Archive for the ‘government’ Category
Big Troubles in Little South Austin
A South Austin neighborhood is being hammered with seemingly nitpicking and spurious code violations.
In October, the city’s 311 nonemergency number started getting a flood of calls complaining about homes in South Austin’s Fairview neighborhood. Over several days, the anonymous caller or callers gave the city 35 different tips about houses with possible code violations. After city inspectors followed up, they issued violation notices to 76 homeowners in the neighborhood, telling them they must apply for permits for improvements such as garage conversions and carports.
Those who fail to correct the problem could be criminally charged and fined up to $2,000 per day or have their utilities disconnected, according to recent letters sent to homeowners that gave them a March 26 deadline to comply.
The homeowners say they’re upset by the violation letters and want more time to figure out how to negotiate the city bureaucracy to get into compliance.
“I’m worried about the fines,” said John Anguiano, 77, who lives on Heartwood Drive, and got a violation notice for a garage conversion he did about 1975. “I’m old, retired and sick, and it’s a pain to deal with this.”
Anguiano said he’s tried to get a permit, but it’s been on hold since October; he’s being told he must get a variance from the Austin City Council because he lives in the flood plain. Williamson Creek is nearby, and many of the 76 homeowners can’t resolve their permit issues until they get a variance to do home improvements in a flood plain.
Dale Flatt, a 24-year city firefighter on medical leave, is one of the organizers trying to help his neighbors straighten out the mess.
“To code inspectors, all these people are just associated with an address,” he said. “But they have lived there up to 40 years, and now it’s turned into a nightmare.”
[Click to continue reading Code violation letters rain down on South Austin neighborhood]
The city’s Planning and Development Review Department is only open from 8 AM to 11 AM, Monday through Friday, not the most consumer friendly hours.
My dad lives in this area, and has received one of the letters. He emailed:
I got a violation notice for replacing my doors with a window and a door. They think that I’ve creating “living space” in the garage. I could beat that by demonstrating that it is not living space but is still a workshop and storage.
… So I must go for the Flood Plain variance from city council to get a permit and get that work inspected. Bullshit, fer sure.
I’ve been in this garage, and other than his oil paints and easel, no building inspector in their right mind would think that area could be classified as living space. There are mostly construction tools and various related items, car parts for the vintage Porsche that’s getting modified to run with an electric motor, and similar things. Stuff that belongs in a garage, in other words.
My brother, pictured above with brussels sprout earrings, who happens to live next door, also got a code violation letter, and adds:
We have been cited by the city for illegal conversion of garage into living space without a permit. In addition, we are located inside the 100 year floodplain, so the city will not issue permits to us because of increased liability for flood damage. What the residents have to do is apply for a permit, get rejected, then bring it to the city council and ask for a variance. If accepted, then file again for a permit, get inspected, pay the fees etc. If the city council will not issue the variance, then either destroy the construction or sue, I guess….
So crazy. The majority of these houses1 were built in the 1960s and 1970s, why has the 100 year flood plain only suddenly become an issue? Curious as to how this will play out now that the story has been made public. Also wonder why this particular area has been singled out. Maybe a disgruntled former resident (someone’s ex-husband or similar)? A disgruntled building inspector? A disgruntled contractor? Who knows, but if a building inspector wanted to look closely, they could discover violations in nearly every house and building on every block in every city2.
Footnotes:USPS Saturday mail delivery
Would it really be the end of the American dream if we didn’t receive mail on Saturday? Would all of our precious bodily fluids be sapped?
Facing a projected $238 billion loss over the next decade, due in part to the rise of the Internet, the U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday proposed a 10-year plan to bring it into financial health, including putting an end to Saturday mail delivery.
The Postal Service, which is regulated by Congress and the administration but operates without federal assistance, faces “a severe income gap that we absolutely have to close,” said Postmaster General John Potter.
Such cost-cutting measures have been proposed, and largely ignored, in the past. Last year, post office representatives pushed multiple times at hearings on Capitol Hill for the authority to end Saturday delivery, change the way the service pays out retiree health benefits and raise prices, all actions that require congressional approval.
