By MARK BITTMAN
NY Times Published: July 23, 2011

WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)

Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.

And — not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending — a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.

Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.

Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we should turn the tables and tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available.

The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soft drinks annually. (Although that includes diet sodas, it does not include noncarbonated sweetened beverages, which add up to at least 17 gallons a person per year.) Sweetened drinks could be taxed at 2 cents per ounce, so a six-pack of Pepsi would cost $1.44 more than it does now. An equivalent tax on fries might be 50 cents per serving; a quarter extra for a doughnut. (We have experts who can figure out how “bad” a food should be to qualify, and what the rate should be; right now they’re busy calculating ethanol subsidies. Diet sodas would not be taxed.)

Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually. That money could be used to subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit.

We could sell those staples cheap — let’s say for 50 cents a pound — and almost everywhere: drugstores, street corners, convenience stores, bodegas, supermarkets, liquor stores, even schools, libraries and other community centers.

This program would, of course, upset the processed food industry. Oh well. It would also bug those who might resent paying more for soda and chips and argue that their right to eat whatever they wanted was being breached. But public health is the role of the government, and our diet is right up there with any other public responsibility you can name, from water treatment to mass transit.

Some advocates for the poor say taxes like these are unfair because low-income people pay a higher percentage of their income for food and would find it more difficult to buy soda or junk. But since poor people suffer disproportionately from the cost of high-quality, fresh foods, subsidizing those foods would be particularly beneficial to them.

Right now it’s harder for many people to buy fruit than Froot Loops; chips and Coke are a common breakfast. And since the rate of diabetes continues to soar — one-third of all Americans either have diabetes or are pre-diabetic, most with Type 2 diabetes, the kind associated with bad eating habits — and because our health care bills are on the verge of becoming truly insurmountable, this is urgent for economic sanity as well as national health.

Justifying a Tax

At least 30 cities and states have considered taxes on soda or all sugar-sweetened beverages, and they’re a logical target: of the 278 additional calories Americans on average consumed per day between 1977 and 2001, more than 40 percent came from soda, “fruit” drinks, mixes like Kool-Aid and Crystal Light, and beverages like Red Bull, Gatorade and dubious offerings like Vitamin Water, which contains half as much sugar as Coke.

Some states already have taxes on soda — mostly low, ineffective sales taxes paid at the register. The current talk is of excise taxes, levied before purchase.

“Excise taxes have the benefit of being incorporated into the shelf price, and that’s where consumers make their purchasing decisions,” says Lisa Powell, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “And, as per-unit taxes, they avoid volume discounts and are ultimately more effective in raising prices, so they have greater impact.”

Much of the research on beverage taxes comes from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. Its projections indicate that taxes become significant at the equivalent of about a penny an ounce, a level at which three very good things should begin to happen: the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages should decrease, as should the incidence of disease and therefore public health costs; and money could be raised for other uses.

Even in the current antitax climate, we’ll probably see new, significant soda taxes soon, somewhere; Philadelphia, New York (city and state) and San Francisco all considered them last year, and the scenario for such a tax spreading could be similar to that of legalized gambling: once the income stream becomes apparent, it will seem irresistible to cash-strapped governments.

Currently, instead of taxing sodas and other unhealthful food, we subsidize them (with, I might note, tax dollars!). Direct subsidies to farmers for crops like corn (used, for example, to make now-ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup) and soybeans (vegetable oil) keep the prices of many unhealthful foods and beverages artificially low. There are indirect subsidies as well, because prices of junk foods don’t reflect the costs of repairing our health and the environment.

Other countries are considering or have already started programs to tax foods with negative effects on health. Denmark’s saturated-fat tax is going into effect Oct. 1, and Romania passed (and then un-passed) something similar; earlier this month, a French minister raised the idea of tripling the value added tax on soda. Meanwhile, Hungary is proposing a new tax on foods with “too much” sugar, salt or fat, while increasing taxes on liquor and soft drinks, all to pay for state-financed health care; and Brazil’s Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program features subsidized produce markets and state-sponsored low-cost restaurants.

Putting all of those elements together could create a national program that would make progress on a half-dozen problems at once — disease, budget, health care, environment, food access and more — while paying for itself. The benefits are staggering, and though it would take a level of political will that’s rarely seen, it’s hardly a moonshot.

The need is dire: efforts to shift the national diet have failed, because education alone is no match for marketing dollars that push the very foods that are the worst for us. (The fast-food industry alone spent more than $4 billion on marketing in 2009; the Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion is asking for about a third of a percent of that in 2012: $13 million.) As a result, the percentage of obese adults has more than doubled over the last 30 years; the percentage of obese children has tripled. We eat nearly 10 percent more animal products than we did a generation or two ago, and though there may be value in eating at least some animal products, we could perhaps live with reduced consumption of triple bacon cheeseburgers.

Government and Public Health

Health-related obesity costs are projected to reach $344 billion by 2018 — with roughly 60 percent of that cost borne by the federal government. For a precedent in attacking this problem, look at the action government took in the case of tobacco.

The historic 1998 tobacco settlement, in which the states settled health-related lawsuits against tobacco companies, and the companies agreed to curtail marketing and finance antismoking efforts, was far from perfect, but consider the results. More than half of all Americans who once smoked have quit and smoking rates are about half of what they were in the 1960s.

It’s true that you don’t need to smoke and you do need to eat. But you don’t need sugary beverages (or the associated fries), which have been linked not only to Type 2 diabetes and increased obesity but also to cardiovascular diseases and decreased intake of valuable nutrients like calcium. It also appears that liquid calories provide less feeling of fullness; in other words, when you drink a soda it’s probably in addition to your other calorie intake, not instead of it.

To counter arguments about their nutritional worthlessness, expect to see “fortified” sodas — à la Red Bull, whose vitamins allegedly “support mental and physical performance” — and “improved” junk foods (Less Sugar! Higher Fiber!). Indeed, there may be reasons to make nutritionally worthless foods less so, but it’s better to decrease their consumption.

Forcing sales of junk food down through taxes isn’t ideal. First off, we’ll have to listen to nanny-state arguments, which can be countered by the acceptance of the anti-tobacco movement as well as a dozen other successful public health measures. Then there are the predictions of job loss at soda distributorships, but the same predictions were made about the tobacco industry, and those were wrong. (For that matter, the same predictions were made around the nickel deposit on bottles, which most shoppers don’t even notice.) Ultimately, however, both consumers and government will be more than reimbursed in the form of cheaper healthy staples, lowered health care costs and better health. And that’s a big deal.

The Resulting Benefits

A study by Y. Claire Wang, an assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, predicted that a penny tax per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes and bring in $1 billion annually. Another study shows that a two-cent tax per ounce in Illinois would reduce obesity in youth by 18 percent, save nearly $350 million and bring in over $800 million taxes annually.

Scaled nationally, as it should be, the projected benefits are even more impressive; one study suggests that a national penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would generate at least $13 billion a year in income while cutting consumption by 24 percent. And those numbers would swell dramatically if the tax were extended to more kinds of junk or doubled to two cents an ounce. (The Rudd Center has a nifty revenue calculator online that lets you play with the numbers yourself.)

A 20 percent increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20 percent decrease in consumption, which in the next decade could prevent 1.5 million Americans from becoming obese and 400,000 cases of diabetes, saving about $30 billion.

It’s fun — inspiring, even — to think about implementing a program like this. First off, though the reduced costs of healthy foods obviously benefit the poor most, lower prices across the board keep things simpler and all of us, especially children whose habits are just developing, could use help in eating differently. The program would also bring much needed encouragement to farmers, including subsidies, if necessary, to grow staples instead of commodity crops.

Other ideas: We could convert refrigerated soda machines to vending machines that dispense grapes and carrots, as has already been done in Japan and Iowa. We could provide recipes, cooking lessons, even cookware for those who can’t afford it. Television public-service announcements could promote healthier eating. (Currently, 86 percent of food ads now seen by children are for foods high in sugar, fat or sodium.)

Money could be returned to communities for local spending on gyms, pools, jogging and bike trails; and for other activities at food distribution centers; for Meals on Wheels in those towns with a large elderly population, or for Head Start for those with more children; for supermarkets and farmers’ markets where needed. And more.

By profiting as a society from the foods that are making us sick and using those funds to make us healthy, the United States would gain the same kind of prestige that we did by attacking smoking. We could institute a national, comprehensive program that would make us a world leader in preventing chronic or “lifestyle” diseases, which for the first time in history kill more people than communicable ones. By doing so, we’d not only repair some of the damage we have caused by first inventing and then exporting the Standard American Diet, we’d also set a new standard for the rest of the world to follow.

On view at the northeast corner of Washington and Centinela through October 14, 2011

LAXART

By ERIC A. POSNER and ADRIAN VERMEULE
NY Times Published: July 22, 2011

PRESIDENT OBAMA should announce that he will raise the debt ceiling unilaterally if he cannot reach a deal with Congress. Constitutionally, he would be on solid ground. Politically, he can’t lose. The public wants a deal. The threat to act unilaterally will only strengthen his bargaining power if Republicans don’t want to be frozen out; if they defy him, the public will throw their support to the president. Either way, Republicans look like the obstructionists and will pay a price.

Where would Mr. Obama get his constitutional authority to raise the debt ceiling?

Our argument is not based on some obscure provision of the 14th amendment, but on the necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.

When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, he said that it was necessary to violate one law, lest all the laws but one fall into ruin. So too here: the president may need to violate the debt ceiling to prevent a catastrophe — whether a default on the debt or an enormous reduction in federal spending, which would throw the country back into recession.

A deadlocked Congress has become incapable of acting consistently; it commits to entitlements it will not reduce, appropriates funds it does not have, borrows money it cannot repay and then imposes a debt ceiling it will not raise. One of those things must give; in reality, that means that the conflicting laws will have to be reconciled by the only actor who combines the power to act with a willingness to shoulder responsibility — the president.

