The Washington Post National Weekly - April 28, 2019

SUNDAY, APRIL 28, 2019

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THE FIX THE FIX

YoungYoung adultsadults did rock didthe rockvote the vote S COTT C LEMENT AND T ED M ELLNIK

BY S COTT C LEMENT AND T ED M ELLNIK

The Census Bureau survey found an survey also found an Thealso Census Bureau urban-rural dynamic to the turnout shift last urban-rural dynamic to the turnout shift last year. In 2014, people living outside of metrooter turnout spiked to a 100-year high spiked to a 100-year high year.

In 2014, people living outside of metrooter turnout politan areas were slightly more areas likely were to cast in last year’s midterm congressional politan slightly more likely to cast in last year’s midterm congressional ballots than those living within metro areas, elections. Census Bureauelections. data finds ballots than those living within metro areas, Census Bureau data finds by 44 percent to 42 percent.

That flipped lastpercent. That flipped last turnout rates jumped across nearly all jumped across nearly all by 44 percent to 42 turnout rates year, with 54 percent of citizens in metro areas oups, but the shift wasgroups, particularly notable year, with 54 percent of citizens in metro areas but the shift was particularly notable turning out, compared turning with 52 out, percent of mong young adults whoamong typically stayadults home who typically stay home compared with 52 percent of young those living outside of them. nonpresidential years.in nonpresidential years. those living outside of them.

The largest turnout shifts The findings illustrate The an extraordinary The were largestamong turnout shifts were among findings illustrate an extraordinary groups that favored Democratic congressional eadth of engagement breadth in the first congresgroups that favored Democratic congressional of engagement in the first congrescandidates as a whole, candidates fueling theasparty’s nal election since Donald became a whole, fueling the party’s sionalTrump election since Donald Trump became 8.6-point victory in overall congressional esident, and only four years after turnout hit 8.6-point victorysupin overall congressional suppresident, and only four years after turnout hit port. Roughly 6 in 10 college graduates 4-year low in 2014, according tolow the in United port.

Roughlyfavored 6 in 10 college graduates favored a 74-year 2014, according to the United Democrats according to network exitaccording polling, to network exit polling, ates Elections Project. States Elections Project.

Democrats and Democrats won even majorities The Census found that 36 citi- that 36 percent of citiandlarger Democrats won even larger majorities Thepercent Censusoffound among Hispanic and Asian voters. ns ages 18-29 reportedzens voting in 18-29 last year’s among Hispanic and Asian voters. ages reported voting in last year’s LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS Democrats also won 67Democrats percent support dterm elections, jumping 16 percentage LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS also won 67 percent support midterm elections, jumping 16 percentage voters younger than 30 and 58 percent ints since 2014 (when turnout The Census percent of young among voters younger than 30 and 58 percent points sincewas 201420(when turnoutfound was that 20 36The Census found that 36among percent of young those ages 30-44, both groups which rcent) and easily surpassing midterm people reported voting inpeople the 2018 midterms, among thoseinages 30-44, both groups in which percent)any and easily surpassing any midterm reported voting inamong the 2018 midterms, turnout increased dramatically, compared ction since the 1980s.

Turnout also inup 16 percentage points since 2014 elections. turnout increased dramatically, compared election since the 1980s. Turnout also inup 16 percentage points since 2014 elections. with 2014. eased sharply among creased adults ages 30-44, with 2014. sharply among adults ages 30-44, elections 58 percent voted in 2018, up 12 points from ing from 36 percent in rising 2014 tofrom 49 percent in Americans’ interest in midterm elections 58 percent voted in 2018, Americans’ up 12 pointsinterest from in midterm 36 percent in 2014 to 49 percent in usually lags far behind that of presidential 2014 to the highest level in midterm elections 18. While turnout among younger adults usually lags far behind that of presidential 2014 to the highest level in midterm elections 2018. While turnout among younger adults years,inbut 2018 at thereyears, were but places wherethere were places where for last fouryear’s decades.

Blacks were in the middleBlacks at ll lags that of their elders, year’s in 2018 for four decades. were thein middle stilllast lags that election of their elders, election turnout approached or even exceeded levels or even exceeded levels 51 percent, up 10 points from the previous arked a clear break marked from thea past two turnout approached 51 percent, up 10 points from the previous clear break from the past two seen in the 2016 presidential midterm. cades of anemic turnout amongofthe youngseen inelection. the 2016The presidential election. The midterm. decades anemic turnout among the younghistorical surge signals the potential forsignals reEducation has long beenEducation one of the has biggest citizens. historical surge the potential for relong been one of the biggest est citizens. cord-setting turnout in 2020. in turnout, and infactors 2018 the education The data comes from theThe voting regiscord-setting turnout in 2020. in turnout, and in 2018 the education dataand comes from factors the voting and regisMcDonald, expert and a turnout expert and divide grew even further.divide A 74 percent majorition supplement of thetration Current Populationof the Michael McDonald, grew even further. AMichael 74 percent majori- a turnout supplement Current Population associate professor at theassociate University of Flori-at the University of Flority of the citizens with postgraduate degrees rvey, conducted nationwide November professor ty of citizens with postgraduate degrees Survey,the conducted nationwide November da, up noted that turnout increased in nearly turned out toelection. vote last year, up 12out points from er each presidential and midterm election. and da, noted that turnout increased in nearly turned to vote last year, 12 points from after each presidential midterm a com- those without a com2014. have And historical59 percent of2014. thoseAnd with59either a ofevery Hispanic and Asian citizens have historicaleverywithout state, including percent thosestate, with including either a those Hispanic and Asian citizens petitive or Senate election. bachelor’s degreeand or some college education voted at far lower rates than at whites and rates petitive gubernatorial or Senate election. bachelor’s degree or some collegegubernatorial education ly voted far lower than whites McDonald suggests is an indication voted, up 13to points the previous mid- from acks, but turnout grew in 2018 record grew McDonald suggests this is an indication voted, up 13 points the previous mid- this blacks, buttoturnout in 2018 recordfrom President Trump was aPresident driving factor, term. dterm highs for both groups.highs Hispanic Trumpand was a driving factor, and term. midterm for both groups. Hispanic McDonald expects the energy to continue Turnout rose by smaller eight points rnout rose from 27 percent 2014from to 4027 percent McDonald expectsin the energy to continue in Turnout roseamong by a smaller eight points among turnoutinrose in 2014 to a40 theeducation, 2020 election whenthe Trump again on a highinschool education, rcent last year, whilepercent Asian turnout 2020iselection when Trump is again on citizens with from a high34school from 34 last year,in-whilecitizens Asianwith turnout to 42 percent, andpercent by a still-smaller five andthe eased from 27 percent to 41 percent. the ballot. to 42 percent, by ballot. a still-smaller five creased from 27 percent percent to 41 percent.

