White House Chronicle

The Case for Fixing Up America

April 27, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

I’m asked with some frequency these days, what do I think the United States will look like in 25 years to 50 years? Underlying this question is a real concern that we’ve lost our way as a nation, that the best is behind us and a strong feeling that the generations to come won’t have it as good as we’ve had.

Actually, I think the United States will be fine. It’ll still be a world power, but not as dominant as it is today and was in the 20th century. I think we’ll still have one of the largest and most important economies in the world; that we’ll still be a powerhouse of invention; and that ourmovies, music and other entertainment forms will still dominate the globe.

American English will continue to be the international means of communication. Sorry Britain, there’s no license fee on language.

A rosy picture, eh? Not quite.

The second, and maybe the more important question, is what sort of country will the United States be to live in? This picture is less rosy.

First, we’re dividing into a country of the super rich and the burgeoning working poor living unpleasantly. The movement of quality manufacturing jobs in the auto and steel industries to the South tells part of that story. The high-wage jobs of Michigan and the unionized North — jobs that pay about $35 an hour — to the union-free auto plants and factories of the South, which pay $14 an hour, is a harbinger of the future. Can less be more?

If the United States is going to have told hold down its wages, then we should fix the living space; that means the infrastructure. It’s a mess and it’ll take decades to bring it up to the standards of much of the rest of the world.

We need better roads (less time in traffic), repaired bridges, sewers, water systems and public transportation. We also should fix the parks — state and national — and build pedestrian areas where we can enjoy the great natural beauty of our rivers and woodlands. London and Paris and Vienna make their rivers places of beauty and recreation. New York runs highways along its rivers — highways where it should have cafes. Los Angeles has enclosed its streams in concrete.

London has refurbished Brunel's masterpiece of design St. Pancras railway station to accommodate the new 200-mph trains that will whisk you to Paris in a little over two hours. Both the station and the trains are great achievements; achievements that can be enjoyed by traveler and visitor alike.

By contrast Union Station in Washington, D.C., a masterpiece in its day, is a mess. The tracks are inadequate. The station seating is inadequate, broken and mostly an afterthought. The restrooms are inadequate and dirty. The majesty of the station has been destroyed by tawdry retailers and half-finished repairs. Decay permeates the place — maybe to prepare the passengers for the disreputable taxis outside.

What an introduction to the capital of the free world. However, if you’ve just arrived on Amtrak, you might already be so dispirited you won't notice.

Likewise, the nation's schools need to be renovated. Leaky buildings seem more designed to prepare students for a lifetime of failure and decline than for a life of pride and accomplishment. “We make buildings and they make us,” Winston Churchill said.

The case for fixing the nation's infrastructure is compelling. But it does not compel in Congress. Congress is hell-bent to hurt the infrastructure with cost cutting-measures that will — as has happened in Britain and Spain — as likely as not add to the deficit rather than reducing it.

A more believable use of the government's resources might be to start fixing America by diverting some of the defense budget to sprucing up and repairing the nation, yielding results in a time frame of 25 to 50 years.

The story of another Churchill saying goes like this:

Churchill was walking in the garden of his beloved home, Chartwell, when he summoned the gardener and said, “I want you to plant an oak tree here.”

The gardener, looking to Churchill and seeing a man approaching 90, said, “But sir, it’ll take a hundred years to grow.”

“Well, you had better plant it now, hadn't you?” averred Churchill.

Quite so. The future awaits. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

CFS: One Disease and Its Costs

April 10, 2012 by White House Chronicle 1 Comment

What would happen to health care if a million new patients with just one of many now incurable and largely untreated diseases flooded the system, relying on medicine that could cost $70,000?

It might happen. Actually, it’s more than desirable that it should happen.

In one instance, a million or more patients who suffer from the devastating, life-robbing disease known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), or myalgic encephalomyelitis, struggle through days of almost total incapacitation, disorientation, pain and despair, clinging to hope that science will rescue them. All that’s known is that like AIDS, it’s a disease of the immune system.

The horror of this affliction is almost indescribable. I’ve been writing and broadcasting about these patients for several years and never have I seen such extended suffering, lives hollowed out, every tomorrow to be feared, the slightest departure from strict routines of inactivity to be met with punishing suffering.

