White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Harassment in Egypt, Then and Now

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A recent front-page story in The New York Times about harassment and sexual assaults on women in Egypt, which have increased over the past two years, reminds me of my own experience there more than three decades ago.

I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo in the late 1970s. From my arrival in Egypt to my departure, I can't remember a harassment-free day. Indeed, the harassment began on the day I landed at Cairo International Airport.

Arriving at the airport, bleary from a difficult overnight flight from London, I grabbed the only taxi at the outside stand. I spoke some Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and I asked the driver, Mohammed, to take me to the American University.

The sun had barely risen when I got into Mohammed's cab, but when he dropped me off at the university at closing time, I'd seen much of Cairo as well as the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Throughout the abduction Mohammed would try to steer the car with his left hand, while trying to grope one of my legs with his right hand – a driving feat, considering I had pinned myself against the right backseat door.

Mohammed wasn't just running up the meter, he wanted to marry me. In fact, we stopped briefly at his uncle's souvenir shop and perfume palace near the pyramids and Mohammed told him that we were getting engaged.

“May God grant a successful conclusion [to the engagement],” his uncle said, handing me a small green glass vial of eye kohl through the cab window.

God, in his mercy, concluded this unwanted tour around 5 p.m. But Mohammed stalked me for another week, showing up at the university and at the apartment on the Nile River island of Zamalek, which I shared with two roommates. They had a head start on harassment management, and I seem to remember that they told Mohammed to hit the road.

The city bus we rode to the university was a daily opportunity for groping by Egyptian men. One morning, I remember getting on the bus which was overloaded with workers — especially men in drab pants and v-necked sweaters, mostly bureaucrats who worked in government administrative offices around Tahrir Square. I was clutching my textbooks and pocketbook, and trying to keep my balance.

As the bus sped along 26th of July Avenue, I heard a woman behind me say sharply to a man in his twenties who was standing close behind me, “You are very wicked.” I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had parted my wraparound skirt and had unzipped his pants. Caught almost in the act, he smiled that smile I came to abhor; the smile that said, “Don't blame me. You're a woman out in public and a khawaga [a foreigner, a loose woman].”

My roommates and I became inured to bad behavior by the boys (shabbab), who crawled under the seats in darkened movie theaters and grabbed our ankles, flashed us in street alleys in Alexandria, encircled us like sharks when we went swimming in the Mediterranean, and muttered ishta (cream) when we walked by them. We chalked it up to their sexual frustration due to the lack of socialization between the sexes, especially among the lower classes, starting at puberty.

“A dog's tail never stands straight,” says an Egyptian proverb about incorrigible habits, including the harassment and abuse of women by men.

In President Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which was opening to the West and modernizing, I was often harassed physically and verbally by men, but I never once feared for my life. Fear of Sadat's police and mukhabarat – the intelligence agents, who my roommates and I called the “green meanies” after the color of their uniforms — prevented men from public attacks on women, which are now so frequent and violent in the Arab Spring Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi.

Sexual assault of the kind that CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and many Egyptian women have suffered since the Jan. 25, 2010 revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak, are the result of the general security breakdown. But they are also the result of a breakdown of human respect and decency, which is a growing worldwide phenomenon.

Innovation and modernization, including the empowerment of women and girls, is suspect and shattering for many men in Egypt, so they beat a dusty retreat into traditional mores. A substantial presence of women in public life in Egypt, and elsewhere in the world, might get the dog's tail to stand straight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Gale-Force Wind Called Thatcher

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If there had been no Margaret Thatcher, the Brits might have had to invent her. 

When she blew into the premiership like a gale-force wind off the North Sea, her island nation appeared to be sinking. The economy was a mess and trade union activism was strangling Britain.
 
In those days, the morning radio broadcasts listed the areas of “industrial action” — the prevailing euphemism for strikes, mostly illegal — as routinely as the weather. For example, “Traffic at Dagenham in Essex will be adversely affected by industrial action at the Ford plant.” Or, “Expect delays on the London Underground today because of industrial action on the Circle Line.”
 
