TheChek News Flow

London’s mayor announces plan to pedestrianise Oxford Street

Sadiq Khan’s proposal argues that famous shopping thoroughfare requires ‘major regeneration’

London’s Oxford Street will be pedestrianised under proposals set out on Tuesday by Sadiq Khan, the city’s mayor, as he tries to make the famous thoroughfare “the leading retail destination in the world”. 

The central London street “is in need of major regeneration” after suffering from increased competition from online shopping, the closure of major department stores and the lingering effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, the mayor’s office said. 

“Oxford Street was once the jewel in the crown of Britain’s retail sector, but there’s no doubt that it has suffered hugely over the past decade,” Khan said. “Urgent action is needed to give the nation’s most famous high street a new lease of life.”

Khan’s years-long effort to pedestrianise the street has faced opposition over the disruption to traffic and public transport, and concern about access for disabled people. 

The plan has been given a boost by the election of a Labour government in July. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner said the redevelopment would “drive growth by creating new jobs, generating economic activity and giving a much-needed boost to London’s night-time economy”. 

Khan said he proposed the creation of a new Mayoral Development Corporation for the area with planning powers to drive the overhaul of the street. 

Westminster City Council, which is responsible for the street, has opposed previous pedestrianisation plans. Stuart Love, the council’s chief executive, said he only learnt of Khan’s scheme days ago but that the council would “work constructively” with the mayor.

Love said pedestrianisation posed “practical challenges” and that the council was waiting for details on “how long it could take to be delivered and how the concerns of local residents and users of the street will be addressed”.

The Labour-controlled council has already consulted locals on a £90mn plan — partly funded by landlords — to improve the street, including wider pavements but keeping two-way traffic, which Love said was “shovel ready”.

Oxford Street has struggled in comparison with Regent Street, which is largely controlled by the Crown Estate, and has attracted big brands including Apple. The patchwork of landlords along Oxford Street has suffered from high vacancy rates and outbreaks of shoplifting. 

The number of vacant storefronts hit 13 per cent on Oxford Street in mid-2022, according to Savills, but has since improved to about 4 per cent as of June this year. 

Leading brands such as Debenhams, House of Fraser and Top Shop have disappeared from the street as the wider retail industry was shaken by Covid and the growth of online shopping. A Financial Times investigation in 2022 detailed the proliferation of American sweet shops along the street, often run through a web of subtenants, agents, intermediaries and shell companies. 

John Lewis, which is one of the major retailers still on the street — along with Selfridges — backed the mayor’s plans on Tuesday. 

Marie Hickey, a director at Savills, said footfall and spending were improving but that “there is more that can be done to strengthen [Oxford Street’s] position on the world stage . . . especially when we compare the street to its competitors”. 

The backroom deal to parachute Macron loyalist into Brussels

Stéphane Séjourné has backed French president since 2017 and replaces European Commission’s biggest rebel

Emmanuel Macron had to pull France’s candidate for the European Commission at the very last moment. Ursula von der Leyen ended up with another man on her team.

They left it late and the execution was messy. But the backroom deal, cooked up over months between France’s leader and the commission president, could leave both feeling satisfied.

Twenty-four hours before von der Leyen was scheduled to announce her new slate of commissioners, Paris replaced its nominee with outgoing foreign minister — and close Macron ally — Stéphane Séjourné.

The unexpected switch rids von der Leyen of Thierry Breton, her most prominent internal critic, in exchange for granting Macron more powerful levers inside the EU executive, according to people briefed on the private discussions between them. But it also leaves her short of her goal of achieving a gender-balanced cabinet.

The talks about a different French commissioner began shortly after the European parliament elections in June and continued even as Macron publicly backed Breton for a second term in Brussels, the people said. Blindsided by the sudden lack of support from the Elysée, the internal market commissioner had no option but to step down on Monday, they said.

He did not depart quietly, however, denouncing the “political trade-off” struck behind his back in a seething resignation letter that lashed out at von der Leyen’s management style.

“[Breton] didn’t see it coming, so it has hit him harder,” said one of the people. “As they say: ‘power is borrowed’.”

