David Warsh: Ukraine and 'Planning Armageddon'

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

So German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande succeeded.   They traveled to Moscow and persuaded Vladimir Putin to pledge to pause and perhaps eventually end Russia’s military support for the Russian-speakers in the Ukrainian civil war – more than 5,000 dead and 1 million refugees so far.

So the pressure on President Obama from U.S.  hawks to begin a proxy war with Russia by supplying weapons to the Ukrainians will ease, at least not now. For a sensible opinion, see Bloomberg View in the days before the bargain

''[T[he law that president Petro Poroshenko signed in December  to end Ukraine’s neutral status and set a course for membership in NATO has created a diplomatic obstacle to peace.  The US and its allies should make clear to Ukraine that its NATO ambitions are unrealistic.  Right or wrong, the alliance doesn’t want Ukraine, and Russia sees its membership in NATO as a red line.''

The Washington Post afterwards took a more pugnacious view

''[T]he deal brokered by German and French leaders with Russia’s Vladimir Putin does little to restrain his ambition to create a puppet state in eastern Ukraine that could be used to sabotage the rest of the country…. By going along with the Europeans’ desperate diplomatic gambit, [Mr. Putin] ensured that not even minor sanctions would be adopted at a European Union summit Thursday. He also provided President Obama with reason to overrule those in his administration seeking to supply arms to Ukraine. Mr. Putin can resume military aggression at will, while the push for new sanctions or weapons could take weeks or months to regain momentum.''

So did the The Wall Street Journal:

''[W]hat better time for Vladimir Putin to agree to another cease-fire that consolidates his military gains, extracts additional political concessions from Kiev, puts off further Western sanctions, and gives President Obama another diplomatic alibi not to supply Ukraine’s demoralized and ill-equipped military with desperately needed defensive weapons?… Mr. Putin will consolidate his latest victory, survey the European landscape for weak spots, and make another move before America gets a new President who might do more to resist his conquests.''

But it was The Economist, in its first major outing under new editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, that went over the top. On the cover, a sinister Putin manipulates strings attached to gullible European marionettes, figures who are not shown. Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande?  No, only Europe’s emergent populist parties, including Syriza in Greece, at least if you believe the sidebar. The editorial, “The View from the Kremlin: Russia’s War on the West,” begins:

''He is ridiculed for his mendacity and ostracized by his peers. He presides over a free-falling currency and a rapidly shrinking economy. International sanctions stop his kleptocratic friends from holidaying in their ill-gotten Mediterranean villas. Judged against the objectives Vladimir Putin purported to set on inheriting Russia’s presidency 15 years ago – prosperity, the rule of law, westward integration – regarding him as a success might seem bleakly comical.  But those are no longer his goals, if they ever really were. Look at the world from his perspective, and Mr. Putin is winning….His overarching aim is to divide and neuter that alliance [NATO], fracture its collective approach to security, and resist and roll back its advances.''

Then in a long essay, “What Russia Wants:  From Cold War to Hot War.”

''Nearly a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West faces a greater threat from the East than at any point during the cold war. Even during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Soviet leaders were constrained by the Politburo and memories of the Second World War. Now, according to Russia’s chief propagandist, Dmitry Kiselev, even a decision about the use of nuclear arms 'will be taken personally by Mr Putin, who has the undoubted support of the Russian people'. Bluff or not, this reflects the Russian elite’s perception of the West as a threat to the very existence of the Russian state

''In this view Russia did not start the war in Ukraine, but responded to Western aggression. The Maiden uprising and ousting of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president were engineered by American special services to move NATO closer to Russia’s borders. Once Mr Yanukovych had gone, American envoys offered Ukraine’s interim government $25 billion to place missile defenses on the Russian border, in order to shift the balance of nuclear power towards America. Russia had no choice but to accept.''

In fact, many sophisticated Europeans and Americans share the basic Russian view of the situation.  They see the campaign to expand NATO to Russia’s southern borders as the fundamental cause of Ukrainian civil war.  Essentially this seems to be the Bloomberg View. Subsequent editorials (you have to know where to look)  here, here, and here take a sterner but still sensible view. )

Whence the dissonance between Bloomberg and The Economist?

As it happens, I have been reading Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War, by Nicholas A Lambert (Harvard, 2012). Towards the end of the book, an idea tumbled out.