Newspapers often weren't printed, trains slowed down, export orders delayed and power stations ran short of fuel. Flying to London was gamble on whether the air traffic controllers were peaceful that day. At one point, because of continuing strikes in the coal industry, the government put Britain on a three-day work week and shops were lit with candles. Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” was a dark place.
 
The public blamed the government as much as it faulted the unions. Yet Britain remained committed to trade unionism and the rights of the unions were protected fiercely, in the way that the Second Amendment is now protected in the United States.
 
Edward Heath, who Thatcher deposed as the leader of the Conservative Party, had been powerless against the miners and their feared leader Arthur Scargill. When the Conservatives decisively won the election of 1979, Thatcher was unleashed. She said of Scargill, “Poor Arthur, he’s out on a limb and all I have to help him with is a chainsaw.”
 
But Thatcher did not break the unions; she simply brought them into the rule of law with the British equivalent of the U.S. Taft-Hartley Act. In a country that treasured unionism, that was a revolution.
 
Thatcher took no public prisoners. Matthew Parris a Conservative member of parliament in the Thatcher years, said she was curt with her own backbenchers and often feared by her ministers. Her sharp remarks cut: No one wanted it known how she had characterized them.
 
Her style in the House of Commons was brutal. It was as though she had brought a club to a fist fight. James Callaghan, leader of the opposition, said to Thatcher, “Congratulations. You’re the only man in your team.” Thatcher replied: “Well that’s one more than your team has.”
 
Thatcher said of her critics that if she walked on the water across the Thames River, they'd say that she did it because she couldn’t swim.
 
For all the harshness, there was a softer Thatcher.
 
I, along with other American journalists, was in the press gallery of the House of Commons for one of the bitterest debates of the Thatcher years. It involved the future of Westland Helicopters, a British company seeking foreign investment. Thatcher not only had to deal with an opposition that smelled blood, but also with a revolt in her own party lead by the defense secretary, Michael Heseltine, who thought he could unseat her. She beat back the opposition and savaged the Heseltine renegades.
 
Our U.S. press group had been invited to tea at the prime minister’s official residence, Number 10 Downing Street. The contrast between the bravura performance in parliament and the soft hostess who greeted us at her home was dramatic. She was indulgent of her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, who fell asleep, seated to her right and an older member of our team, Sterling Slappey, who also dozed off, seated on her left. Without stopping what she was saying, she gently shook these men awake to save them embarrassment. The gale had fallen to a zephyr.
 
Later, I was with her at a conference in Arizona where she exhibited both Thatchers. From the podium she was relentless, booming, a steel-on-steel kind of exhortation meant to rally conservative backsliders and pillory neo-socialists. Afterward, she acknowledged old friends and old campaigners in the audience with extraordinary memory and touching sentimentality. How great the change from major to minor.
 
She also attended every session at that conference, asking questions, taking notes and doing the work of a regular delegate. Even in retirement, Thatcher liked to work. “Men do the crowing, women lay the eggs,” she said once. Some of hers were golden. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

When History and Its Myths Interfere with Today’s Issues

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Justice Anthony Kennedy nailed it when he said the Supreme Court was in uncharted waters when considering same-sex marriage. He might also have said that this means that society is unburdened with myth and legacy on this issue and can consider it almost on it merits; whereas homosexuality is as old and permanent as time, marriage between homosexuals is a new concept in the organization of human affairs.

Actually, the justices are facing something antithetical to their purposes: a clean slate. For the rest of society, a clean slate is almost unachievable. But when it does happen — when law, conduct and invention are unhampered by the legacy of the past and myths that are codified into principles — wonderful things happen. For example:

1. The U.S. Constitution, where the old building blocks of political organization were rearranged into something totally new and marvelous.

2. The computer age, where ideas and inventions — largely because they weren't limited by previous ones — have changed the entire human system of work and communication.

3. Modern art, where millennia of tradition had established rigidities that defined what was art and its production, added to the sum of the medium and allowed a new voice of expression.

4. Rock and Roll, where a new form eclipsed the popular music of the time and was able to borrow from the blues, jazz and other sources without accepting their rigidities. It vastly enlarged the musical firmament.

 
The shadows of history and its attendant myths reach down into the present; sometimes informing and guiding, but also inhibiting.
 
