Cardin voices concerns over Hagel nomination

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said Tuesday that he had "concerns" over President Obama's nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) to serve as secretary of Defense. 

Cardin argued the president's nominee needed to clarify his positions on a slew of issues, from Iran sanctions to the service of gays in the military. 

"He's a good person. I agree with a lot of his positions in regard to Iraq. I certainly believe the president should be able to have his team. But the advice and consent of the Senate is a very important responsibility, we have to do it independently, and there are questions that need to be answered," Cardin told CNN's "Starting Point."

The Maryland lawmaker said he had requested a private meeting with Hagel to address some of his concerns, including Hagel's reluctance to support sanctions on Iran.

"I want an explanation in regard to his position [on] Iran," Cardin said. "He's been very reluctant to support sanctions on Iran. Iran is a very dangerous country."

Hagel has said previously that while he did not support "unilateral" sanctions on Iran, he did support efforts that involved other nations. On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended Hagel's record on the subject, calling the nominee a "supporter of the broad sanctions regime that this president has put into place against Iran."

Carney went on to herald the program as "a sanctions regime that is unprecedented and which as recently as, I think, last spring, Sen. Hagel wrote about favorably and urged Washington as a whole to continue."

Cardin also said he wanted to know what Hagel's position was on gays in the military, after Hagel opposed the appointment of an openly homosexual ambassador during the Clinton administration. And Cardin said he wanted Hagel to better explain his philosophy on the use of military force.

"It's going to be about, I understand his reluctance to use our military, but will he stand strong against those who threaten us in support of terrorism?" Cardin said.

The Maryland senator said he hoped for "an open and fair nomination process," but refused to guess how Hagel's nomination would turn out.

"I think it's too early to make a prediction as to how his confirmation process will go," Cardin said.

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China to cut prices of more than 400 drugs from February

HONG KONG, Jan 8 (Reuters) - China will cut prices of about 400 drugs for respiratory diseases, fever and pain by up to 20 percent from February, in a move to make medicines, including some products from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, more affordable.

It will be the fourth such price cut since 2011 and is part of reforms since the early 2000s to make healthcare cheaper and more accessible.

China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said in a statement on Tuesday the latest round of price cuts involved 20 broad classes of medicines and would include speciality drugs.

As the government cracks down on costs, more Chinese drugmakers are fighting thinning margins.

Sinopharm Group Co Ltd - China's largest drug distributor - and smaller rivals like Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd are expanding their distribution networks to get bigger slices of the market to offset increasing pressure on margins.

Faced with patents running out in the West, bigger foreign pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca , have hitched their futures largely to sales in developing markets including China, India, Eastern Europe and South America.

The average reduction in the latest round of price cuts will amount to 15 percent, although the cut will be as high as 20 percent for the most expensive drugs.

Earlier rounds of price cuts included antibiotics, anti-tumour, hormonal and blood-related medicines, and drugs for the circulatory, nervous, digestive and immune systems.

Health Minister Chen Zhu told a health conference on Monday that healthcare was still too expensive and there was still inadequate control over the improper use of drugs.

China, with an ageing population, is overhauling its health system and has made big strides since 2003. It now has a basic universal medical insurance system and heavily subsidises a growing list of essential drugs.

But many challenges remain in the country of 1.3 billion people, including a lack of state funding for hospitals, where drug sales, often at inflated prices, remain a major source of income.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn and Donny Kwok; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Since 2011, Three-Quarters Of Deficit Reduction Has Been Via Spending Cuts

Since passage of the deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff,” Congressional Republicans have attempted to portray it as the “last word” on taxes going forward. “The tax issue is behind us,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Democrats, meanwhile, have said that any forthcoming budget deal should be composed of equal parts revenue and spending cuts. But even doing that would mean the bulk of deficit reduction will have been achieved through spending cuts, because, as the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger show, three-quarters of deficit reduction since 2011 has been due to spending cuts:

Since the start of fiscal year 2011, President Barack Obama has signed into law approximately $2.4 trillion of deficit reduction for the years 2013 through 2022. Nearly three-quarters of that deficit reduction is in the form of spending cuts, while the remaining one-quarter comes from revenue increases. As a result of that deficit reduction, the projected rise in debt levels from today through 2022 has decreased by nearly 10 full percentage points of gross domestic product. In fact, under today’s policies, debt levels in 2022—as a share of GDP—will be only slightly higher than they are expected to be by the end of next year.

Here’s a timeline of accumulating deficit reduction, with spending cuts in red and revenue increases in blue:

When McConnell tried to claim on ABC’s This Week that revenue was off the table, anchor George Stephanopoulos wasn’t having it. And the numbers show he was exactly right.

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Elizabeth Wurtzel In New York Magazine, Confessional Writing, And Feminism

At some point in my mid-teens, I bought a paperback copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch at my local independent bookstore, inspired by its subtitle “In Praise Of Difficult Women” more than by any particular familiarity with the content, which ranged from Anne Sexton to The Seduction of Joe Tynan. The book, which draws from many different pop culture media to weave together a tapestry of the ways women women can be complicated, uncompliant, mentally ill, and other ways, considered “bitchy,” is a significant inspiration to my criticism. And it’s meant that even as Wurtzel, who’s written memoirs about her depression and her drug addiction, has spent much of the decade and a half since being awfully difficult herself, I’m always curious to see what she has to say next.

In this case, it’s a messy, very sad essay in New York Magazine about how miserable Wurtzel is, how much she cases intense sensation since it seems to be the only thing she can feel any more, how she’s made decisions that have left her without any safety net, and she claims this is some sort of principle. The piece is an embarrassment, rather than accomplishment, but a compulsively readable one—whatever you think of the content, a sentence like “I knew David Foster Wallace pretty well*, and he was pretty smart, but David Boies makes David Wallace look like, well, some other lesser David, maybe David Remnick,” is tremendous in its audaciousness and construction—and over at Slate, my fellow columnist Amanda Marcotte wrote that the piece is “as lengthy as it is incoherent, so the question arises: Did Nolan pay off Wurtzel to make his point for him?”

The Nolan to which she refers is Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan, who recently wrote a piece called “Journalism Is Not Narcissism,” in which he implored young writers not to mistake confessional writing for the stuff of a career. “By plundering your own life for material, you are not investing in yourself as a writer; you’re spending the principal,” he wrote. “Soon, it will all be used up. There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time.” Putting aside the fact that there are very few writers other than Wurtzel and Susan Shapiro, a memoirist and professor Nolan uses as his lead, who make a living, or who want to, solely by dining out on the lunch that they are simultaneously eating and writing about, there are more substantive objections to the idea that reporters should segregate themselves from their stories.

Ann Friedman, who published my favorite long form story of the last year, a story about a woman in Alaska trying to obtain an abortion in which her experience is the incredibly compelling vehicle for an exploration of the policy reasons it’s so difficult for her to get the care she needs, argued in response to Nolan that journalism is always shaded by perspective, and it’s a matter of revealing that perspective honestly and carefully, rather than covering it up. “I cringe every time I read a New York Times story in which the reporter awkwardly refers to herself as ‘a visitor.’ Really? You can’t just say “provided me with directions to her Craftsman bungalow”? Please,” Friedman wrote. ” journalists were always a part of the story. Why not just own up to the fact that three-dimensional humans are doing this work? We have always brought our personal histories and political opinions and casual biases with us while reporting. We just tried to pretend we weren’t with stupid stylistic conventions.”

Another thing that struck me while reading their pieces is the reminder that confessional journalism can serve as a means to reveal that experiences people once thought were singular are actually common, and not a cause for fear or shame. As much as Nora Ephron didn’t like her consciousness-raising group when she went in the seventies, her writing about her breasts and her sex fantasies, and about writing for Cosmopolitan, and about feminine hygiene sprays that were harming women mattered because they spoke aloud things that previously weren’t spoken of at all. Making people realize that problems they thought were personal are actually political and cultural is powerful work.

