Is Martin Shkreli The Son Trump Made With Ivanka? (Asking For A Friend)

Have you wondered lately why we haven't heard a peep out of one of America's most reviled media personalities, Martin Shkreli? That's easy; he was arrested in 2015, found guilty in 2017, bad his bail revoked a month later after he posted on Facebook that he would pay $5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair and soon after that was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for three counts of securities fraud. (Aside from being thrown into prison, he was ordered to forfeit $7.4 million in assets and pay $388,000 in restitution.) He is federal inmate number 87850-053 and residing at a minimum security federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

So how has he been behaving in prison? Yesterday the NY Post announced he was thrown into solitary confinement a few week ago for using a cell phone illegally to run his company.

How did the prison find out he was using a contraband cell phone to run his pharma company, Phoenixus AG (a reincarnation of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG)? Someone bragged to the Wall Street Journal and they ran a piece on March 7 that someone in the prison system saw. The Journal reported that Shkreli fired the firm's interim CEO over the phone, though he let him stay on the board. He expects the firm to become a multibillion-dollar business while he directs it from cell phones that he presumably buys from corrupt guards. (The phones go for $1,000 each.)

And speaking of Pharma and healthcare and all,Tim Russo had an eye-opening post on how Bernie is looking at... well doing the opposite of what Shkreli and Trump do. They raise prices on drugs so only the rich can afford them. Bernie has a different plan and if it has to be "socialism," let it be socialism-- like Medicare. Russo wrote on Sunday that Bernie "launched the hardest leftward shot across any bow I’ve ever seen in presidential politics. This morning on Face the Nation Bernie promised to cut prescription drug prices by 50% if elected, which would be standard puffery from a presidential candidate, except of course, this is Bernie. Asked how he would do that, Bernie listed the litany of big pharma’s greed, then said about a 50% cut in drug prices, "if they don’t like that, then we’ll take a look at their patents.” Forward comrades!

An August 2018 poll by Data For Progress has suggested that despite the red scare tactics, a majority of Americans support seizing pharmaceutical patents, with huge net positives even among Trump voters. The poll question’s wording was, “Would you support or oppose having the government produce generic versions of life-saving drugs, even if it required revoking patents held by pharmaceutical companies?”

“Revoke” the means of production, “seize” the means of production, however you wanna phrase it, Bernie Sanders ain’t playin’.

And still speaking healthcare, the gaslighting asshole Putin installed in the White House who's pretending to be president, says his party is developing a "really great" health care plan that will be "far less expensive and much more usable" than Obamacare. The vote will come "right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate and win back the House."

Most Republicans in Congress are just rolling their eyes and hoping he dies before 2020

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Martin Shkreli we hardly knew ye! Shkreli, if your memory needs to be refreshed, is a former hedge fund manager and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who's biggest claim to infamy is that he raised the price of a live-saving drug (Daraprim) from $13 per pill to $750 per pill, or, in this case $75,0000 for a full course of treatment. What a guy, eh? Well, consider that he is not atypical when it comes to the CEOs of American Pharmaceutical companies. He just pushed the envelope a little bit more than most people in his profession would do, at least all in one instant move. The man just had no subtlety. Most in his position would have raised the price of the medication incrementally. But, at age 34, Shkreli was just too arrogant and full of himself. The great irony in this story is that Daraprim is an anti-parasitical drug.

Martin Shkreli is now going to prison. Unfortunately, he did not get the sentence a person like him deserves but that's our "justice" system for ya. He got the news last week that he would be locked away for a mere 7 years and have to pay out over $7 Million in fines. No hard labor. No beatings, yet.

Shkreli's "worth," if you can use the word 'worth' in relation with him, is listed as $27 Million. At least, for once, that kind of money couldn't save a scumbag perp from doing time. I'll take that as a measure of how despicable he is, maybe in a karma way, but, in reality, he went down for securities fraud. That's the punch line. He isn't being punished for his psychotic determination that people will die while he and his Big Pharma company would make a ton of money in one sweet profit soaring move. Shkeli got his comeuppance for taking advantage of his fellow corporate Richie Rich types. In our "justice" system, a CEO taking actions that unnecessarily kill people is fine, but bilking the rich? Well, you go to jail for crimes against the corporatocracy!

Crooked Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli Found Guilty-- Could Face Decades In Prison

Prison is a horrible place. But there should be more criminals like Martin Shkreli put away to contemplate their crimes. I'm a big law-and-order guy and for his type of crime I'd throw away the key until I was sure the mental illness that is at the base of his anti-social behavior was 100% sure and that he was no longer a threat to society. Friday, as you know by now, he was found guilty of 2 fraud charges and one conspiracy charge for defrauding his hedge fund investors and a pharmaceutical company. He could be given as many as 45 years (a stretch) in prison, although someone just told me he could also wind up with house arrest.

The conviction, even as a mixed verdict, was a major defeat for the divisive Mr. Shkreli, who said before the trial that he was “so innocent” that the judge, jury and prosecutors would apologize to him afterward.

Mr. Shkreli, 34, was acquitted of the count that potentially carried the most weight for sentencing: count seven, which charged him with defrauding Retrophin by creating sham consulting agreements and unauthorized settlement agreements. That charge was associated with the biggest financial loss, which judges take into account when deciding on sentences in fraud cases.

Bridget Rohde, the acting United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the federal prosecutors’ office in Brooklyn, said she was “gratified” with the verdict. “Our work is not done: Mr. Shkreli remains to be sentenced, and there’s a co-defendant in the case,” she said, referring to Evan Greebel, Mr. Shkreli’s onetime lawyer, who is scheduled to be tried in the fall.

...The case has featured a number of strange twists. Judge Matsumoto ordered Mr. Shkreli to stop talking in and around the courthouse after he dropped into a room full of reporters and began offering his thoughts on the trial. Victims, usually the most sympathetic witnesses in a trial, were undercut here by the defense as rich and out of touch; when the prosecution tried to limit the victims it would call to testify, the defense urged it to call more. The investors all made money-- by the defense’s tally, more than triple what they invested.

And it was the defense bringing in personal claims about their client’s life, from his sexual orientation to how frequently he brushed his teeth to his anxiety and depression, often over government objection. And while defendants usually keep a low profile during a federal trial, Mr. Shkreli livestreamed after court many days.

Mr. Shkreli seemed to take pains to appear that he was not taking the trial very seriously. During the prosecution’s rebuttal argument, the last thing the jury would hear from either side, he read a book. He popped into a room full of reporters to denounce the prosecution as “junior varsity,” leading Judge Matsumoto to issue an order preventing Mr. Shkreli from talking in and around the courthouse.

He became widely known after raising the price of a drug called Daraprim to $750 a pill from $13.50 overnight. He courted controversy, defending the price increase, then bragging that he had bought the sole copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $1 million. The case against him, however, has nothing to do with the Daraprim pricing, and the federal investigation into Mr. Shkreli’s hedge fund and Retrophin work began well before the other controversies.

