White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

We Need to Hear What the Democratic Socialists Have in Mind

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Historically, in parts of the British Isles, there were shortages of family names, which is why a disproportionate number of the Welsh are called Evans, Jones or Williams.

Yes, my first name is Welsh, but I believe we were of untrammeled English stock with possibly a smidgen of Dutch.

I mention these things because names, and what they mean, are becoming troublesome, or seem to be.

The Democratic Socialists of America might rue that name. They might have gone for one with less baggage — perhaps the New Democrats, The Fair Vote Party or the Better Shake Democrats.

They are Democrats, and they haven’t fallen far from the tree. Calling themselves socialists is causing good country club Republicans to shake uncontrollably, spilling their martinis, olives and all.

Socialism is a toxic term for most Americans. Classically, it is a political philosophy that holds that the state should own the means of production and distribution.

You might note that it isn’t indistinguishable from communism, which, in the days of the Soviet Union, kept the Russians and their vassal states in subjugation.

That isn’t what today’s democratic socialists want. Even if they haven’t articulated it well, what New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and that old warrior of the left, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, want is the kind of democratic socialism that Scandinavian and Nordic countries practice, and mostly pull off: a government-provided social network plus capitalism.

For those countries, this means high taxes, free education, free healthcare, subsidized but good transportation, and annual six-week vacations. It also includes tax-funded parental leave — where both the father and the mother can stay at home for lengthy periods.

Ostentatious wealth is frowned upon. For those on the bottom rung of the income ladder, there are comprehensive aid services.

Underlying not just Scandinavian-Nordic socialism is a desire to perfect society, to make it fairer and kinder.

In the two countries I know something about, Finland and Sweden, I find people proud of their systems, but also railing against them for the state’s smothering nature.

U.S. left-wingers support socialism because they want a genteel, kind world. They don’t want what we have now: some with billions and some homeless. They want healthcare without strings for the sick, and freedom from the fear of financial ruin from catastrophic illness.

Britain, with its extensive social network, is suffering under an unsustainable burden of good intentions. Welfare provisions, known as “benefit,” aren’t only killing the British economy but also the British spirit.

The Wall Street Journal, in a clear piece of reporting, details the nightmare of good intentions that is impoverishing Britain. As the Journal pointed out, in some circumstances, a patient with a real or imaginary phobia can get a new leased car every three years. A phobia or a “fiddle”?

Somewhere in its post-war history, the idea of a fiddle — a little something on the side — became part of the Brit psyche.

When I worked for a newspaper on Fleet Street, like other reporters, I had access to a motor pool of drivers who drove us around London as we needed. They also did editorial assistant jobs, like finding the nearest phone box—which, in those days before cell phones, was so important.

My driver was a huge man who, of course, was nicknamed “Tiny.” One day, Tiny confided to me that he had another job. While he drove for the editorial side of the newspaper, he was also signed up as a delivery truck driver and got fully paid for a job he never did.

When I told him that was appalling, he said, “It’s my fiddle, everyone has a fiddle. What about your expenses? Aren’t they a fiddle?”

Well, they were. Reporters were compensated by “expenses.” They were told how much to overcharge the company and held to it. Newspapers allowed differences beyond what we actually spent.

I mention this to show how the British welfare system has been so abused, and how the British are at peace with cheating it.

The government — the “nanny state,” as it is called — tries to ease all human difficulties, and it has reached a point where the real economy can’t afford the social welfare it has been so proud of providing.

France and other countries that have taken this gentler socialism route have also found themselves choked by it.

The Democratic Socialists of America need to decide what they are for and what it will cost. Being hostile to the status quo isn’t a policy.

Democratic Lightheadedness Won’t Erase Trump’s Stain

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It sounds like an admonition from a senior detective to a junior colleague: Assume nothing.

Right now, across America, a lot of political assuming is going on, mostly among Democrats. The first assumption is that the Democrats will win the midterms. It is dangerous to assume the winner of any race until the winning post has clearly been passed. Nonetheless, a certain lightheadedness has taken over Democrats and those who are planning to vote with them.

