Page 9 of 10 FirstFirst ... 5678910 LastLast
Results 201 to 225 of 236
  1. #201
    Against Home Schooling Ef-man's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Post Count
    17,530
    Or, you could do what President Trump did about alcohol...

    "How come you don't drink alcohol, Mr. President."

    ---

    "If you don't start, you don't have to stop."

    President Trump, the greatest President to ever walk the face of the earth.
    Now because Americans couldn't handle their we can't get a decent pain killer. in' shame. Thank Christ I held onto every one I ever got and have a good stash of the junk. Otherwise I'd be in a world of real hurt.
    But enough about trump, what will you do about your opioid addiction thread?

  2. #202
    notthewordsofonewhokneels Thread's Avatar
    My Team
    Los Angeles Lakers
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Post Count
    81,192
    But enough about trump, what will you do about your opioid addiction thread?
    I'll do what "Johnny" did...I'll call "Mother."

    tee, hee.

  3. #203
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    another super thread by Cory Doctorow


  4. #204
    Alleged Michigander ChumpDumper's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Post Count
    144,596
    The Crime of the Century is another relentlessly competent Alex Gibney do entary on HBO, this time about the Sacklers and their history of being pieces of .

  5. #205
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Post Count
    50,672
    The Crime of the Century is another relentlessly competent Alex Gibney do entary on HBO, this time about the Sacklers and their history of being pieces of .
    hmm. something to check out.

    Thanks.

  6. #206
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    Sacklers get to pay a pittance, say goodbye to future litigation, and cry themselves to sleep on their grotesque pile of dope money.


  7. #207
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    yep


  8. #208
    Veteran
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Post Count
    97,514
    The War on Drugs, just another war America loses, isn't serious about winning, but it's a great socialistic job creator for LE, and enriches govt contractors.

  9. #209
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425

  10. #210
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    DOJ moves to block the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy deal

    A division of the Justice Department that serves as a watchdog over the federal bankruptcy system filed an appeal late Wednesday seeking to block the controversial Purdue Pharma bankruptcy plan.
    William Harrington, who serves as U.S. trustee for the Justice Department, also filed do ents requesting an "expedited stay" to prevent implementation of the settlement.

    The deal, which Judge Robert Drain approved Sept. 1, granted sweeping immunity from opioid lawsuits to members of the Sackler family who own the drug company.

    The Sacklers, who are not bankrupt, were granted releases from liability after agreeing to contribute roughly $4.3 billion of their private wealth to the deal.

    Supporters of the settlement, including most state attorneys general, said it will avoid costly litigation while funding drug treatment programs over the next decade.


    But throughout a two-week bankruptcy trial, and in court do ents, the Justice Department repeatedly blasted releases from liability granted to the Sacklers as "unlawful" and "uncons utional."
    In an earlier filing, Harrington accused the Sacklers and their associates of using the bankruptcy system to avoid liability for "alleged wrongdoing in concocting and perpetuating for profit one of the most severe public health crises ever experienced in the United States."
    https://www.npr.org/2021/09/16/10378...ankruptcy-deal

  11. #211
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    Are we winning the war on drugs?


  12. #212
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Post Count
    50,672
    yep

    Another example of how conservative policy approaches fail and that negligence kills people.

  13. #213
    Mr. John Wayne CosmicCowboy's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Post Count
    43,734
    It's dumbasses ODing on heroin/fentanyl that are driving the numbers...not prescription pharma.

  14. #214
    Veteran SpursforSix's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Jul 2015
    Post Count
    21,158
    It's dumbasses ODing on heroin/fentanyl that are driving the numbers...not prescription pharma.
    that seems short sighted

  15. #215
    🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆 ElNono's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Post Count
    152,607
    It's dumbasses ODing on heroin/fentanyl that are driving the numbers...not prescription pharma.
    Is that why prescription pharma is going bankrupt and throwing billions of dollars to try to settle lawsuits?

    On July 21, 2021, a $26 billion global settlement offer was made by opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson ($5 billion) and the “big three” distributors McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health ($21 billion) to resolve their liabilities in over 3,000 opioid crisis-related suits nationwide.*

    And on September 1, 2021, Purdue’s $4.5 billion bankruptcy settlement plan won court approval. It will shield members of the Sackler family from future opioid crisis-related suits as feared. The Attorneys General for Washington and Connecticut intend to challenge the decision on appeal; the DOJ dislikes it as well.

