The Washington Post National Weekly - February 24, 2019

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2019

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THE FIX THE FIX

4 big4Mueller big Mueller report report questions questions 3. Does it come with 3. Does any big it come with any big indictments — possibly indictments for Jerome — possibly for Jerome Corsi or even Donald Corsi Trump or even Jr.?Donald Trump Jr.? he long-awaited conclusion he long-awaited of special conclusion of special One of the frustratingOne things of the about frustrating the sub- things about the subcounsel Robert S. Mueller counsel III’sRobert RussiaS. Mueller III’s Russia mission of the Muellermission report isofthat, the Mueller whatever report is that, whatever investigation appearsinvestigation nigh, as The appears nigh, as The we learn, it may not come we learn, right away. it mayAssuming not come right away. Assuming Washington Post’s Devlin Washington Barrett, Josh Post’s Devlin Barrett, Josh we learn that it has we been learn submitted that it to hasthe been submitted to the Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky Dawseyreported and Matt this Zapotosky past reported this past Justice Department, itJustice will then Department, take some time it will then take some time week: week: for Barr et. al. to writefor their Barr own et. summary al. to write(or their own summary (or “Mueller could deliver“Mueller his reportcould to Attorney deliver his report to Attorney summaries) for Congress summaries) and the public. for Congress and the public.

General William P. Barr General next week, William according P. Barr next week, according In the meantime, though, In the it meantime, seems possible though, it seems possible to a person familiar with to a the person matter familiar who, with like the matter who, like Mueller could offer more Mueller indictments, could offer andmore we indictments, and we others, spoke on the condition others, spoke of anonymity on the condition to of anonymity to could learn plenty through could them. learn plenty Roger Stone through them. Roger Stone discuss sensitive deliberations.” discuss sensitive deliberations.” associate Jerome Corsi associate has seemed Jeromea Corsi likely has seemed a likely Here are a few big questions Here areto a few which bigwe questions to which we candidate for an indictment candidate for months for an indictment now — for months now — could soon learn the answers. could soon learn the answers. he even predicted he would he even be predicted indicted. Donald he would be indicted. Donald 1. Will we ever see1.the Will “report” we ever —see or the “report” — or Trump Jr. has also reportedly Trump Jr. told hasfriends also reportedly that told friends that anything close to it? anything close to it?

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— or even that — we will. undoubtedly support).undoubtedly support).

BY

A ARON B LAKE

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BY

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CONTENTS

This publication was prepared This publication by editorswas at The prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing Washington and distribution Post for printing by our and distribution by our partner publications across partner thepublications country. All articles across the andcountry. All articles and columns have previously columns appeared have in previously The Post orappeared on in The Post or on POLITICS washingtonpost.com andwashingtonpost.com have been edited to and fit this have been edited THE to fitNATION this format. For questions orformat. comments For questions regardingorcontent, comments regarding THEcontent, WORLD please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. please e-mail weekly@washpost.com.

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WEEKLYWEEKLY

CONTENTS 4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ONtoTHE COVER The race to claim ON THE COVER The claim POLITICS 4 race moon’s moon’s resources heating upresources is heating up THEthe NATION 8 isthe internationally.

Photo by NASA Photo NASA THEinternationally.

WORLD 10 by COVER STORY 12 LIFESTYLES 16 BOOKS 18 OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

Amazon’s mugging in N.Y. is a warning to businesses STEVEN PEARLSTEIN is a business and economics columnist who writes about local, national and international topics.

Amazon’s decision to abandon plans for a headquarters complex in New York reveals much about what has gone wrong with American capitalism and democracy. ¶ The most obvious, of course, is the cynicism and lack of trust that people have in government officials. Only days before the Amazon deal was announced last fall, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio coasted to reelection. Both are smart, seasoned and expertly advised politicians who have a proven track record of helping the poor and working class. Yet many of the elected and self­ appointed champions of those constituents refused to trust their leaders to negotiate a favorable final deal on behalf of them and their city.

There is little doubt that poor and working-class New Yorkers would have benefited from Amazon’s presence. Although very few would have gained jobs directly, the arrival of more than 25,000 highly paid executives and tech workers would have indirectly created thousands of additional service jobs, put upward pressure on wages and generated more than $1 billion in additional tax revenue each year.

That money would have allowed New York to quickly recoup the $3 billion in tax breaks it gave to Amazon, with plenty left over to expand infrastructure, help the needy or build more affordable housing.

But today’s polarized politics do not tolerate trade-offs or compromise. When no deal is always better than an imperfect one, democracy becomes dysfunctional.

Democracy also becomes dysfunctional when symbols are allowed to become more important than substance. Just think about recent weeks, in which the big news items were the fight over funding a border wall that is likely to have little

impact on illegal immigration or on the budget, and what a governor most Americans don’t care about may or may not have put in his school yearbook page 30 years ago.

Because of its size and visibility and antipathy toward unions, Amazon (and its helipad) became the perfect symbolic target for anti-capitalist activism.

Driving it from New York, however, will not do much to mitigate the effects of gentrification, raise wages or improve working conditions.

Big losers in all this were union leaders, who figured they could use their leverage to force Amazon not to oppose campaigns to organize workers at their distribution plants in New York and everywhere else. In the end, all they accomplished was ensuring that there will be no new workers to organize, at Amazon or any other companies that might have considered expanding in New York.

Amazon’s New York critics were always quick to point out that the world’s most valuable company did not need or deserve tax subsidies to build a new

BEBETO MATTHEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer and Amazon protesters gather after the company canceled plans to build a campus there.

headquarters. But in an environment where cities and states compete to throw money at companies, it is naive to expect any company to turn them down.

The way to end this unproductive arms race is not to vilify Amazon for acting in its rational self-interest. It is to pressure the National Governors Association and National League of Cities to agree to collectively disarm and stop offering these subsidies — or, at minimum, limit them to providing job training and infrastructure investments that benefit everyone.

Business leaders are already pointing to Amazon’s retreat from New York as a warning about the economic harm that will befall the rest of the country if the Democratic Party continues its leftward drift and gains control of Congress and the White House. But they have only themselves to blame. The antipathy and distrust people have for business is the direct result of three decades of winnertake-all capitalism in which the benefits of economic growth were captured by those at the top and too many people were left behind.

Now the business community is discovering that what goes around comes around — that the anger, distrust and resentment that it has spawned does not distinguish between good

companies and bad, between productive self-interest and greed, between good deals and bad ones.

