womensvoicesmedia.org __________YOUR VOICE
Gloria Steinem has an excellent suggestion.
If women are equal to men as the rabid rethuglicans say we are, then there certainly should be no difference in how we are treated vs. how men are treated. That's the fair & equal thing to do. RIGHT?
So, Donald Trump won Iowa. A crazed billionaire who wants to “suspend the Constitution” and claims the right to a murder his political enemies. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Imagine.
Fox “News” shuts down (or just decides to only tell the truth), and most of the steam goes out of the rightwing populist MAGA movement which its billionaire owners helped create in the U.S. Insurrectionist members of Congress find themselves in jail facing sedition charges, as the previous leader of the country is under criminal investigation for taking help from Putin’s Russia. The government begins the process of decriminalizing abortion nationwide. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is overturned and, without the flow of billionaire money directing their votes, Congress begins to actually pass laws that reflect the desires of the majority of the people.
Unless you read international newspapers like The Financial Times, odds are you have no idea that same scenario is now playing out in Poland which, for the previous eight years, had been suffering under a Trump-like administration.
Last summer, progressive Polish politician Donald Tusk promised he was going to clean up that country with an “iron broom.” Few took his promise seriously, but after being sworn into office last month, he’s actually doing it. As Maciej Kisilowski writes for The Financial Times, just a few days after Tusk became prime minister:
“… Poland’s politicized public television station, notorious for its xenophobic, homophobic and racist messages, abruptly went dark. Tusk’s culture ministry summarily dismissed the station’s board and stopped broadcasts to prevent the outgoing leadership from inflaming tensions by airing live the takeover of the group’s headquarters.”
Last week two of the top rightwing politicians in Poland were arrested for abuse of power during the previous regime, while only a few hundred people showed up to protest the end of rightwing programming on the nation’s main television network.
Last Thursday there was a march to protest the new progressive prime minister, but the reaction was both tepid and nonviolent. As Kisilowski writes for The Financial Times:
“These decisive, if heavy-handed, actions come at a time when democrats globally are searching for strategies to deal with populists. In the U.S., for example, there is intense debate about whether the protracted legal cases against Donald Trump are serving to boost his campaign to return to the White House. Perhaps Tusk’s approach offers hope.”
Dislodging the death grip the GOP has on American politics will be more difficult than in Poland, in large part because five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision.
The 2020 election cost over $14 billion. The 2016 election was only $6.5 billion. But in 2008, two years before Citizens United, it hadn’t even hit $1 billion: total spending with a mere $717 million. As the Executive Director of the money tracking opensecrets.org, Sheila Krumholz, said:
“Total outside spending is surprisingly high for this point in the cycle—we’re already at nearly $230 million. That’s more than twice the previous record through this point in the cycle, which was back in 2016. But it’s more than five times as much as was spent by this point in the last presidential cycle in 2020.”
Rightwing fascist-adjacent billionaires have used that open door to severely corrupt our political system, leading to massive gridlock when it comes to anything average people want.
Meanwhile, billionaires got tax cuts and deregulation making them vastly richer at the same time the companies that made them rich refuse to even commit to paying their workers a living wage (fewer than one percent of the world’s top companies have made such a commitment).
As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”
On the other hand, the new American system created by Republicans on our Supreme Court works quite well for the morbidly rich. The people Gilens and Page refer to as the “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.
They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy, like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:
“[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
So, here we are.
If, in a zoo somewhere, a single chimpanzee had risen up and taken all the food from all the other chimpanzees and was hoarding it without being challenged, scientists from all over the world would be trying to figure out what was wrong with that chimpanzee and why the others tolerated his theft.
As Oxfam International pointed out in a report timed to correspond with the kickoff of the billionaire love-fest at Davos this week, the five richest men in the world—four of them Americans—saw their net worth more than double over the past three years from $405 billion to $869 billion.
