White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Joy of the Private Car

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday it will attempt to do what a string of economists and urban planners couldn’t: persuade the Congress to raise the federal gasoline tax to pay for better roads. — The Wall Street Journal

For all the problems that automobiles bring in society, they are wondrous things. They are, in a way, emblems of freedom. Surely private, discreet mobility is nearly beyond price?

There’s a price and a high one at that: pollution, congestion, sprawl, accident lethality and the geopolitics of oil. But oh, the joy of turning the key and heading to a highway; free, anonymous and among your own things (or your own mess, to be precise), listening to your choice of music–your life briefly in your control.

So far, the joys of the personal car have mysteriously evaded the attention of major poets and composers. Maybe it’s because cars bring joy equally to the proletariat and to the elite.

The primary differentiation between vehicles is not aesthetic but financial. A neat car, like a Bentley or a Maybach, costs money, lots of it, compared to, say, a Ford Focus. Yet their function is identical: they move us around.

Just four times in the 100-plus-year history of the automobile has a truly classless–in the sense that blue jeans are classless–car appeared on the streets. These were vehicles driven by the wealthy and the lowly with equal enthusiasm. They were the Ford Model T, the Ford A, the Volkswagen Beetle and the Morris Minor. All were owned and driven across the social spectrum.

It is an American conceit to believe that our love affair with the automobile is unique. It isn’t: It’s as universal as love itself. The poorest Indian dreams of abandoning the bullock cart for the automobile and even Europeans, who are well served with public transportation, love their cars.

One of the first consequences of Irish prosperity was that Dublin became a traffic jam. The Irish folk song goes, In Dublin’s fair city where the girls are so pretty/ I once met a girl named sweet Molly Malone/and she wheeled her wheel barrow/ through the streets broad and narrow/
singing cockles and mussels alive alive oh. Well, Molly would have a hell of a job in today’s traffic.

When Britain opened its beltway around London–known as the M25 corridor or Orbital–in 1986, so many cars took to the road traffic stopped dead, despite designated speed of 70 mph.

What has happened in western Europe is that driving has become more of a recreational activity, and commuting to work is close to mandatory. London, for example, is the second great city in the world to impose a stiff charge on private cars entering the downtown. The first was Singapore.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg would like to do something similar in New York City, but he faces too many jurisdictions that feed traffic into the city. Other American cities do not have the public transportation infrastructure to be able to contemplate choking them off during the week.

New housing developments everywhere are antithetical to public transportation. The cul-de-sac is hard enough to get a fire truck into, let alone to run buses.

A second problem, after congestion, is where are we going to get the oil to fuel the fleet of cars which is growing exponentially around the world, with most that growth in China and India? That future, for a period of 60 or so years, could be natural gas or electricity–and the smart money is on electricity. The rub is that batteries are not yet up to the task; and today’s gasoline and diesel automobile needs a lot of power for non-motion functions, like air conditioning, lights, power windows, seats and trunks.

Will electric vehicles reach market fast enough? That depends on the thorny issue of geopolitics, religious fanaticism, royal families, and prosperity in India and China.

How to proceed? The government would like to move everything forward, but the Department of Energy is having difficulty getting research and development money out of the door, while local jurisdictions are cutting back on highway funds.

Enter the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with an unlikely proposal for a business group: a fuel tax devoted to transportation solutions. It’s radical, unexpected and comes from an organization with right-of-center clout.

Maybe one day, we’ll again tool down the open road—well, get into a stream of traffic that moves, whether it’s with hydrocarbon or electric fuel. Varoom!  –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

Girding Against a Non-Existent Enemy

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There is a new growth industry in Washington; one which will consume hundreds of millions of dollars before it has run its course, and one that is not needed. No, it is not a new government program. It is a new private sector movement to save capitalism, and it is spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce.

The Chamber has committed to raise and spend $100 million on an across-the-board effort to fortify capitalism through media and public affairs campaigns. It will be a big payday for public intellectuals who can whip up an audience about the incipient resurgence of, well, communism, socialism and maybe even monarchy.