Planning Armageddon has been making the rounds in national security circles since it appeared, for obvious reasons:  If plans for an economic blitzkrieg were first developed a hundred years ago, based on British recognition that that international trade had become so important it might be possible to cripple and collapse as rival’s financial system by a series of swift moves in the event off war, how much greater must be the field for mischief in the present age?

It turns out such plans were developed – and even put into action.  Historians have long known that all sides expected a war in 1914 to end quickly.  Lambert shows why.  The Germans had their Schlieffen Plan, led off by a quick march through the neutral Low Countries to capture Paris, based on Prussia’s earlier triumph in the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870.  The Brits, it turns out, had the Desart Committee’s plan for all-out economic war.

Worked out in considerable detail by the Admiralty between 1905 and 1908, the British plan involved using all possible means to disrupt Germany’s trade, chiefly its  food supply, including instigating a banking panic.  A Committee on Imperial Defense refined the plan.  In 1913, the government approved it.  And on Aug. 4,  1914, two weeks after Austrian government  made  an unprecedented threat to government of Serbia, it was put into action.

Immediately the economic war plan began to crumble, The panic touched off by the news that was imminent was worse than had been expected.  The ban on trading with the enemy affected not just but neutral nations, especially the United States, but powerful groups in Britain, too.  The British Board of Trade and the Foreign Office turned immediately against the government’s plan.

By the end of August the British cabinet had begun to dilute it in favor of a very different policy they called “blockade” – and sent an expeditionary force to the Continent instead.

Protected by wartime censorship and secrecy until official histories could render it all but invisibility, the aborted economic blitzkrieg disappeared from view – until Lambert, with access to previously secret archival materials, brought it to modern attention.    Here are three expert reviews of his book, and a response from the author.  It’s as good a story as Erskine Childers’s 1903 classic novel, The Riddle of the Sands, with the added virtue that it’s true.  .

One thing I took away from Planning Armageddon is that military strategists in capitals around the world can be counted on to be doing with computers and present-day financial communication systems what their Edwardian counterparts were doing a hundred years ago – laying plans to disrupt their foes’ economies as thoroughly as possible if it comes to war,.  When Russia’s Kiselev says Putin  will use nuclear weapons if the existence of the Russian state is threatened, economic Armageddon is the kind of thing he’s got in mind – an all-out attempt to starve the Russian government into submission.

The other thing I took away is that, just as market interests swamped the British plan for all-out economic war in 1914, probably they will disrupt the clamor for U.S.  proxy war with Russia in 2015.  There’s a reason that Bloomberg View takes a calmer stance towards the Russian bullying of Ukraine than does The Economist. Its subscribers have more skin in the game.

David Warsh, a long-time financial journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.

A cold and heartless universe

"Night Sky," by  NANCY FRIESE, in the ''RISD Faculty Biennial,'' Feb. 20-March 22, at the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Don Pesci: Senator Murphy for a 'progressive foreign policy'

