White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Loud Silence from Islam

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A dark shadow passed over Paris, the City of Light, on Wednesday, January 7.. Well-organized, well-trained killers murdered 13 people in the name of Allah. As Shakespeare said 500 years earlier, about the heinous murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”
Indeed, recent horrors in the name of Allah have been so gruesome it is impossible to conceive the mutilated reason, the perverted concept of God’s will, and the unvarnished rage that has subverted the once admired religion.
The killers are ruthless and depraved, but those who inspire them are evil and those who tolerate them are guilty.
In 2005, when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed and riots were stirred up against the publishers, a meeting was arranged at a community room in the basement of The Washington Times. It was not organized by the newspaper but, as I recall, by an interfaith group. There were several fringe “let’s be nice” speakers before the main event.
The main event was the Danish ambassador and, to a lesser extent, myself. The ambassador spoke about life in Denmark and what the Danish government would do to understand and listen to the concerns of the Muslim community. My role was to defend and explain the Western concept of freedom of speech and the place satire. The overflow audience, which by dress and appearance was dominated by emigrants from Pakistan, was implacable.
I have spoken to some hostile audiences in my time, but this one was special: No compromise, no quarter. Nor interest in cultures other than their own. Ugly and insatiable rage came out in their questions.
They did not want to know about the values of the country that had given their brethren sanctuary, education, healthcare and a decent life. My audience only wanted to know why the blasphemers in Denmark and Norway (the cartoons were reprinted there) were not being punished. For good measure, they wanted to know why the American media was so committed to heresy against Islam. No thought that they had moved voluntarily to the United States and were enjoying three of its great freedoms: freedom to assemble, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
They wanted absolute subjection of all Western values to the dictates of Islam. They had been fired up and they were angry, self-righteous and obdurate.
In 2009, I was invited to a conference of world religions in Astana, Kazakhstan. There were maybe 100 religions present, but at a featured session the conference degenerated into an Islamic diatribe against sexuality and the treatment of women (mostly in advertising) in the West. No dialogue. No discussion. Absolute certainty.
I mention this because of the reaction to the barbarity in Paris, and to a string of other barbarous murders across the world, from Muslims has been so muted.
“Je Suis Charlie” said millions of people in dozens of countries in sympathy with the murdered journalists and with their fight for press freedom. From Muslim leaders in the West, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the United States, there were statements of condemnation but no sense of outrage. From the bulk of the followers of Islam there was nothing. There never is. Not when innocent children are shot in their schools, or when aid workers are beheaded, or when or when satirical journalists are executed. The Muslim multitudes have acquiesced to evil.
When will those who believe deeply in Islam take to the streets to denounce the excesses of the few? After the horror in Paris, British Muslims took to the BBC to mildly criticize the murders, but more to vigorously demand a better deal for Muslims in Britain.
The medieval certainty of the leadership of Islam is endorsed by the silence of its congregants. The silence of the millions gives a kind of absolution to the extremists, intoxicated with fervor and hate. It will all go on until the good Muslims stand up and are heard. The guilt of silence hangs over Islam. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 

Things That You Won’t Like in 2015

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The new year demands predictions. As those demands must be satisfied, here are mine:

1. President Barack Obama will be blamed for everything, from pet obesity to sunspots.

2. Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation, will continue to solicit me for money and will write me ingratiating letters as one conservative to supposedly another. Things are terrible because of Obama, he will say. But if I send him five bucks, the day can be saved for America.

3. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) will ask me for money, five bucks, to save America from the likes of DeMint.

4. Amtrak – whose high-speed train between Washington, D.C. and Boston, Acela Express, is so expensive only rich business people can afford to ride it — will seek a larger federal subsidy. At present, it stands at $1.3 billion. Ordinary people, who Congress had in mind as riders, can’t afford the Acela's astronomical and predatory fares. So it has become a service for business executives and corporate lawyers — you can tell from the overheard cell phone conversations. A billable hour is a terrible thing to waste.

