The Washington Post National Weekly - July 21, 2019

SUNDAY, JULY 21, 2019 SUNDAY, JULY 21, 2019

. IN COLLABORATION WITH . IN COLLABORATION WITH

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THE TROUBLE WITH THE TROUBLE WITH TIGERS IN AMERICA TIGERS IN AMERICA

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Politics Trump’s race-based strategy 4 Nation An opioid road map 8 5 Myths Peacekeeping 23

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THE FIX

Steering clear of impeachment BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

H

ouse Democrats got as close as they’ve ever gotten Wednesday night to impeaching President Trump — and it wasn’t close at all.

Wednesday’s vote on whether to table, or set aside, a resolution calling for Trump’s impeachment was a good case study on where House Democrats are on impeachment. A majority still doesn’t support moving forward with it, even in the wake of a tumultuous week where President Trump tweeted racist comments about four of their Democratic colleagues.

In the vote, a majority of House Democrats joined with House Republicans to vote against moving forward on articles of impeachment filed by Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.). This wasn’t a vote on whether to impeach Trump. It was a procedural motion, like the first step of the first step to even considering impeachment proceedings. And it failed by a vote of 332 to 95.

House Democrats were willing to take the historic steps of condemning a president’s tweets and to hold sitting Cabinet secretaries in contempt, but they still draw the line at impeachment. That’s telling about where the party is at, even as support for impeachment slowly builds.

This was a victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who thinks impeachment is a waste of political capital and could cost Democrats their House majority in 2020. But she’s not out of the woods yet. There are a couple of things on the horizon that could change this dynamic. Particularly: The Mueller hearing: Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is scheduled to testify Wednesday in front of two House committees about his report. He’s expected to basically just read from the report, which is already public.

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ERIK S LESSER/EPA-EFE

Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) introduced an impeachment resolution against President Trump. It failed by a vote of 332 to 95.

But House Democrats think hearing from his mouth all the things Mueller found Trump did wrong — he found 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice — will make his findings much more salient to the American public.

After Mueller gave a rare news conference talking about the report, a number of House Democrats said they support impeachment.

Could a longer Mueller presence in front of the cameras convince a majority of House Democrats to support impeachment proceedings?

More Democrats from Republican-leaning districts support impeachment: Right

now, the Democrats who matter to Pelosi by and large don’t support impeachment. Those would be the Democrats who flipped Republican districts last year to give Democrats the majority, in states like Kansas and Iowa. This past week, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz), who

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represents a Republican-leaning district, said she supports impeachment proceedings (the first step to impeachment). But she is just one of five Democrats in this group to support it.

The rest of her more moderate colleagues made up the core of the 137 who voted to table Green’s impeachment resolution.

Public opinion sways independents: Americans’ views on impeachment has remained pretty steady since the release of the Mueller report: Even though a majority thinks Trump lied, a majority doesn’t support impeachment.

Could Trump’s recent tweet fracas change people’s minds, especially among coveted independent voters who will help decide control of Congress in 2020? Don’t count on it. Public opinion about the Mueller report and how damning it is for Trump has remain split along party lines, and there’s no evidence that Trump targeting four minority congresswoman has suddenly shaken that loose. In fact, a new poll suggests Trump attacking these women was a politically popular thing to do among his base.

Congress’s other Trump investigations get held up in court: Trump is stonewalling more

than 20 congressional investigations into him and his administration, and the House is taking him to court for it. So far, it’s winning those fights. Trump has already lost the first rounds of two separate legal battles to try to keep his financial details out of control of Congress.

But if the tide suddenly turns against the House in the appeals, many Democratic lawmakers think they may have no choice but to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump. It could strengthen their case in court, and it’s just the only tool they have left to try to execute oversight over the executive branch.

But until that, or any of the above things happen, it seems like liberals’ impeachment push is, well, tabled. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY RESEARCH BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A young tiger from the compound of Zuzana Kukol, an advocate for private ownership of exotic animals. Photo by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON of The Washington Post

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Cost-cutting spree upends Mexico B Y M ARY B ETH S HERIDAN in Mexico City

F

irst to go was the presidential plane.

Next came the sell-off of official helicopters and bulletproof vans.

Then the assault on Mexico’s “golden bureaucracy” really took off. Out went the chauffeurdriven cars. Gone was the private health insurance.

In just 71/2 months, Mexico’s leftist president has achieved the kind of cost-cutting revolution that conservatives in Washington can only dream of. Thousands of federal jobs have been eliminated. Overseas travel has been slashed. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador even refused to shell out the money last month to fly to the Group of 20 summit.

“We can’t have a rich government in a poor country,” he says.

But what started as a popular attack on official privilege has increasingly generated chaos.

Judges are rebelling over salary cuts. Public hospitals have canceled surgeries.

Forest fires have blazed out of control, for want of more firefighters.

The cost-cutting is perhaps the clearest sign yet of the radical vision of López Obrador, who won election last year promising a “fourth transformation” of Mexico — a shift on the order of the 1910-17 revolution.

He’s no Hugo Chávez, the late Venezuelan leader who said capitalism “leads us straight to hell.”

López Obrador backs free trade and promises a balanced budget.

But he is determined to reorient Mexico’s government, slashing bureaucratic expenses so he can funnel money to other areas, including new programs for the poor.

It’s a vision that goes well beyond fiscal austerity, said Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent historian here.

“The whole idea of Mexico is different,” said Meyer, who supports the president.

López Obrador, who took office in December 2018, still enjoys approval ratings above 60 percent.

EDUARDO VERDUGO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The leftist leader’s fiscal austerity is drawing blowback from bureaucrats and institutions But his budget crusade has revealed a tendency to centralize power, worrying some in this country that lived through decades of authoritarian rule.

And the Mexican government, never famous for efficiency, risks becoming dysfunctional, analysts warn.

“The bureaucracy is not yet collapsing, but it’s in lousy shape,” said former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, a critic of López Obrador. “Because there’s no one there.”

The president is auctioning off dozens of government airplanes, helicopters and vans, in a sort of garage sale of privilege. Several of the aircraft were tied to scandals — such as the helicopter that whisked a senior official to his country house in 2015.

That kind of abuse was common in a country once run by a Spanish colonial elite and later subject to 71 years of one-party rule. The saying among Mexican

politicians: “To live outside the government budget is to live in error.”

López Obrador is determined to end that.

He slashed his own salary by around 60 percent, to the equivalent of $5,600 a month. And it was more than a symbolic gesture: His party passed legislation to ensure that federal employees didn’t earn more than the president. The platoons of aides that once swarmed around senior officials have vanished.

López Obrador’s party, which holds a majority in the National Congress, has thrown itself into the austerity campaign with a fervor that would have impressed a medieval Franciscan.

The lower house has whacked 3,000 of its 7,400 jobs, said Mario Delgado, the ruling-party leader.

This month, Mexico’s Senate followed the lower house in approving a bill that would cement many of the cost-cutting mea-

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador waves to the crowd during a rally in Tijuana on June 8.

sures into law.

