The Washington Post National Weekly - October 8, 2017

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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‘I’m going to work until I die’ Amid fragile finances, a record number of Americans older than 65 are still working. PAGE 12

Politics NRA’s reaction to shootings 4

Nation Puerto Rico needs water 9 5 Myths The Vietnam War 23

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THE FIX

What Congress said on Russia BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

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termined, clever, and I recommend that every campaign and every election official take this very seriously.” — Burr

lieve that Russia is not active in trying to create chaos in our election process.” — Sen.

Mark R. Warner (D­Va.) s recently as two weeks ago, the presiTranslation: The senators haven’t condent called the allegations that Russia Translation: Burr was urging upcoming cluded much beyond ruling that Russia medhelped him win the 2016 election a campaigns and state election officials to be on dled in the election and could be trying to do it hoax. high alert that Russia will try to mess with fuagain. They’re still investigating Trump cam“One of the great hoaxes,” he said at a camture elections. But his advice could also apply paign officials’ meetings with Russians, forpaign rally in Alabama. to Trump, who has been accused of brushing mer FBI director James B. Comey’s allegations As recently as Thursday morning, Trump off the notion of Russia meddling. that Trump tried to get him to back off seemed to suggest that the Senate’s top Russia and the Republican campaign committee looking into Russia should platform’s switch to a Russia-friendly be investigating the media instead. position.

Congress sees it differently. The SenBut the senators were ready to definiate’s investigation into Russian medtively say that Russia did three things in dling and whether Trump’s 2016 camthe U.S. election. paign helped isn’t complete, but law1. They hacked into emails of the makers announced this week that Democratic National Committee and they’ve reached some conclusions, and Hillary Clinton campaign director John those conclusions contradict how Podesta to try to damage Clinton politiTrump has approached Russia. cally.

Here are four things a Republican senator and a Democratic senator say 2. They “actively tried” to get into 21 they know about Russia after eight states’ election systems, either to mess months of investigating, hundreds of with the voter registration or underhours of interviews with more than 100 mine citizens’ confidence that their people and nearly 100,000 pages of docvotes were accurately counted.

KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST uments reviewed.

3. They exploited Facebook, Twit1. “There is consensus among mem- Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) chat ter and other social media by buying ads and creating fake accounts with the bers and staff that we trust the conclu- during March hearings into meddling in the election. aim to “sow chaos or drive division in sions” of the intelligence community's our country.”

3. “We have more work to do as it relates assessment. — Sen. Richard Burr (R­N.C.), “I fear sometimes if you add up all this, to Russia collusion, but we’re developing a chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee there was a decent rate of return,” Warner clearer picture of what happened.” — Burr Translation: In January, the U.S. intellisaid. gence community said Russia carried out a Translation: At the very least, accusations One thing Russia did NOT do: The senacomprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage that the Trump campaign worked with Russia tors said they can “certifiably say” that Russia the presidential election and help Trump win. are not a hoax. It’s worth significant time and did not change any votes that were cast.

It was ordered by Russian President Vladimir resources for the Senate Intelligence CommitStates’ voter registration systems and the sysPutin. We looked into it and there’s no reason tee to continue investigating. Same goes for tems that count votes are two different to doubt that conclusion, Burr is saying, even an independent investigation led by special things. n though Trump has questioned it several times. counsel Robert S. Mueller III. 2. “The Russian intelligence service is de4. “You can’t walk away from this and be©The Washington Post

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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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 52

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

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ON THE COVER Richard Dever, 74, drove 1,400 miles to a Maine campground from his home in Indiana to take a temporary job that pays $10 an hour. He is one of the nearly 1 in 5 Americans older than 65 who are working.

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POLITICS

How NRA weathers mass shootings

RICH PEDRONCELLI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

It builds up enough loyalty beforehand so that it can stay quiet amid calls for gun control BY

M ARC F ISHER

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shooter kills, the nation mourns and, immediately, both sides in the debate over guns fall into a well-worn pattern: Gun-control proponents rally their supporters, pressing lawmakers to tighten regulations. Gun rights advocates hang back, waiting for the public’s sorrow and outrage to subside.

And nothing further happens, until the next horrific act fuels the next spin of the cycle.

This is what happened after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, after the Sandy Hook elementary school killings in Newtown, Conn., after the massacre at Virginia Tech. This is, according to

gun rights activists, what will unfold in the aftermath of the killing of at least 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas last Sunday night.

The National Rifle Association, the country’s most influential gun rights group, counts on this, past officials of the organization said.

“For 17 years, there’s been a series of nonstop copycat mass killings, and the NRA has concluded that engaging in battle will just escalate the backlash,” said Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for the Gun Owners of America and a former consultant to the NRA. “Our supporters understand that guncontrol demands are just an effort to put points on the board against the NRA, which is viewed as an arm

of the Republican Party. So the NRA is quiet, and then, after the ‘we gotta do something’ aspect quiets down, they go back to defending freedom.”

NRA officials did not respond to a request for comment, but the organization’s media strategy is plain to see. Its social media feeds — normally a near-constant stream of tales of Americans using their firearms to fend off bad guys and warnings against purported efforts to disarm citizens — went dark Sunday and stayed that way for days.

The NRA Twitter feed had no new postings as of Thursday afternoon. In the previous week, the feed featured an average of 10 posts a day. Similarly, the group’s Facebook page went silent, with no postings through the first days

A memorial has been created on the backyard fence of Las Vegas shooting victim Kurt von Tillow in Cameron Park, Calif. Von Tillow, 55, was at last Sunday's concert with family members.

of the week.

“The NRA goes dark after every single mass shooting,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, which pushes for gun regulation. “That’s just what they do. I’m guessing that they are sitting in a room somewhere strategizing.”

When the NRA did finally speak up this past week, it was to join a growing movement to restrict a device that was used to accelerate gunfire in the massacre, after the White House and top Republicans signaled a willingness to debate the issue in response to the tragedy.

The group issued a statement Thursday supporting efforts to crack down on bump stocks. “The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic

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POLITICS rifles to function like fullyautomatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations,” the statement read.

For Republican supporters of the legislation, it was a signal that these particular restrictions might not garner as much resistance from the NRA as other gun-control proposals. The group exerts considerable influence on the GOP’s approach to gun policy, and many Republicans fear that opposing it could lead the group to retaliate in future primary elections.

This is why, in the cultural and political standoff over the role that guns should play in American society, the sides are so starkly drawn that groups such as the NRA don’t really need to jump into action when a traumatic event such as the Vegas shooting takes place.

“The NRA doesn’t need to send out their troops immediately after these shootings, because they’ve already trained people to believe that these incidents will lead to a crackdown on gun ownership,” said Jeff Nugent, a former chief executive of companies such as Revlon and Neutrogena and brother of entertainer Ted Nugent, who serves on the NRA’s national board.

After last Sunday’s shooting, one of the musicians who played at the festival in Vegas said that the attack had prompted him to abandon his lifelong support for gun rights. “We need gun control RIGHT. NOW,” guitarist Caleb Keeter said on Twitter.

But Keeter’s comments were an anomaly; in the nation’s deeply polarized popular culture, country artists generally either support gun rights or stay quiet about the issue, in part because the NRA actively cultivates connections with country and rock acts.

The intent is to build up enough credibility with country fans and like-minded supporters so the pro-gun side can withstand the pressure for gun control that tends to mount after each mass shooting, according to those who study NRA strategy.

In the weeks after a gunman killed 26 people — including 20 first-graders — in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, polls found a small shift in favor of gun control and against protection of gun ownership. But within a few months, that shift had disappeared, and the public was back to a near-even split between those two priorities.

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“After Sandy Hook, the people on the gun control side had the moral authority, and a lot of that came from having the president of the United States on their side,” said Mike Weisser, a lifetime member of the NRA who has written several books on gun policy. “That world has disappeared. Now, with [President] Trump, the NRA can afford to hang back and then come out and say, ‘We’re for self-defense, thoughts and prayers, have a nice day.’ ” Jeff Nugent said the NRA has mastered the craft of using pop culture and social media to create a base of support that can withstand periodic surges of anti-gun sentiment.

“Their work’s already done through building relationships,” he said, “and my brother’s a great example of how they do it. My dad taught us to hunt when I was 10 years old. And I hunt a lot. So they take artists who are already passionate about guns, and they invite them to their annual meeting, and that influences the fans. You see people lining up around this humongous facility, long lines waiting

to get my brother’s autograph.

They help him, and he helps them.

It’s an amazing strategy.”

The NRA works hard to align itself with country music. The organization’s NRA Country program sponsors concerts, festivals and benefits for military and veteran groups.

“NRA Country will be involved in causes that defend our values and it will empower our artist friends who promote these values,” an NRA statement says.

NRA Country publicizes its “featured artists,” a roster of 39 country acts that includes such performers as Trace Adkins, Montgomery Gentry and Hank Williams Jr. The relationship is mutually beneficial: The NRA gets to wrap its message in the charisma and popularity of its supporting celebrities, and the artists get a welcome dose of publicity and exposure to a friendly audience.

One of the artists on the list, Kevin Fowler, has performed at the NRA Country Jam during the association’s annual convention.

Fowler sells T-shirts at his con-

Top, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), left, and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) announce proposed gun-control legislation Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol. Above, President Trump speaks at the National Rifle Association Leadership Conference in April in Atlanta.

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certs that show an automatic weapon above the words “Come and Take It / Kevin Fowler.” Fowler’s song “Beer, Bait and Ammo” is a proud paean to those “bona fide redneck” necessities, and the artist said in an interview with Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze website that “if guns piss you off . . . you’re probably not coming to my show anyway . . . so I don’t give a damn whether it pisses you off.”

The cultural split over guns closely tracks the country’s political polarization, advocates on both sides of the debate agreed. “The Republicans correctly perceive that gun owners are probably the largest extant foundation of their base,” said Hammond, of Gun Owners of America. “There are fewer people hunting than there used to be, but more people are buying guns for protection, including more women and more LGBT people.”

Weisser, a Democrat who favors regulation despite his NRA membership, said gun-control advocates have failed to appeal to people who are not college graduates and people who view taking their kids to gun shows on Saturdays as entertainment, not as a political statement.

“There won’t be any change as long as the gun-control audience is a bunch of people who look like the friends I went to graduate school with,” he said. “The only time you ever had any real prospect of more gun control was when you had a liberal Democrat in the White House and a blue Congress, like under Lyndon Johnson.”

Now, the president is a man who pledged to an NRA convention this spring that “you have a true friend and champion in the White House.” With that kind of cover, gun rights advocates can safely avoid the fray, said Daniel Webster, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Policy and Research.

“They’ll put forward the general idea that it’s not guns, it’s bad people,” Webster said. And that argument carries considerable power in a country where many people own guns.

