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Electricity Can Help Africa’s Growing Population Crisis

September 17, 2017 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

A population catastrophe is in the making in Africa that could engulf the world, Europe first. The United Nations predicts that between now and 2050 the populations of 26 African countries are expected to at least double their current size. Nigeria will overtake the United States to become the world’s third most populous country in 2050.

By the year 2050, according to the United Nations, annual increases will exceed 42 million people per year and total population will have doubled to 2.4 billion. “This comes to 3.5 million more people per month, or 80 additional people per minute. At that point, African population growth would be able to refill an empty London five times a year,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper calculates. Poor Africa, with so little to support a doubling population, is on its way to new horrors of food shortage, lack of jobs and misery.

This is not just crisis for Africa but very much one for Europe, and in time one for other countries.

African migrants, fleeing broken societies and imminent famine, have been crossing the Mediterranean in rickety craft, flooding Europe. This flood will grow and it will be joined by people seeking survival from deeper in Africa; not just from the north, but from the center and the south.

Desperate people move. Take the Royhinga refugees, walking with what they can carry from Myanmar to Bangladesh: a journey from unsafe to unwelcome. It is already happening in Africa and it will dominate in future.

India, which knows something about population explosions (the population there has grown from 400 million, when the British pulled out in 1947, to 1.3 billion), has looked for a way of improving expectations as a means of population stabilization. Their solution has not been droves of family planners with suitcases of condoms, but rather a bold, high-tech solution: electricity and lots of it.

In New Delhi, this strategy was explained to me by a professor at the University of Delhi. As an American, I was aghast at the poverty and the minimal lives lived by tens of millions. Almost verbatim, this is what I was told, “We have a solution to this misery: an electric grid. When we electrify a village, everything changes. Someone gets a television — maybe an old black-and-white one, but Indians are good at keeping things running — and then expectations go up, hygiene improves, and birth rates go down.”

He added, “It works.”

That, maybe, is why today India is one of the leaders in building electric capacity of all kinds, including an ambitious nuclear program.

Electricity provides a solution in Africa, but much of the installed electric capacity is old, serves only urban areas and dates back to the colonial era.

In Africa and South America, I have seen electricity transform lives. An electric supply leads to the ability of villages to move basically from the Iron Age to the Ion Age.

I saw this acutely in my childhood in Africa. An electrified village can keep its food supply from rotting, grind its grain instead of shipping it to a mill, allow local businesses to get a footing, and limit family size. But mostly the young, whether through television or radio, are inspired to greater expectations, to horizons beyond the squalor and poverty that has been their inheritance.

The European media have been covering the African population flood with intensity, particularly the BBC. Yet much of this has had a hand-wringing quality.

As we see the lethality of electricity failure in Florida, following Irma, we again get a sharp lesson in the value to human life of electricity, unique in service to human kind.

If Africa is not to become a huge and permanent humanitarian crisis, affecting the whole world, it needs to get in on the electric solution. Ideally, this should be first with the fuels available: sun and wind. These are peculiarly suited to Africa: poor, desperate Africa where people hurt so much, every day.

 


Photo: ACCRA, GHANA – MARCH 4, 2012: Unidentified Ghanaian people at the market in Ghana. People of Ghana suffer of poverty due to the unstable economic situation. Credit: Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Africa, electricity, energy, Europe, humanitarian, population

Llewellyn King on SiriusXM POTUS Channel

July 10, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Llewellyn King on SiriusXM, POTUS Channel 124

Listen below for the segment, where Llewellyn discusses his column, “Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump” which can be read on this website, or on HuffPost here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/europeans-feel-they-cant-trust-us-in-the-time-of_us_595f8399e4b0cf3c8e8d57e2

Press the play button below to listen.

http://whchronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/07-07-17-Llewellyn-King-w.Kent-Klein.mp3

Filed Under: King's Commentaries, Random Features Tagged With: Donald Trump, Europe, Poland, SiriusXM, Trump Speech

The Myth of Immigrant Assimilation

March 26, 2016 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

By Llewellyn King

In the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, critics are blaming Belgium for not assimilating immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The fact is that Europe does not do assimilation. Europeans widely practice what might be called “anti-assimilation.” Instead of engagement with their immigrants, they practice a kind of look-the-other-way stance.

