Category Archives: Transparency

Drug companies to be required to report all payments to physicians

Robert Pear, who has always provided excellent coverage of public health issues for The Times, reports that the administration plans to require drug and medical equipment suppliers to report all payments – down to coffee and bagels – made to physicians and medical personnel – and make them accessible to the public via the web. We can’t imagine that there’s a plausible argument that anyone has a privacy information in this data.

What would your reaction be if your physician prescribed a particular medicine, and then found out that your doctor was taking thousands of dollars from the drug’s manufacturer? By the same token –  if you found out that your physician accepted no gifts at all from drug prescribers, might that not enhance your view of that physician’s credibility? From Robert Pear’s U.S. to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors:

WASHINGTON — To head off medical conflicts of interest, the Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment.  Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices.

Consumer advocates and members of Congress say patients may benefit from the new standards, being issued by the government under the new health care law. Officials said the disclosures increased the likelihood that doctors would make decisions in the best interests of patients, without regard to the doctors’ financial interests.

Large numbers of doctors receive payments from drug and device companies every year — sometimes into the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — in exchange for providing advice and giving lectures. Analyses by The New York Times and others have found that about a quarter of doctors take cash payments from drug or device makers and that nearly two-thirds accept routine gifts of food, including lunch for staff members and dinner for themselves.

The Times has found that doctors who take money from drug makers often practice medicine differently from those who do not and that they are more willing to prescribe drugs in risky and unapproved ways, such as prescribing powerful antipsychotic medicines for children.

U.S. Oil companies paid part of Libyan terrorism settlement

Corruption and kleptocracy seem fairly predictable in Libya, although it’s a fair journalistic effort to confirm or refute what may be common knowledge. Perhaps an example of that is The New York Times publishing confirmation of what most New Yorkers knew in the early 1970’s – that the New York City Police Department was a corrupt institution, incapable and/or unwilling to police itself. (See, e.g., the books Serpico by Peter Maas, Prince of the City by Robert Daley).

Now, three of the Times’ heavy hitters, Eric Lichtblau, David Rohde and James Risen, have reported that – in addition to whatever passes for routine corruption in Libya, some – but not  all – foreign companies operating in Libya complied with Qaddafi’s demand that they contribute to the $1.5 billion settlement for its responsibility in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 (the Locherbie bombing) and other attacks.

Does this make these companies accessories after the fact? excerpted from Shady Dealings Helped Qaddafi Build Fortune and Regime:

In 2009, top aides to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called together 15 executives from global energy companies operating in Libya’s oil fields and issued an extraordinary demand: Shell out the money for his country’s $1.5 billion bill for its role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 and other terrorist attacks.

If the companies did not comply, the Libyan officials warned, there would be “serious consequences” for their oil leases, according to a State Department summary of the meeting.

Many of those businesses balked, saying that covering Libya’s legal settlement with victims’ families for acts of terrorism. The episode and others like it, the officials said, reflect a Libyan culture rife with corruption, kickbacks, strong-arm tactics and political patronage since the United States reopened trade with Colonel Qaddafi’s government in 2004. As American and international oil companies, telecommunications firms and contractors moved into the Libyan market, they discovered that Colonel Qaddafi or his loyalists often sought to extract millions of dollars in “signing bonuses” and “consultancy contracts” — or insisted that the strongman’s sons get a piece of the action through shotgun partnerships.

“Libya is a kleptocracy in which the regime — either the al-Qadhafi family itself or its close political allies — has a direct stake in anything worth buying, selling or owning,” a classified State Department cable said in 2009, using the department’s spelling of Qaddafi. was unthinkable. But some companies, including several based in the United States, appeared willing to give in to Libya’s coercion and make what amounted to payoffs to keep doing business, according to industry executives, American officials and State Department documents.

Continue reading →

Bernie Madoff, Richard Feynman, and The Financial Crisis

Bernie Madoff

Bernie Madoff - In Prison

Interviewed in prison, Bernie Madoff asserted that banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his elaborate fraud. Diana Henriques, writing in the NY Times, 2/15/11, (here) said “Madoff described as ‘willful blindness’ their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information,” Quoting Madoff, “They had to know. But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”

Look at this in the context of the the Financial Crisis. The bi-partisan committee on the financial crisis, FiscalCommission.Gov,  released its findings on Thursday, 27, January, 2011.  The Commission, I think, got this one right. The financial crisis could have been avoided.  This thirty-year economic experiment in de-regulation, which started under President Reagan, has proven that self-regulation doesn’t work; the government must regulate the financial industry. The foxes can’t guard the henhouse. Continue reading →

DataSF – DataSF – Liberating City Data

Once again, San Francisco innovates, by making municipal data available online in what appears to be a more comprehensive effort than done elsewhere.The project is called DataSF

.

DataSF is a clearinghouse of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. While there is plenty of room for improvement, our goal in releasing this site is:

(1) improve access to data

(2) help our community create innovative apps

(3) understand what datasets you’d like to see

(4) get feedback on the quality of our datasets

DataSF: Liberating City Data.

Via Matt Mullenweg

.

