White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Anatomy of the Underclass in Britain

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Societies, like soup, need to be stirred from time to time. Britain has erupted into rioting and looting because of too much welfare, too little opportunity, too few jobs, too little education, but mostly because of a kind of social calcification.

While the old British class system, born of land aristocracy and later incorporating business-derived money, exerted downward pressure on all the levels, modern Britain, which has been forming since the end of World War II, is a more liberal place.

Aspiring Britons are no longer despised by other Britons by the way they speak, as George Bernard Shaw said. Upward mobility is easier than ever, though probably less so than in the United States where it is almost a constitutional right.

However, the new liberalism in business and the arts has been at odds with a different liberalism at play in government policies. It is the liberalism of providing for the needy. The result has been the growth of a new social order: the underclass.

The state, under both Labor and Conservative governments, has sought to save ever-larger numbers of people from all the agonies of life at the bottom. But instead of achieving this it has created a new citizen, tethered to the state in all aspects of life, including health and child care; job training instead of a job; unemployment income that can last a lifetime; plus money for having babies, and arguably money for not getting a job.

Where this liberalism has failed is the one thing that it is reasonable to ask of the state: to educate the children. Public education in Britain is as ramshackle and as fraught with problems as it is in America.

If you fall through the cracks in Britain kindly hands will comfort you, pay your rent, give you money, pretend to educate you and pretend to retrain you. They will also possibly trap you at the bottom, but they will certainly trap your children.

Life at the bottom is survivable in Britain — more so than most countries, including the United States. But it is corrosive and it has produced a culture of sloth, vulgarity, casual parenthood and celebrity adulation. The life is coarse and fueled by relentless television-viewing and boozing.

These are the people who have been rioting across Britain, producing television images not reminiscent of Britain but of the intifada on the West Bank: hooded youths stoning the police and torching cars and buildings.
What to do? Liberals will call for more of what has not worked: more social initiatives, more youth centers, more a job training and remedial education. Conservatives will call for harsher treatment: more better -armed police, longer prison sentences and talk about family and morals.

More difficult to address is why so many of what was the working class have fallen to the bottom, and why society continues to stratify.

First, there is the loss of the Empire. The British were always able to change their luck by going “out to the Empire.” At one time, young people could remake themselves in distant British lands, from Kenya to Burma or Canada to New Zealand. There were incentives not to stay put but to go forth. It was a great social safety valve.

The other loss was national service — even more important to the well-being of the body politic in Britain than in America. Lacking our social and geographic mobility, the draft provided skills and launched careers. Also for stratified Britain, it reminded people in one social strata about the existence of people in other strata.

A very distinguished musicologist, Bernard Jacobson, has always benefited as a writer by his superior touch-typing skills. He was taught these by the Royal Air Force, which quickly realized that this dreamer from Oxford should not be allowed near an aircraft.

John Adams, a management and public affairs savant in Washington, was serving with British forces in Korea when word came through the radio on a tank that Winston Churchill had won the election of 1951. Bravo! Adams cheered, but the rest of his squad booed. He looked at them with new eyes. They were all Brits fighting in a foreign land, but they were of different backgrounds.

Denis Nordin, popular here on the BBC radio program “My Word,” credited World War II for liberating young Jews — cockney accented Jews like himself — to have a career in the theater. Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser and cosmetics mogul, said the same thing.

As the underclass of Britain, modern only in that they have cell phones, rampage, the question is what will stir the pot this time? What will bring the bottom to the top the next time? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Mysteries of Europe

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Magazines, newspapers, even the television, are urging me to get to a
beach and to read mysteries. Actually, I don’t go to the beach much; and I
can’t say I read more when I’m there.

But I do read mysteries. This has been a year when I’ve had difficulty
putting them aside.

