James A. McClure

I just signed a contract to install an array of solar panels on my roof that eventually will give me free electricity. But don’t call me an environmentalist.

Solar energy makes sense for me because the sun shines 330 days a year on my flat-roofed house in New Mexico. It makes even more sense when the federal and state governments pick up 40% of the tab.

The irony is that I’m going solar primarily as a hedge against rising utility rates resulting from government environmental regulations. The state has imposed aggressive renewable-energy goals on utility companies, and the federal government is forcing the closing of a coal-fired power plant (because it was creating haze over an uninhabited national park). So rates for electricity are going up with no end in sight. Another irony is that the government is subsidizing those of us who can afford to buy solar systems while ordinary ratepayers foot the bill for environmental progress. 

For the record, I agree completely that the climate is changing and that human activity has something to do with it. I am not convinced, however, that closing all the coal plants will make it rain in California or curb hurricanes on the East Coast. And I had to laugh when scientists studying global warming got stuck in the ice in Antarctica.

Even if we accept a “settled science” that occasionally sounds more like Scientology, imposing draconian energy restrictions at home while China merrily builds coal plants does not strike me as a workable solution to a global problem.

The canary in the coal mine (pardon the expression) is Germany, which set aggressive renewable-energy goals and is closing its nuclear power plants as well. So electricity rates are more than twice as high as in the U.S. and they’re adding coal-fired power plants to make up the shortfall.

The good news is that the U.S. is on the right trajectory. Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped dramatically, mostly because fracking technology has made it economical to replace coal with cleaner-burning natural gas. Fuel-efficient cars, energy conservation and the miniscule impact of renewable energy have helped.

This suggests that commonsense, global solutions may be possible through innovation and engineering rather than symbolic environmental gestures. In the short term, the U.S. has the potential to be a world leader in the production of natural gas. Exporting gas, and the technology we’ve developed to produce it, can replace some of the coal that’s being burned in China and other places. And we already have the technology to use natural gas for motor fuel.

In the long term, developing smart power grids and storage technologies eventually may make wind and solar energy practical on a large scale – especially in third-world countries that still use their forests for fuel. We probably can do more with nuclear energy, perhaps by manufacturing small, standardized reactors like the ones submarines use instead of building humongous, custom-designed power plants.

It also makes sense to devote more research to coal because we have so much of the stuff. Coal plant emissions have been reduced significantly in recent decades, and perhaps further progress can make it possible to keep limited use of coal in our energy mix.

If the solar panels on my roof make a teensy contribution to save the planet while giving me free electricity, that’s fine. But it’s hard to be environmentally smug when my solar panels are coming from a factory in China that’s powered by coal.

I’ve been taking an academic interest in the public reaction to the Obamacare rollout. (It’s academic at this point because my Medicare/Tricare coverage has not changed so far.) I’ve always been curious about how people behave in groups, and my career in public relations made me an armchair social scientist.

One of my favorite assignments was conducting opinion research at Illinois Bell with surveys of customers and employees to evaluate our public relations programs. It was fun because the job gave me license to be the corporate gadfly and they paid me. My role as an opinion research wonk has continued into retirement with surveys for the National Stuttering Association.

One of my projects was tracking customer attitudes toward the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. At the time, this was the biggest corporate reorganization in history: a government initiative to introduce competition by splitting AT&T into separate local and long-distance telephone companies. So I set up a series of periodic surveys to track public opinion before, during and after the reorganization.

Before the divestiture took effect, customers were strongly in favor of the move. Breaking up a big company has compelling populist appeal, and politicians and consumer groups supported the divestiture enthusiastically. My surveys showed that customers were aware the breakup was coming, understood that this would mean changes for their telephone service, and were happy about it. Some respondents thought the government should break up AT&T into even smaller pieces.

After the breakup we saw a dramatic shift in customer opinion when the change began to affect respondents personally. Suddenly, customers told us the breakup was a terrible idea after they experienced what I began calling the Holy Shit Moment. You mean I have to deal with two separate companies for local and long distance service? I’m responsible for my phone equipment now? And you’re adding a charge to my phone bill? Holy shit! Why didn’t someone tell us this was going to happen? The lesson we learned was that public opinion is fickle, and ultimately will be driven by reality rather than rhetoric.

