California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Snake in the Grass Kyrsten Sinema Sells Out to Corporate Lobbyists

by John Lawrence

Corporations, especially the pharmaceutical, can thank Kyrsten Sinema for selling out to them. The least objectionable parts of Biden's Build Back Better plan are the ones Sinema vetoed. Biden's plan would have been much better if corporate lobbyists hadn't gotten to her. But not to worry. She's set for life with probable promises of corporate board positions paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hours "work." With Democrats like her, we don't need Republicans. She's a Republican wolf in Democratic sheep's clothing. But never fear. Biden's Build Back Better Bill will eventually pass within the next couple of weeks, and it's still truly transformational. Too bad that every Democratic Senator had effectively a veto over any provision of it. Joe Mancin was at least up front with the public about his concerns, some of which were at least plausible. Sinema sprung her demands on Biden at the seeming last minute forcing him to renegotiate the whole deal and delaying the whole process. While pundits quibble over Biden's ratings, I don't think he's too concerned about that. He knows he has a BIG DEAL or a BIG FUCKING DEAL as he once whispered to Obama. He'll go down in history as a transformational President.

So what do the Republicans have to offer? Election denialism and insurrection denialism. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that they could spring back to life in two or maybe four years. Too bad for the rest of the world's confidence in America. Although the US decries Soviet and Chinese authoritarianism in which one leader can remain in power for a number of years, while the whole US relationship with the rest of the world could change every four, what about Angela Merkel, who remained in power for 16 years, in a putative democracy. Longevity of intent is not a function necessarily of type of government. The US is back? Biden would like to convince others it's so. But Trump has a different perspective which is that Biden's version of the US is back until he, Trump, takes over again in 2024. The US could veer wildly back and forth without any continuity whatsoever. While Democrats are doing their best to help families and bring the US into the modern world, Republicans offer warmed over conspiracy theories aided and abetted by social media. The US needs to get serious about denying Trump a chance of ever running again. In fact he should be in jail for attempting to overthrow a legitimately elected US government which is treason. Yes, the T word applies to him. The S word, sedition, as well. Yet as of now he can run again and possibly win in 2024.

I think that, after the twin Build Back Better bills finally pass, Democrats will turn their attention to voting rights. Will Sinema and Mancin go along with holding the filibuster in abeyance to get voting rights passed? That's the big question. If not, Democrats are sunk in 2022 and 2024. And so is the US as a world leader. The US will become a backwater and a latter day banana republic with an outsize military, corporate lobbyists run amuck and a fast fading US dollar as the world's reserve currency. Runaway global warming will be a given if Trump is elected again in 2024. The US will become a billionaire's paradise with unrestricted limits in economic inequality and a burgeoning homeless population that neither Republicans or Democrats seem to be able to do anything about. Rents will soar out of sight as more people live in their vehicles and on the streets without adequate sanitation. The rest of the developed world will leave the US in its dust, but they alone will not be able to solve the problem of climate change which will eventually make parts, if not all, of the earth uninhabitable. So there is a lot riding on a Federal voting rights bill overriding the Republican state efforts to gerrymander and restrict access to the ballot in order to favor the electability of Republicans.

Off the Top of My Head

So What's Wrong With Means Testing Biden's Human Infrastructure Plan?

by John Lawrence

Progressive Democrats want universal free Pre-K. Joe Manchin wants to means test it. That means that rich Americans would still pay and poor Americas would not. Not a big problem, I say. In fact I think social security should be means tested. Why should billionaires or people with retirement pensions of over $100,000 a year get social security? Spend the money on the poor and middle class. I'm with progressives on most things, and I certainly want Joe's Build Back Better program implemented. But if you can bring the cost down by means testing and this would lead to its passage, let's get on with it. Furthermore, the military budget can be cut because we are no longer spending $300 million a day in Afghanistan. Manchin is actually for most of Biden's Build Back Better plan. He just wants it in a different form so that it's not universal meaning a giveaway to all concerned, rich and poor alike. Progressives want rich families and poor families to enjoy free pre-K and free community college.

Manchin is not against taxing the rich or a modest effort towards climate change either. His objections seem to be more about fiscal prudence than any of the elements of Biden's plan. Sinema, on the other hand, is the more sinister of the two when it comes to tanking Biden's plan. She doesn't want taxes raised on the rich, for example, and she doesn't want Medicare to be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies in order to bring the cost of drugs down. Manchin wants the Hyde amendment included in the bill which prohibits Federal funding for abortions. Big deal. That's the way it is now. Progressives should be able to live with the Hyde amendment. Nothing is changed. Manchin is an old line fiscal hawk when it comes to deficit spending, but as Modern Monetary Theory has made clear Deficits Don't Matter. Inflation, however does, but taxing the rich removes money from the economy and reduces inflation while paying for everything in Biden's reconciliation bill is inflation neutral.

When all is said and done, the proposed money to be spent on social infrastructure pales in comparison with the money spent on the military budget over the next 10 years. A conservative estimate is that the US spends $725 billion a year on defense. It's actually closer to a trillion when you factor in other costs not usually counted like the cost of nuclear weapons and intelligence services. For instance, future medical and disability costs for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will total between $2.2 trillion and $2.5 trillion. So over a ten year period, military related costs will approach $10 trillion. Progressives want $3.5 trillion for social infrastructure over a ten year period, a pittance compared to military related costs. However, progressives and moderates will haggle over the cost until, eventually some compromise will be come up with, probably around $2 trillion or $200 billion per year. Reducing the defense budget will also calm fears over inflation as will the Fed's backing off from quantitative easing. Manchin is a reasonable person, but Sinema is the wild card who singlehandedly could tank both bills.They need to get the reconciliation bill fully fleshed out and negotiated on and ready to go so that both the bi-partisan and reconciliation bills can be voted on simultaneously in both Houses of Congress.

'This Summit Was a Failure': Biden-Merkel Meeting Ends With No Deal on Vaccine Patent Waiver

U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel hold a joint press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. on July 15, 2021. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Biden's inability to persuade Merkel to drop her opposition to the patent waiver "delivers a punishing blow to efforts to end the pandemic," said one critic.

 

Jake Johnson

July 16, 2021

The brief bilateral summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel ended Thursday without any commitment from the European leader to drop her opposition to a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, a result that public health campaigners dubbed a major failure as infections continue to surge across the globe.

"Tens of millions of lives and livelihoods worldwide are left in peril, including here, given that raging Covid outbreaks anywhere increase the chances for a vaccine-resistant strain emerging."
—Lori Wallach, Public Citizen

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, said in a statement that Biden's inability to move Merkel on the patent waiver "delivers a punishing blow to efforts to end the pandemic."

"People around the world dying for lack of vaccines were relying on Biden to get Merkel to stop blocking the waiver given that he promised that if elected president, he wouldn't allow Big Pharma monopolies to block global vaccine and treatment access," said Wallach. "Tens of millions of lives and livelihoods worldwide are left in peril, including here, given that raging Covid outbreaks anywhere increase the chances for a vaccine-resistant strain emerging. We urge the president to redouble his efforts to get the waiver enacted."

While Biden reportedly raised the patent waiver during his private meeting with Merkel on Thursday, it's unclear to what extent he pressed the German leader on the issue—and the president did not mention the proposal during a news conference following their discussion.

Merkel, who was also silent on the patent waiver during the media briefing, said that "we are convinced... that overcoming this pandemic is only possible if as many people as possible are vaccinated in our countries."

"We have to also support the rest of the world with vaccines. We work together with COVAX," the German leader said, referring to the World Health Organization-backed global vaccination initiative that has struggled to meet its goals due to supply shortages.

