Bloomberg Weighs Making a Run for Financial Times

Not long ago, The Financial Times would have been the crown jewel of any media company, instantly conferring prestige and influence on its owner. Now, given the likely bidders, one of the world’s most respected and distinctive financial newspapers could end up as a trophy to help sell more computer terminals.

Michael R. Bloomberg is weighing the wisdom of buying The Financial Times Group, which includes the paper and a half interest in The Economist, according to three people close to Mr. Bloomberg who spoke on the condition of anonymity to divulge private conversations.

Mr. Bloomberg has long adored The Economist, and his affinity for the paper, at least as a reader, has deepened lately. Its bisque-colored pages, once rarely seen in the thick stack of newspapers Mr. Bloomberg carries under his arm all day, have become a mainstay. Friends say he favors its generally short, punchy and to-the-point articles, which match his temperament.

In October, Mr. Bloomberg visited the London headquarters of The Financial Times, a few blocks away from Bloomberg L.P.’s giant new London complex, which is still under construction. When an editor asked if he would buy the paper, Mr. Bloomberg replied, “I buy it every day.”

He has spoken openly with friends and aides about the potential benefits and pitfalls of making such a costly acquisition in an industry he admires deeply as a reader but sneers at as a businessman, these same people said. And he has recently taken to rattling off circulation figures and “penetration” rates for the paper.

“It’s the only paper I’d buy,” he has said to one associate. “Why should I buy it?” he has asked another.

His ambivalence speaks to the troubles facing the newspaper business, and to the complex motivations of the mayor himself. Drawn to power and prominence, Mr. Bloomberg is wrestling with his affection for the paper as its potential publisher and his wariness of an investment that could mar his company’s reputation for achieving outsize profits. Pearson, the parent company of The Financial Times Group, does not break out separate financial results for the paper, but analysts estimate that it loses money. A spokesman for the mayor declined to comment on his conversations about the paper.

For Thomson Reuters, the other likely bidder, the calculation is somewhat different. Unlike Mr. Bloomberg, who started his financial information company in 1982, James C. Smith, president and chief executive of Thomson Reuters, came up through Thomson’s regional newspapers and has ink in his veins. A replica of an old-fashioned printing press is on display in his corner office overlooking Times Square.

But the company has been hurt financially after its newest desktop terminal product struggled to catch on. In the first nine months of 2012, the company reported revenue of $9.88 billion, a 3 percent decrease from the period a year earlier. A company spokesman declined to comment.

The Financial Times could expand the Thomson Reuters brand and give its reporters additional exposure since, unlike Bloomberg, which bought Businessweek in 2009, the company does not own a regular magazine. Thomson Reuters, partly a British company, and The Financial Times also have large footprints in Asia.

But first, the paper needs to be put on the block. Pearson is about to lose two of its top executives, raising speculation the paper could be for sale. Analysts value The Financial Times Group at about $1.2 billion, well within the reach of Bloomberg L.P., which in 2011 had revenue of $7.6 billion, and Thomson Reuters, which posted revenue of $13.8 billion.

The paper has a successful digital strategy, and analysts have said that its strict online pay wall is considered a financial success. But like most newspapers, it is struggling in an industrywide decline in print advertising revenue. In the three months ending Oct. 1, the paper’s total paid circulation exceeded 600,000, more than half of which was from digital subscriptions. In its most recent earnings report, Pearson said it expected profit to decline because of a sluggish advertising market and “the shift from print to digital.”

Marjorie Scardino, Pearson’s longtime chief executive, who once said the paper would be sold “over my dead body,” is departing on Dec. 31. Rona Fairhead, chief executive of The Financial Times Group, will leave at the end of April. Both executives had championed the print businesses. A successor to Ms. Fairhead has yet to be named, though one person close to the company pointed to John Ridding, the chief executive of the paper.

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Interest Groups Push to Fill Margins of Health Coverage

The chiropractors were out in force, lobbying for months to get their services included in every state’s package of essential health benefits that will be guaranteed under the new health care law.

“We’ve been in constant contact with our state chapters, just telling them, ‘Look, you’ve got to get in the room,’ ” said John Falardeau, senior vice president of government relations at the American Chiropractic Association.

The acupuncturists were modest by comparison, ultimately focusing on a few states, like California, where they had the best odds of being included.

“Our profession really didn’t have a million dollars to spend on a lobbyist,” said Jeannie Kang, the immediate past president of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Instead, they mobilized 20,000 acupuncturists and their patients in a letter-writing campaign.

Both efforts seem to have shown results. Most of the roughly two dozen states that have chosen their essential benefits — services that insurance will have to cover under the law — have decided to include chiropractic care in their package. Four states — California, Maryland, New Mexico and Washington — included acupuncture for treating pain, nausea and other ailments. It is also likely to be an essential benefit in Alaska and Nevada, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“To me, six is huge,” said Ms. Kang, an acupuncturist in Los Angeles, who helped coordinate the lobbying effort.

The main goal of the health care law has always been to guarantee medical coverage to nearly all Americans, but as states finalize their benefits packages, it is becoming clear that what is received will depend partly on location.

According to proposals that the states have submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services, insurance plans will have to cover weight-loss surgery in New York and California, for example, but not in Minnesota or Connecticut. Infertility treatment will be a required benefit in Massachusetts, but not in Arizona.

Over all, the law requires that essential health benefits cover 10 broad categories, including emergency services, maternity and newborn care, hospitalization, preventive care and prescription drugs. But there is room for variation in those categories. Whether insurance will pay for hearing aids, foot care, speech therapy and various medications will vary significantly by state.

