The Washington Post National Weekly - August 28, 2016

Politics Clinton woos big donors 4

World Tribe and neighbors clash 10

Sports A struggle after the Games 16

5 Myths The World Wide Web 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

TH E MYSTE RY

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

T HAT IS MEL ANIA

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m u e s u M SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

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It’s all happening at the

Change with a Purpose: Learning to Live with and Adapt to Wildfire

Legendary

Landscapes

60-minute multimedia presentation featuring Dr. Paul Hessburg 7 p.m. Aug. 30 Wenatchee Valley Museum Info: 509-888-6240

The Era of Megafires Tuesday, August 30 • 7pm

Produced by The Wildfire Project, an affiliate of the Wenatchee Valley Museum Welcome to our 16th annual environmental film series, exploring topics important to our community. All films are presented at the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center. They are free (with a suggested donation of $5) and open to all. Thanks to our co-sponsors for helping make these monthly screenings possible. Series sponsors are The Trust for Public Land, Wenatchee River Institute and Chelan-Douglas Land Trust.

27 S. Mission Street, Wenatchee 509-888-6240 wenatcheevalleymuseum.org Open Tues - Sat from 10am to 4pm

Native Heritage Bus Tour

9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 24 $55, $50 members Explore culturally significant locations with Native American guide Randy Lewis

Native Heritage Bus Tour Saturday, Sept. 24 • 9am to 3pm

Explore culturally significant locations from the Peshastin Pinnacles to the Wenatchee Heights with Native American guide Randy Lewis during a day-long bus tour Saturday, Sept. 24. The bus will depart from the Wenatchee Valley Museum at 9 a.m. and return about 3 p.m. with a stop for lunch on your own at Pybus Market.

Tickets are $55/person or $50/member.

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THE SWITCH

Google wants to help you vote BY

B RIAN F UNG

O

ne of the things that make Google so powerful is that the sheer amount of data the search engine gathers allows us to explore what people as a whole are interested in.

Now the company is using all that data to make it easier for Americans to vote.

Google says it will provide what it calls an “in-depth” search result when users look for information on how to cast a ballot — a search that’s seen triple-digit growth in contested states such as Arizona since the last presidential election. The new search function can tell you the registration deadlines and exactly what you need to bring to the polls. The information, which is tailored to the state you live in, will also explain how to register to vote.

Google gives in-depth results when it has the exact answer to a question.

The company has increasingly been using these to supply information directly, as opposed to presenting users with links to sources.

At right is what happens, for instance, when you plug in “how to vote” from Washington, D.C. What will be the practical outcome of all this information? Since Google accounts for roughly two-thirds of the U.S. search market, according to the research firm ComScore, it seems reasonable to conclude that equipping all those people with better resources may encourage them to vote at greater rates. That’s backed up by years of political science research that shows a link between ease of voting and voter turnout.

“When people have access to more information about an election, they tend to be more likely to turn out,” said Danny Hayes, an associ-

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ate professor of political science at George Washington University. “But I’d expect any effects to be small.”

For instance, as far back as 1997 scholars were studying the effect of lowered registration barriers on elections.

“It is well established that a substantial reduction in registration barriers such as a state's

This is a timely debate. Courts across the country have been striking down voter-ID laws, making it easier for Americans to exercise their civic rights. But given the changes in the law, voters may be more confused about what they need to do. The in-depth results from Google spell things out clearly.

Whether higher turnout tends to benefit Democrats or Republicans is a perennial question for scholars. One 2007 study by New York University found that nonvoters tend to identify more with liberal causes than with conservative ones. Other research suggests that higher-income Americans are more likely to vote.

There’s been lots of breathless reporting on the potential for Google or Facebook to tilt an election just by giving people certain search results or by structuring social news feeds to prioritize certain information. It’s not an idle concern, particularly as these online services come to dominate how we work, play and socialize. But, Hayes said, most elections won’t be decided by small changes in turnout.

More importantly, he said, Google’s potential influence on electoral behavior would not be much different from the League of Women Voters FROM GOOGLE “HOW TO VOTE IN WASHINGTON, D.C.” SEARCH facilitating civic participation.

“Anything that encourages people to vote could in theory affect an election, but adoption of election day registration (EDR) inthat doesn’t mean that it’s done with some creases turnout, although the exact magnitude partisan intent,” Hayes said. of the effect remains in some dispute,” wrote Providing people with the information they Craig Brians of Virginia Tech and Bernard Grofneed to enjoy their political freedoms — informan of the University of California at Irvine. The mation they’re already looking for — is a little researchers went on to examine a 20-year bit different from “tilting” a contest. What’s stretch of voting data and concluded that samemore, it stands to give Americans greater day registration had a remarkable impact on the faith in an institution that’s critical to the likelihood of “medium education and medium healthy functioning of the republic. n income” Americans to vote.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 46

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY DATA CRUNCH BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Melania Trump takes the stage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. Photograph by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images

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POLITICS

Big-money focus feels jarring to some

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Clinton’s high-dollar fundraisers contrast with efforts to ally herself with the middle class

BY M ATEA AND J OHN

T

G OLD W AGNER

he price of entry to see Hillary Clinton last Sunday evening was $50,000 per person, a sum that got you an al fresco meal of tomato and mozzarella salad, lobster, strawberry shortcake and an intimate conversation with the possible next president of the United States.

“It was the easiest event I’ve ever done,” said Elaine Schuster, a longtime Clinton friend who hosted the soiree at her waterfront home on Cape Cod, Mass. “Everyone wanted to come.”

Not everyone could, of course: Just 28 people joined Clinton for cocktails and dinner in Schuster’s

back yard. The Democratic nominee has spent much of August in such exclusive environs, helping her campaign and the party scoop up at least $32 million in three weeks as part of a nonstop press of high-dollar fundraisers.

Clinton has touted her growing support from small contributors, whose donations of $200 or less made up nearly 40 percent of her campaign’s $62 million haul in July.

But the former secretary of state devoted much of this month to seeking big money to finance the Democratic Party, a race for cash that has taken her from Greenwich, Conn., to Nantucket, Mass., to Beverly Hills, Calif. The fundraising drive has served as a re-

minder of her deep and decadeslong connections to some of the country’s wealthiest figures, a jarring contrast with her efforts to cast herself as an ally of those left out of prosperity.

“There is too much inequality, too little upward mobility. It is just too hard to get ahead today,” Clinton said during a major economic speech this month in the bluecollar community of Warren, Mich. If elected, she pledged, “I will have your back every single day that I serve.”

That appeal to working-class voters was bookended by two expensive fundraisers. The night before, Clinton had held a $25,000-ahead event in nearby Birmingham, Mich., at the home of a musi-

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives at Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts on Aug. 20 en route to a fundraiser.

cian whose father was the owner of basketball’s Detroit Pistons.

Legendary soul singer Aretha Franklin provided entertainment for the roughly 70 guests, performing “Natural Woman.”

And on the evening of her speech, donors paid $50,000 apiece to socialize with the candidate at the Chicago Club, one of the city’s most exclusive social gathering places. Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.), did his part by appearing at a fundraiser the same day at a Roman-style trattoria in a boutique Manhattan hotel, where admission started at $50,000 as well.

The Democratic ticket’s relentless fundraising this month — which included 50 private events

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5

POLITICS through last Monday, split roughly in half between the running mates — is helping to drive what is expected to be a record monthly haul for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

But the intense pursuit of big money spotlights what has long been one of Clinton’s biggest vulnerabilities: her immersion in a wealthy elite circle that has supported her family’s political and philanthropic causes over the past four decades. Those relationships were underscored by newly released emails from her time as secretary of state, which showed how the requests of her longtime friends and donors captured the attention of top Clinton aides.

Republican nominee Donald Trump also has devoted much of August to the fundraising circuit, with about two dozen events scheduled in some of the same exclusive enclaves as Clinton’s. But he does not have the same kind of longstanding connections to wealthy donors as the former first lady — relationships that have paid dividends as she has sought financing for her second White House run.

The billionaire real estate developer has attacked Clinton as beholden to her benefactors, picking up a critique that Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) made during the Democratic primaries.

“Hillary Clinton’s donors own her,” Trump said at a rally in Akron, Ohio, last week. “They own her lock, stock and barrel. They own her, and she will do whatever they tell her to do.”

It’s an argument that resonates with many Sanders fans, who remain uncomfortable with Clinton’s pursuit of big money.

“Fifty thousand dollars is more than a lot of people make in a year,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth Action, an environmental group that was an early Sanders supporter.

“When you’re taking such bigdollar contributions, ordinary Americans have a right to question what people are getting in return,” he added.

Clinton officials said that those writing big checks are supplying just a fraction of the campaign’s contributions. Of the $62 million Clinton raised for her campaign in July, $44 million was contributed online, they said. Donations of $200 or less totaled more than $24 million, about 38 percent.

Trump also brought in about

Hillary Clinton’s August fundraising spree In the past three weeks, the campaign has raised at least $32 million through high-dollar events.

Who attended the event Hillary Clinton

Tim Kaine

President Obama

Others

Cumulative contribution total by day $35M

RAISED THROUGH AUG. 22

$31.9M

30 25 20

RAISED THROUGH AUG. 11

$14.5M

15 10 5 0

1

2

3

4

5

President Obama headlines a fundraiser on behalf of Clinton in Atlanta.

6

9

10

11

12

13

15

16

Vice President Biden joins Clinton in his home town of Scranton, Pa., where she raised at least $1.5 million.

17

18

19 20 21 22

Singer Cher voices her support for Clinton at a fundraiser in Provincetown, Mass.

Note: No fundraisers were held on Aug. 7, 8 and 14. The cumulative totals are based on the minimum amount that attendees were required to contribute.

Source: Clinton campaign

$24 million in small donations in July, about two-thirds of the $36 million he collected in his campaign committee.

Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin said in a statement that “grassroots support continues to be the lifeblood of this campaign. Hillary Clinton raised nearly 70 percent of her money online in July, with about half of the donations coming from first time donors and the average donation to the campaign for the month was just $44.”

Still, Clinton spent most of August raising huge sums for the national party, which can accept vastly larger contributions than her campaign, as a result of rules being loosened in 2014.

She pulled in at least $1.5 million from 15 guests who attended a dinner in Omaha hosted by Susan Buffett, the daughter of Warren Buffett, a business magnate and investor, according to details released by the campaign.

A few days later, Clinton scooped up at least $750,000 at the home in Bow Mar, Colo., of Charlie Ergen, co-founder of Dish network and reportedly the richest man in

ASHLEY WU/THE WASHINGTON POST

the state.

Last weekend, Clinton collected at least $3.8 million in a swing through the toniest oceanfront communities in Massachusetts, headlining five events held by the likes of investor Lynn Forester de Rothschild, former ambassador to Portugal Elizabeth Bagley and former Universal Studios chief executive Frank Biondi.

Then it was off to Southern California, where the candidate spent Monday and Tuesday feted by boldface names such as former basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson at six events Monday and Tuesday.

Those who have observed Clinton in these settings say that she takes pains to point out the vast economic chasm that separates the attendees from the majority of Americans.

“She says the same thing at every one of these events as I see on TV,” said Wade Randlett, a longtime Democratic bundler who is raising money for Clinton’s campaign. “The only difference is that she starts by saying that the economy is working for all of us in the room, but it’s not working for too

many people and her job is to make it work for everybody.”

Clinton was the first presidential contender this cycle to take advantage of recent changes in campaign finance rules that allow candidates to seek massive contributions in conjunction with the national party.

