According to recent polls, a growing number of Americans believe that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights in order to guarantee that our government will not impose any kind of tyranny upon us. That an armed populace is a bulwark against government oppression. [More . . . ]
Noah Bonn has written a succinct summary of the five "most corrupt" industries: Banking, Energy, Agriculture/Biotech, Media and Healthcare. Fair enough. These are five deserving nominations. Rather than focus on his nominations, though, I focused on Bonn's "solutions." Though they aren't complete solutions, they are mostly good ideas: Credit unions, renewable energy, local food, independent media, and "naturopaths and homeopaths." What? I've written before on the huge problems with homeopaths. But that still leaves a vaccuum. What is the solution to our out of control health care system? I'd look long and hard at the solutions proposed by the recent Time article titled "Bitter Pill." I agree with many of Bonn's proposals, but I do think that the problem with this slippage into homeopathy is typical with many proposed "solutions" that fall short: they are caused by the lack of even-handed skepticism. America is a huge collection of overlapping tribes, and we need to put the magnifying glass onto those people we want to like as well as those we've written off. In fact, I believe this need for equal opportunity skepticism, is America's biggest need. In short, many of our problems arise from the confirmation bias.
Why is it that generic drug makers sometimes delay entering the market, sometimes long after the drug patent expires? This is another tale in corporatocracy, told by Alternet:
[I]magine you’re a big-time drug company. You want to keep competitors off the market as long as possible. Your move is to basically sue the pants off the generic drugmaker for copyright infringement, setting in motion a long and tortuous legal process. And these usually end with “pay-for-delay” deals. The brand-name drug company pays the generic manufacturer a cash settlement, and the generic manufacturer agrees to delay entry into the market for a number of years. In the case before the Supreme Court, the drug company paid $30 million a year to protect its $125 million annual profit in AndroGel, a testosterone supplement. It’s hard to see this as anything but bribery, designed to preserve a lucrative monopoly for the brand-name drug maker. In fact, this is what the Federal Trade Commission has argued for over a decade. They consider it a violation of antitrust law, arguing that the exchange of cash gives the generic manufacturer a share of future profits in the drug, specifically to prolong the monopoly. As SCOTUSBlog summarizes from the FTC’s court brief, in the regulator’s view, “Nothing in patent law … validates a system in which brand-name companies could buy off their would-be competitors.” Indeed, everyone wins with pay-for-delay but the consumer: the FTC estimates that the two dozen deals inked in 2012 alone cost drug patients $3.5 billion annually, with the brand-name and generic manufacturers splitting the ill-gotten profits.
Common Dreams reports on Senator Bernie Sander's new proposal to break up the biggest banks, which have become both too big to fail and too big to jail. They are so big that the top six banks have assets equal to 2/3 of America's gross national product.
"The numbers in this Alternet article are shocking. We are well on our way to having a country of very poor Americans ruled over by very rich Americans. Some would say, what are you proposing, COMMUNISM? No, just end the current corporate communism (privatized profits, socialized risks). We need go back to something like the tax codes of prior decades, and consider the other suggestions in the above article as well as the basic principles announced by Dylan Ratigan in his famous rant. Why should it matter to those who are still reasonably well off that there is a stark growing divide between rich and poor Americans? Because social science has demonstrated the clear correlation between income inequality and societal dysfunction.