Lobbying in Washington

Along with America’s permanent war agenda, lobbying is practically the national pastime, undemocratic Dems as complicit with influence-peddling and seeking lobbyists as Republicans.

Studies show lobbying works. Money spent produces huge returns, the more spent, the greater the bottom line result.

Individuals involved include former politicians and administration officials well-connected to current ones, easing access to them.

In his inaugural address, Trump said “(f)or too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

“Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth…That all changes, starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you.”

Straightaway in office, his pledge went out the window. Dirty business flourishes like always.

For time immemorial, notably since the neoliberal 90s, his predecessors operated the same way, serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of ordinary Americans, abused and exploited.

Obama promised change, a new course, sweeping government reforms, addressing people needs, and “ensur(ing) that the hopes and concerns of average Americans speak louder in Washington than the hallway whispers of high-priced lobbyists” – the same ones who bought and owned him throughout his tenure.

Promises made while campaigning are broken once in office – the way things in Washington work.

It’s longstanding practice in America, dating from the early days of the republic. Ulysses S. Grant reportedly met with favor seekers in Washington’s Willard hotel.

Lobbying in the nation’s capital began long before his administration. It’s defined as a form of advocacy, intending to influence government decision-making.

What went on long ago pales in comparison to current corrupt practices. Human rights groups and other advocates for ordinary Americans can’t match the power of monied interests, spending whatever it takes to get what they want.

During one of his fundraisers, Obama lied saying “(w)e don’t take a dime from DC lobbyists or special interest PACs – never have and never will.”

Attorney Joseph Sandler was an American Bar Association task force member involved in recommending changes to federal lobbying laws to improve disclosure and reduce conflicts of interest.

He explained “(t)here’s a lot of activity that ordinary people would think of as lobbying that doesn’t trigger the obligation to register as a lobbyist under federal law. Strategic advice is one of those kinds of things…”

Lobbying occurs in various forms, serving client interests. Obama thrived on so-called “bundlers,” raising millions of dollars for his campaigns – individuals involved from Wall Street and other predatory corporate interests. None were registered as federal lobbyists.

Paying to play is how the dirty game works, the more paid, the greater the return.

On January 21, the NYT  headlined “Lobbyists Romp in Trump’s Washington,” citing information from Public Citizen, advocating for ordinary Americans.

It documented dozens of examples of lobbyists seeking to influence his administration’s decision-making.

The Times: “(W)hat is clear is that Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress have been doing corporate interests’ bidding…”

It’s “clear” that his predecessors operated the same dirty way. So do House and Senate members now and earlier.

Washington’s swamp is too corrupted to change. The only solution is grassroots revolution. Nothing else can work, voting a waste of time.

Elections when held are farcical. They all turn out the same way. Dirty business as usual always wins.

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85% of House Committee “Questioning” Zuckerberg Next Week Has Been Given Money by Facebook

As Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg prepares to be questioned by a House Committee, a report from USA Today shows that the overwhelming majority of the members asking the questions have received money from the social media giant.

The post 85% of House Committee “Questioning” Zuckerberg Next Week Has Been Given Money by Facebook appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

Gun Rights And Mental Health Restrictions: A Slippery Slope

This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.com

In the wake of the Parkland shooting, as in the wake of any mass shooting, there has been a scramble by various political groups to place blame for the violence. Everyone is looking for the source of the evil that causes these events, to little avail. In most cases, at least when it comes to the extreme Left, the blame is placed squarely on guns themselves. This is obviously an absurd notion. Placing blame on the particular tool used in the crime does not solve the problem of the criminal and what led him to the deed. Whether or not the tool made his crime “easier” is irrelevant to the greater disturbance at hand.

After years of debate and failed legislation, leftists have discovered that resistance to the incremental destruction of the 2^nd Amendment is insurmountable, and a change in narrative has occurred. Finally, we are talking more about mental health issues and a little less about guns. This is a win for gun rights, however, there is a danger that needs to be addressed.

First, while mental health is being presented in the mainstream media more and more as a central issue in mass shootings, I find it interesting that the problem of psychotropic pharmaceuticals has been conveniently ignored. In a large number of non-terrorist related shooting incidents, assailants have been subjected to long term psychotropic drug use. Why has this factor not been addressed?

Well, consider the fact that Big Pharma has spent at least $2.5 billion over the past ten years lobbying in Washington D.C. Compare this to the NRA lobbying budget, which in comparison was a paltry $20 million over the past 10 years according to OpenSecret.

This should put into perspective the idiocy of anti-gun advocates and their obsession with the “nefarious” NRA. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry is almost universally ignored when it comes to the debate on gun violence, yet their lobbying efforts dwarf all others. All this despite the fact that psychotropic drugs are proven to influence violent and even homicidal behavior in people.

Second, the focus on mental health in terms of the Parkland shooting seems to be glossing over the vast failings of the FBI and local law enforcement in following up and investigating the dozens of warnings they received about Nikolas Cruz.  As I outlined in my recent article ‘“Mass shootings will never negate the need for gun rights,” gun grabbers love to trot out legislation on increased background check restrictions and closing the “gun show loophole,” yet none of their suggested solutions would have stopped the Parkland tragedy from taking place.

The success of Nikolas Cruz’s attack was due to the abject failure of the FBI and law enforcement, NOT the failure of background checks. Had they done their jobs, Cruz never would have been able to purchase a firearm to begin with. I find it rather ironic that gun grabbers constantly argue that average citizens do not need guns for self defense because they have law enforcement to rely on, yet it was exactly the stupidity or inaction of law enforcement that opened the door wide for Cruz to (allegedly) kill.

Clearly, the so-called “authorities” are not trustworthy enough to carry out the job of protecting us all from active shooters. The only people capable of stopping an active shooter in a fast and practical manner are armed citizens on the scene at the moment the attack begins.

Third, and most important, is the issue of mental health parameters and how they will be used to restrict gun rights. The ATF already has rules regarding people “adjudicated as mentally defective,” which includes people ruled a danger to themselves and others by a “court, board or commission or other lawful authority.” Now, these guidelines themselves can be rather broad, but abuse by government so far has been limited (though some instances have been egregious). If the Trump administration seeks to broaden the guidelines even further, then we may have a problem.

Take for example the unacceptable abuse of military veterans and their 2^nd Amendment rights by the Bureau of Veterans Affairs. The VA has in recent years placed restrictions on thousands of veterans, negating their gun rights without due process and without oversight. And all of this has been predicated on the claim that some veterans are “mentally defective” based on dubious parameters, including whether or not they let their spouse handle household finances.

