Op-Ed Contributor: The Urban Fire Next Time

FOR the past several years all the ingredients have been in place for an urban crisis. Unemployment has hovered above 15 percent in many of our most distressed cities. High-poverty neighborhoods have spread beyond cities and into the suburbs. The housing collapse has left large sections of communities boarded up.

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And yet our cities have been relatively quiet. Crime remains at its lowest point since the early 1970s, public housing complexes have not fallen into disrepair, and large numbers of homeless people have not emerged on the streets.

I don't mean to minimize the hardships faced by American families. But the downturn never made its way out of their homes and onto the streets. It has been labeled the Great Recession, but it could also be called the Private Recession.

Compare the current conditions in urban America with those in the early 1980s, when the nation saw a less severe recession, yet neighborhoods were deteriorating and violent crime was much higher. Cities were trying to overcome a range of economic and demographic transformations: the loss of manufacturing jobs, the migration of whites and middle-class minorities out of central city neighborhoods and declining tax revenues.

Meanwhile, cities saw their federal aid decline rapidly as the Reagan administration slashed programs like the Community Development Block Grant and public housing.

The consequences were predictable. Housing agencies were unable to maintain their complexes. Public schools crumbled, police forces were overwhelmed. Public transit deteriorated. It took two decades for many cities to recover.

There are many factors that help explain the difference between now and then, but I believe the primary one is the unpopular, $840 billion fiscal stimulus program in 2009, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

Many of the largest and most important investments made by the "stimulus" went to institutions and organizations that were essential to functioning communities. Abandoned homes did not become hot spots for crime because almost $2 billion went to acquiring, renovating or demolishing them.

Class sizes did not swell and police officers did not disappear from city streets because stimulus money was used to stabilize state budgets, improve underperforming schools and rehire officers for community-oriented policing.

The question is, what comes next, now that the stimulus is over? A historical perspective on urban policy reveals a cycle in which periods of major investment are followed by periods of neglect, disinvestment and decline. This pattern is in the process of repeating.

The early days of the Obama administration saw the announcement of a White House Office of Urban Policy, the unveiling of several high-profile programs to invest in urban communities, and the passage of the stimulus. But the Office of Urban Policy never took off, programs like "Promise Neighborhoods" have been diluted by the political process, and the stimulus money has been spent. In the cycle of urban policy making, we are entering another period of neglect.

To end this cycle requires a shift in the federal approach to urban policy. Our nation's cities and suburbs do not need more initiatives that are unveiled with fanfare and then abandoned a few years later. Urban communities and the institutions within them need a sustained commitment from the federal government, a durable policy agenda with the capacity to generate change in America's most disadvantaged communities.

Such an agenda does not require a vast influx of new money, but it does mean a shift of priorities. For example, the growing segregation of the rich from the poor could be slowed by a federal effort to counter the practice of exclusionary zoning, which allows localities to exclude low-income residents by restricting the types of housing that can be built.

The risks associated with growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood could be mitigated if money being used to imprison our young people went instead to re-integrating former prisoners into society, bolstering connections between the police and community groups and maintaining clean streets and safe parks.

The shortage of affordable, high-quality housing could be addressed if federal money forfeited to the home mortgage interest deduction was instead used to expand the supply and improve the quality of affordable public and private housing.

The Recovery Act provided these types of investments to communities across the country. But almost four years later, joblessness has declined only slightly in many cities, and state tax revenues have only partially recovered.

With the impending cuts to housing, schools, and community organizations from the sequestration, vulnerable communities are in danger of falling apart. A sustained commitment to urban neighborhoods is necessary to end the erratic cycle of urban policy, and to avoid the next urban crisis.

Patrick Sharkey is an associate professor of sociology at New York University and the author of "Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality."

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Letter: Industrial Accidents

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I read with interest and sadness Bruce Machart's April 23 Op-Ed article, "Only an Accident." The loss of life is tragic no matter how it happens, but we cannot chalk industrial catastrophes up to "accident." While incidents like the factory explosion in West, Tex., are often preventable, corporate negligence and poor government oversight drastically increase the risk that they will happen.

When we think of violence, we think of events like the Boston bombing: spectacular and immediate. But preventable industrial accidents also constitute a form of violence, one that often proves much more devastating and persistent. Over time, these incidents create far more death and misery than that caused by bombings, which, while awful and unconscionable, are extremely rare.

Bombs mobilize our fears, but the daily devastation wreaked by corporate negligence is also tragic, and it will become only more so if we allow it to remain invisible.

CASEY WILLIAMS
Durham, N.C., April 23, 2013

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Letters: Does Going to Church Make You Healthier?

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As a seminarian and an admirer of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann's work, I read "The Benefits of Church" (column, April 21) with interest.

While Ms. Luhrmann presents provocative findings about the benefits of worship on mental health, church leaders would be wise to temper their excitement over such positive press.

Faith and liturgy should not only build community but also challenge us to rethink the oppressive structures many of us perpetuate and benefit from. Worship that "improves" us is dangerous unless it also helps us turn outward to serve our neighbors.

JOSEPH PAILLÉ

Princeton, N.J., April 22, 2013

To the Editor:

Do healthy people go to church, or does church make you healthy? If the answer is that church makes you healthy, what is the mechanism? Leaving out divine intervention, what happens in church that produces health?

Economists and other social scientists have examined the relationship between health and social capital, which includes church, social clubs and having a support network of friends. Social capital provides information on health habits, better doctors or hospitals, and reduces stress, which can lead to heart disease and mental problems.

But we must confront the problem of causation. Those who attend church are on average healthier than those who do not: the selection effect. To deal with this, we would need to study the health of those who are randomly assigned to attend church and who do not attend.

Without this evidence, we can only hope that going to church makes us healthier, though it might be a good thing anyway.

RICHARD SCHEFFLER
Madrid, April 22, 2013

The writer is a professor of health economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

To the Editor:

T. M. Luhrmann's claims about the health benefits of attending church simply don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. The evidence that attendance boosts the immune system and lowers blood pressure comes from studies that are significantly flawed.

Moreover, the findings about the health benefits of religious devotion often vary between men and women, and younger and older people, and are overwhelmingly derived from studies of Christians to the exclusion of other religious groups.

Finally, evidence increasingly points to religiosity as a mere marker of underlying physiological and genetic factors that are the true influences of health and well-being. People should attend religious services because they choose to, not in futile pursuit of some specious health effects.

RICHARD P. SLOAN
New York, April 22, 2013

The writer, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, is the author of "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."

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Letter: Endangering Our Beaches

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Re "Dispute in Hamptons Set Off by Effort to Hold Back Ocean" (front page, April 18):

Evidence of how armoring destroys beaches and erodes adjacent beaches can be seen at the bulkheads fronting the developed sections of Great South Bay. There, on both the Long Island and Fire Island shores, the water is deeper right in front of the bulkheads than farther out, and the remaining beaches are no longer contiguous with the bulkheads but inshore of them. We don't want this on the ocean shore!

As for the breach opposite Bellport ("Fire Island's Lucky Break," by Lawrence Downes, The Suburban Life, April 18), it's normal. It is at the exact site of the "Old Inlet" that was there from 1783 to 1827. Indians called such places cupsages, or passages between islands that opened and closed. Since 1690 there have been 12 recorded and mapped. They are vital to bay ecology.

Too many cupsages would destroy Fire Island as we know it. More armoring, such as at Southampton, could destroy the whole South Shore.

ROBERT F. SAYRE
Iowa City, April 22, 2013

The writer is author of the forthcoming book "Fire Island, Past, Present and Future: The Environmental History of a Barrier Beach."

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Opinionator | The Stone: Borges, Paradox and Perception

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

In 1927 a young German physicist published a paper that would turn the scientific world on its head. Until that time, classical physics had assumed that when a particle's position and velocity were known, its future trajectory could be calculated. Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that this condition was actually impossible: we cannot know with precision both a particle's location and its velocity, and the more precisely we know the one, the less we can know the other. Five years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for having laid the foundations of quantum physics.