The mother of an afflicted teenager told me that for New Year, her daughter went out for amid celebration. That exertion cost her two weeks in bed.

My friend and colleague (we host a YouTube channel, mecfsalert), Deborah Waroff, a New York-based writer, has been afflicted for 23 years and has seen her life confiscated. Like other patients she lives in a prison of her body with painful memories of when she was well. The body hurts, the memory tortures. Sleep does not refresh and long hours in bed do not heal.

Sufferers, held together in their pain by the Internet, trade sad notes. Going the rounds now is Winston Churchill’s statement in old age his life was finished but not ended. One sufferer e-mails me that she prays every night that she won’t wake up in the morning.

Patients groups say suicide rates are high. Determining the morbidity rate is a challenge because sufferers die from opportunistic infections rather than from CFS. In this, and other ways, it resembles AIDS and diabetes.

So far, the burden has been carried more by families and loved ones than by the health care industry. This is because there is no diagnosis per se for CFS, and no cure.

Dr. Andreas Kogelnik of the Open Medicine Institute in Mountain View, Calif., says there are no “markers” for the disease. There is nothing in the blood, marrow or soft tissue that identifies the disease.

Therefore, diagnosing the disease is by elimination – a time-consuming undertaking that the present medical regime is ill-equipped to provide. “You can’t do much in 10 minutes,” Kolgelnik says, referring to average amount of time allotted to patients by doctors.

So this is a disease that, even without a cure, the medical establishment has already indicated that it cannot afford.

The matter of affordability, for example, has affected diagnosis and treatment severely in the United Kingdom. There the National Health Service, always struggling with budgets, has encouraged doctors to teat CFS as a psychosomatic condition related to depression. The patients hate this and only recently has the British Medical Research Council softened its position.

That other medical nostrum, diet and exercise, is favored in the UK, too, but not by patients. They write to me constantly pointing out that exercise is corporal punishment for them; a recipe for relapse.

With only under-funded research scattered across the country at clinics and universities, the picture is bleak. But there are two pinpricks of light: a Norwegian cancer drug, Rituxan, which has helped patients in Norway and Germany, and a drug that is still in clinical trials in the United States, Ampligen, which rebalances the immune system.

Even those who administer the drugs, like Dr. Derek Enlander in New York and Kogelnik in California, don’t hail them as panaceas but as hopeful pacesetters. Neither is available except to a few patients in trials. And cost? Ampligen costs about $25,000 for a year of treatment, and Rituxan comes in at a whopping $70,000.

A slew of other diseases await expensive cures. In the future health-care costs, no matter what the Supreme Court and the politicians do, are going to go up and up. To the sick and their families, any price is a small one.

For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate.

Universal Health Care — It’s Addictive

April 2, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Opponents of President Obama's health care legislation were wise to attack it preemptively in the courts on constitutional grounds.

If they hadn't attacked now, they would've learned that universal health care systems – sometimes a hybrid of public and private and sometimes single-payer national systems – are wildly popular in other countries.

So popular that politicians can do no more than fiddle at the edges, as they have done in Britain recently and are about to do in France. No leader, not even that incontrovertible defender of private enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, dared or even thought, to privatize health care.

In the industrial democracies, from Canada to Japan, people complain about their health care systems and would defend them to the death. Once universal health care is introduced and people are relieved of the fear of illness, leading to financial ruin, it is unrepealable.

The opponents of Obamacare must know this, or they wouldn't have been so anxious to test it in court on the grounds of the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Kill it before people love it was an imperative.

Now it's widely believed, after three days of hearings, in which conservative justices sounded more like they were conducting a congressional hearing than a judicial one, that Obamacare will be thrown out before it has ever been sampled by the public, which wouldn't come until 2014. It's been a bit like the Chinese and democracy: Don't let them try it, they might like it.

So how is it the Republicans have been able to so demonize Obamacare? Partly, it's because the administration has done an appalling job of selling its own program. It's almost as though it's ashamed of its offspring because it isn't the child they really wanted: a simpler bill with a public option and such goodies as interstate insurance sales.

The administration is frequently bad at trumpeting its achievements. As health care reform is its defining domestic issue, the fact that Obama and his cabinet have not extolled the virtues of the bill amounts to a curious dereliction, a sin of omission.