5. The airlines will find new ways to discomfort you; watch out for toilets that big and tall people can't sit on, seats that recline a 16th of an inch, and bad food that you'll buy only if you're off your medicine. Don't change your ticket, bring a suitcase or seek a seat with legroom. There are fees for that kind of convenience and comfort. Don't ask for logic in routing: How about Providence to Washington, D.C. with two stops and travel time of 10 hours and 20 minutes? An air travel Web site tried to tempt me with that “super-saver” fare. I reckon you could hitchhike it in about the same time.

6. If you thought it was difficult to reach any large company in 2014, it will be much worse in 2015. There are consultants out and about America, teaching corporations how to avoid their customers. Gone are the days when you could expect customer service of some sort, albeit from Rajiv in Bangladesh. Amazon, always a pioneer, has produced the consumer go-have-sex-with-yourself masterpiece. If you have a question about your Kindle, you have to give them your credit card if you want it answered. It's the no-pay-no-help line.

7. Talking of the perils of being a customer, Bank of America refused to give me the phone number of the local branch where I have an account. When I finally got through to the manager, she said they didn't give out the number because “the phone would be ringing off the hook.” I didn’t know people called the bank just to chat. No thought that those callers might be customers. Just remember new the mantra of big business: “The customer is always wrong, a nuisance, and fitted for nothing better than hanging an hour on the phone with a simple inquiry.”

8. Next year the save-a-buck Congress will decimate the Post Office. Sad because it's the one place that still works, and where you can get a question answered promptly. That will not do. The Social Security Administration is efficient and polite, too. So Congress has its hatchet out.

9. Now that the Republicans have control of government, they'll be out to prove that government doesn’t work. I’m sure they will pull it off. The Democrats will be complaining – having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the midterms.

How can you lose an election when the economy is turning around? Ask Sen. Franken when you send him your five bucks. Bet he won’t tell you. So I will. You turn your back on your president. That makes you look really bad, and looking really bad is a bad election strategy.
 

Happy New Year! — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

A Tale of Two Countries: Cuba and Vietnam

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HANOI, Vietnam — What do Vietnam and Cuba have in common? Short answer: The Washington Post.

In an editorial that shocked as much by where it came from as by its rather distended logic, the newspaper attacked President Barack Obama’s opening to Cuba. It did so because Cuba is still a Communist dictatorship, and argued that giving trade privileges and diplomatic recognition to Vietnam in 1995 had neither lessened the Communist grip there nor improved the human rights record at all.

Wait a minute. Cuba is still very much a Communist country, with severe restrictions on its people. Vietnam has a titular communism and a lot of personal liberty.

Cuba’s President Raul Castro has lightened some of the worst of the oppressiveness of the state but not by more than he has had to, given the changes that Western tourism has forced on the regime. It is still oppressive and there is no personal freedom for the Cubans. They cannot travel and when I was last there, a few years ago, they could not even go to the tourist hotels unless they were government officials.

I can say, though, that things were so much better than they had been when I first visited the island in the 1980s. Then the atmosphere was palpably repressive. The block committees for social spying were in full swing, and the good spirits of the people were shackled by the heavy, Slavic presence of the Soviets. It had the feeling of an occupied country.

By contrast, when I visited Vietnam in 1995, and traveled the length of the country, there was none of the sense of almighty government. Relations with the United States had just been normalized, and Vietnam was enthusiastically looking to joining the world. Businesses were beginning to take hold, and the war had been not so much forgotten as put aside.

One thing you did not get at that time in Vietnam was any sense the Marxist-Leninist dogma was affecting everyday life, or that the people felt oppressed. Those from the South, who had fought against the Communists on the American side, did complain of discrimination.

Fast forward nearly 20 years, and I am again in Vietnam. It is bustling, more prosperous, but still primarily a happy country with people free to travel. In other words, much a better place for personal freedom that the Castro brothers Cuba.