The Postal Service predicted that first-class mail volume will drop 37 percent by 2020. Bob Bernstock, the agency’s president of mailing and shipping services, said that “creates an urgency that was not there before.” The post office generates about half its revenue from first-class mail.
The service has identified measures within its authority to close the shortfall by about $123 billion over 10 years. It cannot eliminate the remaining $115 billion without being granted the authority to implement additional measures, including ending Saturday delivery, estimated to save $40 billion, Bernstock said.
Other savings would come from personnel changes and price hikes, though the price for a first-class stamp will remain at 44 cents through 2010. Post offices would remain open on Saturdays.
U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., a member of the subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service in the House, said that the proposal was “heading in the right direction,” but that it is by no means a done deal.
[Click to continue reading Mail service: U.S. Postal Service may end Saturday mail delivery - chicagotribune.com]
I wouldn’t begrudge not getting mail on Saturday, if mail delivery became more reliable on the other days of the week. From my small sample size, I get misdelivered mail every week, sometimes several pieces at a time1. If I get mail that isn’t addressed to me, then how much of my mail is delivered somewhere else?
Contrary view, USPS mail is dirt cheap, compared to sending a FedEx or UPS envelope. Last time I sent an envelope via FedEx (a signed contract, wanted to be able to track its progress), it cost me over $20. A USPS stamp is only $.44, what other business good or service do you use for less than a dollar?
Footnotes:- magazines, envelopes, direct mail, etc. [↩]
Bush Interference Seen in Blackwater Inquiry
Criminals and thugs. That is the description future historians will often use to describe members of the Bush Administration.
An official at the United States Embassy in Iraq has told federal prosecutors that he believes that State Department officials sought to block any serious investigation of the 2007 shooting episode in which Blackwater Worldwide security guards were accused of murdering 17 Iraqi civilians, according to court testimony made public on Tuesday.
David Farrington, a State Department security agent in the American Embassy at the time of the shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, told prosecutors that some of his colleagues were handling evidence in a way they hoped would help the Blackwater guards avoid punishment for a crime that drew headlines and raised tensions between American and Iraqi officials.
[Click to continue reading Interference Seen in Blackwater Inquiry - NYTimes.com]
and if you don’t have the mental stamina to click the link1
In a closed-door hearing, they also contended that they had evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, there had been a concerted effort to make the case go away, both by Blackwater and by at least some embassy officials.
In fact, prosecutors were told that the embassy had never conducted any significant investigation of any of the numerous shooting episodes in Iraq involving Blackwater before the Nisour Square case, according to the documents.
In his October testimony, Mr. Kohl described how the Justice Department had “serious concerns” about obstruction of justice in the case. He also said prosecutors briefed Kenneth Wainstein, then an assistant attorney general, on evidence of obstruction by Blackwater management.
Mr. Kohl disclosed that prosecutors had discovered that five Blackwater guards who were on the convoy involved in the Nisour Square shootings reported to Blackwater management what they had seen. One guard, he said, described it as “murder in cold blood.” Mr. Kohl said that Blackwater management never reported these statements by the guards to the State Department.
He said that prosecutors informed senior Justice Department officials as early as 2007 that they were investigating whether Blackwater managers “manipulated” the official statements made by the guards to the State Department.
But he testified that prosecutors also had evidence of embassy officials thwarting the inquiry. In addition to the testimony of Mr. Farrington, Mr. Kohl said that United States military officials had told prosecutors that they witnessed State Department investigators “badgering” Iraqi witnesses
and I’d add, scum, to the description of Bushies cited above. Rule of Law, hah. Murderers for hire. Hessians were at least conscripted soldiers, not necessarily believers in the Divine Mission of their masters.
Footnotes:- really, you should [↩]
Looking to Taxes as Solution to a Crisis
More on the Illinois budget woes we mentioned earlier.
So are Illinois residents taxed at a higher rate than other states would tax? Always a bit hard to measure, because there are so many kinds of taxes, and some apply to residents and some to businesses. And more importantly, would companies move away from Illinois if the taxes increased?