The Obama administration originally planned to impose a single set of essential benefits nationwide, so groups like Ms. Kang’s lobbied federal officials at first. But last year, amid accusations that the health care law was too rigid, it decided to allow each state to choose its own guaranteed benefits within the 10 broad categories.

The law stipulates that starting in January 2014, the essential benefits will have to be covered by insurance plans offered in individual and small-group markets. These are the plans that people will shop for to comply with the law’s mandate that almost everyone have health coverage or pay a penalty. They will be available through health insurance exchanges, online markets where the uninsured can shop for coverage, often with federal subsidies to help pay for it.

The essential benefits will not be guaranteed to people who get coverage through large employers, but such plans already tend to be relatively generous. In comparison, many plans currently sold on the individual market do not cover maternity care, for example, or mental health services.

For the most part, states are defining their essential benefits as those provided by the largest health plan in their small-group insurance market. In Washington State, for example, that plan covers 12 acupuncture visits and 10 chiropractic visits per year. It does not cover in vitro fertilization, weight-loss programs or routine foot care for anyone except diabetics.

“Everybody really was conscious of the cost impact that the plan was going to have,” said Stephanie Marquis, a spokeswoman for the state’s insurance commissioner. “That’s something we’re working very hard at keeping an eye on and making sure we’re not adding benefits unnecessarily.”

Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, said that while the essential benefit packages vary at the margins, they are similar over all. Every state’s package will cover visits to primary care doctors and specialists, for example, and diagnostic tests like X-rays and blood work.

“To people who care about particular diseases or conditions or provider groups, these don’t feel like the margins,” Mr. Weil said. “But at the end of the day, the core benefits are very standardized, and the differences are at the periphery.”

Some states have declined to choose an essential benefits package, saying that the law does not give them enough latitude. In those states, the default will be the largest plan available in their small-group insurance market, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Gov. Dave Heineman, Republican of Nebraska, chose an insurance plan with a high deductible as his state’s benchmark, reasoning that such lower-cost plans were popular in the state. But the Obama administration recently informed him that the plan did not meet the requirements of the law, he said.

“The point we were trying to make is that the minimum coverage should not be above what people need,” Mr. Heineman said. “The overriding concern is that the cost will be too great.”

Other states delayed choosing a benchmark plan on the grounds that the Obama administration had not provided enough guidance. Last month, the administration published a proposed rule that sought to answer outstanding questions.

The rule makes clear, for example, that insurers can substitute one covered service for another as long as they are in the same broad category and “substantially equal.” It clarifies that pediatric services, one of the 10 required categories, must be provided to everyone 18 and under.

States can still change or choose a benchmark plan, but they are running out of time. They generally have until Dec. 26, when the comment period for the proposed rule will end. So far, 23 states and the District of Columbia have chosen plans, according to Avalere Health, a consulting company.

Interest groups that did not succeed in getting a particular service covered may have another chance to do so. States will most likely be able to change their benchmark plans after 2015. So groups like the Obesity Action Coalition will keep making their case.

“There’s going to be a great deal more effort on this issue,” said Chris Gallagher, a policy consultant for the coalition. “At a minimum, if plans are going to try to exclude obesity treatment services, there must be some kind of exception for medically necessary treatment. It’s a serious medical condition that affects one in three Americans.”

Likewise, Ms. Kang’s group will keep presenting state decision makers with patient testimonials and research studies on the benefits of acupuncture. Its next targets are New York and Florida, which have more licensed acupuncturists than any state except California.

The chiropractors, meanwhile, are focused on California, where the essential benefits package that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in September does not include chiropractic services. Mr. Falardeau said the American Chiropractic Association was still hoping for a change.

“We’re ready, if we have to, to go to war on it,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 10, 2012

An article on Thursday about the way in which benefits under the new health care law will vary from state to state, using information from the Department of Health and Human Services, misidentified a state that has proposed making infertility treatment a required benefit. It is Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.

Read More..

Interest Groups Push to Fill Margins of Health Coverage

The chiropractors were out in force, lobbying for months to get their services included in every state’s package of essential health benefits that will be guaranteed under the new health care law.

“We’ve been in constant contact with our state chapters, just telling them, ‘Look, you’ve got to get in the room,’ ” said John Falardeau, senior vice president of government relations at the American Chiropractic Association.

The acupuncturists were modest by comparison, ultimately focusing on a few states, like California, where they had the best odds of being included.

“Our profession really didn’t have a million dollars to spend on a lobbyist,” said Jeannie Kang, the immediate past president of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Instead, they mobilized 20,000 acupuncturists and their patients in a letter-writing campaign.

Both efforts seem to have shown results. Most of the roughly two dozen states that have chosen their essential benefits — services that insurance will have to cover under the law — have decided to include chiropractic care in their package. Four states — California, Maryland, New Mexico and Washington — included acupuncture for treating pain, nausea and other ailments. It is also likely to be an essential benefit in Alaska and Nevada, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“To me, six is huge,” said Ms. Kang, an acupuncturist in Los Angeles, who helped coordinate the lobbying effort.

The main goal of the health care law has always been to guarantee medical coverage to nearly all Americans, but as states finalize their benefits packages, it is becoming clear that what is received will depend partly on location.

According to proposals that the states have submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services, insurance plans will have to cover weight-loss surgery in New York and California, for example, but not in Minnesota or Connecticut. Infertility treatment will be a required benefit in Massachusetts, but not in Arizona.

Over all, the law requires that essential health benefits cover 10 broad categories, including emergency services, maternity and newborn care, hospitalization, preventive care and prescription drugs. But there is room for variation in those categories. Whether insurance will pay for hearing aids, foot care, speech therapy and various medications will vary significantly by state.