This is what I am talking about when I bring up the dangers behind “mental illness” and gun rights. WHO gets to decide who is mentally ill and why they are mentally ill? Will this be done by a jury of our peers? Or, by an unaccountable and faceless bureaucracy? Will the guidelines for mental illness be strict and specific, or will they be broad and wide open to interpretation? Once a person has been labeled mentally defective, will they have the ability to appeal the decision, or will the label haunt them for the rest of their lives?

Gun rights activists should not put blind faith in the Trump administration to ensure that new mental health legislation will remain fair to the 2^nd Amendment. Unfortunately, Trump is on record as supporting the “No Fly List” gun control bill. This type of bill is something liberty activists opposed vehemently under the Obama administration because it allows the government to erase the gun rights of almost anyone without due process merely by placing them on an arbitrary watch list. A list, I will remind readers, that is a matter of national security and not subject to public overview.

Would a list of “mentally defective people” fall under the same Orwellian standards?

What about the new and disturbing designation by the psychiatric community of oppositional defiance disorder? This absurd “illness” is being applied to people as young as pre-school age and suggests that adults with the illness often display resistance to authority figures and government.

What if your opposition is not to “authority” in general, but to CORRUPT authority specifically? Is this mental illness, or the very epitome of sanity?

In the Soviet Union, it was all too common for the government to abuse “mental illness” designations as a means to silence and imprison political dissent. Anti-government agitation and propaganda were criminalized under Soviet legal codes, and these codes were frequently applied in conjunction with the psychiatric system. This was sometimes referred to as “punitive medicine.”

The problem with government and psychiatric institutions joining forces to determine constitutional rights for individuals should be obvious. Government should be as separate from the medical establishment as possible yet they are often intertwined to terrible effect. If mental illness is not adjudicated by a jury of ones peers and with extreme oversight by gun rights groups, then abuse of such laws by government is almost guaranteed. The temptation to use backdoor bureaucracy in a totalitarian manner to underhandedly confiscate guns and sabotage the 2^nd Amendment will be high.

It is also important to remember that even if you have placed full and blind faith in the Trump administration, there are no guarantees that the constitutional rules we allow him to bend today will not be completely broken by the next president in line. Gun rights are paramount to a free society. Without them, governments almost always revert to increased socialism and “tyranny creep” while violent crime continues or increases as the citizenry is left defenseless. Mental illness AND psychotropic drugs need to be taken seriously in terms of gun violence, but it is also vital that we do not allow the issue of mental health to be exploited as a subversive means to undermine our freedoms.

***

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You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

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Google is the Largest Political Influencer in the United States

[image: © AFP 2017/ LOIC VENANCE]

(The Real Agenda News) Google, remembered for its slogan “don’t be evil” was the one that spent the most in 2017 to try to influence politicians in the United States.

Lobbying is not a crime, but it often comes too close to being such a thing.

Exercising influence to achieve a goal is not wrong, but perhaps, looking at lobbying from that perspective is why people understand trafficking on political influence as being acceptable.

The point of view which should serve as a starting point to assess whether political influence, better known as lobbying, is right or wrong, is the financial advantage multinational corporations have over their direct competitors: the average citizen.

If we can imagine the lobbying industry – it has indeed become an industry – as a pyramid, citizens are at the bottom of the structure, whereas multinational corporations, large businesses, and powerful unions are at the top and middle of it.

The activity of pressure groups in the United States and many other countries is legal, is accepted and can achieve favorable results.

They are not public relations and neither is it a strictly legal tool, but the influence is part of the power game in Washington; a big part of it.

In 2017, Google became the company that invested the most in these practices, until now co-opted by other industries or by business associations.

Silicon Valley companies became in recent years the ones that used more money to improve their image and to enter the very fabric of power.

Google has broken its own record, with $18 million in 2017, and has, for the first time, positioned itself as the company that has spent the most to influence legislators.

It thus takes over the position occupied by sectors that traditionally made great pressure efforts, such as the tobacco industry or the food industry.

Google’s Political Influence in Key Issues

The Responsive Policy Center has published the data of the different companies that lobby against the federal government.

The search engine is at the top. It exerted pressure in diverse subjects, from immigration to fiscal reform, diversity, net neutrality and online publicity to cite a few.

This figure is well above what other giants of telecommunications used.

Amazon and Facebook also appear in the list, but at a much lower level, in the 16th and 24th positions respectively.

In the previous year it was the National Association of Realtors, the union of estate brokers, which occupied the first place.

The usual thing is that they are groups, unions or conglomerates that join industries that spend more, but not companies in a private capacity.

Thirty years ago, the Responsive Policy Center began collecting data.

There are no previous records, but since they follow it, this is the first time that a specific company leads the list.

Google Sneaking into positions of Power

Sarah Bryner, director of the research, has explained to the technology portal Gizmodo, that the Mountain View company climbed to first place up from 15th place, overcoming efforts by the groups that traditionally had more interests in obtaining a favorable legal framework, such as AT & T, the largest telecommunications company in the country, and Boeing, involved in defense, electronics, and air transport.

Bryner is not surprised that the new technology leaders are no longer in garages inventing new products but exerting their influence beyond the web.

“There is a very ingrained myth. It is considered that they do not intervene in how their industry is politically supported,” she explains.

The case of Amazon, which spent $13 million, is striking, while Facebook invested $11 million.

The researcher does not believe that these actions have an immediate effect, but they do get their opinions heard and provide different points of view.

“Google maintains its “do not be evil” founding motto and there is nothing wrong with spending money on politics, but it is important that public opinion knows it, that it watches over it”, she argues.

Google is not alone when it comes to Buying Political Influence

Apple is not among the corporations that invest the most in these tasks.

Its investments remain at seven million dollars, but it is striking that the amount dedicated to influencing politics increased 51% in just one year.

Among the interests pushed by the Cupertino-based company are climate change, health-related applications and autonomous cars.

Apple, Google and Facebook did not explain this activity. Only Amazon did it in a brief statement:

“As one of the great job creators in this country, we have expanded our team in Washington D.C. to make sure we can be on top of important legislative issues that affect our employees and our consumers,” Amazon said.

Collectively, they have grouped together in The Internet Association to “proactively monitor everything related to the Internet and the possible “negative effects” of racial or gender biases, so that they are quickly identified and minimized”.

As they themselves confess it, Facebook, Apple, Google and other technology companies are now so powerful that they can not only influence politicians to obtain more favorable conditions in the US, but also censor users if they judge that their free speech is offensive to the companies themselves, interest groups or individuals.

