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October 09 Guns N’ Poses: Thugs, Drugs and Style in Shady London
Alex Bailey/Warner Brothers Pictures
Gerard Butler, left, and Idris Elba as partners in London crime in "RocknRolla." October 8, 2008
Guns N' Poses: Thugs, Drugs and Style in Shady LondonBy MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: October 8, 2008
Guy Ritchie reshuffles a worn-out deck in "RocknRolla," a return to the shady stylings that characterized his earlier flicks "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch." The on-screen names have changed, and the edited rhythms have been somewhat slowed, but more or less everything else follows formula: pump up the volume, tilt the camera, flex the muscle, strut the stuff, bang bang, blah blah.
There are the usual villains with funny names — a nice-and-easy Gerard Butler plays One Two, while the underdeployed Idris Elba plays his partner in London crime, Mumbles — committing the usual villainy while spouting the usual argot. There's the big, bad boss, Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), a thug in bespoke pinstripes who comes with an iron fist in a velvet glove called Archy (Mark Strong). There are drugs and a rock 'n' roll druggie, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell). There's the requisite femme fatale in stilettos, Stella (Thandie Newton), and the de rigueur scary, scarily rich Russian, Uri (Karel Roden). There are double-crosses and right hooks and ha-ha scenes of grim torture that come with throbbing musical accompaniment.
It isn't all bad — many of the lads look lovely, and there's a chase sequence that nicely devolves into an impressionistic blur of herky-jerky faces — but there isn't much to chew on or mull over. The violence is idiotic and brutal (the story is just idiotic), but it's also so noncommittal that it doesn't offend. Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose. For Mr. Ritchie, a man who clearly appreciates fine tailoring (and kudos to the costume designer, Suzie Harman), a fist in the mouth or a bullet in the head is just a stylistic flourish, some flash to tart up the genre clichés he never seems to have bought in the first place.
But that's the thing about genre clichés: you need to believe in them before you can twist, upend or abandon them. To judge from his crime flicks, Mr. Ritchie seems to have gravitated to the underworld primarily because of some misbegotten and vague sense of cool. The history of real and imaginary British crime certainly gives him fodder, including the real East End criminals the Kray twins (who were put out of nasty business in 1968, the year Mr. Ritchie was born) and the nattily dressed, lethally armed Michael Caine in Mike Hodges's vicious "Get Carter" (1971). American criminals have the bigger guns, but the Brits lock and load like dandies, a fact that, more than any other, seems to have shaped Mr. Ritchie's oeuvre.
"RocknRolla" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bloody gun violence and crustacean-involved torture.
ROCKNROLLA
Opens on Wednesday in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
Written and directed by Guy Ritchie; director of photography, David Higgs; edited by James Herbert; music by Steve Isles; production designer, Richard Bridgland; produced by Joel Silver, Susan Downey, Steve Clark-Hall and Mr. Ritchie; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.
WITH: Gerard Butler (One Two), Tom Wilkinson (Lenny Cole), Thandie Newton (Stella), Mark Strong (Archy), Idris Elba (Mumbles), Tom Hardy (Handsome Bob), Toby Kebbell (Johnny), Jeremy Piven (Roman), Ludacris (Mickey) and Karel Roden (Uri).
Mud Pies for ‘That One’ Maureen DowdMud Pies for ‘That One’
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen Dowd October 8, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Mud Pies for 'That One'By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON Some of John McCain's friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.'s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.'s no-brains governing. But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor. John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor's understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater. It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater's home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.'s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock). Sulfurous Atwater-style rumor-mongering by Bush supporters — that McCain had come home from a Hanoi tiger cage with snakes in his head — aimed to stop him during that primary after he had zoomed in New Hampshire. Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man. In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges: The Democrat was a '60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite "Harvard Yard's boutique." He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on "the American side." He was on the side of the Scary Black Man. Sound familiar? Certainly, at some level, John McCain must be disgusted with himself for using the tactics perfected by the same crowd that used these tactics to derail him in 2000. He's now curmudgeonly, even hostile, toward the press — the group he used to spend hours with every day and jokingly describe as his base. He unleashed Sarah Palin to slime their opponent and suggested that the Democrat with the foreign-sounding name who came from the Harvard Yard boutique is not on the American side. Campaigning last weekend, Palin cast their Democratic rival as "someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." The woman is sounding more Cheney than Cheney. Palin said that Obama's relationship with the former Weatherman William Ayers proved that he did not have the "truthfulness and judgment" to be president. Asked by William Kristol if the Rev. Jeremiah Wright should be an issue, she said, "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more." Atwater gleefully tried to paint Willie Horton as Dukakis's running mate. With a black man running, it's even easier for Atwater's disciple running McCain's campaign to warn that white Americans should not open the door to the dangerous Other, or "That One," as McCain referred to Obama in Tuesday night's debate. (A cross between "The One" and "That Woman.") On Monday, McCain made Obama, who has been campaigning for almost two years now, sound like an ominous intruder, questioning his character and motives, telling a New Mexico crowd that "even at this late hour in the campaign, there are essential things we don't know about Senator Obama ... "All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government? What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama?" The new McCain TV ad, "Dangerous," calls Obama "dishonorable," "dangerous" and "too risky for America." McCain aides have been blunt in their need to change the subject from the economy. But, as with Bush Senior's re-election campaign, slithery character attacks don't scare as well when Americans are already scared about keeping their jobs and retirement savings. Maybe that's why McCain didn't bring up Ayers or Wright during the debate, instead leaving it to Sarah Barracuda. Palin finally took questions on Tuesday from her traveling press corps on her campaign plane. Asked if she thought Senator Obama was dishonest, McCain's Mean Girl meandered: "I'm not saying he's dishonest, but in terms of judgment, in terms of being able to answer a question forthrightly, it has two different parts to this. The judgment and the truthfulness and just being able to answer very candidly a simple question about when did you know him, how did you know him, is there still — has there been an association continued since '02 or '05, I know I've read a couple different stories. I think it's relevant." Of course she does.
MoveOn Grows UpWhat Started Online in '98 Has Transformed Liberal Politicking
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MoveOn Grows Up
What Started Online in '98 Has Transformed Liberal Politicking By Jose Antonio Vargas
NEW YORK Five days after Sen. John McCain named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, Quinn Latimer and co-worker Lyra Kilston sent an e-mail to 40 female friends and invited them to outline the reasons they were upset with his choice. It elicited such a huge response -- from friends of friends and utter strangers -- that they created a blog called Women Against Sarah Palin. In less than a month, it has become one of the largest hubs of online opposition to Palin, receiving more than 160,000 e-mails. "I am a fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican," writes a 65-year-old from Flagstaff, Ariz. "I am aghast at the choice the Republican ticket has made." "As a registered Independent, I'd been holding out in deciding which way to go on this election. However, once I saw Sarah Palin being interviewed . . . it was a much easier decision," writes a 52-year-old from Los Angeles. Along the way, Latimer got an e-mail from Eli Pariser, head of the liberal group MoveOn.org. Pariser knows about e-mail campaigns; he built MoveOn around them. And Latimer has been a member of the organization since 2000. When Pariser found out that Latimer and Kilston also live in Brooklyn, he asked them to brunch at Flatbush Farm, a local hot spot. Over eggs, oatmeal and coffee, he offered technical support from MoveOn. At one point, he even suggested that the women take time off from their jobs and work full time on the blog until Nov. 4. MoveOn, Pariser told the women, could raise the funds to pay them. "I got to admit I was shocked by that," says Latimer, 30, an art editor. Adds Kilston, 31, also an art editor: "We just kind of stumbled into this whole blogging thing." The women decided to keep their jobs while maintaining the site. But now, with help from MoveOn, they'll use the e-mail list of everyone who has sent a note to the blog to send information about voter registration, phone call drives and house parties. And, to match their online activism, Latimer and Kilston plan to knock on doors for Sen. Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. MoveOn, the enfant terrible of online politicking, is growing up, turning 10 years old last month. And it has become far more than a purveyor of vituperative e-mail blasts. During the 2006 midterm elections, for instance, the online organization -- with a full-time staff of 23, most of whom work from home -- spent $28 million advocating for Democratic candidates through its political action committee, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. In contrast, the National Rifle Association, with a staff of about 500 housed in its expansive headquarters in Fairfax, spent $11 million through its PAC. As the battle between Obama and McCain heated up this summer, MoveOn witnessed its largest increase in membership -- adding a million new members in three months, bringing its total to 4.2 million. Not bad for a group that started off as an online petition to stop the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Created in September 1998 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the petition asked Congress to censure Clinton and "move on" to other domestic issues. "At first, we weren't sure what to make of MoveOn," says Paul Begala, then a senior aide in the Clinton White House. "But it became clear that the grass-roots power that MoveOn represents is what helped save us." In the years since -- through the group's virulent opposition to President Bush and the Iraq war -- Begala has regarded MoveOn as a "spinal transplant" that has reinvigorated the Democratic Party. Perhaps that's an exaggeration. Democrats, after all, lost the White House in 2000 and 2004. It wasn't until the 2006 midterms that they controlled Congress. Still, political operatives in both parties agree that MoveOn is a singular force in Washington, unmatched in its reach and resources. For years, some Republicans have tried to create their own version of it, with little success. At the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., last month, Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, bemoaned that the right has "nothing that looks like MoveOn.org," adding that the GOP is "still in denial about what the left has been able to do." But what exactly is MoveOn? Although it's not a formal arm of the Democratic Party -- and the group doesn't rule out endorsing and financing third-party candidates -- MoveOn has become synonymous with the party's left wing. It's not technically a lobbying group: MoveOn doesn't employ lobbyists who've mastered the ins and outs of Capitol Hill. It's more akin to an interest group, a la Emily's List, the pro-choice organization that supports like-minded female politicians, although Pariser says somewhat grandiosely, "We are not about serving our members' individual interests -- we are primarily serving a national interest." And though officials like to say that MoveOn's membership is as sizable as the NRA's, signing up to receive the group's e-mails is not the same level of commitment as paying dues to the gun rights organization. But in an online networking era in which pols promote their e-mail lists as a symbol of their grass-roots strength, MoveOn's list is unlike any other. The group is led by Pariser, a tall, lanky self-described computer geek, who grew up in Lincolnville, Maine, and graduated at 19 from Simon's Rock, a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. "Led" is a verb that Pariser would take exception to. The way he sees it, MoveOn members are in charge. "They tell us where to go. They lead us," the 27-year-old says of his organization. "It's not about having anointed leaders. It's about leveraging technology so people can help lead themselves." He points to regular surveys that MoveOn conducts to take the pulse of its membership. One week, members deem getting a 60-seat, filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority as a top priority. The next, eyes turn to the financial bailout plan. When MoveOn members voted to endorse Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton days before Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, it was up to Pariser to call and tell Patti Solis Doyle, who was then Clinton's campaign manager. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where MoveOn hosted a packed soiree attended by the likes of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and comedian Sarah Silverman, the group seemed part of the very establishment that it criticizes -- a charge that Pariser rejects. To the McCain campaign, Obama and MoveOn are inseparable. "It's hard for Obama to claim any pretenses of bipartisan outreach when he gladly accepts the help of partisan special-interest groups like MoveOn.org," says McCain spokesman Alex Conant. Pariser's political activism also began with an e-mail. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he sent a note to a group of friends, urging them to contact their elected officials and ask for a restrained response to the tragedy. The e-mail turned into a petition, eventually signed by more than half a million people online. Two months later, MoveOn called with a job offer. Guided by Pariser, MoveOn began to make its mark by raising money online -- lots of it. "When we started MoveOn, there was this standard model of how candidates are elected. Say I'm a candidate and you're a political consultant. You put me in a room, you give me a list of rich donors to call, I make calls and raise, what, $2,000 checks. Then I hand the $2,000 checks to you. You make ads with it. You take a healthy cut. You put those ads in the air -- that's how elections are won. At no point during that process does it matter to anyone other than the rich donors what you actually stand for," Pariser says. "There's a different model now. It was the [Howard] Dean model. It's now the Obama model. You can say things that inspire people and get lots of people to contribute just a little bit. Twenty. Fifty. Maybe, who knows, even a hundred. Then instead of being accountable to a small set of rich donors, you're accountable to a large set of everyday donors." The money has afforded MoveOn so much pull that it's hard to find a prominent Democrat who will openly criticize the group's tactics and positions. "Elected officials don't want to offend them and lose their money, right?" says a party strategist who refused to be identified. MoveOn, he adds, "is like a big-party donor, so they get treated that way. . . . A lot of people in the party who used to have more power don't like that they are losing juice to the likes of MoveOn, but they also realize they can't have the power they have without them." Throughout this campaign cycle, MoveOn has raised nearly $33 million and expects to hit $38 million before Election Day -- money spent buying ads for and against candidates and funding get-out-the-vote efforts. All that money has led to more influence. And to more criticism when the group stumbles. For instance, MoveOn was repudiated by Republicans and Democrats alike in September 2007 when the group ran an anti-war print ad in the New York Times that questioned the integrity of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq. "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" read the ad. Republicans introduced resolutions condemning the ad that easily passed in both the House and Senate. Pariser defended it at the time. But now, more than a year later, he says he "would have worded the ad differently." "MoveOn is still evolving, still maturing, still learning what its boundaries are," says Tad Devine, a longtime Democratic consultant. "But make no mistake about it: This election might be decided by a few votes in a few states. . . . Having those hundreds of thousands of people communicating with each other through e-mails, energizing the base, can make the difference." Beyond Hitting 'Fwd:'
On Aug. 29, just hours after the Alaska governor became the first Republican woman on a national ticket, MoveOn sent an e-mail to its members titled "Who is Sarah Palin?" "Yesterday was John McCain's 72nd birthday. If elected, he'd be the oldest president ever inaugurated," read the e-mail. "And after months of slamming Barack Obama for 'inexperience,' here's who John McCain has chosen to be one heartbeat away from the presidency." That became one of the most forwarded e-mails in MoveOn's history, Pariser says. (The group can count how many people click on the link in the e-mail.) Two weeks later, on Sept. 10, MoveOn sent another e-mail, this one titled "Disgusting." "John McCain and Sarah Palin are repeatedly deceiving, manipulating, and flat-out lying. And polls are showing that some of those lies are convincing voters," the e-mail began. "Palin says she opposed the 'Bridge to Nowhere' -- when in fact she fully supported it. McCain says Obama wants sex-ed for kindergartners -- when he voted for a bill to protect them from sexual predators." That e-mail raised $1.2 million within 24 hours, Pariser says, the most a MoveOn e-mail has raised in a single day. "In a way, Palin's selection was yet another wake-up call, another reminder of just how high the stakes are," says Pariser. "A lot of people have said that she's energized the evangelical base. Well, she's energized the liberal base, too. Our energy level went way, way up." The challenge for a maturing organization is to move beyond forwarding e-mails and facilitating online donations. Can MoveOn persuade independents and Republicans to cross party lines? Is it increasing voter turnout in swing states? How can it avoid being reduced to parody? A recent headline in the Onion, for instance, read "Obama Deletes Another Unread MoveOn.org E-Mail." Those are the questions in the minds of critics such as Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations." Sending an e-mail to your congressional representative is so easy that it has "become effectively meaningless," writes Shirky. Shortly after the book came out, Pariser asked Shirky to lunch. On the day of the meeting, Shirky Twittered: "I'm going to lunch with MoveOn. If I don't Tweet again in two hours, they had me killed." "Eli sees MoveOn as a community-organizing platform that happens to run e-mail campaigns," says Shirky, recalling the conversation. "I'm inclined to think of them as a message and fundraising organization that does some community organizing. They do some, but they can do so much more." In the past five years, Pariser has beefed up the group's offline strategy. In addition to airing pro-Obama TV ads, the group will spend about $5 million in field efforts this cycle. MoveOn collaborates with political scientists at Yale who are studying the impact of its canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004 and 2006. In 2004, about 70,000 members went door to door in 12 states trying to increase voter turnout. This year, Pariser estimates that about 200,000 will have gotten involved by Election Day in more than a dozen states. MoveOn is also holding hundreds of "Call for Change" house parties, at which members call voters in swing states. On a recent Sunday night, MoveOn members made half a million phone calls in two hours. They urged supporters to volunteer for the Obama campaign -- and, in classic MoveOn style, posted photos on Flickr of themselves talking on their phones. The Communications Hub