Experts and public health advocates have argued that the only way to ensure the speedy production and equitable distribution of at least 11 billion vaccine doses—the number believed to be necessary to end the pandemic worldwide—is to temporarily suspend intellectual property protections that are allowing major pharmaceutical companies to maintain a vice grip on vaccine formulas and key technology.

Activists amplified that message outside the White House and across the nation during Merkel's U.S. visit, lining up body bags in the nation's capital to symbolize the preventable deaths caused by the European leader's continued obstruction of the waiver proposal, which India and South Africa first introduced at the World Trade Organization (WTO) back in October.

Proponents argue that a suspension of certain intellectual property protections for the duration of the pandemic would help facilitate the production of generic vaccines, which could then be distributed to low-income nations that have struggled to obtain doses thanks in part to hoarding by wealthy countries.

"As long as Germany withholds its approval of the TRIPS waiver, it threatens the lives of millions of people around the world and our ability to crush the virus."
—Rep. Pramila Jayapal

According to Our World in Data, just 1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose. Haiti—in the midst of a political crisis following the assassination of its president—had yet to administer a single vaccine dose as of Thursday, when 500,000 doses donated by the U.S government through COVAX arrived in the country.

Jean Gough, UNICEF's regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a statement that "thanks to this donation, hundreds of thousands of Haitians will receive their shots against Covid-19."

"Yet, despite the collective efforts to kickstart the vaccination campaign soon, most of the Haitian population is at risk of remaining unvaccinated due to the limited availability of doses currently in the country," Gough warned.

Biden garnered widespread applause after he voiced support for the temporary patent waiver in May, but the president has since come under fire for not doing enough to convince other world powers—including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom—to follow suit. Because the WTO operates by consensus, a handful of rich countries have the power to block a proposal backed by more than 140 countries.

"This summit was a failure," Wallach said Thursday, "and we urge Biden to prioritize getting the WTO waiver enacted ASAP so more Covid vaccines and treatments can be produced worldwide."

With Germany and other rich countries stonewalling the patent waiver, the ultra-contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus is running rampant in undervaccinated regions of the world, including Africa, South America, and pockets of the United States. The World Health Organization said Thursday that Africa reported a million coronavirus cases in just the past month, the fastest surge of new infections on the continent thus far.

"As long as Germany withholds its approval of the TRIPS waiver, it threatens the lives of millions of people around the world and our ability to crush the virus," U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement Thursday, referring to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement.

"The pandemic isn't over until it's over everywhere," Jayapal added.

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Off the Top of My Head

The Code Breaker

by John Lawrence, March26, 2021

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson is an exciting new book which details the efforts and the knowledge to edit genes known as CRISPR. That means cutting into the DNA genome and removing "sick" genes and/or replacing them with the correct genes. The book details the quest to discover the mechanism by which this is possible. The book focuses on Jennifer Doudna but many researchers, many of them recent immigrants or workers at foreign universities, are involved. The fundamental insights can be explained in a few sentences. They noticed that bacteria have been fighting off viruses successfully for billions of years, and they were doing this by incorporating the virus DNA into the data base of their own genome. Upon encountering a new virus the bacteria knew how to encode that virus's DNA so that they could identify it in an attack in the future. Secondly, the bacteria knew how to dispatch a portion of RNA that would travel to the site of the virus and encode an enzyme that would then destroy the virus. The messenger RNA knew precisely where to point the enzyme which then cut the virus DNA thereby destroying it. So the e. coli bacterium has known how to edit genes for billions of years. The trick is to figure out exactly how the bacterium does this.

So Jennifer Doudna and cohorts did just that: They figured out how a bacterium cuts a virus's DNA precisely in a certain location. That's what the book is about. That's what gene editing is about. Gene editing is in its infancy, but it has already been used to correct the genetic mutation which causes sickle cell anemia which is caused by the mutation in one gene. Experimentally, it has been shown that if this gene can be cut out and replaced by one that contains the correct genetic information, the disease can be cured. If this can be done early in the development of an embryo, the correct gene can even be transmitted to succeeding generations. An estimated 8 million children are born each year with severe genetic disorders or birth defects. Gene editing can possibly correct some or all of these defects. In order to do this the enzyme which cuts the gene out of the DNA must be told precisely where to cut, and the correct gene must somehow be implanted precisely at this location and the DNA reconnected. In theory the whole idea is very simple. Figuring out how to do this either in the laboratory or in actual animals, much less in humans, is the hard part.

Whether or not this research will lead to an understanding of the origins of life is an open question. Perhaps there is a sub-atomic entity sort of like a neutrino which is massless and ubiquitous in the universe which is the progenitor of life wherever conditions are propitious. Perhaps it is able to generate an organism with the minimal genome, something which has never been discovered in nature. Even a virus which has the simplest known genomic structure has three thousand base pairs, compared to the three billion base pairs in human genomes. A base pair consists of the 4 nucleotides called A, C, G, T   which comprise one rung of the DNA ladder. So a successful gene edit would have to identify the precise rung of the DNA ladder where the mutation had occurred which means at least one of the 4 letters of the base pair was incorrect and correct it.

So I theorize that a life progenitor would have to be something that is ubiquitous in the universe and capable of starting life with a minimal genome which consists of only a few base pairs. This is a mystery but certainly not the only one. Gravity is an every day phenomenon but no one has detected a graviton which is thought to be the physical entity that distorts space time according to Einstein's theory of relativity. No one understands the "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. No one understands what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" which has been demonstrated to be a reality in quantum theory. Just as the line is blurred between what is material and what is massless energy, the line is blurred between what is spiritual and what is material. Is the creation of life in the universe a physical, material phenomenon or a spiritual one?

Off the Top of My Head

Conservatives Argue That Phasing Out Fossil Fuels is Socialism. They Argue That Saving the Planet from Global Warming is Socialism. They Argue That Universal Health Coverage is Socialism. I Say Bring It On!

by John Lawrence, October 27, 2020

So anything that would benefit the people as a whole or the planet is socialism. Creating jobs by a government sponsored infrastructure program is socialism. Yet private enterprise has not built any infrastructure. It won't do so unless the money is provided by the government. Rebuilding roads and bridges is not something private enterprise is equipped to do. If it was, they'd build roads and bridges and then charge tolls to recoup their investment. Private enterprise is good at inventing things and starting entrepreneurial enterprises, but not large picture enterprises which are properly the domain of government or require government cooperation with the private sector. A government that makes sure that everyone has health care complements private enterprise. They want healthy workers after all. Private enterprise benefits from safe roads, tunnels and bridges more so than does the average citizen. They use infrastructure in the conduct of their business.

President Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Yeah, it's the problem when it doesn't do its proper job. It's the problem when President Trump doesn't take any responsibility for the pandemic or attempts to do anything about it. Reagan also said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Really? We could use a little help from the government in the midst of a pandemic. The private enterprise system is doing its part inventing a vaccine, but they're doing it with the help of government money. Pfizer got $1.95 Billion to produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year. Johnson & Johnson got a billion dollars. Without government being "here to help" there would be no vaccine on the horizon. Private enterprise would not take that money out of its own research budget especially if it didn't figure to make a profit selling the vaccine.

So socialism will be responsible for developing a coronavirus vaccine and eventually ending the pandemic. It will be done with the "government help" that Ronald Reagan thought was so terrifying. The problem is that we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The rich spend tons of money lobbying Congress to pass legislation in their favor. In a truly free market they wouldn't be spending money making sure government was doing their bidding in their interests. They would be spending money on research, development and promoting their products. Rich people don't want government so small that they can "drown it in the bathtub" as Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist said. No, they are manipulating government everyday to get government just the right size to suit their financial interests. Defense contractors lobby to get the government to spend more money on the military-industrial complex. Pharmaceutical corporations lobby to get government not to allow Medicare to negotiate with them for lower drug prices. This is something Joe Biden said he would do: allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma.

