The cure for a taxing allergy

by Sam Pizzigati — OtherWords

Millions of families live in constant dread of what an unexpected encounter — with a bee or a food additive or even a dye — could bring. One slip, and breathing could quickly become difficult, or a heartbeat dangerously low.

Severe allergies, untreated, can kill.

But nobody has to die from an allergic reaction in our modern world. We have medical devices that can keep children and adults alike safe.

The most familiar of these — the EpiPen — works as an auto-injection. By jamming a “pen” into their thigh, sufferers can dispense an exact dosage of epinephrine, a cheap generic drug that can relieve extreme discomfort and severe symptoms.

Medical authorities now recommend that folks with severe allergies have two EpiPen devices available at all times. That used to be a relatively affordable proposition. Not anymore.

In the United States, the EpiPen wholesale price for a two-pen set has jumped from under $100 in 2007 to over $600 this past May. One Virginia mom recently tried to fill a prescription for two EpiPen two-packs and the cost totaled $1,212. Her health insurance, with a $4,000 deductible, wouldn’t have paid a cent of that.

Outside the USA, EpiPens remain readily affordable. In France last year, two EpiPens cost allergy sufferers about $85.

So what’s driving up the EpiPen cost in America? Corporate greed.

This latest greed grab began in 2007 when the drug company Mylan bought the EpiPen franchise and started raising the price amid a huge new marketing campaign. The profit margin on EpiPens soared. Revenue from EpiPen sales soared, too, from $200 million to over $1 billion.

Also skyrocketing: the compensation of Mylan’s top five executives. Over the past four years, they’ve pocketed a combined $247.2 million. Last year alone, Mylan executive chair Robert Coury pulled down $17.7 million, CEO Heather Bresch $18.9 million, and president Rajiv Malik $19.9 million.

In effect, Mylan execs have been emptying the pockets of allergy sufferers to make themselves considerably richer.

We treat muggers who empty people’s pockets as criminals. Maybe we need to think of Mylan’s top execs as criminals, too. The first step in a criminal investigation: identify motive and opportunity.

The Mylan execs certainly have opportunity. We’ve allowed the drug industry to become a playground for corporate quasi-monopolies, enabling them to essentially charge whatever they want. They also have motive. The more they gouge consumers, the greater their personal windfalls.

Drug company executives didn’t have that same powerful motive in 1977, the year the EpiPen first appeared. Back then, corporate executives paid 70 percent of their income over $200,000 — that’s about $800,000 in today’s dollars — in federal tax.

Tax rates that high dampened the incentive for price gouging and other outrageous CEO behaviors. With the IRS standing in the wings, ever ready to tax away ill-gotten gains, corporate execs spent more time doing their jobs and less time conspiring to become incredibly rich.

Today, corporate officials pay taxes at less than half the rate they paid in the 1950s. Our political system seems to have developed an allergy to taxing high incomes at high rates.

An EpiPen for that could save us all from a dangerous reaction.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits Inequality.org. His latest book is The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. Follow him on Twitter @Too_Much_Online. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

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How much hypocrisy will the market bear?

These days the superstition of market worship is the de facto religion of most developed countries, one that they preach and enforce around the world. Panama has joined the ranks of countries that embrace it. So is it time that someone nails 95 theses on the door of the Presidencia, if not the White House?

Panama’s most important day-to-day headlines, particularly those that are about our laws and the institutions in charge of carrying them out, are dominated by hypocrisy at the moment. We have a dictatorship’s constitution which, as a product of General Torrijos’s Revolutionary Process, provides that there shall be no privileges or discrimination based on social class. In practice we see constant assertions of statutory immunity by the political caste and phalanxes of lawyers interposing obstacles that grant impunity to those of the social class who can afford that sort of thing. Then there are all these treaties that were sold as guarantees of property rights and “an even playing field for all.” But what consideration has been given for the property rights of the people of Kiad, who have been evicted without compensation for the Barro Blanco Dam? How even has been the field of their dealings with Honduran thugs and their array of European and Panamanian partners, backers and employees?

Barro Blanco’s promoters filed an environmental impact statement that was replete with the most egregious misrepresentations, and it was accepted by government officials without questions until much later. It set off social conflicts in which the entire Panamanian economy suffered millions of dollars of losses, blood was shed and people were dispossessed. Perhaps the worst of all in the long run, ancient petroglyphs thought to be holy by a religion that much of the Ngabe nation embraces are being destroyed. Those evicted from Kiad were held prisoner without charges in a Catholic Church facility. The seeds of religious conflict have thus been sown by the government. But the lawyer who filed that bogus environmental statement still has a license to practice law. Neither those who filed nor those who accepted the misrepresentations on the government’s behalf have been called upon to personally account for their actions. Why? Because President Varela says that he must uphold international treaties — but not the ones that protect indigenous sites. He cites conventions that protect the banks, even though those don’t actually protect institutions which invest in frauds that they should have discovered.

