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Forget the Mafia, the Real Crime Syndicate is Big Pharma

“It is scary how many similarities there are between [the pharmaceutical] industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry …”[Former VP of drug king pin Pfizer]

Go into any drugstore in America and what you will invariably see is a line at the pharmacy counter. It’s become a status symbol to leave your doctor’s office waving that precious piece of paper (although nowadays many doctors spoil the fun by sending the script over the internet). In a country that’s only 4.5% of the world’s population, doctors are busy dosing hapless Americans to the tune of 3.5 billion prescriptions per year. That’s about 10 prescriptions yearly for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Every prescription a doctor writes and a patient fills makes Big Pharma (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America comprising the global pharmaceutical industry) richer and more powerful. The case for hooking Americans on psychiatric medicines (antidepressants, sedatives and antipsychotics) is particularly horrifying. In 2023, 17% of U.S. adults succumbed to Big Pharma’s blandishments. It doesn’t help that doctors in Big Pharma’s pocket are rewarded with copious amounts of largesse if they dance to Big Pharma’s tune. Is it just a  coincidence that 87,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2024 (114,000 in 2023)?  Who would insist that this is the right prescription for a healthy America? Not Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine — “Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.“

Hard as it may be to imagine, Big Pharma has come up with another wrinkle to juice already skyrocketing sales of antipsychotics. To treat a common side effect of anti-psychotic drugs — uncontrollable movements in the face, tongue, or other body parts (tardive dyskinesia) — Big Pharma is marketing another drug, not to replace the offending drug, but to “supplement” it. Although your doctor will not mention it, this drug has more serious side effects than the one you are already taking, and carries a “black box” warning (FDA’s most serious safety alert). Hallelujah, you’re taking two drugs, one of which might cause you to commit suicide. But for the drug company it’s all about money. In 2024, patients risked their live while Teva, the drug maker of the supplement, added $1.6 billion to its bottom line, a hefty 10% of total revenues for a drug with life threatening side effects. They were undoubtedly uncorking the champagne in the executive suite.

Drugs, drugs an endless vista and U.S. patients are paying through the nose for them. The statistics are eye-popping. Over half of people in the U.S. (58%) report taking prescription drugs on a regular or on-going basis. To be fair American drug use is on a par with that in most advanced economies. Where US patients get the sucker punch is how much Big Pharma charges them. In 2019 (the latest year with internationally comparable data), the U.S. spent $1,126 per person on prescribed medicines, while comparable countries spent $552. According to a RAND report released in 2024, prescription drug prices in the United States are significantly higher than in other nations, with U.S. prices averaging 2.78 times those in 33 other nations. If you go for brand-named drugs the discrepancy is even more remarkable with Americans paying more than four times what people in other countries pay.

How could this be? Americans may not be the brightest bulbs in the world (by most global comparisons in 2024 they ranked around 30 in average IQ while China holds the top spot) but they’re smart enough to know the difference between the $1,349 per month they pay for the weight loss drug Wegovy, while their friends in the U.K. are paying $92. Or how about Ozempic, another weight loss drug that’s all the rage? It you lived in the U.K. a month’s supply would cost $83. Americans are paying $936, 1,300 times more. These two drugs have become a veritable cash cow with Americans paying $36 billion (72%) of the $50 billion in revenues already in Big Pharma’s coffers

How could this be? Let’s give the devil its due and admit Big Pharma’s genius at exploiting Americans’ willingness to pay for their assumed status as numero uno even if it means getting ripped off by the drug companies. “In the U.S. we’ve always accepted that we are the country that overpays relative to the rest of the world,” [Stacie Dusetzina, professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University]. The other reason Americans are willing to pay the larcenous prices Big Pharma charges is the implied approval from the mainstream and to a limited extent alternate media as they eagerly gobble up the $13.8 billion Big Pharma spends on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in the U.S. [The Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing report] The U.S. and New Zealand being the only two countries in the world that allow this practice. Is it any wonder that two-thirds to three-quarters of Big Pharma’s global profits are made in the U.S?

In 2023, Big Pharma plundered Americans out of three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Dishonest profit, most of it unpunished, is the way Big Pharma’s brings home a significant portion of its bacon. Even though “Big Pharma uses its wealth and power to co-op any institution that might stand in its way, including Congress, FDA, academic medical centers and the medical profession” [The Truth About Drug Companies] their criminality is not completely obscured. It is not unknown (although no one dares mention it) that Big Pharma commits more than three times as many serious violations like international bribery and criminal negligence as any other industry. Of the 26 major Pharma companies, 85% have paid financial penalties for illegal activities for a total of $33 billion in the years from 2003-2016 (report in JAMA)

Big Pharma’s is the sad tale of how money lifted from the taxpayer’s pocket through mob-style schemes maintains the corruption of the entire industry while it bankrupts millions of Americans every year.

