White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A National Conversation on Government

by Leave a Comment

 

 

There’s a bear in our backyard. He’s often there and just two days ago he walked, well, lumbered down the road in front of our house, turned up the driveway, and unhurriedly disappeared into some woods behind the house.

 

It was alarming to see the bear in the road. Foxes and deer are killed there with great frequency by cars. I want the bear to be safe, so my wife and I wondered who in the government we should call. There must be a program for bears who are penetrating built-up areas (we live only 45 miles from Washington, D.C.)

 

We haven’t yet called the government. Which one, federal, state or county? Which department? Agriculture, animal welfare, forestry, land conservation, or just our congressman and let him worry about the electoral dynamics of saving bears? There may be enough people worried about bears becoming roadkill that there are votes in it.

 

The main thing is that somewhere in the enormous apparatus of government, I know there is someone who worries about errant bears. In this case, I’m glad that we have big government so that when I decide who to call, someone will tell me what to do about my ursine neighbor.

 

But there’s the rub also. What’s the role of government in society and how much should it do, or how much should we expect it to do? You’d think this had been hammered out in the seminal events of the 18th century.

 

If we’re going to have a national conversation about anything, let’s have it about the role of government. What’s proper for government to shoulder and what should be done in the private sector?

 

The ongoing debate about health care highlights the clear divisions in the country about the responsibilities of government. Liberals, it seems to me, want the government in there, offering its own insurance. Conservatives want the government out, but they want it to do a few things on the way through the door such as forcing private insurers to take patients with pre-existing conditions, assuring greater portability and granting relief to small employers.

 

Liberals and conservatives alike say they want less government, but they have very different ideas about what that reduced government should do; so the government, under both Republicans and Democrats, grows.

 

Liberals think that too much of our national treasure goes into weapons systems, defensive and aggressive. Conservatives think that the government can’t get anything right and should largely be supplanted by the private sector.

 

Here are some big things that could be privatized, although whether they would be better is unknown: air traffic control, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the postal service, the administration of the national parks and the Government Printing Office. Government should be prohibited from competing with the private sector in small things like publishing periodicals and books, and organizing conferences.

 

But does anyone think that the National Institutes of Health should be handed over to the pharmaceutical industry?

 

Or consider these problems which, somewhere one hopes, the government is working on: the effects of rising sea levels; the over-fishing of the oceans; the notorious Panama disease, which is wiping out bananas; the mysterious and massive death of U.S. honeybees; and the proliferation of feral pythons, which are endangering cats, dogs and possibly people in Florida and soon across the South.

 

Without government research, we wouldn’t have the Internet, Velcro, the aeroderivitive turbine, or the cute little winglets on jet airplanes which make them less lethal to other jet airplanes. If, like the Europeans, we decided the government should get behind the arts, we’d have many opera companies to rival the New York Met and provincial theater would boom.

 

I’m ambivalent about health care reform because I’m on Medicare and I think it’s dandy; but I wish my wife’s insurance wasn’t so expensive. Right now, I’d like someone in the government–someone with real clout–to do something to keep the bear in my backyard from becoming roadkill. Will he join the sad roster of bears, deer and foxes that became roadkill because the government didn’t care? I tell you it would be different if bears voted.  — For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

The Health Care Fix That Dare Not Speak Its Name

by Leave a Comment

 

Workaround is a made-up word that came to us from the computer industry – at least, that is how it came into general usage. In that industry, a workaround can be a crafty piece of engineering to get the results you want without infringing on someone else’s patent.

 

Watching President Barack Obama at last week’s prime-time news conference, one had the feeling that he was engaged in a workaround. He was selling a vague health care reform proposal. His spiel was very long because he was selling something that is still a work in progress. Worse: Whatever Obama gets is not going to be the real thing. It is going to be a workaround.

 

One has the feeling that congressional pusillanimity has the Democrats and their leader working around what at heart they know is the only solution to the challenge of health care – a strong federal role. Call it the solution that dare not speak its name, like Oscar Wilde’s love.

 

One had the feeling in the East Room last week that the president wanted to lay down the burden of political gamesmanship and say, “National systems work from Taiwan to Norway, Canada to Australia; why, oh why can’t we face this reality?”

 

The first answer is that no one has the courage to face the Banshee wails of “socialism” that already echo from the right and would intensify to the sound of a Category 3 hurricane. Politically, it would be seen as a bridge too far. Had Obama said in the presidential campaign that he was for a single-payer option, the Democrats on Capitol Hill might have had the temerity to investigate what works remarkably well in Belgium and Japan, among dozens of other countries.

 

Globally, the single-payer option – or, let’s face it, nationalization – has brought in universal coverage at about half of what the United States spends today; let alone what we will spend with the clumsy hybrid that the president is selling and Congress is concocting.