Illinois could raise about $6 billion, covering roughly half the expected 2011 budget deficit, by increasing the Illinois income tax rate on individuals to 5 percent, from the current 3 percent, and raising the corporate tax rate to 6.4 percent, from 4.8 percent, the Civic Federation’s said.
But higher taxes also affect how employers view the state’s business climate, a calculation that factors in state and local taxes on retail sales and business income, too. The Tax Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that measures federal and state taxes, said Illinois’s business climate suffers because low income tax rates are offset by the high rates on retail sales and property transactions.
As of September 2009, Illinois’s combined state and local sales taxes averaged 8.4 percent, making the state the sixth-biggest taxer, just ahead of New York, said Justin Higgenbottom, a Tax Foundation analyst. Illinois’s high taxes on property earn it sixth place in that category.
In addition to the corporate rate of 4.8 percent, other taxes bring the effective Illinois corporate rate to 7.3 percent, Mr. Higgenbottom said. That means the Civic Federation proposal would in effect take the state’s top corporate rate in Illinois to 8.9 percent.
Once the analysts add it all up, the Tax Foundation said Illinois’s state and local taxes in the 2008 fiscal year represented 9.3 percent of the state’s income. That ranks Illinois below the national average of 9.7 percent and roughly the same as surrounding states except Wisconsin, which is higher.
[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Looking to Taxes as Solution to a Crisis - NYTimes.com]
Will facts be compelling enough to convince Illinois legislators to push tax increases? Depends if fear of being labelled a tax-and-spender in the next election cycle trumps being fiscally responsible. I’d be surprised mightily, if the corporate tax rate went up, and moderately surprised if the income tax rate went up.
Illinois Airs Plan on Deficit
It is a bit of a problem: Illinois is not exactly flush with cash, and either services have to be cut, or taxes raised. Neither is politically viable, but ignoring the deficit is not good long-term strategy. Of course, just like in Washington, D.C., deferring decisions until later is a bi-partisan sport.
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has proposed cutting spending and raising taxes to deal with one of the biggest state budget crises in the nation, but his plan will likely be unpopular with some voters and lawmakers during a tough election year.
Illinois’s deficit through mid-2011 is estimated at $11 billion to $13 billion—close to 50% of the expected $26.7 billion in available revenue for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. That is among the worst such percentages among states. Health-care and social-service agencies routinely wait three months or more for the state to pay its bills.
The state pension system also is the worst-funded in the U.S. Illinois borrowed nearly $3.5 billion last year to make its annual pension payment. State auditors estimate that the pension systems are underfunded by $62 billion.
Warning residents that the state faces a fiscal crisis, Mr. Quinn’s office on Wednesday posted his proposals, along with preliminary budget figures, on a state Web site. He isn’t set to deliver his formal budget speech—which kicks off the legislative process—until March 10. Law
[Click to continue reading Illinois Airs Plan on Deficit - WSJ.com]
and even cutting the obvious fat from the budget is not enough
The problem is that Illinois needs billions, not millions, of dollars in increased revenue, lowered spending or both. Many citizen suggestions are prohibited by state or federal law, or make no meaningful dent in the deficit.
In fact, Mr. Quinn’s proposed cuts and revenue increases, if passed, wouldn’t fully resolve the deficit. The governor also wants the state to borrow more and to request more federal assistance. States have been using federal stimulus money to prop up their budgets, particularly in education and health care, but that funding is set to largely disappear by the end of the year.
One of these days the accounting trickery will have to end, both in Illinois, and other similarly strapped for cash states, and on the federal level. But not this year presumedly.
Mr. Quinn and research groups that have analyzed Illinois’s budget say the state consistently spends more than it collects in revenue. For years, lawmakers and governors have relied on borrowing and one-time accounting moves to make up the difference.
but as James O’Shea reports in the NYT:
With a fiscal crisis looming in Illinois, some influential people concerned about the dismal condition of the state’s finances are proposing that lawmakers increase the individual income tax rate by two-thirds and the corporate rate by one-third.