Muslim immigrants on the whole do not seek to integrate into European societies, but rather to demand that European societies adopt their ways. In Belgium, which has three official languages, Dutch, French and German, there are constant demands that Arabic become a fourth. Muslims in Britain, and throughout Europe, demand shari’a, or Islamic law, for their communities. Muslims in Europe, and the United States, demand that Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) be accorded the same recognition as a public holiday as Christmas.

Muslim defenders, after the bombings in Brussels, insist that Western countries with large Muslim minorities should do more to integrate them into national life. But this integration mostly means that the host culture should bow to the insurgent one.

In ancient lands, like Britain and France, this is an affront; as though the extraordinary traditions of those countries should be shoved aside to accommodate the cultural demands of an a very antagonistic minority. That is asking too much.

Europe has mostly dealt with the challenge by hoping that new generations born in Europe and subjected to the influence of European education, the arts and media will become little Europeans: little Frenchmen, little Belgians, little Englishmen, versed in European history and imbued with European values. There are such people throughout Europe, from those of Turkish descent in Germany to those of Indian descent in Britain and North African descent in France.

But by and large the Muslim minorities remain separate, unequal and belligerently hostile to the countries that have given them shelter and opportunity. Rather than the generations born in Europe adopting European norms, they have ended in an unfortunate place where they are outcasts by their own inclinations and by the difficulties posed by European societies, which are quietly nationalistic, closed, eyes-averted.

If anything, the separation has grown worse for generations that know no life other than the one they lead in Europe. This is often marginal, lived in ghettos like the banlieues, the suburbs to the north of Paris, the troubled Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, or Bradford in the north of England.

The original immigrants could look back to what they had escaped, whether it was war and persecution in Algeria, in the case of those who migrated to France, or the grinding poverty that prevailed in Pakistan, in the British case. People move for safety or for a better life. They do not move because they want a new food or a new religion: They want the old food and the old religion in a better place.

Trouble is that three or four generations on, the immigrant descendants may not feel they are in a better place. They are isolated, largely unemployed and subjected to the preaching of murderous extremists.

Once in Brussels, my wife and I were walking down a side street not far from the Grand Place. My wife, who lived in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, remarked that we had left Europe within a few streets and entered North Africa.

As we passed some young men standing outside a cafe, she heard one say to another in Arabic, “What are they doing here? They don’t belong here.”

When the London suburb of Brixton was becoming a black enclave, favored by West Indian immigrants, I lived nearby. “Don’t go there. Maybe they will leave one day,” my neighbors said when I wanted to go there.

No-go areas are not always that: they also are not-want-to-go areas. Someone has to want assimilation, if that is the answer. — For InsideSources


Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: assimilation, banlieues, Belgium, Bradford, Brussels, Brussels attacks, England, Europe, France, immigrants, immigration, integration, King Commentary, London, Molenbeek, Muslims, Paris, Paris attacks

The Future of Britain is on the Ballot

January 18, 2016 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

Long before our election in November, a much greater upheaval may hit Britain. Probably in late June, the country will vote on whether to stay in the European Union. Leaving is called “Brexit” in the British press.

While polls have consistently shown that voters favor Britain remaining a member of the 28-nation bloc, there are signs that things are changing. British business, which has until now seen its future as being in the EU, is beginning to rethink its support for British membership. A recent poll shows industry believing it could prosper out of the EU.

This is a big problem for British Prime Minister David Cameron. He has promised dramatic changes in Britain’s membership, which will be announced at the European summit next month.

Britain wants less-oppressive regulations and a change in immigration policy. It wants an end to what has been a fundamental part of the European structure: the freedom of movement between countries. In short: no more immigration to Britain from Europe.