Meanwhile, he's free on bail pending sentencing. After leaving the courthouse he immediately ran to a gaggle of reporters and told them the trial "a witch hunt of epic proportions" and insisted he had just had a victory because he was found not guilty on the most serious charge, looting his pharmaceutical company. Before his twitter account was suspended yesterday afternoon, he tweeted this:

Then he took his bathos-filled I'm-a-victim-circus to YouTube:



Now that the criminal trial is over, Shkreli will now faces civil charges filed by the SEC (and one filed against him by the company he stole stock and cash from, Retrophin. (He's also suing them for firing him after he was caught stealing.)

In a November Ballot Initiative, California Voters Take On Big Pharma & Sky-High Drug Prices

What drug company CEOs are doing to patients for a few dollars more (source)

by Gaius Publius

Sky-high drug prices are a scandal, but everyone knows that, even those responsible for the prices. They're also a source of enormous profit and wealth, which is the problem. The drug companies, acting alone and through their lobbying arm, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), are literally sending people to their deaths in order to drain others of a few dollars more. It would not be out of line to call this behavior murderous and psychopathic — in a Martin Shkreli sense — though most would settle for a term from economics. Something related to capitalism, perhaps.

Drug companies and their wealth have captured the national legislative and regulatory process and even some of the national patient advocacy groups (see below for more). How to crack the nut of deadly high drug prices and bring them down to an affordable level? Activists in California are making a very credible attempt at the state level with a November ballot initiative called the Drug Prices Relief Act, or Proposition 61.

Fran Quigley, writing in Truth-Out, first describes the scale of the problem (my emphasis throughout):

It is hard to overstate the level of dysfunction in the US medicines system. The headline-producing greed of "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli was just the most dramatic example of a pharmaceutical industry whose patent monopolies grant it immunity from market forces while its political clout shields it from government regulation. Taking full advantage of taxpayer-funded research, drug corporations make record profits, even by Fortune 500 standards, and pay their CEOs as much as $180 million a year. Those corporations spend far more on incessant marketing to consumers and physicians than they do on research -- part of the reason they have largely failed to develop new medicines that address the most deadly illnesses and diseases.

As for the patients who rely on those medicines, pharma lobbying has ensured that the US Medicare program is alone among industrialized nations' government health plans in not negotiating down the price it pays for medicines, causing US patients to pay far and away the highest global price for necessary drugs. One in every five US cancer patients can't afford to fill their prescriptions, and many seniors on Medicare are forced to cut their pills in half to stretch their supply. ...

The industry's US trade organization, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, has an annual budget exceeding $200 million, which it directs to the promotion of the image and interests of its 57 member companies. The industry's US lobbying expenses for 2015 were $238 million, and its campaign contributions have reached as high as $50.7 million in a year. That money has been well-spent.

Even those in government who say they're trying to help aren't helping:

Not that the Obama administration has always been a champion of medicine access: the Affordable Care Act enshrined a huge guaranteed market for pharmaceutical companies, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently flat-out refused to exercise its legal right to address huge corporate mark-ups on cancer medicines the NIH helped develop.

I'm shocked about the NIH not using authority it already has to provide relief. That's a good indication of the extent to which all of national government is captured by this industry.

Only the Veterans Administration, unlike Medicare, negotiates down drug prices. Medicare is forbidden by law to do so. Which makes the prices paid by the VA for prescription drugs an interesting benchmark.

Proposition 61: Marking California Drug Prices to the VA Benchmark

In a nutshell here's what Prop 61 would do:

The initiative, recently certified by the California Secretary of State as Proposition 61, calls for state agencies to be blocked from paying more for a prescription drug than the price paid by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Unlike the Medicare program, the VA is free to negotiate the price it pays for drugs and as a result, pays as much as 42 percent less than Medicare and usually significantly lower than state Medicaid programs. The primary force behind the ballot measure, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, says the law could save Californians hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lower government costs and lower individual co-payments.

Are you a California resident? Imagine a 42% cut in drug prices. (It's not hard to predict prescription prices falling throughout California if state agencies become the go-to source for low-cost drugs.) That alone, I think, makes Prop 61 worth your active and vigorous support. It would literally change lives, including your own.

Are you a resident of any other state with a ballot initiative option? If Prop 61 passes in California, it will be exported, perhaps to a state near you. Another reason to give Prop 61 your active and vigorous support.

Quigley's piece has much more information, including some he said-she said about whether Big Pharma is worried about this initiative passing (count on it, regardless of what they say) and whether the ballot measure will deliver the change it advertises (again, count on it, regardless of what its opponents say). I recommend reading it through if this effort interests you at all. It looks very promising to me.

I do want to leave you with one more quote from the article, however, related to those patient advocacy groups who are opposed to Prop 61.

Some Patient Advocacy Groups Are Opposed; Guess Why

The opposition is quoting some patient advocacy groups that are opposed to the measure. For example:

While the pharmaceutical industry opposition to the measure is predictable, some patient-connected advocacy organizations have raised concerns as well. Anne Donnelly, policy director for the San Francisco-based HIV and Hepatitis C advocacy group Project Inform, has been widely quoted by the opposition campaign and in media reports questioning the wisdom of the ballot initiative. Donnelly says her group is officially neutral on the referendum and points out that Project Inform supports a drug price transparency bill that is pending at the California state legislature. "We are supportive of the goal of lowering drug prices, but the drug pricing system is so complex that I am not sure this simplistic (ballot) measure is the best approach," she said in an interview.

But...

Project Inform's lack of support was highlighted in a July New York Times article on the referendum. But the referendum's supporters have in turn questioned Project Inform's motivations, noting that the organization -- like many patient advocacy groups -- is funded in significant part by pharmaceutical company donations. "When you look at who is speaking out against the initiative, you have to ask what it is in it for them," says Burger of the CNA. Donnelly confirms that industry donations make up between 20-36 percent of Project Inform's budget, but says the organization takes precautions to ensure that the industry does not influence its positions.

Money doesn't talk, it swears. Or so I hear. Though maybe Ms. Donnelly hears it sing a different tune.

GP

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin’s Daughter-- the Next Martin Shkreli

-by Dr. Lee Rogers

Anaphylaxis is a deadly reaction to an allergy. After exposure to an allergen, a person breaks out in hives, lips swell, has difficulty breathing, and wheezes, which can eventually lead to shock and death. It has happened to as many as 1 in 50 Americans. Yet, it is one of the simplest emergencies to treat. The initial life-saving treatment is injecting epinephrine (adrenalin) into the fat or muscle, followed by care from a medical professional.

Epinephrine is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands. The body releases it during the “fight-or-flight” response. It increases the heart rate, improves blood flow to muscles, dilates the bronchioles in the lungs (to increase air exchange), and constricts other blood vessels (to shunt blood to vital organs). As a hormone, it a product of nature and cannot be patented.

Seems pretty straight forward, right? Well, not any more. Mylan Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of the most commonly used device to deliver epinephrine, called the EpiPen, just jacked up the price of the medication over 400% and there doesn't seem to be any better reason than... “because they could.”

