By MARTIN FACKLER
NY Times Published: February 2, 2012

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — Two years ago, the authorities in this gritty rust-belt region declared war on the yakuza, Japan’s entrenched organized crime syndicates. And that is exactly what they got.

Since this city and other local governments beefed up regulations to take on the yakuza — making it a criminal offense for companies and individuals to do business with them — there has been a death threat against Kitakyushu’s mayor and his family, hand grenades tossed at the homes of corporate executives and a construction company chairman gunned down in front of his wife.

The police say the attacks, and many other lesser threats and intimidation tactics, are the doing of the Kudokai, a gang with more than 650 members that officials call one of the most dangerous of Japan’s yakuza. The attacks have prompted the National Police Agency to propose giving law enforcement more powers to search and arrest gang members.

The yakuza remain a remarkably visible presence in Japan, as they have been for centuries. But law enforcement officials say the violence in Kitakyushu may prove a turning point, by shocking a public that has become increasingly fed up.

Any romantic aura that may have enveloped the gangsters in the past is falling away, the authorities say. They added that the Japanese increasingly see the yakuza simply as mobsters much like their counterparts in other countries, making money from drugs, gambling and extortion, particularly from their favorite target, Japan’s bloated construction industry.

“People are now seeing the reality that the yakuza are not chivalrous, but just an antisocial force,” said Kitakyushu’s mayor, Kenji Kitahashi, who said he was not intimidated by the death threat. He said the violence had turned many residents against the yakuza for hurting this former steel-making city’s efforts to lure new investment and jobs.

Japan has tried four times since the early 1990s to rein in the yakuza and has failed to make more than a dent in their numbers, currently about 80,000 (compared with estimates of 5,000 members of the American mafia at its height in the early 1960s). Like many Japanese gangs, the Kudokai even maintains its own public headquarters, the Kudokai Hall — a four-story, fortresslike white building surrounded by tall walls, barbed wire and security cameras — that sits in the center of Kitakyushu, a city of one million residents.

Until recently, the gangs were a quietly accepted fact of life. The yakuza were tolerated because they helped Japan keep its streets safe by imposing the same rigid rules and hierarchy on the criminal world that are seen in the rest of Japanese society. But as Japan has developed into a modern, middle-class nation, it has also refashioned itself into a society that relies on courts and lawyers to keep order, not medieval outlaws. The growing intolerance of the underworld has been evident in recent scandals in which a top television comedian and the national sport of sumo were forced to cut ties with gangsters.

Still, many admit, it has proven tough to completely cut ties.

“Society has used the yakuza for so long that it is hard to just get rid of them,” said Chikashi Nakamura, 75, head of a residents’ association in Kitakyushu that has campaigned to drive out the Kudokai.

Indeed, lawyers and antimob activists say the nation remains reluctant to take the final step of outlawing the gangs outright, a step many here have called for. There are fears that a ban could lead to what many here call a mafia-ization of the gangs, driving them underground and removing their last restraints on violence against regular civilians.

“It has taken 30 years to get this far, and Japan still hesitates to crush these violent groups once and for all,” said Naoyuki Fukasawa, a lawyer who specializes in defending citizens against organized crime. “The police are like archers who intentionally avoid the bull’s-eye, and instead aim at the target’s outer rings.”

The National Police Agency, which sets national crime policy, says outright criminalization is difficult because of constitutional protections on the right to assembly. But Shigeyuki Tani, director of the office of organized crime intelligence at the agency, said the office was drawing up a new law that would designate gangs like the Kudokai as “particularly dangerous,” and make it easier for the police to search their buildings and arrest members for requesting payoffs. (The current law bans only the actual payment.)

However, officials in Kitakyushu say they need even stronger powers to battle organized crime, which is deeply rooted in this city’s blue-collar neighborhoods.

Of the 44 mob-linked shootings in Japan last year, 18 took place in Fukuoka Prefecture, the district on Japan’s southernmost main island, Kyushu, where Kitakyushu is located.

While mob violence is nothing new here, the latest rampage is the worst in memory. It began two years ago, when the Kudokai angered local residents by buying a mansion across the street from a kindergarten to use as an office. After residents protested in front of the mansion’s gate, the home of a resident association leader was shot up in a nighttime attack.

Local authorities responded with the new penalties, aimed at choking off the gang’s sources of income. The police say the Kudokai then lashed out at companies that stopped payoffs, including the grenade attacks on the homes of executives from Kyushu Electric Power and another utility. The most recent attack took place on Jan. 17, when gunmen wounded a construction company president who stepped outside to buy a drink from a vending machine.

That shooting and the killing in November of the chairman of a different construction company have created an atmosphere of fear. One construction executive refused an interview by saying he was going to a hot-springs resort. However, it proved much easier to speak with the Kudokai.

At the gang’s headquarters, Hiroshi Kimura’s business card, written in elaborate calligraphy strokes, identified him as the captain of one of the Kudokai’s sub-groups. Mr. Kimura, who wore a well-tailored black suit and glasses, was meticulously polite.

He led reporters to a room with soft chairs and a low table that looked like a typical Japanese corporate meeting room, except for the black-and-white portraits of deceased gang leaders on the wall. As Mr. Kimura spoke, burly young men in black suits silently knelt to serve cups of green tea and traditional sweets.

Mr. Kimura said the new restrictions had hurt the Kudokai, though he refused to go into detail about the gang’s economic dealings. He said the Kudokai was not behind the recent violence, though he admitted that it could have been the work of errant individual gang members. If so, he vowed, the gang would also mete out its own punishment.

He said the police shared the blame for the violence by trying to drive a wedge between the Kudokai and the community.

“If they crush us, organized crime will just become harder to see, and more violent, like in Mexico,” said Mr. Kimura, who is 58.

He spoke nostalgically of an earlier era when yakuza worked with the police to maintain social order. Police officials said those days were over, though national attitudes have been slow to catch up.

“There are still feelings to use the yakuza to solve troubles,” said Daisuke Harada, head of the organized-crime section of the Fukuoka police. “We need to root out those old attitudes, once and for all.”

By Steve Springer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
February 2, 2012

Angelo Dundee, who trained the two most celebrated fighters of his era, Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, and 15 world champions in all in a Hall of Fame career that began in 1952, has died. He was 90.

Dundee died Wednesday at a Clearwater, Fla., rehabilitation center, said his son, James. He had a blood clot that developed during a flight back to his Florida home after visiting Ali in Louisville, Ky., for the boxer’s 70th birthday last month.

Dundee was in Ali’s corner for the Fight of the Century, the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila, and in Leonard’s corner for his No Mas match against Roberto Duran as well as his memorable fights against Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler.

Other boxers trained by Dundee included George Foreman, Carmen Basilio and Willie Pastrano.

In a sport of drama and explosiveness, dealing with fighters spouting hyperbole and filled with emotion, Dundee was the perfect complement, always calm, always analytical, ever able to maintain his cool, whether in the sweltering heat of Manila or the fury of Zaire.

In his 2007 autobiography, “My View From the Corner,” Dundee said his job was “a mixed bag combining certain qualities belonging to a doctor, an engineer, a psychologist and, sometimes, even an actor….When the bell rings ending the round, that’s when the trainer takes over.”

If Dundee hadn’t taken over on two occasions with Ali, one of the greatest careers in boxing history might have ended almost before it began.

At the end of the fourth round of a 1963 fight against Henry Cooper, Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, was surprised by a left-hand punch that floored him and left him dazed. Fortunately for Clay, it was the end of the round, allowing him to stagger back to his corner.

It was there that Dundee, trying to buy time until his fighter’s head cleared, stuck his finger in a slight split in the seams of one of Clay’s gloves, causing a slightly bigger split. That allowed Dundee to ask the referee for another pair of gloves. None were available, but the incident added valuable seconds to Clay’s rest time, allowing him to recover and go on to win on a fifth-round technical knockout.

His next fight, against heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, might not have occurred if Clay had lost to Cooper.

In the fourth round of Clay’s 1964 fight against Liston, another crisis occurred. A substance of undetermined origin got in Clay’s eyes, temporarily blinding him. In the corner prior to the fifth round, Clay ordered Dundee to cut off his gloves, ending the fight.

The trainer would do no such thing. He wet Clay’s eyes, alleviating some of the sting, and then literally shoved him back out into the ring when the bell rang. Clay, still unable to see, was told by Dundee to just run.

Run he did until, midway through the round, Clay’s vision cleared. At the end of the sixth round, Liston, claiming a shoulder injury, quit in his corner.

Thanks to Dundee, Clay had his first title and a launching pad for the meteoric career that would follow.

