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

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SUBJECT: PSYCHOLOGY (90%); INTERVIEWS (89%); EMPLOYMENT (88%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (87%); BOOK REVIEWS (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (72%); EMPLOYMENT INTERVIEWS (71%); MUSIC (69%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (74%)
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LOAD-DATE: July 15, 2008
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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
July 15, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

One More Battle for a Vintage Warship
BYLINE: By MARC LACEY and WALT BARANGER ; Marc Lacey reported from Lazaro Cardenas, and Walter R. Baranger from New York.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; LaZARO CaRDENAS JOURNAL; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 1183 words
DATELINE: LAZARO CARDENAS, Mexico
In its glory days, the United States Navy destroyer John Rodgers was among the most decorated warships of World War II. Now, hull rusting and big guns whitened by bird droppings, the abandoned destroyer finds itself in what could be its final battle, one that could turn the historic ship into a museum or, alternatively, a heap of scrap.

The John Rodgers was one of the 175 Fletcher-class destroyers, which shepherded aircraft carriers and provided withering cover fire during amphibious landings. During two and a half years in the Pacific, it fought in the Philippines and at Kwajalein Atoll, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It steamed into Tokyo Bay in September 1945, having earned 12 battle stars without, remarkably, losing a single sailor.

The Fletcher destroyers were a swift breed that each carried nearly 300 sailors into war. While many of the ships suffered heavy losses from kamikaze attacks late in the war, most ended up in scrap yards in the decades after peace was achieved.

Only five survive today -- four as museums (in Buffalo; Baton Rouge, La.; Boston; and Greece) and the John Rodgers, which is tethered to a dock in this city, about 150 miles up the coast from Acapulco. Mexican officials want it removed forthwith.

After the John Rodgers was retired in 1946, the Navy lent it to Mexico, which rechristened it the Cuitlahuac. Mexico eventually bought it outright and deployed it on patrols, including hunts for narcotics traffickers. That ended in July 2001.

Then along came Ward Brewer II, 45, an American entrepreneur who drafted a plan after 9/11 to recycle World War II-era ships as floating command posts during disasters in the United States. Mr. Brewer's disaster plan never won the backing of the United States government, but he persuaded the Mexicans to issue a presidential decree in 2006 turning over the John Rodgers to his nonprofit company, the Beauchamp Tower Corporation.

He proposed that the John Rodgers be based in Mobile Bay, in Alabama, as a floating museum, but be available as a communications and logistics center should disaster strike.

First, though, the ship would have to voyage home, which has proved a tricky task.

''We ran into a number of issues,'' Mr. Brewer said in a telephone interview last week.

He managed in August 2006 to persuade a Texas towing company to haul the John Rodgers through the Panama Canal to Mobile.

Veterans of the John Rodgers, dwindling in numbers as years pass, planned to have a reunion in October 2006 to coincide with its arrival at Mobile Bay. The ship proved a no-show. And the venerable destroyer, unscathed in war, found itself in an international legal battle.

John Bergene, who owns the towing company E. J. Ventures, said that on Labor Day weekend in 2006, he hired a crew of five, bought fuel and dispatched a tow ship to Mexico. At the last moment, he said, Mr. Brewer called to say a down payment on towing fees would be delayed until after the holiday.

The money never arrived, but Mr. Brewer provided bank references sufficient for Mr. Bergene to proceed -- ''against my better judgment,'' he said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands.

Then he went to Mexico, only to find that Mr. Brewer was stalling, Mr. Bergene said.

''He said Wednesday you'll get your money, and then Thursday and then Friday,'' Mr. Bergene recounted. ''Finally I said we're not going anywhere until I get my money.''

After a month and a half, Mr. Bergene said, he found another towing job and sailed away.

Mr. Brewer contends that the towing fiasco resulted from a series of misunderstandings with Mr. Bergene and the Mexican government. Still, Mr. Bergene won a federal court judgment of nearly $800,000 against Mr. Brewer and Beauchamp Tower. Unable to collect, he has a lien on the John Rodgers.

''It's hurt me badly, and it's hurt a lot of people badly, and it's made the Mexican government look like fools,'' Mr. Bergene said. ''The Mexican government needs to go after Ward.''

The Mexican authorities may do just that.

They say they have been infinitely patient. They say Mr. Brewer initially told them that after having the John Rodgers removed from a Mexican naval base, he would store the 376-foot vessel at a nearby granary pier for a week or so. It has been there more than 18 months. Port officials said they were consulting lawyers and making plans to seize the ship and sell it for scrap.

