White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Economy Is Righting, but Does Congress Get It?

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The great thing about being a pessimist is that something awful may still happen tomorrow. There are still plenty of pessimists about the economy, saying that we are spending our way into perdition; that the Great Reckoning is just around the corner, unless we do draconian things.
 
However on Wall Street, there is hopefulness — even optimism. The stock market is up, the housing market is showing real life and corporate confidence has increased since the Congress delayed action on the fiscal cliff through a bit of old-fashioned give-and-take. Some economists are saying encouraging things, so are the business magazines.
 
There is evidence that the economy, which was heeling badly, is beginning to right. The U.S. economy, still the economic lungs of the world, is breathing easier.
 
Sure, there was a slight dip in performance in the last quarter, reflecting primarily reduced defense spending. It's a hard lesson for the political right to grasp: You can't extrapolate family financial rectitude into national policy, as they like to do. If a family spends more than it is earning, it simply has to cut expenditures. If it doesn’t, the end is known; credit dries up and horrors, like foreclosure, are at hand. Likewise, corporations cut costs, lay off employees and sell assets until the balance sheet recovers.
 
When a family gets into trouble, it doesn't reduce its income by cutting luxuries, it reduces its spending. When a corporation cuts back, it tries to reduce staff not customers.
 
But governments can worsen the situation when they tackle spending at the wrong time. If they cut expenditures too aggressively and too fast, revenues fall, unemployment rises and demands on the public purse grow. Unlike individuals and corporations, governments can’t walk away from their messes.
 
Witness the recessions in Britain, Ireland, Spain and the total catastrophe in Greece. Irresponsible austerity has compounded the results of earlier promiscuous spending. Strong medicine has sent the patient to intensive care.
 
Amy Kremer, head of the Tea Party Express, and many conservative members of Congress playing the pessimist’s card, like to say, and they say it often, “revenue is not the problem, spending is.”
 
If only it were that simple. The problem is many things, including the global recession, the aging population, the high cost of medicine, two wars, badly timed tax cuts, China’s undervalued currency and the balance of payments deficit.
 
Take your pick. The miracle is that the economy is as vigorous as it is.
 
Already it has to deal with the tax increases that came with the budget deal in early January, particularly the increase in the payroll tax, which takes out of the economy money that would normally be spent — the large proportion of the tax which if left in the hands of the salaried class would be disposable. This may be about as much of a hit as it can take at present.
 
But the pessimists, who believe that spending is the mortal sin of our age, want to let sequestration — a 10 percent across the board cut — happen on March 2. The Washington Post says there is no mood in Congress to compromise. But if there is no compromise, the effects could be more devastating than a simple cut in spending. The result, instead, will be a cut in program expenditures while the government’s overhead in salaries and fixed costs will eat up the budget.
 
Austerity has been a disaster for Britain, Ireland and Spain. Do we want to follow the Europeans down that path?
 
The pessimists, who also believe that borrowing is the original sin of politicians, would let this recovery falter through their belief that the government must be starved. Sequestration will starve it, alright. Trouble is we'll all go hungry. There’s pessimism for you. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hail to America’s Microbusinesses

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To hear the members of Congress tell it, small business – which exists in a mythical place in America along with mummy and apple pastries – has just two problems: marginal tax rates and government regulation.
 
For most small businesses, these aren't the problems at all. It's the complexity of taxes and regulations that is the problem.
 
To understand the predicament of small business today, one needs to get a grip on what it is. The Small Business Administration defines small businesses as those with 500 or less on the payroll. But to most small businesses, the bar is lower by a factor of about 10. Most owners think they have moved to a different place if they can number their payroll in the dozens.
 
Really small businesses, also more appropriately called microbusinesses, according to the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), are those with about 12 employees. These are the businesses that create jobs fast when the economy improves. This is where the rubber of entrepreneurism meets the road of reality.
 
These are Americas real entrepreneurs; these are the people who “go on their own,” preferring self-employment to job security. They aspire to make a living first; making a fortune is a distant second.
 
