Judge tosses $4.5B deal shielding Purdue's Sackler family from opioid claims
reuters.com
reuters.com
probably less disinformed as well
Besides which, when you have media constantly rewriting itself, or geofencing, a mirror can get it in front of more eyes.
I assure you. News orgs aren't hurting that much. And a good deal of their pain is self inflicted.
But while my tone was inappropriate the point holds. Much of the problems we see today are because the news media largely became unprofitable. A few bigger ventures like Reuters still exist, but their money largely does not come anymore from the news business.
As long as news on their own are unprofitable the media and with it the societal discourse will only go further downhill. We should all prefer to see a few ads (or for those that can: pay subscription media) rather than end up deeper and deeper in thr blog-and-opinion-articles information dark ages.
Close, but not quite there. Much of the problems we see today are because the news media are financed through marketing & PR spend.
This makes the media's Overton Window somewhat limited to what is a good side-dish to marketing & PR. Among other concerns, this causes all content to skew towards middle-class, college-educated middle manager viwepoint. That's not exactly a recipe for a great society. And that leaves many segments of the readership underserved.
The money went to investments (which bring us more cash later) and taxes (which we have to pay anyway). What an awful defense, these people are completely clueless or simply don't care about the rest of the world.
This is why I advocate for cooperatively owned and managed firms, so profits spread more widely through the economy and billionaires are less likely to exist in the first place. I can only imagine the extent of the distortions to everyone else's economy caused by the super powerful vying for their own interests. It makes as much sense to me as having kings.
If you want definition of vile person/family look for some videos on YT on Sackler's family and their 'business' practices.
I am not aware of anything that stops the common pattern of using a company to do something dubious (eg. sell opiods), then drain all the profits by paying dividends to shareholders or IP license fees to another company, only later to be sued or fined for the behaviour, but there is no money left to pay the fine.
Is such a practice illegal? Is there any way in law to claw the money back from shareholders or the other company, especially if it cannot be shown they were aware of the dubious behaviour?
Then, the insurance company would price the insurance policy based on the practices of the company, and could price the insurance very high for companies who refused to abide by stricter accounting standards and maintain money reserves to handle such future issues.
One side effect? Societal harm by tech companies these days, far outweighs the opid crisis.
So, will insurance end up affecting us too? And Google, Facebook can pay. But what about the little startup, trying to grow, 2 guys in a garage, but now they need insurance?
I suppose it could only be a requirement once at $x size...
No.
Civil war caused by Facebook policies, death of dissidents due to cooperation with fascist states, COVID deaths due to anti-vaxxers / lies, all of the above, and more, enabled by tech platforms purposefully fanning the flames, for profit.
[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fraudulentconveyance.as...
I'd also like to recommend HBO's 'The Crime of the Century' documentary. It's a two part docu and was directed by Alex Gibney (who won an Emmy and an Oscar). [1] Trailer is available [2]. It details the whole opioid crisis and the role of Purdue and Sacklers.
[1] https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-crime-of-the-century
edit: actually looks like the same show is on both platforms
Also I don’t have Disney+ so I don’t know if the page applies to all of Europe even.
Edit: Yeah I tried to archive a copy of it and for archive.is it got redirected to the Disney+ home page so probably that’s what you will see too. Meanwhile, archive.org was able to capture it without being redirected. So whether the link will show info about the show or just redirect is probably region dependent. Those kinds of redirects are the most annoying btw. At least they ought to give a message like “this show is not available in your region”. Kind of surprised that archive.org didn’t get redirected actually – I had thought the servers archive.org used for capturing pages were in the US. And I thought archive.is were capturing from Europe.
Went ahead and read the book by Beth Macy after I saw the show. I enjoyed the show more, I have to say.
Any other recommendations on Disney+ ,of the same caliber?
Edit - oh hi JD.
The Sacklers were I guess contributing $4.5B for this liability shield? IANAL so genuinely curious: wouldn’t the thousands of cases be rolled up into a few class action lawsuits so $4.5B could be viewed as a settlement of those suits?
Don’t get me wrong: the Sacklers are disgusting people who contributed to the opioid crisis. Can a link be established that meets the relevant legal threshold for liability? Again, genuinely curious.
Pretty sure they single-handedly created the opioid crisis. It seems strange that physicians did not or could not head it off at the pass, but they were incentivized and lied to by Purdue and Sacklers to write as many prescriptions as possible.
Though I think you are correct that this change is not about fairness, a $4.5B settlement is not fair because it is not punitive for the Sackler family members that have blood on their hands. When you kill half a million people for profit and cause incalculable suffering in survivors, all the ill-gotten gains should be forfeit. There's at least $10B left to recover, and even that won't make it fair. I think fair may be unattainable in this case, even if a judge orders capable Sacklers to be forced on oxycontin until addicted and then forced into withdrawal, over and over again, for the rest of their lives.
Created and perpetuated knowingly, ignored memos describing how oxy is harvested for black market for years.
They also created marketing pills to doctors schemes.
There's a ton of internal Purdue emails, showing that the management was aware of the problems from 1996/1997 with their drug and it's potential for addiction.
There's a superb synopsis of the case by an investigative journalist who wrote a book on this case, exploring the players involved as all the aspects to this case:
Also... I don't see any reason why such an agreement, even if upheld, should be able to block any prosecutor from "piercing the corporate veil" and filing criminal charges against company officers and board members, wholesale.
2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pdPrQFjo2o
2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCKR6wy94U
2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaCaIhfETsM
In addition there's some sites made by them as well (referred to in the video):
https://sacklergallery.com/ (with Bryan Cranston, Michael Keaton, Richard Kind, Michael K Williams)