A winter of discontent looms.

Unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III, it won’t be made glorious by anything now in sight. Instead, it promises a tsunami of misery for many and the ugliest election in U.S. history.

At a time which calls for new energy, new thinking and a recasting of the social contract, two old men — who more rightly should be eyeing the sunny side of the veranda at their retirement homes — are in contentious dispute for the presidency.

Whoever wins, President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, the winter will be the harshest in memory for many Americans, particularly those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

The COVID-19 pandemic has evaporated millions of jobs and the small companies that provided them. Most obvious in this slaughter are the restaurants. Yelp, the restaurant reporting service, estimates that 53 percent of the restaurants now closed will never reopen.

Restaurants are among the most fragile and perishable of small businesses. At the best of times, most inhabit an inhospitable space between the restaurant chains and their landlords.

Restaurants are quick to hire and quick to fire. It is where the unskilled (dishwashing and prep) to the low-skilled (line cooks and front staff) find work most easily.

Restaurants tell the temperature of the economy ahead of the official soundings. When business turns down, they stumble.

They also are places of hope: The chefs and waiters of today are the restaurant entrepreneurs or stage and screen stars of tomorrow. They’ve put untold thousands through college. When restaurants jobs go, hopes and dreams go, and often the life’s work of the owners go.

The individually owned restaurant epitomizes entrepreneurism, determination, the capitalist spirit and the joy of self-employment for the owner. All the virtues of small business, routinely drooled over by the politicians, are present even at the humblest greasy spoon. Free enterprise is always on the menu.

And restaurants are part of the fabric of our lives, where we celebrate, occasionally mourn and frequently refresh.

Much of what is true for restaurants is as true for the whole hospitality industry. Those who do the housekeeping in hotels, the porters and, of course, the restaurant staff are all semi-skilled and in need of work to survive.

They are, I submit, not easily re-trained: You don’t go from making beds to computer programming in a short time.

Only Congress can assuage the immediate suffering at the bottom of the employment pyramid. But a new relief package has been tied up in party strife.

Trump said Tuesday that he had withdrawn from negotiations with the Democrats over the package. Now he says he will sign a simplified measure, guaranteeing a payment of $1,200. That came after the stock market — the only index Trump follows — faltered.

Dark as things may be for the workers at the bottom, they also are bleak for all.

Trump won’t say that he’ll accept the results of the election if he doesn’t win. He’s laid the groundwork for this potential coup by criticizing mail-in voting. Without evidence, he’s sought ahead of the election to invalidate mail-in voting and has even trashed the post office, maybe to facilitate this election subterfuge.

If Biden wins, he may be presented with his greatest crisis before he is sworn in: leading the movement for accepting the vote. He’ll be required to lead the millions who may flood the streets, prompting violence between themselves and Trump hardliners.

Shiver, people, shiver. There is much to fear as winter unfolds even if you have a paycheck.

If Trump loses and accepts the result, there will be the time from certification of the election to Biden’s swearing in when an unfettered Trump can indulge his passion for executive orders, abrogating treaties and sowing wanton havoc.

The only sunshine may come from science in the form of a viable vaccine for COVID-19. This won’t occasion us to immediately strip our masks, as it will take a year to inoculate the whole population. But its prospect will put warmth into a cold Christmas.

As the nation returns to health, a hard look at the predicament of those at the bottom will be needed — an amendment to the social contract, if you will.

Top of my list: fix healthcare and repair education.

The closest President Trump came to laying a glove on former Vice President Joe Biden in their first debate was on the environment.

Biden’s published clean energy plan — which is more a gushing hydrant of wishes — is somewhat incoherent, certainly expensive at $2 trillion, and looks counterproductive.

It is built on the left-wing assumption that all commerce, and the electric power industry particularly, is managed by people who would trade away the future for a few pieces of silver; that humanity stops at the corporate door.

This was true once. I’ve been in meetings where circumventing restrictions on coal were discussed and where global warming was regarded as a communist conspiracy.

But now environmentalism is as active in corporate boardrooms as it is in the inner sanctums of Democratic thinking. Younger workers in corporations and shareholders have been demanding this activity. Biden needs to smell the roses, be less woke more awake.

