The nomination of General H.R. McMaster to the recently and abruptly vacated post of national security adviser has not only garnered acclaim from Republicans, but even grudging praise from the left. In today's highly politicized atmosphere, the Democrats likely support McMaster because of his reputation as an independent thinker, which provides a voice which might annoy what the left sees as a very thin-skinned Trump unused to dissent. 

The mainstream media has thus played up McMaster's academic qualifications in his seminal book "Dereliction of Duty", in which he harshly criticized military brass for not standing up more to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and allowing politicized civilian leadership to pervert and ultimately lose Vietnam. This is a thinly-veiled stab at Trump, who has been long lampooned as ignorant and amateurish.

As someone who takes a keen interest in the Vietnam War as a defining period in American history, and having read “Dereliction of Duty” several years ago, I see “Dereliction of Duty” not as brilliant analysis, but a work that is:

But McMaster ignores the most important point about war:

Soon after my last post on DuPont's PFOA debacle, DuPont and Chemours, another company which manufactured the cancer-causing chemical PFOA, have agreed to a huge settlement to 3,550 current lawsuits, some of which have already resulted in multi-million dollar verdicts with punitive damages. 

Many kudos go to those attorneys who took on such cases against a corporate behemoth. It isn't easy spending a quarter of your working life being on the cutting edge and slogging through roadblocks and red tape, all the while never being sure how your case will turn out.

This will only be the tip of the iceberg. PFOA contamination is not only a nation-wide problem, it is a global phenomenon, and likely represents the new frontier of mass toxic tort litigation.

Every time you eat a Chiquita banana, you are eating a little piece of history. "Banana Republic" is not just a clothing chain; it's a pejorative term for when corporations took on the mantle of overthrowing legitimate governments in order to protect corporate interests. The United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International, though you won't find this piece of corporate history on their website) worked in tandem with the CIA and launched a coup against a democratically elected leftist government in order to protect its own interests. Tens of thousands were killed. That was 1954.

Every time you pop a Bayer aspirin, you are reminded of a little piece of history. Back in the 1980s, Bayer realized that blood-derived products for hemophiliacs were contaminated with HIV, yet after discontinuing such sales in the United States, Bayer nevertheless continued to push sales of these same contaminated products in foreign countries. Bayer was sued and eventually paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.

Every day, huge corporations make possible modern life through conveniences not thought possible even a hundred years ago. Our cell phone networks, the cell phones themselves, the miners who extract the resources to make the screen you are reading this on... the list goes on and on. Modern society would simply cease to exist without these corporations. However, sometimes, when blood gets on the balance sheets, when treating humans as mere "resources" and when the law is treated as an annoying speed bump on the path to profit, a corporation becomes more than "an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility" -- it becomes evil.

And so after reviewing the various vile conduct publicized in or around 2016, from Apple making customers overpay for "unauthorized" repairs, to Chipotle forcing its employees to perform unpaid labor, to Wells Fargo ripping off customers by forcing them to pay for fake accounts, the one giant corporation which really wins the 2016 MOST EVIL CORPORATION AWARD is...