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September 14, 2016

Vol. 27 NO. 37 September 14, 2016

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Paula Dwyer

State Ballot Measures In 2016 Reflect Shift To Left A funny thing happened on the way to the ballot box this year.

Though grassroots referendums and initiatives have been on the wane for two decades, 73 have been approved for ballots so far in the 26 states that allow them.

That’s still well below the 1996 peak of 92 measures, but it’s the highest number since 2006 and almost 50 percent more than in 2012.

Why the spike? A big reason, says Josh Altic of the politics website Ballotpedia, is that the number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot in many states is based on voter turnout in the previous statewide election.

And turnout in 2014 was the lowest since World War II. In California, for example, activists needed the signatures of just under 366,000 registered voters, 27 percent fewer than in 2014, to propose changes to state law. California, the hothouse of citizen action, will have 17 ballot initiatives this year, versus four in 2014 and 13 in 2012.

Here’s what I find interesting: When voters get thoroughly fed up with government and stay home on Election Day, they’re making it easier for activists to gain access to the ballot in the next election. Since initiatives and referendums generally result in higher voter turnout - boosting it by 3 percent to 4.5 percent in presidential-election years, and as much as 9 percent in midterm contests, according to one study -- activists may find it harder to repeat this year’s success in the next cycle.

For now, though, the beneficiaries of 2014’s abysmal turnout are left-leaning groups.

With Republicans now in control of 33 state legislatures, and complete control of governorships and legislatures in 30 states, liberals’ frustration runs high. They’ve turned to citizen initiatives as an outlet.

The evidence is seen in both the increase and nature of November’s crop of initiatives.

The bulk of them advocate liberal causes, ranging from minimum-wage increases and marijuana decriminalization to higher taxes and gun control.

(Everytown for Gun Safety, a group backed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, is financing some of the gun-control measures.)

In years past, conservative causes, including tax cuts, term limits and spending restrictions, led the ballot-initiative pack.

California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 set off a wave of taxcutting initiatives in other states for many years, and social measures, like Ohio’s samesex-marriage ban in 2004, were a national trend. The Ohio vote turned out social conservatives in such force that it probably handed President George W. Bush the state’s electoral votes that year, helping to cement his re-election.

More recently, however, proposals of one sort or another to raise taxes are popular, possibly signaling the end of taxcut fever. “We’re noticing a shift toward progressive issues and away from conservative ideas like tax cuts,” says Altic, who runs a ballot-measure project at Ballotpedia. “And we see a correlation with the increase

in Republican-controlled state governments.”

Tax increases are on the ballots of a few deep-red states, such as Louisiana’s measure to disallow federal income-tax deductibility and Oklahoma’s higher sales-tax question.

Elsewhere, California is, not surprisingly, among the 11 other states asking if voters want higher taxes. A measure there would increase personal taxes on incomes above $250,000 a year. Colorado asks if voters want to raise cigarette taxes.

Oregon asks about raising corporate income taxes, while a Washington state measure proposes a tax on carbon emissions.

Nine states have measures that would legalize or decriminalize marijuana use. Five states would raise the minimum wage. Four would tighten gun controls.

One, Colorado, would create an additional 10 percent income tax to finance a universal healthcare system.

Pushback by business groups, sometimes pre-emptively with litigation or television ads to keep measures off state ballots, has made it more costly for citizen initiatives. Business opposition also tends to dampen donor interest in financing future measures. An attempt to get an anti-fracking question on the ballot in Colorado, for example, failed last month when it didn’t attract enough voter signatures to qualify, possibly because the oil industry waged a $13 million media battle to stop it.

In several states, billionaires Charles and David Koch are playing ballot-initiative defense.

A South Dakota measure would require disclosure of donors to campaigns and advocacy groups, limit lobbyists’ gifts to elected officials and provide taxpayer funds to candidates.

The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity is spending heavily to quash it.

Such tactics force activists to choose their fights more carefully. Companies that specialize in signature gathering last year charged between $4 and $6 a signature in California, Ballotpedia says. That means it costs at least $1.5 million just to have a shot at getting on the ballot. Media campaigns to win over voters can cost millions more, especially if the Koch brothers or other big donors are on the other side.

That isn’t necessarily bad if a ballot initiative would impose new costs on the private sector, interfere with market forces or require companies to change the way they conduct their business.

As states have learned the hard way, popular referendums can have deleterious unintended consequences.

Ballot measures will always be used as an outlet and a way of self-correcting for ideological pendulum swings.

No one designed the process this way, but the cycle of voter frustration, followed by low turnout, increased oneparty control and more citizen activism is like an automatic refresher in democracy.

Dwyer writes editorials on economics, finance and politics for Bloomberg View. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-6-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Greg Sargent

Can Hillary Clinton County On The Latino Turnout She Needs?

One of the big questions about the 2016 campaign is this: Will voter groups in the vaunted Obama coalition turn out at levels this fall that rival their turnout in 2012?

Key to this question is the enthusiasm level among Latinos. They are increasingly important to Democrats in national elections, because they are growing as a share of the electorate, even as Republicans appear paralyzed from doing anything to strike a more welcoming posture towards them and have nominated someone who insults Mexican immigrants for sport and vows mass deportations and a great wall keeping the hordes out.

Yet some new polling released this week by Latino Decisions offers some mixed news for Democrats on this front.

On the one hand, the poll finds that Hillary Clinton is beating Donald Trump by 7017 among registered Latino voters nationally. That’s better than Barack Obama was faring among Latinos at the same point in 2012, when Latino Decisions polling found him beating Mitt Romney by 64-21.

In the end Obama beat Romney by 71-27 among Latinos in the

election itself, so while Clinton is roughly at the same number among Latinos right now, Trump is doing substantially worse than Romney fared.

The new numbers on Latinos also look good for Clinton in key battleground states.

She’s beating Trump among them by 62-27 in Florida; by 70-14 in Nevada; and by 72-17 in Colorado. All this suggests Trump’s big speech on immigration, in which he doubled down on the xenophobia and chest thumping about mass removals, may have further damaged him among these voters.

voting this year than in 2012: 51 percent say this nationally, while the number who say this is no higher than 50 percent in any of the battleground states polled.

“When you ask Latino voters if they think it’s more important to vote, you get high numbers saying Yes,” Tramonte tells me.

“The concern is that people may recognize that it’s an important election, but if they’re not really excited about voting, life can get in the way.”

“That’s a concern for Hillary Clinton and Democrats, because she needs every vote,” Tramonte continues. “She’s actually doing better than Obama is, but the next two months are crucial. And it’s all about enthusiasm.”

Along these lines, Tramonte also argues that the new poll also shows that too few Latinos have been contacted

by Democrats: 39 percent say they’ve been contacted to vote or register, while in all the battlegrounds polled the number is in the high 30s or 40s. “Not enough people have been reached out to,” Tramonte says.

Yet Lynn Tramonte, the deputy director of proimmigrant America’s Voice, which sponsored the new polling, says there are some causes for concern also lurking in the data -- involving the enthusiasm level among Latinos.

It’s true that the poll found that 76 percent of Latinos nationally say it’s more important to vote this year than in 2012. That’s good news for Clinton. But Tramonte notes that the poll also shows that more middling percentages say This could conceivably they are more enthusiastic about matter on the margins, because according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages, the race is a dead heat in Florida and in Nevada, both states with large Latino populations.

All this comes amid concerns among some Democrats that the Clinton campaign had been taking Latino turnout for granted, banking too heavily on Trump as a rallying force, as Abby Phillip reported recently: “Some Democratic strategists fear that Clinton has already missed a unique opportunity and warn that counting on

Hispanic voters to turn out just because they hate Trump is not a reliable strategy. Unlike President Obama four years ago, Clinton has run virtually no Spanish-language television ads in the general election, with the exception of a spot that aired during a one-day soccer event. “ ‘I’m worried literally to death now that because Donald Trump is so visceral that they’ll think that Latinos will turn out because of that alone,’ said Chuck Rocha, president of Solidarity Strategies, a Latino political-consulting firm that worked with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary season.

‘Hate alone won’t motivate somebody to vote….They need something to vote for.’

In fairness, there’s time to improve here. The Clinton campaign has stepped up its advertising targeted at Latino voters in Florida and Nevada, and the pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA has followed suit with more of the same.

And the Clinton campaign argues that it has been targeting Latinos through digital ads and via Hispanic radio all along.

But it’s also worth recalling that the big unknown goes beyond Latino voters: Clinton lost among young voters by huge margins to Bernie Sanders during the primaries, raising questions about whether she can excite those voters, too. So one of the big questions of 2016 -- whether the Obama coalition will turn out in 2012 numbers -- still looms.

Sargent writes The Plum Line blog, a reported opinion blog with a liberal slant -- what you might call “opinionated reporting” from the left. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 9-9-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Jules Witcover

Presidential Debates Should Be Moderated In The Public Interest

After the “presidential forum” in New York last week, in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took questions in serial fashion but didn’t appear together, much of the critical reaction fell not on them but on the moderator, NBC News’ “Today” host Matt Lauer, who is known more for dealing with entertainment figures than with high-level politicians in the midst of a critical national campaign.

Many critics argued that Lauer spent too much time pressing Clinton on her handling of emails when she was secretary of state, while he failed to push Trump on false assertions. One such was Trump’s claim to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the start, in the face of evidence on a radio talk show that he actually had supported it.

According to the website Buzzfeed, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks Trump told radio host Howard Stern (himself no paragon of journalism), when asked whether he was for such an invasion, “Yeah, I guess so; I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

poor follow-ups.” Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times called his performance “an embarrassment to journalism” and “not a serious discussion of foreign policy.”

However, one of the journalists chosen to moderate a face-to-face presidential debate this fall, Chris Wallace of Fox News, said this: “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad. It is up to the other person to catch the other one, though I certainly am going to try to maintain some semblance of equal time. ... I suspect I’m not going to have any problem getting them to engage each other, but I don’t view my role as truth-squading....” Wallace is scheduled to moderate the third debate, on Oct. 19 in Las Vegas.

Wallace’s viewpoint seems a rather antiseptic position for any moderator to take, given the critical role of the independent Commission on Presidential Debates and the high stakes involved.

Nor should a moderator be chosen who lacks the political knowledge to put the candidates’ feet to the fire on the truth or Trump has tried to water down that falsity of their observations and their own comment, insisting, “Howard Stern was records. many months before we went into Iraq, and if you saw, I was very tepid.” Yet in January 2003, Trump told Neil Cavuto on Fox News of President George W. Bush’s talk of invasion: “Well, he has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps (he) shouldn’t be doing it, and perhaps we should be waiting for the UN, you know.”

One critic of Trump’s flip-flop on the invasion is Clinton, who as a senator voted in 2002 authorize the invasion but later called her vote a mistake. She said then that President Bush had persuaded her he needed congressional support to induce the United Nations to back the action.

The Lauer pile-on by news-media colleagues, including prominent factchecker columnists, was particularly harsh. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler asked how someone like Lauer could “not set the record straight on Trump’s bogus claim of being against the war in Iraq,” suggesting he “needed to do more homework, for both candidates. Very

The commission in the past chose wisely with seasoned and fair political reporters and analysts such as the retired Jim Lehrer of PBS and Bob Schieffer of CBS News, who were sole moderators.

This year, three others will share the chore: Lester Holt of NBC News for the first one Sept. 26, Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Anderson Cooper of CNN together for the second, and Wallace for the third.

Absent this time around, regrettably in my view, will be experienced news reporters on the national political beat as panel questioners -- a useful feature of past debates. Many reporters have followed Clinton and Trump closely all the last year, and they know what questions can best educate the voters.

After all, the debates should be much more than mere entertainments guided by a morning television talk show host.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast. net.

(C) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

9-11-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Margaret Carlson

Trump, Clinton Plan To Stick To Low Road This should have been the week when both presidential candidates, the summer behind them, seized a back-to-school opportunity for a fresh start -No. 2 pencils sharpened, pristine notebooks, a new backpack, a fresh chance to elevate the campaign to a level deserving of the office they aspire to. No such luck.

All hopes for a new narrative were dashed when Donald Trump violated the vow all presidential candidates must take not to reveal anything about the classified intelligence briefings they get.

It’s never been dishonored, but at a joint “commander-in-chief forum” in New York on Sept.

7, Trump tried to leverage his access to score some cheap political points.

His first briefing, he said, left him “shocked,” because of the information it contained about an unspecified decision by President Barack Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, that had led to an unspecified “total disaster.”

His briefers, he said, were “not happy about” Obama’s failure to “follow what our experts” advised.

Like many other Trump assertions -- Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination, Muslims cheered as the World Trade Center towers fell, Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. -- this one deserves to be taken with a bucketload of salt. Trump conceded that the officials who delivered the Aug. 17 briefing didn’t say they were displeased with the president, but he is certain that was the message they intended fim to hear. “I could tell -- I’m pretty good with body language.”

Whatever actually transpired, we now know that Trump can’t be trusted not to weaponize whatever is at hand, however confidential. Doing so, former acting Central Intelligence

Agency Director Michael Morell told Politico, crosses “ a longstanding red line respected

by Democrats and Republicans.”

President George W. Bush’s CIA director, Michael Hayden, said he he’d never seen anything like it. “I mean, a candidate used the intelligence professionals who were briefing him in an absolutely nonpolitical setting and he imputed to them views that were politically useful to him in the moment.”

This lulu, along with Trump’s false claim that he had always been against the Iraq War, passed right by the NBC moderator, Matt Lauer. The morning TV host got easily lost in the Republican nominee’s word salads. He failed to bring up the Donald’s shift of position that very day on military spending, when he went from supporting sequestration, which slowed spending, to pledging a huge increase of tens of billions in outlays in what is likely an effort to get votes in militaryheavy, must-win states such as Virginia and Florida.

Lauer also didn’t confront Trump on some of the more glaring inconsistencies in his military agenda: that he would allow veterans to go outside the VA system for care and would cover the additional cost by eliminating that old favorite, “waste, fraud and abuse.” Then there was his earlier assertion that if women hadn’t joined the military, there would be no sexual assaults. That was an echo of his earlier advice to women that if they didn’t like being sexually harassed at work they should change jobs. This was before he hired former Fox Chairman Roger Ailes, who recently resigned in the wake of a multi-decade harassment scandal.

Not that Clinton bathed herself in glory last week, except when she batted back the

ridiculous Trump claim that her coughing spell in Ohio on Labor Day indicated that that she’s morbidly unhealthy. Her retort: “I’m allergic to Trump.”

Then there’s the email imbroglio that Clinton just can’t seem to put to rest, ensuring that it’ll be with us until Election Day, and perhaps beyond. Lauer asked the former secretary of state about it three times. She replied wearily, but never quite grabbed back the reins to give her strategic vision for the world.

Unlike Trump, she has experience dealing with the military and veterans, but she didn’t get personal. She categorically said that no U.S. troops would “ever” be sent to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State, even though she certainly knows that politicians should never say “never.” When she rose from her seat, she looked like a courtroom lawyer defending a client, which she may well have been doing.

Trump smiled all the while.