The old way of doing things, the old of thinking, the old slavery to myth is comforting and provides society with order and stability. But at the frontiers of human experience it's distorting. That's why innovators have to leave their old-line companies and branch out of their own, why new art is at war with critics and the artistic establishment, and why medical research is often inhibited by the traditions of medicine.
 
The European Union, for all of its faults, was a bold attempt to free Europe from the bonds of its history and the internecine war which they created. The Middle East is in chaos, as ancient and modern history play out – from Biblical times through World War I and World War II. History won’t let go of it, denying it a new beginning. Ireland’s inability to shake history has cost it dearly, as has bitter relationship between Greece and Turkey. Ditto Kashmir and many other trouble spots.
 
Happily, the implosion of the Soviet Union left little myth to perpetuate its failures; there's not a lot of yearning for a failed idea. The myth of the system's superiority perished with it.
 
Alas, Congress is always convulsed by the past; not the past of ancient history, but the past of the last election. One of Washington’s wiser political figures, former Sen. Howard Baker, who later served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, told me that to understand Congress, you have to understand that it's a retrospective body, always reacting to the last election. Indeed.
 
My reading of this is that if President Obama can't refocus Congress, take it to a new place with new ideas, even if they are new ideas about old issues, then Congress will perpetuate the rancor of the last election with its outrages, false facts and perpetuated myths. That’s what the president must be indicted for – not for being a Democrat or the tragedy in Benghazi, or for trying to revamp our health payment system.
 
Inappropriately, Congress doesn't have a clean slate; uncomfortably, the Supreme Court has one. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Learning about Churchill through His Appetite

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For a reader, getting one’s arms around Winston S. Churchill is like trying to hug a mountain. He was a colossus, a phenomenon.
 
Churchill strode across the world from the time he was commissioned in his regiment, the Queen’s Own Royal Hussars, in 1895 to his death in 1965. He was a force in history, in journalism, in politics and in fun, which he brought to everyday life.
 
This has made reading comprehensive books on Churchill daunting. The great work is his official multi-volume biography by Martin Gilbert and the fact-crammed one by Roy Jenkins, a British politician and biographer. The former is too big and the latter so detailed about the operations of the House of Commons that readers are turned off. William Manchester's biography of Churchill was more novel-like and, as a colleague of mine once said, “lighter on British minutiae.”
 
It is the smaller books that are a joy for readers, who treasure taking their Churchillian history in delectable bites. Martin Gilbert realized this when he wrote “In Search of Churchill,” which is a book about how he wrote the official biography, and one of the most revealing books on Churchill.
 
To enjoy Churchill, to cherish the foibles and the towering achievements of the incontestably great man, read around Churchill. There are many wonderful books in this cannon, for example “Churchill and Ireland” by Mary Bromage.
 
So in this way of approaching a big subject obliquely, it is a joy to read Cita Stelzer’s “Dinner with Churchill” a superbly researched and told story of Churchill’s passion for dinner parties and his belief that in the convivial atmosphere of the well-lubricated social event, minds could be changed and information gained.
 
Stelzer has added a shining star to the firmament of Churchill biography: the idea alone is brilliant. What a marvelous concept to write not about Churchill’s great struggles, but rather about the dinners that he used as a tool of statecraft in the time leading up to and through World War II. Churchill not only believed in dinner parties as a tool to advance his causes, such as trying in Tehran and at Yalta to save Poland from Stalin, but also as riotously enjoyable occasions.
 
Churchill loved to talk, to stimulate ideas and disclosures through his own verbal bravado and so to gain intelligence. He also just liked to eat and to drink, and to celebrate the dinner party as a high art form. He ate a lot and had strong opinions about what should be served. He also drank a lot; maybe not as much as he liked people to believe he drank, but he always had a drink going. Usually he drank champagne or Scotch, starting at breakfast, and this was supplemented with fine wines, port and brandy at dinner.
 
For me, the interesting thing about Churchill’s drinking was how he put it to use rather than being used by it. If he had been indifferent to its effects, one would assume that he would have drunk tea all day. By making jokes about his own consumption, Churchill was able to put his guests at ease and loosen their tongues.
 