''The hurricane season is coming and it's a danger for all of us,'' said Samuel Fonseca, head of the grain port here. ''If they can't move it from this port, we have to see what we can do.''

Even if the ship is scrapped, the fate most of the Fletcher destroyers have met, it probably will not yield enough to cover all the debt associated with it, Mexican officials say.

Besides the $800,000 court judgment, Mexican officials say Mr. Brewer owes as much as $1 million in fines and other fees from the ship's long stay in Mexico. Beauchamp Tower's tax return put its gross income last year at less than $25,000.

Transforming old warships into museums typically costs more, sometimes millions of dollars more, than many veterans groups imagine. The obsolete vessels are floating asbestos mines, full of assorted solvents, fuels and other toxins as well. And their guns, though long silent, worry the United States government, which seeks assurances that they are licensed or disabled.

The challenges do not stop there. Spare parts are a problem. Crew members who know the vessels are dying off. Then there is insurance, constant painting, naval architect's fees and assorted permits. On top of all that, the cost of towing the John Rodgers home has ballooned with soaring fuel prices. What was originally a $350,000 job, Mr. Bergene said, would cost about $500,000.

Then there is the condition of the John Rodgers itself. Long neglected, it is showing wear. Rust is building up, and wind is tearing away at the deck where American sailors helped wage some of the Pacific war's greatest battles.

''I used to go on deck and watch everything going on,'' said Gerry Fried, 91, a former Navy radio operator now living in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Recalling the fighting on the Japanese coast, he added, ''It was very exciting when the ship pulled into Suruga Wan and shelled the shore.''

Some who served on the ship are resigned to never seeing the John Rodgers again.

''I'd like to see it brought back to the States, of course, but it seems to be headed to scrapyards,'' said David Carnell, 87, of Wilmington, N.C., who was a young officer aboard the John Rodgers in 1945.

Mr. Brewer, though, remains ever the optimist. The other day, he said in a telephone interview from Florida that deals were in the works, plans being made, delicate discussions taking place.

The destroyer would be on its way to the United States by month's end, he said. Later, he said that could slip to August, at the latest.

''We're planning to move it out of there,'' Mr. Brewer said, urging that no article on the John Rodgers be published until his deal was done. ''I can't go into any details.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: NAVAL VESSELS (92%); NAVIES (90%); WAR & CONFLICT (90%); WORLD WAR II (90%); ARMED FORCES (78%); ROAD TRANSPORTATION SUPPORT SERVICES (77%); DISASTER PLANNING (76%); INTERVIEWS (74%); HISTORIC SITES (72%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (69%); CANALS & WATERWAYS (68%); NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS (67%); CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES CRIME (50%)
ORGANIZATION: US NAVY (93%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BATON ROUGE, LA, USA (79%); TOKYO, JAPAN (57%) LOUISIANA, USA (79%); ALABAMA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (95%); MEXICO (95%); PHILIPPINES (79%); PANAMA (79%); JAPAN (57%)
LOAD-DATE: July 15, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Tied to a dock in Lazaro Cardenas by fraying ropes, the U.S. Navy destroyer John Rodgers.

A fisherman, Pedro Losano, at the Pacific port, with the John Rodgers in the background.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY JENNIFER SZYMASZEK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) MAP: No one seems to want the ship to stay in Lazaro Cardenas. Map details area of Lazaro Cardenas.

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

581 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 15, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Dispatches From Capitalist China
BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1463 words
Many in the West have assumed that capitalism will inevitably lead to democracy, that free markets will spawn genuine freedom, but as China prepares to host the Olympics and celebrate its own emergence as a world power and economic behemoth, its government has continued to crack down on dissent. More than four dozen online dissidents have been jailed in China, and last year more than 2,500 Web sites were blocked, according to the press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. More recently, human-rights lawyers who volunteered to defend Tibetans charged in violent anti-China protests have been effectively disbarred, and a peaceful gathering of parents protesting shoddy school construction and the deaths of their children in the recent earthquake was broken up.

In his compelling new book, ''Out of Mao's Shadow,'' Philip P. Pan points out that in China ''independent labor unions and churches are still illegal, and the party still exercises firm control over the courts.'' The economic boom has left many behind, he writes, and the nation's problems are ''obvious to anyone willing to see: the stifling limits on political and religious freedoms, the abuse of power by privileged officials, the sweatshop conditions in the factories, the persistent poverty in the countryside, the degradation of the environment, the moral drift of a cynical society.''

