Conservative U.S. Supreme Court to sick and dying Americans: Drop Dead!

"They say drug prices are too high? Shove the prices down their throats!"

The fearless defenders of the right to life of fertilized eggs, blastulas, gastrulas, and fetuses have new reason to rejoice at the appointment of right wing justices to the United Stated Supreme Court.

The right-to-life-loving justices have just delivered a message to the sick and the dying: Be sick and die. We don’t give a damn. We have obscene drug company profits to protect. Not to mention the right of rich corporations to pillage the little guy.

Maryland’s humanity 

vs. conservative greed

All of the above emerged when an attempt by the State of Maryland to regulate the outrageous prices of generic and out-of-patent drugs — drugs that help sick and dying people — was rejected first by an appeals court and then effectively by the so-called conservative Supreme Court.

Reports from Reuters and other news media, this one for example, say the Supremes refused to review the case, which was originally brought by a drug trade association representing manufacturers of generic drugs, and decided in their favor by the appeals court. 

The drug makers took deep umbrage at a Maryland law that would prevent, for example, companies like Mylan and Turing from hiking the prices of drugs whose patent has expired (or their generic equivalents) to stratospheric levels — within Maryland's borders.

This would have undone, in Maryland only, a practice that presents  many desperately ill people with a simple proposition: Your money (if you have enough) or your life.

Pay up or die

Just to remind you of what we’re talking about here, Turing raised the price of Daraprim, an anti-parasitic drug that was keeping AIDS victims and others alive from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. And yes, you'll need a lot more than one pill.

And Mylan, raised the price of EpiPen, an injection device that prevents allergy sufferers and others from going into anaphylactic shock and dying, raised the price of its product from $100 for a two-pack in 2009 to $608 in 2016.

Martin Shkreli, the former head honcho of Turing, is currently blogging, not always completely coherently, from a prison cell, where he belongs. He still has, according to his blog, 30 months left to serve on his sentence. The sentence is for an unrelated or loosely-related crime. And no, I’ll be damned if I’ll voluntarily link to his blog. Ever.

Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, is less likely to do time, for any reason. That's because it’s who you’re related to, and not basic human decency or ethics that counts. Bresch’s father is U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, who also flacks against controls on global warming for coal interests. He says he’s a Democrat. Sometimes our tent is a little too big to suit my personal taste.

Maryland tries to

save its citizens. 

Lotsa luck on that.

Remember, the awful, unconscionable, outrageous thing that Maryland attempted to do was to regulate prices for generic drugs within its own borders. That law was struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals last spring on the grounds that controlling prices in Maryland would somehow regulate trade outside of Maryland’s borders.

I’m not going to get tangled in the weeds concerning the finer points of law here. Feel free to go here and read the technical details until your eyes cross, which I can almost guarantee they will. 

Suffice it to say that the convoluted argument in favor of raping and pillaging sick people is ridiculous, and the legal justification is contradicted by other drug industry practices around the nation.

But your Conservative Supreme Court in action refused to review the lower court’s ruling, much less to change it. 

So much for the right to life when it stands in the way of making a quick and sleazy buck. 

Boof on that, Mr. Justice.

The United States of America is so screwed!

This just in at The Washington Post:

"Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced Wednesday that he is retiring from the Supreme Court, a move that gives President Trump the chance to replace the court’s pivotal justice and dramatically shift the institution to the right, setting up a bitter partisan showdown on Kennedy’s successor."

Welcome back to the 12th Century.

Death by Irritable Judge

Part of the latest Supreme Court decision allowing executions to resume in Oklahoma says, in effect, "So what if it hurts." Evidently Justice Scalia and his right wing court bench pals wouldn't mind going back to the good old days, when people were executed like this.

 Just when you thought it was safe to assume again that reason will somehow prevail at the United States Supreme Court, we have a ruling with the usual 5-4 split that torturing people to death with a chemical cocktail that sometimes seems to inflict searing pain is just hunky-dory. 