Dundee was born Angelo Mirena on Aug. 30, 1921, in Philadelphia, the eighth of nine children. It was his brother Joe, 21 years his senior, who first took the name Dundee to hide the fact he was a fighter from his father. His brother Chris also took the name, as did Angelo eventually.

Dundee’s introduction to boxing came during his time in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He worked the corner in service boxing tournaments.

Dundee’s course in life was set. He would follow his brother Chris, a future Hall of Fame promoter, to New York where Dundee would hone his trade at Stillman’s Gym, and then on to the Fifth Street Gym in Miami where his reputation was sealed.

He became Ali’s trainer in 1960 for Ali’s second pro fight and remained with him until the end, 21 years later. Even when Ali was surrounded by members of the Black Muslims and mired in racial controversy, Dundee, a white man, was able to remain under the radar and do his job.

Dundee added an Olympic gold medal winner to his stable of fighters when Leonard joined him after turning pro. Leonard won the medal in 1976.

Dundee’s most memorable moment in Leonard’s corner came in 1981, in Leonard’s first fight against Hearns. Momentum had slipped away from Leonard by the end of the 12th round of the 15-round match.

“You’re blowing it, son,” Dundee told him in the corner.

Leonard responded by rallying for a 14th-round TKO victory.

As he had with Ali, Dundee had again possibly saved a Hall of Fame career, ensuring himself a spot among the pantheon of boxing trainers.

Besides his son, James, Dundee is survived by his daughter, Terri, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. His wife, Helen, died in 2010.

By ANNIE LOWREY
NY Times Published: February 2, 2012

WASHINGTON — In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for a wide-ranging package of policies to help create American manufacturing jobs, including trade enforcement measures, business tax breaks and worker training programs.

In many ways, the proposal is surprising, as few economists now consider manufacturing a potent engine for job growth in the United States. Manufacturers have added about 330,000 jobs in the country in the last two years. But the growth followed three decades of decline, during which companies like automakers and textile companies slashed payrolls by about 7.5 million. That has led many economists to say the recent turnaround might be nothing more than a correction from the depths of the recession.

But the administration argues that big trends — like rising wages in developing countries, falling wages in America and a weaker dollar — have made moving work to or keeping work in the United States a much more viable option. And they say that manufacturers will continue to add jobs domestically, especially with a little help from Washington.

“We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back,” Mr. Obama said in his address to Congress. “But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.”

The proposal stems from a belief that after “a long period where people felt the wind was in our face, the wind is with us,” said Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council. “It’s not fighting against the trends. It’s actually working with them.”

Workers might command relatively high wages in the United States, but wages are climbing rapidly in countries like China and Brazil. High energy prices have increased shipping costs. And manufacturers argue that American workers frequently produce higher-quality goods and that American factories are closer to the markets for more sophisticated goods.

Those trends have led some companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs in the last few years, a development called on-shoring. General Electric has decided to move production of a water heater to Louisville, Ky., from China, for instance. NCR, a maker of self-service kiosks and automated teller machines, has shifted jobs to Columbus, Ga.

It is difficult to determine how many jobs American manufacturers are sending overseas or bringing back. But in a November survey by MFG.com, a site that connects manufacturers with suppliers, one in five North American manufacturers said they had brought production back from a “low-cost” country, up from about one in 10 manufacturers in early 2010.

Economists said that the administration could help sustain the trend. But they warned that the administration’s proposal seemed unlikely to lead to major job growth, and said that many businesses would still hire lower-cost workers overseas.

“We’re not going to get very labor-intensive, relatively low-skilled jobs in America, and I don’t think we want them,” said A. Michael Spence, a professor at New York University and Nobel laureate in economics. “But sometimes it makes sense to have a little help developing technologies that will make us competitive. And sometimes public support for upgrading workers’ skills makes sense.”

“The best we could possibly get is continued modest growth in manufacturing jobs,” said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research group in Washington.

Mr. Bergsten noted that manufacturing continued to become more efficient, meaning companies needed fewer and fewer workers. American manufacturers produced roughly the same amount of goods in 2010 as they did a decade before, but they did so with six million fewer employees on their payrolls. Mr. Bergsten also argued that sending jobs to other countries continued to make sense for many global firms. “You’re trying to buck two major trends,” he said.

Some economists also questioned whether Washington should be giving manufacturing a hand at all.

“It’s totally implausible to think that there’s going to be a surge in manufacturing jobs,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard. Broader measures to improve American infrastructure and education, he said, would be more effective in creating middle-class jobs.

But the White House says that manufacturing offers significant potential for new jobs — jobs that require more skills and offer better pay than the assembly lines 30 or 40 years ago. And it says that even modest incentives might make a difference.

To that end, the administration has put together a far-ranging set of proposals: cutting taxes for manufacturers that produce goods in the United States, taking away tax breaks for businesses that move jobs offshore, doubling a tax deduction for makers of high-tech goods, providing support to businesses investing in areas where factories are closing, expanding worker training programs and creating a new task force to better enforce trade rules and intellectual property rights. Closing a loophole that allows companies to shift profits abroad would pay for the tax credits, the White House says.

It all adds up to what economists might call an industrial policy, the out-of-favor practice of using tariffs, taxes and other measures to help a particular industry. The White House avoids the term because it implies that the government is picking winners and losers. It argues that its proposals are a moderate plan to aid businesses deciding whether to move jobs overseas.

Countries like Germany, Japan and China offer far larger tax breaks and financing support to their manufacturers, the administration argues. Such countries have “been in a bear hug” with manufacturers, said Fred P. Hochberg, president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal agency. “We’ve held them at arm’s length.”

Mr. Hochberg said a focus on manufacturing and exports might lead to more sustainable growth. “For the last three decades, we’ve relied on the U.S. consumer for growth,” he said. “But now we’re seeing growth coming from an investment in infrastructure happening in the emerging economies,” where American companies should be selling their wares and expertise.

The administration also called for a focus on manufacturing because of its spillover effects on the economy. “We do believe that manufacturing punches above its weight economically,” said Mr. Sperling of the National Economic Council. “Advanced manufacturing is critical to your innovative capacity as a country.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Through April 9, 2012

Kunshalle Zurich

Mike Kelley, one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in South Pasadena, Calif. He was 57.

Some of Mr. Kelley’s artwork included sculptural pieces using stuffed animals, like “Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites.”

Sgt. Robert Bartl of the South Pasadena police said it appeared that Mr. Kelley had committed suicide. Speaking to The Associated Press, he said a friend of Mr. Kelley’s had told investigators that Mr. Kelley had been depressed after breaking up with a girlfriend.

An autopsy was to be performed, Sergeant Bartl said.

Mr. Kelley was born in Wayne, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, to a working class Roman Catholic family in October 1954. His father was in charge of maintenance for a public school system; his mother was a cook in the executive dining room at Ford Motor Company. He had early aspirations to be a novelist, but doubted his talent and found writing was too difficult, so he turned his energies to art, through painting, object-making and through music.

In high school he immersed himself in Detroit’s heavy metal music subculture, and that involvement continued through college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There he performed in a proto-punk noise band called Destroy All Monsters with three other artists, Jim Shaw, Niagara and Carey Loren, creating work that, with its combination of anti-establishment politics and Dada theatrics, had close connections to performance art.

He brought this interest with him to graduate school in 1978 at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif. There he formed a second art-band, “The Poetics,” with fellow students John Miller and Tony Oursler. He absorbed, with some resistance, the school’s overriding focus on Conceptual Art and theory, eased into by the embracing approach of teachers like John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson and Douglas Huebler.

He began creating multimedia installations that synthesized large-scale drawings and paintings, often incorporating his own writing, along with sculptures, videos (one was based on the television show “Captain Kangaroo”), and performances, often scatological and sadomasochistic in nature. Although he stopped performing in 1986 — he later said that he always had to get drunk to do it — the other formal elements remained constants in his art.

A certain tone or attitude remained constant, too. The shorthand term for it is abjection, a deliberate immersion in the gross-out anarchy associated with youth culture. But to see only that was to miss the deep and covered-up strain of poetry in his work, evident in a series of sculptural pieces using children’s stuffed animals sewn onto or covered over with hand-knitted afghans.

On one level, the pieces were sardonic send-ups of aesthetic trends like Minimalism, which Mr. Kelley despised as elitist. On another, they took aim at the strain of too-easy sentimentality he found repellent in popular culture. At yet another level, these pieces, with their martyred dolls and ruined promise of warmth, were innocence-and-experience metaphors, suggesting the trauma of hurt and loss that underlay the juvenile delinquent antics that surrounded them.

