The Sacred Place Where Life Begins. That’s what the Gwich’in people call the coastal plain of Alaska where they live.

The Porcupine Caribou, on which the Gwich’in have relied for tens of thousands of years for their subsistence way of life, migrate hundreds of miles each spring to give birth to their calves there, so the Gwich’in name rings true.

It was this life that the Biden administration protected for years to come with the announcement last week that it was canceling oil and gas drilling leases in the 19.6-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and moving to prohibit drilling in another 13 million acres of protected lands bordering the refuge. 

It wasn’t just the Gwich’in, who have been fighting drilling for nearly 50 years, and the caribou who won. The Inupiaq people who live at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, polar bears, musk oxen, Dall sheep, and birds you can find in all 50 states have roots in the Arctic Refuge. 

That corner of Alaska is one of the world’s last untouched wild places, our country’s largest wildlife refuge, and the only one designed specifically for wilderness purposes. Its continued existence in its pristine, rugged state signals our commitment to nature and our appreciation of its wonder. It’s a symbol of our national character. 

But the value isn’t just symbolic. We’re on pace this year to produce more oil in the United States than ever before. Creating a glut will only extend our addiction to fossil fuels when we know that we need to move swiftly in the direction of burning less. The trade-off is infrastructure needed to drill that will destroy the refuge forever. 

It’s a trade that the American people repeatedly have said they don’t want to make. In polls in recent years, roughly two-thirds of voters opposed drilling in the Arctic Refuge. After the president’s decision to allow another Alaskan drilling project to proceed months ago, this is the leadership most voters want. 

The argument that Arctic drilling will boost U.S. energy independence and national security fall short when you know that all the oil under that part of Alaska is barely a year of the nation’s consumption by many estimates. We won’t drill our way out of the need for fossil fuels, but we certainly can drill our way to irreparable damage to the climate in just a few years. 

Protecting indigenous people and their way of life in Alaska should demonstrate that we can stand firm to defend more communities on the front lines of climate change against the unabated greed of Big Oil. An unscathed, unmatched landscape shouldn’t be the test for doing right by our neighbors and by the planet. 

Too often, we’ve allowed a few people lacking political power and desperate for economic opportunities to bear the immediate cost of bad environmental choices. The flaw is that more often than not, we all end up paying. 

Whether it’s the cancer alleys created in the communities neighboring refineries along the Mississippi or coastal towns repeatedly crushed by extreme weather, they’re only the first to feel the burden. As the hottest temperatures ever recorded showed us this summer, no one can escape the toll that fossil fuel charges the planet.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

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* This article was originally published here

Senator Chuck Schumer has long been an advocate for lowering healthcare costs for New Yorkers, and—in his position as majority leader of the Senate—for Americans across the country. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Schumer helped usher through the Senate, included several critical policies that are already helping to lower prescription drug costs for many. However, one issue the Inflation Reduction Act did not address is the pharmaceutical industry’s abuse of the patent system. 

Although this may be an under-the-radar issue for some, it has serious ramifications for the prices Americans pay for prescription drugs—which are the highest in the world. According to one recent study from the American Economic Liberties Project and the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK), several of Big Pharma’s most commonly used anti-competitive tactics, including several aimed at gaming the patent system, cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $40 billion in 2019 alone.

As the study outlines, “Drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars advancing these schemes because they have calculated that doing so is significantly more profitable than competing with generics and biosimilars based on price and quality.”

The pharmaceutical industry uses a range of mechanisms to abuse our patent system, including tactics such as “product hopping,” “patent thicketing,” and “evergreening.” All are ultimately aimed at keeping their blockbuster products on the market longer without having to face competition from generic and biosimilar drugs. This in turn locks patients into paying higher prices for prescription medications.

While there are several egregious examples of Big Pharma’s patent abuse preventing competition from entering the market, the most notorious example may be AbbVie’s rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira. While Humira is set to face competition for the first time this year, during its almost 20 years on the market, AbbVie’s patent strategy for this drug set the standard other companies have followed in terms of fending off competition and securing extended sales by constructing impenetrable walls of patents.