Many Americans “know tons of people who have guns, and most of those people are not going to concerts and shooting people,” Webster said. “Their whole lived experience is they’re surrounded by guns, and usually nothing bad happens.”n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Roy Moore is already disrupting D.C. BY

S EAN S ULLIVAN

R

oy Moore didn’t travel to Washington on Wednesday to kiss and make up with the Republican leaders who opposed his nomination to fill the Senate seat formerly held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

He came to continue the revolt.

Moore didn’t meet with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or stop by the White House to make nice with the forces that tried to defeat him. Instead, he huddled with Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist and one of Moore’s most outspoken advocates, and spent time in the office of a House Republican from Alabama.

The latest skirmish in the escalating war for the soul of the GOP was more than awkward: It was a window into what might be coming for Republicans next year, when hard-right conservatives emboldened by Moore’s runoff victory against Sen. Luther Strange (RAla.) are likely to target still more establishment incumbents.

It also has immediate and potentially dire implications for the GOP’s slim working majority in the Senate. Although Moore still faces a general election on Dec. 12, he is widely seen as the frontrunner in that race, given Alabama’s heavy conservative tilt.

The growing hostilities threaten the effort by Senate GOP leaders to foster enough unity in their ranks to pass a sweeping rewrite of the nation’s tax laws — which they are wagering is the only thing left that can reverse the political damage the party has sustained this year. Moore is seen as a wild card who could complicate, if not derail, that task.

The controversial former judge’s Washington debut as the Alabama GOP nominee was highly unusual. His trip was a surprise to many party officials, who said they did not hear from him or his team in advance.

Rather than meeting with McConnell, Moore was on the House side of the Capitol on Wednesday.

In a brief interview as he left the

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Senate nominee turns a cold shoulder to GOP leaders who opposed him in Ala. primary runoff office of Rep. Robert B. Aderholt, Moore said he had no meetings set up with McConnell or members of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the Senate majority’s campaign arm, which spent millions trying to defeat Moore in the primary.

“Nothing confirmed,” he said casually, as an aide tried to head off questions. Asked why he decided to come to Washington, Moore simply replied: “Beautiful place.”

In the evening, Moore met with the NRSC chairman, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), according to a Republican close to Gardner and a second Republican familiar with the talk who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door session. Moore’s campaign declined to comment.

The meeting appeared to be hastily arranged, given Moore’s afternoon remark and Gardner’s uncertainty earlier in the day, as he and other Republicans struggled to save face.

Even Sen. Richard C. Shelby

(R-Ala.) was left in the dark.

He said he had not spoken to Moore since his Sept. 26 victory over Strange.

Shelby, McConnell, Gardner and much of the mainstream wing of the party aggressively backed Strange, who was appointed to fill the Sessions seat. So did Trump.

But Moore’s pitch as a strict Christian conservative and Washington outsider, which was bolstered by support from Bannon, proved to be the better fit for the restive primary electorate that had grown frustrated with Republican lawmakers.

After eight months in which the Republican-controlled government fell short of its seven-year goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act and failed to produce any major legislation, party officials are bracing for a similar backlash in other places across the country.

“We want outcomes. And clearly not getting to a point where we think we’re moving health-care in

Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore of Alabama leaves the Cannon House Office Building, where he spent time in the office of Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.) during his visit to Washington.

Moore did not meet with Senate GOP leaders who had opposed him in the primary.

the right direction was very disappointing,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

There are strong hints of the company Moore plans to keep if he wins in December. On election night, he named three senators most known for taking defiant stands against GOP leaders, saying that he had spoken with each before giving his victory speech: Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (RUtah) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

One of the reasons Republicans spent so much money to defeat Moore was a fear that his views would make it harder to strike compromises needed to pass legislative priorities such as tax cuts.

“Good luck moving President Trump’s growth agenda forward,” Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said after the election.

“The deadline for tax reform just became December 12th.”

By some measures, Republican prospects for passing a bill by then are slim, given the existing challenges associated with wrangling enough support among current GOP lawmakers who, even without Moore in the mix, have shown a tendency to disagree on major policy decisions.

“I’ve maintained all along, contrary to some of our colleagues who have felt that tax reform’s going to be a lot easier than health care, that tax reform is going to be enormously complex and challenging,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), a top McConnell lieutenant.

At Moore’s meeting with Bannon on Wednesday morning, the two men compared notes on messaging and political strategy for the coming general-election fight against Democratic nominee Doug Jones.

“The judge obviously really likes and respects Steve, and Steve really likes and respects the judge,” said Andrew Surabian, senior adviser to the conservative advocacy group Great America Alliance, who attended the meeting.

Some Republicans worry that Moore is a general-election liability who could alienate moderate voters with his controversial posi-

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POLITICS tions and past. He was twice ousted as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court — once for defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage and another time for refusing to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments installed at the courthouse.

Bannon and other Trump loyalists are bent on repeating their success in Alabama in some of the 2018 contests already taking shape. The White House has also signaled hostility toward several incumbent senators.

In remarks to Republican donors recently, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, endorsed a “purge” of GOP lawmakers disloyal to Trump’s agenda. Politico first reported the comments.

Mica Mosbacher, a Republican fundraiser who attended the event, said many attendees agreed with the sentiment.

“They are extremely disappointed in the do-nothing Congress,” said Mosbacher, who is affiliated with America First Policies, a pro-Trump organization.

But in some corners of Capitol Hill, Ayers’s remarks were met with a different response. Asked whether the comments amounted to an effective strategy for the party, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) responded, “Probably not,” with a tone suggesting the answer should be obvious.

But in a yet another sign that not all Republican senators are on the same page, one of Scott’s colleagues reacted very differently.

“I can tell you that people are upset that Republican senators are not backing the agenda of this president,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), a Trump ally.

Moore’s ascent and the broader GOP war also jeopardizes Trump’s attempt to build a bipartisan agreement to protect thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation, according to several Republican aides on Capitol Hill.

While GOP lawmakers met with Trump this past week to talk about framing an agreement on conservative terms, congressional aides said more Republicans may still be wary of backing a deal on that issue because they fear primary repercussions if they align against the far-right wing of the party. n ©The Washington Post

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‘It’s time’ for Pelosi to go, says senior House Democrat BY

E D O ’ K EEFE

A

senior House Democrat said Thursday that it’s time for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (DCalif.) and two top lieutenants to prepare to step down and make way for the next generation of lawmakers in her caucus.

The comments by Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (Calif.), who as vice chairman of the House Democratic

JIM WATSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“It’s time to pass a torch to a new generation,” said Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (D-Calif.), seen in September.

Caucus ranks fifth in the 194member body, are the most explicit to date by a senior congressional Democrat and a member of the California congressional delegation about Pelosi’s political future.

Pelosi, 77, has served in Congress since 1987 and has led House Democrats for 14 years. She served as House speaker from 2007 to 2011 and has remained as minority leader ever since Democrats lost control of the chamber. In recent weeks, she has emerged as an unlikely partner of President Trump in negotiations over spending bills and the future of immigration policy.

But Pelosi faced a strongerthan-anticipated challenge to her leadership post last fall after Democrats failed again to take back the House. Sixty-three members of her caucus voted instead for Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio), who had mounted an upstart bid to unseat her just a few days before. In the months since, Pelosi has created new leadership

positions for younger and newer lawmakers in a bid to address concerns that there are few opportunities for advancement as long as Democrats remain mired in the minority.

On Thursday, Sanchez signaled in a television interview that the generational rift remains.

“I do think it’s time to pass a torch to a new generation of leaders, and I want to be a part of that transition,” Sanchez said on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” in an interview conducted by reporters with The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. “I want to see that happen. I think we have too many great members here that don’t always get the opportunities that they should. I would like to see that change.”

Pressed to clarify her comments, Sanchez went further and said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) and House Assistant Minority Leader James E. Clyburn (S.C.), who have been part of Pelosi’s leadership team for more than a decade, also should prepare to step down.

“They are all of the same generation, and, again, their contributions to the Congress and the caucus are substantial. But I think there comes a time when you need to pass that torch. And I think it’s time,” she said.

Sanchez said that the leadership change did not need to happen immediately but by after next year’s elections. The 48-year-old lawmaker also stressed that her concerns were about seniority.

“This is not an age thing,” she said.

Hoyer, 78, has served in Congress since 1981 and as Pelosi’s deputy since she took the top spot in 2003.

Clyburn, 77, has been in Congress since 1993 and served as majority whip when Democrats controlled the House from 2007 to 2011. In the years since, he has served as “assistant Democratic leader.”

Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman, said in an email that she “enjoys wide support in the Caucus and has always said she is not in Congress on a shift but on a

mission. Leader Pelosi is focused on winning back the House and anything else is a distraction from our path to the Majority.”

Hoyer said in a statement that Sanchez is “an outstanding” caucus vice chairman, “and I agree with her that we have talented leaders throughout our Caucus. I remain laser-focused on taking back the House, a goal all House Democrats share and are working tirelessly toward.”

In an interview with the New York Times last week, Pelosi said that she might have been thinking about leaving Congress, but felt compelled to stay after Trump’s victory.

“One of the reasons I stayed here is because I thought Hillary Clinton would win, we’d have a woman president and so there would be a woman not at a seat at the table, but at the head of the table for the world,” Pelosi told the Times.

“We wanted to have a woman president,” she added. “But when we didn’t, then I couldn’t walk away and say, okay, just let all the men have the seats at the table that are making decisions for our country.”

Aides to Clyburn had no immediate comment.

Sanchez said she didn’t know whether Pelosi could survive another challenge to her leadership position and didn’t know who might seek to serve as the next Democratic leader. But, she said, “I think I’m well-placed to help make that transition to a new generation of leadership.”

Sanchez has served in Congress since 2003, representing parts of eastern Los Angeles County. She was narrowly elected as caucus vice chairman last year and previously served as chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and sits on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. She was part of a group of moderate Democrats who met with Trump last month at the White House to discuss tax and immigration policy. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

A flood of injuries rarely seen in U.S.

BY T IM C RAIG, F ELICIA M ELLO AND L ENA H . S UN

Las Vegas

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s trauma nurse Renae Huening rushed into Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center on Sunday night, she “followed a trail of blood indoors.”

Dozens of patients already were crammed into the waiting area, hallways and rooms of the hospital’s emergency department.

Some were “red-tagged,” meaning they needed attention immediately. Names were being assigned randomly because there was no time to register people or find IDs. Huening could smell the blood.

“The air smells like iron,” she recalled Tuesday, barely 24 hours after hundreds of doctors and nurses throughout Las Vegas treated more than 500 victims of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

“You’re standing in a pool of blood trying to care for your patient, slipping and sliding,” Huening said. “Soon you’re covered in blood yourself.”

As investigators fill in the details of Stephen Paddock’s rampage during a country music festival along the Las Vegas Strip, doctors, nurses and paramedics are recounting injuries they say are rarely seen in this country.

