The Washington Post National Weekly - September 11, 2016

Politics Bill Clinton’s lucrative deal 4

World Living among the lions 11

Q&A The creative spark behind Apple 16

5 Myths Labor unions 23

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ON LEADERSHIP

Listening vs. controlling BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

T

here was a lot of talk about leadership in Wednesday night’s televised town hall with presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Given the billing — NBC touted it as the Commander-in-Chief Forum — that’s to be expected. The word “leader” was used at least 26 times; the word “decision” was uttered exactly as many, according to a transcript by The Washington Post, and both White House hopefuls used “judgment” to describe a key trait for being commander in chief.

Yet there were two words — “listen” and “control” — that were used just once, and each time by only one of the candidates. And no, it’s not hard to guess who used which one.

Still, the stark opposition in those words not only helps to illustrate how Clinton and Trump define leadership, but how incredibly different they appear poised to treat the job.

In Clinton’s case, she was asked by moderator Matt Lauer to describe what she sees as the most important characteristic of being this country’s commander in chief.

“When you’re sitting in the Situation Room, as I have on numerous occasions, particularly with respect to determining whether to recommend the raid against bin Laden, what you want in a president, a commander in chief, is someone who listens, who evaluates what is being told to him or her, who is able to sort out the very difficult options being presented,” she told Lauer.

The word recalls how Clinton’s leadership style is not only repeatedly described but how the candidate herself has structured her campaigns. She’s started off efforts at elected office with “listening tours.” In a lengthy analysis in Vox this summer, Ezra Klein said “listening” came up over and over again as the explanation for what people misunderstand about

KLMNO WEEKLY

MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Presidential nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton participate in a forum hosted by “Today” show co-anchor Matt Lauer in New York on Wednesday.

Clinton. “It sounds like a caricature of what we would say about a female politician,” he wrote.

Yet in the course of the primary, “Clinton proved the more effective listener — and, particularly, the more effective coalition builder.”

Meanwhile, that word didn’t show up in the Trump half of the forum. When asked a similar question by Lauer about experiences that have prepared him to be commander in chief, Trump cited his business and his judgment. Later in the discussion, he bizarrely heaped praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin, something the GOP nominee has repeatedly dished out.

The word “control” falls in that extraordi-

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 48

nary passage, in which Trump not only cites Putin’s approval rating but goes on to say Putin “is really very much a leader. I mean, you can say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a terrible thing — the man has very strong control over a country.’ Now it’s a very different system, and I don’t happen to like the system. But certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”

It’s possible Trump is saying that Putin’s control of Russia is the “terrible thing” some might say can happen in a “different system,” one led by a former KGB agent who runs a country that stifles dissent and a free press.

But consider Trump’s past statements, and a more likely interpretation seems to be that he’s instead calling Putin’s “strong control” evidence of his leadership.

To wit: Late last year, “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough asked Trump why he welcomed a compliment from Putin, and Trump responded that “he’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.” In his convention speech in July, Trump said “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” reflecting a hierarchical, dominant leadership style.

Back in March during a primary debate, Trump explained that he could get military officials to follow his orders simply because “I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say ‘Do it,’ they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.”

Clinton’s talk of “listening” and Trump’s talk of “control” should surprise no one. They reinforce what is already said about both candidates and how they might lead. They are but two words in a sea of thousands from Wednesday’s forum. Yet if there were ever a simpler way of representing the vast chasm in leadership styles that seems to exist between these two candidates, it’s hard to see it. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY Q&A BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Police cars sit on Main Street in Dallas after the sniper shooting that killed five officers July 7. Photograph by LAURA BUCKMAN/Agence FrancePresse via Getty Images

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POLITICS

College firm paid Bill Clinton millions

BY R OSALIND S . H ELDERMAN AND M ICHELLE Y E H EE L EE

T

he guest list for a private State Department dinner on higher-education policy was taking shape when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a suggestion.

In addition to recommending invitations for leaders from a community college and a churchfunded institution, Clinton wanted a representative from a forprofit college company called Laureate International Universities, which, she explained in an email to her chief of staff that was released last year, was “the fastest growing college network in the world.”

There was another reason Clinton favored setting a seat aside for Laureate at the August 2009 event: The company was started by a businessman, Doug Becker, “who Bill likes a lot,” the secretary wrote, referring to her husband, the former president.

Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.

There is no evidence that Laureate received special favors from the State Department in direct exchange for hiring Bill Clinton, but the Baltimore-based company had much to gain from an association with a globally connected expresident and, indirectly, the United States’ chief diplomat. Being included at the 2009 dinner, shoulder to shoulder with leaders from internationally renowned universities for a discussion about the role of higher education in global diplomacy, provided an added level of credibility for the business as it pursued an aggressive expansion strategy overseas, occasionally tangling with foreign regulators.

“A lot of these private-education guys, they’re looking to get into events like this one,” said Sam Pitroda, a higher-education expert who was representing a policy commission from India at the State Department dinner. “The

JAVIER SORIANO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

For-profit system touted ex-president’s role as it expanded globally discussion itself is irrelevant. . . . It gets you very high-level contacts, and it gets you to the right people.”

While much of the controversy about Hillary Clinton’s State Department tenure has involved donations to her family’s charity, the Clinton Foundation, a close examination of the Laureate deal reveals how Bill Clinton leveraged the couple’s connections during that time to enhance their personal wealth — potentially providing another avenue for supporters to gain access to the family.

In addition to his wellestablished career as a paid speaker, which began soon after he left the Oval Office, Bill Clinton took on new consulting work starting in 2009, at the same time Hillary Clin-

ton assumed her post at the State Department. Laureate was the highest-paying client, but Bill Clinton signed contracts worth millions with GEMS Education, a secondary-education chain based in Dubai, as well as Shangri-La Industries and Wasserman Investment, two companies run by longtime Democratic donors. All told, with his consulting, writing and speaking fees, Bill Clinton was paid $65.4 million during Hillary Clinton’s four years as secretary of state.

Details of Bill Clinton’s compensation are found in the couple’s tax returns, which were made public by his wife’s presidential campaign and provide an unusual glimpse into the way a former

Bill Clinton speaks in Madrid at the Laureate International Universities Summit on Youth and Jobs in Europe in 2013.

president can make millions in the private sector. Bill Clinton has proved particularly marketable because of his global celebrity, enhanced by his foundation, his continued visibility on the political scene and his wife’s stature as a senator, Cabinet official and potential president.

The Laureate arrangement illustrates the extent to which the Clintons mixed their charitable work with their private and political lives. Many of those who paid Bill Clinton to consult or speak were also foundation donors and, in some cases, supporters of political campaigns for one or both Clintons.

Becker, for example, donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and last year donat-

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POLITICS ed $2,700 to her current effort.

Laureate has given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the charity’s website, and made millions of dollars of charitable commitments through the Clinton Global Initiative, an arm of the foundation that arranged for corporations to make public pledges to their own philanthropic projects. Meanwhile, Laureate portrayed its association with the Clintons as a symbol of its legitimacy rather than the result of a business deal.

“People know that somebody like President Clinton, the most important thing to him is his reputation,” Becker said in a 2010 appearance at a Laureate campus in Malaysia. “And to attach himself to an organization that he doesn’t believe in, he would never do it. It wouldn’t make sense — not just with his own legacy and history but, in his case, being the spouse of the U.S. secretary of state, for example.”

When Becker introduced Clinton at an event at the same campus the next year, he read a statement from Malaysia’s education minister declaring that “there must be something very special about Laureate that has inspired President Clinton to devote his energy to such an endeavor.”

Aides to Clinton and representatives of Laureate characterized the arrangement as one that advanced global access to education.

Angel Urena, a Clinton spokesman, said the former president “engaged with students at Laureate’s campuses worldwide and advised Laureate’s leadership on social responsibility and increasing access to higher education.” Adam Smith, a Laureate spokesman, said Clinton “was paid to advise Laureate, inspire students and visit the campuses and communities they serve, and that’s what he did, with great conviction and energy.”

Becker declined to be interviewed for this report. Laureate officials said that the Baltimore businessman first met Clinton through Laureate Vice President Joseph Duffey, a former Clinton administration official, at a 2007 Clinton Global Initiative event in Hong Kong.

Clinton became familiar with the company after giving a few unpaid speeches on its international campuses and then grew closer with Becker when they traveled to Haiti together in 2009 to explore

OBTAINED BY THE WASHINGTON POST

education issues in the troubled nation, a Clinton aide said.

Laureate had grown rapidly under Becker, a college dropout who became wealthy in the 1980s after inventing a card that could store personal medical information. He launched Laureate in 2003, transforming an old tutoring company called Sylvan Learning Systems into a network of for-profit college campuses.

The company has been intertwined over the years with the global financial elite. Once publicly traded, it was bought out for $3.8 billion in 2007 with investments from, among others, a private-equity firm founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, as well as the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Laureate, which is taking steps to become publicly traded again, has in recent years been largely focused on growing internationally. Typically, it has purchased financially struggling colleges and vocational schools and improved management while boosting profits through expanding enrollment. The company has said in regulatory filings that it enrolls more than 1 million students on 87 campuses in 28 countries. It has five U.S. campuses.

Laureate hired Clinton as scrutiny of private colleges was increasing in the United States and internationally. Congress in 2010 launched an investigation into forprofit schools, which critics say profit from needy students while

making often grand but unfulfilled promises of valuable degrees.

Laureate has clashed at times with regulators in other countries, such as Chile, where the law forbids for-profit education and Laureate operates by acting as a contractor to local nonprofit institutions.

Clinton sometimes mingled with foreign government leaders during his appearances on Laureate campuses, such as a 2013 Laureate-hosted conference on youth unemployment in Madrid featuring top European officials.

Urena said the former president “never sought to influence any foreign or U.S. official on Laureate’s behalf.” Smith said Clinton played an active role as honorary chancellor, visiting 19 locations, meeting with students and delivering speeches that were broadcast to tens of thousands of students around the world. He said Clinton’s role was not related to the company’s business prospects.

Clinton’s contract with Laureate was approved by the State Department’s ethics office, in keeping with an Obama administration agreement with Hillary Clinton that gave the agency the right to review her husband’s outside work during her tenure. An ethics official wrote that he saw “no conflict of interest with Laureate or any of their partners,” according to a letter recently released by the conservative group Citizens United, which received it through a public-records request.

The contract itself became pub-

Clinton, who received $17.6 million over five years to serve as Laureate’s honorary chancellor, was featured prominently in the for-profit college chain’s marketing material.

Doug Becker founded Laureate International Universities, a forprofit college firm.

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lic through a records request by a different conservative group, Judicial Watch, but descriptions of Clinton’s exact consulting role were blacked out in the publicly released document and labeled as trade secrets. Laureate and Clinton aides declined to release an unredacted copy of the contract.

Based on appearances on Laureate’s behalf by Clinton and public statements by the company, it seems that part of the strategy in hiring the former president was to bolster Laureate’s image by aligning it with the former president’s famous charitable efforts — thereby portraying the company as a force for good in the world.

News releases about Clinton’s paid campus appearances often invoked his work on education issues with the Clinton Foundation. And every news release during Clinton’s time with the company carried his name and his title of honorary chancellor.

In 2013, Clinton recorded a message to Laureate students and, without mentioning his financial ties to the company, said he joined Laureate because he admired its “dedication to helping the next generation of leaders be truly educated and well prepared for your future.”

Also that year, Laureate prominently featured its association with Clinton as part of its effort to purchase the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a 70-yearold private business school in Arizona that was struggling financially.

Karen Longo, a graduate of the school who was on the board of directors at the time, recalled that Becker specifically referenced the Clinton tie when he pitched the board on the deal. She provided The Washington Post with brochures Laureate gave out at the time, featuring a letter from Clinton praising Laureate students for working to improve the world and declaring himself “proud to be a part of their efforts.”

“His face, his name was in all their brochures,” Longo recalled.

“It was a very big sell for them.”

She and other alumni were concerned that Laureate would lower the school’s admissions standards to expand its enrollment in an effort to make more money from the campus.

“The more students they got, the more money they got from continues on next page

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from previous page

student-loan funds,” she said. “It would have been a dilution of the Thunderbird brand.”

Longo and four other alumni on the school’s board protested the purchase to the school’s accrediting agency, the Higher Learning Commission. In 2014, the commission refused to sign off on the purchase. Thunderbird has since merged with Arizona State University.

Laureate, meanwhile, pursued close ties with the Clinton Foundation. The company paid to send a group of international students each year to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference in New York, where they conducted video interviews for broadcast to fellow Laureate students around the world.