Taxes are a hot political issue. Illinois has the lowest income tax rate of the 41 states that tax wage income, so the low rate on income makes the tax a juicy target during a tough budget fight. But since governments also impose taxes on sales, property and other transactions, getting a handle on where Illinois stands is not simple.
[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Looking to Taxes as Solution to a Crisis - NYTimes.com]
President Millard Fillmore Coin
First off, a dollar coin? Again? Second, anything that memorializes President Fillmore is going to be ridiculed, that’s just human nature
Buffalo and Moravia, N.Y., are vying for a piece of the Millard Fillmore action.
The two communities both claim this mostly forgotten president, whose very name is associated with mediocrity, and whose oft-cited greatest achievement—installing a bathtub in the White House—was a hoax perpetrated by the writer H.L. Mencken .
Many in New York City have their theories about the man… and their guesses. But the 13th president of the United States is a hero in his hometown of Moravia, New York. WSJ’s Anna Prior reports.
The U.S. Mint this week is releasing the Millard Fillmore presidential dollar coin, with an official launch ceremony on Thursday in Moravia (pop. 4,000), near his birthplace. Some people in Buffalo are miffed.
Fillmore, you see, is buried in Buffalo, where he made his mark as the first chancellor of the University at Buffalo, founding member and first president of the Buffalo Club, and founder of the Buffalo Historical society.
“His legacy is here in Buffalo, not in—what is it?—Moravia,” says William Regan, special-events director for the University at Buffalo. He heads up the annual birthday tribute at Fillmore’s grave. “Why [the coin ceremony] isn’t in Buffalo, I couldn’t tell you. It is kind of strange.”
Buffalo has decided to have its own coin ceremony at City Hall, complete with the representative from the Mint who has promised to swing by. Not even George Washington got a coin launch complete with a Mint rep in two cities.
[Click to continue reading The U.S. Mint is rolling out President Millard Fillmore again, this time on a dollar coin - WSJ.com]
Wikpedia entry begins:
Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the 13th President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853 and the last member of the Whig Party to hold that office. He was the second Vice President to assume the presidency upon the death of a sitting president, succeeding Zachary Taylor, who died of what is thought to be acute gastroenteritis. Fillmore was never elected president; after serving out Taylor’s term, he failed to gain the nomination of the Whigs for president in the 1852 presidential election, and, four years later, in the 1856 presidential election, he again failed to win election as the Know Nothing Party and Whig candidate.
[Click to continue reading Millard Fillmore - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
couldn’t even get re-nominated by his own party. Yikes.
EPA Plans to slowly regulate emissions
Speaking of obstructionist asses in the US Senate1, note how Senator Rockefeller words his plea to the EPA.
Facing wide criticism over their recent finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare, top Environmental Protection Agency officials said Monday that any regulation of such gases would be phased in gradually and would not impose expensive new rules on most American businesses.
The E.P.A.’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, wrote in a letter to eight coal-state Democrats who have sought a moratorium on regulation that only the biggest sources of greenhouse gases would be subjected to limits before 2013. Smaller ones would not be regulated before 2016, she said.
“I share your goals of ensuring economic recovery at this critical time and of addressing greenhouse gas emissions in sensible ways that are consistent with the call for comprehensive energy and climate legislation,” Ms. Jackson wrote.
The eight Democratic senators, led by John D. Rockefeller IV(Coal) of West Virginia, said hugely significant decisions about energy, the economy and the environment should be made by elected representatives, not by federal bureaucrats.
The senators, who earlier questioned broad cap-and-trade legislation pushed by the Obama administration, join a number of Republican lawmakers, industry groups and officials from Texas, Alabama and Virginia in challenging the proposed E.P.A. regulations of industrial sources. Senate Republicans are going a step further, seeking to prevent the agency from taking any action to limit greenhouse gases, which are tied to global warming.
[Click to continue reading E.P.A. Plans to Phase in Regulation of Emissions - NYTimes.com]
Don’t do anything, in other words. Senator Rockefeller (Coal) wants climate change policy making to come back to the Senate where it can die the Death of the Thousand Cuts and Additions2, and generally get debated until we’re all dead. In the last 10 years, what climate change policy has the Senate actually passed into law, Senator Rockerfeller (Coal)? I have exactly zero faith in the US Senate accomplishing anything productive, not unless LBJ rises from the grave to give some of the nattering nabobs of the Senate The Treatment.