 

Under nearly all state-operated systems, private insurers have a role. My friends in Britain and Ireland all have private insurance for bespoke medicine above that available on the state system. Sure, state systems are criticized, especially in Italy (along with everything else), but not one country that has a state system has made any political move to repeal it. State systems are popular.

 

In Britain, where I have had most experience with the National Health Service, it is the third rail of their politics. Even the great advocate of free enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, did not dare to even think of touching it. Every British Tory wants to make it more efficient, but none wants to repeal it. Thatcher repealed anything that had the whiff of socialism about it and privatized much, including the railways, but the health system was sacrosanct.

 

The issue should not be whether we can keep every insurer alive and whether we should continue to burden employers with the health care of their staffs and their families, but whether a new system will deliver for all Americans at reasonable cost.

 

It is probably too late to rationalize the system all at once. There are too many interests, too much money at stake and a pathological fear of government, fanned by the loud few. No matter that the Tennessee Valley Authority works well, that the Veterans Administration is a larger, and probably better, state program than those in many countries. It is not just in health care that Congress and the administration are engaged in workaround. Cap-and-trade in energy is another piece of avoidance.

Utility chief, after utility chief, after utility chief–among them, John Rowe of Exelon and James Rogers of Duke–has said that a simple carbon tax would be more effective and cheaper than cap-and-trade. But the same people who yell “socialist” get severe arrhythmia at the mention of “tax.” Workaround.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

Obama Diagnosis, Won’t Prescribe

by 2 Comments

 

 

President Barack Obama starts from a pretty compelling argument: In the rich industrialized nations, the rich and the poor should be able to afford to get sick. They surely will. Disease does not means test.

 

But after that, the health care argument gets away from the president. In fact, he hasn’t made his own argument.

 

This week Obama has argued passionately for reform, as he did in his prime-time news conference Wednesday night. But we have yet to hear his personal view of what an American health care system should look like. One suspects that it is the solution that dare not speak its name: a single-payer system, a government system. Yes, a–dread word–socialist system.

 

The empirical evidence from Australia to Ireland, Canada to Norway is that this is the way to go. Every country with a national health service pays less for health care per capita than does the United States. And not one has contemplated canceling their system.

 

Yet it is a concept that may be too radical for Americans. It also may be too late in the evolution of the health care industry to nationalize the system.

 

Canada had the most difficulty nationalizing health care of any major country, and is still groaning. Canada did not plunge in; it waded into a state system, and put it all together in an age of sophisticated medicine. But it is not without problems: for example, Canada failed to comprehend that if everyone who needs to see a doctor sees one, more doctors will be needed. There is a chronic shortage of doctors in Canada.

 

Britain, by contrast, nationalized its health system after World War II, when medicine was simpler and the process was easier. It was also a time of post-war idealism. Today, like most state systems, it functions well enough but not perfectly. Well enough for Britons living abroad, including in the United States, to fly home for major surgery.

 

The world of single-payer does allow for private insurance, and it is flourishing in countries like Ireland. This provides a second tier for those who feel the basic system is too rudimentary. Under this arrangement if you want a procedure for a non-life-threatening ailment, which would require a long wait in the state system, you visit the specialist–called a consultant in the British Isles–and the insurance company picks up the tab. The idea is that the well-off get what they want, and the rest get what they want.

 

Obama’s problem is that he can diagnose the problem but has failed to prescribe a solution that he appears to believe in. He is waiting for Congress to produce something that he can sign onto, called reform, and that will not expand the budget. Where European and some Pacific countries have allowed private systems to piggyback on state systems, Congress is struggling with the reverse and the president is going along. Congress is planning to have the state piggyback on the employer-paid system.

 

The idea that employers should carry the health care burden probably goes back to the 19th century when railroads, coal mines and ships found it best to employ a doctor to keep workers on the job. Today, it is an incongrous burden on American firms in an age of globalization.

 

The three principal schemes for a new day in health care seek to preserve private insurance as primary, mandate portability, demand that commercial insurers do not reject pre-existing conditions, and provide some kind of safety net from the government. And, yes, the whole new edifice will be revenue-neutral.

 

At his press conference, Obama was ebullient, funny at times–the very picture of a man about to get what he wants. By contrast, in the halls of Congress, the lawmakers who are supposed to deliver this package are despondent. They do not know what the president will accept and are not persuaded that huge federal spending will not result. There is real political fear on Capitol Hill. Wednesday night did not allay it.

 


 

 

 

 

The Joy of the Private Car

by Leave a Comment

 

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

by Leave a Comment

 

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?

by Leave a Comment

 

 

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

by 2 Comments

 

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

by Leave a Comment

 

 

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!

by Leave a Comment

 

 

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

by Leave a Comment

 

 

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