Llewellyn King: Why this is our decade of anxiety
“Anxiety” (1894), by Edvard Munch
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
They say that Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.
Yet they reflect a much wider societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those who are on the threshold of their lives.
I would highlight five causes of this anxiety:
The presidential election.
Global warming
Fear of wider war in Europe and the Middle East.
The impact of AI from job losses to the difficulty of knowing real from fake in everything.
The worsening housing shortage.
The election bears on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck no matter who wins.
Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub.
Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength either against Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu or the pro-Russian President Vladimir Putin movement in Congress.
He has led on climate change but failed to tell the story.
He has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and lay out, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there.
And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over. She has distinguished herself by walking away from every assignment Biden has given her, in a cloud of giggles. She has no base, just Biden’s support.
Trump inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, many of them working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe that this, the most unlikely man ever to climb the ramparts of American politics, will miraculously mend their world. More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him, and love holding on to power at any price.
You will know them by their refusal to admit that the last election was honest and or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.
The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches.
The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas, the Mideast and the South.
I wonder about children who have to stay indoors all summer in parts of Texas, the South and West, where you can get burned by touching an automobile and where sports have to be played at dawn or after dusk. That should make us all anxious about climate change and about the strength and security of the electric grid as we depend more and more on 24/7 air conditioning.
The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering, the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells.
Our belief that peace had come to Europe for all time has fallen. Surely as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolation has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.
In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a wider conflict have grown exponentially. Will there ever be a durable peace?
Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.
Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. There aren’t enough places to live in.
A nation that can’t house itself isn’t fulfilled. But the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for housing solutions.
There are economic consequences that will be felt in time, the largest of which might be a loss of labor mobility — always one of the great U.S. strengths. We followed the jobs. Now we stay put, worried about shelter should we move.
This is ultimately the decade of anxiety, mostly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. Time for us to get a grip.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: Political class is hiding between two old men; blame the primary system
An image of an elderly man being guided by a young child accompanies William Blake's poem “London,’’ from his Songs of Innocence and Experience.
The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, in Dixville Notch, N. H., the site of the first "midnight vote" in the New Hampshire primary.
— Photo by P199
WEST WARWICK, R.I.,
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 and 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 adequately deliver in the toughest job in the world. Much of the attention about age has focused on Biden, who recently turned 81, but Trump will be 78 in June 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 is an example of the evil that 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.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
White House Chronicle
David Warsh: Despite it all, I think that Biden will win
Plaque in Concord, N.H.
The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, in Dixville Notch, N.H., one of the sites of the first "midnight vote" in the New Hampshire primary.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
This column, named Economic Principals (EP), began forty years ago in The Boston Globe with a commission to write about goings-on within and around the economics profession. It didn’t take long to discover that few readers were sufficiently curious to warrant a sustained diet of economics with a capital E, and so a second column was added, this one about economics and politics.
Becoming unmoored from the newspaper in 2002 has made the mix somewhat richer on political topics, all the more so the tumultuous last few years. In fact, I intend to spend more time on economics, not less, during the next year or two. However, I want to venture a bet on the year – a bet against political acumen.
Of all the issues that EP follows – the wars in Ukraine and the Mid-East, immigration, China, central bank policy, climate change – none is as important this year as the November elections in the United States.
It now seems nearly certain that we Americans are stuck with a re-run of the 2020 election, Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign dissolved in a cocktail of timid captivity to the Trump base and internal dissension. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s gaffe on a voter’s Civil War question revealed all too clearly the dangers of playing to the Trump side of the aisle in the Republican primaries. Big government caused it, she said, failing to mention slavery.
For conventional wisdom in senior Republican Party circles, EP turned, as it does every Wednesday, to Karl Rove, who writes a column in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. A veteran political operative since Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, he served as senior adviser to President George W. Bush, and afterwards wrote quite a good book about President William McKinley’s place in GOP history. Rove has the added virtue of making an annual batch of predictions, and toting up the results a year later.
Rove’s presidential prediction for 2024:
“Biden vs. Trump is a chaotic, nasty mess. Mr. Biden counts on Mr. Trump being convicted and voters adjusting to inflation’s effects. Mr. Trump counts on anger over a politicized justice system and Mr. Biden’s age and mental capacity. Most vote for whom they hate or fear less. Mr. Trump is convicted before November yet wins the election while Mr. Biden receives a plurality of the popular vote. The race is settled by fewer than 25,000 votes in each of four or fewer states. Third-party candidates get more votes in those states than Mr. Trump’s margin over Mr. Biden. God help our country.”
EP has in mind the Kansas abortion referendum, of 2022. A ballot initiative amendment to the state constitution had been scheduled for August that year that would have criminalized routine abortions and given the state government the power to prosecute individuals involved in procedures. Six weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe V. Wade.
The Kansas amendment failed by an 18-point margin, a result ascribed to strong voter turnout and increased registration in the weeks leading up to the vote. In November, 2023, Ohio voters overwhelmingly embraced a constitutional amendment guaranteeing residents access to abortion, becoming the seventh state to affirm reproductive rights in one way or another since the Supreme Court decision.
As Kansas and Ohio voters rejected the Supreme Court’s decision, American voters have the opportunity in the November election next year to overturn the Trump wing of the Republican Party, and not just not just in so-called “battleground states,” of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania The available mechanism is the same in each case – high voter turnout.
True, Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 was far from a landslide. (Rove thinks this one will be closer.) The element of immediacy will be missing this year, though scheduled trials of the former president will refocus attention on the calculations that led up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Those annoying third-party candidates are a wild card, as well.
By Novembers, the stakes will be clear. Never mind the avalanche of advertising spending about to descend. Work on getting voters to show up. We are a few good speeches away from resolving the issue. Biden offers some attributes to dislike, many fewer traits to fear.
Americans will try Donald Trump in the courts, reject him in the election. Biden will be re-elected by a clear-cut margin in the autumn. That’s the bet, based on not much more than a hunch. See you here next Dec. 29, to settle up or collect.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this columnist originated.
David Warsh: Secular time and political time
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
So Joe Biden is sticking with his bid for a second term. Labor Day was the president’s last chance to bow out. I expect Biden to win. Get ready for the hardest four years in the White House since Lyndon Johnson lived there, 1965-1969.
That is the implication of a view of American history as a recurring sequence of lengthy political change: breakthroughs, followed by breakups, followed by breakdowns. Over the years, there have been all kinds of cycle theories about U.S. political change. An unusually fully-elaborated version is associated with Yale theorist Stephen Skowronek.
Skowronek distinguishes between what he calls secular time and political time. The latter is time in the system, the medium through which presidents must reckon with commitments their predecessors have made. Secular means the president’s own time in office, for better or worse. Since presidential leadership is what organizers, journalists, and voters care about, secular time is the way our clocks tick.
Thus five major systems, described by their ideological commitments and coalition support, have unfolded in the years since the American Civil War: the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln to Grover Cleveland, 1861- 1897; William McKinley to Herbert Hoover, 1897-1933; Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, 1933-1968, Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush, 1969-93; and Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, 1993-2025.
Underneath all this is the machinery of constitutional democracy, which is manipulated by actors to determine the outcomes: the federal system, with its regional governments; the three branches of national government, with their various checks and balances; the coalitions of interests, old and new, that constantly shift back and forth; and, finally, “presidential definition” in public opinion, a concept more elusive than the rest.
What enables a president to set an agenda that lasts thirty years?
Luck and timing, of course. There may be a sense that “it’s time for a change.” If a candidacy succeeds, gradually choices are made. These may meet with success among voters. If they do, a two-term president’s successors are constrained. Otherwise, a one-term president goes home.
In Clinton’s case, “presidential definition” turned on his decisions to balance the budget, ignore China and to expand NATO to the borders of Russia. Presidents since then have paid less attention to the budget constraint, continued to cooperate with China in varying degrees, but they have continued to attempt to expand NATO, which has led to the war in Ukraine.
Much of this happened on Barack Obama’s watch, when Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, two failed presidential candidates, served successively as secretary of state. Donald Trump’s presidency led to four years of vamping, thanks to his conflicts with both Russian and Ukrainian interests. Then Biden, who as vice president oversaw Ukrainian policy for eight years as vice president, as president promoted his team of advisers and pressed ahead. It is his war to win, or, more likely, to lose.
So, after the thirty years that began with the election of Bill Clinton, Biden is probably a breakdown president,. His age is a problem. There is his relationship with his son Hunter. “Bidenomics” offers little hope of coming to grips with America’s looming fiscal crisis.
What next? Forget about Trump. I expect a traditional Republican candidate to emerge from the embers of Biden’s presidency, as Lincoln emerged from the ashes of James Buchanan’s single term in office, to end the Andrew Jackson-Buchanan system, 1832-1861 and found the modern GOP. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, an up-to-date version of former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is the most obvious possibility today, but things will shift around a good deal in the next five years.
By 2028, climate change and fiscal crisis probably will be the central issues, replacing the war in Ukraine, threats to Taiwan and the composition of Trump’s Supreme court. Mitch McConnell, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will matter less. The rising generations will matter more.
How to follow developments? Continue to read the four great English-language newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. The long swings will continue. America will be all right.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com.
David Warsh: Why I hope that Biden decides, after all, not to run again
Confronting global warming is our greatest challenge.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
What are the chances that Joe Biden will take himself out of the 2024 presidential campaign, perhaps with a Labor Day speech? Not good, based on what I read in the newspapers. Yet I have begun hoping that Biden just might drop out of the race. Here’s why.
It is not because Biden would fail to win re-election if he sticks to his plan to run. He promised to serve as a bridge and he has done that. His takeover of Donald Trump’s Big Talk platform of 2016 seems nearly complete. “Bidenomics,” which boils down to strategic rivalry with China, is the right road for American industry and trade for many years to come.
