White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A Movie David Goes Against a Goliath of a Disease

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The movie is called “Unrest.” The unrest of the title is one of the many symptoms of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, often expressed as ME/CFS. It is at one level a touching love story and at another, where its real purpose lies, a cry to be heard.
This mysterious, debilitating disease affects maybe 1 million Americans and has no cure, is hard to diagnose, and there is no therapy other than attempts to alleviate the worst symptoms. It is a disease of the immune system. To get it to have normal life confiscated and replaced with bare existence, pain, confusion and fatigue, which is not ameliorated by sleep, hence the unrest.
Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, who directs The Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University, and who has been described as the nation’s leading virus hunter, says that ME/CFS may be like cancer: one disease in many forms.
“Unrest” is not the first ME/CFS documentary but, to me, it is the most compelling. Actually, it is a compelling movie in its own right and someone with no interest or knowledge of the disease would find it engrossing — and damn good entertainment.
The movie, which has been entered for an Oscar in the documentary category, and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is the work of Jennifer Brea and a team of very able professional moviemakers. But Brea is the star, the producer and the director. She also is a severely impacted victim of ME/CFS, and the suffering you see on the screen is not a reenactment.
The key to the movie is home footage shot by Brea and her husband, Omar Wasow, as she fell ill. It opens with Brea in extremis crawling across a floor, flattened and in pain. It has a fine admixture of the horrors of the disease and the joy and love of her restricted life with Omar.
The film scores many firsts, one of which, to the best of my knowledge, is it has been certified for continuing education credits for doctors. For a movie that is entertaining as well as instructive, this is an achievement. At an upcoming showing in Atlanta, the audience will be made up entirely of medical professionals getting continuing education credits.
This is major because the disease is not part of normal medical education syllabuses, greatly exacerbating the diagnosis problem. The film makes a strong point about the inclination of medical establishments to treat this very awful physical disease, with its endless suffering, as a psychological one. One of the most harrowing scenes in “Unrest” concerns the arrest in Denmark of a wrongly-diagnosed patient, Karina Hansen, who was forcibly removed by the police and confined in a clinic without recourse for three years. Her parents were denied access for the first year. This is an extreme example of the cruelty when somatic diseases are diagnosed as psychosomatic.
For seven years, I have covered ME/CFS and its devastation: the broken marriages, teenagers who cannot go to school, and patients who must lie in dark silent rooms, wondering why they must live. In the course of my reporting, I have received thousands of emails from around the world, describing the loneliness and the daily hell of living with ME/CFS. Most patients I find go through periods of extreme incapacity and then a life where every effort has its price: One woman in New York knows that dinner with friends will bear a price of three or more days of exhaustion and bed confinement.
I have interviewed young women who clearly will never see a wedding day, men who may never know the enchantment of love, and parents who suffer the special agony of having to take care of children who cannot help in any profound sense.
Because of the ignorance of ME/CFS in the medical profession, the minuscule funding for research from the government, through the National Institutes of Health and the big foundations, I salute the arrival of a movie that may shake up a complacent world.
Some years ago I started, along with my friend and ME/CFS suffer, Deborah Waroff, the YouTube channel ME/CFSAlert. Our motto was comfort the patients, educate the doctors and shame the government.
“Unrest” does the job on a grand scale.

A New Rolls-Royce, Just in Time for the Holidays

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Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has a new Phantom on the market. It’s just the eighth model with that marque to be produced since Henry Royce himself designed the car way back in 1925. It has been the top of the Rolls line ever since. The big, beautiful one: a land yacht of a car.

Once a “Roller” was somehow able to signal prudence as well as wealth. After World War II, when Britain was getting back on its feet, the big cars (usually black in color) pulled up at Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Dorchester, The Savoy, or one of the other great London hotels, and declaimed Britain’s returning health, quietly suggesting “Britain is back.”

In Hollywood, they signaled status. When they pulled into the Beverly Hills or the Beverly Wilshire hotels, the message was not subdued. It shouted, “I am someone in this town!” There were cheaters, of course: Those who rented a Rolls for a premiere or some other must-be-seen-at event.

Things went somewhat off the rails when the newly minted plutocrats of the Middle East took to treating the great cars as though they were no more than Volkswagen Beetles, sometimes just abandoning them in the desert as a new toy came along.

