The Washington Post National Weekly - August 23, 2015

Worst Week Hillary Clinton 3

Politics Trying to ‘repeal and replace’ 4

Military Gunning for Army deal 16

5 Myths About yoga 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

Unlikely allies A bipartisan push for sentencing reform unites President Obama and the Koch brothers, but many are still waiting behind bars PAGE 12

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Hillary Clinton

by Chris Cillizza

H

illary Rodham Clinton’s e­mail problem just keeps getting worse.

For the second straight week, the Democratic presidential front­runner found the private e­mail server that she used during her time as a secretary of state at the center of a national conversation about whether she was being entirely candid and how much damage she might be doing to her presidential campaign.

The centerpiece of Clinton’s week was a news conference she held after a campaign event in Las Vegas on Tuesday night. She found herself in a heated back­and­ forth with Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry over whether she or her allies had “wiped” the private server clean before turning it over to the FBI. “Like with a cloth or something?” Clinton responded — somewhere between sarcastically and somewhat unknowingly.

She quickly ended the news conference — it ran less than five total minutes — but as she was leaving decided to respond to a shouted question about whether she was worried that the issue would linger for the duration of the campaign. “Nobody talks to me about it . . . other than you guys,” Clinton said.

Within 24 hours of that comment, CNN had released polling showing that 56 percent of voters nationwide thought Clinton had done something wrong in regards to her e­mail server. Later in the week, polling in Ohio,

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MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Pennsylvania and Florida showed that only one in three voters in those states thought the words “honest” and “trustworthy” described Clinton.

While the Clinton campaign insisted everything was going to plan, cracks began to appear as jittery Democrats publicly wondered where the e­mail story would end up.

“It is a problem,” Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D­Mass.) told the Boston Globe on Thursday. “She must know that.”

Hillary Clinton, for apparently not knowing that, you had the Worst Week in Washington. Again. Congrats, or something. n

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. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 45

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

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ON THE COVER Serving a 55-year sentence, Weldon Angelos is the face of the Koch campaign for criminal justice reform.

Photograph by NIKKI KAHN, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

GOP’s ‘repeal and replace’ dilemma

JIM MONE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Obamacare isn’t popular with conservatives, but benefits would be difficult to take away

BY D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD AND J ENNA J OHNSON

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or Republican leaders, one loaded phrase represents the difference between the party they are and the party they wish to be: “repeal and replace.”

Since 2010, Republicans have pledged to repeal and replace President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — promising a legislative backflip that would please conservatives who despise the law’s every word

and moderates who want to keep some of its benefits.

They haven’t been able to do it — although not for lack of trying.

The GOP-led House has voted 56 times to repeal or undermine the law, but zero times on a plan to replace it.

On Tuesday, the party’s unsolved dilemma made its first big appearance in the 2016 Republican presidential race. First, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker released a plan that would replace the health-care law with a mix of tax

benefits and deregulation, designed to make insurance more affordable but less governmentcontrolled.

Then, almost immediately, he was attacked by a fellow Republican candidate, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who said that Walker’s supposedly conservative plan is actually terribly liberal.

In fact, Jindal said, Walker’s plan is so bad that it might signal the death of conservatism itself.

And also dishonor the Fourth of July.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican presidential candidate, presents his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act during a visit to Cass Screw Machine Products in Brooklyn Center, Minn., last week.

“When did conservatism die?”

Jindal said in a written statement.

He said that Walker’s plan would make Americans more dependent on government spending, giving the lie to Walker’s past praise for Independence Day. “With this Obamacare lite health care proposal, he’s going to have to drop those lines from his speech.”

The Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010, created a series of benefits to make obtaining insurance easier. It offers subsidies to help low-income people pay for

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POLITICS coverage. New rules allow children to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26 and prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people with expensive preexisting conditions.

This is one half of the GOP’s dilemma: Those benefits, like most government benefits, would be difficult to take away. An estimated 19 million people could lose health insurance if the measure were repealed.

“It’s almost motherhood and apple pie now, that any plan should protect people with preexisting conditions and help people without health insurance to buy it,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s hard for any candidate to walk away from those ideas.”

But this is the other half of the dilemma: The Affordable Care Act remains unpopular among the primary voters Republicans care about. They particularly resent its regulations and bureaucracy, and the “individual mandate,” which requires most people to obtain insurance or pay a fine.

All of the 17 major Republicans running for president have promised they would repeal the law. But most of them have said relatively little about what they’d put in its place.

Front-runner Donald Trump, for instance, has said that his replacement would be “something terrific” and that it would involve making an unspecified deal with hospitals to treat the poor and uninsured.

“How do you do that, though?”

CNN’s Dana Bash asked him.

Trump did not seem to know.

“We are going to have to work out some kind of a very, very smart deal with hospitals,” he said.

The three GOP candidates who have released the most detailed plans are Jindal, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and — on Tuesday — Walker.

Walker’s plan is 15 pages, but five of those pages contain only logos and three more pages are devoted to tearing apart the health-care law. The other material, the “replace” part of Walker’s proposal, includes elements common to other Republican plans.

It would, for instance, allow people to buy health coverage from insurers outside their states. That is intended to allow greater competition, but critics say it could lead to a “race to the bottom,” with insurers clustered in the state that regu-

lates them the least.

“Imagine if you could follow any state’s gun-control regulations,” said Katherine Hempstead, director of the coverage team at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Walker also would punt some key issues to state governments.

The states could decide whether to require insurers to cover children on their parents’ plans up to age 26. States could set up “highrisk pools,” which are insurers of last resort, to cover those who can’t get private insurance because of preexisting conditions.

And the plan would offer tax credits to people who buy health insurance on their own, instead of through an employer. These credits — worth up to $3,000 per person per year, depending on age — would be a new way to accomplish one of the Affordable Care Act’s old goals. Which is making insurance more affordable for consumers.

Walker, speaking at Cass Screw Machine Products in Brooklyn Center, Minn., said he thinks that, if elected, he could get this done quickly.

“We make sure this happens right away. Because, look, we’ve got to repeal Obamacare entirely — lock, stock and barrel. And we’ve got to repeal every part of it,” Walker said.

Even for a Republican president, however, “replace” would not come that easily. It might take months of haggling and compromise and bitterness to produce a solution, just as it did for Democrats when they had all the power.

Tuesday offered a preview: Jindal’s fiery attack on Walker was based on a fairly wonky disagreement. Walker’s sin was that his tax credits would be . . . refundable.

Meaning that, under Walker’s plan, someone who received a $3,000 tax credit — but owed only $2,000 in taxes — would get a $1,000 check from the government. Jindal prefers offering insurance-buyers a tax deduction, which would lower tax bills but not promise anybody a check.

“His plan is fundamentally accepting the premise of Obamacare — that we need a new federal entitlement program,” Jindal said.

“Surely we as Republicans have more courage than this.”

That’s the distinction that killed conservatism and besmirched Independence Day. If Walker, or Jindal, becomes president, that’s the fire that lies ahead. n

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Walker to woo Trump supporters

BY J ENNA J OHNSON AND S EAN S ULLIVAN

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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, also a Republican presidential candidate, said Walker’s plan to replace the health-care law is so bad that it might signal the death of conservatism.

cott Walker has sought to reassure jittery donors and other supporters this past week that he can turn around a swift decline in the polls in Iowa and elsewhere by going on the attack and emphasizing his conservatism on key issues.

In a conference call, one-on-one conversations and at a Tuesday lunch, the Wisconsin governor and favorite of anti-union conservatives told backers that his campaign is shifting to a more aggressive posture and will seek to tap into the anti-establishment fervor fueling the rise of Donald Trump and other outsider candidates.

During a conference call with top fundraisers Monday afternoon, Walker and his campaign manager were relatively candid in their assessment of the campaign’s shortcomings, according to notes of the conversation taken by a participant. Walker said the campaign will strive to do better in three areas: protest, passion and policy.

“We need to step it up and remind people that we didn’t just take on the unions and Democrats, we had to take on my own party establishment, those who did not want to take on the status quo,” Walker said on the call, according to the notes.

He added later: “One thing I heard about the first debate was: ‘You were fine, you did no wrong, but people want to feel the passion.’ ” The steps mark a clear shift for a candidate who has long positioned himself as a potential bridge between the party’s conservative and establishment wings. Walker now intends to focus his energy primarily on challengers from the right — a constituency that is particularly important in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, which aides consider a must-win contest for him.

Despite Walker’s strong and consistent start earlier this year, he

has quickly lost ground in recent weeks and put in an underwhelming performance at the first GOP debate, on Aug 6. He went from double-digit standings in most national polls in July to single digits in several recent surveys. In the most recent poll of Iowa — where he has led for most of the summer — he was third behind Trump and tea party underdog Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon.

At the same time, Walker has veered to the right on abortion and other social issues, worrying some top backers. Stanley S. Hubbard, a conservative billionaire who oversees a Minnesota broadcasting company and has donated to Walker’s campaign, said the candidate has promised that he would not push a “social agenda” as president and is simply expressing his personal beliefs when asked.

Walker for months has pitched himself as a Washington outsider, but his candidacy has become overshadowed by non-politicians such as Trump, Carson and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, who have connected with voters who are angry at those in office.

Walker said on the conference call Monday that he wants to win over those voters, pitching himself as just as much of an outsider — but one with experience leading a state government.

“Instead of going after Trump, we need to go after his voters,” Walker said on the call. “True frustration — how we handle that is not by knocking him, but saying that we, too, share that frustration.”

Anthony Scaramucci, a New York investor and Walker fundraiser who also was on the call, said Walker and his team have quickly recognized that this contest will be much different than previous ones. The electorate is angry, and the campaign reflects that.

“A good candidate has to adapt to what’s going on,” Scaramucci said. “The candidate has to reflect the reality and the circumstances he’s in.” n

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POLITICS

Clinton, Sanders court divided labor J OHN W AGNER Las Vegas BY

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rganized labor’s divided loyalties between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders coursed through the Luxor hotel and casino here this past week, where both Democratic presidential contenders courted voters at a statewide convention of the Nevada AFL-CIO. Clinton, who addressed the gathering late Tuesday, has deep connections to labor. She received significant endorsements during her unsuccessful run against Barack Obama in 2008. But her equivocations on issues such as the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership and whether to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 have given some union members pause this time around.

Sanders, a senator from Vermont, has drawn huge crowds with sizable union representation and his poll numbers have risen in recent weeks as he touts many of the same positions that labor champions. But even boosters question whether a self-described democratic socialist can win a national election.

Although labor unions’ strength has waned in recent years, they remain a force in general-election campaigns in battleground states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

And the politics of labor endorsements have grown more sophisticated. Several labor organizers suggested that the AFLCIO and its member organizations have an incentive to hold off on endorsements because doing so gives them more leverage to get the candidate they endorse to buy into their ideas.

But other unions have seen an opportunity to make a point with early endorsements.

National Nurses United, which represents 185,000 nurses across the country, this month became the first national union to endorse Sanders. Among other things, the organization cited Sanders’s support for a single-payer “Medicare for All” health-care system, a liberal idea that Clinton has not embraced.

JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

L.E. BASKOW/LAS VEGAS SUN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Unions are still a driving force in general-election contests, but many are waiting to endorse RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the nurses union, said that Clinton — a former first lady, senator and secretary of state — has long been considered the “coronation candidate” of the Democratic establishment and that she received many thank-yous from other unions for having the courage to step out in Sanders’s direction and “fight for something.”

Yet even DeMoro acknowledged Sanders’s principal challenge, saying, “The real debate going on in the background is about Bernie Sanders’s viability.”

The nurses union’s endorsement came in the wake of a decision by the national AFL-CIO, labor’s umbrella group, to delay a primary endorsement after its executive council met in Silver Spring, Md., with Clinton, Sanders and other candidates in July.

The Sanders camp touted the nondecision as a victory, but Clinton supporters are quick to point out that the organization has thrown its weight behind a candidate during contested primaries only twice before: Walter Mondale in 1984 and Al Gore in 2000.

The lack of an AFL-CIO endorsement has sparked more intense battles for nods from its 56 member organizations, two of which are supporting Clinton: the 1.6 million-member American Federation of Teachers and the 600,000-member International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, said Clinton is strong on her union’s issues, including expanding early childhood education, supporting the teaching profession and reducing college debt.

But part of the calculation, she said, is who would be in a position to prevail against the Republican nominee next year in an election when monied interests aligned with the GOP are expected to spend so heavily.

“In national politics these days, you have to not simply have great ideas, but you have to have the infrastructure and ability to get elected,” Weingarten said.

When Sanders met with the AFL-CIO’s executive council last month, he produced polls showing how strongly he might fare against

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks while touring the Carpenters International Training Center on Tuesday in Las Vegas. That same day, Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke at the Nevada State AFLCIO Constitutional Convention in Las Vegas.

various Republican nominees.

Weingarten said that even if the AFL-CIO doesn’t endorse a candidate during the primaries, she expects “a lot of enthusiasm” for Clinton because of the high stakes for working families and the hostility toward unions that many of the Republican candidates have shown.

Here in Nevada, the most powerful union, the 55,000-member Culinary Workers Union Local 226, is in no hurry to endorse before it hears where candidates stand on its most important issue at the moment: repealing the “Cadillac tax” in President Obama’s health-care law.

At issue is a 40 percent tax on expensive insurance plans, scheduled to take effect in 2018, that’s meant to slow the growth in health-care spending while raising revenue.

“Once we fix Obamacare, we can look at other issues,” said Yvanna Cancela, political director of the union, which represents casino and hospitality workers and is affiliated with the Unite Here union. The majority of the culinary workers are Latino, and immigration issues have been at the fore in the past.

Speaking to reporters here after his closed-press remarks to the AFL-CIO, Sanders said he supports the effort to eliminate the excise tax on health benefits earned by union members in collective bargaining agreements.

During her speech, Clinton pointed to signs held by activists saying “Fix Obamacare” and said she is looking at the issue.

The culinary union endorsed Obama over Clinton in 2008 in what became a rough-and-tumble caucus process. Clinton wound up winning the popular vote in the caucuses, but Obama emerged with more delegates from the state.

Cancela said the union is keeping an open mind about Clinton this time.

“I think our membership, like the rest of the country, is listening and learning and getting to know her as a candidate in 2015 as opposed to 2008,” she said. n

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Mississippi flag defenders dig in

BY NEELY TUCKER

Philadelphia, Miss.

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he Confederate flag was on the run earlier this summer. It was coming down everywhere. National retailers stopped selling it.

South Carolina’s legislature ordered it removed from the state capitol grounds. Momentum swelled across a nation horrified by a neo-Confederate’s killing of nine African Americans in a historic South Carolina church.

That sentiment swung into Mississippi, the last place in the nation to incorporate the emblem into its state flag. The state’s two U.S. senators, both Republicans, said the flag should go. A Mississippi-born leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the bedrock faith of many of the state’s conservatives, wrote, “Let’s take down that flag.”

The powerful speaker of the State House of Representatives, Philip Gunn, became a national story when he said his Christian belief dictated that the flag “needs to be removed.” A handful of towns started removing it from city quarters. Even the Ole Miss football coach, whose team is named “the Rebels” for the Confederate troops of yore, said the flag should bite the dust.

Then The Moment met the rest of Mississippi.

Fans of the flag rallied. Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves (R) took a shot at Gunn, tweeting about the South Carolina gunman: “No symbol or flag or Web site or book or movie made him evil.” The governor, tea party favorite Phil Bryant, agreed, saying the flag should stay. But if a change were to be considered, each said that the state’s voters should decide the issue.

By the time the historic Neshoba County Fair rolled around, flag supporters had found their footing.

The grounds — where candidate Ronald Reagan once came to declare his belief in “states’ rights” — were festooned with state flags and Confederate banners. They were draped from many of the hundreds of cottages that ring the red-dirt horse-racing track. They

LUCIAN PERKINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The state is in no hurry to leave behind the Confederate symbol lolled outside the RVs parked beneath the pines. They flapped from the back of pickup trucks.

“They just need to leave that flag alone,” said Bill McCrory, 35, watching the harness races on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. He was wearing a camo-colored Confederate-flag baseball cap, with “Join the Cause” on the front and “Rebel” on the back. “They think it’s racist, but it’s not.”

So when Gunn stepped to the podium at the fair, it heralded a notable moment in the state’s history. The man taking on the flag was not a carpetbagger or an outside agitator but one of the state’s most powerful conservatives.

“I see the ladies from the Philip

Gunn fan club all around here,” Gunn began, playfully acknowledging flag wavers in the audience. “It is true that I voiced my opinion about the flag a few weeks ago and made my opinions known,” he continued.

Then Gunn, who declined to comment for this article, seemed to wilt, if not retreat.

“They are my opinions and my opinions alone,” he said in an offhand tone. “They don’t stand for anybody else. . . . The fact is we can’t do anything about the flag today.

The legislature is not in session.

There is no bill before us. It’s not on the ballot next Tuesday. It’s not on the ballot next November.”

And that was it.

Paisley Watkins, 2, waves the Confederate-themed Mississippi state flag as her mother, Dana Watkins, watches during the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss.

Mississippi’s most powerful supporter of a new flag no longer seemed to be such a powerful supporter of a new flag. With the governor and lieutenant governor already on the record against it, prospects for removing the flag seemed as stagnant as a pool of Delta rainwater.

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itting hard by the Mississippi River, the Confederate flag flies from the pole in front of Shawn Quick and Christine Councell’s one-story brick rancher.

The house sits in the middle of a riverfront industrial district. The landscape is railroad tracks and tanker cars, abandoned metal continues on next page

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from previous page

buildings. The air conditioning is out, so the conversation is on the semi-shaded front porch, with their pit bull, Coco, and her puppies. Their other adult pit, Dixie, was eaten by an alligator recently and carted off down the river.

It is 97 degrees.

The flag is emblazoned with “The South Will Rise Again.”

“I like it just for the history of it,” Quick says. “I’ve had it a long time.

When we moved in, the pole was already there, so we put it up.”

Both are aware that some of their fellow Mississippians find the flag offensive.

“They just don’t know their history,” Councell says.

“You got that right,” Quick adds.

This is a common sentiment in white Mississippi — that the Confederate battle flag is a historic banner that embodies the noble service and sacrifice of men who fought for “states’ rights.”

The other side of states’ rights in Mississippi evokes the Black Codes, the Mississippi Plan, the pig law, prison farms, poll taxes, Jim Crow segregation and the killings of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers. Mississippi’s Confederate veterans won the battle for white supremacy, built monuments to themselves in nearly every town and set in place a system of oppression that would last until the civil rights movement finally knocked it away.

A recent 1,100-mile trip through the state that included dozens of interviews revealed pockets of support for a new flag among whites, mostly in college towns and larger cities. Nearly all African Americans are against the existing flag, but doubt is widespread that change is within reach.

“My district would be in support of a new flag, but they’re like, ‘This has a snowball’s chance in hell,’ ” said Kimberly Campbell, a state House representative from the heavily African American Jackson area.

Deep in the heart of the Delta, dark clouds are moving across the sky in the distance. The overcast hangs like a curtain, visible for miles before it’s reached. Further on is the historic blues town of Clarksdale, one of the municipalities that has taken down the flag.

Bill Luckett, the mayor, is an actor, lawyer and co-owner of a blues club with the actor Morgan Free-

PHOTOS BY LUCIAN PERKINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Derrick Johnson, head of the state chapter of the NAACP, says, “The problem is not so much the flag as the mind-set it represents.” man, a native son. He’s also a white man elected by a populace that is 79 percent black.

There was no vote on the flag issue.

“I just checked with the city attorney to see if I had the authority, and I did, so I just did it,” Luckett says.

Aldermen in a few cities, including Columbus, Starkville and Hattiesburg, have voted to remove the flag after the Charleston shooting.

Elsewhere, it’s complicated.

Washington County lies along the Mississippi on the south end of the Delta. It is 71 percent black. Its county board of supervisors voted 3 to 2 along racial lines to remove the state flag in 2001. But the board put it back up in 2012. And in July, the board voted to keep it up, again voting 3 to 2, this time with a black supervisor siding with two whites.

A group of more than 60 state notables, including Freeman, signed a full-page ad in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger this week advocating a new flag, an attempt to spur new momentum.

But several of the list’s big names — Freeman, John Grisham, Archie Manning, Kathryn Stockett — ha-

ven’t actually lived in the state for years, as commentators on the paper’s Web site wryly noted.

More importantly: Other than the NAACP, which has kept up a steady bid to dump the flag for more than two decades, there is no serious organization devoted to retiring the flag.

In the primary round of elections earlier this month — which included every elected office in the state — no campaign turned on the issue. Few candidates even mentioned it.

Whit Waide, a political science professor at Mississippi State whose family has been in Mississippi since statehood, said, “I would give up this job if it would mean a new state flag.”

He’salsowellplacedtohelpmake that happen. His college roommate and best friend is Reeves, the lieutenant governor. If Reeves supported a bill for a new flag, along with Gunn, the House speaker, it would almost certainly pass.

“I love him. He’s my best friend,” Waide says, shaking his head. “And I just hate that he’s on the wrong side of this.”

Back at the Neshoba County Fair, Tommy Williams’s family has

Top: Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett, who took down the flag in his town, chats with Lamar Powell, center, and Kenneth Hulsey.

Above: Robert Khayat, a former chancellor at the University of Mississippi, was instrumental in getting fans to stop flying the flag at football games.

owned a cottage near the first turn of the racetrack for more than three decades. A retired administrator withthe Mississippi Departmentof Health, he describes himself as a “Civil War historian” and thus has always flown a Confederate flag at the fair.He’sgraciouson the subject and says he can certainly understand other points of view.

But when he takes a reporter onto the second-floor deck, the atmosphere changes.

He quiets down the all-white crowd, then announces that a reporterishere,writingabouttheflag.

Silence ensues. One man yells something angrily. Another leans forward and says, “They can get rid of the flag all right — just take the NAACP out of the state with it.”

Another sidles up, showing a cellphone photograph of a truck’s bumper sticker: “Don’t Blame Me — I voted for the White Guy.” “How about that?” he says. “You ever see anything funny as that?”

Another man approached and politely said: “The Irish were bred with the African slaves, you know?

Even the Irish, we were slaves. At some point, you just have to get over it.”

