drugs

Wikileaks Exposes Trans-Pacific Partnership as Bad Trade Deal Again

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Enslaved through trade,  That seems to be the agenda with trade agreements these days.  Over and over again national law, the common good is overwritten through bad trade deals.  Wikileaks has exposed yet another horror from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement being negotiated.  It seems freedom loving, Democratic United States is leading the charge to ensure life saving drugs are not affordable for most people.

Banks Launder Money With Impunity

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laundering moneyHSBC is a bank. They are also a money launderer. Last week the Senate subcommittee on investigations, part of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, issued a report (pdf) and held a hearing, U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History. Contained within is a laundry list, if we can use the pun, of HSBC evil doings and how they mechanically laundry money for drug cartels, terrorists and tax evaders.

This is over a decade past 9/11 and seemingly HSBC has been operating with impunity. One of the conduits for money laundering is correspondent banking. Correspondent banking is when one financial institution provides services to another financial institution to move funds, exchange currencies, cash monetary instruments, or carry out other financial transactions. Even though in 2002, correspondent banking was recognized as a primary method to fund terrorist activities, the doors have not been shut.

Correspondent accounts continue to provide a gateway into the U.S. financial system, and wrongdoers continue to abuse that entryway.

Below is what has been done since 9/11, yet correspondent banking is alive and well.

The Euphoric Drug of Profit - Part II - A Brief History of Drug R&D

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In the previous post, The Euphoric Drug of Profit, I asked the simple question, should pharmaceutical drugs be for profit at all? They are life saving compounds after all, something for the public welfare and good.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), funds billions of taxpayer dollars in public research.

Before 1980, the results of publicly funded research, often performed at United States universities, was considered public domain (de facto).

Some of the problems with this scenario were:

  • basic research was not taken to product and final development
  • funding basic research does not fund the 75% additional costs of bring results to use by the general public

The Euphoric Drug of Profit

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Should the Pharmaceutical industry be for profit? The orthodoxy is profit motives new drug discoveries, research and without it most drugs would never be discovered. But is the dogma from the profit church true?

Despite prescription drugs having a market growth rate of ~4.5% per year and total US sales of $286 billion, global $745 Billion, in 2007, the press was all aghast at the market decline and blamed it all on the lack of new products.

I wonder if you look at medicine as a product? Well, in the current state of affairs life saving compounds are.