The Washington Post National Weekly - September 16, 2018

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2018

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POLITICAL ANALYSIS POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Mueller gets another guilty plea Mueller gets another guilty plea P HILIP B UMP

tors about his conversations with a Russialinked professor during the campaign; earlier tors about hisweeks conversations with a RussiaBY P HILIP B UMPcrimithis month he was sentenced to two in ollowing his conviction on eight linked professor during the campaign; earlier prison. nal counts in a federal court in Virginia monthadviser he was and sentenced to two weeks in ollowingformer his conviction on eight crimiIn December, formerthis campaign last month, President Trump’s prison. in a federal court in Virginia national security adviser Michael Flynn pleadcampaign chairman nal Paulcounts Manafort In related December, former Trump’s former ed guilty to the same charge, to what he campaign adviser and faced a new trial on anotherlast fullmonth, docketPresident of security adviser campaign chairman Paul Manafort told investigators aboutnational his conversations with Michael Flynn pleadcharges. On Friday morning, we learned that edaguilty the same charge, related to what he a new trial on the Russian ambassador year to prior.

He has the second trial would faced be short-circuited.

In-another full docket of told investigators about his conversations with charges.

Onwhether Friday morning, we learned that not been sentenced. stead of facing a jury to evaluate he Russian trial would October was also thethe point whenambassador Manafort a year prior. He has had laundered moneythe orsecond committed bank be short-circuited. Innot been stead a jury first faced charges, along with sentenced. his longtime fraud or filed false reports on of hisfacing lobbying, theto evaluate whether he October was alsoalso the point when Manafort laundered money business partner, Rick Gates.

Gates, who office of special counselhad Robert S. Mueller III or committed bank first faced along with his longtime or filed false reports on his lobbying, the served as Manafort’s deputy on thecharges, campaign, announced that it hadfraud reached a plea agreebusiness partner, of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III pleaded guilty to two charges earlier this Rick year, Gates. Gates, who also ment with Manafort. In office addition to the original Manafort’s deputy on the campaign, announced that it had reached a plea agreeincluding a conspiracy served charge.asHe cooperated eight charges, Manafort admitted to another pleaded guiltyManafort to two charges earlier this year, ment with Manafort. In addition to the original JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS with investigators, testifying against two, sparing him from another trial. including a conspiracy charges, Manafort to another inJONATHAN the trial during which his former boss was charge. He cooperated In so doing, though,eight Manafort increased a admitted Former Trump campaign manager Paul ERNST/REUTERS with investigators, testifying against Manafort sparing him trial. reached a plea deal on Friday. convicted. metric that efficiently two, summarizes the from effec-another Manafort in obtained the trial during which his former boss was In soHe doing, though, Former Trump campaign manager Paulteam has also Mueller’s guilty pleas tiveness of the Mueller probe. became the Manafort increased a convicted. metric that efficiently Manafort reached a plea deal ontwo Friday. from other individuals not related to the his guilt. the effecfifth person linked to Trump’s campaign who summarizes Mueller’s team has also obtained guilty pleas tiveness of after the Mueller Heeight became theon which he was convicted campaign.

The counts admitted guilt to criminal activity facing probe. from two other individuals not related to the guilt. person to Trump’s campaign Alex van der Zwaan is an attorney who had last month werewho mostlyhis finance-related. charges that stemmed fifth in full or in linked part from The eight on which he was convicted guilt to criminal activity afterday facing worked with Gates andcampaign.

Manafort. He pleaded The same that Manafort wascounts convicted Mueller’s work. The twoadmitted additional charges to Alex van derserved Zwaana is an attorney who had last month were mostly finance-related. that as stemmed or in part from former guilty to making false statements, in Virginia, Trump’s personal attorney which Manafort agreedcharges means that, of writ- in full worked with Gates and Manafort. He pleaded The same was convicted two additional chargeswas to admitting month in prison and was deported.

Michael Cohen guiltday on that eightManafort ing, seven people haveMueller’s admittedwork. to orThe been to making Virginia, Trump’s personal which Manafort that,counts as of writRichard attorney Pinedo is a guilty businessman whofalse ad- statements, served a criminal in NewinYork.

Cohen playedformer a convicted of 24 criminal counts linked agreed to the means month prison and was deported.

Michael Cohen admitting on eight fake ing,campaign. seven people have admitted to or mittedguilt to providing bankinaccount numutility role onbeen the campaign, acting was as an Mueller probe and/or the Another Richard is a businessman who adcriminal in New played convicted criminal linked to the bersCohen to people whoa turned out to Pinedo be Russian advocate on news broadcasts andcounts arranging for York.

26 people and three businesses, allof in24 Russia or counts mitted the to providing fake bank account numutility roletoon thehad campaign, acting as an Muellerby probe and/or the payments campaign.toAnother nationals seeking to influence election. He women who claimed have Ukraine, have been indicted the Mueller bers to people who turned out to be Russian advocate broadcasts for 26 people and three businesses, allrelationships in Russia or with hasand notarranging yet been sentenced. sexual Trumpon to news keep those grand jury. nationals seeking from to influence the election. He payments to women who claimed to have had by from the Mueller Two other prominent allies of Trump’s stories being revealed.

Quite a witch hunt. Ukraine, have been indicted not yet been sexual relationships with Trump to keep have thosealsohas grand the campaign been indicted onsentenced. unreThe campaign contribution charges were One of the two charges to jury. which Manafort Two other prominent beingguilt, revealed.lated charges. Those two are Quite a witch hunt.

Reps.

Chris Collins allies of Trump’s from related to the payments.stories While from admitting admitted guilt on Friday was a sweeping concampaign havewho also been indicted on unrecampaign charges were D.the One ofa the two to which Manafort (R-N.Y.) and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), Cohen directly implicatedThe Trump as beingcontribution inspiracy charge, incorporating slew of charges the lated charges.

Those two related to the payments. While guilt Friday was a sweeping conwereadmitting the first guilt, two members of the House to are Reps. Chris Collins volved in those activities. numerous counts that admitted he faced at oneonpoint.

(R-N.Y.) andfaces Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who CohenTrump directly implicated endorse Trump as being candidacy. inspiracy charge, incorporating a slewcharges of the against Trump’s Collins insidCriminal campaign The other charge is a conspiracy charge related the is first two members of the House to in those activities. countstothat faced at one point. er trading charges, andwere Hunter accused of stretch back volved to October of last year, to obstruction of justice.numerous This isn’t related the he associates endorse Trump’s candidacy. Collins faces insidCriminal charges against Trump campaign Thethe other charge is a conspiracy campaign finance violations. whencharge chargesrelated against former campaign adviser president; Manafort, after original charges erprobe trading charges, and Hunter is accused of associates stretch back of last Mueller’s year, obstruction of justice. isn’t related to the were Meanwhile, continues.

George Papadopoulos first revealed.

Pap- to October were filed, had workedtowith a longtime busi- This n campaign finance violations. chargesinvestigaagainst former campaign adviser president; after the originaladmitted charges towhen adopoulos misleading ness partner to try to bury evidenceManafort, suggesting ©The Washington Post Meanwhile, Mueller’s probe continues. n George Papadopoulos were first revealed. Papwere filed, had worked with a longtime busiadopoulos admitted to misleading investiganess partner to try to bury evidence suggesting ©The Washington Post

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CONTENTS

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CONTENTS

ON THE COVER Fred Cabazos’s family has owned land in Texas for ON THE COVER Fred Cabazos’s POLITICS generations. He has4let Border THE NATION Patrol agents put a 8 towerfamily on it, has but owned land in Texas for He has let Border THE 10losegenerations. nowWORLD he worries he’ll the land Patrol agents put a tower on it, but COVER so theSTORY government12 can build a wall. now he worries he’ll lose the land SPACE Photo by CAROLYN16 VAN HOUTEN of so the government can build a wall.

