Mother Jones - October 2014 USA.pdf

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S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 4 | MOTHER JONES 1

F E AT U R E S

18 �e nra’s Murder MysteryB Y D A V E G I L S O N

One court sent him to prison for shooting a woman. Another set him free over bad police work. Was the NRA’s top lawyer railroaded—or a “bad guy with a gun”?

28 Mothers in ArmsB Y M A R K F O L L M A N

Can Moms Demand Action do to gun extremists what MADD did to drunk drivers?

32 Survival of the RichestB Y D A V E G I L S O N

Income inequality is worse now than in ancient Rome.

36 Tragedy of the Common CoreB Y T I M M U R P H Y

How a nerdy, bipartisan education reform effort freaked out both the tea party and the teachers’ unions

44 �e Great Frack Forward B Y J A E A H L E E

Ravenous for energy, China calls on Halliburton to go after shale gas.

50 �e Chevron Communiqués B Y M A R I A H B L A K E

A trove of secret cables show how Hillary Clinton’s State Department sold fracking to the world.

N O T E B O O K

11 Judicial RestraintsB Y M O L L Y R E D D E N

Young, pregnant, scared, alone—and in front of a hostile judge

D E PA R T M E N T S

5 OutFrontLOLcats of the NSA The wild mines of BrazilNerd virgins for HillarySolar’s sunny future

61 Mixed Media Tony Goldwyn talks Scandal and POTUS envy.Illustrator Wendy MacNaughton on the tales behind tattoos New York Times columnist Charles Blow on trauma and TrayvonNot your mother’s teen fictionBook, film, and music reviews

74 Food + Health The skinny on BMI

Brave new vanilla

September October 2014 volume 39, number 5

Daily scoops hot off the campaign trail. Join the millions who make MotherJones.com a regular habit.

C O V E R : R A M A / W I K I M E D I A ; A B O V E : J A M E S W E S T

2 MOTHER JONES | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 4

1 Dana Liebelson convinced some tight-lipped Silicon Valley programmers to talk about the future of “deep learning” (“Do Androids Dream of Electric LOL-Cats?” page 5). 2 Molly Redden (“Judicial Restraints,” page 11) reports frequently on reproductive rights issues; last year she broke the story of morning-after pills’ ineffectiveness in women weighing more than 165 pounds. 3 Dave Gilson searched municipal archives and visited crime scenes in South Bend, Indiana, to unearth a gun rights crusader’s dark past (“The NRA’s Murder Mystery,” page 18); he also assembled this issue’s chart package on inequality (“Survival of the Richest,” page 32) with graphics by 4 Mattias Mackler, who says he would rather own a fat cat than be one. Tim Murphy is on board with any education reform that promises to get rid of cursive (“Tragedy of the Common Core,” page 36). 5 Jaeah Lee and James West survived four weeks, 12 cities, and some 70 bowls of noodles while reporting in China (“The Great Frack Forward,” page 44). Mariah Blake (“The Chevron Communiqués,” page 50) blames global warming for keeping customers away from—and sapping the profits of—her family’s just-sold New Mexico ski hill; the story’s art is by 6 John Ritter, who lives in western Pennsylvania, above the well-fracked Marcellus Shale.

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837-1930) orator, union organizer, and hellraiserMother JonesMonika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery editorsIvylise Simones creative director Kiera Butler, Mark Follman, Dave Gilson, Michael Mechanic senior editors Clint Hendler managing editor Tasneem Raja interactives editorSam Baldwin online editorBrett Brownell multimedia producer Ben Dreyfuss engagement editorMaddie Oatman research editor Ian Gordon copy editor Kevin Drum political blogger Tom Philpott food and ag correspondentShane Bauer, Josh Harkinson senior reportersAJ Vicens reporterJaeah Lee associate interactives producerHannah Levintova assistant editorJulia Whitty environmental correspondentJulia Lurie, Katie Rose Quandt senior fellowsSam Brodey, Gabrielle Canon, Rebecca Cohen, Prashanth Kamalakanthan, Lei Wang fellows washington bureauDavid Corn bureau chief Nick Baumann, Daniel Schulman senior editors Mariah Blake, Andy Kroll, Stephanie Mencimer, Tim Murphy senior reportersPatrick Caldwell, Erika Eichelberger, Dana Liebelson, Molly Redden reportersAlex Park reporting fellow Jenna McLaughlin fellow climate deskJeremy Schulman senior project manager James West senior producer Tim McDonnell associate producerChris Mooney correspondent and climate desk live hostart and productionCarolyn Perot art director Claudia Smukler production director Mark Murrmann photo editoronline technologyRobert Wise online technology director Cameron Adamez, Ben Breedlove, Mikela Clemmons, Jonathan Friedman web developers Young Kim web producer Dylan DiSalvio systems analyst contributing writersMichael Behar, Peter Bergen, Charles Bowden, Robert Dreyfuss, James K. Galbraith, Ted Genoways, Jennifer Gonnerman, David Goodman, Gary Greenberg, Jack Hitt, Garret Keizer, Joshua Kurlantzick, Charlie LeDuff, Alan Light, Mac McClelland, Bill McKibben, Kevin Patterson, Alissa Quart, James Ridgeway, Paul Roberts, JoAnn Wypijewski, Barry Yeoman, Jon Young contributing illustratorsTim Bower, Steve Brodner, Harry Campbell, John Hersey, Peter Hoey, Mark Matcho, Tim O’Brien, Yuko Shimizu, Owen Smith, Brian Stauffer contributing photographersNina Berman, Marcus Bleasdale, Chris Buck, Matt Eich, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Matt Slaby, Lana Slezic, Tristan Spinski

Madeleine Buckingham chief executive officerSteven Katz publisherpublic affairsElizabeth Gettelman public affairs directorJacques Hebert public affairs managerOlivia Henry public affairs fellowFor media inquiries, email [email protected] or call (415) 321-1740.advertising Khary Brown associate publisher, sales and marketing Brenden O’Hanlon integrated advertising sales managerEmily Andrews integrated advertising account managerMari Amend sales and marketing assistantAlessandra Saluti temporary advertising coordinatorFor advertising information, call (415) 321-1700.fundraisingLaurin Asdal director of developmentStephanie Green development manager, advancement programEmily Cozart regional director, major giftsAllison Stelly development manager, foundations and special eventsNallaly Jimenez development assistantmembershipBetty Russell circulation director Peter Meredith director of online marketing and givingShelley Shames fulfillment managerAmy Auerbach audience development associate Richard Rhodes newsstand management For subscriber customer service, call (800) 438-6656.financeDavid Rothenberg chief financial officerMichelle Reyes controller Mitchell Grummon business analyst Cathy Rodgers business operations specialist Lynnea Wool accounting and human resources associateadministrationEmma Logan director of human resources and administration Ross Montgomery senior it technician Brianna Gerard office assistantSam Chiang publishing internthe foundation for national progressThe nonprofit fnp publishes Mother Jones magazine and its website and directs the Ben Bagdikian Fellowship Program. Mother Jones produces revelatory journalism that, in its power and reach, seeks to inform and inspire a more just and democratic world. board of directorsPhil Straus chair Madeleine Buckingham president Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, Steven Katz vice presidents Sara Frankel secretary Jon Pageler treasurer Harriett Balkind, Harriet Barlow, Jane Butcher, Andre Carothers, Diane Filippi, David Glassco, Erik Hanisch, Adam Hochschild, Kim Keller, Rick Melcher, Carolyn Mugar, Tim Murphy, Maddie Oatman, Ken Pelletier, Nan Schaffer, Kevin Simmons, Judy Wise members

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In June 2012, a Google supercomputer made an artifi -cial-intelligence breakthrough: It learned that the inter-net loves cats. But here’s the remarkable part: It had

never been told what a cat looks like. Researchers working on the Google Brain project in the company’s X lab fed 10 million random, unlabeled images from YouTube into their massive network and instructed it to recognize the basic elements of a picture and how they fi t together. Left to their own devices, the Brain’s 16,000 central process-ing units noticed that a lot of the images shared similar characteristics that it eventually recognized as a “cat.” While the Brain’s self-taught knack for kitty spotting was nowhere as good as a human’s, it was nonetheless a major advance in the exploding fi eld of deep learning.

The dream of a machine that can think and learn like a person has long been the holy grail of computer scientists, sci-fi fans, and futurists alike. Deep learning—algorithms

inspired by the human brain and its ability to soak up massive amounts of information and make complex pre-dictions—might be the closest thing yet. Right now, the technology is in its infancy: Much like a baby, the Google Brain taught itself how to recognize cats, but it’s got a long way to go before it can fi gure out that you’re sad because your tabby died. But it’s just a matter of time. Its poten-tial to revolutionize everything from social networking to surveillance has sent tech companies and defense and intelligence agencies on a deep-learning spending spree.

What really puts deep learning on the cutting edge of artifi cial intelligence (AI) is that its algorithms can ana-lyze things like human behavior and then make sophisti-cated predictions. What if a social-networking site could fi gure out what you’re wearing from your photos and then suggest a new dress? What if your insurance com-pany could diagnose you as diabetic without consulting

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC LOLCATS?

Cool: Computers that think like human brains. Creepy: Early adopters include Facebook and the nsa.

QU

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B R A I N T R U S T


tions by tweaking their feeds or that the National Security Agency harvests 55,000 facial images a day, it’s not hard to imagine how these attempts to better “know” you might veer into creepier territory.

Not surprisingly, deep learning’s potential for analyzing human faces, emotions, and behavior has attracted the attention of na-tional-security types. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has worked with researchers at New York University on a deep-learning program that sought, accord-ing to a spokesman, “to distinguish human forms from other objects in battlefield or other military environments.”

Chris Bregler, an NYU computer science professor, is working with the Defense De-partment to enable surveillance cameras to detect suspicious activity from body lan-guage, gestures, and even cultural cues. (Bregler, who grew up near Heidelberg, compares it to his ability to spot German tourists in Manhattan.) His prototype can also determine whether someone is carrying a concealed weapon; in theory, it could ana-lyze a woman’s gait to reveal she is hiding

of a quantum leap,” says Yann LeCun, a deep-learning pioneer and the head of Facebook’s new AI lab.

Last December, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared, bodyguards in tow, at the Neural Information Processing Sys-tems conference in Lake Tahoe, where insiders discussed how to make comput-ers learn like humans. He has said that his company seeks to “use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share.” Facebook research-ers have used deep learning to identify individual faces from a giant database called “Labeled Faces in the Wild” with more than 97 percent accuracy. Another project, dubbed PANDA (Pose Aligned Networks for Deep Attribute Modeling), can accurately discern gender, hairstyles, clothing styles, and facial expressions from photos. LeCun says that these types of tools could improve the site’s ability to tag photos, target ads, and determine how people will react to content.

Yet considering recent news that Face-book secretly studied 700,000 users’ emo-

your doctor? What if a security camera could tell if the person next to you on the subway is carrying a bomb?

And unlike older data-crunching mod-els, deep learning doesn’t slow down as you cram in more info. Just the opposite—it gets even smarter. “Deep learning works better and better as you feed it more data,” explains Andrew Ng, who oversaw the cat experiment as the founder of Google’s deep-learning team. (Ng has since joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu as the head of its Silicon Valley AI team.)

And so the race to build a better vir-tual brain is on. Microsoft plans to chal-lenge the Google Brain with its own system called Adam. Wired reported that Apple is applying deep learning to build a “neural-net-boosted Siri.” Netflix hopes the technology will improve its movie recommendations. Google, Yahoo, and Pinterest have snapped up deep-learning companies; Google has used the technol-ogy to read every house number in France in less than an hour. “There’s a big rush because we think there’s going to be a bit

E X P O S U R E

Known for suddenly swarming their foes, the Munduruku people take their name from the fierce red ants of the western Brazilian Amazon. Today the 12,000 remaining Munduruku see themselves at war with dam projects and illegal gold mining. Frustrated by official inaction, members of the indigenous tribe have taken matters into their own hands. Photographer Lunaé Parracho followed a group of warriors as they hacked through jungle and patrolled by canoe in search of wildcat miners like this one, whom they detained and kicked off their land. —Maddie Oatman

Law of the Jungle P H OT O G R A P H B Y L U N A É PA R R A C H O

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230%

explosives by pretending to be pregnant. He’s also working on an unnamed project funded by “an intelligence agency”—he’s not permitted to say more than that.

And the NSA is sponsoring deep-learning research on language recognition at Johns Hopkins University. Asked whether the agency seeks to use deep learning to track or identify humans, spokeswoman Vanee’ Vines only says that the agency “has a broad interest in deriving knowledge from data.”

Deep learning also has the potential to revolutionize Big Data-driven indus-tries like banking and insurance. Graham Taylor, an assistant professor at the Uni-versity of Guelph in Ontario, has applied deep-learning models to look beyond cred-it scores to determine customers’ future value to companies. He acknowledges that these types of applications could upend the way businesses treat their customers: “What if a restaurant was able to predict the amount of your bill, or the probability of you ever returning? What if that affected your wait time? I think there will be many surprises as predictive models become more pervasive.”

Privacy experts worry that deep learn-ing could also be used in industries like banking and insurance to discriminate or effectively redline consumers for certain behaviors. Sergey Feldman, a consultant and data scientist with the brand per-sonalization company RichRelevance, imagines a “deep-learning nightmare scenario” in which insurance companies buy your personal information from data brokers and then infer with near-total accuracy that, say, you’re an overweight smoker in the early stages of heart disease. Your monthly premium might suddenly double, and you wouldn’t know why. This would be illegal, but, Feldman says, “don’t expect Congress to protect you against all possible data invasions.”

And what if the computer is wrong? If a deep-learning program predicts that you’re a fraud risk and blacklists you, “there’s no way to contest that determi-nation,” says Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Bregler agrees that there might be pri-vacy issues associated with deep learning, but notes that he tries to mitigate those concerns by consulting with a privacy advocate. Google has reportedly estab-

lished an ethics committee to address AI issues; a spokesman says its deep-learning research is not primarily about analyzing personal or user-specific data—for now. While LeCun says that Facebook eventu-ally could analyze users’ data to inform targeted advertising, he insists the com-pany won’t share personally identifiable data with advertisers.

“The problem of privacy invasion through computers did not suddenly ap-pear because of AI or deep learning. It’s been around for a long time,” LeCun says. “Deep learning doesn’t change the equa-tion in that sense, it just makes it more immediate.” Big companies like Facebook

“thrive on the trust users have in them,” so consumers shouldn’t worry about their personal data being fed into virtual brains. Yet, as he notes, “in the wrong hands, deep learning is just like any new technology.”

Deep learning, which also has been used to model everything from drug side effects to energy demand, could “make our lives much easier,” says Yoshua Bengio, head of the Machine Learning Laboratory at the University of Montreal. For now, it’s still relatively difficult for companies and gov-ernments to efficiently sift through all our emails, texts, and photos. But deep learn-ing, he warns, “gives a lot of power to these organizations.” —Dana Liebelson

FRIENDLY FIRE

CORRECTING HIS RECORDReformed Clinton antagonist David Brock’s team of “nerd virgins”

seeks to destroy the anti-Hillary memes he once unleashed.

A week after Hillary Clinton released her new memoir, Hard Choices, I met Burns Strider for lunch at the Hotel Monaco in Washington, DC. Just as the book hit the shelves, Strider’s organization, Correct the Record, had released 11 pages

of bullet points swatting down anticipated criticisms from Clinton’s detractors (“Hard Choices is just another way for Hillary to make money hand over fist”; “Hard Choices is a glossed-over snooze-fest”). It was the kind of preemptive spin that Correct the Record was created to churn out. As Clinton prepares for a possible presidential run, Correct the Record keeps constant watch for any conceivable attacks against her, and then aggres-sively beats them back before they take hold.

As he picked at his beet and greens salad, Strider told me how he’d ditched eating animal products in 2010 at the behest of the then-secretary of state. “You’ve got to think about your two boys,” she told Strider, who had worked as her senior adviser on faith outreach during the 2008 campaign. That night he got a call from Bill Clinton, who extolled the virtues of his new animal-free diet: “If I can do it, you can.” A few days later Strider received a box of herbivore-themed books and handwritten recipes jotted down by the former president.

The contemplative 48-year-old vegan, who manages Correct the Record’s day-to-day operations, says he has no qualms about his new role in the blood sport of D

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HERE COMES THE SUN Investors are finally taking a shine to solar power.Solar energy is going gangbusters. In the past decade, the amount of solar power produced in the United States has leaped 139,000 per-cent. A number of factors are behind the boom: cheaper panels and a raft of local and state in-centives, plus a federal tax credit that shaves 30 percent off the cost of upgrading. Still, solar is a bit player, providing less than half of 1 percent of the energy produced in the United States. But its potential is massive—it could power the entire country 100 times over. So what’s the holdup? A few obstacles: pushback from old-energy diehards, competition with other efficient energy sources, and the challenges of power storage and transmission. But with so-lar in the Southwest at “grid parity”—meaning it costs the same or less as electricity from con-ventional sources—Wall Street is starting to see solar as a sound bet. As a recent Citigroup investment report put it, “Our viewpoint is that solar is here to stay.” —Tim McDonnell

74%

presidential politics. Yet his boss is an even more unlikely figure: David Brock, the former Clinton nemesis and ring-leader of the “vast right-wing conspira-cy” that Hillary Clinton decried in 1998.

In the mid-1990s, as a reporter at the American Spectator, Brock investi-gated the first couple’s involvement in the Whitewater real estate scheme and dove into the allegations that Bill had used Arkansas state troopers to facilitate his liaisons, including one with Paula Jones. (He also infamously described Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”) Brock later underwent a political conversion and founded Me-dia Matters, a research shop dedicated to countering Fox News and right-wing talking points. Now he’s come full circle, launching Correct the Record to combat the resurgence of the very same narrative—the Clintons are venal, op-portunistic pols who will do anything to attain power—that he once worked so hard to popularize.

Brock’s ideological shift came in the late ’90s as he penned The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, a book that everyone expected to be a withering takedown—but ended up being a tepid biography. By 1997 Brock began to recant, pub-lishing a mea culpa in Esquire titled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man.” In 2002, he released Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Con-servative, a tell-all about the faults of the conservative movement and his disillusionment with it.

Strider recalls picking up a copy in an airport bookstore and devouring it. He passed it along to his then-boss, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and ar-ranged for Brock to address House Democrats. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton had started passing copies along to friends, opening new doors for Brock among liberal insiders. Having turned his back on his old right-wing patrons, Brock proved skilled at convincing rich liberals to open their wallets by revealing inside details of the conser-vative propaganda machine.

Brock says he first conceived of Cor-rect the Record last summer. “Having left the State Department,” Brock told me, “Clinton didn’t have the kind of robust operation that one would have

1%1%

Source: Solar Energy Industries Association (seia)

New electricity generating capacity installed in the United States, first quarter of 2014

SolarWindNatural gasGeothermalOther 74%

20%4%

New solar installations in the United States (in megawatts)

Source: seia

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

’13’12’11’10’09’08’07’06’05’04

UtilityNon-residentialResidential

Assumes 6kW house. Sources: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, seia

The cost of putting solar panels on a typical house has dropped nearly 70% since 1998.

$10,000

$20,000

$30,000

$40,000

$50,000

$60,000

$70,000

$80,000

$90,000

’14 ’12’10’08 ’06’04 ’02’00’98

Source: International Energy Agency

Total installed photovoltaic capacity (in gigawatts)

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

GermanyChina

Italy

USAJapan

SpainFrance

AustraliaBelgiumUnited Kingdom

Enough sunlight strikes Earth every 104 minutes to power the entire

world for a year.The United States has the space and

sunlight to provide 100 times its annual power demand with solar.

Rooftop solar panels alone could meet 1/5 of US electricity demand.

Carbon savings from existing US solar panels offset the equivalent of

3.5 million cars.Since the mid-2000s, the power

generated by new solar installations has grown, on average, 66% a year, far outpacing any other energy source.

Solar industry jobs have increased 50% since 2010. Solar workers now outnumber

coal miners nearly 2 to 1.Venture capital funding for solar in the

first quarter of 2013: $126 million In the first quarter of 2014: $251 million

Average cost of solar panels in 1972: $75/watt

Average cost today: Less than $1/wattExpected cost of Chinese panels in 2015:

42¢/watt


O U T F R O N T

if one was holding public office. That’s where I saw the need.” He wrote a memo predicting “an uptick in political attacks” against Clinton and proposed a rapid-response group to defend her. As it hap-pened, the very next day America Rising, an opposition research outfit founded by former Mitt Romney and Republican National Committee staff, announced a “Stop Hillary 2016” initiative.

Correct the Record’s staff (18 and count-ing) is crammed into a newsroom-style bullpen in the back corner of the offices of American Bridge 21st Century, Brock’s super-PAC. “They’re always there; they’re working around the clock,” former Clin-ton White House adviser Paul Begala says of the crew. “I always tease David that he finds all of these nerd virgins and locks them away in a vault where they never see sunlight or have a drink or get laid. But God bless them!”

The team has been building an exhaus-tive database of factoids documenting Clin-ton’s career, as well as compiling opposition research on her putative opponents. With Clinton’s own press team largely silent,

Correct the Record has become the go-to source for reporters seeking pro-Clinton quotes in response to Republican attacks.

Correct the Record is part of a larger shadow campaign that’s gearing up for 2016. It includes Ready for Hillary, which is collecting voter data, and Priorities USA, which is raising big money. “For the first time in my adult life, the left has their shit together,” says Begala, who relies on Correct the Record for talking points when he prepares for cable spots as a Hill-ary surrogate.

Hillary Clinton has always had a rocky rela-tionship with the press, thanks in part to deal-ing with conservative smear artists like the young Brock. Correct the Record reflects her prickly approach to media relations. The group spent much of the early sum-mer sending out press releases touting the sales of Clinton’s book and tweeting about stories that questioned the num-

bers. When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a column about the lavish speaking fees commanded by Hillary and daughter Chelsea, Correct fired back with a dossier on Dowd, high-lighting her own speaking fees.

But this strategy could backfire. Hillary has always struggled with the perception that she is inauthentic and quick to become

defensive; being shielded by a group that pounces on every slight could reinforce that image.

But Strider isn’t too concerned. The Demo-crats failed in 2004, he explained, by not build-ing a media operation that could respond to the Swift Boating of John Kerry. He doesn’t want Clinton

to suffer from the same mistake in 2016. “One thing Nancy Pelosi has said to me is, ‘Burns, in politics, if you take a swing at somebody you can rest assured of one thing: They’re going to swing back. So why not prepare in advance?’” —Patrick Caldwell

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y January, Kiera had stuffed so many small bills into the envelope hidden in her underwear drawer that it split

open. Kiera knew her mother occasionally cased her room, so to be safe, she’d labeled the envelope “soccer camp.”

“It had to be cash,” says Kiera (not her real name). She lets out a nervous laugh. “I couldn’t write a check and write ‘abortion’ on the memo line.”

Kiera, who lives in the Florida pan-handle, is thoughtful, sarcastic, and whip-

smart. It’s easy to forget that she’s only 18. But in December—when she was staring down a positive pregnancy test, think-ing, shit—she was only 17. Florida is one of 37 states where a minor can’t have an abortion unless at least one of her parents knows about it. Twenty-one of those states (though not Florida) require at least one parent to grant permission.

Kiera’s parents are divorced, and her fa-ther lives on the other side of the country. Her mother, Kiera says, is “unstable,” un-

predictable, and sometimes violent. Once, she kicked Kiera out of the house for for-getting to tell her about a sleepover, and it took a whole weekend for her to cool down. Kiera was sure that if she told her mom, who volunteered for an anti-abor-tion group, that she wanted to end her preg-nancy, she’d be out of the house for good.

But when Kiera confided in a school counselor, she learned about another op-tion: She could ask a judge for permission to have an abortion. Her panic melted

JUDICIAL RESTRAINTS Pregnant, scared, alone—and in front of a hostile judge

B Y M O L L Y R E D D E N

away. “I thought, ‘This will save me,’” she recalls. She started socking away every dollar she could get her hands on—lunch money, tips from her waitressing job. And she started calling courthouses.

EACH YEAR, HUNDREDS of girls in Flori-da petition judges for permission to have abortions; the nationwide number is likely in the thousands. But those statistics only include the girls who make it to court. Poorly trained court staff, anti-abortion judges, and a spate of increasingly restric-tive laws have made it harder than ever for minors to exercise their legal rights.

