Today on the show, we'll discuss whether raising the retirement age would help fix the nation's debt crisis. Plus. Mark Seal unmasks con man Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in 'Man In The Rockefeller Suit,' homeless youths in L.A. help officials count and keep track of their own, and much more.
Would raising the retirement age do more harm than good?
Last week, California congressman Mark Takano wrote a letter saying that he would vote against any cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security benefits, and that he would stand strong against raising the retirment age.
Republicans in the state have argued that such changes are key to addressing spending and balancing the federal budget. The argument is that people are living and working longer, so they should be able to raise the age, but that might not be the case.
Michael A. Fletcher, a reporter with the Washington Post joins the show with more.
Unmasking the 'Man In The Rockefeller Suit'
The murder trial of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter gets underway in a Los Angeles courtroom today.
If the name doesn't ring a bell, perhaps you know him by his most notorious alias: Clark Rockefeller.
Gerhartsreiter is a German con-man who masqueraded as a member of the wealthy Rockefeller clan; It was just one of many identities he's assumed. He was unmasked in 2008 when he was arrested for kidnapping his seven-year-old daughter and leading police on an international manhunt.
Gerhartsreiter now faces murder charges in the 1985 death of a San Marino man, a cold case that had puzzled authorities for over a decade. Writer Mark Seal tells the story of Christian Gerhartsreiter in his book , "The Man in the Rockefeller Suit."
Hollywood Monday: Documentary films buzzing at SXSW
Time now for our regular Hollywood update from Rebecca Keegan of the L.A. Times. She's in Austin today, for the annual South by Southwest festival.
South by Southwest is known for music and technology, but it's also become an important stop on the film festival circuit. Interestingly, one of the films being shown is about music and technology. It's a documentary called "Downloaded," and it's about the rise and fall of Napster. It's directed by Alex Winter, who is probably best know as Bill, from the film "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."
LA's homeless and once-homeless youth help keep track of their own (Photos)
Trying to help people in need is hard when they're doing all they can to be hidden. That's especially a problem with youth homelessness.
Every year the Department of Housing and Urban Development requires communities to take a census of their homeless populations. These figures help determine where to distribute funds and how to prioritize services, for example.
However, homeless youths — classified by HUD as 18- to 24-year-olds — often go uncounted, or when they are, the number is very fuzzy.
"The [national] estimates have ranged from 600,000 to 1.6 million," says Barbara Poppe, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. "It’s really hard to make a case of how to fill the gaps because we don’t know what those gaps are."
Counting older adults and families with young children tends to be easier because they are more likely to use shelters and services, putting them in a position to be seen and tallied. However 18- to 24-year-olds will tend to avoid shelters and service providers out of safety.
"They're dirty, nasty, and overfilled," says Justin Anderson, 24, who was living on the streets of Hollywood.
They also go missed because they try to hide on purpose from older adults. In Seattle, says Poppe, "Youth who are on the street will, within 45 minutes, be approached by a gang member or some other predator."
Youths may also try to blend in with the crowd, making them indistinguishable from other people their age walking down the street.
Los Angeles has a unique way of tracking and counting them: other homeless youths. Pioneered by the Hollywood Homeless Youth Partnership, L.A.'s homeless providers disperse throughout the city in teams for a point-in-time count in January. Among these teams are current and former homeless youths who've been recruited to help spot their own.
Kevin Bates, 21, was among the group. He says when he came out as gay to his family, he was kicked out. Bates had been living on the streets for a year and a half before finding at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center.
They recruited him for this count, and he thinks of it as a "sixth sense."
"When you see it, you kind of know," Bates says. "You can tell because, myself, I’ve been in this situation so I can tell, okay, that looks like me a year ago."
Having youths on teams also makes it easier to approach those on the streets, says Kristin Brock, outreach specialist for youth services at LAGLC.
"Generally, people who don't necessarily need the services that are alone don't want to talk to you," said Brock.
But that presence can put youths at ease, and make them more willing to talk. They are also more likely to know the squats and hiding places not reachable by older adults, and and can point teams to those locations. Because of this strategy, Los Angeles knows there are nearly 4,000 youths living on the streets as of its last official count in 2011.