EpiPen has been around since 1977, but Mylan acquired the product in 2007 when the it cost about $57. Now according to many media outlets and the prescription drug price comparison website www.GoodRx.com, the price has skyrocketed to $640. Fortunately for Mylan, EpiPen has an expiration date of one year, causing the company to bank on an annuity of more than $600 from families who need the life-saving medication, a vast majority of which go unused every year.

The price of epinephrine hasn’t increased in the past 10 years. In fact the epinephrine inside EpiPen costs less than $1. I doubt the price to manufacture EpiPen’s autoinjectors has changed. So what has changed? There are two recent events that help explain. First, EpiPen’s only major competitor, Auvi-Q made by Sanofi, underwent a voluntary recall due to possible dosage miscalabrations. And secondly, this year the FDA rejected an application, which would have been much cheaper, perhaps costing only $10-20, however not auto injected. That opened the door for Mylan to price-gouge consumers into paying outrageous fees for their life-saving medications.

Just in case you might be susceptible to the “poor pharmaceutical company argument,” EpiPen, just one of the products Mylan sells, brings in $1 billion a year and which boosted the company’s 2nd quarter numbers in 2016.

Déjà vu?

If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We all remember Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, the sole manufacturer of Darapim, who notoriously raised the price of the generic HIV medication from $14 to $750. Shkreli faced tremendous public scrutiny and was referred to by the media as “the most hated man in America.” Eventually, he was subpoenaed to testify before Congress, charged with securities fraud, and resigned as CEO of Turing.

Now there’s something wrong when even this man, Martin Shkreli, recently called the executives at Mylan “vultures” for their slimy move!

Who is Shkreli referring to? None other than Mylan CEO Heather Bresch. Bresch isn’t some ordinary greedy pharmaceutical executive. She’s the daughter of US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). She finished her BA in political science at West Virginia University (WVU) and was hired by Mylan in 1992 after her powerful father spoke to former CEO Milan Puskar. She rose through the ranks at Mylan, eventually serving at Director of Government Relations from 2002-2005, while her father was WV Secretary of State. In 2008, there was a controversy at WVU after she claimed to have an MBA. The university initially disputed the claim, but then awarded her an MBA despite only completing 22 of 48 credits required. After public embarrassment, WVU rescinded her degree and the university president, a former consultant and lobbyist for Mylan, resigned in disgrace.


In 2011, just after her father was elected to replace the late Robert Byrd as US Senator, she spearheaded the effort in Congress to pass the Generic Drug User Fee Act, making it more difficult for foreign generic drug makers to import into the United States. In 2012, she became CEO of Mylan Pharamceuticals. Fortune Magazine named her as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2012 and 2013.”

Then in 2015, Mylan purchased Abbott’s generic drug division located in the Netherlands. At that point,Bresch led Mylan through complex and controversial corporate tax inversion to base Mylan’s headquarters (domicile) in the Netherlands in an effort to avoid paying US corporate taxes. The corporate executives still live in the US and run the company from the US. The tax inversion is expected to reap the company an additional 10% in profits. The move wasn't good for everyone. Normally there are no tax implications from a corporate merger for shareholders. But with tax inversions, investors have to pay capital gains tax on the difference between the stock price at their initial investment and what the new company’s stock price would be. Some shareholders were advised to sell their shares at a loss to offset tax capital gains taxes they’d have to pay.

All of this may cause political problems for Bresch’s father, Sen. Manchin. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been very critical of the price hike, taking to Twitter to decry the move. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who was an advocate for getting EpiPens into schools, is now breathing fire over this decision by Mylan. In a recent statement, she said:

"This outrageous increase in the price of EpiPens is occurring at the same time that Mylan Pharmaceutical is exploiting a monopoly market advantage that has fallen into its lap,” said Klobuchar. “Patients all over the U.S. rely on these products, including my own daughter. Not only should the Judiciary Committee hold a hearing, the Federal Trade Commission should investigate these price increases immediately. The Commission should also report to Congress on why these outrageous price increases have become common and propose solutions that will better protect consumers within 90 days."

Hauling a fellow Senator’s daughter into Congressional Hearings a la Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli would certainly not be good for Senate Democrats, not to mention the embarrassment to Senator Manchin casting light on his daughter’s actions during her tenure as CEO of Mylan.

Additionally, Bresch’s actions may win her a new title, next to Shkreli as the “most hated woman in America.”

What Can Patients Do?

I agree, the EpiPen’s design makes delivering a life-saving drug as simple and as effective as possible. But if you can’t afford to be price-gouged for $600, there are alternatives that are still just as life-saving.

A 1 mL ampule of epinephrine costs less than $5. The dose of epinephrine for anaphylaxis is 0.3 to 0.5 ml delivered subcutaneously (in the fat) or intramuscularly (in the muscle). If patient and family members are comfortable with drawing up their own medication and injecting (no more difficult than using insulin), they can request a prescription from their doctor for the vial and syringes. An example of how the prescription would read is below. This would cost about $10.

Prescription:

Rx: Epinephrine 1:1000, 1 mL ampule

Rx: 1 cc syringe with 25g 1.5 cm needle

Instructions: For severe allergic reaction, break ampule and fill syringe with 0.3 mL of epinephrine, inject under the skin. Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.*

*specific instructions will differ, always confer with your doctor.

Owen Mumford makes an auto-injector called Autoject which costs $28. This could be used instead of the syringe if autoinjetion is desired. It is more complex than the EpiPen and above method.

Another alternative is the Adrenaclick epinephrine autoinjector which is closest to the EpiPen. It costs approximately $200.

I always recommend patients price shop for their medication. The GoodRx website is a good place to start. A pharmacist can also help find certain coupons or incentives might be available that lower the out-of-pocket costs.


Dr. Lee Rogers is board certified podiatrist, author, and national speaker. He ran for US Congress in California’s 25th district in 2012 and 2014 where he was endorsed by the LA Times, Blue America, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), mostly for his leadership on healthcare issues.

Trump And Shkreli Have Something Else In Common-- Multiple Campaign Contributions To Hillary Clinton

Thursday, when Herr Trumpf pontificated that "you have to be wealthy in order to be great" how offended were you? What a disgusting little man! I wonder how many evangelicals who voted for him are doing penance. But he certainly excited greed-driven drug maker, scam artist and self-proclaimed arch-villain Martin Shkreli who tweeted "all you people who don't like trump are jealous, stupid and poor! don't make me laugh! and if you are employed by media you are worthless." Something tells me worthless media employees in Shkreli-world would include all the writers at Jacobin and certainly Matt Karp, whose political analysis would likely consign predatory parasites like Shkreli to a one-way trip to Madame Guillotine.

Way back in February, Karp was already ignoring the elites-- from Shkreli to Maddow-- and re-assuring progressive true-believers that Bernie could win. Bernie, Karp pointed out, sure wasn't turning out to be a protest candidate who, at best, could push the Republican-lite Clinton a little to the left.