Séjourné, the former leader of the liberal group in the European parliament and one of the few French politicians who is both a Brussels insider and an Elysée loyalist, is expected to be granted a significant portfolio with oversight over parts of the EU’s industrial policy, the people said. The 39-year-old lawyer is also seen by von der Leyen as an asset in building relations with the fragmented EU assembly.

The appointment also comes as Macron is seeking to repair his standing at a European level after triggering a snap election in the national parliament that hobbled his leadership at home.

In a statement on Monday, the Elysée said the move was in tune with the president’s push for European sovereignty on issues such as industry, technology and competitiveness. 

But some analysts depicted it as a von der Leyen ambush that brings some setbacks too — including having to form new teams on issues where Breton had been a vocal and effective advocate for France.

“It’s a bit of a waste,” said Elvire Fabry, a senior research fellow from the Jacques Delors Institute. “Breton is someone who has been willing to be confrontational on many issues including overseas . . . he’s been an asset for the outgoing commission even if we know relations with von der Leyen have not been easy.”

Macron had “made the most of the change to ensure he would have an ally in place, someone who will be loyal rather than taking into account gender balance”, she said, in reference to von der Leyen’s request that governments send female commissioner candidates. Replacing Breton with another man “is a little dig at von der Leyen too and doesn’t make her job simpler”, Fabry added.

During his term in the EU parliament, Séjourné headed the Renew group, keeping together a fractious coalition of economic liberals and more dirigiste parties from France. 

As the third-biggest party, it held the balance of power between left and right and its compromise positions often won the day. Von der Leyen appreciated his support in getting critical environmental proposals through the house, an EU diplomat said. 

“He can build the necessary trust in all three EU institutions.”

A former colleague agreed. “He has very good relations with everyone. And he is a good negotiator and a hard worker. It’s good news for France.”

But a member of von der Leyen’s centre-right European People’s party said Séjourné would struggle to influence the new parliament, which has moved rightward, relegating Renew to fifth place. The votes of the fourth-largest group led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the European Conservatives and Reformists, will be needed to pass some pieces of legislation.

“He never impressed in plenary debates and mostly lectured the right on fascism. Breton is much more pragmatic than Séjourné. Reaching out to the ECR will be difficult for him,” the person said.

A former Socialist who has backed Macron since the former French economy minister ran for president in 2017, Séjourné is one of the few remaining loyalists and Elysée emissaries set to play a consequent role after Macron’s election debacle this summer at home. 

Macron’s centrists ended up well short of a majority in the French parliament, and the election gamble the president sprang on many of his allies, including then-prime minister Gabriel Attal, further soured relations with some of his early champions.

In the most recent French cabinet, Séjourné had a stint of barely nine months as foreign minister.

Attal, Séjourné’s former partner, was replaced last week by the conservative Michel Barnier, who will now pick a government that will be more independent of Macron than in the past — another incentive for the French president to bolster his influence where he can. 

“Macron is sending his clone to the Commission,” Manon Aubry, a French far-left MEP, said on X. The fractious mood in France extended to the far right, with party officials criticising what they painted as jobs for friends of Macron’s. 

Pascale Joannin, managing director of the Robert Schuman think-tank, said Sejourné would have to prove his clout and that it was not clear he had the “same charisma” as Breton.

Breton was appointed by Macron in 2019 as a second choice after the European parliament rejected his initial candidate, Sylvie Goulard.

The 69-year-old former head of French IT group Atos had a tempestuous relationship with von der Leyen, regularly irking his boss with public remarks that strayed from his official brief and private sniping about her leadership style.

Breton won plaudits for his work in boosting European vaccine production amid the Covid-19 pandemic and for raising the alarm about EU’s woeful level of ammunition production in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But he infuriated senior commission officials for his unsanctioned, unilateral moves to spar with technology tycoons such as Elon Musk over social media policies, and some of his provocations were viewed dimly by the Elysée too. 

In March he questioned von der Leyen’s legitimacy to serve a second term based on the level of support she had garnered in an internal party vote. Last year he discussed replacing von der Leyen with other senior officials from other EU capitals.

Reinhard Butikofer, a former German Green MEP, said Breton had over-reached. “His ego has no limits. He’s the loser of the week.”