We may be seeing a similar phenomenon in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. After years of political debate about what may or may not happen, the hypothetical is becoming real and personal. News reports of adverse consequences of Obamacare — insurance cancellations, website problems, etc. — are showing up in opinion polls and making the law even more unpopular. As expected, both political parties are spinning the story furiously.

Ultimately, the success or failure of Obamacare will depend on consumer experience and not messaging. I am a skeptic at this point but may encounter my own Holy Shit Moment when the law’s Medicare cuts take effect. In the meantime, it’s amusing to watch the politicians and pundits flail away in the forlorn hope that what they say will make a difference.

So the new health insurances exchanges for Obamacare have been plagued by computer problems. Is anybody surprised? Government agencies are not good at running consumer-oriented computer systems. When the feds take on a project as big as Obamacare we tend to assume they’ll screw it up.

It’s not just the federal government. State governments have chronic problems with computer systems that handle unemployment benefits and other government functions. Some states have invested millions of tax dollars in information technology that is outdated, inadequate or just plain doesn’t work.

Happily, this does not seem to be a problem for military technology. Fighter jets fly by wire, cruise missiles find their targets and drones kill terrorists. I’m a little skeptical of the National Security Agency’s data collection, but if Amazon and Facebook can deliver personalized ads I’d like my government to be just as smart at finding the bad guys and keeping us safe.

Most of us have grown accustomed to using computer systems and expect a seamless experience when we bank, pay bills and make airline reservations online. I am comfortable managing my life this way and trust that my bank, Amazon and other commercial websites will process my transactions flawlessly.

I don’t have the same level of trust in government websites, which often are balky and not particularly user-friendly. When I pay my state taxes online I am never completely confident that my payment is going through. The Veterans Administration website allows me to manage my health records online but did not have a record of my knee surgery last year.

One of the reasons private companies are good at online commerce is that they treat information technology as a strategic function under the direction of a chief information officer. I don’t see that level of emphasis in government, where information systems are a support function and often fragmented among government agencies.

So I wonder if federal and state governments would do a better job of managing information technology if they upgraded the IT function under a cabinet-level chief information officer. Not your average political appointee, of course, but a seasoned tech exec from someplace like American Express or Amazon. The risk is that a government IT organization could become an entrenched, unaccountable bureaucracy like the Internal Revenue Service or, for that matter, some corporate IT departments.

Housebreaking government information technology is critical because the core political issue today is the size and scope of government. It will be ironic if the Obamacare exchanges, signature achievement of the big-government folks, become an inadvertent recruiting tool for the Libertarians.

I finally cancelled my landline telephone service. My local phone service has been deteriorating and the cable company made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. This is a big step for me because I was a phone company guy for more than half my career.

I’m still amazed by the technology that transformed an industry and ultimately made it obsolete. When I joined Illinois Bell in 1968, AT&T and its Bell telephone companies made up the largest enterprise in the world: more than a million people, tens of thousands of equipment buildings and millions of miles of cable dedicated mostly to voice telephone service.

That massive investment has all but evaporated. Voice telephone service now is a software function on a generic Internet router, just another data stream on the Internet or a wireless cellular system, and can no longer survive as a standalone business.

My career gave me a front-row seat to this transformation. The Bell System was a monopoly because the staggering capital investment needed to provide telephone service made competition impractical. It was heavily regulated, capably managed by engineers and former Eagle Scouts, and had fiercely loyal employees who racked up decades of perfect attendance. AT&T was a rock-solid business that delivered bulletproof dividends to widow-and-orphan stockholders.

Ironically, it was technology (mostly developed by Bell Laboratories) that made it economical for competitors to meet growing demand for long-distance data communications. This ultimately forced the breakup of the Bell System and fed a generation of lawyers.

Long distance service was the Bell System’s cash cow, and opening it to competition spawned giant companies (remember Worldcom?). But advancing technology eclipsed these companies when long distance service became so cheap that cell phone companies began giving it away.

Meanwhile, state regulators created pretend competition for local phone service by forcing telephone companies to sell their service below cost to fly-by-night resellers who would offer more choices to consumers. Consumers, for the most part, didn’t buy it.

Technology has done what government could not: create a truly competitive telecommunications marketplace. My local telephone and cable companies compete head-to-head with low-priced package deals on telephone service, Internet broadband and television. Today’s cash cow is television delivery, and that may disappear as Internet TV services like Hulu bypass cable and satellite TV companies. And more consumers are replacing landline service with cell phones.