D

usk falls softly in Mississippi, the gloaming comes on and then night falls hard.

Orange fires burn after midnight from a sawmill plant in hill country. Mist holds above the river.

The voices of Mississippi echo in these hours.

There’s Robert Khayat, the former chancellor at Ole Miss who single-handedly got the tens of thousands of fans to stop flying the Confederate flag at football games — by banning sticks inside the stadium. Could the state actually change its flag?

“That’d be a tough one,” he says.

Then Derrick Johnson, head of the state chapter of the NAACP: “The problem is not so much the flag as the mind-set it represents.”

Finally, there comes the soft Southern accent of David Sansing, Mississippi’s preeminent historian, now professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi.

“Mississippians do not study their past,” he says, “they absorb it.”

More faintly, “We’re a strange group.”

Fainter still, fading away now, talking about Mississippi’s eternal attitude toward the rest of the world: “We don’t really need you to like us.” n

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When life begins in rehab L ENNY B ERNSTEIN Baltimore BY

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fter a month of painful withdrawal that bunched her body into a tight ball, after tremors and diarrhea and sleeplessness and difficulty eating, Makenzee Kennedy went home to her bed in a drug rehab facility to celebrate a milestone: turning 2 months old.

She lives there for now with her mother, 31-year-old Ashley Kennedy, who is 11 years into her onagain, off-again struggle with heroin addiction. If all goes well, Makenzee will never again see the inside of the hospital, where she was weaned off drugs through intensive, round-the-clock care.

“It’s not my first time trying to stop,” Ashley Kennedy acknowledged as she bottle-fed Makenzee.

“It’s my last time now. I don’t want to touch another drug after putting my baby through this.”

In communities across the nation, the collateral damage of the heroin epidemic is rippling through the health-care system.

The rate of hepatitis C is skyrocketing, fueled by needle sharing among addicts. Experts worry that an upturn in HIV rates may not be far behind. And the rate of fatal heroin overdoses has quadrupled over the past 10 years.

Among the most heartbreaking developments: a sharp rise in the number of drug-exposed newborns like Makenzee. The incidence of “neonatal abstinence syndrome” has quadrupled over nine years, to 2.7 percent of all neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions, according to a study published in May. The cost to care for each child has also soared, to an average of $53,000 in 2009.

With a bag of heroin now cheaper than a pack cigarettes, people once addicted to costly prescription opioids are turning to the cheaper street drug in alarming numbers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a result, heroin has invaded suburban and rural America, places such as Elkton, Md., a town of 15,000 where Ashley Kennedy

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

A pregnant heroin addict passes on her struggle to her newborn child — and she’s far from alone grew up. At 17, Kennedy suffered facial injuries in a car accident and was prescribed Percocet for pain.

The pills were easy to obtain after her injuries healed, and she became hooked.

At 20, she began selling heroin.

“But then I wanted to know what was the big fuss about this whole thing that I was selling. So it just took one bag and there it went,” she said.

“It was just a good high. Better than Percocets.”

Over the next decade, she gave birth to a disabled son, lived in a car and was jailed five times for theft, credit-card fraud and other crimes she said she committed for drug money. Released from jail last September, she was using heroin again by the end of the month. In October, she discovered she was pregnant with Makenzee.

But Kennedy kept using, eventually injecting 30 five-dollar bags

of heroin a day. When she wasn’t shooting heroin, she was out searching for it.

She found a doctor who prescribed Subutex, a medication designed to replace the craving for heroin, but it didn’t work. Kennedy wound up taking both drugs.

In March, a judge threatened to take her children away. Kennedy finally quit using heroin and was admitted to rehab. She finished her pregnancy on methadone; giving up drugs entirely could have killed her unborn child.

Makenzee arrived here from the University of Maryland Medical Center already started on tiny amounts of morphine and clonidine, a blood-pressure medication that helps in the weaning process.

Every three hours, she was assigned a “Finnegan score” based on 21 factors observed by nurses, including tremors, hyperactivity, fever, difficulty sleeping, sweating

Makenzee Kennedy waits for her mother’s visit in a room filled with lights and colorful objects for babies to look at inside Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore.

Makenzee, whose mother has abused heroin, got intensive care to treat tremors and diarrhea.

and her ability to suck, which often is compromised in infants going through withdrawal. Those scores are averaged and used to determine the next day’s dose of morphine.

Makenzee was a difficult case: Healthy newborns sleep most of the day; she was awake all the time. Healthy newborns relax and begin to stretch their limbs; Makenzee clenched her arms and legs tightly and cried constantly as she adjusted to minuscule reductions in the opiates she had been receiving in the womb. She had acidic diarrhea and sweated heavily.

Nurses dimmed the lights in her room, played soft music and spoke in low voices. They swaddled and held her. They changed her diaper often and patiently fed her.

“It hurts,” said Kay Mathias, the nurse practitioner who runs the unit where Makenzee was treated.

“If you [go through] withdrawal, it hurts.” Of the 97 drug-dependent infants the unit discharged over the past year, most were ready to go home after about two weeks.

Makenzee’s withdrawal took 31 days and cost Medicaid $32,777.

Research has not found devastating long-term consequences for newborns who go through withdrawal. Such children tend to fare poorly by most health and socioeconomic measures, but it’s not clear whether that’s the result of the drugs in their systems at birth or their subsequent upbringing by parents prone to drug use.

At the rehab facility, Ashley Kennedy prepared for her baby’s release by taking herself off methadone. After her rehab, she plans to raise her children far from her drug-seeking friends. For nine days, she went cold turkey, a brutal experience she hoped would leave her clear-headed for the journey ahead.

“So we went through it together this last week,” Kennedy said. “It was painful. [Your] body’s aching.

Your bones hurt. You can’t stay still. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat.

You’re having diarrhea. . . . My body still hurts. My back still hurts.

My legs sometimes. My knees.

“But it’s worth it. Thoroughly worth getting off everything to be with my child.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

The lesson many see in Gaza pullout

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND R UTH E GLASH

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip

T

en years ago this month, the Israeli army undertook one of its most controversial missions, uprooting more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from their homes here in Gaza, some by force.

Many Israelis today believe all they got for their troubles were more rockets.

The evacuation of all Israeli troops and civilians from the Gaza Strip, a unilateral “disengagement” ordered by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005, at the urging of President George W. Bush, was a searing episode for Israel, and a gamble.

But after three wars in six years, Israel has not “disengaged” from Gaza at all.

For the Palestinians, the Israeli withdrawal offered a chance for self-rule. But Gaza today is governed by the Islamist resistance movement Hamas, branded a terrorist organization by the United States and Europe. The last elections in Gaza occurred almost a decade ago.

The disengagement remains a subject of soul-searching and finger-pointing in Israel. The lessons that today’s Israelis say they learned from the pullout reverberate now more than ever.

For many Israelis, especially on the right, the aftermath of the withdrawal serves as a kind of object lesson that supports the open-ended 48-year military occupation of the West Bank and continuing mistrust and resistance to a two-state solution.

The Gaza withdrawal highlighted the deep ideological divide between Israel’s national religious movement, whose members believe that Jews should live on all the Land of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and more secular political forces who saw the 21 settlements in Gaza, and the thousands of Israeli troops needed to occupy the strip, as a security threat that would undermine the Jewish and democratic core of the state.

HEIDI LEVINE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Netanyahu and allies say Hamas takeover and multiple wars support West Bank occupation “It is out of strength and not weakness that we are taking this step,” Sharon vowed in 2005, hoping to mollify critics of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Bush hailed the move as “courageous.”

After weeping mothers were escorted from their kitchens by teenage soldiers, the army razed the emptied homes and even uprooted the palm trees, because the settlers of Gush Katif did not want to see their neighborhoods occupied by Arabs.

“I hope the departure of our forces from the Gaza Strip symbolizes the beginning of a period of tranquillity,” Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, head of Israel’s Southern Command, told the small crowd of Israeli soldiers who lowered the flag 10 years ago.

The departing troops left two dozen synagogues standing, although the Palestinian leadership had begged them not to; they were desecrated by Gazans celebrating the Israeli withdrawal after 38

years of occupation. The remaining greenhouses were looted.

A few months after the pullout, Hamas won parliamentary elections against the weak and unpopular Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The following year, after street battles between Hamas and Fatah militias, Hamas seized control of the strip, and promises made by Israel and the United States to Gaza for eased travel and trade evaporated.

Hamas and Israel fought their third war last summer. Both sides say they are preparing for a fourth.

Israel controls Gaza’s airspace and coastline and restricts imports, exports and passenger travel. Egypt’s land crossing with Gaza has been mostly closed in the past year. The enclave’s 1.8 million people often say they are living in a prison.

Today, many Israelis point to the unilateral withdrawal of troops to argue, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does, that Israel cannot risk giving the Pales-

At the former Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian workers grow vegetables in the greenhouses left behind, although farmers say Israeli restrictions prevent export.

tinians an independent state.

The premier and his allies warn that if Israel pulled out of the West Bank, Hamas would take over as it did in Gaza and expose Israel’s major cities to more rockets at closer range.

“The Palestinian Authority without Israeli protection won’t last five minutes” in the West Bank, said Yossi Kuperwasser, former director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

“They exist by Israel’s bayonets.”

The rise of Hamas in Gaza “undermines the credibility of a twostate solution,” said Efraim Inbar, a professor at Bar-Ilan University.

“It shows the Palestinians are not capable of establishing a state as the world understands the word.”

Inbar told an audience at a recent conference on the Gaza pullout that the years since have only “strengthened the Israeli consensus that there is no partner” for a peace deal. The best evidence, he said, is Gaza.

Emotions are still raw among the Gaza evacuees and their supporters, who believe the Israeli government betrayed and then abandoned them.

Hundreds of the former Gaza families live in temporary mobile homes, and when Sharon died last year after a prolonged stroke, they were not among the mourners.

Orit Strook, a former member of the Israeli parliament and a settler in the West Bank, called Sharon “one of the great builders of the land of Israel, and its greatest destroyer.”

A recent poll sponsored by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies showed that half of Jewish Israelis thought Israeli civilians should return to the coastal strip.

The results surprised some of the researchers.

“I thought it was a stupid act at the time, and I think so today,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser and head of the National Security Council in Netanyahu’s government, of the withdrawal.

“But that doesn’t mean we can go back to Gaza today,” he said.

“We cannot unscramble the eggs. I suggest we forgo this dream.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Attacks on migrants shock Germany Violence ignites fresh debate about racism and lack of tolerance

A NTHONY F AIOLA Meissen, Germany BY

I

n a gesture of German goodwill, the administration in this medieval city leased a newly renovated apartment building here to humanely — even comfortably — house dozens of desperate asylum-seekers. The newcomers from Syria and other war-ravaged nations would enjoy freshly redone floors, cute balconies and shiny, modern appliances in a cheerful building near a timber-framed pub.

Then Meissen’s goodwill went up in smoke.

On a cool night six weeks ago, suspected right-wing arsonists struck the building, scorching its interior and rendering it uninhabitable days before the asylum-seekers were to move in.

The attack added Meissen, a gothic castle town of 30,000 on the Elbe River, to a string of German cities caught up in an escalating rash of violence against refugees.