“People got used to wasting government resources,” Delgado said. “Now we need to get used to an austere state.”

But the goal, he said, isn’t to shrink Mexico’s $300 billion federal budget — it’s to redirect spending toward other priorities. More investment will go to Pemex, the national oil giant.

López Obrador has launched major programs to provide jobs and scholarships for young people and boost pensions for the elderly.

So far, López Obrador says, he’s saved more than $6 billion in government purchases and more than $500 million from canceling bureaucrats’ private health insurance and savings plans.

Meyer, the historian, said the plan reflects López Obrador’s desire to change the very relationship between the government and the people. He recalled a conversation he had in the early 2000s with López Obrador, then the mayor of Mexico City.

It’s hard to change institutions in a few years, the mayor said, in Meyer’s telling. But López Obrador promised that, when he left office, the poor would see the government as theirs.

That’s a cultural change of historic proportions, Meyer said.

Of course, it has its costs.

Around the country, hospitals revolted because of the spending cuts. The head of the social security system quit, saying the controls on health spending were “inhumane.”

Within days, the government relented, freeing up some funding.

More than 3,000 scientists and academics have signed a letter to López Obrador protesting drastic cutbacks at government research centers. In some offices, energy-saving measures are so severe that employees aren’t allowed to charge their cellphones.

“This feels like the dismantling of a scientific network that took decades to build,” said Juan Martinez, a biologist at the Institute of Ecology. n

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POLITICS

White identity politics drives Trump BY

M ICHAEL S CHERER

With a tweeted attack on four minority congresswomen this past week, President Trump made clear that his reelection campaign will feature the same explosive mix of white grievance and antiimmigrant nativism that helped elect him.

Trump’s combustible formula of white identity politics already has reshaped the Republican Party, sidelining, silencing or converting nearly anyone who dares to challenge the racial insensitivity of his utterances. It also has pushed Democratic presidential candidates sharply to the left on issues such as immigration and civil rights, as they respond to the liberal backlash against him.

Still unknown is whether the president is now on the verge of more permanently reshaping the nation’s political landscape — at least until long-term demographic changes take hold to make nonwhite residents a majority of the country around 2050.

Trump won the 2016 election with the help of blue-collar white voters, some of them longtime Democrats, who are more conservative on immigration and more likely to embrace racial solidarity. Two years later, the 2018 midterm election showed suburban and college-educated whites recoiling at the same policies and statements, propelling Democrats to recapture control of the House.

“Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women, while we increasingly pick up working white Americans without college degrees,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout.

“Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap,” he added.

“That’s what the campaign will tell us.”

At the core of the strategy is Trump’s consistent drumbeat of equating the white European im-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

As a 2020 strategy, he is betting on the combination of grievance and anti-immigrant sentiment that helped him win the 2016 election migrant experience with the American ideal, setting those on his side of the divide against the politically correct elites, outsiders, immigrants or nonwhites who he implies are unfairly threatening what is good about the country.

His strategy is sharply reminiscent of that waged by segregationist George Wallace in multiple presidential campaigns beginning in the 1960s. Republican candidates including Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush have since used milder variations of race-based politics to try to pry white voters from the Democratic Party.

But Trump has been notable for repeatedly saying out loud what earlier candidates merely hinted.

To try to excite his core voters, he continues to describe Latino immigration as a threat to the nation by arguing that “we don’t have a country” if borders are not enforced.

More recently, he unsuccessfully championed an effort to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census that would have increased the political power of white voters by discouraging Latino participation in the count and allowed states to draw legislative districts to exclude undocumented immigrants.

Last Sunday, Trump tweeted a

President Trump has not backed away from anti-immigrant nativism. His campaign strategy is sharply reminiscent of that waged by segregationist George Wallace starting in the 1960s.

call for a group of Democratic congresswomen — including three born in the United States — to “go back” to their “broken and crime infested” ancestral countries. His attack struck at the heart of American identity by arguing that citizens from immigrant families should not tell “the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”

Asked Monday by a reporter if he was concerned that white nationalists were associating themselves with his argument, Trump did not back down.

“It doesn’t concern me because

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POLITICS

many people agree with me,” he said.

Trump held a campaign rally Wednesday night in North Carolina where the crowd responded to his attacks on Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) with chants of “Send her back! Send her back!”

The Trump strategy dates to his earlier forays into politics, when he falsely accused Barack Obama of being an illegitimate president who was secretly born overseas.

During the 2016 campaign, he circulated a false tweet that claimed that most killings of white people were committed by African Americans and he spread a false tale about Muslim celebrations in New Jersey after the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“They are trying to take away our history and our heritage,” he said of the mainstream media in August 2017, shortly after attracting widespread criticism for his sympathetic comments about those attending a deadly white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville.

“The president’s overall strategy in 2016 was successful, so it is no surprise that he would adopt much the same strategy for a reelection campaign,” said GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “His job approval is almost identical to the percentage of the popular vote that he received in 2016. So I don’t know if it is any more difficult in 2020.”

Democratic strategists who were certain in 2016 that Trump’s strategy would fail, feel less confident now. After Obama’s 2012 reelection, Republicans, including Fleischer, argued that the GOP was doomed unless it embraced softer rhetoric on immigration.

He called Trump’s Sunday tweet “completely inappropriate.”

Democrats have argued for more than a decade that Republicans needed to get near 40 percent of the Latino vote to win a presidential contest. Then Trump won the 2016 electoral college with 28 percent of Latino voters, according to exit polls, largely because of higher white turnout and lower minority turnout in key Midwestern states.

“We are in an environment

where the laws of physics don’t work,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who was director of the Domestic Policy Council under Obama. “We are trying to predict what happens when we let go of a ball.”

Academic studies of the 2016 election have found a strong correlation between those Americans who embraced white racial solidarity and those who supported Trump.

“The crucial thing about 2016 was [that] how much you felt this grievance as a white person was much more related to how you voted between Trump or Clinton than in 2012 or 2008, even when a black person, Barack Obama, was on the ballot,” said John Sides, a political science professor at George Washington University.

Ashley Jardina, a professor at Duke University who recently wrote a book called “White Identity Politics,” said a majority of white Americans express some racial resentment in election-year surveys.

Between 30 percent and 40 percent embrace a white racial identity. It is the latter group, with concerns about growing immigration threatening their racial status, who gravitated strongly toward the president.

The feeling of white identity is much stronger among non-college-educated whites than those who went to college, she said. “We do know that it is politically mobilizing,” Jardina added. “Those who feel racial solidarity have more likelihood to participate in politics.”

A December 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that 46 percent of white Americans said having a majority nonwhite nation in 2050 would “weaken American customs and values,” compared with 18 percent of black Americans and 25 percent of Hispanics. Asked whether having a majority nonwhite population would strengthen American customs and values, 42 percent of Democrats said it would, while only 13 percent of Republicans agreed.