VERNON, Conn. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D.-Conn.), who has been in the Senate only a little more than  two years and two weeks, is now “Desperately Seeking A Progressive Foreign Policy,” the title of a column the senator wrote on his new blog. According to Mr. Murphy, the modern progressive movement is still in its swaddling clothes. The new movement was “founded on foreign policy” after Democrats had spent a couple of decades "in the wilderness during the era of the Democratic Leadership Council… in the early days of the Iraq war.” The modern progressive movement, Mr. Murphy writes, sprang from Howard Dean’s presidential bid, in 2004, during which time “progressives mounted their first serious assault in years on the conventional thought hegemony by challenging the neoconservative foreign policy vision. Many of today’s icons of the progressive movement — MoveOn, Democracy for America, Daily Kos — arguably originate from this fight. Today’s progressives were molded in the fire of foreign, not domestic, policy.” The young progressive movement now has become reactive, “absent, from serious, meaningful foreign policy debates.” Progressives have been unwilling to engage in such debates in part because there has been for the last few years a Democrat in the White House. Mr. Murphy does not point out in his maiden progressive articulation that President Barack Obama is possibly the most progressive chief executive since Woodrow Wilson left the White House, in 1921. Progressives have understandably deferred to the commander in chief “when it comes to articulating views on international events.” Mr. Murphy rejects neo-conservativism robustly as “a non-starter” a “philosophy of knee jerk military intervention” and “the original motivating force behind the modern progressive voice.” Isolationism is likewise repugnant “as most progressives believe in America playing a positive role in the world. We simply believe that we should lean into the world with something other than the pointed edge of a sword.” Mr. Obama struck a responsive chord in his May 2014 West Point speech, “where he prioritized the use of our military for counterterrorism efforts and emphasized the need to strengthen rule of law and human rights in developing nations.” However, “we break with him on rather substantial questions like domestic surveillance, drone attacks, and most recently, military intervention in Syria.” From the battlements, Mr. Murphy shouts out orders to his progressive troops: “It’s time for progressives to outline a coherent, proactive foreign policy vision, (italics original).” The organizing principles of Mr. Murphy’s progressive vision, he writes, would involve: a) “A substantial transfer of financial resources from the military budget to buttress diplomacy and foreign aid so that our global anti-poverty budget, not our military budget, equals that of the other world powers combined,” b) “A new humility to our foreign policy, with less emphasis on short- term influencers like military intervention and aid [which Mr. Murphy highly recommended in a)] and more effort spent trying to address the root causes of conflict,” c) “An end to unchecked mass surveillance programs, at home and abroad, as part of a new recognition that we are safer as a nation when we aren’t so easily labeled as hypocrites for preaching and practicing vastly differently on human and civil rights,” and d) “a categorical rejection of torture, under any circumstances.” A rapid implementation of Mr. Murphy’s principled vision is necessary because “We are entering well into the fourth month of unauthorized U.S. military actions in Iraq and Syria amidst calls from the new Republican Senate majority to send ground troops back to the Middle East” and “fragile negotiations to end Iran’s nuclear weapons” program are under threat “from good-intentioned but misguided efforts to pass new sanctions legislation against ISIS.'' A recent request to  Congress from Mr. Obama for additional presidential authority to prosecute a war against ISIS, a terrorist group that beheads American journalists, murders American aid workers and crucifies Christians, would seem to violate Murphy principle a), since both the congressional authority and the funds necessary to prosecute a war against ISIS for at least three years certainly would not involve a “transfer of financial resources from the military budget to buttress diplomacy.” It would also violate Murphy principle b), which calls for a new humility that emphasizes a greater “effort spent trying to address the root causes of conflict” rather than investing time and money on “on short- term influencers like military intervention and aid.” Still we are left with the two remaining principles of Mr. Murphy’s progressive vision as yet unassaulted by the progressive Mr. Obama or non-progressives in Congress. Rand Paul, an arch libertarian, has come out strongly against snoops hiding in the telephone receivers of average Americans, and Mr. Obama has long favored assassination, death by drone, to torture. It turns out that the progressive principles enunciated by Mr. Murphy in his progressive blog are not all that cutting edge. Progressives within the Democratic Party may want to start looking for a new John the Baptist. Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a writer who lives in Vernon

Move to:

In six months

 

"Geraniums on Steps'' (watercolor on paper), by K.  SABAKA, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Robert Whitcomb: That's show biz; corrupt NYC condos

 

I’d lay at least part of the tempest about Brian Williams’s exaggerations/lies/amnesia regarding his Iraq, Katrina, Mandela adventures, etc., to coverage cutbacks by the big TV networks. While 30 years ago, the then Big 3 – ABC, CBS and NBC (Mr. Williams’s employer) -- had dozens of correspondents, including some abroad, there are far fewer now, as with big newspapers.

So the celeb known as ‘’the anchor’’ has garnered an ever-larger percentage of networks news’s money and attention. These hosts are under persistent pressure, fueled by the necessary narcissism and vast salaries, to promote themselves as world-historical personalities – making themselves players in great events, albeit leavened by (a stagey) self-deprecation.

The networks lavish so much attention on the anchorpersons that relatively few Americans know the names of the other network journalists, who, more accurately, should be called entertainers anyway.

Meanwhile, these enterprises, to push aside charges from the right that they’re leftie elitists, get the anchors to very self-consciously present themselves as comrades in arms with U.S. troops. This can often seem forced. As Tom Lehrer once sang in “Send the Marines”: “We’ll send the best we’ve got, {the film stars} John Wayne and Randolph Scott.’’)

Television journalism is mostly an entertainment/personality/emotional vehicle, not a serious ‘’content’’ medium. At best, it’s a highly theatrical headline service. So Mr. Williams, et al., are tempted to embellish stories to emphasize their centrality in the news and their emotional bonds with viewers. (Of course, even a “rigorous reporter’’ covering, say, the bond market, should have a bit of the entertainer’s knack for holding an audience.)

Spending more money to obtain and verify more “content’’ (i.e., ‘’facts’’) isn’t part of networks’ business plans. Most Americans are more interested in opinion and personality anyway. And unless U.S. troops are fighting abroad, Americans, except the affluent and some intellectuals, usually have little interest in foreign things.

Of course, like Mr. Williams, most of us redact our pasts, though usually not so much for career reasons, as with an anchorman. We forget, reconstitute and transpose events and chronology. Then we try to untangle the lines of contingency and intention that made us. (In so doing, we pile up even higher hills of regret until, if we’re fortunate, the sense of accelerating time leads to a weary acceptance of our messy histories.)

One of the best current specialists in the flimsy architecture of memory is the English novelist Julian Barnes (See “The Sense of an Ending’’). Proust may be the king of this domain.

But Brian Williams seems to have set out early to publicly/officially mislead, and he could have long ago corrected himself. Perhaps he will in his memoirs, with which he’ll make more millions. Another prediction: Mr. Williams will host a talk show. He, of course, has the gift of gab, and he seems to actually like people, unlike, say, Johnny Carson (whose basic aloofness I always liked).

****

The Feb. 8 New York Times story headlined “Hidden Wealth Flows to Elite New York Condos’’ detailed how vast quantities of foreign wealth (much of it ill-gotten) has flowed into American real estate, much of it through dummy companies. While this flow has helped send housing prices soaring in some sexy U.S. cities, and thus driven from them more of the middle class, there’s happier sign here.  See: http://www.nytimes.com/images/2015/02/08/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf

It’s a reminder how nations, such as America, with the rule of law, including clear property rights --instead of arbitrary governance by the crooks who run such places as Russia -- are rewarded. Police/gangster states are not reliable places to keep your money. You never know when the rules will be changed without warning and the rulers demand a bigger cut.

If not for certain ruthless individuals but certainly for entire nations, honest and orderly legal systems, subject to constant review by uncensored news media and democratically elected officials, create far more wealth than can a dictatorship. Only a fool would put most of his money in places like Russia and China.

Indeed, Mr. Putin reportedly has billions salted away in nice nations. See: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/09/13/Putin’s-Billions-Just-How-Rich-Russia’s-President

****

We just got back from staying at a relative’s place in Florida, whose warmth and that you can walk with little fear of fracture on the ice especially entices cabin-fevered New Englanders this winter. It’s enough to make you tolerate the Sunshine State’s grim grid in many places of too-wide roads; strip malls, and relentlessly chewed-up countryside.

(I was on vacation when the Williams crisis exploded – it’s the perfect vacation story, as People magazine is perfect for doctors’ waiting rooms.)

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees New England Diary (newenglanddiary.com). He's a former Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune and Providence Journal editor, a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy and a partner in a healthcare- sector consultancy.

Greek mythologies

  It's not surprising to see the economic fantasists now running Greece cozying up to Vladimir Putin's Russian police state. There's the shared (and reactionary) culture of the  Orthodox Church, for one thing, and the  irrationality that comes with years of living in corrupt civic cultures.

And it's not surprising that the Greeks have made such a mess of European Union membership. It should never have been allowed into the E.U. It's a corrupt, quasi-Middle Eastern nation, although it was also  a wellspring of Western Civilization. Thank God  the E.U. haven't let in the Turks, now fast becoming another corrupt dictatorship.

--- Robert Whitcomb

Please, Mr. Obama, cool the equivalence

President Obama was foolish the other week to drawn an equivalence between Christian violence, which was mostly hundreds of years ago, and the endless violence perpetrated by Islamists now and from the start. And for that matter, the Muslims started the violence against Christians and invaded Europe soon after Mohammed started the religion.  (Charles Martel stopped them at Tours.) And  early Islamists "converted'' people through the sword; some of them are still doing the same thing, with guns and bombs. They're still using violence to expand their  religion. Christians have long since moved on from the Inquisition, etc. Obama and others must find the courage to declare that Western Civilization has long been better than any other, for all of its disasters. It has created more good for more people than any other  major cultural tradition. One of the reasons is  its ability to absorb the best of other cultures, including many of the glories of Islamic and East Asian civilizations. That makes it the most supple and innovative of  major cultures, and usually, the most humane, with such horrific exceptions as the Holocaust.