The Clintons’ Laureate connection emerged as a campaign issue this summer, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump charged that Hillary Clinton “laundered money” to her husband by funneling tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to Laureate while she was secretary of state.

By all accounts, Trump’s claim was false, and his campaign did not respond to requests for documentation.

The company says its campuses have received about $1.4 million total over the years in grants from the State Department and its international aid arm, USAID. Of that amount, only $15,000 came while Clinton was secretary of state — student scholarships funded by USAID, Laureate said.

Publicly available grant records are not detailed enough to corroborate Laureate’s exact numbers.

But the records do show that neither Laureate nor any of its campuses has received any individual grants larger than $25,000 from the State Department or USAID. Trump appeared to be drawing on — and misrepresenting — a report in the 2015 book “Clinton Cash” that grants from USAID to a separate charity chaired by Becker, the Laureate founder, increased during the Clinton years.

Founded in 1989, the International Youth Foundation has partnered with Laureate campuses in some of its charitable education work. The group has received USAID funding since 1999, and its president said the increase in USAID funding under Clinton was

largely a result of the receipt of multiyear grants awarded before she entered office. There is no evidence Hillary Clinton played a role in the grants, and the group’s president, William Reese, said no government money went to Laureate or Becker.

Though some Republicans tried to draw parallels between Laureate and Trump University, the real estate seminar company founded by Trump that faces multiple fraud investigations, Laureate is a different sort of business.

Unlike Trump University, Laureate’s campuses are fully accredited and offer graduating students valid diplomas. Compared with other universities, including its for-profit competitors, Laureate has a relatively low percentage of students who default on their loans, seen as an indicator of student financial success after graduation. A 2012 Senate report on for-profit colleges said that Laureate’s flagship U.S. school, Walden University, was the best of 30 campuses studied and that students there generally “fared well.”

Still, the company has faced some complaints. A group of students at Walden, a Minneapolisbased online school, sued Laureate in 2015, arguing that the institution unnecessarily dragged out their education so they would have to pay more. Laureate denied the allegation, and the lawsuit was settled out of court.

As of July, three of Laureate’s five U.S. schools were included on a government list of 500 schools that receive additional financial oversight after being found out of compliance with the requirements of federal student aid programs.

People who participated in the 2009 State Department dinner said they remember a high-level conversation about using education to boost diplomacy.

Kevin Kinser, who studies forprofit colleges at Pennsylvania State University, said that given Laureate’s rapid growth, it was not unreasonable to include a company representative in that setting. But he said Laureate’s inclusion just months before Bill Clinton began being paid by the company does not look good.

“They were clearly a legitimate participant in this sort of event,” he said. “But knowing what we know now, it does seem unseemly.” n

Defense spending unites Trump, GOP BY

K AROUN D EMIRJIAN

C Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said, “Almost everyone feels that defense is underfunded.”

apitol Hill Republicans finally found something they can love about Donald Trump — an end to the freeze on defense spending.

Trump’s full-throated call to stop defense sequestration came as welcome news to both his supporters and skeptics in the GOP, where lawmakers are more accustomed to distancing themselves from Trump’s comments than cheering him on. In a major national security speech in Philadelphia on Wednesday, the GOP presidential nominee — who is known for his more isolationist views — advocated for a bigger Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as improved missile defense.

“The way he articulated it, it’s only going to help him,” said Rep. Duncan D. Hunter Jr. (R-Calif.), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and has endorsed Trump.

The embrace of the GOP’s defense platform comes at a critical time for Trump, who has a 19point lead among voters who are serving or have previously served in the U.S. military, according to a new NBC News-Survey Monkey poll. But Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is trying to close that gap, hitting her rival in a new ad called “Sacrifice” for his comments that Sen. John McCain (RAriz.) is not a war hero.

But Trump’s call for ending the defense sequester, which was set in motion by the Budget Control Act of 2011 and formally put in place in 2013, allows the GOP presidential nominee to find some welcome common ground with Hill Republicans, who are worrying about their own prospects in November should the top of the ticket become a drag.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who has refused to endorse Trump, welcomed the details in Trump’s national security speech.

“To the extent any candidate

agrees with me, they’re right,” Thornberry said jokingly.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has often been at odds with his party’s nominee, but he supports spending more on defense along with the rest of the GOP leadership. Many Republicans have long wanted to lift the caps on defense without simultaneously raising the caps on domestic spending — a position that is a nonstarter with Democrats and the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responded to a reporter’s question on Wednesday that “yes” he trusts Trump to have his finger on the nuclear button.

But he was noncommittal when asked how Republicans would actually bust the defense caps as Trump urged.

“We all, on our side of the aisle, almost everyone feels that defense is underfunded, and we’ll be dealing with that challenge and others as we decide how to allocate federal spending for next year,” McConnell said.

On other defense and national security issues, GOP lawmakers have recoiled from Trump’s suggestion that NATO is obsolete while he moves to embrace Russia. Some congressional Republicans have publicly repudiated his plans to ban Muslim immigrants and visitors, and questioned his casual proposals to use nuclear weapons and modernize the military on the cheap.

Rep. Michael R. Turner (ROhio), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who also serves as president of NATO’s parliamentary assembly, has endorsed Trump but also called the nominee’s past comments about NATO “naive.”

On Wednesday, Turner congratulated Trump for “stepping to the plate” by outlining a national security strategy and calling for an end to sequestration, also expressing confidence that Trump “is coming around” on recognizing that NATO is important to the U.S.’s geostrategic interests. n

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In election, pessimism is real unifier In every state, most say neither Clinton nor Trump will reduce divisions

BY D AN B ALZ AND E MILY G USKIN

T

he presidential campaign has intensified longstanding political divisions, but there is one area of broad agreement among voters in both red states and blue states — a pervasive pessimism that no matter the outcome, the election will do little to unify the country, according to a Washington Post-SurveyMonkey survey of all 50 states.

Americans also say they fear that they are being left behind by the cultural changes that are transforming the country. Asked whether the America of today reflects their values more or less than it did in the past, large majorities of registered voters in every state say the country reflects their values less.

But almost hidden behind those broad findings is another striking reality of America at the end of President Obama’s tenure in the White House. Those groups that fall roughly into the coalition that helped elect Obama to successive terms are more likely — in some cases significantly so — to say the country reflects their values more than it did in the past.

Obama has pushed policies and taken executive actions that have played directly to that coalition.

The survey is the largest sample ever undertaken by The Post, which joined with SurveyMonkey and its online polling resources to produce the results. The findings from each state are based on responses from more than 74,000 registered voters during the period of Aug. 9 to Sept. 1. The extensive sample makes it possible not only to compare one state with another but also to examine the attitudes of various parts of the population, based on age, gender, ideology, education and economic standing.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have lower favorability ratings than previous major-party nominees, and a sizable majority has said consistently that the country is seriously off track.

POLL

Washington Post-SurveyMonkey 50-state poll

In every state, most say “America today reflects my values less than it has in the past” In the Post-SurveyMonkey poll, 72 percent nationwide said America today reflects their values less than it has in the past, while 26 percent say it reflects their values more.

Percentage that agree

60 -70%

71-78%

Over 78%

ME 71 VT 66

WI 78

HI 67

AK 71

WA 69

ID 77

MT 78

ND 80

MN 70

IL 73

MI 73

NY 67

MA 69

OR 66

NV 72

WY 83

SD 77

IA 75

IN 78

OH 76

PA 73

NJ 71

CT 68

CA 66

UT 76

CO 74

NE 78

MO 77

KY 81

WV 83

VA 70

MD 65

DE 74

AZ 75

NM 71

KS 78

AR 77

TN 77

NC 75

SC 74

OK 82

LA 76

MS 72

AL 78

GA 73

TX 74

RI 72

FL 73

Source: Washington Post-SurveyMonkey 50-state poll

Nationwide, 55 percent of registered voters say that a Clinton presidency would threaten the nation’s well-being, according to the survey, while 61 percent say a Trump presidency would threaten the country’s well-being.

Only 4 percent nationally say neither would threaten the country’s well-being.

For some voters, the prospect of either Trump or Clinton provides a similar sense of alarm. Nationally, 21 percent say both candidates represent a threat to the nation’s well-being. That number peaks in Utah, where 38 percent cite both candidates as a threat.

Overall, majorities in 40 states say Clinton would be a threat to the country’s well-being, while majorities in 44 states say the same of Trump.

The pattern across the states follows some predictable red-blue divisions. Those most likely to say Trump represents a threat include women, younger voters, nonwhites, voters with at least a college degree and voters living in urban areas.

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Clinton is more likely to be seen as a threat by men, those in rural areas and whites, particularly those with less education.

Pessimism about the aftermath of the election is broad and deep.

Nationally, 68 percent of registered voters say the election will do little or nothing to reduce the divisions that have marked American politics for years now, while 30 percent say it will do “a good amount” or “a great deal” to reduce them.

Across every state, at least 54 percent offer a gloomy prognosis of the impact of the election on the political divisions. Ironically, on this question, Republicans and Democrats are united in their sense of foreboding about the future, with more than 6 in 10 in each party taking a dim view.

Independent voters are even more pessimistic, with independent men the most acidic in their assessments.

Ideologically, those who identify themselves as very liberal are far more pessimistic than those who say they are very conserva-

tive, while African Americans, Hispanics and Asians are more optimistic than whites.

The question of whether the America of today reflects people’s own values produced split results.

On one hand, there is broad agreement across the states that the country reflects people’s personal values less today than in the past.

On the other hand, it’s clear that not all parts of the population view the country through the same negative lens.

Overall, 72 percent of registered voters nationwide say the America of today reflects their values less than it has in the past, while 26 percent say it reflects their values more than in the past.

In every state, at least 65 percent express that conclusion.

Among age groups, the youngest are more likely to say the country reflects their values than the oldest, and the progression is steady across the age spectrum.

African Americans are more likely than whites to say the country increasingly reflects their values, 40 percent vs. 23 percent — although a 58 percent majority of black voters nonetheless say the opposite.

The biggest differences come when the electorate is viewed through partisan and ideological lines.

Among Republicans, 93 percent say the country reflects their values less today than in the past. Democrats, however, split evenly — 49 percent to 49 percent. Independents are less pessimistic than Republicans but far less optimistic than Democrats.

This Washington Post-SurveyMonkey 50-state poll sample was drawn among the respondents who completed user-generated polls using SurveyMonkey’s platform from Aug. 9 to Sept. 1, and results are weighted to match demographic characteristics of registered voters in each state. No margins of sampling error are calculated, as this statistic is applicable only to randomly sampled surveys. For full question wording and methodological details, visit wapo.st/pollarchive. n

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NATION

Pipeline fight sparks tribal movement J OE H EIM Cannon Ball, N.D. BY

T

he simmering showdown here between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the company building the Dakota Access crude-oil pipeline began as a legal battle.

It has turned into a movement.

Over the past few weeks, thousands of Native Americans representing tribes from all over the country have traveled to this central North Dakota reservation to camp in a nearby meadow and show solidarity with a tribe they think is once again receiving a raw deal at the hands of commercial interests and the U.S. government.

Frank White Bull, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council, was overcome with emotion as he looked out over the ocean of brightly colored tepees and tents that have popped up on this impromptu 80-acre campground.

“You think no one is going to help,” said White Bull, 48. “But the people have shown us they’re here to help us. We made our stance, and the Indian Nation heard us.

It’s making us whole. It’s making us wanyi oyate — one nation.

We’re not alone.”

At issue for the tribes is the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, which runs through North and South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois and has a capacity to transport more than 500,000 barrels of oil a day. The $3.8 billion pipeline now under construction was approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to cross under the Missouri River a mile north of the reservation.

That river is the source of water for the reservation’s 8,000 residents. Any leak, tribal leaders argue, would cause immediate and irreparable harm. And tribal leaders point to what they consider a double standard, saying that the pipeline was originally going to cross the Missouri north of Bismarck, the state capital, but was rerouted because of powerful opposition that did not want a threat to the water supply there.

ANDREW CULLEN/REUTERS

Thousands of Native Americans from all over have come to North Dakota to show support The tribe says it also is fighting the pipeline’s path because, even though it does not cross the reservation, it traverses sacred territory taken away from the tribe in a series of treaties that have been forced upon it over the past 150 years.

The reservation sued the Corps in July, saying that the agency had not entered into any meaningful consultation with the tribe as required by law and that the Corps had ignored federal regulations governing environmental standards and historic preservation.