Franklin D. Roosevelt saw this problem clearly, and in his first inaugural address in 1933, addressing his plans to confront the economic crisis, he hinted darkly that “it is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly equal, wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us.”

“But it may be,” he continued, “that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.” In the event, Congress gave him the authorities he sought, and he did not follow through on this threat.

The basic problem today is that the president and the House Republicans are locked in a classic bargaining game. The worst outcome for both is default on the debt, but each side holds out for a favorable deal. They will certainly go to the wire, but economists who have studied bargaining games have shown that there is always a real possibility of breakdown rather than compromise, because only by refusing to deal can each side convey the seriousness of its position. That is why labor strikes occur even though workers and managers do jointly better if they make a deal. Failure to raise the debt ceiling, however, is not akin to any old plant shutdown: it would be catastrophic.

A proposal has been floated by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, under which Congress would delegate to the president the power to raise the debt ceiling, subject to some minor procedural constraints. Mr. McConnell’s ploy is suspect, because it assumes away the problem that it attempts to solve: the internal paralysis of Congress. Congress probably cannot act on its own — for example, by creating a veto-proof budget — because it is internally deadlocked. Not only do Democrats and Republicans disagree, but so do the Republican leaders, who want to avoid a debt default, and the Tea Party-inspired Republican back-benchers, who appear to believe that only a purifying Götterdämmerung can put public finances back in order. The latest proposed deal negotiated by House Speaker John A. Boehner and President Obama is vulnerable to the same problem.

Discussions of an earlier proposal to rely on the 14th Amendment for the President’s authority to raise the debt level centered on whether the debt issued after the president’s action would be under a cloud. Commentators pointed out that the language in the 14th Amendment, which commands that the validity of legally authorized public debt shall not be questioned, does not explicitly authorize the president to do anything. But debt under a cloud is better than default. It would be better if the parties made a deal, but if they don’t, default is the worst outcome.

The 14th Amendment is a red herring, however; even if its debt provision did not exist, the president would derive authority from his paramount duty to ward off serious threats to the constitutional and economic system.

Mr. Obama needs to make clear that he will act unilaterally to raise the debt ceiling if Congress does not cooperate; if he does so, then we predict that Congress will cooperate by enacting the McConnell plan or a similar fig leaf, and so Mr. Obama will not need to follow through on his threat, and the constitutional crisis will pass — just as it did with Roosevelt. Republicans will be publicly outraged, but privately relieved. They do not want an economic catastrophe; they can avoid violating their no-taxes pledge; and they retain the power to fight the budget battle another day. As for the president, he really has no other choice.

Eric A. Posner, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, and Adrian Vermeule, a professor of law at Harvard, are the authors of “The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic.”

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

José Luis Medina grows agave. Like tequila, mescal is a distilled product of agave.

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
NY TimesPublished: July 21, 2011

ZUMPAHUACÁN, Mexico —Eyes pop open, mouths contort, a chorus of crisp “ahhs” rings through the room.
The New York Times

The mescal, the Mexican firewater best known in the United States for the worm in the bottle, has incinerated the tongue, scorched the back of the throat and begun its lava flow to the stomach.

No shots here; the drink is sipped and savored, swirled about the mouth like the finest of wines, inducing a chaser of haughty adjectives.

“Citrusy.”

“Honey-scented.”

“Woody,” come the assessments from the gathering. Far from a college dorm party, it is a group of mostly 20- and 30-something professionals discovering the finer points of the artisanal version of the drink at a recent tasting in this farming village two hours from Mexico City.

“This is clean liquid,” Fructuoso Garcia, 84, one of a handful of producers in this region, stood and declared to the group. “We don’t put anything in to beef up the flavor. This is nothing like you get from the factory.”

Mr. Garcia is one of several local producers fighting to share in the boom in Mexican spirits, with mescal, against all odds, taking a star turn.

It is moving a bit out of the shadow of tequila, the far more popular and, let’s face it, smoother spirit that has won fans (and hangovers) around the world.

Both are derived from agave, a plant native to Mexico, and technically speaking, tequila is a type of mescal (though in Mexico they are regarded as very different drinks, much like champagne and wine). While tequila is made from a specific variety of the plant’s fruit and produced mainly in Jalisco State, mescal (or mezcal as it is spelled in Mexico) is made from a broader class and is often viewed as the earthier, country cousin, distilled in a centuries-old process distinct from tequila’s and with an alcohol content generally in excess of 45 percent.

Different regions have their own versions of mescal, but share a common selling point with the popular saying: “Mescal for everything bad — and everything good, too.” It is a folk remedy for colds and indigestion. But it is probably best known for the worm in the bottle — a marketing gimmick for a few brands from Oaxaca State (a few use a scorpion instead.) And, worm or not, it tends to go down like a flick of lightning. Which may be the point.

Bars and restaurants with mescal, tequila and other traditional drinks as their primary offerings — including pulque and sotol, also derived from agave — are springing up all over Mexico City.

Exports of mescal (up 54 percent last year) and tequila (up 12 percent) have surged, as the trendier precincts of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities find there is more to Mexican liquor than margaritas.

Catering to tourists’ interest, Mexico City in December opened the Museum of Tequila and Mescal at a historic square downtown. And riding the wave of interest, the number of mescal brands has risen sharply in recent years, to 78 from 28 since 2007, according to Mexico’s agriculture ministry.

Part of it is the never-ending cycle of what’s old is hip again. But Mexicans, particularly younger ones, are also on a quest to rediscover and affirm their roots in reaction to the surge of American products and stores inundating the country.

“It’s part of our identity, and it’s worth preserving,” Andrea Bustillos, a 25-year-old art history student, said after sampling several varieties here. “We’ve seen a world of consumerism. Now we don’t want everything the same.”

Fernando Llanos, 34, an artist and one of many bar owners and restaurateurs in Mexico City who have organized tastings and pushed mescal to the top of their offerings, said, “It is a passion of mine.”

“This is for my house,” said Mr. Llanos, a partner in Lilit, a bar and restaurant in Mexico City, clutching a bottle of artisanal mescal here in Zumpahuacán. “But I will see if my sommelier is interested in trying it in the bar. If we don’t support the people out in the country here, they are going to get involved in other things.”

Cornelio Pérez, founder of a group called Mezcales Tradicionales, is the pied piper for artisanal mescal: he is even organizing a campaign to have mescal put on Unesco’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage and Humanity, as traditional Mexican food was last fall.

He rails against the commercial variety, which may carry the official stamp of the national regulatory board but, in his view, lacks flavor and authenticity. The board has certified mescal from seven states for export, but the spirit is produced in several other states that grow agave, including here in Mexico State surrounding Mexico City. So to sell their mescal, local producers depend on cultural tour operators that organize tastings here, passers-by and bar owners in the know.

Mr. Pérez said that he hoped local producers would not get lost in the mescal craze. The proliferation of tequila brands, he says, has led to a dilution in quality, and he frets the same might happen to mescal.

“We do not want to see the tequila-ization of mescal,” he said.

Or, as the museum put it in its display on artisanal mescal, while certification labels “help promote cultural heritage and regional development, they can also exclude and marginalize small traditional producers, putting them at a disadvantage.”

Traditional producers still employ the techniques from centuries ago. Indigenous people had long fermented agave, popularly known as maguey, but the Spanish brought distilling techniques that gave rise to mescal, tequila and other spirits.

José Luis Medina, a mescal producer here, said his family had made the liquor for generations. It is a painstaking process of uprooting the large, heavy agave, roasting the heart (known as the piña, for its resemblance to a pineapple) in deep pits, grinding and fermenting it in wood stills and distilling the vapor. It is the burning — mescal is the Nahuatl word for “cooked maguey” — that imbues the smoky flavor.

“Finding mescal in a house here is like finding tortillas; it is everywhere,” said Guadalupe Vázquez Quirós, 23, the fourth generation of a family of mezcaleros, as they are known. He had his first sip at age 8.

His family and other producers in this region grow corn, beans and other crops to help make ends meet, but find that more city folk are coming out for mescal. Last year, production at the Vázquez ranch was up 30 percent.

He even puts a worm (a moth larvae that lives on agave) in some bottles, to satisfy tourists expecting it. But nothing, they say, is more authentic than freshly distilled mescal off the ranch.

“What you find in the store is like drinking water,” said Mr. Medina, offering a plastic cup of his product. “Taste this. This is really mescal.”

Mr. Freud in 2005

By WILLIAM GRIMES
NY Times Published: July 21, 2011

Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88.

He died following a brief illness, said William Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries, Mr. Freud’s dealer.

Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.

In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.

From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.

The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.

The relationship between sitter and painter, in his work, overturned traditional portraiture. It was “nearer to the classic relationship of the 20th century: that between interrogator and interrogated,” the art critic John Russell wrote in “Private View,” his survey of the London art scene in the 1960s.

William Feaver, a British critic who organized a Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, said: “Freud has generated a life’s worth of genuinely new painting that sits obstinately across the path of those lesser painters who get by on less. He always pressed to extremes, carrying on further than one would think necessary and rarely letting anything go before it became disconcerting.”

Lucian Michael Freud was born in Berlin on Dec. 8, 1922, and grew up in a wealthy neighborhood near the Tiergarten. His father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect who was Sigmund Freud’s youngest son, married Lucie Brasch, the heiress to a timber fortune, and the family enjoyed summers on the North Sea and visits to a family estate near Cottbus, in Germany.

In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the Freuds moved to London, where Lucian attended progressive schools but showed little academic promise. He was more interested in horses than in his studies, and entertained thoughts of becoming a jockey.

In 1938, he was expelled from Bryanston, in Dorset, after dropping his trousers on a dare on a street in Bournemouth. But his sandstone sculpture of a horse earned him entry into the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He left there after a year to enroll in the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, where he studied with the painter Cedric Morris. While it is true that the school burned to the ground while he was there, the often repeated story that Mr. Freud accidentally started the fire with a discarded cigarette seems unlikely.

In 1941, hoping to make his way to New York, Mr. Freud enlisted in the Merchant Navy, where he served on a convoy ship crossing the Atlantic. He got no nearer to New York than Halifax, Nova Scotia, and after returning to Liverpool developed tonsillitis and was given a medical discharge from the service.

Mr. Freud was a bohemian of the old school. He set up his studios in squalid neighborhoods, developed a Byronic reputation as a rake and gambled recklessly (“Debt stimulates me,” he once said). In 1948, he married Kitty Garman, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whom he depicted in several portraits, notably “Girl With Roses,” “Girl With a Kitten” (1947) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1950-51). That marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Lady Caroline Blackwood. He is survived by many children from his first marriage and from a series of romantic relationships.

His early work, often with an implied narrative, was strongly influenced by the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters like Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, although his influences reached back to Albrecht Dürer and the Flemish masters like Hans Memling.

On occasion he ventured into Surrealist territory. In “The Painter’s Room” (1943), a zebra with red and yellow stripes pokes its head through the window of a studio furnished with a palm tree and sofa. A top hat sits on the floor.

Mr. Freud later rejected Surrealism with something like contempt. “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me,” he told the art critic Robert Hughes. “That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.”

A decisive influence was Francis Bacon, a fellow artist at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the subject of one of his most famous works, a head painted in oil on copper in 1952. Bacon’s free, daring brushwork led Mr. Freud to abandon the linear, thinly painted portraits of the 1940s and move toward the brushy, searching portrait style of his mature work, with its severely muted palette of browns and yellows.

“Full, saturated colors have an emotional significance that I want to avoid,” he once said. To the artist and Freud biographer Lawrence Gowing, he said, “For me the paint is the person.” Mr. Freud’s dingy studio became his artistic universe, a grim theater in which his contorted subjects, stripped bare and therefore unidentifiable by class, submitted to the artist’s unblinking, merciless inspection.

The sense of the artist-model relationship is suggested by “Reflection With Two Children,” a 1965 self-portrait showing Mr. Freud seen from below, the vantage point of a dog looking at its master. Two children, almost miniature in scale, are shunted to the side of the canvas. A glaring light overhead contributes to the impression of the artist as all-powerful inquisitor.

His female subjects in particular seemed not just nude but obtrusively naked. Mr. Freud pushed this effect so far, Russell once noted, “that we sometimes wonder if we have any right to be there.” By contrast, his horses and dogs, like his whippets Pluto and Eli, were evoked with tender solicitude.

“I’ve got a strong autobiographical bias,” he told Mr. Feaver, the British critic. “My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings.”

On rare occasions Mr. Freud took on something akin to official portraits. He painted the collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, fully clothed, in “Man in a Chair” (1985). His stern 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth, showing the royal head topped by the Diamond Diadem, divided the critics and public.

Some critics hailed the picture as bold, uncompromising and truthful. Arthur Morrison, the arts editor of The Times of London, wrote, “The chin has what can only be described as a six-o’clock shadow, and the neck would not disgrace a rugby prop forward.” The newspaper’s royal photographer said Mr. Freud should be thrown into the Tower of London.

These were deviations. Much more in the Freud vein was his portrait of a man sprawled on a couch holding a sleeping rat (“Naked Man With Rat,” 1977-78). The animal’s tail, draped across the model’s left thigh, nearly makes contact with his genitals, producing an ineffably creepy effect.

Mr. Freud remained deeply unfashionable in the United States for many decades, but in 1987 the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington exhibited his work in a show that no New York museum would take on. This was a watershed event. Mr. Hughes proclaimed him “the greatest living realist painter,” and a Freud cult soon developed. In 1993 the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a retrospective of his work.

“It is an attempt at a record,” Mr. Freud said, describing his work on the occasion of his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1974. “I work from the people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.”

Untitled (Beveled White Multiple Inner Band), 2009
Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas
8’ x 5’6”

Through August 31, 2011

Ace Beverly Hills

When smells vanish, we lose a whole dimension of the world. Now there’s a movement to change that.

By Courtney Humphries
The Boston Globe
July 17, 2011

Think of some of your most powerful memories, and there’s likely a smell attached: the aroma of suntan lotion at the beach, the sharpness of freshly mown grass, the floral trail of your mother’s perfume. “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.”

But despite its primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history. We tend to connect with the past visually – we look at objects displayed in a museum, photographs in a documentary, the writing in a manuscript. Sometimes we might hear a vintage speech, or touch an ancient artifact and imagine what it was like to use it. But our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.

“It seems remarkable to me that we live in the world where we have all the senses to navigate it, yet somehow we assume that the past was scrubbed of smells,” says sensory historian Mark Smith.

It seems far-fetched to think we could actually start to smell the past – or somehow preserve a whiff of our daily lives. But increasingly, technology is making it possible, and historians, scientists, and perfumers are now taking the idea of smells as historical artifacts more seriously. They argue that it’s time to delve into our olfactory past, trying harder to understand how people experienced the world with their noses – and even save scents for posterity. Their efforts have already made it possible to smell fragrances worn a century ago, to re-create the smell of a rare flower even if it goes extinct, and to better understand the smells that ancient cultures appreciated or detested.

To put smells in a historical context is to add a whole dimension to how we understand the world. Boston’s Back Bay, for instance, has at different times been filled with the smells of a saltwater marsh, a cesspool, horses, and car exhaust. Some smells vanish, new ones arise, and some shift in a way that tells a cultural story. The jasmine and leather notes of a Chanel perfume from 1927 help us understand the boldly androgynous women of the flapper era, just as the candied sweetness of the latest Victoria’s Secret fragrance tells us something about femininity today. What we smell in our cities, homes, and natural spaces is just as much a part of our lives as the what we see, hear, and touch.

Smell is unique among the senses in the way it is processed by the brain – olfactory information travels directly to a brain region linked with the hippocampus and the amygdala, sites of memory and emotion. Scientists have suggested that the way smell is processed makes smell memories particularly strong and persistent. But outside of our memory, smells themselves are ephemeral: They are formed by volatile chemical compounds that can easily disperse and disintegrate. So smell is both a powerful part of our experiences and an evanescent one.

But while smells are not as enduring as solid objects, technology has found ways to make them less ephemeral. Perfumes can be preserved for long periods of time when kept from light and oxygen, and ambient odors can often be analyzed and distilled into a chemical formula, which can be re-created synthetically by a skilled perfumer.

A pioneer of this approach is Roman Kaiser, a Swiss fragrance chemist who developed a technology called “headspace” in the 1970s that made it possible to capture and analyze the scent given off by flowers and other objects. Using a glass container, a pump, and a sampling trap that gathers molecules using a solvent or coated surface, the system allows a chemist or perfumer to gather the volatile scent molecules exuded by an object without harming it. In 1995, Kaiser read a book called “Vanishing Flora” that contained beautiful, detailed illustrations of rare and endangered plants, and had an idea: He convinced his employer, Givaudan, the world’s largest flavor and fragrance company, to let him embark on an olfactory version of the project.

Over the past 10 years, Kaiser has traveled the globe to capture the scents of hundreds of rare and endangered plants. His recently published book, “Scent of the Vanishing Flora,” contains lists of chemicals representing the formula for each plant’s scent, and he has also reconstituted many of these fragrances synthetically. His main purpose was to show people the olfactory beauty in nature, but it also has scientific value: A plant’s scent is an important component of its evolution and ecology. “These are documents,” Kaiser says, “so you would be able in 200 years to re-create these scents when all these plants do not exist any more.”

Perfumers like New York-based Christopher Brosius have used headspace to re-create less obvious smells, like the odor of an old fur coat or a well-worn paperback. Their goal is an artistic one, but the same approach could serve as the beginning of a database. Imagine having a library of scents specific to a particular time or place, from the strangely sweet aroma of a plastic-wrapped CD case to the blend of horse dung and candy that permeates Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

Documenting these smells for future historians might reveal our preoccupations and desires in ways that other sensory information couldn’t. “If you saved the mall smell, you’d see that people were obsessed with cassia cinnamon,” says James McHugh, an assistant professor of religion at University of Southern California, referring to the ubiquitous odor of Cinnabon.

Not surprisingly, the perfume industry is at the cutting edge of scent preservation. An institution called the Osmothèque, headquartered in Versailles, France, operates as a kind of Library of Congress of perfumes – a collection of historically important perfumes, in their original formulas, kept chilled in aluminum flasks. The air in each flask has been replaced with argon, an inert gas that won’t react with the perfumes like oxygen does, helping them stay stable over time. Laudamiel is currently spearheading an effort to bring some of these perfumes to New York City, and has created an Academy of Perfumery and Aromatics that will represent the Osmotheque in the United States.

Patricia de Nicolaï, an independent perfumer and president of the Osmothèque, recently launched a perfume called Kiss Me Tender, a delicate perfume of almond-like heliotrope that was inspired by a perfume base from the 19th century. “Sometimes when you go through very old perfumes, you can find an idea completely forgotten. This is a source of inspiration,” she says.

But what about all the smells that have already disappeared? Historians are finding ways to study these, too. Sometimes this starts with a written description. Using notes made by Napoleon’s assistant, the Osmothèque reconstructed a cologne specially made for the French leader during his exile on the island of Saint Helena before his death in 1821. When McHugh was completing his dissertation in Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard, he encountered a wealth of olfactory information in ancient and medieval Sanskrit texts: detailed formulas of perfumes and incenses and instructions for their use, as well as descriptions of odors in everyday life. McHugh became interested in “turning these lists of words into a thing,” he says, and attracted the interest of Laudamiel, resulting in a series of fragrances based on these ancient formulas.