That's why people flee to the West.

--Robert Whitcomb

Of a hearty heart

"Solid Survival" (exterior house paint on wood), by MARJORIE KAYE, at Atlantic Works Gallery, East Boston, in the show "Inner Investigation/Hidden Truths,'' March 6-28.

'Fallen paintings'

 

"Blow-Up'' (crushed synthetic velvet, fabric dye, 1997), by POLLY APFELBAUM, in the show "Nevermind: Work from the 90s,'' at the Worcester Art Museum, through March 1.

Ms. Apfelbaum thinks of this sort of work as opening up a new conceptual and physical space for painting and sculpture.

She calls it "fallen paintings,'' which are "poised between painting and sculpture.''  And she says that the floor can be an interesting place for art, since, among other things,  " belongs to domesticity, the place where your dirty clothes go.''

Marc Brown: New England's shortsighted electricity policies

This wholesale electricity costs haven’t reached the historic levels seen during the 2013-2014 winter, but that doesn’t mean that all is well with New England’s electricity markets. We still have the highest regional electricity costs in the United States, and impending capacity shortages will be a challenge to policymakers for years to come.

ISO-New England, which operates New England’s power grid, has repeatedly warned that 8,000 megawatts (25 percent) of New England’s electricity capacity has either retired or is “at-risk” of retiring. ISO’s calculations don’t include Pilgrim (Massachusetts) or Millstone (Connecticut) nuclear plants, which represent an additional 2,500 mw that some experts have considered to be at risk of closing.

How did we get here? Over the past 15 years, New England has implemented short-sighted electricity policies that have led to a hodgepodge of mandates and regulations that favor renewable energy generation and state-decreed long-term contracts between electricity suppliers and renewable electricity generators.

A significant factor in the premature closing of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant was the continued expansion of the renewable portfolio standard and purchase power agreements that accompany them. Add that to the federal production tax credits that benefit wind farms, giving them a $50/mwh head start on their competitors in the marketplace. This allows them to submit negative bids into the market, artificially depressing prices, which provides short-term savings, but ultimately leads to more base load retirements and long-term pain for ratepayers.

So why have electricity prices not reached the historic heights of last winter? Two reasons: First, it has not been as cold this winter and this has put less pressure on electricity demand. Second, and more importantly, we have had an increase in liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports mainly due to the inclusion of LNG in the winter reliability program.

The winter reliability program was implemented last winter (without LNG) and was largely responsible for keeping the lights on during last winter’s cold snap. It has played a similarly important role this January. This out-of-market program is designed to incentivize oil, natural gas and dual-fueled generators to carry inventory (oil) or to contract for fuel (LNG), ensuring that they have sufficient fuel reserves to operate when called upon.

Last summer, New England’s winter LNG strip prices were being offered with the highest forward prices, which means that LNG tankers from Trinidad chose New England over Europe or Asia. The Northeast Gateway, an LNG receiving facility located 13 miles off of the coast of Boston, has provided the region with an additional 1 billion cubic feet of LNG this winter from a facility that has laid dormant since the spring of 2010.

We can thank ISO’s changes to the winter reliability program for the increased LNG supplies, but is this a long-term solution? While the program has kept the lights on and the influx of LNG supplies have suppressed prices this winter, it would be foolhardy to depend on LNG imports as a long-term solution to future electricity supply shortages.

The ongoing debate on electricity prices has focused on natural gas pipeline expansion because of our growing reliance on natural gas for generation. There have been a number of pipeline projects proposed throughout New England, but proposals like Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct Project have been met with fierce opposition from residents in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

When faced with policy decisions, our elected officials need to answer one simple question: Will passing this bill raise the cost of electricity? If the answer to that question is yes, then their vote on the bill needs to be no. Until that happens, we will continue to lose jobs to other parts of the country. For those who disagree, maybe you should speak to the thousands of out-of-work millworkers in Maine or machinists in New Hampshire and hear what they have to say.

Marc Brown is executive director of the New England Ratepayers Association.

---

Charles Pinning: 'When what you want comes to you'

 

"Hope'' (oil and gold leaf on panel), by ELLEN GRANTER, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

I was devastated! I’d given Lisa Goodrich a Valentine’s Day card and a box of chocolates, and she could barely say thank you before shoving them into her book bag and hurrying off to her mother’s waiting Cadillac.