Last fall, Sanders’s early momentum may have pushed an ambivalent Clinton to reject the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But after this half-step to the left, Clinton has spent the winter furiously digging an ideological trench between herself and Sanders-- opposing his major Wall Street reforms, attacking his proposed tax increases, and declaring that single-payer health care “will never, ever happen.”

While Clinton continues to talk up her personal credentials as a “progressive,” in substantive terms the primary campaign has deepened rather than narrowed the ideological gulf between the two candidates.

Her forthright opposition to the Sanders agenda has won Clinton praise from some liberal elites, unable to disguise their hostility toward even the most basic social-democratic reforms. Yet unfortunately for Clinton, most actual Americans do not inhabit the pundit class, and their professional credentials do not depend on gravely denying the existence of puppies, rainbows, and successful single-payer health programs.

In fact, Sanders’s ideas remain extremely popular with voters. As a result Clinton has been forced to rely more than ever on a dryly pragmatic case for her nomination: only she can defeat the Republicans in November.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia is likely to heighten this discussion of “electability” in the weeks ahead. “If anyone needed a reminder of how important it is to elect a Democratic president,” Clinton argued last weekend, “look at the Supreme Court.”

Leftists sometimes compare this election-year pitch to a species of blackmail. Vote for us, Democrats tell voters, not because we’ll do anything positive for you, but because if you don’t, the other guys will break your legs and take away your abortion rights.

This may not be an inspiring argument. But like most forms of blackmail, it has undeniable force. And so far, many Democrats seem to agree that Clinton, not Sanders, is the best bet to win in November: in both Iowa and New Hampshire, she claimed over 75 percent of the voters who put a premium on “electability.”

But let’s consider the argument on its own terms. Why should we believe Clinton is more likely to defeat a Republican than Sanders?

Notably, the case that Clinton has the best chance to win in November does not seem to depend much on Clinton herself. This is no coincidence: by a number of measures, she profiles as a comparatively weak general election candidate.

According to national polls, nearly 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of Clinton, which would make her the most disliked presidential nominee in modern history. Even if incumbents are included, the only candidate with worse numbers was Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Public perception of Clinton has been shaped by the intense sexist and right-wing attacks that she has endured since the 1990s. These polarizing assaults, along with Clinton’s own partisan record, have helped make her very popular with loyal Democrats, but unpopular with everyone else.

The problem is that the loyal Democratic vote is simply not enough to win a general election. In 2012, Democrats made up only 38 percent of the general electorate, while registered independents accounted for 29 percent. On his way to defeating Mitt Romney, Barack Obama won almost half of them.

Clinton’s appeal among these non-Democratic voters is extremely limited. Just 29 percent of independents hold a favorable view of her, according to an average of three YouGov surveys taken since January; over 61 percent view her unfavorably. In the most recent poll, Clinton’s count was 24 to 67, with 50 percent saying they hold a “very unfavorable” opinion. These are numbers that should make even Supreme Court-first liberals feel skittish.

It’s too soon to conclude that Clinton’s historic unfavorability will spell defeat in November. Yet as Nate Silver noted with regard to Mitt Romney’s (less pronounced) unpopularity in April 2012, we should not dismiss these early numbers either. At the very least, they make it plain that Clinton faces an image deficit greater than any challenger in recent memory, including landslide losers like Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, and John McCain.

...Some gleefully apocalyptic liberals have likened Sanders to Michael Dukakis, who held an early polling lead over George H. W. Bush before ultimately losing by a large margin in 1988. Yet the comparison falls apart before it begins.

A stiff technocrat, Dukakis won the Democratic primary not by packing arenas with passionate supporters, but chiefly by having more impulse control than Gary Hart and being whiter than Jesse Jackson. And his early polling strength was clearly a mirage, as contemporaries noted: only 52 percent of voters even had an opinion of him in May 1988. Dukakis was John Kasich, not Bernie Sanders.

None of this means we should expect to see the end of the “wait until the Republicans get him” argument any time soon. It’s a staple of the Clinton primary arsenal.

In February 2008, then-Clinton chief adviser Mark Penn discounted early polls that showed Barack Obama performing well in a general election: “Sen. Obama has never faced a credible Republican opponent or the Republican attack machine, so voters are taking a chance that his current poll numbers will hold up after the Republicans get going.”

Penn was writing about an African-American candidate whose middle name was Hussein, and who had spent much of his childhood in a Muslim country. A month later, a video surfaced showing Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright saying, “God damn America!”

Did the vaunted “Republican attack machine” fail to take advantage of what Vox’s David Roberts might have called Obama’s “glaring vulnerabilities”? Of course not: an independent super PAC spent $2.5 million on Wright-themed advertising in swing states. None of it had much impact on Obama’s poll numbers against John McCain, which rose considerably between February and Election Day.

The attacks aimed at Obama may have reinforced his unpopularity with right-wingers, but they did little to dent his appeal among Democrats and independent voters. Why does anybody believe that red-baiting will succeed where racist innuendo failed? When the Berlin Wall came down twenty-seven years ago, today’s median voter was not old enough to drink alcohol.

In addition, this year’s polls show little sign of an electorate ready to abandon Sanders at first exposure to right-wing talking points.

Only 35 percent of Virginia independents said they would be less likely to vote for a “Democratic-Socialist” candidate. And when a conservative push-poll asked Nevada Democrats and independents how they felt about Sanders’s plans to spend “$15 trillion dollars” for “a government run health care program,” 53 percent replied that it made them more likely to support him.

Another and even less persuasive claim is that Clinton, unlike Sanders, has already withstood every right-wing attack she can possibly face. Mark Penn also made this point in 2008-- and today Clinton’s unfavorability is even higher than it was then.

Sanders has famously refused to discuss Clinton’s emails. He has denounced her Wall Street speaking fees, but has largely refrained from discussing the much larger hoard of cash connected to the Clinton Foundation-- an area that Republicans seem eager to exploit. That same Nevada push-poll showed that 64 percent of Democrats and independents were less likely to back Clinton after learning about “foreign donations” given to the foundation while she was secretary of state.

Republican candidates have already made various scattered attacks on these subjects, but we’ve seen nothing like the tornado of Clinton scandal-mania likely to follow if Hillary is nominated.

A final line of argument, exemplified by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post, insists that Sanders’s platform is simply too left-wing for a “moderate” American electorate. Usually this is trotted out amid broad national surveys that find the country divided between ostensibly coherent blocs of “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” voters.

But as political scientists Shawn Treier and D. Sunshine Hillygus have argued, two-dimensional surveys of voter ideology do not provide a useful guide to the American electorate. To the great disappointment of the Post editorial board, many self-identified “moderates” are not sober Beltway centrists but in fact “cross-pressured” by a mix of strong liberal and conservative beliefs.

The unstable and multidimensional identity of the “moderate” voter helps explain why Sanders’s own polling numbers have regularly confounded the prejudices of pundits. In New Hampshire, for instance, where experts repeatedly stressed his strength with “liberals,” Sanders actually did even better with “moderate/conservative” voters.

It might also help explain why Sanders polls well in places like Nevada and Alaska-- states not known as liberal bastions, but home to a large number of independent voters.