"I give it a 55-45, with Obama winning," Pariser says from behind his standing desk in his home office. Thomas Jefferson and Donald Rumseld, he notes, had standing desks. "I somehow picked up that trivia." He got up at 6:20 a.m. on this late September day, went to back-to-back meetings in the afternoon ("with other online advocacy groups," he says, repeatedly declining to elaborate), then hurried home, which is a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn where he sometimes has to jiggle the toilet handle to make sure the water stops running. He lives with his wife, Lindsay, a human resources manager for a construction firm. They married in June. "When I told people that MoveOn turned 10 today, many said, 'What? Ten years ? It feels like it was yesterday,' " says Pariser. "But to me, it feels like it's been decades since 2001 when I first started getting involved. That was such a different world. In 2001, online organizing wasn't really on anyone's radar. There was no YouTube. No Facebook. No group of liberal bloggers, no Net roots. And Bush? Bush was absolutely ascendant. . . . The Democrats were in absolute disarray." "Don't get me wrong -- a lot can change between now and November 4th. Obama can lose," Pariser says. "But here's the thing: Independent of the Obama campaign, in our own lives, through our own networks, we're doing everything we can to win this election. Back in 2001, people felt alone, like there was nothing you could do to get involved. Not anymore. People are finding each other. People are communicating. People are pumped up. "What happens in our in-boxes doesn't just stay there." © 2008 The Washington Post Company Pressured to Take More Risk, Fannie Reached Tipping Point
October 5, 2008
Pressured to Take More Risk, Fannie Reached Tipping Point"Almost no one expected what was coming. It's not fair to blame us for not predicting the unthinkable."— Daniel H. Mudd, former chief executive, Fannie Mae
When the mortgage giant Fannie Mae recruited Daniel H. Mudd, he told a friend he wanted to work for an altruistic business. Already a decorated marine and a successful executive, he wanted to be a role model to his four children — just as his father, the television journalist Roger Mudd, had been to him. Fannie, a government-sponsored company, had long helped Americans get cheaper home loans by serving as a powerful middleman, buying mortgages from lenders and banks and then holding or reselling them to Wall Street investors. This allowed banks to make even more loans — expanding the pool of homeowners and permitting Fannie to ring up handsome profits along the way. But by the time Mr. Mudd became Fannie's chief executive in 2004, his company was under siege. Competitors were snatching lucrative parts of its business. Congress was demanding that Mr. Mudd help steer more loans to low-income borrowers. Lenders were threatening to sell directly to Wall Street unless Fannie bought a bigger chunk of their riskiest loans. So Mr. Mudd made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives. For a time, that decision proved profitable. In the end, it nearly destroyed the company and threatened to drag down the housing market and the economy. Dozens of interviews, most from people who requested anonymity to avoid legal repercussions, offer an inside account of the critical juncture when Fannie Mae's new chief executive, under pressure from Wall Street firms, Congress and company shareholders, took additional risks that pushed his company, and, in turn, a large part of the nation's financial health, to the brink. Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed at least $270 billion in loans to risky borrowers — more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined, according to company filings and industry data. "We didn't really know what we were buying," said Marc Gott, a former director in Fannie's loan servicing department. "This system was designed for plain vanilla loans, and we were trying to push chocolate sundaes through the gears." Last month, the White House was forced to orchestrate a $200 billion rescue of Fannie and its corporate cousin, Freddie Mac. On Sept. 26, the companies disclosed that federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating potential accounting and governance problems. Mr. Mudd said in an interview that he responded as best he could given the company's challenges, and worked to balance risks prudently. "Fannie Mae faced the danger that the market would pass us by," he said. "We were afraid that lenders would be selling products we weren't buying and Congress would feel like we weren't fulfilling our mission. The market was changing, and it's our job to buy loans, so we had to change as well." Dealing With Risk When Mr. Mudd arrived at Fannie eight years ago, it was beginning a dramatic expansion that, at its peak, had it buying 40 percent of all domestic mortgages. Just two decades earlier, Fannie had been on the brink of bankruptcy. But chief executives like Franklin D. Raines and the chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard built it into a financial juggernaut by aiming at new markets. Fannie never actually made loans. It was essentially a mortgage insurance company, buying mortgages, keeping some but reselling most to investors and, for a fee, promising to pay off a loan if the borrower defaulted. The only real danger was that the company might guarantee questionable mortgages and lose out when large numbers of borrowers walked away from their obligations. So Fannie constructed a vast network of computer programs and mathematical formulas that analyzed its millions of daily transactions and ranked borrowers according to their risk. Those computer programs seemingly turned Fannie into a divining rod, capable of separating pools of similar-seeming borrowers into safe and risky bets. The riskier the loan, the more Fannie charged to handle it. In theory, those high fees would offset any losses. With that self-assurance, the company announced in 2000 that it would buy $2 trillion in loans from low-income, minority and risky borrowers by 2010. All this helped supercharge Fannie's stock price and rewarded top executives with tens of millions of dollars. Mr. Raines received about $90 million between 1998 and 2004, while Mr. Howard was paid about $30.8 million, according to regulators. Mr. Mudd collected more than $10 million in his first four years at Fannie. Whenever competitors asked Congress to rein in the company, lawmakers were besieged with letters and phone calls from angry constituents, some orchestrated by Fannie itself. One automated phone call warned voters: "Your congressman is trying to make mortgages more expensive. Ask him why he opposes the American dream of home ownership." The ripple effect of Fannie's plunge into riskier lending was profound. Fannie's stamp of approval made shunned borrowers and complex loans more acceptable to other lenders, particularly small and less sophisticated banks. Between 2001 and 2004, the overall subprime mortgage market — loans to the riskiest borrowers — grew from $160 billion to $540 billion, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. Communities were inundated with billboards and fliers from subprime companies offering to help almost anyone buy a home. Within a few years of Mr. Mudd's arrival, Fannie was the most powerful mortgage company on earth. Then it began to crumble. Regulators, spurred by the revelation of a wide-ranging accounting fraud at Freddie, began scrutinizing Fannie's books. In 2004 they accused Fannie of fraudulently concealing expenses to make its profits look bigger. Mr. Howard and Mr. Raines resigned. Mr. Mudd was quickly promoted to the top spot. But the company he inherited was becoming a shadow of its former self. 'You Need Us' Shortly after he became chief executive, Mr. Mudd traveled to the California offices of Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial, then the nation's largest mortgage lender. Fannie had a longstanding and lucrative relationship with Countrywide, which sold more loans to Fannie than anyone else. But at that meeting, Mr. Mozilo, a butcher's son who had almost single-handedly built Countrywide into a financial powerhouse, threatened to upend their partnership unless Fannie started buying Countrywide's riskier loans. Mr. Mozilo, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, told Mr. Mudd that Countrywide had other options. For example, Wall Street had recently jumped into the market for risky mortgages. Firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs had started bundling home loans and selling them to investors — bypassing Fannie and dealing with Countrywide directly. "You're becoming irrelevant," Mr. Mozilo told Mr. Mudd, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential. In the previous year, Fannie had already lost 56 percent of its loan-reselling business to Wall Street and other competitors. "You need us more than we need you," Mr. Mozilo said, "and if you don't take these loans, you'll find you can lose much more." Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint. Investors were also pressuring Mr. Mudd to take greater risks. On one occasion, a hedge fund manager telephoned a senior Fannie executive to complain that the company was not taking enough gambles in chasing profits. "Are you stupid or blind?" the investor roared, according to someone who heard the call, but requested anonymity. "Your job is to make me money!" Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie's affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers. "When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by a mere one percent per year, Fannie's mission is of paramount importance," Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, lectured Mr. Mudd at a Congressional hearing in 2006. "In fact, Fannie and Freddie can do more, a lot more." But Fannie's computer systems could not fully analyze many of the risky loans that customers, investors and lawmakers wanted Mr. Mudd to buy. Many of them — like balloon-rate mortgages or mortgages that did not require paperwork — were so new that dangerous bets could not be identified, according to company executives. Even so, Fannie began buying huge numbers of riskier loans. In one meeting, according to two people present, Mr. Mudd told employees to "get aggressive on risk-taking, or get out of the company." In the interview, Mr. Mudd said he did not recall that conversation and that he always stressed taking only prudent risks. Employees, however, say they got a different message. "Everybody understood that we were now buying loans that we would have previously rejected, and that the models were telling us that we were charging way too little," said a former senior Fannie executive. "But our mandate was to stay relevant and to serve low-income borrowers. So that's what we did." Between 2005 and 2007, the company's acquisitions of mortgages with down payments of less than 10 percent almost tripled. As the market for risky loans soared to $1 trillion, Fannie expanded in white-hot real estate areas like California and Florida. For two years, Mr. Mudd operated without a permanent chief risk officer to guard against unhealthy hazards. When Enrico Dallavecchia was hired for that position in 2006, he told Mr. Mudd that the company should be charging more to handle risky loans. In the following months to come, Mr. Dallavecchia warned that some markets were becoming overheated and argued that a housing bubble had formed, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations. But many of the warnings were rebuffed. Mr. Mudd told Mr. Dallavecchia that the market, shareholders and Congress all thought the companies should be taking more risks, not fewer, according to a person who observed the conversation. "Who am I supposed to fight with first?" Mr. Mudd asked. In the interview, Mr. Mudd said he never made those comments. Mr. Dallavecchia was among those whom Mr. Mudd forced out of the company during a reorganization in August. Mr. Mudd added that it was almost impossible during most of his tenure to see trouble on the horizon, because Fannie interacts with lenders rather than borrowers, which creates a delay in recognizing market conditions. He said Fannie sought to balance market demands prudently against internal standards, that executives always sought to avoid unwise risks, and that Fannie bought far fewer troublesome loans than many other financial institutions. Mr. Mudd said he heeded many warnings from his executives and that Fannie refused to buy many risky loans, regardless of outside pressures . "You're dealing with massive amounts of information that flow in over months," he said. "You almost never have an 'Oh, my God' moment. Even now, most of the loans we bought are doing fine." But, of course, that moment of truth did arrive. In the middle of last year it became clear that millions of borrowers would stop paying their mortgages. For Fannie, this raised the terrifying prospect of paying billions of dollars to honor its guarantees. Sustained by Government Had Fannie been a private entity, its comeuppance might have happened a year ago. But the White House, Wall Street and Capitol Hill were more concerned about the trillions of dollars in other loans that were poisoning financial institutions and banks. Lawmakers, particularly Democrats, leaned on Fannie and Freddie to buy and hold those troubled debts, hoping that removing them from the system would help the economy recover. The companies, eager to regain market share and buy what they thought were undervalued loans, rushed to comply. The White House also pitched in. James B. Lockhart, the chief regulator of Fannie and Freddie, adjusted the companies' lending standards so they could purchase as much as $40 billion in new subprime loans. Some in Congress praised the move. "I'm not worried about Fannie and Freddie's health, I'm worried that they won't do enough to help out the economy," the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, said at the time. "That's why I've supported them all these years — so that they can help at a time like this." But earlier this year, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. grew concerned about Fannie's and Freddie's stability. He sent a deputy, Robert K. Steel, a former colleague from his time at Goldman Sachs, to speak with Mr. Mudd and his counterpart at Freddie. Mr. Steel's orders, according to several people, were to get commitments from the companies to raise more money as a cushion against all the new loans. But when he met with the firms, Mr. Steel made few demands and seemed unfamiliar with Fannie's and Freddie's operations, according to someone who attended the discussions. Rather than getting firm commitments, Mr. Steel struck handshake deals without deadlines. That misstep would become obvious over the coming months. Although Fannie raised $7.4 billion, Freddie never raised any additional money. Mr. Steel, who left the Treasury Department over the summer to head Wachovia bank, disputed that he had failed in his handling of the companies, and said he was proud of his work . As the housing crisis worsened, Fannie and Freddie announced larger losses, and shares continued falling. In July, Mr. Paulson asked Congress for authority to take over Fannie and Freddie, though he said he hoped never to use it. "If you've got a bazooka and people know you've got it, you may not have to take it out," he told Congress. Mr. Mudd called Treasury weekly. He offered to resign, to replace his board, to sell stock, and to raise debt. "We'll sign in blood anything you want," he told a Treasury official, according to someone with knowledge of the conversations. But, according to that person, Mr. Mudd told Treasury that those options would work only if government officials publicly clarified whether they intended to take over Fannie. Otherwise, potential investors would refuse to buy the stock for fear of being wiped out. "There were other options on the table short of a takeover," Mr. Mudd said. But as long as Treasury refused to disclose its goals, it was impossible for the company to act, according to people close to Fannie. Then, last month, Mr. Mudd was instructed to report to Mr. Lockhart's office. Mr. Paulson told Mr. Mudd that he could either agree to a takeover or have one forced upon him. "This is the right thing to do for the economy," Mr. Paulson said, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. "We can't take any more risks." Freddie was given the same message. Less than 48 hours later, Mr. Lockhart and Mr. Paulson ended Fannie and Freddie's independence, with up to $200 billion in taxpayer money to replenish the companies' coffers. The move failed to stanch a spreading panic in the financial world. In fact, some analysts say, the takeover accelerated the hysteria by signaling that no company, no matter how large, was strong enough to withstand the losses stemming from troubled loans. Within weeks, Lehman Brothers was forced to declare bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was pushed into the arms of Bank of America, and the government stepped in to bail out the insurance giant the American International Group. Today, Mr. Paulson is scrambling to carry out a $700 billion plan to bail out the financial sector, while Mr. Lockhart effectively runs Fannie and Freddie. Mr. Raines and Mr. Howard, who kept most of their millions, are living well. Mr. Raines has improved his golf game. Mr. Howard divides his time between large homes outside Washington and Cancun, Mexico, where his staff is learning how to cook American meals. But Mr. Mudd, who lost millions of dollars as the company's stock declined and had his severance revoked after the company was seized, often travels to New York for job interviews. He recalled that one of his sons recently asked him why he had been fired. "Sometimes things don't work out, no matter how hard you try," he replied.
