Stephan: Katie Porter is the kind of person you want to have in Congress. Honorable, competent, dedicated to fostering welbeing. She is very clear about why America's Illness Profit System must be fundamentally changed. Here is her latest effort.
A new report from Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) reveals how Big Pharma uses mergers and acquisitions to increase profits at the expense of Americans’ healthcare. Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc.
“It’s time we reevaluate the standards for approving these mergers. It’s time we pass legislation to lower drug prices. And it’s time we rethink the structure of leadership at big pharmaceutical companies.”
Rep. Katie Porter on Friday published a damning report revealing the devastating effects of Big Pharma mergers and acquisitions on U.S. healthcare, and recommending steps Congress should take to enact “comprehensive, urgent reform” of an integral part of a broken healthcare system.
“In 2018, the year that Donald Trump’s tax giveaway to the wealthy went into effect, 12 of the biggest pharmaceutical companies spent more money on stock buybacks than on research and development.” —Report
Stephan: Until science accepts consciousness as causal and primary, and recognizes that all life is interconnected and interdependent we are going to continue to destroy earth's matrix of life. We are so close to the edge as it is that it may already be too late. But each of us has got to do everything we can, write every public official, participate in every social action that stresses the wellbeing of the earth, and vote only for politicians who make wellbeing at every level their first priority.
Divers from the Blue Ocean Dive Resort swims with black-tip sharks and other fishes during a baited shark dive in Umkomaas near Durban, South Africa, on December 10, 2020. – Aliwal Shoal, a fossilised sand dune that lies about 4km offshore from the coastal town of Umkomaas, is one of the few places in the world where divers can dive without a cage with Oceanic Blacktip sharks and Tiger Sharks, as the apex predators are attracted by a bait drum filled with sardines. Although this activity still attracts many divers and tourists every year, organisers had to change the name from “tiger shark dive” because of the decrease in their numbers – a decrease environmentalists and dive organisers blame mostly on the shark control devices installed from the 1950’s. Credit: Michele Spatari / AFP
TOKYO — Overfishing has wiped out over 70 per cent of some shark and ray populations in the last half-century, leaving a “gaping, growing hole” in ocean life, according to a new study.Researchers found alarming declines in species ranging from hammerhead sharks to manta […]
Stephan: How crazy has the Republican Party become? Read this and it will give you a good calibration of what that party now is.
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene gives America a good calibration as to what the Republican Party has become. Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty
On Thursday, it was reported that freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had endorsed a theory that wealthy Jewish bankers had started California’s 2018 Camp Fire by firing a laser from space in order to benefit themselves financially.
You can read her Facebook post, uncovered by Media Matters reporter Eric Hananoki, here. In it, Greene postulates that the “Vice Chairman of Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” may have used “space solar generators … beaming the sun[’]s energy back to Earth” to fire a “laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth” to “cause” the 2018 Camp Fire in California in order to manipulate the stock market and line the pockets of “Rothschild Inc,” “Solaren,” and Sen. Dianne “Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum.”
Feinstein and her husband are Jewish, and conspiracy theories involving the Rothschilds are a long-standing anti-Semitic trope. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean and director of global social action of the Wiesenthal Center, told me “anyone who used […]
Stephan: John Alexander whom I have known for many years, and who, like me, closely tracks the politics of America has it exactly right in the this essay. We as a nation are on a precipice. We no longer have a two party democracy. We have one party, the Democrats who may be flawed but as a party are committed to fostering wellbeing and another party, the Republicans, that has become an anti-democratic, White supremacist, christofascist nuthouse. As the Trump impeachment trial gets underway, I think, it is imperative that each of us write our Representative and Senators and tell them Trump must be held accountable and convicted, and the nutcases that fill the Republican Party must be expelled from their positions in the Senate and the House.
White Supremacist, fascist, lie spreader, and top rated Fox host Tucker Carlson
Most every weeknight, Tucker Carlson entertains his audience with lies and misleading information. Unfortunately, his show boasts one of the largest audiences on the Fox News Channel. That, regardless the fact that even senior management, and their lawyers, acknowledge that he is not to be believed. It is equally unfortunate that his vast audience does believe much of the information that they are absorbing. While many in his listening audience may not be terribly sophisticated, there are those with advanced degrees, who yet fail to understand, or choose to ignore, the illogical nonsense that they are being fed.
Given the size of the audience, and the amount of false or misleading information put forth, Tucker is arguably very dangerous to the country. The extent of that danger was seen on 6 January, 2021 during which Trump incited an insurrection resulting in the US Capitol being attacked. Frankly, that could not have been achieved without the collusion of Fox News in general, including Tucker Carlson.
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for over a year, since before the Covid-19 Pandemic began, that it is inevitable that as climate change progresses viruses and bacteria will mutate to meet the evolving conditions, and that America's illness profit system is not prepared for this, because it is very costly to develop vaccines, and preparing for pandemics that have not yet emerged is not profitable. Now the World Health Organization confirms what I have been saying.
What should, of course, be happening is that real healthcare systems need to anticipate and prepare for what may be coming, and that some of the vast wealth we pour into defense corporation coffers should be redirected to that end.
The world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms are little prepared for the next pandemic despite a mounting response to the Covid-19 outbreak, an independent report has warned.
Jayasree K Iyer, executive director of the Netherlands-based Access to Medicine Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the UK and Dutch governments and others, highlighted an outbreak of the Nipah virus in China, with a fatality rate of up to 75%, as potentially the next big pandemic risk.
“Nipah virus is another emerging infectious disease that causes great concern,” she said. “Nipah could blow any moment. The next pandemic could be a drug-resistant infection.”
It is one of 10 infectious diseases out of 16 identified by the World Health Organization as the greatest public health risk where there are zero projects in pharmaceutical firms’ pipelines, according to the foundation’s
