By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY TimesPublished: November 18, 2010

What do the government of China, the government of Germany and the Republican Party have in common? They’re all trying to bully the Federal Reserve into calling off its efforts to create jobs. And the motives of all three are highly suspect.

It’s not as if the Fed is doing anything radical. It’s true that the Fed normally conducts monetary policy by buying short-term U.S. government debt, whereas now, under the unhelpful name of “quantitative easing,” it’s buying longer-term debt. (Buying more short-term debt is pointless because the interest rate on that debt is near zero.) But Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, had it right when he protested that this is “just monetary policy.” The Fed is trying to reduce interest rates, as it always does when unemployment is high and inflation is low.

And inflation is indeed low. Core inflation — a measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices, and is widely considered a better gauge of underlying trends than the headline number — is running at just 0.6 percent, the lowest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, unemployment is almost 10 percent, and long-term unemployment is worse than it has been since the Great Depression.

So the case for Fed action is overwhelming. In fact, the main concern reasonable people have about the Fed’s plans — a concern that I share — is that they are likely to prove too weak, too ineffective.

But there are reasonable people — and then there’s the China-Germany-G.O.P. axis of depression.

It’s no mystery why China and Germany are on the warpath against the Fed. Both nations are accustomed to running huge trade surpluses. But for some countries to run trade surpluses, others must run trade deficits — and, for years, that has meant us. The Fed’s expansionary policies, however, have the side effect of somewhat weakening the dollar, making U.S. goods more competitive, and paving the way for a smaller U.S. deficit. And the Chinese and Germans don’t want to see that happen.

For the Chinese government, by the way, attacking the Fed has the additional benefit of shifting attention away from its own currency manipulation, which keeps China’s currency artificially weak — precisely the sin China falsely accuses America of committing.

But why are Republicans joining in this attack?

Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues seem stunned to find themselves in the cross hairs. They thought they were acting in the spirit of none other than Milton Friedman, who blamed the Fed for not acting more forcefully during the Great Depression — and who, in 1998, called on the Bank of Japan to “buy government bonds on the open market,” exactly what the Fed is now doing.

Republicans, however, will have none of it, raising objections that range from the odd to the incoherent.

The odd: on Monday, a somewhat strange group of Republican figures — who knew that William Kristol was an expert on monetary policy? — released an open letter to the Fed warning that its policies “risk currency debasement and inflation.” These concerns were echoed in a letter the top four Republicans in Congress sent Mr. Bernanke on Wednesday. Neither letter explained why we should fear inflation when the reality is that inflation keeps hitting record lows.

And about dollar debasement: leaving aside the fact that a weaker dollar actually helps U.S. manufacturing, where were these people during the previous administration? The dollar slid steadily through most of the Bush years, a decline that dwarfs the recent downtick. Why weren’t there similar letters demanding that Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman at the time, tighten policy?

Meanwhile, the incoherent: Two Republicans, Mike Pence in the House and Bob Corker in the Senate, have called on the Fed to abandon all efforts to achieve full employment and focus solely on price stability. Why? Because unemployment remains so high. No, I don’t understand the logic either.

So what’s really motivating the G.O.P. attack on the Fed? Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues were clearly caught by surprise, but the budget expert Stan Collender predicted it all. Back in August, he warned Mr. Bernanke that “with Republican policy makers seeing economic hardship as the path to election glory,” they would be “opposed to any actions taken by the Federal Reserve that would make the economy better.” In short, their real fear is not that Fed actions will be harmful, it is that they might succeed.

Hence the axis of depression. No doubt some of Mr. Bernanke’s critics are motivated by sincere intellectual conviction, but the core reason for the attack on the Fed is self-interest, pure and simple. China and Germany want America to stay uncompetitive; Republicans want the economy to stay weak as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House.

And if Mr. Bernanke gives in to their bullying, they may all get their wish.

Through January 29, 2011

Andrea Caratsch Zurich

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: November 17, 2010

Earlier this month, I offended a number of readers with a column suggesting that if you want to see rapacious income inequality, you no longer need to visit a banana republic. You can just look around.

My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.

That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics.

You see, some Latin Americans were indignant at what they saw as an invidious and hurtful comparison. The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.

The best data series I could find is for Argentina. In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.

Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.

At a time of such stunning inequality, should Congress put priority on spending $700 billion on extending the Bush tax cuts to those with incomes above $250,000 a year? Or should it extend unemployment benefits for Americans who otherwise will lose them beginning next month?

One way to examine that decision is to put aside all ethical considerations and simply look at where tax dollars will do more to stimulate the economy. There the conclusion is clear: You get much more bang for the buck putting money in the hands of unemployed people because they will promptly spend it.

In contrast, tax cuts for the wealthy are partly saved — that’s both basic economic theory and recent history — so they are much less effective in creating jobs. For example, Republicans would give the richest 0.1 percent of Americans an average tax cut of $370,000. Does anybody really think that those taxpayers are going to rush out and buy Porsches and yachts, start new businesses, and hire more groundskeepers and chauffeurs?

In contrast, a study commissioned by the Labor Department during the Bush administration makes clear the job-creation power of unemployment benefits because that money is immediately spent. The study suggested that the current recession would have been 18 percent worse without unemployment insurance and that this spending preserved 1.6 million jobs in each quarter.

But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?

Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.

That also means that the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth.

Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, notes that for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.

“There has been an increase in inequality in most industrialized countries, but not as extreme as in the U.S.,” Professor Saez said.

One of America’s greatest features has been its economic mobility, in contrast to Europe’s class system. This mobility may explain why many working-class Americans oppose inheritance taxes and high marginal tax rates. But researchers find that today this rags-to-riches intergenerational mobility is no more common in America than in Europe — and possibly less common.

I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.

And then I see members of Congress in my own country who argue that it would be financially reckless to extend unemployment benefits during a terrible recession, yet they insist on granting $370,000 tax breaks to the richest Americans. I don’t know if that makes us a banana republic or a hedge fund republic, but it’s not healthy in any republic

Nov 12, 2010

You honestly think I give a fuck about what you wore today?

For real, real?

While you were outside of a Starbucks.

Tweeting low-res pics of your hindquarters.

Showing off your crotch blowout.

I was in a fucking mine shaft.

Fading my selvedge.

And reading Glenn O’Drama’s bio.

On my iPad.

You city slickers slay me.

You really do.

But I guess if Rozay is a dealer.

And Yeezy is a martyr.

Then y’all are some rugged motherfuckers.

But on the real.

When’s the last time you heard it like this?

Henley and suspenders.

Scragglepuss beard and lived in White’s.

Clay pomade and fucking boulders.

Do they let you bring a shovel to brunch?

At Balthazar?

Didn’t think so.

Just because I look like a 49er.

Doesn’t mean my swagger isn’t on a hundred.

Thousand.

Trillion.

I’m chillin’ in the Sierra Nevada.

Somewhere near Kings Canyon.

Prospecting for steez.

You’re drinking a Sierra Nevada.

Somewhere near Flatbush.

Prospecting for chicks with septum piercings.

fuckyeahmenswear

Thanks to Andy, Ricky and Rodney

Robert Gray

Dr. Jane Goodall at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia.

