News & Articles

Al Capone, the infamous mob boss and bootlegger in Chicagoland during the 1920s, always maintained that he was just a businessman, saying the only difference between him and others was that the law criminalized his business, while legalizing the criminality of so-called “legitimate” businessmen.
Of course, big business bosses today would find their comparison to mob bosses distasteful – yet it’s not that far from a true fit for many of their corporate “enterprises.” After all, we regularly see shameless racketeering schemes from the establishment peers of Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Food, etc.
Then there are the wiseguys of Big Pharma, whose industry-wide business model is based on legalized price gouging. On February 10, for example, Valeant Pharmaceuticals stunned heart patients, doctors, and hospitals by suddenly jacking up the price of two essential life-saving heart drugs. By a lot – Valeant tripled the price of a single vial of Nitropress, from $260 to more than $800, while sextupling the price of Isuprel from $215 a vial to nearly $1,400!
Had the drug maker improved the medicines? No, they were exactly the same formulations as before. The only thing that changed was ownership – Valeant had bought the rights to the medications from another company on February 10. Then, on that very day, it arbitrarily used its monopoly control to exact a rip-off price from those who have no choice but to pay it. A spokeswoman for Valeant was unrepentant: “Our duty is to our shareholders and to maximize the value” of their investments, she declared.
By “duty,” the lady from Valeant didn’t mean a moral duty, but a “duty” manufactured by corporate lawyers and lobbyists to extract immoral profits from vulnerable people. Al Capone would smile approvingly at that rationalization.

“Firms Buy Rival Drugs, Then Raise Their Prices,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 1015

A powerful voice Takes a  powerful stand on climate change

Some of corporate America’s biggest climate-change deniers – from Exxon Mobil to the Koch Brothers – are in dread of a potent storm that’s gaining strength and headed right at them. It’s the category-5 “Hurricane Francis,” which threatens to overwhelm their flimsy ideological castles.
This threat is not literally a hurricane, but a diminutive human who has become a force of nature: Pope Francis. In June, he intends to deliver a powerful papal encyclical putting the moral energy of the church solidly behind the urgent imperative to end the industrial pollution causing global warming. Specifically, Francis will lead Catholics in a worldwide campaign to enact sweeping reforms proposed by the United Nations to halt the toxic emissions that profit a few wealthy investors at the expense of humanity itself.
The Pope’s principled, stout-hearted stand is causing fainting spells, gnashing of teeth, and bombastic rants in the lodges of the profiteers and their right-wing, anti-science devotees. A delegation of climate change deniers from a front group called the Heartland Institute (funded by Charles Koch) even scurried off to Vatican City to protest what it calls the “mistake” that Francis is making. And a right-wing writer named Maureen Mullarkey offered this feverish screed: “Francis sullies his office by using dogmatic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.” Whew – sounds like she’s mad, in both senses of the word!
They can wail all they want, but Pope Francis – who chose his papal name in tribute to the patron saint of animals and the natural world – is right that stopping the looming human disaster of climate change is not only a matter of science, but also of moral duty.

“Pope’s Climate Plan Vexes Right,” New York Times, April 28, 2014

Gov. Rick Scott is gagging on his own gag rule

If a state government issues a right-wing political order, but it’s not written down, does it make a sound?
Bart Bibler, a respected employee of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, says you betcha – even though the order directed at state employees like him was meant to enforce the sound of silence. Since Rick Scott became governor of the Sunshine State, various agencies run by his appointees have issued 1984-style newspeak decrees that “climate change,” “global warming,” “sustainability,” and other terms related to Earth’s looming climate disaster are verboten.
Unaware of this censorship edict, Bibler innocently blurted out the phrase “climate change” in a February teleconference. To his amazement, his breach of ideological correctness earned him an official letter of reprimand, a two-day suspension without pay, and – get this – an order to undergo a doctor’s evaluation to verify his mental “fitness for duty.”
When outrage over this blunt attempt to banish the idea of climate change spread across the country, the governor and his appointees doubled-down on Orwellian denial: “It’s not true,” said the slippery Scott, insisting that no such gag policy exists. By “exist,” though, he means his dictate is not written down. As many employees have confirmed, however, state officials verbally impose their policy of outlawing the language of climate change. The official taboo is so extreme that even a phrase as benign and factual as “sea-level rise” is banned. Instead, Scott’s team has mandated that this measurable (and alarming) reality be referred to as “nuisance flooding.”
It’s their mental fitness that needs to be evaluated! Trying to ban words only amplifies their sound, meaning, and impact – while also exposing how pathetically scared and stupid the censors are.

“Gov. Rick Scott’s ban on climate change term extended to other state agencies,” Miami Herald, March 11, 2015, http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article13576691.html
“Scott’s climate change gag order claims a victim,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, March 18, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com “In Florida, Officials Ban Term ‘Climate Change,’” Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, March 8, 2015
“It’s ‘Orwellian’: Florida Scientists Respond to Report That State Agency Banned ‘Climate Change,” Center for American Progress, March 9 2015