By the mid-1980s, he was already gaining attention nationally and internationally. His career took off earlier in Europe than it did in the United States; he found enthusiastic audiences in France and Germany, at a time when Americans still didn’t know quite what to do with him, this artist who made drawings of garbage, parodied both religious art and underground politics, and made pieces with titles like “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile.” Mystifying as they were at the time, they have given inspiration to countless young artists since.

The band Sonic Youth used Mr. Kelley’s work on the album cover for “Dirty,” released in 1992.

Mr. Kelley began having regular one-man exhibitions at Metro Pictures in Manhattan in 1982, and at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles the following year. In 2005, he had his first solo show at Gagosian gallery in New York City, which was representing him at his death. A retrospective, “Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes,” appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993 and traveled to Los Angeles and Munich; a second retrospective appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 1997; and a third was at the Tate Liverpool in 2004.

Work by Mr. Kelley will be in the upcoming Whitney Biennial; it will be his eighth appearance in that show.

Mr. Kelley is survived by a brother, George.

February 11 – March 31, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 11 / 4-7pm
Gallery Talk: Monday, February 13 / 10 am

CSUN as part of Pacific Standard Time

Thanks to Jim Sweeters

By DENNIS OVERBYE
NY Times Published: January 29, 2012

HAT CREEK, Calif. — E.T. might be phoning, but do we care enough to take the call?

Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — SETI, for short — which had been interrupted last year by a lack of financing.

Early in December, a brace of 42 radio telescopes, known as the Allen Telescope Array, nestled here in the shadow of Lassen Peak, came to life and resumed hopping from star to star in the constellation Cygnus, listening for radio broadcasts from alien civilizations. The lines are now open, but with lingering financial problems, how long they will remain that way is anybody’s guess.

These should be boom times for those seeking out aliens, or at least their radio proxy.

Astronomers now know that the galaxy is teeming with at least as many planets — the presumed sites of life — as stars. Advanced life and technology might be rare in the cosmos, said Geoffrey W. Marcy, the Watson and Marilyn Alberts in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but surely they are out there, because the number of Earthlike planets in the Milky Way galaxy is simply too great.”

A simple “howdy,” a squeal or squawk, or an incomprehensible stream of numbers captured by one of the antennas here at the University of California’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory would be enough to end our cosmic loneliness and change history, not to mention science. It would answer one of the most profound questions humans ask: Are we alone in the universe?

Despite decades of space probes and billions of NASA dollars looking for life out there, there is still only one example of life in the universe: the DNA-based web of biology on Earth. “In this field,” said Jill Tarter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the “number two is the all-important number. We count one, two, infinity. We’re all looking for number two.”

But the story of SETI is the story of a dream deferred by politics, a lack of money and the technological challenges of searching what astronomers call “the cosmic haystack”: 100 billion stars in the galaxy and 9 billion narrow-band radio channels on which aliens, if they exist, might be trying to hail us.

Politics and the recession have crimped astronomers’ budgets and left the institute’s scientists with a kind of siege mentality. Last spring, the University of California ran out of money to run the Hat Creek observatory, forcing the Allen telescopes into hibernation. In order to continue the search, astronomers are negotiating a deal to share the telescopes with the Air Force, which wants to use them to track satellites and space junk.

No federal funds have been spent searching for radio signals from extraterrestrials since 1993.

A recent visit to the SETI Institute’s Mountain View offices found many of the cubicles empty and the corridors eerily quiet. Last summer, as the Allen telescopes slumbered, weeds grew around them.

998,000 Stars to Go

The story begins with a young radio astronomer named Frank Drake, who pointed an antenna from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., at a pair of stars in 1960, wondering if he could make contact with anything or anyone.

All he got was static, but the hook was set.

In 1971, NASA held a workshop led by Barney Oliver, the research chief of Hewlett-Packard, that concluded the best way to find extraterrestrials was with a $10 billion array of giant radio telescopes called Cyclops. The price tag — as well as the subject — set off alarm bells that still reverberate.

In 1978, Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, an outspoken critic of what he considered wasteful government spending, awarded one of his infamous “Golden Fleece” awards to the hunt for aliens, and in 1993, a NASA-sponsored survey for signals from 1,000 nearby stars was canceled by Congress. With the help of friends like Dr. Oliver in the Silicon Valley, Dr. Tarter and her colleagues took the search private.

As the director of SETI research at the institute, Dr. Tarter, 67, has become the public face of the cause, and she was consulted by the actress Jodie Foster about her portrayal of Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer who finds a signal, in the movie “Contact.”

Dr. Tarter was recruited in 1976, when, as a postdoctorate student at Berkeley, she read the Cyclops report, a rite of passage for most alien-oriented astronomers.

“You didn’t have to ask a priest or philosopher about life in the universe,” Dr. Tarter said. But she realized she was in the first generation who could conduct experiments about it. A half-century and roughly 2,000 stars later, humanity is still officially alone.

Dr. Drake is undaunted, noting that there are 100 billion suitable stars in the galaxy. His personal estimate, based on an equation he invented in 1961, is that there are 10,000 technological civilizations in the galaxy, one per million stars.

“I’ve known all along we have to look at a million stars,” he said. Now a cherubic 81, Dr. Drake is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former chairman of the SETI Institute.

The Allen Array, which was designed to find Dr. Drake his million stars, is named after Paul G. Allen, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, who put up $25 million to get the project going. Jointly owned and operated by the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute, it was to consist of 350 antennas, 20 feet in diameter, that were to be mass-produced like satellite dishes.

The full array would be able to map a swath of sky several full moons in diameter in only 10 minutes, or the whole sky in a night — of great interest to astronomers and, as it turned out, to the military.

But Mr. Allen’s contribution was only enough to build 42 antennas, which started operating in 2007. The astronomers say that another $55 million would complete the array, but there have been no volunteers yet.

The project got a lift in 2009 when Dr. Tarter won a $100,000 prize and “One Wish to Change the World” at the TED conference — short for Technology, Entertainment and Design — in Long Beach, Calif. Her talk there began, “The story of humans is the story of ideas.” It elicited a donation of valuable equipment from Dell and Intel.

The project got another lift — mainly psychological — last year when NASA, whose Kepler spacecraft is beaming back news about the patch of Cygnus that it surveys, published its first list of 1,235 exoplanet candidates.

As Dr. Tarter told a conference of exoplanet hunters recently: “We’re not just pointing at stars. We’re pointing where you have shown us there are planets, and perhaps technologists.”

But the recession and the cutbacks that followed wiped out the university’s funds to run the Hat Creek observatory just as it was getting started on a survey of Kepler’s planets. The Allen telescopes went quiet, and the astronomical staff left.

An appeal for financing went out on the institute’s Web site, which eventually brought in about $220,000 — roughly two months’ worth of operating expenses. Meanwhile, the Air Force was interested in using the radio telescopes.

The array, Dr. Tarter explained, turns out to be adept at tracking satellites and space junk, a possibility first identified as early as 2004 in a memo by her husband, William Welch, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is known as Jack. “There’s a long tradition of radio astronomy and the military scratching each other’s backs,” Dr. Tarter said.

Under terms of an agreement still being negotiated, the Air Force will pay for a share of the operations at Hat Creek, which costs about $1.5 million (plus another $1 million a year to pay the astronomers). The money raised so far will buy a few months at best.

Welcome All Species

The astronomers started bringing their equipment back to Hat Creek in September. The place looked neglected.

“Nobody had cut the weeds,” Dr. Tarter said. “It looked so sad.”

Early in December, when Dr. Tarter and Dr. Welch returned to Hat Creek in Dr. Welch’s Cessna with a reporter in tow, the weeds had been cut and the antennas were majestically turning to a music only they could hear. Scattered across a meadow, they resembled the forest of satellite dishes you see outside events like the Super Bowl.

Nearby in an unassuming ranch house, racks of electronics and computers hummed with life. The doormat read, “Welcome All Species.”

Inside, Dr. Tarter plopped down in front of a computer and watched with a suspicious eye as the display popped with a row of numbers indicating that a narrow-band signal — the signature of an artificial source — had been detected.

She takes great pride in the fact that she and her colleagues have never published a false alarm, and she nodded approvingly as the telescope and computers went through the process of eliminating the new signal from consideration. The Earth’s motion will cause the frequency of a signal from the sky to drift in frequency, for example. The checklist has grown over the years, she said.

Within a few minutes they were back scanning a new part of the spectrum. The computers will check a persistent signal five times, moving the telescope on and off it, before calling someone to discuss it — “whoever is on the desk,” Dr. Tarter said.

The next step would be to call the director of an observatory to the west (since that is the way the sky rotates) and ask for continued observation.

