May, 13 2020, 12:00am EDT
Demand Progress Urges Opposition to HEROES Act
Progressive lawmakers must oppose the bill in order to stop being taken for granted and to effectively leverage their power for stronger legislation moving forward
WASHINGTON
Demand Progress is urging members of the House of Representatives to oppose the so-called HEROES Act on the grounds that it does not do enough to address the impact of the crisis on ordinary people, does not make provisions for sufficient oversight, and unduly benefits the wealthy and large corporations.
Demand Progress supports several measures that were excluded from HEROES, including:
- Direct payroll support, as offered by Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and others;
- A ban on most mergers for the duration of the crisis, as offered by David Ciciline (D-RI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and others;
- An allocation by the International Monetary Fund of "special drawing rights" to support the needs of emerging markets, as offered by Chuy Garcia (D-IL) and others;
- An expansion of federal health insurance programs to the unemployed;
- Funding for proper congressional oversight of the COVID-19 response, including funding for congressional committees;
- Funding for congressional modernization to support remote deliberations and technology modernization.
Meanwhile HEROES includes several objectionable provisions, including:
- A bailout of corporate lobbyists by making the Paycheck Protection Program apply to 501(c)6 and 501(c)4 associations;
- A bailout of debt collectors and mortgage services;
- A bailout of large landlords;
- Effective support for health insurance companies by steering those in need of insurance into COBRA rather than Medicare or Medicaid.
Demand Progress continues to object to the ongoing dysfunction in the House of Representatives that follows from a lack of mechanisms for remote lawmaking and committee hearings. As discussed here, current procedures serve to disempower progressive lawmakers in particular and prevent meaningful oversight of the Trump Administration's oversight of the crisis.
According to David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress:
"This bill doesn't do nearly enough to help those in need and does far too much to help those who are not. It bails out lobbyists but doesn't do enough to help small businesses meet payroll. It bails out mortgage services and debt collectors but doesn't provide easy and affordable health insurance access to people who've lost their jobs. It rejects a merger ban that would help ensure the economy works for ordinary people, not for large corporations that will seek to use easy access to cash to consolidate their power. It excludes language to facilitate the IMF's allocation of 'special drawing rights' to help ensure that emerging economies have access to medical supplies and other basic needs.
"Moreover, House Leadership has repeatedly made it clear it does not take concerns of progressives seriously, and is actively seeking to disempower them. Progressives must oppose this bill so as to stop being taken for granted and to set us on a course that leads to stronger legislation moving forward."
According to Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress:
"The House of Representatives missed a major opportunity to strengthen its oversight capabilities by restoring funding to its committees and the GAO that have been decimated over the last decade. Congress had significantly more resources to oversee the bailout in 2008 and 2009, and much more money is flowing out the door now. In addition, because the pandemic has made it unsafe and unwise for Congress to meet in person, the legislative branch failed to infuse sufficient funds to modernize so they can transition to seamless operations at a distance. While these funds would amount to less than one-tenth of one percent of new spending, they would reap enormous returns on investment."
Demand Progress amplifies the voice of the people -- and wields it to make government accountable and contest concentrated corporate power. Our mission is to protect the democratic character of the internet -- and wield it to contest concentrated corporate power and hold government accountable.
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Bernie Sanders Targets Moderna Greed in Covid-19 Vaccine Hearing
"Should people in America and around the world be allowed to get sicker and sometimes die because they cannot afford the outrageous and arbitrary prices that the pharmaceutical industry demands?" asked the Vermont Independent.
Mar 22, 2023
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday denounced Moderna's proposal to more than quadruple the price of the Covid-19 vaccine it co-developed with billions of dollars in public funding—along with mRNA technology co-invented by government scientists—as an example of Big Pharma's "unacceptable corporate greed."
At a hearing held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), the Vermont Independent reiterated his widely shared belief that the purpose of medical advancements should be to save as many lives as possible, not make executives "obscenely rich."
Sanders, who chairs the panel, invited Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel to testify at a hearing titled "Taxpayers Paid Billions For It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the Covid Vaccine?"
In his opening statement, Sanders stressed that scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies "worked with Moderna to research, develop, and distribute the Covid vaccine that so many of our people have effectively used."
"While Moderna may wish to rewrite history," Sanders continued, "this vaccine would not exist without NIH's partnership and expertise and the substantial investment of the taxpayers of this country. As a matter of public record, U.S. taxpayers spent $12 billion on the research, development, and procurement of the NIH-Moderna Covid vaccine."
