AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on Thursday defended Chuck Jones, president of a local union representing Carrier workers, in the face of attacks from President-elect Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpSenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote Warren, Democrats urge Trump to back down from veto threat over changing Confederate-named bases Esper orders ‘After Action Review’ of National Guard’s role in protests MORE.
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“Chuck Jones is a man of passion, conviction and integrity who would do anything for his union brothers and sisters. President Gerard is exactly right — Chuck is a hero,” Trumka said in a statement Thursday.
“An attack on him is an attack on all working people.”
Trumka is stepping into a fight between Jones, the president of United Steelworkers 1999, and the president-elect over efforts to save jobs at a Carrier plant.
Jones earlier this week said Trump had lied about the terms of a deal to keep Carrier manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Jones said he was optimistic when the president-elect first promised to save 1,350 jobs at Carrier’s Indiana plant. The company had originally planned to move the jobs to Mexico but agreed to keep more than 700 jobs in Indiana after receiving $7 million in tax breaks from the state, where Vice President-elect Mike PenceMichael (Mike) Richard PencePence posts, deletes photo of Trump campaign staff without face masks, not social distancing Pence threatens to deploy military if Pennsylvania governor doesn’t quell looting Pence on Floyd: ‘No tolerance for racism’ in US MORE is governor.
Jones said he was hoping the Trump would explain that 550 of the Carrier jobs weren’t saved. But instead, he said, Trump “got up there, and, for whatever reason, lied his ass off.”
Trump on Wednesday hit back at Jones, saying he has done a “terrible job representing workers.”
“No wonder companies flee country!” the president-elect tweeted Wednesday night.
In a subsequent tweet, Trump slammed the union for not being able to keep the jobs in Indiana on its own.
Trumka said in the statement that Jones was right to claim Trump was inflating the number of jobs that would be saved.
“He understands better than anyone that these are more than numbers—they are people with families to support and bills to pay,” he said of Jones.
“Instead of attacking those who have been working hard to save jobs, the president-elect needs to engage with local union leaders at Carrier and at his hotel in Las Vegas. Donald Trump is breaking the law by not bargaining with his newly unionized employees,” he continued.
“Mr. Trump will soon occupy the White House. His words and actions need to befit that office.”
Need another reminder of how much drugmakers spend to discover what doctors are prescribing? Look no further than new documents from the leading keeper of such data.
IMS Health Holdings Inc. says it pulled in nearly $2 billion in the first nine months of 2013, much of it from sweeping up data from pharmacies and selling it to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The firm’s revenues in 2012 reached $2.4 billion, about 60 percent of it from selling such information.
The numbers became public because IMS, currently in private hands, recently filed to make a public stock offering. The company’s prospectus gives fresh insight into the huge dollars – and huge volumes of data – flowing through a little-watched industry.
IMS and its competitors are known as prescription drug information intermediaries. Drug company sales representatives, using data these companies supply, can know before entering a doctor’s office if he or she favors their products or those of a competitor. The industry is controversial, with some doctors and patient groups saying it threatens the privacy of private medical information.
The data maintained by the industry is huge. IMS, based in Danbury, Conn., says its collection includes “over 85 percent of the world’s prescriptions by sales revenue,” as well as comprehensive, anonymous medical records for 400 million patients.
All of this adds up to 10 petabytes worth of material — or about 10 million gigabytes, a figure roughly equal to all of the websites and online books, movies, music and TV shows that have been stored by the nonprofit Internet Archive.
IMS Health says it processes and brings order to more than 45 billion health care transactions each year from more than 780,000 different feeds around the world. “All of the top 100 global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are clients” of its products, the firm’s prospectus says.
Dr. Randall Stafford, a Stanford University professor who has used IMS data for his research, said the company has grown markedly in recent years through acquisitions of competitors and other companies that host and analyze data. As the pharmaceutical industry has consolidated, he says, IMS has evolved by offering more services and expanding in China and India.
“They’ve been trying to beef up their competitiveness in some areas by making all of these acquisitions,” he said.
IMS has especially expanded its database of anonymous patient records, which can match patients’ diagnoses with their prescriptions and track changes over time, Stafford said.
IMS sells two types of products: information offerings and technology services. The information products allow pharmaceutical companies to get national snapshots of prescribing trends in more than 70 countries and data about individual prescribers in 50 countries.
IMS’s prospectus offers examples of the questions companies are able to answer with its data, including which providers generate the highest return on a sales rep’s visit, whether a rep drives appropriate prescribing and how much reps should be paid.
IMS Health’s data collection and sales have been controversial.
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Several years ago, three states passed laws limiting the ability of IMS and companies like it to collect data on doctors’ prescriptions and sell it to drugmakers for marketing purposes. Their intent was to protect physician and patient privacy and to reduce health care costs by reducing marketing of brand-name drugs. Once a drug loses patent protection and becomes generic, promotion essentially ceases.