The problem is that a second term would almost certainly end in disaster, for both Biden and for the United States. The dismal war in Ukraine; the threat of another in Taiwan; the impending fiscal crises of America’s Social Security and medical-insurance programs: these are not problems for a good-hearted 82-year-old man of diminishing mental capacity, much less his fractious team of advisers.
Most of all, there is the challenge of global warming. It seems safe to say that there can no longer be doubt in any quarter that the problem is real. Perhaps this year’s strong demonstration effects were required to galvanize public opinion for action. But what action to take?
With respect to climate change, I’d written many times that the best introduction available is Spencer Weart’s 200-page book, The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard, 2008.) Weart maintains a much more extensive hypertext version of the book on site of the Center for the History of Physics, which he founded in 1974. The digital edition was most recently updated in May 2023.
A distinguished historian of science, author of several books on other topics, including governance, Weart is a man of balanced and temperate views. Here is what he wrote in his book’s sobering “Conclusions: A Personal Statement:”
Policies put in place in recent decades to reduce emissions have made a real difference, bringing estimates of future temperatures down to a point where the risk of utterly catastrophic heating is now low. If we are lucky, and the planet responds at the lower limit of what seems possible, we might be able to halt the rise with less than another 1°C of warming, putting us a bit under 2°C above 19th-century temperatures. That would be a world with widespread devastation, but survivable as a civilization….
Yet the world’s scientists have explained that we need to get the emissions into a steep decline by the year 2030. Yes, that soon. What if we fail to turn this around? The greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere would lock in the warming. The policies we put in place in this decade will determine the state of the climate for the next 10,000 years….
If we do not make big changes in our economy and society, in how we live and how we govern ourselves, global warming will force far more radical changes upon us. In particular, we must restrain the influence of amoral corporations and extremely wealthy people, who have played a despicable role in blocking essential policies. To allow ever worse climate disruption would give those who already hold too much power opportunities to seize even more amid the chaos….
So, what to do about global warming? Negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. Avoid war in Taiwan. Put the military-industrial complex on pause. Send Biden home to Wilmington, to nurture his family.
Throw open the race. Let other newspapers start writing stories like this one. Trust in the election to produce a young leader. American democracy has done it before. We don’t have four years to wait.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com
Llewellyn King: Despair and danger
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Body language is the new political voice in America.
The language is universal and easily learned because it has just four components: eye-rolling, sighing and shrugging, accompanied by turning hands up.
“Oh my God, it’s a disaster,” is one translation. Another might be, “Don’t ask me, I didn’t sign on for this.”
It belongs — this silent expression of despair about the presidential election, unfolding for 2024 — to old-line Republicans and to a wide swath of Democrats, too.
Political discussion has ended in these groups, replaced by the kind of fatalism summed up in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats that we are slouching toward Bethlehem.
Of course, as Washington Post columnist George Will says, the inevitable isn’t necessarily inevitable. However, at the moment, it looks as if it is.
The despair is spread pretty evenly among Democrat, many of whom consider President Biden too old, and Vice President Kamala Harris not up to the job she has, let alone the presidency.
At 80, Biden is showing reduced vigor and limited mobility, and he favors scripted speeches. This from a politician who was famous for nonstop talking.
Over the years, like other reporters, I have often thought, “Joe, you have made your point, now stop.” These days, you wait in vain for him to go off script. His speeches, which he reads from a Teleprompter, sound as though they were prepared by a committee — lifeless repetition.
He never holds a press conference, a sign of dwindling confidence.
The bigger fear in the Democrats isn’t that Biden is too old but that Harris, at some point, may become president. She has proven herself to be woefully inept and incoherent.
In every assignment Biden has handed her on which she could have shown her worth, she has failed or simply not done. Remember, she was Biden’s point person on the border crisis? She hasn’t been heard from as such.
This past spring, she went to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia to counter the Chinese and chose to make it an occasion to apologize for slavery. I was born and raised in Africa, in what is now called Zimbabwe, and have traveled extensively on the continent, and slavery isn’t a burning issue. The high point of this visit was Zambia, where Harris’s paternal grandfather came from and where she was welcomed.
China has three great appeals to African countries: It asks no questions, doesn’t lecture on human rights, and pays off the ruling elites, trading these indulgences for minerals.
While Biden and Harris may seem a dangerous pair, Donald Trump, twice indicted (so far), twice impeached, now reduced to feeling sorry for himself on a colossal scale, is terrifying. He has promised an administration of vengeance.
Whereas I can’t find any Democrats who are enthusiastic about the Biden-Harris ticket, I certainly can find far-right Republicans who love Trump. Mostly, they are the working-class White voters, who were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party and now believe that the America they know and want to preserve can only be saved by the reprehensible Trump, with his relentless abuse of all who cross him and endless lachrymose pity for himself.
Trump’s defense of himself is risible, but the faithful Trumpsters believe in him — as much as ever.
They aren’t statistics to me. Recently, my wife and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island when a couple with a small child took the booth behind us. You might call them the salt of the earth: working people doing their best to raise a family. The husband was complaining loudly about the high cost of living. Then, after seeing Trump on an overhead TV, he said to his wife, “The only honest man is Trump.”
That young father wasn’t alone.
At a neighborhood pub that, in the British sense, is our “local,” the owner and patrons know that both my wife and I are journalists, and because Rhode Island PBS airs our program, White House Chronicle, we are treated with deference. But that doesn’t prevent good, hard-working, fellow patrons, mostly of Italian, Irish and Portuguese stock, from lambasting the media within earshot of us. “It’s all lies.” “They hate Trump because he tells the truth.” They say things like that because they believe them. They are the Trump base.
When I hear that stuff, how do I react? Well, I roll my eyes, sigh, shrug my shoulders, and, if no one is looking, I turn my hands up to the heavens.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Llewellyn King: Pray tell, Oracle, how we get out of this
“Consulting the Oracle,’’ by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When the ancient Greeks wanted to learn what their future held, they would consult with oracles. Alexander the Great, for one, visited the Oracle at Siwa, an oasis in the Egyptian desert. According to his biographer, Plutarch, the oracle told Alexander that he was destined to conquer the world.
In these tumultuous days when we, the electorate are offered a choice between an old, old president and his daffy vice president and a slightly less old vengeful reprobate with a persecution complex, I did the smart thing: I consulted the oracle.
No, I didn’t cross the desert on a camel, nor as Alexander did on his much-loved horse, Bucephalus, nor in a snazzy BMW SUV.
I did go to the oracle of the day, which is the only place I know to seek and get what seems to be extraterrestrial advice: the Bing AI. I asked the oracle several questions and got some interesting answers.
When it came to the big question, I beseeched the Bing AI, “Great Oracle, I am an American voter, and I am in an awful tizzy. I don’t know whom to support in the next presidential election.
“It seems to me that one candidate, President Joe Biden, a decent man, may be too old to navigate the difficult waters ahead in domestic and international affairs.
“As for another candidate, former President Donald Trump, many people find aspects of his conduct reprehensible.
“What to do? For me, this is even harder because I am a columnist and television commentator, and I need to have something to say. I am sure you understand, Great Oracle.”
Well, the Bing AI, clammed up: It delivered only the formal histories of both men.
I had thought my question would spark a revelation, a wise analysis, or a contradiction of my view of the candidates. Clearly, I shall have to wait for the day when I get into real AI chat: ChatGPT.
Mostly, I had thought that the oracle would tell me that all the presidential hopefuls so far will be toast by November 2024; that new candidates will bring us hope, fire up party enthusiasm and let rip.
Are new faces and new choices too much to hope for?
Republicans are wrestling with their prospective candidate after his latest character stain: He has been found liable for defamation and sexual abuse in a civil trial. What does this mean for the whole issue of what we look for in the character of candidates? Rectitude was once considered essential. Not for Trump. Post-Trump is post-rectitude.
Just under 70 percent of the electorate have told pollsters that they think Biden is too old to run for re-election. That isn’t, I submit, a conclusion arrived at by pondering what it means to be 80. That is a conclusion, again I submit, they have come to by looking at the president on TV — on the few occasions they see him there.
Clearly, he doesn’t have the strength or the confidence to hold a press conference. These are vital.
In America, the press conference is the nearest thing we have to question time in the British House of Commons. It is the time of accounting. Biden is behind in his accounting as audited by the press corps.
Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, is avowedly liberal. He is one of the most skillful political writers working today; deft, informed, convincing, and you know where he stands. He stands with the Democrats.
So, it is significant when he raises a question about Biden and when he draws attention, as he did on May 9, to Biden’s absence from public engagement.
Meyerson wrote, “Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in … allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The Centerville Mill, in West Warwick
Llewellyn King: Prepare for a summer of discontent but enjoy the sun anyway
Heading down to Crane Beach, in Ipswich, Mass.
— Photo by Thomas Steiner
Roller coaster at the Six Flags amusement park in Agawam, Mass. More political/geopolitical roller coaster rides coming.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
All the portents are that 2022 will be a summer to remember --and not in a good way.
It will be a summer of shortages, high prices, possible electric blackouts and severe and unpredictable storms. It also promises to be a summer of political ugliness, where civility and facts are missing.
National unity and cohesion, which usually can be expected in times of crisis, isn’t in sight. We are gracelessly at each other’s throats.
Also missing will be any sense that there is strong leadership anywhere; not in the White House, Congress, or among our allies.
Set these tribulations, caused by a dangerous war in Ukraine following on the COVID 19 pandemic, and you are entitled to be despondent. All this wasn’t in the playbook -- the events that shape the world never are.
But don’t reach for the arsenic. For most of us, glorious summer, so important to the North American lifestyle, will be as it always is with crowded beaches, jammed highways, chaotic airports and painful sunburn. We will have summer; and summer will have its joys, its rituals, and its happiness.
