PATRICE GREANVILLE—The United States has had congressional hearings about price gouging in key industries—including pharmaceuticals— for many decades, and nothing has ever come of it for reasons well known to the politically awake. These periodical exercises in pseudo democracy are meant to provide a cover for the sordid truth: that politicians—from presidents on down— have long been in the pocket of the monopolists’ lobbyists, or, to put it in a different way, they are agents of the billionaires who own all of the major industries and financial institutions dominating the economic life of the nation, including, perhaps, the most crucial social resource of all, the media, which define reality for the ordinary citizen. The upshot of this pervasive corruption—normal under capitalism—is pre-ordained. As Irish socialist icon James Connolly once put it, “Governments in capitalist society are committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”