Most civilized nations have universal health care. The US is the only outlier. Most civilized countries want to do something about global warming. The US under Trump is the outlier. Most civilized countries have a social safety net so that people don't suffer needlessly. At the same time most countries facilitate a partnership between government and private enterprise that works for entrepreneurs and business people and the citizenry as a whole, in partnership and cooperation. There is a balance between capitalism and socialism that works for the benefit of all the people. That's what makes for a successful nation. Right now this is very out of whack in the US. A bloated military has wasted trillions of dollars on disastrous wars that have made the nation less safe. And yet the military was absolutely impotent to do anything about COVID-19. The money would have been better spent strengthening our knowledge and preparations for a pandemic and for better health among Americans so that they don't have so many underlying conditions that have led to more deaths from the coronavirus.

As jobs are being destroyed by automation, robotization and AI, it's imperative that jobs be created addressing the needs of infrastructure and the need for renewable energy. This endeavor can be in part a joint mission for both government and private enterprise, but without government's input the nation will keep on spewing fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere because that's what's in the interests of existing corporations. That dynamic needs to change and government has to be instrumental in bringing about that change. That's why it's important to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Many vested interests will continue making money by polluting and emitting greenhouse gasses unless government changes the dynamics of energy production. This means countering the demand of lobbyists and putting government in a direction that benefits the people as a whole and not just special interests.

VOTE!

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Essential Economy Should Replace an Economy Based on Consumerism

by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020

The economy is never going back to what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. Brick and mortar stores were already failing. Now their fate is being sealed. J Crew, JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus, Chesapeake Oil, Gold's Gym, Hertz, Tuesday Morning, Diamond Offshore, Whiting Petroleum, Sur La Table, 24 Hour Fitness, GNC, Chuck E Cheese, Lucky Brand, Men's Wearhouse, Pier 1 - the list goes on and on. Many of these businesses were carrying huge amounts of debt even before the virus hit. This huge number of bankruptcies is going to slam the economy, and the economy will be restructured as a result. Brick and mortar stores will never be the same as more people are going online to order goods. More schools and businesses will also be going online and staying online. This is good as it will slow the greenhouse gas emissions from commuter vehicles.

The economy needs to be restructured even if we never had the pandemic. Maybe the pandemic is a blessing in disguise if it forces a restructuring which reduces the market for fossil fuels. There needs to be massive restructuring in this regard in the next 10 years if we are to have a prayer to escape runaway global warming. This restructuring will also allow the next President if it's Joe Biden to address economic inequality and uplift the lower half of family incomes. Joe Biden is calling for a $15.00 minimum wage with no exception for tipped workers. This is a step in the right direction. There needs to be massive hiring in fields which will rebuild American infrastructure in a way that uses renewable energy. Fossil fuel companies that are carrying huge amounts of debt should be left to go bankrupt instead of being propped up by interest free loans from the Federal Reserve.

Medicare for All needs to be implemented and updated to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Both Medicare and Obamacare are currently prohibited by law from negotiating with drug companies to get lower drug prices. Whether Biden calls it Medicare for All or enhanced Obamacare, the health care system needs to be radically overhauled and updated so that the poor and middle class get the same level of care as the rich. This is all predicated on both Houses of Congress being controlled by Democrats. Otherwise, nothing will get done, and the US will continue to go down the path of degeneration.

The current American economy is predicated on 70% consumption. It is predicated on private enterprise and very limited government. The result is immense economic inequality and lack of investment in public health, which the pandemic has made evident, and also lack of investment in infrastructure. Instead, the only government investment has been in a ginormous military establishment which has been used in disastrous wars, the only result of which has been to create millions of refugees. It has done nothing to help the 40% of the world's population that does not even have access to clean water or proper sanitation. This situation has only been made worse by the current President whose only goal has been to make the world safe for white people. He has used economic sanctions with the result that the world has turned away from using the US dollar and turned toward China as an ally. Case in point: China has been helping Iran economically as the US policy of trying to trash Iran's economy has left it no alternative.

Instead of making America Great Again, Trump has absolutely trashed the nation including his response to the pandemic. While other countries have mounted a credible response, Trump has only further trashed the American economy by insisting that opening the economy was the only thing that mattered. "So I said to my people, slow down the testing, please." Exactly the wrong response. Trump said to his people (the Supreme Court) "Slow down the legal process, please." He got his wish there. His tax returns will not become public until after the election if ever. The Supreme Court said it has to go back to a lower court. From there it will probably go to a court of appeals and from there back to the Supreme Court in a neverending circular process that only rich people can afford. Lawyers will make a fortune though. That's why rich people get justice. Poor people can't afford it.

The political system needs to be restructured so that the Senate can never again be captured  by one political party which then stymies any initiatives put forward by the other party. Democrats in the House can put forward progressive legislation, but, as long as Mitch McConnell is leader of the Senate, it will never see the light of day or be implemented. It becomes a joke. The result is that the political process is only spinning its wheels and has been for 40 years. Let's hope a Democratic President and a Congress in which both Houses are controlled by Democrats can implement, instead of just talking about, progressive policies starting in 2021.

Off the Top of My Head

How the World Could Change When the Current Crisis is Over

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2020

Perhaps we will rethink what is essential and what is inessential. Here's my list of what is essential: 1) Health care; 2) Food; 3) Water; 4) Sanitation (Waste water and trash collection); 5) Education; 6) Transportation; 7) Electricity; 8) The Internet; 9) Grocery stores. 10) Elder care.11) Police, Fire and Paramedic services. Here are some things that are considered inessential now: 1) Spectator sports; 2) Spectator music events; 3) Parades; 4) Conventions; 5) Bars; 6) Restaurants; 7) Barber and beauty parlors; 8) Tattoo parlors; 9) Political campaign events; 10) Large parties like wedding receptions.

Everyone can come up with their own list of what they consider to be essential and what they consider to be inessential. In my opinion the least essential of inessential services are tattoo artists. There are a lot of products and services in our mass consumer culture which are also frivolous and have nothing to do with what is essential or beneficial to human well being.. It seems that the most essential workers are the least paid while the least essential are well paid indeed. Is advertising really essential? You can look up everything you might want or need online using google or amazon. Why do you have to have some irrelevant product or service pounded into you by TV advertising? It's a historical relic. I record most programs so that I can fast forward through the commercials. If I watch a live program, I put it on pause while I do something else for awhile, and then I fast forward through the commercials. In my opinion everything advertised on TV, especially pharmaceuticals, is inessential. They should be prescribed by a doctor. It's the doctor's business to know which pharmaceuticals you need, not yours.

Are hedge funds essential? Is jewelry essential? Are the products of the wedding-industrial complex essential? Many people are having weddings during the pandemic without paying the tens of thousands of dollars that current weddings fashioned by the wedding-industrial complex demand. There are many frivolous consumer items which advertising insists that people need that they don't really need, that are completely inessential. Some are nice to have, but inessential, and some are downright destructive to peoples' health and welfare.

The most essential activity at this time in history is saving the planet from global warming. Production of renewable energy alternatives is absolutely essential. The provision of green infrastructure is absolutely essential. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground. Getting rid of plastics which pollute the oceans and other waste products that aren't biodegradable is absolutely essential. Rethinking payscales for essential workers like agricultural workers and grocery store workers is essential. If these are the most essential workers, they should be paid more. The same goes for doctors, nurses, certified nursing assistants, the CNAs who do most of the caregiving at nursing homes. CNAs make little more than minimum wage and yet they are exposed to the coronavirus. What this means is that so much that is really essential now is either being ignored or very little money is being allocated to it while huge amounts of money are being allocated to fruitless and frivolous activities.

