Category Archives: Profiteering

‘I don’t know how they live with themselves’ – artist Nan Goldin​ takes on the billionaire family behind OxyContin | Art and design | The Guardian

Source: ‘I don’t know how they live with themselves’ – artist Nan Goldin takes on the billionaire family behind OxyContin | Art and design | The Guardian

the Sacklers, who are based in New York, have donated millions to the arts and sponsored faculties at Yale and many other universities. In each case, the family’s name is displayed prominently as the benefactor. Forbes listed the collective estimated worth of the 20 core family members at $14bn (£10bn) in 2015, partly derived from $35bn in sales revenue from OxyContin between 1995 and 2015.

But few know their wealth comes from Purdue Pharma, a private Connecticut company the family developed and wholly owns. In 1995, the company revolutionised the prescription painkiller market with the invention of OxyContin, a drug that is a legal, concentrated, chemical version of morphine or heroin. It was designed to be safe; when it first came to market, its slow-release formula was unique. After winning government approval it was hailed as a medical breakthrough, which Goldin now refers to as “magical thinking”.

It was aggressively marketed to doctors – many of whom were taken on lavish junkets, given misleading information and paid to give talks on the drug – while patients were wrongly told the pills were a reliable long-term solution to chronic pain, and in some cases offered coupons for a month’s free sample.

Goldin, 64, is incensed that no one in the Sackler family is being held to account. She has created a campaign to try to shame the family into paying for rehab and overdose antidotes instead of patios in art museums. “I’m not asking the museums to give the money back,” she says, “but I don’t want them to take any more from the Sacklers, and I want them to put out statements in solidarity with my campaign.”

US sanctions have Russian oligarchs lobbying hard — Quartz

Anxiety in Moscow is deepening over an imminent new US sanctions list. A leading Russian paper estimates that 300 oligarchs could be named. To avoid inclusion on the list, some are reportedly changing their schedules to avoid being seen with president Vladimir Putin. Others are liquidating holdings that might be exposed. Mikhail Fridman, head of…

Source: US sanctions have Russian oligarchs lobbying hard — Quartz

Legislation protecting Netanyahu brings Israeli parliament to a new low – Smells really bad – wonder if their Supreme Court will do anything?

If the police can publish their recommendations regarding the bribery allegations plaguing Netanyahu, there could be an early election. So the coalition partners hold their noses

Source: Legislation protecting Netanyahu brings Israeli parliament to a new low

Trump commerce secretary’s business links with Putin family laid out in leaked files

Wilbur Ross stands to profit from company run by Russians, some of whom are under US sanctions

Source: Trump commerce secretary’s business links with Putin family laid out in leaked files

 

 

In 2014, Ross led a €1bn takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, a favoured destination for Moscow oligarchs seeking to store their wealth. The bank’s biggest shareholder at the time was the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. In 2008, as the US began to fall into a financial crisis, Rybolovlev bought a Florida mansion from Trump for $95m. The future president had paid $41m for it four years earlier.

Also invested in the bank takeover was the billionaire Russian industrialist Viktor Vekselberg. Vekselberg, who owns the world’s biggest collection of Fabergé eggs, attended the now infamous December 2015 dinner in Moscow for the Kremlin TV channel RT, where Trump’s future national security adviser Michael Flynn was photographed next to Putin.

Ross sat on the senior leadership team of Bank of Cyprus alongside Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB colleague of Putin’s who is also on the board of several state corporations in Moscow.

And in 2015, while Ross was vice-chairman of the bank, its Russia-based businesses were sold off to Artem Avetisyan, a Russian businessman who had been appointed by Putin to lead an agency responsible for strengthening ties between the Kremlin and business.

Plot behind Caceres murder in Honduras, says legal panel | News | DW | 31.10.2017

Records had shown multiple communications between suspected gunmen and an unnamed DESA official, according to GAIPE findings reported by Associated Press.An international outcry ensued after the murder of Caceres who with her movement Copinh led indigenous Lenca peoples in opposing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam project.Construction was subsequently suspended when investors, including a Dutch bank and a Finnish fund, froze funding.

Source: Plot behind Caceres murder in Honduras, says legal panel | News | DW | 31.10.2017

Scott Pruitt’s EPA Just Shut the Door on Independent Scientists | Earthjustice

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decreed that scientists who receive EPA funding for their research may no longer sit on key scientific advisory boards. This policy will freeze out many academic experts who rely on public grants to conduct independent studies. Pruitt also dismissed independent scientists from several important scientific bodies and replaced them with industry insiders.

Source: Scott Pruitt’s EPA Just Shut the Door on Independent Scientists | Earthjustice

The 14 Stereotypes That Facebook Assigns To All Of Us: SFist

Zuckerberg and company seem stuck in a cushy Silicon Valley mindset that assigns actual reality to the milk-and-cookies stereotypes that investors and advertisers are comfortable with. The monster they’ve created is being used for far more sinister purposes than what falls within purview of the company advertising parameters. Facebook remains flat-footed and clumsy in response to troll accounts that literally call for U.S. violence, and internationally, use of Facebook to cause real-life mass violence.There is a popular Silicon Valley notion that tech execs like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Sergey Brin are the best and brightest minds of our era. But if their platforms are being used in ways they didn’t anticipate and still can’t control, well, doesn’t that inherently make them not best and brightest minds of our era?

Source: The 14 Stereotypes That Facebook Assigns To All Of Us: SFist

How saving West African forests might have prevented the Ebola epidemic | Vital Signs | The Guardian – “Bingo! What I have been saying for past 5 years.”

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa may have surprised most of the medical establishment – this is the first such outbreak in the region – but the risk had been steadily rising for at least a decade. The risk had grown so high, in fact, that this outbreak was almost inevitable and very possibly predictable.All that was needed was to see the danger was a bat’s eye view of the region. Once blanketed with forests, West Africa has been skinned alive over the last decade. Guinea’s rainforests have been reduced by 80%, while Liberia has sold logging rights to over half its forests. Within the next few years Sierra Leone is on track to be completely deforested.This matters because those forests were habitat for fruit bats, Ebola’s reservoir host. With their homes cut down around them, the bats are concentrating into the remnants of their once-abundant habitat. At the same time, mining has become big business in the region, employing thousands of workers who regularly travel into bat territory to get to the mines.

Source: How saving West African forests might have prevented the Ebola epidemic | Vital Signs | The Guardian