Category: 1st Issue

Liability-Proof: On the March to Big Profits, Big Pharma Leaves No Stone Unturned

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Overpatnted Overpriced

Leave it to the drug industry to work all the angles. But that’s the way it is when you’re Big Pharma and your business model is to receive billions in public subsidies, charge exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines, and withhold those same life-saving medicines from countries that cannot afford to hand over the big bucks. Think how the champagne corks are popping in the boardrooms of wealthy investors as Pfizer predicts 2021 revenues from the COVID vaccine alone will top $36 billion. Then there’s Moderna with no history of winning FDA authorization for any of its drugs now expecting 2021 revenues of $18 billion from its COVID vaccine. In fact, two of Moderna’s founders and one of its investors are among 44 new billionaires on Forbes’ list of 400 richest Americans. But that’s not the only way big Pharma brings home the bacon. Thanks to its outsized gifts to Congress and the White House, it has total immunity from having to pay for its mistakes. Unlike every other product manufacturer, vaccine makers cannot be sued for defective vaccines that cause lasting harm or death. In short, big Pharma has a total and impermeable vaccine liability shield. Even the Supreme Court gave its blessing to this monumental blunder. Why you might ask. Because big pharma like the schoolyard bully uses threats to get its way—hold us accountable for our screw ups and we’ll stop making vaccines. You’d have to be a fool or a pharma flunky to believe that a profit-hungry industry would walk away from a pot of gold, even a somewhat reduced one. What description best fits politicians under the thumb of pharma as well as the heads of federal health agencies looking to advance their careers with future employment in the pharma industry? Read “On the March to Big Profits, Big Pharma Leaves No Stone Unturned” and decide for yourself.

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Progressive in Free Fall: Compromise and Capitulation

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Not Great News
Abandon hope all ye who persist in believing that you are going to be saved by the Democrats. Their record is tarnished by a long line of democratic presidents notable for their subservience to corporations and billionaires. Case in point, William Jefferson Clinton who “felt our pain,” as he kicked millions of needy families off welfare rolls, deregulated the financial behemoths and with the help of our current president signed a crime bill that made America the world’s largest penal colony. It wasn’t long (eight years) before Obama, the consummate shape shifter, gave the U.S. another first — world’s leading producer of crude oil. His other “accomplishments” — kicking ten million people out of their homes, enacting policies that led to a significant redistribution of wealth upwards and a decline in the standard of living for people of color. Following in the footsteps of these two charlatans, enter Joe Biden who never met an oligarch he couldn’t fawn over. All the “right” people, the mainstream media, his bros in Congress, his buddies in the fossil fuel and pharmaceutical industries and assorted billionaires are over the moon at how successfully he has unwound social reforms the overwhelming majority of Americans favor. Where do the progressives stand on the fate of their “non-negotiable” programs? In the usual place, on their knees gobbling about the joys of “incremental reform” and turning their gaze away from the pain corporate gouging and billionaires in the tax-free zone are inflicting on working Americans. Take heart, our newest Democratic president is not a complete liar. The one promise he made and kept was to his wealthy benefactors — “Nothing will fundamentally change.” If you believe the congressional “progressives’ that the porridge contained in these two bills is “historic legislation [that] delivers on many of the promises that Democrats made to invest in working people across America, you really should read “Progressives in Free Fall: Compromise and Capitulation.”

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Promising to Keep the U.S. Safe and Healthy, Military Contractors and Big Pharma Executives Cash In — Part 2: Pharma Execs on the Hot Seat

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Politicians Cash In

True or false — highway robbery by the drug companies is the price we pay for innovative research? Judge for yourself — U.S. is the only high-income country that does not negotiate drug prices with big pharma. In the first half of 2019, the price of 3,400 drugs in the U.S. increased, but not in Europe. If Medicare, the largest buyer of medicines in the U.S. and together with Medicaid in the world, starts negotiating prices what are the consequences? The sky won’t fall but drug companies will be forced to do less profiteering. About that drug company-inspired myth that the end of outrageous pricing spells the end of innovation—guess where the research for the successful Pfizer mRNA vaccine originated — in drug price-regulated Germany. As a myriad of studies have found, industry’s enormous profits since the 1970s—the most profitable U.S. industry — have nothing to do with the amount it invests on R&D. What makes them rich is aggressive marketing and over the top pricing in the U.S. Two factors which cut Americans’ lives short. Even before the pandemic, Europeans lived three years longer than white Americans and six years longer than black Americans. “The greed of the prescription drug industry is literally killing Americans. All over this country, the American people are asking a simple question: How many people need to die, how many people need to get unnecessarily sicker, before Congress is prepared to take on the greed of the prescription drug industry.” [Bernie Sanders]. But feel-your-pain rhetoric won’t cut it anymore. The men and women we elect to Congress and to the White House should be answering these questions with action. Why aren’t they? Want to get the real skinny on the failure of politicians to stand up to Big Pharma when it counts? First buy a pitchfork and then read “Promising to Keep the U.S. Safe and Healthy, Military Contractors and Big Pharma Executives Cash In — Part 2: Pharma Execs on the Hot Seat.”

