White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, Including at the Tech Giants

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For me, the most remarkable thing about Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at a Los Angeles court, to answer questions about the addictive aspects of social media, was that he was there at 8:30 a.m. wearing a suit.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, in her excellent book about Facebook, “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism,” said Zuckerberg doesn’t see anyone before noon because he has to sleep, having been up most of the night.

This had Wynn-Williams, who rose to head Facebook’s international relations team, sometimes telling heads of state that they would have to wait for the great man to alight from his bed at noon or later.

Zuckerberg could be uninterested or uninformed about the country from which he was trying to get favors for Facebook, she wrote. As Facebook had electorates in its thrall, countries’ leaders were prepared to defer to the sleeping titan.

This doesn’t mean that Zuckerberg is evil, but it does point to enormous self-regard. His sleeping routine is a de facto declaration: I am so rich and so powerful that I can command world leaders to rearrange their schedules to accommodate mine. They did, according to Wynn-Williams.

While the venerable observation by Lord Acton in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is nearly always directed at politicians and autocrats, it is as true for billionaires and their companies.

More so with the tech gargantuans who are a force in the financial markets and politics, and will control much of the future if their investments in artificial intelligence pay off. Among them are Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Another point Wynn-Williams made in her book is that most of the heads of state whom Zuckerberg treated with minimal respect won’t be in power in 10 years, but Zuckerberg, who is 41, may be around for half a century. The long game is his, along with his colleague-companies and their CEOs, especially when they own a commanding amount of the stock, like Tesla’s Elon Musk.

The effect of Big Tech as a lobbying force is apparent: Any CEO has access to the White House and is, in turn, cultivated by it. Congress has a permanent welcome mat out to Big Tech lobbyists and their campaign contributions.

A more damaging impact might be what Big Tech does to new tech.

The biggies buy up every startup that looks as though it might become a mega company. All of the Big Tech companies are conglomerates, and history has shown that conglomerates discard unprofitable enterprises and favor the cash cows. Tech autocracy is no kinder than any other autocracy.

Startups are what keep America ahead of the world in tech, and they are keenly watched for any sign that they may grow into another agent of change. Whereas at the beginning of the tech boom, successful startups headed for an initial public offering, and now they calculate from the get-go which behemoth tech company will buy them. The circle is closed.

The big get bigger, and the startup is absorbed into a giant organization, where it might prosper or whither. Either way, it is out of reach, including regulatory reach. It is in the castle walls.

As we see with the fate of CBS and The Washington Post, Big Tech can play havoc with the media and our right to know what is going on. The money is so large that it is almost impossible for politicians not to seek the favor of the mighty techs and their Vesuvian cash flow.

The obverse of that is what they might do if they overreach, as they may be doing now with AI investments, and bring down the stock market.

Big Tech has showered us with wonders that have made life easier and fun, but there is a price. The price is that we have handed the future to a group of companies that, understandably, are interested in self-preservation first, as with all autocracy.

The Danger of Being Inured to the Status Quo

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We have all had the experience of staying a few days in a hotel — say on holiday — which becomes home; quickly, it becomes familiar. Individuals adjust to change. People who come into money get used to being well-off, and people who lose everything get used to that.

So, too, with nations. They adjust with this attitude: That is just the way it is.

The danger to America is that we will adjust, take the aberrations of today as the norm, and that after this period of presidential excess, we will be inured to presidential excess.

We will expect future presidents to skirt the Constitution or ignore it, and to consolidate the dangerous concept of a unitary executive — where the president is all-powerful and Congress is a functionary, often subservient.

The danger is acceptance. When something is accepted, it becomes the new normal, ensconced and hard to remove. The status quo ante isn’t a guaranteed consequence of the next election.

Over 25 years, I went to Ireland once a year to attend an Irish summer school, akin to a Renaissance Weekend here or a mini-Davos. When I started traveling to Ireland, it was one of the poorest nations in Europe.

What was most disturbing wasn’t that Ireland, the mother-nation to so many Americans, was poor, but rather the terrible acceptance that poverty was inevitable, and that to be a poor nation was the destiny of Ireland.

Then came the Celtic Tiger period, 1995 to 2007. The computer industry set Ireland on the road to global success, and the Emerald Isle became the Golden Isle, basking in prosperity. Ireland gained swagger and became a self-confident place that could show the world. This adjustment came quickly.

