Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Chris McGreal: Drug makers conspired to worsen the opioid crisis. They have blood on their hands
Johnson & Johnson and others profited from addiction and death – and yet they still don’t think they’ve done anything wrong
Johnson & Johnson came out swinging after an Oklahoma judge ruled this week that the company has blood on its hands for driving America’s opioid epidemic.
The pharmaceutical giant tried to blame Mexicans, doctors and, inevitably, the victims themselves for the biggest drug epidemic in the country’s history. Its lawyers reframed a corporate engineered tragedy that has escalated for two decades, and claimed more than 400,000 lives, as a “drug abuse crisis”, neatly shifting responsibility from those who sold prescription opioids to those who used them.
Johnson & Johnson painted itself as a victim of unwarranted smears by grasping opportunists trying to lay their hands on its money when all the company wanted to do was help people.
Judge Thad Balkman wasn’t having it. After hearing nearly two months of evidence, the Oklahoma judge’s damning verdict placed Johnson & Johnson squarely at the forefront of what can only be called a conspiracy by opioid manufacturers to profit from addiction and death.
Balkman found that the company’s “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns have caused exponentially increasing rates of addiction, overdose deaths”. He said the drug maker lied about the science in training sales reps to tell doctors its high-strength narcotic painkillers were safe and effective when they were addictive and had a limited impact on pain.
Joseph Stiglitz: Can we trust CEOs’ shock conversion to corporate benevolence?
An apparent move by big business to maximise stakeholder value sounds too good to be true
For four decades, the prevailing doctrine in the US has been that corporations should maximise shareholder value – meaning profits and share prices – here and now, come what may, regardless of the consequences to workers, customers, suppliers and communities. So the statement endorsing stakeholder capitalism, signed earlier this month by virtually all the members of the US Business Roundtable, has caused quite a stir. After all, these are the CEOs of the US’s most powerful corporations, telling Americans and the world that business is about more than the bottom line. That is quite an about-face. Or is it? [..]
The irony was that shortly after Friedman promulgated these ideas, and around the time they were popularised and then enshrined in corporate governance laws – as if they were based on sound economic theory – Sandy Grossman and I, in a series of papers in the late 1970s, showed that shareholder capitalism did not maximise societal welfare.
Linda Greenhouse: Civil Rights Turned Topsy-Turvy
The Trump administration is moving on two fronts to undo civil rights protections.
The Trump administration is so busy trying to undo longstanding civil rights protections and blocking new ones that it is stumbling over its own feet. Those twin goals have collided in recent days in a way that’s worth unpacking for what it reveals about the upside-down civil rights era we seem to be entering.
On Oct. 8, the second day of its new term, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the basic statutory protection against discrimination in employment — should be understood to prohibit discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender individuals. The administration, rejecting the view of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has filed briefs in the last few days (which lawyers for the E.E.O.C. refused to sign) arguing that the answer is no. [..]
Both government briefs point the justices to the same example of what the administration’s lawyers say is proper judicial deference to Congress: the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits the denial of housing opportunities on the basis of race, religion and national origin. An interpretive question about the Fair Housing Act has been whether it prohibits only intentional acts of discrimination, or whether violations can be proven by showing that actions that appear neutral on their face — a zoning policy or mortgage practice, for example — have a disparate impact on members of one of the protected groups.
Quinta Jurecic: Did the ‘Adults in the Room’ Make Any Difference With Trump?
James Mattis joins a growing list of former Trump appointees who soft-pedal their criticism of the president.
Jim Mattis resigned as defense secretary in December 2018. Since then, he has been publicly nearly silent, though his resignation letter pointed to stark differences between himself and the president on a range of foreign policy issues. Now he has spoken up — not with the force and clarity one might expect given his reputation, but with a mumbled essay that says nothing much at all.
Mr. Mattis’s re-entry into the public sphere takes the form of an excerpt from his forthcoming book, blandly titled “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” adapted into an essay for The Wall Street Journal. The excerpt, The Washington Post writes, “warns of the dangers of a leader who is not committed to working with allies.” NPR says that the book “sideswipes President Trump’s leadership skills.”
Based on the excerpt, even “sideswipe” may be too strong a verb for the criticism of the president Mr. Mattis doles out. His disapproval is so veiled that it is practically shrouded. [..]
All this leads to the question: Whom, exactly, is Mr. Mattis’s essay for? Why write in language comprehensible only to readers who have trained themselves to parse a very particular kind of political code — and why unveil this gentlest of criticism now, when the president has done plenty of damage in the intervening months since Mr. Mattis’s resignation? Is this really something that needed to wait until it could be used to promote book sales? What is the point?
Rebecca Solnit: Welcome to the US, Greta. With your help we can save the planet and ourselves
Dear Greta,
Thank you for travelling across the Atlantic to north America to help us do the most important work in the world. There are those of us who welcome you and those who do not because you have landed in two places, a place being born and a place dying, noisily, violently, with as much damage as possible.
It has always been two places, since the earliest Europeans arrived in places where Native people already lived, and pretended they were new and gave them the wrong names. You can tell the history of the United States – which are not very united now – as the history of Sojourner Truth, the heroine who helped liberate the enslaved, as that of the slaveowners and defenders of slavery, as a place of visionary environmental voices such as Rachel Carson and the corporate powers and profiteers she fought and exposed.
Right now the US is the country of Donald Trump and of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of climate destroyers and climate protectors. Sometimes the Truths and the Carsons have won. I believe it is more than possible for Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal to win, for the spirit of generosity and inclusion and the protection of nature to win – but that depends on what we do now. Which is why I’m so grateful that you have arrived to galvanize us with your clarity of vision and passionate commitment.