I walked home from school and must have looked as dejected as I felt, for as I approached our house, Anna Pasch, who lived next door, came out of hers and asked me what was wrong.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“I gave a Valentine’s Day card to this girl in my class and she just put it in her book bag and walked away.”

Anna slung her arm around my shoulders. “C’mon inside and have some banana bread.”

Halfway through my second slice, Anna got it out of me that it was Lisa Goodrich and that I’d also given her a box of chocolates.

“Oh, boy,” sighed Anna.

I made a wounded animal sound.

“Will you do me a favor? asked Anna. “Will you be my Valentine?”

My older brother was slapping English Leather on his face in preparation for his Valentine’s night out with his girlfriend.

“I’m taking Sally to the Pier,” he said. The Pier was a fancy restaurant on the harbor in downtown Newport.

“I’m going to the White Horse Tavern,” I said.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Anna’s taking me.”

My brother stopped. “What is it with you two, anyway?”

“I—” but before I could say anything he cut me off.

“Anna Pasch is the most gorgeous creature in Newport, possibly the entire United States. I’ve asked her out. Everybody has asked her out, and my fourteen year old brother is the only person she’ll go out with. I’ve asked you this before and I am asking you again: What do you two do together?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s impossible! Two people cannot do nothing together! Did you tell Mom and Dad?”

“Not yet.”

“They’ll let you go. They love her. You’ve never been to the White Horse.”

“So?”

“Well, you better start getting ready. It’s very fancy.”

“As fancy as The Pier?”

“Fancier.”

“Can I borrow one of your ties?”

“No.”

Anna and I sat at a round table in front of the fireplace in the barroom. I wore my blue blazer, plaid bell bottoms and loafers. I took a tie of my brothers anyway. He had so many he wouldn’t even notice, if I put it back just right.

Anna looked like a movie star. Sixteen years old and over six feet tall, her effect was always impressive. Add to that her sapphire-blue eyes and bright blonde hair, perfect complexion and Wonder Woman body and basically everyone in view was dropping dead.

Anna’s uncle was a manager at the White Horse, hence the table in front of the fireplace and the immediate tendering of two flute glasses of French ginger ale.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetheart,” Anna toasted, and after our first sip she kissed me. Her lipstick smelled like roses, made somehow more red and fragrant by the snow falling outside the windows, the candlelight and burning wood.

“Charlie, Lisa Goodrich will waste your time and break your heart. Her family came over on the Mayflower, and they think all that crap is actually important. She is cute but she’s conventional. Lisa will always be about Lisa.

“You are intense and you are smart. And you are sensitive. If you try to please Lisa Goodrich, your edge will dull. Did she wiggle her tail for you?”

Stifling a laugh, I aspirated ginger ale out my nose.

“A female does that to attract and then sort out the possibilities and you’ve been rejected. Consider yourself lucky. She’ll eventually settle on Barclay Belmont, or someone like him. You, as a male, are wired to fight for her and try to control her, even though actual life has surpassed the slow steps of biological evolution.”

“Wow.” I said wow a lot when I was around Anna.

“My love, you don’t win something by conquering it. You win when what you want comes to you.”

Before we got out of Anna’s yellow Mustang convertible, we kissed. Anna and I had a way of getting lost in our kisses. We could let one kiss just go on and on, breathing in out of each other. Our lips had fit together perfectly from the start.

She took my hand. “Here. Feel my heart. Can you feel it beating?”

“Wow.” I’d never felt anything like that before.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetheart. All we have to do is be ourselves and the world is ours. It will be easy for us, if you let it.”

Charles Pinning, an occasional contributor, is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel, “Irreplaceable.”

Selfish people in fat cars

As a libertarian about many things, I used to oppose laws against using cell phones while driving even in states  -- Rhode Island is the worst I have seen -- noteworthy for having very  incompetent, lazy and inconsiderate drivers. No more. The relentless snows have  dramatized just how bad many drivers in the Ocean State are. The people in SUV's are the worst -- perhaps because the owners tend to be affluent and spoiled. They barrel down streets many of which are  now less than a lane wide, at 20 miles an hour over the speed limit, with walls of snow and ice squeezing from both sides while yakking about their trivial lives on their phones.

