Month: December 2020

Whereas both the Obama and Trump administrations have been engaging in largely futile crusades with US pharmaceutical companies to force them to, if not cut prices, then at least slow the pace of price hikes, China shows how it’s done.

As Caixin reports, drugmakers agreed to cut prices on some of their newest drugs in China by an average of 51% to become eligible for reimbursement under government-backed insurance plans. Some of most expensive drugs weren’t included in the annual negotiations for inclusion on the national reimbursement list, a signal to drugmakers from the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA), said Xiong Xianjun, director of the NHSA’s Medical Service Department, at a press conference Monday in Beijing.

Most of China’s 1.4 billion population are covered by state-run basic medical insurance systems, which can provide 60% to 90% reimbursement for basic medical costs. The state insurance programs mainly cover services in public hospitals and common diseases. The list of medicines covered by the programs has been updated annually with new entries since 2017.

That said, even though drug prices can be lowered after negotiations with the government, inclusion on the list can still mean big profits for drug companies as reimbursable drugs are more likely to be widely used.

A total of 162 new drugs were involved in the talks. Of them, 119 were added for insurance coverage, including treatments for Covid-19 such as the antivirals ribavirin and arbidol, according to an updated catalog released by the NHSA.

Chinese patients can now get reimbursement for 2,800 medicines, including 1,426 Western drugs and 1,374 traditional Chinese medicines. The new version of the drug-reimbursement list will be effective March 1. It means that Chinese citizens purchasing US drugs will be a price far, far lower than the price charged for the same drug stateside.

For the first time in drug price negotiations, the state insurance fund slashed prices an average of 43% for 14 drugs whose annual sales exceed 1 billion yuan ($153 million) each.

This year’s drug list also includes more cancer drugs known as PD-1 inhibitors, which use the body’s immune system to fight tumors. China has around 4 million new cancer patients and 2.8 million deaths from cancer annually. According to Caixin, in 2019, Tyvyt – co-developed by Suzhou-based Innovent Biologics and U.S. drug giant Eli Lilly – became the only PD-1 inhibitor to be included on the national reimbursement list. PD-1 inhibitors added this year include medicines developed by local companies BeiGene, Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine Co. and Shanghai Junshi Biosciences. Innovent’s Tyvyt was priced last year at 2,843 yuan ($433) for one dose. The prices of the newly added PD-1 inhibitors are lower than for Tyvyt, the NHSA’s Xiong said. The agency hasn’t disclosed prices for specific drugs.

This year’s negotiation also sought to lower prices of drugs already included on the list as some of them were originally added without price negotiations, Xiong said.

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.

A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.

Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was far more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.

The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.

The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.

The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).

The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.

Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.

Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.

But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.

The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:

The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.

Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”

Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”

These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.

Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”

What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.

Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.

That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate in October: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”

Sen. Ed Markey at tech hearing says: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.” https://t.co/4au67uIp3P pic.twitter.com/HWRPRn2hHA

— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) October 28, 2020

As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.

These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.

The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.

The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.

On Wednesday, Chicago Board of Trade soybean prices flirted with a 6-1/2-year high on tight global supply as investors shrugged off a deal between Argentine soy crushers and oilseed workers. 

On late Tuesday night, Argentina’s soy crushing companies signed an agreement with oilseed worker unions, ending the two-week strike over wages that halted all exports of soybeans from the South American country, according to Reuters. 

“An agreement was reached with the oilseed workers’ unions in a meeting held at the Ministry of Labor, to lift the strike that had paralyzed port terminals and the agro-industrial complex,” Argentina’s CIARA soy crushing chamber said in a statement.

CBoT soybean futures have been on a tear in the last couple of weeks, jumping more than 13% on supply concerns due to the Argentinean strike. Now with a deal, prices are beginning to fade the $13 per bushel line. 

By comparison, CBoT soybean futures were trading around $9.40 per bushel when the U.S.-China Phase 1 trade deal was signed in mid-January. Now prices of beans are approximately 45% higher, hovering a little under $13 per bushel, or at six-year highs. 

The meteoric rise in soybean prices was triggered by China’s strong demand this past summer when prices were trading at multi-year lows. 

However, in late November, trade sources told Reuters that Chinese soybean importers and processors are preparing to cancel deals signed with U.S. firms for December and January shipments. 

The sources explained that crushing margins have collapsed following an exponential rise in bean prices on Chicago futures.

Authored (satirically) by Titania McGrath via TheCritic.co.uk,

Before 2020, the world was a bleak dystopia overrun by Nazis. It never ceased to amaze me how many Nazis I would encounter on a daily basis once I had decided that everyone but me was a Nazi.

Thankfully, 2020 came along and changed everything.

This was the year that intersectional identity politics went mainstream, and there is no going back. The gender-neutral genie is out of the bottle, and xe is fabulous.

There were uprisings against systemic injustice, statues of straight white males were torn down, and Ben and Jerry’s reminded their customers how racist they all were in order to encourage them to buy more of their New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream.

This was all made possible because Covid-19 refused to spread during our mass protests, which just goes to show that even pathogens have gone woke.

The world finally accepted that there are more than 400 genders, and that all of these have been persecuted throughout history. Even the ones we invented last week.

Intersectional feminism triumphed over transphobia. All of a sudden, major companies were using phrases such as “menstruators”, “vulva owners” and “people with a cervix”. All of which is far more respectful to women: or, as I like to call them, bipedal gestation units.

We are now living in a post-BLM world, where Critical Race Theory has been received as the hallowed truth that shall guide us towards salvation. At last, we are amplifying voices of colour that have been historically marginalised. (Except for the ones who don’t agree with defunding the police or dismantling capitalism, who are just white-adjacent scumbags that are best ignored.)

Best of all, Joe Biden triumphed over that malevolent incubus Donald Trump. Already Biden has discovered a vaccine for Covid-19, which explains why he spent most of his election campaign in a basement.

As we move into 2021, Biden’s brave message resounds throughout our new woke empire. It is time for healing. It is time for hope. Above all, it is time for unity.

So let’s make a list of everyone who voted the wrong way and deal with them as soon as possible.

A litany of articles went out yesterday suggesting that NFL star Russell Okung was the first player to be paid in bitcoin. While that lede isn’t exactly true (Okung is converting his dollars to BTC after being paid in USD), it speaks to a larger point about Bitcoin’s growing adoption with the masses.

Okung has been lobbying the NFL to be paid in bitcoin since 2019, where he publicly proclaimed his request on Twitter. But yesterday’s headline about him being paid in Bitcoin isn’t entirely true, according to the Verge. The NFL told the media outlet that it was “not accurate” and that “his people are converting some of the money into bitcoin”. Okung’s team, the Carolina Panthers, also confirmed he was being paid in dollars. 

Paid in Bitcoin. https://t.co/Ey6oOcmLjA

— russ (@RussellOkung) December 29, 2020

Okung’s claim on Twitter that he was “paid in bitcoin” appears to have been a push for a company called “Zap” that allows you to convert any percentage of your paycheck into bitcoin. Perhaps a deal with Zap is why Okung Tweeted 14 times on Tuesday about converting his paycheck to bitcoin, The Verge speculated. 

Do it, now. pic.twitter.com/9eAJxcBxLi

— russ (@RussellOkung) December 29, 2020

Regardless of whether there is a deal with Zap or not, it’s likely in Okung’s best interest to call attention to BTC – after all, the more people who adopt BTC, the higher the price will likely go. After all, when you are looking for bids, drumming up excitement on social media is one way to go about it. Perhaps that is what led to the not totally accurate headlines about Okung being paid in BTC on Tuesday:

To generate that kind of excitement, it helps to have headlines like “First NFL player to be paid in Bitcoin” spread around the web. It certainly sounds more intriguing than “NFL player decides to spend 50 percent of his salary on Bitcoin,” right? It’ll be interesting to see if any of those headlines change overnight.

Okung has reportedly converted half of his $13 million NFL salary into Bitcoin. 

Regardless of his motivation, it is undeniable proof that BTC adoption continues to move in a positive direction. And make no doubts about it, Okung isn’t just some BTC shill – his Twitter leads on that he is far more “woke” than your average NFL player. Case in point:

If you think elections are rigged wait until you learn about the US dollar.