The Democrats are also assuming victory not only in November 2026, but also victory in November 2028. They are dreaming of changes, cosmetic and profound.

Cosmetically, they assume some of the extremes of President Trump’s architectural bric-a-brac in Washington will be torn down — especially the ballroom at the White House and the arch he is dead set on building at Memorial Bridge. Trouble is that people may like the arch and take it to heart. Also, the cost of taking it down will matter.

The ballroom will survive because, well, what could replace it? The East Wing of the White House has gone, and a replica would be an expensive undertaking. Nothing — a gaping hole — isn’t an option.

If he razes the Kennedy Center, the Democrats will rebuild it. The Kennedy name remains dear to them.

The new face of Washington is to be one built by Trump: the ballroom, the arch, and many monuments.

Expect to see these on selfies, postcards and as location identifiers in movies, like the way the London Eye, a Ferris wheel, has come to be the modern symbol of London, taking over from Tower Bridge.

Should a Republican win the presidency in 2028, other Trump changes, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario Lake America, will create optics and likely trigger legal challenges. A Democratic president will turn that clock back with relish, restoring the old names as the beginning of accommodations with Mexico and Canada.

The heavy lifting, as usual, won’t be the optics but the substance. There is a new world order, and future administrations will have to find America’s place in it —  while still facing off against China.

The Democrats, suffering from lightheadedness based on the assumption of victory in the midterms and further victory in 2028, assume that by some magic time travel, the status quo ante will return and the world will be put back together again as it was before Trump 2. Magical thinking.

They should contemplate the significance of Lady Macbeth’s declaration, “What’s done cannot be undone.”

Consider two seemingly irrevocable changes affecting two very different nations, Canada and Iran.

Canada, which has been a constant friend to America throughout its history, is riled as never before. The astute Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has sought to align his vast underpopulated country with Europe. There is even talk of Canada joining the European Union as its 28th member. That is Canadian lightheadedness.

First, the EU isn’t in great shape and has failed to coalesce into a country-like entity. It is riven with national interests and rivalries.

Second, there is the problem of the Atlantic. Whereas most of the EU is contiguous, Canada is far away, and its borders are determined not by a customs post but by an ocean — and by oceans of other differences.

Somehow, despite the loss of trust over torn-up treaties, Canada and the United States need each other.

While at war with America, Iran has discovered a compelling advantage in the region: the Strait of Hormuz. Control of the strait means control of a major asset, affecting the production and export of oil and gas in much of the Middle East. One-third of the world’s fertilizer passes through the strait.

The Trump administration believes America can control the strait and operate it as though it were the Panama Canal before President Jimmy Carter handed it over to Panama.

Sadly, this assumption belies reality. The Iran war has awakened the sleeping dog at the gate, and it is unlikely to obey a new owner or go back to sleep.

I believe we will win the war in the conventional sense, but we can never carry home the prize — that remains a territorial possession of Iran.

Trump’s mark on Washington and the world, like Lady Macbeth’s stain, is indelible.

Spot the Illegals — a Chilling, Sad Neighborhood Game

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Here is a disturbing game: Try to spot the illegal immigrant.

Is it the waitress, the winning one from Bulgaria, or is it the charming emergency room doctor from Pakistan, or is it one of the Mexican men working on the housing site at the corner? Maybe it is the Haitian caregiver in your home, whom you adore and are afraid to ask if employing her will compromise you.

You look hard at them because if they are illegal, or also referred to as undocumented immigrants, ICE could pounce.

They are a shadow underclass, productive members of society, and they are part of our national fabric.

Many of us are silent conspirators when it comes to these immigrants. We know and don’t tell. We don’t reach for the phone, and if they are arrested, we feel it personally.

Some would want you to believe that a majority of these people are rapists, murderers, thieves or drug dealers. If they are, they should be arrested, tried and imprisoned. That is what the police and the FBI should be doing, not the extracurricular, often barbarous ICE.