It is a complex negotiation which Cameron believes he can win; particularly when Europe is in shaky shape after the economic crisis in Greece and from the surge of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Although Europe’s political elites may have to hold their refined noses, the chances are better today than ever that they would rather their unruly island neighbors stay in than further damage the European project by withdrawing.

Predictably some economists say that Britain will do just fine without Europe, while others see dire economic consequences.

When the referendum comes, it will be a free vote with about half of Cameron’s Conservative Party voting to withdraw. These are the rambunctious “Euroskeptics” that have bedeviled British elections for generations and have made the role of Conservative prime ministers particularly trying.

The opposition Labor Party is divided on a Brexit. But Labor has so imploded under the extreme leftist Jeremy Corbyn that it is likely to go along and lend its support — feeble though it is — to the forces wishing to stay in the EU.

The Scottish Nationalists will also support continued membership. They hope that if they break away from the United Kingdom, they will get succor from the EU.

But the forces for exiting the EU are powerful and articulate. They are emboldened by Europe’s problems and the fact that they will no longer be bound by the dictates of, as they say, “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.”

The wild card in the referendum may be England’s wild man: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Now finishing his term as mayor of London, Boris Johnson is a lovable version of Donald Trump. He has gone from scrape to scrape and has come out ahead of the game. For instance, three years after having won a seat in Parliament in 2001, Johnson was sacked by the Tory leader at the time, Michael Howard, for allegedly lying over an affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt. Johnson called newspaper stories about the affair “an inverted pyramid of piffle.” He was also sacked from his editorship of The Spectator, where the piffle took place.

But being elected to higher office is such a compensation, so Johnson, a bicycle-riding, tradition-loving maverick got himself elected mayor of London. In this office he saved the iconic double-decker buses, presided over the 2012 Summer Olympics, and endeared himself to an even wider audience.

The British revere Johnson’s eccentricity and voted him back into Parliament in the last election. Now people talk openly of him being Cameron’s successor after the referendum.

Johnson has hedged his bets on British membership in the EU. Just this week he declared that he will not lead the “Out” forces, but he does not totally endorse the “In” forces.

Here is the possible scenario: Cameron has to produce a deal that satisfies some of the Euroskeptics and set a date for referendum. Then the vote. Then the hangover, one way or another. Then Johnson makes his move – unless some schemer, like the current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has not outmaneuvered the charming and brilliant Boris.

Cleverly Johnson has written a long political treatise comparing London to Athens, and leaving room for people to believe he has the qualities of Pericles, without actually claiming the great Greek’s mantle. Then, just to be safe, he has knocked off a highly laudatory biography of Churchill, which invites the idea that Johnson shares some of his hero’s traits.

This kind of effrontery makes British politics a perpetual night in the pub. Cheers! — For Inside Sources

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Britain, British prime minister, Conservative Party, David Cameron, Europe, European Union, Euroskeptics, Labor Party, Mayor of London, The Spectator, United Kingdom

Europe Faces Winter on the Edge of the Abyss

November 3, 2014 by White House Chronicle 1 Comment

BURGENLAND, Austria –There is another world crisis brewing – and one for which President Obama cannot be blamed. The Europeans and have made a mess of things, and now the wolves are at the door.

The first snarling wolf is deflation. Europe’s economies are so weak, so close to recession, that the very real danger of deflation – falling prices – has its economists petrified. It ought also to have its politicians in anguish, but whether it does is less clear.

Europe’s big-driver economy, Germany, as well as France and Italy, are on the edge. The German miracle is ailing, and Berlin may have been writing the wrong prescriptions for the rest of the 18 countries that share the euro as their currency. It has been aided in this effort by the International Monetary Fund.

