White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A Plan to Save the Debates

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By Llewellyn King

It’s time to fix the presidential candidate debates. If they aren’t fixed, they’ll become as irrelevant as the president’s Saturday radio addresses. These don’t fall on deaf ears so much as they fall on no ears.

The debates, structured as they are at present, somewhere between “Jeopardy” and the National Spelling Bee, don’t cut it.

We all deserve to look at our best at times, and to be judged by our best opinions and ideas. But the present debate format shows every candidate at their worst; fumbling to recall names, tripping over facts half-remembered and looking, well, absolutely anything but presidential.

If the purpose of the debates is to gauge the worth of the candidates’ policies, the way we are doing it is hopeless, favoring (if these extended press conferences favor anyone) the candidate who can summon up the most loved political clichés. For the Democrats, protecting granny from being thrown under the bus; and for the Republicans, the de rigeur attack on the size of government.

None of it is enlightening; none of it answers the real questions of’ statesmanship or illustrates the mental agility and even cunning of the candidate – qualities that serve well in crisis.

The key to my debate fix is borrowed from the hugely popular Prime Minister’s Question Time in the British House of Commons.

Ever wondered how the prime minister can know the state of road repairs in Peebles in the Scottish Borders, and equally what the government is doing to protect British nurses in Bahrain? He isn’t the great Oz. He knows the question in advance, but not the follow-ups or the interjections. This leads to good answers (or at least plausible ones) and real repartee, as the two parties go at each other.

Now I can hear the howls, the shrieks, the hyena-like noises that will come from my colleagues in journalism, as they’re asked to commit the sin of submitting a question. But we’d get real answers. And those answers would lay the candidate open to penetrating follow-ups like these:

“What makes you think that the economy can grow, despite the best efforts of other presidents?”

“Are you proposing a return to the gold standard, and all the trouble with that?”

“How are you going to arrest 11 million people?”

“Are you going to survive stories of deportees being sent stateless out to sea?”

“Do you know that more illegal immigrants are coming here by plane than by foot across the Southern Border?”

“Why, to begin with, did you feel your e-mails should be exempt from the way of doing things observed by other secretaries of state — one rule for them and another for you?”

“If you want the government out of our lives, why do you want it in the most private of situations, when a woman is with her gynecologist?”

The follow-up questions would reveal who the candidates are far more than gotcha questions to people who cannot be prepared for every policy that a president might encounter in four years in office.

This formula would still allow for the spontaneous bon mots that every candidate hopes will lift him or her to verbal Valhalla, like Ronald Reagan’s near immortal “There you go again.”

After that first question, there would be cut-and-thrust, give-and-take, but solid positions would’ve been laid down, parameters established, such as how the candidate’s tax cut would be paid for, or why the Department of Defense, so at home with cost overruns, would do a better job with military and civilian nuclear wastes than the Department of Energy, a recurrent theme every election cycle.

If the candidates felt more comfortable on the major questions of their campaigns, they’d give better debate. — For InsideSources.com

The Collision Course in the South China Sea

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By Llewellyn King

When I was learning to fly, one of the lessons was that if you see an object on the horizon that is seemingly stationary but getting larger, watch out. It is probably an aircraft closing with you.

Trouble with China in the South China Sea is on the horizon of U.S. strategic concerns and getting larger. A major confrontation may be at hand.

China claims sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea. Its claims have been disputed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines,Taiwan and Vietnam.

Ignoring these neighbors’ territorial claims, China has built artificial islands on otherwise submerged reefs in the Spratly archipelago. They have built runways, capable of landing military jets, on Fiery Cross and Subi reefs, and are building one on Mischief Reef.

Vietnam and the Philippines have also built up reefs, but on a smaller scale, and mostly to help their fishing fleets.

Offshore islands, real or summoned from the deep, are trouble. Argentina and Chile nearly went to war over the Beagle Channel Islands, off the inhospitable tip of South America, until Pope John Paul II brokered a peace deal in 1984.

Britain and Argentina most certainly did go to war in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, which Argentina claimed then and still claims.

Nations use territorial disputes not only to divert attention from domestic problems, but also to heal the real or imagined wounds of history.

China feels, reasonably, that it was kicked around in history. Britain occupied parts of it, most notably Hong Kong, and then acted as a drug lord in the 19th-century Opium Wars. In the 20th century, China was invaded by Japan.

Now, as the world’s second-largest economy and most populous nation, China is feeling assertive.

But all of Asia, and by extension the rest of the world, is invested in this dispute: one third of the world’s shipping passes through the South China Sea, and its rich fishing grounds are a vital food source for the region.