Motorsport-F1: Hamilton looking for repeat of Japan GP success
Today’s Papers
National BankBy Joshua Kucera It was another day of grim, fast-moving news on the economy. The New York Times leads with late-breaking plans by the Treasury Department to take ownership stakes in some banks while "injecting" cash into them. All the other papers lead with coordinated interest rate cuts by central banks across the globe, which failed to stop financial markets from falling further downward. The NYT said the bank nationalization plan is "still preliminary and it was unclear how the process would work, but it appeared that it would be voluntary for banks." The authority to do this was part of the $700 billion bailout package and is similar to a British government plan announced Wednesday. The paper cites administration officials saying that the plan "has emerged as one of the most favored new options being discussed in Washington and on Wall Street. The appeal is that it would directly address the worries that banks have about lending to one another and to other customers." The sourcing on the NYT piece is a bit opaque, and the story apparently broke late. The piece contains no comments, even on background, from government officials, although it does say "Treasury officials" described the broad outlines of the plan. But it noted that Paulson, at a press conference Wednesday, "pointedly named the Treasury's new authority to inject capital into institutions as the first in a list of new powers included in the bailout law." Of the other papers, only the Wall Street Journal had the story, and an Associated Press piece on the plan said an "administration official" talked about the plan late Wednesday. Everyone calls the other big news, the coordinated interest rate cut, "unprecedented." Central bankers from the United States, the euro zone, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland all cut interest rates by half a percentage point. In the United States, that puts us at 1.5 percent—a "tricky spot," the Journal says, as it means "rates don't have room to go much lower." China, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Brazil also cut rates, although not as part of the coordinated effort. But it failed to stop the stock market tumble, at least immediately, as the Dow Jones average fell another 189 points yesterday (though Asian markets did appear to be bouncing back overnight). The international efforts will continue on Saturday; the United States has called a meeting of the Group of 20, which includes the United States, Europe, and "cash-rich stars of the developing world, such as China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia," according to USA Today, which leads with the story. The NYT fronts a lengthy, damning analysis of the legacy of the once-revered Alan Greenspan, the longtime chair of the federal reserve, and his role in pushing deregulation of financial derivatives. Those derivatives, he argued throughout his career, would allow investors to share risks, but they have now fueled the crisis we're in. "If Mr. Greenspan had acted differently during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, many economists say, the current crisis might have been averted or muted," the paper says. Greenspan, for his part, keeps the faith and blames greedy investors rather than a lack of regulation for the crisis. "In a market system based on trust, reputation has a significant economic value," Greenspan told a Washington audience last week. "I am therefore distressed at how far we have let concerns for reputation slip in recent years." The Los Angeles Times fronts some news you can use, an analysis of whether the market has bottomed out yet and whether you should buy in. The verdict? Probably not: "Economists and market strategists willing to call a bottom amid the current market turmoil are thin on the ground, vastly outnumbered by forecasters with distinctly more apocalyptic outlooks," the paper writes. The Washington Post has a long front-page account of Barack Obama's days in the Illinois state Senate where, the paper says, he was converted from an idealistic do-gooder into a tough politician. "Barack had this misconception that you could change votes with thoughtful questions and good debate," one of his former colleagues told the paper. "That was a little idealistic, if you ask me. It's not necessarily about smarts and logic down there. Votes are made with a lot of horse trading, compromise, coercion, working with the other side. Those are things that Barack can do—can do very well, actually. But it took him a little while to figure it out." Also in the papers … the NYT and Post get word of an upcoming intelligence report on Afghanistan that concludes the country is in a "downward spiral" with widening violence and a corrupt government unable to handle it. A tragicomic play skewering the Iraqi government is selling out in Baghdad, the LAT finds. It's not just the United States that's dragging down the world economy—the Journal reports that Iceland, too, is suffering a banking crisis that is drawing in the rest of Europe. And all the papers report that Russia has pulled its troops out of Georgia proper, two days ahead of the deadline called for in the French-brokered peace deal. Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. May 05 A Psychedelic ‘Problem Child’ Comes Full Circle
John Loengard/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images
May 4, 2008
Ideas & Trends
A Psychedelic 'Problem Child' Comes Full CircleON the afternoon of Jan. 11, Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, had about a dozen friends and family up to his glass-walled home in the mountains near Basel, Switzerland, for a party. It was his 102nd birthday and, in an important sense, also a homecoming. Dr. Hofmann, who died last week, spent the latter part of his life consulting with scientists around the world who wanted to bring his "problem child," as he called the drug, back into the lab to study as a therapeutic agent. Not long before his last birthday, he learned that health officials in his native Switzerland had approved what will be the first known medical trial of LSD anywhere in more than 35 years — to test whether the drug can help relieve distress at end of life. "It was something to be there, in that house," said Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit group that supports research into LSD and related compounds. "He was walking around the place, telling jokes, being a host. He seemed ... I don't know, peaceful somehow, comfortable to let the next generation carry on his spirit. And he was expressing how completely grateful he was that that we'd been able to restart LSD research — that his problem child had come home, had become a wonder child." Most drugs that capture the imagination of the wider culture seem at first to soothe the unease or gloom of their times, like Valium in the 1970s or Prozac in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But lysergic acid diethylamide, the substance Dr. Hofmann accidentally ingested in 1943 while working at the Swiss drug firm Sandoz, did exactly the opposite. It inflamed people's hopes and fears, powerfully so. LSD, it turns out, is one of the most potent consciousness-altering substances known; an amount the size of a grain of salt can induce swirls of emotion, and shimmering clear senses in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary, luminous, meaningful. It can infuse a person with creative energy or overwhelm the brain with a swarming feeling of loss and fear. Sometimes both: Even Dr. Hofmann had at least one bad trip, recalling in his autobiography, "Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms." Looking back, scholars say, it's hard to imagine that such a drug, once in circulation, could not have taken Western culture for a wild ride, especially given the forces at play in the postwar United States. "It was probably inevitable, and I think the reason is that the common denominator, the common ground shared by all the various groups who made use of LSD, was that they got instantly excited about it as potentiator of their own agenda, whatever that was," said Martin A. Lee, co-author of "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The C.I.A., the '60s and Beyond." "It's a terrible phrase, but I think of LSD as a potentiator of possibilities. It just evoked these grandiose possibilities with people." Scientists in the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, thought it might be the key to providing healing insight, a window on the soul, a way to transcend psychosis, mania, depression. Dr. Hofmann thought it could awaken a deeper awareness of mankind's place in nature. About 1,000 studies crowd the medical literature of that era, many of them sloppy, a few tantalizing and some disastrous for the people being "treated" with an acid trip. The C.I.A. tested the drug as an aid to interrogation, a kind of truth serum. The Army modeled the possibility of using it as a madness gas, of dosing the enemy to gain quick advantage. And this was all before acid met the counterculture on Haight Street in the 1960s. But meet they did, and it was love at first sight. Dr. Hofmann's child was no hustler from a shotgun lab in Tijuana, after all, but a bourgeois revolutionary, born into establishment medicine and able to travel the world and enter societies from the top down, through their most hallowed institutions. The English novelist Aldous Huxley, who struck up a friendship with Dr. Hofmann, was one of the first prominent proponents of LSD use for personal transformation. Timothy Leary, LSD's pied piper, was a Harvard professor whose public raptures over the drug were a strong cocktail of mystical and scientific jargon. Ken Kesey, founder of the protoraves known as acid tests, was at age 30 already an acclaimed novelist, author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." He likened taking acid to "putting a tuning fork on your whole body." Not that acid was a hard sell to young people in the early 1960s, at least to those who longed not only to shake free of mainstream suburban-corporate culture but also to transform it, and themselves. They weren't looking for an angry fix but something far grander. "To put matters bluntly: the hippies were an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration," wrote Jay Stevens in his 1987 book, "Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream." A joint is not going to get you there. Nor, in the end, did LSD. By 1966 a raft of toxic knockoffs were on the street, and the authorities recognized that, whatever its upside, acid had become part of a self-devouring drug culture that exposed many users to a poisonous menu of illicit drugs. The government outlawed distribution of LSD, and research into its effects soon ground to a near halt. Where some saw a long-overdue crackdown on abuse, others saw an overreaction. "Once the drug illegalization crowd gets hold of it, that's that," said Alexander Shulgin, a former Dow chemist who discovered the effects of MDMA, or ecstasy, which has also been made a controlled substance. "People start talking about protecting little children, and worrying about whether someone's going to jump out the window, and meanwhile we have these substances — MDMA and LSD — that may be of tremendous value in psychotherapy and couldn't be explored." They can now; several trials testing psychedelics are in the works, thanks in part to the steady example set by Dr. Hofmann. "I think people in this country, when they see a patient in pain, will not deny that person a medication just because the drug has abuse potential," said Dr. John Halpern, a Harvard psychiatrist who is testing the effect of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in late-stage cancer patients. "LSD is always going to be a touchy subject but I think it's kind of fallen back to earth." The trip is over, the hangover gone, and the prodigal child arrived home, just in time to say goodbye.
March 25 The weird animatronic charms of Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
The Mecca of the MouseBy Seth Stevenson
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Courtesy of the Wood family
Army Sgt. Ryan M. Wood, 22, of Oklahoma. More Photos >
Courtesy of the Agami family
Pfc. Daniel J. Agami, left, with friends.
Courtesy of the Hill family
Left to right: Pfc. Ryan J. Hill, Pfc. Daniel Agami, Specialist Ruben Chavez and Specialist Stephen Breen in Baghdad in October 2006.
Courtesy of the Campos family
Staff Sgt. Juan Campos
Courtesy of the Gomez family
Specialist Daniel E. Gomez with his mother.
Courtesy of the King family
Army Specialist Jerry Ryen King, of Browersville, Ga. March 25, 2008
Six of the Fallen, in Words They Sent HomeBy LIZETTE ALVAREZ and ANDREW W. LEHREN
By the time Specialist Jerry Ryen King decided to write about his experiences in Iraq, the teen-age paratrooper had more to share than most other soldiers. In two operations to clear the outskirts of the village of Turki in the deadly Diyala Province, Specialist King and the rest of the Fifth Squadron faced days of firefights, grenade attacks and land mines. Well-trained insurgents had burrowed deep into muddy canals, a throwback to the trenches of World War I. As the fighting wore on, B-1 bombers and F-16s were called in to drop a series of powerful bombs. Once the area was clear of insurgents, the squadron, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, uncovered hidden caches with thousands of weapons. Two months later, Specialist King, a handsome former honors student and double-sport athlete from Georgia, sat down at his computer. In informal but powerful prose, he began a journal. After 232 long, desolate, morose, but somewhat days of tranquility into deployment, I’ve decided that I should start writing some of the things I experienced here in Iraq. I have to say that the events that I have encountered here have changed my outlook on life... The most recent mission started out as a 24-36 hour air-assault sniper mission in a known al-Qaida stronghold just north of Baghdad. We landed a few hours before daybreak and as soon as I got off the helicopter my night vision broke, I was surrounded by the sound of artillery rounds, people screaming in Arabic, automatic weapons, and the terrain didn’t look anything like what we were briefed. I knew it was going to be a bad day and a half. Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007 A month later, Specialist King was sitting inside his combat outpost, an abandoned school in Sadah, when suicide bombers exploded two dump trucks just outside the building. The school collapsed, killing Specialist King on April 23, 2007, along with eight other soldiers, and making the blast one of the most lethal for Americans fighting in Iraq. In that instant, Specialist King became one of 4,000 service members and Defense Department civilians to die in the Iraq war — a milestone that was reached late Sunday, five years since the war began in March 2003. The last four members of that group, like the majority of the most recent 1,000 to die, were killed by an improvised explosive device. They died at 10 p.m. Sunday on a patrol in Baghdad, military officials said; their names have not yet been released. The next day we cleared an area that made me feel as if I were in Vietnam. Honestly, it was one of the scariest times of my life. At one point I was in water up to my waist and heard an AK fire in my direction. But all in all the day was going pretty good, no one was hurt, I got to shoot a few rounds, toss a grenade, and we were walking to where the helicopter was supposed to pick us up. Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007 The year 2007 would prove to be especially hard on American service members; more of them died last year than in any other since the war began. Many of those deaths came in the midst of the 30,000-troop buildup known as "the surge," the linchpin of President Bush’s strategy to tamp down widespread violence between Islamic Sunnis and Shiites, much of it in the country’s capital, Baghdad. In April, May and June alone, 331 American service members died, making it the deadliest three-month period since the war began. But by fall, the strategy, bolstered by new alliances with Sunni tribal chiefs and a decision by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to order his militia to stop fighting, appeared to be paying off as the country entered a period of relative calm. Military casualties and Iraqi civilian deaths fell, and the October-December period produced the fewest casualties of any three months of the war. The past month, though, has seen an uptick in killings and explosions, particularly suicide bombings. Much of the violence has traveled north to Mosul, where the group calling itself Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains strong. Everything changed in a matter of 15 minutes... About the time I was opening my MRE (meal ready to eat) I heard an explosion. Everyone started running towards the sound of the explosion. Apparently a suicide bomber had blown himself up killing four soldiers from my squadron and injuring another. Our 36 hour mission turned into another air- assault into a totally different city, the clearing of it, and 5 more days. We did find over 100 RPG’s, IED making materials, insurgents implacing IED’s, artillery rounds, a sniper rifle, and sort of like a terrorist training book and cd’s. Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007 Unlike the soldiers of some previous wars, who were only occasionally able to send letters back home to loved ones, many of those who died left behind an extraordinary electronic testimony describing in detail the labor, the fears and the banality of serving in Iraq. In excerpts published here from journals, blogs and e-mail messages, six soldiers who died in the most recent group of 1,000 mostly skim the alarming particulars of combat, a kindness shown their relatives and close friends. Instead, they plunge readily into the mundane, but no less important rhythms of home. They fire off comments about holiday celebrations, impending weddings, credit card bills, school antics and the creeping anxiety of family members who are coping with one deployment too many. At other moments, the service members describe the humor of daily life down range, as they call it. Hurriedly, with little time to worry about spelling or grammar, they riff on the chaos around them and reveal moments of fear. As casualties climb and the violence intensifies, so does their urge to share their grief and foreboding.
