By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

When President Obama went on TV to announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed by American Navy Seals, I was in Los Angeles at NCL’s national LifeSmarts competitions. Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about why this is such a critically important event for me, my friends, and colleagues. After all, as the Executive Director of the National Consumers League, I’m a consumer advocate and a labor supporter; we don’t work on foreign policy issues unless they affect child labor. Last I checked, Al Qaeda’s issues weren’t affecting child labor issues. So, how could his death have any real relevance to what we do at NCL?

But last Monday night, as I met three other working women in Phoenix for dinner to prepare for an important meeting the next day, I realized the answer to why bin Laden’s death is so significant: because a world ruled by bin Laden and his followers in Al Qaeda represents a life of repression and subjugation for women and girls.  That my colleagues and I have the freedom to pursue careers, travel, raise children and earn a living is a world unknown to the women in bin Laden’s world.

In fact, bin Laden took refuge in Afghanistan when it was run by the Taliban, the notorious regime that, immediately upon taking power, forbade girls to go to school. Bin Laden had a close working relationship with Al Qaeda. Under the Taliban, women were barred from working outside the home, precipitating a crisis in healthcare and education. Women were also prohibited from leaving their home without a male relative—those that did so risked being beaten, even shot, by officers of the “ministry for the protection of virtue and prevention of vice.” A woman caught wearing fingernail polish may have had her fingertips chopped off. All this, according to the Taliban, was to safeguard women and their honor.

So the death of Osama bin Laden means that the key iconic leader of this repressive, anti-American political movements gone. So as four working women – my three dinner companions were all very accomplished women –  sat at a lovely Phoenix restaurant on Monday and discussed the news of Osama’s death, I took satisfaction in the freedoms we women in the Western world enjoy but so often don’t stop to appreciate.

Hello from sunny Southern California! NCL and LifeSmarts staff have arrived at the Sheraton Universal in Universal City, CA, where 33 teams are en route to compete at the 2011 National LifeSmarts Championship event.

Can’t join us in Hollywood? Follow the action online:

2011 National LifeSmarts Championship official event blog

Final day of competition streaming live online, Tuesday, May 3 at noon Eastern / 9 am Pacific

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

It’s hard to believe that something as seemingly benign as a window blind shade could kill a child, but as a recent New York Times story illustrated, we haven’t yet solved the fatal hazard window blinds present to children. Andrew Martin’s Times story is a cautionary tale about what happens when regulators wait and wait for industry to get off the dime and design a safer product. It doesn’t happen without regulatory pressure toward a mandatory standard.

As Martin’s story illustrates, regulators have been aware of the hazards of window cord blinds since at least the early 1980s, when a federal study to determine the causes of child strangulation tied 41 deaths to drapery and blind cords. Everything from warnings to discontinuing certain styles like horizontal blinds with pull cords ending in a loop, to other fixes like a breakaway device, have been tried. In fact, one manufacturer, Comfortex, produced an ad that highlighted its own solution to the cord problem. Comfortex advertised: “In 1996, only one company offered a real solution to the problem of injuries due to cords. While the industry searched for ways to make cords safer, Comfortex found a way to make shades without cords.”

Over a period of many years, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has been talking about cracking down on the industry and insisting on a cord-free design. Corded window blinds continue to present dangers to kids. It seems that no matter how well the cords on these blinds are hidden, when a child’s crib or bed is near a window with such a blind, the danger that the child will reach into the window blind and become entangled in the cord is always present.

For years, CPSC has asked manufacturers to devise a way to eliminate the risks from window cords or face the possibility of mandatory regulations. But manufacturers have dragged their feet on addressing safety hazards for decades, making minor tweaks or putting the onus on parents to shorten cords or buy tie-down devices.

CPSC has a task force to look at the issue. As an NCL friend and safety expert Carol Pollack-Nelson told the Times, “It was my understanding that we were eliminating the hazard. Now they are talking about reducing the hazard. We don’t want reduced strangulation. We want no chance of it.” We agree with Carol.

As the Times story also noted, a solution has been available for several decades: cordless blinds. The industry has testified that the additional cost of making a cordless blind is $1 to $2. And industry says cordless blinds are more difficult to manufacture than corded blinds.

Are these extra cost and other concerns worth the cost of a child’s life? Talk to parents who’ve lost a child – or seen their child suffer brain damage from being entangled in a window blind cord – and the answer will be, unequivocally yes. Would any of us disagree if our own children’s lives were in question?