Even in the days when a Rolls was intended to convey solidity as well as wealth, there were exceptions, like Nubar Gulbenkian, the heir to the original Middle East oil fortune. He broke from tradition and owned ostentatious yellow Rolls. In the Swinging Sixties, there were more colored Rolls — even a movie, “The Yellow Rolls Royce,” written by Terence Rattigan, starring Ingrid Berman and Rex Harrison.

To get the full Rolls effect, you want to be chauffeured and lounge in the back: It’s as big a tiny house in the Phantom.

Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British film producer and director, used to sit in the front next to his chauffeur. Upper-class London eyebrows were raised — but then he was in show business.

But the bucks-to-burn oil crowd of the ’70s didn’t really help the prestige quotient of the car. They became a sign of flamboyance and a target for social activists. Gauche vulgarians took over: oil sheiks and rock stars.

Owning a Rolls has its own challenges. People who own them and don’t have a driver to stay with the car when out and about — whether in Hollywood, New York or London — find the Roller is a liability. Do you entrust this mobile bank vault to a parking lot? People steal the famous hood ornament, Spirit of Ecstasy, as a challenge.

Well, if you still want to get into the 2018 Phantom VIII, you can get the ready-to-drive-away model, complete with 12 cylinders of thirsty power and, allegedly, the quietest ride ever in a car for about $435,000. That’s with sumptuous carpets, wonderful leather and wood to get you tree-hugging all over again. Also, it’s pretty fast for a car that weighs nearly 6,000 pounds. It’s regulated to 150 mph. But if you take the regulator off, you can get 186 mph out of it.

Yet there’s something sad, about this latest luxury-and-engineering extravaganza: It seems designed for another time.

BMW, which now owns Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, is about to launch a Rolls-Royce SUV and it may eclipse its sedans. It should claim the market for the fun-in-the-desert crowd as well as those from LA, who like to tool around the canyons east of Malibu.

Worse, the writing is on the wall for internal combustion engines in China (a big, new Rolls market), Britain, Germany and France, which have threatened to ban them by mid-century.

Budget note: You can get into a lesser Rolls, like the entry-level Silver Ghost, for half the price of the Phantom VIII. But if you want to signal that you have Trumpish wealth, a Rolls-Royce coupe Sweptail was custom-built for $13 million.

Just the car to go with the $92 million condo in New York.

I drive a Kia Soul. It cost $15,000 new and it does what the Rollers do: It goes from place to place, just like the Phantom VIII.

Notebook: Theater as It Should Be; Fish and Chips Disappearing in U.K., Plentiful in NE; The Myth of the Frozen North

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Little Arctic, R.I. and Its Amazing Theater

Arctic Impresarios: David Vieira (left) and Jim Belanger. Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

Theater should be readily accessible, affordable and good. For me, the ideal theater experience has always been to pop off to the theater at the last moment and get an affordable seat.

There was a time when you could do that in London and New York. But theater-going has become an expensive chore, both in the West End and on Broadway: Buy exorbitant tickets far in advance, drive, park and get a bill for the evening which can run to over $500 for two.

Not so where I live — just down the street from the amazing Arctic Playhouse, which is to theater what food trucks are to restaurants: accessible, affordable and good.

The Arctic Playhouse is by any measure an anomaly. It just shouldn’t be. Arctic is a distressed hamlet in West Warwick, R.I. Once, it was prosperous shopping area near working textile mills. Now it has fallen on hard times, having lost its retailing base to shopping centers. Washington Street, its main street, has boarded-up shops and a pervasive sense of decay.

But Arctic has live theater at the Arctic Playhouse: a very modest but nonetheless effective theater space where, for under $15, you can see what is often a damn good show. The theater, by the way, will be moving to a larger space on the same street.

I write this in the warm glow of having just seen such a show with my wife: “I Love … What’s His Name?” As its subtitle says, it’s a cabaret about confusion in love in the 21st century.

We were dubious, but we really like the spirit and intimacy of our neighborhood theater and its energetic impresarios, Jim Belanger and David Vieira.

So we ate a light supper and drove a few minutes to be enchanted by a clever review, well-executed by a topnotch cast, including co-creators Rachel Hanauer and Jeff Blanchette, Angela Jajko, Jessica Gates and supported with industrial-lifting, as it were, from pianist Bob Logan.