Particularly disturbing are the list of executive orders Biden says he’ll sign on his first day in office. One would hope after the flood of executive orders signed by Trump, many of them sowing more confusion than direction, that Biden would abide by more acceptable norms of governance. Substantial environmental law needs Congress.

If, as his published policy says, Biden signs these orders on day one of his presidency, on day two the courts will be flooded with lawsuits seeking to uphold the laws already in place, not to have them modified by extra-legal action.

The fact is that business today is not the business of yesterday. It is leading an environmental revolution and is, arguably, in the forefront of a new business dawn. This is especially true in the three places where the difference in greenhouse gas releases count: electricity production, transportation, and manufacturing processes which use a lot of heat.

A wind of change is sweeping through the United States on environmental issues, and it should be allowed to blow free and strong. It is more complete, more encompassing and, in the end, will be more effective than if a possible Biden administration tries to control or direct it.

Consider these indicators of the low-carbon wave that is sweeping across the country:

—  Five of the nation’s largest utilities are aiming to be carbon- free by 2050: Southern Company, Xcel Energy, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, and Public Service Enterprise Group. Others are also on board with the same objective.

—  Amazon is buying 100,000 electric delivery vehicles. Uber and others with delivery fleets are doing the same. Companies with large roof areas, like Walmart, are installing solar to become self-generators of clean electricity.

—  The oil and gas industry, which has most to lose after the rapidly declining coal industry, is pouring resources into carbon capture, utilization and storage.

—  More than 70 of the world’s largest financial institutions — including Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock — have banded together to account for the carbon emissions content in their lending and investing. The group is known as the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials and is administered by the global consultancy Guidehouse. It is huge in its implication.

—  A plethora of electric vehicles is about to hit the market, some from new startup companies, others from famous marques from Europe and Detroit. This bounty’s effect will be that there will be more people, who can’t afford a Tesla, going electric. Commercial charging stations will follow. No need for Biden’s plans to build stations. Government is best kept clear when the market is working.

—  New inventions are coming to solar, wind and storage. CPS Energy, the city-owned electric and gas utility serving San Antonio, recently announced it wanted ideas for 500 megawatts of innovative generation and storage and has had over 200 creative suggestions. It also is seeking 900 megawatts of solar from existing technology and 50 megawatts of storage. That is green creativity at work.

What the Biden administration, if it is to be, must do is, as often as not, get out of the way. It should take action where action is clearly needed. Don’t try to speed up a rushing stream with dams.

One such place where it might strike a blow for clean air is to find a mechanism to save the 12 or so operating nuclear power plants that are to close in the next five years. Their zero-carbon output equals thousands of new windmills.

Their loss will be a carbon-reduction catastrophe. Biden should be told.

If Mitch McConnell’s toadying Senate has its way, we are to have a more conservative Supreme Court come the elections in November, even though it looks like the current concept of harsh conservatism will be roundly rejected in them.

One branch of government, if President Donald Trump and McConnell have their way, will be handed over to an extreme vision of conservatism that has no deep-seated philosophy behind it.

It is a corruption of a noble stream of political thought and its consequence is a political class that adheres to narrow, divisive issues that have an oppressive social effect. Taken together these have the result of seeming to be heartless and causing pain to the poor and under-educated.

That isn’t the conservatism we have known for decades: the conservatism of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. It is a political virus that threatens the Grand Old Party with years of loss of elective office.

If these aberrant Republicans use their form of judicial activism to keep Trumpism alive, they will be ensuring today’s ugly discord for a long time.

The issues which divide us aren’t the solid Republican values of yesteryear of limited government, free trade, market solutions, open opportunity, strong defense, active scientific inquiry, educational excellence, personal freedom and privacy, and universal prosperity.

Not the cramped and spleen-imbued issues that are about to dominate the Senate GOP’s foraging for like-mindedness in the coming hearings.

