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The Short Arm of the Law
mindbrane writes "CNN takes a look at when companies are too big for the legal system to handle. Quoting: 'Prosecutors said that excluding Pfizer would most likely lead to Pfizer's collapse, with collateral consequences: disrupting the flow of Pfizer products to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, causing the loss of jobs including those of Pfizer employees who were not involved in the fraud, and causing significant losses for Pfizer shareholders. ... So Pfizer and the feds cut a deal. Instead of charging Pfizer with a crime, prosecutors would charge a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc. ... As a result, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc., the subsidiary, was excluded from Medicare without ever having sold so much as a single pill. And Pfizer was free to sell its products to federally funded health programs.' IBM may have cast the mold for this sort of thing in its 1970s antitrust case, but the recurrence of similar cases speaks to ongoing concerns for legal systems."
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Too bad no one listened to him.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
1. Pull investors.
2. Start a megacorp.
3. "I AM ABOVE THE LAW!"
4. ?????
5. Profit.
They mean that big corporations runs the system ? Who knew !
Tell me they can stop those Viagra spams by banning the product for all those limpies who dont deserve IT anyway.
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And is a cop-out by prosecutors. Crimes are committed by individual people and that is who should be prosecuted for them. And no, there is no shield, exemption, or veil protecting employees of a corporation against prosecution for crimes they commit on the job.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Maybe they should rewrite the rules for big pharma so that if they're convicted of doing something outrageously illegal, the patents they own which were involved in the crime become public domain. That way, they will not risk a damn thing when it comes to marketing and promotion of their products, and there's no way that suing a company will screw up the nation's health care system.
The medical-industrial complex is only going to get stronger with universal healthcare.
There will be special rules for those to big to fail and too big to regulate and barriers to entry to potentially good new actors will be so high and so many will be lobbying to protect the status quo that change will never happen.
Just like with our well intentioned educational system we are cutting the individual consumer out of the loop. And just like with education we will get less than optimum outcomes will no ability as a consumer to effect change.
By letting Pfizer get away with this the US government has set an example. There is no reason to obey the law if you have enough tentacles. They could have chosen the high-road and smacked them down and then out of the rubble a new generation of companies would have emerged that would have had reason to obey the law. No, instead corruption is institutionalized.
Shh.
Can I incorporate myself? I was born a human and in our society we're second class citizens, let's look at some facts:
- We have to pay tax
- We have to follow the local laws
- We have to deal with issues like morality and ethnics
- We are second class citizens in terms of political power (even as a group)
Also, if I put on enough weight can I become "too big to fail?"
2 simple solutions
A) give away all their patents and nullify their copyright
B) nationalise it with an aim to split it up and sell it.
Grow some balls prosecutors!!!
Is this just the latest application of the Golden Rule? He who has the gold makes the rules...
So, DoJ decided that, in the interests of justice, what amounts to a corporate death pnealty was disproportionate punishment given the nature if the offense. Instead, they, in the interests of justice, worked out a deal that still had Pfizer pay a massive fine as a penalty for their offense. And that's bad...how?
Shouldn't we be encouraged when prosecutors, rather than acting like mindless robots, take into account the larger picture, and the consequences of what they do, and thereby exercise their prosecutorial discretion? Isn't that what they *should* do? If you were accused of a crime, wouldn't *you* want to be prosecuted by someone who's going to take the entirety of your circumstances under consideration, rather than behaving like an automaton?
Sound more like they are to big to fail and we are to little to matter.
Snow Crash, or at least it's corporateocracy setting, looks more and more plausible every day.
However many people this will help in the short term, the precedent this has set and it's long-term implications are incredibly dangerous.
Many people have very valid cases that can not be dealt with simply because the costs are so great that the injured party will never have access to the justice system. And that doesn't even include the lawyer's fees. For example the documentation, research, depositions an typing may well go past $100,000 and then there is the lawyer on top of that.
So just why is it a revelation that justice may be rare when large companies are involved? It is even more rare when Joe Sixpack needs the law.
Its about maintaining healthy capitalism. They were aggressively marketing drugs for purposes where there was no FDA approval. How many normal people had to die before Pfizer deserved the corporate death penalty? If they were smacked down their assets and people would have migrated to other companies and new business' would have emerged that would theoretically have more respect for playing with the lives of your customers. This ruling just makes it into a game: will we make more net money potentially killing people minus the eventual fine? What about next time? Another way to put it is that Pfizer should have died and were spared and now a new generation of entrepreneurs has been denied the ability to compete in the space that would have been made. These smaller, nimbler, and more likely to obey the law companies were snuffed out before they even had a chance to begin.
Shh.
Especially if you're a private military contractor in Iraq.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5xT1DGJMoQ
Obviously no one has read the whole article. Pfizer didn't get off with a "slap on the wrist." Pfizer merely was allowed to keep selling drugs to Medicare/Medicaid. Pfizer was still fined *billions* of dollars -- the equivalent of 3 *months* profits. That's an entire quarter's profits.
Or to think of it another way, when it came time to report quarterly earnings, Pfizer had to announce no earnings, or even an operating loss, because they were guilty of violating FDA regulations. You think their stock price continued to soar? Probably plummetted like a rock. Most of those executives are paid in stock options too, so their compensation imploded.