Abortion foes have pushed for new re-strictions because they believe the process, which is known as judicial bypass, is simply a loophole girls use to avoid talking to their parents. “Judges are rubber-stamping these requests,” Ohio Right to Life warned in a press release in 2011, just after John Kasich, the state’s new Republican governor, signed a bill making the bypass process stricter.

But a review of more than 40 cases, along with interviews with minors and their at-torneys, reveals that in much of the coun-try, obtaining a judge’s approval to get an abortion is a mammoth struggle.

“‘Daunting’ doesn’t begin to cover it,” says Jennifer Dalven, who runs the repro-ductive rights arm of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Imagine it: You’re 17 years old. You’re already struggling with this unplanned pregnancy. You may be afraid of your parents. And now you’re told, ‘Go to court’?”

Susan Hays, a Texas attorney who repre-sents minors through a group called Jane’s Due Process, says about a third of the girls she works with don’t have the option of ask-ing their parents for permission—they’re un-documented immigrants whose parents are not in the country, orphans, or what Hays calls “de facto orphans”: “Mom’s dead, Dad’s in prison, they never liked me much anyway.” She once represented a minor whose parents ran a meth ring: “She had split because she had the distinct impres-sion they were going to start pimping her out.” Legal guardians may grant permission for an abortion in most states. But this is no help to girls who live with family members who never established guardianship.

It isn’t supposed to be this way. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that a girl’s par-ents can’t exercise an absolute veto over

her right to an abortion: States requiring parental notification or consent had to provide an escape hatch. The court did not mandate what form this escape hatch should take. Maine, for example, allows a physician to decide whether the minor is competent enough to make her own decision. But that’s not good enough for anti-abortion activists. Led by Americans United for Life, the legislative wing of the pro-life movement, they’ve advanced laws to put the decision in the hands of judges instead.

The process sounds simple: Go to a courthouse, file a form, and get a private hearing within a day or so. If the judge—who usually holds the hearing in his or her chambers—denies the petition, a minor has a right to a speedy appeal. A pregnant teen, according to standards defined by the Supreme Court, must show either that she is mature enough to have an abortion without her parents’ involvement or that an abortion is in her best interest. “The way most laws are written, if you follow the statute, Jane Doe wins almost every time,” Hays says. But in practice, girls are at the mercy of whichever judge they hap-pen to draw, says Anne Dellinger, a retired University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professor who has studied the bypass

system. “If a girl wanders into the wrong [court], she doesn’t have a chance,” Del-linger says. With few checks on the sys-tem, Hays adds, judges are free to impose their beliefs on the girls who appear before them: “It’s the law of bullies.”

KIERA FINALLY APPEARED before a judge, a man nearing retirement age, when she was about 10 weeks along. Playing phone tag with the court had taken nearly three weeks.

Her school counselor said financial as-sistance from the clinic covered the gap between what she had squirreled away in the envelope and the cost of the abortion, but Kiera suspected her counselor paid the difference herself. She didn’t care. By now, she had begun gaining weight and was sweating nonstop.

From the outset of her hearing, which Ki-era weathered without a lawyer, the judge made his feelings about abortion clear. “I said, ‘I’m an A and B student,’” Kiera re-calls. “I tried to use my SAT words.” The judge was not interested. He grilled her on whether she had contemplated her deci-sion in church, or thought about how she might regret an abortion when she looked at her children in the future. He was upset to learn Kiera wasn’t dating the father.

When they discussed her family, the

J U D I C I A L R E S T R A I N T S

THE PARENT TRAPIn 37 states, minors must notify or get consent from a parent before having an

abortion. Since 2010, Republicans in 11 states have made it harder to bypass these restrictions by appearing before a judge.


Enforcement enjoined by court order in California, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and New Mexico. Source: Guttmacher Institute

States mandating parental involvementStates that have tightened bypass rules

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judge began pleading. “He said, ‘I’m sure your mother would understand,’” Kiera recalls. “He was kind of panicking—I felt like he was saying, ‘Well, have you tried having a better mother? Have you tried religion?’” The judge adjourned the hear-ing without a ruling. It wasn’t until two days later, after Kiera had already can-celed her appointment at the clinic, that she got a call to come back to court. He’d granted her petition.

Kiera’s case ended as she’d hoped. But court records show many girls are not so lucky. In the 40 cases I reviewed, judges denied minors’ petitions for arbitrary, absurd, or personal reasons—such as a mi-nor’s failure to discuss her decision with a priest. (Although the initial hearings are private, summaries and partial transcripts became public when the minors appealed.)

In 2008, Florida Judge Raul Palomino Jr. urged a 17-year-old to think of how distressed her Catholic parents would be if they discovered her secret abortion. In a 2006 Florida case, a girl testified she wasn’t financially or emotionally equipped to raise a child—a claim, the judge ruled, that proved she wasn’t mature enough to choose abortion. Three judges denied pe-titions because becoming pregnant by ac-cident indicated a young woman was too immature to choose abortion.

The records I reviewed show that if a judge doesn’t want to grant a petition, she will find a reason to deny it. One 17-year-old in Alabama tried to satisfy the state’s requirement that minors be well informed by asking six people—a woman who’d had an abortion, a family friend, two nurses, and staffers at Planned Parenthood and the local health department—about the procedure. In court, she described the procedure in detail, naming the surgical instruments used. When the judge asked the girl—a straight-A student bound for college on two scholarships—if she felt emotionally ready to have an abortion, she replied, “I am. I’ve been strong-mind-ed about all of this.”

The judge then denied her petition be-cause she hadn’t spoken to the doctor who would perform the procedure. (The girl said the doctor refused to talk to her; clin-ics often limit contact with minors before their bypass hearing.)

“I’m a mother,” said the judge, who is not named in the court documents. “These

people are interested in one thing, it appears to me, and that is getting this young lady’s money…This is a beautiful young girl with a bright future, and she does not need to have a butcher get ahold of her.” A divided ap-peals court upheld the judge’s denial.

In a 2013 case that made headlines, a Nebraska court decided a 16-year-old in foster care was not mature—in part because she was “not self-sufficient.” The minor had raised her siblings when her parents weren’t

around. The Nebraska Supreme Court up-held the lower court’s decision.

In another case, an appeals court de-scribed the testimony of a young woman who petitioned an Alabama judge in 2000:

“Her father drinks to excess and becomes violent. Recently, she said, he slapped her and told her to ‘get out of the house’ af-ter she had asked him to turn down the volume of the television because she was trying to do her homework…Her father had told her that if she ever came home pregnant he would kill her. She also stated that she did not believe he meant this liter-ally, but that she believed he would whip her. She testified that her mother was also violent and had beaten her older sister un-

til she bled.” The judge denied her petition.In Alabama and Florida, some judges

went so far as to appoint lawyers for girls’ fetuses, even giving them names. “You say that you are aware that God instructed you not to kill your own baby,” one attorney, who represented “Baby Ashley,” thun-dered at his 17-year-old adversary. “But you want to do it anyway?”

IN SOME WAYS, these girls were lucky to have made it to court at all. They had to get out of school, and in some cases to another town, for the hearing (and the procedure itself ). They had to keep the whole process a secret—some attorneys with Hays’ Texas group use Snapchat, a smartphone app that deletes messages after they’ve been viewed. But for many girls, the biggest obstacles are the court employees who act as the gatekeepers of the bypass system. For her 2007 book Girls on the Stand: How Courts Fail Pregnant Minors, Lafayette College law professor Helena Silverstein and a research team called court employees across three states. They found more than half of the courts “proved absolutely or materially ignorant of their responsibilities” under bypass laws. Many court employees, and one judge, told the researchers judicial by-pass didn’t exist. Some court staff lectured callers about abortion or referred them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Others warned that their judge had a blan-ket policy of denying petitions.

“We do not do that here,” a staffer told Kiera at the first courthouse she called. When Kiera became upset, the staffer hung up on her. She called the courthouse back and spoke with a different staff member, who was apologetic, but equally clueless.

At the second courthouse Kiera called, no one answered the phone for several days. Finally, she was told, “That’s some-thing you need to ask your mother and father about.” Kiera cajoled the staffer into looking into the court’s bypass pro-cedures. Later that week, the staffer left a message on Kiera’s mom’s answering machine explaining the process. Kiera frantically deleted the message before her mother got home.

None of this is unusual. In March 2012, students at the University of Michigan repli-cated Silverstein’s study, calling each of Flor-ida’s 67 county courthouses. “Our results…were even worse than we had suspected,”


“YOU SAY THAT YOU ARE AWARE THAT GOD INSTRUCTED

YOU NOT TO KILL YOUR OWN BABY,” ONE ATTORNEY, WHO REPRESENTED “BABY ASHLEY,” THUNDERED AT HIS 17-YEAR-OLD ADVERSARY. “BUT YOU WANT TO DO IT ANYWAY?”


they wrote. “Over two thirds of courts were unable or unwilling to provide callers with the correct or complete information.”

Sometimes, lawyers can counter the sys-tem’s failings. In the early 2000s, the ACLU

won several cases that sharpened Florida’s legal definition of maturity, resulting in fewer arbitrary rulings. In Illinois, the group is collaborating with the courts to make the process quicker and fairer. In Texas, Jane’s

Due Process has had several judges who never approved petitions removed from the rotation of those hearing cases.

But since 2010, many states with new Republican governors—or new GOP ma-jorities in their legislatures—have made the bypass process stricter. Lawmakers in Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Ohio have ratcheted up the standard of evidence in bypass hearings. Ohio and

Oklahoma restricted the counties where young women can petition. Arizona and Arkansas passed laws forbidding anyone other than lawyers or court staff from help-ing a girl obtain a bypass.

A new Florida law requiring minors to seek judicial bypass in courts close to their homes is the work of state Sen. Kelli Stargel, an abortion foe who became pregnant at 17, married the father, and had the baby. John, Stargel’s husband, went on to serve in the Florida House, where he helped write Florida’s parental notification law in 2005. He now serves as a circuit judge—and some-times rules on bypass petitions.

“Some of these children were being taken many, many miles from home,” Kelli Star-gel told me. “The child doesn’t need to go out of the umbrella of the parent’s protec-tion. For all we know, the judge will deny the bypass petition, because he determines the parent should become involved.”

In April, Alabama passed a law formally recognizing the right of judges to appoint lawyers to represent fetuses in the proceed-ings. I called Walter Mark Anderson III, a retired judge who began the practice, and told him the news. “That’s fantastic!” he exclaimed. Before fetal attorneys, he ex-plained, girls “came in, said this, that, and the other…and nobody really questioned her.” The new law also requires district attorneys to cross-examine minors seek-ing a bypass—making the hearings, which are supposed to be fact-finding exercises, more like criminal trials. The judge may adjourn a hearing for as long as he sees fit, and he may disclose the minor’s identity to any person he determines “needs to know.” If a minor’s parents become aware of the petition, which the Supreme Court intended to be confidential, they are en-titled to participate in the hearing and be represented by a lawyer.

It’s been eight months since Kiera’s hear-ing, but the memory still sets her off. “I had to walk this total stranger through my life,” she recalls angrily. “I had to open up one of the most embarrassing parts of my life.” But she knows she was lucky. She has a friend whose dad used to hit her before she moved out of his house. If that friend got pregnant, Kiera asks, “should she ask him if she can have an abortion? Or should she go in front of a court that says, ‘I’m sure your parents would understand’? No, really, tell me—which should she pick?”


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ONE COURT SENT HIM TO PRISON FOR SHOOTING A WOMAN.

ANOTHER SET HIM FREE OVER BAD POLICE WORK.

OR A “BAD GUY WITH A GUN”?

B Y D A V E G I L S O N


Two days earlier, a woman named Anna Marie Yocum had been mur-dered in her South Bend home. An autopsy determined she had been shot three times, once through the chest and twice in the back, likely at close range as she’d either fl ed or fallen down the stairs from her apartment. Two .45-cali-ber bullets had pierced her heart.

Less than an hour after her body was found, two police offi cers had gone to Dowlut’s home and asked him to help locate Yocum’s 16-year-old daughter, whom he’d dated. After a short, fruit-less search, the offi cers took him to police headquarters. Though Dowlut was booked as a material witness, in-vestigators soon came to suspect that the tall, polite Army private, home on a two-week leave, had killed Yocum. After a day of intense questioning, Dowlut allegedly broke down and con-

fessed in detail to the murder as well as to a botched robbery attempt earlier the same night in which the owner of a pawnshop was seriously wounded.

At fi rst, Dowlut insisted that he’d thrown his gun into the St. Joseph River, but the detectives kept push-ing. One offi cer, Dowlut later testifi ed, “just grabbed me by the shirt, told me that I was a son of a bitch, and that I’d better show them where the gun was really at.” Not long afterward, Dowlut told his interrogators that he’d lied: “I said the gun was in the city cemetery.” According to one detective, Dowlut reeled off the weapon’s serial number from memory.

The gun Dowlut unearthed less than a half mile from the murder scene was a Webley Mark VI, a British-made six-shot military revolver commonly sold in the United States after World

S h o r t l y b e f o r e d a r k o n t h e e v e n i n g o f A p r i l 1 7 , 1 9 6 3 , R o b e r t J . D o w l u t w e n t l o o k i n g f o r a g u n i n s i d e t h e c i t y c e m e t e r y i n S o u t h B e n d , I n d i a n a . M a k i n g h i s w a y t h r o u g h t h e h e a d s t o n e s , h e s t o p p e d i n f r o n t o f t h e a b a n d o n e d S t u d e b a k e r f a m i l y m a u s o l e u m . H e k n e l t b y t h e f r o n t r i g h t c o r n e r o f t h e b l o c k y g r a y m o n u m e n t a n d l i f t e d a s t o n e f r o m t h e d a m p g r o u n d . T h e n , a s o n e o f t h e t w o p o l i c e d e t e c t i v e s a c c o m p a n y i n g h i m l a t e r t e s t i f i e d , t h e 1 7 - y e a r - o l d “ u s e d h i s h a n d s a n d d i d s o m e d i g g i n g . ” H e u n e a r t h e d a r e v o l v e r a n d a m m u n i t i o n . A s D o w l u t w o u l d l a t e r t e l l a j u d g e , t h e d e t e c t i v e s t h e n t o o k t h e g u n , “ j a m m e d i t i n m y h a n d , ” a n d p h o t o g r a p h e d h i m . “ T h e y w e r e r e a l h a p p y . ”


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War II. The Indiana State Police Labora-tory determined that it had fired a bullet re-covered from Yocum’s body, one retrieved from her apartment, and another found at the pawnshop.

The following morning, Dowlut was charged with first-degree murder. A year and a half later, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Before the judge handed down a life sentence, he asked the defendant if there was any reason why he shouldn’t be put away. Dowlut replied, “I am not guilty.” A day later, the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City registered Dowlut, now 19, as prisoner number 33848.

Less than six years later, Robert Dowlut would be a free man—his murder convic-tion thrown out by the Indiana Supreme Court because of a flawed police investiga-tion. The court ordered a new trial, but one

never took place. Dowlut would return to the Army and go on to earn college and law degrees. Then he would embark on a career that put him at the epicenter of the move-ment to transform America’s gun laws.

Today, the 68-year-old Dowlut is the gen-eral counsel of the National Rifle Associa-tion. As the NRA’s top lawyer, he has been a key architect of the gun lobby’s campaign to define the legal interpretation of the Second Amendment. He helped oversee the NRA’s effort to strike down Chicago’s handgun ban in the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, and he is the longtime secretary of the organization’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, which has spent millions assisting gun owners in court and sponsoring gun rights research-ers. Dowlut’s journal articles have been cited by federal judges and are quoted by pro-gun activists. Chris W. Cox, the

executive director of the NRA’s lobbying operation, has praised him as “a longtime distinguished Second Amendment schol-ar.” Dowlut’s behind-the-scenes legal work may have done as much to tighten the NRA’s grip on gun policy as its blustery talk-ing heads and provocative PR campaigns.

Among Second Amendment lawyers and scholars, Dowlut is admired for his intellect and calm. “He is a really reliable and exhaustive source for legal input on the issue,” says Robert Levy, the chairman of the Cato Institute’s board of directors and one of the lawyers behind the landmark 2008 Heller case, in which the Supreme Court affirmed an individual right to own guns. Dowlut is “a human encyclopedia” on the subject of state gun laws, says David T. Hardy, a lawyer and prominent pro-gun writer who has known him “longer than I can remember.” (Dowlut and current NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre at-tended Hardy’s wedding in 1982.)

Police claimed that Dowlut (left, in photo) confessed to murdering his girlfriend’s mother (inset) and wounding a store owner.


Yet Dowlut maintains an extremely low profile. “Bob is a man who does his job and doesn’t go looking for attention,” Hardy says. He rarely speaks in public and does not appear on NRA radio or video program-ming. While his wife, a lawyer and gene-alogist, maintains a website with postings on family history, gun rights, and an NRA

law seminar she helped organize, Dowlut himself is conspicuously absent from those pages. He made a rare appearance on the site in a photo—removed a couple of years ago—titled “The Fantasy Supreme Court.” The group portrait shows a smiling Dowlut, his wife, and a who’s who of top Second Amendment lawyers and scholars at the NRA annual meeting in 2010. It is captioned: “These are the men who, over a span of more than 30 years, built the foun-dation that restored the Second Amend-ment as an individual right.”

The story of how Dowlut walked away from a murder conviction and rose through the ranks of the NRA has never been told publicly. It begins with the transcript of his murder trial, part of a 2,100-page court file obtained by Mother Jones that includes de-tailed closed-door testimony not heard by the jury. Despite a series of phone calls and detailed written requests seeking comment for this article, Dowlut did not respond, nor did his wife. It is unclear whether he has ever disclosed his past to any colleagues—Hardy told me he had “no idea” about the murder conviction—or to his employer; LaPierre and other NRA leaders also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Beyond the puzzle of a half-century-old crime is the question of what drove Dowlut to become one of the brains behind the modern gun rights movement, with its insistence that ready access to guns pre-vents, rather than provokes, violent crime. Court documents, Dowlut’s own writings, and interviews with people knowledgeable about his career offer clues to his journey. It spans from the liberated Nazi slave-labor camp where he was born and his troubled youth in Indiana to the chambers of the US Supreme Court—and the front lines of the battle over the right to bear arms.

When Officer Edward M. Scott of the South Bend Police Department pulled up at the house on West Washington Street just before 9:30 p.m. on April 15, 1963, he

found an elderly woman outside, scream-ing, “A lady’s been shot!”

Scott and his partner entered the three-story Victorian and found a woman crum-pled on the second-floor landing. “She was lying more or less on her knees in a squat position and her head was hanging down the stairway,” Scott recalled at Dowlut’s trial. “I noticed there was a large hole in her back and there was a pool of dark blood all underneath her body.” The elderly woman, who had phoned the police, lived across the hall from the victim’s small attic apart-ment but hadn’t seen anything.

When the victim was turned over, Scott recognized her as Anna Marie Yocum, a 36-year-old waitress and single mother. One afternoon about six months earlier, he’d escorted Yocum to the hospital to see her teenage daughter, Camille, who’d faint-ed at a lunch counter. The girl had been with her boyfriend, Robert Dowlut, who’d told the officer how to find Yocum.

By chance, Scott had spotted Dowlut earlier on the night of the murder. About 90 minutes before they discovered Yocum’s body, he and his partner were dis-patched to help investigate the shooting of Saul Berkowitz, the 65-year-old owner of a pawnshop. As the officers stopped at an in-tersection, Dowlut crossed in front of their car, heading in the direction of Yocum’s apartment, two blocks away.

Dowlut was already familiar to the police. In January 1962, according to the South Bend Tribune, he had admitted to what a front-page article described as a “crime spree”: Armed with guns stolen from the local historical soci-

ety’s museum, Dowlut and another teen-ager had robbed a café, netting about $135. Witnesses at the café said the two had brandished a pistol and a homemade zip gun, firing a shot before emptying the till. (In addition to being charged with armed robbery and burglary, Dowlut had faced counts of car theft, hit-and-run, and malicious trespass, according to a 1964 presentencing report.) Brought into juvenile court, the 16-year-old reportedly gave no explanation for his behavior and maintained that he’d never so much as broken a window previously.

After conferring in Polish with Dowlut’s parents, refugees who had immigrated after the war, Judge Frank X. Kopinski opted for lenience. “My logic tells me you should be sent away, but my heart says no,” the judge told Dowlut, according to the Tribune. Dowlut was put on probation and graduated from Washington High School in January 1963 with a good aca-demic record. At the end of the month, he enlisted in the Army and headed off to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for basic training and a fresh start.

Corresponding with his probation offi-cer in March 1963, the young GI sounded hopeful: He was planning to attend signal school in Georgia and perhaps try out for Airborne and a post overseas. He also indicated that he’d decided not to marry Camille, a prospect that had been weigh-ing on him. She was pregnant but had re-cently said he was not the father. “I knew I would be marrying the girl from mere obligation,” he wrote in the letter, which would be read into the record at his mur-der trial. “I will go to college as soon as I finish my obligation to Uncle Sam,” he continued. “I will be out when I am twen-ty years old. I will be more mature and I will have a whole new outlook on life.”

Those plans were dashed when Officer Scott and his partner pulled up to the Dowluts’ modest home on West Dun-ham Street. As they drove Robert Dowlut to police headquarters, they passed by the commotion outside Yocum’s building. Dowlut asked what had happened. Noth-ing, Scott told him. The officer then asked Dowlut what he’d been doing earlier that night. “Well, I have a lot of problems,” he recounted Dowlut saying. The teen said he’d spent much of the evening wandering around by the river. He described the route

T H E N R A ’ S M U R D E R M Y S T E R Y

D O W L U T W A S A L R E A D Y K N O W N T O P O L I C E F O R A P R E V I O U S C R I M E S P R E E U S I N G S T O L E N W E A P O N S A N D A H O M E M A D E Z I P G U N .


he’d taken home, which did not include the intersection where Scott had seen him. “Robert,” Scott replied, “you lying to me.”

At the station, Dowlut was taken to an in-terrogation room, where a trio of detectives began questioning him. He recalled that they first asked about Yocum’s daughter and who she associated with. “They thought that perhaps she did it,” he testified. Ca-mille reportedly arrived at her mother’s apartment two hours after the shooting and was taken into “protective custody.” The police concluded she wasn’t involved in the crime. According to the South Bend Tribune, the police also detained two other young men for questioning, but they were let go. A 38-year-old man, described during the trial as “friendly” with Yocum, was also interviewed and released.

Dowlut refused to take a polygraph, and a test for gunpowder residue on his hands proved inconclusive. Yet the police believed they had enough circumstantial evidence to keep him in custody. First, there was his ap-parent lie about his whereabouts. The po-lice also had learned that Dowlut had been seeing Camille against her mother’s wishes and that he and Yocum disliked each other. There was an eyewitness report of a young man in his early 20s, approximately 6 feet tall, running near the site of the pawnshop shooting. (Dowlut was 6 feet tall.) And then there was Dowlut’s juvenile record.

Around midnight, Dowlut testified, he asked if he could call a lawyer. Inspector Russell Hunt, the lead detective, told him, “No, you can’t have one; you’re under investigation for homicide.” (Hunt testi-fied that Dowlut never asked for a law-yer.) Dowlut said that when he asked what would happen if he tried to leave, an officer patted his holstered gun and growled, “You damned Polack, you step one foot out of that door and I’ll kill you.”

Over the following two and a half days, Dowlut was questioned for a total of nearly 20 hours by no fewer than eight police officers. During that time, he did not see a lawyer and was not charged with any crime. His statements were not re-corded. At his murder trial, details of his interrogation were revealed behind closed doors by the officers who had arrested and questioned him, and by his parents and Dowlut himself. The jury did not hear

these sworn statements, but Dowlut’s law-yers submitted them as part of his appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court.

While the chronologies offered by Dowlut and the police closely matched, their accounts of what was said starkly con-tradicted each other. According to the po-lice, Dowlut was offered multiple chances to contact a lawyer, was treated respect-fully, and volunteered his confession. In Dowlut’s version, he was repeatedly denied access to an attorney and was driven to con-fess by threats, relentless grilling, and classic good cop-bad cop tactics.

Dowlut’s account was corroborated by his father, who saw him twice during his

detention. Donald Dowlut, who wasn’t at home when the police arrested his son, went to visit him at the station a few hours after his arrest. “When I saw him, he look tire [sic] and he look like crying…like scared,” Donald Dowlut testified in the closed-door hearing. The Dowluts be-gan speaking in Polish, but Hunt ordered them to speak English. Donald Dowlut asked if his son needed a lawyer; the of-ficers told him no and that his son would soon be home.