The acts include an ugly spate of arson targeting refugee centers as well as physical attacks on refugees themselves, marking the return of what critics say is an unnerving brand of xenophobia to Western Europe’s most populous nation.

The attacks are undercutting Germany’s image as the country leading the effort to aid a record flow of refugees into Europe, highlighting the rising social tensions in the region amid the avalanche of asylum-seekers. At the same time, the violence has ignited a heated national debate over what pundits here say is a rise in overt racism and intolerance — in a nation highly sensitive to both because of Nazi-era atrocities.

All this is happening as Germany takes in more asylumseekers than any other nation in Europe — a number set to reach an estimated 500,000 this year alone — while quickly running out of places to house them. As a result, the national government in Berlin is turning to insular and almost wholly white enclaves to take in the newcomers, who are mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

In communities such as Meissen, in Germany’s formerly communist east, that has been a recipe for friction.

“In east Germany, we have had 25 years of very powerful influence by neo-Nazi culture. Few immigrants were going there out of fear of being threatened,” said Anetta Kahane, chairwoman of the prorefugee Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin. “Now you see these asylum-seekers placed in cities in the east, a part of the country that is completely white. Sometimes the response is pure racism.”

The arson in Meissen, for instance, immediately exposed a fierce strain of opposition to the new refugee center. A new local anti-refugee group — the Homeland Defense Initiative — drew as many as 650 supporters to a rally recently, far more than prorefugee groups have managed to muster. Many neighbors who live near the burned refugee center are blaming not the arsonists but the building’s owner — local developer Ingolf Brumm — for having agreed to turn it into a shelter.

After Brumm publicly de-

nounced the fire, he and his family received death threats and were viciously harassed online. To protect him, police began patrolling his nearby home office. Recently arrived refugees already living in Meissen have also become targets. One Syrian dentist who was assigned to live in Meissen and arrived Aug. 1 said he has had stones thrown at his apartment door, glue put in his lock and obscenities hurled at him from the street.

“After the fire, the neighbors yelled out at me, saying ‘Good,’ and ‘It’s about time someone did something to stop this,’ ” Brumm said as he surveyed the damage to his building last week. “I thought I knew the citizens of Meissen, but I was wrong. There are good people here but also people with hate in their hearts.”

One neighbor shedding no tears over the torching is Wolfgang Hempel, 65, a retired electrician who lives adjacent to the attacked building. Referring to Brumm, Hempel said he “hates his guts” for leasing the building to the city for a refugee center.

“Germany is turning black,” Hempel said, citing the massive influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East. “Soon only darkskinned people will be living here.

It can’t go on like this. . . . And these days, everybody puts you in a Nazi corner just for voicing your opinion.”

Aggression against the mounting number of refugees coming into Europe has surfaced in France, Greece and other nations in the region. And the German public overall remains relatively more tolerant than the populations of many other European nations. Unlike France and Holland, for instance, anti-immigrant nationalists in Germany are still struggling at the polls.

The incidents in Germany include at least six cases of arson and the beating of a 23-year-old African refugee by five Germans that left him with serious injuries.

Although the attacks have been scattered nationwide, some of the worst have been in the former communist east where diversity levels are extremely low.

While one major anti-refugee movement that launched last year — known as PEGIDA — has begun to fade, it has been replaced by several splinter groups and wholly different anti-refugee and far-right groups that have sparked alarm among German politicians.

In Meissen, pro-refugee activists, including the Rev. Bernd Oehler, 55, have led an effort to counter the naysayers and welcome the newcomers, staging food and clothing drives and organizing rallies and choir celebrations to show their support.

But Oehler conceded that a vocal minority of strong opposition remains across the former East Germany, where economic development still lags behind the wealthier west.

“We have a problem with the middle of society,” he said. “They are afraid. They don’t know about their futures, and now there’s a new issue for them to worry about with the refugees. They were looking for a scapegoat, and they found one.” n

NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Seeking clemency T From left, Meranda Angelos, 12, Jesse Angelos, 16, and Anthony Angelos, 18, walk along a trail near their new home in Sandy, Utah. Their father is serving a 55-year prison sentence for marijuana and gun charges.

STORY BY

S ARI H ORWITZ in Wichita

he gleaming black granite tower where conservative billionaire Charles Koch oversees an empire of multinational corporations is 1,500 miles and worlds away from the California prison cell of Weldon Angelos. ¶ But Angelos sits at the intersection of an unusual alliance between the industrialist and President Obama — longtime political nemeses. Their cooperation illustrates the depth of a bipartisan effort to reduce the nation’s overcrowded prisons and undo the show­no­mercy sentences meted out to drug offenders in recent decades. ¶ As Koch has emerged as one of the most influential advocates of sentencing reform, he has seized on the story of Angelos to illustrate the inequities of the American criminal justice system. And Angelos is one of thousands of prisoners who have applied for clemency from the president under an initiative launched by the Obama administration. ¶ The onetime rapper from Utah was sentenced in 2004 to a mandatory 55 years in federal prison after he was arrested for selling a total of about $1,000 worth of marijuana in three separate transactions with a police informant. ¶ “I obviously did something illegal, which was stupid,” said Angelos, now 36, in an interview at the federal prison in Mendota, Calif. “I’ve accepted responsibility for everything, and I’ve already served 12 years of my life because of my mistakes. I lost the family I started, my career and my father’s final days. I just want to move on. My main goal in life is to get out and take care of my children.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

13

COVER STORY By the numbers

billions spent on inmates and reverse severe drug-sentencing policies that began with the crack cocaine epidemic.

Obama interrupted the laughter. “No, you’ve got to give them credit,” he said. “You’ve got to call it like you see it.”

2.3 million The nation’s prison and jail population today, more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population.

1 in 100 Adults behind bars in America. As many as 100 million of all American adults now have a criminal history record.

60 percent Of prisoners today are people of color. One in 3 black men face the likelihood of imprisonment, and black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, while Hispanic men are 2.5 times as likely.

$80 billion Amount the federal government spends each year on prisons and jails, nearly a third of the Justice Department’s budget. Between 2000 and 2013, the cost per federal inmate increased by almost $8,000, resulting in a $2.3 billion increase in the Bureau of Prisons’ budget.

from previous page

He was 25 when he was sent away, and he will be nearly 80 when he gets out. The federal judge who put him there expressed his frustration and anger at the “irrational” sentence he was compelled to impose and urged thenPresident George W. Bush to commute it.

“Monstrous,” said Koch, 79, of the Angelos case. “Obscene. Somebody makes one mistake, violates a law — and I’m not talking about people who are violent criminals who are hurting people and destroying property — and their lives are ruined by these massive sentences.”

Koch and his brother, David, have used their vast wealth to counter Obama at almost every turn, from the administration’s initiatives on climate change to health-care reform.

But the recent detente began with a 45-minute meeting at the White House between one of the president’s most trusted confidantes and the top lawyer for Koch Industries.

.

Last month, when Obama granted clemency to 46 inmates and just before he became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, he gave a shout-out to the Koch brothers in a speech during an NAACP conference.

“This is a cause that’s bringing people in both houses of Congress together,” Obama said. “It’s created some unlikely bedfellows.

You’ve got Van Jones and Newt Gingrich.

You’ve got Americans for Tax Reform and the ACLU. You’ve got the NAACP — and the Koch brothers.”

The audience started laughing.

These, after all, were the brothers that Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (DNev.) called “un-American” and spoke of their role in political life as “the shadowy influence of two power-drunk billionaires.”

But Koch Industries is urging support of the same legislation in Congress that is backed by Obama as his administration tries to reduce the burgeoning prison population, cut the

Unjust sentences When he gives speeches, Charles Koch says he asks those in the audience to raise their hand if they have never made a mistake that could have gotten them in serious trouble.

“I’ve never had anyone raise his or her hand,” he said in his office on the sprawling Koch Industries campus here. “There, but for the grace of God or good luck or good fortune, go all of us.”

The industrialist said his interest in overhauling the criminal justice system is not new.

For 12 years, Koch Industries, the country’s second-largest private company with a $115 billion valuation, according to Forbes, has been working with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and is providing funding to train lawyers who represent indigent defendants. The group honored Koch Industries a few years ago with its Defender of Justice Leadership award.

Koch describes his focus on sentencing reform as part of his libertarian philosophy of limited government and his commitment to removing barriers of opportunity for the poor. He said Obama should do more and do it faster to rectify the effects of mandatory minimum sentences, especially for the disadvantaged and men and women of color.

“Clemency for a few — to me, that isn’t just,” said Koch, noting that the president has not granted clemency to Angelos despite appeals to do so from a large group of bipartisan lawmakers. “If you have 1,000 people who got unjust sentences, to give clemency to [a few] — what about the others? Why should they suffer?”

But some Democratic groups remain skeptical about any recasting of the Kochs’ image as anything other than megadonors who have long backed Republican politicians, including tea party candidates.

They’ve ridiculed the effort as “Kochshank Redemption,” playing off the name of the 1994 movie “Shawshank Redemption,” about an inmate sentenced to two life terms.

Liberal blog ThinkProgress has questioned how the Kochs can support criminal justice reform while also supporting candidates such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R). As a state legislator, Walker sponsored dozens of toughon-crime bills, including ones to increase mandatory minimum sentences and not allow parole for many offenders.

Critics have also noted the Kochs’ support for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an advocacy group that helped push for mandatory minimum sentences, tough three-strikes laws and privatization of the prison industry.

Liberal watchdog group Bridge Project last continues on next page

KLMNO WEEKLY

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

400% Growth in states’ combined corrections spending from 1980 to 2009.

COVER STORY month released a report, “The Koch Brothers’ Criminal Justice Pump-Fake,” attacking their work on criminal justice issues, saying the Kochs’ interest in reform stems from a 97count indictment and prosecution charging the Koch Petroleum Group and several employees with violating the Clean Air Act at its refinery in Corpus Christi, Tex. David Uhlmann — the federal prosecutor who was head of the environmental crimes section of the Justice Department — described the lawsuit as “a classic case of environmental crime: illegal emissions of benzene — a known carcinogen — at levels 15 times greater than those allowed under federal law.”

“Koch pleaded guilty and admitted that its employees engaged in an orchestrated scheme to conceal the benzene violations from state regulators and the Corpus Christi community,” said Uhlmann, now a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

Uhlmann and other critics are reluctant to accept the Kochs’ support for criminal justice reform at face value and think there must be a deeper political agenda — possibly to include the later pursuit of legal reforms that will benefit corporations.

“Their advocacy for less draconian drug laws could prove to be a stalking horse for their long-standing efforts to protect corporate criminals and roll back environmental, health and safety laws,” he said.

Koch Petroleum was fined $10 million in the Corpus Christi case and ordered to pay another $10 million to fund environmental projects. In a plea agreement, the charges were dropped against the four employees.

In Charles Koch’s opinion, the federal case was unjust.

“We had four innocent employees indicted,” he said. “Okay, the company can handle it. Okay, we pay a fine and so on. What’s so upsetting is seeing what it did to them personally and their families.”

And Mark Holden, Koch Industries’ general counsel and senior vice president, said the company “was railroaded” and that its experience in the Corpus Christi case “is what really started us working on criminal justice issues.”

Of the skeptics, Holden said: “People are going to believe what they want to believe.

