About Our Corrupt COVID Supply Chain

Matt Stoller's antitrust blog should be required reading for every American. Today's topic is the corrupt system behind COVID medical shortages. Here's an excerpt:

Today, corruption in these markets is so extreme that hospital executives themselves are often offered a cut of the fees from GPOs. In 2013, one analyst said that “many hospital executives who are part of the Premier alliance have learned to rely on that share back as an integral part of their annual compensation.” In other words, hospitals are buying supplies at inflated prices, and those suppliers use some of that extra money in direct bribes to hospital executives.

The legalization of kickbacks happened as a series of mergers in the 1990s consolidated power within the industry. In 1995, Premier Health Alliance, American Healthcare Systems, and SunHealth Alliance merged into the nation’s largest GPO, Premier. By 2017, the giants in the industry - Vizient, Premier, HealthTrust, and Intaler - came to manage $300 billion of hospital purchasing for 5000 health systems, or 90% of total medical supplies in the United States. These GPOs have deals with the three major distributors - McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health - which precludes any smaller distributors from getting into the business. At this point, 90% of generic medicines are bought by just four firms.

And this consolidation and restructuring of hospital buying has ruined the American supply chain, and prevented the ability to rebuild it.

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Politico Comes Full Circle on Hunter Biden Laptop Archive: Provides Window into Massive Corruption by News Media

Now that the presidential election is over, Politico's reporter has admitted that many documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop were authentic. This finding reverses the pre-election position of Politico, and is not a mere factoid. Rather, this admission corroborates Glenn Greenwald's analysis and evidence that left-leaning media was corrupt and complicit with the deep state leading up to the election. In sum, reporters refused to do their jobs as reporters and it led to fake news. I used to hate that term, but I can no longer deny that large swathes of our "news" is concocted . . . fake (e.g., several years of hysterical fact-free reporting on alleged Trump-Russia connection). The motivation was always clear - - left-leaning legacy news outlets hated Trump and made it their mission to avoid four more years of Trump.

Do I need to repeatedly write that I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that I find Trump deranged, incompetent and dangerous? My concern in this post is not about who would make the better president. My concern is that the news media should always do its job, publishing important facts regardless of who the evidence helps or hurts, allowing the voters to decide what is important. The opposite of that happened regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, part of a growing trend. In the new way of discussing important national issues, one denies or hides evidence that conflicts with one's preferences. Proud and arrogant confirmation bias is the way many of us make decisions now, instead of relying on Enlightenment values. These are sad days, indeed. It reminds me of how we formerly ridiculed Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party of the USSR.

Greenwald's Tweet on the Politico reversal is the first of a long thread that makes an airtight case against the news media. I highly recommend the entire thread:

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How to Lie While Reporting the News

Do I need to start this post with a reminder that I voted for Hilary Clinton and that I consider Donald Trump a generally dispicable person with whom I rarely agree on an issue?

Michael Sussmann has been indicted. The New York Times reputed this true fact but merely indicated that it's significance was limited, explaining that Sussman falsely told the FBI that he was not representing any client when he reported that there was a covert communications channel between Donald Time and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.

Compare the above NYT version of Sussmann's indictment to Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of the meaning and ramifications of Sussmann's indictment. These two accounts are night and day. Greenwald connected the dots to demonstrate the long-term mendacity and complicity of the left-leaning legacy news media regarding the supposed Trump-Russia connection, as well as the inescapable conclusion that Hillary Clinton delivered four key lies only eight days before the election.

Greenwald's story is one that he has told repeatedly, but this is yet more evidence showing how our news media is organized into two teams tethered to our two main political parties.  Here is the link to following Greenwald's tweets on Twitter:

Greenwald has often lamented that reporters who make shit up are rarely punished. Much more often, they are promoted.

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About the Supposed Meritocracy . . .

