Le Show; 2021-02-07

From deep inside your audio device of choice I'm undergoing self-isolation It's the only way to be Just for the lack of stimulation Who's who comes self-isolate with me? Where? Where? When the music starts to play She slides out on the floor Dancing without a partner

Sweating on the two and four There's a rhythm in the footstep And a flower in her hand A smile on the face Because she's in a place where she don't have a cat She ain't looking for no lover She ain't looking for a romantic She just wants to dance She just wants to dance Yeah, she just wants to dance Ooh, she just wants to dance Where she's moving kind of late And it's obvious to me This little girl ain't crazy She's as wild as she is free

She can feel it in her fingers And it moves on down the spine And then it fits her hips She parts on lips And you know she's feeling fine She ain't looking for no lover She ain't looking for a romantic She just wants to dance She just wants to dance Yeah, she just wants to dance She just wants to dance Oh, don't get it going She ain't looking for no lover

She ain't looking for a romantic She just wants to dance She just wants to dance Get out the way and let the girl dance Yeah, she just wants to dance Yeah, she just wants to Slide along the slope She's wanna jump in the shoes and shake her hips She's gonna wave her hands in the air She's gonna shit that hanging Yeah, but you don't wanna know how you think From New Orleans, Louisiana A home of Yardigra I'm Harry Shira, welcome you To this edition of Lesho, and now it is gentlemen News of the godly More cases of child abuse by the Spanish Catholic Church Are slowly coming to light, according to the Spanish newspaper El País

Thank you, that was five years right there After this Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, recognized 81 victims Since 1927, and announced plans for compensation Other religious congregations have begun to fight The first time in the history of the Catholic Church The first time in the history of the Catholic Church The first time in the history of the Catholic Church The first time in the history of the Catholic Church Other religious congregations have begun to follow the order's example El País spoke to ten of the main Catholic orders in Spain Seven said they'd carried out a war on the process of investigating past cases of abuse And were equally open to compensate any victims But in pesos, you know These investigations are not in-depth internal inquiries, though But a review of existing archives And the findings have not been made public And are still far from reflecting the extent of the abuse by the Catholic Church Compared to the advances made in other countries such as Germany When external audit, external audit, found that 3600 miners have been abused by members of the Church We look forward to more from Spain

When the coronavirus forced churches to close their doors and give up Sunday collections The Roman Catholic diocese of Charlotte Turned to the federal governmentís small business relief program And pull up pocketed They have pockets and casks More than 8 million The diocese is the headquarters, churches and schools Landed the help even though they had roughly $100 million of their own cash And short-term investments available last spring The AP reports after having seen financial records When the cash catastrophe that church leaders feared didnít materialize Those assets topped $110 million by the summer As the pandemic began to unfold Scores of Catholic dioceses since across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection program While sitting on well over $10 billion in cash Short-term investments or other available funds

Thatís the result of an associated press investigation into all that The assets have grown in many dioceses Yet even with that financial safety net The 112 dioceses that share their financial statements along with the churches and schools they run collected at least 1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed aid In Kentucky funds available to the Archdiocese of Louisville, its parishes and other organizations grew from at least $153 to $157 million During the fiscal year that ended in June, said the AP In Illinois, the Chicago Archdiocese had more than a billion in cash and investments in its headquarters and cemetery division as of May The faithful continued to donate more than expected The Raleigh Diocese collected at least $11 million in aid, yet during the fiscal year that ended in June, overall offerings were down just 5 percent And the majority of these dioceses reported enough money on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses Even without any new income

Financial resources of several dioceses Rivaled or exceeded those available to publicly traded companies like Shake Shack and Ruth Kriss Steakhouse whose early participation in the program triggered outrages and they returned the money And overall the nation's nearly 200 dioceses and other Catholic institutions received at least $3 billion Making the Roman Catholic Church perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the paycheck program according to AP's analysis And let's not forget, these are techs exempt organizations on top of it Doing well by doing good, Mount Pleasant New York, Mount Pleasant, no, not New York, Mount Pleasant New York, hello A lawsuit filed February 3 is asking for $300 million from South Carolina's largest Catholic high school Saying an ill-conceived locker room design allowed staff to watch underage students undress Oops! The lawsuit filed on behalf of students and parents at Bishop England High School, six tuition refunds and damages for every child who might have been seen

