In a speech at the "America First" summit in Washington D.C. yesterday, Donald Trump gave us a glimpse into what kind of U.S. dictator he would like to be.
The former one-term president wants to "make America great again" by executing drug dealers in "quick trials" and sending the National Guard to states to "restore law and order" without the governor's consent. — Read the rest
Cops in New Hampshire busted a family methamphetamine operation and it's likely they'll spend years in prison. Meanwhile, the Sacker family made billions selling addictive deadly drugs and they didn't have to go to jail or lose their vast fortune. — Read the rest
Get a load of this Sackler Drug Cartel shill pushing OxyContin.
Once you found the right doctor and have told him or her about your pain don't be afraid to take what they give you. Often, it will be an opioid medication.
The makers of the highly addictive prescription painkiller Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma LP, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to criminal charges in part of a deal with federal prosecutors to resolve an investigation into the drugmaker's role in the U.S. opioid crisis.
Of three total criminal counts against Purdue, two were for violating a federal anti-kickback law, and another charged them with defrauding the United States and violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. — Read the rest
Cory Doctorow's new short book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, was just published in its entirety on OneZero. Below is Cory's Twitter thread that summarizes his argument that the problem with surveillance capitalism isn't that it big tech has AI-enhanced power to brainwash people, the problem is that big tech uses its monopoly power in ways that lead to totalitarian control over our lives. — Read the rest
Six months ago, Propublica began beating the drum about "Free File," a bizarre, corrupt arrangement between the IRS and the country's largest tax-prep firms that ended up costing the poorest people in America millions and millions of dollars, every single year.
Kentucky's Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative came out of a local electrification co-op set up during the New Deal, and in 1949 it was expanded into a telephone co-op with more federal infrastructure money. Today, the PRTC has used Obama FCC funding to expand into public broadband delivery, wiring up all of Jackson and Owsley Counties, some of the poorest places in America, using a mule called "Old Bub" to haul fiber through inaccessible mountain passes and other extremely isolated places.
The pharma industry spends $2 on marketing for every $1 it spends on R&D: Shahram Ahari was a rep for Eli Lilly, so he knows how the money was spent: in a tell-all op-ed in the Washington Post, Ahari describes how he lavished spending over doctors, everything from dinners at "so many fancy Manhattan restaurants that the maitre d's greeted me by name" to free ballgames and Broadway musical tickets to offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to top prescribers.
The past two years have seen a tremendous shift in the public perception of capitalism and socialism, the character of philanthropy as reputation-laundry rather than generosity, and the nature of wealth as an indicator of sociopathy, not virtue or cleverness.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates dismissed the idea of breakups as a remedy for Big Tech's monopolistic market concentration; Gates said that breaking up an abusive company will just produce more abusive companies. Instead, Gates believes that specific monopolistic activities should be banned.
Purdue Pharma (and its richer-than-the-Rockefellers owners, the Sackler family are increasingly being dragged into state courts to account for their role in the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not the first state to sue Purdue Pharma, members of the Sackler family (who own the company), and other board members for their role in deliberately seeking to addict people to their powerful opioid Oxycontin, but unlike other states, Massachusetts is conducting the suit in the public eye, targeting a court judgment rather than a quiet settlement with an accompanying gag-order.
Laura Poitras (previously) is the Academy Award-winning director of Citizenfour; she teamed up with the activist group Forensic Archicture (previously), whose incredible combination of data-visualization and documentary filmmaking have made them a potent force for holding war criminals and authoritarians to account: together, they created Triple Chaser, a short documentary that uses novel machine-learning techniques to document the ways in which tear gas and bullets made by companies belonging to "philanthropist" Warren Kanders have been used against civilians to suppress anti-authoritarian movements, and even to murder innocents, including children.
Philanthropy is theoretically an expression of generosity and fellow-feeling, but in an increasingly unequal world, charitable giving is a form of reputation laundering for super-rich oligarchs who build their massive fortunes on savage programs of exploitation and immiseration. The idea is that you can paper over the fact that deliberately starting the opioid crisis made you richer than the Rockefellers by having your name plastered all over the world's leading art galleries and museums.
[Addendum 2/20/2020: Following a legal complaint, the Guardian removed its article of 14 June 2019 and apologised to Mrs Peel. We are happy to clarify that Yana Peel is not, and was not, personally involved in the operation or decisions of the regulated Novalpina Capital investment fund, which is managed by her husband Stephen Peel, and others. — Read the rest
Five senior execs at Insys Therapeutics (manufacturer of Subsys, a type of fentanyl), have been convicted of criminal racketeering and fraud charges stemming from the company's practice of bribing doctors to overprescribe their incredibly addictive and dangerous product, and for defrauding Medicare in the process.
Summit Learning is a nonprofit, high-tech "customized learning" group funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's family charity; under the program, students are equipped with high-surveillance Chromebooks and work on their own "at their own pace" and call on teachers to act as "mentors" when they get stuck.
Rich "education philanthropists" (Bill Gates, the Waltons, the DeVoses, the Sacklers) have had a lot of business-world ideas for "fixing education" over the years, centered on a system of carrots (bonuses for high-testing schools and schools whose students get admitted to top universitites) and sticks (funding cuts for "underperforming" schools), all backed by high-stakes tests and standardized teaching materials.
The medical world is no stranger to shilling (see, for example, the kickbacks that Purdue Pharma paid doctors who helped hook people on Oxycontin, generating billions in blood-money for the "philanthropist" Sackler family), and doctors are cashing in on the social media influencer market, selling everything from Quaker oats to deodorant.
The Sackler Family (previously) are a family of self-styled philanthropist billionaires who have been largely successful in their campaign to whitewash their family name by giving away a few percentage points off the profits they earned from deliberately creating the opioid epidemic by tricking and bribing doctors to overprescribe Oxycontin, falsely claiming that it was not addictive, and promoting the idea that any doctor who left a patient feeling pain was engaged in malpractice.