A Last Goodbye
Hey beautiful well we were on blackout again, we lost yet some more soldiers. I cant wait to get out of this place and return to you where i belong. I dont know how much more of this place i can take. i try to be hard and brave for my guys but i dont know how long i can keep that up you know. its like everytime we go out, any little bump or sounds freaks me out. maybe im jus stressin is all. hopefully ill get over it.... you know, you never think that anything is or can happen to you, at first you feel invincible, but then little by little things start to wear on you... well im sure well be able to save a couple of bucks if you stay with your mom....and at the same time you can help her with some of the bills for the time being. it doesnt bother me. as long as you guys are content is all that matters. I love and miss you guys like crazy. I know i miss both of you too. at times id like to even just spend 1 minute out of this nightmare just to hold and kiss you guys to make it seem a little bit easier. im sure he will like whatever you get him for xmas, and i know that as he gets older he’ll understand how things work. well things here always seem to be......uhm whats the word.....interesting i guess you can say. you never know whats gonna happen and thats the worst part. do me a favor though, when you go to my sisters or moms or wherever you see my family let them know that i love them very much..ok? well i better get going, i have a lot of stuff to do. but hopefully ill get to hear from you pretty soon.*muah* and hugs. tell mijo im proud of him too! love always, When Staff Sgt. Juan Campos, 27, flew from Baghdad to Texas for two weeks last year, there was more on his mind than rest and relaxation. He visited his father’s grave, which he had never seen. He spent time with his grandparents and touched base with the rest of his rambling, extended family. The day he was scheduled to return to war, Sergeant Campos and his wife went out dancing and drinking all evening with friends. Calm and reserved by nature, Sergeant Campos could out-salsa and out-hip-hop most anyone on the dance floor. At the airport, his wife, Jamie Campos, who had grown used to the upheaval of deployment, surprised herself. "I cried and I have never ever cried before," said Mrs. Campos, 26, who has a 9-year-old son, Andre. "It was just really, really weird. He knew, and I kind of knew. It felt different." "We both felt that it was the last goodbye," she said. Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006 I lost a good friend of mine just two days ago to an enemy sniper. The worst feeling in the world is having lost one of your own and not being able to fight back. The more I go on patrol, the more alert I tend to be, but regardless of the situation here in Iraq is that we are never safe. No matter the countermeasures we take to prevent any attacks. They seem to seep through the cracks. Every day a soldier is lost or wounded by enemy attacks. I for one would like to make it home to my family one day. Pray for us and keep us in your thoughts...for an infantryman’s life is never safe. Juan Campos, Myspace blog Sergeant Campos, a member of the First Battalion, 26th Infantry, Charlie Company out of Germany, was one of thousands of infantrymen assigned to stabilize Baghdad and the surrounding areas last year during the troop buildup. Troops were sent deep into insurgent neighborhoods, where they lived in small outposts, patrolled on foot, cleared houses, mingled with Iraqis and rebuilt the infrastructure. The extra 30,000 service members — 160,000 in all — were deployed to Iraq to help quell the runaway violence that threatened large-scale civil war. Most soldiers spent 15 months in Iraq, a length of time that military commanders have said is unsustainable. Many had fought in the war at least once. A few had been in Iraq multiple times. My only goals are to make it out of this place alive and return you guys and make you as happy as I can. Juan Campos, e-mail message to his wife, Dec. 15, 2006. But to Sergeant Campos and the rest of Charlie Company in Adhamiya, a north Baghdad stronghold for Sunni insurgents, the buildup seemed oddly invisible. The men patrolled almost every day, sometimes 16 to 18 hours a day for months, often in 120-degree weather. Exhaustion was too kind a word for their fatigue. More than 150 soldiers lived in a two-story house with portable toilets, no air-conditioning and temperamental showers. Sleep came only a few hours at a time. The fighting was vicious. Adhamiya was such a magnet for sectarian bloodletting that the military built a wall around it to contain the violence. "They walled us in and left us there," Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, 28, said of the 110 men in Charlie Company. "We were a family. I would die for these guys before I die for my own blood brother." On patrol, sniper fire rang out so routinely that soldiers in Sergeant Campos’s platoon seldom stood still for more than four seconds. They scoured rooftops for Iraqi children who lobbed grenades at American soldiers for a handful of cash. Roadside bombs burst from inside drainage pipes, impossible to detect from the street. The bombs grew larger by the month. Last year, these powerful improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.s were responsible for a majority of American fatalities, a new milestone. The bombs also killed multiple soldiers more often than in the past, a testament to their potency. "It was the most horrible thing you could possibly imagine," Sergeant Johnson said. "As soon as you left the gate, you could die at any second. If you went out for a day and you weren’t attacked, it was confusing." Charlie Company soldiers found a steady stream of Iraqis killed by insurgents for money or revenge. Some had their faces wiped clean by acid. Others were missing their heads or limbs.
’It Could Have Been Me’
to tell the story of iraq is a hard one. Ryan Wood, Myspace blog. Sgt. Ryan M. Wood, 22, a gifted artist, prolific writer and a sly romantic from Oklahoma, was also one of the bluntest soldiers inside Charlie Company. it is fighting extreme boredom with the lingering thought in the forefront of your mind that any minute on this patrol could be my last endeavour, only highlighted by times of such extreme terror and an adrenaline rush that no drug can touch. what [expletive] circumstances thinking "that should’ve been me" or "it could’ve been me". wondering it that pile of trash will suddenly explode killing you or worse one of your beloved comrads..only backed by the past thoughts and experiences of really losing friends of yours and not feeling completely hopeless that it was all for nothing because all in all, you know the final outcome of this war. it is walking on that thin line between sanity and insanity. that feeling of total abandonment by a government and a country you used to love because politics are fighting this war......and its a losing battle....and we’re the ones ultimently paying the price. Ryan Wood, Myspace blog, Adhamiya For the soldiers in Iraq, reconciling Adhamiya with America was not always easy. One place was buried in garbage and gore and hopelessness. The other seemed unmoored from the war, fixated on the minutia of daily life and the hiccups of the famous. The media was content to indulge. WHAT THE HELL AMERICA?? "What the hell happened?" any intelligent American might ask themselves throughout their day. While the ignorant, dragging themselves to thier closed off cubicle, contemplate the simple things in life such as "fast food tonight?" or "I wonder what motivated Brittany Spears to shave her unsightly, mishaped domepiece?" To the simpleton, this news might appear "devastating." I assume not everyone thinks this way, but from my little corner of the earth, Iraq, a spot in the world a majority of Americans could’nt point out on the map, it certainly appears so. This little piece of truly, heart-breaking news captured headlines and apparently American imaginations as FOX news did a two hour, truly enlightening piece of breaking news history. American veiwers watched intently, and impatiently as the pretty colors flashed and the media exposed the inner workings of Brittany’s obviously, deep character. I was amazed, truly dumbfounded wondering how we as Americans have sank so low. To all Americans I have but one phrase that helps me throughout my day of constant dangers and ever present death around the corner, "WHO THE [expletive] CARES!" Wow America, we have truly become a nation of self-absorbed retards. ... This world has serious problems and it’s time for America to start addressing them. Ryan Wood, Myspace blog, May 26, 2007 The somberness of the job was hard to shake off. But, day to day, there was no more reliable antidote than Pfc. Daniel J. Agami, a South Floridian with biceps the size of cantaloupes, and Pfc. Ryan J. Hill, a self-described hellion who loved his "momma" and hailed from what he called the "felony flats" of Oregon. Funny men in the best sense of the word, the two provided a valuable and essential commodity in a war zone. Their mother jokes — the kind that begin, "your mother is so..." — were legendary, culminating in a Myspace joke-off. It ended abruptly after an enough-is-enough phone call from Private Hill’s mother, who ranked No. 1 on his list of heroes in Myspace. Private Agami proclaimed victory. About a month later...I went to my room and my mattress was missing and all my close were being worn by other people. I couldn’t figure it out so I knew right off the bat to go to Hill. I saw him walking down the hall wearing five of my winter jackets. He sold half my wardrobe right off his back to people in our company and my mattress was in someone else’s room. So then I had go to around and buy all my stuff back. (Now I think he won). Daniel J. Agami, Charlie Company. Eulogy sent via e-mail message to his mother, Jan. 29, 2007 To keep their spirits up, combat soldiers learned to appreciate the incongruities of war in Iraq. Jokes scrawled inside a Port-o-Potty quickly made the rounds. Situational humor, from goofy to macabre, proved plentiful. A really girly guy who was a cheerleader in high school, got knocked down and nearly hurt by the wind of the helicopter. Listening to Dickson recite what was in every single MRE was pretty funny. A cow charged and nearly trampled one of my friends when we were raiding a compound. And lastly, I thought that it was pretty comical that I shot at a guy a long ways out but missed and later after taking his house and using it as a patrol base he offered me Chai and rice. Jerry Ryen King, Diyala Province Even a trip to the dentist, with its fringe benefits, is cause for amusement in a war zone. Last Sat. I had two of my wisdom teeth pulled. After taking double the prescribe percocot and morphine pills that the doctor gave me for the pain I decided to catch a flight back to my FOB (forward operation base). It was the coolest Blackhawk ride I’ve had, I was absolutely ripped and I talked the pilots into leaving the doors open. We had four more guys die a couple days ago. They hit an IED, it killed everyone in the humvee.. It’s starting to get a little scary. We made it our first six months with just two deaths and that was plenty. But now just in the past two and a half weeks we’ve had nine more guys get killed, and over 50 wounded. I’m just hoping that I can make it the 75 more days or so that we have left of combat operations before we start packing. Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, April 11, 2007 Among the guys in Charlie Company, Private Agami, 25, was one of the boldest and most resilient. He was the kind of guy who joined an endurance ski contest on a whim. He came in fourth. He had never skied in his life. Private Agami had time for everyone, and everyone had time for him. Affectionately called GI Jew, he held his religion up to the light. He used it to build tolerance among the troops and shatter stereotypes; few in his unit had ever met a Jew. He flew the Israeli flag over his cot in Adhamiya. He painted the words Hebrew Hammer onto his rifle. He even managed to keep kosher, a feat that required a steady diet of protein shakes and cereal. Commander Mom, I cant wait to come home and when I do, dont worry ill have allot to say to the congregation. Dont worry about my mental stage either, we all receive counseling and help from doctors when something like this happens. I am a strong individual physically and mentally and if there is one thing the army teaches you, it is how to deal with death. Everyday that passes it gets easier and easier. I miss you guys very much and I love you! Daniel Agami, e-mail message to his mother, Oct. 28, 2006 It did not get easier. I try not to cry. I have never cried this much my entire life. two great men got taken from us way too soon. i wonder why it was them in not me. I sit here right now wondering why did they go to the gates of heaven n not me. I try everynight count my blessing that I made it another day but why are we in this hell over here? why? i cant stop askin why? Ryan Hill, Myspace blog, Nov. 1, 2006 Private Hill was riding in a Humvee on Jan. 20, 2007 when an I.E.D. buried in the middle of the road detonated under his seat, killing him instantly. Sergeant Campos was riding in a Humvee on May 14, 2007, two weeks after returning from Texas, when it hit an I.E.D. The bomb lifted the Humvee five feet off the ground and engulfed it in flames. "That’s when we just left hope at the door," Sergeant. Johnson said. Severely burned over 80 percent of his body, Sergeant Campos lived two weeks. He died June 1. Another soldier, Pfc. Nicholas S. Hartge, 20, of Indiana, died in the same attack. Private Agami was driving a Bradley fighting vehicle on June 21, 2007 when it hit an I.E.D. The explosion flipped the 30-ton vehicle, which also carried Sergeant Wood. Both men were killed, along with three other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter. "Obviously, it came to a point, you didn’t care anymore if it got better," said Staff Sgt. Jeremy S. Rausch, 31, one of Sergeant Campos’s best friends in Charlie Company. "You didn’t care about the people because they didn’t care about themselves. We had already lost enough people that we just thought, you know, ’why?’ " During their time in Adhamiya, the soldiers of Charlie Company caught more than two dozen high-value targets, found nearly 50 weapons caches, detained innumerable insurgents and won countless combat awards. They lost 14 men. Their mission was hailed a success.
