Why Won’t Manchin Help Keep Jobs in West Virginia?

The Daily Escape:

Grand Canyon NP at golden hour – photo by indieaz

Viatris is a new pharmaceutical company formed by the merger of Mylan and Upjohn late last year. Their strategy for improving profits post-merger was as is usual, to restructure and cut $1 billion in costs. One victim of the cost-cutting is the Viatris plant in Morgantown, West Virginia. The company announced the plant would close last December.

The Morgantown plant has been in operation since 1965. It employs between 1,500 and 2,000, whose jobs will be offshored to India and Australia. These are well-paying jobs in one of America’s poorer states. The bulk of the layoffs will occur on July 31, when 1,246 people will be let go, including 764 union workers and 482 nonunion staff. Complete closure will happen by March 2022.

Mylan reported $3.9 billion in profits in 2019. Naturally, local union president Joe Gouzd had harsh words for Viatris:

“This is the last generic pharmaceutical manufacturing giant in the US, and executives are offshoring our jobs to India for more profits. What is this going to do to us if we have another pandemic?”

The local union represents about 900 workers. Gouzd said:

“…we’re going to rid ourselves of 2,000 high-paying jobs in north central West Virginia, taking out $150m to $200m out of the local economy…”

The West Virginia legislature passed a bill calling on Governor Jim Justice and Joe Biden to save the jobs. Biden has proposed taxing companies that offshore jobs, but it remains to be seen whether he will be successful.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Marco Rubio introduced the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Review Act to study America’s over-reliance on foreign countries in pharmaceutical industry, but neither West Virginia Senator has sponsored the bill.

The Guardian reports that Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito has ignored pleas to work with Biden officials to save the plant. Democrat Joe Manchin, whose daughter Heather Bresch served as Mylan’s chief executive until she retired in 2020, didn’t fully ignore their requests to get involved; he held a Zoom meeting in December that might as well have focused on “thoughts and prayers.”

Isn’t it curious that the state’s two Senators aren’t trying hard to keep jobs in their state?

You probably hadn’t heard that Bresch collected $37.6 million when she stepped down from Mylan. You also missed that under her leadership, Mylan recently undertook what’s called a “tax inversion”, changing its headquarters for tax purposes from Pittsburgh, PA to the Netherlands, reaping big tax breaks. So, less tax revenue for America.

Earlier, Mylan disclosed that it is in an ongoing lawsuit by the Public Employees Retirement System of Mississippi that alleges misconduct by the company. The suit alleges “misrepresentation and concealment of violations of FDA regulations governing pharmaceutical product quality and safety.” In 2016 and in 2018, the FDA found documentation, record-keeping, quality-control and cleaning issues. The plant was shut down temporarily after the 2018 findings. It then reduced production volume by about two thirds, and “right sized” plant staff.

But we initially heard about Ms. Bresch during Mylan’s EpiPen pricing controversy. They had been hiking prices for years on their epinephrine injector to the point where many people could no longer pay for it. Along with the EpiPen fiasco, Mylan paid $465 million to the federal government to settle claims it underpaid Medicaid rebates.

Understandably, the town and the state are looking for ways to head off the layoffs. Last week, members of the union and others rallied outside the state capitol in Charleston to urge Republican governor Jim Justice to help save the facility. According to the union, Justice said his administration was trying to find an alternative to closure, including holding talks with two companies that have expressed an interest in buying the plant.

But Justice said that Viatris was not cooperating:

“We’ve talked with Viatris, and we continue to struggle with them….They’re difficult to work with. The least they could do …is be cooperative.”

So, Viatris isn’t the best of corporate citizens. That doesn’t make them different from most multinationals. That means political pressure is the only leverage that will keep these jobs in America.

Yet, when you see these two “bipartisan” Senators not lift a finger to help the soon-to-be unemployed citizens of their own state, you have to ask: Why haven’t they done more?

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 28, 2016

Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right have returned to the Mansion of Wrong. That means we are back to “All Trump, All The Time”, something we did not miss while in the American and Canadian Rockies.

Saturday’s NYT had a long-form article. “Syria’s Paradox: Why the War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse” details the reasons that the Syrian war could last a very, very long time. From the NYT:

The core combatants — the government and the insurgents who began fighting it in 2011 — are quite weak and, on their own, cannot sustain the fight for long. But they are not on their own. Each side is backed by foreign powers — including the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and now Turkey — whose interventions have suspended the usual laws of nature. Forces that would normally slow the conflict’s inertia are absent, allowing it to continue far longer than it otherwise would. Government and rebel forces are supplied from abroad, which means their arms never run out…These material and human costs are easy for the far richer foreign powers to bear.