The most fruitless activity is war and the provoking of war. The trillion dollar annual budget of the military-industrial complex has been shown to be fruitless and meaningless when the real war is against a virus. Unhealthy conditions in poverty stricken areas of the world including refugee camps can breed disease which affects the whole world including "privileged" people in the more advanced nations. Poverty and disease need to be eradicated in all parts of the world. The military cannot do that. Oh, they can be repurposed a little bit to help out with a pandemic, but they can not really do the job that needs to be done. In particular they are vulnerable to the pandemic themselves and all of the weapons of war cannot protect them. The real war needs to be against poverty and disease which are the breeders of war and pandemics. The real war needs to be against global warming. The real essential workers are construction workers who need to be constructing advanced green infrastructure.

What is clear is that real essential workers need to be paid more which argues for a lessening of economic inequality. So much of the wealth is held by people who are absolutely inessential to the health, welfare and betterment of people all around the world. A Green New Deal needs to be prioritized. Wealth needs to be taxed to pay for it. New York state needs to tax Wall Street to make up for its budget deficit. Priorities, priorities. The helping professionals and care workers need to be given more respect and money. Taxing inessential workers like hedge fund managers is what needs to pay for it.

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not Just Zantac: American Pharmaceutical Corporations are Importing Tainted Drug Ingredients from China

by John Lawrence

Tainted blood pressure medications have been traced back to Chinese manufacturers Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. and Zhejiang Tianyu Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. along with Hetero Labs Limited in India. Those companies then sold ingredients to generic drugmakers. I wrote 3 days ago: " FDA inspectors are unable or unwilling to provide appropriate oversight of Chinese manufacturing. In contrast to the robust testing required for approval for new prescription drugs, the FDA only requires that generic manufacturers prove that patients will absorb drugs at the same rate as the brand-name medications they copy." China and India Now Manufacture About 80% of the Drugs Consumed in the U.S. Funny all the articles on the banning of Zantac don't mention the fact that most US pharmaceuticals are manufactured outside the US where US inspection authorities can't get to them.

Even Fox News was worried. They reported:

"I have no doubt that they would consider weaponizing their dominance of the pharmaceuticals market if they felt that that would give them an advantage over us strategically," retired Brig. Gen. John Adams told Fox News. Adams is also president of Guardian Six, a defense research consulting firm.

In a worst-case scenario, experts warn, China could withhold supply of medicines like important antibiotics, or degrade the quality of our medicines -- even put lethal contaminants in them. Even when it comes to treating anthrax, China is the largest exporter of the building block to make ciprofloxacin, an anthrax antidote.

The more probable threat from China, however, is that it could make America's prescription drugs more expensive.

"In five to 10 years, when China has a complete chokehold over the United States and its supply of medicine, it's gonna be telling us how much to pay for our medicine," Gibson told Fox News. "We will lose control over how much we pay. We will be the price taker, not the price setter. And that's devastating."

We've already lost control over how much we pay thanks to the rapacity of the profit seeking American pharmaceutical corporations. Of course what the Fox News article misses is that its not China that is making huge profits. It's the American pharmaceutical companies which take advantage of cheap Chinese labor, then jack up the price on the imported drugs in order to make huge profits. That's why they don't make them here. Their profits wouldn't be as large if they did, and evidently, the American government doesn't really care about the situation or they would ban the import of drugs from other countries so they would have to make them here.

That's why we need Medicare for All and strict government oversight of pharmaceutical corporations.

Off the Top of My Head

China and India Now Manufacture About 80% of the Drugs Consumed in the U.S.

by John Lawrence, March 29, 2020

The US doesn't even manufacture vital drugs like antibiotics anymore, with the last penicillin factory closing in 2004. But who can blame the drug manufacturers? They're in it for the money. Drugs that you use once or twice and then you're cured are unprofitable. They only manufacture drugs that need to be taken once a day every day for life like high blood pressure and diabetes medicine, and then they outsource the manufacture of those drugs to China because that's the most profitable way to do it. FDA inspectors are unable or unwilling to provide appropriate oversight of Chinese manufacturing. In contrast to the robust testing required for approval for new prescription drugs, the FDA only requires that generic manufacturers prove that patients will absorb drugs at the same rate as the brand-name medications they copy.

But who needs robust drug testing anyway? Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." So who needs the government's help to test drugs? Who needs government's help in a pandemic? Let's get government off our back and let'er rip. And what we surely don't need is government getting into the business of manufacturing drugs themselves and competing with the private sector. That would be socialism!

Many of the generic drugs imported from China are contaminated. So? Caveat Emptor! China is our great friend when it comes to trusting life saving drugs manufactured there, but our enemy when it comes to government sanctioning and disapprobation. We hate their form of government, but we love that we get Chinese laborers to work for a fraction of what Americans make. China and India are now restricting the export of some drugs and medical equipment. That means that Americans will not have the medical equipment and drugs they need due to export restrictions from countries that have a domestic need for those products. They will come first. The US will be last, but that's capitalism!

Big pharma continues to walk away from investment in new antibiotics and there are alarmingly few useful new drugs in the pipeline to deal with the worsening crisis of antibiotic resistance, according to the World Health Organization. So the US has to depend on another country for most of its pharmaceutical needs while at the same time the President is saying negative things about that country. According to him they are not our ally. Not our ally but we're depending on them for life saving medicines ? Does this make any sense? Of course it makes sense because it maximizes profits for private enterprise.

The US wants to have it both ways. They want to say negative things about the Chinese government while at the same time being almost totally dependent on that country for critical medical products as well as tons of other products. It's all about the fact that American corporations want to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor while at the same time the US government feels free to chastise China. The big pharmaceutical companies are not investing in antibiotic research because it is not a lucrative market for them. And BIG Pharma has successfully gotten government off its back because they made sure that in the Obamacare bill, Medicare could not negotiate with the drug companies for cheaper prescription drugs for old people. Score one for the free market! The law states that the secretary of Health and Human Services “may not interfere” in negotiations between pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug insurance plan providers.

At the same time there is much military swagger on the part of the US. China better watch itself in the South China Sea or we will send our mighty aircraft carriers there. "The head of the U.S. Navy warned China that hostile behavior from its coast guard and fishing boats will not be treated any differently from the Chinese navy, the Financial Times reported on Sunday." But what good is the military going to do if the whole world is at the mercy of a virus or a bacteria, if the whole world is brought to its knees except the countries who have invested in the manufacturing of their own critically needed products? Are we going to invade China and demand that they give us the medicine? Yes, we will send our military to make sure that China does not control the South China Sea, but then get down on our hands and knees to beg China to send us critical medicines that are manufactured there. The whole foreign policy regarding China is absolutely nuts.

Agribusiness continues to use antibiotics in animal feed not for the treatment or prevention of disease, but to make them attain higher marketable weights in the quickest possible time. This make more profit for the meat growers and slaughterers. At the same time it decreases the medicinal benefits of antibiotics in humans because the bacteria mutate at a faster rate. Therefore, new antibiotics must be developed, but they aren't being developed. The lucrative drugs are the ones that must be taken every day for life not the ones that, once they have cured a disease, are no longer needed. But we don't want to regulate Agribusiness, do we? We want fewer government regulations because we want to get government off our backs or at least off the backs of private enterprise so they can maximize profits.

For the US to be secure against disease the Federal government must develop the drugs and antibiotics that the pharmaceutical corporations are not developing because they are unprofitable. We can't totally rely on the private sector because the private sector is only in it for the money not for the health of the nation. In a pandemic Reagan's words, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" are not the most terrifying words in the English language. They're the most reassuring words.