On the night of April 16, Robert Dowlut testified, “the police started getting nasty.” When police had searched the family’s house earlier that day, Donald Dowlut told them that he personally had bought a gun through the mail but had since thrown it in the river. The detectives told Dowlut that his dad might be charged as an accessory after the fact and could go to the electric chair. One officer suggested that Dowlut could avoid prosecution by pretending to

be “sick in the head,” while another alleged-ly threatened to “punch me in the kisser.” In his testimony, Dowlut referred by name to many of the officers who questioned him—but he said he couldn’t remember which ones had physically threatened him.

According to Detective Erwin Hampton, Dowlut broke down and confessed on the afternoon of April 17:

He said that he wanted to marry his girl-friend, Cammie; he said that her mother was against this, didn’t like him, was trying to prevent them from seeing one another, and he didn’t like Mrs. Yocum. He said he was about due to go back to camp and that he wanted to take Cammie with him, but he needed some money, so he said that he took this gun from his home, and I asked him what kind and he said it was a Webley, a .45 Webley. He said that he took the gun and he stuck it in his pants, in his belt, under his jacket, and he said he went uptown looking for a place to rob.

Hampton said that Dowlut also admitted to shooting Berkowitz accidentally when the pawnshop owner grabbed Dowlut’s gun. He fled, Hampton said, stopping to vomit in the yard of “the retarded school” about a block from where Officer Scott saw him. He then walked to Yocum’s building. Hampton asked Dowlut why he went there. “I’m verbatim now,” the detective testified. “He said, ‘I went there to kill her.’”

Inside, Hampton continued, Dowlut found Yocum watching TV: “When he walked in she looked at him startled-like, and she started to get up and he fired. He went past her, she turned and went towards the door of the apartment. He was at the front end of the apartment, and he ran past her and he turned and he fired again at her, and that she fell at that time.”

Dowlut initially told Hampton that he’d thrown the gun and remaining ammuni-tion off a bridge, but he revealed their actu-al location and the serial number of the gun later that afternoon. Hampton also alleged that Dowlut admitted to coaching his dad to lie about the gun when they spoke brief-ly in Polish at the police station. (Nowhere in the trial transcript is Donald Dowlut asked if the gun was his.) When prosecu-tor Edward Kalamaros asked about the gun during the closed-door hearing, Dowlut admitted that he had lied about throwing it away and that he’d told the police it was in the cemetery.

The police also tried to squeeze a writ-


“YOU DAMNED POLACK, YOU STEP ONE FOOT OUT OF THAT DOOR AND I ’LL KILL YOU,” DOWLUT SAID THE COP GROWLED AS HE PATTED HIS GUN.


ten confession from Dowlut. He testified that an officer dictated a message to his family, telling him to write, “I confess my crimes.” Dowlut asked what that meant. “Well, he said, ‘You were screwin’ this girl, weren’t you?’ And I told him, ‘Yes, I was,’ and he said, ‘You screwed her more than once, didn’t you?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and he said, ‘Well, those are your crimes, you screwed a minor girl.’” Dowlut said the police also dictated a note to Camille; in it, according to Kalamaros, Dowlut said he was “sorry for what he had done” and asked her “not to hate him.” These notes were not allowed as evidence in the trial.

In both Dowlut’s and the police’s ac-counts, the interrogation reached its cli-max when Donald Dowlut returned to the station on the evening of April 17, after the gun had been retrieved from the cemetery. Dowlut recalled, “I saw him and he saw me and I felt pretty bad about it and I started crying and told Dad that the police made me confess to something that I didn’t do.” His father described the scene similarly. He said he again asked the police to let his son see an attorney but was told, “He not need no lawyer because he confess over.”

The two police officers present also de-scribed a pathetic scene, but remembered

what was said entirely differently. Edward Nawrocki, a Polish-speaking officer who knew Donald Dowlut socially, said the father and son spoke “partly [in] Polish and partly in American.” He testified that Dowlut tearfully repeated his confession to his dad. When his father asked why he’d shot Yocum, Dowlut “just kept repeatin’ that this mother was no good to her, that is, his girlfriend,” perhaps hinting at a mo-tive beyond wanting to run away with Ca-mille. Donald Dowlut also admitted, in tears, that he had not gotten rid of his gun, Hampton stated. “He said he was sorry for lying to me, he didn’t like to lie, but he was IN

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Clockwise from top right: Dowlut shortly before his trial; a police photo of Dowlut and investigators in the city cemetery; Yocum’s corpse as it was found by police; the jury’s verdict

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frightened” for his son, the detective said. Hampton also claimed that Dowlut told his dad that hiring an attorney was a waste of money because, as Dowlut put it, “I’m going to be in prison for the rest of my life.”

An attorney enlisted by Dowlut’s father arrived at the station the next morning to intervene in the interrogation. A few hours later, Dowlut was arraigned for fi rst-degree murder. Five months shy of his 18th

birthday, he was charged as an adult and bond was denied; he pleaded not guilty. Inspector Hunt boasted to reporters about cracking a case that had made front-page headlines for two days.

Dowlut was also charged with assault and battery with intent to kill in the Berkowitz shooting; he pleaded not guilty and bail was set at $100,000. Juvenile court judge Kopinski transferred the case to adult juris-diction. “If I live to be 100 years your case will confound me,” the dismayed judge,

who’d given Dowlut a break a year earlier, reportedly said. “I can’t fathom your ac-tions, and I hope and pray that courts some day can obtain the intelligence to predict when a brilliant and talented young man like you will go awry in life.”

Dowlut’s attorney, former prosecutor William Plodowski, threw everything he could at his young, penniless client’s case. Arguing that pretrial publicity had tainted the jury pool, he got the venue changed to LaGrange County, around 50 miles from South Bend. More importantly, Plodowski insisted that Dowlut’s arrest and interroga-tion had violated his constitutional rights to counsel and against self-incrimination, arguing that all evidence produced from his detention should have been inadmissible.

Following the closed-door hearing on this motion, Judge Winslow Van Horne agreed that Dowlut’s warrantless arrest had been improper but did not agree that he had been coerced into confessing. How-ever, Van Horne ruled that the police con-duct plus the defendant’s youth required the court to disregard any statements ob-tained during his detention. As a result, the jury would not hear anything about

Dowlut’s interrogation and alleged confes-sion. Jurors would be allowed to hear about the gun Dowlut dug up—just not how the police came to locate it in the cemetery.

On the same day that the judge sup-pressed his confession, Dowlut fi led a writ-ten alibi stating that he had spent all of April 15, 1963, at home, except for a short trip to a nearby store “to purchase chew-ing gum.” A friend of his father’s testifi ed that he had seen Dowlut at home about a half-hour before the pawnshop robbery. Plodowski also cast doubt on the idea that his client could have committed the mur-der, hid the gun, and gotten home by the time the police came looking for him.

The prosecution’s case rested largely on Offi cer Scott’s sighting of the suspect, the trip to the cemetery, the gun and bullets, and a jailhouse informant who claimed Dowlut had admitted everything to him. Berkowitz also took the stand, describing how Dowlut had entered his store, asked to see a guitar, and then “took out his gun, put it to my stomach, and pulled the trig-ger.” Camille testifi ed that a few days be-fore her mother was shot, she saw Dowlut, who told her, “If you committed robbery in South Bend…you could get away with it.” She said that he had called her mom a “bitch” and that he wanted her to come with him when his leave ended. She said she didn’t want to, and “my mother wouldn’t have let me.”

At 1:05 a.m. on November 3, 1964, af-ter deliberating for more than eight hours, the jury found Dowlut guilty of second-degree murder. A week later he was sen-

Robert Dowlut’s senior high school photo; part of his Indiana State Prison record; 1968 and ’69 articles on the further rulings in Dowlut’s case


tenced and put in prison. He appealed, but was denied a new trial. In early 1965, the Indiana Supreme Court agreed to review his case, and on April 1, 1968, it handed down its ruling in Dowlut v. State. The trial judge had properly rejected Dowlut’s “il-legal confessions,” Justice Amos Jackson wrote on behalf of the four-justice major-ity, but he had improperly admitted the “poisoned fruit” of the interrogation: the gun in the graveyard.

The court reversed Dowlut’s conviction and ordered that he be retried. The deci-sion echoed the US Supreme Court’s rul-ing in Miranda v. Arizona nearly two years earlier, which had affirmed criminal defen-dants’ right against self-incrimination dur-ing police questioning. A 1978 article in the Indiana Law Review criticized the Miranda and Dowlut rulings for invalidating other-wise reliable corroborating evidence, such as the gun in Dowlut’s trial: “The suspect’s knowledge of where the murder weapon was hidden was conclusive proof that he had knowledge of the murder.”

The state supreme court’s decision left virtually no admissible evidence, and the attempt to retry Dowlut for Yocum’s mur-der was eventually dropped. A week after the high court ruling, he was released into the custody of St. Joseph County, where he faced new charges for wounding Berkowitz. After two more years of venue changes and delays, the remaining charges against Dowlut were dismissed due to the state’s failure to provide a speedy trial. On April 3, 1970, Dowlut received another chance to start over. Sam Mirkin, a now-retired public defender who represented Dowlut at the end of these proceedings, recalls the day his client was released: “Mr. Dowlut said, ‘What do I do now?’ I said, ‘You call your father and have him pick you up.’”

Following his legal odyssey, Dowlut re-turned to the military. According to his official bio, he joined the 82nd Airborne Division, and then served with the Army Reserve’s 12th Special Forces while he at-tended Indiana University-South Bend. (His bio says he was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant.) Known as “Necessity U,” the small campus drew students who “likely would have had no chance for a college education,” as Dowlut’s wife, Alice Marie Beard, later recalled. Dowlut tried to recruit

fellow vets to come to IUSB. As the 28-year-old told Beard for an article she wrote in the student newspaper in April 1974, “I try to impress upon them that I had been out of high school for nine years and that my parents were working-class people, but that I’m making it okay in college.”

He joined the paper’s staff and wrote a series of columns on veterans’ affairs, pro-viding advice on everything from obtain-ing GI Bill benefits to removing negative or embarrassing details from discharge papers. His writing, which ran alongside columns such as “Pigs Are Pigs” (about a student’s run-in with the South Bend cops) and anti-Army ads (“Our best killers have been guys just like you” ), took a practical, even law-yerly, tone. Less than a year after he was interviewed by Beard, they married.

After graduating in 1975, Dowlut enrolled at Howard University School of Law. It was at the historically black school that Dowlut

came to see gun rights as a civil rights issue, according to Robert Cottrol, a professor of law at George Washington University and a member of the Civil Rights Defense Fund board of trustees who is friends with Dowlut. He graduated in 1979 and was ad-mitted to the DC Bar in 1980. By this time he had started working at the NRA.

Dowlut joined the organization just as it was being reborn. In what became known as the Cincinnati Revolt, hardliners had overthrown the NRA’s moderate leadership and installed Harlon Carter as executive vice president in 1977. Under Carter, the NRA adopted uncompromising rhetoric and

an aggressive political strategy that turned it into one of the nation’s most powerful interest groups. Carter also envisioned re-cruiting “young men and women—lawyers, constitutional scholars, writers, historians, professors—who some day will be old and gray and wise, widely published and highly respected. It will be those individuals—in the future—who will provide the means to save the Second Amendment.”

Dowlut became a key player among this new generation of under-the-radar activ-ists, doing everything from representing the plaintiff in a 1984 lawsuit challenging the nation’s first municipal handgun ban to warning housing authorities that pro-hibitions on tenants owning guns are un-constitutional. He has written or cowritten more than 25 amicus briefs on behalf of the NRA in state and federal cases, including a 1997 Supreme Court case aimed at striking down the Brady Law, which requires fed-eral background checks on gun buyers. At a legal forum at the 1989 NRA convention, he warned that “the end goal of the gun pro-hibitionists is to ban all guns,” adding that “because of the inability of parents to instill values in youth” more restrictions were “be-ing placed on the backs of gun owners.”

Dowlut has also helped fulfill Carter’s vision of reshaping Second Amendment ju-risprudence from outside the courtroom. In the late 1970s, a small cadre of law professors and lawyers began arguing that most judges—including generations of Supreme Court jus-tices—had gotten gun rights all wrong. In its first 200 years, the Supreme Court had con-sidered just four Second Amendment cases; it had never affirmed an individual right to bear arms beyond the context of militia ser-vice. The only 20th-century case was in 1939, when the justices unanimously ruled against two men who claimed the federal prohibi-tion on transporting unregistered sawed-off shotguns violated their Second Amendment rights. The new wave of pro-gun scholarship by Dowlut and his allies declared that this legal consensus was not only wrong but dan-gerous: The Second Amendment needed to be rescued from gun-hating judges, politi-cians, and activists.

Dowlut’s first articles on gun rights ap-peared in the early 1980s. A piece in the Oklahoma Law Review in 1983 laid out the basic premise of the modern gun rights movement: Beyond the awkward and archa-ic preamble about a “well-regulated militia,”


“DRACONIAN GUN LAWS ARE AN UGLY FORM OF REPRESSION OFTEN CLOAKED IN LIBERAL TRAPPINGS,” DOWLUT WROTE, STARTING A CAMPAIGN THAT WOULD ONE DAY SWAY THE SUPREME COURT.


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the Second Amendment unequivocally secures a broad individual right to keep firearms for self-defense and “to deter gov-ernmental oppression.” As Dowlut wrote, “Draconian gun laws are an ugly form of re-pression often cloaked in liberal trappings.”

Dowlut’s piece was one shot in a sudden volley of pro-gun scholarship. According to an analysis by political scientist Robert J. Spitzer, between 1912 and 1969, just three law journal articles endorsed this expansive view of the Second Amendment. Between 1970 and 1989, 27 did, while 25 supported the prevalent court interpretation. By the 1990s, articles supporting the broader inter-pretation outnumbered those espousing the traditional view 2 to 1; 27 were written by seven authors who had worked for the NRA

or other pro-gun groups, including Dowlut, who wrote three.

In 1997, Dowlut published his most forceful and sweeping article yet in the Stanford Law & Policy Review, justifying the Clinton-era militia movement and predicting that the Supreme Court would eventually strike a blow against the “bigot-ry, political correctness, and federal courts who give [Americans’] Second Amend-ment rights no respect.” That same year, ruling on the Brady Law case, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted the “growing body of scholarly commentary” that had “marshal[ed] an impressive array of historical evidence,” and hinted at his eagerness to hear a Second Amendment case. Justice Antonin Scalia, in his 1998 book, A Matter of Interpretation, stated that “dispassionate scholarship” suggested there was a personal right to keep and bear arms. The revisionist view of the Second Amendment had gone mainstream.

Dowlut has also spent decades help-ing build the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund (originally the Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund), a nonprofit found-ed in 1978 to establish legal precedents strengthening Second Amendment rights. It has recently backed cases in 35 states and Washington, DC, involving a range of issues from self-defense claims and as-sault weapons bans to the court-martial of a US soldier charged with murdering an Iraqi detainee. In 1996, it contributed $20,000 to the defense of Bernhard Goetz, who was sued by one of the men he had shot and wounded in the New York City subway in 1984. In 2010, the fund awarded

Sen. Ted Cruz its Harlon B. Carter-George S. Knight Freedom Fund award for his work in support of Heller and McDonald as Texas’ solicitor general. Since the late 1990s, the fund has given roughly $2.5 million to pro-gun researchers; Hardy, for instance, has re-ceived at least $467,000 for various projects, including a documentary film.

Dowlut got to witness the culmination of his work on March 2, 2010. Dressed in an Airborne-maroon beret, scarf, and over-coat, he stood in the brisk darkness outside the Supreme Court as his wife handed out cookies to court watchers waiting in line. The Supreme Court was about to hear oral arguments in McDonald v. Chicago, its sec-ond gun rights case in as many years.

Immediately after the 2008 Heller ruling, in which the court had struck down Wash-ington, DC’s strict handgun regulations, the NRA contested Chicago’s 1982 hand-gun ban. The finding from Heller—that the Second Amendment protects an indi-vidual right to keep arms for self-defense—did not apply only to the capital, the NRA

argued, but to the nation as a whole. Its case became part of McDonald v. Chicago, whose lead plaintiff was Otis McDonald, a retired African American maintenance engineer who had sought to buy a gun for self-defense. On June 28, 2010, the court

reaffirmed its earlier ruling, 5-4. Together, these decisions emboldened the gun rights movement, setting off a surge of new chal-lenges to local and state laws.

Writing for the majority in McDonald, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment applied to the states, echo-ing an argument that Dowlut and his col-leagues had been making for nearly 30 years. In their opinions, the majority cited NRA legal fund trustee Cottrol, as well as legal fund recipients Hardy and Stephen Halbrook. Though Dowlut was not men-tioned by name, his influence could be seen between the lines. A popular gun rights blogger wrote, “We also should not overlook the work of NRA General Coun-sel himself, Bob Dowlut, whose work on this issue goes back to the ’70s.”

Dowlut has helped realize Harlon Car-ter’s vision of venerable scholars sitting atop an enduring legal foundation. Yet his story evokes Carter’s legacy in another way: In 1931, when Carter was 17, he was convicted of confronting, shooting, and killing a 15-year-old Mexican American boy in his hometown of Laredo, Texas. Carter’s conviction was later overturned on grounds that the judge had not adequately instructed the jury on the law of self-defense. The managing editor of the Lar-

The abandoned Studebaker family mausoleum in South Bend’s city cemetery, February 2014


edo Times, which uncovered Carter’s past, noted, “When Carter applied for his job with the NRA I doubt whether he told them he had killed a man.” When the incident was reported in 1981, the then-NRA head first denied it, but came to acknowledge it. Asked about the case in 1984, Carter said, “It hasn’t hurt me with the American peo-ple. It still comes up every now and then but it will never have any effect. That was almost 53 years ago.”

It is all but impossible to know exactly what happened on that night in South Bend more than 50 years ago. The South Bend Police Department has Yocum’s murder classified as an open case. Nearly everyone involved in Robert Dowlut’s trial—the judge, lawyers, police officers, and other witnesses—is dead. Camille left South Bend; documents indicate she mar-ried the man described during the trial as having been “friendly” with her mother. He died in 1996. Reached by phone, Ca-mille hung up when asked to comment for this story. A registered letter sent to her ad-dress was refused three times.

For now, a stack of grainy court docu-ments contains the most detailed account of this grueling chapter of Dowlut’s life. The pages hold hints of an even more com-plex story, such as the moment when, ac-cording to Detective Hampton’s account of Dowlut’s interrogation, the teen turned

philosophical: “He leaned back in his chair and he said, ‘Well, you know, Sergeant, it’s just like a person is two people.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ and he said, ‘Well, if one part of me can love and the other part can kill.’”

Without hearing from Dowlut himself, it’s also difficult to know exactly how his ex-perience as a criminal defendant influenced his work. Yet it seems clear that it combined with memories of his family’s painful past to shape his views of government authority and the need to possess guns.

Dowlut’s parents grew up in eastern Poland, in what is now Belarus. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Donald (origi-nally named Dyonizy), Olga, and their in-fant son, Victor, were sent to Dachau with other non-Jewish Poles. The Dowluts were later taken to Augsburg, a slave-labor camp outside Munich that made armaments. There the baby became sick. As Alice Beard explained in an online family his-tory, “A Nazi physician told Olga to hold her baby as Dyonizy watched. The doctor gave Victor an injection; the baby began convulsing immediately and died.”

Robert was born in Augsburg in Septem-ber 1945, less than five months after the US Army liberated it and converted it to a refugee camp. He was originally named Bogdan, meaning “given by God.” In 1949, the family emigrated to Wisconsin, and then South Bend. Donald did manual labor, and Olga worked in the cafeteria at Notre Dame University. (Olga Dowlut died in 1972. Donald Dowlut died in 1989; the South Bend Tribune reported that the coroner determined that the 75-year-old had shot himself in the head.)

During the murder trial, Dowlut’s at-torney drew on the family’s tragic history to undermine the police’s claims that his client had confessed voluntarily. He pre-sented evidence that Dowlut had grown up with an intense fear of armed men in uniform due to his parents’ wartime expe-rience. During his closed-door testimony, Dowlut said their accounts of Nazi camp guards “made me frightened of police of-ficers.” He also said that he’d read news ar-ticles about police brutality in the United States: “Mostly they have to do with civil rights. They said that police used clubs, fire hoses, police dogs.”

Former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman, who first met Dowlut in the mid-’80s, says

that Dowlut drew a connection between his past and his passion for the Second Amendment: “My recollection was that his parents grew up in a totalitarian society and he saw the gun as an expression of the freedom given to Americans.” This reso-nates with one of the key tenets of contem-porary gun rights rhetoric, that the framers of the Constitution saw the right to bear arms as a bulwark against tyranny.

Dowlut’s writings also express skepti-cism about the government’s ability to protect citizens and their rights, including those of the accused. In his 1997 article in the Stanford Law & Policy Review, he wrote, “Historically the police have op-posed any extension of constitutional rights to individuals under their control.” In his 1983 article, he cited the Supreme Court’s affirmation in Miranda of “the right to remain silent and have counsel present during a custodial interrogation.” He disapprovingly quoted Justice Byron White’s dissent, which predicted that the ruling “will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets.” The Second Amendment, Dowlut has argued, must be viewed in this context. Like the criminal suspect’s right against self-incrimination, the ordinary citizen’s right to bear arms is a fundamental protection against govern-ment overreach.

Dowlut is adamant that guns do not fa-cilitate crime or enable violent criminals. In his Stanford article, he quoted a study on gun ownership that asserted, “It perhaps goes without saying that the ‘average’ gun owner and the ‘average’ criminal are worlds apart in background, social outlooks, and economic circumstances. The idea that common, ordinary citizens are somehow transformed into potential perpetrators of criminally violent acts once they have ac-quired a firearm seems farfetched, most of all since there is substantial evidence that the typical gun owner is affluent, Protes-tant, and middle-class.”

There is a clear, bright line between law-abiding gun owners and criminals, Dowlut holds: “Those who argue that a significant share of serious violence is perpetrated by previously nonviolent ‘average Joes’ are clinging to a myth.” Only a criminal, not a gun, can turn a moment of anger or panic into a tragedy. By this reasoning, the good need never apologize—and the bad are be-yond redemption.


HIS LAWYER ARGUED DOWLUT FEARED ARMED MEN IN UNIFORM BECAUSE OF NAZI ATROCITIES HIS PARENTS EXPERIENCED IN THE SLAVE-LABOR CAMP WHERE HE WAS BORN.


elly Bernado woke to the headlines after working her late shift as an ER nurse in Seattle, and she cried through the day and into the next, the shooting at her own son’s high school a year before haunting her

all over again. In Houston the morning after it happened, Kellye Burke was on her way to pick up a Christmas tree, her six-year-old son nestled in his car seat, when she saw the large LED road sign publicizing a gun show and felt the urge to scream. In Brooklyn, Kim Russell felt a surge of adrenaline when she heard the news; after choking back the nausea, she began agonizing about what her first-grader would hear at school. She’d never told her daughter about the time when a robber shot her friend to death and wounded her, then pressed the cold muzzle against her forehead as she begged for her life.

At home in an Indianapolis suburb the morning fol-lowing the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Shannon Watts, a 41-year-old former public relations executive and mother of five, created a Facebook page calling for a march on the nation’s capital: “Change will require action by an-gry Americans outside of Washington, D.C. Join us—we will need strength in numbers against a resourceful, powerful and intransigent gun lobby.” The seed for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America—today a national organi-zation backed by nearly 200,000 members and millions of dollars—had been planted. “I started this page because, as a mom, I can no longer sit on the sidelines. I am too sad and too angry,” Watts wrote. “Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t talk about this tragedy now—they said the same after Vir-ginia Tech, Gabby Giffords, and Aurora. The time is now.”

Three days later, five women convened in Brooklyn for a Skype call with Watts and formed the group’s first chapter. They felt that what happened in Newtown was like another 9/11. None of the women had experience as political activists, but they did remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the pioneering grassroots move-ment of the 1980s that rewrote laws and battled cultural resignation about alcohol-related traffic deaths. They also realized they had an asset that MADD organizers could only have dreamed of: social media. As word of a new effort to confront gun violence sprang up in Facebook feeds, offers flooded in to help launch more chapters, from Virginia and Texas to Kentucky and Colorado.