They are out to burden conservatism with narrow views on a few issues which aren’t intrinsically conservative, including:

• Abortion
• The death penalty
• Healthcare
• Sexual preference

Rigidity on these matters — except for sexual preference — has the effect of laying a disproportionate burden on the poor and, therefore, stimulating the far left of the Democratic Party, empowering the followers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Take just two matters. Abortion falls heavily on the poor. Nobody suggests that it is a good means of contraception, but unwanted pregnancies do occur. They can break up families, cause economic burdens, and bring children into untenable poverty, social dysfunction and other misery.

What women do in private shouldn’t be governed by the Senate or the court.

End Roe v. Wade and rich women will still be able to go to another country or in other ways pay for a safe end to a pregnancy. Appointing a staunch religious anti-abortionist to the Supreme Court is to put a thumb on the scales of justice and to blur the line between church and state for a transient political purpose: reelecting Trump.

The death penalty, which has failed spectacularly as a proven deterrent to murder, likewise falls mainly on the poor — often the poor and mentally challenged. The record shows that rich people aren’t taken to the death chamber at dawn. Superior lawyering from the moment of arrest keeps them from later capital punishment.

What is the ultra-conservative value proposition then?

The same imbalance extends throughout our remarkably punitive legal system that punishes those on society’s bottom rungs more aggressively than those at the top.

Families were destroyed and social mayhem resulted in the mortgage excesses of the last financial crisis. I saw it devastate one of my employees of that time: a struggling Black man of impeccable character but limited education who was talked into unwise refinancing by rapacious mortgage lenders.

He lost his home, his good name, everything. No one across the length and breadth of the scandal went to prison for the damage their greed inflected.

All the other right-wing issues of the day have the same characteristics: They defend the upper reaches of society, those with money, and are harsh and inconsiderate of the rest.

Healthcare glares in this. A patchy and capricious system will become worse for tens of millions of Americans if the legal attack on the Affordable Care Act by the Trump administration goes against the sick in the Supreme Court — a court weighted against ordinary people in pursuit of a suspect interpretation of conservatism.

Radical conservatism is also out to extinguish the labor movement, or what is left of it. A robust labor movement is a bulwark against the pitiless downgrading of the worker from dignity to subservience, living in fear and rewarded inadequately.

The rush to the bottom is becoming a national sinkhole. We can all fall into it eventually.

Four years ago, Democrats slouched to the polls and voted, holding their noses figuratively. Somehow the party had come up with a presidential candidate whom no one liked very much: Hillary Clinton.

Pitted against a risible president, Donald Trump, who is a climate change-doubting, class-dividing, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, law-bending, treaty-tearing, dictator-loving, truth-challenged, dissembling incompetent, this time it should be an easy White House win for the Democrats.

This time, there should be white-hot passion for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the candidate who would restore our moral base, our international standing, salve our wounds, and give us a sense that the nation is moving forward to a sunlit future.

But there is no surge of feeling, zero passion.

Biden is the candidate who would deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding with pestilences of a biblical scale: serial hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and wildfires from hell in the West. He is the man who should give us confidence in our systems, from healthcare to voting, to the rule of law at the Justice Department.

But there is no surge, no passion.

Instead, the closest thing to enthusiasm I find among voters is resigned, faint praise. “He’s a decent man,” I’ve been told over and again. I’ll have a struggle in not offering the next Democrat who tells me in a woeful voice that Biden’s “a decent man” a physical rebuke.

One may discount the great man or woman view of history, but there is no great argument for the “decent man” view of history. You can have decent men who were great, Truman and Reagan, but you can’t move the needle of history with flaccid decency.

Poor old Joe Biden — yes, he is old for the job at 78 — is defined mostly by having been there, like the TV-watching gardener played by Peter Sellers in the movie “Being There.” He was in the Senate for a long time, he was vice president to Barack Obama for two terms. He clears the being-there bar — but it is a low bar, very low.

No one is passionately against Biden. Trump’s attempts to paint him as a socialist ogre about to take us to Stalinism have fallen flat. Flat because they are unbelievable, and they are unbelievable because that isn’t Biden.

Biden has always been the quintessential man of the center of the situation. The pressure on his left wing, coming from Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, and the group around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, is going to be a problem and a discomfort for Biden. He must also wonder where in that world his vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, so far defined more by her ethnicity than her philosophy, will fit.