The Obama administration originally planned to impose a single set of essential benefits nationwide, so groups like Ms. Kang’s lobbied federal officials at first. But last year, amid accusations that the health care law was too rigid, it decided to allow each state to choose its own guaranteed benefits within the 10 broad categories.

The law stipulates that starting in January 2014, the essential benefits will have to be covered by insurance plans offered in individual and small-group markets. These are the plans that people will shop for to comply with the law’s mandate that almost everyone have health coverage or pay a penalty. They will be available through health insurance exchanges, online markets where the uninsured can shop for coverage, often with federal subsidies to help pay for it.

The essential benefits will not be guaranteed to people who get coverage through large employers, but such plans already tend to be relatively generous. In comparison, many plans currently sold on the individual market do not cover maternity care, for example, or mental health services.

For the most part, states are defining their essential benefits as those provided by the largest health plan in their small-group insurance market. In Washington State, for example, that plan covers 12 acupuncture visits and 10 chiropractic visits per year. It does not cover in vitro fertilization, weight-loss programs or routine foot care for anyone except diabetics.

“Everybody really was conscious of the cost impact that the plan was going to have,” said Stephanie Marquis, a spokeswoman for the state’s insurance commissioner. “That’s something we’re working very hard at keeping an eye on and making sure we’re not adding benefits unnecessarily.”

Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, said that while the essential benefit packages vary at the margins, they are similar over all. Every state’s package will cover visits to primary care doctors and specialists, for example, and diagnostic tests like X-rays and blood work.

“To people who care about particular diseases or conditions or provider groups, these don’t feel like the margins,” Mr. Weil said. “But at the end of the day, the core benefits are very standardized, and the differences are at the periphery.”

Some states have declined to choose an essential benefits package, saying that the law does not give them enough latitude. In those states, the default will be the largest plan available in their small-group insurance market, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Gov. Dave Heineman, Republican of Nebraska, chose an insurance plan with a high deductible as his state’s benchmark, reasoning that such lower-cost plans were popular in the state. But the Obama administration recently informed him that the plan did not meet the requirements of the law, he said.

“The point we were trying to make is that the minimum coverage should not be above what people need,” Mr. Heineman said. “The overriding concern is that the cost will be too great.”

Other states delayed choosing a benchmark plan on the grounds that the Obama administration had not provided enough guidance. Last month, the administration published a proposed rule that sought to answer outstanding questions.

The rule makes clear, for example, that insurers can substitute one covered service for another as long as they are in the same broad category and “substantially equal.” It clarifies that pediatric services, one of the 10 required categories, must be provided to everyone 18 and under.

States can still change or choose a benchmark plan, but they are running out of time. They generally have until Dec. 26, when the comment period for the proposed rule will end. So far, 23 states and the District of Columbia have chosen plans, according to Avalere Health, a consulting company.

Interest groups that did not succeed in getting a particular service covered may have another chance to do so. States will most likely be able to change their benchmark plans after 2015. So groups like the Obesity Action Coalition will keep making their case.

“There’s going to be a great deal more effort on this issue,” said Chris Gallagher, a policy consultant for the coalition. “At a minimum, if plans are going to try to exclude obesity treatment services, there must be some kind of exception for medically necessary treatment. It’s a serious medical condition that affects one in three Americans.”

Likewise, Ms. Kang’s group will keep presenting state decision makers with patient testimonials and research studies on the benefits of acupuncture. Its next targets are New York and Florida, which have more licensed acupuncturists than any state except California.

The chiropractors, meanwhile, are focused on California, where the essential benefits package that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in September does not include chiropractic services. Mr. Falardeau said the American Chiropractic Association was still hoping for a change.

“We’re ready, if we have to, to go to war on it,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 10, 2012

An article on Thursday about the way in which benefits under the new health care law will vary from state to state, using information from the Department of Health and Human Services, misidentified a state that has proposed making infertility treatment a required benefit. It is Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.

Read More..

John Silva, Maker of ‘Telecopter’ Camera, Dies at 92

Helicopter news footage is common today. But until myriad problems in sending live pictures from a moving aircraft were solved, television broadcasters could not show an eagle’s-eye view of a forest fire, or contemplate aerial coverage of, say, a famous man fleeing the police in a white Ford Bronco.

John Silva made that now-familiar vantage possible in 1958, when he converted a small helicopter into the first airborne virtual television studio.

The KTLA “Telecopter,” as it was called by the Los Angeles station where Mr. Silva was the chief engineer, became the basic tool of live television traffic reporting, disaster coverage and that most famous glued-to-the-tube moment in the modern era of celebrity-gawking, the 1994 broadcast of O. J. Simpson leading a motorcade of pursuers on Los Angeles freeways after his former wife and a friend of hers were killed.

Mr. Silva, who later earned two Emmy Awards for his pioneering technical work, died in Camarillo, Calif., on Nov. 27. His death was confirmed by a spokesman for KTLA-TV, where he worked from 1946 until leaving to become an electronics design consultant in 1978. He was 92.

Mr. Silva, an electronics engineer trained in radar science during World War II, faced three main roadblocks to transmitting black-and-white images live from helicopters. Rotor vibrations distorted the pictures, and sometimes even cracked the transmitter’s vacuum tubes. Directional antennas went haywire when helicopters changed direction suddenly, as helicopters sometimes do. And the camera equipment weighed a ton.

With help from fellow KTLA engineers, though mainly working alone to keep the project secret from competitors, Mr. Silva stabilized onboard cameras with a system of shock absorbers and cushions, designed aluminum parts to replace heavier metals in his equipment and commissioned an antenna that would extend below the chopper and rotate to maintain uninterrupted contact with KTLA’s mountaintop transmitter. By paring and remachining a basic set of broadcast equipment, he reduced it to 368 pounds from 2,000 pounds and distributed the load with precise symmetry throughout the tiny Bell 47G2 chopper leased for the project to prevent listing.