They may repair cars, make artisan bread, book travel, sell yarn, repair computers, print menus, stage events, publish newsletters, houseclean, landscape, stuff sandwiches, shop for others, manage other peoples’ eBay accounts, test for pollution, paint houses and bird dog the paperwork on import-export.
 
Their governmental enemy is not the rate of taxation, as we were told in the debate that led to the fiscal cliff agreement, but rather the complexity of the tax code. Likewise with regulation, licensing and permitting
 
Keith Hall, who advises the 150,000 member-strong NASE, on tax issues says that microbusinesses are overburdened by the complexity of the tax code and have to spend money they can't afford on accounting fees; or, if they enter into the tax labyrinth themselves, risk making mistakes that can lead to costly audits, and as often as not overlook legitimate deductions.
 
The tax code is a war zone for the single entrepreneur, Hall says. Worse, he says, it favors big business both in the way taxes are calculated and in the deductions allowed. Big companies routinely claim deductions that wouldn't be allowed for microbusinesses: “The playing field is not level,” Hall says.
 
One of the biggest problems centers on health care. The unincorporated entity — say, Jim Smith trading as Gold Limousine — cannot deduct his health insurance. The various forms of incorporation have their own penalties, and all involve time and the need for professional help to administer them.
 
Incorporation is not a panacea for the self-employed. Its primary purpose is to limit liability to the incorporated entity and to facilitate a possible sale of the company, or the taking of equity capital.
 
The distress over the tax code is equaled by employment regulations,environmental mandates and rules about working conditions.
 
But all this is nothing compared to the real enemy of small business: big business.
 
Big businesses, particularly chain retailers and restaurants crush small businesses. They crush them every day. The arrival of Walmart, Home Depot, Target or Staples spells death for dozens of small businesses in the neighborhood.
 
The redevelopment of old neighborhoods, where small businesses flourish, also can be fatal. The local mall is a sanctuary for big retail and a mass grave for small endeavors.
 
The lot of the new business, the small new business, is harder today than it has been historically, as there are fewer fields where the behemoths are not dominant. Also banks lend on formula not character, landlords favor the big and established over the new and enterprising.
 
Yet the urge to be in business continues; the lure is freedom, maybe success and the knowledge that you tried. If you want to see the entrepreneurial spirit at work, visit a decayed strip mall. There you'll find rents that are low and hopes that are high.
 
Of course, you could go to a business school and see the creation of another kind of entrepreneur: the corporate animal learning about business plans, return on equity, takeover strategy and how to get a window office.
 
I say the real entrepreneur is the guy with a fishing boat in Maine, or the single mother with a staffing agency in Oregon. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 

Denmark — the Economic Anomaly

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If Europe is being strangled by its social welfare systems, as many in the
United States believe, what is to be made of Denmark? 

Denmark is a social welfare state. It provides free education from kindergarten through university; a free medical system that costs just 9 percent of its gross domestic product, as opposed to the 17 percent that goes to health care in the United States. Women in Denmark get a year of maternity leave; to prevent employers from discriminating against them, men get paternity leave, three months of it.

In addition to this small-weave social net, the Danes, all 5.5 million of
them, are well down the road to a carbon-free future. Currently, windmills generate a whopping 28 percent of Denmark's electricity; by 2020, they will generate 50 percent of the country's electricity. According to Peter Taksoe-Jensen, Danish ambassador to the United States, the plan is for the Danish economy to be carbon-free by around 2050.

As maritime country, Denmark can place much of its wind generation
offshore. Its emphasis on wind power has made it the world's leading exporter of wind turbine technology. A Danish company, Vestas, has three manufacturing sites in the United States that employ 5,000 people. 

In wind farming, size matters; the larger the wind turbine, the cheaper the collection of the electricity, and the more efficient the maintenance. This
is driving the Danes to larger and larger machines. Most onshore wind turbines in the United States are rated a little over 1 megawatt. The Danes have some rated at 6 MW and are contemplating 10-MW monsters far out to sea — where no one except mariners will see them. 