Today, Moms Demand Action has teams on the ground in all 50 states, elbowing their way into policy hearings and working to motivate “gun sense voters” fed up with the carnage. In less than two years, the organization has com-

pelled more than a half-dozen national restaurant chains, internet companies, and retailers to take a stand against lax gun laws, and has joined forces with one of the nation’s most deep-pocketed political operators to hold elected leaders to account. Many groups have taken on the na-tion’s 30,000 annual firearm deaths—and this latest effort bears resemblance to the Million Mom March in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shooting, whose organizers also sought to be “a MADD for guns.” But no group has risen so far, so fast, influencing laws, rattling major corporations, and provoking vicious responses from hardcore gun rights activists. With its ambition to turn out a million voters for the November midterms, Moms Demand Action may be emerging as a potent threat to the National Rifle Associa-tion’s three-decade-long stranglehold on gun politics.

If stricter national gun laws seemed imminent in the after-math of Sandy Hook, just four months later the popular narrative was that any chance for change had been deep-sixed. A majority in the US Senate approved universal background checks for gun buyers, but the bill fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Once again, the NRA had won.

But Moms Demand Action took the fight to another are-na—public opinion, with a special focus on brand-conscious

MOTHERSIN ARMS

Can these women do to gun extremists what MADD did to

drunk drivers?

B Y M A R K F O L L M A N


corporate America. After Sandy Hook, Sec-ond Amendment activists had stepped up a tradition of openly carrying firearms into Starbucks stores (“open carry” is legal to varying degrees in all but a few states), so in May 2013, Moms launched a campaign urging members to “#SkipStarbucks” on Saturdays and post pictures of themselves having coffee elsewhere. Watts and Kate Beck, a Moms leader in Starbucks’ home-town of Seattle, published a scathing op-ed on CNN.com calling out the company’s inac-tion and citing an accidental shooting at a Starbucks in Florida and a rally at another in South Dakota that drew 60 armed activists. “As mothers,” they said, “we wonder why the company is willing to put children and families in so much danger. Nobody needs to be armed to get a cup of coffee.”

When CEO Howard Schultz announced in mid-September that firearms were no longer welcome on Starbucks’ premises, he declined to discuss the steady pressure ap-plied by Moms, whose 54 Facebook posts over three and a half months had reached more than 5.5 million people and spawned a 40,000-signature petition.

Not long after, dozens of men carrying semi-automatic rifles descended on a Dallas restaurant where four Moms members were having lunch. The women took pictures and turned it into a national news story. It was “a public relations disaster” for the open-carry activists, says veteran Republican strategist and gun owner Mark McKinnon. “Lesson learned? Moms trump guns.”

Social media had helped set off a tec-tonic shift. “Now there’s this passionate community of people who can instantly be in touch in a very public and affirming way,” says Kristin Goss, a political scien-tist and author of Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. “That’s a very new thing for this cause.” Sec-ond Amendment activists have long relied on gun shows, stores, and ranges to rally their faithful, she says, “but for support-ers of gun regulations, what’s that space—the emergency room? It’s Facebook.”

But a few high-profile victories and rapid growth had brought an age-old problem: Moms Demand Action struggled to raise enough money to sustain a corps of national and regional leaders. In summer 2013, Watts met with Mark Glaze, head of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in Montana. They talked at length as they rode a mountain gondola beneath the expansive vistas near Big Sky, forging a plan to build the furthest-reaching operation yet to go toe-to-toe with the NRA. Bloomberg’s group had what Moms needed—not just big funds, but also an expert policy shop and a sprawling political network—but it lacked what Moms had in spades: grassroots firepower and an appealing image. As one political operative who has worked on the guns issue put it, “If you were desperately trying to rebrand your organization because everybody hates you for taking their cigarettes and sodas and guns, wouldn’t you leap at the moms?”

As the nation prepared to light anni-versary candles for the 20 children and six educators of Sandy Hook in December, the two groups announced their combined op-eration: Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by a whopping $50 million from Bloom-berg, who vowed to double the NRA’s politi-cal spending in 2014. “We were the perfect solution to each other’s problems,” Glaze, who was Everytown’s executive director un-til this June, told me. Momentum toward reform could have vanished after the back-ground check bill went nowhere, he notes, “as often happens when you sort of lose with your big moment and your advocates in the field fade away. We were determined not to let that happen.”

There seemed a snow-ball’s chance that Congress would take on guns again, but Moms had other plans.

Starting in January it campaigned against Facebook—where people regularly advertise guns for sale and can easily circumvent back-ground checks for buyers—soon prompting the site to introduce better protections for minors and crack down on potentially illegal sales. In the spring, when Texas open-carry activists showed up armed at national res-taurant chains in Dallas and San Antonio, Moms responded with a volley of press ap-pearances, petition drives, photo memes, and hashtags. Guys flaunting loaded assault rifles at Chipotle? Time for #BurritosNotBullets. At Chili’s? #RibsNotRifles. At Sonic, America’s Drive-In? #ShakesNotShotguns. It took less than two weeks for Chili’s and Sonic to officially reject firearms at their eat-eries; in Chipotle’s case, just 48 hours in the crosshairs was enough.

Moms made Target the next battle-ground, gathering images posted by open-carry activists who’d toted their AR-15s in the toy aisles and declared the retailer “very 2A friendly.” With Moms’ hashtag activism plugged into Everytown’s political machin-ery and mailing list of 1.5 million names, Target headquarters in Minneapolis got hit with 11,000 phone calls and 390,000 peti-tion signatures within a month. Moms also called out Target’s new strategic partner The Honest Company (the baby products line from young mom Jessica Alba), staged “stroller jams” at Target stores in Texas and Virginia, and protested outside the compa-ny’s annual shareholder meeting.

Just before July Fourth, the nation’s fourth-largest retailer announced that firearms were no longer welcome in its 1,789 stores.

Forcing corporations to take a stand against gun activists is no small feat, says Glaze, an experienced Washington lobby-ist. “Changes to the culture are more im-portant than legal changes in some ways,”

“SHANNON WATTS MAY BE A LIAR, BUT SHE’S A PROFESSIONAL LIAR,” SAYS THE EDITOR OF BEARINGARMS.COM.

Shannon Watts, head of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America


he says. “This sends a message that having guns everywhere makes people uncom-fortable, which goes directly against the gun lobby’s agenda—to normalize having them everywhere.”

“As each fresh shooting horror is met by the same inaction in Congress, a roiling frustra-tion may be awakening an army of moms who see themselves as outsiders armed only with their clout as voters and agitators.” So wrote a reporter for Time magazine—in May 2000, on the eve of the Million Mom March on Washington. The parallels between that grassroots movement and today’s are strik-ing. The Columbine massacre in April 1999 had gripped the nation, but it was a rampage at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles four months later that set off the movement, after Donna Dees-Thomases—a 42-year-old mom and part-time corporate publicist liv-ing in New Jersey—saw news footage of a daisy chain of children being led away from the building. “Think about what those kids saw,” Dees-Thomases said in the Los Angeles Times about the attack that left five seriously wounded, including three kindergarten-age boys. (All the victims survived, though the gunman killed a mail carrier elsewhere be-fore the rampage ended.) “I thought, ‘Why haven’t we done anything?’”

The method then was email, internet newsgroups, and an 800 number listed in newspaper ads; soon the Million Mom March had chapters all over the country. They campaigned for “common sense gun laws,” and their march on Washington, which drew roughly three-quarters of a mil-lion people, included a stroller parade. They soon merged with the long-established Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and fought to shape policy at the state and local levels as well.

But where the Million Mom March was limited by its focus on legislation, its agen-da soon eclipsed by the election of George W. Bush, and then 9/11, Moms Demand Action has gone a different route. “They’ve been incredibly creative with campaigns that don’t rely upon elected officials, and finding alternative pathways to influence,” says Goss, the political scientist. They also have the opportunity of heightened public awareness: A spate of mass shootings be-ginning with Virginia Tech in 2007, Goss says, has given rise to “a critical mass” of

survivors and family members devoted to keeping gun violence at the forefront.

And Moms has actively recruited them. “One of the real lessons of MADD is that peo-ple understand tragedy on a human scale,” says Chuck Hurley, its CEO from 2005 to 2010. “Everybody could understand Candy Lightner and her daughter being killed,” he says, referring to the organization’s founder and her 13-year-old, who was struck by a drunk driver in 1980. “There’s no way peo-ple can understand 30,000 firearm deaths. The bigger the number, the less real it is.”

“I think we’re absolutely key,” Lucia Mc-Bath told me in April, outside the packed Indianapolis hotel conference room where a delegation from Moms and Everytown was holding a press conference against the back-drop of the NRA annual convention just a few blocks away. McBath, whose teenage son, Jordan Davis, was gunned down in 2012 in a dispute over loud music by a man citing Florida’s broad self-defense laws, speaks soft-ly but emphatically. “Mothers know how to get things done,” she continued, explaining that they can motivate each other and con-nect with families in a way no one else can. “A lot of mothers are suffering in this coun-try over the nature of the violence.”

McBath has been astonished by the out-pouring of support in the wake of her son’s death. “I feel like I have a whole nation pray-ing for our family, and I’m deeply humbled by that.” A fundamental shift on guns is in-evitable, she says. “With the tobacco indus-try—how many years and how much effort did that take? Or gay rights? To change the culture you have to change the mindset, and that takes time. I know we will succeed.”

Erica Lafferty was 27 when her mother, Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, was slain confronting Adam Lanza. She took up the cause just three months later. “I could literally hear her voice in my head,” Lafferty told me in Indianapolis. “‘Child, get out of bed and do something produc-tive.’” After a year of speaking out and lob-bying Congress with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, she met Watts—“she just gives me this mom hug”—and it struck her: Had the roles been reversed, had she been killed and her mother become an activist, “she abso-lutely would not be doing what I’m doing,” focusing on politicians in Washington. “She’d be doing what Shannon is doing, gathering all of these moms.”

Confronting child gun deaths—especial-

ly those stemming from negligent storage or use of firearms, which go unprosecuted in many states—is an obvious imperative for Moms. “It’s hugely important to our organization,” Watts told me. The strate-gic promise is also clear: In the early 1980s, most Americans saw drunk-driving deaths as “a problem you had to live with,” ac-cording to Hurley. Among MADD’s crown-ing achievements was to redefine them as crimes. MADD put relentless pressure not just on political leaders but also on the li-quor industry—in no small part by turning a spotlight on kids who had been killed.

Last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Penn-sylvania, a man who’d been “messing with” a 9 mm handgun unintentionally shot and killed his two-month-old daugh-ter as she slept in her glider. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, yet local law enforcement officials said they were un-decided about pursuing criminal charges. Typically that might’ve been the end of it, but Moms Demand Action voiced outrage via social media and the local press. With-in two weeks the DA announced plans to prosecute. (He said no outside group influ-enced his decision.)

“While we fully support the father be-ing held accountable for this crime, we also acknowledge the horrific grief this family is experiencing,” Moms Demand Action said after the charges were announced. “We hope their tragedy can serve as an example that encourages others to be more respon-sible with their firearms.” The father later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, which could have brought up to 15 years in prison. He got six years’ probation and no jail time.

Moms also drew attention to a case in February in North Carolina, where a three-year-old boy wounded his 17-month-old sister after finding a handgun that their father—who wrote a parenting advice col-umn in a local paper—had left unsecured. (The infant recovered.) “The parents have been punished more than any criminal-justice system can do to them,” a captain from the county sheriff ’s department said soon after the shooting. After Moms swung into action, the father was charged with failure to secure his firearm to protect a minor; his case is pending.

“All too often DAs are loath to get involved, saying a family has suffered enough,” Watts says,

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[continued on page 70]

For every dollar earned by a family in the bottom 90 percent, one in the top 0.01 percent earns nearly $1,000.

The top 1 percent has captured almost all post-recession income growth. Compare that with how they did during these historic booms.

TRICKLE UP

WHOSE RECOVERY?

The recession left the middle class treading water. But it’s been smooth sailing for the 1 percent. B Y D A V E G I L S O N

The Great Recession officially ended five years ago, but that’s news for millions of Americans: A stunning 95 percent of income growth since the recovery started has gone to the superwealthy. If an average household currently earning $71,000 had enjoyed the same gains as the 1 percent since 2000, it would now make more than $83,000. And the widening income gap is not just about the 1 percent anymore: Take a closer look, and you’ll see that it’s really a tiny fraction—the 1 percent of the 1 percent—that hoovers up the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth. With Washington paralyzed on bread-and-butter issues and the mid-terms ahead, we put together a primer on the state of America’s frozen paychecks.

I L L U S T R A T I O N S B Y M A T T I A S M A C K L E R

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Since 1980, the average real income of the 1 percent has shot up more than 175 percent, while the bottom 90 percent’s real income didn’t budge. But as this chart shows, the vast majority of gains have gone to the tippy-top.

THE RICH AND THE MEGARICH WORKING MORE, EARNING LESSYou’re working harder than ever, but you’re still treading water. In 2012, the median household income had dropped to where it was in 1996 (adjusted for inflation).

For sources, go to motherjones.com/richest.

For the first time in a century, the top 10 percent of Americans control more than half of all income. Economist Thomas Piketty foresees that their share soon will rise to 60 percent.

X MARKS THE SPOT

http://motherjones.com/richest

Looking beyond income to assets like houses and stocks gives a broader picture of Americans’ financial health. Here, too, the recovery’s gains have yet to trickle down.

Between 2007 and 2010, Americans’ median real net worth hit its lowest level since the late 1960s, largely due to the collapse of the housing market. Nearly one-quarter of Americans had negative net worth in 2010.

THE ASSET CRASH

Amount of total income controlled by the top 1 percent in…BACK TO THE FUTURE

Whites’ average household income is 56 percent larger than blacks’ and 39 percent larger than Hispanics’. But the discrepancy is even bigger when it comes to wealth: The median white family holds nearly 20 times more assets than the median black family and 74 times more assets than the median Hispanic family.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

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S U R V I V A L O F T H E R I C H E S T

Even as the incomes of the 1 percent have risen, their taxes have plummeted.HAPPY RETURNS

Billionaires weigh in on the oppression of the wealthy.IT’S NOT EASY BEING IN THE GREEN


ONE NIGHT last September, a 46-year-old Veterans Administration research manager named Robert Small showed up at a pub-lic meeting with state education officials in Ellicott City, a well-to-do Maryland suburb, with a pen, a notebook, and an ax to grind. Small had been doing some homework on the main topic of the event, a set of math and language arts standards called Common Core that had recently been introduced in schools across the country, including his kids’. Fresh from work in a crisp, checkered shirt, he stood

up in an overflow crowd and channeled his inner Henry V. “I want to know how many parents here are aware that the goal of the Common Core standards isn’t to prepare our children for world-class uni-versities—it’s to prepare them for commu-nity college!” An off-duty police officer approached, and Small began to shout. “You’re sitting here like cattle!” Out came the handcuffs. “Hey, is this America?” Small bellowed, as he jostled with the of-ficer. “Parents, you need to question these people! Do the research!”

The police department later dropped the charge of second-degree assault of a po-lice officer; Small, for his part, said he held no grudge against the cops. But a video of the incident, which racked up more than a million views on YouTube, set off a fire-storm of right-wing outrage. On his radio show, Glenn Beck confessed he couldn’t sleep after watching the clip. “This is the way it used to happen in Mother Russia, not America. It’s Dictatorship 101.”

The educational initiative that has inspired such a remarkable outpouring

tragedy of the

common

COREWhat’s pitted Glenn Beck and teachers’ unions against

Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and the Obama administration? The mammoth battle over America’s last bipartisan reform.

by tim murphy illustration by chris buzelli


T R A G E D Y O F T H E C O M M O N C O R E

It turned out that a lot of suburban schools weren’t doing so well either, although the system didn’t show it. They had been ad-ministering the wrong kind of tests and teaching the wrong kind of math, and now it was their students and teachers who would feel the heat of the “accountability” ethic implemented by a group of technocrats. Now it was white suburban parents who felt betrayed by their elected officials. And now, finally, politicians were listening.

THE DEBATE behind Common Core is as old as public education itself: Who con-trols how—and what—children learn? But the standards are the more immediate creation of two men, David Coleman and Jason Zimba. They met as Rhodes Scholars in the class of 1993, and afterward Cole-man headed to McKinsey while Zimba became a physics professor at Bennington College (where Coleman’s mother hap-pened to be president).

In 2000, they reunited to launch the Grow Network, an organization that helped large school systems make sense of the flood of data derived from No Child Left Behind-inspired tests. They found no shortage of clients.

In 2008, Coleman and Zimba unveiled an ambitious plan for overhauling education in an essay for the Carnegie Corporation. “The standards must be made significantly fewer in number, significantly clearer in their meaning and relevance for college and work, and significantly higher in terms of the expectations for mastery of what is covered,” they wrote. In reading, for exam-ple, they said schools should deemphasize literature and rely more on “informational texts”—speeches, magazine articles, govern-ment reports. As Coleman would later put it, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.’”

Coleman and Zimba determined that most K-12 math lacked real-world applica-tions, too. They wanted the focus to be on real learning rather than rote memorization. These were not groundbreaking theories; they were distilled from years of thinking among educators, but many states had ne-glected to incorporate those ideas. Instead, states would simply add new concepts to ex-isting standards, which became so unwieldy that it was a struggle to cover everything in

create a set of key educational bench-marks—concepts and skills students should be learning, but not specific curricula. The jumble of jam-packed, state-specific tests ushered in by No Child Left Behind would be replaced by new tests, consistent across state lines, that measured not rote learning, but the critical-thinking skills that demon-strated a real understanding of concepts.

It didn’t take long for some conservatives to conclude that the Obama administration, which helped to bankroll the standards’ roll-out, was planning to program a new genera-tion of godless socialist worker drones. One Florida lawmaker alleged that Common Core will “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.” Glenn Beck, who wrote a book declar-ing the standards “slavery,” rhapsodized

about the “sci-fi, Gattaca kind of thing”—like a “wireless skin conductance sensor” and a “posture analysis seat”—that he claimed would find its way into schools in the name of Core-compliant data collection.

Common Core won’t turn your kids gay (or Muslim, as one activist suggested to me). Still, it is an ambitious vision—not the Marxist pipe dream that tea partiers have decried, but the brainchild of corporate-bred reformers such as Bill Gates. And it could consolidate power over public edu-cation in the hands of a small cadre who, along with the for-profit textbook and test-ing companies that lobbied for its adop-tion, stand poised to cash in.

Yet what made Common Core such a potent wedge is that it mobilized not just the usual suspects, but also the suburban communities that sat out the last round of ed reform battles. In the era of No Child Left Behind, reformers like Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC, would take charge of a poor, struggling, urban school district, earn plaudits for shaking things up, and leave be-hind shuttered schools, angry teachers, and a riled-up electorate. According to its sup-porters, what Common Core did, by apply-ing a more rigorous testing standard across the board, was pull back the curtain on the problems that had existed everywhere else.

of fury began as a bipartisan endeavor so anodyne, nerdy even, that it proceeded for years with virtual consensus among poli-cymakers of all stripes. Republican gover-nors once enthusiastically signed on to the initiative—but now they (especially those contemplating presidential bids) are scram-bling to distance themselves, and around the country state lawmakers are seeking to halt the implementation of the standards. Perhaps second only to Obamacare, Com-mon Core has become a rallying cry on the right, evoking the kind of anguish and hor-ror once reserved for the so-called death panels. And unlike health care reform, Common Core has tapped into a vein of outrage on the left as well.

Over the last two years, the bipartisan coalition that brought the standards into

being has been supplanted by a growing movement of activists who variously claim that they are too tough, too easy, too lib-eral, too invasive, too extensive, or all of the above. What might have been the last realm of public policy in which bipartisan consensus still reigned has been riven by an opposition as eclectic as it is disjoint-ed—what other issue unites the John Birch Society in common cause with a former member of the radical Weathermen?

COMMON CORE EMERGED from the ashes of No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education reform law that tied federal funding for the nation’s schools to new, mandatory standardized tests. It was a time of sometimes-chaotic trial and error among educational reformers, who feared American students were falling further behind their counterparts in Finland or (gulp) China. But many teachers and par-ents were frustrated by an approach that seemed to punish schools for problems beyond their control, and the lack of uni-formity from state to state—even zip code to zip code—made it impossible to tell how well kids were actually performing.

Common Core set out to change that. This time, the overhaul would be initiated by the states, not Washington. It would

“This is the way it used to happenin Mother Russia,” Glenn Beck fumed.

“It’s Dictatorship 101.”


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were from Maryland, you didn’t have to learn trigonometry, but your neighbors in Virginia did. Maybe they have less triangles,” Gates quipped to an audience of teachers in DC this past March.

Gates, who had already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public education, bought in, and his foundation began spreading grants around to think tanks that could get the ball rolling politically, as well as to the governors’ and state school officials’ groups. He has channeled more than $200 mil-lion toward Common Core’s implementation, with the mon-ey flowing to dozens of uni-versities, state departments of education, policy institutes, and trade groups—recipients ranged from the progressive Center for American Progress to the conservative US Chamber of Commerce, which was awarded $1.38 million last year to whip up support for the standards.

Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, liked the Common Core concept

and wanted to aid the implementation pro-cess by offering states major incentives to sign on. During his campaign, Obama had vowed to “fix the failures of No Child Left Behind.” Now, he offered a carrot: If states agreed to adopt new “college and career readiness standards,” they could compete for funds from a $4.35 billion Department of Education program called Race to the Top. The program awarded extra credit to states that tracked students’ development from kindergarten through high school. No Child Left Behind had, for the first time, collected a huge amount of data about schools, but Duncan wanted schools to drill down deeper, zeroing in on individual students as they progressed through the education system.

Common Core’s critics contend that the administration took advantage of the reces-sion: “The states just adopted it so quickly, largely because a large pot of Race to the Top money was encouraging them to do so,” says Terrence Moore, senior adviser of the charter school initiative at Michigan’s Hillsdale College, who has toured the

the course of a school year, let alone in a test with any real merit. Washington, DC’s standards had swelled to the point where 80 percent of the math concepts students were tested on were superfluous, by Coleman’s estimation. Fixing education meant doing less, not more: America, he said, needs “an eraser, as well as a pen.”

Coleman and Zimba weren’t alone in seeking a fix. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), a national orga-nization of education commissioners, had been stymied by the same issues Coleman and Zimba had faced: whether the tests measured any actual learning. Adding another layer of complication, under No Child Left Behind, each state’s tests and standards were different, making it hard to determine who was really improving, and frustrating colleges and business leaders who wanted to be sure of what their ap-plicants knew.

Coleman and Zimba’s plan attracted widespread support within the commis-sioners’ group and the National Gover-nors Association. The two organizations

decided to work together to devise “a com-mon core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12”—something that could put the United States on the same level as the fabled Scandinavians. It wasn’t a curricu-lum: For, say, statistics, Common Core would suggest a standard like “use random sampling to draw inferences about a popu-lation”—and leave it up to schools to figure out how to get kids there.

But the reformers soon realized that as cash-strapped states confronted the Great Recession, funding a sweeping education initiative would be nearly impossible. So in 2008, Coleman and a top CCSSO official flew to Seattle to pitch Bill Gates.

For Gates and his wife, Melinda, it’s not hard to see why the idea of achieving uni-formity would have a unique appeal. Gates has built his fortune by taking a standardized platform—Windows—and crafting a platter of services to fit it. He compares Common Core to the electric socket—under the old system, it was as if appliance makers had to make a different plug for each state. “If you

GATES-KEEPERThe top recipients of funding

from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to implement

Common Core

NONPROFITS$68 million

New Venture Fund: $15m Colorado Education Initiative: $9.7m

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors: $7.5m Khan Academy: $5.5m

Student Achievement Partners: $4m HIGHER ED $13.5 million

mit: $3.3m University of Michigan: $2m

Stanford: $1.6m

Purdue: $1.5m University of

Kentucky: $1m

THINK TANKS/ ADVOCACY GROUPS$41.3 million

The Hunt Institute: $7.8m The Aspen Institute: $5.2m

The National Association of State Boards of Education: $2.3m The Education Trust: $2m

Foundation for Excellence in Education: $2m

EDUCATION COMPANIES

$14.8 millionScholastic: $4.5m

BetterLesson: $3.5m MetaMetrics: $3.5m LearnZillion: $1.7m

UNIONS$10 million

American Federation of Teachers: $5.4m

National Education Association:

$4.6m

STATES/SCHOOLS$50.1 million

Kentucky Department of Education: $10.8m New Visions for Public Schools: $8.4m

Council of the Great City Schools: $7.6m Louisiana Department of Education: $7.4m

Charter School Growth Fund: $4m

CORE DRAFTERS $19.3 million

Council of Chief State School Officers: $17.2m

National Governors Association: $2.1m

Data compiled by AJ Vicens.Source: Gates Foundation



form efforts, such as No Child Left Behind and the Clinton-era Goals 2000 (which set goals for developing standards) had sparked mini-rebellions on the right—but they had been mild by comparison. For years, con-servative activists had feared that govern-ment bureaucrats might indoctrinate their children with progressive values, and the Obama administration’s support for Com-mon Core turned their dark suspicions up to 11. Though it hadn’t even originated at the federal level, the reform was viewed as yet another prong of Obama’s devious master plan, one aided and abetted by a sin-ister group of politicians and businessmen.

