White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Trump, Who Thinks He Bought the Nation, Now Eyes the World

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When Donald Trump began his first term as president in 2017, I wrote that he came to office not as a politician who had won an election, but rather as a businessman who had won a takeover battle and was ready to hire, fire, sell-off, and generally to reshape the property he had bought.

On Christmas Day, Trump – with a series of posts on social media — revealed himself as a businessman who believes not that he has won the nation in a takeover battle,  but rather that he has won the whole world and that he is ready to hire, fire and sell-off.

Also, like a canny takeover artist, he didn’t reveal his hand during the takeover struggle. During the election, there was no hint that Canada should become the U.S. 51st state, that Panama was overcharging U.S. shipping nor that ownership of Greenland was essential over and above the key role it already plays with a vital U.S. base, happily provided for by treaty with Denmark.

Like a businessman, Trump offered to buy Greenland during his first presidential term. His offer was soundly and summarily rejected. Now he is back and the answer hasn’t changed.

Canada, Trump believes, takes unfair advantage of the United States in trade, although the regime of the flourishing cross-border trading is the selfsame one: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, signed in July 2020 by Trump himself as a vast improvement over its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement, although in substance and spirit it is very similar.

When it comes to Panama, Trump has a double accusation. Beyond the belief that Panama is ripping us off, this kind of national business paranoia is part of the Trump manual of expectations in foreign policy: All foreign governments are scalawags bent on cheating America.

It is part of a kind of permanent, low-grade C-Suite paranoia that is present in many companies: Who is stealing an advantage, who is going to concede to the unions, who is angling for more shelf space, etc. You might call it corporate situational awareness paranoia.

Statesmanship is learned; good instincts help, but it isn’t intuitive for most leaders. It is learned through studying history, meeting, talking, traveling, and moving in foreign policy circles. It is learned best on the job, if the job is in the House or the Senate.

Trump has learned not in that world, but in the world of New York real estate with its own jungle law — deals are done, undone, litigated, and political influence is brought to bear. Ultimately, there is victory for one side.

Trump correctly — and it could be said belatedly because he took no action during his first administration — has cast a penetrating light on China in the Americas. China, as Trump has said, doesn’t operate the Panama Canal. Panama does. A subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings manages two ports at the canal’s entrances, with Chinese firms providing more than $1 billion for the construction of a new bridge over the canal.

Panama’s revenues are up as a result of congestion charging, but fewer ships are transiting the canal due to drought. The vast Lake Gatun, which feeds the canal and keeps the lock system viable, is only partially full. The less water available, the fewer transits are possible. These dipped from 38 large ships to just 22 but rains have improved the situation and transits have risen.

Seizing canals is a fraught business, witness the disaster of France and Britain trying to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. Major damage to the Panama Canal would cost the United States for decades. It is a masterpiece of big, intricate engineering. I took a cruise through it for the purpose of understanding it better.

The British word “gobsmacked” is easily understood: smacked in the mouth. That is what happened to the commentariat — those who comment on national affairs. Trump’s Christmas Day declarations on Truth Social, his social media network, went almost unmentioned. The reporting was there, the networks and newspapers  turned up the volume, but the commentators were silent,

That, in its way, is as notable as Trump’s implication that he has bought the world and plans to take possession. The enormity of the thing has been quieting. We, the opinion writers, have been struck dumb, you might say. That is news in itself.

Coming Electricity Crisis Will Test Trump and Musk

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I would like to lay before you two powerful myths that are very present in the United States in this post-election hiatus.

The first is that business people, because they have had a record of making money, will be good at running the government.

The second is that because one has been a successful inventor, one can fix everything.

No president, including Donald Trump in his first term, has been able to apply the harsh lessons of business to the infinitely complex task of taking care of all of the people.

Equally, inventors can’t invent the nation out of every challenge; they fail more often than they succeed. If Elon Musk had launched his Boring Company before Tesla, he likely wouldn’t be known today.

No one should underestimate the genius of the man. Just think of the engineering feat of Musk’s SpaceX “catching” the first-stage booster of its Starship megarocket as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight.