It’s the politics of times that has driven me to the mystery section of a
bookstore: a magic larder of easy escapism where the shelves are never
bare. One reaches a point where the White House’s assertion that green
energy jobs are going to refloat the economy and cut unemployment is
certifiably fiction. Or the Tea Party’s belief that if you cut economic
activity by slashing the budget, you will, yes, create jobs as far as the
eye can see. Or, the Ayn Rand-derived idea that greed is akin to
godliness; that markets alone will cure all the ills of the human
condition, from broken hearts to stillborn children.

But what to read? Robert Ludlum, Michael Connelly and James Patterson,
the most successful mystery writers of the moment, don’t really do it for
me — although I like the idea of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a Connelly
creation.
My real escape this year has been to Europe – but Europe through the eyes
of three skilled, American mystery concocters. I want adventure, sheer
escape, but I also want a little more: As with journalism, I want to know
a little something that I didn’t know before.

First among equals is Alan Furst whose mysteries, set largely in eastern
Europe between 1933 and 1944 (“Spies of The Balkans,” “The Spies of
Warsaw” and “The Foreign Correspondent,” among others) are on a level with
John le Carre. He gives us history in a time of foreboding, with sinister
forces at play.

If your passion is for a gutsy, sexy private eye carrying on in her
father’s tradition as a Paris flic, and you also desire a little French
slang (Did you know that “mec” is slang for “guy”?) and a lot of French
bistro life, pick up any one of a slew of novels by Cara Black. She’s the
most prolific of my three authors — all of whom were teachers before they
succeeded as novelists.

My favorite at the moment is Donna Leon, whose protagonist, Commissaro
Guido Brunetti, is with the police in Venice. Like Black, she shares the
local architecture, food and a soupcon of ancient Roman literature, as
Brunetti humors his ghastly boss, spars with his well-born wife and,
through dogged police work, unearths evil and corruption. He doesn’t do
big violence or acts of derring-do. He does solid questioning, local
travel and is sustained by grappa and coffee.

Black gives us Aimee Leduc, the very sights and smells of Paris, and plots
that are almost believable. You know she’s going to do things against big
odds; and you so want her to come out unscathed, which she does.

Leon does for Venice what Black does for Paris: complete immersion. Of
course you learn things about Venetian cuisine and the climate. But you
also learn about the diversity of regional speech in Italy; and how the
characters from Venice, or Naples, will speak to each other in their
dialect and break into “Italian” with people from other regions, or on
formal occasions.

If you want your mind to travel far away from Barack Obama, Harry Reed,
John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, et al., try reading a good
mystery: The characters are so much better formed and more believable. You
can even take the book to the beach, if you like that sort of thing.

Slash Government Spending? Think again

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From one end of this land to the other, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Key West, Fla., and from Portland, Maine, to Honolulu, you can get a round of applause by stating that the government is too big. Way too big.

But I ask you, in the name of all of those heresies that have proven to be true, is it too big? Maybe we have the government we ordered up, and it is just the size that, subliminally, we want.

The government may be less than efficient, employ too many people at high wages for low output and sometimes be maddeningly illogical. But those things are not a function of size. They are a function of the wrong dynamics in the structure of government, and they won't be cured by clear-cutting the government itself. We need a forester, not a logger.

The fact is that we the people want a lot of government and, whether we like that or not, we keep ordering up more and more. It will be a neat trick to keep it from getting bigger, just because we keep tasking it to do more. Also, we want to be first in all things from space exploration to green energy.

Do we really want the Chinese walking on the Moon, or an Indian spacecraft circling Mars?

Do we really want to buy our green-generating technologies from Norway?

Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, likes to list those government programs that he, with the wisdom of a Renaissance man, finds foolish. But when you add up his examples, even if he were right, they amount to a few billion dollars in a time of trillions.

Mostly, it is programs they do not understand that bring out the conservative axes. I wonder if Phillips would have supported research on the Internet (a crazy idea hardening computers against nuclear attack)?

The big program that is eating our fiscal cake, for anyone to see, is Medicare.  If you are on Medicare, you can list the waste that you are obliged to countenance. We all have stories of unnecessary X-rays, MRIs and multiple blood tests. But is that the only problem?