Since those five corrupt Republicans on the Court also ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “persons” with nearly-full access to the Bill of Rights—including the right to use money to pay off politicians (the Republicans on the Court call it First Amendment-protected “free speech”)—the corporations that are producing these billionaires are also gouging American consumers as hard and fast as they can.
As Oxfam noted (keep in mind, “profit” means, essentially, “the money that’s left over after all of our business expenses, including payroll, that we, the owners, get to split up and keep for ourselves”):
“Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 percent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021. Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion.”
That money isn’t going to workers, though, who’ve seen their real, inflation-adjusted wages fall worldwide in the same period. Instead:
“The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders. … It would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year.”
Thanks to Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote in Citizens United, Americas are not getting what they want. Which is another way of saying the morbidly rich and the judges and politicians they’ve bought are actively breaking our democratic republic.
On the eve of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for example, the Progressive Change Institute did a nationwide survey of likely voters. The results were stark:
— 84 percent want the government to negotiate drug prices.
— 79 percent support expanding Social Security (which Haley and DeSantis both just last week promised to cut).
— 78 percent want “fair trade” that ends shipping our jobs overseas.
— 77 percent want to tax corporations that have moved jobs overseas.
— 77 percent want universal free pre-kindergarten.
— 74 percent want all Americans to be able to buy into Medicare-for-All.
— 71 percent support a massive infrastructure spending program aimed at rebuilding our broken roads and bridges and putting people back to work.
— 70 percent want free college at all public universities.
— 68 percent want a guaranteed minimum income.
— 67 percent want the government to be the employer of last resort to end unemployment (like FDR did).
— 66 percent want the morbidly rich to pay at least a 50 percent income tax (currently the average American billionaire pays around 3 percent).
— 65 percent want the big banks broken up and a return to local banking.
— 64 percent want net neutrality so your billion-dollar corporate internet and email providers can’t monitor everything you do online and sell that information.
— 63 percent want public financing of elections to get billionaire money out of them.
— 60 percent want the Post Office to offer inexpensive public banking.
President Biden and Democrats in Congress got some of the infrastructure work done and tried to end much of America’s nearly $2 trillion in student debt (until they were blocked by Republican lawsuits and six Republicans on the Supreme Court), and a small bit of the “Green New Deal” incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act, but otherwise there’s a lot that Americans want and deserve that they’re not getting.
Why? Because the morbidly rich control much of our political process right now, and most of our media.
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously said:
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if Citizens United can be legislatively overturned and we can purge our political system of the cancer of big money.
Democrats almost did it in 2022: the For the People Act would have reversed significant parts of Citizens United and provided for public funding of and more transparency around elections. It passed the House and got enough votes to pass the Senate under the Constitution.
Even the Republican filibuster could have been overcome if we hadn’t been betrayed by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote. The stakes have never been higher.
If you need any proof Republicans are determined to make sure women have no control over their own bodies and reproductive healthcare, it’s all here in black and white. On Wednesday, June 5, 2024, Senate Republicans. Except two WOMEN, voted “Nay” on the Right To Contraception Act. This url will take you to the Senate roll call to see for yourself how your Senators voted:
U.S. Senate: U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 118th Congress - 2nd Session
Vote Summary
Question: On Cloture on the Motion to Proceed (Motion to Invoke Cloture: Motion to Proceed to S. 4381 )
Vote Number: 190
Vote Date: June 5, 2024, 03:33 PM
Required For Majority: 3/5
Vote Result: Cloture on the Motion to Proceed Rejected
Measure Number: S. 4381
Measure Title: A bill to protect an individual's ability to access contraceptives and to engage in contraception and to protect a health care provider's ability to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information related to contraception.
Vote Counts:
YEAs 51
NAYs 39
Not Voting 10
*Information compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate bill clerk under the direction of the secretary of the Senate
Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, supported the bill. Chuck Schumer voted no for procedural reasons,so he can bring it up for a vote again. Otherwise, every Democrat voted yes (except for Senator Menendez, who didn’t vote.)
