Those Scummy Monsters at Pfizer Not Only Destroy Entire Cities, They Also Cheat on their Own Drug Studies
What happens when Pfizer doesn't like the test results it gets for a new epilepsy drug? You conceal the evidence—says the New England Journal of Medicine, which is schooling those schmucks hard. This has been a terrible year for Pfizer, but not terrible enough, because they still exist. But what happened to those hideous pigs in the recession?
Early this year, Pfizer bought Wyeth, for $68 billion. They borrowed $22 billion of it, which is an amount larger than what their annual income will be. Then, for false marketing, back in September they had to settle one of the larger lawsuits that they, Giuliani-style, pay up for from time to time; $2.3 billion. This week, they did something even more damaging to their public image. Totally! Worse than their chronic inability to adjust the cost of AIDS drugs to countries where people make $5 a week, you ask? Well… this one has a lower death toll, but is fairly evil! The company that once famously barged in to "redevelop" New London, CT, in exchange for ten years of tax breaks, announced early this week that they were abandoning the project—only four years after the Supreme Court approved it!—and leaving the already crappy city of New London decidedly crappier.
You know when the Wall Street Journal sounds like the Worker's World Daily, things are bleak: "the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare," they wrote this week. Also weird? You know who was right from day one? Clarence Thomas, who called the seizing of an entire neighborhood "a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation."
OMG, Clarence Thomas right? Anyone checked Hell for snow?
Affirmative. Mixed precipitation: snow with a dusting of pubic hairs.
Any drug that can make Clarence Thomas spout some semblance of remotely anticorporate remedy is one I would like to ingest heavily in.
In all likelihood, he's just high on himself.
It's a through-the-looking glass moment to be on the same side of the fence as Clarence Thomas.
Maybe I'm also wrong about my stance on sexual harassment, gun rights and civil liberties?
Do I still even like pancakes?
Don't get me started on my "return to true Republicanism" rant about small government and freedom. The only main thing that's wrong with a historically Republican, Constitution-based politics is that it's gotten entangled with Creationism and fear of cultural change. And that "small government" somehow came to mean amending the Constitution against gay rights.
(God I hope my mom doesn't read this, she'll kill me!)
Well, there are other problems with a small government ideology, namely that a small government can only protect the haves from the have-nots, not the other way around.
Nixon created the EPA and Eisenhower would be considered too liberal today to be elected in the OH 2.
Yes, it really isn't surprising that a conservative would oppose government "taking" private property.
That "main" is a nicely-placed hedge.
Amending gay rights, abortion is murder, but cap punishment isn't, women handcuffed to stove, etc. etc. etc.
I'd like to get my hands on the jerk who mixed the first cocktail of economic libertarianism and cultural represssion that so intoxicates generation after generation of Americans.
I like the Rockefellers, more or less – except that whole quiet eugenics thing.
In this case it would have been a good idea to "constrain the desires of current society."
Okay, okay, their a shady big corporation (and really which big corporations aren't shady?) They also employ like 50,000 people in the New York area, and 50% of the people I know on LinkedIn.
Uh, "they're". Hate that!
Actually, this gets at one of the many things I find fascinating about my country. One the one hand we are super-medicated (in the case of Awl commenters that's of course mostly self-medicated, but never mind) and seem to believe that medicine/medical technology will grant us longer better lives, and on the other hand we openly believe that the drug companies are trying to kill us all for a profit. Strange.
Well, in the United States large drug companies are largely unregulated because of free market, small government ideology. They also have a legal responsibility to generate profit for their shareholders. So if it is legal for them to fleece Medicare (because Medicare is barred from negotiating with drug companies(!)) they have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to charge as much as they possibly can.
It sucks.
"Kill us all for a profit" is a stretch. "Convince us to buy unnecessary drugs based on quack science for a profit" is a little more like it.
Restless Leg Syndrome, people? SWITCH TO FUCKING DECAF
Oddly, I know someone who really has restless leg syndrome. We've shared hotel rooms and it's like he's running while sleeping.
Which strawman am I supposed to agree with?
I dated someone with restless leg syndrome. It was bizarre, and unfortunate, as I bruise easily. I still think fibromyalgia is fake.
I want to know how Arthur Caplan became the go-to-guy for any ethical issue whether it be drug testing, fertility rights, or suicide tourism. That guy is everywhere. My spider sense tells me he must be banging a 12-year old boy, or keeping a gimp in his basement, just to keep the scales balanced.
I'm benching you. Friday Night Lights whoooooo YEAH!
Doctor Disaster, report to Nurse STAT.
I really don't want to be that guy, but the Kelo decision actually limited the government's discretion for when it can employ it's eminent domain power, the complete opposite of its portrayal in the media (as sold to it (and you) by the pre-Tea Party crowd) (compare the Midkiff & Berman decisions).
The most ironic part about the reaction to the opinion is that the "liberal" justices were actually DEFERRING to the local government's decision and not using "judicial activisism" to interject their own decision-making in the process (like The Awl's apparent new bff Thomas, J., always tells them to).
(Sorry. I hate me too.)
/Pfizer is still evil. Pure evil.
//Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn
///dick joke
Just [sic] this whole post.
I need coffee.
Steve, I'd disagree that Kelo leaves less room for the use of eminent domain than Midkiff and Berman. But which of three bad decisions is the least bad is not really important.
What all three opinions share is their casual disregard for the law as written. If there is anything to commend Stevens opinion for it is that it unusually candid as far as these things go. Typically opinions of this type tend to read like the writings of new age theologians, the kind that reject shallow scientific truth in favor of deeper spiritual truth or what the fuck ever. Stevens justs gets down to business. He openly admits that the 5th amendment talks about public use but he is going to apply it as if it said public purpose simply because he, like certain other courts before him, happens to find "public use" too restrictive.
It is about as close as any of these decisions get to admitting the truth. That the dispute between originalist and 'pragamatic' judicial philosophies is essentially a dispute between the rule of law and the rule of men.
Accepting the award for God is Antonin Scalia.