The Washington Post National Weekly. February 16, 2020 by The Wenatchee World

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2020

IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

Kids are terriďŹ ed, anxious and depressed about climate change. Whose fault is that? PAGE 8

Politics Presidential vendetta 4

World Pesticide trafficking in Brazil 10

5 Myths Slavery 23

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Politics

Trump tests limits of power in settling scores Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

As president wages personal vendetta, critics see assault on Justice Dept. independence BY P HILIP R UCKER, R OBERT C OSTA AND J OSH D AWSEY

resident Trump is testing the rule of law after his acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial, seeking to bend the executive branch into an instrument for his personal and political vendetta against perceived enemies. And Trump — simmering with rage, fixated on exacting revenge

against those he feels betrayed him and insulated by a compliant Republican Party — is increasingly comfortable doing so to the point of feeling untouchable, according to the president’s advisers and allies. This past week, the president sought to protect friends and punish foes, even at the risk of compromising the Justice Department’s independence and integrity — a stance that his defenders see as entirely justified.

Trump complained publicly about federal prosecutors’ recommended prison sentence for one of his longtime friends and political advisers, Roger Stone. After senior Justice Department officials then overruled prosecutors to lighten Stone’s recommended sentence, the president congratulated Attorney General William P. Barr for “taking charge” with an extraordinary intervention. Next Trump sought to intimidate the federal judge in the Stone

President Trump has stirred little protest within GOP ranks as he has gone after those he believes crossed him during his campaign and presidency.

case, badgering her on Twitter for previous rulings, and attacked the four prosecutors who resigned from the case in apparent protest of the Justice Department’s intervention. Then Trump floated the possibility of a presidential pardon for Stone, who was convicted by a jury in November of tampering with a witness and lying to Congress. The president has openly encouraged his Justice Department to retaliate against a quartet of

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Politics former FBI officials who long have been targets of his ire for their involvement in the Russia probe. “Where’s [James] Comey?” Trump bellowed Wednesday in a stream-of-consciousness diatribe from the Oval Office. “What’s happening to [Andrew] McCabe? What’s happening to Lisa and — to Pete Strzok and Lisa Page? What’s happening with them? It was a whole setup, it was a disgrace for our country, and everyone knows it, too, everyone.” For months now, Trump has been enraged that these FBI officials have not been charged with crimes. On Thursday, Barr pushed back hard, saying, “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.” In an interview with ABC News, Barr said Trump’s statements and tweets “about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending here, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.” Barr said he was prepared to accept the consequences of speaking out against the president. “I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” he said. He also noted that when he became attorney general last year, he pledged to resist intimidation from any quarter, whether Congress, the White House, or elsewhere. In response, Trump tweeted Friday morning that he has the “legal right” to ask his top law enforcement official to get involved in a criminal case. Some of Trump’s top aides have counseled him against speaking out on legal matters, warning him that doing so could wrongly influence proceedings because officials would then know they needed to please him or risk his wrath. Trump has often responded, “I have a right to say whatever I want,” according to a former administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A second former senior official, former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, said of Trump, “He is mad and he should be mad. The Democrats and the media wasted three years of the nation’s time on a witch hunt. Now he understands

Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post

how to use the full powers of the presidency. The pearl-clutchers better get used to it.” Trump insisted Wednesday that he did nothing improper in the Stone case. “I didn’t speak to them, by the way, just so you understand,” the president told reporters, referring to Justice Department officials. “They saw the horribleness.” Kerri Kupec, a Justice spokeswoman, said department leaders had decided to reverse career prosecutors’ recommendation in the Stone case before Trump’s public statement on the matter. Still, a chorus of former U.S. attorneys and former Justice Department leaders condemned Trump for what they consider improper pressure. “I’ve never seen so many prosecutors, including those who aren’t political or those who haven’t been following this situation closely, go to red alert so quickly,” said Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney in the Obama administration. “The reason is this: If a president can meddle in a criminal case to help a friend, then there’s nothing that keeps him from meddling to harm someone he thinks is his enemy. That means that a president is fully above the law in the most dangerous kind of way. This is how democracies die.” On Capitol Hill, Democrats, too, cried foul. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for emergency hearings and an investigation by

Melina Mara/The Washington Post

the Justice Department’s inspector general. But for Trump’s party, this was no break-the-glass moment. Congressional Republicans evinced little distress, and some excused the conduct entirely. “It doesn’t bother me at all, as long as the judge has the final decision,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who sharply criticized the administration of President Barack Obama over alleged politicization of the Justice Department. Former U.S. attorney Chuck Rosenberg, who has served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, said, “This president is not going to change. We need adults to step up and check

Senior Justice Department officials lightened the prison sentence of Roger Stone, above, one of Trump’s longtime friends and political advisers, after the president complained publicly about the issue, causing alarm among Democrats. Trump also recently trashed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, left, and encouraged military leaders to discipline him in part because of his testimony during the impeachment inquiry.

KLMNO Weekly

his behavior. There was a demonstrated lack of spine recently in the United States Senate. Maybe they have a breaking point and maybe they don’t. One of the things that people said about this Congress is that they’ve lost their authority. That’s not true. They’ve just chosen not to exercise it.” The intervention on behalf of Stone is not the only action this past week raising alarms. Trump also trashed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was abruptly dismissed from the National Security Council, and encouraged military leaders to discipline the decorated combat veteran in part because of his testimony about Trump’s conduct with Ukraine. Trump’s ouster of Vindman was criticized by former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly Wednesday. Vindman, “did exactly what we teach them to do,” Kelly, a retired Marine general, told an audience at Drew University in Morristown, N.J., according to multiple news accounts. “We teach them: Don’t follow an illegal order,” Kelly said. “And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.” In addition, Trump on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of former U.S. attorney Jessie K. Liu to serve as undersecretary of the Treasury Department for terrorism and financial crimes after being lobbied by critics of her prosecutions. Liu oversaw several high-profile cases in the nation’s capital, including ones inherited from special counsel Mueller and involving former Trump advisers Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and Stone. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Wednesday that Trump was “on a retribution tour.” But Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) characterized Trump as “generous” and said he understood Trump’s rationale for each move. “You have a bureaucracy that has tried to push back in a way that is not just insubordinate, but downright unhealthy for our government,” he said. Cramer added that he understood why Trump tweeted about Stone. “The aggressiveness of the FBI and the prosecutors to go after people who are friends of the president, the zeal to which they prosecute, going rogue if you will,” he said. n

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Politics

KLMNO Weekly

New Hampshire: Winners and losers BY

A ARON B LAKE

oters in the first-in-thenation primary in New Hampshire weighed in on the presidential race this past week, and unlike in Iowa the previous week, we actually got results. Below, our winners and losers, with the biggest winners and losers listed first. Winners Bernie Sanders: After winning the most votes but having Pete Buttigieg pull out a delegate win in Iowa, Sanders was the first unmistakable winner of a state in the nominating process. It might not be a big surprise given he won the state by 22.4 points in 2016 and is a senator from Vermont, a neighboring state, but it’s a win. And it cements him as one of two front-runners in this race — if he’s not even a slim favorite at this very early juncture. Making things better for Sanders is how the rest of the field shook out. Buttigieg seemed to cede some support to Amy Klobuchar after Friday’s debate, but they finished second and third, respectively, while the other neighboring-state senator, Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren, finished well behind. To the extent this race focuses on the top three finishers in New Hampshire moving forward, Sanders won’t have to deal with his ideological competitor in Warren, while Buttigieg and Klobuchar fight it out for middle-of-the-road voters. Amy Klobuchar: Perhaps the

biggest question heading into Tuesday was not who would win, but who would finish third: Joe Biden, Warren or Klobuchar? But the Minnesota senator arguably needed it more than the others, and she got it — by a wide margin. She turned a strong debate performance into legitimate and instant momentum, with polls the previous weekend showing her rising into the low teens. She did even better than that.