The trouble starts with the word “illegal,” which conjures visions of an evil underworld. Undocumented workers are indeed living in an underworld, doing essential jobs that others won’t. That labor force is part of the grease that keeps America’s wheel turning.

Whether cleaning houses, minding elderly parents or children, building houses, repairing roads or plucking chickens, immigrants, legal and illegal, are an essential part of the functioning of our society. Failure over decades to enact sensible immigration laws has left us persecuting those we depend on for so much.

The paperless came here chasing a dream that was also the legendary American Dream: a better life in a fairer, happier, safer place, where you can trade a day of work for a day of pay, even if the work was rejected by the rest of society.

Behind all crimes is motive. The motive of the person who walked across the southern border or overstayed a tourist visa is the same: a better life, a life worth living. It is the same motivation that has always brought the needy to these shores, whether it was for religious freedom in the 1600s, the Irish famine in the 19th century or escaping Hitler.

The true asylum seekers came to avoid death, an unquestionable motive.

My plea is for those who are here and have established lives of merit, not for open borders. Migration is a global challenge exacerbated by war, climate change, religious persecution and political oppression. It causes fear that an existing culture will be overwhelmed, as when migrants bring in a different language or a disruptive religion.

These are real concerns, but they should be less so in the United States than in Europe or Australia. This nation is so large, and has benefitted so hugely from immigration, that it should tailor its policies to local reality, not global fear.

The politics of immigration are murky. Democratic and Republican administrations have had vigorous deportation regimes — but the statistics are skewed for President Biden and President Trump’s first administration because of the COVID crisis.

Under the administrations of President Obama and Biden, enforcement was active but less conspicuous, while the southern border remained porous. Under Obama, deportations reached their zenith with 400,000 expulsion orders. In the second Trump administration, deportations will probably exceed the Obama removals’ total.

Among immigrants, there is confusion about their status. There are those from 13 countries who had special protected status, which included allies from the Afghanistan war, Haitians and Venezuelans, who wonder why they have lost it.

Then there are those who wrongly believe their Social Security numbers will protect them; and those who have work permits but don’t have the right to abide by a bizarre legal contradiction.

ICE agents with their thuggish demeanor appear to relish arrests and deportations. We are told ICE has numeric targets for arrests. Whenever its agents appear, they strike fear into the hearts of otherwise innocent people who wanted to share a dream.

None of us choose where to be born. Those born in awful circumstances and who come here without permission are guilty of breaking the law even while signing on to the American dream.

Now that the borders are essentially sealed, how about some American forgiveness?

Foreign Aid That Works — the Malawi Story

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In 2005, Gordon Brown, British chancellor of the exchequer, later prime  minister, was in Washington, seeking to raise $50 billion annually in  additional international aid for Africa.

I hosted a press event for Brown at the National Press Club, and I  asked him how all this money would get to the people who needed it?

“We’ll give it to the right people,” he said crossly.

I told him I had seen foreign aid stolen, diverted and spent by the agencies that were supposed to deliver it on pet projects and themselves.

But there is another way, and it is working in the small, peaceful and democratic Southern African country of Malawi.

An organization called GiveDirectly has been handing $550 to every  adult — men and women — in villages with no strings attached. It is  estimated that for every $1,000 disbursed, there is an economic impact  of $2,400.

This differs radically from foreign aid that has poured into sub-Saharan Africa since the end of colonial rule. Normally, this is passed on to a local government agency or a non-governmental organization and has been earmarked for a school, a hospital, water supply or famine relief. Often, this has led to bureaucratic delays and high overhead costs.

The aid organizations, mostly from North America and Europe, haven’t  always earned plaudits. I have heard them described as “cheap tourists”  and worse.

Another source of friction has been the tendency of aid workers to  impose their values on recipients — for example, promoting green  technologies or Western dietary preferences.