Most people have been persuaded, if they know anything about the bill at all, that it's socialized medicine (it is not); that it will double expenditures on health care (it won't); that it's an enormous new dictatorial intrusion into individual liberty (it's not).

It's not a great bill, but a good start.

We in the United States spend about twice as much as other countries on health care – about 18 percent of our gross domestic product.

Why? Everyone knows there's excessive testing and waste. The quick answer is to defend against lawsuits. Another answer is that doctors have no incentive to save money and through their investments in testing companies, often they have an incentive to order up the tests.

Mostly, I suspect it's just indifference; the medical equivalent of not turning the lights off.

I don't like Obamacare because it only does half the job and I'm uneasy about the individual mandate. Just two cheers from me.

The uninsured should be assigned an insurer and the premium collected through the tax system. That way the insurers would compete for the most desirable prospects, young adults, and a real pool would operate.

Another question that isn't asked: As new technology usually brings down costs, why does this not apply in health care? Why are CAT scans and MRIs not getting cheaper, as they would if they were in a different framework?

Why not use the Republican idea of health vouchers as an incentive to keep patients from frivolous use of services – not as the substitute for insurance, but rather as an incentive mechanism. Pay them to stay healthy.

We suffer from a failure of imagination in health care.

There are good reasons to be ambivalent about Obamacare, but it's a start, a building block. Our medicine is without peer, but our concepts of care are quite sickly. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Obama and Energy: What He Can and Can’t Do

March 26, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

When the Obama administration seeks to explain its oil policy, it changes the subject mid-sentence.

The most frequent practitioner of this verbal contortion is the president's press secretary, Jay Carney. It is as though he's a magician who has promised to pull a live rabbit from his top hat. This conjurer stands before his audience, recites some incantations and, poof, retrieves not a live rabbit, but a dead chicken.

Carney, like others in the administration, starts talking about oil and switches to talking about "alternatives." The alternatives, with the exception of the nettlesome subject of biofuels (nettlesome because they produce little or no energy above what's invested in producing them), are ways of making electricity.

The administration is adept at confusing these almost unrelated subjects.

Oil is the stubborn problem. It affects every aspect of life and prosperity, from the balance of payments to war planning, from economic growth to our relationship with China. Worse, it may be in constrained supply for the rest of time, as the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – continue to suck up the precious commodity.

New finds and technology relieve the gloom for a while, but as demand rises and supply struggles to adjust, the problem remains – even though conservative think tanks and trade groups fight the notion of structural shortage.

But the United States isn't short of electricity and has no need ever to be. The electricity problem, if there is one, is environmental. Do we continue to burn coal on a massive scale while we search for an environmental fix? Or do we go wholeheartedly for nuclear – even though the Obama administration has abandoned the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada?

Solar, wind, geothermal, wave, and even biomass energy come under the rubric of "alternatives" – and they're all electricity technologies.

Then there's natural gas, thought to be exhausted in the United States, but now in abundance as a result of sophisticated technologies. That's another electricity fuel.

It's enthusiasm for alternatives (a longtime love affair on the left) that has encouraged the confusing White House utterances about a policy of "all of the above." It's this that has spread the public perception that the president can do something about the price of gasoline. And it's this that makes him vulnerable to scorn over debacles like the loan guarantees to the solar-array manufacturer Solyndra.

If Obama's reelection hopes aren't to be extinguished at the gas pump this November, he needs to separate oil from electricity – and the future from the present. He can't affect world oil prices, and he can't drill enough holes in the United States to change the world oil market.

But he can change the debate, and push down the price somewhat, by taking up arms not against the oil producers, but rather against the oil traders, who are the market movers. They are concentrated in the New York Mercantile Exchange, where they daily bid up the price in a spiral that is unrelated to cost. The price of oil is set by traders, who use rumor, fear, and the knowledge that producers will be silent partners to jack it up.

They aren't phantoms. They are real, flesh-and-blood people who manipulate the markets daily. What's happening to oil in the New York Mercantile Exchange is what happened to electricity prices in California when Enron's traders were running wild.