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
NY Times Published: November 15, 2010

Jane Goodall went to the Gombe Stream Reserve near Lake Tanganyika in East Africa when she was 26. By living among the animals and quietly recording their interactions, she was able to show that the chimp world included love, hate, fear, jealousy, tool use, brutality, even warfare. I spoke with Dr. Goodall last month at Western Connecticut State College, where she was giving a lecture, and then later by telephone. A condensed version of the conversations follows:

Q. In July you celebrated the 50th anniversary of your first trip to Gombe Stream Reserve. When you arrived there in 1960, could you have imagined the life that lay ahead?

A. Of course not. I was a young girl, straight from England, more or less, no degree of any sort, and Louis Leakey was giving me this amazing opportunity to live with the animal most like us.

There’d been no long-term studies of great apes. The longest had been George Schaller, with mountain gorillas, and he’d stayed a year. I think Louis Leakey thought the study might last 10 years. But at 26, I thought perhaps three. And then the more I learned about chimpanzees, the more I realized there was more to learn — until I couldn’t stop.

Q. So you got to Gombe, and very soon, you observed something astounding: Chimpanzees used tools to fish for ants.

A. I went in July. And tool-making was toward the end of October.

Q. After you had lived with the wild chimpanzees for a year, Dr. Leakey sent you to Cambridge for a doctorate. How did the conservative professors there respond to you?

A. They didn’t know what to make of me. But I was very fortunate in that I had one of the most erudite of all the animal behavior people, Robert Hinde, there. He proceeded to help me to write in such a way that I couldn’t be torn apart by my more pompous scientific colleagues.

For instance, I had written that when Fifi’s (one of the Gombe chimps) brother was born, she was jealous of the others coming to try to touch him. Robert said, “You can’t say ‘jealous’ because you can’t prove it.” And I said, “Well, I’m sure she was!” And he said, “I suggest you say, ‘Fifi behaved in such a way that had she been a human child, you would say she was jealous.’ ” That is so clever. No one can say anything about that. There’s nothing that isn’t fact.

Q. When you first reported chimp tool use, Dr. Leakey declared, “We must now redefine man, redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as human!” Did that ever happen?

A. It’s never happened. Every time someone has shown that chimpanzees or any other animal possesses a characteristic which we used to think was unique to us, there’s an outcry from either scientists or religious people: “It can’t be so.”

It becomes illogical. For a long time people used chimpanzees in medical research because of all the amazing biological similarities. They used them to investigate not only human diseases but mental conditions like depression. Yet, they are still reluctant to admit similarities in mind and expressive emotion.

Q. There are 185 captive chimpanzees at the federal primate facility in Alamogordo, N.M., that may soon be used for medical research, particularly to study Hepatitis C. Why have you been trying to stop that?

A. Because it’s morally wrong. We scientists have proved pretty conclusively that chimpanzees can suffer, that they can anticipate arriving pain. They do have feelings. If you perform an invasive procedure on an animal that is capable of suffering and feeling pain, your behavior is amoral.

These particular animals have been “retired” from experimentation for the past 10 years. Now suddenly someone has decided that they need to experiment on them again. I don’t know why. We’re lobbying. I’ve tried to see the head of the N.I.H. My latest information is that some of them have already gone back into medical research — and this was just as the labs (that use chimps as research subjects) were being closed.

Q. The advocates of this policy argue that short of using humans for these tests, chimpanzees are best.

A. I’m sure there are other ways. There are alternatives on the market today that at one time the animal experimenters said we will always need animals for.

Q. On a different subject: There’s continuing debate among linguists and primatologists about whether other great apes have the capacity for language. What’s your position?

A. It seems to me that the controversy is about whether other primates have grammar in their communications. And to be honest, I’m not interested in whether or not they have a grammar. Why would they? I’ve always felt there are so many fights in this life, so many battles that seem important to win. Like in the beginning I was incensed to be told that chimpanzees or any animal couldn’t be “he” or “she,” but they had to be an “it” and that I couldn’t talk about adolescence or motivation or childhood, that those things are unique to humans. This language thing, I’d rather leave it to people who are involved in that line of inquiry. I’ve been fighting battles that, to me, were important, and that relate to emotions. Do they feel pain or sadness? Do they have minds capable of thinking or planning?

Q. I read somewhere that before you went to Africa, you were a debutante. Can that be true?

A. I was. My father’s sister married the son of one of the last lord chief justices of India. And he wanted to “present” his niece. But the thing about being a debutante is that it’s a marriage market. When you come out, you have a big party and you go to Ascot. Well, we couldn’t afford anything like that. So I got a dress that had been modeled by someone. It was very cheap — gorgeous, but cheap. I literally went to the palace and curtsied to the queen and left. This was about two years before I left for Kenya. That kind of life was never, in the remotest, appealing. I wanted to go to Africa. Because of Dr. Dolittle taking the circus animals back. And then Tarzan. Those were the two books that inspired me to go to Africa.

Q. Are there areas of your life that you regret?

A. Not really. Probably for my own personal peace of mind, it would have been nice if I hadn’t divorced Hugo (van Lawick), my first husband, for the sake of Grub (their son). But then I wouldn’t have married Derek (Bryceson, the head of the Tanzanian National Parks), and then probably Gombe would have collapsed.

Q. You don’t get to Gombe very often now. In fact, you are traveling 300 days a year for your conservation charity, the Jane Goodall Institute. Living in a different hotel every night, constantly encountering new people: that has to be difficult.

A. Well, it is a jolly tough way to live, but it’s worthwhile. Because everywhere I go, there are shining eyes. There are children from our Roots and Shoots program who are all so excited to meet “Dr. Jane” and tell me what they’ve been doing to make the world a better place.

There’s a Roots and Shoots member in the Eastern Congo — where the bush meat trade is decimating wildlife — and he had an uncle who was a hunter. He persuaded the uncle to give it up and become a chicken farmer. Between them, in two years, they’ve changed 75 hunters. When I meet people like that, they give me energy and hope.

Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949)
Dog
1924-1925
Painted Wood, 19.5 x 12.5 x 2.2 cm

4th October, 2010 – 30th January, 2011

Puppets, miniature theatres, dolls, games, furniture, books… The results of the effort to integrate art and education were plentiful. Toys of the Avant-garde brings together an exceptional collection of objects; some of the most outstanding examples of these toys are on display, along with works created by other artists whose sole purpose was to entertain their family and friends.
Among the latter is a car, described as a “Wooden Toy painted by Pablo Picasso” which Pablo Picasso made for his son Paulo.

Besides Picasso, Giacomo Balla, Alenxander Calder, Fortunato Depero, Marcel Duchamp, Alexandra Exter, Paul Klee, El Lissitzky, Joan Miró, Alexander Rodchenko, Edward Steichen, Oskar Schlemmer, Ladislav Sutnar, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Joaquín Torres-García are some of the most influential 20th-century artists whose work can be seen in this exhibition. The common theme is play, with examples from a wide range of disciplines such as the visual arts, theatre, photography, design, film and literature. In this last category, writers such as Marcel Aymé, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Neville, Vladimir Maiakovski and Jacques Prévert are the authors of some of the children’s stories on display.

Museo Picasso Malaga

By JOHN TIERNEY
NY Times Published: November 15, 2010

And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills — that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on the rest of this column will.

I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

On average throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. That figure surprised the researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says.

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

“If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery,” Dr. Gilbert says, “they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go to Italy, I’d buy a boat, I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention the things they would think. But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet.”

Still, even if people are less happy when their minds wander, which causes which? Could the mind-wandering be a consequence rather than a cause of unhappiness?