And even the hardiest medical professionals acknowledged being rattled.

With Paddock perched on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino and firing military-style rifles onto the crowd of concertgoers below, the scale and degree of physical damage were extreme.

So many patients poured into the city’s hospitals that pediatric surgeons were operating on adults and obstetricians were attending to trauma patients.

Many of the most critically wounded patients arrived at the 541-bed University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, the state’s only Level One trauma center.

Over about four hours, it received 104 patients. More than 80 percent were gunshot victims.

GREGORY BULL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After Las Vegas shooting, hospitals were inundated with victims and hard-to-treat wounds Douglas R. Fraser, the hospital’s chief of trauma surgery, struggled with other doctors there to deal with bullet wounds in torsos and limbs that had shredded human flesh into “unusual patterns,” caused “extreme fractures” and bounced through bodies with horrific force.

“These were quite large wounds that we saw,” he said Tuesday. “The fractured shrapnel created a different pattern and really injured bone and soft tissue very readily. This was not a normal pattern of injuries.”

Gun deaths are this nation’s third-leading cause of injuryrelated fatalities, with the most recent data showing that firearms accounted for more than 36,200 deaths in 2015. Over a nine-year period, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 971,000 people were hurt or killed by firearms in the United States — with a new study finding that such injuries

cost nearly $25 billion in hospital emergency and inpatient care from 2006 to 2014.

The devastation that semiautomatic rifles cause to the human body is extreme because they put vastly more energy behind bullets than handguns do.

The velocity of a bullet fired from a typical 9mm handgun is 1,200 feet per second. From an AR-15 semiautomatic, the bullet travels roughly three times faster, and the body must absorb all of that energy.

If a 9mm bullet strikes someone in the liver, for example, that person might suffer a wound perhaps an inch wide, said Ernest E. Moore, a longtime trauma surgeon at Denver Health and editor of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. “But if you’re struck in the liver with an AR-15, it would be like dropping a watermelon onto the cement. It just is disintegrated.”

Survival generally depends on

Trauma nurse Julie Anderson talks about working last Sunday night as victims of the mass shooting began to arrive in the trauma center at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas.

several factors: the position of the body when it was struck and its distance from the weapon; the velocity of the bullet and the type used; and the location of the entry wound and path the bullet follows before it exits — if it exits at all.

Once inside the body, a highvelocity bullet causes a shock wave as it blasts through tissue.

The reverberations expand outward, causing more harm.

“When that happens, it stretches all the blood vessels and tears them, and you lose blood supply to the entire area,” said Faran Bokhari, chairman of the Trauma and Burn Unit at Cook County Health and Hospitals System in Chicago, which sees 1,000 gunshot victims a year.

By contrast, even a grievous knife wound damages only the organs and tissues directly in its path.

About half of the victims taken to University Medical Center suffered graze wounds, probably from bullets that ricocheted off the ground, Fraser said. Other patients may have been struck by bullets that passed through other victims. Some were hurt as they tried to flee — or were trampled in the panic.

But 30 were in critical condition after suffering direct hits, he said.

Across the city, hospital administrators called in their entire staffs within minutes of hearing of the shooting and mass casualties. Elite neurosurgeons were mobilized. Environmental technicians were tasked with cleaning up blood.

And the patients just kept coming — by ambulance, in the beds of pickup trucks, in the backs of SUVs. For hours, some patients were in danger of suffocating on their own blood. So many wounds resembled those most often seen on battlefields that the hospital quickly contacted four Air Force trauma surgeons who happened to be participating in a visitingfellow program there.

“They are used to seeing those things,” Fraser said. n ©The Washington Post

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Puerto Ricans fear ‘disease will come’ A RELIS R . H ERNÁNDEZ Utuado, Puerto Rico BY

C

armen Ortiz can manage without electricity because outages are a routine part of life on an island with a dysfunctional power grid.

But living without potable water? That might mean having to flee her family’s mountain home overlooking the tiny parish of Caonillas. In the more than two weeks since Hurricane Maria crippled Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, there has been no water service here, and it is unclear when it will be restored.

“If there is no water, disease will come,” said Ortiz, who is a nurse and a mother of three.

“Right now, we are rationing what we have in the house because we haven’t seen a water truck come by here.”

Water service had been restored to nearly half of the island’s customers as of Tuesday, according to government officials. While the San Juan metropolitan area and points in the south and east now have water, 1 in 5 households in the north and west — especially in rural areas — do not.

Eli Díaz-Atienza, president of the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, would not say how long it could be before full water service is restored as government officials struggle to rebuild a power grid that supplied electricity to water treatment plants and pumps. Government officials said it could be months before power is fully restored across the island — with a maze of poles and wires down and severed — which means it could be similarly difficult to get water flowing.

Generators are now powering the plants and aqueducts, but that leaves the commonwealth’s water service at the mercy of disrupted diesel supply chains.

National Guard troops and aid services are just beginning to reach some of the most isolated communities in Puerto Rico’s mountainous interior with water trucks and cases of bottled water.

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, residents in rural areas are still without potable water Without this most basic of human needs, some residents have had to resort to their primal instincts, to a time before modern plumbing.

Along Puerto Rico’s Highway 10, which cuts a jagged northsouth route through the center of the island, cars line up against the columns of granite on each side of the roadway. While it is now normal to see dozens of vehicles on highway shoulders as drivers search for cellphone reception, these drivers are searching for spring water.

Between the craggy rocks flows the life-giving liquid. Years ago, someone tapped the mountainside, installing a piece of PVC pipe that now acts as a crude spigot for the natural water that flows through the region.

Samuel Colón, 56, and his wife, Wanda López, 51, brought plastic soda bottles, old paint buckets and coolers to collect the water and load it into their pickup truck.

They drove from their home about 15 minutes away in Campo Alegre, a barrio in Utuado, where they have no running water. Every two or three days they come to collect water they use for bathing, to wash clothes and for drinking.

“We do what we have to do,” Colón said, wiping his glistening face with a towel. Behind him, his 11-year-old son Luis Ángel Colón pulled off his shirt to play in the pool of clear water. “We are blessed,” his father said.

Every half-mile into Utuado, the scene is repeated, any area of exposed mountain rock becoming a gathering place for the makeshift fountains.

In Comerio, another mountainous municipality, flooding from the Rio de la Plata inundated the city and left residents destitute. It took days before any help arrived from the central government, municipal officials said, and residents used plastic pipes to install a crude system to

A man carries bottled water last weekend down a road that was washed out by Hurricane Maria in Utuado, Puerto Rico.

Water pipes across the island, especially in the mountainous interior were destroyed by the storm. Some people must carry water for miles or try to collect it from mountain springs.

reroute spring water to a clearing where, one-by-one, people could shower and fill containers.

Deeper into the mountains, where landslides have washed away roads and toppled homes, residents are trekking to nearby cascades and creeks to bathe.

They have set up makeshift shower curtains using towels and rope.

Luis Morales lives atop a steep hill where the bloated creek destroyed his driveway, cutting him and his sister off from the main road.

They have had to rely on their brother, Miguel Morales, who lives in another town, to drive as close as he can to deliver jugs of water. There, the brothers meet every so often to cross the sediment-filled creek bed and replenish the family water supply.

“They can’t use this water,” Miguel Morales said indignantly, pointing to the brown, murky stream flowing beneath them. He said he has seen women bathe their children in the water that flows through the town of Utuado, water that carries sewage, trash and pollutants. In some places where the roads are gone, people are using ropes to cross rivers or embankments to get to the more-populated areas where they can find bottled water, but it can be an all-day operation in towns like these.

“There has been so much disorganization,” said Luis Morales, a retired government worker.

New U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams visited Puerto Rico on Monday to review operations set up by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Although some worry that a lack of water for sanitation could lead to the spread of diseases, Adams shot down as unfounded recent rumors of cholera outbreaks. But medical professionals and volunteers working with patients coming to the University of Puerto Rico’s central medical campus are on guard for disease.

“Puerto Rico needs to prepare itself ” for what’s coming, said Ortiz, the nurse living in the mountains outside Utuado. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Gaza’s latest woe: Sewage in the sea

BY L OVEDAY M ORRIS AND H AZEM B ALOUSHA

Gaza City

T

he beach has long provided much-needed relief for the 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip, cut off from the rest of the world. They come to swim, play soccer, relax, or as many poetically put it — speak to the sea.

“It’s like talking to a friend, one that won’t gossip,” said Etaf Eleiwa, emerging from the waves. “It washes away the stresses and the problems.”

But the usually packed beaches along the Mediterranean Sea are less crowded this summer. The brown hue that stains the water for several hundred yards out to sea makes clear why, as does the putrid stench that punctuates a drive down the coast.

About 100,000 cubic meters of raw or partially treated sewage have flowed into the sea each day since early summer, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked Israel to cut the power supply to Gaza amid a worsening feud with Hamas, the militant movement that controls the enclave.

The power shortage means that sewage-treatment plants can’t function.

The pollution is so bad that Israel has shut down neighboring beaches for safety reasons and called on the Palestinian Authority to find a solution. President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, raised the issue in a recent speech in New York, saying the untreated wastewater was “imposing unnecessary hardship on both sides.”

But for Gaza, the polluted waters compound the wretchedness for residents already strangled by restrictions on movement and trade by neighboring Israel and Egypt. The densely packed enclave suffers one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, and its education and health services are deteriorating as it struggles to recover from repeated wars.

“The sea is the only way to breathe in Gaza,” said Rami alHabil, a 38-year-old fisherman, as

WISSAM NASSAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Residents already struggle with restrictions from neighboring nations and recovering from wars he sold boxes of sardines at the port. “Our lives are under blockade.”

He said fishermen were already struggling to make ends meet under Israeli restrictions on fishing that prohibit Palestinian boats from going more than six nautical miles from the shore. Israel, which has fought three wars with Hamas, says the restrictions are necessary for security reasons to prevent smuggling into Gaza.

Fisherman insist they fish beyond the pollution, but some Gazans still fear eating their catch.

Gaza is famed for its seafood, which often comes with a fiery sauce. Before Hamas took hold of the strip in 2007, Gaza exported fish to Israel and the West Bank.

Since then, Israel has imposed a partial blockade, restricting freedom of movement and goods into the 140-square-mile strip of land, which the United Nations considers occupied Palestinian territory, although Israel withdrew troops in 2005. Egypt has also periodically closed its border.

“The stereotype now is that the

sea is polluted,” said Ashraf Hissi, a 42-year-old fisherman at Gaza’s port. He said that fewer people are buying because of the pollution.

Others simply can’t afford it.

In an effort to squeeze Hamas, the Palestinian Authority also reduced the salaries of tens of thousands of its workers in Gaza by about a third.

Some days Hissi loses money. “I feel like I’m just exchanging cash for cash,” he said.