“I’m acalling it the storm“I’m of the century,” points among those who lack a high school Turnout among white citizens continued to calling it the storm of the century,” points among those who lack high school Turnout among white citizens continued to said. n 22 percentdiploma to 27 percent). far higher, with Censusbe Bureau data with finding McDonald said. (from 22 percentMcDonald to 27 percent). far higher, Censusdiploma Bureau(from data finding

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OPINIONS

Over time, ‘Avengers’ women gained strength MONICA HESSE is a Washington Post columnist writing about gender and its impact on society.

In the past 14 days, I have watched Black Widow break a dozen bad guys’ necks using only the strength of her inner thighs. I have seen Pepper Potts rise from personal assistant to CEO and the Wasp rise from sparring partner to superhero, and I have pondered the influence of Peggy Carter in the 1940s on Carol Danvers in the 1980s and on Maria Hill in the 2010s. ¶ What is the practical purpose of a low­cut leather catsuit? This I have pondered, too.

Should I be wearing one? Should we all?

Like many fans with too much time on their hands, I devoted a sum-total of 45 catatonic hours preparing for the arrival of “Avengers: Endgame” by rewatching all previous 21 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Condensing the most sweeping pop cultural movement of the past decade into a few weeks reveals a lot about how far we’ve come. On screen as well as off.

Consider, for example, a scene in the original “Iron Man,” released just 11 years ago, which is suddenly an eon in terms of our comprehension of sexual harassment. Robert Downey Jr. as billionaire Tony Stark invites his assistant to dance at a company event. “Am I making you uncomfortable?” he asks. Yes, Pepper Potts acknowledges — it is weird to dance with her boss in a backless dress while an entire ballroomful of guests watches.

“Well, you look great, you smell great,” he responds. “But I could fire you if that would take the edge off.”

It’s meant as a joke, and it’s part of their dynamic: She’s the organized worrywart, he’s the quippy playboy. When I watched this scene in the theater in 2008 — well, I don’t even remember noticing it. At the time, nothing seemed strange about a boss suggesting his underling’s career could be axed if that would get them in bed faster.

Consider, for example, “Iron Man 2” in 2010, when Tony wants to hire Scarlett Johansson’s character only because she looks like Scarlett Johansson, and Pepper tries to block her hiring only because she looks like Scarlett Johansson . . . and, honestly, it’s hard to determine which behavior is worse.

So imagine the joy, then, of “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” which came out in 2015. Pepper Potts is now the head of Stark Industries.

And Scarlett Johansson, i.e. Black Widow, has not only a healthy platonic friendship with her male colleague Hawkeye but also a friendship with his wife and kids.

Sexy female assassins don’t necessarily have designs on your husband; sometimes they’re just Auntie Assassin.

I mentioned all of this to some smart friends whose Avengers knowledge borders on obsessive.

They helpfully responded with a barrage of articles: A list of the most feminist movies in the Marvel universe. A story about the creative influence of Marvel chairman Ike Perlmutter, who reportedly cut back on Black Widow merchandise because he didn’t think “girl” superhero products would sell — and what changed after a revamped corporate structure curtailed Perlmutter’s power.

It was all useful context for understanding how the sausage of

WALT DISNEY STUDIOS MOTION PICTURES/MARVEL STUDIOS/FILM FRAME

In “Avengers: Endgame,” Black Widow has a healthy, respectful and platonic relationship with her male colleague Hawkeye, and it feels like a progressive breakthrough.

pop culture is made. But it didn’t really address what I was trying to get at. What I was trying to get at was the emotional experience of watching a decade fly by, commercial-free, via Netflix and Amazon, and seeing things progressively suck a little bit less.

Of watching the conversations America was having — about representation, about women in the workforce or the military, about equality in romantic relationships — be interpreted onto the big screen.

In “Ant-Man” (2015), Hope Van Dyne discovers her father has finally made a superhero suit for her so she can be more than Paul Rudd’s trainer: “It’s about damn time,” she says.

A trio of female characters in “Black Panther” (2018) — Nakia, Okoye and Shuri — fight battles and solve critical problems in a story line that assumes nothing unusual about women being a country’s top scientist or general.

In “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), a villain arrives on the battlefield and purrs that she’s caught Scarlet Witch “all alone.”

But then suddenly two more female characters arrive, weapons ready. “She’s not alone,” one says, and they all proceed to take care of business.

This happened, and the theater in which I saw it erupted in cheers. Apparently, I don’t remember watching Tony Stark threaten to fire his assistant, but I’ll remember when a packed audience lost their minds at the novelty of this fight scene: It had taken 19 movies, but finally there was a screenful of competent female warriors all working together.

But that’s what progress looks like, isn’t it? Sometimes when we’re in the dark ages, we don’t realize we’re there. We let things wash over us. We don’t realize when the jokes are bad, or the balance is off, or that we’ve sat through scene after scene of interesting characters engaging with each other, and it’s great, except that all of them are men.

We realize when things change, though. When, year by year or movie by movie, someone tweaks the story. “Endgame” will come out and will make a bazillion dollars and will break box-office records and will be a cinematic triumph a decade in the making.

And me? I’ll appreciate it for all of those reasons. But I’ll also appreciate that when the Marvel Cinematic Universe expanded, it did so in a way that included everyone. n

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OPINIONS

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE ADVOCATE

How we can help Yemeni children HENRIETTA FORE is executive director of UNICEF.

More than four years ago, adults started a war in Yemen despite knowing the terrible toll that violent conflict exacts on children.

The war in Yemen, now in its fifth year, continues to fuel the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Indiscriminate violence and destruction have wreaked havoc on the civilian population and pushed millions to the brink. Yet it is Yemen’s children who suffer first and suffer most.

The consequences read like an itemized list of horrors. More than 6,700 children have been killed or seriously injured, while 12 million — more than 80 percent of all children across the country — need humanitarian assistance to survive. Basic services such as water, health care and sanitation have all but collapsed, and with the economy in free fall, families cannot afford to feed their children or bring them to health facilities.

In Yemen, a child dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes, including malnutrition and vaccine-preventable diseases.

More than 1.8 million children are acutely malnourished, including 360,000 severely malnourished children who are fighting for their lives.

More than a quarter of children are out of school or in need of education assistance, and an

estimated 2,000 schools can no longer be used. The journey to school has become so dangerous that parents are keeping their children home for fear of attacks.