BOOKS 18 The Washington Post Photo by CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN of OPINION 20 The Washington Post FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Serena isn’t treated same as men BILLIE JEAN KING is a former No. 1-ranked tennis player in the world, founded the Women’s Tennis Association and is co-founder of the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, a not-for-profit focused on fighting for equality in the workplace.

This was written for The Washington Post.

The ceiling that women of color face on their path to leadership never felt more impenetrable than it did at the women’s U.S. Open final last Saturday. Ironic, perhaps, that the roof of Arthur Ashe Stadium was closed for the championship match. What was supposed to be a memorable moment for tennis, with Serena Williams, perhaps the greatest player of all time, facing off against Naomi Osaka, the future of our sport, turned into another example of people in positions of power abusing that power.

Lost in the craziness of the evening was the fact that Osaka played excellent tennis and won her first major title. Competing against her childhood idol, she summoned her A game and earned her championship — no need for any asterisk in the record book. She was the best player on the court Saturday.

But that’s not what many will remember. For fans, Osaka’s stellar play was overshadowed by an archaic tennis rule that eventually led to an abuse of power.

The cause and effect of this unsatisfactory sequence of events are pretty clear.

The cause was the inconsistent application of a rule — and the rule itself — that led to the warning that chair umpire Carlos Ramos gave to Williams for coaching coming

from her player’s box: If tennis would catch up with the 21st century and allow coaching on every point, the situation on the court would never have escalated to the level of absurdity that it did. Every player, after all, still has to play the match — she has to execute on every point, and she should never be held responsible for the actions of a coach. Coaching happens all the time, at all levels of tennis. So why not just allow it?

The effect was an abuse of power: Ramos crossed the line.

He made himself part of the match. He involved himself in the end result. An umpire’s job is to keep control of the match, and he let it get out of control.

The rules are what they are, but the umpire has discretion, and Ramos chose to give Williams

very little latitude in a match where the stakes were highest.

Granted, Williams could have taken some responsibility and moved on after the first warning (and, speaking from experience, it’s debatable whether she knew this was a warning or not), and before the point and game penalties started flying.

But, for her, and for many other women who have experienced an abuse of power at their workplaces, there was more at stake.

Did Ramos treat Williams differently than male players have been treated? I think he did. Women are treated differently in most arenas of life.

This is especially true for women of color. And what played out on the court yesterday happens far too often. It happens in sports, in the office and in public service. Ultimately, a woman was penalized for standing up for herself. A woman faced down sexism, and the match went on.

Women have a right, though, to speak out against injustice — as much right as a man. I found myself in similar situations in my career; once, I even walked off the court in protest. It wasn’t my proudest moment, but it may have been one of my more powerful ones. I understand what motivated Williams to do

what she did. And I hope every single girl and woman watching yesterday’s match realizes they should always stand up for themselves and for what they believe is right. Nothing will ever change if they don’t.

Women are taught to be perfect. We aren’t perfect, of course, and so we shouldn’t be held to that standard. We have a voice. We have emotions. When we react adversely to a heated professional situation, far too often, we’re labeled hysterical.

That must stop. Tennis is a game, but for Williams and Osaka, it’s also their job, their life’s work. Yes, Williams was heated during the match because she felt Ramos wasn’t just penalizing her, but also attacking her character and professionalism. Her true leadership and character were revealed after the match, in the trophy presentation, when she shifted the spotlight to Osaka.

She didn’t have to, but she did. I know her — that’s who she really is, and she knew it was the right thing to do.

Serena’s a champion. She has done and continues to do the hard work. She was right to speak her mind, to put a voice to the injustice, and she was right to know when to call for the controversy to end. n

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OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Jerry Brown can lead on climate NATHAN GARDELS is editor in chief of the WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post.

Without doubt, Jerry Brown has been one of California’s most legendary governors. Yet his greatest role may still be ahead. His formidable political experience combined with his enduring commitment to resolving the existential challenge of climate change will position him as a global elder statesman when he leaves office next year.

As governor, Brown has put together a worldwide “network of the willing” to battle global warming in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement under President Trump, linking up 188 subnational entities, such as municipal and provincial governments, in 39 countries and across six continents to push ahead with the accord.

Last June, Chinese President Xi Jinping broke long-standing protocol by meeting one-on-one with Brown, a sitting governor and not a national head of state, to discuss how to cooperate on climate change. This past week, Brown hosted the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco with participants from around the world, including Xie Zhenhua, China’s negotiator for the

Paris accord, and Christiana Figueres, who chaired the Paris conclave and brought it to a successful conclusion.

Brown’s most important proposal going forward is to integrate California’s cap-andtrade program with Europe’s and China’s, which is based on the California model. That model caps greenhouse gas emissions and penalizes polluters with stiff fees, the proceeds of which are invested in projects that will help California reach its goal of total reliance on renewable energy sources by 2045.

Polluters can buy and trade emissions allowances that are costly, thus incentivizing reductions. The goal is a “large worldwide carbon trading system,” the governor told European Union officials on a visit to Brussels last November.

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

California already collaborates with two Canadian provinces, Quebec and Ontario, on a range of policies, including carbon pricing through the cap-andtrade program. Extending that to the European Union and China would structurally bind decarbonization efforts in the state with two of the world’s largest economies.

The model for Brown’s elder statesman role is Jean Monnet, a former French official and diplomat who devised the idea of the European Coal and Steel Community implemented in the 1950s. The driving notion was that regional integration of heavy industry in the Ruhr Valley along the FrenchGerman border in the years after World War II would accelerate economic reconstruction and make war “not only unthinkable but materially impossible.”

Similarly, the integration of cap-and-trade markets today would not only ultimately establish a global carbon price that would diminish reliance on fossil fuels; it would also create a bridge of common intent across boundaries to save the planet despite national conflicts arising

today in trade and security matters. Tying our climate fates together would in effect serve as a kind of preemptive version of the Coal and Steel Community.

Homogenizing emission standards and measures so they are comparable and compatible is, to be sure, a technically challenging task.

But if the political will is there, it is certainly no less doable than the regional integration of coal and steel markets among rivals who had only recently concluded a devastating war. And it would lay the essential groundwork for renewed cooperation when the United States inevitably rejoins the Paris accord in the post-Trump era.

Brown has accumulated decades of experience in pushing ecological issues to the forefront and putting effective, concrete policies in place. He also has a long string of contacts globally and a deep pool of expertise to draw on.

While Brown’s ambitions for national office never panned out, a global role, for which he is wholly suited, now beckons.

Becoming an elder statesman on climate change is the natural next step for a proven leader with lots left to offer. n

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POLITICS

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GOP increasingly fears losing Senate BY

S EAN S ULLIVAN

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epublicans have grown increasingly worried about losing control of the Senate, as President Trump’s approval rating tumbles and Democrats gain steam in key battleground races.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday sounded some of the most doubtful notes of Trump’s presidency that Republicans will keep the upper chamber of Congress, telling reporters, “I hope when the smoke clears, we’ll still have a majority.”

His comments came as Republican strategists and officials fretted over a fresh round of private polling on the Senate races, while public polls registered further erosion in Americans’ approval of Trump. “Shipwreck” was how one leading strategist described the situation, adding an expletive to underscore the severity of the party’s problems.

