crooksandliars.com — 60 Minutes tells the story of how pharmaceutical industry lobbyists literally wrote the historic Medicare Prescription Drug Bill and twisted arms to get the necessary votes to have it passed in the middle of the night.
Apr 2, 2007 View in Crawl 4
h0stile17Apr 3, 2007
Special Interests and Lobbyists have all but demolished our Founding Fathers intention of government. I really think our country is going the way of Idiocracy except that I doubt it will take 500 years for it to get there.
patscruApr 3, 2007
@kdx200rider:don't try and use this as a bash conservative rant?this bill was held up by the republican majority, and fought by the dems when it passed. It's not bashing conservatives, but merely stating what actually happened. Republicans have lost their fiscally conservative soul amidst the scandalous lobbying culture in washington. Also, remember that a big reason many republicans lost seats last November is because people have been sick of how many Republicans seem to throw ethics out the window for private gain at the expense of public equity...,.it's sick.
gabrielsApr 3, 2007
Not if that money is worthless. You can have all the money in the world and still have nothing.
axfireApr 3, 2007
@gmason08Mussolini himself called Fascism "Corporatism."I won't bother quoting from the Wiki article on Corporatism, but suffice it to say that Fascism and Corporatism go hand in hand.
dbkakarotApr 3, 2007
Actually, according to US law, a corporation is legally a citizen of the state in which it is incorporated. They receive the rights that a person in the US has.
bacon_skodaApr 3, 2007
Pharma and MPAA had a bidding war for this guy.Democratic Party didn't want him.Billy Tauzin:On January 3, 2005, the same day he left Congress, Tauzin began work as the head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, a powerful trade group for pharmaceutical companies. It was reported that they had offered more than a million dollars per year for his services, outbidding the MPAA -wiki <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Tauzin">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Tauzin</a>However, on August 8, 1995 Tauzin himself became a Republican (after 15 years as a Democrat), claiming that conservatives were no longer welcome in the Democratic Party.
fossil1977Apr 4, 2007
Sorry, but this shouldn't be a big surprise to anybody who pays any attention to what's happening to our civil liberties in this country. Our elected officials are only looking out for their own interests and the President and his administration are the biggest crooks of all (as evidenced by the last bit of this report indicating that Bush is going to veto any measure that the congress sends him that will right the horrendous wrong).
axeswingerApr 4, 2007
Actually, If you look at the case law "I'm to lazy right now to look it up" v. Santa Clara. Corporation were never granted rights as individuals. However due to the way the case brief was filed judges and lawyers used it as precedent for giving corporations additional rights as individuals. Since other cases used it as precedent to over turn it would essentially shake the foundation of business as we know it and settled cases have full effect of law even though they are based on unsound reasoning (based on the faulty presumptions of the original case). True story....I don't have time to look up the case but it did happen in Santa Clara so at least that's a starting point.
cutkompApr 4, 2007
Aww, haha, what's a matter? Did the shills from CCC come in? Hey, it's on your conscience not mine. <a class="user" href="http://www.aspartame.org/aspartame_benefits.html">http://www.aspartame.org/aspartame_benefits.html</a>
axeswingerApr 4, 2007
Found the time.quoted from: <a class="user" href="http://www.gangsofamerica.com/1.html">http://www.gangsofamerica.com/1.html</a>But where did these rights come from? You can read the Constitution from front to back, including all the amendments added to the document to the present day, and not see a single instance of the word “corporation.” For that reason, the rights that corporations now enjoy have all been established through indirect means, especially a handful of key Supreme Court decisions.As I began researching the history of the corporation, I repeatedly saw references to one case in particular, the 1886 ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. This case, supposedly, had declared corporations to be “persons,” and thus had given them access to the same rights as human begins.I figured that if Santa Clara was the key case in this century-long process of corporate rights decisions, then the text of the decision must be worth reading. I was curious how the Supreme Court had been able to justify declaring corporations to be persons. Typing “Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad” into Google, I quickly found the decision online at:www.tourolaw.edu/patch/SupremeCourtcases.html.The very first sentence of the online version said this: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause of section I of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”“All right,” I thought. “Let’s see how they justify this.” The idea that corporations should be considered “persons” seemed to be quite a radical metaphysical assertion, and I wanted to find out how the Court had backed it up. But rather than an explanation, I soon came upon a rather curious paragraph. Chief Justice Waite, it seems, was in an exceedingly crabby mood on January 26, the first day of oral arguments by the lawyers:One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that “Corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” Before argument Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.Wow! I thought. “The Court does not wish to hear argument…” How injudicious. Was the Chief Justice experiencing a bout of dyspepsia? Gout perhaps? (I’d read somewhere that King George III suffered greatly from this.) Or was this simply a glimpse into that whisky-soaked, hard-living era of railroad barons, alcoholic ex-generals, and their cronies? Maybe a hangover.I read on, until I got to another sentence that said, “Mr. Justice HARLAN delivered the opinion of the court.”Hmmm. Perhaps this would be the explanation I had been waiting for. So I read and read and read until my eyes glazed over, 36 exceedingly dry paragraphs about roadbeds, rails, rolling stock, fences, and rights of way. I went back and checked. Nope, nothing about corporate personhood. And finally I got to a passage where Justice Harlan declares the railroad to be the winner of the case, but not on “personhood” grounds. Instead, he awards Southern Pacific a thumbs-up on highly technical grounds having to do with how the assessors categorized the fences attached to the railroad’s property. Indeed, Justice Harlan declares that the Court doesn’t need to invoke any weighty principles to solve the case. The technical issues are sufficient.Now I felt doubly provoked, first, by the idea that corporations should be treated on the same legal and moral plane as human beings, second, by the absence of any discussion of whyand in fact, a disavowal that any constitutional issue had been decided by the case at all!All this left me more than a bit befuddled, though the whole notion of “corporate personhood” still struck me as preposterously, intuitively wrong. I reflected on the common observation that there is something impersonal, alien, soulless, even Frankenstein-like about corporations, especially as they become extremely large. “If anything,” I ruminated, “it is the people inside the corporation that need to have rights, not the corporation.”As I began researching the Santa Clara decision, I found out that I wasn’t the only person who had found it confusing. The case is surrounded with complexities and even intrigue. As related in Chapters 810, there are schemers with hidden agendas, handwritten notes of untold consequence, false clues, deliberate obfuscation, even a “secret journal.” Studying it is like peeling an onion. Beneath one layer of myth is another, and then another. The whole thicket of complications makes the Santa Clara decision interestingthough perhaps a bit too interesting, because all the intrigue and complexity tend to distract attention from other things, especially aspects of corporate empowerment that may be hidden even more deeply in history. Thus Santa Clara becomes its own myththe mistaken idea that the entire octopus of corporate power stems from one Supreme Court decision.
greenjohnsmithApr 4, 2007
How did this even make it to dig. There is nothing any of us could have done about it and nothing any of us are capable of doing about it now. So, lets just discuss it here on dig, where we can vent our emotions and loath the fact that we are taken advantage of by our government and lobbyists every day. Sheeple, come on, lets just go back sleep.