Democratic strategists have warned that the liberal backlash against Trump’s approach could play into his hands. At the Demo-

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

cratic debates in June, most of the party’s presidential contenders endorsed ideas more liberal than the Obama administration’s priorities, including giving undocumented immigrants health insurance and removing criminal penalties for crossing the border.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, found in a study of voter attitudes after the 2016 election that people who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 were likely to be more liberal on economic issues and more conservative on issues of race and immigration. The study has been cited by pollsters for the Immigration Hub, a group that seeks to develop a pro-immigrant congressional agenda, as a cautionary note as the 2020 election approaches.

“If Democrats want to win some of these Obama-Trump voters back — and they should want to do that, because they made the difference in a number of Rust Belt states — they ought to be careful about taking too much of a pro-immigration stand,” Drutman said.

Trump’s unconventional strategy has also revealed the limits of the backlash the president can expect when he takes controversial stands. Clear majorities disapprove of Trump’s general temperament and even larger majorities have said some of his specific actions have been racist — dating to his campaign declaration that an American-born Latino judge could not be unbiased in a case about Trump’s business or his

President Trump told Rep. Ilhan Omar (DMinn.) and three other minority congresswomen to “go back” to their “broken and crime infested” ancestral countries on Siunday. At a Trump campaign rally Wednesday, the crowd responded to his attacks on Omar with chants of “Send her back! Send her back!”

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more recent use of a vulgar word to describe Caribbean and African countries.

But people were critical of Trump on this front in 2015 and 2016, and they haven’t grown more critical of him over time. The number of Americans saying he has acted “fitting and proper for a president” was 28 percent in a Washington Post-ABC News poll this month, similar to or slightly higher than he rated in answers to the question in 2018 and 2017.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued his pattern of using controversial behavior to dominate news cycles and spread his message. A constant refrain, in the face of the backlash, is that he and his supporters are the true victims.

On Monday, he said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claim that his tweet about the congresswomen showed that he wanted to “Make America white again” was a “very racist statement.”

A day earlier, after his tweet about the congresswomen, he retweeted 20 mentions of the proTrump WalkAway Campaign, an online effort that urges people to stop believing mainstream reporting about him.

In one video shared, the founder of the group argued that the media had mounted a “criminal” effort against the president by falsely evoking “racism, homophobia and bigotry” to “control your thinking.”

As he might have expected, few in his party have publicly contested such claims or criticized Trump for his behavior. Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who called Trump’s critique of the Latino judge a “textbook definition of a racist comment” — but later avoided criticizing the president — has retired.

Trump’s current Republican detractors tend to be less direct. Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) called the message “way over the line,” and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) requested “a higher standard of decorum and decency.”

Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the GOP’s only black senator, went further.

He said the tweet was “racially offensive.” n

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NATION Number of pills per person, per year Average county yearly total, 2006 through 2012 5

Wash.

Mont.

75

150+

Maine

N.D.

Ore.

Vt. N.H.

Minn.

Idaho

Wis.

S.D. Wyo.

Pa.

Iowa

Neb.

Ohio Ill.

Utah

Colo.

Calif.

Leavenworth, Kan. Kan. 227

Mingo, W.Va. 203

Mo.

Okla.

N.M.

R.I.

N.J. Md. Del.

Ind. W. Va.

Ky. Tenn.

Ariz.

Conn.

Mich.

Nev.

Mass.

N.Y.

Va.

Martinsville (city), Va. 242

Norton (city), Va. N.C. 306

Ark.

S.C. Miss.

Ala.

Charleston, S.C. 248

Ga.

La. Tex. Alaska

Fla. Hawaii

Source: Data compiled by the DEA and analyzed by The Post

An epidemic unmasked Newly released data on the distribution of pain pills shows the vast scope of a national crisis

BY S COTT H IGHAM, S ARI H ORWITZ AND S TEVEN R ICH

A

merica’s largest drug companies saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012 as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic spun out of control, according to previously undisclosed company data released as part of the largest civil action in U.S. history.

The information comes from a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — from manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in ev-

ery town and city. The data provides an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which has resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.

Just six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills during this period: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart, according to an analysis of the database by The Washington Post. Three companies manufactured 88 percent of the opioids: SpecGx, a subsidiary of Mallinckrodt; Actavis Pharma; and Par Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Endo Pharmaceuticals.

Purdue Pharma, which the plaintiffs allege sparked the epi-

demic in the 1990s with its introduction of OxyContin, its version of oxycodone, was ranked fourth among manufacturers with about 3 percent of the market.

The volume of the pills handled by the companies skyrocketed as the epidemic surged, increasing about 51 percent from 8.4 billion in 2006 to 12.6 billion in 2012. By contrast, doses of morphine, a well-known treatment for severe pain, averaged slightly more than 500 million a year during the period.

Those 10 companies along with about a dozen others are now being sued in federal court in Cleveland by nearly 2,000 cities, towns and counties alleging that they conspired to flood the nation with opioids. The companies, in

turn, have blamed the epidemic on overprescribing by doctors and pharmacies and on customers who abused the drugs. The companies say they were working to supply the needs of patients with legitimate prescriptions desperate for pain relief.

Plaintiffs have long accused drug manufacturers and wholesalers of fueling the opioid epidemic by producing and distributing billions of pain pills while making billions of dollars. The companies have paid more than $1 billion in fines to the Justice Department and Food and Drug Administration over opioid-related issues, and hundreds of millions more to settle state lawsuits.

But the previous cases addressed only a portion of the

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NATION problem, never allowing the public to see the size and scope of the behavior underlying the epidemic. Monetary settlements by the companies were accompanied by agreements that kept such information hidden.

The drug companies, along with the DEA and the Justice Department, have fought furiously against the public release of the database, the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Order System, known as ARCOS. The companies argued that the release of the “transactional data” could give competitors an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

The Justice Department argued that the release of the information could compromise ongoing DEA investigations.

Until now, the litigation has proceeded in unusual secrecy.

Many filings and exhibits in the case have been sealed under a judicial protective order. The secrecy finally lifted after The Post and HD Media, which publishes the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia, waged a year-long legal battle for access to documents and data from the case.

On Monday evening, U.S. District Judge Dan Polster removed the protective order for part of the ARCOS database.

Lawyers for the local governments suing the companies hailed the release of the data.

“The data provides statistical insights that help pinpoint the origins and spread of the opioid epidemic — an epidemic that thousands of communities across the country argue was both sparked and inflamed by opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies,” said Paul T. Farrell Jr. of West Virginia, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

In statements emailed to The Post on Tuesday, the drug distributors stressed that the ARCOS data would not exist unless they had accurately reported shipments and questioned why the government had not done more to address the crisis.

A virtual road map The numbers of pills the companies sold during the seven-year time frame are staggering, far exceeding what has been previously disclosed in limited court filings and news stories.

Three companies distributed nearly half of the pills: McKesson with 14.1 billion, Walgreens with

Share of distributed prescription opioids, by company, 2006-2012 McKesson Corp.

18.4% 14.1 billion pills

Walgreens 16.5% 12.6 billion

Cardinal Health 14% 10.7 billion

Amerisource Bergen 11.7% 8.9 billion

CVS 7.7% 5.9 billion

Walmart 6.9% 5.2 billion

Source: Data compiled by the DEA and analyzed by The Post

12.6 billion and Cardinal Health with 10.7 billion. The leading manufacturer was Mallinckrodt’s SpecGx with nearly 28.9 billion pills, or nearly 38 percent of the market.