For Americans, these aren’t the worst of times. They are just very trying times. We will feel them directly in the wallet, painfully so. Gasoline and other fuels will be very expensive, and heating oil will be a big-ticket item next winter. House prices are still stratospheric, and rents are going up. The markets are shaky.
Americans are feeling that all isn’t well and that things are coming unstuck -- reliable, everyday things.
In democracies, we seek relief by changing the government. All the indications are that we will do that in the midterm elections just months away.
The Democrats are likely to take a drubbing. The Republicans will joyfully seize victory – and they won’t know any better what to do about the great stresses that are shaking the nation and the world.
Instead, they will be tempted to double down on social issues and a raft of things that will exacerbate the divisions in the country, further curb the rights of women, mess with education curricula, seek to influence social media platforms, and keep the government firmly in gridlock.
President Biden and his unlucky administration will get the blame if the Democrats are routed in the midterms. Indeed, it should, fairly or not, even though the alternative may not be better.
Certainly, a Democratic White House and Republican Congress suggests just one thing: crippling inaction.
Biden hasn’t been a proactive president but a reactive one. He has waited for the water to rise before he has acknowledged that it is happening, and it is time to start bailing.
Take, for example, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. When Biden tried to get ahead of the news, to identify an issue and resolve it before it mugged him, he got it terribly wrong. It was a foreign-policy calamity of Biden’s making, and it seems to have curbed his enthusiasm for preempting issues.
Mostly, Biden has sought to balance things. His reaction to outrageousness is a sedate, genteel sense of horror. You expect him to say to the Supreme Court, or the gun lobby, or Russian Vladimir Putin, “Look what you have done!”
One gets the feeling that Biden doesn’t have a grip on much except his decency. Everyone who knows him will tell you what a decent man he is. Decency supports, but it doesn’t lead. Decency isn’t a policy. It isn’t a way forward. It isn’t a solution.
After the midterms, Congress likely will be in the hands of two ruinous vacillators, Sen. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and the even more wobbly Rep. Kevin McCarthy, of California. They aren’t exemplars of the Republican ideal. They aren’t in the previously worshipped Ronald Reagan tradition.
Both have shown themselves captive to former President Trump’s vengeful malevolence and have twisted the truth in their servitude to him.
Politics are sour, prices high, the future bumpy, but summer is glorious. Revel in it, celebrate it, and bask in its untroubled rays. I plan to do just that. Thoughts of politics are worse than sunburn.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Biden's conflicted policies on natural gas; is a carbon-capture breakthrough coming?
Model of the LNG tanker Rivers. It was built in 2002 and is registered in Bermuda. Its capacity is 137,500 cubic meters of gas.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Joe Biden at war and Joe Biden at peace aren’t the same person. When it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war and energy policy, the U.S. president is severely conflicted.
Central to Biden’s strategy has been to cut off Russia’s huge revenues from exporting natural gas to Europe. He has unambiguously declared that the shortfall Europe will have in natural-gas supplies from Russia will, in time, be remedied with other sources, especially with liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from the United States.
So far so good. But Biden has always favored the environmental vision of the left wing of his own party and its implacable resistance to all forms of carbon-based fossil fuels because of their contribution to global warming.
Europe imports one third of the natural gas it needs for electric generation, heating and other domestic uses by pipeline from Russia. Particularly vulnerable is Germany, which depends on half of its gas imports from Russia: a dependency which it has happily allowed to grow year after year.
That was worsened when Germany turned its back on nuclear, aided by its influential Greens, after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, in 2011.
Charlie Riedl, executive director of Center for LNG at the Natural Gas Supply Association, said on my weekly PBS program, White House Chronicle, it will take several years to boost U.S. LNG exports to Europe and will need substantial infrastructure investment.
The United States has six operating export LNG terminals and a seventh nearly ready to enter operation. Europe has 26 main receiving terminals and eight smaller ones. Each new U.S. terminal has a price tag of around $20 billion, Riedl confirmed. Similarly, tankers must be available and gas exporters, like Qatar, are increasing their tanker fleets.
The impediments to building new natural-gas infrastructure in the United States are formidable. On the same broadcast, Sheila Hollis, acting executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, a nonpartisan, non-lobbying group that embraces all energy, explained, “I don’t think there is any easy way to make anything happen of this magnitude in the country, regardless of what infrastructure you’re building, or which industry’s infrastructure.
She went on to say, “I do think it will remain an ongoing saga of slogging your way through the morass of regulations, both state and federal of every conceivable variety, and the strong opposition that comes from entities like financing communities and universities that may have a particular interest in reducing CO2; and because of the magnitude, it is one that will be lit on in the regulatory setting, in the judicial setting, and in the legislative setting, both state and federal, because that is the nature of the beast.”
Moreover, Hollis said, there are environmental-justice sensitivities: “Who gets the work? Where will the facilities be sited? And there will be extreme attention to environmental issues at the facilities and the pipelines.”
Biden is caught between his own plans to cut fossil-fuel use in electric supply in the nation and his commitment to Europe that the United States will be a reliable supplier of fuel for their electricity needs over the long haul.
Commitment is important to the gas industry, which is whipsawed between demands for natural gas and attempts to limit its use by obstructing development. New natural-gas infrastructure will need to operate over several decades to recover investment -- at odds with the Biden plan to reduce fossil-fuel generation in the United States by 2030 and get to net zero by 2050.
A bright spot: The industry is confident that sometime in the future, carbon can be removed from natural gas at the time of combustion. This technology is called carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) and envisages getting the carbon out of the combustion effluent before it goes into the air. It can then be used as a building material and for future gas and oil well stimulation.
According to USEA’s Hollis, the Department of Energy is working with its national laboratories and is making solid progress in perfecting the technology. Energy aficionados believe increasingly that a breakthrough is at hand.
If that is so, then Biden can shush his environmental critics and approach the future with more confidence, giving gas companies and utilities the durable assurances they need.
Meanwhile Biden is bullish on future gas in Europe and bearish on gas in the United States. As in the Johnny Mercer song, “something’s gotta give.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Chris Powell: Scenes from Weimar America; how about neither senile nor crazy, neither far left nor far right?
Adolf Hitler and his followers in 1932, the final year of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). Genocide and world war followed.
Right-wing vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse shows his stuff.
Car lot destroyed by Kenosha rioters.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With proto-Nazis and proto-Commies brawling in the streets across Weimar America, it may be more important than ever to recall Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter's wry observation that "the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people."
At best Kyle Rittenhouse is a stupid and reckless kid and a gun nut who enlisted in a search for trouble and found it in Kenosha, Wis., among rioters, some of them armed, who purported to be enraged by the shooting of a Black man by local police.
Carrying a military-style rifle, Rittenhouse went to Kenosha in the name of protecting property against rioters and ended up killing two of them and maiming a third, all of them white, as Rittenhouse himself is.
Rittenhouse was vigorously prosecuted but, supported by video evidence and even the testimony of a prosecution witness, he maintained that the three men he shot were attacking him, and the jury acquitted him.
Now, because the rioters Rittenhouse shot were rioting in the name of a Black man, the political left is portraying them as martyrs and Rittenhouse as a white supremacist, though there is no evidence that racial oppression was or has ever been his objective. This unfairness to Rittenhouse has prompted the political right to declare him a hero of the right of self-defense and the Second Amendment.
But there were no martyrs or heroes in the brawling in Kenosha, just idiots. When politics is stripped away, Rittenhouse's acquittal fits the facts as the jury could have found them, and if the political left and right were not so crazed and hateful they would be looking for heroes elsewhere.
Of course that's not likely to happen. Instead the Rittenhouse case is inspiring protests and confrontations throughout the country, including Connecticut, where a week ago a group that had been threatening to level the Amazon warehouse in Windsor because ropes resembling nooses had been found there began blocking traffic in the center of Manchester.
Blocking traffic is a good way of looking for trouble too, especially when so many people are stressed and on edge because of the lengthy virus epidemic. People protesting in the name of environmental protection lately have been blocking traffic in the United Kingdom and getting attacked by people trying to get to work.
So as the Rittenhouse verdict protesters were blocking traffic in Manchester, a car stopped in front of them and then slowly pushed through them before driving off. The protesters were able to get out of the way and no one was really hurt, but they all were indignant that their lawbreaking wasn't appreciated but instead was resented as a provocation.
Indeed, some of them are gun nuts just like Rittenhouse and have carried and displayed guns at their previous protests, though no one has been threatening them. In Manchester last weekend they claimed to be armed as well and seemed to want to be considered heroes for not shooting at the car that had nudged them out of the way.
There is good identification of the car and if the police locate and arrest the driver maybe Manchester will be the scene of another trial to which racial implications will be falsely and opportunistically attached. As in Kenosha, MSNBC and Fox News could cover it and designate new heroes and villains, and the verdict could set off its own protests and riots.
Or maybe, realizing that there are still many more civilized ways to make a point, people could resolve to make their points without getting into each other's faces, even if that is less dramatic and satisfying to the ego.
xxx
A national poll three years ago found that nearly half the country questioned President Trump's mental stability and intelligence. Now another national poll has found that about half the country questions President Biden's mental fitness for his office and believes that his health is deteriorating.
Unfortunately, other polls say Vice President Kamala Harris's standing with public opinion is even worse.
So the next act of politics in Weimar America may be the restoration of Trump, unless someone soon can start a sensible third party whose platform might be simple:
Neither crazy nor senile, neither far left nor far right.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Philip K. Howard: A way to make Biden infrastructure program work as hoped
Construction crew laying down asphalt over fiber-optic trench, in New York City
— Photo by Stealth Communications
The Bourne Bridge and the Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge at sunset. The Bourne Bridge, at the canal’s western side, and the Sagamore Bridge, to the east, both built in the Thirties, are slated to be replaced.
