Friday, June 03, 2005

''Why Isn’t Iraq Topic One Among Democrats?''

Here is an excerpt from the text of the speech Arianna Huffington gave today at the 2005 Take Back America Conference: "At the opening dinner last night, Richard Parker, in presenting an award to John Kenneth Galbraith, read from a letter Galbraith had written to JFK in 1961: “The right,” he wrote, “will always criticize reasonableness as softness… When they speak of total victory they invite total annihilation. They aren’t brave but suicidal. There is a curious superficial pugnacity about the American people, which, I am persuaded, does not go very deep. They applaud the noisy man but they reconsider if they think him dangerous. We must make it clear that these men are dangerous.” It’s time the Democratic Party stopped being afraid of upsetting Wall Street and Big Pharma. Drug companies will pocket $139 billion in profits as a result of the new Medicare prescription drug law alone. Can you believe passing a prescription benefit that doesn’t allow the government to negotiate bulk-purchasing discounts? If you were the CEO of a private company signing off on a deal like that, you’d be fired. There has been a lot said after the election about moral values. If Democrats want a moral values issue they can call their own, why not start with the immoral behavior of giant drug companies such as Merck that not only pocket massive profits at the expense of the taxpayer, but continue to sacrifice the health of the public on the alter of higher and higher profits. Indeed, as many as 55,000 patients may have died as a result of taking Vioxx, which Merck continued to advertise even while in possession of studies that showed that it greatly increased the risk of heart attacks. If Democrats want to appeal to voters who believe in promoting what Republicans call a “culture of life,” they should make it a priority to put an end to the kind of corporate behavior that promotes a culture of death."

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