The states that received the highest concentrations of pills per person per year were: West Virginia with 66.5, Kentucky with 63.3, South Carolina with 58, Tennessee with 57.7 and Nevada with 54.7. West Virginia also had the highest opioid death rate during this period.

Rural areas were hit particularly hard: Norton, Va., with 306 pills per person; Martinsville, Va., with 242; Mingo County, W.Va., with 203; and Perry County, Ky., with 175.

The database is a virtual road map to the nation’s opioid epidemic that began with prescription pills, spawned increased heroin use and resulted in the current fentanyl crisis, which added more than 67,000 to the death toll from 2013 to 2017.

The transactional data kept by ARCOS is highly detailed. It includes the name, DEA registration number, address and business activity of every seller and buyer of a controlled substance in the United States. The database also includes drug codes, transaction dates, and total dosage units and grams of narcotics sold.

The data tracks a dozen different opioids, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, which make up three-quarters of the total pill shipments to pharmacies.

Under federal law, drug manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies must report each transac-

Biggest opioid manufacturers, 2006-2012

SpecGx 37.7% 28.8 billion pills

Par Pharmaceutical 15.7% 11.9 billion

Other 24.6% 18.8 billion

WEEKLY

Actavis Pharma 34.6% 26.4 billion

Other 11.9% 9.1 billion

Source: Data compiled by the DEA and analyzed by The Post

tion of a narcotic to the DEA, where it is logged into the ARCOS database. If company officials notice orders of drugs that appear to be suspicious because of their unusual size or frequency, they must report those sales to the DEA and hold back the shipments.

As more and more towns and cities became inundated by pain pills, they fought back. They filed federal lawsuits against the drug industry, alleging the companies not only failed to report suspicious orders, but also filled those orders to maximize profits.

Repeat offenders The DEA has brought a series of civil enforcement cases against the largest distributors.

But the settlements of those cases revealed only limited details about the volume of pills that were being shipped.

In 2007, the DEA brought a case against McKesson. The DEA accused the company of shipping millions of doses of hydrocodone to Internet pharmacies after the agency had briefed the company about its obligations under the law to report suspicious orders.

In 2008, the DEA brought a case against Cardinal Health, accusing the nation’s second-largest drug distributor of shipping millions of doses of painkillers to online and retail pharmacies without notifying the DEA of signs that the drugs were being diverted to the black market.

Some companies were repeat offenders.

In 2012, the DEA began investigating McKesson again, this time for shipping suspiciously large

“America should brace itself for the harsh reality of the scope of the opioid epidemic.”

Peter J. Mougey, a lawyer for the plaintiffs from Pensacola, Fla.

orders of narcotics to pharmacies in Colorado. One store in Brighton, Colo., population 38,000, was ordering 2,000 pain pills per day.

The DEA discovered that McKesson had filled 1.6 million orders from its Aurora, Colo., warehouse between 2008 and 2013 and reported just 16 as suspicious. None involved the Colorado store.

DEA agents and investigators said they had amassed enough information to file criminal charges against McKesson and its officers but they were overruled by federal prosecutors. The company wound up paying a $150 million fine to settle, a record amount for a diversion case.

Also in 2012, Cardinal Health attracted renewed attention from the DEA when it discovered that the company was again shipping unusually large amounts of painkillers to its Florida customers.

The company had sold 12 million oxycodone pills to four pharmacies over four years.

As the companies paid fines and promised to do a better job of stopping suspicious orders, they continued to manufacture, ship and dispense large amounts of pills, according to the newly released data.

“The depth and penetration of the opioid epidemic becomes readily apparent from the data,” said Peter J. Mougey, a lawyer for the plaintiffs from Pensacola, Fla. “This disclosure will serve as a wake up call to every community in the country. America should brace itself for the harsh reality of the scope of the opioid epidemic.

Transparency will lead to accountability.” n

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A tiger lounges in an enclosure owned by Zuzana Kukol in Pahrump, Nev. Kukol, who runs a group called Responsible Exotic Animal Ownership, has 10 tigers.

Opposite page: A young tiger bears his teeth in Pahrump.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

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‘no-limit breeding’ As tigers are bred for profit and owned privately in U.S., a supplier’s trial exposes gaps in oversight

J

oseph Passage, rangy and tattooed with a blond mullet, called himself the “Tiger King” and “one of the world’s experts in tigers.” He was better known as “Joe Exotic.”

Over two decades, the zookeeper had built a menagerie on a 16-acre spread off the interstate in Oklahoma. It housed baboons, wolves, a camel trained to “kiss” visitors and many, many tigers — as many as 200, he claimed.

Gregarious and charming, Passage had an irresistible attraction for travelers coming up the highway: tiger cubs, playthings that padded on oversize paws among marveling visitors who paid to stroke their dense fur.

To meet the demand, Passage became one of the nation’s top suppliers of tiger cubs to individuals and private zoos like his own. Some critics accused him of cruel exploitation, viewing themselves as tiger saviors.

One made him mad enough to consider murder, prosecutors would later say.

On a chilly day in December 2017, Passage met with two other men in his cluttered, wood-walled office. The trio’s relaxed chatter bounced between jokes, recent balmy weather — and homicide: One of the men was willing to kill Passage’s nemesis. The cost would be $10,000.

Passage was deep in debt, but he said he could manage it.

“I’ll just sell a bunch of tigers,” he said, according to an undercover recording by an FBI informant. “Sell a bunch of tigers.”

Passage’s story provides insight into how captive tigers have proliferated throughout America, to the point that there now may be more in this country than in the wild.

The use of an iconic symbol of wildness as a sideshow bauble has helped fuel this growth. The big cats have been subject to gradually tightened regulation, but they are still bred and traded with only patchy oversight.

In the Asian forests and savannas that are their natural habitat, wild tiger populations have plunged, leaving fewer than 4,000 of the majestic creatures slinking

By KARIN BRULLIARD

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toward extinction. In the United States, all tigers are labeled as endangered species. But because most of the animals are crossbred “generic” variants of wild tigers and considered not relevant to conservation, the government has been slow to get involved.

A case against Passage, 56, was its first major attempt to crack down. Last year, he was indicted by federal prosecutors on two murder-for-hire charges and 19 wildlife violations, encompassing several illegal tiger cub sales and the killings of five adult tigers. He was convicted on all of the charges except for two of the wildlife counts in April.

The trial was a highly unusual federal prosecution of endangered species violations involving captive animals, and it exposed basic gaps in oversight. It also forced into a courtroom one of the most contentious battles in U.S. animal circles: the fight over how many tigers live in America, who should have them and how they should be treated.

At the heart of the tiger battle is the cub-petting that Joe Exotic’s business relied upon. An analysis by New York University researchers identified 77 facilities offering public contact with baby animals in late 2015 and early 2016, mostly big cat cubs. These allow visitors — whose ranks have included Ivanka Trump’s children — to pet or bottlefeed the animals.

