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The Fix
Trump’s tough talk on Iran A ARON B LAKE
plenty of theorizing about Trump’s own motivations now that he’s in a reelection year. “Our president will start a war with Iran he United States killed a top-level Iranibecause he has absolutely no ability to negotian military leader in Iraq early Friday ate,” Trump said in a 2011 video blog. local time, and the questions on everySince becoming president, Trump has reone’s mind are: Are we now at war? peatedly used tough rhetoric about Iran, putWhat happens next? And what is President ting it “ON NOTICE,” saying he wouldn’t be as Trump prepared to do? “kind” as Obama was. In perhaps his most The decision to take out the powerful milihawkish comments, Trump sent a tweet in June tary commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, 2018 warning Iranian President Haswas a huge one. Reporting suggests he san Rouhani to “NEVER, EVER is indispensable to Iran-backed forces THREATEN THE UNITED STATES across the Middle East, and the move AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONwill be seen as a remarkable escalation SEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH of tensions between Iran and the UnitFEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE ed States — even after supporters of an EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Iranian-backed militia stormed the At the same time, it’s not clear how U.S. Embassy in Baghdad this past familiar Trump is with what has hapweek. pened in the country. In a 2015 interWe can say two things about Trump view with Hugh Hewitt, for example, in this moment: Trump didn’t appear to be familiar with 1. He has shown a real reluctance as the Quds Force, Iran’s special foreign president to remain bogged down in operations unit that Soleimani led, the Middle East. mixing it up with the Kurds. 2. He has otherwise telegraphed a But the fact remains that Trump’s in very hawkish approach to Iran over the Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/Associated Press the driver’s seat. And, given his past past four decades. comments, it’s evident that he views His earliest recorded comments Qasem Soleimani, one of Iran’s top military commanders, was tough talk as necessary to keep Iran in about Iran were in 1980, when he said killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq early Friday local time. line. The flip side of that is if they try to the United States should have gone in call your bluff. Through provocations, Iran has today, that “they just don’t believe we militarily to free those held in the Iranian apparently pushed Trump toward feeling as would.” hostage crisis and maybe even go further. though he has to make good on his threats — or In 2013, he suggested attacking Iran instead “I absolutely feel that [the U.S. should have at least send a strong signal that he will. of getting involved in Syria, saying, “maybe we sent troops], yes,” Trump told gossip columnist That doesn’t mean Trump is eager for war — should knock the hell out of Iran and their Rona Barrett. “I don’t think there’s any quesand his recent withdrawal announcements nuclear capabilities?” tion, and there is no question in my mind. I about Syria suggest he is indeed trying to get It was in this same window that Trump think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation.” out of the Middle East. But in the end, what we began trafficking in his theory that President In 2011, Trump reinforced that military action have is a president who has repeatedly written Barack Obama would go to war with Iran for should always be an option when it came to a check with his mouth, and the bill appears to the purposes of rallying public opinion and preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon be coming due. n getting reelected — comments that will lead to — but emphasized that it should be a last resort.
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KLMNO Weekly
“I would never take the military card off the table, and it’s possible that it will have to be used, because Iran cannot have nuclear weapons,” Trump said in a November 2011 video from his office. “But you’ve got to exhaust other possibilities.” In 2012, he said Iran would be easy to negotiate with because they know “we could blow them away to the Stone Age.” But he added, in comments that perhaps resonate
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Contents Politics The Nation The World Cover Story Food Books Opinion Five Myths
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On the cover Illustration by IGOR BASTIDAS for The Washington Post
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Politics
KLMNO Weekly
Gun laws debated after Texas attack BY A BIGAIL H AUSLOHNER, D EANNA P AUL AND K IM B ELLWARE
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op Texas officials this past week cited the actions of several armed churchgoers who subdued a gunman in their sanctuary as a model of how Americans should protect themselves from potential mass shooters. Last Sunday’s attack, after which two church members and the gunman were dead, came two years after the Texas legislature passed a law that authorized anyone with a concealed-carry license to bring their weapon into houses of worship. That law was a response to the 2017 attack on a church in Sutherland Springs that left 26 people dead before a local resident shot the gunman outside the building and forced him to flee. The shooter who attacked West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, a suburb of Fort Worth, was killed by a single shot from church member Jack Wilson, a former reserve sheriff ’s deputy and Army veteran. Wilson, who owns a shooting range in nearby Granbury, said he started training fellow members to be a part of the church’s volunteer security team when it launched after the Texas law passed. “If there is any church in this state, in America, that was prepared for this, it was this church,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said at a news conference Monday. “They had done their training. And I think that you could see it in the results.” He credited the new law with making the armed congregants’ quick responses possible, calling it a “model of what other churches and other places of business need to focus on.” President Trump weighed in, tweeting that the attack “was over in 6 seconds thanks to the brave parishioners who acted to protect 242 fellow worshippers. Lives were saved by these heroes, and Texas laws allowing them to carry arms!”
David Kent/Associated Press
Previous church shooting spurred state to allow congregants to carry concealed weapons But other state leaders took issue with Trump and Paxton’s interpretation of the incident. Former Texas congressman and onetime presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said the shooting was a reflection of the state’s lax gun-control measures. “Our representatives in Texas have left us open to these kinds of attacks,” he tweeted. “Time to change our representatives.” Gun-control activists called out the rate of firearm-related homicides and suicides in Texas, which ranks in the middle of the pack nationally for gun deaths, according to federal data. “If more guns and fewer gun laws made Texas safer, it would be the safest state in the US,” tweeted Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action. “Instead, it has high rates of gun suicide and homicide, and is home to 4 of the 10 deadliest mass shootings.” The shooter, whom authorities identified as 43-year-old Keith Thomas Kinnunen, fatally shot
two members of the church’s volunteer security team, both men in their 60s, before Wilson fired back at him, officials said. During a vigil Monday evening, senior minister Britt Farmer said he had encountered Kinnunen at the church before. “I had seen him. I had visited with him. I had given him food. I had offered him food at other occasions he had been to our building,” he said. A video of the attack, captured by the church’s live-stream camera, shows the gunman sitting in a pew during the service before the shooting. He stands up and paces briefly before he speaks to another churchgoer and pulls a large gun from his coat about 10:50 a.m. He then fires toward the man he spoke to, striking him and another man standing nearby, as other congregants scream and dive beneath the pews. The video then shows a fourth man, apparently Wilson, shoot the gunman. At least four congregants with weapons raised
Police on the scene following last Sunday’s shooting at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Tex., where a gunman killed two people.