IMS and other companies sued, and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in their favor, finding a First Amendment right to collect and sell the information. (ProPublica and a group of media companies filed a legal brief supporting IMS on First Amendment grounds.)
ProPublica has sought to purchase data on individual providers from IMS and some of its competitors but was told by each that it could not buy the information at any price.
Instead, reporters obtained data from Medicare on providers in its taxpayer-subsidized drug program, known as Part D, which fills more than one in every four prescriptions nationally. The data is now on Prescriber Checkup, where anyone can look up individual doctors and compare their prescriptions to peers in their specialty and state.
ProPublica has found that in Part D, some of the top prescribers of heavily marketed drugs received speaking fees from the companies that made them.
Physicians and privacy advocates have argued that prescription records could be used to glean information about specific patients’ conditions without their permission. In addition, physicians have argued that they have a right to privacy about the way they choose drugs — but aren’t asked before pharmacies sell information about them.
Stafford said those concerns have parallels to recent revelations about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.
“It’s part of a larger dialogue, which things like the NSA scandal have brought up,” he said. “There’s a lot of data out there that people don’t necessarily know about. … We’re living in a time where people can accept some loss of privacy, but they at least want to know how their privacy is being compromised.”
In its prospectus, IMS cited several challenges to its growth, including data-protection laws, security breaches and increased competition from other data collectors. The filing notes that the United Kingdom’s National Health Service in 2011 started releasing large volumes of data on doctor prescribing “at little or no charge, reducing the demand for our information services derived from similar data.”
Until 2010, IMS Health was a publicly traded company. At that point, it was acquired for $5.2 billion, including debt, by private-equity groups and the Canadian pension board.
Bloomberg News, citing confidential sources, reported last fall that IMS’s owners may seek to value the company at $8 billion or more.
IMS Health declined to comment for this story, citing the regulatory quiet period before the public offering takes place. No date has been set.
Though progressives both inside Congress and out have come out strongly against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and a bill introduced last week that would give President Obama “fast track” authority to sign the “free trade” pact without legislative wrangling, the White House appears to be redoubling its efforts to get what it wants.
The “fast track” bill in question was introduced in the Democrat-controlled Senate last week by the reliable friend of big business Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and co-sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). The companion bill in the House was introduced by Republican Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, though it has so far received no Democratic co-sponsors with only his fellow GOP caucus members lining up in support.
Earlier this month, more than 150 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Obama describing their concerns about the TPP and the fast track legislation under consideration.
“For too long, bad trade deals have allowed corporations to ship good American jobs overseas, and wages, benefits, workplace protections and quality of life have all declined as a result,” said Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and George Miller (D-CA) in a joint statement alongside the letter. “That is why there is strong bipartisan opposition to enabling the Executive Branch to ram through far-reaching, secretly negotiated trade deals like the TPP that extend well beyond traditional trade matters. At the core of the Baucus-Camp bill is the same Fast Track mechanism that failed us from 2002-2007.
“Our constituents did not send us to Washington to ship their jobs overseas, and Congress will not be a rubber stamp for another flawed trade deal that will hang the middle class out to dry. Instead of pursuing the same failed trade policies we should support American workers by making the necessary investments to compete in today’s global economy.”
Outside opponents of the deal itself—unwavering in their critique—have used the fight over “fast track” to exhibit what they see as the undemocratic nature of globalized trade deals like the TPP. And as the implementation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, many of those opponents argue that NAFTA’s terrible economic, social, and environmental legacies should be all the warning needed to put the brakes on such deals.
“Like NAFTA, the TPP will handcuff our ability to set regulations in key areas like finance, industry, the environment, public procurement and fostering programs to create jobs at home,” argued Manuel Pérez Rocha, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, in a recent essay. “Free trade offers corporate subsidies for the rich and cut-throat competition for everyone else. So it should come as no surprise that communities across the continent and the Western Hemisphere are mobilizing in what can be expected as the battle against the TPP.”
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And Dave Johnson, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, explains how “fast track authority” is used to undermine congressional oversight and cut out the American people from the conversation over trade policy:
Obama is expected to make a large public push for the TPP in his upcoming State of the Union address. Whether he can sell the idea to the American people or receive so far absent support from most Democratic lawmakers in Congress remains to be seen.
According to The Hill:
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Officials in drought-stricken California on Tuesday announced 17 communities that could run out of water in 100 days or less.
The list compiled by the California Department of Public Health comes as a result of Gov. Brown’s declaration two weeks ago of a drought State of Emergency.
According to the CDPH, the rural communities on the list range in size from 39 to approximately 11,000 Californians.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that
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“As the severe drought continues, we’re working with impacted communities to identify alternative water sources and additional resources,” CDPH Director Dr. Ron Chapman said.
