Phase out the 401K

There is a post in the NY Times today about the way companies that layoff their workers and replace them with H1B visa holders also require those workers to keep their mouths shut about what is going on.

The non-disparagement clauses might be partially responsible for the conventional wisdom that we need more STEM graduates when clearly we don’t. Long time readers of this blog know that I and my colleagues were laid off in NJ when our site closed. In fact, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania, the Northeast Corridor, laid off hundreds of thousands of invaluable researchers and replaced them with… nothing. In some cases, brand new research facilities, some built for very specific studies that cost millions of dollars to build, were mothballed or even destroyed.

That’s right, it made more sense to the bottom line to destroy valuable lab space than keep the facilities with the upkeep, maintenance and taxes on the books. The people? What about them? It’s interesting to me that the braintrusts who decided to lay off all those scientists and planned to rent out the buildings to new start ups had a hard time finding renters. Who did they think they were going to rent to? The same scientists who were laid off didn’t have the funds for the start ups that were meant to replace the large corporate labs. They were too stressed trying to find any work in any state while keeping their families in the expensive northeast and mortgaged houses out of foreclosure. So, the “rent the labspace to the old labrats” scheme turned out to be a bust and now the buildings have to come down.

There are a couple of states that benefitted from the destruction of the research industry. Those would be Massachusetts and California. The business models were changed from small molecule research to biologicals. But number of jobs created is small. Only a tiny fraction of those laid off were invited to go to Cambridge. Medicinal chemistry in this country is decimated. Compounds can be made very cheaply in India. There’s still research in graduate school labs but it does not begin to make up for what has been lost.

It’s not like there’s not enough biology to research and anyone in the research industry knows that training is not the problem. These are some of the most highly trained people in the world who have to continue reading the latest papers to keep up. Soooo, that’s not it.

What could be driving the frenzy to dismantle the country’s research industry? Hmmm, what could it be, what could it be.

Well, in some companies, the decision to close the site was followed a few days later by an email to all employees from the finance department that congratulated itself on reducing costs and creating a nice quarterly profit. Sort of a “You who are about to die, we salute you!” email.

When they say it’s not about money, it’s about money.

Working Americans have been forced to participate in their own destruction through the 401K. We invest in funds that are rewarded when companies merge, consolidate and layoff. Companies are sold like baseball cards, drained of their assets and left as hollow shells of what they used to be. Research is expensive. Paying for experience is expensive. Better to ship that out if you can, hire only short term contractors, buy up companies with a promising drug lead and lay off their early research staff.

In the meantime, the portfolios will grow and now the masters of the financial universe have brought us into the game, some of us unwillingly. We are now complicit, watching the quarterly earnings reports and demanding more shareholder value. Because there are no pensions in our old age. This is how we make our money- on the backs of our fellow Americans.

And let us now turn our attention to the H1B visa holders who unfortunately have no rights here. If they lose their jobs, they can be sent back to their home countries. It doesn’t matter if they have lives, relationships or property here. Those are risky luxuries. And it doesn’t help that these people may eventually get green cards. Some green cards are so narrowly tailored so as to make getting a new job after a layoff very difficult for the bearer.

It’s all because of the vast amounts of money that used to be tied up in safe, boring but reliable pensions that are now splashing around the world like colored scrip in a global game of Life. The greed of the financiers and titans of industry is gargantuan. The analysts who work for them on Wall Street are incentivized to accumulate as much wealth as possible, with as much risk as possible in as short a time as possible. If they lose money, the government will cover it or some stupid firefighter will take the hit. It’s their fault if they didn’t go to Harvard and make the right connections.

The 401K is at the heart of everything that is wrong with the current economic system. It encourages risk taking, it incentivizes avarice, it propels the short term investment cycle, it causes the outsourcing, it destroys industries and it is now starting to affect productivity. Because when you sacrifice your talent for youth and low wages, and then force everyone to account for every billable minute, you force the workforce to reinvent the wheel and cause anxiety and distraction in the offices with endless paperwork and minute swapping.

Phase it out. Get rid of the pyramid scheme. Disincentivize short term investment and greed. If we don’t tackle the 401K, all the unions in the world won’t make a dent. There will be no need for them when we are all independent contractors in the gig economy looking over our shoulders for the next layoff and becoming more angry by the minute.