To investigate cause and effect, the Harvard psychologists compared each person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that if someone’s mind wandered at, say, 10 in the morning, then at 10:15 that person was likely to be less happy than at 10 , perhaps because of those stray thoughts. But if people were in a bad mood at 10, they weren’t more likely to be worrying or daydreaming at 10:15.

“We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr. Killingsworth says.

This result may disappoint daydreamers, but it’s in keeping with the religious and philosophical admonitions to “Be Here Now,” as the yogi Ram Dass titled his 1971 book. The phrase later became the title of a George Harrison song warning that “a mind that likes to wander ’round the corner is an unwise mind.”

What psychologists call “flow” — immersing your mind fully in activity — has long been advocated by nonpsychologists. “Life is not long,” Samuel Johnson said, “and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.” Henry Ford was more blunt: “Idleness warps the mind.” The iPhone results jibe nicely with one of the favorite sayings of William F. Buckley Jr.: “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”

Alternatively, you could interpret the iPhone data as support for the philosophical dictum of Bobby McFerrin: “Don’t worry, be happy.” The unhappiness produced by mind-wandering was largely a result of the episodes involving “unpleasant” topics. Such stray thoughts made people more miserable than commuting or working or any other activity.

But the people having stray thoughts on “neutral” topics ranked only a little below the overall average in happiness. And the ones daydreaming about “pleasant” topics were actually a bit above the average, although not quite as happy as the people whose minds were not wandering.

There are times, of course, when unpleasant thoughts are the most useful thoughts. “Happiness in the moment is not the only reason to do something,” says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has shown that mind-wandering can lead people to creative solutions of problems, which could make them happier in the long term.

Over the several months of the iPhone study, though, the more frequent mind-wanderers remained less happy than the rest, and the moral — at least for the short-term — seems to be: you stray, you pay. So if you’ve been able to stay focused to the end of this column, perhaps you’re happier than when you daydreamed at the beginning. If not, you can go back to daydreaming starting…now.

Or you could try focusing on something else that is now, at long last, scientifically guaranteed to improve your mood. Just make sure you turn the phone off.

The City Proper, curated by James Welling
20 November — 15 January 2011
Reception: Saturday 20 November 3-5pm

Margo Leavin

via

ANNE FISHBEIN

Campanile’s sauteed trenne

The List

Water Towers

Through December 23

Sonnabend Galery

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 14, 2010

On Wednesday David Axelrod, President Obama’s top political adviser, appeared to signal that the White House was ready to cave on tax cuts — to give in to Republican demands that tax cuts be extended for the wealthy as well as the middle class. “We have to deal with the world as we find it,” he declared.

The White House then tried to walk back what Mr. Axelrod had said. But it was a telling remark, in more ways than one.

The obvious point is the contrast between the administration’s current whipped-dog demeanor and Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric as a candidate. How did we get from “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” to here?

But the bitter irony goes deeper than that: the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

This promise of transcendence may have been good general election politics, although even that is questionable: people forget how close the presidential race was at the beginning of September 2008, how worried Democrats were until Sarah Palin and Lehman Brothers pushed them over the hump. But the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

Right at the beginning of his administration, what Mr. Obama needed to do, above all, was fight for an economic plan commensurate with the scale of the crisis. Instead, he negotiated with himself before he ever got around to negotiating with Congress, proposing a plan that was clearly, grossly inadequate — then allowed that plan to be scaled back even further without protest. And the failure to act forcefully on the economy, more than anything else, accounts for the midterm “shellacking.”

Even given the economy’s troubles, however, the administration’s efforts to limit the political damage were amazingly weak. There were no catchy slogans, no clear statements of principle; the administration’s political messaging was not so much ineffective as invisible. How many voters even noticed the ever-changing campaign themes — does anyone remember the “Summer of Recovery” — that were rolled out as catastrophe loomed?

And things haven’t improved since the election. Consider Mr. Obama’s recent remarks on two fronts.

At the predictably unproductive G-20 summit meeting in South Korea, the president faced demands from China and Germany that the Federal Reserve stop its policy of “quantitative easing” — which is, given Republican obstructionism, one of the few tools available to promote U.S. economic recovery. What Mr. Obama should have said is that nations’ running huge trade surpluses — and in China’s case, doing so thanks to currency manipulation on a scale unprecedented in world history — have no business telling the United States that it can’t act to help its own economy.

But what he actually said was “From everything I can see, this decision was not one designed to have an impact on the currency, on the dollar.” Fighting words!

And then there’s the tax-cut issue. Mr. Obama could and should be hammering Republicans for trying to hold the middle class hostage to secure tax cuts for the wealthy. He could be pointing out that making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent is a huge budget issue — over the next 75 years it would cost as much as the entire Social Security shortfall. Instead, however, he is once again negotiating with himself, long before he actually gets to the table with the G.O.P.

Here’s the thing: Mr. Obama still has immense power, if he chooses to use it. At home, he has the veto pen, control of the Senate and the bully pulpit. He still has substantial executive authority to act on things like mortgage relief — there are billions of dollars not yet spent, not to mention the enormous leverage the government has via its ownership of Fannie and Freddie. Abroad, he still leads the world’s greatest economic power — and one area where he surely would get bipartisan support would be taking a tougher stand on China and other international bad actors.

But none of this will matter unless the president can find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand. And the signs aren’t good.

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

By FRANK RICH
NY Times Published: November 13, 2010

IN the aftermath of the Great Democratic Shellacking of 2010, one election night subplot quickly receded into the footnotes: the drubbing received by very wealthy Americans, most of them Republican, who tried to buy Senate seats and governor’s mansions. Americans don’t hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, who sacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune — not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper — to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.’d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, “I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it.”

To my mind, these losers deserve a salute nonetheless. They all had run businesses that actually created jobs (Raese included). They all wanted to enter public service to give back to the country that allowed them to prosper. And by losing so decisively, they gave us a ray of hope in dark times. Their defeats reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don’t always end up running the asylum of American politics.

The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

On last Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Obama was already wobbling toward another “compromise” in which he does most of the compromising. It’s a measure of how far he’s off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn’t even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”

That’s a good question, all right, but it’s not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.

“How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?” ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics.” If you want to cry real tears about the American dream — as opposed to the self-canonizing tears of John Boehner — read this book and weep. The authors’ answer to that question and others amounts to a devastating indictment of both parties.

Their ample empirical evidence, some of which I’m citing here, proves that America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap. (Yes, the very rich often have fancy degrees, but so do those in many income levels below them.) Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.

The book deflates much of the conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson date the dawn of the collusion between the political system and the superrich not to the Reagan revolution, but to the preceding Carter presidency and its Democratic Congress. They also write that contrary to the popular perception, America’s superhigh earners are not mostly “superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports” or the stars of law, medicine and real estate. They are instead corporate executives and managers — increasingly (and less surprisingly) financial company executives and managers, including those who escaped with outrageous fortunes as their companies imploded during the housing bubble.

The G.O.P.’s arguments for extending the Bush tax cuts to this crowd, usually wrapped in laughably hypocritical whining about “class warfare,” are easily batted down. The most constant refrain is that small-business owners who file in this bracket would be hit so hard they could no longer hire new employees. But the Tax Policy Center found in 2008, when checking out similar campaign claims by “Joe the Plumber,” that only 2 percent of all Americans reporting small-business income, regardless of tax bracket, would see tax increases if Obama fulfilled his pledge to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for the top earners. The economist Dean Baker calculated that the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which “isn’t enough to hire anyone.”