Salwan Georges/The Washington Post

Sanders cements himself as a front-runner; Biden and Warren falter, signaling trouble ahead Iowa was a disappointment for her. She finished fifth there, despite being from a neighboring state. New Hampshire should at least give her a platform in this race in the weeks ahead, which isn’t a complete given for the candidates who failed to nab a top-three spot. Pete Buttigieg: His loss of

ground to Klobuchar in the final days shouldn’t obscure the improbability of what he just accomplished — a delegate win in Iowa and a close second-place finish in New Hampshire. Not bad for the young former mayor of a relatively small city in Indiana. Buttigieg seemed to have a shot at winning New Hampshire as the Iowa results trickled in a few weeks ago, but losing narrowly to a guy who won the state by a big margin last time is hardly a failure. In fact, it was a strong night for Buttigieg. Next, though, he’s got to contend with the newly relevant Klobuchar — and his shortcomings with minority voters.

Primaries: Hey, guess what: They run more smoothly! This will come off as gratuitous after the beating Iowa has taken over the past few weeks for its caucus debacle, and it’s not like we didn’t expect New Hampshire to handle its vote-counting business. But Tuesday was a reminder of how much simpler it can all be when you just let people vote and then count those votes.

Losers Joe Biden: No surprise here, but it’s worth registering just what a disappointment the results were for Biden. After a fourth-place finish in Iowa, he’s in fifth place and the single digits in New Hampshire — an unquestionably troubling start for the man who looked like the leading candidate for much of the race. Biden tried to downplay his impending doom in the Granite State by ditching it on primary night and flying off to South Carolina. He’s trying to project

Supporters cheer as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gives a victory speech in Manchester, N.H., after winning the state’s primary on Tuesday. Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg was not far behind.

that he’s in the race for the long haul. The question now is whether a candidate who never raised money like the front-runner can make it to the first Southern primary in 18 days — and whether he will be a viable choice by that time. (Even if he wins in South Carolina, he’ll have only three days before Super Tuesday to capitalize — not much time to raise and spend money.) The calendar has worked against Biden, in some respects, because there aren’t many black voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. But there is a difference between finishing second or third in those states and not even placing. As troubling for him, he’s even losing his lock on the black vote, with a national poll this past week showing him in a virtual tie with Bloomberg. Not good, all around. “It ain’t over, man,” Biden maintained in South Carolina on Tuesday night. “We’re just getting started.” We shall see. Elizabeth Warren: As a neighboring-state senator who once polled in the lead in New Hampshire, fourth place just isn’t good. There is arguably even less of a path forward for her than for Biden, given she was already falling behind the pace nationally, in Nevada and in South Carolina as of last month. Unlike Biden, it’s not clear where she might plausibly find a victory. Democrats’ diversity: This race once featured five candidates on the debate stage from racially diverse backgrounds. It won’t have any moving forward. Andrew Yang dropped out of the race on Tuesday night, shortly after polls closed, joining Cory Booker, Kamala D. Harris and Julián Castro on the sidelines. Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick dropped out on Wedneday. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), meanwhile, is still in the race but showed no pulse Tuesday in a state where she invested heavily. Minority voters will start mattering big time in this race starting in Nevada; minority candidates will be all but absent. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Nation

Tall walls, tight laws, fewer foreigners Trump is building a potent antiimmigrant record heading into the 2020 election

N ICK M IROFF

uring the past three years, President Trump has hardened the nation’s immigration system into an obstacle course of physical and bureaucratic barriers, causing illegal border crossings to plummet and legal immigration to slump. The number of refugee admissions to the United States fell to the lowest level on record last year, and this year the administration set the refugee cap even lower, reserving just 18,000 spots for people who are fleeing persecution across the globe. The Trump administration also is blocking asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border and flying them instead to Guatemala or sending them back into Mexico. Other visitors are being turned back or staying away entirely: foreign students and tourists are coming in fewer numbers, according to the latest State Department data, and green cards issued abroad since 2016 have dropped 25 percent. The administration just added six names to a growing blacklist of travel-restricted countries: Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and four African nations, including Nigeria, Africa’s most populous one. “It’s no secret that the administration is consciously trying to close America to immigrants,” Lucas Guttentag, an immigration law professor at Stanford Law School, said in an email. “Trump policies and practices have attacked virtually every facet of the immigration system: effectively dismantling asylum protections at our southern border, imposing wealth restrictions on immigrants who are spouses and family members of citizens, burdening businesses that legitimately depend on skilled immigrant workers and threatening mass deportations regardless of how long or deep a person’s ties to country and community are.” On Monday, Trump’s White House released a 2021 budget proposal that would increase deportations by adding thousands

Visas since 2016 The number of visas issued has fallen dramatically since 2016, with immigrant visas being cut by more than 25 percent. Visas issued

Percentage change from 2016 0%

12 million

10.3M

Non-immigrant visas

10M

8.7M

-5%

Non-immigrant visas

8M -10% 6M

Immigrant visas -15%

-15.8%

-20%

Immigrant visas 617,752

461,600

2016

2019

-25%

2016

-25.3% 2019

NOTE: Immigrant visas are issued to foreign nationals who intend to live and work in the United States. Non-immigrant visas are issued to foreign nationals seeking to enter the United States on a temporary basis for tourism, business, medical treatment and certain types of temporary work. Source: State Department

of new immigration agents and expanding jail capacity. Hours later, Attorney General William P. Barr announced Justice Department lawsuits against three “sanctuary” jurisdictions that eschew cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. During his State of the Union address this month, Trump spoke of immigrants almost exclusively in negative terms, railing against “sanctuary jurisdictions” and highlighting the lurid killing of a 92-year-old woman in New York last month. While his predecessors in the Republican Party often balanced calls for tighter border controls with a reaffirmation of the country’s immigrant identity, Trump has largely dispensed with those phrases to depict newcomers as criminals, competitors and a welfare burden. Guided by immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, one of the president’s longest-serving and most-trusted aides, Trump and his administration have announced a flurry of new restric-

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tions in recent months. Lawsuits from immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union have slowed the implementation of some policies, but appellate courts have been allowing Trump’s restrictions to go forward. The U.S. Supreme Court last month ruled 5 to 4 to allow the administration to implement its “public charge rule” — a policy central to Trump’s agenda that allows the government to deny green cards to more low-income applicants. That decision and other court victories have given the administration new momentum after the Central American migration crisis and failed family separation plan that largely derailed Trump’s immigration agenda in 2018 and early 2019, when more than 1 million migrants streamed across the southern border. That crisis is now relatively under control, squelched by enforcement measures that curb the ability of asylum seekers to apply for protection in the United