End result, Pfizer was allowed to continue selling drugs to Medicare/Medicaid, but they, and their executives, got hit where it hurts -- the pocket books. Justice, in my mind at least, was served.
...which is a sign of a failed state. Regulatory Capture is when government agencies become run primarily for the special interests they are supposed to regulate.
This CNN article shows how corporations can become too big to punish (which is similar to the oft cited "too big to fail"). The same conditions which put monopolistic corps and cartels beyond market accountability (lack of competition for those at the top of an industry) probably add to the effect of being "too big to nail" at the same time.
Corporatism has emerged in our society and become monopolistic and wildly out of control. The best remedy we may have is stringent application of antitrust law (break 'em up), although other measures (such as limiting their spending and ties with the media) will probably be necessary as well.
Go ahead and try them. If convicted, pull their patents and let other companies provide the product.
Did anyone die this time? How about next? Perhaps they should not have flaunted what the FDA approved the drug for. Mis-marketing it in dangerous doses hurt their bottom line but can you truly tell the family of grandma that justice was served by money when she is rotting six feet under?
Shh.
I don't think we need to worry about the Fed causing job loss by doing anything to Pfizer. Pfizer is doing a great job by themselves. Just ask the former employees of Park-Davis, Warner-Lambert, Pharmacia, Upjohn, Searle, Wyeth and too many to mention small bio-techs which were dissolved on acquisition. For chemists, Pfizer is a job loss machine.
it's the spammers who dont deserve IT, not the limpies.
Should clarify the mind and make directors / VPs realise that they must take responsibility for the organisations they run id they want to keep earning the big bucks.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
While one may not agree with the particulars, this seems like a pretty standard case of prosecutorial discretion. The reality of the law is that the maximum penalty prescribed by law - and sometimes even the minimum penalty prescribed by law - is not appropriate for the crime committed. And prosecutors plead out criminals for sentences less than those allowed by law all the time.
And in this case, some sales agents in the army of sales agents misrepresented one product out of an arsenal of products. Ok? Of course not. Deserving of a big fine, and probably one larger than the company got? Sure.
But cutting off access to Medicare/Medicaid for the entire company, even if it is an available legal penalty, is not the appropriate legal penalty in this case.
The real problems here are that:
1) The law is not appropriate. A better penalty would be loss of patent protection on a lucrative drug, or 10x profits made on the drug that was mis-marketed.
2) Those selling drugs in a manner that can harm patients are not personally liable for their actions. If your doctor prescribes you a drug that they should know might harm or kill you, they are liable. And if a pharma rep orchestrates or participates in a sales campaign designed to hide the hazards of a drug, they should also be personally liable. If all the pharma reps knew that off-label marketing got 30 days in jail the practice would be curbed considerably.
3) Corporations are designed to separate business assets and actions from personal assets and actions. There is value to this. But using shell corporations to protect parent corporations seems to have gotten a bit crazy.
One and two could be fixed by competent legislation. Three is probably a ship that has sailed.
paintball
Simply create new stock in the company that is owned by the government. The new stock would be a significant fraction of existing stock even to a multiple of the current existing public stock.
1) This potential loss/shock to stock holders would have the incentive to make stock holders pay attention and keep the company from violating laws
2) Government would be a stock holder and able to provide direction and observation
3) Government would eventually be able to sell the stock "release from jail" and realize a profit
Minor offenses less than 100% of stock is newly created as government stock
Major offenses 101% of current stock is newly created at government stock, instantly making the government the majority share holder and causing 50% loss to current stock holders.
Even higher multiples 200% etc for more grievous actions.
This does not hurt employees, customers or any other corporate relations. It directly damages share holders and executives who are responsible for company behavior . It encourages proper oversight and control. The government eventually gets some money back for enforcement.
So it's time we treat them like persons under the law and arrest them.
If the fine is large enough to really hurt PFizer, then that is sufficient punishment, since that is all big corporations care about. Otherwise you could auction off their patents to other pharmaceutical companies who'd be happy to rid themselves of a competitor, and get their hands on IP they did not have to pay the research bill for.
If we treat Corporations as persons in any context, they must be treated as persons in every context.
Do The Math:
Estimated 308 Million people in the US
435 House Representatives
100 US Senators
That equates to 1 representative for every 575,700 how the hell can 1 person represent that many people. Based on the 1790 census and number of representative we had in Washington it was 1 representative for approximately every 23,000 people now that not that great but it is better then what we have now. Our government has stayed small and created an elite class of 535 people who for the most part are above the law and serve the needs of large corporations. I wonder if we even need a house of represenatives anymore seeing how we now can all vote and communicate in a blink of an eye. Our technology has evolved but our government has not.
That's about the closest thing to self ownership.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Nope, the corporate aristocracy listened to Thomas Jefferson. Now they just buy lawmakers and those who enforce the laws.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Prosecutors said that excluding Pfizer would most likely lead to Pfizer's collapse, with collateral consequences: disrupting the flow of Pfizer products to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, causing the loss of jobs including those of Pfizer employees who were not involved in the fraud, and causing significant losses for Pfizer shareholders
Any other company would fill that space in an instant. As there are many competitors, and they would buy Pfizer out. And need new employees to handle the new bigger workload.