“Common Core fits nicely into the whole dynamic of local control and the overly intrusive federal government,” says Anne Hyslop, a policy analyst at the DC-based New America Foundation who has been studying the political fallout of the standards. “You can call it ‘Obamacore’—rhetorically it works very well.”

And it infl amed activists who were bat-tling Obamacare and other Obama ad-ministration initiatives—activists like Chris

Even the American Federation of Teach-ers, one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions and a frequent skeptic of high-stakes testing, hailed the project as “essen-tial building blocks for a better education system.” Coleman was triumphant. “Tell me a signifi cant domestic policy area where Republicans and Democrats have gotten together and gotten something done out-side of education,” he later boasted.

He spoke too soon.

THE STANDARDS were not written in secret, as critics would later contend, or rushed through overnight. But it’s fair to say that in Common Core’s early stages, the na-tion’s focus was elsewhere. The Wall Street bailout, stimulus, and Affordable Care Act all commanded far more attention than a wonky initiative by America’s governors. It wasn’t until late 2011, when states began to move forward with the implementation of Common Core, that parents and political rabble-rousers began to take note.

Once they did, Common Core fast be-came a tea party cause célèbre. Previous re-

country to challenge the standards. In much the same way that No Child Left Behind-powered reformers had left urban parents feeling powerless, Common Core skeptics saw billionaire philanthropists, multinational corporations, and Washing-ton bureaucrats hijacking local control of education—dictating from on high what was best for their families.

Fueling their suspicions was the string of education companies lining up to sup-port Common Core: Testing and textbook provider Pearson, which saw big money in the coming curricular overhaul and exam boom, positioned itself for a financial windfall. Over the previous decade, test-ing had grown into a $2.7 billion-a-year in-dustry in the United States, largely thanks to No Child Left Behind, and Common Core promised to push those revenues higher still. Also potentially lucrative was the vast amount of student data collected via testing. Common Core itself did not call for data collection (it was the federal Race to the Top Program that incentiv-ized it), but the standardization it sought was a major goal for educational number crunchers. In the previous decade, study-ing student data had been a bit like com-paring stats in a basketball league in which all the hoops were a different height. Com-mon Core would ensure the rims were at the same level across the board.

And the reformers had bigger goals for student data: The Gates Foundation, along with the Carnegie Foundation and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., created a $100 mil-lion nonprofi t database called inBloom, which would allow schools and testing companies to share information they col-lected about individual students, from at-tendance records and parents’ names to test results. In the name of innovation, the data would also be made available to for-profi t companies seeking to peddle a vari-ety of educational products and services to school districts. (This spring, inBloom was scrapped over privacy concerns.)

With the education industry on board, the governors and school offi cials got to work. At a joint meeting in 2009, the two groups tapped Coleman and Zimba to lead working groups of math and language arts educators who would draft the new standards. Forty-eight governors agreed to participate in the development, with only Texas’ Rick Perry and Alaska’s Sarah Palin holding out.

TEACHER’S PETS

Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.): Bagged $2 million in Gates grants for his nonprofi t, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, whose donors include Pearson and numerous other for-profi t education companies. He says critics who fl oat “conspiracy theories” are “comfortable with mediocrity.”

Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.): Blames blowback on “knee-jerk” anti-Obamaism.

Gov. Susana Martinez (R-N.M.): “The Next Sarah Palin”—unlike the original—is a supporter.

CLASSCLOWNS

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): Broke with his mentor, Jeb Bush, by slamming the standards as “a national school board.”

Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas): One of just two governors to refuse to participate in the process of drafting the Common Core standards.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas): “We need to repeal every word of Common Core.” (Yes, he said the same thing about Obamacare.)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.): Duh.

TRIAL &ERROR

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.): Currently bat-tling the state board of education to scuttle the standards he once promised would “raise expectations for every child.”

Gov. Nikki Haley: (R-S.C.): Signed off on implementation, before breaking away from the rest of the country like a true South Carolinian.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.): After months of hedging, he called for the standards to be replaced by ones “set by the people of Wisconsin.”

MULTIPLE-CHOICE

Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.): The 2016 dark horse withdrew the state from Common Core—but replaced it with state-drafted education standards that were very similar.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.): He backed Common Core but now says he opposes what it “has become in many states.” –T.M.

CLASS OF 2016 Where the gop contenders come down on Common Core

Once greeted with nearly bipartisan approval, Common Core is shaping up to be the political wedge issue of 2016, particularly among the Republican hopefuls. As the standards have turned politically toxic, some candidates-in-waiting have abandoned their past support, while others are staying the course. Here’s where the gop’s potential presidential contenders stand—for now.


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tive parents found Coleman’s role terrifying: “Once the AP U.S. History test demands blame-America-first answers,” wrote Nation-al Review’s Stanley Kurtz in July, neatly syn-thesizing the new fear, “public and private schools alike will be forced to construct an American history curriculum that ‘teaches to the test.’” The formerly media-friendly

Coleman has become such a lightning rod that he declined an interview request for this story. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he told me when I approached him during a recent conference, “but I have to obey my comms team or they’ll kill me.”

“This is not unlike No Child Left Be-hind, where there were a lot of really kind of out-there fears,” says Michael Brickman, national policy director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that supports the standards. The dif-ference between now and then is the scale of disinformation. “We didn’t have the in-ternet [like] we do today, where you can really spread the fears more efficiently.”

Still, the grassroots critiques of activists like Quackenbush were slow to catch on in national political circles. When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was asked about Common Core as recently as last year, he confessed he had no idea what it was. (He’s now against it.) But eventually the fight drew the attention of established Republican figures, particularly on the religious right. David Barton, a popu-lar evangelical “historian” who keeps a collec-tion of thousands of 18th-century documents from the Founding Fathers in a climate-con-trolled vault outside of Fort Worth, Texas, began arguing that Common Core poses “se-rious problems for the future of the republic.”

When Sean Fieler, a New York City hedge fund chairman and big-time Repub-lican donor who runs the American Prin-ciples Project (an organization founded by Ted Cruz mentor and Princeton professor Robert George), unleashed a $500,000 campaign to rally the grassroots against Common Core, Washington began to take note. Conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, started to push back. In 2013, Cruz spearheaded a letter

Kevin Huffman recalled one meeting where activists presented him with a paper iden-tified as the “Common Core standards for Sexual Education.” The widely circulated document, which is actually titled “Nation-al Sexuality Education Standards,” is a re-port prepared by a national health advocacy group. (Common Core has nothing to do

with sex ed.) Kristie Martorelli, an elemen-tary school teacher from suburban Phoenix, told me of hearing from irate parents who believed that the standards had eliminated the teaching of cursive. “We didn’t teach cursive as a standard previously!”

Common Core became a symbol for change itself, a magnet for every national anxiety (or conspiracy theory) involving the education system. Stories about the depravities of public education had been popping up in conservative media for years, but now critics had something tan-gible at which to direct their outrage.

And someone.

IF YOU WERE looking to create a bogeyman to scare conservative education activists, it would look and talk a bit like David Cole-man. A classicist by training, he speaks in the lofty cadence of TEDx talks. And, critics often note, he was turned down from the only teaching gig he ever applied for, as a public school teacher in New York City: Instead, he came up through the ranks of the consulting giant McKinsey. “He’s a charlatan!” says Sandra Stotsky, an English professor emeri-tus at the University of Arkansas who served on the national validation committee but refused to sign off on the standards.

Critics fear Coleman’s omnipresence as much as his ideas. In 2012, with his work on Common Core at a close, he took a lucrative job as CEO of the College Board, where he set about remaking the SAT. When he discusses the future of education, he says he wants to emulate the work of Dan Wagner, the data whiz who helped get Obama reelected by studying hundreds of pieces of information about individual voters. He’s also enlisted Wagner’s firm, Civis Analytics, to process student data at the College Board. Conserva-

Quackenbush, a real estate agent in Fort Myers, Florida, who heads one of the state’s largest grassroots group opposing the stan-dards. “The steamroller is moving along like we never existed,” she told me one day in February, after returning from a marathon five-hour hearing on Common Core at the state board of education. The conspiracy had never been clearer: “It’s the corporate elit-ists, the one-world-government types from both sides that have joined together under the UNESCO treaty, item 36”—the nonbind-ing United Nations Agenda 21 agreement, a tea party bugaboo that committed signees to promote universal primary education.

Far from reassuring Quackenbush, Com-mon Core’s bipartisan backing only made her more suspicious. She brought up George Soros, the liberal financier; Jeb Bush, the for-mer governor of Florida and possible Repub-lican presidential candidate, who has made the standards a central mission and has a fi-nancial stake in them through his education ventures; and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and social-conservative icon, who was an early supporter.

“We have George Soros, we have Bill Gates, we have Jeb Bush, we have Hucka-bee, and you would think that those would be very strange bedfellows, but in fact they are the corporate elitists,” she told me. What’s more, the standards were being em-braced by Islamists—the third-largest share-holder of British textbook giant Pearson, which is publishing texts that conform to the standards, is the government of Libya. (True, but the shares have been frozen since the Qaddafi regime fell in 2011.) “I’m doing a lot of research,” Quackenbush told me.

She isn’t alone. Fears about Common Core’s aims and origins abound—often blur-ring the distinction between the standards and the curricula being developed to fit it by school districts and private companies. In Louisiana, a fourth-grade worksheet that mentioned “pimps” and “mobstaz” was highlighted by a local television station as part of a Common Core-compliant les-son plan. (It wasn’t—Common Core does not include lesson plans.) Citing a school district spokesman, the Albany, New York, Times Union reported that an assignment asking students to defend the Third Reich was “the type of writing expected of students under the new Common Core curriculum.” (There is no Common Core curriculum.)

Tennessee education commissioner

A lawmaker alleged Common Core would cause “children to become as

homosexual as they possibly can.”


on the right, dissatisfaction has also grown among progressives, long frustrated by the testing-and-school-closing fervor of the Waiting for “Superman” reformers. In an ironic twist on David Coleman’s earlier boast, Common Core became a cause where left and right were working together—to tear it apart.

MARK NAISON is a lefty out of conservative fever dreams. Born in Brooklyn, he was ac-tive in Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s before joining the Weather-men, a radical SDS faction that was the forerunner of the Weather Underground. Naison now teaches African American his-tory at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he has pushed for rent control and fought back against the technocratic edu-cation reforms ushered in by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He writes a blog, With a Brooklyn Accent, and he raps under the alias “Notorious PhD.” Naison has a white goatee and white hair set halfway back on his head, giving him the appearance of a slightly more ruffled Louis C.K.—who, incidentally, has also de-nounced Common Core.

“Supporters of Common Core were try-ing to paint all opponents as right-wingers and tea party people, and here’s me, who has been accused of being a communist, a socialist, a terrorist—you name it!” Naison says, laughing. He believes Common Core, like No Child Left Behind, is turning inner-city kids into lab rats, shuttled from school to school because of standardized exams that have turned their classrooms into little more than test prep. The problem with public education, he and his allies con-tend, isn’t lacking standards; it’s crushing inequality. No concoction of math bench-marks and informational texts will give kids in the Bronx the advantages of their peers in Westchester, let alone Helsinki. But Com-mon Core will cost schools a lot of time and money that could be spent elsewhere. (The city of Los Angeles, for instance, spent $1 billion from a school construction bond on iPads outfitted by Pearson for the pur-pose of Common Core testing, rather than using it to fix crumbling schools.)

The problem with focusing on testing as a determinant of college and career readiness, he explains, is that if things go poorly—and in a trial run last spring, just 15 percent of African American students

a divisive issue in the 2016 presidential race: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum are against them, while Chris Christie supports them and Jeb Bush’s fate is inextricably bound to them—his Founda-tion for Excellence in Education is devoted to promoting national education standards, and he’s barnstormed the country to pro-mote the standards. “If you’re comfortable with mediocrity, fine,” he said at the Na-tional Press Club in September 2013.

And what of the standards’ former Re-publican supporters? They have sought to shield themselves from the backlash—by helping to lead it. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made fixing his state’s failing school system the centerpiece of his tenure, di-

recting tens of millions of dollars to charter schools and voucher programs. He was an early Common Core booster, praising the standards as an opportunity to “raise ex-pectations for every child.” The Chamber of Commerce even featured his on-camera endorsement in a promotional video. But in June, he issued a set of executive orders that forbid officials from implementing Common Core without express authori-zation from the Legislature. “We’re very alarmed about choice and local control of curriculum being taken away from our parents and educators,” he said. “It is never too late to make the right decision.”

Meanwhile, Common Core has cleaved apart the deep-pocketed conservative groups that fueled the anti-Obama upris-ing. Americans for Prosperity, the advo-cacy group founded by the Koch brothers, began targeting candidates who support the standards, blasting Common Core as an Obamacare-like takeover of the educa-tion system (never mind that it has been and remains a state-led initiative). On the other side, the Chamber of Commerce has poured more than a million dollars into keeping Common Core alive, because cor-porations both stand to benefit from a bet-ter-educated labor force and from money spent to implement the new standards.

But the fight is no longer merely a wedge issue within the GOP. After gathering steam

signed by nine Republican senators threat-ening to block the Department of Educa-tion from providing further federal funding for the implementation of Common Core.

Just like that, the bipartisan consensus that had birthed Common Core was be-ginning to crumble.

BY 2012, THE backlash had spread to the ballot box. The first casualty was Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, a man who was revered among DC think tank types and had been tasked by Gov. Mitch Daniels with revamping the state’s school system. Bennett had outraised his Democratic opponent, librarian Glenda Ritz, by a factor of four, but tea party conser-

vatives—who also elected Mike Pence to the governor’s office when Daniels termed out—rallied behind Ritz, shocking the establish-ment. Under Ritz and Pence, Indiana halted plans for Common Core testing and an-nounced it was evaluating the entire system. Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina have since followed suit.

Bennett, for his part, wound up confirm-ing anti-Core activists’ worst fears. After losing the election, Bennett was quickly snatched up by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to run that state’s education system. In short order he resigned over allegations (which he denied) that while in Indiana he had changed the performance grade of a charter school—founded by a top GOP donor—from a C to an A. Now he advises the ACT on how to align its tests to the standards, one of many reformers who have gone on to collect paychecks from a testing company.

By now, Common Core has spilled into elections across the country. Dave Brat, the libertarian college professor who un-seated Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in June, made his opposition to Common Core, which Cantor supported, a key plank of his campaign. The issue has become so po-litically toxic that of the 27 major Republi-can candidates for governor or Senate who are not incumbents, only one publicly supports Common Core.

The standards seem destined to become

“Common Core fits nicely into the wholedynamic of the overly intrusive federal

government. You can call it ‘Obamacore.’”



The hero of the event was the district’s superintendent, Joe Rella, known among anti-Core activists as “America’s Super-intendent.” It’s typical for school district administrators to send a letter to parents explaining the results of annual testing, but when Rella saw his scores last year, he took things further. In 2010, 65 percent of his kids had passed. In 2013, with the new Core-aligned test, it was 35 percent. If these scores reflected reality, he wrote, he should be fired. “The majority of young children will receive the clear message that since these tests are predictors of college success—they are not college material in the 3rd, 4th, 5th grade???!!!” he wrote. “That message is unconscionable.”

Rella, whose district stands to lose fund-ing if the low scores continue, has been urging parents to simply boycott the new test. Last year, 6 percent of students opted out; this year, with Rella’s backing, it was 38 percent of the student body.

When we spoke in the hallway outside the auditorium, interrupted frequently by adoring parents and activists, Rella wore a tweed jacket and lime-green shoelaces, the official symbol of the New York opt-out movement. (“If green laces are every-where,” a sign explains, “people will ask, what’s with the green laces?”) He gestured animatedly, tapping my shoulder and ex-tending his arms as if coming in for a hug as he explained that the corporate educa-tion wonks behind Common Core are mis-guided. The United States is nothing like the countries reformers are attempting to emulate, he said, and policies should reflect that. “They’re comparing us to Finland! Finland has 5 million people. I had more people in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. They’re comparing apples to reindeeeuh.”

They’re also sticking him with the tab, a critique school administrators had leveled previously at No Child Left Behind. His school district got a total of $70,000 over four years from Race to the Top—and it spent $500,000 to implement the Common Core.

Parents I talked to on Long Island, all wearing lime-green shoelaces around their necks, said it was the notion that their kids were marching into uncertainty that scared them most. Preparing a kid for life in the 21st century is hard enough. Doing it on the fly—learning algebra one way in seventh grade and by the Common Core-prescribed method in eighth—is

the American Federation of Teachers—the union whose support had been so critical in getting Common Core off the ground—has called for a three-year moratorium on test-ing nationwide, comparing its implementa-tion to the botched rollout of Obamacare. At Weingarten’s direction, the union’s in-house education think tank has stopped tak-ing money from the Gates Foundation. The problem, she says, is “the fixation on testing. We’ve gone from, in the ’70s and ’80s, focus-ing on what kind of resources are brought to bear, to an education system that’s only looking at what the test scores are.”

Naison floats a theory that may go a long way toward explaining the scope of the Core rebellion. For a decade, he’d watched Bloomberg transform the New York City public school system, aided by mobs of consultants promising to hold teachers’ feet to the fire. It played well at the Aspen Ideas Festival—and, at least in some schools, got pretty good results—but it also roiled parents who saw their schools shuttered, their kids’ futures rising or falling on a single test.

Common Core took this disruption be-yond the inner cities. “Everybody outside the cities would just say, ‘Let them take over Newark, what do I care?’” Ravitch says. “Once they start to mess with Great Neck, you’re gonna hear from a lot of loud voices.”

“It’s fascinating to me,” Arne Duncan mused, in a candid moment last year, “that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.”

IN LATE MARCH, three days before state testing was slated to begin, I took the Long Island Rail Road to the epicenter of the Common Core fight. In few states are the standards more politically charged than New York, and perhaps nowhere has the testing program been greeted as harshly as Port Jef-ferson Station, a working-class suburb half-way to the Hamptons. There, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, several hundred parents and teachers rallied against Common Core in a high school auditorium. A local radio host in an earth-tone muscle shirt took the stage to “We Will Rock You” and announced he had a special message for Bill Gates and his crew of corporate reformers: “They have awoken the mommmmmmies!”

in New York passed the state’s new, more rigorous Common Core-aligned math exams—kids will be effectively branded as failures, as early as fourth grade. “This is fucking insane,” says Naison, who has formed the Badass Teachers Association, a grassroots organization that boasts almost 50,000 members. “It’s child abuse.”

Citing concerns over hasty implemen-tation, the state’s largest teachers’ union withdrew its support for the standards in January. It specifically decried the state’s refusal to disclose a version of the test to prepare students for the new exam, a lack of additional funding for ESL students and children with learning disabilities, and a failure to provide teacher training—they were, the argument went, being evaluated on their ability to teach something they were learning on the fly. In March, state legislators voted for a two-year testing moratorium, on the grounds that students and teachers should have a chance to be-come familiar with the material first. In June, after months of pressure, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo approved a two-year moratorium on using the test results to grade teachers, and he has also called the standards “flawed.” A recent statewide poll found less than 40 percent of New York vot-ers support Common Core.

On the left, just as on the right, the role of corporate reformers like Bill Gates adds to the suspicion. “This is like somebody de-scended from Mount Olympus, like, ‘Take it or leave it, and if you don’t take it, you don’t get millions of dollars,’” says Diane Ravitch, the education historian who was an early supporter of No Child Left Be-hind before becoming a top critic of the high-stakes-testing approach to education reform. (Robert Scott, the former education commissioner of Texas, has said that a Gates Foundation official told him point-blank that his state would never receive funding unless it signed on to Common Core.)

Ravitch looks out on the landscape and sees the funding stream controlled by one man (Gates) and the content stream con-trolled by another (Coleman). “The more and more this kind of undemocratic nature of the process piled up,” she says, “the more unsavory it became that one man bought and paid for the national standard.”

In the face of the anti-Core backlash, some key liberal proponents have also backed away. Randi Weingarten, the president of [continued on page 68]

W I T H J A M E S W E S T

China’s coal addiction

threatens the planet. But

can it handle a natural gas

revolution?

n a hazy morning last September, 144 American and Chinese government of-fi cials and high-ranking oil executives fi led into a vaulted meeting room in a cloistered campus in south Xi’an, a city famous for its terra-cotta warriors and lethal smog. The Communist Party built this compound, called the Shaanxi Guesthouse, in 1958. It was part of the lead-up to Chairman Mao’s Great Leap

Forward, in which, to surpass the industrial achievements of the West, the government built steelworks, coal mines, power stations, and cement factories—displacing hundreds of thousands and clearcutting a tenth of China’s forests in the process. Despite its quaint name, the guesthouse is a cluster of immense concrete structures jutting out of expansive, manicured lawns and man-made lakes dotted with stone bridges and pagodas. It also features a karaoke lounge, spa, tennis stadium, shopping center, and beauty salon.

The guests at the compound that week were gearing up for another great leap: a push to export the United States’ fracking boom to China’s vast shale fi elds—and beyond. Attendees slid into black leather chairs behind glossy rosewood tables, facing a stage fl anked by large projector screens. Chinese businessmen wore high-waist slacks with belts clasped over their bellies. I watched as one thumbed through business cards bearing the logos of Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Halliburton. Behind closed doors, a select group of Chinese and American offi cials and executives held a “senior VIP meet-ing.” Outside, a troop of People’s Liberation Army guards marched in tight formation.

The US-China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, sponsored by the US departments of

Commerce and Energy, as well as China’s National Energy Administration, has con-vened for the last 13 years. But the focus turned to shale gas in 2009, when President Obama and then-President Hu Jintao an-nounced an agreement to develop China’s immense resources. The partnership set the stage for companies in both countries to forge deals worth tens of billions of dollars.

Here at the 2013 conference, the fi rst American to take the podium was Gary Locke, the US ambassador to China at the time. He wore a dark suit and a striped red-and-purple tie; his slick black hair glistened in the fl uorescent light. “From Sichuan to Eagle Ford, Texas, from Bohai Bay to the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and Ohio, US and Chinese companies are investing and working together to increase energy production in both countries,” he pro-claimed. US and Chinese companies were so tightly knit, Air China had recently start-ed offering nonstop fl ights between Beijing and Houston, “making business trips much quicker for many of you gathered here.”

The soft, static voice of a Chinese in-terpreter seeped from the headphones as young women in red vests quietly passed through each row, pausing to pour hot tea, their strides almost synchronized. Tiny plumes of steam arose from the teacups lin-ing each table, like miniature smokestacks. It seemed fi tting, because underlying all the talk of new energy was an urgency to wean China from its decades-long addiction to coal. Locke promised that shale gas would do just that: “We can make further strides to improve energy effi ciency, produce cleaner energy, increase renewables, and increase supply,” he asserted. “Unconventional gas, especially shale gas, is just the start.”

There are two main reasons behind China’s newfound zeal for gas. As Michael Lieb-reich, the founder of New Energy Finance, an energy market analytics fi rm now owned by Bloomberg LP, put it, “One is to feed the growth. There has to be energy and it has to be affordable in order to continue the growth machine. But the other one is that they’ve got to get off this coal.”

Constituting a whopping 70 percent of China’s energy supply, coal has al-lowed the country to become the world’s second-largest economy in just a few de-cades. But burning coal has also caused ir-A

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reparable damage to the environment and the health of China’s citizens. City offi-cials have been forced to shut down roads because drivers are blinded by soot and smog. China’s Civil Aviation Administra-tion ordered pilots to learn to land planes in low-visibility conditions to avoid flight delays and cancellations. Scientists wrote in the medical journal The Lancet that am-bient particulate matter, generated mostly by cars and the country’s 3,000 coal-fired power plants, killed 1.2 million Chinese people in 2010. In late 2013, an eight-year-old girl in Jiangsu Province was diagnosed with lung cancer; her doctor attributed it to air pollution. And earlier this year, scientists found that up to 24 percent of sulfate air pollutants—which contribute to smog and acid rain—in the western United States originated from Chinese factories manufacturing for export.

