While everyone wonders how Mayor Bloomberg could have been such an idiot &c about Cathleen Black, an unidentified observer suggests that any third term will be structurally dubious. 

From outside City Hall, meanwhile, veterans of Mr. Bloomberg’s inner circle say that the dynamic between the mayor and his deputies appears to have changed in unhealthy ways since his first two terms, following the departures of some senior officials.

“His administrative style works best when he has really smart people working for him who understand that he’s the leader, and you cover the leader,” said one former aide, who insisted on anonymity to avoid damaging relationships with people still at City Hall. “He’s covering for everybody else. He didn’t have to do it that much in the first or second terms. I just find it so extraordinary that there are so many people he’s having to cover up for.”

The Mayor might have found that he liked the job and wanted to stay on, but the talented team that made him look good in the early days has moved on.

We’re so appetized by Guy Trebay’s sketch of the Sam Green story that we’re totally bummed to read that the inadequately forthcoming book by Joan Tippett is still in the “research” phase. 

“Sam is one of the emblematic figures of the 1960s, in the sense that a 25-year-old man at that moment could become director of the I.C.A. and could do shows that retrospectively we can recognize as seismic,” said Jonathan Katz, a historian and a curator of last year’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. To Mr. Katz, Mr. Green was a purely Pop creation, a kind of cartoon person whose thought-bubble changed at whim.

“Sam’s greatest strength was sociality,” said Mr. Katz, explaining that “Sam Green could be so much to so many, handsome and charming, gay and straight, serious and frivolous, anything you wanted him to be, he helped engineer the transition from an art world that still turned on the social in the early 1960s to a social world that turned on art. And we still inhabit that world.”

Along the way, though, something happened. Disillusioned by art and academia and ensorcelled by another world, a borderless one whose citizens’ wealth is a passe-partout to unlimited privilege, “Sam sort of lost the thread,” said Jane Tippett, an art historian who is researching a book on Mr. Green.

Perhaps Pop Art was popular when it was for a reason.

(Did we tell you that “taking the day off” means helping the Editor with his storage issues! Some break!) Another item that caught our eye over the weekend was a review by Nancy Koehn of Margaret Heffernan’s Willful Blindness.

Writing in clear, flowing prose, she draws on psychological and neurological studies and interviews with executives, whistleblowers and white-collar criminals. She analyzes mechanisms that limit our vision — individually and collectively — and thus jeopardize our safety, economic well-being, moral grounding and emotional wholeness.

Love, ideology, fear and the impulse to obey and conform all play important roles in rendering us blind to the makings of personal tragedies and corporate collapses.

Information overload is also a big factor, especially in our technologically sophisticated age. Ms. Heffernan explains how multitasking and excessive stimulation, combined with exhaustion, restrict what we see and do.

We’re taking the day off, but there’s something from Sunday’s Times. Cornell’s Robert H Frank (whom we call “Luxury Bob” to distinguish him from the author of Richistan) wrote about what he calls the “toil index,” the number of hours that must be worked in order to pay for housing of average quality. Given income inequality, this average keeps climbing out of reach.

The index rejects the standard economic assumption that well-being depends primarily on absolute consumption. Instead, it assumes that the context of that consumption is often far more important. Context matters because the brain requires a frame of reference to make any evaluative judgment.

For example, is a particular family’s house adequate? The answer invariably depends on the quality and size of other houses in the surrounding area.

Rising inequality has shifted the context that governs housing choices. Higher incomes at the top have led the wealthy to build bigger mansions, shifting the frame of reference that shapes demands for those with slightly smaller incomes, who travel in overlapping social circles. The near-rich respond by building bigger houses as well, shifting the frame of reference for others just below them, and so on, all the way down the income ladder.

Have we missed something, or is there a reason why no one speaks of social economics?

The free flow of financial credit — our everyday lives depend upon it — is a confidence game. It may be honest, but it’s still a game, one in which nobody knows everything about anybody else’s cards. Ignorance is not only part of the game, it’s the secret of its success. That’s why we’re sorry that a glaring light has been thrown on the Federal Reserve’s discount window, a behind-the-scenes operation that contributed to economic stability merely by existing. Bankers knew that it was there if they needed it; they didn’t need to know who was lining up at it.

