Reuters has no paywall. Honestly this site is a leech and I see why it is shared for paywalled links (although that is still unfair to the news orgs), but here is not even a paywall - so why bother?
Ever since Reuters required a login to view news content, I have continued my old habit of checking it for headlines but I get discouraged and close the window when asked to log in. I find myself less informed nowadays. It irritates me that a website already plastered with ads requires me to authenticate who I am in order to learn basic facts about current events. So I'm actually grateful for the archive link.
You're right, my comment was unnecessarily harsh and I meant this more for the 'outline' than internet archive links. I was sure I had seen an outline one, apologies.
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.
>Much of the problems we see today are because the news media largely became unprofitable.
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 Sacklers have faced allegations, which they deny, that they authorized the financial transfers to prevent the money from being drained in future litigation against Purdue. The Sacklers have said much of the money went toward taxes and investments, as opposed to their pockets.
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.
I think when your family has billions of dollars you become willing to lie and cheat or worse to keep it.
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.
While this is clearly very immoral, is it actually illegal?
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?
One solution to this problem is to require all companies hold "bankruptcy fine insurance". The insurance policy would pay government fines or court liabilities that the company was unable to pay.
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...
I am having trouble seeing US tech companies more harm than 500,000 dead people and significantly more devastated lives in the US alone. Perdue isn’t responsible for 100% of those deaths but it’s still quite significant for just one company.
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.
The final season of Goliath [0] is very much inspired by the opioid crisis and deals with a lawyer suing the family. Hopefully real life lawsuits will be inspired by the outcomes in the series ;-)
Another highly recommended series to watch.
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.
Might vary from region to region I guess. I’m in Europe and the following page indicates that it’s on Disney+ here currently https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/series/dopesick/vaEHfF8OZHU... but it might redirect for people in the US or say not available or something.
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.
Disney+ there is a kids section and the broader(not for kiddies) sections which has HBO, STAR world etc. Dopesick is in the [not for kiddies] section. This is in India, it maybe same in other regions.
The judge ruled the bankruptcy court exceeded its authority by attempting to shield the Sacklers from litigation when they themselves had not filed for bankruptcy protection. According to the article this can happen in “unique” situations. So this isn’t about the merits or fairness of the settlement, merely the technical authority.
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.
> 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.
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:
Seems like she could order them to pay up on their commitments, on schedule anyway. They have effectively admitted to at least that much harm. That they will be found, later, to have done overwhelmingly more than that does not bear on what they have already (even if only tacitly) admitted.
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.
It’s such a sad situation. Billionaires knowing they are helping make addicts. Tens of thousands of doctors benefiting from the addiction because they want to pay off their million dollar loans, the dead family members, sigh…
You realize you are mocking the people who were getting payments as part of the 4.5 billion dollar settlement. The creditors are the literal victims of the opioid epidemic.