"For that huge investment," added the progressive lawmaker, Moderna is "thanking the taxpayers of America by proposing to quadruple the price of the Covid vaccine to as much as $130 once the government stockpile runs out—at a time when it costs just $2.85 to manufacture that vaccine."
"Moderna has already made $21 billion in profits off of the Covid vaccine during the pandemic and four of Moderna's executives and investors collectively became more than $10 billion wealthier as a result of the massive taxpayer investment into that corporation," said Sanders. "Mr. Bancel literally became a billionaire overnight and is now worth $4.7 billion."
"Do we not need to change the current culture of greed into a culture which understands that science and medical breakthroughs should work for ordinary people, and not just enrich large corporations and CEOs?"
In the words of the senator, "This type of profiteering and excessive CEO compensation is exactly what the American people are sick and tired of."
In response to a letter Sanders sent to Bancel following Moderna's January announcement of its planned price hike, the corporation vowed to make Covid-19 vaccines and boosters "available at no cost for the vast majority of people in the United States." Last month, after Bancel agreed to testify at Wednesday's hearing, Moderna said that when the federal government's public health emergency declaration expires in May, "Covid-19 vaccines will continue to be available at no cost for insured people," while the company's patient assistance program "will provide Covid-19 vaccines at no cost" to uninsured or underinsured people.
"That is good news," Sanders said Wednesday. "The bad news is that most patient assistance programs are poorly designed and are extremely difficult, if not impossible, for patients to access," he added, urging Moderna "to reconsider their decision to quadruple the price of this vaccine and not raise the price at all."
"Our committee looks forward to working with Moderna to develop a program that allows every American to continue to receive the Covid vaccine for free without the need to file complicated forms or paperwork, answer personal questions, or wait for hours on end at the pharmacy," said Sanders. "In other words, let us truly make this vaccine available for free to all Americans."
But when asked by Sanders if Moderna will charge the U.S. government less for the NIH-Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, Bancel refused to commit, citing so-called "complexity."
"You have money for stock buybacks by the billions, and you guys became billionaires," Sanders responded. "That doesn't seem too complex to me."
In a video shared Tuesday, Senate HELP Committee senior health counsel Zain Rizvi further detailed how Moderna has tried to suppress evidence of the U.S. public's massive contributions to the NIH-Moderna Covid-19 vaccine while refusing to share the recipe with South African scientists who are working with the World Health Organization to boost global supply.
The refusal of Moderna and other pharmaceutical corporations to transfer publicly funded technology to qualified generic manufacturers has contributed to global Covid-19 vaccine apartheid, needlessly prolonging and worsening the pandemic.
Although Covid-19 jabs have been credited with preventing roughly 20 million deaths worldwide in 2021 alone, the People's Vaccine Alliance estimates that 1.3 million additional lives could have been saved in the first year of the vaccine rollout had shots been distributed equitably. As a result of unequal access to lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines—made worse by corporate-friendly trade rules that protect Big Pharma's intellectual property monopolies and lead to artificial scarcity—one person suffered an avoidable death from the disease every 24 seconds in 2021.
"Moderna has taken a publicly funded vaccine, built on decades of publicly funded research, and used it to maximize their own profits at the expense of public health," Julia Kosgei, policy co-lead for the People's Vaccine Alliance, said Wednesday in a statement. "It's long past time for Stéphane Bancel to be held to account."
"Today's hearing must be the beginning of a conversation about how governments can place public health needs before private profit. That means requiring companies that profit from publicly funded research to share new technologies with the world."
Citing the corporation's latest earnings report, Kosgei noted that "Moderna is spending as much on buybacks and dividends as it is on research and development." She called it "plainly ludicrous to suggest that this is the best way to ensure everyone has access to effective vaccines and medicines."
"This should be a moment of reckoning for Big Pharma," said Kosgei. "Today's hearing must be the beginning of a conversation about how governments can place public health needs before private profit. That means requiring companies that profit from publicly funded research to share new technologies with the world."
Like Kosgei, Rizvi stressed that Moderna's behavior is not unique and called for far-reaching action "to put an end to the greed of the pharmaceutical industry."
