There are neither enough reporters nor newspapers to cover the great human story of today: the shredding of families to fulfill political goals.

Husbands and fathers are saying goodbye to their American children; and wives and mothers are weeping as they are led away by agents of the U.S. government. They are headed for countries they hardly know and for a future they do know: one of heartache and worry about their loved ones in the United States, and fear for their own survival.

One well-recorded case, thanks to the diligence of local media, was the deportation from Detroit to Mexico of landscaper Jorge Garcia, who was brought to the United States when he was 10 years old. At 39, he was too old to qualify as a “dreamer.”

An Associated Press picture shows him hugging his 15-year-old daughter, 12-year-old son and wife, as she extends her arm to take a parting family photo. There were tears aplenty, but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had their way and this, to my mind, state-sponsored cruelty went ahead.

If deportation is extended to the innocent dreamers — approximately 800,000 individuals who enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which started in 2012 under President Obama — who have been used mercilessly as political hostages, the horror will be multiplied. ICE agents will round up these kids, who have done nothing wrong, and airports will figuratively be drenched in tears.

Slavery left an indelible stain on America. The deportations will come to be a second stain. Many came to America in chains, now many will leave in them.

Every time I write about deportations, I get abusive emails, like this one in which the writer asked rhetorically, “What is it about ‘illegal’ that you don’t understand?”

To that, I offer this battery of replies:

What is it about innocent that you don’t understand?

What is it that is right about sending human beings into danger and possible death?

Where are the evangelical churches with their professed commitment to “family values”?

When did the tears of children, mothers and fathers lose their capacity to wash away the ink of officialdom?

What is it about laws that is so immutable? Are they not made and revoked all the time?

What is it about America that has caused it to turn its back on immigrants when ancestors, save for Native Americans, came from faraway places without papers but with a desire to escape everything from religious persecution (the Pilgrims), to starvation (the Irish), war and genocide (Jews, Armenians, Rwandans)?

I have always opposed free immigration into the United States and Europe, particularly from a single country. That way you get conquest through migration. Some years ago I argued with a friend, a conservative writer, who took me to task. “We are an immigrant country,” he insisted. He still writes about public affairs, but he is silent on immigration.

Once they, the immigrants, are here, assimilation underway or complete, the equation is changed. They have left their Egypt, crossed their Red Sea and they are here: Americans in all but the paperwork. They deserve to live in peace.

Meanwhile the ICE agents, with their paper authorization and their handcuffs, have about them the whiff of authoritarianism; the crushing power of the state coming down on the individual.

The deportation stain is spreading.

 

 

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Photo Editorial credit: Diego G Diaz / Shutterstock.com. An activist wearing a t-shirt reading “Undocumented and Unafraid” speaks at a rally to protest president Donald Trump’s decision to end DACA in Downtown Portland, Oregon, on September 5th, 2017.

Even in a Race Riot, There Was a Place for Civility

Little things mean a lot and manners mean a great deal. Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, our national manners about race seems to be fraying.

After King was fatally shot, I was in the thick of the riots in Washington. The one thing I recall with great clarity is — even as shops were being looted and fires set — the rioters paused to be polite to me. Several times men, who were out to destroy or steal as much as they could, ushered me to safety and inquired if I was all right.

In those race riots, there were outbreaks of manners; of people seeing each other as people. Richard Harwood of The Washington Post noticed the same outbreak of politeness and wrote about it.

That is why it is distressing to see socially considerate language deteriorate. It means a deterioration in manners.

In these 50 years, we have come both a long way and not far enough. How we talk about things does matter.

Twenty years ago, while I was hanging out with some Irish television journalists in a bar in Dublin, they began attacking a local newscaster. Nothing unusual there: The writers and producers who write the words spoken on air often resent the newscasters who read them.

They are invariably paid much more than the people who prepare the broadcasts, reap the rewards of celebrity and can be a pain. Remember Ted Baxter in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”?

In a final comment, one of the most senior of the journalists declared, “Let’s face it, he’s just a Protestant prick!” This remark gave me a start and made me glad that I was naturalized American. We might call someone names in America, but we would not drag in religious affiliation.

In Washington, at the venerable National Press Club, another little shocker. A Malaysian publisher, discussing the dominant position of the Chinese minority in his country, said in a voice so loud that other guests looked around, “The only straight thing about a Chinaman is his hair.” We would neither say nor think that.

A small thing, words and the related manners they codify, but they set the tone. We scatter the words and they grow into attitude and policy.