In some cases, Laudamiel took imaginative liberties. McHugh says that the texts, which were mostly written by wealthy Brahmins, mentioned certain smells in a positive way and others in a negative way. Laudamiel used these descriptions to create two scents that represented a Brahmin’s ideal – clarified butter, milk, mango blossoms, honey, and sandalwood – and his worst nightmare – smoke, rotting flesh, alcohol, and garlic.

“It was experimental, and some people thought it was too cute,” McHugh says. “But that’s the idea – to see if we could try it.”

At the most scientifically ambitious end, archaeologists are using modern analytical technologies in an attempt to bring old scents to life. Techniques to analyze organic residues left behind on artifacts have been used to study diet and cooking practices in ancient cultures, and have also begun to be used to study fragrances, such as those from incense and perfume. Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum, for instance, has been working to analyze and re-create the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut’s perfume from residue from a 3,500-year-old bottle. The museum plans to announce details soon; its curator says the perfume contained more than 80 ingredients.

Exciting as it may seem to put our noses in the past, not all historians believe that we can easily learn deeper truths about the past by resurrecting such scents. Smith, of the University of South Carolina, has argued that while we can produce smells of the past, “what you can’t do is consume them in the same way.”

The Jorvik Viking Center in York, England, is famous for taking visitors right into the smells of Viking life as part of its re-created Viking village. Dale Air, an environmental scenting company, imbued the center’s exhibits with smells that would have been present at the time – right down to the odor of a fish market and a latrine. But to Smith, it doesn’t really help us understand what the past was like. The smell of a Viking latrine may disgust us, but it doesn’t tell us how the Vikings experienced it.

Smith believes that studying smell and other senses is important, but they must be put into context. There are countless examples of how circumstance influences the way we perceive smells; for instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now – not as people did at the time.

But this is true of any historical experience: A Renaissance painting means something far different to us than it did to people at the time, yet we still recognize its value. Just as we can place the clothing, settings, and poses of old photographs in historical context, we can also understand the larger meaning of our perfumes, laundry detergents, and ambient odors of civilization and nature. Doing so could enrich the way we experience the past by engaging parts of our brain more directly than vision can.

As a chemical sense, smell has always been a visceral connection to the here and now. For people today, adding smells to our compendium of records and artifacts could stretch that visceral connection in new ways. And looking to the future, it offers us an unusual chance to transmit the legacy of everyday life – whether it’s the smell of a vegetable garden, a day at the beach, or just a whiff of a Starbucks circa 2011.

Untitled (Sheats-Goldstein House, #07), 2007
Laserchrome print
32 11/16 X 25 5/8 inches

Through August 11, 2011

Luhring Augustine

Dith Pran/The New York Times

CHILDHOOD RELIC Jungle gyms, like this one in Riverside Park in Manhattan, have disappeared from most American playgrounds in recent decades.

By JOHN TIERNEY
NY Times Published: July 18, 2011

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.”

After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights.

“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”

Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

The old tall jungle gyms and slides disappeared from most American playgrounds across the country in recent decades because of parental concerns, federal guidelines, new safety standards set by manufacturers and — the most frequently cited factor — fear of lawsuits.

Shorter equipment with enclosed platforms was introduced, and the old pavement was replaced with rubber, wood chips or other materials designed for softer landings. These innovations undoubtedly prevented some injuries, but some experts question their overall value.

“There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds,” said David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London. He noted that the risk of some injuries, like long fractures of the arm, actually increased after the introduction of softer surfaces on playgrounds in Britain and Australia.

“This sounds counterintuitive, but it shouldn’t, because it is a common phenomenon,” Dr. Ball said. “If children and parents believe they are in an environment which is safer than it actually is, they will take more risks. An argument against softer surfacing is that children think it is safe, but because they don’t understand its properties, they overrate its performance.”

Reducing the height of playground equipment may help toddlers, but it can produce unintended consequences among bigger children. “Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind,” Dr. Ball said. “Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all.”

Fear of litigation led New York City officials to remove seesaws, merry-go-rounds and the ropes that young Tarzans used to swing from one platform to another. Letting children swing on tires became taboo because of fears that the heavy swings could bang into a child.

“What happens in America is defined by tort lawyers, and unfortunately that limits some of the adventure playgrounds,” said Adrian Benepe, the current parks commissioner. But while he misses the Tarzan ropes, he’s glad that the litigation rate has declined, and he’s not nostalgic for asphalt pavement.

“I think safety surfaces are a godsend,” he said. “I suspect that parents who have to deal with concussions and broken arms wouldn’t agree that playgrounds have become too safe.” The ultra-safe enclosed platforms of the 1980s and 1990s may have been an overreaction, Mr. Benepe said, but lately there have been more creative alternatives.

“The good news is that manufacturers have brought out new versions of the old toys,” he said. “Because of height limitations, no one’s building the old monkey bars anymore, but kids can go up smaller climbing walls and rope nets and artificial rocks.”

Still, sometimes there’s nothing quite like being 10 feet off the ground, as a new generation was discovering the other afternoon at Fort Tryon Park. A soft rubber surface carpeted the pavement, but the jungle gym of Mr. Stern’s youth was still there. It was the prime destination for many children, including those who’d never seen one before, like Nayelis Serrano, a 10-year-old from the South Bronx who was visiting her cousin.

When she got halfway up, at the third level of bars, she paused, as if that was high enough. Then, after a consultation with her mother, she continued to the top, the fifth level, and descended to recount her triumph.

“I was scared at first,” she explained. “But my mother said if you don’t try, you’ll never know if you could do it. So I took a chance and kept going. At the top I felt very proud.” As she headed back for another climb, her mother, Orkidia Rojas, looked on from a bench and considered the pros and cons of this unfamiliar equipment.

“It’s fun,” she said. “I’d like to see it in our playground. Why not? It’s kind of dangerous, I know, but if you just think about danger you’re never going to get ahead in life.”

By JOE NOCERA
NY Times Published: July 18, 2011

You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London — a k a Scotland Yard — he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand.

My first thought was: He didn’t really say that, did he? My second thought was: Can any human being truly be that unaware?

When the writers and editors of the late, unlamented News of the World were busy bribing Mr. Yates’s police officers, what they wanted in return was — gosh! — malicious gossip. When they were hacking the phones of royal family members and murdered teenagers, they were seeking, you know, malicious gossip. When the recently arrested Rebekah Brooks called Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, to tell him that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which she then edited, was about to reveal that his infant child had cystic fibrosis — information that Brown is convinced came from a hacked phone message — she was telling him the paper was going to print a piece of gossip that a more humane institution would have let pass. She might not have viewed this as malicious, but the Brown family certainly did.

Let’s be honest here. There is something undeniably rich about seeing the tables turned like this. When I see photographs of Brooks, or Murdoch, or his son James (who until a few weeks ago was his father’s heir apparent at the News Corporation), sitting in their cars, staring blankly ahead, I can just picture the paparazzi horde jostling to get a decent shot of its prey. Murdoch’s papers have always feasted on scandals like this, picking the bones of their victims. Now Murdoch’s the one whose bones are being picked.

“The schadenfreude is so thick you can’t cut it with a chainsaw,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in an editorial on Monday, defending Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation. (That’s right. After woefully undercovering the scandal in its news pages, The Journal’s editorial page is now leaping to the defense of its owner. Proving, yet again, that The Journal knows where its bread is buttered.)

Well, yes, the schadenfreude is pretty darn thick. Who would deny it? The whole thing reminds me a little of the ending of Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel “Solar,” in which the many awful things the central character has done in his long life suddenly come together to bury him in an avalanche of comeuppance. I’m O.K. with that.

Although I generally admire entrepreneurs who build giant companies, Rupert Murdoch, despite giving us Homer Simpson, generally has not been a force for good over the course of his long career. His Bill O’Reilly-ed, Glenn Beck-ed Fox News has done a great deal to coarsen the political discourse. His tabloids have lowered the standards of journalism on three continents — and routinely broken the law on at least one of them. He had dumbed down his prestige papers, like The Times of London. He has run roughshod over cross-ownership rules meant to prevent one man or company from having too much power — and then used his lobbying might to get those rules diluted. He has put kowtowing to China ahead of freedom of the press, even killing a book set to be published by his HarperCollins unit that the Chinese authorities objected to. He has consistently used his media properties to reward allies and punish enemies. It’s a long list.

Throughout his career, Murdoch has never just been satisfied with besting the competition, as most decent businessmen are. He’s not truly happy unless he has his foot on a competitor’s neck and is pressing it downward. Felix Salmon, a blogger for Reuters, unearthed testimony about an executive who ran one of Murdoch’s more obscure divisions. “I will destroy you,” the man told a competitor, according to the testimony. “I work for a man who wants it all and doesn’t understand anybody telling him he can’t have it all.”

One feature of Murdoch’s career is that he’s never played by the rules that apply to other businessmen. That’s one reason I think he seems so shellshocked in those paparazzi photographs: unable in this dire circumstance to make his own rules, he simply doesn’t know how to react or what to do. On Tuesday, when he is excoriated in Parliament, it will be the first time he has ever truly been held to account. It undoubtedly won’t be fun for him. But there are many people who are going to take great glee in his misery — not unlike the way his newspapers have always taken such glee in the misery of others.

In the e-mails I trade back and forth with friends, we can’t stop marveling at the scandal, at the head-spinning twists and turns. “It’s the best kind of story,” one wrote me, “because none of us really knows how it ends.”

All we can do is read the paper every day, searching for more malicious gossip.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation spent $655 million to settle claims against its newspaper insert business.

By DAVID CARR
NY Times Published: July 17, 2011

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.

The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall.

As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”

Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.

According to The Guardian, whose bulldog reporting pulled back the curtain on the phone-hacking scandal, the News Corporation paid out $1.6 million in 2009 to settle claims related to the scandal. While expedient, and inexpensive — the company still has gobs of money on hand — it was probably not a good strategy in the long run. If some of those cases had gone to trial, it would have had the effect of lancing the wound.

Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make sure it stayed that way.

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely disparage its competitors.

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.

Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had sales of less than $1 million.

But the problems continued, and keeping a lid on News America turned out to be a busy and expensive exercise. At the beginning of this year, it paid out $125 million to Insignia Systems to settle allegations of anticompetitive behavior and violations of antitrust laws. And in the most costly payout, it spent half a billion dollars in 2010 on another settlement, just days before the case was scheduled to go to trial. The plaintiff, Valassis Communications, had already won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in exchange for $500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures going forward.

The News Corporation is a very large, well-capitalized company, but that single payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income in 2010 and matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division that News America was a part of.

Because consumers (and journalists) don’t much care who owns the coupon machine in the snack aisle, the cases have not received much attention. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t a useful window into the broader culture at the News Corporation.

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmelt testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

A representative for the News Corporation did not respond to a request for comment.

Even as the flames of the scandal begin to edge closer to Mr. Murdoch’s door, anybody betting against his business survival will most likely come away disappointed. He has been in deep trouble before and not only survived, but prospered. The News Corporation’s reputation may be under water, but the company itself is very liquid, with $11.8 billion in cash on hand and more than $2.5 billion of annual free cash flow.

Still, money will fix a lot of things, but not everything. When you throw money onto a burning fire, it becomes fuel and nothing more.

Math Bass
“Dogs and Fog”
Sunday, July 17th, 2011
8pm sharp

Overduin and Kite

Editorial
NY Times Published: Published: July 15, 2011

“Catastrophic.” “Calamitous.” “Major crisis.” “Self-inflicted wound.” Those are some of the ways Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has described the fallout if Congress fails to raise the debt limit by the Aug. 2 deadline.

In Congressional testimony this week, Mr. Bernanke also warned that the Fed would not be able to fully counter the damage from a default, including the possibility that spiking interest rates would roil borrowers worldwide and worsen the federal budget deficit by making it costlier to finance the nation’s debt.

That’s not all of it. Brinkmanship over the debt limit is only one of many epic economic policy blunders now in the making. Even if lawmakers raise the debt limit on time, the economy is weak and getting weaker, as evidenced by slowing growth and rising unemployment.

Instead of coming up with policies to strengthen the economy, the Republicans are demanding deep, immediate spending cuts, which would only add to current weakness. The White House, meanwhile, has suggested cuts should be phased in slowly and has said that more near-term help would be good for the economy. That is a better approach. But President Obama has done too little to argue the case, on Capitol Hill or with the public.

Upfront spending cuts could make sense if the budget deficit were the cause of the current economic weakness. If it were, interest rates would be rising, not at generational lows, as the government competed with the private sector. The real cause is lack of consumer demand in the face of stagnant wages, job uncertainty and the continuing payback of household debt from the bubble years. Without strong and steady consumer demand, businesses will not hire, and a self-sustaining recovery cannot take hold.

In such a situation, government must fill the gap with spending on relief and recovery measures. Premature spending cuts will only make things worse by pulling dollars out of a frail economy. Contrary to the claims of Republicans, and some Democrats, that the nation cannot afford new spending, the government could, and should, borrow cheaply at today’s low rates in an effort to bolster demand and, by extension, support jobs.

A place to start would be to extend what little stimulus remains on the books, including the $57 billion-a-year federal unemployment insurance program and the $112 billion payroll tax cut for employees. Both are scheduled to expire at the end of 2011, despite the fact that conditions have deteriorated since they were enacted last year.

Another crucial step would be to reauthorize the highway trust fund, at least at existing levels. The fund, which is paid for mainly by the federal gasoline tax, will allocate $53 billion to states in 2011 for roads and mass transit, supporting millions of jobs. The House version of the highway bill calls for deep cuts, and the better Senate version has not garnered enough Republican support to pass.

It is also past time for lawmakers to move forward with plans for a federal infrastructure bank to provide seed money for major public works.

In his testimony, Mr. Bernanke emphasized that the deficit was a serious problem, but not an immediate one. He is right. It can be solved over time, with spending cuts and tax increases, as the economy recovers.

Recovery, however, requires the creation of millions more jobs, starting now, than the current economy is capable of generating. It is time for the government to step up. If it doesn’t, the weakening economy is bound to become even weaker.

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times Published: July 15, 2011

Amid shattered glass and the black smoke of urban pyres, I found myself in a riot some years ago — the anarchists-led assault on the World Trade Organization meetings of 1999. At the height of what became known as The Battle of Seattle, I bumped into an otherwise mild-mannered, libertarian-leaning friend on the streets, gasping at the bitter taste of tear gas. He was ecstatic.

“Isn’t it great?” he shouted. “The established order is coming down!”

Turns out, only Nike Town, the Gap and a few other outposts of global capitalism were coming down, and just for a day or so. But the nihilistic spirit of those window-smashers, whose goal was to bring chaos to a city of passive refinements, seems to have found a home: in the Republican Party.

Who would put at risk, at a time when most people are hurting from a gasping economy, the monthly issuance of life-supporting funds for wounded veterans, disabled children, countless elderly couples living on barely $2,000 a month — all told, over 70 million checks that go out each month?

Who would risk pushing the livelihoods of businesses small and big off a cliff by an interest rate spike, possibly igniting a second recession as the credit-rating agencies have just suggested — essentially saying “blow your brains out, America,” as Warren Buffett phrased it?

Who would risk this anarchists’ storm, rather than a pass a formality: extending the borrowing authority of the United States so the country can pay bills from the past? Certainly, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, cannot find anyone so reckless in Washington. “Nobody is talking about not raising the debt ceiling,” he said last Sunday. “I haven’t heard that from anybody.”

Radical Republicans didn’t go to Washington to find solutions; they went there to destroy the place.

Either he’s deaf to the roar on his right or he’s speaking exclusively to that diminishing other wing of his party, the Tasseled Loafers. Not only is Michele Bachmann, a leading Republican presidential candidate, saying a government default is nothing to worry about, but a core group of 59 House Republicans have indicated they will not raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

That’s right: no matter how much President Obama gives them — from curbing entitlements to cuts in excess of $3 trillion — this cadre of radical Republicans is taking the burn-it-all-down position. They don’t want to see the terms of a deal because there is no deal they will accept. That’s their stated position.

With this step, what the chaos caucus has proven is that they have no interest in governing. They didn’t go to Washington to find solutions; they went there to destroy the place.

Based on Boehner’s math, the anarchists make up perhaps 25 percent of the G.O.P. House. At the other end of party control are the moneyed interests who’ve long bankrolled Republicans. They’re happy, of course, that their favored politicians are willing to go to the brink of catastrophe to keep even the most egregious tax loopholes from being closed. But now they’re getting scared, as the anarchist wing indicates it is serious about bringing the whole government down — and with it a lot of private money.

Symbolic of the Tasseled Loafers’ hold on power was that dinner of Rep. Paul Ryan last week, in which the House budget-writer shared a pair of $350 bottles of wine with a hedge fund manager and a free-market economist. When the story broke, he was embarrassed enough to issue a copy of his credit card receipt showing he paid for at least one of the bottles of 2004 Echezeaux grand cru Burgundy himself, and was not simply being courted in violation of lobbying rules. (If he’d bought American, and had been as frugal with his money as he wants the country to be, Ryan could have drunk superb Oregon pinot noir for a fraction of the French grape’s price.)

The loafers may want to retreat to their wine cellars until this thing blows over.

I don’t care how rich guys spend their money, or even if a congressman pays as much for a single bottle of wine as some fellow Americans get for their weekly unemployment checks. Ryan is the architect of a budget that gives even more tax breaks for the corporate elite while making the elderly pay for diminished Medicare with coupons. Nobody should be surprised when he drinks $350 wine with people who want continue the policies of economic inequality.

But the dinner is instructive as a picture of power. Throughout these debt ceiling negotiations, I’ve been waiting for the Republicans’ corporate overlords to jerk their chain. And finally, a few days ago, the Business Roundtable, in a letter signed by more than 350 C.E.O.’s, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a dire warning — the game of chicken is up. They said what others who have a large stake in this economy have said: that default could cause a multi-billion dollar crash, affecting everything from auto loans to credit-card debt.

And so, in response to the Tasseled Loafers’ concern, McConnell tried again, saying, “We think it’s extremely important that the country reassure the markets that default is not an option.”

Note who is getting the reassurance from the Senate Republican leader. But it may be too late. The loafers may want to retreat to their wine cellars until this thing blows over. A renegade wing of their party is lighting fires and throwing rocks (metaphorically, of course!). Once they got a taste of smoke in their nostrils, the anarchists realized they could smash the place up, maybe even burn it down, and no one would stop them. After Aug. 2, the default deadline, the smell will go bad, quickly.

Canon Dr- Beverly Hills, 1955

By Patrick Range McDonald
LA Weekly Published: July 14, 2011

On an overcast morning, Susan Bursk, president of the Century City Chamber of Commerce, is running a meticulously staged press conference at the corner of Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars, across from the Century Plaza Hotel. She has enlisted a gaggle of middle-aged supporters who cheer and wave placards for the TV cameras while Century City boosters urge spending tens of millions of dollars on a Westside Subway stop on sleepy Constellation Boulevard, instead of at a long-discussed site on bustling Santa Monica Boulevard about two blocks away.

Bursk, politically savvy if reserved, declares that a station “in the heart of Century City” — a marketing phrase she coined to promote building the subway stop at Constellation Boulevard — will beef up ridership on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s long-vaunted Subway to the Sea.

Los Angeles leaders recently dropped the Subway to the Sea name in favor of the official Metro name, the “Westside Subway” extension, because the line has no serious prospects of reaching the ocean. Though a point of civic pride, the subway — also known as the Purple Line — is expected by 2035 to create a virtually unnoticeable reduction in car traffic of less than 1 percent. Metro conceded in a draft Environmental Impact Report that the Westside Subway won’t cut congestion even slightly in the city or the region.