And that’s why Wurtzel’s essay comes across as intermittently powerful and infuriating and ramblingly bizarre. It’s not about that synthesis, that call to action. It’s aimed at making the rest of us feel like we are a herd of mundanes while Elizabeth Wurtzel is singular and special. “But this is it for me. I am a free spirit,” she writes. “I do not know any other way to be. No one else seems to live as I do. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.” Maybe. But it’s also a cliche, and not nearly as special or rare as Wurtzel seems to think it is. Young journalists should get the same lesson in confessional writing as they do in all else: why does it matter to anyone but you? The answer that they’ll want to consume your special snowflakeness is almost never true, and even more rarely enough.

*Apparently, Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” is about Wurtzel, and boy does that make things click into place.

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A small sales tax on Wall Street reaps big rewards

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One has to wonder if Paul Schott Stevens’ “Don’t enact financial transaction taxes,” December 20, 2012, is more about protecting the turf of billion dollar Wall Street banks and enormous investment firms, including their lucrative mutual fund businesses, than protecting the average people who invest and save. 
 
In his column, Stevens argues against the enactment of a financial transaction tax (FTT) in the U.S., as follows: “[A]ny benefits … would be dwarfed by the harm it would inflict on America’s savers, particularly its 90 million mutual fund shareholders.” Stevens is president and CEO, Investment Company Institute (ICI), a trade association comprised of more than 7,500 mutual funds, with names like Wells Fargo CoreBuilder and Morgan Stanley Global, as well as other investment entities.

What’s raised Stevens’ ire of late is legislation introduced in Congress in September by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), H.R. 6411, “The Inclusive Prosperity Act,” an FTT now with 16 co-sponsors and the backing of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, a coalition in the U.S. of more than 125 labor, religious, consumer, health advocacy and other groups, with combined memberships in the many millions.
 
Scores of leading economists and businessmen support passage of an FTT, as they, too, see it as a legitimate way to raise revenue. Backers include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Stockman, Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to name several.
 
The fact is that for the majority of Americans Ellison’s FTT should cost nothing, hence Stevens’ principal contention that FTTs “will produce a constant drag on shareholder returns… [and] make it all the harder for fund investors to achieve retirement security and other goals” is very misleading.
 
HR 6411 is a tiny tax; it is 50 cents per $100 on stock trades - that’s $50 on a stock trade of $10,000 - and even lesser rates on bonds, derivatives and currency dealings. Here’s what’s critical, and conspicuously absent from Stevens’ column: the facility or broker is levied the tax, not the investor. Thus Stevens’ argument that an FTT constitutes double, triple, even quadruple taxation is way off base. 
 
Here’s the rub for investors: The sales tax is paid by the investor only if the mutual fund passes it along. We would urge the mutual funds Stevens represents not to pass along this small sales tax to the very savers whose interests Stevens says he seeks to guard.

The point here is that mutual fund profits are more than ample to absorb this very tiny tax. Just look at the billions in wealth gathered by top mutual fund managers. According to Forbes, Fidelity Investments’ chairman is worth $11 billion; Charles Schwab’s wealth is approaching $5 billion, some attributable to fund activity; and Charles Johnson, chairman of Franklin Resources, has made $4 billion from his mutual fund business.

As a final protection to investors, per the Ellison law Americans with incomes of up to $50,000, $75,000 for households, would be rebated any FTT paid.   We do not share Stevens’ concern that a tax rebate is an unworkable administrative burden, as credits and rebates are hardly new concepts.
 
Stevens’ worries extend overseas, where the European Commission, he points out, is moving forward on a unified FTT scheme, with the support of 11 member countries. Forty countries now have some FTT in place. As for the U.K. and its decision to stay out of the EC scheme, we would reiterate that a tax on stock trades – the Stamp Tax - is in place in that nation and the London Stock Exchange remains one of the biggest in the world — even with an FTT on stock transactions.
 
