Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: AGRICULTURAL INCOME (90%); TAXES & TAXATION (90%); AGRICULTURE (89%); EXPORT TRADE (89%); FOOD CHARITIES (89%); FARMERS & RANCHERS (78%); FAMINE (77%); FOOD & BEVERAGE (77%); FOOD PRICES (77%); TARIFFS & DUTIES (74%); PRICE INCREASES (73%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (71%); EXPORT CONTROLS (69%)
PERSON: CRISTINA FERNANDEZ DE KIRCHNER (71%); NESTOR KIRCHNER (51%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA (79%) ARGENTINA (99%)
LOAD-DATE: April 30, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Farmers blockaded roads for weeks, including in Gualeguaychu, choking off the flow of meat and grains to markets. The strike, which may resume if talks fail, protested tax increases on exports. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIEL PIKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Farmers in Gualeguaychu, Argentina, north of the capital, watched a televised speech this month by the president in which she urged an end to their strike. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIEL PIKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

At a butcher shop in Buenos Aires, supplies were down during strikes by farmers in rural towns like Wenceslao Escalante. (PHOTOGRAPH BY NATACHA PISARENKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS) MAP: Wenceslao Escalante in Cordoba, Argentina where farmers revolted over rising taxes.
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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

829 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 26, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

As Newark Rebuilds, Help From Beyond City Limits
BYLINE: By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1388 words
DATELINE: NEWARK
William A. Ackman, the manager of a multibillion-dollar Manhattan hedge fund, has no personal ties to Newark and has visited the city only a few times. But next week Mr. Ackman, 41, plans to write checks from his foundation that total around half a million dollars to buy equipment for the Police Department and to pay for job fairs, block parties, concerts and outdoor movies and other recreational activities during the city's violence-prone summer months.

He is considering spending the rest of the $1 million that the foundation, Pershing Square, pledged last year to Newark to renovate dilapidated city parks. (In August, after the schoolyard shootings of four young people, three of whom died, Mr. Ackman donated $100,000 to cover funeral costs and otherwise assist the victims' families.)

For Mr. Ackman, these gifts are a natural follow-up to the thousands of dollars he has given personally and raised from friends and colleagues for the political campaigns of Mayor Cory A. Booker, whom he met six years ago and now considers a friend. He is among a cadre of new benefactors whom Mr. Booker, who turns 39 on Sunday, has aggressively courted to bolster his financially beleaguered city with private capital, often going beyond traditional philanthropic parameters to fulfill basic budgetary needs. Many of them seem as interested in the young mayor's success as in the urban renaissance on which he has staked his mayoralty.

''I don't know what else to say -- he inspires me,'' said Drew A. Katz, 36, who owns a billboard company in Cherry Hill, N.J., and who donated $100,000 when Mr. Booker called after the schoolyard slayings. ''He's got tentacles that reach throughout the country in ways that very few mayors of cities of this size have.''

Mr. Katz was among those people Mr. Booker and his aides recruited within two weeks of the shootings to raise $3.2 million for a high-tech surveillance system. Since December, they have collected $11 million, much of it earmarked for initiatives that include a foundation that purchases police equipment and administers a tip line through which anonymous callers can trade guns for cash. GreenSpaces, a civic initiative to rehabilitate 11 long-neglected public parks, was unveiled in February.

''You go to these parks in Newark, you see drug needles on the ground, prophylactics, abandoned furniture,'' said Leon G. Cooperman, 65, the founder of a $3.5 billion Manhattan hedge fund who pledged $5 million in December after Bari J. Mattes, a senior aide to Mr. Booker, took him on a tour of the city's parks. ''That's not a place to feel good about things.''

In addition, the administration last June helped create a spinoff of the Community Foundation of New Jersey that will devote $21 million to Newark nonprofit groups, arts programs and scholarships. And on Thursday, four national foundations -- including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- kicked off a new Newark Charter School Fund with $16 million, saying they were drawn by Mr. Booker's longstanding commitment to the schools.

Peter Frumkin, director of the R.G.K. Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas, said public-private partnerships have become an increasingly common strategy for cash-strapped local governments like Newark's, which narrowly closed last year's $180 million budget deficit and faces a gap of more than $160 million this year.

But Mr. Frumkin said the Booker administration's tack of filling fundamental needs with projects tailored for particular philanthropists -- especially those well outside the city limits -- is rarer. Donors, he said, often cling to their personal vision, and persuading them to commit to a city where they have no real personal connection requires a compelling argument.