Suppose we were to cut the cost of Medicare in half?

Wow, that would be saving! Well, we spend between 16 and 17 percent of our gross domestic product on all medicine, including Medicare. In western Europe, that figure is just over 8 percent — some with state systems like Britain, and some with hybrid state and private systems like Germany and Holland.

Maybe, we should overcome our Europhobia and find out how they get the same things for less. If that is too much to swallow, look to Japan: It has excellent medicine for a smaller-yet bite of its GDP.

Social Security, the other great potential budget buster (it hasn't happened yet) is subject to relatively easy fixes. Calculate retirement age on years worked. A college graduate works about 44 years. Extend that.

A carpenter works at least four years longer than a college graduate, but is physically unable to work after age 65. Give him or her credit for the equivalent of time served in the workplace.

Meanwhile, new risks to society demand more government responses — not fewer. Try cybersecurity, ocean pollution, invasive species, illegal immigration, climate change, infrastructure renewal and medical research.

I want to know about new and dangerous mosquitoes carrying tropical diseases that have invaded the United States. I also want bed bugs and stink bugs to be brought under control. And I trust the government has scientists looking into these pesky things.

I also want the government to take diseases like myalgic encephalomyelitis seriously and bring hope to a million suffering Americans, and many millions more around the globe.

We got the government we have because we voted for it piece by piece. Now it is in trouble. When in financial difficulty, cut your expenditures as much as possible — and there are limits here — and then try to get a raise. In government-speak, we call that a tax increase. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Murdoch Is Felled by a Disease He Once Cured

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In the 1960s, even to an old union man like myself, British newspaper
unions had reached a point at which they were a threat not only to the
newspaper industry, but also to the freedom of the press itself.

It took someone as ruthless and sociopathic as the unions to find a way to
break their hold. That man was Rupert Murdoch and he did it with
outstanding courage, cheek and military-like planning.

In theory, the deal was simple: If the unions would not behave in the
workplace, he, the proprietor, would move the workplace.

In today’s world, this sounds easy. But in those days, trade union rights
were regarded as inviolable. A blow against one union was a blow against
all unions. “Solidarity,” in union speak, was awesome.

Yet Murdoch set out to leave London’s Fleet Street; then the physical home
of nearly all of Britain’s national papers, now the metaphorical home of
British journalism.

In secret Murdoch built the most modern printing plant of its day in
Wapping, the old dock area in the East End of London. He surrounded it with
razor wire and prison-like defenses and secretly recruited new workers
from the areas of Britain with the highest unemployment.

Nothing so bold had ever happened in British industrial relations.

To get the operation rolling, Murdoch made demands of the National
Graphical Association — the most militant of the unions — on
computerization. The union did not want journalists touching computers,
and they wanted no changes in the antiquated machinery that they used.

Strikes were frequent and often unofficial: The workers just downed tools
over almost always imagined grievances. Then they started censoring the
newspapers: They would not print newspapers with editorial material they
disapproved of. Production was said to be “lost.” This euphemism meant
that the newspapers never appeared in some markets.

If a newspaper were to run a story about communist penetration of the
unions, which was rife, the printers censored it. Sometimes they allowed a
blank space to appear, and sometimes the paper had to withdraw the
offending-but-accurate report to get printed at all.

With planning worthy of a great general, Murdoch orchestrated the move to
Wapping and sprung it on the country as a fait accompli in late January
1986. The journalists, who belonged to a less belligerent union, the
National Union of Journalists, were divided. Some “went to Wapping,”
others quit.

All of Murdoch’s titles moved, including the weekly News of the World, The
Sun, a daily, and the venerable Times and Sunday Times. Five thousand
old-line workers were sacked for honoring what the unions said was a
provoked strike.

But the press was saved, and Murdoch saved it. All the newspapers made it
to fight another day.