Stelzer, who has pursued previously unpublished diaries and spoken to those who were at some of his dinners, believes that Churchill’s drinking is overstated and that he remained very much in control. Martin Gilbert reports on how after long, well-lubricated dinners Churchill would retire and write for two hours. Although there have been many drunken writers, very few could write under the influence. Very few can pour out the golden words after the golden liquid.
 
Be that as it may, Stelzer has captured all the elements of Churchill: his energy, his resilience, his attention to detail, his endless enthusiasm, his humanity, his joy, his baroque speech, his love of the British people, his sometimes petulance and occasional childishness.
 
The reader is awed by how much fun Churchill could have had while prosecuting the greatest war yet raised.
 
This is a wonderful book because if you know nothing about Churchill, you will love it; if you know a lot about Churchill, you will love it more. Through the dinners, Stelzer has served up a man in full. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

King Coal Just Won’t Leave His Throne

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King Coal is back – not that he ever went very far away. But, according to Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, coal in 2016 will again be the world’s favorite carbon fuel, pushing out petroleum as the world's largest source of energy.
 
This may seem especially surprising at a time when the use of coal in the United States is in decline, edged out by cheap natural gas and increasingly strict regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet a rising tonnage of coal is being used for electric generation worldwide.
 
The Third World is hungry for coal, as it increases electricity production. In the developed world, nuclear setbacks — most notably the aftereffects of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, when a tsunami wave knocked out six reactors — have helped boost the commitment to coal. The accident has forced the Japanese to burn more coal and the Germans to begin phasing out their nuclear power plants. Other European countries are dithering, and the cost of building nuclear plants is rising.
 
If you do not have an abundance of natural gas, as here in the United States, then coal is your default choice. It is shipped around the world in larger and larger quantities. The more the world has resisted the burning of coal, the more it has had to fall back on it. Alternative energy, attractive in theory, is yet to make its mark.
 
Because coal has always had an environmental price, it has always been under attack, and at the same time it has proven stubbornly hard to replace. King Edward I of England, who reigned from 1239 to 1307, was the first known major opponent of coal. He banned it in 1306.
 
Tales of why he did this vary. One story goes that his mother, Queen Eleanor of Provence, when staying at Nottingham Castle, was so affected by the coal fumes from the town that she had to move out.
 
Wood was hard to come by in towns, and it does not heat like coal. Anyway England was a cold place and wood was in short supply, so the ban was not very effective, despite the fact that the death penalty was standard for disobeying royal orders.
 
Two and a half centuries later, Queen Elizabeth I tried to ban coal with not much effect. The prospect of a coal ban was even more draconian then as her father, Henry VIII, had largely denuded the English forests to build his navy and she was even more committed to sea power.
 
With the invention of the steam engine in the early 1700s (ironically, it was originally intended to pump water out of coal mines), the supremacy of coal for was guaranteed. It led directly to the Industrial Revolution and coal’s preeminence as the fuel of the Industrial Age. There was a price in mine disasters, mine fires that burn for decades, and air pollution. But there were also huge benefits.
 
Britain led the way both in the use of coal and its environmental costs. An industrial area in the Midlands was known as the “Black Country.”
 
London fog was assumed to be just that, fog, but it was smog. The smog was so bad that I can recall, in the winter of 1962, walking in the streets holding hands with strangers because you could not see where you were going. So-called smokeless fuel – usually a kind of coke or other high- carbon fuel — ended that, and fog in London is now no worse than it is elsewhere.
 
“Clean coal” has been the rallying call of the industry for 30 or more years — and coal is getting a lot cleaner in its preparation, combustion and mining. The trick in combustion is higher temperatures and pressures, described as supercritical and ultra-supercritical, a technology China has embraced that increases the efficiency of coal, from a historical 28 percent to around 50 percent with concomitant reductions in the greenhouse gas per kilowatt.
 
Mining, too, has gotten safer in the developed world with stricter regulation and better equipment. Quinn of the National Mining Association says that reclamation after strip mining is better than it ever has been. Yet the scars remain from an earlier time across all the coal- producing states.
 