It’s crab season in Gaza, and fisherman line the road that hugs the shoreline selling their catch to passersby. But this year, Farid Ashour is steering clear of the local favorite.

“When we drive past, my children keep on asking me to buy crab; they love it,” he said. “But I can’t, because I know what they eat and where they fish them.”

As director of sanitation at the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, he is acutely aware of the water pollution problem.

In recent weeks, there have been signs that the crisis may soon ease. In an effort at reconciliation,

Palestinian fishermen say fewer people are buying their catches at the markets because of the pollution, even though anglers insist that they travel beyond the pollution to fish.

Hamas recently announced it would dismantle its administrative committee in Gaza, which essentially functions as a government, caving to a demand of Abbas after talks brokered by Egypt.

Hamas also said it was ready to hold elections and called on a unity government to take up duty in Gaza. So far, however, Abbas has not reciprocated by lifting punitive measures aimed at Hamas.

Even if he does, Gaza’s power and water-treatment woes are long-standing.

Water-treatment projects have been held back by issues including war, financing and Israeli restrictions. Greenblatt also laid blame on Hamas for diverting funds for military uses instead of paying the Palestinian Authority for services.

“We are 21 years behind the need,” Ashour said, pointing out that construction on a new plant first planned in 1996 has only just started.

It will have a solar-power system installed so it can continue to treat water during power cuts.

Gaza’s environment authority classifies 63 percent of its 25-mile coastline as seriously polluted and says waterborne diseases are increasing.

“It was there before, but it wasn’t so obvious,” Ibrahim alAmasi, a 25-year-old lifeguard said of the pollution as he surveyed a largely empty beach. “Now it’s on a daily basis.”

Eleiwa, 45, and her five friends decided to risk a swim anyway. It was their first of the summer. The sea looked cleaner than on other days, they said. The nearest outlet pipe, just 500 meters down the beach, wasn’t flowing.

On previous trips to the beach, they had watched from the sweltering sand with frustration.

“It’s a risk, but what can we do?” said Eleiwa’s friend, Awatif Sukkar, as they walked to beach huts to dry off.

Amasi said there is supposed to be a ban on swimming, but it isn’t enforced.

“Our life is the sea; we are like fish in the sea,” he said. “It’s like oxygen for the people.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

In Canada, a struggle to legalize pot Trudeau wants marijuana to be legal by next July, but police and others urge caution

A LAN F REEMAN Ottawa BY

C

anada is set to become the first industrialized nation to legalize and regulate marijuana from production to consumption by next July, but increasingly, Canadians are wondering: What’s the hurry?

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pressing ahead with legislation to legalize cannabis, a move that a majority of the Canadian public supports.

But stakeholders such as police chiefs and psychiatrists are urging caution and even delay, worried that a rush to legalization will encourage consumption among young people and increase the incidence of impaired driving.

Under the proposed legislation, the Canadian government would license the growing of cannabis by tightly regulated producers and set standards for potency and penalties for abuse; the provinces would decide on methods for distribution.

“If legislation is ready to go in July 2018, policing will not be ready to go in August. It’s impossible,” Rick Barnum, deputy commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, told the health committee of Canada’s House of Commons last month as it studied the proposed law.

Barnum was part of a contingent of police chiefs from across Canada expressing concern that there isn’t time to train enough police officers to detect impaired driving among cannabis users and that if police are not ready for legalization, organized crime will take advantage of the situation to secure its hold on the market.

Doctors are also worried by the legislation, which will set the minimum age for consumption at 18, although Canada’s 10 provinces will be permitted to raise the minimum age if they wish.

Quebec’s Association of Psychiatrists has called the proposed law unacceptable, arguing that cannabis use in young people can lead to attention deficit and memory problems as well as an increased risk of psychotic disorders such as

Countries in the Americas that have recently relaxed pot laws Canada: Has introduced legislation to fully legalize marijuana, starting in July 2018.

United States: Eight U.S. states and the District of Columbia have approved marijuana for recreational use, and the medical use of cannabis is legal in more than two dozen states.

Mexico: Legalized medical marijuana in June and has decriminalized the possession of small amounts for “personal use.”

CANADA UNITED STATES

Atlantic Ocean

MEXICO JAMAICA COLOMBIA

Jamaica: Decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot.

ECUADOR

Colombia: Allows medical marijuana, as well as the possession and cultivation of limited amounts of cannabis for personal use.

Chile: Passed a decriminalization bill in the lower house of Congress in 2015.

Peru: Decriminalized small amounts of marijuana for personal use.

PERU CHILE

BRAZIL

PAR. URUGUAY ARGENTINA

Paraguay: Decriminalized small amounts for personal use.

Brazil: Allows cannabis products for medical use on a limited basis.

Argentina: Legalized medical marijuana in April. The possession of small amounts for personal use is decriminalized, but cultivation remains illegal.

Ecuador: Decriminalized small quantities of marijuana in 2013.

Uruguay: Became the first country in the world to fully legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. Users can register with the government to grow plants for personal use, join licensed cannabis clubs or buy marijuana at pharmacies.

THE WASHINGTON POST

schizophrenia. The group wants to set the minimum age at 21 or higher, ban all advertising of cannabis and prohibit the growing of cannabis at home. (The proposed law would limit cannabis growers to four plants per household for personal use.)

“When you expose a growing brain to cannabis, you actually change the way it grows and matures,” said Karine Igartua, president of the Quebec psychiatrists group.

Opinion surveys continue to show that Canadians support legalization in principle. But in a

recent survey conducted by Nanos Research, 57 percent expressed a lack of confidence that the federal and provincial governments will be ready with a legal framework for cannabis sales by next July. And 48 percent are worried that legalization would lead to increased consumption by youths.

“People are still quite supportive of the legalization of marijuana, but they want the government to get it right,” pollster Nik Nanos said, noting that approval of legalization has been in the range of 60 percent in several surveys.

Trudeau shows no signs of wavering in his push for legalization, which he promised in his successful election campaign two years ago. “The current framework is hurting Canadians,” he said recently. “Criminal gangs and street gangs are making millions of dollars of profits off the sale of marijuana, and we need to put an end to this policing that does not work.”

In the United States, 29 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana in some form, with eight jurisdictions allowing recreational use of pot, but cannabis remains illegal at the federal level, leading to a patchwork of regulations and enforcement.

The Canadian process is designed to result in full legalization across the country. Uruguay is the only country with a full regime for the legalized sale of cannabis, although a complication with U.S. banking regulations could imperil the country’s new marijuana market.

Trudeau’s government hopes that legalization will reduce access to marijuana by underage users. Bill Blair, a former Toronto police chief who is now a member of Parliament and Trudeau’s point person on cannabis legalization, said he understands public skepticism over whether the legislation will achieve this goal. But he says Canada already has the highest rates of pot usage among young people in the industrialized world. “You can’t regulate something that’s prohibited,” he said.

That is why the government plans to retain all of the current sanctions against the illegal production and distribution of cannabis. And it plans to add as a new offense the sale of cannabis to those 17 and younger, with a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

As for the push for a delay in the legalization date, Blair remains determined. “It’s important that we get this done,” he said. “The price of delay is continued deaths on our roadways, continued jeopardy for kids and billions of dollars in profits for organized crime.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

The new reality of old age in America

R

BY MARY JORDAN AND KEVIN SULLIVAN in Ellsworth, Maine

ichard Dever had swabbed the campground shower stalls and emptied 20 garbage cans, and now he climbed slowly onto a John Deere mower to cut a couple acres of grass.

“I’m going to work until I die, if I can, because I need the money,” said Dever, 74, who drove 1,400 miles to this Maine campground from his home in Indiana to take a temporary job that pays $10 an hour.

Dever shifted gently in the tractor seat, a rubber cushion carefully positioned to ease the bursitis in his hip — a snapshot of the new reality of old age in America.

People are living longer, more expensive lives, often without much of a safety net. As a result, record numbers of Americans older than 65 are working — now nearly 1 in 5. That proportion has risen steadily over the past decade, and at a far faster rate than any other age group. Today, 9 million senior citizens work, compared with 4 million in 2000.

While some work by choice rather than need, millions of others are entering their golden years with alarmingly fragile finances. Fundamental changes in the U.S. retirement system have shifted responsibility for saving from the employer to the worker, exacerbating the nation’s rich-poor divide. Two recent recessions devastated personal savings. And at a time when 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every day, Social Security benefits have lost about a third of their purchasing power since 2000.

Joanne Molnar, 64, and husband Mark, 62, seen in June in the RV that has been their home for several years, managed a camping park in Trenton, Maine, for the summer season.

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

Polls show that most older people are more worried about running out of money than dying.

“There is no part of the country where the majority of middle-class older workers have adequate retirement savings to maintain their standard of living in their retirement,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist who specializes in retirement security. “People are coming into retirement with a lot more anxiety and a lot less buying power.”

As a result, many older workers are hitting the road as work campers — also called “workampers” — those who shed costly lifestyles, purchase RVs and travel the nation picking up seasonal jobs that typically offer hourly wages and few or no benefits.

Amazon.com’s “CamperForce” program hires thousands of these silver-haired migrant workers to box online orders during the Christmas rush. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Walmart, whose giant parking lots are famous for welcoming RV travelers, has hired elderly people as store greeters and cashiers. Websites such as the Workamper News list jobs as varied as ushering at NASCAR tracks in Florida, picking sugar beets in Minnesota and working as security guards in the Texas oil fields.

In Maine, which calls itself “Vacationland,” thousands of seniors are drawn each summer to the state’s rocky coastline and picturesque small towns, both as vacationers and seasonal workers. In Bar Harbor, one of the state’s most popular tourist destinations, well-to-do retirees come ashore from luxury cruise ships to dine on $30 lobsters and $13 glasses of sauvignon blanc — leaving tips for other senior citizens waiting on oceanfront tables, driving Oli’s Trolley buses or taking tickets for whale-watching tours.

The Devers have noticed this economic divide. They found their campground jobs online and drove here in May, with plans to stay until the season ends this month. On a recent day off, they took a bus tour near Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, where the tour guide pointed out the oceanfront Rockefeller estate and Martha Stewart’s 12-bedroom mansion.

“The ones who go on these ritzy, ritzy cruises to all these islands in Maine, I don’t know how they got all that money. Maybe they were born into it,” said Jeannie, 72. “And then you see this poor little old retired person next door, who can hardly keep going. And he’s got his little trailer.”

On Election Day last November, the Devers expressed their frustration. For more than 50 years, they had supported mainstream candidates in both parties, casting their ballots for John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This time, they concluded that the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, would be no help to them. And they found the Republican standard-bearer, Donald Trump, too “mouthy.”

So, for the first time in their lives, they cast protest votes, joining legions of disaffected voters whose aversion to Clinton helped propel Trump into the White House. Richard voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Jeannie left her

PHOTOS BY LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

presidential ballot blank.