The unions had become arrogant, thuggish and sociopathic. They did not
care about the principles of a free press, the illogic of their Luddism or
the greater harm to society. Power and money was their thing, and they had
power: power to boss the bosses, power to set the number of workers who
worked each night, and increasingly power to determine what was printed.

Lord Rothermere, one of Britain’s newspaper barons, was once asked, “How
many people does it take to produce The Daily Mail?” His lordship replied,
“About one quarter.”

The featherbedding was awesome. Some delivery drivers got paid by three
newspapers for delivering papers when they were, in fact, working
somewhere else altogether.

So there is a fine irony that the Murdoch’s News Corp. now stands accused
of many of the sins of the unions he disciplined: sociopathic arrogance; a
desire to control the news as well as cover it; and a thuggish corruption
that reached into the highest levels of at least three British
administrations, Thatcher, Blair and Cameron; and has brought low the
world’s largest and most storied police force, the Metropolitan Police,
known as Scotland Yard.

Murdoch’s many newspapers in England accumulated so much power that they
began to dictate the news, orchestrate policy and politicians came live in
awe of the power of the News Corp. apparatus to reveal people’s private
lives, delve into their finances, and have their careers boosted or
blunted by columnists and selective reporting.

Many years ago, before Murdoch established himself in Fleet Street, one of
its legendary characters, Harry Procter, wrote an angry memoir called
“Street of Shame.” Yes, indeed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Prime Ministers and Publishers: An Unholy Alliance

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Lord Northcliffe: The Read Baron

Lord Northcliffe

 

British newspaper publishers love prime ministers. Conversely, prime ministers love publishers. That is, if the publisher in question owns a national newspaper with a big circulation (often in the millions).

You cannot get into the club if you only own, say, the Lewisham Borough News. This is an exclusive club for those who wield real, palpable power: Witness the scandal of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in Britain today.

The club has been operating for more than 200 years. But it was at the turn of the 20th century, with ever-expanding voter rolls, that the intimacy became really intense. Victorian prime ministers had to put up with editors and owners of journals of opinion, like The Spectator or Punch, and sometimes The Times.

Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his Liberal rival, William Gladstone, bargained with the media of their day. But these did not sway huge swathes of the electorate in the way that was to come. General education produced millions of avid readers and improved printing technology, notably the Linotype machine, made large mass- circulation newspapers possible.

Two brothers, Vere Harmsworth and his more colorful sibling, Alfred, were the first big-time press barons. In time, they were rewarded with titles: Alfred became Lord Northcliffe and Vere, Lord Rothermere.

It is unlikely that all of the prime ministers — and all of them had to deal with the press barons — really liked the intimacy. These men mostly had huge egos, daunting agendas, and their friendship always came with a price. So, of course, did the friendship of the politicians. They sought support in elections and freedom from scrutiny in governing.

Part of the price was usually the peerage, but then there were other considerations. Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian, wanted prime ministers to endorse his campaign for “Empire Free Trade.” Others had other interests; but the tariffs on newsprint, the subsidy of cable traffic (which made getting news from overseas cheaper), and subsidized postal rates for newspapers and periodicals were common to all.

Northcliffe lectured World War I Prime Minister Lloyd George on how to run the war — and everything else. Beaverbrook treated Lloyd George’s successor, Bonar Law, a fellow Canadian, as his surrogate in government and campaigned for him relentlessly.

After that, Beaverbrook turned his demonic energies to supporting Winston Churchill — even though Churchill was at a low period during much of the1930s. Not only was the man who was to be Britain’s greatest prime minister out of power, he was also out of money.

The newspaper proprietors, in surprising unity, came to Churchill’s aid. Churchill boasted that he made 1 million pounds from his articles in one year and retired his debts. That was an astounding amount of money, and it reflected the fact that the newspaper bosses were overpaying him enormously, according the historian A.J.P. Taylor.