That prescription, which often seems to harm the patient, as in Greece and Spain, is for austerity – which appears to work better on paper than in the real world. Germany worries about profligate borrowing throughout the European Union. But if the German economy is to escape recession, Chancellor Angela Merkel may have to borrow some money herself and inject it into infrastructure spending to keep Germany competitive and its workers on the job.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has been slow to institute a badly needed program of buying qualified bonds, known as quantitative easing. In the United States, the Federal Reserve, in a program that is now ending, has pumped more than $1 trillion into the economy and helped pull the economy out of recession. But ECB has been timid because it has no clear direction from the European political establishment — pointing up how cumbersome and directionless the European Union structure has become. It has a parliament, which has no power, and is increasingly attracting members who are actually opposed to the European project.

The European Commission has arguably too much power centered in the bureaucracy in Brussels, but no clear direction form its controller, the Council of Ministers. Trouble is the ministers can disagree and veto needed courses of action.

The economic crisis points up the ungovernable nature of Europe and its present institutions. If Washington is gridlocked, Europe is by structures that cannot deal with crisis and what often appear to reflect as many policies as there are members (28) in the EU.

But it is not just the economic wolf that is at Europe’s door. The Russian bear is there, too. Already there is an undeclared war raging in Ukraine.

At the Association of European Journalists' meeting here, a spokesman from the Ukrainian government, who asked not to be identified by name, expressed the sense in Ukraine that it has been betrayed by EU bungling.

“Europe sees Ukraine as its European neighborhood partner. But in Ukraine, the truth is different: Ukraine’s view is that Europe let us down. We are hurt, bleeding. We have been betrayed by a neighbor that, six months ago, we saw as a brotherly nation,” he said.

What was not said was that Europe may freeze this winter if the Putin regime — a growling wolf — wants to punish Ukraine and its neighbors. Europe is hopelessly dependent on Russian gas, which is used mostly for heating. Germany gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia, and Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia get 90 percent. Russian gas makes its way — largely through Ukraine — down into Italy, and even the United Kingdom has some small exposure.

If the gas goes off, Europe freezes and its economies go south in an avalanche. The most hopeful thing for Europe this winter is that with the world oil price falling, Russia’s own fragile economy may dictate that it keeps the gas flowing — but it will force up the price where it can.

Washington, with a new Congress, might want to brace for Europe’s winter of crisis and disaster. If Europe goes into severe recession, can the U.S. economy escape major harm? The new Congress will be on a sharp learning curve. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Association of European Journalists, austerity, Europe, European Central Bank, European Commission, European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany, King Commentary, oil, Russia, Russian gas, U.S.Congress, Ukraine

The Shadow of 1914

December 31, 2013 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

The new year is beginning with the shadow of an old year flitting around the retina of our consciousness. That year is 1914; the year that Europe was convulsed in the world's worst war – 9 million dead.
 
It was also the war from which the world never fully recovered. In its destruction of the old order in Europe, World War I laid the blueprint for the rest of the century; its emancipations and its enslavements, its triumphs and its horrors.

The century following World War I has been a century in which blood and ideas have flowed freely. As a consequence of the war and the Treaty of Versailles which ended it:

1. The Russian Revolution ushered in communism, and later the Cold War.

2. Britain and France carved up the Middle East with boundaries that created new countries, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, without regard to the promises that had been made to the Arabs during the war or regard for their sensibilities.

3. The Ottoman Empire fell, making way for modern Turkey.

4. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, changing the face of central and eastern Europe.

5. Monarchical rule ended in Europe.

6. Germany was so emasculated by the peace that the ascent of Adolf Hitler was possible.

7. Mechanized war was perfected with industrialized killing by gun, bomb and, for the first time, aircraft was unleashed.

8. The combatants lost the cream of their crop of young men, many of who would have risen to affect the 20th century after the war. The consequences of the loss of a generation of a young men can be speculated upon, but not calculated.

9. The stage was set for the United States — which played a decisive role in the war from the spring of 1917 on, but was not as deeply affected as the European powers — to become the dominant nation in the later part of the 20th century and to this day.

10. The social order throughout Europe began to liberalize. Its feudal underpinnings would remain until World War II, but there was a loosening of the old bonds of class across Europe.

