Sam Smith asks why the Times and the Post overlooked the profit motive in new cholesterol level recommendations:
This is an increasingly important issue for if pharmaceutical companies are successful in defining health downward, millions of new customers for its drugs are created.
Tragic news from New Haven:
Five people in New Haven have been hospitalized since Sunday in apparently random shootings involving the same gun, police said Tuesday. Connecticut State Police said shell casings from each scene were identified as being fired from the same gun. Police would not say what type of gun was used in the shootings in two neighborhoods. Greg Jones, 18, and Christopher Lowery, 20, were shot early Sunday, police said. They are listed in fair condition at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Police would not give the names of remaining victims, who were attacked early Monday within 11 minutes of each other in New Haven’s Hill section. A 24-year-old man shot near his home, and a 41-year-old man wounded near Sylvan Avenue and Elliott Street remain in critical condition at Yale-New Haven Hospital, officials said. A 54-year-old man shot near Congress Avenue and Downes Street is in stable condition at the Hospital of San Raphael. “We’ve made this case priority No. 1,” said New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. “We’re encouraging the community for extra help — to be an extra set of eyes and ears.” Police Chief Francisco Ortiz has reassigned every detective in the New Haven Police Department to work exclusively on the case.
There’s a reason they call it a boys club:
With new White House salary figures leaked to The Washington Post and an Excel spreadsheet, crack researcher Margot Williams determined that men in the Bush White House earn an average of $76,624 a year. Women earn $59,917 on average. That means Bush women earn about 78 percent of what Bush men earn. As it happens, that’s almost exactly the national average for the gap in pay between the sexes, although it’s a good bit below the 88 percent for the nearly 1 million professional and administrative employees in the federal workforce. Also, the White House has the advantage of making all its hires from scratch after the 2000 election.
So this is what Bush and company mean when they talk about unleashing economic freedom:
The United States plans to seek a waiver in international talks this week that would allow American farmers to continue using methyl bromide, a pesticide slated to be banned in 2005 because it contributes to destruction of Earth’s protective ozone layer. The pesticide, which has also been linked to prostate cancer in farm workers and neurological problems in people exposed to large quantities, was scheduled to be phased out in 2005 under the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 treaty struck under the Reagan administration to restrict the use of ozone-destroying chemicals. The pact, which has been updated several times and signed by more than 160 nations, is widely considered the most successful international environmental treaty in history.
One newspaper owns up to its intentional failure to cover the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties:
Deep into a speech on journalism ethics in May, John S. Carroll, now the editor of The Los Angeles Times, told University of Oregon students about his days as editor of The Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky., where the running gag among newsroom staff members was that they should print the following “clarification”: “It has come to the editor’s attention that The Herald neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.” Mr. Carroll, who edited the paper from 1979 to 1991, said he was just trying to underscore the difficulty of correcting major mistakes. “I did it primarily to get a laugh,” he said in an interview. “I didn’t intend to challenge the paper to do anything.”
But a challenge is precisely what it became. When The Herald-Leader’s enterprise editor, John Voskuhl, read Mr. Carroll’s speech online a few days later, a light bulb went off in his head and he fired off an e-mail message to the paper’s new editor asking for permission pick up the gauntlet. “I knew we had skeletons in our closet,” Mr. Voskuhl said. On July 4, readers of The Herald-Leader saw the results of the paper’s inquiry: a front-page exposé, two sidebar articles and a full page of previously unpublished black-and-white photographs describing how the newspapers – The Herald in the morning and The Leader in the afternoon – virtually ignored the civil rights movement in Lexington.
This is, so to speak, good news. But it should also be an important reminder of the widespread failure of the mainstream media to this day to cover the stories which shape the lives of the poor and people of color, and to report on the people’s movements working to change this country.
The President of the General Workers’ Confederation of Peru survives an assasination attempt:
The failed attack took place on 6 July, when a flower arrangement sent to Mr. Huamán’s home was found to contain a hand grenade. Fortunately, the device failed to explode. The attempt on Mr. Huamán’s life was the culmination of a campaign of intimidation against him, which had earlier included threatening telephone calls. As the ICFTU General Secretary pointed out in his letter to the President, resorting to violence and physical attacks against someone whose only “crime” is to protect workers’ interests shows a total disregard for basic human and workers’ rights.
The persecution of the trade union leader has taken place against a background of mounting social unrest caused by rising unemployment, lower real wages, and an increase in poverty. The country’s trade union movement has become the public face of this protest, calling for a national strike on 14 July to demand changes in the government’s economic policies. Trade unions at the national and international level are concerned that the attack on the CGTP leader was related to his role in this popular protest. The ICFTU wrote to President Toledo on June 23 expressing its concern at the situation in the country and urging him to negotiate with the trade unions to seek a peaceful, constructive solution to the crisis before the July 14 General Strike. However the President has not responded to that appeal.
Some prison guard unions have come under criticism, sometimes deserved, for narrowly pursuing their members’ short-term interests in a manner which put them at odds with broader social change movements. That’s what I’d call a craft union approach, and there’s a reason that craft unions never left the kind of impact on this country that the trade union movement – through broad-based organizing – has. Here’s a Madison prison guard local providing a powerful example of the potential of organizing with a broader social vision:
At a meeting recently with four correctional officers, the union’s strategy was laid out in a presentation that will serve as the bargaining unit’s negotiating road map…Far from the “nuts and bolts” wages and benefits, the correctional officers said they will attempt to identify budget problems, how they affect their jobs and why those problems are not the making of the rank-and-file officers. These problems, they say, should not be cited when the state makes what they claim are inadequate economic offers. The officers referred to 1997 Wisconsin Act 283, the state’s Truth in Sentencing Law, that provides for extended supervision and increased penalties for various offenses. The officers claim Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing Law was created from model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council. They say ALEC is a politically conservative organization which held seminars on criminal justice issues such as Truth in Sentencing. The officers say the seminars were sponsored by private sector businesses with an interest in corrections. They named Corrections Corporation of America, a prison-building company that houses Wisconsin inmates out of state, as having ties to ALEC.
…During the presentation, the correctional officers indicated that Truth in Sentencing had contributed greatly to the state’s overcrowding problems. They claimed that the law’s author, then Rep. Scott Walker, patterned Wisconsin’s law after the ALEC model, which was developed by a task force led by private sector firms such as CCA…The point of all this, officers said, is that the prison population explosion was caused in large part by a new law mandating lengthy sentences, and that law was influenced by private companies which directly benefit from greater prison populations. In fact, the officers pointed out, more than 3,000 Wisconsin inmates were incarcerated in out-of-state CCA facilities. Overcrowding is not to be taken lightly, the officers said. It’s a contributing factor to prison riots and other lesser incidents which greatly threaten the safety of employees and inmates alike. A so called “tough on crime” approach is not always productive, the officers said. “Wisconsin correctional institutions are becoming increasingly hostile due to inmate take-a-ways and inmate idleness,” they said. “These actions, by and large, have been enacted by legislators eager to be ‘tough on crime’ with little understanding of the potential ramifications in the correctional setting.”
The New Haven Register reports on last Tuesday’s Community Benefits Agreement Resolution vote, 30-0:
The board has passed a resolution encouraging developers, government entities and nonprofits to enter into community benefits agreements that would ‘guarantee living wage jobs, local hiring and training, direct benefits to schools, affordable housing, neighborhood preservation and community stabilization, park and recreation space, residential parking and responsible contracting.’…But there is a lingering concern among businesses that the resolution would discourage economic development, that it focuses on cutting the pie into more pieces instead of making the pie itself bigger. When it comes to negotiating agreements, one particular clause that causes angst says that the board and city will ‘take such efforts into account when considering projects for approval and presentation.’
[Healey] said community benefits agreements would create “a cultural change where we go about development by bringing in the neighborhoods early. We’re supporting the type of development that will improve quality of life in our neighborhoods.” Healey sponsored an amendment in response to concerns from Mayor John DeStefano Jr. The mayor pointed out that original language did not include voluntary payments in lieu of taxes, and the aldermen included PILOTs in the amended language…Perez and Healey said each neighborhood would select negotiating committees and public hearings and meetings would follow an inclusive, democratic process. “The idea is to eliminate the sort of backroom deals that used to happen and still happen between politicians, developers and community development corporations,” Healey said.
The exterminator gets caught:
In May 2001, Enron’s top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year. DeLay requested that the new donation come from “a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron’s executives,” with the understanding that it would be partly spent on “the redistricting effort in Texas,” said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.
The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts. DeLay’s fundraising efforts helped produce a stunning political success…But DeLay and his colleagues also face serious legal challenges: Texas law bars corporate financing of state legislature campaigns, and a Texas criminal prosecutor is in the 20th month of digging through records of the fundraising, looking at possible violations of at least three statutes. A parallel lawsuit, also in the midst of discovery, is seeking $1.5 million in damages from DeLay’s aides and one of his political action committees — Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) — on behalf of four defeated Democratic lawmakers.
Look like there’s at least one Illinois Republican out there who wants to challenge Barack Obama for Senate:
Dr. Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a Chicago-area physician, had been deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington since 2002, focusing on reducing demand for drugs. Federal law barred her from seeking the Republican nomination while she worked for the government. Barthwell, 50, said that no one had assured her that she would be the GOP candidate. “I’m interested, I want to be considered and I will make myself available to those who make that decision,” she said, “but I am not assuming that I will be the candidate and I am not assuming that once I get all the information that I need, that I would want to run in this particular race.” Financial backing from the party is one big issue, she said. Another is just how much support the candidate would get from the national party. If Barthwell were chosen to face off against Democratic state Sen. Barack Obama, it would be the first time in U.S. history that two black candidates have battled for a Senate seat.
Obama‘s spent his career fighting racial and economic injustice in education, in voting, in employment, and in the crimminal justice system. Meanwhile, Barthwell’s spent the past few years fighting medical marijuana. Bring it.
The Republican leadership stops Congress from voting so it can stop you from reading:
By a 210 to 210 tie vote that GOP leaders prolonged for 23 tumultuous minutes while they corralled dissident members, the House rejected a proposed change to the USA Patriot Act that would have barred the Justice Department from searching bookstore and library records. White House officials, citing the nearly three-year-old law’s importance as an anti-terrorism tool, warned that an attempt to weaken it would be vetoed. But the victory came only after GOP tactics infuriated Democrats and a number of Republicans. The vote, scheduled to last 15 minutes, dragged on for 38 minutes despite outraged shouts and a unified chant of ‘shame, shame, shame’ from Democrats across the aisle…
With President Bush’s approval rating slipping as a result of setbacks in the Iraq war, lawmakers in both parties appear emboldened to defy the White House and the House GOP leadership.
‘The Republican leadership is out of control,’ said Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.). ‘Today’s vote on the Freedom to Read Protection Act is just the latest example of a growing trend towards abusive, closed-fist partisanship on the part of Republican House leadership.’ Rep. C.L. Butch Otter (R-Idaho), a conservative and an advocate of the defeated provision, told reporters after the vote: “You win some, and some get stolen.”
Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the Bush marriage agenda:
Opponents of gay marriage claim that there is some consistency here, in that gay marriages must be stopped before they undermine the straight ones. How the married gays will go about wrecking heterosexual marriages is not entirely clear: by moving in next door, inviting themselves over and doing a devastating critique of the interior decorating? It is equally unclear how marriage will cure poor women’s No. 1 problem, which is poverty ? unless, of course, the plan is to draft C.E.O.’s to marry recipients of T.A.N.F. (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Left to themselves, most women end up marrying men of the same social class as their own, meaning ? in the case of poverty-stricken women ? blue-collar men. But that demographic group has seen a tragic decline in earnings in the last couple of decades. So I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.
The answer turns out to be approximately 2.3, which is, strangely enough, illegal. Seeking clarity, I called the administration’s top marriage maven, Wade Horn at Health and Human Services. H.H.S. is not ‘promoting’ marriage, he told me, just providing ‘marriage education’ for interested couples of limited means. The poor aren’t being singled out for any insidious reason, he insisted; this is just a service they might otherwise lack. It could have been Pilates training or courses in orchid cultivation, was the implication, but for now it’s marriage education. As recently as 2001, however, Horn was proposing that the administration ‘show it values marriage by rewarding those who choose it’ with cash ‘marriage bonuses.’
When I suggested that — with food pantries maxing out and shelters overflowing across the nation — poor women might have other priorities, Horn snapped back: “It’s fine for you to make the decision on what low-income couples need.” Silly old social-engineering-type liberal that I am, I had actually doubted that marriage education might be helpful to couples doomed to spend their married lives on separate cots in the shelter.
As one welfare recipient once told me, “We need caps and gowns, not wedding gowns.”
Josh Eidelson 