The Sacklers will see you now
From the waiting room
In a healthcare waiting room? Get ready for a long, sad wait.
Homicidal corporate greed is literally personified in the private sector by the Sacklers. Their pushing OxyContin addiction was culpable in untold ruined lives and deaths. Highly visible donations to hospitals (as above), while rising to great heights of irony, cannot perfume the social and physical corpses the Sackler family left behind.
It used to be the acknowledged and respected goal of US federal agencies—including the FDA, EPA, CDC, OSHA, CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), etc.—to offer the public some protection against the willingness of corporations like Purdue Pharma to shore up their bottom lines at the expense of the health, safety, and even the lives of workers, consumers, and the environment. The efficacy of these agencies—always compromised to a lamentable extent by the influence of profit-maximizing corporations as well as Congressional apathy and/or corruption—is now being further undermined by pervasive attacks on science, expertise, and the public sector itself. Under Trump, more than 100,000 civil servants have been lost to firing or buyouts.
That war on good governance has been personified by Elon Musk and his DOGE-thugs. And even if Musk has been X-ed out, the damage continues and is escalating—orchestrated as ever by Trump and Project 2025.
These figures on Trump’s bill, now headed to the Senate, are from Robert B. Hubbell’s excellent Substack newsletter:
Thank you for cutting to the chase…
They sure know how to exploit the system, rules and procedures every single day. They never learned compassion but they sure learned cruelty.