National Grid blames old computer systems for sidelining batteries

Britain’s network operator overlooks batteries up to 30% of the time when they are cheaper, company admits

Ageing computer systems and an outdated electricity network means National Grid is often unable to use batteries designed to deliver cheap green power, it has admitted.

Batteries were being overlooked by Britain’s network operator up to 30 per cent of the times when they are cheaper than other power sources, Craig Dyke, from National Grid’s electricity system operator, said.

“We do still acknowledge we still have more work to do,” he said, blaming a range of technical factors including outdated computer equipment at the network operator and not enough cables to send electricity to where it was needed.

The company, which also operates in the US, has plans to lower the rate at which batteries are sidelined to single figures by early next year, he said, calling current levels “higher than where we want them to be”.

Dyke’s comments came in response to a letter from four leading battery storage groups which said National Grid’s “electricity system operator” or ESO division was making the country’s power costlier and dirtier by failing to use their technology properly.

“Consumers are paying more, clean renewable energy is being wasted, and fossil fuel generation is being used instead,” they said. 

The groups claimed batteries were being overlooked up to 90 per cent of the time in a way that favoured gas-fired power plants, which emit tonnes of carbon dioxide and can be more expensive to run. 

Dyke said the ESO had investigated the claim of a 90 per cent rate and found the figure to be valid at one battery unit on one day.

The four groups are Zenobe, which is backed by global infrastructure giant KKR, Field Energy, Harmony Energy and Eel Power.

The dispute highlights the challenges facing Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, as he tries to hit his government’s target to cut emissions from electricity generation to net zero by 2030.

Although the UK is the world’s second-largest offshore wind market after China, its wind farms are wasted when it is too windy and the grid cannot send their power to where it is needed. 

When this happens the ESO pays wind farms in one place to switch off — something called “constraint periods” — and can also need to pay gas-fired power plants in another area to turn on. These payments add up to hundreds of millions of pounds each year, and the costs are passed on to household and business energy bills.

Batteries store excess green power and release it when needed. The companies argue that using batteries can be cheaper and can limit carbon emissions from gas plants.

Successive governments, eager to make the UK a battery storage pioneer, have encouraged developers to build dozens of battery storage facilities across the country over the past decade. 

However, the companies say the ESO is consistently underusing or “skipping” batteries, depriving them of revenue and undermining investor confidence.

“Even when batteries are the cheapest and fastest solution to meet the needs of the GB grid, the ESO favours more expensive options too frequently,” the companies say in the letter. 

“Our own data, verified by the ESO, shows that batteries are being skipped over 90 per cent of the time during constraint periods for some sites.”

Dyke said batteries sometimes had to be overlooked because it was impossible to get their power to where it was needed.

But he acknowledged that they were also not used at times because the ESO’s computer systems had made it hard for grid operators to be sure they had enough charge to supply the right amount of power.

However, Dyke said these so-called skip rates had come down in recent months following a computer system upgrade in December 2023, and aim to reach low single-digit figures early next year following further planned improvements.

The upgrades should allow grid engineers to have a better idea of battery charging levels at individual sites, making them more likely to take their power when needed.

Dyke denied there was any cultural resistance within the business to using newer battery technology rather than conventional gas power plants. 

Use of battery storage abroad has soared in places such as California, where batteries soak up solar power during the day and regularly supply a fifth of the state’s power in the evening.

‘There would be no Wolfsburg without Volkswagen’: Carmaker’s plans shake home town

As Germany’s largest private employer moves to break its job security pledge, city fears its identity will be lost

At Altdeutsche Bierstube, the oldest bar in Wolfsburg, a man at the counter pondered whether Volkswagen’s home town would go the way of Michigan’s Flint — the birthplace of General Motors, once known as “Vehicle City”.

In the mid-80s, GM had announced it could no longer competitively build cars in Flint as it struggled with sliding sales and the rise of Asian low-cost rivals. It whittled down its operations in the city that, like other US locations in the rustbelt hit by the industrial decline, went from one financial crisis to the next, becoming known as one of the country’s most dangerous cities.

