The opioid epidemic is a corporate murder spree that killed more Americans than the Vietnam war, and its deaths carry on, accelerating during the pandemic. The enrichment to its principal architects outstrips the Rockefeller fortune, and they stand to retain that wealth.
The Sacklers owned Purdue Pharma, whose Oxycontin was ground zero of the epidemic. Purdue pushed deliberate lies about the safety of its product and aggressively marketed through doctors and distributors, under the direction of the family patriarch Richard Sackler.
The Sacklers were determined to come through the crisis both rich and well-loved. They laundered the family reputation with gifts to arts institutions that saw their names on galleries and museums around the world. That was the carrot.
The stick was litigiousness - their lawyers threatened me for writing about them - that let them convert blood money to legal force, burying Richard Sackler’s bizarre deposition, which only came to widespread attention thanks to John Oliver.
That was just the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers for the company and the family used the law to suppress court proceedings that revealed the deliberate strategy to addict their customers to Oxy:
The courts were so complicit in the Sacklers’ campaign to suppress evidence of their complicity that they became, effectively, co-conspirators in the opioid crisis:
The Sacklers didn’t invent corporate crime playbook, but their contributions are significant. For example, their PR ninjas at Dezenhall Resources - late of Enron - did very will with a victim-blaming strategy that smeared the dead as reckless junkies.
Eventually, the survivors of Sacklers’ opioids caught up with them. Purdue was sloughed off into a bankruptcy proceeding, and the Sacklers themselves began to cry poor, offering what they claimed were their last $4b to survivors.
But they conspicuously failed to mention the $8-9 billion they’d moved offshore:
(the Sacklers dismissed this story as “nothing newsworthy”).
It looks like they’ll get to keep that blood money, too, thanks to another act of solidarity from the US legal system. A bankruptcy judge is poised to roll the Sacklers’ personal liabilities into the bankruptcy restructuring of Purdue Pharma.
As Libby Lewis explains in The American Prospect, this is a bizarre metastasis of US bankruptcy law, which, in many cases, has swallowed the entire criminal justice system.
Under the Purdue/Sackler proposal, the rights of victims will be transformed into property, owed by the Sacklers, and which the bankruptcy court claims jurisdiction over. So the bankruptcy court can decide what that asset is worth and what percentage of that the victims get.
That means that the legal claims of the victims are being nonconsensually settled without a trial. Worse, the bankruptcy judge making this settlement isn’t even a federal judge with Senate confirmation, qualified to hear a criminal matter - he’s just an administrative judge.
It’s a twisted process. The Sacklers aren’t in bankruptcy court, so they aren’t obliged to disclose all those billions stashed offshore. But they’ve asked the judge to turn the their legal liabilities into property that he can dispose of in *Purdue’s* bankruptcy.
So Jenny Scully, who gave birth to an opioid-addicted child six years ago, because her doctors prescribed her dangerous painkillers whose risk had been downplayed by Purdue and the Sacklers, will have no more recourse.
None of this is in the Bankruptcy Code, but the courts (especially the Second Circuit, which covers the finance sector in NYC), follow a case from the asbestos settlement era that created this weird precedent.
The exception has swallowed the rule, and now bankruptcy is the go-to way for the beneficiaries of corporate crimes - even mass deaths - to walk away with more wealth than the Rockefellers.
(Honestly just turn this place into Ever Given content only; a massive distributed learning platform focused on complex systems, supply chains and maritime infrastructure through Very Online Discourse)
U.S. coal, natural gas and motor fuel producers get implicit benefits worth tens of billion of dollars a year by not having to pay for the damage their products do to the climate and human health, a study said on Monday.
As the world begins to transition to technologies that emit less pollution to generate electricity and fuel vehicles, economists are attempting to estimate the cost to society of burning fossil fuels.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Yale University economist Matthew Kotchen calculated that U.S. fossil fuel companies get direct benefits of $62 billion a year in implicit subsidies due to what he calls “inefficient pricing”.
The overall health, climate and transportation costs to society are about $568 billion, the study, titled “The producer benefits of implicit fossil fuel subsidies in the United States”, said.
i would love to read a book about the psychology or sociology of environmental awareness. like bonilla-silvas “racism without racists” but for the environment. just tons of interviews, and a dissection and naming of attitudes and behaviors.
British artist Jason Anderson creates colorful abstract paintings composed of pixelated swatches of pastel-toned oil paint. Up-close, the artist’s paintings look like blocky layers of shapes and color; but, from afar, his scenes—featuring cityscapes, roads, trains, and marinas—are revealed.
Anderson began his career as a stained glass apprentice, where he worked on restoring the windows of cathedrals. He soon progressed onto designing the glass murals himself, where he learned how to break down subject matter into “jigsaws” of colored sections. This approach still shines through in his paintings today—complex scenes are brought to life with simple shapes and careful consideration to hue and tone.