The CPSC should stop pussyfooting around. We have a product that with a pattern of injury, there’s a technology to make it safe, and doing so is not prohibitively expensive. After years of handwringing, the CPSC should move forward at long last and put a mandatory standard in place for window blinds. No child should have to die because regulators and industry can’t make a simple decision to adopt a safer design for window shades.

By NCL Executive Director Sally Greenberg

Medical malpractice and abuse of the government payment systems tend to go hand in hand, but the medical profession rarely blows the whistle on its own members. Vishal James Makker, a Portland, Oregon doctor, has finally lost his operating privileges after an investigation – launched by the Wall Street Journal – showed that he performed multiple spinal fusion surgeries on the same patients and billed Medicare for huge reimbursement charges. Makker is also facing multiple malpractice lawsuits, with one filed last week, for a total of 9 such suits in seven years. What’s interesting here is that the medical profession does such a poor job policing itself; several years ago the Oregon Board of Medicine, clearly perceiving that Dr. Makker’s surgeries were subpar, forced the doctor to undergo remedial training for unnecessary surgeries and billing for procedures he didn’t perform. But they let him continue practicing.

The result is that Dr. Makker continued to harm patients with unnecessary and harmful surgeries while bilking the government to cover the cost. From January 2009 to May 2010, Dr. Makker was performing two to three surgeries a week—the highest rate of spinal fusion surgeries among 3,407 surgeons who performed the procedure on 20 or more Medicare patients in 2008 and 2009. Dr. Makker’s rate was ten times the national average. He operated on some of his patients as many as seven times.

Further adding to the intrigue is the fact that Makker had a sweetheart deal with a spinal implant maker, which gives financial incentives to doctors who use its products in their surgeries. The Wall Street Journal says that the surgeon received $519,674 from the spinal implant manufacturer in a year and a half’s time.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this scenario. First, the American Medical Association fights medical malpractice lawsuits with a vengeance but doctors do a lousy job of policing their own. A tiny percentage of doctors commit the vast majority of malpractice and physicians know who are the bad apples are, but, as with Dr. Makker, they don’t police them effectively. This doctor is under scrutiny largely because of a newspaper article. The second lesson to take from the Makker case is that it’s unhealthy to have doctors get financial rewards to do more surgeries with a manufacturer’s devices. It puts all the wrong incentives in place.

Lastly, as Congress debates deep cuts in Medicare, policing doctors who abuse the system by overbilling for unnecessary procedures would save many millions. That’s a far better approach than punishing patients who rely on Medicare for their health care.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

This weekend I had the honor of speaking to the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network (RICN) at its Midwest meeting on the Northwestern Campus in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. The RICN is an organization of progressive college students – “millenials” – an exciting generation of young people with a social reform agenda. RICN’s publication “Blueprint for the Millenial America” is a wonderful recitation of the issues that are important to this group of young activists – economic and racial justice, LGBT equality, college affordability, green jobs, environmental protection, access to quality health care for all Americans, and a path to legal immigration for those seeking opportunity in the United States.

I joined a list of speakers that included Gillian Sorenson of the United Nations Foundation talking about the U.S. policy on international human rights and the hope and expectation that the United States would live up to the highest standards of human rights (though it has too often not done so in the past), Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose district includes Northwestern University, fresh off the plane from the brinksmanship of the House leadership who at the last minute struck to avert a government shutdown. Also speaking were Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO, who is always an insightful thinker and great speaker. I reminded students that NCL’s Florence Kelley met and inspired her greatest protégé when speaking on a college campus – Mt. Holyoke – where Frances Perkins heard about the work of the National Consumers League and joined the organization out of college.

And then we had a chance to learn from the students – we heard from group at the Northwestern Campus for cafeteria workers.

The Northwestern Living Wage Campaign is a well organized, well researched and coordinated effort to ensure that the huge multi million dollar food services like Sedexo and Aramark are paying their workforce a living wage. The campaign defines a living wage as “an hourly wage standard that takes into account the local cost of housing, health care and other expenses necessary to support a family.” I predict they will win the day at the campus, despite opposition from the NU college president Morton Schapiro, who himself makes over a million dollars, the students said. Even the student newspaper editorial page (shame on them!) opposed the NLWC. But the justice of their cause – the 1,300 student names they’ve gotten on their petition – shows the odds are in their favor.

Thanks to the RICN for pulling these diverse voices together for the Midwestern conference. These are the progressive students of the future and NCL looks forward to a long and productive relationship with them.