And he had reason to be cheerful: He encountered no challenges as he blithely threatened to remove top generals, who he said had been “reduced to rubble” by Obama; said the U.S. should plunder the oil of the countries where it intervenes; and described President Vladimir Putin as “a leader far more than

our president has been.” The high praise was driven in part by the Russian autocrat’s strength and high approval ratings, but mainly

by Putin’s good judgement in calling Trump “brilliant.”

As a preview of the debates, the forum was disturbing, at least when it comes to holding the candidates’ feet to the fire. One future moderator, Chris Wallace, has said that he won’t be a “truth squad,” which is unfortunate.

Corrections have to be made when the cameras are rolling, otherwise the door is open to self-serving interpretations. At a rally in Cleveland on Thursday, Trump used an “education speech” to do an instant replay of the previous night’s forum, painting Clinton as the liar and himself as the winner of every round.

Post-Labor Day, Trump had an opening to assure worried Republicans that he is prepared -or at least adequately preparing -to be president. Clinton, on a new plane with room for reporters, could have exhaustively and non-testily explained the e-mail controversy without expecting full exoneration, which will never come.

So much for that.

Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-9-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Jules Witcover

Trump’s Campaign is a House of Cards With Labor Day now behind us, the final drive for the presidency has begun. But there seems to be a kind of pause in the race as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton circle each other before their first nationally televised debate at Hofstra University less than three weeks away.

In terms of key policy issues, Trump continues to parade his plan to build a great wall across our southern border and have Mexico pay for it. Clinton, meanwhile, focuses on her wide governmental experience and his total lack of it.

Trump offers little, however, on how that wall will be built, who will build it and how he will make Mexico pay for it. In a terse tweet after a meeting with Trump in Mexico City, President Enrique Pena Nieto flatly rejected the notion that his country would shell out for it.

Trump’s guarantee that the antiimmigration wall will be built comes in the form of his customary “Believe me” assurance. Presumably his ofttouted mastery of “the art of the deal” will somehow turn around the Mexican president.

let alone that Mexico will be made to pony up for it?

In a Gallup Poll dated July 20, twothirds of respondents said they were against building a wall or deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants already here. An overwhelming 84 percent said they favored a path to citizenship for them, an option advocated

by Hillary Clinton. Some 38 percent of Republicans said they opposed the wall and 48 percent were against the forced deportations.

Trump in his memo to the Post also mentioned new trade tariffs on Mexican goods and cancellation of visas as further threats to encourage compliance.

These steps have not been spelled out in Trump’s numerous massive rallies around the country.

Indeed, the entire Trump campaign pitch is a collection of emotional pleas and promises devoid of details of how he would bring them to fruition as president.

This includes his hazy foreign policy agenda marked by hostility toward the NATO allies concerning their financial contributions.

Also very worrisome to many in the During the Republican primaries, American national security establishment Trump sent a two-page memo to The is his apparent coziness with Russian Washington Post describing how he President Vladimir Putin, especially in would get his way. If elected, he said, he would alter the USA Patriot Act by executive order to deny money transfers known as remittances from Mexicans illegally in the United States to their relatives back home.

The maneuver, he said, would constitute “a one-time payment of $5 to $10 billion” to pay for the wall, which he has estimated elsewhere would cost about $8 billion. Trump suggested that as much as $25 billion goes to Mexico from illegal aliens in the U.S., though the Government Accounting Office has said not all such remittances would be from Mexican immigrants.

President Obama, responding to what he called one of “the wackier questions” about the wall, said that “the notion that we’re going to track every Western Union bit of money that’s being sent to Mexico ... good luck with that.”

Do many Americans truly believe that such a physical barrier will ever be built,

light of reports of Russian hacking into American election cyberspace.

In all, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a house of cards, with his wild idea of a border wall as its shaky centerpiece. He now seems to be waffling on certain aspects of his immigration platform, and his new campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway, has promised only that details are “to be determined.” Finding himself under criticism from various quarters, Trump first said there would be “a softening” of his hard line -- and then that there wouldn’t.

At the forthcoming first debate, Trump’s house of cards almost certainly will come under structural scrutiny.

Both the Trump faithful and the Trump doubtful will be watching and listening, closely, to see how it holds up under greater pressure than that delivered by those adoring rallies chanting “Build the Wall!”

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast. net.

(C) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

9-7-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Jonathan Bernstein

Trump’s Ignorance Shows Disdain For Military It would have been nice to have been able to compare the candidates for president of the United States, and their plans for the military, veterans and national affairs.

It would have helped to describe how Matt Lauer and NBC could have done a better job in orchestrating their so-called Commander in Chief forum on Wednesday night. It might have been useful to discuss how Hillary Clinton could have avoided giving up a third of her halfhour to questions about her emails. (Answer: It might have helped if she had held regular press conferences over the last year to deal with that issue.)

But none of these subjects seems even as remotely relevant as the plain fact that the Republican nominee demonstrated yet again how he is entirely unprepared to be president.

Donald Trump’s answers on Wednesday night rarely reached the level of “wrong.”

Mostly what he said was incoherent gibberish.

For example, consider his “answers” when asked about the seeming contradictions in his “position” on ISIS. He could not explain his new idea for demanding a plan from “the generals” to defeat Islamic State. Nor would he explain how his old secret plan was going to work. Or why he says he knows more about Islamic State than U.S. generals.

He simply babbled about firing all the current generals.

Or about listening to them if they had a better plan. He said nothing at all to show he knew anything about what generals do, or what presidents do, or anything else.

For example: He’s still saying “take the oil” as

a supposed solution for what to do about Iraq.

When challenged (and I don’t remember his being challenged on this before), he explained that, well, Iraq has a lot of oil. He didn’t supply guidance for how much it would cost in dollars and lives to guard “the oil” indefinitely, or how other nations in the region and allies elsewhere would react if the U.S. acted as an imperial power, extracting resources from conquered provinces. Trump has a line, and he’s sticking to it.

already exist. Oh, and these assaults are a big problem.

His answer to a question about veterans was basically to say that veterans love him.

And, by the way, Vladimir Putin loves him, too.

This doesn’t even include that Trump is still lying about opposing the war in Iraq (he didn’t until it started going bad) and the intervention in Libya. He introduced a new whopper, claiming that he knew from the “body language” of Barack Obama’s national security officials that they oppose everything the president has done. Needless to say, whatever the officials believe, they certainly weren’t going to act so unprofessionally. Trump is slamming them by making the claim.

When asked about sexual assault in the military, Trump just said it was a big problem, and defended his earlier claim that it stemmed from having men and women in the military together.

He mentioned something about creating courts in the When asked what he military to handle assault has done to prepare for the cases -- these, of course, presidency, about the best he could offer was that he has (supposedly) met with the retired generals and admirals who have endorsed him.

As appalling as all this is, there is something that tops the list: As far as anyone can tell, Trump really thinks he’s prepared for the presidency.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist.

He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-8-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Corrupt One Is Trump Better than anyone, Donald Trump made the case for why our campaign money system is rotten. Unsurprisingly, the prime example he used was himself.

“I was a businessman,” Trump explained at a Republican debate in August 2015.

“I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Bravo. Sort of. In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Republican primary voters seemed to reward Trump for saying that he bought off politicians right and left, as if admitting to soft bribery was a sign of what a great reformer he would be.

And it turns out that there is one candidate who was so metaphysically perfect, so personally close to him, that Trump tells us his (illegal) contribution to her was not designed to make sure she’d be “there” for him.

Meet Pam Bondi, Florida’s attorney general.

Trump would have us believe that it is pure coincidence that the Trump Foundation’s $25,000 contribution to Bondi on Sept. 17, 2013, was made four days after the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bondi’s office was considering joining a class-action lawsuit against Trump University. It was brought by customers who felt victimized by what sure looks in retrospect like a shameless rip-off operation. Weeks later, Bondi announced that Florida would not join the lawsuit after all.

Yes, when Trump needs something, he gets it.

Except that in this one case, Trump insists he wasn’t looking for anything. “I have just known Pam Bondi for years,” he said Monday. “I have a lot of respect for her.” It’s been hard to find evidence that Trump and Bondi were close before Sept.

17, 2013, although I suppose the time between then and now technically adds up to “years.”

The Donald’s affections did not stop there.

The Huffington Post revealed Tuesday that Trump also hosted a fundraiser for Bondi in March 2014 at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The invitation listed Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “special guests.”

However much he respects Bondi, Trump (or his minions) miraculously misreported

the improper donation to her. As David Fahrenthold recounted in The Washington Post, Trump paid a $2,500 penalty because nonprofit, tax-exempt foundations are barred by law from making campaign contributions.

The foundation not only didn’t mention the political gift in its tax filings. It made, Fahrenthold wrote, “a false listing, showing that the foundation had instead given [a] $25,000 gift to a Kansas nonprofit with a name similar to Bondi’s political group.

That gift did not exist. Trump had given nothing to the Kansas group.”

And on Wednesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog organization, filed a complaint asking the IRS to reopen the case because Trump may have violated a separate tax rule against “self-dealing” by nonprofits.

Hillary Clinton’s enemies keep coming back to the same old stories and try to freshen them up. It’s the server, the foundation, and the speaking fees. (The GOP has, for now, left Benghazi dormant, after eight congressional investigations.) Trump, on the other hand, has left such a rich trail of shoddiness that on Aug. 30, David Graham of The Atlantic published an aptly named “cheat sheet” on “the many scandals of Donald Trump.” Graham helpfully noted that to “catalogue the full sweep of allegations would require thousands of words.”

Here, in the briefest form, is a selection from the Atlantic compendium: Trump University, Trump Institute, the beauty pageant scandals, racial discrimination in housing, questions about mafia ties, tenant intimidation, his various bankruptcies, the employment of undocumented workers (including models), breaking casino rules, refusing to pay workers and contractors, and using campaign funds to buy his own books.

Trump has run so many ethical stop signs over his long career that the media just can’t seem to keep up with the number of tickets he is due. Some of the scandals make mere cameo appearances and then disappear behind others.

Of course journalists should investigate and detail all of Clinton’s lapses and mistakes. But it is hugely misleading to take every new Trump scandal and match it up with a replay of one of the standby Clinton scandals -- and then pretend there is rough equality between the candidates on some scandal-o-meter.

There is not. Where sleaze and cornercutting are concerned, we all should pay proper tribute to Trumpian exceptionalism.

When it comes to the broken system he so accurately described, Trump is the star.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@ washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group 8-9-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Ruth Gadebusch

The Lesser of Evils Never did I expect to have such thoughts regarding this Presidential election. Make no mistake; I am still supporting Hillary Clinton; however, it is just not with the same joy and conviction.

There is still the excitement of the possibility of the first female President of this nation but it is tempered by all the revelations regarding her judgment. That holds true even though I am well aware that no one, man or woman, gets to such a high position without warts. I am equally aware that political opposition exaggerates every misstep and even concocts lies. Quite possibly no one has been more victimized by such than Hillary Clinton. Although allowing for that I am disturbed both by the email personal server and dealings with the Clinton Foundation.

Anyone with the experience of the Clintons should be well

aware of how their actions are perceived in the worst light.

Care was called for even if she never planned to run again and most of us doubt that anyone in her position would have given up the idea. That takes her actions back to judgment.

Perhaps worse, hubris simply took over. In which case she would hardly be the first one to be affected.

Having laid out all the above I emphasize that she is still so far superior to her chief opposition that it is questionable how anyone could choose him over her. Any faults she has are magnified ten times over not just by the other candidate but the party stalwarts supporting him.

It is on these latter that I really vent my wrath. As we would have said in my youth in the South the candidate was born that way and had a relapse but we expect better

form the politicians who have moved from outright condemnation to supporting him. There is no excusing that in any way shape, form, or fashion (another Southern description). It is putting party before nation.

Let me repeat: Supporting the Republican presidential candidate is putting party before nation. Simply put, the candidate is dangerous.

Perhaps some have hope because he changes his stand from hour to hour but that is more dangerous than one who has some off the wall view and sticks with it. At least the latter offers some indication of conviction and integrity. Lack of integrity is my strongest condemnation. The candidate has no beliefs except his requirement for attention.

The party folk jumping from attacking his foolishness to support now don’t even have the grace of changing their

minds with further insight into the candidate. After all, he has not changed. These new-found supporters don’t even bother to offer any reason except for party power.

There doesn’t seem to be an iota of concern for the dangers of having this sort of person in command of all the power of the office--power that no one else can rein in, much less control. The tri-partite form of government may place some restraint on the highest office in the land but there remains power like no other in the President’s hands.

For those who feel they cannot tolerate either of the major candidates two of the minor parties have candidates with some credibility, albeit limited.

Their experience is too weak for the highest office on the planet but, at least, they are not the crackpot opposition.

This takes me back to Hillary Clinton. She has superior qualifications to any of the other candidates. No human fails to make mistakes but her mistakes are not at the same level as that of her chief opposition. None of our male Presidents, including George Washington, have ever been pure. I suggest that we judge this woman by the same standards, catching up with other nations making her our first female President.

Whatever faults she may have they pale in comparison with the other choices. She is the qualified one in this election.

9-7-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Eugene Robinson

Trump Is Without Sense or Sensibility The most revealing moment in the presidential candidates’ first joint forum Wednesday night came when Donald Trump told the world how much he admires Vladimir Putin.

Never mind that the Russian strongman invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea.

Never mind that he supports the butcher Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Never mind that so many of his political opponents end up murdered or imprisoned. Never mind that U.S. officials suspect his government of trying to disrupt our election with cyberattacks. In Trump’s star-struck eyes, all of this makes him “a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”

Putin, you see, once paid Trump a compliment. “If he says great things about me,” Trump told moderator Matt Lauer, “I’m going to say great things about him.”

There you have it, folks, the distilled essence of Trump’s disgraceful campaign.

It’s not about immigration or foreign policy or making America “great again,” whatever that means. It’s entirely about Trump and his raging egomania.

Trump is sincere when he expresses preening self-regard. All the rest is just verbiage tossed with a light vinaigrette.

ground troops into Syria.” Those who worry she might prove too hawkish as president may feel relieved.

But the evening was really about Trump, and the stakes are far too high for him to be graded on a curve. No, he did not rant and rave like a crazy man or threaten to nuke anybody. But neither did he give the slightest indication he knew anything about the issues he was supposed to be talking about. Read the transcript and try to find one sensible and substantive thing he had to say.

On top of insisting that Putin is a great guy, Trump denigrated the U.S. military’s high command. “I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble,” he said. “They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country.”

Lauer recalled that Trump has long claimed to have a secret plan for defeating the Islamic State, but now says he would ask “the generals” to submit a plan within 30 days for victory over the terrorist group. Reminded that he has boasted that he knows more about the Islamic State than our military leaders do, yet now says he wants them to come up with a plan, The candidates appeared sequentially, Trump replied: “Well, they’ll probably be not face to face, at the USS Intrepid different generals, to be honest with you.” museum in New York before an audience of military service members and veterans.

The old aircraft carrier, commissioned during World War II and retired after Vietnam, was an apt setting for hearing the candidates’ positions on foreign and defense policy. But only one of them had anything meaningful to say.

