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Beware of the Slavery of Polls and the Evils of Direct Democracy

September 6, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The political chaos in Britain — and the situation in British politics is chaotic — can be laid at the base of two interventions by direct government usurping representative government.

The first is the intervention of polling. Polling, although useful and indeed invaluable most of the time, does restrict the free operation of representative government. The public state of mind the polling day affects the actions of its elected representatives and can inhibit new ideas as they evolve. In the defense of polls, they are reality check when politicians give way to intoxication with their own thinking. Polls are here to stay; an organic part of the political landscape.

Yet the deliberative process can be inhibited by them. It is no accident that the U.S. Senate is regarded as a great deliberative forum: With six years between elections, there is time to work through a problem — at least there should be.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union because his pollster assured him that the public would support him, as they had voted by a large majority for Britain to remain in the European Economic Community, as it was then known, in 1975. Britain’s membership began in 1973.

A poll is a snapshot and reflects not only the feeling of the populace at the time but also the basis of what it thinks it believes or, in fact, does believe.

Cameron did not allow for campaigning and the emotional appeal of inflamed nationalism, plus some pretty hefty fibs from the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his allies in the Brexit camp.

Had the EU membership issue been left to simmer, as it has simmered for decades, it might eventually have been decided by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament or just simmered on, either to dissipate or develop into an election issue at a later time.

But this has always been a particularly difficult issue for Parliament where the two main parties were split on it. Neither of them, Labor and Conservative, was wholly for Europe or against it. Successive Labor and Conservative governments have stayed firmly in Europe, although complaining all the way — as did Margaret Thatcher during her time as prime minister.

The EU referendum was an intrusion of direct government into the workings of parliamentary representative government — a referendum, not favored in Britain’s unwritten constitution, a sort of legal blithe spirit of practice, precedent, tradition and habit, trailing all the way back to the Magna Carta.

The constitution, long believed to gain its strength from its flexibility, now is flexed to a point of full crisis. Polls gave Cameron overconfidence in looking to a referendum to settle a nettlesome issue. It did, but not in the way Cameron and the polls predicted.

Polls are not going away. Recently I visited Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., home to the influential Quinnipiac Poll, where I conducted a television interview. Conclusion: Those pollsters know what they are doing, and they do it with science and without prejudice. Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, and his staff are employed by the university. The polling arm takes no outside funding, shielding the poll from allegations of political favoritism or manipulation.

It should be recognized by politicians that polls are only a snapshot, a second in time, of evolving public opinion. They do not handle complex issues well and referendums, which are polls taken to extreme, are unreasoning.

It can be argued, and I will not argue against you, that politicians now have abandoned thinking, reasoning and compromising in favor rigidities on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet politicians, in doing their jobs in session, remain a better way of deciding great issues than the whole populace in a committee of the whole.

Britain is in crisis not because it is a democracy, but because it tried something undemocratic and antithetical to its own traditions. The nation that ruled much of the world appears unable to rule itself.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Uzbekistan Transforming Old Silk Road Cities to Smart Cities

September 2, 2019 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Photo: Tashkent City designs.

Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is undergoing a transformation at a pace and scale almost comparable to Samarkand in 1370, when the Turco-Mongol ruler Timur, or, Tamerlane, as he is known in the West, made it his capital.

On the one hand, Tamerlane was a brutal conqueror who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. The empire he founded in 1370 and ruled until his death in 1405 (probably of a mid-winter cold, caught while on his way to change the Ming regime in China) stretched from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia.

But on the other hand, Tamerlane was a brilliant constructor. One of his signature achievements was Samarkand, which he strove to make the most splendid city in Asia.

“It’s not hard to see why the author of the ‘1001 Nights’ had Scheherazade spin her tales from a palace in Samarkand: the city was on the Silk Road, alive with people from different lands; it was a wonderland of Islamic architecture, and a great center of learning,” Srinath Perur wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

The Registan in Samarkand

But no place in Samarkand represents all three aspects as well as the Registan, the main square, three sides of which stand a blur-of-blue-tiled madrasas (Islamic colleges). In 1888 George Curzon, world traveler and future viceroy of India, called it “the noblest public square in the world.”

