Steve's Politics Blog

I got this great email from Elizabeth Warren.

Steven,

Over the past 50 years, America’s medical innovations have transformed the health of billions of people around the world.

One way we’ve done that? Blockbuster drugs. Today, about 100 different drugs are used by so many people that each brings in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue. Just 10 drug companies generate more than $100 billion in sales for drugs that treat high cholesterol, diabetes, HIV, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, breast cancer, colon cancer, and leukemia. Those drugs do a huge amount of good, but they also produce huge profits; over the past 20 years, profits for S&P 500 companies have been in the 5-10% range, while profits for the blockbuster drug companies have been in the 18-24% range.

Those very valuable blockbuster drugs don’t just appear overnight as if by magic. They are the end result of generations of huge taxpayer investments, principally through the National Institutes of Health. Drug companies make great contributions, but so do taxpayers. Put simply, the astonishing scientific and financial successes of the pharmaceutical industry have been built on a foundation of taxpayer investment.

With revolutionary new treatments and a giant drug industry built on blockbuster drugs, this should be a moment of great triumph. But in recent years, the American engine of medical innovation has begun to sputter. Why?

• Government funding. Congress used to work in a non-political, bipartisan way to expand NIH funding. But instead of increasing the NIH budget at the pace of potential scientific innovation, budget cuts, sequestration, and other pressures mean that the NIH budget over the last decade hasn’t even kept up with the pace of inflation.
• Drug companies. Over the last ten years, some of our wealthiest drug companies – the ones with those blockbuster billion-dollar drugs – have found another way to boost profits. In addition to selling life-changing cures, some of these companies are increasingly making money by skirting the law. They’ve been caught defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, withholding critical safety information about their drugs, marketing their drugs for uses they aren’t approved for, and giving doctors kickbacks for writing prescriptions for their drugs.

Between these two problems – shrinking government support for research and increased rule-breaking by companies that have blockbuster drugs – lies a solution: requiring those big-time drug companies that break the law to put more money into funding medical research.

That’s why I’m introducing the Medical Innovation Act to substantially increase federal funding for the National Institutes of Health.

Here’s how it works: Just like the big banks, when blockbuster drug companies break the law, they nearly always enter settlement agreements with the government, rather than going to trial.

Under the proposed Medical Innovation Act, those blockbuster drug companies that wanted to settle legal violations would be required to reinvest a relatively small portion of the profits they have generated as a result of federal research investments right back into the NIH.

This isn’t a tax. This is simply a condition of settling to avoid a trial in a major case of wrongdoing. If a company never breaks the law, it will never pay the fee. If an accused company goes to trial instead of settling out of court, it will never pay the fee – even if it loses the case. It’s like a swear jar – break the law and pay something forward that benefits everyone.

If this policy had been in place, over the past five years, NIH would have had about six billion more dollars every year to fund thousands of new grants to scientists and universities and research centers around the country. That’s nearly a 20% increase in NIH funding.

The Medical Innovation Act would substantially increase federal support for medical research without increasing the deficit or cutting other critical programs. Sign up now to show your support.

With too many in Congress willing to sit by and watch the NIH starve – and too many in pharmaceutical industry willing to make a quick buck by breaking the law, it’s easy for cynicism to set in – and it’s easy for us to forget the commitments that we’ve all made to each other.

Today we are choking off support for projects that could lead to the next major breakthrough against cancer, heart disease, Ebola, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or other deadly conditions. We’re starving projects that could transform the lives of our children on the autism spectrum. We’re suffocating breakthrough ideas that would give new hope to those with ALS.

That’s not who we are. We are not a nation that abandons the sick. We are nation of people who invest in each other – because we know that when we work together, we all do better. We’ve done it for generations – and for generations, we have led the world in medical innovation.

It is time to renew our commitment – our commitment to our children, to our parents and to ourselves. I hope you’ll stand with me in this fight.

Thank you for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

All content © 2014 Elizabeth for MA, All Rights Reserved PO Box 290568 Boston, MA 02129

Paid for by Elizabeth for MA

January 23, 2015 – 10:20 AM EST.

About half an hour ago, Elizabeth Warren made a post of her Facebook page about this. Her post has a link to the item My new bill: A swear jar for the drug companies on her web site. The post on her web site is essentially the email that I quoted above.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has the segment The Majority Retort.

Admittedly, it is not a great segment, but at least it taught me what the current bread bag jokes are all about.

As for castrating pigs, I don’t know if that will attract the women’s vote, but I think it might be a turnoff for the men’s vote.

MoveOn is also participating in the movement to draft Elizabeth Warren to run for President in 2016. On their Facebook post about the draft movement, I posted the following comment:

After participating in the DFA sponsored conference call with Bernie Sanders, I think we should shift our focus from drafting Elizabeth Warren to one of drafting Bernie Sanders. All that it would take to get him to run is knowing that he has enough support and can organize a grass-roots movement. MoveOn could show him that he has what he needs to make a run. It is not clear what it would take to get Elizabeth Warren to run. We should focus our efforts where it has the most chance to do some good.

I wonder how Elizabeth Warren would react to such a shift?  Would she breathe a sigh of relief, or would she rue the day she overplayed the coy bit?

New Economic Perspectives has the article The State of the Union Speech and the President’s Credibility Gap by Robert E. Prasch, Professor of Economics, Middlebury College.  There is so much of the article that I would like to excerpt here, but my concept of fair use does not permit me to show any more than what I will show below.

While we are on this subject, I am in awe that in the State of the Union address Obama had the temerity to say, “We should write those rules [on trade]…That’s why I’m asking both parties to give me trade promotion authority to protect American workers with strong new trade deals from Asia to Europe.” They say that if you have to lie, go big. After all, who is the “We” in that sentence? Not working Americans, we can count on that. Not civil society organizations concerned with workplace or environmental issues, to say nothing of people concerned with the cost of excessive patent or copyright protections that have become simple giveaways to firms. No, “We” does not include them, either. The “We” of that sentence refers to the hundreds of corporate lobbyists and trade lawyers who have been working, secretively, cheek-by-jowl with the most virulently anti-labor office in the entire executive branch, the Office of the United States Trade Representative. “We.” I love it. That’s real chutzpah.
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After six years in office, even the most loyal of Democrats can no longer feign to be ignorant of the substance and consequences of President Obama’s economic policies. Remarkably, the income of the median American household declined more during Obama’s recovery than during Bush’s recession! An optimist might describe the Obama Administration’s performance as pathetic or, as is the norm, present multiple excuses for it.
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… in this world of uncertainly and change, we can all rest assured that Hillary Clinton is not, and never will be, on our side. She and her long list of friends in the banks and amongst the defense contractors are opposed – adamantly – to our values and ideals. So, what are we to do?
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…Was all the prattle about “Hope and Change” simply a joke? Was it just a marketing gimmick? I believe that we can now answer that question, definitively.
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Let us be clear, what is being proposed here not about being “revenge” or “being in a huff.” It is a strategy, one that proposes to win by playing the “long game.” As the saying goes, first they will ignore us and then they will insult us, but if can hold the line and deny the time-servers in the DNC the things that they want, they will be forced to negotiate with us. The day after the professional insiders and boot-lickers of the DNC come to learn that they cannot win without their Democratic wing, is the day that they will begin to consider what we want, and actually begin to respond to it. This level of respect will not happen one day before our resolve has been forcefully demonstrated. Not one. So, the question is, for how long do we wish to forestall that day?

I  left a comment for the author on the web site.

Excellent article. Thanks for putting all these issues together. I just got off the conference call with Bernie Sanders. I am beginning to think that I can leave Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and switch to pushing Bernie Sanders for President. He, at least, has shown some interest and some executive skills.

His appointment of Stephanie Kelton as his Senate Budget Committee Chief Economist has given me hope. The hosts of the conference call did not choose to use my question to Sanders’ about what he and Kelton were planning to do. I guess asking about the impact of MMT would have been too specific a question for the conference call. I was just a tad disappointed that Sanders didn’t go into a tirade about needing an inflation constraint instead of a budget constraint on our government plans.

Here is Twenty Pounds of BS in a Ten-Pound Bag By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed.  I am just finding so much good stuff written about the SOTU last night.

The President of the United States gave a speech on Tuesday night that would, in parts, have gone over like gangbusters at any Occupy rally in the country, and then he turned on a dime to brag about our massively impressive oil and gas production, i.e. fracking and maybe the Keystone XL pipeline, and then went on further to give an impassioned aria about climate change, at which point my brain crawled out of my ear and slithered into the bathroom, where it wept piteously into the cold porcelain truth of the base of the toilet.