Since government regulation was originally intended as a substitute for competition, today’s marketplace is making government agencies redundant and bureaucrats unhappy. With no monopolies left to dismember, the Department of Justice antitrust division is reduced to blocking mergers and the Federal Communications Commission is proposing to regulate the Internet.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying my new digital phone service. Eventually I may take the next step and switch to all-cellular service, but I’ve grown accustomed to having a phone in practically every room. Perhaps I’m still a phone company guy.

My heart goes out to the parents of Trayvon Martin. But I’m getting tired of being called a racist.

I came of age during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and raised my kids in a racially mixed suburb. During my career I watched affirmative action and diversity programs succeed in every company and institution I encountered.

I’ve seen public attitudes on race relations change dramatically in a single generation. Yes, racism still exists, but today there’s an overwhelming consensus that racism is wrong. Minorities are protected by law in a variety of ways and countless billions of tax dollars have been spent on anti-poverty programs.

The civil rights movement deserves credit for this initiative. But it’s worth noting that this massive, half-century commitment has been carried out by a succession of mostly white leaders with the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans. It’s a shining example of American exceptionalism: No other country in the world has done so much to raise up a minority population with the backing of the entire nation.

That’s why it’s dismaying to see the hysterical reaction to the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case, and to the Supreme Court decision to end federal supervision of Southern state voting laws. Civil rights leaders, the news media and politicians would have us believe that nothing has changed since the 1960s: that African-Americans are still under attack from white racists, and that American laws and justice are insufficient to address the concerns of African-Americans.

• Civil rights advocates and the media convicted George Zimmerman of a hate crime well before his trial, and that narrative persists despite a fair trial and exculpatory verdict. Does the right to self-defense really threaten every black child in America? At what point does a civil rights protest become a lynch mob?
• What’s revealing about Trayvon-mania is the extent of black grievance and white guilt: that so many people believed a made-up story despite evidence to the contrary, and were outraged when the trial disproved that story. Why did these folks want Martin and Zimmerman to be Emmett Till and Bull Connors instead of two ordinary guys who made bad decisions? 
• The Supreme Court ruling left the rest of the Voting Rights Act intact and recognized that black voter registration now equals or exceeds that of whites. That means the 1964 law has been a spectacular success. Yet civil rights leaders and their politicians chose to claim defeat with wild-eyed claims that Jim Crow laws are coming back (which would be a surprise to the numerous black elected officials in the South).

What’s ominous is that this dramatic increase in race-baiting has the tacit approval of our first African-American president. I understand that President Obama needs to shore up his political base. But putting a civil-rights label on the unrelated issues of gun control, stand-your-ground laws and attempts to curb voter fraud is dividing the country. Not to mention the impulse of Democratic politicians to label legitimate criticism of the President’s policies as racist.

The President says we need an honest conversation about race relations and I could not agree more. But it needs to be a conversation for 2013 and not 1965.

• We need to acknowledge that African-American men commit more crimes than any other group, and that their profiling has as much to do with common sense as with racism. Let’s explore the factors that contribute to this such as education, popular culture and community institutions.
• We need to admit that government programs to combat poverty often have resulted in dependence rather than progress, and seek new ideas rather than pour good money after bad.
• Since jobs and education are part of the problem, we need to ask why African-American politicians and groups like the NAACP exclude employers like Walmart from our cities, oppose educational reform by supporting teachers’ unions, and kill entry-level jobs with a higher minimum wage.
• We need to ask why African-Americans follow leaders who promote a sense of grievance and dismiss people like Herman Cain and Allen West. Why are rap artists who spew racism and misogyny invited to the White House? And why have the news media anointed Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as the spokesmen for all African-Americans? Isn’t it time for those guys to retire?
• Most important, can we really have a conversation about these issues without being accused of racism for raising them?
  

America has done a lot to end racism and inequality through government action. Much of this effort has been successful, but reviving the civil rights protests of the 1960s will not solve the significant problems that remain. To deny the progress of the last 50 years and claim that all the problems of today’s African-Americans are the result of white racism is dishonest and offensive.

It’s time for a new approach to make African-Americans truly equal, and it’s up to blacks to lead the way – probably with new leaders. I’m certain that legitimate efforts to advance economic and educational opportunities for minorities will win the support of all Americans because that’s the kind of nation we are. But accusing most of the population of racism will not help.