But that doesn’t mean Musk is qualified to overhaul the government or that he will have a simpatico relationship with Trump for long. Trump has suggested that Musk will be the architect of a new streamlined government. Maybe.

The Trump-Musk entwining  of two myths isn’t likely to endure.

Trump, always used to getting his way, will come into office with the knowledge of where he failed the first time. He will take control as though he had won the nation not at the ballot box, which he assuredly did, but in a takeover battle, and he will do with the company he has bought what he will. He found that hard to do the first time, but he is better-equipped this time with a substantial mandate that he will employ.

Even though he has been designated by Trump as an agent of change, Musk is unlikely to last.

Musk won’t bow to Trump for long. He is like Rudyard Kipling’s cat: He walks by himself, alone and capriciously. He embodies many of the strengths and limitations that marked the late Howard Hughes: vision and willful eccentricity.

Trump has disparaged electric cars and renewable energy, two of the cornerstones of the Musk empire. Musk is a man who dreams of a future that he can invent, with automated cars, space habitation, and solar power dominating electric supply.

Trump’s vision is not soaring. It is a backward look to a time that has passed. It is a vision which recalls the Reader’s Digest view of America in the heyday of that magazine, wholesome, patriotic, simple but fundamentally unreal.

The first crisis that might divide the two men, and challenge the Trump administration, is energy.

An electricity shortage is bearing down on the nation and there are no easy fixes. Trump has laid out an energy policy that would emphasize oil and gas drilling and environmental controls and curbs on the rate of wind generation deployment.

None of that will get us through the impending crisis as the demand for more electricity is surging. It is driven by more electric vehicles, greater use of electricity in manufacturing, and by the huge and seemingly limitless demands of data centers being built across the country to serve the needs of a data-driven, AI economy and its relentless electricity demand.

The fixes for the electricity shortage are all just over the horizon: new nuclear plants, more solar and wind, more transmission, and a more efficient use of the generation we have at hand.

The most immediate fix is a so-called virtual power plant which coordinates energy saving with new sources, like rooftop solar and surplus self-generation at industrial facilities, under the rubric of distributed energy resources. That is already underway and beyond that looms the potential of blackouts.

California and Texas, along with parts of the Midwest, are precariously balanced. Any severe weather interruptions, like extreme heat or extreme cold, and the electricity supply could fail to meet demand.

Trump is likely to react with fury and to lash out at renewable energy (solar and wind) and electric vehicles. In a way, he will be blaming his new best friend, a principal creator of the current electric landscape, Elon Musk.

The myths will unravel, but the underlying truth is that we are going to have five or more years of acute electric shortage without a quick fix, from an inventor or a businessman.

The U.S. Is Great Now, Leads Envious World

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Don’t look if you don’t want to, but America is great now. Right now, this week, this day, this hour, this second.

Our economy is the envy of the world. Our mobility, socially and for work, is without equal. Our capacity to foster start-up business is without comparison. Our ability to lure the best talent and the most creative people around the world astounds our competitors.

We are a beacon for the best and smartest the world over.

Our technological abilities are formidable, from space travel to artificial intelligence. If the political class doesn’t fail it, America has a future that suggests wonders yet to come in creativity, in wealth creation, in standard of living, in better health, and in the overall human condition.

AI holds the promise of a new age for humanity, led by America, with greater productivity per worker and the elimination of much dead-end work.

The London-based, global magazine, The Economist, in a paean to this nation, stated in its latest edition: “Over the past three decades America has left the rest of the rich world in the dust. In 1990 it accounted for about two- fifths of the GDP of the G7. Today it makes up half. Output per person is now about 30 percent higher than in Western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan — gaps that have roughly doubled since 1990.

“Mississippi may be America’s poorest state, but its hard-working residents earn, on average, more than Brits, Canadians or Germans. Lately, China too has gone backwards. Having closed in rapidly on America in the years before the pandemic, its nominal GDP has slipped from about three-quarters of America’s in 2021 to two-thirds today.”

It is possible to believe that we are on the threshold of  a new golden age. Yet we are just ending a political campaign where self-denigration has been a feature. The economic ideas of both candidates, if they become policy and law, threaten to jeopardize our ascent to what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”

Kamala Harris has put forward a few ideas which have failed in the past, like protecting specific American industries and fighting the shibboleth of “price-gouging.” Who will she go after? Hotels, airlines, and electric utilities, which buy and sell in the wholesale market, all depend on opportunistic pricing. A free market is by its very nature opportunistic.

