The Washington Post National Weekly - October 4, 2015

Worst Week Secret Service 3

Politics Make-orbreak time for Bush 4

Education Teaching vets to deal with loss 16

5 Myths About migrants & refugees 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

LIFE IN THE ‘CALIPHATE’ The Islamic State promises paradise to those who fight for the cause, but those under its rule know only a nightmare PAGE 12

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Secret Service

by Chris Cillizza

J

ust when you thought the Secret Service couldn’t possibly do anything to further harm its already badly damaged reputation, the agency goes and proves you wrong.

The latest entry in this Keystone Cops saga came Wednesday, when The Washington Post broke the news of a report from a government watchdog revealing that Edward Lowery, an assistant director of the Secret Service, had urged that negative information about Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R­Utah) be leaked to the press as a bit of score­settling.

At issue was how aggressive Chaffetz, Chaffetz the head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had been in condemning the Secret Service at a hearing in March for a series of mishaps and mishandlings of its duties.

“Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out,” Lowery wrote in an e­mail in late March, according to the report. “Just to be fair.”

Chaffetz’s private personnel file at the Secret Service was then repeatedly accessed — a violation of privacy laws, if there was no legitimate work purpose — in the hours after that e­mail was sent. Within two days, news broke that Chaffetz had applied to be an agent and was rejected in 2003. What a coincidence!

Lowery insisted that his e­mail was simply a blowing­

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JIM LO SCALZO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

off­steam exercise and that he didn’t intend anyone to act on it. To which I say: Riiiight.

Upon learning of the machinations, Chaffetz said, “It was a tactic designed to intimidate and embarrass me, and frankly, it is intimidating.”

The Secret Service, for forgetting that the job is to protect and serve, not to leak and intimidate, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 51

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

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ON THE COVER The camp for Syrian refugees in Azraq, Jordan, already has at least 20,000 people in it, including many fleeing the rule of the Islamic State. Photograph by CHARLES OMMANNEY, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Bush support continues to melt

MIC SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Candidate needs to gain momentum in the coming weeks, some donors say — or else

BY E D O ’ K EEFE AND M ATEA G OLD

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eb Bush is entering a critical phase of his Republican presidential campaign, with top donors warning that the former Florida governor needs to demonstrate growth in the polls over the next month or face serious defections among supporters.

The warnings, expressed by several senior GOP fundraisers in recent days, come as Bush and an

allied super PAC are in the early stages of an aggressive television ad campaign that they believe will help erase doubts about his viability.

But Bush continues to battle against a steady decline in the polls, sinking to fifth place at just 7 percent in a national NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll released this past week and similarly languishing in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

The warnings from top donors

come as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s exit from the race refocused the battle within the GOP’s establishment wing as one between Bush and his former protege, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Right now, the momentum appears to be behind Rubio, who has jumped ahead of Bush in most polls. At least a third of the bundlers who signed up to raise money for Walker have switched their allegiance to Rubio, while a smaller number have gone with Bush,

Jeb Bush says the Pledge of Allegiance during a Republican event in South Carolina recently.

Bush continues to struggle with a steady decline in the polls among Republican presidential nominees.

according to people familiar with the discussions.

Bush is also facing fresh scrutiny for comments that critics say bear echoes of remarks Mitt Romney made during his 2012 GOP presidential bid, part of a pattern of awkward statements that have forced him or his campaign to clarify.

Campaigning in South Carolina in late September, he said that Democrats too often win over black voters by telling them “we’ll

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POLITICS take care of you with free stuff.”

Romney made similar comments during his bid and Democrats said that Bush’s remarks were part of a pattern of Republicans insulting minority voters.

His comments could undercut what Bush allies argue would be his great strength in a general election contest: A cultural fluency that would give him crossover appeal to a diverse electorate.

Party strategists said that Bush must find a way to recharge his campaign with a compelling message about his conservative governing record as governor of Florida.

“People assume that they know who Jeb Bush is, and that’s part of the struggle the Bush campaign has,” said strategist Henry Barbour. “I think if people get to know Jeb and they give him a chance, he’s going to be tough to beat,” Barbour added. “But they don’t know him yet. And you’ve got a right wing of the party that is almost determined not to get to know him. They want to believe that because they disagree with him on a couple issues that he’s not their guy.”

On “Fox News Sunday” last weekend, Bush played down the importance of current polls.

“These polls really don’t matter,” he said. “. . . They don’t filter out the people that aren’t going to vote, it’s just — I know it’s an obsession because it kind of frames the debate for people for that week.”

As the son and brother of former presidents, Bush is a member of the Republican’s establishment wing, which has suffered setbacks recently. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) — who publicly encouraged Bush to enter the race — announced plans to resign after dozens of conservative lawmakers threatened to oust him. And Walker’s sudden departure from the presidential race came as support shifted to outsider candidates.

Given those developments, Bush “needs to get his favorables up,” said a senior GOP bundler who is backing him and requested anonymity to speak candidly.

“People are looking the stage and saying: ‘Jeb and Marco? I’m going with the new,’” said a top party fundraiser not aligned with a campaign. “You’re seeing people really gravitate to him and saying, ‘Okay, we’ll buck the Bush machine.’ ” “What I hear everywhere when

CARLOS GIUSTI/EL VOCERO VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

you say Jeb’s name is, ‘If you want to lose the general election, nominate Jeb,” the fundraiser added.

But those within the Bush camp say they are not yet alarmed over the dynamics of the race, confident that their financial war chest will enable him to outlast opponents, according to campaign strategists and top Republicans familiar with internal discussions. In private conversations, however, Bush advisers betray signs of anxiety about Rubio’s rise.

“They are prepared for a long, grinding fight and being the last person standing,” the GOP fundraiser said. “But they are concerned about the trends and they are concerned about Marco.”

Rubio has jumped ahead of Bush in recent polls in New Hampshire and Florida — two states critical to Bush’s strategy. In New Hampshire, the most-recent CNN/WMUR poll gave Trump a commanding 26 percent lead. Rubio was third with 9 percent and Bush tied with Ohio Gov. John Kasich for fifth place, with 7 percent. A Florida Atlantic University poll released the other week gave Trump 31.5 percent support among Sunshine State voters, Rubio 19.2 percent and Bush 11.3 percent.

Bush maintains a huge financial advantage over Rubio — he had roughly $120 million between his campaign and an allied super PAC at the end of June. In order to keep his edge, Bush has recruited

his family to help. Former president George W. Bush is headlining a series of fundraisers, an effort that began with a Sept. 10 luncheon in New York. His wife, Laura; Jeb’s wife, Columba; and his son, Jeb Bush Jr., are also taking part in finance events.

The candidate kept a breakneck pace as he traveled the country raising money in the third quarter, holding events in places including New York; Los Angeles; Miami; Boston; Seattle; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; and Birmingham, Ala. There was a big prize being dangled to motivate fundraisers: Those who helped bring in at least $50,000 by Sept. 30 will be invited to a “Jeb Celebration” retreat in Houston in late October that is scheduled to be attended by three generations of the Bush family, including both presidents.

With his financial dominance, Barbour said, Jeb Bush “is clearly a guy who has built a campaign that is looking beyond the first few states and is in it for the long haul.”

“I think the race is fairly wide open and there are a lot of people with a path to the nomination.

Some more than others,” Barbour said. “I think Jeb’s is better than most. But he’s got to continue to perform well and arguably better.”

One persistent problem for Bush has been a tendency to wander into verbal cul-de-sacs, drawing the ire of minorities, women, Democratic

Sen. Marco Rubio (RFla.), right center, poses with a supporter in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in early September.

Some Bush backers worry that Rubio has the momentum in the GOP nomination race.

“I think the race is fairly wide open and there are a lot of people with a path to the nomination. . . .

I think Jeb’s is better than most.”

Henry Barbour, GOP strategist

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leaders or Republicans.

Over the summer, Bush suggested that the federal government should stop funding women’s health programs. He later said he misspoke. He defended the term “anchor babies” — widely viewed as offensive among Asians and Hispanics — as an appropriate way to describe how some undocumented immigrants exploit U.S. citizenship laws. And after saying that “people need to work longer hours,” he clarified that he meant Americans need more full-time rather than part-time work.

Democrats warn they will use Bush’s tongue-twisted answers against him if he becomes the GOP nominee.

“Jeb Bush either has no idea what he’s talking about or he’s a cynical politician appealing to the ugliest elements of the Republican Party,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Michael Tyler. “Either way he is unfit to lead this country.”

Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior aide to President Obama, said recently on Twitter that given his most recent comments on black voters, “If Jeb’s last name was Walker, he would be out of the race by now.”

Bush said in the Fox appearance that his remarks were taken out of context by Democrats. “I think we need to make our case to — to African American voters and all voters that an aspirational message, fixing a few big complex things, will allow people to rise up,” he said. “That’s what people want. They don’t want free stuff.

That was my whole point.”

Before the Sept. 16 debate at the Reagan Library, senior Bush strategists believed that he needed to improve his performance in order to stop a precipitious drop in polling that began shortly after Donald Trump entered the race. A more pugnacious performance — including an off-the-cuff defense of his brother prompted by an attack from Trump — was cheered by some supporters as a sign of much-needed passion.

“As people start to focus and look at each person and the positions they have on how to take the country forward, I think Jeb will do well,” said Chicago privateequity executive Bill Kunkler, who is helping Bush raise money.

“Right now the polls are measuring mood. It’s more like picking a date more than a mate.” n

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POLITICS

How Sanders would change the U.S. BY

D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

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n the America that Bernie Sanders wants to create, tuition would be free for every student at every public college.

Which, of course, is another way of saying that the government would pay for it. To do that, the Democratic presidential candidate would spend $750 billion over 10 years, and raise the money with a new tax on Wall Street trades.

And, once government was paying for college, colleges would run by government rules. Sanders’s rules. For one thing, Sanders thinks student centers are a waste of government money. He’d make sure they didn’t get any more of it.

If he becomes president, Sanders would spend an enormous amount of money: $3.27 trillion.

At the very, very least. But he is not just a big-spending liberal. And his agenda is not just about money.

It’s also about control.

The biggest pieces of Sanders’s domestic agenda — making college, health care and child care more affordable — seek to capture these industries and convert them to run chiefly on federal money.

Sanders thinks this would consolidate areas now shaped by a confusing mix of federal rules, state laws and the private market, and make these systems cheaper and more efficient.

The risk is that this authority would expand the federal bureaucracy, which has sometimes struggled to make itself run cheaply and efficiently.

Sanders said voters would welcome the change. Even if it means Americans must turn to the federal government to oversee new sectors of their lives. He bristles at the idea that this might be considered an intrusion.

“You’re not ‘turning to’ the government. You’re assuming that the government is some kind of foreign entity,” Sanders said in an interview. “The government, in a democratic society, is the people.”

Bernie Sanders — a senator from Vermont who describes himself as a “democratic socialist” — will never get everything he wants in Washington.

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

He would spend trillions to expand government control over health care, college and child care And that still would be true if he became President Sanders. Republicans in the Congress would fight him fiercely. Democrats might not be much help. In fact, Sanders’s most recent Senate bills — legislation that would make college free and provide universal health care — attracted exactly zero Democrats as co-sponsors.

But now, the same ideas that have made Sanders a lonely leftist in the Senate have made him a star on the campaign trail. And he is setting himself up as a champion of liberal ideals while making rival Hillary Rodham Clinton appear cautious by comparison.

After years of debate about how much government to cut, Sanders has succeeded — at least with a piece of the electorate — by promising that he would make it grow substantially.

This assessment of Sanders’s vision is based on an examination of his current and past legislation; his campaign speeches; and interviews with him, his chief policy

aide and experts.

“I want you all not to think small. I want you to think big,” Sanders said during a speech in South Carolina in August. “This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world.”

The simplest parts of Sanders’s platform are the parts that are simply very expensive. New money. But pumped through old pipes.