Dean DePountis, the tribe’s attorney, said: “This pipeline is going through huge swaths of ancestral land. It would be like constructing a pipeline through Arlington Cemetery or under St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

Tensions flared about a week ago when Dakota Access workers plowed under two locations adjacent to the pipeline path that just a day earlier the tribe had identified in a court filing as sacred and historic sites. When tribe members and others tried to prevent

the action, they were stopped by private security workers for Dakota Access who used guard dogs and pepper spray to drive them back. Photos of the encounter shared online showed snarling German shepherds lunging at protesters. A spokesman for the tribe said six protesters were bitten. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department reported that four security guards and two dogs were injured.

That incident prompted the tribe’s attorneys, from the nonprofit legal organization Earthjustice, to request a temporary restraining order on further construction on the pipeline in that location. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg granted the order Tuesday. Boasberg planned to issue a ruling late this past week on the tribe’s request to halt all work on the project until permitting issues and the tribe’s disputes with the Corps have been properly addressed.

On Tuesday, several pipeline opponents attached themselves to Dakota Access construction

Protesters stand on bulldozers after interrupting work on the Dakota Access oil pipeline Tuesday near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

equipment in a “lockdown” protest. Others hung a large white banner that read “Water is our first medicine” on a bulldozer.

Police watched from afar but did not make any arrests, according to a tribe member.

Attorneys for the Corps have argued in court that there was a standard review process for the pipeline and that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was consulted on the project.

Representatives of Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, declined to comment for this article and directed a reporter to the company’s website.

Large labor unions, including the Laborers’ International Union of North America, have supported the pipeline and in a statement characterized protesters as “extremists.”

Even as the battle over the pipeline was playing out in court, support for the tribe’s position poured in from all over. The U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has called on the United States to provide the tribe a “fair, independent, impartial, open and transparent process to resolve this serious issue and to avoid escalation into violence and further human rights abuses.” More than 200 Native American tribes have declared their support, and many have sent food and supplies.

On social media, activists have used the #NoDAPL hashtag to spread information about the protest and provide live video feeds from the campsite and from protests. Actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Shailene Woodley, Rosario Dawson and Susan Sarandon have offered to support the tribe’s efforts.

Environmentalists also have joined the fray, hoping to halt construction of the pipeline and make it go the way of the Keystone XL oil pipeline project, which ultimately was killed by an order from President Obama last year.

Obama and first lady Michelle Obama visited the Standing Rock reservation in 2014. The tribes and environmental groups have appealed to the president to use his authority to halt the Dakota

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

9

NATION Access project, but they have received no response from the White House.

For Native American environmentalists, the cause extends beyond the boundaries of the reservations.

“The goal is to stop the pipeline, and it’s not just for us,” said Nick Tilson, 34, of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

“We know there are 17 million people downstream from us. The problem is bad for whatever community is near this pipeline. It’s not going to be if it breaks — it’s going to be when it breaks.”

At the growing campsite, a mile down the road from the pipeline’s planned route, a sense of rural village life is emerging. There is a central kitchen where meals are prepared morning, noon and night. Another huge tent provides clothing, food and toys. Water and other supplies arrive by the truckload. Children run about kicking a basketball and squealing. The whinnies of horses blend with the whir of a chain saw cutting firewood and the far-off beat of a drum. Smoke fills the air.

Many of the Native Americans who have come here speak of a spiritual reawakening taking place.

As morning broke Tuesday, Jefferson Greene, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon, greeted the day with a song in Ichshkiin, his voice carrying across the slowly stirring campground. The song was giving thanks for the light coming over the horizon and for the strength it provides, he said.

Greene had arrived the night before with his aunt and young son.

“There’s such a feeling of unity here,” he said. “When tribes put the call out for help, we need to support them. We all need to be here for each other.”

Jo Kay Dowell, 59, of Tahlequah, Okla., was beginning her third week at the camp in a tent she shares with her daughter Anna Walker, 25, and granddaughter Kyah Vann, 6.

Dowell, a member of the Quapaw and Cherokee tribes, said she has become frustrated hearing from so many Native Americans that “there’s nothing we can do about it” when it comes to standing up for tribes’ rights.

“To see this many people come fight for something like this is a dream come true,” she said. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

The stunning geographic divide in American creativity BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

U

rbanist Richard Florida popularized the term “creative class,” describing the millions of workers in fields such as the arts, sciences and technology whose work largely involves coming up with new ideas and innovating on old ones.

The creative class has, for better or worse, primarily been associated with big American cities along the coasts: out of Richard Florida’s top 20 creative-class cities in 2015, only one — Dublin, Ohio — was located in a non-coastal state.

But new data recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests that there’s an awful lot of creativity happening far inland from America’s coastal tech and arts hubs.

Among other things, the NEA worked with the Census Bureau to poll residents of all 50 states on their participation in the arts, particularly whether they performed or created works of art in 2014.

That data reveal a somewhat surprising pattern: America’s Great Creative Divide isn’t between the coasts and the center but between North and South.

Nationwide, 45 percent of American adults said they personally performed or created artwork in 2014. “Art,” in this case, was defined by a wide variety of activities, including pottery, playing a musical instrument, acting, dancing , painting and creative writing.

As you can see from the map, the study found a surprisingly wide range of arts participation between states. At one end of the spectrum, folks in places such as West Virginia, Oklahoma and Florida seemed to have little interest in doing art — participation levels there hovered around 30 percent.

By contrast, people in states such as Colorado, Vermont, Montana and Oregon were roughly twice as likely to personally create or perform artwork.

You can see that the states are heavily sorted by geography, with the dividing line at parallel 36°30’

The north-south divide in American creativity % of adults who say they personally perform or create art works, 2014.

Source: National Endowment for the Arts

(by chance, the line that delineated the boundary between new slave and free states in the Missouri Compromise).

In no state to the south of that line do a majority of people say they personally create or perform art. Conversely, in only three states above that line — Kentucky, Delaware and West Virginia — do fewer than 40 percent of residents create or perform art.

What’s driving these differences? A separate analysis by the NEA has some answers. Education is a big part of it. The percent of state residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher is positively correlated with creating artwork: in other words, more education, more art.

This relationship is even stronger in some of the other categories the NEA looked at, such as attendance at art exhibits or performing arts events.

Conversely, poverty rates are a strong negative driver of arts participation. If you’re working three minimum-wage jobs, you’re probably not going to have a lot of time to indulge in crochet or creative writing.

Of course, education and pover-

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

ty are big drivers of each other, too.

States with more money can spend more on better education, which leads to higher wages, which leads to more education, in an ongoing virtuous cycle. Unfortunately, the reverse holds true as well.

Rates of participation in the arts are a powerful and underappreciated proxy for human wellbeing. “Self-actualization,” including creative activities, are at the top of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. If you’re able to spend the time and resources necessary to, say, practice with the local theater group or join the local community band, it’s highly likely that you’ve got all the basics like food, shelter and safety taken care of.

The NEA numbers suggest that a lot of folks in Southern states are falling behind their Northern counterparts on some of those measures. This mirrors what researchers see in other domains too, such as child well-being.

Geography, again, is destiny. Statistically speaking, a kid born in a state such as Florida is likely to have a harder time reaching the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid than one born in, say, Minnesota. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

In Japan, ‘mascot’ is a viable career There are thousands of cuddly characters that represent a mix of agencies — even prisons

A NNA F IFIELD Tama, Japan BY

W

hen Michiyuki Arano was between jobs as a chef two years ago, he decided to take a trial lesson at the Choko Group Mascot Actors’ School here, just outside Tokyo.

For $60, he put on a pig suit and bumbled around. He was hooked.

“I really loved it,” said Arano, a short, round 35-year-old with a lisp. “Once you have a different layer on, you become somebody else, not your normal self. You become a pig or a squirrel, and you see people react to you, and that makes you want to help them even more.”

Now Arano is a regular at the Mascot Actors’ School, where Choko Ohira, who has been in the mascot business for almost 40 years, teaches her craft.

“Some people come to become professional; some come in for fun, for the stress relief,” Ohira said before a group lesson on a recent day.

During years as a freelance mascot — yes, that’s a thing — she played Porori, a popular television mouse pirate, for a decade.

Then she opened the school, “raising the next generation of mascots,” she said.

Now, for $270 for 12 two-hour lessons, Ohira teaches people how to move so that the character looks alive and drills into the students that they must never show any skin in case they give away the secret that there’s a person inside the costume. The Choko Group also makes costumes and acts as an agent for companies needing mascots and mascots needing work.

In Japan, it’s hard to go anywhere without encountering a mascot, a cute and fluffy creature designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy in some of the most unlikely situations.

Visiting the Wakayama prison?

Waka-P, an orange mascot with a huge citrus-fruit head and a letter P (for prison), will be there to give you a hug and remind you to aim for a crimeless society, bright like

PHOTOS BY ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Shinji Kumamoto does reps as a gorilla at the Choko Group Mascot Actors’ School in Tama, Japan; mascot heads at the school; Megumi Iwata, as a fox, with Kumamoto; and Choko Ohira, who runs the school, helps Yuko Mura dress as a squirrel.

a satsuma mandarin.

If you’re using the facilities in Yokohama, especially on Nov. 10, also known as Restroom Day, you might encounter Toilet-kun, a lovable character with a toilet-seat lid for a face and a bowl for a belly.

Toilet-kun (“kun” is the Japanese suffix used with boys’ names) represents the city’s waste recycling bureau.

And who better to represent the Defense Ministry than Prince Pickles, from a country called Paprika, and his girlfriend, Princess Parsley, who hails from the country of Broccoli.

No self-respecting town, business or ministry in Japan would be without a mascot. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo even has one — an Alaskan jelly bean called Tom who’s a freshman in college. (He’s orange-flavored but turns lemon when he’s nervous.)

According to the embassy’s tale, while he’s doing an exchange program in Japan, Tom promotes American culture as well as U.S.-Japan relations, often with Kumamon, the black-and-white

bear who’s the king of Japanese mascots.

Thousands of “yuru-kyara” — or “laidback characters,” as they’re called here — attend the Yuru-kyara Grand Prix each year, vying to be crowned the most popular mascot in Japan.

The mascot industrial complex is so huge in Japan that the Finance Ministry launched a campaign last year to cut the number of mascots to save unnecessary spending.

There are no official figures, but Masafumi Hagiwara, a researcher at Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting, estimates that there are about 4,000 localgovernment-related mascots in Japan. The prefecture of Osaka alone had about 92 mascots, but it gave pink slips to 20 of them during the Finance Ministry’s campaign.

An additional 6,000 characters are probably at central government agencies, companies and other organizations, Hagiwara said.

That makes “mascot” a viable

career choice in Japan. The day rate for a mascot is about $100.

“I was just a salaryman,” said Shinji Kumamoto, 51, who was taking off his gorilla suit after a recent lesson. “When I quit my last job I thought, ‘Why don’t I do something I always wanted to do?’ ” So for the past eight years, he has been making a living in a furry costume. “I really enjoy being something else or someone else,” he said. “I really enjoy doing things like jumping up and down in the street. Things you can’t do in regular life. I can come out of my shell.”

That’s a pretty universal refrain among mascots in usually restrained Japan. “I enjoy doing something that I can’t do normally,” said Yuko Mura, 19, who works part time in a fast-food restaurant and started taking lessons in January. “Of course, if you’re out on the street no one comes up and starts talking to you, but when you’re a character, people — even adults — want to talk and highfive you.”

Indeed, as Kumamoto and Mura and their classmates practiced dance routines without their costumes, they studiously ignored two reporters in the room. But the moment they put on their costumes, they were all handshakes and selfies with the outsiders.

Megumi Iwata was bounding around the room during the class while she had her fox suit on, posing for photos and joking with the other mascots. But as she disinfected her costume after the lesson, she was the definition of shyness. “I don’t want to be interviewed,” she said, looking down.

Some people enjoy being mascots because it offers some escape from ordinary life, said Akihiko Inuyama, a character consultant and author of the book “Yurukyara Theory.”

“You can be detached from a society and become a different you. In normal life, you don’t get admired by strangers, but when you put on a mascot costume, you are popular in an instant,” he said. n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Lions move into the Kenyan suburbs K EVIN S IEFF Nairobi BY

T

he last time the lions charged through Simon Saigilu’s village, he was ready. He jumped out of bed with a flashlight and a spear, emitting a high-pitched scream that was the closest thing anyone here had to an alarm.

He’d had time to practice. Every month or two, the lions appeared, after sneaking through the fence that runs between the village and Nairobi National Park, at the edge of this city of 3 million. The barrier was supposed to be electrified, but it wasn’t. The animals — including the park’s 35 lions — were supposed to remain in the park, but they didn’t.

The collision between humans and wildlife is nothing new in much of Africa, where millions of people have flocked to cities in recent decades and skylines rise in places that were once savanna or forest. But Nairobi has come to represent the extreme difficulty inherent in trying to preserve wildlife while an urban population booms.