While Amazon reflects many of the best attributes of American capitalism — its efficiency, its creativity, its risk-taking, the choice and value it offers consumers, and the wealth it creates for shareholders — it also exhibits some of its worst traits.

(The Washington Post is owned

by Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon founder and chief executive.) The ruthlessness. The instinct to dismiss critics and criticism. The arrogance and insularity of top executives. The fixation on secrecy and control. The disdain for government and the disregard for the public interest.

The too-easy acceptance of extreme inequality. Many of these traits were on display in the HQ2 process.

The political mugging that Amazon received in New York is a preview of what is in store for American business if it fails to repair the social contract and replenish the social capital it has depleted. The choice for the business community is either to embrace rules and practices that strike a better balance between shareholders, workers, customers and the public, or have rules and practices much less to its liking imposed by an angry and sometimes irrational public. n

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OPINIONS

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Betsy DeVos’s double standard DAVID COLE AND LOUISE MELLING Cole is national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Melling is deputy legal director of the ACLU.

In her proposed rules governing the treatment of sexual harassment and assault claims on college campuses and K-12 schools, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has managed to achieve exactly what the law she is enforcing prohibits: discrimination on the basis of sex.

The Education Department is charged with enforcing Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bans sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funding, but DeVos’s proposed rules would create a systemic double standard: They treat claims of discrimination based on sex fundamentally differently from claims of discrimination based on race — also forbidden under federal law. The Education Department offers no justification whatsoever for the disparities, and while women are, of course, accustomed to such differential treatment, that’s exactly what Title IX was designed to eliminate.

What are these double standards? Let us count the ways.

First, under the proposed rules for sexual harassment, schools must investigate only if the harassment is so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it effectively “denies” a student equal access to education. Racial harassment, by contrast, need not meet the “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” standard and must be responded to if it merely “limits” access to education. Racial harassment need only be “sufficiently serious to deny or limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education programs

and activities” to trigger the obligation to respond.

Second, DeVos’s proposed rules would affirmatively forbid schools even from investigating complaints of sexual harassment unless they immediately met the “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” threshold. If they don’t, the schools would have to dismiss the complaint without investigating — even though investigation would often be necessary to assess whether harassment was “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.” No such bar on investigating complaints of racial harassment exists. Schools are free to investigate as they wish.

BY SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNE

Third, while schools are required to investigate all claims of racial harassment of which they know or reasonably should have known, under DeVos’s proposed rules, universities need only respond to sexual harassment if a student files a formal complaint with a handful of specified school officials. If the student tells another faculty member of sexual harassment, or if the university learns of it through another student, it need not respond.

Fourth, while the Education Department requires schools to take “prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end” racial harassment, it would hold schools responsible for failing to respond adequately to sexual harassment only if they are “deliberately indifferent,” a standard the department has never applied to racial harassment.

And fifth, the DeVos rules would impose a strict set of procedural obligations on school disciplinary hearings addressing sexual harassment claims, including a requirement for live hearings, cross-examination and access to all evidence collected by investigators. These are important procedural safeguards, and we support them. But why are they important only for sexual

harassment complaints and not racial harassment complaints, where no such requirements exist?

There is no justification for these disparities. There may be more sexual harassment complaints than racial harassment complaints on college campuses, but that hardly justifies making sexual harassment complaints more difficult to pursue.

Title IX was patterned on Title VI, which bars race discrimination in entities receiving federal funds and which the Education Department also enforces. In prohibiting sex discrimination, Title IX’s drafters used the same language as Title VI, simply substituting “sex” for “race.” The Supreme Court has held that Congress “explicitly assumed that [Title IX] would be interpreted and applied as Title VI had been.” Under DeVos’s rules, that would no longer be the case.

It’s not uncommon for President Trump’s appointees to use their agencies to undermine their very purpose. DeVos is no different: Introducing a double standard in the act of enforcing a law that was expressly designed to end double standards is nothing short of sex discrimination itself. n

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TOM TOLES

The deadly history of measles PAUL DUPREX is a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

This report was originally published on theconversation.com.

On the darkest day of 2018, the winter solstice, we at the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh tweeted, with despair, a report in the Guardian that measles cases in Europe reached the highest number in 20 years.

Why was this a cause for concern? Europe is far away from the United States, and, as some people apparently believe, measles is a benign, childhood disease that causes a bit of a rash, a dribbling nose and a few spots, right? What was all the fuss about?

Collective amnesia about the virulence of this disease has driven us to forget that the measles virus has killed tens of millions of infants throughout history. Now, with several ongoing outbreaks across our own country, this unnecessary threat is back.

Measles is a highly contagious and sometimes deadly disease that spreads like wildfire in naive populations. The virus played its part in decimating Native American populations during the age of discovery.

In the 1960s, measles infected about 3 million to 4 million people in the United States each year. More than 48,000 people were hospitalized, and about 4,000 developed acute encephalitis, a life-threatening condition in which brain tissues become inflamed. Up to 500

people died, mainly from complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis. This was why vaccine pioneers John Enders and Thomas Peebles were motivated to isolate, weaken and develop a vaccine against measles that is truly transformative for human health. Parents who knew the reality of the disease were quick to vaccinate their children.

Uptake skyrocketed and the number of cases, and associated deaths, plummeted in the developed world.

By 1985, when Enders died, over 1 million of the world’s children were still dying because of this infection. However, now measles was a disease preventable by vaccine, and there was a huge impetus to address that tragedy by the World Health Organization.

When I started working on the

virus in 1996, there were still over 500,000 children dying of measles each year worldwide.

Thanks to vaccination, however, between 2000 and 2016 there was an 84 percent decrease in measles mortality, and over 20 millions deaths were prevented due to vaccination. What an achievement.

Near universal adoption of the vaccine in the developing world meant that measles infections and concomitant deaths became rare. By 2000, this led to measles being eliminated from the United States. The last person to die of the infection here was in 2015.

These successes don’t mean measles is gone or that the virus has become weak. Far from it.

What’s important to realize is those millions of children who died of measles each year in the ’90s, for the most part, were not living in the developed world. In those days here in the United States and in Europe, there was a widespread appreciation that #vaccineswork, meaning that the vast majority of people received the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and were well and truly protected.

What one of the most infectious pathogens on the planet can do to an unvaccinated person in 2019 is biologically incredible. Yes, that’s right, an

unvaccinated human. But why would anyone decide not to get vaccinated or refrain from protecting their children?