Footnotes:Glaxo Drug Faces More Scrutiny
Follow up on the NYT article on GSK and their drug, Avandia that we blogged about recently
A Senate report that revives concerns about a GlaxoSmithKline PLC diabetes drug’s link to heart attacks is putting pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to make changes to its drug-safety program.
People familiar with the situation say agency leaders held calls over the weekend to discuss how to address complaints from Sens. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who released a new report Saturday on the Glaxo drug, called Avandia.
The FDA is trying to assemble a timeline of what the FDA knew of risks associated with Avandia, these people say, and plans to call a meeting of an outside advisory committee in the next few months to look at recent information on the drug, which Glaxo reported as having global sales of £771 million ($1.2 billion) in 2009.
According to a two-year investigation by the Senate Finance Committee, Glaxo knew about data linking Avandia to elevated risk of cardiovascular events for several years, but played down the information and tried to suppress doctors who raised concerns. Starting in 1999, Glaxo executives complained to superiors about researchers who questioned Avandia’s safety, the report says.
[Click to continue reading Glaxo Drug Faces More Scrutiny - WSJ.com]
and the FDA is certainly not blameless in this mess
Some critics of the FDA cited the Avandia report in renewing calls for an independent safety unit at the agency to track problems with drugs after they go on the market. Currently the section that does “post-market surveillance” is subordinate to the division that approves new drugs. As a result, there is an inherent conflict of interest because the approval officers are judging their own previous decisions, critics say.
The question is: will public outrage be sufficiently heated to force some structural changes in the FDA? Jury is still out…
Republicans Faux Libertarianism
Almost like clockwork, the Republican Grand Poobahs suddenly become deficit hawks once they fall from power. When they are in power, reducing the federal budget is not really a priority, especially in all things defense contractor related.
There’s a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the “tea party” movement
…
This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their “small government principles.” The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton’s Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted — both before they were empowered and again now — that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.
What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement — the tea partiers — that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP’s actual approach to governing. This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed — to explode — as the modern GOP establishment and the actual “small-government” libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible. Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they’re eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party. That’s the dirty secret which right-wing polemicists are desperately trying to keep suppressed. Credit to Mike Huckabee for acknowledging this core incompatibility by saying he would not attend CPAC because of its “increasing libertarianism.”
[Click to continue reading Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]
The whole thing would be amusing, if it wasn’t so likely that the Republicans will use this strategy long enough to get back the levers of power.
And really, both parties have a ridiculous affection for doling out funds to the defense industry. Why aren’t prominent Democrats suggesting that during these times of financial austerity, we cut back on National Defense? Just a little? Like down to under 20% of our total budget, for instance? Nope, Obama’s 2011 budget has increases nearly across the board. Bleh.
California Dreamin of Water
California is going to have to make some hard decisions about its water1 fairly soon. Their current model is just not sustainable. Doesn’t sound like Senator Feinstein’s plan is the solution, at least from where I sit2
Senator Dianne Feinstein, who angered environmentalists, fishing groups and other Democratic lawmakers by proposing to divert more water to California’s farmers, said on Friday she was working to avoid controversial legislation.
Feinstein’s plan would ease Endangered Species Act restrictions to allow more water to be pumped out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta for growers in the state’s Central Valley.
Dramatic cutbacks in irrigation supplies this year alone from both California and federal water projects have idled about 23,000 farm workers and 300,000 acres of cropland in America’s No. 1 Farm state.
Feinstein’s proposal has quickly become a flashpoint in the state’s epic and long-running water wars as opponents say it could ultimately lead to the extinction of Sacramento River salmon and eliminate up to 23,000 jobs in the Pacific coast fishing industry.
