And most of the residents of [Rio], who live without even minimal services, watched billions and billions of dollars being spent on stadiums that won’t be used and buildings that will now be sold at great profit, while their minimal, meager social programs will now be cut by a government that was never elected.
Mylan is taking advantage of their monopolistic position in the market… That’s the systemic problem that we all face. It’s the number one reason that drug prices are so high in the United States, is that we have government-granted monopolies in many areas, de facto monopolies or individuals like Shkreli and companies like Mylan that have figured out how to corner a market, and they charge as much as we and our health system collectively will pay to care… for our loved ones. And that’s the business model, right? It’s profit maximizing.
Destruction of the marshland is a continuation of harm caused by the oil and gas industry over decades that has contributed to coastal erosion, the elimination of marshes, the elimination of wetlands in Louisiana, which makes storms much more ferocious, because those wetlands, those marshes, should be there to suck in the water, as natural sponges, if you will, when water floods onto land.
Without that marsh, that was eaten away by oil, without that coastline, that was eaten away by salt, that was allowed to incur on the coastline because of canals built for pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, the coast isn’t there, and the floods just come in and decimate communities.
I asked a senior State Department official, ‘What was the Saudi plan when they started this bombing campaign? What was the strategy for the bombing?’ And he got a bit exasperated. He said, ‘Plan? There was no plan. They simply bombed anything and everything.’