If, as still expected but not guaranteed, Biden makes it across the threshold in this election, his greatest strength will be his address book. His best strategy will be to use surrogates to fight his political wars. That means a strong Cabinet and a great White House staff.

Given Biden’s limitations, his chief of staff will be a critical player. He needs to give his Cabinet secretaries their heads. One of the many weaknesses of the Trump administration has been the pusillanimous nature of the Cabinet: Men and women who see the role only as pleasing the capricious and solipsistic president — a chorus of lickspittle people singing hymns of praise to the chief.

Biden doesn’t need to point up Trump’s weaknesses: They are manifest. He needs to point up his own strengths beyond his affability and, yes, beyond his decency.

I’ve been watching Biden for years, nodding “hello” to him, and sometimes talking with him, the way it goes for reporters and politicians in Washington. I get the distinct feeling Biden isn’t the man he was eight years ago, when he would’ve been a more appealing candidate within his limitations. He seems diminished, his fire reduced to an ember.

As it is, Democrats and renegade Republicans will slouch to the polls to vote against Trump. Few in their hearts will be voting for Biden. There is a passion deficit.

When a vaccine for COVID-19 is as easily available as a flu shot, and when the public is comfortable getting it, it will be a time of victory — Victory Virus. And it will be a time to begin building the new America.

Things will have changed. We won’t be going back to the future. Most visible will be the disappearance of a huge number of low-end jobs. No one knows how many but, sadly, we have a good idea where it will hurt most: among semi-skilled and unskilled workers.

They are those who don’t have college degrees and those who wouldn’t have qualified to enter college. Higher education isn’t for everyone, even if money wasn’t an issue. College is for those who can handle it, therefore benefiting.

It isn’t only the virus that is changing the employment picture but also the continuing technology revolution.

Data is going to be king, according to Andres Carvallo, founder of CMG, the Austin, Texas-based technology consulting company, and a professor at Texas State University. Data, he argues, linked with the spreading fifth-generation telephone networks (5G) will delineate the future. Carvallo has pointed out that data from all sources has value, “even the homeless.”

Carvallo’s colleague on a weekly video broadcast about the digital future, entrepreneur John Butler, a University of Texas at Austin professor, believes data and 5G will start to affect American business in a big way and new business plans will emerge, taking into account the increasing deployment of sensors and the ability of 5G to move huge quantities of data at the speed of light.

Carvallo explains, “If you’re moving data at the rate of 40 megabytes per second now, with 5G you’ll be able to move it at 1,000 megabytes per second.”

The technology revolution will continue apace, but will there be a place for those who aren’t embraced by it, like those who serve, clean, pack, unpack and have been doing society’s housekeeping at the minimum wage or just above it?

Evidence is that they are already in sorry shape with a much higher rate of COVID-19 infections than the general population, and even in the best of times they have poorer health — an indictment of our health system.

The future of the neediest workers is imperiled, in the short term, because the jobs they have had and the jobs that have always been there for those on the lower ladders of employment are disappearing. A goodly chunk of these workers will be out of work for a long time.

Retraining is the solution that is advocated by those who aren’t caught in this low-level work vise. Retraining for most people is, to my mind, just a crock. It is a bromide handed down by the middle class to those below; a callow concept that doesn’t fit the bill. It soothes the well-heeled conscience.

First, some people can’t grasp new concepts, particularly as they age. Are you really going to teach a middle-age, short-order cook to navigate computer repair? That is not only impractical, it is cruel.

A further disadvantage is that the affected workers not only are going to be shut out of their traditional lines of employment but they also carry an additional burden, another barrier to retraining: They almost exclusively are the products of shoddy public education, so there is very little to build on if you’re going to retrain.

If you have marginal English, most information technology work is going to be inaccessible; rudimentary math is another stumbling block.

Very smart people are candidates for retraining. The graduate schools see plenty of students who get multiple, dissociated degrees, like lawyers who have nuclear engineering degrees. I know a prominent head of surgery at a Boston hospital who has a degree in chemical engineering. They are the polymaths, but they aren’t laboring for the minimum wage.