11.  Women were beginning to share their gifts with society.

12. African colonies were taken from Germany and handed to Britain for a kind of safe-keeping, but not for the imperial expansion that Britain had been enjoying for two centuries. Britain, France, Portugal and Holland remained the colonial powers — Britain's possessions were many times greater than the rest put together.

13. Fury at the colonial system was building, especially against British control of what are now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The beginning of the end of the colonial concept had begun, but it had many hurdles and another world war to go before it all ended in an avalanche of independencies.

 
World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. The Balkans were the tinder for the war, but the fuel was everywhere: it was the growth in nationalism and its arrogance; a lack of enough understanding of what a modern war would look like; militarism in many countries, and especially in Germany, where the high command found a fatal friend in Kaiser Wilhem II.
 
As tensions in Europe escalated, the players scrambled for allies and these alliances led to the broader war. For example, the German High Command did not think that Britain would join the war, despite Britain's commitments to France and Russia: It thought Britain could and would remain neutral.
 
The great myth of the time was that the European powers were so intertwined in their trading relationships that war would cost too much and so peace was secure. Yet all the ingredients of combustion were present in 1914, and they were abetted by a lack of great leaders in all the countries that would fling themselves at each other.
 
It was a time of crushing mediocrity in European governance. That may have been the real cause of the world's greatest, most terrible miscalculation, 100 years ago: a leadership vacuum. Beware. Happy New Year. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: 1914, 2014, Europe, governance, leadership, World War I

The Economy Is Righting, but Does Congress Get It?

January 31, 2013 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

The great thing about being a pessimist is that something awful may still happen tomorrow. There are still plenty of pessimists about the economy, saying that we are spending our way into perdition; that the Great Reckoning is just around the corner, unless we do draconian things.
 
However on Wall Street, there is hopefulness — even optimism. The stock market is up, the housing market is showing real life and corporate confidence has increased since the Congress delayed action on the fiscal cliff through a bit of old-fashioned give-and-take. Some economists are saying encouraging things, so are the business magazines.
 
There is evidence that the economy, which was heeling badly, is beginning to right. The U.S. economy, still the economic lungs of the world, is breathing easier.
 
Sure, there was a slight dip in performance in the last quarter, reflecting primarily reduced defense spending. It's a hard lesson for the political right to grasp: You can't extrapolate family financial rectitude into national policy, as they like to do. If a family spends more than it is earning, it simply has to cut expenditures. If it doesn’t, the end is known; credit dries up and horrors, like foreclosure, are at hand. Likewise, corporations cut costs, lay off employees and sell assets until the balance sheet recovers.
 
When a family gets into trouble, it doesn't reduce its income by cutting luxuries, it reduces its spending. When a corporation cuts back, it tries to reduce staff not customers.
 
But governments can worsen the situation when they tackle spending at the wrong time. If they cut expenditures too aggressively and too fast, revenues fall, unemployment rises and demands on the public purse grow. Unlike individuals and corporations, governments can’t walk away from their messes.
 
Witness the recessions in Britain, Ireland, Spain and the total catastrophe in Greece. Irresponsible austerity has compounded the results of earlier promiscuous spending. Strong medicine has sent the patient to intensive care.
 
Amy Kremer, head of the Tea Party Express, and many conservative members of Congress playing the pessimist’s card, like to say, and they say it often, “revenue is not the problem, spending is.”
 
If only it were that simple. The problem is many things, including the global recession, the aging population, the high cost of medicine, two wars, badly timed tax cuts, China’s undervalued currency and the balance of payments deficit.
 
Take your pick. The miracle is that the economy is as vigorous as it is.
 
Already it has to deal with the tax increases that came with the budget deal in early January, particularly the increase in the payroll tax, which takes out of the economy money that would normally be spent — the large proportion of the tax which if left in the hands of the salaried class would be disposable. This may be about as much of a hit as it can take at present.
 