At the end of World War II, Argentina had the fifth-largest economy in the world. It had a high per-capita income, and its currency was as stable as the U.S. dollar. Now, it ranks 24th in the world by nominal GDP, and 70th by per-capita income, although it is the second-largest economy in South America, after Brazil.

Worse, I have found on visits to Argentina that it has come to accept its status as a permanent economic basket case with inept political leadership.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been on an upward economic path. It also assumed a world leadership role that made it the envy of the world, the place to emulate.

And for an individual, it was the place to migrate to. Talent and skill poured in, and the United States led the world in medicine, other sciences and technology. Also, in movies and popular music.

A second upward path began in the early 1960s with the civil rights movement, which opened a segregated society to all and became a beacon for the world.

Recently, on the PBS television program “White House Chronicle,” Freeman Hrabowski, spoke with me and my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell, about his astonishing ascent from a child who was imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963 for marching for access to a better school to his being sworn in as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 

“In 30 years, I went from being denied access to a White university, the University of Alabama, to becoming president of a mostly White university,” he said.

Civil rights and human rights were a second trajectory that took the United States to a special place in global esteem. A place of decency, values and hope. We exported those values and promoted them universally, until last year when they were abandoned.

We had accepted that we were a generous nation, concerned with the condition of the world outside our borders and anxious to share our bounty and to help.

The very concept of who we were was tied up with the sense of America’s mission: a force for good at home and abroad; first to seek peace, to further self-determination and healing. America was beautiful in that mission.

Now, we are America the transactional. However, transactions by their nature aren’t generous; they aren’t uplifting. They don’t boost the spirit or inspire the future; they don’t soar. Instead, they say over and over again: “What is in it for me?”

That isn’t America, which is a great country, and a greater state of mind.

SCOTUS May Want to Check the Bible on Citizenship and Rights

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President Trump claims that birthright citizenship isn’t that: a birthright. He wants the authority to revoke the citizenship of U.S.-born children of immigrants here illegally and visitors here temporarily.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on birthright citizenship this spring. It will likely hand down a ruling by summer.  Before the justices decide, they may want to cast their eyes over the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible.

They will learn anew how inviolate birthright citizenship was to Paul when he entered Jerusalem. He had to invoke his Roman citizenship to save himself from flogging and torture. On another occasion, Paul used his rights as a citizen to demand a trial.

Here is what befell Paul in Jerusalem in Acts 22: 22-29:

22 The crowd listened to Paul until he said this. Then they raised their voices and shouted, “Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live!”

23 As they were shouting and throwing off their cloaks and flinging dust into the air,

24 the commander ordered that Paul be taken into the barracks. He directed that he be flogged and interrogated in order to find out why the people were shouting at him like this.

25 As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, “Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?”

26 When the centurion heard this, he went to the commander and reported it. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “This man is a Roman citizen.”

27 The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?”

“Yes, I am,” he answered.

28 Then the commander said, “I had to pay a lot of money for my citizenship.

“But I was born a citizen,” Paul replied.

29 Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.

In the 1st century, Roman citizenship could be had by birth, purchased or granted by the emperor. But citizens born to their status had something of an edge over those, like the commander, who had bought their  citizenship.

A Roman citizen enjoyed many rights, which are also contained in the U.S. Constitution but are being ignored by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are sweeping up people — some have turned out to be citizens and some have been deported in error.

These are the rights of a Roman citizen in the 1st century:

—Immunity from flogging and torture. These could be used to extract confessions, but were forbidden to be used against citizens.

—The right to a fair trial, which included the accused’s right to confront his accusers.

—The right to appeal directly to the emperor.

—Protection from degrading death, particularly crucifixion.

—Protection from illegal imprisonment. A citizen couldn’t be jailed if he hadn’t been convicted.

Trump is seeking a Supreme Court ruling to uphold his executive order (14161), ending universal birthright citizenship. The lower courts have restricted the order, and the president has asked SCOTUS to set that aside.

The 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship to any child born under the jurisdiction of the United States. But Trump’s executive order, according to the New York City Bar, “purports to limit birthright citizenship by alleging that a child born to undocumented parents is not ‘within the jurisdiction of the United States.’  It thereby posits that birthright citizenship does not extend to any child born in the United States to a mother who is unlawfully present or lawfully present on a temporary basis and a father who is neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.”

If Trump prevails, the unfortunate children will be unable to get birth certificates, register for school, receive healthcare or any public assistance. They must either seek citizenship from their parents’ country or, more likely, join the growing ranks of the world’s stateless people, punished for life for the crime of being born.