Down the line, Harris has sought to fix that which the market will repair by itself. Richard Nixon — wise in so much — tried price controls and failed hopelessly.

Housing is an example of where Harris’ plans to have the government interfere will achieve the opposite result to what she is seeking to do. She would give first-time buyers a down payment. That will most likely push up prices in the overheated housing market. What is needed is more houses, which means local restrictions need to be eased.

Donald Trump’s central economic idea is worthy of the kind of economic thinking favored by African dictators the day after a coup. His tariffs would impose a massive de facto sales tax on all Americans, push up inflation, and wreck the global trading system.

If there are reputable economists who endorse the tariff mania, let us hear from them. Where are they hiding? Even the Trump-friendly think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation, have shied away from this misguided enthusiasm. It is dangerous and if Trump is elected, Congress needs to aggressively restrain it.

Both candidates have laid out economic plans which are risible at some level and aimed to protect their voting blocs. Both, in their way, seek to buy their votes with promises which they either can’t deliver on or which would wreak havoc.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th-century Scottish jurist, saw doom for democracies when the money faucet is turned on. He said, “A democracy will exist until such time as the public discovers that it can vote itself generous gifts from the public purse.”

One might add, “or if leaders promise it such gifts.”

America is at a high point and can continue to climb if its politicians don’t arrest the ascent.

Three Environmental Organizations That Are Out-of-Step

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Greedy men and women are conspiring to wreck the environment just to enrich themselves.

That has been an unshakable left-wing belief for a long time. It has gained new vigor since The Washington Post revealed that former President Donald Trump has been trawling Big Oil for big money.

At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is reported to have promised oil industry executives a free hand to drill willy-nilly across the country and up and down the coasts and to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental policies. All this for $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign, according to The Post article.

Trump may believe that there is a vast constituency of energy company executives yearning to push pollution up the smokestack, disturb the permafrost, and drain the wetlands. But he has gotten it wrong.

Someone should tell Trump that times have changed and very few American energy executives believe — as he has said he does — that global warming is a hoax.

Trump has set himself not only against a plethora of laws but also against an ethic, an American ethic: the environmental ethic.

This ethic slowly entered the consciousness of the nation after the seminal publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson in 1962.

Over time, concern for the environment has become an 11th Commandment. The cornerstone of a vast edifice of environmental law and regulation was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It was promoted and signed by President Richard Nixon, hardly a wild-eyed lefty.

Some 30 years ago, Barry Worthington, the late executive director of the United States Energy Association, told me the important thing to know about the energy versus environment debate was that a new generation of executives in oil companies and electric utilities were environmentalists, that the world had changed and the old arguments were losing their advocates.

“Not only are they very concerned about the environment, but they also have children who are very concerned,” Worthington told me.

Quite so then, more so now. The aberrant weather alone keeps the environment front and center.

This doesn’t mean that old-fashioned profit-lust has been replaced in corporate accommodation with the Green New Deal or that the milk of human kindness is seeping from C-suites. But it does mean that the environment is an important part of corporate thinking and planning today. There is pressure both outside and within companies for that.

The days when oil companies played hardball by lavishing money on climate deniers on Capitol Hill and utilities employed consultants to find data that proved coal use didn’t affect the environment are over. I was witness to the energy versus climate and environment struggle going back half a century. Things are absolutely different now.

Trump has promised to slash regulation, but industry doesn’t necessarily favor wholesale repeal of many laws. Often, the very shape of the industries Trump would seek to help has been determined by those regulations. For example, because of the fracking boom, the gas industry could reverse the flow of liquified natural gas at terminals, making us a net exporter, not an importer.

The United States is now, with or without regulation, the world’s largest oil producer. The electricity industry is well along in moving to renewables and making inroads on new storage technologies like advanced batteries. Electric utilities don’t want to be lured back to coal. Carbon capture and storage draws nearer.

Similarly, automakers are gearing up to produce more electric vehicles. They don’t want to exhume past business models. Laws and taxes favoring EVs are now assets to Detroit, building blocks to a new future.

