Earlier this fall, we flagged the federal criminal trial of Massey Energy's former CEO Don Blankenship as an important test of corporate accountability. Blankenship was accused of skimping on mine worker safety and thereby contributing to the 29 deaths that occurred in the 2010 explosion of the Upper Big Branch mine. Yesterday, a jury found […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
…in this week's Post, is the story of a drugmaker choosing profits over accessibility in pricing a Hepatitis C drug. "Gilead Sciences executives were acutely aware in 2013 that their plan to charge an exorbitantly high price for a powerful new hepatitis C drug would spark public outrage, but they pursued the profit-driven strategy anyway," […]
A county electoral board member in Prince William County, Virginia (25 miles south of D.C.) was concerned that allowing electronic signatures to be used in requesting absentee ballots could lead to fraud. To test that theory, the Post reports, the official, "recruited four friends — while the county’s registrar was away — to inspect 151 absentee […]
In 2004, an ISP called Calyx Internet Access in New York received a National Security Letter (NSL), a broad government tool for demanding information without judicial approval. In addition to demanding information, the NSL imposed a broad and indefinite gag order on Calyx and its president, Nick Merrill. They remained "John Doe" litigants through years of […]
…is the tactic described in a Times article over the weekend: [The] Coalition for Affordable Drugs . . . identif[ies] pharmaceutical patents that they consider weak or abusive. Then they request that a unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office review the legitimacy of the patents. . . . [Founders] Mr. Bass and Mr. Spangenberg say […]
In the New York Review of Books, here, reviewing Prof. John Coffee's "The Cure for Corporate Wrongdoing."
…in last Wednesday's Times, notes that, "Last month Congress quietly approved a way for computerized callers to tap into the cell phones used by millions of people who owe money on government backed loans." Read more here.
The ABA Journal reports that “The Georgia Secretary of State’s office accidentally sent protected personal information for its states’ registered voters on computer disks to third parties last month, along with the public voter-registration records for which those organizations had paid.” Last week, plaintiffs brought a class action suit under state identity-protection law on behalf […]
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education adopted the “gainful employment” rule to address overwhelming evidence that some postsecondary career training programs, particularly at for-profit institutions, were failing to prepare students for jobs that would enable them to repay their federal student debt, thus endangering the federal government’s investment in these schools by way of […]
Overall, the program has been working well, the Nobel laureate chronicles: -The uninsured rate has dropped sharply -Most employers are not (as previously feared) dropping coverage for employees -Costs are lower than expected And Krugman puts some recent bad news (about rising premiums, for instance) into perspective. Read Krugman's op-ed here.