“We are all talking about this, but not politicians. Helping people build a nest egg is not on their agenda,” Jeannie said. “We are the forgotten people.”

‘This job is a blessing’ The Devers first hit the road in their 33-foot American Star RV when Jeannie turned 65.

Since then, they have worked jobs in Wyoming, Pennsylvania and now Maine. In addition to their $10-an-hour paychecks, the couple receives $22,000 a year from Social Security, an amount that has barely budged while healthcare and other costs have soared.

“If we didn’t work, our money would run out real quick,” Richard said.

On a recent Friday, the Devers met for lunch back at their RV, Richard’s plaid shirt and suspenders dusty from mowing the drought-dried grass. Jeannie had spent the morning working the front desk in the campground office, where she checks people in and sells bug spray, marshmallows and other camping essentials.

As usual, she had arrived a half-hour early for her 9 a.m. shift to make sure everything was tidy for the first customer. Full of cheer and wearing white sneakers, she shies from talking about her macular degeneration and arthritic knuckles. “This job is a blessing,” she said.

President Trump is one year younger than Jeannie and, she said, “has more money than we can even imagine.” She muses that he probably “will hand a lot down to his kids” — another generation of rich people who, Richard and Jeannie believe, tend to be born that way.

The Devers know how hard it is to make it on

Richard and Jeannie Dever, 74 and 72, respectively, wash clothes in Ellsworth, Maine, on a day off work. The couple lives a new reality of U.S. retirement: Millions must work in their later years to survive.

Social Security payments are less than the federal minimum wage l Poverty threshold: $16,240 l Social Security benefits: $27,120 l Federal minimum wage: $30,160

All figures show an annual salary for a two-person household before taxes.

Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services

your own.

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were running for president, Richard started repairing homes and Jeannie made root beer floats in a drugstore back home in southern Indiana, near the Kentucky border. Later, they ran a business that put vinyl siding on homes and a little start-up called Southwest Stuff that sold Western-themed knickknacks.

They raised two children and lived well enough but never had much extra cash to put away. After a lifetime of working, they have a small mobile home in Indiana, a couple of modest life insurance policies and $5,000 in savings.

The Devers are better off than many Americans. One in 5 have no savings, and millions retire with nothing in the bank. Nearly 30 percent of households headed by someone 55 or older have neither a pension nor any retirement savings, according to a 2015 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

From the camper’s compact refrigerator, Jeannie pulled a tub of meatloaf she had cooked in her crockpot a couple of days earlier.

“Are you good with just a sandwich?” she called to Richard.

“Just a sandwich, thanks,” he said, emerging from the bedroom in a fresh plaid shirt, bought for $2 at Goodwill. His blue-striped suspenders dangled below his waistband.

Without a word, Jeannie leaned over and slipped them over his shoulders — a daily task that keeps getting harder for the man she married 55 years ago.

A Wall Street gold mine While most Americans are unprepared for

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

15

COVER STORY retirement, rich older people are doing better than ever. Among people older than 65, the wealthiest 20 percent own virtually all of the nation’s $25 trillion in retirement accounts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Employers have gradually shifted from traditional pensions, with guaranteed benefits for life, to 401(k) accounts that run out when the money has been spent. Those accounts work best for the wealthy, who not only have the extra cash to invest but also use 401(k)s to shelter their income from taxes while they are working.

People with little financial know-how often find 401(k)s confusing. Millions of people opt not to participate, or contribute too little, or take money out at the wrong time and are charged huge fees.

Even people who manage to save for retirement often face a grim calculation: Among people between 55 and 64 who have retirement accounts, the median value of those accounts is just over $120,000, according to the Federal Reserve. So people are forced to guess how long they might live and budget their money accordingly, knowing that one big health problem, or a year in a nursing home, could wipe it all out.

The system has been a gold mine for Wall Street. Brokerages and insurance companies that manage retirement accounts earned roughly $33 billion in fees last year, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Ted Benna, a retirement consultant who is credited with creating the modern 401(k), called those fees “outrageous.” Many people — especially those who need the money the most — don’t even know they are paying them, he said.

Compared with the old system of company pensions, the new retirement system does not serve the average American well, said Ghilarducci, the labor economist, who teaches at the New School in New York.

“It’s as if we moved from a system where everybody went to the dentist to a system where everybody now pulls their own teeth,” she said.

‘The rich help the rich’ A few miles up the road from the Devers, Joanne Molnar, 64, and her husband, Mark, 62, live in their RV and work at another campground.

For 21 years, Joanne worked as a manager for a day-care company in Fairfield, Conn. She said she paid regularly into a 401(k) account that, at one point, was worth more than $40,000.

By the time she left the company in 2008, however, its value had fallen to $2,000.

Molnar said the company’s owner thought he was doing his 100 employees a favor by managing their retirement accounts. “But he didn’t know what he was doing,” she said.

Instead of being angry with him, she’s furious with the 401(k) system.

“It stinks,” she said.

As Joanne’s retirement account was further battered by the Great Recession in 2008, the Molnars sold Mark’s share of his pianorestoration business and their home in Connecticut, which had lost value but kept attract-

Relying on Social Security Nearly 20 percent of Social Security recipients 65 and older have no other income. For 33 percent, Social Security accounts for at least 90 percent of income.

0

10

20

30

40

100% of income from Social Security

19.7% of population

90%+

33.4%

50

50%+

60

61.1%

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration; 2014 data

THE WASHINGTON POST

Putting off retirement 18.6%

The percentage of people older than 65 working has increased sharply over the past 30 years.

10.6% of population

12.5%

10%

0

1986

2016

2000

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

THE WASHINGTON POST

Social Security has lost a third of its buying power The Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment aims to protect the purchasing power of disabled and retired Americans. Yet, since 2000, COLAs increased benefits by 43 percent while typical senior expenses have increased by 86 percent, according to a study by the Senior Citizens League.

MEDICARE PART B 2000

2017

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS 2000

$3,132

+195%

+184% $1,102

$45.50

REAL ESTATE TAX 2000

2017

$134

HEATING OIL

2017

$690

2000

2017

$1,701.50

$2.63

+147%

+130% $1.15

Medicare cost is monthy. Real estate and prescription drug costs are annual.

Heating oil cost is per gallon.

Source: Senior Citizens League

THE WASHINGTON POST

KLMNO WEEKLY

ing higher and higher property tax bills.

They bought a 25-foot RV for $13,000 and started looking for work near their three sons, one of whom lives near Bar Harbor, and their six grandchildren. After finishing at the Maine campground this fall, they plan to look for work in Texas or Wisconsin, near their other children.

Like the Devers, the Molnars say they are frustrated that the problems of older Americans do not seem to register in Washington.

“The little people are drowning, and nobody wants to talk about it,” Joanne said. “Us middleclass or lower-class people are just not part of anything politicians decide.”

Last year, the Molnars grew more optimistic when they heard Trump promising in campaign speeches to help the “forgotten people.”

Like a majority of older voters, Joanne voted for Trump. She said she thought maybe a businessman, an outsider, would finally address the economic issues that matter to her.

But the Molnars said that with each passing week of the Trump presidency, they are growing less hopeful.

“We’ll see. I’m just getting a little worried now,” Joanne said. “I just think he’s not going to be helping the lower class as much as he thought he would.”

The recent battle to repeal Obamacare was “kind of scary,” she said, noting that Trump supported legislation that would have slashed Medicaid and left more people without governmentsubsidized insurance. Although the effort failed, Joanne and Mark remain nervous.

“The rich help the rich, and I’m starting to think that not enough will fall down to us,” Mark said, as he methodically bolted together one of 170 new picnic tables.

Mark signed up to begin collecting Social Security this summer. Even with those monthly checks, he figures he’ll have to work at least 10 more years.

“Forget the government. It’s got to be ‘We the People,’ ” he said. “We’re on our own. You have to fend for yourself.”

‘It’s not fun getting old’ At the end of a long day at work, Richard and Jeannie Dever met back at their RV. After mowing the grass in the hot sun, Richard, who is just shy of his 75th birthday, was sweating under his baseball cap. He was tired.

“It’s not fun getting old,” he said.

Asked whether he was more worried about dying or running out of money, Richard thought about it, then said with a shrug, “I guess it’s a toss-up.”

Jeannie took off her sneakers and rested her swollen ankles. Richard recently cut back to 33 hours a week, but she was still working 40 hours, sometimes a few more.

A few days earlier, she had spent four hours cleaning a trailer where the guests had used a fire extinguisher to put out a small stove fire.

She got down on the linoleum floor and lay on her stomach to reach the dust under the stove.

In the years ahead, Jeannie said, she hopes to find a job where she can sit down. n © The Washington Post

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INNOVATION

Easing fears over autonomous cars BY

A SHLEY H ALSEY III

I

t may help if you call her “Iris” and allow her to talk with you as if she were sitting in the car beside you.

If you are like most Americans, being soothed by Iris’s calm voice may be just what you need as you make the traumatic transition to cars that drive themselves. Surveys show an overwhelming number of people — 87 percent, one poll says — are more than a little anxious about giving up the steering wheel forever. Never mind that the autonomous cars that will arrive in the next five to 10 years are expected to be far smarter and safer than the average driver.

There will come a time as you drive down the road, perhaps in the very car you now own, when a car without a driver or anyone inside will pass in the opposite direction. That transition period — certainly 10 years, more likely 20 and perhaps 30 — when normal cars and driverless cars share the roads figures to be the most revolutionary automotive era since Karl Benz put the first production car on the road in 1885.

“This is going to be a really dangerous time,” said Paul Brubaker, head of ATI21, a consortium of transportation technology innovators. “When I talk to the folks that I know who are developing the artificial intelligence that’s going to enable this, that’s the biggest challenge that they’ve got, predicting the unpredictable behavior of the human drivers.”

The era when drivers and driverless cars will share the road looms larger this year as both houses of Congress ponder regulations to govern autonomous vehicles and as fleets of test vehicles are mixing it up with hands-onthe-wheel drivers in several states.

It’s easier to predict and prepare for how autonomous cars will interact with each other than it is to imagine every move — some of them demonstrably idiotic — that a human driver might make.

That’s where the soft-spoken, even-tempered Iris may come in.

Iris is not her real name, but she is a real person (a.k.a. Heather

BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

Anxiety over giving up the steering wheel is less when the car has a human voice, studies find Caruso), and she took part in a remarkable psychological study about how people might react to cars without steering wheels and pedals.

Give the car a human name and a human voice and people who ride in it are more likely to relax and trust it.

This is not a radical concept.

Humanizing inanimate objects — B.B. King named his guitar Lucille and probably forgave her for a bad note — is not new, but neither has it factored much in the monumental transition from driving ourselves to being driven by a machine with a computer.

