We have votes. We should not let them get away with screwing us. No matter how much money they spend lobbying - and how, really, does "lobbying" differ from "bribery?" Yes, it skates on the technically legal ice, and given the Roberts Court, that pack of schlemiels, and Citizens United, the system gets away with being people unfriendly. It will stay that way, absent a progressive rebellion against the rigged two party set-up, but votes voted wisely can unblock that two-party mocking stranglehold.
Start with blasting both federal congressional leaderships away from New York Dem hands, and the party will be better already. How to do that? By trying. That said, Link.
In part, the WaPo item states:
The latest broadside arrived Friday, when the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb — a maker of the popular blood-thinner Eliquis — sued the Biden administration over its forthcoming program to lower prescription drug prices for seniors. The case marked the third such legal challenge against the U.S. government this month, raising the prospect that older Americans may never see cheaper pharmacy bills.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, House Republicans over the past week unveiled a battery of measures that would fund the government — and stave off a federal shutdown — on the condition that Congress revokes billions of dollars in funding for other Inflation Reduction Act initiatives. Separately, GOP leaders also took the first step to terminate tax credits that would expand clean energy and promote electric vehicles, potentially undermining Biden’s plans to reduce carbon emissions.
Some of the legislative efforts face tough political hurdles because Democrats control the Senate and Biden could veto any repeal. But the intensifying opposition underscores the fragility of the president’s agenda under a divided government — and the stakes for Biden’s signature achievement entering the next election.
Biden's actual dedication to We the People is not a for-certain thing.
Far, far from it. You want to win the next election, you pose.
Sirota's own June 2 post, "This Is What Biden Says Is A “Big Win” --- Dems’ debt-deal celebration tells us exactly what they think is a victory — and for whom they want to deliver such wins," was placed by him behind a paywall, but he met with Amy Goodman, so read the entire DemocracyNOW! thing, which says in its opening part:
President Joe Biden on Saturday signed a debt ceiling deal into law that averts a catastrophic default by the United States through January 1, 2025, hailing it as a “big win” for the country. Critics say the agreement protects wealthy corporations and tax dodgers while imposing new cuts on key social programs and expanding work requirements for some recipients of food stamps. The legislation has also been called a “dirty deal” by climate activists because it rolls back environmental regulations and fast-tracks the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia, a pet project of powerful Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. “The working class of this country was deeply harmed by this bill,” says investigative journalist David Sirota of The Lever. He also faults Democratic leaders for not raising the debt ceiling after the midterm elections, when the party still had control of Congress. “What you see is a picture of a party that wanted this outcome,” says Sirota.
Biden, again, hiding behind Manchin's skirts. It gets stale, it really does.
From the DN! transcript beginning:
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
President Joe Biden has signed a debt ceiling deal into law that averts a historic default by the United States. In his first address from the Oval Office, Biden said passing this budget agreement was critical.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your president — you know, to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.
AMY GOODMAN: Progressives who opposed the bipartisan deal cited new cuts it imposes on key social programs and expanded work requirements for some recipients of food stamps. The legislation was called a “dirty deal” by climate activists, because it rolls back the National Environmental Policy Act and fast-tracks the approval and construction of the fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia, a pet project of the powerful conservative Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.
Meanwhile, critics say lobbyists prevented the debt bill from including tax reforms and repealing high-income tax cuts. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who voted “no,” spoke Saturday at a “Rally to Raise the Wage” in Charleston, South Carolina.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: In this moment in American history, we have a choice: Either we abdicate our responsibilities to our kids and future generations, and we allow a handful of billionaires to consolidate their wealth and their power, or we stand up and fight back.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Denver, Colorado, by David Sirota, award-winning investigative journalist, founder of the news website The Lever, where his latest piece is headlined “This Is What Biden Says Is A 'Big Win.'” Sirota is also editor-at-large for Jacobin [https://jacobin.com/].
Here is a websearch = jacobin sirota biden, which some readers may choose to follow. Back to the transcript:
David. OK, can you just lay out who you think gained and lost in this historic debt signing deal, historic because it would have been the first time, if it hadn’t been signed, that the country defaulted?
