Columbus City Council President and Mayoral Candidate Andrew Ginther is seeking to explain away yet another public sector scandal – just as the school data scrubbing scandal he was involved in recedes into the background with the plea bargain of Michael Dodds, the last Columbus City Schools administrator to be charged with a crime. In a new scandal, Karen Findley, an executive of Redflex Corp (the Citys’ red light camera provider) pleaded guilty to conspiracy in federal court in mid-June for bribing Columbus elected officials – including Ginther – to secure the contract in violation of 18 USC 370.

Last week Senator Rob Portman voted for Trade Promotion Authority which will make it easier to pass job  killing trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership. Join us this Thursday from 12:15 to 1pm at his office in downtown Columbus, 37 West Broad St., to hold him accountable and let him know that the people of Ohio won't stand for any more corporate trade deals that outsource good jobs! Contact Thomas Lee, tlee@cwa-union.org.

TPP would be the largest trade deal in history. Including countries like Vietnam and Brunei, it would cover 792 million people and account for 40 percent of the world economy.

If the TPP goes into effect:
  • More U.S. Jobs will be sent offshore
  • Foreign Corporations get veto power over U.S. laws
  • Buy American laws would be illegal

Learn more at: http://stopthetpp.org/

“The pharmaceutical companies are an amoral bunch. They’re not a benevolent association.  So they are highly unlikely to donate large amounts of money without strings attached. Once one is dancing with the devil, you don’t always get to call the steps of the dance.”—A psychiatrist, quoted in the Boston Globe, 2002.

The New England Journal of Medicine, under the editorship of Marcia Angell, MD, published a study in the May 18, 2000 issue whose principle author was the chief of Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry. The academic psychiatrist had reportedly made $500,000 in one year doing consultancy “work” for various psycho-pharmaceutical companies that marketed antidepressant drugs. In editing the article, Dr Angell discovered that there wasn’t enough room to print all the various co-author’s conflict of interest disclosures. Because of space limitations, Angell put the full list on the website rather than in the hard copy issue.

Two days ago an email came from an Iraqi doctor in Baghdad in response to a brief greeting I sent for the month of Ramadan.

“Thanks so much for remembering us…In fact we are the same if not worse.  Our hearts are broken at the organized ruining of our country.  We are targeted by those criminals and gangs coming from everywhere, even from the west who are all witnessing this drama and, if not supporting it, are keeping silent.  We wonder what sin we committed to face this gloomy black fate.  In fact, what is going on is beyond words. “

This courageous woman doctor never left the side of gravely ill children despite the great exodus of doctors due to kidnappings, assassinations and threats to their lives and families.  Sadly she reports that another of her siblings has cancer, and she needs to leave the medical students for some days.  This happens she says regretfully in “the critical time of final exams.”   She herself is a cancer survivor and both her mother and sister had cancer.   They have no choice, she says, but to go on and try to survive.