Where those alternative water resources will be is unclear.
2013 was California’s driest year since 1895, according to data complied by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
According to the most recent Drought Monitor, almost 99 percent of the state’s area is experiencing some level of drought, and over 67 percent of the state is classified as suffering “Extreme” or “Exceptional”drought.
According to meteorologist Jeff Masters, “This is the first time since the Drought Monitor product began in 2000 that a portion of California was put into ‘Exceptional Drought,'” a category currently plaguing almost 9 percent of the state.
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An explosion at a natural gas fracking well in Pennsylvania on Tuesday has sent one person to the hospital, left one person injured and sparked a fire that could take days to contain.
According to a statement from well operator Chevron, the fire broke out at approximately 6:45 Tuesday morning at their well in Dunkard Township in Greene County, about 50 miles south of Pittsburgh.
“We’re being told … the site itself, that fire, will not be contained and we will not have access to that property for at least a few days,” Trooper Stefani Plume said at a press conference.
Complicating the fire, which continued to burn into the afternoon, was the fact that a propane-holding truck was on the well pad and also exploded, Poister said.
The cause of the explosion has not yet been determined.
A team from Wild Well Control, a company that specializes in dealing with well blowouts, has been called in to assist with the efforts, and state police have set up a half mile perimeter as a safety precaution.
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Responding to the incident on Twitter, some environmental voices said the explosion was further evidence fracking should be banned:
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It was announced on tonight’s NXT that Dexter Lumis and Cameron Grimes will face off in a “Haunted House of Terror’ match at Halloween Havoc next Wednesday. The details of the stipulation haven’t been revealed.
Grimes interfered in last week’s main event and helped cost Lumis an NXT North American Championship match against Damian Priest. Priest laid out Grimes with The Reckoning after the match.
After being out of action since July due to an ankle injury, Lumis returned to NXT television three weeks ago. Lumis appeared in a backstage segment where he stared at Grimes. Grimes called Lumis a freak and told him to get out of his face. The following week, Lumis defeated Austin Theory but was laid out by a double stomp from Grimes after.
Three other matches have also been announced for next Wednesday’s Halloween Havoc episode of NXT: Io Shirai vs. Candice LeRae for the NXT Women’s Championship, Priest vs. Johnny Gargano for the NXT North American Championship, and Rhea Ripley vs. Raquel Gonzalez.
Shotzi Blackheart will be the host of Halloween Havoc. She announced last week that Shirai vs. LeRae and Priest vs. Gargano will have stipulations determined by Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal. Coal miner’s glove on a pole match, blindfold match, casket match, Chamber of Horrors, biker’s chain match, buried alive match, devil’s playground match, boiler room brawl, Shotzi’s choice, weapons wild match, trick or street fight, and TLS (tables, ladders, and scares) match are the stipulation options listed on the wheel.
President-elect Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpSenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote Warren, Democrats urge Trump to back down from veto threat over changing Confederate-named bases Esper orders ‘After Action Review’ of National Guard’s role in protests MORE early Monday announced his intention to nominate retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
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“Gen. John Kelly’s decades of military service and deep commitment to fighting the threat of terrorism inside our borders makes him the ideal choice to serve as our Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,” Trump said in a statement.
“He is the right person to spearhead the urgent mission of stopping illegal immigration and securing our borders, streamlining TSA and improving coordination between our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. With Gen. Kelly at the helm of DHS, the American people will have a leader committed to our safety as well as one who will work hand-in-hand with America’s rank-and-file TSA, ICE and Border Patrol officers,” Trump added.
Kelly oversaw U.S. military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean as commander of U.S. Southern Command.
Trump’s transition team pointed to his experience in fighting drug and human trafficking and terrorism as well as his work to promote human rights and safeguarding the southern border.
“The American people voted in this election to stop terrorism, take back sovereignty at our borders, and put a stop to political correctness that for too long has dictated our approach to national security,” Kelly said in a statement. “I will tackle those issues with a seriousness of purpose and a deep respect for our laws and Constitution.”
Kelly headed Southern Command until retiring in January after more than 45 years in the Marine Corps. In that role, Kelly oversaw the prison at Guantanamo Bay and publicly butted heads with the Obama administration over its plan to close it.
He also served in combat in Iraq and spent a year as the head of U.S. forces in that country.
At DHS, Kelly will be at the forefront of Trump’s efforts to build a wall along the border with Mexico and round up undocumented immigrants.
Some conservative immigration groups remain wary of Kelly. Hard-liners have praised him for his military experience and trust he will build a barrier along the southern border. But they worry he won’t crack down hard enough on undocumented workers. Kelly will become the third retired general to be tapped for the incoming administration. Some Democrats have raised concerns over the number of generals the president-elect has selected for his administration. They have cited concerns about the amount of sway the military will have in the government. In addition to Kelly, Trump has named two other generals to top positions: retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for national security adviser and retired Gen. James Mattis for Defense secretary. Others are also being considered for additional positions in his administration. A report last week said Trump is considering as many as five generals for his Cabinet.