“The air quality in China has reached a kind of tipping point in the public con-sciousness,” says Evan Osnos, The New Yorker ’s former China correspondent and author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. “The en-tire Chinese political enterprise is founded on a bargain: We will make your lives better, if you’ll allow us to stay in power.” As more Chinese citizens demand clean air and wa-

ter, China’s leaders and foreign business-men have taken drastic measures to get rid of pollution. Some local officials have tried to wash away soot by cloud seeding, a process in which chemicals are rocket-launched into clouds to make it rain. One company is de-veloping a column of copper coils that will use electric charges to suck soot out of the air like a Hoover. Environmental officials in the northern city of Lanzhou attempted to level its surrounding mountains to let the wind blow the soot away—not to be confused with the city’s actual plan to demolish 700 mountains in order to expand its footprint by roughly the area of Los Angeles.

But China’s push to wean itself from coal has also triggered a rush to develop alternative power sources. The natural gas that lies deep within its shale formations is now a top contender. By current estimates from the US Energy Information Adminis-tration, China’s shale gas resources are the largest in the world, 1.7 times those in the United States. So far, fewer than 200 wells have been drilled, but another 800 are ex-pected by next year. By then, China aims to pump 230 billion cubic feet of natural gas annually from underground shale—enough to power every home in Chicago for two years. By 2020, the country ex-pects to produce as much as 15 times that

amount. It’s moving at “Chinese speed,” as one energy investment adviser put it—the United States took at least three times as long to reach that volume.

Yet just as fracking technology has crossed over from the fields of Penn-sylvania and Texas to the mountains of Sichuan, so have the questions about its risks and consequences. If fracking regu-lations in the United States are too weak, then in China the rules are practically non-existent. Tian Qinghua, an environmental researcher at the Sichuan Academy of En-vironmental Sciences, fears that fracking operations in China will repeat a pattern he’s seen before. “There’s a phenomenon of ‘pollute first, clean up later,’” he says. “History is repeating itself.”

When my colleague James West and I traveled to China last September, it didn’t take long to see the toll of the country’s coal addiction: James had a burning cough by our second day. On a bullet train from Beijing to Xi’an (roughly the distance between San Francisco and Phoenix), we whizzed along at 150 miles per hour through some of China’s most polluted pockets, including the northeastern city of Shijiazhuang, where the smog registers at emergency levels for a third of the year—twice as often as in Beijing. A thick miasma

In China, “there’s a phenomenon of ‘pollute first, clean up later.’ History is repeating itself.”


hung heavy, clinging so low to fields of corn that it was hard to see where the earth met the dark, gray sky. Every few minutes we passed another giant coal-fired power plant, its chimneys spewing a continual billow of thick, white smoke.

By the time of our trip, villagers living near fracking wells had already complained about the deafening noise of drilling ma-chinery, the smell of gas fumes, and strange substances in their water. One night last April, in a small southwestern town called Jiaoshi, an explosion at a shale gas drilling rig rattled residents awake, triggering a huge fire and reportedly killing eight workers. In the wake of the accident, an official from the Ministry of Environmental Protection said, “The areas where shale gas is abundant in China are already ecologically fragile, crowded, and have sensitive groundwater. The impact cannot yet be estimated.”

“We call this Shale County,” the driver shouted to us in the backseat as he steered the four-wheel-drive SUV up a steep moun-tain in Sichuan Province. The clouds faded as we climbed, revealing a quilt of farmland dotted with ping fang, or flat-top houses. We drove down a road lined with new hotels, small restaurants, and hardware stores—the markings of a boom-town. Roughly the size of Minnesota, the Sichuan Basin—where many of China’s experimental fracking wells are located—is home to some 100 million people, many of them farmers. It’s not the only part of China with shale gas, but fracking requires a lot of water, and with a subtropical cli-mate and proximity to the mighty Yangtze River, Sichuan has that, too, making it the nation’s first fracking frontier.

With each turn, the road became nar-rower and muddier, until we stopped at a gate behind which a tall red-and-white drill-ing rig shot up as high as the lush moun-tains surrounding it. We were at a shale gas well owned by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), one of the nation’s largest energy companies and its leading oil producer. Most of China was on holiday that week to commemorate 64 years since Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic, but out here there was no sign of rest. Workers in red jumpsuits drove by in bulky trucks. A drill spiraled 3,280 feet un-derground in search of shale gas, screeching

as it churned around the clock.An engineer whom we’ll call Li Wei

greeted us, peering out from under a hard hat. In his mid-20s, with a brand new de-gree, Li worked for a Chinese energy firm partly owned by Schlumberger, the Hous-ton-based oil service company. Last July, Schlum berger opened a 32,000-square-foot laboratory in the region devoted to extract-ing hydrocarbons from shale gas resources. Like many other engineers at China’s new wells, Li had never worked on a fracking op-eration before. We watched as he shooed away neighborhood kids playing by a brick structure straddling a pool marked “haz-ard” as though it were their tree house.

At first, Li said, drilling here didn’t go so smoothly: “We had leaks, things falling into the well.” They had to slow down op-erations as a result. Still, the team planned to drill and frack about eight other new wells in the area in the coming months.

China’s early fracking operations face many risks, but the incentives to keep drilling are too good to pass up. Based on early sampling, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Liebreich estimates that China is currently extracting shale gas at roughly twice the cost of the United States. Ana-lysts expect those costs to fall as China gains experience, but even at current lev-els, shale gas production has been up to 40 percent cheaper—and geopolitically more desirable—than importing gas. As China’s demand for natural gas contin-ues to grow—between 2012 and 2013 it grew at 15 times the rate of the rest of the world’s—domestic reserves will become increasingly important, says Liebreich: If China can continue to extract shale gas at the current cost, that “would be a game-changer.” The “golden age” of natural gas that took root in North America, the International Energy Agency declared in June, is now spreading to China.

All that growth comes with a steep learn-ing curve. Fracking requires highly trained engineers who use specialized equipment to mix vast quantities of water with chemi-cals and sand and shoot it into the ground at high pressures, cracking the dense shale bed and releasing a mix of gas, water, and other sediments to the surface. That’s why service companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton have much to gain: China needs technology and know-how—and is willing to pay handsomely. “Selling the

Source: US Energy Information Administration

Which Countries Use the Most Coal?

ChinaOtherUSIndiaGermanyRussia

49%

25%11%

9%3%

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5

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15

20

25

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35

204020100

5

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25

30

35

20402010Source: US Energy Information Administration

Shale SuperpowersCurrent and projected annual gas production (in trillion cubic feet)

Shale gas Other unconventional gas Conventional gas

US

usually requires fracking

not fracked

China’s Coal Use Drives the World’s…(in thousand short tons)


1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

9,000

’12’08’04’00’96’92’88’84’80

World

China

US

$10B

$20B

$30B

$40B

$50B

$60B

’31-’35’26-’30’21-’25’14-’20

...But Now It’s Investing in Gas(in US dollars; projections based on multiyear averages)

Gas

Coal

Source: oecd/iea 2014

3%

CHINA

T H E G R E A T F R A C K F O R W A R D


JAM

ES W

EST

picks and shovels for the gold rush would be the analogy,” Liebreich says.

No wonder, then, that multinational oil and gas giants have pounced. In 2012, Royal Dutch Shell inked a contract with CNPC. A company executive pledged to in-vest around $1 billion a year for the next several years in shale gas. BP, Chevron,

Exxon Mobil, and Hess also have signed joint ventures to explore shale prospects with Chinese energy companies. In re-turn, Chinese companies have invested in US fracking operations. Since 2010 the Chinese energy company Sinopec, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), and the state-owned Sinochem spent at least $8.7 billion to buy stakes in shale gas operations in Alabama, Colo-rado, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Okla-homa, Texas, and Wyoming. Chesapeake Energy alone got $4.52 billion out of its deals with CNOOC.

“The reason Chinese oil companies have gone after Chesapeake in the past year was because they wanted to apply the technology to tap the world’s No. 1 shale gas reserves in China,” Laban Yu, a Hong Kong investment analyst, told Bloomberg News. Whether or not China will be able to replicate the American shale gas revolu-tion, it is clearly determined to try.

One humid and drizzly night, James and I found ourselves in Chongqing, a hilly me-tropolis on the Yangtze whose population is more than triple that of New York City.

Chongqing’s GDP grew an astonishing 12.3 percent in 2013, 4.6 points higher than the runaway Chinese economy as a whole. Its skyline looks like every major world city smashed into one—including near full-size replicas of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building. The area is also home to castles modeled after those in

France’s Loire Valley, as well as “Foreigner Street,” a 24/7 theme park where visitors can wander through an Egyptian pyramid haunted house, play mahjong by a Vene-tian canal, or sing kar aoke under Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer. Foreigner Street also boasts a 1,000-toilet public bathroom, the world’s largest.

Chongqing is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, in both height and sprawl, with a half-million new residents arriving each year. It is something of a gateway to China’s vast and relatively un-developed west, booming like Chicago in the late 19th century. Its per capita natural gas consumption rate is one of the high-est in the country and is currently rising

by 8.5 percent a year, according to a re-port by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Much of the natural gas produced in Si chuan’s fields ends up here. The city’s officials expect that the municipality will need 530 billion cubic feet of natural gas by 2015—2.5 times the figure in 2011.

Chongqing’s urban center is only 200 miles from the mountainside frack-ing fields we visited, but it might as well have been a different planet. From our hostel, we followed the neon lights until we reached Jiefangbei, a glitzy shopping district named after the tower it encircles, built in the 1940s to commemorate vic-tory over the Japanese during World War II. Now banks, hotels, and skyscrapers dwarf the monument, their electric fa-cades flashing the night sky, their tops fading into the clouds. People clutching umbrellas hurried past the Louis Vuitton, Cartier, and Gucci stores that were stud-ded with giant lightbulbs.

Chongqing’s unbridled growth is par-alleled by a widening wealth gap and rampant corruption. It’s a place where laobans—bosses—reserve $100 tables and drink $200 bottles of Moët & Chandon at nightclubs mere blocks from where porters haul shipments of clothes or steel goods from the riverbanks to shops atop the city’s steep hills for a few pennies. It’s also so overrun by triads—Chinese mafias sometimes deployed by the government as backup muscle—that when the city cracked down on crime in 2009, one criminologist estimated that at least 77 officials were ar-rested for colluding with gang members and protecting them from the law.

“Let some get rich first, and others will follow” is the philosophy that has driven China’s economic reforms since 1979. But the disparity between rich and poor has grown so much that, during a meeting of China’s top political advis-ers earlier this year, one attendee opined that the quality of life for 90 percent of peasants was no better than it was 40 years ago, in part due to burdensome medical expenses and limited access to education. In April, researchers at the University of Michigan calculated that in 2010, China’s Gini coefficient—a measure of income in-equality—was 0.55, compared to 0.45 in the United States. The United Nations considers anything above 0.4 a threat to a country’s stability.

“There are a lot of people in China who don’t want to take political risks. But when it comes to something as elemental as their health, they’re willing to take a risk.”


“You’ve got this ‘damn the torpedoes’ development strategy that sets out all sorts of quotas, expectations, and produc-tivity targets that are not constrained or balanced in any way by environmental protection or public participation to hold people to account,” says Sophie Richard-son, director of Human Rights Watch’s China program. Throw in corruption, she adds, and you see a toxic mix, one that has contributed to an unprecedented level of social unrest. By the latest official esti-mate, China has an average of 270 “mass incidents”—unofficial gatherings of 100 or more protesters—every day. In a 2014 study of mass incidents, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that they were usually sparked by pollution, land acquisitions, labor dis-putes, and forced demolitions.

Fracking may soon join that list. Protests have already stymied drilling operations in Sichuan. From 2010 to March 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported, Shell had lost 535 days of work at 19 of its shale gas wells due to villager blockades or government requests to halt operations. “There are a lot of people in China who don’t want to take political risks—they have too much at stake,” Osnos says. “But when it comes to something as elemental as their health, and that’s what pollution really is about, then they’re willing to take a risk.”

Despite being touted as a cleaner alterna-tive to dirty coal, fracking in China comes with plenty of environmental problems. The country’s shale gas lies deeper un-

derground and in more complex geologic formations than those deposits in the flat-lands of Pennsylvania, North Dakota, or Texas. As a result, researchers estimated that the Chinese wells will require up to twice the amount of water used at Ameri-can sites to crack open the reserves. In-deed, researcher Tian Qinghua points out that it’s hard to imagine how there will be enough water to support an American-style fracking boom in a country with less water per capita than Namibia or Swazi-land, where land twice the size of New York City turns to desert every year. To-day more than a quarter of the country has already dried up, the equivalent of about a third of the continental United States.

An engineer who formerly designed cigarette and paper factories in the 1990s, Tian—who is in his 50s with spiked hair, rectangular glasses, and a professorial air—traces his environmental conversion back to the time he trained a group of technicians from Burma at a sugar factory in Yunnan Province. If they built a fac-tory like this one back home, they asked him, would their river become black like the Kaiyuan River? “I began to doubt my career,” he told us, sipping hot green tea out of a glass beer stein. “All the factories I designed were heavy polluters.” He quit his job and began pursuing environmental research. “I wanted to pick a career I could be proud of by the time I retire,” he said.

In addition to his concerns about frack-ing’s enormous appetite for water, Tian also worries about its waste: the chemical-laden water that comes back out of the rock with the natural gas. In the United

States, it is typically stored in steel con-tainers or open pits and later injected un-derground in oil and gas waste wells. In China’s early wells, waste water is often dumped directly into streams and rivers. If fracking—most of which takes place in China’s breadbasket—contaminates water or soil, Tian argues, it could jeopardize the nation’s food supply. In a seismically active area like Sichuan, leaks are a ma-jor concern: Even a small earthquake—which, emerging evidence suggests, wastewater injection could trigger—might compromise a well’s anti-leak system, causing more pollution. In the past year alone, more than 30 earthquakes were re-corded in the Sichuan area.

In 2012, Tian and his team from the Si-chuan Academy of Environmental Sciences proposed environmental standards for fracking in the province. Lacking financial and political support from the government, the proposal languished in the bureaucratic process and never became law—and al-though Beijing officials are rumored to be working on national standards, it’s unclear when they will release them.

Back at the guesthouse compound in Xi’an one evening, after the conference had ad-journed for the day, we sat for a lavish ban-quet of salty braised greens, fried eggplant, steamed fish, and roasted pork. A thin film of soot clung to the marble floors, table-cloths, and curtains.

I shared a table with Ming Sung, a lean, wispy-haired man in his late 60s who serves as the Asia-Pacific

T H E G R E A T F R A C K F O R W A R D

The Making of a Shale BoomTraveling from fracking fields to ballooning megacities, James West and Jaeah Lee documented the

dawning of China’s energy revolution. You can see their video series at motherjones.com/fracking-china.


One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they hud-dled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Boriss-ov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the ben-efits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighbor-ing Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart ment’s lobbying effort culminated in

A trove of secret cables shows how

Hillary Clinton’s State Department sold

fracking to the world. BY MARIAH BLAKE

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN RITTER



T H E C H E V R O N C O M M U N I Q U É S

Embassy in Warsaw helped organize a shale gas conference, underwritten by these same companies (plus the oil field services com-pany Halliburton) and attended by officials from the departments of State and Energy.

In some cases, Clinton personally pro-moted shale gas. During a 2010 gathering of foreign ministers in Washington, DC, she spoke about America’s plans to help spread fracking abroad. “I know that in some places [it] is controversial,” she said, “but natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today.” She later traveled to Poland for a series of meetings with officials, after which she an-nounced that the country had joined the Global Shale Gas Initiative.

That August, delegates from 17 countries descended on Washington for the State Depart ment’s first shale gas conference. The media was barred from attending, and officials refused to reveal basic information, including which countries took part. When Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) inquired

pany, Gazprom, plummeted by more than 60 percent between 2008 and 2009 alone.

Clinton, who was sworn in as secre-tary of state in early 2009, believed that shale gas could help rewrite global energy politics. “This is a moment of profound change,” she later told a crowd at George-town University. “Countries that used to depend on others for their energy are now producers. How will this shape world events? Who will benefit, and who will not?…The answers to these questions are being written right now, and we intend to play a major role.” Clinton tapped a law-yer named David Goldwyn as her special envoy for international energy affairs; his charge was “to elevate energy diplomacy as a key function of US foreign policy.”

Goldwyn had a long history of promot-ing drilling overseas—both as a Department of Energy official under Bill Clinton and as a representative of the oil industry. From 2005 to 2009 he directed the US-Libya Busi-ness Association, an organization funded primarily by US oil companies—including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon—clamoring to tap Libya’s abundant supply. Goldwyn lobbied Congress for pro-Libyan policies and even battled legislation that would have allowed families of the Locker-bie bombing victims to sue the Libyan gov-ernment for its alleged role in the attack.

According to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, one of Goldwyn’s first acts at the State Department was gathering oil and gas industry executives “to discuss the potential international impact of shale gas.” Clinton then sent a cable to US dip-lomats, asking them to collect information on the potential for fracking in their host countries. These efforts eventually gave rise to the Global Shale Gas Initiative, which aimed to help other nations develop their shale potential. Clinton promised it would do so “in a way that is as environmentally respectful as possible.”

But environmental groups were barely consulted, while industry played a crucial role. When Goldwyn unveiled the initiative in April 2010, it was at a meeting of the Unit-ed States Energy Association, a trade organi-zation representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips, all of which were pur-suing fracking overseas. Among their top targets was Poland, which preliminary stud-ies suggested had abundant shale gas. The day after Goldwyn’s announcement, the US

late May 2012, when Morningstar held a se-ries of meetings on fracking with top Bulgar-ian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgar-ian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.

The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s dip-lomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with en-ergy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy sup-ply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resourc-es as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamina-tion and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmen-tal regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American of-ficials—some with deep ties to industry—also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.

Geologists have long known that there were huge quantities of natural gas locked in shale rock. But tapping it wasn’t eco-nomically viable until the late 1990s, when a Texas wildcatter named George Mitch-ell hit on a novel extraction method that involved drilling wells sideways from the initial borehole, then blasting them full of water, chemicals, and sand to break up the shale—a variation of a technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Be-sides dislodging a bounty of natural gas, Mitchell’s breakthrough ignited an energy revolution. Between 2006 and 2008, do-mestic gas reserves jumped 35 percent. The United States later vaulted past Russia to become the world’s largest natural gas pro-ducer. As a result, prices dropped to record lows, and America began to wean itself from coal, along with oil and gas imports, which lessened its dependence on the Mid-dle East. The surging global gas supply also helped shrink Russia’s economic clout: Profits for Russia’s state-owned gas com-

Top 10 countries with recoverable shale gas resources (in trillion cubic feet)


GAS LANDS

China

1,115

Argentina

802

Algeria

707

United States

665

Brazil

245

Russia

285

South Africa

390

Canada

573

Mexico

545

Australia

437


observers were surprised when he quietly stepped down just before its launch.

When I approached Goldwyn following a recent speaking engagement in Washing-ton, DC, to ask about his time at the State Department and why he left, he ducked out a side door, and Kalicki blocked the corridor to keep me from following. Gold-wyn later said via email that he had simply chosen “to return to the private sector.”

Around the time of his departure, WikiLeaks released a slew of diplomatic cables, including one describing a 2009 meeting during which Goldwyn and Ca-nadian offi cials discussed development of the Alberta oil sands—a project benefi ting some of the same fi rms behind the US-Libya Business Association. The cable said that Goldwyn had coached his Canadian counterparts on improving “oil sands mes-saging” and helped alleviate their concerns about getting oil sands crude to US mar-kets. This embarrassed the State Depart-ment, which is reviewing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline proposal to transport crude oil from Canada and is under fi re from environmentalists.

After leaving State, Goldwyn took a job with Sutherland, a law and lobbying fi rm

continue their fossil fuel development.”The industry began fi ghting hard for ac-

cess to shale fi elds abroad, and promoting gas as the fuel of choice for slashing carbon emissions. In Europe, lobbyists circulated a report claiming that the European Union could save 900 billion euros if it invested in gas rather than renewable energy to meet its 2050 climate targets. This rankled environ-mentalists, who argue fracking may do little to ease global warming, given that wells and pipelines leak large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. They also fear it could crowd out investment in renewables.

By early 2011, the State Department was laying plans to launch a new bureau to in-tegrate energy into every aspect of foreign policy—an idea Goldwyn had long been advocating. In 2005, he and a Chevron ex-ecutive named Jan Kalicki had published a book called Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy, which argued that energy independence was unattain-able in the near term and urged Washing-ton to shift its focus to energy security—by boosting global fossil fuel production and stifl ing unrest that might upset energy mar-kets. Goldwyn and his ideas had played a key role in shaping the bureau, so some

about industry involvement, the department would say only that there had been “a lim-ited industry presence.” (State Department offi cials have since been more forthcoming with Mother Jones: In addition to a number of US government agencies, they say at-tendees heard from energy fi rms, including Devon, Chesapeake, and Halliburton.)

During the cursory press conference that followed, Goldwyn, a short, bespec-tacled man with a shock of dark hair, ar-gued that other nations could avoid the environmental damage sometimes associ-ated with fracking by following America’s lead and adopting “an umbrella of laws and regulations.” A reporter suggested that US production had actually “outpaced the ability to effectively oversee the safety” and asked how we could be sure the same wouldn’t happen elsewhere. Goldwyn re-plied that attendees had heard about safe-ty issues from energy companies and the Groundwater Protection Council, a non-profi t organization that receives industry funding and opposes federal regulation of fracking wastewater disposal.

Goldwyn and the delegates then board-ed a bus to Pennsylvania for an industry-sponsored luncheon and tour of some shale fi elds. Paul Hueper, director of en-ergy programs at the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources, says the tour was organized independently and that en-ergy fi rms were only invited to the confer-ence itself to share best practices. “We are very fi rm on this,” he insisted. “We do not shill for industry.”

While the meeting helped stir up inter-est, it wasn’t until 2011 that global frack-ing fever set in for real. That spring, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its initial estimate of global shale gas, which found that 32 countries had viable shale basins and put global re-coverable shale gas at 6,600 trillion cubic feet—enough to supply the world for more than 50 years at current rates of consump-tion. This was a rich opportunity for big oil and gas companies, which had largely missed out on the US fracking boom and were under pressure from Wall Street to shore up their dwindling reserves. “They’re desperate,” says Antoine Simon, who co-ordinates the shale gas campaign at Friends of the Earth Europe. “It’s the last push to

SouthernPetroleum

SystemParisBasin

FranceSoutheast

Basin ThraceBasin Southeast

AnatolianBasin

CantabrianBasin

LusitanianBasin

North Sea-German System

AlumShale

LublinBasin

Pannonian-Transylvanian

Basin Carpathian-Balkanian Basin

Dnieper-DonetsBasin

Podlasie Basin

BalticBasin

NorthernPetroleum

System

Number of Drilling Concessions/License Permits

0-2526-100101+

Countries with a ban or moratorium on shale fracking

bulgaria

romania

poland

luxembourg czechrepublic

netherlands

russia

russialithuania

ukraine

france

KA

REN

MIN

OT

Sources: Friends of the Earth Europe, media reports


T H E C H E V R O N C O M M U N I Q U É S

Earth Europe, featured presentations from Exxon Mobil, Total, and Halliburton—warned that failure to develop shale gas “will have damaging consequences on European energy security and prosperity” and urged European governments to “allow shale gas exploration to advance” so they could “fully understand the scale of the opportunity.”

US lobbying shops also jumped into the fray. Covington & Burling, a major Wash-ington firm, hired several former senior EU policymakers—including a top energy offi-cial who, according to the New York Times, arrived with a not-yet-public draft of the Eu-ropean Commission’s fracking regulations.

In June 2013, Covington staffer Jean De Ruyt, a former Belgian diplomat and ad-viser to the European Commission, hosted an event at the firm’s Brussels office. Ex-ecutives from Chevron and other oil and gas behemoths attended, as did Kurt Van-denberghe, then one of the commission’s top environmental regulators. These strate-gies appeared to pay off: The commission’s recently released framework for regulating fracking includes recommendations for governments but not firm requirements. “They chose the weakest option they had,” says Simon of Friends of the Earth Europe. “People at the highest level of the commis-sion are in the industry’s pocket.”

Goldwyn was also busy promoting frack-ing overseas—this time on behalf of indus-try. Between January and October 2012, his firm organized a series of workshops on fracking for officials in Bulgaria, Lithu-ania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine, all of them funded by Chevron. The events were closed to the public—when Romanian journalist Vlad Ursulean tried to attend the Romanian gathering, he says Goldwyn per-sonally saw to it that he was escorted out.