School, which is overseen by the diocese of Charleston, both several hundred students each year When the school was constructed in the late 1990s, way back in the late 1990s, where we didn't know anything about this stuff A large window was placed in each locker room, separating it from a staff office School leaders said it was designed for student safety, but did not cover it until a staff member used the opening to a legally record video of young students After decades of sex abuse allegations, the attorney representing victims in previous lawsuit against the diocese Said leaders should have known they were setting children up for exploitation. The diocese said the lawsuit on the subject has absolutely no merit Glad we cleared that up. News of the godly latest gentleman copyrighted feature of this broadcast and now early in the proceedings, the apologies of the week Something must be up. Well, start with the obvious laugh, Marjorie Taylor Greene has apologized

After she got through that attempt to have Republicans kick her off the House committees and the Democrats went ahead and did it She apologized publicly for the first time for those past incendiary comments She apologized for a range of comments in the past few years that include suggesting school shootings were false flag operations and support for the violent conspiracy theory QAnon, quote, I'm sorry for saying all those things were wrong and offensive, I'm happy to say that She also called the Republicans and Democrats who voted stripper of her committee assignments, morons Saddleback church pastor Rick Warren is in Southern California. He's apologized for its children Sunday school curriculum video that used Asian culture stereotypes to teach kids about the Bible Video has been removed, but Michelle Anne raised the Asian American Christian collaborative described it as using Asian culture as a prop for slapstick humor

The video she said blurs and dishonors distinctions and categories of Asian culture in it she said a pastor wears a Chinese shirt makes kung fu sounds and pretends to make sushi that he then spits out Rick Warren, he's sorry for that. The popular series for the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen video channel, it's alive. It was Bradley Onwax, where he was through the process of making foods that involved fermentation or preservation It's latest installment on canned seafood, proved to be corny the Washington Post, a jar too far Bon Appetit removed the video segment from its platforms after experts pointed out that the method depicted on the show is dangerous and could result in the growth of potentially deadly bacteria that causes botulism Inject the seafood into your lips. In the show, Leon prepares canned muscles and lobster using a technique known as the water bath method. He posted it, made a cup on his Instagram feed warning viewers not to try it at home

I apologize if you did see the reason it's a live episode. Please don't water bath your cans. I apologize again will do better as a teacher and student of food The Milwaukee Police Department apologizes this week to a victim in a mishandled rape case woman reached a settlement with a city. She sued in part because her name police interview and investigative files were leaked They lied Washington. The DC jail has apologized after female inmate was placed in a men's holding cell. Family members of the 24-year-old college graduate with no prior criminal record was involved in a domestic dispute with her boyfriend He ends up in a men's jail for an hour but still trauma. Melrose Park in Illinois, Melrose Park Mayor Ronald M. CERPICO, the other CERPICO I guess, was recorded using profanity and erasional slur as he raised his voice in a resident at a village meeting last week Last Thursday Mayor CERPICO said he was sorry, the man who was the target of the tyroid was not buying it and Mayor CERPICO says he is not resigning

He will remain in the other CERPICO In the first season of friends Fisher Stevens played Lisa Kudrow's psychiatrist boyfriend Steven now wants to apologize to the friend's cast for behaving like a Roger on set And acting like a real A-hole while filming his episode. I had never heard of friends because it was just the beginning of the show and I didn't watch TV. At the time, much he says I'm sure if you ask them about me, the people on friends they would go, what a New York snob. He wants to let the cast know how sorry he is. I'm sorry guys. I'm sorry. I was a dick. Not a Roger Donald G. McNeill Jr., the New York Times science reporter whose fame grew during the pandemic as stepping down following allegations they used the N-word during a company sponsored student trip to Peru

As an example of racist language. Would you not tolerate racist language regardless of intense that executive editor Dean Bakke in a memo to staff McNeill was a 45 year veteran of the newspaper previously covered AIDS, Ebola and Zika. He won the John Chancellor Award for Lifetime Achievement and Journalism just last year. McNeill apologized to the students on the trip and the colleagues including the hundreds of people who trusted me to work with them closely during this pandemic. Meantime the Times has also announced the resignation of Andy Mills, a podcast journalist who worked on that series about the Islamic state called Caliphate that according to Bloomberg had to be corrected. Little more information had to be corrected because it was based on the single source narrative of a later to be proven liar.