Also, a collapse of a evil company is a GOOD thing! It is an essential part of a free market.
Also, 90% of the products that Pfizer, Eli Lily & co sell, aren’t needed at all, since they are only symptom suppressors, taken with total ignorance of the actual causes of the diseases, that will only make people think they are healthy, as long as they continue taking the stuff. Fix the cause, and you’re done! But hey, your physician will not even understand what you mean, when you talk about actual causes nowadays. I noticed this with every doc in the last 5 years. I deliberately demand that they find and prove the cause. They look at me with a blank stare, as if I had said something that made no sense. Or they name a symptom, like a organ problem. Idiots.
That’s why I stopped going to docs, except for tests or prescriptions which I make them do, by telling them something that forces them do do that.
By the way: 90%+ of your diseases go away, when you walk for an hour a day, go to bed in the evening and wake up with the sun, and stop eating a one-sided diet (e.g. lots of sugars) or defective (heated/processed to destruction) proteins/vitamins, and process your suppressed horrors by facing them. The rest is genetic, environmental toxins, and injuries. Done. It’s that easy.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
When are we going to see the above title used more often?
There is this attitude that Big is Good, and that we can't ever, never, nope, never ever break up a big monolithic giant.
Bankruptcy is a process of correction, not an end point. GM and Chrysler should have gone through the housecleaning process of bankruptcy. Instead politicians kicked that can down the road and we'll have to deal with it later, in a bigger collapse.
The best remedy we may have is stringent application of antitrust law (break 'em up)
The problem in this case stems directly from pro-trust law. Without patents, there wouldn't be a problem with kicking Pfizer out of Medicare (nor would they wield monopoly-level revenue that underlies issues here ranging from buying doctors to making the legal system its bitch).
There are much better, and vastly more efficient, ways to pay for research than these monopoly rights whose side effects are damaging to the free market, the political system and the legal system all at the same time.
Remember the Enron debacle? Aurther Anderson didn't make the "too big too fail" cut, but the banks did.
If a financial institution gets found guilty of even on felony then they can no longer do business with the feds.
Citibank, a few years ago, paid a 600 million dollar fine for breaking the law and "admitted no wrong doing" because
if they had admitted any wrong doing and been convicted of a felony, goodbye Citibank.
No institution should be so big it can break the law with impunity. The "company" paying a fine is not the same as the officers being thrown in jail for malfeasance.
They should change the way the law currently stands and strip all personhood from corporations. That's the only way you are going to truly solve this problem. If you can't sue the company, then you have to sue the individuals responsible, which is the way it should be. Why should the thousands of employees of a failed company like Aurther Anderson pay for the crimes of the few?
Strip corporations of the same legal rights as a US citizen. Corporations should not have personhood.
although other measures (such as limiting their spending and ties with the media) will probably be necessary as well.
You can't really do any of these things without a new constitutional amendment that says companies are not people and do not deserve human rights. SCOTUS said so, very clearly.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Slow down there, skipper. You're under the misapprehension that Pfizer exists to make pharmaceuticals. Pfizer exists to make profit with advertising, and they happen to sell pharmaceuticals.
>Without patents, there wouldn't be a problem with kicking Pfizer out of Medicare
In that case, it sounds like a better way of achieving justice would be to seize their patent assets (some or all) and then nullify them.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
...now "too big to prosecute"?
What's next, "too big to not be allowed to make laws"? I mean, 'til now they need proxies, but politicians should be wary, corporations have always been very keen on cutting corners to eliminate waste and slack.
A corporation is essentially above the law if you cannot "afford" to hold them accountable for their crimes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So the basic problem is that a large corporation is like a hydra, and can just generate a new subsidiary to be lopped off by the authorities, then move on unharmed.
To deal with this problem, maybe the courts need a corporate decapitation remedy. The idea is that the court could impose a requirement that the entire senior executive and board of the corporation be replaced by unrelated people. The corporate identity and product line could continue, but the top leadership of the overall corporation would be fired for the corporate sin.
This is kind of similar to what happened to GM et al as a condition for Federal bailout money.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
SCOTUS has never reached the decision that corporations are "deserving" of human rights. A passing remark included by a court reporter in the case of Santa Clara County vs Southern Railroad is usually the basis for that belief. It is, frankly speaking, one of the most harmful beliefs in modern law.
Patents didn't keep the US from cashing in Bayer's patent for the Anthrax cure. Or, rather, give them the hint that they will invalidate it due to "national emergency" if they didn't offer the antidote at the US government mandated price.
Why's that impossible with Pfizer?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Every time I see a story like this, it reinforces the idea that there should be a hard limit on the size of corporations. Number of employees, amount of revenue, whatever. Exceed the number and we break you into tiny little pieces.
Too big to fail means too big to exist.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Wish there was a way for the people to organize and pass judgement on these sorts of criminal organizations....Of course, if the people could deal with criminal organizations effectively, then we'd likely have 4/5ths of the government locked up as well...
This is a very good idea. I'd vote for you, if I lived in your county and if I'd vote.