Who are these independents and “moderates” voting for Sanders? It seems reasonable to believe that they are not confused centrists, but “cross-pressured” voters with a wide range of views, all drawn to Sanders’s left-wing economic message. In fact, Sanders has a long record of winning over these kind of populist “moderates.”

...Sanders has shown an undeniable ability to connect with the same kind of lower-income and less-well-educated white voters all over the country, from Iowa to West Virginia to Oklahoma.

Democrats have been slowly losing these voters to Republicans since the 1970s; in the last decade, they have almost abandoned them entirely. But non-college-educated whites still represent over 40 percent of the electorate in key swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

Many of these poor and struggling voters-- however “moderate” according to Gallup-- seem very receptive to Sanders’s call for universal health care and a living wage. A Sanders campaign that made deep inroads with working-class whites across the Midwest would be well-prepared to defeat a Republican in November.

It’s difficult to find an equivalent category of voters where Clinton might outperform Sanders in a general election. Women? Clinton’s most recent favorability ratio with all women voters is strongly negative: 41 to 54 percent. Sanders’s mark stands at 44 to 41 percent. In a general election, those numbers might shift-- but would it be enough to give Clinton a significant advantage?

Clinton’s strongest support in the primary campaign seems to come from the most loyal Democrats, including African-Americans. But in a bitter campaign against an ethnic nationalist like Trump... would loyal party voters refuse to turn out for the Democrats, just because Sanders rather than Clinton was the nominee? It doesn’t seem likely.

None of this is to suggest that Sanders should take loyal non-white Democratic votes for granted. That is exactly what Clinton-style New Democrats did when they pivoted to the center in the 1980s. In a general election campaign, Sanders would have to do the opposite, and build a populist coalition that depended on solidarity between black, Latino, Asian, and white working-class voters.

Unquestionably, it would be difficult work. But the opposition of an ever-more-reactionary Republican Party would surely help. And a successful left-of-center coalition would be well positioned-- in both ideological and electoral terms-- to mount the much larger, long-term struggle necessary to achieve even Sanders’s social-democratic goals.

...[T]here’s no question that Bernie Sanders can win in November-- and there is good reason to believe he would actually be a stronger Democratic candidate than Hillary Clinton.

And by the way, over the years, Trump and Shkreli have contributed multiple times to Hillary Clinton campaigns. I guess they liked the cut of her jib. Please consider a contribution to Bernie's campaign or to the campaign of any of the progressive congressional candidates who have endorsed him and are running on his platform by tapping on the thermometer below:

Burning Questions: Who Took Tainted Shkreli Money? Why Did DFA and CWA Endorse Bernie? Why Is Putin Backing Herr Trumpf?

As we've reported before, when low-life price gouger and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli tried to contribute to Bernie's campaign, Bernie very publicly rejected his contribution and turned it over to charity. Chuck Schumer and Jon Tester on the other hand, couldn't wait to get their clammy paws on some of Shkreli's blood money. Now that America's most hated twerp has been arrested by the FBI-- and faces as much as 20 years in prison-- will the DSCC give back the $33,400 he gave them in July? In fact, when he was arrested yesterday, it was for exactly what the was looking to pay political protection money for at the time he wrote Schumer and Tester the check-- securities fraud involving the biotech firm he started in 2011, Retrophin Inc. Other recipients of Shkreli's "generosity" include Michigan New Dem Gary Peters (over $10,000), Eliot Engel (New Dem, $8,000), Mitt Romney ($2,500), Joe Lieberman, Hillary (although in 2006 and 2007), Miss McConnell, the RNC (just $2,000, nothing like what he gave Tester and Little Chucky Schmucky), Jim Himes (New Dem), Mark Kirk, who is in a very tough reelection fight in Illinois this cycle, and assorted other Members of Congress from both grotesquely corrupt Beltway parties.

Early Thursday DFA, despite a plea from the organization's founder, endorsed Bernie Sanders. Howard Dean, for whom the "D" in DFA once stood, is a Clinton supporter but his letter urging members to vote for her had, sensibly, fallen on deaf ears. As DFA Executive Director Charles Chamberlain wrote to all DFA members, "With 271,527 votes cast-- and all three presidential candidates campaigning directly for your vote-- the results are in and they are extraordinary. Bernie Sanders has earned Democracy for America's endorsement in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary with an astonishing, record-breaking 87.9% of the vote (including 77.8% of voters who were already members of DFA prior to the poll being launched on December 7)."

Like DFA members, Bernie has kept the fight against income inequality front and center in the presidential race. The 2016 presidential primary election could’ve been dominated by the same Republican-Lite rhetoric that helped Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate in 2014. Instead, Bernie’s ideas and solutions for rebuilding the middle class have dominated the debate. His success has helped move critical issues like expanding Social Security, debt-free college, breaking up the big banks and getting big money out of politics-- all issues supported by the majority of Americans nationwide-- into the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

And Bernie is doing all of this while building a powerful, insurgent campaign that is steadily dismantling the conventional wisdom of DC skeptics who claimed he would never have a chance to win.

Bernie has held several huge events with tens of thousands of people in places like Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts-- but the political revolution hasn’t been limited just to liberal states. Over 8,000 showed up at a rally in Dallas, Texas, over 9,200 at an event in South Carolina, and over 11,000 people attended a July rally in Phoenix, Arizona, during one of the hottest days of the year. All in all, the Washington Post reports that over a four-week period this summer, more than 100,000 people attended Bernie's rallies, proving that his vision for America resonates across the country no matter where you live.

It’s not just the crowds. Bernie is polling in first place in New Hampshire and is in striking distance of a win in Iowa. The campaign broke a record just last night, as the first presidential campaign in history to bring in over 2 million individual contributions this early in the primary contest.

We're excited to be backing a bold progressive champion like Bernie, and we're going into full campaign mode to support him but-- as a grassroots progressive movement organization-- we're going to need some significant resources to make it happen.

Until yesterday, Blue America, PDA and, very recently, the Working Families Party, were the only national progressive organizations to have endorsed Bernie. We're really proud to have DFA join the fight and we hope the others do eventually as well. Many of our members are also DFA members-- as am I-- and we commend their courageous stand. You can contribute to Bernie's campaign here. It was a good day for Bernie. He also picked up the endorsement of the largest union to date to endorse him, the 700,000-member strong Communications Workers of America. Like DFA, the Communications Workers polled their members before endorsing and union president Chris Shelton said that they backed Bernie "decisively." Many of the more corrupt unions that do not give a damn what they members want-- LIUNA, the most corrupt union in America and a disgrace to the union movement, is the perfect example-- have endorsed Hillary but will be basically meaningless in the election since their members are not united around her corporatist, establishment candidacy. National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Union, each with around 200,000 members, are also enthusiastic Bernie backers. The unions , whose leaders are in the pockets of the corrupt Democratic Party establishment politicians, like AFSCME, are for Clinton of course.

Meanwhile, Herr Trumpf received a very different kind of endorsement. Wednesday Trumpf had very publicly said, "I really don’t want Jeb’s endorsement because he is a low energy person and he does not represent strength." So Thursday a more energetic Trumpf-type fella stepped in. Maybe he was spooked by the clownish slob Christie bragging he would start World War III by shooting down Russian planes in the Tuesday night crackpot debate, but Thursday Putin had a highly irregular public comment on the U.S. presidential race. At a press conference in Moscow, Putin responded to a question about Herr Trumpf by saying "He’s a really flamboyent [or, depending on translation, "lively"] and talented person, without any doubt. It’s not our job to judge his qualities, that’s a job for American voters, but he’s the absolute leader in the presidential race. He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia; how can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that." And Romney welcomed an opportunity to take a swing at Herr Trumpf for his silly assertions on Morning Joe about the great Putin today:

Putin, of course, wants the person he will be able to work with best in the White House. Trumpf would probably be the easiest to manipulate and, no doubt, Putin is horrified at the prospect of an aggressive neocon like Rubio or Clinton winning. Trumpf would be a walk in the park for him. Trumpf was tickled pink to get the thumbs up from Putin, who, he said, is "highly respected." Miss Herr Trumpf on Morning Joe today? Here's a little of what you missed:

Scarborough: "Well, I mean, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?"

Trumpf: "He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader. Unlike what we have in this country."

Scarborough: "But again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him."

Trumpf: "I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is."

Last night, John McCain referred to them as "a match made in Heaven."

Martin Shkreli Was Arrested But A Far Graver Crime Was Committed In Flint, Michigan-- Will There Be Accountability?

Why isn't Rick Snyder running for the GOP nomination?

The most hated man in America, Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical drug gouger, was just arrested in New York this morning on securities fraud charges, though not on price gouging. Related: Tuesday night's GOP debate was filled with hatred and bombast from a mostly desperate group of ugly Republican politicians striking out irrationally at President Obama and Hillary Clinton on the supposed subject of foreign policy and national security, which was nothing more than a backdrop for their permission to screech unaccountable lies at the moon about the president. Just horrible, deceitful, hackish people. Anna Marie Cox published a wonderful scorecard that compared Mike Huckabee to "grandpa farts," Ted Cruz "a mirror that reflects no light," listening to Carly Fiorina to biting down on aluminum foil and the Republican Party frontrunner and probable nominee for 2016 to "dogshit ground into your living room carpet."

There was nothing discussed related to keeping our country and our families safe-- just a contest of who could tell more gruesome, frightening stories to blame on the Democrats. Nothing about conservative governance principles that are putting the country and the people in such mortal danger on a daily basis. Philadelphia-based reporter and author Will Bunch had this mess in the back of his mind when he tackled the news that the Republican-imposed government of Flint, Michigan had been systematically poisoning it's own citizens-- albeit mostly children-- to save a few pennies on the city's water bill.

Residents began to complain of skin lesions, hair loss, chemical-induced hypertension, vision loss and depression. Finally, a health study confirmed what many parents feared: The number of children in Flint with unsafe levels of lead in their bloodstream has doubled in less than two years.

The new mayor of Flint has declared a state of emergency-- but for thousands of kids in the economically challenged Michigan city, that may be too little, too late. Health experts say that lead poisoning can cause neurological and behavioral problems for children that are irreversible.

Who will keep us safe? More to the point, how did America become a nation that will move heaven and earth to keep hundreds of thousands of kids under lock and key should one email happen to mention ISIS, yet at the same time will feed children rank and obviously polluted tap water and for years ignore a mound of evidence that these kids are being poisoned. Since almost all of the Republicans are running on a platform of slashing both environmental regulations and the size of the EPA (which, stating the obvious, was already MIA in Flint under Democratic President Obama), we probably won't get the answer to that question tonight on CNN.

...It is a serious way to run a country to drop everything-- the lack of working class jobs, the never-ending struggle to get health care to every citizen, the massive debt that's typically required to get a college education, policing policies that leave some neighborhoods feeling like an occupied territory-- to make terrorism our one and only focus?

Too often, we use terrorism, and the fear of being attacked, to not only voluntarily give up some of our freedoms but to also squelch debate on ideas that might reduce some of the massive inequality in America and mean a better life for million of people, using the dozens who might be killed by terrorism as an excuse.

I would ask, who will keep us safe from a system in which-- even with all the hard-fought incremental advances under Obamacare-- some 29 million Americans are still not able to obtain basic health insurance, in which thousands -- become needlessly sick or face medical bankruptcy or even die every year in the world's wealthiest democracy?

Who will keep us safe from a political system in which almost every election and every political candidate is for sale to the highest bidder-- most famously, a billionaire like the host of tonight's "Who Will Keep Us Safe?" debate on CNN, Mr. Adelson-- and in which more and more states are passing laws to make it harder for minorities, seniors and college students to vote? And who will keep us safe from the ravages of climate change-- a topic that had most of the world's attention in Paris but which has seemed to escape the notice of the GOP presidential candidates?

Perhaps most importantly, who will keep us safe from those politics that have created a staggeringly unequal society in which nearly all of the income gains of recent years have flowed toward the top 1 percent and  in which jobless middle-aged, middle-class workers have been stripped of almost all hope.

In 1941, with America less than a year away from joining World War II, Franklin Roosevelt used the State of the Union address to deliver his famous Four Freedoms speech. In it, he did, of course, speak of freedom from fear-- understandably in a time of rising fascism. But he also noted that a successful America requires "freedom from want-- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-- everywhere in the world." If that is ever eliminated from our national debate, we cannot truly be free.

Curt Guyette is one of the best investigative journalists in Detroit and his piece in yesterday's Guardian is worth reading. "It might seem counterintuitive that Flint, Michigan’s declaration that there are dangerously high levels of lead in the city’s drinking water -- and in the blood of the city’s children-- is a positive thing," he began. The contamination of the city’s drinking water is, after all, is a gut-wrenching tragedy. But the declaration about the undrinkable water, made by newly elected mayor Karen Weaver on Monday, is positive in this regard: it is evidence that a semblance of democracy has returned to Flint. Such an announcement would have been unimaginable even six months ago, when Flint was still under the control of an “emergency manager” appointed by Governor Rick Snyder. The state’s usurpation of local power essentially obliterated the kinds of checks and balances that are key to a functioning democracy."

A series of emergency managers, accountable only to the governor who appointed them, held near-dictatorial power over an impoverished city of 100,000 residents-- a majority of whom are African American.

Operating under the most extreme receivership law found anywhere in the United States, these emergency managers had the power to break collective bargaining agreements, abolish city ordinances, fire employees, sell off city assets, and slash the healthcare benefits of retirees. About the only thing Snyder’s appointees couldn’t do was miss a bond payment.

In addition to everything else, these emergency managers held complete power over the duly elected city council and mayor. The emergency manager told these officials what they could and couldn’t do and determined how much, if anything, they would be paid. Any decisions the elected officials made could be overruled.