This is the legacy of the last eight years when no bankers were held responsible and no hearings were conducted to ferret out the root causes of so much risk and destruction while the companies held revolvers to the heads of their laid off staff and told them to not say a word about what was happening to them. Funny, the CEOs don’t have any problem telling the researchers what they think of them and how expendable and exploitable they are.

It’s about the money. The 401K fuels the Gig Economy. It’s the Gig Economy, Stupid that’s undermining the middle class, causing income instability, family instability and a drag on spending. Get rid of it.

Pharmageddon continues

This time it’s Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK). You may remember that GSK was in the papers recently because it was one of the only big pharma companies with a potential vaccine for ebola. Well, now they’re cutting their R&D staff. According to the rumors flying over at In the Pipeline, the biggest cuts are going to happen at their research park in North Carolina.

How these things typically happen is the pharma in question just eliminates a whole research division or therapeutic area. Your job is not spared because you made your company a zillion dollars on the patent you sold to it for a dollar 10 years ago. I used to be in favor of this quid pro quo arrangement. You give me the means to do my research, I give you the fruit of my labor. But now, I’m not so sure. Like everything else, there are predators in the executive suites and on Wall Street who have zero appreciation for the amount of work it takes to create a new drug entity and plenty of people who think they own it. In some respects, researchers have only themselves to blame for not protecting their own interests, those being the need to earn a living in order to consume calories to sustain life and have a roof over their heads.

GSK’s cuts come on the heels of cuts at Astra-Zeneca, which decided to get rid of its antibiotics research unit. Yeah, try to figure that one out. And then there was Amgen that recently announced that it would cut up to 4000 jobs globally including at its research facility in Seattle. So, while the flood of layoffs in the US R&D industry has slowed down a bit since the high water mark of 2009-2010, it’s still not finished yet. After all, sooner or later, the industry will run out of people to lay off. But we’re still going to see pulses of carnage here and there, dumping more over-educated, over-qualified, experienced and talented chemists and biologists into the already saturated labor market. Fun, fun.

In other news, the left sometimes *almost* grasps what the problem is with pharmaceutical R&D but as soon as those of us who really know what’s going on turn our backs, we get more clueless BS from people like Dean Baker. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have him on my side. But he doesn’t seem to spend any time talking with people who have actually, you know, been there. There is something bizarrely automatic about the left’s misunderstanding of how drugs get invented and developed. Maybe this has something to do with the complexity of the process. Or maybe it’s just laziness.

Here’s the basic outline of the misunderstanding: The NIH, which we all pay for, does basic research. Then it collaborates with a big drug company and that big drug company turns around and sells that basic research for a ginormous profit. All the big company does is scales the sucker up, runs some admittedly expensive clinical trials, and then produces and markets the drug, delivered fresh and complete from the NIH labs, directly to you the consumer at an enormous markup.

There is just enough truth about the greed of the executive and finance movers and shakers to make this look plausible. Unfortunately, it is one of those beautiful theories easily destroyed by ugly facts.

I don’t want to go into this again because it will take at least several posts to unpack but the NIH rarely delivers a pristine drug to industry. No, the whole idea of basic research is that it is basic. That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard or not valuable. It means there is sometimes little more than a nugget of a something to follow up on. The “drugs” are sometimes nothing more than fragments or completely undruggable. (Undruggability is a whole different topic) Sometimes, there is no drug delivered to industry. Sometimes, it’s merely the suggestion that a specific protein target may or may not be involved in some undesirable endpoint.

The role of industry R&D is to take this very basic research and through many years of real, genuine, honest-to-god research, turn it into something resembling a drug. It is a very expensive process. I’m not surprised at the numbers being batted around. That is not to say that we can’t cut back on the amount of marketing that pharma does. At the end of the day, what is more valuable to you? The researchers that invent an ebola vaccine or the marketers that tell you why you need it? But to get real drugs from real research, a lot of money must be spent in order to pay for many trials and errors and reagents and lab equipment and researchers who need to be fed and housed.

That being said, it sure does look like there is a plan to exploit NIH and academic labs. If you get rid of all your R&D units in the name of shareholder value, or at least cripple them with endless, non-productive mergers and acquisitions and layoffs, you may end up without anything to market. And there are a lot of geeky students out there who are willing to work at subsistence wages to get a PhD. Why not use them as your new staff? That certainly looks like what is happening. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is missing in the equation is the experienced R&D staff that will know “when to hold’em and when to fold ’em” when it comes to actually making the potential drugs. In other words, there will be a lot of reinventing of the wheel in academic labs as they sort through how to do it on limited soft money.

