Heather Bresch, chief executive officer of Mylan NV, has increased the price of its EpiPen from about $57 a shot when it took over sales of the product in 2007 to more than $600 for two auto-injectors.
The pharmaceutical CEO whose company raised the price of EpiPens by more than 400% was rewarded with a 671% raise.
Bresch went from making $2,453,456 nine years ago to $18,931,068 last year, according to filings from the company.
And her dad is United States Senator (D-WV) Joseph “Joe” Manchin III.
Now maybe she’s the black sheep of the family and is a Republican, I don’t know. This stuff sickens me.
Please share widely!
In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a maximum annual income of about $600K a year (in today’s dollars). As a compromise, the Revenue Act of 1942 implemented a 95% tax rate on all income over $3,000,000 (again, in today’s dollars).
FDR was a hugely popular candidate, so popular that the only way to stop him from winning another term was to amend the constitution.
I do hope we find our way back to out roots, rid ourselves of the neoliberal “Third Way” zombies and get back to representing the people, not the power.
FDR was prevented from winning another term by dying.
you are just discovering Senator Manchin? Googling “Manchin Obama” will quickly tell you how untypical an, er, Democrat Senator Manchin is.
…I am beginning to that I’m the untypical one.
When I came back to the Democrats, the party of my parents who were FDR Democrats, I had no idea so much had changed. We used to be the party f the laborer. What happened?
We’re still the party of the laborer, especially when compared to the alternative.
Even Biden is admitting that the party has let the working class down too much and has strayed from its roots, which has helped give rise to Trump. Matt Taibbi and Tom Frank make this argument often enough as well. No prime time speakers were Union heads, a big departure from the party my dad grew up in.
we’re just awful.
Gerald Schuster wanted Phil Johnston out of the state democratic party. Why? Johnston supported the laborers who were attempting to organize his workers at one of his nursing homes in Wilbraham.. Schuster felt that his donations entitled him to dictate policy for the democratic party.
Years later, the Democratic nominee is at Schuster’s house. Phil Johnston is long gone. Petty likely, Clinton avoided the painful subject of underpaid workers organizing for better pay at nursing homes.
(Not to single out HRC. John Kerry has even closer ties to the Schusters. Even Howard Dean had the Schusters hold a fundraiser for him.)
…long said once he achieved the goal of putting a Democrat in the Corner Office he would consider his work done. Thus Deval Patrick got elected and Johnston stepped aside.
labor, which, by the way, had gotten pretty ugly in the leadership by the lat 60s and 70s.
…that Joe Manchin was cited on at least one occasion by Dan From Waltham as his favorite Democrat. That should tell anyone who remembers DFW all they need to know.
This is one of the poorest states in the union and was once one of the most unionized. It went 2 for 1 for Mike Dukakis and will likely be carried for Republicans the rest of my lifetime. It’s not all social issues, part of it is also the erosion of unions in civic life, local corruption and collusion with Big Coal, and the failure of environmentalists to offer a bailout for the transition to carbon free energy.
Hillary has a great and tragically underrated policy proposal for Appalachia totally eroded by her gaffe that she’d lay off miners. Watch Matewan or the documentary Harlan County USA and then take a swig of moonshine that a plutocrat like Trump will beat the wife of the last Democrat to carry this state.
…but WV voters strike me as the type I don’t want to pander to. After all, our friend DFW thought he was their savior with his dig, baby, dig attitude and on that count he may have had a point. Look at how much flak HRC took for her comment (granted a bit out of context, but also brutally honest) to the effect that we were going to have to lose coal mining jobs.
We want miners to have jobs even if we have to close the mines to save the climate. There was a good NPR series where these voters weren’t as dumb as we tend to paint them. They know their product kills, they know their bosses suck, but they have no way else to earn a living.
It’s why unveiling that policy in the heart of coal country and feeling their pain as another Democratic politician once said is the way to go. Not dismissing them for clinging to their guns or faith or arguing their jobs are expendable. Their industry is, but saving their livelihoods should be a top priority for progressive government.
Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? No elitism to see here, move along…
I have no qualms whatsoever looking a bit down my nose at people whose cultural sensitivities belong in another century, especially when they might actually be better off overall if the opposite side prevailed.
I might write a longer thread about it, but he had some great quotes in this Atlantic interview:
And the political consequences are a party at the apex of it’s presidential popular vote, possibly close to 60% this year, that is at it’s nadir in terms of state houses and governorships and down ballot wins. It has a far thinner bench than the GOP which has several viable under 40 and under 50 candidates waiting in the wings, some of whom are women and candidates of color.
And we can say all we want Trump damns them for another decade, and maybe he does at the presidential and even the senate level, but it doest matter if the majority of the states are in the hands of anti-union, anti-women thugs who defund planned parenthood and crush workers rights. Following the Michael Bloomberg strategy is not the path to the kind of enduring majority needed to pass progressive legislation at all levels of government.
You’ve always had more patience than I have in this regard.
…I am more than happy to engage these voters on their economic struggles, but they can’t expect us to share their cultural views.
Pander: Pandering is the act of expressing one’s views in accordance with the likes of a group to which one is attempting to appeal. The term is most notably associated with politics. In pandering, the views one is expressing are merely for the purpose of drawing support up to and including votes and do not necessarily reflect one’s personal values.
I don’t think that word is ever used with a positive connotation in politics. Every politician panders in some ways. But, to me, “pandering” to this group means what Trump is doing– to inflame and encourage resentment-based upon the groups resentments and hatred of blacks, women, Mexicans, education, Mexicans, Moslems, gays, etc. etc. etc.
The last politician to pander to this group so straightforwardly was probably George Wallace.
I would be pleased to see a politician I support engage these people, to debate with them, to persuade them. Pander, which in my means behave as Wallace did and Trump does? No.
Here’s an alternative view.
West Virginia is ground zero for where the Democrats went right. Rather than bend our values to appeal to West Virginians, we held strong to our values knowing that we’d lose West Virginia as a consequence.
That started with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. West Virginia was slow to follow the Dixiecrats, but it was really just a matter of time. While the Appalachian political culture isn’t identical to the Southeast, it’s awfully close.
Here’s religion, by county. Check out WV and the Southeast
Here’s gun ownership, by state. I’m not as sure of the underlying data as I am with religion.
Here’s 2012 support for gay marriage, by state.
I could go on, but I think you’re seeing the picture. West Virginia is culturally far more like the Southeast and the Southern Appalachian belt than the Mid-Atlantic or the Rust Belt. It’s been realigning to the GOP, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t.
And while a few counties in West Virginia are coal country and there is a statewide sympathy, the fact of the matter is that very few West Virginians work in the coal extraction industry.
Losing West Virginia to the Republicans isn’t about coal. It’s about the GOP cultural platform matching West Virginia’s culture, ranging from Christian-centric policy making to anti-intellectual stubbornness opposing change. While I’m happy to have an extra vote in the Senate on some issues, I’m not okay with the Democrats backsliding in order to keep West Virginia voters.
Miners said they trusted Sanders since he’s walked a picket line. People forget his speech at Liberty University was very well received by a hard evangelical crowd. It was the most interesting moment of this campaign next to the Trump takeover. Both show signs of possible realignments.
Under 30 evangelical Christians embracing a post-culture war push for a more “Christian” economy that’s more equitable, while their parents deserted the born again Cruz running in religious appeals for a thrice married New York billionaire who promised hem jobs made in America again. Reagan Republicanism is dead. The neocons will flock to Clinton, the rest will move left on economics.
I see four coalitions forming. The Clinton wing accepting Clinton Republicans produced this election just as Reagan embraced Reagan Democrats a generation ago. While the Sanders and Trump wings of the party organize downballot and begin primarying people. The populist wings in both parties won’t go away, and the real risk to the establishment is if they find a way to work together towards a common purpose. Certainly against trade, possibly for labor.