One of the most unexpected fights is in reliably GOP Texas, where Sen. Ted Cruz is trying to fend off Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Republicans are so fearful about losing the seat that they are diverting resources to Texas, a sore point in the White House after the animosity between Cruz and Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

Beyond Texas, Sen. Joe Donnelly, once seen as perhaps the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent, has opened up a slight edge over Republican businessman Mike Braun in Indiana, while hopes for picking off Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) in a state Trump won by 43 percentage points have faded along with GOP confidence in state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, the Republican nominee.

The developments signaled the most serious peril yet for Republicans’ 51-49 majority. Losing the Senate was once an unthinkable prospect as the GOP looked to gain seats in the midterms, and with the party’s grip on the House in serious jeopardy, the chamber had been seen as the last line of defense.

IRWIN THOMPSON/DALLAS MORNING NEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Concern is exemplified in Texas, where the party is pouring money into helping Cruz keep his seat At the start of Trump’s tenure, some Republicans envisioned enough wins to secure a filibusterproof majority of 60 seats, confident they could oust many of the 10 Democrats running in states Trump won in 2016. Even a few weeks ago, Republicans were talking more assuredly about flipping seats.

But less than two months till the Nov. 6 election, Republicans barely mention Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — states Trump won — as opportunities to knock out a Democrat, while McConnell reiterated that nine seats, plus Texas, were at stake.

“Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia and Florida. All of them too close to call, and every one of them like a knife fight in an alley; I mean, just a brawl in every one of those places,” McConnell told reporters in Louisville.

The dire warnings could serve as a wake-up call to GOP donors for the final eight weeks of the campaign.

But for the GOP, simply retaining its majority — which was whittled by a seat after a stunning upset in the Alabama special election last year — has looked like a more challenging goal by the day, as controversy swirls around Trump, the public loses confidence in the president, and GOP candidates are slow to gain traction.

A Washington Post-ABC News national poll conducted in late August found just 38 percent of voters approved of the job that Trump was doing, compared with 60 percent who disapproved. His approval rating in April was 44 percent.

These difficulties have come into sharp focus in Texas, where Cruz is fighting for political survival against O’Rourke, a rising liberal star who is raising record-

Sen. Ted Cruz talks with voters during a stop at Tin Roof BBQ in Humble, Tex., last weekend. The senator in the reliably red state faces an unexpected challenge from Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who had more cash on hand than Cruz at the end of June.

setting sums of cash and attracting large crowds across a ruby-red state. At the end of June, O’Rourke had close to $14 million cash on hand to Cruz’s $9 million, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

The tough realities of Texas have prompted an unexpected alliance between Cruz and the Republicans he spent years waging a vendetta against as a senator and as a candidate for president — including Trump and McConnell.

The sudden cooperation underscores how much the GOP fears losing Texas. The shock waves are being felt well beyond the state, as its several expensive media markets could force the party to spend money there that it will have to subtract from GOP hopefuls in other battlegrounds.

McConnell recently assured Cruz in a private conversation that resources would be there for him, according to people familiar with the talk. Trump is planning to campaign for Cruz in Texas next month.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC helmed by a former top McConnell aide, has recently taken a close look at Texas, conducting polling and summarizing its findings in a memo, according to Chris Pack, a spokesman for the group.

The organization also announced a seven-figure advertising campaign in five other states on Tuesday. The ads mostly target Democratic candidates.

Despite Trump’s poll numbers, GOP strategists still consider the president their most effective weapon in the fight to keep control of the Senate. They say his trips to red states with marquee contests, like Montana, North Dakota, Missouri and Indiana, have provided boosts for their candidates.

One bright spot for the GOP has been the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Republican leaders are confident they will confirm him this month, giving Trump and his party a landmark achievement just before voting begins. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

EPA shrinks — just as Trump vowed B Y B RADY D ENNIS, J ULIET E ILPERIN AND A NDREW B A T RAN

O

n the campaign trail, Donald Trump vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form. We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out.”

As president, he is making headway on that promise.

During the first 18 months of the Trump administration, records show, nearly 1,600 workers left the EPA, while fewer than 400 were hired. The exodus has shrunk the agency’s workforce by 8 percent, to levels not seen since the Reagan administration. The trend has continued even after a major round of buyouts last year and despite the fact that the EPA’s budget has remained stable.

Those who have resigned or retired include some of the agency’s most experienced veterans, as well as young environmental experts who traditionally would have replaced them — stirring fears about brain drain at the EPA. The sheer number of departures also has prompted concerns over what sort of work is falling by the wayside, from enforcement investigations to environmental research.

According to data released under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed by The Washington Post, at least 260 scientists, 185 “environmental protection specialists” and 106 engineers are gone.

Several veteran EPA employees, who have worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations, said the agency’s profound policy shifts under Trump hastened their departure.

“I felt it was time to leave given the irresponsible, ongoing diminishment of agency resources, which has recklessly endangered our ability to execute our responsibilities as public servants,” said Ann Williamson, a scientist and longtime supervisor in the EPA’s Region 10 Seattle office.

She left in March after 33 years at the agency, exasperated by hav-

DOUG KAPUSTIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As conservatives applaud the change, many agency veterans have left, feeling demoralized ing to plan how her office would implement Trump’s proposed cuts and weary of what she viewed as the administration’s refusal to make policy decisions based on evidence. “I did not want to any longer be any part of this administration’s nonsense,” she said.

In a statement earlier this month, acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said he was focused on right-sizing the EPA, which Republicans have argued overreached under President Barack Obama, burdening industry with regulations such as those focused on climate change.

“With nearly half of our employees eligible to retire in the next five years, my priority is recruiting and maintaining the right staff, the right people for our mission, rather than total full-time employees,” he said.

Congress has so far maintained the EPA’s budget at just more than

$8 billion, and while current proposals could shrink that amount, any cuts are likely to be modest.

“The Trump administration comes in and goes way, way beyond what the budget requires,” said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee and whose district is home to a major EPA research center. Price said multiple constituents have told him that working at the EPA has become “intolerable” after seeing their findings sidelined.

“It is profoundly demoralizing, and I think, profoundly damaging in terms of the agency’s mission,” he said.

The EPA is not alone in shedding personnel under Trump, despite the fact that Congress passed a $1.3 trillion budget bill in March that boosted both military and domestic spending.

The State Department’s total

Christopher Zarba retired in February after serving as director of the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board. He disagreed with former administrator Scott Pruitt’s decision last year to overhaul the board’s membership.

number of permanent employees, for instance, fell 6.4 percent between Trump’s inauguration and March 2018, according to federal records, while the Education Department declined 9.4 percent during that time.

Part of the drop stems from a government-wide hiring freeze Trump imposed after his inauguration, which lasted nearly three months. The president has continued to press for a leaner federal payroll, asking Congress recently to withhold pay raises for federal workers in 2019.

In a few instances, Trump’s deputies are trying to fill the widespread vacancies in their department’s ranks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently began trying to staff the many senior positions that remained empty under his predecessor, Rex Tillerson.

Meanwhile, Veterans Affairs is eager to hire doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to fill thousands of vacancies.

But at the EPA, it is largely a case of career staff members headed for the exits. Hundreds of employees accepted buyouts last summer, and records show that nearly a quarter of the agency’s remaining 13,758 employees are now eligible to retire. At its peak in the late 1990s, the EPA employed more than 18,000 people.