DAVID SIROTA: Well, certainly, the fossil fuel industry is a big winner here, as you alluded to with the Mountain Valley Pipeline, expediting that controversial pipeline, which many say will be a climate bomb at a time of a climate emergency. So, the fossil fuel industry, a huge winner here.
Defense contractors, military contractors, also big winners in this deal, in which it approved the Pentagon budget going up to another record level.
Private student lenders, who have wanted the end of the private — the student lending moratorium, they are big winners here. They have been lobbying for that. One major private student lender, its stock began rising as soon as this deal was being finalized.
And then, of course, the very rich. Again, as you alluded to, there were no measures in this debt bill to repeal the high-income tax cuts that are responsible, primarily responsible, for the increase in the debt ratio that was supposed to be at issue in this bill. [...] We have a very big situation in this country where hundreds of billions of dollars of owed taxes go unpaid by the richest Americans. That [enhanced IRS] funding was supposed to be to do that kind of crackdown. Now it has been moved out into other programs. So, those are the big winners in this bill.
AMY GOODMAN: The losers?
DAVID SIROTA: Well, the losers are everybody else. The losers, in particular, very, very poor people. Again, as you discussed, the changes to the food stamp program, to make it harder for lots of people to access food stamps, at a time of an affordability crisis, that’s a big loss. I think student debtors, where, again, in the middle of an affordability crisis, you’ve got student debt payments that are going to start up again. So, basically, the working class of this country was deeply harmed by this bill.
And I would say this. The president celebrating this bill as a big win — in other words, instead of saying this is something that we had to do — and we can go over whether he actually had to do it. He didn’t have to do this. But instead of saying, “We had to do this. It’s kind of unfortunate,” going out and celebrating this as a big win is an admission about what the Democratic president and the Democratic Party see as a win, and for whom they think they want to secure such victories. It’s all now out on the table. It’s all now there for everybody to see.
And it’s important to remember that we didn’t have to be at this point. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress in the lame duck and chose not to pass a clean debt ceiling bill. They chose not to. At the time, Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois simply said the party did not feel like making time at the end of the congressional session to do that.
So, the point being is this is exactly the result that the Democratic Party wanted. They wanted to work with Republicans to get to these exact policies. And now they are celebrating that. So I think we all need to take a moment to say, “OK, this is what the Democratic president and the Democratic Party, working alongside the Republican Party, this is what it actually wants.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, obviously, you agree that if the U.S. had defaulted, it would have created an absolute catastrophe. But you say, aside from even having negotiated the deal in the lame duck, when the Democrats were in control, that Biden had this option of the 14th Amendment and didn’t take it. Talk about the significance of that.
DAVID SIROTA: Sure. The Constitution makes pretty clear that the U.S. government is empowered, above statutes, if you will, to deal with the debt and make sure it does not default on its debt. Progressive lawmakers had asked the Biden administration to use this power to avert this entire manufactured crisis. And almost as soon as that proposal was floated by those lawmakers, the Biden White House said, no, they’re not even going to pursue it.
And again, I think you put that together with the fact that they didn’t try to pass a clean debt ceiling bill during the lame-duck session, when Democrats controlled the Congress, and what you see is a picture of a party that wanted this outcome. Overlay it, by the way, with one other layer, with the fact that Joe Biden, throughout his career, has given floor speeches on the floor of the Senate, has made clear that he wants to work with Republicans to cut spending, cut funding for social programs. So I think we have to step back and realize this is a moment of honesty, a moment of clarity, of where at least the leadership of the Democratic Party is when it comes to things like budget austerity.
[italics added] Readers with skepticism are asked to read carefully the argument, to see if there is any flaw to it. Biden too often has spoken large and acted small. It is in his hard-wired old junkyard dog nature, to avoid new, better, decent tricks.
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More from DemocracyNOW! -- Cornel West poses himself as 2024 Green Party candidate for President. With not a prayer of out polling Biden, that would only help Trump's ticket (with Pence gone, guess; a Trump - DeSantis ticket would be too Florida, plus, two assholes might not be as promising to Trump as a softer, brighter, less toxic VP choice, Vivek Ramaswamy or such).
