Archive for September, 2010

September30

Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity might be bigger than Woodstock

By: Joe Newman

If Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and their “competing” Washington D.C. rallies don’t have your attention by now, you  a) have just woken up from a 25-year coma b) live in a shack in Montana where you are working on your great anti-technology manifesto, or c) are among the 4 percent of the population who truly believes President Obama might actually have been born in the Alpha Centauri solar system.

When both Big Os — Oprah and Obama — endorse your Rally to Restore Sanity, you know you might be on to something. Since Sept. 16, when Stewart announced his Oct. 30 rally, along with Stephen Colbert’s satirical March to Keep Fear Alive, 180,000 people on Facebook have said they plan to attend the event, while another 100,000 have said they might.

Public Citizen plans to be there, and we’ve been encouraging people to submit ideas for signs that we’ll hand out at the rally on the National Mall. We plan to pick the slogan that we think best sums up the message we want to share with the throngs of people who will be packed in front of the Lincoln Memorial. So far, more than 3,000 slogans have been entered in our “What Sign Should I Bring to Jon Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ ” contest. Another 1,000 people have joined the accompanying Facebook page, and hundreds more are spreading the word on Twitter with the hashtag #signs4sanity.

Picking the best one is going to be difficult. We’ll be asking our Facebook fans to help, but in the end,  we may have to resort to the old picking a slogan out of a hat method. You can read the thousands of sign suggestions and enter your own at www.citizen.org/jon-stewart-sanity-rally-signs.

Generally, the sign suggestions fall into five categories:

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Posted in: Activism, Campaign Finance, Climate Change, Congress, Consumer Protection, Environment, Ethics, Social Justice4 comments

September29

Strange bedfellows? Corporate lobbyists and government watchdogs work together to reform congressional earmarks

By: Anna Scalamogna

Corporate lobbyists and government watchdog groups are combining efforts to put an end to the corruption associated with congressional earmarks. The coalition hopes to limit campaign contributions from earmark beneficiaries and ban congressional aides from attending campaign fundraisers, according to the New York Times.

Public Citizen has joined the coalition and Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, has drafted legislation to limit campaign contributions from earmark recipients based on a New Jersey state law.

“This is not a campaign finance reform measure,” Holman told the Hill. “This is a policy to ensure integrity in the earmarking process, just like it has ensured integrity in the government contracting process in New Jersey.”

Lawmakers have tried to impose some restrictions but

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Posted in: Campaign Finance, Congress, Ethics0 comments

September29

Jon Stewart is right on many things, just not on so-called tort reform

By: Editor

By David Arkush and Christine Hines

Jon Stewart, the popular host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and “America’s most trusted newsman,”  regularly imparts an astute critique of American political affairs and media.

The comic’s recent two-part exchange with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, for instance, elicited – in between the funny jabs – thoughtful, nuanced discussion on policy, politics, and the president. As Daily Show fans though, we cringed a little during his chat with O’Reilly when they briefly discussed so-called “tort reform,” the phrase used by the health industry and big business to advocate taking away your access to the courts

O’Reilly first broached the issue when Stewart was a guest on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor. He complained that President Obama could have worked with Republicans during the health care reform debate by adding “tort reform” to the bill. Stewart shot back that the president said he was willing to compromise on the issue, a priority for Republicans, even though it wouldn’t save much in health care costs. In their second conversation, this time at the Daily Show. Stewart blasted the extent of corruption, in media and finances (financial services?), and then strangely expressed a willingness to offer “right wing tort reform,” as he called it. It wasn’t clear why he mentioned it. Perhaps to suggest he would bargain on the issue in exchange for measures that curb corruption.

We’re with him on the need to end corruption. Government and corporate accountability are at a serious low point; we’ve proposed

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Posted in: Congress, Consumer Protection, Health2 comments

September29

While Avandia patients died, drugmaker schemed how to turn drug’s side effects into profits

By: Joe Newman

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration took the inadequate measure of restricting the sale of the dangerous diabetes drug Avandia. Public Citizen has long been pushing the FDA to ban Avandia, much like its European counterparts recently did.

Now comes this troubling look at the extent to which GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Avandia, covered up the life-threatening side effects of its diabetes medication. Paul Thacker, who was the leading investigator for Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Finance Committee,  writes in Mother Jones what he learned during his three-year investigation:

During that time, my colleagues and I combed through over 250,000 pages of internal GSK documents and interviewed dozens of witnesses and whistleblowers. What emerged was a troubling picture of a company that had placed corporate profits over patient safety. While suppressing inconvenient evidence about the risks of its top-selling drug, the company even began to develop another drug to treat the very side effect Avandia has been linked to.

Yes, you read that right — Instead of recalling Avandia, which was linked to causing heart attacks in patients, GlaxoSmithKline decided the better thing to do was to develop another drug that could treat the condition caused by Avandia.

Posted in: Congress, Consumer Protection, Health, Pharmaceuticals, Product Safety1 comments

September28

Moving Beyond BP means passing laws to make sure another oil disaster never happens again

By: Dorry Samuels

Five months after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and a little more than a week after the well was officially “killed,” the work is not over. As the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling meets in Washington, D.C., this week, Public Citizen energy organizer Allison Fisher will urge the commission to clarify the government’s role and authority during an oil spill, investigate why BP was allowed to control information around the spill and its cleanup operations, and recommend passage of legislation that specifically responds to the oil spill disaster.

To tell the commission what you’re thinking, click here.

Posted in: Energy, Environment3 comments

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