Christopher Zarba, who retired in February after serving as director of the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board, disagreed with former administrator Scott Pruitt’s decision last year to overhaul the board’s membership. Zarba, a 38-year EPA veteran, said that for many staff members, a belief in the agency’s mission had compensated for lessthan-ideal working conditions.

“That is the crazy glue that holds the place together, the idea, ‘This is important. We’re making a difference,’ ” he said. “And when that crazy glue begins to fall apart, things change.”

That sentiment played a role in Betsy Smith’s decision to retire in June after 20 years with the EPA’s Office of Research and Development — a department singled out for massive cuts in Trump’s first budget proposal. She said officials

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POLITICS largely shelved a project she was leading that aimed to help port communities deal with climate change and other environmental challenges.

“It’s really awful to feel like you don’t have any role to play, that there’s not any interest in the work you’re doing,” said Smith, 62. “My feeling was I could do better work to protect the environment outside the EPA.” Troy Hottle, 32, arrived at the EPA in early 2016 as a research fellow after getting his doctorate in sustainable engineering at Arizona State University. He expected to forge a career there, as others like him had historically done.

“I really felt good about what I was doing and who I was working with,” Hottle said.

But a year and a half into his time at the EPA, the future hiring prospects within the Office of Research and Development seemed uncertain at best. The career path he had “spent half a lifetime” pursuing, he said, no longer looked so appealing.

Last September, when he got a job offer from a national environmental consulting firm, he decided to make the leap.

After his arrival, Pruitt quickly gained a reputation for excluding career officials from key decisions and showing little regard for the agency’s own research. He also took the president’s desire to scale back the EPA to heart, repeatedly boasting about how a buyout and early retirement push last year reduced the agency workforce.

Other conservatives also have cheered the whittling down of EPA’s size and reach as appropriate and overdue.

“It doesn’t take a bigger bureaucracy to clean our environment,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who chairs the House subcommittee overseeing the EPA’s budget, said in a statement. “A lean and efficient workforce at the EPA is a win for taxpayers and the environment by allowing more funding to go towards efforts to clean our water and air.” The agency also underwent buyouts during the Obama administration, but EPA still had about 15,000 employees when he left office.

EPA officials last year launched a reorganization aimed at streamlining the agency, and Wheeler has struck a more measured tone as he has pursued it. A former EPA staff member himself, he praised ca-

KLMNO WEEKLY

Ann Williamson left in March after 33 years at the agency, exasperated by having to plan how her office would implement President Trump’s proposed cuts and weary of what she viewed as the administration’s refusal to make policy decisions based on evidence.

ANDREW BURTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Under Trump, many EPA offices have seen staffs dwindle The EPA has lost 8 percent of its workforce during the first 18 months of the administration, shrinking the agency to a size not seen since the Reagan era.

Here are some of the offices most affected.

-15%

-10

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-6.4% -8 -8.7 -10 -15.3 -15.7 Source: EPA

reer employees in a speech after his appointment, saying his “instincts” would be to defend their work and sympathizing about the stress that comes with the changes the agency is undergoing.

On Sept. 6, he sent an agencywide email announcing that regional offices would be redesigned to mirror the structure at headquarters.

As the departures continue, some EPA workers have voiced worries that the administration’s refusal to fill vacancies with younger employees has effectively blocked the pipeline of new talent.

Dan Costa, 70, joined the EPA 34 years ago as a staff scientist, rising through the ranks to direct its national air, climate and energy

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Office of Air and Radiation Regional offices Office of Water Office of Research and Development Office of International and Tribal Affairs Office of Enforcement and Compliance THE WASHINGTON POST

research program in 2011. He stepped down from that post in January, and he said he spent part of the last year counseling younger researchers who saw no possibility of replicating his career path.

“I had young people come into my office, close the door and say, ‘What should I do? Should I be looking for a job somewhere else?’ ” he said. He said he advised one young man to “test the waters” given the current regime. “These people are like termites, gnawing at the foundation.”

Multiple current and former employees also say that the exodus at the EPA has left important work falling through the cracks. In Chicago, for instance, a civil investigator responsible for probing who is

responsible for Superfund sites left earlier this year and has yet to be replaced, said Mike Mikulka, president of the local union that represents EPA employees.

“You can talk all you want, but your actions speak far louder,” he said, noting that Pruitt had held up Superfund as a top priority during his tenure. “What’s happening is that the lowest priority work just doesn’t get done. And some of that work is really critical.”

One of the EPA divisions hardest hit by staff cuts is the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, whose numbers dipped 15.7 percent between January 2017 and August 2018. Several experts said that any cuts to that division have a major impact because the vast majority of its budget comes from personnel costs rather than grants or other expenditures.

Granta Nakayama, who headed the office from 2005 to 2009, said that it couldn’t sustain that deep a staffing cut without curtailing some of its operations.

“If you don’t have people to enforce the regulations, you’re not going to get enforcement, and you’re not going to get compliance,” said Nakayama, now a partner at the law firm King & Spalding. “If you don’t have boots on the ground, it doesn’t happen.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

In Arctic, less ice means more money

U

CANADA

Bremerhaven, Germany

U.S.

A rc t i c Oc ean

e

Scheduled to arrive: Sept. 22

rc Arctic C i

le

RUSSIA Vladivostok

Suez Canal

Departed: Aug. 23

Asia

Pacific Ocean

JAPAN

IRAN

Africa

CHINA

INDIA

Northern Sea Route

Suez Canal Navigable year round 10,500 nautical miles 34 days

Sea-ice area on Sept. 5 Be ri ng Sea

ea Pacific Oc

Navigable July - Oct. 7,200 nautical miles 23 days

Equator

Median sea-ice extent in September (1980-2010)

Venta Maersk approximate route

Arctic Circle

R U S S I A

Alaska

n

nder partly sunny skies and relatively balmy temperatures in the low 50s, the Venta Maersk sailed through the Bering Strait this month and steered hard to port, beginning a modern-day voyage of discovery that could foreshadow a transformation for global shipping and the Arctic environment.

The Venta is a big, new, pricey ice-class vessel owned by Danish shipping giant Maersk — and it is the world’s first container ship to attempt the Northern Sea Route, the fabled Northeast Passage that runs from the edge of Alaska to the top of Scandinavia along Russia’s desolate Siberian coastline.

Maritime transit is now possible between July and October because of the rapid and, to many, deeply unsettling retreat of Arctic sea ice due to profound climate change, a trend that is amplified at the North and South poles.

Russia, China and commercial shipping interests are among those with high hopes that the Northern Sea Route could become a melt-season alternative to Egypt’s Suez Canal, trim weeks off transit times and slash fuel costs for vessels shuttling between ports in Europe and Asia — and the Americas.

The Russian company Rosatom, which runs the largest nuclear-powered ice-breaking fleet in the world, boasts that the route has “no queues and no pirates,” an allusion to the threat posed by African buccaneers in the Gulf of Aden in recent years.

But as the pace of Arctic traffic quickens, an environment that is today mostly pristine and sparsely populated — by whales and walruses, scientists and indigenous people, ice-breaking crews and oil workers — could be transformed.

And Russia and its competitors may find themselves at odds over who controls what and where.

“The Arctic has turned into an object of territorial, resource and

The Venta Maersk will attempt to become the first large container ship to journey through the Arctic Ocean. The Northern Sea Route passes predominantly Russian territorial waters and could be as much as two weeks faster than the typical Suez Canal passage.

op E u r

Ship packed with fish, gadgets tests route to help Moscow

B Y W ILLIAM B OOTH AND A MIE F ERRIS- R OTMAN in London

U.S. North Pole

FIN.