Jacobin publishes, "Cornel West Should Challenge Biden in the Democratic Primaries." He should. It would pressure Biden to at least talk a more progressive second term, while not helping Trump by siphoning votes.
Bless West, it is the American Way for him to do exactly what he wants to do. We can only judge his judgment.
Crabgrass judging, Cornel West running Green sucks.
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Back to the WaPo item.
For Democrats, the adoption of the Inflation Reduction Act last year secured the final component of Biden’s vast economic agenda. [...] Yet the law stopped short of Biden’s original, roughly $2 trillion re-envisioning of the role of government in Americans’ lives, after Democrats failed to overcome their own internal fissures — and unanimous Republican objections. Lawmakers also faced an onslaught of lobbying: The nation’s largest companies and lobbying groups spent a combined $2.3 billion in 2022 to shape or scuttle key components of the emerging law, according to a review of federal ethics disclosures and data compiled by the money-in-politics watchdog OpenSecrets.
First Biden talked something more "vast" than he likely really cared for. The "compromise" again being his nature.
$2.3 billion is a big sum, one worth a link to the OpenSecrets underlying data. Strib, in carrying the WaPo feed, also declined to link. Making sense:
The search returned much of interest, where readers can look at it buffet meal style.
Last, nationalize the fuckers:
Give the answer first, before the question is fleshed out. WaPo again:
Among the fiercest critics was the pharmaceutical industry, which spent more than $375 million to lobby over that period, the records show. Many tried and failed to block Congress from granting the government new powers to negotiate the price of selected prescription drugs under Medicare.
The work to implement that program is underway: The Biden administration is supposed to identify the first 10 drugs it is targeting for negotiation by September, continue the formal process into 2024 and see the prices implemented in 2026, with more drugs to follow in future years. Drug manufacturers that refuse to comply would face steep financial penalties.
Already, though, pharmaceutical giants have filed an early blitz of legal challenges to that plan.
In its lawsuit Friday, Bristol Myers Squibb argued the negotiation process violates the company’s constitutional rights, particularly by forcing it to sell its medicines at steep discounts. The company earned $46.2 billion in revenue last year, including about $11 billion from Eliquis, one of the drugs that could be targeted for Medicare negotiation.
In a separate statement, Bristol Myers Squibb said the Inflation Reduction Act had “changed the way we look at our development programs,” particularly for cancer drugs. It added that any haggling with the government would harm “millions of patients who are counting on the pharmaceutical industry to develop new treatments.”
It is issuing an ultimatum much as Mayo Clinic did to kill nursing reform measures in Minnesota. It is equally egregious, where Mayo earned great shame for its tactics. But, not enough shame for the way it dragged the fine hard-working (indeed grossly overworked) nurses over the rocks. Bottom line: Cheap bastards. Healthcare's 800 pound gorilla pound-on-the-chest tactics, but it's history, so in posting, move on.
The lawsuit echoes the arguments raised by another pharmaceutical giant, Merck, which sued the Biden administration earlier this month in a bid to shield its lucrative diabetes and cancer drugs from potential price cuts. The industry’s top lobbyists also have joined the fight: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — whose dues-paying members include drugmakers AbbVie and Eli Lilly — aligned with local business groups in a June 9 lawsuit to try to block Medicare from bringing the program online.
Some top executives have signaled they expect additional legal challenges on the near horizon. Asked about its plans at a Bloomberg investor conference earlier this month, for example, the chief executive of the drugmaker Biogen responded: “I think we’ll look at it.”
“In Merck’s lawsuit, they talk about an ‘extortion,’ and I think that is accurate,” Chris Viehbacher said earlier in the conversation. “I’m personally not surprised by the lawsuit. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see more.”
As already noted, the answer is obvious, but not a "low-hanging-fruit" goal. It is far from it and spending billions to bias voters is cheaper than being decent in pricing vs being as greedy as possible, or as greedy as oligopoly economic pricing theory suggests as optimal pricing.
Medicare For All is such an obvious first step, with nationalization a threat the government could use to encourage compliance, much as if turning around the blackmail threat to stymie the blackmailers. Since leadership of both parties is happy with the status quo, another answer is obvious, but hard to reduce to practice.
Big pharma need not be brought to its knees, were it to simply price stuff in the U.S. of A. the same as in other nations where Big Pharma faces less compliant and more humane governments. Reasonableness, alone, would be welcome. We lack it, we need it, and it will have to be fought for against money buying and having bought politicians. The two party system allows both to fatten at the trough, and needs fixing.
__________UPDATE__________
Two points. First, pharma pricing complexity that need not be; here and here.
Why so foggy? Isn't it obvious, to invite interminable litigation thus quelling progress.
Or slowing progress to an ineffective trickle, playing fiddle while there is big time burning.
Second, Cornel West. Quoting from the end of the Jacobin item as depressing as the actuality is, facing it helps:
Breaking the Duopoly?
Some socialists have the opposite objection to the idea of Dr West running as a Democrat. They object to America’s quasi-official “two-party system” and hope that a third-party run would undermine that system.
If that’s the goal, West would be better off running with the Green Party than the People’s Party. The latter is a pretty dubious outfit with a history of scandals and nothing resembling structures of internal democracy. And it has ballot access in far fewer states.
But the larger problem is that the two-party system can’t just be willed out of existence. It’s deeply entrenched. The Green Party got 3 percent of the vote two decades ago when it ran Ralph Nader and neither the Greens nor any other left-wing third party have come anywhere near replicating that result since.
Skeptics about the Democratic-primaries route often point to what happened in 2020, when the Democratic establishment lined up to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. But this is an odd argument. Bernie was getting about 35 percent of the vote in the primaries. That was enough to carry him to victory in the first three states. He lost because he couldn’t translate it into a majority when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and Bernie was facing a two-man race against Biden. If West got 4 percent as a candidate of the People’s Party, on the other hand, that would be little short of miraculous.
Hey, Bernie was done in by the Mayor Pete and Klobuchar phony campaigns quitting on cue while on the eve of the South Carolina primary Clyburn cut a deal with Biden, one Biden entered readily, on VP choice while Clyburn's endorsement triggered the southern Black vote coalescing against Bernie. Clyburn was a bigger factor than Pete/Amy, but they had their coalition and they moved as they did.
Back to Jacobin:
I agree that a real multiparty democracy — on the model of countries where it’s common to have a number of different parties jostling for power and occasionally forming coalition governments — would be far preferable to the narrowly constricted choices typically available to American voters. But I see very little evidence that third-party runs under present circumstances add up to any sort of contribution to making that vision a reality. It would probably take deep changes in the way American elections work, some of which would require amending the Constitution.
The last time a new major party came on the scene was Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which grew out of the antislavery wing of the Whigs. That was long before many of the current obstacles to new parties, like deeply unfair ballot access laws, were put in place. And even without those obstacles, the most likely scenario for the appearance of a new major party would be the same one that played out in the 1850s — a new party emerging out of a struggle within one of the existing major parties. There’s nothing even remotely resembling a precedent for one emerging from an act of will by a tiny band of activists.
Even if West runs as a Democrat, no one should deceive themselves — we’d still be talking about a very long shot. It’s legitimate to ask whether the Left’s energies would be better invested on other projects.
But West’s message is vitally important to the future of American democracy, and he’s a gifted messenger. If he’s going to do this, he should grab the biggest megaphone available to him. That means taking on Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.
[italics added] West pissing around third party will be whatever he makes of it. Yet running a primary against Biden would focus on Joe being only the likely candidate and the lesser evil than Trump; while such a thing in 2020 put heat on Biden in a credible, even if minor fashion. He saw how he could talk expansively with Manchin there to push the REAL Biden agenda. Thus leaving Joe B. perceived by most as smelling more like a rose instead of what that pairing's smell really was. And they play again, 2024, in a theater near you. The Joe-Joe fun for all review. Popcorn and cotton candy. Lacking only a Busby Berkeley dance extravaganza? (Amy don't dance and Petey don't rock and roll.)