The rub is that human rights are abused in Cuba and Vietnam. Both get low ratings from Human Rights Watch on its listing system. It is not a wise thing to criticize the regime in either Cuba or Vietnam: If you do, the prison door will swing open and in you will go. However, I am told by the Dutch Embassy in Havana that they feel things are improving in Cuba. And sources in the U.S. State Department tell me that they think things are slowly getting better in Vietnam — and that they are already much better than they are in China. One thing I am sure of is that if Vietnam had not been so keen to trade with the West, it would not be as easygoing as it now is.

Next year, an important one for Vietnam, as it is the 40th anniversary of the ending of the war and the 20th of normalization with the United States. The government has ambitious plans to privatize as many as 400 companies that are at present inefficient state enterprises. Vietnamese business people told me they thought the country was on the move, going in the right direction.

Business is very important in “Communist” Vietnam.

By stark contrast Cuba has a subculture of tiny businesses, mostly restaurants, that are constantly harassed by government agents. In Vietnam business is celebrated. There are multi-millionaires in Vietnam. Not so Cuba.

One way or the other, the United States has this choice: Maintain the servitude in Cuba that the brothers Castro have been able to blame on U.S. policy since 1960, or let the force of openness prevail. I can tell you that things are better in Vietnam because of normalization of relations with the United States, and worse in Cuba because that has not happened.

To have open relations with China and to rue those with Vietnam, and to want to keep Cuba in limbo is incoherent and self-defeating. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Hanoi: Motor Scooter City

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HANOI, Vietnam — I want tell you about Vietnam: its people, its culture, its economy, its disputes, and its aspirations. But I can’t. Not yet.

Like other visitors to this capital city, I’m not focused on the wide, French-colonial boulevards, the roadsides decorated with extraordinary ceramic mosaics and the great parks; the glorious architecture, which tells its history; traditional, colonial and modern; or the fabulous food, informed by the French but resolutely Vietnamese.
No. I’m totally mesmerized by the traffic: one of the wonders of the world. It’s a wonder not because, like so many of the world’s cities, it’s so terrible, but because it flows in the most extraordinary way. It’s the triumph of a lack of system over a system.
For the most part, Hanoi has no traffic lights, except on major thoroughfares, and no stop or yield signs. Traffic moves along at about 15-miles-per-hour; sometimes a little faster and sometimes slower, depending on the time of day.
Looking at the traffic is like watching a column of ants, going hither and thither in a courteously chaotic way. The only absolute rule on the roads is to keep to the right. Everything else is improvisation.
At the heart of this traffic miracle, this way of moving millions of people with little delay, is the humble but iconic Vespa scooter, its imitators and relations, all powered with small engines in the 150 cc category. For those not intimate with the intricacies of motorcycles, a top-of-the-line Harley Davidson comes in at 1,247 cc.
But central to the Hanoi traffic triumph are scooters and very light motorcycles (some of them electric), the occasional moped and even bicycles — although compared to when I was here 20 years ago, the bicycle has nearly disappeared.
To the more than 3 million scooters, most of which take to the streets daily, add the skill, courtesy and physical courage of the riders. They weave, dodge, brake, swerve, swoop, accelerate and slow in what, to American eyes, is an unscripted ballet with a cast of millions. The dance is known, but the choreography is new by the split-second.
There are cars, too, but they’re the minority. They let themselves into the shoals of seething motor scooter riders with a confidence that I’d never have. I’d never go anywhere, being convinced that I’d plow down dozens of intrepid riders with my first tentative yards onto the road. You must not only have patience, but also enough boldness to know that the river of motorcycles — a river that ebbs and rises, but never ceases — will accommodate you.
I sit in the back of my taxi convinced that blood will flow as I watch young and old glide by with a determination only otherwise seen in NASCAR drivers. The dance is fast and furious; the music is all New World Symphony.
It is worthy of study by fluid dynamists. Maybe the traffic, the smooth-flowing traffic of Hanoi, should also be studied by sociologists.
Everything happens on the darting, rushing motor scooters and mopeds of Hanoi. Families of three are transported, young men and young women ride abreast and meet on wheels.
If you want to cross the street, pluck up you courage, ask forgiveness from your Creator, and step into the maelstrom of motorized wonder, believing, as you must, that the throng of riders in Hanoi have extrasensory perception and will part, like the Red Sea, for you.
Who would believe that watching traffic could be recreational? Worth the trip, almost.
Reporting on Vietnam, with its intriguing culture, emerging economy, territorial contentions, and future relationship with the United States, will have to wait. There may be a moped in my future. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Teetering on the Economic Precipice