Just in Case
Texan to the core, enamored of the military, Specialist Daniel E. Gomez, 21, an Army combat medic in the division’s Alpha Company, relied on his books, his iPod and an Xbox to distract him from the swirl. strange but this place where we are at is unreal almost. I hope I come back mentally in shape. lol. Daniel Gomez, Myspace blog, Sept. 9, 2006 He took pride in being the guy who tended to wounded soldiers under fire, patching them up to help them survive. He did not hesitate to do the same for Iraqis. this iraqi national who I have to say was extremely lucky that he escaped with only sharpnel wounds (metal fragments that fly away from a bomb) when he was standin near a car bomb that was aimed at Iraqi police patrol. Turns out it blow up just when we were passin by soo we had to stop and help. He really was not that lucky though...He had sharpnel to the ankle (it was also broken), to the calf and in the stomach. And he lost his 2 sons in the blast. this [expletive] happens everyday here. [Expletive] insurgents. Anyhow there are more pictures. Daniel Gomez, e-mail message to friends and family, Sept. 15, 2006 As the violence intensified, Specialist Gomez set aside thoughts of a free Iraq or a safer America and, like generations of soldiers before him, simply started fighting for the soldier next to him. A few days ago I realized why I am here in Baghdad dealing with all the gunfire, the rocket attacks, the IEDs, the car bombs, the death. I have only been here going on a month and a half. Already I have seen what war really is... but officially its called "full spectrum operations." No I don’t down Bush, he is my CinC, and I think he is doing an good job with what Clinton left him. I don’t debate why we are involved in Iraq. I just know why I am here. It is not for the smiling Iraqi kids, or the even the feeling of wearing the uniform ( it feels damn good though :) . I am here for the soldier on patrol with me. But why are you there in the states. Why are you having that nice dinner, watching TV, going out on dates... Daniel Gomez, e-mail to friends and family. Sept. 27, 2006 And then Specialist Gomez fell in love. An e-mail flirtation with Katy Broom, his sister’s close friend, gradually led to a cyber exchange of guarded promises about the future. Headed home for a rest break in May, the tentativeness lifted and they began to rely on each other to get through the day. The two joked about "the best sex we never had." ...this R&R there is someone new in my life. Exactly what she is too me, and what I am to her is uncertain, but its not really important at the moment. Just the thought that I could spent a second of my life with her, before I have to come back here makes everything worth it. Daniel Gomez, Myspace blog, May 9, 2007 Rest and relaxation in Georgia went better than expected. He fell in love with the love of his life all over again, this time in person. The couple shared one kiss during his leave. "He was everything I expected and more," said Ms. Broom, 20, who spent one week and two days with him. "It was kind of surreal when we met. It’s almost like a perfect love and war story." Not many soldiers leave behind a just-in-case letter. Specialist Gomez did. He handed Ms. Broom an envelope at the airport with the words, "Don’t read unless something happens to me." On July 18, 2007, two months after his leave, Specialist Gomez died in Adhamiya when the Bradley fighting vehicle he was in struck a roadside bomb. The explosion and flames also killed three other soldiers. Ms. Broom waited three days after she got word to open the letter. She sat alone in the couple’s favorite spot, her apartment balcony. "I was very thankful that he wrote it," she said of the letter. "I have opened and closed it so many times, I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen apart." R+R 2007 Hey baby. If you’re reading this, then something has happen to me and I am sorry. I promised you I would come back to you, but I guess it was a promise I could not keep. You know I never believe in writing "death letters." I knew if I left one for my folks it would scare them. Then I met you. We were supposed to meet, darling. I needed someone to make me smile, someone that was an old romantic like I was. I was going through a very rough time in Iraq and I was startin to doubt my mental state. Then one day after a patrol, I go to my facebook and there you were... I can’t stop crying while I writing this letter, but I have to talk to you one last time, because maybe the last time I heard your voice I did not know it would be the last time I heard your voice.... I Love You. Go be happy, go raise a family. Teach your kids right from wrong, and have faith, darling. I think I knew I loved you even before I met. I love you, Katy. * Kiss * Goodbye
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Behind the Deal, the Hand of the Fed
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Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
The Federal Reserve, and its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, approved JPMorgan’s $10-a-share offer to acquire Bear Stearns March 25, 2008
Dealbook
Behind the Deal, the Hand of the FedAdam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business. There’s been a lot of debate about the price that JPMorgan originally offered for Bear — a price that even Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, suggested on Monday was unfairly low. That, of course, was after he told Bear employees only days earlier, "I feel terrible sometimes when people think we took advantage." So where did the guidance for that price come from? You guessed it. Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and his teammate, Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury secretary, were calling the audibles in the boardroom. Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve of New York, also was calling some last-minute plays. Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, put it bluntly: "Even at $10 per share, the JPM buyout stinks to high heaven because of the conflicted role played by the Fed." The Fed continues to maintain that it did not set the original $2-a-share price that JPMorgan was to pay for Bear. Fed officials said they didn’t care what the price was; that’s not their business, they said. At the same time, the Fed felt that Bear was headed toward imminent bankruptcy, in which shareholders would be wiped out. Any bailout needed to be for the overall system, and not for Bear shareholders — the "moral hazard" issue writ large. One official close to the Fed said that Bear executives themselves did not seem to realize that they had no choice other than a bankruptcy filing. Part of the shock over the price, he said, "was that so many people hadn’t figured out the reality." And the Fed is in the business of saving the financial system from evil, not saving fat cats from having to sell their wine collections, as one Bear executive apparently did last week. Perhaps the Fed never set the exact price, but the notion that it didn’t press JPMorgan to pay as close to zero as possible doesn’t square with reality. One clue came after the $2-a-share deal was announced, when Mr. Paulson told Matt Lauer of "The Today Show" on NBC: "Let me say that the Bear Stearns situation has been very painful for the Bear Stearns shareholders" — as if to suggest that Bear’s shareholders still were losing their shirts and that was a good thing. The bailout was for the American people. Mr. Paulson was desperate to demonstrate to Main Street that he wouldn’t rescue Wall Street on the government’s dime, even though that’s exactly what he did, by providing a $30 billion backstop to the deal. (And he may have been right to do so.) But the night that Bear signed the original bid, the Fed opened what’s known as the discount window to companies like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers — oh, yes, and to Bear, too. Except that the Fed didn’t tell Bear that it planned to open the window when it was signing its deal with JPMorgan. Had Bear known it might have access to the discount window — a crucial source of liquidity — it might have been able to hold out for a couple more days or at least had enough leverage to seek a higher bid. But the Fed clearly preferred the original bid. Inside Bear, jaws dropped at what many considered a broad deception by the Fed. Alan D. Schwartz, Bear’s chief executive, was furious, as was the board and its team of advisers. Several JPMorgan executives even offered their apologies about the way the deal "went down." Of course, shareholders were even more irate, describing the deal in unprintable terms. In effect, they revolted against the terms of the deal — and both JPMorgan and the Fed wound up having to mollify them by raising the price. Had the deal died, Bear would once again be risking bankruptcy, and the market would once again be risking turmoil. (Bear shareholders seem to think they still might have another chance, though, bidding its shares on Monday up to $11.26 a share.) Still, the Fed almost derailed the $10-a-share agreement. Just as JPMorgan and Bear were about to consummate the deal on Sunday night, the Fed started raising questions about the price, people involved in the discussions said. The deal makers were forced to delay announcing the deal until Monday morning while the Fed hashed through "the optics" of the deal, as one participant described it. The truth is, the Fed preferred the $2 price because of the obvious message it sent to the rest of the market, but in the end it went along with the new agreement, in part because it worried that failure of the deal might overwhelm the markets. And they got a giveback — JPMorgan is on the hook for the first $1 billion in losses. Even then, the Fed’s fingerprints were all over the new pact. In an action almost unprecedented in takeover history, JPMorgan bought 39.5 percent of Bear on the spot to ensure that it would have close to a majority of the votes to approve the deal. That agreement completely disregards New York Stock Exchange’s rules that prevent anyone from buying more than 20 percent of company without a shareholder vote. Other parts of the new agreement either stretch the rules or disregard years of precedent in Delaware, where both banks are incorporated. Of course, all this rule-bending was done with the tacit, if not outright, approval of the federal government. If that’s not deal-making, Fed style, what is? The latest news on mergers and acquisitions can be found at nytimes.com/dealbook.
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Failure of Strap Is Suspected in Crane Collapse
A ragged nylon strap was hanging from the topmost of the crane’s three collars on Saturday. More Photos >
Failure of Strap Is Suspected in Crane Collapse
A prime suspect in Saturday’s East Side crane collapse — a spectacular disaster across two Manhattan blocks that has now claimed seven lives and is expected to cost untold millions — is a $50 piece of nylon webbing that investigators suspect may have broken while hoisting a six-ton piece of steel.
A photograph taken at the site shows the yellow nylon sling ragged at the end like a child’s broken shoelace, indicating, according to experts, the immense force that may have torn it apart.
The investigation into the accident continued on Monday as workers recovered three more bodies from the rubble of a four-story town house on East 50th Street that was demolished when a section of the toppling crane slammed into it. That brought the death toll from the collapse to seven, making it one of the deadliest construction accidents in New York City in recent memory.
Also on Monday, workers finished dismantling a long section of the base of the crane’s tower, which had been leaning against a 19-story apartment house on 51st Street opposite the condominium building where the 200-foot crane had been in operation.
And Patricia Lancaster, the buildings commissioner, said she would begin a sweep of new inspections on the approximately 250 cranes in operation at construction sites around the city.
Investigators believe the accident occurred as workers were trying to install a massive square steel collar around the crane’s tower, at the 18th floor of the construction site. They were using a series of manual winches that appeared to have been hung from nylon slings attached to a higher portion of the tower. The collar was to have been attached to the building by steel struts to give the tower added stability.
But the collar broke free and — along with the winches and slings — plummeted down the outside of the shaft, smashing into a second collar at the ninth floor and shearing it from the building before coming to rest on top of a third collar near the base. That destabilized the tower, and the weight of the crane’s cab pulled the tower down onto the buildings to the south, damaging several on 51st and 50th Streets and completely demolishing the town house where the bodies were recovered on Monday.
For investigators who arrived at the site after the accident, the ragged, broken slings immediately raised alarms, according to people involved in the recovery. Construction safety experts said the slings typically cost about $50 and, depending on their size, can lift moderate loads or loads of several tons. But they warned that if the slings are worn or damaged, their strength may be greatly reduced.
Photographs supplied by a person who visited the scene shortly after the accident show the south side of the crane tower’s base, with the three steel collars pancaked together. From the top collar, the one the laborers had been installing, hang two manual winches attached to two yellow nylon slings. The slings are ripped off and ragged at the ends.
"That’s what it looks like when you tear these things apart," said Bradley D. Closson, president of Craft Forensic Services in Bonita, Calif., which investigates accidents involving cranes and other types of hoists. After examining the photographs, he said it appeared that one of the slings had torn and the other had pulled apart, possibly after weight shifted onto it as the first gave way.
"One of them goes then the other one goes," Mr. Closson said. "Something has to be the weak link."
Paul S. Zorich, the chairman of the committee on crane and sling safety standards of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the owner of RZP International, a crane consulting company based in West Virginia, said that the photograph suggested the sling may have been "grossly overloaded."
"It looks from the way that it failed that it virtually exploded," Mr. Zorich said.
Officials in New York said that it was much too early to determine the cause of the accident or say why the slings broke. It was also not clear from the photographs if similar winches and slings had been attached on the north side of the collar.
Steven R. Dewey, president of All-Lifts, a company in Albany that manufactures construction slings, said that slings generally fail only when they are cut or damaged.
"What makes them fail?" Mr. Dewey said. "Overloading, cutting, sharp edges. It could be nine times out of 10 that I’ve done an accident investigation or looked at slings where there has been a failure, it has been caused by the previous lift." He said that workers are instructed to inspect the slings before each use.
Mr. Dewey said that as a general rule, if a heavy weight is lifted using four slings, the load should be rigged so that if two of the slings fail, the remaining slings will be strong enough to hold the load in place.
He said slings come from the manufacturer rated to hold a maximum weight, but the slings are made to withstand loads up to five times that amount. Mr. Dewey said that the way slings are attached and used can also affect their ability hold up, and that if a load shifts suddenly, it can greatly increase the stress on the slings.
Buildings Department officials said they were continuing to look into the history of the companies involved in the accident. The company in charge of the crane work was Joy Contractors, a concrete company based in Elizabeth, N.J.
Joy hired William Rapetti as the master rigger to supervise the work being done on the crane on Saturday. That included adding sections to the tower to raise the crane’s height and installing the new collar and support struts, which connected it to the building. It was not clear whether Mr. Rapetti or another master rigger had supervised earlier work on the crane, including installing the lower two collars on the tower.
The Buildings Department said that the collar weighed about 12,000 pounds, a weight that several people with expertise in cranes said was unusually high.
Several buildings were damaged in the accident, and residents in about 300 apartments in 17 buildings were evacuated. Andrew Troisi, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said that it was not yet clear when some residents from some of those buildings would be allowed to return.
He said that four of the buildings have been reoccupied, and that the remaining residents would be allowed back "as quickly as safety allows."
He also said that water, which had been shut off after the crane fell, was expected to be restored late Monday to 50th Street between First and Second Avenues.
Meanwhile, a pair of construction industry groups said a safety consultant would be hired to evaluate crane installation procedures to see if they need to be improved in the wake of the accident. The groups, the Building Trades Employers’ Association, which represents contractors, and the Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents labor unions, said they would also have all construction projects using cranes inspected for possible problems.
Crane Collapses on Manhattan’s East Side, Killing 4
A construction accident on the East Side of Manhattan killed four and injured a dozen others.
Crane Collapses on Manhattan’s East Side, Killing 4
Correction Appended
A crane towering over a high-rise construction site on the East Side of Manhattan collapsed in a roar of rending steel Saturday afternoon, raining death and destruction across a city block as it slashed down on an apartment building, broke into sections, crushed a town house and cut away a tenement facade.
At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others were injured, and damage was expected to run into the millions of dollars in what the authorities called one of the city’s worst accidents — a calamity that turned a neighborhood near the United Nations into a zone of panic, pulverized buildings, wailing sirens, evacuations, searches in the rubble and covered bodies in the streets.
Many residents of the neighborhood around the site of the collapse — 51st Street between Second and First Avenues — said they had been worried for months about the possibility of a collapse, calling the crane, looming higher each week, a menace, particularly because so many residential buildings were being put up in the area with remarkable speed: several floors a week at times.