That's also precisely what Sanders did during his opening remarks:
In the pharmaceutical industry today we are looking at an unprecedented level of corporate greed—and that is certainly true with Moderna. Today, while 37% of the American people could not afford the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe, 10 major pharmaceutical companies made over $100 billion dollars in profits in 2021—a 137% increase from the previous year. In these corporations, the 50 top executives made over $1.9 billion in total compensation in 2021 and are in line to receive billions more in golden parachutes once they leave their companies. In other words, Americans die because they cannot afford the outrageous cost of prescription drugs, while the drug companies make huge profits.
Further, while many Americans don't know this, the taxpayers of this country have spent many tens of billions of dollars over the past decade to research and develop life-saving medicine. Yet, despite that huge investment, and the vitally important work done by NIH scientists, the citizens of the United States pay far more for prescription drugs than do the people of any other country, in some cases, as much as 10 times more. Unbelievably, there are important drugs on the market today that literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"What does a lifesaving drug mean for a person who cannot afford to buy that drug?" Sanders asked. "Should people in America and around the world be allowed to get sicker and sometimes die because they cannot afford the outrageous and arbitrary prices that the pharmaceutical industry demands?"
"Do we not need to change the current culture of greed into a culture which understands that science and medical breakthroughs should work for ordinary people, and not just enrich large corporations and CEOs?" he continued.
Sanders urged people "to remember the contributions of great scientists like Dr. Jonas Salk who, in the 1950s, invented the vaccine for polio. Salk's work saved millions of lives and prevented millions more from being paralyzed."
According to the progressive lawmaker: "It has been estimated that if Dr. Salk had chosen to patent the polio vaccine he would have made billions of dollars. But he did not. When asked who owns the patent to this vaccine Dr. Salk said: 'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?' What Dr. Salk understood was that the purpose of the vaccine he invented was to save lives, not to make himself obscenely rich."
Salk was not alone, as Sanders explained:
In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a scientist from Scotland, discovered penicillin at St. Mary's hospital in London. Fleming's discovery of penicillin changed the medical world and saved millions of lives.
When Fleming was asked about his role, he did not talk about the outrageous fortune he could have made through his discovery. Instead, he said: "I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident." He refused to make obscene profits from his discovery.
In 1921, Dr. Frederick Banting along with two other scientists at the University of Toronto invented insulin—an issue we're hearing a lot about today. When Dr. Banting was asked why he wouldn't patent insulin and why he sold the rights to insulin for just $1 he replied: “Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.”
It has been estimated that Dr. Banting's invention saved some 300 million lives. Once again, a great scientist made it clear that his purpose in life was to ease suffering and save human lives, not to make billions for himself.
"In this moment of excessive corporate greed," said Sanders, "the moral vision of these great scientists is something that we might learn from."
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New Watchdog Project Targets Neoliberal 'Hacks' Posing as Economic Prophets
"Anyone who claims they have the absolute answer to every economic question isn't being honest with you. They're being a hack, and they shouldn't be considered serious sources."
Mar 22, 2023
Taking aim at "conflicts of interest and flat-out falsehoods in economics reporting and the so-called experts who perpetuate them," the Revolving Door Project on Wednesday launched a new website, Hack Watch, to name and shame Wall Street-friendly experts pushing often harmful neoliberal financial theories as absolute truths.
"Anyone who claims they have the absolute answer to every economic question isn't being honest with you. They're being a hack, and they shouldn't be considered serious sources," Max Moran, the personnel team director at Revolving Door Project (RDP), said in a statement introducing the new site.
"Economists like to sound certain, and they like to ridicule anyone who disagrees with them."
A follow-up to RDP's wildly successful Hack Watchnewsletter—which began by scrutinizing former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, often called "Wall Street's favorite economist," and his cryptocurrency partnerships—the website features an FAQ section on the federal debt as well as a "Trope Tracker" meant to dispel "common fallacies, falsehoods, and framing mistakes in economics coverage."
"Economists like to sound certain, and they like to ridicule anyone who disagrees with them," said Moran. "This can incline reporters, especially reporters who worry that they don't understand economics very well, to defer to economists unquestioningly."
Moran continued:
In the neoliberal age, economic analysis (from the right kind of neoclassical economists) was considered scientific truth. This is nonsense. Economics isn't a hard science, it's a method of analysis—a set of tools that help us to understand a few particular ways of how the economy works. Deciding what's actually right or wrong for the economy is always, ultimately, a matter of values and philosophy, which we express through politics.
"Top hacks" who already have bios on the new site include Summers, 2009 auto industry bailout architect Steven Rattner, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget president Maya McGuineas, and senior vice president Marc Goldwein.