The loss of jobs due to COVID-19 comes at a time when technology, for the first time since the Newcomen engine kickstarted the Industrial Revolution 1712, might be a job subtractor, not the multiplier it has been down through the ages.

Unemployment insurance is a stopgap but it also obscures the full extent of the skill void, the aptitude hurdle.

History is fragile. It needs to be handled with care. The trouble is that it is inevitably viewed through the prism of today, which can cast the good as bad and the bad as good.

That is why those who would edit it, sanitize it or obscure it are, for the most part, vandals. It is in constant danger of being rewritten to accommodate current perceptions.

How has this worked? When Oscar Wilde was arrested on April 6, 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel, London, for “gross indecency” (homosexuality), he was widely denounced as a threat to everything of value and a danger to our morals. In New York, where several of his plays were packing in audiences, Wilde’s name was removed from the playbills, while the plays continued to run.

Today, those who would have him arrested would be arrested for hate speech. The prism has changed.

America’s great journalist H.L. Mencken has fallen into some disfavor because of notes in his private diaries that have been construed to be anti-Semitic and racist. But his genius is unassailable. If you doubt this, just read his work. Yet the National Press Club in Washington changed the name of its library to that of a minor benefactor because the great man in private diaries had entries that were construed to be anti-Semitic. You can find the offending sentences on the web and make your own decision about what he said to his diary in 1943.

A committee of the Council of the District of Columbia advanced a list of historical figures’ connections to slavery and oppression and recommended renaming dozens of public schools, parks and government buildings in the nation’s capital — including those named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and five other U.S. presidents. No one, it would seem, who drew breath at the time of the founding of the republic is safe from retrospective judgment and condemnation. Not even Benjamin Franklin, who told a Philadelphia matron that he had “given you a republic, if you can keep it.”

No historical figures, it would also seem, are safe from indictments leveled against them. Julius Caesar was a Roman imperialist. The French and the British should hate him. Should we therefore destroy statues of Caesar? Then we wouldn’t even know what he looked like.

English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell served as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland during the 1600s. But his actions in Ireland and Scotland were genocidal. He said of the luckless Irish at the Battle of Drogheda, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” Should his name and likeness be expunged from our public records? The Cromwell Road, one of the great thoroughfares of London would have to go. One shudders to think about the awfulness of Queen Victoria in this context.

History is dominated by great figures and they are a mixed lot. The new politically correct assessment of history extends into appending judgment of sex lives. Watch out John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Catherine the Great.

Sixty years ago, those who could’ve been censored and removed from public life would’ve included gays down through the centuries, from Alexander the Great to former Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who is also Muslim.

There is a lot of heavy lifting to be done if you’re going to measure the past against the values of the present.

This brings me to the difficult and contentious issue of the Confederacy and all those statues. Here, there is reason to respect the sensibilities of the African-American community and at least remove statues to museums. The Confederate flag has become an in-your-face statement of white racism and shouldn’t be part of the celebration of Southern culture. These symbols aren’t yet confined to history’s grave but are part of a struggle that isn’t settled.

Oxford University has decided to remove a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, and there is a move to change the name of Rhodes Scholarships to something else. Mind you, not to give up the money that he gave for the scholarship, together with huge gifts to the university.

Rhodes was an imperialist. He wanted Britain to rule from Cape Town to Cairo, but he wasn’t a monster. Ruthless in business, he introduced the first genuine open franchise in Cape Colony when he was prime minister. His sending of a column of police — they weren’t soldiers — into Zimbabwe ended the genocidal war between the Matabele and the Shona. But a white colony run by Whites for Whites resulted.

For me, names and statues record history. They aren’t celebrations of wrongdoing. I would’ve liked to have seen a statue of Stalin, the greatest monster of the 20th century, as he appeared to the Russian people. I think it is good when a small child asks in front of a statue, “Mom, who is that?”

History isn’t to be rewritten, but to be learned, otherwise we won’t know how we got here and what to avoid, as George Santayana pointed out.

 

 

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Photo: May 6th 2020: Statue of Edward Colston with blindfold before it was taken down by protestors

There is health in trees and a narrative in sewage. That is the double story coming out of the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute at the University of Louisville.