Matt Taibbi discusses the "meritocracy," reviewing Michael Sandel's new book, "The Tyranny of Merit." He describes the divide between the those with and without college degrees as stark. He describes this entire topic as unsettling for everyone along the political spectrum. An excerpt from his article, which is titled "Does America Hate the "Poorly Educated"? Michael Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" doesn't say so, but the pandemic has become the ultimate expression of upper-class America's obsession with meritocracy":

As Sandel notes, Trump was wired into these politics of humiliation and never invoked the word “opportunity,” which both Obama and Hillary Clinton made central, instead talking bluntly of “winners” and “losers.” (Interestingly, Bernie Sanders also stayed away from opportunity-talk, focusing on inequities of wealth). Trump understood that huge numbers of voters were tired of being told “You can make it if you try” by a generation of politicians that had not only “not governed well,” as Sandel puts it, but increasingly used public office as their own route to mega-wealth, via $400,000 speeches to banks, seats on corporate boards, or the hilariously auspicious, somehow not-illegal stock trading that launched more than one member of congress directly into the modern aristocracy.

The Tyranny of Meritocracy describes the clash of these two different visions of American society. One valorizes the concept of social mobility, congratulating the wealthy for having made it and doling out attaboys for their passion in wolfing down society’s rewards, while also claiming to make reversing gender and racial inequities a central priority. The other group sees class mobility as entirely or mostly a fiction, rages at being stuck sucking eggs in what they see as a rigged game, and has begun to disbelieve every message sent down at them from the credentialed experts above, even about things like vaccines.

The eternal squeamishness Americans feel about class will prevent this topic from getting the attention it deserves, but the insane witches’ brew of rage, mendacity, and mutual mistrust Sandel describes at the heart of American culture is no longer a back-burner problem. Tension over who deserves what part of society’s rewards, and whether higher education is a token of genuine accomplishment or an exclusive social rite, has become real hatred in short order. In the pandemic age, Americans on either side of the educational divide have moved past rooting for each other to fail. They’re all but rooting for each other to die now, and that isn’t a sentiment either side is likely to forget.

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The Need for Politicians to Condemn the Outrageous Behavior of Members of Their Own Party

A small bit of my faith in the American political system would be restored if politicians would step up to condemn the atrocious behavior of members of their own political party. A small bit of my faith in the American media would be restored if party-affiliated news media (which is most of legacy media) would start stepping up to condemn politicians of their favorite political party. Ryan Grimm of The Intercept recently shined a laser beam on the disgusting behavior of the family of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and his family with regard to EpiPen corruption. On Breaking Points, Krystal Ball followed suit.

Meanwhile, Democrats and Democrat-affiliated-news-media are otherwise maintaining radio silence. This is merely a recent example of the kind of thing that infests both parties of our political system. Here is Krystal Ball's summary of the problem:

Under Joe Manchin's daughter [Heather Bresch], [Pharmaceutical company] Mylan jacked up the price [of Epipens], locked in a product monopoly jacked up the price of war, and then work to eliminate single pack sales with zero medical justification, simply so they could double their revenue, all with the explicit understanding that for their customers, their lives depend on the product, so they have no choice but to suck it up and pay whatever Milan decided to charge. There are no words to describe this type of exploitative, morally bankrupt and sociopathic behavior. It fills me with pure disgust that is only amplified by the knowledge that this type of criminality underpins our entire healthcare system: Bought politicians, price fixing, price gouging monopolies, every single person involved on the take with the cost in dollars, sickness and death passed on to the most vulnerable among us. It's disgusting. So next time the media tries to tell you "Joe Manchin opposes the reconciliation package because he's just trying to represent his conservative state," do not fall for their nonsense. His motives are just the same as his daughter's: to protect corporate profits and his own personal interests above everything else. And it's so disgusting here, Sagar, because you see it all. You see the way that the politician gets his daughter the job. You see the way that he uses his position to ignore when they ship jobs overseas. You see that once she's in that place, the way that she just exploits people knowing knowing that they have no other choice and explicitly making sure that these customers have no other product that they go to. It is some of the most despicable behavior that you can imagine.

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