By giving to two joint fundraising committees that Clinton’s campaign set up with the DNC, a single donor can contribute as much as $619,200 this year to support her bid. (Trump now has a similar arrangement with the Republican National Committee that allows donors to give up to $449,400.)

A Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission filings found that 65 Clinton allies had given at least $300,000 apiece to her joint fundraising committees by the end of June, together accounting for more than $29 million in contributions.

Among them are Univision chairman Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl Saban, who together donated $1.4 million. The Sabans also have contributed $10 million to Priorities USA Action, a proClinton super PAC. A Post investigation last year found that the couple ranked as the top political benefactors of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns since 1992 and also had donated at least $10 million to the Clintons’ family foundation.

On Monday night, the Sabans opened their Beverly Hills home to their longtime friend, hosting 100 supporters who paid $50,000 each to dine with the candidate.

The next day, Clinton took a brief break from her fundraising schedule to participate in a conference call with small-business owners around the country.

During her remarks, she recalled her upbringing in a family that ran a small drapery business in suburban Chicago, saying, “I want to make sure every family has the chance to tell a similar story. And that’s why my top priority as president will be building an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top.”

Soon after, she was off — headed to mingle with stars such as Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx and Tobey Maguire at the Hollywood Hills home of pop star Justin Timberlake and his wife, actress Jessica Biel, for yet another fundraiser.

This one alone would generate more than $3 million for Clinton and the party. n

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“When you’re taking such big-dollar contributions, ordinary Americans have a right to question what people are getting in return.”

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth Action, an early Bernie Sanders supporter

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POLITICS

Who paid for Trump’s TV pledges?

BY D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD AND A LICE C RITES

T

he time had come to fire Khloé Kardashian. But first, Donald Trump had a question.

“What’s your charity?” Trump asked.

They were filming “The Celebrity Apprentice,” the reality-TV show where Trump schooled the faded and the semi-famous in the arts of advertising, salesmanship and workplace infighting. Most weeks, one winner got prize money for charity. One loser got fired.

Kardashian told Trump that she was playing for the Brent Shapiro Foundation, which helps teens stay away from alcohol and drugs.

Trump had a pleasant surprise.

Although Kardashian could not win any more prize money, he would give her cause a special, personal donation. Not the show’s money. His own money.

“I’m going to give $20,000 to your charity,” Trump said, according to a transcript of that show.

He didn’t.

After the show aired in 2009, Kardashian’s charity did receive $20,000. But it wasn’t from Trump. Instead, the check came from a TV production company, the same one that paid out the show’s official prizes.

The same thing happened numerous times on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” To console a fired or disappointed celebrity, Trump would promise a personal gift.

On-air, Trump seemed to be explicit that this wasn’t TV fakery: The money he was giving was his own. “Out of my wallet,” Trump said in one case. “Out of my own account,” he said in another.

But when the cameras were off, the payments came from other people’s money.

In some cases, as with Kardashian, Trump’s “personal” promise was paid off by a production company. Other times, it was paid off by a nonprofit that Trump controls, whose coffers are largely filled with other donors’ money.

The Washington Post tracked

MITCH HAASETH/NBC UNIVERSAL

On his show, Trump said he’d donate his own money, but he didn’t all the “personal” gifts that Trump promised on the show — during 83 episodes and seven seasons — but could not confirm a single case in which Trump actually sent a gift from his own pocket.

Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

For Trump, “The Apprentice” — and later, “The Celebrity Apprentice” — helped reestablish him as a national figure, after his fall into debt and corporate bankruptcies in the 1990s.

On-screen, Trump was a wise, tough businessman. And, at times, a kindhearted philanthropist — willing to give away thousands on a whim.

In one instance, Trump’s sud-

den flourish of generosity was enough to move an insult comedian to tears.

“I’m gonna give $10,000 to it, okay?” Trump said, offering a personal gift to singer Aubrey O’Day after O’Day’s team lost that week’s task. Then Trump noticed another contestant, Lisa Lampanelli — a comedian known as “The Queen of Mean. “Are you crying now? Lisa, what’s going on here?”

“I thought that was really nice,” Lampanelli said, her voice breaking. “I mean, it takes you 30 seconds to make that amount, so thank you. You’re a rich man, and we appreciate it.”

The Post examined Trump’s on-

On “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Donald Trump often promised to contribute to a celebrity’s cause from his own pocket, but the money came from a production company or his foundation, which mostly has other people’s money.

air promises as part of its ongoing search for evidence that the Republican presidential nominee gives millions to charity out of his own pocket — as he claims.

Trump has declined to release his tax returns, which would make his charitable donations clear.

NBC, which broadcast his show, declined to release the episodes for review, saying it did not own the footage. Instead, The Post relied on TV transcription services, online recaps of the show, YouTube clips and public tax records.

In all, The Post found 21 instances where Trump had pledged money to a celebrity’s cause. Together, those pledges totaled $464,000. The Post then

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7

POLITICS contacted the individual charities to find out who paid off Trump’s promises.

In one case, the answer was: nobody at all.

In 2012, Trump had promised $10,000 to the Latino Commission on AIDS, the charity of former Miss Universe Dayana Mendoza. The charity said it never received the money.

In two other cases, it was not possible to determine what happened. One charity said that somebody had paid off Trump’s promise but declined to say who.

Leaders of another charity — baseball star Darryl Strawberry’s foundation, to which Trump had promised $25,000 — did not respond to multiple calls or emails from The Post.

In the other 18 cases, the answer was the same — on-air, Trump promising a gift of his own money; off-air, that gift coming from someone else.

“I think you’re so incredible that — personally, out of my own account — I’m going to give you $50,000 for St. Jude’s,” Trump told mixed martial arts star Tito Ortiz in 2008.

This was the first personal promise The Post found, from the show’s first season.

Ortiz, at the time, was being fired. His team had come up short in a contest to design advertising for yogurt-based body wash. To soften the blow, Trump promised the gift to Ortiz’s charity, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Tax records show that the hospital was sent $50,000 from a nonprofit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

That sounds like it was Trump’s money.

But, for the most part, it wasn’t.

Trump had founded the nonprofit group in the late 1980s — and, in its early years, Trump was its only donor. But that had changed in the mid-2000s. Trump let the foundation’s assets dwindle to $4,238 at the beginning of 2007. After that, its coffers were filled using donations from others, most notably pro wrestling magnates Vince and Linda McMahon.

In 2007 and 2008 combined, Trump gave $65,000 to his own foundation, or about 1 percent of its incoming money.

When he described his gift to Ortiz on-air in 2008, it was per-

SLAVEN VLASIC/GETTY IMAGES

sonal, “from my own account.”

“Thank you very much,” Ortiz said.

“Get out of here,” Trump said.

In the next few seasons, such personal promises from Trump were relatively rare. The Post found six such pledges in the show’s first four seasons combined.

And in at least two of those cases, the payment didn’t come from Trump — or his foundation, which he had used to pay Ortiz’s charity.

“What’s your charity, Jose?”

Trump asked baseball slugger Jose Canseco in an episode in 2011. Canseco was leaving the show voluntarily because his father had become ill. As with Kardashian, Trump said he would soften the blow with a gift.

Canseco’s charity was the Baseball Assistance Team, which provides confidential aid to minor leaguers, umpires, retired players and others connected to the sport.

“All right, I’m gonna give $25,000,” Trump said. “Say hello to your father.”

As with Kardashian, that money came from Reilly Worldwide.

Trump gave nothing.

The Post sent a query to Canseco: Did he think any differently about Trump after he learned that a third party paid off Trump’s promise?

No comment. “He said he’s only doing paying jobs. I’m sorry,” Canseco’s publicist wrote.

In 2012, Trump became more generous on the air.

That year, he promised six $10,000 donations in a single episode. In another episode, he gave contestant O’Day’s charity $10,000 — the gift that moved Lampanelli to tears.

It was all Trump Foundation money.

In 2013, the gifts continued. In one episode that year, Trump handed out $20,000 each to the charities of basketball star Dennis Rodman, singer La Toya Jackson and actor Gary Busey.

“Remember, Donald Trump is a very nice person, okay?” he told them.

By then, a personal gift from Trump was no longer a rare thing.

In fact, contestants had come to expect these gifts — and even to demand them, when Trump didn’t offer money on his own.

“Give her some money. She didn’t win nothin’,” country singer Trace Adkins told Trump in one episode as the billionaire was firing former Playboy Playmate Brande Roderick.

“Okay, I’m going to give you $20,000, okay? All right?” Trump told Roderick.

“Thank you, Mr. Trump,” said Adkins, the man who sang “Hon-

From left, Penn Jillette, Lil Jon, and Trace Adkins all appeared on Donald Trump’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.” In 2013, Trump promised $100,000 to the charity of hip-hop artist Lil Jon. A production company paid the donation.

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ky Tonk Badonkadonk.” “That was cool.”

All of that was the Trump Foundation’s money.

In fact, The Post’s search found that all of Trump’s promises from the show’s last three seasons were paid off by the Trump Foundation, save one. That was the biggest one.

In 2013, Trump promised $100,000 to the American Diabetes Association, the charity of hip-hop artist Lil Jon. He said that the gift was in honor of Lil Jon’s mother, who had recently died.

In that case, a production company paid.

The Post reached out to Trump, NBC and Mark Burnett — the show’s producer — to ask whether there was any way that these production-company checks could actually be considered gifts from Trump himself. Had they, perhaps, been deducted from Trump’s fees for the show?

Trump and Burnett did not respond. NBC declined to comment.

After The Post’s close look at Trump’s promises on the show, a mystery remained: What happened in 2012 to make Trump so much more generous on the air?

In the tax records of the Trump Foundation — which Trump used to pay off most of those new promises — there is no record of a donation from Trump himself in 2012.

In fact, there is no record of any gift from Trump’s pocket to the Trump Foundation in any year since 2008. (In 2011, Comedy Central donated Trump’s $400,000 appearance fee for a televised roast.)

But, in 2012, the Trump Foundation’s records show a large gift from NBC, the network that aired the show. That was more than enough to cover all the foundation’s gifts to “Celebrity Apprentice” contestants’ charities, both before 2012 and since.

For NBC, Trump’s “personal” donations made for better TV. They added will-he-or-won’t-he drama to the show’s boardroom scenes, gave uplifting notes to the “firings” and burnished the reputation of Trump, the show’s star.

Did NBC give Trump’s foundation money, so that Trump could appear to be more generous oncamera?

An NBC spokeswoman declined to comment. n

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NATION

How welfare reform changed poverty Being poor in the U.S. has changed in several ways since 1996

BY

M AX E HRENFREUND

T

wenty years ago, President Clinton kept a promise.

“I have a plan to end welfare as we know it,” he said in a television spot during his campaign for office. He did end it, on Aug. 22, 1996.

The law that the president signed that day, together with other policies enacted by Congress and the states, profoundly changed the lives of poor Americans. It was intensely controversial at the time — and is heating up again today. New data on the hardships of poverty in the aftermath of the recent recession have exposed what critics say are shortcomings of welfare reform.

Clinton ended the traditional welfare system, called Aid to Families With Dependent Children, under which very poor Americans were effectively entitled to receive financial support from the federal government. Under the new system, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, applicants must meet a range of strict requirements that vary by state: working, volunteering, looking for a job or participating in skills training.

Because of Clinton’s welfare overhaul, the experience of poverty in the United States has been altered in many ways, including these seven: Fewer people are on welfare.

After Clinton signed the bill, Americans left welfare rolls in droves. People receiving federal welfare payments fell by half in four years, to 6.3 million in 2000.

