The Washington Post National Weekly - December 10, 2017

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017

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Elitists, crybabies and junky degrees A Trump supporter explains rising conservative anger at American universities PAGE 12

Politics Trump bucks political norm 4

World Girding for ISIS resurgence 11

5 Myths Starbucks 23

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017

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WONKBLOG

The wealth gap keeps growing C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

tiles would get 13 and 11 slices, respectively.

Now, let’s take a look at how the pie is actually distributed. These figures come from he wealthiest 1 percent of American Wolff ’s working paper, and he expands on households own 40 percent of the them further in his new book, “A Century of country’s wealth, according to a new Wealth in America.” paper by economist Edward N. Wolff.

The top 20 percent of households actually That share is higher than it has been at own a whopping 90 percent of the stuff in any point since at least 1962, according to America — 90 slices of pie! That leaves Wolff ’s data, which comes from the just 10 percent of the pie for the refederal Survey of Consumer Finances.

Ultra-wealthy take more of the pie maining 80 percent of the populace.

Since 2013, the share of wealth Share of American wealth owned by top 1% versus bottom 90% The next 20 percent of households (avowned by the 1 percent has shot up by erage net worth: $273,600) help themnearly three percentage points. Wealth selves to eight slices, while the middle owned by the bottom 90 percent, 20 percent ($81,700 net worth, on avermeanwhile, fell over the same period. age) split a measly two slices. The Now, the top 1 percent of households fourth quintile of households gets literown more wealth than the bottom ally nothing: no pie. But they’re still 90 percent combined. That gap, bedoing better than the bottom 20 pertween the ultrawealthy and everyone cent of households, who are actually in else, has only become wider in the past a state of pie debt: Their net worth is several decades. underwater, meaning they owe more Let’s talk a bit about that wealth than they have. Combined, the average gap. Wealth, often described as net net worth of the bottom 40 percent of worth, describes how much stuff you households is minus-$8,900. actually have: It’s the value of your asThis kind of extreme inequality is sets minus the value of your debts. If SOURCE: EDWARD N. WOLFF bad for the economy. The Organization you have a $250,000 house but you still for Economic Cooperation and Develowe $200,000 to the bank on it, and opment, which represents a number of the In 2010, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely you have no other debts or financial assets, world’s richest countries, including the Unitsurveyed more than 5,500 people to find out that means your net worth is $50,000. ed States, estimates that inequality has how they thought wealth should be distributIn the United States, the distribution of knocked nearly five percentage points off the ed in this country: How much of the pie that wealth is even more skewed toward the economic growth in those countries between should go to the top 20 percent of Ameritop than the distribution of income. For the 2000 and 2015. cans, and to the next 20 percent, and so on, sake of illustration, let’s say that the United In high-inequality countries, people from all the way down to the bottom of the distriStates is a country of 100 people, and all of poor households typically have less access to bution? the wealth in the country — the homes and high-quality education. This leads to “large On average, respondents said that, in an land and financial assets — is represented by amounts of wasted potential and lower social ideal world, the top 20 percent of Americans 100 slices of pie. mobility,” which directly harms economic would get nearly one-third of the pie, the secThat works out to an average of one slice growth, according to the OECD. n ond and middle quintiles would get about of pie per person, which is exactly what ev20 percent each, and the bottom two quineryone would get if we lived in a society © The Washington Post BY

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where wealth was equally distributed.

But that’s not the society we live in, and indeed that’s not the society that most of us want to live in, either. People generally agree that if you work harder, you’re entitled to more of the pie, and that if you don’t work at all, well, barring certain circumstances, no pie for you.

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 email 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 4, No. 9

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER The campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. The school’s president says universities must change because “the standard model is elitist.”

Photograph by BONNIE JO MOUNT, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump breaks another party norm

BY M ICHAEL S CHERER, S EAN S ULLIVAN AND D AVID W EIGEL

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resident Trump tore up yet another page in the Republican rule book last week with his full-throated re-endorsement of U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, giving political cover to a man accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, including one who says he touched her when she was 14.

Many Republican leaders followed him — or didn’t protest. The Republican National Committee, which withdrew support several weeks ago with Trump’s consent, is now helping the campaign again. Even Senate leaders, among the strongest voices calling for Moore to step away from the race, dealt with the strategy shift with quiet resignation.

Now, what seemed unthinkable just a month ago falls squarely within the realm of possibilities: Moore, if he wins Tuesday’s election, could arrive in Washington in good standing with the White House — and as a force to be reckoned with in a wary Senate.

“We don’t want to have a liberal Democrat in Alabama, believe me,” Trump said Tuesday, when asked why he had reversed his decision to let the party cut ties with Moore.

Trump’s willingness to buck some of the conventions of politics has challenged many of his GOP brethren’s instincts. From the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted of sexual assault to the daily controversies promoted with presidential tweets, they find their own views drowned out and sometimes contradicted by Trump’s unexpected responses in the political arena.

In the case of Moore, Trump saw an opportunity to help push Moore to victory, and he worried he would probably take blame if Moore lost. He also didn’t like the idea of backing Moore less than wholeheartedly, according to aides.

“Trump sees the vote as important,” says Chris Ruddy, a longtime friend of Trump’s, who speaks with

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

President’s renewed support of Roy Moore signals control over GOP him regularly. “He also doesn’t like the media jihad against Moore, with accusations dropped just a few weeks before the election.

Trump certainly doesn’t like it because he was victimized by it in his mind.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has called for Moore to leave the race, said Tuesday that he has had “no change of heart” on Moore, did not expect the National Republican Senatorial Committee to reestablish ties with Moore and still predicted an immediate Ethics Committee investigation if Moore is elected, to look into the misconduct allegations. But McConnell also refused to comment on Trump’s decision to direct the na-

tional party to reestablish ties.

Several of McConnell’s colleagues also did their best to dodge questions about Trump’s judgment. “Doesn’t really matter what I think at this point, right?”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said.

“I’m not going to try to run the RNC,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she would not endorse Moore. “The president’s going to do what the president’s going to do,” she said.

The only Republicans actively opposing the president’s moves find themselves on the margins.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney warned Monday that Moore in the Senate would “be a stain on the GOP and on the

President Trump heads to Marine One at the White House last week. Trump reendorsed Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, and the Republican National Committee, which withdrew support several weeks ago with the president’s consent, is now helping the campaign again.

nation.” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has announced he will not run for reelection, wrote a $100 check to Democrat Doug Jones, Moore’s opponent. “Country over party,” Flake wrote on the check.

For the White House, the general Republican deference is welcome. One lesson for the Trump team from the 2016 presidential campaign was that the voting public put less stock in questions of personal conduct than many in the political class expected. “There’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you,” explained Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager who is now counselor to the president.

Moore has denied the allegations of sexual misconduct and

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POLITICS giving alcohol to minors, who say they dated him in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was in his 30s. Moore has allowed for the possibility that he dated teenagers older than 16 at the time, though he says he does not remember those relationships.

In late November, RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel called the allegations against Moore “very concerning.” On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump continues to feel the same way. “[He] didn’t say they were lying,” Sanders said of the accusers. “The president’s position hasn’t changed — still finds those concerning.”

Democrats plan on testing the political wisdom of this position in the 2018 midterm elections.

They hope to use the party’s embrace of Moore as a weapon in other races around the country, much like Democrats pummeled Republicans for the ill-informed comments about rape and pregnancy by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin in 2012.

“Whether he wins or loses, Republicans own him, and we are going to make sure the public knows that for the next year,” said Joshua Karp, a spokesman for American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that has taken out digital ads tying Senate candidates in Ohio, Arizona and Nevada to Moore. “Roy Moore is going to be a constant thorn in the side of Republican candidates in 2018.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Tuesday attempted to broaden the ramification of Trump’s decision to endorse Moore. “Any organization that spends money to elect child molesters has no place in the political process,” said Tyler Law, a spokesman for the DNC. For months, Republican leaders have employed similar tactics of trying to tie the Democratic brand to officials who have been accused of misconduct. Republican House leaders have demanded that Democrats return donations to Sen. Al Franken (DMinn.), who was accused of groping a woman while she slept.

McDaniel has called on Democrats to return all donations from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of assaulting and harassing dozens of women. “If Democrats and the DNC truly stand up for women like they say they do, then returning

BRYNN ANDERSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

this dirty money should be a nobrainer,” McDaniel said in October.

Democrats’ ability to counterattack Republicans over Moore may be hampered by the sexual harassment scandals in their own ranks.

On Tuesday, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) resigned from office, following a series of accusations, while a once-rising star, Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.) continued to resist Democratic leadership calls for his resignation after an accusation against him.

In Alabama, Democratic nominee Jones took a tougher tone Tuesday over the allegations against Moore. Jones praised the “nine courageous women” for sharing their credible stories about Moore’s conduct and behavior. “I believe these women and so should you,” he said to applause at a campaign event in Birmingham.

Men who “hurt little girls should go to jail, not the United States Senate,” he added.

With a week to go before the Dec. 12 special election in Alabama, the RNC transferred $170,000 to the Alabama Republican Party, according to a Republican official, though there was no public announcement of how the money would be spent. When the group pulled out in November, it ended contracts with 14 paid staff on the ground, and at least one of those people has since moved to a different state to work on another race.

“It is somewhat difficult to get the gang back together, so to speak,” said David Pinkleton, who lost his part-time job as an RNC

organizer. He said Tuesday that he had not yet heard from the party about being rehired.

Alabama Republicans had been working to make up the difference and were quick to capitalize on Trump’s position. In a piece of direct mail that went out last week, the Alabama Republican Party prominently featured Trump’s Nov. 26 tweet that labeled Jones a “Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is weak on crime, weak on the border, bad for our military and our great vets.”

But there’s evidence that the Republican campaign has been missing some beats. The direct mail piece was shared with The Washington Post by two Alabamians who regularly vote Democratic. Jones has largely owned the airwaves since mid-November, with his campaign and the allied Highway 31 super PAC outspending Moore by a 10-to-1 margin.

Even in rural areas where Moore has run strongly in the past, there’s little visible evidence of support. In larger cities where Jones is trying to maximize votes, lawn signs and billboards for the Democrat are hard to miss.

“Jones has been running a 2017 campaign; Moore has been running a 1957 campaign, on a shoestring,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster whose firm is working on the race for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“If the RNC is going to commit resources and expertise to drag Moore across the finish line, that matters. For the final six, seven days of the campaign, he’ll have

Stephen K. Bannon, left, shakes hands with U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama during a campaign rally in Fairhope, Ala. Bannon said voters could deliver a blow to “globalists” by defeating the Democrats and the media.

“We don’t want to have a liberal Democrat in Alabama, believe me.”

President Trump, when asked why he had reversed his decision to let the Republican Party cut ties with GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore

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some traditional resources.”

The most visible effect of new Republican support might come on the airwaves. The Great America PAC, aligned with former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, and the Trump-aligned America First Policies together have suggested they will spend $1.5 million on the race, cutting Jones’s advantage. People familiar with the ads say they will probably highlight Jones’s support for abortion rights, and echo Trump with the claim that Jones is soft on illegal immigration.

At a Tuesday night rally in Fairhope, Ala., at a picnic venue where Moore and Bannon held their final pre-primary rally, Bannon made fun of Flake’s $100 donation to Jones and said voters could deliver a blow to “globalists” by defeating the Democrats and the media.

