Generic Sovaldi Costs Less than $1,000 in India. It would have been worth mentioning this fact in a Washington Post article on the cost of providing Medicare and Medicaid patients with Sovaldi. Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of Sovaldi, can get away with charging $84,000 for a treatment because the government will arrest anyone who tries to produce the drug without its permission.

Of course there is nothing to prevent people from going to India to get treatment there. It would be possible to pay $20,000 for the treatment and travel of a patient and family member, give them $10,000 for their troubles, and still come out $54,000 ahead. This would be a great win-win situation but apparently The Washington Post doesn’t want anyone to consider ways to save the government money at the expense of drug companies.

And yes, we do have to finance the research, but patent monopolies are a horribly inefficient mechanism for this purpose.

—Dean Baker
Generic Sovaldi Costs Less than $1,000 in India

In the coming weeks, Americans are going to be treated with the worst kind of Washington-speak regarding the tobacco legislation currently being considered by the Congress and Attorney Generals from forty different states. We will hear about the scourge of tobacco and the resultant premature deaths. We will hear about how this phalanx of government elites has suddenly grown a conscience after decades of subsidizing the product which, we are now told, “kills millions of Americans each year.”

Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you… news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.

The tobacco settlement is not only about big taxes it’s about big government. Under the current Senate version, the deal would require the creation of 17 new government bureaucracies to manage the tax windfall described above. But it is also about big government on a much more profound scale, namely, government big enough to protect us from ourselves.

Even a conservative like me would support government big enough to protect us from foreign threats and threats to our domestic tranquility but the tobacco deal goes to the next level. Government big enough to protect us from our own stubborn wills. And a government of such plenary power, once conceived will hardly stop at tobacco. Surely the scourge of fatty foods and their attendant cost to the health care economy bears some consideration. How about the role of caffeine in fomenting greater stress in the lives of working Americans? Don’t get me started about the dangers of sports utility vehicles!

Those of you who find the tobacco deal acceptable should be warned as you sit, reading this magazine, sipping a cup of hot coffee with a hamburger on your mind for lunch. A government big enough to go after smokers is big enough to go after you.

—Mike Pence
The Great American Smoke Out

H/T: Andrew Kaczynski

Note: typos and grammar errors as the appeared in the original; formatting errors fixed.

The ubiquity of market thinking has transformed combative political instincts into commercial or personalized ones or both. Environmental despoiling arouses righteous eating; cultural decay inspires charter schools; rebellion against work becomes work as a form of rebellion; old-form anticlericalism morphs into the piety of the secular; the break with convention ends up as the politics of style; the cri de coeur against alienation surrenders to the triumph of the solitary; the marriage of political and cultural radicalism ends in divorce. Like a deadly plague, irony spreads everywhere.

What lends this thinking and behavior such tensile strength is its subterranean connection to the sense of personal liberation. One of the great discoveries of the feminist movement was that “the personal is political.” This undermined axiomatic assumptions about female inferiority and subordination from which patriarchy will never recover.

However, personalizing of the political also carried with it unforeseen consequences as the aperçu migrated into the wider world, carried there by the tidal flows of consumer culture. Nowadays we live in a political universe preoccupied with gossip, rumor, insinuations, and innuendo. Personal transgressions, scandals, outré behavior, and secrets have become the pulp fiction of politics. Our times didn’t invent that. Grover Cleveland was regularly raked over the coals for having an illegitimate child. Warren Harding’s sexual adventures were notorious. This is to cite two of many possible examples. Nonetheless, this kind of inquisitorial and, let’s be frank, voyeuristic pursuit, of venial sins as the way of sizing up political life, has reached heights undreamed of. And this can be entertaining — indeed, it may be intended by the media to be so, as it is eye- and ear-catching. It displays a kinship with the inherent sensationalism of consumer culture more generally. It is also, often, if not always, stupendously trivial or only marginally relevant, but is treated in exactly the opposite way. We have grown accustomed to examine all sorts of personal foibles as if they were political MRIs lighting up the interior of the most sequestered political motivations.

Credit this hyperpersonalizing of political life with keeping interest alive, even if it’s a kind of morbid interest in the fall of the mighty or the wannabe mighty. Otherwise, for many millions of citizens, cynicism (and only cynicism) prevails. The system seems transparently to have become an arena for gaming the system. Cycles of corruption and insiderism repeat with numbing frequency and in a nonpartisan distribution, verging on kleptocracy.