Maybe next cycle, as it doesn’t seem to have materialized this time.
I tend to think that Sanders did well in WV because Clinton was embraced by all of the groups they hate: uppity women, blacks, Mexicans, gays, Catholics, etc. ad nauseum.
It’s that kind of attitude that continues to erode support for progressive principles among the white working class, you and I have often agreed on this point in the past.
I have generally agreed with you on this, particularly when it comes to religion or certain aspects of community culture. So, I see no need to disparage a voter, or to write off a group of voters, because, for example, they attend church regularly, hunt, enjoy NASCAR. The extent to which there is a rural “gun” culture–hunting, target and range shooting, etc. makes me very ambivalent and somewhat reluctant to be jump on board a lot of enthusiastic gun control advocacy coming from the suburban and urban elite that shops at REI rather than Cabella’s.
This election has really put that position to the test, at least with respect to this particular shrinking group of voters. Because it turns out that nothing really gets them energized like some good old fashioned racism.
I guess I hope that Dems do not simply write off the entire demographic, just because they are white, or male, or attend church. But the guy with a vulgar Hillary bumper sticker on the back of his truck? You can let him vote for anyone else, pleasethanks.
What has been something of an unpleasant revelation this cycle is the latter outnumbers the former in these regions, which really makes one wonder if a 50-state strategy isn’t a waste of valuable resources.
The Biden/Yglesias/Dean 50-state strategy rests on the assumption that people are generally decent and fair. Well, you may not agree with me, but hear me out on this, etc. Give some respect, get some respect. And maybe you plant a seed that might bear fruit one day, even if not in the form of electoral victory.
But the entire Trump phenomenon calls that assumption of decency and fairness into doubt in a fairly stark way.
30 racist, 30 yellow dog Republicans trapped in a and marriage
Point was, it’s basically a third racists who came out of the woodwork and weren’t active in mainstream politics before (alt right), a third yellow dog republicans who can’t abandon their nominee and a third voters who feel screwed. Read the Sunday Times pieces on Scranton and Akron and tell
me it’s not economics that makes these folks, many of them longtime Democrats, Trump voters. Lotta folks I canvassed in Fitchburg and Leominster feel the same way. Lot of the upper crust Gomez and Romney voters I canvassed in Scituate are going for Johnson. We are seeing the great class crack up of the GOP, but it’ll keep being an issue with the Dems too.
My last Lyft driver went from being a google employee in Kendall to getting laid off and being homeless to getting back on his feet as a Lyft driver, and he said we need a bloody revolution to take out the bankers and elitists which is why he was a huge Sanders fan and why he liked Trump until the convention. Now he’s voting Johnson cause he liked Weld.
These are the mid info voters who are mad enough to be angry at a lot of easy culprits, tolerant enough to be turned off by the darker rhetoric of Trump, but mad enough to flirt with him. They aren’t coming to Hillary, they are staying home or voting third party. Like LBJ in 64′, she has a two year window to make a real impact with progressive legislation. Especially with the Senate and even the House coming back into play. Perhaps she’s enough of an insider to move the ball and enough of a politician to know it has to move leftward. But if she plays to the Acela corridor it’s pitchforks from both wings in 2018.
The polling showed that the Trump voters are “struggling economically” ONLY in comparison to non-Trump voters in the Republican primary. But guess what? They are better-off than most Americans, and they are better off than the supporters of either Democratic nominee.
The longer this campaign goes on, the less likely I am to believe that that “other third” actually exists.
What a depressing election this is.
I am saying there are many economically dislocated people who have found themselves obsolete in the new economy who are waiting to storm the barricades.
Anyway we agree here
and if she blows it, it’s President Ryan in 2020
The Reagan coalition is dead. Neoconservatism and the religious right are politically homeless. His policy agenda is widely opposed by a supermajority of his own party, a consequence of their aging and whitening party base combined with the downscale mobility most of their voters are experiencing.