There have even been shenanigans at the Cushing tank farm in Oklahoma, the installation that President Obama toured on Thursday. He might do well to read Leah McGrath Goodman's Fortune magazine article this month, on how ConocoPhillips warehoused oil at Cushing. That oil came in by the same pipeline that the new owners have now reversed, she writes, and it's now flowing to refineries by the very route it came in, but at higher prices.

Goodman knows what she's talking about. The former Wall Street Journal reporter wrote The Asylum, the definitive book about the New York Mercantile Exchange and the madness of oil trading.

Obama could jawbone the traders while providing more resources and moral support to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the poodle trying to do a pit bull's work.

Mass-Transit Enthusiasts: Get on the Bus

March 12, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Even railroad fanatics like me have to admit that the future of passenger transportation by rail, particularly urban commuter rail, is pretty well frozen where it is. New rail – even light rail, an idealistic indulgence – is doomed by high costs, lack of appropriate track, and political squabbling.

New subways, the elegant way to get around a city, by going under it, are an almost impossible dream. The costs are too great in times of austerity, and the costs of maintenance can be prohibitive as a system ages.

Increasingly, the future appears to be the humble bus. Buses have low capital costs, are flexible, and can be adjusted to demand and population changes in ways trains cannot.

Spare the groaning: The buses are coming. And today's bus need not be yesterday's – noisy, smelly, and unreliable.

London, which has possibly the best transportation infrastructure in the world, with a huge rail network, is nonetheless betting on buses. It's deploying a new bus that is designed for the times and preserves some of the features that have made its buses emblematic of the city, like the two decks. And, yes, they are red.

The new London buses are a meeting of nostalgia with high-tech and environmental sensibility. London was busy phasing out its traditional buses in favor of articulated buses, which bend in the middle, when a controversial and eccentric Conservative journalist turned politician, Boris Johnson, declared that if he were elected mayor, he would save the old buses, or at least the concept of double-deck buses. He won the election and ideas were sought from the public.

The result is what the tabloids call the "Boris Bus." It's a high-tech beauty that meets many demands. It has two doors and two staircases, but it's so low that wheelchairs are easily accommodated.

They are designed to have conductors during rush hours and to be operated by drivers only at other times.

They use modern composite materials from the airline industry and are hybrids, with diesel engines and regenerative breaking. That has made way for the lowering of the bottom deck, increasing stability while reducing weight.

The initial reception of this high-tech scion of the old and loved London bus has been so enthusiastic that Johnson is talked about as a future Conservative prime minister – riding the bus to the highest office in the land.

Back to our buses. They, too, are getting better, but less dramatically so. Between Washington and New York, there's now thriving bus service with half a dozen competing firms offering WiFi, toilets, and many points of departure. The ticket price, about $20 each way, is a fraction of those for Amtrak and airlines.

These intercity buses are diesel-powered, but many cities are using natural-gas-powered buses. That might yet seal the deal for buses as the future of urban transportation, reducing the use of cars. America is awash in natural gas. It also has less environmental impact.

Buses are at their best when, as my wife pointed out in London once, they run like conveyors. Frequently, that means enough dedicated bus lanes.

The Obama administration would be well advised to launch a bus initiative with emphasis on better vehicles, à la London, and dedicated bus lanes. The solution to urban congestion may be in a high-speed, WiFi-equipped, natural-gas-powered bus. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Politicos Know for Sure Where the Oil Is

March 5, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Lemuel Gulliver is back! You remember him – he’s the hero of “Gulliver’s Travels,” a satire written by Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726.

Many adventures befall Gulliver, but the one most remembered is that he's captured and pinned down with innumerable strings by the tiny Lilliputians. By their standards, he was a giant, but they tied him down so well that he was helpless.

That, according to those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is the state of the U.S. energy industry – by energy, they mean oil and gas.

According to Newt Gingrich, who's echoed by frontrunner Mitt Romney and his two rivals, the oil and gas industries have been cruelly tied down by government, which imposes onerous environmental regulations and restricts drilling in the most hopeful parts of our ocean shelves and on federal lands.

If these lands and ocean sites were just opened to drilling, the Republican hopefuls argue, the United States would become the world’s greatest energy producer, as it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Drill, baby, drill and a gigantic cornucopia of energy awaits; energy for the United States and the world.

Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the take-no-prisoners trade association that represents nearly 500 oil and gas companies, is a vocal advocate of more drilling in more places. He's a Gulliver theorist.

From Republicans and the oil industry, this is a new optimism born of an old idea. The old idea is that if you drill enough holes in enough places, oil will be abundant.

That optimism has existed more in the fringe world of wildcatting than it did in the big oil companies, which knew that there were limited reserves of recoverable oil and gas in the United States. They also knew that once a reserve is in production, you can calculate the point at which it will decline; as has happened with the North Slope of Alaska, where less than half the 2 million barrels a day produced at its peak is flowing today.

Then came the new technologies, largely developed by the despised government. Now in full deployment, these technologies have incontrovertibly changed expectations for natural gas but their impact on oil is debatable.

The first of these is 3-D seismic mapping. Advanced physics enables the companies to determine very accurately how much hydrocarbon a particular formation underground might contain. Gone are the days when the hard-drinking wildcatter followed his gut and mysterious patterns in the tumbleweed.

Next, is the hole itself. At one time, a well was a well – drilled straight down, looking for a pool of oil, a cavern of gas or both. Fracturing – the process in which water, chemicals and other substances are injected down the hole to break up rock in proximity to the hole – has been used to release more of the good stuff. With time fracturing, also called “fracking,” has become more sophisticated.

What has made the euphoria of the politicians and oil lobbyists possible is the miracle of horizontal drilling, which allows as many as eight holes to be spread out for miles from a single shaft. This and better fracking has changed the prospects for gas out of all hope, and has somewhat improved oil expectations.

Much of the enthusiasm for new drilling has come from the success of the new technologies in North Dakota, which has overnight become the the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the Union. But beware. This isn’t Texas circa 1945.

Oil from North Dakota's Bakken Field isn’t cheap. Its “lifting cost” is among the most expensive there is: It costs about $50 a barrel to bring North Dakota oil to the surface, compared with about $15 in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Is it oil or incense?

API’s Gerard told reporters in a telephone conversation, designed to preempt President Obama’s “all of the above” energy recommendations, that technology in its inevitable advance would keep the oil flowing for many generations.

Only the government, in Gerard’s view, stands between the American people and abundant oil.

However, fields that have peaked – like the North Slope and much of Texas, Louisiana and the North Sea – have seen declining production and no technology has been enough to revive them. All the oil has been removed. Gone, baby, gone.

More drilling has already improved domestic oil production. But will unfettered drilling really make a new Saudi Arabia of the. United States? Can the resource base stand the exploitation? Can Gulliver actually stand up?

The next generation of technology won’t put more oil in the ground. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

What Makes a President: Fallacies about Business, Markets

February 28, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Come walk in the garden where the fallacies grow. Today, we’ll examine two varieties that are enjoying strong growth: the businessus presidentus and themarketus perfectus.

The first fallacy (businessus presidentus) is that a business person, presumably Mitt Romney, is better equipped to run the government than a professional politician. This is an idea as old as anything in the garden. The supposition is that business people are organized, understand the economy and are less prone make decisions based on politics. It also suggests that as a species they are innovative, strategic thinkers and have an acquired understanding people.

Well let's see: The purpose of business is business; in short, to make money. Romantics of the right like to credit it with virtues it doesn't have and doesn't want.

Business is about the numbers, and making the numbers. It’s not intrinsically wise, nor is it necessarily more inventive than government.

It’s true that business innovates; but only when it’s forced to by competition and disruptive technologies. Coca-Cola was supposed to be the smartest company on the planet until it introduced New Coke and had to beat an ignominious retreat. Many old and new businesses simply can't change fast enough. We’ve seen the demise of Kodak, Polaroid and Borders and the emasculation of Western Union. The American car companies had to be rescued — especially General Motors which was a model of management structure, celebrated by Peter Drucker, until its management choked the life out of it.

If Romney has the skills to be a good president, he didn't learn them in the wheeler-dealer world of investment banking – Remember Lehman? – but rather in the statehouse in Boston. By and large, business success prepares a man or a woman for retirement and maybe volunteer work, not political office.

