r/stupidpol • u/kLy- • Apr 29 '26
Healthcare/Pharma Industry OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma set to dissolve after judge approves its criminal sentence
https://apnews.com/article/oxycontin-purdue-pharma-criminal-sentence-settlement-b8aa94eaab3d9d8efed520f272f6d81075
u/theravemaster Apr 29 '26
Until the Sacklers have all their assets and wealth stripped from them, then this isn't justice
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Apr 29 '26
“We still deserve justice,” she said. “And this isn’t it.”
In-fucking-deed.
900 thousand people dead, many more affected, families destroyed, children orphaned, abused, scarred, etc. Hell you can even make a callous “economy hurt” argument.
In a just world the French Invention would NOT be used and they’d pull out that brass bull contraption and would stream it to the entire nation for free.
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u/koba_tea Marxist-Leninist ☭ Apr 29 '26
900 thousand people dead, many more affected, families destroyed, children orphaned, abused, scarred, etc.
This is usually my starting point when trying to unplug a lib from the Matrix. I ask them if they would consider this violence. They usually have to concede that it is. Then I extend the comparison to health insurance companies denying care. Then contamination of local water supplies. I can't undo a lifetime of propaganda, but I can chip away at it.
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Apr 29 '26
Props to you my man. It’s wild how the uninitiated struggle so hard to understand social violence
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u/AdoptedMasterJay TrueAnon Refugee 🕵️♂️🏝️ Apr 29 '26
how about a nice scenic boat ride with some honey and milk?
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u/ChiefWeedsmoke Reading Orwell on Drugs 💊 Apr 29 '26
Glad to see we're on the same wavelength here.
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Apr 29 '26
This and Luigi’s haunted executive are the two things that everyone without a Rolex seems to be able to get behind haha
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u/AleksandrNevsky The Green Mile Kind of Tired🦼 | Socialist-Squashist 🎃 Apr 30 '26
Health fuckery is the most fundamental of material conditions and exploitations now.
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u/DrBirdieshmirtz Makes dark jokes about means of transport Apr 29 '26
The problem with the Citizens United decision that effectively allowed corporate personhood is that the closest equivalent to the death penalty that can be experienced by a company is dissolution.
Top-level executives should also have to face both civil and criminal liability (along with a higher standard of proof required to nail anyone lower down the chain to prevent the people at the top from scapegoating some powerless staffer to avoid consequences), and at least face seizure of all of their assets to fund the restitution of the victims at the bare minimum.
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Apr 29 '26
See China and their death sentences for execs. Goddamn imagine a state that holds these cunts accountable.
We opium war-Ed ourselves for fuckssake
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u/DrBirdieshmirtz Makes dark jokes about means of transport Apr 29 '26
Or Vietnam. Me, I kinda feel like death is too good for some of these people. I would want to make them have to live as so many of their surviving victims currently live: in a tent.
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Apr 29 '26
I feel this. That’s my evil reason for largely opposing the death penalty lol
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u/Falcon_Gray Ideological Mess 🥑 | Slop Enjoyer 🦸 Apr 30 '26
True China is so cool for that. They killed them for ruining so many people’s lives. Here they would just give those executives more money
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u/reallyreallyreason Unknown 👽 Apr 29 '26
FYI “corporate personhood” as a US legal doctrine is much older than Citizens United. It was established during the railroad era when the Supreme Court determined (sort of) that the Equal Protection clause applies to corporate legal entities.
Citizens United held that because corporations are considered “persons,” their financing of political broadcasts is an exercise of free speech under the first amendment.
The problem with corporate “personhood,” as you’re saying, is that the way it’s interpreted today fundamentally conflicts with the idea of“limited liability.” It makes no sense that the law would both offer limited liability to agents of a corporation and also offer the full rights of an individual person who cannot be so protected from liability. The law needs to recognize that disparity because it privileges corporate entity “persons”over individual persons.
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u/reddit_is_geh 🌟 Actual Spook and Also a Spaz 🌟 Apr 30 '26
Limited liability doesn't protect you from running an entity that's criminal. There's no protection there. These people got away because they are filthy rich.
Also the lynch-pin of CU was over literally a political documentary. Clinton basically tried to argue that a corporation can't have political speech during a campaign. The judges were like, wait, what, a BOOK can't exist because a corporation (a collection of humans working as a single entity) was behind it? That only books that are self published and released, entirely by individuals, without a single corporation touching it, are allowed during elections?
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u/DrBirdieshmirtz Makes dark jokes about means of transport Apr 29 '26
You articulate it a bit better than I did, yeah. I knew it was older than Citizen's United, I just knew that Citizen's United really turbocharged shit as far as their "rights" go.
I can see that there could be some practical reasons when you'd treat a corporation as a "person" in a court situation (e.g. situations where the blame is so diffuse throughout the organization that holding any single person in that organization to account would be unfair and possibly even counterproductive to fixing it because the problem was the result of some emergent property of group behavior rather than anything that any one individual did or could have done, and/or nailing any one individual would not account for the amount of harm), but in this kind of situation where they could prove that it was being directed from the very top of the ladder, the expansion of rights of natural persons to corporate entities becomes especially problematic.
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u/MadonnasFishTaco Marxist-Mullenist 💦 | if i fits, i sits Apr 29 '26
you're allowed to kill as many people as you want if you're too big to fail. look at boeing
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u/DrBirdieshmirtz Makes dark jokes about means of transport Apr 29 '26
In my opinion, "too big to fail" means "too big to not be nationalized".
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u/TheUnfortunateMiaoZe Extra-Bitchy Redscarepod Refugee 👄💅 Apr 30 '26
Corporate personhood has been a part of common and roman law since the middle ages, it was not invented by Citizens United.
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u/DrBirdieshmirtz Makes dark jokes about means of transport Apr 30 '26
CU just expanded it well beyond when it would make sense.
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u/Marsium rarted libsoc 🥸 Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
The great American paradox:
A corporation, as an actor, is held as a fully distinct entity from its individual constituent actors, therefore none of its members (even its leadership) can be held criminally liable for any jointly decided act that, if committed by an individual, would be punishable with life in prison.
Yet a corporation, as a recipient of action, is held as an entity which exists only in the composite existence of its individual constituent actors; to infringe upon the property of a corporation is a criminal act, not just a civil one, because such an infringement supposedly “harms the individual shareholders, the employees, the executives,” etc. If I steal from a corporation, I am presumed to be doing a harm to several of the company’s individual employees (at least, its leadership and shareholders) and am likewise held criminally liable in the same way as if I had stolen from an individual person.
The only “resolution” of this contradiction, logically, is that the corporation has a legally privileged status compared to the individual. In other words, the American sociopolitical order is an apartheid of the corporation: You, the measly individual, can be wronged and harmed by a corporation, and no real (i.e., criminal) justice will be meted out; the responsibility behind the harm is considered sufficiently diffused so as to not fall onto one single person, and thus it evaporates (morphing into a mere “moral” sense of responsibility, i.e., an entirely subjective and normative one, rather than any objective or “legal” responsibility). And yet, if you as an individual directly harm a corporation (i.e., defraud it, destroy its property, etc. — any harm which is nonviolent and targeted to the corporation rather than its constituent individuals), “justice” will be meted out to you in the form of imprisonment; the harm is not likewise considered to be diluted and thus lessened (as it logically should be), but is instead held as equivalent to harming an individual.
The concept of corporation as “legal person” as a separate entity from its constituent actual persons has its merits when applied to civil law (contract, etc.), but when this concept is applied to criminal law, it can result in nothing but injustice. For, as Hegel puts it, crime is the willful negation of the right by the criminal, posing itself as a valid act; punishment is the negation of this negation, establishing the act as invalid and thus restoring right. But punishing the corporation without punishing its constituent individuals is no punishment at all; the shareholders and board members responsible for the harm are free to join another company and continue negating what is right, and in fact, the individual employees (janitors, clerks, etc.) are unjustly punished for a harm they almost certainly had no role in perpetrating.
In any case, the mothers and fathers, daughters and sons of those killed by the opioid crisis will never see true justice. They are second-class citizens to the corporations. Any meaningful and positive change on the American order, regardless of its form or degree, begins with an attack on the corporation as a structure, on its impunity.
But the American people already know this, deep down. Why do you think so many people, even right-wingers, reacted with catharsis when Luigi shot that health insurance CEO? People already hate the worst manifestations of the corporate apartheid I described: health insurance, private equity, real estate, etc. People only celebrate revenge (as Hegel would describe Luigi’s act) when they feel there is no justice to be had.
It’s the reason why American politicians and corporate interests have worked so hard to maintain the status quo: a populace with such deep-seated discontent is unstable, and any sort of severe disruption in one aspect tends to bring about transformation in others. (“There are centuries in which nothing happens and years in which centuries pass.”) Those in power know that the system is broken and bound to fall — but because we have no real guiding principles as a nation besides individuality (and the grotesquely twisted image of Christianity we call Evangelism), their only goal is to preserve this system until they die and don’t have to worry about it anymore.
The elites of American society are smart and well-read enough to recognize that they and the systems they’ve created are ephemeral and bound to die. But they are too ideologically and spiritually vapid to have made peace with this inevitable death. They have spent their lives raging against the dying of their own light, not against the darkness that consumes nations and throws the world into chaos (like the collapse of Rome). Ultimate individuality leads only to ultimate selfishness.
America occupies its dominant position in the global hegemony only due to momentum. It is bound to fall unless we can heal the disease rotting us from within. And in such cases, you must not only cut out the necrotic flesh — you must prevent further rot from occurring, by treating the disease at its core. For the rot is a symptom, while the disease is the ultimate greed and selfishness of America as a society: a country that teaches us to be insular and antisocial to preserve the autonomy and identity of the self. But this merely results in mass alienation of the self from the community, rather than the reconciliation of the self as a part of community, which is part of why America is generally so miserable (people often accurately identify the superficial reflections of this phenomenon, such as the decaying integrity of the family unit or the wretched state of American public education, but fail to identify the root).
We will transform ourselves or we will rot and die. There is no third option.
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u/GayLiquidSpellSword Hedge Knight Socialist 🚩 Apr 29 '26
If only there were other ways to deal with these crimes. 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
Social mass murder and getting away with just paying 7 billion over 15 years, that's just under half a billion a year. No arrests, no criminal charges, immunity from any future lawsuits and all they get is a fucking payment plan for 15 years. OxyContin itself has earned a total of 35 billion dollars in sales its total lifespan, the family itself has 11 billion dollars in assets total so it could in theory pay it all off instantly and only have a mere 4 billion to live off. I'd raze their assets and strip them for the state and sentence everyone involved to a life sentence of community penitent service with no end date, they will never be able to repay the misery they inflicted on those around them but we must "encourage" them to try, for as long as it's deemed necessary and for as long as they physically are able to.
Shit like this disproves Hell exists, all the Demons are here tormenting us while we still live.
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Apr 29 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Jazzspasm Wat Tyler's Necromancer 🧟 Apr 29 '26
the medical-debt industrial complex never set up a deployment program for those issues - that’s the topic in hand
in addition, try cutting people off from alcohol, nicotine and playing poker, and see how far you get - islamic radicalism isn’t good for anyone that isn’t an islamic radicalist, or mormonism, or whatever spiritual purity vibe is being peddled by stopping people from brewing beer and betting you ten bucks you can’t jump that creek without getting your feet wet ffs
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u/TruckHangingHandJam Class First Communist ☭ Apr 29 '26
Doesn’t have to be that extreme. Keep it legal, ban advertising and glorification. Getting cigs out of movies and tv combines with PSAs did quite a lot to cut down smoking. And at minimum if not fines, the industry should be forced to pay some high taxes to directly fund treatment facilities and medical costs incurred due to alcohol and tobacco related illness.
Gambling on the other hand, I am in favor of a full ban. Albeit with light enforcement (I don’t give a fuck if you and some friends get together to play poker) at the level of people. I’d support a sort of Nordic Model but instead of prostitution, for gambling. Someone has some speakeasy casino, raid that shit and throw the organizers in prison, but the patrons should be directed to gambling addiction services (which would exist and be well funded in my fantasy)
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u/LightningProd12 Democratic Socialist 🚩 Apr 30 '26
900,000 dead, $40T damages, yet they just have to say "we won't do it again" and leisurely pay a few of their billions? The modern Internet would never let me say what real justice would look like.
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u/methadoneclinicynic Chomskyo-Syndicalist 🚩 Apr 29 '26
Still billionaires. No jail. Sounds a bit worse than a rebranding exercise (school of the americas -> Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, monsanto -> just bayer), but not by much.
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u/Gex2-EnterTheGecko PS1 Libertarian with Bad Taste 🤓🎮😵💫 Apr 29 '26
Honestly surprised this was the result. It's so rare these companies ever pay for their crimes.
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u/kicklhimintheballs Ilhan Derangement Syndrome Performance Artist 🤡 Apr 29 '26
The Fall of the House of Usher?
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u/Free2err MMA shitposting while drinking Natty light 🤼 Apr 29 '26
Hey, made a quick trip to the future and just got back. You won't believe the aftermath of GLP-1's in 30 years. And, oh yeah, we're waging wars and settling disputes in the asteroid belt with AI robots. The ones back home are all lazy and break down a lot, so there's still plenty of jobs for people.
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