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**SEPTEMBER 11, 2023**
On the Prospect website
* David Dayen reports on how the fine print may undercut drug price
controls
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* Susannah Glickman on the California DMV's sweetheart protection of
Waymo
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* Audrey Carleton on environmentalists' questions about
Pennsylvania's secretive cap-and-trade plans
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Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Legacies of 9/11
The long-term consequences of the U.S. response were far worse than the
attacks themselves.
The anniversary of September 11, 2001, has become a ritual day to recall
the horror of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon,
and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and to remember the nearly
3,000 Americans who lost their lives in the first attack on American
soil since Pearl Harbor. But the reverberations are far worse.
September 11 rescued a faltering Bush presidency and turned the feckless
Bush into a national unifying figure. His approval rating rose 35 points
in three weeks. By late September, 86 percent of Americans approved of
the way Bush was handling the presidency. It also made a thug named Rudy
Giuliani, then mayor of New York, into a national hero.
In the wake of 9/11, Congress was rushed into passing an off-the-shelf
wish list of assaults on civil liberty called the USA PATRIOT Act, which
legalized a number of police-state practices that Congress had long
resisted. Support for government also increased, leading some liberals
to wishfully imagine that this unity might spill over into long-deferred
bipartisan domestic reforms. Nope.
The attacks also liberated Dick Cheney, the de facto president for all
matters related to supposed national security, to sponsor several
foreign-policy disasters, whose damage persists and keeps compounding.
The sources of the 9/11 attacks were the Taliban sanctuary for al-Qaeda
in Afghanistan, aided by Saudi nationals. But Bush was obsessed with
Iraq, on the premise that Saddam Hussein has tried to kill his father.
So the attacks became the pretext for making war on Iraq, a misadventure
with broad destabilizing effects on the Middle East for which we are
still paying the price. Meanwhile, the American military involvement in
Afghanistan lasted two full decades, with nothing to show for it but a
humiliating final defeat. The U.S. is more indulgent of the corrupt
Saudi dictatorship than ever.
If the real winner of the 2000 election, Al Gore, had been permitted to
take office, there is a decent chance that the attacks of 9/11 would
never have happened. Richard Clarke, then the government's top
counterterrorism official, had been warning the White House for several
months that a terrorist attack led by al-Qaeda was imminent. But instead
of connecting the dots and investigating why Saudi nationals were on
U.S. soil taking pilot training, or creating a "do not fly" list, Bush
officials kept blowing off Clarke and ordering him to find something on
Iraq.
Contrary to the widespread fears immediately after 9/11, the new normal
has not included repeated foreign terrorist attacks. But despite all the
anti-terrorist measures, the danger is the huge increase in domestic
terrorism, of which government has been far too indulgent.
On September 11, 2001, the
**Prospect** had just moved its offices to Washington. In the course of
less than a week, we published one of our best and most prescient issues
ever, calling for a narrowly targeted response, warning against both
military excesses and gratuitous attacks on our own liberties.
The issue was headlined "Defending an Open Society
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the challenge on September 12, 2001, and it still is.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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We May Not Negotiate Prices for Ten Drugs After All
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Rules that exempt drugs from Medicare negotiation if there's
'meaningful' generic competition could whittle down the effect of
the program. BY DAVID DAYEN
Corporate Capture in California
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The state DMV went to extreme lengths to shield Waymo from having to
release any information about how it obtained permits for self-driving
taxis in San Francisco. BY SUSANNAH GLICKMAN
Environmentalists Demand Answers About Pennsylvania Governor's
Secretive Committee on Cap-and-Trade Program
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As the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative stalls in the courts,
frontline communities ask the administration to prioritize their input.
BY AUDREY CARLETON
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