Last night’s episode of SmackDown on Fox was billed as the show’s season premiere — but that didn’t seem to help the ratings as overnight viewership for the show was the lowest in a month.
The season premiere episode, which was headlined by Roman Reigns defending his Universal Championship against Braun Strowman, averaged 1.987 million viewers in the overnight ratings. Although ratings are not currently available for the two MLB League Championship Series games that aired opposite SmackDown on TBS and FS1, it’s likely those games took away viewers from what was a relatively loaded up show that also featured The New Day’s farewell match after being split up in the WWE Draft and Daniel Bryan’s return to WWE television.
SmackDown’s audience was remarkably consistent with hour one averaging 1.978 million viewers and hour two averaging 1.995 million.
In the 18-34 demo, SmackDown tied the worst rating it’s ever done on Fox in that category with a 0.2 rating. That tied several other shows for the best mark on network television.
In 18-49, SmackDown was down 16.7 percent from last week, averaging a 0.5 rating. That finished second on the networks, trailing ABC’s Shark Tank, which averaged a 0.6.
Comparing the numbers to the same week last year, SmackDown was down 17.8 percent in overnight viewership. It was down 60 percent in 18-34 and 28.6 percent in 18-49.
Next Friday’s SmackDown will air on FS1 due to game three of the World Series being on Fox.
Here’s a look at the last 10 weeks of overnight viewership as well as key ratings demos for SmackDown:
A massive trade deal under negotiation between the U.S. and EU could bolster oil giants’ efforts to expand fracking on both sides of the Atlantic through NAFTA-style secret corporate tribunals.
This is according to a report released Thursday by Friends of the Earth Europe ahead of the fourth round of negotiations on the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Entitled , the study looks at the implications of a proposed clause that calls for a repeat of NAFTA’s corporate-friendly courts, in which corporations extra-judicially “settle disputes” with governments behind closed doors.
“Put simply, this puts profits before people, democracy and the planet.”
—Antoine Simon, Friends of the Earth Europe
Known as the ‘investor-state dispute settlement’ mechanism (ISDS), the clause would establish these corporate-friendly tribunals for companies to claim damages. According to Pia Eberhardt of Corporate Europe Observatory, this would amount to a “power grab from corporations – to rein in democracy and policies to protect people and the planet. This system cannot be tamed – it must be abandoned.”
A summary of the report outlines potential implications:
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The report charges that this clause would constitute a devastating blow to public resistance against fracking on both sides of the Atlantic, strengthening corporations’ bids to beat back moratoria and bans on the controversial practice.
Karen Hansen-Kuhn explains that secret corporate tribunals have made their mark in so-called “free trade deals” around the world. She writes for Think Forward Blog:
Under negotiation since July 2013, TAFTA — also known as Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — has been fiercely opposed on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics charge the deal would expand corporate power and undermine environmental, health, worker, and food safety protections and big bank regulations.
Says Antoine Simon, shale gas campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, “Put simply, this puts profits before people, democracy and the planet.”
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A federal appeals court on Monday morning is demanding that the Obama administration disclose their legal justification for the targeted drone killing program.
Reversing a lower court ruling in The New York Times Company v. United States, a three-judge panel on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the release of portions of a classified Justice Department memo that provided the legal justification for the targeted drone killing of United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.
“This is a resounding rejection of the government’s effort to use secrecy and selective disclosure to manipulate public opinion about the targeted killing program,” said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director, who argued the case before the panel in October.
“The government can’t legitimately claim that everything about the targeted killing program is a classified secret while senior officials selectively disclose information meant to paint the program in the most favorable light,” Jaffer continued. “The public has a right to know why the administration believes it can carry out targeted killings of American citizens who are located far away from any conventional battlefield.”
The issues in this ruling “assume added importance because the information sought concerns targeted killings of United States citizens carried out by drone aircraft,” wrote Circuit Judge Jon O. Newman in the ruling.
The panel argued that the government had waived its right to keep their legal memo secret following public statements by officials and the Justice Department’s release of a “white paper” to Congress explaining their legal rationale.
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“Whatever protection the legal analysis might once have had,” Newman continued, “has been lost by virtue of public statements of public officials at the highest levels and official disclosure of the D.O.J. White Paper.”
The ruling stemmed from lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Times and two of its reporters, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, along with the ACLU. A ruling in January 2013 dismissed the FOIA request on the premise of national security.
“The public has a right to know the circumstances in which the U.S. government believes it can kill people, including American citizens, who are far from any battlefield and have never been charged with a crime,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a previous statement about the FOIA suit.
Shamsi continued:
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