“If they can destroy Roy Moore, they can destroy you,” Bannon said. “They’re trying to send a signal to every young man, woman and child in this country that if they try to stand up for their people, they’ll be destroyed.”

Bannon also lit into Romney for criticizing Moore, saying the 2012 GOP nominee for president had dodged service in Vietnam while Moore served honorably.

“You hid behind your religion,” Bannon said of Romney, who belongs to the Mormon faith. “You went to France to be a missionary while guys were dying in rice paddies.”

Back in Washington, allies of McConnell have taken to sizing up the Alabama race with cold stoicism. “It is what it is,” they say.

They have defended McConnell’s largely unsuccessful navigation of the race, insisting he did all he could, by setting a methodical plan in motion to reject Moore, attempt to inoculate the party from the allegations and come up with last-ditch ways to field alternative candidates.

But he was unable to force Moore to step aside. Now, with Trump driving party strategy, McConnell stands to suffer politically more than most other Republicans.

Not only has he witnessed his political influence wane, but if Moore wins, McConnell will also have to deal with a rogue lawmaker in his ranks armed with a powerful alliance with Trump and determined to dislodge him from power. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

GOP steps up criticism of probe

BY D EVLIN B ARRETT AND S EAN S ULLIVAN

R

epublican activists and lawmakers are engaged in a multi-front attack on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of possible connections between associates of President Trump and Russian agents, trying to stop or curtail the investigation as it moves further into Trump’s inner circle.

For months, the president and his allies have been seizing on any whiff of possible impropriety by Mueller’s team or the FBI to argue that the Russia probe is stacked against Trump — potentially building the political support needed to dismiss the special counsel.

Several law enforcement officials said they are concerned that the constant drumbeat of conservative criticism seems designed to erode Mueller’s credibility, making it more politically palatable to remove, restrict or simply ignore his recommendations as his investigation progresses.

Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, one of the president’s informal advisers as well as one of his most vociferous defenders, on Tuesday night called Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system’’ and said his team is “corrupt, abusively biased and political.’’

Several conservative lawmakers held a news conference Wednesday demanding more details of how the FBI proceeded last year in its probes of Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email and Russian election interference.

Last week, the conservative group Judicial Watch released an internal Justice Department email that, the group said, showed political bias against Trump by one of Mueller’s senior prosecutors.

Fresh ammunition came last weekend, when it was revealed that Peter Strzok, the top FBI agent on Mueller’s team, had been removed over politically charged texts he’d exchanged with another former member of the Mueller team, senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

The texts appeared to favor Clin-

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Activists, lawmakers deem Mueller a ‘disgrace’ and try to curtail his investigation as it intensifies ton and disparage Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

“The question really is, if Mueller was doing such a great job on investigating the Russian collusion, why could he have not found the conflict of interest within their own agency?’’ Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) asked at the news conference. Meadows, leader of the Freedom Caucus, cited a litany of other issues that he said show bias on the part of the FBI and Mueller, including past political donations by lawyers on Mueller’s team.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

Accusations of bias against Mueller from conservatives have become commonplace in the public debate about the president and the Russia probe, and Republicans grilled FBI Director Christopher A. Wray about those matters when he testified Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee.

The chairman of that committee has been pressing the Justice

Department to appoint a second special counsel — one to probe Clinton, as well as the FBI’s handling of past Clinton-related probes.

Mueller did get a public vote of confidence Wednesday from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the senior Justice Department official overseeing the Russia probe — though Rosenstein did not address the Strzok inquiry. In an interview with NBC, Rosenstein was asked whether he was satisfied with what he had seen so far from the special counsel’s office, and he said yes and noted that some public charges had been filed. “We’re not in a position to talk about anything else that may be going on,’’ he said.

Mueller first became aware in late July of text messages exchanged between Page and Strzok, who had been engaged in an affair, according to people familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Strzok was removed from the

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departs the Capitol in Washington after a closed-door meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about Russian meddling in the election.

job immediately and transferred to the FBI’s human resources division, which was widely understood by his colleagues to be a demotion. Officials have said Page left the Mueller team two weeks earlier for unrelated reasons.

Trump tweeted this weekend that the FBI’s reputation was “in Tatters.’’

Strzok was a major player in both the Clinton and Russia probes, taking part in key interviews, including those of Clinton and Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty recently to lying to the FBI during that January questioning.

On Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) signed letters to the Justice Department and FBI demanding more information about Strzok’s communications.

“Strzok’s behavior and involvement in these two politically-sensitive cases raises new concerns of inappropriate political influence in the work of the FBI,’’ Grassley wrote in one of the letters.

Matthew Miller, a Democrat and former Justice Department spokesman, said Grassley is part of a Republican effort to undermine Mueller’s credibility over the long run.

“First, they want to kick up dust about Hillary Clinton so the conservative press has something to talk about that isn’t Trump’s misdeeds,’’ Miller said. “The eventual goal, though, is to delegitimize Mueller in such a way that he can either be fired or can be ignored if he concludes the president broke the law.’’

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (RTenn.), one of his party’s most outspoken Trump critics, said he couldn’t envision the president firing Mueller.

“I can’t imagine him being terminated,” Corker said. “To me, that would be a step too far.”

As for the way the Mueller investigation is proceeding, Corker declined to opine. “I have almost no knowledge as to how it’s proceeding,” he said. n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

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Female lawmakers want real change BY

P AUL K ANE

P

atty Murray (Wash.) leapt onto the national stage 25 years ago by challenging a fellow Democrat in the wake of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee’s handling of sexual harassment charges during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings After the incumbent abandoned the Senate race amid his own sexual misconduct scandal, Murray rode to victory in 1992 along with a record number of women in Congress.

On Wednesday, Murray helped lead the denunciation of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), declaring that an alleged “persistent pattern” of groping women made him unfit for office. She made an all-too-familiar plea for politicians to live up to their words.

“Our history, our culture is changing so dramatically in this country, so fast,” Murray said.

“And I think it is a time for elected officials, at all levels, to stand up and take responsibility for who we are and what we stand for.”

For Murray and other lawmakers, the question now is whether, a quarter-century after the first great reckoning of sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, the culture will actually change more than it did then.

More than 125 women now serve in Congress. Thousands more work on the Hill as staffers. Most want fundamental change.

They want misbehavior and inappropriate advances to be recognized immediately as outside the bounds. They want to be able to raise concerns immediately without fear of repercussion. They want the suppression of stories of misconduct to become a relic of the past.

Most of all, they want this latest period of reckoning to not give way to the same old behavior in years to come.

“This is a historic moment, where women who have been silenced for far too long are standing up and speaking out,” Murray said.

“And I think it’s the time for our culture to change, and that includes elected officials.”

Much of the current discussion has centered on who resigns and who gets to cling to their seats in the House and Senate, even if it means suffering the shame of an ethics investigation.

Franken announced Thursday that he will resign in the coming weeks. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the dean of the House, resigned Tuesday after a prolonged battle against charges that spanned at least two decades of propositioning young female staff.

Others are digging in for a fight. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.) has accused Democratic leaders of knowing about allegations that he made inappropriate advances toward his campaign fundraiser. Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) has accepted no culpability for an $84,000 tax-

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

payer-funded settlement with a former staffer who alleged that he made inappropriate sexual remarks. Now that the settlement has been revealed, he said he will repay the Treasury out of his own funds.

Moreover, some lawmakers see Thomas still holding his lifetime appointment, while in Alabama, Republican Roy Moore might win a special Senate election Tuesday despite allegations that he pursued sexual relationships with teenage girls as a 30-something local prosecutor.

And, of course, down Pennsylvania Avenue, President Trump sits in the Oval Office despite being caught on tape last decade bragging about assaulting women.

“We’re learning a lot about what happens in workplaces, including in the White House and elsewhere,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), shortly after joining the chorus of Democrats demanding that Franken resign.

Murray’s entire career arc is filled with male misconduct. Much has changed in the culture of Congress and Washington, but some things are harder to root out.

She campaigned in her 1992 Senate race as a “mom in tennis shoes” — a label that stuck and came to epitomize a low-wattage but hardworking style that has produced a litany of important bipartisan legislation over the past five years.

Actually, that label came from a 1980 interaction with a male lawmaker in the state capital when she was lobbying against proposed education cuts. “You’re just a mom in tennis shoes,” the lawmaker said.

Then, after watching Anita Hill’s testimony in the fall of 1991 against Thomas, Murray jumped into the primary against then-Sen. Brock Adams (D), believing that only women could change the Senate culture. By March, Adams withdrew from the race in disgrace after allegations that he had sexual encounters

Sen. Patty Murray (DWash.), front, has been a leading voice against sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill since winning office in 1992. In the wake of allegations against male lawmakers, she says she expects zero tolerance.

Sen. Al Franken (DMinn.), top, and Rep. John Conyers Jr. ( DMich.) both announced last week that they planned to step down following several sexual harassment allegations.

with women after drugging them.

“Next January, I’m going to take my tennis shoes back to the United States Senate,” Murray told a cheering crowd the night she won the nomination.

In early 1994, Murray had her own run-in with sexual harassment on the Hill, according to “Women on the Hill,” the Clara Bingham book about how female lawmakers dealt with the culture. Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, then 91 and the longest-serving senator, put his arm around Murray and cupped her breast in the senators-only elevator.

“Are you married, little lady?” Thurmond asked.

Other female senators wanted Murray to expose Thurmond, but, after staff-to-staff communication, Thurmond apologized to Murray, according to Bingham’s account. In a 1996 interview for that book, Murray denied that she was accosted. “I think he was merely hanging on tighter than he should have been,” she said at the time.

In 1995, Bob Packwood was pushed out of the Senate over similar allegations as those waged against Adams, but over the next two decades, the powder keg of sexual harassment receded from the headlines.

There were instances of misbehavior. One senator was arrested in a sex sting in a men’s airport restroom. One was accused of hiring prostitutes. Another had an affair with his wife’s best friend. A male House member was caught sending explicit instant messages to underage male pages. Former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert served a prison term for paying hush money to a man that he sexually abused as a teenager.

But they were isolated and unique to those accused, giving the Capitol a false sense that everything was just fine with the other congressional offices.

Then came Trump’s campaign. Then came the reports against Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation in Hollywood. A bipartisan collection of female lawmakers — led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Reps. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) — warned that predators roamed the halls of Congress, too.

They passed resolutions demanding mandatory training for lawmakers and staff. Then the stories burst into the open — in both parties and in both the House and the Senate.

Murray is now the highest-ranking woman in Senate leadership. Her voice carries great weight on most issues, including this one. This time, Murray expects zero tolerance to really mean something.

“It means that we have to hold people accountable for their behavior that is not acceptable to us,” she said. n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Life after tax cuts a lot like life before T ODD C . F RANKEL Burlington, N.C. BY

F

or a peek into a world after a massive tax cut, visit North Carolina and ride along with factory owner Eric Henry.

Conservative groups have hailed North Carolina as a model of a tax overhaul since it began slashing state corporate and individual tax rates four years ago.

And one of the effort’s main architects, Thom Tillis, is now in the U.S. Senate, where last week he joined 50 other Republican senators in voting for a $1.5 trillion federal tax overhaul — a plan that employs many of the same tactics already in use here.

But as Henry drove through the conservative, rural county he’s called home all his life, he had trouble seeing many benefits of the tax cut. Business was good, but it wasn’t good enough that he could give his 20 workers significant raises.

