Both are posing as “public service” announcements.
Neither is, not truly. And neither clearly identifies the promoter/producer of the ad but it’s my guess PACs stoked with dark money are paying for them.
One commercial starts with a man who identifies himself as someone who works in manufacturing. He’s dressed in clothing evoking a well-trained blue collar worker in a specialized factory.
He reminds us that high-tech manufacturing jobs have disappeared from America, have been moved overseas. And how we have to bring them, with their good salaries and benefits, back to America.
He states that the new, great manufacturing jobs will be/are produced by America’s innovative technology businesses.
Then he speaks to American politicians: please don’t mess with American technology. Keep these jobs in America!
My take. This ad is internally warped, as well as shady.
Yes, we all know manufacturing jobs have left America. So who sent them away to China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, et al? The companies themselves. Companies will make their products wherever it’s cheapest. The cheap cost, i.e., labor, ensures higher profits. If you need proof, take a look at your tech devices to see where they are manufactured.
So who is paying for this TV ad targeting U.S. politicians, not corporations?
I’ll bet it’s a consortium of high-tech businesses. Corporations, that is. And they’re addressing their ad to us consumers, urging us to contact our politicians and tell them to…protect jobs in America? The ones they, the corporations, have shipped out of America, along with their tax obligations?
Nah. The ad is a response to the Biden administration’s strong interest in investigating and bringing antitrust actions against over-powerful tech companies.
So the ad falsely claims it’s about keeping manufacturing jobs in America, while it really is warning our government to keep hands off Big Tech.
It’s capitalist propaganda. Actually, oligarchic-capitalistic-monopolistic propaganda, brought to us by some obscenely rich people who are worried they’re not going to be obscenely rich and omnipotent forever.
Boo. Hoo.
∞
A huge majority of us, around 83 percent, want Medicare, i.e., our government, to be empowered to negotiate drug prices so that one executive, such as Joe Manchin’s daughter, can’t simply jack the price of EpiPens up from $94 to $700.
Even those of us who don’t have asthma or diabetes have to be horrified and furious about the price-gouging on life-preserving meds. I have neither; my fury is a perfect illustration of how individual self-interest (“I’m not diabetic so why should I care about insulin prices?”) can become unselfish in the face of public health emergencies.
So what is this egregiously selfish ad about? The one with an older woman who is pictured as upper middle class, warning us in an unpleasant naggy voice that letting “government” negotiate drug prices is a bad thing. Bad.
She tells us she has lupus and cancer. But if our government can negotiate drug prices, she says she might not be able to get the medications she needs. As an example, she says, in countries where governments negotiate drug prices, the “waiting time” is very long and some drugs aren’t available at all to people who need them.
Without doing more research than I feel like doing right now, I suspect her claims are thoroughly bogus. I know, at least anecdotally, that Canada’s wait times (to see a physician) are no worse than ours. To wit: I was recently warned by my internist to make an appointment with a particular cardiologist, for a regular check-up, immediately since she was booked up for six months.
And what is this unpleasant spokeswoman talking about when she says she might have to wait for her medications? Nah. Or if Medicare negotiates the prices of her medications, she might not get the medications at all? Big nah. (Unless, of course, she’s taking some cockamamie tonic derived from mango pits and manufactured by only one alchemist located on Yap. The FDA might have an opinion to offer in such a case.)
BTW, here are some price differentials on Rx medications: we pay 218% higher than do Canadians, 209% higher than do Japanese and 779% higher than Turks.
We know who pays for our overpriced meds. We do, or our insurance companies do. But who is paying for this infuriatingly dishonest commercial?
Easy: Big Pharma. Who else but drug companies don’t want medication prices negotiated downward? Big Pharma is doing this via a (tax-free!) organization called the Partnership for Chronic Disease, which is one of the carefully Orwellian-labeled newish orgs springing up to fight to keep medicine prices high.
(Understandable. If the commercial finished up by saying, “This information is brought to you by Mylan Pharmaceuticals (see above, re Joe Manchin’s daughter’s EpiPens)”, well…)
I went to the website of this “partnership.” They offer a list of members, many of which seem like excellent public health organizations. Somewhere in the small print, though, I read this list does not necessarily represent that all these organizations are still members which still support what the Partnership for Chronic Disease is doing.
Dishonest all the way through.
And that is my public service announcement.