Ms. Mattes -- who headed the board of Harvey Milk High School, a public school for gay and lesbian students on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before becoming a fund-raiser for Mr. Booker's campaign five years ago -- said she tells potential donors that their money will make a more direct difference in Newark, with its 40,000 schoolchildren, than in a larger city like New York.

But a number of the city's new benefactors are wealthy individuals who say they are motivated by the messenger as much as by the message. Mr. Ackman described his first meeting with Mr. Booker as one of the most inspirational of his life. Mr. Katz was charmed by him when they met at a Bruce Springsteen concert six years ago.

''Cory Booker's charisma allows him to make things happen in a civic community in a way that someone with a lower profile can't,'' said Frederick M. Hess, an expert on philanthropy with the American Enterprise Institute.

''It's the same reason that people will pay more for blue-chip stocks than they will for a seemingly identical stock that's not known as a blue chip,'' Mr. Hess added. ''If you've heard Cory Booker give a speech or seen an interview with him, or know of other wealthy people who have been inspired by him, that gives you more confidence that you know what you're getting.''

But experts warn that projects can shrivel if the giving is tied too firmly to one person, if a new administration is uninterested in taking on the work of the previous one, or if the philanthropists themselves change their priorities.

''It's a fact: Philanthropy doesn't hang around forever, especially aggressive, leverage-oriented philanthropy that by its nature is constantly looking for new projects,'' Mr. Frumkin said. ''You don't want to create a culture of never-ending support.''

Irene Cooper-Basch, director of the Victoria Foundation, which for decades has provided about $12 million a year for environmental, education and poverty-fighting projects in Newark, said that in addition to bringing in new donors, Mr. Booker and his aides have been more likely to invite local philanthropists to City Hall and to engage them in public-sector projects than his predecessor, Sharpe James.

Mr. James, who last week was convicted on corruption charges relating to the sale of city land, focused much of his philanthropic efforts on Newark's cultural life, helping raise $67 million for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1997, and $7 million for the renovation of the century-old Newark Museum in 1989. Throughout his terms as mayor, Mr. James partnered periodically with Raymond G. Chambers, a philanthropist who donated $20 million in the 1980s and 1990s to pay the college tuition of hundreds of Newark students.

Mr. Cooperman, a longtime benefactor who gave $5 million to help build the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, said the new administration has been able to lure back some donors who may have been reluctant to work closely with a City Hall they had seen as corrupt.

''I can't imagine them doing this while Sharpe James controlled the parks department,'' said Boykin Curry, whose family runs a New York investment firm and donated $1 million to the GreenSpaces initiative. ''You'd worry the money would be mismanaged or looted. And when the city was falling apart around it, the park wouldn't have lasted long anyway.''

Philanthropy experts said a crucial question is whether this new flood of interest can outlast Mr. Booker. It is a particularly salient question for the city's 13 charter schools. Mr. Booker, who says he envisions Newark as ''the Silicon Valley of social entrepreneurship,'' has long supported the schools and used his influence to drum up support. He has helped recruit teachers through personal phone calls, steered city property to the schools, and taken donors on tours of Team Academy, a middle school in the city's struggling South Ward.

At a recent $400,000 fund-raiser for the school, two lunches with Mr. Booker were auctioned for $20,000 each.

''Cities compete for this kind of support, and Newark, quite frankly, has not been competitive for the last half-century,'' said Clement Alexander Price, a professor of history at Rutgers University who lives in Newark and has been researching the city since 1970. ''I am hoping that Cory Booker's personal magnetism will serve as a seduction, so that when people look at Newark they will see a city, a very challenged old American city, that predates Cory Booker, and that will probably outlive Cory Booker.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CITY GOVERNMENT (90%); PARKS & PLAYGROUNDS (89%); FOUNDATIONS (89%); CITIES (89%); CITY LIFE (89%); SHOOTINGS (88%); HEDGE FUNDS (78%); POLICE FORCES (78%); CHARITIES (78%); PHILANTHROPY (77%); SCHOOL VIOLENCE (76%); OUTDOOR ADVERTISING (72%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (71%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (71%); EMPLOYMENT (57%); EMPLOYMENT FAIRS (56%); SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (93%) NEW YORK, USA (93%); NEW JERSEY, USA (91%) UNITED STATES (93%)
LOAD-DATE: April 26, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Hayes Park East is one of 11 parks in Newark that are being refurbished through a new civic initiative called GreenSpaces. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

830 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 26, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

A Jazz Lifeline to Academia Is Severed
BYLINE: By BEN RATLIFF
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 9
LENGTH: 1055 words
Over the last week, the jazz world has been reeling from the announcement that the International Association of Jazz Educators, a de facto trade organization, is going out of business.