Country singer Morgan Wallen filmed hurling a racial slur in the streets of Nashville Sunday night and then you know what hit the fan. He is heard on the video calling his friend a pussy ass mother in a statement to TMZ said I'm embarrassed and sorry I used an unacceptable inappropriate racial slur that was the second one he used. That I wish I could take back also with the same modifier by the way. There are no excuses to use this type of language ever I want to sincerely apologize for using the word word I promise to do better. He meant I get the chance cumulus media and I heart media to conglomerates conglomerates that own a shed load of radio stations have removed his records. And fellow country star said it actually is representative of Nashville because this isn't the first scuffle his first scuffle and he just demolished a huge.

Streaming record last month regardless we all know that isn't his first time saying that word. He got kicked off Saturday night live for some. Rock us apologize and then was invited back on. Marvel comics is offering exchanges alongside an apology to readers after alleged anti-Semitic remarks made it into the art of this week's immortal whole number three. In the issue the number problems around harmful depictions and stereotypes of Jewish people were noticed by readers including the bizarre use of the star of David and the unfortunate misspelling of the word. Jew jewelry. The artist in question admitted in a statement he had quote no excuse for the depiction of the star of David and he failed to understand how harmful. The stereotype was he apologized as did Marvel and they are replacing the comic just as soon as they possibly can.

And. Japan's Ministry of Health has admitted that the Android version of the COVID-19 contact tracing app has not informed users of contact with virus carriers since September of last year. He experienced a third wave of infections news of that failure is the significant error and embarrassment. The ministry admitted to the problem in a Thursday update to its web page and apologize deeply apologize for the damage in the trust of many people who use the app. Google play page for the app the contact tracing app reveals users think it's a dud the app has a 1.8 out of 5 rating from more than 15,000 reviewers. The apologies of the week later, German copyrighted feature this broadcast.

It wasn't much till now and you're almost lost. No matter what you've been through long as there's nothing you there is always there's always one more time and if your dreams go bad

every one that you had that don't mean some dreams can't come true because it's funny about dreams just as strange as it seems there is always one more time there's only a state of mind keeping your eyes closed

it's worse than being blind so if there's a heart out there looking for someone to share I don't care if it's been turned down time and again and if we meet someday please don't walk away because there's always one more time there is always one more time

this is the show we're deep into year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic and there is appropriately enough controversy about the rollout of the vaccines and it is devolved as much else does these days into politics I wanted to have a discussion about the rollout of the vaccines and what it means and how it happens with a guest who has a slightly different view of it Matt Stoller is a research associate at the American Economic Liberties Project he's the author of a wonderful book on the subject of Monopoly in America or Monopolys in America called Goliath and of a weekly newsletter on the same subject called Big and he's here to talk with me today. Matt, welcome to the show

hey thanks for having me your newsletter of a week ago took on the subject of the release and distribution of vaccines and it focused on a couple areas of Monopoly so you a verb one is devices and you mentioned a name of a company that I remember from when I was a kid and reading the label on the thermometer is it sat in my mouth for forever B&D is that the same company that you're referring to now as a back to Dickinson yeah yeah there's syringe monopolist they also make a bunch of other stuff yeah that's it's a that's its own crazy monopoly story hospital purchasing the whole healthcare system I mean America spends twice as much or three times as much as most countries on healthcare and we get worse outcomes and we don't cover our whole population and so the question is why is that and the answer is one medical report in a couple years ago said it's the price is stupid