The number of residents on the outskirts of the reserve has grown more than tenfold since it was established in 1946 as the first national park in East Africa.

Saigilu’s hamlet, called Maasai Village after the tribe that lives there, provides a glimpse into the clash between the human and animal ecosystems. On one side of the smattering of huts and sheetmetal homes is the city’s industrial area, a neighborhood of warehouses and factories surrounded by near-endless traffic. On the other side is a 45-square-mile stretch of undisturbed greenery, the world’s only major game reserve within a capital city.

“We are caught in between,” said Jackson Prisitu, whose 96 sheep were slaughtered by a lion one night in March.

Both wildlife advocates and the Kenyan government see the park as a national treasure, a symbol of coexistence between humans and the big-game animals that have lived here for centuries. The park is also a massive tourist attraction,

TONY KARUMBA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Predators from nearby reserve have killed livestock, rattled nerves bringing in more than 100,000 visitors annually.

Urban development “makes this city like any other. But the park sets Nairobi apart. It plays a key role in defining the identity of the city,” said Paula Kahumbu, the director of WildlifeDirect, an international conservation group based in the Kenyan capital.

For years, the villagers’ proximity to the park’s wildlife was rarely a problem. Then a few things changed. At the southern edge of the park, which is unfenced for 12 miles and once bordered a vast savanna, developers started building houses and shopping centers.

Suddenly, when animals moved south, they encountered people, often armed. Their domain had effectively been reduced.

That was a particular blow to the park’s lions. Male lions are very territorial, and each requires a swath of land that can be as large as 100 square miles. With less land, the lions began to look elsewhere. One of the places they looked was Maasai Village, where residents had been raising livestock for more than a half-century.

Meanwhile, alongside the village, a Chinese firm had begun to build a 300-mile railway line, one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Kenya’s history, that would stretch from Nairobi to the Indian

Ocean. When that construction started more than a year ago, the electricity along stretches of the park’s fence suddenly disappeared, making it much easier for lions to escape.

And they did, over and over.

“When they [lions] figure out how easy it is to kill livestock, they’re going to keep doing it,” said Kahumbu, of WildlifeDirect.

Kenyan wildlife officials said the power goes out only for short periods because of the railway construction and vandalism. But during repeated visits by a reporter to the village, the fence always lacked electricity.

Nairobi residents were unnerved by a spate of attacks that galvanized local media attention in the spring. One lion jumped the park fence and killed Prisitu’s 96 sheep in Maasai Village before running back into the reserve. Another lion, named Mohawk for his distinctive mane, escaped into nearby Kajiado town and was shot dead by Kenyan wildlife officials.

“The ease with which the lions are leaving the park is alarming,” said an editorial in Kenyan newspaper the Standard.

The media attention soon waned, but residents of Maasai Village watched as the lions kept coming. Kenyan officials distributed “lion lights” — high-beam

A young lion rests on its haunches at Nairobi National Park outside the Kenyan capital.

Some safeguard failures have allowed lions to encroach on neighboring villages.

lights that could be attached to poles and huts to scare off the animals. But they didn’t seem to work.

“In one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, it’s inevitable that humans and wildlife are going to increasingly come into contact,” said Kahumbu, the conservationist.

In 2013, the Kenyan government passed a law guaranteeing compensation for those whose relatives or livestock were killed by wild animals. Sometimes that compensation arrived, but often in Maasai Village, it did not.

Some officials dispute the number of lion attacks in the village.

“It’s a rare occurrence,” said Alfred Mutua, the governor of Machakos County, where Maasai Village is located. But he said he wasn’t sure how often the animals had stolen into the village. Other officials suggested villagers might exaggerate their claims to gain compensation.

Kenyan officials are debating how to protect the humans and animals on both sides of the fence.

“There are efforts underway to decide whether lions should be moved to other parts of the country,” said Paul Uduto, a spokesman for Kenya Wildlife Service. “This frequency of lion attacks can’t be sustained.” n

SMILEY N. POOL/DALLAS MORNING NEWS VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

A crack in the air, then chaos

BY JAMIE THOMPSON in Dallas

Sgt. Ivan Gunter climbed the stairs, sweating beneath a ceramic-plated tactical vest, his finger resting beside the trigger of his 9mm handgun. He could hear the suspect’s muffled voice above, between thunderous cracks of gunfire. ¶ Gunter, 49, led a specially trained team of nine Dallas police officers called the Foxtrots. In the July twilight, beneath the city’s skyscrapers, a gunman had taken aim at his officers as they stood along Main Street policing a protest rally. ¶ One fell, then a second, and a third. After helping to drag one of his wounded men into a patrol car, Gunter followed the gunman’s trail of broken glass and blood. ¶ As sirens wailed across downtown, Gunter paused in a stairwell of El Centro College. He was part of a small group of police officers closing in on the shooter. ¶ “Hold your positions,” a supervisor ordered over the radio. Gunter crouched in the stairwell, waiting. After a few minutes, his cellphone buzzed. ¶ “Where you at, Gunter? You okay?” asked Sgt. Alan Villarreal, a longtime friend, calling from the hospital. He spoke the names Black Lives Matter protesters march in Dallas on of two of Gunter’s Foxtrots. ¶ “Pat and Krol — July 7 before a gunman opened fire. Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens and Officer Michael Krol stand in the they didn’t make it.”¶ “What?” Gunter said. ¶ crosswalk at the top of the photo. Officer Patrick “I’m sorry, Gunter,” Villarreal said. “You need Zamarripa, in a yellow shirt, is at the bottom of the image. The three were among five officers killed. to get over here, now. Your guys need you.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

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COVER STORY Gunter felt a wave of anguish, then rage.

Two of his men dead, others gravely wounded on what would become the single deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001. Gunter couldn’t leave the stairwell, not with the gunman still alive, still firing.

“You’re going to have to take care of them for me, brother,” Gunter said. “I have to see this through.”

S

even hours earlier, at 2:30 p.m., Gunter had arrived at a two-story brick building off West Illinois Avenue in southwest Dallas. He swiped his security card and walked to his desk, passing rows of cubicles filled with sergeants who supervised the Southwest Division, one of seven patrol districts at the Dallas Police Department. About 300 of the department’s 3,375 officers worked there.

Gunter’s team of Foxtrots handled special assignments requested by supervisors across the department. The group had been formed nearly a decade earlier to respond to highpriority calls on third watch, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Some of its founding members were military veterans who picked the name Foxtrot, which signifies the letter F in radio communications.

The Foxtrots were trained in combat medicine, fugitive apprehension and tactical surveillance. They responded to shootings, carjackings and armed robberies, as well as to lower-priority calls if a need arose. They operated radar guns on high-traffic roads, investigated clusters of vehicle break-ins and tracked robbers snatching women’s purses in parking lots. Some officers considered them a miniature version of the department’s elite SWAT team, responsible for the district’s 75 square miles. The unit had demonstrated success and been replicated at other stations in Dallas.

Gunter needed a team with a variety of skills, and he helped pick his nine officers, choosing one seasoned robbery detective for his knowledge of sophisticated computer programs to help track suspects. He chose another for his enthusiastic tenacity in locating drug houses and cultivating informants.

They were a close-knit group who ate together, spent long hours on surveillance together, knew each other’s girlfriends and wives and children. One officer’s mother invited them over for Sunday barbecues. The department did not allow units to have their own logos, but the Foxtrots quietly created one anyway, sketching a picture of a red fox with a menacing stare, a lightning bolt shooting behind it.

Gunter had the drawing made into a patch.

Some of the men Velcroed it onto their heavy ballistic vests, marking them as Foxtrots.

Gunter arrived at work that Thursday, July 7, wearing his Class B uniform — navy cargo pants and a police button-down — already informed that his team would help with crowd control that night at a protest against shootings by police. Tensions were high across the country again; that week, two videos had gone viral in as many days, show-

COOPER NEILL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

KLMNO WEEKLY

foot 5, weighed more than 300 pounds and could rip burglar bars off a house with his bare hands. Friends called him “Meat” and loved summoning him as backup. But those who knew him well considered him a softy. They’d seen him roll around with his two children, 8 and 10 years old.

Officer Krol was 40 with a boy’s face and goofy grin. He was the only member of the team — maybe the only officer on the force, his colleagues joked — who loved working traffic accidents. Most cops consider them tedious and loathe the paperwork. But Krol enjoyed the meticulous task of figuring out who had collided with whom, and at what speeds and angles.

Krol, like Ahrens, towered over 6 feet. When the pair climbed into a patrol car, officers liked to watch and laugh as it drooped toward the ground.

That afternoon, Gunter led the caravan in his patrol car filled with supervisors’ tools, crowbars, rifles, a gas mask and two medical bags. The Foxtrots headed north to police headquarters to receive their assignments.

A

ERIC GAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ing black men shot dead by police.

A black man born in Dallas and a 25-year department veteran, Gunter sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement. He’d had his own run-ins with police as a boy. He once got stopped while riding his bike to a friend’s house in a largely white, affluent neighborhood. The city’s activists were not given to violence, and Gunter wasn’t expecting trouble at the rally. Still, he needed to be prepared.

As his team members filed into the station around 3 p.m., he instructed them to “gear up,” standard protocol for rallies and protests.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor and grabbed black bags filled with riot gear — shin guards, batons and helmets. Gunter also required all Foxtrots to have military-grade ballistic vests that could protect them from high-velocity gunfire. The officers had bought the vests for about $300 each because the department did not provide them.

The team walked out into the sweltering 91-degree heat carrying their bags and bottles of water. Several officers paired up to ride downtown together. Among them were Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens and Officer Michael Krol.

Ahrens, 48, was one of the most experienced investigators on the team, known for his guile and ability to get suspects to talk. He was 6

Top, Sgt. Ivan Gunter, right, meets with members of the Foxtrots on Aug. 11. Above, a Dallas Police Choir member passes photos of five slain officers before a July 12 memorial service. They are, from left: Michael Krol, Brent Thompson, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith and Patrick Zamarripa.

bout 6:45 p.m., the Foxtrots parked their patrol cars near the intersection of Commerce Street and Interstate 45.

Their job would be to block protesters who might try to march onto the highways.

Officer Gretchen Rocha sat in the passenger seat of a patrol car. At 23, Rocha was a recent police academy graduate three weeks into her field training. She was married with an 11month-old and had wanted to be a police officer since she was a girl. One of the Foxtrots, Senior Cpl. Ivan Saldana, 44, had been assigned to train her.

As Rocha waited for orders, she glanced in a side mirror and saw a man who looked homeless approach a patrol car behind her. He banged on the window, visibly upset. She watched as another Foxtrot, Patrick Zamarripa, stepped out of his car. Rocha and her trainer climbed out to see what was happening.

Someone had stolen his potato chips, said the homeless man. He was near tears. Zamarripa walked toward a convenience store, the man following. Inside, they headed toward the chips. The man looked at Zamarripa, then picked out a bag.

“Want two bags?” Zamarripa asked.

The man shook his head. “Just one.”

Zamarripa paid for the chips, then led the group back to their patrol cars. The homeless man thanked Zamarripa the whole way. He asked whether he could sit next to Zamarripa’s car as he ate, worried that someone might steal the chips again. Zamarripa nodded. The man sat cross-legged on the pavement and ripped open the bag.

That interaction made an impression on the rookie, Rocha. Such a small gesture, but she could tell it made the man’s day. She was impressed with Zamarripa, a 32-year-old father who had served in Iraq before joining the department. continues on next page

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

Before long, their sergeant, Gunter, walked over. Supervisors now wanted the Foxtrots to leapfrog from intersection to intersection, blocking traffic as the marchers headed toward the end of the parade route. The officers worked their way toward Main Street, eventually stopping at Lamar Street, near El Centro College. Protesters walked by, some thanking the officers, others stopping to pose for selfies. The officers still had their riot gear — including their military-grade ballistic vests — on the back seats of their cars. But the crowd was peaceful. The department had spent considerable money and resources in “deescalation” training in recent years and wanted to avoid looking like an occupying army whenever possible.

The sun had fallen by the time the marchers’ chants began to fade. The protesters drifted off Main Street, walking toward their cars. Just before 9 p.m., Gunter was about to dismiss his unit when he heard the first crack of gunfire.

O

fficer Krol screamed, then fell to the ground. Ahrens collapsed beside him, his immense frame sprawled across the pavement.

Another crack, then another. Gunter looked around, trying to figure out what was happening. The sound of gunfire echoed through the streets, getting louder, coming closer. “Get down, get down!” Gunter shouted.