That’s because forgetting the past has precipitated selective amnesia in our post-measles psyche. Unsubstantiated claims that vaccines like MMR were associated with autism, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, etc., and ill-informed celebrities have wreaked havoc with vaccination programs. Genuine, caring parents unaware of the realities of diseases they had never seen decided that since the viruses were gone from this part of the world, shots were unnecessary.

This has created the perfect storm. Since the measles virus is so infectious and Europe, Africa, South America, and South East Asia are not really that far away by jumbo jet, a case somewhere in the world can lead to an infection anywhere in the world.

Failure to vaccinate large groups of people is helping measles come back. From California to New York from Washington state to Minnesota and Georgia, measles is back with a vengeance. Now we can only live in hope that the last death from this deadly disease in the United States remains from 2015.

Unfortunately, that is not a given. n

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POLITICS

Trump’s lasting appeals court legacy BY

A NN E . M ARIMOW

P

resident Trump has installed a historic number of federal appeals court judges for this point of a presidency, with 30 confirmed by the Senate after two years of his term.

His picks for the nation’s 13 circuit courts, one step below the Supreme Court, predominantly are male and less diverse than those tapped by his recent predecessors.

They also include younger nominees, which means Trump’s conservative imprint on the federal judiciary through sheer longevity will endure through cases involving state gun regulations, the environment, immigration and abortion.

The immediate effect on the composition of the courts is modest — and the rapid pace of change is unlikely to continue given a limited number of remaining open seats.

Trump’s nominees mostly add to conservative majorities on courts already dominated by judges picked by Republicans or narrow the margin on moreliberal-leaning courts such as the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, according to an analysis by judicial expert Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution.

A full flip would occur only at the appeals court in Philadelphia, if the president’s current nominees all are confirmed.

Newly confirmed judges to the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit make that court evenly divided by judges nominated by Republicans and Democrats.

But while the shift in the balance nationally “is not as impressive as one might think,” Wheeler said, the long reach of Trump’s choices will be.

His nominees include a 36-year-old former clerk to Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

“When Trump replaces a 72-year-old slightly right-ofcenter judge with a 45-year-old

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

He’s had a record number of confirmations — many of them younger conservative firebrand, it’s not really apples for apples,” Wheeler said.

Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, drew widespread attention for solidifying a more conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.

But while the justices resolved 69 cases in the term that ended in June, the 13 circuit courts handle tens of thousands of cases each year. That makes the appeals courts the last word in most matters affecting residents of the states they cover.

The regional circuits take appeals from the lower federal courts, and the appeals bench often is a steppingstone for the candidates presidents consider for the Supreme Court. All but one of the current justices, Elena Kagan, served on a circuit court.

The Senate Judiciary Commit-

tee’s new chairman, Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), has moved quickly, holding votes earlier this month to confirm a half-dozen appeals court nominees.

“I’m going to make sure that we can appoint as many well-qualified conservatives on Trump’s watch as possible,” Graham said in a Feb. 6 speech to the Federalist Society. “When it comes to judges, younger is better than older.

When it comes to judges, well qualified is better than not well qualified.”

But it isn’t clear how many more vacancies Trump will get a chance to fill, because openings turn on judges retiring, resigning or otherwise leaving.

Judges nominated by Democratic presidents may be less inclined to step down if it means giving Trump an opportunity to name their successors.

“Especially given the intensity

In two years, the Senate has confirmed 30 of President Trump’s nominees for federal appeals court judges. They have been predominantly male and white.

of opposition in many quarters to President Trump, it’s even less likely than usual that you would expect voluntary retirements from Democratic appointees,” said conservative legal commentator Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Remaking the appeals courts is a long game.

“It takes more than two years of strong appointments to begin to transform the courts,” Whelan said.

There is no shortage of jurists who could leave or create an opening by shifting to a lighter workload known as “senior status.” At least 60 of the 167 circuit judges are eligible because of a combination of their age — at least 65 — and years of service on the bench, according to Wheeler’s analysis of Federal Judicial Center data.

But the decision to step down is

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POLITICS highly personal and hard to predict. The party of the president in power may be one among many considerations.

“That might be one factor, but it is not the controlling factor,” said J. Harvie Wilkinson III, 74, and the longest-serving judge on the Richmond-based appeals court, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan.

At the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, where Wilkinson sits, Trump added two judges who are already hearing cases. Jay Richardson is a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution of Dylann Roof, convicted in 2016 of killing nine black parishioners in a Charleston church.

A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. practiced law in South Carolina before Trump initially picked him to serve on the District Court in August 2017. The president elevated Quattlebaum to the 4th Circuit less than a year later.

Richardson and Quattlebaum received bipartisan backing in the Senate and well-qualified ratings from the American Bar Association.

A third nominee, Allison Rushing, has proved more controversial, with the committee voting along party lines Feb. 7 to confirm her nomination. The former clerk to Thomas and Gorsuch, during Gorsuch’s tenure on the Colorado-based 10th Circuit, would be the youngest appeals court judge, at age 36, if confirmed. The nomination of Rushing, a partner at Williams & Connolly, is opposed by civil rights groups concerned about her work as a legal intern for the Christian conservative legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom.

The organization recently represented the Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because of his religious beliefs and brought a case that allowed corporations to opt out of covering contraceptives through their employee health plans based on religious objections.

In response to written questions from senators, Rushing said that as a judge she would “faithfully follow” Supreme Court precedent. As to her relative youth, Rushing cited her “extensive” relevant experience as a clerk and attorney in private practice for the past eight years.

If Rushing goes to the 4th

The Senate has quickly confirmed a record number of appeals court judges nominated by President Trump, with one circuit court set to flip Trump’s nominees mostly add to the conservative majorities of judges picked by other Republican presidents or narrow the margin on more liberal leaning courts.

9th Circuit

2nd

8th

3rd

7th

10th

6th 5th

9th

1st

4th

11th

JUDGES BY PARTY OF APPOINTING PRESIDENT At beginning of Trump’s term DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

If Trump fills current vacancies CIRCUIT

1st

MAJORITY

50% Beginning of term If vacancies filled

2nd Would flip

3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th

Split

D.C. Federal

Source: Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution

Circuit, the makeup of the court that hears appeals from Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas will remain steady, with judges appointed by Democrats still outnumbering those appointed by Republicans. There are unlikely to be additional openings soon, said Wilkinson, who described the bench as “fair-

KEVIN SCHAUL/THE WASHINGTON POST

ly stable.”