Although it means removing cubs from their mothers shortly after birth and has sometimes resulted in injuries to customers and cats, the practice is legal. But the U.S. Agriculture Department says only cubs between the ages of 4 weeks (no longer “neonatal”) and 12 weeks (when they become “too big, too fast, and too strong”) should be used. That creates an incentive, critics say, for breeders such as Passage to pump out cubs — and a constant supply of 100-day-old tigers that have outgrown their value.

“This is the big mystery,” said Carney Anne Nasser, a Michigan State University law professor who has written about holes in tiger monitoring. “Where do they go?”

Between 2013 and 2018, Oklahoma veterinary records show, the zoo Passage founded, then one of the nation’s biggest tiger suppliers, shipped out of state more than 100 tigers as young as 1 week old. Cubs could go for as much as $5,000. Dozens were sent to private zookeepers and animal owners in Florida, Indiana, Colorado and beyond. The reach of Joe Exotic was nationwide.

In April, one tiger born at Joe’s zoo, 400pound Kryxis, lay belly-down on an operating table in a cement-floored Indiana garage outfitted as a veterinary clinic. The cat was having surgery for a congenital eye defect.

His journey to the facility, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, started after a private owner near Houston gave him up to a rescue network founded by a former Wall Street executive who now dedicates his life to tigers. So far, he has relocated more than 250 from private owners and collapsed zoos to sanctuaries.

“The commercial life of a tiger cub is 100

Tigers roam the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma. CEO Jeff Lowe bought the park from Joe Passage, right, who had previously filed for bankruptcy.

COURTESY OF JOSEPH PASSAGE

days,” said Bill Nimmo, the network’s founder.

“The problem is uncontrolled, no-limit breeding.”

A

s Passage built up his business off a stretch of Interstate 35 between Oklahoma City and Dallas, he operated with few legal restraints.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that regulates the wildlife trade, added tigers to the endangered species list in 1970. In 2003, shortly after a tiger was discovered in the Brooklyn apartment of a taxi driver, Congress passed a federal law that

prohibited interstate sales and the transport of big cats as pets.

But Fish and Wildlife did not police the domestic exchange of most captive-bred tigers until 2016, because they were considered mongrels with no conservation value. Today, it is illegal to sell any tiger across state lines without a permit from the agency.

The USDA, which enforces federal animal welfare laws, requires sites open to the public, such as Passage’s, to be licensed and periodically inspected. Any other rules are left up to states.

And for a long time, many states did not concern themselves with tigers or other exotic animals. Prominent zoos offloaded “surplus” animals to dealers, who might hawk them at auctions. Small zoos flourished, as did the population of pet tigers. Former boxer Mike Tyson famously owned tigers for a spell in the 1990s.

Today, dangerous wild animals that are privately held and not traded across state lines remain entirely unregulated by four states and only lightly regulated in most others.

Laws are unevenly enforced and replete with exemptions — for federally licensed zoos and sanctuaries, or universities with tiger mascots, or people who already owned tigers.

In recent years, several states have banned or restricted such pets after attacks or escapes; Ohio, once known as an exotic-animal hotbed, did so after a Zanesville man named Terry Thompson let loose his 56 animals, including 18 tigers, before killing himself in 2011.

A Post analysis of USDA inspection reports, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, found 234 licensed facilities holding

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COVER STORY as many as 1,384 tigers between December 2015 and January 2018. Such reports capture only the animals in licensed circuses, zoos and other exhibitors.

The reality is that no one knows how many tigers reside in the United States. There’s no central tiger database. There’s no microchipping requirement. As Passage’s trial revealed, tigers can easily exist off the books.

WEEKLY

operation in 2012, told The Post that newborn tigers were sometimes removed within 20 minutes of birth to be raised by hand for use in petting or the roadshow.

“Baby tigers are like money in the bank to them,” said Stanton, who lived at the park for eight months, had a falling out with Passage and later submitted a complaint about the zoo to the USDA. J.D. Thompson, the director of a 2016 documentary on Passage, said he believes that “Joe’s love of animals is, or certainly was at one point, sincere. But money interfered along the path and forced him to figure out ways to monetize his obsession.”

T

he origin story of Joe Exotic’s zoo goes like this: In the late 1990s, his brother, Garold Wayne, was killed by a drunk driver. Garold always “wanted to go to Africa to see the animals running free,” Passage said in court. As a tribute, Joe and his parents used insurance settlement money to create an animal park near the tiny downtown of rural Wynnewood, Okla.

They called it the Garold Wayne Exotic Animal Memorial Park, known as G.W. for short. A deer and a mountain lion were among its first residents.

While Passage would need a USDA license to exhibit and breed zoo animals, Oklahoma has one of the country’s most hands-off approaches to animal ownership, allowing pet tigers and in-state sales.

Shortly after the park opened, a game warden asked it to take in two tigers found abandoned in a backyard in Ardmore, Okla., Passage told The Post in an interview from jail.

The cats had a six-cub litter within a year, and “by accident” he had stumbled into breeding, Passage said. Before long, zoos and animal parks were demanding more tiger cubs than he could produce, he said.

Passage initially portrayed his business as a sanctuary for mistreated animals.

“He was against private ownership, which of course we all agreed with, because none of us want to see tigers in our jurisdictions,” said Carrie Daley, who for 22 years was the county animal-control officer. “But then he went from being a tiger sanctuary to being a zoo to having tiger cubs that you could play with. His philosophy did a 180.”

In 2006, the USDA fined him $25,000 and suspended his license for enclosures that were structurally unsound and contained too much “excreta,” among other violations. In 2013, an employee’s arm was partially ripped off by a tiger; that led to a $2,400 fine from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In 2017, the USDA cited the zoo after a tiger escaped its enclosure and was shot by staff.

But Passage continued in business. USDA citations rarely lead to pulled licenses.

Passage made no secret he was breeding, which was legal. Cubs were raised in Passage’s house on the property, their fluffy bodies swirling around the kitchen floor and in portable baby cribs, former employees said.

Adults were fed expired meat donated by Walmart. Peculiar hybrids were created: ligers (male lion-female tiger), tigons (male tiger-female lion), tiligers (male tiger-female liger) and, in 2013, the nation’s first liligers, the

KLMNO

O offspring of a male lion and a female liger.

For several years, Passage took as many as 10 tiger cubs — along with baby lions and bears and small farm animals — on a roadshow around the country. The act, called “Mystical Magic of the Endangered,” combined petting sessions with magic tricks, admonitions to avoid drugs and alcohol, and messaging about the plight of wildlife.

Passage was a natural performer — droll, self-deprecating and bursting with jittery energy. He’d later fill his zoo gift shop with Tiger King-branded condoms and candy.

Eventually, the spectacle caught the eye of Carole Baskin, founder of a well-funded Tampa sanctuary called Big Cat Rescue. Earlier in her career, she’d bred and sold exotic cats and had displayed a tiger at public events. But by this point, she strongly opposed both practices.