He realized his unit, standing within a space of 15 to 20 feet, was under fire, in the middle of the street, with nowhere to hide except behind patrol cars. Gunter recognized the sound as that of an assault rifle. The thin Kevlar vests beneath their shirts would not protect them.

Gunter turned to his right and saw Zamarripa fall. He pressed the button on his radio.

“Shots fired, officer down! Shots fired, officer down! We’re in a kill zone! Stay clear!” Gunter recalls saying on the radio.

He dragged Zamarripa behind his car.

A few feet away, another Foxtrot, Jorge Barrientos, 28, felt a shift in the air as bullets whizzed past his ears. He ran toward a patrol car, seeing bullets hit the ground next to him. A chunk of his radio, attached to his belt, flew into the air. He’s aiming at me, Barrientos thought.

Just before he ducked behind the patrol car, he felt something slam into his chest. It stung, then faded. Barrientos coughed into his hand, looking for blood. He didn’t see any and figured he was okay. Then he looked down and saw a piece of his left index finger dangling.

He and his partner crouched behind the car.

“Stay down!” he screamed. A piece of a tire blew off, striking his partner in the face and pitching him backward.

During a break in the gunfire, Barrientos looked out into the street and saw Krol, lying motionless. He saw Ahrens struggling, trying to apply a tourniquet to his own leg. Then he saw his sergeant, Gunter, crouched over Zamarripa. He crawled over to help.

“Grab my med kit,” Gunter yelled. It was in

COOPER NEILL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

the back of his patrol car. Barrientos raised his head, felt the bullets speed by. He couldn’t reach the kit without exposing himself.

Gunter tugged on Zamarripa’s shirt, trying to remove it. Trained in combat medicine, Gunter feared his officer had a sucking chest wound, one that might fill his thorax with air and cause his lungs to collapse. He needed to plug the hole.

“What do you have?” Gunter asked Barrientos.

Barrientos reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. Gunter grabbed them, slid off the clear plastic wrapper and placed it over Zamarripa’s wound, pushing down.

Zamarripa flinched. Good, Gunter thought.

He’s with me.

“I’m sorry, bro — I know it hurts,” Gunter told him. “You’ll make it. Just stay with me.”

Gunter grabbed his officer’s hand; Zamarripa squeezed back.

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nother Foxtrot, trainer Saldana, was across the intersection when the shooting started. He shouted at his rookie: “Get cover!” He raced toward the fallen officers, hiding behind a patrol car. Sparks flew as bullets struck the pavement. Saldana got on his stomach and peered beneath the car. From this vantage point, he could see Ahrens, lying on his belly, struggling to raise himself up, as if doing a push-up. Then Ahrens shook his head and went back down. It looked as if he was trying to move closer so he could help Krol.

Saldana yelled at him from beneath the car: “Don’t get up! He’s still shooting!”

Farther down the street, another Foxtrot, Senior Cpl. Brian Fillingim, 36, ducked behind the wheel of his patrol car. In front of him, he saw a man throw his girlfriend into a gutter, then lie on top of her. The man shouted at Fillingim: “My mom! You’ve got to help my mom!”

As the man shouted, a motorcycle officer roared into the road and laid his bike down to help cover them, crouching behind it. Fillingim and other officers saw the mother in the street, ran over and dragged her between two

Senior Cpl. Ruben Lozano shows the unofficial Foxtrot logo of his unit with the badge numbers of three fallen colleagues.

cars. Fillingim felt several bullets fly past his head, as if a wasp were buzzing beside his ear.

Fillingim rose and looked out. He saw Krol and Ahrens lying in the street. He stood there staring as everything fell quiet. Then bullets ripped down the street, jolting him back.

The rookie, Rocha, stood across the intersection near El Centro. She had lost sight of her trainer. She took cover behind a patrol car.

Three weeks into her training, she had no idea what to do. She heard her trainer’s voice in her head: Just keep moving.

Rocha saw the wounded officers lying in the street. Patrol cars screeched toward them, bullets flying all around. Several officers began dragging the three wounded toward the cars.

Rocha ran over to help. On the way, she felt bullets whizzing by.

After they loaded Krol into a car, Rocha noticed the driver’s seat was empty. She jumped in. Another officer climbed in the back and started CPR. “Do you know how to get to the hospital?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Go!” She slammed the door, pressed the gas and jumped a curb. Bullets slammed into the car as she sped away. As she gripped the steering wheel, she noticed a throbbing in her right arm. She looked down and saw a growing circle of blood. She, too, had been hit. As the officer in the back pumped on Krol’s chest, Rocha pressed harder on the gas, watching the speedometer climb to 118 mph.

At Parkland Memorial Hospital, medical staffers heaved Krol onto a stretcher and rushed him inside. Rocha ran in beside him.

“Don’t give up,” she told him.

Nurses noticed blood on Rocha’s arm and forced her to sit. As they began treating her wound, Rocha reached for her phone to call her husband.

A

s the wounded officers were being rushed to two hospitals, whoever was shooting was still near the intersection of Lamar and Main streets. Gunter, still at the scene, shouted to the officers around him: “Get your heavy vests on, now!”

He pulled his on and joined a couple of others racing toward El Centro College, less than a block away from his patrol car. The rage that filled him was of a sort that he had never before felt.

“Where is he?” Gunter shouted at other officers.

Officers followed the gunman into the college. Inside, Gunter helped clear the first floor. Then he entered a stairwell. The college’s security alarm wailed as the gunman exchanged fire with police. An officer on the radio gave the gunman’s location, about 18 minutes after the shooting started: “Second floor, body armor, just reloaded, assault rifle.”

A minute later, “We may have the suspect pinned down, northwest corner of the building, on the second floor.”

“We have dialogue going with the suspect.

We need the sirens in the building off to communicate.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

15

COVER STORY Movements of Micah Johnson

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nother Foxtrot, Fillingim, also had remained downtown. He had raced inside a high-rise parking garage during the shooting, thinking the gunman was inside.

After he had cleared the garage, supervisors had ordered him to stay put. For hours, he had been texting Ahrens. The men were close, had

July 7: Dallas police shooting

LAMAR

Supervisors instructed officers to hold their positions. No one was allowed onto the second floor except the SWAT team.

Gunter crouched in the stairwell with three other officers, just below the gunman. Gunter remained on one step, his arm raised as he pointed his 9mm pistol toward the door, in case the gunman appeared. An officer from El Centro stood on a nearby step, pointing a rifle at the same door above them.

While in the stairwell, Gunter got the call from Villarreal, letting him know Zamarripa and Krol were dead. Gunter bowed his head and fought tears. Another sergeant approached: “Do you want to take a minute? Do you need to leave?”

Gunter shook his head. How could he walk into the hospital and face his men, with the gunman still alive, still shooting at officers?

He would hold his position until it was done.

For the next four hours, Gunter remained in the stairwell as police negotiated with the gunman. Gunter called his cousin, told him to call Gunter’s mom and let her know that he was okay. As news spread about the shooting, texts poured in from friends.

“Ivan, are you alright?” one sergeant texted.

“No,” Gunter texted back. “My people are dead, I’m held up in a stairwell, 1 susp still in the building above me, and the car is shot up . . . I’m pretty far from ok . . . i’m pissed the hell off.”

Another sergeant — it was a group text — added: “Keep your head on the d--- swivel and get off yo phone. Update us when you are safe.”

Gunter knew the SWAT team had the gunman cornered above. All he could do was await directions. He never saw the gunman, but he could hear him as he talked on a cellphone to a police negotiator.

At times the gunman shouted. “F--- it,” he yelled at one point, according to Gunter.

The officers’ hands became cramped and sore from aiming their guns for so long. They rotated positions and took short breaks, passing bottles of water around.

At times, Gunter thought about his men and felt a rush of emotion, then suppressed it.

Near 1:30 a.m., Gunter heard an explosion and felt the building rumble. Then quiet.

The standoff was over. Gunter waited for another hour while officers searched for bombs. Finally, a supervisor’s voice came over the radio: “All clear.” Micah Johnson, the Army veteran who had ambushed police, was dead.

Gunter stepped outside into the glow of the streetlights. By now he knew three of his officers were dead.

He had thought the gunman’s death would feel like a victory. It didn’t. Gunter walked alone, toward his car.

5

Bank of America Plaza 72 stories

2

4

3 ELM ST.

Just before 9 p.m., Micah Johnson parks his Chevrolet Tahoe on Lamar Street, dons an armored vest and heads to the corner of Main Street.

1

8:58 p.m.: Johnson directs his shots at officers patrolling the intersection. He fatally hits three Foxtrot officers, and injures three other officers and one witness.

2

Johnson then heads back on Lamar Street and tries to shoot his way into an entrance of El Centro College. He injures two officers inside and then fatally shoots an officer on the street.

3

Approximately 9:15 p.m.: He turns onto Elm Street, shoots his way into an entrance of the college and proceeds to the second floor.

4

From the second floor, he shoots south across Elm Street at officers stationed in front of a 7-Eleven. One officer is fatally shot.

5

Johnson is cornered by officers in a narrow corridor. After a four-hour standoff, a remote-controlled robot is sent in with an explosive charge that kills Johnson at 1:30 a.m.

Sources: Staff reports, Dallas Morning News and Apple Maps SOURCES: STAFF REPORTS, DALLAS MORNING NEWS AND APPLE MAPS

worked dozens of robberies together.

Where you at?

Did you go with Krol?

What’s going on?

No response.

After the standoff, Fillingim got a call from his sergeant, Gunter. The men met in the street. They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then they turned toward Gunter’s car. Bullet holes dotted its exterior; three tires had been shot out.

Without speaking, they walked over to Fillingim’s car. It was still running, just as he left it hours earlier. They climbed in, and Fillingim flipped off the chatter of the police radio. He put the car in drive. The night was silent, except for the low sound of Gunter’s voice.

“I was supposed to look after them.”

“This wasn’t even our fight. Our guys, they had nothing to do with this.”

The men drove through the quiet streets downtown to Baylor University Medical Center.

They stepped around the yellow crime scene tape surrounding the ambulance bay. Dozens of officers fell silent as they saw the pair.

The men walked through the hospital to Ahrens’s room and stepped inside. His giant,

THE WASHINGTON POST

THE WASHINGTON POST

“I was supposed to look after them.”

Sgt. Ivan Gunter, leader of the Foxtrots, a specially trained team of nine Dallas police officers

KLMNO WEEKLY

tattooed frame stretched across the hospital bed, still hooked to a ventilator, machines beeping. It seemed impossible that this powerful man — who had once commandeered a cab to chase a bad guy — was gone.

Ahrens’s wife, Katrina, who is a Dallas police detective, was not in the room when her husband’s commander arrived. She’d been awakened that night and taken to the hospital.

She’d let their two children sleep, in the care of their grandparents. She’d learned that her husband survived an initial surgery before being rushed back into the operating room.

The damage to his liver was extensive, and doctors had not been able to save him.

Fillingim approached, said his goodbyes.

Then Gunter walked over. He looked at Ahrens, said a prayer, and turned away.

Ahrens was the fifth officer to die that night, a final, crushing blow to the dozens of officers who had arrived at the Baylor hospital. Gunter also went to Parkland, where his other two men had been taken. But by the time he arrived, his men already had been zipped into body bags and taken to the medical examiner’s office.

G

unter walked back into the Southwest station about 5 a.m. Several supervisors, including Lt. Juan Salas, sat at their desks, waiting for him.

Salas called Gunter into a chief’s office.

Years earlier, while Salas had been supervising a gang unit, one of his officers had been shot and killed. Salas had felt responsible. He’d endlessly replayed the what ifs. Salas believed that if he had talked about his guilt — said it aloud, rather than keeping it in his head — he might have healed better.

Salas and the other supervisors sat down, telling Gunter they wanted him to talk. No documentation, no recorders, no therapists.

Just cops.

Gunter sat in a chair. It all came tumbling out. Seven of his men on duty with him that night, five of them injured, three fatally, at the hands of a sniper.

It was an ambush, an unfair fight, the officers told him. It wasn’t his fault.

For the first time that night, Gunter broke down and sobbed.

T

he following week, three Foxtrots were lowered into the ground. Two others and the rookie in their care had begun recoveries from gunshot and shrapnel wounds.

After the last funeral, Gunter and four of the men met at a tattoo parlor near downtown.

They took with them a picture of their patch, the red fox head, the bolt of lightning. Around the bottom, the tattoo artist sketched in the badge numbers of the fallen: #9217, #8193, #10112.

The needles buzzed, branding the officers on the back of a calf, on a forearm, on a left shoulder. Foxtrots forever.