CANADA Greenland

Ar c t i c Oc ea n

(DEN.)

NOR.

500 MILES

At l a nt i c Oc ean Source: Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen

military-strategic interest for a number of states,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu warned last month. “This could lead to growth in the potential for conflict in this region.”

Decades ago, the polar cap was

GER.

THE WASHINGTON POST

a Cold War chessboard for dueling navies and submarine war games. The next fight will be more mercantile.

Time-lapse satellite images show sea ice swirling in clockwise gyre around the North Pole,

spreading in the winter and shrinking in the summer, year after year. It is plainly discernible that the extent of summer ice has been shrinking — by 13.4 percent a decade, according to NASA. Looking forward in time, Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, said climate models suggest ice-free summers in the Arctic sometime between 2050 and 2070, with some scenarios forecasting more rapid change, as soon as 2030.

What would that look like from a satellite?

“A blue ocean over the North Pole in September,” Meier said.

That’s extremely distressing for the many who worry about the future of life on this planet. But this “new Arctic” could be a boon for some, starting with Russia.

The Northern Sea Route, because of its location along the shallow seas of Siberia, is free of ice earlier and stays free longer than other areas of the Arctic.

Much of the route passes through waters along Russia’s exclusive economic zone, and vessels seeking passage must apply for permits and permissions from Russia’s Northern Sea Route Administration. The Russians also charge fees for navigation and ice-breaking assistance.

It can be a perilous passage.

“If you get into trouble, you are very far from civilization,” said Mika Hovilainen, a senior project manager at Aker Arctic Technology, which designs ships with hardened propulsion systems and thick bows to withstand the battering of floating sea ice.

He called conditions in the Arctic, even in summer, “extreme.”

But the route’s key selling point is time. A ship sailing from South Korea to Germany via South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope would take on average 46 days, according to SeaRoutes.com. The same voyage via the Suez Canal would be 34 days. The trip via the Northern Sea Route: 23 days.

Hundreds of smaller ships are already out there. A few clicks on MarineTraffic.com show oil tankers, cargo ships, research vessels.

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WORLD Even a few cruise ships are plying the waters this summer. The Chinese shipping company Cosco is on track to complete a dozen transits this year in freighters.

It is maritime container traffic, though, along with fossil-fuel tankers, that are the heart and lungs of the global economy. And this is a big moment for both in the Arctic.

Russia shipped the first load of liquefied natural gas from its new, $27 billion Yamal production facility above the Arctic Circle to China’s port of Rudong in July, completing the inaugural trip in 19 days at sea — 16 fewer days than via the Suez Canal. Gas shipments from Yamal to Europe became routine earlier this year.

The next test is how a modern ice-class, 3,600-container ship such as the Venta Maersk fares.

In its historic first transit of the Northern Sea Route, the Venta is carrying a cargo of electronics put aboard at Busan in South Korea and frozen fish loaded at the Russian port of Vladivostok. The vessel is scheduled to stop at Bremerhaven, Germany, then terminate in Russia at St. Petersburg in late September.

The shipping line stresses that this is a “one-off sea trial,” an exploratory voyage to look and learn and gather scientific data, Maersk spokeswoman Janina von Spalding said.

There are Russian pilots aboard to help navigate past the hazards of floating ice. First-year ice is usually two or three feet thick, but in some years, driven by wind and current, young and old ice piles up alongside the Russian islands in ridges 14-feet high.

Four Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers are ready to assist the Venta if needed. They’re routinely deployed to smash through the ice and lead convoys of ships in the fall, winter and spring months.

Malte Humpert, founder of the Arctic Institute, who tracks marine traffic at the pole, cautioned that the environment remains unpredictable.

“The lifeblood of container shipping is timing. You book a spot at a port terminal hour by hour,” he said, part of the global economy’s “just-in-time” delivery systems.

“In the Arctic, you can’t set your watch by your transit,” Humpert said, because stuff hap-

KLMNO WEEKLY

YURI MALTSEV/REUTERS

pens.

A few weeks ago, a passenger ship in the Canadian Arctic ran aground, and its passengers had to be evacuated. In late June, ice still choked Russia’s Gulf of Ob, paralyzing shipping, according to the Barents Observer.

The additional melting expected in the coming years won’t necessarily help, said Andrey Todorov, an expert in Arctic issues at the Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.

“Even if the ice continues to recede, it doesn’t mean that conditions will become easier for commercial vessels. There will be an even higher risk that huge floating pieces of ice could break from the pack ice and collide,” he said. “Reinforcing vessels for ice conditions costs a lot.”

There are concerns beyond the dangers to vessels and their contents.

Land and sea animals may be exposed to new threats, not only by increased shipping, but by the oil, gas and mineral extraction

along the Siberian coastline, which harbors a trove of untapped reserves.

Environmentalists are not so worried about a ship running down a polar bear, but they are fearful of possible spills as tankers laden with oil and gas operate in extreme conditions, especially in winter. Cold-water spills, one of which involved the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, take decades to clean and disperse.

In addition to the development of ports, the use of heavy fuels and increased pollution cause concern — especially the “black carbon” emitted by ships and industry. The sooty pollution, when spread across the ice, speeds its melting, as dark surfaces absorb rather than reflect the sun’s heat.

Geopolitics could also get a bit messy in the Arctic.

Before the big melt began, the region was mostly of interest to explorers, scientists, local populations and cold warriors. Now it is seen as an oil field and waterway, with Russia, Denmark, Canada,

The Venta Maersk prepares to set off on its Arctic voyage on Aug. 22 from the Russian port of Vladivostok.

Norway and the United States asserting rights — and other countries, such as China, jostling to fish, drill and traverse. Whether the region becomes a “global commons” or a flash point is to be seen.

In testimony this spring before the Senate, the Navy’s U.S. Pacific Command chief, Adm. Harry Harris — now retired and serving as U.S. ambassador to South Korea — said: “Of particular note are Russian efforts to build presence and influence in the High North.

Russia has more bases north of the Arctic Circle than all other countries combined, and is building more with distinctly military capabilities.”

Laurence C. Smith, a professor of geography at UCLA, who has modeled future maritime traffic scenarios in the Arctic, said the Northern Sea Route, in the shortterm, may be a niche market.

But he wonders: “Imagine a time in the not-so-distant future when ice ceases to be the limiting factor.” n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

SPACE

One giant leap for company brands?

BY

C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT

T

he constant creep of corporate America into all aspects of everyday life — from the Allstate Sugar Bowl to Minute Maid Park — may soon conquer a new frontier.

The final frontier.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has directed the space agency to look at boosting its brand by selling naming rights to rockets and spacecraft and allowing its astronauts to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes, as if they were celebrity athletes.

While officials stress that nothing has been decided, the idea could mark a giant cultural leap for the taxpayer-funded government agency and could run into ethics regulations that prevent government officials from using public office for private gain. Astronauts may be the most venerated employees in the federal government, but they are still civil servants bound by regulations.

NASA has steadfastly stayed away from endorsing any particular product or company — even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space “candy-coated chocolates” out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.

But during a recent meeting of a NASA advisory council made up of outside experts who provide guidance to the agency, Bridenstine announced he was setting up a committee to examine what he called the “provocative questions” of turning its rockets into corporate billboards the way advertisements decorate NASCAR racecars.

“Is it possible for NASA to offset some of its costs by selling the naming rights to its spacecraft or the naming rights to its rockets?”

Bridenstine said. “I’m telling you there is interest in that right now.

