Opioid and Asbestos Billionaires’ Make Political Donations to Dodge Justice
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Caught in an opioid or asbestos scandal that’s killed millions? Don’t want to pay the settlement?
- The Sackler Family’s Controversial Political Donations and the Opioid Crisis — Politics Watcher
- A Koch-owned company is exploiting bankruptcy law to avoid responsibility for their asbestos assets and rewrite judicial precedent. — Lever News
- Major Supreme Court Case Secretly Backed by GOP Tycoon Charles Koch: NYT — Daily Beast
- Supreme Court hand the oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries’ subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, a paper and building material manufacturer a major victory — Lever News
- The billionaires rallying behind Trump after his conviction — BBC
Follow the money to see how billionaires get richer, while hard working Americans die from opioid overdoses and asbestos related illness. See how they make (1) political donations (2) exploit bankruptcy laws (3) stack the Supreme Court with justices to do their bidding.
Supreme Court rules for Koch Industries firm. Surprised?
“The U.S. Supreme Court just handed the oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries — and its subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, a paper and building material manufacturer — a major victory when it allowed the company to avoid paying damages to people who claim they were poisoned by the company’s products.
Georgia-Pacific has faced tens of thousands of legal claims from people who unknowingly suffered asbestos exposure from building materials the company sold in the 1960s and 1970s and have since faced serious health issues. And for the last seven years, the company has used a novel legal maneuver to evade those claims, leaving victims and their families in limbo.” — Lever News
Opioid epidemic
The opioid epidemic involves over 500,000 deaths and a $13 billion fortune. How much do you know about Purdue Pharma? The Sackler Family and their political donations to Republicans? And a settlement that would let the family ‘hold onto their freedom and most of their money’? — The Politics Watcher
Voting has consequences
People have limited free time, and bombarded with information. Complex but vital issues like the opioid epidemic often get less public attention than they should. There are dozens of excellent sources of information but people are often unaware of them or do not have time to research them. Activists need a simple to make the facts easy to follow. They need to connect the dots between corporate greed, political influence for those with little time and show how voting has consequences.
That’s where StoryMaps come in. It is a free app designed for visual storytelling. We designed this StoryMap with this framework:
– An eye-catching visual about opioids (Unsplash)
– Introduction to the severity of the crisis and the Sakclers (NY Times, NPR)
– Map of drug overdoes deaths by county with political representative (County Health Rankings)
– Converting the health data into an interactive map (ArcGIS Online)
– Sackler family and Purdue Pharma PAC donations to Republicans (Open Secrets)
– Cartoons for perspective and visual interest (Political Cartoons)
– More information (OpenSecrets, Follow The Money, Empire of Pain)
Check this map with data from County Health Rankings to create the base map which is overlaid with district boundaries and the Congressperson and Senators representing that area. This map has data for 3,144 counties which can be easily searched.
Opioid epidemic background
“Some 500,000 Americans have died from opioid-related overdoses since 1999, and millions more have become hopelessly addicted. Not all of this wreckage can be laid at the feet of the Sacklers, but a lot of it can. By aggressively promoting OxyContin, their company, Purdue Pharma, ushered in a new paradigm under which doctors began routinely prescribing the potent and dangerously addictive narcotics. In the process, the Sacklers became fabulously rich, reaping, according to one expert’s court testimony, some $13 billion.
OxyContin was their cash cow and they milked every last dollar from it despite knowing what it was doing to the country.
If there’s one difference between El Chapo and the Sacklers, it’s that El Chapo is paying for his crimes with a life sentence in a supermax prison in Colorado while the Sacklers get to hold onto their freedom and most of their money.” — NY Times review of the book “Empire of Pain”
Political donations
“Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, under scrutiny for role in opioid crisis, are big political spenders. As the opioid crisis continues to ravage the country killing more than 130 people per day in the U.S., the makers of the addictive opioid OxyContin face tightening legal challenges. The company, Purdue Pharma, has been run by the wealthy and influential Sackler family for generations. In 2016, the Sacklers were listed by Forbes as the 19th richest family in America with a $13 billion net worth. Both Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler clan have been active in the political realm.
The family has favored Republican and conservative causes which have received 52 percent of the family’s total contributions. The overall top recipient of the 12 family members’ contributions was the Republican National Committee (RNC) with $252,700.” — Open Secrets
“Americans should be empowered by access to clear and unbiased information about money’s role in politics and policy and to use that knowledge to strengthen our democracy.” (Open Secrets).
TakeAway: Vote for President Biden and Democrats to fix this system that billionaires have rigged with the MAGA GOP.
Deepak
Reposted from Democracy Labs with permission.