Victims to be exploited down through the decades of their lives.

The United Nations estimates that there are more than 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a gross undercount, considering the number of refugees across Africa and in Latin America. War and drought are adding to the numbers daily.

If the justices want another biblical example, they may turn to the Old Testament and its several warnings that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children for generations. As Exodus 20:5 puts it, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation.”

Those who support the Trump view may want to think about the iniquity they are promoting. No baby chooses where to be born, ever.

A Conversation With 2026 on America’s Meaning to the World

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Come on in, 2026. Welcome. I am glad to see you because your predecessor year was not to my liking.

Yes, I know there is always something going on in the world that we wish were not going on. Paul Harvey, the conservative broadcaster, said, “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”

Indeed. Wars, uprisings, oppression, cruelty and man’s inhumanity to man are to be found in every year. But last year, the world lost something it may not get back. You see, ’26 — you don’t mind if I shorten your title, do you — we lost America. Not the country but the metaphor.

We were, ’26, despite our tragic mistakes — including slavery and wrongheaded wars — a country of caring people, a country that cared (mostly) for its own people and those who lived elsewhere in the world.

It was the country that sought to help itself and to help the world. It was the sharing country, the country that showed the way, the country that sought to correct wrong, to overthrow evil and to excel at global kindness.

It was the country that led by example in freedom of speech, freedom of movement and in free, democratic government.

When John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, described his lover’s beauty as “my America” in the 1590s, he foreshadowed the emergence of the United States a nation of spiritual beauty.

From World War II on, caring was an American inclination as well as a policy.

We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, an act of international largesse without historical parallel. We rushed to help after droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and wars.

We were everywhere with open hands and hearts. America the bountiful. We had the resources and the great heart to do good, to show our own overflowing decency, even if it got mixed up with ideology. We led the world in caring.

We bound up the wounds of the world, as much as we could, whether they were the result of human folly or nature’s occasional callousness.

We delivered truth through the Voice of America and aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our might was always at hand to help, to save the drowning, to feed the starving and to minister to the victims of pandemic — as with AIDS and Ebola in Africa.

In 2025, that ended. More than a century of decency suspended, suddenly, thoughtlessly.

America the Great Country became America Just Another Striving Country, decency confused with weakness, indifference with strength, friends with oil autocracies.

It wasn’t just the sense of noblesse oblige, which not only distinguished us in the 20th century, but also earlier. In the 19th century, we opened our gates to the starving, the downtrodden and the desperate. They joined the people already living here to build the greatest nation — a democracy — that the world has ever seen. First in science. First in business. First in medicine. First in agriculture. First in decency.

These people brought to America labor and know-how across the board, from weaving technology in the 18th century to engineering in the 19th century to musical theater in the 20th century, along with movie-making and rocket science.

I would submit, ’26, that it is all about American greatness, and last year we slammed the door shut on greatness, abandoned longtime allies and friends. We forsook people who had been compatriots in war, culture and history for the dubious company of the worst of the worst, aggressors, oppressors, liars, everyone soaked in the blood of their innocent victims.

Yes, ’26, America stood tall in the world because it stood for what was right. Its system of law — including the ability to have small wrongs addressed by high courts — was the envy of foreign lands where law was bent to politics, where democracy was an empty phrase for state manipulation of the vote. The Soviet Union claimed democracy; America practiced it.

America soared, for example, with President Jimmy Carter’s principled and persuasive pursuit of human rights and President Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary explanation of its greatness: the “shining city upon a hill.”

It sunk from time to time. Slavery was horrific; Dred Scott, appalling; Prohibition, silly; the Hollywood blacklist, outrageous.

But ’26, decency finally triumphed and America was great, its better instincts superb — and now worth restoring for the nation and for the troubled, brutalized world.

Good luck, ’26. You will bear a standard that the world has looked to. Lift it high again.

 

How Fear Came to America in 2025

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Of all the things that happened in 2025 — a year dominated by the presidency of Donald Trump — not the least is that fear came to America.

It’s reminiscent of the fear that African Americans knew in the days of the lynch mob, or that Jews have felt from time to time, or that Hollywood felt during the blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s, or the fear that people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, who were mostly U.S. citizens, felt when they were rounded up and interred following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For some, it is a low-grade fear of reprisals, financial ruin and humiliation. And for some, it is a fear of ruin by litigation. But for others, it is fear of faceless arrest, the jail cell and plastic handcuffs.