“I don’t know the people who this benefits,” Henry said of the North Carolina tax cut.

Changing the national tax code is much different from changing a state’s code. But what’s happening today in North Carolina offers potential clues about the grand experiment with tax cuts the entire nation is close to embarking on, with Republicans appearing confident they can send final legislation to President Trump by year’s end.

The tax changes in North Carolina haven’t produced the fiscal calamity that led Republican legislators in Kansas this year to reverse dramatic cuts they passed a few years earlier, but nor have they produced the kind of winfor-all economic prosperity national Republicans say their effort will spur.

Instead, North Carolina has enjoyed the same steady growth as much of the country, making it challenging to estimate the effect of the tax cut compared with the many other factors shaping the state’s economy.

“There’s nothing magical that has happened in North Carolina,” said John Quinterno, an eco-

PHOTOS BY MADELINE GRAY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

N.C. slashed rates in 2013, but many still waiting to see the benefits nomic analyst at the Chapel Hillbased research group South by North Strategies.

Henry, 60, runs a T-shirt manufacturer called TS Designs, which sources all its material locally. His company almost went belly up in the mid-1990s when free-trade pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the borders to cheap foreign textiles.

Henry knew he couldn’t compete on price. So he rebuilt his business around selling a higher-quality, locally made product instead.

He’s been doing well in recent years. This summer, the company notched its best production month ever, allowing Henry to pay a bonus to his workers. He says the nation’s overall strong

economy is what benefits him.

Henry was driving one day a few weeks ago to give a talk at nearby Elon University. It was on campus that Henry ran into Jason Cox, 37, who owns several Jimmy John’s franchises and commercial real estate projects. Henry asked Cox whether he’d seen a benefit from the tax cuts.

“Not really,” Cox replied.

Cox said the cost of health insurance and regulations loom much larger for him than taxes. Taxes, he said, enjoy “an over-exaggerated role in our decision-making.”

State cuts — and a warning Taxes have long been targeted by many conservatives as obstacles to economic growth.

Eric Henry, owner of TS Designs, stands in the facility where he prints T-shirts in Burlington, N.C. He said he has felt little effect from the state tax cuts Republicans enacted there beginning in 2013.

In 2013, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina started rolling back taxes.

The then-governor labeled it the “Carolina Comeback” and sold the plan as a way to energize a state economy growing sluggishly after the Great Recession.

The corporate rate dropped in steps from 6.9 percent to just 3 percent this year, the lowest in the nation among states that have such a tax. The rate is set to fall to 2.5 percent in two years.

Personal income tax went from a progressive rate that topped out at 7.75 percent to a flat 5.75 percent. This year, it fell again to 5.49 percent.

The state also abolished its estate tax and expanded the sales

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NATION tax to include more services, such as ticket sales and auto repairs.

“I think North Carolina is an example of successful tax reform,” said Jared Walczak, a senior policy analyst at the right-leaning Tax Foundation.

He praised the state for not only lowering rates but eliminating preferential rates for certain industries, creating a more neutral tax code.

Supporters boast that just last month, North Carolina was named No. 1 on Forbes’s annual list of the most business-friendly states. That was a first, although it was just a moderate improvement from earlier years, when it has finished in the top five.

“Generally, it’s part of what’s helped our economy to bounce back,” Lew Ebert, president of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, said of the new tax structure.

North Carolina’s recent history as a tax-cutting state is much less known — and much less turbulent — than Kansas’s.

A year before North Carolina launched its overhaul, Kansas’s Republican-dominated legislature cut rates, with Gov. Sam Brownback (R) predicting an “adrenaline shot” of economic growth. He openly described it as an experiment on the pro-growth strategies touted by conservative think tanks and politicians.

“It didn’t work well for Kansas,” said Jason DeBacker, an assistant professor of economics at the University of South Carolina who co-authored a study that used tax return data to find that Kansas’s strategy generated almost no new economic activity.

“We struggled to find anything,” DeBacker said.

What researchers did find was that the state’s tax coffers were hit hard.

“The net effect is the state is reeling from a huge budget deficit,” said Wally Meyer, director of entrepreneurship programs at the University of Kansas’s business school.

In June, Republican lawmakers raised taxes — even overriding a governor’s veto — to close a $900 million hole in the state budget.

So far, North Carolina has fared better.

The state economy and the number of new jobs have grown slightly faster than in the nation

While North Carolina’s economy has chugged along, signs of strain on state spending have increased. at large since the tax cuts began, said Michael Walden, an economics professor at North Carolina State University.

“My own sense is that the corporate tax rate cuts did help, but both tax and nontax factors were important,” Walden said.

But even if the top-line numbers have improved, workers have not seen huge benefits. The median hourly wage in North Carolina grew roughly on par with the national rate, while the average hourly wage and annual wage grew notably slower, according the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Henry said he supports policies that make running a business easier. He’s fiscally conservative, and he considered himself a Republican until he switched parties in recent years when the state GOP party increasingly took stances on social issues — pushing a samesex marriage ban and the transgender “bathroom bill” — that he disagreed with.

As Henry drove, he called other people he knew. One of them, a local architect named John Plageman, said he’d seen a spike in new business this year.

“I’d assume it has something to do with the tax cuts,” Plageman said.

And he was excited by the prospect of federal tax cuts.

Eating lunch at Reverence Farms Café in nearby Graham, Henry sat with Bruce Nelson, who runs the cafe and a local farm with his daughter and son-in-law. In a different life, Nelson was chief executive of Office Depot. He said he understood why Wall Street was so excited about tax reform.

“It’s all about earnings per share,” Nelson said. Lower taxes mean higher earnings.

But Nelson said he doubted the cuts would generate significant corporate investment. Companies already need to be ruthless about lowering costs. He couldn’t imagine a company waiting for a tax cut to become more efficient.

And he didn’t expect the tax cuts to translate into pay raises.

“There’s no such thing as trickle-down,” Nelson said.

Cuts all around While North Carolina’s economy has chugged along, signs of strain on state spending have increased.

The streets of downtown Burlington, N.C., are empty on a Sunday in December. The state abolished its estate tax and expanded the sales tax to include more services, such as ticket sales and auto repairs.

KLMNO WEEKLY

The state budget has not kept pace with a growing population, said Alexandra Sirota, director of the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, a left-leaning nonprofit.

“Pretty soon, we’re not going to have enough money,” Sirota said.

The state legislature’s Fiscal Research Division agrees. It projects budget shortfalls of at least $1.2 billion starting in 2019.

The squeeze has already hit public schools.

In North Carolina, the state government provides the bulk of public education funding. And while the overall contribution is up, per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, is down. Plus, there are about 10,000 fewer public school teachers in the state, despite growing enrollment, said Mark Jewell of the North Carolina Association of Educators.

The school system serving Burlington is struggling, said Alamance-Burlington Schools superintendent Bill Harrison.

Anyone claiming schools are better off after the tax cuts is “using smoke and mirrors,” Harrison said.

Harrison rattled off a string of numbers to make his point. Funding for school supplies has dropped 20 percent, he said. His schools get 33 percent less money for textbooks now than a decade ago.

“I heard it every year: Why doesn’t my child have a textbook?” Harrison said.

Henry’s wife, Lisa, taught preschool for children with disabilities for almost three decades. She retired in 2015 after watching several years in which state lawmakers made cuts to public schools, including by underfunding teacher pay raises.

“It just felt like a huge slap in the face,” Lisa Henry said.

As the sun started to set, Henry drove back to his company. Just a few employees were still around.

None of them said they’d noticed the state tax cuts.

“Other than the roads not getting taken care of,” said Eric Michel, 33, chief logistics officer.

And no one in the office has gotten a big pay raise since the tax cut, either.

Henry hoped that if the company kept growing, that the orders kept coming in, he could afford to pay his workers more.

“But the seeds for that were planted long ago,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

In Europe, troops battle burnout M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM Brussels BY

G

reen army trucks are rumbling across the cobbled streets of Brussels. Stiffspined soldiers are patrolling the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

Italian troops are guarding the Colosseum. And critics say the years-long deployments at home are sapping the ability of these militaries to fight wars.

Taken together, the domestic deployments — to guard against terrorism — are among the largest in Western Europe since World War II. They come as European militaries are tapped to address an unusually wide range of challenges at once: a resurgent Russia, grinding conflicts in the Middle East, migration across the Mediterranean and smaller wartime deployments far from their borders.

Confronted by terrorism, European leaders rushed their armies onto their streets in the aftermath of attacks starting in 2015. Although advocates say the deployments help bolster security, the peacetime duty has stretched forces thin.

Until recently, 40 percent of Belgium’s combat-ready soldiers were devoted to domestic guard duty. Some officers worry that the lack of time to practice warfare means basic skills are getting rusty. In France, the former leader of the military said last month that he quit in July in part to protest that his forces were “overheating.”

President Trump has pressed NATO allies to commit more toward their own defense and to international missions, but the domestic deployments have made that a challenge. The latest sign came last month at a meeting of defense chiefs in Brussels, when the alliance fell short on pledges toward the NATO training operation in Afghanistan.

In Belgium, a country of 11 million people, military leaders say their troops are feeling the strain.

“I had machine gunners with the rifle section who didn’t fire a machine gun in 16 months because they had become riflemen,”

CHRISTIAN HARTMANN/POOL/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY/EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Domestic deployments strain armies and officers get out of practice for real conflict, critics say said Maj. Gen. Marc Thys, commander of Belgium’s land forces.

Until October, 1,250 Belgian soldiers were deployed across the country, guarding grand boulevards, train stations and other crowded public places that make tempting targets. The intention was to increase public safety and to give police officers more freedom to do investigative work rather than tie them up on guard duty.

The domestic deployments came as European nations struggled to find a way to protect themselves against attacks in a new era of terrorism strategies. Some recent Islamic State-inspired strikes used explosives and required large networks that could be disrupted through aggressive counterterrorism work, but other attacks were as simple as renting a truck and plowing it into a crowd.

Proponents of the military approach say that such attacks can be prevented by quick-thinking soldiers. They point to June’s attempted attack in the Brussels Central railway station, where sol-

diers patrolling the platforms shot dead a suspected bomber after he set off a small explosive that failed to hurt anyone.

“We weren’t ready for the threats that we were facing,” Belgian Defense Minister Steven Vandeput said about the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Both the January Charlie Hebdo newspaper attack and the November Bataclan nightclub attack that year had Brussels connections, and authorities were searching for a quick solution.

In Belgium, the soldiers do not have the power to make arrests or investigate crimes. Advocates say their powerful rifles serve as a deterrent as they walk through crowded weekend markets or stand watch at train stations during rush hour.

“Some countries are used to violence and terrorism. We were not used to that type of violence,” said Saad Amrani, a senior policy adviser with the Belgian Federal Police.

But because the number of war-

A soldier stands guard at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In recent years, European nations have rushed their armies onto the streets following terrorism attacks.

Some say the peacetime duties stretch forces thin.

ready Belgian soldiers is small, that meant that many troops were deploying up to six months a year.

Even during a domestic assignment, troops do not live on base with their families. Instead, they patrol for long hours and, they say, they have few chances to rest.

Some have complained of cramped barracks and poor bathroom facilities, a consequence of the crunched budget.