As the climate crisis has evolved, so have corporate attitudes. Yet there are those who either don’t or don’t want to believe that there has been a change of heart in energy industries. But there has.

Three organizations stand out as pushing old arguments, shibboleths from when coal was king and oil was emperor.

These groups are:

The Sunrise Movement, a dedicated organization of young people that believes the old myths about big, bad oil and that American production is evil, drilling should stop, and the industry should be shut down. It fully embraces the Green New Deal — an impractical environmental agenda — and calls for a social utopia.

The 350 Organization is similar to the Sunrise Movement and has made much of what it sees as the Biden administration’s environmental failures—particularly, it feels the administration has been soft on natural gas.

Finally, there is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s: an anti-nuclear organization called Beyond Nuclear. It opposes everything to do with nuclear power even in the midst of the environmental crisis, highlighted by Sunrise Movement and the 350 Organization.

Beyond Nuclear is at war with Holtec International for its work in interim waste storage and in bringing the Palisades plant along Lake Michigan back to life. Its arguments are those of another time, hysterical and alarmist. The group doesn’t get that most old-time environmentalists are endorsing nuclear power.

As Barry Worthington told me: “We all wake up under the same sky.”

The Political Class Is Hiding Behind Two Old Men

Side by side portraits of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

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Even political junkies are feeling short of adrenaline. Two old men are stumbling toward November, spewing gaffes, garbled messages and misinformation as the political class cowers behind banners they don’t have the courage not to carry.

If you aren’t committed to Joe Biden or Donald Trump in a very fundamental way, it is a kind of torture — like being trapped in the bleachers during a long tennis match. The ball goes back and forth over the net, your head turns right, your head turns left. You watch CNN, turn to Fox, turn to MSNBC, turn back to CNN. You read The Washington Post, try The New York Times, then pick up The Wall Street Journal.

Over all hangs the terrible knowledge that this will end in a player winning who many think is unfit.

These two codgers are batting old ideas back and forth across the news. We know them too well. There is no magic here; nothing good is expected of either victory. Less bad is the goal, a hollow victory at best.

This is a replay. We can’t take comfort in the idea that the office will make the man. Rather, we feel this time, in either case, the office will unmake the man.

Both are too old to be expected to deliver in the toughest job in the world. Much of the attention about age has focused on Biden, but Trump is only three years his junior and doesn’t appear to be in good health, and he delivers incomprehensible messages on social media and in public speeches.

We know what we would get from a Biden administration: more of the same but more liberal. His administration will lean toward the issues he has fought for — climate, abortion, equality, continuity.

From Trump, we know what we would get: upheaval, international dealignment, authoritarian inclinations at home, and a new era of chaotic America First. The courts will get more conservative judges, and political enemies will be punished. Trump has made it clear that vengeance is on his to-do list.

One candidate or the other, we are facing agendas that say “back to the future.”

But that isn’t the world that is unfolding. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late, great Democratic senator from New York, said “the world is a dangerous place.”

Doubly so now, when engulfing war is a possibility, when there is an acute housing crisis at home, and when the next presidency will have to deal with the huge changes that will be brought about by artificial intelligence. These will be across the board, from education to defense, from automobiles to medicine, from the electric power supply to the upending of the arts.

How have we come to such a pass when two old men dodder to the finish line? The fact is few expect Biden to finish out his term in good physical health, and few expect Trump to finish his term in good mental health.

How did we get here? How has it happened that democracy has come to a point where it seems inadequate to the times?

The short answer is the primary system, or too much democracy at the wrong level.

The primary system isn’t working. It is throwing up the extreme and the incompetent; it is a way of supporting a label, not a candidate. If a candidate faces a primary, the issue will be narrowed to a single accusation bestowed by the opposition.

What makes for a strong democracy is representative government — deliberation, compromise, knowledge and national purpose.

The U.S. House of Representatives is an example of the evil the primary system has wrought. Or, to be exact, the fear that the primary system has engendered in members.

The specter of former Rep. Liz Cheney, a conservative with lineage who had the temerity to buck the House leadership, was cast out and then got “primaried” out of office altogether, haunts Congress.