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This will be a bleak Christmas for the small Vermont community of Vernon. It is losing its economic mainstay. The owner of its proud, midsize nuclear plant, which has sustained the community for 42 years, Entergy, is closing the plant. Next year the only people working at the plant will be those shuttering it, taking out its fuel, securing it and beginning the process of turning it into a kind of tomb, a burial place for the hopes of a small town.

What may be a tragedy for Vernon may also be a harbinger of a larger, multilayered tragedy for the United States.

Nuclear – Big Green – is one of the most potent tools we have in our battle to clean the air and arrest or ameliorate climate change over time. I've named it Big Green because that is what it is: Nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of absolutely carbon-free electricity.

But many nuclear plants are in danger of being closed. Next year, for the first time in decades, there will be fewer than 100 making electricity. The principal culprit: cheap natural gas.

In today’s market, nuclear is not always the lowest-cost producer. Electricity was deregulated in much of the country in the 1990s, and today electricity is sold at the lowest cost, unless it is designated as “renewable” — effectively wind and solar, whose use is often mandated by a “renewable portfolio standard,” which varies from state to state.

Nuclear falls into the crevasse, which bedevils so much planning in markets, that favors the short term over the long term.

Today’s nuclear power plants operate with extraordinary efficiency, day in day out for decades, for 60 or more years with license extensions and with outages only for refueling. They were built for a market where long-lived, fixed-cost supplies were rolled in with those of variable cost. Social utility was a factor.

For 20 years nuclear might be the cheapest electricity. Then for another 20 years, coal or some other fuel might win the price war. But that old paradigm is shattered and nuclear, in some markets, is no longer the cheapest fuel — and it may be quite few years before it is again.

Markets are great equalizers, but they're also cruel exterminators. Nuclear power plants need to run full-out all the time. They can’t be revved up for peak load in the afternoon and idled in the night. Nuclear plants make power 24/7.

Nowadays, solar makes power at given times of day and wind, by its very nature, varies in its ability to make power. Natural gas is cheap and for now abundant, and its turbines can follow electric demand. It will probably have a price edge for 20 years until supply tightens. The American Petroleum Institute won't give a calculation of future supply, saying that the supply depends on future technology and government regulation.

Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and is favored over coal for that reason. But it still pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though just about half of the assault on the atmosphere of coal.

The fate of nuclear depends on whether the supporters of Big Green can convince politicians that it has enough social value to mitigate its temporary price disadvantage against gas.

China and India are very mindful of the environmental superiority of nuclear. China has 22 power plants operating, 26 under construction, and more about to start construction. If there is validity to the recent agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, it is because China is worried about its own choking pollution and a fear of climate change on its long coastline, as well as its ever-increasing need for electricity.

Five nuclear power plants, if you count Vermont Yankee, will have closed this year, and five more are under construction in Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. After that the new plant pipeline is empty, but the number of plants in danger is growing. Even the mighty Exelon, the largest nuclear operator, is talking about closing three plants, and pessimists say as many as 15 plants could go in the next few years.

I'd note that the decisions now being made on nuclear closures are being made on economic grounds, not any of the controversies that have attended nuclear over the years. 

Current and temporary market conditions are dictating environmental and energy policy. Money is more important than climate, for now. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Vietnam Welcomes America with Open Arms

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No grunt slogging through the jungles of Vietnam could imagine that in 2014, 41 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese would be welcoming back Americans as investors, tourists, advisers and protectors.

