MONTPELIER – A bill that would tighten reporting requirements for doctors who accept money from pharmaceutical companies and place limitations on such gifts has nearly unanimous support from members of the Vermont Senate, according to backers of the legislation

The bill, which also has support from the Vermont Medical Society, would strengthen legislation that established a database of drug company payments to physicians, including honorariums and other perquisites: The new proposal would place an outright ban on many of those gifts and expand reporting requirements for others…………..

“Patients need to have confidence in the prescribing actions of doctors,” said Dr. John Brumsted, president of the medical society.

I did a diary about this in Dec.but now that the legislature is acting it may worth a reminder of what this bill will not do.

In Vermont  pharmaceutical companies spent $3.1 million to promote their medicines to doctors during a 12-month period ending in June 2007.Peter Shumlin has filed a bill to put a lid on this with reporting requirements that will promote confidence doctors are not making judgments based perks from drug makers .

This bill is one step,but a link in the chain of pharma money remains secret and intact.Last December when discussing this new legislation Shumlin said he envisioned changes to the state law that would only allow the pharmaceutical industry to keep secret very limited information, such as donations to support academic research.Why the exclusion ?This information may be limited but its importance is sizable .Lobbying and campaign contributions are subject to transparency laws,why not pharmaceutical research funding ? Pharmaceutical companies are money making corporations and no matter how altruistic it may seem their motives are to make money.To have confidence in acedemic research the ability to ‘follow the money’ is needed.

“Drug company funding of medical research is not going to end – nor should it entirely stop. Yet a new set of federal rules dictating the transparency and direction of such funding is desperately needed to redress a dangerously corrupt system. It’s not enough to simply have doctors more explicitly report their incomes from drug companies, though it is a very useful first step.”  Lawrence Diller, M.D.

http://www.timesargus.com/arti…

http://www.timesargus.com/arti…

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…

While former radio talk show host and author Al Franken is consistently described in corporate media reports as “comedian Al Franken,” it seems it’s the legal team of former Senator Norm Coleman who are providing the laughs in the first days of the U.S. Senate election contest up in Minnesota.

When even the unapologetic, rightwing, “Franken is stealing the election!” nutcases and conspiracy theorists at Powerline describe Coleman’s legal case as being of “Three Stooges quality,” you know these guys must really be falling apart.

(Coleman’s Continuing Comedy of Errors: Days 2 & 3 at the U.S. Senate Election Contest in MN, Bradblog, 01/28/09)

I suspect Vermont is not unique with our governor seeking to slash spending and cut jobs to “balance the budget” while simultaneously requesting that the feds borrow copious amounts of money to give to the states to create jobs and provide for necessities.

This is nonsense.  

In order for a state to be eligible for stimulus $$ the requirement should be that they cannot cut state spending below the previous year’s.

Otherwise the “stimulus” $ just gets swallowed up filling the hole created by the state.

PJ

(Cross-posted at Broadsides.org)

Yes, the news is true. And, yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek.

For those who don’t know and/or forgot (like I almost did), Food & Water – under the direction of yours truly – launched a campaign against Vermont’s own Cabot Creamery in 1995 when we learned that they were about to allow their farmers to use the Monsanto corporations synthetic bovine growth hormone (rBGH), Posilac. And, last week, Cabot announced that it was, indeed, going to be “listening to its customers” and banning the use of the cow drug by August of this year. Like I said: Victory! Yeah right.

There was one grammatical error in Cabot’s announcement however: They said they were listening to their “customers.” But what they should have said was “customer.” Because Cabot’s nearly-fifteen years of flinging their noses at their real customers who were demanding an end to its rBGH use was really stopped by one, single “customer”: Wal-Mart. Yep, it was the mega-retailer who let Cabot know that they were looking for hormone-free dairy products. And when Wal-Mart said, “jump,” Cabot said, “how high?” – especially when, according to dairy industry insiders, Wal-Mart is now responsible for nearly 25% of Cabot’s sales.

