The Washington Post National Weekly - April 15, 2018

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2018

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Two sides of tariffs An Indiana family finds itself winning and losing in Trump’s trade war PAGE 12

Politics Ryan couldn’t top Trump 4

Nation Courts take on opioids’ cost 8

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THE FIX

Pompeo doesn’t allay concerns BY

A ARON B LAKE

O

ne of the biggest questions hanging over Mike Pompeo’s nomination as secretary of state is whether he’s too willing to do President Trump’s bid-

ding.

An answer he gave at Thursday’s confirmation hearing won’t do anything to temper those suspicions.

Pompeo was asked about a March 2017 briefing after which Trump asked everyone except Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to leave the room. According to The Washington Post’s reporting, Coats later told associates that Trump had, in that smaller group, asked him to intervene with then-FBI Director James B. Comey to get him to back off investigating former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. Trump also generally fumed about the Russia investigation, which Comey had confirmed just two days prior.

So, with Pompeo under oath, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) sought clarity on the episode. He asked Pompeo whether Trump had made such a request. And Pompeo offered three distinct responses: “I’m not going to talk about the conversations with the president that I had.”

“I don’t recall what he asked me that day, precisely.”

“He has never asked me to do anything that I consider remotely improper.”

As CNN’s Jim Scuitto notes, those statements are somewhat contradictory. If you don’t remember what Trump asked, how do you know it wasn’t improper?

Pompeo would probably argue that he would have remembered it if it were an improper request. But he didn’t say that he

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JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo sat for a confirmation hearing Thursday.

didn’t “recall” anything improper; he said Trump “never asked me to do anything that I consider remotely improper.”

But even if we’re over-parsing things here, the evasiveness is notable and a little difficult to swallow. If you’re not going to talk about the conversation, why say you don’t recall something about it? And if you don’t recall something about it, why also deny something specific?

It seemed as though Pompeo was looking for a way to absolve Trump, and he offered three of them at the same time without squaring them with one another.

The “I don’t recall” response is also somewhat difficult to swallow. This was during a key juncture in the Russia investigation, right after Comey publicly acknowledged the inquiry. And it was a very intimate meeting with Coats and Pompeo that Trump reportedly requested. If Trump asked Pompeo and/or

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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 27

Coats to intervene with Comey, that would sure seem to be something they would remember plenty about.

In the end, Pompeo doesn’t deny that Trump asked him to intervene, but he does deny that he was asked to do anything improper. Could it be that Trump did ask him to intervene but that Pompeo didn’t think intervening would have been improper? We just don’t know.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said in his opening statement Thursday that he wanted to make sure Pompeo’s relationship with Trump wasn’t “based on a deferential willingness to go along to get along.” It’s possible that Pompeo simply stumbled. But the disparate answers mean this issue — along with Pompeo’s more general deference toward Trump — probably deserves some clarity. n

© The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Farmer Ryan Rippy, left, feels strained by new tariffs. But the levies have been good for his father-in-law, millwright Barry Burkhart. Photographs by DAVID KASNIC for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

As Trump’s power grew, Ryan’s waned

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Speaker’s abrupt decision to not seek reelection likely shifts party more toward president BY

M ICHAEL S CHERER

A

s he announced his exit from public life, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan tried hard to show appreciation for the man who took the Republican Party from his grasp and transformed it into something else.

“I’m grateful to the president,” Ryan (R-Wis.) said four times in two minutes, with slight grammatical variations, in a news conference at the U.S. Capitol, noting that Donald Trump’s 2016 victory gave Republicans the power to cut

taxes and increase military spending.

But Wednesday’s praise did little to remove the shadow Trump casts over the end of Ryan’s career now that he has decided to forgo a campaign for reelection. The Trumpian revolution, which Ryan had long resisted, appeared to have claimed another victory, dispatching another occasional critic and reaffirming the president’s growing hold on a shrinking electoral coalition.

“Speaker Ryan is an embodiment of a particular kind of optimistic, pro-growth, pro-free-

market inclusive conservatism,” said Michael Steel, a former top adviser to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “And that is a very different feel and tone of where the party is going under President Trump.”

Ryan’s decision to abruptly throw in the towel, about six months before the midterms, is likely to only further Trump’s control of the party. Republican strategists worry it will also make it harder for the GOP to hold onto the House, a prospect that seems less likely after a recent Democratic victory in a special election out-

Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) prepares to speak with reporters Wednesday about his decision to not seek reelection in November.

side of Pittsburgh.

Not only are donors making clear they are more skeptical of the effort to retain the House, but the sudden departure of Ryan suggests the Republican ideological tent will continue to shrink. Including Ryan and Rep. Dennis A. Ross (R-Fla.), who also announced his retirement Wednesday, 46 Republicans have retired or said they will not run for reelection, and those ranks are likely to grow further in the coming weeks.

A former vice-presidential nominee, the highest-ranking Republican during Trump’s rise and

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POLITICS

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

once his party’s ideological standard-bearer, Ryan has spent the past two years resisting, minimizing and ultimately conceding to a Trumpian revolution he could neither contain nor control.

Ryan’s brand of politics, an uplifting fiscal conservatism rooted in his admiration of his former boss, Jack Kemp, seemed ascendant as recently as 2012, when Mitt Romney chose to add him to the presidential ticket. Four years later, as Trump was gaining popularity, Ryan warned the country of the divisive tactics the president continues to employ.

“Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations. Instead of playing the identity politics of ‘our base’ and ‘their base,’ we unite people around ideas and principles,” Ryan said in a March 2016 speech on the state of American politics. “We don’t resort to scaring you; we dare to inspire you.”

But Trump still won, not just the nomination but the White House, with a campaign that disparaged immigrants and encouraged public displays of anger at protesters and the press.

The protests Ryan offered rare-

ly had an impact. He denounced Trump’s comments about a federal judge as “racist,” condemned Trump’s approach to trade, defended immigration as “a thing to celebrate,” and continued to fight for reductions in entitlement spending long after Trump promised no cuts to Medicare and Social Security. As recently as January, Ryan described Trump’s vulgar description of some majorityminority nations as “very unfortunate” and “unhelpful.”

But throughout it all, Trump’s power within the party continued to grow, as Ryan’s waned. National polls show Trump enjoys dominant approval ratings among Republicans, with 85 percent of party voters supporting the president in the latest Quinnipiac Poll, a dramatic increase from his position before the 2016 elections.

“Republicans have united around him and his agenda at least up to this point,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “If you look at positions that Republicans as a whole have taken in the Trump era, positions they held as recently as two years ago no longer hold the same popularity.”

Polls have shown increasing Re-

publican support for expanding Social Security, a position closer to Trump than Ryan, as well as declining Republican support for free-trade agreements, which were once a cornerstone of conservative economic thinking.

At the same time, Ryan has struggled to hold together a fractious GOP caucus, initially failing in his attempt to pass a repeal of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law. Ryan’s favorability among Republican voters hovers around 7 in 10, and his overall favorability rating is about even with that of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in one poll, but he has higher favorability than her in some others.

Democrats began to evoke Ryan in campaign spots, seeing him as an easier target than Trump in some districts. “Paul Ryan is the single least popular political leader in the country,” said Jeb Fain, a spokesman for the Democraticsupporting House Majority PAC, before Ryan announced his retirement. “Across demographics and districts, Ryan’s less popular than Trump, and it comes down to policy.”

In recent months, Ryan has gen-

President Trump greets House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, center, and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) at the White House on June 6, 2017. Ryan spent two years resisting and then finally conceding to a Trumpian revolution he couldn’t control or contain.

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erally been more frank about the tensions of his job in private. At a donor retreat recently in Austin, Ryan interviewed White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly before a group of donors, according to a person who attended the event. At points, they seemed to be commiserating about the difficulty of working in the current political environment.

“The speaker and the chief of staff both talked like they had left office,” said one donor who attended the event, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the proceedings were private. “The speaker thanked the chief of staff for being one of the sane guys in office.” At another point, this person said, Kelly said that when he gets an outside-the-box request from the president likely to cause concern on Capitol Hill, the first person he calls is “Paul or Mitch,” a reference to Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to ensure they are informed.

House Republicans will also be forced to debate Ryan’s replacement as their leader, even as they run for reelection.

“This move by Ryan will set off an intramural food fight and take all eyes off the endgame of maintaining a pro-growth majority,” said Scott Reed, a political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who is planning millions in spending to defend Republican control in the House and Senate.

Corry Bliss, who runs the Congressional Leadership Fund, an outside group focused on keeping Republican control of the House, said Ryan told him he’ll keep raising money and will actually have more time now to do so.

“Paul Ryan’s commitment to protecting the House majority is greater today than it was yesterday,” Bliss said. “He told me personally that he’ll do whatever it takes to help CLF protect the Republican majority.”

For his part, Ryan maintained Wednesday that his departure would have no impact on the 2018 landscape. “I really don’t think a person’s race for Congress is going to hinge on whether Paul Ryan is speaker or not,” Ryan said. “So I really don’t think it affects it.”

It was an optimistic projection for a man who struggled to make his mark with an optimistic vision for the country. n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Targeting Comey before book release BY

J OHN W AGNER

I

n advance of a publicity tour

by James B. Comey to promote his new book, the Republican National Committee is preparing a widespread campaign to undercut his credibility, including a new website that dubs the former FBI director as “Lyin’ Comey.”

The website prominently features quotes from Democrats highly critical of Comey before his firing by President Trump nearly a year ago as he grew agitated by the Russia probe.

RNC officials say their effort will also include digital ads, a “war room” to monitor Comey’s television appearances, a rapid response team to rebut his claims in real time and coordination of Trump surrogates to fan out across other TV programs.

The broadside against Comey, a registered Republican for most of his adult life, comes as he is set to begin a media tour to tout his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty” — which, according to copies leaked Thursday, paints a devastating portrait of a president who built “a cocoon of alternative reality that he was busily wrapping around all of us.”

In advance of the book’s release Tuesday, Comey is scheduled to appear in an interview airing Sunday night with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. A teaser for the interview says Comey compares Trump to a “mob boss.”

Among other things, the 304page tell-all says Trump was obsessed with lewd allegations about him contained in an infamous dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

Comey’s memoir could damage the reputations of Trump and some of his top aides, and the president’s allies are scrambling to undercut Comey’s account.

In a statement, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said: “James Comey’s publicity tour is a selfserving attempt to make money and rehabilitate his own image. If Comey wants the spotlight back on him, we’ll make sure the American people understand why he has

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

A GOP campaign seeks to brand the former FBI director a liar as he begins his publicity tour no one but himself to blame for his complete lack of credibility.”