“We’ve gotten six hours into it four times,” Dr. Tarter said. One dramatic moment was in 1998, when Dr. Tarter and her colleagues were working at the observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., and had a signal they could just not eliminate.

Finally they figured out that they were actually receiving transmissions from the European SOHO satellite.

“We went to bed,” Dr. Tarter said.

“It was a real adrenaline pumping time,” she added. “I can’t imagine what the real deal will be.”

Almine Rech

Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.

For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”

This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.

And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.

The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.

Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID BARBOZA
NY Times Published: January 25, 2012

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.

Apple, in its published reports, has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of this article, but the company declined to comment. The reporting is based on interviews with more than three dozen current or former employees and contractors, including a half-dozen current or former executives with firsthand knowledge of Apple’s supplier responsibility group, as well as others within the technology industry.

In 2010, Steven P. Jobs discussed the company’s relationships with suppliers at an industry conference.

“I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain,” said Mr. Jobs, who was Apple’s chief executive at the time and who died last October.

“I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”

Others, including workers inside such plants, acknowledge the cafeterias and medical facilities, but insist conditions are punishing.

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

The Road to Chengdu

In the fall of 2010, about six months before the explosion in the iPad factory, Lai Xiaodong carefully wrapped his clothes around his college diploma, so it wouldn’t crease in his suitcase. He told friends he would no longer be around for their weekly poker games, and said goodbye to his teachers. He was leaving for Chengdu, a city of 12 million that was rapidly becoming one of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.

Though painfully shy, Mr. Lai had surprised everyone by persuading a beautiful nursing student to become his girlfriend. She wanted to marry, she said, and so his goal was to earn enough money to buy an apartment.

Factories in Chengdu manufacture products for hundreds of companies. But Mr. Lai was focused on Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.

Foxconn’s factory in Chengdu, Mr. Lai knew, was special. Inside, workers were building Apple’s latest, potentially greatest product: the iPad.

When Mr. Lai finally landed a job repairing machines at the plant, one of the first things he noticed were the almost blinding lights. Shifts ran 24 hours a day, and the factory was always bright. At any moment, there were thousands of workers standing on assembly lines or sitting in backless chairs, crouching next to large machinery, or jogging between loading bays. Some workers’ legs swelled so much they waddled. “It’s hard to stand all day,” said Zhao Sheng, a plant worker.

Banners on the walls warned the 120,000 employees: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” Apple’s supplier code of conduct dictates that, except in unusual circumstances, employees are not supposed to work more than 60 hours a week. But at Foxconn, some worked more, according to interviews, workers’ pay stubs and surveys by outside groups. Mr. Lai was soon spending 12 hours a day, six days a week inside the factory, according to his paychecks. Employees who arrived late were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. There were “continuous shifts,” when workers were told to work two stretches in a row, according to interviews.

Mr. Lai’s college degree enabled him to earn a salary of around $22 a day, including overtime — more than many others. When his days ended, he would retreat to a small bedroom just big enough for a mattress, wardrobe and a desk where he obsessively played an online game called Fight the Landlord, said his girlfriend, Luo Xiaohong.

Those accommodations were better than many of the company’s dorms, where 70,000 Foxconn workers lived, at times stuffed 20 people to a three-room apartment, employees said. Last year, a dispute over paychecks set off a riot in one of the dormitories, and workers started throwing bottles, trash cans and flaming paper from their windows, according to witnesses. Two hundred police officers wrestled with workers, arresting eight. Afterward, trash cans were removed, and piles of rubbish — and rodents — became a problem. Mr. Lai felt lucky to have a place of his own.

Foxconn, in a statement, disputed workers’ accounts of continuous shifts, extended overtime, crowded living accommodations and the causes of the riot. The company said that its operations adhered to customers’ codes of conduct, industry standards and national laws. “Conditions at Foxconn are anything but harsh,” the company wrote. Foxconn also said that it had never been cited by a customer or government for under-age or overworked employees or toxic exposures.

“All assembly line employees are given regular breaks, including one-hour lunch breaks,” the company wrote, and only 5 percent of assembly line workers are required to stand to carry out their tasks. Work stations have been designed to ergonomic standards, and employees have opportunities for job rotation and promotion, the statement said.

“Foxconn has a very good safety record,” the company wrote. “Foxconn has come a long way in our efforts to lead our industry in China in areas such as workplace conditions and the care and treatment of our employees.”

Apple’s Code of Conduct

In 2005, some of Apple’s top executives gathered inside their Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for a special meeting. Other companies had created codes of conduct to police their suppliers. It was time, Apple decided, to follow suit. The code Apple published that year demands “that working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.”

But the next year, a British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, secretly visited a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPods were manufactured, and reported on workers’ long hours, push-ups meted out as punishment and crowded dorms. Executives in Cupertino were shocked. “Apple is filled with really good people who had no idea this was going on,” a former employee said. “We wanted it changed, immediately.”

Apple audited that factory, the company’s first such inspection, and ordered improvements. Executives also undertook a series of initiatives that included an annual audit report, first published in 2007. By last year, Apple had inspected 396 facilities — including the company’s direct suppliers, as well as many of those suppliers’ suppliers — one of the largest such programs within the electronics industry.

Those audits have found consistent violations of Apple’s code of conduct, according to summaries published by the company. In 2007, for instance, Apple conducted over three dozen audits, two-thirds of which indicated that employees regularly worked more than 60 hours a week. In addition, there were six “core violations,” the most serious kind, including hiring 15-year-olds as well as falsifying records.

Over the next three years, Apple conducted 312 audits, and every year, about half or more showed evidence of large numbers of employees laboring more than six days a week as well as working extended overtime. Some workers received less than minimum wage or had pay withheld as punishment. Apple found 70 core violations over that period, including cases of involuntary labor, under-age workers, record falsifications, improper disposal of hazardous waste and over a hundred workers injured by toxic chemical exposures.

Last year, the company conducted 229 audits. There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions.

“If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.”

Apple says that when an audit reveals a violation, the company requires suppliers to address the problem within 90 days and make changes to prevent a recurrence. “If a supplier is unwilling to change, we terminate our relationship,” the company says on its Web site.

The seriousness of that threat, however, is unclear. Apple has found violations in hundreds of audits, but fewer than 15 suppliers have been terminated for transgressions since 2007, according to former Apple executives.

“Once the deal is set and Foxconn becomes an authorized Apple supplier, Apple will no longer give any attention to worker conditions or anything that is irrelevant to its products,” said Mr. Li, the former Foxconn manager. Mr. Li spent seven years with Foxconn in Shenzhen and Chengdu and was forced out in April after he objected to a relocation to Chengdu, he said. Foxconn disputed his comments, and said “both Foxconn and Apple take the welfare of our employees very seriously.”

Apple’s efforts have spurred some changes. Facilities that were reaudited “showed continued performance improvements and better working conditions,” the company wrote in its 2011 supplier responsibility progress report. In addition, the number of audited facilities has grown every year, and some executives say those expanding efforts obscure year-to-year improvements.

Apple also has trained over a million workers about their rights and methods for injury and disease prevention. A few years ago, after auditors insisted on interviewing low-level factory employees, they discovered that some had been forced to pay onerous “recruitment fees” — which Apple classifies as involuntary labor. As of last year, the company had forced suppliers to reimburse more than $6.7 million in such charges.

“Apple is a leader in preventing under-age labor,” said Dionne Harrison of Impactt, a firm paid by Apple to help prevent and respond to child labor among its suppliers. “They’re doing as much as they possibly can.”

Other consultants disagree.

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

‘We Could Have Saved Lives’

In 2006, BSR, along with a division of the World Bank and other groups, initiated a project to improve working conditions in factories building cellphones and other devices in China and elsewhere. The groups and companies pledged to test various ideas. Foxconn agreed to participate.

For four months, BSR and another group negotiated with Foxconn regarding a pilot program to create worker “hotlines,” so that employees could report abusive conditions, seek mental counseling and discuss workplace problems. Apple was not a participant in the project, but was briefed on it, according to the BSR consultant, who had detailed knowledge.

As negotiations proceeded, Foxconn’s requirements for participation kept changing. First Foxconn asked to shift from installing new hotlines to evaluating existing hotlines. Then Foxconn insisted that mental health counseling be excluded. Foxconn asked participants to sign agreements saying they would not disclose what they observed, and then rewrote those agreements multiple times. Finally, an agreement was struck, and the project was scheduled to begin in January 2008. A day before the start, Foxconn demanded more changes, until it was clear the project would not proceed, according to the consultant and a 2008 summary by BSR that did not name Foxconn.