The decline had begun a couple of years previously, as states made changes to their policies ahead of the implementation of the new federal law. The rolls had reached their apex of 14.2 million in 1994.

The government didn’t save money. Despite shrinking welfare

rolls, the federal government is spending more on programs that help the poor. That’s partly because the law allows states to redirect that federal money once used for cash assistance to other programs targeting low-income families, such as child care, college scholarships and programs that

Welfare rolls declined after reform

Poverty is higher than in 1996.

The number of Americans receiving welfare payments from the federal government fell abruptly during the Clinton administration.

12.6 million

10.8 10 million

4.6 million

5

1974

2012

1996

Includes both Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Source: Hartley, R.P., Lamarche, C. and Ziliak, J. 2016 (working paper).

How many Americans are poor?

While welfare reform was being debated and implemented, poverty was in decline. As a result of the recent recession, however, more people are poor today.

Supplemental rate

Official rate

19.0% 18% 16 DETAIL

14

15.3% 14.8%

14.3%

14.2% 13.7%

Poverty among children has declined. Children, by contrast,

12

1967

0

2014

1996

The Census recently revised the questions on its survey, resulting in figures for 2013 and 2014 that could be modestly elevated relative to previous years.

Source: Census Bureau, NBER

Where the money comes from for the poorest mothers Since the reform, poor, unmarried mothers have been relying more on food stamps and disability rather than traditional welfare. $12,000

Other public assistance

9,000

Food stamps

$3,000

Cash welfare

Tax credits

Earnings after taxes

0

1995

Social Security

Disability

6,000

2000

2005

2010

2012

Note: average income by source in the poorest decile of unmarried women’s families. 2015 dollars

Source: CBPP

promote marriage as a way to prevent poverty.

Tax credits for the poor also maintained overall cash assis-

Economists and experts on poverty fiercely debate whether the 1996 law made poor Americans better off.

Various measures of poverty show that the number of poor Americans has fluctuated with the economy. The official measure has vacillated around 14 percent for at least half a century. That measure, however, excludes the value of food, housing and other resources poor families receive from the government. A supplemental measure that takes account of those government programs shows a gradual but unsteady decline in poverty, putting the rate at slightly above 15 percent in 2014.

Economic conditions were excellent during the debate over the welfare reform bill in the ’90s, and poverty was already declining before Clinton signed it. Initially, standards of living for poor Americans continued to improve as the law was being implemented. During the recent recession, though, poverty increased again.

THE WASHINGTON POST

tance at a stable level, and programs such as food stamps expanded — especially during the recession that began in 2008.

have been largely insulated from shifts in economic conditions, and the rate of poverty among them has steadily declined.

When welfare reform was passed, the poverty rate for children stood at 13.1 percent. In 2014, it had dropped to 7.8 percent.

Federal policymakers have made reducing poverty among children a priority by offering tax credits to parents and giving children health insurance and free school lunches. In recent years, though, the share of children in poverty has not declined as quickly as in the past.

More unmarried mothers entered the formal workforce. One

particular concern for lawmakers as they debated welfare reform focused on unmarried, poorly educated mothers, who made up a large fraction of people on the rolls in the old system. Many worried that these women would be unable to find work because they had to care for their children.

In fact, according to research by Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, it is

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

9

NATION likely that many of these women were already working — under the table, to avoid losing their benefits under the old system. In any case, many of them entered the formal labor force after welfare reform was passed.

Although the numbers had been rising, the share of never-married mothers with no more than a high school diploma who were working in the formal sector jumped from 64 percent in 1996 to 76 percent in 2000, matching the figure for similarly educated women without children.

Proponents of reform argue that the restrictions Clinton enacted encouraged many people to work and end their dependency on help from the government. At the same time, the robust economy might have drawn more workers into the labor force, and the expansion of the earned income tax credit — a bonus for poor workers that rewards them financially for working and earning more — provided another reason for people to find jobs.

Deep poverty increased among families with unemployed adults. Meanwhile, there

were a few parents who didn’t find work, and they could no longer receive welfare payments from the government. If they did not have a job, the earned income tax credit would not help them either.

The rate of deep poverty — defined as the share living on a household income less than half of the official poverty level — increased among this group following reform, from 32 percent in 1996 to 39 percent in 2000.

Whether this increase was a result of the reform or broader trends in the economy is unclear, since deep poverty among households without working adults had been increasing for some time.

The figure remains around 40 percent today.

Families have become less dependent on welfare.

These days, among very poor, unmarried mothers, welfare is far less important to the average family budget. Instead, these households rely more on food stamps and disability than in the past.

Earnings in the labor market remain scant and have even decreased in recent years. They are getting less from the government overall, and the data suggest they have not been able to make up that money by fending for themselves. n

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As National Park Service turns 100, challenges loom BY

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s the National Park Service turned 100 this past week, federal officials and governors extolled the virtues of what’s hailed as “America’s best idea,” a system started by former president Woodrow Wilson in 1916 that now includes more than 400 parks on 85 million acres in the 50 states and territories.

But these days, the views at the parks aren’t all pretty. The system faces a $12 billion maintenance shortfall that has left everything from bridges to restrooms in disrepair. Yellowstone National Park’s backlog alone is $603 million with crumbling roads, buildings and wastewater systems.

Congress has declined to provide funding needed for fixes that have lingered for more than a decade.

Another looming challenge lies in who comes to the parks. The average age of its visitors is as high as 63 at some sites, and the U.S. National Park Service is unsure how to entice younger people away from cities and the Internet.

Climate change is making matters worse. Rising seas are grinding away at the Assateague Island National Seashore. Decreasing snow and rain are stunting the growth of vegetation in several parks, including the Grand Canyon and the Mojave Desert, leaving bighorn sheep with little to eat. At Glacier National Park in Montana, rising temperatures have caused the most accessible glacier in North America to begin to melt away.

This year is projected to be a banner year for the park system, with attendance topping 330 million for the first time — a 23 million increase from last year. The top draws are Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee with 10 million visitors in 2014, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona with nearly 5 million visitors and Yosemite National Park in California with nearly 4 million.

The most stalwart park visitors are disappearing, though, as they

age. The question of how to draw more young people and minorities is unsolved.

The splendor of the parks is tough to oversell. In national parks, people may find themselves face to face with bison and in shouting distance of bears. They can walk across earth charred by lava flows and watch it flow down

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Yellowstone faces a $603 million maintenance backlog.

cliffs into the Pacific Ocean.

There are pulsing geysers, eyepopping views from cliffs, canyons the size of big cities, and rich animal diversity.

More visitors add to the numbers of people who encounter problems. “Restroom facilities have been closed, trails have not been maintained because there’s no money so visitors can’t take hikes,” said Theresa Pierno, president and chief executive of the National Parks Conservation Association.

“Sometimes campgrounds and services are lacking,” all while more people are coming to parks. “It’s a very serious issue,” Pierno said.

For years, Congress has declined to increase the Park Service’s appropriation above about $3 billion. Republican members instead called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the Park Service was collecting enough visitor fees and membership dues to address the problem on its own.

In a December report, the GAO

concluded that Congress’s $3.1 billion appropriation over about a decade amounted to an 8 percent funding drop when adjusted for inflation. Lawmakers who called on the service to create a higher revenue stream overlooked one major obstacle: Congress. It virtually barred the agency from increasing rates and must pass a law to change that.

But even if the service could increase fees, will there be enough visitors to pay them?

Many park visitors are older than 65, and at that age, entrance is free. The bulk of paying visitors are between 50 and 60, paving the way for a revenue crash in the next decade. The Park Service desperately needs new visitors as it moves into its new century.

That’s where Sangit Chari comes in. As the program manager for the Office of Relevancy, Diversity and Inclusion, her job is to increase the number of African American, Latino, Native American and Asian employees. The hope is that they, with the help of a five-year-old recruitment program for more diverse visitation, will become a beacon for minorities.

It’s been a hard slog, Chari said.

“The issue we have with our minority employees is our turnover rates mirror our recruitment rates,” she said, meaning that they lose as many as they recruit.

“We also have a challenge retaining millennials,” Chari said.

At Yosemite, John Jackson, a park ranger who’s black, said he goes out of his way to make members of underrepresented groups feel welcome when they show up.

He said the service doesn’t do enough to tell the story of how people who weren’t white helped to build Yosemite and other parks.

Yosemite dwells too much on the contributions of John Muir, whose love for the Sierra Nevada led to the creation of the park in 1890.

“We know John Muir,” he said.

“Multiple groups made this place famous historically, not just one group.” n

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Wine-loving tribe fears for its future Kabul

live in several small valleys on the west side

AFGHAN.

of the Chitral River in Pakistan.

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Islamabad

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idden up in the mountains near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the Kalash tribe loves homemade wine and whiskey, dances for days at colorful festivals, and practices a religion that holds that God has spirits and messengers who speak through nature.

Long before the campaign of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, the villagers fretted over whether they needed walls or donot-enter lists to protect them from their more-conservative Muslim neighbors — ultimately deciding that the towering heights of the Hindu Kush would protect them.

But over the past century, Muslims from modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan began moving in. Now villagers say their Kalash culture and religion are threatened by forced conversions, robberies and assaults.

“We are scared,” said Yasir Kalash, the manager of a hotel here in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“They capture our lands, our pastures and our forests, and sometimes take our goats and women. . . . We are afraid in the next few years we will be finished.”

Though the area is called the Kalash Valley, Kalash settlers actually live in three separate valleys that make up an eastern prong of Pakistan’s 1,000-squaremile Chitral Valley.

The Kalash religion was once widespread in Central Asia, but the 4,200 villagers who live here in the Chitral Valley make up the last known Kalash settlement in the world. And now those villages are yet another test of Muslimdominated Pakistan’s tolerance for minorities and cultural diversity.

The Kalash tribe is so fearful of being overrun that its members are considering packing up their children and goats and embarking on a modern-day pilgrimage in search of a new country.

“The younger generation think they cannot live here anymore,”

The Kalash tribe, roughly 4,200 inhabitants,

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T IM C RAIG Kalash Valley, Pakistan BY

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Tensions grow between a group in Pakistan’s mountains and its Muslim neighbors

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Chitral

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said Zahim Kalash, 34.

In June, a two-day riot erupted on this plateau after Kalash villagers said a 15-year-old girl was tricked into converting to Islam.

Last month, two Kalash goatherds were killed in a mountain pasture, the latest in a series of attacks on the tribe. And heated arguments are erupting over practices as simple as using the local spring water.

“According to our traditions, we consider all the springs to be holy,” said Imran Kabir, who lives in the valley and acts as an unofficial spokesman for the tribe. “We don’t allow anyone to wash clothes or take baths in the springs.”

Last month, several of their Muslim neighbors started doing just that — bathing and washing clothes in the cool, emerald waters that flow from the nearby heights.

“We said, ‘Please don’t do that.

People drink from those springs,’ ” Kabir said. “They said, ‘You people are stupid.’ ” And then a scuffle broke out.

The Kalash villages are accessible only by one-lane jeep trails, and residents live in wood-andmud houses that contain few furnishings except for cots. They eat mostly what they can produce, including hundreds of pounds of butter each year.

The Kalash believe in one god with several messengers. To com-

municate with them, the tribe erects altars where worshipers offer sacrifices, usually goats.

Some scholars say the Kalash religion originated during Alexander the Great’s conquest of South Asia around 300 B.C. But other scholars and villagers are skeptical, noting that neither the tribe’s written history nor its oral traditions, including song and poetry, include any reference to Alexander.