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation? American companies seem intent on sitting on trillions in cash until the economy reboots. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks the extension of any Bush tax cuts, let alone those to the wealthiest Americans, as the least effective of 11 possible policy options for increasing employment.

Nor are the superrich helping to further the traditional American business culture that inspires and encourages those with big ideas and drive to believe they can climb to the top. Robert Frank, the writer who chronicled the superrich in the book “Richistan,” recently analyzed the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for The Wall Street Journal and found a “hardening of the plutocracy” and scant mobility. Only 16 of the 400 were newcomers — as opposed to an average of 40 to 50 in recent years — and they tended to be in industries like coal, natural gas, chemicals and casinos rather than forward-looking businesses involving the Green Economy, tech or biotechnology. This is “not exactly the formula for America’s vaunted entrepreneurial wealth machine,” Frank wrote.

As “Winner-Take-All Politics” documents, America has been busy “building a bridge to the 19th century” — that is, to a new Gilded Age. To dislodge the country from this stagnant rut will require all kinds of effort from Americans in and out of politics. That includes some patriotic selflessness from those at the very top who still might emulate Warren Buffett and the few others in the Forbes 400 who dare say publicly that it’s not in America’s best interests to stack the tax and regulatory decks in their favor.

Many of the countless tasks that need to be addressed to start rebuilding an equitable America are formidable, but surely few, if any, are easier than eliminating a tax break that was destined to expire anyway and that most Americans want to see expire. Two years ago, Obama campaigned on this issue far more strenuously than he did on, say, reforming health care. Now he and what remains of his Congressional caucus are poised to retreat from even this clear-cut battle. You know things are grim when you start wishing that the president might summon his inner Linda McMahon.

Nan Goldin

A scene from Sara Driver’s 1980 film “You Are Not I.”

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: November 12, 2010

The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.

In the late 1970s she had fallen in love with a haunting 1948 Bowles story called “You Are Not I,” about a young woman who escapes from an asylum, and decided she wanted to make a film of it. With no money for the rights and the thinnest of shoestrings to make the movie itself — a $12,000 budget, some of it supplied by her small salary at a copy shop — she forged ahead anyway. And before its well-received premiere at the Public Theater in 1983, she shipped a print of the 48-minute black-and-white film, the first screen adaptation of one of Bowles’s stories, to his apartment in Tangier, Morocco, praying simply not to be sued.

“To my great relief, he liked it,” Ms. Driver recalled recently. “And not only that, but he wrote me back with a long, detailed critique of the film, saying, among other things, that he thought one woman overacted — which he was right about.”

Bowles’s agent granted the rights to Ms. Driver, and the movie — shot in six days near her parents’ house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following. The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma.

But almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape.

“Every time I’d get back to someone and tell them, my heart would just sink,” said Ms. Driver, now 54 and the director of three other films.

The film’s story might have ended there, but two years ago a film librarian from the University of Delaware, one of the most important repositories of Bowles’s papers, traveled to Morocco to speak at a conference. While in Tangier, the librarian, Francis Poole, who knew Bowles well during the last years of his life, was contacted by Abdelouahed Boulaich, Bowles’s longtime butler and his heir, who after Bowles’s death in 1999 had helped to secure many of his papers. Mr. Boulaich told Mr. Poole that he still had a few of the writer’s things and asked if he wanted to see them. The two took a taxi from Mr. Poole’s hotel to an empty house owned by Mr. Boulaich, who unlocked a door to a small ground-floor salon that smelled as if it had been closed for years.

With a small flashlight and a digital camera, Mr. Poole set about documenting the room’s contents, which included piles of letters and books and two manual Olympic typewriters, one long used by Paul Bowles and the other by his wife, Jane. Below them on a bookcase sat a film box with two reels inside; the label was faded except for a New York return address visible beneath the dust and insecticide.

“For a second I felt like I was in one of the bug powder scenes from David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’s novel ‘Naked Lunch,’ ” Mr. Poole said. “There were even letters from Burroughs to Paul Bowles scattered around. And some of those had insecticide on them.”

The University of Delaware acquired the contents of the room from Mr. Boulaich, and Mr. Poole and Tim Murray, who oversees the special collections of the university’s library, returned in 2008 and 2009 to box them all up. Mr. Poole still had no idea what was on the film reels, and he acknowledged that he almost decided to leave them. But he put the film box in his carry-on bag and took it to Delaware, where he watched the 16-millimeter reels for the first time — grimy but miraculously, given the humid storage conditions, in good shape — and realized what he had found.

“It was like stumbling upon some kind of treasure in an archaeological dig,” he said. “I wasn’t there thinking I was going to find a lost film. I must say it’s been a once-in-a-lifetime bizarre experience for me.”

For Ms. Driver, the film’s rediscovery has been like opening a time capsule of the No Wave independent-film scene, which flourished in New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It included directors like Jim Jarmusch (Ms. Driver’s longtime romantic partner and the cinematographer and co-writer for “You Are Not I”), Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Bette Gordon, Susan Seidelman (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and even Kathryn Bigelow, of “The Hurt Locker” fame, who made her first short in New York in 1978 (featuring the odd pairing of Gary Busey and the French semiotician Sylvère Lotringer).

It was a tiny film world where favors and friendships often stood in for the money no one had. Mr. Sante recalled that his role in “You Are Not I” required him to be able to drive, which he could not.

“I just needed to go across a parking lot in one scene, and I thought, ‘O.K., I can handle this,’ ” he said. “And I managed to run into a garbage can, which was the only other thing in the parking lot.” (A volunteer body double was recruited.)

The unearthed print of the film, which will remain in the University of Delaware collection, has been completely cleaned and restored. A digital copy has been created, which was used to screen “You Are Not I” for the first time in almost 20 years, at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in Iceland in September and last month at the Portuguese Cinémathèque in Lisbon, where the film first played during its initial run in the early 1980s. Ms. Driver is now applying for grants to help her produce a corrected negative and additional prints.

She said she had been overjoyed to have an important part of her past back, though she pointed out that, technically, “You Are Not I” was not her first film. “I made a little student short before it that was about Troilus and Cressida, and all the dialogue in it was in Middle English,” she said, adding, “That one I don’t think anyone’s ever going to see again.”

Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

Cory and Dana Foht, 25-year-old twins from Florida, have spent some 20 nights over the past two months sleeping in hammocks hung in a Central Park tree.

By COLIN MOYNIHAN
NY Times Published: November 12, 2010

There is no shortage of places in Manhattan where visitors can spend the night. Luxury hotels offer lavish suites that can run thousands of dollars, and youth hostels have beds for as little as $20. At least one flophouse survives on the Bowery. And, of course, there is couch-surfing — countless travelers bunk with old friends or near-strangers for little more than an owed favor.

Cory and Dana Foht have taken another route. On some 20 nights over the past two months, the Fohts, 25-year-old twins from Florida, have climbed about 25 feet up the side of a tall American elm tree in Central Park, stretched nylon hammocks between its branches, unrolled sleeping bags and, with a few acrobatic moves, squirmed into their makeshift beds.

“It’s kind of like its own ecosystem up here,” Cory said one recent night as he lay in his hammock. “You’re definitely aware that you are sleeping in something and attached to something that’s alive.”

Their resting spot is not likely to be awarded any stars by the Michelin Guide, but it offers something the Fohts think is better: stars in an inky firmament directly overhead and obscured only by a screen of twigs and leaves.

“When you sleep inside, it’s warm and cozy,” Dana explained. “But it’s also like you’re sleeping in a box.”