I'll be pleased when the price of gasoline goes to $5 a gallon and even some of these slobs might get rid of their fat cars. They'll still be  self-absorbed, spoiled people but less able to make life miserable for others on the road, be they other drivers or hapless pedestrians looking for a sidewalk behind six-foot-high walls of dirty snow.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Summer scene

"Off the Greenland Coast Under the Midnight Sun'' (oil on pastel), by WILLIAM D. BRADFORD, in the "Over Life's Waters'' sh0w at the New Britain Museum of American Art,'' through April 12.

Amtrak plan to improve Northeast Corridor service

  Some details of Amtrak's plan to improve travel on the Northeast Corridor.

Llewellyn King: The new world of work

One thing we think we know about the Republicans is that they take a dim view of waste, fraud and abuse. So how come the U.S. House of Representatives, in Republican hands, has voted 56 times to repeal or cripple the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare?

They've put forth this extraordinary effort despite an explicit veto threat from President Obama. Their repeated effort reminds one of Onan in the Bible, which politely says he spilled his seed on the ground.

It’s a waste of the legislative calendar and the talents of the House members. It’s a fraud because it gives the impression that the House is doing the people’s business when it is holding a protracted political rally. It’s an abuse of those who need health care because it introduces uncertainty into the system for providers, from the insurers to the home-care visitors.

It’s symptomatic of the political hooliganism which has taken over our politics, where there is little to choose between the protagonists.

Republican groups think that Obama is the doer of all evil in the nation — especially to the economy — and the world. Daily their Democratic counterparts gush vitriol against all the potential Republican presidential candidates, only pausing for an aside about the wickedness of Fox News.

Their common accusation is middle-class job woes. They’re on to something about jobs, but not the way the debate on jobs is being framed.

The political view of jobs is more jobs of the kind that we once thought of as normal and inevitable. But the nature of work is changing rapidly, and it cries out for analysis.

The model of the corporation that employs a worker at reasonable wages that rise every year, toward a defined-benefit pension, is over. Today’s businesses are moving toward a model of employment at will; the job equivalent of the just-in-time supply chain.

While more of us are becoming, in fact, self-employed, the structure of law and practice hasn’t been modified to accommodate the worker who may never know reliable, full-time employment.

The middle-class job market is being commoditized, as the pay-per-hour labor market includes everything from construction to network administration. Sports Illustrated — synonymous with great photography — has just fired all six of its staff photographers. Don’t worry, the great plays will still be recorded and the Swimsuit Issue will still titillate, but the pictures will be taken by freelancers and amateurs.

Two forces are changing the nature of work. First, the reality that has devastated manufacturing: U.S. workers are in competition with the global labor pool, and business will always take low-cost option. If unemployment goes up in China, that will be felt in the U.S. workplace. Second is the march of technology; its disruptive impact is the new normal. Accelerated change is here to stay.

All is not gloom. The trick is to let the old go — particularly difficult for Democrats — and to let the new in. There will be new entrepreneurs; more small, nimble businesses; and whole new directions of endeavor, from gastro-tourism to cottage-industry manufacturing, utilizing 3D printing. Individuals will be free in a new way.

Government needs to think about this and devise a new infrastructure that recognizes that the nature of work is changing. The emerging new economy should have simplified taxes and Social Security payments for the self-employed; portable, affordable health care; and universal catastrophe insurance, so that those who are not under an employer umbrella can benefit from the equivalent of workers’ compensation. The self-employed, rightly, fear the day they can’t work.

Rugged individualism has a new face. The political class needs to look and see the new workplace.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com), an occasional contributor, is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS.

Nature in tooth, claw and wire

"Sculpture in Wire,'' by MARK HOLME, to be shown at Arts Marketplace: Pawtucket, next Sept. 26 and 27.

And I won't come back

 

"Whether'' (mixed media), by ROSALYN DRISCOLL, in the show "Forever & After: Six Contemporary Sculptors,'' at South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, Mass.,  Feb. 20-April 4.

Tim Faulkner: National Grid stalling wind power for fear of competition?

By TIM FAULKNER of ecoRI News staff

PROVIDENCE — The construction of 10 wind turbines, and possibly dozens more, has been stymied by a dispute between a renewable-energy developer and National Grid.

For more than three years, Wind Energy Development LLC, headed by construction company owner Mark DePasquale, has been feuding with National Grid over the cost of connecting proposed turbines to the electric grid, a process known as interconnection.