The Chinese bolster their claims with a 1947 map showing what is known as the “nine-dash line,” or the cow’s tongue because of its shape, in the South China Sea. This line extends around the sea and encloses 90 percent of the area; by historical standards this is a whopper of a claim for territory, and one which threatens U.S. allies in the region as well as our shipping.

The Chinese claims appear to be in total violation of international law,  particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has not ratified, and which China ratified in 1996.

The dispute with claims and counterclaims is laid out in a new, dispassionate report by the Boston Global Forum, a Harvard professor-heavy think tank.

The United States responded to the China’s claim of territorial integrity for its artificial islands after a long delay, testing the right to navigate by sending the USS Lassen, a guided missile destroyer, through the 12-nautical-mile zone off Subi Reef on Oct. 27. China has reacted angrily with aerial exercises.

The USS Lassen’s transit of the reef appears to have divided the White House. At one point, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter would not acknowledge in public that it had actually happened, or that U.S. aircraft might test the Chinese claim to territorial air rights.

These actions are known as freedom of navigation operations, or FONOPS. It is a term we will hear more of if the United States and China cannot divert from their brinkmanship in the South China Sea.

The United States does not favor any nation’s claim to islands, or even rocks, in that sea. It does, though, have a vital interest in checking Chinese expansion and the interests of its Asian allies who expect a robust U.S. response to China’s island grab — and claim to a whole ocean. — For InsideSources.com

You Can Keep Cutting Taxes, If You Want to Pay the Price

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By Llewellyn King

Those Republican presidential candidates who had been governors, vied with each other in their latest debate to claim who had cut taxes the most.

When I hear tax-cutting expounded as an unassailable conservative virtue, my mind goes back to a lunch in Houston in the 1970s, when two of conservatism’s rising stars and I were speakers at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute.

The stars were Trent Lott, then a member of the House from Mississippi, and George Will, the hottest columnist burning up the op-ed pages across the country.

The three of us were urged to lunch together while the organizers got organized. I had recently launched The Energy Daily, a publication in Washington, D.C.

The conversation turned to taxes. We all agreed that we while we hated paying taxes, the United States was an under-taxed country. Let me repeat: Trent Lott, George Will and I agreed that the United States was under-taxed country.

So, I ask, how did we get to where we are today, when Republican presidential hopefuls are firmly committed to tax-cutting; when every state or local Republican governing body would rather see chaos reign — as has happened with our cities — than whisper that we should raise money to fix the problem?

The standard-bearer for taxophobia is neither an elected official nor a presidential hopeful. He is Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a political organization as powerful as the National Rifle Association, and as distorting of the national agenda.

Norquist has introduced a rigidity that makes discussion of tax policy almost impossible on the right. Tax has become not a matter of need and policy, but a litmus test of conservative purity.

The genesis of taxes as an evil goes back to a group of young conservatives — which included Norquist — with a consuming conviction that government is too big, and that the only way to cut it down to size (what size?) was, in their phrase, to “starve the beast.”

The problem is that Americans keep asking more of their government, and consequently it grows. We want more diseases to be researched by the National Institutes of Health, and more energy solutions to be developed by the Department of Energy. We want the food chain to be secured and nuclear waste disposed of. We want better roads, bridges, airports and air traffic control. When something untoward happens, like bee colony collapse or the disappearance of a strain of bananas, we want the Department of Agriculture to find a fix.

All those without a mention of providing social services, extending entitlements, and beefing up the military — all favored by the public.

The trouble gets worse when tax-cutting becomes an ethic, because even good taxes are an anathema to politicians, who are wont to start their political lives by signing Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge.

Take the mess the highway trust fund is in. It is funded in fits and starts by a conflicted Congress, trapped between what it knows to be need and the desire to limit spending. Infrastructure needs to be funded in multi-year programs. Before the recent budget deal, it was funded for just three months. Can anyone build a bridge in three months?

The danger of blind tax hatred can be seen with the gas tax. It is generally agreed that using less gasoline would be a net good: fewer oil imports, fewer greenhouse gases, and more livable cities. Today’s price is low, even by historical standards.

An opportunity that may never come again exists to fix much of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure by increasing the federal gas tax from its present 18.4 cents per gallon, where it has languished since 1993. There is enormous elasticity in the amount of gas an individual or a family uses. You can buy a smaller car or a hybrid, or travel less. The price of gas is not like the price of shelter.

Many of the ills that contribute to the sense that the nation has lost its way would go away with better roads and general infrastructure improvement. You do not feel good waiting to cross a bridge or idling for hours on Interstate 95.