The Kalash religion at one time flourished in the Hindu Kush region. Over the centuries, however, armies and members of competing faiths moved in, and many Kalash were converted. Others fled into the mountain passes, largely left alone when the area was a western frontier of British colonial India.

After Pakistan became a country in 1947, Muslim families began moving into the Kalash Valley, drawn by the crisp climate, undisturbed forests and rich grazing lands.

Salamat Khan, who does not know his age but estimates it to be at least 75, said that for much of his life, the Kalash and their new neighbors lived in relative harmony.

But he and other villagers said the mood has changed over the past decade as a less-tolerant form of Islam began taking hold here.

Traveling Islamic scholars are increasingly showing up in the

valley, and after each visit, villagers say, their Muslim neighbors appear less tolerant.

“They will say, ‘Why do you people make wine?’ ” recalled Yasir Kalash. “We make wine because it’s our culture. We use wine in our rituals, we use wine to cook, and we use wine because, in our mind, wine is purification.”

In June, according to police and local officials, a 15-year-old girl named Rina wandered away from home and ended up at a local Islamic seminary.

After a few hours, the cleric declared that Rina had converted to Islam. She later returned to her village, saying she had not intended to convert.

But angry Muslim villagers began pelting Kalash villagers with bricks and stones, arguing that a conversion to Islam cannot be undone. A judge agreed, effectively severing ties between the girl and her parents.

“The conversion rate is very high, and we are afraid if this goes on, our culture will be finished within the next few years,” Yasir Kalash said.

Kalash villagers also are fearful of violent attacks, including raids

by Taliban militants.

Zabir Shah, 26, a Kalash villager, said that two years ago, Taliban militants from Afghanistan sneaked into Bumberet, the unofficial capital of the valley, and stabbed a 15-year-old boy to death.

“I saw 25 Taliban, from a distance, surrounding the guy and killing him,” Shah said. “There can be no reason for them to kill him except that he was a nonMuslim.”

“We are people from both religions living together,” Shah said.

What makes the Kalash community especially frightened is a feeling of being “isolated and alone,” Yasir Kalash said.

He said Christians can turn to the Vatican or the West for support, while Hindus can look to India, and Shiite Muslims can seek some protection from Iran. Kalash villagers, he added, feel as if no other country cares about them.

“We request to the world, preserve us,” he said. n

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What’s really happening in Ethiopia P AUL S CHEMM Addis Ababa, Ethiopia BY

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fter going through its worst drought in 50 years, Ethiopia is again seeing rain. In fact, in some places, it’s falling too hard and has set off floods.

So while the number of people requiring food aid has dropped slightly from 10.2 million in January to 9.7 million, according to the latest figures, there is a new threat of disease in a population weakened by drought.

Measles, meningitis, malaria and scabies are on the rise. And most seriously, there has been an outbreak of something mysteriously called “AWD,” according to the Humanitarian Requirements Document, issued by the government and humanitarian agencies this month.

“There is a high risk that AWD can spread to all regions with high speed as there is a frequent population movement between Addis Ababa and other regions,” it warned.

The letters stand for acute watery diarrhea. It is a potentially fatal condition caused by water bearing Vibrio cholerae bacterium. Everywhere else in the world, it is simply called cholera.

But not in Ethiopia, where international humanitarian organizations privately admit that they are allowed only to call it AWD and are not permitted to publish the number of people affected.

The government apparently is concerned about the international impact if news of a significant cholera outbreak were to get out, even though the disease is not unusual in East Africa.

This means that, hypothetically, when refugees from South Sudan with cholera flee across the border into Ethiopia, they suddenly have AWD instead.

Similarly, exactly a year ago, when aid organizations started sounding alarm bells over the failed rains, government officials were divided over whether they would call it a drought and appeal for international aid.

The narrative for Ethiopia at

XAUME OLLEROS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Whether it’s disease, disaster or the economy, the country is sensitive about how it’s perceived the time was of a successful nation with double-digit growth, and the government did not want to bring back memories of the 1980s drought that killed hundreds of thousands and left the country forever associated with famine.

“We don’t use the f-word,” an aid worker explained to me in September, referring to famine.

Like many of its neighbors in the region, Ethiopia has issues with freedom of expression and is very aware of how it is perceived abroad. While the country has many development successes to celebrate, its current sensitivity suggests it will be some time before this close U.S. ally resembles the democracy it has long claimed to be.

The government ultimately recognized there was a drought last year and made an international appeal for aid. The systems that had been put into place over the years prevented the drought from turning into a humanitarian catas-

trophe — for which the country has earned praise from its international partners.

In the same manner, even though it does not call it cholera, the government still is waging a vigorous campaign to educate people on how to avoid AWD, by boiling water and washing their hands.

This sensitivity to bad news extends to the economic realm, as well. Critics often have criticized Ethiopia’s decade of reported strong growth as the product of cooked numbers. The government does seem to produce rosier figures than international institutions.

After the drought, the International Monetary Fund predicted in April that growth would drop from 10.2 percent in 2015 to 4.5 percent this year. But Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn maintained that growth would be a robust 8.5 percent, despite falling agricultural productivity and decreased export earnings.

In the political realm, mean-

People stand in the rain in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June. The country recently emerged from its worst drought in a half-century, though officials debated whether to call it a drought.

while, news of unrest and protests is suppressed. During a weekend of demonstrations on Aug. 6 and 7, the Internet was cut, making it difficult to find out what happened.

Human rights organizations, opposition parties and media tried to piece together the toll from the deadly demonstrations, which according to Amnesty International may have been up to 100 deaths.

The United Nations has called for international observers to carry out an investigation in the affected regions, which the government has strongly rejected, even as it has dismissed estimates of casualties without providing any of its own.

“That is one of the factors we are struggling against with this government, the blockade of information,” said Beyene Petros, the chairman of a coalition of opposition parties. “Journalists cannot go and verify. We cannot do that.”

Local journalists are heavily constrained, and as Felix Horne of Human Rights Watch points out, Ethiopia is one of the biggest jailers of journalists on the continent.

“Limitations on independent media, jamming of television and radio signals, and recent blocking of social media all point to a government afraid to allow its citizens access to independent information,” he said.

Foreign journalists do not fare much better, especially if they attempt to venture out of the capital to do their reporting.

In March, New York Times and Bloomberg News correspondents were detained by police while trying to report on the disturbances in the region of Oromia. They were sent back to Addis Ababa and held overnight in prison before being interrogated and released.

Getachew Reda, the communications minister, has dismissed allegations about the information crackdown, and in recent appearances on Al Jazeera he maintained that there are no obstacles to information in Ethiopia.

“This country is open for business. It’s open for the international community — people have every right to collect whatever information they want,” he said. n

P R I VAT E A N D IN THE SHADOW OF A BIG PERSONALITY, THE REAL WOMAN IS OBSCURED IN MYTH

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BY KEN OTTERBOURG

he first time Melania Trump appeared on “The Apprentice” was on Jan. 8, 2004. This was before her wedding, the birth of her child, the launching of her jewelry and skin-care brands and, obviously, before Cleveland and the day last month when she briefly and inadvertently committed the cardinal sin of upstaging her husband.

Her debut was during the finale of Season 1, when she accompanied Donald Trump on a trip to Atlantic City. At the time, she was Melania Knauss, Trump’s girlfriend of five years and a model perhaps best known for posing in what appeared to be the altogether for the cover of the British edition of GQ. “The Apprentice” isn’t a documentary. It’s a reality show, with the emphasis on show. What happens — what we see — is what the producers want us to see. And here’s some of what we saw, which is instructive when you consider all that has since taken place: First, Trump doesn’t wait for Melania when he gets off the helicopter at the Trump Taj Mahal. Then a contestant mispronounces her name. Finally, she gets to say exactly six words, which are: “It’s so cute. It’s really good.”

Trump and Knauss were engaged less than two weeks after the episode aired, and they married the next year. “She’s shown she can be the woman behind me,” Trump would later tell the gossip columnist Cindy Adams. “We’re together five years, and these five years for whatever reasons have been my most successful. I have to imagine she had something to do with that.”

They each said they wanted a small, simple wedding. He, to Us Weekly: “Who needs the big hoopla? I get enough of it.” She, to People: “I like private, intimate.” That didn’t happen. This is not to say they lied or even misspoke. Perhaps just that their plans changed or that the very rich have very different definitions for these very ordinary words.

The ceremony was at the Bethesda-by-theSea Episcopal church in Palm Beach, Fla., and the reception was just down the road at Mar-aLago, Trump’s uber-posh club. Melania’s Christian Dior gown with its shimmer of beads required nearly a half-year of labor to make.

Billy Joel, Elton John, Paul Anka and Tony Bennett performed, and more than 300 guests, a great many of them the global elites that Trump now frequently campaigns against, dined and danced into the evening.

Bill and Hillary Clinton attended, and there is a widely circulated photograph of the Clintons and the Trumps at the reception. Donald is talking, gesturing, and Hillary and Bill and Melania are laughing and smiling at whatever it is he is saying. Bill has his arm on Donald’s shoulder, and Hillary has her arm around Bill.

So, they are intertwined, these three people, one former president and the other two now competing for that job in the ultimate game of musical chairs.

Just off to the side but not quite removed from this braid of ambition, celebrity, narcissism and power is Melania. Depending on turnout in November and a few swing states, she will be either our next first lady or simply and forever the third Mrs. Trump.

Melania Trump speaks in short, declarative sen-

tences. She is 46 and still carries an accent from her native Slovenia and makes the occasional lapses in grammar and syntax that are charming when spoken by a cultured and wealthy person born abroad. She shares her husband’s aversion to introspection or doubt, whether the topic is politics: “I follow it from A to Z. I know exactly what is going on.” Or parenting: “We know what is right, what is wrong.” Or our capacity for personal growth: “I think the mistake some people make is they try to change the man they love after they get

married. You cannot change a person. You accept the person.”

Perhaps the closest she has come to appearing at a loss for words was during an interview this year for a friendly profile that ran in DuJour magazine. She was asked what she thought about the comedian Louis C.K. comparing her husband to Hitler. Melania did not know who C.K. was.

Her enigmatic, cloistered presence has taken on a life of its own. The New York Times published a short story in July loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” with Melania as a brooding wife trying to manage her moody husband and keep a step ahead of his scheming daughters, Tiffany and Ivanka. It can be confusing and — let’s be honest — also a little unfair, this fiction mingling with fact and absence of fact, compounded

by Melania’s low profile. She declined to be interviewed for this story; a spokeswoman cited “scheduling commitments.”

Melania is an infrequent companion with her husband at political events. She wasn’t in attendance when he announced that Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana would be his running mate, and she did not accompany him in the days after the Republican National Convention. In the past, she has tied that decision to her desire to stay in New York with Barron, their 10-yearold son. “I made that choice,” she told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year. “I have my own mind. I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me.”

And that is a constant refrain in Melania’s public remarks. Along with her self-assuredness and her statements that Donald has amazing business skills and that the United States can be great again if we just give him the keys to the car called America is another cri de coeur: that she is more than Mrs. Donald Trump. She is Melania. continues on next page

ILLUSTRATION BY HELLOVON; ARTIST INSPIRATION PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORIO T. BINUYA/EVERETT COLLECTION

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from previous page

She is independent and capable. And she would like our respect.

It is not easy to escape the long shadow of her husband and carve out her own identity. Melania has noted that she is more than just a pretty face. And that is true. She grew up as Melanija Knavs in Slovenia when it was still part of Yugoslavia, graduated from a design high school, then attended the University of Ljubljana before moving to Milan and later Paris for modeling. She has testified in court that she received a two-year degree in architecture from the school, but journalists who have examined her academic record report that she never received any such certification. Her spokeswoman did not respond to a request to clarify her education.

During the early part of her modeling career, she also changed her name to the more German-sounding Knauss. Melania came to New York in 1996, moved into an apartment by Union Square in Lower Manhattan and made her own way. Acquaintances have described her as smart and disciplined, cautious about dating and largely removed from the disruptions of the city’s nightlife. She and Trump met in September 1998 during a Fashion Week party at a place just off Times Square called the Kit Kat Club. In some retellings, Trump arrived with a date; in others, he arrived alone. In any event, he was smitten. Trump was 52 and separated a year from Marla Maples, wife No. 2, whom he would divorce in 1999. Melania was 28, which can be a difficult age in an industry where youth is nearly everything.

They broke up briefly in 2000, when Trump was toying with running for president on the Reform Party ticket. Then they got back together, this time for good. Their pairing raised Melania’s profile. She got to christen a cruise ship, do modeling for Levi’s, have a blink-of-aneye uncredited spot in “Zoolander” and make a cameo in the 2000 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition (she hugs an inflatable killer whale).

Melania was featured in her wedding dress on the cover of Vogue in February 2005,and the next year she was in the magazine again, seven months pregnant and wearing a gold Norma Kamali bikini. In between, she appeared in an Aflac commercial, where she and the spokesduck swap brains at the hands of a mad scientist. “I thought she would be perfect,” said Aflac chief executive Dan Amos. “She’s the bride of the year, and she’s getting enormous publicity. No one really knows her.” The commercial is funny, but it also reinforced her new place in the world. The lab assistant simply refers to her as “Mrs. Trump.”

At the time, Melania was often using the hyphenated Knauss-Trump, a style that would continue until at least 2008, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.

Barron was born on March 20, 2006, a few

months before Melania became a U.S. citizen, and she was less visible while her son was very young. In 2010, she resurfaced. First came a line of jewelry she designed and was sold on the QVC shopping channel. The Melania collection did

NENA BEDEK FOR AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

well, but QVC is a little down-market if you live on floors 66 to 68 of Trump Tower, flanked by Tiffany’s on the north and Gucci on the south, with a view of Central Park spread out below like your own personal picnic blanket. Two years later, she signed a licensing agreement for skincare products made with caviar and sold in high-end department stores. It was her very own art of the deal.

The agreement, which would later become a point of litigation, took a year of negotiations between an attorney for New Sunshine LLC and an attorney with the Trump Organization.

Its first statement of fact read: “Melania Trump, the principal of Licensor (‘Melania’), is a world-renowned model, celebrity and businesswoman, who enjoys the highest reputation in these fields.” The agreement spelled out her advance payments, which were to total $1 million. And it also made clear that the use of her last name was heavily restricted. The brand name was simply Melania, and her full name could appear only directly below the brand itself and always in smaller type.

New Sunshine was run by a businessman named Stephen Hilbert. He and Donald had worked together on a big real-estate deal to buy the General Motors Building in New York in 1998 and remained in contact as business and social acquaintances. Both had much younger wives, too. Although Melania said she had been tinkering with skin-care formulas for years, it was Hilbert’s company that sought her out when New Sunshine wanted to expand its product line because the tanning industry, which had been the company’s mainstay, was tanking.

One reason Hilbert wanted to work with Melania was to get discounted access to “The Apprentice” as a marketing tool. Most business-

es paid more than $1 million for their products to be the subject of the contestants’ often goofy competitions. For Melania, New Sunshine got the friends and family discount: $100,000. The episode, called “How Do You Spell Melania,” aired April 7, 2013, and is a surreal hour of television. Two teams, one led by Dennis Rodman and the other by Penn Jillette, compete to develop a display for Melania Caviar Complexe C6. Gary Busey, on Jillette’s team, at one point says Melania’s beauty is such that it makes his “genitalia so excited that it spins like a Ferris wheel in a carnival ride.” Jillette’s team incurs Melania’s wrath by referring to her as a mere spokesperson instead of the company’s head.

Rodman’s team misspells her name, M-I-L-A-NI-A, an error that cannot be made right, and he gets fired.

By the time the episode ran, there were moreserious problems. The investment fund that owned New Sunshine wanted to renegotiate the agreement. Among other things, it claimed that Hilbert had cut Melania too sweet a deal in part because of his relationship with her husband (in the summer of 2013, he would sell Trump a vacation property in St. Martin for about $20 million). After a bench trial in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, a judge ruled that the agreement was valid and that the dispute would be resolved through arbitration. Melania had sought $50 million in damages, but the settlement has not been disclosed. That said, the launch was in essence aborted. Most of the product was never made or shipped.

During the trial, attorneys for the investment fund sought to cast Melania as a dilettante and dabbler, a woman playing with house money whose celebrity was tied exclusively to her husband’s fame. Licensing expert Erik

A 1977 photo shows Melania, second right, as a child at a fashion review for a textile company in Slovenia.

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DAVID CANNON/GETTY IMAGES

The Trumps with son Barron at the Ricoh Women’s British Open at Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland in 2015.

Rosenstrauch, chief executive of Fuel Partnerships, ridiculed the agreement’s “statement of fact” that asserted Melania’s stature.

“If you are going to do a licensing agreement, you need to talk to your celebrity as the general public would know the celebrity, and therefore, be able to relate to the celebrity,” Rosenstrauch said. “And Melania is not — Melania is just a name.”

In her testimony, Melania held her ground, while others on her team testified to her bona fide celebrity. She said she was a hands-on manager, taking part in every step of the process, including package design and the advertising campaign.

The collapse had left her frustrated, not just for herself but for her fans. “I promoted all around the world,” she said. “The product was on the national TV all around the world, all the magazines and was nowhere to be found.”

Melania has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter. Her husband has more than 10 million; her son, about 1,100, but he follows only Melania and has yet to tweet. Her personal website was taken down in late July. Before Donald’s official candidacy in June 2015, Melania was active on social media, sending forth an inoffensive if perhaps slightly tone-deaf stream of digital flotsam and jetsam. She tweeted pictures of homemade pizza, aerial views of New York snapped from the Trump jet and the occasional selfie, including one a month before Trump announced, taken in her bathroom with the words: “Bye! I’m off to my #summmer residence #countryside #weekend.” But no more.

She tweeted just nine times in the 12 months after she and Donald rode the escalator down to the Trump Tower lobby so he could announce he

was running for president and would build a wall.

Three tweets were in response to an article in GQ (the American version, not the British edition for which she posed all those years ago) that Melania’s supporters felt was condescending in tone and exploitative in reach for reporting on her father’s treatment of a son born out of wedlock.

The reporter became the target of anti-Semitic threats, which Melania disavowed while also seeming to blame the journalist. “I don’t control my fans, but I don’t agree with what they’re doing,” she told DuJour. “I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”

In the handful of profiles that have carried Melania’s stamp of approval, friends talk of her in glowing and carefully polished terms. They praise her loyalty, her even keel, common sense and grace. Pamela Gross, a CNN producer and former editor of Avenue magazine, told Harper’s Bazaar: “When he [Donald] is spinning and thinking and blazing forward, she brings this quality of calm and serenity to him.” She declined to comment for this report.

So did the others. Of nearly a dozen of Melania’s friends and business associates, including fashion designers and photographers, as well as career women who occupy the intersection of wealth and class in a city that knows the difference between the two, none would talk. Some said they would, then changed their minds without giving a reason. Some are politically active and reliable campaign contributors. Several gave to Democrats, and I could find none who had donated to Donald. Of course, Trump’s fundraising machine has only recently revved up.

That said, some of these women appear to have backed other candidates. Audrey Gruss, a New York and Palm Beach philanthropist who hosted

KLMNO WEEKLY

a baby shower for Melania, first gave money to Jeb Bush in July 2015. A month later, it was John Kasich. And a month after that, Chris Christie.

Gruss agreed to an interview, then changed her mind. She had said of Melania in an email that “I am a friend and have only the nicest things to say.”

Political conventions used to be messy affairs.

Spouses attended, but they didn’t make speeches, in part because the nominating process was never a sure thing. In the modern era, as conventions have changed into something approaching the first step in a coronation, the spouses have become part of the act. Their job is to underscore the candidate’s humanity and decency. That’s how Melania found herself as the Republican convention’s headliner on the opening Monday in Cleveland. She was introduced by her husband, and her speech about her values and Donald’s commitment to the country they both love was seen as a welcome respite from the other speakers’ often incendiary remarks about Hillary Clinton. She was a hit. Then she wasn’t.

The first allegations of plagiarism — that part of her speech appeared to be largely lifted from the speech that Michelle Obama gave at the 2008 Democratic National Convention — began even before Melania finished speaking.

By the next morning, it was a viral storm, with the campaign staff trying to deflect and defuse the situation without admitting to any borrowing. The problem was exacerbated because Melania had already asserted principal ownership of her remarks. In an interview with the “Today” show’s Matt Lauer a few hours before the speech, she was asked whether she had rehearsed on the flight to Cleveland. She responded, a bit dismissively: “I read once over it, and that’s all. Because I wrote it . . . with as little help as possible.”

That Wednesday morning, an in-house writer at the Trump Organization offered a more expansive explanation and took responsibility.

It was a simple mistake, Meredith McIver said in a statement; Melania had read McIver inspiring passages from a wide range of people, including those of Michelle Obama, and phrasing from those passages had made their way into the final draft, which McIver referred to, maybe wistfully or optimistically, as Melania’s “First Lady speech.”

Because of the endless parsing of the portion that had a dubious origin (a mere 7 percent, per Chris Christie), there has been little attention paid to the rest of her remarks. They are worth noting. Melania reminded the audience of her immigrant roots and said being a U.S. citizen was “the greatest privilege on planet Earth.” She lavished praise on her husband’s unique ability to get things done.

She urged party unity and reminded the audience of the tough road ahead before the election.

“There will be good times and hard times and unexpected turns,” Melania said. And then with a slight pause, a nod of sorts to the new reality show that she finds herself in, she added, “It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama.” n

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SPORTS

When the Games end, real life begins

BY B ARRY S VRLUGA AND L IZ C LARKE

Rio de Janeiro

T

he morning after her 2008 Olympics ended, gymnast Shawn Johnson awoke with one gold medal, three silvers and no idea what to eat for breakfast. She had no idea when to go to bed, either.

In the weeks that followed, Johnson felt lost each day at 4 p.m., when practice had always begun.

Something as basic as working out in local fitness centers proved bewildering; she’d only trained in gymnastics facilities.

“You feel really lost for a while, just trying to figure out your new routine,” Johnson, now 24, recalled during an interview in Rio, where she covered gymnastics for Yahoo Sports. “It’s a really confusing time.”

Johnson’s experience — Olympic glory built on order and discipline, followed by an Olympic crash of confusion and dismay — is hardly unusual, nor is it a new phenomenon. Each of the 11,000 athletes who competed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics this month endured some measure of meticulous preparation, all building to a single competition when the world’s focus is most intense. Just beyond their medals and the postOlympic exhibition tours and commemorative cereal boxes looms a hurdle they don’t see coming: everyday life.

“I remember waking up the next day after my last competition and feeling like I had run straight into a brick wall,” Johnson recalled. “As an elite athlete, you obsess; you’re a perfectionist over your field. And when you don’t have that to devote every ounce of energy to every day, it’s hard. Any elite athlete will tell you: The transition period from the Olympics into normal life is so hard.”

