COTW: Inhumane Drug Prices

No wonder 'Mericans are angered by prescription drug prices.  This table compares US prices with four other developed countries that have socialized medicine:

In every case US prices are considerably higher. Similar price differentials exist for common diagnostic and surgery procedures. Former hedge fund head Martin Shkreli hiked the price of Enbrel, used to treat AIDs cases and toxoplasmosis, 5500% overnight. Daraprim (generic name) cost about $1 per pill to make and has been in the pharmacopia for sixty years. When Shkreli acquired the drug the price for a bottle when from $405 to $22,500. Other examples of price gouging are those by Valeant Pharmaceuticals which increased the price for two heart drugs, 515% and 212% the same day they were acquired.  An antibiotic, Doxycyclene, was increased in price from $20 to $1849 within a six month period, but the real story is that drug prices have going up rapidly for the past 10 years despite passage of the Affordable Care Act. Cash buyers in the US face the highest prices of all, often these are the poorest citizens without drug coverage. The federal institutional buyers such as the Veterans Administration and the Defense Department pay the lowest prices in the country at 58% of the cash price. Other instituional buyers such as hospitals, Medicare Part D and HMOs pay 5-30% less. Once again the economic leverage exerted by a single payer is demonstrated in these statistics. So US Person says one more time: Medicare for All!

Long Time Coming: Banning Blood Ivory

mature bulls, credit: NatGeo

After the visit of Chinese Premier Xi, the White House was able to announce Friday that both countries have committed to ivory trade bans. The trade bans are described as "nearly complete". China is the world leader in ivory consumption, but the US is not far behind. This is the first time China and the US have made a specific, public commitment to protect wildlife. This precedent is significant because the Chinese government controls the Chinese ivory trade itself. Conservationists welcome the announcement with reservations about its actual implementation as an elephant is illegally killed every 15 minutes for its tusks.

credit: B. Stirton

The enormous pressure of poaching is having genetic effects for elephants in Africa. In Mozambique, where a decades long civil war nearly wiped out elephants, a generation of tuskless elephants has been produced because individuals with tusks were selectively slaughtered to fuel the civil war with materiel and manpower. Despite  increasing trade restrictions, trophy tusks can still be imported into the US with proper certificates. All trophy hunting should be stopped immediately world-wide to reduce the unsustainable rate of elephant mortality. China has lobbied hard in the past to obtain permission from CITES to conduct a controlled domestic market . Under pressure from the world's second largest economy, CITES granted the request for an exemption to the global embargo begun in 1990 in 2008. China bought 73 tons of ivory from African countires, and attempted to legitimize the domestic carving industry by adding it to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The government encouraged more trade by raising the price of ivory. No wonder China's internal ivory trade controls have largely failed.

An established fact is that the illegal trade in ivory is closely linked to terrorist organizations and criminal syndicates. Pope Francis has earned a reputation as an environmentalist, but his own Vatican trinket store, Savelli Gallery, sells hundreds of objects made from ivory. The Vatican city-state has not signed the CITES treaty, so it is not subject to the global ivory ban. This has to change immediately. Pope Francis, US Person aka "the Lawyer from Hell", hopes you read this post and take appropriate action as you did at the Vatican's bank. Your city-state cannot afford to be in the same business as bombers and crime lords who heartlessly destroy one of God's most impressive creatures for gain.  After all, Holy Father, Jesus threw out the moneychangers in the temple.

Tru'merica: Who Is Dorothy Day?

Pope Francis mentioned her among the great modern Americans, but she is practically unknown. She is a potential saint, and an American that should be better known for the right reasons. This short video explains who is Dorothy Day, founder of the movement newspaper The Catholic Worker:



Predictably, but no less disgustingly, the extreme right in America is becoming biblical in its attacks against a world leader it sees as socialist and anti-capitalist. Mouthpieces like Fox News, Washington Times and Newsmax are invoking their multi-purpose authority for matters eschatological, Revelations, to label the Catholic Church's leader a "false prophet". The fact is the Catholic Church as an institution espouses a non-capitalist economic philosophy. The Church understands that markets are made up of people, and any view that considers them perfect or beyond social control is engaging immoral idolatry. No wonder Catholic John Boehner is resigning. The House is full of extremist 'tea partiers' who have debased the Republican Party beyond recognition and demanded Boehner's resignation. Pundits dub them the Kamikaze Caucus because of their single-minded determination to once again shut down the federal government, their own 'Great Satan'. US Person believes their religiously tinged fear-mongering is causing Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt to turn in their graves.

COTW: Apocalypse Soon

The potential apocalypse threatening the planet is, of course, global warming. It is an issue that transcends politics and religion, and with Pope Francis, the first 'green' pope, set to address a historic joint session of Congress, the issue will undoubtably be in the forefront of public discussion. This chart from strictly secular NASA depicts just the radical amount of atmospheric carbon dixoide released by humanity compared to the last 650,000 years of Earth's history:

We are on the path of making our cosmic home unrecognizable, if not uninhabitable to many of our fellow creatures. As Pope Francis wrote in his ground breaking encyclical {20.06.15}, dominion over the planet and other life is inseparable from sacred responsibility to protect and cherish them.

Frontline and Inside Climate News tell us that Exxon knew as early as 1977 that Earth's climate was being seriously disrupted by fossil fuel burning. A company senior scientist, James F. Black told an audience of oilmen burning their products produced atmospheric carbon dioxide that would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity. In 1982 summer intern Steve Knisely at Exxon Research calculated that unless fossil fuel burning was constrained, there would be 400ppm CO₂ in the air compared to 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution.  His predictions have turned out to be very close to the actual. Exxon's response towards the end of the 80s was to curtail CO₂ research and launch a hugely expensive public relations campaign to obfuscate and deny the issue.That campaign continues to this day, fronted by a slender blonde actress in a business suit who brags about the United States' position as the number one producer of methane, a gas that is many times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Some of documents supporting these facts are available here. Once again a major corporation is exposed to have behaved like a criminal conspiracy rather than a responsible 'citizen' in possession of privileged information damaging to its profit margin. Label this conclusion anti-business, because if the label fits, US Person will wear it.

The Last Stand for Wild Sumatran Rhinos

Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) are the rarest species of rhino still living in the wild.  It is the only extant member of the genus Dicerorhinus that dates back to the early Miocene.Their rain forest habitat has been devastated by cultivation for agricultural products like palm oil, and the rhino has been slaughtered for its two horns. Their numbers have dwindled so low that conservationists are recommending the remaining survivors be consolidated into one population and guarded around the clock. A survey by the University of Massachusetts--Amherst, and the Wildlife Conservation Society Indonesia Program has identified for the first time priority protection zones that are essential to survival and small, scattered populations that should be consolidated if they are to be genetically viable. The study's lead author says the Sumatran rhino can still be saved in the wild, but significant increases in protection are needed. Five zones critical to saving the rhino need to have significantly stepped-up law enforcement efforts and planned roads into these areas must be abandoned.

London Zoo's 'Begum', 1872

Vietnam's Javan rhino went extinct in the wild in 2010. The same fate awaits the Sumatran if new efforts to protect it from the deprivations of poachers and destruction of its rainforest home.  The species is already extinct in Sabah and Malaysia. In the 200 years since the Sumatran was first described to science, its range has contracted from a broad swath of Southeast Asia to just three areas on the island of Sumatra and one in Kalimantan. There are less than 100 Sumatran rhinos as of 2013 surviving in the wild.  Forty Sumatran rhinos were brought into captivity in the 1980s with the goal being preservation of the species, but the program was a disaster according to the IUCN.  Most of the rhinos died in captivity and no offspring were produced for twenty years. Cincinnati Zoo has achieved several successful conceptions. Watch this WWF Australia video to know more:

F-35: An Expensive Joint Flop

Conservatives are very fond of talking about limiting government spending.  There are two problems with that meme: their greatest hero, Ronald Reagan, presided over one of the largest military buildups in modern peace time, and Repugnants never seem to include the Pentagon in their cost-cutting ideas. Currently the most expensive weapon procurement program ($1 trillion) is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It is wildly over budget and expected to cost $100 million per unit! Fifteen years of schedule delays due to mind-bending technological complexity have cost the program dearly.

The latest blow to the program's prestige is the finding from the Pentagon's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation that the F-35B aircraft used by the Marines in testing failed to achieve the required number of flight hours to be declared "combat-ready". In fact it declared the Marine trials "could not demonstrate that F-35B is operationally effective or suitable for use in any type of limited combat operation, or that it was ready for real-world operational deployments." In short the Marines rigged the testing aboard the USS Wasp so the jet would pass. Nevertheless the Marines are standing by the complicated and expensive aircraft that is designed to do everything well.

The US Air Force has already bought 28 F-35As and is expected to buy 44 more even though the fifth generation fighter is outfought in close combat maneuvering by fourth generation aircraft such as the F-15 or F-16.  It is also outclassed by the best Russian and Chinese jet fighters.  Air Force generals defend the fighter by saying it is meant to be a long-range weapons platform. Perspective can be gained on this claim by noting that the Air Force recently let out contracts to "re-wing" its aging, slow, but highly effective ground attack aircraft, the A-10 Warthog. The service previously insisted that the entire Warthog fleet would have to be ditched to pay for the F-35 which is also supposed to be able to do close air-support and bombing.  Perhaps the generals have never heard the old rubric, "Jack of all trades, master of none."

Allies who were expected to deploy the fighter--hence the name--are having second thoughts over its price tag. Canada wanted to replace its CF18 Super-Hornet fleet with the F-35 at a cost range of $17 to 45.9 billion. The rise in exchange rates has made the weapon even more expensive and Liberal politicians running for office are pledging not to buy it. Justin Trudeau promised Canadians that a Liberal government would buy a more affordable fighter. Canada has already invested hundreds of millions in the F-35 program without buying a single jet. The Conservative government announced plans to buy the F-35 without following a competitive process. The Dutch also got sticker shock when new estimates of cost recently arrived. The project will now cost the Netherlands €5.2 billion, 550 million more than previously estimated. It has already purchased the first eight jets of a projected 37, effecting a sort of procurement fait accompli. Australian officials witnessed a secret computerized war game conducted at Hickam Field, Hawaii in which F-35s were comprehensively beaten by Russian Sukhois. A Liberal politician described the simulated F-35s as "being clubbed like baby seals". Australia expects to pay $16 billion for supposedly the world's most advanced jet fighter--perhaps not. US Person would take right-wing politicians more seriously if they followed their own parsimonious rhetoric went it comes to their war-mongering.

'Toontime: Revolt of the Silent Majority

In hard times the polis becomes polarized. Matt Wuerker sums up the race for President so far:

Seems 'Mericans are tired of the incremental sell-outs of plutocratic front persons. US Person understands, that is why Bernie has his vote. If they can put aside their racial bigotry for one more political season, they might actually get some ideologically-based policy, and not just simulation intended only to distract and confuse while preserving and even enhancing the pyramid of privilege that is American society in the 21st.