Hillary Clinton went first and was immediately hit with a barrage of questions about her emails. Some commentators said afterward that she sounded defensive, but that line of criticism is absurd. How is one supposed to sound when pressed to defend oneself? Have we finally reached the point when a woman is allowed to speak forcefully on her own behalf? Or do we still expect, at all times, a demure smile?

As would be anticipated from a former senator and secretary of state, Clinton displayed her knowledge and experience.

The headline, I suppose, would be this pledge: “We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again. And we’re not putting

In other words, he promises a purge at the Pentagon. Maybe his friend Vladimir can give him pointers.

And there’s more: Trump repeated his complaint that the United States should have “taken the oil” in Iraq, noting that “it used to be, to the victor belong the spoils.”

Yes, that was true in the time of Genghis Khan. Today, under international law, plunder is a war crime -- and not the only one Trump wants our military to commit. He has said in the past that our forces also should practice torture “worse than waterboarding” against suspected terrorists. He would ask our service members to dishonor the uniform and all it represents.

Trump defended a 2013 tweet about the problem of sexual assault in the military in which he asked, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together?” He said the solution was to “set up a court system within the military.”

Unbelievable.

Face the truth: Trump has to be the most dangerously ignorant major-party presidential candidate in history.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group 8-9-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

11

Kathleen Peratis

The ‘Mad Men’ Days Are Finally Waning Gretchen Carlson got something out of the settlement of her sexual harassment case against Roger Ailes that most women who make a claim against a powerful man don’t obtain. Not the money - although the $20 million to be paid to the former Fox News Channel host is indeed eye-popping. Most women who bring successful sexual harassment claims do eventually receive some compensation.

Carlson is different in another way: She emerged with her honor and reputation intact. In my experience as a lawyer who has represented hundreds of sexual harassment victims, that is rare.

In the real world of sexual harassment cases that take place outside the public glare that accompanied Carlson’s claims, many women forgo making solid claims because they know they risk being depicted as liars or sluts. They worry about being branded troublemakers and suffering harm to their ability to 2009 book, “The Trump Card: be employed in the future.

Playing to Win in Work and Life,” when she wrote, “If I ignored Indeed, when Donald Trump, the inappropriate remarks, I questioned about Carlson’s might come across as weak. If I claim, said a few months ago responded too harshly, I’d be a that a woman who experiences tightly wound witch.” workplace sexual harassment should consider finding another What, then, accounts for job, or even another career, he Carlson’s success? First, there had - sadly - a point. was an avalanche of evidence.

I routinely tell clients It is impossible to overstate the considering making complaints importance of the corroboration that they should do so with the unearthed by Carlson’s legal full knowledge that staying at team and the investigation their job might well become commissioned by Fox. By untenable. Human resources some accounts, there were 20 employees know who signs their other women who also reported paychecks. They manage risk, inappropriatebehaviorfromAiles. which often means minimizing Corroboration gives weight to any complaints and smoothing over legal claim, but it is particularly problems without actually fixing crucial with allegations of sexual them. misconduct.

When victims decide to come That suspicion of sexual forward, they are often blamed, harassment claims echoes the doubted and subjected to legal system’s sad legacy of not retaliation. Ivanka Trump herself believing women who “cry” rape. confirmed she had experienced As recently as 50 years ago, most this “no-win situation” in her states would not allow a jury to

convict a man accused of rape based solely on the testimony of the victim.

Similar attitudes remain toward women making claims of sexual misconduct and are reflected in federal anti-discrimination law. Sexual harassment on the job was thought to be a private peccadillo and not a civil wrong until 1974. Anita Hill was disbelieved by many in 1991, and to this day under federal antidiscrimination law, individuals claiming sexual harassment have to jump through hoops not required of those alleging other kinds of discrimination, such as complaining internally, which discourages some women from coming forward at all. (Carlson avoided all this by simply suing Ailes himself under the New York City Human Rights Law.)

that things are getting better. The bad old “Mad Men” days, where Peggy Olson had to grin and bear harassing comments and behavior, are waning.

Generational differences are having an effect on workplace behavior. We have all heard that Rupert Murdoch’s children were appalled by Ailes and wanted to get to the bottom of Carlson’s claims.

Trump’s ignorant remarks reflect a “Mad Men” mentality, and they will come back to haunt him. He described one ugly reality. The Carlson settlement points us in a more hopeful direction.

Kathleen Peratis is a partner at the New York law firm Outten & Golden LLP, where she chairs the firm’s sexual harassment practice group. She is former director of the Women’s Rights Second, despite the still- Project of the American Civil requisite cautions for ordinary Liberties Union. sexual harassment plaintiffs, (c) 2016, Special to The Washington Post Carlson’s experience suggests 9-10-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Colbert King

Trump Is Good News For Russia “A New York Times report sheds new light on the close ties between Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and Kremlin cronies in Ukraine and elsewhere” - the Atlantic, Aug. 15. “U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections” - The Post, Sept. 6. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along, as an example, with Russia?” - Donald Trump, July 27.

Good grief.

One of the year’s most underreported stories is the Kremlin’s covert efforts to influence our presidential election - a development with potentially far- reaching impact on our nation’s security. That U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are reportedly investigating this broad Russian operation in the United States is reassuring. Voters heading to the polls, however, ought to be aware of the threat.

To be sure, my view of the former U.S.S.R. and today’s Russian Federation is rooted in both my military service and my work as a sworn federal law-enforcement officer with responsibility for the security of State Department personnel and sensitive information.

I was a newly minted U.S. Army second lieutenanton active duty in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy activated some 150,000 reservists in preparation for military conflict with the Nikita Khrushchev-led Soviet Union over the status of Berlin.

I was the duty officer on the October 1962 evening when the cable arrived at my upstate New York military post raising our alert status. Elsewhere, B-52s went on airborne alert for strikes within the Soviet Union, and plans were developed for a strike on Cuba. It was a crisis brought on by the discovery of Russian attempts to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. Thirteen days on the brink of nuclear war.

There was nothing abstract about the Cold War. In August 1968, we watched from the U.S. Embassy in Bonn as Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to break the back of the reform movement there.

It wasn’t only what we saw, but also what we knew, that convinced us Russia was a chief adversary. There was the fact of Sovietbloc agents embedded in West Germany surrounding our diplomatic missions. It was a country filled with Soviet-controlled spies out to obtain classified information through

the recruitment of our staff or the technical penetration of our facilities.

Donald “wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia” Trump undoubtedly will put down this column as a throwback to days long gone. It’s now a Russia led by Vladimir Putin, a man who Trump gushed is “so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

Espionage sagas are things of the past, the man who lavishes praise on KGB veteran Putin might say.

He would be wrong.

The U.S.S.R.’s annexation of the Baltic States in the 1940s has nothing on Putin.

Recall Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The KGB may be gone, but Russian foreign intelligence, operating with the initials “SVR,” is thriving.

Proof: Evgeny Buryakov, the Russian agent who, beginning in 2012, operated undercover as a banker in New York City gathering intelligence, trading coded messages with other Russian spies who sent clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. He was caught, was indicted and pleaded guilty in March.

There’s the reported Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the release of 20,000 DNC emails. Jumping to Putin’s defense, Trump said at NBC News’ Wednesday night national security forum, “Well, nobody knows that for a fact.” Tell that to the intelligence community.

Then there was the temporary elevation of Paul Manafort to Trump campaign chairman - the same Manafort who helped elect former

Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych president in Ukraine. After Yanukovych failed to sign a European Union trade deal, he fled protests in Ukraine for Putin’s Russia - and his ouster sparked Russian intervention in Ukraine.

The same Manafort whose Trump campaign team at the Republican convention in Cleveland, my Post colleague Josh Rogin reported, “orchestrated a set of events to make sure that the GOP would not pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.”

With media attention drawn to allegations of secretive payments for his Ukraine work - which he denies - Manafort quit the campaign.

Then there’s Trump himself.

Reports The Post: “There is strong evidence that Trump’s businesses have received significant funding from Russian investors.”

Turn over the keys to Trump, who mingles with Putin’s Russian oligarchs, hustles business opportunities in Moscow, blithely looks past Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and glosses over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its support for Iran and Bashar Assad in Syria? Who says the NATO-member Baltic states can count on our help only if threatened by Russia if they have “fulfilled their obligations to us”? Who says of Russian election meddling: “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do”?

No wonder Putin, covert manipulator of the West, smirks.

In Donald Trump, Russia will never have had it so good.

Something voters may wish to think about. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 9-10-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

13

John Young

Tell Us About That Immigrant Scourge, Mr. Builder He was in a pinch, on a deadline, and short on cash. So the employer hired undocumented workers.

Working day and night, they demolished a building that the employer ultimately would replace with a structure that would make him a lot of money.

When the workers complained about pay and dangerous conditions, the employer threatened to have them deported.

That employer: Donald Trump.

Reporting on this (how many of his supporters know this?), Time magazine quotes Trump’s own associate as saying the Polish nationals doing the groundwork that preceded Trump Tower in 1980 were paid “starvation wages.”

Illegal immigration is a scourge, unless it makes you money.

Listening to profiteers like Trump painting those horror stories about illegal immigration, it sounds to me like those high-profile sorts who, strumming Bibles to denounce homosexuals, later are found to be batting on both sides of the plate.

Hypocrites.

Adlai Stevenson had this to say about Trump’s kind of politicians: The type who would “chop down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.”

It is sadly fascinating to see the ranks of the most alarmist people when it comes to this issue.

Recently the governing board of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department rejected a proposal by the federal government to use the shuttered Corsicana State Home for housing Central American children who came into the country illegally.

The objective: temporary

shelter for the children until problem unless big business their relatives can take them. can exploit them. And if they’re dark-skinned adolescents, who Leaders in the city of wants them?

Corsicana supported the idea A newly released Gallup as a way to use a facility whose study of Trump supporters closing hurt the local economy. finds this: Those who are But Texas Republican leaders, the most strident about led by Gov. Greg Abbott, were immigration are the least likely more interested in posturing. to encounter an immigrant in They dare not be seen as their neighborhoods. In other capitulating to President Obama words, they know not what about anything, particularly they would demonize. immigration.

In the case of Latino Pompously, Republican State immigrants, says the study, Sen. Brian Birdwell said he individuals in areas with would not “validate the mass heavy Hispanic populations, influx of immigrants” manifest particularly close to the border, in this proposal, denouncing are more hospitable to them, the president’s “willful and less hospitable toward malfeasance” of immigration Trump. law. Harrumph.

Reports Gallup, “Those who Big words, small attitudes. view Trump favorably are more Of course, what this president likely to be found in white is doing with these children, as enclaves -- racially isolated zip with Syrian refugees, is what codes.” all developed countries do in times of humanitarian crisis. In other words, the They help. likelihood that these people Texas Republicans know would ever encounter, or ever what Trump knows: Illegal be impacted by, undocumented immigrants are a serious individuals is slim to none.

These Trump supporters are living a white-flight fantasy but have no reason to flee.

We don’t need Gallup to tell us that in whatever case of stereotyping and alarmist generalizations, whether the objects of the generalizations are Mexicans, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, or anyone else from a world of difference, people resolved to live in that world are more understanding.

Those who never interact with Muslims, who hardly ever see a black person except on ESPN, or who for all they know are surrounded by 100 percent pure churchgoing heterosexuals — those oblivious sorts are the most inclined to fear them.

So, Mr. Trump, when you build that wall, will you be using Poles?

Mexicans?

Syrians? Whom?

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado.

Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail. com.

9-5-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Timothy Egan

The Conscience of the Contrarian Voter I met Gary Johnson, the somewhatsurging Libertarian Party candidate for president, years ago in one of those beautiful Western settings full of mostly awful people at the time — that is, lobbyists and various sycophants who attach themselves to any gathering of power.

He was then the Republican governor of New Mexico, a rare politician with a glib sense of humor, rolling his eyes as his fellow Western politicians sucked up to bolo-tied suits from the oil industry. We talked mostly about marathons and mountains; he’s run the 26-mile race in less than three hours, and climbed the apex of the planet, Mount Everest, as well.

I liked him instantly. And as I’ve followed him since then, my regard for Johnson has grown. Now that he’s running for president, and polling at 15 percent or better in at least 15 states, would I ever vote for him?

Not a chance. And this was before he blanked out on national television Thursday in a question about Syria. Johnson favors many things a thoughtful independent could agree with — a less interventionist foreign policy, an end to the insanity of the drug war, calling out Donald Trump for his racism. And he favors many bad things: no immediate action to counter climate change, health care cuts to the most vulnerable, repealing Wall Street regulations.

A voter of conscience, in a normal year, could go for Johnson and feel OK about it.

But this year, in a tight election, any vote by an independent or a Democrat for Johnson could burden that citizen with a lifetime of guilt for handing the world over to Trump.

His presidency could “lead to the end of civilization,” as his own ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz has said.

Commendably, Johnson has stopped using pot during his run for the White House. “I want to be completely on my game,” he says. But too often, he offers the stoner shrug when asked what he stands for, saying you should just Google him. When you Google him, you’re likely to find something about pot and Googling him.

That’s not a serious campaign. But again, I find Johnson personally refreshing, as he showed with his reaction to the Syria gaffe, saying that his response had removed “any doubt that I’m human.” And I’m assuming that Johnson is taking away slightly more votes from Hillary Clinton than from Trump.

But if you’re leaning toward Trump, by all the White House. If the global emergency of means make the switch to the affable Gary climate change is your issue, as it certainly Johnson. is for many Stein supporters, your Green Party vote may be just enough to ensure that Well then, what about Jill Stein, the the man who calls climate change a hoax Green Party candidate? She’s polling in hastens the end of nature as we know it. You the low single digits, but she still might get may feel good about it; the planet will not. more votes than the 2.9 million that Ralph I asked Bill McKibben, who may one day Nader received in 2000. You remember win a Nobel Prize for his decades of alarmthose Nader voters who insisted there was sounding about life-altering changes to no difference between Al Gore and George Earth, what a progressive drawn to a thirdW. Bush. The world is a far sadder, far more party candidate should do. tragic place, in part because the Naderites “My thinking is that the point of elections helped to tip the balance to a man who, like is not to find a savior,” said McKibben, who Trump, is cocksure of only one thing — his was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders. ignorance. Forget about the mess of Florida. What matters is the movement toward In just one state, New Hampshire, the Nader change, he said. But this year is different. vote was enough to give the presidency to Trump “is bad in a unique (in American Bush. presidential history) way that scares me to Stein said she would put Edward Snowden the marrow.” in her Cabinet, because, I guess, there would And that’s the crucial point. Trump then be no state secrets at all! Her running should scare anyone with a brain and a mate, Ajamu Baraka, has called President heart. Just this week, he showed again how Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom.” Stein is far he would move the United States to a protest candidate, recently arrested for the dark side, gushing about his soul mate protesting. It’s an honorable role, and I wish Vladimir Putin, and dreaming of a plunder her well in future protests. force under our flag, stealing oil from the I get that a majority of Americans think Mideast. In years to come, every American the current two-party system is failing us. voter will be held to account for what they Clinton is not inspiring. Trump is a monster did in 2016. There’s no free pass. who lies the way some people clear their c.2016 New York Times News Service throat. But if you want failure, give Trump 9-9-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

15

Matthew Winkler

Ask Colorado If Infrastructure Spending Works Here’s something all of divided America should be able to agree on: Smart infrastructure investment works. For evidence, look at Colorado, where elected officials of both parties trace an economic boom to a decision 27 years ago to spend more than $2 billion on a new Denver airport.