we just charge a lot more for things that are often worse everything from syringes to hospital beds and it's because there's there's monopoly power everywhere so back to Dickinson is the basically the monopoly provider syringes to hospitals and healthcare providers they they're part of what are called group purchasing organizations and hospitals do all their buying through these large group purchasing organizations and which get funded through kickbacks from the suppliers so basically BD as well as a bunch of other hospital suppliers they will give kickbacks to these GPOs and then they will in return they exclude competitors from being able to sell to hospitals and syringes there's been a lot of innovation in syringes the most recent innovation I believe was the retractable syringes kind of like a pen that was developed in the 90s to deal with HIV but BD excluded them from the hospital the company called retractable syringes

they excluded them from the market lost a bunch of antitrust suits but still retractable one of these suits but they still weren't able to get into the market so BD is now this this Goliath and they make syringes and there's a specific type of syringe that would allow allow us to extract more from each vile and there is a dramatic shortage of these these syringes and BD which has always claimed whatever it merged or fought off an antitrust suit that it needs this scale to be efficient and to make the sort of breadth of products that it makes they are responsible for the shortage of this specialized syringe which in other if the market were competitive you probably be able to ramp up much more quickly so one of the reasons why we're not able to most efficiently use our vaccine supply is because we have a syringe monopolist standing in the way wow I want to just preface this with something that I think people don't hear a lot which is like something that was amazing that happened in 2020

which is that we developed these incredible vaccines and that is a that's like an Apollo moon landing type of accomplishment and and we were able to do it with global cooperation with the Chinese maps the the DNA of the vaccine with technology that was developed here but then eventually moved its way to China then we took those developments online the map of the virus and within a year we had tested vaccines rolling off of trucks ready to be injected and that is an astonishing story the government did an incredible job both financing the research that ultimately was the underpinning of the technology that one of these vaccines that happened under Obama in 2012 2013 2014 is called mRNA and then the operation warp speed actually contracted with six companies and said we want you to compete to develop a vaccine and we will guarantee purchase of these vaccines if you get it through if it works and if it's safe

so in this competitive market that was explicitly set up by the government with end purchasing by the government we were able to develop these incredible vaccines one of them has to get some German technology and like that's amazing so like let's just remember wow like that's just like astonishing what we did what the American system was able to produce when it was kind of at its best and remember that okay I'm mindful also of the fact pointed out this week that the Russians seem to have developed a potent vaccine yeah the Russians the Russian vaccine is good the Chinese vaccines are not but the Russian vaccine is good and you know that's a great thing too so I think we have to look at this and like go humanity so what's getting in the way of humanity I mean we're not the only one suffering from problems of distribution once the vaccines are produced the EU and Britain notably had a quite famous spat last week

that almost got the Irish up in arms again but let's focus on the United States for the moment and talk about two massive drugstore chains CVS and Walgreens and you in your newsletter suggest that they are in many ways responsible for problems so first of all America our vaccine distribution is not going great but we are fifth in the world in terms of the percentage of the population that's been vaccinated about 8 to 10 percent of the population has been vaccinated so far Israel is at 50 percent so Israel's blowing everyone else away then you got England a UK I think they're about 15 and UAE are in America and Europe is a mess inside they just they're a total mess so but in America some of the states are doing much better than others and one of the states that's doing really well is West Virginia and so is that the first time West Virginia has been number one in anything?

I like West Virginia I'm not not I'm not not I'm not going to broke off from the from Virginia because during the Civil War because they were like we don't want to support slavery and then West Virginia was a democratic state until 1988 it was the basis of the labor movement coal miners like West Virginia's it's got a populist history so I think it should be very disturbing to Democrats that that state is now so Trump loving but it is not you're not talking about Dixie Crats you're talking about a you know a very very populist a very populist tradition yeah no I I was just poking at the fact that it is a notably poor state and no and it's poor and rural right yeah and like so how is this poor rural state doing so much better than everyone else on vaccinations right you know California and New York spent a ton of money on public health systems and and they're all fancy and what's going on