He would allot, for example, an extra $1.2 trillion for Social Security beneficiaries, paid for by higher taxes on people earning more than $250,000. He also would create a new Social Security benefit: paying for Americans of any age to take 12 weeks off to care for a new baby or deal with a serious illness.

The funding for that would be new taxes on wage-earners and businesses, raising $319 billion.

Clinton also has called for family leave, but her staff declined to say how she would pay for it.

In Sanders’s more ambitious plans, however, the mechanism is different.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during the Des Moines Youth Summit last Sunday at Creative Visions in Des Moines.

To provide a benefit, the government doesn’t write checks. It takes an existing industry with many paying customers, and reshapes it so there is one major customer: the government. And, analysts say, the bureaucracy would then be tasked with making sure the government’s money is spent according to the government's wishes.

“Now it looks like the federal government is funding schools directly. And if it is funding the schools directly, then it seems much more clear that the federal government should be writing all the regulations,” Neal McCluskey of the libertarian Cato Institute said about Sanders’s college plan.

Sanders’s plan for free tuition would not apply to private colleges. They would still charge students, and their students could still apply for traditional federal scholarships.

Public schools, too, could opt out of the free-tuition model to avoid the government’s rules. In theory. Good luck with recruiting.

“Free,” McCluskey said, is “very hard to defeat with something that’s not free.”

In his speeches, Sanders focuses on the potential benefits of this big idea. Low-income students could find college doors opened to them.

All students could graduate without debt.

The downside, left unstated, would be that all colleges might start to look alike. And that a huge industry would spend its time waiting on bureaucrats, and trying to game their rules.

Take, for instance, that rule against spending money on “nonacademic” buildings.

It’s probably not that simple.

“That one line: Absolutely, somebody’s gonna have to write a rule about what an ‘academic’ purpose is,” said Gerald Friedman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts who has studied Sanders’s ideas and mostly agrees with them. After the rule is written, Friedman said, will come the special cases, nitpicks and loopholes.

What if there’s a chemistry lab in the football stadium’s basement?

What if the student center is 50 percent classrooms? Forty per-

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POLITICS cent? “Then you’re going to have to litigate the rules, because colleges aren’t going to like it,” he said.

The federal education bureaucracy is already not a speedy machine. Recently, the Education Department needed 18 months and 7,000 words in the Federal Register to define the college term “credit hour.”

This part of Sanders’s agenda would be paid for if Congress agreed to his plan to add a small tax to every Wall Street trade. That would be an increase worth $54 billion to $300 billion per year, according to Sanders’s staff.

More broadly, Sanders has proposed more than $3.4 trillion in new taxes, most of them targeting the rich or large companies. But right now, it seems that even this enormous tax increase would not pay for Sanders’s full vision.

That’s because Sanders has not provided details about two of his most ambitious ideas — revamping the health-care and child-care systems. He hasn’t said exactly what he would do to improve these areas or how he would pay for the changes.

“The point is, we haven’t finished the proposal yet,” Sanders said, when asked about the details of his health-care plan. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal quoted an estimate that a plan Sanders has supported in the past would cost $15 trillion over 10 years. Sanders said that missed the point. “Even assuming that it were $15 trillion over 10 years . . .

[Americans] would no longer be paying private health insurance” at the same time, so they’d be saving money, Sanders said.

Left undecided: Exactly how would it hold down costs, with so many new enrollees? How would it deal with unhappy customers, in a system in which Congress would be both the funder and the national complaint department?

On child-care reform, Sanders hasn’t decided what it would cost.

Or how it would be regulated.

But he is certain that the government would become the major funder for the industry. That means child care for every American who wants it. And rules to make sure the money is well spent.

“The goal is to make it universal,” said Warren Gunnels, Sanders’s policy director. “Just like you make health care universal. Just like you make public colleges and universities tuition-free.” n

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Warren takes aim at think tank — and wins BY

T OM H AMBURGER

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he hero of the country’s liberal movement launched a surprise attack Tuesday against Washington’s most revered Democraticleaning think tank — and drew blood.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, stepping up her crusade against the power of wealthy interests, accused a Brookings Institution scholar of writing a research paper to benefit his corporate patrons.

Warren’s charge prompted a swift response, with Brookings seeking and receiving the resignation of the economist, Robert Litan, whose report criticized a Warren-backed consumerprotection rule targeting the financial services industry.

The episode underscored the growing clout of Warren (D-Mass.), who has resisted calls for a presidential run but is positioning herself as a leading critic of corporate interests and their power over the Washington establishment.

And it marked the most dramatic response yet from Brookings, an icon of that establishment, amid criticism and internal debate over theinfluenceofcorporatesponsors.

“I learned there was discomfort with the Warren letter, and I did not want to add to it,” Litan said. “I said, ‘If it will make Brookings more comfortable, I’ll resign.’ ” Litan rejected Warren’s criticism, saying that the company that sponsored his research, the Capital Group, a leading mutual fund manager, had no influence over his findings.

But Litan, an unpaid “nonresident scholar,” acknowledged that he had violated a new thinktank rule prohibiting researchers with such status from citing their Brookings affiliation when testifying before Congress.

Brookings President Strobe Talbott said last week that Litan “made a mistake in not following Brookings regulations designed to uphold the independence of the

ANDREW HARNIK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has resisted calls for a presidential run but is positioning herself as a leading critic of corporate interests.

Scholar resigns after senator said paper benefitted corporate patrons institution.”

A Brookings spokesman added that Litan’s work on the rule came “in his private capacity, not connected with Brookings in any way.”

Warren leveled her criticisms in letters sent Tuesday to Brookings leaders and the Obama administration, citing the $85,000 combined fee that Litan and a co-author received from the investment firm.

Warren called the report “highly compensated and editorially compromised work on behalf of an industry player seeking a specific conclusion.”

Her complaint pointed to a relatively new form of influence peddling in the nation’s capital, with industry groups and even foreign governments paying think tanks and scholars for research papers that support lobbying goals.

Brookings over the past decade has embarked on aggressive fundraising drives to pay for major expansions. Investigations last year by The Washington Post, the New York Times and others found that donors had gained the ability

to influence Brookings’s events and research agenda.

In resigning Tuesday, Litan said that he had not been aware of Brookings’s new rules put in place after the Post and Times reports.

Litan, who was a senior official in the Bill Clinton administration, onceledBrookings’seconomicstudies division and has been affiliated withthethinktankforfourdecades.

He said that he repeatedly disclosed his funding sources in both the original study of the proposed consumer protection rule and when he appeared on Capitol Hill for July 21 testimony.

“I think it’s unfortunate that, even when I disclosed the funding, people spent their time discussing who funded my work rather than discussing the merits of it,” he said.

Tom Joyce, a spokesman for the Capital Group, said his company was following standard practice.

“It is typical for organizations to sponsor academic studies,” Joyce said, noting that in this case, “no preconditions or predetermined conclusions were imposed.” n

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NATION

Where color doesn’t matter BY

K EVIN W ILLIAMS

A

mid the corn and soybean fields of western Ohio lies a progressive crossroads where black and white isn’t black and white, where the concept of race has been turned upside down, where interracial marriages have been the norm for nearly two centuries. The heavy boots of Jim Crow have never walked here.

Founded by James Clemens, a freed slave from Virginia who became a prosperous farmer, Longtown was a community far ahead of its time, a bold experiment in integration.

Now that history is in danger of being lost. Longtime Longtown residents are dying, and whites are moving in and buying property.

Many historically black-owned buildings have already been torn down or remodeled.

But Clemens’s great-greatgreat-great-great-great-greatgreat-grandson is working to save his family’s heritage. Though his eyes are blue and his skin is pale, Connor Keiser, 22, said that his childhood is filled with memories of “cousins of all colors” playing in the pastures at the family farm.

“We were a typical Longtown family. We all looked different, and we were taught that color didn’t matter,” Keiser said. “As long as I have anything to do with it, Longtown won’t die.”

Largely because of Keiser’s efforts, the National Park Service, the National Register of Historic Places and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center have recognized Longtown as a place noteworthy for its early embrace of racial integration and educational opportunities for blacks. But the town’s institutions are in peril.

Longtown’s former school, the Union Literary Institute, founded in 1845, has a largely forgotten history as one of the nation’s first integrated establishments of higher education. Notable alumni include the first black man to serve in the U.S. Senate, Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi. The school, which closed in 1914, fell into disrepair

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A community strives to maintain its 200-year history of racial integration and acceptance and until recently was used to store farm equipment.

The original Clemens farmstead is in better shape; the twostory brick farmhouse, built around 1850, still has its original fixtures and woodwork. Although the National Park Service has dispensed $25,000 to restore the property, Keiser estimated that the project will require an additional $100,000.

So Keiser has hit the road to appeal for money. He’s been drawing big crowds to area libraries with his presentation about the racial harmony of Longtown and the desperate need to preserve it.

“I don’t think the public was aware this was here,” Keiser said.

“Black history is not talked about a lot in general, and I think [the fact] that we have that kind of history means something to a lot of people.”

The racial harmony of Longtown is the legacy of Clemens, who found his way here in 1818 and purchased 390 acres — probably

with the aid of abolitionist Quakers, sympathetic Native Americans and, by some accounts, his former owner in Rockingham County, Va. Clemens was of a mixed-race ancestry — black, white and Native American. So was his wife, Sophia. They served as a beacon to other integrationists, as well as runaway and freed slaves looking for succor and education during and after the Civil War. The couple became conductors for the Underground Railroad and — while the rest of the nation endured Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws — built a mixed-race town that numbered close to 1,000 people at its peak in the 1880s.

But Longtown began to falter after World War II, when residents were forced to seek help from bankers to modernize their farms.

“When we began to need machinery and bank loans to expand and grow and become competitive, that’s when there was trouble,” said Carl Westmoreland, a senior histo-

Connor Keiser, 22, shows his album of historical photos of Longtown, Ohio, to James Jett, 90, at Bethel Long Wesleyan Church in Greenville, Ohio.

Keiser is a descendant of James Clemens, who helped establish Longtown, known as a progressive area because of its integration of races.

rian with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center who has visited Longtown.

“Banks would not help black farmers purchase new equipment.

In Longtown, people gradually had to go to industrial centers for jobs.

And if you are not part of the dayto-day energy of the community, it begins to decline.”

Today, only a handful of families remain. But Longtown lasted longer than other integrated rural villages once scattered across the Ohio plains.

“Because Longtown’s population was so much larger than others like it, it took longer for it to whittle down,” said Roane Smothers, a distant cousin of Keiser’s and an active Longtown preservationist.

“And because Longtown was so much larger, more structures have survived,” Smothers said. “As these other communities faded away, white folks bought the land and structures, and many times all that was left was the church.”

A junior majoring in international studies at nearby Wright State University, Keiser seems an unlikely savior for this blink of a town. Unfailingly polite, possessing a bright white smile, Keiser looks as Caucasian as the rest of Darke County, which was 97.7 percent white at the last census.

But Keiser doesn’t consider himself white. Nor does he consider himself black. Instead he calls himself by the dated and, to some, offensive term “colored.”

“I know who I am and what I am. I may look white, my appearance is white, but my insides are not. I know I am not white,” Keiser said. He makes it a point to tell anyone who will listen about his black ancestry. “I tell everyone about it, whether they want to hear it or not. I am so proud of it.”

One by one, the repositories of Longtown’s legacy and its stories are passing to the grave. Keiser grew up steeped in the town’s oral history, stories passed down from his great-grandfather.

“He was the keeper of Longtown’s history, and my biggest hope is to make him proud by doing the same,” Keiser said. n

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Time to privatize the post office?

BY

L ISA R EIN

T

he U.S. Postal Service, which has been losing customers for almost a decade, is still struggling to right itself.

Everyone understands its basic problem. The electronic age has pushed first-class mail into an unstoppable decline. To stay afloat, the post office needs to get its costs under control, by closing post offices, eliminating Saturday delivery, downsizing its workforce. To boost revenue, it could offer banking services and sell lots of stuff besides stamps.