“We are flipping the traditional aid logic on its head. Rather than  us figuring out what people need and having a kind of one-size-fits-all  approach, we are saying people are the best placed to say what they need and what will be best for their circumstances,” Grace Jackson,  GiveDirectly country director for Malawi, told me and my co-host, Adam  Clayton Powell III, on the television program “White House Chronicle.”

“What we can do is to provide the tools, i.e. cash, so they can go ahead and do what is the most important and most useful to them,” she  added.

Everyone over the age of 18 in a village gets the money delivered via a phone wallet, and if the villager doesn’t have a phone, Jackson said  GiveDirectly provides one.

They also make sure there is a viable local financial entity with enough money on hand to pay out as villagers require it.

I believe this approach works well because of the nature of  subsistence life in rural Africa, typified by village life in Malawi. It is wrong to think of poverty in the African countryside, and it is  extreme, the way we think of urban poverty in America.

Rural people in Malawi — and a majority of its 22 million people are rural — simply have nothing. I repeat, nothing. They have few clothes, no shoes and no food security.

They survive by subsistence farming, mostly growing corn, which, with an occasional protein, is their diet. They have to eat all year on what they grow.

Yet families hold together as do the villages. Often, grown children live with their parents and help with the farming, generally done with simple hand tools. In the nothingness there is order.

The Malawi experiment is working, lifting whole villages above the international poverty line. Jackson, who is English, said the money was used in various ways. People bought more land, got medical attention, paid school fees or pooled the money for big things like electrification.

Recently, the program has received a $150 million boost from the Canva Foundation, the charity established by billionaires Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, co-founders of Canva, a popular graphic design tool.

GiveDirectly was created by MIT and Harvard students as a giving circle, based on their studies of the efficacy of charity programs. It was formalized in 2012. The organization hasn’t just helped the needy overseas, it has also handed out aid in the form of debit cards to U.S. disaster survivors.

The idea of letting the recipients of the aid decide how to spend it  may appeal to conservatives and incline them more favorably toward  foreign aid, especially if it is entirely derived from the private  sector.

By the way, Gordon Brown’s grand scheme never got off the ground.

Soft Power, the Secret Sauce of the British Empire

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When President Trump, on the first day of his second term, closed the U.S. Agency for International Development and began dismantling the Voice of America, he also severely curtailed what had been America’s soft power dominance in the world.

With those actions, we abandoned something of inestimable value: the ability to project Americanism, our ideals. Trump retired an entire diplomatic system that had served the United States well since we more or less inherited it from the British.

Soft power was codified as a concept by the late Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in four books published between 1990 and 2023.

While Nye made soft power his own — he coined the term in 1990 — and wrote, lectured and testified before Congress about it, he never totally convinced conservatives what a valuable weapon it was in the national armory.

The proof of that is in the current administration’s indifference to diplomatic and social muscle, and its lack of a mechanism to talk to the Iranian people in Farsi, their language.

Nye believed an important part of soft power was our educational system, and U.S.-educated foreign students going home and spreading the good news about America.

I believe, although it was never thought of that way, that soft power was one of the things that kept the British Empire together. I saw it in action in Africa as colonial rule waned.

James R. Schlesinger, who served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense, and secretary of energy, was a friend of mine throughout his public career and afterward. The one question he asked me constantly was how the British Empire was able to hold together with so few troops spread across so much of the world.

Schlesinger, a former history professor, wondered how those lessons might be applied to America in the late 20th century.

I told him that it was a combination of the hard power of the Royal Navy and British Army but also, importantly, of the then-unnamed soft power.

Take the massacre in Amritsar, in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab. This occurred on April 13, 1919, when a local British commander in the Punjab feared a meeting in a garden might turn violent and opened fire without warning on thousands of unarmed civilians. Official figures reported 379 dead and 1,200 injured; Indian estimates exceed 1,000 deaths.

This massacre hardened Mahatma Gandhi’s attitude to British rule over the subcontinent. His initial reaction, on hearing of the slaughter, was disbelief that the British would do such a thing. He had bought the soft-power assertion of British values, of decency.

