The Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey has another outstanding story in his series on the Avandia drug scandal at GlaxoSmithKline and what it says about the corruption of our system for testing the safety and efficacy of drugs.
Years ago, the government funded a larger share of such experiments. But since about the mid-1980s, research funding by pharmaceutical firms has exceeded what the National Institutes of Health spends. Last year, the industry spent $39 billion on research in the United States while NIH spent $31 billion.The billions that the drug companies invest in such experiments help fund the world’s quest for cures. But their aim is not just public health. That money is also part of a high-risk quest for profits, and over the past decade corporate interference has repeatedly muddled the nation’s drug science, sometimes with potentially lethal consequences…
The odds of coming to a conclusion favorable to the industry are 3.6 times greater in research sponsored by the industry than in research sponsored by government and nonprofit groups, according to a published analysis by Justin Bekelman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues.
Moreover, at the same time that companies have been funding a larger share of research, they have shifted the job of conducting trials away from nonprofit academic hospitals to for-profit “contract research organizations.” Critics say that with this change, corporate bias is less likely to be challenged.
As you can see from the example of Avandia, which caused some 27,000 heart attacks and deaths. Astonishing. Great work by the Post.
— Here’s a feel-good story for your Audit reading, via the Star Tribune. A grocery store owner in Minnesota is retiring and selling his two stores to his 400 employees, at no cost to them:
On Jan. 1, Lueken’s Village Foods, with two supermarkets in Bemidji and another in Wahpeton, N.D., will begin transferring ownership to its approximately 400 employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP).
Lueken said he had multiple offers to sell to large independent chains and might have gotten more money that way. But he and his family believe that selling to workers will be better for them, the business and this north-central Minnesota city of 13,000 people…
Employees say Lueken’s decision, which won’t require them to pay anything for their shares in the business, multiplied the high esteem they already held for their boss.
Another good Freeland interview:
http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-and-chrystia-freeland-on-the-one-percents-power-and-privileges/
MATT TAIBBI: And I thought it was really interesting in your book how you pointed out that Bill Clinton, himself, responded to Obama's criticism by saying, "You know, I would have done it a little bit differently. I think, you know, you can't attack these people for their success." And I think that's very relevant because if you go back in time, it wasn't always this way.
But I think the shift really began with Clinton and the New Democrats. I think after, you know, Walter Mondale lost in 1984, the Democrats decided, "You know, we're never going to lose the funding battle again." And they began this sort of imperceptible shift, where they continued to campaign on social issues the same way they had before.
They retained their liberalism in that sense. But economically, they began to side more and more with Wall Street and more and more with the very rich...
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: You know, the middle class is being--
MATT TAIBBI: Decimated, yeah.
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: --hammered. Those jobs are hollowed out. And where are the people pulling back and saying, "Okay, technology revolution, we love it." Globalization, I love that too. And I think it's great people are being raised up in India and China and now Africa. But let's think about how our society and our politics need to change to accommodate this. And no one is doing that. And meanwhile, the guys at the top, who are making, who are doing so, so well actually are saying, "We need to slant the political system even more in our own favor."... I think there is a broader cognitive capture of, you know, you might call it the intellectual class, the public intellectuals, around maybe the inevitability of plutocracy. You know, as Matt was saying, this notion that if you're poor, it's your own fault. You're part of this dependent 47 percent. Unions are very bad. All of that sort of stuff.
So I think that that cognitive capture increases. And I think what you see increasingly is, you know, elites like to think of themselves as acting in the collective interest, even as they act in their personal vested interest. And so what I think you'll end up seeing is social mobility, which is already decreasing in the United States, being increasingly squeezed. You see particularly powerful sectors, finance, oil. I would say the technology sector is going to be next in line, getting lots of government subsidies.
And meanwhile, I think you see much less money spent on the things that the middle class and the poor need. That's why have this, you know, full bore attack on entitlements, right? Why is the plutocracy so enthusiastic about cutting entitlement spending? Because they don't need it. But they're very worried about their tax dollars funding it."