No wonder the political class shelters behind the leaders of yesterday, men unprepared for tomorrow, as a new and very different era unfolds.

There is a sense in the nation that things will have to get worse before they get better. A troubled future awaits.

Want To Win the Election? Get a Great Speechwriter

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I wonder whether my hearing is failing. Should I get it tested?

In this seminal presidential election year, I don’t hear the answers from either side about the issues bearing down on the country.

The over-coverage of the Iowa caucuses was in direct proportion to the candidates’ avoidance of the great matters which the victor will have to deal with in the Oval Office.

If the Republicans are off down the yellow brick road of the Wizard of Donald Trump, the Democrats are well along a road of political ruin, believing that they won’t win unless Trump is imprisoned or removed from the ballot. That represents a negative political dynamic.

Neither political caravan has emphasized there are great issues ahead which, if they were to embrace, would lead on to victory.

Trump is sure he has the formula, and he may be right. Grievance, his and those of the voters — vast, shapeless grievance — propels the Republicans forward: Unhappy about something? Trump is your man.

Biden’s message is to vote for more of the same. That should be a message enough because the Biden years have been overall good years with an economy that is growing despite inflation and woes abroad.

Whereas for Trump everything is a platform, everything a bull horn, for Biden no message is getting out. He is in the chorus when he should be the lead singer.

Questions about Trump’s fitness for office are muted and questions about Biden’s – mostly his age — are front-and- center. It is asymmetrical, but it is what it is.

It is up to the Democrats to turn their fortunes around, beyond waiting for Trump to fall. Trump is a political phenomenon, and his Republican and Democratic opponents need to accept that.

Meanwhile, huge issues are begging for attention. Here are just five:

  • How to prepare for artificial intelligence and its boost to productivity set against its threat to jobs.
  • How to accommodate the impact of climate change. Should we build seawalls in vulnerable cities along the coasts? Can Boston, New York, Miami and San Francisco be physically defended against rising seas?
  • The looming matter of Taiwan. Will we defend it or will we let it fall to China? The stakes are appeasing China or going to war — world war.
  • The housing crisis. This is a here-and-now issue that should be at the top of the Democratic agenda. This is a people issue like abortion. People have nowhere to live and that should be a gift to any politician.
  • Immigration writ large, not just as a crisis at the Southern border. It is a world issue in which every war, drought, coup, recession and religious purge worsens as more people from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East seek a better life — but often just life itself. We can seal the border, but the undocumented will still arrive. Migrants are pitiable, as are all refugees, but they are flooding the stable countries of the world so fast they endanger those countries. It is conquest by migration.

The candidates haven’t delivered great speeches on these or other issues, let alone a series of speeches which would move the electorate and the country. Nothing echoes from the rafters when Biden, Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, or Ron DeSantis speak. It is small-bore stuff, no cannons.

Politics in democracies is carried forward by great speeches which raise new issues, redefine old ones and shiver the timbers of the electorate. Think Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Churchill, De Gaulle, Kennedy, Reagan and Thatcher — and, in a special category, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They carried the day with rhetoric and found their place in history with words.

Trump’s speeches are just Trump, part of the phenomenon, part of the cascade of disinformation. Biden’s sound —  as I am sure they are — written by committee, like corporate press releases. And, oh, Harris reduces everything to incoherence. Haley and DeSantis have been hobbled by a disinclination to take on Trump frontally.

The big issues are hanging out like ripe fruit, ready to be plucked by any candidate with the nous to do so and craft a speech or several. None have I heard.

Washington’s New Dance Craze — the Perplexity Quickstep

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After more than six months of vilifying, ridiculing and laughing out loud at President Trump, Washington is getting down to realizing that he is the president — and he will not be gone, by some miracle, in the morning.

Ergo it is time for companies, lobbyists and Congress to find a mechanism to work with Trump or around him. It might be described as a dance: the perplexity quickstep. Fleet feet are essential.

Business is treading with increasing alarm and tentativeness. Lobbyists are seeking White House sources for steps guidance. And Congress is tripping over new choreography.