Athletes and experts say this applies in both the near term and years later, both to Olympic champions and those who compete once and lose, both to competitors and coaches.

“It’s an emotional, psychological transition, and it’s very tough,”

JED JACOBSOHN/GETTY IMAGES

After spending so much time devoted solely to training, some Olympians struggle to adjust said Steven Ungerleider, a sports psychologist and author who has worked with both the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee for four decades. “. . . We’re always seeing a large number of athletes who win medals, or don’t win medals, and come home, the lights are turned out, the media is gone, and they go into a state of shock because they have been up on the pedestal and this emotional high for so long.

And without their training regimen and support staff, it’s a tough transition.”

Suddenly, a lot of free time In the months leading up to the Olympics, athletes are defined by their preparation and sacrifice.

Katie Ledecky put off college for a year and swam 70,000 yards each week. Jordan Burroughs began days with pre-dawn runs and seemingly infinite sets of pullups and push-ups before even taking to the wrestling mat for practice sessions, eschewing time with his toddler son and infant daughter.

Simone Biles chose home schooling over her friends, and any semblance of a social life, to train more than 30 hours weekly and travel for gymnastics.

All of those decisions were based on the cycle of the Olympics.

The Games may enter the public’s consciousness only for 17 days every four years. For the athletes, almost by definition, they are an obsession.

The effort athletes exert often results in expectations both about what being an Olympian will mean and what life afterward will be like. Taraje Williams-Murray twice made the Olympic team in judo. In 2004, he was teammates with Rhadi Ferguson. In the weeks following the Beijing Games, the two wrote a post on WilliamsMurray’s blog titled, “Post-Olympic Stress Disorder: The Dark Side of Going for the Gold,” which warned athletes about the perils of becoming addicted to the competition and the attention.

“You think sex is great?” they wrote. “You think gambling [and

Shawn Johnson of the United States won multiple medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but after they were over, she says she felt lost.

“Any elite athlete will tell you: The transition period from the Olympics into normal life is so hard,” she says.

winning] is great? Driving fast cars? Sky-diving? None of that can light a candle to the thrill of that torch, to the sense of fate, destiny — being a part of something so BIG, universal. You are on stage and the WHOLE world is watching YOU.” The reality: Many Olympic athletes must pay some out of pocket for training and travel. WilliamsMurray returned to financial stresses.

“I was burdened with debt from the run, as well as student loans,” he said recently by email. “I had bouts with depression and often self-medicated with alcohol and marijuana.”

That isn’t a solitary story. David Boudia was 19 when he made his first Olympic team as a diver in 2008. Like with most athletes, his focus on the Games defined his existence.

“Everything I did, I did with the idea of going to the Olympics and winning,” Boudia said before the Rio Games began. “I wanted fame, the riches. I wanted the Games to be the vehicle that delivered all those things.”

Boudia expected to win a medal, maybe two. Instead, he finished 10th in the 10-meter platform event and, with a partner, fifth in the 10-meter synchronized competition. He returned home to Indiana, enrolled at Purdue University, but entered a world he couldn’t handle. He drank. He did drugs. In his book “Greater Than Gold,” released as the Rio Games opened, he revealed that he contemplated suicide.

“The Olympics didn’t fulfill me or bring me satisfaction,” Boudia said. “So for a long time, I wanted to do nothing except to stay in bed.”

Adjusting to a 9-to-5 life The USOC’s website includes a section on sports psychology that features links to 14 articles on the topic of athletic performance, offering them as helpful resources for coaching and athletes.

Not a single article deals with what athletes face when competition is over. This, despite the fact that athletes, coaches and sports psychologists have understood

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DATA CRUNCH the phenomenon going back decades. In 1997, Ungerleider studied 57 Olympians in 12 sports and wrote about the need for developing ways of helping elite athletes make a successful transition to the workplace.

“The majority don’t have a game plan,” Ungerleider said. “. . .

When there is not a program in place or a mentor to prepare them, many of them get depressed. Empirical data show they start drinking or taking drugs or sort of get lost if they don’t have a support system.”

The USOC now offers the “Athlete and Career Education Program” to offer counseling and help former Olympians deal with planning a career, finding a job, networking and academics. But in some ways, the very qualities that pushed these athletes to the top of their pursuits can make it difficult to fit into a 9-to-5 existence.

“Olympians are outliers, largely independent and often self-starters — individuals that are largely predisposed and may have a natural advantage as entrepreneurs,” Williams-Murray said. “The path to a new self-identity that may allow these high achievers to be happy may go beyond finding a job.”

There is now, though, a heightened awareness about what awaits Olympians when they return home. Many athletes here said they have discussed potential pitfalls with teammates. Swimmer Allison Schmitt won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze at the 2012 London Olympics, but she fell into such a deep depression over the ensuing two years that she and her coaches believed it was unlikely she would compete at such a level again.

With help, Schmitt overcame her problems. She came to Rio with the goal of not only helping the Americans to a medal — which she did, gold in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay — but to, as she said, “de-stigmatize the negativity around mental health.” Schmitt said before she left Rio that she plans to travel, that she knows she must keep busy. But she also knows that understanding her past experiences doesn’t mean she is better prepared to deal with what’s to come.

“I’m more aware of it,” she said.

“I don’t know exactly how much more prepared I am for it. I would like to say I am.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Cop land The ratio of full­time sworn police officers to residents in local police departments across the country varies widely, from a low of 10 per 10,000 residents in San Jose, Calif., to 61 per 10,000 residents in Washington, D.C. Here are the nine largest local police departments in the United States by number of full­time sworn personnel, according to 2013 data from the — Annys Shin Bureau of Justice Statistics. n

NEW YORK Population served: 8.3 million Full-time sworn personnel: 34,454

CHICAGO Population served: 2.7 million Full-time sworn personnel: 12,042

LOS ANGELES Population served: 3.9 million Full-time sworn personnel: 9,920

41 police/10,000 residents

44 police/10,000 residents

26 police/10,000 residents

PHILADELPHIA Population served: 1.5 million Full-time sworn personnel: 6,515

HOUSTON Population served: 2.2 million Full-time sworn personnel: 5,295

WASHINGTON, D.C. Population served: 632,323 Full-time sworn personnel: 3,865

42 police/10,000 residents

25 police/10,000 residents

61 police/10,000 residents

DALLAS Population served: 1.2 million Full-time sworn personnel: 3,478

PHOENIX Population served: 1.5 million Full-time sworn personnel: 2,952

BALTIMORE Population served: 621,342 Full-time sworn personnel: 2,949

28 police/10,000 residents

20 police/10,000 residents

47 police/10,000 residents

SOURCE: BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS; FOR METHODOLOGY, SEE bit.ly/1TLUrAY.

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BOOKS

How the euro is shattering Europe N ONFICTION

T THE EURO How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe

By Joseph E. Stiglitz Norton.

416 pp. $28.95

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REVIEWED BY

B ETHANY M C L EAN

he timing couldn’t be better for Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, “The Euro.” In it, Stiglitz recounts the tragic irony of how the euro, which was supposed to bring Europe together, is in fact driving it apart, or as he writes: “Economies that were supposed to converge have instead diverged.” When Britain’s decision to leave the European Union shook global financial markets recently, we were all reminded that what happens in Europe affects the entire world.

Stiglitz — who calls the euro zone “a beautiful edifice erected on weak foundations” — writes that “the cracks were clear from the beginning, but after the 2008 crisis, those cracks became fissures.” He notes the huge costs, including rampant unemployment and economic stress, of the austerity measures that have been deployed by the E.U., the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (known colloquially as the Troika) purportedly to fix so-called crisis countries such as Greece, Ireland and Spain, whose economies were thrown into disarray after 2008.

The resulting battle between creditor nations like Germany and debtor nations like Greece is creating “poorer growth and more divisiveness” than there would have been without any euro at all, argues Stiglitz, whose cogent conclusion is that “the European project is too important to be sacrificed on the cross of the euro.”

Early in the book, Stiglitz writes that he made a decision not to recount the birth of the euro, which is a shame, because this story is crying out for narrative, characters and nuance. Instead, Stiglitz has written a polemic, one that reads like a series of loosely stitched-together lectures. At the root of the book is his deep contempt for what he calls “neoliberal” principles, or “market fundamentalism” — in essence, the belief that free-mar-

TIERO/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

ket policies will solve economic and social issues — which he says has been “discredited” and “flies in the face of a huge body of economic research showing that there is a need for a wider role for government.” The austerity measures undertaken by the Troika are based on this antiquated belief system, in his view.

He may be right, but one downside of his strident style is that the book won’t convince those who want apparently contradictory evidence wrestled to the ground. For instance, in Stiglitz’s telling, the strategy followed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who tackled high inflation in the United States, was wrongheaded, end of story. (There are a lot of odd vignettes that don’t seem to have much to do with the euro.)

Although Germany, which has embraced market-driven policies more so than other European countries, appears to be doing better than its peers, he dismisses it as a “failure” and complains that its success is coming at the expense of others. He mentions in passing that Ireland, which was forced through a tough aus-

terity program, has returned to pre-crisis levels of gross domestic product. In his view, that’s also a total failure because the social costs were so high. But he simply dismisses the apparent ambiguities instead of addressing them.

Another downside to his style is that it strips the humanity out of the story. He dubs the Troika “abusive” and writes that it “has forced the tearing up of the social contract, the bonds which existed among members of society.” He likens Germany to a “medieval bloodletter.” But his viciousness is oddly bloodless: He doesn’t name names, leaving his villains as faceless institutions. And if the villains are just stupid, bad people who don’t understand economics and want to exploit others, then there’s no opportunity to explore why they might think the way they do, even if their way of thinking is wrong. For instance, Stiglitz calls Germany’s insistence on fiscal discipline and fear of inflation “pure ideology,” which seems to ignore a rather large historical issue (anyone remember the Weimar Republic?) that may play a role in why Germany

feels the way it does.

The casting of his book — which is that of a very simple morality play, in which Germany and the Troika are evil villains, and the crisis countries, in particular Greece, are innocent victims — also creates some jarring internal contradictions. Stiglitz, who is a big believer in government spending, says the idea that it can lead to a crisis is wrong, but even he has to acknowledge that in Greece, it was precisely government spending that led to the crisis. He doesn’t reconcile this, perhaps because simple morality allows for no nuance, and so it cannot be that while austerity might be bad, maybe Greece also had some issues.

In broad terms, Stiglitz’s prescription is compelling, although there might be some argument about the details. He writes, “The halfway house in which Europe finds itself is unsustainable: there either has to be ‘more Europe’ or ‘less’: there has to be either more economic and political integration or a dissolution of the Eurozone in its current form.” By “more Europe,” he means shared debt in the form of eurobonds, common deposit insurance for all banks in the euro zone, and more government, from political control of central banks to an E.U.-wide tax of 15 percent on all incomes above a certain level to perhaps a government-based system of distributing credit that would do away with a private banking sector. He writes, “Reforms of the structure of the Eurozone itself should aim at an economic system that can simultaneously achieve full unemployment and robust growth in each of the member countries.”

Which, especially for someone who claims that he is not “Pollyannaish about experts,” sounds an awful lot like Pollyanna. n McLean is a financial investigative journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A spy tale so real Israel censored it

An off-key, joyfully off-color memoir

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

“T

R ICHARD L IPEZ

he English Teacher” is the story of a Mossad operative written by a former Israeli intelligence officer. It’s not an autobiography but rather a thriller, based loosely on facts, or as its author, Yiftach Reicher Atir, writes in his introductory note, “a true story, of real life operatives that are wholly made up, and actual missions that never happened.”