All of this has made us a nation in fear and removed our faith in our laws, our Constitution, and our plain decency.

This is a new kind of fear which is acute in places, such as immigrant communities, but more universal than in the past.

It isn’t the fear of a foreign power or an alien ideology or a disease, but a fear generated domestically — generated by our own government. Fear in our workplaces, our schools, our movie studios, our newsrooms and our universities.

For the first time, this year we saw troops on the streets of cities when there was no civil unrest — as there was, for example, during the riots of 1968 which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

We saw troops deployed in cities where they weren’t wanted, opposed by the local government and local people. But those cities got the troops courtesy of a claim by the president that troops can manage law enforcement better than the local police. Or was there some more sinister purpose?

For the first time, we saw arrests without charge or evidence, carried out by masked ICE agents, of people simply suspected of being here illegally.

Often the suspicion is no more than the color of the arrestee’s skin, their dress and their demeanor. No crime needs to be proved by this army of the state, dressed to intimidate. To the ICE men and women, appearance is tantamount to conviction.

Nightly on television we watched agents drag away men, women and children without due process; they would be held and deported without charge, trial or having any avenue of appeal. Justice denied, nonoperational. Often deportees go to countries that are alien or different from their homelands.

Fear has come home.

Immigrants are frightened even if they are citizens. If you have olive-toned skin, you can be dragged and held incommunicado. No appeal, no trial, no court appearance, no access to help. Habeas corpus suspended.

Pinch yourself and ask: Is this the America we cherish for its freedom, its justice and its generosity of spirit?

The fear isn’t confined to those who might be swept up in the mindless cruelty of ICE but extends throughout society. People with stature fear that if they speak out, if they do what at other times they might have seen as their civic duty, they will endanger themselves and their families. All the government has to do is to start an investigation or threaten one and the damage is done, the first level of punishment is delivered.

Investigations can target anything from how you filled out a mortgage application to whether you wrote something which may be viewed as objectionable, and the punishment begins.

Fear stalks the schools where teachers and professors can be punished for what they say or teach, and where the institutions of higher learning are subject to political scrutiny. Politics has become the law, capricious and savage.

There is fear in business where so many companies rely on government loan guarantees or tax credits for their growth. There is fear that if they say anything that can be construed as disloyal, they will be punished.

Political opponents fear that their mortgage applications may be deemed to be irregular and they are to be censured or prosecuted. Political prosecution is now a government tool.

Others just fear that Trump will ridicule them in public with his schoolyard denigrations, particularly members of Congress. They fear they will be reprimanded and marked for defeat in the polls.

There is an awful completeness about the Trump rampage: his systematic ignoring of norms, shredding of the rights of the individual, destroying families and bringing about untold misery.

A question for all America: How is the spreading of fear — sometimes an acute fear and sometimes low-grade fear — throughout society beneficial and to whom?

We, the people, deserve to know.

The Age of Dichotomy Is Tearing Up America

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We live in an age of dichotomy.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

We have more means of communication, but there is a pandemic of loneliness.

We have unprecedented access to information, but we seem to know less, from civics to the history of the country.

We are beginning to see artificial intelligence displacing white-collar workers in many sectors, but there is a crying shortage of skilled workers, including welders, electricians, pipe fitters and ironworkers.

If your skill involves your hands, you are safe for now.

New data centers, hotels and mixed-use structures, factories and power plants are being delayed because of worker shortages. But the government is expelling undocumented immigrants, hundreds of thousands who have skills.

Thoughts about dichotomy came to me when Adam Clayton Powell III and I were interviewing Hedrick Smith, a journalist in full: a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor, an Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent and a bestselling author.

We were talking with Smith on “White House Chronicle,” the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS for which I serve as executive producer and co-host.

The two dichotomies that struck me were Smith’s explanation of the decline of the middle class as the richest few rise, and the way Congress has drifted into operating more like the British Parliament with party-line votes than the body envisaged by the founders.

Echoing Benjamin Disraeli, the great British prime minister who said in 1845 that Britain had become “two nations,” rich and poor, Smith said: “Since 1980, a wedge has been driven. We have become two Americas economically.”

On the chronic dysfunction in Congress, Smith said: “When I came to Washington in 1962, to work for The New York Times, budgets got passed routinely. Congress passed 13 appropriations bills for different parts of the government. It happened every year.”