The Blackjewel coal mining company can walk away from cleaning up and reclaiming coal mines covered by more than 30 permits in Kentucky under a liquidation agreement that was reached Friday in federal bankruptcy court in Charleston, West Virginia, attorneys participating in the case said.
About 170 other Blackjewel permits in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia will be placed into legal limbo for six months while Blackjewel attempts to sell them to other coal mining companies, the attorneys said. Any permits that are unable to be transferred can then also be abandoned by the company, once the nation’s sixth-largest coal producer.
The ruling will go into effect after bankruptcy court Judge Benjamin Kahn signs a final order.
The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet was preparing a written statement on the decision late Friday but a spokesman said it was not immediately available and declined to comment.
Thousands of acres of mountainous land in Kentucky alone have been disturbed by strip mining allowed by the permits that were before the judge. Both the state and the companies that issued bonds guaranteeing clean-up and reclamation of the dynamite-blasted landscapes had warned in court proceedings that there might not be enough money to do all the required work.
With other U.S. coal-mining companies in similar financial straits and demand for coal plummeting, Blackjewel’s situation is a harbinger of the trouble ahead in coal country, Inside Climate News reported earlier this month.
“Unfortunately, this is likely the start of a trend where bankrupt coal companies dump their coal mine cleanup obligations onto communities and taxpayers who simply don’t have the money to pick up the tab,” said Peter Morgan, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club, who was participating in the case. “This should be a wake-up call to state regulators across the country to immediately hold coal mining companies accountable and to put miners to work cleaning up coal mines before all the burden falls on taxpayers and underfunded surety bonds.”
“I’m on a 500-year clock right now. I’m right here knowing that we’ve got a hell of a long time before we’re going to see the end. Right now, all we’re doing is building the conditions that will allow the thing to happen.”
recur to enjoy this album, one of the first documented cases making use of rla open licensing. keep pushing it, no limit. been recently accused of autopoeisis by third party with great joy #autopoesis https://t.co/WLAHyCx3j9 @internetarchive #recentlivearchive
Reddit investors have found a way to meme for good.
The amateur investors on subreddit WallStreetBets often refer to themselves as apes and use the phrase “Apes Together Strong,” BBC News reported. Now, some subreddit members have started to take this saying literally. Within days, Redditors have raised $350,000 for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund by adopting more than 3,500 gorillas, The Guardian reported.
“It’s safe to say that the#investor community on@reddit is not traditionally who we think of as our supporter base. But they definitely surprised and overwhelmed us over the weekend,” the conservation group tweeted.
The trend began last Friday when Reddit user Pakistani_in_MURICA posted an adoption certificate for a mountain gorilla named Urungano. The post received a 92 percent upvote rate and prompted many other users to follow suit.
The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund works with mountain gorillas in Rwanda and Grauer’s gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to BBC News. On Twitter, the group said that the new funds would support their work studying and monitoring gorillas, and supporting the people who live near them.
The organization told The Guardian that it usually receives 20 new gorilla adoptions a weekend, a far cry from the thousands that the Redditors initiated.
Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.
“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”
From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.
More often than not, when I encounter a proposal to address monopoly power, I return to that old Irish joke: “If you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.” 1/ https://t.co/eueCdNbCJB
What causes neurotypicality? Research is ongoing but some of the likely culprits include: - egg whites - parenting - jet fuel - anything delicious - women probably - you let them keep their teddy bear too long - attention
Ask yourself: Could this meeting be a zoom? Could this zoom be a phone call? Could this phone call be an email? Could this email be a text? Could this text be unsent? Could we in silence retreat to the forest? Could we, by game trails & forgotten paths, vanish into the trees?
“Brain tissue can only be laid down at a constant rate during development, so if you want a bigger brain, you have to take longer to produce it. There are no shortcuts. This means that, at least in mammals, you have to have longer periods of gestation and lactation if you want to evolve a larger brain. And since a computer is no use without software, you also have to have a longer period of socialization (essentially the time between weaning and the start of reproduction) in order to allow the brain to fine tune its ability to deal with all the subtleties of the dynamic, constantly shifting social world. Neuroimaging studies of humans suggest that it takes a surprisingly long time (around 20-25 years) for the brain to figure out how to handle the complexities of our social world.”
A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.
“On one hand, a photo makes everything it represents exist on a strictly ‘equal footing’. Form and ground, recto and verso, past and future, foreground and distance, foreground and horizon, etc. — all this now exists fully outside horizontality-without-horizon. This ‘flattening’, this horizontality-without-horizon, is the contrary of a levelling of hierarchy and a fusion of differences: the suspension of differences proceeds here as a liberation and an exacerbation of ‘singularities’ and ‘materialities’.”
–Laruelle, François.The Concept of Non-Photography / Le Concept De Non-Photographie. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth& New York, NY: Urbanomic& Sequence Press, 2011. (viacarvalhais)
With Robinhood, “you’re able to put it on your homescreen and flip between Instagram and Snapchat; it doesn’t feel as serious as it used to,” he said. “It’s just an app you open up on your phone, there’s graphs, and numbers, and it’s easy to understand and learn really quickly.”
