Check out the website: https://lenspoliticalnotes.com Look at the recent Political Notes and Len’s Letters on the website. Len’s Letter #37 Congressional Punishment, Political Note #359 Maggie Hassan US Senate New Hampshire, Political Note #364 Jana Lynne Sanchez TX 06 (special election coming soon)
031421 Len’s Letter #38 Regulating Corporate Capitalism
2021 Governing
Tom Bruce. Beth Macy. Angela
Friedman. Schneier Rasmussen
The February 24, 2021 edition of the New York Times editorial page did two things that provoked this Letter. 1) The Op-ed pieces seemed coordinated. That’s unusual and interesting. Coordinated op-eds focus readers on an issue. 2) The issue to focus on: The danger of unregulated corporations to our health and the health of the planet.
Consider what the Times and its op-ed contributors had to say. Below the fold on the editorial page itself, Tom Friedman wrote Can you Believe This is Happening in America?
“People in Texas are burning furniture for heat, boiling water to drink, and melting snow to flush toilets…. Texas radically deregulated its energy market in ways that encouraged every producer to generate the most energy at the least cost with the least resilience – and to ignore the long-term trend toward more extreme weather.”
They had been warned, he explained, after a heavy snow 10 years earlier in February, 2011. “But 10 years later, pipelines remained inadequately insulated and heaters and de-icing equipment that might have kept instruments from freezing were never installed – because they would have added costs.”
Short term gains brought a long-term disaster. Friedman condemns the Texas Governor mendaciously blaming the Green New Deal and calls the misdirection an escape from reality into politics. It was politics or, perhaps, ideology that led Texas to avoid regulation of their electricity generation. Or was it acquiescence to corporate greed?
Below the fold on the op-ed page, the Kennedy School’s Bruce Schneier wrote When Companies Skimp on Cybersecurity. He didn’t blame politics or ideology for cybersecurity failures. He blamed corporate greed and a failure to regulate.
Schneier described the system that led to the hacking of the widely used management software Solar Winds as “privatizing profits and socializing losses.” Customers and the public pay the cost of failures, not those who created or sold the product. Solar Winds is owned primarily by private equity firms Silver Lake and Thomas Bravo. Schneier wrote that these firms are “known for extreme cost-cutting.” The firms got away with lax security because customers learned about the consequences of that laxity only when the hacking became visible – long after the management software had been bought and paid for.
The Solar Winds disaster was created by what appears to be Russian access to the computer networks of the 18,000 Solar Winds customers. The customers were agencies such as the Departments of State and Homeland Security, nuclear research laboratories and various private and non-governmental agencies throughout the world. They were impacted by a greater failure than the Texas weather disaster. In Texas, the homes and businesses can be repaired. In Texas the power system vulnerabilities can be made less vulnerable if they bother and are willing to spend the money. Customers can be made to pay for some of the work. Texas taxpayers will pay some. (The Texas Governor suggested the federal government pay the cost.) Possibly, maybe, perhaps private industry will pay a share so long as the spending doesn’t get too much in the way of profitability.
The State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, all these other agencies, lost information to the Russians that cannot be recalled. The information is no longer entirely the property of the Solar Winds customers. We may all pay the cost of making management systems less vulnerable to being hacked. We may never figure out what changes need to be made to make the hacked information obsolete? The hacking has probably created back doors into the customers’ systems so that any remedies we develop will be communicated to our adversaries automatically. We are attempting to close the bard door too late because we can’t close that electronic back door.
Scheier says “the only way to force companies to provide safety and security features for customers and users is with government intervention…..The federal government should set minimum security standards for software and software development.” Now he tells us!
Above the fold on the op-ed page, Beth Macy, an American journalist focused on business, tells us about Failures That Fueled the Opioid Epidemic. Macy points to Purdue Pharma’s public relations campaign to persuade regulators and doctors alike about the importance of the time-release, delayed-action mechanism in the medication they were selling. The FDA’s approved label on that opioid medication reflected the goal of the public relations campaign. By 2002, as the public was becoming conscious of the addictive dangers of OxyContin, the Food and Drug Administration convened an advisory panel. Macy reports that eight of the ten panelists had consulted for opioid manufacturers or had been paid speakers at events help by opioid manufacturers. The panel recommended no regulatory changes.