A lot of business leaders thought that Trump, himself a businessman, would see government from the Oval Office as though he were still sitting in the corner office. They believed he would seek the best path forward, going for the main chance and strategizing how to get there. Instead, the business community — from the chairmen of some of the largest companies, with whom I have spoken, to those of small- and medium-size companies — is flummoxed, reviling Trump in private and seeking advice from a variety of Washington gurus on what to do going forward.

Business people, who think they understand cause and effect, cannot find a pattern that suggests the president has any understanding of that relationship. Business hankers for certainty, Trump for adulation. Business worries about the bottom line, Trump about the television commentariat. Business people who want to get a point of view across to the president are trying to get on television — particularly on the morning shows on Fox.

The trade associations, among the most effective lobbies in Washington, are working under the old rules while trying to learn the new dance steps. So they continue to “applaud” Trump appointments and to “congratulate” administration policy. Business and its lobbyists truly hope for lower corporate taxes and for loosening of regulations but they worry about the future of trade and trade agreements — and the concept that America can pull back all its overseas commitments. “America First” is a harbinger of bad things to come for global companies.

Many CEOs, including Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple and some other bold Silicon Valley C-suiters, have criticized Trump and quit his advisory committees. This has earned them public plaudits, but in doing so they have reduced their ability to affect things. Many others ask, “With Trump, isn’t it better to be on the inside, as close to the president as possible?” Trump is said to believe the last person with whom he spoke.

In Washington’s new dance, the hope is that when the music stops, you are the one standing next to him. You cannot do this if you have taken off to California in high dudgeon.

Many corporations are in the awkward position of needing good relationships with the White House because they are involved in government contracting — and most large corporations are, even as they like to denounce government. Less government, more contracts is the dichotomy of the business-government relationship.

So many corporations with interests in Washington are learning the perplexity quickstep: two quick steps to the right, two quick steps to the left, and circle to the rear. Dance near Trump and he might heap praise on you. Dance far from him and he might come after you for manufacturing overseas. Like his own party and the press, business waits for the new choreography which often arrives by Twitter in the early morning.

This was a week to marvel at the perplexity quickstep: Trump decided on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, or DACA, putting the fate of nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants in lawmakers’ hands before undermining the whole effort by tweeting that if Congress did not act in six months, he would insert himself back into the process. Then he danced the GOP right off the floor and cut a deal with the House and Senate Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi of California and Chuck Schumer of New York. Dizzying.

 

Photo: President Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President Michael R. Pence, and Second Lady Karen Pence, dance with service members at the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. The event, one of three official balls held in celebration of the 58th Presidential Inauguration, paid tribute to members of all branches of the armed forces of the United States, as well as first responders and emergency personnel. (DoD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Kalie Jones)

Oh, America, My Adopted Land, What Are You Doing to Your Special Self?

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When I arrived on these shores in 1963, I wrote to a friend in London from New York, “We had America wrong. It is not a melting pot but rather a fruit salad. Spanish-speaking youths sell pizza on Broadway. Italian and German men drive taxis. All the doormen — they stand in front of the better blocks of flats — seem to be Irish. Black men and women do menial work: They are less obvious and not prospering.”

Those were the days when integrating the South was being bitterly fought and I, for one, thought that the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King could heal as well as inspire.

The most overt racism I saw in the North was not in New York or Washington but in Baltimore. At a bar beloved by the editorial staff of the Baltimore News American on Pratt Street, a major commercial thoroughfare at the time, an African-American man came in for a drink. The owner, a Polish-American, was on his feet in seconds, telling the man that the bar was in fact a private club, but he could sell him a bottle to go. The would-be patron took this clear lie quietly and left. My colleagues at the newspaper, including an African-American editor, were not interested in protesting the incident.

Race is probably baked into my consciousness, as I was born and raised in the British African colony of Southern Rhodesia. I grew up in a society in which some dreamed of a multi-racial future and others leaned toward white supremacy. In the end, after independence, Robert Mugabe made a mockery of democracy and civil rights for white and black citizens; his rule has been an equal opportunity horror.

When King was shot in 1968, Washington and Baltimore erupted in riots. I would not call them race riots, but they were riots of protest, of angry people who felt they had had enough. I walked through some of the worst rioting in Washington, and later drove through burning sections of Baltimore.