But, for the sheer fun of it, let’s step back and look at how Food & Water secured this “victory.” In the spring of 1995 as Food & Water was preparing to unveil a similar anti-rBGH campaign against Land 0’Lakes, an employee of Cabot Creamery approached me with the news that he had obtained an internal memo from Cabot’s headquarters that he was certain I would be interested in. The Cabot employee was right: The memo acknowledged that Cabot farmers were not only being allowed to use rBGH but that its use was well underway. And this was a time when Cabot was publicly declaring a “wait and see” attitude about Monsanto’s cow drug.

After confirming the authenticity of the memo and a few phone calls with Cabot’s executives, a campaign was born. As we said at the time, we weren’t about to go after the Minnesota-based Land O’Lakes for its use of rBGH and then ignore the same consumer and animal welfare transgressions by our neighbors, Cabot Creamery (at the time, Food & Water was headquartered in Walden, Vermont, a mere five miles up the road from Cabot).

The campaign generated enormous attention both here in Vermont and throughout the United States. While most anti-rBGH activists at the time were focused on lobbying the Food & Drug Administration or Congress, Food & Water saw the writing on the wall and, instead, directed our campaigns at the corporations seeking to use the product. I wrote an article at the time, in fact, that described the legislators and regulators as the mere “puppets” in the battle, while the Monsantos and the food corporations like Cabot were the “puppeteers.” And so we aimed directly at the folks holding the strings.

It got mighty heated, too. While our campaign generated thousands of letters, postcards and phone calls to Cabot’s offices demanding that they reverse their decision based on human health and animal welfare considerations, Cabot dug in their heels and called in their favors from Vermont’s political, media and economic elite to help them fight off the big, bad Food & Water.

The facts regarding rBGH’s link to cancer and its known contribution to animal disease and even death were mostly discarded by the rescue squad called in by Cabot to fend us off. Governor Howard Dean held a press conference to condemn us. Newspapers editorialized about our “tactics” being suspect (boycotts?). And even our peers in the consumer and environmental movement (yes, VPIRG and Rural Vermont) came to Cabot’s defense, urging us to take our campaign someplace else. Chickens. But, then again, they’re still operating at full-strength…

After hearing about Cabot’s fifteen-year change of rBGH policy, I wandered out to my barn to peruse my old Food & Water archives (stored in a horse stall, where the horses have dutifully defecated on them and found a real use for them: scratching posts). Oh boy, let the memories flow.

Here are some of my favorite moments while walking down the Cabot campaign memory lane this morning:

• After Food & Water unveiled a radio commercial targeting Cabot’s use of rBGH, Governor Howard Dean held a press conference condemning Food & Water, calling us a “terrorist group” and, while holding up a package of Cabot’s cheese, urged all Vermonters “to go home and eat two Cabot grilled cheese sandwiches.”

• Another “liberal” politician, Elizabeth Ready, a state senator at the time but later the state’s auditor, had this to say to Food & Water via the media: “Either pack your bags and hit the road or change your tactics.” And, remember, this was when we were simply asking people to “call Cabot” and ask them to stop using rBGH.

• Cabot’s spokesperson at the time, Roberta McDonald, was good for more than a few whacky comments about Food & Water, too. Following the Dean “terrorist” analogy, McDonald compared Food & Water to the Unabomber before declaring that, “locking up the leaders of Food & Water would be a better way to protect the people.” Yikes. I guess we were getting on her nerves, huh?

Funny, though, that we don’t hear the same kind of language now about Wal-Mart. I mean, they simply asked for the same thing Food & Water asked for fifteen years ago: Stop using rBGH. Oh well, I guess it’s all a matter of how you ask….

I’ll be sharing some more stories about the early years of Food & Water now that I’ve jumped down the rabbit hole of opening the old files and bringing the memories bubbling up from yesteryear. They were good times. We were fighting the good fight. We were just a decade and a half ahead of the curve of change.

Go figure.

[You can reach the author at mcolby@broadsides.org]

( – promoted by odum)

Here we go again… last week the Governor proposed a budget eliminating permanently affordable housing development efforts and completely eliminating conservation investments that boost our working land economy.

The Governor proposes a 70% reduction to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Budget on top of a series of cuts over the past seven years that had already meant a more than $30 million loss.