rush toward the attacker, who had fallen to the ground. Before the new law, gun owners in Texas could not carry weapons into a house of worship without specific authorization from church leadership. The Sutherland Springs attack spurred Texas lawmakers in a Republican-controlled legislature to loosen the state’s gun laws so that they could do so more easily. While there is no specific law that allows armed volunteers in places of worship, members of a congregation can use their concealed-carry license to protect their religious community, said South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman. Houses of worship and other businesses in Texas are still legally authorized to ban firearms on their premises. But in September, another law went into effect requiring a house of worship to post a sign stating it is opting out before it can prohibit licensed individuals from carrying weapons inside. Conservative politicians and gun rights advocates credited the looser gun laws with saving lives. “The brave officers from the White Settlement Police Department were on the scene in less than two minutes, but these men who had volunteered for the church security team had already secured their church,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said in a statement. The National Rifle Association renewed its “good guy with a gun” defense of looser firearms restrictions in a Sunday tweet praising the armed churchgoer’s actions — a defense that gun-control group Newtown Action Alliance called a “myth,” noting that Wilson was “highly trained.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) also praised the armed response. Paxton said Monday: “We can’t prevent every incident, we can’t prevent mental illness from occurring, and we can’t prevent every crazy person from pulling a gun. But you can be prepared like this church was.” n
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Nation
N.Y. Jews fear history repeating itself J ULIE Z AUZMER in New York BY
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endy Spielman sat at the checkout counter at the Kol Tuv kosher supermarket in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, thinking of the violence that keeps gripping his Orthodox Jewish community. The string of assaults on Jewish men and women in Brooklyn. The stabbing of five people celebrating Hanukkah in the New York suburb of Monsey. The shooting this past month in a Jersey City supermarket just like this one. “I feel sick,” Spielman said. He has taken to carrying pepper spray for the first time in his life. “This is how it is, being Jewish. You know history always repeats itself.” New York’s Orthodox Jews, many of whom are descended from those who fled the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s or the pogroms of Eastern Europe the generation before that, thought they had created safe havens for themselves in places such as Rockland County, home to Monsey, where one-third of the population is Jewish, and in neighborhoods like Crown Heights. Kingston Avenue — where Spielman works — is a place where cars drive up and down the street with menorahs on top, where the deli menus are in Hebrew letters, and where the stores advertise Hanukkah sales on wigs and tefillin. But the sense of security within this insular community has been shattered by the recent attacks: 13 in New York state in the past three weeks alone. In New York City, anti-Semitic crimes have jumped 21 percent in the past year. As Spielman discussed the fear and frustration of New York’s Jewish community, federal prosecutors filed hate-crime charges against Grafton Thomas in the Monsey stabbing, which left five people wounded at a rabbi’s Hanukkah party this past weekend. The charges were based on Thomas’s handwritten journals and online search history. They came after Thomas’s family said he has
Emily Leshner/Associated Press
Anti-Semitic attacks as well as a Hanukkah stabbing have rattled the Orthodox community “no known history of anti-Semitism,” attributing his alleged actions to “profound mental illness.” Spielman thinks New York officials have not sufficiently enforced prosecution of hate-crime suspects. He expressed his irritation that the left and the right seem to blame anti-Semitism on the other without recognizing that it comes from both sides. Nearby, the Jewish Children’s Museum bustled with Jewish families Monday, the final day of Hanukkah. “When you go to Israel, I always felt you had to keep your eyes on a swivel, be aware of your surroundings. I never felt that way here. Now I do,” said Brian Yavne as he watched his young son painting an orange menorah. Yavne, who lives in Brooklyn, said he has never felt fearful as an American Jew before now. “There have been some eerie flashbacks, based on the memories we were told, to what’s going on right now. … More and more, it’s not taboo for it to be open season on Jewish people.”
Tzvi Schwartz, a real estate agent visiting the museum with his young daughter, said he still believes American Jews are safer than almost any time or place in Jewish history. “For 2,000 years — the pogroms, the inquisitions. We’ve come to a place where religion is free to be practiced. There’s no question that the powers of evil have lost,” he said. Still, he thinks media reports have not sufficiently conveyed the seriousness of the assaults on Jews in New York. Goldie Rosenberg, the museum’s director of education, said she believes New York’s Jews might be witnessing the early stages of the type of widespread violence that consumed European Jewry. “The community is feeling very scared and vulnerable,” she said. “We don’t want to repeat what happened years ago. We don’t want to repeat another World War II, another Holocaust. We need support from everyone. . . . It definitely can build much more.” To try to forestall deepening
Alex Mizrahi, center, lights a candle on a menorah for Hanukkah in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn on Dec. 29. A man stabbed five people at a rabbi’s Hanukkah party in Monsey the night before.
hatred, Rosenberg is planning more education programs at the museum to introduce public school students to Judaism. She said she hopes to answer basic questions students might have, such as: “Why do we look different?” For Rosenberg, this is not just professional but personal: Her father, Menachem Moskowitz, was attacked last year while walking home from synagogue. A stranger allegedly shouted “You Jews took my house and mortgage” before trying to strangle Moskowitz and breaking his rib. The attack traumatized the whole family, Rosenberg said, and led to her fears about a second Holocaust. “Ten years ago, I didn’t feel that way.” Some who left Brooklyn had expected a safer home in the suburban Orthodox community in Monsey. But after the stabbing, many are talking about whether to hire armed guards at their synagogues and Jewish schools, and how to teach their children what to do in the event of an attack. “When my 11-year-old gets off the bus at 6:10 p.m. and it’s dark outside, do I teach him to use his briefcase as a shield? Do I send him to self-defense classes?” said Shoshana Bernstein, a Monsey resident and community activist, repeating conversations she has heard among parents since this weekend. She said she believes local government should fund more security for Jewish schools in light of the attack. Bernstein prayed Saturday afternoon at Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg’s synagogue, just hours before the attacker entered the rabbi’s home next door and stabbed five partygoers who were lighting Hanukkah candles. In the hours after the attack, Bernstein said a dark text conversation started unfolding among Monsey’s Jews. “They’re saying: ‘Is this it? Is this what our grandparents went through? Is this the turning point when they said we need to leave?’” said Bernstein, who was deeply saddened by the questions. “How horrifying is it, that this is the United States?” n
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Nation
KLMNO Weekly
A boom for the ages, but not for all Investors have enjoyed the bull market this past decade — but many Americans have been left out
“The decade was about the capitalists. People who own capital did the best.” Joseph LaVorgna, chief economist of the Americas at Natixis
BY
T HOMAS H EATH
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he U.S. stock market concluded the decade in record territory, a boom that emerged from the wreckage of the financial crisis but left on the sidelines the millions of Americans without money to invest. The Standard & Poor’s 500stock index, which tracks the biggest American companies, has registered a total return of about 256 percent, or 13.5 percent annually, since the beginning of 2010, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at the S&P Dow Jones Indices. That compares with an average annual total return, including dividends, of 10.3 percent since the 1920s, he said. That means someone who had $10,000 in the S&P 500 at the start of the decade has ended it with close to $36,000. In 2019 alone, investors saw a total return of more than 31 percent. The stock market has contributed to a high degree of economic satisfaction across the country, on top of a very low unemployment rate and modest but steady economic growth, surveys show. People who got into the market early in the decade, or even joined more lately, will have seen their retirement assets, college savings and other investments increase. “If you owned stocks, bonds, real estate, hard assets, you benefited,” said Michael Farr, president of Farr, Miller & Washington, a D.C. investment firm. “Prices on everything from parking lots to publicly traded equities went dramatically higher.” Yet not only did the prosperous decade leave many Americans behind — 52 percent of Americans own stocks, largely through retirement accounts, according to the latest Federal Reserve data — it also fits into a much more uneven economic picture. Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, acknowledged that people who owned stocks did well. “But when you are talking about the equity markets, you are talking about the top half
U.S. stock market boomed in the 2010s Average total annual return (including dividends) 0 1930s
5
10
15
20 percent
1
1940s
8.7
1950s
19.2
1960s
7.8
1970s
5.9
1980s
17.6
1990s 2000s
18.2 -0.9
2010s
13.5%
Source: Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices BRITTANY RENEE MAYES/THE WASHINGTON POST