The man drinking his rum-laced tea glumly noted, that whether Wolfsburg, known as Germany’s “Die Autostadt”, would suffer a similar fate, depended on VW’s next move as it faces up to slowing demand, increasing competition and high costs.

For decades, Wolfsburg and its car plant — the world’s largest — symbolised Germany’s miraculous postwar industrial revival. VW’s crisis, and its plan to close some German factories, has unleashed angst among the city’s 120,000 inhabitants, many of whom work directly for the carmaker.

“There would be no Wolfsburg without Volkswagen,” said Anke Jentzsch, who joined VW as a trainee more than 20 years ago, highlighting the high stakes as Germany’s largest private employer this week walked back on its promise not to axe workers in its home country.

Wolfsburg was founded by the Nazi government a year before the outbreak of the second world war to house workers who were to build the Volkswagen — the people’s car. Since then, more than 48mn cars have rolled off Wolfsburg’s production lines, more than anywhere else in the world.

Today, VW employs 60,000 people in Wolfsburg, and just as many in the central German state of Lower Saxony, which is teeming with automotive suppliers that exist only because of the demands of Europe’s largest carmaker. Jentzsch, who works in VW’s 12,000-people strong technical development team, added that the company’s importance to the region stretched beyond the automotive sector to “the baker around the corner, the hairdresser”.

But the shift towards electric vehicles is costly, as is the race to develop smoothly running software. Growing competition from Chinese start-ups known for their prowess in modern technologies, is only going to further erode VW’s share in the diminishing European car market, its top executives have warned in recent weeks.

“We want to enter into negotiations to ensure Volkswagen’s long-term competitiveness,” VW’s head of human resources, Gunnar Kilian, wrote in a note to employees as the company last week formally notified the IG Metall union that its three-decade old job security guarantee was now void.

The union and VW’s powerful works council, which sits on half the seats on the company’s supervisory board, have made clear that they will challenge any attempts to cut jobs or shut plants.

“We will fiercely defend ourselves against this historic attack on our jobs,” works council chair Daniela Cavallo said last week, as she argued that job cuts would not address the key issue — sliding demand for VW cars. Her clashes with Blume’s predecessor Herbert Diess following his hints at potential lay-offs was a key factor in his sudden dismissal two years ago.

The threat by Germany’s largest private employer to sack workers has led Chancellor Olaf Scholz and former EU industry commissioner Thierry Breton to wade in, with both having expressed concern about the future of Europe’s largest industrial base.

“This is VW’s biggest crisis since the early 90s,” said Helena Wisbert, a professor of business administration at Ostfalia University in Wolfsburg, who previously worked for the company.

At the VW-sponsored automotive theme park Die Autostadt, which sits adjacent to the carmaker’s headquarters, the pervading sense of gloom was strangely absent.

Some one million people visit each year, and Beate Altenhoff-Urbaniak offers guided tours to the hundreds of people who come each day especially to pick up their brand new Volkswagen, Seat and Cupra cars. Hours before, she had guided a couple from Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, who had made the four-hour drive to pick up Volkswagen’s popular SUV, T-Roc. “For the lady,” Altenhoff-Urbaniak said, with a smile.

But demand for the T-Roc, which last year was VW’s best-selling SUV in Europe, has not been managed to offset the trend towards lower sales and higher costs.

VW’s CFO Arno Antlitz this month warned that the group’s namesake brand — which accounts for roughly half of the group’s car production — had been spending more money than it was earning “for some time”.

The discrepancy was long masked by the company’s success in China, where low production costs and high regard for German brands made it the company’s most profitable market.

But VW has been losing market share in China, amid increasing appetite from domestic consumers for homegrown brands such as BYD. Chinese sales of Porsche cars — which Blume has continued to lead, even after he took on the chief executive role of the entire VW group — were a third lower in the first half of 2024, compared with the same period last year.

The growing uncertainty about VW’s future in China has forced executives to address issues at home that have been evident for years.

Suppliers such as Bosch, Continental and ZF Friedrichshafen took the first hit when customers such as VW started building fewer cars, and have in the past five years announced tens of thousands of job cuts.

At VW, some of its 300,000 workers in Germany have already faced de facto pay cuts as several plants have had to scrap night shifts to adapt to slowing demand.