Why shareholders aren't punished for the actions of a corporation is completely beyond me.
The problem with that is that you're penalizing all stockholders, even those who try to clean up the corporation. Or are you one of those who believes in guilt by association? One of the most effective ways to change corporations today is via stockholder activism. Sure investors can use socially responsible investing but that's what shareholder activism is. Of course my way, corporate charter revocation also hurts activist investors.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Just put the people in jail, who were involved in the decision making process (the longest terms for these), and those who would, or should, know it was a crime, knew what the company was doing, and failed to block and/or report it. That should be everyone involved from the top to the bottom. If people start going to jail for their actions that manifest in crimes happening under the name of a corporation, maybe others will think about what they are doing in other cases. That won't get everyone to stop, which is why we still always have to keep investigations going all the time.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think eminent domain at the federal level would be quite appropriate.
Putting a fair price on the patents however might be a bit tricky.
It's easy to seize one specific, high profile patent. It's anthrax, damn it! If you can't seize that in a case of emergency, you can't do anything. The situation with pfizer is quite different: we're talking loads of individually "small" patents. You can't seize that portfolio without falling prey to accusations of communism.
Hmm... being labeled a communist or being labeled a corporate bootlicker...
I'll go for communist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I understand the ideas behind them saying a company is too big to fail. I even understand wanting to help them survive if that is the case, because it will have wide-reaching consequences over a huge number of other companies/industries. What I don't understand is how after they determine a company is too big to fail, they then don't start working on a plan to correct it.
Pfizer is too big to prosecute because they are too big to fail. Fine, so we let them slide this time. But what about next time? If there isn't a solution put in place, it basically signals to them that they can continue to break the law, because they will always get lesser penalties. How about if we determine a company is too big to fail, we start making it so they are the right size so if they fail, it won't kill everything. We should be looking into ways of forcing Pfizer to break into multiple companies so the next time something happens, they aren't too big to fail. I understand the issue, and I understand why they don't want them to fail, but the solution isn't to leave them as big as they are, it's to right-size them so they aren't too big to fail. Otherwise, we will always be left holding the bag for these companies.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Prosecutors said that excluding Pfizer would most likely lead to Pfizer's collapse, with collateral consequences: disrupting the flow of Pfizer products to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, causing the loss of jobs including those of Pfizer employees who were not involved in the fraud, and causing significant losses for Pfizer shareholders.
(Emphasis mine)
I can understand trying to shield innocent employees and patients. But is the government so deep into corporate America's pocket that they openly admit that protecting shareholder profits trumps upholding the law?
I think they should just find out who was responsible and put them in prison and leave the rest of leave the company alone. They do this in China all the time. Instead, in the U.S we have this world of legal fictions and obfuscations made possible by corporate personhood.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/09tentopnews/2009-12/24/content_9223590.htm
The idea of capitolism working was that it was "survival of the fittest." Supposidly just like nature. If your company @#$%s up, well, you need to pay up. If that hurts your company, well, tough beans. Your company is big, remember... let your lawyers figure it out on their battlefield. Every time the government bails out a company, regardless of what the company does, it's a step towards comunism. Banks, Car companies and Drug companies are supposed to be private entities, or traded on the stock market. Why is the government even contemplating bailing them out? If the governemt wants to continue on this line of thinking, perhaps we should go one step further. When a company is able to show over $100,000,000 in the black, or when CEOs of a company can make more in bonuses than what they pay 15% of their total workforce, the works of the company become public domain. Why? Well if a company is too big to fail, the only way to ensure the works of the company always remain available to the public is to make those works public properties. The side effect of such a law would bring one of two things: either higher wages to their employees, or huge charitable donations. Maybe a bit of both. Maybe my idea of a size restraint is a little communistic too, but it does keep the cost down for the government overall. As if bailing out any bank or car company isn't communistic... And get rid of that whole shell company BS.
Once you go communist, you never have to worry about being a corporate bootlicker again. Now you have to worry about being a PARTY bootlicker. Oh, you also kill pharm R&D. All research now has to be government funded. Better raise taxes. Congratulations, comrade.
Go study history and get back to me on how communism has worked out every place it was tried.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
The monetary loss was significant BUT so was the profit that resulted from the criminal activity. Pfizer will simply write it off as the cost of doing business and try not to get caught next time. This is not justice.
The prosecutor by his own account conspired with the defendant to prevent the penalty the law calls for from being effectively imposed. This prosecutor needs to be prosecuted as well.
Dont hold your breath.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It is a well know fact that Communism ONLY works in countries that begin with "C".
"But this one goes to 11!"
In the case of major pharmaceutical industry, if they dominate the market for a drug, then they must be forced to multisource I have no issue with them being handsomely rewarded with license fees but they should never be able to hold the market to ransom.
See my journal, I write things there
Wow, a $1.2 billion dollar fine on $1.7 billion dollars of illegal profit.
That'll show 'em. I'm sure they learned their lesson. Crime doesn't pay.
Unless you consider a half a billion dollars profit as pay. Then crime apparently pays a shitload.
This sentence no verb.