It’s a research strategy only a banker could love.

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One bright spot for the journal famished: Nature is experimenting with making its journal archive and current issue available as a free “read-only” version. That’s to circumvent the habit of some poor researchers who have to sneak around to satisfy their paper habit, a phenomenon known as “dark sharing”. You have to know someone who has inside access to a license, usually some friend who is still in industry or someone at a university. This is what we are reduced to: sharing illicit copies of nerdy papers like they’re banned versions of Tropic of Cancer. Read-only versions that you can’t save or refer to later is  better than nothing, I guess, though not quite as good as getting a subscription to Nature and Science for Christmas.

 

Post in a hurry

Weather here in Pittsburgh is right up there with Edinburgh, Scotland this spring.  The forsythia still have yellow flowers on them.  The magnolia tree was in full bloom when we got a hard, hard frost a couple of weeks ago.  That turned all of the blossoms brown.  That same frost killed the flowers in my planter.  Don’t you love to spend money on plants to watch them die?

Lovely.

Cate Blanchett as Hedda Gabler

I noticed that someone was reading my Mad Men post from a couple of years ago.  I still stand by the Ibsen connection but I have a couple of revisions, as well as some theories about a secondary theme on the submission of the creative forces in business to the forces of convention and money.  Heads up: it doesn’t end well for the creative types.  But if you’re wondering how it is Americans celebrate the MBAs and their values to the detriment of everyone else, Matt Weiner may have an idea about how that happened.  I’ll try to map that out later.

Betty Draper as Hedda Gabler

In the meantime, what is the real world consequence of the defeat of the creative?  We may be about to find out when it comes to infectious diseases.  The NYTimes reported yesterday on the first case of MERS in the US.  MERS is a respiratory disease that is related to SARS.  It has a lethality rate of around 30%.  That’s scary high.  It doesn’t mean that MERS is going to take off like the pneumonic plague but I’m betting that fellow passengers on the flight with patient zero are sweating buckets right now.

MERS is a viral infection but resistant bacterial infections are the ones to really worry about.  Viral infections require vaccines and they’re trickier to treat once you get an infection.  For example, what do you take if you get the flu or ebola?  Cat’s out of the bag at that point.  You don’t have a lot of options but to wait it out and hope your immune system kicks in before you die. But we know how to make antibiotics.  We just aren’t making a lot of new ones these days.  Those kinds of drugs aren’t profitable because patients don’t take them for long periods of time so the shareholders aren’t getting a high enough return on investment.  The antibiotic projects get dumped from the portfolio in favor of cancer drugs and orphan disease drugs.  Maybe that’s reassuring to the cancer patients out there but how does it feel to be the shareholders’ cash cows?  And what about the patients with resistant infections, psychiatric illnesses and other illnesses that are difficult and expensive to discover drugs to treat?

In the meantime, the creative types are busily writing their resumes in the wake of another M&A announcement.  That’s the way the world works these days.  The research divisions are viewed as unpredictable and expensive weights on the bottom line.  The hardworking creative geniuses are at the mercy of the bean counters and MBAs.

And so are the rest of us.

Need Yves Smith’s analysis of new Pfizer hostile takeover of Astra-Zeneca

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline has a post on Pfizer’s hostile move on Astra-Zeneca:

What the hell is Ian Read thinking? Pfizer is apparently going hostile with their attempt to buy out AstraZeneca, all but ensuring that the deal, if it goes through, will take place at the highest price and in the messiest fashion that it possibly could. And for what?

If you’ve been following Pharmageddon from the beginning, you will know that Astra-Zeneca’s fall off the “patent cliff” was one of the steepest in the industry.  The patent cliff is the term used in the industry that refers to the expiration of patents for the major blockbuster drugs.

Patent Cliff by company since 2010.

 

Weirdly, most blockbuster patents have expired within the past decade because they were discovered in the 90’s, the golden age of drug research.  If you’re wondering why your blood pressure meds are suddenly so affordable, that’s why.  They’re generic now.  Pharma can’t make as much money off them anymore.  Great!, you say.  And it probably is great, to some extent.  The problem is there is not a lot in the pipeline to replace them, that is, if you’re interested in more effective drugs with fewer side effects.  There are several reasons for this that I’ve discussed in previous posts but the primary cause is NOT for lack of trying.  Researchers have seemingly endless dogged determination to preserver in  the face of failure after failure.  The problem is that research has to deal with *two* impossible systems: the complex biology and the self-serving, clueless managerial/finance class.  And the underfunded and politicized FDA.  Make that THREE impossible systems.  And the class action law industry.  FOUR! It all adds up to unnecessarily and ridiculously expensive drugs.  But I digress.