Critics of the deployment also say that the security value is limited. The real reason soldiers are on the streets, some of them say, is to give Belgian citizens the feeling their leaders are fighting terrorism. The deployment has been popular, sending the domestic approval ratings of the military skyrocketing.

“They’ve been standing in front of buildings, doing everything other than what they trained for,” said Wally Struys, a professor emeritus of defense economics at Belgium’s Royal Military Academy, who has studied the deployments. “These are very good PR operations.”

Belgian defense leaders point to military deployments in Mali, Lithuania, Afghanistan and elsewhere as evidence that their nation is still active in the world.

Larger militaries have also felt the burden when soldiers have been sent into the streets.

“The number of missions that fall to our armies both in France and around the world has not been so high since the end of the Algerian War” in 1962, wrote French Gen. Pierre de Villiers in a memoir released last month. He was the commander of France’s armed forces until he resigned in July following a dispute with French President Emmanuel Macron.

“The French Army is now in a real state of overheating,” de Villiers wrote.

The consequences can be dangerous, retired French Gen. Vincent Desportes said.

“The guys underneath the Eiffel Tower are trained for what they do, individually. But if we are faced with a big situation globally, then we will not be ready because we are not trained enough,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Few celebrate end of ISIS ‘caliphate’

BY T AMER E L- G HOBASHY, M USTAFA S ALIM AND L OUISA L OVELUCK

Baghdad

E

very day for more than three years, the U.S.-led coalition bombed Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, for a total of nearly 30,000 strikes. But on Nov. 26, not a single airstrike was launched.

Just a week earlier, Iraq’s military had won back the last sliver of territory controlled by the militants. The Pentagon has announced that 400 Marines deployed to Syria to fight them will be returning home.

Those milestones appear to mark the Islamic State’s defeat, with the end of its self-declared caliphate. But the battle isn’t over.

Iraqi and Syrian forces have yet to secure their porous border, which the Islamic State’s ministate once spanned, and are still chasing militants in canyon-filled deserts. Nor has the U.S. military determined its role now that major combat is over, although American and Iraqi officials have suggested a major drawdown of U.S. troops is possible.

Most urgently, Iraq and Syria are girding for a wave of terrorist violence, such as the attack that killed more than 300 people at a mosque in northern Sinai in Egypt in late November.

Iraqi forces are transitioning into policing roles that will call for them to gather intelligence and break up sleeper cells. U.S. forces are assisting by working with police forces and army units tasked with preventing the militants from staging attacks in places they once held, said Col. Ryan Dillon, the spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State.

“We fully expect them to go back to their insurgent roots,” he said.

But the unpredictable politics of Iraq and Syria, and rivalries over territory, could derail counterterrorism efforts.

In Iraq, an elite U.S.-trained counterterrorism force has been drawn into a political and military standoff between the Iraqi government and a Kurdish effort

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Iraq and Syria gird for a wave of terrorist attacks as the group returns to its ‘insurgent roots’ to secede. The force’s units were expected to return to their provincial headquarters throughout Iraq as the battle against the Islamic State wound down. Instead, they have been scattered across northern Iraq to areas disputed by Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government, said Lt. Gen. Sami al-Aridhi, the commander of one of the three divisions of the force.

Resolving the crisis would allow the counterterrorism units to return to their designated role as a bulwark against Islamic State attacks, such as one in September that killed more than 80 Shiite pilgrims in southern Iraq. Such assaults underscore the sustained threat posed by the Islamic State despite its territorial losses.

Iraq’s army and allied Shiite militias have cleared about 5,400 square miles of desert in western Iraq, but about that much still must be secured, Iraqi commanders said. The area includes smuggling routes and militant hideouts that Iraqi forces are reaching for the first time in 14 years, said Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Mohammadi, the

commander of western Anbar province operations.

The presence of American forces in Iraq has long rankled Iranbacked Shiite militias, and their leaders have demanded a withdrawal now that the Islamic State’s caliphate has been toppled. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said he expects the American troops to begin drawing down from the peak of 5,200 earlier this year but wants some to stay to continue training Iraqi forces in intelligence-gathering and information-sharing.

Abadi said Iraq will not celebrate victory over the Islamic State until the militants are routed in the western desert and the border with Syria is sealed.

The outlook in Syria is far murkier. The Trump administration has indicated that American forces could have an open-ended mission there until a political solution to Syria’s war is worked out. That halting process involves Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies, and U.S.-backed opposition groups.

Iraqi armored vehicles advance last month in Anbar province, along the Syrian frontier. Iraq and Syria have yet to secure their porous border, which the Islamic State’s ministate once spanned. And their forces continue to chase militants across the desert.

Experts and rebel commanders warn that the Islamic State remains a potent threat in Syria and that the country’s fractured political climate could help the militants regroup.

“Governments like to talk about ISIS in terms of metrics, numbers, cities taken. What we forget is that ISIS is more than a presence on the ground. It is a political force, an ideological force, and it says something about the world that people across Syria and Iraq have been living in,” said Tobias Schneider, an international security analyst, using another name for the Islamic State. “We are not one step closer to solving those politics.”

As Assad’s government recaptures territory, the most unpopular components of its rule are in place. Tens of thousands of people remain in squalid government jails, and economic inequalities have been sharpened by a war economy that rewards government loyalists as much of the population relies on aid handouts.

“Terrorist groups will not disappear while the conditions that allowed them to flourish are still here,” said Mustafa Sejari, an official with the Pentagon-backed alMutasim Brigade, a rebel group fighting the Islamic State. Now stationed in a Turkish-protected enclave in northern Syria, his group has faced a string of counterattacks over the past year.

The involvement of Iran- and U.S.-backed proxy groups in the war again the Islamic State in Syria could soon also pose problems, analysts said.

That outside forces brought down the Islamic State should give the United States and its partner force pause as they focus on restoring stability to the areas they have seized, said Nicholas Heras of the Washington-based Center for a New American Security.

Of particular concern are the parts of eastern Syria where the fighters have set up base in the desert. Heras said that region, which abuts Iraq, “will be a sea of turmoil as ISIS ramps up its insurgency mission over the coming months and years.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

“

The establishment has created this thing that if you don’t go to college, you’re somehow not equal to someone else who did.’

BY KEVIN SULLIVAN AND MARY JORDAN in Cochise, Ariz.

F

rank Antenori shot the head off a rattlesnake at his back door last summer — a deadeye pistol blast from 20 feet. No college professor taught him that. The U.S. Army trained him, as a marksman and a medic, on the “twoway rifle range” of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Useful skills. Smart return on taxpayers’ investment. Not like the waste he sees at too many colleges and universities, where he says liberal professors teach “ridiculous” classes and indoctrinate students “who hang out and protest all day long and cry on our dime.”

“Why does a kid go to a major university these days?” said Antenori, 51, a former Green

Frank Antenori

Beret who served in the Arizona state legislature. “A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”

Antenori is part of an increasingly vocal campaign to transform American higher education. Although U.S. universities are envied around the world, he and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government money to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail to provide practical skills for the job market.

To the alarm of many educators, nearly every state has cut funding to public colleges and universities since the 2008 financial crisis. Ad-

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

justing for inflation, states spent $5.7 billion less on public higher education last year than in 2008, even though they were educating more than 800,000 additional students, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

In Arizona, which has had a Republican governor and legislature since 2009, lawmakers have cut spending for higher education by 54 percent since 2008; the state now spends $3,500 less per year on every student, according to the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Tuition has soared, forcing students to shoulder more of the cost of their degrees.

Meanwhile, public schools in Arizona and across the nation are welcoming private do-

nors, including the conservative Koch brothers. In nearly every state, the Charles Koch Foundation funds generally conservativeleaning scholars and programs in politics, economics, law and other subjects. John Hardin, the foundation’s director of university relations, said its giving has tripled from about $14 million in 2011 to $44 million in 2015 as the foundation aims to “diversify the conversation” on campus.

People across the ideological spectrum are worried about the cost of college, skyrocketing debt from student loans and rising inequality in access to high-quality degrees. Educators fear that the drop in government spending is making schools harder to afford for low- and

Frank Antenori, a former Green Beret and Arizona legislator, stands outside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington.

middle-income students.

State lawmakers blame the cuts on falling tax revenue during the Great Recession; rising costs of other obligations, especially Medicaid and prisons; and the need to balance their budgets. But even as prosperity has returned to many states, there is a growing partisan divide over how much to spend on higher education. Education advocates worry that conservative disdain threatens to undermine universities.

In July, a Pew Research Center study found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents think that colleges and universities have a negative effect “on the way continues on next page

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017

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COVER STORY

from previous page

things are going in the country,” up from 37 percent two years ago. Among Democrats, by contrast, 72 percent said they have a positive impact.

A Gallup poll in August found that a third of Republicans had confidence in universities, which they viewed as too liberal or political.

Other studies show that overwhelming numbers of white working-class men do not believe a college degree is worth the cost.

A single year at many private universities costs more than the median U.S. household income of $59,000. Although most students receive financial aid, a four-year degree can cost more than a quarter-million dollars. Tuition at public universities has soared, too, and a degree can easily cost more than $100,000.

It is not just the money: Dozens of the most prestigious schools reject more than 80 percent of applicants, and the admissions system often favors the wealthy and the well-connected.

“The new upper class has nothing to do with money. It has to do with where you were educated,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who is pushing to make high-quality degrees more accessible to lowerincome students.

Antenori views former president Barack Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer who taught at the University of Chicago Law School, as the embodiment of the liberal establishment. Antenori said the liberal elite with fancy degrees who have been running Washington for so long have forgotten those who think differently.

“If you don’t do everything that their definition of society is, you’re somehow a knuckledragging Neanderthal cave man,” Antenori said.

Antenori was drawn to Trump, he said, because Trump was the “reverse of Obama,” an “anti-politically correct guy” whose attitude toward the status quo is “change it, fix it, get rid of it, crush it, slash it.”

Even though Trump boasts of his Ivy League degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Antenori said he “had a different air about him.” Unlike Obama, Trump has not emphasized the importance of Americans going to college.

During the campaign, Trump said many colleges “have gone crazy” and that young people were “choking on debt.” He criticized universities as getting “so much money from the government” while “raising their fees to the point that’s ridiculous.”

Hillary Clinton trounced Trump in the nation’s most educated counties, but Trump won white voters without a college degree by 37 points.

Although Trump has largely ignored higher education during his first year in office, his son Donald Trump Jr. recently excoriated universities during a speech in Texas, for which he was paid $100,000. On college campuses, he said: “Hate speech is anything that says America is a good country. That our founders were great people. That we need borders. Hate

vention, loves that kind of talk.

Finally, he said, people in power understand how he feels.

Partisan gap widens in views of colleges Percent who say “colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.”

70%

65%

72% Democrats

60%

58%

54%

40

36% Republicans

20

0

2010

2017

2015

Arizona’s deep cuts in university funding Since 2008, Arizona has cut per-student funding more than any other state, according to an analysis of changes since the recession. At the same time, the state increased public-school tuition more than all but one state, Louisiana.

LESS FUNDING

MORE FUNDING

La.

+100%

Ariz.

+75

Eight states cut funding by more than 30%

Hawaii Ga.

Ala.

LARGER TUITION HIKE

Calif.

39 other states cut funding

+50

SMALLER TUITION HIKE

Okla.

N.M. Ill.

+25

S.C.

Wyo.

Pa.

3 states N.D. increased funding Mont.