The leading paymasters were Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, and Brendan Bracken, the Irishman who owned the Financial Times. In Churchill they saw potential, a lively contributor, and someone who gave the best dinner parties in England. Bracken even encouraged rumor that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son, although he knew this was nonsense.

The cultivating of prime ministers was an ecumenical affair. Cecil Harmsworth King, who ran Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1960s, lectured Prime Minister Harold Wilson on everything, including his own somewhat ridiculous idea that Britain needed a bipartisan national government — as in wartime — to get it out of his its financial difficulties. Rupert Murdoch went all out for Margaret Thatcher. But he turned against her successor, John Major, and supported the Labor Party and Tony Blair. Gordon Brown failed to get Murdoch’s nod, but current Prime Minister David Cameron did. The rest, as they say, is history.

When television came along, the proprietors had a new incentive to cultivate prime ministers: licenses. The big winner here was the least pushy of the publishers, Roy Thomson, another Canadian, who owned The Times. He got the license to run commercial television in Scotland and became Lord Thomson. Like Murdoch, Thomson did not crave the company of prime ministers. He was happy to let others carry his requirements to the men in power. Murdoch has used various  intermediaries, including the American economist and free-market ideologue Irwin Stelzer.

Is it all over now? Will prime ministers shun the company of media barons?

Will the sun rise in the East tomorrow?  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

Mugabe, the Jeweled Raptor

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Diamonds are a dictator's best friend. Just ask Robert Mugabe, president
and dictator of Zimbabwe.

When things seemed to be at their worst for Mugabe, diamonds were
discovered at Marange, in eastern Zimbabwe. The old monster was saved
because he got enough money to pay his thugs. One of the first lessons of
dictatorship: Keep the thugs happy.

Mugabe, who had destroyed his currency, starved his people and turned the
breadbasket of Africa into yet another begging bowl, looked as though he
was through, when in 2006 diamonds were found in an unexpected place.

Thousands of itinerants flooded into Marange to lay claim to the riches,
under the colonial-era mining laws. They had few tools, but they had hope.

Sadly, they also had Mugabe.

He sent in his military to evict the miners. They used helicopter
gunships; at least 200 miners were slaughtered and the rest were driven
off. The army took over the diamond fields and Mugabe was renewed in
power.

There has been enough money (about $1.7 billion a year), through official
and unofficial diamond sales, not only to keep the thugs in power and their
Mercedes-Benzes fueled. But there also may have been enough money quiet
Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change and impotent prime minister.

When I asked two very brave women, who have cycled in and out of jail
because they tried to do something about the pitiful condition of
women in Zimbabwe, whether they were hopeful about Tsvangirai and the
opposition, one of them snorted: “Government in Zimbabwe is about who gets
a Mercedes-Benz.”

Peter Godwin, who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1957 and who has
been a fearless chronicler of the decline and fall of his homeland in
books and articles, has pointed out the evil of these “coalition”
governments. It is, he has said, a spoils system where elections are
negated when the contestants decide they both won; and in a united
government, they can just divide up the spoils instead of fighting over
them.

In Zimbabwe the fear is that Tsvangirai, rather than resolving to get rid
of the Mugabe government apparatus, if he ever becomes president, will
keep it and perfect it. Mugagbe preserved the most repressive colonial 
laws to use at will himself, while blaming the white settlers for them.

One of Mugabe's gambits, detailed by Godwin, is particularly cruel: How you
appear to win elections fairly when you have coerced the electorate
cruelly. Suspected opposition supporters are seized by the police and the
military in the rural areas and then are taken to torture centers -- located in
schools -- where they are beaten and maimed. Often, their feet and legs are
pulped. The children of dictatorships learn their lessons early. The victims 
are sent back to their villages as a perpetual reminder of
what happens if you vote against the “Big Man.” 

Even so, it should be noted the Mugabe lost the last election and simply
stayed. His concession to the winner, Tsvangirai, was to stop bringing 
treason charges against him and to make him prime minister. Not so much 
power-sharing as loot-sharing.

