About Your Tax Dollars Supporting the U.S. Proxy War Effort in Ukraine

The United States has already sent $68 Billion to toward the war effort in Ukraine a territorial dispute regarding who rules the Donbas Region of a country most Americans cannot locate on a map, a dispute that is risking "Armageddon," according to President Biden. The White House has now asked for another $37.7 Billion, so the total will soon be $105 Billion.

What does that mean for you if you are one of the 70 million Americans who pays taxes?  It means that, on average, $1,500 of your taxes will go to U.S. involvement in Ukraine this year.  Can you possibly think of any better use for your tax dollars?

The following tweet about sums things up, complete with the regurgitated U.S. Iraq war trope about not having to fight "them" over here. Who is "they"? Russia, of course. Icing on the cake is Adam Schiff's admission that this is a U.S. proxy war against Russia:

Continue ReadingAbout Your Tax Dollars Supporting the U.S. Proxy War Effort in Ukraine

Antitrust Victory

Good news, reported by Matt Stoller:

The problem is not convincing voters that monopolies are a problem. They already believe that. The problem is convincing them that doing something about these problems is possible. This fatalism also shows up in conversations with policymakers, businesspeople, and workers. There are any number of comments you’d recognize making this point. Congress is corrupt. Big tech is too powerful. Washington is broken. Big money runs everything. The government works for big business. Essentially, the case for concentrated corporate power is that, well, they are simply too entrenched to overcome.

Well yesterday, the anti-monopoly political movement showed that it is possible to use our political system to fight concentrated power. In a shocking action, the House passed a provision to strengthen antitrust laws by a vote of 242-184. Google, Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and various big tech funded trade associations opposed this bill, and Republican leaders like Jim Jordan and Silicon Valley Democrats Zoe Lofgren fought it bitterly. But they lost. And this is very weird to write, because Google never loses in legislative votes. Ever. But they did yesterday.

Continue ReadingAntitrust Victory

Some Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division

Excerpt from Matt Stoller's website:

[O]n Thursday, the FTC voted to resurrect the Robinson-Patman Act, a bill prohibiting corporate bribery and price discrimination by middlemen that hasn’t been meaningfully enforced since the 1970s. I wrote several chapters in my book on the titanic fight in the 1930s to tame chain stores with this law, and the equally vicious conflict in the 1970s to stop enforcing it. The end of RPA enforcement is why chain stores like Walmart and Amazon took over our retail space, and why dominant middlemen control every area of our economy at this point. It’s worth noting that Robert Bork’s most hated statute was the Robinson-Patman Act, and he considered it a tremendous victory that he helped end the enforcement of the law.

So what happened at the FTC? All five commissioners voted on a policy statement saying that the use of rebates by dominant middlemen in the insulin market were a potential violation of different laws under the jurisdiction of the FTC, including the Robinson-Patman Act. This vote is a signal to every private antitrust lawyer, state attorney general, and judge, that the Robinson-Patman Act can once again be dusted off and used.

Insulin is a great test case for this law, because everyone knows how unfair and inefficient the insulin market truly is. It’s a medication that has been around since 1922, and yet it has been increasing in cost every year for decades. And while the three main producers engage in all sorts of schemes to push up cost, most of the high cost of insulin is actually a result the middlemen named pharmacy benefits managers - CVS Caremark, Cigna (Express Scripts), and United Healthcare (OptumRx) - who manage and control how medicine is priced and sold. PBMs demand rebates of up to 70% for the right to have an insulin company sell their product to patients. These rebates in turn massively drive up the price of insulin.

Continue ReadingSome Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division