The cabaret featured a series of ballads and patter songs — some by musical greats, like Tim Rice and Stephen Sondheim — about dating. Very modern, too: Cell phones play a big part in a show that is funny, tuneful and rip-roaring good entertainment.

I’ve always said you don’t need a palace to put on a good show, just good players. It’s about the play and the players, as Shakespeare said in “Hamlet,” not the venue. Arctic proves that, production after production. Local fun in a clubby atmosphere with free cookies, decaf coffee and popcorn, and a full, cash bar.

Give my regards to Broadway, but you won’t be seeing me in many a day.

If You Want Great Fish and Chips, Try New England

Rightly, you think the national dish of Britain is fish and chips. Well, maybe not anymore.

It is increasingly hard to find fish and chips in Britain and Ireland. Not impossible, but harder than it was when there was a fish-and-chip shop, known as a chippie, almost on every corner.

The other shocking thing is that the fish and chips in the chippies, when you find them, are likely to be squeezed in with other fast food —hamburgers, sausages and even lasagna.

What you are more likely to find in every town or village is an Indian or Pakistani restaurant. In fact, I’ve read it argued that the national dish of England is no longer fish and chips, but curry and rice.

But I’m delighted to report that some of the best fish and chips to have crossed my plate in a long time are to be found in New England, particularly in Rhode Island. Almost every restaurant and bar has very good fish and chips. Excellent, in fact, but missing that standard of the British Isles version: mushy peas. You don’t have to have them with your battered cod in the U.K., but you’d be missing the full experience if you don’t.

Mushy peas are, as they sound, peas cooked to produce a mush. Sounds disgusting, eh? Well, they’re delicious.

Why, I wonder, with so much excellent haddock around, is there no smoked haddock to be had? Finnan haddie is just not on sale among the wonders of the sea in every supermarket. The Brits like to eat it at breakfast, and the French serve it as a main course. My wife, Linda Gasparello, who grew up in Hingham, Mass., says finnan haddie and cod cakes were regular offerings on South Shore menus.

Very good too. Ladies and gentlemen, start your smokers.

The Myth of the Frozen North

We moved to Rhode Island from the Washington, D.C. area five years ago and we still shuttle back and forth with some regularity. It is hard to be a journalist and not be drawn into the Washington maelstrom.

We sing the praises of Rhode Island as loudly as operatic stars. We go on about its great food, wonderful beaches, fabulous architecture and nice people.

But people in Washington, and elsewhere in the country, believe that we live in igloos, kept warm at night by a five-dog team of huskies. They believe the cold dominates our lives and that we drive Humvees to get through the snow.

It’s not an argument we have been able to win. But the fact is the climate in most of New England is much better than the climate down in the nation’s capital where the summers are insufferably hot and humid and the winters can be as cold as they are in Providence. There is less snow there, but everything ceases up when it does snow —usually a big one every year.

The pathological fear of cold keeps people away and living in worse climates. Pass the grog.

When the Light Fails — Modern Society’s Weakest Link

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Modern life has a woven-in thread of vulnerability that is peculiar to our times: electricity. It is the cardiovascular and nervous system of life across the world, more so in the Internet Age than even 30 years ago.

If the nation were to lose electricity, it would cause an instant and lethal paralysis that would go beyond inconvenience of the kind parts of New England have just experienced — and that left me charging my cell phone in my car.

Nonetheless, limited and scattered blackouts of the kind I have been caught in are a reminder of what alarmists (alarmists are unsettling, but not always wrong) have been warning. If there is no electricity, there is no light, no water, no sewage treatment, no gas and diesel, no heating and cooling — even gas and oil systems rely on electric pumps and fans. If such a blackout were sustained, slow death through starvation, or fast death through disease and armed gangs ravaging the cities and towns for food, would be the result.

A curtain-raiser is Puerto Rico. Just look to its agony: The mitigation is that there is help from the rest of the United States — imperfect and maybe inadequate, but still help.

In a national blackout, Canada and Mexico might be as affected, and the catastrophe would be complete.

Such a blackout — very unlikely but not inconceivable — is posited to come from a hostile power using a nuclear weapon targeting the special vulnerability that comes with electricity and computerization. The hostile power would not target cities, as in the past, but instead would detonate a nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would do the damage. It would cause destructive electric surges, fry electronics and render most things that support daily life in 2017 inoperable.

