Is This the Conversation We’ve Been Waiting For . . . Or Not?

Posted: January 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, 2012 primaries, Banksters, Congress, Corporate Crime, corporate money, Economy, income inequality, Regulation, Republican Tax Fetishists | Tags: , , , , | 22 Comments

The recent brouhaha over Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney locking horns over Romney’s involvement [I created 100,000 jobs] at Bain Capital has raised speculation that a conversation about capitalism, the way it’s been practiced these last 30-40 years, is about to commence, a conversation that is way overdue.

The irony is that the issue has been brought to the fore by Republican candidates, none of whom questioned the blowback of leveraged buyouts [LBO] and private equity firms in the past or even whispered the traitorous phrases–crony capitalism, vulture capitalism–in public.  In fact, the centerpiece of GOP economic theory is free market fundamentalism—set the market free, unfetter business from governmental regulation and Heaven’s Gate will open.

Not quite.

There’s the 2008 meltdown to contend with, the abuses of Wall Street and a clear example that Greenspan’s ‘self-regulating’ market theory was a cruel and greedy joke.  Following the meltdown, Greenspan himself glumly admitted his worldview was incorrect.

In addition, we have plenty of evidence that the so-called Trickle-Down philosophy has not ‘raised all ships’ as heralded by the true believers but rather led to huge income disparities, flat wages and the death-rattle of the middle-class.

Yes, there is the question of globalization.  Like it or not, we have grown interconnected.  But when decisions are made purely on profit, the quicker the better, then transferring manufacturing abroad, exploiting cheap foreign labor, taking advantage of lax worker safety rules and nonexistent environmental regulations begins to make a twisted sort of sense.  So, too with trade agreements made deliberately lopsided and unfair because these ‘deals’ have no national loyalty.  Profit is king; all else is subservient.

The long-term damage is massive.  We don’t have to speculate about this.  The evidence is everywhere in our unemployment numbers [which are far worse than reported] and the slide into poverty for alarming numbers of Americans.  Add in the housing crisis, still escalating health care costs, the Gulf oil spill, endless wars, the battles over extracting oil, coal and natural gas while refusing to work on rational and workable alternative energy policies,  and .  .  .

Well, it’s enough to make your head explode.

But suddenly, the door has flown open for a conversation on what it means to be a shareholder capitalist.  The unquestioned virtue of profit over all else has begun to raise its ugly head.

For instance, what value [if any] is created for a society when money is valued above all else, valued over the welfare of fellow citizens–the sick, the disabled, even our children.  What value is maintained when corners are cut, laws rewritten, ridiculous tax policies hyped as necessary for growth and future job creation?  But the mythical jobs, positions offering a living wage, never come. What does it mean when massive profits stream only to the top tier of the population, the so-called job creators, while everyone and everything else is left to flounder?

I call it a no-value deal–a lie, a theft–the magnitude of which hollows out a society, sucks it dry.

For too long Newt Gingrich [for all his caterwauling now] and his like-minded buddies have called it the free enterprise system.  Free for whom?  Certainly not for the families who have lost their homes, seen their jobs exported and have no reasonable expectation that their own children will ever see better times.  Not with the continuation of what Dylan Ratigan has termed Extractionism, a system that takes money from others without offering anything of value, anything that actually promotes growth or improves society.  This is a system that merely fills the coffers of the Extractionists, while they play a heady game of King of the Mountain and continue to spread the folklore that this is what freedom and liberty look like.

But let’s be fair.  Mitt Romney is not the devil incarnate, nor is Bain Capital the worst of the worst.  Much of what Newt Gingrich’s SuperPac is selling to the electorate conveniently let’s Wall Street and multinational corporations off the hook.  The ads fail to mention the cushy collusion of legislators who push laws and tax breaks to keep the circle spinning.  And Washington Democrats who may be dancing the happy dance now are just as guilty of supporting the status quo, going along to get along, eagerly taking campaign donations from their own smiling Extractionists.

Is this the conversation Republicans are offering?

Sorry, no.

