US: Drug Companies to Reveal Grant Practices

For years, the nation's largest drug and medical device manufacturers have courted doctors with consulting fees, free trips to exotic locales and sponsoring the educational conferences that physicians attend.

Those financial ties in most cases need not be disclosed and can lead to arrangements that some say improperly influence medical care.

Now, under the threat of regulation from Congress, the two industries are promising to be more forthcoming about their spending. A dozen of the nation's leading drug and device makers have told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that they have plans or are working on plans to publicly disclose grants to outside groups. The details will be provided on each company's Web sites.

Watchdog groups say the companies are trying to derail legislation that would require public disclosure of their giving.

''If they were doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they would have done so decades ago,'' said Dr. Peter Lurie of the consumer group Public Citizen.

Of particular interest to Grassley, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is the money companies spend on continuing medical education. Physicians attend such conferences to fulfill their license requirements and to keep up to date with the latest treatment trends. Professional associations and companies frequently ask drug and device makers to help pay for the conferences. Recently, Grassley asked 15 companies whether they planned to follow the lead of Eli Lilly & Co., which now discloses its grants to such programs.

''If your company does not yet have any efforts or plans in place, please explain why not,'' Grassley wrote.

The responses are in. They are wide-ranging but mostly what the senator wanted to hear. Indeed, many of the companies said they would go beyond disclosing grants for medical education. Some companies said they would also disclose payments to patient advocacy groups such as the American Heart Association or the American Diabetes Association. Boston Scientific said it was developing a system that even discloses certain payments to physicians.

Medtronic Inc. said it will post payments for professional meetings and patient groups on its Web site beginning May 1. AstraZeneca PLC said it would do the same on Aug. 1, providing the amount spent and the purpose of the financing. AstraZeneca gets 4,000 to 5,000 grant applications each year and funds about a third of them.

Merck and Co. was vague about its plans, but committed to the concept. ''We are currently in the process of developing an action plan,'' the company wrote to Grassley.

Amgen Corp. and Abbott Laboratories said they had formed working groups to determine how to compile and display their grants.

Schering-Plough Corp., however, told the senator what he didn't want to hear: ''We do not publish or have plans at the moment to publish a list of charitable contributions or educational grants that medical organizations have received from us.''

Grassley said, overall, he was happy with the responses.

''The way these companies are making information about financial relationships open to scrutiny is the right thing to do,'' he said.
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LSD Comic Book Done in the Style of Jack Chick

Thanks to MARK FRAUENFELDER for posting on BoingBoing:Here's an online comic book about this history of LSD done up in the style of one of those hateful Chick tracts:

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What's with this Hugo Chavez guy?

"Access to free primary health care and dentistry - through the public health reform program known as Mission Barrio Adentro ("Mission Inside the Barrio") - is one of the most important improvements that the residents of Jos Flix Ribas say they have experienced under Chvez. Most of the doctors and dentists here are Cubans who have moved to the barrio as part of a deal under which Cuba receives cheap oil from Venezuela."

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Wal-Mart's Candid Moments Caught on Tape: Managers Parading in Drag and Many More Moments We Weren't Supposed to See

Wal-Mart's internal meetings are on display in three decades worth of videos made by a Kansas production company scrambling to stay in business after Wal-Mart stopped using the firm.Wal-Mart Stores Inc. dropped longtime contractor Flagler Productions in 2006. In response to losing its biggest customer, the small company has opened its archive, for a fee, to researchers who include plaintiffs' lawyers and union critics seeking clips of unguarded moments at the world's largest retailer.Those moments never meant for public display include a scene of male managers parading in drag at an executive meeting, a clip used by union-backed critics at Wal-Mart Watch for a recent advertisement castigating the retailer's attitude toward female employees.

McCain and Conspiracy Theorists Agree that Washington is Satanic

BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder writes:Dan Morse of The Washington Post looks for evidence to support McCain's frequent claims that Washington is the "city of Satan."First, McCain:McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, has regularly called Washington Satan's City over the past 10 years. He did so twice last month, including during a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain whose founder is such a devoted Baptist he keeps the eateries closed on Sundays. "It's harder and harder trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," McCain said, according to an Associated Press account.Next, Cutting Edge Ministries director David Bay:"McCain was right," said David Bay, speaking by phone from Lexington, S.C., where as director of Cutting Edge Ministries he has long asserted that Washington's streets are positioned to usher in Lucifer as "the ultimate master of Government Center."

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US: In Justice Shift, Corporate Deals Replace Trials

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

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GM SFood Linked to the Nightmare Condition called Morgellon"s Disease

Have you heard of the nightmare condition called Morgellon's Disease? (More info.)Victims experience unbearable sensations — all the time, day and night - of insects crawling under their skin, burning and itching so terrible that people have committed suicide to end the torture. To make matters worse, much, much worse, these unfortunate people, who range in age from babies to the elderly, have open lesions on their skin that produces sharp, thin red, black, blue and white fibers and black sand-like grains. The fibers appear to move as if alive and, incredibly, when placed in a Petri dish after removal, continue to move and grow!The origin of this horror has been unclear since it was first named in 2001 by the mother of a 3 year old baby whose symptoms she described and documented on a website. Since that time, thousands of people have been identified with this condition for which the only successful cure has been that most potent (and safe) of all antibiotics, nano silver. But the nature of the condition, and its cause, have remained a mystery until now.


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US: House panel questions Bear rescue plan

The rescue of Bear Stearns faced further scrutiny in Congress on Tuesday as a powerful Democratic lawmaker demanded more information on the selection of BlackRock as investment manager for $30bn in the bank’s mortgage assets.

A key element of the takeover of Bear by JPMorgan Chase was the quick decision to bring in BlackRock, a New York-based asset management firm run by Laurence Fink, as a portfolio adviser for the $30bn (£15bn) of mortgage assets, which will be used as collateral for a $29bn loan from the Federal Reserve. BlackRock and the Fed agreed to determine the fee for the arrangement at a later date.

In a letter, Henry Waxman, chairman of the House oversight and government reform committee, asked Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to answer questions on the decision to give BlackRock a “potentially lucrative position...without competition”.

“When contract terms are not defined in advance, it is usually the taxpayer – not the contractor – who suffers,” Mr Waxman wrote. “In Iraq and in the response to the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina , taxpayers have incurred billions of dollars in unnecessary costs when federal agencies tried to negotiate terms with a private contractor that knows it has already won the contract.”

Mr Waxman asked that by the end of next week the New York Fed de­scribe the “basis” of the BlackRock choice, and whether the Fed would be able to solicit competing bids. A spokesman for the New York Fed declined to comment.

America for Sale: 2 Outcomes When Foreigners Buy Factories

Four years ago, a low-slung factory on the fringes of town here was stagnating and shedding workers. Then Siemens, the German industrial giant, bought the plant and folded it into a global enterprise. Today, the factory is shipping wastewater treatment equipment to Asia and the Middle East and employing twice as many workers.

The Electrolux refrigerator factory in Greenville, Mich., was closed two years ago. The company sent production to Mexico.

“Globalization has been good for Holland,” said David J. Spyker, once the plant manager and now vice president of a Siemens unit with operations around the world.

About 60 miles to the northeast, such talk provokes contemptuous snickers. Two years have passed since a Swedish multinational shut down what had been the largest refrigerator factory in the country, a sprawling complex along the Flat River in Greenville.

The company, Electrolux, sent production to Mexico, eliminating 2,700 jobs from a town of 8,000 people.

“Everybody talks about Electrolux around here the way the rest of the country talks about Katrina,” said Becky Gebhart, manager of a nonprofit medical clinic that opened last November in Greenville, 30 miles northeast of Grand Rapids, that serves people with little or no health insurance.

As foreign buyers descend upon the United States, capturing widening swaths of the industrial landscape and putting millions of Americans to work for new owners, these two cities offer sharply competing narratives for a nation still uneasy about being on the selling end of the global economy.

And with the dollar losing much value in recent years, the pace is picking up again, as some of the country’s most valuable assets go on the block at bargain-basement prices.

For many communities, like Holland, Mich., the consequences include new jobs at decent pay, fresh capital to finance expansion and links to markets around the globe.

Yet many others, like Greenville, are suffering from being branded redundant by huge enterprises with factories around the world.

To travel Michigan today is to experience America’s often ambivalent relationship with the global economy..

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Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Final, Undelivered Sermon Was Titled 'Why America May Go to Hell'

In light of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Hillary Clinton said she would not have him as a pastor. Given his final years, would she have had Martin Luther King, Jr. as one? Vern E. Smith and Jon Meacham write in Newsweek:The sun was about to set. On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had retreated to room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, worrying about a sanitation strike in Memphis and working on his sermon for Sunday.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sits in a jail cell in the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Ala. on November 3, 1967. Its title: "Why America May Go to Hell." For King, whose focus had shifted from civil rights to antiwar agitation and populist economics, the Dream was turning dark.To his family, King was murdered because he was no longer the King of the March on Washington, simply asking for the whites only signs to come down. He had grown radical: the King of 1968 was trying to build an interracial coalition to end the war in Vietnam and force major economic reforms - starting with guaranteed annual incomes for all. They charge that the government, probably with Lyndon Johnson's knowledge, feared King might topple the "power structure" and had him assassinated.

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Contract Justice

For the first time since 1968, the Pentagon has charged a civilian contractor under military law. But the individual in question is not one of the Blackwater "shooters" alleged to have gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square last September, nor is it the Blackwater contractor accused of shooting to death a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president inside the Green Zone on Christmas Eve 2006. In fact, the contractor is not even a US citizen. Nor is he an armed contractor. And the crime in question was not committed against an Iraqi civilian.

The swiftness of the military's response to this alleged crime, the nature of that crime and the identity of the victim speaks volumes about the priorities of US oversight and law enforcement when it comes to contractor crimes in Iraq. What's more, the news of the prosecution came just days before the State Department announced that despite the serious allegations against Blackwater, it was extending the company's Iraq "security" contract for yet another year.

The accused contractor, Alaa Mohammad Ali, is a dual Canadian-Iraqi citizen who worked for the US corporation Titan as a military translator in the western Iraqi town of Hit. He reportedly emigrated to Canada after fleeing Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's violent suppression of the 1991 Shiite uprising. Now, Ali stands accused of stabbing in the chest a fellow contractor--reportedly another translator--on February 23. The military began the process of charging him four weeks later, on March 27.



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Another KBR Rape Case

Karen Houppert | In the wake of Jamie Leigh Jones's highly publicized charges, a woman comes forward with new allegations of a brutal sexual assault and cover-up at a KBR camp in Iraq.

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[Source: The Nation: Top Stories - Posted by WAR ON YOU]