When Trump took office in January 2017, he inherited a large number of court openings, including 17 on the federal appeals bench. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), during the last two years of the Obama administration, had slow walked nominations. Most notably, the

Senate refused to hold a hearing for Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, chief judge of the D.C. Circuit in Washington, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

McConnell and the White House Counsel’s Office, led until recently by Donald McGahn, made the confirmation of conservative judges a top priority.

The path from nomination to confirmation has been quick.

Trump’s circuit court picks were confirmed after a median 146 days, compared with 229 for Obama’s nominees, even though Trump’s picks had to overcome more negative votes, Wheeler’s analysis shows.

With Senate Republicans gaining seats after the November election, it should be even easier to confirm Trump’s picks.

Once current vacancies are filled, Republican nominees will account for 54 percent of all circuit judges, compared with 44 percent when Trump took office, Wheeler’s data shows.

That increases the likelihood that appeals cases will wind up before a more conservative threejudge panel. But the losing side still could ask for a second look by a full complement of a circuit court’s judges sitting en banc.

Many of the president’s circuit nominees have impressive credentials, including Supreme Court clerkships, degrees from prestigious law schools and portfolios of legal scholarship. Most are members of the Federalist Society, the conservative and libertarian organization whose president, Leonard Leo, helped shape Trump’s list of high-court nominees.

The president’s early picks — Amul Thapar, Joan Larsen and Amy Coney Barrett — are on his shortlist for the Supreme Court should there be a third opening, according to the White House.

But some nominees haven’t had a smooth path and faced questions about their qualifications, affiliations and temperament.

The president’s pick to replace Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit, Neomi Rao, faced tough questions this month about her work to roll back regulations as the Trump administration’s regulatory czar and for provocative columns she wrote as a college student. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

JABIN BOTSFORD/ THE WASHINGTON POST

The confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice opened a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

Neomi Rao, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has been nominated to fill the D.C. Circuit seat.

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

For Sanders, new challenges in 2020 D AN B ALZ in Manchester, N.H. BY

W

hen Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, it took little time for him to turn the competition into a two-person race with Hillary Clinton. As he joins the field for 2020, the path ahead will be more complicated and the environment potentially less forgiving.

The assets that Sanders brings to a second campaign for the presidency are obvious. He has the experience of 2016 upon which to draw. He has some supporters who are as loyal to him as President Trump’s backers are to the president. He has the capacity to again raise substantial amounts of grass-roots money. Given all that, he enters as a top-tier candidate.

But so much has changed.

Sanders faces a political dynamic dramatically different from that of 2016, both in terms of the national mood and inside the Democratic Party that he seeks to lead. Had he been in New Hampshire over the Presidents’ Day weekend and seen the energy and the crowds who turned out to see some of his rivals, he would have recognized how much things have changed.

Sanders can claim credit for moving the Democratic Party to the left. Many of the items on his 2016 agenda appear to have become articles of faith to many Democratic voters and some of the other candidates seeking the nomination.

That presents two issues for Sanders this time around. First, he will not have the issue agenda he pushed the last time as his own for the 2020 campaign. Other candidates will have pieces of that message, in some cases large pieces. At the same time, there is a brewing debate among the Democratic candidates about the wisdom of taking an agenda that includes pledges of Medicare-forall and the most aggressive version of a Green New Deal into a

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

He has many assets from his earlier campaign, but the environment and his rivals have changed general election, just to name two issues.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) made clear her opposition to that agenda in a CNN town hall Monday night here in Manchester, preferring more incremental steps on health care and, while a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, calls it aspirational and questions some of the specifics. Some of the prospective candidates who could enter the race in the coming weeks — among them former vice president Joe Biden — will probably join Klobuchar on the center-left, resisting the agenda of democratic socialism.

Even active candidates who fall into the progressive category are avoiding the label of Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whose attacks on big corporations and drug companies echo those of Sanders, has proclaimed herself a capitalist.

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), speaking with reporters Monday

in Concord, N.H., said, “I am not a democratic socialist.”

Four years ago, Sanders benefited from what became a binary choice in the Democratic competition — a choice that for many voters was as much “Clinton or Not Clinton” as “Clinton or Sanders.” Right now, there isn’t anything close to a binary choice for Democrats. It is a big and robust field, as shapeless as any Democratic contest in years, and soon to get even bigger.

Judging from events in New Hampshire the past few days — and those in Iowa and South Carolina and elsewhere this year — Democratic voters are eager to see and hear all the candidates.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) drew nearly 250 people to a house party Monday morning in Nashua. Harris was greeted with an overflow crowd in Portsmouth.

Warren had long lines in California.

Raymond Buckley, the Democratic Party chairman in New Hampshire, said Tuesday morn-

In his second attempt to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.) faces a robust field of competitors, some of whom could steal his thunder.

ing that the enthusiasm he has seen and the size of the crowds showing up to hear the candidates these past few days made it seem as if the primary was only days away, rather than almost a year away. It has been that way from the start.

On Wednesday, Sanders said he raised $6 million from 225,000 contributors since he announced, citing these figures as evidence of the enthusiasm for his candidacy. There will be no official record of early campaign donations for several weeks, but Sanders’ reported figure got the attention of other candidates.

In an interview with John Dickerson of CBS News that aired Tuesday, Sanders acknowledged that the expanded field will make for a different kind of competition this time and will potentially make things harder. But he also said things could be easier this time — in a crowded field, he could succeed with a smaller percentage of the vote in primaries than he needed against Clinton.

Sanders loyalists still harbor grudges against the Democratic National Committee, believing that the DNC tilted the scales against him and in favor of Clinton. At the same time, however, the Vermont senator faced very little pushback from Clinton or the Republicans.

This time, the other candidates will treat Sanders as what he is — a serious contender for the nomination and someone whose ideas, record and background should be scrubbed and vetted and challenged.

As well as he did in 2016 — and he outperformed all the expectations that existed when he entered that race — his first campaign was ultimately incomplete.

In 2020, he will have to show that he can withstand attacks from his rivals, more scrutiny generally, and that, in the end, he offers Democrats the best opportunity to end Trump’s presidency after one term. That makes this campaign a truer test for Sanders and more revealing of the state of the Democratic Party. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Federal workers BY

W ALTER M . S HAUB J R.

Thanks to an acrimonious budget battle in Washington, the federal government endured the longest shutdown in its history last month — and then spent half of February teetering on the brink of yet another closure. But what does the American public know about the people who carry out the day­to­day functions of their government? A number of myths persist about the federal workforce. Here are a few.

MYTH NO. 1 Federal employees earn more than private-sector workers.