In Louisville, where the air quality ranks among the worst in Kentucky, the Envirome Institute is planting trees at a near manic pace, but it isn’t planning to wait years for the first payoff.

There is scientific purpose and a plan, and even the federal government is involved because, as Theodore “Ted” Smith, director of the institute’s Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil, told me, the tree-planting project, called Green Heart, is also a fully fledged clinical trial of the type normally used to assess the effect of medicines.

“Actually it’s a drug trial of sorts, except the drug is trees and bushes. You could go to clinicaltrials.gov, where all the clinical trials are listed, and under ‘drug,’ it says ‘trees,’” Smith said. “We’re taking very seriously the need to empirically demonstrate what the value of trees, bushes, greenery, nature is; what is the basis of the connection of exposure to green places and the improvement in human health.”

People living in four south Louisville neighborhoods where trees are being planted will be monitored against a control group in neighborhoods that aren’t being planted and surrounding Jefferson County. The project’s stated purpose is “testing if increasing green space in a neighborhood improves air quality and human health with the goal of developing a ‘greenprint’ for creating healthier neighborhoods.”

Aruni Bhatnagar, the institute’s director, told me that they chose to study the heart because most people die of cardiovascular disease. He said 8,000 to 10,000 trees are being planted in every available space in Louisville: open land, along roadways, and anywhere that will support trees.

The trees are already of substantial size — 15 feet to 20 feet in height — when they are transplanted in Louisville, which also has an urban blight problem. They’re planting evergreen trees because they have year-round foliage, increasing their effect.

Smith said, “We’re very hopeful that we’ll be able to shed some light on just what are the benefits of trees. Maybe it’s cooling: There are a lot of people who are concerned about heat issues in cities. We’re concerned about pollution. As a research institute, we’ve had a long track record in working on exposure to pollutants. That is one of the functions trees perform for us.”

Like all scientific institutions, said Bhatnagar, the Envirome Institute felt it should swing into action to help with COVID-19. It is doing so with a program monitoring Louisville’s sewage to determine patterns of infection and to bring these to the attention of health authorities. The wastewater is sampled at 16 locations and analyzed in the institute’s own labs to find the COVID-19 penetration.

These samplings provide a schematic. Initially, researchers found higher infections in affluent parts of Louisville. But over time, infections spread to the city’s disadvantaged and low-income neighborhoods, where they increased dramatically.

Overall, according to Smith, the wastewater monitoring will lead to a  comprehensive understanding of the health anatomy of Louisville, providing data that could have a big effect on the future health and well-being of the city and, if adopted as a general part of urban health analysis, much of the world. “There’s gold in those sewage pipes,” he quipped.

Louisville philanthropist Christina Lee Brown has been working with health activists across the world on a whole-health — physical, mental, economic, spiritual — concept for living. In the quest for sustainable, livable, enjoyable environments, Brown works closely with Britain’s Prince Charles, who has similar goals and has invested heavily in this harmony.

“We encourage people to see the interconnected nature of all the forms of health and how they reinforce and support each other,” Brown said.

Trees are not just for climbing, and sewers are talkative.

I don’t know a lot about social media. I don’t know how it works technically. I don’t know why it is such a force in society.

I don’t know why very prominent people like comedian Steve Martin, prognosticator Nate Silver and columnist Tom Friedman, who have plenty of outlets, tweet.

I don’t know why people who are great company, need to post on Facebook tedious photos of  (A) their cats, (B) their grandchildren, (C) their hobbies, and (D) their vacations — (That’s Ann and myself in a Costa Rican rainforest).

Because of this personal bric-a-brac, I tend to avoid Facebook and solicitations to befriend people there. I fear those children, that cat, those hobbies and snaps of my friends despoiling places of natural beauty.

What I do know is that we face a clear-and-present danger of social media censorship.

What makes it worse is those calling for censorship should know better. They are, many of them, of the progressive left. It seems they hate “hate speech” more than they hate anything else, including censorship by machine or, worse, censorship deep in Twitter or Facebook by committees of the nameless wonks.

Now social media is full of remarkably ugly, vicious, deranged and fabricated things. The truth isn’t safe with social media. The truth is scarcely an ingredient. But that isn’t reason enough to introduce censorship, whether self-censorship or some other adjudication of what we see and hear.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et al. aren’t publishers. They are common carriers, like the post office, the railroads and the telephone companies. Certainly, they aren’t publishers or broadcasters in the traditional sense.

The remedy for the excess on social media — conspiracies, homophobia, Islamophobia, and even my phobia about cat photos — won’t be cured by getting the companies that carry them to introduce censorship, however well-intentioned and noble in purpose.

The right to free speech is ineradicable, absolute and cardinal. Without it we start sliding down the slippery slope — except the internet slope is steeper, greasier and globe-circling.

So, I defend President Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow as having a right not to be censored. That is all I’m defending: only their right not to be censored, not their speech or even the ideas behind it.

There was a time, before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked down on unions, when the printers of British national newspapers set themselves up as de facto censors.

Not the editors or owners, but the press operators: They wouldn’t print stories of which they disapproved. The newspapers were forever making statements like this: “One-third of last night’s print run was lost due to industrial action.” That meant a shop steward didn’t like the content.

The issue now revolves around hate speech, a social construct. It is, as Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That means that there can be no standard when the offense is so subjective that it is in the eye of the beholder.

The blanket indictment of hate speech, if applied to any discourse — for example, political, literary or sports — is that it can’t be conducted without the honorable traditions of wit, invective, ridicule, scorn and satire. If a sports columnist berates a fumbling NFL quarterback, is that hate speech?

Until now the laws of libel and slander have worked imperfectly, but they have done their bit to protect reputations, to halt dishonest and malicious allegations, and to give a kind of discipline, sometimes lax, to journalism.

These laws aren’t adequate for the internet, but they hint at future concepts that might endeavor to quiet the internet and its social media sewers. Censorship won’t do it with perpetrating a greater evil.

When you’ve read this, you may want to hurl used cat litter at me in the street. Your right to want to do that should be unassailable, but if you do it, you should be prosecuted for assault.

Hate is a human emotion, and emotions aren’t criminal until they’re acted on.

If you censor the internet, as many would like, the workaround will come in seconds. Social media and its sewer of disgusting, repugnant and  vile assertions won’t be silenced, but honest disputation may be banned.

Actually, I love cats.

 

 

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Photo Editorial credit: Primakov / Shutterstock.com

The Democrats, supporting in whole or in part the goals of the Green New Deal, have, one suspects, a vision of themselves facing off against an implacable opposition of energy companies and financiers committed to business as usual.

The fact is, if the Democrats win the White House in November, they may find the enemy isn’t fighting. Indeed, they may find energy producers — both oil and natural gas — and the electric utilities are no longer opponents but devout, if questioning, allies in the struggle for carbon neutrality.

And Wall Street, often identified as the evil force behind the polluters, is striving to be green, and to assess and direct the effect of their lending with a view to reducing carbon emissions and remediating them.

A remarkable organization, the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), has enlisted top global banks and lenders in the decarbonation of the future. In the United States its partners include Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.

A slew of banks spread across western Europe has joined PCAF, including Britain’s NatWest and Denmark’s Danske Bank. Its first task will be to develop organization-wide standards and methodology to assess the carbon impact of their lending.

Oil and gas entrepreneurs and electric utilities have long been entwined with their bankers. They need each other. It takes a lot of capital to explore for and exploit oil and gas deposits, and the electric utilities have traditionally been the most capital-intensive American industry.

So complete has been the relationship between banking and energy that American Electric Power, once the nation’s biggest electric power company, had its headquarters on Wall Street for decades before moving it to Columbus, Ohio, where its customer base is.

The Edison Electric Institute, now a fixture among the power players in Washington, was headquartered in New York City when I began writing about the utility industry in 1970. Likewise, the Atomic Industrial Forum, a forerunner of the Nuclear Energy Institute, moved to the Washington area.

When the price of oil went down suddenly in the 1980s, a bunch of Southwest banks failed. The banking-energy linkage is absolute and at heart unshakable. And it can be dynamic and progressive.

PCAF is the singular and extraordinary creation of Guidehouse, a globe-spanning environmental consulting firm. It began modestly in Holland — one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world — in 2015 and spread to banks across Europe. But its big expansion came in the last two years with the addition of the big American financial institutions and NatWest.

It won’t just be large energy investments that will be subject to scrutiny and assessment by PCAF members. “It will extend all the way down to mortgages,” Jan-Willem Bode, a Guidehouse partner based in London, told me in a guest appearance on “White House Chronicle,” the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS.

Bode said the banks want to harmonize how they measure their carbon impact and work toward investments in everything from alternative energy projects, like wind farms, to solar homes that reduce the carbon load.

Bode insisted the commitment of the partners is real. They want a decarbonized future and will favor investments which bring that about.

Of course, there will be critics aplenty. They’ll bandy about the pejorative “greenwashing” and will suggest that the companies that financed carbon production in the past are still at it.

I think they haven’t got the message: America will be greened a lot faster when big money says “green.”

Take what Citi’s CEO Michael Corbat said, “If there’s one lesson to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that economic and physical health and  resilience, our environment and our social stability are inextricably linked.”

The greenback is getting greener.

To compound the COVID-19 crisis, we have a cultural crisis. It is a crisis of our individualism.

That cultural element — precious and special, of the individual against adversity, the individual against authority, the individual against any limits imposed on free action — is at odds with the need to behave. Worse, our individualistic trait has been politicized, dragged to the right.

This aspect of American exceptionalism is now killing us, on a per capita basis, faster than people in any other country. We are in a health crisis that demands collective action from people who revere individual freedom over the dictates of the many, as expressed by the government.

Simply, we must wear masks and stay away from groups. It works; it is onerous but not intolerable.

There is a hope, almost a belief, afoot that by the end of the year there will be a vaccine, and that the existence of a vaccine will itself signal an end to the crisis.

A reality check: No proven vaccine yet exists. Although all the experts I’ve contacted believe one will work and several might.

Another reality check: It may take up to five years to vaccinate enough people to make America safe.

My informal survey of doctors finds they expect one-third of us will be keen to be vaccinated, one-third will hold back to see how it goes and one-third may resist vaccination because they’re either opposed in principle or consider it to be a government intrusion on their liberty.

If their expectation holds true, COVID-19 is going to be with us for years.

No doubt there are better therapies in the pipeline to deal with COVID-19 once the patient has reached the hospital. But that won’t affect the rate of infection. The assault on our way of life and the economy will continue; the price our children are paying now will escalate.

If you’re pinning your hopes on a vaccine, several may come along at the same time and jostle for market share.

That happened with poliomyelitis: Three vaccines were available, but one failed because of alleged poor quality control in manufacture. If there is a scramble among vaccines, look out for financial muscle, politics, and nationalism to join the fray. None of these will be helpful.

So far, there has been a catastrophic failure of leadership at the White House and in many statehouses. “Say it isn’t so” is not a policy. That is what President Donald Trump and Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia have, in essence, said — resulting in climbing infections and deaths.

Americans sacrificed on a politicized cultural altar.

We know what to do: A hard lockdown for a couple of weeks would stop the virus in its tracks. It worked in New York.

We are in a war without leadership. We have governors forced to act as guerrilla chiefs rather than generals of a national army under unified leadership with common purpose.

Right now, we should hear from the political leadership about what they plan to do to slow the spread of COVID-19 and how, when this is over, they plan to rebuild: What will they do to help the 20 million to 30 million people in hospitality and retail whose jobs have gone, evaporated?

Refusing to wear a mask may have deep cultural significance for some, particularly in the West, but for all of us, restaurants are part of the fabric of our living. For most us, the happiest moments of lives have been in a restaurant, celebrating things that are precious milestones in life, like birthdays, engagements and anniversaries.

We can’t give one cultural totem precedence over another.

More than half the nation’s restaurants may never reopen — employing 10 percent of the nation’s workforce and accounting for 4 percent of GDP — and the biggest helping hand to them would be to throw the Defense Production Act at manufacturing millions of indoor air scrubbers. It would increase livability for all, ending our isolation from each other.

Wash your hands, America. Don’t wring them. We can beat the virus when we fight on the same side with science and respect the commonweal.