This routine congressional action happened because there were compromises, he said, noting, “There were 70 Republicans who voted for Medicare along with 170 Democrats. (There was) compromise on the national highway system, sending a man to the moon in competition with the Russians. Compromise on a whole slew of things was absolutely common.”

Smith remembered those days in Washington of order, bipartisanship and division over policy, not party. There were Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans, and Congress divided that way, but not routinely by party line.

He said, “There were gypsy moth Republicans who voted with Democratic presidents and boll weevil Democrats who voted with Republican presidents.”

In fact, Smith said, there wasn’t a single party-line vote on any major issue in Congress from 1945 to 1993.

“The Founding Fathers would never have imagined that we would have what the British call ‘party government.’ Our system is constructed to require compromise, while we now have a political system that is gelled in bipartisanship.”

On the dichotomy between the rich and the poor, Smith said that in the period from World War II up until 1980, the American middle class was experiencing a rise in its standard of living roughly keeping up with what was happening to the rich.

But since 1980, he said, “The upper 1%, and even the top 10%, have been soaring and the rest of the country has fallen off the cliff.”

This dichotomy, according to Smith, has had huge political consequences.

In 2016, he said, Donald Trump ran for president as an advocate of the working class against the establishment Republicans: “He had 15 Republican (contenders) who were pro-business; they were pro-suburban Republicans who were well-educated, well-off. Trump had run on the other side, trying to grab the people who were aggrieved and left out by globalization. But we forget that,” he said.

Smith went on to say that Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, did the same thing: “He was a 70-year-old, white-haired socialist who came from Vermont, with its three electoral votes, but he ran against the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton … and he damn near took the nomination away from her.”

Smith said that result showed “there was rebellion against the establishment.”

That rebellion, in my mind, has resulted in a worsening separation between and within the parties. They aren’t making compromises which, as in times past, would offer a way forward.

A final dichotomy: The United States is the richest country the world has ever seen, and the national debt has just reached $38 trillion dollars.

Fear Is Afoot, Be Afraid America

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There is enough fear to go around.

There is fear of the indescribable horror when the ICE men and women, their faces hidden by masks, grab a suspected illegal immigrant. Their grab could come at the person’s home or place of work, while picking up a child from school or standing in the hallway of a courthouse.

That person knows fear as never before. That person’s life, for practical purposes, may be over: loved ones left behind, hope shredded. He or she may be shipped to a place where they won’t be able to survive.

Fear is there because, maybe decades ago, they sought a better life and voted for it with their feet.

There is no time to argue, no time to ask why, no time to say goodbye. No time to prove your innocence or your U.S. citizenship. It is raw fear — the fear that secret police have always used.

There is the fear of those who work in government — once one of the securest jobs in the country — that they will be fired because their legitimate work in another administration is an affront to this one.

This hammer has come down in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. The crime: supposedly being on the wrong side of history.

There is fear in the universities. Once a babel of free, even outrageous speech, they are cowed. Mighty Harvard, one of the shiniest stars in the education firmament, is dulled, and other universities fear they will be next. Everywhere academics worry that what they say in their classrooms might be reported as inappropriate — their careers ended.

There is fear in the law firms. A new concept is at work: an advocate is somehow guilty because of whom they defended. This violates the whole underpinning of law and advocacy, dating back to Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, now asunder in the United States.

Media is afraid. Disney, CBS and The Washington Post have bent before the fear of retribution, the fear that other aspects of their business will pay the price for freedom of speech. Journalists fear the First Amendment is abridged and won’t protect them.

There is fear, albeit of a lower order, across corporate America as it has become apparent that the government can reach deep down into almost any company, canceling contracts, withholding loan guarantees and, worse, ordering an “investigation.” That is a punishment that costs untold dollars and shatters good names, even if no prosecution follows.

Elected officeholders have reason to feel fear. President Donald Trump has suggested that Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should be in jail. Is his compliant DOJ working on that? Fear is unleashed for the elected. Doing your job is no protection.

If you have expressed an opinion that could be judged as subversive, the state could come after you. Suppose you walk in a demonstration, exercising your constitutional right to assemble and petition? Suppose you wrote something on social media, so easily traced with AI, which is now out of step with the times? Satire? Opinion? News? Facts that are out of fashion? If you have posted, be afraid.