In my own negotiations — business negotiations, labor negotiations and news-story negotiations — manners have been an essential part of them. If you have publicly denigrated your opponent before you sit down, you will have traded a position on the high ground for one in the swamp.

So why is President Trump, who fancies himself the deal-maker in chief, the denigrator in chief? Dissing others is like lying; no one will believe anything that comes out of your mouth later. A veracity gap has a permanence about it.

 

The Bad, Sad News from Puerto Rico

I have had a lifelong interest in electricity. As a kid in Africa, I learned the difference between having it and not. It is the difference between living and subsisting, hope and hopelessness.

I read an alarming story in The Intercept, an online news publication, which says that despite more than 1,500 highly experienced emergency workers from the mainland in Puerto Rico, crews are sitting idle while the supplies, which would enable them to get on with the job of restoring power to about 1 million American citizens, are locked away in warehouses.

Yankee can-do is apparently not doing, owing to local incompetence and maybe corruption.

 

The Debate over Embassies: Don’t Lose Track of the Facts

Amid all the outrage and some endorsement of Trump’s moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the fact that the two cities are close to each other got lost. It is a distance of 50 miles and I have traveled it several times in, as I remember, about 40 minutes or less by taxi.

As for the new London embassy, it is on the London Underground in Nine Elms, an up-and-coming area in a dynamic and changing city.

It is not Ye Olde London: Just look at the skyline and marvel.

 

The Things They Say

“It’s not tyranny we desire; it’s just, limited, federal government.” — Alexander Hamilton.

Horace Greeley, founder and editor of The New York Tribune, said, “Go west, young man, and grow with the country.”

In the movie “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman is advised to go into “plastics.” Nowadays, young men and women are being advised to go into the “trades”: There’s work for people who can weld, read a grade level, work a lathe or follow site drawings.

There’s a severe shortage of skilled labor, from carpenters to steel fitters. And it’s beginning to be a brake on the economy.

Some are heeding the call. One young man who grew up in San Francisco, call him Jeremy, whose parents are college-educated (his mother is an Ivy League college graduate), has decided he’ll forgo college — although his parents can well afford it — and become a welder. Bravo!

But the road to a happy life through the trades hasn’t been cleared of the debris left by our passion for college degrees. The aspiring young welder and hundreds of thousands of others who’ll be tempted to give up the pleasures of four years in college for the rigors of as many or more years in an apprenticeship will likely find themselves marked for life as “second rate.”

Jeremy can find work aplenty in today’s job market and good wages, too. But he’ll be binding himself to a world where many will look down on him; where the values of his upbringing are scarce in the workplace, with its dictatorial foremen and rough-and-ready society; where he’ll have a sense, ever present, of being low on the social and work totem pole; and where he’ll encounter many closed doors if he wants to leave welding for some other kind of work.

Jeremy or an equivalent young woman, call her Jane, could leave welding as their interest declined or simply because, with the passage of years, he or she couldn’t handle the physical demands of the trade. But what to do? With a wealth of experience, how about teaching? No way with no degree.

Supposing Jane, at age 25, decides that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a world of arcs and acetylene, burns and fumes. She’s young enough to learn to fly and become a pilot. But she’ll never fly for an airline: They require pilots to have a college degree of some sort. Management in a hotel chain? Not as such. They like degrees for anything above housekeeper or waiter.

Jeremy and Jane will come up against the “mortar board ceiling,” as I’ve called it. I know many who’ve bumped up against it. A useless degree from a mediocre college is still better than great life experience when it comes to career.

When I arrived in the United States from Britain, I hit my head on the mortar board ceiling many times. Although I had worked for ITN and the BBC in England, I couldn’t get an interview with a U.S. television network on the grounds I didn’t have a college degree. The human resources departments were adamant.

Insanely, The New York Times told me that I’d never be a writer on the paper, but they had an opening for an editor. I went, almost literally, around the block to The Herald Tribune and signed on there as a rewrite man on the foreign desk. They didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.

It’s important that people going into artisan work, for all of its camaraderie and job fulfillment satisfaction, know that it’s still fair weather work. Little or no sick leave, no lifetime guarantees and pension, unless it is a union job. You clock in and clock out: the devil take the hindmost.

Time was when the trades offered a future: A meat cutter could open a butcher shop and become self-employed, a baker a bakery, etc. That line of entrepreneurship is essentially foreclosed in today’s winner-take-all world of big companies.