Rush Limbaugh has been apoplectic on the issue.  According to Limbaugh, Gingrich has ‘Gone Perot.’

So you might say that Newt now has adopted the Perot stance, because he just said it: ‘I’m gonna make sure that Romney doesn’t come out of New Hampshire with any momentum whatsoever.’ And he’s using language that the left uses, and he’s attempting to make hay with this. You know, he’s trying to dredge up and have long-lasting negatives attach to Romney [this is what’s so unsettling about this] in the same way the left would say it. You could, after all these bites, say, “I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.

Rudy Giuliani also weighed in.

What the hell are you doing, Newt?” Giuliani said this morning on “Fox and Friends.” “The stuff you’re saying is one of the reasons we’re in this trouble now.

This whole ignorant populist view of the economy that was proven to be incorrect with the Soviet Union with Chinese communism.

Oh yes, the ‘ignorant populist’ view that has beamed a light on business as usual.  Which btw, is not working, except for a tiny fraction of the American public.  If anything, Uncle Newt has pulled back the curtain and revealed an unsettling truth.

This might not be the full-throated conversation Americans need to engage in.  Still it’s a beginning from a most unexpected quarter, whose raison d’etre is as caught up in short-term results as are its economic principles.  Almost Occupy Wall St. in nature, the conversation is now in the open.  This is a conversation that defies Mitt Romney’s suggestion that sensitive subjects are better left to the privacy of ‘quiet rooms.’

This is the conversation of the moment.  The first word, the opening sentence.  It has just begun.

Crony Capitalism and Damned Lies

Posted: November 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Corporate Crime, corruption, Economy | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

I just had to point out a WSJ Op-Ed/article that is just one more example of how much the media has ceded facts to right wing tropes.  It’s written by Arthur Brooks. It’s called “Fairness and the Occupy Movement”.  Brooks tries to equivocate the rent seeking activities of rich and powerful interests like the war and finance industries and the existence of social safety net programs like food stamps.  It is not difficult for me to understand there is no real connection between providing things to the poor that need programs to stay alive and handing stuff needlessly to rich industries to attain extraordinary profits from market protections, subsidies and out right federal largess.  Why is it so difficult for the press and politicians to grok the difference?

Economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Thoma call shenanigans on Brooks’ pretzel logic and self-serving ignorance of facts.  Of course, I’ve come to expect nothing less from the American Enterprise Institute and its researchers who suspend all kinds of data and theories for their highly paid propaganda.  The Wall Street Journal is basically an arm of that enterprise.  The problem is that these lies shape policy debates.

First, Sachs points out this is an absolutely disingenuous narrative.

Where Brooks goes wrong is his description of inequality and fairness. The Republican view, which he espouses, is to reduce taxes, cut government services, and let markets be the standard of fairness. Here Brooks is deceptive in his rendition of the facts.

First, Brooks downplays the extent of inequality that has been built up in thirty years of crony capitalism. He favorably writes that “every income quintile has seen a real increase in purchasing power of at least 18% over the past 30 years,” citing a recent study of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Yet the real point of the CBO report, which Brooks does not mention, is that the richest 1% enjoyed a staggering rise of 275%, while the poorest stumbled by with a meager 18% gain. Moreover, the CBO report takes the data only to 2007. By now, even those meager gains at the bottom have been mostly lost.

Second, Brooks fails to note that the situation for the poor will be drastically worse if federal transfer programs are cut as the Republican Party is urging. The poorest quintile depends on these federal programs to stay alive. If the poorest Americans had to survive without government support, their incomes would be slashed to disastrous levels.

The Republicans answer to crony capitalism is to slash government. Yet by this they mean mainly an attack on the remaining social programs. This is a kind of bait-and-switch strategy: rev up the anger against government corruption, and then kill the life-support programs of the poor and working class. Crony capitalism exists mainly in the big-ticket sectors of the economy — banking, oil, real estate, private health insurance, military contractors, and infrastructure — not in the essential but much smaller parts of the economy: malnutrition of poor children, lack of quality pre-school, insufficient job training, and inadequate student loan coverage.

Yes, crony capitalism should be confronted anywhere in the economy, yet cutting the life-support systems for the working class and poor won’t fix government, but instead would cripple the prospects of more than 100 million poor and near-poor Americans. To control crony capitalism, we need to direct our attention where it belongs: the wealth-support systems of the rich, not the life-support systems of the poor.

Sachs points out 5 egregious examples of crony capitalism.  Mark Thoma goes even farther. He discusses how the Democrats have been sucked into the right wing agenda of twisted facts and ground shifting. Your guess is as good as mine as to how this has come about.  I’m sure Dems like Ben Nelson support the agenda and could care less about the untrue narrative that supports wealth transfer and market manipulation for the uberrich.  Others are likely captured because they want the wealth that comes with “serving the public” and they want to get re-elected.  Political office appears to be the fast track to the 1 percent these days.  Others probably think this is sincere negotiation or they get some side benefit to concession so they go along.

The hope for common ground where there is none can lead to Obama like one-sided concessionary behavior, and we have more than enough of that already. Yes, let’s find common ground where it exists, but let’s also be careful not to try to meet in the middle when the other side is pursuing a bait and switch strategy. The Republican goal of reducing the size of government through reductions in social programs is unwavering, and they will pursue any argument handy at the moment to bring this about. In recessions, they tell us tax cuts are needed to stimulate the economy, but the real goal is to cut funding for the government permanently. Once the taxes are reduced, they won’t agree to increase them again (unless it’s to protect their cronies, i.e. an increase in payroll taxes is fine so long as it prevents the increase in taxes on the wealthy needed to fund it). In normal times, we’re told tax cuts stimulate economic growth even though there’s not much evidence to support this claim. Presently, it’s the cronyism argument, and tomorrow it will be something else. The Republicans have their eyes on the ball, and the rules of the game are to be adjusted as necessary to allow them the best opportunity to take the ball across the goal line. Winning is all that matters. Fairness for both sides playing the game, etc. has nothing to do with it and we’d be wise to keep our eyes on the ball as well.

The other thing to note is that the location of common ground has shifted to the right from where it used to be. “Meet us in the middle” now means meeting on ground that would have been considered on the right not all that long ago. Democrats have already conceded too much in the ideological war, and there comes time when leaders in the party must take a stand and hold their ground. That time is long past.

What is clear to me is that there is very little left of what an economist would view as a free,efficient, functional market through out our economy.  Economies of scale, information brokers, concentration of markets into the hands of very few corporations, tax subsidies, federal contracts handed to friends of politicians, advertising, imagined product diversity, insider information, and moral hazard have all dealt blows to efficient pricing, resource allocation, and resultant quantity produced. It’s terribly dishonest of people like Arthur Brooks to equivocate programs that exist to protect the weakest in the society from the predatory behavior of the most rich and powerful who destroy functioning markets to achieve extraordinary profits and market power.

I have no idea why any one takes these fake “think tanks” seriously except they put out propaganda to serve the interests of crony capitalism itself..   The Paul Ryan Budget Scam was an example of crank analysis coming from the Heritage Foundation. Their output plagues policy discussion.  Their stuff wouldn’t be given the light of day in actual empirical or theoretical journals so they have to invent some institute just to look serious.  How these guys can lie with such a straight face is beyond me.  Also beyond me is the number of people that fall for the lies.  But then, some gullible and clueless media outlet or one saying that they’ll print lies just to be perceived as fair or some journalist with an agenda runs with the story.  Then, crank analysis achieves some critical mass of “serious”.  By the time that damned lie gets fact checked, no one is paying attention any more.  It’s no wonder that we are so f’d.

If a Rubio screams from Down a Rabbit Hole, does any one hear It?

Posted: July 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Media SUCKS, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , | 11 Comments

Occasionally one of the villagers gets it right (h/t to Digby).  Today’s Awake Villager Award goes to Kevin Drum of MoJo who expresses utter contempt for the current Republican strategy of destroying the country at any cost to take down a Democratic President while mentioning that said Democratic President and his crony congress cadre have basically given said right wingers absolutely everything they’ve wanted for over a decade without a fight. I bestow this prize because the piece also recognizes the complicity of “journalists” in this charade.

People who are making policies and people giving air time to policy makers these days exist  in a state of complicity in lies. The continuation of more and more of the same damned policies are basically getting the same damned result yet real analysis of the results and the connection to the policy never occurs in the public forum.  The polices of the last 12 years induced a financial crisis and are inducing another one.  They created high unemployment and falling wages and they continue to perpetuate joblessness and income inequality. No one holds the policy makers or the narrators of the results accountable to hard, cold reality.   How is it that this game continues to grow exponentially without riots in the streets by the 99% of the country that’s been hurt and continues to be hurt by this insanity?  Are we so doped up with sports and “reality” shows that we don’t have time to take stock of what these people are doing to us?

But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at. As a result, guys like Marco Rubio have a free hand to insist that Obama — Obama! The guy who rescued the banking system, bailed out GM, and whose worst crime against the rich is a desire to increase their income tax rate 4.6 percentage points! — is a “left-wing strong man” engaged in brutal class warfare against the wealthy. And Rubio does it without blinking. Hell, he probably even believes it.

We are well and truly down the rabbit hole. The party of class warfare for the past 30 years is fighting a war against an empty field and the result has been a rout. I wonder what would happen if the rest of us ever actually started fighting back?

There are so many little gems in this assessment it’s hard to point to them all.  The Republican denial of how their policies have and continue to trash the nation’s economy is the obvious one.  The next is the obvious enabling by the press that exists in some strange struggle to seem fair or be some Orwellian version of  “fair and balanced”  that ignores facts and data and experts in fields.  The press puts party operatives and politicians on TV to lie their frigging hearts out without fact checking their statements.  Some how, fair and balanced means repeatedly letting people put out “opinions” like the sky is green and dirt is blue.  An opinion isn’t misstating facts last time I checked my notes on the scientific method and the rules of public debate.

This is what drives me craziest. The press treats “seriously” people that get on TV to present alternate reality under the guise of looking at all sides.  Misstatement of facts are not opinions.  They are damned lies.

Most journalists these days peddle in access to lies and not much more.  There is lots and lots of irrefutable, scientific evidence on evolution, climate change, and the results of “voodoo” economic policy.  One does not get an “opinion” on appendicitis except on TV news shows.  In life, a certified and trained doctor  diagnoses the condition.  Fair and balanced reporting should not mean getting a panel of grade school educated yokels on TV who insist that people can’t get appendicitis because the appendix doesn’t exist.  It also doesn’t mean that some congressman that sits on a committee looking at health issues should be freed of the burden of proving his point that the appendix doesn’t exist because god and Ayn Rand wrote it down somewhere.  There are tons of freaks these days that are funded by rich idiots–many that own said corporate media outlets–that set up “think tanks” to put out false research that basically states that the sky is green.  These freaks show up on TV news constantly.   Study after study shows that people that view Fox news–as an example–don’t just hold opinions.  They hold completely false information. This is a huge problem because an effective democracy relies on an informed electorate.  We are getting systematically fed falsehoods that are killing our country and our livelihoods. This particulary bothers me because as an economics and finance professor, I have to confront the economic and finance fairy tales daily.  I hear the economic version of “the appendix doesn’t exist” from people who think they are just expressing an opinion instead of repeating a complete falsehood.

I guess what really struck me the most about Drum’s rant was that same sense of frustration and near-depression throughout that basically haunts me too.   I have absolutely no idea how to stop what he’s described. What brought about the huge changes during the Great Depression was the vision of  a leader and the people who surrounded him and the fear of the elite that US citizens might actually take to the streets.  They feared it was the New Deal or a Communist-style revolution in which they would lose everything.  The political and economically powerful no longer fear us and we no longer have leaders with vision beyond their own re-elections.  Something is going to give eventually and I’m just hoping its not the 200+ year experience that’s called the United States of America. Over the last thirty years, all three branches of government and the press have been successfully infiltrated to represent only the most rich and powerful.  What are we going to do about it?

Oh. The answer to the question at the top is that every one hears the Rubio Down the Rabbit Hole.  That’s because we’re not only victims of crony capitalism, we’re victims of crony journalism.

Not a Socialist

Posted: February 15, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: president teleprompter jesus, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy | Tags: | 2 Comments

so⋅cial⋅ism

–noun

1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

I cringe every time I hear the Right Wing Media machine continue to label Obama a socialist, a liberal, or even progressive. He’s undoubtedly maintained more status quo from the previous administration than not. There have been a few marginal changes in laws impacting GLBT civil rights, women’s reproductive health, and a return to civil rights in general, but creeping back towards the middle after a big lurch right does not earn him an leftish label in my book.

I’ve used the phrase crony capitalism before to describe Obama’s approach to the economy and the power structure within the beltway. Michael Barone, Senior Political Analyst for The Washington Examiner goes into the numbers vs. the rhetoric on lobbyists and lobbying in the New World Order of Obamanomics. The bottom line is that Obama likes his friends rich and works to ensure they get richer. That is not capitalism.  That is not socialism. That is actively creating the formation of monopolies and writing laws to protect monopoly interests. This is the antithesis to both capitalism and socialism

Fast-forward to the present day. Lobbyists, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, had a record 2009 in Barack Obama’s Washington. Despite candidate Obama’s promises to shun them, they raked in $3,470,000,000. Somewhere up there, Tommy Corcoran is chuckling.

Last week, amid Washington’s blizzards, Obama was asked about the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and the $9 million bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

“I know both these guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” he said. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.” So much for campaign-trail denunciations of “fat cat” bankers and bloated bonuses.

It does not take any savvy to take advantage of government bailouts, near zero loans of capital from the FED, and announcements by the FED of planned buying of you and your buddies toxic assets. It also does not take savvy to be on Timothy Geithner’s best buddy list when things are coming apart at the seams when he can move the market in your direction. Consider this from Baseline Scenario today.

At 9:30pm on Sunday, September 21, 2008, Goldman Sachs was saved from imminent collapse by the announcement that the Federal Reserve would allow it to become a bank holding company – implying unfettered access to borrowing from the Fed and other forms of implicit government support, all of which subsequently proved most beneficial. Officials allowed Goldman to make such an unprecedented conversion in the name of global financial stability. (The blow-by-blow account is in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail; this is confirmed in all substantial detail by Hank Paulson’s memoir.)

We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November. These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets. When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.

A single rogue trader can bring down a bank – remember the case of Barings. But a single rogue bank can bring down the world’s financial system.

Goldman will dismiss this as “business as usual” and, to be sure, a few phone calls around Washington will help ensure that Goldman’s primary supervisor – now the Fed – looks the other way.

This is not socialism. This is not the way either perfectly competitive markets nor centrally planned economies work. In both situations, the result should be widespread distribution of goods, services and income. This is simply re-writing the rules of the game to benefit the already rich and powerful. Even rightwing blogs get the picture, but many right wingers find the wrong bottom line. Here’s an example from SayAnythingBlog.com. This part is the correct part. The conclusion is a bit of the mark. Some of the commenters are way off the mark. Screaming Marxism with no real knowledge of what it is does not help a conversation, yet alone lead to a solution of the basic problem.

This is what happens when the government has too much power. Rather than the economy being about who can offer the best goods and services at the most reasonable prices, who can outperform everyone else to provide citizens with what they want at prices they can afford, the economy becomes about who can lobby, bribe and coerce the best deal out of the government.

Grease the right palm and you get government contracts, bailouts and favorable taxation and regulation. Grease the wrong palm and you get demonized by grandstanding politicians and summoned to explain yourself in front of Congress.

Businesses under the vision of a perfectly competitive market–essentially the Invisible Hand concept set up by Adam Smith–are not supposed to be BIG. In the 18th century world of little trade guilds, thousands of small farmers and merchants, and a few monopolies (like the India Tea Company), the original concept of the market did not include megacorporations, huge trade unions, and a democratically elected government that does anything to enable its benefactors. The crony capitalism we see now had its roots in the Civil War, and as Barone points out, most recently the World War 2 period. Remember, Dwight David Eisenhower was the president who termed military industrial complex. A lot of the first lobbyists came from the War Lobby. Lincoln saw the dangers of huge businesses, making money off wars, lobbying congress for the creation of further laws in 1863. Again, all of our monopoly laws are rooted in the Sherman Antitrust Law of 1890. Lenin’s big academic analysis was about J.P. Morgan, interlocking directorates, and huge corporations. The father of modern day socialism/Marxism would have been just updating his old arguments which are pretty much the same thing you see quoted above from the right wing blog. Barone argues that FDR used cronies to win a war, but that Obama is using it for something completely different.

Crony capitalism is now the order of the day in the United States. The government and the United Auto Workers own General Motors and Chrysler, which aren’t likely to pay back their billions in TARP money any time soon, if ever. Meanwhile the government tells Americans to stop driving Toyotas.

The government was going to remake the health care sector, and so Billy Tauzin and other health care industry lobbyists were busy in the White House cutting deals to keep their clients above water. The government was going to remake the energy sector, and utility CEOs and lobbyists have been busy flaunting their green credentials.

As my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has been documenting, Big Business has been busy lobbying Big Government for “reforms” that serve big companies’ interests. Wal-Mart backs a health care mandate, Philip Morris shapes tobacco regulation, General Electric is setting up a joint venture to trade carbon offsets (wasn’t that Enron’s line of work back in the day?).

The picture is not pretty. Government’s pets or, in the president’s words, “savvy businessmen,” use government to get policies that will give them competitive advantages and stifle smaller competitors. Pleasing their masters in government is now absorbing the psychic energy of CEOs who used to concentrate on meeting consumers’ needs in order to make profits.

This is not capitalism. This is not socialism. This is not Marxism. This is not progressive politics. This is not the policy of some one who is too liberal. This is the policy of a beltway that seeks to stay in power and privilege by enacting laws that provide unfair advantage to their cronies. This is not what many democrats or republicans of past would have found tenable. It’s an unholy alliance between huge business interests and the government of the ‘people’. It can be measured in terms of lobbying dollars and the numbers of Tom Daschles and Billy Tauzins; former elected officials who have joined the ranks of lobbyists.

I’ll give the Financial Times, the bottom line in an article called “Obama fails to turn back lobbying cash tide.”

The lobbying frenzy peaked in the fourth quarter of 2009, which hit a record of $955m spent, just as negotiations over the now stalled healthcare reform supported by the Obama administration were ramped up on Capitol Hill.

“Lobbying appears recession-proof,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center. “Even when companies are scaling back other operations, many view lobbying as a critical tool in protecting their future interests.”

The pharmaceutical and health products industry broke all records by spending $267m last year, in what the Center’s analysts said was the “greatest amount ever spent on lobbying efforts by a single industry for one year”.

Not all of those funds were spent rallying against healthcare, however. The pharmaceutical industry’s main lobby group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent $26m lobbying in favour of healthcare reform after it negotiated an $80bn deal with the Senate and White House last summer that critics said was a gift to the industry.

The chief negotiator of that deal, former congressman Billy Tauzin, yesterday announced his resignation as president of the trade group. Mr Tauzin, who has run the association since 2005, said he would formally step down in June.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong. It doesn’t help to correct the problem by mislabeling it. The right and the left both see problems with this. The name calling has to stop in order for us all to work for the better interests of our country.

mo·nop·o·ly mo·nop·o·lies

-noun
1. Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service: “Monopoly frequently … arises from government support or from collusive agreements among individuals” (Milton Friedman).
2. Law A right granted by a government giving exclusive control over a specified commercial activity to a single party.
3. a. A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity.
b. A commodity or service so controlled.
4. a. Exclusive possession or control: arrogantly claims to have a monopoly on the truth.
b. Something that is exclusively possessed or controlled: showed that scientific achievement is not a male monopoly.