The question is: Is it possible? The answer is: I don’t know, but we want somebody to give us advice on whether it is.”

He also said he wanted astronauts to be not only more accessible to journalists but even to participate in marketing opportunities to boost their brands — and

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

NASA to examine selling naming rights to rockets and spacecraft and letting astronauts be in ads that of the space agency.

“I’d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I’d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,” he said. “I’d like to see, maybe one day, NASA astronauts on the cover of a cereal box, embedded into the American culture.”

The effort is part of a broader effort to generate more privatesector involvement in low Earth orbit. NASA already relies on companies to fly cargo to the space station — and is on the path to relying on companies to deliver crew. The White House has also said it would like to end direct funding for the International Space Station and turn over operations of the orbiting laboratory to a private entity. Meanwhile, there are companies looking to develop their own commercial space stations. And the White House is working to ease regulations to

promote private-sector growth.

“As NASA looks toward the future of private-sector space stations, it’s vital to explore these kinds of innovative commercial concepts to ensure that the U.S. maintains an ongoing presence is low Earth orbit,” said Mike Gold, the chairman of the new NASA committee.

That idea to privatize the International Space Station has run into opposition from Congress, which said the United States shouldn’t cede control of an asset in which it has invested nearly $100 billion.

Likewise, the idea of selling naming rights, or having astronauts appear in commercials, was met with skepticism from many NASA experts. Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year in space, said in an email to The Washington Post that it “would be a dramatic shift from the rules prohibiting government officials from using their public

The Kennedy Space Center in Florida is seen. NASA has been exploring more partnerships with the private sector.

office for private gain.”

He added, “But I guess this is the world we live in now. ” If NASA were able to loosen its restrictions, commercialization and branding could generate significant revenue. A study last year by the Science and Technology Policy Institute, a federally funded research and development center, found that a privately run space station could bring in between $455 million to $1.2 billion a year by participating in all sorts of commercial activities, including selling naming rights, allowing films to be shot in space, conducting research and hosting tourists.

The study estimated that leasing a module of a space station could generate as much as $25 million for 60 days, or more than $416,000 a day. A NASA economic adviser once suggested a boxing match in space — a “Brawl in Free Fall,” he called it — that could be a pay-per-view event.

In 1993, a Georgia company called Space Marketing proposed putting a billboard in space so big that it would be visible from Earth. But the plan was met with disapproval from some in Congress, who derided the idea, saying space was a commons that should stay free of advertising.

Still, companies have found a way to include space into their marketing campaigns, and brands such as Tang have benefited from their affiliation with the space program. When Mir deorbited, Taco Bell put a huge floating tarp into the Pacific Ocean and claimed that if any piece of the space station hit it, the company would give everyone in the country a free taco.

More recently, Budweiser announced its plans to be “the first beer on Mars,” as part of a plan to study barley in the weightless environment of the space station.

“While socializing on Mars might be in the near-distant future, Budweiser is taking steps now to better understand how its ingredients react in microgravity environments so that when we get to Mars, Budweiser will be there,” it said in a press release. n ©The Washington Post

11

SUNDAY, September, 16, 2018

COVER STORY

‘how long can we hold them off?’

T B Y E LI S ASLOW in Madero, Tex.

he most recent government letter arrived in an envelope marked “Urgent: Action Required,” so Fred Cavazos asked his family to meet at their usual gathering spot on the Rio Grande. He and three of his relatives crowded around an outdoor table as Fred, 69, opened the envelope and unfolded a large map in front of them. It showed a satellite image of the family’s land, 77 rural acres on the U.S. border where Fred had lived and worked all his life, but he had never seen the property rendered like this.

“Border Infrastructure Project,” the map read, and across its center was a red line that cut through the Cavazos family barn, through their rental house, and through a field where they grazed a small herd of longhorn cattle.

“This is where they want to put the wall,” Fred said, tracing his finger along the line. “They want to divide the property in half and cut us off from the river.”

They stared at the map for a few seconds, trying to make sense of it. It seemed to Fred that the government was interested only in a thin strip of land running across the width of his property, just wide enough to build a wall, leaving the Cavazos family with land on both sides. But even if they lost only a few acres of land to the 30-foot wall, the barrier would sever the property in half and make it difficult for anyone to access the riverfront. The map didn’t show a gate or a door, and Fred wondered how they would travel from one side of the property to the other.

“We’d lose the renters,” his sister said. “We’d lose the cattle without access to the river.”

“All of it,” Fred said. “Who wants to live on the other side of that wall? If this goes through, our property’s useless.”

In the three years since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign with a promise to build a “great, great wall,” Fred had tried to dismiss the idea as an easy applause line,

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

A Border Patrol watchtower stands on Fred Cabazos's land, where his family has lived since the 1700s, in McAllen, Tex.

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COVER STORY

a fantasy both too expensive and too complex to become reality. Texas alone has more than 1,200 miles of border, much of it similar in nature to the Cavazos’s land: rugged, remote, unfenced and privately owned. But, in March, Congress approved $641 million toward building 33 miles of Trump’s wall in the Rio Grande Valley, and now every few weeks, Fred was turning away another government official who had come to ask for the right to access his land.

They wanted him to sign a “Right of Entry” form so they could take soil samples, survey the flood plain and plot the final path for a hulking concrete-and-steel barrier.

Fred and his family had consulted with a pro-bono lawyer, who helped explain their options. They could sign the forms, grant access to their land and expect to eventually sell some of their property to the government at market price for construction of a wall. Or they could refuse to sign, risking a lawsuit and the possible seizure of their land by eminent domain.

“What kind of choice are they giving us?”

Fred said now, staring at the map. “We let them have the access, or they take it. Either way, we lose.”

“We can’t give an inch,” said his cousin, Rey Anzaldua, 73. “It’s the principle. I don’t care if they offer us a million dollars. We’d be selling off our history.”

Fred’s ancestors came from Spain to the Rio Grande Valley in the 1760s on a Spanish land grant of more than 500,000 acres, giving them ownership of almost a third of the Valley. Over the generations, some of that land was lost to taxes and land grabs as governance of the Valley changed from Spain to Mexico to the independent Republic of Texas, which became part of the United States in 1840s. The Cavazoses had continued to lose land, much of it transferred to settlers through sales, tax penalties, fraud and thievery. The family had hired lawyers to investigate and had filed legal claims, but by the time Fred was born, what his parents had left was 77 acres, a rectangular plot tucked against the river. They built a small house, a farm store, and then cut down patches of unruly mesquite to farm cattle and cotton.

For much of his lifetime, Fred had watched border politics continue to transform the property as illegal immigration increased in the Rio Grande Valley. His pasture was now a busy route for human trafficking, with as many as 30 migrants passing through on some days. The quiet riverfront where he learned to fish had become a cacophony of Border Patrol speedboats and helicopters. But through it all, Fred had continued to work the land — even after an illness restricted him to using a wheelchair — waking up early to feed the cattle and renting out a few dozen recreational fishing camps on the river for $100 a month, earning just enough to get by.

“This wall leaves you with nothing,” Rey said. “Who’s going to rent your land if it’s on the other side of the wall? They’re asking you to sign away your livelihood.”

“This is Trump’s baby,” Fred said.

PHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

“Then we delay them and fight it in court,” Rey said. “We have to stand strong.”

“I know,” Fred said. “But how long can we hold them off?”