That may well be because the people developing autonomous cars are automotive engineers, not psychologists. They are laserfocused on creating cars that — as nearly as they are able — won’t make mistakes.

It’s not their worry that the number of people who say they would be happy to ride in a fully autonomous car dropped by 11 points to just 13 percent this year, according to an MIT survey. Another survey found that almost half of people said they would

“never purchase a car that completely drives itself.”

In other words, they won’t trust it.

“We’re trying to figure out, what are those human kind of interactions that engender trust between a human and a machine?” said Jack Weast, Intel’s chief architect for self-driving solutions. “What we are finding is the more you can embody those kind of human trust interactions into a humanmachine experience, the human perception of the safety and security of that machine changes dramatically.”

Iris came to life in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Nicholas Epley, Joy Heafner and Adam Waytz.

“When people attributed a mind to a [car], they tended to think of it as more intelligent, more thoughtful, more capable of doing the things it’s intended to do,” Epley said. “If you think that it can think — it’s not just a mindless machine, but you kind of get a sense that it’s a thoughtful person — then you’re more likely to trust it.”

A self-driving car being developed by nuTonomy, a company creating software for autonomous vehicles, drives down a street in Boston this summer.

Epley, who teaches behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and his colleagues gave Iris a genuine human voice and, as a result, a gender. Then they used driving simulators to test whether 100 people reacted differently when dealing with Iris and a nameless, voiceless but otherwise identical autonomous car. They found that riders were roughly four times as comfortable with Iris than with the other vehicle.

“The presence of a voice is really critical for inferring the presence of a mind,” Epley said. “When you hear what somebody has to say, people are judged to be more mindful, more thoughtful, more rational.”

Then they tossed a curveball at their test group. The car they were riding in got into a crash it couldn’t avoid. It was sideswiped by another vehicle that clearly was at fault. People riding in the nonhumanized autonomous car were more than four times as likely to blame the computer in their car than the people in Iris were.

“We found that people were more relaxed physiologically [with Iris] when they got into an accident,” Epley said. “People who thought their car was intelligent, thoughtful and rational blamed their car less because they assumed it was more that other car’s fault.”

With a public already skeptical about the wisdom of fully autonomous cars, reaction to the initial mishaps they get into figures to play a huge role in determining how quickly Americans get comfortable with the new cars.

Karl Brauer, executive publisher of Cox Automotive, likens the arrival of autonomous cars to that of the iPhone.

“The next 10 years of personal transportation will be like the last 10 years of mobile technology,” Brauer said. “Ten years ago the iPhone still hadn’t been introduced. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. That sort of paradigm shift is what autonomous tech will do to our society in the next 10 years.” n ©The Washington Post

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9/11 tribute may also help save birds BY

S ARAH K APLAN

M

ost years, sundown on Sept. 11 finds Susan Elbin standing atop a parking garage in Lower Manhattan. She watches as technicians turn on dozens of 7,000-watt bulbs to create two brilliant columns of light — an ethereal tribute to the towers that fell there and the people who lost their lives inside them.

Darkness falls, and there’s suddenly movement inside one of the beams, something that dips, whirls and calls out in highpitched chirps. Then more shapes appear. They’re birds, circling endlessly inside the columns as though caught in a trance. Elbin and her colleagues count tens of thousands of them over the course of the night.

“You can see the pillars of light sort of filling up with birds, almost like they’re pouring in from the top,” recalled Elbin, director of conservation and science at NYC Audubon. “It’s just this combination of awe and thinking, ‘Gosh, we have to do something to get these birds back on their way.’ ” In a paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Elbin and her colleagues report the results of their yearly tally: Between 2008 and 2016, roughly 1.1 million migrating birds were affected by the Tribute in Light annual installation. For some, the attraction was fatal: Unable to escape the thrall of the beams, the birds became disoriented and exhausted by hours of mindless spiraling flight.

Some simply fell to the ground; others were more likely to strike buildings when the sun rose and they could finally fly away.

The research at the 9/11 tribute illuminates the growing hazard posed by artificial light, Elbin says. Accustomed to traveling under the cover of darkness, migratory birds become disoriented by the glow from cell towers, flood lights, stadiums, office windows and streetlamps. Scientists can still only guess at the cumulative impact of all this light pollution on bird populations, but with

BEN NORMAN/CORNELL

Lessons from bright columns that mesmerized birds can mitigate other light pollution dangers numbers of most migratory bird species in decline, it probably isn’t good.

Working with the artists behind the memorial, Elbin and her colleagues found a way to free the birds from the light column spell.

Their success could guide other efforts to protect other birds.

The Tribute in Light first illuminated the skies above New York in spring 2002 and is re-lit each year on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It consists of 88 bulbs arranged in two large squares to create four-mile-high light pillars that can be seen from 60 miles away.

To Elbin, who was working just across the Hudson River when the twin towers were struck 16 years ago, the sight of the beacons was deeply moving. But it also worried her. The anniversary of the attacks coincides with most birds’ annual migration south. On any given fall night, an estimated billion birds are flying across the continent, some traveling as far as from the Canadian Arctic to the southern-

most tip of South America. Most small songbirds travel at night to avoid predators and exploit favorable air currents. Past research had suggested that human lights could thwart these journeys.

“Lower Manhattan is . . . a risky place for birds anyhow,” Elbin said. She and her colleagues often find feathered carcasses of those that flew into the reflective glass windows of the neighborhood skyscrapers. Some 230,000 birds die this way each year in the city.

Add the disorienting effect of a powerful artificial light, and, Elbin said, “we predicted there would be a problem.”

In 2005, NYC Audubon scientists and volunteers got permission to count the birds caught in the columns from the rooftop, where the bulbs are arrayed. They were joined by researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who could identify the species involved and used radar to understand how far the beacons’ lure extended. Radar imagery of bird density over the tri-state area on

A bird monitor walks among the 7,000watt bulbs that make up the Tribute in Light, which is lit in New York on the anniversary of 9/11.

A report found that between 2008 and 2016, roughly 1.1 million migrating birds were affected by annual installation.

Sept. 11 and 12, 2015, shows a bright-red hot spot over the lower part of the Manhattan.

According to Kyle Horton, a Cornell ornithologist who was lead author on the paper, scientists don’t know why birds are so mesmerized by light. Research suggests that it may interfere with their ability to detect subtle visual cues, such as starlight, that they use to find their migration routes.

Some birds fly to the beams to hunt insects, like moths, that also are drawn to the glow.

This is a solvable problem. In recent years, scientists have let the memorial’s operators know when too many birds are present in the beams. If the count exceeds 1,000 or if census-takers see a creature fall from exhaustion, the lights are turned off one by one until the birds disperse. According to NYC Audubon, survivors of the terrorism attack said the last thing they wanted was for the memorial to be a site of still more death.

“It turned into this camaraderie and mutual respect,” Elbin said of the partnership with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which now runs the tribute.

The collaboration could inform other efforts to mitigate the effects of light pollution, Horton said. For example, ornithologists are trying to get the beacons on oil rigs and cell towers replaced with flashing lights, which are less likely to entrap birds. Some bird lovers are also working to persuade schools to hold fall sporting events in the afternoons so that migrating animals aren’t harmed by the glow from lit stadiums.

This year, a woman whose brother had been killed on 9/11 approached Elbin to ask why the tribute was being dimmed. When Elbin explained, the woman gasped. “She said, ‘Oh my gosh, those dots in the beams are birds?

I never realized,’ ” Elbin recalled.

It turned out the woman was a member of her local Audubon society. And together, the two watched as the tribute went dark and the birds broke free of its spell — safe, for the night. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Black Monday still haunts Wall Street N ONFICTION

S A FIRST-CLASS CATASTROPHE The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History

By Diana B. Henriques Holt.

393 pp. $32

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REVIEWED BY

S TEPHANIE M EHTA

andwiched between the Great Depression and the financial crisis of 2008, Black Monday doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Though Wall Street suffered its largest single-day loss on Oct. 19, 1987, history textbooks and 1980s retrospectives tend to characterize the crash as a coda to Reagan-era excesses. And lawmakers and investors searching for ways to strengthen the markets and prevent future catastrophes often look mainly to repair the cracks exposed by the most recent debacle, which explains why we have the (now-imperiled) Dodd-Frank reforms that require banks to show they are strong enough to survive a 2008-like financial downturn.

But ignoring the events of 30 years ago, and the factors that led to that crash, is a terrible mistake, Diana B. Henriques argues in her meticulously researched new book. The conditions that preceded the market meltdown — new and complex financial instruments, technology-powered trading, the rise of powerful institutional investors, squabbling government agencies, and deregulatory zeal — haven’t gone away. In fact, they’ve grown more pronounced. “The road from Black Monday could have led to a different outcome, to broader, deeper, more coherent markets operated for the public good,” writes Henriques, a respected financial journalist who also wrote “Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust.” “Instead, it led us here — to a global market that is a fragile machine with a million moving parts but few levers to govern its size or its speed.”

The title of Henriques’s book comes from a comment that John Phelan, then the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, made to Investment Dealers’ Digest, a periodical popular among the finance crowd, published in March 1987. He’d seen market activity grow in volume and volatility, and

BRYAN R. SMITH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

he fretted about program trading, or the use of computers to automatically trade stocks based on a set of rules, a precursor to today’s algorithmic trading. Program trading had become widespread among arbitrageurs and purveyors of a product called portfolio insurance, which promised to help investors limit their losses by buying index futures when the market was up and selling futures when the market fell.

Phelan said he feared that program trading could lead the market to shed hundreds of points. “At some point you’re going to have a first-class catastrophe,” he warned. Of course, the New York Stock Exchange had done its part to facilitate program trading by automating its order processing system, allowing members to transmit large order volumes. And Henriques notes that Wall Street’s institutions had profited tremendously from program trading.

By Wednesday, Oct. 14, the stage was set for the meltdown Phelan predicted. Jittery institutional investors started to sell stocks and allocate money to the bond market. Individual investors started to reallocate their retirement portfolios, causing mutual funds to sell.

And several computerized trading

models kicked into sell mode, too.

Nonetheless, regulators and White House officials projected confidence. Alan Greenspan, the relatively new Federal Reserve chairman, met with President Ronald Reagan and key White House advisers. According to Henriques, Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Jim Baker vouched for the soundness of the market.

When the markets opened on Black Monday, sellers flooded in.

Rumors of a temporary trading halt sent stocks plummeting further. The only people who seemed blase were the folks in charge.

Greenspan flew to Dallas to give a speech. Baker was en route to Sweden. The chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the NYSE kept appointments and entertained visitors, even as the market tanked. Phelan met with the chief executives of Wall Street’s biggest firms and reported that they “didn’t seem to have any inkling of how bad the situation really was.” It was bad: The Dow Jones industrial average fell 508 points (equal to about 4,000 points by today’s standards), or about 22.6 percent.