We’ve been working on these issues for 12 years now. Charles has had these views his whole life, by and large. Just judge us by our actions. We’re in this for the long haul.”

In a nod to the moment, Holden has a T-shirt in his office with the words: “Koch. Not Entirely Awful,” playing off the words of a recent article.

Van Jones, the president of #Cut50, a group seeking to cut the incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years, and the former special adviser on Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality, defends the Kochs.

“In a democracy, when you disagree with somebody, you should really work hard against them,” Jones said. “We oppose the Koch agenda when it comes to their propolluter, extremist agenda for the environ-

FAMILY PHOTO

Weldon Angelos is shown with his sons. He hasn’t been able to see them in eight years because they can’t afford to travel to California.

ment, and we fight real hard. But when you agree with them, you should work really hard alongside them. On criminal justice reform, we’re very proud to work alongside them.”

“And,” Jones added, “I never met a single person in prison who said, ‘I sure hope the Republicans and the Koch brothers don’t help me.’ ” A former prison guard The Koch-Obama alliance began to take shape at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel in March. In a hotel ballroom, #Cut50 held a bipartisan criminal justice summit, hosted by former Obama administration official Jones and former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Roy Austin Jr., a deputy assistant to President Obama, approached Holden at the gathering and they traded business cards.

“Both our bosses care a lot about these issues,” Austin said, according to Holden. He later invited him to the White House.

When Holden walked into a West Wing office to meet Austin on April 16, one of Obama’s closest advisers, Valerie Jarrett, was waiting for him, along with other White House officials.

“I decided to participate in the meeting to signal to him how important this effort is to President Obama,” Jarrett said in an interview.

Jarrett was struck by Holden’s sincerity and personal engagement with the issue.

“Mark was very forthcoming about why he thought it was important to his company and also why it was of personal importance to him,” Jarrett said. “He shared his story about working as a prison guard.”

After high school and during summer breaks in college, Holden had worked as a

guard in a prison in Worcester, Mass., where he grew up. He said there weren’t “a lot of rich people in prison” and that many of the inmates were kids he knew who had drug problems.

But what convinced Jarrett of Koch Industries’ commitment was when she asked Holden’s position on “ban the box,” the effort to remove the criminal-record check box from job applications. It is a defining issue for reformers because the box has proved to be a critical barrier to getting former prisoners into the workforce. Employers tend to see the tick and dismiss the application.

Holden told her that Koch Industries, which has about 100,000 employees worldwide, had joined Wal-Mart, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond and others in the “ban the box” movement.

Surprised, she asked Holden if he was willing to talk about it publicly and encourage other companies to do the same. He said he would.

“You have made my day,” Jarrett said.

She told Obama about the meeting and said that she thought Holden and the Koch brothers were “very committed” to criminal justice reform.

Obama didn’t hesitate.

The president’s message to us was “work with whoever will help form that coalition of the willing,” Jarrett said. “He’s always been willing to work with people with whom he disagrees on many issues, searching for that common ground.”

At the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Jarrett met Charles Koch’s brother, David, and in her speech there, mentioned the Koch brothers.

The next month, Obama would do the same.

Holden, who is Charles Koch’s point person

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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COVER STORY

NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel at Koch Industries, left, with his boss, Charles Koch, in Koch’s office in Wichita.

on criminal justice reform, said he is focused on persuading more Republicans to pass criminal justice legislation, including the Safe, Accountable, Fair and Effective Justice Act introduced in June and sponsored by Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.).

The bill would impose mandatory minimum sentences on high-level drug traffickers rather than low-level, nonviolent ones; apply life sentences for drug trafficking only in egregious cases; and allow eligible offenders to petition for resentencing under new trafficking laws.

The criminal justice effort is being led by Charles Koch, Holden and a Koch Industries team in Washington. Much less involved is the network of conservative advocacy groups backed by Koch, such as Americans for Prosperity, which is more focused on energy regulation and government spending, and the LIBRE Initiative, which is working on immigration and education.

Holden declined to discuss the funding and resources dedicated to sentencing reform, except to say they were “significant.” He also said Freedom Partners, which oversees the donor network the Koch brothers created, sent a questionnaire to all the 2016 presidential candidates that included two prominent questions on criminal justice issues.

Holden sometimes talks to people about Angelos, who was featured in a video that the Kochs helped produce.

“They all shake their heads and say, ‘That was an unintended consequence and an outlier,’ ” Holden said. “I say, ‘Well, maybe, but Angelos is more than that. He’s a human being.

And it’s wrong. He’s just one of many, many stories like that. The bad news is that this

happened. The good news is we can fix this.’ ” ‘Gun stacking’ Angelos has never met Charles Koch or anyone from Koch Industries. While people in Washington and Wichita debate sentencing reform and Justice Department lawyers sift through clemency petitions, he and thousands of others are still waiting for relief.

But he is acutely aware of the interest of politicians and activists in his case. Recently, he was holding up a radio to the window to get better reception and listen to a talk show on criminal justice issues. He heard Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul invoke his name.

“I heard him say, ‘There’s this guy, Weldon Angelos, and he got 55 years’ and I was like, ‘Wow, he’s talking about me!’ ” He is hopeful that the influence of the Koch brothers and others could secure his release through presidential clemency and help other inmates.

“Their support is definitely going to make a difference,” Angelos said. “I think it has already. Their coming out on this and telling Obama to grant these commutations and pass these bills has brought some Republicans around. We need that conservative support.”

The son of a Greek immigrant, Angelos grew up poor and on food stamps. His escape was music. In his early 20s, Angelos founded a Utah-based rap label, Extravagant Records.

Trying to break into the industry, he wrote and produced songs with several well-known artists, including Snoop Dogg.

“It was really promising,” Angelos said. “But I just didn’t have the financial backing I needed.” In 2002, when he was 23, Angelos was arrested for selling marijuana to a Salt

Lake City police informant.

“It ruined my career and my life,” he said.

In the cell he shares with another inmate, Angelos has a small library of books. He is taking classes to get a college degree. Every night he calls his children. He hasn’t had a visitor in three years.

Angelos hasn’t seen his two boys — Anthony, 18, and Jesse, 16 — in eight years because they can’t afford to travel to California. The boys and their mother recently moved in with Angelos’s sister near Salt Lake City after they were evicted. His 12-year-old daughter, Meranda, who has a different mother, lives nearby. He last saw her three years ago.

Anthony reflected on his father’s life in a video produced by Generation Opportunity Institute, a group backed by the Koch brothers, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the group that first told the Kochs about the Angelos case.

“I think it’s cruel,” he said. “I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve anything, but he did serve his time, and I think he’s in there long enough.

The minimum should have been five years maybe. Fifty-five years is way too much. Way too much.”

Angelos never used or pulled a gun, but the informant later testified in court that he saw one in Angelos’s car during the first buy. He said that during the second buy, Angelos was wearing an ankle holster holding a firearm.

Officers later searched his home and found guns.

The sentence Angelos received as a nonviolent first-time offender fell under a law called 924(c).

Federal drug laws require five- to 30-year mandatory minimum sentences for possessing, brandishing or discharging a gun during a drug-trafficking crime. For each subsequent gun conviction, there is a mandatory sentence of 25 years that must be served consecutively.

This is often referred to as “gun stacking,” which is why Angelos received 55 years without parole.

He received five years for the gun in the car; 25 years for the second gun charge, having one in an ankle strap; and another 25 years for a third firearms charge, the gun police found in his home. He got one day for the marijuana.

At Angelos’s 2004 sentencing, Utah U.S. District Court Judge Paul G. Cassell, appointed by President George W. Bush, compared Weldon’s sentence (738 months) with the guideline sentences for the kingpin of three major drug trafficking rings that caused three deaths (465 months), a three-time aircraft hijacker (405 months), a second-degree murderer of three victims (235 months) and the rapist of three 10-year-olds (188 months).

“This is the most difficult case that I’ve faced since taking the bench 21/2 years ago,” said Cassell, now a professor at the University of Utah’s law school.

“I believe that to sentence Mr. Angelos to prison for what would essentially be the rest of his natural life is unjust, cruel and even irrational.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

40% Decrease in annual earnings and higher unemployment rates for people who serve time in prison.

Families with incarcerated fathers have greater economic stress, are more likely to be homeless and are likely to report negative behavioral changes in children, particularly aggression and delinquency.

Source: Compiled by the Coalition for Public Safety, a bipartisan criminal justice reform organization

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

MILITARY

Beretta’s fight to arm the military J ACOB B OGAGE Accokeek, Md. BY

T

he letters gave Cpl. Ernest Langdon “freedom of movement” in the Panama Canal Zone.

The United States maintained control of the canal in 1989, when Langdon, a Marine, was stationed there. But as tensions mounted between President George H.W. Bush and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Langdon and his comrades were ordered to test the lines of the Panama Defense Forces to see how far those papers would take them.

On patrol in the muggy jungle, Langdon often reached for his pistol, the only weapon he carried, for a pinch of firepower — just in case. It was a Beretta M9 pistol, standard issue for U.S. servicemembers.

Here in Accokeek, at Beretta’s U.S. headquarters, workers kept those M9s rolling off the line, supplying the military long after Noriega was ousted. Production ramped up as U.S. soldiers moved on to the war zones of the Middle East: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.

Now, the military says, it’s time for a modern handgun for modern warfare. The M9 has long been a sturdy standby when things fall apart in battle — a defensive weapon. The military wants soldiers to reach for the new gun — the XM17 — going into battle.

The military’s move to retire the M9 poses a new business challenge for Beretta on top of other change. After 40 years in Maryland, it’s moving its manufacturing — and more than a hundred jobs — out of the state in response to new gun laws that limit the sale and possession of firearms and threatened its commercial business.

And Beretta is suddenly fighting for a military contract worth $580 million with rivals it normally competes with in gun shops, not in defense contracting: Traditional military suppliers such as Beretta and Colt are facing competition from civilian manufacturers including Glock and Sturm, Ruger & Co.

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

As the M9 is retired, the company must compete with civilian gunmakers for the next contract Commercial handguns are sophisticated enough that the military can ask gunmakers to modify a civilian product to meet battlefield specifications. They’re durable, accurate, high-capacity weapons, perhaps giving civilian gunmakers the upper hand for the first time in military contracting history, gun experts say.

Losing a military contract can spell disaster for corporations that have relied on them to carry their brands. Colt, which made the M1911 pistol, the military’s sidearm for 70 years before the M9, filed for bankruptcy this summer, capping a decades-long decline touched off by the loss of the M1911 contract.

“When the gorilla is your only customer, you’re really hogtied,” says Brian Rafn, research director at financial firm Morgan Dempsey, where he specializes in firearm sales. “You’ve got nothing to fall back on. It’s much quicker selling to Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shops.”

The M9 is the pride of the Accokeek plant. In the lobby is a

target signed by every factory employee who helped make the first shipment of M9s for the military in 1985. Before that contract, there were 50 employees in Accokeek. Now there are 160.

“All this,” Gabriele de Plano, Beretta’s vice president of military and marketing sales, says as he strolls onto the factory floor in a dark suit and eye-protection goggles, “this is because of the M9 contract.”

But Beretta, an Italian company, is gearing up to move its U.S. manufacturing to Gallatin, Tenn.