A unified scheme in Europe and around the world, at all the major exchanges, avoids capital flight. So when Stevens raises that issue in the context of Sweden a generation ago, he seems behind the times.
 
In France, cautions Stevens, “large players are able to skirt the tax using an array of techniques, leaving small investors to bear the burden.” Unlike many taxes, Ellison’s proposal is difficult to evade because the tax is collected at the point of transaction and title is withheld until marked paid. With automation, trades are easy to track and tax collected.
 
Stevens shares our concern that “high frequency trading” needs regulation, but he believes an FTT  “seems an awfully blunt tool for achieving that goal.”  But the same top economists who support the FTT cite its usefulness in helping curb these destabilizing trading practices.
 
By one estimate, for every gallon of gasoline purchased in the U.S. today, $1 of cost can be attributed to speculative activity in the markets. We think that’s a national shame. An FTT can help to lower levels of speculative trading, according to numerous studies.  
 
To the  millions of Americans who are members of organizations calling for an FTT, some of whom are also mutual fund investors, the Ellison bill’s goal of raising an expected $350 billion annually serves an overwhelming national need. The FTT would expand state and federal investments in communities still very much experiencing harm from the 2008 financial collapse. The Inclusive Prosperity Act identifies job creation, the rebuilding of infrastructure, investment in transportation, education and healthcare, and environmental protection among its goals. It would also direct funds to international research and treatment of HIV/AIDS and to address climate change.
 
FTT supporters believe there is no time to delay, as the enduring harm faced by countless communities drags America deeper into poverty and forestalls a real recovery.   
 
Given the amounts our Treasury expended on Wall Street bailouts, not to mention substantial profits racked up in the finance sector today, an FTT at these small rates and under these well-defined conditions seems eminently fair. Wall Street’s debt to Main Street is past due.

Flynn is managing director, Health GAP, a founding member of the U.S. Robin Hood Tax Campaign.

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4 New Year’s Resolutions For Transforming The U.S. Electricity System

by Peter Bronksi, via the Rocky Mountain Institute

It’s that time of year when people make New Year’s resolutions, commitments to do things differently in the coming year that are going to have a positive impact on their lives. But what would New Year’s resolutions look like if the United States as a nation resolved to decrease its fossil fuel consumption and increase the adoption of efficiency and renewables?

I sat down with program director James Newcomb and principal Lena Hansen to find out. They offered up four New Year’s resolutions that can help make the United States’ electricity system more efficient, more resilient, and more planet-friendly sooner than later.

1. Invest further in end-use efficiency.

Energy efficiency is often considered one of the cheapest and most readily available energy sources. Investments in efficiency programs have been increasing around the country, but significant opportunity remains on the table and many utilities are still incentivized to sell more electricity, rather than to sell more efficiency. Taking end-use efficiency to the next level will require utilities and consumers to work more closely together than ever before. Utilities especially can take several steps to make that happen: a) improve efficiency program marketing to truly engage customers and increase participation, b) streamline program transaction costs, such as by implementing faster and simpler energy audits, c) adopt regulatory mechanisms that remove utilities’ disincentives and create incentives to sell efficiency, and d) embrace collaboration with other stakeholders, including regulators, NGOs, auditors, customers, and architectural and engineering firms.

2. Anticipate and head off friction over solar.

As the cost of solar has come down in recent years (19 percent overall between 2011 and 2012 alone, ranging from 15 percent for residential solar up to 30 percent for utility solar) and new business models have emerged, solar is becoming cost competitive with grid-sourced electricity in an increasing number of locales. Meanwhile, the amount of installed solar continues to grow. (According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the U.S. now has more than 6,400MW of installed solar electric capacity, enough to power more than 1 million average American homes.) These trends are set to continue, and as they do, there’s likely to be increased conflict between utilities, solar companies, and customers. Utilities, regulators, and solar companies need to come together now to dialogue and develop regulatory, business, and pricing models that will enable sustained growth for the solar market while still compensating utilities for the real and valuable grid services they provide.