In this volume Mr. Pan, former Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post, examines the current state of the world's most populous nation, looking at both the growing personal freedom its citizens now enjoy and the Communist Party's continued monopoly on power. He notes that prosperity has raised people's expectations and access to information, even as it's helped the government forestall democratization: many citizens who might once have become dissidents have grown increasingly focused on their private lives and the opportunity to make money quickly, while party officials, who ''can often determine who succeeds and fails in the new capitalist economy,'' wield ''tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen and entrepreneurs that might otherwise support political change.''

By embracing market economics while preserving the party's monopoly on power and restricting political freedom, Mr. Pan writes, China's Communist leaders have concocted an ''authoritarian capitalism'' that ''could be as exploitative as anything Marx -- or Mao -- ever envisioned.'' Free markets and private enterprise, he says, ''generated wealth and prosperity, but unrestrained by democratic institutions, they also produced grim work conditions'': without trade unions, a free press, independent courts or elections, workers have little leverage with their employers and no way to remove corrupt officials, who often collude with business interests.

''No one benefited more from the shift to capitalism than party officials and those with connections to them,'' Mr. Pan writes. ''The party's betrayal of its founding ideology, the logic-defying contortions that the propagandists used to explain the reversal, the blunt calculus that holding on to power was an end that justified any means -- it all bred a cynicism in the party ranks, and access to the riches of the booming economy quickly warped the party-state.''

It is Mr. Pan's achievement in ''Out of Mao's Shadow'' that he makes the dark side of China's glittering economic growth palpably real to the reader by showing the fallout of these changes on the lives of individual citizens, just as he shows the potent effect that a few brave individuals -- speaking up on behalf of civil liberties, freedom of the press and government accountability -- can have on the party's conduct of day-to-day business. Fluent in Chinese, Mr. Pan crisscrossed the country, from Beijing to booming cities and dismal mines in the south to aging factories in the northeast. He interviewed artists, workers, peasants, journalists and entrepreneurs, and his portraits of these people possess both the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novel.

Mr. Pan also maps the government's efforts to paper over the horrors of its recent history -- from the Anti-Rightist Campaign begun in the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution (which began in 1966 and ended a decade later) to the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 -- while chronicling the brave, sometimes thwarted, efforts of citizens to pay tribute to the victims of those years and to pry a truthful version of the past from the gears of the government's mammoth propaganda machine.

During the Mao era, Mr. Pan writes, ''fabricating and controlling history was so important to the party that it devoted a vast bureaucracy to the task, an army of propagandists, ideologues and censors who labored to deceive the masses in the name of serving them. By some estimates, the party employed one propaganda officer for every hundred citizens.''

After Mao's death, in 1976, things began to change, but the party has refused to permit a soul-searching national discussion to take place about Tiananmen Square or the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Pan says, because it is fearful of the emotions that such discussions might unleash and ''the lessons that might be drawn about the wisdom of one-party rule.''

Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party who spoke out on behalf of the pro-democracy Tiananmen demonstrators, was ousted by party elders and effectively erased from history -- airbrushed from photos, deleted from textbooks and banished from news accounts. Yet when he died in 2005, word spread by the Internet and cellphones, and thousands of people from across the country converged on the cemetery to pay their respects.

Many of the other people profiled in this volume also dared to defy the government, risking arrest and lengthy prison sentences. Hu Jie, a documentary filmmaker who became obsessed with a student dissident and poet named Lin Zhao, spent years working on a movie about her life, piecing together the story of her arrest and eventual execution. By 2005 his film had become an underground success, and state security agents came to his door and told him he was quite famous now and they could no longer ''look after'' him.

Jiang Yanyong, an elderly, semiretired military surgeon who became convinced that the government was underreporting SARS cases in the spring of 2003, decided he needed to speak up to prevent the spread of that deadly disease. After his efforts to go through official channels produced no results, he sent e-mail messages detailing his findings to several friends, hoping one of them would get the message to someone in the leadership or the foreign media. It wasn't long before he was contacted by The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, and soon the story had gotten out to the world. The party struggled for several days to maintain its cover-up, but suddenly caved: one day it was saying there were only 27 cases of SARS in Beijing; the next, it admitted that the count stood at 339 confirmed cases and 402 suspected ones.