Since the Stockholm agreement was reached late last year between parties to the conflict, the situation has, if anything, worsened. Violence has escalated in some areas — including around Hajjah, north of Hodeidah — displacing more than 37,000 people, half of whom are children. Nearly 1.2 million children are living in 31 active conflict zones, either right on the front line or in areas witnessing heavy violence. Each day, it is estimated that eight children are killed or seriously injured.

Exposure to violence has a lifelong impact on children’s physical and emotional wellbeing. With little recourse for specialized care, many children

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

will carry these scars into adulthood, with long-term consequences.

Simply put, Yemen remains a nightmare for children.

The question now is what can be done to protect Yemen’s children and safeguard the country’s future before time runs out. Any solution must start and end with putting children first.

For starters, parties to the conflict must make every possible effort to keep children safe and to abide by their legal obligations to keep them out of the line of fire — even in areas of active fighting.

This also means sparing the essential infrastructure on which children depend, such as health centers, water and sanitation systems and schools. All parties to the conflict bear responsibility for killing and maiming children and using disproportionate force without consideration for the safety of children and other civilians. Those who have influence over the parties, including members of the U.N. Security Council, have an obligation to use that influence to protect children.

Parties must also allow unlimited imports of humanitarian and essential commercial supplies through all ports of entry to Yemen by sea, air and road, and remove all

impediments that delay ground transportation within the country. Bureaucratic obstacles to the delivery of aid and to humanitarian and commercial imports should be eliminated, and parties should provide sustained, unconditional and uninterrupted humanitarian access to people in need — no matter who controls the areas they live in.

The international community also has a key role to play. It must continue its financial support to help meet the immediate needs of children and make longer-term investments to establish a system of governance in Yemen that places the interest of children at its heart. Yemeni authorities, donors and humanitarian and development organizations should all find ways to sustainably provide longer-term cash assistance to the most vulnerable children and families.

But generosity alone is not going to bring an end to children’s suffering in the war-torn country.

Any improvements in the conditions for children must be consolidated and preserved through a comprehensive and lasting peace agreement. Parties must work to reach a negotiated political solution, prioritizing and upholding the rights of children. n

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OPINIONS

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TOM TOLES

Does a president’s age matter?

HELAINE OLEN is a contributor to Washington Post Opinions and the author of “Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry.”

Age discrimination is a major issue in American society.

According to some reports, a majority of people older than 50 will be involuntarily separated from their jobs at least once. But when it comes to our presidential politics, it’s another matter entirely.

President Trump is turning 73 this spring. On the other side of the aisle, the two leading contenders to challenge Trump are Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 77, and former vice president Joe Biden, 76. The two share little in common politically, yet, amazingly, Biden is the top No. 2 choice of Sanders supporters, and those backing Biden return the favor. When the issues of infirmities of age are even hinted at, voters across the board seemingly dismiss them. In a recent focus group session of swing voters put together by pollster Engagious, not a single participant said they would vote against a candidate because the candidate was too elderly. Other candidates such as South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg might claim that it’s time for a “generational change" in our politics, but it appears few are heeding the message.

How could this be? How can a

society that worships youth on the job and in the culture turn into what Malcolm Harris, author of “Kids These Days,” calls a political gerontocracy? Well, you can thank a confluence of factors, ranging from the decades-long impact of the inordinately large baby-boomer generation, combined with how the particular personalities of a number of older candidates reflect what kind of older candidates we like — and which ones we don’t.

Older Americans remain in a position of political strength in our society. Yes, millennials will overtake boomers as the largest adult age cohort this year, according to the Pew Research Center, but seniors in total (boomers and the remaining members of the Silent and Greatest Generations) are still a larger overall group, as well as a wealthier one. Since older Americans vote at higher rates

than their younger peers, they retain outsize strength at the ballot box. “People stay in power for the most part till they are forced out of power,” says Ashton Applewhite, author of “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism.”

Then there is personality. As I’ve noted in the past, age works particularly well in Sanders’s favor because he plays the longestablished role of the elderly truth-teller and moral authority.

His positions — down with capitalism, up with increasing Social Security benefits — have been his positions for decades, no matter how unpopular they once might have been. That consistency particularly appeals to younger voters. “Young people are fiercely independent, and I think that’s something Sanders really connects with,” says John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. As for Biden, middle-aged or young men who are prone to gaffes and invasions of personal space are not endearing or charming. But in old age, Biden became “Uncle Joe Biden,” the cool elderly relative all too many wish turned up at their family gathering.

Our older candidates also use their age to highlight their positions. Trump and Biden hark

back to what many of their supporters view as a better past — Biden to the two-term Obama presidency and/or a more bipartisan, less polarized past, and Trump to an earlier era, where men where men, the country was solidly majority white, and prosperity supposedly reigned.

It’s also true, however, that all these leading senior candidates are male. We view their female peers very differently. Hillary Clinton was beset by rumors about her health while running for president, even though the obviously overweight Trump — who can’t even recall where his dad was born — still gets a pass from many of the same people.

Now it’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), 69, who’s facing our sexist double standards. Warren has debuted ambitious gamechanging plans to offer universal child care and all but wipe out student debt, all while calling out our system for coddling the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. This stuff should be catnip to financially besieged and progressive millennial voters, but Warren is continuing to languish, at least for now. It points to an elemental truth: Only one sex gets to use their age to enhance their status. Women?

They need to prove they are not old, again and again and again. n

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POLITICS

Trump, Hill in power struggle President resists subpoena requests

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

BY

S EUNG M IN K IM

P

resident Trump’s defiance of congressional attempts to investigate his administration has put new pressure on the legislative branch’s ability to serve as a constitutional check on a president who sees few limits on his executive power.

Since taking office, Trump has consistently treated Congress as more of a subordinate than an equal — often aided by the tacit approval of congressional Republicans who have shown little interest in confronting the president.

But tensions between Trump and Capitol Hill have escalated in recent days as the White House refuses to comply with subpoenas from newly empowered House Democrats eager to conduct ag-

gressive oversight of his administration.

Trump’s decision not to cooperate with House committees, coupled with reluctance from Republicans in control of the Senate to cross him, has left Congress struggling to assert itself as a coequal branch of government — most likely leaving it to the courts to settle a series of power struggles that could define the relationship between the executive and legislative branches for years to come.

“A respect for the limits of your branch of government, a respect for the role of other branches of government is sort of the oil that makes the machinery work,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the House Oversight Committee. “Absent that, things break down. And I think we’re definitely seeing that with this

administration in unprecedented ways.”

