Category: Corporate Statism

The joys of for-profit medicine

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

And people wonder why I’m suspicious about every prescription they hand me:

For years, a trio of anemia drugs known as Epogen, Procrit and Aranesp ranked among the best-selling prescription drugs in the United States, generating more than $8 billion a year for two companies, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson. But a Washington Post investigation shows that the benefits of the drugs — including “life satisfaction and happiness,” according to the FDA-approved label — had to be retracted and that potentially lethal side effects, such as cancer and strokes, were overlooked. Millions of patients were subjected to dangerous doses that might have had little advantage.

The multibillion-dollar rise and fall of the anemia drugs illustrates how the economic incentives embedded in U.S. health care can make the system not only inefficient, but potentially deadly. Through a well-funded research and lobbying campaign, the drugmakers won far-reaching approvals from the FDA. Doses tripled in size. The pharmaceutical companies conducted trials that missed the dangers and touted benefits that years later would be deemed unproven. The companies took more than a decade to fulfill their research commitments. And when bureaucrats tried to rein in the largest doses, a high-powered lobbying effort began until Congress forced the regulators to let the drugs flow.

Greedy bastards

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

And still they whine!

WASHINGTON — The share of the nation’s wealth held by the less affluent half of American households dropped precipitously after the financial crisis, to 1.1 percent, according to new calculations by Congress’s nonpartisan research service.


By contrast, the share of total net worth held by the weathiest 1 percent of American households continued rising, hitting 34.5 percent in 2010. The top 10 percent’s share was 74.5 percent.


The bottom half’s share of wealth has declined since it reached a high of 3.6 percent in 1995. But the most dramatic drop occurred after 2007, according to the analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances.


Another staggering indicator of the concentration of wealth at the top in the U.S: When all household wealth is divided by the number of households, the mean household net worth in 2010 totals $498,800. But the median household net worth — the level at which half the households have more and half have less — was $77,300, meaning that the rich have so much that the average net worth in the U.S. is actually 6.5 times that of a typical American family.

Olympics tax breaks

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I’m probably going to tick off a lot of people, but I no longer see any point to the Olympics. They’ve become a giant business enterprise and personally, I don’t think they do a thing to promote fellowship between nations (unless you count the athletes who are having sex with each other). The internet probably does more to expose people to other cultures now. I even think it’s a planned diversion, of the bread and circuses variety — not to mention another opportunity for high-profile security theater.

Oh yeah, and they spend obscene amounts of money that could better go to the people of their countries. From what I’ve read, host countries lose money on the deal. So I’m happy that this push was successful:

For the London Summer Olympics, which start ten days from now, several corporations have been given an exemption from collecting the UK’s corporate income tax. Foreign corporations that are acting as the game’s sponsors — including BP, Coca-Cola, and Visa– will benefit from what is essentially a temporary tax haven.

But at least one eligible company says it will forego the tax break, following pressure from activists:

McDonald’s has bowed to an online campaign and declined an Olympic tax break, just days before the start of the Games. […]McDonald’s made clear that the cost of turning down the break would be minimal, as revenue from the Games would be less than 0.1% of its annual sales in the UK. It said in a statement: “We will not be making any corporate income tax exemption claim with respect to any activity concerning our involvement with the London Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

The organization 38 Degrees collected more than 150,000 signatures against the tax break. “It’s working! McDonald’s have said they won’t be taking the tax break – but please sign the petition to keep pressure on the other sponsors,” the organization said in a statement.

The Tax Justice Network estimated that the tax giveaway will cost the UK “tens of millions of pounds” in lost revenue. “We’re giving money away that we need to solve our debt crisis and to preserve essential public services,” said the Tax Justice Network’s Richard Murphy.

The Federal Election Commission is a joke

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I would prefer not to be around for that moment when the majority of the American public realizes just how captured and corrupt our institutions are, because it won’t be pretty. Just my opinion! Via Alternet:

The Federal Election Commission has long been the go-to source for tracking political money. So when it starts cleansing politically hot contributions from its files, it matters. Big time.


We have discovered that sometime after January of this year, the FEC deleted a whole set of contributions totaling millions of dollars made during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The most important of these files concern what is now called “dark money” – funds donated to ostensible charities or public interest groups rather parties, candidates or conventional political action committees (PACs). These non-profit groups – which Washington insiders often refer to generically as 501(c)s, after the section of the federal tax code regulating them – use the money to pay for allegedly educational “independent” ads that run outside conventional campaign channels. Such funding has now developed into a gigantic channel for evading disclosure of the donors’ identities and is acutely controversial.


In 2008, however, a substantial number of contributions to such 501(c)s made it into the FEC database. For the agency quietly to remove them almost four years later with no public comment is scandalous. It flouts the agency’s legal mandate to track political money and mocks the whole spirit of what the FEC was set up to do. No less seriously, as legal challenges and public criticism of similar contributions in the 2012 election cycle rise to fever pitch, the FEC’s action wipes out one of the few sources of real evidence about how dark money works. Obviously, the unheralded purge also raises unsettling questions about what else might be going on with the database that scholars and journalists of every persuasion have always relied upon.