But mostly, Jeremy and Jane need to know that the future for the non-college worker is still inferior. Society still looks down on the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil — and there’s no change in sight. Meanwhile, we’ll have too many graduates and too few people who can build and repair.

The Sad Collapse and Sale of Westinghouse

Can you shed a tear for a corporation that messes up? I can.

It was known, after its logo, as “The Flying Bar W.” It was the emblematic “can do” company: creative and confident in its engineering, sagacious in its marketing, aggressive politically and not afraid of a scrap.

It was Westinghouse, and it traced its linage to George Westinghouse, the man who invented the air brake that, with modifications, still stops railway trains and big trucks. He also warred with Thomas Edison and proved to be right in backing Nicola Tesla’s alternating current over Edison’s direct current.

Now, after an ignominious bankruptcy, the company has been sold by its last owner, Toshiba, to a Canadian asset management firm, Brookfield Business Partners.

Westinghouse has had its ups and downs. I was lucky enough to know its executives and to cover the company when it was on a winning streak under the chairmanship of Robert Kirby.

Westinghouse was a sluggish but still prosperous operation when Kirby took over in 1975. He sold off unprofitable divisions and concentrated on its core power generation business, especially nuclear. “I have had to sell businesses that would have made an individual rich,” Kirby told me.

The world nuclear industry owes much to Westinghouse and technology, which came out its former Monroeville, Pa., headquarters near Pittsburgh. It was a technology driver. Nearly every light water reactor design was influenced by Westinghouse. The envied French nuclear electric system relies partly on Westinghouse designs.

Poor management — including an excursion into television — hurt the power business, as did the long hiatus in domestic plant ordering.

The proximate cause of the economic collapse of Westinghouse are two ambitious reactor projects: V.C. Summer and Vogtle nuclear plants in South Carolina and Georgia. There were multiple mistakes suggesting a lack of managerial depth, both at Westinghouse and Toshiba, which bought the battered Westinghouse power business from BNFL for $5.4 billion in 2006, and probably overpaid.

Then there was a new reactor design that was yet to be deployed in the United States (Westinghouse 1000) and the deteriorated nuclear supply chain — no reactor had been built here in 20 years. But, sources tell me, the critical mistake was fixed-price contracting. This had been a no-no from the early days of nuclear power: too much can go wrong and often has. It did again.

Maybe its new owners will let Westinghouse lead again.

The Joy of Reading Detective Fiction

I feel a bit sorry for people who don’t read fiction or who don’t think they have time for it.

I’ve been checking informally on the reading habits of my friends and I learn that most of them are on the news-and-fact treadmill night and day. Get off, I say.

The easiest way to escape dull care is to tuck up with a good detective book and live in your head with its characters. These have beginnings and ends: In the hands of masters — say P.D. James, Donna Leon or the late Colin Dexter — you get complex characters, human situations and the whole project moves along at the pace of the investigation. There aren’t that many awkward endings that bedevil many books.

I exclude those detective novels with superhuman heroes, tough guys. Unreal. A common thread in detective fiction is the struggle of the individual against the system. Maybe that’s everybody’s struggle, the human condition. The system is at odds with all of us. Maybe that’s why we enjoy detective fiction.

And the Answer Is … Money?

One wishes Alex Trebek, the host of “Jeopardy!” who is taking a medical leave after undergoing surgery to remove blood clots from his brain, a quick recovery.

He has been seeking answers at the syndicated game show since 1984. One does wonder how he has survived doing the same thing with the same equanimity for so long? I guess, as Noel Coward said to an interviewer when asked why the critics hated his last play, “Sail Away”, which nonetheless was sold out in London, “I suppose I shall have console myself once again with the bitter palliative of commercial success.”

Trebek makes $10 million a year. Maybe that’s it.

The Things They Say

“It is very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.” — Alex Trebek

In the Trump calendar, this is the year for infrastructure. During the campaign it was one of the inducements he held out to voters: $1 trillion to upgrade and renew the nation’s deteriorated roads, bridges, airports, railroads and harbors, and to expand broadband.

The White House is about to announce “principles” for infrastructure legislation. If the nation is hoping for the metaphorical equivalent of a four-lane highway, it had better brace for a bicycle path at best.

Money isn’t the only impediment to a robust approach to rebuilding the infrastructure; so is philosophy.

