From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

With inflationary costs reaching a 40-year high under the Biden-Harris administration, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and others in their administration have repeatedly blamed businesses, livestock producers, grocery stores, oil and natural gas companies and others for high prices.

At the same time, a record number of businesses closed, declared bankruptcy and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, citing high inflationary costs. In a recent report, nearly half of all small businesses said they won’t survive a second Harris term, higher costs and increased taxes, The Center Square reported.

Despite this, Harris says she plans to implement price controls, increase taxes on businesses and allow the 2017 tax cuts to expire, creating a $6 trillion chasm between her plan and former President Donald Trump’s, the Wall Street Journal reported.

As Americans struggled with increased grocery costs, including the high cost of meat, producers were faced with higher fuel, feed, grain and hay costs, driving up their operational costs that were passed onto consumers, according to multiple reports. In response, in 2021, the White House National Economic Council blamed high meat prices on “dominant corporations in uncompetitive markets taking advantage of their market power.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce disagrees, arguing that market concentration in the meat packing industry had been virtually unchanged for 25 years at the time. It then asked “if high prices are the result of corporate greed, why did these ‘greedy’ companies wait two decades to raise prices?” It clarified that increased meat prices were driven by supply and demand and overall inflation, largely created by increased federal spending and debt.

With costs increasing across the board, some companies adjusted by selling less product for more, referred to as shrinkflation, The Center Square first reported in 2022. However, Biden and Harris blamed companies for higher costs, reportedly in response to Democratic operatives advising them to do so, The​ Washington Post reported.

“What we said is, ‘You need a villain or an explanation for this. If you don’t provide one, voters will fill one in. The right is providing an explanation, which is that you’re spending too much,’” one Democratic operative told the Post. “That point finally became convincing to people in the White House.”

“And thus began the effort to wrongly blame employers for high prices,” the chamber’s executive vice president Neil Bradley said in a report identifying examples of the White House “wrongly blaming businesses for high prices.”

Also in 2022, Biden publicly blamed container companies for high shipping costs. News reports pointed to supply chain issues impacted by worker shortages, changes in customer spending that resulted in more cargo arriving in ports that the ports couldn’t handle, and port fines and fees contributing to higher costs.

The chamber notes that increased prices “resulted from consumers shifting their spending from services to goods” during the COVID-lockdown era, causing increased cargo demand. “Increased demand created backlogs at the ports, raising prices even higher. As supply and demand normalized, prices fell.”

By 2023, the president again publicly blamed the U.S. oil and natural gas industry for gas prices reaching a seven-year high. This was after he took more than 200 actions against the U.S. oil and natural gas industry, U.S. House Democrats introduced a bill that would have added a 50% per barrel tax, and the U.S. Treasury Department proposed a $110 billion tax hike on the industry, The Center Square reported.

But the industry doesn’t control the market, it’s subject to it like everyone else, Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association President Ed Longanecker said. The Biden-Harris administration could have lowered costs by expediting permits, lifting the federal leasing ban and creating “a more stable regulatory environment that provides certainty to producers and investors,” he told The Center Square. “Overburdensome regulations, increased taxes and anti-oil and natural gas rhetoric” exacerbated high energy prices and raised consumer costs, he said.

The administration has also repeatedly sued the industry and Texas, which leads U.S. production, exports and energy creation. In response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has aggressively fought to protect the Texas industry from Biden policies, the governor argues.

Also in 2023, the chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers said grocery sector profit margins “were elevated” and needed to “pass-through” to consumers. Earlier this year, Biden again claimed, “there are still too many corporations in America ripping people off: price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation.”

The chamber refutes these claims, pointing to federal data, arguing that “higher grocery prices are a result of inflationary pressure across the supply chain and basic supply and demand dynamics,” explained by Department of Agriculture and Government Accountability Office economists.

Biden and Harris blaming businesses for high prices is “entirely backward,” Bradley says. “The truth is the Administration’s own fiscal and regulatory policies are driving inflation, and the American consumer is left holding the bag.”

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Two Republicans and two Democrats in the House of Representatives have leveled stunning allegations against two pharmaceutical companies, calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to investigate potential testing of drugs on prisoners of Communist China.

A bipartisan group of Congress members has leveled stunning allegations against pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Eli Lilly, calling on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate the potential testing of new drugs on prisoners of Communist China.

The letter was sent August 19 to FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Calf and signed by Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chair Rep. John Moolenaar, a Republican from Florida and ranking member and Illinois Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Health Energy & Commerce Subcommittee ranking member and California Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo, and Florida Republican Rep. Neal Dunn.

“For over a decade, it appears that U.S. biopharmaceutical companies conducted clinical trials with China’s military organizations, and specifically with medical centers and hospitals affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA), to determine the safety and effectiveness of new drug candidates prior to approval,” the letter reads. “ … we are also concerned that U.S. biopharmaceutical companies have conducted clinical trials with hospital infrastructure located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in genocide of the Uyghur population.”

The lawmakers’ review of publicly available data found that over the last decade major American Pharma companies have conducted “hundreds of clinical trials in China that included at least one entity with PLA in the name as a research trial partner.”

“Even today, one major U.S. biopharmaceutical entity is actively recruiting patients for an advanced Alzheimer drug trial and is partnered with the PLA’s General Hospital and Medical School … and the PLA’s Air Force Medical University. … Previously, another U.S. biopharmaceutical entity used the 307 Hospital of the PLA (307 医院) as the setting for a cancer therapeutic clinical trial.”

Such work not only carries risks of sensitive technology falling into the CCP’s hands, “there are also U.S. biopharmaceutical trials listed on clinicaltrials.gov that were conducted with hospitals located in the XUAR, where credible investigative reports have shown that ethnic minorities in the region are repeatedly forced by the CCP to surrender their body autonomy. As we know, there is simply no ability for firms to conduct due diligence to ensure that clinical trials done in XUAR are voluntary.”

Axios noted that the trials in question concern Pfizer’s kidney cancer drug axitinib (brand name Inlyta), and Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s drug donanemab (brand name Kisunla).

The lawmakers asked the FDA to answer several questions related to its knowledge and oversight of such trials and called on the agency to “take on a greater role in protecting U.S. national security interests. With this data, it is clear that the FDA should play a greater role in analyzing U.S. biopharma entities (sic) clinical trial operations in the PRC.”

Pfizer responded that it “is committed to conducting business in an ethical and responsible manner. This includes respecting internationally recognized human rights throughout our operations,” Straight News reported. Eli Lilly claimed that it is “committed to IP protections, and we conduct robust assessments of our partners to ensure they meet Lilly standards for research and data privacy. Further, we oversee their activities when conducting clinical trials to ensure quality and data integrity.”

The allegations come amid a strained public reputation for Big Pharma given its role in the COVID-19 pandemic response.

A large body of evidence has found that mass restrictions on personal and economic activity undertaken in 2020 and part of 2021 caused far more harm than good in terms of personal freedom and economics as well as public health, particularly through the controversial COVID vaccines rushed through development by Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and the Trump administration.

Yet, so far Big Pharma has largely escaped accountability thanks to the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the PREP Act empowers the federal government to “limit legal liability for losses relating to the administration of medical countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.” Near the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the Trump administration invoked the Act in declaring the virus a “public health emergency.”

Under this “sweeping” immunity, CRS explained, the federal government, state governments, “manufacturers and distributors of covered countermeasures,” and licensed or otherwise-authorized health professionals distributing those countermeasures are shielded from “all claims of loss” stemming from those countermeasures, with the exception of “death or serious physical injury” brought about through “willful misconduct,” a standard that, among other hurdles, requires the offender to have acted “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose.”

A handful of states are currently making efforts to hold Pharma companies accountable despite this hurdle, such as Florida’s ongoing grand jury investigation into the vaccines’ manufacturers, and a Kansas lawsuit accusing Pfizer of misrepresentation for calling the shots “safe and effective.”