'Dementia' Joe keeps imbeciling along — pharmaceuticals, sending Nuland to Moscow — and (equally gracelessly) retreating from corporate taxation

22 October 2021

Long live the American Oligarchy?

Three tidbits of relatively recent news follow. So as to scar your happy day.

The below items concern America's belligerent foreign policy, evasive corporate taxation and our inability to manufacture much of anything actually useful.

Let's start with the United States' self-prescribed inability to . . .

. . . manufacture enough to qualify as being nationally secure.

Pharmaceuticals, for instance.

The United States (unbelievably) is about 80 percent dependent upon China and India for its pharmaceutical ingredients:

The pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chain involves two main stages.

The first is the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). These are the key parts of a drug which produce an effect. Such production is chemical-intensive, involving reactors for drug substance manufacture.

The second stage is a physical process known as formulations production. Substances known as excipients are combined with APIs to turn a drug into a consumable form, such as a tablet, liquid, capsule, cream, ointment or injectable product.

China and India are the source of 75% to 80% of the APIs imported to the US. Janet Woodcock, the director of the Centre for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), told Congress in 2019:

The number of Chinese facilities producing APIs for the US market has increased over the past decade, as part of a massive movement of pharmaceutical production offshore.

This movement is being driven by the pharmaceutical industry’s desire for cost savings and less stringent environmental regulations.

Notice that China and India do the hard part

And our largely inept United States just puts those active ingredients into pills, capsules and fluids.

How this medical drug shortage situation is not a national security issue beats me:

A recent survey of medical oncologists reported that 83 percent of physicians were unable to prescribe their preferred chemotherapy agent(s) in the prior six months. Drug unavailability necessitated a major change in treatment for their patients.

Similarly, surveys of pediatric oncologists showed that 66 percent reported drug shortages that significantly hindered patient care. Within the past decade, eight of the 10 major chemotherapy agents used to treat childhood ALL have been on shortage and unavailable for clinical use.

Furthermore, oncologists have also experienced intermittent lack of access to critical supportive care medications (e.g., anti-emetics, leucovorin, intravenous immunoglobulin), anti-infectious agents, blood pressure support medications, electrolyte supplementation, and even normal saline for fluid resuscitation, all of which negatively impact the ability to deliver high-quality curative anti-cancer therapy.

Such drug shortages have led to delayed clinical trials, increased patient morbidity, substitution or omission of critical medications resulting in increased rates of relapse and toxicity, increased cost and resource utilization to manage drug shortages, and ethical supply-versus-demand dilemmas for physicians regarding allocation of limited chemotherapy resources among their patients.

© 2021 Lauren Pommert and Sarah K. Tasian, Chemotherapy Drug Shortages in Pediatric Oncology: A Global Public Health Crisis Threatening Our Children, The Hematologist (2021) 18(4), https://doi.org/10.1182/hem.V18.4.2021412 (14 June 2021)

Related to the nation's medical drugs shortfall . . .

. . . consider the United States' accompanying, proudly bureaucratic incompetence.

If you want to puke at our mealy-mouthed — 'say nothing, do nothing' — lack of ability, read the following report. It is about the drug shortage conundrum.

And it comes from the complacently half-assed (and ass-covering) bureaucrats at the FDA:

US Food & Drug Administration, Report to Congress: Drug Shortages for Calendar Year 2020, fda.gov (inexplicably, but typically, lacks a publication date)

You can access the above-cited PDF from the following webpage, where the citation to the pertinent PDF also lacks a date of publication:

US Food & Drug Administration, Drug Shortages, fda.gov (visited 22 October 2021)

Evidently, the FDA is — probably indicatively of most Federal agencies — too stupid to recognize that virtually all medical and science publications are time sensitive.

One wonders how these FDA fatheads stay in power.

Perhaps the United States' oligarchically intended lack of a genuine educational system explains it.

News item two — foreign policy

Stone-headed belligerence reigns there, too:

Joe Biden’s administration insists that it wants to improve America’s badly frayed bilateral relationship with Russia. However, the president’s recent choice of an envoy for that task, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, strongly suggests a lack of sincerity on Washington’s part.

She is universally loathed among Russia’s leaders for her blatant hawkishness, and especially for her prominent role in supporting demonstrators who successfully ousted Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014 when she served as an assistant secretary of state in Barack Obama’s administration.

It is possible that selecting Nuland for such delicate negotiations simply was the latest in a string of blunders by Biden’s gaffe-prone foreign policy team.

However, it instead may have been a deliberate move to demonstrate U.S. “firmness” and an unwillingness to compromise with an adversary that administration leaders consider odious, but also weak and vulnerable.

We will see about the merits of the "weak and vulnerable" perception

Like our relationship with China, I suspect that this planet's Center for Mindless Belligerence (meaning the United States) is going to find (again) that it consistently bites off more than it can chew.

After all, who just left Afghanistan with its mottled, scraggly tail between its legs? In that impoverished place, thoroughly defeated by a ragtag bunch of determined people wielding primitive weapons.

A more representative loss of US face would be difficult to come up with.

Yet now, after that Afghanistan debacle — and all the other strategic losses that preceded it — we are sending Belligerence's Fondest Mouth-Foaming Bitch to Moscow?

How, one wonders, is that appointment going to advance anything other than Military Industrial Complex profits and — probably eventually — many pointless American deaths?

Then, there's . . .

. . . President Biden's predictable retreat from trying to fix corporate taxation.

That promise went the same do-nothing way that his student loan forgiveness idea (also predictably) did.

What the Oligarchy does not want, the Rabble does not get:

The White House told Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday that a proposed hike in U.S. corporate taxes is unlikely to make it into their signature social spending bill, according to a congressional source familiar with the discussions.

President Joe Biden's plans to hike the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%, a key campaign promise, are likely to be one of the steep concessions he makes to steer his economic revival package through Congress, the White House disclosed in the private meeting with top Democrats.

In short

Inequitable taxation is one of the nation's most pressing inequity problems. Ordinary taxpayers have to pay the bulk of this Military Industrial Complex's financing, while corporations dodge most (and sometimes all) taxes.

Let us worship Mammon's power.

That should be uplifting, shouldn't it?

The moral? — The United States is run by avariciously destructive idiots

Greedy hostility is America's most defining trait.

It is metaphorically appropriate that our former president was a foul-mouthed and perpetually lying megalomaniacal idiot — and the new one, equally representatively — a demented, Deep State-puppetized automaton.

At this rate, China (with all its flaws) will be running things soon.

And by then, a whole lot of the world's people will be thankful that the soul-polluted United States is cowering — like a proto-mammal — in the shadows, paw-sifting soil for manufactured scraps that it cannot produce.

I do not think that this is the Fate that America's founders had in mind, when our experiment in republican democracy began.

In sum, if you are a thoughtful person, you will see why Christianity's seven deadly sins — pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth — remain pertinent in 2021.

God forbid — the enshrined American leadership nevertheless mandates — that anyone pay corrective attention to those.

PeteFree.com

'Dementia' Joe keeps imbeciling along — pharmaceuticals, sending Nuland to Moscow — and (equally gracelessly) retreating from corporate taxation