The Washington trade associations periodically decide what they need is “kick-ass” business person. In time, they find someone who knows the ways of Congress to be a lot more effective than someone who can read a balance sheet.

Then there’s the workforce difference. Management controls the workforce in private industry, but the workforce often controls the management in government. Only the military is exempt from this rule. Presidents down to junior political operatives chafe under this reality.

The second fallacy (marketus perfectus) is about markets being next to godliness. Markets are an efficient way to distribute goods and services at affordable prices. But they are as cruel as they are efficient. They exterminate and reward.

It’s a heresy in conservative circles to point out that national interest and market interest do not always coincide. But among treasured companies that have been saved by government intervention in the market are Harley-Davidson (price barriers), Lockheed (loans), Chrysler (twice with loans, and later part of the great Detroit bailout).

It can be argued that some of our current economic woes are the market doing what it does best: seeking the lowest-cost, competent production. It was that which lead to the export of our manufacturing. Companies flooded China because they got the three things they sought and which they sought to satisfy the marketplace: low wages, talent and reliability. They didn’t flood to other cheap-labor places like sub-Saharan Africa, but to China which knew how to please.

People who have really changed the political landscape in Washington have been professional politicians, or those who have embraced politics as a second career, like Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon changed it not by his misdeeds, but by creating the Office of Management and Budget from its predecessor the Bureau of the Budget. In so doing, he increased the power of the presidency and downgraded the Cabinet. And the consummate Washington insider, Lyndon Johnson, enhanced the president's war-making prerogatives — even though it would’ve been better for him and the nation if he hadn't.

If Romney makes it to the Oval Office, he'll have Massachusetts on his mind not Bain & Co. You won't get the garden to bloom with the wrong seed. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate.

The Technological Revolution So Great We Forget It

February 28, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

What are the achievements of Western civilization?

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the spread of democracy and a free press tower on the intellectual side of the ledger. But they didn't happen in a vacuum; they needed coincidental technological advances.

The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450, made the Enlightenment possible. Shaft horsepower, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 and developed by James Watt into a practical steam engine, enabled the Industrial Revolution to get off the ground and make the first great change in how people lived by substituting mechanical energy for human and animal energy.

For all the downsides of the Industrial Revolution, it was the dawn of the possibility of an improvement in the lives of most people. It hinted, even with the horrors of the exploitation of workers and miners by their employers, that life could be lived without relentless drudgery.

Recently Brian Wolff, senior vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, told security analysts in New York that the trade association is launching a campaign to celebrate the value of electricity.

Bravo and about time; for it is electricity that has done more to improve the livability of human life than any other product or service.

Electricity has many fathers, going back to 600 B.C., when Thales of Miletus wrote about static electricity. In 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert gave us the name “electricity,” derived from the Greek word for amber: Early experiments consisted of rubbing amber to produce static electricity.

Investigator after investigator added to the knowledge of electricity. In 1745, it was discovered that electricity was controllable and the first electrical capacitor, the Leyden jar, was invented.

Then came Benjamin Franklin, who popularized concepts of electricity with his key on the kite and his invention of the lightening rod. The first battery was invented by Alessandro Volta, who also proved that electricity can travel over wires, in 1800.

Technology moved way ahead in 1821, when the great English scientist Michael Faraday outlined the concept of the electric motor. Six years later another Englishman, Joseph Henry, built one of the first motors.

All of this paved the way for Thomas Edison, who founded the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. A year later, the first commercial power station opened in San Francisco and the first commercial arc lighting system was installed in Cleveland.

But it was Edison's demonstration of the incandescent light bulb in 1879 that raised the possibility that human life could get easier. From then on, electricity was deployed at an astounding rate; despite excursions and disputes, like those between Edison and George Westinghouse and Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla.

And what a boon electricity has been. It has made the home life safer, eliminating open flames for heat and light, and more convenient. At various times, as a boy in Africa, I lived in homes without electricity. It's not an experience that I'd voluntarily repeat – no light after dark to read by, little heating, no cooling and immense drudgery to heat water and build a cooking fire.

Electricity has effectively liberated women from the slavery of the home and given then an equal role in society, and has made life in inhospitable climates, including the U.S. South, agreeable. And it's enabled whole technological revolutions to take place: broadcasting, recorded music multistory building, computing, health, refrigeration, transportation and just about anything one can name.