The Denver International Airport was the brainchild of Federico Pena, who was elected mayor in 1983 and who would become the Secretary of the Transportation and Energy departments in the Clinton administration. It was assailed as a boondoggle by some local businessmen in a campaign led by Roger Ailes, then a Republican media consultant and later the impresario of Fox News.

The airport was financed by revenue bonds, which proved to be among the best performers in the market for state and local government debt. Today it is the linchpin of Colorado’s transition to a global 21st-century economy flush with high-paying jobs and enhanced by daily nonstop flights to Asia, Central America and Europe.

Colorado has many economic advantages, from shale to ski resorts and beyond, but state officials say the new airport was the catalyst needed to set off the boom.

“It’s foundational,” Gov. John W. Hickenlooper said in an interview last month in his statehouse office. “I mean we look at infrastructure” as the central element “to build our new economy around.”

The airport is seven times the size of Stapleton Airport, which it replaced in 1995 as the largest public-works project in Colorado history.

It still is the only major new U.S. airport since Dallas-

Fort Worth in 1974. Even though the plan for the new airport was approved by 65 percent of Denver voters in 1989, some airline executives resented its cost and didn’t think it was needed. Robert L. Crandall, the chairman of American Airlines, told Time Magazine in October 1991 that the facility was “a field of dreams” where “a lot of money is being poured into building a great big airport way out in the boonies,” 24 miles from downtown. “There is no need for a new airport in Denver,” he said.

On the contrary, the DIA’s annual economic impact today exceeds $26 billion, more than eight times Stapleton’s in 1984, according to George Karayiannakis, the airport’s director of financial risk and analysis. It has generated more than 270,000 jobs, almost twice the comparable figure for Stapleton 32 years ago, and $295 million in concession gross revenue, compared to $45 million for Stapleton in 1994 (about $73 million after adjusting for inflation).

Passenger traffic was a record 27.5 million for the six months through June, up 6.8 percent from 2015. Stapleton had 33.1 million passengers in all of 1994.

Denver’s population during the past five years surged 10 percent to about 700,000 as the fastest-growing major American city after Austin, Texas, overtaking Baltimore, Boston, Detroit and Washington as it climbed to No. 19 from No. 22 in 2010, according to data compiled Bloomberg. As the Denver population booms, the city’s and state’s unemployment rates remain among the lowest at 3.8 percent, more than a percentage point below the

national average of 4.9 percent, according to Bloomberg data.

The DIA’s success helped put Denver at the top for U.S. homeowners with aboveaverage growth and belowaverage price fluctuations.

During the past 30 years, the housing market for Denver produced the second-best return after Portland, Oregon, adjusted for price swings of the 20 major cities in the U.S., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Denver, unlike any other major city, has been among the top five performers over 10 years and 5 years, reflecting its capacity for both fast and steady growth. During the past year, mortgage delinquency in the state declined 22 percent, the fourth-best result after Florida, Oregon and the state of Washington.

Colorado’s economy, meanwhile, is leaving behind its reliance on mining and energy. Since 2012, the accommodations and food services industry grew 22.5 percent, faster than in any other state except Texas and California, according to Bloomberg data. Health care and social assistance companies expanded 17.4 percent, the most for any state. Wholesale trade grew 17.7 percent, the fourth best in the U.S. Since 2014 and finance and insurance grew 7.4 percent, bettered only by Utah and Nevada. Today, material and energy make up less than 30 percent of the total market capitalization of Colorado’s publicly-traded companies, down from 53 percent in 2010.

Colorado’s bet on infrastructure has been a bonanza for investors as well.

The DIA’s bonds during the past five years provided a total

return (price appreciation and income) of 19 percent, better than Atlanta, Orlando and Houston, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Municipal bonds sold by Colorado have the sixth-best return of any state and returned 8.8 percent the past 12 months, a percentage point more than the U.S. average. Bonds sold by the E-470 Public Highway Authority returned 23 percent the past year.

Back in 1984, “a year into my administration, we fell into a major recession,” Pena recalled in a telephone interview last month. “Our unemployment rate was two points above the national average. We had a 30 percent office vacancy rate in downtown Denver. The state of Colorado actually had a net loss of population which had never happened before.

Every sector of the economy imploded.” He said shrinking city revenues persuaded local politicians that “we had to invest.”

“We had Republicans, Democrats and Independents coming together to get the airport approved, financed and built,” Pena said. “We understood we had to diversify from what for the past 90 years was referred to as the boom and bust economy.”

The 2016 presidential election is 62 days away and both candidates have urged a greater commitment to national infrastructure. Colorado shows why this national priority could be the gift that keeps on giving.

With assistance from Shin Pei. Winkler, the the editor-inchief emeritus of Bloomberg News, is a Bloomberg View columnist. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-6-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Ian Bateson

In Ukraine, Live By The Pen, Die By The Sword On the morning of July 20, the idyllic calm of Kiev’s leafy center was shattered.

A bomb planted beneath award-winning journalist Pavel Sheremet’s red Subaru exploded, killing him instantly and raining down fiery debris on the quiet boulevard. Triggered by remote control, the assassination was intentionally visible, loud, and meant to send a message. What made the loss so hard for Kiev’s journalist community was that the 44-year-old Sheremet had survived the intimidation and censorship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, moving from his native Belarus to Russia and finally to Ukraine, fleeing authoritarian presidents who aimed to control the press to secure their own political stability.

Sheremet’s death has made many in the media fear that Ukraine has returned to its darker days of journalism.

Whether or not Sheremet’s killing was meant to send a message, the authorities’ response has sent its own.

Knowing Ukraine’s miserable record for investigating violence against journalists, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko quickly announced that U.S. investigators from the FBI would also be joining the case. But in the months since Poroshenko’s announcement, the investigation has stalled or never started in the first place - to date, there have been no arrests, and no suspects have been identified. Even a statement by the prosecutor-general noting that the first deputy head of the national police had Sheremet under surveillance before the killing was not enough to impel the official to return early from his vacation to answer questions.

Sheremet’s murder is an unpleasant reminder that Ukraine is fighting another war beyond the ongoing conflict with proRussian separatists, one where journalism has become a new and dangerous front.

The fight against institutionalized corruption that drove the Maidan protests in the winter of 2014 rages on - and journalists have become a major target. The Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a Kiev-based nongovernmental organization, has recorded 113 criminal offenses against reporters so far in 2016.

This new violence, as well as the government’s lack of response, is reminiscent of the intimidation and

censorship that the media faced under the regimes of former Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych. The most infamous murder in Ukraine’s media history came in 2000, when Georgiy Gongadze, the founder of the country’s premiere investigative publication Ukrayinska Pravda, was abducted and later decapitated. At a time of increasing media repression under then-President Kuchma, Gongadze was investigating the leader’s links to corrupt businesses and, prior to his abduction, had said he was being harassed by the country’s security services. Recordings of Kuchma, publicly released in November 2000 by opposition politician Oleksandr Moroz, which were passed on from one of the president’s bodyguards, caught Kuchma ordering the killing of Gongadze in coded language. In the years that followed, successive investigations have failed to prove in court who ordered the murder, despite the recordings. Every year on Sept. 16, the day Gongadze was abducted, Ukrainian journalists march down Kiev’s main boulevard holding aloft the images of killed journalists. This year, Sheremet will be added to the list.

In May, Myrotvorets, or “Peacemaker,” a Ukrainian website that claims to reveal information about the “enemies of Ukraine” and is strongly suspected of having government links, published the names, employers, email addresses, and phone numbers of more than 4,000 local and international journalists who had obtained press credentials from separatists to cover the war in the east. Myrotvorets labeled thousands of journalists, the majority of them Ukrainian or from Western countries, accomplices to terrorism, making their contact information freely available to the public and open for harassment.

Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, promoted the list of names on social media.

Amid international criticism, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov defended his department’s actions on Facebook, saying that Myrotvorets was an ally and more important to him than complaining “liberal separatists.”

The leak and official response were a major step backward for Ukraine and its government, still struggling to live up to the lofty popular expectations of reform following the Maidan protests that ousted Yanukovych. After weeks of outcry from journalists and mounting international pressure on Kiev, Poroshenko finally condemned the Myrotvorets leak. But

The recent backsliding on press freedom has been fueled in large part by the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, where reporting on the conflict has brushed up against rising nationalism in the country. Bateson continued on page 17

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

17

Ian Bateson

In Ukraine, Live By The Pen, Die By The Sword Bateson continued from page 16 even in that brief moment of hope, there were signs that Ukrainian leaders failed to understand what journalism is and why it’s necessary. In the same statement, Poroshenko called on journalists not to write negative articles about Ukraine.

Emboldened by the lack of official response, another leak soon followed that contained journalists’ correspondences with an official from separatist-held Donetsk who was responsible for evaluating requests for accreditation and scans of their passports. Since the original leak of information in May, media freedom in Ukraine has continued to erode. Poroshenko’s statement was doubtlessly an attempt to hedge international criticism and growing domestic sentiment that journalists were somehow working against Ukraine. But, in practice, the compromise meant that in the months after no legal action followed the condemnation of the list and attacks against reporters have become more frequent.

journalist Anna Nemtsova, who received threats after writing a series of articles for the Daily Beast in July and August. On September 4 the studio of Inter TV, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and considered by many Ukrainians to provide pro-Russian coverage, caught fire in a potential arson incident during a protest against the channel. Though it is unclear whether these events represent an organized campaign, they are a threat to governmental reform and transparency in Ukraine.

In recent months, a common topic of conversation with journalists in Kiev has been the failure of police investigations to stop menacing intimidation.

As always, it is the local journalists who face the most harassment and are the most vulnerable. After Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh published an article on the business interests of a member of parliament from Yanukovych’s former party, she began receiving death threats. Berdynskykh went public with the threats on Facebook and spent hours in police stations providing evidence and filling out forms, but months later the investigations have failed to yield any results. Russianborn journalist Katerina Sergatskova received a phone call threatening the life of her infant after her name - and phone number - were included on the first list released by Myrotverets. She also received threats over Facebook against her life, but after informing a police officer investigating the Myrotvorets leak, she says no action has been taken.

This capped off what had already been a troubling summer for journalists in Ukraine. A day before Sheremet was murdered, Maria Rydvan, who works for Forbes’s Ukrainian outlet, was stabbed multiple times, and days later journalist Sergey Golovnev was followed on the street and beaten. In July, Hromadske TV was the victim of a pro-government troll attack seeking to tar the independent television station as a traitor for its critical coverage of nationalist groups. Foreign journalists who have criticized the deterioration of the media Despite the innate danger environment have also come of working in this tense under fire, like Russian environment, the journalist

community in Ukraine was initially divided on how to react. To be a journalist is to deal with a certain amount of harassment, especially if you write about politically charged topics while the country remains on a war footing.

Some felt that though they may receive threats, the likelihood of anyone following through was slim. But the murder of Sheremet has changed this calculus.

What has become clear is that government officials can’t - or won’t - protect journalists. Tetiana Popova, Ukraine’s deputy minister of information policy, resigned on Aug. 3, over what she said was the government’s failure to take threats against journalists seriously. “I personally went to [the] national police and gave some information to [the] investigator from [the] national police, but nothing happened,” she said in an interview with Hromadske TV, referring to the information she gave police after receiving threats for defending journalists publicly following the Myrotvorets leak. According to Popova, almost all the cases involving threats against journalists and their defenders aren’t being investigated properly, including her own.

Beyond the inadequate response from authorities, there is also increasing evidence that forces in the Ukrainian government are working to intimidate the media. The International Federation of Journalists has said state security services are believed to have “close links” with the elements responsible for the Myrotvorets leak.

Oksana Romanyuk, the director of IMI and the Ukrainian representative for the press freedom organization

Reporters Without Borders, sees Myrotvorets as an outgrowth of an earlier progovernment “internet army” project, which was composed of volunteers originally organized by the Ministry of Information in 2015 to counter Russian propaganda online. There is currently not enough evidence to prove that Myrotvorets or those behind the troll attack on Hromadske TV are directly linked to Kiev, but there is growing concern among journalists and watchdog organizations that government forces could be using such outsourced operations to try to silence critics while dodging culpability.

If the media climate continues to decline, it will sabotage Ukraine’s ability to emerge as a modern and transparent country.

For now, there are still levers of international pressure to influence Ukrainian leaders during this rocky transition stage. The perpetrators of Pavel Sheremet’s murder need to be brought to justice, threats to journalists must be taken seriously, and there needs to be accountability for coordinated online attacks on journalists and their reputations. Any less is to leave Ukraine to drift back into a country where a silenced press hides the egregious actions of its leaders and where corruption flourishes amid willful opacity - just like Belarus and Russia, the countries Sheremet left behind.

Bateson is a foreign correspondent based in Ukraine. He is working on a book about Ukrainian identity after the Maidan revolution.

Follow him on Twitter: @ ianbateson (c) 2016, Foreign Policy 9-6-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Matt Levine

Well’s Fargo Opened Up A Couple Million Fake Accounts

Two basic principles of management, and regulation, and life, are: - You get what you measure.

- The thing that you measure will get gamed.

Really that’s just one principle: You get what you measure, but only exactly what you measure. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the more general good thing that you thought you were approximately measuring.

If you want hard workers and measure hours worked, you’ll get a lot of workers surfing the internet until midnight. If you want low banking bonuses and measure bonus-to-basesalary ratios, you’ll get high base salaries.

Measurement is sort of an evil genie: It grants your wishes, but it takes them just a bit too literally.

Anyway, Thursday Wells Fargo was fined $185 million by various regulators for opening customer accounts without the customers’ permission, and that is bad, but there is also something almost heroic about it. There’s a standard story in most bank scandals, in which small groups of highly paid traders gleefully and ungrammatically conspire to rip-off customers and make a lot of money for themselves and their bank.

This isn’t that. This looks more like a vast uprising of low-paid and ill-treated Wells Fargo employees against their bosses. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which fined Wells Fargo $100 million, reports that about 5,300 employees have been fired for signing customers up for fake accounts since 2011. Five thousand three hundred employees! You’d have a tough time organizing 5,300 people into a conspiracy, which makes me think that this was less a conspiracy and more a spontaneous revolt.

The Los Angeles City Attorney, which got $50 million (the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency got the other $35 million), explained the employees’ grievances in a complaint last year: “Wells Fargo has strict quotas regulating the number of daily “solutions” that its bankers must reach; these “solutions” include the opening of all new banking and credit card accounts. Managers constantly hound, berate, demean and threaten employees to meet these unreachable quotas. Managers often tell employees to do whatever it takes to reach their quotas. Employees who do not reach their quotas are often required

to work hours beyond their typical work schedule without being compensated for that extra work time, and/or are threatened with termination.

“The quotas imposed by Wells Fargo on its employees are often not attainable because there simply are not enough customers who enter a branch on a daily basis for employees to meet their quotas through traditional means.”

So they resorted to non-traditional means. Like: “In the practice known at Wells Fargo as ‘pinning,’ a Wells Fargo banker obtains a debit card number, and personally sets the PIN, often to 0000, without customer authorization. “Pinning” permits a banker to enroll a customer in online banking, for which the banker would receive a solution (sales credit). To bypass computer prompts requiring customer contact information, bankers impersonate the customer online, and input false generic email addresses such as 1234@wellsfargo.com, noname@ wellsfargo.com, or none@wellsfargo.com to ensure that the transaction is completed, and that the customer remains unaware of the unauthorized activity.”

Is it not weird that all the fake email addresses were Wells Fargo addresses? I mean “noname” is obviously a weird email address, but maybe the customer was Norbert O’Name. But surely all the “@wellsfargo. com” accounts were a tip-off that the requests were coming from inside the building.

Anyway, it’s all pretty much as dumb as that, but on a scale that is magnificently, hilariously dumb. From the CFPB’s consent order: “Respondent’s analysis concluded that its employees opened 1,534,280 deposit accounts that may not have been authorized and that may have been funded through simulated funding, or transferring funds from consumers’ existing accounts without their knowledge or consent. That analysis determined that roughly 85,000 of those accounts incurred about $2 million in fees, which Respondent is in the process of refunding.”

And: “Respondent’s analysis concluded that its employees submitted applications for 565,443 credit-card accounts that may not

have been authorized by using consumers’ information without their knowledge or consent. That analysis determined that roughly 14,000 of those accounts incurred $403,145 in fees, which Respondent is in the process of refunding.

So that’s about 2.1 million fake deposit and credit-card accounts, of which about 100,000 -- fewer than 5 percent -- brought in any fee income to Wells Fargo. The total fee income was $2.4 million, or about $1.14 per fake account. And that overstates the profitability: Wells Fargo also enrolled people for debit cards and online banking, but the CFPB doesn’t bother to count those incidents, or suggest that any of them led to any fees. Which makes sense: You’d expect online banking and debit cards to be free, if you never use them or even know about them. Meanwhile, all this dumb stuff seems to have occupied huge amounts of employee time that could have been spent on more productive activities. If you divide the $2.4 million among the 5,300 employees fired for setting up fake accounts, you get about $450 per employee. Presumably it cost Wells Fargo way more than that just to replace them.”

In the abstract, you can see why Wells Fargo would emphasize cross-selling of multiple “solutions” to customers. It is a good sales practice; it both indicates and encourages customer loyalty. If your customers have a checking account, and a savings account, and a credit card and online banking, all in one place, then they’ll probably use each of those products more than if they had only one.

And when they want a new, lucrative product -- a mortgage, say, or investment advice -they’re more likely to turn to the bank where they keep the rest of their financial life.

But obviously no one in senior management wanted this. Signing customers up for online banking without telling them about it doesn’t help Wells Fargo at all. No one feels extra loyalty because they have a banking product that they don’t use or know about. Even signing them up for a credit card without telling them about it generally doesn’t help Wells Fargo, because people don’t use credit cards that they don’t know about. Cards with an annual fee are a different story -- at least you can charge them the fee! -- but it seems like customers weren’t signed up for many

Levine continued on page 20

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

19

Bobby Allyn

The Files of Credit Reporting Agencies Are Full of Errors

Apartment hunting in Philadelphia is already hectic enough. So relief washed over me when my girlfriend and I found a charming spot that worked for us. But before I was able to sign the lease, I received a call from the landlord, and he spoke slowly. He seemed concerned, and for good reason: After running a tenant screening on me using a service provided by the credit-reporting behemoth TransUnion, a clutch of criminal offenses appeared, including two felony firearms convictions.

He said it didn’t seem to square with what he had expected from a public-radio reporter moving from one trendy neighborhood to another.

It didn’t. I have never owned nor fired a weapon in my life.

The other charges the agency listed were equally as baffling, since they were just as made up.

A case of mistaken identity, I thought, should be easy to clear up.

I was wrong. It took me more than a dozen phone calls, the handiwork of a county court clerk and six weeks to solve the problem. And that was only after I contacted the company’s communications department as a journalist.

TransUnion is one of the largest consumer creditreporting agencies in the country, valued at around $4 billion. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, all credit-reporting agencies, are the three mostcomplained-about companies in America. These companies furnish reports for landlords to examine tenants, for banks to analyze borrowers, for insurance companies to figure out monthly rates and for employers to probe the backgrounds of potential hires - so they wield serious

influence over our financial lives and futures. But since 2012, according to the bureau, there have been more than 158,000 complaints against the three agencies, 80 percent of which are about incorrect information on credit reports. The agencies’ “primary duty is to make money,” says Chi Chi Wu, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center. “The consumer is not their customer. The consumer is their commodity.”

warrant had indicated that he was homeless. None of those details have ever described me. When I told all this to TransUnion, another representative said that the company would be in touch once it concluded its investigation; until then, the offenses would stay on its report.

Only after I told the company’s press office that I intended to write about this did I receive an email informing me that the charges had been “suppressed” from my consumer file as a As a reporter who covers “preventative measure.” courts, I’m better equipped than the average consumer to navigate Credit reports do not county judicial records. I’m also contain criminal history, but privileged enough to have a job agencies like TransUnion that sometimes allows me to offer a multitude of services turn a personal frustration into a that can uncover other parts of professional pursuit. But many a consumer’s life, including consumers are facing down criminal history. That’s how error-riddled credit files and it tapped Tennessee’s records don’t know where to begin. and conflated me with someone When I contacted else. And the agencies have no TransUnion, a customer-service incentive to fix a consumer’s representative pointed a finger file speedily. It can be a vexing at Rutherford County Circuit process, says Paul Stephens Court in Tennessee, which is with the Privacy Rights outside Nashville, where I used Clearinghouse.

“Consumers to live. The report simply grabs will often find that their dispute information provided by courts, enters a black hole,” Stephens the rep told me, after a full name said. and date of birth is queried. If I The Federal Trade thought something was wrong, Commission’s last large-scale I could file an internal dispute, study of credit reports, published which could take up to 30 days in 2012, found that 26 percent to complete. of the consumers it examined First I wanted to figure out how had at least one mistake in this had happened. So I called their files. And 5 percent had the court clerk in Tennessee, errors that could be devastating, who confirmed that I had no potentially denying lines of criminal record there. I provided credit to them and making things her with the case numbers that like auto insurance prohibitively TransUnion generated; the expensive. “To have that error defendant, unsurprisingly, had level, it’s akin to 5 percent of the same legal first name, last automobiles spontaneously name and middle initial. We accelerating and having an were also both born in 1987. accident, or 5 percent of planes But our similarities end there: falling from the sky,” Wu says.

He has half a dozen convictions. “We wouldn’t accept that error He’s black. He’s currently rate in other areas.” incarcerated. And an arrest This problem has spawned

scores of lawsuits against reporting agencies, state investigations and proposed federal regulations. In March 2015, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a settlement with the three major credit-reporting agencies, including TransUnion, after droves of New Yorkers leveled complaints that trumpedup information was not being removed from their reports.

Under the agreement, which 31 state attorneys general joined in a separate settlement two months later, the agencies vowed to overhaul their methods of fixing errors across the country.

The settlement also called for specially trained individuals to investigate internal disputes, instead of an automated process, which is how many of the credit firms handled complaints. Some of the major reforms are being implemented behind closed doors, so advocates say the effect of the settlements is still being studied.

In Washington, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., last year introduced a bill to further regulate “data brokers,” which supply agencies like TransUnion with some of their raw information. It would establish stronger procedures to ensure that information is vetted. It also would give consumers better means of disputing a credit file.

The legislation is stalled. But as my experience (more than a year after the multi-state settlement) and that of many others shows, only sweeping federal regulation can drive speedier reform at the credit-reporting agencies.

Until then, one way to push a complaint to the top of the heap is to go to court for remedy. Federal lawsuits filed against TransUnion in U.S.

Allyn continued on page 20

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Liberal Opinion Week

Continued from Page 18 and 19 Levine continued from page 18 of those. This isn’t a case of management pushing for something profitable and getting what they asked for, albeit in a regrettable and illegal way. This is a case of management pushing for something profitable but difficult, and the workers pushing back with something worthless but easy.

Not that the workers were happy: These tactics seem to have been less a fun way to put one over on the bosses, and more a desperate attempt to stop the pain. Some of them still sound pretty traumatized by all the berating: “When I worked at Wells Fargo, I faced the threat of being fired if I didn’t meet their unreasonable sales quotes every day, and it’s high time that Wells Fargo pays for preying on consumers’ financial livelihoods,” Khalid Taha, a former employee, said in a statement.

And of course the customers were unhappy.

Actually, it seems like a majority of them were unharmed and oblivious, but that’s a majority of a very large number. Thousands were charged fees, or had their credit damaged, or were generally creeped out by, you know, strangers using their personal information to open bank accounts on the internet. Even ignoring all the eventual fines, no one was made better off by this system. Wells Fargo’s customers were harmed, its employees were miserable, and it didn’t even really make any money doing it.

Eventually we will all stop reading and writing articles about Why No Senior Executives at Big Banks Went to Prison for the Financial Crisis, but that time isn’t quite yet. There are basically two views about the answer. One is that senior bankers knowingly countenanced fraud, but were good at covering it up, and prosecutors couldn’t quite find the smoking gun. The other is that fraud is sometimes an emergent property of complex institutions, and that there can be widespread misbehavior at a bank without senior management approving it, or knowing about it, or wanting it. This case is, I think, useful evidence for the latter view. “Wells Fargo knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, that its employees open unauthorized accounts,” said the L.A. City Attorney last year, but it’s hard to believe that any actual human in senior management wanted that to happen.

They wanted employees to open lots of

real accounts, and designed a system that they hoped would encourage that. But they designed it badly, and ended up instead encouraging employees to open a lot of fake accounts. That’s not what anyone wanted, but it happened anyway.

Levine is a Bloomberg View columnist. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-9-16

Allyn continued from page 19 district courts for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the law governing how credit agencies report information, have been mounting around the country.

The 1970 law was intended to ensure that agencies report carefully and accurately, but the onus is on the affected person to identify and challenge fictitious information, not on the agency for pushing out sloppy reports.

Consumers have to find the source of incorrect criminal information, “go back to the court and pull the docket, and get the correct information that needs to be sent by certified mail to these reporting agencies,” says Philadelphia lawyer Lou Schwartz, who has sued TransUnion many times.

Many consumers, though, may never even know that they have been smeared as criminals, turning false credit reports into de facto histories. My would-be landlord told me what he’d found, but he didn’t have to extend that courtesy. Employers are supposed to tell job applicants when they’re rejected because of something in a report, but they often don’t. (The agencies are each required to provide one free report per year, but with no reason to suspect something amiss, most consumers don’t ask.)

James Baker, who works in real estate in Allentown, Pa., wanted to expand his business, so he applied in 2015 for a professional license in several states, including Virginia and Florida. Those two states denied his application after he failed a credit check because of $4,000 in outstanding debt on a credit card. The problem was that no such debt existed, he says. Baker says he paid off his card in 2009. When he contacted the reporting agencies, they told him the debt was “verified accurate.” He never got his Virginia or Florida licenses, and he’s now locked in a federal lawsuit with TransUnion, Equifax, Experian and

Barclays, which issued the credit card.

A TransUnion supervisor told me to take a look at the fine print on the bottom of the report about me. It says that “the depth of information available varies” but that “every effort has been made to ensure accuracy or completeness.” By definition, though, the portrait of me created by the report is both inaccurate and incomplete. When I asked the company for a comment for this article, it said that “errors can happen” but it’s rare.

TransUnion says fewer than 1 percent of its tenant background screenings are disputed.

“We also encourage consumers to use our dispute process to remove any errors from our records,” said spokesman David Blumberg. Last year, its consumer disputes were resolved in less than two weeks on average, he said. He blamed a “processing delay” for the extra time it took TransUnion to complete its investigation into my file.

Keeping on TransUnion’s case about correcting my file and knowing what’s within my rights under the law are not cumbersome tasks for me, a professional reporter who pesters people for a living.

Finding the right court official to corroborate that the criminal offenses were connected to another person did not take too much effort, either. Yet for many other people whose files have been mixed up by credit agencies, or whose files show debt that has long been cleared, the avenues for recourse might not be as obvious. And when steps are taken to amend carelessly assembled files, agencies should act quickly, not drag the process out, throwing the helpless consumer in limbo.

In my case, the landlord allowed me to sign the lease, trusting my word when I said TransUnion had not just misrepresented but utterly distorted my background. But what about all the employers, landlords and insurance agents who are less gracious? And those who think the information presented to them on a TransUnion report is vetted and truthful? And how about all the consumers who don’t have the resources, know-how or time to confront the agency’s inefficient and frustrating dispute process? The legions of untold consumers who never take their misrepresentations to court, and instead allow their files to languish with falsehoods, are the ones who are most aggrieved.

Allyn is a staff reporter for NPR member station WHYY in Philadelphia.

Special To The Washington Post 9-8-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

21

Nicholas Kristof

Temperatures Rise, and We’re Cooked One of Donald Trump’s 100 wackiest ideas is that climate change is a hoax fabricated by China to harm the United States.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing uncompetitive,” Trump once tweeted.

He later said, unconvincingly, that he had been kidding about China, but he has emphasized that he does not believe in climate change and would end serious efforts to prevent it.

That obstinacy confronts a new wave of research showing that climate change is much more harmful than we had imagined.

Until now, the focus has been on rising seas, more intense hurricanes, acidification of oceans, drought and crop failures. But new studies are finding that some of the most important effects will be directly on our bodies and minds.

A clever new working paper

by Jisung Park, a Ph.D. student in economics at Harvard, compared the performances of New York City students on 4.6 million exams with the day’s temperature. He found that students taking a New York State Regents exam on a 90degree day have a 12 percent greater chance of failing than when the temperature is 72 degrees.

The Regents exams help determine whether a student graduates and goes to college, and Park finds that when a student has the bad luck to have Regents exams fall on very hot days, he or she is slightly less likely to graduate on time.

Likewise, Park finds that when a school year has an unusual number of hot days,

students do worse at the end of the year on their Regents exams, presumably because they’ve learned less. A school year with five extra days of temperatures greater than 80 degrees leads students to perform significantly worse on Regents exams.

The New York City students in Park’s study do poorly on hot days even though the majority of city schools are airconditioned (perhaps in part because the air-conditioning often barely works). Imagine the consequences in hotter climates with less airconditioning: The average Indian now endures about 33 days a year with temperatures greater than 90 degrees, and that is forecast to increase by as many as 100 days by 2100.

“If students in New York public schools are being affected by heat stress, one can only imagine what it’s like for a student in Delhi,” Park notes.

Heat affects our bodies as well as our minds: As temperatures rise, people die. In India, a rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit in average daily temperatures leads to a 10 percent increase in the annual mortality rate. Even a single extra hot day leads to a noticeable jump in mortality.

Even in the U.S., heat kills. A single day above 90 degrees increases the monthly mortality rate by more than 1 percent, according to research

by Olivier Deschenes and other economists.