Maryland’s gun laws played a part in that. Gallatin did its part to sweeten the deal, giving Beretta $4 million worth of tax incentives over a 10-year period and 100 acres in the city’s industrial park free of charge. Gov. Bill Haslam (R) flew to Italy to lobby the Beretta family to bring the headquarters to Tennessee.

Industry analysts say the costcutting measures involved with the move will be crucial if the company doesn’t win the XM17 contract.

A newly drilled Baretta M9 pistol is seen during the manufacturing process at a plant in Accokeek, Md. Traditional military suppliers are facing competition from civilian manufacturers for the first time.

“The [Modular Handgun System] kind of snuck up on us,” de Plano says.

The Army, the main driver behind any services-wide smallarms deal, didn’t ask for any technical advancements as the M9’s lifespan wore on, de Plano said.

Soldiers, however, were more candid in their critiques of the sidearm.

In 2006, the Center for Naval Analyses, a military nonprofit, surveyed soldiers who had fired the M9 during their previous deployment. Only 58 percent of them were satisfied with the M9.

It didn’t have accessories — or modularity, as the military calls it.

It’s range was poor in comparison with long-barrel rifles. And it was clumsy.

Nine years later, the military announced the XM17 contract, looking for a gun with more accessories — such as a rail to mount lights or laser guides on, or better sights on the barrel, or a slimmer grip for better control, or a lighter gun in general — anything to boost confidence in the Army’s arsenal.

“Manufactures have to introduce new models just like vehicles,” says Greg Danas, president of G&G Firearms Experts. “We haven’t had a new military gun for 30 years. Think about how much technology is behind.”

That $580 million contract amounts to more like $1 billion in work, Beretta’s de Plano says, when you put together the cost of research, production, accessories and disposing of old weapons, also the job of a manufacturer.

Still, gun companies will line up for the contract because that extra business cost pays off in other ways.

“The benefit of an Army win is the intangible advertising value for the individual consumer,” James says.

“That’s what’s driven the manufacturers,” Rafn of Morgan Dempsey says. “We’re going to have military-type hardware.

We’re going to have military accessories and we’re going to sell you the look, too. That’s a great margin business.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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Becoming a lord of discipline N ORA K RUG Port Royal, S.C. BY

T

hree years ago, life caught up with the novelist Pat Conroy. After decades of eating and drinking pretty much whatever he wanted, the best-selling novelist found himself lying in a hospital bed, bloated with fluids as his organs floundered. He had Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and a failing liver.

“I was in the process of dying,” Conroy says. His doctor told him he needed to adopt a more healthful lifestyle and enroll in a hospitalbased alcohol treatment program.

Conroy would have none of it.

“I told him, ‘Doctor, you don’t know me very well,’ ” Conroy recalls. “ ‘You will never see me again — and that is a promise.’ ” He kept his word. Following his release from the hospital, Conroy, now 69, quit drinking. He has since lost about 25 pounds. His blood pressure is now at a normal level, without medication. He has worked with a nutritionist, who happens to be his next-door neighbor. “She actually comes to my house and opens the refrigerator door and starts throwing away things she doesn’t want me to eat,” he says.

The self-deprecating Conroy may not see himself as a fitness inspiration, but he has nonetheless shown that no matter your age or how far you’ve fallen, there are still ways to regain your health.

Last spring, Conroy sealed his commitment to self-improvement with an investment: He opened a fitness studio in Port Royal, S.C., where he works with Mina Truong, a personal trainer.

One recent hot afternoon, Conroy, dressed casually in gym shorts, a T-shirt and a Citadel hat, showed off his new hangout, Mina & Conroy Fitness Studio, a 600-squarefoot workout space. The small gym is equipped with little more than a bike, mats and some pulley and boxing equipment. But for Conroy, it’s just enough.

“He just keeps pushing,” Truong says. “I have to stop him sometimes.”

ALEX HOLT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Novelist Pat Conroy was ‘dying’ three years ago.

Then he changed his lifestyle and got healthy.

Conroy hasn’t exactly transformed himself into Jack LaLanne, nor is he the svelte cadet who weighed 150 pounds during his college years at the Citadel. But Conroy, who is 6 feet tall, says he’s slowly approaching his goal of 230 pounds.

The author of such celebrated novels as “The Prince of Tides” and “The Lords of Discipline,” Conroy speaks openly about reckoning with his doctors, his self-image and his habits.

“Everything the diabetes doctors told me was absolutely true,” says Conroy, who was diagnosed in 1996 and told to lose weight and exercise more. “I just didn’t do it.”

Like many of the estimated 29 million Americans with the disease, Conroy was overweight and suffered from neuropathy. But he struggled to face reality. “No one likes to see themselves fat,” he says.

“I never liked it, never got used to it. But there it was when I looked in the mirror.”

The problem was finding the motivation to change. It “took a near-death experience,” he says. It

also took the help of friends and family — and a sense of humor.

In addition to Truong and his nutritionist, Conroy’s wife, the novelist Cassandra King, helps him maintain a healthful diet. A typical daily menu will begin with coffee, granola and Greek yogurt.

“And then, of course, since I am built like a Sri Lankan elephant, I starve until lunch,” he says. Lunch is usually light — on this day, he has a plate of sashimi — and his wife typically prepares dinner: salad, chicken, “something disgustingly healthy,” Conroy jokes.

He skips dessert and, on the advice of Truong and his nutritionist, skips diet sodas, too. “I drink very expensive water,” he says, pointing to his concoction of ice water spiked with lemon, herbs and vegetables.

Giving up alcohol was difficult, he says, but worth it. Reading the biographies of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, Conroy was awakened to a sad truth: “All these male novelists killed themselves the same way,” he says. “Unless I’m in complete and

Pat Conroy works out at the fitness studio he opened as part of his makeover. In three years, he has lost 25 pounds, quit drinking, brought his blood pressure down and improved his diet.

utter denial, I knew I had to get away from this or I’d be doing the same thing everyone else did.”

Conroy, who in 2004 published a cookbook that included recipes for decadent treats including candied bacon and cheddar-cheeseand-sausage biscuits, confesses he misses some things from his old diet. He is a lover of “animal fat in all its grotesque proportions,” he says, adding, “If there was a loving, just god, foie gras would have one calorie and a bean sprout would have 1,400.” He also admits that he occasionally indulges at a favorite Italian restaurant in Beaufort, where he lives. But workouts help mitigate the effects of his sins.

His one-hour regimen, devised

by Truong, combines stretching with strength and balance exercises, light cardiovascular work and a strong focus on the core.

Over the course of five days, Truong mixes up the exercises; she also varies them week to week. On some days she’ll focus on the upper body; on other days she’ll have him do high-intensity interval training, a regimen that alternates between short high- and lowintensity exercises.

Truong is mindful of Conroy’s medical issues — he has also struggled with damage to his rotator cuff and lingering back problems from his days on the Citadel basketball team. Truong monitors his movements carefully, asking about pain, checking his heart rate.

Conroy says his new lifestyle “has helped me in every conceivable away.” He recently finished a young-adult novel with his daughter Melissa and is working on a new novel about Charleston.

Still, Conroy is ever the realist.

“I know I could die tomorrow.”

But, he adds, “I also have these feelings — as I get these results from doctors — that I may be extending my life. And when I sit down to write, I feel like I am extending the clarity in my writing life.

“The thing that surprises me,” he says of his workouts, “is that I keep coming back. I thought I would get sick of it. Now I have made it a part of my daily life, like writing. It’s been habit-forming.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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BOOKS

Smoke a joint for whatever ails you?

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

S USAN O KIE

‘D STONED A Doctor’s Case for Medical Marijuana

By David Casarett Current. 289 pp. $27.95

oes medical marijuana ‘work’?” That question, posed in an illuminating new book by David Casarett, a hospice physician and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, sounds simple and turns out to be anything but.

The short answer is that it depends on the symptom or problem being treated, on the physiology of the patient using it, on the mode of drug delivery (a joint? a brownie? a vapor pen? a beer?) and on various other factors. A small but growing trove of research suggests that for some symptoms — insomnia, nausea, certain kinds of pain, muscle spasms, perhaps even the disabling anxiety of post-traumatic stress disorder or the agitation often experienced by people with Alzheimer’s — medical marijuana does work. And for some other conditions, marijuana or drugs based on some of its active ingredients appear promising.

“It’s starting to look to me like marijuana might offer real medical benefits,” Casarett acknowledges halfway through “Stoned,” noting that he embarked on the book project believing he’d find little evidence of weed’s effectiveness.

That’s potentially good news for people living in states where medical marijuana is legal — currently 23, plus the District — but it’s only half the picture. Research has also identified risks clearly associated with marijuana use. Casarett reports worrisome evidence of a link between marijuana use and psychosis, and somewhat weaker findings suggest that it may increase users’ chance of developing schizophrenia. It can also cause addiction in some people, since it lights up the brain’s pleasure circuitry in essentially the same way as alcohol, cigarettes or cocaine — although a user’s risk of becoming addicted probably depends on one’s genetic makeup, frequency of use and the strength of the marijuana product being inhaled or ingested.

WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION; BASED ON ISTOCK PHOTOS

Some studies have also found subtle structural changes in the brains of heavy marijuana users, fueling worries about possible permanent effects on learning and memory. On the other hand, some of the theoretical concerns long cited by researchers about marijuana’s potential for damaging organs have not been borne out by studies. In particular, marijuana — despite containing many of the same components as tobacco — has not been found to damage the lungs or cause lung cancer in longtime smokers. In one study, smoking it even improved lung function in people with asthma. And, although smoking it can lower a user’s blood pressure, increase heart rate and make blood more likely to clot, so far it hasn’t been shown to lead to heart attacks or strokes. Still, Casarett warns that people with diabetes, high blood pressure or other risk factors should be warned of the possibility of such an event, and he cautions that marijuana should not be used during pregnancy.

Statistically, the most lifethreatening danger of marijuana — both to users and to the general public — is probably the herb’s well-documented impairment of driving skills. Recent use slows a driver’s reaction time, reduces the brain’s ability to focus and worsens performance when faced with multiple tasks. Studies indicate that driving while stoned approximately doubles the risk of an accident. Moreover, the effects persist for hours, and there’s currently no reliable sobriety test for users.

Casarett advises: “If you’re thinking of getting high and then driving a car . . . Don’t. Just don’t.”

Although his methodical parsing of the scientific evidence makes the book slow going at times, Casarett spices things up with a hands-on approach to investigative reporting. Not only did he seek out and interview numerous patients who said their symptoms had been relieved by marijuana when nothing else had worked, he experimented on himself. By my count, he describes

trying marijuana in four different forms, testing their ability to relieve what ails him as well as their effect on his consciousness.

His first-hand account of weedinduced hallucinations underscores the book’s message that marijuana’s effects are produced by dozens of chemicals whose levels vary in different strains of plants, and that choosing a particular strain or dose and predicting how it will work in a particular patient is difficult, requiring both expert advice and trial and error.

Butwiththe medicaluse ofmarijuana expanding and additional states likely to legalize the practice, Casarett argues that it’s time to test and standardize the quality of the products being dispensed to patients, and to require clinics and dispensaries to educate would-be consumers more thoroughly about the herb’s potential benefits and risks. Posing as a patient at two marijuana clinics, he encountered one that fulfilled those responsibilities and one that fell far short. In the future, he predicts, researchers will explore how the plant’s several dozen cannabinoids — the active ingredients — affect the brain, immune system and other organs, and may create new, targeted drugs as a result of those discoveries.