Let’s not kid ourselves. This is a direct attack on the programs that house Vermont’s workforce, provide the means to save family farms, protect recreation and sensitive natural areas and stimulate the economy.

The governor warned against the drastic wholesale elimination of programs and then proceeded to do just that. He said that it was obvious that we should eliminate our conservation program during difficult economic times.

Every day it seems we are hearing about additional losses of good jobs for Vermonters. In these times we need to look what helps Vermont’s economy grow!

Conservation and affordable housing supporters held a press conference yesterday to respond to the Governor and his proposal. This press conference also marked the official kick-off of Conservation Can’t Wait, our conservation public awareness campaign that includes a new, short video featuring business leaders who explain why conservation is critical for Vermont.

At the Vermont Land Trust website vlt.org you will also see testimonials from those people who have benefited from conservation.

Vermonters strongly believe in protecting our working landscape and yet there has been a gradual erosion or maybe an all out attempt to dismantle the successful conservation program in Vermont. We need to get more creative in Montpelier and figure out how to hold on to our state’s most effective programs while also protecting Vermont most vulnerable citizens! This is possible.  

I wonder if I should start blogging in vague, unknowable quatrains that could mean anything. Like Nostradamus did. So everyone can look back in a few months and decide (in whispered awe) that I had mystic insight.

I. The gavel tolls the darkness of the day

Acts 60, 250, and Catamount?

Shumlin and Smith? Or Douglas’s way.

Veto proofing is a sport of the count.

(Nate’s back with a bang, and interestingly enough, he’s tackling something that the GMD front pagers have been talking about looking into ourselves in recent weeks. There are a lot of questions worth asking, here, especially given the recent scandals in similar organizations and the rather bizarre accusations in circulation on the web. Nate’s professional, no-nonsense approach is spot-on. – promoted by odum)

UPDATE:  I've posted the budget line items under the category of Other and general administrative expenses online.  The only way I could figure out how upload a PDF file is through Google Docs.  If you don't have a gmail account, all you have to do is set up a free account and log in to make the links below work.  The resolution is good enough to print out.

VSAC documents

…..Cover Letter

…..VSAC Salaries (not including insurances, bonuses, retirement & perks)

Other general and administrative expenses, 

…..Page 1

…..Page 2

…..Page 3

…..Page 4 

Auditor of Accounts:

I would like to request a formal, comprehensive audit of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation. Based on information provided by VSAC, I have found an accounting discrepancy which suggests VSAC under-reported “Other general and administrative expenses” by more than $2.4 million in FY '08 and more than $2.6 million in FY '07.

Page 13 on the FY '08 Annual Report accounts for $10,233,000 in “Other general and administrative expenses, while information provided directly from VSAC provides a total of $12,653,553. The same annual report accounts for $8,788,000 in “Other general and administrative expenses” while data provided by VSAC offers a total of $11,428,035 for the same line item. Over the ten year period of annual reports available on VSAC's web page, “Other general and administrative expenses” has grown at stunning rates from year to year. Several expenses appear significantly excessive. These include:

The image is of a man both curious and intelligent, yet with eyes that betray the sense of humor that was frequently present in his writing.

Sad news comes today, of the death of John Updike, perhaps the greatest American author of the second half of the twentieth century. A true man of letters, Updike's literary output includes not only short stories and novels, but also poetry, essays, criticism, and even sportswriting. He published his first story in the New Yorker in 1954, the year he graduated from Harvard, and published more than a hundred additional stories, essays, articles, and poems there in the next five years. News stories today typically referred to his output as “more than fifty” books: the actual count to date is sixty-one, but I think he has another coming out later this year. He did it the way one must: every day he went to the office and wrote, three pages a day.

I loved his writing. It was in reading Updike that I first saw how writing could be described as “lapidary”: he is second to none as a prose stylist, although in an interview with the Times last fall he said that he didn't think of himself as a stylish writer, just one who wanted to get everything right, so that the reader would see the people and the world he was writing about exactly as he saw it. He could also make you love the unlikable character: I know of at least one person who couldn't bring herself to read the final scene in Rabbit at Rest, in which his greatest character, whom we have known since he was a young, not very good, husband, dies.

I also loved the fact that in his books he included a note about the typeface, Janson, although in his later books, instead of saying that it was set on the Linotype, it was a digitized version.

We still have his writings, and it is part of the measure of his greatness that we can feel that a writer with two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards was underappreciated. It may be that the anti-Americanism bred of Bush's presidency is what deprived him of the Nobel, but this oversight will not diminish the legacy of this great man.

There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract “information” from detainees in that and other facilities.

In a piece in this morning's Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, “the world” did not “change” on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a “very different country” on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen's (and others) claim.

In many ways it is our body of law that binds the past, present and future. The rule of law gives constancy to our “values.” Laws may change but the process of change is, and should be reasoned and deliberate, not an impassioned reaction to the events of the day. That kind of reaction to the passions of the moment is the path of the lynch mob.

If, as is said in legal circles, “big cases make for bad law,” the events of 9/11 and the rapid changes in our laws and public policy that resulted from the reaction to those events gives us the mother of all examples of the aphorism.  An extremely big case led to a series of terrible revisions of our laws.

Among the legion of egregious errors committed by the last Republican administration was the naming of the war that it proposed to fight following the criminal destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of a fourth commercial airliner in a Pennsylvania pasture.

As has been pointed out numerous times “War on Terror” is an unfortunate term which calls for a war on a tactic: terror. You can no more fight a war against “terror” than you can fight a war against “covering fire,” “encirclement” “camouflage” or “surprise.”

Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the Goebbelian PR squad in the White House basement used the term “terror” more for its perceived effectiveness in arousing the public than for any accuracy in describing their strategy, or as Bush put it, “strategery.” It was in the Bush White House that the ad boys gave the word a capital “T” and used it as their “brand” for instilling public fear and acquiescence in nearly any act that they chose to carry out over the ensuing seven years.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 involved specific criminal acts, all of which are spelled out in federal and state law and punishable by lengthy prison terms up to and including life in prison. Under federal law, death penalty statutes would apply for the murder of the thousands of victims of the crimes.

When the World trade center was bombed the first time in 1993 the crime was investigated by the NYPD, the ATF and the FBI with the help, no doubt, of other agencies both here and abroad. A thorough investigation by law enforcement professionals resulted in the arrest, conviction and life sentences for the criminals involved.

The Marines were not sent in, nor were the Army and Navy deployed in force and the country did not go to war. Rather than launching a full scale campaign of “shock and awe,” the Clinton administration, in its wisdom, effectively, sent in “Columbo.”

Following the crimes of 9/11 the mindset of our “leadership” was very different; actually, it now seems that the minds were made up before the event, made up in fact even before the 2000 election.

An investigation quickly confirmed the involvement of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and it was quickly decided to take on the Taliban and al Qaeda, Afghanistan was never intended to be the main thrust, nor was bin Laden to be the main target.

The public was, quite rightly, afraid after the attacks; I was. (I watched it on TV too) It was a time of fear and uncertainty that called for calm leadership and thoughtful action.

That is not what we got. We got a strutting cowboy alternately threatening the world, boasting of American might, and daring potential adversaries to “bring it on.” He sounded like a drunken Saturday night drugstore cowpoke, cranked up on Jack Daniels, inviting any and all to a session of parking lot gravel dancing. “Mano a mano?”

Afghanistan and the Taliban were bottled up quickly, bin Laden isolated and rendered ineffective (at least temporarily) and the public roared its approval. (Cohen cites Bush's 92% approval ratings)

But our leadership kept feeding the collective fear and fanning the flames of public passion with manufactured intelligence, imagined alliances, an “axis of evil” cut from whole cloth and mythical “weapons of mass destruction.”

Afghanistan and bin Laden was not enough, it would not serve as the entree to the Middle East that our “leadership” required, and in fact, his capture or death would retard the main goal of this posse. Saddam Hussein was to be the quarry, Iraqi oil the tool, American hegemony in the Middle East the ultimate prize.