Anyway government in general, and the administration of Barack Obama in particular, is sure to figure as the merciless opponent of capitalism, seeking to regulate it and nationalize it out of existence. Only Asia, it would seem, is immune from government’s dead hand. There, in the mythology of the times, governments work for capitalism, as with the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the global reach of China.

 

To be believe this you have to swallow hard and affirm that bureaucrats of Asia are oh-so-smart, while those of the United States and Europe are stupid, incompetent and out to promote failure.

 

The Chamber, one hastens to point out, is not the villain here; it is, if anything, the victim. A lot of Chamber members really believe that capitalism is endangered by the Obama administration and its preparedness to intrude into markets. This belief has been fed, this paranoia has been indulged by the far-right wing and its protagonists in the blogosphere and broadcasting.

 

The fact is that capitalism–the world of willing buyers and willing sellers–has been around since the dawn of human history. It is as natural, as native, as fundamental to human society as the quest for God or the organization of the family. Probably as old as the market itself are the rogues who distort the market for excessive gain. Christ did not throw the moneychangers out of the temple for praying too fervently. Nor did Lehman Brothers collapse because it was timid about leverage.

 

Equally, capitalism has had an historic problem with social justice. No less a philosopher of capital’s virtue than Irving Kristol, inventor of neo-conservatism and father of its proselytizer, Bill Kristol, has pointed out that capitalism would not find fault with slavery or worker exploitation. Other institutions must seek that rectification. In Kristol’s words, “Two cheers for capitalism.”

 

Capitalism’s great enemy was, of course, Karl Marx and his collaborator,

Frederick Engels (Lenin was an adapter). But after much struggle, communism, or anti-capitalism, failed abysmally. It was the worst social and economic experiment ever and its few remaining adherents, like Cuba, are themselves economic and social failures.

 

Daniel Yergin, author of “Commanding Heights,” makes the point that capitalism has swept away any thoughts that communism has a future. Yergin’s commanding heights are controlled by capitalist nations.

 

Yet the fear that the armies of controlled economies are on the march still haunts many business people, who should know better. There is plenty of irony to go around in this fight against nothing.

Health care is the Trojan horse of those who see the enemies of capitalism on the march. Ironically, it is the Chamber which has called for manufacturers to be saved from the burden of health care. It has also called for normalization of relations with Cuba and a national gasoline tax.

Capitalism is not in danger. Even Britain’s venerable Labor Party had shed most of its socialist principles to compete and win under Tony Blair. The great writer H.G.Wells, one of the fathers of science fiction (“War of the Worlds”), predicted that socialism would defeat capitalism because it was a system and capitalism was not.

Wells had it exactly wrong. Capitalism is a dynamic system and socialism or its extreme, communism, is not. –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

Public Faces, Scowls or Smiles?

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France is wiping its public face. Maybe you don’t think it needed it but the French do, and they have committed a chunk of their economic stimulus package to refreshing public buildings and historical treasures. The royal palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles near Paris, and the many chateaus down the Loire River will benefit.

 

To the casual eye, these monuments, these aspects of the public face of France, looked in pretty good shape. But when this latest effort is finished, they should be as great as they were hundreds of years ago.

 

By contrast, the economic slump has forced U.S. jurisdictions to cut back on their expenditures for the public face of America. Those who had hoped that the stimulus package would revive the New Deal-era Works Projects Administration are disappointed. Federal and state governments are slashing funding for public works projects and letting public places decay.

 

Virginia is even closing some of the rest areas on its Interstates. These are not especially plentiful, but they are a godsend for truckers and people traveling with children and pets. They offer no food but they do offer clean toilets and, thoughtfully, an area for dogs to do what dogs do. No luxuries, just necessities.

 

France is not alone in thinking it must keep its public face clean and smiling. Allegedly, staid Britain works hard on its public face. For example the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has promised that the double-decker London buses will not be phased out as his predecessor, Socialist Ken Livingstone, had tried to do.

 

Livingstone wanted all the city’s familiar red buses replaced with so-called bendy buses (articulated buses). On the face of it, the old buses are uneconomic; they take a crew of two, whereas the bendy buses only have a driver. Yet that first economic calculation does not tell the whole story: Johnson sees the double-decker buses as being an integral part of the public face of London.