Rather than being threatened as a white man in black communities that were gripped with looting and fire-setting, there was an almost eerie politeness, a concern among the rioters for my safety. Richard Harwood, father of the CNBC correspondent, wrote about this, these manners, in The Washington Post.

It struck me then that the United States could survive even in its worst struggles if it could keep its manners, its sense of the other fellow’s well-being.

Nelson Mandela said that hate has to be learned. What he did not say, as far as I know, is that people love to hate. When hate is sanctioned, as it was in Nazi Germany or in endless Russian pogroms against the Jews, it becomes a creed and a way of seeing everything.

The selection of Barack Obama not as an African-American but as the Democratic presidential candidate was a high point. It made me very proud to be an American, of having been accepted in an exemplary place. It told the world that the United States, for all of its history of slavery and prejudice, was an ascendant society; Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

In Dublin, I chastised an Irish journalist for criticizing a less-than-lovable newscaster as a “Protestant prick.” What had the man’s religion to do with it? In America, I said, we would not add religion to the epithet.

I was lunching with a Malaysian publisher at the National Press Club in Washington when he declared for all to hear, “The only straight thing about a Chinaman is his hair.” I was appalled and said so. We would not have said that, not in recent decades, because of the restraint of brotherhood, the sense of ascendance and the manners of a people from many places who live together.

Now an American president, Donald Trump, has whistled up tribalism, rationalized the unacceptable through false equivalence. And America, as an ascendant place, is in question, the delicate weave of its social fabric under stress.

John Donne, the metaphysical English poet, wrote nearly 400 years ago of “America” as hugely desirable place. He also warned, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Even more so in a diverse nation held together by the knowledge that any other course, any tribal hatred, diminishes the whole construct; or, to me, contaminates the fruit salad with rotten produce.

 

Photo: NEW YORK CITY – JUNE 28: Commuters in subway wagon on June 28, 2012 in NYC. Credit: PIO3 / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

China’s Not-So-Secret Weapons — Rare Earths

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In October 1973, the world shuddered when the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur war. At the same time, they ramped up prices.

The United States realized it was dependent on imported oil — and much of that came from the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia the big swing producer. It shook the nation. How had a few foreign powers put a noose around the neck of the world’s largest economy?

Well, it could happen again and very soon. The commodity that could bring us to our knees isn’t oil, but rather a group of elements known as rare earths, falling between 21 and 71 on the periodic table. This time, just one country is holding the noose: China.

China controls the world’s production and distribution of rare earths. It produces more than 92 percent of them and holds the world in its hand when it comes to the future of almost anything in high technology.

Rare earths are great multipliers and the heaviest are the most valuable. They make the things we take for granted, from the small motors in automobiles to the wind turbines that are revolutionizing the production of electricity, many times more efficient. For example, rare earths increase a conventional magnet’s power by at least fivefold. They are the new oil.

Rare earths are also at work in cell phones and computers. Fighter jets and smart weapons, like cruise missiles, rely on them. In national defense, there is no substitute and no other supply source available.

Like so much else, the use of rare earths as an enhancer was a U.S. discovery: General Motors, in fact. In 1982, General Motors research scientist John Croat created the world’s strongest permanent magnet using rare earths. He formed a company, called Magnequench. In 1992, the company and Croat’s patents were sold to a Chinese company.

From that time on it became national policy for China to be not just the supplier of rare earths, but to control the whole supply chain. For example, it didn’t just want to supply the rare earths for wind turbines; it insisted that major suppliers, such as Siemens, move some of their manufacturing to China. Soon Chinese companies, fortified with international expertise, went into wind turbine manufacture themselves.

“Now China is the major manufacturer of wind turbines,” says Jim Kennedy, a St. Louis-based consultant who is devoted to raising the alarm over rare earths vulnerability. A new and important book, “Sellout” by Victoria Bruce, details the way the world handed control of its technological future to China and Kennedy’s struggle to alert the United States.

At present, the rare earths threat from China is serious but not critical. If President Donald Trump — apparently encouraged by his trade adviser Peter Navarro, and his policy adviser Steve Bannon — is contemplating a trade war with China, rare earths are China’s most potent weapon.

A trade war moves the rare earths threat from existential to immediate.