President Biden’s breathtaking $5 trillion infrastructure agenda — about $50,000 in debt for each American family — is stalling on broad skepticism on both the goals and means of spending that money. There’s bipartisan agreement on at least some of the goals: Spending $1.2 trillion to fix roads, build new transmission lines, expand broadband, and provide clean water could improve American competitiveness as well as its environmental sustainability.
There’s a deal to be made here: Use this moment to overhaul how Washington spends money. Skeptics are correct that, otherwise, most of the money will go up in smoke. What’s needed is a new set of spending principles, based on the principle of commercial reasonableness, enforced by a nonpartisan National Infrastructure Board.
The key to governing is implementation. Big talk in press conferences rarely results in success. Nor does throwing money at a problem. The chaos in Afghanistan reveals what happens when top-down dictates are not accompanied by a practical plan for executing the goal. But the Biden administration has no plan on how to implement its infrastructure proposals wisely.
What is certain is that, without reform, most of the infrastructure money will be wasted. Red tape, delays, rigid contracting rules, entitlements and other inefficiencies guarantee that American taxpayers will receive less than 50 cents of infrastructure value for each dollar. That’s optimistic. Comparative studies of infrastructure costs in developed countries show that public transit in the U.S. can be four times as expensive as in, say, Spain or France. A highway viaduct in Seattle cost three times more than a comparable project in France, and seven times more than one in Spain.
What causes the waste? No U.S. official has authority to use commonsense, at any point in the process, to build infrastructure sensibly. Other countries have “state capacity”— a euphemism for public departments where officials are given the authority to make contract and other decisions comparable to their counterparts in the private sector. In America, by contrast, officials’ responsibility is preempted by red tape.
Here are some of the main drivers of waste:
- Permitting can take years because no official has authority to 1) limit environmental reviews to important impacts; 2) resolve disagreements among competing agencies; or 3) expedite resolution of lawsuits. In our study Two Years, Not Ten Years we found that delay alone can more than double the effective cost of projects.
- Rigid procurement protocols strive to detail each nut and bolt in advance, limiting the flexibility needed to confront unanticipated issues inherent in any complex construction project. This leads to massive waste as well as costly change orders.
- Union collective-bargaining entitlements have accumulated over the decades, for example, requiring twice as many workers as needed to operate the tunneling machine for a New York subway. Work rules are designed not for safety or efficiency, but to provide compensation even where there’s no work.
- Legislative mandates further increase the cost of public projects. The “Buy American” laws can increase costs by 25 percent, sometimes more. The Davis-Bacon Act from 1931 increases labor costs by upwards of 20% over market by requiring “prevailing wages”— which is a euphemism for highest wage that can be justified. An army of Washington bureaucrats has the job of dictating wage rates and benefit packages in hundreds of construction job categories in each of 3,000 designated labor markets in the U.S.
- All these legal processes, rigidities and entitlements provide grounds for a lawsuit for any unhappy bidder, contractor, labor union, or environmental group. Lawsuits not only add costs to delay projects, but are commonly used as a weapon to extract payments and concessions that further raise the costs.
Thick rulebooks have supplanted human responsibility. Washington allocates money, with lots of legal strings. It then gives grants to states and localities, many of which are actuarily insolvent – precisely because they cannot manage their public unions and other interest groups. Time passes. Lawyers and consultants produce environmental impact statements. Various groups object and threaten lawsuits. Unions demand ever-greater benefits. Understaffed civil servants try to write procurement guidelines that anticipate every detail and eventuality. The low bidder wins, even if the bidder has a lousy record. Some infrastructure gets built, often badly, and always at a cost that far exceeds what a commercial builder would have paid. The waste here is a scandal — political leaders might as well take taxpayer money and throw it in the fireplace.
How should infrastructure be built? What causes waste in building infrastructure, as NYU’s Alon Levy puts it, is “rigid[ity], where what is needed is flexibility and empowerment” of officials with responsibility. Someone needs to be in charge of each project, and whoever’s in charge needs to have the flexibility to negotiate contracts, adapt to new conditions, and, above all, not to be hamstrung by unrelated requirements.
Building roads, bridges and power lines isn’t rocket science. Other countries and private companies know how to do this. Most public engineers know what performance standards are required. By the simple mechanism of empowering public servants to take responsibility, Levy found, other countries are able to “spend a fraction of what the US does on the same bridge or tunnel.”
Giving officials flexibility to use their judgment, however, requires a mechanism to overcome Americans’ distrust of government. That’s what keeps America’s byzantine bureaucracy in place. Any effort at reform is resisted by groups who argue “What if... an official is on the take?” “What if…the official is Robert Moses, and wants to bulldoze poor communities?”
Opponents to spending reform are mobilizing as I write. The $1.2 trillion Senate bill includes permitting reforms that seek to limit the permitting process to two years. But even this modest reform is under attack by “environmental justice” groups who argue that two years is insufficient to consider those issues. Similarly, a reform to expedite permits for interstate transmission lines is being vigorously opposed by the state energy regulators. They pluck the strings of distrust. But their real objection is that minimizing delay removes the legal veto which they use to extract lucrative benefits for themselves.
What’s needed to overcome distrust is a nonpartisan oversight body that is empowered to avoid waste and corruption. In other developed countries, most citizens accept official authority. But Americans don’t. Creating a trusted oversight institution means it can’t be in the control of either political party. An example are the nonpartisan “base-closing commissions” which decide which defense bases should be shuttered.
I propose a nonpartisan National Infrastructure Board, analogous to oversight boards in Australia and other countries. Its responsibilities would be not to build infrastructure but to oversee and report on how infrastructure is built. Funding could still go through states, but only on condition that timelines and contracts meet standards of commercial reasonableness. No more featherbedding. No more payoffs. States would lose funding if they continued current practices.
The power of a trusted oversight body is exponentially greater than its size. The availability of accountability, not micromanagement, is the element that avoids waste while instilling trust and confidence that everyone is doing their part.
America is at an institutional crossroads. Nothing much works as it should because no official, or teacher, or hospital administrator, or manager, is authorized to make sensible choices. Pruning the jungle of red tape never works because the underlying premise is to avoid human judgment on the spot. The only solution is to replace the jungle with a simpler framework activated by human responsibility and accountability. But who will oversee those officials? That’s why a trusted oversight body is essential.
Philip K. Howard is a lawyer, author and chairman of Common Good, a bipartisan reform coalition. This piece first ran in The Hill.
Sam Pizzigati: Biden’s Roosveltian tax-the-rich plan
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
President Joe Biden has made no secret of his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president proudly displays a portrait of FDR in the Oval Office.
More significantly, he’s announced the most ambitious plan since FDR’s New Deal for enhancing the well-being of working Americans while trimming the fortunes of America’s super rich. The president has promised to fund his big plans for infrastructure, jobs and education entirely with taxes on the top.
In fact, Biden’s new tax-the-rich plan is a good deal more Rooseveltian than the numbers, at first glance, might suggest.
In 1945, when FDR died in office, the nation’s most affluent faced a 94 percent tax on income over $200,000, a little more than $2.9 million in today’s dollars. The rates Biden has proposed come nowhere near those — they’d top out at just 39.6 percent of ordinary income over $400,000. That’s up only slightly from the current 37 percent.
But the gap between Biden’s plan and FDR shrinks big-time when we toss capital gains — the dollars the rich make buying and selling stocks and bonds, property, and other assets — into the picture.
In 1945, the nation’s deepest pockets paid a 25 percent tax on their capital-gains windfalls. Today’s rate tops off at 20 percent. For households making over $1 million in annual income, the Biden plan would raise the top capital- gains tax rate to 39.6 percent, the same top rate that applies to earnings from employment.
In other words, the Biden tax plan ends the most basic tax break for the ultra rich: the preferential treatment they get on the income from their wheeling and dealing. This would be a big deal. In 2019, 75 percent of the benefits from the capital-gains tax break went to America’s top 1 percent.
Dividends currently get the same preferential treatment. Americans making over $10 million in 2018 took in over half of their total incomes — 54 percent — via capital gains and dividends. If Congress adopts the Biden tax plan, the basic federal tax on that 54 percent would just about double, from 20 to 39.6 percent.
The Biden plan also totally eliminates the federal tax code’s open invitation to dynastic family wealth: the “step up” loophole. Under this notorious giveaway, any fabulously wealthy American sitting on unrealized capital gains can pass those gains onto heirs tax-free. The Biden plan short-circuits the simplest route to dynastic fortune.
Under Biden’s tax plan, new dynastic fortunes would have a much harder time taking root. Already existing dynastic fortunes, on the other hand, would still be with us. Biden — like FDR in his day — has not yet warmed to the idea of a wealth tax.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren led a recent hearing highlighting the enormous contribution that even a 2 percent annual tax on grand fortunes could make. Among the insightful witnesses at the hearing: the 61-year-old Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney, the co-founder of the Disney empire with his brother Walt.
“I can tell you from personal experience,” Abigail Disney told senators, “that too much money is a morally corrosive thing — it gnaws away at your character… It warps your idea of how much you matter, and rather than make you free, it turns you fearful of losing what you have.”
Franklin Roosevelt understood that debilitating dynamic well enough to propose, in 1942, a 100 percent tax on annual income over what today would be about $400,000. Biden hasn’t ventured anywhere close to that level of daring. But he’s certainly come much further than anyone could reasonably have expected.
Sam Pizzigati is the Boston-based co-editor of Inequality.org and author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.
Llewellyn King: Interconnectivity at the heart of the revolution that’s upon us
Visualization from the Opte Project of the various routes through a portion of the Internet
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When we look back on the convulsion that is going to reset America — the great technology-driven revolution that will extend to nearly every corner of American life — it may be named for President Joe Biden, but it won’t be his revolution. It is innovation’s revolution. He will help finance it and smooth it out, but it is already happening and is accelerating.
Biden’s typically soft speech to Congress (no stemwinder he) was a wish list of things dear to him, but also an acknowledgement of what already is in motion.
