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**MARCH 12, 2024**

On the Prospect website

White House Commits to Antitrust Division Budget Restoration

After its budget proposal followed a recent appropriation and capped
premerger filing fees for the agency, an administration spokesperson
said it would work to reverse that. BY DAVID DAYEN

Against the Wind

Climate science deniers, right-wing think tanks, and fossil fuel shills
are plotting to foil the renewable-energy revolution. BY REBECCA BURNS

Are Jews Safe in America?

Not entirely, but name me a place where Jews are safer. BY ROBERT
KUTTNER

Time After Time

Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World BY TOM TOMORROW

Meyerson on TAP

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**** Drug Companies Are Fighting Biden's
Efforts to Lower Their Prices

We should visibly fight back (good for Americans' health and wallets,
and good for Democrats' prospects).

Melting down a Gilded Age has never been easy. The great corporations of
the first G.A.-rail, steel, oil-fiercely resisted those who sought
to spread power and wealth to actual people during the Progressive Era,
as their successors did with the coming of the New Deal. Today, our
corporate overlords are at it again, with Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader
Joe's all responding to the prospect that their workers might opt to
go union by challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor
Relations Act, which gave workers the right to bargain collectively. The
NLRA has been on the books for 89 years, and was upheld by the Supreme
Court 87 years ago.

No less extreme is the response of the pharmaceutical industry to the
provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that have enabled the Biden
administration to negotiate with drug companies over the price Medicare
pays for ten widely used prescription drugs-drugs that cost less
virtually everywhere else on the planet save in these United States.

According to an article

in today's

**Washington Post**, Bristol Myers Squibb, Janssen, Novartis, and Novo
Nordisk have all gone to court to keep the administration from bringing
down drug prices so that they're closer to the level they're at in
Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Canada. The article notes that the
companies' lawyers have argued that such action is unconstitutional
"because it would force them to acknowledge in public that a lower price
is a fairer one."

A tear wells in the eye.

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The druggies' attorneys are almost certainly court-shopping-looking
for a Republican judge who will stay the horror of more affordable
medications. Partisan judgment is crucial here, as the Inflation
Reduction Act got through Congress without a single Republican vote. By
the same token, reducing these prices is an initiative that already is
playing a major role in Joe Biden's re-election campaign and in
campaigns for Democratic House and Senate members. The more that the
public understands the difference between D's and R's on this
issue-and between Biden (who pledged last week to make 500, not just
ten, drugs subject to such negotiations if re-elected) and Trump-the
better the chances that Biden and the Dems will have a good Election Day
come November.

Still, they and we (the current and future medication-takers of America)
need to do more to get this contrast before a substantially
news-impervious public. How about public demonstrations outside every
courtroom where the drug companies are trying out their arguments? Or
outside the drug companies' corporate headquarters, or just plain
hospitals, or parks? I can think of a large number of groups, starting
with but going well beyond the AARP, that could be doing this, and state
and local Democratic Parties should be out there, too. I don't doubt
that the airwaves (or whatever the social media equivalent of an airwave
is) will be filled with Democratic commercials highlighting this issue
in the fall, but right now, our side is coming up short on popular
mobilizations that turn out and speak both to base and swing voters, to
lefties and moderates alike. To paraphrase Hillel, if not this, what?
And if not now, when?

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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