Macy described an accomplice — Janet Woodcock. Woodcock is currently the Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. She had been the Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research within the FDA and is currently under consideration by the Biden administration to become Commissioner. Macy describes Woodcock’s previous job as the “top cop” for dealing with pharmaceuticals. Macy wrote there had been 500,000 deaths from opioid drug overdoses and now millions of people live with opioid use disorder. Macy argues the half million deaths and the millions who are sick are somebody’s fault, the opioid manufacturers and the officials who were their accomplices.
Macy added: “As drug overdoses fueled a decline in American life expectancy drug makers kept bringing new opioids to market.” Macy points particularly to the way the FDA is funded – fees from the manufacturers whose drugs are being tested. Whether the fees influence decisions about drug approval or not, Macy’s op-ed is a story about the consequences of a failure to regulate corporations’ quest for short term profit. The manufacturers and distributers of opioids are an example of “privatizing profits and socializing losses.” Even when they are sued successfully, the Opioid manufacturers do not pay enough to compensate for the damage their drugs have caused.
Tom Friedman contrasted the venality of the Texas energy industry with the scientific motivation of the Mars landing. The Mars landing, which will provide new information about the planet, was an example, he said, of letting science lead the work rather than letting politics or ideology or greed be the basis for decisions. Georgetown’s Angela Rasmussen’s column on the left side of the op-ed page – How Shots Can End Virus Spread makes Friedman’s point about relying on science. She describes how it is possible to take into account financial implications without being venal.
Rasmussen explains there is a difference between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 disease. You can have the SARS-CoV-2 virus without the Covid – 19 disease (that is, you can be asymptomatic or the virus can be prevented from giving you the disease and causing you harm even if you have the virus).
The vaccination trials have been focused on making certain that the vaccinations prevent the development of the Covid-19 disease, whether or not people have the SARS-CoV-2 virus that carries the disease. Preventing people from getting sick and dying is, after all, the public health goal. These distinctions are probably not what has made so many people cautious about being vaccinated?
As in a widely read Atlantic article by Zeynep Tufekci, Rasmussen compares the wary response to the availability of Covid-19 vaccines with the enthusiastic response to the introduction of the polio vaccine. Why the difference? Tufekci describes a series of communication failures as being responsible for so many people being reluctant to get the Covid-19 vaccination.
I’ll suggest (and the Times seemed to be suggesting on February 24th) that we have learned that large corporations cheat to gain short-term profits without regard to long term consequences. The customers and the public bear the cost of those consequences (financial and otherwise). The cheating corporations, especially the individuals leading the cheating corporation, do not. Friedman, Schneier, and Macy provide details to support this public view. Politics was a factor. Every time President Donald Trump pressed the vaccine developers to hurry up, to make vaccines available before the election, the people of the United States grew more skeptical about the vaccines.
The public, or that part of the public who are wary about the vaccines, are right that there is something complicated about the production of the vaccine. As Rasmussen explains, the vaccines protect us from the disease, not necessarily the virus that is essential for the disease. The pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines and receiving preliminary approvals knew they were being watched by the public. Even as they were bullied by the President of the United States who wanted approved vaccines before the election, the pharmaceutical companies focused on the science.
In this instance, the public was wrong to be skeptical.
Why did Pfizer and Moderna, the earliest to get American approval, resist Donald Trump’s pressure to hurry up? Why did Atro-Zeneca, whose vaccine has not yet received American approval, delay its request and redo some work when they found some of their data did not make sense? Why did Johnson & Johnson maintain their steady pace?
Because they were better regulated than electricity in Texas, cybersecurity in the United States, or opioids? Or was it because they knew everyone was watching to see if they would succumb to Presidential pressure.
Add another possibility. These firms may have a culture of integrity. We have grown out of the habit of assuming the integrity of corporations.
Was the New York Times intentionally creating a coherent set of op-eds intended to provoke us to think about corporate greed and regulation? Maybe not. The editorial for the day was about Mitt Romney’s plan for a permanent child benefit.
Putting out a daily newspaper; getting an editorial page filled with op-eds addressing the issues of the day a coherent focus on the op-ed page might be too much to expect even of the newspaper of record. Even the newspaper that says “All the news that’s fit to print” may not be able to consistently coordinate editorials and op-eds so that there is a focus on a single important issue.
Mostly. On February 24, 2021 the New York Times focused on short term greed, long term consequences, on who pays the price of those consequences and on the integrity or lack of it of corporations.
Three Relevant Organizations:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) https://dccc.org The official campaign organization of Democrats in Congress.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC). https://democrats.org The official organization of the Democratic Party.
FairFight https://fairfight.com/ Originated in Georgia, promotes fair elections around country.