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Please understand that the drug industry has the LARGEST political lobbying force in the United States.
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There is nothing benign about Big Pharma. Yes, the United States government and medical industry is guilty of major complicity, but money talks.
Pharmaceuticals often have a larger budget for advertizing than for research. Overpricing drugs and price fixing is rampant. Pfizer and other pharmas protect their price gouging by paying hundreds of millions to other companies not to market cheaper generic drugs. Despite being labeled corporate criminals, Big Pharma seems to treat settlement payments as a part of doing business.
www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=315
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/...oj-settlements
http://64.207.159.91/media.php?NewsID=120
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Big Pharma: Biggest Defrauder of Federal Government
In fact, the drug industry now tops all other industries in the total amount of fraud payments for actions against the federal government under the False Claims Act.
Four companies stand out as the worst of the worst.
GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Schering-Plough accounted for 53 percent of all financial penalties imposed on pharmaceutical companies between 1990 and 2010.
Most recently, on November 3, the New York Times reported that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has settled another round of litigation against them to the tune of $3 BILLION. (The previous record was held by Pfizer, which in 2009 paid a fine of $2.3 billion for illegal marketing.) The charges against GSK included illegal marketing of the dangerous diabetes drug Avandia, kick-backs to doctors, and manipulation of medical research. Three billion dollars is no chump change, but it's still just a drop in the bucket when you consider the astronomical profits these companies rake in, which are significantly bolstered by their criminal activities.
For example, GSK has an annual revenue of about $28 billion, so how much of a deterrent can $3 billion really be?
The record over the past 20 years tells us that financial fines have done nothing to curb the criminal mindset within the pharmaceutical industry. On the contrary, it has increased in the past several years, despite larger fines being levied. This is largely due to the perversion of corporate influence on the government, as most eloquently explained by one of the most famous political lobbyists of all time who was able to freely spill the beans about the process in the 60 Minutes sequence below, after having served time in federal prison. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...-industry.aspx
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PS -- hi_iq, report me if you think this political.