In the wake of this week’s $18 billion Meta settlement, it’s worth noting that attorneys in class-action lawsuits always claim they’re seeking huge payouts to win justice for victims — yet some ugly news from New Jersey again shows how little the real victims ever see.

Some 25 Garden State towns blew at least $2.3 million from the 2021 nationwide opioid settlement on naked self-dealing and utter nonsense. 

So a crusade in the name of mitigating the harm done to individuals and communities really adds up to little more than a shakedown to benefit the lawyers who sued and local officials who got to spend freely.

Look at the shopping list:

• $73,000 on a custom Mustang for Atlantic City’s police department.

• Nearly $150,000 handed over in Camden to a nonprofit for  . . . identifying broken streetlights.

• $600,000 on “opioid awareness concerts” in Irvington.

• Some $53 million is reportedly simply sitting in municipal accounts as towns like Summit just hold the cash.

The settlement language ordered the funds go to fight addiction and fund prevention  — so heads should be rolling.

But insiders are all too used to how settlement cash ends up in the pockets of everyone but the victims of negligence or malice such litigation always pretends it will help.

The plaintiffs of record — of whom there can be millions in any given class — routinely receive pittances, while the fat-cat lawyers who “represent” the class get even richer. 

In the opioid settlement, lawyers’ fees hit $2.3 billion; one firm, Motley Rice, took home $396 million — and appealed the award because it wasn’t big enough. 

Legal fees climbed above $10 billion in the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement, with even more going to state-level slush funds. 

Another dodge is to shower a good chunk of the payout on “charities” allied to political powers-that-be.

Google settled a 2010 class action with literally zero going to the vast bulk of the plaintiffs; a few got token awards and the lawyers took their hefty cut, then the rest went to nonprofits picked . . .  mysteriously.

The corruption can start at the top: In 2018, the Obama administration gave nonprofits close to $400 million as part of a settlement over alleged Department of Agriculture racism against Native Americans. 

Let’s see how Meta’s $18 billion gets split up: In the absence of constant sunlight, don’t expect much of it will help the kids the lawyers insisted the suit was about.

People hurt by negligence or worse deserve redress — but the class-action bar and its buddies in government are extortionists, pure and simple.