But first, take money. There simply isn’t a spare trillion bucks floating around the U.S. treasury. Instead, there are deficits reaching to a point beyond the horizon. Even if, optimistically, the economy puts the pedal to the metal and we get hypergrowth and big tax revenues, there’s unlikely to be big, new money to fix America.

At some point, the very condition of the infrastructure will become an impediment to growth: jammed highways, inadequate barge traffic, clogged ports and systems that can neither make goods efficiently nor deliver them to market economically.

One option for infrastructure funding is use-specific tax and in particular, the gasoline tax. The federal take is 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel, last raised in 1993.

While fixing the infrastructure may be on many lips, Congress is taxaphobic, any tax is to be resisted. A tax is an assault on the national manhood.

That’s why politicians at every level have looked favorably on substituting gambling for taxing. Casinos and lotteries abound across the country in a cynical, collective political decision to tax through gambling; to substitute the foolish for rank-and-file taxpayers, the beneficiaries. This spares those who should be paying taxes for the services, largely education, where gambling is footing the bill. Sadly, the heaviest patrons of state-sponsored gambling are the poor. Heads the politicians win, tails the poor lose.

Trump will most certainly favor private investment and public-private partnerships. Trouble is that there’s limited opportunity here.

Not many public facilities lend themselves to private capital solutions. A bridge may convenience those who drive over it most and they may be persuaded, through tolls, to shoulder much of the cost of the operation of the structure. But a whole region may benefit from the bridge without ever driving over it.

The Gateway project to build rail bridges in New Jersey and new tunnels into Manhattan, which are failing after more than 100 years, illustrates the problem. The cost is enormous, an estimated $30 billion, more than users can ever pay. But the benefits will affect the whole region; jobs during construction, expedited commuting on faster and safer trains, and enhanced prosperity all-around.

Because Amtrak would use these bridges and tunnels, the whole East Coast passenger rail system would benefit. The cost would be shared by the immediate beneficiaries: New Jersey, New York and the federal government.

New Jersey faltered in 2010, then came on board later, influenced by damage to the existing tunnels from Hurricane Sandy. Now the U.S. Department of Transportation is balking — and on the eve of the White House infrastructure announcement.

Where the Trump administration can have a major effect without new money is something dear to its heart: easing the regulatory burden on new projects, especially pipelines and power transmission lines. These are years in the planning and more years in being litigated before, if ever, they see fruition.

In this cold spell, New England has been paying the highest prices ever for natural gas because there aren’t enough pipelines to bring in gas or facilities to handle additional liquified natural gas. Gas pipelines and electric transmission providers shouldn’t be exempt from public decision-making procedures, but they should be guaranteed expeditious and binding decisions.

It’s forgotten now, but the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was granted federal pre-emption from legal challenges by an act of Congress in late 1973. Otherwise, building it might still be in contention in the courts.

Some things can be done for infrastructure, but don’t expect much if federal dollars are required. It’s a case of the dogs bark but the caravan moves on — along a rutted track.

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Photo: “The great blizzard of 2016” jseliger2 from New York. Used under the CC BY 2.0

There is a shortage of long-distance truck drivers because of traffic jams. It is like this: Truck drivers are paid by the mile and if they are stuck in traffic for hours, they are not earning.

A different wage structure could be conceived and implemented. That would partly shift the traffic jam cost from the drivers to the owners, or to the consumers.

But trucking charges are calculated on distance and weight, so changes could be difficult, even near-impossible. What if the price of vegetables fluctuated like airline fares? It would mean chaos for the whole transportation chain. The solution, of course, is the infrastructure. Fix it.

That is what President Trump has promised to do in 2018. Chances are that in an election year something will be done, but not much.

Trump may have gotten the legislative order of his first and second years in office wrong: It may have been better to do infrastructure reform before trying to repeal Obamacare and overhauling taxes.

It is easy to talk about fixing the nation’s infrastructure and very difficult to do. Every project, every dollar is fraught with special interests.

At the core of the thinking of Trump and the GOP is that infrastructure revitalization can be achieved with public-private partnerships. Sounds good: the costs are shared and the federal budget is eased. In reality, of the huge number of infrastructure needs, very few are amenable to public-private partnership. Outside of toll roads, not all that much is immediately receptive to such partnerships, and they can take years to negotiate.

The quickest fix for the infrastructure is to increase the amount of funding through established channels, like the Highway Trust Fund and the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, also called the Aviation Trust Fund. These are the mechanisms that exist. It is the way that governments — federal, state and local — know what to do. It also is the “money solution” and likely to run into severe disfavor from fiscal conservatives.

The idea that all infrastructure, from airports to sea and river ports, to highways and bridges can be dealt with in one omnibus bill — the implication of Trump’s rhetoric — is fading. Think of it this way: An old mansion — as is U.S. infrastructure — is falling apart. Does the owner take on the whole upgrading job, from dry rot remediation to electrical rewiring to roof replacing? Or does he or she do it room by room?

In what is going to be a financially constrained year, as the consequences of the tax cut are digested, look for big hopes and small dollars. The deliverables in the time frame are few.

The midterm elections will dominate. Therefore, Republicans will push for privatizing the air traffic control system and initiating private-public partnerships in things where there will eventually be a revenue stream to justify the private investment — possibly seaports; possibly selling off federally owned properties, like some airports; and giving accelerated regulatory relief to projects like new pipelines and transmission lines, one of the most difficult infrastructure undertakings.

During his presidential campaign, Trump talked about new infrastructure funding of $1 trillion. Now the talk is in the low billions of dollars. To really understand such a climbdown, understand that a trillion is a thousand billion. Real money. Two billion dollars — which has been bandied about lately — is, well, you do the math, peanuts.

Over the holidays, it took a friend 10 hours to drive from Providence, R.I., to Newark, N.J., and 10 hours to drive back— a distance of 190 miles. Somewhere in that mess were untold numbers of truck drivers, trying to make a living and thinking about job alternatives.

One of the political motives for infrastructure overhaul has been jobs. But with near full employment and a chronic shortage of skilled workers, here is a question: Who would do the work? It is a question that does not require an answer because, in the time available, small things will come from Congress to ameliorate the infrastructure crisis and Trump will, as is his wont, couch withdrawal as victory.

The coming year will be a year of talking about infrastructure. But you cannot cross a bridge with mere words, let alone repair it.

Happy New Year!

 

Photo: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Ameer Attia

Movie Gets a Lot About Churchill Right, Even the Drinking

Why do so many American devotees of Winston Churchill work so hard to play down his drinking? That is a question that has interested me for some time.

One man I know — who owns several of Churchill’s paintings — avers Churchill didn’t drink much, just sipped frugally on an ever-present glass. He is one of a line of Churchill admirers who don’t want to think Churchill drank incessantly. But the evidence is there, from the writer Nicholas Monsarrat to his hostess Eleanor Roosevelt.

The revisionists want him sober through the war years. I doubt he was falling-down drunk, but his consumption of alcohol (especially Scotch and Champagne, which he started on at breakfast) was awesome — as was everything else he touched.

I raise this because, for me, the furniture of the holidays includes a movie. So I went to see “Darkest Hour,” the biographical story of the first days of Churchill’s premiership in May 1940. Germany was invading Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The British army and allies — 338,000 of them — were trapped on the French coast at Dunkirk.

The movie is remarkable in fidelity, touching on all the high points from Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s hope of making peace with Hitler, through the dubious offices of Mussolini, to the last cautious but patriotic endeavors of the deposed prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain is treated as he was: a man up against history forced to bargain with Hitler, while a weak Britain rearmed. The real appeaser was Halifax, who later was sent to Washington, where he endeavored to undermine Churchill. The movie does justice to the booze, too.

I was especially glad to see the movie recognized the genius and courage of the evacuation of the army at Dunkirk by an armada of many hundreds of small boats, some just seaworthy. The enormity of the operation was somehow missed in the movie “Dunkirk,” which came out earlier in the year.

Joe Wright’s movie jams in many little episodes loved by the Churchill cognoscenti, like Churchill’s habit of working from bed with terrified dictationists on hand and, of course, always with a glass in reach; his habit of walking around naked, no matter who was there; and the little funny of his encounter with Clement Atlee, the Labor Party leader, when Churchill was in the toilet.

I both salute Gary Oldman’s bravura performance and question his interpretation of Churchill as a somewhat doddery, old, old man. He was just 65 and according to his newspaper publisher friends, like Brendan Bracken and Lord Beaverbrook, was at his peak. Likewise, Lord Boothby, who helped engineer Churchill’s rise to the highest office.

On YouTube, you can find film of Churchill addressing Congress in April 1943. I submit he is more robust and spry than in the performance that Oldham gives, even if the great man — maybe the greatest Englishman — had already had a few.

 

In Praise of Short Books That Do the Job

Many of my friends write books — and I admire them their industry — but not all.