These Ceo's... Reminds me of the old Taibbi letter:
http://www.alternet.org/story/133627/aig_exec_whines_about_public_anger%2C_and_now_we%27re_supposed_to_pity_him_yeah%2C_right?paging=off
“Hey Jake, it's not like you were curing cancer. You were a fucking commodities trader. Thanks to a completely insane, horribly skewed set of societal values that puts a premium on greed and severely undervalues selflessness, communal spirit and intellectualism -- values that make millionaires out of people like you and leave teachers and nurses, the people who raise your kids and clean your parents' bedpans, comparatively penniless -- you made a lot of money.
Good for you. Consider yourself lucky... [S]top whining. Jesus Christ.”
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 29 Nov 2012 at 03:24 PM
Meanwhile:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/11/chart-day-our-economys-real-problem
"Add up both the drop in potential GDP and the fact that we're operating well below even that, and the American economy is running at about $2.5 trillion under its forecast from only a few years ago. Congressional action probably can't fix this entirely, but it could sure fix a lot of it. It's scandalous that we're wasting our time talking about invented nonsense like Benghazi and the fiscal cliff instead."
So why are we? Because the right is broken, riddled with irredeemable idiocy.
The left? As Bruce Bartlett details here:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community/
"The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right."
As Freeland says, we are being eaten up by the twin threats of political and cognitive capture.
There is no real opposition. There is right and off the charts right. Where's the people's party?
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 29 Nov 2012 at 03:33 PM
"Where's the people's party?"
Answer? They're the ones being pushed off the screen on CNBC.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 29 Nov 2012 at 03:35 PM
"That's why have this, you know, full bore attack on entitlements, right? Why is the plutocracy so enthusiastic about cutting entitlement spending? Because they don't need it. But they're very worried about their tax dollars funding it."
Once again, Pierce shows us how a blog post can be made taste like a fine wine:
"There are many more important topics out there than The Deficit, the scary, hairy monster that haunts the dreams of David Gregory and only the blood of the poor and elderly can appease its wrath. Climate change comes immediately to mind, as do income inequality, the vast inequities of our tax code, the ongoing upward translation of the nation's wealth, why more bankers aren't in federal prison, and whatever did I do to the baby Jeebus that he allowed Notre Dame to play for a national championship. But the biggest reason why we should shut the national piehole on the topic is not that we have more serious problems, or even that any discussion violates the blog's first rule of economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. The real reason we should stop talking about it for a while is that the people who are insisting that it will eat us and our posterity on toast are lying swine who would sell your white-haired granny to the Somali pirates for another three points on the Dow. Until we all acknowledge the fact that organized wealth in this country has become downright sociopathic in the heedless damage it does, any discussion of The Deficit can and will be hijacked by that quarter in order to gain absolution for its grievous sins and the right to go on committing them against the rest of us, over and over again...
The latest confirmation of this obvious truth comes from the good folks at the Institute Of Policy Studies, who took a look at the various plutocrats and pirates who are behind Fix The Debt, the latest scam from the phony deficit scolds, albeit one made up almost exclusively of people who helped threw the national economy into the abyss for a decade, and then came looking for government handouts when it all went to hell...
[W]e have the people at IPS, to whom none of our courtier press will pay attention, but who have done us the invaluable service of showing us in detail how the folks behind Fix The Debt do business in their day jobs. These are the people, of course, who are so concerned about The Deficit because of the impact it will gave on their children and grandchildren, most of whom, of course, will not have to work a day in their lives, because Grampy stole the country back in the day...
Look at those numbers. Only two — ! — of these gombeens run companies that intend to fulfill the bargains they have made with their workers."
Ahhhh. Read it yourself. Savor it.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 30 Nov 2012 at 01:35 AM
Like a man who's drunk too much wine, I've told you to look at a link I forgot to post.
http://www.esquire.com/_mobile/blogs/politics/why-we-should-stop-talking-about-deficit-112912
And of course, since I gots the space, we can mention the work of Ellen Schultz here as well.
http://labornotes.org/blogs/2012/02/stealing-nest-egg
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 30 Nov 2012 at 01:59 AM