As for Cheng Yizhong, the editor in chief of The Southern Metropolis Daily , he pioneered a new form of journalism in an environment where newspapers were routinely regarded by the Communist Party as propaganda channels: his paper not only started running consumer news and reviews of foreign movies, but also began giving readers articles that challenged the government. After breaking the news blackout on SARS, Mr. Cheng went on to run an expose of the ''shourong'' or ''custody and repatriation'' system, a network of detention centers that authorities used to enforce an internal passport policy and keep undesirables, usually peasants, out of the nation's cities.

Amazingly enough, less than two months after The Southern Metropolis Daily published a report on the death of a detainee, it was announced that Premier Wen Jiabao had abolished the shourong regulations and was going to close the system's 700 detention centers. But Mr. Cheng and The Daily were made to pay for their audacity: advertisers were told to stop buying ads in the paper; its general manager was sentenced to 12 years in prison (the sentence was later reduced); and Mr. Cheng was arrested and held for five months.

It is the efforts of people like Mr. Cheng and Mr. Jiang, Mr. Pan concludes, that represent the best hope for genuine reform in China: ''what progress has been made in recent years -- what freedom the Chinese people now enjoy,'' he writes, ''has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure.''

OUT OF MAO'S SHADOW

By Philip P. Pan

349 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ECONOMIC NEWS (89%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS (78%); OLYMPICS (77%); POLITICAL PARTIES (77%); FREEDOM OF PRESS (77%); GARMENT WORKERS (75%); BOOK REVIEWS (74%); CHILDREN (74%); FREEDOM OF RELIGION (73%); LABOR UNIONS (73%); POLITICS (71%); SCHOOL BUILDINGS (71%); RELIGION (68%)
COMPANY: WASHINGTON POST CO (54%); CNINSURE INC (93%)
ORGANIZATION: REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS (57%)
TICKER: WPO (NYSE) (54%); CISG (NASDAQ) (93%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS517110 WIRED TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (54%); NAICS515120 TELEVISION BROADCASTING (54%); NAICS511120 PERIODICAL PUBLISHERS (54%); NAICS511110 NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS (54%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BEIJING, CHINA (79%) NORTH CENTRAL CHINA (79%); XIZANG, CHINA (58%) CHINA (97%); TIBET (79%)
TITLE: Out of Mao's Shadow (Book)>; Out of Mao's Shadow (Book)>
LOAD-DATE: July 15, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Philip P. Pan(PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH SCHAFER)(pg. E7)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

582 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 14, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Government As Big Lender
BYLINE: By PETER S. GOODMAN
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; NEWS ANALYSIS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1495 words
The desperate worry over the health of huge financial institutions with country cousin names -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- reflects a reality that has reshaped major spheres of American life: the government has in recent months taken on an increasingly dominant role in assuring that Americans can buy a home or attend college.

Much of the private money that once surged into the mortgage industry has fled in a panicked horde, leaving most of the responsibility for financing American homes to the government-sponsored Fannie and Freddie.

Two years ago, when commercial banks were still jostling for fatter slices of the housing market, the share of outstanding mortgages Fannie and Freddie owned and guaranteed dipped below 40 percent, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Moody's Economy.com. By the first three months of this year, Fannie and Freddie were buying more than two-thirds of all new residential mortgages.

A similar trend is playing out in the realm of student loans. As commercial banks concluded that the business of lending to college students was no longer quite so profitable, the Bush administration promised in May to buy their federally guaranteed student loans, giving the banks capital to continue lending.

In short, in a nation that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, the government has transformed from a reliable guarantor into effectively the only lender for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives.

Before, its more modest mission was to make more loans available at lower rates. Now it is to make sure loans are made at all. The government is setting the terms and the standards of Americans' biggest loans.

On Sunday, that federal oversight and protection was made more explicit, as the Bush administration sought to mount a rescue of Fannie and Freddie, asking Congress to devote public money to buying the two companies' flagging stocks.

The new reality is scorned by libertarians and conservatives, who fear state intrusions on the market, and by populists and progressives, who dislike the idea of education and housing increasingly resting upon the government's willingness to finance it.

''If you're a socialist, you should be happy,'' said Michael Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a research institute in Washington. ''But you should really wonder whether you want people's ability to pay for housing and college dependent on the motives of people in Washington.''

The government is trying to support plummeting housing prices and spare strapped homeowners from the wrath of the market: last week, the Senate adopted a bill authorizing the Federal Housing Administration to insure up to $300 billion in refinanced mortgages, enabling borrowers saddled with unaffordable loans to get better terms.

