White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Strange Case of the NIH and an Elusive Disease

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The federal government has a mostly open dialogue with those it serves and those who serve it. This happens pretty well across government agencies, from the Pentagon to the Department of Transportation to the Department of Agriculture.
 
So it is troubling that the National Institutes of Health, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, appears to have no communication with a critical but ignored patient cohort: those suffering from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and often referred to only as ME/CFS. The NIH does not appear to hear the cries of the petitioners at its door; it seems to be interested only in classifying and defining the disease.
 
According to the Centers for Disease Control, ME/CFS afflicts 1 million people in the United States, and 17 million people around the world. While those numbers of victims are disputed, their suffering is not; they are ill in a terrible way.
 
ME/CFS takes healthy — often athletic — people and casts them into a shadow world of physical incapacity, mental fog, loneliness and relentless dependence on others. The suffering is measured in years and decades. Suicide is common.
 
It is a disease of the immune system, but what triggers it is unknown. Physicians who treat ME/CFS have told me that they would rather have cancer than this disease. One epidemiologist said, “With cancer, you are cured or you die. ME/CFS just goes on and on. You live the life of a zombie.”
 
From a physician devoted to treating and researching ME/CFS, this is not only a terrible admission, but also a de facto indictment of the national effort to find a cure, or even a therapy, for alleviating the suffering.
 
One of the problems affecting ME/CFS treatment is diagnosis. There are no biological labels, known as markers, that enable doctors to easily identify ME/CFS; it cannot be picked up in a blood tests or a urine sample. It is a ghostly manifestation, and doctors fall back on what is known as wastebasket diagnosis. In its simplest form, this means testing for a lot of diseases and if it does not turn out to be one of them, it could be ME/CFS.
 
But one case definition has satisfied the ME/CFS community in recent years, and it is endorsed by specialists in the field. Established in 2001, it is called the Canadian Consensus Criteria.
 
Yet, incomprehensibly, the NIH is spending some of the paltry $6 million devoted to ME/CFS, on a study to come up with a new case definition for the disease; something that no one wants and which could do real harm.
 
To do this work, the NIH selected the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which has no expertise in ME/CFS and which had drawn opprobrium with its clumsy attempt to do a case definition of Gulf War Syndrome.
 
The NIH, which has failed to explain itself in plain English, has ignited incandescent rage in the patient community and from patient advocates. In a unique outpouring of objection, 50 of the world's top doctors and clinicians wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius, pleading with her not to muddy the waters and to stay with the definition which is working well. The NIH went ahead with the IOM contract.
 
So lacking is government support, moral as well as financial, that the research community, including dedicated physicians such as Andreas Kogelnik of Mountain View, Calif., Daniel Peterson of Incline Village, Nev., and Derek Enlander of New York City, feel they have to raise funds privately to continue their work. Even celebrity virus hunter Ian Lipkin of Columbia University has abandoned hope of getting his seminal work funded by the NIH and has joined the researchers who have had to hold out begging bowls to the public to do their research.
 
Judging by social media, the entire patient community is in a state of metaphorical war with the NIH.
 
There is a cry from and on behalf of the pitiable sick for action, sympathy and even courtesy from the bureaucrats in Bethesda, where the NIH is headquartered. The Hippocratic Oath says, “first do no harm.” When people are in pain and despair, inaction is palpable harm.
 
A congressional hearing is needed to investigate decision-making in the NIH, find out about its budget request to the Office of Management and Budget, and to demand that it listen to those who suffer and those who are trying to help them. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

David and Goliath, or, the Sick and the Bureaucracy

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Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, has grown rich with a series of books exploring the sociological dimensions of success and failure. In his latest, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants,” Gladwell celebrates the many Davids who triumphed over the odds because they were nimble and resourceful.
 
If he wants to observe a classic David-versus-Goliath rumble, Gladwell might want to go to Washington on Tuesday (Dec. 10). He will see a frail woman go up against the federal government with a humble petition and a small following of mostly very sick people.
 
Her name is Susan Kreutzer and she suffers from the debilitating and mysterious disease Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, which is the name patients favor.
 