Technology is rampant and government’s role should be to provide partnership and, above all, standards, according to two savants of the tech world, Jeffrey DeCoux, chairman of the Autonomy Institute, and Morgan O’Brien, a visionary in U.S. wireless telecommunications, now executive chairman of Anterix, a company providing private broadband wireless networks to utilities. Above all, they said in an interview with me for the PBS program White House Chronicle, standards for the new technology are essential.
Partial interconnection with different appliances, from road sweepers to drone delivery vehicles speaking only to identical devices, will be self-defeating. The internet without international standards would have failed.
Biden is set to preside over the greatest industrial leap forward since steam provided shaft horsepower to make factories a reality. If Congress allows, the Biden administration will finance much of the upgrading of the old infrastructure. It also will be called upon to be part of the new infrastructure, the technological one. That will be expensive; both DeCoux and O’Brien warned that it will take huge sums of money to build out complete 5G broadband networks, which will carry the load of interconnectivity.
For the nation to leap forward, these networks need to bring 5G broadband to every corner of it, O’Brien said. It can’t be allowed to serve only those places where population density makes it profitable.
In his speech to Congress, Biden laid out a revolutionary abstract for the future of the nation. The human side of the Biden infrastructure plan -- things like day care, free community college, better health care, prescription drug pricing -- is the true Biden agenda.
The technology revolution is seen by the president not for what it is, a resetting of everything in America, but rather as a way to job creation. It will create jobs, but that isn’t the driving force. The driver is and has been innovation: science helping people. That, in turn, will bring about a surge of productivity and prosperity and with that, new jobs, quality jobs – robots will soon be flipping hamburgers and painting houses.
This other agenda, the one that will make the fundamental difference between the nation of today and the nation of tomorrow, is the technological revolution. The evolutionary forces for this upheaval have been gathering since the microprocessor started things moving in the 1970s.
At the core of the coming changes is interconnectivity. That is what will craft the future. Cars on highways will be connected with each other through thousands of sensors, and these will speed traffic and enhance safety both for those with drivers and new autonomous ones. Likewise, drones will deliver many goods and they will need to be interconnected and have superior flight management. Every aspect of endeavor will be involved, from managing railroads to increasing electricity resilience and the productivity of the electric infrastructure.
In an interview on the Digital Roundtable, a webinar from Texas State University, this past week, Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, said improved interconnectivity could increase available electricity from dams and power plants often without new construction. He explained that interconnectivity wouldn’t only be essential to managing diverse generating sources, like wind and solar, but also in wringing more out of the whole system.
Technology has gotten us through the pandemic. Most obviously in the huge speed at which vaccines were developed, but also in our ability to meet virtually and the effectiveness of online ordering and delivery.
By nature, and by record, Biden is a get-along-go-along politician, a zephyr, as we heard in his address to Congress. But history looks as though it will cast him as a transformative president, a notable leader presiding over great winds of change.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Autopilot system in Tesla car
Judith Graham: Biden pushes 8-year, $400 billion program to strengthen long-term care
“{I}t is not a good thing to be stuck in long-term care institutions”
— Ari Ne’eman, senior research associate at Harvard Law School’s Project on Disability
There’s widespread agreement that it’s important to help older adults and people with disabilities remain independent as long as possible. But are we prepared to do what’s necessary, as a nation, to make this possible?
That’s the challenge President Biden has put forward with his bold proposal to spend $400 billion over eight years on home and community-based services, a major part of his $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
It’s a “historic and profound” opportunity to build a stronger framework of services surrounding vulnerable people who need considerable ongoing assistance, said Ai-jen Poo, director of Caring Across Generations, a national group advocating for older adults, individuals with disabilities, families and caregivers.
It comes as the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and group homes, killing more than 174,000 people and triggering awareness of the need for more long-term care options.
“There’s a much greater understanding now that it is not a good thing to be stuck in long-term care institutions” and that community-based care is an “essential alternative, which the vast majority of people would prefer,” said Ari Ne’eman, senior research associate at Harvard Law School’s Project on Disability.
“The systems we do have are crumbling” due to underfunding and understaffing, and “there has never been a greater opportunity for change than now,” said Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, at a recent press conference where the president’s proposal was discussed. LeadingAge is a national association of more than 5,000 nonprofit nursing homes, assisted living centers, senior living communities and home care providers.
But prospects for the president’s proposal are uncertain. Republicans decry its cost and argue that much of what the proposed American Jobs Plan contains, including the emphasis on home-based care, doesn’t count as real infrastructure.
“Though this [proposal] is a necessary step to strengthen our long-term care system, politically it will be a challenge,” suggested Joseph Gaugler, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, who studies long-term care.
Even advocates acknowledge the proposal doesn’t address the full extent of care needed by the nation’s rapidly growing older population. In particular, middle-income seniors won’t qualify directly for programs that would be expanded. They would, however, benefit from a larger, better paid, better trained workforce of aides that help people in their homes — one of the plan’s objectives.
“This [plan] isn’t everything that’s needed, not by any step of the imagination,” Poo said. “What we really want to get to is universal access to long-term care. But that will be a multistep process.”
Understanding what’s at stake is essential as communities across the country and Congress begin discussing Biden’s proposal.
The services in question. Home and community-based services help people who need significant assistance live at home as opposed to nursing homes or group homes.
Services can include home visits from nurses or occupational therapists; assistance with personal care such as eating or bathing; help from case managers; attendance at adult day centers; help with cooking, cleaning and other chores; transportation; and home repairs and modifications. It can also help pay for durable medical equipment such as wheelchairs or oxygen tanks.
The need. At some point, 70 percent of older adults will require help with dressing, hygiene, moving around, managing finances, taking medications, cooking, housekeeping and other daily needs, usually for two to four years. As the nation’s aging population expands to 74 million in 2030 (the year all Baby Boomers will have entered older age), that need will expand exponentially.
Younger adults and children with conditions such as cerebral palsy, blindness or intellectual disabilities can similarly require significant assistance.
The burden on families. Currently, 53 million family members provide most of the care that vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities require — without being paid and often at significant financial and emotional cost. According to AARP, family caregivers on average devote about 24 hours a week, to helping loved ones and spend around $7,000 out-of-pocket.
This reflects a sobering reality: Long-term care services are simply too expensive for most individuals and families. According to a survey last year by Genworth, a financial services firm, the hourly cost for a home health aide averages $24. Annually, assisted-living centers charge an average $51,600, while a semiprivate room in a nursing home goes for $93,075.
Medicare limitations. Many people assume that Medicare — the nation’s health program for 61 million older adults and people with severe disabilities — will pay for long-term care, including home-based services. But Medicare coverage is extremely limited.
In the community, Medicare covers home health only for older adults and people with severe disabilities who are homebound and need skilled services from nurses and therapists. It does not pay for 24-hour care or care for personal aides or homemakers. In 2018, about 3.4 million Medicare members received home health services.
In nursing homes, Medicare pays only for rehabilitation services for a maximum of 100 days. It does not provide support for long-term stays in nursing homes or assisted living facilities.
Medicaid options. Medicaid — the federal-state health program for 72 million children and adults in low-income households — can be an alternative, but financial eligibility standards are strict and only people with meager incomes and assets qualify.
Medicaid supports two types of long-term care: home and community-based services and those provided in institutions such as nursing homes. But only care in institutions is mandated by the federal government. Home and community-based services are provided at the discretion of the states.
Although all states offer home and community-based services of some kind, there’s enormous variation in the types of services offered, who is served (states can set caps on enrollment) and state spending. Generally, people need to be frail enough to need nursing home care to qualify.
Nationally, 57 percent of Medicaid’s long-term care budget goes to home and community-based services — $92 billion in the 2018 federal budget year. But half of states still spend twice as much on institutional care as they do on community-based care. And 41 states have waiting lists, totaling nearly 820,000 people, with an average wait of 39 months.
Based on the best information available, between 4 million and 5 million people receive Medicaid-funded home and community-based services — a fraction of those who need care.
Workforce issues. Biden’s proposal doesn’t specify how $400 billion in additional funding would be spent, beyond stating that access to home and community-based care would be expanded and caregivers would receive “a long-overdue raise, stronger benefits, and an opportunity to organize or join a union.”
Caregivers, including nursing assistants and home health and personal care aides, earn $12 an hour, on average. Most are women of color; about one-third of those working for agencies don’t receive health insurance from their employers.
By the end of this decade, an extra 1 million workers will be needed for home-based care — a number of experts believe will be difficult, if not impossible, to reach given poor pay and working conditions.
“We have a choice to keep these poverty-wage jobs or make them good jobs that allow people to take pride in their work while taking care of their families,” said Poo of Caring Across Generations.
Next steps. Biden’s plan leaves out many details. For example: What portion of funding should go to strengthening the workforce? What portion should be devoted to eliminating waiting lists? What amount should be spent on expanding services?
How will inequities of the current system — for instance, the lack of accessible services in rural counties or for people with dementia — be addressed? “We want to see funding to states tied to addressing those inequities,” said Amber Christ, directing attorney of the health team at Justice in Aging, an advocacy organization.
Meanwhile, supporters of the plan suggest it could be just the opening of a major effort to shore up other parts of the safety net. “There are huge gaps in the system for middle-income families that need to be addressed,” said David Certner, AARP’s legislative counsel.
Reforms that should be considered include tax credits for caregivers, expanding Medicare’s home health benefit and removing the requirement that people receiving Medicare home health be homebound, said Christ of Justice in Aging.
”We should be looking more broadly at potential solutions that reach people who have some resources but not enough to pay for these services as well,” she said.
Judith Graham is a Kaiser Health News journalist.
Llewellyn King: Electrification and the Great American reset
Independent (electric grid) system operators and regional transmission operators
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It is underway. It has huge momentum, and it will change everything we do — work, leisure, health care, education, use of resources — and, as a bonus, how the world sees us.