In an e-mail message sent on April 18, the 10,000-member organization, based in Manhattan, Kan., announced that its executive board had decided to file for bankruptcy and that its annual convention, which was to be held in Seattle next year, had been canceled.

The group's demise is a major disappointment to jazz's international network of professionals -- educators, musicians, promoters, music publishers, critics, historians -- who have few other occasions to meet, conduct business face to face or have their music exposed to a discerning public. The conferences offered hundreds of workshops, panel discussions and performances by top musicians and far-flung university big bands.

At root, the annual convention -- which alternates between New York and other locations -- was a demonstration of jazz's lifeline to academia: its reliance on students and instructors in the flourishing world of jazz education to keep the music circulating, program it for live performances on the university circuit and create its next generation of audiences.

''The conference was an indispensable networking opportunity,'' said Mitchell Feldman, who runs a jazz publicity and radio promotion business and is one of the thousands who attend the event every year.

Russell Thomas Jr., a professor and director of jazz ensembles at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., said, ''It gave the students a chance to hone their skill and see outstanding musicians that they wouldn't see otherwise.'' After meeting musicians like Donald Byrd, Jimmy Heath and Jackie McLean, he said, he found it easier to recruit them for clinics and concerts.

Not all the conventions have been well attended. Despite a poor turnout in Toronto in 2003, the group's annual event returned there in January, and attendance was down by 40 percent from the previous year, according to last week's e-mail message. Not long after that, Bill McFarlin, the organization's executive director for 24 years, left for another job.

As word of the organization's bankruptcy, a Chapter 7 liquidation, traveled throughout the jazz world, the reaction was mixed. Some had heard reports of overspending and had long felt that the organization's ambitions were too big for its means. Still, many people seemed stunned by the speed and finality of its implosion.

In early April, Chuck Owen, the president of the organization's board, sent an e-mail message to the organization's members, asking them each to pay $25 to help cover debts. That fund drive produced $12,000, according to the group's recent message, but the debt was ''in the million-dollar range,'' said Alan Bergman, its legal counsel.

The organization's most recent available financial records, from 2005-6, show a deficit of $90,000, although two years earlier its revenues were in the black. The group also published a bimonthly magazine, Jazz Education Journal, but it depended almost solely on the conventions to cover its operating costs.

Last year's convention, held in Manhattan, attracted nearly 8,000 attendees and vendors, many of them paying a $250 registration fee. But the event moved back to Toronto this year, Mr. McFarlin said in an interview last week, because the hotels and convention center that housed it could write off the penalties owed from the poor performance of the convention there in 2003. This year, he said, the combination of the weak American dollar and expensive air fares dissuaded attendance and brought down the association.

People within the group also point to its failed fund-raising efforts as a major reason for its implosion. It had sought to create an endowment -- ''a war chest for jazz,'' Mr. McFarlin called it -- with the Campaign for Jazz, a drive begun in 2006 whose costs, Mr. Owen said, ''greatly exceeded the cash that was received.'' It sought to raise $8 million to $13 million, but far less than that was pledged, and some of the money -- including $1 million promised by a Los Angeles entrepreneur -- never materialized.

There has been speculation since the April 18 announcement, on Web sites and blogs, that Mr. McFarlin had stepped down because he knew that the association was on the verge of collapse. He denied this, saying that he left because he ''needed a break'' after more than 20 years of service.

''If I had known,'' he said, ''I would have tried to stay and work fervently to try and sustain the organization. It was our life's work.''

The cause of the crisis, said Laura Johnson, a board member and treasurer for the last two years, was ''the accumulation of the debt incurred by the campaign'' and the last conference. ''We hadn't realized early enough just how striking that amount was. We knew that there was a hole there, but we had no idea it was the size that it was.''

Ricky Schultz, a former record executive, current jazz industry consultant and longtime member, said, ''It was absolutely shocking to see this well-established organization that had a lot of support just pull the plug.'' He added, ''A million dollars in red ink is not a crazy, insurmountable amount of money.''

The group's board filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, Mr. Bergman said, ''because we have outstanding obligations which we do not have money to pay, and we'll probably be sued by creditors.'' He added that ''if someone were to come along and give money, it might still be possible to convert to Chapter 11.''

The prominent jazz composer Maria Schneider said, ''The old jazz culture doesn't exist anymore,'' adding that jazz is dependent on ''educational institutions, for better or worse.'' In her own case, Ms. Schneider's career was given a major boost when she won a prize commission from the group in the early 1990s and played the work at the conference. That performance resulted in residencies and clinics at schools, as well as greater industry and critical recognition.

