Tuesday Reads

Posted: December 21, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Catfood Commission, Civil Rights, Democratic Politics, Team Obama, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 66 Comments
Good Morning!

The Tax Cuts for Billionaires (tm) program has passed and will keep all the scrooges making merry merry for a bit.  Unfortunately, the stimulus and capital investment will probably go outside the United States and a budget fight is on deck.   The next budget crisis is looming.  The Federal government will probably hit the debt ceiling in April.  There’s 50 other problem budgets out there also. CBS has an interesting state of the states piece up called “The Day Of Reckoning”.

Most states will have worse problems because they must balance their budget, they’re running cyclic deficits which happens when unemployment goes up and they can’t print money.  State budgets are overwhelmed with needs for state programs like food stamps and unemployment as well as SCHIP and other family safety net programs.  They are also underwhelmed by incoming revenues because demand for things is way off.  Federal tax cuts make this worse because many states–including here in Louisiana–base their income tax formulas on how much Federal Taxes have been paid. It’s tough for them to change the law at this point to reflect that Obama/McConnell Billionaire rescue plan ™.   States and municipalities must watch their bond ratings and compete with other states for investor funds.  This keeps them on a much tighter rein than the Feds.  Additionally, there was some stimulus money in the original Obama stimulus progam that is not being renewed and will run out.    All-in-all, 2011 will be a bad year for states. The worst is yet to come.

This situation has already worried Wall Street and  will undoubtedly cause an increase in unemployment as state and local workers are laid off to balance budgets.  One problem that we’ve had here in Louisiana is that state employment levels have been frozen in the clerical areas and the increased demand for unemployment has led to a 4 – 6 month backlog in processing unemployment benefits.   If you don’t have a rich relative or an emergency savings fund, you’re most likely going to find yourself out on the street.  It’s been the topic of many an investigative report in local TV.  I found that it’s not just in Louisiana.  It’s happened in Connecticut, Kansas, Rhode Island, and California too.

The states have been getting by on billions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, but the day of reckoning is at hand. The debt crisis is already making Wall Street nervous, and some believe that it could derail the recovery, cost a million public employees their jobs and require another big bailout package that no one in Washington wants to talk about.”The most alarming thing about the state issue is the level of complacency,” Meredith Whitney, one of the most respected financial analysts on Wall Street and one of the most influential women in American business, told correspondent Steve Kroft

Whitney made her reputation by warning that the big banks were in big trouble long before the 2008 collapse. Now, she’s warning about a financial meltdown in state and local governments.

“It has tentacles as wide as anything I’ve seen. I think next to housing this is the single most important issue in the United States, and certainly the largest threat to the U.S. economy,” she told Kroft.

Asked why people aren’t paying attention, Whitney said, “‘Cause they don’t pay attention until they have to.”

Whitney says it’s time to start.

This investigative report has examples of looming problems for California, Arizona and New Jersey.  If you live in any of these three states, you should be prepared for an incredible scale back of government services and possible tax hikes. Another state with serious problems is Illinois.  Illinois is already in the ‘deadbeat’ state category.  Here in Louisiana, severe budget cuts by “Bobby is for Bobby” Jindal have led to attempts to break all public service unions including the ones for teachers, state clerical workers, firefighters and police.  Here’s a list of targeted furloughs, layoffs, and firings in Louisiana as reported by WBRZ, a Baton Rouge TV station last month. If they’re not happening in your state already, they will undoubtedly be starting next year when the stimulus funds run out.  Prison guards are even on the list.  I wonder who will win the debtor’s prisons and poor house farms?  Halliburton perhaps?

There is one more major lame duck issue sitting on the docket.  Democratic senate leaders are hopeful they will get the START treaty ratified despite ongoing Republican obfuscation. Let’s hope they’ve got the votes they need.  Even Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are on board with ratification.

