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Mighty whiteboard of truth: The weapon Rep. Katie Porter used to school a pharma exec and plenty others
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post


Washington Post, October 1, 2020
Posted: October 12th, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/01/katie-porte...

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) got out her marker and scrawled a figure on the whiteboard beside her: $13 million. Do you know what this number is? she asked Mark Alles, the former CEO of the pharmaceutical company Celgene, as he testified remotely before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Does it ring any bells? Alles could hardly get his answer out before Porter scribbled more math on the board. That multimillion figure his total compensation in 2017 was already 200 times the average income in the United States, the congresswoman pointed out. It got even larger, she said, after Celgene needlessly tripled the cost of a cancer medication, thus securing himself hefty bonuses in return. As of early Thursday, the rapid-fire interrogation had been viewed more than 15 million times on Twitter the latest in a long list of her viral cross-examinations. These stunning exchanges at congressional hearings have themselves gained plenty of attention beyond Capitol Hill especially when Porter pulls out what one person on Twitter dubbed her mighty whiteboard of truth. It is this kind of clear, insistent inquiry that has made Porter a consumer protection lawyer ... who studied bankruptcy law under Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) so effective at grilling everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to little-known Trump appointees, all with a dry-erase marker and some simple math. No one has ever wielded a weapon as terrifying as Katie Porters whiteboard, wrote Molly Wood, a public radio journalist.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.


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