 

Likewise, the black taxis of London. They are unique to London and they cost more than regular cars because they are purpose-built, and new designs are introduced every few years. Often modified, new design-taxis are built by different companies: Some are built by companies that are not otherwise in the automobile business. This procurement pattern keeps the innovations coming.

 

While it costs Londoners more for their buses and their taxis, it comforts them in a way; it makes them feel special. But the real dividends are in tourism: London is the most visited city in Europe.

 

Paris and Rome each have a high sense of their public face and a regard for the aesthetic sensibilities of the population. Also, they have a certain knowledge that that a smiling public face will bring the smiling tourist faces, clutching their dollars, yen and yuan.

 

At bottom, it may be more of a philosophical issue than an economic one. Half a century ago, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the “private affluence” and “public squalor” in the United States.

Not that there are no great public places in the United States: New York’s Central Park holds its own against London’s Hyde Park or Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if there were stimulus money to spruce them up and maybe create a great new public toy, like London’s giant Ferris wheel, The Eye. Churchill said that we shape buildings and then they shape us. Quite so. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Power Lunches, Then and Now

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Despite Jimmy Carter, lunch is alive and well in Washington. But it is a different rite than it was before his presidency.

 

Carter was the president who launched an attack on the notorious three-martini lunch. He not only scorned the business lunch culture, but he also changed the tax law so that only half the cost of a business lunch can now be deducted.

 

Carter became a dirty word in the restaurants of Washington. Yet the change in lunch habits may have occurred anyway.

 

During the Carter years, drinking at lunch slowed to a stop. There is hardly any drinking at lunch these days: Headwaiters proffer wine lists to shaking heads.

 

It was not Carter’s jiggling the tax code that killed the three-martini lunch, but rather a great social change that coincided with his time in Washington. For complex reasons, the decision-makers of the big cities dried out in the 1970s. My guess is that the world became more competitive, secretaries were not prepared to cover for their intoxicated bosses, drunk-driving laws tightened and health became an issue.

 

For me, the old-time Washington lunch was exemplified by a wonderful man, a great friend and a tremendous lobbyist. His name was Tom Clark and he represented the nuclear interests of the General Electric Company in Washington. Clark—who, alas, died more than two decades ago–was the uncontested master of the Washington lunch. And, yes, he drank three martinis with his lunch every day.

 

Clark was an American patrician, a kind of nobleman. He was also marvelous company and a skilled lobbyist. His principal tool was lunch, but he did not roam from restaurant to restaurant. He ate his lunch every day at Le Provencal, a classic French restaurant, where he always sat at the same large, round table.

 

Clark’s guests were a who’s who of Washington movers and shakers. There would be a Cabinet secretary at his table, maybe a senator and often a House member. I was one of the regulars at his round table. As a reporter, these feasts were valuable but mostly fun. You could drink anything you liked so long as it was distilled, fermented or brewed. There was a large menu, but most of Clark’s guests followed his lead and ordered grilled Dover sole.

 

Well, there are no more long, three-martini lunches and grilled Dover sole has given way to a new kind of eating: stacked, fusion food favored by the dieting classes in Washington. Of course without alcohol, three-hour lunches are out. Now we choke down the ersatz food with bottled water, ice tea or diet soda. Tom Clark would not have approved.

 

It is the shorter lunch that has allowed the development of that gastronomic and political horror: the power breakfast. All over Washington power-brokers are breakfasting with people from Capitol Hill, the media and the political financiers, who are the kingmakers.

 

Eating around Washington is really not about deals and arm-twisting, but rather about opening and keeping open channels of communication that later might be used to push a lobbying message. In the days when the martini ruled, it was a bit about communications, but mostly it was fun. It was just that it was more productive to have fun with a Cabinet member or an important senator than, well, your neighbor.

 

In the old days, the greatest lunch place in Washington was another French restaurant: Sans Souci. Its headwaiter, Paul, was known for his prodigious recall of names. You had to fight for a reservation and fight to be seated at a good table. The most important table–in a restaurant that was fairly small and had terraces of tables–was the Kennedy table. At this table, Kennedy family members dined with their White House and media friends. Columnist Art Buchwald was often seen with Ethel Kennedy. A cheery hail from that table as you passed by and you were on the A-list.