Gunter stood to the side, watching. He wasn’t ready for the tattoo yet. He wanted to quiet his thoughts, to stop the images in his mind. He wanted to remember. He wanted to forget. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Q&A

tim cook looks back — and ahead BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

O

n a sleek white coffee table in Apple CEO Tim Cook’s fourth-floor office in late July, a rose gold iPhone 6s sits in its original box. Earlier that morning, Cook had stood in front of employees at Apple headquarters and held up the phone, which a staffer had hand-delivered from a store in Beijing to commemorate a notable occasion: Apple had sold its billionth iPhone.

That celebratory milestone aptly coincides with another big moment for the technology giant’s chief executive. A few weeks later, Cook would mark the fifth anniversary of what has been the most closely watched transition of power in corporate history: On Aug. 24, 2011, just six weeks before his death, Apple’s iconic founder, Steve Jobs, permanently handed his chief operating officer the reins. “It’s been a blur in a lot of ways,” says Cook, who had filled in for Jobs during medical leaves. “It feels like it was yesterday in some respects.”

It is fitting that these two milestones arrive so close together. That’s because the iPhone, launched by Jobs, has been the biggest driver of Apple’s massive growth during Cook’s tenure. It led the company to soaring valuations and accounted for nearly two-thirds of Apple’s revenue in the past year. Just the tally on iPhone sales, almost $141 billion over the past four quarters, is more than the annual sales figures of Cisco, Disney and Nike — combined. And just this past week, Apple announced the iPhone 7.

Cook, 55, sat down with The Washington Post to discuss his first five years in one of corporate America’s most glaring spotlights and the company’s future. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Your first day in this job, you sent a memo to employees that said, “I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change.”

Five years later, it has to have changed. What qualities of Apple are immutable, in your view?

A. The DNA of the company is really what I was talking about there. The North Star has always been the same, which for us, is about making insanely great products that really change the world in some way — enrich people’s lives. And so our reason for being hasn’t changed.

Other things do change. But that’s the thread that ties everyone together.

And what has changed?

The obvious things are we have more em-

which is you unveil them when you’ve finished.

But we stepped back and re-evaluated that and said, “You know, if we wait until you do that, we’re not helping anyone else get there, too.”

You’ve said you don’t want to be a traditional CEO. What do you mean by that?

I think of a traditional CEO as being divorced from customers. A lot of consumer company CEOs — they’re not really interacting with consumers.

I also think that the traditional CEO believes his or her job is the profit and loss, is the revenue statement, the income and expense, the balance sheet. Those are important, but I don’t think they’re all that’s important. There’s an incredible responsibility to the employees of the company, to the communities and the countries that the company operates in, to people who assemble its products, to developers, to the whole ecosystem of the company.

And so I have a maybe nontraditional view there. I get criticized for it some, I recognize.

But I’ve never wanted to be the stereotypical CEO. I don’t think I’d be very good at it, honestly. And I don’t think for Apple that would in the long run be good for the company. If you care about long-term shareholder return, all of these other things are really critical.

You’ve got the billionth iPhone on the table here. One thing that has changed is that in 2011 about 44 percent of the company’s sales came from iPhone. Now it’s close to twothirds. How can Apple move forward when so much of its business is tied up in the iPhone and an industry that’s cooling off ?

This is actually a privilege, not a problem.

Think about this: What other products do you know where the ratio of people to the product, for a consumer electronics product, will be one-to-one over the long haul? I don’t think there is another one.

ANDREW BURTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Meaning?

ployees. The company is four times larger [by revenue since 2010]. We’ve broadened the iPhone lineup. That was a really key decision and I think a very good one. We’ve gone into the Apple Watch business, which has gotten us into wellness and in health. We keep pulling that string to see where that takes us. Lots of core technology work has been done.

Are there ways the culture has evolved?

We have stepped up our social responsibility.

We have talked about things and been more transparent about what we’re doing — not on products: We try to be as secretive as we’ve always been on products, although it’s increasingly difficult to do that.

The real test is: Are you creating a ripple that helps other people as well? An example of that is the environmental work. We’ve had environmental work going on at Apple for decades, but we didn’t talk about it, and we didn’t set aspirational kind of objectives. We used the same philosophy we do with our products,

In an exclusive interview, Apple’s CEO talks iPhones, artificial intelligence, privacy, civil rights, missteps and Steve Jobs

The global sales of PCs each year are about 275 million right now. That number’s been declining. The global market for smartphones is 1.4 billion. Over time, I’m convinced every person in the world will have a smartphone.

That may take a while, and they won’t all have iPhones. But it is the greatest market on Earth from a consumer electronics point of view.

Look at the core technologies that make up the smartphone today and look at the ones that will be dominant in smartphones of the future — like AI. AI will make this product even more essential to you. It will become even a better assistant than it is today. So where you probably aren’t leaving home without it today — you’re really going to be connected to it in the future.

That level of performance is going to skyrocket. And there is nothing that’s going to replace it in the short term or in the intermediate term, either.

I realize that the people who are focused on this 90-day clock say, “Oh, my God, the smartphone industry only grew by 1 percent or decreased by 6 percent.” You know, the global

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

17

Q&A economy’s not that great right now. But if you’re in it for the long haul, this is the best market on Earth.

You succeeded one of the icons of American business. What does it feel like to step into those shoes?

To me, Steve’s not replaceable. By anyone.

[Voice softens] He was an original of a species. I never viewed that as my role. I think it would have been a treacherous thing if I would have tried to do it. When I first took the job as CEO, I actually thought that Steve would be here for a long time. Because he was going to be chairman, work a bit less after he came back up the health curve. So I went into it with one thought, and then weeks later — six weeks later, whatever —

Quickly.

It was very quickly. [The day he died] was sort of the worst day ever. I just — I had really convinced myself. I know this sounds probably bizarre at this point, but I had convinced myself that he would bounce, because he always did.

What did you think you knew about leading Apple that turned out to be wrong?

There’s nothing like sitting in the chair, so to speak. I was reminded that customers have a really deep love for the company. I started just getting an avalanche of customer mail. I don’t mean complaints. Email. Positive. Negative.

Points of view. Not the ‘hey, this broke, I’m mad.’

Largely not that kind of stuff. Things much deeper than that. Moved by how they were treated in a store. Lots of people have written me about FaceTime and how they could be near their mother’s or father’s bedside before they died only because of it.

You’ve been more outspoken on social issues than any other CEO of a company your size. Do you think companies have a responsibility to publicly take on such issues as civil rights and climate change?

I think everybody has to make their own decision about it. Maybe there are compelling reasons why some people want to be silent. I think for us, though — for a company that’s all about empowering people through our products, and being a collection of people whose goal in life is to change the world for the better — it doesn’t sit right with me that you have that kind of focus, but you’re not making sure your carbon footprint isn’t poisoning the place. Or that you’re not evangelizing moving human rights forward. I think every generation has the responsibility to enlarge the meaning of human rights.

I do view that a CEO today of Apple should participate in the national discussion on these type of issues.

Who were you thinking about when you decided to write the op-ed where you publicly came out as gay?

I was thinking about kids. I was getting notes from kids who knew I was gay, or assumed I was, because of something they had read on the

KLMNO WEEKLY

Web. And they were kids who were distraught.

Some had been pushed out by their families.

They thought they couldn’t achieve anything.

They couldn’t do anything. They were seeing the national discourse around it and feeling isolated and depressed. And I just thought — I’ve got to do something.

became more of a matter of how do we explain this. Because this is not easy. You can imagine.

You just hear: locked phone. Terrorist. People dead. Why aren’t you unlocking this?

And you speaking out would do what?

Maps was a mistake. Today we have a product we’re proud of. But we had the self-honesty to admit this wasn’t our finest hour and the courage to choose another way of doing it.

That’s important. It’s the only way an organization learns. The classic big-company mistake is to not admit their mistake. They double down on them. Their pride or ego is so large that they can’t say we did something wrong. And I think the faster you do that, the better — change gears to something else. If you’re honest, people will give you the benefit of the doubt. But if you have your head stuck in the sand and you just keep doing it, I think you lose your employees and your customers as well.

When you look back, are there mistakes you’ve made that you’ve learned something from?

I thought it would minimally say you can do pretty good in this world and be gay. That it’s not a limiter. It’s okay to be. That it’s okay to be honest about it. I figured if I could help one person, it would be worth it.

There are few jobs in corporate America that have the same scope, breadth and size as yours. Geopolitics. National security. Consumer retail. Global supply chains. The entertainment industry. It’s mind-boggling.

Where do you turn to for advice?

Whoever I think can help me. When I was going through [the question of ] what should we do on returning cash to shareholders, I thought who could really give us great advice here? Who wouldn’t have a bias? So I called up Warren Buffett. I thought he’s the natural person, and so I try to go through that process on everyone. That doesn’t mean I always do what they say. But I think it’s incumbent on a CEO to not just listen to points of view but to actually solicit them. Because I think, if not, you quickly become insular. And you’re sort of living in the echo chamber.

With the fight with the FBI, did you have any idea what you were getting into?

We knew it was going to be very, very difficult.

And that the cards were stacked against us. But we spent a lot of time on “what is right here?”

People who were really key on this decision are folks like [senior vice president of software engineering] Craig Federighi. This at its heart is a deep, deep technical question. You first have to understand that to do anything else.

The lightbulb went off, and it became clear what was right when we did the first piece of work: Could we create a tool to unlock the phone? After a few days, we had determined yes, we could. Then the question was, ethically, should we? We thought, you know, that depends on whether we could contain it or not.

Other people were involved in this, too — deep security experts and so forth, and it was apparent from those discussions that we couldn’t be assured.

The risk of what happens if it got out, we felt, could be incredibly terrible for public safety.

We knew the positioning on the outside would not be public safety. It would be security vs. privacy — security should win. But we went through the deep, deep, deep discussions on that. It became clear that the trade-off, so to speak, was essentially putting hundreds of millions of people at risk for a phone that may or may not have anything on it, and that likely didn’t, because of other things that we knew about. We thought this actually is a clear decision. A hard one, but a clear one. Then it

“I think it’s incumbent on a CEO to not just listen to points of view but to actually solicit them.

Because I think, if not, you quickly become insular.”

Let’s jump to Apple’s future. You made some statements in the earnings call about artificial intelligence that got a lot of attention. Can Apple catch up with the AI efforts from companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon?

Let me take exception to your question. Your question seems to imply that we’re behind.

Let’s take a look at that. We’ve been shipping Siri since 2011, and Siri is with you all of the time. Which I think most people would want an assistant with them all the time, whether they’re at work or at home or in between or on the soccer field. You don’t think of your to-do list, so to speak, only when you’re in your kitchen. And the breadth of Siri is unbelievable.

Increasingly, Siri understands things obviously without having to memorize certain ways to say things. The prediction of Siri is going way up.

What we’ve done with AI is focus on things that will help the customer. And we announced in June that we’re opening Siri to third parties, so third-party developers can now use Siri. So a simple example with that, whatever kind of ride-sharing app you might use, Uber or Lyft in the United States, you could just — using your voice — order the car. So third-party developers are writing tons of those that will be available to the public in the fall. And that’s how we’re broadening Siri in a huge way.

But there are other things in there, like if you’re typing in mail, the prediction capability of the next word or next phrase that you will use — Siri has gotten a lot smarter about that.

Any final reflections on your tenure? Moments that stuck out at you?

I’ve got the best job in the world. I think about my day and weeks and months and years — I put them in three buckets: people, strategy and execution. I sort of move between those on a daily basis as to where I put my time. I always think the most important one of those is people. If you don’t get that one right, it doesn’t matter what kind of energy you have in the other two — it’s not enough. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Loss of memory was science’s gain N ONFICTION

B

ISTOCKPHOTO

PATIENT H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

By Luke Dittrich Random House. 440 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

A MY E LLIS N UTT

efore iPhones and thumb drives, before Google docs and gigabytes of RAM, memory was more art than artifact. It wasn’t a tool or a byproduct of being human. It was essential to our character and therefore a powerful theme in both myth and literature.

At the end of Book 2 of the “Divine Comedy,” with Paradise nearly in reach, Dante is dipped into the River Lethe, where the sins of the self are washed away in the waters of forgetfulness. To be truly cleansed of his memories, however, Dante must also drink from the river of oblivion. Only then will he be truly purified and the memories of his good deeds restored to him. Before we can truly remember, according to Dante, we must forget.

In “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets,” author Luke Dittrich seems to be saying that before we can forgive, we must remember. The terrible irony is that H.M., the real-life character around whom Dittrich’s book revolves, had no memory at all.

In prose both elegant and intimate, and often thrilling, “Patient H.M.” is an important book about the wages not of sin but of science.