It was under this autocracy that Flint-- in April 2014-- ended a 50-year relationship with the Detroit department of water and sewerage to begin drawing the city’s drinking water from the corrosive, polluted Flint river. The initial savings to the city were pegged at $5m.

As soon as the changeover occurred though, it became apparent that the decision was a disastrous one. Residents began complaining of water that looked, smelled and tasted bad.

Because of high bacteria levels, a series of boil-water notices were issued. Then came news of dangerously high levels of total trihalomethanes, a carcinogenic byproduct of the chlorine being used in increased amounts to combat the bacteria problems.

As early as February of this year, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the ACLU of Michigan, the US Environmental Protection Agency began raising concerns that the highly corrosive river water, along with everything else, was beginning to eat away at the pipes carrying water to Flint’s 40,000 homes. And of particular concern to residents and the federal government alike was the effect of the corrosive water on an untold number of lead service lines and leaded home plumbing.

Despite mounting evidence that levels of lead in the city’s drinking water were increasing, the state-- and the city officials under their control-- adamantly maintained that the water was safe.

If not for a determined coalition of residents who refused to swallow those false claims in addition to the toxic water provided to them by the order of Snyder’s appointee, the full extent of the problem might never have come to light.

It came to light because the residents went around Snyder's anti-democratic government, appointed to oppress them, and worked directly with water experts at Virginia Tech. The state department of environmental quality, a dumping ground for GOP ideologues, discounted their findings. As Guyette wrote, "What is the likelihood that one gubernatorial appointee is going to announce that a decision made by another gubernatorial appointee is resulting in the widespread, systematic lead poisoning of children? And when the city council voted to return to the Detroit water system, the emergency manager/dictator vetoed it. The emergency manager, Darnell Earley is gone now, but is not in prison, nor has Governor Synder been dragged out of his office and hung from a lamppost. Nor is the Republican Party of Michigan disbanded.

I've always been intrigued by a story my mother's younger brother told me when I was a child. He fought in Italy towards the end of World War II and he told me about how the Italian people in a small village between Milan and the Swiss border, Giulino di Mezzegra, caught the country's right-wing dictator who had brought so much pain and suffering to the nation. On April 27-- three days before Hitler's suicide, Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured near beautiful Lake Como, shot the following day and strung up in a mundane square near Milan, where my uncle and his detachment found their mangled bodies, which had been abused by the crowds. Does Rick Snyder deserve better? Do any fascists?

There's A Conservative Way At Looking At Martin Shkreli And There's A Progressive Way

Until Friday, the newest controversy around young greed and selfishness icon Martin Shkreli was how he bought the single existent copy of the 31-track Wu-Tang Clan double album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, for a million or two million dollars (no one who knows for sure is telling) at an auction, after having a trusted staffer listen to a 13 minute snippet. Then Friday the former hedge fund manager-turned-pharmaceutical CEO was in the news again with a plan to sharply increase the price of a decades-old drug for a serious infectious disease, Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can cause potentially lethal heart problems.

The plan also is upsetting some organizations that supply drugs for neglected diseases because Mr. Shkreli has said he wants to take advantage of a federal program intended to encourage companies to develop such drugs. The program awards vouchers that can be sold to other companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Shkreli has said he hopes to obtain such a voucher by getting the Chagas disease drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the United States. Critics say that it would be another case of the system being abused by awarding a voucher not for developing a new drug but merely for obtaining F.D.A. approval of a drug already used in tropical countries.

...Last month, Mr. Shkreli led an investor group that took control of a failing California biotechnology company, buying a majority of its shares on the open market at an average price of about $1.50 a share. The stock of the company, KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, now sells for about $28,  based in part on expectations that the company will prosper under Mr. Shkreli.

  As one of his first moves at KaloBios, Mr. Shkreli agreed to license the worldwide rights to one version of benznidazole, a standard treatment in South and Central America, where Chagas disease is most common.

Benznidazole has never been approved for sale in the United States but is provided free to patients by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on an experimental basis.

Mr. Shkreli said on a conference call with KaloBios investors last week that if the company won F.D.A. approval for benznidazole, it would have exclusive rights to sell it in the United States for at least five years. He said the price would be similar to that of hepatitis C drugs, which cost $60,000 to nearly $100,000 for a course of treatment.

In Latin America, benznidazole costs $50 to $100 for the typical two-month course of treatment.

KaloBios’s price would be “pretty devastating,” said Dr. Meymandi of U.C.L.A. “The people with Chagas for the most part are poor” and many lack insurance, she said.

It is estimated that 300,000 people in the United States have Chagas disease, virtually all of them immigrants from Latin America who were infected before they came.

When asked at a recent Forbes health-care summit, how he could have redone his first bout of national publicity around his decision to buy Daraprim, a standard treatment in the care if a life-threatening parasitic infection, just to raise the price from $13.50/pill to $750/pill, he boasted he would have raised the drug’s prices higher. "My shareholders," he said, "expect me to make the most profit. That’s the ugly, dirty truth... I’m going to maximize profits. That’s what people are afraid to say."

Even Republicans are afraid to say that too loud-- and in mixed company-- but that's an underlying principle of their Law of the Jungle philosophy, which, in effect, enshrines price gouging. And that, of course, is why societies protect themselves with one of the bêtes noires of the conservative movement and their Republican Party: regulation that protects the interests of society.



As many people know, especially-- though not exclusively-- as they age, high drug prices are killing people, not rich people, not the millionaires and billionaires, of course, but everyone else. As Social Security Works warned their members this week, "The U.S. pharmaceutical industry is forcing Americans to pay the highest drug prices in the world while stashing their profits in tax havens overseas, even while most of the drugs that they profit from are produced with taxpayer funded research."

This is especially concerned for them because fully 37% of Social Security checks go toward out-of-pocket health care costs. "Big Pharma is gouging the American people with sky-high drug prices, dodging taxes, and eroding our Social Security benefits," something none of the establishment presidential candidates is seriously addressing, although it is certainly at the heart of Bernie Sanders' renegade campaign. Bernie has been working for decades to stop pharmaceutical companies from raking in record profits while avoiding taxes and ripping off American consumers.



In 2013, the U.S. spent nearly 40% more per person on prescriptions than Canada, the next most expensive industrialized nation. This is because drug lobbyists have been able to:

• block Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices,
• block legislation that would require transparency on how pharmaceutical companies set their prices,
• and block legislation that would prevent greedy CEOs and investors from forcing drug prices through the roof-- bankrupting patients.


And while the pharmaceutical industry is raking in record profits, Pfizer-- one of the world’s wealthiest drug companies-- is attempting to move its corporate headquarters out of the United States to a tax haven overseas in order to avoid paying what it owes in taxes here at home. Pfizer already has $140 billion in untaxed profits stashed offshore.

...Congress should recognize that this is not a partisan issue. According to a recent Kaiser Health poll, 86% of Americans-- Democrats, Republicans and Independents-- want Congress to address skyrocketing drug prices by requiring drug companies to release information on how they set their prices.