By the end of another tumultuous day, treaty backers said they could count more than the two-thirds majority required for approval in votes that could begin as early as Tuesday. The Senate mustered as many as 64 votes in defeating Republican amendments on Monday, just two short of what supporters need for final approval, and three senators who supported one of the amendments have already said they will vote for the treaty in the end.

The momentum building for the treaty came despite the announcements of the two top Senate Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Jon Kyl of Arizona, that they will vote against the treaty, known as New Start. Treaty supporters pressured wavering Republicans on Monday with an appeal by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s top military officer, to approve the agreement.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s recent slip of the tongue will undoubtedly create issues should he decided to make a run for the presidency in 2012. Barbour gave an extensive interview that basically showed how many parts of the south have not changed.   The Mississippi governor praised a civic group that is–for all intent and purpose–a  white supremacist group  in the state.  He also made a comment about the things not being so bad during the civil rights era.  Kinda makes me think Trent Lott might have a better shot at the presidency than good ol’ Haley does.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says he doesn’t remember the Civil Rights era being “that bad,” citing his attendance at a Martin Luther King Jr. rally nearly 50 years ago.

“I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” Barbour (R), 63, told the conservative Weekly Standard, which did a lengthy profile on the governor. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

The profile also showed Barbour’s ignorance of the role of hate group in trying to maintain segregation.  The group has a long history of white supremacist activities and writings.

“You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK,” said Barbour. “Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights — notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour’s hometown, as opposed to Barbour’s recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

If you check the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate map of Mississippi, you’ll see that they’ve identified approximately 25 hate groups there.  Many are in the area surrounding Yazoo.  You’ll see that the Council of Conservative Citizens is quite active around the area. Some of these groups have changed their name to sound more palatable but it’s the same old racist screeds. It wouldn’t take much for Barbour to learn about these folks.

The Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC, which initially tried to project a “mainstream” image, has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.” The group’s newspaper, Citizens Informer, regularly publishes articles condemning “race mixing,” decrying the evils of illegal immigration, and lamenting the decline of white, European civilization.

In Its Own Words

“God is the author of racism. God is the One who divided mankind into different types. … Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God.”
— Council of Conservative Citizens website, 2001

“We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people. … We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”
—Statement of Principles, Citizens Informer, 2007

“Controlling immigration is about the security of this republic [terrorists illegally crossing the borders] and making sure countries like Mexico stop dumping their murderers, rapists, those carrying AIDS and other communicable diseases and gang members on America’s door step.”
—Devvy Kidd, Citizens Informer, 2006

Yup, nothing to see here.  Just about as benign as your local chamber of commerce or Elk’s Club. You’d think a governor would be familiar with terrorist and hate groups in his own state, wouldn’t you?

This Politico op-ed by Robert Kuttner is undoubtedly one of the first in the a number that will come up as Obama moves on Social Security. It’s called ‘Obama to blink first on Social Security’. Kuttner says that key senate Democrats and the White House are moving to embrace the Cat Food commission report AND cuts in social security. We’re supposed to hear about it in the State of the Union address coming up in January.

The idea is to pre-empt an even more draconian set of budget cuts likely to be proposed by the incoming House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as a condition of extending the debt ceiling. This is expected to hit in April.

White House strategists believe this can also give Obama “credit” for getting serious about deficit reduction — now more urgent with the nearly $900 billion increase in the deficit via the tax cut deal.

How to put this politely? For a Democratic president, this approach is bad economics and worse politics.

For starters, cutting Social Security as part of a deficit reduction deal is needless — since Social Security is in surplus for the next 27 years. The move also gives away the single most potent distinction between Democrats and Republicans — Democrats defend your Social Security, and Republicans keep trying to undermine it.

If you think the Democratic base feels betrayed by Obama’s tax-cut deal, just imagine the mayhem when Obama proposes to cut the Democrats’ signature program.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) compared Obama’s tax deal to punting on first down. A pre-emptive cut in Social Security is forfeiting the game before kickoff.