Century City boosters claim that a subway station placed at the “center of the center” is inarguably superior to a station on Santa Monica Boulevard. But Metro’s own preliminary data show that a few hundred more people each day will use the subway if it stops on the big artery, Santa Monica, rather than 1,000 feet south on three-block-long Constellation Boulevard.

Yet a debate over whether Santa Monica or Constellation should get the stop is fueling the fiercest — and potentially one of the costliest — transportation wars to hit the Westside since Beverly Hills stopped a freeway 40 years ago that would have come to Century City’s doorstep.

Bursk and the boosters claim that Century City office workers will eagerly use the subway if the station is moved two blocks south. Such a route would take the subway to the foot of a 37-story “Century City Center” skyscraper expected to be built by JMB, a City Hall–connected developer that has showered Villaraigosa with campaign funds.

But creating that southern turn onto Constellation means tunneling a subway line directly beneath the historic Beverly Hills High School campus.

“We were caught off-guard,” says Lisa Korbatov, board president of Beverly Hills Unified School District. “We were blindsided.”

Plainspoken and direct, Korbatov is furious about the potential fate facing Beverly Hills High, where the district has extensive plans for underground construction on district land — land that would be gobbled up by a Metro tunnel if the subway is routed onto Constellation Boulevard.

“[Metro] will gut this campus,” Korbatov says. “It is so detrimental to our ability to build not just now, but for a hundred years.”

Century City News publisher Mike Carlin might be describing a crime syndicate when he declares of Beverly Hills Unified: “Every time these guys do something, they deal from the bottom of the deck.” He slams the district’s website, centurycitysubway.org, as looking “like it’s the official website for Century City, and that’s the farthest thing from the truth. They’re slimy.”

In the savage political battle of the 1960s, the “Beverly Hills Freeway” was backed by California’s top politicos. A massive east-west 10-lane edifice running roughly parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard and Melrose Avenue, the freeway would have wiped out and slashed through big sections of Hollywood, Hancock Park, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Westwood. It would have served a futuristic “Century” city of skyscrapers on a vast backlot previously owned by 20th Century Fox.

The skyscrapers were built, but the freeway wasn’t. It was stopped by a mighty midget, the residents of Beverly Hills.

This time, Beverly Hills isn’t opposing the subway. The civic leaders love it. But every Beverly Hills elected official, from the City Council to the Beverly Hills Unified School District Board of Education, strongly opposes tunneling below the high school campus to move the route two blocks south. And they are pouring significant resources into fighting the much richer, bigger land barons of Century City.

“Who’s behind it?” Beverly Hills Mayor Barry Brucker asks of the Constellation Boulevard subway stop proposal. “Three initials: JMB.”

Patrick Meara, a senior vice president at JMB Realty, when asked if JMB has held private talks with Villaraigosa, avers, “This whole process has been very public.” He insists JMB won’t unduly profit from the enhanced land value created by the Constellation station: “No different than what anyone else would get.”

In 2008, Beverly Hills voters approved a $334 million bond measure to help the school district modernize and renovate Beverly Hills High School, circa 1927, which was deemed a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education in 2004 and serves 2,200 students.

Beverly Hills Unified plans to construct new buildings and a subterranean parking lot at the exact location where Metro would put its tunnel if Metro’s board of directors chooses Constellation for the subway stop later this year. The parking lot probably would be impossible to construct and, Korbatov argues, government regulations could prohibit or jack up construction costs by millions of dollars if the school district wants to build on the school land topping the tunnel.

Beverly Hills leaders now are wary and suspicious of Metro’s motives, and with good reason: During years of talks between Metro staffers and Beverly Hills community leaders, an old “option” gathering dust that would place the station on Constellation never came up. Beverly Hills officials heard unverifiable rumors about the scheme last year, and soon after that Metro staffers and politicians on its board began acting as if they were sold on the high school tunnel route.

The key cheerleader for all this is Mayor Villaraigosa, chairman of Metro’s board of directors. Villaraigosa has taken at least $296,000 for his pet political projects and election campaigns from JMB Realty and Westfield Corporation, two large developers whose Century City property values would be enhanced by having a subway at their doors. At a recent Century City “power breakfast,” Villaraigosa publicly backed the Constellation station, telling the crowd that a subway stop “needs to be right here in the heart of Century City.”

Villaraigosa’s push for the Constellation station could jeopardize two key promises he made to Los Angeles County taxpayers and to federal politicians during trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby President Obama and Congress for a hefty federal loan for the Westside Subway: He promised an unusually speedy and cost-efficient completion of the $5.3 billion underground Purple Line.

Those two promises have been a mainstay of Villaraigosa’s position. If things go wrong, the Westside Subway project could skyrocket in cost, consuming $1 of every $5 from a special half-cent transportation sales tax collected from millions of residents across L.A. County. If mired in traditional delays brought on by lawsuits, tunneling troubles and missed funding opportunities, the Westside Subway extension’s cost is pegged by some analysts at $6 billion to $9 billion.

The price tag quoted by Metro has already quietly jumped from $4.8 billion to $5.3 billion before a shovel of earth has been turned.

Observers suggest Villaraigosa is rolling the dice on behalf of his good friends at JMB, the company co-founders Judd Malkin and Neil Bluhm, and praying that scrappy Beverly Hills Unified doesn’t play hardball.

“You can never stop a government public works project entirely,” advises developer Jerry Schneiderman, who fought Metro after its subway tunneling led to the collapse of Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990s. But, he says, “You can starve it.”

Encircled by aging and dense L.A., Beverly Hills leaders protect their territory like a Doberman pinscher against an old but wily grizzly bear. “The school district is an absolute source of pride,” says Beverly Hills City Councilman John Mirisch. “It’s a very important component to us.”

If Beverly Hills shows the tenacity it did 40 years ago, it could create real trouble for Villaraigosa’s jump-start of the Westside Subway. In 2010, Villaraigosa made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., seeking creation of a “national infrastructure bank” that would loan Metro early funds for the Purple Line and other projects. Although Villaraigosa’s idea was applauded in Washington, it went nowhere.

Last week, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) opposed a national infrastructure bank, probably its death blow. There is still hope for fast-tracking the Westside Subway so that it can reach Westwood by Metro’s most optimistic projection of 2022. The feds recently awarded Metro $546 million to help speed up by two years the construction of the Crenshaw Light Rail line through South Los Angeles, indicating that Washington admires Villaraigosa’s fast-tracking idea. In addition, Mica has proposed a $1 billion annual boost in federal transportation funds for major projects nationwide.

Some transportation experts are fascinated to see Los Angeles pick this late-in-the-game fight with Beverly Hills Unified School District just when Washington is being asked to decide whether, and how much, to help out the Westside Subway. Despite Mica’s $1 billion proposal, the Republican majority in the House is looking for a reason to reject transportation funding, angry over the deficit and President Obama’s push for costly high-speed rail.

“You have a House of Representatives that’s all ears” regarding controversies it can cite to sink a transportation project, says Wendell Cox, an international mass transit expert who served on the former L.A. County Transportation Commission, now known as Metro. The House is “far from friendly toward this kind of project.”

Beverly Hills could play directly to that political reality and upset L.A.’s game plan as it did decades ago.

In the early 1960s, the Aluminum Company of America and developer William Zeckendorf decided to build a “city within a city” named after 20th Century Fox, designed by renowned architect Welton Becket and served by a brand-new freeway that would slash across L.A.’s most livable neighborhoods. During the 1960s and ’70s, several “freeway revolts” erupted in which Californians stopped Caltrans from erecting wildly inappropriate freeways that were never built (the “Reseda Freeway” would have cut straight through the pristine Santa Monica Mountains to the ocean). In one noteworthy “freeway revolt,” Beverly Hills killed the Beverly Hills Freeway.

Century City developers seem to have the upper hand in the new clash.

That advantage largely comes down to the longtime relationship between Malkin and Bluhm, co-founders of JMB Realty — a super-rich, politically connected, Chicago-based real estate firm — and Villaraigosa, chairman of the powerful Metro board that will pick the subway route.

JMB Realty owns the SunAmerica skyscraper at Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars, and plans to build the 37-story Century City Center on open land at that intersection. The subway station at Constellation would run almost to the lobbies of those two highrises. Another JMB skyscraper, formerly called the MGM Tower, is a half-block away.

JMB’s alliance with Villaraigosa dates to 2006, when the Weekly reported that the mayor received $100,000 from the firm to spend on his Committee for Government Excellence and Accountability. At the time, Villaraigosa’s committee was lobbying the California Legislature for a new law giving him veto power over the hiring and firing of the L.A. Unified School District superintendent. Villaraigosa’s bold and bitterly fought education reform was found unlawful by a judge.

Two years later, Judd Malkin and Neil Bluhm sponsored a June 3, 2008, fundraiser with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to help finance Villaraigosa’s mayoral re-election campaign. JMB’s event for Villaraigosa in Chicago raked in nearly $96,000, with Malkin’s and Bluhm’s employees, family members and associates contributing heavily.

Nobody knows how the proposal came about to spend an extra $60 million so that Century City could have a subway stop at Constellation Boulevard. But the estimated extra cost is significant, given that numerous less-powerful cities are being told by Metro that there is no way to pay for many of their own $10 million to $50 million projects from the half-cent sales tax approved by voters. The city of Hawthorne, for example, wanted $52 million for a badly needed auxiliary lane on the 405.

On Oct. 15, 2009, three months after Villaraigosa took office for a second four-year term, Century City’s heavy hitters asked for a private meeting with Metro staffers Jody Litvak and David Mieger, to discuss their desire for a subway stop on Constellation Boulevard. Litvak is the Westside Subway community relations manager and Mieger is the planning project director.

