Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 I think that here in corporate america, we need to stop treating employees as mere resources and machines, and start thinking about them as human beings. We need to really connect with them and find out what they need and what their challenges are outside of their work tasks. Where can they find balance in their lives, and how can we as employers help create environments and impart information that can help these employees improve their lives outside of work?
For those companies that want to experience a real revolution in wellness, drop the business suit dress code. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 Anthony graduated from MIT, and after serving an apprenticeship in corporate america, he started his own international business, with headquarters in Cleveland. Through his family's many contacts in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, he set up operations in Southeast Asia to develop metalworking industries. He traveled a great deal, and whether at home or on the road, he continued to be—his own description—a "glutton." "I was gaining weight," he says, "but since I had my clothes tailor-made in Hong Kong, I'd have a suit made every trip, and didn't really notice that the old suits didn't fit. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| But do you ever see them investigate the snake-pit that is "business as usual" corporate america? If they really attacked corporate crime, including pharmaceutical crime, exposing the corporate sharks for the criminals they are, these poor excuses for hard-hitting journalists would be nothing more than anal debris at the bottom of the corporate cesspool.
By asserting their journalistic dedication and honesty, they are able to focus public attention on a myriad of topics. |
Stacy Malkan
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 Plus, unlike many environmentalists in the nonprofit sector, Janet had a background in corporate america. She'd spent four years as political director of the phone company Working Assets.
"I already knew that it was possible for companies to be sustainable and do the right thing. I knew that companies weren't all necessarily black and white, that there were a lot of shades of gray within the corporate community," Janet said. "So I went out with this naive kind of attitude, which was like, well, why wouldn't you want to do the right thing? |
| No More Shades of Gray
Janet Nudelman was starting to see a different side of corporate america than she'd experienced over at Working Assets. "I was just shocked when they would bold faced turn around and say 'No, we're not going to do this. We believe our definitions of safe are safe enough and we don't care if there's conflicting scientific evidence,'" Janet said. "They weren't engaging in a real dialogue with us, and that was their loss. That was a really big loss as far as I'm concerned, because we weren't trying to nail them to the cross. |
| Sales of natural cosmetic products are increasing faster than conventional product sales. corporate america is paying attention. "By many accounts, the green business movement is taking off," wrote Michael S. Rosenwald in the Washington Post, "with the marketplace topping more than $228 billion in the United States and with such companies as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. getting into organic food and General Electric Co. plowing into renewable energy. Levi's is introducing organic cotton jeans. Vanity Fair recently published a green issue. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 By cutting benefits and moving away from defined-pension arrangements, a sizable slice of corporate america moved large numbers of employees into programs that are far less costly for the corporate bottom line. In 1985, there were approximately 22 million active participants in single-employer defined-benefit plans. Seventeen years later, there were 5 million fewer, despite the fact that the overall U.S. workforce had increased significantly.
Many companies with traditional defined-benefit plans are dumping them onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Self-replicating seeds which have been saved year after year, generation after generation, throughout every culture on our planet, offer sustainability, freedom and independence. corporate america wants dependence -- it wants centralized control, scarcity, a monopoly; it creates this by forcing people to use things like terminator seeds and by claiming intellectual property over things like the gene sequence of a seed.
The situation has become so bizarre that if you were to go back in time and try to explain to somebody in the 1970s what is happening today, they wouldn't believe you. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The government has become, in essence, the enforcement branch of corporate america. Virtually every significant new law passed by Congress is structured in alignment with the wishes of America's most powerful corporations. This is no coincidence.
Can Ron Paul save our nation?
There's only one person in the running for the next presidential election who even has a shot at reversing this, and that's Ron Paul. But even if he were to get elected, he would be walking into a quagmire of politics, corruption, back-door dealing and criminal conspiracy at the highest levels. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| Broadcast media, as part of corporate america, depends on advertising dollars to remain profitable. As the number of pharmaceutical ads increase, so does the perception that the bond between pharmaceuticals and media is perhaps more than it first appears.