3. Learn from 2012’s debilitating storms and make grid resilience a priority.

From devastating droughts in the Sahel and America to extreme flooding in Australia, from Western wildfires to Hurricane Isaac and Superstorm Sandy, 2012 was the year of debilitating storms and other weather and climate events that knocked out power for millions and millions of people. Such massive, widespread outages had very real and damaging impacts, from loss of life to billions of dollars lost. It is time to learn from those experiences and begin a genuine conversation about what it will take to fundamentally transform the grid’s architecture to make it inherently more resilient. The conversation must move beyond simply “hardening the grid” by trimming trees or installing expensive underground lines, which are more or less Band-Aids. A more decentralized electricity system—one built upon greater levels of rooftop solar, efficiency, electric vehicles, smart controls for customers, and more—has the potential to support greater resilience, but represents more fundamental and transformative change that must be thought through carefully.

4. Don’t think or act incrementally when it comes to long-term infrastructure.

The U.S. has been under-investing in its electricity system infrastructure for a long time. Even without the devastation caused by storms such as Sandy and the rebuilding that goes along with it, that system will require significant investment in 2013 and beyond. The Brattle Group estimates that the U.S. will need to invest up to $2 trillion in its electricity infrastructure by 2030, for example. But once such infrastructure investments are made, they’re there for decades. Let’s not make incremental investment decisions based on what we’ve always done; the status quo must go. Instead, we must be thoughtful, think systematically, and consider the best overall solution—not the best incremental Band-Aid—before acting. For example, is a new transmission line the best option, or could efficiency and distributed resources closer to the point of use meet the need? These are but four commitments of many the U.S. could make to improve its electricity system. And while the change will happen over the long term, the time to resolve to make that change—and take the first steps toward it—is today.

Peter Bronksi is the Editorial Director of the Rocky Mountain Institute. This piece was originally published at RMI’s Outlet Blog and was reprinted with permission.

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Health of the Consumer

 Highlight transcript below to create clipTranscript:  Print  |  Email Go  Click text to jump within videoMon 07 Jan 13 | 05:30 PM ET The CDC says this is the most aggressive early flu season in 8 years. Discussing which under-the-weather trades could lead to some healthy profits, with the Fast Money traders; and Dan Hurwitz, DDR CEO, discusses the winners and losers in retail now, and what's next for DDR.

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UPDATE 1-Shire adds to genetic disorder drugs with U.S. deal

LONDON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - British drugmaker Shire has agreed to buy Lotus Tissue Repair, a U.S. biotechnology company developing the first treatment for a rare genetic disorder that causes extremely fragile skin and recurrent blister formation.

Shire said on Tuesday the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, would boost the pipeline of its Human Genetic Therapies unit, which makes protein therapies for rare genetic conditions like Hunter's Syndrome and Fabry and Gaucher diseases.

Cambridge, MA-based Lotus Tissue Repair's lead product candidate, which is in late pre-clinical development, is a protein replacement therapy for the treatment of dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (DEB), Shire said.

"DEB ... (impacts) the lives of patients and their families, many of whom have few or no treatment options other than palliative care," said Philip J. Vickers, head of R&D at Shire Human Genetic Therapies.

He said protein replacement therapy had the potential to provide a first-in-class disease-modifying treatment for children with DEB.

Shares in London-listed Shire were trading up 1.9 percent at 1,951 pence by 1252 GMT.

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Church Of England To Allow Gay Bishops

Church Of England To Allow Gay Bishops | The Church of England has announced that it will allow gay clergy to be promoted to the rank of bishop, provided they maintain their celibacy. Jeffrey John divided the church when he was promoted in 2003 then forced to step down after protests. LGBT advocates point out that straight clergy do not have to prove their celibacy, whereas gay clergy cannot be trusted to honor the vow. Because the UK offers civil partnerships but not marriage for same-sex couples, this also raises the question of whether a bishop could have one of those partnerships, since they do not include the same assumptions of consummation as the Church’s definition of marriage.

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