The phenomenon has been known since the earliest days of nuclear weapons development, during the World War II Manhattan Project. Atmospheric tests by both the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 gave the world hard evidence. The new urgency comes because some believe North Korea would try such an assault as soon as it perfects its long-range intercontinental missile.

One of the people who takes the EMP threat seriously is nuclear proponent and public policy advocate Richard McPherson of Idaho. He has written to President Trump proposing that Puerto Rico become a test bed for an EMP-hardened electrical grid.

Engineers believe they know how to do this, but the cost would be prohibitive, according to experts I have interviewed at the Electric Power Research Institute and the Edison Electric Institute, respectively the research arm of the electric industry and its trade association.

Robin Manning, EPRI vice president of transmission and distribution infrastructure, says they are studying the EMPs and a progress report is expected in a few weeks.

To believe the North Korean theory, you have to accept that North Korea is run entirely by cartoonish characters like its president, Kim Jong-un, and that they wish to be destroyed in global retaliation, from Europe and even China.

A quieter and very knowledgeable voice comes from Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has visited North Korea’s nuclear sites seven times and has seen some of their most secret installations, including their centrifuges. He has even been allowed to handle a container of plutonium, the raw material of thermonuclear devices.

In a speech at Brown University on Oct. 31, Hecker said that North Korean technology and science is very impressive, and the scientists and engineers running the nuclear program are not mad fanatics but very dedicated to their task. He does not see the small country as an existential threat to the United States, but it is a problem: a problem that must be tackled civilly, through conversation.

“We know nothing about this country and who controls their nuclear arsenal. We need to talk to them, and their denuclearization will come later,” Hecker said.

Meanwhile the long-term security of the electric system remains a national necessity, whether the threat is monster storms, cyberattack or EMPs.

Scott Aaronson, EEI executive director of security and business continuity, says a “holistic” approach for security, embracing all hypothetical disasters, not obsessing on one, is necessary.

The situation in Puerto Rico is not hypothetical. It is an American tragedy of enormous proportions here and now. It is also a frightening window into what can go wrong in this, the Electric Century.

The Internet of Things has Turned on Me, Big Time

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Dear Diary,

I’m writing by the light of a candle, with a pencil in the bathroom. I have to sit here in the dark. You see, the Internet of Things is driving me mad, out of my mind. The appliances in my home are ruining me; sliming me.

I always had trouble with inanimate objects: doors that hit me, shoes that hid from me, hammers that sought out my thumbs and carpets that wanted me flat on my ass. But that was before the Internet of Things; before Silicon Valley issued them with brains.

That nice, useful microwave is a malicious devil. Would you believe that it has gotten the other appliances – all those with computers built in — to conspire against me because of something I wrote belittling the Internet of Things?

Well, the things have taken up arms against me. It is war, plain and simple, in my home.

They bully me. The washing machine emailed me, “I know what you and the boys did last night. Spaghetti and Chianti again?”

The television in the bedroom tweeted, “You’re cut off. No more binge-watching ‘Married with Children.’ ”

How can I tell my dear wife that I have to sleep on the couch because the microwave is in cahoots with the washing machine and the bedroom TV to torment me? Even my i Phone threatened to put pictures of me in the buff on Facebook.

I’ve tried to reach out to the appliances, tried to make peace with them. I’ve pleaded with the smart meter in the kitchen, “Can’t we just get along? After all, we live in the same house.”

My life is utterly destroyed.

It all began with one of those smart domestic assistants that communicated with the smart devices in your home. I knew about its artificial intelligence but I didn’t think it was intelligent enough to prevail on all the appliances in my home to drive me mad.

How did I get on the wrong side of my appliances, which I bought and installed? Even my video game console is a double agent. It lulls me into a false sense of trust with games, then it hands over the results of secret IQ tests to my boss.

I can’t tell anyone. “Who you going to tell? You’ll be committed,” the cruel refrigerator emailed me.

I begged the appliances collectively to accept my apology, to let me make amends. That set off a torrent of abuse on social media. My smart watch started flashing, “Nice try, big guy.”

I’m now all alone with my toilet bowl. I could hug it because it’s not part of the Internet of Things. It’s solid, old-fashioned and even, in my mental state, lovable.