This past week alone, the White House and top Trump administration officials have resisted subpoenas issued by Democrats on at least three fronts — limiting how much oversight Democrats can exert as both sides prepare for a potentially protracted standoff.

First, the White House directed a former personnel security official to not appear at a scheduled deposition as part of the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the administration’s security clearance practices. The official, Carl Kline, could now be held in contempt of Congress.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former White House counsel Donald McGahn, prompting administration offi-

President Trump has decided not to cooperate with House committees.

He has consistently treated Congress as more of a subordinate than an equal.

cials to indicate they would assert executive privilege to block his testimony as Democrats seek more information about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, including whether the president obstructed justice.

And on Wednesday, the Justice Department said it will not comply with a bipartisan subpoena from the Oversight Committee that sought testimony for its ongoing investigation of the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

The Treasury Department this past week also blew through another House-issued deadline, though not technically a subpoena, to turn Trump’s tax returns over to the Ways and Means Committee.

And late Wednesday, the White House told a House committee that

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POLITICS Trump adviser Stephen Miller was turning down an invitation to testify on the administration’s immigration policies.

“We’re fighting all the subpoenas. These aren’t, like, impartial people,” Trump told reporters Wednesday, charging that Democrats are motivated solely by politics. “The Democrats are trying to win 2020.”

Democrats, determined to punch back harder with every rejection from the administration, warn that Trump’s attempts to resist congressional oversight could set a dangerous precedent.

“If Trump is allowed to get away with ignoring Congress, then, in effect, we no longer have a representative system of government,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (DCalif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee. “We have more like a monarchy. That’s exactly what our framers wanted to prevent.”

The president and his allies have dismissed these complaints, noting he is not the first president to go around a recalcitrant Congress or to clash with lawmakers eager to investigate an administration. His defenders also argue Democrats are overreaching in their probes, which launched shortly after the party took control of the House on Jan. 3.

“He obviously wants to work with Congress because he has an agenda that, most of it, doesn’t go anywhere without Congress,” said a former senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s views. “But I also think he looks at Congress in the way he looks at all of Washington. . . .

These people were sent here to do specific things they ran on and they don’t do a whole lot.”

While Trump’s subpoena fights with Democrats are new, his lack of deference to Congress has been a theme throughout his presidency, when for the first two years a Republican-controlled Congress rarely challenged him. He continues to brush aside some concerns voiced by Senate Republicans over nominees, his assertion of executive power and trade policy.

Trump has openly expressed his preference for acting Cabinet members, even while vacancies persist at the highest levels of the administration, despite senators’ argument that senior officials who don’t go through the confir-

“If Trump is allowed to get away with ignoring Congress, then, in effect, we no longer have a representative system of government.”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.)

mation process can be less accountable to lawmakers and the public. Several key Cabinet posts are filled by acting officials, including the secretaries of defense and homeland security.

The year began with a historically long partial government shutdown that ended only after Trump issued an emergency declaration to circumvent Congress to secure funding that lawmakers would not provide for his border wall — despite early warnings from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that such a move would be unpopular with GOP senators.

The administration has also blown off some requests from powerful Republicans, such as a demand from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) in February that he be provided with a copy of a Commerce Department report examining whether tariffs on for-

eign-made cars and auto parts could be imposed on national security grounds. As of this week, he hasn’t been provided one.

“The Finance Committee is the committee of jurisdiction for trade policy,” said Michael Zona, a Grassley spokesman. “So there’s no good reason the Commerce Department shouldn't share an official trade policy report with the chairman.”

A bipartisan investigation requested by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last fall into the death of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi called on the administration to send a report to Congress required under a law aimed at combating human rights abuses.

But in February, the Trump administration declined to do so. A senior administration official at the time said Trump has discretion to “decline to act on

The White House and top Trump administration officials have resisted the House by moving to block the testimonies of former White House counsel Donald McGahn, top, and Trump adviser Stephen Miller, above, among others.

KLMNO WEEKLY

congressional committee requests when appropriate.”

Senate Republicans have shown more willingness to break with the president — if gently — in recent weeks.

Opposition from at least four Senate Republicans doomed any prospects of former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain getting nominated to the Federal Reserve. And GOP leaders are urging Trump to get input from their members earlier and more often in the confirmation process — a tacit acknowledgment that their constitutional role and influence has been shrinking under Trump.

“He seems to be comfortable with people in an acting role,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican. “I think it’s better for the process, for him, and for the people that are being nominated to these positions if they go through a full confirmation process and get the validation of the United States Senate under the advise and consent requirement in the Constitution.”

The dynamic between the White House and House Democrats is becoming increasingly bitter, even as leaders in both branches continue to hold out some hope that bipartisan deals might be possible in the second half of Trump’s first term.

The president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are scheduled to meet this week about infrastructure, although the specter of congressional investigations will almost certainly hang over the discussion.

“They’re supposed to be talking about infrastructure,” counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said. “If she’s coming here under the ruse of infrastructure and wants to talk about subpoenas, I’ll let you know.”

And on Wednesday, Trump suggested he would go to the Supreme Court to stop any attempt by Democrats to impeach him, despite legal scholars saying that power is clearly given to Congress in the Constitution.

“I DID NOTHING WRONG,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only are there no ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ there are no Crimes by me at all.” n

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NATION

The end of capitalism as we know it?

G REG J AFFE in Palo Alto, Calif.

BY

A

perfect California day.

The sun was shining, a gentle breeze was blowing and, at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, Rep. Ro Khanna was sitting across from one of his many billionaire constituents discussing an uncomfortable subject: the growing unpopularity of billionaires and their giant tech companies.

“There’s some more humility out here,” Khanna (D-Calif.) said.

The billionaire on the other side of the table let out a nervous laugh. Chris Larsen was on his third start-up and well on his way to being one of the wealthiest people in the valley, if not the world.

“Realizing people hate your guts has some value,” he joked.

For decades, Democrats and Republicans have hailed America’s business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country’s salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America’s innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country’s most vexing problems. Government’s role was to stay out of the way.

Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism’s future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America’s business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

On a quiet weekday at a stripmall coffee shop, the conversation between Khanna and Larsen turned to what went so wrong.

NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

For the first time, U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system that made them rich Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.

“What happened to us?” he imagined people in these leftbehind places asking.

Part of Khanna’s solution was to sign on as co-chairman of the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the democratic socialist who rose to the national stage by railing against “the handful of billionaires” who “control the economic and political life of this nation,” and who disproportionately live in Khanna’s district.

The other part of Khanna’s solution was to do what he was doing now, talking to billionaire tech executives like Larsen who worried that the current path for both capitalism and Silicon Valley was unsustainable.

Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and

anger in the country would continue to grow.

“It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.”

‘Middle of a revolution’ Khanna was elected in 2016, just as the anxiety started to spread. In Europe, far-right nationalist parties were gaining ground. Closer to home, socialists and Trump-inspired nationalists were winning state and congressional elections.

Conversations of the sort that Khanna was having with Larsen were now taking place in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.

The setting was the opening of

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) walks through a crowd after a Bernie Sanders rally in San Francisco.

Khanna is co-chairman of Sanders’s presidential campaign.

Klarman Hall, a new $120 million conference center, built with his family’s donation. “It’s a choice to pay people as little as you can or work them as hard as you can,” he told the audience gathered in the 1,000-seat auditorium. “It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.”

Six months after that speech, Klarman was struck by how quickly his dire prediction was coming to pass. Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Klarman wasn’t opposed to more progressive taxation or regulation. But he worried that these new proposals went much too far.

“I think we’re in the middle of a revolution — not a guns revolution — but a revolution where people on both extremes want to blow it up, and good things don’t happen to the vast majority of the population in a revolution,” he said.

He wasn’t the only one who felt a sense of alarm. One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective had started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it. During that period the students had grown increasingly cynical about corporations and the government, said Rebecca Henderson, the Harvard economist who teaches the course.

A few dozen of those students spent their winter break reading “Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments

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NATION in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School.

Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have had eluded a plodding and divided government.

This spring, Giridharadas took his argument to Klarman Hall. He trashed Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s independent presidential run as an effort to protect the interests of the uber-wealthy. And he lambasted the notion, frequently championed by the likes of Bill Gates and Barack Obama, that Silicon Valley’s innovations would disrupt old hierarchies and spread capitalism’s rewards. “Really?” Giridharadas asked. “Now five companies control America, instead of 100! And a lot of those companies are whiter and more male than the ones they disrupted.”

Runaway capitalism In 2014, backed by the tech community and a long roster of billionaire donors, Khanna challenged an eight-term incumbent in a Democratic primary and lost.

The defeat caused him to reflect on what he had missed — in particular, the problems that runaway capitalism were causing in his district, where the median home value in formerly blue-collar cities surged past $2 million.

His days are split between meetings with billionaires and his many constituents who are struggling to stay afloat amid Silicon Valley’s success. “I am an 11-year renter with a master’s degree,” a teacher told him at a meeting with school employees. Her question wasn’t about whether she would ever be able to afford a home, but about a fellow teacher who couldn’t afford health insurance.

A few days earlier, he had met with two activists who wanted his help pressuring big tech companies to pay contract janitorial and cafeteria workers a living wage.

Khanna agreed to host a press event on their behalf.

The billionaires in Khanna’s district, meanwhile, were consumed by a different worry. Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism.

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

As technology advanced, some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers.

The next step was computers that could learn and think.

A ‘blueprint’ for opportunity Khanna’s focus was on fixing the version of capitalism that existed today. He often pleaded with big tech executives to spend just 10 percent of their time thinking about what they could do for their country and 90 percent to their companies.

The tougher question was exactly what he wanted them to do with that 10 percent.

On a warm spring evening, Khanna was trying to answer that question for about two dozen Silicon Valley tech executives, software engineers and venture capitalists. The group gathered at a

$5 million Mediterranean-style villa perched atop a hill overlooking Cupertino, which glittered in the valley below.

Khanna described a December trip he organized to tiny Jefferson, Iowa, for a group of tech executives that included Microsoft’s chief technology officer and a LinkedIn co-founder. The executives donated to the community college’s scholarship fund and paid to equip its computer lab with the goal of training 25 to 35 students for software developer jobs, starting at $65,000 a year.

Khanna had made similar trips to West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. The total number of jobs these trips produced was small, and the pay wasn’t great. Still, Khanna believed they served a larger purpose. They proved that people in Silicon Valley cared about places like Jefferson, a rural town of only 4,200. They gave people hope that even the remotest parts of America could take part in the country’s tech revolution.

The next step, Khanna told the executives at the mansion in Cupertino, was a $100 million effort to build 50 technology institutes, similar to land-grant colleges, to train workers in left-behind parts of America. Khanna had already

Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All,” an attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve problems that have eluded government.

KLMNO WEEKLY

introduced a bill that he admitted was unlikely to pass. But that wasn’t really the point. “It sets a blueprint,” he said.

Khanna’s blueprint reflected his broader view of how to unite an increasingly polarized country.

Many Democrats blamed Trump’s victory and the country’s divisions on racial tensions as the nation grew more diverse and whites lost their favored positions.

Khanna had a different view.

He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.

Sometimes Khanna imagined what people in these left-behind parts of the country were thinking: Their grandparents had fought in World War II and helped build the country’s industrial age economy. Now they worried people like Khanna, whose parents emigrated from India, were surging past them.

“They just got here, and they are doing really, really well,” Khanna imagined these people saying. “What happened to us?”

Not everyone at the tech gathering was buying Khanna’s analysis.

Atam Rao, a nuclear engineer, told Khanna that he had come to the United States from India 50 years earlier. Rao’s son, who founded a successful video-game company in Los Angeles, was born in America. The day after Trump was elected, his son suggested shifting some money to a bank account in India, just in case they needed to return someday.

“Are we welcome here?” he said his son asked.

He believed that Khanna was underestimating the racial anger in the country.

But that wasn’t the America Khanna knew. It didn’t fit with his experience growing up in suburban Philadelphia or arriving in Silicon Valley, where Indians had become rock stars and CEOs of companies such as Google. And it didn’t comport with the results of the 2018 election, he said, now speaking directly to Rao. “The same country that elected Trump just elected the most diverse Congress in the country’s history,” Khanna said.

Khanna didn’t deny the problem of racism, but like Sanders he saw the country’s divisions primarily through the prism of capitalism’s shortcomings and the economy, not race. n

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AN ECOSYSTEM TRANSFORMS As climate shifts, lost sea creatures wash up on shores

BY SCOTT WILSON in Bodega Bay, Calif.

T

he Pacific Ocean off the California coast is mixed up, and so are many of the animals that live there.

The violet, thumbnail-size snails washing up here in Horseshoe Cove have never been seen this far north. By-the-wind sailors, a tiny relative of warm-water jellyfish, sprinkle the tideline by the dozen.

And in the tide pools along the cove’s rocky arms, as harbor seals about to pup look languidly on, a slow-motion battle is underway between native giant green and starburst anemones, a species common in Mexico. The

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PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

southern visitors are bludgeoning their northern hosts with poisonous white-tipped tentacles.