Uber also appears on the list. It exerted pressure so that a regulation of “advances in vertical takeoff and landing” was approved. The company is now looking into offering air transport in the same fashion it offers ground transport.

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Overflowing Swamp: Non-Partisan Watchdog Report Shows Political Bribery Now at Record Levels

A report from a non-profit, nonpartisan research group has revealed that for the first time since 2007, the number of registered lobbyists and the amount of money spent on lobbying have increased significantly.

The post Overflowing Swamp: Non-Partisan Watchdog Report Shows Political Bribery Now at Record Levels appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

How The Elite Dominate The World – Part 4: They Buy Politicians, And Incumbents Almost Always Win

This report was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse

Once we wake up to how the game is being played, then we will have a real shot at changing things. For decades, the elite have been pulling the strings behind the scenes in both major political parties. That is why nothing has ever seemed to change very much no matter which party has been in power. The agenda of the elite has always seemed to march forward, and ordinary people like us have always been frustrated that we can’t seem to make a difference. But now a shift seems to be taking place. Donald Trump took on the establishment in both major parties, and he miraculously won the presidency. Down in Alabama, the elite spent more than 30 million dollars to defeat Roy Moore, and he still defeated Luther Strange.  A political awakening is taking place, and I can’t wait to see what happens during the mid-term elections in 2018.

In Part I and Part II of this series, I talked about how the elite use debt as a tool of enslavement.  In Part III, I went over how the elite use the colossal media corporations they own to control what we think. Today, I want to talk about their influence in the realm of politics.

In Washington D.C., it is well understood that the game of politics is all about the money. If I win my election, and online polling suggests that there is a ton of enthusiasm for my campaign, I will be expected to spend most of my time on the phone raising money. As a freshman member of Congress, at orientation it will be explained to me that I am supposed to spend approximately four hours a day doing fundraising, and that is why the House and Senate floors are so empty most of the time.

By law, members of Congress cannot make fundraising calls from their offices, and so both parties have huge call centers just across from the Capitol. Especially around lunch and dinner times (because those are some of the best times to reach people), those call centers are packed as members of the House and Senate run through lists of potential donors.

And it isn’t just about raising money for their own campaigns. As a freshman member of Congress I would be expected to raise at least $200,000 for the NRCC (the National Republican Congressional Committee). If I don’t pay my dues, I would get into big trouble with party leadership.

But you know what? I have already pledged that I am not going to participate in this very corrupt system. If I am sent to Congress, I am going to spend my time doing the job that the people of Idaho sent me there to do.

So will Paul Ryan and the others in leadership get very upset with me for not “paying my dues”?

Of course.

But it is time for some of us to take a stand and do what is right. Congress has become a cesspool of filth and corruption, and it is time to flush the toilet.

Because if we don’t fight this corrupt system, the influence of money in politics will just get worse and worse. Today, the elite pour millions upon millions of dollars even into small campaigns, and in 2016 it took an average of more than 10 million dollars to win a U.S. Senate seat…

While the White House may not have gone to the biggest spender, an awful lot of House and Senate seats did — as usual. And it was pricier than ever to win them.

This election cycle, an average winning Senate candidate had spent $10.4 million through Oct. 19 (reflecting the latest reports filed with the Federal Election Commission). That’s a $1.8 million increase over the same period in the 2014 cycle. By the end of last cycle, the number rose to $10.6 million, and a similar uptick is expected this time once post-election and year-end reports are filed.

Once you win, the pressure to raise money for your next campaign never ends.

The elite know this, and they use this pressure to influence votes. Prior to a big vote, lobbyists will make it abundantly clear how they want certain members of Congress to vote, and if they vote the “right way” those members of Congress will be rewarded.

Just across from the U.S. Capitol there are clubs where fancy receptions are regularly held. If you vote the “right way” on a particular bill, you may be invited to one of these receptions, and there will be big, fat donation checks waiting there for you.

Of course most members of Congress have learned how to play the game, and this is why it is nearly impossible to defeat incumbents.  Over the past six decades, the re-election rate for members of the House of Representatives has consistently been well over 80 percent, and according to the UVA Center for Politics incumbents actually did far better than that in 2016…

This election cycle, 393 of 435 House representatives, 29 of 34 senators, and five of 12 governors sought reelection (several of the governors were prohibited from seeking another term). Of those, 380 of 393 House members (97%), 27 of 29 senators (93%), and four of five governors (80%) won another term. These members of Congress and governors not only won renomination, but also won in November.

Since World War II, the overall success rate for Senate incumbents has been 84 percent, and the overall success rate for House incumbents has been 94 percent.

Incumbents are almost always armed with huge war chests and most of them have tremendous name recognition, and so toppling them is not easy.

Fortunately, there is no incumbent in my race because Raul Labrador is running for governor. So the race is completely wide open, and right now my campaign has the most enthusiasm by far. If you would like to help me flush the toilet in Washington, I would encourage you to visit MichaelSnyderForCongress.com.

If we don’t fight back, we will never break the stranglehold that the elite have on our political system.

Every generation of Americans has had to stand up and fight for liberty and freedom, and now it is our turn. This particular battle will not be fought with guns and bullets, but rather with ideas, values and principles.

We are part of a movement that is sweeping the nation. Good men and women are rising up to run in federal, state and local races all across the country, and it is absolutely imperative that we all get behind them and support them.

Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years.Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream. 

If you want to know what is coming and what you can do to prepare, read his latest book Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming.

Google Is The Biggest Lobbying Spender In Tech

The fact that many major tech companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice in Washington as well. As Statista"s Feliz Richer notes, according to documents filed in accordance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act, companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon spend millions every year trying to legally influence D.C. lawmakers.

The following chart shows how the lobbying expenditure of Google,
Apple, Facebook and Amazon has developed over the past few years. For
additional information please refer to the official database.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Interestingly, the quarterly filings not only reveal how much the companies spend on their lobbying efforts, they also provide us with information on which issues these efforts are related to.

Take Google for example: in the second quarter of 2017, the search giant spent $5.9 million on lobbying with respect to issues ranging from more obvious ones such as regulation of online advertising and immigration of highly skilled individuals to more surprising ones such as wind power and unmanned aerial systems technology.

Only 2% Of US Politicians Actually Want To Stop Arming Terrorists - Here's Why

Authored by Alice Salles via TheAntiMedia.org,

One of the few elected Democratic lawmakers with an extensive anti-war record, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), has combined forces with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) to push legislation through both the House and the Senate that would bar federal agencies from using taxpayer-backed funds to provide weapons, training, intelligence, or any other type of support to terrorist cells such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any other group that is associated with them in any way.

The Stop Arming Terrorists Act is so unique that it’s also the only bill of its kind that would also bar the government from funneling money and weapons through other countries that support (directly or indirectly) terrorists such as Saudi Arabia.

To our surprise — or should we say shame? — only 13 other lawmakers out of hundreds have co-sponsored Gabbard’s House bill. Paul’s Senate version of the bill, on the other hand, has zero cosponsors.

While both pieces of legislation were introduced in early 2017, no real action has been taken as of yet. This proves that Washington refuses to support bills that would actually provoke positive chain reactions not only abroad but also at home. Why? Well, let’s look at the groups that would lose a great deal in case this bill is signed into law.

Military & Homeland Security Companies, Lobbyists, And Lawmakers All Profit From War

With trillions of tax dollars flowing to companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and even IBM, among others, companies that invest heavily in weapons, cyber security systems, and other technologies that are widely used in times of war would stand to lose a lot — if not everything — if all of a sudden, the United States chose to become a nation that stands for peace and free market principles.

For one, these companies have a heavy lobbying presence, ensuring that lawmakers sympathetic to their plight are elected every two years. When the possibility of a new conflict appears on the horizon, these companies are the first to lobby heavily for action.

But this dynamic isn’t a secret. We all know that the crony capitalist system that thrives in Washington, D.C., is the very bread and butter of politics in America. After all, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation in his farewell address in 1961 that “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” were becoming the great powers behind U.S. politics, and that if we weren’t weary of this influence, we would risk living in a perpetual state of war.

Still, we allowed it to take over. And there isn’t one industry powerful enough to counter this destructive authority.

With the support of an army of well-established and connected millionaire lobbyists, the war machine operating in Washington is so powerful that anything can be turned into an existential threat.

Any conflict abroad that has absolutely no importance or that poses literally no threat to the common American is inflated to become a threat to the American way of life. They hate us “for our freedom.” Therefore, we must show them what democracy looks like.

Without the same kind of powerful and wealthy team behind the cause for sanity and peace, this army of big money and big lobbyists has single-handedly put us and many generations to come in debt over Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and now Syria. And as the marketing machine behind this kind of lobbying effort taps into the social justice trend that has infiltrated every aspect of our culture in recent years, these organizations have learned that they will get even broader support from the public if they add feminist, anti-poverty, and pro-equality messages to their pro-war efforts.

Take the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, for instance, which, as NBC has reported, originated with “Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank for the Africa region and a senior advisor on Africa Economic Development Policy for the Open Society Foundations”  —  a George Soros-backed foundation. In no time, the social media “effort” had become the most effective lobbying force behind the expansion of the never-ending war on terror. And whether it was meant to promote this outcome or not, it helped the United States easily invest more tax dollars into an unwinnable war.

As you can see, even if Gabbard and Paul managed to use all of their time to force the Stop Arming Terrorists Act through Congress so it could get to President Donald Trump’s desk, the powers at play in Washington would do their best to sweep this effort under the rug. Not because individuals involved in pro-war lobbying are, perhaps, thirsty for war per se, but because the system under which they operate allows for bad incentives to produce a great deal of wealth and influence, tilting the balance toward evil.

Without a state that can be bribed, companies would be left to fend for themselves and stay afloat by making customers… happy. And you can’t make customers happy if all you have to offer is war.

Health Care Debate Exposed as a Fraud, Dems and Reps Just United to do Big Pharma Bidding

The circus sideshow of health care politics is providing yet another smokescreen for the real agenda of the corporate 2-party dictatorship. Contrary to the “different visions for America” portrayed by MSM talking heads, Democrats and Republicans vigorously agree on a fundamental principle: Big Pharma will continue to rake Americans over the coals, with the help of federal government.

The health care “debate” has been portrayed as Republicans and Democrats valiantly fighting for the interest of American citizens. But as Ron Paul points out, the actual difference amounts to slightly different degrees of government control over health care, all of it stifling free market solutions and driving up costs.

Exhibit A is the recent move by Democrats and Republicans alike to ban the importation of prescription drugs from other countries such as Canada. While the American Health Care Act takes all the headlines, Congress is quietly passing the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017—the framework of the Big Pharma protectionist racket.

As Rolling Stone reports, only a few weeks ago Democrats and Republicans came together to defeat an amendment that “would have allowed for importation of drugs from FDA-approved facilities in Canada.” Senators who supported importation in January suddenly reversed their position, voting no when it seemed the amendment could actually pass. As expected, “no” votes came from senators who receiver copious amounts of money from the pharma lobby.

Every time a lawmaker is pressed on why they vote to deny Americans the ability to get cheaper prescription drugs—a simple free-market solution to outrageously high American drug prices—the lawmakers play the bogus “safety” card. Without providing a fact-based rationale, they simply suggest that we can’t “ensure foreign drugs meet American safety standards.”

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The reality is that lots of drugs and drug ingredients are imported from other countries, but only the pharmaceutical industry is allowed to do it, while pharmacists and consumers are banned.

“In fact, an astonishing 40 percent of all pharmaceuticals sold in the United States are already imported, as are 80 percent of the chemical ingredients. These imported drugs and drug ingredients arrive by way of more than 300,000 foreign food and drug manufacturing facilities that are regularly certified as safe by the FDA.

These drugs come from manufacturing facilities not just in Canada but across the globe, from the first world to the third, sometimes using the same kind of degraded and underpaid labor forces we bemoan in other industries.”

It doesn’t take much inspection to discover the blatant, cruel way that Congress protects Big Pharma. President Trump is on board, too. Campaign promises to bring down drug prices for Americans have evaporated, as industry lobbyists have filled his administration. Sure enough, in mid-June it was revealed that the “White House task force [on drug pricing] echoes pharma proposals.”

That’s not where it ends, though. The FDA Reauthorization Act is also known as the “user fee” bill because this is where Big Pharma pays FDA for the privilege of fleecing the masses. According to Stat News, the bill “spells out how much branded and generic drug companies and medical device manufacturers pay to support their product reviews at the FDA.”

Several amendments in the “user fee” bill opposed by Big Pharma were shot down, including drug importation, one that would have “kept branded manufacturers from using certain strategies to delay generic drug launches” and another that would “encourage pediatric studies in cancer drugs.”

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While federal government gladly intervenes in the functioning of the health care market, lawmakers continually prohibit federal and state governments from negotiating lower prices for bulk purchases. Whatever price the industry wishes for its patented products, it gets.

Hospitals, too, are prevented from getting discount drug prices at the behest of Big Pharma.

“Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, for example, used a recent oversight letter to echo the pharmaceutical industry’s longtime concerns with a controversial drug discount program that largely benefits hospitals. That inquiry may lead to a congressional hearing — one likely to be far better for pharmaceutical companies than hospitals, Republican committee leaders told STAT.”

Government has become expert at protecting the financial interests of various industries while pretending to “debate” over the best interests of Americans. This protectionist racket comes at the expense of human health and lives.

The issue was underscored last year when the price for a life-saving injection for children called the EpiPen was hiked to $630, causing a public furor. Other outrageous examples include pills that cost $1,000 in America but only $4 in India.

The public is well aware they are being fleeced, as 77 percent of survey respondents say drug prices are “unreasonable” and 71 percent favor the importation of drugs from Canada.

But public opinion and free market solutions have no place in a system where Big Pharma lobbyists have lawmakers in their pockets. PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) spent $7.9 million in the first three months of 2017, deploying an army of lobbyists and outside firms to Capitol Hill, while individual pharma companies spent $20 million during the same period.

“That spending doesn’t count campaign donations, either. The website OpenSecrets, maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, estimates the industry gave about $27.9 million to candidates on both sides of the aisle during the 2016 cycle.”

In the coming days we will be inundated with partisan nonsense over Obamacare and Obamacare 2.0, while the real scheme orchestrated by the corporatocracy is already set in motion.

Welcome To The Corporatocracy

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

The interests of Washington and large corporations have merged so completely they are now inseparable.

America’s large corporations and its government have merged. Or was it an acquisition? If the latter, who acquired whom? Unfortunately, the labels affixed to purely corporate combinations lose their analytical usefulness here. While the two retain their own distinct legal structures and managements, so to speak, such a close community of interest has evolved that it’s no longer possible to separate them or delineate their individual contours. Political labels are no help; the ones most often used have become hopelessly imprecise. The Wikipedia definition of “fascism” is over 8,000 words, with 43 notes and 16 references.

However, the conjoined blob is so big, rapacious, and intrusive that akin to Justice Potter Stewart’s famous non-definition of obscenity, everybody knows it when they see or otherwise come into contact with it. This article will use the term “corporatocracy.” It’s less letters, dashes, and words to type than “the corporate-government-combination.” No serviceable understanding of either US history or current events is possible without close study of the corporatocracy. Unfortunately, such study, like entomology or cleaning septic tanks, requires a stout constitution. But take heart, entomologists grow to love their creepy crawly things, and septic tank cleaners say that after a few minutes you don’t even notice the smell.

A cherished delusion of naive liberals holds that big government is a counterweight, not a partner, to big business. Such a rationale is touted when the righteous demand new regulation, the public and media endorse it, the legislators pass it, and the president signs it into law. However, there are always unpaved stretches on the road to hell—once regulation is law, the righteous, public, media, legislators, and president, and their ostensibly good intentions, are on to the next cause.

In the quiet obscurity they relish, regulators and regulated get down to doing what they do best: bending the law to their joint benefit. Business, whose P&L’s can be powerfully affected by regulations, hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers in a never ending effort to tilt the playing field in their direction, and improve bottom lines, stock prices, and executive bonuses. The return on such investment is far higher than on old fashioned expenditures like research and development, plant and equipment, and job-creating expansion.

Not-so-naive liberals, professed conservatives, and apolitical opportunists work both sides of the street. The revolving door ensures that all concerned do well. Playing this game isn’t cheap, which serves as a barrier to entry to scrappy competitors who compete those old fashioned ways: innovation, hustle, and better products and services at lower prices. Regulation cartelizes industries; look, for instance, at banking and medicine. No surprise that regulatory barriers are one of Warren Buffett’s favorite “moats”: deep and hard-to-cross waterways that protect durable commercial advantages.

Washington doesn’t just fortify favored corporations’ business plans. A $4-plus-trillion-a-year enterprise, the government is the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Procuring those contracts employs more armies of lobbyists and lawyers, and has a powerful effect on policy. The shoddy premises supporting the welfare and warfare states, and their epic waste, are obvious to many of the taxpayers forced to underwrite them. They’ve decried them for decades, and voted for candidates promising to cut welfare, waste, war, and taxes. However, beyond voting, taxpayers can devote little time to stopping or slowing the gravy train. Their resources are infinitesimal compared to the resources its passengers expend to keep it running.

The modus operandi for Washington and big business have converged. Debt, its issuance and marketing, is the pillar of the financial nexus and revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. The government and its central bank artificially pump up the economy and hide its deterioration with debt and machinations: ultra low interest rates, quantitative easing, and debt monetization. Big businesses lever their balance sheets to pump up their stock prices or make acquisitions, machinations that do nothing to improve core businesses but often hide ongoing deterioration.

The history of any long-running government program is a catalogue of failures and expanding budgets. Washington cherishes failure, the fountainhead of larger appropriations and more power. Success would put bureaucrats out of work and give politicians less influence to peddle. Likewise in business, failure has become much more acceptable than it was during those bad old days of cutthroat capitalism. Marissa Mayer’s undistinguished five-year tenure at Yahoo, while perhaps not a complete failure, certainly can’t be termed a success. Nevertheless, she’s walking away from the company with at least $186 million for her middling endeavors. Given all that discrimination out there against women, one can only imagine what she would have made if she were a man.

Silicon Valley puts billions into companies like Uber, AirBnb, Snapchat, and Lyft that lose those billions and will continue to do so for the foreseeable—and probably the unforeseeable—future. Private equity shops load up companies with debt that gets paid out as special dividends to the private equity shops, leaving the indebted and enfeebled companies unable to compete and the rest of us wondering how such rape is legal in our rape-conscious age. This recipe for inevitable failure is now playing out in the beleaguered retail sector, which would be nowhere near as beleaguered if it wasn’t so beset with debt.

Tesla, a stock market darling and the quintessence of companies in which failure is the business plan, milks Wall Street for financing and Washington (and a bunch of state and local jurisdictions) for subsidies. It has lost billions during its ten years of existence, but its many admirers sing the praises of CEO Elon Musk, always using the term “consummate salesman”—perhaps it’s on his business card. Musk and fan club dream of “the next big thing” and engage in mutual masturbatory fantasies of transforming the world…and Mars. All this is harmless enough as fodder for dazzling audiovisual presentations and slick speeches, but downright dangerous when real billions, private and public, gets sucked in.

Meanwhile, the corporatocracy crucifies an old-line, profitable corporation, Volkswagen, that cheated on one of its hundreds of thousands of regulations. It undoubtedly wasn’t the cheating that got VW in trouble. Regulations are made to be cheated—it’s impossible to run a business without doing so—but the proper offerings must be made to the corporatocracy. If that were not the case, there would be Wall Street, Pharma, and Defense Contractor wings at federal penitentiaries. VW didn’t kowtow low enough or pay high enough to the bureaucrats and politicians, who retaliated, probably “nudged” by a VW competitor.

As a successful businessman, President Trump knows many of the corporatocracy’s skims, scams, and schemes. Perhaps that will enable him to keep his pledge and drain the swamp. However, it’s extensive, fetid, and teems with loathsome creatures, so a bet he’ll succeed involves exceedingly long odds. You’re probably better off buying Tesla stock.

Largest Bank in Russia Confirms It’s Hiring Podesta Group to Lobby Against Sanctions

(ZHE) Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution told TASS on Thursday.

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“The New York office of Sberbank CIB indeed hired Podesta Group. Engagement of external consultants is part of standard business practices for us,” Sberbank said.

Previously, The Daily Caller reported that Tony Podesta was proactively lobbying for cancellation of a range of anti-Russian sanctions against the banking sector. In particular, he represented interests of Sberbank and was paid $170,000 for his efforts over a six-month period last year to seek to end one of the Obama administration’s economic sanctions against that country. Podesta, founder and chairman of the Podesta Group, is listed as a key lobbyist on behalf of Sberbank, according to Senate lobbying . His firm received more than $24 million in fees in 2016, much of it coming from foreign governments, to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Former President Barack Obama imposed the Russian following the break out in violence in east Ukraine in 2014.

“Podesta’s efforts were a key part of under-the-radar lobbying during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign led mainly by veteran Democratic strategists to remove sanctions against Sberbank and VTB Capital, Russia’s second largest bank.

“The two Russian banks spent more than $700,000 in 2016 on Washington lobbyists as they sought to end the U.S. sanctions, according to Senate lobbying and documents filed with the Department of Justice.

“The Podesta Group charged Sberbank $20,000 per month, plus expenses, on a contract from March through September 2016.”

Both Sberbank and VTB Capital have faced severe cash shortages due to plunging oil prices, plus the U.S. sanctions. If Obama’s sanctions were lifted, however, both banks could legally seek funds from American financial institutions. The lobbying campaign targeted Congress and the executive branch, with Podesta and other lobbyists arranging at least two meetings between Sberbank officers and Department of State officials, according to Elena Teplitskaya, Sberbank’s board chairman, who spoke to House aides in August.

“’The Democrats are sitting there trying to convince us that the Russians are trying to throw the election to Trump,’ a congressional aide who requested anonymity and met Teplitskaya told TheDCNF.

“’And then they’re with us here in the House and meeting directly with the administration behind closed doors on the issue of the sanctions. The hypocrisy could not be any richer,’ he said.”

As the Caller puts it, “the discovery of high-profile Democrats like Podesta being paid lucrative fees for lobbying to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia contrasts with charges from Democrats that President Donald Trump and his key aides are soft on Russia while the Obama administration was tough on Moscow.”

Podesta is one of the Democrat’s highest profile lobbyists who enjoys close personal and business connections to former Presidents Obama and Bill Clinton. John Podesta was chief of staff in Clinton’s White House and special counselor in the Obama White House.

Some more details on the meeting: joining the Podesta lobbying campaign was David Adams, who describes himself on the Podesta Group website as a “trusted adviser” to Hillary Clinton, serving as her as assistant secretary of state for congressional affairs. Another Podesta lobbyist was Stephen Rademaker, a former Department of State official in the George W. Bush administration. The Podesta Group represented Sberbank and its subsidiaries, Troika Dialog Group in the Cayman Islands, SBGB Cyprus Ltd in Nicosia, Cyprus, and SB International in Luxembourg. Troika Dialog also was related to Klein, Ltd., a Cayman Island organization that once funneled tens of millions of dollars to environmental groups to oppose low-cost fracking in the U.S., which was hurting the Russian oil industry.

Regular readers will recall that the Sberbank-Podesta relationship goes back many years. Sberbank was the lead financial institution in the Russian deal to purchase Uranium One, owned by one of Bill Clinton’s closest friends, Frank Giustra. Giustra and Bill Clinton lead the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership, an integral part of the Clinton Foundation. Giustra has additionally donated $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.

“Giustra sought to sell his stake in uranium reserves that included ore deposits in the Western United States, and Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state, approved the sale. And in one felled swoop, 20 percent of America’s uranium ore was sold to the Russian state atomic agency.

“During the pending sale, the Podesta Group represented Giustra’s company and tried to advance the transaction.”

We do not expect to read about the Podesta lobbying relationship with Russia’s largest bank in such truth-seeking, at least according to their ad campaigns, publications as the NYT and/or WaPo.

By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge / Report a typo

Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis

Congress would rather protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies than the health of those addicted to dangerous opioid drugs, says a former head of the DEA responsible for preventing abuse of medications.

Joseph Rannazzisi, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, asserts Big Pharma and its lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on legislators in Congress and have engineered the protection of a $9 billion per year industry over the health of American citizens, according to a report from the Guardian.

“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive,” he said, according to the outlet. “As long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.”

Rannazzisi explained lobbyists have spent millions thwarting legislative and policy efforts to provide guidelines for reducing the prescribing of opioid medications closely related to heroin — and helped limit the DEA’s powers to discipline those who dispense unusually high dosages of the same.

A pharmacist himself, Rannazzisi severely criticized lawmakers he claims hold a double standard — publicly vowing to combat the opioid epidemic, while essentially working on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to ensure the industry’s profits.

“These congressmen and senators who are using this because they are up for re-election, it’s a sham,” he told the Guardian. “The congressmen and senators who are championing this fight, the ones who really believe in what they’re doing, their voices are drowned out because the industry has too much influence.”

With the unique insight of having been an insider, Rannazzisi excoriated the duplicity evidenced between legislators’ public lamentation of addiction and deaths from the opioid crisis during election years, and private efforts to protect drugmakers from liability.

And he would know. According to Rannazzisi’s LinkedIn profile, as Chief of Diversion, he had been tasked with “oversight and control of all regulatory compliance inspections and civil and criminal investigations of approximately 1.6 million DEA registrants” — but if the standards are lowered by Congress to allow greater leeway in prescribing opioids, the threshold of criminality is raised.

As the Guardian points out, legislation to fight the opioid epidemic, Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, did, in fact, pass in July — but partisan controversy erupted when Republicans failed to provide funding to give the law sharp teeth. Democrats then issued a report titled “Dying Waiting for Treatment” in response, which “likened the Republican response to the opioid crisis to ‘using a piece of chewing gum to patch a cracked dam.’”

Indeed the report sharply criticized the bill, equating its policies to ‘empty promises’ for the lack of financial follow-through.

As the Washington Post detailed in a report earlier this month, the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to rein in distribution of opioids by pharmaceutical manufacturers to illegal ‘pill mills’ and corrupt pharmacies, who cared little whether the drugs wound up on the streets.

Headed by Rannazzisi, the Office of Diversion Control sent investigators into the field, and began issuing hefty fines and filing lawsuits against the distributors responsible for the proliferation of opioids on the streets.

But the disproportionately powerful pharmaceutical industry — fearing a potential significant loss in profits — fought back. Hard.

According to the Post, the deputy attorney general summoned Rannazzisi to a meeting in 2012, concerning the cases of two unnamed major drug companies.

“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” the now-retired DEA official told the Post.

Then, in 2014, came what constituted a hand out to the pharmaceutical industry by the Department of Justice and congressional legislators: the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act — legislation initiated by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association — the industry group representing distributors at the heart of the controversy.

An analysis of lobbying records by the Post found “the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016.”

Rannazzisi argued his case to congressional staffers in a phone conference in July 2014, and recalled telling them, “This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations.”

Stunned at the massive — and ultimately successful — effort to take the bite out of DEA attempts to hold distributors and drugmakers responsible for their role in an epidemic estimated to take 19,000 lives every year, Rannazzisi likened the legislation to a “free pass” for legal drug pushers.

“This doesn’t ensure patient access and it doesn’t help drug enforcement at all,” he told the Guardian. “What this bill does has nothing to do with the medical process. What this bill does is take away DEA’s ability to go after a pharmacist, a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor.”

“This was a gift. A gift to the industry,” he added.

After heading the diversion office for a decade, Rannazzisi retired in 2015 — likely disgusted over legislators’ dedication to the legal drug industry, rather than the people whose interests they’re ostensibly obligated to protect.

“The bill passed because ‘Big Pharma’ wanted it to pass,” he told the Guardian in no uncertain terms. “The DEA is both an enforcement agency and a regulatory agency. When I was in charge what I tried to do was explain to my investigators and my agents that our job was to regulate the industry and they’re not going to like being regulated.”

Big Pharma relies overwhelmingly on lobbyists filling the coffers of politicians to ensure they ignore the crisis gripping the nation. As the Center for Public Integrity found, the Guardian noted, Purdue Pharma — at the heart of the epidemic for its highly-addictive drug introduced in the late 1990s, OxyContin — spent a breathtaking $740 million in the last ten years on congressional lobbying efforts.

However, Big Pharma’s power to influence policy and legislation extends far beyond simple but effective lobbying — the government-run Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC) has been accused by Sen. Ron Wyden of being a tool to “weaken” CDC guidelines for limiting overprescribing of opioids.

Wyden wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell of his concerns the IPRCC had been staffed with ‘experts’ with conflicts of interest for their close ties to Big Pharma, including a scientist with a $1.5 million endowment from Purdue, reported the Guardian.

“You’ve got a panel that’s certainly got a fair number of people that have a vested interest in this problem of overprescribing. That’s something you’ve got to root out,” Wyden asserted. “The role of the pharmaceutical companies on these advisory panels troubles me greatly. Science is getting short shrift compared to the political clout of these influential interests.”

Families of countless addicts and victims of the opioid industry would undoubtedly find the direct influence of Big Pharma’s pro-opioid cash appalling — yet it continues to this day. Policies and legislation have not yet been given the appropriate funding needed to effectively combat the problem, which swirls out of control while politicians and drugmakers reap blood-tainted profits.

“Corporations have no conscience,” Rannazzisi flatly told the Guardian. “Unfortunately, with my job, I was the guy who had to go out and talk to families that lost kids. If one of those CEOs went out there and talked to anybody, or if one of those CEOs happened to lose a kid to this horrible, horrible domestic tragedy we have, I’d bet you they’d change their mind.

“When you sit with a parent who can’t understand why there’s so many pharmaceuticals out in the illicit marketplace, and why isn’t the government doing anything, well the DEA was doing something. Unfortunately what we’re trying to do is thwarted by people who are writing laws.”

The DEA Will Slash Opioid Production 25% in 2017

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced on October 4th, 2016 that plans to reduce opioid manufacturing by 25% next year are underway, citing a shrinking market and the epidemic of abuse as primary reasons.

The official change, or Final Order, has been published in the Federal Register. And, as The Verge reports:

“The DEA reserves the right to change a quota based on reasons such as increased demand or new manufacturers entering the market.” [1]

Shrinking Demand, Shrinking Manufacture

From 1999 to 2014, sales of prescription opioids in the U.S. nearly quadrupled. Today, an estimated 20% of patients with non-cancer pain are prescribed the potent drugs. [1]

Since doctors are working to reduce the number of opioids they prescribe, the DEA is following suit by cutting down on the allowed quota.

Read: This NJ Hospital Will Do Anything to Avoid Prescribing Opioids

The DEA is making the move, even though pharmaceutical companies and advocacy groups spent $880 million on campaign contributions and lobbying initiatives from 2006 through 2015. That amount is 8 times what gun lobbyists spent, and 200 times more than advocates for stricter policies shelled out during the same time period.

The DEA sets a limit on the total amount of a drug that can be manufactured each year. Next year’s reduction in opioid medications will affect medications such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine, hydromorphone, and fentanyl. [1]

Hydrocodone production will be cut by 34%.

In a press release, the DEA said:

“Earlier this year the CDC issued guidelines to practitioners recommending a reduction in prescribing opioid medication medications for chronic pain.

For years, DEA and others have been educating practitioners, pharmacists, manufacturers, and the public about the potential dangers of the misuse of opioid medications.” [1]

A Growing Crisis

Doctors wrote nearly 207 million prescriptions for narcotic painkillers in 2013 – a huge increase from about 76 million in 1991. This was in large part due to lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and a PR campaign led by Purdue University to increase the use of the drugs. [3]

Purdue went on to plead guilty to misleading the public about the risk of addiction to the painkiller OxyContin, and paid a fine of $634.5 million.

CDC statistics show that more people died from drug overdoses in 2014 than in any year on record, and that opioids were involved in more than 6 out of 10 fatal overdoses. [1]

Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois pointed out this past June that the DEA had approved enough opioid pills to be manufactured in 2014 “for every adult in America to have a bottle of pills.” [2]

Over the summer, a group of senators, including Durbin, called on the DEA to direct pharmaceutical companies to stem the supply of painkillers. Durbin wrote a letter to the administration, signed by a handful of his fellow lawmakers, which read:

“We urge the DEA to utilize its existing quota setting authority, to the fullest extent possible, to combat this epidemic.”

He went on to write:

“Fourteen billion opioid pills are now dispensed annually in the United States – enough for every adult American to have a bottle of pills.

Certainly, the pharmaceutical industry is at fault for decades of misleading information about their products and the medical community bears responsibility for its role in over-prescribing these dangerous and addictive drugs, but we remain deeply troubled by the sheer volume of opioids available – volumes that are approved by DEA.”

According to the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, upwards of 6.5 million Americans over age 12 have used opioids for non-medical use in the past month. Opioids are the second most popular drug after marijuana – and more popular than heroin, hallucinogens, and cocaine combined, in terms of use over the past month. [1]

Source: Business Insider

However, reducing the amount of prescription opioids can cause other problems. For example, in 2011, Florida Gov. Rick Scott started cracking down on pain-management clinics that were suspected of dispensing too many opioids.

The good news from Scott’s decision is that prescription-drug overdoses fell within the first year. The bad news is that heroin deaths climbed 39%, as people who couldn’t get their prescription painkillers turned to the illegal drug.

Meanwhile, the DEA decided in August 2016 not to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I substance to a Schedule II substance. That means marijuana remains in the same group as heroin, LSD, peyote, ecstasy, quaaludes, and bath salts. Rescheduling marijuana would have made it legal for medical use nationwide.

Interestingly, cannabis has shown promise in studies in treating addictions to hard drugs, including opioids.

Sources:

[1] The Verge

[2] The Huffington Post

Business Insider

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

No Wonder U.S. is No. 1 in Obesity — ‘Big Soda’ Caught Funding 96 Health Groups Including Govt

Ever since former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg failed in 2014 to implement a city-wide ban on large and extra-large soft drink sizes, the national spotlight has been on soda companies, thanks to the progressives. And the nation’s thought police have targeted soda companies in what appears to be a witch-hunt to tax and regulate the nearly 80 billion dollar soft-drink industry.

Take, for example, California. The state wanted to force soda companies to place warning labels on soda, just like the federal government did to cigarettes. And we know how that went. It resulted in a windfall of taxes pouring into the federal coffers that continue even to this day.

Critics contend the consumption of soda pop leads to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. And they may be right. But that hasn’t stopped the soda industry from fighting back in the court of public perception. And one of the ways they’re doing so is by funding health groups and organizations. That seems hypocritical to researchers who sought to uncover Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s philanthropic contributions.

Daniel Aaaron and Michael Siegel looked into what they titled “Sponsorship of National Health Organizations by Two Major Soda Companies.” Their study, published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, concluded the drink companies had contributed to, “96 national health organizations, including many medical and public health institutions whose specific missions include fighting the obesity epidemic.” They also noted that during the time their study was being conducted, the companies, “lobbied against 29 public health bills intended to reduce soda consumption or improve nutrition.”

Because the drink companies lobbied against Uncle Sam’s attempts to regulate their industry, the researchers questioned the soda companies’, “sincere commitment to improving the public’s health.” But the researchers, who are not supposed to display bias, also had harsh criticism for the organizations accepting Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s contributions. They wrote, “By accepting funding from these companies, health organizations are inadvertently participating in their marketing plans.”

So who are some of the 96 medical, and public health organizations receiving money from Big Soda? Time looked into it and found, “The groups accepting sponsorships included the American Diabetes Association, the National Institutes of Health, the American Red Cross, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and many more.”

Going further, and describing the effectiveness of large contributions to the organizations, Aaron and Siegel discovered, “that in 2010, Save the Children, a group that advocated for soda taxes, dropped the cause after they received more than $5 million from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in 2009. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which also received soda industry funding, issued a statement declining support for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed limit on soda portions, arguing nutrition education should be emphasized.”

But the American Beverage Association fired back against the latest research uncovering their cozy relationship with health groups. In a statement of their own, denying culpability in muddying the waters between soda consumption and public health initiatives (which would most assuredly entailed heavy taxation and regulation) they wrote;

America’s beverage companies are engaged in public health issues because we, too, want a strong, healthy America. We have a long tradition of supporting community organizations across the country. As this report points out, some of these organizations focus on strengthening public health, which we are proud to support.

We are making a difference through the voluntary actions we are taking to reduce calories and sugar from beverage consumption—and by working together as competitors. Through our efforts, we’ve engaged with prominent public health groups on how best to help people moderate their calories in what is the single-largest voluntary effort by any industry to address obesity.

Yes, we may disagree with some in the public health community on discriminatory and regressive taxes and policies on our products. But, we believe our actions in communities and the marketplace are contributing to addressing the complex challenge of obesity. We stand strongly for our need, and right, to partner with organizations that strengthen our communities.”

As free thinkers, it’s important to focus in on the bigger picture. There may be no better example of the intersection of public health, big government (and bigger taxes), and capitalism, than the soft drink industry. The fact is the progressives want to control our lives, not only how we think about soda, but they want to tax the hell out of it, and tell us how much we can drink at any one time. And they want to paint the soda company as being part of the problem by strategically using their millions in charitable donations to improve their bottom line, thus providing an impetus for taxing the hell out of the 80 billion dollar soda industry. Those taxes, almost assuredly, wouldn’t all go to bettering your child’s PE or school lunch programs, which tastes like you know what already.

Imagine if the progressives had been successful. There would be a warning label on soda cans, soda bottles, and fountain drink Styrofoam, all of which would not be any larger than 16 ounces. And God forbid the 2-liter containers! The nearly psychopathic obsession with portion sizes runs afoul with the fact that soda consumption is purely voluntary.

And if you think drinking a diet soda is better for you, think again. A 2014 study concluded the consumption of diet drinks jacks up the guts opti-flora or the digestive system’s natural bacteria and can lead to diabetes. So, once again, life lived in moderation may be the best defense against many of life’s illnesses. And a conscientious avoidance of “high fructose corn syrup” in sodas might be your best bet, as some have concluded, the substance seems to be far worse for you than natural sugar.

But if you’re looking for a rabbit hole to go down into, researchers studying obesity have long used monosodium glutamate (MSG) to induce obesity in rats. Yep! The same MSG found in most good ole Chinese food might be what’s making our nation’s kids so fat. And while it’s rumored that Coca-cola places the flavor enhancer in their drinks. There’s absolutely no truth to the myth. Cheers mate!