 

Today, there is nothing that looks like an A-list in Washington, and no restaurant dominates political and media circles. Also since the Carter presidency, White House staffers have favored the White House mess over restaurants.

 

Only retired people dare quaff midday martinis these days. As Rudyard Kipling noted, “There’s sore decline in Adam’s line.”  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blood Diamonds Steady Mugabe

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Diamonds are not a country’s best friend; certainly not if yours is a semi-lawless country in Africa, like Zimbabwe.

 

In Zimbabwe the discovery of diamonds in the beautiful part of the country around Marange, southeast of the capital of Harare, has probably extended the life of the Robert Mugabe regime by two years. Their discovery by a British company, Africa Consolidated Resources, in September 2006, provided Mugabe with another source of plunder; plunder he could use to keep his brutal security forces loyal.

 

Fact is that such economic governance as remains in Zimbabwe is directed to finding cash to pay the army and the police, who keep the Mugabe regime afloat, Even so, Mugabe had fallen behind; and last December soldiers and police demonstrated in Harare, demanding to be paid. Basically, Mugabe’s response was to cede the diamond operations to the security forces.

 

In a new report, Human Rights Watch says the security forces killed 200 miners while tightening their grip on the mines and introducing forced labor. The Kimberley Process, a humanitarian alliance set up to stop the flow of so-called blood diamonds, sent a six-person team to investigate the Zimbabwe mines and found such human rights abuses that it classified the gems as blood diamonds to be sanctioned.

 

But diamonds are hard to trace and label; they are fungible and portable, and they can be mined with a pick and shovel in many places, as they are today in Zimbabwe and Congo. They also can be smuggled in many of the ways drugs are, except there is no odor to aid border guards with dogs.

 

Through the years diamonds have been ingested, concealed in body cavities and even hidden in wounds. Desperate people do desperate things–and never more so when there is the prospect of riches in places of utter poverty.

 

A diamond rush, as has happened in Zimbabwe, is a dangerous, lawless, violent and wretched occurrence.

 

As Mugabe has rejected international mining partners, who might actually know something about the safe and orderly mining of diamonds, the Zimbabwe mines are dangerous, inefficient and environmentally disastrous.

 

The Zimbabweans are not even getting fair value for their gems. These are being marketed through back channels established by the government, and untold numbers of gems are stolen at production and sold to middle men and unscrupulous cutters around the world.

 

The link between the security forces and the mines has another bad effect: It adds to the political impotence of Morgan Tsvangirai, prime minister in a power-sharing arrangement with Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party. In that arrangement Mugabe retains control of the the security forces, thus robbing Tsvangirai of any authority–not that he would use it well if he got it.

 

Zimbabweans are wondering what has happened to Tsvangirai, who seems to have lost the ability to stand up to Mugabe. For nearly a decade, Tsvangirai endured false arrests, allegations of treason, beatings while in custody and had the last election stolen from him and his Movement for Democratic Change.

 

Now Zimbabweans are asking whether the trappings of power have corrupted their hero or whether, in accepting the South Africa-brokered power-sharing deal, Tsvangirai boxed himself in. Anyway, he looks as though he has become Mugabe’s bagman, touring the world seeking “investment.” Tsvangirai has been promised some very limited humanitarian aid, including $8 million of conditional aid from the British and a promise of a little over $73 million of even more restricted and conditional aid from President Obama. World leaders are aware that $7 million in private charity money for AIDS victims was.diverted.

 

When Tvangirai got back to Harare, Mugabe supporters ridiculed his efforts

and his own supporters accused him of selling out to Mugabe. As if to show up his old rival, Mugabe then announced a Chinese loan of just under $1 billion; much of this money has to be spent on Chinese imports.

 

It is ironic that Mugabe should be kept in power by diamonds. It was diamonds that formed the basis of the fortune that enabled the adventurer, Cecil John Rhodes, to colonize Zimbabwe for Britain in the 1890s. Maybe all diamonds are conflict diamonds. Bloody stones.  –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

Happy Birthday, America; Take That, Europe!

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Happy birthday, America—really happy birthday.

 

As an immigrant, I can say that with an authenticity and sincerity I would not have if I had been born on this blessed piece of real estate with its spirit of possibility. I came here because I am of the last generation that was, perhaps globally, pro-American.