Taking on the greedy, out-of-control pharmaceutical industry has been a core priority for Bernie for his entire career. And Shkreli is just an extreme manifestation-- a kind of Overton Window version-- of this kind of Republican Party business-as-usual. Shkreli, whose contribution to Bernie's campaign was publicly rejected and donated to charity, went to Fox Business News where he declared that "I don’t think [Bernie] understands pharmaceuticals at all." Unfortunately for price gougers like Shkreli, Bernie, more than anyone else who has ever run for president understands exactly how the pharmaceutical industry actually does work. And he's vowed to change that to make sure the industry serves the public interest not just a narrow and sociopathic profit motive. For Bernie health care is a human right that includes access to safe and affordable prescription drugs.

Americans pay, by far, the highest prices for prescription drugs in the entire world. When we talk about health care, we are talking about the need of the American people to be able to afford the medicine their health care providers prescribe. A life-saving drug does no good if the people who need it cannot afford that drug.

Yet, last year, nearly one in five Americans between the ages of 19 and 64-- 35 million people-- did not get their prescriptions filled because they did not have enough money. In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, Americans should not have to live in fear that they will go bankrupt or die because they cannot afford to take the medication they need.

In any given month, more than half of all American adults take at least one prescription drug. There is no question that medicines help millions of people live healthier and longer lives, and can also prevent more expensive illnesses and treatments. However, it is unacceptable that the United States now spends more than $370 billion on prescription drugs and spending is rising faster than at any point in the last decade.

Instead of listening to the demands of the pharmaceutical industry and their 1,400 lobbyists, it is time that Congress started listening to the American people, who overwhelmingly believe that the cost of medication is too expensive. More than 70 percent of Americans believe drug costs are unreasonable and that drug companies are putting profits before people.

Americans filled 4.3 billion prescriptions last year. The Sanders plan includes six policies to get better deals for the American people. Sanders’ plan will:

1. NEGOTIATE A BETTER DEAL

• Require Medicare to use its bargaining power to negotiate with the prescription drug companies for better prices-- a practice that is currently banned by law.

• Last year there were more than 37 million Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in private Part D plans. 90 percent of seniors take at least one prescription. Many seniors-- almost two-thirds-- take three or more prescription drugs.

• Not only would negotiation substantially reduce prices seniors and people with disabilities pay for drugs, it could save Medicare between $230 billion to $541 billion dollars over the next decade.

• 83 percent of Americans support allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug companies for better prices.

2. IMPORT PRESCRIPTIONS FROM CANADA

• Allow individuals, pharmacists, and wholesalers to import prescription drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies.

• The United States spends more than $1,000 per person per year on prescription drugs-- that’s nearly 40 percent more than Canada, the next highest spender.

• In 1999, Sanders became the first Member of Congress to take a busload of Americans across the border into Canada to purchase prescription drugs. Americans should not have to pay higher prices for the exact same drugs than our Canadian neighbors simply because Congress is bought and paid for by the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

• 72 percent of Americans support this policy of allowing Americans to easily import safe and affordable prescription drugs from Canada.

• Prohibit the United States from agreeing to provisions in international trade deals that would raise drug prices in the United States or extend the monopoly period when a brand name drug company has no generic competition.

• Suspend the government’s authority to destroy packages of imported drugs at the border until new legislation is passed ensuring that Americans can import safe and affordable drugs from Canada.

3. RESTORE DISCOUNTS FOR LOW-INCOME SENIORS

• Close the Medicare Part D donut hole for brand and generic drugs by 2017, three years earlier than under current law.

• The private Medicare Part D benefit contains a “donut hole.” It’s a coverage gap, wherein seniors and people with disabilities must pay for their medications even while they are paying monthly premiums. Under current law, this gap in coverage will close by 2020. Sanders’ plan closes the gap by 2017.

• Require generic drug companies to pay an additional rebate to Medicaid if their drug prices rise faster than inflation.

• Brand name drug makers have to pay a rebate to Medicaid if their drug prices rise faster than inflation. This provision ensures generic drug companies are subject to the same rules. Nearly 10 percent of generic drugs more than doubled in price last year.

• According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, this policy will save the federal government $1 billion over 10 years.

• Restore Medicare prescription drug discounts for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

• Pharmaceutical companies got a huge victory ten years ago, when prescription drug coverage for low-income seniors and people with disabilities was moved from Medicaid to Medicare. Because Medicaid gets a much better price for prescription drugs than private Medicare Part D plans, this policy change meant that drug companies would gain even larger profits on the backs of low-income seniors at the taxpayers’ expense.

• The Sanders plan will restore these rebates for low-income seniors, saving $103 billion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

4. PROHIBIT DEALS THAT KEEP GENERIC DRUGS OFF THE MARKET

• Prohibit anti-competitive deals-- “pay-for-delay” deals-- between brand and generic drug makers.

• Brand name drug companies sometimes try to delay their competition by paying generic drug makers to stay off the market. When these deals occur, drug prices stay high, costing patients and taxpayers more money.

• The Sanders plan prohibits these pay-for-delay deals. According to the Federal Trade Commission, these anticompetitive deals cost consumers and taxpayers at least $3.5 billion in higher drug costs every year.

5. ENACT STRONGER PENALTIES FOR FRAUD

• Terminate exclusivity-- a government-awarded monopoly period-- from a drug company convicted of fraud.

• The Sanders plan holds the pharmaceutical industry accountable when they defraud the American people. Today, nearly every major pharmaceutical company has been convicted of either civil or criminal fraud for violations including off-label promotion, kickbacks, anti-monopoly practices, and Medicare fraud.

• Even though the Justice Department has won suits requiring companies to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, the prescription drug companies simply treat those fines as the cost of doing business.

6. REQUIRE PRICING AND COST TRANSPARENCY

• Require drug companies to publicly report information that affects drug pricing.

• Companies routinely distort the true cost of drug research and development to justify skyrocketing prescription drug prices. Under the Sanders plan, drug makers would be required to report certain price information to the federal government and the public on their products, including the total expenditures on research and development and clinical trials, as well as the portion of their drug development expenses offset by tax credits or paid for by federal grants.

• Companies would also be required to report not only the price information charged to federal payers, such as Medicare, but would also have to submit price, profit, and sales information for other countries in which the drug is sold.

• 86 percent of Americans, including 82 percent of Republicans, think drug companies should be required to release information to the public on how they set their prices.

This is not a partisan issue. Most Americans-- Republicans, Democrats, and independents-- want Congress to do something about drug prices. Tens of thousands of Americans now spend more than $100,000 a year on prescription medications. Drug costs are out of control because that’s the way pharmaceutical companies want it. Other countries have national health insurance plans that negotiate better prices for all of their residents. In this country, however, drug lobbyists have been able to block all of these common-sense solutions that we must work to pass into law. That is unacceptable and that has got to change.

If you'd like to help Bernie win his race for the White House, you can contribute here, on this ActBlue page. And if you need more convincing, take a look at this poll of national Republicans that NBC and the Wall Street Journal just released this morning. Cruz is on the move, my friends. And if you think Trumpf was bad... what 'til you find out more about this maniac!