While most of the edifices seen around the square were built after Tamerlane’s death, they couldn’t have been built without his sacking Islamic brother cities (including Baghdad, Damascus and Khiva) and his sparing their artisans and craftsmen, who he brought back to Samarkand.

In 1399, just a year after reducing Delhi to rubble because he thought the Muslim sultan was too tolerant of his Hindu subjects, Tamerlane was back to building his sumptuous capital. A caravan of 90 captured elephants was employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a great mosque, according to Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, an envoy the Spanish kingdom of Castile dispatched to Samarkand. The Europeans rather liked Tamerlane because roughed up their neighborhood bully, the Ottoman Turks.

Tamerlane returned from his military conquests — estimated to have wiped out five percent of the world’s population — with architectural inspiration and plunder that could finance his appetite for building in Samarkand and other cities.

One of his monuments bears the proverb, “If you want to know about us, examine our cities.”

That proverb could be driving Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who succeeded Islam Karimov as president in 2016. His smart city projects in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, so it seems, are aimed at rebranding Uzbekistan as a country interested in political reform, economic investment and good relations with the rest of the world.

Javlon Vakhabov, Uzbekistan’s youthful new ambassador in Washington, discussed one smart city project, Tashkent City, in some depth at a summit on smart cities and communities organized by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.

Construction of Tashkent City, a $1.7-billion international business and financial hub in the heart of the capital, started in 2018. The design includes an industrial park, eight business centers, a shopping mall, restaurants and a cultural center, as well as residential apartments on a 173-acre site.

“The aim of this project,” according to the government, “is to create an architectural complex in the center of Tashkent, implemented by embedding the latest trends in world architecture and the application of environmentally-friendly and energy-saving, smart technologies.”

Vakhabov enthused that Tashkent City projects have already received millions of dollars in loans from the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.

But he added, “Uzbekistan is a 3,000-year-old country. We have four UNESCO World Heritage cities. We have 4,000 sites that are highly protected by UNESCO. We need to be sensitive to these historical sites and adapt them to smart cities.”

“A mass movement of people from the countryside to the cities has created stresses on the environment and infrastructure,” he said. Ultimately smart cities can alleviate those stresses, using information and communication technology to improve efficiency, sustainability and citizen welfare.

Meantime, smart city projects have been stressing out people. There have been news reports about protests and court cases in Tashkent over traditional housing demolitions and evictions.

“As for the resettlement of people living in houses built by their forefathers, we need to create more favorable conditions for people persuaded to move to other communities,” Vakhabov said reassuringly.

 

Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com.

Filed Under: Gasparello's Articles

Smart Cities Need to Be Super-Efficient and Walkable, Too

August 30, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

It is coming as surely as cars changed the way we live, as airplanes revolutionized transportation and as the cellphone has conquered all.

It is the smart city of the future.

While it will look much like today’s cities, it will in fact be a digital construct; a place where sensors, interactivity and hyper-electronic speeds replace what will come to be seen as today’s leisurely pace of city operation and communication.

Imagine a place where police cruisers know the location of gunshots before anyone has called 911. Or, as Morgan O’Brien, chief executive officer of Anterix, a creator of private telephone networks for utilities, says, “By using broadband private networks, utilities can know a transmission wire has snapped before it hits the ground.”

Electric utilities, sometimes seen as wedded to the old ways of generation and distribution, have already laid the groundwork for cities’ electronic refurbishment. The first wave of the future, the smart meter, is in more than 60 percent of homes, and deployment continues apace.

The home smart meter does much more than simply record electricity use and ready a bill. It generates data on the local demand and flow patterns in the neighborhood. The smart meter has become vital in helping people save money when electricity prices are low (such as the middle of the night in many jurisdictions), but also helping to integrate the diverse new sources of generation from solar farms, solar panels on rooftops and wind turbines. Keeping tabs on this intermittent generation requires very smart electronics.