Kreutzer and others will begin their demonstration at 9a.m. outside the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services on Independence Avenue, where she will hand over a petition. Then she will move up the street to Capitol Hill to demonstrate and hand-deliver petitions to members of Congress. She will end her day of petitioning her government outside the White House.
 
Kreutzer has no idea how many, if any, demonstrators will join her, but she assures me she has the required permits to demonstrate. Another time, only six demonstrators turned out,, but they unfurled a huge banner and stood on he street telling the oft-ignored story of their suffering to anyone who would listen.
 
Telling your story in Washington without a big-bucks lobbying firm or celebrity friends is not an easy assignment. Not only is there the high chance of being ignored but there is also the chance of being discounted as one of the apocalyptic “end of days” proselytizers, or those who believe the CIA has it in for them and who habitually assemble at the White House and elsewhere. In other words, it is easy to be dismissed as a “crazy.”
 
But Kreutzer, who will have a warm-up demonstration on Dec. 9 in San Francisco at the HHS offices there, believes in the strength of small voices, of a murmur in the cacophony of Washington petitioning. “I feel I have to do this,” she said.
 
This year, the victims of CFS are particularly upset with HHS and its dependent agency the National Institutes of Health. They are fuming at the decision of NIH to seek a new clinical definition of their disease, supplanting the Canadian Consensus Criteria, which has been the diagnostic gold standard for researchers who are deeply committed to finding a cure for a disease that affects as many as 1 million Americans and another 17 million people worldwide.
 
It is a disease that simply confiscates normal life and substitutes an existence in purgatory, where victims can be confined for decades until death. Sometimes they will be so sick they must lie in darkened rooms for months or years; sometimes they can function for a few hours a day, usually followed by collapse. Dysphasia — word confusion — increases. Lovers leave, spouses despair and the well of family compassion runs dry.
 
The first and major complaint of all those in researching the disease and those suffering from it is that NIH spends a trifling $6 million on this circle of hell that could have been invented by Dante.
 
The second and immediate source of anger laced with despair is that NIH has, apparently arbitrarily, decided to have the clinical definition of the disease reclassified by the Institute of Medicine and has diverted a precious $1 million to this purpose. Thirty-six leading researchers and physicians from the United States, risking retribution in funding, protested the move but were ignored. They were joined by colleagues from abroad, bringing the blue-ribbon protesters to 50.
 
Still nobody knows why the move to reclassify the disease. One school of thought is that NIH would like to abandon the current and well-accepted diagnostic criteria, known as the Canadian Consensus Criteria, in order to treat the disease as more of a mental one rather than a physical one.
 
I approached HHS for a comment and for a word with Dr. Howard Koh, the assistant secretary in charge, but have received no response.
 
Will this David, Susan Kreutzer, fell this Goliath, HHS? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Washington Post: Family Adieu

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Part of the problem with dragging the news business into the 21st century is that newspaper people are so damned conservative. That's right, conservative.
 
Most journalists who work in print may be liberal, but we are conservative about our own trade. We like it the way it has always been. Gruff editors hammered into us how it should be, and we have passed the hammer.
 
While magazines experimented with new ways of presenting their wares and developing new voices, especially in the 1920s, newspapers clung to the past. Horizontal layout – the headlines running across the page rather than sitting astride vertical columns – was considered radical enough.
 
Even the sensational papers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were sensational within bounds. They pushed the limits of content and veracity, but the concept of the newspaper was unchanged. The carved-in-stone rules of the trade were not challenged — like the one that says headlines must have verbs, and another that says the first line of a headline cannot end with a conjunction or a preposition.
 
The most revolutionary of American newspapers was probably The New York Herald Tribune. In its last decade, even as it was dying a decades-long death from extraordinarily poor management, it became a laboratory for new journalism with certifiable newspaper geniuses like David Laventhol, Eugenia Sheppard, Red Smith, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Clay Felker. Working at the paper was like working for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater: great stuff was going on.
 
The Washington Post has had its share of dazzling reporters and columnists – and benefited from some of its Herald Tribune hires, including Laventhol, who created its much-imitated Style section. I was lucky to have worked for both papers.
 
The Post has shone in the coverage of politics, interpretative foreign stories and big investigative stories. Watergate gets the kudos, but there was good, even great, investigative work before and after that.
 