But with three Congresses in a row failing to pass legislation to help stabilize its finances, some lawmakers and policy experts have reached the consensus that it’s time for the government to sell the post office.

This group was limited for a few years to conservatives and Republicans in Congress. But now a Democrat at the centrist Brookings Institution, Washington’s premier academic think tank, is joining the privatization side, arguing in a new paper that Congress’s inaction requires that something be done.

Elaine Kamarck says that letting politicians continue to protect the Postal Service from competition is no longer viable.

“If the USPS were a purely private entity, the changing shape of the marketplace wouldn’t necessarily pose an existential threat,” Kamarck wrote in an essay made public the other week, “Delaying the inevitable: Political stalemate and the U.S. Postal Service.”

“They could shrink the infrastructure created to deliver firstclass mail and increase their capacity to deliver parcels,” she writes, “a logical adaptation to the changes that have come about as Americans have moved from paper to the Internet.”

The idea of selling off any part of the government agency for which Benjamin Franklin first served as postmaster general has drawn fierce opposition from Democrats in Congress and the still-powerful postal unions.

But Kamarck argues that the

MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS

With red ink growing and Congress failing to act, the idea of government-run mail loses backers post office’s existence in a “nevernever land” that is “not fully public and not fully private,” stifled by laws and saddled with a “governance structure that impedes innovation,” now requires that the country’s second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart be broken in two.

Many of the problems getting in the way for the post office stem from Congress. The Postal Service has been self-financed for decades, but Congress controls most of what it does.

Congress, riven by an ideological and demographic divide between lawmakers representing rural and urban districts, cannot agree on a fix to its finances, made shakier by massive liabilities for future retirees. Proposals on Capitol Hill would let postal officials compete with other retailers and make cuts to service. But interests including postal unions and greeting card companies have stepped in to pressure lawmakers not to act. And the losses continue —

$5 billion last year, the eighth annual net loss in a row.

It’s unclear who would buy such a money-losing operation, but Kamarck joins conservatives in concluding that government-run mail no longer makes sense in the Internet era. Britain and other European countries are privatizing.

The telecommunications industry deregulated, the thinking goes. So should the Postal Service.

The government entity would continue delivering the mail. The rest of the agency would spin off into something private, competing with the likes of banks, retailers, FedEx and UPS to deliver packages and sell anything else it wanted to.

The change would open the door to a sale to the highest bidder.

“What really should happen is that Congress needs to fix the Postal Service,” Kamarck, founding director for the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings, said in an interview. “But they don’t want to deal with it. They’re

$5 billion Amount of USPS loss last year, the eighth annual net loss in a row.

allergic to it.”

Postal officials rejected the proposal. In a statement, Toni DeLancey, the Postal Service’s senior manager for public relations, said, “The idea of separating and privatizing the package delivery business, which has been growing by double digits for the past several years, is poorly conceived at best.

“At worst, and aside from being politically and economically unrealistic, the proposal aims to shift an enormous financial burden onto taxpayers,whichisunnecessaryand unwanted in any policy context.”

Kamarck, creator and manager of the Clinton administration’s reinventing government initiative in the 1990s, does not go as far as conservatives in advocating a total sell-off of the Postal Service. She writes that the agency’s mandate to provide universal service is essential and “has been baked into the American value-system.”

Universal service means, simply, that the letter carriers must deliver to every home, even if it is hard to reach, even if the Postal Service loses money on remote, rural routes. If UPS or FedEx owned the system,theywouldnotbeobligated to serve every corner of the country.

Although the Postal Service has a legal monopoly on mail delivery (no one else can put letters or packages in its mailboxes, for example), it enjoys the equivalent of generous subsidies that private companies don’t get. It can borrow from the Treasury at low interest rates. Its buildings are exempt from state and local property taxes. It pays federal corporate income taxes on some earnings, but they are circulated back to the agency, according to a study this year by Robert Shapiro, who was an economist in the Clinton administration.

Adjusting these subsidies would have to be part of any transformation to a private entity, Kamarck said.

She does not offer specifics on how such a massive change would take place at the agency. But with Congress unwilling to allow the Postal Service to operate like a business, calls to farm out government delivery of mail are likely to grow. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015

10

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Wanted or not, Syrians are coming R.

T

he next act of the European refugee crisis will unfold in little places like this one, where hundreds of Syrian war refugees are coming to live in a town that just voted by overwhelming numbers to oppose their stay.

Over the past few days, the first of 500 Syrian asylum seekers arrived to take up three-month residency at a state-run dormitory in the center of town.

In August, as locals watched the news of streams of refugees winding their way through Europe, the town held a special referendum: 97 percent voted to oppose reopening the Slovak government’s refugee facility.

“We’re not haters,” said Zoltan Jakus, one of the organizers of the vote.“ButIthinkthiswillendbadly.”

With the refugee crisis escalating, European Union leaders the other week approved a plan to spread 120,000 asylum seekers across 28 nations on the continent, over the objections of Central European countries. Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia voted against the measure, a rare note of discord.

The residents of Gabcikovo wonder why wars and unrest thousands of miles away, involving Muslims, should be their business.

Gabcikovo is a town of 5,000 residents, where pensioners ride bicycles along quiet lanes lined with sturdy houses, many with overflowing gardens and ceramic gnomes, where everybody knows not only your name but also what football club you support and what beer you drink. Most of them speak Hungarian and are Catholic.

The people of Gabcikovo say they are not cold-hearted or racist, but they are clearly worried, and many of them are asking the same questions as other Europeans who feel uneasy about the rising numbers of war refugees and economic migrants.

“Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why are they here?” said Daniel Koczkas, 27,

three or four months — that all are Syrians applying for asylum in Vienna Austria and that none will remain Gabcikovo 0 30 in Slovakia. (The E.U. plan calls for AUSTRIA MILES 800 refugees to be settled in Slovan u a D be R . kia eventually, though Slovak Gyor leaders are opposed).

Budapest HUNGARY T “Austria has run out of room, so we are being good neighbors and POLAND BELG. GERMANY helping them,” Jaros said.

In the Schengen area, ESTONIA POLAND passports are not required to Vienna is just an hour away.

LUX. E N CZECH. LATVIA UKRAINE borders.

G FRANCE cross common “They’ll do all their paperwork N Detail LITHUANIA E A BRITAIN H E there.

We have nothing to do with R AUST. C SWITZ. MOLD. A S that. Here they will sleep, eat, meet BELARUS Border closed by POLAND SLVN.CRO. GERMANY ROMANIA with social workers and study Ger108-mile fence man, and if they are accepted, they New migrant BOS. SERB. GEORGIA CZECH REP. Black S ea UKRAINE route forming will move to Austria.”

Western Balkan BULG. MONT. FRANCE SWITZ. AUSTRIA route Jaros said he has been imITALY MACE. HUNGARY TURKEY pressed with the first arrivals at ALB. ROMANIA Eastern TURKEY the dormitories.

“Very calm. Very Mediterranean GREECE GEORGIA orderly. You can see they are eduroute ITALY BULGARIA cated people. They speak better 0 500 SYRIA ALGERIA English than me,” he said.

SYRIA MALTA MILES TUNISIA MALTA GREECE TURKEY HehasnopatiencefortownspeoCentral Mediterranean M ed . Sea CYPRUS route ple who fear that the newcomers Sicily Source: Frontex LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST will bring terrorism or disease.

“Some people think refugees who works at a coffee distributor Other residents mentioned diseat little children for breakfast,” and has lived in Gabcikovo all his eases — and the prospect of single Jaros said. He shrugged and suglife. young men walking the streets gested that the complaints were He waved a greeting to his with no work and no money. naive or worse. mother, who was passing by on her “They’re scared,” said Peter BorBasil and Etidal Taroun, pharbicycle. “We have no problem with bely, a graphic artist from Hungamacists from the Syrian capital, different colors,” Koczkas said, ry who works here. “It’s a small arrived recently and were strolling “but we don’t know them.” town, really a village. Very tight, through town, relieved and maybe One of his friends, Zoltan Zsemmaybe even closed to outsiders, a bit stunned at where they had lye, 26, who works for Volkswagen, even to me.” ended up. They were applying for said, “If they’re all war refugees, He predicted that their fears asylum in Austria. why don’t they go to the Arab would be allayed in time.

“It is nice for us,” Basil said. “It is countries?”

Gabcikovo has a long history of okay.”

The two friends asked how hosting outsiders, but this time it His wife was smiling and said many refugees were being taken in is different. During the early they would never complain. They by rich Arab states in the Persian 1990s, the dormitories at Slovak would share a bathroom and toilet Gulf.

Technical University sheltered with another family.

They answered in unison, people fleeing the Balkan wars.

Their 2-year-old son was suck“None!”

The dormitories were used again ing on a lollipop. They would learn A pair of young mothers pushing to house other refugees and miGerman quickly, Etidal promised. baby strollers, who declined to give grants seeking asylum in Europe.

They would be given asylum, they their names, asked, “Would you “We had Chechens, Iranians, Sri were sure. They had made it here want them in your home town?”

Lankans, Romanians, you name after 24 days on the road.

A vegetable vendor said she was it,” said Zoltan Jaros, an adminisThey did not know that the worried that terrorists could slip trator of the dorms. town had voted to oppose their in among the refugees.

Jaros said that between 1993 stay.

Several local people expressed and 2008, more than 5,000 refuJakus, who led the referendum fears that on the nearby Danube, a gees and migrants spent time at effort, said that volunteers collectmassive dam and its hydroelectric the campus dorms. “We have not ed 1,881 signatures in just three plant would be a choice target. had a single serious crime,” he days to stage the vote and that the “They flew airplanes into the said. “Maybe somebody stole an “no” campaign won 97 percent of twin towers. Why not blow up the apple from a tree. But no rapes, the ballots with a turnout of dam?” the grocer said. She pointed assaults, robberies. Nothing.”

60 percent. to the church steeple. The water He stressed that the refugees “So that says something,” Jakus from the dam would be that high. are to be housed in dorms for only said. n SLOVAKIA

Bratislava

za

W ILLIAM B OOTH Gabcikovo, Slovakia BY

is

Before the refugees arrived, residents solidly voted against housing them in this Slovakian town

Västeras

Tallinn

Stockholm

Örebro

Kirkcaldy

H

H

Aberdeen

Dunfermline

Rybinsk

Perth and Kinross Dundee

Kostroma

Naberezhnye Tchelny

Ufa

Neftekamsk

Nizhnekamsk

Yaroslave

Linköping

Magnitogorsk

Falkirk Renfrew Glasgow Monklands

Hamilton Cunninghame

Ioshkar-Ola

Kineshma

Novgorod

Norrköping

Motherwell

Tartu

Ivanovo

Edinburgh West Lothian

Cheboksary

Novocheboksarsk

Zelenodolsk

Kazan

Göteborg

Kyle and Carrick

Almetievsk

Boras

Jönköping

Oktyabrsky

Nizhny Novgorod

Pskov

Sterlitamak

Dzerzhinsk

Kovrov

Salavat

Tver

Carlisle

North Tyneside Tyneside South

Waverley

Blackpool

Liverpool Wirral

Chester

Sheffield

Vale Royal

The Wrekin

Stroud

Tula

Cambridge

Waveney

South Cambridgeshire

Dover

Suffolk Coastal

Zaanstad Haarlem

London

Leiden

s-Gravenhage

NETH.