and I think what you have in in every state is you know you have a different levels of competence because the rollout in the US you know Trump did a good job with the vaccine development but a very bad job with the pretty much everything else including a rollout and left it up to the states and some states are pretty competent and others are not and as it turns out one of the factors in whether a state is able to deploy these vaccines is the structure of their pharmaceutical their pharmacies because a lot of people get medical care at pharmacies injections and things like that you know flu shots and whatnot and the Trump administration set up said we want every state to sign a deal with CBS and Walgreens to distribute vaccines and we want CBS and Walgreens to specialize in giving vaccines to nursing homes West Virginia simply doesn't have enough CBS's and Walgreens to make that viable so they had to go to their locally owned pharmacies they are predominantly in rural areas

and they're usually owned by a pharmacist who is a health care provider so the state government went to them and as it turns out if they were way better at doing the job than CBS and Walgreens they were more flexible they had better IT systems they had better records on patients they had personal relationships with patients and they moved at the speed of a small business versus CBS and Walgreens which were these big hulking creaky bureaucracies that had a really tough time you know doing anything and so that's been a fact it's not the only factor but it's a significant factor and the reason it matters is because you know and I'm an I look at monopoly power so I'm not a specialist in medicine or anything like that but the way we've run our society for the last 40 years is our policymakers who think about corporate power have said we like stuff to be big because if it's big there are what they call economies of scale

so the idea is that if you have a small steel plant it doesn't it produces steel but it's kind of expensive whereas the more steel you produce the cheaper each grade of steel or each steel product becomes so there's no like family artisanal auto factories right you want big auto factories same with like search engines things like that like the bigger the more efficient right this theory of economies of scale has underpinned our merger policy for the last 40 years in our antitrust and regulatory policy and it's the reason that CBS and back to Dickinson and Walgreens were who were you know CBS and Walgreens were relatively small companies in the 7 in 80s and they were able to buy their way to dominance they bought up a bunch of different chains CBS then bought what's called the Pharmacy Unicle Benefits Manager which is basically a building and pricing system for for pharmaceuticals and then they also bought Etna which is a large insurance company

and they're effectively huge conglomerate that touches one out of every three Americans their health care not physically I know but every time they bought someone they would make the argument to regulators this will help us become more efficient and deliver better care and the regulators said okay we got it that's good go off and do do better right be bigger and better and what we can now see and this is true across like a lot of the economy there are hundreds of acquisitions by big tech and big ag and big pharmaceutical companies and so on and so forth but what we can see with the deployment of the vaccine is that that the economy of scale argument here was just nonsense it just was not true these companies are more profitable they have more market power but they are less efficient than pharmacies that are owned by local pharmacies who is a health care provider in the town you you mentioned in your newsletter that a woman had studied

facing Mitchell? yes and she found in her study that independent pharmacies are better for consumers than chains chains she says offer worse health care delivery in terms of the time pharmacists spend with patients the range of tests they do what they offer in terms of screenings and the pricing is much better now presumably efficiency size all of that should tend to lower prices so what's the deal here? yeah so it's it's just you get better you get better prices for medicine it independent pharmacies and then also independent pharmacists are more likely to do things like home delivery 70 percent of local independent pharmacists do home delivery and chains basically don't what what about drug dash? oh that doesn't exist sorry and you know Amazon just recently promised to Biden we'll do everything we can to out with the vaccine rollout and Stacy was like what are they going to do? they don't you can't like I mean they can deliver you a vaccine I guess

if they figure out the storage technology says to be really cold but you can't give yourself a vaccine so it's really an empty promise so the basic dynamic here is that we have independent pharmacies who are better and more efficient offer better prices and this leads to the question that you just asked which is why are they why are you know they've declined a number by a couple hundred pharmacies a year since 2010 or so they're kind of growing why is that? right in a market system you would expect that the more efficient producer of goods and services going to grow and the less efficient one is going to us shrink and so the the answer is that CVS has market power right so one of the CVS and this is this is going to get to sort of an arcane area of the health care system but CVS owns something called a pharmacy benefits manager and a pharmacy benefits manager basically do is they keep a list of all of the pharmaceuticals out there and what they do and they then sell