States. The number of arrests and detentions along the U.S. southern border has plunged 75 percent since May. Cris Ramón, an immigration analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, said the administration reached a turning point last summer when it debuted measures like the “Migrant -0.05 Protection Protocols” that sent asylum seekers back across the border instead of allowing them -0.10 to wait in the United States for their court dates. By pressuring Mexico and Central America to assist with immi-0.15 gration enforcement, the administration was able to wield restrictive new tools Congress would not -0.20 approve. Trump administration officials could then turn back to their immigration priorities in the U.S. interior. -0.25 “I think what happened in 2019 was the administration was able to pivot back to legal immigration, especially once MPP began having impact on the arrival of Central American migrants,” Ramón said. “They were slowly trying to push through reforms, and now that the crisis has diminished, they are moving forward.” There have been signs in recent weeks that the administration is forcing fewer returns to Mexico, a process that still affords asylum seekers a hearing with a U.S. immigration judge. Instead, authorities are putting migrants on planes to Guatemala, part of the “Asylum Cooperation Agreements” the Trump administration has reached with Central American governments. The move lightens the load on U.S. courts — migrants’ asylum claims are instead deferred to other countries for processing — and eliminates an avenue migrants previously had for gaining entry. Homeland Security officials and defenders of Trump’s immigration policies say Democrats and immigrant advocates have overreacted to the president’s policies, pointing out that the number of people taking the naturalization oath reached 833,000 in 2019, an 11-year high. The United States remains the most welcom-

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world

Pesticide smuggling grows in Brazil T ERRENCE M C C OY in Dourados, Brazil BY

aldir Brasil could see that the truck driver was terrified. His hands were shaking. His knee was jiggling. Whatever the driver had in the back of his trailer, the highway cop concluded, it was not legal. Along one of Latin America’s most lucrative smuggling routes, where Brazil and Paraguay share an expansive and virtually unpatrolled border, Brasil had seen every illegal good imaginable. But now, another illicit product — one that, until recently, he couldn’t have imagined — was increasingly appearing. He lifted the tarp covering the truck’s cargo. “Pesticides,” he said that day last October. Hidden beneath a few sacks of grain were 12,000 pounds of the pesticide emamectin benzoate. With a street value of more than $2 million, the illegal pesticides, produced in China and then smuggled across the Paraguay border, were twice as powerful as what is allowed in Brazil. The driver had planned to take them 700 miles to the north, police said, where a man known as “Pit Bull” would take the delivery. Brasil, dismayed by the size and audacity of the shipment, felt as if he were standing at the portal to a massive, unexplored netherworld. And in a way, he was. Over the past two decades, the trafficking of a product as seemingly banal as pesticides has quietly grown into one of the world’s most lucrative and least understood criminal enterprises. Adulterated in labs and garages, hustled like narcotics, co-opted by gangs and mafias, counterfeit and contraband pesticides are flooding developed and developing countries alike, with environmental and social consequences that are “far from trivial,” the U.N. Environment Program reported last year. Each year, pesticides poison 3 million people and kill more

Dourados Federal Highway Police

Trafficking in counterfeit agro-chemicals thrives as farmers look to increase crops, cut costs than 200,000, the World Health Organization estimates, the great majority of them in the developing world. Their excessive use, researchers say, can poison soil, contaminate water sources and devastate ecosystems. All these harms are exacerbated by the illegal, unregulated trade. “It’s very unknown, and it’s very common. This is big,” said Javier Fernández, a senior official with the agrochemical trade association CropLife. Now, he said, as climate change and increasing demand for food accelerate the need for pesticides, “it’s getting bigger and more violent.” Multinational corporations that sell Brazilian food in the United States say their products are safe. Bunge, a U.S. producer that sources crops here, said its contracts with farmers include clauses that “require the responsible use of pesticides,” and it conducts “chemical analyses on its products to ensure their safety.” Citrosuco, the world’s largest producer of orange juice concen-

trate, said it trains fruit growers to use only “approved” pesticides. Cargill said it “performs constant monitoring” to guarantee producers “respect social and environmental legislation.” Analysts say tests cannot determine whether produce was grown with counterfeit pesticides. “There are plenty of ways where the criminal businesses can make the ‘ideal’ mixture of the illicit pesticides,” said Mikhail Malkov, who studies the illegal trade at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. “There are plenty of technologies, starting with sophisticated adulterations and blending, and God knows what they’re putting inside those drums of pesticides.” Roughly 10 percent of the agrochemical trade — a quickly growing market valued at $220 billion — is believed to be illegal, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The estimate has doubled since 2007.

Brazilian highway police seize 13,000 pounds of suspected illegal pesticides last month. This area along the border with Paraguay has seen a surge in smuggled pesticides. “This is only going to get worse,” said Waldir Brasil, a highway cop in Brazil.

Some consider even that a vast underestimate. “More likely [it is] quite a bit higher,” said Leon Van der Wal, the organization’s expert on illegal pesticides. In Europe, he said, it is 14 percent, despite what he called “well-established procedures against and intelligence into the modus operandi of illegal traders.” In Brazil, it is 20 percent — $2 billion annually. Sometimes, what separates licit and illicit pesticides is little more than a slip of paper. Regulations change depending on the country: What’s legal here isn’t legal there. The gaps between laws and prices are the spaces where smugglers are thriving — moving products across borders and undercutting the legal market with lower prices. But other times, there’s nothing legitimate about the chemicals from the start. Officials and analysts say transnational criminals are increasingly targeting countries with large agricultural economies, weak laws and unmanned borders. Places that look a lot like Brazil. “This is only going to get worse,” Brasil said. Dominated by pesticides There are few products more important to Brazil than pesticides. As the world’s top producer of soy, oranges and coffee, the country exports about $100 billion in agricultural goods annually — production that analysts say would be halved without agrochemicals. The country today has consequently become the world’s biggest pesticide market, according to Phillips McDougall, the agribusiness intelligence firm. In 2018, the trade here was worth $10.1 billion — more than those of India and China combined. In the farming regions, the feel of pesticides is everywhere. Billboards advertise them alongside signs for local restaurants. Planes pass overhead, dusting the crops. In some towns, pesticide stores seem to outnumber churches. And business will only im-

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WORLD prove. The inauguration a year ago of President Jair Bolsonaro ushered in a new era of pesticide use in Latin America’s largest country. As his agriculture minister, he appointed Tereza Cristina, from the heartland state of Mato Grosso do Sul, who is known to critics as the “poison muse.” Then his administration greenlighted more pesticides than at any time in the past 14 years. Top Bolsonaro administration officials, meanwhile, have said little publicly on the illegal trade. Senators discussed increasing criminal penalties for pesticide smuggling in August, but they have yet to take action. The Ministry of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment. Some days, it feels to Fernández as if no one is paying attention. For five years, the CropLife official has received a monthly roundup of news reports that mention illegal pesticides. At first, the reports were only two or three links. “Now, it’s five or six pages’ worth of links,” he said. “Pages and pages and pages. And now, violence is one of the trends I’ve been seeing.” Hooded and armed robbers were storming farms across the country, hunting not for money or drugs, but for pesticides. In November, gunmen took three people hostage at one farm and made off with $50,000 worth of agrochemicals. In September, an armed group took 80 hostages and tore through everything in the search for pesticides. Along the border with Paraguay, where customs enforcement ranges from lax to nonexistent, matters looked even more perilous. Police in Parana state were finding cars stuffed with illegal pesticides. And in neighboring Mato Grosso do Sul, where the weight of seized pesticides doubled in 2019, police and prosecutors were increasingly complaining about a situation veering out of control. “When you consider all of the factors, this is more lucrative than drugs,” said Ricardo Rotunno, a state prosecutor in the city of Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, near the Paraguay border. He thinks the industry in Brazil is worth perhaps as much as $3 billion. “Brazil has to open its eyes to this new reality,” he said. n