Unless we’re persuaded otherwise, our position is that, during the credit crisis that heated up in 2007,  the discount window was a bulwark standing between the nation and its financial collapse. We’re sorry to see that its actions are now being scrutinized for political impropriety when,  as even one critic admits, the partial disclosures that the Fed has had to make pursuant to a court ruling do not support conclusions one way or the other.

Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia University who has studied discount window lending during previous crises, said the Fed had not released enough information for the public to determine whether some of the recipients were propped up inappropriately and should have been allowed to fail more quickly.

“Do we know whether the Fed did that? No, we don’t,” he said. “But the Fed has become more politicized than at any point in its history, and I do worry very much that a lot of Fed discount window lending may just be part of a political calculation.”

We sense that this Times article, by Binyamin Appelbaum and Jo Craven McGinty, does not provide a full context for evaluating the reported inuendo.

We applaud Joe Nocera for pointing out who’s really responsible for the fact that General Electric’s tax department is a profit center.

Is G.E. one of the companies that lobbies for the active financing exception? You bet it is. As Willens nicely puts it, “They are taking advantage of a loophole they helped create.”

But G.E. has also taken the next obvious step: It has managed, over time, to shift billions of dollars in profits from its U.S. income statement to its overseas income statements. Wouldn’t you know it? Most of their profits are also financing related. There is nothing illegal or even unethical about any of this. It’s Congress — the same Congress that is now screaming bloody murder about the deficit — that has paved the way for G.E.’s tax creativity.

We would go further. Who’s really responsible? Any voter who responds to paid political advertising, that’s who.

In response to the announcement by Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith that the City will be in-sourcing jobs from outside contractors — itself a response to last week’s revelations about City Time — the Times rounded up some experts, and as far as we can tell most of them only seem to speak the same language. For sheer rigor, the remarks of Cornell city planner Mildred Warner were a standout.

Rigorous quantitative analysis of every published study from around the world of water delivery and garbage collection (the two most commonly privatized services at the local government level) finds no statistical support for cost savings under privatization. Economic theory would predict this result. Private firms have incentives to reduce quality to enhance profits. Hence careful monitoring is required. But monitoring is expensive and it requires continuing knowledge, within government, of how services are produced.

Many public services are natural monopolies. In these cases, monopoly provision is cheaper than competition. But monopolies require public control. Even in services which initially experience competition, a competitive market erodes after the initial contract. Fully 75 percent of contracts are given to the incumbent without rebidding. For most local government services the average number of alternative providers is less than two. Only one third of the 67 most common local government services have two or more alternative providers in the market. So in many cases, all privatization does is substitute a private monopoly for a public one. There is more potential for public control over a public monopoly.

We’d like to keep an eye on efforts by  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood efforts to coordinate safety programs for oil and gas pipelines — currently a morass and a welter tied up in a Gordian knot. We’re not optimistic that the initiative will accomplish much on its own, but it may serve to highlight the antagonisms of transmission companies on the one hand and federal, state, and local authorities on the other, and let’s not forget about us.

Mr. LaHood said he had met with the executives of major natural gas companies to discuss better surveillance of pipelines and a new replacement schedule.

Cynthia L. Quarterman, the administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said her office did not have the authority to order replacement of pipes unless it found an “imminent hazard.” And, she said, pipes only had to be “fit for service.”

“There is no hundred-year deadline for any piece of pipe,” she said, although companies “have to assure it’s been operated and tested appropriately.”

But Mr. LaHood said “the point of this is to get everybody around the table and say, O.K., another 100 years in the ground is not going to cut it. We’re trying to work with all the stakeholders to reach a conclusion.”

Mr. Swift, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: “Part of the problem is there hasn’t been a focus on the replacement schedule, what we do with these 50 or 70 years down the line. People are aware it’s aging, but it’s a process we didn’t plan for gracefully.”

Narendra Modi, the demagogue who runs the Indian state of Gujarat, has banned Joseph Lelyveld’s new book about Gandhi, even though it has yet to be published in India.

“The writing is perverse in nature,” Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, said of the book after the ban. “It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking.”

India’s law minister, M. Veerappa Moily, said on Tuesday that “the book denigrates the national pride and leadership,” which he said could not be tolerated. Officials “will consider prohibiting the book,” he added.

[snip]

In the interview Mr. Lelyveld said the information about Gandhi’s relationship with Mr. Kallenbach was not his own discovery and was never intended to be the main focus of his book.

