Ruth Milka , - Nation of Change
Stephan: The creation of the opioid epidemic, a perfectly legal drug addiction crisis, is usually blamed on the pharmaceutical industry, and they certainly bear great responsibility.
But the truth that dare not speak its name is that the entire legal infrastructure of governance and law enforcement in the United States has been complicit in this disaster that has killed tens of thousands. This article discusses just the role of judges in this debacle.
We really don't value anything but profit in this country.
Credit: Nation of Change
Big Pharma is notorious for their role in the opioid epidemic that has killed more than half a million Americans. But according to a new analysis, judges have played a major contributing role as well.
An analysis of U.S. court secrecy, conducted by Reuters, shows that by sealing evidence from the public, judges may have lengthened and deepened the epidemic.
In 2001 the first lawsuit filed by a state against a Big Pharma company that manufactured OxyContin began. West Virginia brought the suit against Purdue Pharma LP, accusing them of minimizing the drug’s risks and telling doctors that it was less addictive than other opioids.
During the discovery part of the case, thousands of internal memos from Purdue, including marketing plans and sales calls to doctors, were made available to the prosecution. This mountain of evidence convinced Judge Booker T. Stephens that the prosecution had enough material to convince a jury that Purdue was deliberately lying in their sales pitches to doctors.
The problem is, Judge Stephens sealed this information from the public after Purdue […]
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Mayank Bhardwaj , - Reuters
Stephan: This, I am afraid, is the future in many countries, including very possibly the U.S. where wealth inequality has changed the nation's entire social structure. Water is destiny.
Residents fill their containers with drinking water from a municipal tanker in New Delhi, India, June 28, 2019. Picture taken June 28, 2019.
Credit: Reuters/Adnan Abidi
NEW DELHI, INDIA — In this teeming capital city of more than 20 million people, a worsening drought is amplifying the vast inequality between India’s rich and poor.
The politicians, civil servants and corporate lobbyists who live in substantial houses and apartments in central Delhi pay very little to get limitless supplies of piped water – whether for their bathrooms, kitchens or to wash the car, dog, or spray a manicured lawn. They can do all that for as little as $10-$15 a month.
But step into one of the slum areas in the inner city, or a giant disorganized housing estate on the outskirts and there is a daily struggle to get and pay for very limited supplies of water, which is delivered by tanker rather than pipe. And the price is soaring as supplies are fast depleting.
India’s water crisis is far from even-handed – the […]
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Tracy Jan, - The Washington Post
Stephan: If you live in a Red value state and voted Republican the people you voted for at the state and federal level are degrading your life; you voted against your own self-interest. It was your choice.
Bettie Douglas, a 61-year-old mother of three from St. Louis, stands inside the McDonald’s where she worked in 2017. Douglas was earning just above the state minimum wage until St. Louis’s new $10 minimum wage went into effect in May 2017. A state law passed later that month rolled back the city wage to the state minimum of $7.70 per hour.
Credit: Jim Salter/AP
For most of her 13 years working the grill and cash register at McDonald’s, Bettie Douglas earned just over $7 an hour. Then in 2017, the St. Louis resident’s hourly pay rose to $10 after the city increased its minimum wage.
But the Missouri legislature soon invalidated the local wage ordinance following opposition from business groups, despite the state Supreme Court having already upheld the increase. Pay for tens of thousands of low-wage workers in St. Louis reverted to the state’s then-minimum of $7.70 an hour.
Missouri is among 25 states that expressly block local municipalities from adopting their own minimum-wage laws. State legislatures in […]
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Camille Goldmon, - truthout
Stephan: Yet another way in which the Red value states are having their lives degraded by Republican governance. Have we really gotten to a point where a large percentage of Americans put White supremacy and male dominance above all other considerations? It appears we have.
Drought stricken corn
Credit: Getty
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has withheld from the public dozens of climate-change related studies conducted by the department’s principal research agency, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
That’s the finding of a recent Politico investigation, which documented “a persistent pattern in which the Trump administration refused to draw attention to findings that show the potential dangers and consequences of climate change.” Though the ARS has reportedly completed at least 45 climate-related studies since Trump took office in 2017, only two have been publicized, Politico found. Both contained findings favorable to the meat industry, which in 2018 alone at the federal level spent over $4 million on lobbying and donated nearly twice as much to Republican candidates as Democratic ones. Reports that conflict with the administration’s agenda, such as those pointing to climate change as an agricultural emergency or to industrial agriculture as a high-emissions sector, have been relegated to the sidelines.
Several of the reports that the administration buried are particularly relevant to the agricultural industry in Southern states, which […]
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Stephan: And here is a third way Red state voters have backed people who only do them harm. According to CBS News, as this report says, "Since his election, 51 coal plants have closed and eight coal companies have filed for bankruptcy."
I actually consider this excellent news, for the Earth, but very sad and painful for the coal states because nothing was done to help them make the inevitable transition.
A dying coal pit. Since Trump’s election, 51 coal plants have closed and eight coal companies have filed for bankruptcy, CBS News reported.
Credit: AP/Mead Guver
The coal industry was rocked by two massive bankruptcy filings this week that have put nearly 2,000 jobs at risk in Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming and West Virginia.
Revelation Energy LLC., a West Virginia-based company that employs about 1,100 people in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of West Virginia, the Lexington Herald-Leaderreported. Cumberland, Kentucky, Mayor Charles Raleigh told the outlet that the company has already shut down its nearby mines and workers were told not to show up for work.
The move comes as Revelation’s parent company, Blackjewel LLC, shuttered two coal mines in Wyoming amid its own bankruptcy filing, leaving 700 workers unemployed, The Casper Star-Tribune reported. The two mines, Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr, are the fourth- and sixth-largest producing coal mines in the country.
In a bankruptcy filing Monday, Blackjewel […]
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