Tag: corpocracy

That doesn’t mean that the IT fascists won’t try to prevent their serfs from hearing it:

“Well, it’s official. My company’s IT department has, as of today, blocked Vox Popoli as a “Fringe Usenet Group.” This also came with a stern talking to by the IT department head to me personally about the inappropriate, off color nature of the Ilk. Be proud, VD.”

It’s certainly an interesting categorization, given that the blog is not, and has never been, a Usenet Group. Please feel free to tell the IT department head from me, personally, that no amount of foolish devotion to corporate fascism is going to save his job from the contracting global economy. Since IT doesn’t produce income, it’s a luxury and in most cases a counterproductive one at that.

The fact is that it really doesn’t matter if anyone reads this blog or not. It doesn’t matter if anyone believes anything I write or not. What is going to happen will happen whether the cubicle serfs or their corporate overseers like it or not. And you can’t stop the signal.

CNN reports on the shenanigans devised to protect Pfizer from the legal consequences of its large-scale lawbreaking:

By April 2005, when Bextra was taken off the market, more than half of its $1.7 billion in profits had come from prescriptions written for uses the FDA had rejected. But when it came to prosecuting Pfizer for its fraudulent marketing, the pharmaceutical giant had a trump card: Just as the giant banks on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail, Pfizer was considered too big to nail.

Why? Because any company convicted of a major health care fraud is automatically excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. Convicting Pfizer on Bextra would prevent the company from billing federal health programs for any of its products. It would be a corporate death sentence.

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.

“We have to ask whether by excluding the company [from Medicare and Medicaid], are we harming our patients,” said Lewis Morris of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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.

We are truly living in a post-republican age of American corpocracy. Not only is there no equality before the law, but it is clear that artificial persons and individuals of political influence are now regularly granted rights, privileges, and immunities that are denied to the citizenry.