"Economics isn't a hard science, it's a method of analysis—a set of tools that help us to understand a few particular ways of how the economy works."
"When these hacks receive air time, they often present the existing socio-economic order as a natural phenomenon, softly echoing Margaret Thatcher's famous 'no alternative' declaration," said Dylan Gyauch-Lewis,who co-leads the Hack Watch project, in a reference to the former right-wing British prime minister's infamous neoliberal slogan.
"In a time of crisis after crisis, we cannot afford to restrict the public's imagination to the world as it was in 1992," Gyauch-Lewis asserted. "The staid old guard not only restricts the public conception of what economic policy can be, it misleads about what that view already is."
"To allow the same few Clintonian New-Democrats to monopolize discourse does viewers, policymakers, and the world a great disservice," he added.
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UN Urges Global Cooperation as Quarter of Humanity Lacks Safe Drinking Water
"Water is our common future and we need to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably," said the director-general of UNESCO.
Mar 22, 2023
Amid a lack of global cooperation, the world is far off-track in achieving universal access to clean drinking water by 2030, according to a United Nations report released Wednesday as officials marked World Water Day.
TheUnited Nations World Water Development Report 2023 was released by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as global leaders convened in New York for the first international conference on water in nearly half a century.
With seven years to go until the end of the decade, 26% of the world population lacks access to safe drinking water and 46% don't have access to basic sanitation, the report found.
The persistent scarcity of potable water is being driven by a rapid increase in water use in recent decades, with usage growing by 1% per year in the last 40 years due to "a combination of population growth, socioeconomic development, and changing consumption patterns," including within the agriculture industry. Yearly water use growth is expected to continue at this rate until at least 2050.
In some of the most affected areas of the globe, progress on closing the water access gap and meeting this aspect of the U.N.'s sixth Sustainable Development goal would need to quadruple.
"Water is our common future and we need to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UNESCO. "As the world convenes for the first major United Nations conference on water in the last half century, we have a responsibility to plot a collective course ensuring water and sanitation for all."
In addition to water use, UNESCO reported, "the acceleration and spreading of freshwater pollution"—the biggest source of which is untreated wastewater—and the climate crisis have helped to make water scarcity "endemic," particularly in middle- and lower-income countries.
"As a result of climate change, seasonal water scarcity will increase in regions where it is currently abundant—such as Central Africa, East Asia and parts of South America—and worsen in regions where water is already in short supply, such as the Middle East and the Sahel in Africa," reads the report. "On average, 10% of the global population lives in countries with high or critical water stress."
In a separate news report, Al Jazeeraprovided a visualization of water stress across the Middle East, showing how countries including Algeria, Egypt, and Sudan are "either extracting unsustainably from existing aquifer sources or relying heavily on desalination," and how rising temperatures, increased demand, and the construction of dams has shrunk a number of lakes across the region.
The UNESCO report emphasizes that global partnerships and cooperation are crucial to ensuring universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2030, which Richard Connor, editor-in-chief of the report, told the Associated Press would require an investment of $600 billion to $1 trillion per year.
At the U.N. Water Conference, taking place from Wednesday through Friday, representatives from dozens of countries and international organizations focused on Indigenous rights, public health, and the climate are expected to speak about the solutions addressed in the report, including:
- The reallocation of water from agriculture to urban centers, which has "become a common strategy to meet freshwater needs in growing cities";
- Watershed protection, which can provide biodiversity conservation as well as jobs and training opportunities;
- Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) initiatives such as water operators' partnerships, which "connect established, well-functioning utilities with others that need assistance or guidance";
- Initiatives that allow the "meaningful" participation of beneficiaries, especially in rural areas; and
- Coordination between climate and water agendas, with policymakers proactively reaching out to climate stakeholders and vice versa.
"Accelerating action through partnerships and cooperation between water and climate stakeholders can create additional benefits to freshwater ecosystems and to the most exposed and vulnerable people, reducing disaster risks, delivering cost savings, fostering job creation and generating economic opportunities," reads the report.
"Safeguarding water, food, and energy security through sustainable water management, providing water supply and sanitation services to all, supporting human health and livelihoods, mitigating the impacts of climate change and extreme events, and sustaining and restoring ecosystems and the valuable services they provide, are all pieces of a great and complex puzzle," it continues. "Only through partnerships and cooperation can the pieces come together. And everyone has a role to play."
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