Hey, Al, I got an idea.  Why don’t you and the others fight him just for once?  Frankly no deal is better than the deals he’s been negotiating for us.  Don’t hold your nose and vote for this one like you did with the Tax Cut for Billionaires (tm) plan.  Please?

Altogether now,  “We are so F’d”.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Empowering a Failed Hypothesis

Posted: December 20, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: , , , , , , | 58 Comments

One of my neighbors is a public defender who is a New Orleanian by birth and fits all the standard eccentricities of New Orleanians.  He spent some time in the Navy during the Vietnam period.   Now my friend is very liberal, but one of his buddies from the Navy time that visits frequently is not.  The buddy lives in rural Washington state and teaches in a small college there.  How he every managed to get a gig teaching economics with just an MBA still boggles my mind, but that is the deal.  When you do a stint in actual economics–not just managerial economics and your basic theory classes–you spend a lot of time proving theoretical models.  By the time you get farther in a program and have completed your first few econometrics courses, you’re taught how to empirically validate or destroy other folk’s academic work and their models.

One of the easiest groups of hypotheses to shoot down empirically came from the Reagan years. The results were pretty astounding–we would call that highly significant to what ever statistic was used–so much that David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett gave those hypotheses up rather quickly and they were key architects of the Reagan Economic Revolution. You can’t find a’ conservative’ economist in the sense of Reaganomics unless it’s one at the Heritage Foundation that is paid to deliberately ignore the facts.  In which case, that explains why they’re no place else BUT the Heritage Foundation.

Or they’re like my friend’s buddy who still goes back to the 1980s and pulls out old articles about things like the Laffer curve and teaches it because he wants to show all “opinions”.  That’s what he says to me any way, when I ask him why he teaches a failed hypothesis.  Frankly, he teaches it because he wants others to share his hopes and wishes that the silly thing is true.   Because he’s not had the rigorous training to prepare to do actual economics, he just teaches want he wants to teach.  He also hasn’t gone through publish or perish where you don’t get to have opinions without peer-reviewed facts.   This drives me nuts.  You can’t teach theory or empirical evidence or the scientific approach by clinging to a failed hypothesis.  This makes you an intellectual flat earther.

What we currently have right now is a president that is giving the Flat Earth Society the primary voice in NASA policy and funding when it comes to economic policy.   Paul Krugman has an op-ed from this weekend that firmly states that Obama has empowered the economics version of the Flat Earth Society.  His op ed is called ‘When Zombies Win.’ It’s exactly what needs to be said.

First, the original Obama stimulus plan was anything but text book Keynesian economics and can’t be seen as a way to shout fail on Keynesian theory.  It was more based in Reagan philosophy and those failed hypotheses than any neoKeynsian model.  While I’ve continually called the Supply Side wishful thinking as a failed hypothesis, Krugman is more direct.  He refers to it as failed doctrine.

For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts — was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And that’s not 20-20 hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

I wrote repeatedly at the time–no Nobel winning economist am I either–that the stimulus was bound to be way too little to be of any use.  You can read me screaming ‘Tax Cuts Don’t Cut It or Cure It’  from January 2006, 2009 where I quote John Mishell’s study that talks about how the Bush tax cuts didn’t grow jobs and didn’t grow the economy.  As a matter of fact I have many posts up along that line.   Here’s one covering the FT’s Martin Wolf where I talk about the same thing and it’s even called ‘Still Too Little and WAY TOO Republican” from January 17, 2009. You can search my archives during that time period and find I’m very consistent at writing how the Obama stimulus would fail and that it was primarily because it was based on tax cuts.

