THE FBI REPORTS THAT STREET CRIME COSTS AMERICA $18 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR. BUT WHITE COLLAR CRIME, WHICH IS A PROTECTED CRIMINAL CLASS, COSTS AMERICA $500 BILLION. WHICH IMPACTS YOU THE MOST? WE NOW HAVE A GOVERNMENT SO CORRUPT THAT WE HABITUALLY ELECT WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS WHO BRING ALONG THEIR BRIBES SUCKING AND SIPHONING FAMILY MEMBERS WITH THEM.
Biden has been selling his soul for money for decades; to China, to Ukraine, to Pakistan. How else can he explain his massive wealth and multiple mansions on a salary of $174k? He cannot. See Peter Schweitzer’s book Profiles in Corruption. Chapter 3 is about Joe Biden:
“The Biden family partners are often foreign governments, where the deals occur in the dark corners of international finance like Kazakhstan, China, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Ukraine and Russia. Some have even involved taxpayer money.”
And later in chapter 3:
“The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank and sister Valerie.”
Read Schweitzer’s book. For the Bidens, as Ilhan Omar is fond of saying, it was always and only about the Benjamins.
In just seven months Biden has created seven disasters. Every sentient American surely knows by now about Biden’s plagiarism, his pathological lying about everything from his law school record to his fabricated exploits around the world. Everyone surely knows by now of Hunter Biden’s depravity, all of which China has proof of (as did the FBI in December of 2019).
Long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing, as featured in the HBO documentary Crime of the Century.ON PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SUMMER 2021 READING LISTThe Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions--Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.Empire of Pain begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm.Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury.Forty years later, Raymond's son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium--co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug's addictiveness--was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die.This is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d'Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama--baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful.
Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America's second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world's great fortunes.
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Federal bankruptcy judge grants Sackler family sweeping immunity in $4.3 billion opioid settlement
In an example of class justice, the billionaire Sackler family, which fueled and profited immensely from the opioid epidemic through its company Purdue Pharma and its OxyContin medication, was handed immunity last week from all future opioid lawsuits by federal bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain in White Plains, New York. The ruling affirms the capitalist right to profit regardless of the cost in lives.
More than 100 people die in the US every day from opioid overdoses, with preliminary Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) numbers putting the number of deaths for 2019 at nearly 50,000, an all-time high.
Judge Drain’s decision is part of a $4.3 billion bankruptcy settlement that involved the Sacklers’ selling their pharmaceutical holdings and forfeiting ownership of Purdue Pharma. The ruling, which is exactly what the Sacklers demanded, grants releases from liability for harm caused by the company’s aggressive and sometimes illegal marketing of the discontinued opioid OxyContin and other opioids. This marketing entailed a coordinated campaign to get doctors to prescribe opioids for everyday chronic pain, which also included bribes to doctors.
In addition to the Sacklers themselves, hundreds of individuals and organizations associated with the Sacklers, such as lobbyists, financial advisors, public relations firms, law firms, drug-makers and laboratories, as well as the Sacklers’ remaining business empire, are also granted immunity.
The immunity deal effectively shuts down any further investigation into the role played by the Sacklers and their hundreds of associates in the opioid epidemic, despite the fact that there is extensive documentation of the Sackler family’s involvement in Purdue’s operations in and profiting from the opioid epidemic, with Richard Sackler playing a key role in the marketing of the drug as an executive and even afterwards as late as 2012, while former board member Kathe Sackler bragged about coming up with the idea for OxyContin.
The Sacklers moved billions from Purdue before the deal, stashing it into other investments and offshore bank accounts that cannot be touched in the settlement.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged in 2020 that the Sacklers committed “fraudulent transfer” as part of a scheme to “hinder future creditors,” and the family settled these allegations to the tune of $225 million while denying any wrongdoing in that case as well.
The DOJ filed two legal briefs condemning the release from liability provided to the Sacklers and their associates in the bankruptcy deal on constitutional grounds, arguing that people with potential claims against the Sacklers would be deprived of their right to due process without legal review or compensation.