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Slammed for Saying Something Positive About Cuba. Now Cuban Doctors Are Going to Italy to Help With Coronavirus.

by John Lawrence

Something the main stream media won't report: Cuban doctors are being sent to Italy. Previously, they helped with the Ebola crisis in Africa. Regardless of their form of government, give credit where credit is due. Joe Biden and the media jumped all over Bernie for saying one good thing about Cuba.  Biden sought to contrast Sanders’ comments with former President Barack Obama, noting that Obama “did not in any way suggest that there was anything positive about the Cuban government.” No, nothing positive? Not increased literacy? Not better health care outcomes than the US? The conventional wisdom about Cuba is bullshit, and you can't acknowledge that they have done one good thing without being slammed? Give me a break. Italy has no such compunctions about Cuba. They requested that the Cuban doctors come to Lombardy. That tells you something about what the rest of the world thinks about Cuba's proficiency in medical care. The rest of the world isn't as ignorant as US politicians and media stalwarts like Anderson Cooper. The US needs to wake up and realize that the meme that Cuba is all bad is outdated and factually incorrect. It is the meme of an ignorant electorate - Democrats included!

Reuters reported:

The Caribbean island has sent its “armies of white robes” to disaster sites around the world largely in poor countries since its 1959 revolution. Its doctors were in the front lines in the fight against cholera in Haiti and against ebola in West Africa in the 2010s.

Yet with the 52-strong brigade, this is the first time Cuba has sent an emergency contingent to Italy, one of the world’s richest countries, demonstrating the reach of its medical diplomacy.

This is the sixth medical brigade Cuba has sent in recent days to combat the spread of the new disease abroad. It has sent contingents to socialist allies Venezuela and Nicaragua as well as Jamaica, Suriname and Grenada.

“We are all afraid but we have a revolutionary duty to fulfill, so we take our fear and put it to one side,” Leonardo Fernandez, 68, an intensive care specialist, told Reuters late on Saturday shortly before his brigade’s departure.

Even staunch US ally, Britain, thanked Cuba for allowing a British cruise ship that had been turned away by several Caribbean ports to dock on the island and for enabling the evacuation of the more than 600 passengers onboard. Yet the US continues to sanction Cuba forcing it to forego much needed pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. Despite more than half a century of a US economic embargo, Cuba’s average life expectancy is greater than that in the US. As of 2015 Cuban life expectancies of 79.5 years and infant mortality rates of 4.3 per 1000 live births were better than rich nations like the US (78.7 years and 5.7 per 1, 000 live births) yet its per capita income of $7602. makes it one of the poorest economies in the hemisphere (World Development Indicators DataBank, 2017).

As for literacy, the rate was 77% in 1959 before the revolution. Two years after the revolution it was 100%.

Cuba has better health care outcomes than the US despite every attempt by the US from embargoes to sanctions to destroy their economy. Perhaps the American people should wake up and listen to Bernie Sanders for a change. He knows a helluva lot more about Cuba than the ignorant Joe Biden and the other Democrats who have attacked him about his remarks about Cuba and Latin America in general. At least admit the undeniable truth no matter how much you dislike their form of government.

Off the Top of My Head

Wouldn't It Be Great If This Level of Arousal Was Mustered for Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, March 14, 2020

The coronavirus is a world wide event affecting us all everywhere on planet earth. The other thing that affects us all on planet earth is global warming which, if nothing much is done about it, will result in the deaths of far more people. In fact it could be the entire human and mammal population. The coronavirus is a clear and present danger whereas global warming is a fuzzier and somewhere off in the future danger which, if not acted on now, will creep up on us until it's too late. The danger signs are all around us, but some of them are so far away that they are "out of sight, out of mind." Take sea ice for example.

The most recent Arctic report card from the U.S. government’s leading ocean scientists documents the precipitous loss of multiyear sea ice. When they began measurements in 1985, government scientists calculated that multiyear ice made up 16% of the total. This year, that had dropped to only 1% of Arctic sea ice—a 95% reduction in multiyear ice over the last 33 years. A comprehensive review of satellite data acquired at both poles is unequivocal in its assessment of accelerating trends, say scientists. Between them, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice in the period from 1992 to 2017. This was sufficient to push up global sea-levels by 17.8 mm.

While people are perhaps overly concerned about the coronavirus, not much concern is being generated about antibiotic resistant germs. According to the CDC's report, "Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States, 2019", more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. In addition, 223,900 cases of Clostridioides difficile occurred in 2017 and at least 12,800 people died. Actually this is something to be more concerned about than the coronavirus. Farmers have been feeding antibiotics to farm animals to get them to grow bigger and fatter sooner with the result that antibiotics have become more ineffective in humans. Shortly they won't be effective at all and people will die from all sorts of bacterial infections. Yet the free enterprise system has let farmers maximize their profits by getting farm animals to market sooner by the use of antibiotics.

In addition pharmaceutical companies are getting out of the business of developing new antibiotics because it's unprofitable. Business Insider reported in an article entitled, Pharmaceutical companies are backing away from a growing threat that could kill 10 million people a year by 2050:

Just two years after Novartis announced it would embrace the challenge of searching for cures for life-threatening infections known as superbugs, the drugmaker said last week it would exit antibacterial and antiviral research.

Novartis' retreat follows a growing trend of big pharmaceutical companies — including AstraZeneca, Sanofi, and Allergan — that are exiting from this type of research because of a lack of profit.

That leaves Merck, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer as the remaining pharmaceutical companies with active antibiotic programs, according to Nature Biotechnology. Only 12 antibiotics have been approved since 2000.

Isn't this starting to sound like a broken record? There are no antibiotics being developed because it's not profitable. Farmers are allowed to feed farm animals antibiotics because it's more profitable. Green house gasses are spewed into the atmosphere because it's more profitable than rapidly developing renewable energy forms of transportation. One of the positive aspects of the coronavirus is that greenhouse gas emissions are down because of decline in automobile travel (commuting to work and events), air travel and cruise ship travel. In fact the economy would basically have to shut down to address global warming unless rapid investment in renewable energy infrastructure was ramped up simultaneously which would take up the slack from cutting down the oil based economy. In that respect alone the Green New Deal represents a far reaching and super intelligent understanding of just what is at stake. Global warming must be addressed while substituting an oil based economy for a renewable energy economy. If those two things don't happen at the same time, either the economy will go down the tubes or the planet earth will go down the tubes.

But America, due to its conservative economic attitude that diminishes the role of government in the economy and exalts the unregulated free market based economy, is powerless to do anything about those things that the free market system finds to be unprofitable. China, with its more authoritarian government, didn't hesitate to take drastic steps in dealing with the coronavirus with the result that the pandemic is all but over with in China. Meanwhile, it rages in other parts of the world particularly since the US has offshored all its pharmaceutical production to China thus maximizing profits for the pharmaceutical industry which charges average Americans enormous prices and produces prodigious profits.

Off the Top of My Head

The Solution to High Drug Prices

by John Lawrence, January 1, 2020

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) protects the health of all Americans and provides essential human services so why not have them develop, control and sell needed pharmaceuticals to the American public doing away with the private pharmaceutical corporations which have been gouging the American public and raising drug prices by ungodly percentages? What good is Medicare for All if Medicare has to buy drugs from private corporations?

Trump’s original spending proposal for fiscal year 2019, released last month, included major cuts to not just to the National Institute of Health (NIH), but the National Science Foundation as well. It is those two publicly funded entities — not Big Pharma — that support the bulk of the country’s basic research into diseases and pathways to new treatments.

That’s why the cuts were especially unwelcome in the executive suites of drug and biotech companies. Their business models depend on Washington subsidizing expensive, high-risk basic research, mostly through the vast laboratory network funded by the NIH.

Since the National Institute of Health does the research to develop drugs and not the pharmaceutical corporations themselves, why does the American public have to buy drugs from Big Pharma? Why instead can't we buy the drugs directly from HHS or NIH? If we want to cut out the middle man and bring drug prices down, let's have a public option for buying drugs.

But the NIH doesn’t get to use the profits from these drugs to fund more research, the way it might under a model based on developing needed drugs and curing the sick, as opposed to serving Wall Street. Instead, publicly funded labs conduct years of basic research to get to a breakthrough, which is then snatched up, tweaked, and patented (privatized) by companies who turn around and reap billions with 1,000-times-cost mark-ups on drugs developed with taxpayer money.

Those companies then spend the profits on executive bonuses and share buybacks, and lavish mass marketing campaigns to increase sales of amphetamines, benzos, opioids, and dick pills.

So Medicare for All? How about public sale of drugs developed by publicly funded research? Why is the government being used as Big Pharma's research and development branch with all the ridiculous profits going to private corporations?

The LA Times reported:

Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, with private companies only getting seriously into the biotech game in the 1980s.

Big Pharma, while of course contributing to innovation, has increasingly decommitted itself from the high-risk side of research and development, often letting small biotech companies and the NIH do most of the hard work. Indeed, roughly 75% of so-called new molecular entities with priority rating (the most innovative drugs) trace their existence to NIH funding, while companies spend more on “me too” drugs (slight variations of existing ones.)

But if Big Pharma is not committed to research, what is it doing? First, it is well known that Big Pharma spends more on marketing than on R&D. Less well known is how much it also spends on making its shareholders rich. Pharmaceutical companies, which have become increasingly “financialized,” distribute profits to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks designed to boost stock prices and executive pay.

Take Pfizer. Economist William Lazonick has shown that from 2003 to 2012, it spent $59 billion on share buybacks and $63 billion on dividend payouts — for a total payout to shareholders of 146% of net income. All the while, Pfizer benefited immensely from U.S. government spending on life sciences research and drug development.

Why aren't the Democrats talking about this? The profits should accrue to the American people not to Big Pharma which won't even market a drug which isn't profitable. So drugs which cure an illness with one dose will not even be developed or marketed. They want a profitable drug which must be taken every day for life. The US is so devoted to capitalism that it wants the profits from government research to go to private corporations. The American people are being hoodwinked. If the government sold the drugs developed with taxpayer money to the American public at a reasonable price, that would be socialism. Sorry, if you'd rather be taken.

Off the Top of My Head

Vaping or Cigarettes: Choose Your Poison

by John Lawrence, June 9, 2019

Only in America can you put a product on the market without any testing to see if there are any health risks. It's about testing by marketing to the American people and you find out later whether the product is toxic or not. In Europe they have the precautionary principle where products are tested first before they are released on the public. So who would have thought that a product that was touted as safer than cigarettes would turn out to be far more deadly and debilitating? Cigarettes contain tobacco which when inhaled is thought to be hazardous to your health, but, like a lot of other products, it won't kill you immediately. That will take 30 years or so. Vaping contains a toxic mixture of chemicals which, as it turns out, can kill you in far less time. Hundreds of people across the country have been sickened by a severe lung illness linked to vaping, and a handful have died, according to public health officials. Many were otherwise healthy young people, in their teens or early 20s.

So who would have thunk it? The Food and Drug Administration is warning that there appears to be a particular danger for people who vape THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. So people will just have to go back to smoking marijuana the traditional way - in a bong. Or maybe in a hookah. A hookah is a device for vaporizing nicotine using water instead of a bunch of chemicals. That seems far more healthier. It seems that the chemicals in e-cigarettes congeal in the lungs making their function useless and leading to lung disease. The e-cigarette industry, for whom vaping is extremely profitable, have tried to lay the blame on vaping THC and other street products. They would hate to see their investments go down the drain. However, in 53 cases of the illness in Illinois and Wisconsin, 17 percent of the patients said they had vaped only nicotine products, according to an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

So a word of caution to vapers: Get a life! You can smoke marijuana legally in most states now. Vote for a Democratic President, and, most importantly, a Democratic Senate in 2020, and marijuana will probably be legalized at the Federal level. Some so-called "hard drugs" have even been used on a regular basis by some people who have led very successful, even celebrated, lives. Take jazz drummer, Art Blakey, for example. Today he is being lauded for having had one of the most successful bands in jazz history. He is considered to be a legendary drummer. Blakey was a heroin addict, a very highly functioning one, and he introduced many of his sidemen to heroin. One of them was Lee Morgan, considered to be one of the great trumpet players of jazz history. However, Morgan's addiction did not have such a happy outcome as did Blakey's. By 1967 Lee was a junkie who had fallen so low that he was seen sleeping on the street outside Birdland without shoes and committing petty crimes so he could buy drugs. Still his record, "The Sidewinder", whose title tune was written on a piece of toilet paper during a break in a recording session, became Blue Note's best-selling record ever, breaking the previous sales record roughly ten times over. 

So a word of caution to Americans: be careful of what you put in your mouth. The American mantra is Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware. According to the journal article, “e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless; it can expose users to substances known to have adverse health effects, including ultrafine particles, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and other harmful ingredients.” Omigod, you mean that I can't trust American products that I can buy legally on the market more than I can trust street drugs? Well opioids are a case in point. They have been prescribed by legitimate doctors, sold  by legitimate pharmacies and the patients have become addicts.

Another note of caution: stay away from Monsanto's Roundup, a pesticide whose main ingredient is glyphosate. The Guardian reports:

Germany has said it will phase out the controversial weedkiller glyphosate because it wipes out insect populations crucial for ecosystems and pollination of food crops.

The chemical, also suspected by some experts to cause cancer in humans, is to be banned by the end of 2023 when the EU’s approval period for it expires, ministers said.

Biologists have sounded the alarm over plummeting insect populations that affect species diversity and damage ecosystems by disrupting natural food chains and plant pollination.

“What harms insects also harms people,” said environment minister Svenja Schulze, of the centre-left Social Democrats, who warned of a future when fruit could become a luxury.

“What we need is more humming and buzzing,” added Schulze, stressing that “a world without insects is not worth living in”.

So modern technology is not all it's cracked up to be whether on the chemical level or on the fossil fuel level or on the plastics level. The fact of the matter is that the technology developed in the last couple hundred years since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is ruining the environment on small scales and large scales. Unless there is a change, the earth, let alone the oceans or mundane pollution, will become uninhabitable for humans at least. Probably some insects will survive, but insecticides and pesticides are doing their best to eliminate even those. Probably some day some space travelers will alight on earth only to wonder what happened here that the earth should have become a dead planet.

'About Damn Time': In First of Thousands of Lawsuits Against Big Pharma, Johnson & Johnson Ordered to Pay $572M for Flooding Oklahoma With Opioids

Published on Monday, August 26, 2019

by Common Dreams

"The opioid crisis has ravaged the state of Oklahoma," a federal judge said Monday. "It must be abated immediately."

by Common Dreams staff

 

25 Comments

An Oklahoma judge ruled Monday that phramaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is responsible for its role in perpetiuating the opioid crisis. (Photo: Cindy Shebley, Flickr, cc)

In the first decided case against a corporation accused of contributing to the opioid epidemic in the U.S., personal care and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson was ordered on Monday to pay $572 million in fines for its role in perpetuating the crisis.

Through contracts with poppy growers in Tasmania, the company supplied 60 percent of the ingredients that drug companies used in opioid painkillers like OxyContin, contributing to the deaths of about 400,000 Americans in the last two decades—including 388 Oklahoma residents just in 2017.