If, like Edward I, Elizabeth I and the EPA, we cannot stop coal use, we better get behind the technologies and regulations that reduce its impact, because King Coal looks set for a long, long reign. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 

St. Patrick’s Day and the Computer-Aided Drinker

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I’m going to get right to it: If you want to do it up right on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, you really should go on a pub crawl. That's the time-honored way to enjoy a good deal of what the clergy in Ireland have been known to refer to as “the devil’s buttermilk.”
 
The important thing about a pub crawl is the crawl – visiting a number of establishments and not tarrying too long in any one. A real pub crawl in Dublin would begin as early as 2 p.m. and last until six or more establishments have been visited. Ideally, this should be accomplished on foot and in the company of friends, who can look out for each other in the the event that sudden loss of vertical stability should occur.
 
The crawl establishes a kind of discipline on the proceedings. You are advised to drink the native brew of Ireland, stout, usually Guinness, but there are other brands like Murphy’s; or beer, the most popular in Ireland is Smithwick's ale from Guinness, but other low- carbonation beers are quite acceptable. But for safety, stay with Guinness, it's slow to draw (properly done, it can take five minutes or longer to get the head just right) and you can’t drink it too fast.
 
As I've done on many a night in Ireland, along the way you might have a whiskey, Bushmills or Tullamore Dew. But these are, as Thomas Jefferson warned, “ardent spirits” and can cause an abrupt deterioration in vertical stability.
 
A good pub crawl can be undertaken anywhere in the world where liquor is sold. Remember it's not about getting drunk, but rather about good company and holding off inebriation; you parry with the demon drink, not succumb to him.
 
You may wonder how such indulgence, such frivolity, such selfishness, such pampering of the dark side of self, such willing abandonment of Christian rectitude, such sinning can take place during Lent? Rest easy, both the Anglican Communion (the Church of Ireland) and the Catholic Church give dispensation for drinking on St. Patrick’s Day. Probably, they calculate the sinner will be punished more on March 18 than he can offend the rules of God and man on March 17.
 
There are few parts of the world in which St. Patrick’s Day is not celebrated. Would you believe the wearing of the green and the flooding of the pubs is prevalent in Argentina?
 
For nearly 70 years, the pubs of Ireland were closed officially on the great day after over-celebration in the country in the early part of the 20th century. But the Irish started to feel left out of their own festival and overwhelmed by the greatest of all St. Patrick’s celebrations: the convulsion that shakes New York every year in memory of the man who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 4th century, and possibly drove the snakes out of Ireland.
 
I'm excited to report on the eve of this St. Paddy’s Day, science has wrested pub crawling from the poets and musicians and handed it over to mathematicians and engineers. At a conference in Dublin of largely PhD engineers that I was oh-so-lucky to attend last year, the engineers, having apologized that the timing was truncated and that the boozy perambulation couldn't start after lunch, but had to be delayed until evening, we were issued a pub crawl itinerary with engineering-type specs — and an awesome thing it was!
 
There were details of when the celebrants and “spiritual advisers” should arrive at each of the 13 pubs, how many drinks they should order at each pub, the precise time they should head to the next pub, and how to watch for danger and slowdown. It even suggested at which pub a sandwich should be eaten, and at which point of danger a taxi should be summoned and the whole project delayed a year.
 
The engineers laid out a vigorous tour of Dublin — one refueling station after another noted, no substitutions allowed. The engineered-pub crawl has a lot to be said for it; call it “structured imbibing” or “computer-aided drinking.” It even has a default position – home to bed. Cheers! — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Obama and His Oil Sands Brer Rabbit

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If there were an Oscar for political ineptitude, President Barack Obama would be a front-runner for the prize. The president’s possible approval of the 2,000-mile-long pipeline from the oil sands (previously known as the tar sands, and most correctly bitumen sands) of Alberta, Canada to the refineries and shipping terminals of the U.S. Gulf Coast is a tale of political calculation that has gone sadly wrong.
 
Back in January 2012, when he was expected to give his approval and that of the State Department, to what is an international agreement, the president punted. Concerned about stout opposition in his own administration, and particularly from his Environmental Protection Administration chief Lisa Jackson, Obama demurred and requested more studies.
 