Biomass is also a favorite of the alternative-energy culture in Denmark.
This is a practicality, not a wish. With more than 25 million pigs, manure
is a very available resource for the Danes and they are using it.

Denmark has one of the highest bicycle penetrations in Europe with more than  half of Danes biking to work and everywhere else. In Copenhagen, the principal traffic problem is congestion on the bike paths and bike highways, according to Amb. Taksoe-Jensen. As gasoline costs between  $10 and $12 a gallon, it is not altogether surprising the Danes have learned to love their two-wheelers.

This seeming Green Revolution had its roots not in concern over global
warming, but rather in the Arab oil embargo and the resulting energy crisis of
1973-74. At the time, Denmark was almost entirely dependent on imported oil and other fossil fuels and was very hard hit. Amb. Taksoe-Jensen says the
Danes said to themselves “never again” and set out to become energy
self-sufficient in any way they could with what was at hand. The idea that you could be green as well came later, as a kind of bonus. 

On its journey to a renewable future, Denmark got a leg up from the discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea, which became available in the 1970s. This has now peaked and will be gone in about 20 years. But it has been a valuable transition fuel and currency earner.

Denmark is part of the European Union and NATO. It uses the krone as its currency, which is pegged to the euro.

The economic storms that have been raging over Europe since 2008 have affected Denmark. Global demand for Danish technology and agricultural products has protected Denmark from a severe buffeting. Unemployment which was at 2.5 percent has risen to 6 percent; in most of Europe, unemployment is over 10 percent. 

To this sanguine picture of a future that appears to work, add one more
bonus: for three years straight, polls conducted by the Organization for European Cooperation and Development have ranked the Danes as the happiest people in the world. Last April, a gastropanel crowned Danish restaurant Noma the best in the world for the third year in a row.

For all of this, the Danes pay a price: They have the highest taxes on
Earth and the state is ever-present. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

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Watch Out for the 'Nocebo Effect' in Washington
 
By Llewellyn King
 
Whether you like it or not, you are living in an age of political anxiety. Don’t just sit there, worry.
 
To make it easy for you I'll provide a list of things to worry about. If worrying about them causes them to happen or makes you sick, despairing and even suicidal, then you're experiencing what doctors call the “nocebo effect.”
 
Increasingly, sociologists and some historians are using the nocebo effect to explain instances of national psychogenic illness, when whole countries become anxious and depressed by untrue and harmful information. The Japanese obsession with cleanliness, for example.
 
In his recent book, “Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations,” Chris Berdik writes about a plague of compulsive dancing that hit Strasbourg during the summer of 1518. People were dancing themselves to death in the city's summer heat.
 
Berdik relates that Strasbourg physicians wanted to bleed the dancers, but city fathers prescribed more music, which worsened the epidemic. People believed they'd catch the deadly dancing bug, and they did – an example of the nocebo effect, in which peoples' expectations cause harm.
 
In a placebo effect, according to medical definition, a medication with no known therapeutic value is administered to a patient, and the patient's symptoms improve. The patient believes and expects that the treatment is going to work, so it does. A nocebo effect occurs when a dummy medication taken by a patient is associated with harmful effects due to negative expectations or the psychological condition of the patient.
 
My thesis here is that if we as a nation worry enough about what ails us – or what we're told ails us – we'll do ourselves damage. Indeed, that may be what is tearing Congress apart and is threatening the larger economic well-being of the nation.
 
Here are seven things that may be having a nocebo effect on our national psyche:
 
  1. Our schools are failing to produce the kinds of math and science graduates that will keep us competitive with the Chinese.
 
  1. Our deficit is out of control and will destroy all of us.
 
  1. Our values have been suborned by alien cultures and religions.
 
  1. Our infrastructure is a goner and we'll never be able to fix it.
 
  1. Our political system is irreparably broken, leading to anarchy and lawlessness.
 
  1. The Republicans will control the U.S. House of Representatives forever, the Democrats will control the White House forever and the country will sink into chaos through gridlock.
 