The Graham family presided over the Post in its golden period from 1954, when it bought its morning rival, The Washington Times-Herald, to 2000 to the present. It never achieved the global recognition that The New York Times enjoys, but it was a close second — and on many days, the Post was clearly the better newspaper.
 
The Washington Post Company, which is controlled by the Graham family and which owned the newspaper, is less of a success story.
 
While other publishing companies grew and prospered, The Washington Post Co. was less successful: After its acquisition of Newsweek in 1961, it faltered as a dynamic news entity, even though the newspaper was hugely profitable.
 
It failed to become a major player in television, athough it owned stations, failed to expand its magazine franchise and missed out on cable TV, which has been so important to the growth of old-line publishers Scripps Howard and Hearst.
 
The company bought and sold many properties on the fringes of its core business, but with little success, except for Kaplan Inc., which was very profitable until the student loan imbroglio.
 
Four years ago the Internet, like an invasive species, began choking the life out of the Post. It didn't know how to respond. It failed to create a credible Web site and watched two English newspapers, The Guardian and the Mail, build up huge Web presences in the United States. Helplessly, it also watched an upstart company, Politico, staffed with Post veterans, take hunks out of its political franchise. As recently as last year, the Post could not establish whether it needed a pay wall.
 
Now the Graham family, headed by Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive officer Donald Graham, has done something very brave in the egotistical world of publishing. It has admitted: We don't know what to do.
 
Jeff Bezos, the inordinately wealthy founder of Amazon, has bought the paper. Does he know what to do? Nobody knows.
 
Nothing Bezos has done suggests that he either understands or reveres newspapers. But he can afford to be radical and he is not bound by newspaperdom's reverence for the way we used to do it; our conservatism. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

A Young Man, a Big Disease and a Big Idea

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We expect big ideas to come from young people in computers, social networking and music. In medicine, less so.
 
So meet Ryan Prior, age 23, of Atlanta, Ga. He suffers from a little understood but ghastly disease of the immune system known in the United States as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), and in the rest of the world as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME).
 
The disease is mostly incurable; affects men and women, but more women than men are recorded; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta says there are 1 million victims in the United States and 17 million worldwide.
 
Its impact is horrific; confiscating lives, wrecking homes, sundering love affairs and grinding down caregivers and families. For the most part, the sick are sick until they die. Some are bedridden for years. Advocacy groups say suicide is high. I have received many letters from patients who say they can't take the pain, the helplessness and the stigma any longer, and beg for a quick release.
 
Despite all this, the disease gets short shrift from the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, although patients say they get a better hearing at the Food and Drug Administration.
 
Enter the over-achieving young patient, Ryan Prior. His story begins on Oct. 22, 2006. Like many victims he knows exactly when he was felled, when normal life had to be abandoned. He entered a dark world where good times are marked in hours; where bad times are days, weeks or months in darkened, silent rooms.
 
Prior was student president at Warner Robins High School in Warner Robins, Ga. (about 90 miles south of Atlanta), captain of the cross-country team and was taking three advanced placement courses. “My goal was to attend Duke University or West Point with the ultimate goal of becoming an Army Ranger,” he said.
 
By Nov. 15, 2006, Prior had to quit school. Under a Georgia plan for educating sick students, “my physics teacher taught me heat transfer while I was lying on the couch,” he said. But he slept through calculus.
 
Ryan still hoped to make it as an athlete. During a brief respite, he was back on his soccer varsity squad. But it was a disaster. He had been put on a drug that provided a short energy boost. “I went to a practice and played for about five minutes. I did OK for the first minute. After five minutes, I realized I had to stagger off the field as soon as possible. If I didn't get off voluntarily, I knew I would have to be carried off soon after.”
 
After seeing 15 doctors, who knew little or nothing about the disease, Prior found one who has helped him. Now, he says, he functions 90 percent of the time if he takes 15 to 20 pills a day and avoids overdoing it. Ultimately, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Georgia.
 
But it's the almost complete ignorance of CFS by most doctors that has set Prior on his big idea project. He is making a documentary film about the disease with young filmmakers, and with a $12,000 budget. He hopes the film will lead to $50,000 in funding to create “an eight-week summer fellowship program” for medical students, between their first and second years, to study with recognized experts in CFS. They would, according to Prior, provide each student with a stipend of $5,000 for the eight weeks.
 