If you take a flight these days, the TSA will ask you to look into a camera. Then government has a fresh picture of you in its active system, ready for facial recognition software to identify you. It will ID you if you should be walking in a demonstration or just be near one. Your own picture, so easily captured by modern technology, can convict you.

What is the purpose of that picture? It has no bearing on the flight you are about to take. The same thing is true when you reenter the country from abroad. Smile for Big Brother.

Surveillance is a favored tool of the authoritarian state. I have seen it at work in Cuba, in apartheid South Africa and in the Soviet Union. Successive U.S. administrations have been quick to criticize the increasing use of technology for surveillance in China. No more.

Troops are being ordered into cities where the locals don’t want them. They come under the promiscuous use of the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Does America fear insurrection? No, but there is fear of federal troops in our cities.

The Stateless in America Would Face a Kind of Damnation

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I have only known one stateless person. You don’t get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.

The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.

They don’t know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.

His story ended well, but few do.

When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.

It hadn’t always been that way. He told me he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn’t damage the cloth.

To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.

So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.

Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.

I don’t know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.

An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.

The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?

Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.

It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.

Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn’t choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.

The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can’t absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.

There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture and established religion is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.

But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?

All immigrants can’t be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.

It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.

To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn’t good policy. It is also unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.

Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?

The Shady, Sometimes Wacky World of State Secrets and Security Clearances

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Beware: Classified documents don’t always hide state secrets, and security clearances are used as tools of manipulation and vengeance.

Before Xerox, if you wanted to keep a copy of something, you had to type it with a carbon sheet backing every page.

In 1969, I was commissioned by a long-gone consultancy, the Arctic Company, to write a paper on the use of hovercraft by the military, especially the infantry.

They were offering $500 for the job and, like most reporters, I was keen for the income, so I signed up.

It was a time when it was believed that hovercraft — vehicles that cover the ground on a cushion of air — would be widely deployed.

I had no great insight into the vehicles or how they might be used as chariots of war. But I did have a lively imagination and access to The Washington Post library. I gorged on newspaper clippings and wrote my commissioned piece.

After it had been accepted, and I was told by the company that the army was “very pleased” with it, I forgot about it.

Then someone unrelated asked if they could see it out of curiosity. I said I didn’t have a copy, but I had been told that it had been mimeographed and widely distributed in the Pentagon.

I asked the Arctic Company for a copy, and they referred me to the appropriate office in the Pentagon. I was rebuffed. They said that it was classified and I could only see it if I had security clearance.

The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which controlled the nuclear establishment, military and civilian, used classification and security clearances to keep other members of Congress and the press out of its business; it regarded itself as the only responsible custodian of the nation’s nuclear secrets.

I was told that they were so classification-obsessed they couldn’t discuss the contents of the papers they had assembled to discuss because they were marked “Eyes Only.”

When James Schlesinger became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in August 1971, he set about overhauling the classification of documents.

I was close to Schlesinger, and he told me that he thought more than half of the AEC documents shouldn’t be classified, and he set about declassifying them. His argument: If you classify the trivial, all classification is degraded.

Dixy Lee Ray, the last chair of the AEC, became a friend of mine. I invited her to dinner at the venerable Red Fox Inn & Tavern in Middleburg, Virginia, established in 1728. It is a pleasant place to dine and claims to be the oldest continuously operating inn in America.

Ray went everywhere with her two dogs (Ghillie, a Scottish Deerhound, and Jacques, a miniature poodle), and they were in her limousine wherever she went. The car also contained — as I am sure the secretary of energy’s car does today — the hotline that would be part of the launch procedure, in the event a nuclear attack was ordered by the president.

In her briefcase, Ray had an innocuous study she had wanted to give to me.

It was a blustery night, and her driver was waiting in the car in the parking lot with her briefcase on the back seat and both dogs on the front seat.

The moment Ray opened the rear door, two things happened: A great gust of wind arose and Ghillie leapt from the front seat to the back seat, upsetting the briefcase. Crisis!

All the papers in the briefcase, many of them marked with the big red X of classified documents, blew all over the parking lot.

The three of us, in panic mode, set about scouring the bushes for them in the dark, fearing that someone would find one of them and, so to speak, the jig would be up. We could imagine the headlines.

After an hour’s search, we figured we had gathered all the papers, and Ray did an inventory. Nonetheless, the next morning I drove out from Washington to make sure no nuclear secret was impaled on a bush branch.

From the time when J. Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance under murky circumstances, these have been used as a tool of manipulation and vengeance.