that service of saying we'll keep track of all these pharmaceuticals to health insurance companies it's called a formulary that list and a health insurance company will be like okay you take care of the formulary for our for our clients so you will just just decide what drugs are offered for what conditions and then go and negotiate with the drug companies to get us a better price and go and negotiate with the and this is the key the pharmacies to tell them what their reimbursement rates are and because you're big and you're knowledgeable about these drugs you can get better prices now so they essentially set prices in the market now I think one can can see that there's a problem if CVS both has drug stores and it sets prices for its drug store competitors right that's what's it's also very pbms very concentrated industry there's basically three pbms that control the market so CVS is now saying to its rivals these are

local independent drug stores hey we're going to change your reimbursement rates and lower the amount of revenue that you get for different medicine how hard it is to run a drug store these days why don't you just sell out to us right it's a kind of offer you can't refuse dynamic so if you can set the prices for your competitors because you have some controls somewhere else up in the supply chain then you are effectively the mob boss of the industry regardless of how efficient you are it's classic market power that's right let's get back to the vaccine there are areas that are not like West Virginia that have a lot of CVS and Walgreens so theoretically they should be able to handle this have they done so effectively in states like let's say California or Louisiana I think Louisiana has done a pretty good job I think that Dakotas have done a pretty good job

Alaska has California not so much I mean Nevada there's but I mean I think you have to we have to do a lot more analysis of the different factors that have gone into the deployment of the vaccine and I don't think that chain versus local pharmacies are the only factor that's happening but just with West Virginia it was really obvious because West Virginia you know they had everybody who was in a nursing home was offered a vaccine by late December right I mean they were just like way ahead of the game and it was because they could work through their local pharmacies I think in a bunch of other states the independent pharmacies are actually having trouble getting access to the vaccines because states signed deals with CVS and Walgreens right so it's not necessarily that just having a lot of local pharmacies is going to help you you actually have to use them so you're suggesting that the

Trump administration abetted the market power of to near monopolies or oligopolies right yeah I think that's right I mean I think they went off and remember in like March or April when Trump was doing his daily press conferences on COVID I love those they were fun at first and then I was like oh he doesn't really actually have anything to say I actually want someone to deal with this yeah but you know he would often bring in you know CEOs major CEOs Walmart or you know Target or whoever and in this case Trump was just doing what like Democrats and Republicans have done which is to say you run a big powerful institution you must know things you must know how to do things right and actually what people who run big powerful institutions know is they know how to acquire lots of power through political machinations but they don't actually know how to do anything useful but that's not necessarily how

how Trump thinks or how a lot of our policy makers have thought so he came in and he said oh well you know we have these big guys and these big guys are really great they're going to help everything and fix everything and that's what you know what they ended up doing there was like I forget the companies that were doing the testing but they like because there's been this attempt to you know take testing blood labs which are very you know you buy a lab machine and you get a phlebotomist and you can set up a lab but there's been this roll up of labs into this company lab core and quest diagnostics those are the two ones with market power that the same thing they were like not as good at testing and the reason I think they actually got kicked out of South Dakota but the reason is because they don't focus on actually the lab business they focus on acquiring more labs and they focus on negotiating to get more bargaining leverage so like that's kind of writ broadly in our economy we have a problem where most of our business and financial leaders are actually not focused on

business they're focused on just acquiring power you say in your newsletter I'm just looking at it a reference that going back to CVS for a minute that when CVS buys out drug stores local drug stores they often close them down why do they do that? Yeah I mean this is something Stacey told me because what they want to do is they want to eliminate competition and they don't really care if they are serving a community so if they eliminate a competitor then they can say well you have to either drive 40 or you have to use our specialty pharmacy that's a mail order pharmacy and that's what they want to do they want to roll up the market they're not that interested in kind of I mean sometimes they'll buy it and they'll operate it themselves change it from a you know Mr. Smith's pharmacy to CVS but oftentimes they'll just close it down because the point isn't to own another pharmacy the point is to own more of the market

now I remember as recently as maybe five years ago that if you looked at the drug store business you would think of it as a big three and there was CVS Walgreens and right aid Right I think right aid who did I think Walgreens bought a bunch of right aid stores and and there were also I think Target owned a bunch of stores and they got CVS and there's a bunch of there was Eckerd like there were a whole bunch of chains that got bought up by CVS and Walgreens so you've seen this kind of massive murder spray oh and then one other important thing to note is that if you're CVS and you buy a local pharmacy and shut it down it's not like it's easy to start a new one right so it'd be one thing if you bought it up and shut it down and it was easy entry into the market but it's not easy entry just like it's not easy you know I used to see when I was a kid I went to the doctor and it was an independent practice it's really hard to set up an independent practice now as a doctor

because you have to negotiate with giant healthcare companies and it's probably the same thing with with with drug stores it's like if you have a drug store that you can run it you have some deals already that's one thing but to set up a new drug store is really hard because you're dealing with other providers and you're dealing with payment systems that are all very concentrated so it's like okay you don't have ease of entry into that line of business so CVS doesn't have to worry about potential competition into that market either you're suggesting that bigness in one side of the economy acts as a bar to entry for smallness in other parts of the economy that have to deal with the former right that's right that's right that's not that's not a good look let me move to something that made the news this week which was that Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced a bill which got some media coverage on Thursday

purporting to be and I don't know the details of it you may I do okay let's talk about that is it what it purports to be so she introduced a number of different bills that touch a number of different parts of antitrust law including mergers and certain forms of anti-competitive conduct and it's stuff that she's introduced since 2016 so she's like she's been writing legislative proposals there's some good stuff in there but the dynamic that we have right now is that the economy has become much more concentrated since 2016 since you had a bunch of mergers Trump and since COVID and so we have to get more aggressive in the way that we think about changing the law we also have a bunch of Trump judges and so you can't kind of be vague about the language because the Trump judges will just take that and do whatever they want with it so the instructions have to be very specific we think the instructions in her bill are a little bit too vague

but just about senator clobachard this is the beginning of a process and she knows that she's taking over the antitrust subcommittee from the republican and she wants to hold a bunch of hearings in different sectors of the economy over the next two years and really pick up the mantle from the house which did a big investigation on on big tech and sort of do that in other sectors and I think going through and looking at the economy in detail I mean we suggested to them that they look at like the chain store dynamic with the vaccine rollout like we think that she's really smart and she was actually an antitrust lawyer so she's really knowledgeable about this sector of law she has a book coming out about it and so I think we know she's not where we are philosophically but I think this is a starting point and so you know it's exciting to have members of congress that are really taking this seriously that are in the right positions in both the house

and the senate and actually on both the republican and democratic side of the aisle really trying to solve this problem of bigness instead of yelling at each other about silly sort of partisan arguments like this is a real investigation of the economy and I think that's why we're not like totally into all of the details of the legislation that she introduced although there's some good stuff in there like there is a merger presumption that says if you're bigger than 100 billion dollars you basically can't do any more mergers and that's a very good thing but we are just excited that we think that there's real leadership on both houses of congress hopefully in the antitrust agencies in the rest of the government and yeah we think it's like a it's going to be a very good few years for anti-monopoly policy yeah I guess the reason I was asking is because there is that in the air and the suspicious part of me thinks a theoretical politician would like to ride that wave but not

royal waters too much I think that's right I mean I think you have a lot of political leaders and academics too I mean let's you know media people like let's not just isolate this it's not like politicians are the only people who have ever been opportunists so so there's a lot of people that are like oh here's my thing about you know what we need to do about big tech or monopolies and you know there's a lot of opportunism and cynicism but and I think that like the the basic fear that most people have that I have I'm sure you have it is it is a sort of pervasive sense that we haven't really governed well for decades so it's hard to believe in the political process as a focal point of change and so we're always sort of looking for the scam and that's one of the reasons why I did talk about how what an amazing development the vaccine was because I think it's important to recognize that politics can work and I mean that's really important like if we just don't believe in democracy

