Tag: people before profits

A plague on both their houses!

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“Genie Energy Ltd. is an American energy company headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. It is a holding company comprising Genie Retail Energy, a retail energy provider in the United States, and Genie Oil and Gas, which is pursuing a conventional oil project in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.”

Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal members of America’s political Establishment, these misleaders of the wonderful 2-Party System of electoral politics all wave the same flag, owe their allegiance to profits before people.

Teens climate lawsuit marches on past Trump’s attempted roadblock

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A group of 21 youths who accuse the U.S. government of failing for decades to properly address climate change defeated the Trump administration’s attempt to keep the dispute out of court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that a novel and sweeping case, which the Obama administration first tried to extinguish in 2016, can proceed toward a trial. Trump’s Justice Department is expected to ask the Supreme Court to shut it down.

The group of mostly teenagers in Oregon alleged in a 2015 complaint that government policies have exacerbated global warming in violation of their rights — and those of future generations — under the U.S. Constitution…

Julia Olson, the lead attorney for the teens, said the opinion offers them the opportunity to continue fighting for environmental justice, saying it gives them “the green light for trial.”

“We will ask the district court for a trial date in 2018 where we will put the federal government’s dangerous energy system and climate policies on trial for infringing the constitutional rights of young people…”

Keep on rocking in the free world. And fightback against the creeps and scumbags who value profit over people’s lives.

Wonder why crucial vaccines are sometimes unavailable?

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When cases of a potentially fatal strain of meningitis began cropping up at Princeton last year, university officials trying to stop its spread could recommend little beyond precautions like frequent handwashing and not sharing beverage containers.

Although a vaccine against the rare bacteria that was causing the illness on campus existed in much of the developed world, it was not available in the United States. Novartis, its Swiss-based manufacturer, had not applied here for licensure of the vaccine, called Bexsero, because it seemed unlikely to be used enough in the United States to offset the cost of entering the market.

In all, it took nine months after the first case was detected in March 2013 before Princeton students could be immunized and nearly a year before they had completed the two-shot course, and that happened only after extraordinary interventions from the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration to allow the vaccine into the country.

By the end of the outbreak, seven more students had contracted the disease on the Princeton campus, and a student at another university died after contact with Princeton students. In a second outbreak involving four students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a lacrosse player had to have his feet amputated.

The episode highlights a drug approval process in the United States that experts say does not always take into account public health needs. Regulators typically do not seek out new treatments, but wait for pharmaceutical companies to apply for approval of new products. Drugmakers weigh their estimates of sales potential against the high costs of application. And that calculation is often more fraught in the United States than in other countries, in part because American regulators are historically loath to grant approval based solely on foreign trials, so they require expensive new studies.

RTFA for all the hoops everyone had to jump through to get the appropriate treatment into the United States and available where it was desperately needed.

A second segment of the article introduces the novel notion – for the United States – that we might alter regulations and procedures to allow for need instead of profit margins. Golly.