The RNC effort underscores the incredibly high stakes for Trump and his party as Comey details his interactions with the president, including his claim that Trump asked for a loyalty test. Many Democrats, meanwhile, are hopeful that new revelations will further bolster a case for the president’s impeachment.

Comey’s firing set off a chain of events that have endangered Trump’s presidency. The Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel to probe Russian interference in the 2016 election — and possible collusion with the Trump campaign — in the aftermath of Comey’s ouster.

With the Mueller probe escalating — including the FBI raid this past week on Trump’s personal lawyer’s home and office in Manhattan — Comey’s media appearances could pose a major public relations challenge for the White House.

“I’ve been around politics a long time, and I know fear when I see it,” said Jim Manley, a lobbyist and former senior aide to former Sen-

ate minority leader Harry M. Reid.

“This White House reeks of fear. . . . This shows me that they are prepared to use a scorched-earth strategy to undermine the FBI’s credibility. The party of law and order has become the party of trying to protect Trump at all costs.”

Doug Heye, a former RNC communications director, said the Republican effort shows Comey’s publicity tour is “going to dominate news coverage. He’s going to be seemingly everywhere.”

But Heye said the RNC is doing its job. “It would be political malpractice not to do this,” he said.

Heye said the biggest challenge for Republicans could be combating claims from Comey that have not previously made headlines.

In recent weeks, Trump has continued to attack Comey on Twitter. On Friday morning, Trump tweeted that Comey “is a weak and untruthful slime ball.”

Comey has suggested that he will have his say through his book.

“Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is

Then-FBI Director James B. Comey appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017.

His book, “A Higher Loyalty,” is critical of President Trump.

not,” Comey said in a tweet last month.

Earlier this week, Comey tweeted a picture of the room in his home where he was interviewed

by Stephanopoulos, which had been transformed into a small television studio.

As part of its effort, the RNC is also distributing talking points to Trump surrogates to further its case against Comey. Among them: “Comey is a consummate Washington insider who knows how to work the media to protect his flanks,” and “Americans will remember that his attempts to smear the Trump administration are nothing more than retaliation by a disgraced former official.”

Although Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adult life, he has said he no longer is. He was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and deputy attorney general

by President George W. Bush; he was appointed FBI director by President Barack Obama.

After Sunday’s interview, Comey has numerous other bookings, including news programs as well as appearances with CBS latenight host Stephen Colbert and the hosts of “The View.”

A large reception is also planned Tuesday, the day of the book’s release, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Among those quoted on the RNC website is the 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, who argued that her campaign was seriously undercut by the FBI’s investigation, overseen by Comey, into her use of a private email server while secretary of state. “Badly overstepped his bounds,” Clinton is quoted as saying of Comey.

Other Democrats whose past quotes are included on the website include Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) (“I do not have confidence in [Comey] any longer”), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) (“The FBI director has no credibility.”) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (“It would not be a bad thing for the American people if [Comey] did step down.”). n © The Washington Post

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A surge in protests and activism One in five Americans have been to rallies or marches since start of 2016

BY M ARY J ORDAN AND S COTT C LEMENT

T

ens of millions of Americans have joined protests and rallies in the past two years, their activism often driven by admiration or outrage toward President Trump, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll showing a new activism that could affect November elections.

One in five Americans have protested in the streets or participated in rallies since the beginning of 2016. Of those, 19 percent said they had never before joined a march or a political gathering.

Overwhelmingly, recently motivated activists are critical of Trump. Thirty percent approve of the president, and 70 percent disapprove, according to the poll.

And many said they plan to be more involved politically this year, with about one-third saying they intend to volunteer or work for a 2018 congressional campaign.

The poll offers a rare snapshot of how public activism has changed in the 50 years since large street protests and rallies last dominated the political landscape. Back in the turbulent Vietnam War era, college students were the face of protests. Today, many activists are older, white, well-educated and wealthy, the findings show.

A significant number — 44 percent — are 50 or older, and 36 percent earn more than $100,000 a year. Far more are Democrats than Republicans. An equal percentage are men and women. An outsize share live in the suburbs.

The Post-Kaiser poll is the most extensive study of rallygoers and protesters in more than a decade and one of the first attempts to quantify how many Americans are motivated by Trump to join these increasingly frequent events.

According to the findings, 10 percent of all adults said they joined a rally or protest since the beginning of 2016 as a reaction to Trump. Six percent turned out to oppose Trump, and 4 percent did so to support him.

“I never thought I was an activ-

POLL

Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation Poll

One-fifth of Americans say they attended a political rally in past two years Attended rally or protest in past two years 20%

Did not attend 80%

1 of every 5 rallygoers had never attended an event before.

Source: Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll Jan. 24-Feb. 22, 2018, margin of sampling error of +/- 3 percentage points among 1,850 adults.

ist — until now,” said Anna BralDuring the presidential race, Rallygoers more likely to be Democrats, ove, 69. The day after Trump’s Borgers, 61, got an email from the college2017 graduates and to of Trump January inauguration, shedisapprove Trump campaign inviting him to joined the massive Women’s attend a Trump rally in Phoenix.

Demographic and political makeup of rallygoers March in Washington, her first He is not sure how the campaign political gathering. got his address, but he downloadTRUMP APPROVAL With a busy job training people ed the ticket and went.

Among rallygoers on ever-changing computer sys“It could not have been simpler,” tems, Bralove for decades never said Borgers, 61, who lives just felt the need to spend precious free outside Phoenix. That was the first time protesting. But recently, she rally of his life. said, “I looked up and saw life Borgers loved being with likewasn’t what we thought.” Now, she minded people and so many other said, she has lost her trust in those military veterans. “I liked the enin power, both in Congress and the ergy, the vibe,” he said.

White House.

Borgers said the only other canSo, to be heard and counted, she didate he admired who might joined a second women’s rights have drawn him to a political rally march in Florida near her home was Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, early this year. More recently, she but back then, he was stationed on flew to Washington for the March a Navy ship. for Our Lives to push for more A registered Republican, Borgrestrictive gun laws, one of 800 ers said his party no longer reflectApprove of Trump of Trump rallies held around the nation the edDisapprove his views, and he cheered same day. Standing in a sea of Trump’s break with the GOP estabprotesters near the White House, lishment. “I saw him as a change vs. 43% of vs. 54% of Bralove said she is frightened that agentnon-rallygoers and thought the Republican non-rallygoers Trump is in the Oval Office.

Party should be punched in the But Chris Borgers, a Trump fan nose,” he said. who plans to vote for him again in In addition to the large number PARTY AFFILIATION 2020, sees the president as aAmong rare rallygoers of rallygoers, the poll showed an politician worth making the effort even bigger number — over 1 in 4 to hear in person.

— of more quietly politically active

30%

70%

adults. These people took multiple political actions, such as volunteering for a campaign, joining a boycott or donating money.

The poll was conducted in the first two months of this year among a random sample of 1,850 adults nationwide, including 832 who attended a protest or rally in the last two years.

“My issue is abortion — it’s wrong,” said John Blackley, 42, a teacher from Atlanta, who organizes members of his church to knock on doors on behalf of antiabortion candidates. “I am almost embarrassed to be at a political rally. It’s just not the kind of thing I do. I do my part, but I am not one of those people with pins and buttons from marches and rallies.”

Gloria Eive, an 81-year-old Californian, said these days, she doesn’t have the endurance she once did for street protests. In 1965, Eive was the San Francisco chair of the Women for Peace march against the Vietnam War. “Now, I march with my pen — and to the extent I can, with my pocketbook,” said Eive, who writes lawmakers and donates to campaigns. She roots for those marching for good causes: “All of the important achievements of the last 100 years have started with marches and protests.”

Tens of millions of Americans do not even vote. Roughly 40 percent of those eligible to cast a ballot have not voted in recent presidential elections, according to the U.S. Elections Project. In midterm years, about 60 percent have skipped voting.

Increasing voter turnout could affect the outcome of November’s midterms. Eighty-three percent of rallygoers and protesters say they are certain to vote.

Nearly 4 in 10 said they plan to become more involved in political causes. Among the one-third who planned to work or volunteer for races, 64 percent say they will do so for Democrats, and 26 percent plan to work for Republicans.

“I will vote. I will give money. I will go to marches,” said David Orelowitz, 59, a software engineer from New York City. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Fight against opioids moves to court K ATIE Z EZIMA McArthur, Ohio BY

T

he opioid epidemic has affected nearly every aspect of life in Vinton County.

Teachers buy shoes for students whose addicted parents send them to school in footwear held together with tape. Overdose deaths have surged. Foster care is overwhelmed. The jail is bursting at the seams.

The expenses related to caring for the children of drug abusers and locking up drug offenders here eat up about 25 percent of the Ohio county’s $4 million annual budget, a hole that it can’t plug.

Now, Vinton officials think someone should help foot the bill: Big Pharma.

“It almost feels like Vinton County was preyed upon,” said Lily Niple, who got addicted to prescription opioids here but managed to push through, having been clean for more than two years. “It’s like a huge exploitation of the people here. And it was negligent. Just complete disregard for the future.”

As communities continue to reel and police and emergency responders struggle to keep the addicted alive, the biggest fight against the opioid epidemic is being waged in a federal courthouse in Cleveland, where hundreds of lawsuits brought by cities, counties, Native American tribes and unions have been brought together into one case with a scope that rivals anything seen in the U.S. legal system.

Vinton County and hundreds of municipalities across the nation are suing companies that manufactured and distributed powerful painkillers and others up and down the supply chain, arguing that they knowingly peddled massive amounts of a highly addictive product that set in motion a public health crisis. The plaintiffs argue that the vast network of opioid businesses should pay for the damage the drugs wrought.

“This is probably the most complex piece of litigation in the history of our country,” said Paul J. Hanly Jr., one of the lead plaintiffs

ANDREW SPEAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Hundreds of municipalities sue distributors and suppliers to make them pay for epidemic’s costs lawyers.

The consolidated case is being compared to the one that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements against tobacco companies and restricted the sale and marketing of cigarettes. Some of the same tobacco lawyers are now working on the opioids trial.

Plaintiffs are making different, but similar, claims and suing companies in the drug pipeline. Some allege the drug companies created a public nuisance with their products. Others argue that deceptive marketing led to an epidemic.

Some say state consumer protection laws were violated. Some of the lawyers allege that the distribution system, which includes wholesalers and distributors of powerful narcotics, amounted to a criminal enterprise. A small group is suing pharmacy benefit managers. Some are suing pharmacies.

