[Plura-list] 80% of the stimulus tax break will go to 43,000 people; Gilead, the remdesivir welfare queens; Poor countries denied covid aid

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* 80% of the stimulus tax break will go to 43,000 people: $195B over ten
years..

* Gilead, the remdesivir welfare queens: Big Pharma socializes its
costs, privatizes its gains.

* Poor countries denied covid aid: The G20 has offered $150B; they need
$2.5T.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019.

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading.

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☄️ 80% of the stimulus tax break will go to 43,000 people

Remember when the stimulus was first proposed, and there was a lot of
concern that the GOP would us it as an excuse to put billions more into
the pockets of, you know, billionaires?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#stimulus-scam

You'll never guess what happened next.

Unsurprisingly, Mitch McConnell's version of the CARES Act included
swingeing tax-breaks for the richest people in America, eliminating the
Tax Scam's modest limits to how much individuals earning $250K or more
could claim.

https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/research/the-cares-act-major-coronavirus-relief-for-american-workers-families-and-small-businesses

All told, the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that this change
will cost $195B over ten years: more, even, than the US is showering on
the airlines who so unwisely incinerated their cash reserves in an orgy
of stock-buybacks, leaving them to beg for corporate welfare.

It's hard to overstate much much money this will give to the richest
people in America. *Eighty percent* of the *195 billion dollars* will go
to 43,000 people.

These are literally the richest people in the country.

As Matt Taibbi explains so masterfully, this is a trickle-down bailout,
with seemingly unlimited budgets to lift asset prices, but a mere $1200
to help low-waged workers survive for ten weeks (Treasury Secretary
Mnuchin calls this a "liquidity bridge").

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-trickle-up-bailout

The Fed is stepping in with billions for  junk bonds issued by "fallen
angel" companies whose credit ratings have fallen through the floor.
They're buying from banks like Citibank, who buy bonds them at steep
discounts, then sell them at full face value to Uncle Sucker.

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☄️ Gilead, the remdesivir welfare queens

To read Bret Stevens in the New York Times ("there should be no
big-pharma haters in pandemics"), you'd think that remdesivir, the
promising covid treatment, was the result of Big Pharma's big R&D;
budgets. You'd be wrong. Remdesivir was publicly funded.

https://www.keionline.org/wp-content/uploads/KEI-Briefing-Note-2020_1GS-5734-Remdesivir.pdf

The ​U.S. Army, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
National Institutes of Health/National Institute Allergies and
Infectious Diseases subsidized the preclinical and clinical development
of remdesivir - helped along by public universities.

Actual pharma R&D; spend goes to things like figuring out how to
repatent an old heart med as a boner pill (Viagra), or how to
reformulate a public domain opioid and repatent it (Oxycontin).

The risky spending that saves lives? That comes from the government.

Why would the private sector spend money that it could divert to
shareholder buybacks and executive salary on high-risk ventures to
improve patients' lives, when the can just appropriate publicly funded
research, patent it, and charge unlimited sums for access to it?

It didn't used to be this way. In 1989, the Bush NIH adopted a rule
limiting how much pharma companies could charge Americans for products
derived from publicly funded research. In 1995, Bill Clinton struck down
the rule.

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/12/us/us-gives-up-right-to-control-drug-prices.html

Centrism literally kills.

What's more, as David Sirota notes, the Clinton HHS czar who oversaw the
change, Donna Shalala, was just appointed to oversee trillions in
stimulus funds by Nancy Pelosi.

https://sirota.substack.com/p/will-big-pharma-fleece-us-on-a-covid

If remdesivir turns out to be an effective covid treatment, it will be a
huge, publicly subsidized windfall for Gilead, the pharma company that
gouged the public on Hepatitis C treatments, tripled the cost of
publicly funded HIV meds, dodged tax by offshoring its profits.

Gilead is also the company that secured "orphan drug" status for
remdesivir, giving it 7 years' worth of extra exclusive rights to it
(this status is for drugs that treat rare diseases that no one else is
addressing).

It only backed off after public shaming.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/25/gilead-sciences-coronavirus-drug/

The right has fretted for decades about the "moral hazard" of government
handouts, warning that giving poor people enough money to house and feed
themselves will tempt them to be lazy and greedy.

But the only welfare queens driving Cadillacs and getting fat on
government pork are the donor class in exclusive ZIP codes, not people
living in Section 8 housing and risking their lives working for Doordash.

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☄️ Poor countries denied covid aid

The world's poorest countries (ahem, "emerging markets") need at least
$2.5 trillion to weather the pandemic. The world's richest countries
(the G20) have offered them $150 billion.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-18/guardians-of-global-economy-come-up-short-in-fight-against-virus

The thing is, only treating part of the population in a pandemic is like
only banning pissing in one end of the swimming pool. We have a shared,
species-wide microbial destiny.

That's a lesson Singapore learned in the hardest way possible.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/18/asia/singapore-coronavirus-response-intl-hnk/index.html

You may recall that early in the pandemic, Singapore boasted of a
near-miraculous control over the spread of infection. Now, it's gripped
by an out of control second wave that's burning through the city-state.

That second wave came from Singapore's much-abused underclass.

Singapore's political authoritarianism has its origins in the
subjugation of ethnic minorities and the systematic denial of political
agency to a permanent class of gastarbeiters who live in cramped dorms
and earn peppercorn wages.

In other words, Singapore is exactly like America, or Saudi Arabia, or
Qatar, or any other country that relies on a brutally exploited
underclass to maintain its quality of life.

It's also a microcosm for the world.

And while America - and other sovereign currency issuers - can conjure
up unlimited funds by adding zeroes to the spreadsheets in the national
bank's computers, poor countries cannot.

Their debts are denominated in foreign currencies. Minting more Haitian
gourdes will not help the country pay its dollar- and euro-denominated
debts. Nor can the Haitian state procure the resources it needs to fight
covid by spending gourdes domestically.

Haiti's centuries of debt-slavery - whereby it had to divert the lion's
share of its productive output to pay for its freedom from France, which
had already enslaved and looted the country before "freeing" it - has
made it impossible to develop domestic production capacity.

Haiti, too, is a microcosm for the world, whose poor countries have been
forced at debt-point to privatize and sell off their state industries to
foreign looters who left them to crumble, and whose domestic production
priorities were sidelined to serve export markets.

Exports generated foreign currency that could be used to service debt to
foreign creditors - but also, orienting poor countries' economies around
exportable commodities made it impossible to sustain themselves,
creating endless new debts.

Now, the World Bank and the IMF - the arm-breakers who oversaw this
whole process in the name of "development" - are wringing their hands
because the rich countries they served aren't even coughing up 5% of
what these debtor nations need to survive pandemic.

But the joke's on the G20. We're all in the same swimming pool, but
we've denied the people in the deep end any right to get out and use the
toilets. Our pool will have a pissing-end and a non-pissing end, and
we're all gonna be swimming in it for a long time to come.

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☄️ This day in history

#15yrsago India rejects software patents
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/04/20/2311255/software-patents-stopped-in-india

#10yrsago HOWTO sneak Hitler onto YouTube
https://web.archive.org/web/20100422192034/https://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2010/04/20/youtubes-automated-copyright-filter/

#10yrsago Students remake Goofy Movie's title sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OABeWNqZph4

#10yrsago Ireland High Court gives entertainment giants the power to
disconnect whole families from the net
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/04/major-labels-go-bragh-as-irish-judge-allows-3-strikes/

#5yrsago Helen Keller, feminist, radical socialist, anti-racist activist
and civil libertarian
https://truthout.org/articles/the-radical-dissent-of-helen-keller/

#1yrago Noam Chomsky takes ten minutes to explain everything you need to
know about the Republican Party in 2019
https://truthout.org/video/chomsky-on-the-perils-of-depending-on-mueller-report-to-defeat-trump/

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☄️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 539 words (5299 total).

Currently reading: I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about
tech, "Uncanny Valley" and Jo Walton's forthcoming novel "Or What You
Will."

Latest podcast: Podcast swap: Wil Wheaton on Little
Brotherhttps://craphound.com/podcast/2020/04/13/podcast-swap-wil-wheaton-on-little-brother/

Upcoming appearances:

* Apr 22, Flatten The Curve Summit https://flattenthecurve.tech/

* Apr 23, Canada Reads Q&A;
https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/ask-the-canada-reads-authors-your-questions-live-on-facebook-1.5512394

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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