This discovery has all the hallmarks of a modern scientific breakthrough; so it may be surprising to learn that the uncertainty principle was intuited by Heisenberg's contemporary, the Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, and predicted by philosophers centuries and even millenniums before him.

While Borges did not comment on the revolution in physics that was occurring during his lifetime, he was obsessively concerned with paradoxes, and in particular those of the Greek philosopher Zeno. As he wrote in one of his essays: "Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno."

Kant's antinomies are paradoxes that are inevitably produced when our reason overreaches the boundaries of what we can learn through our senses and makes pronouncements about the world as it is in itself, independent of how it appears to us. His second antinomy, which deals with the divisibility of space, shows that we can infallibly reason both that the basic components of nature are simple, indivisible substances, and that all substances are infinitely divisible, despite the fact that each of these positions blatantly contradicts the other.

On the one hand, Kant says, our reason tells us that as we hone in on a substance we will eventually come to a unit that cannot be further divided, for if we didn't, there would be nothing out of which the world and everything in it is composed. On the other hand, our reason also tells us that such a simple substance, if we find it, occupies space; and if it occupies space, that space must be divisible.

In formulating the antinomies, Kant was inspired by Zeno. Zeno's paradoxes purport to prove the impossibility of motion. To get from Point A to Point B, a traveler must first cross to a Point C halfway between them. Prior to that, though, he or she must cross Point D halfway between A and C, and so on infinitely, such that the traveler never in fact moves.

In both Zeno's paradoxes and Kant's antinomies, an act of observation engenders an apparent contradiction in the very knowledge it produces. As it turns out, it is this very same apparent contradiction that we see at work in the uncertainty principle. While any and all observations contain this inherent paradox, it becomes visible only when pushed to the extreme, either of logic or of the physical world.

In a story published in his 1941 collection "Fictions," Borges created just such an extreme scenario. His character in that story, Funes, has a memory so perfect that he perceives every moment in time as entirely distinct, unrelated to those coming before or after. Consequently, he is incapable of overlooking minor differences in order to connect the impressions of one moment in time to those of the next. He becomes frustrated at our how language generalizes, at how we use the same word, "dog," to refer to a four-legged creature facing one direction at 3:14 and facing another direction at 3:15.

While Borges may have been inspired by examples of prodigious memory, pushed to such impossible extremes the example of Funes reveals the paradox at the heart of any and all knowledge of the world: namely, that there can be no such thing as a pure observation, one free of the changes imposed by time.

What Funes shows is that, at its most basic level, any observation requires a synthesis of impressions over time. Furthermore, the process by which the synthesis takes place, the media through which it is processed, and the entity doing the synthesizing are all essential aspects of the knowledge being produced. This is, in a nutshell, the first part of Kant's 1781 opus magnum, "The Critique of Pure Reason."

Kant had been challenged — awoken from his dogmatic slumber, as he said — by the empiricist David Hume's assertion that we could never infer any certain knowledge about, for instance, laws of causality, because we are limited to knowing what our senses can learn about the world at any given moment. We may know that the sun is rising now, he famously argued, but cannot infer with any certainty that it will rise again tomorrow.

Kant's insight was that, in order for the knowledge we get from our senses at any given moment in time to mean anything, our minds must already be distinguishing it and combining it with the information we get in prior and subsequent moments in time. Thus there is no such thing as a pure impression in time — no absolute, frozen moment in which we know the sun is rising now without being able to infer anything from it — because such a pure moment without a before or after would be nothing at all. Funes from Borges's story could have a concept of "dog" in the first place only if it included the four-legged creature changing positions over time — which is exactly what Borges concludes when he points out that Funes can't really be said to be thinking at all, because to think means to "forget differences, generalize, make abstractions." Not only is it entirely possible to infer from our momentary impressions to prior and later events, but we are in fact always doing so.

For an observer to perceive an entity, he or she must be capable of distinguishing it from the succession of impressions preceding and following it; in order to grasp those impressions as pertaining to the same entity, however, the same observer must be able to take them as a unity despite the differences that succession implies.

This ineluctable fact of observation underlies the paradoxes of motion, the antinomies, and the uncertainty principle. For in all cases, some minimum of motion, distance or velocity — namely, change over time — is required for any observation to take place, even as the observer posits an unchanged point or particle as being subject to that change.

At the level of normal, physical sensation, the fact that these necessary elements of observation exclude one another passes unnoticed. It is only at the highly focused, granular level of quantum physics or in the extreme situations of philosophical fictions that this mutual exclusivity emerges.

Borges continues the passage I quoted at the outset by writing: "we have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false."

It may well be that the uncertainty principle, along with other curious aspects of quantum theory, is another such interstice of unreason, a reminder not that the world we know is false, but that it is always the world as we observe it.

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William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of "In Defense of Religious Moderation" and the forthcoming "The Man Who Invented Fiction: Cervantes in the Modern World."

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Editorial: The E.P.A.’s Keystone Report Card

In the bland, formal language of interagency correspondence, the Environmental Protection Agency has written a trenchant review of the State Department's most recent effort to assess the consequences of building the Keystone XL pipeline. The E.P.A'.s letter, issued Monday, at the end of the public comment period on the department's latest draft environmental impact statement, is hardly a favorable report card.

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The letter commends the State Department for inching slowly toward an understanding of the significant difference in the amount of greenhouse gases caused by the energy-intensive production of Alberta's heavy oil compared with the amount caused by the production of conventional oil. But it wishes that the department had given greater emphasis to the cumulative impact of these gases in the atmosphere over the next 50 years. It also says the department gave short shrift to the corrosive effect of the oil and its dangers to the vital aquifer underlying part of the pipeline's latest route.

But the department's biggest problem, the agency said, is a flawed assumption that distorts all of its analyses: that "oil sands crude will find a way to market with or without" the Keystone pipeline. This is a kind of magical thinking. If this pipeline won't do, the State Department argues, other pipelines will be built or rail traffic will be ramped up. One way or another, the department says, oil sands production will go ahead full speed. For a variety of reasons, not least the cost of rail transportation, the E.P.A. has serious doubts.

One of the things we have found distasteful about the State Department's views from the start is their air of inevitability. But we should not regard the pipeline or the eventual scale of tar sands production as inevitable. Nor should President Obama, whose decision is expected later this year, or Secretary of State John Kerry, who will advise him. In his Earth Day statement, Mr. Kerry, discussing global warming, said that "the science is screaming at all of us and demands action." Blocking the pipeline is one obvious response.

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Editorial: Leaving Behind the Noise of the City

Rashid Perkins still remembers that first day. One summer morning, when he was 7, he left his home in Jamaica, Queens. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, he said goodbye to his mother and boarded a bus that would take him to Needham, Mass., for a two-week stay with a host family, a trip sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Rashid Perkins, 22, a tutor at Middle School 424, in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, participated in summer program sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund.

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He wasn't nervous when he greeted the family, Beverlie and Morris Marks and their son Andrew, who was 5. "I had a big smile on my face," Mr. Perkins, now 22, recalled recently. He spent the rest of his first day outside, learning to play baseball with Andrew. That night, the quiet around him made it difficult for him to fall asleep.

Those two weeks changed his life. Mr. Perkins returned to visit the family every summer for more than a decade and often spent winter breaks with them. "I became part of the family and the community," he said. He decided to attend Hobart and William Smith Colleges after a neighbor of the Markses took Mr. Perkins on a tour of the school, the neighbor's alma mater, in Geneva, N.Y. Mr. Perkins now works as a tutor for at-risk students at Middle School 424, in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. He intends to study education in graduate school, but first he wants to travel. "I consider myself a natural traveler now," he said. "The Fresh Air Fund changed my perception."

The fund hopes to reach 9,000 New York City children this year, with 4,000 staying with host families across 13 states and Canada, and 3,000 going to Fresh Air Fund camps. An additional 2,000 will take part in year-round programs. A two-week stay with a host family costs the fund $890; a session at camp, $1,632. These programs are available only to New York City children whose families cannot afford such trips. The fund hopes to raise $10.6 million by the end of September.

Tax-deductible donations can be sent to the Fresh Air Fund, 633 Third Avenue, 14th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10017, or made online at www.freshair.org. Families who wish to be hosts can write to the same address, fill out a host inquiry online or call (800) 367-0003.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Morose Middle Class

The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.

An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they'll be in a higher class at some point, even more Americans (59 percent) are worried about falling out of their current class over the next few years. In fact, more than eight in 10 Americans believe that more people have fallen out of the middle class than moved into it in the past few years.

The poll paints a picture of a group that is scared to death about its station in life.

By the way, 58 percent of respondents in the poll viewed themselves as either middle class (46 percent) or upper middle class (12 percent).

According to the poll, Americans see a middle class with less opportunity to get ahead, less job security and less disposable income than the middle class of previous generations.

Respondents were most likely (52 percent) to say that losing a job would put them at the greatest risk of falling out of their current class, followed by an unexpected illness or injury in the family.

Most of those polled believe that higher education is the key to staying in the middle class, but many worry about its prohibitive cost and inaccessibility.

And who did most of them say is responsible for making it worse for the middle class? Congress, chief executives of major corporations and big financial institutions.

Of those who blame politicians, there is some evidence that Republicans get more of the blame than Democrats. A CNN/ORC poll released last month found that 32 percent of respondents thought that Democrats favor the middle class compared with 27 percent who believed the same of Republicans. Sixty-eight percent of those polled believed that Republicans favor the wealthy, compared with 24 percent who believed that Democrats do.

This anxiety about a shrinking middle class is understandable.

A Pew Research Center study, "The Lost Decade of the Middle Class," released in August, found that "since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some — but by no means all — of its characteristic faith in the future."

According to the report, "Fully 85 percent of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living."

The report continued:

"Their downbeat take on their economic situation comes at the end of a decade in which, for the first time since the end of World War II, mean family incomes declined for Americans in all income tiers. But the middle-income tier — defined in this Pew Research analysis as all adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median — is the only one that also shrunk in size, a trend that has continued over the past four decades."

It's important to note that many of the people who describe themselves as middle class would not be placed under that rubric by most objective observers. For instance, the Pew study found that 35 percent of people making $30,000 and under and 46 percent of those making $100,000 and over self-identified as middle class. (Meantime, six percent of those making $30,000 and under self-identified as upper class, and six percent of those making $100,000 and over self-identified as lower class. Go figure.)

As Pew pointed out, over the last decade, "middle-tier median household income" fell and median net worth plummeted, and people in the middle class said it was becoming harder to maintain their lifestyles.

To add insult to injury, another Pew report, released this week, found that "during the first two years of the nation's economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent."

As The Washington Post reported in September after the release of a frightening Census report: "The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow."

The wealthy have come surging back, riding record stock market highs, but many in the middle class are at best treading water and at worst sinking.

In his State of the Union speech in February, President Obama said that the "true engine of America's economic growth" is "a rising, thriving middle class."

It certainly looks as if that engine has stalled.

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Opinionator | Disunion: Grant in Pictures

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

The story of Ulysses S. Grant is an American epic practically without equal. Hollywood couldn't dream it up. Even today, Grant's complicated persona and unquenchable will to victory enthrall historians and fiction writers alike.

How can anyone explain, 150 years later, the complicated psychology that drove this great general: despite repeated personal failures, he remained undaunted in his self-confidence. At times horribly crude, he had a precision of language that made him a great leader and, at the end of his life, the author of a classic text in American autobiography. He demanded unconditional surrender from the Confederacy, but offered humility and generosity to those he defeated. He struggled with alcoholism and depression but remained, by all accounts, an exemplary family man.

Ulysses S. Grant simply did not have the look, the flash or the fortune that could stand up to the early 20th century's needs for mythic figures and celebrity. Perhaps that is why, for so long, this signature American hero was derided, lauded for his battlefield victories but little else. For much of the last century, it was the well-heeled Robert E. Lee who was exalted as the formidable general of Arthurian nobility. Grant, a man of humble circumstances, was maligned as a drunkard, a butcher and a frump.

He is, however, a man fit for our more complicated, imperfect times. His hard, complex life made him understand that the war itself was to be hard and complex; he knew that slavery bore no easy answer, and that the chosen one, armed conflict, would bring unspeakable horrors to the land. But it was, he recognized, the only way forward.

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Disunion Highlights

Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.

This vision, combined with a clarity of both strategic and tactical leadership, simplicity of organization and command, and the ability to connect with and move troops effectively, made the faltering Union Army victorious. As with the institution, so with the man: on the verge of destitution at the outset of the conflict, three years later Grant was given the military's highest rank, lieutenant general.

Grant's story is ultimately inexplicable. Despite volumes that I have read about the man, I still do not understand the drive that made this hero. Thus, I embarked on a photographic journey to make an elegy, to capture the essence in those places made great by his indomitable spirit. By doing so, I hope to come to a greater understanding of this American hero hidden in plain sight.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

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Charles Traub, a photographer, is the chairman of the masters in fine arts program in photography, video and related media at the School of Visual Arts. Images courtesy of the photographer and Gitterman Gallery.

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Taking Note: The Boston Bombing and Immigration

In the days since the Boston marathon attack, a number of Republican lawmakers have demanded a delay in immigration reform because the two bombers were fairly recent immigrants.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid on April 22 to say:

"We should not proceed until we understand the specific failures of our immigration system. Why did the current system allow two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism? Were there any safeguards? Could this have been prevented? Does the immigration reform before us address this?"

Actually, neither brother immigrated from Chechnya. The ethnically Chechen Tsarnaevs came here from neighboring Dagestan. And when did the United States start excluding immigrants from dangerous places? Seems to me that they fall into the categories of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," not to mention "wretched refuse" of teeming shores and the "homeless, tempest-tossed."

Nevertheless, Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa has also said that "we need to take a look at the big picture" before proceeding with immigration reform.

So, let's look at the big picture. The slain older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had a green card, while the surviving younger brother, Dzhokhar, is a naturalized citizen. As I said, they both arrived here fairly recently.

But then, so did Lu Lingzi, one of the three people killed in the explosions. She was from China, a graduate student at Boston University who played piano and liked dogs and blueberry pancakes.

The Tsarnaevs' 26-year-old carjacking victim was also born in China. According to a Boston Globe story on his harrowing experience "his quick-thinking escape…allowed police to swiftly track down" the brothers, "abating a possible attack" on New York City.

Guess who else was foreign born? The gas station clerk who sheltered the carjack victim and called 911. His name is Tarek Ahmed. He is 45 years old,. He told a Times reporter, Wendy Ruderman, that he is Muslim and came here from Egypt seven years ago.

Mr. Ahmed also told The Times: "I love this country. My heart goes out to everybody who is affected by this."

The story of the Boston marathon attacks is not just about two immigrant brothers suspected of committing a horrific act of violence. It is also about the foreign residents and immigrants they victimized and those who assisted in their capture.

The "big picture" is the same as it ever was: Visa shortages and the millions of people living in the shadows, doing jobs no one else wants.

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Letter: Defending the Indigent

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Re "Sequestration of Justice" (editorial, April 12):

Sadly, while it is widely recognized in this 50th-anniversary year of the historic Gideon decision that indigent defense is in crisis across the country, until the recent budget cuts that was not true in the federal courts.

That system is viewed as the gold standard. It is a hybrid system that provides adequately resourced defenders and panels of private lawyers who are among the most talented and dedicated advocates. There is simply no basis for the unsubstantiated assertion that panel lawyers are less skillful and effective than public defenders.

A healthy system requires the participation of both public and private defenders, and adequate resources and money for both. The alternative is the excessive caseloads and resulting assembly-line justice and the wrongful convictions that are so pervasive in many states.

Both the judiciary and Congress have a duty to prevent that from happening in the federal courts.

NORMAN L. REIMER
Executive Director, National
Assn.
of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Washington, April 12, 2013

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Letter: Q. and A. at Bush Museum

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To the Editor:

Re "Rewinding History, Bush Museum Lets You Decide" (front page, April 21): While I'm pleased to learn of the interactive question-and-answer approach at the new George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Texas, here are some questions visitors are unlikely to be asked:

Was this man fairly elected? Was he prepared for the presidency? How many of his "crises" in office were self-inflicted? Was America better off when he left office? Did he raise America's stature on the world stage?

I know how I'd vote, but I wonder if my votes would be fairly counted.

BRUCE WATSON
Leverett, Mass., April 21, 2013

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Letter: Ending Sex Trafficking

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To the Editor:

In "Free Speech and an Anti-Prostitution Pledge" (editorial, April 23), you use a free speech argument to oppose the United States government's requirement that organizations that receive federal funds have a policy opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.

The issue is actually human rights. As lead counsel on the amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of the existing policy, I, along with at least the 46 other human rights organizations that signed on to our brief, know well that the prostitution industry, the endpoint of sex trafficking, must be opposed if we stand any chance of ending sex trafficking. Not to do so would be the equivalent of working to free the slaves without working to dismantle the slavocracy.

NORMA RAMOS
Executive Director
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
New York, April 23, 2013

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Letters: Despite Flaws, Bronx Courts Aim for Swift Justice

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Re "Broken Justice in the Bronx" (editorial, April 22):

I strongly agree that it is indeed urgent to find a permanent solution to the case backlog. But you place far too much responsibility on my office. We do not control court calendars. We do not bring cases to trial "five years after the crime."

We are permitted to try cases when both sides are ready and the courts can accommodate us. We always have enough ready cases to fill vacant court parts. If we caused a five-year delay, speedy trial laws would lead to dismissal of the case or release of the defendant.

You use extreme examples to make your point, but it should be noted that swift trials for defendants and victims is our goal. It is the prosecution that usually suffers from lost witnesses and fading memories.

What also suffers are the personal schedules of diligent lawyers, who are at the mercy of defense and court actions that can sometimes result in lengthy periods of multiple and rescheduled trials.

The statistic about the conviction rate in Bronx jury trials is based on 3 percent of our cases. The more telling statistic is that in 2011, 88 percent of all indicted defendants were convicted by plea or trial. Furthermore, since 1990, Bronx violent crime is down 73 percent.

For decades, I have been requesting additional judges. Until the Legislature and the executive respond, we will cooperate with the court in the continuing struggle to coordinate the movement of cases to trial.

ROBERT T. JOHNSON
District Attorney
Bronx, April 22, 2013

To the Editor:

The crisis facing the Bronx County Courthouse is a symptom of a deeper ailment: the failure of harsh "tough on crime" policies that have led to the mass incarceration of millions of people, disproportionately from poor African-American and Latino communities.

In 1963, when the Supreme Court expanded the right to counsel in Gideon v. Wainwright, there were 217,000 people in prison. Today, our country incarcerates about 2.3 million people. The criminal justice system, and specifically indigent defense, has not been financed to keep pace with this explosive growth.

The country should invest in courts and public defenders to protect the right of both crime victims and the accused to a speedy and fair trial. We should also analyze criminal laws to determine which petty offenses can be reclassified or removed without affecting public safety. Ending mass incarceration is the only way to fix a justice system stretched far beyond capacity.

THOMAS GIOVANNI
New York, April 22, 2013

The writer is director of the Community-Oriented Defender Network at the Brennan Center for Justice.

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Letters: The Joy (and Despair) of Cooking

To the Editor:

In "Pollan Cooks!" (column, April 18), Mark Bittman urges us all to cook from scratch and leave prepared foods on the store shelf. Late in my life, I've learned to do that, with tremendous personal satisfaction.

As a retiree, I have time. I had to get over fear of cooking (burning, overseasoning, menu timing). But what about the many who feel too tired or too pressed?

You should start small. Master an easy recipe that you like, and cook it once a week till habits form and confidence builds. Add another recipe involving different techniques; master that. Begin to substitute ingredients in the recipes you've practiced.

As you take small risks and observe altered outcomes, you'll be enjoying the rewards of kitchen creativity. You'll decide to cook more regularly. (You'll buy a decent knife and a cast-iron skillet!) You could end up with a joyous hobby. And live longer.

BLANCHARD HIATT
Hallandale, Fla., April 18, 2013

To the Editor:

Michael Pollan is right. Mark Bittman is right. I know that they're right, and yet I will not cook.

Even though I know I should, I will not cook, beyond the intermittent grilled cheese or the odd lasagna (both bitterly resented for the brief time I spend preparing them).

Why won't I cook? Because I hate cooking. I have always felt that people who like to cook genuinely cannot understand people who hate to cook, who would rather be doing anything else; they always qualify our professed dislike, as Mr. Bittman does when he writes that people "say" that "they just don't like it."

I don't care how easy it is. I'm not claiming merely to not like cooking; I honestly can't stand it. For me and for many people like me, it's not a matter of economics or time management or gender or education.

It's a choice, and like so many other choices that people make, it may be wrong, it may be harmful, I may be doing myself and my children a disservice. But I still won't cook, and I'm really tired of the moralizing legions of cooking enthusiasts telling me that I must.

WENDY SCHOR-HAIM
Jersey City, April 18, 2013

To the Editor:

Mark Bittman quotes the author Michael Pollan as saying we need to "rebuild a culture of cooking," and "we need to bring back home ec, but a gender-neutral home ec."

Children are not learning how to cook at home or at school. The schools have forgotten to teach the basics. With the teaching of home ec must come an understanding of basic nutrition and why it is important to learn to eat and cook healthful foods, and maybe to learn what a portion size really is.

Perhaps now could be the time to encourage families and schools to teach children the most basic of skills: to be able to provide their own healthful, home-cooked meals for a lifetime.

AVIS R. WALS
Rye Brook, N.Y., April 18, 2013

The writer is a registered dietitian.

To the Editor:

Mark Bittman writes that big food companies have alienated us from the beauty, fun and health benefits of home cooking. But as a home cook (I love to cook and make virtually everything my family eats from scratch), I don't recognize myself in Mr. Bittman's definition of some iconic home cook.

I bake my own bread, but it's often white, not whole grain. I rarely buy organic (too expensive). And while Mr. Bittman says home cooks aren't going to choose to make their own French fries (too much trouble), that's my family's favorite dish.

Please, give us home cooks a break. Home cooking has many benefits — it's lower cost, generally more healthful and tastes better — but a mystical, organic, locally sourced experience isn't one of them. Not in my house anyway.

YVETTE ALT MILLER
Northbrook, Ill., April 18, 2013

The writer is the author of "Angels at the Table: A Practical Guide to Celebrating Shabbat."

To the Editor:

If we Americans have strayed so far from fundamentals as to need a reminder about the benefits of home cooking, I'd add that kitchen work, even at the simplest level, is full of life lessons that transcend the food.

Cooking rewards planning, punctuality, stick-to-itiveness and, when one is caught short, ingenuity; it promotes satisfaction in a job well done and instills forbearance when things don't go as planned. Those are among the building blocks of good character.

As a former copy chief at Saveur and Bon Appétit magazines, I've been fortunate to work with food editors and test-kitchen staffers. I've found that crowd ranks high in equanimity, perhaps because their food-related tasks are a link with the essential practicalities of life.

Put in full context, the savings and good nutrition that come with home cooking almost amount to gravy.

DOROTHY IRWIN
Brooklyn, April 21, 2013

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Letter: Birth Control in Drugstores

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The answer to the question "Is It Time for Off-the-Shelf Birth-Control Pills?" (news analysis, Sunday Review, April 21) is a resounding yes. Not only is it medically unnecessary to require a prescription for birth control pills, but also a doctor's visit is costly and adds a hurdle that can delay women from getting the contraception they want and need.

It's very common to see women in my office who would have been on the pill earlier if they didn't need to scrape together the associated costs for a visit. But as we move forward with this critical conversation, we must keep an eye on other new costs that could arise.

When a product moves from prescription to over the counter, the cost to the patient can often double or triple, given that over-the-counter drugs are not typically covered by health insurance. This may put the pill out of reach for the average woman. It will be critical to keep the cost in check; otherwise, we risk doing a disservice to the very women we seek to help.

DOUGLAS W. LAUBE
Board Chairman
Physicians for Reproductive Health
Madison, Wis., April 22, 2013

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Letter: Wounded in Boston

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To the Editor:

Re "For Wounded, Daunting Cost; For Aid Fund, Tough Decisions" (front page, April 23):

It seems to me that all medical care, rehab and basic living expenses for the victims of last week's Boston Marathon attack should be paid and guaranteed for life by the federal government, as needed.

If we can bail out banks and wage wars that run up huge deficits, we can surely take care of our own, wounded in an act of terrible violence at a public event.

THEA PANETH
Arlington, Mass., April 23, 2013

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Letter: Resistant Bacteria in Meat

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Re "Report on U.S. Meat Sounds Alarm on Resistant Bacteria" (news article, nytimes.com, April 17), about the Environmental Working Group's interpretation of government data on antimicrobial resistant bacteria in meat:

The National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System tests a variety of bacteria against a battery of antibiotics to examine resistance trends over time. But some data may have limited direct medical relevance, and it's important to consider which drugs are used to treat infections and which bacteria actually cause food-borne illness. Enterococcus, for example, is not known to cause food-borne illness.

Antibiotic resistance is a serious and complex issue. It is an oversimplification to conclude that resistance in any bacterium is problematic for human health. Some bacteria are naturally resistant to certain drugs.

Also, describing bacteria that are resistant to one, or even a few, drugs as "superbugs" is inappropriate. Rather, "superbugs" are pathogens that can cause severe disease and are very difficult to treat.

It is critical that we continue to minimize antimicrobial resistance and promote appropriate and judicious use of antimicrobials in both humans and animals.

BERNADETTE DUNHAM
Director
Center for Veterinary Medicine
Food and Drug Administration
Rockville, Md., April 22, 2013

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Letters: The World Is Watching: A Russian Blogger’s Trial

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Readers of Bill Keller's April 22 column, "A Blogger on Trial," have to be outraged, particularly those of us who endured the tactics of the K.G.B. when Vladimir V. Putin was one of its hired guns. I was the CBS News correspondent in Moscow from 1972 to 1974. Just as Mr. Keller points out, the arrest and trial of Aleksei Navalny smell of a done deal, or so we old hands would assume.

The Kremlin will no doubt expect its handpicked federal Investigative Committee to provide unfounded evidence that Mr. Navalny's crusade against corruption at the highest levels of the Russian government is false and supported by Western stooges. That's the kind of knee-jerk reaction President Putin levels at any criticism of him or his cronies.

He will no doubt claim that the investigative work of Mr. Navalny, a lawyer, is that of scoundrels. As my wife of 52 years, a wise observer of character during our Moscow days, later reminded me, Mr. Putin, having manipulated his way into power, bears a chilling resemblance to a sinister figure of czarist days: Rasputin.

MURRAY FROMSON
Los Angeles, April 23, 2013

The writer is professor emeritus at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California.

To the Editor:

I read with great interest and a touch of pride statements by Vladimir Markin, the Russian Investigative Committee spokesman, that Yale University somehow fomented the antigovernment activities of Aleksei Navalny, an internationally admired champion of transparency and the rule of law.

Mr. Navalny spent the fall of 2010 in New Haven as a Yale World Fellow, a program intended to cultivate and inspire a network of globally engaged leaders committed to positive change. At Yale, Mr. Navalny was enriched through spirited debate with World Fellows colleagues, faculty and students, which provided a global perspective from which he grew to appreciate the devastating effects of corruption on society.

We at the World Fellows Program are unabashedly inspired, but not surprised, by Mr. Navalny's rapid ascent to political relevance after returning to Russia. Although the program claims no credit for his achievements, the 238 Yale World Fellows representing 81 countries applaud his courage and selfless dedication to democratic reform.

MICHAEL CAPPELLO
Director, Yale World Fellows Program
New Haven, April 22, 2013

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Op-Ed Contributors: Make Wall Street Choose: Go Small or Go Home

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PROGRESSIVES and conservatives can debate the proper role of government, but this is one principle on which we can all agree: The government shouldn't pick economic winners or losers.

In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the government stepped in and decided which Wall Street banks were so large and interconnected that they would receive extraordinary help from the government to enable them to survive. They were deemed, to use a now ubiquitous phrase, too big to fail. Meanwhile, smaller banks in communities across the country, including Cleveland and Covington, La., in the states we represent, were allowed to fail. They were, evidently, too small to save.

Today, the nation's four largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — are nearly $2 trillion larger than they were before the crisis, with a greater market share than ever. And the federal help continues — not as direct bailouts, but in the form of an implicit government guarantee. The market knows that the government won't allow these institutions to fail.

It's the ultimate insurance policy — one with no coverage limits or premiums.

These institutions can then borrow and lend money at a lower rate than regional banks, Main Street savings and loan institutions, and credit unions. This implicit taxpayer subsidy has been confirmed by three independent studies in the last year; one of them estimated it at $83 billion per year. We have, in essence, a financial system that rewards banks for their size, not the quality of their operations. It's a "heads the megabanks win, tails the taxpayers lose" scenario, one that discourages innovation and competition and is distinctly un-American.

 How did we get here? When the government established the Federal Reserve in 1913 as a lender of last resort, to mitigate the severity of financial panics, and then, 20 years later, created deposit insurance in response to the Depression, those protections were intended for commercial banks that provided savings products and loans to American consumers and businesses. At that time, most banks had shareholder equity equal to 15 to 20 percent of their assets.

 In the ensuing decades, the expanding federal safety net allowed financial institutions to depend less and less on their own capital. Federal support was stretched far beyond its original focus, as successive generations of lawmakers and regulators allowed financial institutions to enter the business of insurance, securities dealing and investment banking.

We want to reverse this dangerous trend with bipartisan action aimed at ending "too big to fail" in a practical, responsible fashion. On Wednesday, we will introduce legislation to ensure that all banks have proper capital reserves to back up their sometimes risky practices — so that taxpayers don't have to. We would require the largest banks to have the most equity, as they should.

 Our bill aims to end the corporate welfare enjoyed by Wall Street banks, by setting reasonable capital standards that would vary depending on the size and complexity of the institution. Economic and financial experts on both the left and the right agree that capital is a vital element of financial stability. Adequate capital levels lower the likelihood that an institution will fail and lower the costs to the rest of the financial system and the economy if one does.

Unfortunately, existing capital rules are insufficient to prevent another crisis and are either too complex to administer or too easy to manipulate. Andy Haldane, the executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, has estimated that an average large bank would have to conduct more than 200 million calculations to figure out whether it meets the capital regulations under the so-called Basel II framework, a set of international standards that banking regulators use to determine how much capital banks need at their disposal to guard against risk.

A new set of standards known as Basel III is still being implemented. But it would take years to finalize, and even the new proposed standards are too weak: in many scenarios, for every $1 of equity a bank used, it could borrow $24. That means that the bank could become insolvent if its assets declined by as little as 4 percent. As we know from the housing meltdown, that is far too narrow a margin of error.

Senators Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, are members of the Senate Banking Committee.

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Letter: Do the Police Belong in Our Public Schools?

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Re "With Police in Schools, More Children in Court" (front page, April 12): Stationing police officers in public schools clearly causes the criminalization of routine misbehavior. Last school year, 882 students were arrested in New York City public schools. Another 1,666 children were issued tickets. These children's "crimes" ranged from drawing graffiti to possessing marijuana. Serious felony arrests were rare.

But the introduction of our children to the criminal justice system is only one of the harms resulting from the introduction of the police into our schools; it also subjects children to unnecessarily violent and frightening confrontations with the police.

The New York Civil Liberties Union's class-action lawsuit challenging the N.Y.P.D.'s aggressive presence in New York City schools includes numerous incidents in which children were needlessly manhandled, slammed against walls and thrown to the floor in incidents that began as minor disciplinary infractions.

Police officers in city schools are guided by policies and practices that may be suitable for fighting crime on the streets but are completely inappropriate for working with children in a learning environment. By ignoring the important differences between patrolling the streets and monitoring school hallways, a police presence can make schools less safe for students.

Ultimately, authority over school safety belongs in the hands of professional educators, who possess the skills and the training to manage children effectively.

ALEXIS KARTERON
Senior Staff Attorney
New York Civil Liberties Union
Hempstead, N.Y., April 12, 2013

To the Editor:

There are alternatives to meting out punishment that treats our schoolchildren like criminals. Instead of sending students to the principal's office or worse — calling the police into classrooms to handle disorderly conduct — schools can equip their teachers with tools proved to defuse disruption before it takes over.

Practices developed by Dr. Geoff Colvin at the University of Oregon, for example, enable teachers to manage and correct antisocial behavior before it escalates into something unsafe for everyone. And cooperative learning techniques not only encourage children to work with one another, but they also build trust and communication skills that cut down fights.

The key is training every adult in a school, not just a few, and the children as well, in these strategies that create a safe and healthy learning environment for all. We want children to spend more time in the classroom learning, not in lockdown.

PAMELA CANTOR
New York, April 17, 2013

The writer, a psychiatrist, is president and chief executive of Turnaround for Children, a nonprofit that works with low-performing public schools.

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Editorial: A Confirmation of Marilyn Tavenner Is Overdue

The Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to hold a long-overdue vote on Tuesday on President Obama's nominee to lead the embattled agency responsible for overseeing Medicare, Medicaid and the implementation of health care reforms. The committee ought to set aside its deep partisan divisions and unanimously endorse Marilyn Tavenner to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The full Senate should then confirm her.

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Ms. Tavenner, a nurse, experienced hospital administrator and former state health official, has performed capably as the acting administrator for 16 months. She was first nominated for the post in December 2011, but Republican antipathy to the agency's former administrator, Donald Berwick, Republican determination to undermine the health care reform law and insufficient votes to overcome a filibuster persuaded Democrats to shy away from a confirmation vote during a presidential election year.

Now that many senators seem willing to consider Ms. Tavenner on her own considerable merits, not as a pawn in bigger political struggles, there is no good reason to deny her the added authority that support by the full Senate would bring.

Some Republicans have high regard for her. Representative Eric Cantor, a Republican of Virginia and the House majority leader, worked with Ms. Tavenner when she led his state's health and human resources department; he has testified on her behalf before the Senate panel. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the committee, considers her "a bright and capable nominee and absolutely will support her," according to his staff. We can only hope that other Republicans follow their lead.

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Editorial: Free Speech and an Anti-Prostitution Pledge at the Supreme Court

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That law prohibits the use of any government money to "promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution." But it also goes beyond that reasonable provision to require almost all recipients of funds to "have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution" — to make an anti-prostitution pledge — and to refrain from any speech the government deems "inconsistent with" the policy.

On Monday, in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether this provision violates the recipients' First Amendment right to freedom of expression. It clearly does by requiring them to speak and advocate the government's position, without the option of staying silent. This provision could also hurt outreach programs by undermining trust with sex workers, who may avoid seeking help from organizations with a declared anti-prostitution agenda.

The government contends that placing a condition on federal dollars is a legitimate way to promote its policies and those who do not want to make an explicit pledge can avoid it by not taking government money.

While the Supreme Court has said organizations receiving federal money can be restricted from different forms of expression, like talking about abortion as a medical option, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said correctly in 2011 that the anti-prostitution speech provision "pushes considerably further and mandates that recipients affirmatively say something" by declaring their opposition to prostitution.

Compelling that speech is unconstitutional, as are other forms of compulsion by government, like requiring schoolchildren to salute the flag as a condition of going to public school, which the Supreme Court rejected in a landmark case as "official control" over personal beliefs.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. said at Monday's oral argument, "I'm not aware of any case in which this court has held that it is permissible for Congress to condition federal funding on the recipient's expression of agreement with ideas with which the recipient disagrees." He called that "a dangerous proposition."

The Justice Department initially said the condition "cannot be constitutionally applied to U.S. organizations" and it was not enforced. Then the department, saying that view had been tentative, changed its mind. The Supreme Court should affirm the appeals court and rule that the First Amendment prohibits this form of official control.

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Editorial: More Help for Syrian Rebels

There was more horror in Syria over the weekend, where scores of bodies, most of them civilians, were discovered in a Damascus suburb. The victims are believed to have died in a weeklong offensive by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, who seems to have no misgivings whatever about a slaughter, including the use of airstrikes and missiles, that has claimed more than 70,000 lives so far during two-and-a-half years of war.

Long after Western governments predicted he would be gone, Mr. Assad is hanging on even as his country unravels, deepening sectarian divisions, expanding the fighting across borders and forcing an estimated one million Syrians to flee to neighboring countries. There are increasing fears about whether the country can hold together, whether the fighting will destabilize its neighbors and whether, when all is said and done, extremist groups with connections to Al Qaeda who have been among the best anti-Assad fighters will emerge on top.

Eager to find ways to speed Mr. Assad's fall, or at least change his calculations, President Obama is edging, cautiously but appropriately, toward greater support for the rebels. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that Washington would double aid to the opposition's military wing by providing an additional $123 million in "nonlethal" assistance like body armor and night-vision goggles. Some $385 million in humanitarian aid had already been committed.

The president has wisely resisted calls to supply American weapons and to intervene directly. He should continue to do so. Nevertheless, in recent months, the C.I.A. has helped Arab governments and Turkey airlift arms and equipment to the rebels and provided training. The agency also vetted rebel groups to ensure that only moderates receive those supplies.

Such caution makes sense, not least because the administration itself is not unanimous on whether more aid is a good thing. Mr. Kerry sees opportunities in the opposition, while Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned of the risks of deeper involvement with opposition groups whose loyalties to the West, and a moderate course, are suspect.

A weekend meeting in Istanbul of 11 countries committed to aiding the opposition sought to address some of those problems. Mr. Kerry said donor nations agreed to funnel all aid through the rebel military council to prevent it from falling into the hands of extremist groups. The rebels also renewed their promises to embrace minorities who have backed Mr. Assad, build a pluralistic government and forgo postwar reprisals.

Meanwhile, the European Union on Monday eased sanctions to allow European importers to buy oil from the Syrian opposition, which controls some territory with oil deposits. This may have little practical effect given the country's battered infrastructure, but it could boost the opposition's credibility and finances. The European Union should think twice about letting its arms embargo expire because that could open the door to Britain and France providing the rebels with lethal aid.

Assisting the rebels is not the whole answer. Mr. Obama and Europe should keep trying to persuade Russia to abandon its unconscionable support for Mr. Assad and to work cooperatively to stabilize the region.

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Editorial: Credit History Discrimination

People fall behind on their bills for many reasons — a recession that costs them jobs, a divorce, an illness. Now comes a further obstacle to getting their lives in order: employers who screen job applicants based on credit histories.

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A bill before the New York City Council would prohibit employers from using credit histories in hiring except in the very few cases where credit checks are required by law. It would be the strongest such law in the country.

About 60 percent of employers use credit checks to screen applicants, even though research has shown that people with damaged credit are not automatically poor job risks. Besides, the credit agencies that compile and sell records on about 200 million Americans make mistakes.

A report issued earlier this year by the Federal Trade Commission found that one in five consumers who participated in the study had errors in credit reports. In more than 5 percent of the cases, the mistakes were serious enough to lower the person's credit score, making it likely that more would be charged for car loans or mortgages. If used by potential employers, these erroneous reports could shut people out of the job market.

The City Council put a human face on this problem at a hearing earlier this month. A 30-year military veteran who had been deployed in Iraq testified that he had been turned down for a job as an airport passenger screener with the Transportation Security Administration because of a mistake on his credit report. By the time he got the mistake resolved, he said, the job had been filled. "Even if I did owe the bogus debt," he said, "I don't see how it disqualifies me from screening passengers. A credit report does not prove what a person's character is or is not."

By using credit histories, employers have created a disadvantaged class that could be permanently locked out of the economy. The City Council could fix that, at least in New York City, by passing this bill.

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Op-Ed Columnist: A Blogger on Trial in Russia

IF you set out to design a political nemesis who would give Vladimir Putin the shivers, you might well come up with Aleksei Navalny. That is why the trial of the popular Russian activist on Wednesday is the most important political trial in Russia in decades.

Navalny, a lawyer, anticorruption crusader and blogger, has been likened to every political insurgent from Julian Assange to Nelson Mandela. As a potential political leader he long ago surpassed Assange and hasn't quite caught up to Mandela, but he keeps getting better. He is young (36), thoughtful, politically astute, crowd-pleasing and apparently unafraid. He has command of the Internet and the skills of an investigative reporter. (He buys stock in state-owned oil companies and banks and uses his status as a minority shareholder to air their dirty laundry on his LiveJournal blog.)

He is an ethnic Russian who has incorporated a mild dose of nationalist sloganeering into his patter. This has dismayed some of his liberal friends, but it is shrewd. It inoculates him somewhat against Putin's favorite line of attack, that critics are Western stooges, and, more important, helps broaden his appeal beyond the young, social-media-savvy cubicle workers who are his base.

His platform combines free-market libertarianism, which appeals to Russia's growing bourgeoisie, and a relentless campaign against corruption, which resonates widely in a nation where it seems every transaction entails a bribe. (Russia ranks a humiliating 133rd on the Transparency International index of countries where businesses can invest with confidence.) The Moscow Times in 2011 called Navalny "the only electable" opposition figure. That might be true, although the best rabble-rousers don't always make the best presidents — a lesson Russia should have learned from Boris Yeltsin.

This is hardly the first time the Putin regime has used law enforcement and the criminal courts (acquittal rate: 0.4 percent) to cull antagonists. The hounding of the outspoken tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was an appalling and largely successful effort to warn Russia's wealthiest not to kid themselves that money entitled them to free speech. The sham trial of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who dared take on tax fraud in high places and died in jail from mistreatment, sent a message not to meddle with the thievery of Putin's cronies. And the trial of the sacrilegious punk trio Pussy Riot served notice that the president does not see the joke, not when it's on him. None of these victims of Kremlin justice, though, could mobilize a serious political following. Navalny might, especially if he ever gets off a TV black list.

The main charge against Navalny is that, as an adviser to the regional government in Kirov, he embezzled money from a state-run timber company. A review of the case by a Chicago law firm for a client sympathetic to Navalny's plight concluded that the charges were laughably bogus, and the state has offered nothing to rebut that. In fact, local authorities conducted what seems to have been a thorough investigation and concluded no crime was committed. But the federal Investigative Committee, a powerful agency that serves Putin, stepped in and — without adding any new evidence — charged Navalny with stealing timber worth more than $500,000.

It's probably no coincidence that one of the targets of Navalny's recent muckraking was the head of the very same Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin. Navalny posted documents showing that Bastrykin secretly possessed a residence permit and real estate in the Czech Republic, raising questions about his faith in Russia's future and, since the Czech Republic is a member of the NATO alliance, his vulnerability to blackmail.

The state's obvious hope is that by convicting Navalny on charges of greed, it will diminish his credibility as a corruption-fighter and, not incidentally, head off his political ambitions. (Conviction of a serious crime is a disqualification for public office.)

I suspect the Russian public knows exactly what is going on. That, in fact, is the point. The trial is a show, and the moral of this drama is, if you stick your head up too high, you could lose it. In an interview in Izvestia that reads like a relic of Soviet-era cynicism, Vladimir Markin, the oleaginous spokesman for the Investigative Committee, left no doubt about Navalny's real crime. Why, the paper asked, was the case propelled to the front of the court docket? The spokesman replied: "If a person tries with all his might to draw attention to himself, even, you might say, tries to taunt the authorities — says, 'Look at me, you're all covered in dirt and I'm so clean' — well, then the interest in his past grows, and the process of exposing him naturally speeds up."

Markin suggested that Navalny, who spent a semester at a Yale program for budding foreign leaders, is a kind of Ivy-League Manchurian candidate, set in motion by American mentors to provoke a conflict with the Kremlin that would end in his arrest and demonstrate that Russia persecutes truth-tellers.

The interviewer asked why, rather than threaten Navalny with jail, the state did not enlist his anticorruption expertise to help clean up the country. "No one is hindering his public activities," Markin smirked. "Even in prison many convicts write letters and statements, struggle against the shortcomings of the system."

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Op-Ed Contributor: A Smart Way to Revive East Midtown

WE are told that New York needs to be lofted back into global competitiveness. That the city isn't modern enough. Take the area around Grand Central Terminal. With 80 percent of the building stock in the neighborhood now over 50 years old, we hear, our city is falling behind, and current zoning restrictions inhibit redevelopment.

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Last summer the Department of City Planning released its East Midtown study, envisioning a taller, denser, shinier future for the neighborhood around Grand Central. New and more liberal regulations that will allow bigger office towers are on their way to the City Council for approval before the end of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's current term. But what is a modern city, exactly? And is New York really in danger of falling behind new global cities like Shanghai?

With district improvement bonuses, the City Planning study proposes to double the developable floor area on some sites around Grand Central, allowing enough additional square footage to give us a neighborhood of towering office buildings, some as tall as 1,300 feet or more. (For reference, the Chrysler Building is 1,046 feet to the top of its spire.)

I'm nearly always an advocate of density: it's socially beneficial and environmentally responsible. And I like tall buildings as much as the next architect, especially if I'm asked to design them.

But the advantages of density can go only so far without the infrastructure to support it. And the appropriateness of tall buildings is a question of where and when, and what they contribute to the public realm. Let's all admit that the Pan Am Building, now MetLife, was a mistake in 1963, and is still a mistake from an urbanistic point of view. It disrupted the vista down Park Avenue that had become an essential part of our city.

Are we preparing to make the same mistake again, on multiple sites? The rezoning study makes no mention of protected-view corridors. Can we guarantee that in the future the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building will not be lost in thickets of taller buildings?

And what of our streets and subway platforms? I commute through Grand Central several times a week, and at 6:20 a.m., when I catch my train to New Haven, the terminal is already full of people. When I return at 6:30 or 7 p.m., I can hardly make my way to the stairways and escalators that lead to the Lexington Avenue subway platforms.

How will the added workers quartered in these new buildings get from their trains to their desks? The plan says that special assessments and payments in lieu of taxes will guarantee "pedestrian network improvements as development occurs." There is nothing wrong with privately financed infrastructure improvements. But the study, if I read it correctly, gets it backward: first you put in the infrastructure, then you build the buildings. Look at the example of Grand Central, the private enterprise that spurred all this development in the first place.

What lessons should we take from other great cities? In the early 1990s, Shanghai organized a special economic zone that led to the development of a financial hub in Pudong, on land previously occupied by warehouses and wharves. Towers sprouted to create an instant iconic skyline, but with a regrettable, scaleless urban moonscape below.

Should we in New York in 2013 emulate the Shanghai of the 1990s? Or should we heed the lesson the Chinese themselves have subsequently learned, that saving old buildings and neighborhoods is essential to the continued vitality of great cities? In Shanghai, the pre-World War II buildings along the Bund, which loom so very large in the city's appeal, have been saved and repurposed. Nearby, at Xintiandi, a historic residential neighborhood of stone houses and tight alleys has been transformed into a chic, walkable retail and entertainment district.

Terminal City, a sophisticated mix of hotels, clubs, office buildings and residential blocks at the heart of East Midtown, was built on platforms bridging the rail yards north of Grand Central. It was a bold plan to create valuable real estate where once there had been urban blight. As much as anything, this development created what the world knows today as Midtown Manhattan.

Robert A. M. Stern, architect, is dean of the Yale School of Architecture and a co-author of a series of books about architecture and urbanism in New York.

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Editorial: How to Handle a Terrorism Case

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina apparently has a thermal-imaging device for detecting the motivation of the man arrested on suspicion of bombing the Boston Marathon. He and three other Republican lawmakers declared — without the benefit of evidence — that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be considered an enemy combatant, not a criminal, and should be held by the military without access to a lawyer or the fundamental rights that distinguish this country from authoritarian regimes.

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Mr. Graham's reckless statement makes a mockery of the superb civilian police work that led to the suspect's capture, starting with a skillful analysis of video recordings of the marathon. The law enforcement system solved the case swiftly and efficiently, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police, and as shocking as the attack was, there is no reason civilian prosecutors, defense lawyers and courts cannot continue to do their work — especially since they have proved themselves far better at it than the military.

Mr. Tsarnaev is a naturalized American citizen, an inconvenient fact for the pressure-him-at-Gitmo crowd. He cannot be tried in a military commission, a legal system reserved for aliens. Even to be held by the military without trial would require a showing that he is associated with a declared enemy of the United States, such as Al Qaeda or the Taliban. So far there isn't any visible connection between the Tsarnaev brothers and anyone more malevolent. Their Islamic or Chechen heritage alone is hardly proof of jihadist intent.

Fortunately the Obama administration has ignored the posturing and declared that Mr. Tsarnaev, like all citizens and even alien terrorists captured on American soil, will be tried in the federal courts. He will soon be charged with terrorism under federal statutes, and will be represented by the federal public defender's office.

Federal and local officials intend to take their time, however, in giving a Miranda warning to the suspect, advising him of his right to remain silent. (Even if Mr. Tsarnaev remains too wounded to speak, he still deserves his rights.) There is a public safety exception to the Miranda requirement, allowing investigators to question suspects about imminent threats, like bombs or specific terror conspiracies, before the warning is given and then use that information in court. In 2010, unfortunately, the administration improperly told agents that they could expand that exception for terror suspects even when threats were not imminent.

It is not clear whether that expansion, which has yet to be tested in court, is being employed in this case. But the Obama administration, no less than Republicans, should not allow the raw emotions associated with a terrorism case to trample on the American system of justice.

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Editorial: Visa Reforms for Skilled Workers

The immigration reform bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators last week would make it easier for skilled workers to come to this country while toughening rules to prevent abuse in temporary work visas.

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Many skilled workers and their families spend a decade or more waiting for employment-based green cards, which are capped at 140,000 a year and are subject to per-country limits. The bill addresses this problem by temporarily raising limits to clear a backlog of 234,000 applications for employment-based permanent visas. It would also exempt spouses and children of workers from the limits, which should free up nearly 80,000 visas a year.

It also creates a "merit based" category of green cards while getting rid of permanent visas for siblings of citizens and for people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. These new visas would be given to people on the basis of points granted for factors like the college degrees they have earned; whether their siblings are citizens; how highly they score in an English proficiency test; and whether they are from an underrepresented country. This proposal is deeply troubling because it appears to buy into the zero-sum thinking that pits employment-based immigration against family-sponsored and diversity immigration. America should welcome both groups of people, not choose between them.

The senators also want to expand the popular H-1B category of work visas to 135,000, from 85,000 — a quota that is often reached in a matter of weeks or months every year. The new, higher limit would be allowed to increase or decrease by as many as 10,000 visas a year based on demand for them and government unemployment data. In an important provision, people on such visas will be able to switch employers more easily, making it harder for companies to pay workers below-market salaries.

Another provision would clamp down on abuse by imposing higher fees and other restrictions on employers who have a large percentage of their work force on such visas. Over several years, the bill would force these companies, many of which are the United States operations of outsourcing firms from India, to reduce the number of their workers who are foreigners to less than 50 percent.

While some provisions need to be improved, the bill sets the right tone for making America more hospitable to skilled and hard-working immigrants.

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Editorial: Broken Justice in the Bronx

Quietly over time, the gleaming glass building near Yankee Stadium that houses the Bronx criminal courts has become a place where delay and dysfunction are the norm and central ideals of the American justice system — especially the promise of a speedy trial — have been disgracefully subverted.

The state court system has a guideline that requires most felony cases to go to trial or be resolved within 180 days of the suspect's indictment. While criminal courts in every borough in New York City violate that guideline, in the Bronx, the city's poorest borough, 73 percent of all felony cases exceeded the 180-day limit, as of January.

In recent years, there were more defendants waiting years in jail for their trials in the Bronx than in the rest of the boroughs combined. The Bronx accounted for more than half of the cases in the city's criminal courts that were more than two years old, and for two-thirds of people held for more than five years awaiting trial.

A powerful series by William Glaberson of The Times has painted a devastating portrait of a lackadaisical court culture in which the main actors in the Bronx seem utterly paralyzed or incompetent. None appear to have the necessary drive to ensure that justice is done for the defendants, the victims or the public.

The Bronx district attorney, Robert Johnson, and the prosecutors serving under him show little sense of urgency as cases age. In one ludicrous case, an assistant district attorney actually left on vacation in the middle of a trial she was working on. Defense lawyers have been allowed to exploit delays to help their clients, since witnesses can move away and evidence can become tainted; sometimes the defense lawyers simply delay cases to suit their own schedules. And there are the judges — many elected through a political machine-controlled process — who are unable or unwilling to exert strong control over their courtrooms to resolve cases in a reasonable time.

The inordinate delays impose heavy tolls. Innocent people remain in jail for crimes they did not commit. Memories fade, evidence dries up, and witnesses disappear, making convicting the guilty harder. Victims and their families suffer, as does faith in the justice system's ability to protect the public.

In one case, as reported by Mr. Glaberson, Bronx prosecutors did not try a defendant accused of murder until five years after the crime. The defendant ended up going free after the first police officer to testify answered that he could not remember numerous details under questioning by the defense lawyer. In another murder case, which also resulted in a not-guilty verdict, the star witness at the trial four years after the crime testified that he could no longer be sure who pulled the trigger.

As old cases have piled up in the Bronx, conviction rates have declined to less than half in jury trials, far lower than elsewhere in the city and well below the national rate. In 2011, Bronx prosecutors won guilty verdicts in 46 percent of their jury trials, court data shows, down from 67 percent in 1989, when Mr. Johnson took office.

While that dismal record may be partly a product of the skepticism Bronx juries have of the police, it also raises questions about whether the breakdown in the borough's court system is letting dangerous criminals go free. Like many other states, New York has slashed court budgets in the past few years in the face of a harsh recession. But the problem in the Bronx began festering long before that and goes beyond a shortage of resources.

Because of budget problems, the court day has been shortened and now ends at 4:30. But a lot more could be accomplished if judges required all participants in proceedings to show up on time — something that rarely happens now — and stopped accepting prosecutors' and defense lawyers' weak excuses for delays.

Part of the blame for the current mess belongs to state court administrators. They should have acted sooner to dismantle the well-meaning but unsuccessful reorganization plan put in place in 2004 by Judith Kaye, then the state's chief judge, and take muscular action to address the Bronx backlog. In a positive step in January, the state's current chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, dispatched a "SWAT team" of judges to deal with the delays. According to court officials, they have already cut the number of cases two years or older by 21 percent, mostly by arranging plea deals and dismissing cases.

But the problem runs deep. Changing the culture will require a new commitment by Mr. Johnson, Bronx criminal court judges and court administrators to improve the management and work ethic in every part of the system. It will also require enlisting more seasoned defense lawyers to take cases in the Bronx. Some additional financing for court employees will be needed, too. But no management reform will be sufficient or lasting unless the city's political and judicial leaders raise expectations about what a well-functioning criminal justice system requires.

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