Electricity is ubiquitous and the single-greatest contributor to our quality of life. In our fascinating with computer technology and the Internet, it is forgotten that it rests on an earlier harnessing of electrons by a plethora of scientists down the centuries.

Of all the things invented by the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing has been such a gift to humanity as electricity. It's appropriate that it should be celebrated and find a prominent place in the pantheon of human achievement.

Flip that switch and marvel. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

PBS Hasn’t Kept Up

February 20, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Things are tough in the world of public television.

State budgets for local stations are being slashed or eliminated, as in Rhode Island where Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee has proposed to fund Channel 36 through Dec. 31 and then eliminate state funding.

Five states have eliminated funding and others have cut contributions.

In Washington the federal contribution, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is under constant attack from Republicans who believe that PBS is biased and that it shouldn't receive any public money whatsoever.

Mitt Romney says no to federal money.

But a larger problem for PBS and its stations is one of mission.

When the service was created in 1970, the mission was apparent: Create quality programming that couldn't be found elsewhere. As PBS was cobbled together from a collection of educational stations, children's programming was always an important element and remains so; also books, cooking, political talk, business, interviews, documentaries, music and drama.

Over time, the television landscape has changed out of recognition.

Competing broadcasters, to say nothing of the Internet, have eroded the once solid franchises that were the backbone of PBS broadcasting.

Books have been largely ceded to C-SPAN and the ever-creative Brian Lamb. Cooking, far from the glory days when the only place you could find out how to make a roux was from Julia Child, is now the theme of two cable cooking channels that are creating new stars.

Political talk, which in its modern incarnation was born on PBS with "The McLaughlin Group" and "Firing Line," is now a staple of commercial television. Likewise, cable has pushed ahead of PBS in developing business (Remember "Wall Street Week"?), interview, history and arts channels. Other PBS innovations like "Motor Week" and "This Old House" are also under attack on cable.

Running down the list of what PBS does that no one else is doing brings one to the last franchise that PBS still dominates, and that might be called the "British bonanza." PBS has been mining effectively the output of both the BBC and the commercial British television channels with great effect since the days of "Upstairs Downstairs" (commercial in Britain).

Today, in its struggle for audience, another British import, "Downton Abbey," is the brightest star in PBS's dimming firmament.

If PBS is to again command the community loyalty it once enjoyed, if it is to answer its political foes, if it is to be a decisive force in television and perhaps on the Web, it needs to stop whining about money – now part of its demeanor – and to ask itself, "Is it new?" Is it bringing in and developing young talent? Is it doing something, anything, that will be imitated around the world? Is it creating programs that will bring in dollars in syndication and entice sponsors to be associated with the excitement?

In the 1960s the BBC, which had become a national treasure during World War II, had lost its way. Commercial television was eroding its audience and pirate broadcasters were attacking its radio franchise. The BBC got off the couch and joined the creative fray, especially the satirical revolution. Bam! It was back.

Of course, the BBC with its private tax, called a licensing fee, had a lot of money to spend. But it wasn't money that saved the BBC from ignoble decline – it was unleashing creative forces in post-Empire Britain.

Particularly, the BBC encouraged young writers and producers. It worked.

PBS should think of itself as an incubator, not as a roost for the old, the tired and the timid. Had PBS, or rather one of its bigger stations, been offered "The Daily Show" or its stable mate "The Colbert Report," it's hard to imagine that they would've been welcomed.

Yes, PBS, those retread English comedies and Lawrence Welk won't cut it going forward. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate

What Makes a President: Fallacies about Business, Markets

February 16, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Come walk in the garden where the fallacies grow. Today, we’ll examine two varieties that are enjoying strong growth: the businessus presidentus and the marketus perfectus.

Well let's see: The purpose of business is business; in short, to make money. Romantics of the right like to credit it with virtues it doesn't have and doesn't want.

Business is about the numbers, and making the numbers. It’s not intrinsically wise, nor is it necessarily more inventive than government.

If Romney makes it to the Oval Office, he'll have Massachusetts on his mind not Bain & Co. You won't get the garden to bloom with the wrong seed. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate.