Yves Smith has the Naked Capitalism article Trans-Pacific Partnership Reveals Deadly Cost of American Patents.

While US news stories occasionally mention the breathtaking cost of some medications, they almost always skirt the issue of why American drugs are so grotesquely overpriced by world standards. The pharmaceutical industry has managed to sell the story that it’s because they need all that dough to pay for the cost of finding new drugs.

That account is patently false.

First, part of the story the drug industry chooses to omit is that a substantial portion of drug R&D, and the riskiest part (basic research) is heavily funded by the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. It’s hard to put all the data together, but the latest estimates I’ve seen put the total funded by the government at over 30%.

Second, Big Pharma spends more on marketing [than] on R&D. And it markets in the highest cost manner possible: in person sales calls to small business owners (doctors). The fact that it is worth it to sell in such an exceptionally high cost manner is proof of fat margins (the marginal value of a sale supports such a costly sales effort).

Third, and this is where the foreign debate over the TransPacific Partnership comes in, one of the big reasons US drugs are so costly is we allow drug companies to milk patents to a degree that is unparalleled elsewhere.

And this is only the beginning of the article before she gets really revved up.

When I first heard politicians telling us that we need treaties protecting our “intellectual property” rights, it sounded like a plausible story.  The politicians implied that those nasty people in other countries were most uncivilized not to respect our “intellectual property” rights.

It is becoming more and more clear what an abusive concept we have in our American style “intellectual property” protections. When even President Obama repeats this malarkey, just do your own internal translation to “intellectual property” abuse.

The Boston Globe has The New York Times story Soviet-style propaganda in media fueling crisis.

In the past week, as the crisis in Crimea deepened, similar images have been running on Russia’s state-run television. Even for the Kremlin’s master propagandists, it is a tenuous stretch — but that’s of no matter. The enemy has been identified: It is the West, allied with “fascist mercenaries” in Ukraine.

The scale of Russia’s propaganda effort in the current crisis has been breathtaking, even by Soviet standards.

That’s rich.  The master of American propaganda calling out Russia on propaganda.  Wasn’t it the false stories in The New York Times that promoted us into invading Iraq?

The Russians couldn’t possibly worry about the fake threat of missiles being launched at their territory from their former satellites that have been enticed into NATO  like the Americans were worried about Russian missiles in Cuba being launched at us in the 1960s.

And those neo-Nazis that we are supposedly befriending in Ukraine – unfortunately that’s not propaganda, that’s true. I’d call the denial of that factor in Western Ukraine is the propaganda.  Didn’t we just read about this in an OpEd piece in The Boston Globe yesterday. (See my previous post Vladimir Putin’s enemies aren’t all good guys.)

It’s Our Economy has the post A Healthy Economy Cannot Rest on Financialization.

Given this data, a reasonable person might conclude that the financial sector is two to four time too large. Therefore, we could either dramatically reduce the financial sector to one quarter to one half its current size, or cut its profits, salaries and bonuses by 50 to 75 percent without harming the economy.

This also means that progressives need to be more radical in our demands if we truly wish to tame financialism.

To paraphrase Grover Norquist, our goal should be “to shrink [Wall Street] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

What the Republicans call the job creators are in fact the job killers.  This article presents the evidence.  As soon as more people figure this out, the Republican’s political power will be gone.