Watch for more of it as faux democracy continues in Africa, south of the
Sahara and possibly north of it.

Like Godwin, I was born in Rhodesia. Like many young people at the
time, inside and outside of the country, we dreamed of a free,
multi-ethnic Africa -- the whole continent a kind of Garden of Eden. Our
template for that was Rhodesia of the time: peaceful, prosperous, idyllic,
but in need of extending the franchise genuinely to all the people -- de
facto ensuring black government.

Instead, we got Ian Smith: a brave fool who tried to extend the status quo
and brought on a race war which brought Mugabe to power.

In his first days as president, while Mugabe was feted around the world
and showered with honors, he sent his dreaded 5th Brigade into
Matabeleland; the stronghold of his opponent Joshua Nkomo, later to be
incorporated into the Mugabe system of government, but not before 20,000
of his Ndbele people had been killed by the Mugabe men.

For 31 years, the government of Mugabe and his “security” men has reduced
Zimbabwe to ruin, driving maybe as many as 3 million people into refugee
status in neighboring countries, starving and beating the people of my
childhood.

The tears of Africa, like diamonds, seem to be forever. 
-- For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Give Yourself a Present, America

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A lightness of countenance has fallen on Washington. I kid you not. Strangers were talking to each other in elevators, smiles in the street made walking a pleasure.

Even President Obama lightened up. At his midweek press conference, the president seemed in an unusually good mood: helping NBC’s Chuck Todd sort out his questions, referring cheerfully to the work ethics of his daughters (and his own), and lampooning the corporate jet set.

Had peace broken out somewhere? On Capitol Hill, in Libya or Afghanistan, between Los Angeles Superior Court judge Stephanie Sautner and Lindsay Lohan — her honor dropping by for a few belts?

No. It all comes down to the prospect of a four-day weekend. It should be three days, but many are able to stretch it to four. Heapings of happiness!

By the joy this little perturbation in routine has wrought, it’s clear that Americans are overstretched, overworked, overstressed and badly in need of R&R — even just a syllable of it — over the Fourth of July weekend.

Also it’s a birthday bash. Uncle Sam has made it through another year and the dollar is still worth having; the barbecue worth lighting; and the hamburger, America’s great contribution to cuisine, worth eating. Even though Budweiser — like so much else nowadays — belongs to a foreign company, millions of us still find it worth drinking.

Hooray! Happy Birthday! For he’s a jolly good fellow! (Uncle Sam, that is).

Unlike many others of the British persuasion, as I once was, I agree with my colleague Martin Walker that Brits shouldn’t feel loss on the Fourth of July, but should be leading the celebration.

Walker, who knows a thing or two about celebrating, says: “I’m not downcast by the victory of honest British colonial farmers over a German king and his German mercenaries.”  

That’s right, Americans love the Brits. Otherwise, why would a country that threw off the imperial yoke on July 4, 1776, go bats for the wedding of Prince Harry, heir to the despised throne once occupied by George III?

One thing the Brits do have over us: their vacations. A worker averages about a month a year of vacation.

Of course, it would never work here — especially not in Washington. Think of the anxiety. Oh the fear of being left out, losing your job or just being bored. Americans on long vacations get surly, marriages creak and desperate couples hunch over lunch in faraway places, trying to decide where to have dinner.

No. No. No. Our special genius has been the creation of the long weekend. We have more of them than most countries; they are envied even by the French who talk about — I kid you not again — le long weekend.

We have something here. Instead of pining for more vacation , we should build on the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Memorial Day by working only a four-day week.

I don’t like to point fingers, but there are those in the bureaucracy who are pioneering the new order for us. Around Washington, in the aisles of the supermarket and the sporting-goods emporium, you can hear it every Friday: Some person of impeccable rectitude about other things, declaring, “I’m working from my home office today.”

At the commuter rail station I use, parking is a big problem every day of the week except Fridays, when more than half the spaces are open. Well, not casting aspersions, I have to advise that 80 percent of the riders are government employees. Ah, the lure of the “home office” on Friday.