So Pfizer breaks the law, and the government is afraid to apply the prescribed penalties for the infraction and your solution is for the government to than break the law or rather selectively apply it and not enforce their IP rights.
Now personal I think the concept of intelectual property is bad and we should repeal those laws but I don't want to live in a systems where the powers that be; be they our corporate masters or our government can change the rules outside the process at their whim.
That is how how democracies end.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What do you call an immortal, amoral being that cannot be imprisoned or executed for its crimes (no matter how heinous) and who was summoned into being for the sole purpose of taking wealth from people?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Name change recommendations for the United States of America:
Canada South
Constitutionland
Cunited Chates of Camerica
The good news is that the states of California, Connecticut and New Cork should have a smooth transition.
So Pfizer breaks the law, and the government is afraid to apply the prescribed penalties for the infraction and your solution is for the government to than break the law or rather selectively apply it and not enforce their IP rights.
How would it be any different from imprisoning or fining a person that breaks the law?
Was I the only one here who saw those in the headline, and was expecting a bunch of Viagra jokes?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I accidentally mod'd this down. Sorry. Hopefully it will go back up after posting.
Slowly we are creating a type of uber-citizen called a corporation. The Supreme Court has ruled they have all the rights of a regular citizen, but few of the regular avenues for punishment. When was the last time a company was sentenced to the equivalent of 10 years in prison? to the death penalty?
Hudsucker Proxy.
Yeah, what happened to men like John Adams?
"Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."
I have a better solution, one that provides better self regulation...
Corporate Death Penalty.
Corporations are a creation of the state, and exist only under permission of the state. The solution for dealing with such abuse of laws is to have the state dissolve the corporation and auction all the assets, and release all "intellectual property" back to the public as public domain.
If we actually enforced corporate death penalty, the company's owners (stock holders) would be much more careful about how the company they own is operated.
No company is too big to fail, and failure is the only alternative we have. The whole idea that failure is not an option is itself a really bad idea.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As corporations buy other companies and other corporations we are torn between realizing growth potential and the need to maintain competition and stability of the economy. When business becomes too big, they risk destabilizing the economy either through unfair abuses and practices or through other means such as failure.
I think as time progresses, we are beginning to see what the problems and risks are when the capitalist ideal is carried to its extremes. I am capitalist in my own ideals -- I don't want government getting in the way of my potential. But there is a much bigger picture that includes everyone and the environment. Already we are seeing the threat of economic problems being balanced against the need to clean up the global environment. China doesn't want to cut emissions because it would slow their economic growth. The U.S. doesn't want to change for similar reasons. But global contamination affects us all -- the air, the water, the plants, the animals -- our food, our shelter. When business is allowed to exist on these gargantuan scales, not only is the ability for them to change slowed, but the costs not only to them but to all of society becomes a heavy consideration.
The short of it is that to prevent these factors, companies need to be kept smaller, or at the very least, more modular. (so yes, maybe DuPont should be allowed to buy all of the other chemical companies, but for the sake of everyone, perhaps the operational units should never be allowed to consolidate and remain independent and to compete with one another.) The point is that companies should never be allowed to grow to a point that their fortune or failure have a massive over-all effect over the global or national environment or economy.
Microsoft and Intel are two companies that already break this notion despite a variety of laws in place designed to prevent these problems. For example, government procurement policies and procedures require two vendors of the exact same item. In Intel's case, AMD was given rights so it could be considered as a competitor to satisfy government requirements. Lately, Intel has been challenging AMDs rights and moving back in the direction of being a single supplier. Microsoft is a problem of various types. While it would be unrealistic to expect them to hand over their source code to a competitor, it would not be unrealistic to expect them to wrote their software to operate on standardized data formats that other companies or individuals can work with. While efforts are being made to precisely that, Microsoft has been very effective in thwarting and manipulating this movement.
At some point, application of already existing laws need to be made and enforced. We don't need new legislation. We need to enforce the legislation that already exists. The problem here is that these two example mammoth companies would certainly lose or at the very least become challenged and would affect a LOT of other industries and a lot of other individuals on a global scale. At this point, it is safe to say that enforcing the law could have harmful effects on the economy because of the size, scale and scope of these companies. When the law can no longer be applied fairly, justly and equally without causing global harm, something worse has happened. This is what we are seeing today.
Similar things have been done before. Bayer were forced to cede the trademark aspirin as war reparations.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And you cant not seize it without falling prey to accusations of corporatism.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If the patent is seized by the government then the fair price would be free for the patent driving down costs for manufacturers. This of course only gets applied when the company breaks the laws of the land. It would finally be proper incentive for them to behave responsibly.
What should be done is pull ALL government R&D funding to Pfizer. Pharmaceutical companies have a dream setup: they get all/most of their R&D paid for by tax dollars, and they spend a much larger budget (their own money) on advertising. Yank all government from these companies and let them spend their own funds on R&D rather than your and my tax dollars, and they can sell drugs for treatments, and R&D new drugs rather than advertising 3,192 cosmetic and emotional reasons to use existing drugs on contrived conditions like "social anxiety disorders" that is really just shyness, which is not an illness. Now, I realize that social anxiety disorder is a very real condition but I don't think that pharmaceutical companies would be spending such an immense amount of money to advertise such drugs if they didn't think that hypochondriacs would say "Oh, well, this can turn me from a wallflower to a party animal!" For the legitimate illnesses/conditions/disorders, the people who need treatment will seek it, and trade journals and simple mailers can keep doctors informed as to what the available products are which can treat such conditions.