The next year, a Foxconn employee fell or jumped from an apartment building after losing an iPhone prototype. Over the next two years, at least 18 other Foxconn workers attempted suicide or fell from buildings in manners that suggested suicide attempts. In 2010, two years after the pilot program fell apart and after multiple suicide attempts, Foxconn created a dedicated mental health hotline and began offering free psychological counseling.

“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H.P. and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep an arm’s length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.”

BSR, in a written statement, said the views of that consultant were not those of the company.

“My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company’s standards and the expectations of consumers,” wrote Aron Cramer, BSR’s president. Mr. Cramer added that asking Apple to pressure Foxconn would have been inconsistent with the purpose of the pilot program, and there were multiple reasons the pilot program did not proceed.

Foxconn, in a statement, said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address suicides, and “the record has shown that those measures have been successful.”

A Demanding Client

Every month, officials at companies from around the world trek to Cupertino or invite Apple executives to visit their foreign factories, all in pursuit of a goal: becoming a supplier.

When news arrives that Apple is interested in a particular product or service, small celebrations often erupt. Whiskey is drunk. Karaoke is sung.

Then, Apple’s requests start.

Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits.

So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies.

“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues, including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins. Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis.

Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.

Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to fix the ventilation system.

That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to speak with some of them.

Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

Wintek is still one of Apple’s most important suppliers. Wintek, in a statement, declined to comment except to say that after the episode, the company took “ample measures” to address the situation and “is committed to ensuring employee welfare and creating a safe and healthy work environment.”

Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions.

“Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packard’s supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”

The Explosion

On the afternoon of the blast at the iPad plant, Lai Xiaodong telephoned his girlfriend, as he did every day. They had hoped to see each other that evening, but Mr. Lai’s manager said he had to work overtime, he told her.

He had been promoted quickly at Foxconn, and after just a few months was in charge of a team that maintained the machines that polished iPad cases. The sanding area was loud and hazy with aluminum dust. Workers wore masks and earplugs, but no matter how many times they showered, they were recognizable by the slight aluminum sparkle in their hair and at the corners of their eyes.

Just two weeks before the explosion, an advocacy group in Hong Kong published a report warning of unsafe conditions at the Chengdu plant, including problems with aluminum dust. The group, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, or Sacom, had videotaped workers covered with tiny aluminum particles. “Occupational health and safety issues in Chengdu are alarming,” the report read. “Workers also highlight the problem of poor ventilation and inadequate personal protective equipment.”

A copy of that report was sent to Apple. “There was no response,” said Debby Chan Sze Wan of the group. “A few months later I went to Cupertino, and went into the Apple lobby, but no one would meet with me. I’ve never heard from anyone from Apple at all.”

The morning of the explosion, Mr. Lai rode his bicycle to work. The iPad had gone on sale just weeks earlier, and workers were told thousands of cases needed to be polished each day. The factory was frantic, employees said. Rows of machines buffed cases as masked employees pushed buttons. Large air ducts hovered over each station, but they could not keep up with the three lines of machines polishing nonstop. Aluminum dust was everywhere.

Dust is a known safety hazard. In 2003, an aluminum dust explosion in Indiana destroyed a wheel factory and killed a worker. In 2008, agricultural dust inside a sugar factory in Georgia caused an explosion that killed 14.

Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.

Then the screams began.

When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.

At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said.

Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.

“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him.”

“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”

After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.

Foxconn, in a statement, said that at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.

In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.

“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.

For Mr. Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”

Hitting the Apple Lottery

Every year, as rumors about Apple’s forthcoming products start to emerge, trade publications and Web sites begin speculating about which suppliers are likely to win the Apple lottery. Getting a contract from Apple can lift a company’s value by millions because of the implied endorsement of manufacturing quality. But few companies openly brag about the work: Apple generally requires suppliers to sign contracts promising they will not divulge anything, including the partnership.

That lack of transparency gives Apple an edge at keeping its plans secret. But it also has been a barrier to improving working conditions, according to advocates and former Apple executives.

This month, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, including The New York Times, Apple released the names of 156 of its suppliers. In the report accompanying that list, Apple said they “account for more than 97 percent of what we pay to suppliers to manufacture our products.”

However, the company has not revealed the names of hundreds of other companies that do not directly contract with Apple, but supply the suppliers. The company’s supplier list does not disclose where factories are, and many are hard to find. And independent monitoring organizations say when they have tried to inspect Apple’s suppliers, they have been barred from entry — on Apple’s orders, they have been told.

“We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times,” said a former executive in Apple’s supplier responsibility group. “There is a genuine, companywide commitment to the code of conduct. But taking it to the next level and creating real change conflicts with secrecy and business goals, and so there’s only so far we can go.” Former Apple employees say they were generally prohibited from engaging with most outside groups.

“There’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything,” the former executive said.

Some other technology companies operate differently.

“We talk to a lot of outsiders,” said Gary Niekerk, director of corporate citizenship at Intel. “The world’s complex, and unless we’re dialoguing with outside groups, we miss a lot.”

Given Apple’s prominence and leadership in global manufacturing, if the company were to radically change its ways, it could overhaul how business is done. “Every company wants to be Apple,” said Sasha Lezhnev at the Enough Project, a group focused on corporate accountability. “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.”

But ultimately, say former Apple executives, there are few real outside pressures for change. Apple is one of the most admired brands. In a national survey conducted by The New York Times in November, 56 percent of respondents said they couldn’t think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent said the worst thing about the company was that its products were too expensive. Just 2 percent mentioned overseas labor practices.

People like Ms. White of Harvard say that until consumers demand better conditions in overseas factories — as they did for companies like Nike and Gap, which today have overhauled conditions among suppliers — or regulators act, there is little impetus for radical change. Some Apple insiders agree.

“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive.

“And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs remains a major sore point for most Americans. But owners of some of the nation’s most popular electronics — including iPhones and iPads — are less concerned than other Americans about where their purchases are made, according to a nationwide survey conducted by The New York Times.

Apple, meanwhile, remains a hugely popular American company. More than three-quarters of respondents said they had a very favorable or mostly favorable opinion of Apple.

The Times poll found that most Americans considered it very important to buy American-made products.

Over all, 52 percent of the public said it was very important that the products they buy were made in the United States; only 42 percent of owners of Apple products agreed.

Outsourcing, they say, is clearly a cause of fewer jobs domestically. And two-thirds of the public wants American companies to shoulder a lot of responsibility to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States.

“Things would be more expensive if they were made here, and companies want to cut costs. Everything seems to be about money,” said Dannie Gilchrist of Oskaloosa, Iowa, in a follow-up interview. “I would be willing to pay more for items manufactured here,” he added, volunteering that he owned an iPad. “I think if people knew products were made entirely overseas they wouldn’t buy as much of them.”

Owners of Apple products were largely aware that Apple products had a large foreign manufacturing component. Most, 54 percent, said they were made partly in the United States and partly overseas, 18 percent said entirely overseas, 8 percent said entirely in the United States and 20 percent said they did not know.

“I had no idea where they are made. But 90 percent of the products we have in America are made overseas,” Mariann Bellville of Haverhill, Mass., said. “We don’t like it, but we don’t have a heck of a choice. You can’t get a coffee pot made totally in this country.”

The poll, conducted Nov. 18-21, interviewed 951 adults using both landlines and cellphones. Percentages for all adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points; for owners of Apple devices it is plus or minus five percentage points.

Ei Arakawa
Math Bass
Ben Carlson
Nikolas Gambaroff
Nathan Hylden
Dianna Molzan
Paul Sietsema

January 29th – March 10th, 2012
Opening Sunday, January 29, 6 to 8 pm

Overduin and Kite

I hope President Obama read about Maddie Parlier as he was working on his State of the Union address. Parlier is the subject of Adam Davidson’s illuminating article in the current issue of The Atlantic.

Parlier’s father abandoned her when she was young and crashed his car while driving drunk, killing himself and a family of four. Maddie is smart and hard-working. She did reasonably well in high school but got pregnant her senior year.

She and the father of her child split up, which put the kibosh on her college dreams because she couldn’t afford day care. She temped for a while. Her work ethic got her noticed, and she got a job as an unskilled laborer at Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors.

Parlier earns about $13 an hour. She’d like to become one of the better-paid workers in the plant, but, in today’s factories, that requires an enormous leap in skills. It feels cruel, Davidson writes, to mention all the things Parlier would have to learn to move up. She doesn’t know the computer language that runs the machines. “She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.”

A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream.

Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.

Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.

Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.

Over the past 40 years, women’s wages have risen sharply but, as Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project point out, median incomes of men have dropped 28 percent and male labor force participation rates are down 16 percent. Next time somebody talks to you about wage stagnation, have them break it down by sex. It’s not only globalization and technological change causing this stagnation. It’s the deterioration of the moral and social landscape, especially for men.

