Sackler exploitation of bankruptcy laws

In an earlier post, I linked to an episode of Last Week Tonight where John Oliver explained how the odious Sackler family are trying to use the bankruptcy laws so that, while they claim that they will be paying $4.5 billion, they will end up with total immunity frrom future lawsuits, will not have to admit guilt, and likely end up even more wealthy than they are now. This article explains why this is such a bad deal for the public and how it lets the Sacklers off the hook.
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Why the Sackler deal is so bad

The legal cases brought by so many state attorneys general and individuals against the odious Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma was responsible for so many opioid deaths, is going before a bankruptcy judge this week who will decide on a plea deal brought by some state attorneys general.

John Oliver gives a masterful expose of why the deal that has been proposed is such a bad one but will likely get approved. Basically the deal is such that the Sacklers, while pretending to pay billions, will actually get off very lightly by having their considerable personal assets mostly protected and will also be given sweeping blanket immunity from the lawsuits of those who did not agree to be part of this deal and even future lawsuits. They will not even have to plead guilty to any personal wrongdoing in the case, blaming it all on the company even though they were very hands-on in driving the practices that led to massive rates of addiction.

The bankruptcy judge hearing the case has a history of being sympathetic to these kinds of deals which is why the Sacklers shopped around so that they could appear before him in the small town of White Plains, NY. This case shows how the rich can manipulate the legal system to their benefit.

I hope that this show helps to create a big enough uproar that he has second thoughts about letting them get off so easy.

How to give away money

While Amazon founder Jeff Bezos uses the obscene wealth he has squeezed out of the labor of his employees before getting rid of them to indulge his whims of flying into space and building megayachts while avoiding paying taxes, his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott is using her share of his ill-gotten gains that she obtained in her divorce to try and do a little good.

The American novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott said on Tuesday she had given a further $2.7bn (£1.9bn) to 286 organisations.

Scott, who was formerly married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, issued a statement regarding distribution of the latest tranche of her $57bn fortune.

It was the third round of announcements Scott has made regarding her philanthropy, which rivals the largest of foundations. In 2020, she made two similar surprise announcements and donated about $6bn to causes including Covid relief, gender equity, historically Black colleges and universities and other schools.
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New documentary on opioid drug profiteering

Alex Gibney has a new documentary The Crime of the Century that looks at the opioid drug crisis and the shameless role played by the big pharmaceutical companies like Purdue and the Sackler family who profited greatly from the deaths of many people and the destruction of families and communities, topics that I have covered many times before. They were aided and abetted in their crimes by government officials and lawmakers who cut deals with the Sacklers and top Purdue executives to allow them to escape the consequences of their actions and retain their ill-gotten billions.

Here is a detailed review by Saloni Gajjar.
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The Sackler family epitomizes greed and sleaziness

I have written many times before about the Sackler family that made billions of dollars by pushing their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals to get doctors to overprescribe the opioid painkiller OxyContin and making the dosage stronger, resulting in the massive drug addiction problem we have now that have caused so many deaths.

Investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe has written a new book Empire of Pain about the Sackler family and he was interviewed on the radio program Fresh Air about how the family went to great efforts to push the drug while at the same time keeping their name separate from the company so that they could build up their reputations as philanthropists and have their name attached to many public and university buildings. He explained how they are trying to shield their personal fortunes from the many lawsuits against them by shifting company money into their private accounts and then putting the company into bankruptcy.
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The ethics of accepting ‘anonymous’ donations from bad actors

Thanks to a comment by John Morales, I read this article by Kelsey Piper that looks at a possible justification given by MIT for why they went to such lengths to keep the money they got from sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein secret. It is an argument I had not heard before.

The obvious question: What on earth were they thinking? The MIT Media Lab — an interdisciplinary research center affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — was well regarded, well funded, had great publicity, and was attached to one of the world’s best universities. Why would they risk it all to attract donations from someone like Epstein? And how could people write emails like the ones revealed in the New Yorker piece — “jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous” — without realizing they were on the path to disaster?

On Sunday, we got a partial answer via an essay by Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He knew all along that the MIT Media Lab was taking Epstein’s money, he said. He thought it was the right thing to do. So, he says, did the team at the Media Lab.

Their justification is simple: If someone is a bad person, taking their anonymous donations is actually the best thing you can do. The money gets put to a better use, and they don’t get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn’t know about it.

This argument isn’t that eccentric. Within philanthropy, it has been seriously raised as a reasonable answer to the challenging question of how organizations should deal with donations from bad actors.

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The problem with tainted money

The exposure of the Sackler family as the owners of the company Purdue Pharma that is responsible for creating much of the opioid epidemic by aggressively marketing those drugs has resulted in many of the institutions wondering what to do with the gifts that the Sacklers gave to them. Professor of law Terri Lynn Hegee looks at the legal issues faced by these institutions involved in distancing themselves from disgraced donors.
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The menace of philanthropists

I have reached such a level of cynicism that now when I hear someone described as a philanthropist, I immediately assume that they must be really awful people who have either got their money by practices that abuse and exploit people or that they are personally abusive to those immediately around them or most likely both, and they are now using their gifts to hide the ugly sources of their wealth or to buy silence. The burden of proof has shifted to them to show that they are not awful people.
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Further evidence of the Sackler family’s utter rapaciousness

The Sackler family are the owners of Purdue Pharma, maker of the powerful opioid OxyContin, the drug that has been a major contributor to the drug crisis that has killed so many people and ruined the lives of so many others. I have written before about how they relentless marketed the drug in their effort to get more money. The people in the pharmaceutical industry that pushed these drugs have been described as “drug dealers in lab coats”. Now ProPublica, that excellent investigative news organization that I financially support, has another report obtained from sealed testimony about their sleazy tactics to get doctors to prescribe more of the drug by giving them a false impression of its potency.
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These so-called philanthropists are really ruthless monsters

A new report from ProPublica says that Purdue Pharma, a major manufacturer of opioids such as OxyContin that was founded by the Sackler family, aggressively marketed them in ways that led to addiction and is now also trying to profit from drugs that seek to combat addiction or reverse the effects of overdoses. In other words, they want to benefit both ways from addiction, first by causing it and then selling treatments for the problem that they continue to cause. This information came from a filing in a case against the company
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