One lawyer is suing on behalf of children born to mothers who were addicted to opioids.

“We brought suit because we recognized that the companies had to both be held accountable

for their long-term marketing practices that really created this market and fostered a misleading attitude toward these drugs as a pain management,” said Edward N. Siskel, the Chicago corporation counsel. “And then to make sure that they reform the industry going forward.”

The Justice Department filed a motion this month requesting that it be allowed to participate in settlement discussions as a friend of the court. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the department would seek repayment for the cost of the drug crisis because the federal government has borne substantial expenses.

The sheer number of defendants in the case — more than a dozen — also is staggering and unprecedented. And they could start pointing fingers at one another. They include the manufacturers Purdue Pharma and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the distributors AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and Cardinal Health and pharmacy benefit managers such as Express Scripts.

Lily Niple, 34, who has struggled with opioid addiction, said her home town in Vinton County, Ohio, feels as if it was “preyed upon” by drug distributors and manufacturers.

Janssen, in a statement, argued that the claims made against the company are “baseless and unsubstantiated” and that its marketing and promotion of the medications were “appropriate and responsible.” Purdue Pharma, in a statement, said it is “deeply troubled” by the opioid crisis and “dedicated to being part of the solution.” Express Scripts said it denies the allegations and “will vigorously defend ourselves.”

The Healthcare Distribution Alliance, a trade group that represents distributors and is not involved in the litigation, said it “defies common sense” to think that distributors are responsible for the number of opioid prescriptions written across the country.

“Those bringing lawsuits would be better served addressing the root causes, rather than trying to redirect blame through litigation,” Senior Vice President John Parker said.

The litigation comes as people at all levels of government have identified opioid abuse as a major public health — and societal — woe, one that thus far has defied solution. And in many ways, lawyers and legal experts say, the opioid lawsuit is different and far larger in scope than efforts such as the action against Big Tobacco.

The opioid epidemic kills hundreds of people each day, akin to the 1918 flu pandemic. The judge overseeing the case, Dan Aaron Polster of the Northern District of Ohio, said during a January hearing that this scourge was manmade and that lawyers need to reach a resolution quickly, because about 150 people are dying each day.

Greta Johnson, assistant chief of staff to the executive of Summit County, Ohio, said the county has spent nearly $200 million during the past decade trying to keep up with the costs of addiction. That includes a mobile unit for when the morgue is at capacity, as it was five times last year.

“We are literally stacking bodies,” Johnson said. “That was the reason for the lawsuit.”

The crisis also is affecting the national economy, something that

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NATION could drive a settlement well past record-breaking territory. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates that the economic cost of the opioid crisis was $504 billion just in 2015, or 2.8 percent of that year’s gross domestic product. Altarum, a nonprofit organization that studies health care, estimates the opioid crisis cost the country more than $1 trillion from 2001 to 2017.

Attorneys argue that some municipalities have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to fight opioid-related concerns. Health-care costs for municipal employees have skyrocketed. Jails are packed.

Counties have purchased thousands of doses of a drug used to reverse overdoses, and first responders are working overtime, often reviving the same people over and over again.

The merged federal case is called multidistrict litigation, or MDL. Lawsuits of its kind are rare — some lawyers admit they don’t even know what they are — but are increasing as the economy nationalizes and courts are being used to solve problems that the government can’t. Other MDLs include litigation surrounding concussions suffered by NFL players, which was settled for about $1 billion, and lawsuits from the BP oil spill that settled for about the same amount.

Judges understand that “the MDL is being entrusted with the most difficult problems of our time,” said Jaime L. Dodge, director of the Institute for Complex Litigation and Mass Claims at the Emory University School of Law. “At some level I think there’s a recognition that in some of these cases it’s not just a dollar or cents, it’s about fixing ongoing societal problems.”

How exactly to fix the problem of opioids is the question that Polster and the hundreds of lawyers are trying to answer. The judge has said that he wants to see a speedy settlement and an end to the suffering. Polster wants to help solve the crisis and do something to “dramatically reduce the quantity” of opioids being disseminated, manufactured and distributed, he said in a January hearing. He also wants to ensure the drugs are being used properly.

“My objective is to do something meaningful to abate the crisis and to do it in 2018,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Study: Seas rising too fast to save all of Mississippi Delta BY

C HRIS M OONEY

L

ouisiana is proceeding with ambitious plans to redirect the Mississippi River and rebuild some of its rapidly vanishing wetlands — but even this massive intervention may not be enough to save the most threatened lands from fast rising seas, scientists concluded in a study published this past week.

The study uses a methodology

ANJALI FERNANDES

Zhixiong Shen and Elizabeth Chamberlain collect a sample for “optical dating” along Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana, an abandoned course of the Mississippi River.

called “optical dating” to study how the river built an area called the Lafourche subdelta in coastal Louisiana, where the Mississippi dumped loads of sediment as much as 600 years ago, when it changed paths. The technology lets scientists identify the last time that long-buried sand was exposed to sunlight and, therefore, determine the rate at which the river naturally built up land by carrying sediment downstream.

“What we found was that, on average, it produced somewhere between 6 and 8 square kilometers of land per year, and the shoreline migrated seaward by somewhere between 100 and 150 meters per year,” said Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Tulane University geologist who was one of the study’s authors.

“Those numbers in themselves I

find pretty impressive.”

“But the problem is that if you put that in the context of the rates of wetland loss that we’ve seen over the last century, it doesn’t even come close,” he added.

The study, released Wednesday, reports that wetland loss at present is more like 45 square kilometers a year, or more than one acre an hour (an acre is close to the size of a football field).

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are valuable as the home to human communities and also because they help protect New Orleans from hurricanes and sea-level rise.

At the same time they’re a major habitat for birds, and they nourish fisheries on which humans rely.

The research was published in Science Advances and led by Tulane’s Elizabeth Chamberlain with colleagues at Tulane and other institutions in the United States, Britain, Austria and the Netherlands.

The scientists took their samples in areas of solid land where you would hardly expect there was once open water or a marsh — but, then, that’s the point. The Mississippi River is a great builder of land as it carries large volumes of sediment and silt downstream.

Some of that sediment is now trapped behind dams along the length of the river, but much still reaches the delta. The problem is that factors that drive wetland loss are more powerful — the sinking of the land (subsidence), the intrusion of saltwater as seas rise, the dissolution of wetlands that have been cut into canals to support oil and gas pipes, and more.

And on top of that, sea-level rise is now occurring much faster than it did when the Bayou Lafourche land was built. The current rate is about 3.2 millimeters per year, and it is believed to be accelerating.

But when the Lafourche subdelta grew, the sea-level rise rate was 0.6 millimeters per year.

“Lafourche formed during a relatively favorable time when the rate of sea-level rise was about as low as it can get in this region,”

Tornqvist said.

The conclusion is that, well — the river just may not be able to keep pace. That’s even though the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, using funds from the BP settlement, is moving forward with two large sediment “diversions” that within a few years could start channeling huge volumes of river water in new directions, in a bid to protect areas around New Orleans in particular. Many scientists have applauded the plan as a way of harnessing nature’s power to counter land loss.

But the rate at which the diversions may build land may not be enough for many areas, Tornqvist said.

“The results are, on one hand, encouraging and helpful as the state of Louisiana moves forward with designing and implementing large diversions of sediment from the river that mimic the natural processes that built this landscape in the first place,” said Don Boesch, the president emeritus of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that the delta studied was building when there was very little rise in ocean levels,” Boesch continued. “Already, global sea level is rising many times faster. To have a fighting chance in maintaining some semblance of a functioning delta, the world must quickly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and slow sea-level rise.”

So humans may be able to actively counter some of the wetland losses, but not all of it.

“We’re still convinced that these river diversions are basically the only real shot at getting something done in terms of coastal restoration,” Tornqvist said. “But you have to be really realistic about what you can expect, and it’s going to be have to be very focused on small and carefully selected parts of the delta. It means very difficult choices are going to have to be made.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Resisting virginity tests in India V IDHI D OSHI Pune, India BY

I

n the run-down neighborhood of Bhatnagar in this sleepy Indian city, a small rebellion is underway. The new generation of the close-knit Kanjarbhat community is staging protests at weddings to end the centuries-old practice of virginity tests.

The tests typically happen like this: The bride and groom consummate their marriage on a white cloth. The virgin bride proves her “purity” by staining the cloth with blood from her broken hymen. The following day, a council of community elders publicly asks the groom, “Were the goods pure?”

Virginity tests are rare in modern India and happen only in small pockets, such as among the Kanjarbhat, a once-ostracized tribe.

But the predominantly Hindu country is seeing waves of change brought about by a new generation that has benefited from policies ensuring that members of India’s lower castes, long disadvantaged in the hierarchical social system, receive an education and employment opportunities. And members of the younger generation have focused much of their attention on women’s rights, pitting them against community elders who want to uphold ancestral traditions and value systems.

Leelabai, a 55-year-old divorced woman who goes by only one name, recalls how she was put through the test when she was 12. “At the time, I was young,” she said. “I didn’t know what was happening.”

For many years, Leelabai hid her anger over the test and even allowed it to be performed on her daughter. Now, she and a group of widows and divorcées in the Kanjarbhat community are denouncing the ritual, triggering a vehement backlash from those who want to preserve the practice.

A rift in the community began after Vivek Tamaichikar started a WhatsApp group of Kanjarbhat young people who want to end virginity tests. Tamaichikar, who hopes to marry his fiancee later this year, said he won’t allow his

SHANKAR NARAYAN/HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

A close-knit tribe is divided over the pushback to a centuries-old tradition to ensure brides’ ‘purity’ family to put her through the test, which he thinks is misogynistic and cruel. Members of the community have threatened to disown the couple if he doesn’t follow tradition, he said.

A number of Kanjarbhat — both men and women — said that Tamaichikar’s campaign has put an unwanted spotlight on the community’s rituals. Some described how Kanjarbhat girls at colleges were taunted by their peers who waved white handkerchiefs with red ink stains as they walked past.

Others said marriage offers from Kanjarbhat communities outside the state had diminished.

Women who spoke about going through virginity tests said members of the community lied to outsiders about the existence of the ritual.

“They’re all liars,” Leelabai said.

Community members are afraid to speak against the village council of community elders, or panchayat, Tamaichikar added. Those who do face boycotts and intimidation.

Stigmatized for decades by po-

lice and government officials after being classified as a “criminal tribe” under India’s colonial rule in 1871, the Kanjarbhat prefer to keep the authorities out of their affairs.