0

–50%

–25%

LESS FUNDING

0

+25%

MORE FUNDING

Sources: Pew Research Center, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities KEVIN UHRMACHER/THE WASHINGTON POST

speech is anything faithful to the moral teachings of the Bible.”

Trump Jr. went on to say that many universities offer Americans a raw deal: “We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country. . . . We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and, my personal favorite, tree climbing.”

Antenori, who served as a delegate for Trump at the 2016 National Republican Con-

‘Go out and generate revenue’ ntenori was born in Scranton, Pa., and dreamed of playing football at Pennsylvania State University. But he started partying, and his grades slipped in his senior year of high school. His father balked at paying for college.

“I’m not paying for C’s,” Antenori recalled his father saying. “You want to go? You pay for it.”

So at 17, he joined the Army, which promised him $20,000 toward college if he enlisted for three years. He stayed on, joined the Green Berets and became a medic. He did not get around to college until he was 32.

Still on active duty, he enrolled in a pre-med program at Campbell University in North Carolina, a Baptist school a few miles from Fort Bragg. He earned a bachelor’s degree taking classes four nights a week and on weekends.

After he retired from the Army in 2004, he moved to Tucson, where he works as a program manager for a major defense contractor. This year he completed an online MBA through Grand Canyon University, a for-profit Christian school in Phoenix.

“I got functional degrees that helped me move up in the corporate world,” he said, crunching through the parched grass on his 40-acre ranch in the southeastern Arizona desert. Compact and muscular, wearing a red T-shirt and dusty work boots, he speaks with jackhammer bluntness.

Antenori said many young people would be better off attending more affordable two-year community colleges that teach useful skills and turn out firefighters, electricians and others. Obama promoted the same idea, launching new efforts to boost community college and workplace training. But Antenori said he thinks Obama pushed young people too hard toward four-year degrees.

“The establishment has created this thing that if you don’t go to college, you’re somehow not equal to someone else who did,” Antenori said, sitting with his wife, Lesley, at the dining room table in their modest one-story ranch house.

Antenori said that when he was in high school in the 1980s, students were directed toward college or vocational training depending on their abilities.

“The mind-set now is that everybody is going to be a doctor,” he said. “Instead of telling a kid whose art sucks, ‘You’re a crappy artist,’ they say, ‘Go follow your dream.’ ” The Antenoris did not steer their two sons, 23 and 22, toward college, and neither went.

One helps at home on the ranch, and the other is in the Army.

Antenori is just as happy that his sons are not hanging out with the “weirdos” he reads about on Campus Reform, a conservative website with a network of college reporters whose stated mission is to expose “liberal bias and

A

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COVER STORY abuse on America’s campuses.”

In a sign of the intensely partisan climate on campus, the website’s recent headlines include: “Prof wants ‘body size’ added to diversity curricula,” “Students cover free speech wall with vulgar anti-Trump graffiti” and “College Dems leader resigns after declaring hatred of white men.”

The federal government spends $30 billion a year on Pell grants, which help lower-income students, including a large number of minorities, attend college. But studies show that half of Pell grant recipients drop out before earning a degree.

The overall college dropout rate is also high.

Only 59 percent of students who start at four-year institutions graduate within six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That leaves millions with debt but no degree.

More than 44 million Americans are paying off student loans, including a growing number of people older than 60, according to the Federal Reserve. The average student loan debt of a 2016 college graduate was $37,000. At $1.4 trillion, U.S. student loan debt is now larger than credit card debt.

Antenori said taxpayers should help pay only for the types of degrees — such as in engineering, medicine or law — that lead directly to jobs. If students want to study art or get “junky” degrees in “diversity studies or culture studies,” they should go to private schools, he said.

And he said dropouts who have received government aid should pay it back. “That would be awesome,” he said, flashing a big smile.

“You want to create someone who’s going to be a contributor, not a moocher,” Antenori said. “Go out and generate revenue; that’s what it’s all about.”

‘It’s my crusade’ teve Farley could not disagree more.

“This whole idea that government should be run more like a business is so profoundly morally flawed,” said Farley, a Democratic state senator who is running for governor and used to spar regularly with Antenori when the Republican served in the state legislature from 2009 to 2013.

“Government should be run like a family. We should be raising our children to be the best people they can be,” Farley said. “We should not be manufacturing them to be products to be consumed. That is a basic ethical and moral flaw in this whole argument, that everything’s got to have financial payback so we can reduce taxes for the Koch brothers.”

It was Politics and Pizza night at a community center in suburban Phoenix, and Farley was speaking to 100 people in folding chairs listening to Democratic candidates running in 2018.

They cheered when Farley, in a crisp white dress shirt and a yellow tie, blasted Republican cuts to education funding.

“We choose to give our money away in corporate tax cuts and corporate sales tax

S

loopholes,” said Farley, 54. “It’s my crusade to get rid of those loopholes and fund our public education system at every level.”

The views of many conservatives are being fanned by Trump, he said, including a vilification of universities that is “corrosive to our democracy and our society in general.”

“The whole liberal bastion idea is just absurd,” Farley said, noting the growing amount of money on campuses from conservative donors.

A graduate of Williams College, a highly selective private liberal arts school in Massachusetts, Farley is an artist and graphic designer who invented a process for turning photographs into images on ceramic tiles, which he sells across the country.

Farley said music and art are critical to education, invention and creativity “that can lift us from all these problems that we seem surrounded with these days.” He noted that Apple founder Steve Jobs credited a college calligraphy course with helping spark the design of the first Macintosh computer.

Farley worries that the withdrawal of public funds for colleges is widening the class divide.

Public universities have long been the surest route to a degree for those who are not wealthy.

But as tuition rises, they are beyond the reach of more people. A recent study by New America, a Washington think tank, found that since the 1990s there has been a sharp reduction in the proportion of low-income students at the nation’s top public universities and a sharp rise in wealthy students.

Trump hit higher education hard in his first budget proposal, which called for sharp cuts to the federal work-study program, the National Institutes of Health and other programs that fund university research. The House recently approved a tax overhaul that would cut corporate rates while imposing a new tax on the endowments of many of the nation’s wealthiest universities and eliminating the deduction for student loan interest.

“Public education at every level is the only tool we’ve ever invented to effectively allow people to lift themselves from poverty,” said Farley, the son of two public school teachers.

“In Arizona, 1 in 4 children live in poverty right now. If you take away that tool, there is no hope for our future — none.”

‘What are you doing for me?’ row, the president of Arizona State University and one of the nation’s leading voices on higher education innovation, agrees that it is critical for universities to change, because “the standard model is elitist.”

“The system is creating social disruption,” he said. “It is creating this dynamic where people are not connected” and parents think, “Oh, my kid can never get into one of those great universities.”

Crow is working with 11 other public university presidents to bring more low-income students to campus and increase graduation rates.

He said there is an indisputable return on

C

“Public education at every level is the only tool we’ve ever invented to effectively allow people to lift themselves from poverty,” said Arizona state Sen. Steve Farley (D), seen in his office in Phoenix.

Arizona State University President Michael Crow, says universities must change because “the standard model is elitist.”

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investment for a college degree. College graduates earn more, pay more in taxes and are less likely to need government assistance, he said.

“A lot is at stake,” he said. “Education is the single most important predictor of social mobility for the last hundred years; it drives the economy.”

But, he said: “There is fear and angst about the future. People are looking around and saying to universities, ‘What are you doing for me? You guys at the universities are building robots that are going to replace my job.’ ” Jobs that require only a high school diploma are disappearing fast, he said: “The old way where a guy like my dad or my grandparents — really smart people, but not educated — could do almost anything is just not going to work anymore.”

When Crow arrived on campus in 2002, the state provided about half of ASU’s budget. That has been slashed to 10 percent, he said. So Crow spends much of his time courting private donors and looking for ways to reduce costs and connect his school to the changing workplace.

“If we don’t learn how to communicate better and work with the community,” Crow said, “there are going to be pitchforks and tar-and-feather buckets waiting outside the gates for us.”

‘Crybabies and spoiled brats’ wo years ago, Antenori left Tucson for rural Cochise because he “couldn’t take the hippies anymore. They were raising my taxes for every stupid little thing, like bike paths and puppy palaces.”

He lived in a tightly packed subdivision, with a homeowner’s association that gave him grief because his Ford F-350 truck was slightly too big for his driveway.

So now he and his family live in a low-tax patch of desert in the shadow of the Dragoon Mountains, in a county that voted for Trump.

He can bow-hunt for deer on his own land, keeping one eye out for mountain lions.

“The only noise I hear is the damn coyotes howling at night,” he said, looking out over the mesquite trees under perfect blue skies. “My blood pressure has dropped 20 points since I moved here.”

He and his buddies often gather at Silver Saddle Steakhouse, a Tucson lunch spot frequented by sheriff’s deputies ordering $12 mesquite-grilled steaks. Antenori said that “95 percent of the people I hang with” share his views.

A year after Trump’s election, Antenori gives the president “a B, maybe a B-plus.” He has been disappointed with Trump’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act but thrilled with his conservative judicial appointments.

And he loves that Trump’s White House is less “snobbish” and more welcoming to people like him. Antenori is tired, he said, of being condescended to for thinking universities should be more practical, not havens for “damn crybabies and spoiled brats.” n

T

© The Washington Post

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MONEY

Feeling the cost of caregiving BY

J ONNELLE M ARTE

A

lantris Muhammad says there was no question that she would leave her job after her mother was in a car accident that left her unable to walk or eat on her own.

At 42, she hadn’t even started to think about retirement. But as the oldest of four siblings — and the only one in a dual-income household — she says it was a “no-brainer” that she would look after her mother full time to avoid putting her in a nursing home.

“I gave my boss two weeks’ notice and told him that I had to quit and that I had to go take care of my mom,” said Muhammad, who is now 53. “It was a sacrifice for our entire family.”

Her experience matches those of millions of Americans who provide care for an aging or disabled parent.

About 17 percent of adult children take care of their parents at some point in their lives, according to a report from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Once they become caregivers, adult children are likely to commit a substantial amount of time — about 77 hours on average each month — to looking after their relatives, the researchers found.

For people who provide roundthe-clock care, the commitment is even greater.

The need for caregivers is expected to grow in the United States as more baby boomers enter retirement. The number of Americans age 65 and up is expected to almost double by 2050, according to projections from the United Nations.

Caregivers often need to make life-altering decisions about where to live and whether to continue to work. Many caregivers take on the full-time role without pay. But even people who are paid for the care they provide for a relative may face long-term financial challenges, caregiving experts say.

In most states — with the exception of North Dakota — caregivers can be paid if the person they are looking after qualifies for Medicaid, said Kathleen Kelly, executive director of the Family Caregiver

ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Adult children may face financial challenges when making lifestyle changes to help ailing parents Alliance, a nonprofit group that advocates for caregivers. The rules vary by state in terms of the health needs of the patient and who can provide care (most states do not allow spouses to participate).

Although the programs can provide families with some financial relief, caregivers may still struggle financially without the other benefits they would earn at a traditional job — including health care, disability insurance and retirement plan contributions, Kelly said.

Caregivers being paid through Medicaid programs typically earn the minimum wage, which may be just a fraction of what they earned in the past. And many caregivers spend out of their own pockets to help cover living expenses and medical bills for their loved ones.