Sleeping in the elm may be invigorating, but it is also illegal. Visitors are not allowed in Central Park between 1 and 6 a.m.; violators can be fined $50. While park rules do not explicitly forbid climbing any of its 24,000 trees, they do prohibit any behavior that damages a tree.

Police and parks officers go through Central Park each night and rouse anyone found sleeping. But those people are usually on a bench or under a tree. A spokeswoman said the Department of Parks and Recreation knew of no one who had recently been discovered slumbering in a hammock after curfew.

“Twenty-five years ago, there was a guy who built treehouses in the park,” the spokeswoman, Vickie Karp, wrote in an e-mail. “He promised never to do it again.”

The Fohts made no such promises.

The notion to camp above the ground came to the brothers this spring while they were climbing a banyan tree in Florida. They put the idea into practice a few months later when they embarked on a city-to-city bicycle trip and began exploring creative and cheap ways of finding food and lodging.

“Really, the inspiration behind it was getting above the sidewalk level,” Cory said. “You’re getting into your own little world and rising above the stress of the street life.”

Their first try came a few months later, in August, while visiting Williamsburg, Va., but they encountered hammock-hanging problems.

Soon, they learned the importance of selecting the right tree. It must have branches low enough to be ascended without a rope, but also have boughs high and sturdy enough that the hammocks can safely be suspended. The tree’s canopy must be dense enough for the Fohts to recline amid the leaves without being easily seen.

They have since slept in trees on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (“We thought Jefferson would approve,” said Cory, referring to Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the school), and near Arlington National Cemetery. In Richmond, where they spent about a week’s worth of nights in two different trees, their favorite perch was a towering oak next to a church parking lot, until one Sunday morning when they awoke to find a police officer guarding cars parked by worshipers. (They stayed in their hammocks until the congregation had dispersed.)

While in trees, the brothers said, they sometimes catch glimpses of people who do not know they are being observed, or overhear snippets of conversation from those who imagine that they are alone. They have experienced a few close encounters with birds, they said, but have been lucky to avoid raccoons. The soft sway of the branches usually lulls them to sleep, though one recent night in Central Park, Dana had a disturbing dream in which a cord used to secure one end of his hammock came loose, leaving him to swing among the leaves like a pendulum.

The brothers, who graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University in 2007 and want to make documentaries, said that they were editing footage to create a 10-minute film about life in the elm, which they plan to post on YouTube. The two came to New York in September to participate in a rally for the preservation of community gardens, then decided to stay. They have spent some rainy nights in friends’ apartments, and occasionally hang their hammocks in the back room of a bicycle-repair workshop in Brooklyn where they volunteer as mechanics.

But they find themselves drawn back to their elm in Central Park. Spending a night there is spiritually restorative, they said, if a bit chilly of late. As the leaves and temperatures fall, the brothers said, their time in the tree is drawing to a close.

“I love this tree,” Cory said, adding that they always climb carefully, to avoid harming it. “Some of the most inspiring nights I’ve had in New York were spent here.”

One night this week, they entered the park about 9 p.m., wearing knit hats and backpacks, and keeping an eye out for others. They followed the shadowed turns of a path, then scrambled up the side of their beloved elm, grabbing thick branches and feeling for toeholds. A wintry wind whipped through the park, but by 10 p.m., aloft in the tree, it was as quiet as Manhattan gets. An occasional siren wailed, and a faint whistle could occasionally be heard from a Metro-North train emerging from the Park Avenue tunnel. The rumble of cars and trucks, though, washed into a high distant sound that blended with the rustle of the wind through the leaves.

About seven hours later, the brothers woke up as the sky began to brighten and reported that gusts of wind had rocked their hammocks for much of the night. In daylight, they showed off some of the tree’s features that they had come to appreciate most: the thick, leathery bark of its trunk, which provided climbing traction; the low, sweeping boughs that offered an easy path back to the ground; the dense foliage that gave cover from inquisitive eyes.

“It’s made an interesting little home,” Cory said.

Then the Fohts packed up their gear and headed for the Upper West Side, where they had stored their bicycles overnight with a friend. Joggers and dog walkers filled the park, but nobody appeared to give the itinerant tree-dwellers a second glance.

Hiroko Tabuchi for The New York Times

Japan, which is considering a trade alliance, has a 777.7 percent tariff on imported rice, helping farmers like Atsushi Kono.

By HIROKO TABUCHI
NY Times Published: November 11, 2010

IWAMIZAWA, Japan — Atsushi Kono considers it the gravest threat to his family’s farm in a century of rice-growing: a free-trade initiative that could dismantle Japan’s sky-high protective farming tariffs, finally opening up the country to cheap, foreign produce.

In a move pitting Japanese farmers against the nation’s export industries, Prime Minister Naoto Kan is pushing to join negotiations for an American-backed free-trade zone called the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would span the Pacific Rim.

The new zone would give Japanese exporters of cars, televisions and other manufactured goods greater access to the United States and other markets. But a trade agreement could dismantle the generous protections that have sustained Japanese farms for years — most notably, Japan’s 777.7 percent tariff on imported rice.

Free trade is high on the agenda of the back-to-back summit meetings of the Group of 20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum this week in South Korea and Japan, attended by leaders including President Obama and Mr. Kan.

“Japan is determined to more actively open up to the world,” Mr. Kan told world leaders gathered at the G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday. Meanwhile, Pacific Rim trade ministers gathering in Yokohama, Japan, vowed to take concrete steps to create a vast free-trade area that would involve over half of the world’s economic output.

But Japan’s politically powerful agriculture industry is not cheering. The Agricultural Ministry warns that if Japan were to join the proposed trade zone, 90 percent of the nation’s rice cultivation would disappear, and wheat, sugar, dairy and beef output would also be adversely affected — costing the country about 4 trillion yen, or $49 billion, in lost production and 3.4 million lost jobs.

“This is the end of the road for my farm,” said Mr. Kono, 60, who grows rice, wheat, red beans and cabbage on 17 acres of farmland here in Iwamizawa, on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. He would probably end up selling his land, he said, if he could find a buyer.

“But then what do I do?” Mr. Kono said. “I can’t see a future at all.”

On Tuesday, 1,000 farmers took to the streets in Iwamizawa, fists raised against what they say is a government betrayal that will ruin their livelihoods. On Wednesday, almost 3,000 farmers rallied in Tokyo against free-trade plans.

“Farming communities across Japan will face ruin,” said Mamoru Moteki, who heads an umbrella organization for Japanese agricultural cooperatives. “We must prevent this by all means.”

Mr. Kan is eager for Japan to join negotiations for the American-backed Pacific trade partnership, which seeks to remove all tariffs among its members. Though preliminary negotiations involve just nine countries, including the United States and Singapore, the plan would be a building block for a wider pan-Pacific free-trade zone.

The Japanese business lobby has gone all-out in support of the drive, saying it would help exporters — like automakers and electronics manufacturers — regain their competitive edge. The country’s exporters have been particularly vocal as their overseas earnings suffered from a strong yen, which can make Japan-made products more expensive overseas or erode exporters’ overseas earnings.

Meanwhile, the high agricultural tariffs mean Japanese consumers must choose between expensive domestic produce or even more expensive imports. They pay four times the average global price for rice; three times the global average for sugar, butter and beef; and twice the global average for wheat, according to government estimates.

Not surprisingly, the Japanese public tends to back more free trade. In a recent nationwide poll by Kyodo News, 46.6 percent of respondents said Japan should join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, versus 38.6 percent who opposed it.