Opioid manufacturers are facing thousands of lawsuits across the country for aggressively marketing drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet as non-addictive and safe for long-term use for chronic pain—even though the drugs are chemically very similar to heroin.

Public health advocates applauded District Judge Thad Balkman for holding the company accountable for its role in flooding Oklahoma with enough opioids between 2006 and 2012 for every resident to have nearly 100 pills each annually in some areas.

About damn time. We can't accept living in a country where Americans are in jail for possessing marijuana—but not a single Pharma exec has spent even a night behind bars for the opioid crisis. The least they can do is pay up. https://t.co/dbWlTHdJBc

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) August 26, 2019

This ruling against J&J on fueling the opioid crisis is interesting and significant. Same arguments can be used against gun manufacturers for fueling the gun violence epidemic we all now live with. We must be able to pursue our litigation against them.https://t.co/V0E3HB4xgA

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) August 26, 2019

"Johnson & Johnson executives made the calculated and coldblooded decision that they were going to produce a mutant strain of poppy, corner the market and supply massive amounts of the active ingredients for other companies to manufacture opioids," said Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, who brought the case against the company.

JUST IN: Johnson & Johnson has been found liable for fueling Oklahoma's opioid crisis and will pay $572 million pic.twitter.com/YOjSVXXdjk

— Bloomberg TicToc (@tictoc) August 26, 2019

Three executives at Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, were found guilty in 2007 of misleading doctors, patients, and regulators about the addictive nature of the drug, and were ordered to pay $34.5 million in fines, in addition to $600 million paid by the company. But the lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson is the first of about 2,000 pending cases filed in cities and towns across the country where officials and residents want to hold opioid makers and marketers accountable for the damage they did to communities.

"The opioid crisis has ravaged the state of Oklahoma," Balkman said before announcing his verdict. "It must be abated immediately."

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'Spoiler: Because Australia Has Universal Healthcare': Watch Ocasio-Cortez Ask Pharma CEO Why HIV Drug Costs $8 Overseas But $1,780 in the US

Published on Thursday, May 16, 2019

by Common Dreams

"We the public, we the people, developed this drug, we paid for this drug. There's no reason this should be $2,000 a month. People are dying because of it."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

62 Comments

"I think it's important that we notice here that we the public, we the people, developed this drug, we paid for this drug," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during a House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)

During a House hearing on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked the CEO of one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies a simple but crucial question: Why does a life-saving HIV drug that costs $8 a month in Australia have a $2,000 price tag in the U.S.?

Gilead chief executive Daniel O'Day declined to comment on the low price of Truvada for PrEP in Australia, but said the reason the cost is close to $2,000—"the current list price is $1,780," he said—in the United States is because the drug has "patent protection."

As the Washington Post reported in March, the development of Truvada as a treatment for HIV was "almost fully funded by U.S. taxpayers."

The U.S. government patented the treatment in 2015, according to the Post, but has "opted not to file an infringement suit to enforce" the patent even as Gilead—which argues the government patent is invalid—rakes in billions of dollars in profits from Truvada.

Ocasio-Cortez highlighted these facts during the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Thursday.

"I think it's important that we notice here that we the public, we the people, developed this drug, we paid for this drug, we led and developed all of the grounding patents to create PrEP, and then that patent has been privatized despite the fact that that patent is owned by the public," said Ocasio-Cortez. "We refuse to enforce it."

"There's no reason this should be $2,000 a month," Ocasio-Cortez added. "People are dying because of it. We own the intellectual property for it. People are dying for no reason. For no reason. We developed this drug."

In a tweet following Thursday's hearing, Ocasio Cortez answered her own question on why Truvada's price is $8 in Australia.

"Spoiler: Because Australia has universal healthcare," wrote the New York congresswoman.

The reason the United States hasn't joined the rest of the industrialized world in establishing a universal healthcare system is not individual drug company executives like O'Day, said Ocasio-Cortez.

"I don't blame you. I blame us. I blame this body," Ocasio-Cortez said during the hearing. "Because every single developed country in the world guarantees healthcare as a right except us. Except the United States. Because we can't get it together. Because we don't have the fortitude to kick pharmaceutical lobbyists [out of] our congressional offices."

.@RepAOC @AOC: "I blame us. I blame this body because every single developed country in the world guarantees health care as a right except us, except the United States, because we can't get it together." pic.twitter.com/9adUIKQlIb

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 16, 2019

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Trump’s Drug Pricing Scam

by Robert Reich

Friday, May 11, 2018

Trump promised to rein in drug prices. It was his only sensible campaign promise.

But the plan he announced Friday does little but add another battering ram to his ongoing economic war against America’s allies.

He calls it “American patients first,” and takes aim at what he calls “foreign freeloading.” The plan will pressure foreign countries to relax their drug price controls.

America’s trading partners “need to pay more because they’re using socialist price controls, market access controls, to get unfair pricing,” said Alex Azar, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who, perhaps not incidentally, was a former top executive at the drug maker Eli Lilly and Company.

By this tortured logic, if other nations allow drug companies to charge whatever they want, U.S. drug companies will then lower prices in the United States.

This is nonsensical. It would just mean more profits for U.S. drug companies. (Revealingly, the stock prices of U.S. pharmaceutical companies rose after Trump announced his plan.) 

While it’s true that Americans spend far more on medications per person than do citizens in any other rich country – even though Americans are no healthier – that’s not because other nations freeload on American drug companies’ research.

Big Pharma in America spends more on advertising and marketing than it does on research – often tens of millions to promote a single drug.

The U.S. government supplies much of the research Big Pharma relies on through the National Institutes of Health. This is a form of corporate welfare that no other industry receives. 

American drug companies also spend hundreds of millions lobbying the government. Last year alone, their lobbying tab came to $171.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

That’s more than oil and gas, insurance, or any other American industry. It’s more than the formidable lobbying expenditures of America’s military contractors. Big Pharma spends tens of millions more on campaign expenditures.

They spend so much on politics in order to avoid price controls, as exist in most other nations, and other government attempts to constrain their formidable profits.

For example, in 2003, Big Pharma got a U.S. law prohibiting the government from using its considerable bargaining clout under Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate lower drug prices. Other nations with big healthcare plans routinely negotiate lower drug prices.

During his campaign Trump promised to reverse this law. But the plan he revealed Friday doesn’t touch it. Trump’s plan seeks only to make it easier for private health insurers to negotiate better deals for Medicare beneficiaries.  

In reality, private health insurers don’t have anywhere near the clout of Medicare and Medicaid – which was the whole point of Big Pharma’s getting Congress to ban such negotiations in the first place.

In the last few years, U.S. drug companies have also blocked Americans from getting low-cost prescription drug from Canada, using the absurd argument that Americans can’t rely on the safety of drugs coming from our northern neighbor – whose standards are at least as high as ours.

Trump’s new plan doesn’t change this, either.  

To put all this another way, when Americans buy drugs in the United States, they really buy a package of advertising, marketing, and political influence-peddling. Consumers in other nations don’t pay these costs. Which explains a big part of why drug prices are lower abroad. Trump’s so-called plan to lower drug prices disregards this reality.

Trump’s plan nibbles at the monopoly power of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, but doesn’t deal with the central fact that their patents are supposed to run only twenty years but they’ve developed a host of strategies to keep patents going beyond then.

One is to make often insignificant changes in their patented drugs that are enough to trigger new patents and thereby prevent pharmacists from substituting cheaper generic versions.

Before its patent expired on Namenda, its widely used drug to treat Alzheimer’s, Forest Labs announced it would stop selling the existing tablet form of in favor of new extended-release capsules called Namenda XR. Even though Namenda XR was just a reformulated version of the tablet, the introduction prevented generic versions from being introduced.  