Not all cartoons are funny. Here is a graphic way to think about the war’s impact on Syria’s children:

COW Syrias Kids

Khalid Albaih is a Sudanese cartoonist living in Doha, Qatar.

The French forcing Muslim women to take off their burkini is another form of warfare:

COW Burkini

Trump backtracks on the wall:

COW Trump Wall2

Trump knew from the beginning that he couldn’t deport 11 million people, and he knew from the beginning that his wall would never be built. So, maybe this isn’t a flip-flop, just an admission. Trump supporters, however, were conned about as much as they deserved to be.

The Orange Trumpet pitched African-Americans this week:

COW Trumps Pitch

Hillary better hope the Clinton Foundation issue doesn’t weaken her campaign:

COW Clinton Foundation2

Epipen pricing by Mylan is just another racket:

COW Epipen

 

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 29, 2015

Mylan, a generic drug maker based outside Pittsburgh, abandoned its status as a US corporation, gaining tax advantages by moving its headquarters to the Netherlands. The move reduced the taxes the company pays on profits from sales of drugs overseas, but Mylan continues to maintain most of its operations in Pennsylvania.

Mylan was viewed by some in Congress and the Obama administration as a symbol of corporate greed when they undertook a corporate inversion that placed profits above any commitment to its home country.

But now, Mylan is demanding that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) protect it from a hostile takeover bid by an Israeli company, Teva Pharmaceuticals. Mylan asked the FTC to examine Teva’s purchase of Mylan stock for possible violation of the requirement that large purchases of stock of US firms must be reviewed by antitrust authorities, because Mylan is still listed on the NYSE. The company claims that its principal office remains in Pennsylvania, which makes it a “US issuer” of stock for federal anti-trust purposes.

The irony of this is not lost in Washington. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee said:

Mylan is trying to have its cake and eat it too…It is an intolerable abuse of a loophole when US corporations pretend they are based overseas in order to get out of paying their fair share and duck their responsibilities to the United States. It’s just plain hypocrisy when one of those same inverted companies claims that it is actually a US company because it needs the special protections US law gives to American companies.

Mylan may have a case. Its plea for help from the US government could pass legal muster but, the optics of a company that abandoned its US citizenship in order to pay less in federal taxes, and then seeking the protection of a federal agency is problematic.

Compounding the farce, Mylan is attempting its own hostile takeover of Perrigo, in order to stave off Teva.

Mylan’s unabashed lack of shame is impressive. Maybe the FTC’s decision-making on this case should take quite a while.

So, wake up Congress, and deal conclusively with corporate inversions! Our wake-up calls for the next few weeks will be songs about summer. We start with the Lovin’ Spoonful’s only #1 hit, “Summer in the City”:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

The return trip often seems shorter than the initial trip, even though the distance traveled and the actual time spent traveling are identical. This is called the “return trip effect”. Two studies say it is real, but you already knew that.

Trucker jobs will be the first casualty of driving robots. Trucker salaries average $40,000/year. Most truck accidents are due to user error: Driving too fast, driving while tired, or driving while intoxicated. Robots don’t drink, don’t get tired, and won’t drive unsafely in order to get to a destination faster. Drivers will still be needed for inner-city driving (at least initially), but most long-haul operations will quickly vanish as soon as licensing is complete in most states.

Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2032, slightly more than Germany has today. The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produce—and their domestic consumption has been rising at 7% a year, nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a British think tank, if this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil exports by 2021 and make the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.

Privail Diagnostics, has developed a simple, portable blood test that can detect the HIV virus (not antibodies) for the first time. That means an earlier diagnosis, and reduced infection rates. Privail’s at-home testing device is like a diabetes test, needing only one drop of blood. It shows the results in a color bar, like an at-home pregnancy test or digital output, like a diabetes meter. Invest at your own risk.

Hackers have apparently cracked the computer systems responsible for issuing flight plans to pilots of every airline. The apparent weak link? The flight plan-delivery protocol used by every airline. Ground computers calculate the appropriate flight plan for planes, and someone on ground approves the plan before distributing it to pilots. Pilots receive plans before taking off, as well as enroute, when a change occurs during a flight. Plans are uploaded to planes via a datalink. Once a hacker figures out those protocols, it is possible to issue a bogus flight plan. But, the industry says, not to worry.

Your thought for the week: Giving money to poor people is socialism, or even communism…..giving money to AIG or Goldman Sachs is capitalism, and that’s what made this nation grrrreat!!!

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