Sitting in a traffic jam for two hours in the morning and two hours at night may not qualify as a tax, but it is taxing. — For InsideSources.com


Signaling Climate Virtue in Paris

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By Llewellyn King

Anyone who is anyone will be off to Paris in December. That’s where the United Nations is holding its Climate Change Conference. Forget Davos: That annual summit in the Swiss Alps is just for billionaire buffoons who have made it big on the Internet and mastered the art of lending money to Greece and getting out early, or those who think that standardizing coffee shops is good for the world.

Davos is better for partying in January than the Super Bowl because it drags on for days. But if you aren’t one of the aforementioned billionaires, after your first two bottles of wine, you’ll have to fly home because no one told you how expensive Switzerland is, nor how hard the Swiss franc is next to every other currency.

The best of all possible places in the world to be on November 30 to December 11 is Paris. If you’re not there, it says you don’t care.

In progressive circles, you have to be seen to care deeply. Your presence in Paris will manifest “virtue signaling” — a phrase on everyone’s lips in Britain since James Bartholomew coined it in the April 18, 2015 edition of The Spectator, a weekly British conservative magazine. You know how it works. You wear fake fur to signal that you love animals. You drive a hybrid vehicle to show that you save oil and are doing your bit to reduce your carbon footprint. That signals virtue, but it’s a week signal. You can boost that signal by attaching a conspicuous bicycle rack to your hybrid vehicle, even if you don’t own a bike.

You have to be careful in Paris. Signaling is everything: Think before you signal. For example, claim you had other business that brought you to Paris, like the book you’re planning to write on the Louvre or the history of alfresco sex along the Seine in the time of the Francois I. This way, you avoid the thought — perish it — that you wasted all that jet fuel just to attend a conference where you absolutely knew you had to be seen, like the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner in Washington, D.C.

If you flew to Paris first class, conceal it by complaining about the smallness of the seats and awfulness of the meals. If you’re winging across the Atlantic or the Pacific in a private jet, land in another country and take the train to Paris. European trains are electric and that signals virtue. Generally trains signal virtue, except Amtrak, which signals something else.

Housing is a problem in Paris because you’ll be tempted to stay in one of the great hotels. Warning! Cross these places of luxury, taste and convenience off the list: The Ritz, the George V, the Bristol, and the Meurice. People who signal their deep concern about global warming are also concerned by the amount of energy it takes to keep the rich in comfort.

If you’re to get entry to the finest salons on the Left Bank and the conference halls, and if you’re to shake hands with climate seer James Hansen, you must signal virtue. Borrow a bicycle, or grow a beard, but not too full or Le Flick, the French police, will have you in the cells as a terrorist in no time.  Sandals send a great signal, as do rough linens from India. If you have a lovely mink, leave it at home. Bad signaling. If Paris turns cold, buy a duffel coat or an old military great coat. Show them that you care, that you live lightly on the Earth.

If you can’t resist a slap-up dinner at Maxim’s or Laperouse, try getting there on the Metro wrapped in something dowdy. You can expose the fine threads inside. You’ll find staff very understanding. Hell, they learned it all from the French existentialists, who loved to signal virtue almost as much as they loved rich women, who bought them things while they philosophized: an unmistakable signal of virtue.

If you can just signal virtue, you can sink to any depths – and the good people of Paris will help you.

If I make it there, I’ll be staying in a modest hotel on the Ile St. Louis. And I’ll signal virtue by wearing cords and an old tweed jacket

Mark Twain said, “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Signal virtue and you can let rip. –For InsideSources.com

AARP Is Alientating Me and Other Oldsters

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By Llewellyn King

The common law has a tort that allows an aggrieved party, a spouse or a lover, to sue for alienation of affections. Derived from English common law, it has been abolished in all but seven states.

The most obvious targets for lawsuits were lovers who had taken the loved one from a marriage and made away to some new love nest; there to pursue, well, you know.

But it wasn’t just the third party in a love triangle who could be sued. It could be a priest, a psychiatrist, or even a family member who had advised a change in the marriage or its equivalent.

Clearly, alienation of affections isn’t what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has in mind when it cries out for tort reform.

My interest in this kind of lawsuit is practical. I wonder if there is an obscure tort that would entitle me to damages from the AARP. I want millions of dollars from the giant nonprofit organization for making me old. That’s right, old!

The AARP is in the business, besides selling insurance of all types, of alienating us oldsters from our sense of well-being, of the sense of triumph that has brought us this far. It wants to deny us one of the great joys that all of us in our Viagra years should be entitled to enjoy: the pleasure of ridiculing the younger generations.

Ah, the rapture! How can the young’uns, with their eyes glued to cell phones, know the thrill of the chase in the good old days? How can they know, in the these days of the Internet, what it was like to pursue the blue passages of literature that led us to John Donne, Sir John Suckling and Frank Harris? They don’t know what spats were, or the pleasures that were to be found at a drive-in movie theater with the girl next door.

The AARP wants to take away the comfort of reminiscing; wants to rob us of the joy of old-age superiority, and the satisfaction that comes from of looking down on those who aren’t gifted with mileage of time. Damn the AARP! The elephantine organization seems to want to make us old so that it can sell us stuff: insurance, cell phones, walk-in tubs, and funeral packages.

For evidence, and at random, I bring you the latest edition of the AARP Bulletin, a publication which, in the good old days, would have been banned in Boston. It’s a sampling of how the AARP is out to disquiet me and everyone else who has reached the Age of Enlightenment, which lies somewhere north of 65.

The cover sets the tone of latest issue. It features brain health, or how you can find out if you are losing your marbles. Inside, it has a quiz that anyone over d’un certain age who takes it will be reminded that they can’t remember little things like where they put their car keys, or that they made “a doctor appointment for a check-up months ago but completely forgot it.” Clearly signs that one is on the slippery slope of dementia.

Oprah Winfrey is on the cover, which states, “Oprah Joins Americans Over 50 On a Search for Meaning.” Hell, if Oprah hasn’t found the meaning that abides in a glass of single malt whisky at her age, I doubt anyone can help the poor dear. But does she have to take us with her, tramping through the forests of “whys” and “what ifs”?

If all the philosophers, clerics and gurus who ever lived can’t answer these questions, can we trust Oprah to answer the Big Question? Take a cruise, lady. It works for most of us.

Also in the bulletin, the AARP wants us to worry about “the frightening prospect of cyberattacks” on the electric grid. Really, we care more that we can’t work the electric gizmos that we have charged up in the best of times.

As to the ads, they focus on terminal illness, immobility (Want a stairlift on Medicare?), money shortage, and are so depressing that you wonder why we don’t collectively drink the Kool Aid. The AARP will sell that to us, too, probably.

The AARP has upped my anxiety and alienated me from the fun of being old. I want to sue. –For InsideSources.com

 

The Riddle of the U.S. Snub of Jordan

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By Llewellyn King

The continued refusal of the Obama administration to sanction the sale of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) aircraft to Jordan provides a kind of window into the confusion and incoherence of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Next to Israel, little Jordan (population about 8 million) has been one of our best friends in the region. It has a peace treaty with Israel, and has been seen as a moderate force in the Arab world. Its royal family, Western-educated and bilingual in English, have been favorites, politically and socially, in London and Washington.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was educated in England and the United States, having attended tony prep schools in both countries before he attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (as did his father, King Hussein), the British equivalent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, in 1980. Commissioned into the British Army as a second lieutenant, he served for a year in 1981 as a troop commander in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars.

Abdullah took a few years off from the military in the 1980s, studying at Pembroke College, Oxford and Georgetown University. But before becoming king in 1999, he served in Jordan’s army, where he rose to the rank of major general, and air force, where he was trained to fly Cobra attack helicopters – his father was an avid and daring helicopter pilot.

My sources tell me that Abdullah is a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yet when Jordan came a-knockin’, the administration barred the door. This with them knowing well that the Predator and the Reaper, which is a larger and more sophisticated model, are not the only UAVs on the market. Both Israel and China are vendors of unmanned surveillance aircraft, and Jordan is actively being courted by them. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice cried.

The administration, while declaring its affection for Jordan, may have in mind that Jordan has been more friend than ally: Jordan did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But why would that deter the Obama administration? It is because of the fight against ISIS that Jordan has requested permission to purchase unarmed Predators needed for surveillance, as well as armed ones.

The arguments for the sale, frequently championed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., is that it is a win-win for the United States and Jordan. Jordan gets the best technology for surveillance that money can buy; the United States gets one more eye in the sky over Syria and Iraq, which share borders with Jordan.

Sources to the left and right of the foreign policy establishment in Washington tell me they are baffled by the administration’s reluctance. Policy wonks are wondering aloud, “What is the White House thinking? It will lose a sale and Jordan will buy inferior military hardware, while being shut out of a valuable source of surveillance intelligence. If China or Israel supply drones to Jordan, U.S. access to this intelligence may come with strings.”

It is easy to understand that the administration does not know what to do about Syria. What might have been done was not done. Four years ago, there might have been the diplomatic equivalent of a plea bargain with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, or we might have more effectively armed those rebelling against him, before those motivated by religious sectarianism became dominant.