This did two things: It antagonized the Canadian people, always sensitive to slights from the United States, and humiliated the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Joe Oliver, Canada's minister for natural resources, told me on the record just before Obama’s statement that he had had strong indications from the administration that the Keystone XL pipeline would be approved. In the event, he and the Canadian government were outraged and embarrassed.
 
As though offending our trading partner and favorite neighbor was not enough, Obama gave the environmentalists time to mobilize — a mobilization so complete that it resulted in a demonstration on the Mall in Washington immediately after the president’s second inauguration.
 
Not only did a broad front of environmentalists march against the pipeline but in the year since Obama kicked the can down the road, they extended and codified their objections not just to the pipeline, but also to the exploitation of the oil sands. Obama’s delay has allowed the environmental groups to declare a kind of non-governmental trade war against Canada.
 
Originally, the environmental movement and its supporters in the administration were concerned with the effects of the pipeline in Nebraska and the threat it would pose to rivers and aquifers in the state. While the company that wants to build the pipeline, TransCanada, has agreed to re-routing and Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has signed off on the project, the environmentalists have downplayed the Nebraska issues and concentrated on the whole matter of the exploitation of the oil sands. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called oil-sands oil “the filthiest oil in the world.”
 
This is a mighty assault on the economy of Alberta and Canada, as 44 percent of Canada’s oil exports come from the oil sands and they are scheduled to keep rising. If it were of less economic consequence, the protests might find more sympathy north of the border than they do. Mining the sands is a monumental undertaking, disturbing enormous tracts of earth and employing trucks and mechanical shovels, which are the largest on the globe. The disturbance to the earth is considerable and worth noting.
 
Also worth noting are the vast quantities of natural gas and water used in the extraction and retorting of the sands. More greenhouse gases are released in the production of the oil than in regular oil fields; the oil sands extraction is calculated to be the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in Canada.
 
However, Canadians are sensitive to these issues and are offended by the idea that Canada is a backward country with no regard to the environment. Canada maintains that evolving technology is reducing the impact on the environment year after year. The oil sands are going to be developed no matter what.
 
There is a pattern of escalation in environmental concerns about big projects. Nuclear power gives a fine historical perspective on this escalation. Back in the 1960s, the first concerns about nuclear power were on the thermal effluent into rivers and streams. This escalated into concern about radiation, then safety, then waste and finally a blanket indictment of the technology.
 
Bogdan Kipling, who has been writing about Canadian-U.S. relations from Washington for four decades, takes an apocalyptic view of the future U.S.-Canada relations if Obama wavers and does not approve the pipeline. In a recent column, he said that such an action would “decouple” the United States from Canada across a broad range of issues, social a as well as economic. “Such a decision would be sweet music to the ears of Canadian nationalists,” Kipling said.
 
Now Obama finds himself between the swamp of his own political left and the rock of international relations. It did not have to be like this. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

A Drug Goes Down in a Perfect Storm

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A man you have never heard of is on a hunger strike in Reno, Nev., in a desperate petitioning of the government to do something to help bring a drug you have never heard of to some very sick people.
 
The man is Robert Miller, a former miner and bartender, who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). And the drug, which stimulates the immune system, is Ampligen.
 
Miller and the drug are at the heart of a perfect storm involving bureaucratic procedures, corporate ineptitude and a community of patients who have no Washington presence and therefore no strident voice.
 
Instead of a lobby, there are individuals — many of them very sick — who form a rag-tag pressure group, a small irregular army, who speak out on behalf of what is believed to be a million CFS sufferers in the United States.
 
The problems start with the disease itself, which like AIDS is a dramatic compromise of the immune system. It is hard to diagnose: There are no biological markers; there is no way to quickly identify it. Instead, it is what doctors call a waste-basket diagnosis: If it is not any of a list of ailments, then it must be CFS.
 
Some suffers report flu-like symptoms at the onset, building to a total collapse. Others simply collapse after exercise. Recovery is very rare — and only men. The disease undulates; good days and bad days, good years and bad years. In bad days and years, the victims are bedridden with intolerance of light and sound; restricted to bed and darkened rooms. Suicide is common, the suffering endless and severe.
 