Here’s my proposal: Increase the workday to 10 hours and have three-day weekends every week. Once again America will be the envy of the world, even if we have to prohibit home-office work by civil servants on Thursdays. This way we’ll be a happier people. We’ll have given ourselves a present that keeps on giving.

Happy Birthday, America. And spare a kind thought for the Brits, who lost the best piece of real estate on Earth. Poor dears. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

 

 

That’s the Spirit!

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Llewellyn King, the British-born host of “White House Chronicle,” stands on a sidewalk in Georgetown, a green and pleasant neighborhood located in northwest Washington, D.C., along the Potomac River waterfront. On Thursday, Georgetown was festooned with flags and filled with pre-Fourth of July revelers.

Georgetown was founded in 1751, well before the establishment of the city of Washington and the District of Columbia, when the Maryland legislature purchased 60 acres of land for the town from George Gordon and George Beall at the price of 280 pounds.

Some believe that Georgetown was named after those two wealthy landowners. Others believe that its name has royal origins, since it was founded during the reign of George II of Great Britain.

Certainly, it wasn’t named after the Father of Our Country. But George Washington frequented Georgetown, including a long-gone watering hole, Suter’s Tavern, which was the site of land deals involved in establishing Washington as the “Federal City.”

In Nuclear, U.S. Is Still the Gold Standard

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In nuclear industry parlance the “gold standard” has special significance and there is real concern the world may slip below that standard as the U.S. industry falters.

Gold standard is the term applied globally to the U.S. regulation and licensing of nuclear power plants. It is a term of respect for American standards of excellence. It was widely used at a meeting of the Nuclear Infrastructure Council in Washington Tuesday and Wednesday; and surprisingly, coming from French and Chinese lips, was an affirmation of the whole licensing and regulatory apparatus that exists in the United States.

The fear is that as the United States lags in the construction of reactors and while it continues to eschew fuel reprocessing, the gold standard will lose its luster to a world that is building new nuclear at breakneck speed and is, or plans, to reprocess the used fuel.

Most of today’s concern is about China, now committed to the fastest growth in nuclear. But India is also building and others like the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Brazil and Argentina are thinking about it.

Will a deterioration in the quality of construction, regulation and operation occur? Not if the gold standard continues to be respected and reflects the latest innovations, according to industry sources in Europe and America. Otherwise, a slew of new reactors could be less safe than they might be.

At present, according to the companies involved in China including Westinghouse Electric, the Shaw Group, a U.S. construction firm and the French giant Areva, they are maintaining the gold standard. The term embraces total quality assurance from licensing integrity to concrete and steel specifications, to analysis of components and certification of welds.

What is surprising about the idea of the gold standard is how long it has endured. It goes back to the Eisenhower administration and the Atoms for Peace program. This was an ambitious idea that the civilian benefits of atomic power would be spread across the world. Implicit in the program was the assumption that the U.S. nuclear industry would control world nuclear commerce and, as a result, safety standards would be the highest. Proliferation and accidents would be guarded against by the gold standard, exercised through the dominance of the U.S. industry.

The world’s fledgling nuclear industry accepted this U.S. technological hegemony happily. No one wanted a nuclear accident; and those who wanted to build a weapon would do so clandestinely, as Saddam Hussein tried to do in Iraq.

The gold standard regime was first challenged when President Jimmy Carter — a nuclear engineer who was ambivalent about nuclear — yielded to the left wing of the Democratic Party and decided that the United States would unilaterally not process used nuclear fuel. Carter’s point man in this folly was Joseph Nye of Harvard. The industry and those interested in maintaining the gold standard were appalled.

I crossed swords with Nye, highly regarded as an academic and intellectual, at the Uranium Institute (now the World Nuclear Association) annual meeting in London in September 1977. So heated was our discussion that Nye followed me out of the hall into the street, urging me to accept his point of view.

