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• Americans now pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation because Big Pharma is setting the rules – extending the life of drug patents, prohibiting Medicare from using its bargaining power to get lower drug prices, and blocking consumers from buying cheaper drugs from Canada.
  
• We pay more for Internet service, health insurance, airline tickets, and banking services because the increasing market power of key players in these industries lets them raise prices. Antitrust enforcement has been systematically weakened.
  
• The biggest Wall Street banks continue to reap the financial benefits of being too big to fail. 
  
• Hedge-fund partners make bundles from confidential information, trading on which used to be illegal.
  
• CEOs cash in their stock options and grants just when they pump up the value of their company’s stocks with buybacks. It’s allowed because laws and regulations have been loosened.
  
• Trade agreements are now designed to protect the intellectual property and foreign assets of giant corporations, but nothing is done to protect the incomes of Americans who lose their jobs to foreign competition.
  

This is business as usual in Washington. 

Quote:Two new books explore how difficult the housing market and criminal justice system make it to climb out of poverty.