 

Yes, after World War II, the United States was admired the world over. I grew up in Africa where American education, American technology and American goods–from cars to radios–were venerated.

 

When Coca-Cola was introduced into Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), there was practically a national holiday. The company’s employees–with the blessing of the authorities and government departments—flooded the schools with vending machines. This was not because local soft drinks were not refreshing. No, it was a kind of homage to the United States: We wanted a sip of the American magic. As a colony, we wanted less of London and more of New York. We believed Americans were invincible. In our eyes Americans were superior because they had smarter government, better laws and more entrepreneurial people.

 

Of course, in that faraway place, we idealized all things American and sometimes we were wishfully wrong. For example, we believed that the United States had solved its race problems (hardly in the 1950s) and that the more we followed America and broke with our mother country, Britain, the better. It was the American example that led Prime Minister Ian Smith to unilaterally–and disastrously, as it turned out–declare independence from Britain on Nov. 11, 1965.

 

In 1959, I moved to Britain where there was a much greater sense of competition across the Atlantic, more resentment of America climbing as Britain was sinking. Also, there was resentment of America’s abandonment of the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956. It was a period of adjustment.

 

It was also a wrenching time in European intellectual life. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, both followed by brutal Soviet repression, undermined European intellectuals’ faith in communism; but they did not switch to untrammeled support of capitalism. Wary of the politics of the right, they were looking for kindness, gentleness and an indigenous way forward.

 

Europeans wanted a future that would allow for their historical experiences, but would not sweep them into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union or the United States. That way forward was democratic socialism, embraced by all European political parties except the extreme nationalistic ones of the right and the communists, who are still found on the extreme left in France, Italy and other countries.

 

As Europe moved into its democratic socialist future, anti-Americanism grew. It was based on economic resentment, fear of U.S. foreign policy and anger over the difficulty of penetrating the U.S. market. Appreciation of American sacrifice in World War II was laced with resentment that America did not join the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Some blame for anti-Americanism lies with the European newspapers of the time. They seized on crime; the oddities of American life (like the shoe-shaped house); the size of American automobiles; and, of course, the cavorting of Hollywood stars. While American media portrayed Europe as Disneyland for grownups, Europeans were led to believe that American life was brutal and freakish.

 

Serious chroniclers like Alastair Cooke–an Englishman who dedicated a good part of his life telling Britain, on the BBC and in The Manchester Guardian, that America was a wondrous place–failed to arrest the rising tide of anti-Americanism.

 

That had to come later, after the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. None of our carping European friends could pull off such an historical first in their own countries.

 

No matter what you think of the man, Obama’s election as the first African-American president is a very American triumph. The world has applauded the system that could produce this result and the people who made it possible. Only in America. Happy birthday.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

 

When a Lovely Flame Dies

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Farewell, tobacco. You’re a drug now and we don’t hang out with druggies. But, oh, before you fell, what history, what innocent bliss, what romance! They can’t take that away from us; even though President Obama has signed into law a bill which classifies tobacco as a drug, and the Food and Drug Administration will be landing its troops in Marlboro Country any day now, there are memories.

 

What memories!

 

Tobacco has killed in my family, so I should have no brief for it, but I do. Close friends have died, too; or they’re lung cancer survivors.

 

Yet it was tobacco that sustained the early settles of Virginia (which gave its name to the most popular variety of cigarette tobacco) and it remained an economic force until recent times.

 

In distant Zimbabwe, were I grew up, tobacco was king. Tobacco dwarfed corn as the cash crop of choice; and even city dwellers admired tobacco farmers, frequently known as “tobacco barons.”

 

At my school, the boys whose fathers grew tobacco were the plutocrats, Of course, they really weren’t that rich–it was just in relation to the rest of the population. They could do things that their relative wealth made possible; things like taking European vacations and buying new cars every few years.

 

There were, in those days, whispers about the health effects of smoking. The editor of the farming paper asked me to go out and find out if it was only American tobacco that was a problem and not the local crop. He was determined to be right, but no such luck.

 

Later, in the 1960s, I heard cigarette workers in Richmond, Va., proclaim that the famous Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health was a “communist plot.”