Many young users on the WallStreetBets forums have complained that no matter what they do, the deck is always stacked against them. Many say they seek to expose the entire financial system for the game that it is. Meme stocks are part of that. Some will hype up a novelty stock or trade it as a stunt.
Check out this amazing Overview of the Banks Peninsula, which juts off the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The landmass, which is volcanic in origin, has an area of roughly 440 square miles (1,150 sq. km) and encompasses two large harbors and many small bays and coves. It is believed that forests once covered 98% of the Banks Peninsula, yet — as the result of deforestation — less than 2% of the native forest cover remains today.
“Non-photography is thus neither an extension of photography with some variation, difference or decision; nor its negation. It is a use of photography in view of a non-photographic activity which is the true element of the photo, its meaning and its truth.”
— Laruelle, François.The Concept of Non-Photography / Le Concept De Non-Photographie. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth & New York, NY: Urbanomic & Sequence Press, 2011.
“Zhen Xian Bao or Chinese thread book is a yarn collection box made using paperfolding techniques developed from a fascinating tradition from remote South West China. Boxes are basically everywhere in it”
There are still a lot of working public pay-phones all around downtown Taipei in metro stations and convenience stores. They often double as wifi hotspots too
.. a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man’s spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success [bucky]
would go for a generator straight. i’ve got one that loads an svg as a starting point and deforms that by taking a random walk with the vertices. @LabJetpack logo hardcoded no quests https://t.co/l9F7l8XWFJhttps://t.co/7Y0vBsVRde
I learned about ResEdit at roughly the same time I learned how to use computers with GUIs. To me, the idea of a computer with an “operating system” is 1:1 linked with “you should be able to customize this infinitely and without effort”. Every computer since has dissatisfied me. https://t.co/oQ8jvyH152
hey all, today i’m going for a ride around Sol on the planet ship. anyone wanna join? it’ll take about a year and can drop you off again right here. beautiful vistas, nice food and music
📸 Explore ‘FoAM in 02020’ on Flickr, an album that weaves together FoAM trajectories through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of 02020 ➡️ https://t.co/YkpAJtcL7Ihttps://t.co/nqAnIfMA2H
I say again: i am so tired of people whose art means something to me turning out to be pieces of shit, & i am equally if not even more exhausted of being told that my desire to not support the art of anyone who can’t just be goddam decent is somehow a personal failing on my part.
—Damien P. Williams, MA, MSc, Werewolf, Revenant (@Wolven)
The confluence between the dematerialisation of art and the materialisation of music happened in 1968, when John Cage played chess against Marcel (and Teeny) Duchamp on a sound-generating chessboard. https://t.co/SKbBxL3m8O
LA has temporarily suspended air quality restrictions due to the surge in cremations but yes let’s hurry back to Buca di Beppo patio seating and get a mani
Technically speaking, nothing. Werner has no background in skating. But I believe he is one of us.
This suspicion started a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. Not knowing much about him I skimmed the back cover, which eerily read like a skater’s manifesto. Werner preaches maxims like getting the shot by any means necessary, carrying bolt cutters everywhere, and thwarting institutional cowardice with guerrilla tactics. His film school teaches lock picking, forgery, and his entire career has been built on a DIY approach to life, his craft banged into existence through decades of trial and failure.
Because Werner’s approach to life and filmmaking mirrors the ethos of skating in so many ways, I decided to track him down to chat about the similarities and differences between our two worlds.
In all seriousness, there’s a temptation to see disciplines as communities that have simply made different choices about specialization. But this is wrong. Disciplines are divisions created by deep ideological and moral differences that are often in direct conflict.
Call it FONO, or fear of a negative outlook. Also known as “dismissive positivity,” it’s expressed as an overbearing cheerfulness no matter how bad things are, a pep that denies emotional oxygen to anything but a rictus grin.
You see it on Instagram, where the affective filter is always upbeat, usually followed by the hashtag #blessed. You hear it from the SoulCycle instructor exhorting every rider to swaggeringly sweat through the pain. It’s available from the newly anointed chief creative officer for Vital Proteins, actress Jennifer Aniston, who claims that renewal isn’t only a result of its powders: Instead, “it’s within us.” You might even recognize it in the boss who insists that colleagues start every Zoom meeting by sharing a piece of good news to help keep moods buoyant amid the gloom.
Think of this mindset as one that responds to all human anxiety, or sadness, with uncompromising optimism. It can be found in sentences that start with those negating words “At least,” which are followed by a suggestion that however bad you’re feeling, at least you’ve got plenty else that should offset and outweigh it. Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines.
I would be plausibly intrigued by a cryptocurrency where the proof of work is something (a) physically tangible and (b) positive, e.g. “I planted a tree: its GPS coordinates are X,Y: it can be monitored here: this coin will be deleted/garbage-collected if/when the tree dies”. https://t.co/oVa7M78c71