"Were we not to have done that, we would’ve missed 50 percent of our 18-24 homeless youths," says Mark Silverbush, a policy and planning analyst at the LA Homeless Services Authority.
LAHSA organizes the city's count and this year, for the first time, is also conducting follow-up surveys that will pinpoint on homeless youths who are LGBT, who account for anywhere between 20 - 40% of that population.
"It helps us to break down these large numbers in L.A. County into smaller pieces so that we can see how to better line up resources," says Silverbush.
Barbara Poppe from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness says, "We cite California as a place we’d love to see other states begin to do the work that Los Angeles started."
USICH is studying how nine communities this year, including Los Angeles, conduct their count of youths. When the final census and survey results are released this summer, the group hopes to assemble best practices that the rest of the nation can follow.
The hope is that having clearer numbers will help more of them be like Kevin Bates, who just last month got off the streets, got a job at Forever 21, and into his own apartment.
"To know there are people who give their time and energy to make sure that you have a roof over your head and food in your stomach," said Bates. "Take full advantage of it."
What happens if you don't cooperate at inland checkpoints? (Video)
Drive across the Southwest, north of the U.S.-Mexico Border, and you are likely to encounter a Border Patrol Checkpoint. There are two on the Interstate 5 and 15 Freeways as you head north from San Diego. These roadside stations are set up to check immigration status and sometimes they require all traffic to stop. But as Fronteras correspondent David Martin Davies shows us, what happens next is an open question.
When a driver approaches a Border Patrol checkpoint, the drill is to pull off the highway, wait in line, and then a Border Patrol agent will ask, “Are you an American citizen?”
If you answer “yes," in most instances you’ll soon be back on the road.
But what happens if you refuse to answer?
That’s what some people are doing and their videos are a YouTube sensation. It’s not quite the Harlem Shake, but motorists who shake off questions from Border Patrol agents, are seeing their videos go viral.
One video showing a compilation of refusals has more than 400,000 views since it was posted just over a month ago. The montage of checkpoint stops all show drivers refusing to answer the Border Patrol’s favorite question: Are you an American citizen?
Terry Bressi lives in Southern Arizona and has videotaped about 250 checkpoint experiences where he's refused to answer Border Patrol questions. “It really is a smack across the face of any liberty loving American," said Bressi, who writes the blog CheckpointUSA.org.
Although Bressi has posted several of his check point videos on Youtube, he says the purpose of recording his interaction is protection.
“My primary purpose in having the video cameras running while I’m going through a check point is not so I can have cool video to make for YouTube. It’s to protect myself legally," said Bressi.
Bressi claims without the videotape the Border Patrol agents would be free to invent probable cause and detain him simply because they don’t like his attitude.
Adriana Pinon, a lawyer for the ACLU, says these YouTube videos show what happens when people exercise one of their fundamental rights.
“One always has the right to remain silent. So in the video you do see people asserting that right and an individual has a constitutional right to remain silent even at a check point," said Pinon.
The Border Patrol would not comment for this story but said most Americans cooperate at the checkpoint and there’s no indication of a growing number of people refusing to answer their questions.
The real issue here is a dispute over whether or not these checkpoints violate the U.S. Constitution. The Border Patrol says they do not, and Pinon agrees.
“The courts have decided that because they are such a brief intrusion upon a person’s liberty, privacy and interests that it is constitutional," she said.
But Bressi disputes that. He claims the checkpoints are unconstitutional because the Supreme Court ruled they should be used only for immigration purposes.
He believes the question — “are you an American citizen?” — is actually a ruse used by the Border Patrol to get drivers to stop, be scanned, tracked, recorded and sniffed by drug dogs, which he said are all violations of the Constitution.
“It’s not border security, it's internal security," Bressi said.
Using your phone to make some extra cash
The mobile apps "Words With Friends" and "Fruit Ninja" provide a great distraction from work, but what about apps that can be the basis for work themselves? Are there apps that can be considered as a job creator? We'll find out.
UC Riverside exhibit explores the art of citizen space travel
Imagine this: In the not-too-distant future, space might not be the place for just scientists or astronauts. It could be home to everyday people and artists too.
Sculptures will orbit the earth alongside satellites, dancers will perform anti-gravity ballets, and beyond our planet, artists might explore new worlds of creativity. Those ideas are already being explored in a new art exhibition at the UC Riverside ARTSblock called, "Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration." Drew Tewksbury from KCET's Artbound has the story.
Curators at the University of California Riverside’s ARTSBlock aren’t waiting for the future. Their current exhibit "Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration" examines how the privatization of space travel could provide new opportunities for artists.
"We believe that there is quite a crucial moment happening where private citizens have the ability to start constructing machines and apparatuses to leave the earth’s surface and go into orbit," said Marko Peljhan, artist and co-curator of the show. "This is happening in Southern California, the main players are located here, so we are in the center of that moment."
This isn’t a curated show of art featuring aliens or psychedelic planetoids airbrushed on the side of a conversion van. Instead, it uses high technology and high art to pose the question: What can artists really do with space?
As unlikely as it seems, art and aerospace have a special relationship in Southern California. For many years, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has maintained an artist-in-residence program. There's also the new wave of private space companies like the Hawthorne-based Space X. They successfully launched a rocket which docked with the International Space Station last year.
All of a sudden, space isn't all that far away, and artists are exploring the real possibilities of making art up there. Tyler Stallings — the show’s co-curator — says he wanted to showcase artists who are serious about space.
"We wanted to include artists who had actually had a very serious relationship or aspiration towards working with aerospace companies, as opposed to just kind of stopping in their work at metaphor and allegory," said Stallings. "We’re standing in an installation by artist Carrie Paterson from Los Angeles...All of the different aspects of the project are dealing with the idea of smell and perfumes. In one of the projects, where it’s this kind of high-tech perfume counter that looks like something from the future, and one of the items is this little ball that’s in sections, kind of like an orange...It’s a homesickness kit.
While the homesickness kit looks to future space travel, other pieces in the show look to the past. And some have even made the trip to space, like the piece, Moon Museum. The Moon Museum is a small white ceramic chip, the size of a postage stamp.
On it are simple drawings by six artists including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. Twenty identical chips were created by artist Forrest Myers and engineers at Bell Labs. In 1969, one of the chips was smuggled onto an actual trip to the moon during the Apollo 12 mission.
"The 'Moon Museum' is one of these works which, you know, is from, really I’d say, a pioneering era, from the heroic era of space art," said Peljhan. "And it happened also in a kind of a very covert, conspiracy between artists, engineers, and people that were working at Grumman Aerospace, who were building the Moon Lander. One of these pieces was covertly put between the blankets of the lunar lander."
One of the chips is on display in the exhibition, and another one circles the earth still in the lunar lander. While this may be the most high profile piece in the show, other works highlight the collaboration between artists and scientists. Two particular pieces explore the weightlessness of space momentarily created in steeply diving airliners. One artist made Pollack-esque paintings free from gravity, and French choreographer Kitsou Dubois developed dance moves that were performed while floating through the air.
"Kitsou is special within the show because she was the first artist to go on a parabolic flight," said Stallings. "When she comes back to earth, she creates dances where she tries to incorporate some of the moves from microgravity but now being back in gravity, yet, you know, torquing the body in these very weird ways to try to capture that same weightless sensibility."
As Peljhan points out, artists — like scientists — are good at pushing the limits.
"We see it, art, as part of the sort of initial process. Because there’s no better troublemakers than artists to ask the most difficult questions. Of Course, some people don’t like troublemakers but, in general, you need them to really sort of stir things up when things are not going in the right direction," said Peljhan.
The exhibit will be at UC Riverside's Sweeney Art Gallery and Culver Center of the Arts until March 23.
Website with data on outpatient surgery centers lacks key details
Under a relatively new law, Californians are supposed to receive better information about outpatient surgery centers. But, as KPCC discovered, the state medical board has largely failed to implement key provisions of the law. Our health care reporter, Stephanie O'Neill has the story.
The Medical Board of California has largely failed to implement key provisions of a law intended, in part, to provide consumers with better information about physician-owned, outpatient surgery centers that the agency is responsible for regulating, KPCC has found.
Senate Bill 100 requires the Medical Board of California to “obtain and maintain” a list of accredited outpatient settings, including the names of all doctor-owners and their medical license numbers. The board must post that information on its website, which must also note whether a facility has had its accreditation suspended or revoked.
But the medical board has yet to fully implement those provisions, which became law on Jan, 1, 2012.
A KPCC survey of the consumer website instead found a poorly-organized website that’s not only hard to locate on the medical board’s site, but that contains a jumble of mostly incomplete records that provide little value to the public.
A state official acknowledged the website is incomplete and problematic and said they are working on improving it.
KPCC reviewed 100 surgery centers listed on the site; only 14 included the name of a doctor-owner, and only five provided the doctor-owner medical license number as required by California Health and Safety Code Section 1248.2 (b). Also missing from most of the records listed was information on whether a surgery center had its accreditation suspended or revoked.
Consumers Union also reviewed the listing of surgery centers on the medical board's website, and got similar results.
"Of the first 25 that came up, 18 of them did not have the name of the doctor who owned it, which is a pretty critical piece of information for consumers and for any kind of accountability," said Lisa McGiffert, director of Consumer Union’s Safe Patient Project, a national campaign that for the past year has focused on oversight of California’s physician-owned surgery centers.
“This is an absolute failure to comply,” said Los Angeles consumer attorney Kathryn Trepinski, who testified in Sacramento last year on behalf of SB100.
Trepinski represents Betty Brown of Torrance, whose sister died in December 2010, three days after undergoing lap-band weight-loss surgery at a physician-owned surgery center in Beverly Hills, owned by brothers Michael and Julian Omidi. The Omidis were behind the once-popular 1-800-GET-THIN campaign. Brown has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Omidis.
Trepinski said she was disturbed to find the website listing for the clinic did not mention the Omidis or any other owners. Without such information, she says, consumers checking out the center may be hard-pressed to learn that the medical board revoked Julian Omidi's license to practice in 2007 and suspended Michael’s Omidi's license in 2008, for three years.
“People need to know the identities of physicians who own and run these centers so they can check their disciplinary records and their backgrounds,” she said. “This is a key part of patient safety and it’s important public health information.”
State Senator Curran Price (D-Los Angeles) is author of SB100, which he told KPCC he wrote in response to “a number of deaths that have occurred at these centers.”
Five patients died after having lap-band weight loss surgery at the Southern California clinics associated with the 1-800-GET-THIN marketing campaign and brothers Julian and Michael Omidi.
The Omidi brothers and their surgery centers are the target of numerous local, state and federal fraud and criminal investigations. There are also at least two insurance company fraud investigations, two whistleblower civil lawsuits and several wrongful death actions.
In an interview with KPCC, Medical Board of California Executive Director Linda Whitney acknowledged the website is incomplete and problematic.
“It’s not the most consumer-friendly, I do admit that,” said Whitney, who noted that the agency is currently carrying out an agency-wide overhaul of its computer system. “So, unfortunately, it has not been the highest priority to refine that website.”
“In the coming year we hope to make it much more consumer friendly,” she said.
Whitney said the website doesn't have a complete list of surgery centers because her board told accrediting agencies that they don't have to provide the data on a particular facility until its accreditation comes up for renewal. The agencies hadn't collected owner information before, so this approach was designed to give them time to figure out best how to get it, she said.
But because surgery centers' accreditation comes up for renewal only once every three years, some of the information won't get to the medical board– or consumers – until 2015.
When KPCC informed Senator Price about the website's problems, he expressed dismay.
"We think the Board should be a lot more aggressive in gathering this information, and so I want to find out exactly what the lag is," he said. "The intent was...this information would be made available as soon as possible...not to wait for three years."
While most consumer advocates acknowledge that doctor-owned outpatient surgery centers often offer better accessibility to surgical procedures, cleaner environments and better prices than hospital-based settings, Consumers Union's McGiffert and others fear the medical board's incomplete website reflects a lackadaisical attitude toward surgery center oversight.
“What we’re seeing now are some pretty major procedures being done in these facilities – knee replacements, a lot of cosmetic surgeries, really invasive procedures,” McGiffert said. “The consuming public believes someone in the state is overseeing these caregivers and these facilities to make sure they’re safe for consumers and we don’t think the (oversight) infrastructure is solidly in place in California today.”