She singled out Passage on her website, 911AnimalAbuse.com, designed to call attention to animal exhibitors she viewed as “bad guys.” Baskin asked venues to cancel his shows and her followers to protest them.

Passage would later claim in a court filing that cancellations cost him three-year contracts with 265 properties worth a total of nearly $10 million. In 2010, he retaliated by renaming his traveling company “Big Cat Rescue Entertainment” and adopting a logo similar to Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue. Baskin’s sanctuary sued him, and in 2013, it won a $1 million judgment.

Passage filed for bankruptcy, dissolved his business, transferred assets and later sold the zoo to a man named Jeff Lowe, but he continued running daily operations until 2018. Baskin’s attorneys said it was all an effort to avoid paying her. Passage also attacked her on his online shows, “Joe Exotic TV” and “Joe Gone Wild.”

During this time, people who worked for Passage noticed things that troubled them.

David Stanton, who ran Passage’s video

“But then he went from being a tiger sanctuary to being a zoo to having tiger cubs that you could play with.”

Carrie Daley, former animal-control officer for Joe Passage’s county

Veterinary ophthalmologist Heidi Klein, left, and veterinary assistant Andrea Hegyi surgically repair the eyelids of a tiger at the Exotic Feline Rescue Center.

ne tiger born at the zoo Passage founded, Spunky, now lives at the foot of rocky Nevada hills on land owned by Zuzana Kukol, a defender of what she calls responsible exotic animal ownership. She has nine other tigers as well as lions, cougars and other exotics she considers pets. Feeding alone takes three to four hours daily.

“He’s going through a growth spurt,” Kukol, wearing a tiger-printed cap and gloves in bone-chilling February wind, said of Spunky, who brushed against his chain-link enclosure as she crouched to greet him. “He’s like a teenager! He eats all the time.”

Spunky, who is now nearly 2 years old, came to Kukol through a circuitous route. Lowe, the man who purchased the Wynnewood zoo from Passage, took the cub to Las Vegas and was charged with lacking required permits in a case that is still open. Lowe declined an interview request.

Authorities confiscated Spunky and transferred him to Kukol, who lives on the outskirts of Pahrump, Nev., on a property with a nine-foot perimeter fence and guard dogs.

Sixty miles west of Las Vegas, Pahrump and the surrounding area are home to brothels, marijuana farms and a surprising number of tigers. Though growing rapidly, the town of 36,000 is still a place where people move to be left alone.

Kukol, a 54-year-old who came to the United States as a refugee from Czechoslovakia, got her first tiger 20 years ago, when living in Washington state, a place she found too rainy. She had also lived in California, which she now scorns as a “socialist republic.” Rural Nevada beckoned.

Her 10 tigers live in spacious enclosures.

“Tie-outs,” or metal stakes with attached rings, dot the property and serve as spots where Kukol and her partner, a retired defense contractor named Scott Shoemaker, can attach the tigers’ leashes while on walks.

Kukol and Shoemaker lobby lawmakers in Nevada — one of the states with no private ownership restrictions — against new regulations. Their organization is called Responsible Exotic Animal Ownership.

“My answer is: Why not?” Kukol said. “I’m not taking them from the wild. I’m not hurting them. Why not?”

Eight more tigers live not far from Kukol’s

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COVER STORY

house, on a remote lot with three no-trespassing signs. The cats are owned by former Hollywood animal trainer Karl Mitchell, 66, and his wife, Kayla. They met at the local Walmart when she rang up his purchase of chicken — for the tigers — and she asked whether she could come over to touch one.

Karl Mitchell says he moved to Pahrump in the 1980s when a friend told him “you can have tigers out there.” Over the years, he told The Post, he received at least four tigers from the G.W. zoo in Oklahoma.

When Post reporters visited him in February, the tiger enclosures appeared modest but tidy. A small wooden bridge led to a spring-fed pond amid bamboo, which Karl Mitchell said the tigers use “like a private tub.” Bordering the property is federal land with a dry lake bed, where the Mitchells said they take leashed tigers for walks.

The county spent much of last year in conflict with Mitchell.

After he applied for a county permit to keep tigers on his property, the sheriff ’s office produced a report saying that he had exhibited his cats without a required local permit or USDA license, and included testimony from a Las Vegas magician who said he’d paid Mitchell $750 to display Abraham, then a cub, at a birthday party at the Tropicana hotel and casino.

Mitchell says he did not renew his USDA exhibitors’ license in 2001, though federal records make clear the agency revoked it for a litany of violations — including failure to provide tiger cubs with sufficient water — and went on to fine him more than $100,000.

But Mitchell, a Vietnam veteran who says he has post-traumatic stress disorder, never gave up on the animals. Nye County reissued his local permit in February after he argued that his cats were “emotional support tigers.”

“A tiger will look at you and see the spirit you carry with you,” Mitchell said.

F

or decades, Fish and Wildlife paid no attention to cats like Spunky or Abraham — “generic” mutts that make up the majority of tigers born and raised in the United States. The agency’s domestic-tiger concerns centered on pure subspecies, nearly all of which are now believed to live in facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, or the AZA. A change took years, former Fish and Wildlife director Dan Ashe said, because the Office of Management and Budget was wary of further regulating small businesses. Also, he acknowledges, “it wasn’t a priority for us.”

In 2016, the agency approved a rule that required any seller of generic tigers across state lines to get the same permit needed to trade in purebreds. Passage never applied for one. The rule made clear that any of Passage’s out-of-state sales from then on would be illegal. But more than a year after its implementation, he was unconcerned. He had never been visited by Fish and Wildlife in 20 years of business, he says.

the trial in March.

At Passage’s trial, prosecutors played a recording of the zookeeper telling Garretson how to explain the acquisition of a baby tiger to USDA inspectors. Already have a male and female? Say it was their offspring, Passage said. How to get rid of a tiger? “Just off it and say it died,” Passage replied.

On a property list entered as evidence in court were 13 pages of animals Passage valued at a total of $361,000. Some tigers were worth $5,000, he wrote.

In October 2017, prosecutors alleged, Passage killed tigers for profit. A circus wanted to pay $5,000 to board big cats for the winter.

The cages were full, two employees testified.

One said he helped identify five tigers — those in cages 40, 42 and 81 — that were not breeders and were therefore less valuable. Another said he watched Passage shoot the cats, which had been sedated, with a .410 shotgun.

Passage testified that the tigers were crippled, and that in a moment of shame over using the cats to “suck donations” from visitors, he decided to euthanize them. Shooting them would be “twice as fast” as lethal injection, he said, and he “had a legal right.”

But while the Endangered Species Act allows euthanasia, shooting them in the head without a veterinarian’s approval would not qualify, prosecutors said.

Fish and Wildlife agents exhumed the tiger corpses a year later and found them buried in a row, “like hot dogs in a pack,” an agent testified. A federal forensic pathologist who examined them testified that all seemed healthy.

P Top: Zuzana Kukol at her compound in Pahrump, Nev. She and her partner, Scott Shoemaker, lobby lawmakers in Nevada against new regulations on private ownership of tigers.