  16. #216
    🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆 ElNono's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Post Count
    152,607
    I get that this thread backfired mightily, but it's time to just accept it and move on, tbh

  17. #217
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425

  18. #218
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Post Count
    89,425
    Another great explainer by Doctorow

    Will be interesting to see where SCOTUS comes out on this.

    First, they extracted vast sums from Purdue and shifted it into offshore financial secrecy havens:

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

    Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded — and received — extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:

    https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

    When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with trillions in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.

    When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

    But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one’s balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.
    The Sacklers are a case-study in how a corrupt bankruptcy can be conducted.

    Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.

    First, they converted their victims’ right to compensation into “property” that the Sacklers themselves owned. This transferred jurisdiction over these claims from the regular court system to the bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge — not a jury — would decide how much each of these claims was worth, and then what how much of that worth these victims (now recast as creditors) would be en led to through the bankruptcy.

    Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who’d undergone Senate confirmation:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

    These “coercive restructuring techniques” are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills — these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.

    Three judges — David Jones and Marvin Isgur of Houston and Bob Drain of New York — hear 96% of the country’s large corporate bankruptcies:

    https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html

    These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory “that casts the invention of the limited liability corporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity”:

    https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

    Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation’s biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?

    They cheat.

    For example: when GM was facing bankruptcy, it argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem, and got in front of Judge Drain.

    The Sacklers were — characteristically — even more brazen. They really wanted to get their case in front of Judge Drain, the nation’s most enthusiastic supporter of “third party releases,” through which bankrupt billionaires can wipe the slate clean, securing dismissals of all claims by the people they wronged.

    Drain is also uniquely hostile to independent examiners, “an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate ‘fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor.”

    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851339

    If you’re the Sacklers, hoping to keep two thirds of your billions and extinguish all claims by your victims, there is no better helpmeet than Judge Robert Drain of the Southern District of New York.

    So, 192 days before filing for bankruptcy, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, New York (a company may claim jurisdiction in a specific court once they’ve operated a business there for 180 days).

    Then they filed a bankruptcy in which they altered the metadata on their casefile, inserting the code for a Westchester county hearing into the machine-readable, human-invisible parts of the do ents they uploaded to the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system (they also captioned the case with “RDD, for “Robert D Drain”).

    They chose their judge, and the judge obliged. UCLA Law’s Lynn LoPucki is one of the leading scholars of these bankruptcy “megacases,” and has written extensively on why these three judges are so deferential to corporate criminals seeking to flense themselves of culpability. She sees judges like Drain motivated by “personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase — very appealing to certain personalities.”

    Thus, these judges are “willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…”

    https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/02870w66d

    This kind of judge-shopping goes beyond the Sacklers; the cases that Drain and co preside over make a mockery of the idea of America as a land of equal justice. “Prepack” and “drive-through” bankruptcies are reliable get-out-of-jail-free cards for capitalism’s worst monsters: private equity firms.

    Whether PE murdered your grandmother by buying her care-home and putting each worker in charge of 30 seniors:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/portopiccolo-nursing-homes-maryland/2020/12/21/a1ffb2a6-292b-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html

    or poisoned your kids by filling your neighborhood with carcinogens:

    https://www.webmd.com/special-reports/ethylene-oxide/20190719/residents-unaware-of-cancer-causing-toxin-in-air

    limited liability wipes the slate clean.

    30% of America’s bankruptcies are private equity companies using the bankruptcy system to wipe away claims for their misdeeds, while keeping a fortune, thanks to the shield of limited liability.

    Take Millennium Health, James Slattery’s fake drug-testing company, which promised to help nursing homes figure out whether seniors were abusing (or selling) their meds by testing their piss for angel dust and other drugs. Slattery defrauded Medicare and Medicaid for millions, borrowed $1.8 billion (Slattery got $1.3 billion of that). He eventually walked away from this fraud after paying a mere $256m to settle all claims, and kept a fortune in assets, including the 40 vintage planes his private company (“Pissed Away LLC” — I am not making this up) owned:

    https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

    For the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor — or a noose. This is by design: judges who preside over elite bankruptcies speak of their protagonists as heroic “risk takers” and tiptoe around any consequences, lest these ans be chained to a mortal’s fate, costing us all the benefits of their entrepreneurial genius.