In the days after the crash, regulators and officials sought to reassure investors. The Fed said it

would provide liquidity, then worked with banks to make sure they would lend money to financial institutions facing margin calls and in need of credit. The equity desks at Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs pledged to buy major stocks while they were down, an opportunistic move that nonetheless helped restore confidence and buoyed the market.

Henriques posits that these kinds of informal, behind-the-scenes deals, not shrewd regulatory policies, prevented the calamity from getting far worse.

Indeed, the author bemoans the government inaction that followed the crash, which wasn’t for lack of introspection. An exhaustive report about the causes of Black Monday by Wall Street veteran Nicholas Brady determined that the meltdown could be blamed only partly on technology and financial innovation. Poor oversight and cooperation by the government and the financial industry played a significant role.

Despite being panned in Washington, mostly by regulators who felt they were being called out, the report was eerily prescient. Shortly after the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, former treasury secretary John Snow complained to Congress: “We have a fractured regulatory system, one in which no single regulator has a clear view, a 360-degree view, of the risks inherent in the system.

We need to change that.”

Henriques invested considerable time in research and interviews for the book, and she has nearly 100 pages of footnotes to prove it. She has produced a firstclass cautionary tale that should be on every financial regulator’s and policymaker’s desk — and many an investor’s, too. n Mehta is a deputy editor at Vanity Fair.

She has worked as a staff writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg. This was written for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Sidel series ends in Oval Office plot

How global law influences war

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

T

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REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

rumpery has been good to Jerome Charyn’s new crime novel, the 12th and last in a series featuring a New York City cop named Isaac Sidel. Isaac has become president of the United States — a development made far less improbable by the real-life rise of a perpetually irate reality-TV star to the same slot.

In his introduction, Charyn admits to imbuing his protagonist with “the cosmic sadness” of his childhood. And what more cosmically sad job could Isaac have fallen into than president of the United States?

The winter of “Winter Warning” is 1989, and the Soviet Union is imploding. Isaac first made a name for himself as a law-andorder cop with a heart, a crimestopping champion of rent control who rose to police commissioner and then mayor — New Yorkers still refer to him as the “Pink Commish.” Hoping to outdo the Republicans in law and order, the Democratic Party chose Mayor Sidel as running mate for its presidential nominee. The ticket won, but the president had to resign because of his involvement in crooked real estate deals, and the gun-toting Isaac entered an office nobody wanted him in, least of all himself. “He’d Glocked his way to the White House.”

(Students of U.S. history will recall that a similar fate befell another New York City police commissioner: Theodore Roosevelt.)

Charyn excels at sketching the presidency’s effect on a reluctant incumbent. Aside from the monumental difficulty of the job, Isaac resents the constraints. Thanks to the Secret Service, he can never be alone. (He and his wife are separated, and his daughter — married to a cop — is a minor presence in the novel.) Thanks to the high stakes of the decisions he must make, he can’t trust anyone not to be using him. And thanks to geopolitics, he can’t stray far from “a black briefcase which held the

doomsday codes that would allow the president to launch a nuclear counterstrike.” His popularity is dropping fast, and his rise to power has been so fluky that he wonders how long he can hang on — an uneasiness compounded when he learns that European bankers are placing wagers on when he will die.

Shaken by an assassination attempt, he vows to change his presidential ways. He will emulate one of his heroes: Franklin D. Roosevelt, who “turned the White House into a Washington resort hotel.” It’s not long before the mansion is crawling with friends and political exiles.

Charyn’s feisty style is as strong as ever. This is American prose at its punchiest. Lamenting the number of near-misses of which he is the target, Isaac refers to his Secret Service handlers as “always a few paces behind someone else’s curve.” A character who recovered from a boyhood case of polio has since developed a slight limp, “as if his own body had become a haunted house.” With regard to the multitudes who want him dead, Isaac complains of having “a ghoul on my back wherever I go.”

The plot of “Winter Warning” may be too byzantine for some tastes. It has to do with counterfeit U.S. currency, bets on Isaac’s life and the loyalty (or lack thereof ) of Isaac’s vice president. But luckily, the plot is rather beside the point in an Isaac Sidel novel.

We read these books to encounter the gaudy characters who flit in and out of the hero’s life. My favorite this time is a zaftig blonde who reminds Isaac of the primordial TV star Dagmar and who, disguised as a housekeeper, tries to finish him off with death by ironing.

“Winter Warning” brings a bravura series to a fitting end. n Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World. This was written for The Washington Post.

W

WINTER WARNING An Isaac Sidel Novel

By Jerome Charyn Pegasus. 256 pp. $25.95

THE INTERNATIONALISTS How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

By Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro Simon & Schuster.

581 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

D EBORAH P EARLSTEIN

ith their volleying threats of mutual destruction in recent weeks, neither Kim Jong Un nor President Trump has seemed much concerned that international law prohibits states from starting wars. From what we know of these two leaders, we should not be terribly surprised.

The crisis on the Korean Peninsula follows a string of controversies that have strained the most basic rules of the international order: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s assertion of sovereignty over its homemade islands in the South China Sea and Syria’s use of long-banned chemical weapons.

This seems an especially difficult moment to make a persuasive case that the international move in the last century to outlaw war “has largely, if not perfectly, worked.” But it is exactly the argument that Yale Law School professors Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro put forward in their new book. “The Internationalists” is partly a rich history of the emergence of the modern international legal order and partly an empirical study of the change in war the authors say the law helped produce.

As a legal history, the book is indispensable. It traces the intellectual origins of today’s international legal order to the muchmaligned Paris peace pact of 1928 — the agreement in which the United States and 14 other nations renounced “recourse to war” as an “instrument of national policy,” only to embark upon the most destructive war in world history scarcely more than a decade later. Indeed, a version of the pact’s rule would not be formally codified into law until the 1945 adoption of the U.N. Charter, a treaty to which the United States and every other nation in the world is party today, and which prohibits the threat or use of force “against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” But as Hathaway and Sha-

piro demonstrate in richly researched detail, the watershed moment in legal thought was contained in the 1928 idea: that it was time to abandon the “old world order” in which war was a common and lawful means of resolving disputes.

When war was legal, nonwarring states could not impose economic sanctions on an aggressor state without risking their own status as neutral parties; diplomacy was regularly conducted at the point of a gun; and territory belonged to the side whose weapons were best.

The move to outlaw war carried consequences for all of these old customs. States that started wars in the new world were now violating the law and could thus be punished by other states economically or even criminally for their transgressions. Agreements concluded under threat of force could no longer be valid. And while aggressor states still had the power to conquer territory by force, that territory would no longer be recognized as legally theirs.

Understanding whether law makes a difference in states’ behavior is a notoriously difficult problem. Governments are complex organisms, led by individuals who regularly reach decisions after consultation with sometimes warring casts of advisers, each one with his or her own reasons for urging a particular action. In such circumstances, looking at what states do can tell us only a little about why they do it.

“The Internationalists” provides a great service in illustrating the ways in which law can speak powerfully to individual decision-makers. An even greater service would be to show us more about what kind of decision-maker it takes to listen. n Pearlstein is a professor of constitutional and international law at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

This shadow economy was created by the NCAA SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

Without the NCAA, the FBI doesn’t have a crime. The bribery and fraud scandal engulfing college athletics could not exist without the fundamental corruption of an NCAA system that is flush with illicit cash but denies players the basic right to a dollar.

Basketball practice opened this past week, and once again, amateurism is just a storefront for the underworld economy that federal prosecutors have uncovered, the cycle of graft among coaches, sneaker execs, and agents skimming off a $10 billion business on the backs of athletes, who have to lobby for meal money much less fair market compensation.

For years, the NCAA has refused to create an honest framework that would let players earn off their sweat like everyone else does. Instead, athletic directors, college presidents and other bureaucrats insist on preserving a superficial corseted Victorian amateur morality code in which athletes are cheats for taking any “extra benefits” — which conveniently preserves everyone else’s seven-figure incomes, and enables truly felonious black market behavior.

Assistant coaches are indicted for allegedly taking bribes to steer star players to certain financial advisers and brands, while sneaker companies essentially act as money launderers for head coaches.

None of it could happen in a free market.

Just maybe, the investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York will result in the end of the NCAA rule book as we know it, and open the market into the fresh air. As attorney and commentator David A. French puts it, it’s time for “profit legalization” for college athletes: Grant them the rights to seek the market value of their own names and likenesses, to openly retain agents and advisers, and enter into legitimate

aboveboard business deals. Drag the industry out of the shadows and into open accountability.

Disinfect the pipeline.

There has never been an amateur code that the sporting world didn’t eventually discard and look back at with regret, recognizing its essential injustice.

Cash under the table is age-old behavior: Jim Thorpe took it to play college football in 1912; tennis players such as Jack Kramer took it in the 1940s; and so did Olympic track stars in the 1970s. What separates the NCAA is the sheer size of the revenue it earns, and withholds, from the amateurs it exploits.

This has led to truly criminal acts. Indictments have been brought against 10 people for black market dealings with players, and no one believes that the investigation will end with Auburn, Southern Cal, Oklahoma State, Arizona, and Louisville, or their opponents either. Nor is it likely to be confined to basketball, or a single executive from Adidas.

The investigation has thrown into full relief this weird shadowland economy and inverted morality. But there is a bigger crime to contemplate: What could be more defrauding than to rob athletes of the ownership of their own

TIMOTHY D. EASLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The growing scandal has engulfed Louisville head coach Rick Pitino, who was suspended by the university and is expected to lose his job.

names, likenesses and abilities?

The NCAA, under the fraudulent guise of “nonprofit education,” has segregated athletes into a separate class of citizens who simply have fewer rights than other American students. “It’s almost an equal-protection argument,” French observes.

What other university students are abused this way? No one ever told Jodie Foster that she couldn’t be paid for acting while at Yale.

No one tried to prevent Snapchat’s co-founders from profiting on their tech musings while at Stanford. Meantime, athletes are economically sequestered and must work 60hour weeks in exchange for a scholarship that doesn’t begin to cover their real worth. The bureaucrats commandeer their market value and reap billions, all in the name of “tradition.”

For years, athletic directors and presidents have argued that there is no way to directly pay revenue-producing college athletes without making dramatic cuts to other sports or ruining parity.

But every new investigation shows more cooking of books and sly self-dealing.

Before he was suspended, Louisville’s Tom Jurich, enabler of suspended head coach Rick Pitino, was the highest-salaried athletic director of a public university at $1.4 million — and was due another $6 million in incentive pay that was quietly

granted to him by a former school president. Among Jurich’s achievements was negotiating a $160 million deal with Adidas, under which Louisville athletes have to wear the brand for free.

This is sanctioned theft.

Jurich’s pay was essentially illgotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue.

Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.