In case you wonder what the bill would have done, it’s simply this (per the Hill):
The bill would guarantee the legal right for individuals to get and use contraception and for healthcare providers to provide contraception, information, referrals, and services related to contraception. It would apply to hormonal birth control pills, the “morning after” pill, intrauterine devices (IUDs), and other methods.
It would also prohibit the federal government and any state from administering or enforcing any law, rule, or regulation to prohibit or restrict the sale or use of contraception.
In the words of Jessica Craven from Chop Wood, Carry Water http s://chopwoodcarrywaterdailyactions.substack.com/, “If your Senator is a Republican and voted against this bill AND IS UP FOR REELECTION, please call them out. Tell your friends and family to do so as well, over and over. Post about it on your social media platforms. Make sure people who ignore the news know what they did. Anyone who currently or in the future plans to use contraceptives should be aware of and making noise about this appalling vote.”
“Folks, we knew this bill would fail. We know who Republicans are. We know they aren’t kidding about coming after ALL of our freedoms. Not everyone does. Talk to people you know about this vote. Explain its ramifications. Help them understand that their fundamental freedoms are under threat—really.“
“Access to contraception is an issue Americans care about and upon which they are largely agreed. Let’s rally around it. And when talking about Republicans’ position on it, be sure to use the words “extreme and out of touch” often. They’re effective, pointed, and true.”
Those are words of advice we should all follow.
Plastic particles and chemicals pollute all of our bodies. But people living on the fencelines of the fossil fuel, plastic, and waste industries face even more life-threatening pollution.
By Erica Cirino
Louisiana’s “River Parishes,” located along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, shoulder some of the worst industry impacts in the United States. As a result, this region has acquired a grim reputation as “Cancer Alley.” Stretching across 85 miles of rural land along both banks of the Mississippi River are around 200 industrial plants—many of which process fossil fuels to produce petrochemicals and plastics, “reportedly the largest concentration of such plants in the Western Hemisphere,” according to a 2024 Human Rights Watch report.
Across the U.S., most regions show a cancer risk of around five to twenty-five in a million, based on my assessment of 2019 Environmental Protection Agency data. For people living in Welcome, Louisiana, in St. James Parish, and across the rest of Cancer Alley, that risk runs at least double—and in some places, is up to seven times greater than—the national average. Across St. James Parish, about a dozen polluting facilities, many of them petrochemical plants, emit a constant cocktail of emissions, including toxic and carcinogenic ethylene oxide and formaldehyde. This, plus all the light, noise, and diesel emissions from constant freight train, tanker, and truck traffic, and frequent spills of gas, oil, chemicals, and plastic pellets from machinery, pipelines, and vehicles, makes the region a constant health hazard for residents.
While plastic and other consumer products pollute our environment and—as scientists have detected—our bodies, they begin inflicting harm far before they’re sold farther up the pipeline. A survey of plastic’s impacts isn’t complete without taking into account how plastic and other industrial manufacturing pollutes air, soil, and water—especially in communities where poor, rural, Black, Indigenous, and people of color live.
St. James Parish, Louisiana
Living in Welcome, a predominantly African American neighborhood in St. James Parish, retired special education teacher Sharon Lavigne (born in 1950) has watched her neighbors and family members grow ill with cancers, heart problems, autoimmune disorders, and other conditions known to be caused by a variety of factors that include, most notably, exposure to industrial fossil fuel pollutants. The governmental, political, and corporate systems and cultures enabling and favoring the unjust placement of polluting industries in Black communities like Welcome are textbook examples of environmental racism.
The consequences are clear: In America, Black people are more likely to die prematurely due to toxic air pollution because decades of racist housing, voting, financing, and other social policies have made sure that the air they breathe is the dirtiest in the country. People who are Indigenous, unhoused, poor, or belong to other historically underserved groups share this increased risk of pollution exposure. While America’s Clean Air Act of 1970 has, over time, reduced some disparity in populations made to bear the burden of industrial pollution, to this day, industries continue to overwhelmingly target underserved communities—often enticed by local governments looking to profit from development.