It is the Great American Reset, where things will be irreversibly changed. It is a seminal reset that will shape the decades to come, just as the New Deal and World War II shoved the clock forward.
The reset is being driven in part by COVID-19, but in larger part by technology and the digitization of America. Technology is at the gates, no, through the gates, and it is beginning to upend the old in the way that the steam engine in its day began innovations that would change life completely.
Driving this overhaul of human endeavor will be the digitization of everything from the kitchen broom to the electric utilities and the delivery of their vital product. Knitting them together will be communications from 5G to exclusive private networks.
President Biden’s infrastructure proposals could speed and smooth the innovation revolution, facilitate the digital revolution, and make it fairer and more balanced. Biden’s plan will fix the legacy world of infrastructure: roads, bridges, canals, ports, airports, and railroads. It will beef up the movement of goods and services, supply chains, and their security, even as those goods and services are changing profoundly.
But if Biden’s plan fails, the Great American Reset will still happen. It will just be less fair and more uneven — as in not providing broadband quickly to all.
Technology has an imperative, and there is so much technology coming to market that the market will embrace it, nonetheless.
Think driverless cars, but also think telemedicine, carbon capture and utilization, aerial taxis, drone deliveries, and 3D-printed body parts. Add new materials like graphene and nano-manufacturing and an awesome future awaits.
We have seen just the tip of digitization and have been reminded of how pervasive it is by the current chip shortage, which is slowing automobile production lines and thousands of manufactures. But you might say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The future belongs to chips and sensors: small soldiers in mighty armies.
Accompanying digitization is electrification. Our cars, trucks, trains, and even aircraft and ships are headed that way. Better storage is the one frontier that must be conquered before the army of change pours through the breach in a great reshaping of everything.
Central to the future — to the smart city, the smart railroad, the smart highway, and the smart airport — is the electric supply.
The whole reset future of digitization and sensor-facilitated mobility depends on electricity — and not just the availability of electricity going forward, but also the resilience of supply. It also needs to be carbon-free and have low environmental impact.
An overhaul of the electric industry’s infrastructure, increasing its resilience, is an imperative underpinning the reset.
The Texas blackouts were a brutal wake-up call. Job one is to look into hardening the entire electric supply system from informational technology to operational technology, from storm resistance to solar flare resistance (see Carrington Event), from catastrophic physical failure to failure induced by hostile players.
The electric grid needs survivability, but so do the data flows which will dominate the virtual utility of the future. It also needs a failsafe ability to isolate trouble in nanoseconds and, essentially, break itself into less vulnerable, defensive mini-grids.
Securing the grid is akin to national security. Indeed, it is national security.
Electricity is the one indispensable in the future: The future of the great reset.
Klaus Schwab, the genius behind the World Economic Forum, called this year from his virtual Davos conference for a global reset to tackle poverty and apply technology and business acumen to the human problems of the world. We are on the cusp of going it alone.
In the end, the route to social mobilization is jobs. The Great American Reset will throw these off in an unimaginable profusion, as did the arrival of the steam engine a little over 300 years ago.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The New England electric grid is managed by ISO New England from Holyoke, Mass., whose skyline is seen here. Note the clock tower of City Hall and the Mount Tom Range in the background,
David Warsh: Biden's policies, like Reagan's, are a big gamble, but based on experience
On Wall Street, with flag-draped New York Stock Exchange at right
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Might Democrats retain control of the White House through 2032? When I ventured that possibility the other day, my sagacious copy editor observed that one party had won three consecutive terms only once in the 70 years since Harry Truman left office on Jan. 20, 1953 – during the dozen years after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, reelected in 1984, and succeeded by Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988.
I’ve been thinking ever since about why it might happen again. I know, I said I planned to write for a while mostly about economic topics, but what’s more economics than this?
It is not easy to recall how unlikely a Reagan’s victory seemed in the months running up to the 1980 election. True, he had served two terms as governor of California, but he had run unsuccessfully for president twice; he’d announced at the last minute in 1968 before running again, in 1976. His right-wing instincts were so little trusted by the Republican Party’s Establishment that Henry Kissinger sought to persuade him to accept former President Gerald Ford as his running mate. He was 69, an additional factor against him.
Similarly, Reagan’s policy initiatives – big tax cuts for the well-to-do, a willingness to tolerate the Federal Reserve Board’s high interest rates, deregulation for everyone, and an expensive confrontation with the Soviet Union – were thought to be dangerous and, at least by the Democrats, were expected to fail. Not much about America’s future was clear in 1980, except the widespread dissatisfaction with President Jimmy Carter. (Former Republican John Anderson was also on the 1980 ballot, as an independent; Reagan still would have won if he hadn’t been, but it wouldn’t have been the landslide it turned out to be.)
Then two years into Reagan’s first term, the economy took off, inflation fell, financial markets boom and China entered global markets. Over the course of the decade, the Cold War ended, and the government of the Soviet Union collapsed. Vice President Bush succeeded Reagan and fought a successful war in Iraq. Bush was defeated in 1992 because of a lack-luster economy, but the next 24 years – the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – were dominated, one way or another, by the “Washington Consensus” on economic policy that had formed during the Reagan years.
What similarities does Joe Biden share with Reagan? His candidacy was unexpected, for one thing; twice before Biden had run for president and failed to come close, in 1988 and 2008. At 78, Biden was even older than Reagan when elected. Most important, after nearly 50 years in the Senate, Biden is thoroughly wed to a movement, if that turns out to be what is unfolding, that has been in the making for as long or even longer than his service to it.
What movement? If Reagan’s gospel was that government was the problem, Biden’s credo seems to be that government spending is the solution to a variety of present-day problems – a fraying social safety net, deteriorating infrastructure, diminished U.S. competitiveness in global markets, and diminished opportunity. Gerald Seib, political columnist for the news pages of The Wall Street Journal, made a similar point to the one I’m making here the other day when he observed that not since Reagan’s presidency has a new administration opened with “a gamble as large as the one in which President Biden is now engaged” – an effort to change “not just the policies but the path of the country” with borrowed money.
Why might voters’ minds have changed in significant numbers about such fundamental matters as their enthusiasm for taxing and spending? Experience is one reason: Free markets and austerity failed to redress the problems they promised to solve. Indeed, they seem to have made them worse. Changing circumstances are others. Global warming has become manifest. A new kind of Cold War, this one with China, has emerged. And the Republican Party is deeply divided.
A shift of opinion on this scaled scale would, of necessity, entail a massive realignment of financial markets. As it happens, I have been reading The Day the Markets Roared: How a 1982 Forecast Sparked a Global Bull Market (Matt Holt Books, 2021), by Henry Kaufman. Kaufman was the authoritative Salomon Brothers economist whose forecast, on Aug. 18,1982, that interest rates would soon begin dropping ignited a stock market rally that hasn’t ended to this very day. Toward the end of his book, Kaufman mourns what he sees as a system of capitalism giving way to a system of “statism,” especially as the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve System come under collaborative management in pursuit of White House goals. There is plenty more to be borrowed, he says — certainly enough to readjust in the future the currently skewed rates of return among stocks, bonds and commodities. Financial markets might yet sigh.
Saying how the battles of the next 10 years might play out would be a foolish venture. Forecasting who might be the Democratic and Republican Party nominees in 2024 and 2028 is considerably more pointless than guessing who will meet in the Super Bowl next year since there are far more variables involved. But there is nothing foolish about acknowledging the existence of tides of public opinion that ebb and flow. Reagan’s presidency was a “triumph of the imagination,” wrote former New York Times reporter Richard Reeves, in 2005. Might someone say the same of Biden in 2045?
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
Phil Galewitz: Vt., N.H. and Maine are pushing to import Canadian drugs
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border in Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Quebec. The dark line shows the exact border.
Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, all bordering on Canada, as well as Florida and Colorado, are moving ahead with efforts to import prescription drugs from Canada, a politically popular strategy greenlighted last year by then-President Trump.
But it’s unclear whether the Biden administration will proceed with Trump’s plan for states and the federal government to help Americans obtain lower-priced medications from Canada.
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden expressed support for the concept, strongly opposed by the American pharmaceutical industry. Drugmakers argue it would undercut efforts to keep their medicines safe.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., to stop the drug-purchasing initiatives in November. That followed the Trump administration’s final rule, issued in September, that cleared the way for states to seek federal approval for their importation programs.
Friday was the deadline for the government to respond to the suit, which could give the Biden administration a first opportunity to show where it stands on the issue. But the administration could also seek an extension from the court.
Meanwhile, Florida and Colorado are moving to outsource their drug importation plans to private companies.
Florida hired LifeScience Logistics, which stores prescription drugs in warehouses in Maryland, Texas and Indiana. The state is paying the Dallas company as much as $39 million over 2½ years, according to the contract. That does not include the price of the drugs Florida is buying.
LifeScience officials declined to comment.
Florida’s agreement with LifeScience came last fall, just weeks after the state received no bids on a $30 million contract for the job.
Florida’s importation plan calls initially for the purchase of drugs for state agencies, including the Medicaid program and the corrections and health departments. Officials say the plan could save the state in its first year between $80 million and $150 million. Florida’s Medicaid budget exceeds $28 billion, with the federal government picking up about 62% of the cost.
On Monday, the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing issued a request for companies to bid on its plan to import drugs from Canada. Unlike Florida’s plan, Colorado’s would help individuals buy the medicines at their local pharmacy. Colorado also would give health insurance plans the option to include imported drugs in their benefit designs.
Kim Bimestefer, executive director of Colorado’s Health Care Policy and Financing agency, said she is hopeful the Biden administration will allow importation plans to proceed. “We are optimistic,” she said.
Her agency’s analysis shows Colorado consumers can save an average of 61% off the price of many medications imported from Canada, she added.