“Interconnectivity is the future,” says Clinton Vince, chairman of the U.S. Energy practice and co-chairman of the global energy sector at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. Basically, he points out, electric utilities must be very nimble to deal with the new microgrids and with individual generators using rooftop solar. The same applies to wind turbines, where the flow of electricity can be cut off instantly with a wind drop and other sources have to pick up seamlessly.

Chris Peoples, founding and managing partner of the Baltimore-based innovation strategy firm PP&A, says all this hyperactivity in the smart city will be recorded and preserved by blockchain, the ledger system of the 21st century.

To come are electric vehicles and autonomous ridesharing — so important that the big tech companies Cisco, Google, Uber and Amazon have invested in smart cities technologies, and have high hopes for growth there.

The smart city will want an even more reliable electric supply than we have today. Rapid response has been the modus operandi of electric companies down through the decades. Outages are handled with speed and big outages, such as after hurricanes, are dealt with by mobilizing restoration crews from unaffected areas.

But that may not be enough with greater reliance on electricity for things like autonomous vehicles and electric-powered delivery drones. These will have self-sufficiency through their batteries, but they also will need to have control systems that can operate in a blackout.

Anterix, for example, will provide secure broadband communications to utilities, enabling them to communicate when all other systems have failed.

There are two existential threats to the electric grid and, therefore, to the electricity-hungry smart city. One is cyberattack by enemies known and unknown. The other is a magnetic pulse, generated by an act of God in the form of solar flares, or an act of evil in the form of a nuclear weapon detonated overhead. Either way, the grid must be hardened, as far as science allows, against such eventualities.

I would submit that this amounts to a brave new world. But I would implore the designers to remember people also want simple things of their cities, like walkability and mobility.

If you get walkability you get livability and, yes, lovability. Think Paris, San Antonio and San Francisco. Get smart, smart city designers.

 

Photo: A JUMP on-demand electric bike in downtown San Antonio. JUMP Bikes is a dockless electric bicycle sharing system acquired by Uber – San Antonio, Texas, USA

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Labor Day — the Untrammeled Joy of a Three-Day Holiday

August 23, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Labor Day is almost here and with it another blessed, three-day weekend. Three days without work!

The best day, of course, is the middle one, when we can luxuriate in the time off without the knowledge that grips most of us on Sunday afternoons — that we must climb Monday’s escarpment.

The fact is that we Americans work too much. Not necessarily too hard, but too much. In the United States, workers’ vacations are mostly two precious weeks — and a third after long service. In Europe, they’re a month or, as in Germany, often up to six weeks — yet no one accuses the Germans of being idlers or not performing.

We won’t get more vacations, I think, until high-tech workers — those one might refer to as “the indispensables” — demand and get them. Some already have the choice of working in Europe and are looking at the “package” of their employment, not just the dollars in the paycheck. If they demand more, the idea will get around.

However, more vacation days won’t have the same benefit as those leisurely Sundays in a three-day weekend.

There is a way to greater leisure with the same number of work hours in a week. I have experienced it, and it does wonders in terms of employee happiness and creativity.

In the early 1960s, I was a writer for BBC Television News, and we worked a fabulous shift system: three days on and three days off. This system recognized that journalists could seldom finish what they had started in a procrustean eight hours.

The BBC 10-hour shift — three days on and three days off — accepted and accommodated the reality of the work rather than trying to squeeze the work into an arbitrary time frame, leaving it either unfinished or for someone else to try to finish — say a script for the late news broadcast or coverage of an ongoing parliamentary debate.

The social dimension of this work structure was even more interesting. Writers and editors became more productive in other ways: Some wrote novels, others worked on biographies or tried their hands at plays. They’d been given the gift of time.

Armed with this experience, when I worked at the Washington Post, where I was an assistant editor and also president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, one of the largest chapters of the American Newspaper Guild, the trade union that represented journalists and some other workers, I was appalled at the mess the Post had with its overtime.