Protecting communities from further colonization by industries requires constant effort. In 2017, Lavigne and her neighbors watched as the state wrested an enormous rural plot, formerly home to two plantations, from the local community and quietly sold it to FG LA LLC (FG), one of many business endeavors run by the Taiwanese manufacturing conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group. By 2018, then-Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and Formosa executive Keh-Yen Lin announced FG’s plans to build a $9.4 billion chemical and plastic complex on the land the company had bought.
To prevent further industrial colonization of her community, in 2018, Lavigne retired from teaching to form RISE St. James Louisiana, a faith-based activist organization whose members document pollution, attend public hearings and community meetings, bring lawsuits against polluters and dysfunctional government regulatory agencies, write to lawmakers, and pray.
By 2024, Lavigne and RISE had prevented FG from completing its plan to build in Welcome what has grown to be a proposed $12 billion complex of 16 facilities spread across the 2,400-acre plot—according to a 2019 ProPublica investigation done along with other publications. This complex would more than triple Welcome residents’ exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.
FG’s plant is expected to spew 13.6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, the amount of carbon that 3 million cars would add to the atmosphere in one year. This is in a region already feeling the heat cast by humanity’s uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions—oppressively hot, humid days and sinking coastlines, deadly floods, and catastrophic storms have occurred more frequently and intensely than ever.
Even if the U.S. and the rest of the world curbed carbon emissions right now, between 2040 and 2060, experts estimate that between 2 and 5 percent of St. James will be regularly underwater at high tide, with temperatures soaring high enough to make it too dangerous to go outside. This will become a regular occurrence.
Point Comfort, Texas
Residents in Welcome who are wondering what a new plastic plant would mean for their community can get an idea from Point Comfort, Texas, a small working-class port community about 400 miles west of Welcome, Louisiana, where more than 50 percent of residents are Latino, Black, Asian, or biracial. In Point Comfort, Formosa operates a plastic complex comparable in size and design to that proposed for St. James Parish. There, Formosa’s biggest opponent has been Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman and retired shrimp boat captain who has spent more than 30 years documenting and challenging the pollution caused by the company in court.
Wilson’s efforts include ta 1994 lawsuithat saw Formosa agreeing not to discharge any plastic from its Texas facility into Lavaca Bay—a promise the company ultimately failed to keep. She waded and paddled with her kayak into the facility’s outfall pipes along Cox Creek, scooping plastic pellets and powder into thousands of store-bought plastic bags.
Wilson used these samples as evidence in court to challenge the company, ultimately garnering a $50 million settlement in the largest Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act lawsuit ever filed by a private individual. Since the settlement, Formosa has agreed to pay about $3 million in fines in 2021 for its continued pollution and nearly $30 million to clean up its plastic pollution from nearby waterways in 2022, which Wilson and her allies at San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper have continued to monitor.
Ha Tinh, Vietnam
Formosa is a massive industrial manufacturing conglomerate based in Taiwan that runs about 100 companies spanning petrochemical processing, electronics production, and biotechnology worldwide. Formosa’s subsidiaries have been accused or found guilty of polluting in every country they operate.
Formosa’s extensive industrial portfolio means it creates an enormous array of industrial emissions. In 2016, the company’s steelworks in Ha Tinh, Vietnam, discharged toxic wastes into local waterways. The chemical emissions killed many marine animals, hurt the local environment, and affected more than 5 million people across four of Vietnam’s provinces—the work of more than 179,000 fisherpeople in the region was ground to a standstill as a result of this.
After scientists revealed the extent of damage, Formosa publicly admitted it caused the pollution. Yet, residents say this has not helped address the 2016 disaster or curb continued pollution from the Formosa plant. The company was eventually required to provide $500 million in compensation, but victims of the 2016 disaster say the Vietnamese government has not correctly distributed the funds.