I had a plan which I broached with my wife. I asked her, out of earshot of anything connected to the Internet, whether she would like to join the Amish, to live simply with a horse-drawn buggy. Then I realized that we couldn’t buy a buggy because the mixer in the kitchen has been monitoring my credit cards obsessively.

Like President Trump, these gadgets don’t brook criticism. Even an innocent clock-radio can turn on you. Mine did. It woke me up on Nov. 9, 2016 to tell me that Trump had won. That’s when I began losing it.

The Electric Revolution Is About To Upend Transportation

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Connie Francis sang about “Where the Boys Are” in 1961. Well, the bright boys and girls are flooding into transportation. It is the place of cutting-edge invention: not cell phones, they were so last year; not computers, they were, er, so last century. The smartest students leaving university may well find the adventure of creating in transportation.

A science-led revolution is in the making in transportation. Leading this revolution is the electric car. It is no longer a drawing-board dream. It is here and gaining market share, albeit miniscule at present.

The surge to electric-powered transportation goes beyond the Tesla and Elon Musk — although Musk has been a catalyst. All manufacturers are now making or investigating electric cars. But the electric car is only a beginning: buses, trucks, trains, boats ships and even airplanes are in the mix.

China is throwing government and private resources into an electric future. France, Britain and eight other countries have declared that they will ban the internal combustion engine by mid-century. Volvo has said that it will stopmaking fossil fuel-powered cars.

At the extreme end of the electric car excitement are automated vehicles. These have caught the imagination — and the dollars — of Google and Uber. But Detroit is also is coming to realize that it has to go electric. General Motors has paved its way with the EV1 and the Volt. Others are scrambling.

The political pressure behind the urge to go electric is clean air, reduced noise and, for many countries, the end of a huge oil bill.

One hundred and forty years after Thomas Edison first perfected a light bulb, electricity is once again a major disruptive technology – and not just on the surface of the Earth. Electric aircraft are in design with short-haul, small-load passenger versions flying in Dubai. Mighty Boeing has teamed up with innovative JetBlue to work on an electric-powered aircraft, although these might have to wait for much better electric-storage batteries than now exist.

Naysayers are quick to point up the inadequacy of batteries — lithium ion are the workhorses in this revolution — and the difficulty of charging them.

These arguments point up a fork in the road for electric enthusiasts: Will the future depend on today’s charging technology where a car has to be tethered to the charging apparatus by a wire, or will electromagnetic fields be used in inductive charging, eliminating the wire? This is known as Wireless Power Transfer (WPT).

Enthusiasts see WPT charging in two ways: either a plate set in a driveway or parking lot with the vehicle at rest or a strip in a roadway which can charge vehicles in motion – a grander idea. If the latter is successful, it opens the way to smaller batteries in lighter vehicles, cheaper trucking.

The disruption is going to be very large.

Gas stations would largely disappear or be very few. Automobile technicians might want to look for alternative employment, as will, eventually, many truck drivers.

The search for new batteries is frenetic and international. New, longer-lived batteries will, in large measure, determine the rate of growth in the more advanced electric vehicle applications.

Another big imponderable is who will provide the electricity? There is a general assumption in the electric utilities that they will do this. But will they? The new owners of the charging networks may choose to make their own with wind, solar and small modular nuclear reactors.

What will the role of government be? Local government will have to deal with the road-use issues. But what of the federal government? It has always been involved in transport. As Peter Morici, the economist and columnist, points out, it stimulated the railways with right-of-way grants and the airlines with mail-hauling contracts. Will it find a similarly elegant way to stimulate the flow of electrons into transportation, and a whole new way of getting ourselves and our stuff around? Maybe it will be led by the military: the Navy wants electric ships.

No wonder the best minds out of colleges and universities are getting wanderlust.

Photo: SAN ILDEFONSO, SEGOVIA, SPAIN – SEPTEMBER 24, 2017: Car charging station for self-sufficient and first photovoltaic panels in Europe. it is also free. Juan Enrique del Barrio / Shutterstock.com.

The Case for the Eight Hundred Thousand Innocents

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Pity the “Eight Hundred Thousand.” Pity those who came here as the children of parents who moved illegally to the United States. Pity them for every day they walk in dread: Will they be deported if President Trump loses in his power play with Congress over their future? Them or the Wall.