Christopher Bianchi, 40, of Manhattan, owner of Crave Ceviche Bar on Second Avenue, said he saw three bodies on stretchers in the street. "Their heads were covered," he said. "One of the police was giving last rites."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg arrived at the scene hours later, surrounded by an army of police officers, firefighters, city officials and reporters. "It’s a sad day," he said, as the lights of scores of emergency vehicles revolved and flashed. "Our thoughts go out to those who were killed, and we pray that those who were injured will recover."
As people were evacuated from a half-dozen buildings and rescue workers using dogs, listening devices and thermal imaging cameras searched the rubble for victims — taking care to cause no further collapses — the mayor said the four known dead were believed to be construction workers on or near the crane. The injured included at least three civilians taken to hospitals in critical condition.
One man was pulled from the debris nearly four hours after the collapse.
The dead, all believed to be members of Local 15 of the Operating Engineers Union, were identified as Brad Cohen, Aaron Stephens, Anthony Mazza and Wayne Bleidner.
The cause of the accident on a sunny, windless day was unclear and under investigation by city, state and federal agencies. But Stephen Kaplan, an owner of the Reliance Construction Group working at the site, told The Associated Press that a piece of steel had fallen and sheared off one of the girders holding the crane to the building.
A construction worker on the 15th floor, Ismael Garcia, said he saw something fall and strike one or more of the girder ties, weakening or breaking the connections. "Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a piece falling," he said, and then the crane pulled away.
The collapse occurred, the mayor said, as workers attempted to jack up the crane, raising its height to enable work to continue above the 19th floor of a planned 43-story building. Builders had city permission to raise the crane, and the crane had been inspected on Friday, with no violations found.
The collapse occurred at 2:22 p.m. as the crane, about 22 stories tall and attached by girders to the apartment tower under construction at 303 East 51st Street, east of Second Avenue, broke away from its anchors and toppled south, across the block between 51st and 50th Streets, as workers at the site and people in high-rises for blocks around looked on, stupefied.
Witnesses told of a rising, thundering roar and clouds of smoke and dust as the crane — a vertical latticed boom for its base, topped by a cab and jib, the swinging arm that lifts building materials — fell across 51st Street and onto a 19-story apartment building at No. 300, demolishing a penthouse and shaking the building with the force of an earthquake.
Mike Shatzkin, a resident of the 17th floor, said he was talking on the phone when it hit. "All of a sudden, I felt a very violent shake, and stuff fell off the walls, and my wife said a bomb went off." After discovering that their building had been struck by the crane from across the street, he said, "We worried about this crane every day."
The upper reaches of the crane — including the cab and the extended swinging arm — broke away from the boom, which was left leaning against the facade, and hurtled southward across the block toward 50th Street, tumbling in the air, some witnesses said.
The crane’s blue cab and white jib, itself a latticework of steel, made a direct hit on a four-story town house at 305 East 50th Street, a modern stucco structure with apartments upstairs and a bar called Fubar on the ground floor. The building, on the north side of 50th Street, was demolished.
The bar was not open, and the owner, John P. LaGreco, who had been the proprietor for a decade, said that Juan Perez, 38, a Queens resident and the father of three children, was in Fubar at the time, preparing to open about 4 p.m.
Mayor Bloomberg said one or two people were in the building at the time. The fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, said that a man, apparently referring to Mr. Perez, was taken alive out of the collapsed town house shortly before 6 p.m. He said there had also been reports of a woman in the building, and search efforts continued late into Saturday night.
In addition to the collapsed town house, the toppling crane jib sheared away the side of a six-story gray tenement building at 301 East 50th, just to the west, exposing tiers of apartments and haunting images of shattered homes: a pink suitcase dangling from the sixth floor, a mattress, a rack of shoes, broken bookshelves.
Debris also damaged buildings on the south side of 50th Street, and bricks demolished parked cars — a dark blue BMW flattened, a Mini Cooper battered with debris.
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, stunned people rushed into the streets from restaurants and shops, from apartment buildings in the surrounding blocks, many of them unaware of what had happened and fearing the worst.
Within minutes, an armada of fire engines, police cars, ambulances and other emergency vehicles converged on the scene. Water from broken mains was gushing into the street, and an odor of gas was in the air. City and Consolidated Edison workers quickly moved in to cap the leaks and prevent explosions. Throughout the afternoon and evening, traffic was blocked off for blocks around the site.
Some residents of the area saw or heard the collapse from their apartments. Bruce Silberblatt, a retired building contractor who lives at 860 United Nations Plaza, said: "I heard this big double bang. Bang! Then, bang! The first bang must have been the crane hitting the first building, then the second must have been everything else going into the street."
Scores of evacuated residents from at least a half-dozen damaged or imperiled buildings were offered shelter at the High School of Art and Design, at 228 East 57th Street, the mayor said.
A Fire Department spokesman said that 13 people were injured and taken to area hospitals. Three had critical injuries and two were listed in serious condition, while the rest, including five firefighters, had minor injuries. Four other people were treated at the scene, the spokesman said.
Mayor Bloomberg identified the site’s principal developer as James P. Kennelly, a former firefighter, and the construction company as RCG, an apparent acronym for Reliance Construction Group. He said the crane owner was the New York Crane & Equipment Corporation. The manufacturer, he said, was an Australian company known as Favco, which makes a tower crane with an eight-ton lifting capacity.
"There are no words to describe the level of devastation we feel today as a result of this tragic event," Mr. Kennelly said in a statement. While the mayor and other city officials said that there had been a relatively small number of violations issued against the construction site in the more than two years since work began, many residents questioned the safety record at the building site.
"We had been very unhappy with the way he was doing his work," said Mr. Silberblatt, a member of the Turtle Bay Association, a civic group. He cited debris in the streets, a lack of a sidewalk bridge, and other faults.
According to records from the New York City Department of Buildings, the agency has issued 14 violations against contractors doing work at the site, 10 of them against RCG. The citations were issued between Jan. 17, 2006, and Feb. 8 of this year. The violations included failure to safeguard the public and property and failure to provide roof protection on adjacent property.
A Buildings Department spokeswoman, Kate Lindquist, said that of the 14 violations, 13 remained "open" — meaning that a court date is pending or the company did not appear at a scheduled court hearing and the violations are in default status.
Ms. Lindquist said that Buildings Department inspectors performed an inspection of the site Saturday morning in preparation for predicted high winds. Upon inspection, she said, a partial stop-work order was issued to halt all concrete operations at the site. The order was issued because inspectors found material stored too close to the building’s edge on several floors. The order did not apply to the extending of the crane, which was under way at the time of the accident, she said.
The last major crane collapse at a construction site in New York occurred in September 1999, when a 383-foot crane fell at 24th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, crushing a carpenter and injuring three other people.
Reporting for these articles was contributed by Al Baker, Sushil Cheema, John Eligon, Jason Grant, Christine Hauser, Serge F. Kovaleski, Colin Moynihan, Anthony Ramirez, Warren St. John and Tanzina Vega.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 18, 2008
An article in some editions on Sunday about the deadly collapse of a construction crane on the East Side of Manhattan included an erroneous spelling from city officials in some copies for the surname of one victim. He was Wayne Bleidner, not Binder.
The Rise of American Incompetence
We used to be the world’s most skillful entrepreneurs and managers. Now we’re laughingstocks. What happened?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, March 15, 2008, at 7:12 A.M. E.T.
The dollar plunged to new lows against foreign currencies this week. There are plenty of reasons for its plunge, but at the most basic level, the dollar’s weakness reflects the world’s collective, two-thumbs-down verdict about the ability of the United States—businesses, individuals, the government, the Federal Reserve—to manage the global financial system and the world’s largest economy. Countries that outsourced their monetary policy by pegging domestic currencies to the dollar are having second thoughts. Kuwait last year detached the dinar from the dollar, and Qatar government officials last week said they were considering doing the same with their currency. International financiers are unnerved by the toxic combination of "misplaced assumptions about housing, a lack of necessary regulation and irresponsible use of debt with sophisticated financial instruments," said Ashraf Laidi, currency strategist at CMC Markets.
Dissing American financial management is an affront to national pride tantamount to standing in Rome and asking, loudly, if Italians are able to make pasta. The United States invented the concept and practice of running large, complex systems. Along with baseball and deep-frying, management is one of our great national pastimes. The world’s first MBAs were awarded by pioneering yuppie factories such as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. (Wharton’s founding in 1881 was quickly followed by the world’s first time-share summer houses in the Hamptons.) Henry Ford’s revolutionary assembly line was the gold standard in global manufacturing for decades. Contemporary American institutions stand for excellence in managing everything from supply chains (Wal-Mart) to delivery services (Federal Express and UPS).
Americans’ ability to manage complex systems has been the ultimate competitive advantage. It has allowed the United States to enjoy high growth and low inflation—a record we haven’t hesitated to lord over our foreign friends. The shelves in the business section of a bookstore in a mall in Johannesburg, South Africa, are stocked with the same volumes you’ll find in a Barnes & Noble in Pittsburgh, Pa.: memoirs by cornfed paragons of capitalism like Jack Welch, wealth-building advice from American money managers, large tomes on how Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller built global businesses from scratch.
But now, thanks to widespread incompetence, American management is on its way to becoming an international laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of knee-slapping in even the most sober Swiss banks. (How do you say schadenfreude in German?) Earlier this month, as oil hovered near $100 a barrel, President Bush complained to OPEC about high oil prices. OPEC President Chakib Khelil responded acidly that crude’s remarkable run had nothing to do with the reluctance of Persian Gulf nations to pump oil, and everything to do with the "mismanagement of the U.S. economy." Since Bush’s plea, oil has gushed to $110 per barrel. (How do you say schadenfreude in Arabic?)
Americans abroad are constantly taunted by perceived failings of American management. America’s aviation system is now the butt of jokes because 9-year-olds have become accustomed to removing their Heelys before boarding a plane. As my family and I passed through the snaking security line in Cancún, Mexico’s airport last month, we were harangued by a security guard who encouraged tourists to sing along with him: "Please. Do not. Remove. Your shoes."
The concern extends beyond airlines to America’s industrial complex. Doubtful of the ability of provincial American executives, with their limited language skills, to negotiate today’s global business environment, the boards of massive U.S. firms like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Alcoa, and insurer AIG have hired foreign-born CEOs. Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider, has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at CEOs’ expense. On a recent 60 Minutes, Icahn complained to Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management. "I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it."
Icahn is moping all the way to the bank. The market’s recognition of management failures gives him the opportunities to acquire companies on the cheap. But those of us who aren’t billionaire corporate raiders—which is to say pretty much all of us—must manage through this management crisis on our own.Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com. He is the author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy.