Through the years, AbbVie applied for more than 300 patents on Humira, securing more than half of these. Importantly, more than 90% of the patents AbbVie filed on Humira came after the drug was already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), demonstrating that AbbVie was seeking additional patent protection to extend the length of time the drug could be on the market without competition. 

This strategy led to obscene profits for Humira and forced patients and the U.S. healthcare system to pay egregious sums of money. Since its launch in 2002, Humira has raked in over $200 billion for AbbVie. To give you a sense of the scale of these profits, last year AbbVie brought in more in revenue ($21 billion) for just this one drug than all 32 teams combined brought in for the National Football League ($19 billion).

In my work at God’s Battalion of Prayer Ministries, I’ve encountered countless individuals and families who have been burdened by the high price of prescription drugs. It remains an issue for far too many New Yorkers, and far too many Americans. 

According to recent polling, almost one in three Americans report difficulty with affording their medications as prescribed due to cost. And importantly, Americans understand where the blame truly lies. Almost eight in ten respondents to the same poll said that pharmaceutical industry profits are a “major factor” in contributing to the price of prescription drugs.

To build on the positive progress made in terms of lowering prescription drug prices with  the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress must take the next step and work to crack down on the many ways the pharmaceutical industry abuses the patent system.

A solution to address this critical priority has already been introduced in Congress. The bipartisan Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2023, introduced by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX), would crack down on several anti-competitive tactics the pharmaceutical industry employs to abuse the patent system and help increase competition by enabling more generic and biosimilar products to come to market, which would lowering prices.  

This is an important legislative solution that would help ease the burden of New Yorkers and Americans across the country contending with the high price of many prescription drugs. 

In an increasingly divided Congress, our elected leaders can continue to find common ground in working to lower Americans’ healthcare costs. Democrats saw the value of this in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year. I’m certain they will see the value in keeping up the momentum by passing the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2023 later this year.

Reverend Alfred S. Cockfield is COO of God’s Battalion of Prayer Ministries.

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* This article was originally published here

The video session of the Giants’ 40-0 regular season opening game loss at home at MetLife Stadium on Sunday night to the Dallas Cowboys was undoubtedly both instructive and mortifying.  

Bluntly, the Giants were horrible in all facets of the game. The Cowboys imposed their will on them early in the game, taking a 16-0 first quarter lead and essentially deciding the outcome by halftime when the score was 26-0. The Cowboys 14 second half points were for posterity.

It made the shutout the largest by either team in head-to-head matchups, surpassing the Cowboys’ 35-0 victory in 1995. The one positive takeaway for the Giants is that the game took place in Week 1, so they have 16 more to go. But if what transpired was more of an exposure of lingering weaknesses than an anomaly—most glaringly a disjointed offensive line—the Giants will find the next three and a half months problematic.

Giants quarterback Daniel Jones was under siege all evening by the fast and physical Cowboys defense and did not respond well, looking uncertain, hurried, and rattled. He passed for just 104 yards and threw two interceptions. Similarly, running back Saquon Barkley was not able to get untracked and was pounded between the tackles and in space. 

Barkley had a respectable 4.3 yards per carry average, rushing for 51 yards on 12 attempts, including an 18-yard scamper. One of Jones’ interceptions came when Barkley was hammered by Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs late in the first quarter on a dump off from Jones. The hit jarred the ball from Barkley and it was picked out of the air by Cowboys cornerback DaRon Bland, who sprinted 22-yards for a touchdown with 2:22 remaining in the first quarter. 

 “Obviously, a tough loss, a disappointing loss, got beat all the way around, [from] coaching to playing and I accept that, got a lot to learn from, a lot to work on and that’s what we’ll do,” said Giants head coach Brian Daboll to begin his postgame press conference. 

 “No excuses, give credit to Dallas. They just did everything better than we did tonight.”

 We got skunked in the National Football League against Dallas, and at home,” said Barkley. “That’s football. We’ve got to do a better job, starting with myself and the leaders of stop the leaking, stop the bleeding and we didn’t do that. We can’t go down like that to a team of that caliber. Just got to go, watch film, learn from it, and get ready for Arizona.”

 The Giants will play the Cardinals on the road this Sunday (4:05 p.m.).

The post After a concerning opening, the Giants look ahead to Week 2 appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here