“All I can claim is that I dealt with that material more extensively with an eye to the general public than anyone previously,” Mr. Lelyveld said. “But it’s not a central preoccupation. My book is about Gandhi’s struggle for social justice, not his intimate relationships. But he was a complicated man, and the two are linked.”

We couldn’t decide which story seemed most noteworthy, so we’re snipping bits from three items in the Times.

First, Paul Krugman on the Republican Party’s “Mellon Doctrine.”

Here’s the report’s explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: “A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of “educated, skilled workers” — in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers — we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring.

There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to …? I need some aspirin.

For the resolution of this conundrum, we refer Mr Krugman to the piece by Motoko Rich piece in the Business section, “Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs.” Pay particular attention to the disparity between official poverty lines and the actual costs of a half-decent life.

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

“We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States.” “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.”

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The Mellon Doctrine, you see, contemplates a future with more poor people! Which makes perfect sense in an era in which, as Floyd Norris points out, bankers believe that they should not have to assume risks on mortgage loans.

Small banks especially seem to think it is a birthright for them to make money on mortgages without suffering any ill effects if the loans go bad. They argue that they did not cause the last crisis, so they should not have to suffer now.

The founders of many of those little banks — now long dead — would never have thought it possible that such a right could exist. Now it is defended as critical to saving the housing market.

What ought to have been a blessed event is turning into one that will leave a bad smell. Will you wait to buy your copy of The Pale King, the posthumous novel by David Foster Wallace, at your local independent bookstore, where it’s supposed to go on sale on 15 April? Or will you click your way to more immediate possession at Amazon’s or Barnes & Noble’s Web sites?

Amazon and Barnes & Noble were selling the book on their Web sites on Wednesday, long before many bookstores would receive copies. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, part of Hachette, said the official on-sale date for the book was March 22, but the publication date — when the book is available everywhere — remained April 15. (A countdown clock on the Hachette Web site ticks away the days, hours and minutes until April 15.)

“I don’t really understand the confusion,” Ms. Dewey said. “This happens all the time. There’s nothing unusual about it.”

It was a distinction lost on many bookstores, who erupted in protest on Wednesday when they heard that Amazon was already selling the hotly anticipated book.

“Outrageous,” said Zack Zook, the general manager and events coordinator at BookCourt, an independent store in Brooklyn. “If stuff like this keeps happening, booksellers are going to start suing publishers.”

In the mean time, we’re reading Suicide, by Édouard Levé, a French writer who killed himself after handing in the manuscript.

Publicity consultant Alan Oxley and Institute for Liberty president Andrew Langer claim that it’s just a coincidence that the Institute is advocating tariff repeals that would be favorable to Mr Oxley’s client, Asia Pulp and Paper. We’d like to think that Tea Partiers would withdraw from their association with the Isntitute upon learning of its thoroughly un-populist campaign, but we can’t bring ourselves to believe that Tea Partiers are quite bright enough to see through the slick.

Tariff-free Asian paper may seem an unlikely cause for a nonprofit Tea Party group. But it is in keeping with a succession of pro-business campaigns — promoting commercial space flight, palm oil imports and genetically modified alfalfa — that have occupied the Institute for Liberty’s recent agenda.

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government. Yet an examination of the Institute for Liberty shows how Washington’s influence industry has adapted itself to the Tea Party era. In a quietly arranged marriage of seemingly disparate interests, the institute and kindred groups are increasingly the bearers of corporate messages wrapped in populist Tea Party themes.

In a few instances, their corporate partners are known — as with the billionaire Koch brothers’ support of Americans for Prosperity, one of the most visible advocacy groups. More often, though, their nonprofit tax status means they do not have to reveal who pays the bills.

Mr. Langer would not say who financed his Indonesian paper initiative. But his sudden interest in the issue coincided with a public relations push by Asia Pulp & Paper. And the institute’s work is remarkably similar to that produced by one of the company’s consultants, a former Australian diplomat named Alan Oxley who works closely with a Washington public affairs firm known for creating corporate campaigns presented as grass-roots efforts.

Jan Gordinier writes about Bon Yagi, “An East Village Ambassador for Japanese Cuisine.” Mr Yagi owns 11 restaurants in the East Village, and has committed a portion of their profits to Red Cross relief in Japan.

If you have a fondness for Japanese food, especially the unpretentious street grub and lunchbox fare that are a common part of day-to-day life in Japan, it’s likely that you’ve patronized one of Mr. Yagi’s 11 restaurants.

