No news here. Pharmaceuticals are corporate criminals. In my post
"You, too, Bru Crew?" I cited the documentary, The Corporation (2004), based on Law Prof. Joel Bakan's
The corporation: the pathological pursuit of profit and power, in which Bakan proposes that corporations, when behaving badly, should be viewed as pathological, as sociopaths. My proposal, pursuant to Prof. Bakan's thesis was that corporations, like Massey Energy and, more recently, BP, should be sued civilly, under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). RICO is a statute which was originally believed to allow prosecutors to go after organized crime figures and organizations under a statutory umbrella providing for treble damages, a severe financial club with which to kneecap, e.g., the Mob, La Cosa Nostra, the Organization, the Mafia, etc.; however, when clever attorneys read RICO carefully, they realized that there wasn't much, if any, restriction against whom or whatever fit the vague definition of possible targets. When the Supremes finally got the first cases appealing the onerous RICO damages taxed against ordinary corporations in the trial courts, they said that ordinary citizens could, in effect, use RICO to act as "private attorneys general"; see
Private attorney general: West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Since then, attorneys-general-gone-wild have expanded the use of RICO into a specialized area of litigation requiring volumes of explication and examples; RICO is unquestionably the primary reason the rabidly pro-criminal-corporation Rs have such a twisted bunch in their Hanes over trial attorneys. The pharmaceutical companies that peddle death and disabling side effects via their brands of poisonous snake oil should be and have been brought into the cross hairs of RICO.
Because of the broad brush that RICO wields, whenever Big Pharma gets sized up for a royal hosing under RICO, Big Oil should be as well. Why? The HuffPost by Sen. Dianne Feinstein about her attempt get Bisphenol A (BPA) x-ed out of baby products (
Chemical Industry Lobbyists Block Measure to Protect Infants and Toddlers) gives you a clue: Sunoco, a major oil company, makes BPA. Although BPA is considered a plastic, plastics and pharmaceuticals suffer from the same problem - both are completely dependent on petroleum as a raw material, see, e.g.,
Center for Science in Society. "[Blythe Hoyle, a former petroleum geologist] predicted that, although science will find ways to replace, with other sources, the fuel we need both for car transportation and the heating of buildings, we are 'going to be in trouble' in trying to replace [the petroleum needed to make] jet fuel ('unless we are willing to slow down again') and other products (such as plastics and pharmaceuticals." Hoyle's expressed quandary for continuing world prosperity of "trying to replace" the raw materials for jet fuel and plastics/pharmaceuticals proceeds from her "prediction of the end of the petroleum age, in 2040."
This isn't news, either, unless you live in the Rs' dream-state echo chamber, blissfully ignorant of what's known as Hubbert's Peak, or Peak Oil, the forecast made in 1956, by Shell Oil geophysicist Dr. M. King Hubbert that by, oh, let's look at the old clock on the wall, by 2004, global oil reserves will have reached their maximum accessibility;
Hubbert Peak of Oil Production and
Hubbert peak theory. which translates to "it's starting to cost us as much to get it out of the ground, as we can possibly afford to pay for it." Not exactly brain science, uh, rocket surgery, well, anyway, there are any number of excellent film docs about this horrendous fate awaiting all of humankind, all depressing, all gloom-and-doom (to which I, personally, am ill-suited), except for one, which I recommend as being, at least, a lot of laffs, that is, if you like Brits humor, which I do;
Peak Oil by Robert Newman, takes awhile to get to the Peak Oil point, but does summarize the history of oil with far less drudgery than any other. Plus, as you'll note, it's only 45:37 in length because apparently the guy on the bike supplying the power to make the video got leg cramps.
The looming doom of this Big Trouble facing Big Pharma and Big Oil, as co-passengers in the same sinking boat, which Robert Newman so engagingly underscores, is being kited into oblivion by the American's Big Stick, currently on display in the latest neo-con episode of
The Power of Nightmares - Part 1+2+3, on location in Afghanistan, where it's more about Big Dope than Big Oil. Oh, is that their solution? Put everybody into a coke/heroin-induced stupor, the globalization of the pacification of the Chinese hordes via the opium den? Our less self-destructive political solution, per Newman, is us doing them.
Mine is more pathological, as in, sue BP as pathological. Sue BP as pathological? My proposed path for that RICO strategy in
You, too, Bru Crew?, using Massey Energy and their criminal negligence in the West VA Upper Big Branch mine disaster in April of this year, as the model, is similar in mode to Newman's. According to counsel for the United Mine Workers (my interview), most of the families of the victims quickly refused the lucrative, but pathetic, offer from corporate pathological master-criminal Don (yes, his real name is Don) Blankenship who cynically wants to avoid the glare of a public trial; the burn-off of Blankenship's weaselly maneuver by those families may be the catalyst in the very recent public ruminations about the sale of Massey (
Massey Energy For Sale?). Also, named would be the Big 6 pharmaceutical genocidalists named in Dr. Mercola's post;
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/11/18/drug-companies-are-ranked-in-the-top-100-corporate-criminals-of-the-1990s.aspx. Why? BP's "accidental" oil spill wiped out several millenia worth of coral. Dr. Reese Halter,
conservation biologist at Cal Lutheran University:
Research from Israel in 2007 clearly showed that dispersant [like that which BP spewed all over the Gulf] kills coral reefs and significantly retards regrowth. Florida is the only state in continental United States to have extensive (about 6,000) shallow coral reefs near its coasts, and most are located in the Florida Keys. These reefs range in age between 5,000 and 7,000 years old, and they are the third largest coral reef formation on Earth. Surrounding the corals are extensive beds of sea grasses. Between the reefs and the sea grasses are more than 500 species of fish, spiny lobsters, snow crabs, Caribbean manatees, American crocodiles, leatherback, loggerhead, Kemp's ridley and green sea turtles. Coral reefs have been likened to the Amazon rainforest because of the rich array of life-forms.