There was a complicated system of overtime and something called “overtime cutoff,” which applied to people who were paid more than the Guild-negotiated salary. It led to fights, conscientious reporters and editors working overtime without compensation, and major altercations over weekend schedules. No winners, just unhappy people. The management knew it was a mess and would’ve liked to change it.

When I suggested the BBC system to the Washington Post Company, management was enthusiastic. They asked if the union would bring it forward as a formal proposal in the contract negotiations, then just beginning for a new three-year contract.

We had to have our proposal vetted by union headquarters, the International. They said, “No, no, no. Heresy.” The union had always fought for a shorter workday since the so-called “model contract,” written by Heywood Broun, the famous reporter, columnist and founder of the American Newspaper Guild, in 1935. It was dropped like a libelous story.

Well, the three-days shift won’t work in many places, but in journalism, manufacturing and retail, it’s worth a try. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers would have the joy of that middle day of rest and, maybe, creativity.

When you open another cold one on Sept. 1, think about how nice it would be if that happened all year. Three days on and three days off. Glorious!

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

A Plea to Solve One Part of the Immigration Puzzle

August 16, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The serenity prayer, often called the alcoholics’ prayer, states, “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

These thoughts might well be applied to the contentious and, at times, grim business of immigration.

You don’t have to be a political scientist to see that the immigration system is broken. Worse, it won’t be fixed soon.

In the absence of an immigration policy, the de facto policy is more of what doesn’t work — more cruel deportations and more desperate people seeking the simplest of human needs: safety and the ability to provide for themselves and their families.

A recent ICE raid on seven poultry plants in Mississippi tells the immigration story: People who are doing work Americans don’t want to do are rounded up at incalculable human cost.

Families are ripped asunder; the fathers are to be shipped to places they scarcely know and where there is nothing for them except penury and likely violent death. One man is headed for Guatemala after 18 years in the United States. He leaves behind his children who are, by birthright, citizens.

Poultry production is hurt, affecting the whole supply chain from farm to table.

President Trump has said raids like the one in Mississippi are a deterrent to illegal immigration. Were public hangings a deterrent to murder?

Desperate people do desperate things. Illegal immigration is a crime — a crime that has no statute of limitations. But it is a crime based on a fundamentally noble human aspiration: to be safe and to work.

Ideas about an open border are, at this period in history, insane. That would lead to a kind of conquest by stealth.

What to do?

First, decide what can be done and what might get through Congress.

A starting place: the status for the 11 million living in the shadows. They are the clue to ending the horror of deportation, which has done nothing to stem the tide of migrants — whether the deportations were conducted during the Obama administration or this one.

Neither deportation nor citizenship is an answer. This phantom population needs to be stabilized and brought into the light. The working illegals provide labor where it is needed for American prosperity and, as they send expatriate earnings to their homelands, helps those countries from slipping further into chaos.

Next, the extreme voices of the left and the right need to be quieted.

People who are here and have roots here need to be recognized as the flotsam of broken countries, not persecuted as criminals. Pro-immigrant groups, with their insistence that any solution must contain a “path to citizenship,” don’t help. A right to work and live in peace should be victory enough. That requires a regime of work permits related to what the British call “right of abode.”

I have been drawn to, and written about, the work of a Malibu, Calif.-based outfit called the Immigration Tax Inquiry Group (ITIG) because it seems that organization has a plan that would work, normalizing life for those who are here, ending the savagery of families torn asunder by men with guns raiding at dawn.

The ITIG, the work largely of one man, Mark Jason, a former IRS special agent, aims to provide a 10-year work permit but with a twist. The twist is that the permit recognizes the special nature and special burden of migration and accesses a 5  percent tax on both the employer and worker’s wages. These tax revenues, hundreds of billions over time, according to Jason, should then go to helping those communities with high immigrant populations pay for schools, health care, policing and other services.

In medicine, doctors seek to stabilize the patient before all else. Immigration is in chaos: people desperate to get in, people desperate when they’re thrown out. It may be the law, but it also is state-sponsored cruelty.

We can stop the deportations with a simple work permit; end much suffering as we head haltingly toward a more complete policy.

