Corporations, industries, labor unions, governments and other interests spent a record $2.79 billion in 2007 to lobby for favorable policies in Washington, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has calculated. This represents an increase of 7.7 percent, or $200 million, over spending in 2006.

And for every day that Congress was in session, industries and interests spent an average of $17 million to lobby lawmakers and the federal government at large. The drug industry spent more than any other, increasing its lobbying 25 percent last year.

Read the full news release here.

See OpenSecrets.org’s Lobbying Database here.

By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

I haven’t worked in the realm of children’s television in more than a decade, but lessons learned in that world are lessons learned for life.

First and foremost: never condescend. When writing for kids, think of them as slightly shorter grown-ups with fewer bad habits and better credit.

Would that the Bush administration followed the non-condescension rule for adults. Instead, they’ve taken a page from the playbook of the late Uncle Don, host of a kiddy show during the glory days of radio.

It’s apocryphal, one of those hoary urban legends, but the story goes that after finishing the broadcast of his usual half-hour of moonbeams and treacle, Uncle Don turned to a colleague – not knowing the microphone was still hot – and said, “Well, that ought to hold the little bastards.”

Similarly, the White House seems to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that dispersing the same old, Uncle Don-style effluvium to the American public will continue to placate and hold us close. But more and more of us know it’s nothing more than a bad smell.

A comparison of two noteworthy speeches last week – Barack Obama on race, George Bush on Iraq – shows the difference between a candidate who talks to us like grown-ups and an incumbent who seems to think he’s still reading “My Pet Goat” to second graders in Sarasota.

Regardless of how you feel about Obama’s candidacy or the continuing issue of his past affiliation with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, last Tuesday’s speech in Philadelphia was formidable, candid, sophisticated rhetoric.

As Republican Peggy Noonan, a virtuoso of speechwriting for Ronald Reagan, observed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, “He didn’t have applause lines. He didn’t give you eight seconds of a line followed by clapping. He spoke in full and longish paragraphs that didn’t summon applause. This left TV producers having to use longer-than-usual soundbites in order to capture his meaning. And so the cuts of the speech you heard on the news were more substantial and interesting than usual, which made the coverage of the speech better. People who didn’t hear it but only saw parts on the news got a real sense of what he’d said.”

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How and Why We Celebrate
By Sue Katz

On Saturday, women around the world will celebrate our progress and plans for the future. Where will you be?

It’s annoying that International Women’s Day gets a mere whisper compared to the retail shout-out that Mothers’ Day receives in this country. Although I’m not a big holiday/ritual/ceremony kinda girl (no, you can’t ignore my birthdays), I do think this particular annual event is special, so I try to celebrate each year.

Let’s start with some history.

In February, 1909, following a march for labor rights by many thousands of women workers the year before, the Socialist Party of America declared International Women’s Day (IWD) in the United States. The next year, at the Second International, in Copenhagen, women from 11 countries adopted the day in the hopes of furthering women’s suffrage.

In 1911, over a million women and men marked the day around the world, but only a week later the crime known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took the lives of over 140 women in the rag trade – mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants – and the struggle against sweatshop conditions became forever associated with IWD.

Russian women imprinted their own radicalism on IWD in 1917 when their strike for “bread and peace” over the death of two million Russian soldiers led to the abdication of the Czar and governmental embrace of women’s voting rights.

Soon the UN adopted International Women’s Day and in 1975, in recognition of the second wave of feminism, held a global International Women’s Year. This meant that, just like the men, we could gather from around the world, compromise bitterly after difficult debate (say, over the inclusion of queers or abortion rights), make resolutions that no one is entirely happy with and be unable to get our governments to put any resources into meeting the goals, anyway. Wow, finally we’ve got a seat at the table of world-level frustration.

While there’s hardly even an official murmur in the States over IWD, there is a website that lists an exhilarating range of world locations and activities – giving the sense that International Women’s Day is not as moribund elsewhere as it seems to be here. This website keeps a tally of events, including the following.