The Democrats will soon be split between the Bloomberg wing and the Bernie wing of the party. In some ways we are returning to the old coalition based system of the party’s but along ideological rather than geographic grounds. There will be populist conservatives (Trump wing) and establishment conservatives (Ryan wing) and populist liberals (Bernie wing) and establishment liberals (Hillary/Bloomberg wing).
And there will be more and more bills where the Trump and Bernie wings make common cause (trade, entitlements, and maybe immigration come to mind) while the establishment grows closer and closer together in opposition to the populists (trade, foreign policy, incremental social liberalism). In a generation they will likely coalesce into a new party system.
How in the world does “economics” for anyone but the superrich lead to the conclusion that they should vote for Trump (or any Republican for that matter)? Hey I got a brilliant idea! I’ve been shafted by the great upward transfer of wealth over the years, so I’m going to vote for the party which most intentionally tries to make that happen. I’m still feeling the effects of the last recession so I’ll vote for the party whose policies brought us the recession AND prevented more alleviation due to Congressional shenanigans. Yeah – that makes a lot of sense! (snark off).
…you mocked them through the lens of Democratic Party rhetoric.
Have you ever met a Republican who believes that the GOP intentionally tries to make the transfer of wealth go upward while the Democrats do not?
Have you ever met a Republican who believes it was the GOP (not Democrats, Obama, or 9-11 terrorists) whose policies brought us the recession?
Notwithstanding some “helpful” ideas from the DNC, the Clinton campaign left that pretty much alone.
You’re talking about people who voted in the Democratic primary. None of the success that Bernie had in rural areas surprised me, while it did surprise people I know who live in some of those states.
Bernie is a salt of the Earth kind of guy who has had much respect from people, including from those who disagreed with him. While Donald Trump has been described as someone “who speaks his mind” and is incredibly disgusting, Bernie has been considered someone who tells the truth and wants to fight for the downtrodden and wants to make a fair economy that works for everyone (and doesn’t target any marginalized groups).
This notion that Bernie got the votes of Democrats who hated Hillary because marginalized groups that these voters hate were embraced by Hillary is absolutely ridiculous.
…a colleague who recent worked in southern WV mentioned how many Confederate flags she saw in that area with the usual appeals to heritage. Never mind that the whole reason WV is its own state is because those counties seceded from VA in response to VA seceding from the Union.
There were Confederate sympathizers throughout Maryland. Although you are absolutely correct about the secession of WV from VA, we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the feelings of the populace. The region just south of the Mason/Dixon line is where the aphorisms about the Civil war pitting brother against brother and father against son were most apt.
It wasn’t admitted at all until 1863 IIRC and had very few slaves (not a lot of room for plantations in the mountains after all). Border states usually refers to DE, MD, KY, and MO where there were significant slave populations, but no secession (though MD was practically forced to stay at gun point, KY set up a shadow Confederate government in another capital, and MO sent regiments to both sides). As for feelings of the populace, there are probably a couple of states that did secede, but wouldn’t have if the question were put to a plebiscite even assuming the franchise in such circumstance would be limited to white men, so that cuts both ways.
I grew up in MD, the institutional memory of the civil war was still strong when I was young. Not just the monuments and battlefields, but old-timers who remembered and told stories. When I was a kid, civil war veterans still appeared in local parades (usually a handful of VERY old men who had been 8-10 year old drummers in the conflict). My family vacationed in WV when I was young, and we got to know friends who had grown up there. Later, some of the family settled in WV. Discussions about “the war” were frequent and passionate in that region, even among friends. All sides were passionately represented.
I guess I didn’t mean “border state” in the technical sense, more that in the western part of Md (Hancock, Cumberland, points west of Hagerstown), WV is just part of the neighborhood.
NE WV (Berkeley Springs, Martinsburg, Charles Town, Harpers Ferry) is becoming a bedroom and vacation community for Washington DC, and is not representative of the rest of the state politically.
