IN THE WAKE of the 60 Minutes/Washington Post story on the drug industry using its political influence to pass a law to undercut Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to police pill mill suppliers, the sponsors of the bill have lashed back, claiming they were simply acting in the interest of patients.

"Leave the conspiracy theories to Netflix," wrote Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. In a column responding to the story, Hatch said the piece falsely depicted lawmakers as "in the pocket of the drug industry."

Hatch wrote that he was concerned about reasonable access to drugs, and "with the support of patient advocates and others," negotiated a version of the bill to introduce in the Senate.

Not only does the story provide robust evidence that pharmaceutical supply companies were involved in every step of the legislative process - with a drug lobbyist even ghostwriting the original bill - the patients rights' organizations supporting the effort have extensive ties to the drug industry.

One of the primary letters to lawmakers in support of the legislation was signed by several self-described "patient advocacy and health professional" organizations, including Patient Access Alliance, a group that receives support from drug companies involved in the opioid industry.

The metadata of the letter, dated three days after the bill was introduced, shows a name unrelated to the patient groups that signed it. The document properties show that the letter was created by Kristen L. Freitas, the vice president for federal affairs of the Healthcare Distributors Alliance. HDA is the trade group that represents McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Amerisourcebergen, the principal suppliers of pharmaceutical opioids in the country. Freitas, filings show, was one of the drug industry lobbyists working to influence lawmakers in support of the bill.

Freitas did not respond to a request for comment; neither did the patient organization that sponsored the letter.

An investigation last year by the Charleston Gazette-Mail revealed that major distributors had disregarded rules to report suspicious orders to the DEA while flooding West Virginia with over 480 million pain pills over a five year period. The unusually large shipments, from firms such as McKesson and Cardinal, have been directly linked to the skyrocketing opioid addiction problem in the region.

In 2016, there were 14,400 overdose deaths caused by prescription opioids such as Percocet and Oxycontin. Many of the addicts that use increasingly popular street opioids, such as heroin and black market fentanyl, gained their addiction first through pain pills prescribed by a physician. A recent analysis found that over the next decade, opioid deaths could claim the lives of as many as 500,000 Americans.

In 2012, the DEA moved to temporarily revoke the license of a Cardinal Health distribution center in Florida after the firm was found violating its own internal safeguards and providing increasingly massive opioid shipments to several CVS pharmacies in the state.

The Cardinal incident provoked the industry to push back against the DEA. Cardinal hired former Department of Justice officials, including former Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, to pressure the Obama administration against enforcement actions. D. Linden Barber, a former DEA official-turned industry lobbyist, drafted legislation that was given to Rep. Tom Marino, R-Penn., to curtail the DEA's ability to revoke distributors' licenses. After initially hitting a roadblock in 2014, the bill passed the following year. In July of this year, Linden secured a job working directly for Cardinal as the company's chief regulatory counsel.

Campaign finance records show that the drug industry provided hefty donations to the legislators spearheading the legislation. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., two of the other sponsors of the legislation, received $5,000 each from the the Healthcare Distribution Alliance PAC. Scott Gottlieb, now serving as President Donald Trump's Food and Drug Administration chief, published a column sharply criticizing DEA action to revoke the Cardinal license, and, as we reported, later received speaking fees from the Healthcare Distribution Alliance and opioid manufacturers.

Backlash from the story has been swift. Several lawmakers have expressed an interest in repealing the law in question.

On Tuesday, in response to the story, Marino removed himself from consideration as the next federal drug czar, a position he had been nominated to by President Trump.
(c) 2017 Lee Fang is a journalist with a longstanding interest in how public policy is influenced by organized interest groups and money. He was the first to uncover and detail the role of the billionaire Koch brothers in financing the Tea Party movement. His interviews and research on the Koch brothers have been featured on HBO's "The Newsroom," the documentaries "Merchants of Doubt" and "Citizen Koch," as well as in multiple media outlets. He was an investigative blogger for ThinkProgress (2009-2011) and then a fellow at the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute and contributing writer for The Nation.