Then there are the whales.

As many as five at a time have been foraging in the San Francisco Bay, the vast inlet about an hour south of here along the wild Sonoma and Marin coasts. The number is far larger than in a normal year, when one or two might wander in beneath the Golden Gate Bridge for a day or two at most.

These whales now are staying for as long as a month. And, for the first time ever, there are two species in the bay at the same time — grays and humpbacks, both usually speeding north to their Bering Sea feeding grounds this time of year.

Instead, whale-watching boats are having more luck in the opaque waters off Berkeley on the bay’s eastern edge than in the open ocean. Three grays have also washed up dead on bay shores in recent weeks, their stomachs empty.

“Our guess is that they are super hungry, maybe looking for a little food before continuing north,” said Bill Keener, a marine mammal biologist who has been tracking whales, dolphins and porpoises in the bay for decades as head of Golden Gate Cetacean Research. “But why are they staying this long? We can’t really figure out what these guys are doing.”

The likely culprits: “the blob” and “the boy.”

Eric Sanford, right, and Jacqueline Sones, left, walk through the tide pools around Horseshoe Cove in Bodega Bay, Calif.

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Five years ago, the Gulf of Alaska warmed to record temperatures, likely the result of a sudden acceleration in the melting of Arctic sea ice. Usually a cold southern current flows along California. That year, the warm “blob” spread down the coast and, instead of blocking tropical species from moving north, it served as a balmy welcome to a variety of animals far from home.

Then came El Niño, the roughly once-a-decade temperate current that flows north and east from the equatorial Pacific to the California coast. The two warm-water events came together — one rare but understood, one unprecedented and baffling — to form an ocean heat wave whose real-time and lingering effects may have permanently scrambled California’s coastal ecosystem.

“This was like opening a door temporarily for southern species to move northward,” said Eric Sanford, a professor of biological sciences who runs a lab here at the University of California at Davis’s Bodega Marine Laboratory. “And the longer you hold the door open, the more opportunity you give southern species to move north.”

The door was not just ajar but wide open for several years. Today, there are still pockets of unusually warm water off California, doggie doors that continue to beckon tropical species that are strangers to its usually chilly 840-mile coastline.

HERE TO STAY Last year, scientists identified a yellow-bellied sea snake that had washed up on Newport Beach in Orange County, the first time the tropical species had ever been found in California in a non-El Niño year. Then, last month,

an olive Ridley sea turtle was spotted by lobster fishermen off Capistrano Beach, in part because a sea gull was resting on its back.

The turtle migrates on warm currents, one of which may have swept it so far north.

Things got even weirder a few-hours’ drive north in Santa Barbara County, where a hoodwinker sunfish washed up last month.

The fish, about seven feet long and weighing a ton, is among the more bizarre-looking creatures of the sea. So, too, was its place of death: A hoodwinker had not been seen in the Northern Hemisphere for more than a century.

“These extreme events exaggerate the rate of change that is taking place in our oceans,” said Jacqueline Sones, the research coordinator at the Bodega Marine Reserve, referring to the back-to-back blob-El Niño phenomenon. “And if you have more of these extreme events, you will see an even greater rate of change.”

Sones and Sanford, research partners as well as spouses, published a paper with several other scientists in Nature last month that identified 67 marine species now pushing the northern boundary of their commonly known habitat.

Of those, 37 species had never been found as far north as Bodega Bay, a seaside town best known in popular culture as the place where Alfred Hitchcock filmed “The Birds.” Another 21 species had been found so far north during El Niño years or during other unusual warmwater events — boundary pushing that Sones tracks in part through her blog, where she posts be-on-the-lookout photos of species for those even farther north to identify.

The findings suggest that some of these species are here to stay, a relocation that

This page, from left: A sunburst sea anemone, right, has taken up residence at Horseshoe Cove alongside its coldwater cousin, a native to California waters. A pelagic red crab is a newly arrived warm water marine species at UC Davis.

Opposite page, from left: Volunteers walk past pens where they are rehabilitating elephant seals to reenter the wild at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif.

Sanford and Sones do not necessarily believe is a bad thing but one with uncertain longterm effects.

“This really is a striking barometer of change,” said Sanford, who has been at the blufftop lab here for 14 years. “That’s a short window of time. Our oceans are changing pretty quickly.”

FOLLOWING THE FOOD The consequences are also visible in the well-scrubbed pens of the Marine Mammal Center, a laboratory, emergency-response center and hospital that sits atop a Cold War-era Nike missile installation in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco.

The hospital — the largest of its kind in the world — is bracing for its busy season.

In the past two weeks, the number of patients has doubled to 90. Most are northern elephant seals, many of them weak from malnourishment and about a third the size they should be three or so months into life.

At the hospital, they live in spacious pens — clean seawater pools in the middle — where they are fed, tested and given medicine when needed. The place is a mad chorus of yelps and groans, a whirl of cleaning and feeding and transporting patients from pens to exams in four-wheeled “seal barrows.”

Before release into the rough Pacific, the seals attend “fish school,” hands-on coursework that teaches them how to find and capture food in the open ocean. In the hospital, they collectively consume a half-ton of herring a day.

“It’s very obvious to us when the cycle gets thrown off,” said Shawn Johnson, the center’s director of veterinary science. “We’re basically

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on the front lines of ocean health, and mammals are very sensitive to even minor changes in the ocean’s health.”

In 2015, at the ocean heat-wave’s peak, the hospital, which monitors 600 miles of California coastline, took in 1,800 seals and sea lions.

That was three times the average.

While the numbers have declined since then, they remain higher than in pre-blob days.

The center receives 10,000 calls each year on its rescue hotline from as far away as San Luis Obispo County, hundreds of miles to the south. On this day, three elephant seals — named Dayzend, Yazzy and Washbean by the emergency crews — are scheduled for rescue.

The reason for the continuing high numbers is the mystery around food.

Even before the blob, the supply of anchovies and sardines, the staple of many marine mammal diets, was low and declining. The warming served as a wild card.

Many of the seals and sea lions breed on the Channel Islands, a protected chain that runs off Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. They then roam for food in the summer months with sardines as their prime prey.

But sardines remain scarce, even though they are considered a warmer-water fish.

Studies have found that adult seals and sea lions are traveling much farther for food, leaving pups to fend for themselves closer to shore. Many end up in the hospital.

Elliott Hazen, a research ecologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Monterey, Calif., said that “a lot of signals point to the fact there is just not enough food to support some of these sea lion habitats.”

