Even the one "enviro" thing that Joe Manchin supports is a benefit to his personal bottom line. Why Manchin will profit from abandoned mine land reclamation, from our friends at @Sludge:https://t.co/xZnompee9F

— David Dayen (@ddayen) September 23, 2021

Lachlan Murdoch defended Carlson in April by claiming that the host wasn't actually advocating white replacement theory. He's now doing so explicitly and Fox News is promoting it on their homepage.https://t.co/HrPI1azu2Y

— Philip Bump (@pbump) September 23, 2021

NEWS: Dark-money group @NoLabelsOrg to donors: Reconciliation bill can still be killed https://t.co/whBfFJ1hpv

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 23, 2021

https://www.salon.com/2021/09/23/big-pharma-firms-donated-750k-to-kyrsten-sinema–then-she-opposed-bill/

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the controversial Arizona Democrat who threatens to derail President Biden’s legislative agenda, received more than $750,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. After that, she announced her opposition to a Democratic plan to lower prescription drug costs.

Sinema told White House officials that she opposes House and Senate bills that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug costs, sources told Politico this week. Democrats estimate these bills would save $450 billion over the next decade and thereby pay for a large portion of President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan. The budget bill would expand child care, health care and paid family leave and would fund programs to combat climate change, among other measures. Three House Democrats have also balked at the plan, although they have offered a “centrist” alternative that would drastically limit which drugs are subject to Medicare negotiation. Sinema reportedly opposes that proposal as well. During her successful 2018 Senate campaign, Sinema repeatedly vowed to lower prescription drug prices and drug costs for seniors.

Sinema is a longtime favorite of the pharmaceutical industry and now appears ready to undermine Biden’s entire agenda as Big Pharma wages a lobbying blitz in hopes of torpedoing the bill, which nearly 90% of voters support. Sinema and several House Democrats who oppose the drug pricing plan have received major financial support from the industry. Given a 50-50 Senate and a narrow House majority of 220 to 212 (with three seats currently vacant), their opposition could sink the proposal or even the entire budget bill.
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Sinema has received $519,988 from PACs and individuals in the pharmaceutical industry throughout her political career, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. She brought in more than $120,000 in pharma contributions between 2019 and 2020 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Sinema has also received $190,161 from donors in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space and $62,797 from the medical supplies industry.

Sinema’s office is led by a former lobbyist whose firm worked on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. The senator’s chief of staff, Meg Joseph, was a registered lobbyist and principal at Clark & Weinstock, where her clients included the health insurer Health Net. During her tenure, the company also lobbied on behalf of numerous pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, drug distributor AmerisourceBergen Corp., and the biotech firm Genzyme Corp. It also lobbied on behalf of Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and AdvaMed, two major industry trade groups.

Sinema got major backing from the industry before her threat to derail the Democrats’ drug bill. Center Forward, a Washington nonprofit that has received at least $4.5 million from PhRMA, has run TV and digital ads praising Sinema for the past two weeks, according to The Daily Poster, and sent out pro-Sinema mailers urging recipients to thank the senator for “fighting as an independent voice.” The group’s board includes at least two PhRMA lobbyists who work on drug pricing issues and represent numerous pharmaceutical companies.

Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called out Big Pharma’s campaign to defeat the drug pricing legislation during a speech on Tuesday in front of PhRMA’s headquarters in Washington.

“The overriding motivation of the pharmaceutical industry is greed,” he said. “Their overriding goal is to make as much money as they can by squeezing as much as they possibly can out of the sick, out of the elderly and out of the desperate.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/atlas-covid-herd-immunity/

What is happening in the American South is no accident. It is not born of ignorance or folly. It is a choice. Consider this comment in a New York Times article by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “Clearly the vaccines are keeping most of these people out of the hospital, but we’re not building the herd immunity that people hoped,” he said (emphasis mine). Herd immunity. We’re back to Scott Atlas, who would be a footnote in epidemic history—except for the thousands of deaths for which he is responsible. DeSantis was an early adherent of the notion of herd immunity espoused by Atlas and a group of scientists funded by the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research. Governor DeSantis and his colleagues in the South genuinely think they are doing the right thing. Their persistent, horrific quest for herd immunity confirms preexisting biases about the role of the state in our lives—the less the better. In the People’s Temple of the Sunshine State, this faith has led the people’s leader to hand out the Kool-Aid to his own citizens, leading them to their own deaths.

Remember, before Covid-19 the South was already the least healthy region in the country: People there lived shorter lives, with much higher rates of chronic conditions. The South was the epicenter of the American AIDS epidemic—and rife with other infectious diseases. Yet, except for Louisiana and Arkansas, most of the states in the Deep South refuse to expand Medicaid—depriving many of their citizen of access to medical care that can make their lives better. While that, too, may be rooted in a libertarian, small-government impulse, writers like Jeneen Interlandi of The New York Times have made a compelling case that decisions to restrict access to health care in the United States have everything to do with race. This is where American libertarianism meets white supremacy.

Conservatives have worked hard for decades to bring us to this very moment, always implying that the safety net they were shredding—the basic fundamentals of public health they’ve been chipping away at over the past year—were benefiting someone else. Someone darker. Someone less deserving. Before Atlas was pro-Covid, he was looking to roll -back the ACA and dismantle Medicaid.

But let’s head south again. The recent attacks on public health, the willingness on the part of Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Tate Reeves, Kay Ivey to defy standard public health practice—even as they see their constituents suffer—has its roots in a deep ideological commitment. This isn’t about the CDC’s shifting mask guidance, or about the belated acknowledgement of airborne transmission of the virus. This isn’t what matters to these leaders. And it’s simply willful ignorance to suggest that “bad communication” is at the root of what is happening now. As Naomi Klein notes, every catastrophe is an opportunity.

The pandemic has enabled these leaders to pursue policies they have wanted to push way before SARS-COV-2 had entered the scene. As the poet Anne Sexton said of self-destruction in another context: “Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.” The GOP is looking for ways to undermine access to health care, public health regulations and programs—the whole already-frayed safety net. Right now, we need a massive investment to revive public health in America. We were in dire shape before the pandemic; now we have one party that is hell-bent on destruction and the other party, for all its welcome departure from the Trump administration’s insanity, thinks it can McKinsey its way out of a crisis, ignoring the fundamental weaknesses in our public health system.

NEW: Gregory Meeks’s amendment to stop Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is really an excuse for business as usual https://t.co/I1y7ZbGVjP by @SaraLSirota

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 23, 2021