Policy 10/24/2009
Posted by rosshunter on October 23, 2009
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where does the corruption of our government come from? It comes from business.
From non-regulated, non-accountable, non-responsible business. Something outside of the political process that the people participate in.
How do we the people fight back against the lobbyists and the corruption? Not by eliminating government.
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Ezra Klein – How the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists cost America $378 billion
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Actually the article is about lobbying, and the money spent by the biologics companies to hold exclusivity of patent on the new miracle drugs before the generic companies can make them too.
Generics have saved $734 billion in a decade with the other drugs.
But biologics is a new plateau of medical treatment only recently attained. Biologics are derived as always in medicine on the back of the standard model of the basic research being performed by government and other tax-funded entities, and with the final manufacturing end then handed away at no charge to business.
Nontheless, the industry argues that too short a period of time for exclusivity of manufacture will not allow companies to recoup their development costs.
Before biologics, drug companies had five years to make their margin. Obama as a compromise is suggesting 7 years. The companies want 12 years as a minimum.
The article concludes by asking if the government will have the strength to resist the massive lobbying dollars (which cloud the air with consultants and dire prognostications) and to conduct this negotiation – where the asking party of course overstates as we all do in a negotiation – to the benefit of the dying patients who can’t afford more life, or to the profits of the biologics companies.
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visonbrkr you crystallize the underlying dilemma here with your support for the “liberal” position.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all deliberate this matter so that those with more liberal (“give to the people”) leanings could spar with those who held more conservative (“but don’t take from the owners”) leanings, and between the two extremes a representative balance could be struck.
What damages this process for all of us is the distortion of lobbying, especially as it over-advocates, clouding the issues with spurious argument, and actually wearing opponents down with a kind of fatigue.
I’ve said before that I think we have a good political system except for the corruptions upon that system. But I’m starting to realize that a system susceptible to those corruptions indicates a systemic flaw itself.
How to strengthen the immune system of our political process?
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We’re not talking about more taxes, we’re talking about redistribution, narrowing that widened gulf between the holders of wealth and the dispossessed.
We’re talking about redressing the massive shift in equities of the last 30 years, from Reagan on.
There are reasons that the culture records a lack of progress in recent decades of that old American Dream – it stopped happening, and regresssive ideologies rolled back a lot of the well-being of ordinary people.
Every chance, every micro-opportunity arising in the legislative chamber to redress this imbalance will be taken I trust, and should be taken, by the Democrats who were elected in general principle to do this very thing.
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America’s unusually democratic democracy
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I think the system really does work along the lines of the upper house acting as a cooling process for hot legislation from the lower.
Also it takes much to develop an involved interest in any particular field, and each house has its acknowledged “experts” – you can’t just develop ideas on a dime. This is especially so at the Senate level perhaps, which, as said, is less the originating arena and more the finalizing arena.
Especially with some study over the years I’ve always thought we have a pretty good system of government – it’s the corruptions upon that system that cause most of our heartburn I think.
It’s not that the system is rotten, or government inept, more that money is rotten and inept, but carries the most weight and and has its way against all reason.
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well if this thread is continuing this morning, let me add that the word “democracy” is a loaded one, since the founders of our system wanted a republican form of representation, not a fully typical democracy, which they equated with mob rule and its contemporary menace, the guillotine.
So they wanted – and created (and this is what we’re dealing with) – a system that embraced proportional representation (one man one vote) somewhat equally with non-proportional representation.
Bicameral systems of upper and lower houses seemed to be working well, in Europe and the current states, so as the Union was devised the states became the upper house with one state two votes.
They debated if non-landowners should be given a vote at all, but eventually settled for yes. However, the brake of the states in the senate was intended to destroy the possibiity of “democracy,” precisely so that states with large populations couldn’t so easily prevail upon the inhabitants of the less populated states. This was a deliberate, and very liberal, altruistic conception.
Personally I think it works well, but you have to take the long view to think this perhaps.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