''The saddest part about this,'' Ms. Schneider said, ''is that for a lot of young musicians, the I.A.J.E. conference is a place where they perform to professionals in the audience. You hear some kid get up and take a solo, and you say, 'Oh, my God, who's that?' ''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CONFERENCES & CONVENTIONS (91%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); MUSIC (90%); JAZZ & BLUES (90%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (78%); HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCE (78%); MUSIC INDUSTRY (78%); COMPANY LIQUIDATIONS & DISSOLUTIONS (77%); BUSINESS INSOLVENCY & BANKRUPTCY (77%); FUNDRAISING (74%); COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES (73%); LIQUIDATIONS (71%); HISTORY (70%); MUSIC PUBLISHING (70%); HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES (68%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (73%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (90%)
ORGANIZATION: JACKSON STATE UNIVERSITY (54%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (92%); SEATTLE, WA, USA (92%); JACKSON, MS, USA (69%) NEW YORK, USA (92%); WASHINGTON, USA (92%); KANSAS, USA (91%); MISSISSIPPI, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: April 26, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

831 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 26, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

Horatio Alger Multiplied By 1.3 Billion
BYLINE: By JOE NOCERA; Tang Yicheng contributed reporting.
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; TALKING BUSINESS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1629 words
''My generation is very lucky,'' said Feng Jun.

Mr. Feng, the chief executive of Aigo, a large Chinese consumer electronics company, is a classic Chinese entrepreneur: starting with $31 in his pocket, he has built a business whose products are a staple of urban China, including digital cameras, MP3 players and a new iPhone-like all-in-one device. Before telling me his Horatio Alger story, though, he had something he wanted me to understand.

''My mother and father went through the Cultural Revolution,'' Mr. Feng said. ''They had no chance.''

He continued: ''When I was in grammar school, the Cultural Revolution ended. When I graduated from university in 1992, that was the year of real reform. Deng Xiaoping encouraged students to go into business and become entrepreneurs. Before then, if you wanted to be an entrepreneur, you would sink like a stone. But after that, anyone could be an entrepreneur.''

I spent two weeks in China, hardly enough time to begin understanding the place -- as if a country as vast and varied and complex as China can ever be truly understood by a foreigner. But as I headed back to New York, Mr. Feng's quote stuck with me. It resonates with so much else I saw and heard.

First, it helps explain why most of the Chinese chief executives I met -- every one a company founder -- were in their 30s. Though Mr. Feng began his company 16 years ago, he is just 39, and absolutely brimming with entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

You hear constantly that China is a country of young people -- the average age is 33 -- but you really see it in business, where just about everybody seems to be under the age of 40. For people over the age of 50, sadly, as Mr. Feng said, they had no chance. The risk-taking impulse, and so much else, was crushed by the Cultural Revolution.

Secondly, it's a reminder just how quickly China's economic rebirth has taken place. Mao Zedong died in 1976. Four years later, the country's first special economic zone, explicitly created to encourage entrepreneurial capitalism, was established in the southern city of Shenzhen. What China has done in less than three decades is nothing short of astonishing. As Byron Wien, the chief investment strategist for Pequot Capital Management, wrote last summer, ''Nothing I have read, heard or seen will dissuade me from my view that China has made more economic progress in the last 30 years than any country in history.'' It is impossible to visit today's China and disagree.

Third, modern China surely shows that trickle-down economics is not just supply-side propaganda. Deng Xiaoping, the driving force behind the move to capitalism after Mao's death, famously said, ''To get rich is glorious.'' And goodness knows, lots of people have gotten rich.

But look at what else happened: motivated by the prospect of wealth, people started companies. And as those companies succeeded, millions of new jobs were created. In Shanghai -- a place with more entrepreneurial energy than any place I've ever visited, including Silicon Valley in the 1990s and Houston during the 1980s oil boom -- you can practically see wealth being created before your very eyes. If Shanghai doesn't make you a believer in the power of capitalism to improve lives, nothing will.

Yes, in much of China, the deal is still a pretty raw one for most laborers, who live far from their families, working under arduous conditions for low wages. And like most first-time visitors, I was appalled by the pollution, especially in Beijing. (Are they really going to run a marathon there?) But even these problems are beginning to get attention, as the country moves to higher-value products, and as the environment becomes a public policy priority, thanks in part to the Olympics.

But can it last? There are, undeniably, signs of a bubble economy -- wheeler-dealers everywhere, Internet companies with no real business models, private equity and venture capital rushing in helter-skelter, rising inflation, a volatile stock market that moves on rumors and hot tips.