If we can’t fix the entire immigration dilemma, then let’s have the courage to change what we can and stop the shame of tearing up families.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Carbon Capture Gets a Starring Role in the Energy Future

August 10, 2019 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

In the ’70s and ’80s, black was gold. Coal was king.

Coal in tandem with nuclear were to be the white knights of the United States, as we struggled with the Arab oil embargo, price-gouging by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and declining oil production at home.

In 1977, the fledgling Department of Energy declared natural gas a “depleted” resource. Today, it battles with solar for cost advantage. The technology of fracking changed everything. Never forget technology’s possible revolutionary impact.

Solar and wind — today’s energy darlings — were struggling as the National Laboratories sought to make them workable. Solar was thought to have its future in mirrors concentrating heat on “power towers.” Wind was regarded with skepticism; even the shape of the towers and blades was in flux.

Everything that moved would be electrified. Nuclear would be used to make electricity. Coal would be burned as a utility and industrial fuel, and it would be gasified and liquified for transportation and other uses.

Environmentalists were pushing coal as an alternative to nuclear, which they were convinced was dangerous: In the United States it has cost no lives, but gas and oil in various ways have taken their toll.

Coal and nuclear were bright stars in a dark sky.

In 1974, at the White House, Donald Rice, who later ran the Rand Corporation, speculated in an interview with me on whether there might be oil and gas in the Southern Hemisphere, then considered unlikely and now, with production in South America and South Africa, a game-changer. Beware of the conventional wisdom.

All of this came flooding back at an extraordinary summit on global energy horizons convened in Washington recently by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm with offices in 79 countries. By pulling in lawyers from Uzbekistan to London, Dentons’ summit was able to fit America’s energy transformation into the global reality.

Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, laid out a picture that is sobering. He said that by 2040, the world would be pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than today, notwithstanding dramatic actions to curb burning fossil fuels in North America, Europe and China. The problem is the growth in demand for electricity in what is being called the “Global East,” where new coal plants are coming online in China, India and Indonesia among other countries. This despite all deploying solar and wind, and India and China having aggressive nuclear growth plans. The electricity need in the region is great and fuel solution is fossil, mostly coal.

Enter Ernest Moniz. The former secretary of energy who now heads his own think tank, Energy Futures Initiative, is a passionate backer of carbon capture use and storage. Moniz, also an adviser to Dentons, is laying out a whole scenario of “carbon capture from air” that is persuasive. It is part of his newly unveiled “Green Real Deal.”

Having chaired two carbon capture conferences, I have wondered why the technology, which gets more sophisticated all the time, has not been embraced by coal producers with vigor. They have been cooler than the utilities who somewhat favor the technology.

Clinton Vince, chair of Dentons’ U.S. Energy practice and co-chair of the firm’s global Energy sector, reminded the summit of the global importance of nuclear, now shunned in the United States for cost reasons. He sees nuclear as vital to climate goals around the world.

Unlike the ’70s and early ’80s, there is no shortage of energy. The challenges are in how clean it can get; how it can be stored, if it is electricity; and how fast technology can change the energy equation — as it has over the last four decades — to save the climate without restricting economic growth.

The commodity that is in truly short supply is time.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Apparently, the Left Wants to Destroy Health Care to Save It

August 3, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The Democrats on the left of the party, exemplified by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, are running away with the health care debate.

The problem for those who, like myself, want to see health care extended and rationalized is that the real goals of reform have been abandoned for “universal health care” as an ideological and political goal; add a political prejudice against corporations and the idea of the most health care for all of the people gets lost, as it did  in the debates.

There should be only two goals in health care reform: bring down the cost and see that everyone is covered.

We in the United States have the costliest medicine on earth. We also have the spottiest and most risible coverage. We spend over 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on health care, nearly twice the cost of health care in other advanced countries like Britain, France, Germany and Holland. That is a huge cost, making us a less-competitive country. It comes not from medicine but rather from inefficient management.

We are a nation that venerates its business culture, but in health care, as it stands, we are protecting inefficiency as though it were a system. There are better ways, short of upending the whole structure, as Warren, Sanders and Harris would like to do, of fixing the system.

