My mother died a horrible death in 1984 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of 69 due to the poisoning of the water supply in Parkersburg, West Virginia with byproducts from the manufacture of Teflon. By the time I figured out what had happened it was way too late to do anything about it. I currently have a good friend who has just begun his second round of chemo for non-Hodgkins lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup. I don’t know if he has received any compensation. Roundup is still so widely used that we all carry body burdens of it without knowledge of possible long term effects. I worked for Monsanto from 1984 to 1994 and was told that Roundup quickly broke down into harmless products and was not toxic. Profits trump honesty and safety every time.
Thanks again for calling out the oligarchs as our nation's biggest problem.
More and more citizens of the world, especially the Oligarchs, believe in an imaginary social hierarchy that makes them superior to others. This belief has aided in the passing new laws to protect the oligarchs from prosecution.
Also, John Dean referenced, from Twitter, a good article written from a Canadian perspective about the efforts of the oligarchs to destroy USofA and what Canada needs to do to prepare. This article makes some of the same points you have made:
The Extreme Right:
"Some diagnoses of America’s crisis that highlight “toxic polarization” imply the two sides are equally responsible for that crisis. They aren’t. While both wings of U.S. politics have fanned polarization’s flames, blame lies disproportionately on the political right."
"By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy."
"One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost."
The similarities with Hitler and Nazi Germany:
"First, in both cases, a charismatic leader was able to unify right-wing extremists around a political program to seize the state. Second, a bald falsehood about how enemies inside the polity had betrayed the country – for the Nazis, the “stab in the back,” and for Trumpists, the Big Lie – was a vital psychological tool for radicalizing and mobilizing followers. Third, conventional conservatives believed they could control and channel the charismatic leader and rising extremism but were ultimately routed by the forces they helped unleash. Fourth, ideological opponents of this rising extremism squabbled among themselves; they didn’t take the threat seriously enough, even though it was growing in plain sight; and they focused on marginal issues that were too often red meat for the extremists. (Today, think toppling statues.)
"To my mind, though, the fifth parallel is the most disconcerting: the propagation of a “hardline security doctrine.” Here I’ve been influenced by the research of Jonathan Leader Maynard, a young English scholar who is emerging as one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers on the links between ideology, extremism and violence. In a forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, Dr. Leader Maynard argues that extremist right-wing ideologies generally don’t arise from explicit efforts to forge an authoritarian society, but from the radicalization of a society’s existing understandings of how it can stay safe and secure in the face of alleged threats.
"Hardline conceptions of security are “radicalized versions of familiar claims about threat, self-defence, punishment, war, and duty,” he writes. They are the foundation on which regimes organize campaigns of violent persecution and terror. People he calls “hardliners” believe the world contains many “dangerous enemies that frequently operate in and through purported ‘civilian’ groups.” Hardliners increasingly dominate Trumpist circles now."
All of the reasons Thom has given for the decreased likelihood of white-collar criminals being investigated, indicted, tried, and convicted are grounded in the powers of corporate personhood. The oligarchs (and their array of public and private sector henchpeople) have conducted a 50-year campaign of compelling the three branches of our government to produce the legislation, regulations, and rulings that they want, regardless of the negative externalities they force on the rest of the world. I think it’s safe to assume that “psychopaths in suits” are much like shingles in the Shingrix commercial-they just don’t care (there's a good chance that they even derive pleasure from the harms they cause). Because most of us do care about our fellow citizens, it’s difficult to relate to their decision-making, and easy for the oligarchs to control their marks. For those who are poorly educated, they are more likely to succumb to the cult leader that tells them what to believe, especially when they’re manipulated with the classic wedge issues (racism, guns, abortion, etc.) the propaganda machines drive home daily. (I define the “poorly educated” among us as those who learned to eschew facts, reason, and critical thinking so they can be part of the toxic tribe that Trump built.) Regardless of the psychological disorders we use to describe the oligarchs and their destructive underlings, we need to strip them of their ability to make our government serve their greed because if there's one thing we should have learned by now, they are tenacious and they really don't give a shit.
There probably isn't one American who has not lost somebody due to corporate greed. Much of it due to the cost/benefit ratio used in doing business here. Add to that formula, the hypocrisy of these CEO's demanding accountability from everyone but themselves, and TA-DA!, they give you "The Free Market". How anyone uses that phrase with a straight face is beyond me.
We feel you Thom, your loss, sorrow, frustration. I hope you have some great tag memories of the days when you and your brothers were all there playing together. I preferred spotlight tag with the flashlights....more danger, more mischief.
Another corporate mass murder is currently going on via the opioid crisis. In 2020, over. 92,000 people died from overdose, with over 841M people dying from overdose since 1999 (per the CDC).