Goldwyn told Mother Jones that the work-shops featured presentations on technical aspects of fracking by academics from the Colorado School of Mines and Penn State University. Chevron, he maintains, had “no editorial input.” But all of these coun-tries—except Bulgaria, which was in the midst of anti-fracking protests—would later grant Chevron major shale concessions.

In some cases, the State Department had a direct hand in negotiating the deals. Giten-stein, then the ambassador to Romania, met with Chevron executives and Romanian of-ficials and pressed them to hand over mil-lions of acres of shale

99 percent drop. Geological conditions and other factors in Europe and Asia also made fracking more arduous and expensive; one industry study estimated that drilling shale gas in Poland would cost three times what it does in the United States.

By 2013, US oil giants were abandoning their Polish shale plays. “The expectations for global shale gas were extremely high,” says the State Department’s Hueper. “But the geological limitations and aboveground challenges are immense. A handful of coun-tries have the potential for a boom, but there may never be a global shale gas revolution.”

The politics of fracking overseas were also fraught. According to Susan Sakmar, a visiting law professor at the University of Houston who has studied fracking regula-tion, the United States is one of the only na-tions where individual landowners own the mineral rights. “In most, perhaps all, other

countries of the world, the underground re-sources belong to the crown or the govern-ment,” she explains. The fact that property owners didn’t stand to profit from drilling on their land ignited public outrage in some parts of the world, especially Eastern Europe. US officials speculate that Rus-sia also had a hand in fomenting protests there. “The perception among diplomats in the region was that Russia was protecting its interests,” says Mark Gitenstein, the for-mer US ambassador to Romania. “It didn’t want shale gas for obvious reasons.”

Faced with these obstacles, US and Euro-pean energy companies launched a lobbying blitz targeting the European Union. They formed faux grassroots organizations, plied lawmakers with industry-funded studies, and hosted lavish dinners and conferences for regulators. The website for one industry confab—which, according to Friends of the

that touts his “deep understanding” of pipe-line issues, and launched his own company, Goldwyn Global Strategies.

In late 2011, Clinton finally unveiled the new Bureau of Energy Resources, with 63 employees and a multimillion-dollar budget. She also promised to instruct US embassies around the globe to step up their work on energy issues and “pursue more outreach to private-sector energy” firms, some of which had generously supported both her and President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. (One Chevron execu-tive bundled large sums for Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, for example.)

As part of its expanded energy mandate, the State Department hosted conferences on fracking from Thailand to Botswana. It sent US experts to work alongside for-eign officials as they developed shale gas programs. And it arranged for dozens of foreign delegations to visit the United States to attend workshops and meet with industry consultants—as well as with envi-ronmental groups, in some cases.

US oil giants, meanwhile, were snapping up natural gas leases in far-flung places. By 2012, Chevron had large shale concessions in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, and South Africa, as well as in Eastern Europe, which was in the midst of a claim-staking spree; Poland alone had granted more than 100 shale concessions covering nearly a third of its territory. When the nation lit its first shale gas flare atop a Halliburton-drilled well that fall, the state-owned gas company ran full-page ads in the country’s largest newspapers showing a spindly rig rising above the hills in the tiny village of Lubocino, alongside the tagline: “Don’t put out the flame of hope.” Politicians prom-ised that Poland would soon break free of its nemesis, Russia, which supplies the lion’s share of its gas. “After years of dependence on our large neighbor, today we can say that my generation will see the day when we will be independent in the area of natural gas,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared. “And we will be setting terms.”

But shale was not the godsend that in-dustry leaders and foreign governments had hoped it would be. For one, new research from the US Geological Survey suggested that the EIA assessments had grossly overesti-mated shale deposits: The recoverable shale gas estimate for Poland shrank from 187 tril-lion cubic feet to 1.3 trillion cubic feet, a

“The Romanians were just sitting on the leases, and Chevron was upset,” says former US ambassador to Romania Mark Gitenstein. “So I intervened.”


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The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to HabermasTaught by Professor Lawrence CahooneCOLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS

LECTURE TITLES

1. Origins and Confl icts of Modern Politics2. Ancient Republics, Empires, Fiefdoms3. Machiavelli’s New Order4. Hobbes, Natural Law, the Social Contract5. Locke on Limited Government and Toleration6. Rousseau’s Republican Community7. Kant’s Ethics of Duty and Natural Rights8. Smith and the Market Revolution9. Montesquieu and the American Founding10. Debating the French Revolution 11. Legacies of the Revolution—Right to Left12. Nationalism and a People’s War13. Civil Society—Constant, Hegel, Tocqueville14. Mill on Liberty and Utility15. Marx’s Critique of Capitalism16. Modern vs. Traditional Society17. Progressivism and New Liberalism18. Fleeing Liberalism—Varieties of Socialism19. Fleeing Liberalism—Fascism and Carl Schmitt20. Totalitarianism and Total War21. Conservative or Neoliberal—Oakeshott, Hayek22. Reviving the Public Realm—Hannah Arendt23. Philosophy vs. Politics—Strauss and Friends24. Marcuse and the New Left25. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice26. Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Libertarianism27. What about Community?28. Walzer on Everything Money Shouldn’t Buy29. Identity Politics—Feminism30. Identity Politics—Multiculturalism31. The Politics of Nature—Environmentalism32. Postmodernism, Truth, and Power33. Habermas—Democracy as Communication34. The End of History? Clash of Civilizations? 35. Just Wars? The Problem of Dirty Hands36. Why Political Philosophy Matters

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S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 4 | MOTHER JONES 61C R A I G S J O D I N / A B C

WHEN TONY GOLDWYN showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past year, warm greetings from politi-cians quickly turned to accusations: “You are just a terrible president,” several attend-ees told him. And they may have a point. In the first three seasons of ABC’s Scandal (season 4 commences in late September), Goldwyn’s character, President Fitzgerald Grant, has released a known terrorist from prison, personally snuffed out a Supreme Court justice, and had an ongoing affair with his campaign manager, Olivia Pope (the show’s star, Kerry Washington). Heir to a Hollywood dynasty, he’s the grand-son of the middle initial in MGM Studios and the son of producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. and Golden Age actress Jennifer Howard. He began as a stage actor before getting his first big movie break as the villain in 1990’s Ghost. More recently, he’s co-creator and executive producer of The Divide, a new series on WE TV exploring race and the death penalty in Philadelphia. Mother Jones: As a Goldwyn, was your showbiz path pretty much a given?Tony Goldwyn: My parents were very diligent, frankly, at keeping us away from show busi-ness, because they didn’t want us to grow up to be Hollywood brats. I initially assumed I would have nothing to do with it. But I started acting in high school plays and fell in love with it. I went to theater school in Lon-don for a couple of years, and then started

POTUS ENVY Scandal’s Tony Goldwyn on presidential demeanor, jumping the shark, and creating a death penalty dramaby patrick caldwell

M E D I A + C U L T U R E

working in the theater in New York.MJ: Theater was your way of rebelling?TG: I wouldn’t say it was rebellious. My mother’s family had been from the theater. Because I grew up in Hollywood, I wasn’t that interested in Hollywood. But the New York theater was completely exotic and fab-ulous to me.MJ: Do you still act on the stage?TG: About every five years. When I was younger, I would do a play every year at least. But then you have to start supporting a family. [Laughs.]MJ: What’s your political persuasion?TG: I’m a moderate Democrat. I’ve always been fascinated with poli-tics, fascinated and mad-dened by the way things get done in our system, which as an ideal is so extraordinary, but the way it actually works can be mind-boggling.MJ: Is that what drew you to Scandal? Or was it more that Shonda Rhimes created it?TG: I played Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, in a movie about the Iran hostage crisis, and I played the president’s chief of staff in The Peli-can Brief, so playing the president defi-nitely interested me. But it was certainly in combination with being an admirer of Shonda’s and wanting to work with Kerry Washington.MJ: How did you research the role?TG: I had read a lot of presidential biogra-phies for the other films, and spent some time at the White House, so I felt famil-iar with this world. The two that I kind of focused on for Scandal were Clinton and Obama, because they had attributes I want-ed in Fitz. Clinton can make everyone feel they’re important to him, like he’s just a regular guy. Obama’s the same way. I want-ed Fitz to have that. Jeff Perry—who plays my chief of staff—and I constantly traded books and documentaries.MJ: You modeled a Republican president on Clinton and Obama?TG: Well, Fitz is about as Democratic of a Republican as you can get. The theory Jeff and I came up with is that his presi-dency is about bringing the party, kicking and screaming, back to the center—al-though his vice president is very much of the Michele Bachmann wing.

MJ: Scandal fans say Fitz is a terrible presi-dent. What’s your view?TG: I disagree. You can say his private life takes up so much of his time that he doesn’t focus on his job, so therefore he’s terrible. But in my narcissistic imagination, the 23 hours of the day that we don’t expe-rience, he’s very hard at work. I think he’s quite an effective and successful president.MJ: So you’re okay with him murdering a Supreme Court justice?TG: Well, that’s a bit of a problem. [Laughs.]MJ: Are you kind of floored when you see something like that in the script?TG: Yeah. That one probably more than

anything else was where I went, “Ooookaaaay…” That same episode was also when I rejected Olivia in a very brutal way. That was extremely difficult to process. But Fitz had just found out that they stole the election. The fact that Olivia was complicit was something he just couldn’t process. His whole un-dercurrent was to be le-gitimate, the antithesis

of what his father represented. And the murder of [Justice] Verna Thornton was this moment of psychosis where it was a decision of survival: She was going to take him down, take the country down, which would have proved his father right.MJ: The show took an even darker tone last season, with intense torture scenes.TG: I love it! Shonda is just pushing the envelope constantly the darker it gets. Have you seen the finale? I couldn’t believe she went there! The audience gets drawn in with their popcorn and then they get punched in the gut.MJ: Do the actors get any advance warning?TG: Never. She won’t tell us. If a character is going to die, she will take them aside and let them know that their execution date is coming. But usually the day before we start shooting we sit down and read the scripts out loud, and that’s the first we ever hear of it. Which is kind of hairy, but very ex-citing. I create my own reality, and then I have to be ready to turn on a dime.MJ: Would you ever run for office in real life?TG: Nooooo. The more I learn about it, the less I would want to. I would lose my autonomy, and to get things done I

would have to compromise and get into the weeds of policy. I don’t know if I’m smart enough.MJ: You’d probably have help. Your fans apparently include Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton.TG: The first time I went to the Correspon-dents’ Dinner, all that these incredibly prominent, sophisticated people wanted to talk about was Scandal. I was pretty startled, and kind of embarrassed. There were so many politicians! This year there were 10 times that, from Nancy Pelosi to the presi-dent himself—although I expect he doesn’t actually watch it. I suspect he was briefed.MJ: What made you want to do a show about the death penalty?TG: I directed and produced Conviction, a movie about a man who spent 18 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I got to know [Innocence Project cofounder]Barry Scheck very well—he’s a character in the movie—and I got very passionate about the cause. It’s just so inherently dramatic—my coproducer said, “There’s a TV series in this.” Then we came up with the idea of a prosecutor who gets it wrong. I never wanted to do a polemic. What interested me was the moral divide: In trying to do the right thing, where’s the line you cross?MJ: Were you inspired by real-life cases?TG: A few. We were thinking of something like the Petit murders in Connecticut. In our very first conception, we went to the stereo-type of a black man wrongfully convicted of murdering a white family. It was Barry’s idea to flip it racially. He said, “Why don’t you make it a white guy who murdered a black family, and a white guy on death row?” He suggested a black prosecutor who puts a white guy away. One of the other things we’re really exploring is this new breed of African American politicians—guys like Cory Booker who present themselves in a sort of postracial world, and yet we live in anything but a postracial world.MJ: What’s your personal view on capital punishment?TG: It makes no sense as a policy—it’s not a deterrent, and economically it’s a disaster. It’s very clear that there are innocent peo-ple on death row. And if I put an innocent person to death, that’s murder.MJ: Do you suppose we’ll ever phase it out?TG: That’s one of the reasons why we want-ed to do The Divide. When people under-stand what’s going on, the tide will shift.


“ALL THAT THESE INCREDIBLY PROMINENT

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SKIN, DEEPIn Pen & Ink, a book based on the blog by illustrator Wendy MacNaughton and BuzzFeed books editor Isaac Fitzgerald, expressive watercolors of tattoos are paired with handwritten testimonies. Some insig-nias represent people’s low moments, like incarceration or chemo. Others are goofy: One woman inked a T. rex on her rib cage as a reminder “not to take myself too seri-ously.” But every tat is an access point, MacNaughton says. “If someone is choos-ing to permanently mark their body, there’s a story behind it.” —Maddie Oatman

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brave subjects, if deeply pes-simistic about the prospects of women in this maddeningly repressive culture. —Michael Mechanic

My Life As a Foreign CountryBy Brian TurnernortonIn this moving

account of his time as a ser-geant in Iraq, Brian Turner,

The Marshmallow TestBy Walter Mischellittle, brownMuch ado has been

made of the titular psych test, in which kids able to wait 20 minutes to earn two marsh-mallows instead of settling for one right away were shown, decades later, to rate better on everything from educational level to their risk of becoming

whose poem “The Hurt Lock-er” was the namesake for the Oscar-winning fi lm, delivers a succession of oddly beauti-ful, appropriately devastating refl ections that drive home the realities of war. Turner takes us from training camp to war zone and home again, where, in bed with his wife, he dreams he’s a drone, fl ying over countries of wars past. —Julia Lurie

b o o k sThe Birth of the PillBy Jonathan EignortonSeventy years ago, birth control—illegal,

crude, and unreliable—was re-served for women with means whose men were willing to go along. Jonathan Eig’s gripping history recounts how two men and two women fought sci-ence and society for a pill to enable smaller families (and low-risk recreational sex). Their campaign, which touted prag-matism (population control, economics) over pleasure, won some unlikely victories: the support of a devout Catholic OB-GYN, for instance, and the backing of a feisty heiress who once smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms into the States, sewn into the folds of the latest European fashions. The pill is utterly ordinary today. The story of how we got here is any-thing but. —Hannah Levintova

The Underground Girls of KabulBy Jenny Nordbergcrown publishingIt sucks to be female

in Afghanistan. No surprise there. Journalist Jenny Nord-berg’s revelation—to Western eyes, anyway—is that more than a few Afghan families raise their girls as boys. The practice, bacha posh, accepted when done discreetly, serves as a roundabout way for girls to attend school and earn money, and for couples who lack sons to avoid public humiliation. The real tension comes with puberty, when the bacha posh is expected to give up her am-bitions, respectful treatment, male playmates, and even her freedom to leave the home. Nordberg’s intimate explora-tion leaves us rooting for her

http://motherjones.com/tattoo

“WHAT DO I TELL MY BOYS?”New York Times columnist Charles Blow on Trayvon Martin, and his own trial by fi re

Charles Blow is known to readers of the New York Times’ opinion pages as a guy who distills com-plex news events into tidy concepts and charts. (And for helping put Trayvon Martin on the na-tional radar.) But his unabashedly honest new memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, reveals a painful, messy upbringing in rural Louisiana, where whites and blacks were “separated by a shallow ditch and a deep understanding.” His early childhood was a succession of diffi cult experiences, none more scarring than his sexual abuse by an older cousin, but Blow reinvented himself as an athlete, star student, and, later, president of his college fraternity. He became the Times’ graphics director at age 25, but that hardly prepared him for the title of Gray Lady columnist, which he’s held since 2008. “I was in a panic the day that I got this job,” he admits. “An absolute panic!” —Julia Lurie

Mother Jones: You have an amazing memory.Charles Blow: Trauma stays with you. You relive it every day, so those scenes are incredibly fresh. In addition, the house where I grew up was still there. Nothing had been changed inside. I’d just sit in the room, forcing myself to remember. MJ: As a questioning teen, you learned that the Bible portrays homosexuality as an abomina-tion. What would you tell that kid today?CB: Something along the lines of: Different is not deviant, no matter what the world may say.MJ: As a married father of three, are you ner-vous about making your sex life public?CB: The facts are nonnegotiable. I always say to my friends, “I sleep well at night.”MJ: During high school, though, you set out to refi ne your country mannerisms.CB: When I won my way to the international science fair one year, I didn’t want to embar-rass myself. It was the fi rst time I was going to be away from home. I went to the local library and checked out every single etiquette book. All of a sudden I knew what to do when the food dropped from the table and how to sig-nal that you were fi nished or that you wanted coffee—all these little intricacies that just did not come into our lives because we were poor.

MJ: What was it like going from graphics guru to high-profi le columnist?CB: It has been the most excruciating and public on-the-job training I could imagine. I had no professional writing experience before this job! I started to lean much more on what made me different from the other columnists than what made me like them. Since I grew up in the rural South, I learned how to bring the cadence of that language to my writing.MJ: You write in the book that hazing frater-nity pledges put you at the apex of the sort of social subjugation that had caused your seven-year-old self to contemplate suicide.CB: I’m trying to illuminate how perilously nar-row we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality. Part of the book is to highlight these very tricky social settings that young men navi-gate, including that hazing, which is about bru-tality but also about bending yourself until you break in order to fi t in.MJ: In one of the Trayvon columns, you asked, “What do I tell my boys?” Well, what did you?CB: Part of the great sadness of that episode is that I was never able to fi nd the language to both empower and protect my boys. I still don’t know what to tell them.


a drug addict. In this book, Walter Mischel, who designed the original experiment, dispels the notion that the ability to delay gratifi cation is a have-or-not-have trait. The patient kids, he writes, used strategies anyone can learn. (“I think, therefore I can change what I am.”) And if you’re just not motivated, don’t fret. After all, Mischel notes, what fun is life without a little indulgence? —Lei Wang

The Human AgeBy Diane AckermannortonIs humankind so dominant that we

deserve our very own geologic era? Naturalist Diane Ackerman answers an emphatic “yes” in this ambitious survey of our brief reign on Earth. Despite pockets of purplish prose, The Human Age is a well-crafted and often compelling book: Orangutans with iPads, self-aware robots, and visionary fi shermen are characters in her expansive story of how human advancement affects our lives and our environment. Acker-man is neither overly optimistic nor alarmist as she explores the pros and cons of humanity, expressing wonder and concern at all the things we’re capable of. —Sam Brodey

f i l mLife Itselfkartemquin filmsThere’s a scene early in Life Itself when a hospitalized Roger Ebert, missing his lower jaw after multiple surgeries for thyroid cancer, needs his throat suctioned. The camera holds steady as Ebert winces through the procedure, but then an email box pops up on the screen. “great stuff!!!!!” types Ebert, no longer able to speak. “I’m happy we got a great thing that nobody ever sees: suction.”


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Director Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters) blends an intimate end-of-life story with Ebert’s wide-ranging biog-raphy: precocious college news-paper editor, recovering drunk, screenwriter of the schlocky Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, friend and critic of Hollywood’s biggest names. But for all of Ebert’s exploits, it’s the private moments James captures, like his increasingly brief email responses as cancer slowly wins out, that endure. —Ian Gordon

The Overnightersmile end filmsThis engrossing film is set in Williston, North Dakota, where locals are freaking out about the hordes of desperate men in need of cash and a fresh start who pour into their tiny town in search of fracking jobs. A local pastor takes pity on them, converting his Concor-dia Lutheran Church into an ad hoc shelter. He’s resolute, even as his family reels from the criticism of angry neighbors and congregants who want him to be a little less Christian. But he risks losing everything when the local paper reports that sex offenders are among the visi-tors. Up through its devastating reveal, The Overnighters ques-tions the motivations behind (and consequences of ) our choices and convictions. —Katie Rose Quandt

m u s i ctrack 3“To Turn You On”From Robyn

Hitchcock’s The Man Upstairsyep rocLiner notes: Hitchcock gives Bryan Ferry’s morose love song a charming, irony-free makeover, setting his surpris-ingly tender vocal to a delicate

chamber-folk arrangement.Behind the music: The former Soft Boys leader teamed with producer Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Anna and Kate McGarrigle) for this vibrant mix of originals and covers (Doors, Psychedelic Furs).Check it out if you like: Vital vets like Richard Thompson and Marshall Crenshaw.

track 10“Is What It Is” From She Keeps Bees’ Eight Houses

future godsLiner notes: Smokey and lan-guid, Jessica Larrabee croons defiantly, “Be not completely consumed/Do not surrender,” on this hazy ballad, with kin-dred spirit Sharon Van Etten singing backup.Behind the music: Larrabee fronted the Philadelphia band the English System before teaming with drummer Andy

LaPlant to form the Brooklyn-based duo.Check it out if you like: Moody chanteuses (Cat Power, Angel Olsen, PJ Harvey).

track 1“Pressure”From My Brightest Diamond’s This Is

My Handasthmatic kittyLiner notes: The fourth MBD al-bum gets off to a rousing start with this joyful brew of march-ing-band rhythms, xylophone, brass, and Shara Worden’s big, operatic voice.Behind the music: An alumna of Sufjan Stevens’ band, Worden’s résumé includes collaborations with David Byrne, Matthew Barney, the Blind Boys of Ala-bama, and the Decemberists.Check it out if you like: Brainy art-poppers, meaning St. Vin-cent, tUnE-yArDs, or Joanna Newsom. —Jon Young

HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIALForget magic and monsters: Sara Farizan pens a different kind of teen fantasy.

WHEN SARA FARIZAN presented early drafts of her young-adult novels at writing workshops, her fel-low graduate students at Lesley University would often respond with a stunned “Huh.” The YA genre tends to be dominated by wizards and trolls, but here was Farizan writ-ing about gay teenage sexual angst. Her 2013 debut novel, If You Could Be Mine, centers on Sahar, an Iranian teenager who considers desperate measures—including sex reassignment surgery—to try to stop her true love’s arranged marriage. Fari-zan, born in the United States to Iranian parents, figured the book would sell on the fringes, but it quickly landed on several “best YA reading” lists and snagged a Lambda Literary Award.

Coming this fall, her second novel, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, takes place closer

to home. It’s set in a waspy prep school, not un-like the one Farizan attended as a closeted teen in Massachusetts (“pre-Ellen,” she notes). “I had this

outgoing personality, and I was class president, but inside, I was going to my car to cry.”

Farizan’s goal is to write the kinds of books she wishes she had as a teenager. Her novels, as full of gossip as any school cafe-teria, are nonetheless funny and frank. They purposefully deal with uncomfortable issues—and not just for “girls named Emily or Annie.” For that matter, Farizan thinks her fellow YA au-thors could do better at appeal-ing to kids of all stripes. “Not

that Harry isn’t great,” she says. “But if Ron and Hermione had been some other identity—black, Latina, gay—I think that would have made a huge difference.” —Maddie Oatman

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chief representative for Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based partnership between environmental advo-cates and the private sector that’s focused on reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Sung, who spent 25 years as an engineer and manager for Shell, now splits his time between Texas and China, helping US and Chinese oil and gas com-panies lower their emissions.

Sung told us that shale gas, despite its reputation as a cleaner fuel, could be a huge pollution problem, if the technology wasn’t handled correctly. For example, he says, if “you don’t seal the wells properly, methane will leak.” Although natural gas can gener-ate electricity at half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal, methane is as much as 105 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The EPA estimates that drilling for natural gas emits 0.04 to 0.30 grams of methane per well per second in the United States, the annual greenhouse gas equivalent of as many as 24 million cars.

But beyond the mechanical risks of fracking, there’s a more fundamental problem: Shale gas might not even signifi-cantly reduce China’s coal dependence. In the United States, fracking proponents have argued that natural gas is crucial to help with the shift from the dirtiest fossil fuels to renewable resources. But that ar-gument falls apart in China. Unlike what happened in the United States, the Energy Information Administration’s future pro-jections of China’s energy demand suggest that in 2040, coal will continue to domi-nate while natural gas, even with a golden era, will fuel only 8 percent of demand. “The whole pie is growing so rapidly that you still see a very carbon-intensive mix,” says Rachel Cleetus, a senior economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. As China continues to grow its economy and expand its cities, it will need every resource it can get—coal, gas, solar, wind, hydropower, and nuclear. James Fallows, a senior correspondent at The Atlantic who spent many years covering China, notes that the Chinese government “is push-ing harder on more fronts than any other government on Earth” to develop energy sources other than coal. “The question is, will they catch up? Who will win that race between how bad things are and how they’re trying to deal with them?”