  1. Invasive species like the Burmese pythons are living large in Florida, the Asian carp are making their way up the Chicago River to the Great Lakes and, of course, there is global climate change — after which, Armageddon.
 
As any debtor will tell you, worrying too much creates a kind of toxic syndrome of thought in which solutions are crowded out by anxieties, leading to more disasters: the nocebo effect.
 
The atmosphere in Washington these days is not only poisonous, it's also despairing. Members of Congress are sure nothing good is going to happen. They believe the old military oxymoron that the city has to be destroyed to be saved will apply to the economy, which will have to go into freefall to be saved.
 
That’s the nocebo effect at work. Would anyone like to dance? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 

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How the president let Romney vanquish him

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The trick is to say that you have a plan. If you say it often enough, your opponent will come to fear that you really do have a plan.

A collection of political concepts, informed by ideology, will coalesce in due course, and you'll begin to believe that there is a plan. Just add a sprig of parsley after the election, and it will be ready to serve.

Richard Nixon told the electorate that he had a plan for ending the Vietnam War. He didn't have one, but it was enough to help carry him into the White House.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has studied the "plan" playbook. He used his mythical plans to out-gun President Obama in their first debate.

Romney claims to have a plan for everything. He carried the day with frequent references to his plans, without fleshing out one of them. Talk about faith-based; just believe in Romney's plan, and it will come to pass.

Obama, in a performance that left his supporters ready to hit their heads on hard objects, let Romney build a cotton-candy mountain of sweet conjecture with hardly a challenge. Who advised Obama? Not only did Obama keep his powder dry for the entire engagement, he apparently didn't even bring it with him. He offered a muddled defense and no assault.

No shot was fired toward Romney's gaping vulnerabilities. One glancing round, that looked as if it might be the opening of a barrage, was when Obama told Romney that he'd have difficulty reaching out to the Democrats if he destroyed Obamacare as his first act of business. But the moment passed; the advantage was not driven home.

As so often with Obama, he failed to trumpet what his administration has accomplished: steadying the financial ship, saving the automobile industry, passing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), killing Osama bin Laden, and beginning a course toward rationalizing military expenditures.

These aren't small things; they are things that history may judge Obama very favorably for. But the president let Romney, ably assisted by the weak moderating of Jim Lehrer, characterize them as failure.

If this was the debate on which it all hinges, as many have suggested, then Obama's performance is tantamount to capitulation, again assisted by Lehrer's inability to restrain Romney's volubility bordering on mannerlessness.

Which raises a question that has hung about Obama throughout his presidency: Who is the essential Obama? The president often seems like a guest at his own party. Confidence abounds when he's on stump, but deserts him elsewhere.

It was this second Obama — the man who goes to watch the play when he has the lead role — on the stage in Denver. Obama stood, eyes down, smiling as if to endorse, not discredit, Romney, looking like a spectator who had come to watch Romney's bravura performance. In dealing with a hostile Congress, in lauding what his administration has achieved, even when trying to comfort the bereaved, Obama slips away into a place inside himself; he projects that sense of being alone in a crowd.

A girlfriend of Obama's youth is said to have told him that she loved him, and he responded "thank you." Passion on demand is not Obama's thing.

Romney can turn up the passion for brief interludes, like the debate. It's the sustained effort that makes him look awkward, uncomfortable and unsuited to public life. In the short format he can talk about the "plan" — whatever plan that is. No zingers here, no transcendental thoughts, nothing to suggest he understands how really difficult life is for working people; he conveys no empathy for most of the electorate.

Romney is a throwback to when gentlemen ran for office on the basis that they knew what was good for everyone else. No plan then, just an innate sense of superiority.

Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, is going to have a much harder time in his debate with Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday. That's because he has a plan, and it's written down in his House budget. And most people don't like it.

Perry Peddling the Mythological Texas

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The manner of a man's arriving is not without consequence. Tom Enders, the
German-born and American-educated head of Airbus, the European aircraft
giant, likes to do it by parachute, if it is an open-air event. People
don't always remember what he says, but they sure remember how he got
there.

