Today a federal judge is expected to certify Purdue Pharmaceutical’s bankruptcy plan – a $4.5 billion settlement between the company and thousands of state and municipal governments that have sued for damages related to the opioid epidemic. The settlement occurs more than two decades after Purdue began aggressively marketing OxyContin to an unsuspecting public and after more than 500,000 people died in the United States as a result.
Purdue will be bankrupt, but members of the multi-billionaire Sackler family – who were responsible for the decisions that led to these deaths and profited the most from Purdue’s opioid dealings – will gain near-total immunity from future litigation. By the time the settlement is paid out they most likely will be as wealthy as they ever were.
So where does personal responsibility come in?
Arthur M. Sackler made a fortune in the 1980s by being the first to directly market prescription drugs to physicians. Utilizing many of the same direct-marketing techniques, his brothers Mortimer and Raymond and nephews Richard and Jonathan, began pushing OxyContin, which had […]
Stephan: Afghanistan, from start to finish has been an international geopolitical mistake. We never should have become involved, and we should have left years ago. But it was ever so profitable and the military-industrial corporations and contractors lobbied so hard to keep it going.
America needs to reconfigure its foreign policy. We will get much more mileage and respect out of fostering wellbeing than we ever will killing people.
U.S. Army soldiers return home from a 9-month deployment to Afghanistan on December 10, 2020 at Fort Drum, New York. The 10th Mountain Division soldiers who arrived this week are under orders to isolate at home or in barracks, finishing their Covid-19 quarantine just before Christmas. The troops were replaced in Afghanistan by a smaller force, as the U.S. military continues to reduce troop levels Afghanistan. Credit: John Moore/Getty
The international community’s belief in America as a steady hand on the global tiller has been deeply shaken by the chaos engulfing Afghanistan.In the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency, many world leaders feared that Biden would simply be a welcome, but temporary, reprieve from former President Donald Trump’s nativist and isolationist politics. When Biden was running for president, he had tried to assuage those concerns by saying on his first day in office he’d reach out to our NATO allies and assure them they could once again count on the US.
Stephan: Green steel. Here is a report on what could turn out to be some very good news.
A piece of iron produced as part of the green steelmaking process. Credit: Hybrit
The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.
The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.
Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Thomas Fuller, San Francisco Bureau Chief - The New York Times
Stephan: I am beginning to see stories from many communities about their growing water problems, and in the Southwest this is just the beginning.
A Mendocino Water Company delivery truck. Credit; Max Whittake/The New York Times
MENDOCINO, CALIFORNIA — As a measure of both the nation’s creaking infrastructure and the severity of the drought gripping California there is the $5 shower.
That’s how much Ian Roth, the owner of the Seagull Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in this tourist town three hours north of San Francisco, spends on water every time a guest washes for five minutes under the shower nozzle.
Water is so scarce in Mendocino, an Instagram-ready collection of pastel Victorian homes on the edge of the Pacific, that restaurants have closed their restrooms to guests, pointing them instead to portable toilets on the sidewalk.
And the fire department has asked sheriff’s deputies to keep an eye on the hydrants in response to a report of water theft.
“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given,” said Julian Lopez, the owner at Café Beaujolais, a restaurant packed with out-of-town diners in what is the height of the tourist season. “There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to […]
Stephan: What I want to know is why is Trump not in court defending himself against criminal charges, and how is it possible Bill Barr still has a law license? Because the American justice system is so deeply flawed it does not hold accountable the rich and powerful. This has become a major issue in the United States; it shapes the way people see us, and it now shapes the way we see ourselves. Amongst the world's nations our justice system ranks 21st. You may not know this but I can assure you every world leader knows it, to our shame.
BLack Lives Matter demonstrators Credit: Getty
The US Justice Department and federal law enforcement “deliberately targeted” Black Lives Matter demonstrators under the “express direction” of Donald Trump and former US Attorney General William Barr, according to a sweeping analysis from advocacy group Movement for Black Lives.
In nearly every prosecution, cases related to protests from 31 May through 25 October “resulted in hundreds of organisers and activists facing years in federal prison with no chance of parole” after federal law enforcement “exploited the expansive federal criminal code” to assert jurisdiction over protest-related cases that “bore no federal interest,” according to the report.
The report – which examines 326 criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors in the wake of 2020 protests amid an uprising against police violence and racial injustice after the police murder of George Floyd – appears to “largely corroborate what Black organisers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report says.
![The Port Kembla Steelworks the home of Bluescope Steel and Colourbond in Wollongong, Monday, March 12, 2018. The Australian Government has secured an exemption from the recently announced U.S tariffs imposed on steel and aluminium [...]
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