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Promising to Keep the U.S. Safe and Healthy, Military Contractors and Big Pharma Executives Cash In — Part One

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War is a Money Maker
“Our 20-year war was a strategic failure [General Mark Milley, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff]. Strategic failure yes, but for military contractors, Congress members, media personalities, high ranking military officers, foreign policy “experts” in and out of the administration, think tanks, research departments of major U.S universities it was a big payday. According to folks at the Watson Institute at Brown University, the U.S. has wasted $14 trillion dollars on wars since 9/11. Defense industry contractors made off with $7 trillion of that. Much of that money has been spent on a U.S. murder spree with “at least 5.8 to 6 million people likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.” [Byline Times report]. The rot that all this unregulated money produces goes all the way up the political food chain to the White House. When Dick Chaney, former CEO of Halliburton, a defense industry contractor, was George Bush’s vice president, he racked in big bucks when his old firm collected $30 billion most in no-bid contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dick Chaney’s net worth today? $105 million. When will the U.S. embrace peace? Never as long as war is so profitable for the elites. “We have a massive presence overseas…the perverse incentive to facilitate a war economy we’re giving more money to the Pentagon than ever to keep this going…It is a small elite who are making massive amounts of money off conflict or the potential for conflict and being driven by fear…” [Thomas Drake, former senior executive of the NSA and a whistleblower] Sick to your stomach yet? There’s lots more. You’ll find some of it in “Promising to Keep the U.S. Safe and Healthy, Military Contractors and Big Pharma Executives Cash In — Part One.”

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How the Most Expensive Healthcare in the World Became the Least Effective When Covid Struck

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Covid on the March

How does the U.S. healthcare profit making and taking boondogle that siphons off 18% of U.S. annual GDP, cashes in on the $4 trillion dollars spent by the public and the government perform in a major health crisis? The results are in. The most expensive healthcare in the world flopped badly. Compared to another hard-hit country, India, with three times the population (1.4 billion to 330 million) and with the U.S. coming into the pandemic with a GDP seven times greater than India’s ($21.5 trillion to $3 Trillion), simple math would suggest that India must have had a far worse experience than the U.S. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. In fact, the U.S., arguably the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth, suffered more than any other nation on earth. While the virus claimed 442,000 lives in India, COVID went on a tear in the U.S. claiming (as of this date) 662,000 lives. Although 51% of Americans are fully vaccinated compared to 13% of India’s population, death rates don’t lie. If you needed more proof that a privately held healthcare system can’t ever cut the mustard, here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. Want to know how a tsunami of death and suffering and $4 trillion dollars coexist? Read “How the Most Expensive Healthcare in the World Became the Least Effective When Covid Struck.”

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Biden’s Infrastructure Follies — Much Less Than Meets the Eye

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Infrastructure Disaster

To get a handle on the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill, let’s see how it stacks up against the other things Washington politicians pour money into. For openers, Biden’s infrastructure plan calls for an annual expenditure of $64 billion to rein in climate change. His budget for the military, largest producer of greenhouses gases in the world, is twelve times more. On a macro level, the Afghanistan war has cost U.S. taxpayers about $2.3 trillion. The UN puts the cost of stemming climate change at $300 billion. How’s that for a classic non-sequitur? Amid much hoopla, President Biden proposed a $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill. Not enough but a good start. A little Republican muscle and a bunch of squawking corporate DINOs (democrats in name only), and bipartisan Joe caved. The new bill? $1.1 trillion. But only $550 billion is new money that doesn’t have to be stolen from money already attached to other funding priorities (Medicare lost $70 billion in the shuffle). Who was supposed to fund this bill? Oh right, high income earners paying a modest tax. That idea quickly went the way of whalebone corsets and 23 skidoo. No rolling back the $5 trillion Trump tax cuts either. Instead, this wily bunch of bipartisan shapeshifters dragged out the oldest scam of all — public-private partnerships, a euphemism for stealing public assets, like express ways, bridges and toll roads and “selling” them to big corporations and financial behemoths. Whereupon corporate piggies haul in ginormous profits by jacking up the price paid by public users. A scheme that any politician looking for rich corporate donors can love. There’s lot more to be outraged about and you can find it in “Biden’s Infrastructure Follies — Much Less Than Meets the Eye.”

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More Pandemics in Our Future? U.S. Private Profiteering Healthcare System Can’t Stop Them. Single Payer Medicare-for-all Can

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US Healthcare Tab

If you read the reports in the mainstream media, you may believe that this pandemic is a once-in-a-century occurrence. But in the view of many infectious disease experts, the next pandemic may be only a few years away. And sadly the U.S. overpriced, profiteering healthcare system is totally unprepared to handle it. Look at the bang-up job they did on this one. In this article we take on the question that the healthcare system doesn’t want to answer: Why has the U.S., spending more on healthcare than any other country in the world, been unable to control the spread of COVID? Healthcare experts know— “The high U.S. death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the difficulty of achieving good health care outcomes if the population is sicker and access to preventive and primary care is limited, because of affordability.” [“Mirror, Mirror: Reflecting Poorly” Commonwealth Fund Report 8/4/21]. The U.S. healthcare system is a bust, out of reach for millions of Americans. When the coronavirus came on the scene, Americans who were already suffering from a lack of medical attention were its first victims. While fortunes were being made in healthcare boardrooms and executive suites, the U.S. record of pandemic-related hospitalizations and deaths became a national scandal. How could the most expensive healthcare system in the world bomb so dramatically when the stakes were so high? Going forward what can we do about it? There is a solution — “Single-payer Medicare for All would address some of our most pressing problems by establishing no-cost access to care for all Americans; bolstering primary care; and drastically reducing administrative costs.” [Physicians for a National Health Program]. We cover all that and lots more in “More Pandemics in Our Future? U.S. Private, Profiteering Healthcare System Can’t Stop Them. Single Payer Medicare-for-all Can.”

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Billionaires Do the Two-Step into Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat

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Making Money

Eleven people in the world die every minute — most from preventable causes like hunger. That doesn’t seem to faze three billionaires who could afford to right the world’s ship solely on the rise in their net worth during the pandemic. Instead, these unspeakably greedy billionaires, chief among them Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, are off to the wild blue yonder to turn space into a capitalist profit center via a sub-orbital tourist business. But the vast bulk of Americans need not apply. For the first trip, the Bezos entourage held a lottery. The winning bid? $28 million. “We need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.” [Jeff Bezos] Considering that in order to snag a seat on Bezos’ next flight, a ticket will cost $300,000 or more, the universe of space travelers and their “kids” is miniscule. Only about two million people in a U.S. population of 333 million could afford a seat on the next joyride. [Vertical Research Partners] Remember this is the guy who could give all Amazon’s U.S. workers (one million+) a one-time $105,000 bonus and still be as filthy rich as he was before the pandemic. What he did instead as the pandemic was raging: eliminated the $2-an-hour pay boost intended to reward frontline workers for continuing to come into work. While he was cheating his workers, he was hard at work building a half billion-dollar yacht. Think that’s as obscene as it gets? Check out “Billionaires Doing the Two-Step in Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat” and you may wind up wishing he stays in space permanently.

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Promises Made, Promises Broken: All in a Days’ Work for U.S. Presidents — Part 2

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The Two Faces of Biden

In Part 2 of this chronicle of backpedals, flip flops and downright lies of the current President, we dig more deeply into how his domestic agenda has been cannibalized by his fealty to his major donors in healthcare, corporate America, the executive suites of big pharma, and among the political class hoping to expand the reach of imperial America. His debt to voters who were the actual king makers isn’t on his radar crowded out by the demands of the only people who count in Washington — major donors. That’s why there will be no $15 minimum wage, no public option in Obamacare, no legislation to lower drug prices or allow overburdened consumers to import their drugs from Canada. On the contrary, the Biden administration is actively working to subvert efforts to reduce (minimally) student loan balances and to relax the bankruptcy rules for needy debtors. Candidate Biden’s high-minded rhetoric on making rich Americans pay for infrastructure repairs bit the dust soon after he became president. We end with a little dark humor. His fiery rhetoric extolling the virtuous behavior of imperial America and his equally fiery denunciation of those “sneaky” Russians. It’s a true Biden moment you won’t want to miss. Tune into “Promises Made, Promises Broken: All in a Day’ Work for U.S. Presidents, Part 2.”

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Promises Made, Promises Broken: All in a Day’s Work for U.S. Presidents, Part 1

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Last Four Presidential Liars

While running for office, U.S. presidents promise the moon to voters. Once they’re elected, it’s green cheese all around. Call it the essence of American democracy. The current president, Joe Biden, is not one to scoff at tradition. His list of promises made during his run and broken in short order after the election would fill an encyclopedia if one still existed. He bragged that the moment his hand left the sacred bible he would “start by reversing the tax cuts for the super-rich and corporations.” Then he directed his new Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellin, to let the people who really count —Wall Street crooks and corporate robber barons — know he was just kidding. She speedily set the record straight — “And probably tax increases to pay for at least part of it [infrastructure spending] would probably phase in slowly over time.” Come to think of it, what right-minded politician who has spent five decades sucking up to big money would consider a promise made in the heat of battle to be set in stone? Mary Poppins called them piecrust promises —quickly made and easily broken. In “Promises Made, Promises Broken: All in a Day’s Work for U.S. Presidents, Part 1,” you may discover why it’s time for a third party.

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