“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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Paul Krugman: Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
Item: The C.E.O. of Volkswagen has resigned after revelations that his company committed fraud on an epic scale, installing software on its diesel cars that detected when their emissions were being tested, and produced deceptively low results.
Item: The former president of a peanut company has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly shipping tainted products that later killed nine people and sickened 700.
Item: Rights to a drug used to treat parasitic infections were acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals, which specializes not in developing new drugs but in buying existing drugs and jacking up their prices. In this case, the price went from $13.50 a tablet to $750.
In other words, it has been a good few days for connoisseurs of business predators.
Bill Sher: Here’s What John Boehner Should Do Before He Leaves
Speaker John Boehner resigned, presumably, to save the government from another shutdown. Now he can pass a bill to keep the government open – while also maintaining funds for women’s health clinics including Planned Parenthood – by relying on Democratic votes to make up for Republican refuseniks.
But Boehner set his resignation date for October 30th, not September 30th. He’s giving himself an extra month. That means he can try to pass still more things with the help of Democrats.
Of course, Boehner is not a closet liberal. But he has long tried to pass compromise measures that would help his party appear like people interested in responsible governing, only to be thwarted by those in his caucus who are not.
Now is his chance to clear the decks of everything the far right has been holding back. Boehner can now put on the floor:
Thank Martin Shkreli for demonstrating that we can’t depend on the market to deliver the drugs we need
Over the weekend Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli raised the price of the malaria and toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill, an action that outraged people nationwide and made them question why pharmaceutical companies have unilateral power to raise prices on the drugs on which so many of us depend. [..]
n an ironic twist, we can thank Shkreli for illuminating the disconnect between public health’s humane motives and biotech firms’ profit motives. Leaving drug development up to the market puts us at risk of prioritizing the health of people who can afford healthcare over the health of people who cannot. While a few politicians have called for regulations on drug prices, this would be treating the symptoms of the problem instead of the cause.
An increase in public funding for pharmaceutical research would address the cause of these problems. It would ensure that even unprofitable drugs might be developed. And while this would be an expensive undertaking – researchers estimates that each new compound the Food and Drug Administration approves costs $2.6 billion to develop – publically funded pharmaceutical research would ensure that people’s suffering is not judged by their net worth. And it could stop the Martin Shkrelis of the world from harming people’s lives by meddling with their medications.
Dave Johnsom: VW Case Shows Need for More and Bigger Government
Again and again we hear about corporations doing bad things so they can make more money: polluting, selling contaminated food or otherwise harming people’s health, selling products that injure people or just don’t do what they advertise, tricking and scamming people out of their money, selling banned goods or providing financial services for terrorists or drug cartels, and so many other things that are not good for people or society.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were some entity that was more powerful than these corporations, whose purpose is to protect us, reign these corporations in, make and enforce rules, prosecute offenders and put a stop to this stuff? [..]
Our government supposedly exists to protect We the People from wealthy and powerful interests, including other countries. Our revolution against the wealthy British aristocracy and the King’s corporations testify to this. A government that is “of the people, by the people and for the people” should be big enough, strong enough and funded enough to reign in companies and billionaires, and protect We the People from the kind of corporate misbehavior we saw from Volkswagen — long, long, long before it involves 11 million cars all spewing out serious threats to public health.
Judith Solomon: Defunding Planned Parenthood Would Undermine Women’s Care in Medicaid
Barring federal funding for Planned Parenthood, as some in Congress favor, would have a devastating impact on women’s access to health care services through Medicaid — especially family planning services — and put many women’s health at risk.
Nearly 400,000 low-income women would lose access to care under the one-year funding prohibition that the House passed recently, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. Moreover, by making it harder for women to get family planning services, defunding Planned Parenthood would raise state and federal Medicaid costs for unplanned pregnancies. [..]
Eliminating federal funds for Planned Parenthood for even one year would undercut future savings from avoiding unplanned pregnancies, while depriving hundreds of thousands of low-income women of critical family planning and other women’s health services.
Joseph Marguiles: Open the lid on US torture
The public deserves to know what the CIA did in its name
I thought things might be changing earlier this year, but I was wrong.
In January, Barack Obama’s administration announced what seemed to be a major change in policy: Henceforth, former prisoners of the Central Intelligence Agency would be allowed to describe their life in custody. Though they could not identify CIA personnel or disclose where they were tortured, the new rule allowed them to provide “information regarding [their] treatment” and “conditions of confinement.”
That was a big deal, and those of us who represent the men tortured by the CIA welcomed the news. Attorneys for Majid Khan, a former CIA prisoner, promptly sought permission to disclose his description of his torture. Among other abuses, he was subjected to what the CIA euphemistically calls rectal infusions but what prosecutors all over the country call anal rape.
After some back and forth, the government allowed Khan’s lawyers to release his account to the public. Reuters published the account, and for the next 24 hours, the article was one of the most popular stories on Reuters’ 17 websites worldwide, which gives some indication of the public interest in this information.
And that was apparently the end of the administration’s very brief dalliance with transparency.
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