Next year is a big year in Vietnam. It is the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975. It is also the 20th anniversary of the normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam, a country where so much American and Vietnamese blood was spilled.

The Vietnam War started in the Eisenhower Administration, dragged down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and was ended in the Nixon Administration amid controversy that tore America apart and has informed its foreign policy ever since.

It will be remembered in the annals of war for the limits it revealed on mechanized fighting, and the challenge of asymmetrical fighting and wrong-headiness. But it also deserves mention in the annals of peace for the surprising speed in which the war has been put aside, especially in Vietnam, where the gory past has been buried and the future embraced.

Today’s Vietnam is a place where the United States is admired and emulated. And the Vietnamese want nothing so much as to be closer to Americans.

Twenty years ago when I traveled from Hanoi, south along the spine of the country, to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, I was astounded by the way the war had been willfully forgotten: people I met did not want to talk about it.

Da Nang still was set about with hardened bunkers, Hue, which had been the national capital until 1945, was a sad ruin, but people were determinedly forward-looking. They wanted to know three things: how could they get American goods, how could sell their goods in the U.S. market, and what was the United States going to do about China?

A generation later, Vietnam is more passionate in its desire to get close to the United States. The government of Vietnam is making a new push for American investment, particularly in the privatization of infrastructure, which is still government-controlled and beset by inefficiency and corruption.

Vietnam Report, a business and data service, has just released a comprehensive white paper, prepared by Corr Analytics, a New York-based risk management consultancy, that paints an agreeable picture of investment opportunities, particularly in those industries that the Vietnamese government is anxious to hive off to the private sector. Of 432 projects identified by the government, Corr has honed in on what it believes to be the 31 best-investment targets. These range from opportunities — from a few million dollars to over $7 billion — in finance, infrastructure, manufacturing and petroleum.

The backstory is that Vietnam needs more than U.S. investment. As it struggles against China in the South China Sea, over territorial claims on small island groups that are thought to contain large hydrocarbon reserves, Vietnam wants the United States to be a visible friend.

There is even talk that the United States, might establish a naval base at Cam Rahn Bay, its legendary base and deep-water port during the Vietnam War. This, the argument goes, would compensate for the loss of the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Come back, Yanks.

Several analysts have told me that they believe Vietnam to be an excellent investment opportunity, but there are concerns. The government is nominally communist and there is only one party: the Communist Party. It is avowedly pro-business but faces human-rights issues, press-freedom issues, and the impartiality of the judiciary is questionable. Corruption is widespread and debilitating.

Yet Forbes magazine is looking to Vietnam as the new Asian investment haven. In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings, according to Corr Analytics, Vietnam is ahead of major investment destinations such as China, India and Brazil. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has made it clear that his country is open for business – particularly American business.

Tourism is growing, especially at Vietnam’s superb beaches. Lauren Graham, who stars in the NBC drama “Parenthood,” has taken a bicycle trip with her father, a Washington lobbyist and fluent Vietnamese speaker.

Some who fought in Vietnam have joined the ranks of its boosters, like Tom Patterson, the famed Harvard professor, who is helping to develop a high-technology village near Nha Trang and Cam Rhan Bay, where he was once stationed.

The generational change also has made a difference. Much of the Vietnamese population was not born during the war. A new generation of Americans has been shaped by war in the Middle East not in Asia. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

