James Ridgeway

In 1965, James Ridgeway helped launch the modern muckraking era by revealing that General Motors had hired private eyes to spy on an obscure consumer advocate named Ralph Nader. He worked for many years at the Village Voice, has written 16 books, and has codirected Blood in the Face, a film about the far right. In 2012, he was named a Soros Justice Media Fellow.

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Governor Cuomo to New York's Poor and Middle Class: Drop Dead

—By James Ridgeway

| Tue Mar. 29, 2011 6:15 AM PDT

There is no country in the industrial world with as great an income disparity between the rich and poor as the United States. And within the US, there is no state where the disparity is more pronounced than New York. New York City was the center of the Great Recession, and today unemployment there stands at 9 percent and is not expected to drop any time soon. At the same time, the financial sector that caused it all has recovered nicely, and the executives are pulling down salaries and perks larger than they did before the recession.

In the midst of all this gross inequality, New York’s millionaires are getting a tax break, thanks to the state's new Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. Son of liberal ex-governor Mario Cuomo, inheritor of some of the enthusiasm that once surrounded Eliot Spitzer’s campaign, and successor to the weak stand-in David Paterson, Cuomo was elected on a wave of optimism. He even ran on the line of the Working Families Party, an increasingly important progressive player in state politics. Yet Andrew Cuomo has turned out to be just another craven neoliberal. In his most meaningful action to date, he has embraced a budget that would make any Bushite salivate.

In a deal this past weekend, the governor and legislative leaders agreed upon a $132.5 million budget that cuts state spending by 2 percent, largely on the backs of the poor and the sick, women, children, the elderly, and other beneficiaries of state services. It offers next to nothing to the struggling middle class. But for the well-heeled denizens of Wall Street and beyond, there's a promised end to the so-called millionaire's tax passed at the height of the recession. This privileged group has already received a massive boost from the federal government in the form of the financial industry bailout, followed by the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Now they'll receive an extra gift from the state.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Bradley Manning's Torturous Treatment Met By Growing Resistance

—By James Ridgeway

| Fri Mar. 18, 2011 9:02 AM PDT

The solitary confinement of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, is now approaching its tenth month. In addition to sporadic on-the-ground protests, a growing chorus of media and activist voices is calling for an end to Manning’s appalling treatment. Implicitly or explicitly, they link the accused WikiLeaker’s fate to that of tens of thousands of other US prisoners held in solitary, and shed new light on a widespread and torturous practice.

Yesterday the ACLU sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, charging that the "gratuitously harsh treatment" of Manning "violates fundamental constitutional norms." The letter states:

The Supreme Court has long held that the government violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment whenever it “unnecessarily and wantonly inflicts pain.” No legitimate purpose is served by keeping Private Manning stripped naked; in prolonged isolated confinement and utter idleness; subjected to sleep deprivation through repeated physical inspections throughout the night; deprived of any meaningful opportunity to exercise, even in his cell; and stripped of his reading glasses so that he cannot read. Absent any evident justification, such treatment is clearly forbidden by our Constitution…

President Obama recently stated that Private Manning’s conditions comply with the Pentagon’s “basic standards.” Given that those standards apparently permit Private Manning to be subjected to plainly unconstitutional conditions, it is clear that the Department of Defense must adapt its standards to meet the demands of the Constitution.

Amnesty International sent a letter to Gates in January, and amplified its protests last week. Yesterday, Human Rights Watch issued a statement calling on the US government to "publicly explain the precise reasons behind extremely restrictive and possibly punitive and degrading treatment that Army Private First Class Bradley Manning alleges he has received while detained at the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia."

NPR's On Point this morning spent a full hour on Manning, and the show includes a good rundown of the controversy over his confinement. Mainstream publications have joined progressive critics like Salon's Glenn Greenwald in decrying Manning’s treatment. Earlier this week they were joined by the conservative National Review, which declared that he "does not deserve arbitrary and pointless abuse."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Is Your Drugstore Selling Your Private Information to Big Pharma?

—By James Ridgeway

| Tue Mar. 15, 2011 9:50 AM PDT

For years, the big drugstore chains have stoutly denied selling prescription information—patient names, contact information, doctors' names, and prescription details—to pharmaceutical companies for marketing use. Now, that charade has come to an end with two class action suits, accusing CVS and Walgreen of doing just that.