of the population,” he said. “The bottom half of households don’t own stocks.” Emerging financial challenges such as the explosion of student debt and, until the past few years, highly disappointing levels of wage growth meant many Americans may have had less to invest in the first place. “Unfortunately, the bulk of investors don’t have enough money in their retirement accounts to retire on, even though they just lived through a fantastic decade,” said Daniel Wiener, chairman of Adviser Investments. In addition, Americans who sold in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, or lost their home to foreclosure, would not have had as much of a chance to take part in this decade’s boom. Retirees who shifted money into fixed-income accounts saw paltry returns as interest rates sat at historic lows. Even those who did enjoy the roaring markets may look at the five- and 10-year returns on their investment accounts and formulate unrealistic expectations about what the future might hold. According to S&P data starting in 1930s, the best decade was the 1950s, when the market had a 19.21 percent average annual total return. The worst was 2000 through 2009, when the S&P fell, on average, 0.86 percent. The 2010-to-2019 decade is the fourth-best since the 1930s, the data shows. The starting point for the past
decade’s boom was the recovery from a massive financial crisis and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. What followed were extraordinary levels of action by policymakers to lift the economy and the markets. That included trillions of dollars in public spending, authorized by members of both parties, and an unprecedented campaign by the Fed to boost economic growth and asset prices through low interest rates and other means. Those policies continued under the Trump administration, which pushed through a massive tax cut. Meanwhile, after raising rates for several years, the Fed began cutting them again in 2019, moves that helped the markets break records. The number of households worth $1 million, not including their primary residence, grew to 11.8 million as of one year ago, according to the Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based market research firm. That is an increase of 51 percent over 2009, with 2019 yet to be counted. “The decade was about the capitalists,” said Joseph LaVorgna, chief economist of the Americas at Natixis. “People who own capital did the best.” Technology stocks were the market’s story of the decade. Apple, Microsoft and Amazon became the first American companies to crack the $1 trillion mark in
total stock value. (Amazon owner and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The sector far outperformed any other category in the S&P 500, tripling its worth over the past 10 years to more than $6 trillion, according to the S&P data. Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, represent the lion’s share of millionaires, many of whom were able to take advantage of the decade-long bull market. Those who had money in stocks leading up to the 2009 financial crisis, and who left those assets in the market, rode the wave up from what had been a generational low. Retired executive Fritz Gilbert, 56, lost a third of his savings during the 2009 crash but kept on buying stocks. Now he counts himself in the millionaire cohort. ““Those who didn’t panic and were patient have been rewarded the last 10 years,” said Gilbert, who writes a retirement blog. The 126-month-long economic expansion that fueled the gains is now the longest on record. The bull market began in the throes of the 2009 crisis, which was caused by an overvalued, oversold housing market that turned trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities held by banks and investors around the world into toxic assets. “Who would have thought that after suffering through a near-60 percent decline in the S&P 500 through early March 2009, the worst bear market since the Great Depression, the bull would still be alive and kicking 10 years later?” said Sam Stovall of CFRA Research. The question going forward is how long the bull market can go. In December, Vanguard Group issued a research paper for 2020 that said the coming years will be the dawn of the “new age of uncertainty.” Citing U.S. trade policy and declining global growth, Vanguard said that “persistently elevated policy uncertainty is holding back economic activity more than ever.” It remains to be seen whether Trump’s recently minted “phase one” trade deal with China will ease that uncertainty. n
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Food
KLMNO Weekly
The 2010s’ most important food trend BY
T IM C ARMAN
T
alk all you want about avocado toast, plantbased meats, small plates and milk alternatives, but the biggest food trend over the past decade was the fast-casual. Nothing had a larger impact on American dining than these counter-service restaurants. They changed the way people ate and how ingredients were sourced at chain restaurants. Fast-casuals predated the 2010s, of course. Launched in the 1990s with the promise of healthful food prepared with better ingredients than those at fast-food chains, fast-casuals became the darling of the last decade, driven in part by the effects of the Great Recession, skyrocketing rents and rising food costs. The numbers give you a glimpse into their dominance: In 2009, there were about 17,300 fast-casuals in the United States with sales of $19 billion, according the market research firm Technomic. By 2018, the last year for which statistics are available, fast-casuals had more than doubled their locations (34,800) and sales ($47.5 billion). Yet, the numbers alone don’t begin to explain the influence that fast-casuals had over the past 10 years. If you’ll recall, the aughts were the decade of the chef as benign dictator, the chef as auteur, every bit as controlling as Alfred Hitchcock on set. You were not allowed substitutions, special requests or even a salt shaker. You were there to do one thing: savor the genius of the chef. Fast-casuals turned that relationship on its head. The diner was, once again, in charge. Customization was not only encouraged but often built right into the business model as customers walked the line, engineering their own burritos, rice bowls, conveyer-belt pizzas or whatever other dish served as the focal point of the concept. Chefs may have helped design a fast-casual menu, but they were relegated to corporate kitchens, where the collective will of the people (and the poor economy) had deflated their am-
Dixie D. Vereen For The Washington Post
Fast-casuals changed how people eat, and they forced competitors to adapt or lose customers bitions and their egos. But more than that, fast-casuals split the difference between chef-driven restaurants and multinational fast-food outlets. Chains such as Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Pei Wei Asian Kitchen, Cava and others promised fresh, sometimes organic ingredients, occasionally sourced from nearby farms, just like the whitetablecloth restaurants that used to list their suppliers right on the menu. Just as important, fast-casuals promised an attractive space to eat, not some industrially lit environment with hard plastic chairs and loud metal surfaces, which all but encouraged you to eat up and get out. The fast-casual was perfect for the era: In the 2010s, smartphones would become our constant companion, providing us with a steady stream of information, entertainment and texts, but also tying us to the workplace at every hour of the day. Suddenly, we had no time. We were too busy for this full-service restaurant
tomfoolery. We wanted something good. Something quick. Something relatively cheap. The fast-casual fit right in. And fast-casuals capitalized on this technology. They built proprietary apps, so we could order ahead and avoid the long lines that form around the lunch hour. We could earn rewards, swag, even, if we were loyal. This was a two-way street, naturally: The companies collected data on us. Lots of data: our dining frequency, our menu selections, our price sensitivities. As Nicolas Jammet, co-founder of Sweetgreen, told me a couple of years ago, “Having all the data helps us be smarter.” During a decade when operating costs increased across the board — food, labor and rent — fast-casuals appealed as much to bean-counters as to diners. The counter-service concept requires far fewer employees, and those workers will not demand the type of salaries that an executive chef, sous chefs, a general manager or other upper-management mem-
Cava lets customers build their own meals from a Mediterranean menu filled with fresh ingredients. By 2018, fast-casuals had 34,800 locations and $47.5 billion in sales.
bers of a fancy restaurant would. Not surprisingly, the profit margins of fast-casuals are attractive to investors and venture capitalists, said David Strasser, managing director of Swan and Legend Venture Partners, a partner in both Beefsteak and Cava. Another thing that excited investors during the 2010s, Strasser added, was the fact that Chipotle and Panera — two fast-casual pioneers — proved the concept could work in the suburbs, not just urban centers where young and single diners patronized the restaurants. “It just showed that suburban people were willing to pay a premium . . . for high-quality food,” Strasser told me. The popularity of fast-casuals did not go unnoticed by casualdining or fast-food chains, both of which suffered at times during the rise of the counter format. But fast-casual’s competitors did not sit still, either. They responded by cleaning up their ingredients, introducing more healthful options, adopting new technologies and sometimes even moving into the fast-casual category themselves. The decade-long influence of fast-casuals had a strange effect on the hospitality industry: The lines between fast-food, casual and fast-casual restaurants began to blur. This, in return, had an impact on fast-casuals in the latter part of the decade. They were hurt by their own popularity and irrational exuberance, whether squeezed by the increased competition or by their own overexpansion (and an outbreak or two of foodborne illnesses). Despite the setbacks, the fastcasual market continues to grow overall and continues to influence other restaurants, both high and low, said Cherryh Cansler, vice president of editorial for Networld Media Group, which publishes FastCasual.com, an online magazine that covers the industry. At this point in its history, fast-casuals can no longer be identified as a trend, Cansler added. They are a permanent fixture in the hospitality industry. Can you say the same for avocado toast? n
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Opinions
Behind the NBA’s success was Stern’s fighting spirit Ben Golliver writes about the NBA for The Washington Post.
Adversity supposedly reveals character, but David Stern’s character is best revealed by his endless list of adversaries. ¶ The NBA’s longtime commissioner, who died Wednesday at 77 after suffering a brain hemorrhage last month, rarely shied from a confrontation. In truth, he often sought them out. Stern jabbed at politicians, owners, coaches and reporters, and he oversaw contentious negotiations with the National Basketball Players Association that twice led to work stoppages. For many, the iconic image of Stern came during his annual appearances at the draft. Before welcoming basketball’s future stars, he gleefully cupped his hand to his ear, goading the rambunctious fans in New York to boo him more loudly. Stern will be remembered as a relentless, uncompromising leader during his 30-year tenure, a lawyer whose marketing instincts helped the NBA ride Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan — and later Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James — to new heights of global popularity. At every stop, there were confrontations. In the early days, Stern’s NBA grasped for relevance, television airtime and a seat at the table next to pro football and baseball. As Johnson and Bird emerged as household names and the faces of dueling dynasties, the league pushed for more endorsement opportunities, greater media visibility and better behind-thescenes access. As Jordan became an international phenomenon, Stern charged on, taking the game directly to Chinese consumers and dreaming of international expansion. He settled on placing two franchises in Canada in the 1990s but kept hinting for decades afterward that the league would eventually conquer Europe. With the advent of social media, a league that couldn’t get its Finals on live
television in the pre-Stern era began to eclipse its fellow pro leagues in follower counts and influence. The NBA’s explosive growth since Stern took over in 1984 is a tidy narrative: The Portland Trail Blazers, as just one example, were sold for $70 million in 1988 and are now valued at $1.6 billion. Yet talk of Stern’s legacy must include the bumps and bruises, the pugnacious spirit that led critics to label him as a “bully” and a “dictator.” Stern fought and fought and fought, delivering wrath with piercing media comments and expensive sanctions. Fame was no inoculant. He fined Jordan for wearing shoes that violated the league’s dress code. He fined legendary San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich for daring to rest his players for a nationally televised game. He fined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at least 20 times, including sixfigure punishments for blogging about officials and sitting on the baseline during a game. Remember, these targets were the NBA’s crème de la crème. Jordan: the most popular and marketable modern player, a six-
Charles Bennett/Associated Press
NBA Commissioner David Stern hands the NBA Finals award for most valuable player to Michael Jordan on June 18, 1996. Stern was the NBA’s longest-serving commissioner, at 30 years.
time champion whose banned shoes turned into a billion-dollar business. Popovich: perhaps the most respected modern coach, a five-time champion whose organization has pioneered everything from international scouting to efficient shot distribution. And Cuban: a tech billionaire whose over-the-top investments in his organization led to the 2011 title and helped raise the bar for modern owners. If Stern didn’t mind conflicts with valued partners, he had no problem whatsoever eviscerating foes. Stern labeled Tim Donaghy, the disgraced referee, a “rogue, isolated criminal.” When Gilbert Arenas brought a gun to the locker room, Stern banned him for the season and said bluntly that the Washington Wizards guard “is not currently fit to take the court.” The NBA’s labor wars represented Stern at his most polarizing. In 1999, the NBA lost 32 games to a lockout. In 2011, 16 games were lost. As Stern insisted on drastically reworking the league’s financial framework in favor of the owners, he accused player agents of being “greedy” and “trying to scuttle the deal.” That lockout led HBO’s Bryant Gumbel to call Stern a “plantation overseer,” a nod to the obvious divide between the
NBA’s largely white owners and largely black players. Many of Stern’s noteworthy policies on the league’s players — from the dress code to the age limit on prospects entering the draft to airbrushing tattoos from magazine covers — already seem to be relics of a past era. Stern, perhaps, is fortunate that his tenure predated cancel culture. Yet the opposite is true, too: Some of Stern’s passion projects proved to be ahead of their time. The commissioner famously supported Johnson when he announced he was HIV positive in 1991. Stern fined Bryant $100,000 for using a homophobic slur during a 2011 game, then repeatedly provided public encouragement to Jason Collins, who became the first openly gay active NBA player in 2013. While there were squabbles on a thousand fronts over the years, Stern’s focus remained on growing and selling the game. His final act as commissioner was to groom an able successor in Adam Silver, inevitably cast as the good cop to Stern’s bad cop. Stern pushed, prodded, punished, insulted, chafed and charmed those who crossed or challenged him. He believed in the fight, and the fight was the point. n
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TV by Steven Zeitchik
New big streaming services will mean new big hits (and new big bills)
2020 year in
preview
We know this much already: There will be an election this year. People will spend money, eat food, watch (and play) sports, use phone apps and play video games, and countries around the world will engage in BY M IKE diplomacy — and M ADDEN conflict. The ILLUSTRATIONS details of all those BY I GOR BASTIDAS things, as always, will be what make the year interesting. To get a jump on the future, we asked Washington Post beat reporters and columnists to think about the big stories, themes and questions that we’ll look back on in December. Here is the Year in Preview.