KTLA, the first commercially licensed television station west of the Rockies, faced growing competition in the late ’50s. New network-affiliated stations were scoring scoops with mobile broadcast units like ones Mr. Silva had pioneered, and everyone was fighting to get through increasingly clogged Los Angeles freeways.

The Telecopter was intended to kill the competition.

“If we could build a news mobile unit in a helicopter,” Mr. Silva recalled in a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television, “we could get over it all, get there first, avoid the traffic and get to all the stories before anybody in the competition.”

“It’d be a wonderful thing,” he said.

By the time he began work on his airborne live television, Mr. Silva had already achieved a landmark in ground-level television history. In 1949, he was the technical director at KTLA who rigged the electronic connections — using duct-tape ingenuity and a borrowed generator — that carried what historians consider the first live television broadcast of a breaking news event.

The 27-hour rescue operation in San Marino, Calif., to save Kathy Fiscus, a 3-year-old trapped in an abandoned water pipe 94 feet below ground, was unsuccessful; but the station’s coverage was the precursor to every wall-to-wall television event broadcast since.

The Telecopter’s first flight took place at Los Angeles City Hall on July 24, 1958. It re-established KTLA’s dominance (until competitors put their own helicopters up). And for better and worse, it brought a Hollywood-style excitement to television news.

In the archive interview, Mr. Silva was asked what the first live helicopter pictures showed. They were panning shots, he said — zooming in and out of the L.A. landscape between the station’s Sunset Boulevard studio and City Hall.

Most of what they showed, he added, “was the freeway.”

John Daniel Silva was born in San Diego on Feb. 20, 1920, the youngest of three children of a commercial fisherman, Guy Silva, and his wife, Lottie, a homemaker. He attended M.I.T. for two years, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree after two years more at Stanford.

During World War II, he was a Naval officer who positioned radar defenses in the Pacific.

After the war, he worked for Paramount Pictures as an engineer for an experimental television station, W6XYZ, that later became KTLA.

Mr. Silva’s survivors include his wife, Mary Lou Steinkraus-Silva; three daughters, Patricia Vawter, Kathleen Silva and Karen Samaha; and a granddaughter.

The Telecopter had its greatest moments, predictably, at news events of Cecil B. DeMille dimensions: The 1963 dam break at the Baldwin Hills Reservoir in Los Angeles that sent 250 million gallons of water into surrounding neighborhoods, destroying many homes and claiming five lives. The 1965 Watts riots. The 1961 brush fire that swept through Bel Air, sending Hollywood stars scrambling to their roofs with garden hoses.

In his three-hour interview with the television archive, Mr. Silva never mentioned the 1994 O. J. Simpson freeway pursuit footage he made possible. But in answering a question about the future of helicopter reporting, he made clear that he had no regrets about the Telecopter’s role in creating an increasingly graphic television sensibility.

He would just like the lenses to get longer and the close-ups tighter, he said.

“When they’re doing freeway chases, they need to have a system that can come down in front, and be able to get pictures of suspects in the front windshield,” he said, describing one improvement he hoped to see.

Smiling, he added, “To fill the screen with their wonderful faces.”

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India Ink: A Conversation With: Human Rights Activist Binayak Sen

Binayak Sen, 62, is no ordinary doctor. Few doctors, after all, spend three decades working in a region threatened by what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the “single biggest internal security challenge ever faced” by the country. And that was before Dr. Sen was jailed on charges of “waging a war against the state,” which prompted a group of Nobel laureates to petition for his release.

Dr. Sen was released in 2009, after spending two years in jail, but still faces charges of supporting the Maoists, also referred to as Naxalites, which he denies.

The Maoists have been leading an armed movement to capture political power in 13 states in India over four decades, and claim to be fighting for the poor, dispossessed and marginalized. Dr. Sen ran mobile clinics in the interior of Chhattisgarh, one of the states most affected by the Maoist insurgency. In 2005, he led a 15-member team that published a report criticizing the Salwa Judum, which  Human Rights Watch calls “a state-supported vigilante group aimed at eliminating Naxalites.”

The Chhattisgarh state government alleged that his work, and in particular his association with the Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal,  amounted to helping wage “a war against the state.” Although that charge was dismissed, he was found  guilty of sedition and conspiracy, and sentenced to life imprisonment by a lower court in Chhattisgarh in 2010. He was granted bail by the Supreme Court in 2011 and an appeal against the conviction is pending in the Chhattisgarh High Court.

A group of 40 Nobel laureates described him as “an exceptional, courageous, and selfless colleague, dedicated to helping those in India who are least able to help themselves,” in a 2011 letter appealing for his life sentence to be overturned.

India Ink had several conversations with Dr. Sen, both over the phone and e-mail, to discuss how human rights activism grew from his work as a doctor.

Describe your journey from being a doctor in rural areas to being labeled a Maoist sympathizer.

My work in Chhattisgarh was with village communities, some of the poorest in India, and training health workers to look after their needs. Earlier, I had helped establish a hospital for mine workers in the area. As a logical outcome of my work, I was involved with human rights work, and was the general secretary of the state unit of the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties.

In this capacity I was instrumental in documenting and exposing deaths due to hunger and malnutrition, and to the displacement of over 600 tribal villages by the state-sponsored militia called Salwa Judum, or S.J., in southern Chhattisgarh. Last year, the S.J. was banned by the Supreme Court of India.