the democracy we it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and America's nice there's a lot of nice things about this country we were able to create through our democratic system including this vaccine so let's not give up on it and that's where I think that's the position I have on this monopoly stuff we were talking about it you know I learned about it in 2011 or so and no one was talking about it then but you know it's still a relative late-comer I mean monopolies have been here for a long time but now it's just because it's a totally different conversation you have to talk about the way you would break up these companies and that's the kind of cynical opportunism that I'll you know that we want to see I suspect you're about to sit down and write an anthem called America the Nice one of the things that strikes me about all of this is that this is a cycle we're now at a point in American economic history where it's easy to see that there have been periods where

stuff got bigger and companies got more powerful and more monopolistic power was exercised in the marketplace and then there have been at least one period we know of coinciding roughly with Teddy Roosevelt where the Sherman and Clayton acts were passed and Standard Oil was broken up and in a later period where AT&T was broken up although it's certainly hampered back together again as quickly as it could but so this there seem we seem to be in another part of the latest version of this cycle you see it that way I hear what you're saying I always go back and forth on this there is a sort of a traditional anti-monopoly sentiment that actually comes out of England from the 1600s and that really was suffused in the American revolution and there were you know a lot of the civil war was people that were against the land monopolist which they considered the slave owners

and you had the populist and Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and FDR this is this whole dynamic which AT&T was broken up in the 80s but that's actually the third time it was broken up it was broken up in 1913, 1956 and 1982 America just likes to break up AT&T the original AT&T was American telephone and telegraph and in 1913 that one of those teas went away they had to spin off a western union so it's not like this is the first time we've done it and so you know I think something happened after 1980 that was very unusual I mean kind of an anomaly when we just really got rate of that anti-monopoly tradition so there have been periods of time in the 80s maybe or 1920s when we consolidated power but people nobody ever said people didn't like monopolies in the political system we did talk about monopolies but what happened after 1980 was really this total airbrushing of the anti-monopoly tradition out of our memories

no longer fearing financial power so things like George Stigler who's an important economist talked about how they had discovered that and it was like hence the lifting of all state limits on credit card interest rates right that's right so this is the economist of society that usury is fine you can go back to Babylonian times and find prohibitions on usury everybody knows and has known in every civilization that's ever existed in human history that usury is not fine usury destabilizes the society right it enslaves people like that's what it does so it also creates financial instability so we know that we've known that for thousands of years and then in like the 1970s and 80s these Chicago school economists are like oh we figured it out usury is not a problem it's efficient and people were for 30 years they were like oh I guess this is efficient and then the financial crisis happens in 2008 and 2008 to 12 and now people were like well maybe maybe soon those ideas weren't awesome so I think you're right

that you know there have been periods when we've done stronger and weaker enforcement but I do think we're in this weird period which is very un-American like basically post-1980 American history is just different than then pre-1980 American history let me circle back to CVS and Walgreens for one second the mechanisms that you've described in terms of control of the market and raising prices as a result wouldn't necessarily suggest an impediment in the supply chain from pharmaceutical manufacturers to dispensers of vaccines would they that's right so if we're talking about why we're looking at sub-optimal performance and vaccine deployment CVS and Walgreens would be part of the answer but not by any means the whole answer yeah that's right I mean I think you know you you go to go into a pandemic

with the healthcare infrastructure you have not the one that you would want you're being run Feldeon very runs Feldeon right yeah and so we have these chain pharmacies they're inefficient they're a problem but there are thousands of them and they're in lots of communities and they have some capacity so we have to use them as best we can this is the same with BD you know they make syringes so we have to you know use that capacity but I think we should recognize and learn and hopefully that's what Senator Kovacar will will be leading we have to realize that we should just restructure our healthcare delivery infrastructure both public and private and we have a good model which is we have about 20,000 locally owned pharmacies and we should kind of get back to that Matt Stoller fascinating stuff Goliath is a great read the newsletter big every week in your inbox the one this week is particularly fascinating as well thank you for spending some time with us today

hey it's always a pleasure thanks for having me my pleasure nutty little technical problem there for a moment ladies gentlemen news of the warm the start of California's annual rainy season has been pushed back from November to December prolonging the state's increasingly destructive wildfire season by nearly a month opening the way for the Jewish space lasers the study cannot confirm the shift is connected to climate change the results are consistent with climate models who doesn't only get climate model walk walk into a party with one on your arm

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