[snip]

All of them joined a growing list of restaurants, including JoJo, SD26, Telepan and Mercer Kitchen, in the Dine Out for Japan Relief campaign, which planned to give to the Red Cross — 5 percent of their profits was suggested — from March 23 to 30.

New York has no Japantown, per se, but in his quiet, deliberate way, Mr. Yagi has dedicated himself to building just such a culinary and cultural vortex, casting himself as its mustachioed Buddhist godfather, reverently known as Yagi-san.

“He’s kind of a pioneer,” said Chikako Ichihara, the president and chief executive of Azix, a marketing and consulting company that helps promote Japanese food and culture. “He brought real Japanese food to New Yorkers.”

Almost every Sunday, the Editor takes his grandson on a walk right through the heart of Yagi-san’s empire. He looks forward to taking the boy inside one of the restaurants, one fine day.

Under the direction of Wellington Chen, a new business development district, which hopes to have city authorization sometime this summer, has been formed in Chinatown. One board member calls the project “long overdue.” Indeed, tourism in Chinatown has never recovered to pre 9/11 levels (Chinatown lies in a district adjacent to the site of the destroyed World Trade Center). But change in Chinatown is harder work than it is elsewhere in an already difficult city.

Ownership is the crux of the problem. Wellington Chen, the executive director of the coming business district, now called the Chinatown Partnership, said buildings of all descriptions, including side-street tenements, are owned by “associations” of Chinese business people as well as families, many of whom have owned all or part of a building for generations. Getting all parties to agree to a sale would be nearly impossible, he said, even if all the owners could be located. Assembling multiple contiguous parcels for new construction, like three or more tenement buildings, would be extremely difficult.

“Chinatown is the Wild, Wild West when it comes to finding out who the building owners are,” said Yvonne Chang, a broker with the Kaufman Organization who is marketing leases at a two-story building at 257 Canal Street.

Landmark status on some buildings is another obstacle to development, as is the significant number of rent-controlled and rent-stabilized housing units in the area. Mr. Chen said about 4,200 of the 5,000 apartments in the neighborhood are regulated. Ousting tenants in any of the regulated buildings is out of the question, even though some building owners would like to see them go so they could raise the rent.

Chinese owners also prefer to do business within the Chinese community, another factor that gets in the way of development. “They won’t go far past who they know, and they know everybody,” Ms. Chang said. “They market among themselves.”

We like the air of paradox in Ms Chang’s comment.

Former butler to “Lady Astor” [sic!] Christopher Ely irons one of reporter Michael Wilson’s shirts. You can sign up for Mr Ely’s class at the French Culinary Institute. The question, though, is: do you take the class yourself, or do you send your butler?

Mr. Ely took one of this reporter’s wrinkled shirts and, before he even plugged in the iron, examined a tag in the shirt with a little symbol of an iron with three dots inside. That indicates how much steam to use.

First, he ironed the inside, or back, of the collar, loath to leave one of those thin creases so commonly seen after a shirt’s trip to the cleaner’s. “That’s bad form,” he said, one of many criticisms he has for dry cleaners, who he said are a crutch for New Yorkers and who he flatly accused of ruining clothes. “The most important thing is your collar.”

Next was the button-hole strip of double fabric, and then the button side, face down. “The trick with the buttons, if you want them to lie flat, you lay them on a towel,” he said. The buttons sank into the plush towel, leaving little indentations.

Next, he ironed the tricky shoulder sections, spread over the pointed tip of his board. The iron, hefty in his hand, did more of its share of the work than its $9.99 cousins found in many apartments, with Mr. Ely constantly tugging at the fabric to keep it tight. The best ironing situation, he said, involves plugging in the iron from the ceiling, so the cord stays out of the way.

He paused to lightly spray the shirt from a water bottle. He wears Brooks Brothers shirts, perfect but for the six little pleats — about five too many for Mr. Ely — that adorn the cuffs.

After ironing the cuffs and sleeves, he finished with the front-left panel, the back and the front right. He buttoned and folded the shirt into a tight square that would have looked at home on a department store shelf.

It took about 20 minutes. And it probably looked better than the ironed shirts of a lot of people who pay other people to iron their shirts. And he hopes those people send him their employees.

The Editor remembers following the same procedure, but he can’t believe that he ever spent twenty minutes on a single shirt.