We just don’t function as well when the mercury goes up. When the temperature rises above 85 degrees, Americans who work outside cut their time in the heat by about an hour. Even in auto factories, most presumably

air-conditioned, a week of six researchers find that police days above 90 degrees reduces officers are more likely to production by 8 percent. draw and fire their weapons during a training session Perhaps more startling, conducted on a hot day. rising temperatures seem to In Tanzania in any season, cause more violence. elderly women are sometimes “The relationship is accused of witchcraft and really clear,” said Edward hacked or beaten to death.

Miguel, an economist at the Miguel has found that unusual University of California, weather linked to climate Berkeley, who has studied the change — either drought or issue. “Extremes in climate heavy rainfall — is associated lead to more violence, more with a doubling in the number killing, more war, more land of these “witch” killings. riots in Brazil, more sectarian It appears that 2016 will be violence in India. It’s pretty the hottest year in recorded stunning how the relationship history, and each of the first between climate and violence six months of this year set a holds across the globe.” record as the hottest ever — The starting point is that the hottest January, the hottest heat makes people irritable. February, and so on. But it’s Researchers have found hot not just that the mercury is days linked to more angry going up; fundamentally, we honking in Arizona, and more are creating a hotter world for road rage and car crashes in which we humans are poorly Spain. Scholars have done adapted. the math and found that So it’s time for Trump — on hot days a major league and all Americans — to rebaseball pitcher is more likely evaluate. Climate change isn’t to retaliate for a perceived a hoax, and it certainly isn’t offense and deliberately hit a a Chinese conspiracy. Unless batter. we act, we’re cooked!

“High temperatures,” Contact Kristof at Facebook. that study finds, are com/Kristof, Twitter.com/ “lowering inhibitions against NickKristof or by mail at The retaliation.”

New York Times, 620 Eighth On hot days, property Ave., New York, NY 10018. crimes aren’t more common, c.2016 New York Times News Service but murders go up with 9-10-16 the temperature. Likewise,

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Margaret Sullivan

Roger Ailes Should Be Down For The Count By Now, But He’s Still Hitting Back - And It Could Get Ugly

If Roger Ailes believes in anything, it’s the counterattack.

When you’re accused, losing, wounded, bleeding - hit back hard. Go for the jugular.

That philosophy - actually, a whole way of life - is surely what’s behind a letter sent a few days ago to New York magazine from one Charles Harder, on behalf of the deposed Fox News founder, suggesting that a defamation action may be coming.

Harder is the high-profile Hollywood lawyer behind the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that, in effect, put Gawker out of business last month.

He’s the same lawyer representing Melania Trump in her assertions that publications defamed her when they reported that she once was associated with an escort service; one of those publications took down its story after the threats.

And so, when a letter arrives from Charles Harder, it sends a loud message: Stop messing with my client, or else.

Or else what? Well, in the post-Gawker era, the suggestion is this: Or else we’ll come after you so hard, and with such deep pockets, that you’ll have to fold.

New York magazine is the publication easily most responsible for Ailes’s stunning fall. That’s where Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman has relentlessly reported about the sexual harassment claims that led to his ouster from the network in July. (Ailes has denied all claims of sexual harassment.)

Those claims resulted in Tuesday’s news that former Fox host Gretchen Carlson would get a $20 million settlement from 21st Century Fox, the parent of the cable news company. It was Carlson’s suit, accusing Ailes of sexual harassment, that opened the floodgates. (As a side note, I hoped that Carlson wouldn’t settle, because I thought a trial would force some ugly truths into the sunlight where they belong. Still, I give her a lot of credit for the gutsiness it took to come forward.)

Since then, a lot has happened: Ailes, 76, quickly was shown the exit; 20 other women came forward with similar stories of being asked to trade sexual favors for career advancement; another former Fox host filed suit.

But Ailes, who was, after all, Richard Nixon’s media adviser, didn’t have the grace to slink away. Instead, he began blaming the messenger. And pulling out a proven big gun to do it. The suit against Gawker brought

$140 million in damages for Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea; soon after, Gawker filed for bankruptcy, and last month, it stopped publishing.

Ailes’ main lawyer, Susan Estrich, once considered a feminist, recently accused Sherman of abusing women by airing their grievances. And she told the Daily Beast that he would “use any woman he can find - no matter how clearly and deeply troubled she is - to try to concoct allegations against Mr. Ailes.”

That’s absurd, of course. But in AilesWorld, it’s normal behavior. It’s no surprise that the truth-challenged counterattack is a favorite tactic of Donald Trump, who has described his friend Roger Ailes in glowing terms and reportedly is using him as an adviser in preparation for the presidential debates.

New York magazine’s reporting has been careful and reviewed by lawyers at every step.

I don’t mean to equate the Hulk Hogan matter, which hinged on an invasion-of-privacy claim, with Sherman’s work, whatever legal claim Ailes may have in mind there. New York’s reporting, though was important and responsible journalism. Whereas I don’t believe that Gawker should have published the tapes of Hogan having sex that prompted that suit - though I also firmly don’t believe it should have had to pay for that misstep with

its very existence.

But something bigger is going on here that worries me. Many publications are struggling to survive. Not all can survive a deep-pocketed legal assault, like one Mother Jones successfully fended off from a wealthy dietary supplements mogul angry over a story about his political donations and regulatory battles. Some will indeed find it wiser to pull their punches than to continue aggressive reporting.

In short, there’s a risk of self-censorship by intimidation. After the Financial Times reported Ailes’ hiring Harder, business journalist Heidi Moore posted a warning on Twitter to “all the smug media church ladies who said this could only happen to Gawker and not ‘real journalism.’”

New York magazine, I feel confident, would prevail in court were Ailes and company foolish enough to follow through.

Of course, the former Fox News chief hasn’t always exercised the best judgment.

Twenty or so women could tell you all about that.

Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post’s media columnist. Previously, she was The New York Times public editor, and the chief editor of The Buffalo News, her hometown paper. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 9-6-16

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

23

Noah Feldman

Roger Ailes’ Empty Lawsuit Threatens Free Speech The defamation lawsuit that Roger Ailes’s lawyer is threatening against New York magazine would seem to have no chance of legal success.

So why has the former chairman of Fox News bothered to hire the lawyer who brought down Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan?

The answer is that the threat puts the magazine on the defensive -- and that’s a problem for free speech. The First Amendment has been interpreted to protect even defamatory speech against public figures. But as the Hogan case shows, not every court applies the constitutional standard correctly.

In that environment, even legally empty threats have a chilling effect.

First, the law: under the landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision, a libel case against a public figure can only succeed if the defamatory statements are both false and made with actual malice. Malice means that either the publication knew the statements were false or else recklessly disregarded the truth.

There’s no way Ailes can satisfy this standard. New York

magazine’s reporting on his involvement in sexual harassment has already been validated by multiple on-the-record sources, including, most prominently, Gretchen Carlson, who just got a $20 million settlement from Fox. In other words, the reporting is true. And even if some details turned out to be inaccurate, they won’t have been fabricated or published with reckless disregard for their falsehood, since they would be part of the pattern of harassment that the magazine set out to document.

On the surface, then, the magazine is precisely the kind of media defendant supposed to be protected by the Sullivan precedent. Strictly speaking, there’s no successful lawsuit possible.

Thus, whatever the explanation for Ailes retaining the attorney Charles Harder, it isn’t that Ailes expects to win his case in court.

Harder, who has written to the magazine to ask it to preserve correspondence relevant to Ailes in anticipation of a future suit, is unlikely to be worried about wasting his time. Simply being

mentioned in connection with Ailes has garnered major publicity for the lawyer. Ask yourself, did you remember the name of the lawyer who represented Hulk Hogan before now? I didn’t, and I’ve written about the case a couple of times.

Nor is Harder likely to be worried about harming his reputation by hinting at a lawsuit he couldn’t possibly win. All he’s done so far is send a letter that says a lawsuit is possible. If and when that suit ever materializes, there won’t be any consequences for him.

Ailes, of course, is trying to change the subject from his misdeeds to the magazine’s decision to write about them.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that trick, cheap though it may be.

What’s worrisome is that Ailes is also trying to put New York magazine on the defensive by making its editors and executives worry that they might become vulnerable in the same way that Gawker did. The case against Gawker should never have made it to a jury. Yet the trial judge allowed the case to reach a verdict,

which an intermediate Florida appellate court declined to strike down.

Technically, Hogan sued for breach of privacy, not defamation.

He can’t deny that he appeared in the sex tape that was made public by Gawker. The reason the verdict hasn’t yet been struck down is that the Supreme Court hasn’t directly held that the New York Times v. Sullivan standard applies to lawsuits for public disclosure of private facts. The Florida judges must know this; but they’re exploiting the temporary gap in Supreme Court precedent to punish online media because they prefer a climate of greater privacy.

Ailes’ threatened lawsuit is an excellent piece of evidence as to why the Gawker verdict was not simply wrong but highly dangerous. It’s no coincidence that Ailes hired the same lawyer that Hogan used. The association is intentional.

That’s the essence of a chilling effect on free speech. Every media outlet that wants to bring a public figure into disrepute -- however accurately -- must now stop and think about whether it’s worth it to face the risk of a lawsuit.

Ailes can’t put the genie back in the bottle in his own case. But by his maneuver, intended in his own case only to change the subject and shift the strategic balance, he’s doing damage to free speech.

You might be sympathetic to Hogan on the plausible theory that what you do in the bedroom should be private. But Ailes’s possible suit shows why free speech must outweigh Hogan’s privacy interests. When courts tolerate severe limits on what the media can say about public figures, the free press itself is threatened.

Feldman is a Bloomberg View columnist. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-7-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Rosemary and Walter Brasch

O Say Can You See The First Amendment?

Before a football game against the Green Bay Packers two weeks ago, Colin Kaepernick, San Francisco 49ers quarterback, refused to stand for the pregame patriotic ceremony that is wound around the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Kaepernick later said he was “not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” and said his stance, a quiet form of civil disobedience, was to him “bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.

There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” Several professional athletes had previously protested what they saw as police brutality directed against Blacks; about 70 percent of NFL players are Black. However, Kaepernick’s actions received far more attention because he was the quarterback to a Super Bowl championship team and the 49er–Packers game was televised to a national audience.

The NFL, many of Kaepernick’s team mates, and civil rights activists across the country supported his right of protest; that right was burnished into the First Amendment. Others said he was unpatriotic, a disgrace, and a hypocrite for taking a six year $114 million contract, with $61 million guaranteed and the rest based on various bonuses. The Santa Clara police union issued a threat—its officers might not wish to work at future 49er games if the team’s management didn’t discipline Kaepernick.

About 70 police are security for each of the home games.

Before the game against the San Diego Chargers this past week, Kaepernick said “The media painted this as I’m antiAmerican [but] that’s not the case at all.”

During the 1960s, hippies often sewed flag patches to their jeans to cover up holes.

The establishment coiled up in fear that those who looked and acted different from them not only were unpatriotic but posed a threat to God, mother, and apple pie.

Today, just about every sub-group of society, from homeless teens through affluent senior citizens wear T-shirts, shorts, bandanas, and every kind of clothing imaginable with the American flag depicted on it. At the Olympics, American athletes even wrapped themselves in oversized flags. And no one complained about their

disrespect.

newspapers run full color, full page depictions of the flag—and tie advertising During the late 1940s to the 1970s, blocks to it? thousands of persons, mostly in the arts, were subjected to Congressional hearings During the first Gulf War in 1991, that were ways to ferret out those whose how many Americans flew the flag to political beliefs did not match the two show American pride, but were intolerant major political parties’ idea of what a “true of minorities and those who rightfully American” should be. Businesses and protested that war or who didn’t put a flag in numerous governmental bodies demanded their house windows or by their mail boxes? workers to sign loyalty oaths. Those who It was during that war that thousands of had no allegiance signed; thousands who businesses flew flags, believing the larger were patriots did not and stood up to the the flag, the greater the patriotism, but still politicians and business owners, risking treated their workers shabbily or outsourced their own careers but knowing such oaths jobs to other countries. Just how patriotic is were unconstitutional and discriminatory. that?

In the 1960s, a few million Americans How many Americans are willing to send sat down at lunch counters or on the their youth to war, but when they return streets to demand that state and the federal home don’t give them jobs, counseling, governments adhere to the Constitution to or adequate medical assistance? Shouldn’t allow all citizens the right to vote and to that be unpatriotic? receive equality under the law.

How many Americans who flew flags In thousands of classrooms in 26 states, after 9/11 thought it was acceptable to the day begins with an obligatory recitation violate the Constitution by rallying behind of the Pledge of Allegiance, written by a a government that was engaged in overt socialist in 1892 and adopted by Congress practices to deny American citizens their as the national pledge in 1945. Those who First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and refuse to stand or who stand and remain Fourteenth Amendment rights? How silent or who don’t mouth “under God,” are many Americans disregard the part of the exercising their First Amendment rights.

First Amendment that protects freedom Colin Kaepernick repeated his of religion, and attack American citizens constitutional right of dissent this past who are Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, or any week when he kneeled down during the religion other than Christian? ceremony. Next to him was safety Eric Reid How many Americans don’t know much who also took a knee rather than stand. about history, political science, or current Kaepernick did not rant and rave; he did events, yet screech bar-room ignorance not destroy property or threaten anyone’s about what they think is wrong with the life. He just refused to stand. country, while doing nothing to improve Those who condemned him for what it? they mistakenly saw as his anti-American In the last two months of a presidential action might be the ones who defame the election, how many Americans follow flag and American patriotism. Here’s are politicians who stand in front of large some questions that need to be answered.

American flags, wear tiny metal flags on The Flag Code suggests that when the their lapels or collars, and condemn other National Anthem is played, persons should politicians who don’t wear flags? stand and cover their heart with their right How patriotic is it when a millionaire hand. There is no federal law that requires politician hides money in an off-shore anyone to stand, but how many who do account to avoid paying his or her fair share stand take off their baseball caps and put of taxes? their right hand over their heart?

About 94 percent of all American flags How many Americans fly tattered and are produced in China, according to the weather-worn flags in front of their houses, U.S. Bureau of the Census. How many businesses, and municipal buildings, also Americans buy flags and all kinds of Flag Code violations? merchandise made in other countries, while How many Americans get rid of the worn- neglecting American-made products? out flags, according to the Flag Code?

The American flag is material. It is not June 14 is Flag Day. How many American Brasch continued on page 25

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

25

Cass Sunstein

One University Has A Fix For The Culture Wars Last month, the University of Chicago appeared to pick sides in the latest iteration of America’s culture wars. But it was really announcing just how silly those culture wars are -- and how to get past them.

The school informed incoming students that its “commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

Conservatives saw the letter as a political intervention, a courageous stand against “political correctness” -- as if the University of Chicago shared the concern of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and others about left-wing orthodoxy on campus, in the media and political debates. But the letter’s real lesson lies elsewhere. It’s a political intervention that doesn’t involve contemporary political issues at all.

In my 27 years as a faculty member at the University of Brasch continued from page 24 who we are or what we believe, nor is singing or standing for the “Star Spangled Banner,” which became the national anthem only in 1931, 155 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. The Constitution allows for divergent beliefs.