They, these children, some adults now, live in a place uniquely dreadful as they go through each American day — the only days most of them know or can remember. Pity them as they go about their business of school or work, speaking the only language many of them know: English.

Pity them as they wonder if they will be forced, by brutal deportation, to start life over in country in which they may be truly aliens. Not so bad for those from Ireland or Australia, where they will be accommodated by enlightened governments, but those are the small minority.

Think, instead, of those who must go back to the poverty and war, the deprivation and violence, the sheer horror of a life so harsh we cannot with ease imagine it. That is what awaits them in much of Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East.

The illegals committed what is only a misdemeanor in law and tried to improve their own lives and dared to hope for work, food and shelter in the United States. They hoped for more for their dependent children. They shared the same motive that has always brought people to these shores: the dream of a better life.

Unwanted migration is a huge global problem. The desperate vote with their feet. Ironically, illegals have one of the qualities prized in our culture: enterprise. It is not easy to get here and it is not easy to live in the shadows.

But must the children of illegals also live in the shadows, fearing the knock on the door that ends their hope? Must the iniquity of the fathers, as it says in the Book of Exodus, be visited upon the children?

The administration has worked mightily to demonize all illegals, to brand them as murderers, rapists and job-snatchers despite study after study showing illegals to be more law-abiding than the citizen population. Yet Trump is set on deportations and triggering a season of fear in the migrant community.

The knock on the door is one of the terrifying sounds that echoes down through history, a knell of horror for the oppressed. When the state — whether it was the Roman state, the Inquisition state, the Nazi state, the Soviet state or the apartheid state — comes a-calling, it is a time of unmitigated fear.

To hold the “Eight Hundred Thousand” hostage to Trump’s other immigration demands is callous and supremely cruel. He has claimed sympathy for the children who are here through no fault of their own, but his subsequent actions belie that.

Is the president’s only motivation to undo, with pathological fervor, everything that President Obama did? Is the human cost to have no entry in his ledger?

If the deportations begin to include the Dreamers, then there will be shame aplenty to go around. Shame on the Republicans in Congress, who mutter privately against the Trump excesses but do not act, perhaps out of fear of Twitter ridicule. Shame on the evangelical churches, who preach family values but are silent on the tearing apart of parents and children, husbands and wives, mocking all that they profess to hold dear.

There is an economic case for considering the issue of illegals, who are here and contributing mightily. But the moral and human case for the children — these innocents who have adopted us — is prime. Time to adopt them.

To leave the “Eight Hundred Thousand” in limbo is to tear the cloth of our decency.

I get regular cascades of emails that ask: What is it they do not understand about “illegal”? I ask: What is it they do not understand about “innocent child”?

 

Photo: Berkeley, CA – September 05, 2017: Unidentified participants protesting Trump rescinding DACA,. Approximately 200 demonstrators gathered in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza and marched down Telegraph Avenue. SHEILA FITZGERALD / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Looking for the Next Big Thing: Innovation’s Rocky Path

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Innovation is the hot word in the business press and in academia. Business itself, maybe less so. If business is profitable and secure it would rather grow through acquisition than innovation.

There is a public sense that innovation is on a tear; that new ideas are bursting forth irrepressibly. Possibly not.

At a recent exhibition of early stationary steam engines in Rhode Island, I was struck by the inventiveness and the variety of these machines, but mostly by the diversity of the manufacturers. These were the inventions, the innovations that powered the Industrial Revolution. They were being improved and deployed in ever greater numbers until electricity — that big game-changer, that supernova of invention — came along to disrupt everything again.

Likewise, it is impressive to look at the early days of automobiles. Hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers, hoping that they had found the forward route and that route was the one that would survive.

Aviation, the same story.

The impediment to these kinds of diverse inventions and modifying innovations is often just the size of corporations.

The early years of computers were a time of incandescent creativity, followed quickly by innovations. But the inventors succeeded too well and instead of there still being thousands of entrants, the early winners hold hegemony over the industry. They have moved from innovators to rent collectors, from white-hot invention to comfortable, corpulent middle age very fast. Include in this list of those who went from eureka beginnings to cautious management: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and probably Uber.

Commercial success came too quickly and hegemon, as it always does, followed; then sclerosis through size.

It can be seen as a replay of what has happened in other industries, where success has led to growth and invention has given way to preservation.