Serious reform is seriously needed.

Children’s National Hospital in Washington, for example, I am told, employs 150 people just to deal with the insurance companies, negotiating payments, securing permission for procedures and protesting disallowances. Presumably, there are as many people in the insurance companies on the other side of these transactions.

None of this huge personnel deployment is delivering health care or serving medicine. They are engaged in health care’s equivalent of a souk — bargaining care for money. It should change because it is enormously wasteful, let alone because it fails in its mission: delivering care to the sick.

Remember the old military saw: We had to destroy the town to save it.

In full bay at the Democratic debates in Detroit, Warren, Sanders and Harris were in competition both to junk all private health insurance and to trash the companies that provide it.

I have spent three decades studying health care delivery. While I am an unalloyed admirer of the National Health System in the United Kingdom, it is not for the United States. Not now.

I know the NHS: It has treated my family well since its inception and, briefly, myself. But I do not think we can trash what we have here root and branch and install a duplicate NHS. We have too much that would have to be changed; too large a new bureaucracy would have to be created.

I am in favor, though, of the government as a payer of last resort for those who cannot get coverage and those for whom treatment is too expensive for the insurer.

We need to regulate medicine and to take the uncertainty out of it. That uncertainty extends from patients who never know when they will be sideswiped by an out-of-network procedure and routine providers, to the hospitals that need to know what they will be paid. Coverage should be guaranteed, not negotiated.

I used to own a newsletter publishing and conference company in Washington. I provided health insurance, which cost me in well-being as well as dollars. The costs went up relentlessly and coverage was problematic. My top aide came down with a rare cancer. The treatment was fine, all paid for, but the post-treatment painkillers were not allowed. I tried to persuade the insurer — after all, we were a 20-strong group. They would not be moved. So my aide, who is French, had her sister send the medications from France, where she could get them for free as a citizen.

If we can get the horror of negotiation out of the system, care would be better, and costs would fall.

I am told the future might be based on what already is working well with Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium that insures, provides doctors and hospitals in the package.

It is worth a look — before we start shelling the system to save it.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

The Race Card Stultifies Speech

July 26, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I, a serial supporter of minority causes, am fed up with the race card. Calling someone a racist is sliming’s cheap shot. It is a banal accusation that cannot be justified and cannot be defended against. It implies the moral deficiency of those who are accused of it.

I am not abandoning my abhorrence of people held down, held back or shuffled through a justice mill because they are of a different race or ethnicity.

Believe me, I have seen it. I have seen a bartender in Baltimore refusing to serve a black man but telling him he could take a bottle home. I have worked at a newspaper where it was debated whether a black editor could manage white editors. I have covered courts where young black offenders are marched through trials that are no more than sentencing mills; where hire-by-the-trial lawyers plead away young minority people who do not know what is happening to them besides that they are going to jail. I have seen segregated water fountains, park benches and restrooms.

Yes, I have seen it.

In South Africa during apartheid, I saw a policeman leading a prisoner with a wire tether around his neck, as you would walk a dog. In Zimbabwe, I saw then-President Robert Mugabe become obsessed with demeaning and forcing out the white population.

I heard the language of apartheid on the West Bank, where there are struggles over land. I heard a Malaysian publisher say demeaning things about the Chinese. I know of the oppression of minorities from Vietnam to those of Korean descent

who perforce live second-class lives in Japan.

I have seen how the Catholics were treated in Northern Ireland and how both sides killed each other randomly. It starts with insults and ends with bloodshed.

I have toured Auschwitz where racism was perfected into genocide and evil wrought its masterpiece.

Race-baiting, race oppression and race categorization are among the deep and pervasive threats to society and to a civil way of life.

But that does not justify the easy and destructive branding of almost anyone who disagrees with anyone else as a racist. That is cheap, shallow, damning and, as a negative, hard to disprove.

I have been there, too, and know the humiliation and impotence of being accused of something you cannot defend yourself against.