My sister, formerly a professional social worker, spent nine years addicted to OxyContin, prescribed for pain by doctors who were repeatedly told by Perdue Pharma (run by the Sackler family who ran Perdue and took the profits) that OxyContin wasn't addictive and couldn't be abused. It took two painful years on Suboxone to get her clean with near constant withdrawal symptoms and cravings. She will never be 100% and will always have to look over her shoulder, and lost everything, including her daughter.
My sister's daughter, after sneaking her mother's pills (and without her mother's knowledge) became addicted, too, as a young teen, and is now living on the streets, a heroin/fentanyl addict. I'm sure her mother's addiction was a factor in the child's addiction journey. We, as a family are devastated. There is little we can do. Opioid addictions are famously difficult to treat. Relapse is over 90% and there is very little financial support available for the 4-6 rehab periods needed to get a person clean. Few families can afford even ONE of these treatments. Trying to help a loved one has broken many families financially, mostly to no end.
Prior to heavily marketing OxyContin in rural areas and the midwest where people did hard physical labor and often had pain, Purdue influenced FDA regulators to approve the drug without reservations, without any real scientific data to back up their claims. The FDA official, Curtis Wright, deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products at the time, approved a one-off, never-used-by-FDA label, saying OxyContin was non-addictive - a claim justified through no studies or data. Two years later Curtis was working for Perdue Pharma. The Sacklers created fake medical associations (controlled by the Sacklers) and built relationship with universities and bonafide medical organizations to spread misinformation and pump up sales. They paid doctors to promote OxyContin at posh all-expense paid "pain management" (marketing) seminars at resorts.
My niece's situation is common; heroin and illegally-produced fentanyl are where millions of the Perdue/Sackler's victims turn when the medical community cuts them off of the medication to which they have become addicted. They are cheaper and more readily available than OxyContin. 75% of the today's opioid addicts say they started with prescription pills, yet our country treats these addiction victims criminally, rather than medically.
The Sackler family destroyed (and is still destroying) millions of people's lives and their communities this way. Richard Sackler, who has made billions of dollars off addicting people, used his vast resources to demonize his victims: “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote in an email in February 2001. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” The Sacklers have kept their personal fortunes intact (and in fact massively increased that wealth since their lies were uncovered - still selling OxyContin.) America is now awash in an intractable opioid crisis and nobody is being held to account. This is America writ large, and similar crimes are going on in almost all industries, entwined with Government via a revolving employment door.
My mother died a horrible death in 1984 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of 69 due to the poisoning of the water supply in Parkersburg, West Virginia with byproducts from the manufacture of Teflon. By the time I figured out what had happened it was way too late to do anything about it. I currently have a good friend who has just begun his second round of chemo for non-Hodgkins lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup. I don’t know if he has received any compensation. Roundup is still so widely used that we all carry body burdens of it without knowledge of possible long term effects. I worked for Monsanto from 1984 to 1994 and was told that Roundup quickly broke down into harmless products and was not toxic. Profits trump honesty and safety every time.
Hi Thom,
Thanks again for calling out the oligarchs as our nation's biggest problem.
More and more citizens of the world, especially the Oligarchs, believe in an imaginary social hierarchy that makes them superior to others. This belief has aided in the passing new laws to protect the oligarchs from prosecution.
Also, John Dean referenced, from Twitter, a good article written from a Canadian perspective about the efforts of the oligarchs to destroy USofA and what Canada needs to do to prepare. This article makes some of the same points you have made:
The Extreme Right:
"Some diagnoses of America’s crisis that highlight “toxic polarization” imply the two sides are equally responsible for that crisis. They aren’t. While both wings of U.S. politics have fanned polarization’s flames, blame lies disproportionately on the political right."
"By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy."
"One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost."
The similarities with Hitler and Nazi Germany:
"First, in both cases, a charismatic leader was able to unify right-wing extremists around a political program to seize the state. Second, a bald falsehood about how enemies inside the polity had betrayed the country – for the Nazis, the “stab in the back,” and for Trumpists, the Big Lie – was a vital psychological tool for radicalizing and mobilizing followers. Third, conventional conservatives believed they could control and channel the charismatic leader and rising extremism but were ultimately routed by the forces they helped unleash. Fourth, ideological opponents of this rising extremism squabbled among themselves; they didn’t take the threat seriously enough, even though it was growing in plain sight; and they focused on marginal issues that were too often red meat for the extremists. (Today, think toppling statues.)
"To my mind, though, the fifth parallel is the most disconcerting: the propagation of a “hardline security doctrine.” Here I’ve been influenced by the research of Jonathan Leader Maynard, a young English scholar who is emerging as one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers on the links between ideology, extremism and violence. In a forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, Dr. Leader Maynard argues that extremist right-wing ideologies generally don’t arise from explicit efforts to forge an authoritarian society, but from the radicalization of a society’s existing understandings of how it can stay safe and secure in the face of alleged threats.