Legal disputes within the community, from marriages to killings, are presided over by the panchayat.

Despite the community’s access to benefits through India’s affirmative action policies from the 1960s onward, poverty remains rampant in Bhatnagar. Kanjarbhat millennials are the first generation to have widespread access to higher education and Western media.

The resulting differences in education levels have cleaved the community in two. Those against virginity tests are “defaming” the Kanjarbhat people, community members said.

“Why are they doing all this in front of the media?” said Jitendra Karalekar, a Kanjarbhat man who denied that virginity tests happen.

“If they want to do all this, they should do it behind a curtain. We want people in Washington and everywhere to think of us highly.”

Kanjarbhat community members in Pune, India, support the virginity ritual.

Vivek Tamaichikar created a group for those who oppose the test. He won’t allow his fiancee to be put through the ritual, which he finds misogynistic.

Tamaichikar is not the first in his community to speak out; he is carrying on a battle his uncle and aunt started in 1996. Krishna and Aruna Indrekar married after a 10-year romance and refused to go through the virginity test, the pair recounted, which distanced them from the community.

Krishna, who got a university education and later a government job, was snubbed by members of his family and community who thought his years at college made him believe he was superior to them. When he announced he would marry Aruna in court rather than follow the panchayat’s orders, he faced threats.

Krishna’s stepbrother, Irani, who sits on the panchayat, said he thought his brother’s refusal to follow tradition was arrogant.

“He’s very self-righteous,” Irani said. “He won’t listen to us. The test that you’re talking about, it will never stop. It has been going on for years, and it will go on for years.”

The women in the community are divided. Young, married women were unwilling to speak on the record out of fear of reprisals from the community.

Sapna Rawalkar, a community doctor, said there is a practice of elders asking about the woman’s purity, but the term “virginity test” is a misinterpretation of their traditions, which she said protect women. Asking the husband to testify to his wife’s virginity publicly, for instance, is a practice that protects the bride from future allegations against her character.

“They’ve taken this and exaggerated it and colored it in their own way,” she said.

But Vivek’s cousin Priyanka Tamaichikar said she thinks the protests signal the beginning of change.

“I thought I was the only girl in my community who thought the tests were wrong,” she said. “I’ve seen a bride being beaten. I’ve seen women going into the room to look at the stained cloth. All my life, I’ve thought, one day, I’ll get up and show them they’re wrong. One day, I’ll do something.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2018

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Kim plane may not get him to summit BY

D AVID N AKAMURA

W

ith a million-man army, a bevy of intercontinental ballistic missiles and a growing nuclear arsenal, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has sought to project the image of a powerful leader who can face off against President Trump and China’s Xi Jinping.

Yet as he prepares for a possible summit with Trump next month, it’s not clear that Kim possesses another piece of crucial hardware for the aspiring global negotiator — an airplane that could reliably fly him across the Pacific Ocean, or to Europe, without stopping.

“We used to make fun of what they have — it’s old stuff,” said Sue Mi Terry, who served as a senior CIA analyst on Korean issues during the George W. Bush administration. “We would joke about their old Soviet planes.”

Most public speculation over the undecided summit location has focused on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where South Korean President Moon Jae-in will meet Kim this month. Others have pointed to nearby China or Russia. But some analysts have suggested Trump would favor a grander setting in the United States or another country outside the region — such as Singapore, Switzerland or Sweden.

That has raised a question about how Kim, who made a trip to Beijing in an armored train last month, would get there.

“In terms of his traveling anywhere, it would not be a problem — the South Koreans or the Swedes would give him a ride,” said Victor Cha, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served as senior Asia director at the National Security Council under Bush. “But it would be embarrassing.”

If Kim took his own plane, stopping to refuel on the way to any summit could also prove embarrassing by highlighting the limits of the aircraft — and where to stop would be complicated as well, given the number of countries that

KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY/REUTERS

Ahead of a possible Trump meeting, some worry about N. Korean fleet’s ‘embarrassing’ limitations have sanctioned North Korea.

The logistics of Kim’s movements are likely to draw less public scrutiny than, say, whether the North is serious about denuclearization or how Trump is preparing. But Kim’s surprise visit to Beijing offers a window into the fundamental dichotomy of North Korea, as he attempts to modernize the regime’s image abroad while presiding over a nation where the vast majority of its 25 million citizens lack sufficient food and electricity.

This sharp contrast is the byproduct of a nation that has remained cloistered since the Korean War armistice in 1953 and invested a lopsided portion of its limited trade revenue into the development of military weapons.

Since assuming power in 2011, Kim, who is thought to be in his early 30s, has tried to project a more charismatic and worldly image than his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, Kim Il Sung.

That has included building skyscrapers in the capital city of

Pyongyang, constructing a luxury ski resort in Kangwon Province to bolster international tourism, and opening several private runways near Kim family compounds for single-engine personal jets.

Kim Jong Il was afraid of flying and, on the rare occasion that he left Pyongyang, rode in an armored train similar to the one used by his son on the China trip last month. In recent years, the younger Kim staged a series of photo-ops designed to demonstrate that not only does he not share his father’s aversion to the skies — he took international flights to attend boarding school in Switzerland — but that he is actually a pilot.

In December 2014, North Korean state media released a video of him behind the controls of the An-148, a Ukrainian-made plane designed for midrange, regional trips that was acquired by Air Koryo, the North’s national airline.

Less than two months later, images were released of Kim on a different plane — a presidential jet

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves from a train during an unofficial visit to China, in a photo released March 28.

Even as Kim and President Trump prepare for a possible summit, it is unclear if the North has a plane capable of ferrying the leader out of the region.

quickly dubbed “Air Force Un” — en route to inspect a construction site. He was photographed holding a phone to his ear while seated in a plush leather chair, behind a polished wooden desk arrayed with blueprints. This plane was a Cold War-era Ilyushin-62, a Soviet-manufactured long-range jet.

Yet some analysts concluded there was reason to doubt the plane’s reliability due to its age and lack of regular testing.

In 2016, Enrique Perrella, publisher of Airways Magazine, paid $2,200 to a London-based tour company to join a group of 75 foreigners to ride on several older Air Koryo jets. When he arrived in Pyongyang, “only a very small portion” of Air Koryo’s two dozen planes appeared operational, Perrella said in an interview. The others were parked on the tarmac, some covered or missing parts.

The newest planes, including a 21st-century Russian model, were “short range,” he said.

Still, Perrella said he thought Air Koryo could probably find something in its fleet to handle a transcontinental flight.

Charles Kennedy, a Londonbased aviation journalist who has been to North Korea numerous times, was more bullish, noting in an email that the Il-62 remains in use for heads of state in Russia, Sudan and Ukraine. He added that Air Koryo also maintains two Tupolev jets, delivered in 2010, that are similar to a Boeing 757, with a 3,000-mile range and an “excellent safety record.”

Kennedy acknowledged that a trip from Pyongyang to Los Angeles — a flight path of 5,900 miles — would stretch the boundary range of Kim’s Il-62. But he emphasized that the plane “is extremely rudimental technology and the North Koreans would have no trouble keeping it in top condition.”

By comparison, Air Force One, a Boeing VC-25 similar to a 747, is capable of flying nearly 8,000 miles without refueling.

Now, Air Koryo flights are limited to Chinese cities and to Vladivostok, Russia, just over 400 miles from Pyongyang. n

© The Washington Post

n

Ryan Rippy checks on grain levels and equipment at his Wingate, Ind., farm this month.

COVER STORY

STEEL’S RISE IS TEMPERED BY A CROP’S FALL

F

BY DAVID J. LYNCH Crawfordsville, Ind. armer Ryan Rippy had been haggling for almost three months over the price of a new storage bin when he felt the pinch of President Trump’s trade offensive.

The contractor told Rippy he needed to order the 30-foot structure immediately or see its roughly $50,000 price swell, perhaps by $5,000, thanks to a tariff on imported steel that the president imposed last month. Already facing the possible loss of $200,000 in crop sales to China, irked by another round of Trump tariffs, Rippy signed the paperwork.

A trade war is bad news for farmers such as Rippy, 31, who raises soybeans, corn and cattle on a 1,500-acre farm outside this central Indiana town. But it’s good news for his father-inlaw, Barry Burkhart, 50, a millwright in a local steel plant, whose job could depend upon the tariffs keeping steel prices high.

DAVID KASNIC FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY DAVID KASNIC FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Ryan Rippy has already felt the pinch of President Trump’s tariffs when purchasing a storage bin before its roughly $50,000 price potentially swells, perhaps by $5,000, thanks to a levy on imported steel. And just the threat of an interruption in Chinese soybean orders disrupted his effort to sign contracts for next year’s crop.

As Washington and Beijing swap threats in their escalating trade dispute, this Indiana family shows how global commerce is marbled through communities across the country. Local residents compete with, sell to and work for foreign enterprises, a reminder that in trade wars, it’s hard to shoot at the enemy without hitting a friend.

“I want to see everybody rise. I don’t know that tariffs are the right solution, because it helps some industries and hurts others” Rippy said. “Maybe we should look for other solutions that help everybody.”

Two products at the center of the trade conflict, steel and soybeans, determine whether this area prospers. No other Indiana county produced more soybeans last year than Montgomery County’s 7.6 million bushels, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. No company employs more local residents than steelmaker Nucor, which has about 750 workers in a mill located amid cornfields outside of town.

As a result of its agricultural and manufacturing base, the surrounding county is among the one-fifth of U.S. counties that are most vulnerable to retaliatory Chinese tariffs, according to calculations by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

“My community is concerned about that because things are going so well here right now.

We’re hitting our stride,” said Todd Barton, 51, the town’s Republican mayor. “We could be

collateral damage. You could see Nucor Steel suffer. You could see our farm economy suffer.”

Trump in recent weeks has moved aggressively to implement his “America First” trade policy, intended to return millions of lost manufacturing jobs to the United States. But by imposing tariffs on solar panels, washing machines and industrial metals — and threatening to put up barriers to $150 billion in Chinese products — the president is protecting some Americans while exposing others to higher prices or to retaliation by U.S. trading partners.

“Personally, right now, it’s great. We’re running like gangbusters,” said Burkhart, who works for Steel Dynamics. “For me and my family, it’s a good opportunity to make money. . . . For my son-in-law, my daughter and her family, it may hurt and I hate that.”

The trade skirmish with China began with Trump, citing national security considerations, acting to limit imports of steel and aluminum. It has expanded to include potential tariffs on a total of $150 billion in Chinese electronics, aerospace parts and machinery.