But the pessimists, who believe that spending is the mortal sin of our age, want to let sequestration — a 10 percent across the board cut — happen on March 2. The Washington Post says there is no mood in Congress to compromise. But if there is no compromise, the effects could be more devastating than a simple cut in spending. The result, instead, will be a cut in program expenditures while the government’s overhead in salaries and fixed costs will eat up the budget.
 
Austerity has been a disaster for Britain, Ireland and Spain. Do we want to follow the Europeans down that path?
 
The pessimists, who also believe that borrowing is the original sin of politicians, would let this recovery falter through their belief that the government must be starved. Sequestration will starve it, alright. Trouble is we'll all go hungry. There’s pessimism for you. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Amy Kremer, austerity, conservatives, Europe, federal budget, sequestration, Tea Party Express, U.S. economy, U.S.Congress, Wall Street

The Fuel Revolution that Is Changing the World — And Us

July 24, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

 

Colorless, odorless natural gas is changing the world geopolitically and economically in ways undreamed of even five years ago.

It is a giant upheaval of which President Obama is both the beneficiary and the victim. He benefits because low natural gas prices are helping consumers and industry. And he is undermined by them because the cheap gas is savaging his dreams of “green” energy alternatives with scads of jobs attached.

The technologies which have brought on the gas boom also are contributing to enhanced oil production in the United States. Who would have believed that North Dakota would become the third-largest oil-producing state?

But the price of gas, now at historical lows, is also a political difficulty for Obama. His energy policy has been based on the old reality of shortage and a need for “alternatives.”  In the administration’s scheme of things, the slack was to be taken up by the renewable sources ofenergy, wind, solar and wave power. With natural gas in plentiful supply and pushing out coal and new nuclear, the president is saddled with his failed attempts to push alternatives and to create a plethora of “green” jobs.

Yet without the boost that oil and natural gas are giving to the economy, it would be in worse shape than it already is.

A similar natural resources boom in the North Sea greatly aided Margaret Thatcher’s government and has underwritten Britain’s economy to this day, when production and British prosperity are both in decline.

New technology has brought the gas boom to the world and with it a change in geopolitics, soothing some tensions and exacerbating others.

The biggest excitement is in the Eastern Mediterranean, where there have been huge discoveries of gas — and sometimes oil and gas — off the coasts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and around the Island of Cyprus.

The problems reflect the old tensions of the regions and some new ones, such as the growing estrangement between Israel and Turkey and the projection of Russian interests in the region.

Cyprus, itself a divided island since the Turkish invasion of 1974, is the closest member of the European Union to chaotic Syria and is being courted on several fronts by Russia.

Russia is worried about new gas supplies affecting its monopoly in gas supply in Europe, as well as the future of its naval base in Syria. As a result, Russia is pouring money and people (150,000) into Cyprus to keep its options in the Mediterranean open.

Cyprus would like to become a transshipment point for Israeli gas (when a gas liquefaction plant is built). But claim to reserves in its own territorial waters are being contested by Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots. About 63 percent of the island is controlled by 900,000 Greek Cypriots who claim to speak for the whole island.

With new gas everywhere, there will be a rush to find markets. Europe, for example, is hoping to ease its Russian gas dependence by building pipelines that will bring gas from Central Asia through Turkey  avoiding Russia. Others, like Qatar, are looking away from Europe and to Asia for new customers.

The appeal of gas to electric utilities everywhere is undeniable. It burns with about half the greenhouse effluent than oil and coal. The power plants are easily sited, do not need huge cooling structures and the capital cost is low.

However, methane, which makes up 75 percent of natural gas, is a serious greenhouse contributor and needs to be kept out of the environment. The other components of natural gas are ethane, 15 percent, and butane and propane come in at about 5 percent each. Natural gas is the world’s most abundant compound.

While the case against the swing to gas is primarily environmental, there is an economic concern about costs in the decades to come. The environmental case is twofold:

• One, that although it produces less CO2, a principal greenhouse gas, than coal or oil, it still produces half as much as they do.

