Two New Yorkers were charged with possessing more than $1 million in stolen goods and reselling them through their business, Rehana’s Cosmetics, a perfume and cosmetics store in Midtown Manhattan, the borough’s district attorney Alvin Bragg said at a press conference.
“Through our investigation, we found that Rehana’s Cosmetics was well-known to shoplifters, who would willingly bring them stolen items,” Bragg said. “We allege that created a motive for shoplifters to steal, and thus that the defendants, we allege, were drivers of crime.”
Rehana’s Cosmetics, Bragg alleged, claimed to be a “beauty and perfume store,” but was instead found to have hundreds of boxes filled with products not typically found at such stores, including designer purses, over-the-counter medications, kitchenware and more. He said the defendants obtained the stolen items from shoplifters for the purpose of reselling.
“The root cause we allege here is greed,” Bragg said. “They were doing this to make money. This is the motive that is old as time.”
While Bragg was unable to give a specific number when asked how many stores are believed to be engaging in similar operations, he noted that there have been “far too many assaults” on employees at stores that have experienced theft.
“By using a multi-pronged prosecution strategy, we can make a lasting dent in retail theft that will keep our store employees safe, cut off the incentives to steal and resell stolen goods and allow our retail sector to thrive,” he said.
In a statement to CNBC, a Macy’s spokesperson said, “We appreciate the work of law enforcement and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and defer any comments about the case to them.”
A spokesperson for CVS said the drugstore is “grateful” for the work of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
“Our partnerships with law enforcement are integral to our efforts to prevent organized retail crime (ORC) rings from stealing and then selling stolen goods online. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with the DA’s Office as we work to combat ORC across New York City,” the spokesperson said.
A Walgreens spokesperson told CNBC earlier this year that the chain is taking steps to “safely deter theft” and “deliver the best patient and customer experience.”
The other retailers alleged to have stolen goods included in the bust did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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Fascism became a swear word in the US and UK during the Second World War. It has been ever since, to the point that the content of the term has been drained away completely. It is not a system of political economy but an insult.
If we go back a decade before the war, you find a completely different situation. Read any writings from polite society from 1932 to 1940 or so, and you find a consensus that freedom and democracy, along with Enlightenment-style liberalism of the 18th century, were completely doomed. They should be replaced by some version of what was called the planned society, of which fascism was one option.
A book by that name appeared in 1937 as published by the prestigious Prentice-Hall, and it included contributions by top academics and high-profile influencers. It was highly praised by all respectable outlets at the time.
Everyone in the book was explaining how the future would be constructed by the finest minds who would manage whole economies and societies, the best and the brightest with full power. All housing should be provided by government, for example, and food too, but with the cooperation of private corporations. That seems to be the consensus in the book. Fascism was treated as a legitimate path. Even the word totalitarianism was invoked without opprobrium but rather with respect.
The book has been memory-holed of course.
You will notice that the section on economics includes contributions by Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin. Yes, their ideas and political rule were part of the prevailing conversation. It is in this essay, likely ghostwritten by Professor Giovanni Gentile, Minister of Public Education, in which Mussolini offered this concise statement: “Fascism is more appropriately called corporatism, for it is the perfect merge of State and corporate power.”
All of this became rather embarrassing after the war so it was largely forgotten. But the affection on the part of many sectors of the US ruling class had for fascism was still in place. It merely took on new names.
As a result, the lesson of the war, that the US should stand for freedom above all else while wholly rejecting fascism as a system, was largely buried. And generations have been taught to regard fascism as nothing but a quirky and failed system of the past, leaving the word as an insult to fling at in any way deemed reactionary or old-fashioned, which makes no sense.
There is valuable literature on the topic and it bears reading. One book that is particularly insightful is The Vampire Economy by Günter Reimann, a financier in Germany who chronicled the dramatic changes to industrial structures under the Nazis. In a few short years, from 1933 to 1939, a nation of enterprise and small shopkeepers was converted to a corporate-dominated machine that gutted the middle class and cartelized industry in preparation for war.