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China’s businesses take a hit as workers, clients stay away A NNA F IFIELD in Beijing BY

ost workers in China were supposed to get back on the job last week — despite a steady increase in people infected with the new coronavirus — as jittery leaders in Beijing tried to minimize the economic impact of the outbreak. But on days that should have been business as usual, nothing was usual. “Normally thousands of subway passengers from the nearby station would drop by to buy something,” said Nancy Cao, a 25-year-old clerk who was wearing a face mask and gloves as she worked in a convenience store in Beijing’s Capital Mall on Wednesday. “It’s usually packed, but now we’re lucky to see more than 20 people in an hour.” Worried about the toll the epidemic will take on China’s growth rate, which the government has been toiling to keep at 6 percent, officials told businesses across the country to return to work after extending the Lunar New Year holiday by an extra week. Provincial and municipal authorities in the most-affected areas have discretion about when business should resume — ruling out the epicenter of Hubei province, and large parts of Zhejiang and Guangdong, both provinces that are industrial powerhouses but are the worst affected after Hubei. But in the capital Beijing, a city of 22 million people that has 352 confirmed cases of coronavirus, the streets and office buildings and stores were remarkably empty midweek. Sanlitun, a glitzy shopping area usually jam-packed with people at lunchtime, was a concrete wasteland on Wednesday. The Apple store was closed. Uniqlo and Starbucks had only one door open, and staff were constantly disinfecting the handle.

Roman Pilipey/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

A woman wearing a protective face mask sits in a nearly empty cafe in Beijing. Many have refused to return to work amid coronavirus fears.

The H&M was as empty as Gucci in a recession. In fact, the only bustle was at a desk where would-be entrants had to have their temperature tested before entering the shopping complex. As if trying to will the economy back into gear, the state media have exhaustively reported the numbers of business resuming operations: 2,100 companies in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area in Yizhuang; 7,000 in the Zhongguancun Science Park, Beijing’s answer to Silicon Valley; 80 percent of businesses in Beijing’s largest produce market. “The important areas of the national economy and people’s livelihoods should be resumed immediately and production should be restarted,” said Cong Liang, secretary general of China’s top economic planning agency. “Major projects should be returned to work and started as soon as possible.” Despite the exhortations to return to work and the breathless state media reports of a mass return to the coalface, the scenes across Beijing told a different story. Most banks were closed — they are public places, said one

grumpy worker at the ATM machines of a bank branch in Dongcheng district — and office buildings were almost entirely empty. Everywhere, there were street cleaners blasting the pavements and ride-on sidewalk scrubbing machines. The signature scent of Beijing — usually oil and chili with whiffs of sewer — is 100 percent bleach these days. “I have disinfectant, and I disinfect my broom and my cart,” said Xu Changfu, a street-cleaner from Inner Mongolia who’s tasked with keeping the capitals roads shipshape. “How can I not be worried? Everyone’s worried, everyone’s afraid.” With many people still in their hometowns instead of heading back to their workplaces after the holiday, some policymakers are warning of the impact of restricting people’s movement even as the virus remains unchecked. “We should be worrying about the factories disappearing along with the epidemic,” Huang Qifan, Vice Chairman of the National People’s Congress Financial and Economic Affairs Committee, said last week. “The discontinuation of a machine that supplies new blood is more scary than the disease itself.” n

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COVER STORY

illustration by Janelle Barone for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, February, 16, 2020

T The environmental burden of Generation Z They believe it’s their job to save the planet — and it’s ruining their mental health. Who’s to blame? BY

J ASON P LAUTZ

he teenagers pour off buses near Denver’s Union Station under a baking September sun. Giggling with excitement at skipping out on Friday classes, they join a host of others assembled near the terminal. Native American drummers and dancers rouse the crowd, and there’s a festive feeling in the air. But this is no festival. The message these young people have come to send to their city, to their state, to the nation — to the world of adults — is serious. Deadly serious. “We won’t die from old age,” reads one of the signs they hoist above their heads. “We’ll die from climate change.” High school sophomore Sophie Kaplan is marching in a bright yellow flowered sundress, but the sentiment on her poster is hardly so sunny: “Why Should I Study For a Future I Won’t Have?” She thinks about climate change every day, she tells me. She reads “about how we’re on the brink” and hears her teachers and parents tell her that it’s up to her generation to fix things. “I don’t understand why I should be in school if the world is burning,” she says. “What’s the point of working on my education if we don’t deal with this first?” As the estimated 7,500 marchers converge on the state capitol, I come upon Chris Bray and his children, sixth-grader Arianna and second-grader Colin. Dressed in plaid shorts and blue sunglasses, Colin hovers shyly behind a homemade sign (a picture of coal with the word “Why?” and a shining sun with the words “Why not?”). The boy is “scared about the planet,” he tells me, but it feels good to be surrounded by so many other people who care, since he can sometimes feel as if nobody else is worried. Climate change, say Chris and his wife, Amber, is a big topic of discussion in their home. Colin and Arianna have always shown an interest in the environment. They’ve cried over nature documentaries about the destruction of the coral reefs and sought out coverage of 17-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Chris and Amber are proud that their children are so aware, and of the way their kids’ interest has informed their own actions. But at the same time, like many parents, they’re concerned that their children could be overwhelmed by predictions about the environment that seem to be growing ever more dire. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2018 that policymakers have just 12 years to avert the worst consequences of global warming; news coverage is constantly filled with apocalyptic stories of storms and wildfires. Young people, absorbing the gravity of these warnings, have become the defining face of the climate movement — marching, protesting and berating their elders for bequeathing them an uncertain, unstable future. Underlying their anger, though, is another feeling: anxiety. And it’s something they’re increasingly voicing.