Those who opposed — and lost — the merger McDonnell Douglas and Boeing did so because they feared that Boeing, which had upended aviation not once but twice with the 707 and the 747, would lose the heart it once had for such bold and risky innovation. Big organizations are inherently hard of hearing.

Computing also has become a hegemon in its own way. The adventurous money, the best minds and the great universities all are centered on Silicon Valley and what has become celebrity technology.

But other technologies are coming on quietly, most notably additive manufacturing, colloquially known as 3D printing. It is moving very fast and has gone from manufacturing simple things to making very complex nuclear fuel, aviation parts and even human body parts. It could be the next big thing.

But what about the next little thing?

Step forward an imaginative television program running on 200 public broadcasting stations. It is called “Make48” and it is a reality show with a difference. Its CEO Tom Gray says one should think of the annualized, eight-part series as a cross between “Shark Tank” and “How It’s Made,” two very successful commercial cable television shows that cater to the latent creative, entrepreneurial spirit often daunted by the complexity of thinking up a product, making it, financing it and getting it to market.

Make48 seeks to solve those problems, or most of them, by recruiting teams of inventors who, at the Kansas City Art Institute, are supplied with experts to show the creators how to manufacture their creations in 48 hours. The product can be in any material: metal, wood, plastic, rubber — you name it. But it has to be made in front of television cameras in 48 hours. Then three winners get the professional help in marketing the products, getting them on store shelves, TV sales programs and online shopping. The whole suit of needs met.

The program is supported generously by chief sponsor Stanley Black & Decker, and by The Grommet, QVC, Duck Tape and others, who are looking outside for new products. Always the hope that the next Walkman, safety razor or Post-it is waiting to be created and taken to market. Last year’s winners were modest: a kitchen sink stopper or bath plug, a series of color-coded food preparation surfaces to prevent cross-contamination, and a laser-aiming device for men and boys using toilets.

Who knows whether a big winner, like the electric screwdriver, will come forth, but mighty oaks do start as acorns.

 

Photo Credit: Make48 LLC

Welcome to the World of Unintended Consequences — Tax

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An open letter to the tax writers of Congress:

Even us laymen, us non-economists have opinions about taxes. We pay them. We also benefit from loopholes and are punished for being not rich enough to have investments that lighten the tax load.

Those at the bottom of the tax ladder seem to pay their taxes with more equanimity than those at the top.

For more than three decades, I operated a small business. Over the years, I employed hundreds of people and all were keenly interested in what they would be paid, but none — not one ever — asked what their take home pay would be or how that could be finagled, as with benefits. In business parlance, they were interested only in the top line, not the bottom line.

By the same token, other small businesses seemed to be unbothered by taxation, although they all relied on accountants to get them the best deal. Taxes were not a subject that came up in in our trade association meetings. T.J. Zlotnitsky, a member of the progressive Patriotic Millionaires, told me that he and other very successful businesses were not crippled by taxes and saw them as a necessity — a cost of being in business, if you will. Billionaire Warren Buffet and economist-actor-writer Ben Stein echo that view.

But big business, unlike small business, and its agents from trade associations to their lobbyists, believes that tax rates are the problem. Take the issue of U.S. companies whose offshore subsidiaries earn profits that are retained in foreign countries to defer paying U.S. corporate tax. It is an act of Republican theology that this money would come back instantly to the United States if the tax threat were removed and that it would be invested in new enterprise, plant and products here.

It is as likely that this money will be used to buy back stock. There are plenty of companies right here in the United States sitting on billions of dollars, not investing them either here or overseas. Explain, please.

Perhaps tax rates, assuming they are the effective rate that will be paid (seldom the case), should be thought of in terms of pricing. Pricing is a whole science, possibly an art. There is a sweet spot in pricing where buyers and sellers agree.

For President Trump and Congress to say that sweet spot is 20 percent for corporations and 35 percent for individuals is arbitrary. Despite company “inversions,” where they move their domicile to tax-friendly countries, corporations, as measured by earnings, are doing nicely, thanks.

It is true that high tax rates discourage investment and lead to capital flight. But there are glaring exceptions: Why are companies flocking to high-tax Massachusetts rather than low-tax New Hampshire?

My own guess is that the sweet spot is between 25 percent for corporations and 30 percent for individuals. I expect to be disabused.