In 2012, he co-founded RepublicReport.org, a blog to cover political corruption that syndicates content with TheNation.com, Salon, National Memo, BillMoyers.com, TruthOut, and other media outlets. His work has been published by VICE, The Baffler, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Progressive, NPR, In These Times, and The Huffington Post. His first book, "The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right," published by The New Press, explores how the conservative right rebuilt the Republican Party and its political clout in the aftermath of President Obama's 2008 election victory. He is based in San Francisco.

ONE DAY the Israeli Labor Party felt that it needed a new leader.

That happens to this party every couple of years. The party is in bad shape. It looks more like a political corpse than a living organism. Wanted: a new leader, charismatic, energetic, enthusiastic.

So they found Avi Gabbay.

Why him? Nobody is really sure.

Avi Gabbay has no visible qualities of political leadership. No charisma at all. No special energy. No enthusiasm himself and no ability to inspire enthusiasm in others.

After serving as a government employee dealing with the mobile phone industry, he himself became the successful director of the largest mobile phone concern. Then he went into politics and joined a moderate right-wing party, and was appointed Minister for the Protection of the Environment. When the extreme right-winger Avigdor Lieberman was appointed Minister of Defense, Gabbay resigned from the government and his party and joined Labor. That was only a year ago.

He has one significant asset: he is a Mizrahi, an oriental Jew. His parents are immigrants from Morocco, he is the seventh of eight children. Since the Labor party is considered a Western, Ashkenazi, elitist grouping, these passive attributes are important. Up to a point.

GABBAY DID not waste time in presenting his political identity card.

First he made a speech asserting that he will not sit in the same government with the "Joint List."

The Joint List is the united (or disunited) list of the Arab community in Israel. It joins together the three very different "Arab" parties: the Communist party, which is overwhelmingly Arab, but includes some Jews (including a Jewish member of parliament), the Balad party, which is secular and nationalist, and a religious Islamic party.

How come these diverse parties created a joint list? They owe this achievement to the genius of the great Arab-hater, Avigdor Lieberman (see above), who saw that all three parties were small and decided to eliminate them by raising the electoral threshold. But rather than perish separately they decided to survive together. There is no doubt that their list represents the vast majority of Israel's Palestinian citizens, who constitute more than 20% of the population. Strange as this may sound, every fifth Israeli is an Arab.

The simple numerical fact is that without the support of the Arab members in the Knesset, no left-wing government can exist. Yitzhak Rabin would not have become prime minister, and the Oslo agreement would not have come into being, without the support "from the outside" of the Arab bloc.

Then why did they not join Rabin's government? Both sides were afraid of losing votes. Many Jews cannot envision a government including Arabs, and many Arabs cannot envision their representatives sharing "collective responsibility" in a government mainly occupied with fighting Arabs.

This has not changed. It is highly unlikely that the Arabs would join a Gabbay government if invited, and even more unlikely that they would receive such an invitation.

So why make such a declaration? Gabbay is no fool. Far from it. He believes that the Arabs are in his pocket anyhow. They could not join a Likud government. By making a blatantly anti-Arab declaration, he hopes to attract right-wing voters.

His predecessor, Yitzhak Herzog, publicly complained that too many people considered the Labor party to consist of "Arab-lovers". Terrible.

IF ANYONE hoped that this was a one-time anomaly, Gabbay put them right. After the first blow came more.

He declared that "we have no partner for peace." This is the most dangerous slogan of the populists. "No partner" means that there is no sense in making an effort. There will never be peace. Never ever.

He declared that God promised the Jews the entire land between the sea and the Jordan. That is not quite correct: God promised us all the land from the Euphrates to the River of Egypt. God never made good on that promise.

Last week Gabbay declared that in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians, not a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank would be evacuated.

Until now, there has been tacit agreement between Israeli and Palestinian peace activists that peace will be based on a limited exchange of territories. The so-called "settlement blocs" (clusters of settlements near the green-line border) will be joined to Israel, and an equivalent area of Israeli territory (for example, along the Gaza Strip) will be ceded to Palestine. This would leave some dozens of "isolated" settlements in the West Bank, generally inhabited by fanatical religious right-wingers, which must be evacuated by force.

