Nobody's seen nothin'

[Guest guest]

This one's well done. - SB

****************

Washington's hottest whodunit

Who turned the Homeland Security bill into the Eli Lilly Protection Act?

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By Arianna Huffington

Dec. 5, 2002 | Quick, somebody call Sherlock Holmes. Or at least the

Hardy Boys. Or maybe even newly designated Homeland Security Secretary

Tom Ridge. There's a Washington mystery that needs solving.

Everyone in D.C., it seems, is utterly baffled as to how an ugly little

provision shielding pharmaceutical behemoth Eli Lilly from billions in

lawsuits filed by the parents of autistic children made its way, in the

12th hour, into, of all things, the 475-page Homeland Security bill.

[]

" It's a mystery to us, " shrugged Eli Lilly spokesman Rob .

It's a mystery to us, too, echoed spokesmen for the White House, the

Department of Health and Human Services, and

physician-turned-senator-turned-drug-company-shill Bill Frist, who had

originally penned the Lilly-friendly provision for a different bill.

The haphazard lawmaking also proved baffling for pharmaceutical industry

lobbyists, and for White House budget director Mitch s, a former

Lilly executive, who made a very public show of disavowing any knowledge

of the amendment's mystifying genesis. Gosh, maybe the little provision

just flew down from heaven. Or was immaculately conceived. Or maybe

Osama bin Laden snuck over and planted the little public policy bomb

himself.

The outrageous rider stuck onto the end of the Homeland Security bill

provides security for Lilly from suits filed by the families of autistic

children who believe that their kids' condition is linked to Thimerosal,

a mercury-based preservative made by Lilly that used to be a common

ingredient in childhood vaccines.

But in a town where knowledge is power, and where there is no shortage

of people willing to take credit for even the most minute

accomplishment, there has been a sudden outbreak of people playing dumb.

Official Washington is observing a code of omerta that makes the

Sopranos look like the loose-lipped gals on " The View. " In other words:

Nobody's seen nothin'.

Here are the clues we have to work with: Over the Veterans Day weekend,

GOP negotiators from the House and Senate hunkered down to finalize the

details of the elephantine security bill. At some point -- no one is

willing to say when -- someone -- no one is willing to say who --

inserted the Lilly provision -- though no one is willing to say why.

It's vital that we solve the mystery, even if you believe that the

custom-made legislation is justified. We need to find out because this

kind of behind-closed-doors monkey business is an affront to our

democracy -- the very democracy this bill was theoretically designed to

protect. Perhaps it should have been called " the Homeland and Lilly

Protection Act. "

" The ability, " Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, told me, " of a special

interest group to secretly insert provisions into law for its own narrow

benefit and to the detriment of the public interest raises fundamental

questions about the integrity of our government. "

Kucinich has vowed to lead a challenge to congressional rules that

permit our representatives to do the bidding of their deep-pocket donors

away from the prying eyes of the public. At the most crucial part of the

bill-drafting process -- when the language of the law is being finalized

-- Washington's corporate alchemists work their black magic to turn

legislative gold into self-preserving lead.

" It's a defect in the system, " explains Kucinich. " When a bill goes into

a conference committee, it gets yanked out of the sunlight and into the

shadows. The conference process is a closed one, so you can go into a

conference committee and basically add anything or take out anything you

want and no one really knows. It transforms the legislature into a

secret cabal. "

So this fight is about a lot more than pushing for the repeal of the

Lilly provision, something Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and

McCain, R-Ariz., have promised to do when the 108th Congress convenes in

January. It's about putting an end to the gaming of the system that is

turning the legislative process into a prize-a-minute carnival for big

contributors. " Inserting such favors for special interests in a bill is

a directive that can only come from some very high places, " Stabenow

told me.

Intriguingly, Stabenow, McCain and Kucinich may have found an unlikely

ally in their battle -- one with a very personal stake in the issue. It

turns out that Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., the chairman of the Government

Reform and Oversight Committee, has a grandson who first began showing

symptoms of autism within days of receiving vaccinations containing

Thimerosal. " He became radically different, " says Burton, " banging his

head against the wall, running around flapping his arms. Twenty years

ago we had one in 10,000 children that they thought was autistic. Now,

it's more than one out of 250. "

This is clearly not a left-right issue. Any politician who has waxed

lyrical about " accountability " and " transparency " -- that includes you,

Mr. President -- owes it to the public to demand that Congress get to

the bottom of just whose directive it was to insert into the Homeland

Security bill a provision that has absolutely nothing to do with

homeland security. And to find out whether the $1.6 million that Lilly

contributed in the last election cycle -- 79 percent of which went to

Republicans -- had anything to do with the inclusion of this designer

provision. And, come to think of it, whether these donations had

anything to do with the Bush administration asking a federal claims

court to block public access to documents unearthed in over a thousand

Thimerosal-related lawsuits.

For anyone remotely familiar with the ways of Washington -- and Sherlock

Holmes -- the answer should be " elementary. "

We're used to having pounds of fatty pork stirred into almost every

recipe Congress dishes up. But the abuse of a bill about homeland

security is especially distasteful. Washington's greedy corporate

masters may finally have overreached. Their continued influence

constitutes a clear and present danger to our security and if the

president is serious about protecting the homeland, he should speak up.

salon.com

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About the writer

Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of

nine books. Her most recent, " Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed

and Political Corruption are Undermining America " will be published in

January by Crown.

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