Of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, it could be said that he parachuted into the
race for the Republican presidential nomination. The manner of his entry
will be remembered, as it was meant to be.

Perry orchestrated a drum roll of media speculation, leading up to his
announcement. He assessed, contemplated, debated, discussed, examined,
explored and weighed entry. The media followed: might he, should he, would
he?

The drum roll, fed by leaks, grew louder as the declared candidates
traveled to Iowa for a debate and straw poll. Then Perry, with an
announcement in South Carolina, jumped and precision-landed on the parade
in Iowa.

Poor Michele Bachmann, left like a performing dolphin that has had its
fish snatched away. She had won the straw poll, deserved a few hours of
party adulation and had her joy cut by this man, who dropped in from the
West, all swagger and handshakes.

Perry hit the ground campaigning, when she was hoping to savor a victory
moment or two. Those famed southern manners don't extend into Texas
politics. Ask fellow Texan, Kay Bailey Hutchison. He crushed her in a
Republican primary in Texas.

In Perry's political lexicon Texas, and things Texan, are at once policy,
ideology and creed. But Perry's Texas is not all of Texas, with its
alluring geographical and social diversity. It is the Texas of the
caricature — of barbecue, boots, swagger and can-do. It is not the Texas
of artists in Austin, of the symphony in Houston, ballet in Dallas or jazz
in San Antonio.

It is an inauthentic Texas, minted not on the ranches and the oil rigs,
nor the ugly, sprawling, low-income housing that surrounds the bustling
cities – a testament to an increasing chasm between rich and poor. It is
not the place where schools are failing, the prisons are overflowing, and
the execution rate is the highest in the advanced world.

Perry's projection of Texas, which he sees as a template for the rest of
the United States, is as inauthentic as tumbleweed — an invasive species
from Russia. Perry's Texas was created in novels, honed in Hollywood and is
part of the myth that Texas and Texans are imbued with qualities denied to
lesser breeds beyond the Lone Star State.

The problem with believing in myth, and elevating it to the the standing
of principle, is that myth is flexible and can be adjusted to reality.
Ergo the early revelation that Perry is happy to disavow difficult things,
like global warming. He says that there is a list of scientists, growing
almost daily, that say global warming is not the result of human activity.
This is cunning. It disavows responsibility without having to deny the
evidence. While the heads of most advanced governments worry about the
impact of greenhouse gases, a President Perry will not have to.

Perry has also laid down his marker as a man of faith, or at least a man
of public piety. He might want to note that the two most publicly
religious presidents of recent times, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush,
left office in low esteem and are not faring well in the first books of
history. He may want to ponder why the Founding Fathers were so anxious to
separate church and state.

Perry's political barbecue sauce, such as berating the Federal Reserve,
may be the precursor to a string of tired, old political nonsenses, like
returning to the gold standard; quitting the United Nations; and
abrogating treaties, in the belief that every commitment abroad is an
infringement of sovereignty.

Perry has made a dramatic entry. Now we wait in trepidation; even George
W. Bush's people are alarmed. Are we to be shown the real Texas, at the
same time proud and flawed, or the synthetic one, doctored for political
effect? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Republican Graybeards: ‘Let Romney Be Romney’

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The scene is the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Reno, Nev. Enter Mitt Romney stage right, dressed as Rambo.

This typecasting goes with the territory for Republican presidential aspirants. None going back to Richard Nixon has been able to resist it because that is what the base wants. The base wants to believe that their man will bound on the world stage with a dagger between his teeth, swathedin belts of ammo, an assault weapon at the ready and a brace of grenades on his belt,  ready to toss at anyone who does not toe the line

The most dangerous part of this metaphorical macho get-up for Romney is the one that is not seen. It is the script by the likes of John Bolton, George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, with editing by an assortment of Bush-era neo-cons, and some old-time Cold War warriors from the Bush and even Reagan era.

One of these men, a former secretary of defense, told me at the time of the Iraq invasion: “At least the Arabs will respect us now.”