It’s really quite a logical situation and one the most flawed precepts sits right there in the Obama-McConnell tax travesty.  There’s a huge tax write off in the bill for companies buying new equipment.  This is something completely ineffective because it just helps the few companies that would’ve done that any way.  The majority of companies are hurting for customers.  No amount of tax write offs for equipment or even employees is going to make them expand if they don’t have customers or revenue.  In fact, my guess will be that an academic study some where down the line will show that the majority of those tax cuts were used by corporations who expanded in emerging markets instead of here.  That’s because that’s where the inflation, growth and action is and there’s nothing in the bill that says tax benefits stay here.

Krugman also talks about something I spoke to recently in that nearly every Republican put in charge of some committee dealing with some aspect of the economy is so far out there on doctrine and short on economic theory and evidence that we’re bound to see more of the same stuff that tanked us the last time out.  The Republicans sitting on the Financial Crisis panel just put out their financial version of the Earth is Flat manual last week.  They said it was too much regulation which is pretty much the exact opposite of everything that every empirical study has shown us.  Here’s one I keep pushing called “Slapped in the Face by  the Invisible Hand” because it’s nontechnical in nature. Krugman called the release of the document ‘Wall Street Whitewash’.

So, Krugman’s op ed from this weekend isn’t astounding in that we all know what neoKeynisans like Stiglitz, and Blinder, Sachs and Krugman have been saying for months now.   Now that I’ve read BB’s morning links, I’m even getting a better feel for the source of my weekend wonderment on Krugman’s bottom line.  Krugman was one of a group called before the President in an attempt to get them to STFU.  The deal is this.  The Nobel Peace Prize may now be given on an ‘aspirational’ basis, but the Nobel Prize for economics is not.  Stiglitz and Krugman earned their Nobel Prizes. I admit to having empirically tested some of Blinder’s models doing my first Masters in Economics so I’m very familiar with his contributions to the literature.  These economists live in a world of peer review where there’s a very dim view of people who cling to failed hypotheses.

So, here’s the wonderment from Krugman’s December 19, 2010 op-ed.

President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?), adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession, offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.

None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist. But it helped empower bad ideas, in ways that can do quite immediate harm. Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy — but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal. And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

What is even more significant is that this horrible tax bill was put forward so as not to stall things like START.  So, what is the status of the START Treaty and the Republicans who said they’d play ball if the Tax Cuts for Billionaires program was passed.  Has this eased the hostage crisis?

Well, the vote is supposed to be held tomorrow so we shall see. But, this is quote is fresh from the AFP 4 hours ago from the moment I’ve hit the publish button.

Democrats expressed astonishment that top Republicans continued to oppose ratification when virtually every present and past foreign policy or national security heavyweight backed the move, regardless of their political stripes.

In that same announcement, Mitch McConnell was quoted as saying he’d vote against it the ratification. So is John Kyl. Collin Powell and Condoleeza Rice support the ratification of this treaty.  This is what you get when you negotiate with terrorists; domestic or otherwise.

This President has consistently used the failed dogma of Reaganomics in economic policy.  It makes no difference if the wackiest of the right wing say he is a socialist.  The evidence clearly points to his obsession with failed tax cut dogma.  I don’t know if his reasons are political or if–deep down–he is a Republican in Democrat Clothing.  All I know is that we can no longer empower a failed hypothesis.   I certainly hope that Michael Hirsch’s list of  ‘Disillusionati’ continue to expose this economic policy for what it really is.

UPDATE via commenter waldenpond at TL.

File this under we told you so,

love, the Sky Dancing Cassandras

Prescribing Death for Profits

Posted: December 19, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Big Pharma, Corporate Crime | Tags: , , , , , | 63 Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, for The Call by John Sloan

An article in this month’s Vanity Fair called “Deadly Medicine” made me realize how much of the movement of various parts of corporate business functions were not only to chase the lowest wage, but to also chase the least amount of regulation. The result of this movement has been the death of many poor people in many poor countries.  Yet, we hear very little of this news in this country.  You can only image how much this has to do with the huge connections between Corporate Big Media and its Corporate Advertisers.  I’ve had to rely on many a foreign source and watch dog blog to sniff out some of the  information in this post.

You may have read a link I put in down thread to a fire in a Bangladeshi factory that killed many young women that sounded hauntingly familiar to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy in this country in 1911. I know a lot about the Bangladeshi economy because that is where my major professor was born. Much of the country’s growth has come from the textile business. It employs young women in situations similar to what workers endured in 18th and 19 century America. We have the laws and the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union to watch for these kinds of abuses. The young women of Bangladesh have neither. This fire happened five days ago. Many of the fire exits were locked as was the case with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.  The workers were subject to appalling conditions. At least 27 died and around 100 were seriously injured. Workers jumped to their death to avoid the flames. Bangladesh has another cottage industry that kills too. It serves as a guinea pig country for Big Pharma and the results of this relationship are frequently tragic.

Similar sad stories unfolds in parts of the old USSR, South America, and Asia as a result of the greed of Big Pharma. This industry looks for countries where it can avoid and cripple FDA regulation of their industry. I was appalled that I had not read much of this until I picked up the Vanity Fare article. After Googling the topic, I found that the media coverage at the time was limited mostly to foreign outlets.   It figures. Let me give you a taste of what I’m going to write about in several installments because there is so much to tell you and it will make you weep.

Many of these clinical trials have gone to places where people give their consent with a finger print or a poorly scribbled  “X”.  Surely, this is questionable ‘consent’. Some of the victims of these experiments are not even capable of granting consent.  My first case study for you is the example of 49 babies who died in India while undergoing experimental drug trials.  In some instances,  pediatricians were actually paid up to $350 a head to come up with subjects for the trials. As I share the investigative reporting on this subject, one of the things to keep in mind is that there are now companies that broker clinical trial sites and victims for Big Pharma. It’s a growth industry. These brokers act as agents who procure countries with dysfunctional laws and judicial systems and poor, desperate people for drug experimentation. There is evidently big money in prescribing death to people in the poorest nations of the word.

In August, 2008, The Sunday Times reported this story.

Forty-nine babies have died in drug tests at one of India’s top hospitals, raising concerns that ethical standards are being compromised as the country becomes the world’s leading destination for clinical trials.

The deaths occurred over a period of 30 months at the Delhi-based All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), an elite medical college and public hospital renowned for providing low-cost treatment to the poor. The victims were among the 4,142 infants who were used in a total of 42 clinical trials — one of the final stages of developing a new drug — at AIIMS since January 2006, many for Western companies. Of the children used in the trials, 2,728 were aged under a year old.

The mortality rate among the babies, many of whom were seriously ill before they became part of the clinical trials, was 1.2 per cent — significantly below the 4 per cent for all patients treated at the hospital. However the age of those selected for testing has shocked many in India and there are fears that the increasingly lucrative drug-testing industry may be cutting corners because of a shortfall of staff trained in medical ethics and best practice.

Manish Tiwari, a spokesperson for the Congress party, which heads India’s coalition Government, said: “The practice of using infants like guinea-pigs for drug testing must end.”

In 2006, a science Reporter for the Times asked this salient question in a headline:  ‘Poor, sick, desperate. What more could Big Pharma ask in Indian drug trials?’ The article outlines steps taken by the big drugmakers to move risky trials over seans to avoid lawsuits like those resulting from products like Vioxx –a Merck product–and from Paraxel made by TeGenero. The rush to find the most vulnerable countries and people has gone largely unnoticed in this country.

And so Big Pharma has begun outsourcing its trials to India, a move that, according to bioethicists, could create a “new imperialism”. India has huge numbers of sick people glad to test drugs in return for minimal, if any, recompense. The patients rarely mind — to them, experimental healthcare is better than none at all — and they rarely complain. India also has a homegrown supply of highly educated, English-speaking doctors, who cost a fraction of their Western counterparts.

AstraZeneca has opened a drug-testing facility in Bangalore; Pfizer has done the same in Bombay. At the moment one in a hundred global clinical trials is conducted in India, but Oxygen Healthcare, a British consultancy, estimates that in five years’ time that figure will have risen to one in ten.

This makes financial sense but others are clearly worried that poor, illiterate patients are being exploited. There is certainly doubt over whether they are giving informed consent. The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics reports that patients are often unable to distinguish between trials that might benefit them and those that won’t. Another study pointed out that, of the country’s 14,000 general hospitals, fewer than 200 are equipped to carry out drug trials adequately.

Indian patients are often used to test medicines that, once marketed, they will not be able to afford.

The editors of the American Journal of Bioethics say in their blog that “pharma trials in India should be the focus of a huge amount of attention in the world of research ethics”. Even more forthright was a recent opinion piece in The Scientist. “If Gandhi were alive today, he would lead protesters to the doors of a clinical research trials facility, where the oppression of the Indian poor dwarfs that of the 1930s.” This is a reference to Gandhi’s march against the British salt tax, which made it illegal to obtain salt from anyone other than the British Government, even though it could be collected along the coast. Gandhi and his supporters marched 240 miles from western India to coastal Gujarat, gathering the mineral on the way. The march ended in a bloody confrontation at a salt factory.

The Indian Government now stands accused of colluding in this new oppression. In 2004 it stipulated that drugs tested in India should first be proved safe in their country of origin; in 2005 the law was revoked.

Believe me, I’ve been Googling up a storm on these trials in India and other places for reports in US Newspapers.  I have yet to really find one.  I have found one blog called PharmaGossip that discusses some of these issue and the Vanity Fare article in particular. It simply shares the article that begins with this short introduction giving you a flavor the extent and the tragedy of cases found by its authors.

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

The article includes examples–including the one from India above–from hamlets all over the world with exotic-sounding  names.  All of these countries have citizens that have died so that Big Pharma can bring wrinkle creams, erectile dysfunction drugs, and tiny twists on existing drugs to the U.S. Market.  Many of these drugs are not as efficacious and have deleterious side effects compared to existing, older drugs.

If you go to the home page on PharmaGossip you’ll see more news on AstraZeneca which is one of the companies that comes up in many of these horror stories.  Here’s a link to another blog called Corporate Crime Daily that tells the story of Seroquel from 2009.  The article is called: AstraZeneca: Tales of a Deadly Drug Pusher. Seroquel is an anti-psychotic drug.  Because the drug came to market and caused damages to U.S. citizens and wound up in court, you can find coverage by the NYT.  AstraZeneca was also found guilty of defrauding Medicare in 2008. The reason I’m adding this is that when it hits our citizens and our courts, it becomes a media issue.  When the trials kill Indian babies and poor Poles, the US press is mum.

The number and type of clinical trials held in Western Europe, Canada, or the United States have been reduced significantly because their judicial systems are a way to check unethical and deadly business behaviors. [Restated to avoid confusion.  Yes some trials are held here but they are fewer and some types are not done here much any more.] **   As long as the FDA will approve drugs based on experimentation in vulnerable countries, we will have the blood of many on our hands.   Here are some numbers from the Vanity Fare article.

Many of today’s trials still take place in developed countries, such as Britain, Italy, and Japan. But thousands are taking place in countries with large concentrations of poor, often illiterate people, who in some cases sign consent forms with a thumbprint, or scratch an “X.” Bangladesh has been home to 76 clinical trials. There have been clinical trials in Malawi (61), the Russian Federation (1,513), Romania (876), Thailand (786), Ukraine (589), Kazakhstan (15), Peru (494), Iran (292), Turkey (716), and Uganda (132). Throw a dart at a world map and you are unlikely to hit a spot that has escaped the attention of those who scout out locations for the pharmaceutical industry.The two destinations that one day will eclipse all the others, including Europe and the United States, are China (with 1,861 trials) and India (with 1,457). A few years ago, India was home to more American drug trials than China was, thanks in part to its large English-speaking population. But that has changed. English is now mandatory in China’s elementary schools, and, owing to its population edge, China now has more people who speak English than India does.

Read the rest of this entry »

DADT Vote Live Blog: DADT is REPEALED!!!

Posted: December 18, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, DADT, Democratic Politics, Diplomacy Nightmares, Foreign Affairs, GLBT Rights, Human Rights, legislation, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 27 Comments

I just wanted to update you on two Senate votes that are really important.  The first, is the DADT vote and the second is the Child Marriage Bill.

First, the DADT has been repealed.  It got 8 votes from Republicans.  We’ll be adding links to the coverage as they become available.  Be sure to check back in!!  You’ll see we’re adding more as you read!!

Also, there is a bill that would help the State Department stop the exploitation of teenage girls who are damaged for life by early marriage.  The grandstanding around this is just getting ridiculous.  The Jane Crow Law set is trying to turn this into an abortion bill, of all things!!!

Here’s the status on the Child Marriage bill (S. 987)  from Post Partisan at WaPo.

In case you missed it, S. 987 (The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act) failed to pass last night. Despite unanimously passing the Senate, it only garnered a 241-166 majority in the House. Since House rules were in suspension, the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who sponsored the bill, had a blunt response in a late-night press release:

The action on the House floor stopping the Child Marriage bill tonight will endanger the lives of millions of women and girls around the world. These young girls, enslaved in marriage, will be brutalized and many will die when their young bodies are torn apart while giving birth. Those who voted to continue this barbaric practice brought shame to Capitol Hill.

His frustration makes sense: the corresponding House Bill had 112 co-sponsors! What the heck happened?

In the hours before the vote, Republicans circulated a memo to pro-life members of Congress alleging that the bill could fund abortions and use child marriage “to overturn pro-life laws.” It also reiterated concerns over the bill’s cost. When it came time for a vote, a number of the bill’s pro-life supporters in both parties abandoned ship. Even co-sponsors of the corresponding House bill (H.R. 2103), like Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.), voted against it.

Time for the facts. First of all, S. 987 is short–the body of the bill is around ten pages long–and does not mention abortion (“family planning” isn’t in there either). A quick read suffices to show that the bill is not dealing with abortion.

The lives of teenage women are at stake.  How is this not more important than inventing abortion charades?

The Senate just passed the Bill To Repeal DADT by 65-31. CSPAN is showing the results now and Lieberman is giving the presser.

Here’s the coverage from CNN.

Here’s the coverage from NYT.

The Senate on Saturday struck down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

By a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned discrimination that treated gay and lesbian troops as second-class citizens.

Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban. “As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best led and best trained fighting force the world has ever known,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the Senate, on a 63-33 vote, beat back Republican efforts to block a final vote on the repeal bill.

The vote marked a historic moment that some equated with the end of racial segregation in the military. It followed a review by the Pentagon that found little concern in the military about lifting the ban and was backed by Pentagon officials as a better alternative to a court-ordered end.

I will be thrilled to see the President sign this policy change.  Finally, a few people do the RIGHT thing!!!  Thanks go out to Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins and to Harry Reid who made this a stand alone, up and down vote.  Senators Gillibrand and Levin also played important roles.  It’s great to get rid of this unjust policy!!

Here’s something from The Hill on the bill itself.

The repeal measure requires the president and the secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send a certification to Congress declaring they have considered the recommendations contained in the Pentagon Working Group report on repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

They must also certify that the Department of Defense has prepared the necessary policies and regulations to implement the repeal and that those policies are consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy established under former President Bill Clinton, will not be repealed until 60 days after Obama submits the certification to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.