Purdue Pharma and its attorneys launched a pressure campaign against the DOJ aimed at convincing them to not challenge the plan, with an early draft of a letter from this campaign being obtained by National Public Radio.
For all of the death attributable directly to the Sacklers’ leadership of Purdue, which pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing in its marketing of OxyContin both in 2007 and 2020, not even an apology was issued, and the Sacklers deny any wrongdoing. Drain cynically remarked that “A forced apology is not really an apology… So we will have to live without one.”
Steve Miller, chair of Purdue Pharma’s board of directors, voiced his satisfaction with the ruling in a statement to NPR, declaring, “Instead of years of value-destructive litigation, including between and among creditors, this plan ensures that billions of dollars will be devoted to helping people and communities who have been hurt by the opioid crisis.”
The company that emerges from Purdue Pharma will be allowed to continue the production and selling of OxyContin and other opioid drugs.
According to a report from the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform, chaired by US Representative Carolyn Maloney, the Sackler family wealth totals $11 billion, accrued “in large part through sales of OxyContin.” The settlement means that the Sacklers will keep the bulk of their fortune.
The report continues “Members of the Sackler family pushed Purdue to use deceptive marketing practices to flood communities with this dangerous painkiller, and now the Sackler family is attempting to use Purdue’s bankruptcy proceedings to evade individual responsibility for their role in fueling the opioid epidemic.” This is exactly what has happened.
House Democrats in April called for the passage of the “Sackler Act” which supposedly would prevent the Sacklers and other non-debtors in the deal from receiving immunity from lawsuits. The settlement details were announced in October 2020, with the protection from liability having already been announced as part of the deal. Only the amount to be paid under the deal was increased since then, with no change in the liability protection.
However, nothing has been done by the Democrats, who have feigned surprise at the ruling. The Democrats along with the Republicans are awash in pharmaceutical company money, with the vast majority of Senate and House members, 72 senators and 302 members of the House of Representatives, cashing a check from the pharmaceutical industry, according to an analysis by Stat News released in June.
Purdue itself spent over $1.2 million in lobbying in the year and a half leading up to the settlement, according to a review of lobbying records by T he Intercept, and reportedly was monitoring the Sackler Act, among other proposed legislation. It hired the same public relations firm, Purple Strategies, that BP hired following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
As the WSWS noted in December 2019, protection was already granted to the Sacklers as the settlement was being hashed out: “On November 6, federal bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain halted all lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family until April 8, 2020. The extension of protection to the Sackler family was highly unusual because the Sacklers themselves have not yet filed for bankruptcy. Even Judge Drain conceded that the order was ‘extraordinary.’”
Drain hypocritically called his ruling last week a “bitter result” and stated that “I believe that at least some of the Sackler parties have liability for those [opioid OxyContin] claims. ... I would have expected a higher settlement.'
Drain’s record reflects the judicial system’s class character as a tool of the corporate financial oligarchy, and belies any of the feigned surprise or outrage by the Democrats, who knew full well that he would bow to the Sacklers’ demand for immunity.
- In 2006 Drain approved a plan by Delphi Corporation executives to approve tens of millions in bonuses to Delphi executives while hourly autoworkers faced a wage cut of up to 60 percent and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, claiming it was needed to make Delphi “competitive.”
- In 2012 Drain approved $1.75 million in bonuses for Hostess executives and shortly thereafter approved the liquidation of the company and the destruction of 15,000 jobs, shutting bakeries, distribution centers and stores.
- In 2015 Drain ruled in favor of former supermarket chain A&P allowing the severance pay of about 2,500 workers be cut to 52 percent of what they were entitled to receive under the labor agreement between the company and the unions representing them.
This is just a small glimpse of the class justice that rules not only in Drain’s court but the capitalist legal system as a whole, as well as the parasitism of an economic system which profits off death and destruction.
House Republican Demands Hunter Biden’s Art Dealer Assist in Investigating White House Corruption
House Oversight Committee’s ranking member Rep. James Comer (R-KY) has demanded Hunter Biden’s “art” dealer “assist” in an investigation regarding “undue White House influence” over Hunter’s scheme of selling paintings worth $500,000 to anonymous investors.