It’s not the rule of law, let alone of God’s law. It’s the worship of money, and a matter of how much hypocrisy the market will bear.

Replace the Cuban Adjustment Act

The foreign ministers of Panama and eight other Latin American countries have asked for a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss the annoying effects of a 1966 US law, the Cuban Adjustment Act, on much of the Western Hemisphere. It’s hard to imagine that in an election season much will change in Washington, but this policy needs to change.

The Cuban Adjustment Act provides that Cubans — and Cubans alone — who manage to set foot on US soil without proper permission can’t be summarily sent back to their country of origin like citizens of other countries. US immigration law isn’t quite that simple, for Cubans or anyone else, but the rule of thumb and the commonly held belief in Cuba is that once in the USA, a Cuban is there to stay for the rest of his or her days.

It’s an outdated bit of Cold War legislation. These days the Republican Party, in whose ranks most of the Cuban-American exile leadership has operated for many years, has turned against Cubans along with all other Latin Americans. One might think that with the thaw in US-Cuban relations this bit of legislation would be vulnerable to repeal. The case for ending the double standard gains force when one considers the problems that it creates for countries along the circuitous routes by which undocumented Cubans seek to sneak into the United States.

Other Latino groups in the United States would have reason to let the Cuban-Americans swim alone against anti-immigrant tides and the currents of history. The policy makes unfair and unreasonable distinctions. The Cuban government is not a democracy and the Cuban people are not prosperous, but Cuba does not have the death squad terror that stalks places like Mexico and Honduras and the government in Havana isn’t notably more corrupt than those of many other Latin American neighbors. Poverty is the lot of many Latin Americans, not just Cubans. Any notion that Cubans are inherently better people than other Latin Americans would be ridiculous, although the fact that Cubans tend to be better educated than their Latin American counterparts would be relevant for US immigration policy — or for Panama’s thinking on the subject, were it rational.

However, there are reasons for the United States to give would-be Cuban immigrants a special break. For starters, the Cuban-American community is the oldest US Hispanic community. St. Augustine, Florida, was a Spanish-speaking town before any English settler arrived in North America and Florida was incorporated into the United States before the annexation of Texas or the Mexican Cession brought many Mexican-Americans into the USA by conquest. The long-established Cuban-American community is willing and able to take in new arrivals and has done so with great success for a long time.

The United States needs a new immigration law anyway, and it’s reasonable to take historic relationships into account in the drafting of such legislation. Panama also has special ties with the United States that ought to be taken into consideration.

There are things short of controversial legislation that the United States can immediately do to deal with the present problem of massive uncontrolled Cuban migration. This is not the first inconvenient Cuban exodus toward the USA, and let us recall measures that were taken in the past.

Those were temporary and partial measures, though. What’s needed is a more comprehensive US immigration reform that among other things replaces the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Bear in mind…

Our Revolution persists

Don’t be discouraged or distracted by the cynics, the trolls and those who think that their nastiness will get them hack jobs in a new administration. It’s a movement that doesn’t go away when set back, but which bounces back up and continues the fight.

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Rechazamos el traicionero “pacto” de Barro Blanco

por el Polo Ciudadano

Polo Ciudadano rechaza categóricamente la manera espuria como el gobierno panameñista de Juan C. Varela ha impuesto un supuesto “pacto” sobre la cuestiona hidroeléctrica de Barro Blanco con autoridades de la comarca Ngäbe-Buglé cuya legitimidad está en duda.

El acuerdo firmado en Llano Tugri claramente desconoce la demanda sostenida por el pueblo de la comarca desde hace diez años de: ¡No a la hidroeléctrica!

Todo el proceso de imposición del proyecto hidroeléctrico de Barro Blanco ha estado salpicado siempre de mentiras, engaños, arbitrariedades, ilegalidades y represión; desde que, en 2006, la administración de Martín Torrijos (PRD y aliado), lo negociara en secreto con un cacique ilegítimo, incumpliendo con la legislación ambiental vigente y desconociendo a la población directamente afectada.

El gobierno de Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal – CD; no sólo avaló el proyecto, propiedad de capitalistas hondureños, sino que le concedió una ampliación en la capacidad de generación eléctrica de 19 megavatios a 28 megavatios, sin un estudio de impacto ambiental, como lo manda la ley, y sometiendo a una represión policial que dejo heridos y muertos al pueblo Ngäbe-Buglé.

Siguiendo entonces con ese gran mega negociado, el gobierno del partido “Panameñista” de Varela, actuó con dolo y alevosía desde un principio; engañando al pueblo panameño y a los pobladores de la comarca, con una supuesta “negociación”, mientras permitía la continuidad de la construcción de la hidroeléctrica, para llegar a una situación de hechos consumados como la actual.