Today’s Papers
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Knocking on Lehman’s DoorBy Daniel Politi Financial news continues to get top billing as all the papers try to digest the latest news from the Federal Reserve and the markets to figure out how far the current crisis will spread. The New York Times’ lead story notes that although the stock market didn’t plunge as was widely expected, there were several ups and downs as uncertainty ruled the day on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed Monday with a 0.2 percent increase, largely because of the strength of J.P. Morgan, which rose because of the widely held belief that it was able to acquire Bear Stearns at a veritable bargain. The Washington Post leads locally, but off-leads news that shares of many of the largest banks and investment firms plummeted yesterday. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how many are wondering whether the Fed is taking on too much risk and for how long it can keep pumping money into the economy in its attempt to save the country from a deep recession without hurting the nation’s overall finances. Over the past few days, many economists have said that the key question now is not whether the country will enter into a recession, but rather how long it will last. Ordinary Americans seem to agree. USA Today leads with a poll that shows 76 percent of Americans think the country is in a recession. In addition, 79 percent said they’re worried about the possibility of a depression that could last several years. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao saying at a news conference that the Dalai Lama is to blame for the recent violence that has broken out in Tibet. As the protests spread to other parts of China, Jiabao accused the Dalai Lama of trying to get publicity and gain influence in the run-up to the Olympics. Both the NYT and the WSJ, which devotes a separate Page One story to the subject, point out that as investors desperately tried to figure out which company could be the next to follow in Bear Stearns’ footsteps they seem to have agreed on a likely candidate: Lehman Brothers. Investors see similarities between the two companies since they’re smaller than their main rivals and highly dependent on the mortgage business. But, as the WSJ reports in detail, Lehman isn’t willing to go quietly into the night, and its executives are desperately carrying out an offensive operation to quickly dispel any rumors that might crop up about the company’s financial situation. How much that will help is anyone’s guess, particularly considering that it was less than a week ago that the chief executive of Bear Stearns was on CNBC talking about how the company’s "balance sheet has not weakened at all." Even if what Lehman’s executives say is true and the company’s finances are solid, there’s good reason for them to worry if there are persistent rumors that the firm is in trouble. The WP notes that if there’s one central lesson from the fall of Bear Stearns it’s that "investment firms live and die on confidence." And as confidence in the markets continues to decrease, the LAT notes there are many who fear that the Fed’s latest moves could turn the central bank into "the nation’s chief financier, a role that it was not designed to play and its leaders dearly hope to avoid." Everyone points out the Fed is likely to cut its benchmark short-term interest rate today by as much as one percentage point to 2 percent. But the WSJ says the cut may actually be smaller because of persistent inflation concerns. Meanwhile, talk on Wall Street yesterday centered around the demise of Bear Stearns and the way the Fed put its own money forward to facilitate the acquisition by JP Morgan. Some expressed concern that the Fed has set a dangerous precedent and wonder whether the central bank will continue to offer up public money in order to save private institutions. In fact, as both the WP and WSJ note, it’s actually possible that the Fed will be able to make money out of selling the $30 billion worth of assets from Bear Stearns, but that all depends on the markets. The LAT also points out that although many are wondering how much money the Fed has available, the truth is that it "has the capacity to create a near-infinite amount of credit," and even in the worst case scenario "taxpayers should not get stuck with the bill." Under the headline "The Week That Shook Wall Street," the WSJ fronts an interesting and extremely detailed account of the events that led to the fall of Bear Stearns. But if you’re still scratching your head over the latest financial news and why it’s important, USAT has a good Q&A that starts with the very basic before getting into the details: "What is an investment bank, and why should I care what happens to one?" The LAT notes that President Bush tried to express some optimism on the economy but was immediately criticized for words that "struck many as discordant and disengaged" when he thanked Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "for working over the weekend." Many said that by focusing on Paulson’s schedule, he immediately revealed that he "has no idea what’s going on," as Rep. Barney Frank put it. Meanwhile, many Democrats were also quick to point out that the administration seems perfectly willing to back the bailout of a big investment bank while it ignores the plight of regular people who are being kicked out of their homes. "Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy," writes the Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. As could be expected, the topic quickly spilled into the presidential campaign, which, as the NYT points out, shows how much the economy has taken over as the main issue of the day, even as the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq draws near. The Democratic candidates were quick to criticize the Bush administration for failing to do more to prevent the crisis from unraveling, but the LAT points out that "none of the candidates offered specific economic policy proposals beyond their past statements addressing the months-old housing mortgage crunch." Even their schedules illustrate how the contenders have been caught off-guard by the situation. Sen. Hillary Clinton was supposed to focus on Iraq this week, and Sen. Barack Obama will give what is being billed as a major speech on race today. In the WP’s op-ed page, Eugene Robinson writes that criticizing Bush is "not the same as charting a path out of this mess" and implores the candidates to start paying attention to the crisis in the economy. In other campaign news, everyone notes that Florida Democrats appear to have given up on plans to redo the state’s presidential primary. This means the decision on whether to seat the state’s delegates at the convention once again falls on the Democratic National Committee. Meanwhile, officials in Michigan continued to debate whether to hold a new vote. Worst career move ever? The WP, like many of the other papers, goes to the Bear Stearns headquarters in Manhattan—where someone taped a $2 bill to one of the building’s doors—to do the requisite story about how the firm’s employees are worried about their future. "Would you believe I’ve been here five days?" asked one employee who was outside smoking a cigarette. "Do you know where I came from? J.P. Morgan."Daniel Politi writes "Today’s Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com. |
Personality Plus: A Twin Takes Over
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BORN ON A BLOG Elisa DeCarlo, playwright and vintage dealer, a k a the Mad Fashionista. February 28, 2008
Front Row
Personality Plus: A Twin Takes OverBy ERIC WILSON
IT was hard to tell just who was talking over a plate of scrambled eggs at a cafe in the West Village on Tuesday: was it Elisa DeCarlo, a playwright and part-time vintage dealer, or her online alter ego, the Mad Fashionista? But neither one of her personalities was very pleased with the red carpet parade at Sunday night's Oscars. "Nicole Kidman was a disaster," Ms. DeCarlo said, slipping into a yodeling voice that was loud enough to cause other diners to look up from their papers. "She looked like a chandelier had fallen on her head. I thought Tilda Swinton was very nice to make a dress out of a black bedsheet she found in a 99-cent store. And someone should get their hands on Jennifer Hudson and get her a bra." Ms. DeCarlo describes herself as a fashion outsider. She wears a size 14 or 16, and most of her clothes are very old, like the purplish fake fur coat that was crumpled beneath her and once belonged to her mother. But the Mad Fashionista, who came to life two years ago as a blog character (diaryofamadfashionista.blogspot.com), is a fashion freak. Ms. DeCarlo conceived of her as a surrogate personality to shill for the plus-size vintage clothes that she sells on eBay and at specialistauctions.com. But her invented other became so popular that Ms. DeCarlo wrote a play about her called "Diary of a Mad Fashionista." "A lot of people think the Fashionista is real," said Ms. DeCarlo, whose play is included in the Frigid New York Festival that opened on Wednesday. "It's scary," she said. "Fashion is the only environment I've seen that is more hysterical than show business." The plot: the Fashionista, a successful celebrity stylist played by Ms. DeCarlo, has been awarded a grant from Bill Gates to teach a course about fashion to welfare recipients at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The class is called "Haute Cou-poor." "It's a pun on haute couture," she said. "Nothing rhymes with indigent." The Fashionista has all the money in the world and no conscience, and also a rival in Sabrina Airchild, who dresses Nicole Richie and Mischa Barton, and sounds a lot like Rachel Zoe. As they do battle over a 1967 Christian Dior cheetah coat with otter collar and cuffs, the Fashionista discovers the price of a lifetime of bad karma, but not so well as to learn a lesson. As she concludes to her indigent subjects, "You must be superficial in fashion or it will drive you insane."
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However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy
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Sol Neelman
Margaret B. Jones February 26, 2008
Books of The Times
However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit StrategySkip to next paragraph
LOVE AND CONSEQUENCES A Memoir of Hope and Survival By Margaret B. Jones 296 pages. Riverhead Books. $24.95. In the South-Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Margaret B. Jones grew up in the 1980s, gangs recruited "with the same intensity as the N.F.L. did," she says, and shootouts and hits were so ubiquitous that "the odds were stacked against a male child living to see 25." Peddlers went door to door selling life insurance policies, reminding parents of these deadly stats, and even teenage girls and elderly church ladies carried pistols to protect themselves. As the crack epidemic metastasized, and turf wars escalated, the 'hood became a combat zone, with police raids and deadly face-offs between Bloods and Crips becoming routine parts of daily life. A dealer the young Ms. Jones made deliveries for lays out the unforgiving rules of the street: ¶ "Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough." ¶ "War has no room for diplomacy, war is outright vicious. Never expect mercy and never show it." ¶ "There is no greater sin in war than ignorance. Never speak or act on anything you aren't 100 percent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it." This violent world has been memorably depicted before in Sanyika Shakur's "Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member" (1993) and Leon Bing's "Do or Die" (1991). What sets Ms. Jones's humane and deeply affecting memoir apart is not just that it's told from the point of view of a young girl coming of age in this world, but also that it focuses on the bonds of love and loyalty that can bind relatives and gang members together, and the craving after safety and escape that haunts so many lives in the 'hood. Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood. She captures both the brutal realities of a place where children learn to sleep on the floor to avoid the random bullets that might come smashing through the windows and walls at night, and the succor offered by family and friends. She conveys the extraordinary stoicism of women like Big Mom, her foster mother, who raised four grandchildren while working a day job and a night job. And she draws indelible portraits of these four kids who became her siblings: two young girls she would help raise, and two older boys, whom she emulated and followed into the Bloods. Ms. Jones — or Bree, as she was known to family and friends — was abused as a child, put in foster care, and after three years of carrying a trash bag filled with her possessions from one temporary home to another, ended up, at 8 ½, in Big Mom's home in South-Central — a part white, part Native American girl who looked utterly out of place in this nearly all-black world. Bree had been told she had attention deficit disorder, reactive attachment disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and labeled "S.E.D. (severely emotionally disabled)." By age 8 she had "decided not to hurt anymore" and mastered the art of detachment: "I was shocked that I hadn't thought of it before. I would watch my life from the outside rather than feel it from within. If I couldn't feel it, it couldn't hurt me." Though her foster family's love would help heal Bree's heart, the numbness always threatened to return, and she observes that this sort of emotional hibernation was rampant in South-Central. When Bree went to visit her foster brother Taye in prison — he'd been sentenced for selling drugs — he told her he loved her but didn't want her to come back for any more visits: waiting for visits and letters, he said, "was killin me," and he'd decided he wasn't going to "even find out what was up wit y'all." He had to do his "time solo" or he "ain gonna make it." Ms. Jones's portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it's clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring. Instead it heightened her powers of observation, enabling her to write with a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines. She tells us how her brother Terrell became an "official" Blood, getting "jumped into" the gang by surviving a savage initiation beating. ("So five grown men beat 13-year-old Terrell for two minutes in the street.") She tells us about getting a .38 for her 13th birthday and learning how to cook up a batch of crack to pay her family's overdue water bill. She tells us about survival tips for visiting the local park. ("You must always scan the park, figure out who is where and the best escape route from each direction.") And she tells us about the iconography of the tattooed tear many prisoners and ex-prisoners wear on one cheek. (It "can mean a few things, but usually it's that the wearer killed someone in prison or lost a loved one while in prison.") Ms. Jones's own story is strewn with loss and death and grief. She saw a gang elder named Kraziak, who'd patiently taught her about the history of L.A., gunned down by rival Crips. She saw her next-door neighbor Big Rodney, who used to give her books to read, grabbed by the police in a violent raid. Both her older brothers, Terrell and Taye, were sent to prison, and after his release, Terrell, who'd talked of getting a straight job so his children wouldn't grow up in the 'hood, was shot to death by Crips as he sat outside Big Mom's house, waiting to meet his son for his weekend visit. Ms. Jones's friend Marcus, a brother figure with whom she used to drive around Los Angeles, dreaming of what life might be like "beyond the lights" of the city, was shot and killed, she says, and her boyfriend, Slikk, was arrested for an attempted murder he didn't commit. Although one of Bree's teachers urges her to apply to college, the idea initially seems "almost unimaginable" — "so beyond my reach that I couldn't really picture myself doing it." Finally, however, she does apply and eventually graduates from the University of Oregon with a degree in ethnic studies. She finds love with, of all men, a Crip who "changed every detail of my life" and who taught her that "we are not each other's enemies," we "were just born into different streets and neighborhoods." "Unlike most of my homies," she writes, "I made it out of L.A. with my life and without a prison record. Wait, let me reword that, as it is not entirely true as it stands. I made it out of L.A. with what life I had left. I wake up in the morning, and where I live, in a little house on a dead-end street in a small Oregon town, I hear birds singing in a big-leaf maple outside my bedroom window, and I thank God because I know it shouldn't have been so." There are "some parts of me that did die in L.A.," she adds, "and that I'll never get back, and other parts of me that die daily because I exist away from the city, in a world where people can't begin to imagine what it was like where I grew up." One of her friends in prison writes her that "so few of us will ever get the chance to see what it's like outside L.A.," that she should "be our eyes." That Ms. Jones has done, and with this remarkable book she has also borne witness to the life in the 'hood that she escaped, conveying not just the terrible violence and hatred of that world, but also the love and friendship that sustained her on those mean streets.
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The strange power of junkie retro soul.
Winehouse's voice can sound like aural blackface, but her range and variety resist definition. Photograph by Harry Benson.
Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse's being awarded five Grammys this month? A cynic might say that her ability to stay alive is startling, but Winehouse's worrying series of relapses and collapses could simply be a trick of the light. Actors and singers were misbehaving vigorously before the advent of radio; Winehouse may seem like such a dedicated tearaway because the lens recording her movements is wider than anything a sixties celebrity would have encountered, doesn't switch off, and continually feeds a twenty-four-hour newsstand. (Winehouse is one of the five or six celebrities—mostly women—whose every action has been "serialized," to borrow the phrase Harvey Levin used to describe the coverage of Britney Spears on his Web site, TMZ.com.) Winehouse's misadventures—walking in London barefoot in her bra at dawn, spitting on the set of a TV game show, drawing blood in a "spat" with her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, being filmed smoking what appeared to be crack, heckling Bono during an awards ceremony, stints in rehabilitation facilities—support the tired (if true) template of the Genius Junkie, a story you can find, if determined. But the miserable-circus part of Winehouse's story unfolded largely in the second half of 2007, well after "Back to Black"—the album that won all the Grammys—had become a hit. It has now sold 1.6 million copies in America, and had won Winehouse several awards in England—including the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) for Best U.K. Female—before the Grammys swooped in with their golden stickers.
Winehouse's self-destructiveness isn't a plausible explanation for her popularity, or her awards, no matter how easily it converts into press. With the producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, she made a very popular album that looks firmly, and directly, backward. "Back to Black" is a deft and convincing pastiche of the girl groups of the sixties, the jazz singers of the forties, and a variety of rhythms from the seventies and the nineties. (The eighties get a pass.) It's an entertaining, clever album that benefits from a strategy that makes everyone who isn't Miles Davis look good: it's only thirty-five minutes long (and closer to thirty without the bonus track). "Back to Black" is a modified sixties soul album, with one perfect single (the ubiquitous "Rehab," which allows Winehouse to celebrate, make fun of, and justify her own substance abuse), sung and written by a twenty-four-year-old girl from Southgate, London, who says she has the musical taste of "an old Jewish man" and wears her hair in a vertical pile she refers to as "my hive." (Is there a TMZ video of anyone else arranging her hair in public? Winehouse is the Marge Simpson of junkie retro soul.) Her label—only doing its job—describes her as "the most talented and important musical artist of her generation," which would seem like space-cake hyperbole if so many people didn't seem to agree, at least a little.
Yet what reads as musical innovation in 2008 is blue-ribbon revivalism, a high-production-value version of the songbook logic driving current Broadway musicals. The sounds of yesteryear! Sung by today's young people! (Who, in this case, enjoy ketamine and margaritas.) Winehouse's music is reassuring to those old enough to remember the original and novel to those too young to know. And her music refers to rappers while simultaneously avoiding actual rapping and sounding just like the music that rappers first sampled decades ago. So many demographics united through the magic of consumption!
"Back to Black" has grown on me since its domestic release, last year. At first, I reacted badly to what I took as mere imitation, but Winehouse and her crew execute their homage with class and understated force, a quality that overrides—for now—the perils of heavy borrowing. Mark Ronson's arrangements are knowing; the quick rhythm changes in "Rehab" are unobtrusive but urge the song along and make it easily replayable. This decision alone might have earned Ronson his Producer of the Year Grammy, though there are at least five other producers who deserved it, too. (This is an age of producers.) And hearing a live band working in tight unison with a good singer is a reliable pleasure. The central production conceit is in the voice, though; listen hard to Winehouse's singing, and you will hear the odd combinations that make "Back to Black" more than skilled aping.
I bought Winehouse's first album, "Frank," in 2004 at a Heathrow Airport music kiosk. I listened to it on the plane home and dropped it in a garbage can on the way to baggage claim. "Frank" was Winehouse being showy before her voice could raise the curtain: she sounds thin, misses notes, and lacks any specific character. As sixties soul grounds "Back to Black," "Frank" was tied to a denatured version of jazz vocals, sung by someone channelling Lauryn Hill and resorting to wobbly flourishes when stuck for an idea. (The lyrics employed curse words to show that Winehouse wasn't, like, square, a charge that she will never have to worry about again.) The singing style heard on "Frank" started years ago—Lauryn Hill, the dopey singer-songwriter Jewel, and Joni Mitchell are all glossed in this approach—and has filtered down through singers like Nelly Furtado, Winehouse, and a currently rising star, Sia. ("Frank" sounds a bit like a drunken Furtado working a piano bar without the benefit of a decent songbook.) This style provides a way of singing derivations of black music without resembling modern R. & B. In fact, avoiding the sound of current R. & B. may be its guiding principle. White singers generally seem to use it more than black singers, though it is open to anyone who wants to use its limited vocabulary.
"Back to Black" also sounds nothing like current R. & B., but chooses rich, older source material; Winehouse's collaboration with Ronson catalyzed her songwriting, and a radical change in her vocals pushes the album. Her tone is darker, the control is infinitely stronger, and her range sounds as if it had gained an entire lower octave. And then there's the accent, which isn't simply the Southgate speaking voice that makes "cool" sound like "coal." Winehouse's singing sounds, even to a nonpolitical ear, like some sort of blackface. She slurs words and drops consonants; you hear "dat" and "dis" in place of "that" and "this" several times. Is "Back to Black" meant to be literal?
The musicians on the record are drawn largely from a band of New York soul revivalists called the Dap-Kings. For many of Winehouse's shows, including the one I saw at Highline Ballroom last May, the Dap-Kings serve as her live band. (The Dap-Kings also work with Sharon Jones, a fiery fifty-one-year-old singer from Georgia, who is building a body of work based on sixties soul. Jones & Co. are faithfully re-creating the sound of Lyn Collins, a singer who was produced by and played with James Brown. Watching the two singers with the same band is like a controlled experiment. Live, there is no contest. Winehouse can be iffy, but Sharon Jones and the band invariably hit their marks hard and with gusto.)
Pop has room for weird appropriations, even if they don't always settle or become comfortable. Winehouse 2.0 works because of the number of different modes that she and her band pile up and the way that she resists definition. Ronson directs the band to stay firmly in the territory of Detroit and Memphis soul, but Winehouse is free to roam through Sarah Vaughan's lower range and Lauryn Hill's rapturous, disjunct leaps. Winehouse and her band play what sounds like a straight James Brown ballad from the fifties called "Me and Mr. Jones"; the Mr. in the title, though, is not a dapper ballroom dancer or long-lost love—it's the rapper Nas, whom she claims she can't be kept apart from. The lyrics are genuinely obscure; someone has made Winehouse miss a "Slick Rick concert." Later, she sings that " 'side from Sammy, you're my best black Jew." Sammy is almost certainly Mr. Davis, Jr., but the "you" isn't likely Nas, as he isn't Jewish. Go figure. Perhaps it's a jokey reference to her husband, who may have prevented her from seeing the show in the first place. The old Jews and blacks romp, mysteriously.
Winehouse's delivery, though—take a little time to suss that one out. It isn't really straight minstrelsy, because her inflections and phonemes don't add up to any known style. Listen to the mid-tempo shuffle "You Know I'm No Good" and hear how she elongates and deforms the word "worst." Is she channelling a little-known blues singer? Is she hammered? This mush-mouthed approach is Winehouse's real innovation—a mangling of language that will pull you in, especially when you want to hear the words. One effective summing up of her style can be seen in a YouTube video of her performing the album's title track, labelled "Amy Winehouse performing drunk or high. Your guess!" It may be neither—it is Winehouse's signature, and if she can detach it from the past and keep writing songs like "Rehab" there will be nothing surprising about having her around for a long time. Other than having her around. ?
Two Siblings Stuck in a Junkyard World, Struggling to Survive and Dream
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Jon Higgins/Koch Lorber Films
Alejandro Polanco in Ramin Bahrani's film, "Chop Shop." February 27, 2008
Two Siblings Stuck in a Junkyard World, Struggling to Survive and DreamBy A. O. SCOTTPublished: February 27, 2008
Because the last shot of Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" is as quiet and matter-of-fact as most of the rest of the film, it takes a moment to register as a metaphor. For nearly an hour and a half we have been immersed in the rhythms of daily life in the battered Willets Point section of Queens, and Mr. Bahrani's hand-held camera has remained studiously fixed at street level. Now, all of a sudden, it pitches upward to follow a flock of pigeons breaking toward the sky, a shift in perspective that also changes, subtly but unmistakably, our understanding of the movie.
Like its prosaic title, or like those homely birds, "Chop Shop," written by Mr. Bahrani and Bahareh Azimi, dwells mainly in the realm of the literal. Filmed inside shady auto-repair businesses, on bleak overpasses and in vacant lots in the shadow of Shea Stadium, this film, like Mr. Bahrani's 2006 feature, "Man Push Cart," is concerned principally with the kind of hard, marginal labor that more comfortable city dwellers rarely notice. But there is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.
When you stop to think about it, the life of Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco) — known as Ale — should be cause for despair. A skinny, fast-moving boy a year or so from puberty, he sleeps in a makeshift room above the shop where he works. His main concern, aside from the daily scramble for cash, is his older sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), who seems more passive than her brother and more detached, perhaps self-protectively, from her emotions. Their parents are never seen or mentioned, and school is more an abstract notion than a real possibility.
Ale's plan, equally a childish fantasy and a hard-headed entrepreneurial scheme, is to save enough money to buy a broken-down vending truck and fix it up so he and Isamar can sell hot meals to chop shop workers and customers. Isamar works in a similar business and also sells sex after-hours to drivers who park at the edge of the neighborhood. Ale's desire, all the more acute for remaining unstated, is to rescue her from this fate and also, more generally, to formulate the plausible idea of a secure adult future for the two of them.
Mr. Bahrani does not treat his characters with pity, and they feel very little for themselves. Perhaps this is because they are too young, and too focused on the present-tense demands of getting by, to dwell on what they don't have. But the film's emotional restraint, while impressive, also feels limiting. Mr. Polanco and Ms. Gonzales have the wary inscrutability that often characterizes nonprofessional actors, and though Mr. Polanco is a lively and likable presence, there are times when his performance is tentative and stiff.
Mr. Bahrani was born in the United States and lived for a while in Iran, his parents' native country (and Ms. Azimi's), and the influence of recent Iranian cinema on "Chop Shop" is unmistakable. The oblique, naturalistic storytelling, the interest in children and the mingling of documentary and fictional techniques — these have been hallmarks of the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, but they are rarely deployed with such confidence or effectiveness by American filmmakers. "Chop Shop" suggests the potential of such an approach, which has roots in postwar Italian Neo-realism, to compel an encounter with local reality that is both poetic and clearsighted.
Whether the situation in "Chop Shop" is entirely realistic is another question. I found myself wondering not only about what had happened to Ale and Isamar's parents, but also about the total absence of any adult or institutional concern with these children's lives. The shop owners pay Ale his wages and teach him new skills, but there is a hardness in their dealings with him that struck me as implausible. That may be wishful thinking on my part. Or it may be that I was taken in by the rough surface of this film, seduced into mistaking a subtle, artful fable for the cold, hard facts of life.
CHOP SHOP
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Directed and edited by Ramin Bahrani; written by Bahareh Azimi and Mr. Bahrani; director of photography, Michael Simmonds; production designer, Richard Wright; produced by Lisa Muskat, Marc Turtletaub and Jeb Brody; released by Koch Lorber Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Alejandro Polanco (Alejandro), Isamar Gonzales (Isamar), Carlos Zapata (Carlos), Ahmad Razvi (Ahmad) and Rob Sowulski (Rob). |
Attention on Evidence Shifts to Testing for Fingerprints
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Brian McNamee gave federal investigators needles, syringes, gauze pads and vials he hoped would support his case. February 26, 2008
Attention on Evidence Shifts to Testing for FingerprintsOne of the more intriguing elements in the confrontation between Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee has been whether the needles, syringes, gauze pads and vials that McNamee turned over to federal authorities contain Clemens's DNA or traces of steroids or human growth hormone. What has not received the same amount of attention is whether any of those used items or the eight vials of unused steroids that McNamee also turned over to authorities contain Clemens's fingerprints. If they do, that fact could bolster McNamee's assertions that he injected Clemens with steroids or H.G.H. on at least 16 occasions between 1998 and 2001. In January, McNamee gave the items — some of which he said he had kept in his home since 2001 — to federal investigators, who have sent the materials for testing. McNamee also handed over the eight unused vials of steroids, which he said Clemens had kept in his New York apartment until he gave them back to McNamee as he prepared to return home to Houston at the end of the 2002 season. Lawyers familiar with the case said federal investigators would undoubtedly look for fingerprints from Clemens as well as traces of his DNA. Still, when McNamee's lawyers first revealed that McNamee had turned over physical evidence to federal authorities, much of the attention was on the DNA issue; the issue of potential fingerprints — an old-fashioned concept compared to the high-tech nature of DNA testing — was largely ignored, except by bloggers. Clemens has denied using performance-enhancing drugs. He has said that McNamee did inject him, but only with vitamin B12 and the painkiller lidocaine, an assertion McNamee has denied. If Clemens's DNA is found on any of the syringes, needles, gauze pads or vials, he could conceivably argue that it stemmed from B12 or lidocaine injections. If traces of both his DNA and steroids or H.G.H. are discovered, Clemens could argue that the evidence was tampered with and that the drug traces were added after the injections were given. And the fact that the evidence was in McNamee's possession for so long would allow critics, or Clemens, to raise questions about tampering. In fact, forensic experts said it would be easy for Clemens to attack the credibility of the evidence if it relied on traces of his DNA. Refuting the presence of a fingerprint would be a more difficult task. Erin Murphy, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on forensic evidence, said it was not difficult to plant a person's DNA on an object that person had not touched. She said the argument that DNA evidence had been tampered with was often made in similar cases. "Especially with someone like a trainer who is around an athlete who may be bleeding, it would not be hard to spread someone's DNA all over the place," Murphy said. "It is much more difficult to get someone's fingerprint on something without them knowing and makes it harder to refute he didn't handle these things." If a Clemens fingerprint is found on a vial of steroids, it would not prove that Clemens had used the substance, but it would show that he had come in contact with the vials and raise new questions about his denials. Richard Emery, one of McNamee's lawyers, said McNamee gave Clemens an undisclosed number of unused steroid vials in 2001; it was from that batch, Emery said, that Clemens returned the eight unused vials to McNamee at the end of the 2002 season. "Brian is not sure what Clemens did with the vials but they were in his possession," Emery said. "Prosecutors will be looking for prints on the vials. If his fingerprints are there, I don't know how he can say his fingers weren't on them." Emery also said that Clemens's fingerprints may be on the syringes. "Although Brian supplied the syringes and they were kept at Roger's apartment, he remembers the routine was such that Roger would handle the syringes," Emery said. "Roger would usually lay them out; he was very organized. The syringes may have been in plastic, or maybe Roger removed the plastic and touched them." In a written statement Monday night, Rusty Hardin, Clemens's lead lawyer, referred to the fingerprint issue as "a bunch of 'what if' speculation" and expressed the hope that any investigation would be allowed to run its "natural course." "We would expect if the Department of Justice conducts an investigation, it would be a thorough and fair one," he added. "Does that mean that they would test items they were given for fingerprints? Of course, they would."
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Congress May Single Out Clemens
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Brian Walsh/Associated Press
Roger Clemens could face charges in the wake of his testimony before Congress. February 26, 2008
Congress May Single Out ClemensBy KATIE THOMAS and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
A Congressional committee has taken the first steps toward asking the Department of Justice to start a criminal investigation into whether Roger Clemens committed perjury during testimony about performance-enhancing drugs, according to three lawyers with knowledge of the matter. A draft letter referring Clemens, but not his accuser Brian McNamee, had been drawn up by staff members for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform by the end of last week, according to two of the lawyers. But all three lawyers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter, said it was possible that McNamee would also be included in the referral by the time it was sent to the Justice Department. If the committee does decide to refer Clemens alone, it would indicate that the Democratic majority, led by the chairman Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, had prevailed over any Republican reservations about the truthfulness of McNamee's statements in the Mitchell report, a subsequent deposition and his testimony at a nationally televised committee hearing Feb. 13. That hearing split along partisan lines, with most Republicans attacking McNamee and most Democrats challenging Clemens. The next day, Waxman said he regretted that the hearing had been held — he said he thought the depositions would have sufficed but that Clemens's lawyers wanted a public airing of the issues — and that he also believed that Clemens did not tell the truth. In an interview Monday, Waxman said that no decision on a referral had been made, but that one would be forthcoming by the end of the week. He said he had not yet spoken to the committee's ranking Republican, Tom Davis of Virginia, about the matter. In addition, Keith Ausbrook, the Republican chief counsel of the committee, said he was not aware that a letter had been drafted. Joe Householder, a spokesman for Clemens's defense team, declined comment. Because of the partisan nature of the Feb. 13 hearing, there had been speculation that the committee would refer the entire matter to the Justice Department rather than single out Clemens. In his deposition to Congressional investigators and at the hearing, Clemens denied that he had ever taken steroids or human growth hormone, even though McNamee has testified that he injected Clemens with one drug or the other on at least 16 occasions between 1998 and 2001. In a related case last month, Waxman and Davis jointly asked the Justice Department to investigate shortstop Miguel Tejada for suspected false statements in 2005, when Tejada spoke privately with committee staff members about performance-enhancing drugs. It was unclear Monday whether any Clemens referral would be similarly bipartisan. Although sending the entire matter to the Justice Department could be seen as a compromise between Democrats and Republicans, referring only Clemens's testimony could be read as an endorsement of the work of George J. Mitchell, the former Democratic senator who identified Clemens as a steroids user in his report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Any referral from the committee is primarily a symbolic gesture. The Justice Department can decide on its own to investigate a Congressional perjury case, and indeed, several federal agents were present during the hearing Feb. 13. One of those in attendance was Jeff Novitzky, the I.R.S. agent who has spent the past several years investigating steroid use among professional athletes. McNamee is cooperating with federal authorities and, under a proffer agreement, he will not be charged with any crimes if he tells the truth. In January, he gave federal authorities syringes, vials and gauze pads that he said contained proof that he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs. A referral by Congress is like an extra push to the Justice Department, said Todd D. Peterson, a law professor at the George Washington University School of Law who worked in the department's Office of Legal Counsel during the 1980s and 1990s. "It simply puts informal public pressure on the Department of Justice to take a look at it and respond in some way to Congress's action," he said. In addition, a referral also sends a message about "Congress's own view as to which testimony seems not plausible to them," Peterson said. If the committee chooses to refer Clemens's testimony and not McNamee's, he said, "that's a pretty clear statement as to what their views are." Murray Chass and David Herszenhorn contributed reporting.
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