The book was published in 1939 before the invasion of Poland and the onset of Europe-wide war, and manages to convey the grim reality just before hell broke loose. On a personal note, I spoke to the author (real name: Hans Steinicke) briefly before he died, in order to gain permission to post the book, and he was astonished that anyone cared about it.
“The corruption in fascist countries arises inevitably from the reversal of the roles of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power,” wrote Reimann.
The Nazis were not hostile to business as a whole but only opposed traditional, independent, family-owned, small businesses that offered nothing for purposes of nation-building and war planning. The crucial tool to make this happen was establishing the Nazi Party as the central regulator of all enterprises. The large businesses had the resources to comply and the wherewithal to develop good relations with political masters whereas the undercapitalized small businesses were squeezed to the point of extinction. You could make bank under Nazi rules provided you put first things first: regime before customers.
“Most businessmen in a totalitarian economy feel safer if they have a protector in the State or Party bureaucracy,” Reimann writes.
“They pay for their protection as did the helpless peasants of feudal days. It is inherent in the present lineup of forces, however, that the official is often sufficiently independent to take the money but fails to provide the protection.”
He wrote of “the decline and ruin of the genuinely independent businessman, who was the master of his enterprise, and exercised his property rights. This type of capitalist is disappearing but another type is prospering. He enriches himself through his Party ties; he himself is a Party member devoted to the Fuehrer, favored by the bureaucracy, entrenched because of family connections and political affiliations. In a number of cases, the wealth of these Party capitalists has been created through the Party’s exercise of naked power. It is to the advantage of these capitalists to strengthen the Party which has strengthened them. Incidentally, it sometimes happens that they become so strong that they constitute a danger to the system, upon which they are liquidated or purged.”
This was particularly true for independent publishers and distributors. Their gradual bankruptcy served to effectively nationalize all surviving media outlets who knew that it was in their interests to echo Nazi Party priorities.
Reimann wrote:
“The logical outcome of a fascist system is that all newspapers, news services, and magazines become more or less direct organs of the fascist party and State. They are governmental institutions over which individual capitalists have no control and very little influence except as they are loyal supporters or members of the all-powerful party.”
“Under fascism or any totalitarian regime an editor no longer can act independently,” wrote Reimann.
“Opinions are dangerous. He must be willing to print any ‘news’ issued by State propaganda agencies, even when he knows it to be completely at variance with the facts, and he must suppress real news which reflects upon the wisdom of the leader. His editorials can differ from another newspaper’s only in so far as he expresses the same idea in different language. He has no choice between truth and falsehood, for he is merely a State official for whom ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ do not exist as a moral problem but are identical with the interests of the Party.”
A feature of the policy included aggressive price controls. They did not work to suppress inflation but they were politically useful in other ways.
“Under such circumstances nearly every businessman necessarily becomes a potential criminal in the eyes of the Government,” wrote Reimann.
“There is scarcely a manufacturer or shopkeeper who, intentionally or unintentionally, has not violated one of the price decrees. This has the effect of lowering the authority of the State; on the other hand, it also makes the State authorities more feared, for no businessman knows when he may be severely penalized.”
From there, Reimann tells many wonderful if chilling stories about, for example, the pig farmer who faced price ceilings on his product and got around them by selling a high-priced dog alongside a low-priced pig, after which the dog was returned. This kind of maneuvering became common.
I can only highly recommend this book as a brilliant inside look at how enterprise functions under a fascist-style regime. The German case was fascism with a racialist and anti-Jewish twist for purposes of political purges. In 1939, it was not entirely obvious how this would end in mass and targeted extermination on a gargantuan scale. The German system in those days bore much resemblance to the Italian case, which was fascism without the ambition of full ethnic cleansing. In that case, it bears examination as a model for how fascism can reveal itself in other contexts.
The best book I’ve seen on the Italian case is John T. Flynn’s 1944 classic As We Go Marching. Flynn was a widely respected journalist, historian, and scholar in the 1930s who was largely forgotten after the war due to his political activities. But his outstanding scholarship stands the test of time. His book deconstructs the history of fascist ideology in Italy from a half-century prior and explains the centralizing ethos of the system, both in politics and economics.
