Tilting at windmills

Washington Monthly, May-July, 2008 by Charles Peters

Fundamental restructuring for thee ...

The International Monetary Fund's lending decreased 86 percent over the last five years. In that same period, the IMF found it necessary to retain all but 13 percent of its staff. This illustrates an important point about bureaucracies. As they age, they tend to become more interested in the preservation of their staff than in the performance of their mission.

Heckuva job, Gordon

If you wonder whether George W. Bush has retained the gift for selecting government officials that he demonstrated when he hired "you're doing a heckuva job, Brownie," consider his Undersecretary of Defense, Gordon Englund. (To understand what follows, you need to know that the Department of Energy pays the lion's share of the cost of nuclear weapons development, even though the Defense Department pretty much determines the amount that needs to be spent.)

Recently Englund testified before the Energy Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, whose ranking minority member, David Hobson, observed, "I heard some complaints that Defense asks for the pie-in-the-sky sometimes because they don't have to pay for it; it doesn't come out of your budget, so ask for everything."

Hobson then asked Englund: "Do you think this current arrangement makes sense?"

Englund replied: "Mr Hobson, I guess I was not aware that we were not paying for these programs."

Doctored

"Citing ethics, some doctors are rejecting industry pay," is the headline of a recent article by Gina Kolata in the New York Times. The word "some" was used advisedly, as the first sentence makes dear, by referring to the "small number" of physicians involved.

The great scandal of American medicine is the large number of doctors who take payoffs from manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices and the number of respected medical journals whose integrity has been compromised by publishing the results of industry-subsidized studies.

The latest example is provided by the prestigious physicians who allowed Merck to use their names as authors of studies actually done by Merck employees to demonstrate the potency and safety of Vioxx. In other words, the studies were not just paid for by Merck, they were performed by Merck.

One study by nine Merck staffers was found in the files with a notation, "external author?"--meaning they were looking for another corrupt physician ready to sell his name.

The magic speech

If Reverend Wright's "God damn America," Michelle's "the first time in my adult lifetime I'm really proud of my country," and the flag-pin issue have raised doubt about Obama's patriotism, I have a suggestion for him. It is to recall the day he gave the speech in Iowa in which he got the audience so fired up about the potential of this country to come together that they started chanting, "USA, USA,"--and give that speech again and again.

Wright on Moyers

After watching the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's appearance with Bill Moyers and their hour-long discussion of Wright's life, religion and values, I called Bill to congratulate him for letting the public see how thoughtful Wright had been. I then called several friends who had missed the show to tell them how impressive Wright could be. They must have thought I was demented when they saw Wright's performance at the National Press Club the following Monday morning. Over the following month, I searched the media for reports of the Moyers' show, and found only snippets that failed to suggest the impression Wright had made.