But none of those missed opportunities justifies snubbing one of our only friends in the region, as chaos escalates beyond the wildest fears of many a Middle East Cassandra. The administration seems to have gone into a catatonic state in Middle East policy, feeling as though whatever it does will not work, and that its legacy will be written in failed states including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Hunter, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “Damage has been done to U.S. relations with Jordan, but the simple act of approving drone exports would prevent further harm. If Jordanian policy, like President Obama’s, is to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ ISIS, why is the Obama administration refusing to provide an ally with the tools to do just that? ” — For InsideSources.com

How to Learn to Love Stoplights and Your Electric Car

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By Llewellyn King
 
Ever thought you’d be pleased to wait at a stoplight?  Well, the day is coming when the stoplight may also be a refueling point for your electric car. It won’t be the key point, but it might give your car a little boost until you get home, or to your parking garage or the supermarket.
 
Electric cars are much in the news these days, as the big automakers like Mercedes and General Motors try to catch up with the space, and notoriety, that Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors occupy.
 
But the bugaboo for electric cars, whether they are the super-refined Tesla or the more utilitarian Nissan Leaf, is charging. Batteries are getting better all the time, but they still need frequent charging. You wouldn’t want to try to go any distance without planning ahead for where you can plug in, whether it’s a high-speed, high-voltage charging station or a wire coming out of a kitchen window, which would need about eight hours to get you ready to speed off with that legendary electric car acceleration.
 
Electric cars have been the dream of automakers since the first cars, some of which were electric, but the limits of lead-acid batteries doomed them to very narrow uses. When I lived in Britain, milk delivery vehicles, called milk floats, were electric; and Harrods, the great London department store, used electric delivery vans for decades. In this case the slow-moving, use-specific and very distinctive vehicles possibly were as much for advertising as anything else. Customers wanted to have them pull up at their homes, suggesting that they could afford the substantial prices that are still part of the mystique of Harrods.
 
Over the decades, many new battery types have been tried, including some very far-out ideas like the aluminum-air battery. But the best, so far, is the lithium ion battery, a version of which you have in your cell phone or your computer, and which powers both pure electric cars and the electric component of hybrids like the Toyota Prius. 
 
But there’s still the pesky issue of charging. A Nissan Leaf has a range of about 100 miles, and a Tesla Model S Performance car’s range is 265 miles. The test comes on a cold, wet night when you’re throwing everything at the electric system in addition to propulsion. Get it wrong and your only way home is by tow truck. 
 
But the technology is on the way. The limits, as in so many things, are not on the technology, but the institutions that will bring it to market. Anyone want to make a business of car charging?
 
The technology, where the power is delivered by magnetic field without a direct connection to the wires, is called induction charging. You probably use it if you have an electric toothbrush, or a phone that charges in a cradle. Scaled up, it can be used to charge cars without a hard wire: a car, or other vehicle, drives over a plate in a parking lot or at a stoplight in the road and, miraculously, charging begins. 
 
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., is working on induction charging; and in South Korea, the technology already is in use for buses. The South Korean buses charge, among other places on their routes, at bus stops. While the bus is loading passengers, it is also fueling. Very cool.
 
Nikola Tesla, after whom the car is named, was the Serbian-American genius who briefly worked with Thomas Edison before selling several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. Tesla claimed he’d found a way of distributing electricity without wires. But how he’d planned to do this remains one of science’s biggest mysteries because he left no plans when he died in 1943.
 
It’s fitting that Tesla, in some small way, may be vindicated as electric vehicles named for him could be among the early beneficiaries of wireless charging. — For InsideSources.com

 

Richardson Says We Should Honor Russia Plutonium Deal

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By Llewellyn King

Bill Richardson could teach Donald Trump something about the art of the deal.

He has done a lot of them. Richardson also wrote a book about the art of the deal, the big deal, entitled “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark; Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.”

In a towering life of public service (U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, secretary of Energy, New Mexico governor, and peripatetic hostage negotiator), Richardson confronted Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, two of North Korea’s dictators, and an assortment of international thugs. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The essence of Richardson’s deal-making was that the commitment must be kept by both parties.

At present Richardson sees one of his deals in jeopardy, and he was in Washington last week to raise the alarm, meeting privately with former colleagues and appearing at a press conference at the National Press Club.

The deal in jeopardy involves a commitment he made, when he was secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, with the Russians to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, the long-lived ingredient in nuclear weapons. There are 34 metric tons of the stuff that the United States is bound, by treaty with Russia, to dispose by integrating it into nuclear fuel and burning it in civilian power plants. This is known as mixed oxide fuel or MOX.

But the Obama administration wants to end the program, before a fleck of plutonium has been processed for fuel. It is seeking to pull the plug on the construction of the facility at a Department of Energy site on the Savannah River in South Carolina, which is two-thirds complete and has already cost over $4 billion.