Following an erudite examination of the main theorists, along with Flynn provides a beautiful summary.
Fascism, Flynn writes, is a form of social organization:
1. In which the government acknowledges no restraint upon its powers—totalitarianism.
2. In which this unrestrained government is managed by a dictator—the leadership principle.
3. In which the government is organized to operate the capitalist system and enable it to function under an immense bureaucracy.
4. In which the economic society is organized on the syndicalist model; that is, by producing groups formed into craft and professional categories under supervision of the state.
5. In which the government and the syndicalist organizations operate the capitalist society on the planned, autarchical principle.
6. In which the government holds itself responsible for providing the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing.
7. In which militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending.
8. In which imperialism is included as a policy inevitably flowing from militarism as well as other elements of fascism.
Each point bears longer commentary but let’s focus on number 5 in particular, with its focus on syndicalist organizations. In those days, they were large corporations run with an emphasis on union organization of the workforce. In our own times, these have been replaced by a managerial overclass in tech and pharma that have the ear of government and have developed close ties with the public sector, each depending on the other. Here is where we get the essential bones and meat of why this system is called corporatist.
In today’s polarized political environment, the left continues to worry about unbridled capitalism while the right is forever on the lookout for the enemy of full-blown socialism. Each side has reduced fascistic corporatism to a historical problem on the level of witch burning, fully conquered but useful as a historical reference to form a contemporary insult against the other side.
As a result, and armed with partisan b̻te noires that bear no resemblance to any really existing threat, hardly anyone who is politically engaged and active is fully aware that there is nothing particularly new about what is called the Great Reset. It is a corporatist model Рa combination of the worst of capitalism and socialism without limits Рof privileging the elite at the expense of the many, which is why these historical works by Reimann and Flynn seem so familiar to us today.
And yet, for some strange reason, the tactile reality of fascism in practice – not the insult but the historical system – is hardly known either in popular or academic culture. That makes it all the easier to reimplement such a system in our time.
Editor’s note: the following is the first essay in a series, written by former Moscow Times co-worker and current E.R. doctor Matt Bivens. The remaining features will be published serially on his Substack site, The 100 Days. None of the articles in the series will be paywalled.In a normal presidential election year, the opiate addiction crisis would be a front-and-center domestic issue, but for a variety of mostly illegitimate reasons, it flies somewhat under the radar. Matt’s series chronicles the surprising and little-understood reasons contributing to this man-made, rapidly worsening disaster.
Yes, we in the medical profession got millions of Americans addicted to heroin and fentanyl. But that was all just a big misunderstanding. Why get into it?
And sure, nearly one in ten adults has had a family member die from a drug overdose. Ordinary people are furious about it, too. Their under-appreciated rage drove skepticism of official COVID-19 narratives, and that same rage might sway the outcome of the Presidential election — heck, might even land us in a war with Mexico! (Wouldn’t that be the ultimate “Wag the Dog”-level distraction from those sociopaths upstairs in our House of Medicine!)
So, yes, agreed. All good points.
We medical people who see the patients and do all of the work — we, the house staff — we’re downstairs people. We can’t do anything about what goes on above. Agreed, it’s shameful how easily the upstairs sociopaths conned us, and it’s annoying to see them now so fabulously rich. But doctors being intentionallymanipulated into destroying the lives of millions — that could have happened to anyone. Why stay angry about it? Ancient history! It’s not like it’s still happening, right? (Right?)
Surely you don’t want to burn down the entire house? We work here. And the pay is not bad. Let’s just focus on the patients before us, and try to stay positive. Right?
Heroin™ — brought to you by Bayer!
As a medical student, I was once told by my attending physician that people treated with morphine for pain don’t get addicted.
Surprised, I asked, “But what about all the Civil War veterans?”