It is deeply reported and surprisingly emotional, at times poignant, at others shocking.

H.M., arguably the single most important research subject in the history of neuroscience, was once Henry Molaison, an ordinary New England boy. When Henry was 9 years old, he was hit by a bicyclist as he walked across the street in his home town, Hartford, Conn. It was the mid-1930s, and the accident probably triggered years of epileptic seizures, which grew more frequent and more severe as Henry grew up. In 1953, at the age of 27 and facing a lifetime of disability, Henry underwent a risky brain operation. Though it was unclear exactly where Henry’s seizures originated in the brain, his surgeon, William

Beecher Scoville, targeted a suspected spot deep in the medial temporal lobes and removed all but a vestigial amount of a seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus. The good news: Henry’s seizures were greatly reduced. The bad news: It quickly became clear that the young man had paid a life- altering price for the diminution of those seizures.

For all intents and purposes, he was now memory-less.

In the middle of the 20th century, the human brain was still largely a mystery. Memory, it was believed, was distributed throughout a person’s gray matter. But when Henry awoke from his operation and was found to be incapable of forming new memories, science learned a valuable lesson about the crucial role the hippocampus played in a person’s life. Though he would live 55 more years, Henry would be forever amnesic for those years, unable to recall the names of people he met and the places he visited, any thought he had, any action he

took. And yet his losses were neuroscience’s gain.

If this was the sole subject of “Patient H.M.” the book would still be a fascinating read, since Dittrich, a magazine writer by trade, spent six years writing it, poring over medical records and transcripts and interviewing key figures to flesh out a story that’s never been told this fully.

But “Patient H.M.” has delicious surprises in store for the reader. It turns out that Scoville, the surgeon who forever altered Henry’s life and the history of neuroscience, was the author’s grandfather.

“My grandfather didn’t make any mistakes that day,” Dittrich writes. “He took exactly what he wanted to from Henry.”

What was taken from Henry after his surgery, and how he was treated as a research subject for more than half a century, are just two of the provocative questions Dittrich takes up in his book.

Because it is about so much more, Dittrich takes risks with the struc-

ture, never more so than when he leaves Henry on Page 47 and doesn’t return to him until Page 201. The discursiveness is what lends the book its power and keeps the reader turning its pages. In fact, Scoville, Dittrich’s grandfather, often steals the show.

Threaded throughout the stories of H.M. and Scoville are important side trips into the history of neuroscience, mental illness and the treatment of humans as research subjects.

But it’s his portrait of Suzanne Corkin, the M.I.T. scientist who oversaw decades of research on H.M., acting sometimes as a guardian and others as a scientific gatekeeper, that has drawn Dittrich into controversy.

On Aug. 7, the New York Times Magazine published an excerpt from “Patient H.M.” that dealt largely with Corkin’s claim to have destroyed all ancillary data about H.M., as well as her contentious relationship with Jacopo Annese, the scientist who was awarded the postmortem task of processing, preserving and analyzing H.M.’s brain. At the heart of the conflict is a dispute over one of Annese’s early findings, which could undermine the integrity of research based on H.M. The next day, Corkin’s colleagues at M.I.T. as well as some 200 other scientists sent letters to the Times criticizing the publication of what they deemed errors in Dittrich’s description of Corkin’s actions and attitudes.

It’s too bad the scientists didn’t wait to read the book when it was released the next day. If they had, they would have discovered that those errors were largely differences of interpretation and emphasis, and that Corkin takes up only a fraction of the book. The real shame of it is that they would have also realized that “Patient H.M.” is a scintillating book, infused with humanity. n Nutt is a science writer at The Washington Post. Her beat is the brain.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Another knockout in mystery series

A revisionist view of early art in U.S.

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

T

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

he plot of Louise Penny’s 12th Chief Inspector Gamache novel, “A Great Reckoning,” involves the discovery of an intricate old map that’s been stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, the village in Quebec where Gamache and his beloved wife, Reine-Marie, keep a house. The map, unearthed during a renovation, depicts the route to the village of Three Pines, but it’s off in strange ways — there’s a snowman in the upper right corner, holding up “a hockey stick in triumph” and pointing to a curious pyramid in another section.

Gamache has solved many mysteries throughout his 30-odd years as an investigator, but there’s a mystery about the Gamache novels themselves that has long remained unsolved: that is, what to call them? Just try describing the Gamache series to an uninitiated reader and you’ll be flummoxed.

These are not “just” suspense stories, police procedurals or crime novels. They’re certainly not cozies, despite their intermittent change of scene from the streets of Quebec to the quaint village of Three Pines.

The Gamache series is deep and grand and altogether extraordinary. Although individual novels have featured plots about mass murderers and serial killers, they’re always infused with wit and compassion; they’re as much spiritual investigations into the nature of evil and divine mercy as they are “entertainments.”

When “A Great Reckoning” opens, Gamache has just stepped into his new post as chief superintendent of the police academy.

Gamache accepted the job to find the source of corruption within the academy: Idealistic cadets are being warped into brutish police officers, quick to intimidate and even terrorize the population. In an attempt to reach out to four first-year cadets who seem particularly vulnerable, Gamache gives them each a copy of the riddling map and challenges them to crack its secrets.

Soon, an even more crucial question about the map arises when a copy is found in the bedroom of a professor who’s been murdered at the academy. That professor, Serge Leduc, had been demoted by Gamache when he assumed command. Given their antagonistic relationship and the curious discovery of the map, Gamache becomes something of a “person of interest” in Leduc’s murder.

This is but the skimpiest sliver of the plot of “A Great Reckoning.”

As always in the Gamache series, the main narrative branches into more complicated patterns until all questions are resolved in a spectacular climax that cross cuts between story lines. The chief moral question that permeates the many subplots of “A Great Reckoning” is the vexing one of what elders owe to the young under their care. The curious map, which turns out to have connections to World War I, calls to mind the carnage of that war and the young men that so many villages like Three Pines lost. Then there are the cadets at the academy who’ve been led into danger — both moral and physical — by some of their superiors. One cadet, in particular, draws out Gamache’s protective instincts. A sullen goth named Amelia, she’s tricked out with tattoos and body armor. Here’s how one of Gamache’s concerned colleagues regards the cadet: “The rings and studs, like bullets. A girl pierced and pieced together. Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Looking for a heart.”

That tossed-off description of Amelia is a stand-alone poem. In addition to all her other many gifts, Penny is a beautiful writer. “A Great Reckoning” is one of her best, but I think that pretty much every time I finish a Gamache mystery . . . or metaphysical exploration, or whatever the heck these miraculous books are. n Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air.”

W

A GREAT RECKONING

By Louise Penny Minotaur. 389 pp. $28.99

GRAND ILLUSIONS American Art and the First World War

By David M. Lubin Oxford. 366 pp. $39.95

l

REVIEWED BY

Y AËLLE A ZAGURY

ith its use of modern warfare from trenches to submarines, World War I claimed millions of lives and drastically changed the geopolitical structure. But the war also rocked Western culture, from altering the status of women to sparking new artistic movements such as Dada and surrealism. America, which suffered relatively fewer casualties than Europe, was regarded as somewhat impervious to these seismic shifts in the artistic realm. The beginning of a distinctive American art is usually dated to around World War II, roughly with the rise of Abstraction.

David M. Lubin, a professor of art history at Wake Forest University and a curator of a forthcoming exhibition on World War I and American art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, seeks to upend this narrative. “Grand Illusions” comes in the wake of a reappraisal of the Great War’s effect on American culture.

Lubin’s book is an ambitious, albeit unequal, undertaking that investigates the variety of American art — pacifist and bellicose alike — from the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to the rise of the Third Reich in 1933. An eloquent writer who came of age during the Vietnam conflict, Lubin juggles a formidable array of visual media in this knowledgeable study. He rescues photographs, posters, paintings, sculptures and films from oblivion to reenergize the debate and offer a new, if revisionist, perspective perhaps more fashionable in cultural studies departments than among museum curators. Delving deeply into popular and highbrow culture, he often draws inspired connections, situating artworks in a crucible of fresh references, and his readings, which may be irritating to the political conservative or the more classicminded, are intellectually provocative.

Pleasantly surprising, for instance, is his rethinking of George Bellows, who patriotically adhered to the Bryce Committee report on German atrocities and allowed his old-fashioned realism to yield to phantasmagoric war scenes. Or Lubin’s reassessment of John Singer Sargent’s late, remarkably modern work, such as “Gassed” (1919), a large painting depicting a dozen or so soldiers who have been blinded by poison gas.

Also aptly reconsidered is Horace Pippin, a forgotten self-taught painter and a soldier in the 369th Battalion, consisting of African Americans. His naive style provides an arresting contrast to the grimness of war. Lubin’s reclaiming of Claggett Wilson, one of the eight illustrators of the American Expeditionary Forces charged with documenting the war for posterity, is equally felicitous.

Despite hinting that Wilson’s work was erased from the annals due to a mishap and Pippin’s on account of his ethnicity, Lubin fails, nonetheless, to consider broader issues that a work of this scope should have warranted: Why are some works retained by history and others blotted out?

What are the ideological assumptions behind aesthetic canons, especially ones dismissing American art of the time? Brief references notwithstanding, his study is also missing a sociological map of the artistic milieu.

Instead, his focus is oftentimes squandered on overwrought exegesis, and his interpretive frenzy frequently substitutes rigor for mere stylistic cleverness, even fallacy.

Looking at artworks solely as pro-war or antiwar “images,” Lubin delivers a disparate collection of essays while failing to conclude whether, indeed, a cohesive national style emerged in the aftermath of the war. n Azagury’s writings about art and literature have appeared in Lilith, the Jerusalem Post and the New York Times Book Review.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Founders foresaw failure of our two-party system GARY JOHNSON

Shortly after drafting the Massachusetts Constitution, John Adams expressed his greatest fear for the nation: “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader. . . . This . . . is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.”

He wasn’t alone. James Madison warned against the dangers of factionalism. And in his farewell address, George Washington called “party dissension” a kind of “frightful despotism,” warning that a party leader would be prone to pursue his own agenda “to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

Almost in spite of themselves, the founders allied themselves into political parties: First the Federalists against the Democratic­Republicans, then the Whigs against the Democrats. That second party alignment collapsed under the weight of slavery — when a third party, the Republican Party, rose up with a fresh message unencumbered by the past.

ISTOCKPHOTO

is the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president.

Has the two-party division that the founders railed against become today’s political status quo?

It doesn’t have to be. With the Republicans and the Democrats having nominated their most polarizing presidential candidates in more than a generation, now is the moment for a third way.

My running mate, Bill Weld, and I were each two-term Republican governors in heavily Democratic states. Both of us won reelection overwhelmingly.

We did this by governing as fiscal conservatives and social liberals.

That’s where most Americans want their government to be.

Political parties aren’t necessarily evil — unless they lead to the level of dysfunction that we have today. Elected officials in Washington cannot even agree upon a real budget —

and haven’t for years. That’s their most straightforward responsibility.

These partisans place loyalty to their team over loyalty to the nation’s needs. It’s eerie to see Republicans under Donald Trump denounce free trade and limited government. It’s unsettling to see how comfortable Democrats have gotten with Hillary Clinton’s approach to Middle East regime change as secretary of state.

Fortunately, most Americans aren’t buying it. More people consider themselves “independents” than are aligned with either of the two largest political parties. They want an alternative: a common-sense approach that combines fiscal discipline with social inclusion.

As presidential and vicepresidential candidates, that’s our message. A nonpartisan

approach in the Oval Office would do wonders to diffuse the harsh partisanship that we’ve seen develop in recent years.

Think of it as a new form of checks and balances, with different parties controlling the executive and legislative branches.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison warned about the dangers of factionalism. His proposed solution was to divide power within the government.

That can be frustrating to some because it makes the federal government inefficient by design. It keeps one person, or one party, from accumulating absolute power.

Yet the two larger political parties have worked hard to try to create their own tyrannical majorities. The majorities alternate, but the basic premise doesn’t change.

So consider a system where a president from a bona fide third party enters the mix.

With a chief executive free of any obligation to either party, the focus will be on the business of the nation, not on propping up a crumbling party apparatus.

The first priority of the Johnson-Weld administration will be submitting to Congress a balanced budget. As governors, we held true to promising that taxes would go down, not up.

We’ll end up cutting spending by roughly 20 percent in order to match it to current tax receipts.

My default is to question

federal spending and to require every year that each agency justify its budget anew. As governor, I vetoed more than 750 bills, often special-interest payoffs, and I won’t hesitate to veto such bills from Congress.

That said, Bill and I are reasonable and realistic executives. We will accomplish the free-market, fiscally conservative agenda of limiting government and increasing trade, while pursuing longoverdue immigration and criminal-justice reform.