So, according to Derek, Astra had some really rough years, laid off a ton of people in Delaware and all around the world, but hired a new guy in 2012 to turn the ship around and has plans to consolidate a tiny fraction of their research unit in Cambridge, MA where no one really wants to work because it’s a.) expensive, b.) a pain in the ass commute and c.) an insecure career environment for researchers.  MBAs really are a bunch of status snob lemmings, I swear.  Or magpies chasing the latest shiny thing.

My bad, that’s Cambridge, UK where AZ wants to set up its stripped down R&D division.  It’s probably just as attractive to the relocated researchers (You happy few!  You band of brothers!) as the American Cambridge.

Derek makes a good point in that Pfizer has a lot of money to spend on the small, nimble biotech startups that MBA types have told the analysts are supposed to be able to generate a s^&*load of drugs to inlicense.  They’re like unicorns, these little startups, or like perfectly elastic collisions of particles in a box.  Theoretically, they exist but in the real world?  ehhhhh, not so much.  Drugs rarely emerge from these tiny incubators fully formed because, helloooooo, Silicon Valley, drug discovery is NOT like writing code for a new Facebook.  But you’ll find out in the next couple of years.  Just sit in on one of the project teams while the biologists drone on and on and on about how much to tweak the components of their confirmatory and cell based assays to make them reproducible and it will quickly dawn on you that drug discovery makes coding look like Chutes and Ladders.  Even so, we’ve got to wonder why Pfizer is choosing to forgo spending some of their billions on the biotech startups in order to sit on a pile of cash.  Where is the drive for innovation we’re always hearing so much about?

Anyway, where was I?  After pondering the problem for awhile, Derek hypothesizes that Pfizer is buying Astra-Zeneca, a foreign owned company, to hide its taxable profits from the US government.  Or the British government.  It’s like some British, Swedish, American threesome, which initially sounds like a good time for everyone except the citizens who actually count on corporations to respect them. It’s a rather strong accusation but Derek says he never wants to work for Pfizer anyway.  That’s Ok for him but my pension was acquired by Pfizer when it gobbled up Wyeth and then proceeded to lay off every one of the people I used to work with.  I’m kind of concerned with this wobbly third leg of my rapidly disappearing retirement stool so if Pfizer is up to something, I’d like to know what the heck it is.

The remaining survivors in research at Astra-Zeneca can see what’s coming.  They must be busily rewriting their CVs and networking instead of finishing that reaction or fishing the crystals out of solution to send to the synchrotron.  What a lovely way to spend your hours in the lab.  And the industry wonders why there is nothing in the pipeline after 20 years of this crap.

What this research project team really needs is a financially nerdly Yves Smith type who can look at the details of the proposed takeover and report back in a meeting to tell us what’s up.  More to the point, what does the UK’s new tax rates for foreign profits say about whether the conservative government is trying to make Britain into a sleeker global tax haven?  I’m just a chemist.  Money is not my area of expertise.  This project team needs a finance specialist.

 

 

Friday: The Stupid Continues

More fallout from the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to kowtow to it’s noisy but small group of elderly ultra religious social conservatives (whose numbers are shrinking at an alarming rate) and drop funding to Planned Parenthood.  This bit from John Raffaelli, a board member, sums up just how smug the social conservatives have gotten:

Her comments directly contradicted those of John D. Raffaelli, a Komen board member and Washington lobbyist, who told The New York Times on Wednesday that Komen made the changes to its grant-making process specifically to end its relationship with Planned Parenthood. Mr. Raffaelli said that Komen had become increasingly worried that an investigation of Planned Parenthood by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, would damage Komen’s credibility with donors.

Komen gave Planned Parenthood $700,000 last year — a tiny portion of its $93 million in grants — to finance 19 separate programs. A growing number of religious organizations had become concerned that donations to Komen would benefit Planned Parenthood and had advised members not to give to Komen. Rather than risk offending some donors with a relatively small portfolio of grants, Komen decided to largely cut off Planned Parenthood, Mr. Raffaelli said.

