The need to reenact Glass Steagall

by Glen Wallace

If traditional banking is to be considered a vital national utility, then safeguards need to be in place to protect that utility from harm. As it is, we the people are acting as the de facto insurance company backing the banking industry.  Unfortunately, those financial institutions don't have to pay any premiums for what is effectively the world's largest insurance policy.  We the people pay out when times are bad for those banks, but we get bupkis when times are bountiful for them.  So, we should either be getting regular dividend checks or the casino side of banking and the traditional saving and lending side should be clearly and cleanly separated through the reenactment of Glass Steagall.  Another option is to start a national bank for traditional banking either as the only option or a public option.

The problem with a lack of separation between casino or investment banking and traditional banking is that there is no signs or symptoms for a long time leading up to a financial disaster caused by the lack of separation.  For instance, while there are plenty of problems faced by the general public from our private health insurance system such as high rates and poor coverage that leads the constituents to clamor for a single payer plan, there are no such problems that the general public has to face and deal with in terms of  the lack of separation between the casino and traditional side of banking -- everything seems to be going along swimmingly until disaster strikes and banks start closing and banking holidays are declared.  The lack of a Glass Steagall type legislation is not a problem until it is a huge problem.  But despite all the glaring problems with our private insurance systems, the difficulty in trying to enact something like Medicare for All leads me to think it will be nearly impossible to reenact Glass Steagall until the next banking crisis -- although I am wondering why that wasn't the first thing attempted after the fall of some big banks in 2008, instead of passing the critically weak Dodd Frank bill. 

The US Government could just start making drugs like insulin and devices like the epipen as a solution to price spikes

The following is a comment I posted in response to the above Richard Wolff video essay:

There is a third way of lowering drug prices: make it ourselves.  By 'ourselves' I mean the US Government owning and operating the means of production of medical drugs and medical devices and distributing those products according to need.  The Government Printing Office has for decades manufactured and sold their own published products.  So there is precedent there and if anyone wants to they can go to their website and browse and maybe buy one of their books:

If they can own the means of production for one type of product, books and other publications, why can't the US Government also own the means of production for other types of products; namely medicines and medical devices?  I think they can and should start to manufacture drugs and medical devices -- especially those products that have fallen outside of patent protection.  And the two products that have gotten the most press recently for price spikes are outside of patent protection; insulin and epipen type devices.

But even for those products that are under patent protection the government should intervene and manufacture those products if the patent owner refuses to lower the price to a much more reasonable level.  The drug company may balk at the idea and complain that they wont be motivated to invest in research if they think the government might preempt any patent rights they might gain from a newly developed medicine -- We can respond that if that is the result then the government can start doing all the research, but doing it for the right reasons; patient health rather than profitability and shareholder value.  Because as it currently stands, the only reason drug companies develop any drug is if and only if they think it will be profitable -- and meanwhile much of the rest of society keeps working under the unsafe assumption that what is best for Big Pharma is also going to be best for patients.

I've written Senator Klobuchar a couple times with my suggestion and she just replies with her explaining her proposed solutions.  One of the main solutions she wants to enact is a bill she introduced that would make it quicker and easier to get generics onto the market and let competition drive down the prices.  My response is that, for one thing, there is nothing mutually exclusive about trying to achieve both my idea and her idea simultaneously.  For another thing, her generics to the market idea seems like just another futile attempt to depend on free enterprise and capitalism to solve are most pressing problems even though a non-capitalist solution is staring at her straight in the face.  I keep thinking about  the movie Jurassic Park near the ending (I'm assuming anyone reading this has seen the movie and thus doesn't need a spoiler alert)  where the park visionary Hammond, even after all the damage and carnage wrought by the dinosaurs, instead of giving up, still is trying desperately to come  up with a way to make it work.  Now, even amidst the aftermath of all the carnage wrought by the involvement of predatory capitalist sharts in the field of medicine, Klobuchar is still trying to figure out ways leave our medical well being in the jaws of those sharks without us getting hurt.  I think it is time to give up on that route and realize that under the exigent circumstances, we need to get started as soon as possible manufacturing and distributing, according to need, those medicines and medical devices.