Don't invite Eddie N. Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and onetime Joint Center senior staffer Roger Campos of the recently incorporated Minority Business RoundTable to your Fourth of July picnic unless you want to see some real fireworks.
That's because Williams and the Joint Center are publicly threatening to take Campos and his MBRT to court. Minority Business RoundTable's alleged sins include unlawfully using the MBRT name and misrepresenting itself as being affiliated with the Joint Center, Williams said.
Not to be outdone, MBRT is considering legal action against the Joint Center and any organization that repeats Williams's "blatantly false and malicious" charges, warned MBRT general counsel Charles Cervantes.
At issue is who has the right to call itself the Minority Business RoundTable. In 1999, the Joint Center, a think tank specializing in issues of particular interest to blacks and other minorities, established the MBRT, a high-profile forum for minority business executives. Williams appointed Campos to be its first executive director on Jan. 18, 2000.
Cervantes says the initial MBRT organization severed all ties with the Joint Center earlier this year and is now an independent, nonprofit corporation. He said the break occurred after the think tank allegedly failed to honor the terms of a 1998 planning grant from the Department of Commerce. The grant required the center to "incubate" the MBRT and then incorporate it by January 1999, he said. After waiting more than two years, the MBRT steering committee took matters into its own hands in February and incorporated under the MBRT name, retaining the novel capitalization of "RoundTable."
Not so fast! says Williams. "We continue to operate the MBRT today and have proprietary rights to the names and service marks Minority Business RoundTable and MBRT," Williams said, adding that the Campos organization "is unlawfully using the MBRT name and service mark and . . . is unlawfully identifying itself as being associated with the Joint Center."
Take that back! says Cervantes. "The allegations about any illegal MBRT activities are false and defamatory," he wrote. The lawyer also demanded that Williams "retract" his claims "and immediately and provide me a list of all parties to whom it was published." He also hinted at problems with the way the Joint Center managed MBRT program funds.
Williams canceled a scheduled interview yesterday to discuss the dispute. Other center officials declined to respond to telephone calls and an e-mail seeking response to Cervantes's statements.
A PENNY FOR YOUR . . . Offering Americans roughly $1,000 per organ donor could solve the deadly shortage of available transplant organs, according to economists David L. Kaserman and A.H. Barnett, who previewed their new book on the topic at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday.
Federal law prohibits a deceased donor's family from receiving any payment for the donor's parts. At the same time, the waiting list of needy patients numbers in the tens of thousands.
According to Kaserman and Barnett, the organ shortage is not caused by a lack of usable "cadaveric" organs but by the failure to set up an organ market. They estimate that 13,000 to 29,000 people die each year in circumstances that would yield usable organs, but only about 6,000 donate them.
"Thus, the organ shortage is the product of an ill-conceived public policy that fails to achieve higher collection rates from the available pool of donors," they wrote. Just last week, the American Medical Association went on record supporting research into the effect of using money to motivate donors.
"Ethical objections to cadaveric organ markets appear to be either logically specious or generally unconvincing," Kaserman and Barnett wrote.
"Our data suggest that payments on the order of $1,000 per donor would encourage an increase in the number of donors that would be sufficient to enable supply to meet demand."
AEI Press is publishing "The U.S. Organ Procurement System: a Prescription for Reform" this month.
QUESTIONING THE FOREIGN STUDENT PROGRAM: Sept. 11 tipped us off that the foreign student program in the United States wasn't exactly being all it could be. Now Harvard professor George J. Borjas is laying out the case.
"The remarkably powerful combination of INS ineptitude and the higher-education sector's greed perverted what would have seemed to be a sensible and noble effort into an economically dubious proposition and a national security fiasco," Borjas concludes in a report being released today by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Borjas notes that prospective foreign students need only show that they have been accepted by an Immigration and Naturalization Service-approved school and intend to enroll full time, can pay their way and have a permanent foreign residence.
On the first count, it turns out the INS isn't too picky. In the San Diego area, the agency has approved schools ranging from San Diego State University to Avance Beauty College, the Asian American Acupuncture University and the San Diego Golf Academy.
The foreign student business has spawned major industries both on the continent and off, Borjas says. Schools seek foreign students to boost their enrollment and to serve as low-cost labor. Meanwhile, a raft of for-profit companies abroad offers to "guide" foreign students through the student visa process. Some are legitimate; others take massive advantage.
Either way, Borjas says that "by delegating the responsibility for selecting foreign students to tens of thousands of institutions, the INS has itself created security problems that would not exist in a more tightly controlled system."
The report is online at www.cis.org.
