Government in Action A British manufacturer, BCB International, is flourishing, buoyed by sales of its Kevlar underwear, at $65 a pair, to U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, soldiers and Marines must buy them directly; the "Bomb Boxers" are not supplied by the Pentagon even though nearly 10 percent of battlefield explosive-device injuries result in sometimes-catastrophic genital and rectal damage. According to an October report in Talking Points Memo, the Pentagon's currently issued protection is inferior to BCB's but is less expensive. (Although the Pentagon fully funds post-injury prostheses and colostomies, it could purchase about 7,700 Bomb Boxers for the price of a single Tomahawk missile.) [Talking Points Memo, 10-18-2011] In what a cement company executive said is "one of those bureaucratic things that doesn't make any sense," the city of Detroit recently built wheelchair ramps at 13 intersections along Grandy Street, despite knowing that those ramps are either not connected to sidewalks or connected to seldom-used, badly crumbling sidewalks. The ramps were required by a 2006 lawsuit settlement in which Detroit pledged to build ramps on any street that gets re-paved, as Grandy was. (No one in city government thought, apparently, to attempt a trade of these 13 intersections for paving 13 more-widely used ones in the city.) [Detroit News, 10-28-2011] A Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV investigation revealed in September and October the astonishing result that Illinois laws passed in 1997 and 2007 at the behest of organized labor have given at least three former union leaders lifetime government pensions as if they had been city or state employees, totaling an estimated drain on public budgets of about $7 million. Two teachers' union officials were allowed to teach exactly one day to qualify, and an engineers' union official was hired for exactly one day, with the remainder of the service of the three having been on the payroll of the respective unions. A September Tribune report estimated that perhaps 20 other union officials might have been eligible under similar provisions. [Chicago Tribune, 9-21-2011, 10-22-2011]