New York, by national standards, is heavily taxed, but businesses and people are pouring in. Explain perceived value, please.

Yet after World War II, when taxes really were too high in Britain, many moneyed people, including almost all the film stars, established residences in Switzerland to escape confiscatory taxes: 90 percent was just too much for the likes of Noel Coward and David Niven. Ninety percent was a sour spot, very sour.

Then, there is the highly speculative issue of how tax reduction will trigger growth. It is an argument that would not pass the loan committee at the local bank: the idea that increasing debt now will lead to huge growth later. Take a piece graph paper and draw an ascending line, make no provision for recession, war or, as now, acts of God. Is it believable?

Finally, there is the vexing question of estate taxes, which — with fiendish cleverness — the opponents have labeled “death taxes.”

The fact is that if you remove or reduce these, you guarantee less revenue. But, more important, in a time when the economy has created many billionaires, you risk the creation of super class of Americans, rich in perpetuity and growing richer with even the most conservative investments: a feudalization of the United States.

Is that the America which is great (again)?

Taxation is all about unintended consequences.

Talking Heads Are the Salt and Fat Diet of Television News

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Guess you’ve noticed: There are no politicians on the politics-obsessed cable news channels. Instead, there are journalists talking about politicians and politics; rafts of journalists organized into “panels” to comment, in seconds, on events.

Twenty years ago, it was different. So much so that I started a television program with the avowed intention of letting the public see who was writing the political news in the newspapers. We are still on the air, but with fewer journalists commenting.

In that seemingly distant time (which was, in reality, not very long ago), the principal political talk shows were “The McLaughlin Group,” under the pioneering John McLaughlin; “Inside Washington,” formerly “Agronsky & Company,” with Gordon Peterson; and the long-lived “Washington Week in Review” with Ken Bode.

They were weekly, half-hour programs and mine, “White House Chronicle,” joined the roster as a distant “also ran.” We aimed at introducing print journalists to a TV audience. Other programs had set round tables that included Tribune Media’s Clarence Page, because he was a delight to work with — as we found on our program — and because he was informed and entertaining.

Women were fewer and they were led by Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker, Eleanor Cliftof Newsweek, Cokie Roberts of NPR, and syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer.

Cable news meant CNN, then still trying to be magisterial.

Fast forward and television is chock-full of journalists talking about the news in what is now a staple of cable television; and rather than occupying half an hour a week these “panels,” as the hosts call them, are on pretty well 24/7.

The New York Times publishes under the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” On television, it’s all the news that can be talked about — and they do, endlessly. I think that is pretty entertaining and most of the talking heads seem to have really good sources; they are on the news — all the politics that can be talked about. It is the fat and sugar diet of TV.

What is missing are the subjects. Few members of Congress, with the exception of the leaders, are seen or talked about by name on television. They have been cleared from the television politics smorgasbord. Even the talking heads do not name them. The ubiquitous panelists talk about “my sources” or “a conservative congressman” or “a Democratic member.” No names. No faces.

There are reasons aplenty for this. One, now that there is more party discipline, except for people like Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, it is known what the party the line will be: It is there in the talking points — and that makes for little news and boring television.

Another is that while journalists go for instant analysis, a cable television staple, politicians are scared of “stepping in it.” Search technology is so fearsome now that almost anything any politician says can be retrieved and put on the screen. That is fodder for future “gotcha” moments. The late Tim Russert of “Meet the Press” was a master of this. “In 2003, you said” and there it was, right on the screen, the politico making a regrettable remark.

Also, there is always the question of what the public wants (ratings to the TV industry). The public appears to be more interested in journalists debunking political leaders than the nuts and bolts of legislation or even what is happening in, say, science or the rest of the world. Salt and fat gets the eyeballs.

The late Arnaud de Borchgrave lamented that in his day, aspiring reporters longed to be foreign correspondents, now they yearn to cover Capitol Hill and the White House. Ralph Nader — who was once a prized “get” in the parlance of television bookers — has just issued a paper regretting the dominance of political chatter in the news space. Maybe he will be asked to talk about it on television, but it is unlikely.

On the upside, there are some awesome new talents, and more women in the Washington journalistic firmament — even if some of us like it when journalists, in the words of radio veteran Dan Raviv, just set out to “find out what’s happening and tell people.” No salt, no fat, just the facts.