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Cover story

Teachers hear their students talk about panic attacks when wildfires break out, and psychologists face young patients weeping about their fear of never having a family. Amber Bray recalls Colin solemnly telling her on his eighth birthday, “My life would be better without climate change.” How to handle such fears? The adult world seems unsure, at best. The Brays, for their part, think it’s important to work through the anguish and keep talking to their kids. “We’ve decided to be open and honest. They have feelings, we validate them,” Chris says. At the same time, he admits, “It’s sad, it’s hard.” As climate change continues unabated, parents, teachers and medical professionals across the country find themselves face-to-face with a quandary: How do you raise a generation to look toward the future with hope when all around them swirls a message of apparent hopelessness? How do you prepare today’s children for a world defined by environmental trauma without inflicting more trauma yourself? And where do you find the line between responsible education and undue alarmism?

he nexus between climate change and the mental health of children is rarely at the forefront of the discussion around environmental politics, but it’s very real: In a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of American teenagers released in September, 57 percent said that climate change made them feel scared and 52 percent said it made them feel angry, both higher rates than among adults. Just 29 percent of teens said they were optimistic. Reports such as the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment have cited mental health concerns as a side effect of climate change. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement in 2015 warning that climate change poses threats to “children’s mental and physical health,” and that “failure to take prompt, substantive action would be an act of injustice to all children.” In expert testimony for the plaintiffs from 2018 in Juliana v. United States — a lawsuit filed by a number of young people seeking to force the U.S. government to adopt policies to fight climate change and end fossil fuel subsidies — psychiatrist Lise van Susteren wrote that children will be “at the center of the storm” as climate change worsens and that they may already be feeling mental health impacts. “Day in and day out worrying about the unprecedented scale of the risk posed by climate change . . . takes a heavy toll on an individual’s well-being, wearing them down, sending some to the ‘breaking point,’ ” she wrote. “Children are especially vulnerable.” Those words, she told me, were “really painful” to write. Interviewing children about their fears for nature and their worries about their future families, she says, left her with “a sense of shame.” “Eco-anxiety” or “climate depression” is playing out in real terms among young people, sometimes in extreme ways: A 2008 study in an Australian medical journal chronicled the case

less situation, and I’m supposed to act powerful when the source of power is collective power and it’s overwhelming, and I’m supposed to feel faith and do things to be sustainable when nature is declining around me.” Overcome by a sense of powerlessness, they simply feel stuck in a situation, with no way out.

P Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images

of a 17-year-old boy who was hospitalized after refusing to drink water during a nationwide drought, in what the authors called the first case of “climate change delusion.” A psychiatrist I interviewed told me a patient had confessed that she secretly wished a pandemic would strike to ease stress on the planet. But the anxiety can manifest in subtler ways as well. Sarah Niles, an 18-year-old from Alabama, told me that her fears about climate change have simply become a part of her life. “I feel like in my peer group, you just go right from talking about polar bears dying to ‘Did you see what Maya posted on Snapchat?’ Nobody has a filter to adjust,” Niles says. “It’s like, the ice caps are melting and my hypothetical children will never see them, but also I have a calculus test tomorrow.” According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3 people ages 13 to 18 experience an anxiety disorder, and a study published in April 2018 in the Journal of Development and Behavioral Pediatrics found that anxiety diagnoses in children ages 6 to 17 increased 20 percent between 2007 and 2012. There’s no single cause: A nonstop barrage of social media, a heightened political climate and the threat of school shootings are all stressors. And that’s on top of being a teenager, with all the tumult that entails. But the often apocalyptic nature of the news about climate change is perhaps uniquely paralyzing. Elizabeth Haase, a psychiatrist in Nevada, describes how some of her patients can be overwhelmed by the scale of the problem: “I’m supposed to be emotionally hopeful in a hope-

Students and others at a climate change protest in New York in May. A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll last year found that 57 percent of American teens said climate change made them feel scared and 52 percent said it made them feel angry.

ark Guthrie knows about this paralysis in climate-change-spooked kids. A sixth-grade teacher in Sonoma County, Calif., he has seen the toll that the state’s raging wildfires can take on the generally enthusiastic 11- and 12-year-olds in his classes. He has witnessed panic attacks triggered by the mere smell of smoke. When smoke from a nearby controlled burn once drifted to the school, he recalls, one boy smiled blankly and announced, “I think I’m having PTSD.” Last year, after the Kincade Fire burned nearly 78,000 acres in the county in late October, Guthrie found himself, not for the first time, comforting students worried about their homes and their relatives. Guthrie understands how much climate change troubles his students, but he doesn’t shy from talking about it. He confronts not only their fears, but also the political reality of denial and decades of inaction, all of which is disturbing to his students. “It’s like there’s a paradigm shift, like when you learn that Santa Claus isn’t real,” he says. “Everything we teach them, that science is a tool for understanding the world, that adults are protecting you, falls apart. There’s nothing to prepare them for this enormous problem that we simply haven’t solved.” Guthrie fears that by not speaking up forcefully about climate change as a generational issue, institutions are “propping up this fictional story that you can care for kids in our country while neglecting or ignoring the climate.” As a teacher, Guthrie is a “mandated reporter,” someone legally required to speak up about signs of child abuse and neglect. If climate change will harm his students and is causing them anguish, isn’t silence on the issue a violation of that duty? Guthrie has taken his views national as the co-founder of the nonprofit Schools for Climate Action (S4CA), which asks schools and other educational groups to pass resolutions highlighting the effects of climate change on children. Since December 2017, more than 100 resolutions have been passed, 66 by school boards and 29 by student councils. Many set sustainability goals or call on Congress to take climate action. Most are shepherded by students, who write the resolutions with the help of administrators and school board members.

“Day in and day out worrying about the unprecedented scale of the risk posed by climate change . . . takes a heavy toll on an individual’s well-being,” wrote psychiatrist Lise van Susteren in testimony in a climate change lawsuit filed by young people.

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cover story Though they don’t commit organizations to any specific action, the resolutions send a signal that there are support networks for students struggling with climate change. They also bolster the idea that students can at least make a difference by raising awareness: Jordyn Bauer, a 20-year-old sophomore at California’s Sonoma State University who worked to pass a resolution in her California school district in 2018, said it helped validate her ability to do something. “Too many people are just standing by,” she says. “I felt like it was my responsibility to take charge.” Not everyone, however, is on board with Guthrie’s agenda. Last spring, Guthrie and a number of S4CA partners — including several students — lobbied the National Association of School Psychologists to adopt a resolution stating that climate change is a children’s issue, as the group’s California chapter had done. But the organization declined. The group’s executive director, Kathleen Minke, responded in an email to Guthrie that her group focuses on “issues that have a very direct impact on schools, student learning and children’s mental and behavioral health.” Climate change, she said, “falls outside this professional focus.” When I interviewed her later, Minke told me that her organization isn’t ignoring climate change and has dedicated resources to help school psychologists deal with kids affected by natural disasters. But when it comes to managing anxiety, their focus is on coping, not causes. “You’re not going to develop an entire curriculum around anxiety related to ‘x,’ ” she says. “There are too many x’s for that to be efficient.” Likewise, S4CA’s efforts to get national school board groups to lobby on climate change have come up short. Chris Ungar has been a school board member for 20 years in California’s San Luis Coastal Unified School District. Last spring, he proposed language to the National School Boards Association recognizing climate change as a threat and asking Congress for funding to help schools affected by natural disasters. It easily passed a policy committee, but before the full association, the resolution was, in Ungar’s words, “gutted” — the climate change language stripped because delegates from some states worried that it could obscure the natural-disaster funding request. That outcome underscored one of the biggest barriers to Guthrie’s work: Education and youth groups don’t always see climate change as having a direct link to children if they’re not being displaced by a disaster — and sometimes not even then. Still, more schools have picked up the S4CA resolution model, and in September, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduced a