One very literate journalist, when I asked her why she hadn’t tried her hand at authorship, came back with, “You wouldn’t want to lock me up in a room with all those words, would you?” Quite so.

Nonetheless, books are becoming important to journalists in a way they weren’t earlier. There being no magazines left in which large arguments can be advanced, books are the answer.

Gone are the days in which a writer like Stewart Alsop could argue the Vietnam War in 7,000 words in The Saturday Evening Post. If you want to write something weighty these days, write a book.

But publishers insist on a certain number of pages. The result is many books are too long, padded.

I’m grateful to two friends who’ve written short books that make their point. There is Tim McCune’s “Smoke Over Bagram,” a revealing look at the contractor’s life in the surreal world of Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, and Kevin d’Arcy’s “Adventures in the Gardens of Democracy.”

McCune’s can be found on Amazon as a virtual book. D’Arcy’s book, which is about British journalism and the decline of representative democracy, is published by a small British house, Rajah.

I thank them for saying what they have say without padding. No pea of an idea in haystack of words for either. So I devoured both books with joy and without giving over days of my time.

 

The Things They Say

“Nothing corrupts a politician as much as friendship. Good politicians don’t bribe; they make us like them.” — Matthew Parris, journalist and former Conservative member of the British House of Commons

 

 

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Photo: “Potsdamer Konferenz, Winston Churchill” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany

Every year, I write about Christmas. But none of my Christmas columns has given readers more pleasure than this one.

Christmas Isn’t the Most Wonderful Time of the Year for All

Deck the halls! It’s Christmas and I love the warmth of it: strangers embracing and goodwill flowing; gorgeous music, particularly the English and German carols; the feasting; and the wondrous excitement of it all. It’s every year’s exuberant moment.

But it isn’t for everyone.

The shut-in and the shut-out have an especially hard time as the rest of us cavort in funny hats, red vests, hugging, laughing, eating (too much) and drinking (a bit too much). My mother, who was a teetotaler all year long, would drink two small glasses of sweet sherry and declare that God would forgive her because it was Christmas.

But it’s also a time when those who are hurting hurt more. When those who are lonely feel their isolation more keenly. And when those who are bedridden feel the bondage of the blankets more acutely.

For those incarcerated at Christmas, the bars press in. For those who have no home, the sidewalks are hard and the shelters are terrible. Homelessness is the workhouse and sleeping in the streets is the debtors’ prison of the 21st century.

There are no mangers in urban America.

Spare a thought among the jollity and mirth for those who are sick, those who care for the sick, those who are in prison, and those who will lay down their heads on a concrete couch maybe after a charity handed out dinner. They weren’t made for that.

 

The Dog Poems That Warm The Heart

If you’re getting a puppy for Christmas, or if you have a dog, it’s time you read the four greatest poems ever written, to my knowledge, about dogs. They are the work of Rudyard Kipling.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I routinely send them to friends who have lost a dog or, even more sadly, have had to put one down.

I can’t resist the first two lines of “His Apologies”:

Master, this is Thy Servant. He is rising eight weeks old.
He is mainly Head and Tummy. His legs are uncontrolled.

Or this verse from “The Power of the Dog”:

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

 

After the Tax Cuts, Where Will We Get the Workers?

If the tax cut produces more jobs, as President Trump promises, there will be a labor shortage of gargantuan proportions.

Talking to an executive from a trucking company, I learn that his company is desperate for drivers. Nationwide, there are more than 30,000 vacancies for drivers in a workforce of 3.5 million. Turnover is 90 percent, as drivers seek better jobs and easier work.

A driver makes about $41,000 — a wage that hasn’t kept up with living costs. In the glory days, before trucking was deregulated in 1980, a driver made good money and was firmly a part of the middle class.

Likewise, the contracting industry is hampered by a lack of workers. An architect in a large practice tells me they can’t get contractors for new projects because the contractors can’t get qualified help.

Next step: Welcome back the undocumented? Considering the severity of the labor shortage, one wonders how soon automated trucks will hit the streets. My friend in the trucking industry says his company is watching Tesla with keen interest and is in touch with Tesla management.

At Harvard, I sit in on a Boston Global Forum session whose participants are talking about massive job displacement by artificial intelligence. Optimists tell you that all past automation has led to an abundance of new jobs. But, avers a friend in industry, in the past, automation produced new products, and AI looks like it will just make old ones better. And there’s the rub, as Hamlet said.

The Things They Say

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked me for my autograph.” — Shirley Temple Black