The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.

Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.

If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.

Jessica Dickinson, Liam Everett, Alex Olson, Josh Smith
Garth Weiser

January 5 – February 25, 2012

altmansiegel

January 7 – February 12th, 2012

CANADA

Thanks to Matt Connors

By CAROL VOGEL
NY Times Published: January 20, 2012

ELLSWORTH KELLY’S studio here is a sprawling labyrinth of white-walled rooms, some with skylights, some with large windows looking out onto the rolling landscape. The walls are either bare or impeccably hung with a selection of Mr. Kelly’s striking painting reliefs. Everything is simple, spare and modern with one exception: at the entrance is a small mustard-yellow ladder-back chair with a multicolored woven straw seat inspired by van Gogh’s paintings of his bedroom in Arles.

“I did this in shop class in sixth grade,” Mr. Kelly said during a visit one recent wintry afternoon. “It was my first color spectrum.”

“The negative,” he went on, pointing to the spaces between the slats in the back, “is just as important as the positive.”

A classic observation coming from this 88-year-old artist, whose seven-decade career has been an unwavering exploration of shape, line and color in their purest forms. While many other artists of his generation were appropriating images of American flags or movie stars or newspaper clippings, Mr. Kelly was relentlessly immersed in abstraction: creating color spectrums and panel paintings with nothing but a giant curve or rectangle, or making drawings depicting the simple outline of a leaf.

Refusing to be labeled a Minimalist or Abstract Expressionist, he spent decades fighting for attention, while others of his generation — Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — were grabbing the spotlight.

“Ellsworth never tried to second-guess art history,” said Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art. Yet while Mr. Kelly’s lifelong focus on abstraction in paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and prints may not have been a smart career move — there were years, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, when his work went ignored and unsold — now it appears that the tide has turned.

Abstraction is hot again, with canvases by Gerhard Richter fetching astronomical prices at auction and the recent Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was a crowd pleaser. Reflecting on the multiple exhibitions of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings that opened this month in Gagosian’s 11 galleries around the world, Mr. Kelly said: “He’s been able to get a lot of attention, making color and form stand alone. That’s something that has taken me decades.”

“Time has always been very important in my work,” he added. “Tastes have changed recently, and although abstraction has been difficult, people are more open to it now.” As a result Mr. Kelly finds himself more in demand than ever before. In July two 18-foot-high wall sculptures were installed on the facade of the American Embassy in Beijing. He is juggling several new sculpture commissions and has a full schedule of museum exhibitions, including one of his wood sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a show of black-and-white works that closes this weekend at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and reopens on March 1 at the Museum Wiesbaden. Another exhibition of prints and paintings will open this weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in June the Metropolitan Museum of Art will offer a show of his plant drawings.

Meanwhile the Chelsea art dealer Matthew Marks turned to Mr. Kelly for the opening of his first gallery in Los Angeles, a former garage in West Hollywood that has been turned into an all-white 3,500-square-foot space. Not only will it be filled with Mr. Kelly’s works, but he has transformed the facade with a black sculpture in relief along the top, inspired by a collage and a painting he did in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Ellsworth has been fearless in his commitment to the limitless possibilities of abstraction,” said James Cuno, chief executive and president of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, who first met Mr. Kelly in 1989 and has exhibited and commissioned his work in various museums where Mr. Cuno has been a director, including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and the Art Institute of Chicago. “With concentrated imaginative power he has made some of the most beautiful and important paintings of the Modernist era. And he is at the height of his powers, not elegiac but ecstatic, filled with the wonder of seeing the world afresh.”

Tearing around his studio in gray flannel pants and sneakers, hampered only by long tubes for the oxygen machine that he is hooked up to because of a recent lung condition — possibly caused by years of inhaling turpentine, oil paint and other materials in his studio — Mr. Kelly was animated. With an almost boyish energy and laser-sharp memory that make him seem a lot younger than his years, he spoke about his work, his recent surge of popularity and his life in this secluded hamlet in upstate New York, a few miles west of Stockbridge, Mass.

In one of the largest rooms he pointed out a brightly splattered area he called his painting wall. Unlike younger artists, including Mr. Hirst and Jeff Koons, who often direct studio assistants, Mr. Kelly creates everything with his own hand. “I wouldn’t feel right doing it any other way,” he said. “Kids do anything these days, but I’m still an old-fashioned painter. Maybe in a few years when I’m too old, I’ll need help, but what am I going to do, say to an assistant, put the yellow there?”

Mr. Kelly was staring at a group of painting reliefs — simple forms with dramatic combinations of orange and blue, dark blue and black, green and blue, black and white — that filled the adjacent walls. They were drying, each with long wood strips separating the background canvas from the colored relief panel in front. “I have to wait a week for each to dry,” he said. “Oil takes that long, sometimes longer. I don’t like acrylic because you can’t get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint the surface gets better and richer.”

Creating these unframed relief paintings, he explained, is his way of “going into the viewer’s space,” adding, “If I painted it all on one canvas, it wouldn’t have the depth. It would be flat.”

“What I’ve made is real — underline the word real,” he added. “It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.”

Mr. Kelly has been experimenting with the notion of painted reliefs since he lived in Paris in 1949. “I began with cardboard painted reliefs,” he said. “Some of them were all white. And I’ve continued this relief work ever since. I like the relief of Romanesque architecture.”

He draws constantly, sometimes making tiny sketches on a scrap of paper, even a folded cigarette carton picked up on a New York City street because the shape caught his eye. Often he’ll save these bits and use them years later as inspiration. Some start out as drawings and over time morph into a painting or a monumental sculpture. The lyrical, folded sculpture outside the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for example, started out as a three-inch piece of cardboard that developed into a sketch, then a sculpture in wood, then aluminum, then steel, becoming refined with each incarnation. “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch,” said Mr. Marks, his dealer. “He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”

The actress Gwyneth Paltrow is a big fan of Mr. Kelly’s work and has been collecting his plant drawings since 1997, “as soon as I got my first paycheck,” she said in a telephone interview. “There are certain artists you have a visceral reaction to, and Ellsworth is one of them.” The two met when she was in a play in Williamstown, Mass. “He came backstage and introduced himself,” she recalled.

Mr. Kelly grew up in Oradell, N.J., the second of three sons. His father was an insurance company executive. After serving in the Army during World War II he moved to Boston, where he qualified under the G.I. Bill for tuition at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. There he studied old master painting and drawing and taught night classes in art in the Roxbury neighborhood, in exchange for room and board.

He moved to Paris in 1948 and got to know John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the Surrealist artist Jean Arp and the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whose simplification of natural forms had a lasting effect on him.

He moved to New York in 1954, settling in a 19th-century loft on an old dock called Coenties Slip, near Wall Street. At the time artists living nearby — like Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman, Rauschenberg and Mr. Johns — were creating pioneering work that bridged Abstract Expressionist and the Pop and Minimalism of the 1960s. The Abstract painter Agnes Martin lived in the same building, and the two became close friends and exchanged ideas about their work.

During these years Mr. Kelly created single canvases of hand-drawn shapes that were different from his Paris paintings, which were mostly panels, each canvas a separate color. He also joined several powerful galleries: Betty Parsons, then Sidney Janis and later Leo Castelli. Although he got some attention, he was eclipsed by bigger stars like Rauschenberg and Mr. Johns.

In 1970 he decided to abandon the city’s flourishing art scene, putting down roots here, where he still lives with Jack Shear, a photographer. In the ensuing decades he has worked steadily, if quietly. Despite some ups and downs his art has been purchased by museums and collectors around the world. He has also had shows at numerous galleries and museums, including a giant retrospective in 1996 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate in London and the Haus der Kunst.

Mr. Marks, who has been his dealer for 20 years, recalled that when he first began representing Mr. Kelly, a German dealer said to him: “Why did you take on Ellsworth Kelly? He’s so boring.”

“I ignored it,” Mr. Marks recalled.

An obsessive archivist, Mr. Kelly has kept examples of his work from every decade of his career, studying them continually for inspiration, as a way to move forward. “He’s the last artist to repeat himself,” Mr. Storr said. “But he always comes back to his basic vocabulary: surface, scale, color, image. And he always gets it as simple as he can.”

The facade of Mr. Marks’s new Los Angeles gallery, for instance, was inspired by ”Study for Black and White Panels,” a collage he made while living in Paris in 1954, and a painting, “Black Over White,” created in New York 12 years later. Both are predominantly white with a black bar that floats in relief on the upper portion of the all-white stucco facade.