If a scientist or a manager loses their clearance, they can appeal in a long, difficult and expensive process. Even if the victim appeals, the damage is done; the subject is damaged goods, publicly humiliated as morally deficient and untrustworthy.

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

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A California company, Wind Harvest, is in high gear to change the dynamics of wind energy and to vastly improve the economics of wind farms. 

But the company wouldn’t be marketing to large energy users and wind farm operators today if it hadn’t used crowdfunding for its recent rounds of financing. Crowdfunding can get a startup over the hill.

Kevin Wolf, Wind Harvest co-founder and CEO, explained that developers of hardware face a double problem when it comes to financing: The banks won’t finance their customers’ projects until the technology has been certified and, in Wind Harvest’s case, dozens of their unique wind turbines have been operating for at least a year which requires money.

Wolf said, “It takes about two years to complete a ‘technology readiness level,’ unless a company is well-funded. Six months to have all the components arrive, six months to a year to install and fully test the prototype, and then another six months to complete the new design.” Meantime, a team of engineers and the bills have to be paid.

Venture capitalists have shown a decided disinclination to finance hardware, preferring computer-related software products, he said.

But with crowdfunding, often through a special-purpose company, thousands of individuals have become venture capitalists in companies like Wind Harvest. Many of those investors have hit it big. 

Two standout companies which grew into multi-billion dollar ones: Oculus VR and Peloton.

Oculus, the virtual reality technology company, used crowdfunding to raise $250,000 in 2012. Two years later, it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.

Peloton, the fitness company, started with crowdfunding of $307,000, achieved a valuation of $8.1 billion its initial public offering, and rose to astronomically high valuations during the Covid pandemic. It has now fallen back considerably, after many difficulties in the fitness industry.

Wind Harvest is essentially offering new infrastructure which, should it catch on, would give it a steady and fairly predictable path forward as both a wind turbine Original Equipment Manufacturer and as a renewable energy project developer.

The company’s product, trademarked as Wind Harvester, is a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT): The drive shaft and the electrical generator are aligned vertical to the ground. In traditional wind turbines, those components are horizontal to the ground. 

The most famous vertical-axis wind turbine is the Darrieus, named after a French engineer who patented it in 1926. It has an elegant, eggbeater shape almost like a fine outdoor sculpture. But it ran into problems with vibration and other technical drawbacks and wasn’t a commercial success.

At the outset of the energy crisis in 1973, Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, one of the jewels in the crown of the national laboratory system, did considerable theoretical work on wind turbines, concentrating on vertical-axis designs. But when the research was moved to another laboratory, the horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) became the focus.

The codes developed at Sandia are foundational to the Wind Harvest design. Wolf explained that the choice between VAWTs and HAWTs isn’t an either-or choice, except where wind shears are high and wind near the ground slows down. Then tall, horizontal-axis wind turbines have the advantage.

Wind Harvest turbines are designed to capture the wind on ridgelines, hills and mountain passes where wind funnels and accelerates turbines under the tall horizontal-axis turbines. VAWTs can take advantage of the powerful wind that swirls around near the ground. This turbulent wind at the surface is an unused resource now.

With the bottom of their blades between 25 feet and 50 feet off the ground and installed in pairs 3 feet apart from each, Wind Harvest turbines can double the output of electricity from a wind farm while still leaving enough clearance for agriculture, whether it is grazing animals or growing crops. So, add efficiency to the virtues of these turbines: better use of the wind resources, land and infrastructure. 

Thanks to crowdfunding in four tranches, Wind Harvest is now ready to go to market with utility scale installations.

Wolf listed these additional virtues for VAWTs: 

  • They can be entirely made in America. Right now their blades are extruded by Step-G in Germany.
  • They are designed to withstand the 180 mph wind gusts from a Category 5 hurricane.
  • Because they are short, they can use larger permanent magnet generators (PMGs) not made of rare earth magnets. For example, their PMGs can use ferrite magnets which are iron-based. 
  • Wind Harvest installations have a fatigue life of 75 years with maintenance and periodic refurbishment. Most turbines now in use must be replaced after about 25 years.

The first Wind Harvesters to be put into service are planned for a dredge spoil-created peninsula on St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, located in the Caribbean Sea. The entire output of the first phase of the project will be bought by the oil refinery adjacent to the project site and replace the burning of costly propane for generation.

Big ideas now have funding sources besides “Shark Tank,” venture capital, and the banks.