Although Japan has negotiated free-trade agreements with a handful of smaller trading partners, including members of Asean, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Tokyo has always insisted that agricultural produce like rice and dairy stay exempt from the tariff reductions. Besides the high rice tariffs, Japan levies a 252 percent tariff on imported wheat, 360 percent on butter, 328 percent on sugar and 38.5 percent for beef.

Partly as a result of that rigid stance, Tokyo has yet to conclude free-trade agreements with China, the United States or the European Union, which are Japan’s main export markets — a major impediment to gaining market share, exporters argue.

“Any further delays will mean Japan will be left out of global economic growth,” Hiromasa Yonekura, chairman of the Nippon Keidanren, Japan’s biggest business lobby, told reporters at a gathering this month.

Japanese exporters are particularly wary of rivals from South Korea, which has been more aggressive in forging trade agreements with important trading partners. A free-trade agreement between South Korea and the European Union goes into force next July, while Seoul is trying to reach a similar agreement with the United States. Staying out of a pan-Asian free-trade bloc would shave at least 1.5 percent, or 10.5 trillion yen ($128 billion), from the Japanese gross domestic product and eliminate eight million jobs, according to a recent estimate by Japan’s trade ministry. Exporters have threatened to shift more factories from Japan to overseas locations to get around both tariffs and the strong yen.

“To be globally competitive, we need to be able to play by the same rules,” Osamu Suzuki, chief executive at Suzuki Motor, said during a news conference this month.

Despite the public polls showing support for a free-trade agreement, Mr. Kan is making a big political gamble in pushing to join the talks. Although farming and other primary industries, like mining, make up just 1.5 percent of gross domestic output, outdated election maps and effective organization by farmers give Japan’s rural communities disproportionate political power. A sizable group of lawmakers in Mr. Kan’s ruling Democratic Party have urged him to abandon his free-trade drive to placate the nation’s farmers.

“If things go as is, the Democratic Party can expect electoral setbacks as serious as those of Mr. Obama in the United States,” Masaru Kaneko, a political economist at Keio University in Tokyo, warned lawmakers at a gathering in Tokyo this week.

Partly bowing to the pressure, Mr. Kan has softened his stance, promising this week that Japan, for now, would only “initiate consultations” on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He has also promised to overhaul the country’s agricultural policy, possibly increasing subsidies to farmers.

The anger is evident in Tokachi, another major farming region on Hokkaido, where local officials warn that the entire region would lose jobs across all sectors if farms were allowed to perish. Tokachi has few manufacturers to speak of, with local factories making potato chips, sugar, cheese and butter. Even the transportation networks are maintained by farms.

But local farmers say that their sector has been weakened by a reliance on tariffs and ineffective government subsidies, which do not reward farms for innovation or productivity. High transaction costs hamper efforts to consolidate farmland and raise efficiencies, they say, leaving farms fragmented. According to government statistics, the average size of a farm in Japan was just 1.9 hectares, or 4.7 acres, in 2009, compared with 198 hectares in the United States.

Moreover, a sprawling and bureaucratic distribution system dissipates farmers’ earnings. That leaves farm incomes depressed despite the heavy protection they receive and drives younger generations from farming, experts say. In 2010, the average age of Japan’s 2.6 million farmers reached 65.

“As it is, Japanese farming is in crisis,” said Masayoshi Honma, a professor in agricultural economics at the University of Tokyo. The trade partnership, he said, could perhaps “serve as a much-needed shock therapy.”

Masatoshi Honda, 67, and his son, Koichiro — who run a small dairy farm of about 100 cows in Tokachi — say they are eager to expand and eventually export premium cheese and butter overseas. But entrepreneurship has not been rewarded in Japanese farming policy, they say, and farmers need more time to prepare for greater competition from overseas.

“We realize Japan can’t resist opening up forever,” said the younger Mr. Honda, 34. “But fixing Japanese farming has to come first,” he said. “Everything is happening too suddenly.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

This photo illustration is NOT the vice president washing his car in the White House driveway, but rather a doctored image from the fevered imagination of the satirical journal The Onion.

By JEREMY W. PETERS
NY Times Published: November 10, 2010

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has never smashed a Whac-A-Mole game in a drunken fit. He has never invoked Freedom of Information laws to find out a female federal employee’s work schedule. And to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he has never washed his car in the White House driveway.

But to readers of The Onion, the satirical newspaper and Web site, the vice president has done all of those things, plus bounce a check for $39.50 to a liquor store and star in advertisements for Hennessy cognac that emphasize his international playboy swagger.

Political satire typically seizes on a public official’s foibles or flaws and exaggerates them — Gerald R. Ford’s clumsiness, Bill Clinton’s fast-food cravings, George W. Bush’s malapropisms, for example. Turning the craft on its head, writers at The Onion have created a caricature of the vice president that is entirely incongruous with his public image. Of all Mr. Biden’s imperfections, being a womanizer and a drunk are not on the list. In fact, he does not drink and has been, by all accounts, a devoted husband and family man for more than 30 years.

The Onion’s portrayals of Mr. Biden began as traditional vice president jokes (“Biden Pardons Single Yam in Vice-Presidential Thanksgiving Ritual”) but writers there had an epiphany last year when they discovered that tweaking their caricature of the vice president into someone virtually unrecognizable from his public persona — “Biden To Cool His Heels in Mexico For a While,” read one headline — was comic gold.

The result has been endless fodder for Biden jokes — too many, in fact, for The Onion to publish. So at a time when no major news media outlet has a reporter dedicated solely to covering the vice president, writers at The Onion are generating so many story ideas about Mr. Biden that editors have to turn them down.

“We have a backlog of Biden jokes,” said Will Tracy, The Onion’s associate editor. One idea Mr. Tracy said he had to nix: a spread by the vice president in Playgirl inspired by Burt Reynolds, whose nude pose for Cosmopolitan in 1972 on a bearskin rug became an emblem of 1970s hedonism.

“We decided it was almost too big time for him,” Mr. Tracy said. “We like it better when Joe Biden is doing very small-time stuff, like getting kicked out of Dave & Buster’s, not appearing on the cover of a major national magazine.”

The articles perform extremely well on The Onion’s Web site. Since the story “Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am in White House Driveway” went online last spring, it has generated over half a million page views. The video “Biden Criticized for Appearing in Hennessy Ads” has been viewed 450,000 times since it appeared in January. For a site that receives 7.5 million unique visitors each month, those are considerable numbers.

The Onion’s “reports” on the vice president generally portray him in one of two molds: Boozy and brash, or slick and over-sexed. There was a report describing how he flouted a ban from all Dave & Buster’s restaurants nationwide. “After he was barred from the Tempe, Ariz., location in 2007, the former senator would reportedly do burnouts in the parking lot with his Trans Am while waiting to pick up a waitress employed there at the time, a woman identified only as ‘Candi,’ ” it said.

He has also been known to Dumpster dive. One article blamed him for bringing a bedbug infestation to the White House after hauling in an old, discarded recliner from the curb.

Then there is the womanizer who cockily refers to himself in the third person, seduces ladies named Lexus, and stars in a $28 million Hennessy advertising campaign (“Sensual, Powerful, Biden,” the tagline goes).

The randomness of it is precisely the point, writers said.

“People kept trying to peg him as a buffoon,” said Carol Kolb, head writer for The Onion News Network, the comedy newspaper’s online video producer. “We just abandoned that and put him in silly uniforms and had him opening a crab shack.”