“He’s making art as good as the art that inspired him when he was in Paris,” Mr. Storr said. Comparing him to Mr. Johns, perhaps the only other major artist of his generation who is actively working today, Mr. Storr continued: “To a great extent Jasper is a literary artist. His work is coded with secret messages. Ellsworth is purely a visual artist. With Ellsworth there is no message, just an experience.”

January 22, 2012–April 22, 2012

LACMA

By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER
NY Times Published: January 21, 2012

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
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But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

In Foxconn City

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

Paydays for Apple

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.

While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Innovation’s Losers

Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.

Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.

What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.

In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.

“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “But will someone in his 40s have the skills for them? Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”

The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.

Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

There wasn’t even a tiny scratch on the screen.

David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampell contributed reporting.

IF you want to understand how great teachers transform lives, listen to the story of Olly Neal.

A recent study showed how a great elementary schoolteacher can raise the lifetime earnings of a single class by $700,000. After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment. If you think that, or if you scoff at the statistics, then listen to Neal.

In the late 1950s, Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity, and his father was a farmer with a second-grade education. Neal attended a small school for black children — this was in the segregated South — and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”

Neal adds: “She would have had good reason to say, ‘this boy is incorrigible.’ ”

A regular shoplifter back then, Neal was caught stealing from the store where he worked part time. He seemed headed for a life in trouble.

Carolyn F. Blakely, then a new teacher at the school (who retired last year as the dean of the Honors College that now bears her name at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), remembers Neal as an at-risk kid prone to challenge authority. At the time, even teachers in the school called students “Mr.” or “Miss,” but Neal disrupted class by addressing her impertinently as “Carolyn.”

To deal with kids like him, Blakely told me, “I’d go home and stand in front of the mirror and practice being mean.”

One day in 1957, in the fall of his senior year, Neal cut Blakely’s class and wandered in the library, set up by Grady, the English teacher whom he had tormented. Neal wasn’t a reader, but he spotted a book with a risqué cover of a sexy woman.

Called “The Treasure of Pleasant Valley,” it was by Frank Yerby, a black author, and it looked appealing. Neal says he thought of checking it out, but he didn’t want word to get out to any of his classmates that he was reading a novel. That would have been humiliating.

“So I stole it.”

Neal tucked the book under his jacket and took it home — and loved it. After finishing the book, he sneaked it back into the library. And there, on the shelf, he noticed another novel by Yerby. He stole that one as well.

This book was also terrific. And, to Neal’s surprise, when he returned it to the shelf after finishing it, he found yet another by Yerby.

Four times this happened, and he caught the book bug. “Reading got to be a thing I liked,” he says. His trajectory changed, and he later graduated to harder novels, including those by Albert Camus, and he turned to newspapers and magazines as well. He went to college and later to law school.

In 1991, Neal was appointed the first black district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas. A few years later, he became a judge, and then an appellate court judge.

But there’s more.

At a high school reunion, Grady stunned Neal by confiding to him that she had spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him, but then, in a flash of understanding, she realized his embarrassment at being seen checking out a book.

So Grady kept quiet. The next Saturday, she told him, she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another novel by Yerby. Finally, she found one, bought it and put it on the library bookshelf.

Twice more, Grady told Neal, she spent her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by Yerby — all in hopes of turning around a rude adolescent who had made her cry. She paid for the books out of her own pocket.

How can one measure Grady’s impact? Not only in Neal, but in the lives of those around him. His daughter, Karama, earned a doctorate in genetics, taught bioethics at Emory University, and now runs a community development program in Arkansas.

The big-hearted Grady, now dead, is a reminder that teachers may have the most important job in America. By all accounts, Grady transformed many other children as well, through more mundane methods.

To me, the lesson is that while there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer. That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time.

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers. The need for more pay is simple. In the 1950s, outstanding women like Grady didn’t have many alternatives, and they became teachers. Grady was black, so she didn’t have many options other than teaching black children in a segregated school.

Today, women like Grady often become doctors, lawyers or bankers — professions with far higher salaries. If we want to recruit and retain the best teachers, we simply have to pay more — while also more aggressively thinning out those who don’t succeed. It’s worth it.

“There are some kids who can’t be reached,” Neal acknowledges. “But there are some that you can reach every now and then.” As his life attests.

By PETER KEEPNEWS
NY Times Published: January 20, 2012

Etta James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the subtlest love songs, most indelibly in her signature hit, “At Last,” died on Friday morning in Riverside, Calif. She was 73.

Her manager, Lupe De Leon, said that the cause was complications of leukemia. Ms. James, who died at Riverside Community Hospital, had been undergoing treatment for some time for a number of conditions, including leukemia and dementia. She also lived in Riverside.

Ms. James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950s with records like “Good Rockin’ Daddy.” She is in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame.

She was also comfortable, and convincing, singing pop standards, as she did in 1961 with “At Last,” which was written in 1941 and originally recorded by Glenn Miller’s orchestra. And among her four Grammy Awards (including a lifetime-achievement honor in 2003) was one for best jazz vocal performance, which she won in 1995 for the album “Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday.”

Regardless of how she was categorized, she was admired. Expressing a common sentiment, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in 1990 that she had “one of the great voices in American popular music, with a huge range, a multiplicity of tones and vast reserves of volume.”

For all her accomplishments, Ms. James had an up-and-down career, partly because of changing audience tastes but largely because of drug problems. She developed a heroin habit in the 1960s; after she overcame it in the 1970s, she began using cocaine. She candidly described her struggles with addiction and her many trips to rehab in her autobiography, “Rage to Survive,” written with David Ritz (1995).

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12.

She began singing at the St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles at 5 and turned to secular music as a teenager, forming a vocal group with two friends. She was 15 when she made her first record, “Roll With Me Henry,” which set her own lyrics to the tune of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ recent hit “Work With Me Annie.” When some disc jockeys complained that the title was too suggestive, it was changed to “The Wallflower,” although the record itself was not.

“The Wallflower” rose to No. 2 on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1954. As was often the case in those days with records by black performers, a toned-down version was soon recorded by a white singer and found a wider audience: Georgia Gibbs’s version, with the title and lyric changed to “Dance With Me, Henry,” was a No. 1 pop hit in 1955. (Its success was not entirely bad news for Ms. James. She shared the songwriting royalties with Mr. Ballard and the bandleader and talent scout Johnny Otis, who had arranged for her recording session. Mr. Otis died on Tuesday.)

In 1960 Ms. James was signed by Chess Records, the Chicago label that was home to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and other leading lights of black music. She quickly had a string of hits, including “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “Trust in Me” and “At Last,” which established her as Chess’s first major female star.

She remained with Chess well into the 1970s, reappearing on the charts after a long absence in 1967 with the funky and high-spirited “Tell Mama.” In the late ’70s and early ’80s she was an opening act for the Rolling Stones.

After decades of touring, recording for various labels and drifting in and out of the public eye, Ms. James found herself in the news in 2009 after Beyoncé Knowles recorded a version of “At Last” closely modeled on hers. (Ms. Knowles played Ms. James in the 2008 movie “Cadillac Records,” a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Chess.) Ms. Knowles also performed “At Last” at an inaugural ball for President Obama in Washington.

When the movie was released, Ms. James had kind words for Ms. Knowles’s portrayal. But in February 2009, referring specifically to the Washington performance, she told an audience, “I can’t stand Beyoncé,” and threatened to “whip” the younger singer for doing “At Last.” She later said she had been joking, but she did add that she wished she had been invited to sing the song herself for the new president.

Ms. James’s survivors include her husband of 42 years, Artis Mills; two sons, Donto and Sametto James; and four grandchildren.

Though her life had its share of troubles to the end — her husband and sons were locked in a long-running battle over control of her estate, which was resolved in her husband’s favor only weeks before her death — Ms. James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it.

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.”

Art Los Angeles Contemporary at Brennan & Griffin

By IHSAN TAYLOR
NY Times Published: January 19, 2012

Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, songwriter, impresario, disc jockey and talent scout who was often called “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died on Tuesday at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Terry Gould.

Leading a band in the late 1940s that combined the high musical standards of big band jazz with the raw urgency of gospel music and the blues, Mr. Otis played an important role in creating a new sound for a new audience of young urban blacks. Within a few years it would form the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.

With a keen ear for talent, he helped steer a long list of performers to stardom, among them Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Esther Phillips and Big Mama Thornton — whose hit recording of “Hound Dog,” made in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley’s, was produced by Mr. Otis and featured him on drums.

At Mr. Otis’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Ms. James referred to him as her “guru.” (He received similar honors from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and the Blues Foundation.)

Mr. Otis was also a political activist, a preacher, an artist, an author and even, late in life, an organic farmer. But it was in music that he left his most lasting mark.

Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, which as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and said he considered himself “black by persuasion.”