“Part of what was so unique about the blob is that it was warming we had never seen

“Mammals are very sensitive to even minor changes in the ocean’s health.”

Shawn Johnson, the Marine Mammal Center’s director of veterinary science

before, so there was no antecedent to compare it to,” Hazen said. “And it may be true that not all warm water is equal in its effect on fisheries.”

What have rebounded are anchovies, a dietary staple of the humpback, which has the rare ability to feed on small fish and krill. But anchovies are behaving differently, too.

Hazen said the fish are moving closer to shore, maintaining a density that is appealing to humpbacks, which are becoming increasingly reliant on anchovy as part of their diet.

This may explain why humpbacks, never seen inside San Francisco Bay until three years ago, are moving in now.

SKINNY WHALES The Pacific was calm on a recent morning, a chilly breeze scalloping the surface, lit by sunlight fighting through low clouds. Lands End park sloped into the sea on the far side of the bay’s opening, and from high in the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate Bridge appeared below with the city skyline in the middle distance.

Just off Kirby Cove, a spout rose from the smooth sea. Then a humpback leaped, breaching momentarily, before a several-minute dive for food. The uncommon is now common, the wait for a whale sighting from land just minutes long.

But the close-to-shore migrations in search of food have increased risks to the whales. Of the 11 recorded whale deaths in the region last year, the vast majority were the result of the animals’ being hit by ships or tangled in fishing nets.

Those dangers are amplified this year. But Keener, the marine mammal biologist who

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tracks whales in the bay, is equally concerned by the bizarre gray whale behavior and appearance.

“We’re just seeing a big number of skinny whales,” he said.

Gray whales, once endangered, have made a remarkable recovery in the past half-century.

They are still at risk, though, mostly because of the dangers posed by nets off the California coast.

As their numbers have risen, though, their food has declined with increased demand and as varying ocean temperatures may be pushing krill outside of migration routes. In the San Francisco Bay, the grays are hanging around Angel Island, once the main point of entry for Asian immigrants arriving on American shores.

The undeveloped island sits off Tiburon, among the most sought-after real estate in a region of sought-after real estate, where residents can now whale-watch from living rooms. The high-speed commuter boat from San Francisco’s Ferry Building to Larkspur now must navigate around whales, something it has never had to do.

Keener’s phone buzzed with a photo from a friend who operates a whale-watching boat in the bay. It was a picture of his “fish finder,” which provides a kind of MRI of the water near a boat. This one showed thick red bands of anchovy just east of Alcatraz.

The carcass of a gray had also washed up that day even farther east. A team from the Marine Mammal Center would head there a few hours later, performing the necropsy and then letting it decompose into nutrients for other animals stalking the bay for food.

“They just keep heading east,” Keener said.

“And that is a really bad sign.” n

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15 19

SUNDAY, April, 28, 28, 20192019 SUNDAY, APRIL

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Bot isn’t just going through motions

Creativity powered by dysfunction

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

H

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

alf a century ago, Philip K. Dick asked, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” and now Ian McEwan is sure those androids are pulling the wool over our eyes.

His new novel, “Machines Like Me,” takes place in England in the 1980s, but it’s an uncanny variation of the past we remember. Just the slightest fluctuations have altered the vectors of history. England lost the Falklands War. Unemployment is at Depression-era levels. Perhaps most significantly, in McEwan’s retelling, Alan Turing didn’t commit suicide after the British government convicted him of gross indecency. Instead, the brilliant mathematician rejected the offer of chemical castration and went to prison, where, in blissful solitude, he laid down the theoretical principles that have enabled the creation of remarkably humanlike robots.

Our narrator is Charlie Friend, a lazy day-trader in London who vacillates between bouts of grandiosity and worthlessness. The ultimate early adopter, Charlie uses a recent inheritance to buy “the first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression.” The robot’s name is Adam, which suggests what the creators must think of themselves. He is one of 25 androids sold around the world in a variety of ethnicities, 12 male and 13 female versions.

Adam’s affect may be slightly odd (he doesn’t blink quite right), but to the casual observer, he’s a handsome, muscular man — “fairly well endowed,” Charlie admits.

But sex is certainly central to this carefully constructed comedy of terrors. As the novel opens, Charlie is wooing Miranda, a somewhat unresponsive younger woman who lives in his apartment building. He hopes that they can program Adam’s personality together, as a kind of bonding experience.

Charlie gets an inkling of the

complications ahead, though, when he spends an evening listening to Adam loudly making love to Miranda in the upstairs apartment. It’s grim satisfaction to realize he’s the “first to be cuckolded by an artefact.” What man could compete with that stamina, those hydraulics?

McEwan, who won the 1998 Booker Prize for “Amsterdam,” is a master at cerebral silliness. His previous novel, “Nutshell,” was a modern-day retelling of “Hamlet” from the point of view of an indecisive fetus. In that book and in this new one, McEwan knows just how to explore the most complex issues in the confines of the most ridiculous situations.

Trapped in an apartment-size version of “Westworld,” Charlie and Adam debate the essential nature of consciousness while vying for Miranda’s affections.

Charlie is sure that his android cares for Miranda only “as a dishwasher cares for its dishes,” but Adam, who has perfect command of the world’s religious and philosophical writings, claims, “I’ve a very powerful sense of self and I’m certain that it’s real.”

How exactly would you dismantle Adam’s claim to consciousness? Try clinging to the primacy of biology and you’ll slip on the comedy of Terry Bisson’s “thinking meat.” As countless fiction and nonfiction writers have pointed out, we have little understanding of what our own consciousness is; we’re in no position to deny it to a perfect simulacrum.

McEwan to cleverly embeds the challenge of robots in the lives of two people trying to find a way to exist with purpose. That human drama makes “Machines Like Me” strikingly relevant even though it’s set in a world that never happened almost 40 years ago. “Everything was rising,” Charlie notes, “hopes and despair, misery, boredom and opportunity.” n Charles writes about books for The Washington Post.

I MACHINES LIKE ME

By Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese. 352 pp. $26.95

CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup

By David Browne Da Capo.

480 pp. $30.

l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID K IRBY

magine a production of “Hamlet” with three Hamlets.

Or four or two: No one is certain who will show up when, not even the actors themselves. Now move the action from a castle in Denmark to a recording studio in Los Angeles, and instead of fratricide and revenge, let kingsize egos drive the drama, boosted by a mountain of cocaine and an ocean of alcohol.

Now you have a sense of what it was like to witness the rise, fall, resurrection and multi-car pileup that was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the folk-rock supergroup that shaped and were shaped by 1960s and ’70s counterculture while propelling millions of music lovers to near-orgasmic levels of joy. David Browne’s “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup” is for music lovers, but it should also be required reading for students of group dynamics.