Mons

La Louvière

Charleroi

Köln

Potsdam

Halle

Chernigov

Konotop

Sumy

Radom

Jena

Belgorod

Legnica

Dresden

Lublin

Gera

Wroclaw

Chemnitz

Zwickau

Gorzów Wielkopolski

Liberec

Ústí nad Labem

Walbrzych

Kielce

Czestochowa

Lutsk

Opole

Prague

Kiev

Fürth

Rzeszów

Tarnów

Belaya Tserkov

Bielsko - Biala

Cherkassy

Krementchug

Khmelnitsky

Regensburg

Brno

Augsburg

Pavlograd

Alexandriya

München

Dijon

Linz

Basel

Vienna H Bratislava

SLOVAKIA

Salzburg

H

Astrakhan

Shakhty

Rostov-na-Donu

Taganrog

Nikopol

Mariupol

Beltsy

Botosani

Satu-Mare

MOLDOVA

Suceava

Baia Mare

Budapest

H

Graz

Novoshakhtinsk

Krivoi Rog

Chernovtsy

Miskolc

Györ

Innsbruck

Volzhsky

Krasny Lutch

Novocherkassk

Nyiregyhaza

Vaduz

Luzern

Alchevsk

Makeyevka

Zaporozhye

H

Winterthur

Zürich

BernH

Lausanne

Genève

Lyon Villeurbanne

Debrecen

Székesfehérvár

Iasi

Berdyansk

Melitopol

Nikolaev

Chisinau

H

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Bolzano

Kherson

Tiraspol Bendery

Piatra Neamt

Kecskemet

Saint-Etienne

Yenakievo

Volgodonsk

Donetsk

Kamenetz-Podolsky

Ivano-Frankovsk

Uzhgorod

Lugansk

Gorlovka

Dnepropetrovsk

Dneprodzerzhinsk

Kirovograd

Kosice

Stakhanov

Konstantinovka

Vinnitsa

Ingolstadt

Ulm

Besançon

Slavyansk

Kramatorsk

Ternopol

Stuttgart

Reutlingen

Freiburg im Breisgau

Mulhouse

Clermont-Ferrand

Severodonetsk

Lisichansk

Lvov

Olomouc

Pforzheim

Strasbourg

Tours

Cluj-Napoca

Marebor

Odessa

Stavropol

Bacau

Lecco

Tirgu-Mures

Udine

Bergamo

Grenoble

Novara

Brescia

Armavir

SLOVENIA

Treviso

Vicenza

Verona

Trieste

Venezia

Padova

Allessandria

Ljubljana

H

Monza

Milan

Torino

Rijeka

Parma

Ferrara

Reggio nellEmilia

Szeged

Pécs

Aix-en-Provence

Marseille

Monaco

H

Nice

Drobeta Turnu-Severin

Tuzla

Pyatigorsk

Cherkessk

Kislovodsk

Makhachkala

Naltchik

Vladikavkaz

Sochi

Bucharest

H

Rimini

San Marino

HERZEGOVINA

H

Firenze

Pitesti

H

Doboj

Forli

Prato

Pisa

Nevinnomyssk

Maikop

Simferopol

Sevastopol

Ploiesti

Belgrade

Banja Luka

La Spezia

Toulon

Krasnodar

Novorossiysk

Galati

Braila

Buzau

Rimnicu Vilcea

Bologna

Ravenna

Perpignan

Kertch

Evpatoriya

Brasov

Novi Sad

Prijedor

Montpellier

Focsani

Sibiu

Timisoara

Osijek

Modena

Genova

Arad

Subotica

Zagreb

H

CROATIA

Piacenza

Toulouse

Nimes

Atirau

Poltava

Kraków

Jastrzebie - Zdrój

Ostrava

Volgograd

Zhitomir

Tychy

Rybnik

Pizen

Nürnberg

Heilbronn

Karlsruhe

Kharkov

H

Rovno

Bytom Gliwice Chorzów Zabrze Ruda Slaska Katowice Sosnowiec

Hradec Králové

H

Erlangen

Le Mans

Limoges

Kamyshin

Lódz

Erfurt

Offenbach am Main

Darmstadt

Würzburg

Metz

Starsy Oskol

Mozir

Pinsk

Brest

Leipzig

Siegen

Wiesbaden Frankfurt am Main Mainz

Kaiserslautern Ludwigshafen am Rhein Mannheim Saarbrücken Heidelberg

Orléans

Voronezh

Kursk

Warsaw

Zielona Góra

Cottbus

Koblenz

Luxembourg

H

H

Angers

Engels Saratov

Elets

Plock

Poznan

H

Bergisch Gladbach

LUX.

Reims

Tambov

Lipetsk

Orel

Gomel

Wloclawek

Magdeburg

Göttingen

Kassel

Bonn

Rouen

Paris

Bryansk

Bobruisk

Solegorsk

Berlin

H

Braunschweig

Salzgitter Hildesheim

Paderborn

Hagen Düsseldorf Wuppertal Solingen Remscheid

Leverkusen

Aachen

Liège

Namur

Neuss

Baranovichi

Bialystok

Torun

Hanover

Bielefeld

Recklinghausen Hamm Bottrop Herne Moers Gelsenkirchen Oberhausen Dortmund Essen Duisburg Mülheim Bochum a.d.

Ruhr Witten

Krefeld

Mönchengladbach

BELGIUM

Amiens

Minsk

H

Grudziadz

Bydgoszcz

Wolfsburg

Eindhoven

Maastricht

Uralsk

Kalisz

Osnabrück

Münster

Tilburg

Brussels

H

Michurinsk

Grodno Dabrowa Górnicza

Szczecin

Enschede

Nijmegen

Breda

Le Havre

Mogilev

Olsztyn

Bremen

Apeldoorn

Arnhem

Dordrecht

Antwerp

Gent

Aktjubinsk

Balakovo

Schwerin

Oldenburg

Almere

Utrecht Amersfoort

Rotterdam

Brugge

Kortrijk

Lille

Penza

Novomoskovsk

Orsha

Borisov

Elblag

Hamburg

Amsterdam

H

Haarlemmermeer

H

Brighton

Caen

Vilnius

H

Kaliningrad

Gdansk

Koszalin

Bremerhaven

Groningen

Guildford East Hampshire Rochester-upon-Medway Reigate and Banstead Sevenoaks Swale Eastleigh Redbridge Southampton Maidstone New Forest Arun Thanet Tonbridge and Malling Horsham Poole Bournemouth Canterbury Fareham Havant and Waterloo Mid Sussex Wealden Portsmouth Chichester

ANDORRA HAndorra la Vella

Orenburg

Kuznetsk

Kaluga

Smolensk

Kaunas

Kanliningrad (Russia)

Gdynia

Slupsk

Rostock

Lübeck

Broadland Norwich South Norfolk

North Hertfordshire Oxford Aylesbury Vale South Bedfordshire Luton Vale of White Horse Ipswich Dacorum East St. Hertfordshire Albans Enfield Braintree Wycombe Colchester Barnet Epping Forest Thurrock Chelmsford Harrow Slough Hillingdon Haringey Waltham Forest Camden Wokingham Bracknell Islington Kensington and Forest Chelsea Croydon HackneyHavering Ealing Windsor and Maidenhead Westminster, City of Dagenham Hammersmith and Fulham Tower Hamlets Barking and Lambeth Newham Southwark Richmond upon ThamesHounslow Wandsworth Greenwich Basildon Kingston upon Thames Merton Basingstoke & Deane Lewisham Southend on Sea Winchester Sutton BexleyBromley

South Oxfordshire Reading Newbury

Test Valley

Novotroitsk

Samara

Novokuybishevsk

Syzran

Ryazan

Serpukhov

Vitebsk

Zelenograd

Kiel

Kings Lynn & West Norfolk

Thamesdown

West Wiltshire

Orsk

Tolyatti

Saransk

Obninsk

Panevezhis

East Lindsey

Salisbury

North Wiltshire

Zhukovsky

Kolomna

Shauliai

Klaipeda

Kingston upon Hull

Breckland Tunbridge Wells

Mid Bedfordshire

Northavon

Bristol

Sedgemoor

Lyubertsy

Daugavpils

Malmö

Beverley

Bedford

Peterborough

Milton Keynes Northampton Huntingdonshire

Cherwell

Ulyanovsk

Orekhovo-Zuevo

Moscow Podolsk

Copenhagen

H

York

Charnwood

Warwick

Stratford-upon-Avon

Tendring

ShchelkovoNoginsk Kaliningrad Mytishchi Elektrostal Balashikha

H

Odintsovo

Helsingborg

Bassetlaw

Ashfield Mansfield Amber Valley

Newark and Sherwood Erewash South Staffordshire Derby Nottingham Broxtowe Rushcliffe South Kesteven

Sandwell Leicester Birmingham Nuneaton & Bedworth Wyre Solihull Coventry

Wychavon

South Somerset

Khimki

Velikie Luky

Liepaja

Dimitrovgrad

Doncaster Rotherham

Crewe & Nantwich Chesterfield

Newcastle-under-Lyme Stoke on Trent Stafford Gedling

Dudley

Gloucester

Murom

Scarborough

Preston Harrogate Blackburn South Ribble Leeds Bradford Calderdale WiganBolton BuryRochdale Knowsley Kirklees St. Helens Wakefield Oldham Salford Manchester Warrington Trafford Tameside Barnsley Stockport

West Lancashire Sefton

Macclesfield

Wrexham Maelor

Wolverhampton

DENMARK

Stockton-on-Tees Langbaurgh-on-Tees DarlingtonMiddlesbrough

Halton

Elmbridge

Arzamas

Riga

H

Sunderland

South Lakeland

Cheltenham Rhymney Valley

Vladimir

Sergiev Posad

Newcastle upon Tyne Gateshead

Lancaster

Livorno

SERBIA

Kutaisi

Kragujevac

Sarajevo

H

Ancona

Sukhumi

Constanta

Craiova

Zenica

Split

Tbilisi

H

Roussé

Sumgait

Rustavi

Perugia

Plévène

Mostar

Tarrasa Sabadell Mataro Santa Coloma de Gramanet Barcelona Badalona Hospitalet de Llobregat

Choumen

Nis

Varna

Terni

CROATIA

Pescara

MONTENEGRO

Sofia

Bourgas

Stara Zagora

Yerevan

H

Trabzon

Plovdiv

Skopje

Samsun

Ordu

H

Latina

Foggia

Sassari

Tirana

H

Palma de Mallorca

Bari

Napoli

Sardinia

Giyandja

ARMENIA

Slivène

H

Pristina

Podgorica



Rome

H

VATICAN CITY

Islands

MACEDONIA

Zonguldak

Edirne

Karabuk

Erzurum

Istanbul

ALBANIA

Torre del Greco

Salerno

Ardabil

Çorum

Adapazari Sakarya

Gebze

Sultanbeyli

Khvoy

Sivas

Ankara

H

Bursa

Van

Kirikkale

Eskisehir

Maragheh

Elazig

Orumiyeh

Balikesir

Malatya

Kayseri

Diyarbakir

Afyon

Usak

Euboea

Adiyaman

Manisa

Al-Kamishli

Izmir

Kahramanmaras

Messina

Reggio di Calabria

Urfa

Konya

Patrai

Athens

Péristéri Calithèa Piraiévs

H

Denizli

Mosul

Erbil

Gaziantep

Isparta

Aydin

Osmaniye

Qazvin

Mehrshahr KarajRajai shah

Batman

Volos

Catanzaro

Palermo

Zanjan

Kütahya

Larissa

Cosenza

Algiers

Rasht

Tabriz

Taranto

Cagliari

H

AZERBAIJAN

Batumi

Corsica

Baku

H

Dobritch

Sanandaj

Sulamaniya

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

A must-see for foreign leaders T ODD C . F RANKEL Menlo Park, Calif.

BY

I

ndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had already dined with Silicon Valley’s tech titans and toured Tesla Motors, and now Sunday he was sitting down for a talk with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Soon, he’d set off for the 15-minute drive to Google to talk with its chief executive. Then he had a reception at a sold-out, 18,000-seat arena in San Jose.

India offers a tantalizing opportunity for tech firms such as Apple, Google and Facebook. India has 1.25 billion residents but lags far behind the United States in the digital infrastructure needed to spur its online economy. Still, the number of Internet users in India is surging, estimated to reach 328 million this year alone.

At Facebook, Modi acknowledged the challenges faced in wiring his massive country, noting that investors worldwide looking for places to invest their money should consider India.

“So I’m giving them the advice — here’s the place,” Modi said through an interpreter.

Modi’s trip to Silicon Valley — the first to California by any Indian leader in more than 30 years — signals the rising influence and economic power wielded by this technology hotbed. Other world leaders recognize it, too, explaining why a wave of foreign dignitaries have added Silicon Valley stops to theirtraditionalU.S.toursinrecent years. Heads of state from Japan and Brazil visited earlier this year, following earlier trips by the leaders of Ireland, Israel, Russia and Malaysia. The region is so popular that last year the nonprofit Silicon Valley Office of Protocol opened its doors to help with the finer points of international diplomacy, including etiquette and manners.

“Silicon Valley is, in some ways, more important than New York and the financial sector, or D.C. and the political world,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director at Menlo Ventures. World leaders “see clearly that when it comes to just about any sector, Silicon Val-

MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

More dignitaries adding Silicon Valley to their list of U.S. stops, showing the tech hub’s influence ley is eating them up.”

It’s not just world leaders who are interested in Silicon Valley. In March, ambassadors from 35 countries — including Kazakhstan, Gabon and Paraguay — toured the region to soak up lessons on how technology might contribute to their home economies.

Modi’s visit was partly a recognition of the tremendous Indian influence at tech firms. Nearly 16 percent of tech start-ups have Indian founders, according to researchers. Indians and Indian Americans make up an outsize proportion of the tech workforce.

At Google, Asians, who include Indians, account for 30 percent of employees. During his stops in Silicon Valley, it often seemed as if Modi was playing to a hometown crowd — no translation required.

Modi is also at home with technology. With 15 million Twitter followers and 30 million Facebook fans, he trails only President

Obama among world leaders in social media popularity. He noted during his talk with Zuckerberg how social media has changed the way he governs. The instant feedback made possible by tweets and posts helps steer his government’s decisions.

“Instead of elections every five years, you have elections every five minutes,” Modi said.

Foreign leaders hope to learn from Silicon Valley firms and instill the region’s entrepreneurial spirit back home.

“They see Silicon Valley as a center of innovation and are trying to understand it and what it would take to re-create that in their country,” said William F. Miller, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, who has accompanied many foreign delegation visits over the years.

But it remains unclear if these visits by heads of states result in actual business deals or propel

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks at Google headquarters last Sunday. During his visit to Google, Indian-born chief executive Sundar Pichai said the Internet giant would install free WiFi at 100 of India’s largest railway stations.

countries down a more entrepreneurialpath.Theirsignificancemay be more symbolic than practical.

In April, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the tech firms, he gave a speech at nearby Stanford to urge his nation to adopt the dynamism of Silicon Valley. Abe also announced a small program that would send 30 Japanese entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to Silicon Valley investors.

Two months later, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, was here at the end of a five-day U.S. tour that included stops in the traditional power towns of Washington and New York. She, too, met with technology leaders. And she took a ride in one of Google’s self-driving cars.

During Rouseff’s visit, Google announced that it would more than double the number of its engineers working in Brazil — a deal that wouldn’t change Brazil’s economy but could pay dividends at some point.

During Modi’s stop at Google, Indian-born chief executive Sundar Pichai announced that his company would install free WiFi at 100 of India’s largest railway stations. Plans call for wiring 400 stations by year’s end. Pichai said it was a contribution toward Modi’s “Digital India” initiative, an $18 billion government plan to string high-speed Internet access across the subcontinent.

But, of course, they have a long way to go, given India’s scale: The country has about 7,500 railway stations.

Silicon Valley’s appeal to foreign leaders is driven by the same impulses that send tourists to take selfies outside the corporate headquarters of Facebook or Apple.

“This is where the magic is happening,” said Bipul Sinha, a longtime tech investor and chief executive at data management start-up Rubrik.

That was not lost on Poorva Agrawal, an Indian worker at Facebook who stood in the audience during Modi and Zuckerberg’s discussion.

“It’s great to see him here,” she said. “It’s important. Maybe something will come of this to help the country back home.” n

A young boy is seen inside a camp for Syrian refugees in July in Azraq, Jordan. There are at least 20,000 refugees living in the camp.

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

spoils for the rulers, terror for the ruled Despite slick propaganda, existence under the Islamic State is filled with violence, shortages of basic needs and fear for women and those wishing to escape the militants’ occupation.

Mosul

Raqqa

Tig

Amman

Azraq refugee camp

JORDAN

ris

SYRIA

Damascus

Eup hr

ate

Baghdad s

IRAQ

T

BY

K EVIN S ULLIVAN

The white vans come out at dinnertime, bringing hot meals to unmarried Islamic State fighters in the city of Hit in western Iraq.

A team of foreign women, who moved from Europe and throughout the Arab world to join the Islamic State, work in communal kitchens to cook the fighters’ dinners, which are delivered to homes confiscated from people who fled or were killed, according to the city’s former mayor.

The Islamic State has drawn tens of thousands of people from around the world by promising paradise in the Muslim homeland

it has established on conquered territory in Syria and Iraq.

But in reality, the militants have created a brutal, two-tiered society, where daily life is starkly different for the occupiers and the occupied, according to interviews with more than three dozen people who are now living in, or have recently fled, the Islamic State.

Foreign fighters and their families are provided free housing, medical care, religious education and even a sort of militant mealson-wheels service, according to those interviewed. The militants are paid salaries raised largely from taxes and fees levied on the millions of people they control, in an arc of land as big as the United Kingdom.

Those whose cities and towns are held by the Islamic State said they face not only the casual savagery of militants who behead their enemies and make sex slaves out of some minority women but also severe shortages of the basics of daily life.

Many residents have electricity for only an hour or two a day, and some homes go days without running water. Jobs are scarce, so many people can’t afford food prices that have tripled or more. Medical care is poor, most schools are closed, and bans on most travel outside the Islamic State are enforced at gunpoint.

Over the past two years, the militants have produced a torrent of startlingly sophisticated online propaganda that has helped persuade at least 20,000 foreign fighters, many with families, to come from as far away as Australia. The campaign, largely distributed on YouTube and social media, depicts a place filled with Ferris wheels and cotton candy, where local families cheerfully mingle with heavily armed foreigners.

But local people interviewed said their daily lives are filled with fear and deprivation in the Islamic State “caliphate,” governed by the militants’ extreme version of Islamic sharia law.

“We went back to the Stone Age,” said Mohammad Ahmed, 43, a former Arab League worker from Deir al-Zour, a town near Raqqa, the militants’ self-proclaimed capital in northern Syria.

“We used to have a beautiful house with marble and ceramic floors,” said Ahmed, who fled his home in June and now lives alongside 20,000 other Syrians in Jordan’s Azraq refugee camp. “All our lives, we had everything we needed. Then, when they came, we were cooking over a fire outside and washing our clothes in a bucket.”

Several of those interviewed said the Islamic State was actually less corrupt and provided more efficient government services, such as road construction and trash collection, than the previous Syrian and Iraqi governments. In Iraq, some said, the Sunni Islamic State militants treated them better than the Shiitedominated central government in Baghdad.

But none of those interviewed said they supported the militants, and all said efficient government did not excuse the group’s brutal and fanatical behavior.

“We hate them,” said Hikmat al-Gaoud, 41, the former mayor of Hit, who fled in April and now divides his time between Baghdad and Amman, Jordan.

The Islamic State came to power in the wake of years of fighting in Syria and Iraq that continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

already had shattered many public institutions. But people interviewed said the Islamic State had made the damage worse, in ways that could be felt for decades to come — reversing gains in public education,ruining the medical infrastructure, establishing a justice system based on terror, and exposing a generation of children to gruesome and psychologically devastating violence.

For women, living in the Islamic State homeland often means being subjected to a virtual assembly-line system for providing brides to fighters, or sometimes being abducted and forced into unwanted marriages.

Many who were interviewed gave only their first name or declined to be identified at all, for their own safety and the security of their family members still living under Islamic State control. They were interviewed via Skype or telephone calls from Syria and Iraq, or in person in Iraq, Turkey and Jordan.

Those who spoke from inside areas controlled by the Islamic State did so at great peril, saying the militants closely monitor Internet access. They agreed to speak so that they could tell their story of life inside the Islamic State caliphate.

Nearly everyone interviewed said they had witnessed a beheading or another savage punishment. It is virtually impossible to independently verify these accounts, just as it is impossible to verify the claims in much of the propaganda material put out by the Islamic State. The militants almost never allow journalists or other observers inside their territory, and they have posted video of the beheadings of several they have captured.

The interviews, conducted over several months, were arranged largely at random or through long-established contacts in the region. Although several activists were among those interviewed, The Washington Post did not rely on activist groups to provide interview subjects. At the Azraq camp, Post reporters reviewed records of arrivals and sought out those who had come recently from militant-controlled areas. Many of the interviews lasted two hours or longer.

The militants control small farming communities and large urban areas, including Mosul, an Iraqi city with a population of more than 1 million people. The Islamic State’s policies differ somewhat in each area, so there is no single, uniform way of life; but in the interviews, consistent themes emerged about women, health, education, justice and the economy in the Islamic State.

Women must be fully veiled and can be whipped for leaving the house without a male-relative escort. Many simply stay at home for fear of being picked up on the street and forced to marry a foreign fighter.

Hospitals are usually reserved for foreign fighters and are staffed by doctors who have come from as far as Britain and Malaysia.

Local people are forced to seek care in ill-equipped clinics, which have expired medications and poorly trained staff.

COURTESY OF CHARLIE WINTER/QUILLIAM FOUNDATION

Propaganda depicts a place filled with Ferris wheels where locals cheerfully mingle with foreigners.

In some places, the Islamic State has shut down cellphone service and Internet access.

Where it still exists, the militants try tocontrol it closely. They have set up Internet cafes that have become centers for propaganda, where recruiters encourage young people around the world to leave their homes and come to the Islamic State. They have persuaded about 200 Americans — some still in their teens — in Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and other U.S. cities to try to come to Syria. Most were arrested before reaching their destination, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.

Except for religious schools for the children of foreign fighters, schools are generally closed. Militants have confiscated college diplomas and burned them publicly.

“Life under Daesh is a nightmare each day,” said a female math teacher who lives in Mosul, using an Arabic name for the Islamic State.

“We have an unknown future,” she said, asking that her name not be used. “Maybe Daesh will kill us or maybe we will die in the war, or maybe after. What we are going through right now is a slow death.”

The militants have established checkpoints to prevent people from fleeing. But those interviewed said a growing network of smugglers is helping people get away, and they are entering Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and nonmilitant-controlled areas of Iraq in increasing

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15

COVER STORY

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

numbers. U.N. officials said that 60 percent of refugees who have crossed the Syria-Jordan border recently were escaping areas controlled by the militants.

The Islamic State’s propaganda portrays the militants as liberators; one recent video showed armed fighters delivering sweets to a home for the elderly. But according to those interviewed, the majority of residents view the militants as a merciless occupying force, and they stay away from them as much as possible.

“Even if we see them in the streets or in the shops, there is no mingling,” said an activist who calls himself Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, a native of Raqqa who runs a social media site called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently.

People in Raqqa, he said, “feel like strangers in their own city.”

The Islamic State has had some success recruiting local people. Those interviewed said many of their friends and neighbors in Syria and Iraq have chosen to join the Islamic State, becoming fighters, teachers or workers in their government offices.

Some do so because they believe in the militants’ goal of uniting the world under their extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

But most of the people who work for the Islamic State do so out of economic desperation, according to those interviewed. In places where the cost of food has skyrocketed and

“We hate them,” Hikmat alGaoud, above, said of the militants. The former mayor of Hit, Iraq, fled in April.

KLMNO WEEKLY

where many people are living on little more than bread and rice, some men have concluded that becoming an Islamic State warrior is the only way to provide for their family.

“There is no work, so you have to join them in order to live,” said Yassin al-Jassem, 52, who fled his home near Raqqa in June. “So many local people have joined them. They were pushed into Daesh by hunger.”

Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College in London, said that although foreign fighters have given the Islamic State a boost, “in the long term, they will turn out to be a burden.” He said that local tribes rose up against al-Qaeda in Iraq in the mid-2000s partly because that group was perceived as a foreign organization. He said people now under Islamic State control could do the same — especially in Iraq.

But those interviewed who had lived under the Islamic State said it has gone to great lengths to suppress any potential uprisings, killing anyone suspected of disloyalty.

Faten Humayda, 70, a grandmother who fled her town near Raqqa in May and now lives in the Azraq camp, said the violence increases local anger at the militants, but it also creates suspicion among local people. It is harder for any kind of resistance movement to form when people think their friends and neighbors might be informants for the militants.

“They have turned us against each other,” she said.

Ahmed, who fled his town near Raqqa in June, said some of the Arab fighters would try to mix with the local population, but the Europeans and other non-Arabs never did. He said that although the Islamic State militants claimed they were there to create a better life for Muslims, they seemed mainly focused on battles with other rebel groups and government forces.

“They were always very aggressive, and they seemed angry,” he said. “They are there to fight, not to govern.”

Interviewed in his baking-hot metal hut in the Azraq camp, Jassem recalled that while he was living under Islamic State control, his 2-year-old grandson developed a brain tumor.

Doctors wanted $800 to remove it.

Jassem, a farm hand, hadn’t worked since Islamic State militants took over his home town. He was desperate, so in late May he went to the militants to beg for his grandson’s life, and they offered him a choice.

“They said to me, ‘If you give us your son to fight with us, we will pay for your grandson’s treatment,’ ” he said.

The idea of one of his sons becoming an Islamic State fighter turned his stomach, and the thought of losing his grandson broke his heart. So Jassem took his family and escaped in the back of a smuggler’s truck. He said his son is now asking Jordanian authorities for medical help for the little boy.

“I am never going back to Syria,” Jassem said, looking out from his 12-by-18-foot hut at the bleak expanse of empty Jordan desert. “It’s not my Syria anymore.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

EDUCATION

Future vets get a lesson in loss BY

T . R EES S HAPIRO

S

ara Waltz never wandered far without her bull terrier, Marti Gra, padding by her side. They went on long hikes, on romps around the family farm, and at night they shared the same bed.

When the brindle-and-white dog suffered a debilitating infection in 2008, Waltz was unable to watch her companion in pain and decided to euthanize her. When Marti Gra took her last breath in Waltz’s arms, anguished tears welled in Waltz’s eyes. The veterinarian, meanwhile, approached the procedure with a disconcerting nonchalance; his clinical lack of empathy and apparent disregard for her grief left Waltz reeling.

“For me, I vowed at that point that I didn’t want to be a vet like that,” Waltz said.

Now a fourth-year veterinary student at Virginia Tech, Waltz, 29, is among a class of future doctors learning that saying goodbye to patients they often come to love like their own — and understanding what their human owners are going through — can be the hardest part of the job.

Euthanasia is one of the most common procedures veterinarians perform, and some individual doctors put more than 100 of their patients to death each year. Experts say that can exact an indelible psychological toll. And now college programs training future veterinarians are paying special attention to the emotional aspects of death.

College professors now realize that veterinarians face unique stressors compared with any other career, even within the medical field. It’s considered the only medical profession in which killing your patient is not only acceptable, but also occasionally encouraged as the best possible resolution to alleviate suffering. The term euthanasia is derived from the Greek words “eu,” meaning good, and “thanatos,” meaning death.

“A good death is tantamount to the humane termination of an animal’s life,” according to a 102-page report published by the American

NORM SHAFER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Students are taught how to handle emotional toll of putting down pets and how to comfort owners Veterinary Medical Association on guidelines for euthanasia.

As difficult as euthanasia can be for pet owners, the sense of loss can be magnified for veterinarians who grow attached to patients that they watch grow from puppies to old dogs with snow-flecked snouts.

“It takes something out of you,” Virginia Tech professor Harold C. McKenzie III said. “It weighs on me. It’s a cumulative toll. It weighs more heavily on me now than it did 20 years ago.”

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that veterinarians experience suicidal thoughts at a significantly higher rate than the average population.

The CDC study found that among 10,000 veterinarians who took part in a 2014 survey, 14 percent of men and 19 percent of women had considered suicide since leaving school, which is three times the national average.

In response, veterinary schools across the country are changing how euthanasia is taught in classrooms by emphasizing ways to cope emotionally, including grieving alongside clients in their anguish.

“Classically, in the old tradition, we ignored this very human side of the profession,” said Jennifer Hodgson, associate dean for professional programs at Virginia Tech. “We used to teach just the science and didn’t talk about how you think and how you feel. We can’t train the next generation of students like that.”

At Colorado State University, the veterinary school offers a course called the healer’s art, which explores “the mystery and awe in life,” during which a medical professional and students discuss the emotions that accompany euthanasia, said associate dean Melinda Frye.

At Iowa State University, professor Dawn Sweet teaches a

Assistant professor Mark Freeman and Virginia Tech student Lucy Lee give Charlie, who is recovering from surgery, an acupuncture treatment.

course for veterinary students on communication in tense moments and “how important it is to build and cultivate a relationship with your client so you can foster trust.”

Jim Clark, a professor at the University of California at Davis, said that, schoolwide, “there’s a growing focus on recognizing the importance of mental well-being among veterinary students.”

Veterinary students at Virginia Tech are exposed to the realities of euthanasia beginning in their first year of classes. Throughout their four years, students take part in lectures and seminars on the ethics of euthanasia and discuss how to break bad news to clients.

“I see it as a gift of veterinary medicine to make it so that our animals don’t have to suffer at the end of their lives,” said Army Col. Bess Pierce, a Virginia Tech veterinary professor. “I have gotten more thank-you cards from euthanasias that were done compassionately than anything else. It makes such an impression on owners who needed it the most.”

Pet owner Michael Brodie of Coral Springs, Fla., said that veterinarians and their staff can bring comfort in subtle ways before, during and after a euthanasia procedure. Brodie recently had to euthanize his family’s poodle mix, Milton, who had suffered heart problems.

“I knew that the next time I was going to the vet that it was going to be his final time,” he said.

When he and his wife arrived with Milton, the office staff members guided them to a private waiting room and arranged for Brodie to pay for the procedure ahead of time, knowing that he would be dealing with the emotions of the euthanasia afterward. The veterinarian ensured that Milton was wrapped in a blanket and that Brodie and his wife held the dog as a fatal dose of drugs was administered. Afterward, the vet offered words of sympathy and let Brodie and his wife sit with Milton to grieve for as long as they wanted.

Brodie said that the office receptionist cried with them.

“They wanted to make sure it was the most comfortable way that

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17

THE ECONOMY we wanted,” Brodie said. “It was calm and quiet. Very dignified.”

Virginia Tech students learn to sit side by side with a pet owner, rather than directly across, as they discuss end-of-life options and how to listen to client concerns without judgment. Admissions director Jacquelyn Pelzer said that professors bring in actors to simulate situations with clients and record video of how the students react.

“It doesn’t come natural to a lot of students,” she said.

But students relish the opportunity in the simulations to learn to best address clients in such fragile moments.

“Even as young students, we’re so unequipped to deal with people’s emotions because it’s not something you are taught in school,” Waltz said.

Talking about mental health in class, particularly when the subject is euthanasia, is part of the broader effort at vet schools to help students cope with the strenuous nature of the field. Professors reiterate to students that the best way to face euthanasia is with compassion. Oncology specialist Shawna Klahn said that too often veterinarians compartmentalize their feelings in order to endure what can seem like day-in, day-out death.

“You do question the value of getting involved and of caring, because it hurts,” Klahn said. “It paralyzes you as a doctor. Who does it help if I care? You go through these moments where you get distanced. But you can’t help it. If at some point I don’t care, then I no longer belong in this profession.”

Waltz said that she decided to focus on euthanasia as a veterinarian after her own traumatic experience with Marti Gra during her senior year in college. When she arrived at the clinic that day in 2008, Waltz saw that her 10-yearold dog was in pain.

The veterinarian told Waltz that Marti Gra was suffering from a severe infection, was septic and was experiencing kidney failure.

She said that the veterinarian did little to comfort Waltz once she made the decision to put down Marti Gra. Peace came to her, Waltz said, when she walked in to see Marti Gra. “I came in, and she wagged her tail,” Waltz said, brightening at the remembrance. “That’s how I knew it was time. She made me feel like it was okay to say goodbye.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

For most in America, real income isn’t budging BY

J EFF G UO

I

n September, the Census Bureau released data showing that, financially, 2014 was much like 2013 and the years before: meh for the majority of Americans. Real income for the median household has been level or declining each year since the recession, and in 2014 that number remained 6.5 percent lower than it was in 2007.

Meanwhile, the nation’s gross domestic product is up nearly 9 percent from its high-water mark just before the recession, while corporate profits have grown 25 percent. America is more prosperous than ever. All that money simply isn’t reaching the hands of average Americans.

Five years after the recession was officially declared over, the typical American household was still shambling along without a real raise.

The Census Bureau report described a few statistically significant differences between 2013 and 2014. Most notably, the median income for white non-Hispanic families decreased 1.7 percent. On the other hand, the median income for Hispanic families seems to have increased by as much as 5 percent.

Here’s another way to look at the data: The median income for native-born households decreased by 2.3 percent, while the median income for foreign-born households increased by 4.3 percent. In other words, average immigrant families have been doing slightly better.

The gulf between high earners and low earners remains the widest it’s been since at least 1993, the earliest year for which there is comparable data.

In 2014, a household at the 90th percentile was making nearly 13 times as much money as a family at the 10th percentile. In the 1990s, that ratio hovered between 10 and 11.

These twin trends — rising inequality and wage stagnation — predate the recession. The Eco-

Four decades of income and poverty in the U.S. Income Median household income in 2014 dollars, by race, 1973--2014 In thousands Asian $74.3k

$80 70

White $60.3k

60

U.S. $53.7k Hispanic $42.5k

50 40

Black $35.4k

30 20 10 0

2014

1975

Poverty Share living in poverty, by race, 1973--2014 40% 35% 30%

Black 26.2%

25%

Hispanic 23.6%

20%

U.S. 14.8% Asian 12% White 10.1%

15% 10% 5%

2014

1975 SOURCE: U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, CURRENT POPULATION SURVEY CHART BY WASHINGTON POST

nomic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimates that median wages have grown only 6 percent since 1979, after accounting for inflation.

Other big news: The Census Bu-

reau confirmed that more Americans now have health insurance, in large part thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Equally important to note is that practically nothing else changed. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

How the economy plays us all for fools N ON-FICTION l REVIEWED

G

WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION; BASED ON ISTOCK PHOTOS

PHISHING FOR PHOOLS The Economics of Manipulation and Deception

By George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller Princeton Univ. 272 pp. $24.95

BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

eorge A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller are economics nobility. Both have won Nobel Prizes: Akerlof for explaining how “asymmetric information” between buyers and sellers distorts market outcomes, Shiller for his research on the volatility of prices for stocks and bonds. Akerlof happens to be married to Federal Reserve boss Janet Yellen. Shiller predicted the recent housing collapse. Among dismal scientists, these guys are as respected and connected as it gets.

But with books, as with stocks, timing is everything. Akerlof and Shiller’s first book together, “Animal Spirits,” in 2009, challenged economic orthodoxy — especially the notion that markets reflect the behavior of rational actors — just as confidence in standard economic models was disintegrating with the Great Recession. They argued that emotions involving confidence, fairness, bad faith, corruption and misunderstandings about money exert a powerful influence on behavior and therefore on unemployment, business cycles, financial markets and real estate prices. To cope with all this, they argued, a broader responsibility for government is needed.

“The proper role of the parent is to set the limits so that the child does not overindulge her animal spirits,” the authors wrote.

Six years later, Akerlof and Shiller have written “Phishing for Phools,” another attempt to upend our traditional understanding of how economies work. Free markets do not just deliver choices and prosperity, the authors contend, but create irresistible incentives for businesses to manipulate consumers and prey on our emotions and ignorance. “The economic system is filled with trickery,” they assert, “and everyone

needs to know that.”