China has responded by threatening its own import taxes on U.S. products, notably including soybeans, corn and pork.

For farmers, the punch and counterpunch threaten to raise their costs and cut their sales.

Although the president later exempted twothirds of global steel imports from the tariffs, the levies still mean higher prices for the Rippys’ new 15,000-bushel storage bin and for equipment like the new combine they’re con-

7.6 million bushels No other Indiana county produced more soybeans last year than Montgomery County, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

sidering buying this year.

Those giant machines, which harvest grain crops, cost more than $500,000, so an increase of even a couple of percentage points means thousands of dollars in additional costs.

China buys 61 percent of U.S. soybean exports, and more than 30 percent of overall U.S. production. Just the threat of an interruption in Chinese soybean orders sent commodity prices plunging and disrupted the family’s effort to sign contracts for next year’s crop.

Rippy farms land that has been in his mother’s family since 1848, when his ancestors settled at the intersection of three counties.

The young farmer’s schoolteacher wife recently gave birth to Burkhart’s fourth grandchild.

The Rippys’ spartan, wood-paneled office is appointed with a pair of wooden desks and a worn plaid couch. A framed collection of Indian arrowheads unearthed by their plows adorns one wall.

Global issues have shadowed Rippy Farms since Ryan’s father, Howard, 61, raised his first crop in 1980, the year President Jimmy Carter imposed an embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan.

That may explain why the elder Rippy is more sanguine about the tariff threat than his son. The wet, cold weather that has delayed the spring planting already had Ryan Rippy on edge before the tariff announcement.

His dad offers a reassuring perspective. The ex-businessman in the White House talks a tough game as part of a negotiating strategy.

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2018

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Meanwhile, the steel tariffs that concern Ryan Rippy are helping his father-in-law, Barry Burkhart, 50, a millwright in a local steel plant, whose job could depend on keeping steel prices high. Burkhart has been laid off before, after a flood of cheap imported steel in to the United States forced over two dozen steel companies to go bankrupt.

“I’m just not convinced that everything he’s threatened will happen,” Howard Rippy said.

Responding to cries of worry from farmstate Republicans, Trump recently ordered Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to develop a plan to protect farmers from retaliation.

On Monday, the president repeated his promise of help, saying that “farmers will be better off than they ever were” after enduring some short-term financial pain.

No one here is sure what that will mean, but some are wary of additional government intervention in their market, even if it’s designed to help them.

“If they do something for farmers, how fair is that to the retailers and the other industries?”

Howard Rippy said.

Across the street from the Nucor mill, which has a giant American flag along one side, is the Ceres Solutions farmer cooperative, where Ryan Rippy and his dad purchase truckloads of fertilizer, fuel and seed.

The steelmaker last year sought Washington’s protection, complaining that statesubsidized Chinese mills are flooding global markets with low-priced steel, contributing to the loss of manufacturing jobs and the erosion of Nucor’s customer base.

“China, in particular, has been cheating for years,” said Ron Dickerson, who retired three years ago as general manager of the local plant.

“The tariff is just a means to resolve the issue.”

Nucor maintains a no-layoffs policy, but inexpensive imports have cost domestic pro-

ducers sales and reduced some of their outputlinked pay.

“It has lowered production and clearly affected the teammates out there,” said Dickerson, referring to China.

Nucor selected Crawfordsville for the mill, one of its largest at 1.9 million square feet, in the late 1980s, drawn by the rural work ethic.

About a decade later, Burkhart was hired by another steelmaker in Pittsboro, about 25 miles east.

His timing was unfortunate. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis unleashed a flood of cheap imported steel into the U.S. market, driving prices to their lowest point in 20 years.

The effect on domestic producers was “catastrophic,” according to a 2002 report by the U.S. trade representative.

More than two dozen steel companies declared bankruptcy, including Burkhart’s employer. The father of three was among those let go.

“With a wife and kids at home, that kind of hit hard,” he said. “We made do for a few years. I worked in different jobs to get by.”

Steel Dynamics outbid Nucor to acquire the bankrupt mill in 2002. By 2004, the new owners rehired Burkhart at his old plant. Business was good at first, but within a few years, the economy stumbled into the worst recession since the 1930s and his pay fluctuated.

“I probably had more bad years than good ones,” he said.

But steelmakers are now doing well financial-

“Personally, right now, it’s great.

We’re running like gangbusters.

For me and my family, it’s a good opportunity to make money. . . .

For my son-inlaw, my daughter and her family, it may hurt, and I hate that.”

Barry Burkhart, above, a steelworker whose son-in-law Ryan Rippy, a farmer, raises soybeans, corn and cattle

ly. Nucor reported $1.3 billion in profits last year, its best performance since 2008. Steel Dynamics was profitable four of the past five years, and its $806 million profit last year was more than double what it earned one year earlier.

Burkhart is cheered by signs that Trump’s tariffs are spurring steel production. U.S. Steel and Republic Steel are reopening shuttered Midwestern mills in Illinois and Ohio. He likes that the president is making tough decisions and standing up to China.

“China has been putting the hurt to us for a long time. President Trump is fighting back and China doesn’t like it,” he said, sitting in his Ford pickup as snowflakes swirled outside.

“They don’t like the hurt being put back on them.”

Burkhart and his son-in-law struggle to make sense of the latest news from Washington. China’s violations of American intellectual property — the administration’s stated rationale for its latest tariff blast — is accepted here as fact.

But the intricacies of the matter are elusive and many here, in a part of Indiana where Trump won nearly 76 percent of the 2016 vote, put their faith in the president’s claim of superior negotiating skills.

“I hope in these decisions, my family doesn’t suffer,” Burkhart said. “I’m hopeful this doesn’t turn into such a trade war it starts bankrupting companies and farmers and small businesses.

I’m so hopeful that doesn’t happen.” n © The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

EDUCATION

Lessons in navigating the Internet D REW H ARWELL Newark BY

T

he fifth-graders of Yolanda Bromfield’s digitalprivacy class had just finished their lesson on online-offline balance when she asked them a tough question: How would they act when they left school and reentered a world of prying websites, addictive phones and online scams?

Susan, a 10-year-old in pink sneakers who likes YouTube and the mobile game “Piano Tiles 2,” quietly raised her hand. “I will make sure that I don’t tell nobody my personal stuff,” she said, “and be offline for at least two hours every night.”

Between their math and literacy classes, these elementary school kids were studying up on perhaps one of the most important and least understood school subjects in America — how to protect their privacy, save their brains and survive the big, bad Web. Classes such as these, though surprisingly rare, are spreading across the country amid hopes of preparing kids and parents for some of the core tensions of modern childhood: what limits to set around technologies whose longterm effects are unknown — and for whom young users are a prime audience.

The course offered to Susan’s 28-student class at First Avenue School, a public neighborhood school in Newark, is part of an experimental curriculum designed by Seton Hall University Law School professors and taught by legal fellows such as Bromfield.

It has been rolled out in recent months to hundreds of children in a dozen classrooms across New York and New Jersey.

The classes are free, folded into kids’ daily schedules and taught in the classrooms where the fifthand sixth-graders typically learn about the scientific method and the food chain. Gaia Bernstein, director of Seton Hall Law’s Institute for Privacy Protection, which designed the program, said each class includes about a half-dozen lessons taught to the kids over

DREW HARWELL/THE WASHINGTON POST

New curriculum aims to help tech-immersed kids find a safe balance — and help parents keep up several weeks, as well as a separate set of lectures for parents concerned about how “their children are disappearing into their screens.”

Professors designed the program — funded by a $1.7 million grant awarded by a federal judge as part of a class-action consumerprotection settlement over junk faxes — to teach students about privacy, reputation, online advertising and overuse at the age when their research found that many American kids get their first cellphones, about 10 years old, though some in their classes were given phones years earlier.

The Seton Hall instructors speak of the classes in the same ways others might talk about sex education — hugely important, underappreciated and, well, a bit awkward to teach. But they said they had no interest in teaching kids digital abstinence or instructing parents how to be the computer police. The Internet, they conceded, is a fact of life — and the

kids always find ways around their parents’ barriers, anyway.

In designing the classes, Bernstein said she was surprised at how little attention most schools paid to the digital worlds its students were immersed in every day — and, as a parent, she often wished she had done things differently with her 15-year-old son. She could find few other classes that included both the kids and parents in broader conversations about tech dependence and digital tracking. Other programs, she said, seemed unrealistic or out of date, aimed at choosing good passwords or avoiding bad chat rooms but silent on the daily questions of attention and privacy.

“Everybody seems to focus on things that are unlikely — a stranger online taking your child away,” Bernstein said, adding, “There are things that happen every day that parents aren’t taught about — children posting things on Instagram or a group text that could have an effect on their social lives, their

Yolanda Bromfield teaches a fifth-grade class last month in Newark about digital privacy and keeping an online-offline balance, part of a program devised by professors at Seton Hall University Law School.

college admissions, their futures.”

That privacy debate was rekindled recently by news that the personal information of as many as 87 million Facebook users, mostly in the United States, had been gathered by the political data firm Cambridge Analytica — a sign, Bernstein said, that these were issues affecting lots of adults, too.

“Everybody’s so appalled about how that information got out,” she said. “But the problem is how the information gets in — the fact that we can’t resist putting our information in, because the platforms are so addictive.”

The tech giants have shown a growing interest in catering to a younger clientele. Facebook recently released an app, Messenger Kids, aimed at children as young as 6. Apple in March unveiled family-focused suggestions on how its devices could help people become better parents and introduced classroom-friendly iPads at a high school on Chicago’s North Side.

Often, the kids-only online playgrounds advertised by the services as cures for parental anxiety carry subtle risks of their own. YouTube Kids, with its 11 million active viewers every week, was found by the website Business Insider to have steered young audiences to conspiracy theories and lewd videos, probably because the video giant’s recommendation algorithms have trouble understanding context and filtering out junk.

Netflix, which offers an exhaustive stream of shows for kids, tested in March — and, after backlash, quickly killed — a video-game-like rewards system that would give special “patches” to kids on a streaming binge.

Parents and schools, meanwhile, have often struggled to keep up. The ideas for protecting kids — screen-time limits, content ratings and campaigns such as Wait Until 8th, which urges parents to delay giving their kids smartphones until eighth grade — have been mostly scattershot, untested and devised on the fly.