Years ago, I was going to be appointed to a vacancy on the board of the venerable National Press Club in Washington, when one board member received an anonymous phone call saying that I said racist things. I did not and I do not, but the board thought it better not to appoint me. It hurt then, decades ago, and it hurts now.

Who wants to say, “Some of my best friends are minorities” or signal their virtue to disprove the label “racist”? Like a wall poster, it is easy to put up and hard to take down.

It is time we took the race card, burned it and interred its ashes. The epithet “racist” — which can be attached as easily as sticking on a Post-it — is neither dialogue nor disputation. Worse, its careless use is turning people against people whose views they fundamentally support.

While it is in play, the race card can be produced from the political sleeve like a wild card to slime anyone who disagrees with its player.

I know House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has worked for decades for civil rights causes. Using the race card was woeful in its dishonesty.

By the same token, I believe President Donald Trump to be, in many things, a truly reprehensible man; a disgrace at many levels. But that is not a reason to use the race card. Calling someone a racist precludes bringing in the heavy artillery of facts to blow away real bigotry. In its way, it locks in prejudice.

The president standing toe to toe with four Democratic House novices of color — the Squad — shouting “racist” is not speech. It is a refuge for the verbally bankrupt. Sadly, by calling Trump a racist, the Squad fired the first fusillade.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Nuclear Industry Claims Embedded Prejudice in Finance Agency

July 19, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

They are bureaucracy’s equivalent of ghosts: old policies, fiats and ideas that have lost their relevance — if they ever had any — and are without a constituency, but they live on.

Take the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a little-known, self-sustaining agency of the government, which was set up in 1971 to help American businesses invest in emerging markets. It helps with risks that are outside the purview of the Export Import Bank and facilitates the attraction of private capital to do the heavy lifting. It is considered a success and an important tool in foreign policy, so much so that in October, it will be subsumed into a new agency, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, to work in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

OIPC’s website says clearly that it helps U.S. manufacturers gain a foothold in new markets. It does not list exclusions from its consideration.

But it has priorities and blind spots, often inherited from the attitudes of a previous administration. A case in point is that it will not lend to help countries buy nuclear power or nuclear power equipment.

The nuclear industry, which is exercised about this impediment to sales in new markets, believes that the agency’s policies of opposing such assistance lie in ambivalence toward nuclear in parts of the Obama administration.

Normally, this would be of little consequence because OPIC cannot afford to finance a whole new nuclear power plant of the traditional type, running to billions of dollars. Its lending limits are in the hundreds of millions, but it does provide risk mitigation that enables other financing to proceed.

This is especially important because the nuclear power industry is in the throes of reinvention: Small modular reactors are the new reality. These have many designs and varied support, including the traveling wave reactor from TerraPower, a Bill Gates-funded company, and the first of these new small reactors, the NuScale, is soon to be deployed at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. It will sell power to a consortium of local public utilities.

The stakes are not small. Fifty companies are working on new nuclear designs, most of them small modular reactors that can be built in a factory and shipped to their deployment sites for assembly. All of them will feature designs that obviate the possibility of catastrophic accidents and will seek to minimize nuclear waste.

In short, the new reactors are aimed at the very markets that OPIC is interested in. Its mission, especially when it morphs into U.S. International Development Finance Corporation this fall, will be to counter aggressive Chinese marketing under its ubiquitous Belt and Road initiative, which seeks to vacuum up markets in Asia and Europe.

David Blee, the dynamic president of the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council, has met with OPIC officials. Blee, along with nuclear industry executives, has also had a meeting with President Trump, where the issue was raised. Trump turned to his top economic adviser Larry Kudlow and asked him to investigate. So far, OPIC has not softened its anti-nuclear stance.

Lawyers who deal in international nuclear trade tell me the damage from OPIC’s ban on taking on nuclear projects is twofold: First, specific projects are likely to go to foreign competition, and second is the fact that a major U.S. agency will not even entertain assisting in financing such projects suggests a lack of confidence in American nuclear products by the government itself.