This kind of humor does pose a risk for the comedians writing it, because it could easily fall flat with readers who are accustomed to more traditional forms of satire. Even some of the boldest comedy writers said they would be wary of trying it with their audiences.

“The risk of it sometimes for us is that to know, to appreciate what’s funny about doing that with Biden, you have to know that it’s completely wrong and arbitrary,” said Jim Downey, a writer for “Saturday Night Live” who has written many of the show’s political sketches. “People in the audience, even if they have no idea who Biden is, they might say, ‘Oh, I did not know that he was a bit of a dirty dog.’ So it throws things off.”

But The Onion has doubled down on its caricatures, even hiring a body double to pose in pictures so editors can Photoshop in Mr. Biden’s head to create images of him, for example, washing his Trans Am — in cutoff jeans and no shirt — on the South Lawn of the White House. The caption: “Vice President Biden ditched a day of presiding over the Senate to ‘give the twin cannons some sun.’ ”

According to Onion writers, Mr. Biden is good humored about the parodies. They said they received word from one of the vice president’s associates saying that Mr. Biden thought the articles were a riot. “We got an e-mail saying: ‘Keep it up. He really likes it,’ ” Mr. Tracy said. “Apparently he’s a fan.”

But Mr. Biden’s office said it was not aware of anyone on the vice president’s staff who might have contacted The Onion to pass along his approval. A spokesman for Mr. Biden, Jay Carney, said the vice president was unavailable to be interviewed about his portrayal in The Onion.

“Let me get this straight: You want to interview the vice president about stories about him in The Onion?” Mr. Carney asked, sounding at once amused and dumbfounded by the request. “Well, I’ll give you credit for trying.”

Mr. Tracy said he and other Onion writers found something very malleable about the vice president’s everyman persona. “You could see him in a different context if he wasn’t famous, if you just moved him in a little different direction.”

Ms. Kolb chimed in, “He could be living in a houseboat.”

“That’s actually a good idea,” Mr. Tracy added.

And another idea for a new Biden parody was born.

Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#04-10), 2010, oil on canvas

November 18, 2010 through January 8, 2011
Opening Reception: November 18, 6 – 8pm

Harris Lieberman

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Fred Kress, 46, who is terminally ill, relaxes with his fluorescent alien masks and other artwork.

By JOYCE WADLER
NY Times Published: November 10, 2010

THERE is some confusion about the cause of the liver disease that has given Fred Kress a short time to live. The 46-year-old handyman and house painter, who lives outside of Baltimore, had had hepatitis C, which causes liver damage, for several years. Doctors at one point suggested that alcohol abuse may have been a contributing factor, which makes no sense, Mr. Kress and his family say, because he was never much of a drinker. The real culprit, he now believes, was chemical: he didn’t wear the right mask when he was painting houses, and when he did his craft projects, making alien masks out of fiberglass resin, he worked in a small, windowless room, ignoring all the warning labels on the supplies he used.

“It said ‘will’ — not ‘can’ — cause liver and kidney damage,” Mr. Kress said. “My liver was completely fried.”

Even before he became sick, however, his life was no bed of roses. He had had a 20-year love-hate relationship with a girlfriend and was living, at the time of his diagnosis, with his widowed mother. His 17-year-old daughter has Rett syndrome, an autismlike disease that has left her unable to speak. And the day last February when his doctors told him he had no more than a year to live, his girlfriend and his best friend hooked up.

“That’s been rougher than knowing I am going to die,” Mr. Kress said. “And then, for some reason, I picked up a paintbrush. I got that paintbrush in my hand, I don’t think about any of that.”

Mr. Kress stepped up his work on the masks. He covered the walls of his room in fluorescent paint, illuminating it with black light that made the colors come alive, and bought 30 mannequin heads for $3 each, painting them fluorescent colors as well.

“I love it,” he said. “Whatever I happen to paint that night, I’ll sit there and kind of stare at it and eventually fall asleep. Anything beats crying myself to sleep.”

Although Mr. Kress was making the masks long before his diagnosis, said Bonnie Weissberg, a social worker at the Gilchrist Hospice, which is providing him with at-home care, “When he realized he was going to die, he just devoted himself to making the room itself a work of art.”

According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, most Americans — 80 percent, one survey reported — would prefer to die at home. It’s a choice that necessitates a number of physical changes, like setting up medical equipment and bringing in a hospital bed. For some people, however, what matters more is altering their environment in a way that makes them feel better emotionally — creating a place that represents their final idea of home. Family members often find the process surprisingly helpful as well.

Dr. Robert Milch, the medical director emeritus at the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care in Buffalo, N.Y., recalls a patient who had had a tumultuous marriage. She and her husband “had separated on several occasions,” he said. But when terminal cancer was diagnosed in her, “they came to cohabit again, and he cared for her as her disease progressed.”

This woman told her husband that what she really wanted, he said, was a sun room where she could spend her last days sitting and looking out at the woods and the mountains. “He undertook the creation of a Florida room off their deck, and built it himself over the course of two weeks, so he could move her out there,” Dr. Milch said. “All I could think of was in the winter of their discontent, he brought an endless summer.”

For someone else, of course, the final idea of home might be something very different. The crucial thing, said Dr. Cheryl Phillips, a past president of the American Geriatrics Society and the chief medical officer for On Lok Lifeways, a nonprofit organization that provides services for the frail elderly in greater San Francisco, is finding out what makes the person who is dying feel most at ease. “If there was one thing that would make a difference, what would it be?” she said. “It’s amazing how creative people can be to make these special wishes come true.”

Warm Sand in Winter

Virginia Fry, a counselor who has been the director of the Hospice and Palliative Care Council of Vermont for 30 years, believes people should have a bucket list for the environment where they spend their last days — including what it should look like, and how it should sound and smell. Smell is particularly important because the odors of illness can be intrusive, Ms. Fry said. Often, people try to mitigate that problem by putting out bowls of potpourri or dabbing essential oils on light bulbs.

To create a happy environment for a woman in Vermont some years ago, Ms. Fry and her organization went way beyond potpourri. The woman dreamed of going to Hawaii, but she did not have the money, Ms. Fry said, and she was too ill to travel. And so the hospice organization brought Hawaii to her — a particular challenge in a Vermont winter. Ms. Fry asked what the woman’s favorite colors were and bought Hawaiian fabrics that could be wrapped around her like a gown (this outfit had to accommodate her IV pole). Tiki torches were mounted in the snowbanks leading to the house. Visitors were asked to wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and to make the home smell like Hawaii, they were offered copious amounts of coconut oil. The organization’s board of directors had a 40-orchid lei flown in from Hawaii — the first fresh flowers the woman had ever had in the house, she told them. A recording of crashing waves and an erupting volcano played in a continuous loop, and meats grilled with pineapple were served.

“We had what it looked like, what it smelled like, but we were stuck at the sense: how does Hawaii feel?” Ms. Fry said. “We decided it was hot sand on the feet, so one of our staff members took her driveway sand and heated it in the oven for four hours until it became powdery. Then we laid down sheets with electric pads on top of them, then another sheet on top of that, then the sand on top of the that, so the sand covered an area of about three feet.”

Where was the owner of the house when all this was happening?

“She was directing it,” Ms. Fry said. “You want the patients to be directing, because they lose power by being patients, so anything that restores the sense of control is therapeutic.”

Still, three square feet of sand doesn’t sound like a lot of beach.