Last year, a group called American Transparency sought to shock observers with its finding that “there is a new ‘minimum wage’ for federal bureaucrats — at 78 departments and independent agencies, the average employee made $100,000 or more.”

But these are misleading figures, and the groups that purvey them often overlook some important facts: Salary comparisons aren’t useful because “federal workers tend to be older, more educated, and more concentrated in professional occupations than private-sector workers,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. There are also comparatively few part-time workers in the government.

Some federal employees make more, and some make less, than private-sector workers, but when comparing apples to apples, only federal employees with just a high school diploma make more than their private-sector counterparts, while professionals with advanced degrees usually make less, according to the CBO. MYTH NO. 2 The federal workforce is mostly located in D.C. In reality, the vast majority of federal workers are based outside the D.C. area. In a piece surveying major hubs for this workforce, The Washington Post explained that “only about 1 in 6 of the 1.87 million civilian full-

time federal employees live in the Washington, D.C. metro area.” Federal News Network recently highlighted Texas as home to a large federal worker population, adding that “more federal employees work in California, for example, than the District of Columbia, Virginia or Maryland.”

MYTH NO. 3 The government is shrinking.

President Trump kicked off his administration with a hiring freeze. He said he did not want to fill a number of vacant positions and insisted, “You don’t need all of those people.” His initial efforts prompted headlines like this one in the Daily Wire: “Donald Trump Is Shrinking The Government. Everything Else Is Noise.”

But there’s scant evidence to support these assertions.

According to Paul Light, an expert on the federal workforce, the number of federal jobs has remained relatively constant over the past several decades.

Reported changes during the Trump administration don’t appear to reverse this trend significantly, with a minor reduction of fewer than 16,000 civilian positions (out of nearly 2.1 million) in 2017 and a minor increase of 10,000 uniformed personnel (out of 1.3 million) in 2018.

MYTH NO. 4 The private sector delivers more value for the money.

Some say privatizing

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

A worker arrives at the Department of Interior on Jan. 28 in D.C. More federal workers are located in California than the D.C. metro area.

government yields better value for our tax dollars.

Not so fast. In April 2017, the Defense Department advised Congress that its study of the issue revealed “no . . . evidence to suggest that DoD civilians predominantly have higher or lower fully burdened costs to the government than contractors do.” And profits are factored into the cost of contractor services: Defense contractor General Dynamics paid its CEO $21.2 million in 2017 — over 100 times more than Uncle Sam paid former defense secretary Jim Mattis. The Project on Government Oversight says that “the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services.”

MYTH NO. 5 It’s impossible to fire a federal worker.

There’s no disputing that it’s harder to fire federal workers than those in the private sector,

but that’s because private-sector workers have few rights. Most federal employees can file appeals if they are fired. This due-process protection guards against a return to the spoils system that let political patrons dole out jobs at the expense of government integrity. Removing that protection might deter whistleblowers from exposing government corruption and waste.

Still, statistics show that management usually wins on appeal. In 2016, the board that hears most of these cases upheld more than 80 percent of the disciplinary actions it adjudicated — which doesn’t even include feds who resigned or either dropped or settled their cases. The reality is that federal employees are fired all the time. n Shaub is a former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and special adviser to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

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NATION

Amid political heat, doing their duty P AUL S ONNE in Yuma, Arizona BY

S

taff Sgt. Chris Cazares is panting to catch his breath after slicing down a salt cedar on the banks of the Colorado River with one of those orange-handled saws commonly used in school shop class.

A supervisor at a nursing home, the longtime soldier in the Army National Guard was previously deployed twice to Iraq, where he specialized in neutralizing chemical attacks. Now he is deployed to his hometown on Arizona’s border with Mexico.

Here, he is neutralizing trees.

Cazares is one of roughly 600 guardsmen serving on the border in Arizona since President Trump dispatched the National Guard last April in support of Customs and Border Protection. Numbering about 2,200 as of early this month, the guardsmen Trump supplied from across the nation answer to the governor of the state in which they are deployed. The active-duty troops the president sent to the border last fall now number about 4,350; they report to U.S. Northern Command.

Whether Cazares and his fellow guardsmen are needed here on the border has become the subject of a renewed debate that has cleaved along party lines. It has again put the U.S. border with Mexico at the center of national political rancor that is poised to escalate after Trump declared a national emergency Friday, bucking Congress to secure more funding for a wall.

This month, the newly inaugurated governors of California and New Mexico, both Democrats, ordered the withdrawal of most guardsmen from the border in their states, suggesting that Trump had deployed the Guard not because CBP is facing a crisis but rather because the president wants to sow fear and appear tough on illegal immigration by showing off uniformed officers in the field.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the deployment a “theater

PHOTOS BY CAITLIN O’HARA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Critics decry Guard deployment to border as theater, but agents welcome help with tasks of the absurd” upon withdrawing the bulk of the forces from the border in his state and redeploying them to fight fires and target drugs. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who retained a handful of guardsmen on the border, said her state would no longer abide “the president’s charade of border fearmongering by misusing our diligent National Guard troops.”

The Republican governors of Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, have kept the full National Guard border deployments in their states. Supporters of the deployment say the back-end assistance from the Guard frees up Border Patrol agents to deal with threats from drug smugglers and human traffickers. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they point out, both deployed the National Guard to the border during their presidencies.

The American military cannot conduct domestic law enforcement activities, owing to an 1878 federal law called the Posse Comi-

tatus Act. As a result, the uniformed personnel are helping in the background rather than dealing directly with migrants crossing the border.

In Yuma, about 100 guardsmen are performing ancillary tasks for CBP — clearing brush, fixing machinery, stocking foodstuffs and monitoring surveillance cameras at the sector headquarters. The idea is to free up border agents previously assigned to those duties so that they can instead apprehend and process migrants.

“It’s kind of a godsend,” said Vincent J. Dulesky, special operations supervisor for public affairs at the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector. “As we were getting strained out, you have the National Guard.”

The 126 mile stretch of Arizona and California border that comprises the Yuma sector is a mélange of worlds — tribal areas, military installations, government parks, majestic sand dunes and vast stretches of agricultural

National Guardsmen clear brush near the Colorado River outside Yuma, Ariz.

land, much of it harvested by Mexican seasonal laborers who traverse the border with work permits. Sometimes described as the sunniest place in the United States, Yuma grows much of America’s lettuce. In a local souvenir shop, one Yuma T-shirt reads: “If you’ve had a salad in the winter, you’re welcome.”

Overall, the number of people apprehended for crossing the border illegally has decreased dramatically from a multi-decade high nearly two decades ago. In the Yuma sector there were 26,244 apprehensions of migrants crossing illegally in the 2018 fiscal year, down from 108,747 in 2000. Across the entire border with Mexico, apprehensions decreased to 396,579 from 1.6 million over the same time period.

Although the number of apprehensions in Yuma are down from 20 years ago, they have more than quadrupled since 2014 amid an influx of families and children, primarily from Honduras and Guatemala, fleeing poverty and violence. The number of border agents assigned to the sector, meanwhile, is roughly the same now as it was in 2014.

More than three-quarters of the people apprehended in Yuma last year crossed as unaccompanied minors or members of families including children. They tend to surrender to Border Patrol immediately after crossing into U.S. territory in what the agents call “give ups” — and many file asylum claims. Border Patrol is supposed to hold them for a maximum of 72 hours. After that, Immigration and Customs Enforcement can keep minors in immigration detention for no longer than 20 days. If a family hasn’t received a hearing by then, authorities must transfer the children to a licensed child-care facility or release them with a parent, who often receives a tracking bracelet and a court date.

The Trump administration says these standards create a loophole that is incentivizing migrants to cross the border with

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SUNDAY, February, 24, 2019

COVER STORY

global space race heats up

BY CHRISTIAN DAVENPORT

D

uring the height of the Space Age, the United States and the Soviet Union bushwhacked a frantic path to the lunar surface, landing nearly 20 spacecraft softly on the moon between 1966 and 1976, including the six carrying NASA’s Apollo astronauts.

But after the last of these missions, a robotic Soviet probe that brought back six ounces of lunar soil, Earth’s closest neighbor was virtually abandoned. The public and politicians lost interest.

While the occasional orbiter has launched to survey the moon since then, in more than 42 years only one spacecraft touched down softly on the lunar surface: China’s Chang’e 3 in 2013.

The Chang’e-3 rocket, carrying the Jade Rabbit rover, blasts off in China’s southwest Sichuan province in December 2013.

The Chang’e-3 rocket, carrying the Jade Rabbit rover, blasts off in China’s southwest Sichuan province in December 2013.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

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COVER STORY

However, the moon, often referred to as the eighth continent, is again the center of a reinvigorated space race that, like any good Hollywood reboot, features a new cast of characters and novel story lines.

There is the rise of China, which on Jan. 3 landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first. On Thursday, an Israeli spacecraft destined for the moon launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If successful, it would make Israel the fourth country, after the United States, Russia and China, to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Later this year — the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing — two more moon missions are planned, one by India and another by China. On Feb. 14, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the space agency intends to partner with the private sector to land an American spacecraft on the moon as early as this year.

“It’s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,” he told reporters. “We’re going to take shots on goal.”

If those landings are successful, it would set a record: the most soft lunar landings in a single year, surpassing 1966 and 1972, which each saw three vehicles touch down.

(At the beginning of the Space Age, many spacecraft ended up crashing into the moon.)

The Trump administration has said a return to the moon is a top priority. And NASA this month announced a plan to develop spacecraft capable of bringing humans to the lunar surface by 2028. That’s a key step, NASA says, in building a permanent presence on and near the moon.

“This time, when we go to the moon, we’re actually going to stay,” Bridenstine said.

“We’re not going to leave flags and footprints, and then come home, to not go back for another 50 years.”

Like the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the new lunar activity is fueled by national pride and a quest for scientific discovery in a high-stakes contest among countries, especially with China.

Yet, unlike the Apollo era, this Space Age is being driven by a third factor: greed. A growing number of corporations are benefiting from new technologies and wealthy backers chasing an unproven dream that a lucrative business can be built on the moon and deep space by extracting the metals and resources on the surface of the moon.

Though the prospect of a self-sustaining lunar-mining economy may be little more than a chimera, the moon is drawing investors and explorers the way the promise of the American West once did. As a result, several lunar-prospecting companies have emerged with plans to fly spacecraft to the moon in the coming years.

They are attracted by “the gleam of the gold prospector going out to San Francisco

PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

years? Is it in 50 years?”

Like the West once was, space is distant and dangerous. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich proposed setting up a moon base and was ridiculed. Even the most optimistic predict many businesses will fail — several already have — mistaking the seductive lure of opportunity as little more than a siren’s song.

Space, especially deep space, is still very much the province of governments, not corporations. If the fear of being surpassed by other nations and the quest for knowledge are what have driven space exploration, it is still not clear that greed alone can sustain a commercial venture.

But that’s not stopping the more adventurous from trying.

TIM ISBELL/THE (BILOXI) SUN HERALD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

in [1849],” said Ellen Stofan, the director of the National Air and Space Museum. “Is there an actual economic motive for going, which has brought in a new wave of companies? There’s all this talk of a new space economy.”

Still, she is skeptical it is happening any time soon. “Is there a profit motive yet?”

Stofan said. “I would argue there’s probably not one. But I would argue that there is going to be someday. But is that someday in 20

TOP: NASA and the Pentagon have invested billions into companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX. ABOVE: People watch the Saturn V rocket arrive at the Infinity Science Center in Pearlington, Miss., in 2016.

Gas station in the sky There is gold on the moon and nearby asteroids. And silver, titanium and an isotope known as Helium-3 that could be used in nuclear fusion. A trove of vast riches on a dead, gray landscape that Buzz Aldrin once described as “magnificent desolation.”

According to Congress, they are there for the taking. In 2015, it passed the Space Act, which, among other things, allows U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space.

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COVER STORY Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who has been working to reduce regulations on the space industry, is one of the chief proponents of the theory that space, and in particular the moon, could be an economic engine, fueled by mining and other activities.

“Space is already a $340 billion business.

We think it will be into the trillions within not a huge number of years,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post last year.

“Space is the next truly huge frontier and a huge, huge opportunity for the United States.”

The resources on the moon are at or near the surface, scientists believe. The problem is an economic one. It is extremely expensive to get to the moon, and not easy to break free from Earth’s gravity.

To do that, rockets need an enormous amount of propellant. The Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon was a towering behemoth. At 363 feet, it was taller than the Statue of Liberty. But mostly, it was propellant. As it stood, fully fueled, on the launchpad, 85 percent of its mass was propellant. Same with the space shuttle. In fact, most rockets are shells to hold the fuel needed to generate the enormous energy to get to orbit. By contrast, only about 4 percent of a car’s mass is fuel.

To get to the moon and back, the Saturn V needed not just enough fuel to get to the moon, but also enough to get home.

Going to space is sort of like taking a trip across the country but without gas stations.

You have to take all your fuel with you.

As it turns out, there is fuel on the moon in the form of water. Its elements, hydrogen and oxygen, can be used as rocket propellant, which is why many refer to water as “the oil of the solar system.” Water is a valuable resource that makes the moon “a gas station in the sky” and that “completely changes the economics” of accessing resources on the moon, said Robert D. Richards, the co-founder and CEO of Moon Express, which is developing lunar landers.

Whoever lays claim to the water at the poles of the moon could have an important advantage. That’s one of the reasons Bridenstine said NASA was moving with a sense of urgency.

“We have seen the immense amount of international interest in specific parts because it could be advantageous from a geostrategic perspective,” he said. “It’s in our interest to make sure that we’re represented there as well and as soon as possible.”

It’s not the first time corporations have gone starry eyed over the prospects of mining celestial bodies in space. Goldman Sachs wrote in a 2017 note for investors that “space mining could be more realistic than perceived” and that the use of water as fuel could be a “game changer.”

The U.S. company Planetary Resources promised it would be “the leading provider of

Russia

U.S.

1960

Missions to the moon

1970

Israel’s first lunar mission is scheduled to launch this month from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If successful, it would make Israel the fourth country, after Russia, the United States and China, to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.

1980

Apollo 11 First manned landing on the moon in July 1969

1990

2000

Lunar landing

2020

European Space Agency

Chang'e 4 First landing on the far side of the moon in December 2018

India

Israel

Note: Chart includes three missions that India, Israel and China will send to the moon later this year Source: NASA

YOUJIN SHIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

JACK GUEZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Israeli scientists make final preparations to launch the country’s first spacecraft to the moon.

WEEKLY

was sold, ending a trajectory many viewed as a cautionary tale.

Then there was the Google Lunar X Prize. To help jump-start a commercial lunar industry, and free it from government, the contest offered a $20 million award to the team that could first land a spacecraft on the moon, travel up to 1,640 feet on the lunar surface and beam back live video.

Last year, the deadline for the contest came and went. Not one team made it to the moon.

And Google pulled the prize money.

Japan

China 2010

KLMNO

resources for people and products in space through its goal of identifying, extracting and refining resources from near-Earth asteroids.”

For years, the leading contender to achieve that was Planetary Resources, backed by founder Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and James Cameron, the filmmaker. Then the funding dried up. The company started selling off all sorts of equipment, from 3-D printers to folding chairs. Late last year, the company

‘Tipping point’ reached NASA, however, is getting in on the moon rush and putting even more money on the table.

The first act of the reconstituted National Space Council led by Vice President Pence was to declare a return to the moon in partnership with the private sector.

NASA recently took a first step announcing nine companies that had been chosen to compete to fly science experiments to the lunar surface, with the goal of landing as soon as this year. At stake in what’s known as the Commercial Lunar Payloads program is $2.6 billion over 10 years.

In addition to those small landers, the space agency is looking for spacecraft capable of taking people to the surface as part of its plan to build what it calls the Gateway, a spaceship that would stay in orbit around the moon. In an announcement earlier in February, it called on space companies to build landers capable of flying astronauts to the surface by 2028.

It is the latest example of NASA helping to boost the private sector. Over the years, NASA and the Pentagon have invested billions of dollars into companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, helping them develop rockets to launch satellites and supplies to what’s known as low Earth orbit.

It is looking for public-private partnerships that will help it get to the moon. And with the NASA-funded moon programs, the private sector finally sees a revenue source that will help it close a business case.

Smaller companies that were competing in the Lunar X Prize are expected to bid. So are the bigger companies, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and SpaceX. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, has also pitched its lunar lander design to NASA. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“It’s like trying to roll a big boulder up a hill, and I think we’re reaching that tipping point where it starts rolling downhill,” said John Thornton, the CEO of Astrobotic, a space-robotics firm based in Pittsburgh that was one of the X Prize contenders. “And the biggest signal of that is NASA getting involved.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A Facebook evangelist’s about-face N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

E VGENY M OROZOV

I ZUCKED Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

By Roger McNamee Penguin Press.

335 pp. $28

n March 2011, Roger McNamee, a 50-ish psychedelic rocker with a quirky side career in private equity, gave a TED Talk in the hippie enclave of Santa Cruz, Calif. McNamee, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and an investor in Facebook, argued that the next 15 years would be all about boosting “engagement.”

Eight years later, it seems McNamee has had a spiritual awakening. In those earlier days, had he been badly “zucked”? It’s plausible, judging by his book, “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.” These days McNamee proffers markedly different advice. Engagement, it turns out, is just one of Facebook’s bland euphemisms for getting users addicted to its services; its sinister aim is to produce “behavior modification that makes advertising more valuable.” While Twitter and Google also get a beating, McNamee mostly directs his rage at Facebook, the company he knows best, charging it with amplifiying tribalism, allowing “bad actors” to “harm democracy” and even “shirking civic responsibility.”

Anyone looking for a systematic treatment of Silicon Valley’s political and economic power will probably be disappointed.

“Zucked” does dabble in the recent history of Silicon Valley and the country to explain how both have turned libertarian, substituting civic engagement at the heart of a vibrant democracy with user engagement at the heart of Facebook’s outsize balance sheet.

Such analytical efforts, however, mostly stay on the surface. McNamee is much more convincing on the inner workings of Silicon Valley, pointing, for example, to the disproportionate role of the “PayPal Mafia” — including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and many others — in shaping the culture of start-ups that, like Facebook, blossomed in the 2000s.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears for a hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building in April 2018.

McNamee played a minor role in Facebook’s early years; in addition to occasionally mentoring Zuckerberg, he helped hire the social network’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg. McNamee has spent the past three years ringing alarms on the company. “Zucked” is a culmination of these efforts. His advocacy has involved not only a stream of op-eds, essays and frequent media appearances, but also coaching Congress on grilling secretive tech executives about the data skeletons in their server closets.

“Zucked” is part memoir, part Facebook-bashing, part detailed, hour-by-hour account of congressional testimony — not your usual thriller material (“Early in the third hour, Zuck caught a lucky break . . .”). Not all of these parts are equally enjoyable. McNamee’s penchant for sharing the life stories of his latest associates and his constant name-dropping often get in the way. The book’s acknowledgements section, stretching over seven pages and featuring Bono, Bill Gates, George Soros

and Tim Cook, reads like the guest list of an exclusive party in Davos.

McNamee offers a convincing portrait of Facebook’s disturbing organizational culture, revealing how the company keeps ignoring its critics even where a minor concession would settle the matter for good. “Zucked” explains such obstinacy by a combination of cultural and economic factors.

On the one hand, Facebook’s youthful and supercilious executives are convinced that the barbarian world outside Menlo Park is ripe for their civilizing mission.

On the other hand, the company’s advertising-based business model not only prods users to behave in metric-friendly ways, it also handily packages them as highly personalized audiences for its clients — including governments and their operatives — to appeal to and influence. The faster and more efficiently such packaging occurs, the more profitable Facebook’s operation. Growth, thus, triumphs over everything.

Reading “Zucked,” it’s hard to decide what is more worrisome:

the fact that Facebook, with its clever but ruthless tactics of initially handing its advertising customers free promotional tools, only to withdraw and charge for them later, resembles a drug syndicate; or that big-name investors like McNamee can profess so much naivete — and for so long — about their proteges.

That the McNamee of 2011 — a private-equity guy with a Dartmouth MBA, not just your average aging hippie — didn’t know that engagement meant getting users addicted seems implausible. His anti-Facebook coalition did incorporate concerns about the effects of social media on public health, but the true sources of his recent anxiety seem to lie elsewhere. One gets the feeling that, had Donald Trump’s election not put Facebook’s operations under closer scrutiny, McNamee would now be prepping for another TED Talk, perhaps, on “engagement 2.0.” n Morozov is the author of “To Save Everything, Click Here.”

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

K-beauty targets new clientele: Kids B Y M IN J OO K IM AND S IMON D ENYER

in Seoul

L

ast year in kindergarten, Yang Hye-ji developed her morning routine. Uniform? Check. Homework?

Check.

Makeup? Definitely.

“Makeup makes me look pretty,” the 7-year-old said on her second visit to the ShuShu & Sassy beauty spa in Seoul.

She was wrapped in a childsize pink robe and wearing a bunny hairband. Her face was gently touched up with a puff. Her lips got a swipe of pink gloss.

South Korea’s cosmetics industry, known as K-beauty, has become an Asian powerhouse and global phenomenon for its rigorous step-by-step regimens.

But exacting beauty norms also put enormous pressure on South Korean women, making the country one of the world’s centers for plastic surgery. And increasingly, the beauty industry is looking at younger and younger customers.

That is stirring concerns that touch on many core social debates in South Korea: how much a society should value appearance, whether messages about beauty crowd out other aspirations for young girls, and whether it’s right to add even more pressure to an already stresspacked childhood of long school hours and make-or-break exams.

“The shiny cartoon heroines young girls admire are fully made up from head to toe,” said YoonKim Ji-yeong, a professor at the Institute of Body and Culture at Seoul’s Konkuk University. “As they put on the makeup and put on the dress to imitate the characters, girls internalize that a woman’s success is closely associated with beauty.”

Advertisers are not subtle.

“I watch my mom and I follow her. I am growing up today,” a billboard advertisement selling makeup kits for 6-year-olds proclaims, with a photo of a young girl in a school uniform applying lipstick.

A YouTube video of a 7-year-old

JEAN CHUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Some wonder how young is too young for South Korea’s thriving cosmetics and skin-care industry putting on lipstick, titled “I want to wear makeup like mom,” has attracted 4.3 million views, while similar videos show young girls sharing their “elementary school makeup routine” and “unboxing my Hello Kitty makeup kit.”

ShuShu Cosmetics is a pioneer in K-beauty’s outreach to children. Started in 2013, it operates 19 boutiques across South Korea, offering “healthier” cosmetics for kids, such as water-soluble nail polish and nontoxic lip crayons in a range of “edible” colors.

There are sticker earrings and tattoos, “sun-whipping” cream cleanser, “fancy girl” soap and goat-milk shampoo carrying the slogan: “I’m not a baby.”

In the spa and beauty parlor, girls ages 4 to 10 can enjoy a spa experience for $25 to $35, featuring a foot bath, a foot and calf massage, a face mask and makeup, and a manicure and pedicure.

“The motto of our beauty spas is that children can connect with

their moms while playing with them,” said Grace Kim, a manager at ShuShu Cosmetics. “Our products are safe for pregnant women as well.”

This is hardly a trend exclusive to South Korea. Kylie Jenner has built a cosmetics empire worth an estimated $900 million largely targeting teenage girls, while child beauty vloggers are popular in the United States and elsewhere.

For decades, academics of all stripes have studied the impact of pressure on teenagers and young women in the West to conform with unreasonable standards for appearance and body type.

But such concerns in South Korea also now include girls so young they can barely read the packaging on the beauty products aimed at them.

South Korea is home to one of the world’s top 10 beauty industries, worth in excess of $10 billion, according to market re-

A young girl applies makeup made for children at PriPara Kids Cafe in Yongin, South Korea.

search firm Mintel.

It has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world, with 1 in 3 women ages 19 to 29 saying they have undergone procedures, especially on their eyelids, according to a Gallup survey. It also has the world’s highest number of plastic surgeons per capita, according to a 2017 study by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

ShuShu is selling its kids’ cosmetics in Singapore and Thailand, and it plans to expand to the United States and elsewhere.

The kids’ beauty market is expanding as makeup is promoted as a “new play culture” for children, said Lee Hwa-jun, an expert on South Korea’s beauty industry at Mintel. “Cosmetic companies in South Korea are increasingly interested in children as potential new consumers.”

Relatively small start-up companies are leading the way, Lee says. “Cosmetic giants also show interest in expanding their customer base to younger women, but they are carefully weighing the pros and cons, as targeting children could stir a backlash.”

Some women are fighting back.

Freelance makeup artist Seo Ga-ram declared that she would refuse clients’ requests to apply cosmetics to child models.

“I found it absolutely bizarre that actual makeup kits have come in place of toys that children play with,” she wrote in a Facebook post in May. “Please stop consuming images of children posing with heavily colored cheeks, red lips and curled hair,” she wrote.

Nevertheless, the trend appears impossible to stop, said Kim Ju-duck, a professor of beauty studies at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul, with the media increasingly showing images of young girls wearing makeup, and with cosmetics accessible to preteens and younger children.

He surveyed 288 girls in elementary school in 2016 and found that 42 percent wore makeup. He said the proportion has risen since then. n

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