Proof, (at least the appearance of proof) was needed to bind Iraq and Hussein with al Qaeda and bin Laden. Proof was needed to tie bin Laden's ability to acquire WMD to Hussein, to Iran, to anywhere they wanted to make a move.

They spread cash all over Afghanistan, all over Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Wads of hundred dollar bills, five grand here, ten there, were offered for information about al Qaeda members in some of the world's most impoverished countries, places where the annual per capita income is less than I spend on rum, and they got results.

People turned in cab drivers, personal rivals, enemies, tourists, their wife's divorce lawyer, you get the picture. Lots of suspects, never mind that they were often told by locals, by advisers, by interpreters that they were collaring the wrong guys, that many of these people were just hapless bystanders who had wandered into the net. It didn't matter.

It didn't matter because they weren't looking for facts; they were looking for “information.” “Information” was necessary to tie Saddam to the “war on terror,” so electrodes were attached, thumbs were screwed, genitals mistreated, people were “extraordinarily hydrated,” and they got lots of “information.”

Hook me up to the Toquemada machine and I'll confess to anything, any crime, any degradation to make the pain stop, and so will you. In a few days any of us will confess to being responsible for original sin, to make the pain stop.

Did they get facts, sure, cast a net that wide and you're bound to catch something edible, but I expect that the ratio of facts to “information” is, as they say, “highly classified.”

At what cost did they gather these facts? We'll probably never know how many average Joes were destroyed, how many families ruined, how many people were murdered as a result of these “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or how many minds were destroyed in the process.

And that is why we cannot “look forward,” we cannot ignore these terrible, willful crimes, these war crimes, these crimes against humanity.

We must answer as a society for the criminality of our leadership by prosecuting them for what they purported to do in our name.

Cohen adds this:

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives — and maybe were — and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs — not time-stampers who take no chances.

Is the cop on the street who beats a false confession out of a teenage suspect making a “sincere effort” to enforce the law? Is he saving lives?

Are the “finest people” those who can be persuaded to violate all norms of human decency?

Are those who resist power and insist on following the rule of law, now to be called “time stampers,” “who take no chances?”

Cohen writes:

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done — back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

I suggest that blue ribbon commissions are usually hired when whitewashing is felt to be the solution. I think that this is a job for the Justice department and perhaps a special prosecutor.

We don't need to find out what went wrong, there is a world full of opprobrium focused on our country as a result of these crimes, there is a sea of blood and body parts to attest to what went wrong. There is a universe filled with screams of torment to testify to what went wrong; it is time to find out whom, to what degree and to punish accordingly.

Yes we were scared, I too wanted to be secure but I have never been willing to give up my rights or the human rights of others for my personal safety; so don't, Mr. Cohen, try to blame this on me or the American people. We didn't sign on for crimes against humanity.

I'll leave you with this; I am a Marine veteran of Vietnam; twice a year (as I remember) we were instructed in the Military “Code of Conduct.”

Here is a relevant excerpt:

“It is a violation of the Geneva Convention to place a prisoner under physical or mental duress, torture or any other form of coercion in an effort to secure information.”
US Military Code of Conduct

Fact: Torture is illegal under US and international law.

Fact: We hung German officers and civilians for ordering others to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Fact: We executed Japanese soldiers in WW2 for water boarding allied prisoners.

Fact: We punished our troops in Vietnam for the same offenses.

Leadership must be prosecuted for issuing unlawful orders to their troops which require them to violate our laws, treaties and conventions and the troops they lead are required to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders whether from superior officers, from a frightened populace or… from a lynch mob.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Reading the news this morning, I was pleased to see that Bernie was one of the senators who opposed the Geithner nomination, but I couldn't find anything more. So, after a quick phone call to DC, I got this:

Sen. Sanders statement on now-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: “Massive deregulation of the financial services industry has led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We need a treasury secretary who will support strong and robust regulation of the financial services sector. Mr. Geithner was at the Fed and the Treasury Department when the deregulatory fervor that got us into this mess ran rampant. He was part of the problem. I hope he becomes part of the solution, but I could not support his nomination at this time.”

Telling it like it is. There's also an interview with Bernie from MSNBC here.