The pharmaceutical companies sued in this case are not merely greedy. Many people who desperately need these drugs can no longer afford them, and they are going without, resulting in pain, sickness and even death. We need to stop mincing words. These defendant pharmaceutical companies are functionally assaulting and murdering innocent people through their predatory policies and their lies that there are “markets” when they have illegally destroyed any semblance of markets. Thank goodness that the Connecticut AG has brought this suit (now joined by 43 states). Shame on the U.S. Antitrust Department for not vigorously filing this suit a long time ago.

Here is a key quote from the lawsuit:

For many years, the generic pharmaceutical industry has operated pursuant to an understanding among generic manufacturers not to compete with each other and to instead settle for what these competitors refer to as “fair share.” This understanding has permeated every segment of the industry, and the purpose of the agreement was to avoid competition among generic manufacturers that would normally result in significant price erosion and great savings to the ultimate consumer. Rather than enter a particular generic drug market by competing on price in order to gain market share, competitors in the generic drug industry would systematically and routinely communicate with one another directly, divvy up customers to create an artificial equilibrium in the market, and then maintain anticompetitively high prices. This “fair share” understanding was not the result of independent decision making by individual companies to avoid competing with one another. Rather, it was a direct result of specific discussion, negotiation and collusion among industry participants over the course of many years.

Try and give me a better example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. In short, thousands of ordinary-seeming people, many of them like you and me, work for these corporate entities that have been illegally inflicting pain and death upon innocent people.