[Click to continue reading Senator suggests truce in California's water fight | Reuters ]
So divert water so that California agribusinesses get it to spray wastefully on their crops? Short term fix, of course, but what happens in two years? Maybe iceberg lettuce is not what should be grown in the first place, nor year-round tomatoes and canteloupes. Maybe food cannot be as cheap as it once was. Something has to change, or this water war will continue forever.
And if California cannot figure out what to do, there are precedents of worse to come:
Footnotes:Yemeni water trader Mohammed al-Tawwa runs his diesel pumps day and night, but gets less and less from his well in Sanaa, which experts say could become the world’s first capital city to run dry.
“My well is now 400 meters (1,300 feet) deep and I don’t think I can drill any deeper here,” said Tawwa, pointing to the meager flow into tanks that supply water trucks and companies.
From dawn, dozens of people with yellow jerricans collect water from a special canister Tawwa has set aside for the poor.
“Sometimes we don’t have any water for a whole week, sometimes for two days and then it stops again,” said Talal al-Bahr, who comes almost daily to supply his family of six.
The West frets that al Qaeda will exploit instability in Yemen to prepare new attacks like the failed December 25 bombing of a U.S. airliner, but this impoverished Arabian peninsula country faces a catastrophe that poses a far deadlier long-term threat.
Nature cannot recharge ground water to keep pace with demand from a population of 23 million expected to double in 20 years.
[Click to continue reading Yemen's water crisis eclipses al Qaeda threat| Reuters]
Generic Drugs and the FDA
In other corrupt-Washington-business-as-usual news, the pharmaceutical corporations have successfully protected their profits against generic drugs by convincing Washington to underfund the department of government regulators who approves generics. If they have no staff and no budget, generics can’t be brought to market, causing consumers and Medicare to spend more on non-generic drugs.
American consumers are waiting nearly a year longer for government regulators to approve new lower-priced generic drugs than they did in 2005.
The delays, caused by a growing backlog of applications at the Food and Drug Administration, may be costing consumers and the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars a year as they continue in some cases to pay for name-brand drugs even after their patents expire, industry analysts said.
[Click to continue reading New Generic Drugs Facing Longer Waits for Approval - NYTimes.com]
Currently, approvals are taking over 2 years to wade through. Obviously, this office of the FDA is not a priority.
With lawmakers preparing to meet at the White House next week to discuss ways to give more Americans access to health insurance, generic makers say that underfunding of the F.D.A.’s generics office is denying consumers access to more affordable drugs. The agency’s office of generic drugs has a budget of $51 million for fiscal year 2010, up from $41 million in fiscal 2009.
Executives at the generics meeting joked that government was spending less per year on reviewing applications for new generic drugs than the New York Yankees spend on the payroll of the left side of their infield. (Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter between them earned $54.6 million last year, according to ESPN).
but if Washington was serious about being cost-sensitive and fiscally responsible, they’d act already. Ultimately, delaying generic drugs ends up costing taxpayers more money
While accounting for the majority of drug prescriptions in the United States, generics represent just a fraction of the total cost of drugs. Generics accounted for 70.4 percent of the 2.9 billion prescriptions in the United States last year, according to IMS Health, a health information company. But they accounted for only about 15 percent of the $300 billion spent on prescription drugs in this country last year, IMS said.
The slowdown in new generic drug approvals ultimately hurts consumers — and government payers like Medicare — because prices stay higher when there are no or only a few generic alternatives to a branded drug, industry analysts said.
Sad state of affairs: almost as if pharmaceutical corporations like GlaxoSmithKline set national policy. Hmmm, maybe they do?
Diabetes Drug Avandia Harms the Heart
Speaking of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, GlaxoSmithKline wants to protect its drug profits at the expense of hundreds of deaths a year.
Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.
The reports, obtained by The New York Times, say that if every diabetic now taking Avandia were instead given a similar pill named Actos, about 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure would be averted every month because Avandia can hurt the heart. Avandia, intended to treat Type 2 diabetes, is known as rosiglitazone and was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009.
“Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market,” one report, by Dr. David Graham and Dr. Kate Gelperin of the Food and Drug Administration, concludes. Both authors recommended that Avandia be withdrawn.