Century City chamber president Susan Bursk, a former deputy for ex–L.A. City Councilman Jack Weiss, had met with Litvak four months earlier. Now, Bursk brought along executives from JMB Realty, Next Century Associates, Westfield Corporation and other major Century City land holders. Two aides for L.A. City Councilman Paul Koretz, whose district includes Century City, also were present.

No records were kept of what was said. Although government staff were present, Metro spokesman Rick Jager says no audio or video tapes exist of the meeting — and strangely, neither do written notes, which are usual for such meetings.

One bit of information was preserved, however: a brief notation in the Metro log maintained for all Metro meetings. It states that Bursk and her associates “generally favored [a] Constellation station.”

Litvak insists to the Weekly that the idea for a Constellation station was generated at public hearings, and was being studied by Metro months before the unrecorded meeting.

Fifteen days after the private sit-down, Villaraigosa publicly unveiled his “30/10″ plan to convince the Obama administration and Congress to loan Metro billions of dollars so L.A. could jump-start the Subway to the Sea and other rail projects, finishing in 10 years instead of 30. (No longer the Subway to the Sea, the Westside Subway extension stops miles short of Santa Monica Beach at Westwood and thus would take 23 years, not 30, to build without upfront federal loans.)

After that, the civic cheerleading was in full force.

“If Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has his way,” an Oct. 30, 2009, Los Angeles Times article gushed, “Los Angeles County will soon embark on a commuter rail–building boom the likes of which the region has never seen.”

Beverly Hills leaders were never informed that the Constellation option to tunnel under the high school campus was under study in early 2009 — yet they met with Metro staff on 10 or more occasions starting in 2007. Still in the dark in August 2009, the Beverly Hills City Council approved recommendations from its mass-transit committee to support a subway line through Beverly Hills that ran beneath Wilshire Boulevard, then switched to Santa Monica Boulevard to run beside Century City.

“A route underneath the high school was never mentioned,” says Beverly Hills Mass Transit Committee member Ken Goldman, who’s also president of the Southwest Beverly Hills Homeowners Association.

Councilman John Mirisch says Metro leaders “baited the entire community to support the subway by getting them involved, and then switched [the subway route] when political forces got involved.”

Sarah Shaw, a general manager at JMB, again met privately with Jody Litvak in March 2010, and a month later Beverly Hills leaders began to hear rumors that Metro was considering a different route.

Brief notes in a Metro log show that Shaw and Litvak discussed “Century City station & alignments.” The log says Villaraigosa’s ability to nail down a federal loan for his “30/10″ concept could help skyscraper owners JMB build their 37-story tower. “Given the economy,” wrote Litvak, JMB’s leaders “don’t know when they would start. If 30/10 happens, construction lay down is a possibility.”

At the time, Villaraigosa had grown somewhat obsessed with obtaining the federal loan to build the subway in 10 years. On April 20, 2010, as President Obama was preparing to leave Los Angeles after a visit to Southern California, Villaraigosa rushed to meet him on the tarmac at LAX. He later told news crews covering the president’s trip that he hadn’t gotten a promise for 30/10 funds — but Obama had appraised Villaraigosa as someone who is “indefatigable and won’t take no for an answer.”

In September 2010, Metro released a draft environmental study with a surprise: the announcement of the Constellation station “option.” The next month, on Oct. 28, Beverly Hills community leaders stormed a Metro meeting, telling Villaraigosa, Yaroslavsky and other Metro board members that the idea of tunneling under Beverly Hills High School was unacceptable.

“We do not want the subway to run under our high school,” Beverly Hills City Councilwoman Nancy Krasne told Metro board members.

Since then, school board president Korbatov says, Metro staffers and board members have only shown heightened interest in the Constellation option. “It really troubles me,” Korbatov says, “and it troubles my colleagues. They’re telling us, ‘Wait, wait, the process isn’t done yet, we haven’t decided yet.’ But it seems they have.”

Villaraigosa, in particular, is publicly “promoting it. They appear to have made up their minds, but they just haven’t formalized it,” she says.

The exchange of words has grown ugly. Korbatov says neither Yaroslavsky, who represents Beverly Hills, nor Villaraigosa has visited the high school campus, although invitations were extended to both. Yaroslavsky, in turn, criticizes Beverly Hills Unified, saying, “It’s been very difficult in dealing with the [Beverly Hills] school district, because they won’t give anyone their development plans.”

But David Mieger, the Westside Subway project director, says Yaroslavsky’s claim is not true. Beverly Hills Unified made a “good-faith effort to dig through their files and give us whatever they’ve got.” Korbatov calls Yaroslavsky a liar, saying his statement is “uncategorically, 100 percent false.”

Yaroslavsky also snaps that a comment made by Korbatov several months ago, that subways are prime targets for terrorists, is “just absurd.” He belittles the plan to build subterranean parking at the school, declaring, “I don’t think anybody is going to spend money to build an underground garage.”

Yaroslavsky has taken no public position on where to place the Century City subway route, but he uses the talking points promoted by Century City boosters. “Any 6-year-old can you tell you where the center of a circle is,” he says, and Constellation Boulevard is that “center,” while Santa Monica Boulevard is not.

Yaroslavsky even came up with his own slogan: “The center of the center.”

Huffs Korbatov: “Zev is very much for the ‘center of the center’ — their version of it.”

For his part, Villaraigosa’s spokeswoman Sarah Hamilton says the “mayor has not yet taken a position, as there is currently not enough information available.”

But that’s not true.

Villaraigosa three months ago made his position clear, publicly embracing the station on Constellation Boulevard at an April 7 Century City breakfast sponsored by the Century City Chamber of Commerce, military contractor Northrop Grumman, the Pollack PR Marketing Group and others.

In a YouTube video produced by Mike Carlin’s Century City News and featured on the Chamber of Commerce’s website, Villaraigosa busily works the room with a wireless microphone and says, “I think you all know that I’m on record that [the subway station] needs to be right here in the heart of Century City!”

Villaraigosa triumphantly thrusts an arm in the air, while Century City’s elite applaud. Someone lets out a whoop. They all understand: The mayor has just publicly backed the route to Constellation Boulevard desired by JMB and the other developers.

Since Villaraigosa is chairman of the Metro board of directors, his cheerleading for people who have showered him with political money is seen as unseemly.

“The mayor is certainly entitled to his opinion,” says Bob Stern, president of the L.A.–based Center for Governmental Studies. “At the same time, he listens to [Century City developers] more closely than to me, who hasn’t contributed $300,000.”

Other politicians are more careful than Villaraigosa. California State Assemblyman Mike Feuer says he hasn’t taken a position because “it would be inappropriate to champion one route or another until the analysis has been completed.” A spokesperson for Rep. Henry Waxman tells the Weekly the congressman wants to “see the final report of the geotechnical and other studies” before deciding.

Meara, the senior VP at JMB Realty, tells the Weekly that Constellation Boulevard is the best place to put a subway station because of larger civic needs. He doesn’t mention that it will stop almost directly beneath a JMB skyscraper. He says JMB’s heavy contributions to Villaraigosa are solely because “the mayor puts a priority on things that we’re supportive of: education, the environment and the business health of Los Angeles.”

Century City booster Susan Bursk is confident that Metro’s final environmental impact statement and report (EIS/EIR) later this year will unveil new findings that make a strong case for Constellation. But such predictions make outside experts uneasy about the influence being brought to bear on Metro employees who are writing up the EIS/EIR.

Tom Rubin, an Oakland-based mass transit consultant and former chief financial officer of the Southern California Rapid Transit District now known as Metro, says, “It would be a very, very brave CEO of a transit agency to tell the board they are wrong. That’s not something you see very often.”

He warns: “Government transportation doesn’t have anything to do with what’s best for transportation, especially at Metro.”

Later this year, Metro’s 13 board members — including Yaroslavsky, Villaraigosa and his three appointees, Mel Wilson, Richard Katz and Jose Huizar — will approve the final route for the Westside Subway. The former Subway to the Sea will run from Vermont Avenue nine miles west, ending at the VA Hospital near the 405 in Westwood. If the Metro board of directors selects the Constellation route, how they reached that decision likely will come under scrutiny.

“Carmageddon,” the July 16-17 closure of the 405 in Los Angeles, focused attention on how fears of a lawsuit by local residents can force Caltrans and Metro to back down. Caltrans and Metro surprised residents along the 405 early this year with a cheaper “alternative” plan for replacing Mulholland bridge that threw out an earlier design. Locals fought back. To avoid a potential years-long delay of the 405 widening project, Caltrans and Metro returned to the original plan.

The parallels to the war between Century City and Beverly Hills are plain.

“Metro is in a situation where they’re pretty darn sure there’s a legal challenge coming,” says Rubin, the outside consultant. Metro will be “very careful” not to appear as if it slanted the findings to satisfy the desires of politicians or their friends.

Hollywood developer Jerry Schneiderman, who hammered Metro throughout the 1990s for its numerous mishaps and scandals including the collapse of Hollywood Boulevard during subway construction, says Beverly Hills officials could make life a nightmare for Metro — especially, he quips, if they hire him as a consultant.

In 1994, when he was president of the Hollywood Property Owners Association, Schneiderman recalls, Metro officials threatened to bankrupt him if he ever filed a lawsuit against the Red Line subway. So, “I decided I would bankrupt them first.”

When a giant sinkhole collapsed Hollywood Boulevard, Schneiderman made Metro’s life miserable. He hired a law firm that sought damages for numerous businesses on Hollywood Boulevard, and he and mass-transit watchdog John Walsh frequently made headlines attacking the costly boondoggle. The sinkhole, lawsuits, negative news coverage and other events helped boost Metro’s annual insurance rate for the Red Line from $16 million in 1994 to $61 million in 1998, Schneiderman says.

“We did so much damage to [Metro's] reputation,” he says, “that any politician looked silly supporting it.” He says its federal funding plummeted between 1994 and 1998 — and many credited the Hollywood activists in part.