The opportunity cost of lost wages can build over time for people who provide informal care at home, costing caregivers an estimated $522 billion a year, according to a 2015 Rand analysis of data on how Americans spend their time.

But the true financial toll can be difficult to quantify, particularly for people such as Muhammad who put their careers on hold.

Her mother, Dorris West, was driving on the expressway when she crashed — an accident that they now know was caused by a brain aneurysm. The impact shattered the bones on the left side of her face, caused her brain to swell and led to a bad break in her ankle.

After West spent a few months in the hospital, Muhammad moved her mother to her house in the suburbs of Chicago so she could help with her recovery. For months, Muhammad slept in her living room on a newly purchased sofa bed so that she could stay near her mother, who was on a feeding tube and could not yet climb the stairs to her new bedroom. Eleven years later, West’s mobility has improved. But West, who is now 70, still has several strokes a month and has a difficult time speaking or doing routine tasks, symptoms that doctors say are probably re-

Alantris Muhammad helps her mother, Dorris West, step outside her home in Chicago Heights, Ill. West moved in with her daughter after a debilitating car accident 11 years ago, and Muhammad quit her job at age 42 to become a full-time caregiver.

lated to the brain injury.

With the help of a rehabilitation center, Muhammad enrolled in a program funded by Medicaid that pays those who care for people with disabilities. Her wage has increased slightly over time — to $13 an hour from $10.55 — but she is still making about 40 percent less than what she earned when she was selling home and car insurance.

Women are more likely than men to retire early after taking on the responsibility of caring for an aging parent, according to the Center for Retirement Research. Those women who continue to work tend to scale back their schedules by three to 10 hours a week.

With advances in health care, many boomers are expected to live longer than their parents did. But living longer can also mean spending more years with chronic longterm ailments, such as dementia and other conditions requiring expensive care, researchers say.

“People don’t realize that maybe Mom and Dad planned for or had money to live 20 years, but now they’re living to 95, and they’ve run out of money,” said Gail Gibson Hunt, chief executive of the National Alliance for Caregiving, another nonprofit that advocates for caregivers. “It comes as a rude shock that this isn’t already paid for somehow.”

When financial shortfalls arise, it often falls on relatives and friends to cover the difference.

More than 40 percent of caregivers spend at least $5,000 a year to help pay for transportation, clothing and medical costs, according to a survey by Caring.com, a website that helps pair consumers with caregivers.

The burden can cause those caregivers to cut back on other financial goals, such as saving for retirement or for their children’s college education, Hunt said.

When Jan Wirpel first moved in with her parents in Minneapolis in 2000, her plan was to save money to buy a condo. But several months later, her father, Gene Wirpel, began to have serious complications related to his diabetes. Doctors said he had six months to live.

Jan Wirpel, who was in her early

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TRENDS 50s, gave up plans of buying a home and quit her job to care for him full time. Her mother, Eleanor, did most of the cooking while she helped her father with daily tasks, such as bathing, getting dressed and taking him to doctor’s appointments. He lived nearly three more years, which doctors attributed to the care he received, she said.

But after he died, her mother had her own health problems.

They learned she has fibromyalgia, a disorder that causes pain throughout her body. As the pain worsened, she became less able to help with household chores. Wirpel now cares for her mother, who is also experiencing memory loss, on a daily basis.

Wirpel, now 69, is participating in a Medicaid program that pays her nearly 44 hours a week for taking care of her mother. But the actual care she provides to her 94year-old mother extends beyond the time she is paid for, Wirpel said.

Financial experts say it may be easier to have conversations about how to cover living expenses and other bills before health issues arise.

But few families get around to it.

More than one-third of parents said they haven’t talked to their families about how they plan to cover living expenses and other bills once they retire, according to a 2016 survey of parents with adult children by Fidelity Investments.

As a result, few caregivers have time to prepare for the major changes they will have to make to their lifestyles, such as moving to be closer to their parents, cutting back hours at work or footing the bill for health-care services.

Some people who anticipate that they may need to care for their aging parents should boost their savings, which may provide a cushion if they reach a point where they need to quit their jobs or work fewer hours, said Gal Wettstein, an economist for the Center for Retirement Research. Some adult children may also help their parents buy long-term care insurance.

Wirpel says she wishes she had prepared better for the possibility that her parents might need her help one day.

“I wasn’t even thinking about that when it happened,” she said.

“It’s going to happen to all of us.

We’re going to get older, and we’re going to need help and care. People should always have that in the back of their minds.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Fast-food ban near schools gets a big-city boost BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

M

cDonald’s and Pizza Hut just joined a club once reserved for smoke shops and sex stores: London Mayor Sadiq Khan recently announced a plan to ban them — and all fast-food joints — from opening near London schools.

Effective fall 2019, the policy would block new fast-food restaurants from setting up shop within a quarter-mile of primary and secondary schools. It would also require all new fast-food outlets to adhere to minimum nutrition rules.

The plan comes at a time of mounting global concern about the link between fast food and childhood obesity: The latter has reached epidemic proportions in many countries, and studies have found that salty, greasy restaurant diets are, in large part, to blame. That realization has spurred a desperate search for policy initiatives that can persuade children, and their parents, to eat more healthfully.

As the first major city to propose such a ban, London could well inspire similar policies elsewhere.

“It sets a precedent,” said Ben Winig, the vice president of law and policy at the U.S.-based nonprofit ChangeLab Solutions. “As public health and planning become more intertwined, I think we’ll see more cities use zoning as a public health solution.”

According to Winig and many others in public health, the need to address childhood obesity has never been more urgent. In both the United States and Britain, about 1 in 5 11-year-olds is obese — which makes them far more likely to develop such conditions as diabetes and heart disease as adults.

Researchers have blamed the epidemic on diets rich in processed, high-calorie foods, which contain far too many calories and not enough fruits and vegetables.

Fast food contributes to those poor diets: One 2009 study in the Ameri-

can Journal of Public Health, found that students who go to school within walking distance of a fastfood outlet drink more soda, eat fewer fruits and vegetables, and are more likely to be overweight than students who do not.

Findings like that one have fueled calls for policies such as fastfood bans near schools or “healthy food zones.” In Britain, the cities of Newcastle and Halston have adopted bans already, and Charlotte and Austin also have floated their own school fast-food bans.

ISTOCK

London, however, is by far the largest city to begin a fast-food ban of this kind.

Proposed as part of a periodic city planning initiative, the policy will go into effect after a two-year comment period, according to a spokesman for the mayor’s office.

It will apply to all new establishments that sell hot foods to go, from corner fish-and-chip shops to major multinationals. It also would mandate that all new fastfood spots, regardless of their proximity to schools, adhere to the city’s Healthy Catering Commitment — an otherwise voluntary initiative that encourages restaurants to adopt healthier cooking methods and menus.

Commitment signees must agree to eight of 22 “assessment criteria,” which include displaying water more prominently than soda and shaking the extra grease off fried foods. Neither policy will apply to existing restaurants.

In a statement, Khan described the measure as part of his attack on the “ticking time bomb of child-

hood obesity.”

“Takeaway restaurants are a vibrant part of London life, but it’s important that they are not encouraging our children to make poor food choices,” he said. “I am working hard to create a healthier London, and this must start with the food that our children eat.”

Public health advocates in the United States say they are paying attention. If London’s ban keeps unhealthy food options away from schools, it could serve as a model for other jurisdictions.

Although such bans have been discussed in the United States before, few health groups have pursued them, said Margo Wootan, the vice president of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Instead, U.S. efforts around fast-food restaurants and children have largely focused on improving kids’ meals and getting them to offer beverages besides soda.

There is one standout exception: In 2008, several low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles adopted a blanket ban on new standalone fast-food restaurants, regardless of whether they were near schools. But the policy failed.

A study seven years later found that the ordinance had not dented fast-food consumption, in large part because there were already so many unhealthy options in the neighborhood.

London’s ban may face the same challenges. A map of the cities’ schools and existing fast-food outlets, published by a British data analyst, shows that many city schools are already within a short walk of several fast-food establishments. Those businesses will not be affected by the ban.

But for the schools that aren’t in range — and there are many — experts said they think the policy could have a real effect.

“When a city like London does something like this, it reinvigorates the debate,” Winig said. “I think it might push more folks to look at these policies again.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Shining a light on Hoover’s legacy N ONFICTION

H HOOVER An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

By Kenneth Whyte Knopf.

728 pp. $35

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL T AUBE

erbert Hoover was one of the more intriguing and unconventional figures ever to have occupied the White House, but historians and biographers often have treated him unkindly. A nominal Republican, Hoover felt more at ease as a political shapeshifter who refused to toe the party line. His complex, brooding leadership style, combined with poor communication skills, served to frustrate friend, foe and voter alike.

Kenneth Whyte’s “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” casts a new light on the remarkable career of the 31st president. Whyte is an impressive stylist with a penchant for explaining political history to contemporary readers. This well-researched volume proves that Hoover should be rightfully acknowledged as the father of New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism.

Hoover was born in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa, to a Quaker family that Whyte describes as “plain pioneer folk . . . austere in almost every aspect of their lives, from their artless conversation, to their simple diet and drab clothing, to their record keeping.” His mother and father both died before Hoover turned 9, requiring him to move to Salem, Ore., to live with his uncle, Henry John Minthorn.

An uninspired student, he had an “unbroken four-year run of academic mediocrity” at Stanford University. This included failing his entrance exams, although Hoover was “waved through to admission on condition that he showed effort and improvement.” He graduated in 1895, but “strictly speaking, he did not earn his degree”: A conditional pass in English was removed when a “friendly professor rewrote one of his essays and submitted it on his behalf as evidence of his competence in the language.”

Hardly an auspicious start for a man who would one day lead his country.

Yet Hoover was intelligent, in-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Herbert Hoover, shown in 1929, came up with intiatives that were incorporated into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

dustrious and determined. He would eventually work as a mining engineer in Australia (becoming a partner in Bewick, Moreing and Company) and in China (becoming a director in the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company). In 1905 he founded the Zinc Corporation, which “eventually became one of the longest-running and most financially successful operations of its kind in the world.” Having accumulated significant personal wealth, Hoover later was involved in relief work during World War I. But as “Hoover” illustrates, politics, rather than business, was his true passion. He had a “genuine desire to do good,” Whyte writes, and “his commitment to public service would prove so deep and enduring that it had to stem in large part from a sincere desire to be of useful service to his fellow man.”

Hoover’s presidency, one of the main thrusts of this book, was more in the mold of a progressive Republican like Theodore Roosevelt than a conservative like Calvin Coolidge.

He championed “cooperative action, [a] belief in a positive role for the state, and his willingness to stamp out predatory business practices.” He resembled “an echo of the late Rough Rider’s progressivism” with policies that endorsed “honesty and merit in public service . . . protection of the less fortunate,” and the reduction of waste and inefficiency. Moreover, “he had never been shy about federal interference in the economy” during the Great Depression and was comfortable “with intrusive government in exceptional circumstances.”

This earned him the admiration of progressives such as suffragist Jane Addams, civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard and Justice Felix Frankfurter. The liberal writer Walter Lippmann even called him “bold and brilliant,” noting “many felt, as I did, that they had never met a more interesting man.” He had a “long and productive relationship” with Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, although they made a “curious pair” because of their similarities (both

were “hungry for power . . . and difficult to know”) and their marked differences (Wilson was East Coast to Hoover’s West Coast and more used to ivory towers than mining tunnels).