There is a gold rush mentality, a powerful sense that you have to do a deal right this second, or somebody else will snatch it out from under you. These are attributes I also saw in Houston and Silicon Valley -- and, well, you know how those booms turned out.

Yet who can really argue against China's continued growth? It's been mainly the coastal cities that have prospered so far. There are hundreds of millions of people in other parts of China where capitalism is just starting to take root. In a country of more than 1.3 billion people, ''only'' 162 million use the Internet (as of 2007) and what they see there is strictly censored. In a country with 20 percent of the world's population, China accounts for only 2 percent of world consumption. Forget about exports -- the growth of the domestic economy alone should keep China's economy from stalling out.

Plus, of course, China has well over $1 trillion in foreign reserves -- most of it in dollars, thus propping up our own consumption habits, thank you very much -- which it can spend to unleash entrepreneurial instincts in the rest of the country. The government defines progress almost entirely in economic terms. Surely, such progress will leach beyond the big coastal cities, as the prospect of ''glorious'' riches loom.

Here's another impression I came away with. Inch by inch, the intellectual property situation seems to be improving.

Admittedly, this is hardly obvious. Counterfeit goods are everywhere; even at the Great Wall, I was offered some great deals on fake Rolex watches. Cheap, pirated CDs and DVDs are equally ubiquitous. It doesn't take more than a few days in China to see why Western movie and music company executives tear their hair out.

On the other hand, in the last few years the government has issued edicts calling on companies and government agencies to use -- and pay for -- licensed software. Lenovo, the Chinese company that makes the ThinkPad laptop, has been a leader in pushing the government to do more in this regard.

Alas, enforcement is still lax, but about a year ago, the government also mandated that computer manufacturers preload a licensed operating system instead of simply taking it; many of the big manufacturers now do so. Indeed, a number of big, publicly held Chinese companies, which five years ago would have used pirated software, now buy legal, licensed products from software vendors.

Including, of course, Chinese software vendors, like Caxa Technology, the company I mentioned in last week's column. Do potential customers sometimes steal Caxa's software? Yes, said Yi Lei, the chief executive. But most big customers are buying his product, and using it legally. ''The rapid growth of Caxa shows that we are succeeding,'' Mr. Yi said.

Hence the real reason that China is likely to start respecting intellectual property: China now has some skin in the game. More and more, it is not just Western companies with intellectual property to protect; Chinese companies like Caxa and Lenovo also need to have their intellectual property protected.

In addition, many Chinese companies talk about wanting to instill a culture of innovation, rather than slavishly copying the innovations of others. But innovation is impossible without intellectual property protection. After all, what's the incentive to invent something new if your competitor can steal it with impunity?

I saw recently that Gucci won a big lawsuit -- in China -- against a Chinese company that was using its logo illegally. And Andrew Rothman, a China analyst with the investment firm CLSA, noted in a paper last September that ''last year, China passed the U.S. to become the world's most litigious country in terms of intellectual property disputes.'' Most of the lawsuits, he added, were brought by Chinese companies against other Chinese companies. I never thought I'd see the day when an uptick in litigation was a sign of progress, but there you go.

My last interview in China was with a teacher-turned-businessman named Michael Yu. He is the founder and chief executive of New Oriental, a Kaplan-style company that he began in 1993 and has since become the largest private education company in China. In 2006, it went public, transforming Mr. Yu into a billionaire. On the day I met him, he was wearing a flannel shirt, jeans and sneakers. At 45, he was the oldest chief executive I met in China.

The interview was one of the most enjoyable hours I spent in China. Mr. Yu, it turned out, had been through a lot to get to this point -- he'd been run out of Beijing University after a public humiliation, had struggled to get a government license to start his first school and had had to slay many dragons along the way. His was hardly a get-rich-quick story, and Mr. Yu told it without an ounce of braggadocio. ''Michael built a business before he did an I.P.O,'' said New Oriental's chief financial officer, Louis T. Hsieh.

Though he professed to be a poor manager -- ''that's why I hired these guys,'' he laughed, pointing to Mr. Hsieh and another executive -- Mr. Yu had the qualities you yearn to see in any company leader. He clearly cared deeply about his company and its mission. He wanted to see his employees succeed. He was straightforward and charismatic.

''We didn't just do this to get rich,'' he said. ''We are doing it to enrich other people's life. The I.P.O. is a dot on the road. You do not change your road because you have money or because you have an I.P.O.''

China has plenty of problems: Tibet, pollution, political repression, the Great Firewall, you name it. Even so, it is hard not to be optimistic when you meet someone like Mr. Yu. If he is the future of Chinese business, then that future is very bright.