Other nations don’t allow drug patents to be extended on such flimsy grounds. Trump’s plan doesn’t touch this ploy.

Another tactic used by U.S. drug companies has been to sue generics to prevent them from selling their cheaper versions, then settle the cases by paying the generics to delay introducing those cheaper versions.

Such “pay-for-delay” agreements are illegal in other nations, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in America – and Trump doesn’t mention them although they cost Americans an estimated $3.5 billion a year.

Even after their patents have expired, U.S. drug companies continue to aggressively advertise their brands so patients will ask their doctors for them instead of the generic versions. Many doctors comply.

Other nations don’t allow direct advertising of prescription drugs – another reason why prices are lower there and higher here. Trump’s plan is silent on this, too. (Trump suggests drug advertisers should be required to post the prices of their drugs, which they’re already expert at obscuring.)

If Trump were serious about lowering drug prices he’d have to take on the U.S. drug manufacturers.

But Trump doesn’t want to take on Big Pharma. As has been typical for him, rather than confronting the moneyed interests in America he chooses mainly to blame foreigners.

The Bayer-Monsanto Merger Is Bad News for the Planet

by Ellen Brown, from truthdig, April 3, 2018

A Monsanto office in Enkhuizen, Netherlands. (Karen Eliot / Wikimedia)

Two new studies from Europe show that the number of birds in agricultural areas of France has crashed by a third in just 15 years, with some species being almost eradicated. The collapse in the bird population mirrors the discovery last October that more than three quarters of all flying insects in Germany have vanished in just three decades. Insects are the staple food source of birds, the pollinators of fruits and the aerators of the soil.

The chief suspect in this mass extinction is the aggressive use of neonicotinoid pesticides, particularly imidacloprid and clothianidin, both made by the Germany-based chemical giant Bayer. These pesticides, along with toxic glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup, have delivered a one-two punch to monarch butterflies, honeybees and birds. But rather than banning these toxic chemicals, on March 21 the EU approved the $66 billion merger of Bayer and Monsanto, the U.S. agribusiness giant that produces Roundup and the genetically modified (GMO) seeds that have reduced seed diversity globally. The merger will make the Bayer-Monsanto conglomerate the largest seed and pesticide company in the world, giving it enormous power to control farm practices, putting private profits over the public interest.

As Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren noted in a speech in December at the Open Markets Institute, massive companies are merging into market-dominating entities that invest a share of their profits in lobbying and financing political campaigns, shaping the political system to their own ends. She called on the Trump administration to veto the Bayer-Monsanto merger, which is still under antitrust scrutiny and has yet to be approved in the U.S.

A 2016 survey of Trump’s voter base found that more than half disapproved of the Monsanto-Bayer merger, fearing it would result in higher food prices and higher costs for farmers. Before 1990, there were 600 or more small, independent seed businesses globally, many of them family-owned. By 2009, only about 100 survived, and seed prices had more than doubled. But reining in these powerful conglomerates is more than just a question of economics. It may be a question of the survival of life on this planet.

While Bayer’s neonicotinoid pesticides wipe out insects and birds, Monsanto’s glyphosate has been linked to more than 40 human diseases, including cancer. Its seeds have been genetically modified to survive this toxic herbicide, but the plants absorb it into their tissues. In the humans who eat the plants, glyphosate disrupts the endocrine system and the balance of gut bacteria, damages DNA and is a driver of cancerous mutations. Researchers summarizing a 2014 study of glyphosates in the Journal of Organic Systems linked them to the huge increase in chronic diseases in the United States, with the percentage of GMO corn and soy planted in the U.S. showing highly significant correlations with hypertension, stroke, diabetes, obesity, lipoprotein metabolism disorder, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis C, end stage renal disease, acute kidney failure, cancers of the thyroid, liver, bladder, pancreas, kidney and myeloid leukaemia. But regulators have turned a blind eye, captured by corporate lobbyists and a political agenda that has more to do with power and control them protecting the health of the people.

The Trump administration has already approved a merger between former rivals Dow and DuPont, and has signed off on the takeover of Swiss pesticide giant Syngenta by ChemChina. If Monsanto-Bayer gets approved as well, just three corporations will dominate the majority of the world’s seed and pesticide markets, giving them enormous power to continue poisoning the planet at the expense of its inhabitants.

America’s Shkreli Problem

by Robert Reich

Friday, March 9, 2018

On Friday, Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison. What, if anything, does Shkreli’s downfall tell us about modern America? 

Shkreli’s early life exemplified the rags-to-riches American success story. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in April 1983, to parents who immigrated from Albania and worked as janitors in New York apartment buildings. Shkreli attended New York’s Hunter College High School, a public school for intellectually gifted young people, and in 2005 received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College.

But soon thereafter, Shkreli turned toward shady deals. He started his own hedge fund, betting that the stock prices of certain biotech companies would drop. Then he used financial chat rooms on the Internet to savage the companies he bet against, causing their prices to drop and his bets to pay off.

In 2015, Shkreli founded and became CEO Turing Pharmaceuticals. Under his direction Turing spent $55 million for the U.S. rights to sell a drug called Daraprim. Developed in 1953, Daraprim is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a rare parasitic disease that can cause birth defects in unborn babies, and lead to seizures, blindness, and death in cancer patients and people with AIDS. Daraprim is on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines.

Months after he bought the drug, Schkreli raised its price by over 5,000 percent, from $13.50 a pill to $750.00.

Shkreli was roundly criticized, but he was defiant: “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.” He said he wished he had raised the price even higher, and would buy another essential drug and raise its price, too.

In February 2016, Shkreli was called before a congressional committee to justify his price increase on Daraprim. He refused to answer any questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment. After the hearing Shkreli tweeted, “Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government.”

Shkreli was subsequently arrested in connection with an unrelated scheme to defraud his former hedge fund investors. In anticipation of his criminal trial, Shkreli boasted to the New Yorker magazine, “I think they’ll return a not-guilty verdict in two hours. There are going to be jurors who will be fans of mine. I walk down the streets of New York and people shake my hand. They say, ‘I want to be just like you.’”

During his trial, Shkreli strolled into a room filled with reporters and made light of a particular witness, for which the trial judge rebuked him. On his Facebook page he mocked the prosecutors, and told news outlets they were a “junior varsity” team.

He retaliated against journalists who criticized him by purchasing internet domains associated with their names and ridiculing them on the sites. “I wouldn’t call these people ‘journalists,’” he wrote in an email to Business Insider. He said on Facebook that if he were acquitted he’d be able to have sex with a female journalist he often posted about online.

After his conviction, Shkreli called the case “a witch hunt of epic proportions, and maybe they found one or two broomsticks.” As she imposed sentence last Friday, the judge cited Shkrili’s “egregious multitude of lies,” noting also that he “repeatedly minimized” his conduct.

Shkreli’s story is tragic and pathetic, but I ask you: How different is Martin Shkreli from other figures who dominate American life today, even at the highest rungs?

Shkreli will do whatever it takes to win, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. He believes that the norms other people live by don’t apply to him. His attitude toward the law is that anything he wants to do is okay unless it is clearly illegal – and even if illegal, it’s okay if he can get away with it.

He’s contemptuous of anyone who gets in his way – whether judges, prosecutors, members of Congress, or journalists. He remains unapologetic for what he did. He is utterly shameless.

Sound familiar? The Shkreli personality disorder can be found on Wall Street, in the executive suites of some of America’s largest corporations, in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in some of our most prestigious universities, and in Washington. If you look hard enough, you might even find it in Trump’s White House. 

Face it: America has a Shkreli problem.

Martin Shkleri will spend the next seven years of his life in prison. What will happen with the other unbridled narcissists now in positions of power in America, who also blatantly defy the common good?