We applaud President Obama for the liberal pragmatism that informs our engagement with the coalition against Libyan tyrant Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Aaron David Miller, a State Department Middle East peace negotiator during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Obama described a doctrine that, in essence, can be boiled to this: “If we can, if there’s a moral case, if we have allies, and if we can transition out and not get stuck, we’ll move to help. The Obama doctrine is the ‘hedge your bets and make sure you have a way out’ doctrine. He learned from Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The nuclear-power industry isn’t the only one that is up for a re-think in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake.

Among the casualties of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11 were modern communications networks, which proved surprisingly vulnerable. Millions of people in eastern and northern Japan, including Tokyo, lost some or all cellphone service. A total of 1.3 million land lines and fiber-optic links also went dead.

While those interruptions pale in comparison to the human tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami — 27,000 people are dead or missing — the fragility of modern communications has emerged as one of the catastrophe’s sobering lessons.

In a technology-crazed nation where many people were glued to cellphones and accustomed to the Internet’s nearly instantaneous access to information, being cut off has proved disorienting and frightening. Many local governments in the hardest-hit areas, desperate to reach residents with important emergency information, have reached into the past for more tried-and-true means of communication, including radios, newspapers and even human messengers.

Ray Madoff rails against a particularly ghoulish line of traffic in the intellectual property racket: making money from the public images of dead people. Trademarking the deceased is obscene.

Contrary to what the owners of these identities claim, a right of publicity that continues after death does little to protect the reputations of the deceased. American law, unlike that in much of Europe, explicitly and uniformly provides that reputational protections — including libel and slander and the right of privacy — all end at death. The expansion of the right of publicity does nothing to change this.

Instead, it has afforded riches to the heirs of the dead and the companies that represent them. Einstein’s estate has generated $76 million in the last five years. But the dead themselves — particularly those who would have preferred to avoid being marketed as a commodity — may not be so well served.

While people can provide for the postmortem exploitation of their identities, there is no legal mechanism by which they can prevent it. It is a basic tenet of wills law that a person cannot order the destruction of a valuable property interest. Therefore, if Parks had written in her will that she did not want her identity to be marketed, there is a good chance that a court would not enforce those wishes.

We take this occasion to restate our position on intellectual property, which is that it cannot be sold. If you invent something, you can license your idea, but it remains inalienably yours. Your heirs can inherit the right to profit by it (for a limited tiime) but not the right to control its use.

Floyd Norris, writing about the trial of Kerry Killinger and other WaMu executives doesn’t come out and say that the Crash of 2008 was the result of a mad game of musical chairs, but that’s what his column led us to conclude. The pursuit of short-term gains appears to have hidden long-term consequences in plain sight.

What went wrong? The chief executive, Kerry K. Killinger, talked about a bubble but was also convinced that Wall Street would reward the bank for taking on more risk. He kept on doing so, amassing what proved to be an almost unbelievably bad book of mortgage loans. Nothing was done about the office where fraud seemed rampant

The regulators “on the ground” saw problems, as James G. Vanasek, the bank’s former chief risk officer, told me, but the ones in Washington saw their job as protecting a “client” and took no effective action. The bank promised change, but did not deliver. It installed programs to spot fraud, and then failed to use them. The board told management to fix problems but never followed up.

No clearer demonstration of American wrongheadedness can be made: “GE’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” That wrongheadedness extends right to the Times editor who approved the title of David Kocieniewski’s report; because of course it is Congressional cooperation that cuts the mammoth corporation’s tax bill.

The assortment of tax breaks G.E. has won in Washington has provided a significant short-term gain for the company’s executives and shareholders. While the financial crisis led G.E. to post a loss in the United States in 2009, regulatory filings show that in the last five years, G.E. has accumulated $26 billion in American profits, and received a net tax benefit from the I.R.S. of $4.1 billion.

But critics say the use of so many shelters amounts to corporate welfare, allowing G.E. not just to avoid taxes on profitable overseas lending but also to amass tax credits and write-offs that can be used to reduce taxes on billions of dollars of profit from domestic manufacturing. They say that the assertive tax avoidance of multinationals like G.E. not only shortchanges the Treasury, but also harms the economy by discouraging investment and hiring in the United States.

“In a rational system, a corporation’s tax department would be there to make sure a company complied with the law,” said Len Burman, a former Treasury official who now is a scholar at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “But in our system, there are corporations that view their tax departments as a profit center, and the effects on public policy can be negative.”

This isn’t just inequitable; it’s bad for business — unless, of course, you’re in the businss of making money.