That year, Yaroslavsky authored a ballot measure that banned the use of county sales tax money for further subway tunneling, and voters effectively killed new subways in L.A. Ten years later, in 2008, voters changed their minds and approved Measure R, the half-cent countywide sales tax that will gradually pour $30 billion into the Westside Subway and other transportation projects across L.A. County.

Land-use attorney Robert P. Silverstein, who is battling Metro in a dispute over the Gold Line, says Beverly Hills Unified could challenge the validity of Metro’s final EIR, a move that could soak up nearly two years and probably would delay construction of the Westside Subway. A judge can order the agency to re-study the issue and write another EIR — which can add another year of delay. If Beverly Hills officials don’t like that revised EIR, they can sue again.

School district officials also could sue Metro for damages. “If Metro takes the land,” explains Silverstein, a graduate of Beverly Hills High School who is not involved in the dispute, “Beverly Hills Unified probably can’t build underneath the campus. That damages your property value.”

The idea that it’s crucial to move the subway stop two blocks, to the foot of Century City’s skyscrapers, is seen by some as a symbol of L.A.’s leadership woes. “If this was New York, London, or Paris,” says mass transit expert Wendell Cox, “that argument would be laughable.”

In a room at the Century City offices of Sitrick and Company, Beverly Hills School Board president Lisa Korbatov is flanked by two PR consultants and an engineering expert. The district has approved $500,000 for legal, lobbying and consulting fees to fight the subway tunnel under Beverly Hills High School. Of that war chest, $350,000 came from the district’s bond measure aimed, in part, at modernizing the high school built in the 1920s.

Korbatov is not happy about these expenditures, thinking the money would be better spent on students and facilities. “To make a little school district fight for their existence on this — to me, it’s unconscionable what they’re forcing us to do.”

Cox says Beverly Hills officials have a good argument for sticking with their battle. The data show that neither proposed station will outdo the other, with Santa Monica attracting slightly more riders than Constellation. The possible lawsuits and delays attendant to tunneling underneath a high school campus can be avoided if Metro board members choose the Santa Monica station. Yet no elected official on the federal, state or local level is hinting at support for the Santa Monica subway stop.

“You can avoid the downsides,” Cox says. Or you can roll the dice.

Century City News publisher Carlin, who’s also a member of the Century City Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t want to hear such talk. “Let’s take care of Los Angeles for a change,” Carlin says. “Beverly Hills is always taken care of.”

Korbatov says she hopes “people aren’t doing things on a handshake or backroom deals. I hope they put the public’s needs first. But I’m realistic as well.”

If Metro board members approve the Constellation station this fall or winter, they’ll likely follow their frequent behavior after taking a big vote: They’ll announce that a “historic day” has come to Los Angeles. The more likely reality is that the Beverly Hills versus Century City showdown has only just begun.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 14, 2011

There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.

A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.

Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.

And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state.

Let’s talk for a minute about what Republican leaders are rejecting.

President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As The Times’s Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!

Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.

First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past. Mitt Romney’s health care plan became a tyrannical assault on American freedom when put in place by that man in the White House. And the same logic applies to the proposed debt deals.

Put it this way: If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.

Beyond that, voodoo economics has taken over the G.O.P.

Supply-side voodoo — which claims that tax cuts pay for themselves and/or that any rise in taxes would lead to economic collapse — has been a powerful force within the G.O.P. ever since Ronald Reagan embraced the concept of the Laffer curve. But the voodoo used to be contained. Reagan himself enacted significant tax increases, offsetting to a considerable extent his initial cuts.

And even the administration of former President George W. Bush refrained from making extravagant claims about tax-cut magic, at least in part for fear that making such claims would raise questions about the administration’s seriousness.

Recently, however, all restraint has vanished — indeed, it has been driven out of the party. Last year Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, asserted that the Bush tax cuts actually increased revenue — a claim completely at odds with the evidence — and also declared that this was “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.” And it’s true: even Mr. Romney, widely regarded as the most sensible of the contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination, has endorsed the view that tax cuts can actually reduce the deficit.

Which brings me to the culpability of those who are only now facing up to the G.O.P.’s craziness.

Here’s the point: those within the G.O.P. who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price, if outsiders had been willing to condemn those who took irresponsible positions.

But there has been no such price. Mr. Bush squandered the surplus of the late Clinton years, yet prominent pundits pretend that the two parties share equal blame for our debt problems. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a supposed deficit-reduction plan that included huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, then received an award for fiscal responsibility.

So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end. If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.

Thanks to Danielle Kays

Not Now, 2011, Oil on canvas, 84 x 60 inches inches (213.4 x 152.4 cm)

Through July 30, 2011

“Six Pack” at Richard Telles

Just shy of 80, Ronnie Nelsen has been a Dodgers vendor for 53 years, focusing mainly on peanuts. An inspiration to teammates and fans, he hasn’t missed a home game in nine years.
“I look at life this way,” Ronnie Nelsen says. “I’m doing this for my health, I’m burning weight off and I’m seeing people and enjoying life.” (Gina Ferazzi, Los Angeles Times / July 7, 2011)

By Steve Lopez
Los Angeles Times Published: July 13, 2011

In an otherwise horrible season for the Dodgers, Ronnie Nelsen is having a pretty good year.

He can throw either right-handed or left-handed with equally good arm strength, and he’s an inspiration to teammates and fans. Just shy of 80, Nelsen has been a Dodgers vendor for 53 years, focusing mainly on peanuts. And he hasn’t missed a home game in nine years.

Kathy Paris, a fan in Section 39, was Nelsen’s first sale of the night at a Dodgers-Mets game last week. She and her friend Brenda Barnett said it’s an inspiration to see a guy his age working such a physically tough job. Nearby, a fan named Anita Morland had this to say:

“God bless him. He goes up and down the stairs like he’s a young man.”

A slight exaggeration, perhaps. Sure, Nelsen charges around like a bull, even during blazing hot day games, when a band of sweat forms along the shoulder strap of a vending sack filled with as many as 25 bags of peanuts.

But there’s enough of a lurch to his step as he descends the concrete stairs, slightly hunched, that you pray he won’t take a tumble. There’s determination in his ice blue eyes, though.

“I look at life this way,” said Nelsen. “I’m doing this for my health, I’m burning weight off and I’m seeing people and enjoying life.”

Nelsen, who lives alone in Valley Village, grew up in Washington state. He said he had seizures as a kid, later suffered a head injury in a fall and moved to Los Angeles in his 20s for an adult education program. He pumped gas at a filling station and also worked as a security guard and restaurant busboy.

Then came his big break.

“I went to a meeting at the union office in December of 1957,” said Nelsen, who was a member of the restaurant and hotel workers union. “They said a baseball team was coming to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, if anybody wanted to be a vendor.”

He raised his hand, and for as long as Vin Scully has been calling games in the announcer’s booth, Nelsen has been serving Dodger fans. Today, Nelsen is one of four vendors who started in 1958 when the Dodgers played at the Coliseum. The others are Roger Owens, Leo Ramsey and Mort Rose, all of whom made the move to Dodger Stadium with Nelsen in 1962.

Nelsen hasn’t had the same exposure as Owens, who’s known for his acrobatic peanut tosses and has been on the “The Tonight Show.” But as Owens said at the Mets game, Nelsen is an original, and he’s known by fellow vendors as “Ronnie Baby” and “Ronnie Hollywood.”

“Baby” because he acts like he’ll live forever, and “Hollywood” because of his knack for accidentally getting his picture in the sports pages.

“You see this?” Nelsen said, pulling a framed clipping out of a bag he brought from home for his interview with me. In the photo, torn from the L.A. Times, two Dodgers are at home plate, celebrating a run, and the handsome young vendor looking on from the stands is Ronnie Hollywood.

Before each game, the vendors, employed by Levy Restaurants under a contract with the Dodgers, assemble in the upper reaches of the stadium for what they call the lineup. In order of seniority, they choose what they want to sell — peanuts, ice cream, soda, etc. — and what part of the stadium they want to work in. Nelsen usually picks peanuts, which are light and popular, and he favors the nut-buying acres between home plate and left field.

After choosing his usual assignment on the night I visited last week, Nelsen descended five flights of stairs like he was running to fight a fire. The faster you get your peanuts from the storage bins, the faster you can start selling them. Nelsen, who sells between three and seven boxes each game, said this has been a challenging year because of the well-documented woes of the Dodgers’ owners and the drop-off in attendance.

But he stacked six boxes on a cart, stashed all but one of them in a locked service area, and charged into the crowd yelling, “Peanuts!”

Nelsen made the first sale in less than two minutes, and had peddled 10 bags by the time the game began. The vendors really hustle because they’re paid based on sales. Nelsen generally makes about $100 a game, which is nice to have in his pocket on top of a Social Security check.

For many years, Nelsen worked night games, then went straight to a graveyard shift somewhere as a security guard or gas station attendant. Now it’s just the vending job, and when there’s no ballgame, Nelsen likes to cruise the Valley in his Mazda, listening to his Johnnie Ray CDs, or maybe the Ames Brothers or Tommy Dorsey.

If he’s up for a treat, he’ll pull into Denny’s or Norms for ice cream or a piece of pie. He and another vendor, Dave Rafel, enjoy “2 For Tuesdays” at Lancers in Burbank, where two people can eat for the price of a single $14.99 dinner.

“You can pick barbecued ribs, liver and onions, meatloaf or red snapper,” said Nelsen.

On game days, Ronnie Baby can’t wait to get to work, and he sneaks glimpses of the game when he can. Nelsen says Dodgers greats Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale treated him well, autographing baseballs for him. And he likes it when fans tell him he looks young for 80, or that they remember seeing him at ballgames back when they were kids.

“If I can,” said Nelsen, “I’ll keep doing this till I’m 90.”

Through August 12, 2011

Andrea Rosen