“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”

As a musician (he played piano and vibraphone in addition to drums) Mr. Otis can be heard on Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love,” Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” and other seminal rhythm and blues records, as well as on jazz recordings by Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet. As a bandleader and occasional vocalist, he had a string of rhythm and blues hits in the early 1950s and a Top 10 pop hit in 1958 with his composition “Willie and the Hand Jive,” later covered by Eric Clapton and others. His many other compositions included “Every Beat of My Heart,” a Top 10 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1961.

As a disc jockey (he was on the radio for decades starting in the 1950s and had his own Los Angeles television show from 1954 to 1961) he helped bring black vernacular music into the American mainstream.

Johnny Otis was born John Alexander Veliotes (some sources give his first name as Ioannis) on Dec. 28, 1921, in Vallejo, Calif., the son of Greek immigrants who ran a grocery. He grew up in a predominantly black area of Berkeley. Mr. Otis began his career as a drummer in 1939. In 1945 he formed a 16-piece band and recorded his first hit, “Harlem Nocturne.”

As big bands fell out of fashion, Mr. Otis stripped the ensemble down to just a few horns and a rhythm section and stepped to the forefront of the emerging rhythm and blues scene. In 1948 he and a partner opened a nightclub, the Barrelhouse, in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Otis had 15 singles on Billboard’s rhythm and blues Top 40, including “Double Crossing Blues,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks. On the strength of that success he crisscrossed the country with his California Rhythm and Blues Caravan, featuring singers like Ms. Phillips, billed as Little Esther — whom he had discovered at a talent contest at his nightclub — and Hank Ballard, who a decade later would record the original version of “The Twist,” the song that ushered in a national dance craze.

Around this time Mr. Otis became a D.J. on the Los Angeles-area radio station KFOX. He was an immediate success, and soon had his own local television show as well. He had a weekly program on the Pacifica Radio Network in California from the 1970s until 2005.

Hundreds of Mr. Otis’s radio and television shows are archived at Indiana University. In addition, he is the subject of a coming documentary film, “Every Beat of My Heart: The Johnny Otis Story,” directed by Bruce Schmiechen, and a biography, “Midnight at the Barrelhouse,” by George Lipsitz, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.

While he never stopped making music as long as his health allowed, Mr. Otis focused much of his attention in the 1960s on politics and the civil rights movement. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly and served on the staff of Mervyn M. Dymally, a Democratic assemblyman who later became a United States representative and California’s first black lieutenant governor.

Mr. Otis’s first book, “Listen to the Lambs” (1968), was largely a reflection on the political and social significance of the 1965 Watts riots.

In the mid-1970s Mr. Otis branched out further when he was ordained as a minister and opened the nondenominational Landmark Community Church in Los Angeles. While he acknowledged that some people attended just “to see what Reverend Hand Jive was talking about,” he took his position seriously and in his decade as pastor was involved in charitable work including feeding the homeless.

In the early 1990s he moved to Sebastopol, an agricultural town in northern California, and became an organic farmer, a career detour that he said was motivated by his concern for the environment. For several years he made and sold his own brand of apple juice in a store he opened to sell the produce he grew with his son Nick. The store doubled as a nightclub where Mr. Otis and his band performed.

Later that decade he published three more books: “Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue” (1993), a memoir of his musical life; “Colors and Chords” (1995), a collection of his paintings, sculptures, wood carvings and cartoons (his interest in art had begun when he started sketching cartoons on his tour bus in the 1950s to amuse his band); and “Red Beans & Rice and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Recipes” (1997), a cookbook.

Mr. Otis continued to record and perform into the 21st century. His bands often included family members: his son John Jr., known as Shuggie, is a celebrated guitarist who played with him for many years, and Nick was his longtime drummer. Two grandsons, Lucky and Eric Otis, also played guitar with him.

In addition to his sons, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Phyllis Walker; two daughters, Janice Johnson and Laura Johnson; nine grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandchild.

Long after he was a force on the rhythm and blues charts, Mr. Otis was a familiar presence at blues and even jazz festivals. What people wanted to call his music, he said, was of no concern to him.

“Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “The music isn’t just the notes, it’s the culture — the way Grandma cooked, the way Grandpa told stories, the way the kids walked and talked.”

Call me peculiar, but I’m actually enjoying the spectacle of Mitt Romney doing the Dance of the Seven Veils — partly out of voyeurism, of course, but also because it’s about time that we had this discussion.

The theme of his dance, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is taxes — his own taxes. Although disclosure of tax returns is standard practice for political candidates, Mr. Romney has never done so, and, at first, he tried to stonewall the issue even in a presidential race. Then he said that he probably pays only about 15 percent of his income in taxes, and he hinted that he might release his 2011 return.

Even then, however, he will face pressure to release previous returns, too — like his father, who released 12 years of returns back when he made his presidential run. (The elder Romney, by the way, paid 37 percent of his income in taxes).

And the public has a right to see the back years: By 2011, with the campaign looming, Mr. Romney may have rearranged his portfolio to minimize awkward issues like his accounts in the Cayman Islands or his use of the justly reviled “carried interest” tax break.

But the larger question isn’t what Mitt Romney’s tax returns have to say about Mitt Romney; it’s what they have to say about U.S. tax policy. Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden?

For they do. If Mr. Romney is telling the truth about his taxes, he’s actually more or less typical of the very wealthy. Since 1992, the I.R.S. has been releasing income and tax data for the 400 highest-income filers. In 2008, the most recent year available, these filers paid only 18.1 percent of their income in federal income taxes; in 2007, they paid only 16.6 percent. When you bear in mind that the rich pay little either in payroll taxes or in state and local taxes — major burdens on middle-class families — this implies that the top 400 filers faced lower taxes than many ordinary workers.

The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries. So the question is whether capital gains — three-quarters of which go to the top 1 percent of the income distribution — warrant such special treatment.

Defenders of low taxes on the rich mainly make two arguments: that low taxes on capital gains are a time-honored principle, and that they are needed to promote economic growth and job creation. Both claims are false.

When you hear about the low, low taxes of people like Mr. Romney, what you need to know is that it wasn’t always thus — and the days when the superrich paid much higher taxes weren’t that long ago. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term.

Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And today’s ultralow rates — the lowest since the days of Herbert Hoover — date only from 2003, when former President George W. Bush rammed both a tax cut on capital gains and a tax cut on dividends through Congress, something he achieved by exploiting the illusion of triumph in Iraq.

Correspondingly, the low-tax status of the very rich is also a recent development. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, the top 400 taxpayers paid close to 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, and even after his tax deal they paid substantially more than they have since the 2003 cut.

So is it essential that the rich receive such a big tax break? There is a theoretical case for according special treatment to capital gains, but there are also theoretical and practical arguments against such special treatment. In particular, the huge gap between taxes on earned income and taxes on unearned income creates a perverse incentive to arrange one’s affairs so as to make income appear in the “right” category.

And the economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity. During that first Clinton term, when the very rich paid much higher taxes than they do now, the economy added 11.5 million jobs, dwarfing anything achieved even during the good years of the Bush administration.

So Mr. Romney’s tax dance is doing us all a service by highlighting the unwise, unjust and expensive favors being showered on the upper-upper class. At a time when all the self-proclaimed serious people are telling us that the poor and the middle class must suffer in the name of fiscal probity, such low taxes on the very rich are indefensible.

So my opposition to the entertainment industry’s maximalist online power play, in the current form of two pieces of legislation being considered in the US Congress right now, SOPA and PIPA, is neither fleeting nor naive.

As many people with far greater expertise than I have discussed in great detail, these proposed laws are a grave threat to the Internet as a platform for economic, cultural, and political exchange. They are unnecessarily broad and ambiguous and give vast, new, unchecked power to corporations who have consistently lied and misrepresented their case and the supposed threat they face.

Stop SOPA and PIPA by calling your US Congressional representatives today, but also get smart on the issues surrounding these bills. And keep following them, and keep holding politicians and the companies they’re serving accountable, because this crap won’t end today or this week.

Posted by Greg Allen

Public Knowledge primer and updates on SOPA & PIPA

via

Accidents in Abstract Painting
Free Public Event: Sunday, January 22, 4pm

In the outdoor spectacle entitled Accidents in Abstract Painting Richard Jackson will fly and crash a radio-controlled, model military plane with a fifteen-foot wingspan, filled with paint, into a twenty-foot wall that reads “accidents in abstract painting.” The spectacle, free and open to the public, will take place on Sunday January 22, 2012 at 4pm at Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, southeast of the Rose Bowl in Area H. This monumental spectacle is part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.

The Armory as part of Pacific Standard Time

Thanks to Morris and Andy Goldman