An open market would plant college sports on less-corrupt ground. Why is anyone entitled to dictate whether Louisville guard Quentin Snider can get a car commercial from a local dealer?

Or command a fee for his autograph, or a speaking engagement? Why shouldn’t he be able to say to anyone who wants to bid for his services, “What terms are you offering?”

Instead, the NCAA is robbing players of some of their peak earning years.

Maybe Snider will make it in the NBA — or maybe he will leave the height of his earning ability, athletic popularity, achievement and physical health behind, in other people’s bank accounts.

There’s a word for that. It’s called stealing. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Lessons from N. Korea’s leaders JIMMY CARTER is the 39th president of the United States and founder of the nonprofit Carter Center. This was written for The Washington Post.

As the world knows, we face the strong possibility of another Korean war, with potentially devastating consequences to the Korean Peninsula, Japan, our outlying territories in the Pacific and perhaps the mainland of the United States. This is the most serious existing threat to world peace, and it is imperative that Pyongyang and Washington find some way to ease the escalating tension and reach a lasting, peaceful agreement.

Over more than 20 years, I have spent many hours in discussions with top North Korean officials and private citizens during visits to Pyongyang and to the countryside. I found Kim Il Sung (their “Great Leader”), Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, and other leaders to be both completely rational and dedicated to the preservation of their regime.

What the officials have always demanded is direct talks with the United States, leading to a permanent peace treaty to replace the still-prevailing 1953 cease-fire that has failed to end the Korean conflict. They want an end to sanctions, a guarantee that there will be no military attack on a peaceful North Korea, and eventual normal relations between their country and the

international community.

I have visited with people who were starving. Still today, millions suffer from famine and food insecurity and seem to be completely loyal to their top leader. They are probably the most isolated people on Earth and almost unanimously believe that their greatest threat is from a preemptory military attack by the United States.

The top priority of North Korea’s leaders is to preserve their regime and keep it as free as possible from outside control.

They are largely immune from influence or pressure from outside. During the time of the current leader, Kim Jong Un, this immunity has also applied to China, whose leaders want to avoid a regime collapse in North Korea or having to contemplate a nuclear-armed Japan or South Korea.

Until now, severe economic sanctions have not prevented North Korea from developing a formidable and dedicated military force, including longrange nuclear missiles, utilizing a surprising level of scientific and technological capability.

There is no remaining chance that it will agree to a total denuclearization, as it has seen what happened in a denuclearized Libya and assessed the doubtful status of U.S. adherence to the Iran nuclear agreement.

There have been a number of suggestions for resolving this crisis, including military strikes

North Koreans almost unanimously believe that their greatest threat is from a preemptory U.S. attack.

on North Korea’s nuclear facilities, more severe economic punishment, the forging of a protective nuclear agreement between China and North Korea similar to those between the United States and South Korea and Japan, a real enforcement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty by all nuclear weapons states not to expand their arsenals, and ending annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises.

All of these options are intended to dissuade or deter the leadership of a nation with longrange nuclear weapons — and that believes its existence is threatened — from taking steps to defend itself. None of them offer an immediate way to end the present crisis, because the Pyongyang government believes its survival is at stake. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s statement recently that “we have lines of communications to Pyongyang.

We’re not in a dark situation” is a good first step to defusing tensions.

The next step should be for the United States to offer to send a high-level delegation to Pyongyang for peace talks or to support an international conference including North and South Korea, the United States and China, at a mutually acceptable site. n

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OPINIONS

BY DANA SUMMERS

Trump crowd shows its ugly side JOE SCARBOROUGH is a former Republican congressman from Florida and hosts the MSNBC show “Morning Joe.” This was written for The Washington Post.

Who are you? I’ve got to say that I really don’t know anymore. It’s kind of a strange turn of events since we went to the same public schools across the Deep South, then attended the same state colleges, cheering wildly on Saturdays for our favorite SEC teams, and spent Sunday mornings together in the same Southern Baptist pews. We even went to Training Union on Sunday nights.

Remember how our conversations always seemed to turn to politics? How we criticized Bill Clinton for playing so fast and loose with the truth?

And how shamefully Democrats turned a blind eye to his fabrications and outright lies?

Man, how could those Democrats sleep at night?

And what about how the guy we voted for, George W. Bush, was running up the federal debt and launching ill-planned foreign adventures overseas? We swore that the next time Republicans got in power, we would pressure them to cut spending, attack the debt and put America’s foreign policy on a restrained and reasonable path.

After Bush, we grew enraged by President Barack Obama’s efforts to reorder one-sixth of our economy on a straight party-line health-care vote. How reckless was that!

You and I always agreed that Washington Democrats and Republicans were cut from the same cloth, and that we needed to keep both sides honest. We were united by the shared belief that politicians must put country above party, right?

Right?

What happened to you?

The guys I came up with in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and northwest Florida for more than 40 years would never boo a former American prisoner of war — especially one who refused to return home until the enemy released every one of his buddies in the prison camp. Southern

BY CLAYTOONZ.COM

guys like us loved that “leave no man behind” ethos when John Wayne or Sylvester Stallone exhibited it on movie screens. So why would you even think of booing a man, now fighting for his life, who showed that true grit in real life?

But boo Sen. John McCain (RAriz.) you did, at the behest of President Trump during a rally in Alabama recently.

Mike Allen of Axios further reported that Trump has been “physically mocking” the thumbs-down gesture McCain used to deliver the deciding vote against the Republican healthcare bill in July. Did that mocking involve an imitation of McCain’s stiff arm movements?

In case you haven’t read a newspaper in the 45 years since we played on the same Dixie Youth Baseball team together, McCain got the hell beaten out of him by the communists who held him in the Hanoi Hilton for more than five years.

At that same time, Trump was dodging the draft by claiming

Do you have that kind of character?

If you booed McCain at that rally, don’t bother answering.

that bone spurs stopped him from serving his country in uniform. And yet this crippling condition didn’t stop the spoiled Ivy League student from playing football, tennis and golf. After four draft deferments, Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 on the same day 40 U.S. servicemen were killed in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, McCain continued receiving the beatings that would forever leave him incapable of lifting his arms over his head. He kept enduring torture because he refused to leave his band of brothers behind.

Do you have that kind of character? If you booed McCain at that rally, don’t bother answering. Someone has obviously failed you in your life; you probably need to spend some time figuring out who that was. And if you still go to church, you may also want to pray for all those around you who put tribal politics ahead of basic humanity.

Then maybe you should drive home and tell your children the story of John McCain’s sacrifice.

If you can teach your children that lesson of heroism, there’s a chance they might grow up to have more character than the president you now praise.

And perhaps there just may be hope for our country. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Vietnam War BY

L AN C AO

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick say their multipart PBS documentary about the Vietnam War, which concluded recently, was intended to unpack a complex conflict and to embark upon the process of heal­ ing and reconciliation. But despite thousands of books, articles and films about this event, there remain many deeply entrenched myths.

MYTH NO. 1 The Viet Cong was a scrappy guerrilla force.

In reality, the Viet Cong, the pro-North force in South Vietnam, was armed by North Vietnam — which planned, controlled and directed Viet Cong campaigns in the South — along with the Soviet Union and China.

According to the CIA, from 1954 to 1968, those communist nations provided the North with $3.2 billion in military and economic aid, mostly coming after 1964 as the war accelerated.

Other sources suggest the number was more than double that figure.

The Viet Cong had powerful and modern AK-47s, a Sovietmade automatic rifle that was the equivalent of the M-16 used by U.S. troops. Its fighters were also equipped with submachine guns, grenades, rocket launchers and an array of weapons.

MYTH NO. 2 The refugees who came to the U.S. were Vietnam’s elite.

Although the group that fled in 1975, referred to as the first wave, was more educated and middleclass, many who arrived through the U.S.-sponsored evacuation efforts were also people with close ties to the Americans in Vietnam whom Washington had promised to rescue. They were not necessarily “elite.” These included ordinary soldiers of South Vietnam as well as people who had worked as clerks or secretaries in the U.S. Embassy.

The second wave of refugees who left Vietnam after 1975 numbered about 2 million. They came from rural areas and were

often less educated. Most escaped on rickety wooden boats; they deluged neighboring countries of “first asylum” — Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Indonesia — at a rate of 2,000 to 50,000 per month. More than 400,000 were admitted into the United States.

The third wave of refugees, during which an estimated 159,000 came to the United States beginning in 1989, were offspring of American fathers and Vietnamese mothers, as well as political prisoners and those who had been put in “re-education camps.”

MYTH NO. 3 American soldiers were mostly draftees.

Between 1964 and 1973, volunteers outnumbered enlisted troops by nearly four to one. Nor did the military rely primarily on disadvantaged citizens or African Americans. According to the Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force in February 1970, African Americans “constituted only 12.7 percent of nearly 1.7 million enlisted men serving voluntarily in 1969.” A higher proportion of African Americans were drafted in the early years of the war, but they were not more likely to die in combat than other soldiers.

Seventy-nine percent of troops had at least a high school education (compared with 63 percent of Korean War veterans and 45 percent of World War II veterans). And according to VFW Magazine, 50 percent were from middle-income backgrounds, and 88 percent were white

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

South Vietnamese civilians wait to be evacuated in Plei Me in 1965.

(representing 86 percent of the deaths).

MYTH NO. 4 Enemy forces breached the U.S. Embassy in the Tet Offensive.

In fact, communist forces had blasted a hole through an outer wall of the compound and hunkered down in a six-hour battle against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The embassy was never occupied, and the Viet Cong attackers were killed. The Tet Offensive’s other coordinated attacks by 60,000 enemy troops against South Vietnamese targets were repelled. Don Oberdorfer, writing for Smithsonian Magazine, said that Tet was a military disaster for the North, yet it was “a battlefield defeat that ultimately yielded victory” for the enemy. In part, that was because the erroneous reports about the embassy assault were humiliating to Americans, and no subsequent victories during Tet could dislodge the powerful notion that the war effort was doomed.

MYTH NO. 5 South Vietnamese troops were unwilling and unable to fight.

Those who fought alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) tell a different story. Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, adviser to the

South Vietnamese Airborne Division, bemoaned that “the sacrifice and valor and commitment of the South Vietnamese Army largely disappeared from the American political and media consciousness.” He wrote of the tenacious fighting spirit of those troops, particularly at the Battle of Dong Ha, where they were charged with supporting American Marine units.

South Vietnamese forces also fought off the surprise communist assaults on Saigon and elsewhere during the Tet Offensive of 1968. In August and September of that year, according to Gen. Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. military operations from 1968 to 1972, “the ARVN killed more enemy than all other allied forces combined . . . [and] suffered more [killed in action], both actual and on the basis of the ratio of enemy to friendly killed in action,” because it received less air and other tactical support than U.S. forces.

In the end, those soldiers had even more at stake than the Americans did. n Cao, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Lotus and the Storm.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2017

24

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