Bands implode all the time, but it’s rare for one to operate so dysfunctionally over five decades while also spawning so many imitators, influencing so many musicians and producing so much memorable music, including such hits as “Teach Your Children” and “Ohio.”

The story begins on Feb. 14, 1968, at Hollywood’s legendary Whisky a Go Go, where the Hollies were playing. Two years earlier, the club often booked grittier acts like the Doors and Frank Zappa, yet here were five young men from Manchester, England, including guitarist and singer Graham Nash.

In the audience were David Crosby and Stephen Stills. Crosby had just been fired by the Byrds, and Stills wasn’t sure whether his band, Buffalo Springfield, even existed anymore. On the sidewalk after the show, the two musicians waxed eloquent on Nash’s performance and wondered aloud whether he might be the bridge to a new and better band.

It wasn’t long before the three men were touring together and recording for Atlantic Records.

But something was missing, which was why Atlantic co-founder and president Ahmet Ertegun suggested that they fill out their sound by bringing in Stills’s old Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young. As with many of their momentous decisions, this one turned out to be both the best and the worst choice: Young’s prolific songwriting and distinctive countertenor gave the band an extra dimension, but his abundant ego added volatility to a group dynamic that was already strained.

Then there were the drugs, which seemed as ubiquitous as oxygen. Crosby came so close to losing his life while freebasing cocaine that the band hired a minder to keep him from overdoing it.

This bodyguard had had the same job with John Belushi, who had died of an overdose a few months earlier. “Great reference,” Crosby said when the two men were introduced.

Stills provided Browne with a darkly comedic metaphor that best describes the interactions of the four musicians at the band’s peak. It was “a four-way street,” he recalled, “four horses pulling in different directions. Which is the method they used to use for executions.” Of course, that just led to more songs: “We externalized everything,” Crosby said, and that meant duking it out lyrically.

One of the group’s employees estimates that they broke up eight times during his tenure alone, yet somehow they managed to keep getting back together. And even though Crosby underwent a liver transplant in 1994, all four are active today. Does this mean we’ll see them together onstage again?

Nash stated in an interview not long ago that the band was offered $100 million to go on tour. But that’s not going to happen, he said, for one simple reason: “We don’t like each other.” n Kirby is the author of “Crossroad: Artist, Audience, and the Making of American Music.”

16

SUNDAY, April, 28, 2019

Issuer Free Writing Prospectus, dated March 5, 2019 Filed Pursuant to Rule 433

Redeemable Preferred Stock & Warrants • 6% Annual Dividend Rate* PAID MONTHLY • Senior Position TO THE PUBLICLY-TRADED COMMON STOCK • Growth Potential WITH BRG WARRANT PRICE PER INVESTMENT UNIT: $1,000 ($5,000 minimum investment) $500,000,000 Redeemable Preferred Stock & Warrants Offering

Relating to Prospectus Supplement dated November 16, 2018 to Prospectus dated May 23, 2018 Registration No. 333-224990

Securities offered through Crown Capital Securities, LP, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment Advisory Services offered through Family Financial Services an SEC Registered Investment Adviser.

Ronald M. Ivanick, Family Financial Services, and Crown Capital are not affiliated with Bluerock Real Estate or the Bluerock Residential Growth REIT.

TO OBTAIN A PROSPECTUS, CONTACT:

Ronald M. Ivanick

Russell Indexes

General Securities Principal & Registered Investment Advisor

by Russell Investments

Included in both the Russell 2000 & 3000 indexes

509.421.1051 • rivanick@crownmail.net www.FamilyFinancialServicesWA.com 1513 APOLLO PLACE • WENATCHEE, WA 98801

Bluerock Residential Growth REIT (“BRG”) is a publicly traded, NYSE American listed Real Estate investment trust (REIT) that acquires well-located, Class A apartment properties in growth markets across the United States. With over 14,700+ units and approximately $2.0 billion in property assets, BRG seeks to maximize returns through investments where we believe we can drive substantial growth in funds from operations and net asset value.

The advertisement does not constitute an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein.

Such an offering is made only by means of a

Prospectus.

Prospectus

The security investment described herein relates solely to BRG’s Series B Preferred Stock and Warrants, a non-traded securities of BRG which have not been listed on any exchange. The risks and rewards of investing in the Series B Preferred Shares and Warrants are separate and distinct from an investment in BRG’s common stock listed on the NYSE American.

This is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein. An offering is made only by the prospectus. This sales and advertising literature must be read in conjunction with the prospectus in order to understand fully all of the implications and risks of the offering of securities to which it relates. A copy of the prospectus must be made available to you in connection with this offering. Neither the Attorney-General of the State of New York nor any other State regulators have passed on or endorsed the merits of this offering. Any representation to the contrary is unlawful.

The issuer has filed a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the SEC for the offering to which this communication relates. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus in that registration statement and other documents the issuer has filed with the SEC for more complete information about the issuer and this offering. You may get these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC Web site at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, the issuer, any underwriter or any dealer participating in the offering will arrange to send you the prospectus if you request it by calling toll-free 1-877.826.2583. * Dividends have been paid on our Class A common stock since May 5, 2014 through the quarter ended December 31, 2018. Through December 31, 2017, such dividends have been declared and paid on a monthly basis at a quarterly rate of $0.29 per share. Effective January 1, 2018, the common stock dividend was reduced to a quarterly rate of $0.1625 per share. From May 5, 2014 through December 31, 2018, we have paid total common stock dividends, including dividends reinvested through our dividend reinvestment plan, of $94,568,133, of which on a cumulative basis, approximately 7% were paid from sources other than cash flows from operations, including from the proceeds of our equity offerings. In addition, the Company has issued Series A preferred stock, Series B Redeemable Preferred Stock, Series C preferred stock and Series D preferred stock. The Series A preferred stock carries an 8.25% stated dividend rate, the Series B Redeemable Preferred Stock carries a 6.00% stated dividend rate, the Series C preferred stock carries a 7.625% stated dividend rate and the Series D preferred stock carries a 7.125% stated dividend rate. From May 5, 2014 through December 31, 2018, we have paid total preferred stock dividends of $70,720,200, all of which were paid from cash flows from operations.

V-19-34

bluerockresidential.com

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Ronald M. Ivanick www.FamilyFinancialServicesWA.com

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1513 Apollo Pl., Wenatchee, WA 98801 • rivanick@crownmail.net Securities offered through Crown Capital Securities, L.P., Member FINRA/SIPC

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