— russ (@RussellOkung) December 29, 2020

 

Authored by Eric Peters via Eric Peters Autos,

An easy way to establish the fatuity –  the evil – at the core of what’s going on would be to apply it universally.

Every “lockdown” applies to everyone – including every politician and every government worker. If anyone is forced by decree to stop earning their living then everyone is forced to stop earning their living. The big box stores are shuttered, too.

Aren’t we “all in this together”?

Of course, “we” aren’t. There is the essential class – which issues and enforces the “mandates” – which it is important to constantly repeat are not laws but literally the arbitrary decrees of politicians grown fat, like blood-gorged ticks, with limitless power somehow acquired in the name of gesund – even though we’re healthy, thanks – and there is the rest of us, deemed non-essential.

We are supposed to just make do; figure out a way to keep a roof over our heads and food in the ‘fridge – without a paycheck. Or a third of one. To pay 100 percent of our mortgages/rent and power bills and so on.

Shutter our businesses; send our employees home to do nothing — while their bills pile up.

The essentials  lecture, finger-point – and enforce. But never miss a paycheck. Which we are forced to pay for.

Their bills do not go unpaid. There is no sacrifice by those demanding it – the usual practice of the coercive sector as distinct from the private sector. The latter can only ask for your business; the former can force you to close it – and then make you pay them for doing it.

How about we all pay?

Them and us – alike.

If they decree we may not work, then they must be “in it” with us, together. No paycheck for us? None for them as well. No forcing us to pay for their paychecks, either. The taxes that pay for them held in abeyance until the cases! the cases! recede.

If, in fact, that is truly what this is all about.

In fact – literally – it’s not.

This store is not “closed due to COVID.” It is closed by decree of “essential” government workers.

As should by now be obvious to anyone still capable of rational thought. What conclusions can be drawn from the coercive class declaring itself essential – and us, not? From our being “locked down” – told by them we may not move without their permission, while they are free to move as they like?

Ordered to accept economic death while they continue to feed – off of us?

While we get to watch them ignore their own “mandates”?

The restaurant owner in California who used his truck prevent an essential government worker from working was trying to make the point – to both the essential government worker and the essential government enforcers who came to make sure the essential government worker could go about his essential work.

It is easy to be unctuous when there is no cost to you – and possibly much to gain.

The essentials who are getting paid – by us – have more than just our money to pay their bills. The have our money to buy our losses. When a non-essential’s home goes into foreclosure or his business is shuttered, someone else is going to acquire the property. It will inevitably be someone with the means to pay for it.

That will be someone who hasn’t been bled white. It will probably be someone essential, who has spent the past year bleeding the non-essentials white.

Who, having taken everything away from the previous owner will now use the previous owner’s money – transferred via taxes – to own everything that was taken away.

Probably at a fire-sale price, too.

The same process is under way at the corporate level. The Big Box retailers were not locked down – which is why their profits have gone up (skyrocketed up) during the worst year – for us – since 1929. It is not hard to understand why. Wal-Mart and the rest were open while everything not Big Box wasn’t, by “mandate.”

The non-essentials were forced to do business with the essentials. Forced to facilitate the transfer of wealth from local, privately owned stores to massive, shareholder-owned corporations, who sold the same stuff and were not attacked by swarms of gesundpolizei for allowing more than 10 people within their stores at a time.

A simpleton should be able to draw the obvious conclusions.

The essentials want to use the corporations as feed lots are used for cattle. We – the nonessentials – are to be herded onto these feedlots, where we will be obliged to be obliging, else no more “corn” for us. The essentials want to be able to partner with a handful of big corporations who will employ everyone who is still allowed to work and sell everything we’re still allowed to buy.

When there are no alternatives, there are no options.

When you can work for yourself or work for someone who owns the business you work for, you are much less under the thrall of a pyramidal hierarchy that mandates things which can be appealed – or avoided.

When there is no work except corporate work, the corporations own you. And then the coercive sector controls you . . . via the corporations. Neat, sweet and not petite.

It is all very essential – and has nothing to do with “stopping the spread.” If it did, then everything would be closed, everyone “locked down.”

If, in fact, we are “all in this together.”