In truth, the Arabs got quite a different lesson. It is one that all empires learn eventually: When you invade, you reveal yourself in ways you would rather not have.

One of the many sad lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions is how after brilliant military performances, we fell apart in both countries with inter-agency squabbling, a lack of planning and terrible naivety in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Agency forInternational  Development. Worse, the CIA either did not know or was not heeded about conditions on the ground in either country. Is it possible that no one told George W. Bush about the Sunni dominance of the Shia majority in Iraq? But that is true. Money, lives and respect have been lost.

Conservative foreign-policy thinking is, it seems to me after decades of talking with conservatives about foreign policy, unduly influenced by two aspects of history, both British.

The first is the British Empire. I was born into it and spent the first 20 years of my life in one of its last embers, Rhodesia. Conservatives are right to admire much of the British Empire. It was a great system of trade, education and, much of the time, impartial justice.

It rested on two planks: military superiority and huge confidence in British superiority. Call it British exceptionalism. Its unwinding in Asia and Africa had different causes that led to the same result.

In Asia, and particularly in India, which then included what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh, the end came when the idea of the British as a kind of super-race with their “show” of ceremonies, from tea to parades, plus military and civil skills died. Indians started traveling to Britain, particularly in Victorian times, and were appalled at the squalor they found in British slums. These people were not that super.

In Africa, the end came because of a general sense after World War II that self-determination was the way of the future.

What hastened everything was not only a change in moral perception but also the proliferation of small arms.

Churchill famously said: “I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” But it was dissolving. Britain’s main loss, looking back, was to its pride.

The other British history lesson that is misread by conservative foreign-policy analysts in the United States is Munich.

Certainly when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper on Sept. 30, 1938 and declared, “peace for our time,” he was a hero. He was a hero because just two decades earlier, the British Empire had suffered 3.1 million casualties in World War I.

Churchill knew that this wound was open. He did not refer to the courage and sacrifice of that war when seeking courage and sacrifice in a new war. Also, Britain was not ready for war; rearmament, urged by Churchill, was still in its infancy.

Many old-line Republicans tell me that Romney is not a man who will be marched around by those who brought us Vietnam, Iran Contra and Iraq. He is smarter than that.

They believe that when the time comes, if it comes, President Romney will be Romney. Not Rambo. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Republican Graybeards: ‘Let Romney Be Romney’

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The scene is the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Reno, Nev. Enter Mitt Romney stage right, dressed as Rambo.

This typecasting goes with the territory for Republican presidential aspirants. None going back to Richard Nixon has been able to resist it because that is what the base wants. The base wants to believe that their man will bound on the world stage with a dagger between his teeth, swathed in belts of ammo, an assault weapon at the ready and a brace of grenades on his belt, ready to toss at anyone who does not toe the line

The most dangerous part of this metaphorical macho get-up for Romney is the one that is not seen. It is the script by the likes of John Bolton, George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, with editing by an assortment of Bush-era neo-cons, and some old-time Cold War warriors from the Bush and even Reagan era.

One of these men, a former secretary of defense, told me at the time of the Iraq invasion: “At least the Arabs will respect us now.”

In truth, the Arabs got quite a different lesson. It is one that all empires learn eventually: When you invade, you reveal yourself in ways you would rather not have.

One of the many sad lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions is how after brilliant military performances, we fell apart in both countries with inter-agency squabbling, a lack of planning and terrible naivety in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Agency for International Development. Worse, the CIA either did not know or was not heeded about conditions on the ground in either country. Is it possible that no one told George W. Bush about the Sunni dominance of the Shia majority in Iraq? But that is true. Money, lives and respect have been lost.

Conservative foreign-policy thinking is, it seems to me after decades of talking with conservatives about foreign policy, unduly influenced by two aspects of history, both British.

The first is the British Empire. I was born into it and spent the first 20 years of my life in one of its last embers, Rhodesia. Conservatives are right to admire much of the British Empire. It was a great system of trade, education and, much of the time, impartial justice.

It rested on two planks: military superiority and huge confidence in British superiority. Call it British exceptionalism. Its unwinding in Asia and Africa had different causes that led to the same result.