Stephen King, in several of his books, deployed a line I’ve never forgotten: “So full of shit you squeak going into a turn.” Between his cheerleading for fracking and his full-court press for the Trans-Pacific Partnership – which he championed again on Tuesday night out of the other side of his mouth – I honestly don’t know how the president sleeps at night, especially after coughing up so many demonstrably phony hairballs about protecting the environment.
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And then it got worse.

Wouldn’t you like to know what William Rivers Pitt really thinks about Obama and the SOTU?  You’ll have to follow the link above to see it in all its glory.

NPR has a Transcript: President Obama’s State Of The Union Address. I looked it up because I wanted to get his words that he spoke about trade agreements.

21^st century businesses, including small businesses, need to sell more American products overseas. Today, our businesses export more than ever, and exporters tend to pay their workers higher wages. But as we speak, China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region. That would put our workers and businesses at a disadvantage. Why would we let that happen? We should write those rules. We should level the playing field. That’s why I’m asking both parties to give me trade promotion authority to protect American workers, with strong new trade deals from Asia to Europe that aren’t just free, but fair.

Look, I’m the first one to admit that past trade deals haven’t always lived up to the hype, and that’s why we’ve gone after countries that break the rules at our expense. But ninety-five percent of the world’s customers live outside our borders, and we can’t close ourselves off from those opportunities. More than half of manufacturing executives have said they’re actively looking at bringing jobs back from China. Let’s give them one more reason to get it done.

Yes, China wants to write the rules in its part of the world like we want to write the rules for all of the world.  What they want is bad because they are China.  What we want is good because we are the USA. Our workers are at a disadvantage, not because of the rules that China wants to write.  They are at a disadvantage because of the rues that US corporations want to write.  Certainly our oligarchs who can purchase whatever rules they want from our government see no need to let someone else write the rules.  You might think that leveling the playing field might be a fair thing to do, but what it actually means is that a single corporation can overturn the rules that hundreds of millions of people voted to have their government enact.  Strong new trade deals as defined by what Obama is trying to do aren’t going to protect US workers.  What is  fair about taking away our workers protections to unionize, to take away their right to have pollution free air to breathe, and their right to have safe working places?  What is fair about taking away our product safety rules so that we  can buy products that won’t kill us? These are the kinds of rules that a corporation can overturn if they think that the rules hamper their making ever greater profits.

Previous trade deals have not only impoverished American workers, but they have also done so for foreign workers.  95% of the world’s customers may live outside our borders, but if we keep them in poverty, they aren’t going to be able to afford to buy anything from us anyway.  For years we have been giving corporations tax breaks for shipping our jobs overseas.  If we just stop doing that, the businesses will have plenty of incentive to stop outsourcing.

Past trade deals have not lived up to their hype, not because other countries have broken the rules.  They failed to live up to the hype because the hype from the corporations always covered up the facts that were in the deals.  So Obama is negotiating a trade deals authored by the corporate oligarchs, and will not let our elected officials even see the deals until they are done.  A leak about the secrets in the trade deal indicates that some of what is in the trade deal will even be kept secret for years after it is implemented.  How are our elected Representatives going to oversee the enforcement of rules they aren’t even allowed to know about?  Have you ever heard of rules that only the people who are supposed to abide by them are allowed to know what they are?

Even Ronald Reagan said “trust, but verify.”  So does this make Obama a greater fool than a guy who had Alzheimer’s disease while he was dispensing his pearls of wisdom?  Or does it make Obama more dishonest?

Are we fools to trust anything else in the SOTU, when Obama would tell such blatant lies to us in this part of the speech?  If only we could get the Republicans to impeach the President for this crap.

YouTube has a snippet from MSNBC respectfully titled Bernie Responds to the State of the Union. There is a post on The Friends Of Bernie Sanders Facebook page where you can join the conversation about this video.

In Sander’s answer about TPP, he failed to mention that if Obama would respond to Sanders’ request and let Sanders have a peek at what was in the TPP, then at least he could make judgments about the TPP from more than just leaks about what is in it. Middle-class friendly Obama will let the titans of industry write the treaty, but he won’t let members of Congress see it. Makes me pretty sure Obama is hiding something that he knows the Progressives and the American public cannot accept.