For long stretches, the second book feels far less revolutionary than the first. Its examples are well-known and overly dissected cases of economic misdeeds: Advertising misleads consumers.

Credit card firms and car dealers rip us off. Rating agencies and investment banks gave us the subprime loan debacle. Food and pharmaceutical companies finesse regulations to bring unhealthy products to market. Akerlof and Shiller once again rely on behavioral economics to illustrate their cases, but after more than a decade of “Freakonomics”-style books peddling gee-whiz findings, the authors sound a little like the guys still enamored of the hipster trend long after the hipsters have moved on.

Although “Phishing for Phools” reads at times like one more behavioral-economics tract, it is far more than that. Its critique of conventional economics is more powerful and comprehensive — and more paternalistic — than that of “Animal Spirits.” Here, Akerlof and Shiller aren’t just saying that emotions distort economic outcomes or that free markets feature imperfections that devious actors exploit at the expense of consumers. No, they are arguing that such exploitation is inherent to the system, that the equilibrium that economists worship — whereby any opportunities for unusual profits are quickly seized and taken off the table — also means that chances to take advantage of our weaknesses, to counter our true preferences, are soon identified and abused.

The mechanism for this abuse is “phishing,” the term for a form of online fraud in which the culprit obtains sensitive personal data from another person by posing as a reputable entity such as a

bank, an Internet service provider, or a Nigerian prince. Akerlof and Shiller broaden the definition; for them, phishing occurs throughout the economy and involves “getting people to do things that are in the interest of the phisherman, but not in the interest of the target. . . . There are so many phishers and they are so ingenious in the variety of their lures that, by the laws of probability, we all get caught sooner or later.”

So we are all played for fools, whether psychological ones, with our emotions leading us astray, or informational ones, when we are intentionally misled.

Akerlof and Shiller distinguish between our stated preferences — we want to eat better, save more, stop smoking — and the preferences of, as they put it, the “monkeys on our shoulders” that entice us into poor decisions. “Standard economics has ignored this difference because most economists have thought that, for the most part, people do know what they want,” the authors explain. “But that ignores the field of psychology, which is, largely, about the effects of those monkeys.”

That difference exerts a huge influence on our lives, they contend, and means that total freedom to choose can lead to serious economic trouble. “Free markets do not just produce what we really want; they also produce what we want according to our monkeyon-the-shoulder tastes.” Meaning, they yield a steady supply of phishes to capitalize on our weaknesses.

They stress that phishing works because of the stories we tell ourselves and the stories the phishers have long told us. Palmolive soap doesn’t just make you clean, it makes you beautiful; more Facebook “likes” mean our lives must be better; and more recently, certain German diesel cars meet low emissions standards. The influence of stories on economic decisionmaking is pervasive, Akerlof and Shiller write, and “perhaps our book’s most important takeaway.”

The book ends with an ode to the regulators and activists who seek to protect us from phishing and from ourselves. They are the true heroes of the economy, Akerlof and Shiller write. n

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Satire turns silly in Atwood’s latest

A gun guy tires of radical rhetoric

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

M

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

argaret Atwood has long been a wry, incisive prophet. From “The Handmaid’s Tale” to her “Oryx and Crake” trilogy, she’s exposed our current ills by peering down the path and discerning perils fast approaching.

Unfortunately, her novel, published last week, is a silly mess.

Several chapters of “The Heart Goes Last” appeared a few years ago on Byliner under the title “Positron.” At the time, Atwood told NPR that she was inspired by the serial productions of 19th-century novelists such as Charles Dickens.

“The closest analogy is probably TV sitcoms,” she said.

There’s some truth in advertising there, which should have tempered readers’ expectations, but “The Heart Goes Last” was highlighted as one of the fall’s most anticipated books. Updated with that plaintive title, an ominous cover image and the publisher’s puffery about its brilliance, this novel seems engineered to trick buyers into taking it seriously.

It certainly starts seriously enough. The scene opens on a city strafed by unemployment and crime, as though the Great Recession of 2007 had screwed ever downward until the structure of civil society snapped: “The whole card castle, the whole system fell to pieces,” Atwood writes, “trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheets like fog off a window.”

Our heroes, Charmaine and Stan, are a once-middle-class couple now reduced to living in an old Honda somewhere in the ruined Northeast. Stan soldiers on, Dumpster-diving and moving the car every few hours to stay ahead of the gangs. His wife buoys herself by recalling the vacuous aphorisms of her Grandma Win. These opening scenes offer a sharp portrait of the financial rot that destroyed so many North American cities and almost permanently destabilized the economy. We know that many frightened and idle people turn with

varying degrees of readiness to violence or despair, but what Atwood shows with such caustic wit is the way economic stress renders once-absurd solutions suddenly plausible. Given a surplus of criminals and a paucity of jobs, why not get government out of the way and let corporate America cure both problems at once?

“Tired of living in your car?” a man asks on TV. “Remember what your life used to be like? Before the dependable world we used to know was disrupted? At the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, it can be like that again. We offer not only full employment but also protection from the dangerous elements that afflict so many at this time. Work with like-minded others! Help solve the nation’s problems of joblessness and crime while solving your own! Accentuate the positive!”

As Stan and Charmaine learn, eager volunteers who enter (and can never leave) this walled town are divided into two rotating groups: For one month, half the population lives in lovely suburban homes. Then everybody switches, and those suburbanites spend the next month in prison.

As a satire of unregulated markets, this is rich, and the early scenes race by, grim and funny.

Things fall apart, naturally. The executives of Consilience devise ever more grotesque ways to extract profit from their alternating prisoners and suburbanites.

But what’s more surprising than the corruption of Consilience is the quick collapse of this potentially insightful novel about unbridled capitalism. Just as Atwood begins exploring the horror of living in an incorporated terrarium, the story deflates into a flaccid sex comedy. Even when chickens are involved — no, especially when chickens are involved — this is pretty unbearable stuff.

Having abandoned any intelligible pursuit of its dark themes, the story limps to a tidy and thoroughly false resolution. n

T THE HEART GOES LAST

By Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday. 308 pp. $26.95

ARMS The Culture and Credo of the Gun

By A.J. Somerset Biblioasis.

342 pp. Paperback, $17.95

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD

he point of view of “Arms,” A.J. Somerset’s history of gun culture, might be more important than any of the stories he tells.

Somerset traces firearms history back to frontier times, through old westerns and battlefields (actual and, later, cultural), and onward to the National Rifle Association, mass shootings, fantasies of a zombie apocalypse and the white picket fences of suburbia, where housewives squeeze off rounds at the range with pink guns. (The color white plays an important role in this history: Somerset writes that “race war has long been the drunken uncle of American gun culture.”)

But what makes his book entertaining, often funny and ultimately an important addition to the limited canon on guns is that Somerset is a gun guy. He owns them, shoots them and loves them. And yet he is exasperated because gun owners, along with their culture and rhetoric, have increasingly “grown more radical,” leaving “anyone who breaks ranks” as a “traitor to the cause.”

Which means Somerset will be considered a traitor.

A former soldier who is now a technical writer in Canada, he skewers the gun industry, particularly the NRA, for convincing many gun owners that the Second Amendment is “the single most importantsentenceintheentireBillof Rights” and that any threat to expanding gun ownership — universal background checks, for instance — is “an attack on Mom, apple pie, democracy, and Jesus himself.”

The effect can be chilling, particularly on moderates like him, who own guns and acknowledge their danger to society, as mass shootings now shake the country with terrifying regularity. The loudest voices in the ensuing debates tend to be those at each extreme, leaving out the important middle, where solutions often emerge. “As the treetop squawking and screeching begins, the loudest

monkeys take over, and the moderates find better ways to spend their time — partly because, as moderates, they don’t worry too much from day to day about apple pie, democracy and the AR-15,” Somerset writes.

The message from the gun lobby, Somerset argues, is clear: Your very identity depends on your absolute unwillingness to bend on the Second Amendment. But as he writes, “Not everyone wraps his identity around his gun.”

There are other gun owners like him, willing to give an inch, except they are unwilling to openly criticize gun culture. People at gun ranges regularly tell me that they disagree with the NRA, that they wish there was more gun control and less theatrics, but they almost never want go on the record.

A recent Pew poll found that 49 percent of gun owners favor a ban on assault rifles and 61 percent favor a federal database of gun sales — propositions the gun lobby vehemently opposes. And almost 90 percent of gun owners favor background checks at gun shows. Of course, all of those numbers are even higher for non-gunowners, but they show that at least half of gun owners are moderate in their view of gun laws. But when was the last time we heard from these people? Somerset has a harsh (and perhaps too harsh) answer: “Culture war favors the blowhard, and by framing gun control as culture war, the NRA distracts us from the serious policy questions while silencing internal dissent.”

Somerset is great at describing the culture but short on solid ideas for changing it, which is not so much a criticism of the book as an observation about how difficult it is to alter human behavior, especially when fear is involved. The gun industry has bred successive generations of new gun owners.

And once they get guns, political radicalization is easy, and those with softer views learn to keep their mouths shut. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Here’s what foreign cars have done to Michigan EDWARD MCCLELLAND is the author of “Nothin’ but Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland.” He drives a Ford Escape.

Logan Square, a bottom-of-the-market shopping center on the southwest side of my automaking home town of Lansing, Mich., may represent the future of American retail.

The anchor tenant is a plasma donation center, where donors puff cigarettes while awaiting their appointments.

Scattered among the boarded-up or dusty-glassed storefronts are a laundromat, a Dollar Tree, a Save-A-Lot food store, a Rent-A-Center and a tax preparer offering instant refunds. A poverty pimpin’ conglomerate could make a lot of money franchising these PoorMalls to innercity neighborhoods and small towns gored by globalization.

Logan Square, however, developed organically.

Throughout the 1990s, it was occupied by a hardware store, a bakery, a barber college, a Kroger’s supermarket and a hobby shop.

What happened? Since 1991, American brands’ share of U.S. auto sales has fallen from 70.5 percent to 45 percent. Michigan has suffered most from car buyers’ turn away from patriotic consumerism: In the 2000s, remembered here as “The Lost Decade,” its per capita income dropped from 18th to 37th, and it was the only state to lose people.

The withering of the American auto industry, to the point where the Big Three — Ford, Chrysler and General Motors — have been downgraded in journalese to the Detroit Three, is not just a crisis for the Rust Belt. It’s bad for the entire country, particularly workers. The United Auto Workers not only founded the modern labor movement, by winning recognition during the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37, it set the standard for wages up and down the economy.

UAW membership has been sliding down the same rocky peak as domestic auto sales. In its prime, in 1979, the union had 1.5 million members. Today, it has 400,000. Now, what once was the

nation’s flagship union doesn’t even set the standard for wages in the auto industry. Those wages are set by foreign automakers who create plants in Southern states to avoid American unions.

UAW members now build just over half the cars produced in the United States. As recently as 1999, they built 85 percent.

In 2008, when the chairmen of GM and Chrysler begged Congress for a loan, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who represents a Volkswagen and a Nissan plant, attempted to force the UAW to accept “wage parity” with foreign auto plants as a condition of the bailout. His attempt to cut union wages to non-union levels was made moot when President George W. Bush decided that the auto companies were too big to fail and sent $17.4 billion, enough to keep them afloat for three months. (Corker later intervened in the UAW’s unsuccessful attempt to unionize the VW plant in Chattanooga, telling workers a “no” vote would be rewarded with a new SUV line.)

Nonetheless, American auto companies have lowered wages to compete with those in Japan, Germany and Italy — the Axis of Automakers. Because it provides pensions and benefits that were

PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In 2014, a 2015 Chrysler automobile moves down the assembly line at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Sterling Heights, Mich.

standard in a more prosperous era, GM’s labor costs average $58 an hour, compared with $48 for Toyota and $38 for Volkswagen.