The last few months of 2019 were filled with streaming news. Buckets of it. From the nonstop marketing of Jennifer Aniston in Apple TV Plus’s “The Morning Show” to that ubiquitous Baby Yoda from Disney Plus’s “The Mandalorian,” it seemed like the spigot might never turn off. And it won’t, not anytime soon. This will be a year of new digital programming — and new services to deliver it. Just two weeks into 2020, Comcast will unveil more details about Peacock, its new service with content from across NBC Universal properties, set to launch several months later. The spring will also bring HBO Max, the prestige-branded service with all manner of TV shows and movies from the WarnerMedia empire. Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus, both of which launched in November, will add more content throughout the year, too — as will Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post). Viewers will have an ever-wider choice of fresh programming. Want new seasons of fan favorites “Search Party” and “The Boondocks”? They’ll be on HBO Max. It’s the final episodes of “BoJack Horseman” you crave? Where else but Netflix. Looking for “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” to give you a fix between Marvel movies? Disney Plus has you covered. Finding out when new episodes premiere, let alone whether they are worth watching, will be a task far more complicated than your Twitter feed can keep up with. All these services know they need to offer some reliable hits to complement the new stuff. That means many popular sitcoms are migrating from Netflix. “The Office” is headed to Peacock; “Friends” to HBO Max. And it will all be expensive. Turns out spending sacks of cash on new shows and movies — Netflix alone is expected to shell out in excess of $15 billion in 2020 — isn’t easy without ad revenue. Services have to charge, whether that’s the $5 a month for Apple TV Plus or the $15 for HBO Max. For consumers, that means piling on to a monthly entertainment bill or making tough choices about what to forgo. But don’t get too despondent. If some of the recent sitcoms you seek are too unwieldy or costly to find on streaming services, there’s a suddenly appealing option: traditional television. Many shows, after all, will continue to air in syndication. BREXIT by Karla Adam
Britain will leave Europe. And then the negotiations will continue. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, fresh off an election victory, has vowed to “get Brexit done.” Brexit will probably not be “done” in 2020, but it will — finally — get started. In January, 312 years after voting narrowly in favor of Brexit, Britain will officially split from the
European Union. Expect a big party and fireworks, but don’t expect a big rupture in relations between London and Brussels. The status quo will largely continue as the country enters an 11-month transition period, during which Britain will attempt to negotiate a trade deal with the E.U., its largest trading partner, as well as come to agreements on issues including security and law enforcement. Analysts think this is a crazy tight timetable, especially if Johnson wants to diverge substantially from E.U. rules. If a deal isn’t completed by the end of the year, it’s possible Johnson could break his pledge and seek to extend the transition period. Alternatively, Britain could crash out of the E.U. without a trade pact, reviving anxieties about an abrupt, chaotic and economically damaging “no-deal” Brexit. One reason it’s tricky to predict how Johnson will tack in the upcoming negotiations — does Britain stay closely aligned with the E.U.? Or does it tilt toward less regulation, in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher? — is that the prime minister is hard to pin down politically. But he could be tempted to keep Britain more in lockstep with the E.U., not least because his whopping majority means he won’t be beholden to Euroskeptics in his party anymore. Plus, closer alignment could help with his political problems in Scotland and Northern Ireland: As the reality of Brexit sinks in, nationalist movements could gain momentum outside England, and a closer relationship with the E.U. could help head off those threats. FOOD by Laura Reiley
You will soon taste meat grown in a lab, not on a farm
Plant-based meat was so 2019. Big Beef st(e)aked out territory, demanding legislation that put this interloper on the defensive, mostly in anticipation of what will surely be the food world’s biggest game changer in the year to come: Cell-cultured meat, poultry and seafood products derived from muscle tissue grown in a lab with cells harvested from a living animal. It is unclear which U.S. company will be first to market — chicken and duck from Memphis Meats in Berkeley, Calif., with investors such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Tyson Foods; Wagyu beef or chicken nuggets from Just (formerly Hampton Creek), whose investors include Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund; or bluefin tuna from Finless Foods — but Barclays analysts say “alt meat” could in the next decade capture 10 percent of the $1.4 trillion global meat industry. Much of it hinges on rates of adoption. The numbers of vegans and vegetarians aren’t growing much. These new products are geared toward omnivores and “flexitarians,” but as with genetically modified organisms more than a decade ago, some consumers distrust food that has been tinkered with in a laboratory. As it happens, that will also be an issue with another trend this coming year: grocery store foods that are gene-edited with CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Romaine and white potatoes that don’t brown or
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bruise, and a gene-edited farmed tilapia that grows quickly, are among the foods improved via tiny DNA snips, essentially accelerating the selection of desirable traits that Gregor Mendel achieved via crossbreeding his peas. Whether consumers will embrace these new foods is unknown. For now, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed overseeing gene-edited animals as drugs, something the meat industry thinks will disadvantage American producers.
If Iran stumbles, would Putin be forced to bail out Assad, at the risk of getting ensnared in Syria and sparking disquiet at home? Could he continue to avoid a confrontation with Turkey? Would the Saudis be as friendly with Moscow if they thought Iran was distracted by its own troubles? Will the mood shift unpredictably in Washington? In 2019, Russia demonstrated its agility in the Middle East. The real test may still lie ahead.
RUSSIA by Will Englund
Putin will press his advantage in the Middle East If Russian President Vladimir Putin suspects that President Trump has been irretrievably weakened or distracted — and especially if he thinks Trump will be replaced by a more mainstream alternative — expect him to redouble his efforts to secure a deeper Russian role in the Middle East while he still has a chance. Russia has been on a roll in the region, with a winning military intervention in Syria; a strengthening of diplomatic and commercial ties with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Israel; a mercenary involvement in Libya; and a toe in the waters of the western Mediterranean through joint naval exercises with Algeria. But Moscow’s gains have come through craft, stealth and a large measure of luck, rather than through major-power prowess, and the challenge will be to sustain and build on those achievements. Potential pitfalls abound. Putin has forged a generally useful working relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he may have to start fresh in a post-Netanyahu era,
depending on Israel’s third round of elections in March. Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been receptive to Russian dealmaking, but neither is a client state of Moscow by any measure. And the real key to Russia’s Middle Eastern success almost certainly depends on its longtime ally Iran, now shaken by violent protests. In Syria, the Russian military effort has come with little cost and less pain. The real fighting on the ground on behalf of the government of Bashar alAssad has been carried out by Iran and its Hezbollah allies. But anti-Hezbollah unrest in Lebanon, antiIran unrest in Iraq and upheaval on the streets of Iran itself could significantly alter the calculation.
TECH by Tony Romm
Washington will try to lock down Silicon Valley Very few things unite President Trump and the Democrats vying to take his place in the White House, but both are readying for battle against Big Tech. Amazon, Facebook, Google and their Silicon Valley peers could face the first major consequences in the coming year from investigations by state and federal regulators into whether they undermine privacy, mishandle sensitive online content, damage elections or quash competition. Amazon is in the crosshairs for the tactics it’s used to dominate e-commerce, Facebook for the way it gobbles up users’ data (and its corporate rivals) and Google for its dominance of the online ad business. Attorney General William P. Barr has said the Justice Department plans to wrap up its wideranging look at search, social media and online shopping in 2020. That could result in calls for new regulations and potentially punishments — the most extreme being an attempt to break up one or more companies. The House Judiciary Committee spent 2019 demanding internal documents from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. In 2020, it’s expected to issue a report on whether the industry has, in effect, subverted federal antitrust protections. And if Trump loses the White House, the pressure will mount: Democratic contenders, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), have promised to unwind some of the mergers that helped the giants become so big in the first place, such as Facebook’s purchases of the photosharing app Instagram and the messaging platform WhatsApp. Internet companies spent $55 million over the first nine months of this year to lobby Washington, and they’ll throw more political weight around as the threat grows. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg hinted about a fierce counteroffensive in a talk with employees last
summer. “At the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight,” he said. That fight is about to intensify. THE ECONOMY by Heather Long
A fragile boom keeps going and going
Although risks remain, the U.S. economy appears unlikely to fall into a recession in 2020. Another year of decent growth will probably make it easier for even more Americans to find jobs — and boost President Trump’s chances of reelection. And the trade wars that dominated economic discussion in 2019 seem to be over, at least for now. Growth is expected to be 1.8 percent next year, according to a closely watched survey of economists. That’s far from the boom that Trump promised and slower than this year’s pace of about 2.2 percent and last year’s rate of 2.9 percent — but the president and the Federal Reserve may have it in their power to nudge the figure upward. Trump just reached trade agreements with China, Canada and Mexico. The deals are more modest than what he vowed he could achieve, but they signal that he is hitting pause on his trade battles, a welcome relief for Wall Street investors and many business leaders. Although consumers continue to spend at a healthy clip, companies had dramatically scaled back purchases this year because of the trade uncertainty. If Trump keeps the peace on trade, business spending could resume. Economists and investors also expect the Fed to lower rates at least once more in 2020, providing another boost. Three rate cuts by the Fed in 2019 were a major reason the stock market hit record highs and recession fears abated.