Winston Churchill, then serving as the minister of war, told Parliament early the next year that the shooting was “unalterably monstrous.”

I tried to explain to Schlesinger over many evenings, over many years, what I had seen growing up in British Africa as the essence of British soft power.

To me, it boiled down to a kind of moral posture, a determination to project British justice as inviolate, British exceptionalism as a moral force, and a general admirable state of decency. The term soft power hadn’t yet been created, but it was the essential ingredient in British colonial administration.

When American commanders sought the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, they might well have said they were seeking to establish “soft power.” But it was too late.

The concept of soft power and how it blossomed for America has wilted under the Trump administration. The posture now is that economic and military power are how we project influence and authority.

Ironically, while I think Nye did something of great value in identifying and promoting the concept of soft power, he and I didn’t enjoy a warm relationship. He had been President Jimmy Carter’s point man for nuclear disarmament and had favored an end to nuclear reprocessing as well as other aspects of the U.S. nuclear ecosystem.

In 1977, we debated in London, and the argument got so intense that we spilled into the street, shouting at each other.

A British Immigrant’s Defense of Immigration

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Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught. Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.

There is no simple solution, no slogan that encompasses a fair and reasonable course of action for the receiving country.

I moved from a British African colony, Southern Rhodesia, to the homeland, Britain, when that was our birthright, and to America a few years later. I did that because it was the place I wanted to be, the happening place, the place of all possibility and challenge.

I didn’t plan to stay, and now it is more than 60 years later. And, yes, I was elated to become a citizen.

In those days, if you were British, immigration was no harder than filling in some forms and swearing that you weren’t a communist and wouldn’t live in “moral turpitude” when you got to America. That reprehensible state wasn’t described.

To me, America was more than a country; it was, and remains, a state of mind.

At its best, America is generous, caring, open and empathetic to the world and its hurts. Yet, how human a country! It is replete with hideous mistakes from the Palmer Raids, to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, to the Vietnam War. The gash of slavery hasn’t healed, and racism has left its mark.

America’s genius is that it realizes itself as a work in progress. 

Our major weakness, it always seemed to me, was the obverse of our strength: wishing our ways on others; wanting them to see the light we see. 

Like so many others, my attitudes are conflicted, hypocritical and without a simple, elegant defense. About 30 years ago, I first raised the issue of immigration’s effect on the nation. My concern then was that Spanish was becoming a second language. If that were to happen, I feared the country would enter into the same debilitating, two-nation status that has divided Canada and Belgium.

Also, I have argued against the way immigration has left its mark on Europe, especially from North African migrants who have set up enclaves where there is no attempt to integrate and where their religion has maintained them in isolation; angry minorities in their urban strongholds. That undermines the value of the journey both to the migrant and the host country.

I have come to believe that Spanish isn’t the threat it appeared at that time, and that our ability to absorb and prosper as a result of immigration is at a real and present danger of being wasted, denying us the talent flow that has made us a beacon to the world.

Never forget that every deportation is a human disaster: a life and a family sent into an unknown purgatory.

Recently, I had a weeklong stay at a Rhode Island hospital and marveled at doctors who were from distant lands, including Iran and Arab countries. In the late reaches of one night, I had a crisis. My room was flooded with nurses and their assistants, all helping and caring. From their accents, I was certain that at least four of my angels weren’t born here. I was glad of them.

Just as I am glad that we lead the world in high tech and, at the apex of its leadership, sit immigrants. They dominate at the top tech behemoths.

Not every immigrant has added to America’s greatness; some have brought with them creeds that are hard to accommodate, some have brought crime. Overall, each wave of immigrants has lifted America and its people to new heights.

From those early settlers to the German filmmakers, to the Scandinavians who planted the Great Plains, to the Irish who have informed our culture, to the Italian builders, to the German filmmakers, who came in the 1920s and 1930s and created the Hollywood we know and treasure, to the Jewish refugees from Europe who gave us everything from great music to the magic of Broadway, to high science and lifesaving medical research.