• Two, that hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking” affects groundwater, uses too much water itself in the process and may stimulate earthquakes.

Yet the chances of the world or the United States turning away from this new bounty are nil.

If the 19th century belonged to coal and the 20the century to oil, it looks as though the 21st will be the natural gas century. Reports of the death of fossil fuels are wildly exaggerated. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Cypru, Europe, fracking, green energy, natural gas, President Obama, Russia, selectric utilities, Turkey

Hey Dick, Add a Spoonful of Socialism to Your Tea

December 17, 2009 by White House Chronicle 2 Comments

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — The English like to say, from an old music hall song, “a little of what you fancy does you good.”  Well, so does a smidgeon of socialism.

Shock horror! Alert Dick Armey, inform Rudy Giuliani and let Rupert Murdoch know. Heresy is dangerous, and the correct authorities should be informed.

Like most people who rail against European socialism, those three have been the beneficiaries of some largesse that might be described as socialistic.

Armey, who is leading the tea bag revolution and who talks of the socialist threat as though a fleet were coming up the Potomac to sack Washington, is the beneficiary of the rights, honors and money that come from being a former congressman, all the way down to a handsome health care package.

Then there is Giuliani, who presided over the second most liberal city in the United States, after San Francisco, added to its amenities and improved America’s largest subway system. Notably, he did not end rent control, now known as “rent stabilization,” nor did he end a plethora of liberal services available in New York. Yet if the former mayor, who wanted to be president, wants to denigrate something, he utters the “s” word.

Murdoch is special. He has played footsie with the Gordon Brown Labor government in London; played up to the Communist Chinese; cooed over the Clintons and booed ideas of assistance to the media; and employed a staff at Fox Cable News who are devoted to castigating Europe and its left-of-center democracies. Worse, Murdoch has benefitted over the years from various government subsidies including the Commonwealth Press Cable Rate, which moved news inexpensively around the world before the Internet. And he has never cried out against second-class postage, another huge government subsidy to publishers.

OK, socialism, even the mild kind favored here in the Netherlands, isn’t the promised land of governance; but it produces, at the street level, some pretty agreeable result. Scads of American visitors groove on the country’s parks, public toilets, bike paths and buses that are easy to use.

This small city of about 200,000 bears its medieval history with pride and its socialist amenities with grace, from miles of bike paths to trains that can whisk you to the next hamlet or to Hamburg, Germany.

Travel to a nearby major city, like Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris, and Europe is yours with its high-speed trains that crisscross the continent at 200 mph, and even plunge under the English Channel to London’s St. Pancras Station, a masterpiece which has been restored to its Victorian glory.

London itself adds public amusements with pride. Three recent ones are the Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye; the foot bridge across the Thames, nicknamed the “wobbly bridge”; and the New Tate, an art gallery in an old power station.

You can put this down to the kind of post-socialism that former British prime minister Tony Blair (a Murdoch man) described as “social-ism;” not the old-school, “Keep the Red Flag Flying” socialism, but the idea that people are entitled to services beyond national defense. A good question for Giuliani might be: “Would you have approved the building of Central Park?”

Where socialism–lite has failed in Europe is in an excess of regulation, particularly the rigidity it has brought to hiring and firing. This has kept small business in Europe operating at the mom-and-pop level, scared to hire because in most European countries firing is subject to a labor tribunal’s approval. Approval seldom comes.

One of the great drivers of entrepreneurism in the United States is the harsh but effective idea that employees serve “at will.” That, the socialists can’t stomach. They want Paradise enow.

A little socialism will do–and we needn’t mention single-payer health care.

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Dick Armey, Europe, Fox Cable News, London, Maastricht, Rudy Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, socialism, the Netherlands, Tony Blair

Happy Birthday, America; Take That, Europe!

July 1, 2009 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

 

 

Happy birthday, America—really happy birthday.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, democratic socialism, Europe, European intellectuals, Fourth of July, Rhodesia, World War II, Zimbabwe

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