We’ll do this through having both Republicans and Democrats in the Cabinet and working simultaneously with the leaders of those parties. Seeing that, by working together, the best ideas of each party will receive a fair hearing, both will see real movement toward addressing challenges they care about, not just winner-take-all partisan gridlock. A great deal could be accomplished by having thirdparty leadership dedicated to finding the common ground that has so often eluded the parties in recent years: on balancing the budget, curbing taxes, protecting our privacy and reforming our criminal-justice system.

The fact that the founders anticipated our two-party morass and warned against it ought to be enough incentive to look beyond it. The two major parties have failed to meet the needs of the nation. It’s time to try something different. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A safe space for free expression CHRISTINA PAXSON is the president of Brown University.

New students are entering colleges and universities at a time of fierce debate about whether institutions of higher education are becoming places that stifle speech in the interest of protecting students from ideas and perspectives they don’t want to hear. In the clash over freedom of expression and the supposed coddling of American college students, safe spaces and trigger warnings are held up as the poster children of overprotective universities.

In the setting of private institutions, this is not a First Amendment issue. Private colleges and universities could restrict the expression of ideas and beliefs within their campuses, if they chose to do so.

But most private colleges and universities wisely do not make this choice. Instead, colleges and universities protect the rights of members of their communities to express a full range of ideas, however controversial.

That is because freedom of expression is an essential component of academic freedom, which protects the ability of universities to fulfill their core mission of advancing knowledge.

Suppressing ideas at a university is akin to turning off the power at a factory. As scholars and students, our responsibility is to subject old truths to scrutiny and put forward new ideas to improve them.

At universities, we also advance understanding about issues of justice and fairness, and these discussions can be equally, if not more, difficult. From the earliest days of this country, college campuses have been the sites of fierce debates about slavery, war, women’s rights and racial justice.

These discussions create rocky moments, and they should.

If we don’t have these debates — if we limit the flow of ideas — then in 50 years we will be no better than we are today.

I don’t share the view that American college students want to be protected from ideas that make them uncomfortable. Just the opposite. Over the past few years, our students have addressed topics that make many people very uncomfortable indeed.

As for “safe spaces” — the term is used in so many different ways that it is impossible to discuss it

without being precise about its meaning. The term emerged nearly 50 years ago to refer to forums where women’s rights issues were discussed. Then it was extended to denote spaces where violence and harassment against the LGBTQ community would not be tolerated, and then extended again to mean places where students from marginalized groups can come together to feel comfortable discussing their experiences and being themselves.

If this is what a safe space means, then, yes, Brown has them.

Proudly. And even the campuses that decry these spaces have them.

We see safe spaces in the choices our students make every day. Students find many opportunities through clubs and organizations to meet those who share similar backgrounds and interests — religious, political and otherwise.

In her memoir “My Beloved World,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor talks about Acción Puertorriqueña, a Princeton group for students of Puerto Rican heritage. Although she made it a point to develop relationships with people from different backgrounds, that group gave her a much-needed anchor in an unfamiliar environment.

Maybe this isn’t what the critics

mean when they deride “safe spaces,” but these spaces deserve to exist at colleges across the country.

I would say the same for trigger warnings, which are meant to alert students who have been subjected to trauma, such as sexual assault and combat, that some material in class may be disturbing. Faculty should be free to use them at their discretion.

My final point — often missed in the media debates — is this: Universities are doing something difficult and important. We are grappling with how to create peaceful, just and prosperous societies, even as we live in a society that often feels more divided and rancorous than ever, fractured along lines of race, ethnicity, income and ideology.

With the right of academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to think carefully about how that right is exercised in the service of society to confront these divides.

At Brown, as at many institutions of higher education, we are not coddling our students — or limiting freedom of expression. Instead, we are teaching them, encouraging them and giving them the space to have the discussions that will make them better scholars and prepare them to best serve society. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

Shiny Capitol, tarnished Congress DANA MILBANK is an opinion writer for The Washington Post.

The smell of fresh paint greeted lawmakers reacquainting themselves with their workplace after their seven-week break.

The scaffolding was coming down, revealing a gleaming dome and, underneath it, restored friezes, oil paintings and statues. The Capitol has been returned to its former glory.

If only they could do the same to Congress.

After their seven-week recess, which included both party conventions and was the longest break since at least 1960, the people’s representatives in the House are back for just four weeks before recessing again until the election — and there has been talk of cutting those four weeks of work to three or even two.

They might as well go home, because the House to-do list could end up looking something like this: Impeach the IRS commissioner. Punish the Democrats. Sue the Saudis.

This is how Donald Trump happened.

Americans are worried and angry about the big issues: stagnant wages, immigration, trade deals, health care, entitlement programs, the tax code, the Zika virus, tainted drinking water. Yet the best Congress can do for the moment

is to keep the government running on autopilot for a few more months, and even this isn’t guaranteed.

With three weeks to go in the fiscal year, Congress has enacted not one of the 12 annual appropriations bills (the House has passed six). While leaders struggle to pass a temporary “continuing resolution,” Republicans fight among themselves about how long it should last and hard-liners threaten to derail it by adding language banning Syrian refugees.

As Republicans sat down for their caucus meeting Wednesday morning, the conversation wandered — this member’s new grandchild, that member’s engagement, various anecdotes and talking points. GOP leaders held a news conference after the meeting, at which they voiced enthusiastic support for . . . a new

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

soapbox that had appeared over the recess to help shorter members of the caucus be seen behind the lectern.

“Gee whiz!” said Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), trying it out.

With so little happening, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to create the illusion of activity, asserting that in this Congress “a total of 219 bills have been enacted into law.

That’s an increase over the 25year average.”

Actually, the average number of bills enacted into law in previous Congresses going back to 1991 is 435 — double the current output.

McCarthy’s spokesman said the claim was based on when Congress went on its long summer holiday. But as of now, McCarthy’s 219 bills are well below the 25-year average of 257 enacted at this point by previous Congresses. And, as House Democrats point out, 195 of those 219 bills have been minor “suspension” bills, such as postoffice namings.

“People want a positive vision and a clear direction for solving the country’s big problems,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan declared at his news conference.

They do. But instead, they’re getting: l An attempt to impeach the IRS commissioner. Some hard-

liners, still angry about the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups, are using a “privileged resolution” to force leaders to hold a vote to impeach the current commissioner, John Koskinen, who took over after the alleged wrongdoing occurred. l A bid to punish two dozen House Democrats, led by civil rights icon John Lewis, who staged a sit-in on the House floor in June to protest Republicans’ refusal to bring up gun-control legislation. l Legislation allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia in federal courts.

The bill has no chance of surviving an expected veto.

Instead, House Republicans could spend their fleeting time at work resolving an impasse blocking funds to fight the Zika infection. The Senate reached a bipartisan deal in May to provide $1.1 billion for the effort, but the agreement fell apart when House Republicans added a provision restricting funds from going to Planned Parenthood.

Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) said his constituents “are demanding action and they are seeing inaction, and in that inaction they are angry.”

Yes, but have they seen that new soapbox for members of Congress? Gee whiz! n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Labor unions

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BY

M OSHE M ARVIT

This past week marked Labor Day, first celebrated 134 years earlier in New York City. At that time, labor unions were often viewed as criminal conspira­ cies, and a few years later with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, they were treated as anti­competitive trusts. It took years for labor to debunk these myths. Here are a few others that currently surround labor.

MYTH NO. 1 Unions are for the working class only.

Despite their old-fashioned image, labor unions also include new industries and white-collar workers. The professional class has not been immune to workplace issues of mistreatment, outsourcing and stagnant or declining wages, and as a result its members have increasingly joined unions. For decades, the percentage of professional workers in unions has grown, and now professionals are the majority of union members in the United States.

Conversely, the share of union members in traditional bluecollar jobs such as manufacturing and mining has diminished along with those industries.

MYTH NO. 2 Workers can be forced to join unions.

The reality is that closed shops, which restrict hiring to union members, have been illegal in the United States since 1947. In every jurisdiction in America, if the majority of workers choose to be represented by a union, any worker can object and choose not to join without risking his or her

job. In non-right-to-work states, these objecting workers still pay a fair-share fee that covers the costs of representing them at work.

These fees vary union by union and year by year based on expenditures, but typically they constitute 70 to 85 percent of regular union dues. Objecting workers do not pay for any political or other activities of the union. In right-to-work states, a worker can choose to pay nothing, even though the union must represent all workers equally, regardless of their membership or payment of dues. Nobody, anywhere, is ever forced to become a union member.

MYTH NO. 3 Right-to-work laws would bankrupt unions.

Right-to-work does not necessarily translate into high levels of covered, “free-riding” workers who don’t pay. For instance, all federal employees, including postal workers, are under right-to-work. In the federal workforce (excluding postal employees), 79 percent of the workers who are covered under a union contract have chosen to join; among postal employees, more than 92 percent

The seventh annual convention of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Stablemen & Helpers in Peoria, Ill., on Aug. 5, 1910.

covered under a contract have chosen to join. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has pointed out that union membership among unionrepresented workers has remained around 80 percent despite right-to-work policies passed in recent years.

Yet right-to-work laws threaten to expose real weaknesses inside unions: a lack of solidarity and participation among members.

MYTH NO. 4 Unions help only union workers.

It is true that unions often limit their activities to matters concerning their membership.

But it is wrong to conclude that this work does not help workers more generally or that unions don’t organize for the common good. A new paper from the Economic Policy Institute shows that higher union density has historically led to higher pay among nonunion workers. In fact, if union levels were in 2013 what they were in 1979, nonunion men would be earning an additional $109 billion per year. Groups like the Service Employees International Union have spent millions in a fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though they are unlikely to get an increase in membership in the short term.

Beyond wages and benefits, teachers unions, for example, have found creative ways to better the lives of students through collective bargaining, with the Chicago Teachers Union going on

strike in part for increased libraries and other resources, and the St. Paul teachers union fighting to limit foreclosures during the school year for households with school-age children.

MYTH NO. 5 Unions are a bulwark against globalization.

From NAFTA to the TransPacific Partnership, labor unions have positioned themselves as the primary critics of, and protectors of workers against, globalization and free trade. The reason for their opposition is clear: Increased globalization often leads to more competition with countries where workers are paid far less, exploiting those workers while making it difficult to keep American wages high.

But despite the best efforts of labor, including large protests in the 1990s, globalization has largely continued apace, and U.S. workers have paid the price.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, while NAFTA promised to create 200,000 new jobs for American workers, since its 1994 inception 682,900 jobs have been lost. Another EPI report found that international trade depressed wages for non-collegeeducated workers by 5.5 percent, meaning an annual loss of $1,800 for the average worker. n Marvit is a labor and employment lawyer and a fellow at the Century Foundation. He is the co-author of “Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016

24

A & Q

THE RACE: Douglas County Commission | District 1

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:

ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C

Douglas County has a historically high poverty rate.

What is the most innovative thing a commissioner can do to address that?

CANDIDATES:

PAT HALEY

DAN SUTTON

Independent engineering consultant and contractor

Owner of Cottage Inn Restaurant in Wenatchee

prefers Republican Party

prefers Republican Party

ANSWER: The primary responsibilities of a county commissioner are the professional management of county services. This includes budgeting and appropriation of county expenditures, constructing and maintaining roads & public buildings, designing safe and efficient transportation systems, enforcing federal and state ordinances, assuring reliable public safety, providing long range land-use planning, prosecuting and defending all legal actions for and against the county, and supervising and hiring of non-elected management staff for county agencies. The better a commissioner focuses on excellence in governance—good roads, low taxes, disciplined budgets, wise planning, and quality service — the better he/she can be a supportive team player with other public & private agencies in solving these types of challenging issues in Douglas County.

ANSWER: Encourage economic and private sector development including tourism, education, transportation, infrastructure and affordable housing.

We must create a climate which encourages growth and development throughout the county by establishing economic development areas, be it through temporary tax deferral or reduction and presenting a climate conducive to growth rather than burdensome and discouraging through unrealistic site improvements and regulations causing many businesses to look elsewhere. I support private sector growth, due to the very nature of diversity. It is more beneficial to the health of the county to have 10 businesses employing 25 people than to have one business employing 250 people, however I would be happy with both. When business development and entrepreneurship are stifled by inappropriate regulation, excessive taxes and unstable policy application, lack of growth and increased poverty occur. By collaborating with groups like the Port of Douglas County and the WVC Chamber of Commerce we will succeed.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the candidates in any race in North Central Washington please your suggestion to newsroom@wenatcheeworld.com.

2016

ELECTI N GUIDE

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