A 2003 law passed by Big Pharma’s friends in Congress actually prohibits Medicare, which serves the elderly, from negotiating drug prices for the 52 million Americans in the program. Because of this cynical give-away to some important election funders, Americans pay an extra $16 billion a year more than is necessary for pharmaceuticals, whose cost, in America, …
Continue reading ‘How Congress stacks the deck against ordinary people’ »
Today there ia an article in the Washington Post that announces that gun deaths are as common as car deaths for the first time ever. Every week there seems to be another mass shooting in America, and the reaction is the default ceremonial sentence, “Our thoughts and prayers are with …..”. This is all the …
A 1958 law allows food companies to avoid formal regulations if it can show that the additives they use are generally used and regarded as safe. About a third of the time companies make safety evaluations in secret without ever telling the FDA, and a single consultant can sign off on safety determinations. Even when they …
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“I was surprised that the latest Bond film, Spectre, is officially categorised as containing only ‘moderate violence’. Since it involves exploding buildings (with people inside them), several shootings, fisticuffs every few minutes, eye-gouging and torture, I shudder to think what would be labelled ‘immoderate’. People who join Isis and other Islamist groups are accused of an …
Quotation: “Our so-called free trade policies have been a disaster for the United States ever since NAFTA was enacted. Before NAFTA went into effect 20 years ago, we never had had a trade deficit of more than $135 billion. Every single year since then, for 20 years in a row, our trade deficit has been …
Continue reading ‘One politician’s view of the new “trade” agreements, TTP and TTIP’ »