Atir provides an astonishing look at Middle Eastern spycraft.

He alerts readers that “numerous changes and omissions were imposed” by his government’s censors. Because a lot of what got into the novel seems plenty revealing and is often hair-raising, one is left wondering what shockers were left out. Also, how much of what Atir (who participated in the 1976 hostage-rescue operation in Entebbe, Uganda) put into the book is actually disinformation meant to throw other Middle Eastern intelligence agencies off track about how the Mossad spy agency actually operates? These are legitimate, intriguing questions that only add to the novel’s overall mysteriousness and to the many pleasures it offers.

The book begins with a startling moment: Operative Rachel Ravid — once Rachel Goldschmitt, sometimes Rachel Brooks — is preparing to vanish.

We see her closing up the apartment of her recently deceased father and basking in the freedom his death has finally provided her.

Instead of returning to Tel Aviv and her job in biological weapons research, the 41-year-old is headed elsewhere in the Middle East, and she’s not telling anybody where.

Impulsively, it seems — though is the act really calculated? — Rachel phones her old case officer, Ehud, now retired from the Mossad, and tells him: “My father died. He died for the second time,” before abruptly hanging up.

Near-panic breaks out in the Israeli intelligence establishment.

Falsely announcing the death of her

father 15 years earlier was code for Rachel’s fleeing the Arab country where she had worked as an English teacher for six years while gathering information on that country’s biological weapons program. Most of the invaluable data she had stolen came from her lover, a sweet, hapless man named Rashid, whose family ran a chemical business.

Now it appears that Rachel, overcome with guilt and yearning for the return of lost love, may be headed back to the man she abandoned without explanation years earlier when it looked as if she was about to be exposed. The problem for Israel is that she’s carrying a trove of state secrets around inside her head.

The widowed Ehud, brought back to trace and then reason with his renegade former agent, is under terrific pressure. His former colleagues know that he was in love with Rachel and may not have been as objective in managing her as he should have been. Nor is it easy for him to accept that Rachel has become such a “loose cannon” that she may have to be framed or even killed by the Mossad.

Among the many insights of Atir’s compelling tale is why people are drawn to this patriotic dirty work. Ehud admits that “there’s something intoxicating in our work; suddenly it’s permissible to lie, you can put on an act, and everything is sanctioned by the state.”

Although Atir never questions Israel’s overall policies with its neighbors — the country’s survival as a Jewish state is an operational given here — he does portray heartbreakingly the moral toll on the individuals who carry out what recent Israeli governments have deemed necessary for the country’s safety. As in the works of John le Carré and Charles McCarry, here we see that in the day-today spy business, it’s not so much countries that are in danger but individual human souls. n Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.

I THE ENGLISH TEACHER

By Yiftach Reicher Atir Translated by Philip Simpson Penguin. 260 pp.

Paperback, $16

SICK ON YOU The Disastrous Story of the Hollywood Brats, the Greatest Band You’ve Never Heard of

By Andrew Matheson Blue Rider. 321 pp.

Paperback, $16

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REVIEWED BY

K EVIN C ANFIELD

n the 1970s, Andrew Matheson was the singer for the Hollywood Brats, a British proto-punk band that sold just a few albums but charted a path for better-known performers. The group’s goal, he recalls, was to be “messy and noisy,” a “frantic mix of sweat and decibels.” The Brats would clout “you in the gob if you’re daft enough to play the record.”

It’s not easy to capture this type of sonic energy on the page. But Matheson does an awfully good job in an exuberant memoir that doubles as slapstick comedy.

A riotous portrait of a naive rocker with a penchant for foolishness, “Sick on You” is packed with louche behavior, provocative musicianship and outrageous social gaffes. Though Matheson never misses an opportunity for a superstar cameo, his book is guided by a breezy self-awareness — he’s often the butt of his own jokes. Some of Matheson’s stories are surely embellished, or misremembered, or both. Factual, fanciful or somewhere in between, they’re tremendously fun.

There was the time, for instance, when Matheson leaned down from the stage and tried to make a connection with a female fan: “Instead of a peck on a knuckle, I give her fingers the merest lick.” Her displeased boyfriend responded by belting Matheson. “Curiously enough, that seems to settle the account as far as he’s concerned. Lick my chick’s hand, I’ll sock you one.

Then he keeps on dancing.”

Matheson writes with the jagged verve he once sought from his band. “Booed, threatened, arrested, evicted, convicted, spat upon, named as a nincompoop in the newspaper” — such was his life in early 1973. By this time, Matheson, making frequent use of the Melody Maker want ads, had assembled his group’s core lineup. The Hollywood Brats’ “razor-chainsaw guitar concept” and “crashing, feedback-

drenched chords” would be augmented by a daring look: The all-male band would wear lipstick, mascara, “skyscraper heels, plexiglass bangles, a dress, a bodice, a waistcoat, and more — always more.”

Matheson soon learned that his act wasn’t unique. Across the Atlantic, the similarly attired New York Dolls were getting the attention the Brats never enjoyed. But Matheson’s band pressed on, earning “a constant barrage of garbage, beer, and lout-speak” from concertgoers.

Though the band’s only album wasn’t a hit, the Hollywood Brats seem to have had a small influence on the burgeoning London punk scene: Mick Jones, the Clash guitarist, and Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ manager, show up in the book as Brats admirers.

“Sick on You” features the requisite druggie tales and unflattering celebrity walk-ons: Matheson scuffles with Queen’s Freddie Mercury and disses a visiting California band: “Just saw the Eagles. . . . The drummer’s got a perm.

They’ll never get laid in England.”

But these stories don’t compare to the author’s hilarious selfskewering. Led by Matheson, the Brats accidentally start a recording studio fire, mystify the audience at a debutante ball, topple overboard in a drunken boat mishap and generally behave like clumsy rubes. At a Christian film premiere, Matheson, caught urinating into a vase, retreats to “an oxblood leather sofa, where I sit on its circular furry cushion, which turns out, yelpingly, to be an elderly dachshund.”

Matheson eventually faces the truth about the Hollywood Brats: “I thought that band was perfection and it quite patently wasn’t.”

Four decades later, he has turned his punk rock travails into an enormously likable memoir. n Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and many other publications.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

As insurers leave, here’s how to save Obamacare HENRY J. AARON is the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the vice chair of the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange.

According to an old bit of folk wisdom, if one person says you are drunk, you can wave him off. If two people tell you, go home.

When UnitedHealth Group announced a few months back that it was going to stop selling individual health insurance in most Obamacare exchanges, informed observers were not alarmed. They noted that nearly all exchange customers still had at least two, and most had three or more, insurers competing for their business.

Now with Aetna’s announcement that it will stop selling insurance in 11 of the 15 states where it has been active and will abandon previously announced expansions in five others, Obamacare supporters are worried. And with good reason. If too many insurers jump the Obamacare ship, customers will be left adrift.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to reduce this risk. It was crafted in Washington, D.C., by the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority: Make the Obamacare exchange one big marketplace for everyone buying individual health insurance coverage.

Nationwide, this would merge the 12 million people who get their insurance through Obamacare with the roughly 9 million who buy their policies outside the exchanges.

To understand the problem bedeviling Aetna and other insurers — and the solution — one has to understand five key features of individual insurance markets.

• The price insurers charge non-exchange customers for a given plan has to be the same as what they charge Obamacare customers.

• The vast majority (about 85 percent) of exchange customers nationwide qualify for the program’s tax credits and costsharing subsidies because their

incomes are below four times the federal poverty threshold — $97,000 for a family of four this year — and they are not offered affordable coverage through employment or some federal program. To obtain that help, customers must buy insurance through the Obamacare exchanges, rather than directly from insurance companies.

• Those eligible for that assistance tend to be sicker than those who don’t qualify because those with comparatively low incomes have poorer health on average than people with higher incomes.

• Obamacare bars insurers from keeping more than 20 percent of premium income from insurance sales in the individual market to cover marketing costs, administration and profit. Before Obamacare, all companies could keep more, and many did.

• Some insurers face heightened financial risks because an unusually large proportion of Obamacare exchange customers are new customers — 50 percent of Aetna’s 2016 enrollees, for example. In the old days, insurers could question new customers and charge very high premiums to those having characteristics associated with high health-care use. No longer.

Obamacare allows premiums to vary by only a few factors, such as the age of the insured. To protect

JESSICA HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

companies from getting hammered by an excess of highcost customers, Obamacare compensates companies with such customers with funds transferred from companies that cover few of them. But this “riskadjustment” system hasn’t worked as well as hoped.

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that Aetna and UnitedHealth, confronting losses and heightened risk, would desert many Obamacare health exchanges. In some states, insurers are abandoning the individual market altogether because they must insure even high-risk customers and cannot charge them enormous premiums.

Fortunately, there is a good fix for much of this problem. From the day it opened its doors, the D.C. Health Exchange has required that all individual insurance policies be purchased through the D.C. exchange.

Accustomed to buying coverage directly from insurance companies, some customers grumbled. The botched rollout of the federal government’s health exchange, HealthCare.gov, added to their worries.

To its credit, the D.C. exchange avoided most of those problems. It has provided nearly uninterrupted service since its opening in late 2013. Once enrolled, customers’ applications go directly to the private company of their choice, where service is the same as it would have been

had they applied to the insurer.

Because the D.C. individual market is one big marketplace, there is no “inside” and “outside” the exchanges, with profit in one area and loss in the other.

So far, only Vermont has adopted the same framework as the District. But if the federal exchange and all of the other state exchanges were to adopt the “one big marketplace” rule, the risk that insurers such as Aetna and UnitedHealth would selectively abandon customers in Obamacare exchanges would evaporate. Merging the relatively healthy individuals who now buy coverage outside the exchanges with those using Obamacare would help stabilize insurance for the whole group.

Insurers might balk at facing intensified competition. Some would incorrectly allege that customer choice had been limited. But in truth, customers would have expanded choice and improved service, because the exchanges can provide them unbiased information about coverage, costs and networks under all insurance plans.

Creating one unified market would not solve every problem that insurers now confront. They would still have to learn how to manage risk in a world where they cannot charge absurdly high premiums or deny insurance to anyone. But establishing one big marketplace in each and every Obamacare exchange is lowhanging fruit. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A useless word in higher ed: ‘Tuition’ DANIELLE ALLEN is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post. She is a former trustee at Amherst College and Princeton University.

If Congress wanted to make an actual difference regarding the rising cost of college, and to give universities and colleges a fighting chance to solve this problem, it would strip from the Higher Education Act the requirement that colleges publish a “tuition” number. The figure is as good as useless now.

Colleges should instead publish five numbers: how much they spend each year on educating each student; the range a family is expected to contribute to that expense, from zero to a maximum; how much a family contributes on average; the range of what a college itself will contribute for each student; and how much the college contributes on average to the total expense for each student.

Why is the concept of tuition as good as useless? Let me count the ways.

1. At Ivy Leagues and top liberal arts colleges, whose tuition announcements get lots of attention, the tuition is only a “sticker price.” The majority of families whose children attend these elite schools pay less, as determined by their level of financial need. Increases to tuition matter only for the fullpayers. For those on financial aid, changes to aid policies, not to

tuition, are what matter.

2. At elite colleges and universities, the actual cost of educating any given student for a year is greater than the “sticker price.” For the 2014-2015 school year, Amherst College calculated a cost per student of $95,600. For 2012-2013, Princeton put the number at $92,000. In the Ivies and top liberal arts colleges today, a reasonable estimate would put that number in the territory of $100,000, whereas the “sticker price” clocks in at about $65,000.