Potent medicines come from the coral reefs. Philippine cone snails are 100 times stronger than morphine. Prialt, the blockbuster drug, comes from them. Soft corals from northwest Australia are the most efficacious cancer compounds ever found. Caribbean sea squirt is used to treat melanoma and breast cancers. Sponges from Florida Keys have been used to treat leukemia since 1969. And research from sponges led scientists to develop the blockbuster AIDS drug AZT.
Ocean-derived pharmaceuticals are so important that Merck, Lilly, Pfizer, Hoffman-Roche and Bristol Myers Squibb have all established marine biology divisions.
Worldwide, coral reefs are our grandchildren's legacy.
Some of the dispersants and oil have entered the Loop Current — a powerful conveyor belt that carries the warm Gulf water through the Straits of Florida. It contains 80 times the volume of water of all rivers combined on Earth. It then joins the Gulf Stream Current, which barrels past Miami [toward another massive coral reef structure up the Southeast Coast] carrying one billion cubic feet of water every second. As it passes Georgia and then South Carolina it triples its volume, and once it reaches Cape Hatteras, N.C. it heads out into the Atlantic toward the only open sea on the globe, the warm Saragossa Sea [More coral? Yeah, more coral, deep-sea coral].
Why wipe out a vast amount of coral, when it's used to provide miracle cures? To eliminate competition for the much more expensive, patentable, pathological-corporate-
strategy-of-charge-you-up-your-punk-ass petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. Y'know. The ones that inflict horrendous side effects requiring more pharmaceuticals. Which require more pharmaceuticals blahblahblah, ad nauseam/infinitum. Natural cures have no side effects. Of course, pharmaceuticals cure nothing; they only mask symptoms. Hell, you don't expect the poorpoor victims of disease to wait 5000 to 7000 years for those damn coral reefs to come back, duya? Nooo-ho-ho-ho. Big Pharma and Big Oil to the rescue. Kill me now.
Where's the Big Stick, the US military in all this? Protecting us ... like the Coast Guard's Cap'n Crunch guy. The bald guy who's been covering up offshore oil spills for as long as he's bobbing up and down on CG cutters. Besides the dynamic aptly laid out by Newman (US as gangster beats up, with difficulty, on Iraq), there's also the R&D conducted secretly, or not very, at the United States Army Military Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, MD; see, e.g., The Hot Zone - Richard Preston. Although USAMRIID is, for public consumption (like The Hot Zone), doing defensive research to prepare antidotes, prophylactics, treatments and cures for scary weaponized bugs, like anthrax, the high-security Level 4 facility, where sci-fi is born in Level 4, was also where the US military concocted biological weapons, from 1943 to 1969, meaning that, after 1969, the weaponizing facility was moved elsewhere and nowhere in particular, into various CIA-funded university programs, as well as corporate labs with Level 4 facilities financed by CIA black budget $. The bio-weapons research was originally organized and overseen by George W. Merck, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co.
After the outbreak of HIV1 in the homosexual population in the US entered the collective consciousness during the early 1980s, the Soviet Union, so the counter-tale as told to debunk the tale told by alleged KGB agent Jakob Segal goes, revved up a disinformation campaign,
Operation INFEKTION, calculated to frame the CIA and the US military (USAMRIID) for inventing and introducing HIV1 into the homosexual population in North America. Although the CIA itself set about to debunk that particular conspiracy theory (
Operation INFEKTION - Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign), the debunking article itself cited examples of why the theory was believable.
One example was the secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at the premier US chemical and biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which had created a number of germ weapons for the CIA (codename MKNAOMI). Later, an SOD report surfaced, detailing a simulated biological warfare attack in New York in the summer of 1966—Army personnel had released aerosol clouds of a “harmless simulant agent” into subway stations along the 7th and 8th Avenue lines to assess the vulnerability of subway systems to covert biological attacks and to explore “methods of delivery that could be used offensively.”
* * * * *
The emergence of the mysterious illness [AIDS] so soon after revelations about US biological warfare experiments therefore provided Soviet active measures specialists an opening to exploit. In addition, the Soviets were extremely sensitive to charges against them concerning biological weapons. A US State Department report released on 22 March 1982 accused Moscow of using chemical toxin weapons (“yellow rain”) in Southeast Asia. This allegation may have provided an impetus for the KGB to respond in kind.
Not only demand a pat down but that they also CHANGE THEIR GLOVES!!!
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