Those who don’t recite the Pledge or sing the Anthem are no less of a patriot than those who are determined to make their voice the loudest in the room, while their own actions show them to be nothing more than jingoistic opportunists.

Patriotism can mean standing up—or sitting down—for

Chicago, I heard all sorts of discomfiting and even shocking arguments.

Distinguished professors argued that the great civil rights laws of the 1960s are unconstitutional; that insider trading should be freely permitted; that the Federal Communications Commission should be abolished; that nothing in the Constitution forbids racial segregation; and that the government should be allowed to censor speech whenever the benefits of censorship exceed the costs.

I also heard distinguished professors contend that the Constitution requires affirmative action programs; that reparations for AfricanAmericans would be an excellent idea; that federal law should forbid employers from discriminating against gays and lesbians; that judges do not, and should not, follow the text of the Constitution; and that Karl Marx was fundamentally right on the deepest questions in political philosophy.

These wildly disparate arguments had a unifying feature. Even if they turned out to be quite preposterous, their advocates defended them with

social justice.

Rosemary Brasch before retirement was a secretary, Red Cross family services national disaster specialist, and university instructor in labor studies. Walter Brasch is an award-winning social issues journalist, patriot, and professor emeritus of mass communications from Bloomsburg University, who refused to sign a loyalty oath to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. His latest book is Fracking America: Sacrificing Health and the Environment for Short-Term Economic Benefit.

9-9-16

careful arguments -- and you couldn’t easily dismiss them.

You might think that the civil rights laws are self-evidently constitutional, but at the University of Chicago, people feel free to press a legitimate question: Where does Congress get the authority to forbid small companies in (say) Indiana from hiring the people they want to hire?

You might think it’s obvious that judges must follow the text of the Constitution. But at the University of Chicago, some professors emphasize that with respect to freedom of speech -- perhaps the most fundamental right of all -- they just don’t. The Constitution bans Congress, and not the president, from abridging the freedom of speech, and yet everyone agrees that if the president restricts free speech, he’s violating the Constitution.

That raises the question: Are judges really bound by the Constitution’s text?

On issues large and small, University of Chicago students are likewise defined by their willingness to defy contemporary orthodoxies. As early as the mid-1980s, law students rejected conventional wisdom and contended that there is a constitutional right to possess guns (recognized by the Supreme Court in 2008) and same-sex marriage (recognized by the court in 2015). More recently, University of Chicago students have made strong arguments in favor of fortifying the rights of property holders - and of protecting the rights of animals.

In insisting that the university does not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces,” the now-famous letter was not intervening in current debates about racism, sexism, and homophobia on campus.

It was not saying anything about political correctness.

(Opposition to political correctness is, in its own way, a form of political correctness.)

Instead it was signaling a much broader commitment, which is to welcome the toughest questions about existing practices, so long as those questions are rooted in reason, evidence, and history - rather than in currying favor, posturing, or making some kind of display.

That commitment does have a negative side. At the University of Chicago, arguments are sometimes unpleasant; people’s feelings are bruised. There aren’t a lot of compliments. But both faculty and students get much smarter.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan greatly benefited from their years on the faculty -- and the same is true for the current president of the United States.

There is a lesson here not only for academic institutions but for politics as well.

Speaking of the constitutional convention, James Madison emphasized a situation in which “no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth.” He added that everyone “was open to the force of argument.” It’s not exactly realistic to expect that kind of culture in an era of partisan politics, let alone during a presidential campaign.

But aspirations matter -- and the University of Chicago has the right aspiration.

Cass R. Sunstein is a Bloomberg View columnist.

He is the author of “The World According to Star Wars” and a co-author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.” (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 9-7-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Nathaniel Morris

As A Mental Health Provider, I Ask All My Patients About Guns. Here’s Why.

Few topics stir more controversy in this country than guns. Mass shootings and urban gun violence inflame public passions. Gun control measures divide our political leaders, and elections often hinge on candidates’ views of guns.

I struggle with issues related to firearms every day, but in a different way. To me, it’s not about politics or elections. It’s part of my daily job. As a mental health provider, I have to ask all my patients about guns.

I spend many of my days and nights caring for patients with psychiatric crises in emergency departments. We address a variety of clinical problems, from hallucinations to delusions to addiction. Suicidality is one of the more common ones. Too often, patients want to hurt themselves or have already tried to do so.

So why do I ask about guns?

Because when I think about how patients might harm themselves, guns frighten me the most. As a resident physician in psychiatry, I see some pretty terrible things. Suicidal patients talk about hanging themselves, overdosing, throwing themselves into traffic, and a host of other awful ways to end their lives.

But when I hear that a patient owns a gun, it gives me extra pause.

No, I’m not creating a registry. No, I don’t care if they’re members of the National Rifle Association. I don’t claim to know the right balance between gun control and personal freedom. I just want my patients to be safe.

When it comes to suicide, guns matter. In a column published by Newsweek last year, writer Mike Mariani sums up why: “The problem is that firearms are frighteningly lethal. The most common method of attempting suicide, overdosing on drugs, has a completion rate of just 3 percent (in other words, 97 percent of attempters survive).

Gun suicide, by comparison, has a completion rate of 85 percent. This is surely gun violence at its most virulent - Berettas and Glock 17s crystallizing passing impulses into something

horrifically permanent. . . . “Research further supports this link. A 2007 study found states with the highest household gun ownership have roughly double the number of suicides compared with states with the fewest household guns.

While gun owners are no more likely to have mental health issues than those without guns, access to a gun means acting out on suicidal thoughts has more deadly consequences. As written in a 2008 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, “a suicide attempt with a firearm rarely affords a second chance.”

Suicide risk isn’t the only reason I ask about guns. Sometimes, patients threaten to harm other people as well. In these circumstances, we have to assess the seriousness of these statements and risk factors for violence, including access to weapons.

In the media, mental illness is a common scapegoat for gun violence.

But the reality isn’t that simple. In a column for the Atlantic earlier this year, writer Julie Beck points out “the overwhelming majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, just like the overwhelming majority of all people are not violent.” Actually, a 2005 study found adults with severe mental illness are more than 11 times more likely to be victims of violence than adults in the general population.

Indeed the specter of suicide, rather than homicide, haunts me most often in my daily work. Each year in the United States, there are nearly twice as many suicides by guns than homicides by guns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet public perceptions of gun violence rarely associate with a person alone at home, desperate, in need of medical help.

So if my colleagues and I evaluate a patient who owns a gun and wants to self-harm, or more rarely harm others, what do we do?

We can pursue a range of options, from handing out gun locks to requesting family or friends temporarily hold onto firearms to asking that local police to

perform a welfare check at the patient’s home. In extreme cases, if patients pose an imminent risk to themselves or others because of mental illness, we can place them on a legal hold to evaluate them in the hospital for up to 72 hours.

These approaches hinge on the concept of lethal means reduction. By temporarily limiting patients’ access to guns and other dangerous instruments, like sharp objects or pills, we hope to protect them from transitory suicidal or homicidal impulses. A large body of research supports the efficacy of these prevention measures, particularly in reducing rates of suicide.

Unfortunately, the politics of guns sometimes affect patient care. In 2011, lawmakers in Florida passed a law to curtail physicians from talking to patients about guns, and similar bills have popped up in states from North Carolina to Oklahoma to Minnesota.

Over the last two decades, Congress has virtually blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research into gun violence in the United States.

This is too bad because, as healthcare providers, we do our best to help patients with evidence-based practices.

We’re not out to get anyone’s guns.

We don’t wake up hoping to infringe on patients’ personal lives. But, to keep patients and communities healthy, clinicians need to be able to ask about firearms.

In medicine, rarely can a single question make such a difference.

Nathaniel P. Morris is a resident physician in psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Special to The Washington Post 9-8-16

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September 14, 2016

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Keith Ellison

I’m The First Muslim In Congress. I Beleieve American Can Beat Islamophobia.

Fifteen years ago, the United States was attacked by terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam. America’s response?

“United We Stand.” Yet now it feels like Muslims face more hatred in 2016 than on Sept. 11, 2001.

Back then, President George W. Bush, no liberal, visited a mosque in Washington, D.C., just days later to show solidarity with Muslims, saying, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace.

They represent evil and war.”

People came together in gratitude for those who risked everything rescuing others during the attacks, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old first responder who died saving lives in the World Trade Center.

He was Muslim. So am I. Before that day, America’s Muslim community wasn’t the focus of much political discussion. Now, Islam and Muslims are regular topics on talk shows and in headlines, often in a negative light. The political landscape has changed dramatically for America’s Muslim community - for better and worse. Increased Muslim visibility and engagement in the community are occurring at the same time as an increase in antiMuslim hate crimes, and this is not a coincidence: A recent study by the Bridge Initiative found that anti-Muslim crimes have increased during this election season, with 2015 having the most anti-Muslim violence and vandalism of any year since 9/11. Looking at the data, there is a clear uptick in anti-Muslim crime associated with the rise of Donald Trump. In fact, two Somali Muslim men were recently shot in my own city of Minneapolis because of their

faith. For American Muslims, the period since 9/11 has represented both progress and peril - and many fear what may lie ahead.

On the good side, President Obama just nominated America’s first Muslim federal judge, Abid Qureshi. Ibtihaj Muhammad just won an Olympic bronze medal in fencing - hijab and all.

Seven Muslims addressed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, including the electrifying presentation of Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan. Thirty-three-year-old Ilhan Omar, who lived in a Somali refugee camp from the ages of 8 to 12, is poised to be elected to the Minnesota state legislature on a decidedly progressive platform.

And today’s Muslim community is voting, running for office, opening businesses and starting health clinics like never before.

When I first came to Congress after 9/11, I certainly faced challenges: Glenn Beck asked me to prove I wasn’t working with our nation’s enemies; Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., warned his constituents that unless America supported his exclusive vision of immigration, there would be “many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.” But I took these things in stride because I expected negative reactions from some people to the first Muslim congressman.

Now, I’m no longer sure those reactions are receding. Indeed, things are still challenging for America’s Muslim community, as we face down lies and fear mongering about our faith - by the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, no less. AntiMuslim hate speech used to be limited to the fringe. But over time, because of well-financed advocacy, these ugly views have crept into the mainstream.

People like Frank Gaffney and Pam Geller pushed anti-Muslim sentiment during the incessant right-wing media coverage over the so-called “9/11 mosque” a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center. It morphed into members of Congress advocating for McCarthy-like tactics for Muslims working in our government. And it has culminated with a Republican presidential nomination race that included Sen. Ted Cruz appointing Gaffney to be one of his closest advisers, Ben Carson saying a Muslim should never become president, and the nomination of a man who said Muslims should not be allowed to enter our country. What used to be whispered through a dog whistle is now being screamed through a bullhorn.

Throughout all this, the Muslim community has shown an incredible amount of poise and patriotism. So much so that Daesh (known as the Islamic State by some) has put out a list of Muslim Americans they want to kill because of their service to our country. I am one of them.

Daesh is right about one thing: American Muslims are serving their country. Muslims are working to make it better every day. After the killing of Michael Brown, I traveled to Ferguson, Mo., to meet with members of the community. During my visit, I went to the Salam Clinic, which is housed inside of a Christian church. There, two Muslim doctors joined with the pastor to offer free health care to anyone who showed up that weekend. While talking with the doctors, I was surprised to find out that Salam Clinic wasn’t just offering free care in response to the protests over Brown’s death. Salam Clinic has opened

its doors every weekend since 2008 and still gives free care to hundreds of local residents.

These doctors and pastor are true public servants.

Like millions of other Muslims in this country, I find peace and comfort in my faith. The Quran teaches us that “Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving like kindred” (16:91). It inspires leaders such as Omar, the doctors at the Salam Clinic, and Olympic fencer Muhammad, who ignore the hate and serve their communities.

It is also inspiring future generations.

During the Republican primary race, 12year-old Yusuf Dayur responded to Carson saying that a Muslim should never be president. In his video, Yusuf said that he will become the first Muslim president. He also promised to reject all forms of hatred: “When I become president,” he said, “I will respect people of all faiths, all colors and all religions.” Go Yusuf!

The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should remind us of lessons learned long ago: The best way to overcome darkness is with light. And despite so much negativity, people are responding. During Ramadan in June, many of my neighbors in the Twin Cities, most of whom were not Muslim, posted yard signs saying, “To our Muslim neighbors, blessed Ramadan.”

Let’s follow their example, and turn to each other, not on each other.

Keith Ellison represents Minnesota’s fifth congressional district and was the first Muslim elected to Congress. He is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and serves on the Financial Services Committee.

Special to The Washington Post 9-10-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Samantha Sunne

I Got Arrested For Putting My Feet Up On The Subway. I Was Lucky I Was White.

In a holding cell below New York City’s Chinatown one night last year, I spent four hours curled in a ball, balancing on a narrow wooden bench. I was trying to avoid the freezing cinderblock walls and the cold cement floor, splattered with cigarette butts and rotten food. The NYPD had taken my shoes, in case I tried to hang myself with my laces.

An hour earlier, I was quietly riding the A train home from a folk-music show in Brooklyn. My earbuds were plugged in, my feet propped on the seat in front of me.

Sometime around 2:30 in the morning, the train paused at the Canal Street station.

A uniformed and armed New York police officer popped her head through the door and beckoned me off the subway car. Within a few minutes, I was handcuffed, ID’d and marched upstairs by two police officers.

That night, I became one more victim of “nuisance laws,” regulations that criminalize small misbehaviors that don’t hurt anyone.

These policies have been enacted by cities across the country. In New York, for example, it’s against the law to take up more than one subway seat or even put a foot up. It’s illegal to be in most parks after dark, or to drink beer on your stoop. People can get arrested for asking someone else to swipe them into the subway. (Washington’s Metro system does not criminalize putting your feet up on the subway or taking up two seats.)

This type of zero-tolerance policing has been adapted around the country. In Texas, minors can be jailed for missing more than 10 days of school in a six-month period. In Arkansas, a woman was imprisoned after a $1.07 check she wrote for bread bounced. In Washington, police can arrest residents for minor offenses like letting your dog off its leash or fishing with the wrong equipment. A two-year-old here was even cited for littering.

(Officials later dropped the case.)

On its face, this might not seem like a big deal - everyone wants clean subways and orderly cities. But criminalizing small acts can have major consequences for nonwhite and low-income people, who are disproportionately arrested and convicted for these infractions. A USA Today report, which examined data from across the country, found that “blacks are more likely than others to be arrested in almost every city for almost every type of crime. Nationwide, black people are arrested at higher rates for crimes as serious as

murder and assault, and as minor as loitering and marijuana possession.” In New York in 2014, 43,000 people were arrested on public transportation; just 3,600 were white, even though whites make up 37 percent of public transit riders. The most recent numbers, from the first six months of 2015, show a similar trend: of the more than 20,000 arrests; fewer than one in 10 people were white.

Those caught misbehaving are often arrested, booked and arraigned in criminal court. They might, as a result, lose their jobs or have to scramble for child care. They might be asked to pay a bail they can’t afford. And a criminal record could cost them assets from subsidized housing to student loans.