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The People’s Climate March in New York in September. Older generations are grappling with how to convey the urgency of the climate crisis to younger people without causing too much panic.

nonbinding resolution acknowledging climate change as a social justice issue and supporting more climate education. “By failing to address climate change in a meaningful way, we are failing our children,” she said in a floor speech, “and they know it.”

lthough there’s little question that climate change will harm younger generations, there’s considerably more debate about a related concern — that the rhetoric surrounding the issue is equally injurious. When young people seize on the U.N. warning that governments need to take action in 12 years to conclude, incorrectly, that the planet has only a decade remaining (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last year that millennials fear “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change”), or when the website of the U.K.-based activist group Extinction Rebellion warns that “societal collapse and mass death are seen as inevitable by scientists and other credible voices,” it can be terrifying. Some voices are now sounding the alarm about alarmism, suggesting that we’d all be better off if we dialed down some of the hyperbole. “This message of ‘We’re all going to die, how dare you say there might be something we can do’ . . . that’s just not supported by the science,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and mathematician at Columbia University. “I’m not saying we can all rest, and I’m not saying we live in the best of all possible worlds. But one can have a sense of optimism by working towards a solution.” Many adults I talked to said the heightened

“Everything we teach them, that science is a tool for understanding the world, that adults are protecting you, falls apart,” says California teacher Park Guthrie. “There’s nothing to prepare them for this enormous problem that we simply haven’t solved.”

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rhetoric around climate change reminded them of the panic around nuclear weapons during the Cold War, when school lessons were interrupted by “duck and cover” drills and there was perpetual fear that the world might end at any moment. The 1983 TV movie “The Day After,” which dramatized the fallout from a nuclear attack on the Midwest, emerged as an apocalyptic touchstone; surveys after the film aired found viewers were more depressed about their chances of survival and were less optimistic about their ability to influence nuclear weapons policy. Michael Shellenberger, an author and founder of the California-based nonprofit Environmental Progress, which promotes nuclear energy, remembers how panicked he felt after watching the movie. Now, he considers it “bizarre” that adults would have decided “to traumatize teenagers with that.” Today, he says, some in the environmental movement are making climate change “the new apocalypse.” “We have people that know the power of fear manipulate consciously the psychology of young people in a way that is wrong and should stop,” he argues. “What people need to understand is that there are extreme scenarios . . . and they are not the same thing as predictive science.” Indeed, scientists say that while some warming is baked in, action now could avert the worst consequences. Marvel puts it this way: “There are so many futures between doomed and fine.” Even the lower end of that range of futures, however, can mean destructive storms, displacement and economic upheaval, and that’s the reality that teachers have to communicate. To Meghan Duffy, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, the climate change lecture in her introductory biology course is the “most important” class she teaches. But, worried that the class might be overwhelming or not communicated well, she surveyed her students for a study published in 2019. After the climate change lesson, students knew more but felt worse: Only 4 percent of the class thought humans would successfully address climate change. One student wrote in an anonymous survey, “I understand that global warming is an important part of learning from this class, but at some point one of the lectures gave me an anxiety attack, so that wasn’t fun.” Studying that emotional response forced Duffy to reevaluate her syllabus. This past fall, she added a second lesson about solutions, highlighting the drop in the cost of renewable energy and improvements in battery technology for storing clean energy. It’s a strategy Duffy says is necessary for any climate communicator, but especially one working with young minds. “There’s a danger in having the instruction emphasize climate catastrophe,” she says. “It’s tempting to say how bad things are, how much we need to stop it. But at some point you’ve accidentally said this is a foregone conclusion. We can overemphasize how scary it is to the point where people feel hopeless and panicked.”

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KLMNO Weekly

cover story

Working toward a solution, in fact, is the consensus approach to calming young people’s fears about the future. The key to addressing eco-anxiety at any age, says psychiatrist Haase, is getting “unstuck,” losing that feeling of paralysis in the face of the problem’s magnitude. Haase is a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, an ad hoc group that has sprung up to offer patients and doctors advice on discussing climate anxiety. It’s one of a number of such groups that are tackling the growing rate of patients panicked about the state of the world: The Good Grief Network was launched in 2016 to offer group counseling sessions to the climate-anxious. The emphasis, doctors say, should be on personal responsibility and empowerment. For an overwhelming problem like climate change, being able to take some action — whether eating less meat or switching to an electric vehicle — can help fight paralysis and get patients to recognize that the worst of climate change is not a fait accompli and that some progress can be made.

s the ones usually tasked with bringing climate change information to their students, teachers are increasingly taking on the weight of the psychological implications. Lisa Balazs, a science teacher at a private school outside Birmingham, Ala., told me she persuaded her school to offer a specialized climate change class last year. She wanted to walk students through the physics and chemistry of the changing climate, but also focus on solutions. “I wanted them to feel like they were empowered in the way you could have an intelligent conversation,” she says. “The scary part is feeling like there’s nothing you individually can do, especially when you look at the government. So turning it around and putting it back in your personal control, this is what you can vote for and work for.” Balazs highlighted how politicians even in her conservative state have promoted clean energy, and she encouraged her students to take political action. Sarah Niles, who took Balazs’s class as a senior, says it was “inspiring” to learn about solutions to climate change, especially since, so often, the subject “felt like devastation with no hope.” She recalls “days after class where we would go to the common room and just sit because we didn’t know what to do.” Now, she’s taking a gap year before college and volunteering in Rockport, Tex., to help rebuild the community, which was devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Of course, before you can bring up solutions, you have to be able to bring up climate change

Renee Belisle, a curriculum specialist for Denver Public Schools, says that the standards, which passed narrowly in Colorado, have played a “hugely significant” role in a rewrite of the district’s high school science curriculum, which now integrates climate change into biology, physics and chemistry classes. Each climate change unit contains an action item; as early as middle school, students are taught that steps such as changing your diet or turning off the lights can have an effect. “That arc of ending with the empowerment is a way to help mitigate that pessimism that could develop,” Belisle says, “particularly with kids, who might feel disenfranchised.”

Boston Globe/Getty Images

at all. Schools, however, have sometimes been slow to bring climate change into the classroom, especially in conservative areas. Lawmakers in states such as Florida and Texas have pushed bills that would strip climate change from curriculums entirely. In Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks School District in 2017, a Republican school board member used fears about rising anxiety among the young in lobbying to remove textbooks that discussed climate change. Moreover, many teachers are unequipped to deal with it. A survey from the National Center for Science Education and Penn State’s Survey Research Center during the 2014-15 school year found that fewer than half of the teachers responding had taken a formal course on climate change. The same survey found that only two-thirds of teachers said they emphasize that human activity is the primary driver of climate change, despite the scientific consensus that humans are the cause. Many teachers told me they’re supported by the Next Generation Science Standards, written in 2013 to overhaul science teaching. Created by officials from 26 states and several national science education organizations, the standards take climate change as a given, expecting students to be taught that human activities contribute to global warming and that the phenomenon is having a dire effect on human life. They also go deep on solutions, such as clean energy. So far, though, only 20 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards, although 24 other states have drawn up their own guidance based on them.

Students take a break after marching during the Youth Climate Strike in Boston in September. Doctors say that one way for young people to combat climate anxiety is to focus on empowerment and action.