While Franklin Roosevelt, who beat Hoover in the 1932 election, may have been the father of the New Deal, many New Dealers would take “applause for initiatives that had been fathered by Hoover.” In fact, “especially at the start, Roosevelt had hewed closely to Hoover’s program of bank relief, agricultural aid, labor reform, industrial cooperation, federal aid to local government, and cuts to conventional spending.”

Hence, it was a Republican who opened the awful Pandora’s box to big government.

It doesn’t stop there. While Hoover called himself a liberal for years, the term gradually became, in Whyte’s words, “distorted in common parlance to describe people favoring the use of government to achieve social and economic outcomes.” Since New Dealers were liberals, and he wasn’t a New Dealer, the old “darling of the progressives” began “self-identifying as a conservative.” Whyte argues that “modern American conservatism, conceived as an antidote to the New Deal,” started in 1937 because of Hoover, “its prophet and philosopher.”

Although Hoover’s worldview is “difficult to pin down” at times, as Whyte notes, “he clearly played important roles in the development of the progressive and conservative traditions.” While this is fascinating on the surface, Whyte also presents this assessment: “That one man can in one lifetime be a leader to opposed schools raises the inconvenient fact that they have more in common than not.” n Taube, a Troy Media syndicated columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Dashiell Hammett’s starter detective

U.S. foreign policy, reflected in films

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

H

l

REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

ave I got a treat for those who prefer to celebrate their holidays in hardboiled, rather than Hallmark, style. It’s a heavyweight of a collection called “The Big Book of The Continental Op” that gathers together the 28 short stories, two novels and one unfinished tale starring Dashiell Hammett’s first series detective, known only as “The Continental Op.” For those readers who haven’t yet run into him, the Op is middleaged, overweight and nameless.

His moniker derives from his job: He’s an “operative” or detective, who works for the Continental Detective Agency. He’s easy to underestimate, but that would be a mistake. In the Op, Hammett revolutionized the traditional figure of the detective, strong-arming him out of his Sherlockian smoking jacket and into an American-made trench coat, shoving him out of his armchair and down those dark alleys where the most realistic crimes are waiting to be solved.

Hammett paid tribute to his first great literary creation by referring to him as “a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit.”

This collection is edited by the distinguished Hammett scholar Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, who is Hammett’s granddaughter. In a couple of short-butsubstantive opening essays, Layman sketches out the sources of the Continental Op stories in Hammett’s own five-year career working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. That career was interrupted by his Army service in World War I. In 1922, Hammett took a course at the Munson School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper writing objective.” Layman suggests that journalistic training came in handy when Hammett began submitting stories to the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1923.

Those early stories were published under the editorial reign of George W. Sutton. There’s little to

suggest that either Sutton or Hammett realized that the popular Op stories were also remaking the detective fiction form. The first Op story, “Arson Plus,” is dated Oct. 1, 1923, and Hammett wrote it under the pseudonym Peter Collinson. The plots of “Arson Plus” and the other Sutton-era stories are simple and their pilferings from the more genteel British mystery tradition evident. When Phillip C. Cody became the editor of Black Mask in 1924, Hammett’s simple tales more than doubled in length, and became more complex and nastier.

For those who want to delve even deeper into the pulp appearances of the Continental Op, this collection also includes the Black Mask serialized versions of “Red Harvest” (originally titled “Poisonville”). As Layman demonstrates, the language of both novels were substantially changed when they were published in book form by Knopf.

There’s one striking word, however, that remains unchanged in the opening paragraph of both versions of “Red Harvest.” It’s a word that also appears frequently throughout the Continental Op stories: meaningless. A bit of humorous wordplay is “meaningless” in the opening of “Poisonville”; a servant’s face is “meaningless” (7) in “Arson Plus”; a smile is “meaningless” in “Dead Yellow Women” and on and on, into Hammett’s masterpiece, “The Maltese Falcon,” where the entire quest for the falcon itself is meaningless.

“Meaningless” is a word that packs an existential wallop for Hammett and his fellow modernist writers.

As this magnificent collection attests, the world that the Continental Op investigates may be “meaningless,” but that nameless “little man’s” work — and Hammett’s achievement — remain momentous. n Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program, “Fresh Air.” This was written for The Washington Post.

P THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP

By Dashiell Hammett Edited by Richard Layman & Julie M. Rivett Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.

733 pp. Paperback, $25

THE TUNNEL AT THE END OF THE LIGHT Essays on Movies and Politics

By Jim Shepard Tin House. 272 pp.

Paperback, $15.95

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REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

ay close attention to the subtitle of Jim Shepard’s smart, stimulating new book, “The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics.” In these 10 pieces, first published a decade agoin the Believer magazine, you won’t find reflections on what we ordinarily think of as political movies. Rather, Shepard discusses films such as “Badlands,” “GoodFellas” and “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which few if any politicians are portrayed, but which highlight certain character traits that shape our politics. Above all, he focuses on “the power and resilience of the lies we tell ourselves as a collective.”

Take, for example, “Badlands” (1973), the first feature directed by Terrence Malick, in which Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek play young killers. Based on the 1958 rampage of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, the movie is narrated by Spacek’s character, Holly, who has a knack for detaching herself from the mayhem. “Think about our conception of ourselves in terms of our foreign policy,” Shepard writes. “We may screw up, we may blunder about, but we always mean well. Any harm done to others is either unforeseen or couldn’t have been avoided. Our hearts are in the right place, even if we act as though they aren’t.”

In an essay on Italian American mob movies, Shepard prefers Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” to Francis Ford Coppola’s vaunted “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II.” In “GoodFellas,” the only value is power. “If you got out of line, you got whacked,” one character observes. “But sometimes, even if people didn’t get out of line, they got whacked.” This shrugging off of arbitrary brutality strikes Shepard as truer to the way gangsters actually behave, and he draws analogies with the politics of the day, especially the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Shepard singles out the revealing explanation given by an official at the American

Enterprise Institute: “Every ten years or so the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

It probably goes without saying that if you are a conservative, this book is probably not for you. But even for unregenerate lefties, the last and longest piece in the book may come as a welcome change of pace. Paying scant attention to politics, Shepard analyzes “The Vanishing,” a Dutch thriller from 1988.

“The Vanishing” gets its title from the disappearance of a young woman who is driving through France with her boyfriend. They stop at a gas station. She goes to the bathroom, he stays with the car, she never comes back. The boyfriend, Rex, is so distraught that he plasters the region with missing-person signs and keeps searching for her. We soon learn part of what happened: She was abducted. The rest of the story is left for Rex — now our eyes and ears — to unearth. Shepard emphasizes the aspect of the film that makes it more than just exciting: the profoundly creepy relationship that develops between Rex and the kidnapper.

This is a fine essay about a haunting masterpiece, but I think Shepard missed a trick. The director, George Sluizer, remade “The Vanishing” a decade later in English, starring Jeff Bridges. But “The Vanishing II” (if you will) exemplifies just about everything that’s wrong with the stock Hollywood approach to moviemaking — a topic Shepard might have done well to address.

As our new president continues to make fresh breakthroughs in reckless buffoonery, it can be tempting to cast “a rosy glow backward” on Bush. In this astringent and witty collection, Shepard argues convincingly that to do so would be a travesty. n Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, writes frequently on movies. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

IOC’s decision on Russia is self-serving, cosmetic SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

The International Olympic Committee’s window­ dressing decision to suspend Russia doesn’t really touch the “state” part of “state­sponsored” doping. Oh, a few Russian crested blazers will have to skip the little cakes with white diamond fondant icing at the dessert buffet.

No matter. The Russian ministry already got what it wanted from its willing partner the IOC, which was the oligarchical rake­off from Sochi’s immense buildup. The medal haul was merely ornamental. Kind of like the gold flakes in the cappuccinos.

The IOC deserves no great congratulations for what can only be termed its moral entrepreneurship in sanctioning Russia. The IOC and World Anti­Doping Agency remain a harrumphing, selectively enforcing, self­ dealing intentional failure of a bureaucracy that couldn’t even plug a mouse­hole in the Sochi drug testing lab, for the simple reason that it didn’t want to. We still wouldn’t know of that hole’s existence if not for whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov. All the IOC has really done is ban a song and a swathe of fabric from PyeongChang, and unfairly stigmatize Russian athletes along the way.

The Russian flag will not fly and the anthem will not be played in a Winter Olympics no one is much interested in.

Russian athletes may compete under a neutral flag if they are individually approved (the IOC essentially managed to approve no fewer than 278 for the Summer Games in Rio), and various “officials and support staff ” will be welcome at the IOC’s discreet invitation. Also the Russian Olympic Committee from PyeongChang may be allowed back by the Closing Ceremonies. Exactly how this will chasten Vladimir Putin and his Sochi ski buddies is unclear.

It’s perhaps faintly embarrassing, though there is a real question as to whether the chest-baring former head of the

KGB is embarassable.

It would be pleasant to think this will deter all of the other IOC state actors who have systematically participated in performance enhancement or turned a blind eye to it (large portions of the USA apparatus over the years included), but that’s highly unlikely. If the IOC had really wanted to discourage “state-sponsored” doping, it would not have awarded an Olympics to a state that practically invented it.

Here is when you will know the IOC is serious about doping: not when it lowers a flag, but when it knocks down and razes WADA for the pocket-lining bureaucracy that it is, and starts clean. Really clean.

You will know the IOC is

DENIS BALIBOUSE/REUTERS

Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, and Samuel Schmid, chair of the IOC Disciplinary Commission.

serious on this subject when it declares a blanket temporary amnesty for the purpose of studying some very hard questions. Such as: What is the difference between enhancement vs. therapy and recovery? Have the effects of certain substances been overstated or overcriminalized?

To what extent, if any, might legalization actually relieve the pressure on athletes in statesponsored systems? Are these public condemnations doing any good, or are they just resulting in failed policy and coverups?

Most importantly, what is the real purpose of an anti-doping effort in the first place? The IOC blares that it is to protect “clean sport.” But the evil of statesponsored doping is not that it results in “unclean sport,” or makes people “dirty.” The evil is it might result in a violation of human rights, rob individuals of informed consent.

Would it not be healthier and cleaner for all to bring these systems above board and examine what athletes and trainers are doing in the collective light of day? What do we really fear from performance-enhancement legalization, or at least deeper inquiry into it?

The IOC’s official anti-doping effort was launched in 1999, and

it has yet to act as a meaningful deterrent, much less address any of these difficult questions.

Instead, it has merely created a moral panic. And moral panics are worse than ineffectual; they result in greater evils than the original sin. They literally spread poisons.

Prohibition was one example.

The xenophobic Victorian amateur code was another. But moral panics do serve one group well: the moral entrepreneurs who gain power and profit off them. So long as the IOC and WADA insist that doping is a global moral crisis and create occasional villains, they can continue to command huge resources to “police” it. It is interesting to note that WADA President Sir Craig Reedie has been campaigning energetically for a massive budget expansion, even lobbying that WADA should get a cut of Olympic TV rights and sponsorships.

The hallmarks of moral panics are disproportionality, exaggeration, stereotyping, rushes to convenient judgments and the creation of boogeymen, villainizing certain parties as The Other responsible for moral decay. Sometimes The Other is an Indian who took money to play baseball. As social psychologists will tell you, moral entrepreneurs are expert at preying on social anxieties. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Beware an economic boom. Really.

ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics for The Washington Post.

We don’t need an economic boom, but that’s what we may be getting. Since the 2016 election, the stock market is up roughly 24 percent, reports Wilshire Associates. The price of the cybercurrency bitcoin soared more than 1,000 percent before retreating. The unemployment rate of 4.1 percent is the lowest since 2000. The economy’s growth has exceeded an annual rate of 3 percent for the past two quarters.

Anyone familiar with the postWorld War II economy is bound to feel ambivalent about these dazzling developments. On the one hand, after so many years of disappointment following the Great Recession of 2007-2009, it’s nice to see the economy outperforming. Since the low point in late 2009, non-farm jobs have increased by 17 million. On the other hand, extended booms give rise to long busts that have been hugely destructive in human terms — meaning higher unemployment and lower incomes.

Since World War II, there have been two instances of these grand boom-bust cycles. The 106month expansion in the 1960s was followed by more than a decade of economic turmoil: double-digit inflation, four recessions (unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent in late

1982) and a stagnant stock market corrected for inflation.

The second grand cycle started with the tech boom of the 1990s that lasted exactly a decade. It led to the economic carnage of the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession.

The ultimate source of these boom-bust episodes is human nature. Although prosperity is a good thing, long stretches of good times can become selfdestructive. People — consumers, business owners and managers, bankers, investors, entrepreneurs — become sloppy, overconfident and complacent. They become increasingly vulnerable to economic setbacks, but their careless behavior continues because it is crowd-driven.

This history cautions prudence. We don’t know whether the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 will end

in some sort of crackup. But we should minimize the odds of this happening by avoiding policies that overstimulate the economy when it doesn’t need more “stimulus.”

In the present context, there are two implications. First, the Federal Reserve should continue raising short-term interest rates, which are still low. And second, the Republican tax legislation now being considered by Congress should not increase budget deficits by a penny. The various tax proposals are estimated to add from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion to deficits over a decade, depending on how the calculations are done.

Lowering tax rates is good; borrowing to do so, as opposed to closing other tax breaks, is bad.

What’s often overlooked is that even before the Republican tax proposals, projected budget deficits were sizable. The Congressional Budget Office estimates them at $10 trillion cumulatively from fiscal 2018 to 2027.

Many mainstream economists have convinced themselves that the tax proposals won’t stimulate the economy or threaten the recovery. Here’s the conclusion of a study from Moody’s Analytics: “Neither the House or Senate [tax] plans would meaningfully

improve economic growth. . . .

Growth would be stronger initially, since the deficitfinanced tax cuts are a fiscal stimulus. But given that the economy is operating at full employment, stronger inflation and higher interest rates will result. The economic benefit of the lower tax rates on business investment is washed out by the higher interest rates.”

Maybe. But in practice, this view may be too sanguine.

Suppose the strong demand of a boom economy causes inflation to exceed expectations — say 4 percent instead of 2 percent.

The increase could set off a destructive chain reaction.

Higher inflation begets higher interest rates. (The Fed raises short-term rates; market pressures push up long-term rates on bonds and mortgages.)

Higher interest rates darken the economic outlook, causing stocks to crash and confidence to slump.

The truth is that we don’t fully understand the effects of budget deficits on the business cycle. On the other hand, we better understand history, and history suggests that the bigger the boom, the bigger the subsequent bust. A patient economy may ultimately be more rewarding and sustainable than its more spectacular counterpart. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

Food fight at the Supreme Court DANA MILBANK is a Washington Post opinion writer

There will come a time, hopefully before long, when it won’t be legal to discriminate against gay people any more than it would be to deny goods or services to African Americans, women or the disabled.

But we’re not at that point yet. Hence the need for Tuesday’s food fight at the Supreme Court.

On the justices’ plates: whether a baker can refuse on First Amendment grounds to make a cake for a gay wedding because it offends his Christian beliefs.

Layered throughout the oral argument: Is food speech? Or is it, well, food?

Kristen Waggoner, arguing for Masterpiece Cakeshop of Colorado, made the creative argument that the Christian confectioner “intended to speak through that cake” and that when the cake maker bakes, “he is creating a painting on that canvas that expresses messages” — and is therefore covered by the First Amendment.

Trump administration Solicitor General Noel Francisco, also arguing for the cake maker, said that the first question was whether “the cake rises to the level of speech.” He gave no indication that his pun was intentional.

To the casual consumer of

cakes, it’s obvious that cake does not rise to the level of protected speech. Cake is dessert. But for a Supreme Court that has determined that corporations are people, it is not settled law that cake is food.

This raises the possibility of other goods and services being denied to gay people by those who cite their free-speech and free-expression-of-religion rights — just as Jim Crow merchants did when refusing to serve African Americans a half-century ago.

“The person who does floral arranging,” asked Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Would that person also be speaking at the wedding?”

Yes, Waggoner answered, “if they are custom-designed arrangements.”

“How about the person who designs the invitation to the wedding or the menu for the wedding dinner?”

“Certainly.”

BY NICK ANDERSON FOR THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Justice Elena Kagan decided to play. “The jeweler?”

Possibly, Waggoner reasoned.

“Hair stylist?”

“Absolutely not.”

“The makeup artist?” Kagan persisted.

Waggoner said that the makeup artist would not be speaking — neither, she replied to Kagan’s further questions, would the wedding tailor or the chef.

“Whoa!” Kagan pounced. “The baker is engaged in speech, but the chef is not engaged in speech?”

The case could go either way, with four justices apparently on the cake-is-speech side, four on the cake-is-food side and the inscrutable Anthony M. Kennedy in between. But Kennedy did tell Francisco that his side in the case has a “problem,” because “there’s basically an ability to boycott gay marriages. If you prevail, could the baker put a sign in his window: ‘We do not bake cakes for gay weddings’?”

Francisco allowed that the baker could.

“And you would not think that an affront to the gay community?”

Of course it would be. But lawyers for the cake baker argued that discrimination on the basis of race or disability is different because it is based on “who the

person is” — as if being gay isn’t who the person is.

The high court has enshrined the right to same-sex marriage, but neither the court nor Congress has protected sexual orientation the way they protect race, religion, gender and disability. Several states and localities have such laws, but those will have little effect if the justices decide that anti-gay discrimination is protected as free speech.

Hence the slippery-slope questions. If the custom-cake guy, the florist and the people who design invitations and menus can discriminate, “I don’t see a line that can be drawn that would exclude the makeup artist or the hairstylist,” Ginsburg pointed out.

This is important, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said, because “we want some kind of distinction that will not undermine every civil rights law from the Year Two, including African Americans, including the Hispanic Americans, including everybody who has been discriminated against in very basic things of life, food, design of furniture, homes and buildings.”

Piece of cake: If you can’t do it to racial and religious minorities, women and the disabled, you shouldn’t be able to do it to gay people. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Starbucks BY

diversity.” And the company has issued statements over the years worrying about global warming and supporting same-sex marriage.

This year’s holiday cups, featuring presents wrapped with bows and two clasped cartoon hands, again stirred the ire of conservatives who said the design reveals Starbucks’s “gay agenda.”

B RYANT S IMON

Before Starbucks took off in the 1990s, coffee in the United States was just coffee. But Starbucks changed the beverages we drink, when and where we drink them, what they taste like, how much we con­ sume and even their temperature. Its stores became the nation’s sec­ ond living room, meeting place and study hall. It’s not a stretch to say Starbucks has altered American culture. But with such far­reach­ ing, sociologically significant effects came a host of myths and coun­ ter­myths about Starbucks. Here are five.

MYTH NO. 1 Starbucks puts local coffee shops out of business.

In 2008, Starbucksit settled an antitrust lawsuit in Seattle that charged it with passing out samplesof its habit-forming, sugary drinks in front of rival coffee shops and strong-arming landlords into not leasing space to its competitors.It’s true that competing against Starbucks isn’t easy. The coffee giant scoops up the best locations and drives up real estate prices for independents, making them do business along less-trafficked streets. But the chain’s rivals are doing just fine. Today there are 13,327 Starbucks stores across the United States. That’s a lot, but according to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, there were 31,490 independent coffee shops in 2015, up from 1,650 in 1990. In the past decade alone, 10,000non-chain stores have opened.

MYTH NO. 2 Starbucks is a worker-friendly company.

Employees, including parttimers, receive health benefits.

That’s not the whole story, though. Workers, including parttimers (two-thirds of the company’s payroll), may purchase employer-provided coverage — something common in the rest of the economy, though admittedly less so in retail — if they work at least 20 hours per week. But getting to that weekly threshold

can be tough. One of the company’s goals is to ensure that it has the right number of workers behind the counter at all times — not too many when traffic is slow and not too few during peak hours. Employees don’t make their schedules, and they don’t usually work the same days every week. They might work a night shift followed by a morning shift; four hours here and six hours there. And while Starbucks baristas earn, on average, about $9.50 per hour with tips, few make a living wage, especially in high-rent, Starbucks-dense cities such as New York, Washington and Seattle.

MYTH NO. 3 Starbucks coffee is burned.

Starbucks beans are merely roasted to be very dark — darker even than French roast — which produces coffees with a touch of bitterness and a hint of charred wood. In the company’s early days, this dark roast allowed Starbucks to distinguish its coffee from typically weak American brews. Eventually, rapid expansion meant the company bought millions of pounds of coffee each year and needed to replicate the taste for customers who expected a uniform flavor.

The dark roast covered up the beans’ natural differences and made brewing more efficient: Well-roasted beans could be processed at higher temperatures in shorter periods of time.

MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Starbucks holiday cups from 1997 through 2017, starting at the top left and ending at the bottom right.

The other thing about darkroasted coffee is that it goes better with milk and sugar. And milk and sugar are lucrative menu items.

MYTH NO. 4 Starbucks is not a combatant in the culture wars.

Starbucks releases a new holiday cup design every year featuring such seasonal symbols as reindeer, snowmen and Santa.

But in 2015, its cups were simply red. Some right-wing pundits greeted the receptacles with fury, accusing the company of waging a “war on Christmas.” In response, the company’s defenders insist that there isn’t a drop of antiChristian sentiment in its holiday cups.

Yet Starbucks’s accusers aren’t entirely wrong. The company has allied itself with the razor-thin majority of Americans who, according to Gallup, appreciatebeing greeted with an inclusive “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” It has ignored President Trump’s promise to bring back “Merry Christmas” greetings, sticking to its ecumenical 2015 vow to promote “inclusion and

MYTH NO. 5 Starbucks stores help build community.

Starbucks says its stores function as “neighborhood gathering places.” Supposedly they are spots “for people to connect” and join in “public conversation.” The company puts community bulletin boards on its walls and sponsors fun runs.

But sociologists of the community-building process, such as Roy Oldenburg and Robert Putnam, argue that community means bringing people face to face from different walks of life who don’t necessarily know each other already, so they can talk and better understand their differences.

During several recent visits to East Coast stores, I found people sitting at tables and on sofas, engrossed in their laptops or cellphones, protected by their earbuds. Groups that chat are ones that arrive together and leave together. More than 70 percent of customers I saw got their coffee to go.

As New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollisspeculated more than a decade ago, “Maybe . . . we only wish to drown our sorrows in a strong cup of coffee in cushy chairs surrounded by strangers who will grant us the illusion of community yet respect our privacy.” n Simon, a history professor at Temple University, is the author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2017

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