How many times a day are you, juror, bombarded with advertisements for drug products. Permission for DTC (direct to consumer) advertising has seen the numbers balloon. |
Charles Barber
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 In the public's view, the pharmaceutical industry has recently joined the oil industry as the most exploitative and reviled sector of corporate america. The perception of manipulation and arrogance on the part of Big Pharma is starting to stick. A trust factor appears to have been violated. Between 1996 and 2002, the portion of the public who distrusted information from clinical research professionals shot up, from 28 percent to 75 percent.91 The New York Times noted that by 2005, consumers seemed to be less confident in drug marketing. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| In the meantime, I will wait for the day that any of you on-the-air cowboys get to the core of our problems — corporate america. |
| But until corporate america is called to task, until mankind matters more than money, cures will remain illusive.. .always just five years down the road.
Chapter 16 Solutions
Pharmaceuticals must become participating citizens, not greedy corporate entities, and practice the Golden Rule as a part of humanity.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease. |
Michael J. Panzner
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| Similar in scope to the role of its sister agency, GASB, in setting state and local government accounting protocols, FASB decided to rework the rules to provide more insight into corporate America's financial condition. The effort would be a two-stage process. The first step, effective December 15, 2006, requires companies to shift details on the net exposure of pension and other postemployment benefit programs from the footnotes to the balance sheet, directly impacting reported net worth, or assets minus liabilities. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| This relationship has eroded over time, and what now exists is a malevolent liaison between corporate america and regulatory agencies that excludes the rights of citizens. (See Chapter 6, Government.)
Several states have passed laws that basically give corporations the same constitutional rights as the individual. Hoping to extend these rights, a proposal has been put forth that would request Congress to enact a bill to "hold harmless" the FDA and the pharmaceuticals in cases where approved drugs have been determined to cause death, assault on the human body, or other ancillary damages. |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 The corporation, however, did not realize that inside the fortress of corporate america, a dangerous fifth column was already in place. It seems that the automotive industry was never truly keen on MMT. Ford and General Motors may not have been particulatly concerned about the electrical signals transmitted between nerve cells, but they have been worried about the potential degeneration of spark plugs caused by long-term exposure to this chemical. |
Michael J. Panzner
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| Competition from a variety of other operators, including securities firms, foreign banking groups, and corporate america, also meant that traditional lending institutions were constantly striving to reduce low-earning capital cushions or otherwise maximize their returns, often at the expense of traditional prudence. |
| Like the public sector, corporate america has significant exposure to retiree health care costs. According to one estimate, two-thirds of the S&P 500 companies have some OPEB obligations, to the tune of about $300 billion—in addition to $150 billion of underfunding for employee pensions. At one company in particular, the numbers are indeed astonishing. |
| At the same time, wide swaths of corporate america began to feel the pinch, especially in vulnerable sectors like auto manufacturing, where foreign competitors had already made significant inroads. For industries that had long been forced to offer cheap credit as an inducement for big-ticket purchases, costlier borrowing rates were also becoming a serious threat. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| With no fanfare and no news flashes, the American public became an essential funding source for "poor" corporate America; and with the flourish of a presidential signature, ceded historically significant intellectual properties to the highest bidder.
In the late 70s, biotechnology was coming of age, and gene technology paved the way for drugs to be produced at fractions of their former costs. Again, those in high places in government greased the paths for rDNA insulin and other products to reach the marketplace, creating a new industry and providing an immediate economic boom. |
Michael J. Panzner
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| Nervous individuals and institutions with a newfound aversion to risk will scale back exposure. corporate america will put deals and spending plans on hold, rattled by unsettled markets and admonitions from investors.
At the same time, a growing list of scandals and the fallout from the change in retirement accounting standards will add to rising public hostility toward both Wall Street and Main Street.