Gabbay's new statement means that after a peace agreement, these islands of racist extremism will continue to exist where they are. No Palestinian will ever agree to that. It makes peace impossible, even in theory.

In general, Gabbay agrees to the "two-state solution" - but under certain conditions. First, the Israel army would be free to act throughout the demilitarized Palestinian state. The Israeli army would also be positioned along the Jordan River, turning the Palestinian "state" into a kind of enclave.

This is a "peace plan" without takers. Gabbay is much too clever not to realize this. But all this is not devised for Arab ears. It is meant to attract right-wing Israelis. Since a Labor-led "center-left" coalition needs rightist or religious votes, the reasoning looks sound. But it isn't.

There is no chance whatsoever that a significant number of rightists will move to the left, even if the left is led by a person like Gabbay. Rightists detest the Labor party, not since yesterday, but have done so for generations.

THE LABOR party was born a hundred years ago. It was the main political force that led to the creation of the State of Israel, and led it for almost thirty years. Its power was immense, many (including me) accused it of dictatorial tendencies.

During all these years, the main occupation of the Zionist leadership was the historical fight against the Palestinian people for the possession of the country. Except for a tiny minority, the party was always nationalist, even militaristic. It was left-wing only in its social activities. It created the Jewish workers movement, the powerful trade union (the "Histadrut"), the Kibbutzim and much more.

This social network has long since degenerated. Corruption became endemic, many scandals were uncovered (mainly by my magazine). When the right-wing under Menachem Begin finally took over, in 1977, the Labor Party was already a living corpse. It has changed its name many times (its current name is "the Zionist Camp") but it has dwindled from election to election.

Avi Gabbay was called in as a savior. His nationalist declarations are conceived as patent medicines. No chance.

CAN THE Labor Party be saved at all? I doubt it.

In the last elections, after a powerful, spontaneous social upheaval, there seemed to be a new chance. Some of the young leaders, female and male, who had appeared from nowhere, joined the Labor Party and entered the Knesset. They are genuine leftists and peace activists. Somehow, their voices became quieter and quieter. Instead of inspiring the party, the party subdued them. It seems to be beyond repair.

A question never asked is - does the party really, really want to assume power? On the face of it, the answer is yes, of course. Isn't that the supreme prize of politics?

Well, I doubt it. The existence of a parliamentary opposition is a cozy one. I know, because I was in that situation for ten years. The Knesset is a good place, you are coddled all the time by the ushers, you get a good salary and an office, you have no responsibilities at all (unless you create them for yourself). You must, of course, make an effort to be re-elected every four years. So, if you are not particularly keen on becoming a minister, with all the work and responsibilities and public exposure that this entails, you just stay put.

WHAT IS the practical conclusion? To forget the Labor Party and create a new political force.

We need new leaders, young, charismatic and resolute, with clear-cut aims, who can energize the peace camp.

I do not subscribe to the picture of a public divided between a right-wing majority and a left-wing minority, with the orthodox on one side and the Arabs on the other.

I believe that there is a right-wing minority and a left-wing minority. Between the two there is the great mass of the people, waiting for a message, desiring peace but brainwashed into believing that peace is impossible ("there is no partner").

Two unfolding developments show the stark choices faces humanity.

In China, president Xi Jinping laid out the Communist Party's 30-year grand plan to become "a moderately prosperous country" by 2020 and "a modern prosperous society" by 2049. The roadmap was both detailed and realistic, based on the world's most populous nation's steady -- but nevertheless breathtaking -- growth over more than three decades. As Eric Li noted in The World Post, "China has led improvements in health, education, science and overall standard of living at a speed and scale that is unprecedented in human history," even as most of the rest of the world economy caught "the American disease" with the meltdown of 2008. The Party's vision for building socialism with Chinese characteristics is stunning in its specificity on the whole range of developmental issues, "including housing, health, science, defense, artificial intelligence and the sharing economy."