A

lready, they had been resisting the government’s requests for five months, and it had begun to seem to Fred that his job was no longer to work the land but to preserve it. He had met with other nearby landowners to discuss their options and studied the intricacies of eminent domain. His sister, a retired teacher who lived with Fred, had written letters to Texas politicians. Rey had traveled to Washington and walked the halls of Congress in his cowboy boots, asking lawmakers to defund the wall. But still the letters from Washington continued to arrive, each more insistent than the last.

“We hope that you and other landowners in

the Rio Grande Valley will assist us in our strategic efforts to secure the Nation’s borders,” read the first notice, which Fred forwarded to his lawyer.

“Return two signed copies within seven days,” read the second notice, which Fred put into a drawer.

“This is critical,” read another notice, midway through the summer, at which point Fred decided to attend a meeting hosted by local Border Patrol officials to learn more about the wall. He remembered an agent explaining that much of the 33 miles of wall being built in this initial stage would run through Hidalgo County, where Fred and about 200 other landowners had received government letters asking for the right to enter their property and nearly 85 percent had signed. That meant Fred was one of about 30 people left standing between the president and his primary campaign promise.

Rey Anzaldua helps as his cousin Fred Cabazos gathers hay for his cattle on his family’s land in Texas. Above left, piece of a shirt rests on Cabazos’s land.

People frequently go through his property after illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico.

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

R

Rey Anzaldua walks with his sisters on the levee on family land in Granjeno, Tex. He fought government efforts under George W. Bush to build a wall through his home and land. After two years, a compromise was made and a wall was built farther back. The home was saved, but they still lost access to the riverfront.

“The wall is moving ahead,” Fred remembered one agent telling him. “It’s just a matter of how hard you want to make it.”

There were other pressure as well, such as the kind Fred felt as he and Rey drove through the property one morning to feed the cows and were met again by the reality that, even if a wall wasn’t the solution, there was in fact a problem to solve. They drove by a cattle fence damaged by migrants and saw a discarded inner tube in the mesquite. They passed two Border Patrol SUVs parked on the side of the road and continued to the barn, where Fred saw footprints scattered across the dirt. Some were of shoes aimed toward the brush.

They went into the barn, and Fred attached a rolling cart to his wheelchair and loaded it with hay for the cows, feeding them one at a time.

The small herd didn’t make him much money, but he liked the familiarity of the work. He’d grown up raising livestock, harvesting corn, and fishing the Rio Grande with a bamboo pole for catfish and alligator gar. As children in the 1960s, he and Rey had escaped the heat by swimming 150 yards across the river to Mexico.

They watched Mexicans cross, too, and sometimes their grandmother would trade migrants a few meals for a day of work picking cotton.

But in the past two decades, drug cartels had taken over the human-smuggling business, and the number of Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley had risen from about 500 to more than 3,100. Now there were often several units patrolling Fred’s acres, a crossing spot favored by traffickers. The property sat directly across from the Mexican city of Reynosa and was obscured by dense mesquite and thorny

brush. It was a good place to hide, and in the past several years, Fred had found dozens of inner tubes stashed in the brush, trails of discarded water jugs, bales of marijuana floating on the river, and, once, 25 illegal immigrants hiding in one of the small fishing camps he rented out on the water.

Border Patrol agents had come asking for his help again and again, and he always gave it to them. They wanted access to his private dirt road, so he gave them the combination to the lock on his gate. They wanted to drag tires across the road twice each day, smoothing it so footprints were easily visible. They wanted to bring in a tower to monitor the waterfront, so they erected one that was three stories high.

They wanted to cut down some of Fred’s mesquite trees to allow for a clearer view of the river.

Now a Border Patrol truck approached the barn, and an agent rolled down his window.

“Morning,” he said. “You guys wander into anyone out here in a green shirt?”

“No, sir,” Fred said.

“We caught a raft this morning, and we got all of them but the guide,” the agent continued.

“He’s out here somewhere, so please keep an eye out.”

Fred went back to feeding cows as Rey handed him more bales of hay.

“I guess we’re not alone,” Rey said.

“Are we ever?” Fred said. “Sometimes it feels like this place stopped being ours a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but you still own it,” Rey said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t need you to sign the papers.”

ey and Fred sat together by the water late one afternoon, when the wind died in the heat and the riverfront went quiet and it felt for at least a few moments just as it had when they were growing up.

Fred grabbed his fishing pole and tossed his line into the water. He watched the line bob up and down in the water. Nothing was biting and he didn’t care.

“I love it out here,” he said.

“It’s everything we have left,” Rey said.

“Just the quiet peacefulness of it,” Fred said, keeping his eyes on the surface of the water, where everything was smooth and still, until he noticed a sudden flurry of movement coming from the other riverbank.

A large raft slid from the brush on the Mexican side and into river, with one person paddling in the front and another in the back, and Fred tried to count the number of bodies jammed between. “That has to be at least a dozen people,” he said. The raft was a few hundred yards farther from where Fred sat and was aiming for the far end of his property. He set down his bamboo pole and grabbed his cellphone, hitting the speed-dial number he had programmed in for Border Patrol.

“There’s a boat of illegals coming over, and I’m watching them right now,” he said. “They just started out. You might have time to get them.”

The agent said he would try to scramble some units, and Fred hung up and kept his eyes fixed on the raft. No matter how many times he had watched people cross, he never stopped marveling at the audacity of it. The river was 150 yards wide and 40 feet deep, and now it seemed to Fred that the raft might be taking on water in the swift current. Even if it made it to the American side, a dozen migrants would be deposited into the thorny mesquite, left to sweat out the heat of the day with the cottonmouths and rattlers as the Border Patrol closed in. Those who were lucky enough to escape might end up in a crowded stash house, and then maybe in the back of a locked truck that would have to pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint before carrying them into the interior of the United States.

“The boldness of the whole thing is crazy to me,” Fred said. “There’s Border Patrol everywhere here all the time. It’s the middle of the day.”

“If they’re determined enough to get here, they’ll get here,” Rey said. “How can anyone believe a wall will change that?”

“It won’t,” Fred said.

Now the raft was nearing the shore. He dialed the Border Patrol again.

“They made it across,” Fred said, as he counted five, 10, 14 men leaping off the raft and running onto his property. Fred felt certain that a wall would not have stopped them. He wasn’t going to sign over access to his land for one more solution he didn’t expect to work.

“I’m sorry,” he said, to the Border Patrol agent on the phone. “They’re gone. I don’t know what to tell you. I did what I could.” n ©The Washington Post

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SUNDAY, September, 16, 2018 23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Democracy BY

J AMES M ILLER

“Democracy” has taken different forms throughout history. Virtually every political regime today claims to embody some form of democ­ racy — and its diverse proponents, and its critics, have propagated many myths about it. Here are five.

MYTH NO. 1 The United States revived and perfected democracy.

Most of America’s founders abhorred democracy as a form of government. They hoped to create what John Adams called a “natural aristocracy,” comprising men of virtue and talent who would govern on behalf of all. In one letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams expressed his wariness of the “stupidity” of the “numerous multitude.” That’s why the Constitution set up American government with so many explicitly anti-democratic elements, such as the electoral college, an equal number of senators for each state and indirect election of senators by members of state legislatures, creating, in effect, an American House of Lords.

The democratic ideal in the United States emerged only gradually. The right to vote, for Americans of any “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” wasn’t recognized until the 15th Amendment’s ratification.

Women gained the franchise after the 19th Amendment’s ratification. Only after the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913 did each state’s two senators become “elected by the people thereof.”

MYTH NO. 2 Democracy is about electing representatives.

This isn’t the only way to ensure the people’s input.