Most plant workers rotate between morning, afternoon and nights shifts. Night duty is most lucrative, meaning that workers relieved of it face a shortfall of hundreds of euros per month.

Benny Littau, who works in a Wolfsburg plant where the Golf is made, said that while he was partly relieved to have stopped working nights two years ago, he was also feeling the effects on his bank account.

“Many of my colleagues started having issues with their mortgages,” Littau said, while expressing frustration with the common perception that VW workers are exceptionally well off. “It is physically demanding labour [ . . . ] we work hard for the money”.

Wolfsburg’s mayor, Dennis Weilmann, told the Financial Times that he could sense growing frustration among the city’s inhabitants. “Naturally, there is growing concern about jobs,” he said.

But he added that VW’s woes, and its implications for the city and its neighbouring towns, had put more than employment at stake. “My father and both my grandfathers worked for Volkswagen,” he said, “Volkswagen is part of our identity”.

OpenAI finally released its Strawberry reasoning artificial intelligence last week—or rather, an initial, less-complete version known as o1-preview. We first reported about the breakthrough behind Strawberry 10 months ago when it was still called Q*, and more recently told you what was coming, though we expected a more inspiring name than o1-preview!

The reasoning model differs from prior large language models like GPT-4 in one key way: When training the reasoning model, its capabilities grow at a higher rate the more computing power you give it, thanks to the way it makes sense of, or “thinks,” about data it has already reviewed. In essence, it creates new data, or thoughts, without needing as much information as prior models did.

The same thing happens when the reasoning model is answering questions from OpenAI customers, including ChatGPT users. When o1-preview spends more time, or compute power, to answer a question, the answers improve at a higher rate compared to other LLMs.

This type of improvement is known as log-linear compute scaling, in AI parlance.

OpenAI leaders themselves commented on these improvements in different ways. Boris Power, OpenAI’s head of applied research, attempted to lower expectations by saying on X that the new release is “not a mass product that just works and unlocks new value for everyone effortlessly.” CEO Sam Altman and Mark Chen, the company’s VP of frontier-model research, reacted with pride and provocation, respectively.

In some ways, the “new value” that Power was talking about is plain to see: o1-prevew is better at solving complex math and coding problems and asking users clarifying questions when it needs more details.

Among the highest praise came from Terence Tao, a preeminent mathematician and professor at UCLA. He said o1-preview was like “trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student. However, this was an improvement over previous models, whose capability was closer to an actually incompetent graduate student.”

He could see future models acting like a competent grad student, “at which point I could see this tool being of significant use in research level tasks.”

That’s a big deal.

Some existing OpenAI customers also had compliments. Insurance firm Oscar Health, for instance, said o1-preview would help handle complex paperwork and health rules to determine the cost of certain medical services like newborn delivery, identify fraud or waste in medical bills, and extract data from medical record charts. Oscar’s post might be partly about marketing its AI products, but the post had supporting evidence.

Speaking of health, o1-preview also appeared to score well in a test in which AI models try to diagnose patients in a simulated medical clinic.

Where o1 Falls Short

In other ways, o1-preview falls short. One early tester told me that it struggles with long questions, meaning that the questions have to be broken down into several parts. OpenAI itself has admitted that o1-preview is on par with, or even worse than, GPT-4o in some cases, such as writing or editing text. And o1-preview still gets stumped by some simple puzzles that any middle schooler could solve.

The new model and its “mini” version are also missing a number of features you’d expect in a product. Unlike some of OpenAI’s other models, the new models are text-only for now, meaning that users can’t upload pictures and files to ask questions about them. ChatGPT subscribers are limited by weekly rate limits of 30 messages for the o1-preview model and 50 for the mini version—an amount that you could easily blow through in an hour or two if you’re not careful. (The company later said it was extending the limits.)

And it’s expensive. For developers who use the o1-preview model through OpenAI’s application programming interface, the new model is more than six times more expensive than OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, its prior flagship LLM. So o1-preview is not the most financially sound option for every developer.