Although unemployment is at a 50-year low, the position of the middle class remains precarious. Jobs that pay middle-income wages are increasingly going away, replaced by positions paying over $100,000 or under $30,000. That socially destabilizing phenomenon will be a focus of the presidential race. Economists, meanwhile, are also keeping a vigilant eye on robots — because firms typically accelerate the automation of jobs done by temporary and lowskilled workers in the months leading up to a significant downturn. But the general expectation is that the longest expansion in U.S. history, which began in mid-2009, will last at least one more year.
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WORLD by Ishaan Tharoor
We have had a full year of hand-wringing over “cancel culture,” particularly as it relates to comedians. Shane Gillis, for example, hired and then fired by “Saturday Night Live” for racist language on podcasts, was denounced on social media by celebrities — and also defended by famous comedians.
The motives of the millions who took to the streets in Santiago, La Paz, Algiers and Basra were as varied as their geography. But the demonstrators were united in what has become an epochal display of global discontent, an explosion of popular unrest that capped a decade of angst and anger. When they weren’t clamoring for greater freedoms and democracy, protesters were marching against corruption, inequality and state brutality. In their wake, presidents fled, prime ministers resigned and governments fell. And the movements that flared in 2019 aren’t about to peter out. Across Latin America, a creaking social contract seems on the verge of collapse: In Chile, widely viewed as one of South America’s most stable societies, weeks of protests against austerity measures compelled the center-right president to shuffle his cabinet and announce reforms. But protesters remain on the streets, demanding a wholesale remaking of the socioeconomic order. Demonstrators in Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Haiti echoed the call for economic justice. An uprising in Bolivia chased out a long-ruling leftist president, while autocrats in Venezuela and Nicaragua cling to power despite popular challenges. More polarization, paralysis and violence may follow. That’s all the more on view in the Arab world, where a stunning wave of protests unseated leaders in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq. But an entrenched and often corrupt old guard is desperately trying to stay in control. In Iraq, security forces and pro-Iran militias have killed about 500 people and are preparing for a deeper crackdown. Iran hasn’t been spared, either. In November, authorities cut off Internet access and killed potentially hundreds to quash protests that erupted after a rise in fuel prices. As Iran’s theocratic regime
No one will stay canceled for good
But 2020 may be the year when we learn that no one is canceled forever. The controversies will continue, yes. The societywide reckoning with sexual harassment and assault will not abate. There will be more denounced jokes; comedy, more than most art forms, ages terribly. Norms and tastes rapidly evolve. More performers will come under fire for past or recent statements, jokes, offstage behavior or allegations of sexual misconduct. “Getting canceled,” though, means suffering professional and personal consequences, not being permanently silenced. Look at Aziz Ansari, who was embroiled in controversy in 2018 after Babe.net published an anonymous accusation of sexual impropriety (Ansari said that the interaction “by all indications was completely consensual”). He retreated from the limelight for a while, but then he returned to standup, doing small shows to work out material before hitting the road to perform in packed theaters. He even addressed the allegation in an acclaimed Netflix special. Louis C.K., who admitted to sexual misconduct after the New York Times published allegations from five women, lost his manager, publicist and all of the cultural cachet he had built up in his career. But he had a massive email list pre-scandal, and he can still promote himself to his die-hard fans, the ones most likely to have remained as subscribers. C.K. is still performing, and as he announced to his list, he has several club and theater gigs in the United States and abroad in 2020. Even Bill Cosby, convicted of assault, has found an audience — albeit behind bars — eager to listen to him opine. Corporate entities putting together TV shows and movies will remain skittish about backing performers accused of problematic behavior, or ones criticized for offensive material. But there will still be audiences willing to watch.
Protests won’t stop. Neither will government crackdowns.
enters its fifth decade, a tanking economy and widespread public anger over political elites’ mismanagement and corruption only add to the sense of a brewing existential crisis. In Hong Kong, a sustained pro-democracy movement remains grimly determined, defying the authoritarian leadership in Beijing and its local proxies. China has no intention of acceding to
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protesters’ demands, though, and 2020 could mark a bloody tipping point for Asia’s financial capital. President Trump, known more for his coziness with autocrats than commitment to democracy struggles abroad, has been conspicuously silent about most of these displays of people power. But only in a few instances — Hong Kong’s American-flag-waving youth come to mind — are any of these movements explicitly calling for U.S. support. The immediacy of social media still allows us to bear witness and hold repressive governments to account. There will be plenty to watch in the year to come.
THE WHITE HOUSE by Josh Dawsey
President Trump knows you don’t like him. He doesn’t care.
President Trump has begun admitting what polls have shown for three years: Many, many people hate him. And he’s okay with that. “You don’t like me. You have no choice but to vote for me,” he told Wall Street bankers in November. “You’re … not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me,” he said to a room of Jewish supporters in December. “You have no choice … you’re not going to vote for the wealth tax!” It is a rare admission from a politician. But it’s key to a campaign strategy built around an awareness that Trump’s favorability — even before he was impeached by the House — is near record lows and that he won’t stop tweeting, offering bombast and insults, saying things that aren’t true, or making polarizing decisions. So Trump’s advisers are leaning in. “He’s no Mr. Nice Guy,” said the narrator in a $1 million-plus ad that ran during the World Series, highlighting some of the president’s accomplishments while admitting that voters might not like him. “But sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to change Washington.” The idea is to talk more about his record and less about his personality — while slashing and burning Democratic opponents. At a briefing with reporters in mid-December, campaign manager Brad Parscale and senior adviser Jared Kushner showed data from 2016 indicating that people who said they disapproved of Trump still voted for him. They said many people don’t want to publicly admit that they back Trump, but they ultimately will. Their targets are primarily suburban women and independents. Essentially, Trump’s bet is: If your paycheck is better, and we can make you hate the other candidate, you will vote for the president, even if you find him detestable.
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The campaign expects to send surrogates who are less bombastic, such as Ivanka Trump, into areas where suburban women might be persuaded to vote for him. Officials point to statistics that cut in the president’s favor. For example, a recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 57 percent of voters nationally say they are better off than before Trump’s presidency. He regularly scores high marks on the economy, which has continued to improve. That same poll, though, found Trump losing to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. And his approval ratings are mired below 50 percent. But to Trump’s team, that’s no reason for panic: On Election Day in 2016, 61 percent of the country rated Trump unfavorably. Now he’s running for a second term.
audience. Celebrities have had to watch what they say for generations. But gamers grew up with social media, which often rewards the loudest in the room, no matter what. All signs point to a messy integration between the populist media darlings of Gen Z and the existing power structure for politically correct pop. Ready or not, this clash of cultures is looming — and Player One is determined to win the game at any cost.