Above: Former Hollywood animal trainer Karl Mitchell kisses one of his tigers on his property in Pahrump.

A Vietnam veteran, he regained his local permit after arguing that his big cats were “emotional support tigers.”

“Why are they on the Endangered Species Act?” he mockingly said of tigers in 2017, according to a recording played at his trial.

“Nobody can track them.”

To evade oversight, Passage simply falsified or did not fill out USDA or state veterinary forms, which asked whether the purpose for transferring an animal was a sale, donation or some other activity.

Before the 2016 rule, Passage’s veterinary forms, obtained by The Post under a public records request, regularly showed sales. In December 2014, for example, he sold two 2-week-old tigers to a Florida man.

After the rule change, most of the transfers were marked “donation,” records show. Giving away tigers — the zoo’s product — might not make much sense for a man saddled with lawyers’ fees. But it would be legal.

It also wasn’t true, according to testimony from Passage’s friend, James Garretson, who secretly recorded him for the FBI. “That’s, I guess, standard practice in this industry . . . everyone marks donation,” said Garretson, himself the owner of a half-dozen tigers. A prosecutor asked when “sale” is used.

“In my years, I’ve never seen one,” he replied at

assage took the stand on April 2, the last day of his trial. He wore a suit, his neck tattoos poking out of a button-up shirt.

His face looked drawn.

By this point, prosecutors had shown pages of records of tiger cubs being “donated” to out-of-state facilities. Passage’s former boyfriend had testified about driving tiger cubs across the nation to recipients who handed him cash, which always “went straight to Joe.” They had played recordings of Passage discussing a plan to have an employee go to Florida to kill Baskin. They had offered evidence that he had given the employee $3,000 to do it. They had chronicled his numerous Facebook and video threats: shooting an effigy of her and standing with a shovel and saying, “We’re going to bury Carole.”

Passage testified that he was never serious about killing Baskin. He argued that if he was breeding 50 endangered tigers a year and had “euthanized” the five found on the property, “I should get credit for 45 more,” he said.

Prosecutors dropped two of the wildlife charges during the trial. It took the jury mere hours to convict Passage on all remaining counts. “He’s now in a cage,” said Brittany Peet, a lawyer for PETA, one of Passage’s longtime enemies. “And I think there is some justice in that.”

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BOOKS

Dedication behind our boldest leap N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARK W HITAKER

W

ONE GIANT LEAP The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

By Charles Fishman Simon & Schuster.

464 pp. $29.99

hen astronaut Neil Armstrong emerged from the spindly lunar module Eagle onto the craggy surface of the moon, he united a bitterly divided nation in a brief moment of national pride and wonder. After years of Vietnam protests, political assassinations and urban race riots, an astonishing 94 percent of all American households stayed up into the late night of July 20, 1969, to watch the miracle of Apollo 11 unfold on live TV. “That’s one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong radioed once his boots touched the ground. Yet soon enough, moon and space station missions became routine, and public indifference and secondguessing set in. So 50 years later, what are we to make of those hours of glory?

In his meticulously researched and absorbingly written book, journalist Charles Fishman provides both a celebration of the Apollo 11 mission and a corrective to some of the myths that have crystallized around it. The first involves the role of President John F. Kennedy. True, Fishman documents, it was Kennedy who in 1961 announced the goal of putting a man on the moon. “We choose to go to the moon, in this decade, and do other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard,” Kennedy famously declared in a speech at Rice University, after visiting the construction site of a new NASA center in Houston in September 1962.

But Fishman argues that it was all about macho Cold War politics for Kennedy, after the Soviets took the lead in sending rockets, men and dogs into space. Privately, Kennedy cooled on the project after superpower tensions eased in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis that October, and he might have dialed it back, Fishman suggests, had he lived. Only after Kennedy’s assassination did Lyndon Johnson double down on the Apol-

NEIL ARMSTRONG/NASA/EPA-EFE

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin deploys the Passive Seismic Experiment package on the lunar surface on July 20,1969. On the left, the American flag planted by the astronaut can be seen.

lo program, and Jackie Kennedy tie her husband’s name to space travel for posterity by lobbying to have the space center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., named after him.

After all the movies and memoirs focused on astronauts, Fishman skips retelling the personal stories of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins, the third Apollo 11 crew member who manned the Columbia command module. Instead, he introduces us to the scientists and engineers who made it all possible. Charles “Doc” Draper was the bow-tie-wearing ballroom-dance enthusiast who headed the MIT Instrumentation Lab, which designed the internal navigation system. Bill Tindall was the talented writer and orbital mechanics “genius” from the old NASA headquarters in Langley, Va. Most memorable of all, John Houbolt was the quiet, middleaged, mid-level NASA engineer who dared to pester his superiors with long, single-spaced letters advocating a “lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR)” — a “lunar ferry,” as

the New York Times first described it, that would detach as it neared the moon, then link back up with the command module for the trip home. In making his case, the lowly Houbolt was taking on the “Earth-orbit rendezvous” scenarios originally advanced by the cocky Saturn booster rocket team led by the legendary Wernher von Braun. But in a fateful meeting at the Saturn headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., in June 1962, von Braun suddenly threw his weight behind the LOR plan. Seven years later, Houbolt was invited to sit alongside von Braun in NASA’s VIP viewing room. When Armstrong reported that “the Eagle has landed,” von Braun turned to Houbolt.

“John, it worked beautifully,” he said.

To the criticism that the Apollo program was a “moondoggle” (in the words of sociologist Amitai Etzioni) and a waste of billions of dollars that could have been better spent addressing social ills at home, Fishman offers a persuasive defense. Not only did space contracts with Grumman, General

Motors and other companies account for hundreds of thousands of jobs spread across all 50 states, but for almost a decade, NASA and its contractors, along with the Pentagon team building the Polaris missile, served as virtually the only buyers for Fairchild Semiconductor’s integrated circuits, perfecting and driving down the price of the computer chips that now power everything from our laptops and smartphones to kitchen appliances and electronic cars.

“No, Apollo didn’t usher in the Space Age, but it did usher in the Digital Age,” Fishman concludes.

“It helped lay the foundation of the technology that created the digital revolution, and it helped give Americans a sense of excitement and anticipation about the Digital Age . . . that had been completely missing before the 1960s began.”

In his final chapter, Fishman riffs on the can-do “spirit of America” that the Apollo program came to symbolize, captured in the oftrepeated phrase: “If we can send a man to the moon, then why can’t we (fill in the blank).” As tempting as it would be to recommend “One Giant Leap” as a welcome diversion from our current political chaos, that meditation invites the question of what has become of that spirit in the self-dealing era of President Trump.

But Fishman rescues what could have come across as an outdated paean to American exceptionalism with a crucial caveat.

“We have to be asked” if we are to accomplish hard and great things again, he writes. In this most fractious era since the 1960s, one finishes this book wondering: Will we ever again find missions that unite and inspire us as a nation, and leaders with the vision and magnetism to point the way? n Whitaker is the author of “Smoketown: The Unknown Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.” Previously, he was managing editor of CNN and, before that, editor of Newsweek.