Defense contractors have always found it is impossible to sell defense hardware abroad if that same equipment is not deployed by the Pentagon. The buyer psychology is not hard to fathom: If it is not good enough for the United States, we do not want to know about it.

Critics of the agency cannot say that it is wholly out of touch with today’s reality: It is helping to finance Ivanka Trump’s projects for women around the world. Maybe America’s nuclear entrepreneurs should look to pitching their magical new machines to the first daughter. After all, the nuclear industry is employing more and more women.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Up, Up and Away — Electricity Takes to the Skies

July 13, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The aviation industry — from the backyard inventors to the giants like Boeing and Airbus — are all feverishly working on electric airplanes. The sparks are flying. The new age of flight has taken off.

Erik Lindbergh, grandson of national icon Charles Lindbergh, calculates that 200 firms of all sizes are working on electric aircraft, reminiscent of the early days of both flight and automobiles.

Lindbergh, an accomplished pilot, who replicated his ancestor’s Atlantic solo crossing in 2002, but in a single engine plane, is an avid electric aircraft proponent and developer.

Across the Atlantic in Lausanne, Switzerland, another aviation giant, Andre Borschberg, famous for his around-the-world flight in the solar-powered Solar Impulse in 2016, has just demonstrated an electric flight trainer, the H55, that is operational and being offered to flight schools around the world. It was rolled out at a press event last month.

The destination is always the same, but the paths differ.

The goal is to say farewell to noisy, polluting planes and to usher in environmentally acceptable ones. Even The Economist, a pro-business, pro-personal choice magazine with a global readership, has recently railed against the pollution from airliners and criticized the use of private jets and first-class travel. Aviation is estimated to add up to 5 percent to the greenhouse gas being pushed into the atmosphere. The real problem is that jets lay it down where it does the most damage: at 30,000 feet and above.

To those who live near airports whether it is in Arlington, Virginia, San Diego or London, noise is a real and constant problem.

It will be decades before large jet liners are replaced with electric propulsion, but for light aircraft and for a new kind of flying, involving what Lindbergh calls “flying cars,” the future begins now.

Lindbergh tells me he is working with a major automobile company on what will be a vertical takeoff and landing, flying car, aka airplane. Enthusiasts have dreamed about such a vehicle since the Wright Brothers.

Borschberg, with an enormous amount of firsthand knowledge about using electricity in propulsion, acquired in his spectacular around-the-world flight with co-pilot Bertrand Piccard, is using the experience gained with Solar Impulse in the H55. It is the first generation of trainer: good today, better tomorrow. It also gives suppliers, like Siemens — which is developing electric aviation-specific motors — to evolve their products. The H55 buys its components.

Borschberg says the flight trainer market for a two-seater simple aircraft is large and expanding, particularly in Asia. “There is a pilot shortage all over the world,” he told me.

The limitation of the H55 and other light electric airplanes, including those made in Slovenia, is range. The H55 has only 90 minutes of endurance because of the limits of battery technology. You had better have landed or you will be out of juice; up, up and away having become down, down and dismay. OK for one-hour flight training, but not for those cross-country flights that trainee pilots must make, at least in the United States.

For that reason, Lindbergh is promoting, through his company VerdeGo Aero, a hybrid with a gasoline engine and electric motors. While not a pure electric play, this will perform bridging, much as hybrids have in the car market.

Elsewhere, there is huge excitement about all-electric air taxis and many companies, including Uber, are concentrating on these. In fact, Uber ties eventual financial success to driverless air taxis.

Lindbergh says money is pouring into the electric aircraft field with rich individuals, including Larry Page, co-founder of Google, leading the way. Pure electric drones (like the air taxis, but not designed to carry passengers) are the darling of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The new airplanes are of various shapes and sizes. Electricity allows you to have many propulsion points, many propellers or one; propellers at the back or the front, and even to have jet equivalent with propellers forcing air into a tunnel to create thrust.

The sky’s the limit, you might say, if batteries catch up with soaring hopes.

 

 


Photo: H55 Electric Flight Trainer © H55/ Anna Pizzolante

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

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