GAMING by Gene Park
The newest celebrities will play video games With $152 billion in revenue expected in 2019, gaming has become the dominant entertainment medium of the past decade. And if gaming is this century’s rock-and-roll, its biggest personalities are becoming a new class of rock stars. These celebrities are much closer to the irreverence of rock and rap icons than any of the Hollywood guard: They’re younger, have little interest in social filters and are mostly unimpressed by the lingering sheen of 20th-century stardom. But they’re still causing “utter destruction” in hotel rooms across the world, like the famous troublemakers who came before them. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the most visible such star recently, has been at the forefront, with an unprecedented exclusive contract with Microsoft’s
Mixer streaming platform. Others have followed suit, signing lucrative (and secretive) contracts. PewDiePie, arguably the most powerful person on the Internet, hit two milestones in 2019: becoming the first YouTuber to accumulate 100 million subscribers and marrying his longtime girlfriend, Marzia, in a royal wedding for the meme generation. And Dr. Disrespect, who brings the pomp and panache of pro wrestling to Twitch, just signed a TV deal, another first for a pro gamer. Besides building careers as gamers, they also share brushes with controversy — which may have been inevitable, given the challenges of communicating to an always-online, always-posting, always-angry
THE SUPREME COURT by Robert Barnes
Impeachment will land squarely on the chief justice
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist added the famous Gilbert-and-Sullivan-inspired gold stripes to his black robe long before he wielded the gavel at President Bill Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial in 1999. But he did borrow from the operetta “Iolanthe” in describing his role at the trial: “I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well,” he told a television interviewer two years later. Now on deck: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. The man who made judge-as-umpire his credo during his confirmation hearing would be only the third chief justice to preside at a presidential impeachment trial. It would also be the first trial of any kind where the lawyer turned appellate judge has been in charge. Roberts was a law clerk to Rehnquist and shares with his predecessor the goal — perhaps only aspirational, probably unobtainable — of convincing the public that he and his fellow justices are impartial to outcomes and immune to partisan influence and bias. Although the Supreme Court itself has no formal role in President Trump’s impeachment, Trump has, perhaps wishfully, imagined that it might. He tweeted this past month: “Shouldn’t even be allowed. Can we go to Supreme Court to stop?” Trump has also asked the court to protect his financial records from prosecutors and members of Congress, separate from impeachment; the justices will review that question in the spring. But it is the chief justice, usually just one of nine, who by constitutional design plays the lone judicial role in presidential impeachment. Like Rehnquist, Roberts is a student of history and the Constitution. Rehnquist wrote a book on impeachment; those who’ve studied the Clinton trial say he was reluctant to make broad rulings that could be overruled by a simple majority of senators. He left it to lawmakers to work out details over motions and
witnesses. Roberts, who has chided Trump for suggesting that judges’ views are more political bias than studied reasoning, will be looking to preserve his own reputation in a process that by design is more political than legal. POLITICS by Michael Scherer
The billionaires are coming
Call it influence inflation: Back when Bill Clinton was president, $100,000 was enough to get a political donor invited to sleep over in the Lincoln Bedroom. These days, top political benefactors dole out $100 million or more to elect favored candidates. The amount of money spent on presidential campaigns by independent groups rose from almost $129 million in 2008 to nearly $670 million in 2016, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. And essential functions like collecting and analyzing voter data, voter registration drives and spending on political ads are increasingly funded by America’s 607 billionaires, outside the direct control of politicians or parties. (In the 2018 cycle, one of the richest, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, donated $10.1 million to a super PAC supporting military veterans running for office, as well as $52,400 to five other federal PACs and campaigns, according to public records.) Next year will set records, reaffirming the second coming of a gilded age for political money. What Brookings Institution scholar Darrell West calls the “wealthification” of American politics is changing the players as well as the game. Two Democratic billionaires, Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, are self-funding presidential campaigns to dethrone the billionaire president, Donald Trump (and to replace
his Cabinet, the wealthiest in modern history, including billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos). A co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Thomas Hicks Jr., is the son of one of the country’s wealthiest families, as is the party’s finance chairman, Todd Ricketts, while Linda McMahon, a former head of the Small Business Administration whose husband is a billionaire, chairs the top proTrump super PAC. Polls have shown for years that strong majorities of voters think there is too much money in politics. But that hasn’t changed the bottom line: The exceedingly wealthy increasingly fund the political world. You just vote in it. n
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Opinions
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Tom Toles
Khashoggi verdict empowers MBS Mohamed Soltan is a human rights advocate and founder of the Freedom Initiative.
The conclusion of Saudi Arabia’s secret trial into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was an abhorrent miscarriage of justice that capped a tumultuous and disturbing ordeal. Any casual observer would have anticipated the Saudi monarchy acting as it has in the past, without the slightest semblance of due process or rule of law. The attempts to scapegoat a handful of individuals for this heinous crime to deflect attention from the involvement of the kingdom’s leadership were also predictable. But the brazen attempt to bury the highest-profile murder case in the past decade at the end of the year is almost more audacious than the crime itself, which took place midday on foreign soil, inside a diplomatic mission. The timing is hardly a coincidence. The Saudis conveniently concluded the closed-door trial during the holiday season, when capacities in government and media are at their annual low. This also coincides with the U.S. media’s focus on the presidential impeachment and Senate trial. Meanwhile, critical Arabiclanguage media seems to have softened their Saudi coverage to accommodate widely speculated Qatar-Saudi rapprochement. The verdict is telling of how emboldened Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has
become. The kingdom’s historically partial judiciary sentenced five low-ranking officials to death and three others to 24 years total in prison. The masterminds in the chain of command — former Saudi consulgeneral in Istanbul Mohammad al-Otaibi, former deputy intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri and MBS’s closest adviser Saud al-Qahtani — were all exonerated for “insufficient evidence.” All three were fired from their posts over the murder and named in the U.N. special rapporteur’s report. Otaibi and Qahtani were also sanctioned by the United States after the CIA and Treasury Department found them to be involved. The verdict reflects MBS’s sense of invincibility after surviving the worst wave of criticism in the kingdom’s recent
history. Not only does he feel immune from any accountability for the murder, but he is also now attempting to extend that immunity to his associates. It is no secret that Qahtani is MBS’s de facto enforcer. About two months after Jamal had gone into self-imposed exile in September 2017, I was present for a call between Jamal and Qahtani that Jamal asked me to record. Qahtani started the call by establishing his authority, indicating he was calling on behalf of MBS, who had asked him to thank Jamal for his tweets in support of the Saudi government announcing it would lift the driving ban on women. Qahtani told Jamal that the prince followed his work closely and was pleased to see the tweet. Jamal quickly responded, “Please send my regards to his Highness and tell him that it is only my duty as a patriot to compliment the positive reforms taken by the government.” Jamal could have easily stopped there, capitalized on the rapport he just built with the most powerful man in the kingdom and asked for his son’s travel ban to be lifted, but he didn’t. He continued as his hand shook uncontrollably and his voice trembled, “and when there are transgressions, we will critique.”
Jamal used the rest of the call to selflessly advocate for the release of political prisoners, intellectuals, writers and preachers. He named them hurriedly and pleaded for their release. Qahtani’s voice quickly turned aggressive, cutting Jamal off: “These are traitors, and a threat to national security.” Jamal challenged, “I can testify to their patriotism and love of country.” Qahtani frustratingly ended the call by saying, “The evidence will be revealed in due time.” Social psychology explains that surviving an imminent fatal threat increases the survivor’s risk appetite and the sense of invincibility. This means that, emboldened by overcoming the fallout from the seemingly insurmountable atrocity, MBS, Qahtani and company will continue to push the limits of what they can get away with. This is not just about the justice Jamal deserves, or even closure for his friends and family. This is also about deterrence, so another critic is not killed in London’s Hyde Park, abducted from a Toronto suburb or assaulted in a D.C. bar. If we close the book on the Khashoggi murder without proper accountability, it will no longer be an anomaly, but a new norm. n
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BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
The fourth stage of a Trump attack James Comey is a former FBI director and deputy attorney general.