In a strange regulatory twist the United States, and most of the world, won’t be able to open rare earths mines without legislation and an international treaty modification. Rare earths are often found in conjunction with thorium, a mildly radioactive metal, which occurs in nature and doesn’t represent any kind of threat.

However, it’s a large regulatory problem. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency have defined thorium as a nuclear “source material” that requires special disposition. Until these classifications, thorium was disposed of along with other mine tailings. Now it has to be separated and collected. Essentially until a new regime for thorium is found, including thorium-powered reactors, the mining of rare earths will be uneconomic in the United States and other nuclear non-proliferation treaty countries.

Congress needs to look into this urgently, ideally before Trump’s trade war gets going, according to several sources familiar with the crisis. A thorium reactor was developed in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. While it’s regarded by many nuclear scientists as a superior technology, only Canada and China are pursuing it at present.

Meanwhile, future disruptions from China won’t necessarily be in the markets. It could be in the obscure but vital commodities known as rare earths: China’s not quite secret weapon.

A Plea to Start Again on the Whole Issue of Health Care

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The process now underway in Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) reminds me of what would happen if you tried to thread a small darning needle with a strand of bulky yarn: It won’t go through the eye. The more you try to pull the strand through the eye, the less useful the yarn coming through it will be.

Therefore, isn’t it time to reconsider the whole proposition as though there were no Obamacare, no House version of its replacement, and no preconceived objective beyond affordable care for all?

Also, there should be no pre-established conditions, such as single-payer and multiple-payer; no pre-established goals, such as preserving particular insurance practices and expectations that employers will always be part of the deal; and no expectation that the health-care bill should also be a tax bill or a welfare bill.

Its simple goal should be to free people from fear of medical catastrophe and enable physicians and hospitals to care for the sick without commercial pressure.

I’ve come to the belief that big, new ideas are needed from my own experience as an employer-provider. For more than 30 years, as a small Washington publisher, I provided health insurance for my staff of 25. It was a nightmare that got worse as medicine got more expensive.

Of many strange situations, none was worse than the employee who developed nasopharyngeal cancer, a rare type of head and neck cancer. The insurance paid for chemotherapy and radiation, but refused to pay for expensive painkillers. These had to be brought in from France by a family member.

Maybe the most discouraging was a printing-press operator who wanted the premiums given to him, as he refused to see the point of insurance, although he was married with three small children. “We don’t use insurance,” he declared. “When the kids are sick we go to the emergency room and tell them we have no money.” When pressed, he said they did this because they didn’t want the bother of filling out forms.

If you think, as I do, that the system we have is less than perfect, one is immediately thought to be a believer in British-type national health insurance. Not necessarily so.

As a former citizen, I know something about Britain’s National Health Service and I think it is better than what is happening in the United States. I’ve received treatment in Britain under the system and members of my family in England are devoted to it. There is good treatment for major procedures. However for lesser ailments, there are long waiting lists. Bureaucracy is everywhere.

Worse, can you imagine a health-care system dependent on the budget cycle in Congress?

In Switzerland there is a totally private system, which looks like improved Obamacare. Everyone is obliged to buy insurance, just as everyone has to pay taxes. There are no limits on troublesome things like preexisting conditions. The government regulates the insurers. In a referendum, the Swiss rejected a switch to a single-payer system by 60-40 percent.

There also are mixed systems in Germany and Holland. The commonality is that everyone is covered and the governments regulate. That way, insurance pools are large and have the correct mix of old and young — otherwise the old will overwhelm any system.

Unless we devise a structure that caters to all, we will continue with overburdened emergency rooms, preposterous hospital charges and doctors who will pick and choose their patients.

No one on a gurney being wheeled down a hospital corridor should be thinking, “How will I pay for this?”

The chances are that when Congress has finished trying to thread the unthreadable needle, there will be a groundswell on the left for single-payer — better, possibly, but not a fit in the United States.

Meanwhile, there are too many pre-existing conditions in congressional thinking. We need a new prescription, a bigger needle and a finer thread.

Photo: CALDWELL, IDAHO – NOVEMBER 9 2016: at healthcare.gov getting ready to start an application. txking / Shutterstock.com