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Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where the enemy you see wears a cloak of decency.

We begin with good news up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), where Attorney General Maura Healey, who does not punch down, has opened hostilities against the pharmaceutical companies that have raked in the profits from the opioid crisis. From The Boston Globe:

She asserts that the privately held company and 16 of its key directors and executives actively obfuscated the truth about opioid use, downplaying the perils of addiction and overdoses with the aim of getting more people to take them at higher doses for longer periods of time in order to boost the business’s bottom line. “Purdue Pharma created the epidemic and profited from it through a web of illegal deceit,” the lawsuit alleges. While several other state attorneys general have taken similar legal action against Purdue, Healey’s action Tuesday opens a new front in the battle against the scourge of overdoses in Massachusetts. And the suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, hints the state could be seeking damages to the tune of billions of dollars.

“We found that Purdue misled doctors, patients, and the public about the real risks of their dangerous opioids, including OxyContin,” Healey said at a news conference, standing next to officials including Governor Charlie Baker as well as families who have lost loved ones to overdoses. “Their strategy was simple: The more drugs they sold, the more money they made — and the more people died,” Healey said. An investigation by Healey’s office found that since 2009, 671 people who filled prescriptions for Purdue opioids in Massachusetts subsequently died of an opioid-related overdose, the legal complaint says.

Prior to this, Healey led the Commonwealth’s legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act. She went to court against all the iterations of this administration*’s travel ban, and she started the day after Inauguration Day. She’s brought a suit against Exxon-Mobil on the grounds that the company lied about what it knew about the climate crisis. And now she’s after the pharmaceutical industry, as is a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from around the country. As are individual attorneys general from a number of states. In West Virginia, not only is the state suing the companies, but so are nine towns and 10 counties. The companies have settled lawsuits with New York and Kentucky. Attorney General Maura does not settle easily.

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Moving on to Michigan, we have another lovely flashback to the unlovely 1980s happening again: a genuine textbook war. From the Detroit Journalism Cooperative:

While the standards still could be tweaked as a result of public comments, the current draft bears the imprint of several notable Michigan conservatives who served on a focus group charged with making changes to the standards, according to several members of the committee and officials at the Michigan Department of Education who spoke to Bridge, along with Colbeck, who is running as a Republican candidate for governor...

...Notable changes in the proposed new standards include:

- References to the Ku Klux Klan are decreased, from two to a single reference in eighth-grade, along with a mention in a list of optional examples high school history teachers can consider when teaching about social issues between 1890 and 1930. (Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story only listed the optional example mention of the KKK in the proposed standards.)

- Five existing references to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have been cut, with a lone reference remaining in a section on the 1920s on its “legal strategy to attack segregation.”

- The two references to gays and lesbians in the current standards, in sections dealing with the fight for rights for minority groups, have been deleted.

- Both references in the current standards to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, are removed.

- A high school standard about the expansion of civil rights and liberties for minority groups cut references to individual groups, including immigrants, people with disabilities and gays and lesbians. The new proposal includes teaching “how the expansion of rights for some groups can be viewed as an infringement of rights and freedoms of others.” Colbeck told Bridge he added that phrase.

- References to climate change are cut in the proposed standards, with the impact of man on global warming limited to an optional example sixth-grade teachers can use when discussing climate in different parts of the planet. (The standards retain a more generic reference to teaching how "human actions modify the environment.") In notes Colbeck sent to the state board, the former aerospace engineer argues that climate change is “not settled science.”

Another example Colbeck cited of his influence in shaping of the new standards is the deletion of the word “democratic” from the phrase “core democratic values.” They had this term in there called ‘core democratic values,’” Colbeck said. “I said, ‘Whatever we come up with has to be politically neutral, and it has to be accurate.’ I said, ‘First of all, core democratic values (is) not politically neutral.’ I'm not proposing core republican values, either.”

If this intellectual devolution keeps up, the Republicans are going to be running strands of kelp by the 2022 midterms.

One of the more intriguing stories playing out across the country is the sudden reaction of Republican governors to the president*s woolly-headed trade war. One of the more prominent of these is Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

“I do recognize this is probably a negotiating tactic … the administration is using, but in the meantime real families are being crushed by these tariffs right now,” said Doug Reigle of Regal Ware, a company with 200 employees in West Bend that makes cookware and small kitchen appliances. “We ship our products all over the world — 65 percent of our revenue comes from outside the United States … and the tariffs are hitting us especially hard,” said Reigle, who said his firm has already spent about $150,000 this year to cover the tariffs.

At a press event Monday morning in Eau Claire, Walker praised Trumps call to eliminate all tariffs and said the president's comments brought attention to tariffs placed on American products, including Wisconsin dairy, by countries like Canada. "If it gets their attention and gets the focus on the fact that if we just have a level playing field, American workers and American farmers can compete with anyone in the world and I hope that we can eventually get to that," said Walker. Despite his own call to eliminate tariffs, Trump defended his decision to place steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from the European Union and Canada. Walker said those could have negative impact for Wisconsin businesses and consumers and he hopes the Trump administration will change course. "My hope would be that if they don’t pull back entirely on the tariffs that at least we can get some exemptions for Wisconsin-based companies and farmers," he said.

There’s one born every minute.

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And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Grackle Counter Friedman of the Plains brings us another story concerning the benefits of bringing American business savvy into the criminal justice system. From the Tulsa World:

The 34-page lawsuit describes a “wealth-based detention scheme” in which poverty-stricken people “bear the weight of this systemic illegal detention.” The “disproportionate incarceration” of minorities and the “unusually high rates of incarceration” for women in part derive from Tulsa County’s monetary payment system for release, it alleges. The county’s policies and practices caused a pre-trial detention rate 18 percent higher than the statewide average and 83 percent above the national average as of August, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs contend more than 62 percent of people incarcerated in the jail on an average day are presumptively innocent and awaiting adjudication of misdemeanors or felonies. “As a result of Defendants’ policies, people too poor to pay for their release are jailed for days, weeks, or months,” the lawsuit states. “This automatic pretrial detention of poor people has devastating consequences: people who are arrested lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, endure separation from their children and loved ones, and face pressure to plead guilty as soon as possible because that is often the quickest way to terminate their unlawful confinement.”

This didn’t used to be a place where gulags sprouted like mushrooms after a hard rain.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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