 

Although that was decades ago, it was the first blow to the gold standard. Other countries proceeded with reprocessing: Areva and British Nuclear Fuels claim it is a very profitable business, as well as greatly reducing waste volumes.

Despite this insult to nuclear, the gold standard held — possibly at 18 carats rather than 24 carats.

But the Obama administration is doing what Carter did all over again.

Carter tepidly endorsed nuclear, while opposing reprocessing and a demonstration fast breeder reactor authorized by Congress. Obama has been less severe, but he has nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada — and $15 billion spent there — and set back a waste-storage solution by as much as 50 years.

Now the world will store and reprocess waste without a gold standard to guide it.

It matters because slipping standards — anywhere from China to Jordan — endanger all nuclear power and a lot of people. A meltdown in Japan has battered nuclear acceptance and that was because of a once-in-history natural event. The next one could be because of lower licensing standards, bad concrete, fake parts or a bribed inspector. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

John Bryson, the Right Man for Commerce

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John E. Bryson, who is President Obama's nominee to be Secretary of Commerce, has a soft heart and a hard head; an admirable duopoly, one might think. Ideal, really.

But not in the United States Senate. Not these days.

The fight over the Bryson nomination, like so much else in Washington, is a fight among pit bulls: a fight for the sake of fighting, a fight without purpose. Dogs fight over bitches, over food, over defensiveness toward their owners and over territory. Pit bulls just fight. Proximity is casus belli.

In today's Senate, an administration nominee is casus belli.

It causes one to wonder why a man like Bryson would shatter the tranquility of his retirement years to endure besmerchment in Washington. He does not need the job or indignity of the process, but we need him or people like him. As the confirmation process has grown uglier and uglier, they have become fewer and fewer,

If I were a senator questioning Bryson, or some similar nominee, the one question I would ask is: “Why in God's name would you submit yourself to this?”

It is as though people of otherwise sound mind voluntarily placed their heads and hands in the stocks and allowed a howling mob of self-righteous idiots to pelt them with rotten vegetables and invective. Minus the vegetables, that is what the procedure of “advise and consent” has now come down to. It is a travesty of the Founders' purpose. It has become an opportunity for the talentless and graceless to abuse the talented and accomplished.

Accomplishment is the rub. If you have left an edifice in print, in business, in public works, stay away from the U.S. Senate. Senate pit bulls will sink their teeth into any record of accomplishment.

Among Bryson's sins, enumerated in an editorial in The Washington Times, is that he and other Yale graduates founded the Natural Resources Defense Council. Bryson did not author any of the council's more controversial excursions. Instead he was part of its idealistic founding; at a time when environmental abuse was a national reality that had been exposed eight years earlier by Rachel Carson in her seminal book, “Silent Spring.”

Despite the wishing of an editorial writer at The Washington Times, Bryson was a free-market innovator.

When Bryson was chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission, he asked me to speak at a conference he was convening at Stanford on regulating electric generation. We were both talking about deregulation a decade ahead of time. And Bryson was talking about it when it had no political traction.

From state service, Bryson went on to run Edison International, parent of Southern California Edison Company, for 18 years.

He has served on the boards of some of the country's largest companies including Boeing and Disney. He has also been a trustee of Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology.

Yet his detractors, the sum of all their ignorance and folly neatly assembled in The Washington Times' editorial, accuse him of destroying jobs. The evidence for this: he supported cap-and-trade legislation as a free-market solution to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. That support was shared by many electric utilities (including Exelon) and oil companies (ConocoPhillips among them).

If these are institutions of the Left, then lead on.

Like all men who get things done, some of Bryson's endeavors have been less successful than others: Remember, Ben Franklin's stove was not a success. But Bryson's record is the record of a man of his times, prepared to instigate and manage change.

As the commerce secretary job involves managing the changes that come with globalization, a nimble man like Bryson, who has served capitalism and idealism, should be just the ticket. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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