Prior has compiled a list of nine doctors or clinics preeminent in the field who he believes would accept the fellows. The end result: a flow of young doctors with a knowledge of CFS and new ideas.
 
I can attest that this is desperately needed. As far as I have been able to determine there are many states, including West Virginia and Rhode Island, where there are no doctors with specialized knowledge of the disease. One woman travels from Delaware to Manhattan for treatment with Dr. Derek Enlander, and many have moved Nevada to be near Dr. Dan Peterson in Incline Village and the Whittemore-Peterson Clinic in Reno.
 
If Prior's plan works, it may lead to a much larger training effort in the United States and across the world.
 
“The message is simple: American history has progressed in a logical line from women's rights, through civil rights, then to gay rights,” Prior says, adding, “Medical history has a similar process of ridicule, repression and ultimate acceptance: MS, AIDS, and now we want CFS to be the next step.”
 

How to Move the Nuclear Project Forward

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Nuclear power ought to have everything going for it. It has worked extremely well for more than 60 years — a fact that will be celebrated at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s annual meeting in Washington this week.

Yet there is a somber sense about civil nuclear power in the United States that its race is run; that, as in other things, the United States has lost control of a technology it invented.

Consider: There are more than 70 reactors under construction worldwide, but only five of those are in the United States. They are in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Even so, costs are rising and rest of the electric utility industry is resolutely committed to natural gas, which is cheap these days.

Once nuclear power plants are up and running, they tend do so seamlessly for decades, often operating above their original design output. It is clean power, unaffected by fuel prices, doing no damage to the air and very little to the earth, except in the mining of uranium or in immediate contact with the used radioactive fuel, when it is finally disposed of — an issue made thorny by two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Carter banned nuclear reprocessing just as it was about to be commercialized, and Obama nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada. The trigger for his devastating decision was the opposition of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), thought to be acting on behalf of the gaming interests of Las Vegas. Talk about wheels of fortune — a great technology endangered by legions of slot machines.

Overlooked when the nuclear titans gather in Washington will be two of nuclear’s greatest achievements: the nuclear Navy and the transformation of medicine. The Navy is largest maritime war machine in history with its aircraft carriers that can stay on station for more than a year and submarines that can go under the icecaps and stay submerged for months.

The utility industry seeks stability in all things, ergo it is not scientifically entrepreneurial. It embraces risk reluctantly. It accepts new technology when it is delivered with limited or shared risk.

It was that way with nuclear power, where the risk was shared with the government and sometimes the vendors. Likewise, with the development of today’s aero-derivative gas turbines, the military did the work and took the risk.

In this atmosphere it is easy to forget that nuclear is not a mature technology, but that it belongs at the frontiers of science. Today’s nuclear power plant is analogous to the black rotary phone — there is room for improvement.

But as there is no competition between electricity supplying entities, the impetus must come from elsewhere: government and incentivized private companies. Some like the General Atomics Corp. in San Diego, Calif., have reaped huge benefits by exploring the scientific frontier. While they are known mostly for the Predator drone, General Atomics' work on nuclear fusion has provided the building blocks for magnetic resonance imaging and tissue welding among dozens of medical advances and has enabled the company to use fusion science to develop the electromagnetic catapults for launching aircraft from carriers. If you get to ride a levitating train, it may be because it is suspended by electromagnetic forces pioneered in nuclear research by General Atomics.

Nuclear waste – the industry hates that term because of potential energy left in spent fuel — is the sad story of nuclear: too much yesterday (ideas codified and frozen 60 years ago), not enough tomorrow.

When aviation science has been stuck in the past, it has leaped forward by offering prizes to unleash invention: the first flight across the English Channel, the first Atlantic crossing, and now the first commercial foray into space, were inspired by prizes.

The good burghers of the nuclear industry might with their government allies think of cobbling together a really big prize that will change the thinking about how we deal with used nuclear fuel. At present, there are only two options: reducing the volume by cutting it up, leaching the useful stuff out and making glass out of the rest, and burying that or everything in a place like Yucca Mountain.