In Asia, and particularly in India, which then included what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh, the end came when the idea of the British as a kind of super-race with their “show” of ceremonies, from tea to parades, plus military and civil skills died. Indians started traveling to Britain, particularly in Victorian times, and were appalled at the squalor they found in British slums. These people were not that super.

In Africa, the end came because of a general sense after World War II that self-determination was the way of the future.

What hastened everything was not only a change in moral perception but also the proliferation of small arms.
Churchill famously said: “I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” But it was dissolving. Britain’s main loss, looking back, was to its pride.

The other British history lesson that is misread by conservative foreign-policy analysts in the United States is Munich.

Certainly when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper on Sept. 30, 1938 and declared, “peace for our time,” he was a hero. He was a hero because just two decades earlier, the British Empire had suffered 3.1 million casualties in World War I.

Churchill knew that this wound was open. He did not refer to the courage and sacrifice of that war when seeking courage and sacrifice in a new war. Also, Britain was not ready for war; rearmament, urged by Churchill, was still in its infancy.

Many old-line Republicans tell me that Romney is not a man who will be marched around by those who brought us Vietnam, Iran Contra and Iraq. He is smarter than that.

They believe that when the time comes, if it comes, President Romney will be Romney. Not Rambo. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Fuel Revolution that Is Changing the World — And Us

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Colorless, odorless natural gas is changing the world geopolitically and economically in ways undreamed of even five years ago.

It is a giant upheaval of which President Obama is both the beneficiary and the victim. He benefits because low natural gas prices are helping consumers and industry. And he is undermined by them because the cheap gas is savaging his dreams of “green” energy alternatives with scads of jobs attached.

The technologies which have brought on the gas boom also are contributing to enhanced oil production in the United States. Who would have believed that North Dakota would become the third-largest oil-producing state?

But the price of gas, now at historical lows, is also a political difficulty for Obama. His energy policy has been based on the old reality of shortage and a need for “alternatives.”  In the administration’s scheme of things, the slack was to be taken up by the renewable sources ofenergy, wind, solar and wave power. With natural gas in plentiful supply and pushing out coal and new nuclear, the president is saddled with his failed attempts to push alternatives and to create a plethora of “green” jobs.

Yet without the boost that oil and natural gas are giving to the economy, it would be in worse shape than it already is.

A similar natural resources boom in the North Sea greatly aided Margaret Thatcher’s government and has underwritten Britain’s economy to this day, when production and British prosperity are both in decline.

New technology has brought the gas boom to the world and with it a change in geopolitics, soothing some tensions and exacerbating others.

The biggest excitement is in the Eastern Mediterranean, where there have been huge discoveries of gas — and sometimes oil and gas — off the coasts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and around the Island of Cyprus.

The problems reflect the old tensions of the regions and some new ones, such as the growing estrangement between Israel and Turkey and the projection of Russian interests in the region.

Cyprus, itself a divided island since the Turkish invasion of 1974, is the closest member of the European Union to chaotic Syria and is being courted on several fronts by Russia.

Russia is worried about new gas supplies affecting its monopoly in gas supply in Europe, as well as the future of its naval base in Syria. As a result, Russia is pouring money and people (150,000) into Cyprus to keep its options in the Mediterranean open.

Cyprus would like to become a transshipment point for Israeli gas (when a gas liquefaction plant is built). But claim to reserves in its own territorial waters are being contested by Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots. About 63 percent of the island is controlled by 900,000 Greek Cypriots who claim to speak for the whole island.

With new gas everywhere, there will be a rush to find markets. Europe, for example, is hoping to ease its Russian gas dependence by building pipelines that will bring gas from Central Asia through Turkey  avoiding Russia. Others, like Qatar, are looking away from Europe and to Asia for new customers.

The appeal of gas to electric utilities everywhere is undeniable. It burns with about half the greenhouse effluent than oil and coal. The power plants are easily sited, do not need huge cooling structures and the capital cost is low.