“It’s tempting to say how bad things are, how much we need to stop it,” says Michigan professor Meghan Duffy. “But at some point you’ve accidentally said this is a foregone conclusion. We can overemphasize how scary it is to the point where people feel hopeless and panicked.”

nd yet the seemingly best approach — making young people feel enfranchised to deal with climate change — comes with both upsides and potential downsides. On the one hand, what better way for young people to process climate change worries than to pressure adults to actually do something about the crisis? Campaigns like the youth-led Sunrise Movement, founded in 2017, have pursued this strategy, placing young people on the front lines of the fight over the Green New Deal; the group gained Internet notoriety in February 2019 with a video of students, some as young as 11, confronting Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California over her lack of support for the plan. On the other hand, high schoolers are still high schoolers, with homework and soccer practice and dates and part-time jobs. And teenagers I spoke with admitted that activism can be a burden. “I’d love to not be doing this. I’d much rather be hanging out with my friends, watching something stupid on Netflix,” says Jonah Gottlieb, 17, a high school senior in California. “I have to because adults have left us no choice.” That feeling of responsibility, of being let down by prior generations, permeated the conversations I had — and there probably isn’t a good solution, aside from actually solving climate change itself. For now, parents are left to walk a tightrope between being honest and being comforting, between empowering their kids and weighing them down with the responsibility of saving the world. The Bray family, at least, is erring on the side of not underplaying the situation — or the need for everyone to contribute to solutions. Amber Bray recalls the day the U.N. panel issued its 12-year warning. When Arianna came home from school, Amber told me, she hugged her daughter tight and, with tears in her eyes, apologized. Both said that day changed their perspective and rallied the family to work harder to reduce its environmental impact. “Some parents might think they should shield their children from the realities,” Amber says. “I believe it’s my job as a parent to prepare my children to be ready, make good choices, be part of the solution. It’s a disservice to our children if we don’t teach them about life’s dangers and how to protect themselves, even as we pray it is never necessary.” n

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Entertainment

KLMNO Weekly

Will Oscars shocker reverberate? S TEVEN Z EITCHIK in Los Angeles BY

‘P

arasite’s” big Oscar win a week ago turned what had previously been a night of outliers — with director, screenplay and international-feature victories for Bong Joon-ho’s movie earlier in the evening — into the stuff of history. Screenplay and directing wins for non-English movies are rare but not unprecedented. Before Sunday, however, every best picture in the 91-year-history of the Oscars had been predominantly in English. “Parasite” is in Korean. It would be hard to overstate the disruption caused by “Parasite’s” win. Hollywood has exported its product to countries around the globe with increasing vigor in recent years. Overseas box office exceeded $31 billion in 2019, a record, and nearly 2½ times the amount the studios generated in the United States. Yet importing other countries’ output has been much rarer. Broad hits from outside the English-speaking world until now were almost nonexistent; the previous foreign-language best picture nominee to be released widely in theaters, 2012’s “Amour,” generated $7 million in the United States. And the industry club had ensured its big prize, the best picture award, didn’t go to films made outside the studio system, let alone one made in a country 6,000 miles away. The South Korean film’s win was the ultimate sign that the club had fractured. Agents, producers, directors and publicists — but notably no major studio executives — wondered whether “Parasite,” with $36 million in U.S. box office receipts and probably a bunch more after the Oscars, is a sign globalism will cut the other way. “I think what you’re seeing here is that this isn’t just Hollywood telling people in Europe, Asia and everywhere else what to see,” Céline Sciamma, the French director whose drama “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” was nominated

Chris Pizzello/Invision/Associated Press

Some see best picture win for ‘Parasite’ opening doors for more disruption across film industry for a Golden Globe this year, said in an interview. “It’s a dialogue, and sometimes the rest of the world might tell America what’s worth seeing, too.” The Oscars were created for an essentially local industry that now exists in a world that’s gone beyond the local. Sciamma raised the questions that had been percolating even before Oscar voters decided to offer an answer: What are the responsibilities of an industry that exports so much of its product to the rest of the world to hear what the rest of the world has to say in return? Can it continue looking outward for money but turn inward for glory? “I think it changes Hollywood forever,” said Rodrigo Teixeira, the Brazilian-born producer behind both foreign- and Englishlanguage films, including this year’s cult favorite “The Lighthouse” (English), “The Father’s Shadow” (foreign language) and past Oscar winner “Call Me by Your Name” (multilingual). Already he and others are rel-

ishing the chance to pitch projects to financiers with “Parasite” in their back pockets. In a town that elevates a fear of missing out from social media anxiety to professional animating principal, “Do you really want to risk losing the next best picture winner?” packs a big pitch-meeting punch. “Parasite’s” disruption was not limited to its global aspects. Also behind the movie’s success was social media, particularly “film Twitter,” the loose collection of critics, fans and other voices whose support has become increasingly important. Oscar campaigning, consultants say, has changed. Where many past best picture winners have been part of efforts organized by studios that aim directly at the top — members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the “Parasite” campaign worked differently. Orchestrated by Quinn and a consultant group led by longtime indie-film marketer Ryan Werner of Cinetic Media, its goal was to

Bong Joon-Ho reacts as he is presented with the award for best picture for “Parasite” from presenter Jane Fonda at the Academy Awards. Before Sunday, every best picture in the 91-year-history of the Oscars had been predominantly in English. “Parasite” is in Korean.

seed the grass-roots first. Werner and his team courted film Twitter out of the movie’s Cannes premiere last May and then in the award-season months that followed in the fall. The idea was that the group had become instrumental enough to basically send the buzz the other way — from its own digital wilds up to mainstream media outlets, then on to younger academy members and ultimately to an older academy guard that is still required to secure the best picture vote. “You need the right movie, the right moment — all of that,” said an executive at a rival company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But does anyone doubt these champions online played a big role in this win?” The executive said he believed it would be a playbook others would follow. Many awards experts said the win showed that, foreign language or not, the academy has become the place that sees no distinction between studios and independent companies, and in fact sometimes prefers the latter. It remains to be seen what the award efforts from the studios, which dived in massively this year as Universal, Sony and Warner Bros. all made big plays with studio films — and all came up short for the big prize. That was particularly true in the case of Universal, which had one of the year’s biggest bombs in “Cats” but an apparent surefire best picture winner in “1917,” the prohibitive front-runner. (That the movie has grossed $288 million around the world may help ease the sting.) One sales agent said he was certain that, in a culture of global franchises, the academy might swing more toward foreign-language films but that studios were unlikely to take the plunge. Even if they don’t, companies with the “Parasite” mind-set might carry the baton. Imperative has recently financed “Mosul,” a new dramatic thriller about an Iraqi police force directed by a Hollywood filmmaker. Its primary language? Arabic. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Opinions

States are ﬁnally taking action against puppy mills Helaine Olen is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post.