In Saudi Arabia, they’re holding a two-day workshop on integrating women into the economy. A domestic violence group in Albania offers an event they call a Manifestation. Likewise, Tanzania’s having a mother-daughter fundraiser for their domestic violence organization, while the funder in Fiji goes towards building a scholarship fund for “young women studying Automotive and Electrical Engineering at the Fiji Institute of Technology” – the event has the charming name of Women in Celebration of You. In Lebanon they’ll be looking at women’s health. Icelanders are planning to talk about women’s world-wide friendships and about children’s rights, while the Kenyan’s are having a musical festival and handing out prestigious awards.

So what are you doing? I’m going to an annual tea with 90 other women in the afternoon and in the evening to a screening of the as-yet-unfinished film, “Left on Pearl”, about the 1971 takeover that started on IWD of a Harvard University building by the vibrant Boston women’s movement. I was there, so I was interviewed for the film. I’m going to celebrate old victories, because lately it feels like those are the only ones we have.

Sue Katz has published journalism on the three continents where she has lived; her topics range from Middle East peace movements to the impact of ageing on sexuality. Visit her blog, Consenting Adult, at www.suekatz.com.

By Scott Blaine Swenson

Americans need look no farther than the reauthorization of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to understand why fundamental change is needed in Washington. The good intentions of American taxpayers extending a helping hand to Africans ravaged by AIDS are caught between Republican ideologues and complicit Democrats avoiding a fight on issues at the center of efforts to combat AIDS; sexual and reproductive health.

PEPFAR’s mission was compromised by the House Foreign Affairs Committee because they cannot honestly discuss sexual reproductive health. Once Republican ideologues invoke abortion, which has nothing to do with PEPFAR, problem solving is lost to politics.
For 25 years social conservatives ignored AIDS, using it to marginalize people and allowing the disease to run rampant. Now rigid ideology prevents them from allowing public health experts to use proven scientific methods to educate, prevent and treat. Democrats who compromise are politically complicit.

Ignoring objective analyses and recommendations based on PEPFAR’s first five years from the Institute of Medicine, General Accounting Office, Center for Public Integrity and others, the current proposal fails to ensure the increased funds are spent wisely. Congress will spend more without listening to proven public health strategies.

The good news is the White House has agreed to Congress’ request for $50 billion, over five-years, up from $30 billion President Bush requested. More money is good, but more money spent wisely, based on reality is better.

The new proposal includes efforts to address unique circumstances that women, girls and youth face, including efforts to confront violence against women, promoting property and inheritance rights, expanding economic opportunity to promote financial independence, and efforts to work with men and boys to reinforce positive attitudes and the rights of women. Women in Africa have less ability to negotiate sex, are often married young, and exposed to HIV often through marriage.

Other positive changes include increased training of health care professionals and support for nutrition programs.

Now for the bad news:

Republicans continue to push abstinence-only policies that major studies on PEPFAR indicate impede program effectiveness. An earmark insisting 33 percent of funds be spent on abstinence is gone. But in its place is a requirement that 50 percent of funds for preventing sexual transmission be spent on “behavior change,” defined as abstinence, delay of sexual debut, monogamy and fidelity. The tone of the new requirement suggests that abstinence-only programming is preferred. The proposal requires local public health officials to report noncompliance. Congressional micro-management like this perpetuates failed abstinence-only policies and politicizes a program that should be based on scientific evidence, not ideology.

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10,000 Maniacs
by Jeff Malachowsky
CommonDreams.org

Some political scientists argue that voting is irrational, that the act of political participation doesn’t bring enough benefits to the individual to make it worth the effort.

This might be so in many places, but Oregonians don’t think so. Recently, 10,000 have declared, ‘things are different here.’

That’s how many voters coughed up $5 and gave their signatures to candidates running for mayor and city council in Portland, under the city’s new ‘Voter Owned Elections’ system. Moreover, the election is still months away, in May, and it’s only a primary, to boot. What is going on?

Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s most famous orators, once observed – “If the people don’t want to come, nobody’s gonna stop ‘em.” And there-in lies the problem with elections, and with democratic government more broadly. You can’t compel participation; you can’t stop people from sitting out the vote.

But what if you could attract people, make it more fun, more popular – and, more rewarding to participate?

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