I have talked to dozens of sufferers — the most heartrending are the teenage girls who are denied schooling, social life and the prospect of marriage by their ghastly affliction.
 
Enter Ampligen. It is an anti-viral compound developed in the 1970s and administered intravenously. Every patient is not helped by Ampligen, but many are restored to mobility after being bedridden. Robert Miller is one of these.
 
Last December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) heard from more than 700 patients praising Ampligen, with accounts of the choice it presented for them between functioning or being dependent on others.
 
Yet this month, the FDA rejected certification of the drug. The agency acknowledged the patient support, but castigated the company that makes Ampligen for incomplete data, a lack of scientific evidence of its efficacy and the way that it had handled the clinical trials.
 
There is a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone in the FDA’s rejection of application for the drug by its maker Hemispherx Biopharma, Inc. of Philadelphia.
 
The FDA said: “As evidenced by the hundreds of letters, emails, and testimonies submitted to FDA, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a devastating disease with a serious impact on quality of life. We are acutely aware of the seriousness of this disease, that no FDA approved treatments are available, and of the community's strong desire to see rintatolimod injection (Ampligen) approved.”
 
The bottom line is that the patients are to be denied a drug which helps some of them. Dr. Daniel Peterson of Simmaron Research in Incline Village, Nev., estimates that 70 percent of his patients are helped. Dr. Nancy Klimas of Nova Southeastern University in Florida, a dedicated supporter, puts the success rate lower.
 
For the patients, the dispute of methodology is irrelevant. What is relevant is that methodology has triumphed over humanity — and medicine.
 
Miller is continuing his hunger strike in the hope that the National Institutes of Health can be persuaded to conduct its own trials as, they can and do sometimes. But even if they do, it will be years before the FDA will rule again. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 

The Economy Is Righting, but Does Congress Get It?

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The great thing about being a pessimist is that something awful may still happen tomorrow. There are still plenty of pessimists about the economy, saying that we are spending our way into perdition; that the Great Reckoning is just around the corner, unless we do draconian things.
 
However on Wall Street, there is hopefulness — even optimism. The stock market is up, the housing market is showing real life and corporate confidence has increased since the Congress delayed action on the fiscal cliff through a bit of old-fashioned give-and-take. Some economists are saying encouraging things, so are the business magazines.
 
There is evidence that the economy, which was heeling badly, is beginning to right. The U.S. economy, still the economic lungs of the world, is breathing easier.
 
Sure, there was a slight dip in performance in the last quarter, reflecting primarily reduced defense spending. It's a hard lesson for the political right to grasp: You can't extrapolate family financial rectitude into national policy, as they like to do. If a family spends more than it is earning, it simply has to cut expenditures. If it doesn’t, the end is known; credit dries up and horrors, like foreclosure, are at hand. Likewise, corporations cut costs, lay off employees and sell assets until the balance sheet recovers.
 
When a family gets into trouble, it doesn't reduce its income by cutting luxuries, it reduces its spending. When a corporation cuts back, it tries to reduce staff not customers.
 
But governments can worsen the situation when they tackle spending at the wrong time. If they cut expenditures too aggressively and too fast, revenues fall, unemployment rises and demands on the public purse grow. Unlike individuals and corporations, governments can’t walk away from their messes.
 
Witness the recessions in Britain, Ireland, Spain and the total catastrophe in Greece. Irresponsible austerity has compounded the results of earlier promiscuous spending. Strong medicine has sent the patient to intensive care.
 
Amy Kremer, head of the Tea Party Express, and many conservative members of Congress playing the pessimist’s card, like to say, and they say it often, “revenue is not the problem, spending is.”
 
If only it were that simple. The problem is many things, including the global recession, the aging population, the high cost of medicine, two wars, badly timed tax cuts, China’s undervalued currency and the balance of payments deficit.
 
Take your pick. The miracle is that the economy is as vigorous as it is.
 
Already it has to deal with the tax increases that came with the budget deal in early January, particularly the increase in the payroll tax, which takes out of the economy money that would normally be spent — the large proportion of the tax which if left in the hands of the salaried class would be disposable. This may be about as much of a hit as it can take at present.
 