So we’re back to the 12th Century, unless frying condemned prisoners from the inside out and letting them die in agony over many minutes — including some prisoners who may turn out to be innocent — is your idea of justice.

Justice Sotomayor, one of the four Supreme Court dissenters, summed up my sentiments exactly:

Petitioners contend that Oklahoma’s current protocol is a barbarous method of punishment — the chemical equivalent of being burned alive,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “But under the court’s new rule, it would not matter whether the state intended to use midazolam, or instead to have petitioners drawn and quartered, slowly tortured to death or actually burned at the stake.”

The right wing majority seems to want death at any cost, whether the condemned person is innocent or guilty. Pain? So what’s a little pain? Or a lot of pain? Even people who aren’t executed sometimes die in pain,  Justice Alito argued, according to the New York Times. And besides, who says that a man, supposedly anesthetized and in the midst of his own execution, is feeling pain just because, while supposedly unconscious and paralyzed, he tries to sit up, writhing and gasping, his face contorted?

Then we had  Justice Scalia, playing the new conservative game of co-opting the liberal point of view and then claiming that such a point of view should result in a conservative outcome.

We federal judges,” Justice Scalia continued, “live in a world apart from the vast majority of Americans. After work, we retire to homes in placid suburbia or to high-rise co-ops with guards at the door. We are not confronted with the threat of violence that is ever present in many Americans’ everyday lives. The suggestion that the incremental deterrent effect of capital punishment does not seem ‘significant’ reflects, it seems to me, a let-them-eat-cake obliviousness to the needs of others. Let the people decide how much incremental deterrence is appropriate.”

The trouble with Scalia’s argument is that people who have been subject to violence in their everyday lives, don’t think “incremental deterrence” like capital punishment is appropriate. Take the survivors of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. When members of their congregation  were murdered by the white racist thug Dylann Roof (who was taking advantage of the right wing Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the Second Amendment) they forgave their assailant. It’s Justice Scalia, living in his own protected real estate, who wants to see a body hanging from a tree. Or tortured to death on a gurney. Or however it is he wants the execution to be committed.

But I’ll give nearly the last word to a letter writer to the Times who observed:

The countries that practice the death penalty are (in order of the number of executions: 1. China, 2. Iran, 3. Saudi Arabia, 4. United States, 5. Pakistan,
6, Yemen, 7, North Korea, 8. Vietnam and 9. Libya. Distinguished company eh? And hey, we're number 4!

If Sharia Law ever arrives in this country, Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and maybe even Kennedy will probably welcome it with open arms. Well actually, they already have.

You are on the verge of being blinded to what’s in your food, what’s in your medicine, perhaps even why your electric bill suddenly got bigger. Be very afraid.

Below, two chilling excerpt from  an article by Haley Sweetland Edwards in the Washington Monthly Magazine online. Read the excerpts, shudder, then read the entire terrifying piece here: 

***

"And if industry goes on to win the war—if they collect a body of First Amendment case law establishing that corporations’ First Amendment-protected speech cannot reasonably be fettered by economic regulation—our society will be in a world of hurt. There will be no corporate transparency whatsoever. No way to enforce workers’ rights. No way to compel companies to protect investors or shareholders. And all regulations that require corporate disclosure, including most financial regulations, will cease to exist in any meaningful way."

***

"By claiming that the government cannot, under the Constitution, compel companies to 'engage in speech they would not otherwise issue,' NAM is essentially undercutting nearly alleconomic regulation. 'If that seems alarmist, it’s not,' wrote University of Tulsa law professor Tamara Piety, the author of Brandishing the First Amendment. In the legal context, the current definition of 'speech' is famously fuzzy and could, depending on the situation, include very nearly everything a company does, from advertising and performing financial transactions to transferring data and utilizing computer algorithms. So if NAM’s claim were true, it’s very possible that the government couldn’t regulate any of those activities. 'If you cannot regulate commercial speech,' Piety wrote, 'you cannot regulate commerce, period.'”

Oh shut up with that nitpicking blather that a healthcare mandate is a tax. Just shut up, will yuh, Willard?

Of all the dissembling horse crap I’ve ever witnessed falling out of a Republican’s mouth, the biggest lump of it came when I watched Willard (aka “Mitt”) Romney talking about the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare (which as you may recall, is almost exactly the same thing as Romneycare. Or at least it’s the same as what Romneycare used to be before Willard etch-a-sketched his own brain.) 

What the Supreme Court ruled is that the penalty that a few people who refuse to buy health insurance will be charged is a tax. And they damn well deserve to be taxed, since by not jumping into the health insurance pool, they’re driving up costs for the rest of us.

But Willard “Mitt” Romney is insisting that the whole bill is a tax, the largest tax in history. He says the Supreme Court says so. He knows that’s not true. Not to mince words, he’s a liar. That’s spelled l-i-a-r.

Willard is lying to confuse enough gullible voters to maybe swing some electoral votes his way in swing states. But there’s no tax increase coming. What is coming is a reduction in the rate at which healthcare costs are growing.

Here Willard. Here’s a firefly in a jar. Or maybe it’s a God particle taken from a horse's bowel. Go swallow it and shut up.

Roberts Supreme Court gives medical device makers a license to kill – YOU!

The U.S. Supreme Court under Justice Roberts has decided that if a company makes a device so ineptly or negligently that the device kills you, your widow or widower and orphans have no right to sue the device maker.

At least, not if the FDA has approved the device.

This means, in effect, that some company can ram through the FDA shoddy equipment or drugs that might maim or kill you, and when you are injuured they can effectively say to you or your heirs, “Tough luck, pal. Go stuff it.”

Apparently only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg sees through the court’s “thinking” – actually an attempt to protect big business from the consequences of its own mistakes, carelessness and greed.

This latest strike for big business against the citizens of the USA is right up there in extreme right wing judicial activism with the decision, a little over six years ago, not to recount the misleading and Florida ballots in the Bush vs. Gore election.

You might be tempted to ask, “Well, if a device is FDA approved, doesn’t that mean its safe?”

Hell no!

The FDA under the Bush administration has been a cash-starved political arm of the White House. Examples of sloppy, questionable or downright negligent approval have been legion, but here are just a fcouple, reported on the website of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.

Poor quality control standards in American drug and vaccine manufacturing plants is a disgrace.

…rather than accelerating inspections and enforcement to ensure quality control, FDA reduced its factory compliance inspections from 4,300 in 1980 to just 1,600 last year. Fewer inspections produce fewer critical report findings, but fewer inspections mean that American consumers are at increased risk of contaminated medicines…

[There is] Evidence demonstrating that in the rush to bring new drugs to market human subjects are exposed to increased risks of harm in clinical trials-- even before their safety has been shown in animals.

..Indian researchers have complained that humans tests were being conducted at the same time as animal tests --and that animal tests revealed the drug caused tumors, first in rats, then in mice

Naturally, the Bush Administration sided with the defandants, claiming that unfavorable state jury verdicts against companies like meditronic would compel companies to alter product designs or labels that had already gotten FDA approval.

Hell, just because a product kills people, should a company have to go to the onerous trouble of changing some labels? I mean, what’s more important, human lives or a few cents less of profit due to label printing costs?

Moreover, the defandant in the Supreme Court case that caused the ruling, a company called Medtronic, has been implicated in several cases of shoddy devices and practices. Go here for stories about Medtronic devices that may have caused at least five deaths with its heart defibrillators and about Medtronic’s questionable payments to doctors in relation to a spinal surgery device.

Congress can “solve” the problem by restoring the rights of injured citizens to sue the companies that injure them. A new law would tell most of the justices of the Supreme Court to take a flying leap of their own.

Moreover, an overwhelmingly Democratic Senate and House, with a Democratic president, could begin taking steps to bring the Supreme Court back to earth where it can focus on law and justice rather than so-called “Conservative” radicalism.

All the more reason to vote for not one Republican the next election. Got that? Not-one-Republican.

Correction and addendum: A new story in the Feb. 21 New York Times states:

The food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, under which the F.D.A., regulates pharmaceuticals, does not contain a pre-emption clause. Nontheless, the administration is arguing in the case the court has accepted for its next term, Wyeth v. Levine, No 06-1249, that pre-emption is implicit in the structure of the statute.

In other words, for the moment your right to sue if, say, you get poisoned by an erroneously labeled or dangerous drug still exists, but probably not for long. The Bush Administration is fighting to take your right away to sue in this case, too, and the situation is essentially the same. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

“Oink!” Miss Piggy’s Tragic Lament or: The Supreme Court, The Hapless Consumer, And The Day Big Business Spammed the Court System

I noted with cranky alarm this morning a report in the New York Times. It revealed that the Roberts U.S. Supreme Court has again affirmed its allegiance not to the U.S. Constitution or to the people of the United States, but to what you might call The U.S. Chamber of Big Business.

At issue was whether investors like you and me have a blanket right to sue corporations that commit securities fraud. Hell no, the Supreme Court in effect said, practically handing fraudsters a new constitutional privilege to rob you blind in certain circumstances

The majority reasoning on the court was a mind-boggling brain-busting tangle of what passes for reasoning. You can try to parse the Times' summary of their thinking, if you dare, here.

The sad truth is that the Roberts Supreme Court and Republican blowhards talk a good line about opposing “frivolous” litigation, but only when it’s litigation brought by a little guy or somebody representing a bunch of little guys suing big business.

You never hear a word – not from the Supreme Court, not from the Republican Party thugs who love to stick their hands in your pockets, not from the Bush White House, not from the corporate crybabies in who don’t like getting punished for their sometimes multi-billion dollar ripoffs – when the big guys come down like a ton of bricks over some relatively little guy for some trivial transgression.

Case in point: Hormel vs.
Miss Piggy’s daddy

My favorite example goes back to 1995 and 1996 when the Hormel Corporation, makers of Spam, came down like the proverbial ton of bricks on the late Jim Henson, the puppeteer who created The Muppets.

Henson was making another Muppets movie, and in addition to all the usual suspects like Miss Piggy and Kermit, he had plans to very briefly introduce a character named Spa’am, a wild boar puppet. Guess what?

Hormel squeals like
a stuck you-know-what

Hormel Foods Corporation, the makers of Spam, sued The Muppets seeking an injunction to prevent the making of the movie with any character named Spa’am. Fortunately, Hormel sued in the Southern District of New York – Manhattan is what normal people call the area – which as everyone knows, is a roiling nest of reprobate liberals like The New York Crank. And so sweet reason prevailed.

Faced with a phalanx of corporate litigators grown irate over a pig puppet, the normally august District Court for the Southern District was forced to climb down into the sandbox with those runny-nosed kids from Hormel and make some observations.

Dr. Laura A. Peracchio, an expert in consumer behavior, states in her report that Spa'am is unappealing and will lead to negative associations on the part of consumers because he has small eyes, protruding teeth, warts, a skull on his headdress, is generally untidy, and speaks in a deep voice with poor grammar and diction. I am, however, persuaded by the report and testimony of Anne Devereaux Jordan, an expert in children's literature, who notes that children (and adults) often have positive associations with characters that may not appear classically handsome. Among other examples, Ms. Jordan points to "Pumbaa," the good-natured warthog in Walt Disney's film The Lion King, and "Splinter," the aging rat who acts as teacher and father-figure to the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

When all was said and done, the District Court for the Southern District essentially told Hormel to go take a hike. Whereupon, summoning all its mighty financial muscle and its powerful litigators, Hormel drove Henson’s costs up further in this tempest over a piggy puppet and appealed the decision.

Could the distinguished judges
manage to keep a straight face?

I would love to say the appeals court was not amused, but judging from the justices' written decision, the Court of Appeals was very amused. I quote from their decision, which wiped up the floor with Hormel. You can find the full text here, but the judicial writing is so delicious – and certainly tastier than a plate of Spam – that I feel I absolutely must quote parts of it to you.

The film will use some of Henson's most familiar characters, including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and [**3] Fozzie Bear. A number of additional characters have been created [*501] for this production, among whom is Spa'am, the subject of this litigation. The similarity between the name "Spa'am" and Hormel's mark is not accidental. In Henson's film, Spa'am is the high priest of a tribe of wild boars that worships Miss Piggy as its Queen Sha Ka La Ka La. Although the name "Spa'am" is mentioned only once in the entire movie, Henson hopes to poke a little fun at Hormel's famous luncheon meat by associating its processed, gelatinous block with a humorously wild beast. However, the executives at Hormel are not amused. They worry that sales of SPAM will drop off if it is linked with "evil in porcine form."... … Hormel also expresses concern that even comic association with an unclean "grotesque" boar will call into question the purity and high quality of its meat product. But the district court found no evidence that Spa'am was unhygienic. At worst, he might be described as "untidy." Id. at *6. Moreover, by now Hormel should be inured to any such ridicule. Although SPAM is in fact made from pork shoulder and ham meat, and the name itself supposedly is a portmanteau word for spiced ham, countless jokes have played off the public's unfounded suspicion that SPAM is a product of less than savory ingredients. For example, in one episode of the television cartoon Duckman, Duckman is shown discovering "the secret ingredient to SPAM" as he looks on at "Murray's Incontinent Camel Farm." In a recent newspaper column it was noted that "In one little [**5] can, Spam contains the five major food groups: Snouts. Ears. Feet. Tails. Brains."

Before it was through, the appeals court had gotten into not only pronunciation of the Hormel Spam one syllable brand name and the boar puppet’s two-syllable name, but also into logotypes, consumer perceptions, “expert” testimony, and an older case pitting the movie character King Kong against the computer game Donkey Kong. In the end, the appeals court affirmed the district court’s decision and Hormel was again told to go take a hike. And you thought law was boring?

Hormel ends up with
pork fat on its face

Of course, ultimately the joke on Hormel was even bigger than anyone might have guessed at the time. Within a few years, as America became wired to the Internet, "spam" took on a whole new meaning – a definition of the crap you don’t want that shows up in your e-mailbox.

Also, thanks to the Internet, there’s Wikipedia. So now you and the entire world can go here and discover that:

"A 56 gram (approximately 2 ounce) serving of original Spam provides 7 grams of protein, 2 grams of carbohydrates, 15 grams of fat (23% US Daily Value) including 6 grams of saturated fat (28% US Daily Value), and over 170 calories. A serving contains nearly a third of the recommended daily intake of sodium (salt). Spam provides very little in terms of vitamins and minerals (0% vitamin A, 1% vitamin C, 1% calcium, 3% iron). It has been listed as a food that is a poor choice for weight loss (or weight gain) and optimum health and as a food that "is high in saturated fat and sodium".

At last, I come to
the cranky point

So what’s all this have to do with the Supreme Court’s decision favoring the right of big business to hoodwink the public and deprive us of our investment dollars?

Only this cranky citing of the ancient cliché that, “what goes around comes around.” One of these days, the Supreme Court’s latest pro-thug decision will come around to haunt not only the thugs in many corporate headquarters, but the clowns on the court who are joyfully wallowing in their distortion of the Constituion, common law and plain decency.

When that happens, remember that you heard it cranked about here first.