When I first arrived in New York, I wrote to a friend, “This is an extraordinary place, less of a mixing bowl and more of a stew, where all of the ingredients remain intact and yet work together in a kind of wondrous unity.” I wouldn’t withdraw or amend a word of that more than 60 years later.

People move because they aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. Grabbing those who slipped in and sending them to all they sought to leave behind is, to this grateful immigrant, un-American.

We are a big country, big-hearted, too, and we have room for these big contributors to our future.

Air Conditioning Costs Threaten Summer of Sun Belt Catastrophe

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The summer of our discontent is at hand. When I asked a professional weather forecaster what we might expect this season, he said, “Hades.”

That was as disturbing as everything else in this disturbing year.

America has a summer culture. You could say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere has one, but there is a special reverence, a profound intimacy that Americans have with summer. It is a happy place for healing hurts, meeting old friends, making new ones, and the extraordinary joy of just basking, even romancing.

The British usually make jokes about summer. One goes, “I missed summer. I went to a movie and when I came out, it was over.”

Clearly, they aren’t making jokes like that this summer when temperatures have set records and forced people to do extreme things to cool off. Untold deaths have resulted.

The French have always had their own reverence for summer and, as a nation, down tools in August and head to the beach, often in the South.

They, like the British, are suffering in the current heat wave because there isn’t a lot of air conditioning — almost none in homes and a limited amount in public buildings. Only one in five British homes has air conditioning. In France, there is more in the south, but not in the north around Paris. It was never needed.

I have been in London when it is hot, but not as hot as it has been so far this summer. Sitting in a theater in London in summer was excruciating, made the more so because Britain is humid.

Anyone who lives in America’s coastal regions, especially the South, knows the awful combo of heat and humidity.

Deaths from heat in Europe are widespread and are still being reported.

Air conditioning has shaped America for the last seven decades. It has made living with year-round comfort possible in the South, the Southwest and the West.

If it weren’t for our ability — with enough electricity — to reverse the climate in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the migration from the north wouldn’t have happened. Once there was air conditioning, people felt they could live comfortably anywhere in the nation.

Even so, all isn’t well. Indeed, this may be the summer of catastrophe, and deaths from heat and uncontrolled fires. The prognosis isn’t good.

The impending social pushback was pointed up by my colleague Herman K. Trabish, writing in Utility Dive. He was attending the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in early June, and wrote in a brief, “Protesters shouting affordability claims and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff.”

Trabish continued, “The confrontation shows the extent to which rising energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.”

The protests were directed at a demand charge approved by the utility commission that wouldn’t take effect until next year, but it opened deep anxiety in southern Nevada about the cost of electricity in weather that is getting hotter and hotter.

Protest leader Leslie Vega said, after the protesters were escorted out of the meeting, “In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity.”

Vega’s remarks might well reflect a truth for the whole of the South, Texas and the Southwest. Cheap electricity has been a factor in the migration of tens of millions from the northern states. It was never mentioned; it was just there.

Now the price of electricity is rising inexorably as temperatures appear to rise with equal, threatening vigor.

The natural response from those facing disaster in the heat zones will be to blame the electric utilities and the ubiquitous data centers. There will be calls to nationalize investor-owned utilities like NV Energy, and calls will go out to curb utilities that are already publicly owned, including rural electric cooperatives and those owned by towns and cities.

Additionally, residents in many states with wildfire exposure will, from time to time, have their power cut off entirely for periods to reduce the risk of new fires caused by sparks from line shorting. That will cause new anger.

Most of the world accepts that extreme weather, now common, is associated with global climate change, which is blamed in part on greenhouse gas emissions. That isn’t accepted by the Trump administration, which favors further use of greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The president has said that global warming is a “hoax.”

Hot people have short tempers. They can be expected to have something to say as they suffer, and death tolls rise.

The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose

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Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions. But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” 

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, like Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

In the Turmoil, Challenges for Graduates in the Class of ’26

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Dear Graduates of 2026,

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American.

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.