But it was in 2007 that I was labeled a Maoist supporter, for reasons best known to the Chhattisgarh state government. I was arrested in 2007 and charged with sedition, as well as under internal security acts, spent two years in jail during the trial, was released on bail by the Supreme Court,  convicted and sent to jail again, before again being released on bail in 2011. My appeal against the conviction is still pending in the state high court.

What was your association with the Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal?

I was approached by Narayan Sanyal’s family to help him with his legal cases and his health needs. In my capacity as a P.U.C.L. activist, I visited him in jail several times in the presence of senior jail officials, as they testified at my trial.

Could you tell us about your time in prison?

My time in prison was a time of deep despair, as I was unable to figure out the logic of the juridical action against me. At the same time it gave me an opportunity to know the stories of many fellow prisoners who were undergoing the same trauma as myself.

I came across many such instances where people had spent substantial amounts of time and were later let go. In some instances the judges have indicted the police for fabrication of evidence and illegal detention, but nothing has happened.

I did not do anything that was, to the best of my knowledge, wrong or illegal.  I didn’t expect anything like this happen to me; I had in fact worked with the government to provide essential services in these areas. After coming out of jail, I have been part of a nationwide process for the repeal of unjust and oppressive laws.

There was no physical intimidation that I faced in jail. However, I was kept in solitary confinement. Life in jail is itself a form of mental intimidation.

Do you consider yourself fortunate that you received a great deal of media attention when you were arrested?

I faced a virulent media trial in Chhattisgarh in the print and electronic media, as well as on the Internet. The ordinary journalist in Chhattisgarh relies to a large extent on government (including police) handouts. It was the contribution of dedicated national journalists who turned their spotlight on the real story.

It was only over a period of time that a campaign against the patent injustice in my case built up, and many prominent citizens at the national and international levels besides sections of national media took a positive view about me.

What is your understanding of the Maoist problem in India? Does their use of violence overshadow the issues they are fighting for?

It is surprising that so much of the public discourse is about the issue of violence. Large sections of the population in the “affected areas” are living in a state of perpetual hunger, to the point of famine, and lack appropriate and basic health care. Their access to common property resources, essential for their survival, is denied to them as a result of state action, to a point where the very survival of entire communities is called into question – but this does not become the center of the discourse.

I have clarified on many occasions that I do not condone the violence either of the agencies of the state or of those who oppose the state.

You were recently part of a conference called “Resist the Silent Emergency” in Delhi; what is the “silent emergency” in India?

The conference to which you refer was mainly devoted to documenting and chronicling widespread fabrication of cases and the use of sedition-like laws to suppress dissenting voices across the country. The silent emergency refers to the suppression of fundamental rights to freedom of thought and expression, without the declaration of an actual internal emergency as in 1975.

You have spoken about the need to establish alternative agencies and systems. What has given rise to the need?

First of all, I want to clarify that I have always engaged with the state to help it function better. I was recently part of the steering committee for health in the 12th five-year plan, and earlier part of the advisory group on structural reforms in health care for government of Chhattisgarh.

However, recent developments make it plain that the planning commission is unlikely to carry out its stated commitments to the universalization of health care. The alternative strategies that most public health workers are advocating, is the universalization of health care and for increased resource allocation in the health and nutrition sector.

Some suggest we need to involve international bodies in improving health care. Does that signal a lack of faith in the country’s own systems of checks and balances?

The distress due to chronic hunger, lack of health care and widespread displacement of the people, who constitute one sixth of mankind, cannot be constrained only by questions of national identity. These are matters of concern for the entire world community.

(This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)

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Financiers Bet on Rental Housing

DAVID N. MILLER, a master of bailouts, steps to the dais and coolly explains how the financial world went crazy.

It is February 2010. The anger behind Occupy Wall Street is building. Flicking through slides, Mr. Miller, a Treasury official working with the department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, lays out what caused the housing bubble: easy credit, shoddy banking, feeble regulation, and on and on.

“History has demonstrated that the financial system over all — not every piece of it, but over all — is a force for good, even if it goes off track from time to time,” Mr. Miller tells a symposium at Columbia University in remarks posted on YouTube. “As we’ve experienced, sometimes this system breaks down.”

But, it turns out, sometimes when the system breaks down, there is money to be made.

Mr. Miller, who arrived at the Treasury after working at Goldman Sachs, described himself as a “recovering banker” in the video.

Today, he has slipped back through the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. This time, he has gone the other way, in a new company, Silver Bay Realty, which is about to go public. He is back in the investment game and out to make money with a play that was at the center of the financial crisis: American housing.

As the foreclosure crisis grinds on, knowledgeable, cash-rich investors are doing something that still gives many ordinary Americans pause: they are leaping headlong into the housing market. And not just into tricky mortgage investments, collateralized this or securitized that, but actual houses.

A flurry of private-equity giants and hedge funds have spent billions of dollars to buy thousands of foreclosed single-family homes. They are purchasing them on the cheap through bank auctions, multiple listing services, short sales and bulk purchases from local investors in need of cash, with plans to fix up the properties, rent them out and watch their values soar as the industry rebounds. They have raised as much as $8 billion to invest, according to Jade Rahmani, an analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods.

The Blackstone Group, the New York private-equity firm run by Stephen A. Schwarzman, has spent more than $1 billion to buy 6,500 single-family homes so far this year. The Colony Capital Group, headed by the Los Angeles billionaire Thomas J. Barrack Jr., has bought 4,000.

Perhaps no investment company is staking more on this strategy, and asking stock-market investors to do the same, than the one Mr. Miller is involved with, Silver Bay Realty Trust of Minnetonka, Minn. Silver Bay is the brainchild of Two Harbors Investment, a publicly traded mortgage real estate investment trust that invests in securities backed by home mortgages.

In January, Two Harbors branched out into buying actual homes and placed them in a unit called Silver Bay. It offered few details at the time, leaving analysts guessing about where it was headed.

“They were not very forthcoming,” says Merrill Ross, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities. As of Dec. 4, Two Harbors had acquired 2,200 houses. Ms. Ross says she couldn’t find out how much Two Harbors paid or the rents it was charging. Two Harbors shares, which recently traded at $11.66, are up about 25 percent in 2012.

Two Harbors now plans to spin off Silver Bay into a separately traded public REIT. The new company will combine Silver Bay’s portfolio with Provident Real Estate Advisors’ 880-property portfolio. Silver Bay will focus on homes in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada, states where prices fell hard when the bottom dropped out.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, Silver Bay said it planned to offer 13.25 million shares at an initial price of $18 to $20 a share. But it’s no slam dunk. While home prices nationwide have begun to recover — they were up 6.3 percent in October, according to a report last week from CoreLogic, a data analysis firm — prices could fall again if the economy falters anew. Millions of Americans are still struggling to hold onto their homes and avoid foreclosure.

“Recent turbulence in U.S. housing and mortgage markets has created a unique opportunity,” Silver Bay said in an S.E.C. filing. The company, which will be the first publicly traded REIT to invest solely in single-family rental homes, says its investment plan will help clear foreclosed homes from the market, spruce up neighborhoods and renovate vacant homes, presumably while enriching its new shareholders. Its portfolio will be managed by Pine River Capital Management, a hedge fund in Minnetonka that has reportedly been buying bonds backed by risky subprime mortgages. Mr. Miller is a managing director at Pine River and chief executive of Silver Bay.

Mr. Miller, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article, citing the pending stock offering.

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New Taxes to Take Effect to Fund Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.

The new levies, which take effect in January, include an increase in the payroll tax on wages and a tax on investment income, including interest, dividends and capital gains. The Obama administration proposed rules to enforce both last week.

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

To help finance Medicare, employees and employers each now pay a hospital insurance tax equal to 1.45 percent on all wages. Starting in January, the health care law will require workers to pay an additional tax equal to 0.9 percent of any wages over $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The new taxes on wages and investment income are expected to raise $318 billion over 10 years, or about half of all the new revenue collected under the health care law.

Ruth M. Wimer, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said the taxes came with “a shockingly inequitable marriage penalty.” If a single man and a single woman each earn $200,000, she said, neither would owe any additional Medicare payroll tax. But, she said, if they are married, they would owe $1,350. The extra tax is 0.9 percent of their earnings over the $250,000 threshold.

Since the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, payroll taxes have been levied on the wages of each worker as an individual. The new Medicare payroll is different. It will be imposed on the combined earnings of a married couple.

Employers are required to withhold Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from wages paid to employees. But employers do not necessarily know how much a worker’s spouse earns and may not withhold enough to cover a couple’s Medicare tax liability. Indeed, the new rules say employers may disregard a spouse’s earnings in calculating how much to withhold.

Workers may thus owe more than the amounts withheld by their employers and may have to make up the difference when they file tax returns in April 2014. If they expect to owe additional tax, the government says, they should make estimated tax payments, starting in April 2013, or ask their employers to increase the amount withheld from each paycheck.

In the Affordable Care Act, the new tax on investment income is called an “unearned income Medicare contribution.” However, the law does not provide for the money to be deposited in a specific trust fund. It is added to the government’s general tax revenues and can be used for education, law enforcement, farm subsidies or other purposes.

Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the burden of this tax would be borne by the most affluent taxpayers, with about 85 percent of the revenue coming from 1 percent of taxpayers. By contrast, the biggest potential beneficiaries of the law include people with modest incomes who will receive Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies to buy private insurance.

Wealthy people and their tax advisers are already looking for ways to minimize the impact of the investment tax — for example, by selling stocks and bonds this year to avoid the higher tax rates in 2013.

The new 3.8 percent tax applies to the net investment income of certain high-income taxpayers, those with modified adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

David J. Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University, offered this example. In 2013, John earns $160,000, and his wife, Jane, earns $200,000. They have some investments, earn $5,000 in dividends and sell some long-held stock for a gain of $40,000, so their investment income is $45,000. They owe 3.8 percent of that amount, or $1,710, in the new investment tax. And they owe $990 in additional payroll tax.

The new tax on unearned income would come on top of other tax increases that might occur automatically next year if President Obama and Congress cannot reach an agreement in talks on the federal deficit and debt. If Congress does nothing, the tax rate on long-term capital gains, now 15 percent, will rise to 20 percent in January. Dividends will be treated as ordinary income and taxed at a maximum rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 15 percent rate for most dividends.

Under another provision of the health care law, consumers may find it more difficult to obtain a tax break for medical expenses.

Taxpayers now can take an itemized deduction for unreimbursed medical expenses, to the extent that they exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. The health care law will increase the threshold for most taxpayers to 10 percent next year. The increase is delayed to 2017 for people 65 and older.

In addition, workers face a new $2,500 limit on the amount they can contribute to flexible spending accounts used to pay medical expenses. Such accounts can benefit workers by allowing them to pay out-of-pocket expenses with pretax money.

Taken together, this provision and the change in the medical expense deduction are expected to raise more than $40 billion of revenue over 10 years.

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New Taxes to Take Effect to Fund Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.

The new levies, which take effect in January, include an increase in the payroll tax on wages and a tax on investment income, including interest, dividends and capital gains. The Obama administration proposed rules to enforce both last week.

