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The United States is suffering through many crises right now, but Americans still had things to be thankful for over the Thanksgiving holiday. For starters, Purdue Pharmaceutical has finally been destroyed. The OxyContin producer has pleaded guilty to a series of crimes, and it will be dissolved after as much money as possible has been extracted from it to settle lawsuits.
Of course, not nearly enough justice has been done. Purdue’s former owners, the Sackler family, will remain enormously wealthy even after all settlements are paid out. The Sacklers, and most others associated with the company, are unlikely to ever spend a day in prison, even though they truthfully deserve to be numbered among the most abominable criminals in American history.
Still, at least some measure of justice has been done. The same cannot be said for one of Purdue’s co-conspirators — the consulting giant McKinsey & Company. If President Trump wishes to strike another blow for ordinary Americans against the elites who have brought the country to the brink of ruin, he should act immediately to destroy McKinsey for good.
Documents unearthed through a series of lawsuits have made it plain that McKinsey was a full-blown co-conspirator in Purdue’s effort to sell billions of dollars in addictive, deadly painkillers while escaping any consequences.
By 2017 the destructive impact of opioid painkillers was obvious to the entire country. In 2007, 18,515 Americans died from overdosing on an opioid drug. In 2017, 47,600 died that way. While heroin and fentanyl caused most of those deaths, thousands of those junkies got their start abusing Purdue’s infamous painkiller, which was promoted to the public with lies that it was less addictive than other opioids. By 2017, the only public debate should have been what punishment was fitting for Purdue executives. But at McKinsey, consultants were looking for ways to sell more pills.
According to records revealed last week, in 2017 McKinsey pitched Purdue on an idea to boost drug sales by paying out rebates to retailers whenever their customers died of drug overdoses.
McKinsey also, among several options, proposed that Purdue pay rebates for opioid overdoses or opioid use disorder cased by its product…not to the victims, but to the Pharmacy Benefits Managers like CVS and Anthem. See this slide (this is all from a court filing last week) pic.twitter.com/Kcd9dcp1Y6
— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike) November 27, 2020
For every OxyContin-related “event,” McKinsey proposed paying health providers a rebate of up to $14,810. The rebates would serve many purposes, not all of them stated explicitly. Besides shielding those providers from possible lawsuit damages, the rebates would also compensate them for the losses from killing off their own customers.
In another email recently brought to light, McKinsey executive Martin Elling told senior partner Arnab Ghatak that McKinsey at minimum should be deleting all its emails and documents pertaining to Purdue. Elling asked Ghatak if McKinsey should take any other steps to shield itself from responsibility.
It’s morbid and horrific — and perfectly up McKinsey’s alley. It’s already been known for two years that McKinsey’s consultants pitched Purdue on ways to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales:
In 2009, McKinsey wrote a report for Purdue Pharma saying that new sales tactics would increase sales of OxyContin by $200 million to $400 million annually and “suggested sales ‘drivers’ based on the ideas that opioids reduce stress and make patients more optimistic and less isolated,” according to the lawsuit.
It was that year that Craig Landau, then Purdue’s chief medical officer and now its chief executive, had an email exchange that included a McKinsey consultant about how to counter mothers whose teenagers had overdosed on OxyContin. The solution: bring in patients to emphasize how the drug helps to relieve pain.
In 2013, amid the rapidly intensifying opioid crisis, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the Justice Department reached a settlement with Walgreens, the second-biggest American pharmacy chain. Walgreens agreed to new procedures to crack down on illegal prescriptions … According to the lawsuit, McKinsey recommended that Purdue “lobby Walgreens’ leaders to loosen up.” [NY Times]
None of this was happening in the 1990s, when McKinsey might at least have pled ignorance about what OxyContin was doing. It was happening just a few years ago, when evidence of the drug’s destructive power was overwhelming. McKinsey made the calculated decision to make money by furthering the deadliest drug epidemic in American history.
McKinsey has done more than enough for us recognize what they actually are: A moral offender as bad as Purdue Pharma itself.
This is all horrifying, but it will be even worse if McKinsey is allowed to get away with it. That is what the vast majority of America’s power structure wants to happen. They want Americans to think it is somehow “unreasonable” to hold a company responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people. The decrepit ruling class of America is built entirely on the assumption that consequences are for chumps. That’s why the architects of the Iraq War disaster have all thrived professionally. In America, the corrupt and largely incompetent ruling class is defined by immunity from consequences. They will always have well-paid jobs, not matter how disastrously or immorally they behave in their previous ones.
President Trump could change that. Like most major consulting companies, McKinsey has many clients in the government. From 2006 to 2019, McKinsey collected close to a billion dollars from the federal government thanks to a lucrative arrangement with the General Services Administration (an arrangement where they overcharged U.S. taxpayers by almost $70 million). In 2020, the company has collected more than $100 million advising all levels of government on how to handle the coronavirus.
So the question is, why tolerate any of this? McKinsey collaborated with Purdue Pharma to maximize the sales of a drug that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Purdue has belatedly been recognized as a de facto criminal enterprise. So why not treat McKinsey the same way? President Trump should bar McKinsey from receiving any government contracts, or contracting with any recipient of federal dollars, pending a full and aggressive criminal investigation of the company’s actions. And don’t settle for meaningless fees or guilty pleas by McKinsey itself. Introduce real accountability. Consultants who conspired with Purdue to keep killing Americans should be treated as the criminals they are. Charge them with conspiracy to commit murder.
McKinsey is a particularly worthy target, because it’s not like they provide any other valuable service to the American people. Consulting companies create nothing, and provide no useful service that improves the lives of regular people. Despite this, they vacuum up a huge proportion of America’s young talent. It’s no coincidence that Pete Buttigieg’s first job after being a Rhodes Scholar was at McKinsey. Practically every aspiring aspiring technocrat passes through the company or one of its competitors as a young adult.
In 2019, 18 percent of Harvard’s graduating class took a consulting job. These young consultants have helped spread a gospel of outsourcing, temp work, and a general gutting of life for the American worker. While other workers have fallen further and further behind, McKinsey’s consultants receive spectacular salaries for their role entrenching America’s modern caste system.
There are few institutions that embody the evil, superficiality and ugliness of globalism than McKinsey, and the President should immediately act to destroy the company as one last great achievement during his first four years in office. Even if the worst should occur on January 20th and Joe Biden becomes president, he would be placed in a position of having to actively renew McKinsey’s blood-stained contracts, while no longer prosecuting them for the deaths of vulnerable Americans. It will breathe some welcome honesty into American politics, and make it starkly clear who has taken the side of ordinary Americans, and who has sided with Wall Street and Silicon Valley to achieve their destruction.
It is bad enough that Biden and his team of globalists profit from endless wars and outsourcing middle-class jobs overseas. It is an unacceptable insult and an unforgivable injury that the same globalists should fatten their purses still more off of the depression and despair left in the wake of these policies. For American patriots the moral high ground has never been clearer, and the obligation to completely replace and destroy what is left of America’s corrupt ruling class never more urgent. McKinsey delenda est.
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