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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

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.

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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Trump and the Art of the Flail

Protectionism is worse when it’s erratic and unpredictable.

The “very stable genius” in the Oval Office is, in fact, extremely unstable, in word and deed. That’s not a psychological diagnosis, although you can make that case too. It’s just a straightforward description of his behavior. And his instability is starting to have serious economic consequences.

To see what I mean about Trump’s behavior, just consider his moves on China trade over the past month, which have been so erratic that even those of us who follow this stuff professionally have been having a hard time keeping track.

First, Trump unexpectedly announced plans to greatly expand the range of Chinese goods subject to tariffs. Then he had his officials declare China a currency manipulator — which happens to be one of the few economic sins of which the Chinese are innocent. Then, perhaps fearing the political fallout from the higher prices of many consumer goods from China during the holiday season, which would result from the tariff hikes, he postponed — but didn’t cancel — them.

Wait, there’s more. China, predictably, responded to the new United States tariffs with new tariffs on U.S. imports. Trump, apparently enraged, declared that he would raise his tariffs even higher, and declared that he was ordering U.S. companies to wind down their business in China (which is not something he has the legal authority to do). But at the Group of 7 summit in Biarritz he suggested that he was having “second thoughts,” only to have the White House declare that he actually wished he had raised tariffs even more.

And we’re not quite done.

Jamelle Bouie: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Democracy Better Than Republicans Do

The idea that proponents of greater electoral equity have to quiet down because we live in a ‘republic’ is absurd.

Spend enough time talking politics on the internet — or in any other public forum — and you’ll run into this standard reply to anyone who wants more democracy in American government: “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”

You saw it over the weekend, in an exchange between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Dan Crenshaw of Texas. In a brief series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez made the case against the Electoral College and argued for a national popular vote to choose the president. “Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from,” she wrote. “The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it.”

Crenshaw, who has sparred with Ocasio-Cortez before, jumped in with a response: “Abolishing the Electoral College means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas. That is not a representative democracy.” And then he said it: “We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.”

Crenshaw is wrong on the impact of ending the Electoral College. A presidential candidate who focused only on America’s cities and urban centers would lose — there just aren’t enough votes. Republicans live in cities just as Democrats live in rural areas. Under a popular vote, candidates would still have to build national coalitions across demographic and geographic lines. The difference is that those coalitions would involve every region of the country instead of a handful of competitive states in the Rust Belt and parts of the South.

But the crux of Crenshaw’s argument is his second point. “We live in a republic.” He doesn’t say “not a democracy,” but it’s implied by the next clause, where he rejects majority rule — “51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.”

Tim Wu: The American Economy Is Creating a National Identity Crisis

It has become painfully clear that we are more than just consumers and corporate shareholders.

Europeans often describe the United States as a great place to buy stuff but a terrible place to work. They understand the appeal of our plentiful and affordable consumer goods, but otherwise they just don’t get it: the lack of real vacation, the sending of emails after business hours, the general insensitivity to work-life balance.

That may be just a casual observation, but it identifies something deep and problematic about the economy that the United States has built over the past 40 years.

Since the 1980s, American economic policy has insisted on the central importance of two things: cheaper prices for consumers and maximum returns for corporate shareholders. There is some logic to this: We all buy things, after all, and more than 50 percent of Americans own at least some stock.

But these priorities also generate an internal conflict, for they neglect, repress and even enslave our other selves: our identities as employees, producers, family members, citizens. And in recent years — as jobs become increasingly unpleasant and unstable, as smaller towns and regional economies are gutted, as essential industries like the pharmaceutical and telecommunications sectors engage in outlandish profiteering, and above all, as economic inequality becomes the trademark of our nation — the conflict seems to have reached a breaking point.

Alex Kotch: Death and destruction: this is David Koch’s sad legacy

Anarcho-capitalism was the real cancer plaguing the billionaire libertarian. And it spread across universities, halls of Congress and the White House

In 1992, billionaire industrialist David Koch was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given just a few years to live. Thanks to his enormous wealth, he was able to purchase the best treatment in the world, and he survived 27 more years until his death last week. [..]

Koch Industries, a private company, is the United States’ 17th-largest producer of greenhouse gases and the 13th-biggest water polluter, according to research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst – ahead of oil giants Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and Phillips 66. The conglomerate has committed hundreds of environmental, workplace safety, labor and other violations. It allegedly stole oil from Indian reservations, won business in foreign countries with bribery, and one of its crumbling butane pipelines killed two teenagers, resulting in a nearly $300m wrongful death settlement. The dangerous methane leakage, carbon emissions, chemical spills and other environmental injustices enacted by Koch’s companies have imperiled the planet and allegedly brought cancer to many people. But it took Koch’s own struggle with the disease for him to care about cancer and fund research to combat it.

Michael H. Fuchs: We need to cancel the next G7. Let’s resume them when Trump is gone

Right now, the G7 is not equipped to work towards its goals, and the biggest obstacle is US President Donald Trump

The takeaway from the 2019 Group of 7 (G7) Summit? We need to cancel the 2020 G7.

The goal of the G7 is to bring together some of the world’s most prosperous democracies to coordinate on the most important issues of the day. Whether on climate change or responding to Russia’s invasion of Crimea or making gender equality a reality, the G7 countries are supposed to lead, crafting policies that can foster global peace and prosperity in ways that uphold democratic values.

Right now, the G7 is not equipped to work towards these goals.

The biggest obstacle is the US president, Donald Trump, whose policies are antithetical to the goals of the G7 – he wants America to work alone, to destroy the current global trading system, slash foreign assistance that helps address transnational challenges, ignore human rights, and doesn’t believe climate change is real. When Trump attends, chances are high that he causes a diplomatic incident, like he did at the 2018 G7 when he threw a temper tantrum and insulted his Canadian host. The G7 is an annual long weekend of toddler day care for Trump.