Generally in life and science, when there are only two options, there is a deficit of thinking. — 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

 
 
 
 

Denmark — the Economic Anomaly

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If Europe is being strangled by its social welfare systems, as many in the
United States believe, what is to be made of Denmark? 

Denmark is a social welfare state. It provides free education from kindergarten through university; a free medical system that costs just 9 percent of its gross domestic product, as opposed to the 17 percent that goes to health care in the United States. Women in Denmark get a year of maternity leave; to prevent employers from discriminating against them, men get paternity leave, three months of it.

In addition to this small-weave social net, the Danes, all 5.5 million of
them, are well down the road to a carbon-free future. Currently, windmills generate a whopping 28 percent of Denmark's electricity; by 2020, they will generate 50 percent of the country's electricity. According to Peter Taksoe-Jensen, Danish ambassador to the United States, the plan is for the Danish economy to be carbon-free by around 2050.

As maritime country, Denmark can place much of its wind generation
offshore. Its emphasis on wind power has made it the world's leading exporter of wind turbine technology. A Danish company, Vestas, has three manufacturing sites in the United States that employ 5,000 people. 

In wind farming, size matters; the larger the wind turbine, the cheaper the collection of the electricity, and the more efficient the maintenance. This
is driving the Danes to larger and larger machines. Most onshore wind turbines in the United States are rated a little over 1 megawatt. The Danes have some rated at 6 MW and are contemplating 10-MW monsters far out to sea — where no one except mariners will see them. 

Biomass is also a favorite of the alternative-energy culture in Denmark.
This is a practicality, not a wish. With more than 25 million pigs, manure
is a very available resource for the Danes and they are using it.

Denmark has one of the highest bicycle penetrations in Europe with more than  half of Danes biking to work and everywhere else. In Copenhagen, the principal traffic problem is congestion on the bike paths and bike highways, according to Amb. Taksoe-Jensen. As gasoline costs between  $10 and $12 a gallon, it is not altogether surprising the Danes have learned to love their two-wheelers.

This seeming Green Revolution had its roots not in concern over global
warming, but rather in the Arab oil embargo and the resulting energy crisis of
1973-74. At the time, Denmark was almost entirely dependent on imported oil and other fossil fuels and was very hard hit. Amb. Taksoe-Jensen says the
Danes said to themselves “never again” and set out to become energy
self-sufficient in any way they could with what was at hand. The idea that you could be green as well came later, as a kind of bonus. 

On its journey to a renewable future, Denmark got a leg up from the discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea, which became available in the 1970s. This has now peaked and will be gone in about 20 years. But it has been a valuable transition fuel and currency earner.

Denmark is part of the European Union and NATO. It uses the krone as its currency, which is pegged to the euro.

The economic storms that have been raging over Europe since 2008 have affected Denmark. Global demand for Danish technology and agricultural products has protected Denmark from a severe buffeting. Unemployment which was at 2.5 percent has risen to 6 percent; in most of Europe, unemployment is over 10 percent. 

To this sanguine picture of a future that appears to work, add one more
bonus: for three years straight, polls conducted by the Organization for European Cooperation and Development have ranked the Danes as the happiest people in the world. Last April, a gastropanel crowned Danish restaurant Noma the best in the world for the third year in a row.

For all of this, the Danes pay a price: They have the highest taxes on
Earth and the state is ever-present. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Old New England Mills — Where Profit and Beauty Entwined

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Across New England they stand as testaments to a time when the United States was a place of untrammeled confidence. The air was infinite, the water clean and abundant. At least for those in the ownership class, life was good and getting better.

They are the great textile mills of New England; magnificent stone and brick structures, in their way as beautiful as basilicas, found along the streams of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Water, as a motive power source, drew them to the streams. Then they added steam, hence the mills’ magnificent smokestacks: sentries standing lonely guard over the memories of a more confident time.

Mostly the mills are abandoned now, waiting a new use or the wrecker’s ball. Some have been saved by being converted into residential lofts and art centers. None will again make cloth, or provide thousands of jobs.

Before critics and designers began linking form to function, the mill architects of New England, these designers of castles of production, did so, using great stonework and imaginative engineering. They are stunningly handsome, the way that great bridges are; the spirit of enterprise encased in stone and brick lovingly.