However, methane, which makes up 75 percent of natural gas, is a serious greenhouse contributor and needs to be kept out of the environment. The other components of natural gas are ethane, 15 percent, and butane and propane come in at about 5 percent each. Natural gas is the world’s most abundant compound.

While the case against the swing to gas is primarily environmental, there is an economic concern about costs in the decades to come. The environmental case is twofold:

• One, that although it produces less CO2, a principal greenhouse gas, than coal or oil, it still produces half as much as they do.

• Two, that hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking” affects groundwater, uses too much water itself in the process and may stimulate earthquakes.

Yet the chances of the world or the United States turning away from this new bounty are nil.

If the 19th century belonged to coal and the 20the century to oil, it looks as though the 21st will be the natural gas century. Reports of the death of fossil fuels are wildly exaggerated. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Old New England Mills Where Profit and Beauty Entwined

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Across New England they stand as testaments to a time when the United States was a place of untrammeled confidence. The air was infinite, the water clean and abundant. At least for those in the ownership class, life was good and getting better.

They are the great textile mills of New England; magnificent stone and brick structures, in their way as beautiful as basilicas, found along the streams of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Water, as a motive power source, drew them to the streams. Then they added steam, hence the mills’ magnificent smokestacks: sentries standing lonely guard over the memories of a more confident time.

Mostly the mills are abandoned now, waiting a new use or the wrecker’s ball. Some have been saved by being converted into residential lofts and art centers. None will again make cloth, or provide thousands of jobs.

Before critics and designers began linking form to function, the mill architects of New England, these designers of castles of production, did so, using great stonework and imaginative engineering. They are stunningly handsome, the way that great bridges are; the spirit ofenterprise encased in stone and brick lovingly.

So when and why did we develop a penchant for ugly buildings? Was it the downside of cost accounting? Why are so many modern schools dumpy and deformed? Why must we put our children to study the classics in structures that implicitly deny the classics?

Winston Churchill said, “We shape buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Indubitably.

In the second half of the 20th century, did we hand human aspiration over to cost-cutters, put it through a calculating machine and turn it out bent and spindled? Must we learn to appreciate the economics of urban blight, the strips of chain outlets that presage our arrival in any town or city?

One can weep now over the beauty of a mill in Rhode Island or a grain elevator on a Virginia farm. But will we weep in a century over the golden arches? Shed a tear for the mall? Swallow hard for Public School 19 somewhere?

If the abandoned mills of the Industrial Revolution were just a little older, we would characterize them as archeological sites — perhaps U.N. World Heritage Sites — and assure their survival for generations to come to marvel at.

Of course the history of New England industrialized weaving was not without strife and folly, greed and cruelty.

The loom technology was smuggled out of Britain by industrial espionage, labor conditions wereterrible for much of the life of the mills, and labor unrest continued through all the days of the textile industry. Royal Mills in West Warwick, R.I., for example, the former home of Fruit of the Loom, was the scene of a bitter strike in 1922.

 

Powering yesterday, charming today

 

Incidentally, this giant mill has been preserved. In a stunning piece of imaginative restoration, it has been converted into 250 apartments, keeping the feel and preserving some of the artifacts of the old mill. It is a restoration that deserves global recognition for showing how the 19th century’s relics can find life in the 21st century, just as the restored power plant on the South Bank of the River Thames in London now houses the Tate Modern art gallery.

When old beauty meets new high purpose, something thrilling happens.

The trick in urban architecture is to remember the people who are outside of the buildings as well as inside; those who can glory in the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower by looking up as well as going in.

For this full enjoyment, great architecture needs great public space.

Would the skyscrapers of New York be as glorious without Central Park to view them from? Would the new "Shard," the extraordinary glass-clad building in London, the tallest in Europe, be as great if it could not be viewed from the city’s abundant public spaces?

Yet urban design today, in an age of public austerity, makes no allowance for public space and has come accept the myth that economics are at odds with great city design.

I am comforted to know that the great squares of London, the avenues of Paris and the mills of New England were built for profit. It can be done. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate