The Senate will vote this week on S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would begin to unravel the FCC's net neutrality repeal; this is worth a phone call, today and every day, until the vote takes place. The FCC has lately announced that net neutrality will officially be no more as of June 11; one hopes that the big internet service providers aren't stupid enough to start charging for faster website loading and censoring and slowing down websites that very day, but they'll be able to do so, even if a lawsuit eventually overturns the FCC's action. Given the news that AT&T paid the President's lawyer, Michael Cohen, $600,000 for "consultation" on communications issues, do you suppose Mr. Cohen might have influenced the President as he chose his next FCC Chair, the notoriously anti-internet freedom Ajit Pai? Hey, it's a question worth asking!
Meanwhile, our President outlined yet another series of half-measures and non-measures about prescription drug prices that he of course called "the most sweeping action in history to lower the price of prescription drugs for the American people," but Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact policies that would really reduce drug prices, like allowing reimportation of drugs from Canada and allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. The CBO famously found over a decade ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't lower prices very much, but that finding testifies more to how much corporate welfare big pharma corporations get -- when you hear, for example, that big pharma would respond to a more-empowered Medicare by raising a drug's launch prices, you might well ask why we should allow them to do that, particularly when our government funds so much of their research.
Comments