So when and why did we develop a penchant for ugly buildings? Was it the downside of cost accounting? Why are so many modern schools dumpy and deformed? Why must we put our children to study the classics in structures that implicitly deny the classics?

Winston Churchill said, “We shape buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Indubitably.

In the second half of the 20th century, did we hand human aspiration over to cost-cutters, put it through a calculating machine and turn it out bent and spindled? Must we learn to appreciate the economics of urban blight, the strips of chain outlets that presage our arrival in any town or city?

One can weep now over the beauty of a mill in Rhode Island or a grain elevator on a Virginia farm. But will we weep in a century over the golden arches? Shed a tear for the mall? Swallow hard for Public School 19 somewhere?

If the abandoned mills of the Industrial Revolution were just a little older, we would characterize them as archeological sites — perhaps U.N. World Heritage Sites — and assure their survival for generations to come to marvel at.

Of course the history of New England industrialized weaving was not without strife and folly, greed and cruelty.

The loom technology was smuggled out of Britain by industrial espionage, labor conditions wereterrible for much of the life of the mills, and labor unrest continued through all the days of the textile industry. Royal Mills in West Warwick, R.I., for example, the former home of Fruit of the Loom, was the scene of a bitter strike in 1922.

 

Powering yesterday, charming today

 

Incidentally, this giant mill has been preserved. In a stunning piece of imaginative restoration, it has been converted into 250 apartments, keeping the feel and preserving some of the artifacts of the old mill. It is a restoration that deserves global recognition for showing how the 19th century’s relics can find life in the 21st century, just as the restored power plant on the South Bank of the River Thames in London now houses the Tate Modern art gallery.

When old beauty meets new high purpose, something thrilling happens.

The trick in urban architecture is to remember the people who are outside of the buildings as well as inside; those who can glory in the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower by looking up as well as going in.

For this full enjoyment, great architecture needs great public space.

Would the skyscrapers of New York be as glorious without Central Park to view them from? Would the new "Shard," the extraordinary glass-clad building in London, the tallest in Europe, be as great if it could not be viewed from the city’s abundant public spaces?

Yet urban design today, in an age of public austerity, makes no allowance for public space and has come accept the myth that economics are at odds with great city design.

I am comforted to know that the great squares of London, the avenues of Paris and the mills of New England were built for profit. It can be done. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Political Lies and Small Business

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Brace for a storm of platitudes, recycled myths, and just old-fashioned
political lies.

It will all start with President Obama when he addresses a joint session
of Congress on Thursday about the jobs deficit. Whatever he says will be
followed by scorn and abuse from the Republicans. All the hoary old claims
about the absence of leadership, wasteful spending, punitive regulation
and the need to cut taxes will be regurgitated.

The president will have a TelePrompTer full of enchantment tales. He also
will talk of cutting some taxes; maybe because he thinks this will endear
him to the undecided voters, or mollify some Republicans, or because he
consistently tries to make his way in a viciously partisan political world
by endeavoring to sound like the voice of detached reason. It will make no
friends and infuriate the Democratic core. It will be another betrayal to
them.

All of the tax ideas, presidential and Republican, will be wrapped in cant
about small business. Oh, do politicians love small business. Apple pie is
good, mom is noble but small business, and small business alone, can cause
the entire Congress of the United States to genuflect.

They love the travel agent with six employees with the same passion that
they adore General Electric. The machine tool repair and maintenance
contractor with 40 employees – he is the very embodiment of American
exceptionalism. The woman with a wholesale jewelry business that she
operates with her husband and grown daughter — they are the stuff of
American legend.

Nonsense.

If Congress knew anything about the small business world, it would
stop forcing the wrong medicine on the patient. Incorrect therapies won’t
help, no matter how vigorous the applications.

To the political establishment, small business is suffering because of
taxation and regulation. Fiddle with these twin bugaboos, the political
narrative goes, and small business will bloom like the bluebells in
spring.

Have any of these people ever talked to small business operators? Small
business has many problems, but taxation is seldom one of them. Do they
really think the garment manufacturers on New York’s 7th Avenue are on the
phone, schmoozing about the rate of corporate taxation? More likely they
are talking about why the banks won’t lend, even against collateral, to
heretofore good customers; why imports from all over Asia are laying waste
to their customer base; and why the traffic in the cross-town streets is
horrendous.

