The Washington Post National Weekly - April 3, 2016

Politics Sanders’s showdown in N.Y. 4

World They face death for a cause 10

Recreation 12-year-old readies for Everest 17

5 Myths About Cuba 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

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Oil firms borrowed billions.

Now they’re getting burned.

Banks face wave of defaults from companies that opted to ‘drill, drill, drill,’ betting that prices would stay high. PAGE 12

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Trump just had a terrible week BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

D

onald Trump’s timing in the 2016 presidential campaign has been impeccable. He got into the race just as dissatisfaction with the crop of candidates was rising. He began peaking as fall turned to winter, right in time for a series of critical votes nationwide. He has been in the right place at the right time almost every time.

Until this past week. After taking the previous week off the campaign trail — totally unheard of for a candidate in the midst of a contested primary fight — Trump needed this past week to be a momentum-builder before Tuesday's winner-take-most Wisconsin primary. It has been the exact opposite.

The week began with the news that Corey LewanLewandowski dowski, Trump’s highprofile and controversial campaign manager, had been charged with battery for grabbing Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields after a Trump event last month. Not only did Trump refuse to fire Lewandowski, Fields who had previously insisted that he had never touched Fields, but the Republican front-runner also mounted an aggressive attack against the reporter — insisting that she had changed her story, exaggerated badly and actually — wait for it — been a threat to him.

So, that was bad. But it would get much worse.

Trump’s fumbling answers on abortion during a town hall event with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Wednesday led to a series of

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clarifications and revisions of what, exactly, his position is on the issue. Trump initially suggested that if abortion were made illegal, there would need to be punishment for women who had abortions. Then, in a statement, he said that the issue is best left to the states.

Then, in a follow-up to the first statement, Trump said he thinks that women should not be punished for seeking an abortion but that the blame should rest with the health-care provider who performed the procedure. Got all that?

Republican polling in Wisconsin Marquette Law School polling in 2016

The story of what Trump said about abortion (and what he meant to say) dominated the coverage for at least the next 24 hours.

That brought us to Friday in a week in which not one second of the coverage was positive for Trump — and all of it was the result of selfinflicted wounds.

Having such a bad week matters more now than ever because Wisconsin’s primary is just days off. Wisconsin is one of a handful of

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 25

states left on the calendar where Trump could take the lion’s share of delegates if he wins statewide. And to get to the 1,237 delegates he needs to formally clinch the party’s nomination before the national convention in July, he needs strong showings in states such as Wisconsin.

The problem is that even before this disastrous week, polling in the state suggested that Trump wasn’t going to get the win he wanted/ needed. A poll by Marquette Law School in Milwaukee released Wednesday showed GOP rival Ted Cruz running first, with 40 percent.

Trump took 30 percent, while John Kasich was at 21 percent. The poll also found that 70 percent of Wisconsin voters have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.

If Trump loses statewide in Wisconsin on Tuesday, he might still be able to claim some delegates from the state, because the winner in each of the eight congressional districts will win three delegates. The problem for Trump is that Wisconsin was a state in which, as recently as a month ago, it looked as though he might be able to take all 42 delegates for himself.

Losing Wisconsin wouldn’t zero out Trump’s chances of getting to 1,237. But it makes the odds far longer than if he were to win convincingly. To put it simply: Losing Wisconsin would erase any margin of error for Trump in the states still waiting to vote.

Of course, up has been down and right left for Trump this entire campaign. He has committed seemingly campaign-ending gaffes more times than I can count only to watch his poll numbers increase in their wake. It’s possible then that this is yet another one of those moments — and that he will soar to victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

But I doubt it. This past week looks and feels like a gigantic momentum-killer for Trump at a time when he can least afford it. n

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

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ON THE COVER Oil prices are down and drillers have scaled back, but the Valero Three Rivers refinery still converts the oil that is being pumped in that area of Texas.

Photograph by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON, The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

Sanders prepares for his toughest test

MARK KAUZLARICH/REUTERS

All-out effort to stun Clinton in New York could derail her plans to build party unity BY

P HILIP R UCKER

I

n a mathematical squeeze to make up ground in the Democratic presidential race, Bernie Sanders is preparing to ratchet up his attacks on Hillary Clinton ahead of a New York showdown this month that could establish how easily the party can pull itself back together for the general election.

The Empire State’s April 19 primary looms as potentially determinative: A win by Clinton, who is favored, would further narrow Sanders’s path, while a loss in the state she represented as a senator would embarrass her and hand

Sanders a rationale to continue campaigning until the final votes are cast in June.

Clinton had enjoyed a lead of roughly 300 in pledged delegates, but Sanders narrowed the gap March 26 with victories in all three Western caucuses. In one of the most successful days of his campaign, the senator from Vermont easily won in Alaska, Washington state and Hawaii. Heading into Tuesday’s Wisconsin primaries, Clinton has 1,243 pledged delegates and Sanders has 979.

To capitalize on his fresh momentum, Sanders plans an aggressive push in New York, modeled after his come-from-behind victory

last month in Michigan. He intends to barnstorm the state as if he were running for governor. His advisers, spoiling for a brawl, have commissioned polls to show which contrasts with Clinton — from Wall Street to fracking — could do the most damage to her at home.

“We’ll be the underdog, but being the underdog in New York is not the worst situation in politics,” said Tad Devine, the chief strategist for Sanders. “We’re going to make a real run for it.”

The intensified and scrappy approach by Sanders comes as Clinton is eager to pivot to the general election. Clinton keenly understands the imperative to unite

Bernie Sanders, flanked by Secret Service agents, speaks at a campaign rally in Milwaukee last week. Wisconsin’s primary is Tuesday.

Democrats for the fall campaign and, thinking that the nomination is nearly locked up, wants to spend the spring building bridges to the Sanders wing.

A potentially ugly primary in New York threatens to derail those efforts. Clinton’s advisers are all but urging Sanders to lay off his attacks.

“We’re going to run to win delegates and run to win the primary,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in an interview Friday. “We intend to win this thing with a majority of pledged delegates. Senator Sanders is going to have to make up his mind about what he wants to do and what kind

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

5

POLITICS of campaign he wants to run.”

Podesta noted that Sanders took a more negative turn in the Midwestern states that voted on March 15 — Illinois, Ohio and Missouri — and lost all three. “It didn’t work,” he said.

Clinton, her aides and her allies in recent weeks have avoided sharply attacking Sanders, wary of saying or doing anything that would make it more difficult to engineer an eventual coming together.

In particular, the Clinton forces have been careful not to be seen as pushing Sanders to quit the race.

A group of pro-Clinton senators recently considered writing an open letter to Sanders saying the time had come for him to end his campaign. But when two Clinton allies, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.), caught wind of the idea, they persuaded their colleagues to nix it, according to two people familiar with the letter.

Assuming that Clinton stays on course to secure the nomination, her team sees wooing the Sanders coalition as a pressing mission, especially young people and independents, to ensure that they don’t sit out the November election altogether. Key would be whether and how soon Clinton wins Sanders’s endorsement — and how enthusiastic he is in giving it. Clinton’s vocal support for then-Sen. Barack Obama following their divisive 2008 primary helped unite Democrats.

Two popular Democrats currently on the sidelines — President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) — could help bring the two sides together. David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, pointed to a third unifying figure: Donald Trump. He noted that Warren recently fired off a flurry of tweets attacking Trump, which he read as an important signal.

“She was sending a message to Democrats that there are bigger things at stake here,” Axelrod said, adding: “There probably is going to be a very vivid choice in the general election and one that very much unifies Democrats.”

With that in mind, the Clinton team has been trying to foster trust with the Sanders base. Long lines at Arizona polling places on March 22 led Sanders supporters to speculate that the Clinton campaign was in cahoots with the Democratic National Committee

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Clinton, her aides and her allies in recent weeks have avoided sharply attacking Sanders. in creating obstacles for voters.

Rather than responding with indignation, Clinton’s campaign counsel, Marc Elias, wrote a post on Reddit — in an online public square for Sanders fans — sharing in their outrage and explaining that the lines were the result of Republican-led voter restrictions in Maricopa County.

“What happened in Arizona is bad for BOTH Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton, and supporters of both campaigns should come together to make sure this is addressed before November,” Elias wrote. “By the way, if you’re wondering, Secretary Clinton’s got a plan to address this, but I’m really not here to plug my boss!”

Clinton supporter Jay Jacobs likened the courtship of Sanders backers to making Thanksgiving dinner. “You can’t cook a turkey too fast by turning up the heat,” he said. “You’ve got to cook it at the right temperature for the right amount of time, and it’ll come out fine — but you’ve got to do a lot of basting along the way.”

Sanders, meanwhile, is hoping for another win in Wisconsin this coming Tuesday. Sanders won two

of Wisconsin’s neighboring states — Michigan to the east and Minnesota to the west — and the state’s overwhelmingly white electorate and the progressive, reformist roots of Democrats there should give him an advantage.

“If we’re going to have a serious shot at the nomination, we’re going to have to defeat her in Wisconsin,” Devine said.

Sanders then hopes to slingshot into New York, which will award a whopping 247 delegates — second only to California.

In New York, a diverse and pulsating center of Democratic power which has not hosted a truly competitive presidential primary since the 1980s, Democrats are buzzing with anticipation over the showdown.

“Everybody thinks it’ll be big,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a New Yorkbased strategist and former Clinton adviser. “If the turnout by African Americans is large, Secretary Clinton will win well. If the turnout is not large, she will not win. Is the opportunity with her? Yes. But this is a test. . . . If it’s tight, it means the left is still aggravated against her.”

Hillary Clinton speaks to voters at a rally last week in Green Bay, Wis. The campaigns will soon pivot to New York ahead of the April 19 primary there.

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The Clinton team is readying for a competitive race and is not taking New York for granted.

“If [Sanders] sneaks up on her, then shame on the Clinton campaign,” Axelrod said. “The city is a bastion of progressivism, and there should be pockets of Sanders supporters. . . . But I have to believe that the relationships she’s forged there in the last 15 years mean something.”

Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn and plans to highlight his “New York values,” Devine said, and the campaign’s ads would have “a good feel for the state.”

Sanders also is likely to go after Clinton over her ties to Wall Street, an issue he has raised for several months now.

Sanders wants to ban fracking, the practice of pumping water containing chemicals deep underground at high pressures to release oil and natural gas. Clinton, who has ties to the fossil-fuel industry, says she does not support fracking where it is causing environmental damage — or in states like New York, where it is banned — though she has stopped short of opposing the practice outright.

The New York primary, by definition, should draw considerable media attention, but Sanders wants to raise the stakes even higher. His campaign is lobbying the DNC to organize a debate in New York. The Clinton campaign has objected to having a debate in the state, according to Devine.

Fallon declined to comment on debate negotiations.

For now, at least, Clinton’s backers are confident that any damage caused by Sanders will not be lasting. “I think this primary is going to make our Democratic nominee even stronger heading into the general election, and I believe Democrats will come together in November,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) said in an email.

Asked about bridge building, Devine suggested that such outreach was a ways off.

“I’m not great at reading the tea leaves,” he said. But he added, “I know Podesta has my number, because he’s called it before — and it wasn’t to build bridges, in case you’re wondering.”

Podesta would not characterize his recent conversation with Devine.