In a congressional letter addressed to Hunter’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, Comer notes it “is the Oversight Committee’s responsibly to scrutinize Mr. Biden’s business activities because he [Bergès] chooses to conduct them in the most murky and corrupt corners of international affairs.” The letter also speaks to Bergès’ connections to China and the art industry’s “commodities of fluid and opaque value” that “evade sanctions”:
Moreover, he has chosen—in the latest iteration of his career—to sell commodities of fluid and opaque value to anonymous benefactors. Mr. Biden acknowledges it is “a hell of a lot easier to get noticed” as an artist due to his family name.
Given Mr. Biden’s connection to the White House, his network of foreign associates, your efforts to become the “lead guy in China” for art, and history of foreign nations that have “used transactions involving high-value art to evade sanctions imposed on them by the United States,” the extent and nature of your dealings with Mr. Biden must be subject to the same scrutiny.
Comer, therefore, demanded Bergès comply with the following document requests:
- All documents and communications between you, the Georges Bergès Gallery (or agents thereof) and the White House, including a copy of the ethics guidelines;
- All documents and communications between you, the Georges Bergès Gallery (or agents thereof) and Mr. Biden;
- All guidelines, agreements, contracts, or other documents executed by you or the Georges Bergès Gallery (or agents thereof) in connection with Mr. Biden;
- All documents and communications pertaining to setting the prices for Mr. Biden’s art;
- A copy of the ethics guidelines, created in conjunction with the White House, pertaining to Mr. Biden’s art;
- Documents sufficient to show who attended the opening of Mr. Biden’s shows; and
- Documents sufficient to show who purchased Mr. Biden’s artwork.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Ranking Member James Comer (R-KY) speaks during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing titled The Capitol Insurrection: Unexplained Delays and Unanswered Questions, on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images)
Comer’s press office in a statement also suggested Hunter’s art dealings are concerning due to the artists’ “new, untrained, celebrity” and for “the Biden family’s historic precedent of using proximity to political power for self-gain”:
Given the history of foreign governments using high value art to evade U.S. sanctions, the unprecedented prices which Hunter Biden—a new, untrained, celebrity artist— is selling for, and the Biden family’s historic precedent of using proximity to political power for self-gain.”
Ranking Member Comer is demanding information and communications between the gallery and Hunter Biden, including the individuals who have purchased the art or indicated an interest in purchasing his art via attendance at his art shows.
Previously refuting any concerns over the art scheme, White House press secretary Jen Psaki stated in July that Hunter “has the right to pursue an artistic career” by selling “artwork” to an anonymous buyer for as much as $500,000, despite concerns that Hunter Biden is still invested in “CCP [Chinese Communist Party]-linked firms.”
Bergès would set the prices for the artwork and withhold “all records, including potential bidders and final buyers,” Washington Post reported. “The owner, Georges Bergès, has also agreed to reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price, according to people familiar with the agreement.”
Hunter Biden walks to Marine One on the Ellipse outside the White House May 22, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
But when Psaki was asked if Hunter will undergo ethics training while his father is President of the United States, Psaki ignored the reporter’s direct question by suggesting Hunter “is not involved in the sale or discussions about the sale of his art,” and Hunter will not be “informed” of “who is purchasing his art.”
Breitbart News senior contributor and Profiles in Corruption author Peter Schweizer said the entire proposal is an utterly “absurd” solution.
“The only way to address these issues is with greater transparency — not less,” he told Breitbart News. “Their proposed solution is greater secrecy, not transparency. And they are essentially saying, ‘Trust Us.’ Joe and Hunter Biden’s track record on such matters gives us no reason to trust them.”
Hunter responded to his critics by suggesting selling art for $500,000 to anonymous investors is a “pretty courageous thing to do.”
“Fuck em … Look man,” Hunter Biden explained on the Nota Bene Podcast, “I never said my art was going to cost what it was going to cost, or how much it would be priced at. I would be amazed, you know, if my art was sold, for you know, for, umm, for ten dollars.”
“I’m [the] most famous artist in MAGA world, at least,” Hunter facetiously said before suggesting President Joe Biden believes “everything” Hunter does “should be in National Gallery” of Art.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø.
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
Has there ever been a President as cold-hearted as Joe Biden?
No. There never has. No previous president in US history has been as willing to sacrifice America, American lives, and American power and standing in the world solely for political purposes. Are his traitorous actions purely political? Perhaps his motives are personal as well.
Biden has been selling his soul for money for decades; to China, to Ukraine, to Pakistan. How else can he explain his massive wealth and multiple mansions on a salary of $174k? He cannot. See Peter Schweitzer’s book Profiles in Corruption. Chapter 3 is about Joe Biden:
“The Biden family partners are often foreign governments, where the deals occur in the dark corners of international finance like Kazakhstan, China, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Ukraine and Russia. Some have even involved taxpayer money.”
And later in chapter 3:
“The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank and sister Valerie.”
Read Schweitzer’s book. For the Bidens, as Ilhan Omar is fond of saying, it was always and only about the Benjamins.
In just seven months Biden has created seven disasters. Every sentient American surely knows by now about Biden’s plagiarism, his pathological lying about everything from his law school record to his fabricated exploits around the world. Everyone surely knows by now of Hunter Biden’s depravity, all of which China has proof of (as did the FBI in December of 2019).
Just as the truth about the covid vaccines is strictly suppressed, so was the depth and breadth of the Biden family’s corruption. The media, print and electronic, deranged by their irrational hatred of Donald Trump, covered up the truth about the Biden family’s unscrupulousness.
We have the media and their big tech partners in crime to blame for the calamitous failures of this illegitimately installed president. We will suffer the reverberations of his open borders, energy regression, inflation, and the horrors unfolding in Afghanistan for decades to come.
Does Biden care how his diktats and policies have hurt millions of Americans? Not one bit; he revels in the damage he is doing. He finally has the power he has lusted after for decades, but his sabotage will embolden jihadists around the world for the foreseeable future. Biden has single-handedly ushered into power and armed a vast terrorist state.
How could a man view the carnage he is responsible for in Kabul and publicly blame President Trump? How on earth could he compare the loss of his own son from brain cancer to the loss of those thirteen young people he condemned to death?
Now Biden is warning of another terrorist attack on our troops who are sitting ducks at that regional airport in Kabul because of him! This level of callousness cannot be explained by his cognitive decline. Those of us who have lived with aging parents with dementia know that their core qualities become startlingly more pronounced. Joe Biden has always been a racist and a bully. He has always been in the business of politics strictly for the money. He owes China, Pakistan, Ukraine, and who knows what other corrupt nations for his unearned wealth and, as president, he is now paying them back. He just handed Afghanistan to China and Pakistan. For money, he is betraying our country and troops. For money, he has kickstarted WW3.
Lara Logan said on Jeanine Pirro’s program Saturday night:
“These people [the Biden administration] have a special place in history. They will go down as the most evil people that have ever led this country and have ever led American people to their deaths because when you betray one ally you betray all of your allies and if you empower one of your enemies you empower them all. There is not an American alive today who isn’t less safe because of what this administration has done.”
She is exactly right. None of this would be happening if Trump were still President. The southern border would still be closed. We would still be energy independent, Afghanistan would be more stable than at any time in the last twenty years with a scheduled, conditioned withdrawal that would have evacuated the Americans and our troops safely.
Those thirteen young people would still be alive. Their blood is on the hands of all of those Trump-deranged people who did everything in their power, legal and illegal, to defeat Trump. Their blood is on the hands of every Biden voter. They should have known better. They should never have fallen for the left’s propaganda so cleverly devised to induce mass psychosis. Biden and his entire cabinet must resign or be impeached for they have perpetrated the most egregious crime against this country in US history.
Photo credit: Jay Godwin, LBJ Library, public domain
Biden throws a tantrum
Our hapless president’s speech on Tuesday was not a speech at all. It was a full-blown childish tantrum. While he was ostensibly celebrating his massive “airlift” of thousands of mostly-Afghan refugees, from the beginning it was clear he is extremely angry. He almost shouted his claim that his catastrophic misadventure in Afghanistan has been a smashing success. This is a huge lie and everyone knows it, even those trying to spin this debacle as a win.
In fact, Biden’s surrender has probably set a genocide in motion just as our betrayal of the South Vietnamese gave birth to the killing fields. Women and girls are sure to be brutalized.
Biden had promised for days that no American would be left behind but of course hundreds, perhaps even thousands, have been left behind. Some even made it to the airport and were then denied flights home by US forces on the ground there. Thousands of those who escaped were rescued not by Biden’s forces but by retired vets and private organizations who set out to do what the government would not.
Biden is, and has always been, a pathological liar of the worst kind, the kind who lies to boost his own ego no matter how easy it is to prove his dishonesty. His seething, wretched defense of this massive failure will haunt this nation for decades to come. He has single-handedly created a fully-armed terrorist state, a state surrounded by enemies of the US – China, Iran and Pakistan. Those countries now have access to the $90b worth of American weapons, military vehicles and aircraft, not to mention Bagram Air Base.
Our NATO allies will no longer trust us. Biden will be forever known as the most destructive, the weakest and most gullible president in US history. A better man would resign but Biden is not even a decent man. As his mad rant on Tuesday proved, he will never take responsibility for his fatal errors in judgment.
Biden blamed President Trump, whose actual plan had stabilized the country and would have worked if implemented, and he blamed the Afghan army whom he betrayed by withdrawing their air support and their financial support. Of course, they fled. Biden betrayed them as cruelly as any leader in history has abandoned his troops and allies. He can claim his decision to withdraw as he did was successful from now to kingdom come, but it was the most egregious foreign policy error in American history.
The deaths of those thirteen young soldiers who died last Thursday is entirely his responsibility and yet he could not even bring himself to salute at their dignified transfer as their coffins passed by; he just kept checking his watch as if he had somewhere more important to be. The man is without heart and soul. The few parents who spoke with him were shocked that he only talked about his deceased son Beau. That’s his go-to default reply to anyone else’s loss; he makes it all about him.
As the months of his administration slip by, it becomes clearer and clearer that he is something of a sociopath. Nick Arama agrees. He is congenitally unable to care. As for Americans still stranded in Afghanistan, he blamed them – for not getting to the airport, for being “dual citizens” as if that makes them less worthy of rescue.
Of course, it is not just Biden that is to blame. Those military clowns, the ones who just weeks ago were telling us that Covid was the gravest threat we face (Austin) or that ‘white rage” is worth investigating (Milley) are to blame as well. Whoever was giving the orders on the ground in Kabul should also be fired.
Who thought it was a good idea to have those young soldiers do crowd control in a sea of panicked Afghans? Who decided those busloads of Americans had to be turned back in favor of unvetted refugees? Whose decision was it to let the highly trained military dogs who were brought safely to the airport be left behind, turned loose to face certain death on the streets of that benighted city?
Every leader who participated in this ill-timed, fateful attempt at withdrawal should resign or be fired. As many observers have noted, a high schooler could have managed it all better. But then maybe it was all by design, engineered by Biden’s paymaster, China. Biden has been bought and paid by a long list of influence purchasers for nearly all his years in Congress. “Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.” (Bill Watterson). Biden sold us out long ago.
Nancy Pelosi, a horrid woman equally as without heart and soul, on Tuesday refused to have the names of the thirteen soldiers killed in Kabul read out on the floor of the House. That should permanently indict her for being the wicked witch she is. She is more devious, more calculating than the irresponsible Biden but every bit as beyond redemption as he is. She will do anything to try to convince the American people, for whom she has only contempt, that whatever she and her party do is righteous no matter how loathsome and totalitarian.
Like the schoolyard thug he is, Biden will defend to the death the treacherous plan he put into motion so he could make a grand speech on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. He ignored the advice of some advisers, wanted Ghani to lie about the Taliban’s success in July (transcript here), all to mount a bit of theater with him in the starring role. No matter what he says, things did not go as he envisioned so like a spoiled child, he threw a tantrum from the podium at the White House. Shame on him a thousand times.
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