The internal F.D.A. reports are part of a fierce debate within the agency over what to do about Avandia, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline. Some agency officials want the drug withdrawn because they believe there is a safer alternative; others insist that studies of the drug provide contradictory information and that Avandia should continue to be an option for doctors and patients. GlaxoSmithKline said that it had studied Avandia extensively and that “scientific evidence simply does not establish that Avandia increases” the risk of heart attacks.
[Click to continue reading Diabetes Drug Avandia Harms the Heart, Studies Find - NYTimes.com]
GSK is more interested in resurrecting their cash cow:
Driven in part by a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, sales [of Avandia] were $3.2 billion in 2006
despite the US Senate suggesting the process itself was/is flawed:
In a letter sent Thursday to Dr. Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Mr. Baucus and Mr. Grassley asked “what steps the F.D.A. has taken to protect patients in the TIDE trial” and said the trial’s patients had never been told about the concerns raised by the agency’s own safety officers.
Mr. Grassley said the internal agency battle showed that the agency needed to be restructured to give more power to safety officials like Dr. Graham and Dr. Gelperin over their counterparts who approve medicines and deal more directly with drug makers.
“It doesn’t make any sense to have these experts who study drugs after they have been on the market for several years under the thumb of the officials who approved the drug in the first place and have a natural interest in defending that decision,” Mr. Grassley said. “The Avandia case may be the most alarming example of the problem with this setup.”
The question of when and how to communicate possible drug risks has long bedeviled drug makers and regulators. Hints are common that drugs may cause injuries; thousands of drug injury reports pour into the Food and Drug Administration every week. For example, Avandia ranked first among all prescribed drugs in the number of serious, disabling and fatal problems — including 304 deaths — reported to the agency in the third quarter of 2009, according to an analysis done by the Institute for Safe Medication Practice, a drug safety oversight group.
…
The Senate investigation — the result of years of digging through more than 250,000 internal company documents — concludes that GlaxoSmithKline and by extension the F.D.A. delayed far too long in this process.
Don’t forget that the FDA’s coziness with the pharmaceutical corporations is part of the problem too. Unless there are some drastic structural changes in the FDA, these sorts of issues are going to come up repeatedly.
US asks Supreme Court to Review Tobacco Company RICO Ruling
Wouldn’t this be funny, if the tobacco giants suddenly had to cough up $280,000,000,000? Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations sounds like an apt description of Altria and others, actually. Their business model was always pretty obvious: convince consumers that cigarettes weren’t all that bad for you, and especially that Brand A was better than Brand B.
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Friday to review a 2006 federal fraud racketeering conviction against the tobacco industry and to authorize the district judge in the case to require tobacco companies to give up as much as $280 billion in “ill-gotten gains.”
…
In the 2006 decision, nine tobacco companies and two trade organizations were found to have deceived the public about the dangers of secondhand smoke and so-called light cigarettes, and to have manipulated the nicotine levels in cigarettes.
The companies “have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs,” Judge Gladys Kessler, of the Federal District Court in Washington, wrote in a 1,653-page opinion after a nine-month trial.
The case was filed by the Clinton administration in 1999 under a civil statute normally used for organized crime.
Although the industry lost the case, it avoided crippling monetary damages. Judge Kessler had originally agreed to consider requiring the tobacco companies to give up profits if they lost the case, but she was overruled after the industry filed a pretrial motion with an appeals court.
[Click to continue reading U.S. Asks Justices to Review Tobacco Company Ruling - NYTimes.com]
I doubt the Roberts Court would allow such a drastic outcome of course, but might be a good time to short some tobacco stock, no?
Chemical Weapons R US
Nice – weapons of mass destruction are fine to stockpile if your military is by far the biggest in the world.
Under the gun to destroy the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile — and now all but certain to miss their deadline — Army officials have a plan to hasten the process: Blow some of them up.
The Army would use explosives to destroy some of the Cold War-era weapons, which contain some of the nastiest compounds ever made, in two communities in Kentucky and Colorado that fought down another combustion-based plan years ago.
