“Punting 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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Dean Baker: The TPP, Drug Patents, and President Clinton
There are many serious issues raised by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but the one that may have the greatest long-term impact is its provisions on drug patents. The explicit purpose is to make patent protection stronger and longer. While these provisions are likely to lead to higher drug prices in the United States, they will have their greatest impact in the developing world.
In most developing countries, drugs are far cheaper than in the United States. This is especially the case in India. The country has a world-class generic industry that produces high-quality drugs that typically sell for a small fraction of the price in the United States. For example, the generic version of the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi can be purchased in India for less than $1,000 a treatment. The patent protected version sells in the United States for $84,000.
The U.S. drug industry desperately wants to eliminate this sort of price gap, which can exceed a ratio of one hundred to one. While India is not in the TPP, the goal of TPP proponents is to expand the pact over time so that India would eventually be included and therefore be subject to its strong patent rules.
Jeb Lund: Agreeing to remove the Confederate flag isn’t courageous. It’s just politics
In response to a white supremacist’s massacre of nine black citizens of Charleston in a historic black church, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday finally answered the question, “Should the Confederate flag be taken down from state house grounds?” In the pantheon of gimme questions, it is one of the gimmiest, somewhat more difficult than “Should we have a do-over of the Iraq War” and only barely easier than, “Do I want to be drowned in a sack with rats?”
The suit-fillers of Beltway media passed an energetic “She said yes!” through the Twitter-madding crowd with the enthusiasm of a lummox who proposes to his girlfriend on the ballgame Jumbotron and thumbs-up at 30,000 people after she bows to the peer pressure. Chris Cilizza thinks Nikki Haley has “potential”, and whomever wrote the headline for his piece quoted the language of Hubie Brown calling the NBA draft. Someone will spend today calling her brave. It is the faintest of praise for the faintest of gestures – a politician putting her convenient brand on an issue that already threatened to be inevitable – and it is one Haley herself was happy to undermine even as she was making it.
For all the congratulation Haley will doubtless garner, she still tooted the whistle of southern Lost Cause rhetoric loud and hard enough to send a few terriers home with burst eardrums.
“With cat-like tread upon our foes we steal.” So boasted Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as they decided to try a little burglary for a change. And “steal” is the appropriate word.
It’s hardly a surprise that Republican congressional leaders and their cadre of Democratic allies spurred on by Barack Obama are resorting to a bagful of parliamentary tricks to put the Trans-Pacific Partnership on a “take it or leave it but you can’t change it” fast-track to enactment by Tuesday.
No sooner had the first round gone to pro-democracy forces than Speaker Boehner — forever remembered as the man who handed out tobacco lobby checks to members on the House floor — promptly scheduled a new vote allowing time to bring pressure on naysayers.
Michael Arceneaux: The Key Thing Conservatives Don’t Get About Obama’s Use Of ‘N*****’
I think I speak for many black people when I say that I’m wonderfully bored with white people’s obsession with policing whether or not it’s ever appropriate for a black person to use “nigger” and all its variances. The majority never really has a right to question the marginalized-but particularly when context is key. And yet, they do it anyway, again and again. This time President Obama is the target, but the intent is the same: to be caught up in a word rather than the crux of an argument about systemic racism. [..]
I wish I could be amused by mass media’s disingenuousness. President Obama is not the first president to use “nigger,”-he’s merely the first one not to use it as a slur. For all his work on passing civil rights legislation, former Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson let the word fly freely and routinely from his mouth. The same goes for former Republican president Richard Nixon, and for Harry Truman, when he called Adam Clayton Powell “that damned nigger preacher.”
And, you know, all those other presidents who owned slaves and expressed deep contempt for black people.
So, with that in mind, what purpose does it serve asking whether or not the first black president’s use of “nigger” in the context of a larger reflection on covert versus overt racism relevant? Because a few white people will object? Who cares? How much longer are we going to entertain thoughts of whether or not there is a double standard at play? This is a ruse of the highest order. Even if you don’t agree with the approach, black people use “nigga” in a different context than “nigger.” Whites have every other advantage over blacks; they can take the “L” on this one word.
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