    PE companies helped the Sacklers design their own bankruptcy strategy, and it was a standout, even by the standards of Bob Drain and his kangaroo bankruptcy court. But now, the Supreme Court has pumped the brakes on the whole enterprise.

    The judges ruled that the exceptions the Sacklers took advantage of were intended for bankrupts in “financial distress” — not billionaires with vast fortunes hidden overseas. In so doing, the court threatens all manner of corrupt arrangements, from “the Boy Scouts, wildfires and allegations of sexual abuse in the church diocese — where third parties get a benefit from a bankruptcy they themselves aren’t going through.”

    The case was brought by the DoJ’s US Trustee Program, which lost in the Second Circuit when it tried to halt the Purdue bankruptcy and argued that the Sacklers themselves had to declare bankruptcy to discharge the claims against them.

    Now the Supremes have hit pause on the bankruptcy the Second Circuit approved, and will hear the case themselves. It’s only one step on a long road, but it’s an unprecedented one. Some of the country’s filthiest fortunes are riding on the outcome.


    https://doctorow.medium.com/the-sack...s-62120696e2de

  19. #219
    notthewordsofonewhokneels Thread's Avatar
    My Team
    Los Angeles Lakers
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Post Count
    81,192
    Another great explainer by Doctorow

    Will be interesting to see where SCOTUS comes out on this.

    https://doctorow.medium.com/the-sack...s-62120696e2de
    You're gonna have to see if any of this that you're throwing at Thomas will stick, fast. If not, you're SOL because Roberts will not move hard left until the time is ripe. & dad, it ain't ripe.

  20. #220
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Post Count
    76,235
    Stomach wrenching with what they got away with

  21. #221
    notthewordsofonewhokneels Thread's Avatar
    My Team
    Los Angeles Lakers
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Post Count
    81,192
    Stomach wrenching with what they got away with
    You got away with threatening President Trump on Inauguration Day with blowing up the White House.

    You've nary room, Blake.

    Nary.

  22. #222
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Post Count
    76,235
    You got away with threatening President Trump on Inauguration Day with blowing up the White House.

    You've nary room, Blake.

    Nary.
    Back on ignore

  23. #223
    Take the fcking keys away baseline bum's Avatar
    My Team
    San Antonio Spurs
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Post Count
    93,157
    Kill one person in America and you get the needle. Kill half a million and you get immunity and a boatload of cash. Wouldn't shed a tear if someone who lost a husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, etc went and slit the throats of multiple members of the Sackler crime family.

  24. #224
    notthewordsofonewhokneels Thread's Avatar
    My Team
    Los Angeles Lakers
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Post Count
    81,192
    Of course, you won't be held to account when presented with the grim facts. So, you run.

    It's human.

    & here is how you reasoned [it---death threat on Inauguration Day]..."We're en led. He didn't deserve to be President. It is unconscionable to see him as President of the United States. So, just this once, and only this one time I will suspend my decency and do whatever is needed to get him out, AND punish him thereafter so he suffers for the rest of his life. Then, once he's out of office we can once again have a regular President and a normal succession of power in this country. And then I'll be my regular self."

    Signed,

    - Blake

  25. #225
    notthewordsofonewhokneels Thread's Avatar
    My Team
    Los Angeles Lakers
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Post Count
    81,192
    Kill one person in America and you get the needle. Kill half a million and you get immunity and a boatload of cash. Wouldn't shed a tear if someone who lost a husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, etc went and slit the throats of multiple members of the Sackler crime family.
    Bull , bum. It is a medication for pain, extreme pain that alleviated that pain almost at once. It was a blessing. A monumental miracle that came to us, and as usual the weak s in our society ed it up for EVERYONE. Just thank Christ every single time I got a script for it, I filled it. "But, I don't need it, Girl, the Aleve is good enough."

    "Fill it, Dale, fill it!"

    "Okay, okay, already, holler but like don't hit."

    So, I have a cache of hundreds, just in case. You know where half of that stash is? In the Wells Fargo safe deposit box. It-is-gold.

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •