Sam Pizzigati at Inequality.org writes—A Tale of Two Druglords. One gets life behind bars, the other retires into luxury. Guesswhich one wreaked more havoc:
Last week didn’t go so well for the Mexican druglord Joaquín Guzmán Loera. A federal district court sentenced the notorious “El Chapo” to life in prison. The 62-year-old will almost certainly, notes the New York Times, be “spending the rest of his life behind bars.”
El Chapo certainly deserves his fate. The drug cartel he ruled, a jury determined this past February, dumped “hundreds of tons of drugs to the United States” and “caused the deaths of dozens of people to protect himself and his smuggling routes.”
John Hammergren dumped far more deathly damage. Over the years from 2006 through 2012 alone, we learned last week from the release of a previously secret federal drug database, the corporation that Hammergren ran as CEO inundated local communities in the United States with over 14.1 billion highly addictive opioid pills, nearly a fifth of the opioids distributed in those years.
No other corporation distributed more opioids in those years than Hammergren’s McKesson, the Washington Post reports. Overall, America’s corporate health care giants dropped 76 billion opioid pills on American localities in the time period the new stats cover, enough to supply 36 pills to every man, woman, and child in the United States.
Some 2,000 American cities, towns, and counties are now suing McKesson and the rest of the corporate drug distribution complex. They’re charging that these corporations “conspired to flood the nation with opioids.” The companies, the charge continues, didn’t just fail to report suspicious orders. They “filled those orders to maximize profits.”
The new stats the Washington Post has highlighted will undoubtedly heighten the pressure on McKesson and its fellow partners in crime to settle. But John Hammergren personally has little reason to worry. Unlike El Chapo, Hammergren knew when to fade way. He retired this past April, ending a CEO career that began in 2001. Over his first 16 years as CEO, notes Bloomberg, Hammergren pocketed $781 million. His final months in the McKesson chief executive suite brought that total near $800 million. Upon his retirement, he walked away with a pension package worth $138.6 million. [...]
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2017—It's slowly dawning on Republicans that Trump just might be the worst president ever:
All is not well in Republicanville. No matter how slavish the Fox News segments become, it ain't working; it is slowly dawning on powerful Republicans that the president they are so dutifully protecting and sucking up to may, in fact, be an idiot.
Trump’s struggles go beyond health care. More than six months into Trump’s presidency, Republicans have no legislative accomplishments other than the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a confusing foreign policy, and a White House that is perpetually in damage-control mode. From lawmakers and governors to donors and foreign policy experts, a certain realization is sinking in within the party, based on more than a dozen interviews in recent days: Donald Trump has been a historically weak and ineffective president.
That it took six months to start wondering whether the man who talked about grabbing women, who discussed his penis size during a presidential debate, who sent his press secretary to baldly lie about the size of the crowds on his inauguration day, and who is currently engaged in a public defense of his campaign team openly seeking the assistance of the Russian government during a period of unprecedented assault on our election systems by that government, is perhaps not the brilliant world-shaping genius he made himself out to be.
This is the problem with the Republican Party. They don't catch on too quick.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: It's not the heat, it's the racism. Greg Dworkin's roundup includes two "how to deal" threads. Armando demands a check-in on impeachment procedure. Q anon shows up with guns, again. And this time someone dies. But… well, ok, we are against that.