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

To help finance Medicare, employees and employers each now pay a hospital insurance tax equal to 1.45 percent on all wages. Starting in January, the health care law will require workers to pay an additional tax equal to 0.9 percent of any wages over $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The new taxes on wages and investment income are expected to raise $318 billion over 10 years, or about half of all the new revenue collected under the health care law.

Ruth M. Wimer, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said the taxes came with “a shockingly inequitable marriage penalty.” If a single man and a single woman each earn $200,000, she said, neither would owe any additional Medicare payroll tax. But, she said, if they are married, they would owe $1,350. The extra tax is 0.9 percent of their earnings over the $250,000 threshold.

Since the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, payroll taxes have been levied on the wages of each worker as an individual. The new Medicare payroll is different. It will be imposed on the combined earnings of a married couple.

Employers are required to withhold Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from wages paid to employees. But employers do not necessarily know how much a worker’s spouse earns and may not withhold enough to cover a couple’s Medicare tax liability. Indeed, the new rules say employers may disregard a spouse’s earnings in calculating how much to withhold.

Workers may thus owe more than the amounts withheld by their employers and may have to make up the difference when they file tax returns in April 2014. If they expect to owe additional tax, the government says, they should make estimated tax payments, starting in April 2013, or ask their employers to increase the amount withheld from each paycheck.

In the Affordable Care Act, the new tax on investment income is called an “unearned income Medicare contribution.” However, the law does not provide for the money to be deposited in a specific trust fund. It is added to the government’s general tax revenues and can be used for education, law enforcement, farm subsidies or other purposes.

Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the burden of this tax would be borne by the most affluent taxpayers, with about 85 percent of the revenue coming from 1 percent of taxpayers. By contrast, the biggest potential beneficiaries of the law include people with modest incomes who will receive Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies to buy private insurance.

Wealthy people and their tax advisers are already looking for ways to minimize the impact of the investment tax — for example, by selling stocks and bonds this year to avoid the higher tax rates in 2013.

The new 3.8 percent tax applies to the net investment income of certain high-income taxpayers, those with modified adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

David J. Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University, offered this example. In 2013, John earns $160,000, and his wife, Jane, earns $200,000. They have some investments, earn $5,000 in dividends and sell some long-held stock for a gain of $40,000, so their investment income is $45,000. They owe 3.8 percent of that amount, or $1,710, in the new investment tax. And they owe $990 in additional payroll tax.

The new tax on unearned income would come on top of other tax increases that might occur automatically next year if President Obama and Congress cannot reach an agreement in talks on the federal deficit and debt. If Congress does nothing, the tax rate on long-term capital gains, now 15 percent, will rise to 20 percent in January. Dividends will be treated as ordinary income and taxed at a maximum rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 15 percent rate for most dividends.

Under another provision of the health care law, consumers may find it more difficult to obtain a tax break for medical expenses.

Taxpayers now can take an itemized deduction for unreimbursed medical expenses, to the extent that they exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. The health care law will increase the threshold for most taxpayers to 10 percent next year. The increase is delayed to 2017 for people 65 and older.

In addition, workers face a new $2,500 limit on the amount they can contribute to flexible spending accounts used to pay medical expenses. Such accounts can benefit workers by allowing them to pay out-of-pocket expenses with pretax money.

Taken together, this provision and the change in the medical expense deduction are expected to raise more than $40 billion of revenue over 10 years.

Read More..

You for Sale: Company Envisions ‘Vaults’ for Personal Data

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Michael Fertik, the founder and chief executive of Reputation.com, at its offices in Redwood City, Calif., where he has amassed a database of information collected on millions of consumers.

“YOU are walking around naked on the Internet and you need some clothes,” says Michael Fertik. “I am going to sell you some.”

Naked? Not exactly, but close.

Mr. Fertik, 34, is the chief executive of Reputation.com, a company that helps people manage their online reputations. From his perch here in Silicon Valley, he views the digital screens in our lives, the smartphones and the tablets, the desktops and the laptops, as windows of a house. People go about their lives on the inside, he says, while dozens of marketing and analytics companies watch through the windows, sizing them up like peeping Toms.

By now many Americans are learning that they are living in a surveillance economy. “Information resellers,” also known as “data brokers,” have collected hundreds to thousands of details — what we buy, our race or ethnicity, our finances and health concerns, our Web activities and social networks — on almost every American adult. Other companies that specialize in ranking consumers use computer algorithms to covertly score Internet users, identifying some as “high-value” consumers worthy of receiving pitches for premium credit cards and other offers, while dismissing others as a waste of time and marketing money. Yet another type of company, called an ad-trading platform, profiles Internet users and auctions off online access to them to marketers in a practice called “real-time bidding.”

As these practices have come to light, several members of Congress, and federal agencies, have opened investigations.

At least for now, however, these companies typically do not permit consumers to see the records or marketing scores that have been compiled about them. And that is perfectly legal.

Now, Mr. Fertik, the loquacious, lion-maned founder of Reputation.com, says he has the free-market solution. He calls it a “data vault,” or “a bank for other people’s data.”

Here at Reputation.com’s headquarters, a vast open-plan office decorated with industrial-looking metal struts and reclaimed wood — a discreet homage to the lab where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb — his company has amassed a database on millions of consumers. Mr. Fertik plans to use it to sell people on the idea of taking control of their own marketing profiles. To succeed, he will have to persuade people that they must take charge of their digital personas.

Pointing out the potential hazards posed by data brokers and the like is part of Mr. Fertik’s M.O. Covert online profiling and scoring, he says, may unfairly exclude certain Internet users from marketing offers that could affect their financial, educational or health opportunities — a practice Mr. Fertik calls “Weblining.” He plans to market Reputation.com’s data vault, scheduled to open for business early next year, as an antidote.

“A data privacy vault,” he says, “is a way to control yourself as a person.”

Reputation.com is at the forefront of a nascent industry called “personal identity management.” The company’s business model for its vault service involves collecting data about consumers’ marketing preferences and giving them the option to share the information on a limited basis with certain companies in exchange for coupons, say, or status upgrades. In turn, participating companies will get access both to potential customers who welcome their pitches and to details about the exact products and services those people are seeking. In theory, the data vault would earn money as a kind of authorization supervisor, managing the permissions that marketers would need to access information about Reputation.com’s clients.

To some, the idea seems a bit quixotic.

Reputation.com, with $67 million in venture capital, is not making a profit. Although the company’s “privacy” products, like removing clients’ personal information from list broker and marketing databases, are popular, its reputation management techniques can be controversial. For instance, it offers services meant to make negative commentary about individual or corporate clients less visible on the Web.

And there are other hurdles, like competition. A few companies, like Personal, have already introduced vault services. Also, a number of other enterprises have tried — and quickly failed — to sell consumers on data lockers.

Even so, Mr. Fertik contends Reputation.com has the answer. The company already has several hundred thousand paying customers, he says, and patents on software that can identify consumers’ information online and score their reputations. He intends to show clients their scores and advise them on how to improve them.

“You can’t just build a vault and wish that vendors cared enough about your data to pay for it,” Mr. Fertik says. “You have to build a business that gives you the lift to accumulate a data set and attract consumers, the science to create insights that are valuable to vendors, and the power to impose restrictions on the companies who consume your data.”

THE consumer data trade is large and largely unregulated.

Companies and organizations in the United States spend more than $2 billion a year on third-party data about individuals, according to a report last year on personal identity management from Forrester Research, a market research firm. They spend billions more on credit data, market research and customer data analytics, the report said.

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Shintaro Ishihara, Right-Wing Japanese Politician, Makes Gains

TOKYO — Shintaro Ishihara has been a rare, flamboyant presence in Japan’s otherwise drab political world for four decades. A novelist turned right-wing firebrand, he has long held celebrity status on the political margins, where he was known for dramatic flourish. He once signed a pact in blood to oppose diplomatic ties with China because of its communist government, and he published a book at the height of Japan’s economic power that lectured his countrymen on the need to end what he considered its postwar servility to the United States.

Now, at 80, Mr. Ishihara is leading a newly formed populist party and has emerged as a contender for prime minister, vowing to turn Japan into a more independent, possibly nuclear-armed nation. While political analysts deem him a long shot, they say the fact that he has gotten this far after decades of pushing what was seen as a fringe agenda is a worrying sign of how desperate this nation is for strong leadership after years of cascading troubles.

With his promises to restore Japan’s battered national pride, Mr. Ishihara has staked out an even more stridently nationalistic position than the current front-runner, Shinzo Abe, the leader of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, who has called for revising Japan’s pacifist constitution. Analysts worry that if Mr. Ishihara succeeds in his bid to become prime minister, he could weaken relations with the United States, yank Japan to the right and damage ties with China, which is already angered by his almost single-handedly rekindling a territorial dispute over an island chain.

But even if in the likely event that Mr. Ishihara loses, they say, his campaign could still have a lasting effect, bringing patriotic populism into the political mainstream of a nation that has shunned such open jingoism since its devastating defeat in World War II.

“This election will be a test of whether Japan is really losing its dovishness,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a politics professor at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. “There is so much irritation at how everything seems to be going wrong, and Japan is losing its pride. Politicians on the right like Ishihara and Abe are trying to fan these flames.”

The rise of the two hard-liners has already contributed to hand-wringing among liberals who are anxious that the foreboding sense that Japan is fast becoming an international has-been has left the Japanese vulnerable to long-suppressed nationalism. Even those who call those fears overblown acknowledge that anti-China feelings, which could be easily exploited, are rising as that country eclipses Japan, builds a formidable military and makes its territorial ambitions clear.

From Mr. Ishihara’s vantage point, those geopolitical realities make now the perfect time for Japan to put him in charge.

“Here I am, the old man who has run amok!” he bellowed to a wave of applause at a recent campaign appearance in front of Shinjuku train station in Tokyo. “I am 80 years old, and I am standing here because I want to break through the indecisive and barren politics that is stifling Japan!”

A tall, bespectacled figure, Mr. Ishihara spent most of his short speech emphasizing what has become the central campaign message of his Japan Restoration Party: offering forceful leadership to end Japan’s long political drift by breaking the grip of bureaucrats and vested interests.

Much of the party’s message, however, has become vintage Ishihara. He goes further than Mr. Abe, calling for an outright scrapping of Japan’s antiwar constitution, written by its postwar American occupiers. He still speaks about ending what he sees as political and cultural subservience to the United States and pledges to resist Chinese territorial appetites, promising to build permanent structures on the disputed islands in a move likely to further antagonize China.

“I cannot allow myself to die until my Japan, which has been made a fool of by China, and seduced as a mistress by the United States, is able to stand up again as a stronger, more beautiful nation,” Mr. Ishihara said last month to reporters, explaining why he resigned after 13 years as Tokyo’s governor to return to national politics. He did so after being asked to lead the fledgling Restoration Party’s slate in this month’s parliamentary election by its founder, the popular mayor of Osaka who did not yet want to run for national office.

So far, polls show that Mr. Ishihara has only limited appeal. His party’s approval ratings are in the low teens, about the same as the unpopular incumbent Democratic Party, but below Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democrats, who poll only slightly better, at around 20 percent. Polls also show that more than half of voters disapprove of Mr. Ishihara and of scrapping the antiwar clause of Japan’s constitution.

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