Senate Fails on Dream Act

Posted: December 18, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Rights, Democratic Politics, Human Rights, jobs, legislation | Tags: , | 12 Comments

People are NOT Political Pinatas

Right after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had an influx of Mexican workers.  Many spent their evenings at Vaughn’s because owner Cindy has a house in Mexico and has a lot of cantina music on the juke box.  She also runs a gift store that sells native art from all over Mexico.  There’s a side room  with a TV that’s mostly on soccer too.  We’re a very welcoming neighborhood.   The upper 9 is pretty diverse and tolerate.  We’re known as the place where the gay community, artists, writers and musicians live as well as a huge number of working class people.  It’s an inner city hood.  Make no doubt about that. Most of the neighborhood didn’t didn’t flood since it’s so close to the Mississippi. It was a natural place for recovery workers to dwell.   We’re one mile east of the French Quarter via the River Road.  Close enough to walk, bike or take the shuttle, but far enough to miss Mardi Gras madness and tourists.

Anyway, I got to meet a young man in his early 20s there.  He was extremely cute, had a wicked crush on my neighbor, and you wouldn’t know he was Mexican because he could barely speak Spanish.  He’d been brought to the country as a baby and was educated in U.S. schools.  For all intents and purposes, Juan is a typical American young adult about the age of my oldest daughter.  But, if he were picked up by ICE, he would be sent back to a country where he knows no one, can’t speak the language very well, and has absolutely no attachments.  Why would we do that?  His story compelled me to find out more about the Dream Act.  I can’t see visiting the ‘sins’ of the elders on kids like these.  Current immigration policy is way too harsh.

Evidently, Senate Republicans and RINOs disagree with me.

The Senate failed Juan and many other kids of various foreign births in similar situations. (I was surprised to find how many Irish and New Zealand illegals we have in New Orleans so it’s not just all about Mexicans, but their numbers are obviously larger.)  This information is from the NYT and David Herszenhorn. To me, Passing the Dream Act should’ve been a no brainer.  The Republicans held together in their block of “no to everything we didn’t think of” and then there were the usual RINOs like Ben Nelson who represent the neanderthal wing of the Democratic Party.

The Senate on Saturday blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements, including passing a criminal background check.

The vote by 55-41 in favor of the bill, which is known as the Dream Act, effectively kills it for this year, and its fate is uncertain. The measure needed the support of 60 senators to cut off a filibuster and bring it to the floor.

Supporters said they were heartened that the measure won the backing of a majority of the Senate. They said they would continue to press for it, either on its own or as part of a wide immigration overhaul that some Democrats hope to undertake next year and believe could be an area of cooperation with Republicans, who will control a majority in the House

Most immediately, the measure would have helped grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students and recent graduates whose lives are severely restricted though many have lived in the United States for nearly their entire lives.

Young Hispanic men and women filled the spectator galleries of the Senate, many of them wearing graduation caps and tassels in a symbol of their support for the bill. They held hands in a prayerful gesture as the clerk called the roll and many looked stricken as its defeat was announced.

President Obama had personally lobbied lawmakers in support the bill. But Democrats were not able to hold ranks.

Five Democrats joined Republicans in opposing the bill. They were Democratic Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Jon Tester of Montana.

I’ve never been sure why we make it so hard for people to get citizenship here.  My Lama–a Sherpa from Nepal– just got his citizenship last year via his religious VISA and green card being the lama at our Dharma Center.  I’m sponsoring his young son who just started at UNO and wants to be a doctor. His daughter is in Massachusetts now with other sangha family going to community college.  I’ve been sponsoring Sherpas for some time now.

There are lots of students I meet from other countries that major in areas where we could used some help.  Of course, any service to our country through military or other duty should be rewarded.  But, some folks just cling to some xenophobic idea of being overrun by outsiders or something.  This confuses me because if some one really wants to be an American and contribute, we should reward it.  We shouldn’t make villains of the very people that want to be us.  The senate garnered 55 votes.  That’s a clear majority.  Something is very wrong right now with the beltway.  So many people’s lives should not be held hostage by a belligerent minority.  People are not political pinatas.

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