In the meantime, he believes that well-informed patients who want to try marijuana should be allowed to weigh the risks against the hoped-for benefits. “Why don’t we give the public a role in research?” he asks. “Let them see what happens. And then let their experiences guide the design of rigorous trials that reflect the wisdom of the crowd.”

Anyone considering whether to use marijuana for a medical condition will find this book a valuable introduction to becoming an educated consumer. n Okie is an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Georgetown University and a former reporter and science editor at The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

In defense of Italy’s Borgia clan

Busting myths about black women

H ISTORICAL

N ON-FICTION

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riters and entertainers have long found rich fodder in the historical muck of the Borgia clan. Spanish interlopers at the height of the Italian Renaissance — the “original crime family,” as the popular Showtime series describes them — inspired works by Dumas, Victor Hugo and Rafael Sabatini, among others. Despite all the adultery, bribery, incest, murder and ruthless power-grubbing in the House of Borgia, perhaps no member of the family has excited more salacious gossip than Lucrezia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI and Renaissance Italy’s favored villainess. An alleged poisoner of husbands said to have conducted incestuous affairs with father and brother both, Lucrezia had a dubious reputation as early as the 17th century in John Ford’s tragedy “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.”

According to the new novel by Nobel laureate Dario Fo, however, this is nothing but “creative embroidery in the fine art of scandalmongering.” Making his novel debut at the lively age of 89, Fo’s “The Pope’s Daughter” offers a studied reconsideration of Lucrezia’s life, swerving dramatically from accounts of her as “a monster, a poisoner, and a prostitute.” Here, instead, she is a devoted wife and daughter, lover of culture and patron of the poor and downtrodden. Not just a pawn or sacrificial lamb, she’s a keen political mind in her own right, able to maneuver with the best (and worst) of the men.

The Borgia’s political machinations provide an undoubtedly grotesque spectacle, a fine subject for the dell’arte all’improvviso, which has long been a creative touchstone of Fo’s. A controversial choice for the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Italian has been called the “people’s court jester,” taking his cues, as an actor, playwright, comedian and director from the tradition of the Italian giullare, an

J ENNY H ENDRIX

itinerant medieval performer whose antics gave the exploited a voice.

But Fo is considerably more restrained in “The Pope’s Daughter” than he’s been in the past, and consequently less vivid, as though his concern for Lucrezia’s redemption outweighed his own impulses. His tone is colloquial and gently ironic, but he is unendingly affectionate toward his heroine. He explained, in an interview, that he identified Lucrezia with his late wife, the actress Franca Rame, and the result is a historical novel that unabashedly takes sides, justifying and praising Lucrezia’s every move in scenes that move briskly through her life.

Fo doesn’t entirely escape the stage. Certainly, the machinations of the Borgias are their own kind of theatrics, and Fo exaggerates the analogy to the point at which artifice overruns plot and infects form as well. His prose here is knowingly self-conscious, its over-explications verging on farce. The dialogue, too, though taken from historical accounts, reads as stagey and false.

Some may be able to read in “The Pope’s Daughter” a mask of contemporary Italy, though Fo does not, for a change, make this obvious. What is clear though, through the hints he drops throughout, is that Fo values the Borgia’s era less for its stories of brutality and intrigue than for its careful incubation of the arts — including the commedia — a compensatory tendency that he’s reportedly found lacking in Italy today. For, despite their Machiavellian politics, he writes, the Borgias and the artists they nurtured “knew each other, hated and loved each other, producing — in the union of their personalities and creative energies — perhaps the most exalted and matchless moment in the history of Italian culture.” n Hendrix is a writer in Brooklyn.

I THE POPE’S DAUGHTER

By Dario Fo Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar Europa. 241 pp.

Paperback, $17

THE SISTERS ARE ALRIGHT Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

By Tamara Winfrey Harris Berrett-Koehler. 146 pp. Paperback, $15.95

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L ORI L . T HARPS

ronically, “The Sisters Are Alright” appears at a time when sisters seem anything but. As I write these words, the fate of Sandra Bland and four other black women who died while in police custody is galvanizing a hashtag movement seeking to bring attention to what seems an unrelenting and underreported tidal wave of abuse and ridicule of black women. In early July, Serena Williams, one of America’s greatest athletes, earned her 21st Grand Slam title with an electrifying win at Wimbledon; in response, several media outlets chose to critique her body type. Also in July, the mayor of Airway Heights, Wash., Patrick Rushing, came to national attention after posting a Facebook message referring to our first lady as “Gorilla face Michele.” All of this in just one month suggests that the sisters are not all right.

Journalist and blogger Tamara Winfrey Harris believes otherwise and sets out to prove it in this, her first book. Using a combination of anecdotal evidence, historical research, and well-documented facts and studies, Harris has compiled an engaging treatise on black womanhood in America.

With chapters on beauty, sex, health, marriage and anger, Harris hits all the hot-button issues that typically engage black women in this country. In each chapter, she points out distortions — all black woman are angry, all black mothers are single mothers — and then cites the life experiences of women who challenge the myths. We hear from a single mother who was raised by a single mother and, predictably, she’s all right. In the chapter on marriage, we meet Kim Akins, a happily single black woman who, far from lamenting her noncoupled status, celebrates her freedom.

Akins’s story is neither instructive nor necessarily representative, but it challenges the typical story foisted on black women in America.

In literature and in film, on television and even in our history books,

the narrative of the black female experience is too often one-dimensional. “A hyperfocus on black women’s challenges, with Mammy, the Matriarch, Sapphire, and Jezebel forever in the shadows, gives an inaccurate and narrow picture of black women’s lives,” Harris writes in her introduction.

The problem with “The Sisters Are Alright” is that, in her attempt to change the broken narrative of black women in America, Harris spends too much time reiterating what’s broken and not enough time constructing a thoughtful alternative version. In the chapter on sex, for example, the author examines the black woman as hyper-sexed myth but uses Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé as case studies!

Instead of giving considerable ink to the black women who are shattering stereotypes, Harris offers micro-sidebars scattered throughout under the awkward heading “Moments in Alright” to highlight moments in black women’s lives. In the chapter dedicated to beauty, there’s a “Moment” that reads, “College-educated black women are the most likely group to read a book in any format.” While that is a positive fact to share, why is it in a chapter about beauty, and how does it fit into the new narrative that Harris is trying to construct? Had these sidebars been expanded and organized in a more coherent way, they could have served as the inspirational nuggets.

From outliers such as Oprah to everyday heroes such as Ruth Simmons, who was the first black president of an Ivy League university (Brown), examples abound of black women who refuse to be pigeonholed. But they are not in this book. Their voices, along with a more thorough and nuanced presentation of the statistics and scholarship on black female achievement, could have bolstered Harris’s claim that the sisters are indeed all right. n Tharps is an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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OPINIONS

Family bonds were forged in the heat of spicy food PERRI KLASS is a professor of journalism and pediatrics and director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

After I gave birth to my first child in January 1984, one of the nurses in the progressive Cambridge, Mass., hospital where I had my exhausting, anaesthesia­free delivery came to give me the standard breast­feeding lesson. Lots of fluids but no alcohol. Try for serenity, rocking chair, music, she said — and no spicy foods. We don’t want to upset Baby’s stomach!

Decades later, my reaction is still a family legend. I sat bolt upright in bed and demanded: “What about the mothers in Mexico? The mothers in India?

For crying out loud, what about the mothers in Szechuan province?” I had just endured the indigestion of pregnancy and the abdominal overcrowding of the third trimester. I was already fantasizing about a return to spicy foods.

So I disregarded that breastfeeding guidance with all three children. I loved them but not enough to abstain, especially during those months of interrupted sleep and hormonal emotion. I needed jalapeños, serranos, cayenne, Szechuan peppercorns and all the other condiments that give meaning to life.

Was there any evidence that nursing infants are troubled by a spicy maternal diet? I think it was just another piece of let’smake-motherhood-as-bland-aspossible righteousness. And now, with the publication in the British Medical Journal this month of a study showing that people who eat spicy food live longer, science has caught up with my instincts. We are in that rare situation where something that adds incomparable pleasure to your life might actually be a nutritionally and medically wise thing to do. (Take that, kale.)

What is life without heat, without spice, but a cold and cheerless landscape? That was

not the planet where I wanted to live — or where I wanted my children to grow up. I didn’t think I was planning a healthy regimen back then. What I was doing was craving all that is most blazingly delicious, most immediately for myself but also, of course, for those I love.

This goes back a generation: My parents first ate Indian food on a research trip to Trinidad in the 1950s, and I grew up loving it.

I now have three adult children who respond to the question “Mild, medium or hot?” with an unhesitating “Very hot, please!”

Whether it’s the barbecue sauce, the nuclear wings, the northern Thai salad, the vindaloo or the Ma La hot pot, we go as a family for the dishes on the menu with the three or four little red peppers next to them. We’ve attended the employee Christmas party at the Szechuan restaurant around the corner from our home, and some of the staff came to my mother’s memorial: She, too, had loved their “Dry Spicy, Tasty Diced Chicken with Ginger and Peanut,” a dish in which you can crunch the fried red peppers as if they were explosive potato chips. The waiters long ago stopped trying to discourage us from ordering the dish appropriately listed on the menu as “Tears in Eyes (Very Spicy Mung Bean Noodle).”

The BMJ study made me imagine parents — or even nutritionists — saying to children, “You need more fruits,

MATT WALFORD/GETTY IMAGES/CULTURA RF

vegetables and hot sauce in your diet.” An enormous epidemiological project that tracked the dietary habits of nearly half a million people in China, the report showed that eating spicy food was associated with a lower risk of death than not eating it, and eating spicy food more often lowered your risk even further. The risk of particular diseases (cancer, certain kinds of heart and lung disease) was lower for spicyfood-eating people, too. As with all such studies, this association doesn’t tell you cause and effect.

But the researchers corrected for a wide variety of other epidemiologic factors: drinking, smoking, education, physical activity and more.

In their conclusion, they speculate as to the reasons for the results, discussing the possible effects that capsaicin, the active component of chili pepper, may have in the human body: “The beneficial roles of capsaicin have been extensively reported in relation to anti-obesity, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and antihypertensive effects, and in improving glucose homeostasis, largely in

experimental or small sized population studies.” Further, they go on, spices serve a longrecognized antimicrobial function and may do good things for the balance of bacteria in the gut.

So there it is: “Eat your ‘Sichuan Spicy Ma Po Tofu with Black Beans’ or no dessert!” Still, while I’m delighted to be able to pretend I had nutritionally sound motives for a family diet rich in chili oil, the truth is that spicy food has always seemed to me one of the great joys of human existence. What really gives me satisfaction is to be able to experience this pleasure on a regular basis with the people I love most.

For me, spicy food is clearly part of the bond with my parents and therefore part of the taste of family life. We weren’t pushing the ma po tofu because we thought it would extend our lives; we were just passing it around because we knew it was part of what made life worth living.