CBS News: $1 billion in equipment missing in Iraq, according to IG Report

Laura Strickler of the CBS News Investigative Unitreports on CBSNews.com that the Pentagon’s Inspector General has found that a great deal of equipment in Iraq is unaccounted for:

Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, crates of machine guns and rocket propelled grenades are just a sampling of more than $1 billion in unaccounted for military equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces, according to a new report issued today by the Pentagon Inspector General and obtained exclusively by the CBS News

investigative unit. Auditors for the Inspector General reviewed equipment contracts totaling $643 million but could only find an audit trail for $83 million.

The report details a massive failure in government procurement revealing little accountability for the billions of dollars spent purchasing military hardware for the Iraqi security forces. For example, according to the report, the military could not account for 12,712 out of 13,508 weapons, including pistols, assault rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and machine guns.

The report comes on the same day that Army procurement officials will face tough questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding their procurement policies. One official, Claude Bolton, assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology has already announced his resignation on the heels of sharp criticism of army contracting. Bolton’s resignation is effective Jan. 2, 2008. The Army has significantly expanded its fraud investigations in recent months.

Pentagon misstates data in budget request

Tom VanDen Brook

of USA today has reported that

The Pentagon has asked Congress for $1.4 billion in emergency spending to combat a growing threat of sniper attacks in Iraq based on an overstated assessment of the extent of the attacks, its records show.

[photopress:Marine_sniper_ghillie_suit.JPG,thumb,alignleft]In last week’s spending request, the Pentagon said sniper attacks have quadrupled in the past year and, if unchecked, the attacks could eclipse roadside bombs as the top killer of U.S. troops. However, the rate of sniper attacks has dropped slightly in 2007 and fallen dramatically in the past four months, according to military records given to USA TODAY.

Pentagon officials acknowledged the mistake Monday after questions about the data were raised by USA TODAY.

“The term quadrupled will be removed from the justification because it is simply incorrect,” said Dave Patterson, deputy undersecretary of Defense. [photopress:Simo_Hayha.jpg,thumb,alignright]

In 2006, there were 386 sniper attacks on coalition forces, according to data from the Multi-National Force-Iraq headquarters in Iraq. Through Oct. 26 of this year, there were 269 sniper attacks, the figures show.

The Pentagon does not release the number of troops killed by snipers. Improvised explosive devices have killed about 1,600 U.S. troops, more than half of all combat deaths since the war began in 2003.  Continue reading →

International Herald Tribune: U.S. widens contract fraud inquiry to include military’s food suppliers

The International Herald Tribune reports that a company being paid $1 billion per year to provide meals in Iraq is under investigation for price-gouging. The company, formerly Public Warehousing, now Agility Logistics, appears to be so well-connected that ConAgra, Tyson Foods and Sara Lee were excluded from at least some business. (Scratch the surface here, I’m afraid, and we’ll find firms complaining – nominally – that other peole are stealing – when what they’re actually upset about is not the stealing – but the other people who are doing it.
Federal agents are investigating whether several large food companies charged the government excessively high prices for supplies to U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, according to administration officials.Widening their previously disclosed inquiries into contract fraud and corruption in Kuwait and Iraq, investigators from the Justice and Defense departments are examining deals that Sara Lee, ConAgra Foods and other U.S. companies made to supply the military, officials said.

The inquiry centers on whether the companies overcharged Agility Logistics, a Kuwait-based company formerly named Public Warehousing that is the U.S. Army’s principal food supplier for the war zones. Investigators are also reviewing whether Agility Logistics improperly took payments from the food companies.

Agility Logistics, which supplies enormous amounts of fruits, vegetables and meats for more than 160,000 troops in combat zones, said in a statement that it had done nothing wrong and was fully cooperating with the investigation.

But a Justice Department lawyer, Brian Mizoguchi, told a Federal Claims Court judge in Washington on June 12 that the company’s business arrangements were the target of “a very large and active investigation into criminal fraud involving amounts in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” Continue reading →

Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA)

  makes the case that military activities have had a profound environmental effect on Southern California:

Southern California’s health and environment has been profoundly transformed by military activity.   Did you know that the entire San Gabriel Valley is an EPA Superfund site – and the eastern half of the San Fernando Valley is similarly a Superfund site due to military pollution?

[singlepic=136,320,240,,left]  PSR-LA is working to ensure the cleanup of the Rocketdyne Laboratory in the Santa Susana Hills above Chatsworth

Military, intelligence, and to some extent, law-enforcement agencies, not without some reason , are exempt from many regulatory schemes. In the first place – there are often no civilian analogues – making regulations less relevant. Even more powerfully, they’re charged with critical and specialized tasks  [singlepic=137,320,240,,right] that might well, in an individual case, or in wartime, outweigh other concerns.

However, as Lord Acton observed, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and the power – especially when masked by official government secrecy – tends to aggregate these decisions.

Fewer than 300 people were killed in the planes on September 11, 2001. The two planes which hit the World Trade Center hit buildings which were owned by the Port Authority of New York  and New Jersey – a bi-state agency. Because they were government-owned – even though most of the tenants were commercial tenants who might have rented from a regular commercial landlord – all sorts of building and fire codes were waived.

via Critical Spacial Practice

Unusual occurrence – DHS blog permits gently critical comment

I don’t understand it.

But – Michael Chertoff has started a blog. And, after a recent  post, David W. Stephenson, of Stephenson Strategies, made a comment that actually made it through DHS screening.

I’m not sure he could have gotten the comment onto a commercial flight, though, unless it was in checked luggage.

Check out Mirabile dictu! My comment on Chertoff’s blog was ok’d

,  on Stephenson blogs on homeland security 2.0. 

Stephenson is co-author, with Eric Bonabeau, of Expecting the Unexpected: The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, in the February 2007 issue of Homeland Security Affairs . 

We’ve blogged about this article before – but it’s good enough that I’m happy to shill for it more than once – as I am about HSAJ’s parent organization, the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense & Security.

Between Stephenson, Bonabeau, and Professor Brian Steckler of NPS, I’ve been persuaded of the utility of wireless networks in emergencies – although it’s my contention that, organized from the bottom up – we need more than one system. More about system redundancy and about NPS soon.

Waxman accuses Department of State IG of obstructing investigations

According to an article on the website of The New York Times, Congressman Henry Waxman has Howard J. Krongard in his sights. David Stout and Brian Knowlton (for whom the Times doesn’t have an index page) report that Waxman

sent the inspector general, Howard J. Krongard, a 14-page letter spelling out accusations that he said came from several current and former employees of that office, who documented their charges with e-mails.

– snip –

Some of the accusers have sought “whistleblower” status, which protects government employees who report malfeasance from being punished for doing so, Mr. Waxman said. The accusations are serious and far-reaching, and included assertions that Mr. Krongard has effectively become a political defender of the administration rather than, as his job is meant to be, a studiedly neutral overseer of its spending and practices.

– snip –
Mr. Waxman invited Mr. Krongard to respond to the accusations at a committee hearing on Oct. 16.

– snip –

Since Democrats gained control of the House in the 2006 elections, Mr. Waxman has made no secret of his relish in probing activities of the Bush administration. One of the more serious accusations against Mr. Krongard is that he interfered with an investigation into the conduct of Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of Voice of America and a close associate of Karl Rove, President Bush’s former political adviser, by passing information about the inquiry to Mr. Tomlinson.

Mr. Waxman wrote that Mr. Krongard’s detractors have described “a dysfunctional office environment” in which he routinely bullies and berates employees and shows contempt for the work of career professionals. As a result, turnover has been so high that the inspector general’s office has been severely compromised, Mr. Waxman wrote.

Continue reading →

Mark Kleiman on WaPo coverage of Russia

If you’re not already persuaded that the current state of affairs in Russia should be a cause of great concern, Mark Kleiman makes the point quite concisely in this post.

I’ve been reading Kleiman’s work since dinosaurs roamed the Grand Concourse, carrying betting slips for wise-guys. When getting a copy of one of his article or books meant long waits via interlibrary loan, and many quarters spent printing microfilm reprints. He was one of the first people to look at drug policy in a methodical way. These days he posts at The Reality-Based Community

– and lots of other stuff.

While I was law school, and a bit after, I did some work as a ghostwriter and book editor. I was approached by aides to someone that I’ll refer to here as One of Many Current Candidates. OMCC wanted me to ghost-write a book persuading America that (illegal) drugs were evil, as great a threat as threats could be, and that only someone with the particular skills, experience, and temperament of OMCC could save America from the dreadful prospect of the universal availability of drugs, mandatory

drug use (an idea which, sadly, has not gotten the consideration it’s due), the whole country taken over by Colombian drug cartels.

I talked myself out of that job – and, in fact, I talked OMCC out of being one of many politicians who’ve written drug-war memoirs. One of the arguments I used was that to make the case he wanted to make, one would first have to take account of – and rebut – the work of a number of serious scholars who’d already addressed the issue – and who hadn’t necessarily come to the “no penalty too harsh, no intrusion sufficiently invasive” position this politician had come to. I’m sure I mentioned Kleiman, and Norman Zinberg, of Harvard Medical School. Their work was part of my introduction to drug policy, before I was involved in enforcing it, or criticizing it, or writing about it.

So I talked myself out of a well-paid gig; the politician – now a candidate for the presidence – never did have that book written.

I don’t know if Kleiman is the coiner of the phrase “Reality-Based Community.” I’ve been reading his stuff on the Internet since I found out that I could do it without using the microfilm machines or filling out an interlibrary loan slip and waiting two months. His current blog includes his contributions and those of a handful of other people – mostly scholars – who aren’t familiar to me. But The Reality-Based Community blog is worth checking out; its current skewerings of the Administration’s prevarications and obfuscations regarding the “overblown personnel matter” (the firing of eight United States Attorneys) are precise, and to the point. Each new statement from the Administration is like the Coyote’s new order to the Acme Company; Kleiman’s posts are like the Acme merchandise, unwrapped and in action. See, Coyote v. Acme, U.S.D.C., S.W.D., Arizona (No. B191294) (1990).