Prices are cheaper north of the border because Canada limits how much drugmakers can charge for medicines. The United States lets the free market determine drug prices.
The Canadian government has said it would not allow the exportation of prescription drugs that would create or exacerbate a drug shortage. Bimestefer said that her agency has spoken to officials at the Canadian consulate in Denver and that officials there are mainly concerned about shortages of generic drugs rather than brand-name drugs, which is what her state is most interested in importing since they are among the most costly medicines in the U.S.
Colorado plans to choose a private company in Canada to export medications as well as a U.S. importer. It hopes to have a program in operation by mid-2022.
But skeptics say getting the programs off the ground is a long shot. They note that Congress in 2003 passed a law to allow certain drugs to be imported from Canada — but only if the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services agreed it could be done safely. HHS secretaries under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama refused to do that. But HHS Secretary Alex Azar gave the approval in September.
Biden’s HHS nominee, Xavier Becerra, voted for the 2003 Canadian drug-importation law when he was a member of Congress.
HHS referred questions on the issue to the White House, which did not return calls for comment.
Trish Riley, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, said that states have worked hard to set up procedures to ensure drugs coming from Canada are as safe as those typically sold at local pharmacies. She noted that many drugs sold in the United States are already made overseas.
She said the Biden administration could choose not to defend the importation rule in the PhRMA court case or ask for an extension to reply to the lawsuit. “Right now, it’s murky,” she said of figuring out what the Biden team will do.
Ian Spatz, a senior adviser with consulting firm Manatt Health, questions how significant the savings could be under the plan, largely because of the hefty cost of setting up a program and running it over the objections of the pharmaceutical industry.
Another obstacle is that some of the highest-priced drugs, such as insulin and other injectables, are excluded from drug importation. Spatz also doubts whether ongoing safety issues can be resolved to satisfy the new administration.
“The Trump administration plan was merely to consider applications from states and that it was open for business,” he said. “Whether [HHS] will approve any applications in the current environment is highly uncertain.”
Phil Galewitz is a Kaiser Health News journalist.
Phil Galewitz: pgalewitz@kff.org, @philgalewitz
Chris Powell: Military-industrial complex is fine with Conn. delegation
This building in the affluent Hartford suburb of Farmington, Conn., was United Technologies’ headquarters in 2015-2020.
— Photo by Daniel Pennfield
MANCHESTER, Conn
In his farewell address 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against what he called "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Since he was a military hero, perhaps only Eisenhower could give such a warning during the Cold War without risking denunciation as a Communist.
But Eisenhower's warning has never been heeded, and President Biden, with his defense secretary, is essentially proclaiming the victory of the military-industrial complex. The new secretary is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who upon leaving the Army a few years ago joined the board of directors of military contractor and Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Technologies Corp., which recently acquired Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. Austin will have to sell Raytheon stock he received for serving on the board. It may net him as much as $1.7 million.
Acknowledging what will be his continuing potential for conflict of interest, Austin pledges to avoid decisions involving Raytheon for a year. But this can't worry Raytheon much about its investment in the general, since the corporation plans to be doing government business a lot longer than that.
With Austin at Defense and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen becoming Treasury secretary after receiving at least $7 million in speaking fees from big banks and investment houses in the last three years, the federal government's two most lucrative agencies will have been securely captured by their primary beneficiaries.
With the exception of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the members of Connecticut's congressional delegation -- all supposed liberals -- are fine with this exploitation. After all, the state is full of investment bankers and military contractors and what's good for them may be considered good for the state. As for the country, that's something else.
Even Blumenthal's concern about Austin probably became a mere quibble. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming defense secretary until they have been out of uniform for seven years, so Austin needed a waiver from Congress. Such waivers have been granted twice before. Blumenthal said that to uphold the principle of civilian control of the military, he opposed another waiver. But few other members of Congress objected to it, and Blumenthal and those others still had it both ways, voting against the waiver and then voting to appoint Austin once the waiver is granted.
Besides, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government, conflicts of interest and civilian control will barely register against the party's new highest objective in Cabinet appointments -- racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Austin is Black and so meets the decisive qualification.
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PAY AS YOU THROW?: The administration of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont seems to have determined that state government no longer can make any money by burning trash to generate electricity at the state Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority's facility in the South Meadows section of Hartford. Such generation apparently is now much more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas, and the facility's equipment already needs renovation estimated to cost more than $300 million.
So the authority plans to close the facility by July 2022, turning it into a trash-transfer depot and shipping to out-of-state dumps the trash now being burned. This is not only retrograde environmental policy; it likely will raise costs for the authority's 70 client towns. As a result the authority and the towns are discussing how to reduce their "waste streams" -- possibly by charging residents a fee for every bag of trash collected, a system called "pay as you throw."
There would be some sense to this, since it would cause people to take more responsibility for their trash, the packaging of what they buy, and recycling. But this also would increase the risk of illegal dumping, even as Connecticut's roadsides and city streets are already strewn with trash.
It might be best for state or federal sales taxes or fees to recover in advance the disposal costs of everything sure to wear out, as the state already does with beverage containers and mattresses and used to do with tires.
Government needs to teach people more about the trash issue. But all that roadside litter suggests that many people are unteachable slobs.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Happy memories of way back in Washington, long before the neo-Fascist invasion
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“This is what you’ve gotten, guys.”
-- Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, yelling at Sen. Ted Cruz and some other neo-Fascist GOP colleagues in the Capitol who were leading the lie-and-demagoguery-filled attempt to overturn Biden’s election.
Trump's acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, presumably at the order of Trump, had refused until it was too late to authorize the use of National Guard to defend the Capitol, making its storming easier. And the Capitol Police acted (intentionally?) hapless. Were Russia-connected agents involved? How much of this attack was closely coordinated with Trump and his henchmen? Questions, questions….
Watching the ignoramuses, Nazis, gun fetishists, KKK-style white racists, QAnons and simply suckers, and all of them traitors, crashing into the Capitol at their fuhrer’s command on Jan. 6 in Washington took me back to a quieter, easier time in that city, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when I’d visit friends there. The District then still often had the air of a sometimes sleepy Southern town, and there was far, far less security. The assassinations, riots and terrorist attacks, especially, of course, 9/11, that would come in future years would lead to much tighter restrictions in public buildings, including those hideous barriers in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.
But back then you could wander around with considerable freedom. I remember one in particular, in 1961, with my friend Al d’Ossche, a native of New Orleans (where he learned to become a terrific performer of jazz and other music) who had moved to Washington and quickly learned its byways. We’d wander the Capitol building and nip into the offices of senators and congresspeople, often chatting with them and their staffers.
I particularly remember meeting in the hall with Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the libertarian/conservative from Arizona (where he took many beautiful photos) and New York Sen. Jacob Javits, who was a member of that now mostly extinct species (Nelson) “Rockefeller Republican’’. Javits grew increasing grouchy by being held up by a couple of kids as Goldwater continued to talk with us, maybe because I told him I had read his book The Conscience of a Conservative. I wonder if they missed an (unimportant) vote on the Senate floor as a result.
On another trip in those years, I dropped by the office of my old-fashioned Yankee Republican congressman from southeastern Massachusetts, Hastings Keith. He asked me: “What do you actually know about how Congress really works?’’ Then, without waiting, he explained how it did. And, God knows, in those days Congress often worked pretty well because Democrats and Republicans were frequently more than happy to work together. For that matter, unlike now, they also often socialized together, including with their families.
On that and other trips, I found it easy to wander through assorted grand buildings housing federal departments with virtually no security apparent. One was the White House, where the man in the guard house (a Marine, I think) waved us through. We explained to a guide in the public part of the mansion that we wanted to look at the official – and large -- official portrait of Harry Truman, which Al’s maternal grandmother, Greta Walker, had painted. The guide led us there and showed us some parts of the White House that were then off-limits to the general public.
Truman is my favorite Democratic president. My least favorite are the genocidal Andrew Jackson – crook, slaveowner and mass murderer of Native Americans, whose portrait Trump appropriately hung in the Oval Office -- and the extreme racist prig Woodrow Wilson, whose ignorance of Europe and rigidity in dealing with the Senate about the League of Nations killed American participation in it. That was a factor in creating the conditions that led to World War II.
Al also showed me such exotic (for back then in America) private-sector sights as the mosque at the Islamic Center of Washington and the National Press Club, with its always crowded bar, which, sadly, we were a tad too young to patronize. Mid-day drinking by journalists, politicians, lobbyists, PR people and other very-Washingtonian groups was far more common then. D.C.’s boozing culture started to go into sharp decline in the ‘80s. It was great unhealthy fun while it lasted.
Rachana Pradhan: How big pharma money colors Operation Warp Speed
April 16 was a big day for Moderna, the Cambridge, Mass., Massachusetts biotech company on the verge of becoming a front-runner in the U.S. government’s race for a coronavirus vaccine. It had received roughly half a billion dollars in federal funding to develop a COVID shot that might be used on millions of Americans.
Thirteen days after the massive infusion of federal cash — which triggered a jump in the company’s stock price — Moncef Slaoui, a Moderna board member and longtime drug-industry executive, was awarded options to buy 18,270 shares in the company, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The award added to 137,168 options he’d accumulated since 2018, the filings show.
It wouldn’t be long before President Trump announced Slaoui as the top scientific adviser for the government’s $12 billion Operation Warp Speed program to rush COVID vaccines to market. In his Rose Garden speech on May 15, Trump lauded Slaoui as “one of the most respected men in the world” on vaccines.
The Trump administration relied on an unusual maneuver that allowed executives to keep investments in drug companies that would benefit from the government’s pandemic efforts: They were brought on as contractors, doing an end run around federal conflict-of-interest regulations in place for employees. That has led to huge potential payouts — some already realized, according to a KHN analysis of SEC filings and other government documents.
Slaoui owned 137,168 Moderna stock options worth roughly $7 million on May 14, one day before Trump announced his senior role to help shepherd COVID vaccines. The day of his appointment, May 15, he resigned from Moderna’s board. Three days later, on May 18, following the company’s announcement of positive results from early-stage clinical trials, the options’ value shot up to $9.1 million, the analysis found. The Department of Health and Human Services said that Slaoui sold his holdings May 20, when they would have been worth about $8 million, and will donate certain profits to cancer research. Separately, Slaoui held nearly 500,000 shares in GlaxoSmithKline, where he worked for three decades, upon retiring in 2017, according to corporate filings.
Carlo de Notaristefani, an Operation Warp Speed adviser and former senior executive at Teva Pharmaceuticals, owned 665,799 shares of the drug company’s stock as of March 10. While Teva is not a recipient of Warp Speed funding, Trump promoted its antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment, even with scant evidence that it worked. The company donated millions of tablets to U.S. hospitals and the drug received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in March. In the following weeks, its share price nearly doubled.
Two other Operation Warp Speed advisers working on therapeutics, Drs. William Erhardt and Rachel Harrigan, own financial stakes of unknown value in Pfizer, which in July announced a $1.95 billion contract with HHS for 100 million doses of its vaccine. Erhardt and Harrigan were previously Pfizer employees.
“With those kinds of conflicts of interest, we don’t know if these vaccines are being developed based on merit,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a liberal consumer advocacy group.
An HHS spokesperson said the advisers are in compliance with the relevant federal ethical standards for contractors.
These investments in the pharmaceutical industry are emblematic of a broader trend in which a small group with the specialized expertise needed to inform an effective government response to the pandemic have financial stakes in companies that stand to benefit from the government response.
Slaoui maintained he was not in discussions with the federal government about a role when his latest batch of Moderna stock options was awarded, telling KHN he met with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and was offered the position for the first time May 6. The stock options awarded in late April were canceled as a result of his departure from the Moderna board in May, he said. According to the KHN analysis of his holdings, the options would have been worth more than $330,000 on May 14.
HHS declined to confirm that timeline.
The fate of Operation Warp Speed after President-elect Biden takes office is an open question. While Democrats in Congress have pursued investigations into Warp Speed advisers and the contracting process under which they were hired, Biden hasn’t publicly spoken about the program or its senior leaders. Spokespeople for the transition didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The four HHS advisers were brought on through a National Institutes of Health contract with consulting firm Advanced Decision Vectors, so far worth $1.4 million, to provide expertise on the development and production of vaccines, therapies and other COVID products, according to the federal government’s contracts database.
Slaoui’s appointment in particular has rankled Democrats and organizations such as Public Citizen. They say he has too much authority to be classified as a consultant. “It is inevitable that the position he is put in as co-chair of Operation Warp Speed makes him a government employee,” Holman said.
The incoming administration may have a window to change the terms under which Slaoui was hired before his contract ends, in March. Yet making big changes to Operation Warp Speed could disrupt one of the largest vaccination efforts in history while the American public anxiously awaits deliverance from the pandemic, which is breaking daily records for new infections. Warp Speed has set out to buy and distribute 300 million doses of a COVID vaccine, the first ones by year’s end.
“By the end of December we expect to have about 40 million doses of these two vaccines available for distribution,” Azar said Nov. 18, referring to front-runner vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
Azar maintained that Warp Speed would continue seamlessly even with a “change in leadership.” “In the event of a transition, there’s really just total continuity that would occur,” the secretary said.
Pfizer, which didn’t receive federal funds for research but secured the multibillion-dollar contract under Warp Speed, on Nov. 20 sought emergency authorization from the FDA; Moderna just announced that it would do so. In total, Moderna received nearly $1 billion in federal funds for development and a $1.5 billion contract with HHS for 100 million doses.
While it’s impossible to peg the precise value of Slaoui’s Moderna holdings without records of the sale transactions, KHN estimated their worth by evaluating the company’s share prices on the dates he received the options and the stock’s price on several key dates — including May 14, the day before his Warp Speed position was announced, and May 20.
However, the timing of Slaoui’s divestment of his Moderna shares — five days after he resigned from the company’s board — meant that he did not have to file disclosures with the SEC confirming the sale, even though he was privy to insider information when he received the stock options, experts in securities law said. That weakness in securities law, according to good-governance experts, deprives the public of an independent source of information about the sale of Slaoui’s stake in the company.
“You would think there would be kind of a one-year continuing obligation [to disclose the sale] or something like that,” said Douglas Chia, president of Soundboard Governance and an expert on corporate governance issues. “But there’s not.”
HHS declined to provide documentation confirming that Slaoui sold his Moderna holdings. His investments in London-based GlaxoSmithKline — which is developing a vaccine with French drugmaker Sanofi and received $2.1 billion from the U.S. government — will be used for his retirement, Slaoui has said.
“I have always held myself to the highest ethical standards, and that has not changed upon my assumption of this role,” Slaoui said in a statement released by HHS. “HHS career ethics officers have determined my contractor status, divestures and resignations have put me in compliance with the department’s robust ethical standards.”
Moderna, in an earlier statement to CNBC, said Slaoui divested “all of his equity interest in Moderna so that there is no conflict of interest” in his new role. However, the conflict-of-interest standards for Slaoui and other Warp Speed advisers are less stringent than those for federal employees, who are required to give up investments that would pose a conflict of interest. For instance, if Slaoui had been brought on as an employee, his stake from a long career at GlaxoSmithKline would be targeted for divestment.
Instead, Slaoui has committed to donating certain GlaxoSmithKline financial gains to the National Institutes of Health.
Offering Warp Speed advisers contracts might have been the most expedient course in a crisis.
“As the universe of potential qualified candidates to advise the federal government’s efforts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine is very small, it is virtually impossible to find experienced and qualified individuals who have no financial interests in corporations that produce vaccines, therapeutics, and other lifesaving goods and services,” Sarah Arbes, HHS’s assistant secretary for legislation and a Trump appointee, wrote in September to Rep. James Clyburn (D.-S.C.), who leads a House oversight panel on the coronavirus response.
That includes multiple drug-industry veterans working as HHS advisers, an academic who’s overseeing the safety of multiple COVID vaccines in clinical trials and sits on the board of Gilead Sciences, and even former government officials who divested stocks while they were federal employees but have since joined drug company boards.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb and Dr. Mark McClellan, former FDA commissioners, have been visible figures informally advising the federal response. Each sits on the board of a COVID vaccine developer.
After leaving the FDA in 2019, Gottlieb joined Pfizer’s board and has bought 4,000 of its shares, at the time worth more than $141,000, according to SEC filings. As of April, he had additional stock units worth nearly $352,000 that will be cashed out should he leave the board, according to corporate filings. As a board member, Gottlieb is required to own a certain number of Pfizer shares.
McClellan has been on Johnson & Johnson’s board since 2013 and earned $1.2 million in shares under a deferred-compensation arrangement, corporate filings show.
The two also receive thousands of dollars in cash fees annually as board members. Gottlieb and McClellan frequently disclose their corporate affiliations, but not always. Their Sept. 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed on how the FDA could grant emergency authorization of a vaccine identified their FDA roles and said they were on the boards of companies developing COVID vaccines but failed to name Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. Both companies would benefit financially from such a move by the FDA.
“It isn’t a lower standard for FDA approval,” they wrote in the piece. “It’s a more tailored, flexible standard that helps protect those who need it most while developing the evidence needed to make the public confident about getting a Covid-19 vaccine.”
About the inconsistency, Gottlieb wrote in an email to KHN: “My affiliation to Pfizer is widely, prominently, and specifically disclosed in dozens of articles and television appearances, on my Twitter profile, and in many other places. I mention it routinely when I discuss Covid vaccines and I am proud of my affiliation to the company.”
A spokesperson for the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, which McClellan founded, noted that other Wall Street Journal op-eds cited his Johnson & Johnson role and that his affiliations are mentioned elsewhere. “Mark has consistently informed the WSJ about his board service with Johnson & Johnson, as well as other organizations,” Patricia Shea Green said.
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is in phase 3 clinical trials and could be available in early 2021.
Still, while they worked for the FDA, Gottlieb and McClellan were subject to federal restrictions on investments and protections against conflicts of interest that aren’t in place for Warp Speed advisers.
According to the financial disclosure statements they signed with HHS, the advisers are required to donate certain stock profits to the NIH — but can do so after the stockholder dies. They can keep investments in drug companies, and the restrictions don’t apply to stock options, which give executives the right to buy company shares in the future.
“This is a poorly drafted agreement,” said Jacob Frenkel, an attorney at Dickinson Wright and former SEC lawyer, referring to the conflict-of-interest statement included in the NIH contract with Advanced Decision Vectors, the Warp Speed advisers’ employing consulting firm. He said documents could have been “tighter and clearer in many respects,” including prohibiting the advisers from exercising their options to buy shares while they are contractors.
De Notaristefani stepped down as Teva’s executive vice president for global operations in October 2019, but according to corporate filings he would remain with the company until the end of June 2020 in order to “ensure an orderly transition.” He’s been working with Warp Speed since at least May overseeing manufacturing, according to an HHS spokesperson.
When Erhardt left Pfizer in May, U.S. COVID infections were climbing and the company was beginning vaccine clinical trials. Erhardt and Harrigan, whose LinkedIn profile says she left Pfizer in 2010, have worked as drug industry consultants.
“Ultimately, conflicts of interest in ethics turn on the mindset behavior of the responsible persons,” said Frenkel, the former SEC attorney. “The public wants to know that it can rely on the effectiveness of the therapeutic or diagnostic product without wondering if a recommendation or decision was motivated for even the slightest reason other than product effectiveness and public interest.”
Rachana Pradhan is a Kaiser Health News correspondent.
Looking across the Charles River toward Kendall Square, Cambridge, headquarters of Moderna and other tech companies.