 

Tobacco favored light, sandy soils that were not ideal for citrus, corn, soy, or tea: the crops that sustained Zimbabwe’s economy until President Robert Mugabe destroyed the farming class, and farming productivity dwindled and ceased. I loved visiting tobacco farms. You would walk down the rows feeling the leaves, which left a slightly sticky residue on your hands. And I reveled in the heavy smell in the curing barns.

 

Later, living in England, I learned of the other pleasure of tobacco: the luxurious smokerama: glorious Cartier gold lighters, exquisite Tiffany silver cigarette boxes, elegant lacquered cigarette holders (could we have had Coward without them?), cigar cutters and humidors (Kennedy’s revenge against Castro), pipes of all kinds, from brier to Meerschaum to corn cob. Could MacArthur have prevailed without his modest corn cob pipe or Churchill triumphed without a mighty cigar?

 

There’s no more Sobranie Cocktail or Black Russian cigarettes in a girlfriend’s Christmas stocking, no Oval Turkish in Dad’s; and little brother who thought it was cool to upset people with a pack of Gaulois stuffed in his back pocket won’t be getting the satisfaction again.

 

Those great movies of the 1930s and 1940s depended on cigarettes as props. When the director called “action” someone was expected to light up. Now, only the villains light up. Some revisionists have suggested that old movies should be edited to remove the cigarettes so that children will not be tempted to take up the habit. But Bogart, Cagney, Cooper, Gable and Mitchum, to say nothing of Davis and Crawford, would be unsexy if film editors took away their oral satisfiers. Their characters would go up in smoke, so to speak.

 

Sadly, all bad things must come to an end. Remember that Venetian glass ashtray, that sophisticated cigarette holder, even that vintage Ronson lighter, well, they are all now drug paraphernalia.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fighting the Socialist Straw Man

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Don’t look now, but there’s a monster hiding in the attic; or is it crouching behind the garden wall? Maybe it’s lurking with a troll under the bridge? There are a growing number of Americans who think that socialism is a threat to our free-market economy.

 

Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will commit millions dollars—maybe as much as $100 million–to a long-term campaign to teach the verities of capitalism and free markets.

 

“Supporters and critics alike agree that capitalism is at a crossroads,” said U.S. Chamber President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue, “It’s time to remind all Americans that it was a free enterprise system based on the values of individual initiative, hard work, risk, innovation, and profit that built our great country. We must take immediate action to reaffirm the spirit of enterprise in America.”

 

In his statement, Donohue did not mention socialism; but the implication is that it is coming in with the policies of the Obama administration.

 

Indeed, President Obama has not been squeamish about government intervention in the market. The economic stimulus package, the bailout of the banks, General Motors and possibly some states, the wishful “green”energy bill on Capitol Hill, and, front and center, health care reform all add up to a fear by many Americans that the United States is headed toward European-style democratic socialism.

 

The U.S. Chamber’s “Campaign for Free Enterprise” will feature a grass-roots movement, a “vigorous” media and public education campaign, focusing on the “economic literacy of younger Americans,” and issue-advocacy program, leading up to the 2010 elections and, of course, lobbying. It reflects a deep concern by the board of the chamber that the country really is heading down the path of Euro-socialism.

 

This concern begs the question: Is that so bad?

 

Putting aside those who think Europe’s social contracts of today are a kind of Marxism redux (they are not), what are the fears? Mostly, Europeans like their system and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finds the countries of western Europe out-score the United States in terms of national happiness. The socialized service most feared in the United States,

nationalized medicine, is both criticized, particularly in the United Kingdom and Italy, and loved. No politicians dare suggest privatizing it. The same goes for subsidized and pervasive public transportation,

 

The real problem for Europe is rigidity. Business has no freedom to act, and successive governments have mortgaged themselves to public service unions in country after country.

 

Margaret Thatcher loosened some of those bonds in Britain; but compared to the United States, business is still shackled in a way that would be hard to swallow here. Particularly, the American employment model is at odds with the European one. U.S. employment law is built on the concept of employment “at will.” In Britain, and most of the rest of western Europe, a fired employee can drag the employer before a labor tribunal and force an arbitration that usually will side with the worker.

 

This may be noble in concept, but it is devastating in reality. Even in good times, employers fear increasing payrolls. So permanent jobs are treated as temporary, and contract employees are favored over regular ones to protect employers from the rigors of hiring.

 

European governments do try to fix everything, and pass laws and rules to implement the fixes. I have heard social workers complain that they have to tell people who rip off the system how to do it more efficiently. In Britain, welfare, unemployment insurance, and other welfare-state handouts are known as “benefit”–and it can work like an annuity, especially in disability cases. I have heard British social workers complain that they feel complicit in abusing the system.

 

In Scandinavia the father, as well as the mother, can get a year of maternity leave, The “coddled society,” you might say. Yet as Harold Meyerson, a declared liberal, writes in The Washington Post, conservative parties embrace most of the same goals as the left-of-center ones.

 

Certainly cradle-to-grave Euro-socialism is expensive. It also stifles the business dynamic; business just has so much more to overcome to succeed and to survive in Europe. If you want to start a business, better do it in the United States. But if you want your opera produced, try Europe. Good and bad things come in the European package.

 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will get something for its efforts and its money if it admits that the door to more government was opened not by incipient socialists but by the excesses of capital managers, and that the threat to American business is wrong regulation not regulation itself. The specter of socialism in the U.S. context is a political device to frighten the gullible. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right-Wing Publishing: Musical Chairs

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Word is out that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is on the verge of selling its conservative political magazine, The Weekly Standard, to the publishing company owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. If the deal goes through, it does not bode well for The Standard, founded and edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes.

More than any other conservative paper, The Standard has been able to find and develop new and original talent.

The list of writers of real ability who have passed through the portals of The Standard, located on 17th Street in Northwest Washington, includes David Brooks of The New York Times; broadcaster and writer Tucker Carlson; and Christopher Caldwell, Matt Labash and Matt Continetti, who still write for the magazine.

By comparison Anschutz’s current Washington property, The Examiner, a free daily newspaper, is home to some old standards like Michael Barone, Byron York and Mark Tapscott, who came to the paper from The Heritage Foundation. No one pioneering or fresh. The Examiner is the exemplar of your father’s conservatism.

But worse, leaving aside the politics, which is why The Examiner and The Standard exist, is the basic newspapering of The Examiner. It needs work–just to make it more of a plausible newspaper. The headlines are too small. It covers national politics, but in all other respects, it is a local newspaper with wobbly news judgment.

If any of these weaknesses are to infect The Standard, an important voice of erudite conservatism will be lost. Scintillating new writers will not get a start. Bashing liberals is not enough.

At 10th birthday party for The Standard (founded it in 1995, when Irwin Stelzer, a News Corp adviser, persuaded Murdoch `that the United States needed a magazine of opinion and literary comment like the venerable Spectator in England), Brooks said The Standard was a magazine conceived to serve a government in power not to whine in opposition, which by implication is what Human Events, The American Spectator and National Review do. Even in opposition, it has kept its optimistic tenor and its book reviewing is of a high order.

Sadly, The Standard has never been able to totally learn from its English cousin. American conservatives want just conservative views in their political magazines, not the occasional piece of amusing heresy.

There is a third player is Washington conservative journalism: The Washington Times, a respectable daily with a definite rightward slant, sometimes in its coverage as well as on its opinion pages. It is the home to old-line conservative writers and some liberal ones, including Pat Buchanan and Larry Kudlow on the right, and Nat Hentoff and Clarence Page on the center-left.

The quality of the newspaper craft in The Times dwarfs The Examiner. But those two papers and The Standard are the toy things of rich men with a political point of view. The Times is owned by the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. You could say that all three are vanity publications: They lose money, lots of it.

But this is not new. The late great New York Herald Tribune was bought by oil billionaire Jock Whitney to counter the liberal New York Times, and to save an important conservative voice in New York at a time of liberal ascendancy.

Earlier, during World War I, Max Aitken, a Canadian, bought the London Daily Express, at the behest of the Conservative Party, to keep a conservative voice in Fleet Street. The Tories were so grateful that they elevated Aitken to the Peerage, as Lord Beaverbrook. Both Beaverbrook and Tories lived to rue the day. Beaverbrook because he realized his chances of being prime minister had evaporated with the honor and the Tories because Beaverbrook was a maverick. Also, Beaverbrook soon started making money–lots of it–off his newspaper and did not have to worry about conservative orthodoxy anymore. Neither Murdoch nor Anschutz nor Moon is ever likely to make any money out of their publishing properties.

Amazing how unbusinesslike conservatives can be when it comes to defending the faith.  –for North Star Writers Group

Shut Up and Think of Something

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In early 1943, Britain’s Bomber Command had been wrestling with the thorny problem of how to breach two critical dams in the Ruhr valley, cutting electricity production and incapacitating industrial production. Taking them out was a high priority of the war cabinet and Bomber Command.

 

But the problems were daunting. The dams, the Eder and the Mohne, were heavily protected with anti-aircraft batteries, and bombing at the time lacked precision. Bomber Command knew that it had to deliver its explosives to the lower part of the dam walls, if they were to be breached.

 

The solution came from a scientist and engineer, Barnes Wallis, who watched children skipping stones on water: Drop the bombs well away from the dam walls and have them bounce to the wall, sink and explode. Simple technology to the rescue.

 

The bombs would be circular and would be rotated so they hit the water, spinning backward but with overall forward motion. Like a stone skimmed along the surface of a pond they would travel to the wall, sink and detonate at the foot of the dam.

 

The scheme was fiendishly clever and extremely dangerous. It was conceived in January 1943 and executed on May 17, 1943.

 

To avoid detection, waves of bombers flew across Holland into Germany, maintaining an altitude of 100 feet and making their runs at 60 feet above the water. Many aircraft and their crews were lost, but the Eder and Mohne were breached, wrecking havoc in the Ruhr Valley.

 

There is a lesson here in how to deal with nuclear proliferation: Call off the politicians and the commentators and send in the scientists and engineers.

 

With Iran and North Korea, the West is not only suffering huge frustration but its impotence is revealed, tempting every other aspiring nuclear power to forge ahead. Neither of the options on the table is any good at all. Sanctions don’t work and reigniting war on the Korean Peninsula by bombing North Korean nuclear installations is unpalatable. As should be further destabilizing the Middle East by bombing Iran, thus consolidating hatred of the West and pushing oil above $200-a-barrel.

 

So forget about bombing and sanctions. Bombing, even if it were to dent the nuclear development in the countries concerned, is clumsy, wrought with unintended consequences and calculated to produce years, if not centuries, of resentment.

 

Yet morally, those who are in the nuclear club are obliged to keep their awful institution small. Preemptive action is reasonable but it needs to be stealthy and, ideally, anonymous. In this case, the moral weight is on the side of intervention.

 

There are many ways of enriching uranium, which involves concentrating the fissionable isotope, uranium 235, by stripping away the dominant isotope, uranium 238. The preferred way is using gas centrifuges, which is the way Iran has chosen, To understand the technology, think of a cream churn: Rather than being filled with milk these vessels are filled with a gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spun at 1,500 revolutions a second in batteries of hundreds of centrifuges.

 

These machines have two important vulnerabilities: They are so highly engineered that supposedly a fingerprint can throw them off and initiate failure, and they consume a lot of electricity.

 

Electric systems are vulnerable to cyber-attack, if they are computer- controlled (almost certainly the case in Iran and probably not in North Korea). Iran, which is apparently working toward a highly enriched uranium weapon, is vulnerable through its centrifuges–a cyber-attack on its electricity supply, causing wild functions in voltage, could be damaging, as could harmonic resonance and vibration, if these can be delivered secretly.

 

North Korea is more problematic because they already have a weapon and it is unclear whether they stuck with their original plan to use plutonium from a Soviet-era reactor or whether, as they said, they switched to uranium enrichment. These are the two paths to making a weapon: plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

 

With North Korea–so paranoid and insecure–their vulnerability is with their delivery rockets. The West’s imperative: find a way of messing with their guidance systems. If surreptitiously their rockets could be destroyed early in flight, or redirected back towards their launch pads, the Pyongyang military might rethink their whole program.

 

Bombs skittering across the surface of German dams in 1943 point to the potency of technological solutions–and a third way.