As a result, the UAW agreed in 2007 to a two-tier wage system, in which new hires earned $14 an hour, less than half the $28.50 paid to longtime autoworkers.

Admittedly, the Detroit Three alienated a lot of drivers in the ’70s and ’80s, when the Arab oil embargo created a new market for fuel-efficient cars. Ford, GM and Chrysler didn’t want to build those vehicles — in part because they didn’t generate enough profits to pay union wages and benefits — so they produced some of the junkiest clown cars ever to blow a head gasket on an American freeway: the Chevette, the Nova, the Volare, the Escort.

Today’s generation of car buyers has forgotten Pearl Harbor but remembers the Ford Pinto and so has no problem buying Japanese.

The American auto industry’s decline has invited an assault on labor throughout the Midwest. In 2012, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed a right-to-work law that would allow workers in union shops to stop paying dues.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who has built a political identity as a union slayer, made Wisconsin the 25th right-to-work state in March. Walker rails against “the power of union bosses,” but he’s not attacking

unions because they’re powerful.

He’s attacking them because they’re weak.

It matters to all of us what happens to a Midwestern factory town. Although the nation’s cultural and intellectual trends derive from the East and West coasts, its economic trends begin in the Midwest. The housing crisis that blew up into the Great Recession got its start in Cleveland.

Carl Crow, a Buick historian, declared in 1945 that “America is a thousand Flints.” He meant that the entire nation was about to enjoy the prosperity of an automaking city. Today, with its automotive workforce down to 6,000, less than a tenth of its 1970s prime, Flint has the highest homicide rate in the nation and an average home sale price of $15,000. Writes Andrew R. Highsmith in his new book “Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis,” “Like their postwar predecessors in the growth-hungry states of the South and West, the Vehicle City’s twenty-first century boosters aggressively publicized Flint’s probusiness economic climate, pointing to the city’s two-tier wage structure, low taxes, severely weakened unions, surplus labor and company town heritage.”

Sen. Corker, you win. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Restoring free speech on campus GEOFFREY R. STONE AND WILL CREELEY Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago, chaired the University of Chicago’s Committee on Freedom of Expression.

Creeley is vice president for legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Censorship in the academic community is commonplace. Students and faculty are increasingly being investigated and punished for controversial, dissenting or simply discomforting speech. It is time for colleges and universities to take a deep breath, remember who they are and reaffirm their fundamental commitment to freedom of expression.

The past academic year offers a depressing number of examples of institutions of higher education failing to live up to their core mission.

At Northwestern University, for example, Professor Laura Kipnis endured a months-long Title IX investigation for publishing an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she discussed a high-profile sexual assault case.

Just a few months later, her fellow professor, Alice Dreger, courageously resigned in protest over Northwestern’s censorship of a faculty-edited medical journal.

Louisiana State University fired Professor Teresa Buchanan after nearly two decades for her occasional use of profanity, which the university suddenly deemed “sexual harassment,” and Chicago State University enacted a new cyberbullying policy to silence a blog that was critical of university leadership.

At Iowa State University, administrators censored T-shirts created by the university’s student chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The regents of

the University of California are considering adopting a “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” that would ban “derogatory language reflecting stereotypes or prejudice.” Other institutions are considering banning “microaggressions” or requiring “trigger warnings” to protect students from having to confront potentially upsetting ideas and subjects. Still others have withdrawn invitations to speakers who have taken positions that some members of the community find unpleasant, offensive or wrong-headed — a practice President Obama criticized last month, saying that leaving students “coddled and protected from different points of view” is “not the way we learn.”

Restrictions on free expression on college campuses are

incompatible with the fundamental values of higher education. At public institutions, they violate the First Amendment; at most private institutions, they break faith with stated commitments to academic freedom. And these restrictions are widespread: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s most recent survey of college and university policies found that more than 55 percent of institutions maintain illiberal speech codes that prohibit what should be protected speech. For students and faculty, the message is clear: Speaking your mind means putting your education or your career at risk.

Enough is enough. Our colleges and universities should redeem the promise of the new academic year by reaffirming their commitments to freedom of expression.

Last year, the University of Chicago convened a Committee on Freedom of Expression to do exactly that. The committee issued a statement identifying the principles that must guide institutions committed to attaining knowledge through free and open discourse.

Guaranteeing members of the academic community “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge,

and learn,” the statement guarantees students and faculty the right “to discuss any problem that presents itself.”

How should students and scholars respond when challenged by speech with which they disagree, or that they even loathe? The Chicago statement sets forth the answer: “by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.”

Anticipating the push and pull of passionate debate, the statement sets forth important ground rules: “Debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

The Chicago statement also makes clear that “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”

Encouragingly, Princeton University, American University and Purdue University have already adopted the core of the Chicago statement as their own. If colleges and universities nationwide were to follow their example, academic censorship would face a powerful new challenge. n

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OPINIONS

BY SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNE

Boehner climbs off the tiger E.J. DIONNE JR. writes about politics and is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

John Boehner was a deal-maker who took over the House speakership at a moment when making deals had, for many Republicans, become a mortal sin.

He was thoroughly conservative in a Republican Party that had moved the goal posts on what constituted conservatism. He could never be conservative enough for his critics on the right.

His tea party antagonists call themselves “constitutionalists,” but they seem to ignore the part of the Constitution that provides the president — in this case, a president from the other party — with veto power.

The GOP’s most ardent conservatives thought they had won the right to run the country when they took control of the House in 2010. They felt this even more strongly after gaining a Senate majority in 2014.

Democrats who controlled one or both houses of Congress when Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were in the Oval Office never presumed they had such power. But the standards Boehner was held to were more exacting.

Over the years, the Obama White House was divided in its view of Boehner. President Obama, who called the speaker “a good man” the other week after Boehner announced his coming resignation, always thought he could work with him. As a member of the Illinois state Senate, Obama had productive

relationships with classic, oldschool Republican legislators. He saw Boehner in that light.

But members of the president’s staff were frustrated with the speaker, particularly in the days when Washington was trying to avoid potential catastrophe over a failure to raise the debt ceiling in 2011. One told me then that Obama might be better off dealing with a less amiable figure than Boehner who could deliver the House Republican caucus and make deals stick.

In truth, given the hostility to Obama that runs so deep in the Republican Party, and given the tea party revolt, it’s doubtful that any Republican would have found it easy to deliver. Boehner had a pattern of letting the right push things to the limit and then agreeing to pass bills with

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

Democratic votes to avoid a complete breakdown in governing. It was the responsible thing to do, but Boehner’s critics saw each moment of responsibility as another sellout.

David Winston, a Republican pollster who is close to the speaker, praised his decision to quit as a case of “putting the country first.” Boehner, he said, “always believed in governing and in pushing things forward,” adding: “Shutting things down was not his idea of moving things forward.”

But Boehner often gave a lot of room to the party’s agitators, feeling he had little choice. After the damaging government shutdown in 2013, he was remarkably candid, telling Jay Leno: “When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way, and you learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk. So I said, ‘You want to fight this fight, I’ll go fight the fight with you.’ But it was a very predictable disaster.”

Pleased, perhaps, that he was finally done with “predictable disasters,” Boehner broke out in song when he discussed his decision to leave in October with reporters on Sept. 25.

Boehner’s situation often reminded me of a passage from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural

address: “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” Boehner was happy to ride the tea party to the speakership — but to keep the job, he often had to appease the tiger.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” in February 2011, for example, he declined to take issue with those calling Obama a Muslim. He said the president’s own statements were “good enough for me,” but added: “The American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t — it’s not my job to tell them.” That stray “I can’t” said a great deal about the box Boehner felt he was in.

Boehner, a very committed Catholic, might well see Pope Francis accepting his invitation to be the first pontiff to address Congress as his career’s high point. A man unafraid to show his emotions, he was moved to tears as Francis spoke. Boehner might have been thinking of how hard it was to answer the pope’s call for a “renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity,” a “spirit of cooperation” and an environment in which people showed “respect for our differences and our convictions of conscience.”

Boehner is a decent man who tried to live up to those words. But his angry and fractious party made this impossible. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Migrants and refugees BY

J ILL G OLDENZIEL

Tragic images of refugees and migrants desperately seeking safety in Europe have shocked the world. The continent is facing its worst population displacement crisis since World War II. Its response has been far from coherent: Policies change nearly daily, people ping­ pong between borders, and thousands drown in the Mediterranean while others are saved. Given this chaos, many myths about migrants and refugees persist. Debunking these misconceptions can lead to better policies to improve human rights.

1

This is a migrant crisis, not a refugee crisis.

It’s both. The people flooding into Europe can be sorted roughly into three groups: refugees, economic migrants and those fleeing violence. Many media outlets, including The Washington Post, have used the terms interchangeably. But the difference is not just a matter of semantics. It determines whether someone can legally stay.

Under international law — and the asylum laws of the United States and most Western countries — the term “refugees” refers to a very narrow group of people. Legally, a refugee is someone who has fled his country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. No state, regardless of whether it has signed the U.N. Refugee Convention, can return a refugee to a place where his or her life would be endangered.

“Migrant,” in common parlance, it is used to describe people seeking work opportunities. States have no legal obligations to migrants — they are free to deny them entry or deport them. So when European politicians lump together all those at their borders as “migrants,” they imply that their nations owe those people nothing.

Although the term “refugee” is also commonly used to refer to people fleeing war, most of those trying to escape violence in Syria

and elsewhere are legally not refugees and are ineligible for asylum, because the threat to their safety is not specific enough to meet the legal definition. But some states will choose to grant them temporary protection.

2

The migrants and refugees present a security threat.

Yes, in theory, terrorists could exploit the same porous borders exposed by human smugglers. But in practice, they are unlikely to use migration routes to infiltrate Europe.

As Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has argued, well-funded terrorist groups have no need to embark on complicated and dangerous schemes to get to Europe. Anyone who can take a plane is unlikely to risk his life by using a smuggler.

Moreover, Europe has plenty of experience handling asylum applications from residents of states known to harbor terrorists, Iraq and Afghanistan prominent among them. If Islamic State fighters or other people plotting terrorism try to enter that way, stringent background checks are in place to help weed them out.

3

Overly generous rescue operations encourage refugees and migrants.

Mediterranean migration is driven by human desperation, not

by Europe’s willingness to rescue.

When Italy’s search-and-rescue operation Mare Nostrum was suspended in October 2014 and

DAVID RAMOS/GETTY IMAGES

People walk to a refugee camp in Croatia. Those coming to Europe fall into three categories: refugees, migrants and those fleeing violence.

superseded by a smaller-budget E.U. operation that kept close to the Italian shores, migration flows continued unabated — and the death toll increased. From January through the end of April, 1,721 migrants and refugees died crossing the Mediterranean, setting 2015 up for a record death toll. Then, because Europe began providing more funding, boats and planes to the effort, and started patrolling a broader swath of sea, the death toll dropped.

4

Europe is hostile to the migrants and refugees.

While some of the poorer nations and former Soviet bloc countries have been especially hostile, Europe’s wealthier states have been relatively generous. The European Union recently adopted a plan to resettle 120,000 asylum seekers, over the objections of Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. That’s on top of the tens of thousands of people to whom Western European countries granted asylum or offered temporary protection in 2014. Germany has been the most generous: It took in 40,560 asylum seekers last year and expects to receive as many as 800,000 this year. And Sweden has

been granting permanent residency to all asylum seekers from Syria.

5

Persian Gulf states have not been doing their part.

As Amnesty International and other groups have noted, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain “have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.”

But gulf states have assisted in other ways. They have donated to support the U.N. refugee agency’s efforts in countries neighboring Syria. They have welcomed large numbers of foreign workers, including 2 million to 3 million Syrians, many of whom arrived since the war began. And they have quietly renewed the visas of Syrian workers so that they don’t have to return to Syria. Saudi Arabia also says it has given Syrians free health care and education, and has granted permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of them.

Goldenziel is a research fellow in the international security program of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015

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Foothills Magazine presents its 4th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at ncwfoothills.com/photocontest Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2016

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