U.S. Regime Change Engine Masquerading as a “Do Gooder” Charity: Why Defunding USAID Makes a Lot of Countries Breathe Easier

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the [U.S.] Government, and I’m here to help.” [Ronald Reagan]

For Ronald Reagan that was the beginning of an eight-year crusade to cut social welfare programs that brought much needed aid to America’s poor. For the world’s countries that have been on the receiving end of America’s “generosity,” it means something quite different but just as ‘terrifying.’ The “aid” program in question is a $40 billion (annually) behemoth which operates under the title of USAID and dispenses its largesse to 130 countries—Europe and Eurasia getting the lion’s share ($17.2 billion). Since 2022, most of it, 14.7 billion in 2023, going to line the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs and Ukrainian President Zelensky.

The sound bites from USAID’s vast propaganda apparatus paint a rosy picture of aid workers bringing relief to desperately poor countries. The reality is quite different. Client states who have experienced the destabilization and unrest that occurs when USAID comes calling tell it like it is — “At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda,” [El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele]

Former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obra is another of a few world leaders who have survived despite USAID “humanitarian visits” —“The US government, specifically through USAID, has for some time been financing organizations openly against the legal and legitimate government I represent. This is clearly an interventionist act, contrary to international law and the relations which should prevail between free and sovereign states”

But that state of affairs is not what most of the world’s main stream media want you to believe. In the wake of President Trump’s plan to close down USAID, the media’s pants are on fire. Here’s NBC News singing the blues — “USAID cuts devastate lifesaving programs.” CNN was also down in the dumps — “USAID’s extremely uncertain future risks global aid efforts, especially in Ukraine”

To receive such glowing press, USAID spends more than $250 million every year bankrolling 6,200 reporters at 1,000 news or journalism organizations under the guise of “promoting independent journalism.” Not surprisingly 90% of Ukrain’s media has been compromised [Oksana Romanyuk, director of Ukraine’s Institute for Mass Information.

Sometimes even those whose living depends on USAID inadvertently tell the truth — “If you are funded by the U.S. government, there are certain topics that you simply would not go after, because the U.S. government has its interest that are above all others.” [Leila Bicakcic, CEO of Center for Investigative Reporting, a USAID-supported Bosnian group).

As USAID is being dismembered, the rats are leaving the sinking ship. One laid off former employee told Fox News —“it’s not a generosity project. This is a national security agency and effort at its core.”

It all started in 1961 with President John F. Kennedy, who, overlooking his 600 attempts on the life of Cuban President Fidel Castro and on the strength of his creating the Peace Corps, was generally considered a compassionate humanitarian peace-loving president. Typical of most U.S. presidents during the cold war and after, his concern for the poor and downtrodden was secondary to his devout anti-communism. JFK, like every cold warrior, saw a “commie” under the bed of every world leader who refused to go along with the U.S. fantasy of a world-wide Communist plot. USAID was his answer to that illusory threat. Founded to bolster conservative pro-US governments and to destroy national liberation movements, it orchestrated regime operations in Latin America, Africa, Asia and eastern Europe.

USAID is a global phenomenon. Operating in tandem with the CIA, it has spread chaos and confusion all over the world destabilizing governments and replacing democratically elected leaders with dictators. Haiti is a tragic example. In 1991, USAID backed opposition groups and death squads contributing to the destabilization and eventual overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide. USAID’s meddling had dramatic and for the Haitian people devastating consequences as the country erupted in political turmoil and violence. By 2024, Haiti was ranked fourth as the country with the highest crime rate in the world. [World Population Review]

Cuba’s brush with the “do-gooders” at USAID was a similar catastrophe. After spending billions on unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Castro, in 2014, President Obama bragged about a “new beginning” for relations between the two countries. As his lies were being broadcast around the world, USAID was running a fake HIV-prevention workshops designed to create the “perfect excuse” for their intelligence gathering and recruitment activities.

It’s not only the global south, countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, but countless other places in central America that have seen their people reduced to poverty, their country ransacked when USAID came calling.  In the Mideast, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen have been destroyed by USAID’s regime change operations. Ukraine is on the verge of disappearing. Even former Soviet republics and satellites, like Georgia and Romania have felt the heavy hand of the spooks at USAID.