But there is a growing push among teachers and education ad-

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TRENDS vocates to focus school resources on combating the dangers of the Web. The advocacy group Common Sense Media in February said it would expand a “digital citizenship” curriculum now offered free at tens of thousands of nationwide public schools touching on topics of self-image, relationships, information literacy and mental wellbeing. Lesson plans for the program, which one executive called “driver’s ed for the Internet,” range from kindergarten (“Going Places Safely,” “Screen Out the Mean”) to high school (“Taking Perspectives on Cyberbullying,” “Oops! I Broadcast It on the Internet.”)

The Seton Hall program’s elementary classes serve as a children’s guide to some of the Web’s biggest pitfalls and thorniest debates. For a lesson on privacy, the kids are taught that sharing personal information online is like walking around with a sign on their back telling everyone about how they embarrassed themselves at summer camp — as well as their phone number, their best friend’s name and their bad grade in math.

The students’ parents are offered separate companion classes in which, Bernstein said, many have agonized over how to set reasonable rules for their kids with technologies they barely understand. The classes focus largely on how parents should deal with kids’ overuse — and, in a world where much of their homework and friendships play out online, what normal use even looks like.

Bromfield said she was surprised how wise the kids in her digital-privacy classes were to the dark side of the Internet.

“These kids are much more savvy than we had anticipated,” said Najarian Peters, an assistant professor at the Seton Hall institute.

“They’re also very observant about how technology affects the people around them — how their parents or siblings or friends can often be more engaged in their devices than they would like.”

The professors are now pushing to introduce the lessons in other schools and keep developing it for the years ahead. But they are realistic about whether they will make any difference in an age where the tech is always evolving and expanding in their students’ worlds.

As one student said, gathering his stuff for his next class, “My phone is my life.” ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Animal house? Colleges start to allow pets in dorms.

BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

M

ost dorm residents at Southeast Missouri State University will show up this fall with bedding, a laptop, a backpack and other typical accessories. A few dozen others will tote something furrier — and breathing: their pets.

The school in Cape Girardeau, Mo., announced recently it is creating pet-friendly floors in one residence hall, where students will be allowed to bunk with roommates of the feline,

ECKERD COLLEGE

Claire Russell attends the “pet commencement” at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Sierra last year.

petite canine or “small caged animal” variety. The decision came in response to rising requests from prospective students — and their parents — for such a perk, according to university officials, who hope it will help smooth some newcomers’ transition from home to higher education.

With this move, Southeast Missouri joins a small but growing group of colleges that offer housing to students and their critters.

They include MIT, which has allowed cats in some dorms since 2000; Pfeiffer University in North Carolina; the University of Northern Colorado; Eckerd College in Florida; and Stephens College, a women’s school in Columbia, Mo., with a website that boasts, “Here, we treat pets like royalty.”

College officials say students

today retain closer ties to home than those of previous generations, in part because of social media. That can make the move tougher, and permitting pets is one way “to make sure we’re integrating students best into the learning environment,” said Debbie Below, Southeast Missouri’s vice president for enrollment management and student success.

The school, located near the banks of the Mississippi River, will make space for about 70 pets in one of its 21 residence halls, Below said. They will be distinct from the 25 or so service and emotional support animals that, as required by federal housing and disability laws, already live in various dorm buildings.

The university’s experience with those animals made officials feel confident they could lay out a more general pet welcome mat, Below said.

Officials also hope the new pet-friendly floors might attract some of the students with service or emotional support animals, which Below said occasionally present challenges in regular dorms. “You could have somebody on that floor who’s afraid of animals or has a serious allergy, and you’re going to end up moving somebody,” she said. “We’re hoping that this is one solution.”

Pet-friendly housing rules tend to be fairly similar from college to college, and they are designed to prevent problems caused by animals in shared spaces. At Southeast Missouri, which has about 11,500 students, critters will have to be family pets that are quiet, housebroken and get a roommate’s sign-off. They will not be allowed in dorm bathrooms, and to protect residents with pet allergies, owners may not use laundry facilities to wash pet bedding or toys. (The University of Northern Colorado, on the other hand, dealt with this issue by designating washing machines and dryers for that specific purpose.)

Below emphasized that Southeast Missouri’s pet-friendly floors

will be a pilot program and adjustments to the policy are likely.

At least one school that has tested such a program, Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, decided to abandon it after two years.

At the other end of the spectrum is Eckerd, a liberal arts college in St. Petersburg, that has permitted dorm pets since the 1972-73 school year. James Annarelli, vice president for student life and dean of students, said records do not reflect how the policy came about, but he suspects it was driven by student demand. “This is not a top-down place,” he said.

These days, Eckerd has under 1,900 students, but it has 229 registered pets on campus. Of those, 132 are dogs or cats, and the remainder represent an exotic array of species, spokeswoman Robbyn Hopewell said.

“We have some spiders,” Hopewell noted as she read from a spreadsheet of campus animals.

“It looks like our most popular lizard is a bearded dragon; there are five of those. Ferrets, fish, gerbils, frogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, hedgehogs, rabbits, rats, unspecified reptiles. We’ve got 23 snakes, one sugar glider and seven tortoises or turtles.”

There once was a pair of ducks that lived with a pair of roommates. “The ducks actually graduated two years ago,” Hopewell said. (Their humans did, too.)

Twice a year, a veterinarian visits the Eckerd campus to provide checkups. Once a year, a pastor comes to the school, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian church, to bless pets in honor of Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. Each spring, Eckerd holds a commencement ceremony just for the animals.

Even students who have no intention of keeping a pet of their own cite the school’s pro-pet posture as a draw, Annarelli said.

“It is, for them, a sign of the kind of welcoming community this is,” he said. n © The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Quest for perfection has grim results N ONFICTION

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SELFIE How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us

By Will Storr Overlook. 403 pp. $29.95

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REVIEWED BY

S ARA E CKEL

hile reporting his new book, “Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us,” journalist Will Storr attended a week-long workshop at the Esalen Institute, the epicenter of the human-potential movement of the 1960s and ’70s. A shy, curmudgeonly Briton, Storr endures some excruciating group-encounter exercises while trying to maintain a reporter’s remove. He doesn’t belong there, and he’s sure his fellow participants agree.

Then a woman from the group challenges him. “ ‘We’ve all been talking about it,’ ” she says. “ ‘Why the hell do you think people don’t like you? . . . You’re sweet. You’re funny. You can’t hide it. Everybody here likes you.’ ” Storr tries to brush this off, but a swell rises in his throat. In less than a week, he has gone from eye-rolling cynic to member of a tribe. This is one of the many ways “Selfie” illustrates how slippery our identities can be and how quickly we’ll accommodate them to the world around us.

“Selfie” might appear to fit in the genre of high-end poppsychology books that promise to shed light on the human condition while also telling us how to be more productive, persuasive or in some other way climb a rung or two higher on the winner’s ladder. But this book is no life hack.

Rather, in this fascinating psychological and social history, Storr — who has published three other books and is a seasoned foreign correspondent — reveals how biology and culture conspire to keep us striving for perfection, and the devastating toll that can take.

We are, he shows, wired to seek excellence. But it’s not a question of nature vs. nurture but nature and nurture. Our brains, he tells us, plagiarize material from culture to help us fit in. “Voices from long-dead minds haunt us in the

AARON JOSEFCZYK/REUTERS

Cleveland Cavaliers basketball player J.R. Smith takes a selfie during a parade to celebrate winning the 2016 NBA Championship.

present, often without our conscious awareness,” he writes. “Arguments they’ve made, feuds they’ve waged, battles they’ve fought, best-sellers they’ve written, revolutions they’ve triggered, industries and movements they’ve raised and destroyed, all live within us.”

Storr deconstructs these influences — from the hero worship of ancient Greece to the neoliberalism of Silicon Valley — to show how Western culture arrived at its current ideal: the outgoing and athletic individualist, the fearless and talented optimist who works hard, dreams big and believes that anything is possible. He contrasts this with Eastern culture, which focuses on group harmony.

Storr’s essential point is that the societal cheerleading that pushes us to become the most glamorous and confident versions of ourselves actually makes us miserable — because ultimately we fall short of that ideal, and we know it.

The chapter on the self-esteem movement provides the clearest illustration of how a cultural meme can embed in the collective consciousness and perpetuate damaging falsehoods. In the 1980s, a California assemblyman named John Vasconcellos proposed bringing self-esteem education into the state’s schools, arguing that teaching children to love themselves would lead to higher grades, and lower rates of drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and delinquency. The proposal made Vasconcellos a laughingstock until a panel of University of California psychologists validated the idea. Once implemented, self-esteem education spread quickly. But, as Storr discovers, researchers’ findings on the value of self-esteem education were inconclusive at best, and its benefits were deliberately exaggerated to appease the powerful legislator.

The book justifying Vasconcellos’s project was, as one of its co-authors told Storr, “a bunch of

scholarly gobbledegook.”

More than a decade later, psychologist Roy Baumeister performed a meta-analysis of selfesteem research and found no conclusive evidence that raising children’s self-esteem leads to higher grades or lower rates of delinquency or drug abuse. Since then, self-esteem’s stock has slowly slid, as researchers and laypeople alike observe that an abundance of self-love — be it in junior employees or world leaders — often does not correlate with good behavior.

For Storr, who as a teenager fell for self-esteem proselytizing, this is personal. “That ‘golden city on top of a hill’ I’d imagined — the place that, when I reached it, would magically transform me into the perfect version of myself — was a mirage,” he writes. “I could hardly believe it. My fight with low self-esteem was who I was.”

The autobiographical passages are a very small part of “Selfie,” but Storr’s vulnerability ends up quietly bolstering the book’s message. Storr, by his own description, is a misanthropic, frequently self-loathing introvert, the polar opposite of our cultural ideal.

And yet, you like the guy. We’re instructed to revere the bold and the beautiful, but I’d vastly prefer to spend time with Storr than a glad-handing start-up founder enthusing about a world-changing app.

Sure, books promising to make you a better parent or middle manager by the time your plane hits the tarmac may offer useful tips. They may help you navigate the system, but they probably won’t ask you to question it. By exposing the cultural con that says we can be anyone we want to be, “Selfie” invites to us to relax into our flawed, limited selves. n Eckel is the author of “It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

A noir spin on a Shakespeare play

A hurried, vital trip to the moon

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

T

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REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

he Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo’s adaptation of “Macbeth” is a variation on the known-outcome thriller, a subgenre that we may owe to Frederick Forsyth. The reader picks up Forsyth’s pioneering novel “The Day of the Jackal” (1971) knowing that Charles de Gaulle was not assassinated; the suspense lies in finding out how a near-foolproof plan to accomplish that will be thwarted.

With Nesbo’s “Macbeth,” readerly foreknowledge rises to a new level. We come to the novel not only with an awareness of how the play turns out (not so hot for the title character), but also with a cauldron of memorable features bubbling in our brains — the soothsaying witches, the compulsive hand-washing, Banquo’s ghost and at least a smattering of the poetry: “Out, damned spot,” life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” etc. Here, the fun comes from watching a crack storyteller put his noir stamp on one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.

The new “Macbeth” takes place circa 1970, not in a kingdom but in a nominal democracy with a tendency to elect strongmen. By eliminating rivals and superiors, Macbeth hopes to slay his way into the mayor’s office of the industrial city in which he lives, and then — well, to borrow from another Shakespeare play, perhaps there will be a tide in his affairs, taken at the flood.

To help the Scottish play’s heaping doses of mayhem go down, the author makes some crafty choices.

Many of the main characters, Macbeth included, ply a trade in which killing with impunity is relatively easy: police work. To provide plausible modern substitutes for ghosts, Nesbo hooks many of his characters on a drug called (heavyhandedly) “power,” which can induce frightful hallucinations.

To make the drug kingpins au courant, the author endows them with a libertarian strain. “My reli-

gion is capitalism,” one of them explains, “and the free market my creed.” And Nesbo adds another layer of addictive behavior by making casino gambling his imagined country’s national pastime.

I don’t know whether Nesbo has read Stephen Greenblatt’s “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.” But Greenblatt astutely points out that the Macbeths are the Bard’s most convincing portrait of a devoted couple, and Nesbo takes care to explain why they delight in each other. In a drug lord’s words, Lady, as she is simply called, is Macbeth’s “beloved dominatrix.” In turn, she views his submissiveness as an asset, exulting that he loves “that part of her which frightened other men. Her strength. Willpower. An intelligence that was superior to theirs and [that] she couldn’t be bothered to hide under a bushel. It took a man to love that in a woman.”

Nesbo tinkers with some elements of the play, as when he changes Caithness’s gender from male to female. On the whole, though, Nesbo manages the balancing act of being true to the original play without slighting his own interests as a writer: bleak settings, loyalty (or the lack thereof ) among crooks, clever escapes from tight spots, the affinities between policemen and the criminals they chase.

Near the end of the novel, Macbeth raises his hand to give a certain door a momentous knock. He stares at that hand, expecting it to betray “the seven-year tremble. He couldn’t see one. They said it was worse when there wasn’t one, then it was definitely time to get out.”

That missing constabulary tremor is a nice touch, an embellishment of Shakespeare that is all the more striking when you recall that Macbeth is indeed about to “get out,” though not the way he intended. n Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World. This was written for The Washington Post.

T MACBETH

By Jo Nesbo Hogarth.

446 pp. $27

ROCKET MEN The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon

By Robert Kurson Random House. 372 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

M ARY R OACH

here were, in all, 12 Apollo spaceflights. We remember them by number if history was made (Apollo 11) or things went wrong (1 and 13). By either measure, we should remember Apollo 8: the first mission to take humans all the way to (if not yet onto) the moon.

“Rocket Men” opens in summer 1968, with the space race in high gear. The Soviet Union had already put the world’s first satellite and the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth’s orbit. The Soviets were projected to reach the moon by the end of the year, months ahead of the United States.

The race, at this point, was to get close to the moon, rather than to land on or even to orbit it. The mission was to be a simple flyby: a sort of dress rehearsal for an eventual landing. I say simple only in that once the spacecraft was blasted out of Earth’s orbit toward the moon, physics and gravity would handle the rest.

NASA’s progress had been hobbled by problems with its lunar module — the spidery lander that would one day shuttle astronauts from the orbiting mother ship down to the surface of the moon and back up. Although a flyby doesn’t require a lander, NASA would have sent it up so the payload would match that of the eventual landing mission.

But, sitting on a beach one day, a NASA engineer named George Low had an idea: The United States could beat the Soviets to the moon if NASA left the lunar module behind on Earth. NASA brass then upped the dangers by adding multiple lunar orbits. Rather than sling-shotting partway around the moon, the crew would circle it 10 times, carrying out some of the necessary prep for an eventual landing, scouting level landing sites and measuring gravity fluctuations, which can alter a spacecraft’s path in potentially catastrophic ways.

To understand the added dangers of a lunar orbit mission, the

reader must understand some rocketry basics. Here’s where Kurson is our man. As he takes us through the flight moment by moment, his instinct for what needs explaining and in how much detail is unerring. For the astronauts of Apollo 8 to orbit the moon, their spacecraft had to be slowed. If it wasn’t, the forces of gravity and inertia would have whipped them partway around the moon and then back toward Earth. To slow the spacecraft, the propulsion system had to be fired in reverse for a precisely calculated duration. Too much “burn,” and the craft would slow too much, drop out of orbit and crash into the moon; too little, and it would careen off into deep space with no way to reverse course. Adding to the danger, this critical maneuver took place on the dark side, where the moon blocks communication with Mission Control.

Kurson unpacks this and several other critical maneuvers, effectively escalating the tension.

Several things did go wrong, but the real drama lay in the gnawing anticipation of fatal catastrophe.

Everyone involved knew that schedules were rushed, steps were skipped and tremendous risks were undertaken. Engineers were nervous to the point of passing out.

What Kurson has managed is impressive, given the hundreds of hours of transcripts he waded through. Those include transcripts of his own interviews as well as voluminous Apollo 8 mission communications. A nonfiction author is a massive filtration system. You’re only as good as what you leave out. Kurson omits skillfully. “Rocket Man” is close-tothe-bone adventure-telling on a par with Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance” and Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air.” It’s as close to a movie as writing gets. n Roach is the author of “Packing for Mars,” “Stiff,” and other books. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

The Internet has a bigger problem than Facebook DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

A word of advice for Congress as it ponders new schemes for Internet regulation after the “perp walk” this past week of Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg: Don’t do it.

Zuckerberg is a tempting target. His serial apologies show how Facebook became so entangled in its corporate mission to “bring the world closer together” that it stopped putting the customer first.

Facebook is paying for its mistakes in loss of customer trust — its main asset — and this market punishment has only just begun. It’s obvious to users now that Facebook’s business model isn’t about making the world better, but about obtaining information about its customers and profiting from it.

The social media site illustrates the buzz phrase: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Meaning, Facebook has been giving us a free service because it can monetize our data. We’re the product it’s selling. If we don’t like that, then Facebook can charge us money for its service, as Zuckerberg testified Tuesday.

Facebook will make changes to recover its reputation.

Users will have better control over their privacy, perhaps by having to opt in before their data is shared. Zuckerberg outlined other needed reforms: The company will restrict the data it shares with app developers, increase its security and require political advertisers to confirm their identities.

Would more government regulation make things better?

Federal oversight might nominally increase transparency and accountability, but it would mainly make work for lobbyists and lawyers. This is a case where angry customers and newly skeptical investors will be the best cops.

What worries me about the Internet is something else. Is the underlying “marketplace of ideas” experiencing market failure? My business of journalism is predicated on the idea that in the unregulated competition of ideas,

the truth will eventually prevail.

But this process seems to be breaking down as the Internet fosters a “post-truth” era. The public wants its biases to be affirmed these days, not challenged.

The corruption of information technology was debated last weekend at a conference at Princeton University on “Defending Democracy,” for which I was a keynote speaker.

Vint Cerf, who helped build the Internet, reminded the audience that it was created to be open, borderless and unregulated.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears before a congressional hearing Tuesday to be questioned about the site’s privacy issues.

When the Web’s founders thought about “bad behavior,” they had in mind rowdy graduate students. A world where Russia’s Internet Research Agency could feed fake news to Facebook was unimaginable — or at least unimagined.

The information space needs not more government intervention but less, especially in places such as Russia and China.

But as I watched Zuckerberg being grilled Tuesday, it was obvious that this market can be better protected by the companies, so that hidden incentives don’t skew it toward extremism and toxicity.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted at the Princeton conference that algorithms push YouTube viewers toward ever-more-intense content. If you keep clicking on videos about running, you’ll eventually get ultramarathons, she noted. Similarly, if you like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton videos, algorithms will push you toward more extreme content on the right and left.

It’s not a conspiracy; the algorithms are just maximizing the number of ads they display to users. Social media companies could address this problem by making their algorithms more transparent.

As we think about Facebook’s failures in combating Russian meddling, we should recall the United States’ history of

overreacting to external threats.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 sought to combat French political meddling; McCarthyism began with legitimate fear of Soviet espionage but led to blacklists and purges. The cure is sometimes worse than the disease.

The market will correct most of Facebook’s problems. What should concern us, beyond fake news, is fake reality — images of events that never happened, voiceprints of speeches that were never delivered, phone calls that were never made, texts that were never sent. The term for these alltoo-feasible digital manipulations of audio and video content is “deep fakes.”

A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency media-forensics team is creating tools that, in theory, can automatically detect when video or audio images have been altered. I’d be happier if the reality-detection system were operated by private companies. I fear we’re heading toward a world where a future national security adviser, in response to Russian or Chinese deep fakes, might ask: If “they” can shape our reality, do “we” need to be able to shape theirs?

Zuckerberg looked so uncomfortable Tuesday in his coat-and-tie contrition costume, you almost felt sorry for him. He made us realize that the weak link in the Internet system isn’t a lack of government oversight, but our own gullibility. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

VA isn’t broken, but it is in trouble ANTHONY J. PRINCIPI served as secretary of veterans affairs from 2001 to 2005 and was chairman of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission. This was written for The Washington Post.

Last month, President Trump nominated Navy Adm. Ronny L. Jackson to be the 10th secretary of veterans affairs. As the fourth VA secretary, I wish him well.

The agency is not broken, as many outside commentators seem to think. The department provides world-class health care to more than 6 million patients every year and disability compensation to more than 4.6 million veterans. It administers nearly 3 million home loans annually, is helping nearly 950,000 veterans attend school and maintains 135 cemeteries as national shrines.

However, Jackson would face significant challenges. The agency is in desperate need of restructuring. The president’s budget request for fiscal 2019 for Veterans Affairs is $198.6 billion — more than three times what it was in 2004 when I left the agency. This is despite the fact that there were 26 million living veterans in 2004 and 20 million today.

With courage, Jackson, Congress and the administration could stop the continued upward spiral of VA appropriations.

Here’s how: First, close unneeded facilities.

The agency is no longer a hospital-centric organization; the department’s health-care offerings have been significantly decentralized. Dollars that could be used for 21st-century health

care are instead used to maintain outmoded infrastructure. A bipartisan proposal omitted from the omnibus funding bill would have provided a systematic review of VA’s infrastructure with recommendations on closing or modifying old facilities and opening new ones where needed.

It should be revived.

Second, refocus the compensation system. The spouses of heroic men and women killed fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan receive the same level of death and indemnity compensation as those of my comrades who die of prostate cancer later in life that may be unrelated to their service in Vietnam. Such inequalities will cause the American people to question the entire rationale behind the veterans disability

compensation system, which is still based on principles developed in 1917. We need a compensation system that understands today’s economic realities. It should promote wellness and reintegration into the workforce, not isolation from it. And it should meets the economic and quality-of-life needs of veterans permanently disabled by their service.

Third, consider fully integrating the health-care systems for the VA and Defense departments. The cost of running the two systems, which serve the same people at different points in their lives, now costs taxpayers more than $125 billion annually.

We need integrated management systems, increased purchasing clout for pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, jointly developed community-provider networks, and the opportunity to share high-cost medical equipment and health-care facilities. All of this will save taxpayers money and allow both systems to refocus their efforts on providing world-class care.

Finally, better integrate private providers into the VA health-care system. We cannot and should not privatize care for veterans. VA plays an important role in spinal cord injury, mental health, medical education and research.

But as a task force suggested in 2016, we could give every eligible veteran the opportunity to receive health care from private providers, while also giving them the option to use the VA health system if they so choose.

What we must do is create a balanced public-private partnership under the control of an agency that ensures we provide the highest quality of care — and timely access to that care.

The Veterans Choice Program was not intended to privatize the veterans system; it was to ensure that community care would be accessible for veterans who would otherwise have to wait more than 30 days or drive more than 40 miles for care. Congress could expand that program further.

Maybe not today, but soon, the combination of decreasing numbers of veterans and increasing costs will draw the attention of budget-cutters on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill. Those who resist needed reforms should know that if the agency does not change, its future is in doubt.

We need to ensure Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 commitment “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” is preserved in our generation and for generations to come. n

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OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

Cohen raid portends familiar scene KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture for The Washington Post. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2010.

We’ve seen this movie before.

It would seem but a matter of time before the president of the United States is asked a question under oath and gives a false answer. A lie, in other words. In the prequel, starring Bill Clinton, impeachment followed.

When the FBI, after a referral from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, raided the offices and hotel room of Trump attorney Michael Cohen, the thud of the other shoe dropping sent ripples along Pennsylvania Avenue, down the Mall and over the Potomac River into Northern Virginia, where more than a few veterans of earlier political wars probably grimaced at what could come next.

No one should feel good about what’s happening now.

This isn’t to say the raid wasn’t necessary or proper — it was ordered not by Mueller but by the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

But it shows that we’ve reached a point that apparently made it necessary. The timing, given world affairs, couldn’t be worse.

As President Trump pointed out amid lamentations of a witch hunt, “We’re talking about a lot of serious things.” Indeed, we are, especially as concerns the dire humanitarian situation in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad reportedly executed a chemical attack on civilians, including children, near Damascus.

Trump is caught in a double bind with potentially disastrous

consequences either way. To not take military action, as he has said he would, risks his being seen as weak or indecisive.

Remember President Barack Obama’s flimsy red line. To engage Syria militarily risks everything else, further worsening relations with Russia, which vowed last month to retaliate against the United States should it attack Assad’s forces, within which Russian troops are embedded.

Closer to home, Trump risks the plausible perception, given history and his often impulsive decision-making process, that he would strike to create a distraction from the personal chaos surrounding him. Back to the prequel, you’ll recall Clinton’s 1998 missile strikes in Sudan,

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

where a pharmaceutical factory was destroyed, as well as simultaneous strikes in Afghanistan. According to U.S. intelligence, the Sudan facility was part of Osama bin Laden’s empire and was believed to be a chemical weapons site, which turned out not to be so.

Thus was born the wag-the-dog theory that Clinton was creating a distraction from his tortures at the hands of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, who was investigating the president’s alleged relations with Monica Lewinsky. According to the Clinton administration, there was only a small window of time when the missiles could be launched effectively, which just happened to be on the very same day of Lewinsky’s appearance before Starr’s grand jury. Wrote Christopher Hitchens at the time: “What was the rush? . . . Clinton needed to look ‘presidential’ for a day.”

Recall, too, that Starr’s original mandate was to investigate an allegedly questionable land deal in Arkansas known as “Whitewater.” But, well, one thing led to another, and you know the rest. Sexual relations did take place in the Oval Office, but Whitewater was a bust. And the 9/11 Commission concluded that the rationale for the bombings

had been credible given information at the time. My, but history does seem to enjoy repeating itself.

As for the alleged Mueller “break-in” — Trump’s characterization — the perps were FBI investigators, not burglars, who came equipped with a warrant approved by a judge. Also, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein personally approved the raid, even though he wasn’t required to do so.

Of this much one can be fairly certain: The agents knew what they were after and were convinced that Cohen wouldn’t voluntarily hand it over. Whether Cohen’s $130,000 payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels can be shown to have been an illegal “campaign donation” — or that he violated banking laws — remains to be seen. But he’s now in the grip of the Justice Department — and possibly Mueller — and soon it could behoove Cohen to become a witness in the special investigation.

It has been observed that most movies end with a repetition or variation of the opening scene.

Increasingly, this plot seems to be foreshadowing a day when Trump, exposed and possibly impeached, is shown going back up the down escalator — alone, perhaps, but glad to be home. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Parcel shipping BY

N ICK Z AIAC

President Trump recently criticized Amazon.com over its deal with the U.S. Postal Service for delivering Amazon’s packages. (Amazon’s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) In fact, the nation’s shipping industry is plagued by numerous misunderstand­ ings and uncertainties.

MYTH NO. 1 Packages will save the Postal Service.

There is no guarantee that the agency’s package profits will cover its losses as the number of letters being sent declines. And the potential revenue from package delivery simply cannot cure the Postal Service’s greater systemic failures. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office deemed the Postal Service’s business model “not viable” and “high risk.” Much of this was because the agency faces a serious unfunded mandate for the costs of its future retirees. Some reforms — congressional action to change the extremely conservative retirement portfolio rules, or better oversight of USPS contractors — could help. But the fact is that letter shipping has declined by more than 40 percent since its peak in 2001, and it’s unclear whether the USPS can make enough money on packages to account for consumers’ rapid shift away from mail.

MYTH NO. 2 Holiday package-handling hiring is good for the economy.

In conditions of low unemployment rates among lower-skilled workers — such as the market today with nearrecord low jobless rates for those without high school degrees — holiday hiring can drive up costs as companies raise wages in pursuit of scarce labor. Finding workers for jobs that do not require college degrees has proved challenging for companies, said Roy Maurer of the Society for Human Resource Management. Over the past

holiday season, the unemployment rate for these people hit 4.2 percent in December, the lowest rate for that month since 2000.

Trucking companies also are struggling to recruit workers. As it becomes more expensive to move goods around, costs for those who produce goods increase. Seasonal cycles are like business cycles, economists Robert B. Barsky and Jeffrey A. Miron noted. Meaning that the thousands who join UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service each year can make labor even more scarce, pushing consumer prices up further to pay for the higher wages. The workers receive higher salaries, but everyone could end up paying more for shipping when the economy is improving.

MYTH NO. 3 The Postal Service is bestequipped to solve last-mile delivery problems.

Where last-mile deliveries pose a problem, such as remote homes, more-specialized private companies — particularly those that specialize in automation — might fare better. Recently, for instance, a California company that delivers medical supplies across Rwanda launched the world’s fastest delivery drone.

Similar technologies could help parcels reach rural Alaskan outposts, forest villages of Vermont and ranches in the vast Western plains without the need for people to trek across the isolated expanses. Heavier loads could benefit from advances in autonomous trucking to help freight reach remote areas

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

without putting USPS drivers on treacherous roads.

In more urban settings, private companies — which don’t have the Postal Service’s mandate to visit each post box — have more flexibility. Companies such as Swiss Post and Amazon are experimenting with new delivery options, including allowing deliveries to the trunks of cars.

Such services can be more convenient for customers and have the potential to make lastmile problems less of an issue.

Package lockers can be found in an increasing number of locations. These services, including Amazon’s thousands of parcel lockers, compete directly with parcel delivery to P.O. boxes, weakening the USPS monopoly and putting pickup locations in places where people go already, such as grocery stores.

MYTH NO. 4 Scale economies mean FedEx and UPS lack competition.

These businesses face competition domestically and internationally in each of their product lines. Both package companies compete with the Postal Service for domestic deliveries as well as with smallerscale couriers that move parcels within cities. And abroad, the European parcel market is highly

competitive, with privatized and state-owned carriers fighting for market share. Efficient innovations such as automated sorting mean they may be able to enter the U.S. market in the coming years. European carriers have fewer facilities spread across smaller nations, which means fewer workers to retrain in new technologies and less need to spend money reconfiguring warehouses.

MYTH NO. 5 Drone delivery is more than 10 years away.

Even today, large logistics companies such as Amazon Prime Air are preparing their own drone delivery services. Not limited to residential parcels, autonomous drone delivery is coming quickly to all modes of shipping, all over the world. Drone trains started hauling ore through the Australian desert last fall. The first drone delivery ships will ply the fjords of Norway by 2020.

Amazon and others have said they are poised to test drone deliveries after Federal Aviation Administration rules change in 2019. n Zaiac is a fellow in commercial freedom at the R Street Institute, an organization devoted to open markets. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2018

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Wenatchee Valley

Visitor Guide

Spring and Summer 2018

Featuring Wenatchee Valley ❖ Lake Chelan Leavenworth ❖ The Methow The Okanogan ❖ Columbia Basin

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There’s a lot to do in North Central Washington, and we have your guide to experiencing it all. The Wenatchee Valley Visitor Guide, Spring & Summer edition, has just been published by The Wenatchee World.

We’ve packed two seasons of activities into 92 pages of fun-filled activities, whether you’re hiking in Leavenworth, wine-tasting in Lake

Chelan, climbing in the Okanogan region, shopping in the Wenatchee Valley, touring the Methow Valley, or enjoying the fruits of the Columbia Basin.

Pick up a copy of the Wenatchee Valley Visitor Guide at the Wenatchee World office,

visitor locations or view the digital edition at wenatcheeworld.com/vg/2018/

wenatcheeworld.com