When the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, both sides demobilized a weary horde of chronically ill and wounded. Some soldiers had contracted tuberculosis, or a lingering pneumonia (in the days before antibiotics). Others had suffered field amputations with handheld saws. But whether the question was chronic coughing or terrible pain, the answer was morphine. The newly invented hypodermic needle allowed for fast-acting injections. Veterans everywhere got hooked, to the point where addiction was called “the Soldier’s Disease.” Soon morphine moved beyond the battlefield and was in use for everything from menstrual cramps to teething.
Things got so bad that when heroin (diacetylmorphine) arrived, it was welcomed as an improvement. Chemists had discovered it decades earlier, but in 1898 the pharmaceutical company Bayer started selling it as Heroisch, German for “heroic.”
Heroin was a trade name. It was Heroin™ — brought to you by Bayer!
Doctors desperate for something safer than morphine often convinced themselves this new drug wasn’t addictive.
“Heroin… possesses many advantages over morphine,” wrote a physician in 1900, in the precursor to the New England Journal of Medicine. “It is not a hypnotic… [and there is no] danger of acquiring the habit.” The philanthropic St. James Society even mounted a campaign to mail free heroin samples to morphine addicts (!), to help them break the habit.
Other doctors saw the public swilling down heroin and berated their fellow physicians for not sounding the alarm.
“The patient comes to look on heroin as a harmless sedative for his cough,” wrote one such physician in 1912, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, because too many doctors think it’s safe:
“A patient who came under my observation told a physician, who was called to treat him for an attack of laryngitis, not to give him anything that contained opium, because he had formerly been a slave to this drug. The physician replied: ‘I will give you some heroin; there is no danger of habit from that’.”
Ordinary Americans weren’t buying it, and by 1906 we had established the federal Food & Drug Administration, because moms want to know if it’s got heroin. Cure-alls like the morphine-and-alcohol-based Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup definitely did quiet fussy babies, but it’s believed thousands never woke up again.
President Teddy Roosevelt appointed an “Opium Commissioner,” who looked around and saw track marks on the arms of everyone from aging Army of the Potomac vets to high society ladies, and declared, “Americans have become the greatest drug fiends in the world.” It was our first Opioid Crisis. It had been driven by genuine ignorance and a lack of good alternatives — but tellingly, also by the inappropriate use of heavily marketed and physician-endorsed treatments. In response, the nation went on a scorched-earth campaign against all addictive substances, starting with new anti-narcotics agencies staffed by G-men in trench coats, and culminating in the U.S. Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. Again: We rewrote the Constitution to outlaw alcohol. That we once went so far suggests how bad things had gotten.
This all seems like a glaringly obvious cautionary tale for the House of Medicine. Yet somehow, not 70 years after the nation had walked away from the Prohibition experiment, medical schools — medical schools! — were abruptly teaching that opioids weren’t necessarily addictive.
When my attending said a patient wouldn’t get addicted if a doctor gave morphine for pain, he was simply channeling what all the best people were saying. For example, in 2000, the Joint Commission — an independent non-profit that sets accreditation standards for hospitals — published a book for physician education that claimed:
There is no evidence that addiction is a significant issue when persons are given opioids for pain control.
No evidence. And if the medical students ask about morphine-enslaved Civil War veterans? The Joint Commission’s book dismisses such concerns as “inaccurate and exaggerated.”
It was the same over at the Federation of State Medical Boards — a trade organization for the bodies in each state that license, investigate and discipline doctors. A set of FSMB guidelines from this era sternly stated that opioids are “essential” for treating various kinds of pain, and only mentioned addiction to warn that “inadequate understandings” of that could lead to “inadequate pain control.”
I was literally told by my attending — who was just echoing those who accredit the hospitals and license the doctors — to “do more reading.” That’s a common directive to a medical student: Stop with the skeptical questions and go study.
From 20,000 deaths a year, to 50,000, to now 80,000
At the turn of the century, about 20,000 people each year would take an opioid — as a pill, or as a snorted or injected powder — and then stop breathing and die. Those of us working on ambulances or in emergency departments could not save them.