In 2022, Wilson and Lavigne joined Texas-based filmmaker Nancy Bui, an advocate for those harmed by Formosa’s pollution in Vietnam, to form the International Monitor Formosa Alliance (IMFA). IMFA is an international alliance representing human rights, peace, justice, environmental, and commercial fishing organizations that seek justice for victims of Formosa’s and other corporations’ industrial pollution in Vietnam and beyond.
In May 2023, Bui, Lavigne, and Wilson traveled to Taiwan to tell Formosa shareholders during their annual meeting how the company has harmed people and the environment, especially in South Texas and Vietnam. They emphasized that while residents of South Texas won a lawsuit resulting in a major settlement, residents harmed by Formosa’s pollution in Vietnam had not, despite more than 8,000 people filing a lawsuit calling for accountability—and urged the company to take action. Until then, victims of Formosa’s pollution at the Ha Tinh steel factory and their allies continue to fight for their rights.
Unfortunately, Welcome, Point Comfort, and Ha Tinh are just a few of many regions facing the devastating pollution and environmental injustice caused by the fossil fuel and plastics industries. With the increasing expansion of plastic and petrochemical production—despite dwindling fossil fuels—come growing streams of pollution trespassing into our homes and bodies.
Across the world, frontline communities and their allies are uniting to hold corporations accountable for their harm to people and the planet. These activists and advocates for environmental justice are calling for an end to the growth of lethal industries that pollute the air, water, soil, and human bodies.
These efforts have become especially important in light of World Health Organization findings that industrial activities and infrastructure contribute to 99 percent of the global population breathing unhealthy air, one in three people worldwide not having access to safe drinking water, and worsening soil pollution widely threatening human health. Ultimately, activists and advocates show us that, without systemic action, environmental injustices will continue to grow unchecked.
Author Bio: Erica Cirino is a writer, artist, and author who explores the intersection of the human and more-than-human worlds. Her photographic and written works have appeared in Scientific American, the Guardian, VICE, Hakai Magazine, the Atlantic, and other publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and others, as well as several awards for visual art. She is a contributor to the Observatory.
Source: Independent Media Institute
This adapted excerpt is from Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino (Island Press, 2021). Reproduced by permission from Island Press. This web adaptation was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Pharmaceutical companies are resisting public scrutiny and suing over modest drug price regulations. It’s past time to regulate their profiteering.
By Sonali Kolhatkar
Major pharmaceutical companies in the United States are battling with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over an issue that is at the heart of whether we value human wellbeing over corporate profits. As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), Sanders has vowed to force CEOs of pharmaceutical companies to publicly answer for why their drug prices are so much higher than in other nations. He plans to bring a committee vote to subpoena them. The subpoenas are necessary because—brazenly—the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck have simply refused to testify to the HELP committee. What are they afraid of?
In a defensive-sounding letter to Sanders, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson accused the Senator of using committee hearings to “punish the companies who have chosen to engage in constitutionally protected litigation.” The letter does not specify the litigation in question—perhaps because it would sound so ridiculous and would reveal the company’s real agenda. Last July, the company, along with Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb sued the Biden administration fceuticalor allowing the Medicare program to regulate prescription drug prices.
It appears that Johnson & Johnson and Merck are indeed afraid of being questioned by lawmakers about drug-profiteering in the U.S.
One pharmaceutical expert, Ameet Sarpatwari of Harvard Medical School explained to the New York Times that, “The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies… There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.” Another expert, Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford university, told the Times, “Drugs are so expensive in the U.S. because we let them be.”
In other words, it’s been a free-for-all for pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. In 2003, then-President George W. Bush signed a Medicare reform bill into law, promising help for seniors struggling to pay for medications, but that law stripped the federal government of its power to negotiate drug prices for Medicare’s participants. It was a typically Republican, Orwellian move: promise help to ordinary people and deliver the exact opposite.
Nearly two decades later, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Biden signed into law in 2022, tied Medicare drug prices to inflation and required companies to issue rebates if prices rose too fast. It was the first time since Bush’s 2003 law that drug manufacturers were subject to any U.S. price regulations. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t having it, and not only did they sue Biden over the IRA, they don’t seem to want to answer for their actions publicly.