And in that spirit, I offer my humble thanks to the gods of medical research and, of course, to the Szechuan restaurant around the corner. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A sinister expansion of euthanasia CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer, specializing in economic policy, federal fiscal issues and business, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog.

If you were a psychiatrist and a chronically depressed patient told you he wanted to die, what would you do?

In Belgium, you might prescribe this vulnerable, desperate person a fatal dose of sodium thiopental.

Between October 2007 and December 2011, 100 people went to a clinic in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region with depression, or schizophrenia, or, in several cases, Asperger’s syndrome, seeking euthanasia. The doctors, satisfied that 48 of the patients were in earnest, and that their conditions were “untreatable” and “unbearable,” offered them lethal injection; 35 went through with it.

These facts come not from a police report but an article by one of the clinic’s psychiatrists, Lieve Thienpont, in the British journal BMJ Open. All was perfectly legal under Belgium’s 2002 euthanasia statute, which applies not only to terminal physical illness, still the vast majority of cases, but also to an apparently growing minority of psychological ones. Official figures show nine cases of euthanasia due to “neuropsychiatric” disorders in the two-year period 2004-2005; in 2012-2013, the number had risen to 120, or 4 percent of the total.

Next door in the Netherlands, which decriminalized euthanasia in 2002, right-to-die activists opened a clinic in March 2012 to “help” people turned down for

lethal injections by their regular physicians. In the next 12 months, the clinic approved euthanasia for six psychiatric patients, plus 11 people whose only recorded complaint was being “tired of living,” according to a report in the Aug. 10 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

If you find this sinister, I agree.

Bioethicists Barron H. Lerner and Arthur L. Caplan, who reviewed the data from the Low Countries in JAMA Internal Medicine, observe that the reports “seem to validate concerns about where these practices might lead.”

That’s putting it mildly.

Thienpont acknowledges that “the concept of ‘unbearable suffering’ has not yet been defined adequately” and that “there are no guidelines for the management of euthanasia requests on grounds of mental

suffering in Belgium.”

Yet she and her colleagues continue to put the mentally ill to death, insisting that they are respecting their wishes — though, as she writes, “further studies are recommended.”

Thienpont’s co-author Wim Distelmans, a leading advocate of euthanasia, has ended the life of a 44-year-old who was anguished, but not terminally ill, due to a botched sex-change operation.

Distelmans also put to death identical 45-year-old deaf twins who said they lost the will to live upon learning they would eventually go blind.

Frank van den Bleeken, imprisoned for 30 years for rape and murder, sought euthanasia from Distelmans, citing his incurable violent impulses and the misery of life behind bars. Belgian officials and Distelmans initially agreed; a lethal injection the murderer might have gotten as punishment in the United States would be supplied as therapy in anti-death-penalty Europe.

In January, however, Distelmans backed out just before the scheduled procedure — there was still hope for van den Bleeken to get treatment at a facility in the Netherlands, he said.

The “very worrisome” trends in Europe “should give us pause” about where the “assisted dying”

movement might lead in this country, Lerner and Caplan write.

To be sure, by authorizing doctors to administer lethal drugs, in terminal and nonterminal cases, the Benelux countries go far beyond laws in Oregon and four other states, which permit physicians to prescribe, not administer, a fatal dose — and only in cases of terminal physical illness.

Those limitations, and their effectiveness since Oregon adopted its law in 1997, help explain why 24 states, and the District, are considering assisted-suicide legislation, which 68 percent of the public supports in some form, according to a Gallup poll.

What’s noteworthy about euthanasia in Europe, though, has been its tendency to expand, once the taboo against physicianaided death was breached in favor of more malleable concepts such as “patient autonomy.”

The United States, like Europe, is aging, with all that implies for the spread of Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders. If pressure rises for more doctorassisted death, Lerner and Caplan insist, “physicians must remain primarily healers.”

“Part of the problem with the slippery slope,” they write, “is that you never know when you are on it.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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OPINIONS

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

Monticello’s whitewashed history DESIREE H. MELTON is a philosophy professor at Notre Dame of Maryland University and specializes in critical race theory, feminist philosophy and social and political philosophy.

The day was overcast and humid on a recent visit to Virginia wine country. After visiting a couple of wineries, my partner and I decided it was time to visit Monticello. I had planned our short getaway with a visit to the slave sites at Monticello in mind, but still I had to steady myself before I could stomach seeing the plantation. We would not take the guided tour because I did not want to share the experience with strangers, so we took a self-guided walking tour and shared earbuds as we listened to narration about the slave sites.

To my surprise, I was not saddened by the experience. I did, however, get angry. I was angry at the utter lack of reverence and solemnity. There was no somber reflection in the place where President Thomas Jefferson kept his people. Instead, visitors were ducking in and out of the slave cabins to escape the gentle rain, handling the artifacts like items in a store. One preteen white boy bounded into one of the cabins and exclaimed to his father, “This isn’t so bad!” The father looked around and agreed. I was stunned.

But I should not have been.

Reverence and solemnity among its white visitors were missing from Monticello because it did not demand it of them. A comparison is often made between American slavery and the Holocaust, but I could not help but think of the emotional

demands the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum places on its visitors and notice that Monticello does not do the same.

Visitors to the Holocaust Museum speak in hushed tones, and reflection and contemplation are encouraged. Not at Monticello. It is always easier for a nation to recognize atrocities committed elsewhere than to claim its own, especially when its reverberations are still being felt.

Why does Monticello allow visitors to tour the house and then skip over its related slave sites?

Why does Monticello not demand that its visitors consider that

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY JOE HELLER FOR THE GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE

Jefferson was so exacting that he rubbed his horses with a white cloth to check that their grooming met his standards? How does Monticello reconcile its claim that Jefferson was “kind” to his slaves with the fact that his favorite overseer was the most brutal? How can “kind” ever be an adjective used to describe a slave owner? Doesn’t owning people, raping women, selling children and destroying families preclude kindness?

Whitewashing our history of slavery is not only dishonest but also allows for a disconnect between the horrors of slavery and the current entrenchment of inequality. If white people cannot accept the awful truth that one of the nation’s cherished founders held people as property, and that slavery was indeed horrific, why would they acknowledge the covert ways in which blacks are still oppressed? Remaining willfully ignorant of racism and its grip on our institutions is a challenge if one acknowledges the horror of captivity and being forced to bear the children of one’s captors, or of the fact that

Acknowledging black oppression involves taking stock of how this nation enslaved a people.

one’s children can be sold at auction at any time or given as gifts to white children, or of families being split, or of losing one’s culture.

Acknowledging black oppression involves taking stock of how this nation enslaved a people, marked them as subhuman and closed off opportunities in obvious and notso-obvious ways. The nation must demand that whites confront the fact that this country was built on chattel slavery that set the stage for generation upon generation of black inequality. Yes, progress has been made, but current conditions are still unacceptable.

I was one of only a few black people at Monticello that day.

Whites made way for me as I walked the grounds. This was a first for me. Perhaps the greater the distance between them and me, the easier it was to keep up the pretense of slavery being my history and not theirs, too. They kept their distance the way Monticello has kept its distance from its history. Displaying Monticello for what it was — a slave plantation owned by a founder and president who supposedly believed in freedom for all — will not solve racism. But at the very least, it would be one small step on the way toward facing the truth. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Yoga BY

A NDREA R . J AIN

Yoga has become one of the most fashionable practices in the world, yet a number of myths have grown up around it.

1

Yoga is exclusively of Hindu origin.

Although there are countless Hindu forms of yoga, the notion that it is originally or definitively Hindu ignores its historical diversity. Throughout its history, yoga was shaped by an array of South Asian practices, ideas and aims widespread among not only Hindus but also Buddhists, Jains and adherents of other religions.

Modern postural yoga — that popular fitness regimen made up of sequences of challenging poses — has more varied origins. It is a result of cross-cultural exchanges and influences from modern medicine, sports and exercise programs. In the 1930s, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, for example, became one of the first postural yoga gurus. He was Hindu but taught a form of yoga partly shaped by British calisthenics. Practitioners from India, Europe and the United States, with a wide array of religious convictions or none at all, created the yoga that Americans began adopting widely in the 20th century.

2

Yoga is not religious.

Some forms of modern yoga have explicitly religious aims, from Hindu schools such as siddha yoga, which promotes the “strength and delight that come from the certainty of the divine presence within you,” to Christian varieties such as holy yoga, which describes its mission as “experiential worship . . . to deepen people’s connection to Christ.” Even in other forms, yoga has implicit spiritual dimensions, though they’re not limited to one particular religious tradition.

Practitioners participate in scripted rituals requiring

movement through a sequence of postures meant to reorient them away from the day’s business and stresses and toward the goal of self-improvement.

3

Swami Vivekananda created modern yoga.

In the New York Times a few years back, Ann Louise Bardach wrote, wryly, that “you might blame Vivekananda” — a turn-of-the-century Hindu reformer, emissary to the United States and Indian nationalist who created a system of modern yoga called raja yoga — “for having introduced ‘yoga’ into the national conversation.” The swami is known for a wellreceived speech he gave in Chicago in 1893 to the Parliament of the World’s Religions, in which he declared that “sectarianism, bigotry and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth” and “had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.” But the speech, in fact, never mentioned yoga.

In terms of his yogic teachings, Vivekananda had several Indian, European and North American contemporaries whose work was equally influential in the development of some of yoga’s earliest modern forms.

Nineteenth-century American social radical Ida C. Craddock created a yoga system for married couples looking to improve their sex lives. Another early modern yoga advocate was Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian guru who traveled to the United States and taught yoga to Americans in the first half of the 20th century.

Vivekananda’s emphasis on self-control, meditation and psychology appealed to many who challenged institutionalized

BRITTANY GREESON/THE WASHINGTON POST

religion. But he wasn’t a fan of yoga poses — and those, of course, are what most of us envision when we think of yoga.

4

You need money to practice yoga.

Practitioners in the United States spend more than $10 billion a year on classes, clothing and accessories. A typical studio class can cost more than $18, and a Lululemon outfit pushes $200. The most committed adherents can shell out more than $100 for a top-ofthe-line mat.

But these accessories are recent additions to the experience. The first purposemade yoga mat was not manufactured and sold until the 1990s. Before then, yoga was practiced on grass, towels, rugs or bare wooden floors. Today, a small set of traditionalists refuses to use mats, arguing that they interfere with the practice.

Some yoga advocates have rejected its commercialization by offering nonprofit classes and opening studios that spurn expensive accessories. Yoga to the People, for instance, offers donation-based classes in several cities. The company says the rising cost of yoga is at odds with

its essence. Yoga is meant to help people become self-actualized, the company says — a priceless aim. Increasingly, yoga is also being introduced in marginalized communities, with classes taught in prisons, schools in low-income neighborhoods and homeless shelters.

5

Yoga has always been about physical fitness.

More than half of yoga enthusiasts in the United States say physical fitness is their primary motivation, according to a Yoga Journal survey, and 78 percent say they’re in it mostly to gain flexibility. That vision is a modern invention; nothing like it has existed in most of yoga’s history.

In the early days of modern yoga, turn- of-the-century Indian reformers, along with Western social radicals, focused on the practice’s meditative and philosophical dimensions. For most of them, the physical aspects were not of primary importance. n Jain is an assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis and the author of “Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2015

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