The treaty is so bad that Obama has to twist the arms of our trading partners to the point of breaking, and they still don’t want it. I guess this is called diplomacy in Obama’s eyes. (Why do they hate us so?)

Morning Joe really only wants answers to question framed in a way that makes Republicans look good and Progressives look bad. Even though Sanders was too polite, he did manage to turn those questions upside-down.

Why were they interested in who might run for President on the Republican side, but seemingly uninterested on who would run on the Democratic side?

The American Prospect has the article The Politics of Gesture by Robert Kuttner. “None of Obama’s proposals will fundamentally change the distribution of wealth and power in America.”

These initiatives are welcome. It probably sounds churlish to say that measures such as these should have come much earlier in his presidency, and could have been a lot stronger. Late in the game, when there is no risk that his proposals will be enacted, Obama is belatedly pursuing policies that seek to underscore the differences between Democrats and Republicans in terms of the practical situation of regular people.
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The White House policy of business-as-usual for Wall Street plus marginally increased help for working families calls to mind a very useful British expression—”horse and rabbit stew,” a supposedly equal ragout made from one horse and one rabbit.

When you add it all up, it still amounts to Rubinism, the ideology associated with America’s most influential Wall Street Democrat, Robert Rubin. The former Goldman Sachs co-chair, later chair of the executive committee of Citigroup—with a stint as Clinton economic policy czar and later treasury secretary in between—had a neat formula for serving the interests of Wall Street while signaling concern for America’s struggling working families.

The policy was one part financial deregulation and trade deals crafted to enable banks and corporations to outrun the constraints of domestic law. The other part was small-bore initiatives to signal help for ordinary working families. Such proposals are unobjectionable, except for the fact that they don’t fundamentally change the political economy of American inequality.

If Hillary Clinton should be the next president, we run the risk of having Rubinism as the dominant Democratic economic ideology for three successive Democratic presidencies—and we will keep wondering why working people increasingly give up on Democrats and on government itself. (While Obama is cautiously proposing some modest spending initiatives, Bill Clinton keeps on showing up at events sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, sounding the alarms about the federal deficit.)

Kuttner is right.  The concept of horse and rabbit stew is quite useful.  In this country we are getting elephant and donkey stew.

I just got an email from Democracy For America with the subject “State of the Union: Imagine if President Warren gave it?”

I am too lazy to post it all here, so I will just give you some selected excerpts.

Wow. That might have been the most progressive State of the Union speech that President Obama has ever given.

Tonight, President Obama used his State of the Union to promote a number of unabashedly populist, progressive ideas, from cutting taxes for middle class families to giving workers more paid time off and making some college tuition-free.

“It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come,” he said. “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?”

Elizabeth Warren has been leading the charge on issues like income inequality and student debt for years. Now, finally, the rest of the Democratic Party — and even the President — seem to be catching up.

That’s why Democracy for America, along with our friends at MoveOn, launched our Run Warren Run campaign. Because if Elizabeth Warren has this much influence over the Democratic Party agenda as a Senator, just imagine the progressive changes she could make happen as president.

Democracy For America is not just a cheerleader.  They also have a discerning eye.

The speech had its shortcomings, of course. President Obama’s request for trade promotion authority to pass the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership is tremendously disappointing. Previous trade deals haven’t just failed lived up to the hype, they’ve cost Americans’ jobs, destroyed communities, and ripped apart families. Elizabeth Warren opposes that bad trade deal — another reason why we need her to run for president.

Finally, the bottom line:

We believe that income inequality is the greatest crisis we face as a nation today, and we’re thrilled to see the president proposing bold steps to address it. But President Obama won’t be president for much longer.

We can’t afford to go backwards: We need to make sure that we have a candidate in 2016 who will fight for working families, even when — especially when — that means making deep-pocketed Wall Street donors and corporations uncomfortable. We need Elizabeth Warren.

Now, imagine if President Hillary Clinton gave the speech.  What do you think she would say?  Do you have any evidence from her previous behavior to back that up?

Here is the video that everyone is talking about.  It must have happened after the President lost me, and I turned off the speech.  How come nobody told me about this?

Score 1 for Obama.