Like all small businessmen, they don’t agonize over the frustration of
having to meet OSHA and EPA standards — these are irritants. Instead,
they agonize over whether there will be enough money to meet payroll.
Taxes, if any, come once a year, but the payroll keeps the small
entrepreneur anxious all year. It is the ogre that visits every two weeks.

To many, government is the problem; but not in the way legislators think.
The problem is the growing shortage of federal and state funds. This
affects many small businesses like builders, excavators, asphalt-layers
and the service industries that owe their survival to small contracts:
social service providers, translators, software writers, and consultants
in just about everything.

If you cut budgets, you cut small business.

Then there is the “chaining” of America. Local diners, hardware stores,
pharmacies and other retailing are crushed, annihilated when the chains
move in. The chains are not inherently evil, but they are manifestly
merciless. Walmart is but one of the chains putting small business to the
sword.

If those who administer government want to know something about small
business, they should spend a weekend at a strip-mall bakery or any other
firm with less than 50 employees. The experience would radically adjust
the rhetoric. It’s too late for Thursday, but don’t believe what you hear.

–For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Political Lies and Small Business

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Brace for a storm of platitudes, recycled myths, and just old-fashioned political lies.

It will all start with President Obama when he addresses a joint session of Congress on Thursday about the jobs deficit. Whatever he says will be followed by scorn and abuse from the Republicans. All the hoary old claims about the absence of leadership, wasteful spending, punitive regulation and the need to cut taxes will be regurgitated.

The president will have a TelePrompTer full of enchantment tales. He also will talk of cutting some taxes; maybe because he thinks this will endear him to the undecided voters, or mollify some Republicans, or because he consistently tries to make his way in a viciously partisan political world by endeavoring to sound like the voice of detached reason. It will make nofriends and infuriate the Democratic core. It will be another betrayal to them.

All of the tax ideas, presidential and Republican, will be wrapped in cant about small business. Oh, do politicians love small business. Apple pie is good, mom is noble but small business, and small business alone, can cause the entire Congress of the United States to genuflect.

They love the travel agent with six employees with the same passion that they adore General Electric. The machine tool repair and maintenance contractor with 40 employees – he is the very embodiment of American exceptionalism. The woman with a wholesale jewelry business that she operates with her husband and grown daughter — they are the stuff of American legend.

Nonsense.

If Congress knew anything about the small business world, it would stop forcing the wrong medicine on the patient. Incorrect therapies won’t help, no matter how vigorous the applications.

To the political establishment, small business is suffering because of taxation and regulation. Fiddle with these twin bugaboos, the political narrative goes, and small business will bloom like the bluebells in spring.

Have any of these people ever talked to small business operators? Small business has many problems, but taxation is seldom one of them. Do they really think the garment manufacturers on New York’s 7th Avenue are on the phone, schmoozing about the rate of corporate taxation? More likely they are talking about why the banks won’t lend, even against collateral, toheretofore good customers; why imports from all over Asia are laying waste to their customer base; and why the traffic in the cross-town streets is horrendous.

Like all small businessmen, they don’t agonize over the frustration of having to meet OSHA and EPA standards — these are irritants. Instead, they agonize over whether there will be enough money to meet payroll. Taxes, if any, come once a year, but the payroll keeps the smallentrepreneur anxious all year. It is the ogre that visits every two weeks.

To many, government is the problem; but not in the way legislators think. The problem is the growing shortage of federal and state funds. This affects many small businesses like builders, excavators, asphalt-layers and the service industries that owe their survival to small contracts:social service providers, translators, software writers, and consultants in just about everything.

If you cut budgets, you cut small business.

Then there is the “chaining” of America. Local diners, hardware stores, pharmacies and other retailing are crushed, annihilated when the chains move in. The chains are not inherently evil, but they are manifestly merciless. Walmart is but one of the chains putting small business to thesword.

If those who administer government want to know something about small business, they should spend a weekend at a strip-mall bakery or any other firm with less than 50 employees. The experience would radically adjust the rhetoric. It’s too late for Thursday, but don’t believe what you hear.

–For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate