OCTOBER 2018 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Big Pharma Nostrum Laboratories’ Nirmal Mulye. Pharmaceutical companies use the weakest and frequently the laziest, excuses for jacking up the prices of their life-saving drugs. In the end, no matter what they say, it is about money. Their job, as they see it, is to make money. If they keep 100 people alive or 1,000 or 1,000,000,000, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that number on the bottom line on their accounting sheet. If their goal is to make $1,000,000, and they need to sell a pill for $1,000,000 apiece for the only 10 babies who need it in order to achieve that goal, then that is what they will do.

Most people, faced with that statement, would say that is immoral; that is, except Nirmal Mulye.  In an interview published in the Financial Times, he had this to say about everyone making Martin Shkreli out to be a bad guy for raising the cost of one of his own company’s drugs through the roof.

“I agree with Martin Shkreli that when he raised the price of his drug he was within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders [...] If he’s the only one selling it then he can make as much money as he can,” said Mr. Mulye. “This is a capitalist economy and if you can’t make money you can’t stay in business.”

What is Mulye defending? Well, his “Missouri-based” company, Nostrum Laboratories, just jacked up the price of their drug nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392. According to the World Health Organization, nitrofurantoin is what they classify as an “essential drug” for treating bladder and urinary tract infections. Mulye wasn’t done giving a lesson in sociopathy as he continued to defend Shkreli as being within his rights:

“We have to make money when we can. The price of iPhones goes up, the price of cars goes up, hotel rooms are very expensive.”

According to Mulye, Nostrum was working the market against Casper Pharma, which makes another version of the same drug and had recently raised its price to $2,800. So, you see, Mulye is still offering it up for less! Morality! The guy is a saint!

Sadly, this is what it’s come to in America. Corporations prioritize profits and shareholders over consumers, workers, any sense of a public good, or basic human needs. It hasn’t always been this way.  I’m old enough to remember a different time.

2. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). After Dr. Christine Blasey’s Senate Judicial Committee testimony, Graham appeared on Sean Hannity to celebrate the” big win” over the sexual assault accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. While tens of millions of women worldwide watched and wept hearing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford detail her sexual assault at the hands of a drunken Brett Kavanaugh when she was 15 years old, Lindsey Graham was celebrating with Sean Hannity. Despite Fox News characters like Chris Wallace saying he found Dr. Ford’s testimony to be credible and compelling, telling a story about his own daughters opening up about sexual assault at their school because of Dr. Ford’s bravery, ol’ Lindsey was telling Hannity that Dr. Ford just needed to get over it.

“I am now more convinced than ever that he didn’t do it. He is the right guy to be on the court,” Graham told Hannity. “Ms. Ford has a problem and destroying Judge Kavanaugh’s life won’t fix her problem.” Later, asked what he meant by that, Graham said Dr. Ford should get some therapy.

But he wasn’t through with the insults. Later, appearing at an event from The Atlantic, Graham when asked about President Trump’s disgusting public attack on Dr. Ford Graham responded by saying “this is what happens when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill.” The two-faced Graham tried to have it both ways, saying Donald Trump shouldn’t have made those public comments but then defending the deplorable behavior saying, “everything he said is factually true.”

The Trump-critic turned Trump lapdog is a disgusting human being.

3. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Fellow GOP Scam Artists. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. The McConnell/Trump/GOP rushed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was supposed to pay for itself by stimulating economic growth that would increase federal revenues has instead exploded federal deficits. Duh! This outcome was so predictable you didn’t need to be an economist to see through the scam. I saw it, but I suspect so did anyone with half a brain. As expected the U.S. deficit has exploded, adding an estimated 17 percent increase in 2018 alone. It is predicted to ramp up to $1.4 billion in the first decade.

Remember what McConnell said last year about the tax cut plan: "I not only don't think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue neutral"? "In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap." Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin echoed this nonsense, saying he expected the new law “to more than pay for itself—it would help to reduce future deficits.”

I wasn’t alone in expressing skepticism about Republican rosy claims. Doubt was widespread. When the tax law passed, members of Congress had an abundance of evidence predicting it would accelerate America’s growing budget deficits. Predictions from authoritative sources went as high a $2 trillion.

If most economists and Republican lawmakers knew this, why did the party that claims a visceral aversion to debt push such a huge tax cut plan? Because, as I suggested previously, their real agenda was not only to reward their wealthy donor class, which is their stock-and-trade (the super-rich would see their tax bills slashed by more than 40 percent, among other perks), but, perhaps more important, to provide an excuse to use the expanded deficits as an excuse to cut federal spending--a familiar GOP tactic.

The message is unmistakably clear: Republicans don’t give a damn about deficits, except as an excuse for slashing entitlements and essential services like education and health care. This has always been the Republican plan.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell left no doubt about this agenda, saying this month that the U.S. budget deficit is "very disturbing." As on cue, he called for cuts in “Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.” He also suggested Republicans might repeal the ACA if after the November election is they retained control of the House and Senate.

Now that the tax cut is not paying for itself, and federal deficits are growing, and with a morally bankrupt, unfeeling ally in the White House, McConnell and his greedy congressional pals are ready to make their move.

Trump, McConnell, Mnuchin, Ryan, et. al., all lied, because that’s what they do. Everybody knew this was coming. Nearly every economist and budget analyst in the nation predicted the tax cut would balloon the deficit. Those of us who have been paying attention to Republicans for decades know what this would mean: a gutting of social insurance programs and a new push to privatize entitlements. Only the midterm election stands between them and their grim reaper cuts. (Has there ever been more at stake in a midterm election?)

You’ve got to hand it to the GOP. They got their tax cuts for the rich while paving the way for the ultimate destruction of the nation’s most successful and popular programs, which they’ve always loathed.

4. Representative Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-CA). We Americans have become used—or should I say numb—to false negative campaigning. Phony stories like Swift Boat and Clinton child trafficking have become an integral part of our anything-goes elections. Both parties are guilty. Now we have the despicable Duncan Hunter stooping to perhaps a new low in falsely tarring an opponent.

Hunter is running ads that try to tar his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, with a grandfather who masterminded the 1972 terrorist attack on Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich. Hunter of course failed to mention that Israeli commandos killed the grandfather long before Campa-Najjar was born. The tarring effort was considered so revolting it prompted the Jewish group J Street to condemn it as “one of the most ugly, racist campaign ads we’ve ever seen.”

Hunter is running for re-election in his San Diego congressional district while facing five dozen indictments for spending donor-given campaign funds on himself, his wife, and a string of affairs. His actual actions in Congress have been predictably odious.

In a bid to save his behind in his hard-right Republican district, he's now eagerly going full racist trash, suggesting to voters that his opponent, the son of Palestinian and Latino parents, is a secret terrorist. Why? Because of his name.

“He changed his name from Ammar Yasser Najjar to Ammar Campa-Najjar,” Hunter said at a recent campaign event, according to NPR, “so he sounds Hispanic ... That is how hard, by the way, that the radical Muslims are trying to infiltrate the U.S. government.”

Not that it is any of the indicted trash bag's business, but Democratic opponent Campa-Najjar is Christian, he changed his name to honor his mother, and he holds a federal security clearance due to his past position in the Obama administration. Duncan Hunter, in the meantime, is a serial affair-having, indicted campaign embezzler who inherited his identically-named father's congressional position in an act of grotesque, cynical nepotism.

The overtly racist Republican, however, isn't just muttering such things to private crowds. He's cutting campaign ads based on those attacks, as well:

A scary-sounding ad from Hunter’s campaign also accused Campa-Najjar of trying to “infiltrate” Congress, noting that his grandfather, Yasser al-Najjar, participated in the deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

What Hunter's white nationalist campaign team leaves out is that Campa-Najjar's grandfather died 15 years before Najjar was born; the two never even met each other in a dream. Duncan's campaign is suggesting that such acts must carry through via genes or osmosis, a common refrain in the worst racist circles but in few other places. If we want to talk about criminality and family ties, perhaps we need to take another look at what Duncan's father was up to during his own congressional years? Yes? No?

Unbelievably the affair-having, campaign cash-embezzling crooked Hunter probably will still win reelection (he's three-points ahead as of this posting), which says a lot about voters in his district. Hunters sprawling district that has been a den of conservative racism for a very, very long time, fueled mostly by old, sunshine-seeking farts put out that their chosen paradise is somehow too close to the southern border for their tastes and nurturing the general sense of pasty entitlement common in every other racist nook of the country. I grew up in San Diego and know the place quite well: Trumpville!
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And the winner is:

I'm tempted to go with the dirtbag Duncan Hunter, Jr, but because of the horrific consequences for ordinary Americans of the McConnell/GOP tax scam, I award this month’s IGGY to Senator Mitch McConnell and his Republican cohorts.