While political junkies obsessed over the results of the New Hampshire primaries, dog lovers obsessed Tuesday night over an even more urgent question: Who would win Best in Show at the annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show? It was clear the crowd favored Daniel, a comely purebred golden retriever. Still, dog lovers everywhere went on to embrace the ultimate winner, Siba, a stately and gorgeous black standard poodle. ¶ But if you want to buy a similar dog, it’s getting increasingly hard to purchase one from a pet store. A growing number of cities and states have either banned, or are in the process of banning, the sale of commercially bred dogs and cats at retail establishments. At the beginning of 2016, about 100 U.S. cities had forbidden them, but the number has approximately tripled since then. States are also getting in on it: California, Maryland and Maine no longer allow such sales. The movement goes back more than a decade — Albuquerque was the first major city to pass such a law, in 2006 — but it has picked up steam since President Trump’s election. There’s a reason for that. Lackadaisical in the best of circumstances, federal oversight of the notoriously abusive puppy mill and animal breeding industries deteriorated dramatically since Trump took office. Shortly after his swearing-in, the Agriculture Department’s animal welfare database went offline. Disciplinary actions are down, too: The Post reported late last year that the number of citations issued by the department to breeders — along with zoos, circuses and research labs — declined by two-thirds between 2016 and 2018. This matters, because large-scale commercial breeding of dogs and other animals is often accompanied by extreme abuse.

But Trump’s radical regulatory actions collide with the ongoing upgrade to the status of animals — especially dogs — in our personal lives. Emotional support animals on airlines are the tip of the iceberg: States are passing laws permitting everything from dogs on restaurant patios to their burial next to their owners in graveyards. The shift is so incredible, it’s overriding traditional political divides. Republicans’ traditional concern for small business? Not always here. Signing Maryland’s ban on puppy-mill sales in pet stores, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said, “There are about seven pet stores in Maryland that might be affected, but there are thousands of puppies.” And the full USDA info should also be back online soon — Congress demanded that as part of recent omnibus legislation. Today there are two bipartisan bills in Congress demanding increased regulation

Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post

A playful Beagle puppy.

of large-scale animal breeding facilities. The WOOF! Act would put an end to breeders with multiple violations from reregistering their operation under a different individual but at the same address. The Puppy Protection Act would significantly heighten the care animals receive at breeding facilities, as well as require breeders to test their breeding stock for hereditary conditions. But the legislation is unlikely to go anywhere, observers say. Instead, the USDA — bowing to public pressure — is expected to release new regulations offering incremental improvements: Puppy-mill dogs would need to receive an annual vet exam, for example. The lack of interest from the top leaves states and cities in the position of attempting to tackle puppy mills themselves — much as they have taken on everything from raising the minimum wage to tightening gun regulations. Before Trump entered the White House, two states — Arizona and Ohio — stepped in to restore the rights of pet stores to sell puppy-mill dogs. But since then, efforts to do so have faltered in states ranging from Florida to Michigan, where former Republican governor Rick Snyder vetoed a similar effort as one of his last acts in

office before leaving in 2018. New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Wisconsin are now also considering legislation that would end the sale of puppy-mill dogs. There is no question that the regulations are taking a bite out of the pet breeding industrial complex. According to the Omaha World Herald, the number of licensed commercial breeders in Nebraska — one of the largest states for puppy mills — fell by a third between June of 2018 and June of 2019. But never underestimate capitalism. Much the way California’s AB5, which cracks down on employee misclassification, also caused companies to look to workers in other states when they could, breeders are already figuring out ways around the rule. In California, for instance, which still permits in-store sales of dogs obtained by rescue groups, investigations have uncovered dealers who’ve rebranded themselves as nonprofits — “puppy laundering” so pet stores can continue to market their goods to the public. All this points to the fact that more federal action is still needed, but for now, we’ll have to take the states. And the charmingly archaic Kennel Club competitions will continue. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Five Myths

Slavery BY

D AINA R AMEY B ERRY

AND

T ALITHA L . L E F LOURIA

Only 8 percent of high school seniors can identify slavery as a central cause of the Civil War, according to a recent Southern Poverty Law Center survey. The average American has grown up believing a slew of myths about the institution. As scholars of slavery and its aftermath, we have identified a few of the many misconceptions we have encountered in the classroom and in public spaces over the years. Myth No. 1 The first Africans came to America in 1619. While this date is indeed significant to British arrival and settlement, Africans came to America well earlier. Some, such as Juan Garrido and Esteban, came as explorers with the Spanish in 1503 and 1528, respectively. Because of their mobility and influence among the conquistadors, historians offer differing interpretations on whether they were ever enslaved, but at some point, both men were considered free. Another example is Isabel de Olvera, a free woman of African descent, who in 1600 went on an expedition to New Spain (a region comprising present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Florida and other parts of North and South America), in search of trade goods and new places to settle. Myth No. 2 Enslaved people who worked in the house had easier lives. In a 1963 speech, Malcolm X strongly distinguished enslaved people who worked in the house from those who worked in the fields, claiming that the former enjoyed greater privileges and comforts and that some even identified with their enslavers. But the distinction is not that simple. While a few of the very largest plantations had entirely separate labor pools, says historian Greg Downs, in most households, laborers moved between tasks depending on their age or the season. And working indoors had its own

physical and psychological hardships. Enslaved people were on call 24 hours a day, mostly on their feet and in close proximity to their enslavers, which led to greater scrutiny of their work, according to historian Deborah Gray White. In these settings, writes historian Thavolia Glymph, domestic laborers often experienced physical and sexual abuse. Myth No. 3 Slavery was limited to the South. Slavery touched nearly every corner of this country. Northern communities supported and benefited from Southern slavery through the shipbuilding, textile and shoemaking industries. In Rhode Island alone, traders shipped more than 100,000 African captives to the Caribbean and American colonies, according to “People Not Property,” an online documentary. Plantations along the Connecticut, Delaware and Hudson rivers relied on enslaved workers to produce wheat and process it into flour. Myth No. 4 Women were not as involved in slave-owning as men were. In fact, white women actively participated in the institution of slavery. In “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,” historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers shows that white women had a deep economic investment in slavery and exercised

Matt McClain/The Washington Post

The basement of the Freedom House Museum in Alexandria, Va., recalls the building’s history as a slave-trading site. Enslaved people were held there before being transported to other Southern states.

extraordinary control over the enslaved people in their households. Many learned this practice from birth, receiving enslaved people as gifts when they were children or even infants. Women bought and sold people at auction, and successfully sued their male family members for control of their laborers. Women supervised plantations and brutally punished their human “property.” Myth No. 5 The Civil War ended slavery. But in effect, slavery continued into the 20th century, under a system known as convict leasing. This practice, in which private enterprises leased felony prisoners from the state for a fee, primarily targeted black men, women and youth. African Americans were incarcerated for offenses such as loitering, stealing farm animals, breaking into railroad cars, spitting on the sidewalk and vagrancy. Some were individually auctioned at county courthouses, while

others were rented in groups. Convict leasing involved holding people against their will, separating them from their families, working them from sunup to sundown, beating and whipping them regularly, and severely punishing them for minor infractions. Many leased prisoners were held for life, and mortality rates were high. In 1873 in Alabama, 25 percent of black leased convicts died. Though convict leasing was legally abolished in 1928, at least 37 states still permit contracting prison labor out to private companies. Most receive pennies per hour for their labor, while others receive no compensation at all. n Berry, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation.” LeFlouria, an African American studies professor at the University of Virginia, is the author of “Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South.”

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