—Steve Fraser
The Age of Acquiescence

Those who champion the free market as the carrier of prosperity today are not only fanciful but really hypocritical. Take Orange County, for example: the home of the Goldwater movement back in the late 1950s and the early 1960s — to this day a very conservative, right wing, affluent place. Orange Country doesn’t exist as a high tech place without the defense industries, aerospace, huge government irrigation networks, waterworks, road building, tax subsidies, tax exemptions, federal subsidies: the whole world out of which Orange County and other sun belt communities were born.

Phoenix, Arizona, for example, or places in Texas depend utterly on government supports that build the infrastructure that makes the market exchanges possible and so on. This was always true — back in the Gilded Age in the 19th century. The railroads, which were the first major form of industrialization in the United States, depended on land grants — from states and the federal government — in order to build the railroads that they constructed across the country. They depended on governments to provide them with all kinds of federal subventions and tax exemptions. So it’s a myth that there ever was this free market that didn’t depend on the government.

—Steve Fraser
Conversations with Great Minds

Dear Ted…

[Y]our grasp of history is as secure as your grasp of science.

This is so wrong. This is more wrong than the geocentric model of the universe, the thing I actually spent my life debunking. (We knew Earth wasn’t flat, dang it. Columbus had already sailed!) What I battled wasn’t a ruling scientific theory, either. It was religious dogma. I am not saying that those are opposites, but mistaking one for the other is like mistaking you for someone with an understanding of climate science…

It’s like saying “by opposing vaccinations, I am just following in the footsteps of a heretic called Edward Jenner, who as we all know invented the light bulb.” This is like invoking Elizabeth Cady Stanton to support Men’s Rights Activism, but crediting her with Prohibition. It’s like saying, “I am a Democrat, just like Ronald Reagan, who of course won the Civil War.” You might as well thank Tesla every time you perform dark magic…

And I don’t care what you believe about the climate. I mean, I’m dead already. I don’t care what you do with the place. Just don’t use my name to lend yourself credibility. Once being forced into a lot of inaccurate statements by people whose grasp on science was lacking is enough.

Eppur si muove…

—Galileo Galilei (as told to Alexandra Petri)
An Open Letter From Galileo to Ted Cruz

I assume liberals are not going to jump on this Ted Cruz being born in Canada business with the same fervor as the right’s masturbatory obsession with Obama’s birth certificate because the facts are clear: he is eligible to run for president. But it cannot pass unnoted that the right wing spent years attacking Obama for allegedly not being a “natural born American” even to the extent that they claimed he faked his birth certificate. But the fact is that he was born in the US and it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t been since his mother was American, just like Ted Cruz’s.

This is the situation with Cruz. His father was a Cuban citizen when Cruz was born, his mother was American and he, unlike Obama, actually wasn’t born in the US and held a dual citizenship with Canada until last year. All of that makes him perfectly eligible to be president, of course. But the idea that these right wingers are a-ok with Cruz’s circumstances after having made such a spectacle of themselves over Obama shows them to be… hypocrites. Shocker, I know.

—Heather Digby Parton
The Canadian Candidate

By now many have read and been moved by the extraordinary mea culpa published in the Shreveport Times by a man named Marty Stroud III, who more than thirty years ago sent Glenn Ford to die for a crime he did not commit…

Yet as these narratives become more ubiquitous, they also expose a nagging hypocrisy. If we are drawn to such expressions of penitence and moral clarity, if we see them as brave or enlightened or even noble, why don’t we grant people in prison the same potential for change? Why have we abandoned rehabilitation, once supposedly central to the mission we call “corrections,” and replaced it with the longest sentences on the planet? Why do we give people who do bad things so few pathways toward redemption? Is it too much to consider that murderers in prison are as complex and human as people who kill in the name of the state? …

Even as more states abolish the death penalty, we have installed in its place different forms of permanent punishment, astoundingly long sentences that deny people’s ability to evolve — or even the human tendency to “age out” of crime. Today, one in nine US prisoners, including people convicted as juveniles, are currently serving a life sentence, according to [PDF] the Sentencing Project, and “those with parole-eligible life sentences are increasingly less likely to be released.” More people than ever are serving life with no possibility of parole — including thousands for nonviolent offenses, as the ACLU found in a major study in 2013. In Shreveport, Louisiana, where Glenn Ford was wrongly sentenced to die, a lesser known man named Sylvester Mead was sentenced to die in prison after he drunkenly threatened a cop while handcuffed in the back of a police car. As I noted at The Nation, Mead’s own trial judge argued that his offense “does not warrant, under any conscionable or constitutional basis, a life sentence.” Yet “Mead’s prosecutor appealed multiple times seeking a harsher sentence because of his old convictions.” We can try to construe this as justice. But like Marty Stroud in 1984, this was a prosecutor bent on winning…

If there is room for redemption at all — and if we are honest about addressing the crisis of mass incarceration — we must start by recognizing that the 2.3 million people we have put behind bars are no less human than the rest of us. That includes many who have done terrible things. What if we gave more prisoners a second chance, some meaningful shot at parole — an opportunity to redefine their legacy, like Marty Stroud did when he sat down to write to the Shreveport Times? What kind of human potential might they reveal? …

“Looking back at that period of time in my life, I was not a very nice person,” Marty Stroud admits about the man he was when he sent Glenn Ford to die. Few seem to doubt his sincerity. How many people in prison would say the same about their own worst mistakes? Would we listen?

—Liliana Segura
A Prosecutor Seeks Redemption. Can We Allow Prisoners the Same?

The amount of household debt and even more recently of student debt in the US is something that is really troublesome… This exemplifies a particular problem with inequality in the United States, which is very high inequality and access to higher education. So in other countries in the developed world you don’t have such massive student debt because you have more public support to higher education. And I think the plan that was proposed earlier this year in 2015 by President Obama to increase public funding to public universities and community college is exactly justified.

This is really the key for higher growth in the future and also for a more equitable growth. There’s one statistic, which I give in my book, which is a bit frightening, which is that if you look at the average income of the parents of Harvard University graduate students right now what you get is the equivalent of the average income of the top two percent of the US distribution of family income…

So this is an example which shows that you have the official discourse about meritocracy, equal opportunity and mobility — and then you have the reality. And the gap between the two can be quite troublesome. So this is like you have a problem like this and there’s a lot of hypocrisy about meritocracy in every country, not only in the US, but there is evidence suggesting that this has become particularly extreme in the United States. And of course, student debt at the other extreme of the distribution is the other side of the coin. So this is a situation that is very troublesome and should rank very highly in the policy agenda in the future in the US.

—Thomas Piketty
Big Think

The evidence is overwhelming that the rich and powerful of Venezuela have followed a continuous, constantly morphing plan to de-stabilize the country and take over the government by any means necessary and that the United States government knows about that plan, supports it and, as much as it can, is assisting in it…

Everything about Venezuela — including its progress and successes, its growing status as a leader in its continent and its difficulties, stumbles, and failures — is driven by two realities. One is its government’s commitment to a genuine program of fundamental political and economic change and the other is an equally committed effort to sabotage that program and overthrow this government.

Is there a coup planned in Venezuela? All the time.

—Alfredo Lopez
Venezuela’s Continuous Coup

I am the more confirmed in this determination by everything I see and hear in this country. Their statesmen in and out of office have their minds too occupied with English and foreign affairs to have either leisure or inclination to be troubled with the wants of Ireland or the rights of her people. I solemnly declare my conviction that the senate of Petersburg or the divan of Constantinople would be as ready to attend to the grievances of Ireland as the British House of Commons. There is an utter ignorance of, and indifference to, our sufferings and privations. It is really idle to expect that it could be otherwise! What care they for us, provided we be submissive, pay the taxes, furnish recruits for the Army and Navy and bless the masters who either despise or oppress or combine both? The apathy that exists respecting Ireland is worse than the national antipathy they bear us.

—Daniel O’Connell
Letter to TM Ray, 1839

In 2011, when then-Labor leader Ehud Barak bolted his own party, obituaries abounded for the party that had built the Israeli state and ruled it unchallenged for four decades. Since the 2000 collapse of the peace process, the party that signed the Oslo Accords had been discredited in the eyes of most Israelis. And in the elections that followed, it ceded the mantle of largest anti-right party first to Kadima and later to Yesh Atid. It contented itself with serving as a junior member of nearly every government.

Last night’s results were a disappointment when compared to the buoyant polls of a few days earlier. But compared to what was expected when Netanyahu called early elections three months ago, it was a miracle. The party’s 24 seats marked its best finish since 1999, when Barak reached the prime minister’s office with 26.

All signs point to Labor joining the opposition. The question is whether the party’s primary voters will reward Isaac Herzog or, as they have more often done, search for a new savior. There will be no shortage of candidates for the role. Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin — one of the subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers — is somebody to watch.

—Ben Birnbaum
Benjamin Netanyahu Will Not Win Another Election