In a civil suit in Philadelphia County Court, as Courthouse News reports, the city’s teachers union charged that consumers got unsolicited sales pitches after CVS allegedly sold customers’ private information to Eli Lilly and Co., Merck, AstraZeneca, Bayer, and other drug manufacturers. The union’s claim states:

"Specifically, in exchange for the receipt of funds, direct promotional letters were sent to physicians of consumers by defendant CVS Caremark in order to promote and tout specific prescription drugs of pharmaceutical manufacturers who contracted with defendant CVS Caremark" for use of prescription information, according to the complaint.

"While touted as an 'RXReview Program' by defendant CVS Caremark, in reality, the physician communications were nothing more than a profit-making opportunity," the class claims.

CVS's scheme contradicts its "public pronouncements as to the sanctity of both consumers' privacy and the physician-patient relationship," according to the complaint.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Peter King, Qaddafi, and the IRA

—By James Ridgeway

| Fri Mar. 11, 2011 12:27 PM PST

Peter King is, in one sense, uniquely qualified to hold hearings on the "radicalization" of young men to a terrorist cause: He may be the only member of the United States Congress to have undergone the process himself, at the hands of the Irish Republican Army.

Some of King's previous dealings with the IRA have been reported, but the depth of his embrace is best documented by Ed Moloney, author of A Secret History of the IRA and former Northern Ireland editor of the Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune, whose reportage on the IRA's operations is second to none. Moloney now writes a blog, The Broken Elbow, in which he recently recapped what he knows about King—including his links to none other than Col. Muammar Qaddafi, long known as an arms supplier to international terrorists:

The re-emergence of the old links to the IRA are embarrassing to Peter King and his response has been both utterly predictable and supremely dishonest – he has wrapped the peace process around himself as protection and justification for what he did. This is what he told the Washington Post:

"I [wanted] a peace agreement, a working agreement, where the nationalist community would feel their rights would be respected," King said in an interview at his Capitol Hill office. "I felt that the IRA, in the context of Irish history, and Sinn Fein were a legitimate force that had to be recognized and you wouldn’t have peace without them. Listen, I think I’m one of the people who brought about peace in Ireland."

The facts, sadly for him, do not support any of this. King first came to Belfast in 1980 just when the first hunger strike, the one led by Brendan Hughes, was reaching a climax, and was radicalized by what he saw and experienced. He came back for the second hunger strike, and it was then he met the family of Bobby Sands, in particular his sister Bernadette and her then partner, now husband Micky McKevitt. He would visit them on every trip he made and often stayed in their home in Louth.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

How to Put Wall Street CEOs in Prison

—By James Ridgeway

| Tue Mar. 8, 2011 1:59 PM PST

“Forgive me,’’ director Charles Ferguson said in receiving an Academy Award for his documentary Inside Job, "I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail — and that’s wrong.''

In New York, Tuesday marked the beginning of the long awaited trial of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who ran the $7 billion Galleon Group and whose personal wealth is estimated at $1.3 billion. He is being prosecuted by the SEC for insider trade deals. Rajaratnam is said to have made $45 million in illegal profits. He has denied the charges and is free on $100 million bond. If he is convicted he could go to prison for as long as 20 years. The SEC historically has been such a handmaiden of the finance business that it's hard to imagine anything serious coming out of its prosecutions, but one never knows.

Whatever happens to Rajaratnam, it would be simple enough to prosecute many of the high rollers on first civil, then criminal charges, fining them millions of dollars and taking them out of circulation for up to 20 years.

"Contrary to prevailing propaganda, there is a fairly straightforward case that could be launched against the CEOs and CFOs of pretty much every US bank with major trading operation," writes Yves Smith in her popular Naked Capitalism blog. "I'll call them 'dealer banks' or 'Wall Street firms' to distinguish them from very big but largely traditional commercial banks.’’ She proceeds to lay out the case, the key points of which I have excerpted below:

Since Sarbanes Oxley became law in 2002, Sections 302, 404, and 906 of that act have required these executives to establish and maintain adequate systems of internal control within their companies. In addition, they must regularly test such controls to see that they are adequate and report their findings to shareholders (through SEC reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K) and their independent accountants. “Knowingly” making false section 906 certifications is subject to fines of up to $1 million and imprisonment of up to ten years; “willful” violators face fines of up to $5 million and jail time of up to 20 years.

The officers in question must certify that, among other things, they "are responsible for establishing and maintaining internal controls" and making sure everyone concerned knows about them--and beyond that, for taking steps to have these controls evaluated and reported. Smith continues:

[Read more in the MoJo blog]