Some who live near the two installations worry it’s a face-saving measure, driven by pressure from U.S. adversaries, that puts the safety of citizens below the politics of diplomacy and won’t help the U.S. meet an already-blown deadline.
[Click to continue reading US to blow up its chemical stockpiles Army struggles to meet deadline for weapons disposal- Salon.com]
and the US Army is really taking its sweet time to comply with various treaties calling for destruction of these stockpiles
Richmond has far fewer chemical weapons than Pueblo but a wider variety, including the deadly nerve gases sarin and VX. Of the 15,500 mustard rounds housed at the Kentucky depot, as many as 9,300 could be corroded and therefore considered a risk to workers if they leaked and required emergency repairs.
Chemical weapons have horrified the world since they blinded and crippled thousands of soldiers in World War I. Mustard gas can disable an opposing army by causing severe, painful but nonfatal blistering. It can also cause cancer, and even low levels of exposure may threaten workers and the public.
Scientists developed even deadlier chemical bombs during and after World War II. All of them were supposed to have been destroyed in the U.S. by 1994 under a directive from Congress. In 1997, the Chemical Weapons Convention enacted an international deadline of 2012. The U.S. now acknowledges it will certainly miss that too.
Soda tax and Corn Subsidy
There is talk of soda and other sugary drinks being publicly identified as being a culprit in our nation’s worsening health
In their critics’ eyes, producers of sugar-sweetened drinks are acting a lot like the tobacco industry of old: marketing heavily to children, claiming their products are healthy or at worst benign, and lobbying to prevent change. The industry says there are critical differences: in moderate quantities soda isn’t harmful, nor is it addictive.
The problem is that at roughly 50 gallons per person per year, our consumption of soda, not to mention other sugar-sweetened beverages, is far from moderate, and appears to be an important factor in the rise in childhood obesity. This increase is at least partly responsible for a rise in what can no longer be called “adult onset” diabetes — because more and more children are now developing it.
[Click to continue reading Is Soda the New Tobacco? - NYTimes.com]
So what to do? Well, in the best Washington manner, the answer is to tax the offending party and hope this changes behavior:
A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men’s Health magazine last fall that such a tax is “an idea that we should be exploring. There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda.”
…
Small excise taxes on soda are already in place in Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, and Chicago imposes a 3 percent retail tax on soft drinks. Soda taxes were proposed in at least 12 other states in 2009, though none were approved. Mississippi is considering legislation that would tax the syrup used to sweeten soda; the mayor of Philadelphia is weighing a tax on soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks, and Gov. David Paterson of New York has indicated that he will recommend a penny-per-ounce tax on sugared beverages in his 2011 budget.
The penny-per-ounce tax, favored by Dr. Brownell and others, would produce a significant increase in retail costs: the 12-pack of Coke on sale for $2.99 would go for $4.43 and a 75-cent can would rise to 87 cents. These increases, Dr. Brownell estimates, would reduce the annual per capita consumption of soda by more than 11 gallons, to 38.5 gallons. “And the revenue,” he says, “could be used to subsidize fruits and vegetables, fund obesity prevention programs for children and home economic classes in schools, and more.”
A couple of points in response. One, I’ve heard the 50 gallons per person a year claim before. That’s a hell of a lot of soda. Especially when household’s like my own are considered. Even if you add in cocktail ingredients like tonic water, ginger ale and tomato juice, we probably drink ten 12 ounce containers, which is 1 gallon a year in our entire household. But the oft cited average is 500 12 ounce containers annually, or nearly 1.5 cans a day. That’s a lot, and of course, this is only the average person.
Two, Mark Bittman’s article doesn’t mention a topic that Michael Pollan and others have argued quite compellingly, namely that the US Government is complicit in soda remaining so cheap because of the Federal Farm Subsidies to high fructose corn syrup producers like ADM and Cargill. On the one hand, the government gives tax money to agribusinesses to grow corn, and on the other, the government taxes products like soda made with the byproduct. Of course, PepsiCo and other cpgs1 depend upon cheap ingredients as part of their business model, so they cannot talk too loudly about the injustice of it all.
Footnotes:- consumer package goods [↩]