So far, Wind Energy Development (WED) has built one commercial-scale turbine in North Kingstown and has received approval to build 10 400-foot-high wind turbines in Coventry. Construction is ongoing for two of those turbines at the site of the former Picillo Farm, a 99-acre Superfund site owned by Coventry. Site work is underway for another six turbines on private property adjacent to the former pig farm. Sites are also being prepared for two more turbines along Route 117.

On Feb. 17, WED is scheduled to present proposals for two turbines to the North Smithfield Town Council.

DePasquale claims National Grid is stalling the projects and jeopardizing plans for others by delaying approval of paperwork and frequently requesting new information. The utility also has increased WED’s interconnection cost from $270,000 to $1.2 million, according to DePasquale.

He believes  that National Grid is stymieing interconnections and intentionally inflating costs to dissuade developers like him from generating electricity and selling it directly to customers. This process was helped last year by a change in state law that allows all public entities, such as water supply boards and sewage treatment facilities, to enter into long-term power-purchase agreements.

“That’s a threat to National Grid. A big threat,” DePasquale said during a Jan. 29 Statehouse hearing for a bill that requires utilities such as National Grid to complete interconnection agreements within 60 days.

The legislation asks the utility to pay for the interconnection through its maintenance fund, called the Electric Infrastructure, Safety and Reliability Account. The bill also looks to double the size of a renewable-energy project that qualifies for the state’s fixed-pricing program, known as distributed generation (DG).

DePasquale said he’s willing to pay his fair share of the interconnection costs, but not for maintenance that should have been done years ago. The stall tactics, he claimed, are holding up $81 million in new construction and $12 million in lease revenue to private property owners.

Coventry and West Warwick have already signed long-term, fixed-price agreements to buy power from WED turbines and are eager to receive the savings, he said.

DePasquale added that the interconnection dispute also is delaying new contracts with hundreds of other potential partners for wind turbines, such as farmers. German wind turbine company Vensys, he said, is also looking to open a facility at the Quonset Business Park to import its turbines and meet the demand that  WED is creating in the region.

WED has filed a  document with the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission that seeks to prohibit National Grid from assessing a charge-through tax and ends the practice of overcharging for studies.

National Grid says the delays and the 150-day waiting period are justified in order to address the complexities of a relatively new renewable-energy program. Mike Ryan, National Grid’s vice president  for government affairs for Rhode Island, said the company has devoted $500 million to update its substations, utility poles and electric wires.

He said using funds from the Electric Infrastructure, Safety and Reliability Account for interconnection would increase ratepayer costs. He noted that all other states require renewable-energy developers to pay the entire cost for interconnection.

“Those costs are always built into it,” Ryan said.

The state Office of Energy Resources, which oversees the DG program and other renewable-energy incentives, said it hasn’t received complaints about interconnection from other commercial-scale renewable developers. However, the three turbines built at the Narragansett Bay Commission water-treatment facility at Field’s Point were delayed by a protracted dispute over interconnection costs.

The sponsor of the bill, Rep. John Carnevale (D.-Providence) said National Grid is using delay tactics and “squeezing” WED to pay for maintenance the company has neglected for decades. Carnevale claimed National Grid is instead spending its money on executive pay.

He noted that last year compensation to National Grid CEO Steve Holliday increased 56 percent, to $7.8 million. He said Steve King, head of the U.S. operations for National Grid, received a 58 percent pay raise, to $6.8 million.

“And they hit our ratepayers with a 23 percent increase,” Carnevale said.

He noted National Grid’s repeated resistance to legislation that expanded wholesale buying and selling of electricity, known as net metering, by independent power producers.

“They don’t want competition plain and simple,” Carnevale said.

The legislation was held for further study by the House Committee on Corporations. The PUC said it expects to conduct a full review of the matter.

'Honor' and Putin do not go together

. “We must attempt an honorable peace, but the Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves,” Vice President Joe Biden said on Saturday. A "honorable peace'' is impossible with a narcissistic and kleptocratic thug like Vladimir Putin. The Ukrainians should have been armed by the West many months ago, as Putin, who is basically a Fascist dictator, stole Crimea on route to more conquests. And yet many in the West fearfully hang on to their illusions.

The long view of the Great Snow of 2015

  David Epstein puts the Great Snow of 2015 in historical perspective.