Unless this trajectory is interrupted by war with the United States, there is no reason to doubt that China will surpass the U.S. as the planet's most important economic center long before 2049, having already overtaken the U.S. in purchasing parity power (PPP). Chinese society is being transformed at dizzying speed, with 60 million people emerging from poverty in just the past five years. In recent years there has even been significant progress in stemming the horrific environmental damage that has accompanied China's breakneck growth. The same "command economy" that fouled the air and water now leads the world in renewable energy and technology and has decreed that electric cars are the wave of the future.

In foreign policy, China is the global vector of voluntary, non-coercive "connectivity" among nations, by far the biggest international investor in infrastructure development. The Chinese build African ports and railroads, while the U.S. builds drone bases.

U.S. rulers also have grand plans -- not for raising domestic or global living standards, but for war. As servants of the Lords of Capital, both corporate political parties promise their citizenry nothing but austerity. The political hegemony of the oligarchs is so complete -- especially since the Clinton years in the White House -- the very idea of governmental intervention on the side of the non-rich has become foreign to much of the public, including the Black political class. Corporate media define "left" and "right" based mainly on so-called "social," non-economic issues, as if the argument over economic justice has already been settled -- in the oligarchs' favor.

The people's representatives grovel at the feet of the rich, begging for crumbs that might fall from on high. As of last week, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world with a net worth of $90 billion, has received 238 proposals from local governments across North America begging for a chance to host a second headquarters for his Seattle-based corporation. Nearly every city worthy of name recognition, and some you've never heard of, has positioned itself booty-up for Bezos and the prospect of 50,000 jobs. The only states from which no applications have been received are North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Vermont, Arkansas and Hawaii.

Bezos is an extortionist. Amazon has already gotten more than $1 billion in local and state subsidies for its warehouse centers around the country, where workers are paid 15 percent less, on average, than other warehouses in the region. According to a recent study, Amazon's business model has destroyed nearly 150,000 more jobs in retail stores than have been created in its warehouses. Author Simon Head writes that Amazon's "system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive" he has ever come across -- even worse than Walmart. However, the whole point of establishing an austerity regime is to starve working people and their communities into submission to employers like Walmart and Amazon - and to make governments pay for the privilege of hosting the extortionist.

Greg LeRoy, of Good Jobs First, says Bezos has gotten tax break extraction down to a science. Amazon is shameless in its pursuit of public subsidies. "Most companies - 99.9 percent of them - go to great lengths to keep their search a secret, so this is a very unusual, highly public episode. What we're about to see is a textbook auction for tax breaks."

Amazon's grand auction will doubtless become the model for further corporate predation, just as Walmart led the retail industry's race to the bottom. Both evil behemoths deploy high-tech systems to extract every possible advantage from employees and suppliers. But, advanced technology is not the villain -- capitalism is.

Amazon is allowed to prey on workers and communities because Jeff Bezos and his ilk have used their political power to create an economic order of near absolute worker insecurity. Austerity enforces insecurity; that's why it is always on the capitalist politician's menu, in good times or bad.

Jeff Bezos is already in heaven. Late stage capitalism has concentrated wealth like never before in history, so that Bezos and seven guys like him are as rich as the poorest half of the rest of humankind. The Lords of Capital have no vision of a "modern prosperous society" - in American, Chinese or any other terms. They are concerned only with eliminating every threat to their wealth and power. That is the extent of their vision.

China -- or rather, the global movement towards connectivity and peaceful relations at which China is at the center -- will inevitably overwhelm Bezos' world, unless the process can be halted by war.

Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)? -- Donald J. Trump via Twitter, 19 October 2017, 7:56am

Sometimes I talk to the president of the United States in my head. It's weird, but I have to.

Dude, I say (I can hyperlink words when I talk to the president in my head). Dude, what? Really? It always begins this way. We've covered some serious ground, the president and I, over the 40 miles of bad road that has been the last two years of American politics. His attacks on Muslims and Mexicans, his marauding misogyny, the border wall, penis measuring during a nationally-televised debate, the bag of hammers he chose for his Cabinet, Russia Russia Russia, Puerto Rico, North Korea, his embrace of Nazis and Klansmen, the NFL, the families of fallen soldiers, meeting the president of the Virgin Islands, Comey, Clinton, Mueller, Obama and all his favorite people -- there isn't much we haven't discussed. It always starts the same way.

Dude. Let me get this straight. You accused Russia, the Democratic Party and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of conspiring to confabulate a dossier filled with damaging information about you. These three entities, you claimed, came together in secret to undo you by creating a package of reports that include detailed descriptions of deep ties between you, your campaign and Russia ... because Russia would enter into a plot that would expose their own clandestine operations, just to burn you? That's so them.

The FBI part is even more odd. You're comfortable accusing the law enforcement arm of the Justice Department of a vendetta against you? Of falsifying information to foment political change -- against you? The bureau has a sordid history, to be sure, but the targets of its sordidness are not powerful, wealthy, white men.

As for the Democrats, whatever dude. The scary freakin' Democrats did it. We're talking about the same party, right? The one that lost to you? You! They lost to you, Donald fa-chrissakes Trump. The Atlanta Falcons ain't got nothing on the Democratic Party when it comes to stalled momentum, chump mistakes and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Democrats are having trouble conspiring to put in a lunch order these days. Coming up with something this spectacularly hilarious isn't really in their wheelhouse.

It's all of a piece with you, isn't it. All that stuff about Obama bugging your tower was pretty spiffy but this one is special. This is you changing reality into unreality with your mighty foghorn of nonsense. The world says, "Wha? Huh? How can he say ...?" and you smile, because they're talking about you again, and that's what matters.

You are certainly a man of the times, The Man, avatar of all that ails us. You are, among other things, the end product of a decades-debunked economic model that consigns a vast majority of Americans to poverty and stasis while lavishing trillions on the wealthy. This we call "trickle down," and we've waited half a century now for the rain that never comes.

Work doesn't make money anymore. Money makes money. Money made by money made you. From what I hear, the last person you trickled down on got a page in that famous dossier. The economic model has failed dramatically, but you couldn't care less. It did well by you, and that's the dot at the end of the line.

Reality TV star, right? Perfect. Just exactly right. Television, Edward Murrow's wires and lights in a box, will prove in time to be one of the greatest derangers of civilizations in the history of the planet. A spigot of fiction, fear, calamity, greed and deception flows daily from every screen, unmaking reality stitch by stitch. Many see themselves now not as who and what they truly are, but as how they are depicted in the box. That's where you came from, that land of bombast and lies, and it makes seamless sense. "Reality" TV, indeed.

Not that you give a damn, but a lot of people are genuinely terrified right now. Pursuing your catastrophic brand of foreign policy with unstable nuclear nations is only slightly less smart than jumping into a shark tank with a pork chop tied around your neck. I know the folklore of noble American militarism by heart, too. Taking on the flag, the anthem and the football players was you rewriting reality, again, by swaddling yourself in that folklore. John Kelly helped tuck you in. It's the safest place there is in politics, and it only cost tens of trillions of dollars to make it happen. Meanwhile, the country you claim to lead is hiding under the bed.

And since we're on the topic of conspiracies, what about "Climate change is a Chinese hoax"? This past hurricane season must have put at least a small dent in your denialism, not that it's doing Puerto Rico any good. This is the stuff that is going to get us all killed. You have to know that, right? Of course you do. You're the guy who wanted to use his money, which was made by money, to build a wall around his golf course in Scotland to protect it from the rising seas.

You are the distilled essence of the age, a blurred orange watercolor that looks different every time the light changes. There is no substance to you, only menace and the same confused fiction that seeks to define and control this nation. Too many ignore or dismiss you as some sort of terrible mistake, a wrong turn down a blind driveway we can back out of, but that is not the truth of it. You were inevitable, a product of unreality many years in the making. If you didn't exist, someone would have made you up.