Last Week in Dystopian Plutocracy
Scott Peters, Joe Manchin, and Company Are the Embodiment of the Corporate Threat to Democracy and Our Future
By Jim Miller
Rep. Scott Peters is getting a lot of unwelcome attention lately as he has drawn national condemnation for his vote opposing his own party’s efforts to reduce the costs of medications by allowing Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. While a large majority of Americans support such a move, Big Pharma is not a fan, and Peters is well-aware of who is buttering his bread. His feeble protestations about this much-needed reform restraining science and “innovation” don’t pass the laugh test.
As the Guardian reported last week:
[C]onservative Democratic lawmakers threatening to kill their party’s drug pricing legislation have raked in roughly $1.6m of campaign cash from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products industries . . .Peters is the House’s top recipient of pharmaceutical industry donations in the 2022 election cycle . . .
Peters and his family were worth an estimated $60m in 2018, making him one of the wealthiest lawmakers in Congress, according to Open Secrets. His wife is the president and CEO of Cameron Holdings, an investment firm whose portfolio company provides manufacturing and packaging for pharmaceutical companies.
Peters is well known locally and nationally as an unapologetic corporate Democrat whose love of neoliberal policy and disdain for progressive priorities is notorious in activist circles. Thus, normally, this kind of move against the vast majority of his fellow Democrats (and Americans for that matter) should come as no surprise.
But given the dangerously fragile state of post-insurrection American politics, the razor-thin nature of the Democratic majorities in Congress, and the gigantic stakes that come with the effort to pass not just the bipartisan infrastructure bill but a huge, transformative package through reconciliation, one might think the Congressman would swallow hard and do what it takes to help the Biden Administration succeed as the alternative would help put power back in the hands of the unrepentant American right who are doing everything they can to obstruct and undermine progress of any kind.
As many observers have noted, this package is likely the Democrats’ big chance to deliver for the American people and push back against the cynical idea that the government itself is the problem and cannot be effectively used for the greater good. Hence, to see a small number of corporate Democrats transparently shilling for Big Pharma on a core issue is not just disgusting but politically suicidal for the national Democratic party.
The only explanation for this is that Peters and his tiny crew of Congressional allies care more about their own individual political and economic interests and those of their funders than the best interests of the country during a time of great peril.
Add to this the news from the New York Times that the fate of the climate action portion of the reconciliation bill is in the hands of an old friend of the fossil fuel industry, Joe Manchin:
Joe Manchin, the powerful West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate energy panel and earned half a million dollars last year from coal production, is preparing to remake President Biden’s climate legislation in a way that tosses a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry — despite urgent calls from scientists that countries need to quickly pivot away from coal, gas and oil to avoid a climate catastrophe . . . Mr. Manchin has received more campaign donations from the oil, coal and gas industries than any other senator, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets, a research organization that tracks political spending.
He profits personally from polluting industries: He owns stock valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Enersystems Inc., a coal brokerage firm which he founded in 1988. He gave control of the firm to his son, Joseph, after he was elected West Virginia secretary of state in 2000. Last year, Mr. Manchin made $491,949 in dividends from his Enersystems stock, according to his Senate financial disclosure report . . . The proposals now being weighed by Mr. Manchin “would keep fossil fuels as a major engine of the economy for longer than the climate can bear it,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University.
In the wake of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called a “code red for humanity,” such news is deeply unwelcome. Spouting fossil fuel industry talking points, Manchin’s aim is to slow down any progress toward a significant reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels precisely at the time that scientists are telling us that their report should be a death knell for this industry. But of course, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Senator and the industries that he profits from in the first place, so such pleas fall on deaf ears.
The utter shamelessness of this national disgrace would be bad enough if it only affected our politics, but given the existential crisis we face, it’s down-right insane. The kind of compromise the “moderates” lionize is debatable when it comes to run of the mill policy, but in this case, it is murderously cynical. No serious person who knows anything about the climate crisis thinks it’s sound policy to delay our transition off fossil fuels. As the IPCC report outlines, we are already too late to stop a significant amount of warming which has and will continue to have dire consequences. What is at stake here is our ability to stop catastrophic outcomes.
In light of this reality, one cannot help but feel that we are reading the first chapter of a dystopian novel where the last best efforts to prevent an apocalyptic future were stymied not by our inability to affect change, but by our cowardly resistance to even try to disrupt business as usual.
When history called, we didn’t answer the phone.
It’s far too easy at present to point out the utter insanity of the Republican party, but it would be a mistake to put all the blame for our current perilous circumstances at their feet. Surely, we need to defeat the fascistic tendencies on display on the American right, but none of us will feel much better if we sell out the future of the country and the planet because a handful of corporate Democrats in Congress refused to bite the hand that feeds them.