As Scott Hechinger of Brooklyn Defender Services told the New York Times, an arrest can derail a person struggling to make ends meet. “Most of our clients are people who have crawled their way up from poverty or are in the throes of poverty. Our clients work in service-level positions where if you’re gone for a day, you lose your job. People in need of caretaking - the elderly, the young - are left without caretakers. People who live in shelters, where if they miss their curfews, they lose their housing. Folks with immigration concerns are quicker to be put on the immigration radar.”

In other words: A small mistake could ruin your life.

Criminalizing small infractions is part of a larger law-and-order effort known as “broken windows” policing. Popularized by two criminologists in 1982, this theory encourages law enforcers to arrest people for low-level offenses including loitering, public drinking and littering. Creating a semblance of order in a neighborhood discourages more serious crimes, the scholars argued.

This method was implemented in New York under Mayor Rudy Guiliani in the 1990s; during that time, the city saw violent crime drop by more than 56 percent and property crime by about 65 percent. Outgoing New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton credits “broken windows” policing for the declines, saying the method makes neighborhoods cleaner and safer by stopping even the tiniest violation.

But opponents see it differently. They say the practice leads to unwarranted aggression against low-income people and minorities.

“The kinds of things that [people of color]

get arrested for, these innocuous acts, have been virtually decriminalized among white communities,” said Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, which tries to raise awareness of racial profiling

by New York police. New York’s nonwhite residents disproportionately bear the burden of arrest. In 2015, for example, about 153,000 were arrested or given tickets for sneaking into the subway. Ninety-two percent were people of color. According to the New York Times, about 300,000 criminal summonses were issued by officers last year, “many in minority neighborhoods.”

This is something Timothy Middleton knows all too well. Middleton, who is black, was arrested on the subway last fall for assault in the third degree - the most minor assault charge - for what he called a “shouting match.”

“The police were very derogatory and disrespectful . . . and I spoke up for myself, and they didn’t like that too much,” he said.

Middleton spent a few hours in a cell, received his court date and went home.

That’s when he found out that, because he had a charge pending, he’d been automatically suspended from his job without pay.

Middleton worked as a peer specialist at a social-service nonprofit, helping people with mental disabilities.

He survived three months of unemployment, borrowing money from friends and waiting for his charge to be resolved. While waiting for his case to come up in court, he went on welfare. When his case was finally resolved (a judge gave him a verbal warning to stay out of trouble for a year), his employer let him know: His job had been filled by someone else. “And it was the perfect job and perfect hours,” he said. “I was enjoying what I was doing, helping people. . . . I was just on a roll, you know?”

Others have similar stories. In 2009, Juan Castillo was arrested for putting his foot up on a subway seat so he could inject himself in the thigh with insulin. Castillo, a diabetic, was arrested and jailed for 30 hours, and the police refused to give him access to insulin.

He ended up in a hospital. (Castillo later sued the city; he was awarded $150,000.)

Flavio Uzcha, an Ecuadorian line cook, was brought in for standing too close to the door in a packed subway car in 2011. When he was

Sunne continued on page 29

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

29

Clarence Page

Sorry, No Easy Answers For Chicago Homicides “Hey, more than 500 people have been murdered in Chicago this year,” says one of my conservative friends. “I can’t wait to see what you write about that.”

Why? You didn’t listen to me the last time. Are you really listening or just waiting for your own turn to complain?

“Jeez, why are you so touchy?”

I’m just tired of hearing your usual one-note analysis and solution: Black people are having too many babies out of wedlock. Hey, do you ever ask what happened to the jobs that used to enable workers to support a family? Do you ever notice how the poverty, crime, opiate addiction and out-of-wedlock birth rates are growing among poor whites, too? When are you people going to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps?

“Hey, you don’t think fathers are important?”

Of course, we’re important.

But where are you going to find all the marriageable black men to fulfill your dream?

“Hey, OK, I’m listening. Tell Sunne continued from page 28 arraigned, authorities discovered a 2002 deportation order, and he was forced to leave the United States.

The NYPD has denied allegations of racial profiling and defended its “broken windows” practices, arguing that they make the transit system and city much safer. But in recent months, they’ve also begun to move away from making arrests for minor offenses. In March, officials announced that officers in Manhattan will no longer arrest people for minor crimes like riding between subway cars or drinking in public. Instead, they will get a criminal summons. In May, the New York City council passed a measure creating a civil

me what you would do about the killers roaring out of control in Obama’s adopted hometown.”

Hey, that’s President Barack Obama, pal. Respect. Look, 500 murders and it’s only September? There’s a horrible thing. But it’s not a first. Violent crime is like a Zika virus. You don’t know when or where it’s going to surge but you have to deal with it when it does.

We’ve been through this before. I was covering Chicago cops as a young reporter in 1974 when murders in Chicago peaked at 970 -- or about 29 per 100,000 -- after rising for more than 10 years. And I remember when murders peaked again in 1992, this time at 943 or 34 per 100,000.

You could almost hear the rejoicing in December 2004, when the Chicago Tribune headlined: “City murder toll lowest in decades.” For the first time in almost four decades, there were fewer than 500 murders in Chicago. Break out the champagne.

“So what’s that got to do with process for some common lowlevel infractions, like littering and excessive noise. “We pledged to reduce unnecessary arrests while protecting the quality of life of all our residents,” Mayor Bill de Blasio, said at the time. “This legislation is an important step toward this essential goal.”

For my arraignment, I had to report to the New York City Criminal Court in downtown Manhattan, where I spent a few hours sitting in a pew behind a beefy man in handcuffs.

Eventually, a judge called me up and gave me a light punishment: probation.

“You didn’t have a collateral consequence,” Legal Aid Society spokeswoman Pat Bath told me later. She was right. I didn’t risk my job, or my family, to appear

this year?”

First, it tells you that we’ve dealt with crime waves before.

One reason murders look so high is because violent crime overall, including murder, has dropped since the 1990s.

Second, everybody talks about how Chicago homicides this year outnumber those in New York and Los Angeles combined. But a number of smaller cities like Milwaukee and Houston have had big increases this year, too.

So far, it’s not a national trend, but it’s not a uniquely Chicago problem either. There is no single, one-stop, one-size-fitsall diagnosis or prescription.

“Yeah, but you’re not talking about Black Lives Matter and kids with cellphone cameras waging war on the police. The cops are afraid to get out of their patrol cars for fear of winding up on YouTube.”

Frankly, some of them should fear winding up on YouTube, considering what we’ve seen on YouTube already.

But I notice you’re not talking about how New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio pulled back on

in court.

The two teenagers I was arrested with were not so lucky.

They had been busted for walking between subway cars - a constant sight, but still illegal. One had been arrested three times in the past year, the other two times for putting his foot up on the subway and for panhandling and interfering with “the movement of passengers.”

One of them didn’t show at court the day I was there, common among teenagers. “So now” - for putting his feet up “he’s a fugitive,” Gangi said.

Sunne is a freelance reporter based in New Orleans, focusing on data and investigations in the Deep South.

Special To The Washington Post 9-9-16

the city’s aggressive stop-andfrisk profiling policy on the streets last year. Conservatives howled, but so far homicides have continued to decline.

“So you want to coddle the criminals and wage war on police?”

No, quite the opposite. I want to see more cops on the street, working in cooperation with local residents and community leaders. Community policing works, if you do it right.

Unfortunately, Chicago police are undermanned and pulling lots of overtime. The city and state are deep in debt, and, as much as Mayor Rahm Emanuel talks about hiring more cops, nobody knows where he’s going to get the money except from taxpayers who are feeling pretty tapped out already.

Ah, so, once again Democrats are screwing up our cities.

I know you’d like to make this a partisan issue, but it’s not that simple either.

“Hey, Donald Trump recently said Chicago police could solve the city’s crime problem ‘in a week.’ “ Oh, yeah? How? Is he going to give gangbangers scholarships to Trump University?

“No,” he says the police only have to be “very much tougher” than they are now.

Oh, gimme a break. This is a guy who claims he knows “more about ISIS than the generals.”

Now he thinks he knows more than Chicago’s police?

“He says one of Chicago’s ‘very top police’ told him and Trump says he believed the guy ‘100 percent.’ “ Right. That would make Trump as gullible as he hopes the voters will be in November.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(C) 2016 Clarence Page 9-11-16

30

Liberal Opinion Week

September 14, 2016

Hayley Tsukayama

Five Myths About Smartphones Americans are estimated to check their smartphones a collective 8 billion times per day, and Nielsen says we spend an average of one hour and 39 minutes on our smartphones each day - up 60 percent from last year. But while many of us consider our smartphones to be an essential part of our lives, there are many misconceptions about how we use them and how they affect us.

Myth No. 1 Smartphones give people cancer.

The World Health Organization (WHO) set off a small flurry of panic in 2011 when it classified the radiation from cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic.” And worrywarts for years have been concerned about the “radiation” from handheld devices.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site, Goop, asks, “Are Cell Phones and WiFi Signals Toxic?” The city of Berkeley, Calif., passed a “Right to Know” measure in 2015 that requires all cellphone stores to warn buyers that the devices emit radiation. “Even if the science isn’t firm, if there’s a risk, we should proceed with caution,” Berkeley City Council member Max Anderson told the New York Times at the time.

But scientists have never established a direct link between cellphones and cancer, as even the WHO admitted. The group’s fact sheet, issued at the same time as its classification, says, “To date, no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use.” Researchers have yet to definitively rule out suggestions that phones can increase cases of two types of brain cancer, a malignant form called glioma and a benign form called acoustic neuroma, but a definitive causal link has never been found. And the National Cancer Institute says there has been no significant increase in brain cancers in the past decade as cellphone use has increased.

Myth No. 2 Smartphones are a luxury that poor people can’t afford.

The perception that smartphones are beyond the reach of the poor surfaces in political debates about governmentsubsidized phones. Critics of the Lifeline program - incorrectly nicknamed the “Obama phone” program - that provides subsidies for cellphone service have been particularly shocked that it can be used to reimburse smartphone use.

“The federal government should only be providing services for emergencies. You and I, taxpayers, shouldn’t be paying for cellphones so someone can have a social life,” then-Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark.) told the Daily Caller in 2012. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate.” More recently, critics of aid to Syrian refugees have pointed to photos of them holding their smartphones, asking how dire their situation could be if they still had a means to snap selfies.

But the dropping price of smartphones has put these devices in reach of many more people. Companies such as Motorola and Chinese manufacturers Huawei and OnePlus have focused on selling affordable phones, particularly in the international market. The Pew Research Center reported that, as of last year, 54 percent of people across 21 emerging and developing countries “reported using the internet at least occasionally or owning a smartphone.” In Malaysia, for instance, where the median monthly income is about $1,130, Pew found that 65 percent of people had a smartphone.

Smartphones have become a daily necessity, not just a perk for the middle class. For many low-income families, as the Commerce Department found, the devices provide the only reliable access to the Internet - which they need to apply for jobs or do homework, among other things. This spring, the department reported that “29 percent of online households with family incomes below $25,000 only used mobile Internet service at home, compared with 15 percent of those households with incomes of $100,000 or more.”

What’s more, in crisis situations, smartphones have become the most reliable way to get information, apply for aid and find a place to live. Time magazine, which called smartphones a “lifeline” for refugees, asked a man from Syria which was more important, food or power? He answered without hesitation: “Charging my phone.”

in 2000 to eight seconds in 2015 - less than that of a goldfish - and that digital media use helped contribute to that decline. The headlines practically write themselves: “Are smartphones making us dumber?” asked one from the Huffington Post. “Butterfly brain: why smartphones are making us stupid,”read another from the Telegraph.

Butthere’snothinginherentinsmartphones that turns us into dunces. When it comes to actual intelligence, some studies suggest that they in fact make us smarter. Researchers studying the “Flynn effect” - a trend that suggests IQ overall has been improving over the years - in people older than 50 say mobile phones and computers seem to contribute “considerably” to people’s ability to stay in intellectually demanding jobs for longer periods of time. “On average, test scores of people aged 50+ today correspond to test scores from people 4-8 years younger and tested 6 years earlier,” researcher Valeria Bordone told Science Daily.

There are certainly cases in which digital media can prompt isolating behaviors; more and more researchers treat excessive smartphone and Internet use as an addiction.

But that doesn’t necessarily make users antisocial. In fact, smartphones enable us to speak more with close friends and relatives than ever before, as well as to meet new people and organize social events. A 2015 Pew study showed that coordinating plans and talking to family and friends were the second and third most common uses for smartphones, behind finding information.

Myth No. 4 Smartphones are killing the retail stores. store.

For many pundits, it’s a foregone conclusion: Online sales will supplant brick-and-mortar shops. “Retail guys are going to go out of business, and ecommerce will become the place everyone buys,” tech investor Marc Andreessen said in 2013.

“You are not going to have a choice.” When Amazon announced that it was making a smartphone with special shopping features in 2014, Salon said it was chief executive Jeff Bezos’s path to “kill off brick-andmortar retail, once and for all.” (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)

There is no denying that smartphones have altered the way we shop and that online shopping provides competition for the

Myth No. 3 Smartphones make us dumb and antisocial.

It seems intuitive, especially considering the glazed, vacant-eyed stares on most people’s faces when they use their phones.

And think of all those selfie-related fatalities.

Researchers at Microsoft grabbed headlines when they found that the average human attention span had dropped from 12 seconds Tsukayama continued on page 31

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Hayley Tsukayama

Five Myths About Smartphones Tsukayama continued from page 30 year. traditional storefront. But about Mobile shopping is on the 90 percent of purchases are still rise - up 30 percent between made in stores. Often, stores and the holiday seasons of 2014 smartphones have developed and 2015, according to IBM a symbiotic relationship, as - but brick-and-mortar stores retailers experiment with ways are also, surprisingly, popular to incorporate mobile shopping even with young people. An into in-person shopping. One August report from eMarketer example is the rise of in-store found that teensprefer shopping pickup programs, which give in a real store for just about customers the convenience everything apart from games. of mobile shopping and the Perhaps shopping in a store will immediacy of real-world become the next hipster trend. shopping - all without the shipping times. Meanwhile, Myth No. 5 Amazon’s smartphone, which Smartphones make you more was designed so that shoppers productive. could bypass stores altogether, How does your smartphone was discontinued after about a make you feel? “Productive”

was the most common answer (followed by “happy”) among respondents asked to link their phones to an emotion in Pew’s 2015 study on smartphone use.

Productivity is a big selling point for smartphone makers.

Samsung’s ad campaign for its latest smartphone trumpets the virtue of being “busy, busy, busy” and explains how the device can help buyers stay that way.

But tapping away at your smartphone all day doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting things done. A study released in August, commissioned by the security firm Kaspersky Lab, found quite the opposite.

Researchers from the Universities of Würzburg and Nottingham-Trent asked 95 participants to perform tasks with their phones placed in their pockets, on their desks, in a locked drawer or outside the room. As the phones got farther away, productivity levels went steadily up. Overall, those whose smartphones were outside the room performed 26 percent better on the tests than other participants did.

Hayley Tsukayama covers consumer technology for The Washington Post. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 9-9-16