En ese sentido, consideramos que, en el “acuerdo” de Llano Tugri no sólo se avala la existencia de la hidroeléctrica, sino que también respalda a una empresa extranjera que desde un inicio violó todas las normas y leyes nacionales en esta materia. En dicho “acuerdo”, tampoco se especifica el monto y manera de dar las compensaciones a las familias y comunidades afectadas.

Si bien el acuerdo establece que un porcentaje de “ganancias” que genere la hidroeléctrica irán a inversiones públicas en la comarca, no se establece nada en concreto, pues no se precisa el 15% de ¿cuánto?; tomando en cuenta la deuda con la banca, los gastos operativos de los nuevos administradores “privados”, y las cuantiosas ganancias que ellos mismos se embolsen.

Al igual que al inicio, cuando el proyecto fue impuesto negociando con un cacique de manera ilegítima; ahora nuevamente se repite la ilegitimidad, pues la propia Corte Suprema de Justicia, mediante un fallo ya había desconocido hace meses a las actuales autoridades comarcales.

Por lo que, debieron mediar elecciones de autoridades previo a cualquier rúbrica. En ese sentido, está en duda, este “pacto”, pues, la legitimidad la firma de los “caciques” Silvia Carrera, Jeremías Montero y Chito Gallardo, queda en entredicho.

Como Polo Ciudadano, reconociendo el derecho a la lucha por la madre tierra de nuestros pueblos indígenas, exigimos la derogación de este “acuerdo” dudoso, hasta que se establezcan medidas para la consulta real y democrática en el pueblo Ngäbe-Buglé, respecto al proyecto hidroeléctrico de Barro Blanco.

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US weapons sales are drenched in Yemeni blood

by Medea Benjamin — OtherWords

When Pope Francis visited the US Congress in September 2015, he boldly posed a moral challenge to his American hosts, asking: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”

“Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money,” he solemnly concluded. “Money that is drenched in blood.”

In this case, it’s innocent Yemeni blood.

During his almost eight years in office, President Obama has approved a jaw-dropping, record-breaking $110 billion in weapons sales to the repressive Saudi regime, all with Congressional backing.

“In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and stop the arms trade,” Pope Francis said. Our lawmakers have failed miserably at heeding the Pope’s call.

Manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and McDonnell Douglas have been pushing these sales to offset military spending cuts in the United States and Europe. These weapons manufacturers spend millions on lobbying, filling the campaign coffers of both Republicans and Democrats.

In addition to that lobbying power, US officials were pressured to placate Saudi Arabia after the Obama administration made a deal with its adversary, Iran. That appeasement came in the form of a level and quality of arms exports that should’ve never been approved for a repressive regime with an atrocious human rights record.

Saudi Arabia is the number one exporter of radical Islamic extremism on the planet. Fifteen of the 19 Sep. 11 hijackers were radicalized Saudi citizens. The regime oppresses religious minorities, women, LGBT people, and dissidents, while dozens of non-violent participants in their own Arab Spring protests face execution, usually by beheading.

The Pentagon says that providing the Saudis with F-15s bombers, Apache helicopters, armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs supports Saudi Arabian defense missions and helps promote stability in the region. But since March 2015, the Saudis have being using these weapons offensively to intervene in neighboring Yemen.

Their relentless onslaught has killed thousands of innocent civilians, decimated Yemen’s infrastructure, and left more than 21 million people — that’s 4 out of 5 Yemenis — desperately in need of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has said that Saudi air strikes on civilian targets likely constitute war crimes and calls the situation in Yemen a “catastrophe.”

Despite this carnage, the Obama administration just announced an additional $1.15 billion in Saudi weapons sales.

In the week following that announcement, the Saudis bombed a Yemeni potato chip factory, a school, a residential neighborhood, and a Doctors Without Borders-run hospital. Most of the dead and wounded were women and children.

But it’s not too late for Congress to stop this madness.

By law, they have 30 days after arms sales are announced to stop or modify the deals. And despite the overall apathetic response to the crisis in Yemen, not all members of Congress are turning a blind eye to the violence.

California Democratic Congressman Ted Leiu, for example, is ready to take a stand. “When Saudi Arabia continues to kill civilians, and in this case children, enough is enough,” he said.

Senators Chris Murphy and Rand Paul have also come out against the sale. But for the sake of thousands of innocent civilians who could be slaughtered with these weapons, many more members must act quickly.

It’s high time for Congress to answer the Pope’s challenge to stop the arms trade and help prevent more Yemeni bloodshed.

 
Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK and the author of nine books, including the recently released Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection. Distributed by OtherWords.

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