How the government came to dominate these two crucial areas of American lending is -- depending on one's ideological bent -- a narrative of regulatory and market failure, or a cautionary tale about bureaucratic meddling in commerce. Perhaps it is both.

To those prone to blame lax regulation, the mortgage fiasco was the inevitable result of a quarter-century in which American policy makers prayed at the altar of market fundamentalism, letting entrepreneurs succeed or fail on their own.

This was the spirit in which Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, allowed banks to engineer unfathomably complicated webs of mortgage-based investments that, through the first half of this decade, sent real estate prices soaring and expanded homeownership.

The banks relied on these investments to raise money for the next wave of loans. The system worked so long as lenders could keep selling their mortgages, and so long as someone would guarantee most of the debts. Fannie and Freddie took care of both tasks. Together, they now guarantee or own roughly half of the nation's $12 trillion mortgage market.

Belief in Fannie and Freddie gave banks a sense of certainty as they plowed more of their capital into residential mortgages. That easy financing, in turn, brought more and more people into the market for homes, generating a belief that American real estate prices could keep rising forever.

And that contributed to the banks' ultimately making extraordinarily risky loans, which defaulted first when home prices started falling. As lending became conservative, the whole speculative bubble burst.

As some called for intervention by the Fed to cool a speculative binge, Mr. Greenspan resisted. He believed the risks of real estate were effectively limited because debt was widely dispersed. The market would sort it all out.

''Alan Greenspan had this view that the light hand of regulation was best,'' said Vincent R. Reinhart, a former Federal Reserve economist and now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

When housing prices commenced plummeting, the ugly truth emerged that many banks did not understand the details of the mortgage-backed investments they owned. Ignorance proved expensive.

As one bank after another announced losses that now exceed $400 billion and that some estimate will ultimately cross the trillion-dollar mark, money ran screaming from the field, leaving Fannie and Freddie pretty much the only players.

A general fear of debt took hold. Banks that had offered loans to students under a federally guaranteed program suddenly could not sell investments linked to those outstanding debts, meaning they could not raise cash for the next crop of loans. Dozens of banks pulled out of the program.

''What's happened kind of speaks for itself,'' said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. ''You had this effort to weaken the government's role. There was this conscious effort to turn things over to the private sector, and it failed.''

But there is a parallel narrative, the story that critics and competitors of Fannie and Freddie have told for years: how the two companies exploited their pedigree as entities backed by the government to secure an unfair advantage over the private sector.

They swelled into highly leveraged behemoths, it was said, on the implicit guarantee that the government would step in and rescue them if they ever got into trouble. This allowed them to borrow money more cheaply than their competitors could, enabling them to make loans more cheaply.

That secured more business and rewarded their shareholders, along with their handsomely compensated executives. It emboldened them to trade in highly risky investments.

''They were using their privileged position as favored children of the government to dominate the market, and taxpayers were on the hook for substantial risk,'' said Martin N. Baily, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration. ''You couldn't possibly say this was a pure unfettered market.''

The government was getting something for its protective largess. It was using Fannie and Freddie to pursue the social goal of broader homeownership, particularly among racial minorities.

''When you're looking at the upside, here's the government helping people get mortgages and student loans,'' said David R. Henderson, a self-described libertarian economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. ''The downside is there might be a bailout and then you pay in taxes. These things don't come cost-free when government gets involved.''

As the Bush administration readies funds to buy student loans from cash-short banks, and officials plot a potential bailout of Fannie and Freddie that could run into tens of billions of dollars, the government's outsize role in these two huge areas will not shrink anytime soon.

It seems a strange coda to an era in which markets were sacred, and regulation heresy.

For a generation, American policy makers have lectured the world on the need to unleash the animal instincts of the market. China's rickety banks should stop lending to protect state factory jobs, Americans said, and focus on the bottom line. Now the Bush administration is reluctantly concluding that Fannie and Freddie might need to be propped up to protect the American homeowner.

During much of Japan's lost decade of the 1990s, Americans called for an end to its coddling of weak banks. Better to let them keel over, along with the paper tiger companies they sustained. No company was ''too big to fail,'' Washington said.

Yet here, in the aftermath of a financial crisis brought on by what were once called American virtues -- financial engineering and risk management -- Washington may bail out Fannie and Freddie for the simple reason that they are too big to fail. If they go down, so do whole neighborhoods. So, perhaps, does the global financial system.

''The thing we have to do now is to make sure that Fannie and Freddie remain solvent and continue to make loans,'' Mr. Baily said. ''We just don't have any choice.''