At research universities, it is especially hard to calculate the annual cost, or investment, per student, because these institutions do so many things in addition to educating undergraduates. But such calculations can be done at liberal arts colleges, and their cost-perstudent figures would offer a baseline for a conversation about what we should be investing in students and how we should be

paying for it.

3. Tuition decisions made by elite colleges and universities are actually decisions about whom to subsidize. The lower the sticker price, the more the well-to-do are being subsidized for an education that costs well above the sticker price. The higher the sticker price, the more the subsidy is shifted to the less welloff. Over a decade-plus of work in administration in higher education, I’ve paid attention to how these subsidies have shifted.

At one leading liberal arts college, in the early 1980s, all families were being subsidized for about 50 percent of the actual cost of educating their students.

That subsidy has increased to 100 percent for the worst off and fallen to about 30 percent for the well-off. The elite colleges and universities are asking fullpaying families to increase their contribution so that the colleges and universities can spread their institutional contribution as far as possible. Decisions about how to set “tuition” are having impacts that are the reverse of what our instincts tell us about what a higher or lower number means. A price that goes up is good for the worst off. A price that goes down is bad for them.

4. The first three points apply only to the very well-endowed

colleges and universities. They top the rankings tables partly because they can invest more in educating each student they admit. But their tuition sticker prices, which are more redistributive the higher they go, set the terms of the conversation for everyone else. Their high sticker prices give public universities cover, I believe, for raising their own sticker prices.

But public universities are not similarly able to discount that price through substantial financial aid packages. The higher the sticker price rises at the wealthy private schools, the more the public colleges can charge and still appear to be a bargain in comparison.

If you feel confused by now, then you have just experienced a small taste of what conversations about tuition setting are like in higher ed.

Which is why, if Congress wants to solve this problem, it should scrap outdated language in the Higher Education Act that is distorting the decision-making at colleges as they try to consider how much to invest in each student annually, how much each family should be asked to contribute to that investment, and how much the college or university should itself commit to contributing, whether from its endowment or, in the case of the publics, public coffers. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

22

OPINIONS

ALEXIS MADRIGAL AND DODAI STEWART Madrigal is the editor in chief of Fusion. He is the author of “Powering the Dream” and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.

Stewart is the executive editor of Fusion and was previously the deputy editor at Jezebel.com.

This presidential election is like no other in history, and it should not be treated like any other. That includes the debates.

Traditionally, presidential debate moderators have been white men over 40. In 2012, all four moderators — Martha Raddatz, Jim Lehrer, Bob Schieffer and Candy Crowley — were white people over 55. It was the first time in 20 years a woman had been chosen to moderate.

This isn’t what America looks like. Issues around race, gender, immigration, discrimination and justice are not just talking points — they’re a matter of life or death for many. We need moderators who better reflect this reality.

Young adults between 18 and 33 are the most racially diverse generation in American history.

Forty-three percent are nonwhite.

Large numbers of these young people date outside their race.

They believe in a gender spectrum. About 68 percent of those young, nonwhite people believe government should provide health care for all. Almost half of young people who are black report having had “negative interactions” with police.

According to Pew Research Center data, Hispanic voters age 35 or younger will account for almost half (44 percent) of the record 27.3 million Hispanic voters in 2016. That’s more than any other racial or ethnic group of voters.

But as The Washington Post

reports, young people are also less likely to vote. Could it be because they don’t see themselves as important to the electoral process? Could it be because they’re not included in the important conversations?

It’s no secret that young voters flocked to the Bernie Sanders campaign — in several polls, Americans under 30 showed more support for Sanders than for Trump and Clinton combined.

Why? Because the senator consistently spoke out about issues that truly matter to younger people: student debt and affordable education, as well as this country’s economic disparities and social injustices. A fall 2015 Harvard Institute Of Politics survey found that nearly 6 in 10 college graduates between

WEEKLY

BY LOWE

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Debates need diverse moderators

KLMNO

18 and 29 consider the American Dream to be “alive.” They are hopeful, and they are the future: By 2020, minorities will be the majority. Representation matters.

Inclusivity matters.

We owe it to young Americans — the people who have to live in this country in the future — to have a debate that deals with the issues important to them. We need a moderator who will ask about Black Lives Matter. We deserve a moderator who will ask tough questions about immigration. We are owed a moderator who will question the candidates about Islamophobia, who is not afraid to question the nominees about abortion, about deportations, about paid maternity leave, about LGBTQ discrimination, about student debt. If America’s future is young, brown, queer and female, America owes it to itself to listen to those voices during the presidential debates. Reporters who are gay, women, black, Latino, Asian and Native American should be considered for the moderator roles. And we’re not talking about brief cameo appearances by black and brown faces invited to ask uncomfortable questions before being shuttled off the stage.

There are plenty of excellent options: not just traditional

network anchors like Maria Elena Salinas and Lester Holt, but fresh voices like NBC’s Perry Bacon, Buzzfeed’s Darren Sands, The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe, The Washington Post’s Abby Phillip, Boston Globe’s Shira T. Center, Fox News Latino’s Bryan Llenas, CNN’s MJ Lee, and Fusion’s own Jorge Rivas — just to name a few. Who is asking the questions matters: In January, at the Iowa Brown and Black forum (co-hosted by Fusion), Jorge Ramos asked Hillary Clinton not to use the word “illegals” when speaking of undocumented Americans. At the same event, Drake University junior Thalia Anguiano asked Clinton, “What does white privilege mean to you?” With race, ethnicity and identity being some of the most talked-about subjects during this election cycle, voicing nonwhite perspectives is essential. A bonus would be journalists very active on social media, since, let’s face it, that’s where young people get their news.

On Nov. 8, the United States will be forever changed. But before we get there, we owe it to this country to make changes in how the candidates are questioned. The people moderating the debates ought to reflect those of us who will inherit America. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Web BY

A NDREW L . R USSELL

As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, it gets more and more difficult to imagine life without it — or without cat videos. And although our world certainly has been transformed by the Web’s capabilities, its history includes some persistent myths and comically naive predictions.

MYTH NO. 1 We know who invented the Web and the Internet, and when.

The concept of “invention” does not map well to the actual histories of these technologies, which arose from collaborations among large numbers of people and whose development features very few moments that were obvious transformations.

The history of the Web has one singular figure, Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to format textbased documents, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to send documents across the Internet, and a software program to view or browse pages. But Berners-Lee did not sit down one day and create the Web. There were many precursors, including ideas and systems sketched by Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson.

And Berners-Lee began to play with hypertext programs in 1980, nearly 10 years before he and Robert Cailliau developed a proposal for an informationmanagement system.

MYTH NO. 2 The Web is an American innovation.

The Defense Department spent millions from the 1960s to the 1980s developing the core technologies of the Internet.

Through entities such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Defense Communications Agency, defense investments played major roles in the creation of the digital infrastructure that we use to browse the Web. But the Web’s origins are

distinctly European, and even the American contributions were infused with international collaboration. Berners-Lee, an Englishman, created some of the Web’s key technologies while working as a software consultant alongside Cailliau, a Belgian engineer, at a Swiss lab. The American protagonists of Internet development at ARPA worked closely with European researchers and built on the concepts of French computer scientist Louis Pouzin.

MYTH NO. 3 Government power is obsolete on the Internet.

Over the past three decades, governments at all levels — local, state, national and international — have claimed and exercised jurisdiction over behavior online.

Examples include filtering and censorship regimes such as China’s Great Firewall, court rulings that forced Yahoo to remove Nazi memorabilia from its online auction service in France and international treaties to protect intellectual property (implemented in the United States via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), to say nothing of vast systems of espionage like those exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

“Cyberlibertarian” arguments also obscure the formative role of government in the creation and maintenance of network technologies.

MYTH NO. 4 The gatekeepers are dead; everything is disrupted!

The notion that the Web hurt

GALLERY STOCK

“gatekeepers” is not entirely wrong. Plenty of musicians, including Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, got record deals after they went viral on YouTube. A similar phenomenon has reshaped academia, where researchers can post their work on their own websites, bypassing the slow and costly apparatus of academic publishing.

But in music, academic publishing and elsewhere, these shifts have not generated the predicted revolutions. Major music labels eventually adjusted to Web-based distribution and revenue models, as did the old giants of academic and popular publishing. Other ideas that promised to “disrupt” this or that have fallen flat, such as the MOOC (massive open online course) craze that led some pundits to predict “the end of college as we know it.”

The best example, of course, was the dot-com crash.

Entrepreneurs and starry-eyed investors had fueled the bubble, eager to believe that the Web’s rise changed all the rules. But by 2000, everyone had learned the harsh reality: Sound business practices were not fundamentally disrupted by the “get big fast” ethos of Web entrepreneurship. And despite predictions that the Web

portends a new economic era of commons-based peer production, old-fashioned industrial capitalism has proved quite resilient.

MYTH NO. 5 A massive cyberattack is coming.

Even though a large-scale attack hasn’t materialized, experts continue to use the threat of one to try to shake the Web out of some bad habits and inferior technologies. Neither the Web nor the Internet was designed with unshakable commitments to security or privacy, and efforts to update them have, for the most part, failed, leaving Web users vulnerable to governments, corporations and anonymous bad actors of all kinds.

In the meantime, most users have grown accustomed to intrusions from hackers and viruses; they assume that there is no way to guarantee privacy or security on the Web. But despite the massive vulnerabilities and the regular occurrence of significant data breaches, the long-predicted “digital Pearl Harbor” has not come to pass. n Russell is a professor of history and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica and Albany.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

24

A & Q

THE RACE: Douglas County Commission | District 2

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:

ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C

The Wenatchee Valley is experiencing a severe housing crunch. What can Douglas County do to resolve the issue for all income levels?

CANDIDATES:

DALE SNYDER

KYLE STEINBURG

Incumbent, shop manager for Barnes Welding in Waterville

Owner of Wenatchee Body and Fender

prefers Republican Party

prefers Republican Party

ANSWER: In 2015 Douglas County expanded the urban growth area and zoned lands to allow increased densities to accommodate more housing. Between March 2015 and June 2016 eight subdivisions have submitted applications and nine more had pre-application meetings. A greater supply of housing should improve costs. The county also helps financially with extensions/expansions of infrastructure necessary to support development. The county contributed $200,000 to the East Wenatchee Water District, $270,000 for the city of Rock Island’s sewer project, and $80,000 per year for a 20 year bond for the Douglas County sewer district’s line extension to the Pangborn area. Douglas County also financially supports non-profit housing organizations, such as the Women’s Resource Center, Chelan/Douglas Housing Authority and Habitat for Humanity. The county also contributes money yearly to the city of Wenatchee for the Homeless Coalition. Because they oppose minimum density requirements, ultimately the developers, homebuilders and Realtors decide the size and costs of homes.

ANSWER: There is a saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. The first thing that needs to happen is for the residents to elect commissioners that they feel will have the ability to move the county in a positive direction. Secondly, I will work with the staff of Douglas County to ease unnecessary regulations and mandates which will lower cost and transcend to home prices making them more affordable.

Thirdly, I will set clear expectations. We have been put in a housing deficit and I will expect that staff responsible for helping to eliminate this housing shortage work efficiently and for the benefit of the residents of Douglas County. When I was in the Marine Corps we had a saying “lead from the front” I will lead from the front and get things done.

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

2016

ELECTI N GUIDE

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