All this suggests that the o1-preview release may have been rushed, either because of the company’s ongoing fundraising efforts or because of growing pressure from competitors. We should also point out that there’s a fuller, better version of o1-preview (it’s just called o1) that OpenAI didn’t launch but still published evaluation results about it.

OpenAI will have to put in extra work to make sure developers understand how to use the new models effectively. For instance, one founder of a legal AI startup I spoke with said that they don’t use o1-preview to answer every question from customers, even if it is better at reasoning. Instead, the founder uses the model to decide which smaller LLM should handle each step in the process of drafting various legal documents. (You can analogize this to a manager delegating tasks to their subordinates.)

The founder said they also use o1-preview for tasks that might have previously taken lawyers days to complete, so customers aren’t put off by the model’s longer response times.

OpenAI’s Altman is already thinking ahead. Late Friday he appeared to be reflecting on the beautiful “night sky” of St. Louis, where he grew up, and looking forward to “winter constellations.”

But with help from ChatGPT, we deduced he was making a veiled reference to Orion, code name of the company’s next flagship LLM. As we previously explained, Strawberry/o1 will help make Orion better.

A devastating report on global threats and American weakness is met with indifference.

The news from abroad is chilling. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports from Kyiv that Ukraine is “bleeding out” as its weary soldiers struggle against a numerically superior Russia. The New York Times reports that China is expanding the geographical reach and escalating violence in its campaign to drive Philippine forces from islands and shoals that Beijing illegitimately claims. And Bloomberg reports that Washington officials are fearful that Russia will help Iran cross the finish line in its race for nuclear weapons.

These stories, all from liberal news outlets generally favorable to the Biden administration, tell a tragic and terrifying tale of global failure on the part of the U.S. and its allies. China, Russia and Iran are stepping up their attacks on what remains of the Pax Americana and continue to make gains at the expense of Washington and its allies around the world.

What none of these stories do is connect the dots by analyzing the consequences of repeated American failure on the widely separated fronts of the international contest now taking place. To see what this all means and where it is leading, we must turn to the recently released report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. This panel of eight experts, named by the senior Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees, consulted widely across government, reviewing both public and classified information, and issued a unanimous report that, in a healthy political climate, would be the central topic in national conversation.

The bipartisan report details a devastating picture of political failure, strategic inadequacy and growing American weakness in a time of rapidly increasing danger. The U.S. faces the “most serious and most challenging” threats since 1945, including the real risk of “near-term major war.” The report warns: “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.”

Worse, “China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea. . . . This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.”

Should such a conflict break out, “the Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.”

To summarize, World War III is becoming more likely in the near term, and the U.S. is too weak either to prevent it or, should war come, to be confident of victory.

A more devastating indictment of a failed generation of national leadership could scarcely be penned.

This is not, or should not be, a partisan issue. No recent president and no party escapes responsibility for our current plight. Red and blue America will suffer equally if the global slide toward war continues unchecked.

Even more appalling than the report is the general indifference with which it has been received. Aside from a few honorable exceptions (including a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Shay Khatiri and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s clear-sighted advocacy), the commission’s report sank like a stone. There has been no uproar in the press, no speechifying by presidential candidates, no storm on social media, no sign that the American political class takes the slightest interest in the increasing fragility of the peace on which everything we cherish depends.

That isn’t new. Congress, much of the media and public opinion at large have ignored alerts from respected defense leaders at least since Robert Gates warned almost 12 years ago of the dangerous consequences of defense cutbacks. The commission’s report is now warning that the long-deferred bill is coming due.

If history teaches anything, it is that decadence this deep, carried on this long, entails enormous costs. Our adversaries’ conviction that the inattention of a flabby political class is bringing the Pax Americana to an inglorious end is a key reason why nations as suspicious of one another as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have chosen this moment to make common cause against us.

The prophet Ezekiel spoke about the duty of the watchman on the city wall to sound the trumpet when enemies approach. The Commission on the National Defense Strategy has fulfilled its mission. But judging from the indifference with which its report has been greeted, more and louder trumpets need to sound. Not since the 1930s have Americans been this profoundly indifferent as a great war assembles in the world outside, and not since Paul Revere traversed the dark country lanes of Massachusetts have Americans more urgently needed to rouse themselves from sleep.