“We’re in a contest,” the Clinton chairman said. “We both understand it.”n

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POLITICS

YouTube flexes its election power Google’s video behemoth offers campaign breadth that few networks can match

BY

D REW H ARWELL

I

n the years since Sarah Palin’s sound bites and the “Obama girl” cemented 2008 as America’s first “YouTube election,” the world’s most popular video site has proven even more spellbinding — and powerful — than political campaigns ever imagined.

In January, a political ad — actually, three — ranked among YouTube’s 10 most-watched ads for the first time in history, delivering millions more views to campaigns than to the best commercials corporate America had to offer.

And in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the streaming giant’s open pool of reserved ad time did something it had never done: It sold out, a sign that candidates yearned so deeply to reach voters’ cellphones that they wanted to snatch up every YouTube second money could buy.

Google’s video giant has become not just the Web’s biggest petri dish for the funny, weird and astronomically popular. With its 1 billion viewers and cultural omnipresence, it now also offers campaigns a breadth no hometown TV network can match.

“Anybody at this point who doesn’t get it’s a part of everyday life . . . is myopic at best and malpracticed at worst,” said Chris Wilson, founder of WPA Opinion Research and the director of research and analytics for the campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), whose border-jumping “Invasion” ad ranked among January’s most watched.

YouTube and digital advertising have played key roles in past campaigns, Wilson said, but “this is the first cycle where if you’re not doing it, you’re going to lose.”

Republican front-runner Donald Trump has been the most digitally prolific, with more YouTube views and videos about his campaign than all other candidates, data provided by Google show. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Cruz follow, in that order, closely resembling

YOUTUBE

Donald Trump hangs out with a bald eagle. The candidate’s presidential announcement garnered 1.8 million YouTube views.

YOUTUBE

A campaign spot set to Simon and Garfunkel’s iconic “America” features Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont touring the heartland.

the real-life race.

But YouTube’s digital populism — hundreds of millions of hours are watched every day — ensures that no campaign is ever in complete control. Trump’s presidential announcement garnered 1.8 million YouTube views — impressive, but fewer than videos in which he is thwapped by a bald eagle, exalted by young “Freedom Girls” and ridiculed for 18 minutes of “idiotic moments.”

Even as Facebook and other competitors have vied for video content, YouTube’s audience remains widespread: More 18-to49-year-olds watch its videos on their phones than tune into any cable network in America, Nielsen data show.

But YouTube is far from a young person’s playground: Google says its surveys have

found that more than half of baby boomers and seniors are watching online videos, too. When the site recently unveiled a program offering advertisers first grabs at premium ad time, the first to sign up was AARP, the powerful seniors’ advocacy group long known for political-ad blitzes on TV. In an encouraging sign for campaign ad makers — and a reflection of how bizarre or amusing this race has become — many viewers are seeking out the same political ads they only previously endured during commercial breaks. Since April, Google data show, Americans have watched 12,500 years’ worth (110 million hours) of YouTube videos about the 2016 issues and candidates.

For this year’s presidential race, data from market researcher Borrell Associates show, campaigns

will spend nearly $300 million on online ads — more than they will spend on newspaper and radio ads, combined.

Though broadcast TV remains king, gobbling up $2 billion of ad budgets, campaigns are increasingly turning to YouTube for its finer precision in targeting voters and its potentially viral popularity. Old-fashioned commercials are pricey, time-limited and impossible to pass on, while YouTube lets campaigns experiment with a wider range of lengths, costs and talking points.

The record-setting YouTube ads from January are vastly different in target and tone. Cruz’s satirical ad depicted lawyers and bankers crossing the Rio Grande in suits and heels; another, from an anti-Donald Trump super PAC, replayed past interviews during which the conservative firebrand praised Clinton and contradicted his current ideals.

But the most popular, with nearly 3 million views that month, featured no mudslinging and came from the Sanders campaign: a tear-jerking spot set to Simon and Garfunkel, in which the candidate tours the American heartland. “Well I’ve hit replay about 10 times now,” a YouTube commenter wrote. “Anyone else?”

YouTube’s greatest power may be in reaching voters who least expect it.

Kevin Lepore, a 28-year-old analyst living outside Chicago, was scrolling through his phone one morning on the train ride to work when he stopped abruptly on Sanders’s “America” ad and, surprising himself, started tearing up.

A scant TV watcher, Lepore had seen few traditional campaign ads. But upon watching it, he decided to share the video on Facebook with his mother-in-law in Iowa, telling her to “please consider” Sanders. More than a hundred people liked his comment, with one stranger writing, “come on Bonita!! We need you!!”

“In the old days,” Lepore said, “you’d have only seen it from, you know, 6 to 9 p.m., whenever you’re watching TV. Now, it’s everywhere.” n

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POLITICS BY

KLMNO WEEKLY

P AUL K ANE

I

t’s one of the most controversial things to say on Capitol Hill, sparking looks of shock and disbelief: The House majority is in play this fall.

For almost five years, ever since state legislatures and commissions finished drawing the new congressional districts for this decade, the Republican stranglehold on the House has been taken for granted because of the precise targeting that fortified GOP-held swing seats to seemingly withstand the toughest politicalclimate.EvenleadingDemocrats, just two months ago at their annual issues retreat in Baltimore, declinedtopredictanythingcloseto winning the 30 seats they need in November to reclaim the majority.

Then Republicans started voting in their presidential primary, with Donald Trump taking a commanding lead.

By the other week, as House Democrats showcased several dozen top recruits on Capitol Hill and at K Street fundraisers, the tone had finally begun to shift. Trump has become so unpopular among key constituencies, including the growing suburbs that are home to several dozen Republican members, that some independent analysts, political strategists and a few Democrats say that anything might be possible come Election Day. “People are now beginning to understand that things could set up — could set up — to give us a shot at the majority. They’re beginning to understand that’s a possibility, because of Mr. Trump. But in any event, they understand we’re going to gain seats,” said Rep. Denny Heck (D-Wash.), who is helping lead the recruiting effort.

That’safarcryfromguaranteeing victory, but it’s quite a pivot from a Democratic caucus that four months ago unveiled a data-heavy effortdubbed“TheMajorityProject” that appeared to focus on winning back the majority by 2020 or 2022.

Republicans reject any hint that their majority could implode in the House, where Democrats hold their smallest share of seats since 1948. They contend that, even if a massive anti-Trump wave fully builds, Democrats recognized it too late. Filing deadlines have already passed in almost 40 percent of House districts, leaving many potentially ripe seats without a strong Democratic challenger.

“They’re missing candidates in

Making rivals great again?

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

the seats they need to win. The math is not on their side. Time is not on their side,” Katie Martin, spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Tuesday.

Also, Republicans have reversed the financial edge the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee held over the NRCC two years ago, opening up a $2 million advantage last month. Both sides say the Republican network of outside super PACs will swamp the amount of cash that Democratic super PACs devote to House races.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the down-ballot effect of Trump or his leading rival for the nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.), will no longer just focus on the Senate, which has long been viewed as a toss-up for who controls the majority next year. But in the House, Democrats are “headed for significant double-digit gains” unless Trump can alter his image, according to Nathan L. Gonzales, editor of the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report, an independent political analyst.

Such a big loss would leave Republicans holding the slimmest House majority either party has held in more than a decade. That could further destabilize the control of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) over a chamber in which his conservative flank has recently rebelled against his agenda.

Of the six most recent national polls, Trump has trailed the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, by 10 percentage points or more in five of them.

Such a huge loss by the Republi-

can presidential nominee would pit two oft-voiced truisms against each other: that the House majority is securely in GOP hands because of the tilted redistricting process in 2011 and that the era of voters splitting presidential tickets is over.

In the past 40 years, there have been three landslide presidential contests. Ronald Reagan’s massive victories in 1980 and 1984, by 10 and 18 percentage points, respectively, helped Republicans win 34, and then 16, seats in the House. In 2008, President Obama’s victory by more than seven percentage points helped Democrats win 21 seats.

Even under the currently drawn House map, Obama’s small victory in 2012 boosted Democrats to an eight-seat gain.

Then, a historically low 10 percent of voters cast ballots for their member of Congress different from the party affiliation of their presidential candidate. If the decline of ticket splitting holds, a landslide loss by a party’s presidential nominee would mean a disaster in the House.

“Now that it’s extremely likely that the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, congressional Republicans are entering uncharted and potentially dangerous territory,” Dave Wasserman, an independent House expert, recently wrote for the Cook Political Report.

The views of Wasserman and Gonzales crystallize the debate over Republican vulnerability in the House. Their handicapping reports rate an almost identical amount of Republican districts as vulnerable, but Wasserman takes

Given the anti-Trump sentiment, optimistic Democrats see hope for taking back a majority in the House Donald Trump has become so unpopular among key constituencies that some analysts say it could hurt Republicans farther down the ticket on Election Day.

a macro-view of the national environment, especially in an era in which four of the last five elections have produced big swings of at least 13 House seats.

Gonzales digs into district-bydistrict matchups and sees too many missing parts for Democrats. “Potential Democratic candidates who think an anti-Trump wave is developing either missed their opportunity or likely need to make up their minds soon,” he wrote in his most recent report.

Heck, chief recruiter for the DCCC, acknowledged that there are not enough Democrats with political surfboards — yet — to try to ride Trump’s wave to victory.

“We’ve done very good, but not yet great. The process is still underway,” he said.

The focus is on districts with a highly educated populace, those in the suburbs and those with large numbers of Hispanic voters, or a combination of all three, because those are the voters most consistentlyoffendedbyTrump’smessage.

At least two Republican seats in Minnesota surrounding the Twin Cities are now a target. Rep. Scott Garrett, a staunch conservative from northern New Jersey, faces a fresh challenge from a former speechwriter to Bill Clinton for a seat held by Republicans since Reagan’s first landslide.

No one is guaranteeing a House takeover, but the Democrats finally have some optimism.

“There are going to be people that raise their right hand next January on our side of the aisle that nobody thought would be coming here,” Heck said. n

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NATION

Pay felons not to commit gun crimes?

A ARON C . D AVIS Richmond, Calif.

BY

T

he odds were good that Lonnie Holmes, 21, would be the next person to kill or be killed in this working-class suburb north of San Francisco.

Four of his cousins had died in shootings. He was a passenger in a car involved in a drive-by shooting, police said. And he was arrested for carrying a loaded gun.

But when Holmes was released from prison last year, officials in this city offered something unusual to try to keep him alive: money.

They began paying Holmes as much as $1,000 a month not to commit another gun crime.

Cities across the country are moving to copy Richmond’s controversial approach because early indications show it has helped reduce homicide rates.

But the program requires governments to reject some basic tenets of law enforcement even as it challenges notions of appropriate ways to spend tax dollars.

In Richmond, the city has hired ex-convicts to mentor dozens of its most violent offenders and allows them to take unconventional steps if it means preventing a homicide.

For example, the mentors have coaxed inebriated teenagers threatening violence into city cars, not for a ride to jail but home to sleep it off — sometimes with loaded firearms still in their waistbands. The mentors have funded trips to South Africa, London and Mexico City for rival gang members in the hope that shared experiences and time away from the city streets would ease tensions and forge new connections.

And when the elaborate efforts at engagement fail, the mentors still pay those who pledge to improve, even when, like Holmes, they are caught with a gun, or worse — suspected of murder.

The city-paid mentors operate at a distance from police. To maintain the trust of the young men they’re guiding, mentors do not inform police of what they know about crimes committed. At least

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Cities across the country are seeking ways to copy a California success twice, that may have allowed suspects in the program to evade responsibility for homicides.

And yet, interest in the program is surging among urban politicians.

Officials in Washington, D.C.; Miami; Toledo; Baltimore; and more than a dozen cities in between are studying how to replicate Richmond’s program.

Five years into Richmond’s multimillion-dollar experiment, 84 of 88 young men who have participated remain alive, and 4 in 5 have not been suspected of another gun crime or suffered a bullet wound, according to DeVone Boggan, founder of the Richmond effort.

City leaders credit the program with cutting Richmond’s homicide rate to less than half and

helping it shed its reputation as one of the nation’s deadliest cities.

Those results have won over a pair of Richmond police chiefs, a series of mayors and even a sometimes-skeptical City Council, which continues to fund it despite budget shortfalls.

“Richmond was bold enough to take an untested step and try this model of really direct and intense intervention,” Richmond Police Chief Allwyn Brown said. “And it’s dealing with the violence in the right way: teaching these kids basic life skills and how to not resort to a gun and operate in a civil society.”

R

ichmond’s decision to pay people to stay out of trouble began a decade ago during a

A 15-year-old boy was fatally shot in Richmond, Calif., on March 10. Despite that shooting, city leaders credit the anti-gun-crime program with cutting Richmond’s homicide rate to less than half.

period of despair.

In 2007, Richmond’s homicide tally had surged to 47, making it the country’s sixth-deadliest city per capita. In the 20 years prior to that, Richmond lost 740 people to gun violence, and more than 5,000 had been injured by a bullet.

Elected leaders of the heavily African American city of about 100,000 began treating homicides as a public health emergency.

Boggan, who had lost a brother in a shooting in Michigan, came up with the core of the program after reading about a paid business school fellowship. He wondered whether troubled young men couldn’t be approached the same way and be paid to improve their lives. But he had to raise the money

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

9

NATION because he couldn’t persuade officials to give tax dollars directly to violent firearms offenders.

He hired men who had served time across San Francisco Bay at California’s San Quentin State Prison, often for their own gun crimes on the streets of Richmond.

Boggan and his streetwise crew of ex-cons selected an initial group of 21 gang members and suspected criminals for the program. One night in 2010, he persuaded them to come to city hall, where he invited them to work with mentors and plan a future without guns. As they left, Boggan surprised each one with $1,000 — no strings attached.

“No cop had ever handed them money without asking for something in return,” Boggan said. “And it had the intended effect. It sent a shock wave through the community. People sat up and began watching.”

Boggan’s Operation Peacemaker Fellowship is working with its fourth class of recruits, and he no longer needs to wow participants with money upfront. Dozens of former fellows on the streets of Richmond — alive and not in jail — are his best advertisement, he said.

Those in the program begin by drafting a “life map” and setting goals — such as applying for a job, going back to school or communicating better with family. They meet with facilitators who, unbeknown to the young men, are psychologists or sociologists. Together, they talk through issues in what amounts to stealth therapy.

If they remain engaged for six months, meeting with mentors several times a week, they start to receive monthly payments between $1 and $1,000, depending on their level of participation. The maximum amount paid is $9,000 over the 18-month fellowship.

The program has handed out $70,000 a year, on average, since 2010, Boggan said.

Boggan believes that travel is another key to the program’s success. He sets aside $10,000 per fellow for trips that are often the first time participants have left the state or the country. But fellows must agree to partner with someone they have either tried to kill or who attempted to kill them.

“Wild, right?” Boggan says. “But they get out there and realize, ‘Hey, this cat’s just like me.’ ” Boggan’s measure of success: No fellows who have traveled together have been

KLMNO WEEKLY

keep robberies down,” he said.

N

In Richmond, Calif., Ligé McClanahan views the body of Xavier David McClanahan, her 14-year-old son, for a final time on March 11. The boy was shot at close range in February.

suspected in subsequent shootings against one another.

Boggan and his staff are used to questions — and criticism — about the money. How do they know it doesn’t go to drugs? Or bullets?

They maintain that the money is an indispensable tool, a way to keep kids engaged long enough to make a difference in their lives.

“This is controversial, I get it,” Boggan said. “But what’s really happening is that they are getting rewarded for doing really hard work, and it’s definite hard work when you talk about stopping picking up a gun to solve your problems.”

Sam Vaughn, a senior mentor, is more direct as he sits behind the wheel of a city-issued sedan on a recent morning, cruising a neighborhood looking for those who are in the program.

“We don’t know where it goes, and I’m not sure we always would want to know where it goes,” he said. Program managers, such as Vaughn, say they hope that the young men come to realize that the money is best spent on bills and making progress toward a safe, secure livelihood. He offers his own past as a cautionary tale: He beat a man into a vegetative state with the barrel of a gun and served 10 years in prison.

Vaughn turns a corner and stops at the sight of a black car parked in front of a row of vacant houses pockmarked by bullet holes.

Holmes rolls down his window upon seeing Vaughn. A cloud of marijuana smoke escapes into the

rainy morning.

So far, the attention — and money — seems to be working for Holmes. Although the $1,500 he has received since getting out of prison last fall has not led to a miraculous transformation, it enabled him to make a down payment on his black 2015 Nissan Versa — something meaningful for a young man who for many years was homeless.

He now spends hours each day in the car, driving around with friends, often smoking pot but not “hunting” — Vaughn’s term for seeking conflict with rivals.

Holmes is worried about how he’ll afford the $500 monthly car payments and insurance once the program ends. He has applied to get a job as an Uber driver.

Money from the program has helped Holmes stay straight.

“The money is a big part,” Holmes says. “I can’t count the number of times it has kept me from . . . doing what I’ve got to do.

It stopped me from going to hit that liquor [store] or this, you feel me, it’s a relief to not have to go do this and endanger my life for a little income, you feel me?”

Holmes hits up Vaughn for $5 for a quart of oil. Vaughn tries to use it as a teachable moment and reaches into his pocket. “You’ve got to protect your investment — you need an oil change,” Vaughn explains.

Holmes settles back in the car and picks up a new blunt passed from a buddy in the back seat. He paused before inhaling. “If they do this in D.C., definitely, I think it will

othing in the Richmond approach is black and white.

Mentors operate with the support of the city in an ethical gray zone, often trying to anticipate the next shooting before it happens and then using the levers of the stipend and relationships to defuse conflict before it turns violent.

Success one day can morph into a setback the next, and consequences can be fatal.

On a recent day, three of the program’s 20 fellows sat in jail, charged with violating parole restrictions after they gathered with suspected gang members. One of them also was carrying a gun when police descended on the hangout, which means he could face a long term if convicted.

There have been worse failures.

Four of the program’s fellows have died since 2010, including two who were killed by other fellows, said Boggan and Vaughn. The suspected killers have not been charged and remain in the program.

“We’ve still got to deal with that fellow,” Vaughn said. “Because who’s to keep him from killing another one . . . ?”

Although the program appears to largely be working for its small group of recruits, homicides citywide are rising again, raising questions about its wider impact across Richmond.

After reaching a record low 11 homicides in 2014, killings nearly doubled in Richmond last year and are on pace to match that again this year.

And Boggan, 49, and Vaughn, 39, say their fourth class of recruits, younger than the first three — are progressing surprisingly slowly, and the mentors acknowledge that they are having a harder time connecting with the class of “youngsters.”

Vaughn and other mentors gather each morning to scour fellows’ Facebook and Instagram accounts, noting emojis of guns and bullets and references to past killings for signs of brewing conflict.

But two killings in the past month — of a 14-year-old and 15year-old — have pierced the aura of success. For all the efforts by the mentors to identify the most likely to be caught in violence and bring them into the program, they weren’t aware of either of the victims. n

Sam Vaughn, top, oversees the outreach program of the Office of Neighborhood Safety. DeVone Boggan, above, is the founder of Operation Peacemaker Fellowship.

“No cop had ever handed them money without asking for something in return.”

DeVone Boggan, founder of Operation Peacemaker Fellowship

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WORLD

‘A lot of people wanted her dead’ BY

D ARRYL F EARS

L

ong before gunmen burst into Berta Cáceres Flores’s house in rural Honduras, Beverly Bell gave up any hope that her friend would live to an old age. “This was a marked woman,” said Bell, who kept a long list of the death threats. “Everyone knew it.”

The March 3 slaying of the internationally known environmentalist was condemned from the State Department to the Vatican.

But for activists who work in Latin America, Cáceres’s murder was tragically familiar.

Two-thirds of environmentalists who died violently around the world since 2002 lost their lives in that region. For the five years ending in 2014, more than 450 were killed, according to an international watchdog group. More than half were in Honduras and Brazil.

Among the more recent deaths: A young worker who protected sea turtles in Costa Rica was kidnapped and brutally beaten. A farmer in Peru was shot 12 times for protesting a hydroelectric dam. A Guatemalan activist who linked a massive fish kill to pesticides sprayed by a palm oil company was gunned down near a courthouse in broad daylight. A Brazilian activist who fought logging in the rain forest was ambushed and fatally stabbed while returning home with his wife.

The common thread in virtually every case is the fight by communities to stop government-approved corporate development of remote lands. Slain environmentalists frequently have attempted to halt such projects as dams and logging involving hundreds of millions of dollars, which stand to enrich local providers of labor and materials.

Those locals have an interest in eliminating whoever gets in the way,accordingtoJohnKnox,aUnited Nations special rapporteur on human rights and the environment and a professor of international law at Wake Forest University.

Most victims are indigenous people “who are oppressed, largely marginalized and are considered almost expendable by the

TIM RUSSO/GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

For Latin American environmental activists, violence and death are constant companions powers that be,” he said.

The risks they face also reflect a legacy of U.S. intervention throughout the 20th century, noted Dana Frank, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

“The United States famously nurtured and funded dictatorships, corrupt governments and military rule throughout most of Latin America,” Frank said.

“The post-coup regime in Honduras continues that tradition,” adding that the same is true in Guatemala, Colombia and other countries.

The 2013 murders of three members of the Honduran Locomapa tribe demonstrate how lethal the region’s activism can be — without consequences for the killers.

María Enriqueta Matute, Armando Fúnez Medina and Ricardo Soto Fúnez were part of a peaceful sit-in and road blockade to protest mining and logging on their land when two gunmen opened fire.

Fúnez and Soto were killed immediately. Matute fled to her nearby home, where she was tracked and shot. Reports say that although

there were about 150 witnesses — other protesters at the sit-in as well as onlookers — there has been no investigation and no arrests, according to activists. Two brothers were the alleged attackers.

In mid-March, a man who worked for the organization that Cáceres co-founded, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), became the latest fatality.NelsonGarcía,38,wasshotinthe face as he returned home in northwestHondurasafterbeingrounded up and held by state police.

In response, a Dutch bank that was a prime backer of the huge dam project that COPINH was fighting declared itself “shocked” by the violence and immediately suspended all activities and funding.

“Latin America is the hardest-hit region,” said Billy Kyte, a campaigner for Global Witness, who wrote its latest report on killings of environmentalists. From 2010-2014, he said, three-quarters of those deaths occurred there. The network organization is still gathering 2015 statistics, but Kyte expects that it was the deadliest year ever.

The embassies of Peru, Hondu-

Berta Cáceres Flores of Honduras speaks in 2015 to a crowd near the Gualcarque River, the site of a massive dam project. She was killed March 3.

ras and Brazil did not respond to email or phone requests for comment.

Whether the statistics are skewed by inadequate data elsewhere, making the region seem even more dangerous for activists, is of some debate. Knox said he thinks countries in the Americas have better reporting of deaths by governments and media, compared with countries in other parts of the world, such as Africa.

Yet he and others agree that government authorities often do not pursue cases aggressively.

“They’re just not doing what we think police should do,” said Grahame Russell, director of Rights Action, a nonprofit group that funds community development and human rights workers in Guatemala and Honduras.

The problem is so widespread that it often is part of the narratives of recipients of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, said David Gordon, the organization’s executive director.

But the 45-year-old Cáceres stands out as the only Goldman award recipient to have been killed.

After starting COPINH, she waged a decade-long fight against the construction of the Agua Zarca Dam on the Gualcarque River. The project was targeted because the government allowed the privatization of large sections of the river and the forced removal of communities. Death threats tied to Cáceres’s efforts to stop the project were constant.

Her killers remain at large. According to Kyte of Global Witness, 90 percent of killings of activists generally in Honduras are never solved.

“A lot of people wanted her dead,” said Bell, whose own social-justice organization, Other Worlds, works with COPINH. Four years ago, after hearing Cáceres talk about the threats and physical attacks “in almost every conversation,” Bell began drafting a eulogy for her friend.

“Writing it felt like an inevitable exercise,” Bell said. “Because her assassination felt like an inevitable fate.” n

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Is China’s Xi losing his grip?

S IMON D ENYER Beijing BY

A

series of extraordinary outbursts of public criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping in recent weeks has raised the question of whether his crackdown on dissent is backfiring.

The sniping has come from the highest levels of the business community and the media but also, most tellingly, from within the Communist Party itself.

At its core is a growing unhappiness with Xi’s attempts to centralize power and crush dissent, both within the party and outside.

No one is predicting that China’s president is about to be toppled or even that he is about to change course. More likely is that Xi will be so preoccupied with internal politics that he continues to shy away from the painful changes needed to resuscitate China’s slowing economy. He may also continue to take policy in a more nationalist direction to bolster his support.

One criticism, reported by The Washington Post last month, came in the form of a letter by “loyal Communist Party members” calling on China’s president to resign for gathering too much power into his own hands and provoking a series of political, economic, ideological and cultural crises.

But a second essay was equally explosive — because it was posted on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the anti-corruption body that has been at the center of Xi’s efforts to reform the party, eliminate rivals and crush internal dissent.

The CCDI is run by Wang Qishan, generally regarded as Xi’s right-hand man.

The essay, “A thousand yes-men cannot equal one honest adviser,” cited imperial Chinese history, Confucian teaching and the Communist Party’s traditions to argue for the benefits of honest counsel and open debate.

“The ability to air opinions freely and to accept suggestions frequently determined the rise or fall of an empire,” it read. “We should not be afraid of people

FRED DUFOUR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Amid president’s attempts to crush dissent, party grumblings have given way to public criticism saying the wrong things; we should be afraid of people not speaking at all.”

Ever since taking office in 2013, Xi has been cracking down — on corruption within the party and on free speech and civil society outside it.

In the past few months, he has tightened the screws further, outlawing “improper discussion” of government policy within the party and demanding that state media toe the line even more rigorously than they already do.

But instead of shutting up, people are plucking up the courage to speak out.

Property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang’s social-media accounts were shut down in late February after he criticized Xi’s clampdown on the media. In the days that followed, Ren faced virulent criticism from the party but also won support from some unlikely quarters.

A professor at the Central Party School warned that cracking down on different opinions was dangerous for the party; the influ-

ential financial magazine Caixin staged an online protest over the lack of free speech; and a staff member at Xinhua, the state news agency, published a widely shared denunciation of the crackdown, likening it to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

On Monday, Yu Shaolei, an editor at the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, announced he was resigning in protest.

That there is grumbling within the party should perhaps come as no surprise. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign was at least partly designed to undercut local-level cadres who have gorged for years on the fruits of graft and to appeal directly to the Chinese people.

But that the elite are prepared to risk their careers — and perhaps even their freedom — by speaking out suggests more than the usual griping.

The party had long prided itself on its ability to conduct internal debate and rule by consensus.

These outbursts suggest serious concerns that the system is bro-

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, attends the third plenary session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing last month.

ken under the personalized, centralized rule of Xi. There are also substantive concerns about the direction in which China is headed.

The letter purportedly signed by loyal party members appeared on several websites simultaneously just before the annual meeting of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, in Beijing, and took aim at many of Xi’s perceived failings.

His assertive foreign policy, it argued, had antagonized China’s Asian neighbors and allowed the United States to win influence, while alienating the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan. His mismanagement of the economy led to last year’s stock market crash, caused mass layoffs at stateowned firms and brought the national economy “to the verge of collapse,” it said. His anti-corruption campaign has left officials too scared to work and was motivated by a power struggle, it argued.

About 20 people are reported to have been detained for questioning in relation to the letter. According to the BBC, they include staff members from the website on which it was posted and employees of a related technology company. Two Chinese dissidents based in New York and Germany say they have had several close relatives taken away.

The question is what all this grumbling portends. Xi appears to have consolidated power significantly and elevated his own supporters during the past three years, and the chances of his not being returned for a second fiveyear term in 2017 remain extremely slim. But the composition of the Politburo’s Standing Committee after 2017 will be closely examined to see how much power rival factions have retained.

Although independent polling is impossible in China, every indication suggests Xi remains popular with the Chinese people. The party wanted a strong leader in 2013 to confront the nation’s mounting problems, and even if Xi has taken things too far, there is no hint yet of any change in course. n

Drillers’ boom bust

&

Small and medium-sized oil companies stagger under weight of immense debt

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

A few years ago, oil production in South Texas was booming, companies were investing heavily in fracking technology and towns that supported the workers were thriving.

Then oil prices plummeted and that all changed. One of the victims was Swift Energy, led by Terry Swift, middle left, who had to file for bankruptcy for his family’s company.

BY CHICO HARLAN in Tilden, Tex. He’d borrowed from banks and investors and retirement funds, all in a frenzied mission to drill for oil and gas, and by the time Terry Swift realized he’d gone too far, this was his debt: $1.349 billion. His company, founded by his father almost 40 years earlier, had plunged into bankruptcy and laid off 25 percent of its staff. Its shares had been pulled from the New York Stock Exchange. And now Swift was in a company Chevrolet Tahoe, driving back to the flat and dusty place where his bets had gone bust.

Swift was coming to this energy-rich strip of South Texas trying to grapple with how much blame he shouldered for the failure of his company. A low-key and historically cautious oil chief executive who eschews private jets and orders low-fat salads for lunch, he had made what he thought was the best financial move of the past decade — a gamble on rising oil prices — and yet he was ensnared in an industry-wide craze of dangerous debt.

“Maybe we were wrong to believe there wouldn’t be a bust this bad,” Swift, 60, said as the Tahoe rumbled south of San Antonio. “It didn’t even continues on next page

Swift Energy still operates at a reduced scale. Robbie Walters, middle right, is the senior production supervisor for the company. The oil boom necessitated the creation of “man camps” — compounds of prefab trailers — such as Shale Lodge. Now there is a glut of housing. “You look back and you see it wasn’t sustainable,” Walters said.

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from previous page

feel risky.”

Swift’s miscalculation has made his company, Swift Energy, a casualty of the greatest wave of financial defaults since the subprime mortgage crisis ravaged the U.S. economy. For him, it’s a painful low point in his family’s 111-year journey in American oil, one that started when his great-grandfather set up a series of storage tanks in the plains outside Tulsa. And it’s a jarring reversal from just a few years ago, when Swift felt as if he’d taken his company to a pinnacle by capitalizing on a massive surge in U.S. energy production — one that promised an era of American energy independence thanks to revolutionary new technologies.

This new wave of bad loans isn’t of the same magnitude as the housing bust, but it reflects similar behaviors. Borrowers feasted on what Bloomberg estimates was $237 billion of easy money without scrutinizing whether the loans could endure a drastic downturn. The consequences are far-reaching: The U.S. oil industry, having grown into a giant on par with Saudi Arabia’s, is shrinking, with the biggest collapse in investment in energy in 25 years. More than 140,000 have lost energy jobs. Banks are bracing for tens of billions of dollars of defaults, and economists and lawyers predict the financial wreckage will accelerate this year.

South Texas, along with North Dakota, had been the testing grounds for the industry’s ambitions, a place where shale oil and gas companies had taken on billions in loans to support more drilling and fracking. The strategy was to gather up drilling sites at turbo speed and later slow down and reap the benefits. But then oil prices plunged and stayed down. They have fallen 60 percent from two years ago.

“It was drill, drill, drill,” said Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer, an investment bank.

“Every Tom, Dick and Harry was trying to become an oil baron. Now all of a sudden you say, my God — all these people spent beyond their means.”

As Swift arrived in Tilden, the site of some of Swift Energy’s fields in South Texas, the signs of decay were everywhere. Scrubby two-lane roads once clogged with heavy-duty vehicles were almost empty. Roadside hotels that sprang up to meet demand — including one that once was booked solid for a year by Halliburton — had vacant parking lots and dust glazing the windows. McMullen County, where tens of thousands had worked every day at the peak, had shriveled back to a quiet place of 800.

The Tahoe turned onto a straight country road and headed toward Swift Energy’s field office, a series of trailers that were the base for its drilling operations. Little paddles of cactus nuzzled a fence that ran alongside the road, and Swift spotted a few cows near the entrance, the only visible activity along the horizon.

“We’ll have to chase them out,” he said.

He was quiet for a moment, pausing on what had transpired.

“You know the thing that’s disappointing?” he said. “All the wealth that was created — it dried up.”

The end of the U.S. oil boom, told through one firm's bust Swift Energy, a Houston-based oil and gas company, is one of many casualties of a rapidly shrinking U.S. oil Industry. Like many small and medium-size energy companies, Swift took out large loans to get into the fracking game but fell victim to falling oil prices and growing foreign competition.

There and back again 2008-2011

SWIFT ENERGY STOCK PRICE

ACTIVE OIL AND GAS RIGS

$43.40

1,774

$60

2,000

40 1,000

502

20 0

.9¢ Jan. ’08

Steady decline in share price ’08

’11

Jan. ’08

Feb. ’16

Oil market in free fall

2011-2014

2014-PRESENT

’11

’10 Positive Negative

0

Feb. ’16

’12

’13 ’09

’14

’14 ’16

Amid the Great Recession, Swift Energy's stock price collapsed from $63 to $5 in just eight months. As oil production began to rebound, the company again became profitable and its share price stabilized.

Swift’s stock price began to tumble again starting in 2011 as natural-gas prices declined and as production at drilling sites lagged behind competitors.

’15

The value of oil plummeted in late 2014, ending a prolonged period of stable and lucrative prices.

Swift’s stock price fell below 25 cents, and the company was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange.

PEAK PRICE

Ambitions fueled by debt be the worst of all the$63.02 busts.”

Swift Energy’s stock price and oil production moved hand in hand “It was How drill, America’s great energy boom resulted not Swift had been inJunethe 2008oil industry since simply from gains made by the established graduating from the University 400 600 800 1,000 1,200 1,400 1,600 1,800 2,000 of Houston drill, drill. giants — ExxonMobil and Chevron — but rather with a degree in chemical engineering in 1979. from the rise of hundreds of smaller companies.

He started off in Texas for a few years and in Every Tom, Active oilthose and gas rigs companies grew with debt, $60 $60his father, And smaller 1981 joined the company run by using it to drill 8,000 feet into Earth’s crust and Aubrey Earl Swift, who died in 2006.

There, he Dick and COMPANY INCOME renting equipment, pumpSTART HERE 10,000 feet across, was initially dispatched to work overnight Swift Energy ing in millions of pounds of sand and creating shifts in West Virginia. He calls50himself a 50 2008 Harry was share price fractures that released oil and natural gas. geological nerd and happily talks for hours Negative Positive This was hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, about rock formations and sonic mapping trying to the technology that, in the middle of the last tools. 2011 40 40 decade, allowed companies to reach oil and gas “It gets in your DNA,” Swift said. become an that was previously inaccessible. Companies Before fracking, Swift Energy had been a 2012 had a choice — borrow to enter the fracking medium-size player — operating conventionoil baron.”

30 30 race, or stay on the sidelines and risk losing out. al oil and gas wells in Louisiana and Texas — Fadel Gheit, analyst 20

Oil production fell duringSwift, the chose to frack.

Most, including 2010 GreatThat Recession, thenmultiplied across hundreds decision, of rebounded quickly. producers, has nearly doubled U.S. oil produc-

tion since 2007. And while politicians and executives celebrated that new capacity — Less than 1¢ 10 Feb. 2016 dramatically reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil — few discussed the dangerous financial risks.

2016 The industry’s debt, after all, had also nearly 0 doubled. Producers such as Swift didn’t think 400 600 1,000 1,400 this was a 800 bubble: Instead, they1,200 saw a new chapter in American energy — one in which technology had helped expand the market Source: Bloomberg News, Baker Hughes permanently at a time of global energy needs, led by China.

“Not that the industry was bust-proof, but the cycles maybe wouldn’t be as deep,” Swift recalled. It was a profoundly wrong call.

“By the time this is over,” he said, “this might

that had relied on much the same formula for more than a decade. It kept its debt to a 2009 minimum.

It drilled somewhere 20 between 30 to 70 wells per2013 year. It also had owned previously2014 sleepy tracts in South Texas’s Eagle Ford, an area that, with fracking,10 looked like America’s next energy 2015 moneymaker. Swift felt his company had lucked out.

“The play was getting bigger and bigger,” 0 Swift said. “So our vision was, we could do 1,800 2,000 this.” 1,600 As the company began to frack more often, the amount it spent on exploration and drilling LAZARO GAMIO AND TIM MEKO/THE WASHINGTON POST skyrocketed by hundreds of millions of dollars.

To cover that spending, Swift Energy issued three separate packages of bonds worth $875 million. It also had a credit line of $500 million from JPMorgan. Altogether, the more than $1 billion in debt represented an

’09

Negative

’14

’14 ’16

AmidAPRIL the Great Swift SUNDAY, 3, Recession, 2016

Energy's stock price collapsed from $63 to $5 in just eight months. As oil production began to rebound, the company again became profitable and its share price stabilized.

Swift’s stock price began to tumble again starting in 2011 as natural-gas prices declined and as production at drilling sites lagged behind competitors.

’15

The value of oil plummeted in late 2014, ending a prolonged period of stable and lucrative prices.

Swift’s stock price fell below 25 cents, and the company was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange.

PEAK PRICE

$63.02

How Swift Energy’s stock price and oil production moved hand in hand

June 2008

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

1,800

2,000

Active oil and gas rigs

$60

$60

START HERE

COMPANY INCOME

50

1,600

Swift Energy share price

2008

50

Negative Positive 2011

40

40 2012

30

30

Oil production fell during the Great Recession, then rebounded quickly.

20

10

2010

2009 2014

Less than 1¢

20 2013 10

Feb. 2016

2015

2016

0 400

600

0 800

Source: Bloomberg News, Baker Hughes

amount so large that if the company had combined its profits from its 20 best years, it could not have paid it back.

Not long after, cracks began to show in Swift Energy’s plan. The first problems, Swift thought, seemed manageable. Swift Energy was drilling in five places across Texas and Louisiana — each a different kind of dirt — and was taking a little longer than competitors to figure out the best drilling methods. Several times a year, Swift would pledge to pull a certain amount of oil and gas from the ground, then tell investors that the company had missed its targets. Often, its share prices would tumble.

“They were horribly inefficient,” said David Deckelbaum, an analyst at KeyBanc.

Then Swift Energy began to feel the pain of unexpected global developments. Naturalgas prices started to dip. Then the price of oil fell off a cliff in November 2014 when Saudi Arabia, in a bid to retain market share amid greater U.S. competition, increased its production. Meanwhile, global demand sagged, again led by China.

Swift realized a manageable problem was no longer manageable. The company needed cash just to make interest payments, and nobody would lend it more money.

Swift tried to perform triage. He laid off employees. He called vendors and asked for lower prices. He chiseled at expenditures.

The company’s lender, JPMorgan, began tightening the funds Swift Energy could withdraw. The company’s stock — above $40 per share in 2011 — dipped below $1, and then

1,000

1,200

1,400

1,600

1,800

2,000

LAZARO GAMIO AND TIM MEKO/THE WASHINGTON POST

below 25 cents.

Swift, along with the company’s chief financial officer, Alton Heckaman, spent days at the computer running scenarios.

Can we survive if oil bounces back to $60?

Are we doomed if oil hits $30?

Running out of cash, Swift realized his company was bound for bankruptcy. “I knew it was the best path,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it was a great path.”

On Dec. 1, Swift skipped an interest payment to its bondholders.

On Dec. 18, the company’s shares were yanked from the New York Stock Exchange because of their “abnormally low” prices.

And on the night of Dec. 31, Swift and Heckaman gathered at their Houston office, signing the last bankruptcy papers.

“The debtor requests relief in accordance with the chapter of title 11,” one of the documents said, and in this case restructuring meant that everybody who’d once owned stock in Swift Energy would lose virtually everything.

It was not alone. In 2015, 42 oil and gas companies failed, according to Haynes and Boone, a Dallas-based law firm, and this year that number is projected to accelerate.

“It was a disaster for everybody,” said J. Ellwood Towle, a St. Louis-based investor who was among Swift Energy’s biggest shareholders.

‘It wasn’t sustainable’ Here in Tilden, 80 miles south of San Antonio and 100 miles north of the Mexico border, Swift Energy had rented out its own

“It was very competitive. . . . The longer you waited, the more you missed out.”

Terry Swift, chief executive of Swift Energy

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“man camp” — a compound of prefabricated trailers — to house workers recruited from as far away as Ohio. For the three-person trailers, the company paid $3,000 a month.

The 13-trailer compound felt at the time like the only option, Swift said. Without a man camp, you could spend $5,000 a month just to house an employee.

In the Eagle Ford basin, the number of drilling rigs doubled between 2011 and 2012, topping 250. Prices for land spiked a hundredfold. Swift had put up with the prices because the potential rewards were so great, but now he was directly facing the consequences of those decisions.

Swift walked into the field office to meet with Robbie Walters, the supervisor who managed all the production in South Texas.

Walters sat in a wood-paneled office covered in geological maps.

“Down here just for the day?” Walters asked. He never mentioned the bankruptcy.

“Just for the day,” Swift said.

Walters talked, instead, about the broader landscape. About the empty hotels. The businesses that had disappeared. The TexMex restaurant, Pepe Boudreaux’s, that had shuttered only weeks earlier.

“You look back and you see it wasn’t sustainable,” Walters said.

Now, only 43 rigs were operating in the Eagle Ford.

“It was very competitive,” Swift said. “If you ever blinked and said, ‘I’m not sure about sustainability,’ you’d get put in the bleachers.

The longer you waited, the more you missed out.”

Swift returned to the Tahoe and checked out some other spots in the Eagle Ford: a new gas well that was being tested and the company’s man camp, where they were trying to renegotiate a better rate.

While touring the field, Swift stayed mostly quiet, instead listening to his employees detail how well the work to develop oil and gas wells was going. But on the drive home, he had something to say. It wasn’t so much an explanation for his company’s demise but rather an explanation for his actions.

Comparing the joy of pulling oil from the ground with a “baby being born,” he said, “Mother Earth has treasures, and there are prizes if you can extract them.” He added: “I don’t ask myself when I wake up, ‘How much money do I have?’ I’m still an oil guy.”

But even if he remains an oil guy, his father’s company will no longer be controlled by one.

When Swift emerges later this year from a lengthy federal court process in Wilmington, Del., Swift will still be CEO. But the company will be owned by bondholders, including the hedge funds that swooped in last year — when it was obvious Swift Energy was in trouble — and bought, for dimes on the dollar, the bonds that were certain to default.

Swift doesn’t even know whether the company will retain its name.

“If I was in total control, I’d answer that,” Swift said. “I’m not in total control.”n

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TELEVISION

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You may scoff at ‘American Idol,’ but it changed pop culture forever

here are hundreds of former “Idol” contestants, but here are the 10 we think are the most important to the music industry. (Note: Album sales don’t equal importance, especially since all figures — which are from the artist’s representatives or recent Wall Street Journal data — are approximate.)

1. Kelly Clarkson Winner, Season 1 Clarkson, 33, recently returned to “Idol” in its final season and had the audience in tears with an emotional performance of her latest single, “Piece by Piece.” It’s a fitting bookend, as Clarkson had the same effect when she belted out her coronation song and first single, “A Moment Like This,” on the finale in 2002. Clarkson’s powerhouse voice and dynamic presence signaled that the music industry should take these reality show contestants seriously: Her first two albums, “Thankful” and “Breakway,” sold about 10 million copies combined, and her pop tunes became empowerment anthems across the globe. l Album sales: 21.5 million l Popular songs: “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” “Since U Been Gone,” “My Life Would Suck Without You” 2. Carrie Underwood Winner, Season 4 The country music landscape for women is bleak right now, save for two female superstars: Miranda Lambert and Underwood, now 33. The Oklahoma native arrived for her “Idol” audition in 2004 as a 21-year-old college student. She blew the judges away with her rendition of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Her first album, “Some Hearts,” went seven-times platinum, and she has co-written about half of her 23 No. 1 hits since. l Album sales: 18 million l Popular songs: “Before He Cheats,” “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” “Blown Away” 3. Adam Lambert Second place, Season 8 Lambert’s soaring falsetto made him an instant frontrunner, especially when his performance of “Mad World” drew a rare standing ovation from the always-prickly judge Simon Cowell.

The Freddie Mercury compari-

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nocuous pop song that was everywhere after Phillips debuted it in 2012? Really! It sold 5 million copies and was featured in more commercials and inspirational TV spots than anyone can remember.

Phillips, 25, reminded the world that after years of falling ratings, (a) “Idol” still existed and (b) it could still lead to success. l Album sales: 2.5 million l Popular songs: “Home,” “Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Raging Fire”

E MILY Y AHR

It might be hard to remember now, but “American Idol” had quite an impact. Though the Fox show, once a ratings behemoth, has dropped off the grid in recent years, it created music stars and made Paula Abdul a household name again. It sparked an endless era of reality competition singing shows, a lot of tabloid fodder and quite a few Broadway performers. As the series ends for good on Thursday, we look back on 15 years of “Idol” stars.

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sons started early, and by 2011, he was performing with Queen, eventually standing in for Mercury as the band’s lead singer.

Lambert, 34, raked in enough cash last year to land the No. 1 spot on Forbes list of 5 HighestPaid American Idols in 2015, earning about $10 million. l Album sales: 7 million l Popular songs: “Whataya Want from Me,” “Ghost Town,” “If I Had You” 4. Chris Daughtry Fourth place, Season 5 Cowell was initially dismissive of Daughtry when he sang a gruff version of Joe Cocker’s “The Letter” at his audition in 2005.

Daughtry went on to prove that rock artists could thrive commercially. After he was voted off, Daughtry, 36, started an eponymous band whose music became a mainstay on Top 40 radio. The Daughtry self-titled debut album was a smash, spawning five hit songs. l Album sales: 8 million l Popular songs: “It’s Not Over,” “Home,” “Over You” 5. Fantasia Barrino Winner, Season 3 Barrino’s haunting, powerful

rendition of “Summertime” in 2004 is often cited as the best performance in “Idol” history. Her coronation song, “I Believe,” flew to the top of the charts after the finale. Later, Barrino, 31, released four albums, appeared on Broadway in “The Color Purple” and “After Midnight” and won a Grammy Award in 2011 for her single “Bittersweet.” l Album sales: 3.1 million l Popular songs: “I Believe,” “When I See U,” “Free Yourself” 6. Mandisa Ninth place, Season 5 Several “Idol” artists went the Christian music route (Danny Gokey, Chris Sligh, Phil Stacey), but Mandisa has flourished the most with five albums. Still touring regularly, she has been nominated for four Grammys and won Best Contemporary Christian Music Album in 2014 for her record “Overcomer.” l Album sales: 1.5 million l Popular songs: “Stronger,” “Overcomer,” “My Deliverer” 7. Phillip Phillips Winner, Season 11 Would you believe the topselling song from any contestant in “Idol” history is “Home,” the in-

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8. Josh Gracin Fourth place, Season 2 “Idol” made strides in pop with Clarkson’s win, but was the insular, traditional Nashville going to accept a country singer from a reality show? Gracin’s breakthrough in 2003 was a resounding “yes.” His first single, the inspirational “I Want to Live,” was a Top 5 hit and helped propel his selftitled debut record up the charts.

Gracin, 35, continued the trend with his sophomore album in 2008, and though his follow-ups weren’t as successful, he paved the way for others. l Album sales: About 1 million l Popular songs: “Nothin’ to Lose,” “Stay With Me (Brass Bed),” “We Weren’t Crazy” 9. Jennifer Hudson Seventh place, Season 3 Hudson went from seventhplace finisher to Oscar winner in an astonishingly short amount of time. Though her “Dreamgirls” song “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” made the biggest impact, she also had several R&B hits and kept the momentum going with her third record, “JHUD,” in 2014. Her first album, “Jennifer Hudson,” resulted in three Grammy nominations. l Album sales: 1.8 million l Popular songs: “Spotlight,” “If This Isn’t Love,” “Where You At” 10. Kellie Pickler Sixth place, Season 5 Back in 2006, the quirky North Carolina native charmed everyone. After she was sent packing, Pickler landed a record deal that resulted in a gold-certified record, “Small Town Girl.” Though she’s not as dominant as her “Idol” country counterparts, Pickler, 29, has remained a critical favorite. l Album sales: 2 million l Popular songs: “Red High Heels,” “I Wonder,” “Best Days of Your Life” n

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Mountain climber, 12, is peaking early BY

M ARYLOU T OUSIGNANT

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he call could come any day now. When it does, Tyler Armstrong hopes to be one step closer to doing something he has dreamed about for years: climbing Mount Everest, Earth’s highest peak.

Tyler is 12. If he makes it to the top, he will be the youngest person to scale the most famous mountain in Asia, if not the world.

Records are nothing new to Tyler. Mountain climbing is in this California sixth-grader’s blood. He has been doing it for half his life.

“I was watching a nature hiking documentary when I was 6,” Tyler said, “and I asked my dad if I could start climbing. He thought it was a joke.”

But his father, who was not a mountain climber, allowed Tyler to pursue his interest. The boy quickly proved how serious he was by eating more healthfully and by jogging. Before long, he was regularly running 41/2 miles around a nearby lake and training with experienced climbers.

He scaled California’s Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States, when he was 7; Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest in Africa, when he was 8; Mount Aconcagua, the highest in South America, when he was 9; and Russia’s Mount Elbrus, considered the highest in Europe, when he was 11. Along the way, he received donations and sponsors to help pay for the trips.

He was the youngest or secondyoungest to reach the summit on three of those four adventures. He aims to reach all “seven summits,” the top of the highest mountain on each continent. As part of that goal, Tyler is raising money to help cure a rare disorder called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It affects mostly boys, leaving them unable to walk.

The six-week trek on snowcovered Everest will be Tyler’s toughest challenge. At the mountain’s summit (29,028 feet, give or take a little — scientists can’t agree), the oxygen level is onethird what it is at sea level. And winds can rage in excess of 100

Young mountain climber Tyler Armstrong trains on Mount Rainier in Washington.

FAMILY PHOTO

miles per hour.

Tyler will be accompanied by his dad, two of his trainers, another veteran climber and Sherpas. The group aims to reach the summit in mid-May, when the snow level is lowest. But first there is the question of getting permission for Tyler to go.

Everest straddles the border between Nepal and the Tibet region of China. Both sides require climbing permits, and both have minimum age requirements. The Tibet side, the route that Tyler plans to take, prohibits climbers younger

than 18, so he needs special permission. That’s the call he and his father are waiting for.

If Tyler conquers Everest, he will break the record of fellow Californian Jordan Romero, who did it in 2010 at age 13.

More and more, it seems, kids are tackling thrill-seeking challenges that were once off-limits until adulthood. Some examples: l Atage9,BradenDuboisbecame theworld’syoungeststockcardriver when he raced older kids at his parents’ Michigan speedway in 2012. l In 2009, Tiger Brewer, 8, of

California boy awaits go-ahead to try to climb Everest

London flew at 100 miles an hour while standing on the wing of his grandfather’s plane.

Not everyone applauds the youth trend. Guinness World Records, which publishes lists of factual or freaky human achievements and events in nature, discourages people younger than 16 from dangerous attempts to set a record. A few sports groups have similar age limits.

Some doctors and others worry that pushy parents and the popularity of extreme sports are driving kids to be daredevils.

“Kids aren’t mentally ready for these activities,” said Vani Sabesan, a professor and surgeon in Michigan who specializes in bone and muscle injuries. “They tend to underestimate risk.” Without proper training, she told the New York Times, “a lot of kids [are] thinking maybe they can do what . . . professional athletes can do.”

Thomas Kuepper, a professor and specialist in sports medicine in Germany, said young mountain climbers face a higher risk of hypothermia, a dangerous drop in body temperature brought on by extreme cold. And, he said, doctors don’t know enough about how to treat kids who get severe highaltitude sickness, or fluid in the lungs or on the brain. Tyler’s Everest goal is “utter nonsense,” Kuepper told a German website.

The climb is dangerous, even for adults, many of whom have died in the process.

Tyler and his dad have heard the critics but are confident he’s up to the challenge. “It’s obviously a very dangerous sport,” said Kevin Armstrong, Tyler’s dad. “If he didn’t have the ability and mental maturity, we wouldn’t let him do it. But the professionals are telling us he’s got the ability.”

“There’s definitely a lot of naysayers,” Tyler agreed. “But they don’t know me. People have different strengths. The [critics] don’t base their objections on skill, just my age.”

So if he gets the go-ahead, does he think he can make it all the way up Everest? “I can’t say for 100 percent sure,” Tyler said, “but we’ll try our best.” n

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BOOKS

When our past is lost in the cloud N ON-FICTION

I WHEN WE ARE NO MORE How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

By Abby Smith Rumsey Bloomsbury. 229 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

N ICHOLAS C ARR

n the spring of 1997, the Library of Congress opened an ambitious exhibit featuring several hundred of the most historically significant items in its collection. One of the more striking of the artifacts was the “rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence. Over Thomas Jefferson’s original, neatly penned script ran edits by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers. Words were crossed out, inserted and changed, the revisions providing a visual record of debate and compromise. A boon to historians, the fourpage manuscript provides even the casual viewer with a keen sense of the drama of a nation being born.

Imagine if the Declaration were composed today. It would almost certainly be written on a computer screen rather than with ink and paper, and the edits would be made electronically, through email exchanges or a file shared on the Internet. If we were lucky, a modern-day Jefferson would turn on track-changes and print copies of the document as it progressed.

We’d at least know who wrote what, even if the generic computer type lacked the expressiveness of handwriting. More likely, the digital file would come to be erased or rendered unreadable by changes in technical standards. We’d have the words, but the document itself would have little resonance.

Historian Abby Smith Rumsey was one of the curators of the Library of Congress exhibit, and that experience informs “When We Are No More,” her wide-ranging rumination on cultural memory. “A physical connection between the present and past is wondrously forged through the medium of time-stained paper,” she writes.

But that “distinctive visceral connection” with history may be much diminished, if not lost, when our cultural heritage is stored in sterile databases rather than in actual objects. Rumsey’s book pos-

Jefferson, Thomas

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION USING ISTOCK IMAGES

es a vital question: As more and more of what we know, make and experience is recorded as vaporous bits in the cloud, what exactly will we leave behind for future generations?

We tend to think of memory as a purely mental phenomenon, something ethereal that goes on inside our minds. That’s a misperception.

Rumsey draws a powerful analogy to underscore memory’s materiality. The greatest memory system, she reminds us, is the universe itself. Nature embeds history in matter. Geologists discovered that the strata in exposed rock tell the story of the planet’s development. Biologists found that fossilized plants and animals reveal secrets about the evolution of life.

Astronomers realized that by looking through a telescope they could see not only across great distances but far back in time, gaining a glimpse of the origins of existence.

Through such discoveries, Rumsey argues, people revealed and refined their “forensic imagination,” a subtle and creative way of thinking highly attuned to deciphering meaning from matter. We deploy that same imagination in

understanding and appreciating our history and culture. The upshot is that the technologies a society uses to record, store and share information will play a crucial role in determining the richness, or sparseness, of its legacy.

Whether through cave paintings or Facebook posts, we humans have always been eager to record our experiences. But, as Rumsey makes clear, we’ve been far less zealous about safeguarding those records for posterity. In choosing among media technologies through the ages, people have tended to trade durability for transmissibility. It’s not hard to understand why. Intent on our immediate needs, we prefer those media that make communication easier and faster, rather than the ones that offer the greatest longevity.

We’re now in the midst of the most far-reaching shift in media ever, as we rush to replace all manner of physical media with digital alternatives. The benefits are compelling. We’ve gained instant access to a seemingly infinite store of information. But there are losses, too. “Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile,” Rumsey reports, “limitless in

scope yet inherently unstable.” All media are subject to decay, of course. Clay cracks, paper crumbles. What’s different now is that our cultural memory is embedded in a complex and ever-shifting system of technologies. Any change in the system can render the record unreadable. A book can sit on a shelf for hundreds of years and retain its legibility. All that’s required to decode it is a pair of eyes.

A digital file is far more fussy.

Dependent on computers for decoding, it can disappear or turn to gibberish whenever operating systems, software applications or document standards are revised.

Rumsey is clear about the dangers of our “ephemeral digital landscape,” but she isn’t a doomsayer. She believes that we can protect our cultural legacy for our descendants, even if that legacy ends up mainly in the form of immaterial bits. But, she stresses, we’ll first need to overcome our complacency and start taking the long-term protection of valuable data seriously. We’ll need a reinvigorated system of libraries and archives, spanning the public, private and nonprofit sectors, that are adept at digital preservation.

We’ll need thoughtful protocols for determining what data need to be saved. And we’ll need to ensure that control over culturally significant data doesn’t end up in the hands of a small group of commercial enterprises that focus on profit, not posterity.

Those are prudent suggestions.

But, even as we continue down the path to a virtualized future, we shouldn’t lose sight of the enduring value of the material artifact.

We should make sure that there’s always a place in the world for the eloquent object, the thing itself. n Carr is the author of “The Shallows” and “The Glass Cage.” His new book, “Utopia Is Creepy,” will be published this summer.

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Tales for fans and non-fans of horror

Holy decades of longevity, Batman!

F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

B ILL S HEEHAN

ince the publication of “Ghost Story” in 1979, Peter Straub has been one of the dominant figures in contemporary horror fiction. Like his friend and occasional collaborator Stephen King, he has taken on a marginalized subgenre and elevated it, demonstrating, in the process, its largest, darkest possibilities.

There may be no better introduction to Straub’s accomplishments than this new, aptly titled career retrospective, “Interior Darkness.” The collection contains 16 stories, three of them previously uncollected. They range in length from single-page vignettes to densely detailed short novels, in settings from the 20th-century Midwest to the Amazon basin, and in subject matter from the traumatic to the transcendent. Likewise, the narrative voices that animate these stories veer from the straightforward prose of the opening novella, “Blue Rose,” to the more surrealistic content of the later entries.

In “The Juniper Tree,” a raw and moving account of sexual abuse and buried memories, the Straublike narrator describes himself as a writer of “unfashionably long” novels. But these shorter forms have provided Straub with assorted opportunities to experiment freely, to articulate, from a variety of perspectives, a highly personal vision of the world.

Straub’s world is one where trauma — in the form of war, random violence, calculated cruelty and familial dysfunction — dominates the landscape. In the view of a nameless war veteran, the visible world is no more than “a picture over the face of a terrible fire.” It is a world in which angels can appear on the streets of New York, in which love, art, books and music are the only consistent sources of solace. It is, most centrally, a realm filled with enigmatic encounters and terrible, unyielding mysteries.

Several of the stories gathered

here connect directly to Straub’s larger works. “Blue Rose” describes certain defining events in the adolescent life of Harry Beevers in “Koko” (1988). Straub’s account of the making of a sociopathic personality is both credible and chilling. In “The Juniper Tree,” the sexual crimes that take place in the Orpheum-Oriental movie theater resurface, to traumatic effect, in “The Throat” (1993). “Mallon the Guru” offers a glimpse into the colorful history of the charismatic wanderer in Straub’s most recent novel, “A Dark Matter” (2010).

The range and variety of Straub’s work never fail to surprise. “A Short Guide to the City,” inspired by an essay on Leningrad/St. Petersburg by poet Joseph Brodsky, is itself an essaylike piece that provides a sociological portrait of a Midwestern city stalked by a serial murderer known as the Viaduct Killer. You have never read a story quite like “The Buffalo Hunter.” It introduces us to Bob Bunting, an infantile loner who escapes, in very literal fashion, into the fictional worlds of Luke Short, Raymond Chandler and Leo Tolstoy. In “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a cuckolded husband hires mysterious figures to punish his wife and her lover, ushering in his own destruction in the process. Loosely inspired by “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and written in a flawless approximation of 19thcentury American prose, this tightly compressed novella manages to be both frightening and funny.

“Interior Darkness” is a book for those who think they dislike horror, as well as for those who love and respect the genre. Filled with terror, wit and unexpected grace notes, it’s a remarkable achievement that reflects the arc of a lengthy and celebrated career. n Sheehan is the author of “At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry Into the Fiction of Peter Straub.”

T INTERIOR DARKNESS Selected Stories

By Peter Straub Doubleday. 496 pp. $28.95

THE CAPED CRUSADE Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

By Glen Weldon Simon & Schuster. 324 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL C AVNA

he man who helped create the Joker flashed a wide grin. This artist, then in his 80s, had lived through every incarnation of Batman, and that smile said it all.

The late Jerry Robinson was the last studio man who truly spanned the life of Batman. On a dark night six years ago, I asked him whether he liked Heath Ledger’s Oscarwinning performance as the Joker. The verdict: He loved what he saw.

That anecdote reflects the most fascinating pop aspect of Batman: How does one comic-book character remain so consistently intriguing to so many people over eight decades?

An engaging new book takes up that question. Batman is the World’s Greatest Detective, and so it’s apt that author Glen Weldon approaches his subject like a metaphor-loving sleuth for a mission that could be called “The Case of the Rubbery Mutability.”

Three years ago, Weldon published “Superman: The Unauthorized Biography,” which shed light on how another DC hero has stayed popular since his 1938 birth. Now, Weldon, a pop-culture journalist and podcaster at NPR, delves deep into Batman’s story in “The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture,” just in time for the release of the film “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

Weldon goes on the trail of the Gotham hero’s popularity as if he’s crafting a procedural. He hews tightly to the chronology to piece together clues from each distinctive era, and his ultimate conclusion is that for every generation, Batman becomes what we need him to be. “No single image defines Batman,” Weldon writes. The Caped Crusader functions like an inkblot: “He’s whatever the reader brings to him.”

Batman was born 77 years ago, as Bob Kane and Bill Finger borrowed from numerous pop influences — comic strips, pulp detective stories, children’s books, even

German Expressionist film — to create a “winged figure of vengeance.” Orphaned by his parents’ murders and powered by an oath to forever wage war on criminals, this dark-caped hero became the “badass Batman of 1939” — who soon began to acquire one of the greatest rogues’ galleries in comics history.

Through the succeeding decades, Batman went through cycles as a driven loner, then a father figure to sidekick Robin, and then paterfamilias to a growing cast before being returned to the role of solo vigilante. And through these iterations, Batman was adapted — on page and screen — to environments involving sci-fi, saturatedcolor high camp and bloody noir. If his cape is sometimes as black as a movie theater, all the better for us to project our literary needs onto him through each reinvention.

Weldon especially shines when rendering Batman’s shift from ’60s TV camp to the reactionary “Great Inward Turn,” when “Batman changed for good” as a dark figure, and then again in the ’80s, when Frank Miller’s influential “The Dark Knight Returns” morphed Batman from merely “obsessive” crimefighter to a nocturnal vigilante saddled with “fullblown schizophrenia.” The author rightly calls the ’70s move the “most dramatic and influential reboot of any character in the superhero genre” and deftly emphasizes how Miller “set out to engage with, and update, Batman the Idea, not Batman the Character.”

What Weldon ultimately achieves here is a character and comic-franchise history that is itself flexible enough to become what the reader needs it to be. If you’re a Bat-neophyte, this is an accessible introduction; if you’re a dyed-in-the-Latex Bat-nerd, this is a colorfully rendered magical history tour redolent with nostalgia. n Cavna is creator of the Comic Riffs column and the graphic-novel reviewer for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

While Ga. took a breath, N.C. rushed bills through DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined the Post as a political reporter in 2000.

You can have your Coke with a smile today.

On Monday, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a conservative Republican, said he would veto a bill that would have legalized discrimination against gay people, responding to an outcry from corporate interests including Coca­Cola, Home Depot, UPS, Walt Disney, Delta, Time Warner, Comcast, Netflix, Apple and the National Football League.

As state legislators pushed the “religious liberty” bill through, Deal told them: “I hope that we can all just take a deep breath, recognize that the world is changing around us.”

Headlines of the past week show seemingly contradictory developments: Even as Georgia’s governor took a bold stand against discrimination, North Carolina’s Republican governor last Wednesday signed into law similar legislation enshrining discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.

But there is really no contradiction: Georgia’s governor vetoed the bill because it received massive public exposure and there was a resulting outcry from corporations concerned that it would offend customers and workers. North Carolina’s governor signed the bill literally in the dark of night, just before the Easter holiday weekend, after legislators introduced and passed it in a single day at a hastily convened special session — essentially slipping it into law before it could get attention and business interests could state their objections.

In both cases, you can see the effects of a new corporate citizenship that is emerging.

Corporate America is traditionally conservative, reluctant to react to social controversy and divisive issues.

But as public sentiment shifts dramatically on gay rights and as pro-equality millennials become a large bloc of consumers,

business is shedding its reticence.

This has happened, to a lesser extent, on immigration, various environmental issues and, recently, in support of Apple’s stand for consumer privacy.

Democrats and progressives see potential for a larger shift nationally in corporate political behavior, as Republicans take ideological stands on education, the Export-Import Bank, the debt ceiling and infrastructure spending that put them at odds with their traditional corporate allies. “They’re just not offering companies what they crave most out of Washington, which is predictability,” said Matt Bennett of Third Way, a business-friendly Democratic group. Republicans “are just these wild cards now,” he said, and will become more so if Donald Trump — who talks of 45 percent tariffs — becomes their nominee.

Though it’s not clear whether that broader shift to the left will occur among corporations, there is no doubt that a dramatic change has occurred on gay rights. When the Georgia legislature took up legislation giving religious groups the right to deny services to gay people, corporations by the dozen voiced their objections. Disney and Netflix said they would stop filming in Georgia, and the NFL said the bill would jeopardize

DAVID GOLDMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed legislation that would have legalized discrimination against gay people. North Carolina passed a similar bill.

Atlanta’s hopes of hosting the Super Bowl.

Deal said he wouldn’t “respond well” to “threats of withdrawing jobs from our state,” but respond he did. On Monday, he said the religious community’s request for government protection was “ironic,” because if “indeed our religious liberty is conferred by God and not by man-made government, we should heed the ‘hands-off’ admonition of the First Amendment.”

In North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory and other state Republicans tried to avoid the trouble Deal faced, and the similar trouble Indiana Gov. Mike Pence faced in 2014.

North Carolina’s bill, passed and signed within 12 hours of its introduction, invalidates municipal nondiscrimination ordinances, including a Charlotte city ordinance covering transgender people’s use of restrooms. Lawmakers also passed a statewide nondiscrimination policy that omits protection for sexual orientation.

American Airlines, Apple, Dow Chemical, PayPal and others rushed to criticize the new law.

The National Basketball Association suggested it might move its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte.

On Tuesday, more than 80 top executives from blue-chip companies signed a letter to McCrory saying the legislation is “bad for our employees and bad for business” and will “make it far more challenging for businesses across the state to recruit” and will “diminish the state’s draw as a destination for tourism, new businesses and economic activity.” The letter, coordinated by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, was signed by, among others, executives from Levi Strauss, Apple, Marriott, Pfizer, Google, Yahoo, Biogen, Microsoft and Facebook.

McCrory, peppered during a news conference Monday about all the municipal ordinances the new law would overturn, complained that the reporters were “blindsiding” him.

If he didn’t want to be blindsided by his own law’s effects, he could have spent more than one day on it. But McCrory, unlike the term-limited Deal, is up for reelection and probably hopes the issue will rally his conservative supporters.

Now North Carolina will face the economic consequences of his poor choice. McCrory should have done what Georgia’s Deal proposed: take a deep breath, and recognize that the world is changing. n

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TOM TOLES

President’s unpardonable inaction GEORGE LARDNER JR. AND P.S. RUCKMAN JR. George Lardner Jr., a former Post reporter, is scholar in residence at American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. P.S. Ruckman Jr. is a professor of political science and editor of the Pardon Power Blog.

When the Obama administration’s new acting pardon attorney, Bob Zauzmer, arrived on the job in February, he ran headlong into a backlog of more than 9,000 clemency petitions awaiting a decision on whether they deserve the president’s consideration. Many of those petitions were the byproduct of the announcement of Clemency Project 2014, which was established by the Justice Department — to great fanfare — to process additional applications from federal prisoners seeking reductions of unjustifiably long drug sentences.

Zauzmer has his work cut out for him — it has been widely reported that his predecessor, Deborah Leff, stepped down in January over frustrations with a lack of resources.

Was the administration ever serious about Clemency 2014?

The rules for commutation requests even reaching the overburdened pardons office under the initiative are inexcusably discouraging. The worst is that inmates must have served at least 10 years of their sentence. Other rules state they must not have “a significant criminal history” (whatever that means); they must be nonviolent, low-level offenders; and they must be serving a sentence harsher than they would have gotten if convicted of the same offense today. Those who fall “outside of this initiative,”

according to the Justice Department, can still seek clemency under the old rules if their applications are “especially meritorious.”

The results of this great, unprecedented effort? Obama has a clemency record comparable to the least merciful presidents in history. He has granted just 70 pardons, the lowest mark for any full-term president since John Adams, and 187 commutations of sentence.

Meanwhile, 1,629 pardon petitions have been denied (more than five of the previous six presidents), as well as 8,123 requests for commutations (a new record). An additional 3,444 requests have been “closed without presidential action.”

Obama’s record is all the more deplorable because of assurances that he has made and that have

been made on his behalf. On April 21, 2014, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. encouraged federal prisoners to seek relief, noting that, despite sentencing reforms Obama signed into law in 2010, there were “still too many people . . . sentenced under the old regime” who needed attention. Clemency Project 2014 has, however, become a bureaucratic disaster, assigned to volunteer lawyers and law students with little if any experience in the pitfalls of dealing with the federal criminal justice system.

In June 2014, the Hill reported that Obama was pushing forward with a review of the clemency system. In March 2015, the president told the Huffington Post that the pardon process had been “revamped” and that he would be exercising the pardon power “more aggressively.” Seven months later, he told the Marshall Project that clemency applications were being processed “more effectively” and a “steady ramp up” was in play.

The Post recently reported that some additional grants are expected in the coming weeks, but “big” is hardly a word that appropriately describes what has gone on to date.

By now, Obama could have simply signed an amnesty

proclamation covering everyone qualifying for lesser sentences.

He could have taken the pardon process out of the Justice Department and given the job to a commission or an independent agency that would give him a degree of political cover if anything went wrong. Just such a move had been proposed by his first White House counsel, Gregory Craig.

Regardless, seven neglectful years allow for few pretty endings. If current patterns persist, Obama will go down as one of the most merciless presidents in history. On the other hand, even a moderate display of concern about clemency, with a few grants here and there, will almost certainly be viewed (and dubbed) as “a last-minute gesture,” granted to avoid any serious political accountability.

Having waited almost two years before granting his first presidential pardon, Obama would probably do as much harm to the general reputation of the pardon power as to his personal legacy with a controversial, Bill Clintonesque splurge in clemency just before leaving office. Sadly, many deserving recipients would be besmirched as well. This is the bed the president has made for himself. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Michelle Obama’s grace amid hate COURTLAND MILLOY is a local columnist for The Washington Post.

I recently attended a White House event that featured the cast of the Broadway hit “Hamilton.”

But it was the host for the occasion who was most impressive: first lady Michelle Obama, still standing tall, chin up, despite nearly eight years of enduring the kind of crudities that the wives of some of the current presidential candidates are starting to get a taste of.

Personal insults in politics are certainly nothing new, and even first ladies have long been regarded as fair game. But racial contempt for the Obamas and the development of so many new ways to express it resulted in an unprecedented barrage of ugliness toward her.

In a speech to graduates at Tuskegee University in Alabama last year, she recalled having “a lot of sleepless nights . . . fearing how my girls would feel if they found out what some people were saying about their mom.”

But it’s not just uncivil discourse that poisons the political environment.

In 2013, a monument in Georgia to her great-great-greatgrandmother — who was born into slavery — was vandalized.

In September 2014, a gunman fired seven shots into the White House and shattered a window just a few steps from

the first family’s formal living room. The president, first lady and one of their daughters were away. But their other daughter and Michelle Obama’s mother were there.

Fortunately, no one was injured.

It’s juvenile for Donald Trump to tweet an unflattering photo of rival Ted Cruz’s wife and in poor taste for an anti-Trump super PAC to post a nude photo of Trump’s wife.

But that’s nothing compared to the hateful caricaturing, disrespectful comments and threats that have been aimed at Michelle Obama.

As the first African American first lady, Obama was expected to be flawless — meaning fashionable, sophisticated, smart and worldly, and never too loud, too angry or too black.

“Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to keep my sanity and

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

not let others define me, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to have faith in God’s plan for me,” she told the Tuskegee graduates. “I had to ignore all of the noise and be true to myself — and the rest would work itself out.”

Health and nutrition, and caring for veterans are two of her causes that tend to get the most attention. But it was her passion for art and culture that brought the cast of “Hamilton” to the White House on March 14.

In the audience were students from high schools outside of Washington, D.C., in Virginia and Maryland.

“We host a lot of special events here,” Obama told them.

“We do a lot of really cool things.

But this, for me personally, is the coolest.”

Her affinity for artists, writers and entertainers is not without its critics. In a new book, “Listen, Liberal,” political analyst Thomas Frank argues that Democratic Party elites, such as the Clintons and the Obamas, have abandoned the working class in favor of a more affluent, “creative class” of professionals.

But there was nothing elitist in Michelle Obama’s comments about art to the students.

“We also wanted to highlight all different kinds of American art — on all the art forms: painting, music, culture — especially art forms that had never been seen in these walls,” she said. “So what did we start with? We started with spoken word, because no one had ever held a poetry slam in the White House, that’s for sure.”

They brought in a youngster from New York, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who performed the opening song from a musical he was working on about Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury.

Seven years later, “Hamilton” is the hottest ticket on Broadway. A high school history curriculum has developed around the themes in the play.

“I remember I was telling LinManuel that he’s got to do this for, like, the Middle East, and all the other issues,” Obama said.

“You’ve got to talk about slavery.

You’ve got to cover it all.”

So much for her critics.

“Are you all excited?” she asked the students. When they roared “Yes!” the first lady did a charming imitation of a teen girl shimmy to show that she was, too.

May the next first lady — or first man — hold up as well as Michelle Obama. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Cuba BY

C HRISTOPHER S ABATINI

President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba recently returned U.S. and world attention to the small Caribbean island, about which there a welter of assumptions — some propagated by the 1959 revolution, others by the Cuban diaspora and the rest by Americans who haven’t seen Cuba up close in more than half a century.

1

Cuba’s free health-care system is great.

While Cuba made great gains in primary and preventive care after the revolution, advanced health care is flagging.

In the famously closed country, reliable statistics and rigorous studies are impossible to come by, but anecdotally, it appears that the health system used by average Cubans is in crisis.

According to a report by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, hospitals “are generally poorly maintained and short of staff and medicines.”

The writer visited facilities in Havana and describes them as being in an advanced state of neglect and deterioration. In the 10 de Octubre facility, “the floors are stained and surgeries and wards are not disinfected. Doors do not have locks and their frames are coming off. Some bathrooms have no toilets or sinks, and the water supply is erratic. Bat droppings, cockroaches, mosquitos [sic] and mice are all in evidence.”

2

Cubans already have plenty of contact with other people, so lifting the U.S. embargo won’t help the country liberalize.

Yes, tourists from Europe, Canada, Latin America and other places (close to 3 million in 2015) have been visiting the island for years with little discernible effect on the regime.

But this doesn’t begin to match the exposure that a U.S. opening to Cuba could bring.

Once the ban is fully lifted, some 1.5 million Americans are

expected to travel there each year. But the real differencemaker will be Cubans themselves. More than 2 million Cuban Americans live in the United States, and they are likely to return for visits bearing news, goods, cash and ideas. Already, they make 700,000 trips each year since the cap on Cuban American travel was lifted in 2009. They are passing out USB drives with U.S. movies and TV series on them — already a popular sensation in ways the U.S. taxpayer-funded Radio and TV Marti could never become.

At the same time, U.S. tourism is already helping to support the burgeoning private sector in Cuba. Today there are close to 500,000 private entrepreneurs allowed under the law, many of them serving clients from the United States. More than 3,000 private restaurants serve meals in people’s homes and ask clients to review them on Yelp. More than 300 bed-and-breakfasts are open for tourists and listed on Airbnb. These numbers will explode if and when the embargo dies. And the tourists are supporting businesspeople who for once are gaining a measure of economic independence — and with it, a stake in a more democratic future.

3

Che Guevara was a freedom fighter.

After the revolution, Guevara oversaw the execution by firing squad of between 55 and several hundred prisoners, including officials from the previous government, whom he lined up after kangaroo-court

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Children gather in the streets of Cocodrilo, Cuba. The island nation is bracing for change as relations with the United States normalize.

trials. He also launched a system of labor camps that became home to gay people, AIDS victims and political opponents.

The regime of Fulgencio Batista, which Che helped overthrow, was autocratic, kleptocratic and violently repressive. But what followed the revolution wasn’t an experiment in high-minded ideals; it was a mass slaughter and brutal crackdown.

4

Cuban cigars are the best.

Shortly after the revolution, many of the large growers took the Cuban seeds to equally fertile soil in other countries, such as the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua. At the same time, according to a number of experts, a lack of technology and a lack of competition have decreased the quality of the national product.

And no wonder: Tobacco growing and cigar production are controlled by the state.

Since then, the relative quality of Cuban cigars has dropped.

According to Bill Shindler, the general manager of Rich’s Cigar Store in Portland, Ore., one of the principal problems is the lack of consistency. And in 2015, Cigar

Aficionado named just three Cuban brands among its top 25 smokes. Nicaraguan stogies, by contrast, landed in 13 spots.

5

Cuba has achieved racial equality.

A study published in Socialism and Democracy in May 2011 found that “black and mixed populations, on average, are concentrated in the worst housing conditions” and tend to work in lower-paying, manuallabor jobs.

With the rise of the tourism industry in the 1990s, the emergence of the entrepreneurial sector and an increase in remittances, structural disparities have increased. The Socialism and Democracy study found, based on surveys conducted among about 7,000 workers, that blacks and mestizos occupy only 5 percent of the lucrative higher-end jobs (managers and technicians) in the tourism industry but are heavily represented in low-level jobs. n Sabatini is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and director of Global Americans.

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2016

24

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