But for every death, there are about 20 non-fatal overdoses. So, with bag mask ventilation and opioid reversal agents, we have dragged millions of people back to life. How many suffered anoxic brain injuries, and today are mentally a half-step slower? Unknown.
Overdoses at this scale were a new development, and they were occurring hand-in-hand with the aggressive new marketing and prescribing of opioids. This is the era chronicled so well by popular miniseries — “Dopesick” on Hulu, “Painkiller” on Netflix. In the midst of it, the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma pled guilty to a deception campaign meticulously designed to bring about recklessly liberal opioid prescribing. As punishment, the company had to shell out $600 million, and three top executives got multi-million-dollar fines and 400 hours of community service.
That should have been peak “Opioid Crisis.” But it was only 2007. Heck, George W. Bush was still president. The Sacklers were never contrite. They’d been raking in about $1 billion a year for more than a decade. The $600 million fine sounded impressive — but the Sacklers shrugged, cut the government in to the tune of less than 5% of the cash rolling in, and got right back to slinging opioids. And in the 17 years since, everything has gotten terribly worse.
Did it feel like a catastrophe back in 2007, when 20,000 people a year would die, and people were enraged at Purdue?
Or a decade later, in 2017, when President Donald Trump declared it a national emergency, and 50,000 people a year would die?
That’s nothing. For the past three years, we’ve reliably seen 80,000 people each year take an opioid, stop breathing and die.
Opioid overdoses accelerated amidst the despair of COVID-19 lockdowns. These days, it’s completely routine for a private car to brake with screeching tires at our emergency department entrance, with the driver screaming about someone in the back seat who is floppy, gray, not breathing. The overhead announcement of “trigger to triage!” used to get nurses and techs running excitedly to the front door. Now, they respond at a walk — a briskly respectful walk, but it’s clear no one’s particularly excited. The novelty wore off long ago.
The Olympics of Sociopathy
Back when Purdue Pharma had to pay $600 million, that was big news. Today, judgments are handed down left and right for billions, without much comment or public excitement, against everyone involved in making, distributing or selling opioids: $17.3 billion from CVS, Walmart and Walgreens, $5 billion from Johnson & Johnson, $21 billion from opioid distribution companies McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, $4.25 billion from Teva Pharmaceuticals, $2 billion from Allergan.
Meanwhile, an agreement to let the Sackler family skate while Purdue surrenders $6 billion and goes bankrupt is before the U.S. Supreme Court. (For context, Purdue has earned far more than $30 billion from opioids by now. Forbes estimates the Sacklers as individuals are worth more than $10 billion; attorneys general argue the family has hidden billions more abroad. The Sacklers have for years sold more opioids via Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, a Rhode Island-based company they quietly control, than via Purdue).
Pondering these massive new settlements, I remember thinking, “Walmart? Johnson & Johnson? Surely some innocents have been caught up in an indiscriminate dragnet?”
Wrong. Don’t look into this if you don’t want to know. Like competitive bicyclists, many had lined up to slipstream behind Purdue Pharma and its deranged, anti-social marketing of OxyContin®. Perhaps none of those other corporations would have dared try to convince physicians and nurse practitioners to hand out opioids like candy. But the Sacklers dared and met with success — instant success, shocking success, in perhaps the most shameful episode in the history of medicine.
The other companies might have been surprised, but they all fell eagerly in line behind. Each of them drafted in the turbulent wake of Purdue opioid marketing — some just coasting and enjoying the free money, others so excited they would at times sprint out ahead to briefly take the lead in this Olympics of Sociopathy.
For example, it may have been the Sacklers who first decided to target returning veterans (who have good health insurance) as an opioid growth market — veterans, by the way, are three times more likely to overdose and die than other Americans.
But it took a Johnson & Johnson-backed organization, the “Imagine the Possibilities Pain Coalition”, to spitball in 2011 about targeting elementary school students. After all, third graders have pain, too! A PowerPoint presentation from this group noted we could start marketing opioids to kids “via respected channels, e.g., coaches.”