As activity in some trading arenas surges, markets will see technical glitches and breakdowns similar to those that occurred in Japan during January of 2006. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The "free" America we all once knew is long gone, and it has been replaced with The United States of corporate america, where police tactics are now used to enforce hazardous public health policies, and the people who run the State no longer think there's anything wrong with rounding up the population at gunpoint and performing large-scale medical experiments on their children. That's what modern vaccines are, after all: A grand medical experiment whose effects will only become known after a generation of mass poisoning has come and gone. |
Melody Petersen
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 Hundreds of academic scientists, including many who had once looked at the pharmaceutical industry with skepticism, walked down from their ivory towers and into the boardrooms of corporate america. The role of the academic as referee to the drug companies' clinical trials became a minor one. And the moderating force that had kept scientific studies honest and impartial began to disappear. |
| To be effective, the agency must limit its staff to those medical experts who are free of ties to corporate america. The agency should be funded by the government but not run by the government. The pharmaceutical companies are so politically powerful that it would be easy for them to manipulate the process if it were managed by the government.
The agency would review classes of medicine to determine what drugs were the most effective and had the fewest side effects and, on the other hand, what products should be avoided. |
Michele Simon
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 Carmona asked, "What is the responsibility of corporate america in addressing this obesity epidemic?" Nestle's Christensen said his company anticipates more profit: "We see this as a business opportunity, to develop new value-added products." Holden of Kraft chimed in with: "It's part of our responsibility to be part of the solution." Rosen, the McDonald's representative, took the cake with: "Corporate citizenship is part of our DNA."18
Next, Carmona won the prize for the question most guaranteed to get a preprogrammed response: "Do we need lawsuits? |
| At that moment I became aware of a troubling dichotomy: on the one hand, the nation's top health official was telling us that corporate america was taking care of the problem. But on the ground in state legislatures, reality wasn't reflecting the rhetoric. Upon further investigation, I confirmed my suspicions that Representative Brown wasn't the only well-meaning local politician finding himself at the receiving end of industry lobbying against commonsense nutrition policies. But the extent of the corporate duplicity and hypocrisy was even worse than I had imagined. |
| Are lawsuits necessary to force corporate america to do their job?" And how did the potential targets of litigation answer? McDonald's Rosen had her predictable rejoinder at the ready: "The answer is clearly no. We believe the way to change behavior needs to be positive and collaborative and to work together with the right solutions."19
Kraft's Holden, to no one's surprise, agreed: "I don't think nutrition policies should be decided in a courtroom; often we look for silver bullets when this is a very complex issue and there isn't one sector or industry that's fully to blame. |
| But why must we resign ourselves to a model that corporate america has created for us? Is a little tinkering around the edges really the best we can hope for? Moreover, in confining their complaints against fast food to a narrow set of health-related issues (e.g., portion sizes), advocates ignore a host of other critical social ills for which many food corporations are also responsible—including unjust labor practices, environmental destruction, cruelty to animals, and so forth. |
| Leave it to corporate america to put a ton of sugar in a product and then turn around and tout a modest cutback in the ingredient as a health benefit.
The low-sugar cereal scam prompted a California woman to file a lawsuit under the state's consumer protection laws against Kraft, General Mills, and Kellogg in 2005. She alleges that the companies' low-sugar cereals falsely represent "that they offer a nutritional advantage over defendants' full-sugar breakfast cereal products, when in fact, the removed sugar is replaced by other carbohydrates, thus offering no significant nutritional advantage. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Let's face it: corporate america has your best interests at heart, and we should just let these companies operate with impunity so that they can get down to the business of helping everyone.
Taurel says we should focus more on the BENEFITS of the drugs. Like how much money they make shareholders, for example. Or, perhaps, how prescription drugs are good for the economy because they create new job opportunities for doctors, nurses and surgeons to treat all the dangerous drug side effects.
How much of a better deal does Taurel want than today's industry-friendly FDA, anyway? |
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