This way, we have less waste by people going to the emergency rooms with every little tear or sniffle, and we see more innovation because these companies are spending more money R&D and less on blasting us all with constant TV ads to convince us that we're all anxious, depressed, and suffering from insomnia. Leave the contrived conditions for the likes of Enzyte.
Right, punish the stockholders for things the managers did...
Communism would also kill organized religion. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good.
But yeah sadly the execution of Communism in the real world is simply substituting "THE STATE" (or more accurately "PARTY MEMBERS") for "CORPORATIONS" in a capitalistic existence.
"But this one goes to 11!"
The so called conservatives who rail against separation are only interested in religion as a vehicle to play petty politics. Destroying the integrity of religion is irrelevant to their own personal gain. Wolves in sheep's clothing, indeed.
Prepare to be fucked by the long dick of the law.
The government owns the patents and gets license fees as recompense.
Indeed, it's not that they are deserving which is not what the court normally goes into, it's that they've decided time and again that the 14th Amendment grants full rights. And these are just rights, not "human rights."
I think you should learn what eminent domain is. He's talking about the price at which the government reimburses the company it is seizing the patent from.
Imprisoning a burglar is the prescribed remedy according the law. Revoking IP rights is not prescribed by the law. That's the difference.
All drug research is already government funded. The drug companies spend more on marketing than they do R&D.
And I was saying that they didn't need eminent domain. I mentioned that they should seize the assets to make up for the rampant fraud.
We were originally going to be called Columbia. That's why Washington D.C. is the District of Columbia.
Why not sell the patent in an auction? There wouldn't be a problem with pricing then.
I totally agree. Too big to fail means it's above the law.
...and the next time i commit a major crime and get caught, i'll cut a deal with the police so that they charge my toe-nail clipping rather than me.
The government seizes assets *all the time* from people convicted of crimes. A to Z. Why should intangible assets be treated differently??? They could just as easily seize "intellectual property" assets as some tangible property. Absolutely nothing strange there at all, and it could be done, they could then open the patents, or auction them (I would prefer opening them so that way more companies could make use of them and get the costs down faster) and sell off the facilities at auction.
Along with throwing a lot of execs in the pokey.
And if they started doing this more, I would bet that employees with inside knowledge of shenaningans going on would be a lot more forthright in whistleblowing faster, precisely because maybe they could save their job that way, nip the criminality in the bud faster. Keeping crimes secret inside some corporation would become a lot harder to do then, if EVERYONE knew they were at risk.
Too big to prosecute or fail is too big to exist. Fullstop. The law should apply fairly or just skip the law, stop enforcing it at all. One or the other.
We *need* corporate death penalties, bad. We don't need any company so large that busting it up would result in massive systemic economic harm. There's no excuse at all to let any corporation get that big and powerful. Banks, brokerages, insurance companies, car companies, pharmcos..doesn't matter. Too big to fail should be too big to exist. And if they screw up and commit crimes, too bad, their assets get seized and put to the public good, and the decision makers should get pokey time.
An auction with one bidder? What are you talking about? Eminent domain is when the government takes (by force), but still reimburses. Where the hell would an auction fit in?
Corporations and cartels get to "vote" all the time. They hand over paper sacks full of green colored pieces of paper "ballots" to politicians they want to "vote for" on a regular basis. And that is the only "vote" that counts anymore. That other sort of "vote", that all sorts of grassroots well meaning but quite naive activists go on and on about all the time, is a *quaint* anachronism designed to keep the rubes/marks/victims faked out that their opinion on any issue actually matters.
Why only one bidder? All pharma companies could bid.
If this went into effect, some evil corporation would try to use this law to eliminate a competitor by framing them for some crime and getting them liquidated.
On the other hand, you are on the right track in your thinking. Corporate law, as currently implemented, is the main cause of a whole bunch of problems. Including the one being discussed here. Think like a lawyer version of a network or sys. admin for a moment and answer this question: What security measures would you implement to prevent 'hacking' of a corporate death penalty for nefarious purposes?
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Corporations are a creation of the state, and exist only under permission of the state. The solution for dealing with such abuse of laws is to have the state dissolve the corporation and auction all the assets, and release all "intellectual property" back to the public as public domain.
But how do you do that without causing massive collateral damage in the form of employees (in pfizer's case, about 82,000 of them) losing their jobs/pensions/etc.?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Would you have a cite for that? I'd just like to check it out, not doubting you, just didn't know about that. I know the government takes patents all the time for "national security"**, or keeps them hidden under gag orders if developed "in house", stuff like that (refs: http://www.bitlaw.com/source/35usc/181.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725075.800-patents-gagged-in-the-name-of-national-security.html etc, google has a lot of hits on that) so I wasn't aware that IP seizure for crimes was illegal.
**some decent conspiracy theory out there about stuff like applecart upsetting energy related patents, etc, as well. That's how I first learned about "secret" seized patents. Ha! Stuff stacked up in that big warehouse at the end of the Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie
Sometimes they side with corporate personhood and sometimes they do not. There has not been a consistent view on this. It almost always depends on the details of the specific case.
Government can already disband corporations. But corps can essentially buy the loyalty of politicians partly because they are considered "persons" with a right to involve themselves in political campaigns.
Combined with the brainwashing of the public from being exposed to constant "freedom" propaganda in the context of corporate interests, this dynamic has sapped the will from our culture to keep corporations in check.
The whole idea that failure is not an option is itself a really bad idea.
So is the idea that "preventative war" can be rightfully waged. Pharma isn't the only industry pushing ideological bankruptcy.
I'll play!
merger=marriage
hostile takeover=home invasion
corporate division spin-offs=children
small compared to profits corporate fine for being "bad"=two minutes timeout in the corner
Anyway, my point is, in the real world where we all live, voting with your wallet, especially with the wallets corporations and cartels have, is way more effective in getting what you want from government than that ballot box politician vote.
They would need a law or legal precedence allowing them to seize the patent. Right now there isn't one and there is a huge problem with creating laws after the fact. There is also the constitutional problem with not being able to take private property without just compensation. So even if congress passed a law tomorrow, we would still need to compensate the company/shareholders.
Jeebus christ. You must be trolling me. In an eminent domain seizure the property is take by the government, for the government.
They sell the patent in an auction, money goes to government, case solved. Why do you insist to eminent domain?
When was the last time a company was sentenced to the equivalent of 10 years in prison? to the death penalty?
You're going to need a mighty big needle to kill an entire company :-).
However, you're missing something: culpability. A company has no morals, no ethics, no sense of justice, but those who control it do. Every single time an executive gets away with what the Germans said after the war ("Ich habe es nicht gewusst"/"I didn't know") you put another nail in the coffin of society. IMHO, the rules are simple: if you share in the profits of an organisation as a board member or shareholder, you accept culpability with it. If your organisation audits, then your company will be responsible for failures - all the way to the top, so there's no scapegoating possible.
However, that goes for governments too: if your department was responsible for watching over the finance market and failed, you damn well are PERSONALLY responsible and should be heading for jail. If the law you signed in had at the last moment some totally irrelevant clause added (which apparently happens in the US - a worse form of non-oversight is hardly possible) YOU will face the consequences for the problems (so stop that practice).
If you as a judge allowed injustice to stand and progress, YOU should be looking at jailtime. Not just disbarment so you could go and live of the money you made until you screwed up, no, suffer hardship like the one you caused by putting the letter of the law before their guiding principles.
It's time voters hold companies, government AND the legal system accountable. If someone spied on people without permission, find who authorised it and stop the courts from freeing them on some technicality. If it was a president, last time I looked he's a servant too. If you can impeach a guy for finding the only girl in town who doesn't know how to clean a dress yet left the country with a considerable surplus, then it ought to be possible to put the people in jail who took a country to war on a lie and tried to exclude themselves from due process, leaving behind a black smoking crater of a deficit. Audit records and email gone? Well, hang those whose job it was to watch over that and didn't.
Sure, there is an awful LOT of that to do - but if you don't, things will only get worse. Now the ship is sinking, the rats are busy stealing all the remaining biscuits off the life rafts. Until you expose the rats and DEMAND some honesty and ethics it's not going to change. The hard bit is that it will demand thinking for yourself again, a habit that has been systematically weeded out..
So there. I'll take my medicine now, thanks :-)
Sounds like you haven't kept up with the war on drugs or terror because there is plenty of precedence for seizing property from criminals.
The main difference between capitalism and communism is only that in one system you become important by being rich, in the other one by being a "good party soldier". The difference is mainly that capitalism was more successful in convincing people that everyone could become rich and thus important.
The system is harder to see through. Else, same shit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While I agree it's a problem, this is not really any different conceptually from using human shields when committing some other crime. We don't try to argue that bank robbers, for example, should go free because they have hostages, we try to find a way of capturing them without harming the hostages.
In the case of a corporation, it's more difficult because there is overlap between the hostages and the criminals. There does, however, need to be a way of making this separation. The corporation is not guilty of anything - it is a fictional construct with no independent will. The people who run the corporation are guilty.
The punishment for the corporation should be decapitation - a more human punishment on a corporation than on a person, because corporations can regrow their heads. Remove all of the senior management and anyone else implicated. Declare them bankrupt, preventing them from ever holding directorships again. Remove all of their shares and do not allow them to collect salaries, pensions, or income from shares in the company.
Then, you allow the company to recruit new management, or you split it into smaller independent units. This may harm the shareholders, but I don't really have a problem with that - you should not be allowed to gain from investments in criminal enterprises. Claims of ignorance are irrelevant - if a secondary effect of this is to make people more wary of investing in legally dubious enterprises, then that's a benefit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sounds like you haven't kept up with it either or what I said. "they would need a law or legal precedence to take someone's property".
Currently, the "laws" allow them to take property that was used to commit a crime or was purchased in part or whole from proceeds of a crime.
The constitution has stopped them from taking any more as was evidence in the court cases stopping the government from seizing rented homes and joint property belonging to a spouse or someone who purchased it through legitimate means. The government currently has to show that the property was either used in the commission of a crime or was purchased/obtained because a crime was committed. Otherwise, they have to give just compensation for any property they took.
But dang that sounds cool. And you *know* they must have some secret stuff in reality there...muahahahaha!
That sounds pretty good. If they're claimed "too big to (f/n)ail", it's because their resources are considered critical. If they're dismembered and sold off piecemeal, those resources are still around but under different management. What I really don't like about corporate law is how those who make the decisions are isolated from the consequences of them. A CEO, board of directors, or whoever else may be running a company cannot at present AFAIK, be imprisoned for the wrongdoings committed under their direction. This needs to change. In addition to reintroducing accountability, it would preserve the corporation itself, because after replacing the person or people in question business could continue as usual.
How about changing the laws so that corporations are not treated as 'citizens' and then start going after the people themselves that make these decisions. Start throwing people in jail and I guarantee you things will change. The primary reason that corps. pull this kind of stuff is because the people doing it know that for the most part they are shielded from direct prosecution. So what if the company has to pay a fine, it's no skin off the individuals back that perpetrated the crime. Start making it personal and prosecuting people, not 'entities'.
"If this went into effect, some evil corporation would try to use this law to eliminate a competitor by framing them for some crime and getting them liquidated."
And if they were caught, it would mean corporate death penalty. It isn't as dangerous as you think. Would you risk death to frame someone for a crime?
The risk of death is valid check to high risk activities. It won't eliminate risk takers, but those willing to go down in a flame of glory, have already agreed that it was worth the risk when they attempt high risk moves.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Uh, too bad for them.
That's the problem with the system now, people aren't taking responsibility for their part of the world, blaming everyone else for problems at least partially their own making.
As of right now, there is NO RISK in doing illegal or immoral activities, because of exactly that kind of thinking. It is always someone else's fault and problem, not yours, not mine. It was the CEO of Enron, even though there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who knew how shady the business was.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I was referring to USvsFEC 1/21/10. Scalia was pretty clear in saying that you can't separate the human speaker from the corporation, so the corporation in effect has human rights. To claim otherwise is "sophistry" (see footnote 7). http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
In order to limit the speech of a corporation in any way it will take a constitutional amendment.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
That is what happens when government partners with business: the individuals get screwed both ways!
I don't get cable or satellite, but maybe someday I can find it cheap on disk. I'll look for it!
Actually in practice you do have to prove your innocence or at least afford a good lawyer to find a loophole.
This is one of the reasons that the American prison system is full of poor people who co
No, the reason the American prison system has the highest incarceration rate in the world is because of the stupid War on Drugs and mandatory sentencing guidelines. "We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of Western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses". Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety [pdf] by the Justice Policy Institute says:
"U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence,4 the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."
Others in gael or prison though not convicted of drug offenses are there because they committed another crime such as theft to support their dru8g habit. Re-legalization and taxing drugs would do a lot to reduce the prison population in the US. With drugs being legal the prices will be lower thus reducing crimes such as the above theft, or more importantly murder. It seems that almost daily the news talks about murder Mexico, especially Ciudad Jaurez, Mexico, right across the border from El Paso, Texas. Almost all of these murders have something to do with drugs. Legal drugs being legal to import, as well as legal to grow your own, would significantly reduce violent crimes.
If drugs were taxed then the money collected used for treatment of those who asked for it then drugs abuse and addiction would decline. There are no drugs that are so addictive that people can not be "cured" of their addiction. The Rat Park study showed that in enriched living conditions rats were not addicted to drugs, when given a choice between water with and without the drug they avoided the water laced with the drug. The hypothesis of the test was that living conditions and not drugs cause addiction.
Of course so called Drug Warriors and the prison-industrial complex don't want to hear that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Just fire the entire management chain. "You are hereby proscribed from holding a position of management or any other authority or advice provision over persons, organizations, or other legal bodies or their subdivisions other than your own self for a period of five years. Furthermore, any and all current and future owed payouts or other benefits from the affected entity or any entities it is involved with which may benefit you are hereby rendered null and void."
And of course, a multilevel freeze on any non-salary bonuses or other benefits to take place during the entire period of the investigation. Anyone remaining after the purge gets their bennies unlocked again. Can't imagine any stock options already issued would be worth much over the next couple of months either.
This whole story is totally warped by government intervention:
1) A company is unjustly fined not by whether a drug actually works, but whether it got approval. Those are not the same thing.
2) Drug companies should not be subject to advertising restrictions in the first place, so in fact they did nothing wrong.
3) The same bullying government that won't let drug companies do business as they see fit, doesn't want to shortchange its poor captive Medicare and Medicaid audience. Rather than worrying about that, they should be worrying about the veritable slaves it is ripping off to pay for those programs (taxpayers). All we hear about is the poor people who won't be getting drugs if the government enforces its own nonsensical, arbitrary laws.
What about the producers? What about those of us who don't want to pay into Medicare and Medicaid, but wish to provide for ourselves? We are obviously regarded as rightless serfs not worthy of comment.