How to Steal the Sea, Chinese Style

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In history, countries have sought to increase their territory by bribery, chicanery, coercion and outright force of arms. But while many have sought to dominate the seas, from the Greek city states to the mighty British Empire, none has ever, in effect, tried to take over an ocean or a sea as its own.
But that is what China is actively doing in the ocean south of the mainland: the South China Sea. Bit by bit, it is establishing hegemony over this most important sea where the littoral states — China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam — have territorial claims.
The importance of the South China Sea is hard to overestimate. Some of the most vital international sea lanes traverse it; it is one of the great fishing areas; and the ocean bed, near land, has large reserves of oil and gas. No wonder everyone wants a piece of it — and China wants all of it.
Historically China has laid claim to a majority of the sea and adheres to a map or line — known as the nine-dash map, the U-shape line or the nine-dotted line — that cedes most of the ocean area and all of the island land to it. The nine-dash map is a provocation at best and a blueprint for annexation at worst.
The mechanism for China’s filching of one of the great seas of the world is control of the three island archipelagos, the Paracel, Spratly and Pratas islands, and several other smaller outcroppings, as well as the seamounts, called the Macclesfield Bank and the Scarborough Shoal. Between them, they consist of about 250 small islands, atolls, keys, shoals, sandbars and reefs. Very few of these are habitable or have indigenous people. Some are permanently submerged, and many are only exposed at low tide.
Yet if China can claim title to them, it can use them to extend its hegemony into the area around them. First, it can claim the standard 12 miles of territorial waters around each land mass and it also can claim an economic zone of influence of 200 miles from the most dubious “island.” Ergo, China can connect the dots and grab a large chunk of the South China Sea.
China is reclaiming land – actually building a new artificial island — in the disputed Spratly Islands. The two-mile-long island will have an airfield that, China’s foreign ministry claims, will be used for air-sea operations. The other claimants, think otherwise, especially Vietnam. The United States has called for China to halt the island project.
China has been both stealthy and obvious about its strategy. It has increased its trade with the claimants; and in some cases has made generous contributions to their infrastructure development, but not in the South China Sea. In its maritime provocations, China has been careful to use its coast guard, not its navy, as it extends its grasp on the archipelagos, and inches forward to total domination of anything that looks like land in the waters off its southern coast.
The Philippines has sought international legal redress under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty which the United States has not ratified, limiting its legal maneuvering, according to Barry Nolan of the Boston Forum, a policy analysis group that has studied the South China Sea crisis this year. China denies the legitimacy of international law in what is says is an internal matter.
To my mind, we are seeing is a new kind of imperialism from China, a gradual annexation of whatever it wants; quiet aggression, just short of war but relentless. This is China’s modus operandi in Southeast Asia, Africa and other places. It squeezes gently and then with greater strength, like a lethal constrictor snake.
Southeast Asian countries are arming, but China’s naval forces are growing faster. Also, it has the cash and the people to do what it wants. The U.S. “pivot to Asia” has done little to reassure China’s neighbors. Their nervousness is compounded by the ease with which Russia was able to annex Crimea and is proceeding into Eastern Ukraine unchecked. What’s to stop China grabbing some useless islands, and then a whole sea?
The ancient concept of oceans as commons is under threat. The Chinese dragon walks and swims. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Cruelty of the Holidays

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T.S. Eliot may have had it wrong: The cruelest months are November and December, when the holidays are upon us, not April. For those who are broken – broken in all the ways that people can be broken — the holidays are a special hell.
The bedridden, the incarcerated, the mourners, the maimed from accidents, disease or wars, the heartbroken – either those who have had their hearts broken by lovers or others, or those who have had no one in their lives — endure the holidays in anguish, hurting even more than the permanent hurt that has become their lives.
You may find the broken in the corners at parties, sitting glumly at the table. But the real suffering is unseen; the real sufferers cannot make it to the table – or dare not for fear that the outing will cost them later. The brave face can mask the deepest hurt. They are the permanently sick. Those who will be sick today, sick tomorrow and sick in the next holiday season as they were in the last.
There are people who suffer constant illness in all the myriad ways that a body can be afflicted or fail. No afflicted cohort is more deserving of understanding than another; none has a greater call for science to redouble its efforts for a cure than another.
But the effort to find cures is woefully skewed by the institutions of medicine, by the pharmaceutical companies and by those diseases that have celebrity champions, informing the public and the politics of research institutions. Yes, there is always politics and so there are winners and losers. Celebrities can help: Elizabeth Taylor did so for AIDS, Jerry Lewis for Multiple Sclerosis, and Michael J. Fox is doing so for Parkinson’s disease.
I write and broadcast about one disease in particular, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It is a disease largely orphaned by the medical community which has no test for it — cannot say with assurance that a patient has it until months of debility validate that it is ME. In medical parlance, there are no biological markers. What is known is that it is almost certainly a disease of the immune system, and that there is no cure. It also has no celebrity benefactors and no lobby in Washington.
I think of it as a terrorist disease, which takes its patents hostage and confines them in an alternative world of muscle pain, headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, brain fog and almost permanent collapse. Some are adversely affected by light, others by sound.
One sufferer says that having ME is like being an engine without fuel: Your tank is empty and you hurt in new and refined ways almost daily. Sufferers go through long periods of disability where they cannot function at all. “I thought I was already in my coffin,” another told me.
The joys are few and sometimes from little things, like a pet or nature observations. One sufferer, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, wrote a wonderful book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.” It is about the habits of a snail in a terrarium next to her bed, during two years of sustained collapse.
This is a disease that steals lives, chains them up in dungeons of despair where loneliness and suffering reach “excruciating proportions,” according to my colleague, Deborah Waroff, whose life was snatched by this disease 25 years ago. Together Waroff and I established a YouTube channel on ME, mecfsalert.
The loved ones, and the caregivers – if there are any — are enslaved by this disease, seeing those they care about in a place where neither love nor medicine can reach them. Literally and figuratively, they must fluff the pillows once again and mouth the empty words — lies really — of encouragement that we all utter in the face of hopelessness. Those who live on their own, often in poverty and sloth they cannot ameliorate for themselves, suffer what one woman told me was such sustained loneliness that she prayed nightly for death.
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's Eve are on the way. Sadly, while the rest of us are suffused with joy, the permanently ill take stock and find their lives are terribly wanting and isolated on the holidays. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Media-Pollster Axis Stole the Election

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Politics is the hot ticket in journalism these days. Young reporters long to cover Capitol Hill, when once they longed for the exotic life of the foreign correspondent. “Timbuktu or bust” has become “Washington or fail.” Journalism's stars today are those who can reel off the precincts of Iowa or the hobbies of senators, not the wonders of rural Sri Lanka.

Yet the passion for politics that has seized the Washington press corps and those who want to join it across the country has not been reflected in the public – not, at any rate, by the abysmally low national turnout of 36. 3 percent on Nov. 4, arguably one of the most important midterm elections in a long time.

It was the lowest voter turnout in 72 years: a seeming monument to voter apathy. Certainly not the sign of a seething, unhappy electorate which believes the bums should be thrown out because the country is on the wrong track. That may be so, but you wouldn't know it from the voter turnout.

The voter turnout wasn't large enough for anyone to claim that the country has veered to the right, or that the victors have a mandate. Yet we know President Obama is held in low esteem, although not as low as the risible contempt in which Congress is held.

If the voters didn't come out in large enough numbers to give us a clear reading, how do we know that Obama is on the ropes and that Congress is despised? We know it, without doubt, from the innumerable opinion polls which are now part of the journalistic toolbox.

There is no doubt about the public mood. So why didn't the public vote when there was so much journalistic enthusiasm for the election; when an amazing amount of television time, especially on cable, was given to politics; and when radio goes at politics 24-7?

The paradox may be journalism and its commitment to opinion polls, largely funded by the media. If you know who is going to win the match, why buy a ticket?

The passion in journalism for politics has made politics a victim, robbed it of surprise and tension. I voted without passion because I had a very complete picture of the outcome before I did my civic duty. It was like reading an otherwise gripping who-done-it, when I already knew it was the butler.

The metadata people, like Nate Silver, aren't helping either.

When newspapers are cutting their staffs and budgets are tight, why is political coverage and polling out of Washington thriving? First, it is cheaper to create news than find it. With polls, you scoop the election result. Second, there is a large pot of money for “political issues” advertising that has given rises to a raft of new outlets, forcing old-line media to double down.

Washington politics is no longer a franchise of The Washington Post and The New York Times. It has its own trade press, led by the upstart and well-funded Politico, a big news predator in a school of hungry fish. There is The Hill, Roll Call, National Journal, RealClearPolitics and more than a dozen others, like The Cook Political Report and Talking Points Memo.

It is these new entrants, with their access to instant electronic delivery, that have led the change and fueled the frenzy. They are in danger of becoming the game instead of covering it. They have become more interested in what the polls say than what the politicians say.

On Capitol Hill, members of Congress are in bunker mode. They are afraid to say anything or look a bit tired, distressed or unkempt because these ill-considered words and unflattering images will be flashed across the Internet – there to be retrieved at any time, for all time.

There is a joke around Washington that if a member of Congress breaks wind, Politico will have the story. In this new world, every trifle is recorded and archived. Is this the way to foster statecraft in a dangerous and unforgiving world? Let's poll that question, shall we? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Need To Redistribute Income Is Real

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If you want to get people riled up, whisper "redistribution."
 
Well, sorry about this, but that is what we need. We need to re-establish what might be called "the comfortable class." Those are the people we used to call the middle class until the politicians, with a helping hand from the media, characterized everyone who worked as middle class.
 
When we had a working class and a middle class, the working class could aspire to join the middle class, and the middle class could aspire to join the upper middle class, which might also be thought of as the managerial or professional class.
 
The professional class is still mostly intact; it includes doctors, dentists, corporate lawyers and some scientists. But the rest of us, unless we are protected by government employment, are standing on the edge of a precipice, and some are already on the way down.
 
There are many problems with our social structure today, not the least of which is that many forms of work have been endangered or have disappeared. Look around you.
 
You do not have to look far to see whole swaths of employment that have disappeared; either moved overseas or have fallen prey to the predations of the computer. I treasure my electronic reading device, but every time I switch it on, a parade of ghosts passes before me: book designers, papermakers, printers, bookbinders, warehousemen, drivers, sales assistants and store cleaners. Well, they are just the book people who the clever device has rendered obsolete.
 
Then there is the whole issue of the future of retail in general, and shopping centers in particular. A young person told me recently that the mall was for hanging out, but shopping should be done on the Web. Retailing has always been poorly paid but, even there, the middle class had a foothold with its managers, marketing specialists and all those aspiring sales assistants.
 
A new book is all the rage in circles that care about such things, and it is causing economists to rethink the inequality that wage-fear has made possible; the fact that the minimum-wage and low-wage structure now prevails in many states and is spreading.
 
The book is "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty. It lays out how money is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with more of it belonging not to those who earned it, but to those who inherited it. With sound, but not spectacular investment, the owner of a few billion dollars will almost certainly pass even greater wealth on to his or her heirs in a never-ending column of money, creating the greatest concentration of wealth in history.
 
Yet there is nothing pushing up our earnings.
 
Instead, there are many forces pushing them down — from the inability of the unions to adjust to the times to the constant endeavor by states, such as Texas, to suck high-wage jobs out of other states and beggar the workers. Employers do not want to pay more than necessary and, of course, there is computerization.
 
Lower wages mean less spending, more low-wage jobs, fewer people in the middle class, fewer "comfortable" people.
 
Martin Wolf, the esteemed columnist of the Financial Times, points out that where redistribution is practiced as a continual part of the political process, as in Scandinavia, there is generally universal prosperity and a measurable middle class, enjoying a lot of social services. In Latin America, where you have an oligarchy of the kind forming here, there is little prosperity and consequent human suffering.
 
In history, there have been savage periods of redistribution. Henry VIII seized the abbeys because that was where the wealth was; Oliver Cromwell had the same idea. The French overdid it terribly in 1789, the Russians in 1917. And the British ran taxes up to 90 percent of income after World War II with predictable, devastating results.
 
Societies work best when they are flexible without rigidities; the rise of incalculable billions in the hands of the very few while general incomes are falling creates a cruel and dangerous rigidity. Worse, concentrated wealth overwhelms democracy.
 
Whisper it: "redistribution."  – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate