Whether PE murdered your grandmother by buying her care-home and putting each worker in charge of 30 seniors:
or poisoned your kids by filling your neighborhood with carcinogens:
limited liability wipes the slate clean.
26/
She sees judges like Drain motivated by "personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase – very appealing to certain personalities."
Thus, these judges are "willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…"
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/02870w66d
24/
This kind of judge-shopping goes beyond the Sacklers; the cases that Drain and co preside over make a mockery of the idea of America as a land of equal justice. "Prepack" and "drive-through" bankruptcies are reliable get-out-of-jail-free cards for capitalism's worst monsters: #PrivateEquity firms.
25/
She sees judges like Drain motivated by "personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase – very appealing to certain personalities."
Thus, these judges are "willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…"
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/02870w66d
24/
(They also captioned the case with "RDD, for "Robert D Drain.")
They chose their judge, and the judge obliged. UCLA Law's Lynn LoPucki is one of the leading scholars of these bankruptcy "megacases," and has written extensively on why these three judges are so deferential to corporate criminals seeking to flense themselves of culpability.
23/
Drain is also uniquely hostile to independent examiners, "an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate 'fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851339
If you're the Sacklers, hoping to keep two thirds of your billions and extinguish all claims by your victims, there is no better helpmeet than Judge Robert Drain of the Southern District of New York.
21/
They *really* wanted to get their case in front of Judge Drain, the nation's most enthusiastic supporter of "third party releases," through which bankrupt billionaires can wipe the slate clean, securing dismissals of all claims by the people they wronged.
20/
These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory "that casts the invention of the #LimitedLiabilityCorporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity":
https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/
Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation's biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?
They cheat.
18/
For example: when GM was facing bankruptcy, it argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem, and got in front of Judge Drain.
The Sacklers were - characteristically - even *more* brazen.
19/
These "#CoerciveRestructuringTechniques" are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills - these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.
Three judges - #DavidJones and #MarvinIsgur of Houston and #BobDrain of New York - hear 96% of the country's large corporate bankruptcies:
https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html
17/
These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory "that casts the invention of the #LimitedLiabilityCorporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity":
https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/
Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation's biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?
They cheat.
18/
Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who'd undergone Senate confirmation:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished
16/
These "#CoerciveRestructuringTechniques" are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills - these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.
Three judges - #DavidJones and #MarvinIsgur of Houston and #BobDrain of New York - hear 96% of the country's large corporate bankruptcies:
https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html
17/
Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who'd undergone Senate confirmation:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished
16/
This transferred jurisdiction over these claims from the regular court system to the bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge - not a jury - would decide how much each of these claims was worth, and then what how much of that worth these victims (now recast as creditors) would be entitled to through the bankruptcy.
15/
When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation
But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one's balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.
13/
The Sacklers are a case-study in how a corrupt bankruptcy can be conducted.
Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.
First, they converted their victims' right to compensation into "property" that the Sacklers themselves owned.
14/
Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded - and received - extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/
When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with *trillions* in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.
12/
When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation
But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one's balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.
13/
Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded - and received - extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/
When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with *trillions* in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.
12/
They invented a modern #ElitePhilanthropy playbook that #AnandGiridharadas documents in his must-read *Winners Take All,* about the charity-industrial complex that washes away an ocean of blood with a trickle of money:
As part of this PR exercise, the individual Sacklers kept their names and images out of the public eye. For years, there were virtually no news-service photos of individual Sacklers.
9/
The Sacklers didn't invent this trick. Think of the way that history's great monsters - Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford - are remembered today for the foundations and charities that bear their names, not for the untold misery they inflicted on their workers, their crimes against their customers, and the corruption of governments.
But the Sacklers made those Gilded Age barons seem like amateurs.
8/
The legacy of this smear campaign is still with us, both in the contempt for people struggling with addiction and in the cruel barriers placed between people in unbearable agony and medical relief.
But mostly, the Sacklers kept their names out of it. They laundered their reputations by donating a homeopathic fraction of their vast drug fortune to art galleries and museums in a bid to make their names synonymous with good deeds.
7/
This scam had a natural best-before date. As ODs flooded America's ERs and bodies piled up in America's morgues, it became increasingly clear that something was rotten. The Sacklers pursued a multipronged campaign to keep the truth from coming to light, and to keep the billions flowing.
On the one hand, they hired #McKinsey to find novel ways to encourage doctors to keep writing prescriptions and to convince pharmacists to turn a blind eye to abuse.
5/
The saga of the #Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed
1/
But there's an unexpected twist to this tale. After the Sacklers procured a sham bankruptcy that denied their victims the right to sue while leaving their fortune largely intact, the #SupremeCourt - yes, *this* Supreme Court - saw through the scam and froze the process, pending a full hearing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-opioid-settlement.html
2/
The saga of the #Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed
1/