But the pessimists, who believe that spending is the mortal sin of our age, want to let sequestration — a 10 percent across the board cut — happen on March 2. The Washington Post says there is no mood in Congress to compromise. But if there is no compromise, the effects could be more devastating than a simple cut in spending. The result, instead, will be a cut in program expenditures while the government’s overhead in salaries and fixed costs will eat up the budget.
 
Austerity has been a disaster for Britain, Ireland and Spain. Do we want to follow the Europeans down that path?
 
The pessimists, who also believe that borrowing is the original sin of politicians, would let this recovery falter through their belief that the government must be starved. Sequestration will starve it, alright. Trouble is we'll all go hungry. There’s pessimism for you. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hail to America’s Microbusinesses

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To hear the members of Congress tell it, small business – which exists in a mythical place in America along with mummy and apple pastries – has just two problems: marginal tax rates and government regulation.
 
For most small businesses, these aren't the problems at all. It's the complexity of taxes and regulations that is the problem.
 
To understand the predicament of small business today, one needs to get a grip on what it is. The Small Business Administration defines small businesses as those with 500 or less on the payroll. But to most small businesses, the bar is lower by a factor of about 10. Most owners think they have moved to a different place if they can number their payroll in the dozens.
 
Really small businesses, also more appropriately called microbusinesses, according to the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), are those with about 12 employees. These are the businesses that create jobs fast when the economy improves. This is where the rubber of entrepreneurism meets the road of reality.
 
These are Americas real entrepreneurs; these are the people who “go on their own,” preferring self-employment to job security. They aspire to make a living first; making a fortune is a distant second.
 
They may repair cars, make artisan bread, book travel, sell yarn, repair computers, print menus, stage events, publish newsletters, houseclean, landscape, stuff sandwiches, shop for others, manage other peoples’ eBay accounts, test for pollution, paint houses and bird dog the paperwork on import-export.
 
Their governmental enemy is not the rate of taxation, as we were told in the debate that led to the fiscal cliff agreement, but rather the complexity of the tax code. Likewise with regulation, licensing and permitting
 
Keith Hall, who advises the 150,000 member-strong NASE, on tax issues says that microbusinesses are overburdened by the complexity of the tax code and have to spend money they can't afford on accounting fees; or, if they enter into the tax labyrinth themselves, risk making mistakes that can lead to costly audits, and as often as not overlook legitimate deductions.
 
The tax code is a war zone for the single entrepreneur, Hall says. Worse, he says, it favors big business both in the way taxes are calculated and in the deductions allowed. Big companies routinely claim deductions that wouldn't be allowed for microbusinesses: “The playing field is not level,” Hall says.
 
One of the biggest problems centers on health care. The unincorporated entity — say, Jim Smith trading as Gold Limousine — cannot deduct his health insurance. The various forms of incorporation have their own penalties, and all involve time and the need for professional help to administer them.
 
Incorporation is not a panacea for the self-employed. Its primary purpose is to limit liability to the incorporated entity and to facilitate a possible sale of the company, or the taking of equity capital.
 
The distress over the tax code is equaled by employment regulations,environmental mandates and rules about working conditions.
 
But all this is nothing compared to the real enemy of small business: big business.
 
Big businesses, particularly chain retailers and restaurants crush small businesses. They crush them every day. The arrival of Walmart, Home Depot, Target or Staples spells death for dozens of small businesses in the neighborhood.
 
The redevelopment of old neighborhoods, where small businesses flourish, also can be fatal. The local mall is a sanctuary for big retail and a mass grave for small endeavors.
 
The lot of the new business, the small new business, is harder today than it has been historically, as there are fewer fields where the behemoths are not dominant. Also banks lend on formula not character, landlords favor the big and established over the new and enterprising.
 
Yet the urge to be in business continues; the lure is freedom, maybe success and the knowledge that you tried. If you want to see the entrepreneurial spirit at work, visit a decayed strip mall. There you'll find rents that are low and hopes that are high.
 
Of course, you could go to a business school and see the creation of another kind of entrepreneur: the corporate animal learning about business plans, return on equity, takeover strategy and how to get a window office.
 
I say the real entrepreneur is the guy with a fishing boat in Maine, or the single mother with a staffing agency in Oregon. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate