Unequal Protection: The Battle to Save Democracy
source: http://www.truth-out.org/introduction-the-battle-save-democracy68271
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- ClassicalGas
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The Battle to Save Democracy by: Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers | Serialized Book
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Editor's Note: Truthout is proud to bring you a new, exclusive series from Thom Hartmann, the New York Times-bestselling, four-time Project Censored Award-winning author of 21 books. We'll be publishing weekly installments of Hartmann's bestselling book, "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' and How You Can Fight Back." Join us as, chapter by chapter, we delve into issues of corporate power, popular resistance and the nature of democracy itself. We begin today with the book's introduction, "The Battle to Save Democracy."
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On September 2, 2009, the transnational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people and that definitely led physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended.
Because Pfizer is a corporation—a legal abstraction, really—it couldn’t go to jail like fraudster Bernie Madoff or killer John Dillinger; instead it paid a $1.2 billion “criminal” fine to the U.S. government—the biggest in history—as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties. The total settlement was more than $2.3 billion—another record. None of its executives, decision-makers, stockholders/owners, or employees saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell.
Most Americans don’t even know about this huge and massive crime. Nor do they know that the “criminal” never spent a day in jail.
But they do know that in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation.
read the rest of this installment here:
http://www.truth-out.org/introduction-the-battle-save-democracy68271
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Editor's Note: Truthout is proud to bring you a new, exclusive series from Thom Hartmann, the New York Times-bestselling, four-time Project Censored Award-winning author of 21 books. We'll be publishing weekly installments of Hartmann's bestselling book, "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' and How You Can Fight Back." Join us as, chapter by chapter, we delve into issues of corporate power, popular resistance and the nature of democracy itself. We begin today with the book's introduction, "The Battle to Save Democracy."
----------------------------------
On September 2, 2009, the transnational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people and that definitely led physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended.
Because Pfizer is a corporation—a legal abstraction, really—it couldn’t go to jail like fraudster Bernie Madoff or killer John Dillinger; instead it paid a $1.2 billion “criminal” fine to the U.S. government—the biggest in history—as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties. The total settlement was more than $2.3 billion—another record. None of its executives, decision-makers, stockholders/owners, or employees saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell.
Most Americans don’t even know about this huge and massive crime. Nor do they know that the “criminal” never spent a day in jail.
But they do know that in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation.
read the rest of this installment here:
http://www.truth-out.org/introduction-the-battle-save-democracy68271
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- tags:
- Books, Corporations, Thom Hartmann, Corporate Personhood, 1 more
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ClassicalGas
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This book, or at least the links to this on-line serialization, is going out to everyone on my mailing list!
- 1 year ago
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ClassicalGas