To Planned Parenthood, that decision amounted to a betrayal of the organizations’ shared goal of saving lives through breast screening programs. Ms. Richards, Planned Parenthood’s president, said her organization was gratified by the support the controversy has brought.

“We provide care to one in five women in America, and over the last two days it seems we’ve heard from every one of them, through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and all sorts of ways, “ Ms. Richards said. “It’s a true show of women standing for women.”

Over 30 years, Komen became one of the most successful disease advocacy organizations in the world by making pink ribbons and the fight against breast cancer as prevalent a symbol here as baseball and apple pie.

Avoiding this kind of controversy was the very reason Komen chose a quiet ending to its relationship with Planned Parenthood, Mr. Raffaelli said. And he said Komen was bitterly disappointed that Planned Parenthood was using Komen’s decision to raise money.

Notice what is really outraging the board at Komen.  It’s not that they haven’t cured breast cancer or spared one woman the pain of losing her breasts or life.  No, the outrage is that Planned Parenthood is benefitting from the Komen’s ill-advised, boneheaded decision.  How dare Planned Parenthood not take defeat humbly?!  Don’t they realize that the most powerful breast cancer organization in the world has just given them orders to drop their abortion services or suffer the consequences?  Doesn’t Planned Parenthood recognize shame when it is shoved in its face?  Who do these (slightly soiled and socially unacceptable) people think they are by assuming they can raise money for their filthy deeds?

I think we can deduce the kind of people Komen mingles with.  They’re not the kind of people who would ever need to visit Planned Parenthood.  They’re the kind of people who see the breast cancer screening activities of Planned Parenthood as a small auxilliary activity of their pro abortion empire.  They’ve never been a poor college student or working class woman or even middle class woman with a gap in her health insurance coverage.  It is inconceivable why anyone would want to contribute money to THAT GROUP.  In their minds, and the minds of their friends, Planned Parenthood has a reputation that is roughly equivalent of a crack den or a massage parlor.  I think Komen is just now waking up to the fact that millions and millions of American women do not see it that way at all.  This is what happens when growing income inequality separates the moneyed from everyone else.  They just have no idea how the other 99% live.

Sadly, I know exactly the kind of people Komen is trying to appeal to.  I’ve had dinner with these people.  Some of them are pretty well off and are otherwise kind and generous.  They just have this weakness where social issues are concerned and a blind spot about who actually uses services like Planned Parenthood.  Their obsession with homosexuality and abortion tears churches apart and their wealth gives them the power to withhold their money from any organization that does even one teensy tiny thing they don’t approve of.

Komen should have held firm and told these people to back off.  If preventing breast cancer is the goal, all of the money in the world won’t work unless it is put in the hands of the people who can actually detect and prevent breast cancer.  There’s no point sitting on a pile of cash if you don’t intend to use it.

Which brings me to my next item…

Astra-Zeneca announced the layoffs of 7700 people yesterday.  AZ is closing their site in Montreal, Canada.  Pharmageddon is hitting Montreal pretty hard, which makes me more than a little concerned for one of my favorite Canadian computational chemistry vendors.  I wonder how long they can survive in this environment and am hoping they are working on a new business model.

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline covered the Astra-Zeneca layoffs yesterday and discovered this little nugget:

And AZ seems to be all but getting out of pain/CNS, cutting down to a few dozen people who will do external collaborations. Oh, and they’re buying back 4.5 billion dollars worth of stock, instead of spending that money on what the company tries to make a profit on. So there is that. If you’d like to hear AZ tell you how all this is making them more productive, here’s the press release.

Yes, you read that right, AZ is destroying the careers of almost 8000 scientists and support staff so that they can buy back stock.  Just concentrate that wealth even further.  Don’t dilute it.  And you know, I’m all for it.  I hope my 401K isn’t invested in AZ stock because the company isn’t going to grow any time soon.

Derek has a new post up today about AZ in Waltham, MA.  It looks like the shadow man is hanging over that site as well and AZ is playing the same game that Pfizer and other pharmas have done to their staffs:

Pfizer has done this to their people before, as have other companies in the throes of layoffs, and it’s the only way I know to actually push morale and productivity down even further in such a situation. You come to work for weeks, for months, not knowing if your, your lab, or your whole department is heading for the chopping block. All you’re sure of is that someone is. And will your own stellar performance persuade upper management to keep you, when the time comes? Not likely, under these conditions – it’ll more likely be the sort of thing where they draw lines through whole areas. Your fate, most people feel at these times, is not in your own hands. A less motivating environment couldn’t be engineered on purpose.