Despite all these unknowns, the Obama

administration is now encouraging other countries to tap their shale reserves. A year after Obama and Hu announced their shale gas agreement, in 2010, the State Department launched the Global Shale Gas Initiative, an “effort to promote global energy security and climate security around the world,” as one researcher put it. (See “The Chevron Communiqués,” page 50.) As a JPMorgan research memo stated, “Unless the popular environmen-tal concerns are so extreme, most coun-tries with the resources will not ignore the [shale gas] opportunity.”

Toward the end of our trip, we visited a village near Luzhou, a port city on the Yangtze with a population bigger than Los Angeles. We met a middle-aged woman named Dai Zhongfu, who told us that in 2011, Shell and PetroChina set up a shale gas well right next to her house. Standing under the shade of her plum tree and sporting a cropped haircut and a navy blue windbreaker, Dai said that occasion-ally someone would show up here and take a water sample from her well. They never identified themselves or returned with the results. By the time we arrived, Dai and her neighbors had grown wary of outside visitors; when we first met, her neighbors mistook us for water testers and advised her not to bother talking to us.

As the drilling continued, Dai said, her groundwater started to run dry, and now only rain replenished it. She doubted the water was fit for drinking. “After you use it, there’s a layer of white scum clinging to the pot,” she said. They couldn’t even use it to cook rice anymore. “You tell me if there’s been an impact!”

When I asked Dai why she and her neighbors hadn’t protested, she said, “You know that we rural folk really have no re-course,” she said. The drilling was over, and now that the well was producing, all that was left were a few surveillance cam-eras and a concrete wall. “Now there’s no chance they’ll pay attention to us—where we get our drinking water, how we use it,” Dai said. “People here have been abused so much that they’re afraid.”

This story was supported by a Middlebury College Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and a grant from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

the great frack forward[continued from page 49] something else en-

tirely. “They threw a soccer ball in the mid-dle of a football game,” one mom told me.

The architects of Common Core would counter that the new standards aren’t about branding kids as failures—they’re about revealing how they have been failed: They weren’t held to a high enough standard in the No Child Left Behind era, and are now having to come up to speed. In fact, Common Core’s supporters even anticipated that drop and offered a fix: The point of all the data-gathering they envisioned was to help teachers make ad-justments that would let students master the new methods. Common Core’s draft-ers always anticipated a learning curve—just not a political insurgency intent on destroying the program before it had a chance to produce results.

The trajectory of Common Core just might wind up resembling that of the Affordable Care Act. Once the hysteria passes, it’s likely to be viewed as a genuine improvement to the education system—even if the vision of a national standard isn’t fully realized. “The [original] prom-ise was, ‘Wow, this is nearly every state in the country!’” the New America Founda-tion’s Hyslop says. “We may not have that moving forward, but we’re at least going to have a good 25 or 30 states.” From the per-spective of the policymakers who pushed for Common Core seven years ago, that would still be a success story.

But it came at a heavy cost: The grand bipartisan consensus has been cut clean to the bone, offering a preview of the obstacles facing future reform efforts. If you thought math and reading standards were a hard sell, try biology. And activists are already taking aim at Coleman’s new Advanced Placement tests, administered by the Col-lege Board—tests they fear have been infect-ed with the ills of Common Core.

The political consequences are still un-folding. In June, the Pew Research Center released new evidence that the gap within the GOP had closed: self-identified “busi-ness” conservatives opposed Common Core at the same rate as “steadfast conser-vatives” (61 percent). If that holds true, the 2014 midterms, where many candidates have staked out anti-Core positions, just might determine the standards’ fate in many states. Common Core now faces the highest-stakes test of all—the ballot box.

tragedy of the common core[continued from page 43]


“especially in states where laws are inadequate.” But just as MADD battled to tighten drunk-driving stan-dards and stiffen penalties, Moms is push-ing to toughen negligence and child-access prevention laws. One study found that 43 percent of homes with guns and kids have at least one unsecured firearm, and in 2013 at least 52 children killed themselves or others after coming across loaded guns, a Mother Jones investigation showed. “This idea of ‘accidental’ gun deaths, when some-thing is truly negligence, has to be reme-died,” Watts says.

Moms Demand Action has also cam-paigned aggressively for laws to disarm domestic abusers—legislation categorically opposed by the NRA until it quietly began moderating its stance this past year. Every year more than a million women are physi-cally assaulted by an intimate partner, and when a gun is present, the likelihood of their being murdered goes up more than fivefold. Women regularly are shot to death even af-ter obtaining court protection orders against their abusers, according to a New York Times investigation last year. The phenomenon

was on grim display again in July, when a man who’d had multiple restraining orders against him shot to death six of his ex-wife’s family members in Texas, including four children. Thanks in part to Moms’ lobbying, six states have moved on the issue in 2014, including Wisconsin and Louisiana, where bills were signed by conservative governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal.

Moms has also chipped away at the sta-tus quo by battling state laws that allow people to pack heat in schools or bars and by working with cities to require “social responsibility” measures (such as prevent-ing their products from appearing in video games) from gun manufacturers bidding for lucrative police department contracts.

Universal background checks for gun buyers these are not, acknowledges Mark Glaze. But what’s one of the first things you have to do if you want to sustain a move-ment? “You have to rack up some victories.”

It’s no coincidence that from the start Moms Demand Action has been armed with ef-fective slogans and well-orchestrated cam-

paigns against corporations: Watts has deep experience—from the other side. Before she decided to become a stay-at-home mom in 2008 when her youngest kids started middle school, she spent a decade as a PR executive for large firms, including Monsanto, where part of her role was to defend their con-troversial GMO products. She also handled crisis communications for corporations at FleishmanHillard; prior to that she’d been an aide to a Democratic Missouri governor and a speechwriter in the state Legislature.

All of which her detractors have tried to use against her. “Shannon Watts may be a liar, but she’s a professional liar,” the editor of BearingArms.com scoffed recently about her résumé. Opponents have also invoked her career to declare that she’s not a real grassroots mom and denounced her as a “Democratic Party operative.” And that’s the tame stuff. As Moms’ clout has increased, gun rights activists have aggres-sively targeted its members and leaders, calling them “Bloomberg’s whores,” “thugs with jugs,” and far worse. Watts has been at the receiving end of menacing phone calls and violent images posted online. She gets

mothers in arms[continued from page 31]

http://BearingArms.com


emails from people threatening to rape and murder her and her children. “They call me every horrific name you’ve ever heard, and say they hope that if I die it gets televised so they can watch,” she told me. (Watts has alerted the FBI to specific threats and has noted publicly that her home is protected by dogs and an alarm system.)

For decades the gun rights movement has relied on aggressive rhetoric—an over-bearing government is coming to take your guns—and during the Obama presidency the NRA’s leadership has doubled down on stoking anger among its members. But in its most exaggerated form, and directed at a group of sympathetic women, that rage has created a public relations nightmare for the gun lobby—particularly in Texas, where Moms Demand Action has 7,000 active members and counting. In late April, as I first reported in Mother Jones, a veteran NRA board member in Hous-ton confronted the leader of Open Carry Texas, warning that the backlash from flaunting semi-automatic rifles in public was jeopardizing the gun lobby’s longtime control of “a massive number of votes” in the Statehouse. The head of Open Carry Texas retorted that the NRA was siding with the “ultraliberal gun-control bullies” of Moms Demand Action. Some members of Open Carry Texas used disturbing in-timidation tactics, including hounding a Marine veteran through city streets with assault rifles, shooting up a naked female mannequin, and publicizing a woman’s personal information online and exposing her to vicious harassment.

By June, the NRA’s lobbying wing made an extraordinary move, denouncing the Texas activists’ demonstrations as “fool-ishness” and “downright weird.” But when the enraged activists cut up their membership cards, the NRA beat a fast re-treat and apologized.

Whipping up gun rights die-hards in recent years may have helped it sway lawmakers and elections. But in the pro-cess, the century-and-a-half-old NRA, once known for championing marksmanship, hunting, and gun safety, has all but ceded that legacy. And while most of its mem-bers, polls show, favor gun safety measures such as broader background checks, clos-ing loopholes, and securing guns from the mentally ill, the leadership has stuck to its hardline position.

Key to Moms’ message is that being a socially responsible gun owner has noth-ing to do with being anti-gun. In fact, some of the leadership is deeply experienced with firearms. As an ER nurse in Seattle, Moms regional leader Kelly Bernado has cared for patients physically shattered by gun violence—but as a police officer in the 1990s, she often rolled up on armed sus-pects and faced split-second decisions with her weapon drawn. “I find the people who carry weapons and think they can be some sort of hero in these situations absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. (Though she came “very, very close” in one domestic-violence situation, Bernado never fired on anyone during her career.)

Kellye Burke, who grew up in rural Texas in a family tradition of gun ownership dat-ing back to frontier days, says it was the notorious “good guys with guns” speech from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre one week after Sandy Hook that drove her to action. “It just personified the sickness and the cal-lousness that has overtaken our country,” she says. “The fact that they’re still not acknowledging that this is an actual prob-lem—it’s just zero accountability and zero responsibility. And that trickles all the way down to the individual gun person who thinks, ‘I can do whatever I want and basi-cally screw everybody else.’”

The ripple effect that certain gun deaths now have across social media—from Trayvon Martin in Florida to two-year-old Caroline Sparks in Kentucky to college kids in Santa Barbara—echoes their comprehen-sive toll. Thirty-thousand Americans die from guns every year, but assume that even just five people are severely affected by each person’s death and now the damage afflicts 150,000 more Americans annually. Over 10 years, that’s a total of 1.8 million people. Now add the number of gunshot victims each year who survive—one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention esti-mate suggests at least 64,000, not includ-ing accidents—and the overall number of Americans directly affected by shootings each decade climbs to 5 million.

“Newtown concentrated the horror in one place,” as Judith Palfrey, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me at the one-year anniversary. Still, polls show that few Americans vote based on gun

policy. The most ambitious goal of Every-town, with Moms Demand Action as the vanguard, is to alter that calculus—and they may just have a chance. “Moms are an im-portant and powerful constituency that can uniquely tap into the emotion of the elector-ate,” says GOP strategist McKinnon. “At the very least they can get a hearing. Whether or not they can actually mobilize voters, we don’t know yet.”

Leaders of the movement preach patience as well as tenacity. “The NRA has been in this for a very long time, so I don’t only see this through the lens of 2014,” says Howard Wolfson, a top political adviser to Bloom-berg. “This is not a one-time electoral effort.”

The leading new gun reform groups share the same essential goals, though there are differences on how to achieve them. Americans for Responsible Solu-tions, the super-PAC and lobbying shop started by former congresswoman and mass-shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, is throwing millions of dollars this year behind 11 Sen-ate and House candidates who back stricter gun laws. However, the group won’t target Democrats such as Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Mark Begich of Alaska, who voted against the background check bill.

Support for allies “is obviously very help-ful,” Wolfson told me, “but there are two sides to this coin. From our perspective, we also want to make sure the people who op-pose gun safety pay an electoral price.” In July, Everytown rolled out a 10-point ques-tionnaire for congressional candidates on gun safety priorities; the plan is to reward supporters and go after those who don’t measure up—even if, says Wolfson, that means endangering the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. It’s a page straight from the NRA playbook.

“This is about building a foundation,” Watts says, “and it can’t be built on wheth-er you have Democrats or Republicans in office. Many Democrats have shown that they are just as in the pocket of the NRA as their Republican counterparts. This has to transcend political labels.”

As Watts sees it, that’s the only way to defeat the ingrained “nothing happened, nothing will” narrative that so frustrates her and the women who’ve joined her. “It’s such a ridiculous idea that because some-thing doesn’t pass in weeks or months that all hope is lost.”


the chevron communiquésback down. Along with other American energy firms, it lobbied to insert language in a proposed US-EU trade agreement al-lowing US companies to haul European governments before international arbitra-tion panels for any actions threatening their investments. Chevron argued this was necessary to protect shareholders

against “arbitrary” and “unfair” treatment by local authorities. But environmental groups say it would stymie fracking regu-lation and point to a $250 million lawsuit Delaware-based Lone Pine Resources has filed against the Canadian province of Quebec for temporarily banning fracking near a key source of drinking water. The case hinges on a similar trade provision.

Despite the public outcry in Europe, the State Department has stayed the course. Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, views natural gas as a key part of his push against climate change. Under Kerry, State has ramped up investment in its shale gas initiative and is planning to ex-pand it to 30 more countries, from Cambo-dia to Papua New Guinea.

Following the Crimea crisis, the Obama administration has also been pressing East-ern European countries to fast-track their fracking initiatives so as to be less depen-dent on Russia. During an April visit to Ukraine, which has granted concessions to Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, Vice President Joe Biden announced that the United States would bring in technical ex-perts to speed up its shale gas development. “We stand ready to assist you,” promised Biden, whose son Hunter has since joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company. “Imagine where you’d be today if you were able to tell Russia: ‘Keep your gas.’ It would be a very different world.”

This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

ter’s office, a Romanian official met with Chevron executives and an embassy-based US Commerce Department employee to craft a PR strategy for the project. They agreed to organize a kickoff event at Victoria Palace in Bucharest. As a spokesman, they would tap Damian Draghici, a charismatic Romanian lawmaker who was a “recognized personality among the Roma minority,” which had a “considerable presence” around Chevron’s planned drilling sites. “It was re-ally extraordinary—the level of collaboration between these players,” says Ursulean, who has written extensively about Chevron’s ac-tivities in Romania. “It was as if they were all branches of the same company.”

The strategy did little to soothe the public’s ire. When Chevron finally did attempt to install the rig in late 2013, residents—including elderly villagers who arrived in horse-drawn carts—blockaded the planned drilling sites. The Romanian Orthodox Church rallied behind them, with one local priest likening Chevron to enemy “invaders.” Soon, anti-fracking protests were cropping up from Poland to the United Kingdom. But Chevron didn’t

concessions. “The Romanians were just sitting on the leases, and Chevron was upset. So I intervened,” says Gitenstein, whose State Department tenure has been bookended by stints at May-er Brown, a law and lobbying firm that has represented Chevron. “This is traditionally what ambassadors do on behalf of American companies.” In the end, Romania signed a 30-year deal with Chevron, which helped set off massive, nationwide protests.

When the government began weighing a fracking ban, it didn’t sit well with Giten-stein, who went on Romanian television and warned that, without fracking, the na-tion could be stuck paying five times what America does for natural gas. He added that US shale prospectors had “obtained great successes—without consequences for the environment, I dare say.” The proposed moratorium soon died.

A few weeks later, Chevron was preparing to build its first fracking rig near Pungesti, a tiny farming village in northeastern Romania. According to a memo from the prime minis-

[continued from page 54]

“We are very firm on this,” insists the State Department’s Paul Hueper. “We do not shill for industry.”

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I t wasn’t so long ago that fat people were considered healthy. Doctors were far more worried about underweight Americans, many of whom were too poor to afford enough calories. But

as farms industrialized and food became cheaper, the tables began to turn. Shortly af-ter World War II, it became clear that eating too much food led to just as many problems as not eating enough. Insurance companies noticed that their fattest policyholders were signifi cantly more likely to die early than those of average weight. They searched for a way to measure excess fat and hit upon a simple formula developed in 1832 by a Belgian statistician, mathematician, and as-tronomer named Adolphe Quetelet: Simply divide a person’s weight by the square of his height. This formula, known as body mass

index (BMI), spread from insurers to health researchers and fi nally, in the 1980s, entered the clinical realm.

Today, BMI is still one of the most com-monly used measures of health. When primary-care physicians record your height and weight, as required by law, the elec-tronic record they see displays your BMI. In-surance companies use it to set premiums: A 2013 report from the provider eHealth-Insurance found that people with BMIs in the “obese” category paid 22 percent more, on average, than those in the “normal” range. Doctors typically use BMI to advise their patients: If you’re below 18.5, you’re underweight; 18.5-24.9 is normal; 25-29.9 is overweight; and 30-plus is obese.

There’s just one problem: A higher BMI doesn’t necessarily mean you’re less

e c o n u n d r u m s

Why bmi Is a Big Fat ScamBody mass index is used to sell weight loss drugs, set insurance premiums, and counsel patients. There’s just one little problem.

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the only one, or even the most important one.” A more reliable indicator of metabolic health is the circumference of your waist relative to that of your hips. As a general rule, a higher ratio indicates the presence of visceral—or belly—fat, a risk factor for meta-bolic and heart disease. But while doctors must record a patient’s height and weight, they don’t have to measure the waist and hips. Donna Ryan, a physician and spokes-woman for a clinical weight research group called the Obesity Society, has trained thou-sands of primary-care doctors in obesity screening. She asks them to raise their hand if they use waist circumference as a health indicator, and usually only about 10 percent do. “Doctors are so pressed for time,” she ex-plains. “And it’s intrusive. You have to put your arms around the patient.”

But there’s an even easier way for docs to gauge their patients’ risk level: Ask them

how much they exercise. “It’s much more important to avoid low fitness than it is to avoid fatness,” Lavie says. Research supports this: McAuley and his team, for example, followed 831 vet-erans with type 2 diabetes for 10 years and found that the ones who exercised rare-ly and performed poorly on treadmill tests had a 70 per-cent higher death risk than those who got regular exer-cise. Fitness, it turned out, beats BMI as a predictor of

mortality. Yet many physicians still don’t prescribe exercise: In a 2013 study, Lavie and his colleagues found that only a bit more than half of diabetes patients—and just 44 percent of those with hypertension—report-ed being counseled to exercise more.

Of course, exercise requires no prescrip-tion. So the next time you find yourself ob-sessing about BMI, maybe it’s time to stop crunching numbers and go for a walk.

healthy. In fact, patients with heart disease and metabolic disorders whose BMIs classify them as overweight or mildly obese survive longer than their normal and underweight peers. A 2013 meta-analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics looked at 97 studies covering nearly 3 million people and concluded that those with overweight BMIs were 6 percent less likely to die in a given year than those in the normal range. These results were even more pronounced for middle-aged and elderly people. This is known as the obesity paradox. “The World Health Organization calls BMIs of 25 to 29.9 overweight,” says Paul McAuley, an exercise researcher at Winston-Salem State Univer-sity. “That is actually what is healthiest for middle-aged Americans.”

And get this: While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national obesity rates (nearly 35 percent for adults and 18 percent for kids), the distinctions can be arbi-trary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Ameri-cans as fat overnight—to match international guide-lines. But critics noted that those guidelines were draft-ed in part by the Interna-tional Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. In his re-cent book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, political scientist Eric Oliver reports that the chairman of the NIH committee that made the decision, Columbia University professor of medicine Xavier Pi-Sunyer, was consult-ing for several diet drug manufacturers and Weight Watchers International.

So should we just ignore BMI? Not nec-essarily, says Carl Lavie, a Louisiana-based cardiologist and author of the new book The Obesity Paradox: When Thinner Means Sicker and Heavier Means Healthier. “It’s one tool that you can use,” he says, “but it’s not

volume 39, number 5. Address editorial, business, and production correspondence to Mother Jones, 222 Sutter Street, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94108. Subscriptions: $24/yr in the US, $34 (US) in Canada, or $36 (US) elsewhere. POSTMASTER: Send changes of address to Mother Jones, PO Box 3029, Langhorne, PA 19047. Customer service: [email protected] or (800) 438-6656 or (267) 557-3568 (Mon. to Fri., 7 a.m.-10 p.m., Sat. to Sun., 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. ET). We sometimes share our mailing list with reputable firms. If you prefer that we not include your name, contact customer service. Subscribers are members of the Foundation for National Progress. Printed in the USA. MOTHER JONES (issn 0362-884), 222 Sutter Street, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94108, is published bimonthly by the Foundation for National Progress. Periodicals Postage paid at San Francisco, CA, and additional mailing offices. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608. Canada returns to be sent to Pitney Bowes, PO Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.

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allows products to go from lab to grocery store with little or no oversight. Evolva’s vanillin and resveratrol will likely sail through the Food and Drug Administra-tion’s approval process—and end up in your food without any special labeling—be-cause they are versions of already-existing compounds and thus have “generally rec-ognized as safe” status. The Environmental Protection Agency—which is supposed to evaluate the environmental implications of new products—requires companies to file a report on novel microbes but doesn’t always mandate testing.

And what happens to farmers when their jobs are taken over by designer yeasts? Jim Thomas, the research program manager for the Canada-based technol-ogy watchdog ETC Group, points out that synbio companies are so far targeting stuff grown in the Global South, which could have devastating economic consequences for the poor farmers who produce the nat-ural versions. In addition to vanilla (grown in Madagascar, Indonesia, and Mexico) and stevia (China, Paraguay, and Kenya), Evolva’s projected roster of products in-cludes saffron (Iran), turmeric (India), and ginseng (China).

Evolva CEO Neil Goldsmith says that Thomas raises a “legitimate question” but doesn’t think farmers will ultimately be harmed. He argues that synthetic vanillin has existed for decades without taking busi-ness away from natural vanilla producers. But that could be because consumers are willing to pay more for the real version. If Evolva is allowed to market its vanillin as a “natural” flavoring rather than a synthetic one, then it could compete directly with vanilla farmers—and it looks like Evolva is aiming to do just that: A recent press re-lease called the product “natural vanillin for global food and flavor markets.”

Indeed, Goldsmith claims that his pro-cess is “as natural as bread.” Yeasts used in commercial bakeries have been carefully selected and cultivated. Now, you may consider creating new DNA to be an entirely different matter, but whether you find it creepy or cool ultimately doesn’t matter: Because synbio foods won’t have to be la-beled as such, you’ll likely soon be eating them—without even knowing it.

L ike many novel technologies in this age of TED Talks and Silicon Valley triumphalism, synthetic biology—synbio for short—floats on a sea of hype. One of its founding scientists,

Boston University biomedical engineer James Collins, has called it “genetic engi-neering on steroids.” Whereas garden-variety genetic engineers busy themselves moving genes from one organism into another—to create tomatoes that don’t bruise easily, for example—synthetic biologists generate new DNA sequences the way programmers write code, creating new life-forms.

It may sound like science fiction, but synbio companies have already performed modest miracles. The California-based firm Amyris, for example, has harnessed the technology to make a malaria drug that now comes from a tropical plant. In order to do this, company scientists lever-aged the well-known transformative pow-ers of yeast, which humans have used for millennia to turn, say, the sugar in grape juice into alcohol: They figured out how the wormwood tree generates artemisinic acid—the compound that makes up the globe’s last consistently effective anti-malarial treatment—and programmed a yeast strain to do the same thing.

And there could be more innovations on the horizon. In 2011, Craig Venter, the scientist/entrepreneur who spearheaded the mapping of the human genome, vowed to synthesize an algae that would use sun-light to unlock the energy in carbon diox-ide. If successful, this attempt to replicate photosynthesis could transform CO2 from climate-heating scourge into a limitless source of energy. Synthetic biologists also aim to conjure up self-growing buildings, streetlight-replacing glowing trees, and medicines tailored to your body’s needs. No wonder the market for synbio is ex-pected to reach $13.4 billion by 2019.

So how soon can you expect glowing trees to light up your block? Well, no one knows. That’s because thus far it has been much easier to create novel life-forms than to control how they function. Venter, for

example, hasn’t yet figured out how to cheaply grow enough of his synbio algae to make it competitive with fossil fuels. And malaria is rapidly developing resis-tance to artemisin drugs, which could eventually render the synbio replicant as useless as the real deal.

But while synbio likely won’t sort out our climate and health woes anytime soon, it just might transform our…ice cream. By creating yeasts that produce high-end flavorings, a Swiss company called Evolva

has created synbio vanillin, the main flavor compound in the vanilla bean—and it in-sists its product tastes much better than the petroleum-derived synthetic vanillin that now comprises virtually all of the vanilla market. Evolva is also preparing to release a synbio version of resveratrol, a compound with antioxidant properties naturally found in grapes and cocoa beans. Next up: a better-tasting version of stevia, a natural, low-calorie sweetener that the soda indus-try hopes can replace synthetic chemicals in diet sodas. After that, Evolva hopes to make a dizzying variety of lab-grown ana-logues, including musk, truffle flavoring, and even breast milk.

What could possibly go wrong with va-nilla flavoring brewed by DNA-manipulated yeast? Well, like genetic engineering, syn-bio falls into a regulatory void that often

f o o d f o r t h o u g h t

Vanilla SpliceSynthetic biology may one day save the world. In the meantime,

it’s in your ice cream. by tom philpott

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Director of Gift Planning, at (212) 727-4421 or email her

at [email protected]

www.nrdc.org/legacygift


http://www.nrdc.org/legacygift

Mother Jones - October 2014 USA.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Mother Jones - October 2014 USA.pdf