Johnson & Johnson also quietly funded the 2013 launch of “Growing Pains”, “a new social networking site for young people with pain”. This effort to market opioids to teenagers aged 13 and up was shut down only as of 2021.
From Oxy to Heroin to Fentanyl to … Buprenorphine?
Today nearly every 10th adult has lost a family member to an opioid. All major candidates for president have tapped into the anger — which, however, they have chosen to direct at Chinese and Mexican cartels.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vowed if elected president to send U.S. special forces into Mexico (!) to take out fentanyl labs. Trump as president reportedly talked about shooting missiles into Mexico to destroy said labs. President Joe Biden has pledged to “stop [fentanyl] pills and powder at the border.”
So, the newly agreed-upon villains are foreigners.
Did something change?
Yes and no. It turns out the Opioid Crisis — that catchall term for this 25-year-long blizzard of addiction, overdose and death — has gone through different stages, much like how COVID-19 would cycle through variants, from Delta to Omicron. But while COVID quickly mellowed, the Opioid Crisis has just gotten nastier.
The CDC identifies three waves: First came the prescription wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which launched the entire enterprise. Next came the heroin wave, which per the CDC roughly started in 2010, when the prescription-addicted turned to the streets. From about 2013 to today, we have been awash in synthetic opioids like fentanyl (heroin requires farming poppies, but fentanyl is cheaply made in labs).
Graphic accessed at the CDC. Look at how steeply the death rate is climbing today!
But wait long enough, and Big Pharma always wins. Amoral, soulless corporations — often the same ones paying out massive settlements — have maneuvered skillfully to reassert control over the addiction market they’ve created. The goal now is to create a fourth and final wave of the Opioid Crisis: the buprenorphine wave. We will start as many people as possible on this ingenious opioid.
Buprenorphine, the main ingredient in brand names such as Suboxone® and Subutex®, is a so-called partial opioid agonist: It latches tightly onto opioid receptors but stimulates them only slightly — just enough for a person with physical addiction to not experience withdrawal. A person on appropriately dosed buprenorphine is not sedated or high, they just “feel normal.” (What’s more, even if they were to inject fentanyl, the opioid receptors are already locked down by the buprenorphine, which blocks other opioids from getting through.)
I can’t argue against expanded use of buprenorphine. The data clearly shows that it prevents death and disability. People really do get control of their lives again. Of course, it is also addictive. So, the plan we confidently propose is to treat opioid addiction with this admittedly ingenious and excellent medication, for a monthly price tag, depending on the formulation, ranging from $196 to $1,136… forever.
What’s not to like?
Big Pharma, Finally Unmasked
Medicine has wrought amazing breakthroughs, and we have professed high moral standards. But some of us aren’t above indulging in the same “Braindead Megaphone”-style pronouncements plaguing the rest of society: sternly shouting down even the meekest questions about pediatric gender reassignment therapies or vaccine mandates, for example. When it comes to the Opioid Crisis — this massive, deadly pandemic of addiction we’ve unleashed — we stroll past whistling and look guiltily away, then whirl back around, whip out the Braindead Megaphone, and loudly announce that we expect to be paid handsomely to provide additional addictive opioids to treat this same pandemic. We declare this with wide-eyed innocence, and get indignant if anyone questions this plan — even as internal corporate communications now available show Big Pharma corporations rubbing their hands gleefully at the thought of all of that buprenorphine cash.
That’s right: internal corporate communications — millions of pages — are now available. They can be searched online at the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, hosted by University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
I thought I knew a lot about the Opioid Crisis. After all, I’d been a reluctant front-line participant in it for 20 years, as a paramedic, a medical student and a physician.
Then the lawsuits arrived, and the Archive opened.
Next: A conspiracy to taint the medical literature
Matt Bivens, M.D.: Full-time ER doctor. Board-certified in emergency and addiction medicine. EMS medical director for 911 services. Former Russia-based foreign correspondent, newspaper editor and Chechnya war correspondent. Reluctant student of nuclear weapons.