One might call it social engineering at the butt of a rifle as USAID uses aid as a weapon to interfere in the political life of other countries. Millions of the world’s people have found their way of life shattered, their future prospects grim as USAID mounts regime change operations, color revolutions, bankrolls friendly media and spends billions of American taxpayer dollars making the world unsafe for countries that don’t march to the tune of America the Beautiful.

As USAID is being dismembered, one has to ask: Will anything change. Will wishes come true and US humanitarian aid be reimagined as a force for good? “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

Fear Thy Neighbor

“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.” [Vice President Kamala Harris, June, 2021]

The U.S. has spoken. Is anybody listening?  We have already seen that prospects for a sane and humane solution to the border controversy aren’t on the agenda of the new administration. Failure seems to be bi-partisan. In  one term, Joe Biden deported more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. Kamala Harris, when she was the democratic presidential campaign, doubled down on Republican talking points praising a bill (never passed) to authorize $650 million to continue building Trump’s border wall.

On the campaign trail, Trump, at his most bellicose, announced — “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals [undocumented immigrants] in the history of America.”

After a trip to the grocery store, particularly if you bought eggs, you might be wondering why people would risk their lives to come to the U.S. The mainstream media has the answer — The range of reasons why people move to the US from different parts of the world… Some are seeking economic opportunities. Others are fleeing violence, persecution or climate disasters. [CNN, April 15, 2023]— But who is to blame for all this misery? According to the mainstream media, if it’s not the immigrants themselves, it’s the failure of their leaders (most of them hard liners installed by the US).

No mention of the part the U.S. empire plays in the life-or-death struggles to reach the border. You won’t hear the truth from the former vice-president (or the present one for that matter), not President Trump or the media folk. The U.S. has a sordid history of intervention in and destabilization of Central America starting almost from the moment the empire came into being.

It started in 1823 when James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president and his plutocrat buddies decided they owned the entire American continent. The Monroe Doctrine, which survives to this day, warned former colonizers, the European powers, that there was a new sheriff in town. South America would henceforth be considered the U.S. back yard.  No more take-overs by outside forces. The U.S. was bent on endless self-enrichment.

The CIA is the US advance man organizing invasions and coups in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia  and Venezuela to name their most egregious operations. These coups replace democratically elected governments with dictators, usually military strong men. The people are the big losers. Austerity is the new normal, social programs get the axe. Economic inequality is rampant as the rich get richer and poverty increases. Desperation sets in and people take to what they decide are greener pastures. Can you blame them for believing it lies across the border?

Not surprisingly, two of the countries whose governments were targeted by U.S.-supported coup d’etats have the highest rates of people trying to immigrate to the U.S. Decades ago the US toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala and set off a series of civil wars which to this day has led to endless misery in the lives and fortunes of its people. In 2022, 675,000 undocumented Guatemalans crossed the border into the U.S.

Venezuela is another country that has suffered mightily from US efforts to effect regime change. Ten years ago, Barack Obama slapped punishing sanctions on Venezuela aimed at their economy. As per usual, the people were the losers. In 2016, President Trump tried to replace democratically elected President Maduro by naming an “interim president.” He also put a $15 million bounty on Maduro’s head. Biden continued the vicious assault. His Secretary of State announced “[the U.S.] does not recognize Nicholas Maduro as the president of Venezuela.” Biden one-upped Trump by raising the bounty on Maduro to $25 million. As a result, the U.S. must take “credit” for 82% of Venezuelans living in poverty, 53% in extreme poverty. Disease and death are rampant. The U.K. also has blood on its hands. True to its reputation as a U.S, lap dog, the U.K has frozen $1.95 billion of Venezuelan gold reserves in its central bank.

The evil genius of the U.S. is boundless. Even though Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, U.S. sanctions have cut a crater-sized hole in its oil exports which are 95% of its revenues. From being one of the most prosperous countries in South America it has become one of the poorest. In 2022, 270,000 Venezuelans fled their decimated country and entered the US as undocumented immigrants.

Perhaps the saddest story of all is what happened to America’s neighbor, Mexico, with whom it shares a one-thousand-mile border. It’s the Bad Neighbor policy on steroids. This tale of horrors dates back to the nineteenth century when the U.S. stole over half of Mexico and created the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. In the early part of the twentieth century, the U.S. Congress passed a series of immigration acts which wreaked further havoc. One was especially cruel forcing the repatriation (expulsion and deportation) of 300,000 to 2 million Mexicans who lived in the U.S. Unbelievably over half were American citizens.