“She would be sitting or standing there,” Ms. Fry said. “And she would invite people as they rotated through to stick their toes in her sand and sit with her.”

A Garden From Childhood

Susan Sanchez, an administrative assistant who lived in Santa Barbara with her husband, Oscar, a retired engineer, and her adult daughter, Amanda, loved gardens. For a few years after moving to California, she had a small garden with a patio and fountains, and after her first brush with illness — a brain tumor in 2001, when she was 60 — she starting writing stories, one of them about her grandmother’s garden in England. It was remarkably detailed, considering that the memories were 50 years old: Ms. Sanchez spoke of the whitewashed outhouse; the toad that she and her brother occasionally treated to worms; the path that divided the flowers and vegetables; and her favorite plants, the runner beans.

“They grew up a number of tall trellises and had lovely scarlet flowers,” Ms. Sanchez wrote. “My granny called them scarlet runners. It was a high day and holiday when the scarlet runners were ready to eat.”

The story concluded: “My granny’s garden fed our stomachs and our senses. My granny fed our souls.”

Four years later, Ms. Sanchez was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and by 2009, she knew she was dying. She wanted to be cremated and chose for her funeral urn a garden birdbath; the support column would contain her ashes. Her garden, however, was in disrepair and her daughter, Amanda, who was having health problems of her own, was not strong enough to restore it.

So her daughter contacted the Dream Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Using the story as a guide, volunteers created an English garden with the flowers from Ms. Sanchez’s childhood. The birdbath that was to be her resting place was highlighted with a circular flagstone path.

The garden was finished just two days before Ms. Sanchez died, said Jackie Waddill, the donor relations manager for the Dream Foundation, but because Ms. Sanchez was able to help create it, she was comforted by the knowledge that it would one day be a beautiful place where her husband and daughter could remember her. Amanda Sanchez, who had a memorial there on the anniversary of her mother’s death this year, said that the garden has been a comfort for her as well.

“We have a lot of roses, irises and those bearded irises around her birdbath, and then I started growing some vegetables this year,” she said.

How were they?

“They were wonderful. And the birdbath is very visible. I was very close with my mother, and I know how much she enjoyed these things, watching the birds, so I do that now,” she said. “And the beans were practically right outside the door, so I just pull one off and stand there and eat them and think of her.”

A House in Nature

Bernd Krausse was a German engineer who loved nature. He and his wife, Laurie, a dental assistant, owned a ranch house in Kenwood, Calif., in the Sonoma Valley. It was a little fixer-upper on a third of an acre, she said, but it was across from Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, with views of the mountains — and, of course, Mr. Krausse could and did fix anything. The couple decided not to have children so they could spend their time together doing the things they most enjoyed: hiking, fishing, skiing, rafting.

But five years after they bought the home, when Mr. Krausse was 52, they learned that he had a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. His wife, who was 12 years younger, was devastated. “This was my soul mate, the love of my life,” she said. Her husband, who had always been interested in Eastern religions and believed he had a spirit that would survive him, was calmer.

“He said: ‘It’s O.K., everybody has to die. I’m here with you, let’s just focus on the now,’ ” she recalled. “He also said one of the things he had to do was finish this house, to put the windows in. We talked about going to Hawaii. He said, ‘Let’s go to Hawaii and be with God.’ In Bernd’s eye, God was beauty, God was nature, God was the flowers, the mountains, the moon and the stars, so he wanted to be outside all the time. He was not one who was going to lie in bed and die, that’s for sure.”

But finishing the house proved too much for Mr. Krausse, who had begun having seizures and could no longer drive or work, and his co-workers pitched in to complete the job. One day, when his wife was coming home from work, she was stunned to learn from a neighbor that he had been seen getting off a public bus with 12-foot planks strapped to his body — materials for the backyard barn the couple had spoken of one day building. With the help of family members, the barn was completed. His wife tried to make it as nice as possible, decorating it with a white cast-iron bed and Oriental carpets, and it became the couple’s last home together.

“Bernd was just in love with that barn,” she said. “For months and months before he died, he wanted to sleep in it all the time. It was comfortable to him because it was rustic and he felt like he was outdoors. We would sit out and look at the stars and the mountains.”

It was the couple’s wish that after his death he would lie in rest for a few days at home — they worked with Jerrigrace Lyons, the executive director of the home funeral organization Final Passages in Sebastopol, Calif., to make that happen. After his body was cremated, his wife kept his ashes in their house for many years, finally scattering them by the barn.

Laurie has since remarried, and the barn is now used for storage. But to her, it still represents his resting place. If she’s had a hard day and she needs to visit him, she goes out to the barn and kneels down. “Hi, Bernd,” she says.

Coming Home

The life of Debra Rothenburgh, a 41-year-old waitress in western New York, was a modern American tragedy even before her metastastic cervical cancer was diagnosed in August. As a girl, she spent time in foster care; she had to get married at 17, when she got pregnant; later, she lost custody of the child, a son; and then she had two more children, both of whom died in accidents as teenagers. When Ms. Rothenburgh learned she had cancer, she was working as a waitress in Bath, a small town outside Corning, N.Y., a job, ironically, that made her situation worse.

“She didn’t have insurance,” Ms. Rothenburgh’s mother, Gwen Lewis, of Palmetto, Ga., said. “She made too much money, they took her Medicaid away from her — she made $7 too much a month. She was going to work with ice packs on her back. August 6, she got taken to Corning Hospital. At one o’clock in the morning, she called me and told me, ‘Mama, I’m dying, I’m full of cancer.’ I said, ‘Debra, don’t you say that.’ ”

Ms. Lewis continued: “I said, ‘I’m on my way.’ I drove to my daughter’s house. She was crying. She said to me, ‘I’m dying.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘How long can you stay?’ I said, ‘Deb, I’m staying till the fat lady sings, and she’s only humming now.’ ”

Ms. Rothenburgh, who had an apartment in Bath, initially wanted to stay in the area to be with friends, but by the end of August, she had changed her mind. Her stepfather, Jim Lewis, brought some of her furniture back to Palmetto — her dressing table, her entertainment center — and tried to create a room that would feel very much like home to her. Ms. Rothenburgh did not want a hospital bed, so Mr. Lewis found her a twin bed, with a comforter in a pattern that matched the dress Ms. Rothenburgh wore at her son’s wedding. He filled the room with family pictures, including a photo of her at the wedding.

Nurses came from the Southern Tier Hospice and Palliative Care Center to take care of her. She and her mother spent most of their time sitting on the front porch, enjoying summer’s end.

One day, while she was staring at the bins filled with her possessions that were sitting on the porch, Ms. Rothenburgh said, “Here I am with nothing again.”

Her mother replied: “You know, honey, we come in with nothing and we go out with nothing. It’s only material stuff.”

Later, Ms. Lewis observed: “She wanted to camp out this summer, and we couldn’t have done that up North. Jim brought out chaise longues, which have the nice pad, and we brought her pillow so she could fix her pillow around that.”

She added, “I had a baby monitor for her, and all night I could hear crickets.”

Ms. Rothenburgh died on Sept. 27, with her brother and sister and mother at her bedside. Some people, Ms. Lewis said, felt her daughter should have been in a medical facility, but she disagrees.

“If she was in a hospital, you don’t have that time,” she said. “She wouldn’t have been able to sit on the porch, to camp out, to listen to the crickets. She got to do what she wanted to do, and I’m happy about that.”

Through December 17

Herald Street

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Thanks to Lance Drake