"Hardline conceptions of security are “radicalized versions of familiar claims about threat, self-defence, punishment, war, and duty,” he writes. They are the foundation on which regimes organize campaigns of violent persecution and terror. People he calls “hardliners” believe the world contains many “dangerous enemies that frequently operate in and through purported ‘civilian’ groups.” Hardliners increasingly dominate Trumpist circles now."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/
All of the reasons Thom has given for the decreased likelihood of white-collar criminals being investigated, indicted, tried, and convicted are grounded in the powers of corporate personhood. The oligarchs (and their array of public and private sector henchpeople) have conducted a 50-year campaign of compelling the three branches of our government to produce the legislation, regulations, and rulings that they want, regardless of the negative externalities they force on the rest of the world. I think it’s safe to assume that “psychopaths in suits” are much like shingles in the Shingrix commercial-they just don’t care (there's a good chance that they even derive pleasure from the harms they cause). Because most of us do care about our fellow citizens, it’s difficult to relate to their decision-making, and easy for the oligarchs to control their marks. For those who are poorly educated, they are more likely to succumb to the cult leader that tells them what to believe, especially when they’re manipulated with the classic wedge issues (racism, guns, abortion, etc.) the propaganda machines drive home daily. (I define the “poorly educated” among us as those who learned to eschew facts, reason, and critical thinking so they can be part of the toxic tribe that Trump built.) Regardless of the psychological disorders we use to describe the oligarchs and their destructive underlings, we need to strip them of their ability to make our government serve their greed because if there's one thing we should have learned by now, they are tenacious and they really don't give a shit.
There probably isn't one American who has not lost somebody due to corporate greed. Much of it due to the cost/benefit ratio used in doing business here. Add to that formula, the hypocrisy of these CEO's demanding accountability from everyone but themselves, and TA-DA!, they give you "The Free Market". How anyone uses that phrase with a straight face is beyond me.
We feel you Thom, your loss, sorrow, frustration. I hope you have some great tag memories of the days when you and your brothers were all there playing together. I preferred spotlight tag with the flashlights....more danger, more mischief.
No one writes about it like you do. But will it help?
Another corporate mass murder is currently going on via the opioid crisis. In 2020, over. 92,000 people died from overdose, with over 841M people dying from overdose since 1999 (per the CDC).
My sister, formerly a professional social worker, spent nine years addicted to OxyContin, prescribed for pain by doctors who were repeatedly told by Perdue Pharma (run by the Sackler family who ran Perdue and took the profits) that OxyContin wasn't addictive and couldn't be abused. It took two painful years on Suboxone to get her clean with near constant withdrawal symptoms and cravings. She will never be 100% and will always have to look over her shoulder, and lost everything, including her daughter.
My sister's daughter, after sneaking her mother's pills (and without her mother's knowledge) became addicted, too, as a young teen, and is now living on the streets, a heroin/fentanyl addict. I'm sure her mother's addiction was a factor in the child's addiction journey. We, as a family are devastated. There is little we can do. Opioid addictions are famously difficult to treat. Relapse is over 90% and there is very little financial support available for the 4-6 rehab periods needed to get a person clean. Few families can afford even ONE of these treatments. Trying to help a loved one has broken many families financially, mostly to no end.
Prior to heavily marketing OxyContin in rural areas and the midwest where people did hard physical labor and often had pain, Purdue influenced FDA regulators to approve the drug without reservations, without any real scientific data to back up their claims. The FDA official, Curtis Wright, deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products at the time, approved a one-off, never-used-by-FDA label, saying OxyContin was non-addictive - a claim justified through no studies or data. Two years later Curtis was working for Perdue Pharma. The Sacklers created fake medical associations (controlled by the Sacklers) and built relationship with universities and bonafide medical organizations to spread misinformation and pump up sales. They paid doctors to promote OxyContin at posh all-expense paid "pain management" (marketing) seminars at resorts.
My niece's situation is common; heroin and illegally-produced fentanyl are where millions of the Perdue/Sackler's victims turn when the medical community cuts them off of the medication to which they have become addicted. They are cheaper and more readily available than OxyContin. 75% of the today's opioid addicts say they started with prescription pills, yet our country treats these addiction victims criminally, rather than medically.
The Sackler family destroyed (and is still destroying) millions of people's lives and their communities this way. Richard Sackler, who has made billions of dollars off addicting people, used his vast resources to demonize his victims: “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote in an email in February 2001. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” The Sacklers have kept their personal fortunes intact (and in fact massively increased that wealth since their lies were uncovered - still selling OxyContin.) America is now awash in an intractable opioid crisis and nobody is being held to account. This is America writ large, and similar crimes are going on in almost all industries, entwined with Government via a revolving employment door.
What concerted action should be taken?? Many have been aware of this for a long time. D> Hayes