It needs to be said that the entire region, from mid-PA (Altoona, Johnstown, State College) through western MD (Cumberland, Hancock, etc) and into WV has been absolutely devastated by the economy. It is a case study in how huge swaths of America are in SERIOUS economic difficulty even while the published statistics look rosy.
We are in the midst of an economic calamity, especially outside the prosperous northeast, and neither party is doing very much to address it.
So we should come up with policies to address it and campaign on them. Fortunately our nominee already has, I might add her plan was so good I praised it during the heat of the primary when I backed her opponent. Just campaign on it and don’t cede the working class hero status to Trump. He so does not deserve it.
Other than, you know, a state on the border with the confederacy?
The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.
The last civil war widow died in Tennessee in 2003.
A “Border State” is defined as a slave state which did not secede, specifically the four I mentioned.
I agree that texts define “Border State” as you describe.
I’m not talking about texts. I’m talking as someone who grew up in the region. Whether it’s in those texts or not, WV is different from Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, etc. Secession was viewed very differently in WV, just as it was viewed very differently in MD.
We are discussing the political culture of WV, with specific reference to the alignment with the deep south of much of WV. That culture cannot be understood without understanding the role that the civil war played in the region. As CMD observes, the civil war isn’t “past”. The wounds from the civil war are very different in WV than in the deep south, but they are nevertheless still there. The history of WV is fascinating, especially Harpers Ferry.
Perhaps we might focus less on textbook definitions and more on the humanity and culture of WV.
I just find historical ironies amusing, such as a state which owes its very existence to wanting to stay in the Union now feeling more kinship with the former Confederacy.
Another good example is Church of England prelates getting all worked up over whether Prince Charles, divorced himself and now married to a divorcee, should be allowed to become King. I want to ask, “You do realize your church wouldn’t exist if a King hadn’t wanted a divorce badly enough, right?”
…where there was a critical mass of pro-Union sentiment. Tennesee comes to mind…
n/t
I’m with Matthew Yglesias on this. We need to return to a 50 state strategy, and I would rather a big tent on culture and litmus tests on economics than the other way around. Especially since the culture war is largely over and the good guys won.
The religious right is going to be a relic in an election cycle. Nobody my age goes to church, not even in red states. So the way to win over millennials and create a new majority out of the next two cohorts who will uniformly be culturally progressive, is to move to the left on economics. Which is where most Americans already are, apparently in both parties.
…there are a lot more millenials in church than you might think, and many churches do quite a bit of outreach to them.
If you noticed that last weekend’s fundraiser in Osterville was hosted by by former landlords, the Schusters.
I’m going to try time to post about them. For the most part, the Globe has avoided saying anything unpleasant about them, pushing a line that they are philanthropists, and ignoring their activities as slumlords.
…that the first Democrat of any significance to publicly reject HRC as the nominee is the leading candidate for the gubernatorial nomination in WV. She also pointed out that said candidate only became a Dem for this race and that the other candidate for nomination is also anti-Hillary. Apropos of our laments about this state I would say WV DINOs are much worse than MA DINOs.
WV DINOs are much worse than MA DINOs. Vote for HRC because Trump would be a disaster.
Bill Clinton may have done a few bad things (bank deregulation, crime bill, welfare reform)….but he was far better than the GOP alternative…
Can’t we support Democrats on their own merits and not just because “the other guy” is a nightmare?
. . . sometimes. Hopefully.
HRC is the best candidate for a host of reasons on her own merits and I rarely feel like I’m supporting the lesser of the evils. However, elections ARE choices to relative merits are also instructive. NOTA cannot win elections.
EpiPen was developed entirely with taxpayer money.
In 1973, when Kaplan was finalizing the design concept for the EpiPen, he was approached by the U.S. Department of Defense, which was looking for a device that could quickly inject an easily deliverable antidote for nerve gas.
Then follow a long line of government patents, FDA regulations and a load of regulatory capture and you wind up where we are today, with the daughter of a US senator raking in tens of millions of dollars a year with a state protected monopoly. And yeah, she used some of those millions to contribute to the campaign of HRC.
When Thomas Piketty published his 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century, he said that capitalism’s primary beneficiaries aren’t those who make amazing things that improve the world (as its proponents claim) — rather, it favors those who have a lot of money to begin with.
And now this: Heather Bresch did not invent the EpiPen, she simply used her company’s wealth to purchase the rights to it and exploit its monopoly for massive profits.
behavior is called “rent-seeking,” which boils down to doing stupid shit to increase profits. A great example of rent-seeking is Apple, many products are not upgradeable, they overcharge for replacement chargers.
Piketty argues that r > g. Basically, rich people have investments that have a higher return on investment than what a growing economy provides.
Describes rent seeking in this way : —the practice of increasing wealth by taking it from others rather than generating any actual economic activity.
It’s far easier and cheaper for a company to lobby the government to change a rule or adopt a “trade agreement” in order to boost profits than it is to actually build a better mousetrap,
Most of the mousetraps made in the US since about 1980 have been intended to get more product out of fewer and less skilled labor hours. We’ve spent at least the last 35-40 years finding ways to eliminate workers and jobs.
It’s therefore not surprising that we’ve succeeded. The question is what we’re going to do now.
We’re at 5% unemployment. So 95% of us have a job. We just cut the wages. Our #1 private employer used to be General Motors, now it’s WalMart. There is no more sill involved in putting wheels on a Chevrolet rolling down the assembly line than there is stocking the shelves in housewares. I might even say that shelf stocking takes more talent.
We just cut wages. Republicans tell us that our wages are low because we make poor choices and we don’t work hard enough. Democrats tell us our wages are low because we don’t have enough education and job training. Both are true to a small extent. The bigger reason is that labor is no longer organized politically.
LOL. STOP.
In a well-run market economy, this will cause people to lose jobs but a robust welfare state is supposed to give them soft landings and ready them for new jobs in newer industries.
In our racist-infused political system, we can’t have a nice welfare state because it might benefit “those people” more than they “deserve” because all their job losses are due to laziness, of course, rather than economic churn.
was a bad deal, but Democrats took it. Capitalism is plagued with ups & downs and the welfare state keeps the commoners from rioting in the streets and burning down the homes of the owners. What we need is a shared economy, where the laborers own the means of production. This is not “Commie Russian” stuff, it’s part of the DNA from our founders, not all of them, just the good ones.
I’m not sure you understand what is meant by this term
I think we are going to turn to more and more radical answers as the decade goes on and more and more workers find their professions obsolete or outsourced. It’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle via protectionism or nativism a la Sanders and Trump, but I can see a reimagined welfare state serving this purpose.
We will have to seriously ask ourselves if we have reached a post-work world and how to mitigate against it. Basic income, cooperatives, and massive taxes on the wealthy and global capital will become more and more mainstream ideas as the pain wears on.
The French and Russian Revolutions will look like a minor squabble in comparison.
The question is will this revolution be peaceful or violent.
Sickening affair indeed. Figuratively, and also literally.
The company was founded in West Virginia. It’s current headquarters are in Pennsylvania. However, to dodge their responsibility to pay taxes and support the USA where they make enough to pay one woman $18 Million a year….they are registered in the Netherlands.
…why the corporate address matters. Presumably they sell millions of EpiPens in the United States. Therefore, they should be taxed on revenues generated in US sales by the US, corporate HQ notwithstanding.
Not entirely in this case, but this case does give us numerous examples of regulatory capture. Here we see the U.S. Patent Office, the I.R.S. and the F.D.A. all behind regulations that make all this possible.
That’s why I get a kick out of Republicans who say they want fewer regulations. In truth, they want fewer regulations of one type and a boatload of the regulations that are written by the very same interests they are supposed to regulate.