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OPINIONS

Thank John Paul Stevens for your binge-watching CHARLES LANE is an editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, and a weekly Washington Post opinion columnist.

Millions are mourning John Paul Stevens, the retired Su­ preme Court justice who died Tuesday at age 99, as the liberal lion who stood for gay rights, campaign­finance re­ form and government power to regulate gun ownership. ¶ All true. But let us never forget Stevens’s most transforma­ tional cultural contribution on the court — as the intellec­ tual godfather of binge­watching. ¶ Seriously: John Paul Stevens was the author of a landmark 1984 ruling that thwarted the entertainment industry’s efforts to control in­home video recording of television programs, clearing a legal path not only for the VCR but for all the consumer­ controlled viewing that followed it — from the DVD to Facebook to Netflix.

Long ago and far away, during the late 1970s, the hot new technology was something called the Betamax, a gizmo from Sony that enabled you to record your favorite TV show on a clunky cassette tape and then play it back at your convenience — or sell it.

Sensing, correctly, a threat to their absolute monopoly on copyrighted material, but unable to go after every homeowner in America, Hollywood took aim at Sony, suing in federal court to make the Japanese company either stop selling Betamaxes in the United States or pay handsomely for the right to do so.

“The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone,” Motion Picture Association of America lobbyist Jack Valenti warned Congress in 1982.

Long story short, one appeals court in New York sided with Sony and one appeals court in California sided with the key

plaintiff, Universal City Studios.

Therefore, the Supreme Court had to settle the issue.

The court itself was bitterly divided and, according to subsequent historical accounts, there was a good deal of backstage wrangling.

Stevens fervently believed that Sony was in the right, but his opinion started out as a dissent. Eventually, however, he assembled a narrow five-vote majority for his view that the maker of a device, like the Betamax, that has legitimate purposes that don’t infringe on copyright — such as copying a TV show to watch it later yourself — cannot be held liable for the illegitimate uses to which consumers might put it.

To rule otherwise, he reasoned, would essentially hold creators of new technology hostage to incumbent owners of intellectual property, thus stunting innovation and economic growth.

“If liability for contributory infringement were imposed on the manufacturer or seller of

BOB DAUGHERTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Justice John Paul Stevens, shown in 1976, fervently supported Sony’s DVR and assembled a 5-vote majority in favor of it in court.

every product used to infringe — a typewriter, a camera, a photocopying machine — the ‘wheels of commerce’ would be blocked,” Stevens wrote.

In hindsight, it’s hard to see how Sony could have lost: One of the company’s expert witnesses in the lower court was the benign Fred Rogers, creator and host of PBS’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” This paragon of friendliness testified that “he had absolutely no objection to home taping for noncommercial use, and expressed the opinion that it is a real service to families to be able to record children’s programs and to show them at appropriate times,” Stevens’s opinion noted.

How myopic, by contrast, seemed dissenting Justice Harry Blackmun’s concern about “eroding the very basis of copyright law, by depriving authors of control over their works and consequently of their incentive to create.”

In any case, Hollywood adapted its business models and

Stevens’s opinion created lasting legal protections for both makers and users of home recording technology. Without those protections, intellectual property law expert Robert S. Schwartz wrote in 2014: “We could not today buy most consumer digital products or log on to most online services that search for, store, and respond to copyrighted information. All online services, as well as digital devices like DVRs, smartphones, and tablets, must routinely store and display copyrighted information and programming based on consumer searches and requests. Most do not or cannot require advance permission. The Internet itself would have remained a closed circuit primarily for government, educational, and industrial use.”

So next time you reach for the remote and begin surfing through the comedies on Hulu, take a moment to thank the man who made it all possible: Justice John Paul Stevens. n

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OPINIONS

BY DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

‘Breaking up’ big tech won’t work FIONA SCOTT MORTON is a professor of economics at the Yale University School of Management and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

There has been a lot of talk all year about restraining big tech — but very little action. That seemed to change a few days ago when the Federal Trade Commission slapped Facebook with a $5 billion fine. And there are promises of more to come, if not from the FTC, then perhaps from some other part of the federal government. Overseas, the specter of other action, from other capitals, also looms.

In this anti-big tech moment, the slogan “break them up” is simple, catchy and has been adopted by some politicians and other observers to capture the emotion of the era.

Unfortunately, “breaking up” large tech platforms is often not a good solution to the economic harms created by large firms in this sector.

The break-them-up sloganeering fails to recognize that “big” is not, under the law, an antitrust violation. New products can achieve huge market share because consumers love them: consider Rollerblade’s dominance in the inline-skating market in the late 1980s, AOL’s high share of Internet access in the 1990s or how Apple owned the tablet market in 2011. If a product gets a big share because it is good and popular — but its maker has not behaved anticompetitively toward its rivals —

it has not violated our antitrust laws. Without new laws giving the government the power to take a different approach, Washington cannot just break up big tech, or any company, solely because it is large or has a high m An agency should analyze each platform individually and determine whether it acted in a way that was anticompetitive.

Public information already sheds light on some possibilities for such an antitrust case. Perhaps an independent Instagram would have become a serious competitor to Facebook. The Clayton Act permits the FTC to bring a case against Facebook after the fact for anticompetitive acquisitions that lessened competition.

That bring us to the second question: Will a breakup prompt a remedy that will increase competition? In the old days of the Standard Oil monopoly, enforcers often broke up large

BY SHENEMAN

entities by geography. But there is no sense in which it’s useful to a have a search engine or social network for a small section of the country. Rather, an agency must think carefully about the source of each platform’s market power and figure out what remedy would create competition in that market. If used indiscriminately, a breakup can actually harm consumers and workers and reduce innovation.

Simply divesting Instagram from Facebook is unlikely to work. For one thing, everyone wants to be on the same site as their friends, so a divested division with no links to Facebook would likely lose its customers quickly — back to Facebook.

Secondly, Facebook began integrating the backends of Instagram and WhatsApp in January 2019. By the time any antitrust verdict is rendered, there will be one coherent Facebook and no divisions to divest. However, competition could be restored by requiring that Facebook enable open interconnection between itself and any new market entrant. As a result of the interconnection, a consumer could switch to a new social media platform based on a better user experience or privacy, without sacrificing the

connection to other Facebook and Instagram friends.

Third, and more generally, the government can go beyond antitrust and increase competition by establishing a more muscular regulator to level the playing field between incumbents and entrants.

Regulations that lower entry barriers will help reduce the entrenched market power of dominant platforms. Today it is very difficult for a consumer to switch platform providers because her data are not under her control. Data portability could allow new competitors to attract customers more easily.

Finally, a regulator could establish open standards for micro-payments from digital businesses to consumers.

Platforms would then have to compete not just on quality but also on price — by paying consumers to use their search engines or social media sites.

Regulations such as these and others could erode barriers to entry and give more opportunities for competition to manifest itself to the benefit of consumers.

Just “break them up” is an oversimplified sound bite, not a real policy that would restore competition in digital markets and benefit consumers. n

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