But that’s what AZ’s management has chosen to do at their largest research site in North America. I hope that they enjoy the results. But then (and more on this later), these are the people who have chosen to spend billions buying back their own stock rather than put it into research in the first place. It’s not like the score isn’t already up there on the big screen for everyone to see.

Been there.  Done that.  The shadow man hung over our site for about 2 years.  I don’t know what made us think the company would spare us.  In the final months before we were laid off, the lights were dimmed, the labs rearranged, whole departments were abandoned, their gleaming robotics collecting dust.  The hallways were darkened and we navigated our carts down allies cluttered with discarded lab equipment.  Chemists roamed the corridors with pale skin and dark circles under their eyes from lack of sleep, like zombies, with slowed gaits and unfixed gazes, turning inwards towards some bleak vision of the future.  No, I am not exaggerating.  My lab partner and I were so busy we hardly noticed the change around us until we met one of the living dead chemists in the hallway.  We were so caught up in our own research and making such good progress that we had no idea that we would be the first to go.  And no, it didn’t matter that our work was stellar or had gotten praise or that we had gotten Christmas bonuses for outstanding performance.  When the cut came, we were stunned.  But an email from the corporate guys up the street let us know that because our jobs were sacrificed, the company had met and exceeded its quarterly projections.  That was supposed to make us feel better.

There should be a law about sending out tasteless and painful email like that to employees you still want to work for you for four more months.  But it’s almost like the MBAs didn’t know we existed or that we had feelings and children we had to break the news to.  I understand that the AZ folks have been fully informed of the stock buy back program and must be feeling really peachy about it now.  Waltham folks should get their affairs in order.  When you start to work under the shadow man, your site’s days are numbered.

And here’s a little dark comedy production put together by a pharma chemist with YouTube handle ZombieSymmetry.  This is what passes for pharmaceutical research in this country these days.  It is trickle down Wharton MBA:

This is EXACTLY the kind of crap we had to put up with. And this:

I realize there are some smug and resentful liberal types out there reading this who have zero sympathy for pharma workers. Personally, I think you’re lacking a compassion component to your personality or are letting your political dogma interfere with your understanding of a crucial component of your country’s research infrastructure. I won’t call you stupid because that wouldn’t be nice because that wouldn’t be true. But your attitude is incredibly naive.

Pharmageddon should matter to you and you should see it as an opportunity to rejigger pharmaceutical research to work for YOU and not the small evil group that runs everything and to which no one we know belongs. Right now, the research community needs you to grow a clue and help them so they can help you. Without them, you are going to face rising costs in generic drugs and will become reliant on China for any new drugs that get discovered. Is that what you want??

Didn’t think so. Now, grab onto the research that is slipping away and pull hard.

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In case the politicians start singing about green shoots being just around the corner in yet another recovery summer, here is more evidence that it’s not happening in the pharma/biotech sector where the workers with the best educations are.  This layoff list is from FiercePharma and is just from *this year*.  We’re only three days into February and this is what we’re looking at:

• AstraZeneca puts 7,300 jobs on the chopping block

  February 2, 2012
• Abbott’s round of 700 layoffs doesn’t spare pharma

  January 26, 2012
• Takeda targets 2,800 jobs in Europe, U.S.

  January 18, 2012
• Novartis hammers out deal to keep Nyon plant open

  January 17, 2012
• Novartis to slash 2,000 US jobs, mostly in sales

  January 13, 2012
• Montreal suffers new layoffs by J&J, Sanofi

  January 12, 2012
• Valeant targets $200M in post-merger cost cuts
• January 9, 2012

If I were a politician in NJ, NY, PA, CT, MA or CA, I’d be shitting bricks right now.  The loss of highly paid, technical and biotech jobs has been enormous and we know that politicians have been sticking their fingers in their ears singing “la-la-la”.  Democrats haven’t done a damn thing to stop the job losses.  They have allowed the grasshoppers to hollow out these companies and take everything for themselves.  We’re left fending for ourselves in an environment when money for research is scarce and vulture capitalists are waiting to swoop down and take advantage of any new discoveries we can find from working our asses off.

Everyone will pay for this with higher drug costs, and fewer new and safer discoveries.  What has been allowed to happen is criminal.  Don’t expect us to reward incumbents with our votes.