Sit down for this one: Donald Trump lied about how much money his DC hotel brought in. It ran in the red, of course — this is a guy who figured out how to lose money running casinos — and lost $70 million, despite L’il Donnie Two Scoops accepting $3.7 million from foreign governments. This is an incredibly low amount to sell out a country for.
Because he’s a piker, Trump can only dream of ripping off the public on the scale of Big Pharma. Consider Merck. As Thom Hartmann explains using the example of molnupiravir, a monoclonal antibody being used to treat Covid, American taxpayer/consumers are being reamed at both ends.
It was originally developed by Emory University to treat horses infected with Venezuelan equine encephalitis with a $10 million grant from the Department of Defense and $19 million from the National Institutes of Health. In other words, its invention was paid for with your tax dollars.
Emory University passed along the patent on molnupiravir to a small company, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, which in turn passed it along to the pharmaceutical giant Merck. Manufacturing cost for molnupiravir, according to a report from researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health, is around $17.74 for a 5-day course of treatment. Merck just signed a contract with the federal government to sell 1.7 million treatment courses for the government to distribute to infected people for $712 each.
This price-gouging hustle was both made possible—and, ironically, perhaps made illegal—by a piece of legislation passed back in 1980 that gave universities the ability to sell patents to inventions funded with federal money to non-profit organizations and small businesses…but not to major corporations. Since then, small businesses like Ridgeback have served as middlemen handing off profitable pharmaceuticals developed with our tax dollars to giant corporations like Merck.
All you young’uns mock us, but back when we had a president whose scandal sparked a Constitutional crisis, we paid more attention — my generation can still rattle off the names of minor Watergate co-conspirators, many of whom did time for little more than passing along the checks. This excerpt from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s report on the insurrection can get you started on a list of people who damn well ought to do time this time around, because they did a lot more than just pass along checks.
Because Republican politics is all performance art, it’s easy to lose track, but remember when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced his state would build the silly-ass wall the Biden administration wouldn’t, and that he’d crowd-source the funding? He did, and though it was far less than he wanted, his appeal did bring in $54 million. Just one problem: All but about $1 million came from a single donor, a member of the execrable Mellon family, which is why I think that if we’re not going to tax the rich into the poorhouse or assassinate them, we should at least sterilize them.
Philadelphia’s Italian-American community has succeeded in its effort to demonstrate that Italian-Americans are the most pathetic ethnic group in the country, managing to convince a judge — an elected judge, which is why electing judges is the worst idea in a country full of bad ideas — that the city had to remove the plywood surrounding the Christopher Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza because a bunch of dead-end guidos can’t live without pretending that they have some kind of kinship with Columbus. News flash — they don’t. Columbus was Genovese. There was no “Italy” when he made his voyages, and most of the Italian-Americans in this country come from the southern part of the peninsula — literally another kingdom at the time Columbus sailed. A more rational judge overruled that idiot decision — really, we’re going to let small, ill-educated mobs set city policy now? — but it shows, in a nutshell, why I’m leaving the country and this is my last DL Open Thread for the foreseeable future.
The floor’s yours. Last one out turn off the lights.