Ancient Athens selected almost all significant officials not by voting but randomly, by drawing lots. This is how we select juries today, for the same reason: It nullifies the advantages of the

wealthy and well-known, and it means a political order in which citizens engage in public life on equal terms, ratifying Aristotle’s conclusion that “from one point of view governors and governed are identical.” As Montesquieu wrote, “The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy.”

TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST

MYTH NO. 3 Democracy is a guarantor of liberty.

Not necessarily. The first Protestant champions of popular sovereignty summoned the power of the people for the purpose of dethroning rulers with whose religious views they disagreed. As historian Edmund S. Morgan writes, “It was not religious liberty they sought, but the elimination of wrong religions.”

And democratically elected governments can produce illiberal policies: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was democratically elected, but he has sought to stifle critics, including a senator who hasn’t left the nation’s Senate building after being threatened with arrest by Duterte over decadeold allegations of coup attempts.

Last year, the Hungarian parliament revised a law reportedly to facilitate the shuttering of Central European University, whose founder, billionaire George Soros, and curriculum are political foils of the ruling party of authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

MYTH NO. 4 Democracy is inherently pluralistic.

History is rich with

President Trump has described the country as “home to an incredible people with a revolutionary idea: that they could rule themselves.”

democracies that excluded minority groups or reduced them to second-class citizenship. In Athens, women, foreigners and enslaved people couldn’t become citizens. In the United States, of course, slavery was legal until the end of the Civil War; segregation was legal until the middle of the 20th century. The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts placed discriminatory limits on who could become a citizen; the Constitution referred to American Indian nations in the same context as foreign countries.

To this day, some advocates of democracy argue that robust forms of self-rule require the exclusion of foreigners. In Italy, the recently elected deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, has said he plans to expel members of the country’s Roma minority who don’t have Italian citizenship. Former White House adviser Stephen Bannon has blamed immigration for undermining American living standards.

MYTH NO. 5 Democracy will triumph.

In many nations that flirted

with or even embraced democracy, democratic norms have crumbled. Poland, after a backlash against an unusually progressive government in the 2000s, has drifted in an illiberal direction: Last year, President Andrzej Duda signed a law meant to pack the country’s judiciary with judges friendly to the party in power. After decades of military rule in Egypt, Arab Spring protesters brought down Hosni Mubarak, and voters chose Mohamed Morsi to lead their country. But Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi and the military seized control again in 2013.

Still, nearly every modern regime pays at least lip service to democracy. President Vladimir Putin and his supporters have long declared Russia a “sovereign democracy.”

Even North Korea, one of the most repressive authoritarian states in the world, calls itself a “Democratic People’s Republic.” n Miller is a professor of politics at the New School for Social Research and the author of “Can Democracy Work?”

This was written for The Washington Post.

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SUNDAY, September, 16, 2018 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2018

PETS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Grain-free diet linked to dogs’ illness BY

K ATE F URBY

I

t started with a late-night cough. “He was otherwise fine, but . . . something was weird and different,” said Verai Ramsammy, who was worried about her miniature schnauzer, Louie. She was a meticulous dog person, the kind who bought special food for her pets. She made a veterinary appointment just to be safe.

Within months, Ramsammy’s second dog, Mico, fell ill with the same problem. This made Ramsammy’s veterinarians sit up. The two dogs, both mini schnauzers, were unrelated. Their only connection was the home in which they lived.

Their cases helped link a serious, sometimes fatal, heart condition with the latest dog food fad.

As more cases were reported from around the country this year, veterinarians and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began investigating a potential link between boutique, grain-free diets and a heart disease called canine dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), which had been known primarily as a genetic disorder. This summer, the FDA issued a caution against grain-free diets. Since then, many more reports have poured in.

Three weeks after Louie’s minor cough and a bronchitis misdiagnosis, Ramsammy said, the 19pound “typical barky schnauzer” with a rough black coat stopped eating and had trouble breathing.

“It was bad. It just progressed so quickly,” said Ramsammy, an intensive-care unit physician who was no stranger to emergencies.

She rushed him an hour and a half away to North Carolina State University’s veterinary hospital, in Raleigh, for advanced care.

After a sleepless night at the hospital with Louie, Ramsammy saw Mico collapse outside the hospital. “He had this spastic movement, and then he scrambled to his feet,” she said. She assumed the stress of travel and hospital visits was getting to the dog, the way it was getting to her.

Inside the hospital, Louie’s

RYOTA NAKAJIMA

The FDA cautions owners after multiple reports of dogs having heart problems, some of them fatal heart was enlarged, and fluid was filling his lungs. “He was dying,” Ramsammy said, “there was nothing I could do.” Ramsammy held him as he died, one month after his symptoms began.

Three months later, Mico, a soft-haired, salt-and-pepper-colored schnauzer, was collapsing more frequently. Darcy Adin and her veterinary team at N.C. State found he was also struggling with an enlarged heart. The veterinarians put Mico on heart medication immediately. The dog was “on the verge of going into heart failure the way Louie did, and it’s just lucky they caught it in time,” Ramsammy said.

Canine DCM weakens the dog’s heart, Adin said, preventing it from pumping enough blood, so it enlarges to try to compensate.

After a certain point, fluid backs up from the heart into the lungs, causing congestion and coughing. Other symptoms of DCM

include difficulty breathing, weakness and lethargy. It can eventually “lead to congestive heart failure signs and, in some cases, sudden death,” Adin said.

Across the country at the University of California at Davis, Joshua Stern, another veterinary cardiologist, started to see surprising signs of heart disease in his golden retriever patients.

Multiple veterinary groups, working independently at first, started to notice this disturbing trend. The world of veterinary cardiology is small, with about 200 specialists in the United States, Stern said. They alerted the FDA. Together, they began compiling cases and investigating environmental conditions that might affect unrelated dogs within one household. The vets started to find that many of the sick dogs had been on grain-free diets, high in legumes, leading up to their illnesses.

Veterinarians around the country started noticing unusual cases of canine dilated cardiomyopathy, and new reports are still coming in.

“There was a lot of guilt that it was something I’d done, but I had no idea what it was,” Ramsammy said.

On July 12, the FDA put out a cautionary statement. The FDA report stated that canine DCM was typically caused by a genetic predisposition in large breed dogs such as Great Danes and Newfoundlands. The recent cases included “Golden and Labrador retrievers, a Whippet, a Shih Tzu, a Bulldog and Miniature Schnauzers, as well as mixed breeds.

Early reports . . . indicate that the impacted dogs consistently ate foods containing peas, lentils, other legume seeds or potatoes as main ingredients,” said the report. The length of exposure to the diet ranged from months to years.

Before releasing the cautionary statement, the FDA had received 30 reports of dogs affected with DCM and linked to a grainfree diet, said Martine Hartogensis, the deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, and the veterinary cardiologists had collected about 150 cases. Since then, the FDA has received reports of an additional 120 dogs sickened with DCM, most involving a grain-free diet.

At least 24 dogs have died of the condition.

The FDA is still investigating the link with grain-free pet food.

An FDA press officer stated in an email that it “has not determined that the pet food is causally associated with these pet illnesses and deaths.” No dog food has been recalled.

The condition is linked to a taurine deficiency. Taurine is an amino acid that most animals, including humans, can create their own. Dogs get a lot of it from their diet. Chicken and beef are high in taurine, while rabbit, lamb, legumes, pea-protein and other ingredients found in some grain-free foods have little or no taurine. If items that are naturally low in taurine are placed in food formulas, they need to be supplemented with taurine, Stern said. n ©The Washington Post

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