The worst was yet to come. In 1954 one of America’s war criminal presidents, Eisenhower, hauled out Operation Wetback. That’s right a nice touch of racism to add to the shameful proceedings. Operation Wetback used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century and some were American citizens, Operation Wetback sent them back to Mexico.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A bi-partisan screwing was next on the U.S. imperial agenda: the War on Drugs and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). The War on Drugs was President’s Nixon’s (R) nifty idea. Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one” giving him the excuse to dump a massive amount of money into militarizing the Mexican border (not the Canadian border) and throwing in a miniscule bit of funding for drug treatment programs. Everyone agrees 50 years later that like all the shooting wars the US has fought and lost, this one too has been an abysmal failure creating sky high rates of violence among emboldened drug cartels, but not stopping or even slowing the drug trade. The War on Drugs was used as a way to steal valuable Latin American farmlands and resource-rich areas, criminalize the indigenous population living there, make way for wealthy American capitalists to move in.  Where dirty dealings are afoot, count in the CIA. In 1998, the CIA’s own Inspector General concluded that the CIA was aware of and ignored the drug smuggling operation allowing drug cartels to blanket Los Angeles with crack cocaine setting off the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s.

Count on “I feel your pain” Clinton (D) to inflict more pain on Latin America. As his contribution to the U.S. bad neighbor policy, he created the world’s largest free trade zone between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It was meant to reward corporate thugs (mostly his campaign donors) whose “generosity” catapulted him into the White House. The Mexican people were collateral damage.  Job losses in agriculture and mining soared. Millions of Mexicans were forced off the land and into U.S-run sweatshops in the cities. With no check on their labor practices, unions being excluded, U.S. employers paid starvation level wages.

America being America, its own people didn’t escape the effects of this ruinous policy. “You implement NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement, where they pay people a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” [Ross Perot, libertarian presidential candidate in 1992]. He was right. The U.S. lost upwards of 850,000 jobs from 1993-2013. Jobs losses and the decline of workers’ wages in both countries devastated families and whole communities.

Desperate people make desperate choices. From 1993, the year before NAFTA to 2000, annual immigration from Mexico increased from 370,000 to 770,000. With annual immigration on the rise, the total number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in the United States increased from about 2.9 million in 1995 to 4.5 million in 2000. The upward trajectory has continued.  By July of 2023 11.7 undocumented (the left-leaning media prefers to call them “unauthorized) immigrants were in the U.S.  Four million (37%) come from Mexico.

What does the U.S. do now? President Trump has promised to extend Biden’s recent get-tough policy on immigrants. By January 23, three days after his inauguration 1,000 immigrants had been rounded up and were headed for deportation. His future plans include restoring the “remain in Mexico” policy, end “catch and release, invade” sanctuary cities, including schools and churches, declare a state of emergency allowing federal troops to mass at the border and declare drug runners “terrorists.” In a final irony, Trump has announced that he will cut off all U.S, aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador which after Mexico are the leading countries of origin for undocumented immigrants. How do you think that will work?

How about the U.S. boasting about its generosity to poor nations? In reality the U.S. is very miserly when it comes to doling out money to its neighbors. All the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (with the exception of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia who get zero) split $2.5 billion in US foreign aid. Not nearly enough to restore the damage U.S. interference has caused the people of Latin and Central America. Quite the reverse, U.S. foreign aid is directed towards shoring up the rule of military dictators and comes with massive strings attached. Little of it goes to humanitarian assistance. In an ironic twist, U.S. “generosity” often results in conflicts and violence promoting migration rather than stemming it.

It’s a different story when Israel and Ukraine come calling.  Between 2022-2024 Ukraine, considered the most corrupt country in Europe, has been gifted with $183 billion in foreign aid. Israel is a perennial beneficiary of taxpayer largesse. In one year from October 2023 to October 2023, the U.S. spent $17.9 becoming Israel’s partner in the war crime of genocide. [Cost of War Project, Brown University] Two countries thousands of miles away that have little or no strategic value to the U.S. are the recipients of $200 billion taxpayer dollars while the U.S. starves the neighbors it has pauperized and creates a major problem for itself.

Will the new President solve the immigration problem with his tough guy, take no prisoners approach? The U.S, has been down this road before. With little success. What do you think are the chances for success this time around?