It’s not enough for Medicare to be able to cut drug prices. There needs to be nationwide regulation on all drug prices for all Americans. After all, American taxpayers generously subsidize the research and development of most drugs. A report by Sanders’ staff explained that “[w]ith few exceptions, private corporations have the unilateral power to set the price of publicly funded medicines.” The report’s authors chided that “[t]he government asks for nothing in return for its investment.”
What’s more, the report rightly points out that people in other nations benefit from having access to lower-cost drugs that Americans have paid global pharmaceutical companies to develop. For example, SYMTUZA, an HIV medication that scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health helped to develop, is available to U.S. patients for a whopping $56,000 a year, while patients in the UK pay only $10,000 a year for the same drug purchased from the same company.
It’s not as if companies like Johnson & Johnson have some perverse preference for European patients over American ones. It’s merely that their prices are regulated by most other industrial nations. The U.S. “happens to be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t negotiate” drug prices, explained Merith Basey, Executive Director of Patients For Affordable Drugs NOW, in an interview on Rising Up With Sonali last fall.
Indeed, countries like the UK, France, and Germany, offer models for the U.S. in drug price controls and much has been written about what works best. Further, there is—unsurprisingly—a strong public desire for price controls. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in August 2023, “[m]ajorities across partisans say there is not enough regulation over drug pricing.” Moreover, a whopping 83 percent of those polled “see pharmaceutical profits as a major factor contributing to the cost of prescription drugs.”
There is no shortage of ideas for specific price control regulations that could work in the U.S. For example, the Center for American Progress’s October 2023 report, “Following the Money: Untangling U.S. Prescription Drug Financing,” delves deep into how market prices are determined for medications and suggests interventions at every stage of drug price setting.
Frankly, such complex solutions would not really be necessary if all Americans could simply join Medicare health coverage and if Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices could be applied to all drugs. But, in the absence of this commonsense holistic approach to healthcare, even complex price controls would be better than no price controls.
Predictably, conservative capitalist critics have trotted out the same, tired arguments against government price regulations of pharmaceuticals. “Drug Price Controls Mean Slower Cures,” declared a Wall Street Journal editorial headline. The paper’s editorial board called the IRA, “the worst legislation to pass Congress in many years,” and went as far as accusing the Biden administration of “extortion.”
But who is engaging in extortion? Economists studying the pharmaceutical industry have found that for years companies have been so flush with cash that they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and exorbitant executive bonuses and pay packages. “The $747 billion that the pharmaceutical companies distributed to shareholders was 13 percent greater than the $660 billion that these corporations expended on research & development over the decade,” wrote William Lazonick and Öner Tulum in a report for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Further, the Wall Street Journal’s screed ignores price controls in the UK, France, Germany, and other nations. If those have no bearing on the speed and quality of drug development, why should U.S. price controls have an impact? And if they do have an impact, then Americans are being unfairly required to bear the burden that people all over the world benefit from.
The Journal’s editorial board made one accurate claim, saying that the IRA “will also give companies the incentives to launch drugs at higher prices and raise prices for privately insured patients to compensate for the Medicare cuts.” The paper made this prediction without any comment on unfettered corporate greed. Indeed, if anyone is engaging in de facto extortion, it appears as though pharmaceutical companies may be the guilty parties in punishing Americans for price controls.
Pharmaceutical companies launched the new year with announced price hikes on at least 500 medications—a massive effort at gouging the public. In contrast, the IRA’s drug price controls apply to only 10 medications so far, and will be expanded to 15 drugs per year for the next four years, and 20 drugs per year thereafter.
Rather than removing price controls on the paltry numbers of medications the IRA can regulate, an easy fix is to apply those same regulations to most or all drugs. Best of all, in order for such a solution to be implemented, pharmaceutical company CEOs wouldn’t even have to drag themselves into committee hearings to explain away their corporate greed.
Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.