The administration is now looking not at the completion cost, but at the lifetime cost of the facility. And it is saying that it is too high; although that could have been calculated years ago.

The deal was signed by Vice President Al Gore with Russia back in 2000. The Russians, for their part, are burning their surplus plutonium in fast reactors, which we do not have in operation.

The back story may be not about lifetime cost, but about the deployment of federal dollars in the very near future. Nuclear industry insiders believe that the Department of Energy, which makes nuclear weapons and stockpiles them, wants to divert all available resources to its weapons refurbishment program and, in argot of the moment, kick the plutonium can down the road. New funds are harder to come by than re-purposing extant ones.

The department is floating the idea that the plutonium should be “down-blended,” meaning mixed with some secret ingredient that the department believes will render it safe for all time, and stored in a troubled existing facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

“I don’t believe this is a good course of action.” Richardson told reporters at the press club event. He said the WIPP facility was designed for low-level waste … there would be a lot of opposition in New Mexico.” He was involved in that project, too, when he was in government.

On sanctity of treaties, Richardson said, “I think that [closing down the MOX facility] would be a grave mistake across the board.”

Richardson said that he had negotiated with the Russians as U.N. ambassador and as Energy secretary. In the matter of plutonium disposal, he said the Russians have kept their side of the deal. There was plenty of tension over Ukraine and Syria, and “we don’t need any more tension.” He said, “This is one potential area of cooperation that should not be discarded, and it would be, should the MOX facility be discarded.”

If the MOX facility is shuttered, it will be one of many nuclear facilities across the country, paid for by taxpayers, which have been abandoned because of other priorities or political agendas. The price is high in enthusiasm, creativity and commitment from the workforce at facilities, like the MOX one.

The dollars spent have no legacy except a sad, new kind of national monument: structures that have been left forlorn and incomplete as politics have zigged and zagged. These abandoned structures range from the experimental Fast Flux Test Facility in Hanford, Wash. to the Integrated Fast Reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho to the sad, $18-billion Yucca Mountain facility sitting unused in Nevada. There are many more.

As Richardson might tell, in a long life in public service, you have to defend the deal long after it was signed, sealed and delivered. Not so, perhaps, in real estate transactions. — For InsideSources.com

 


Vietnam Diary: Ho Chi Minh City

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By Linda Gasparello

In Ho Chi Minh City, the steeples of Notre Dame Cathedral and other French colonial-period churches no longer dominate the skyline. Tower cranes are everywhere as scores of high-rise buildings are going up in this city of 8 million, which is widely still called Saigon.

This city is a hive for the young – 60 percent of Vietnam’s population is under 30, and 85 percent is under 40. Educational attainment is rising fast. In Ho Chi Minh City, there are more than 80 universities.

“Young Vietnamese are eager to learn,” said Duc Anh, one of the city’s young entrepreneurs. And earn.

Wearing shiny helmets, cowl scarves pulled up to their noses, jackets and gloves, young Vietnamese swarm the streets on their motorbikes.

Mobile Mom. A young mother, with a rattan high chair perched on her motor scooter, waits on tiptoes.

Mobile Mom. A mother, with a rattan high chair perched on her motor scooter, waits on tiptoes.

Those with dash and cash head, for example, to the Vincom Center, a twin-towered, glassy mega mall in District 1, the city’s center. They hang out in the district’s burgeoning home-grown coffee chains with European-cafe (the French introduced coffee to Vietnam in 1857) ambiance, including Phuc Long Coffee and Startup Coffee. And they club the night away.

But modernization hasn’t come to all of the city’s 24 districts (19 urban and five rural) at a high-octane rate. Traditional culture is parked everywhere from the streets lined with shops carrying just one type of product, to the pungent food stalls in the Binh Tay Market in Cholon, the city’s huge Chinatown, to The Jade Emperor Pagoda, a multi-faith temple, built by the Cantonese in 1909, where turtles swim in the fetid courtyard pools and people pray in a fog of incense smoke.

 

Sacred swimmers. Hundreds of turtles swim in a pool at the Jade Emperor Pagoda

Sacred swimmers. Hundreds of turtles swim in a pool at The Jade Emperor Pagoda.

This diary will meander from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang, a buzzy seaside town, also the capital of Khanh Hoa Province, on the south central coast of Vietnam.

Landmark Meeting

In July, I traveled to Vietnam with my husband, Llewellyn King. It was our second trip to the country in six months, and in a year that marks two important anniversaries: the 40th of the end of the war with the United States, and the 20th of the normalization of diplomatic relations.

During our trip, a milestone in Vietnam-U.S. relations was in the making: Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Vietnam Communist Party, met with President Obama at the White House.

“As you heard, I got an invitation to Vietnam. And I think this is indicative of the remarkable progress that’s taken place in the relationship between our two countries over the last 20 years,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office, following his meeting with Trong on July 7.

“Twenty years is a long period of one’s lifetime. Yet, it is merely a fleeting moment in the long history of relations between nations,” Pham Binh Minh, deputy prime minister and foreign minister, wrote for a news site of the state-run Vietnam News Agency. “Few people could have imagined that Vietnam and the United States would make such great strides in their bilateral ties after two decades of normalized relations.”

Since May 2014, when a fierce fight over sovereignty broke out between communist neighbors Vietnam and China, causing relations to plummet to their worst level in three decades, those strides have become more vigorous in defense. In October that year, the United States decided to partially lift its ban on lethal weapons sales to Vietnam. And three months ago, the two countries announced a Joint Vision Statement to increase defense ties, bolstering the comprehensive political and strategic partnership established in 2013.

Trade between the Vietnam and the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. “From a modest figure of $400 million in 1994, bilateral trade has increased 90-fold to $36.3 billion in 2014. With $30.6 billion in exports to the United States in 2014, Vietnam became ASEAN’s No. 1 exporter to the U.S. market: Vietnam even surpassed India and joined the list of top 10 net exporters to the world’s largest consumer market,” Minh wrote in his July 7 article.

Currently, the United States is the sixth-largest investor in Vietnam, with direct investment of $7 billion, reaching $9 billion with the addition of investment via a third country. In two or three years, the United States will become the top investor in Vietnam, a place now held by South Korea, predicts Matthew Daley, chairman of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. In early May, the council sponsored a group of 23 U.S. businesses on a visit to Vietnam – the largest-ever U.S. business group trip to the country.

It won’t be long before the “Made in China” labels in your clothes and other products will be replaced with “Made in Vietnam” labels. Not long at all: the Chico’s brand sweater I’m wearing has that label.

Crisp Currency

The Vietnamese don’t like creased or crumpled currency. I found this out when I tried to change a $20 bill at the Pullman Saigon Centre, a five-star hotel, in Ho Chi Minh City.

I handed Giang, a front desk clerk, a neatly folded $20 bill, and asked her to exchange it for dong. She handed it right back to me with two hands, saying, “We cannot change it; only new bills. It is a law since 2006.”

By new, she meant hot off the U.S. Mint presses. “Money is money; crisp or crumpled,” I protested.

“No,” she said, “In Vietnam it is not. And so many visitors here are sad when I cannot change their money.” And mad, too, I thought.

I’m not sure there is such a law, but there is a tradition of crisp currency in Vietnam.

“In general people prefer notes to be shiny, new, crisp and unfolded. Traditionally money is given in the New Year, at weddings and other family occasions. Fresh, new notes are considered ‘lucky,’ while grubby, crumpled, soggy notes are very much frowned upon,” according to Jonny Platt, a Briton who has lived a decade in Ho Chi Minh City and writes the Vietnam Travel blog.

“When paying for goods or services, it is polite to straighten the notes and to hand them to a vendor with two hands, making eye contact as you do so,” Platt advises in his blog.

Sweet Thy

When in Ho Chi Minh City, get a guide. That’s my advice.

Mind you, as a lifelong traveler, I love meandering in a city. But when I’ve toured a city with a good guide, it’s really paid off.

Hiring one can be a crapshoot, but my husband and I lucked out twice in this buzzy southern city.

We took two city tours, morning and afternoon, offered by Saigontourist, a state-owned holding company with investments in the hospitality (including the Pullman) and tourism industries. Small and medium-sized, independent tour operators are cropping up, but they’re up against a government giant: I was told, for example, that Saigontourist is one of two companies allowed to provide tours to the cruise ships making calls in Vietnam’s southern ports, which are becoming industry hot spots.

Both guides may have been government employees, but they were anything but dull, especially our afternoon guide, Anh Thy. Indeed, the booking agent said, “You were very lucky. She was a history teacher. She is famous in Saigon.”

During our four-hour tour with Miss Thy (pronounced “tea”), we learned that she was a gifted anthropologist and comedian. Our tour included a visit to the Ben Thanh market; The Jade Emperor Pagoda; the Reunification Palace; and a cyclo ride in Cholon, the Chinatown that dominates the western part of the city.

On one street, Miss Thy pointed out a Fruit Shake shop that sells nuoc ma, sugar cane juice. “We like that drink. So sweet, you don’t have to sweeten it,” she said, adding, “Sugar-cane juice in Fruit Shake with many flavors becomes a high-class beverage in Vietnam.” It’s also a refreshing drink sold all over the country in lowlier stalls and carts.

Miss Thy gave us this food and beverage rule of thumb: Hanoi, located in the North, hot and salty; Hue, in the central part of the country, hot and spicy; Saigon, cold and sweet.

As for coffee, Vietnam is the world’s largest producer of Robusta coffee, a bean variety that coffee experts consider inferior to the Arabica type. But the Vietnamese don’t give a hill of ’em about that, and brewed Robusta is a top drink thanks to Vietnamese ingenuity, which you’ll see everywhere from their agricultural practices to exquisite handicrafts to major engineering projects, to the way millions of motorcyclists know where to buy gas in Saigon, where there are few gas stations — Hint: Look for an upturned brick on a sidewalk, and you’ll find a man with a gas can.

In Ho Chi Minh City and elsewhere in Vietnam, coffee is prepared using a small, metal drip filter. “In the South, we like our coffee cold and sweet with [condensed] milk.” If you crave an Americano or a cappuccino, you can order one at the proliferating European-style coffee shops, like the local My Life Coffee, or the Australian chain, Gloria Jean’s. And they often come – thanks to Vietnam’s French colonial past and current culinary trends – a macaron.

French twist. Coffee is served at the Pullman Saigon Centre Hotel with a macaron.

French twist. Coffee is served at the Pullman Saigon Centre Hotel with a macaron.

Another one of Miss Thy’s food and beverage rules of thumb: “We drink coffee in Saigon; in Hue, they drink coffee and tea; and in Hanoi, they drink tea, like the Chinese.”

 

The Efficient, Stupid Market for Nuclear Electricity

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By Llewellyn King

The market is a wondrous place. It ensures you can drink Scotch whisky in Cape Town and Moscow, or Washington and Tokyo, if you prefer. It distributes goods and services superbly, and it cannot be improved upon in seeking efficiency.

But it can’t think and it can’t plan; and it’s a cruel exterminator of the weak, the unready or, for that matter, the future.

Yet there are those who believe that the market has wisdom as well as efficiency. Not so.

If it were wise, or forward-looking, or sensitive, Mozart wouldn’t have died a pauper, and one of the greatest — if not the greatest architecturally — railway station ever built, Penn Station, wouldn’t have been demolished in 1963 to make way for the profit that could be squeezed out of the architectural deformity that replaced it: the Madison Square Garden/Penn Station horror in New York City.

End of the line

End of the line

Around Washington, Los Angeles and other cities are the traces of the tracks of the railroads and streetcar lines of yore. These were torn up when the market anointed the automobile as the uber-urban transport of the future. As Washington and Los Angeles drown in traffic, many wish the tracks — now mostly bike paths — were still there to carry the commuter trains and streetcars that are so badly needed in the most traffic-clogged cities.

Now the market, with its concentration on the present tense, is about to do another great mischief to the future. An abundance of natural gas is sending the market signals which threaten carbon-free nuclear plants before their life is run out, and before a time when nuclear electricity will again be cheaper than gas-generated electricity. World commodity prices are depressed at present, and no one believes that gas will always be the bargain it is today.

Two nuclear plants, Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt. and Kewaunee in Carlton, Wisc., have already been shuttered, and three plants on the Exelon Corp. system in the Midwest are in jeopardy. They’ve won a temporary reprieve because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says the fact that they have round-the-clock reliability has to be taken into account against wind and solar, which don’t. In a twist, solar and wind have saved some nuclear for the while.

Natural gas, the market distorting fuel of the moment, is a greenhouse gas producer, although less so than coal. However gas, in the final analysis, could be as bad, or worse, than coal when you take into account the habitual losses of the stuff during extraction. Natural gas is almost pure methane. When this gets into the atmosphere, it’s a serious climate pollutant, maybe more so than carbon dioxide, which results when it is burned.

Taken together — methane leaks with the carbon dioxide emissions — and natural gas looks less and less friendly to the environment.

Whatever is said about nuclear, it’s the “Big Green” when it comes to the air. Unlike solar and wind, it’s available 24 hours a day, which is why three Midwest plants got their temporary reprieve by the FERC in August.

When President Obama goes to Paris to plead with the world for action on climate change in December, the market will be undercutting him at home, as more and more electricity is being generated by natural gas for no better reason than it’s cheap.

As with buying clothes or building with lumber, the cost of cheap is very high. The market says, “gas, gas, gas” because it’s cheap – now. The market isn’t responsible for the price tomorrow, or for the non-economic costs like climate change. 

But if you want a lot of electricity that disturbs very little of the world’s surface, and doesn’t put any carbon or methane into the air, the answer is nuclear: big, green nuclear. — For InsideSources.com