What’s it like to be personally and publicly attacked by the president of the United States? Like many others in and out of government, I have some experience. I have also watched friends and former colleagues deal with vicious, repeated assaults. The attacks have interfered with their ability to find work after government service, as even employers who see through the lies fear hiring a “controversial” person or being attacked themselves. It can mean reassuring concerned friends and family, who can’t imagine themselves the target of presidential wrath, that you’re doing just fine. And it also means avoiding much of social media, because every presidential assault unleashes truly disturbed Trump supporters on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. So, it’s hard on good people, especially those who don’t have savings to fall back on. But the truth is that, in many ways, it is not as hard as you might think, especially as it continues endlessly, leaking power, shrinking its source. At first, the attack is stunning and rocks your world. Waking up to find the president has tweeted that you are guilty of treason or committed assorted other crimes is jarring and disorienting. That’s the first stage, but it doesn’t last. The second stage is a kind of numbness, where it doesn’t seem quite real that the so-called leader of the free world is assailing you by tweet and voice.
It is still unsettling, but it is harder to recapture the vertigo of the first assault. But the longer it goes on, the less it means. In the third stage, the impact diminishes, the power of it shrinks. It no longer feels as though the most powerful human on the planet is after you. It feels as though a strange and slightly sad old guy is yelling at you to get off his lawn, echoed by younger but no less sad people in red hats shouting, “Yeah, get off his lawn!” In this stage, President Trump seems diminished, much as he has diminished the presidency itself. Foreign leaders laugh at him and throw his letters in the
BY SHENEMAN
trash. American leaders clap back at him, offering condescending prayers for his personal well-being. The president’s “trusted” advisers all appear to talk about him behind his back and treat him like a child. Principled public servants defy his orders not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. His record in the courts is similar to the Washington Redskins’ on the field. Even his secret weapon has lost power. Engagement with his Twitter account — the company’s measure of how often people read, share and comment on a tweet — has steadily declined. Americans have grown tired of the show. They are channelsurfing on him. The exhausted middle has arrived at a collective stage three. I don’t mean to suggest Trump is not dangerous. The horrific betrayal of allies in northern Syria demonstrates that an impetuous and amoral leader can do great harm, even in shrunken form. And if he succeeds in redefining our nation’s core values so that extorting foreign governments to aid in one’s election is consistent with the oath of office, he will have done lasting damage to this nation — the harm our founders worried about most.
For the fourth, and final, stage, we need to fight through our fatigue and contempt for this shrunken, withered figure. Spurred by the danger he poses to our nation and its values, we have to overcome the shock and numbness of earlier stages. We must not look away. We must summon the effort necessary to protect this republic from Alexander Hamilton’s great fear, that when an unprincipled person “is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ” We are headed into the storm our founders feared. Getting safely to the other side will require all of us to resist complacency and cynicism. Yes, the final stage is a test of the founders’ design, but it is also an opportunity to demonstrate American character. This democracy — made up of citizens and their institutions — is strong enough to weather the storm. n
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Five Myths
The lottery BY
G EORGE L OEWENSTEIN
Lotteries have been with us for most of recorded human history, dating back at least to the Han Dynasty in China, when proceeds may have helped finance the Great Wall. They were also present at the very start of this country, when King James created a lottery to raise money for the new settlement at Jamestown, Va., in 1612. The dream of drawing a lucky number still has an allure: About half of Americans said in a 2016 Gallup poll that they had bought a state lottery ticket within the past year. Many myths surround these games of chance — and their winners and losers. Myth No. 1 Playing makes economic sense when the jackpots get big. But even aside from the infinitesimally small chance of winning, lotteries with huge jackpots aren’t as good as they look. First, the jackpot is paid out as an annuity, which decreases its net present value; if you choose to take it as a lump sum, you will get only about 60 percent of the advertised prize. Second, winners pay serious taxes on their payout (close to 50 percent in total, depending on the state). Finally, with a huge jackpot, so many people are playing that there is a very good chance that more than one winner will have to share the prize: The likelihood of sharing would be about 50 percent for a $500 million jackpot, and it goes up from there. As a result, the expected value of playing actually decreases as jackpots get very large. Myth No. 2 Winning big will solve your financial problems. But research shows that winning significant prizes is not the ticket to easy street. When a team of economists tracked the fortunes of financially distressed people in Florida who had won the lottery, they found that within three to five years, the winners of big prizes (between $50,000 and $150,000) were equally likely to have filed for bankruptcy as the
small winners, and the groups had similarly low savings and levels of debt. According to the National Endowment for Financial Education, about 70 percent of people who win a lottery or receive a large windfall go bankrupt within a few years. Myth No. 3 Winning the lottery will not make you happy. “Winning a $20 million lottery ticket won’t make you happier,” Harvard Medical School professor Sanjiv Chopra said in a recent TED talk. He cited research showing that happiness fluctuates with positive or negative changes in circumstances in the short run but that, over time, people tend to revert to their own happiness “set point.” Studies that have examined the happiness levels of lottery winners, however, offer a more positive view. Probably the best study on this question, by researchers at the University of Warwick, examined repeated surveys collected from a random sample of Britons, some of whom received medium-size lottery wins of up to approximately $200,000. When compared with people who hadn’t won or who won small prizes, winners of medium-size prizes exhibited significantly better psychological health. Two years after a lottery win, the average measured improvement in mental well-being was 1.4 points on a 36-point
G-Jun Yam/Associated Press
Signs display lottery prizes in Chicago in August 2017. The bigger the jackpot does not necessarily mean the bigger the reward.
measure of psychological stress. (Being widowed — the event that leads to the most serious average decline in well-being — produces a decline of approximately five points.) A 2014 Health Economics study found that lottery winners were happier and, again, less stressed than before they won, though no healthier — in part because they spent some of their new money on drinking and smoking. Myth No. 4 State lotteries have a net benefit for public services. Most state lotteries earmark the revenue generated for specific purposes, and the most common is education. Billboards and television spots in California have often touted the lottery’s benefits for education; Virginia used to print that claim on the back of its lottery tickets. Introducing the “North Carolina Education Lottery” in 2005, then-Gov. Mike Easley promised that “we will be adding another half billion dollars annually for education.” But studies find that lottery dollars do not actually increase education spending: Instead, legislators tend to redirect a corresponding amount from school funding to other purposes.
Myth No. 5 There’s never a good reason to play the lottery. But there are plenty of reasons to play the lottery. For many, the game offers their only chance of dramatically changing their economic circumstances. Lottery purchases tend to rise when the economy is bad and are especially concentrated among people with low education, the jobless and those collecting government benefits. For most players, lotteries provide psychological benefits. Though poor people spend a larger fraction of their income playing the lottery, lotteries are popular among all income groups. Indeed, a 2016 Gallup poll found that while 40 percent of lower-income respondents reported buying a state lottery ticket in the past year, 53 percent of upper-income people did. About 7 percent of Americans report that they have a problem with gambling, but for everyone else, the occasional indulgence of a ticket licenses pleasant fantasies at a relatively modest cost. n Loewenstein, a professor of behavioral economics at Carnegie Mellon University, has conducted research on the motives that drive people to play the lottery.
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