Corporate Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

An Arlington-based Halliburton Co. subsidiary that has been criticized for its reconstruction work in Iraq has begun tapping a $500 million Navy contract to do emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and Marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc., won the competitive bid contract last July to provide debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters. KBR has been at the center of scrutiny for receiving a five-year, no-bid contract to restore Iraqi oil fields shortly before the war began in 2003. Halliburton has reported being paid $10.7 billion for Iraq-related government work during 2003 and 2004. The company reported its pretax profits from that work as $163 million. Pentagon auditors have questioned tens of millions of dollars of Halliburton charges for its operations there. Last month three congressional Democrats asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to investigate the demotion of a senior civilian Army official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, who publicly criticized the awarding of that contract. Vice President Cheney headed Halliburton from 1995 to 2000.

No single person has come to more represent the big questions about drug safety that emerged following the withdrawal of Merck's painkiller Vioxx than the Food and Drug Administration's David Graham. And now that a Texas jury has awarded the widow of one Vioxx patient $253 million, Graham, who works in the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, is more critical than ever. Of the drug, and his employer, for whom he doesn't speak. "If the judgment is that there's blood on Merck's hands," Graham says, "there's blood on the FDA's hands as well." Graham has estimated that Vioxx killed some 60,000 patients - as many people, he points out, as died in the Vietnam War. He says that fundamental problems at the FDA led to those deaths. "People should turn to Congress and demand a drug safety system that is free from corporate influence - and a distinct center for drug safety." In Graham's eyes, the problem at the FDA is that the same scientists who approve drugs are the ones charged with deciding whether or not they are safe enough to remain on the market when problems crop up. Graham says that he thinks there should be formal, periodic reviews of the safety of new medicines - and that the FDA should release documents that explain its reasoning. "The FDA does not think anything it did is a mistake," he says. "[Yet] none of its decisions are evidence-based." "Today Merck was on trial, and a judgment was rendered," he says. "But when will the public hold the FDA accountable for its role, its complicity, in this catastrophe?"

Note: Learn how Merck blatantly altered the death numbers in their drug trials in this Seattle Times article. This article persuasively argues the actual death numbers were around 500,000. WTK founder Fred Burks had a shocking encounter where he learned about intense corruption at the FDA. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

A new book looks at how pharmaceutical companies are using aggressive marketing campaigns to turn more people into patients. In their new book, “Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients”, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels examine how the drug industry has transformed the way we think about physical and mental health and turned more and more of us each year into customers. Moynihan...a regular contributor to the British Medical Journal [discusses] how -- and why -- drug makers have begun targeting people who aren’t sick. The so-called preventives are where the big money are: like the bone-density drugs or the cholesterol [-lowering] drugs. Increasingly we’re seeing the marketing shift to those types of drugs. People talk about the "worried well." There are many ways in which the drug companies target those people. There’s an informal alliance between the drug companies and aspects of the medical profession and aspects of the patient advocacy world who all seem to have interests in defining more and more people as ill. Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population but the U.S. makes up...half of total spending on drugs.

The maker of a billion-dollar antipsychotic medication has acknowledged misleading doctors and other healthcare providers about the safety of its product, minimizing potentially deadly side effects. On Wednesday, drug maker Janssen Pharmaceutica wrote a two-page letter to doctors, warning them that the company, in promotional material, had "minimized potentially fatal risks, and made misleading claims" that the medication was more safe in treating mental illness than other drugs in the same category. Risperdal is the leading drug used to combat schizophrenia and other types of psychotic disorders, earning Janssen about $2.1 billion in annual sales. The drug was first marketed about eight years ago, and is prescribed to more than 10 million people worldwide. The "important correction of drug information" came shortly after federal regulators had accused Janssen of "disseminating" advertising and marketing material that was "false or misleading."

Don't miss the highly revealing article on this vital topic by the New England Journal of Medicine's former editor in chief Marica Angell. Click here

Within the next few weeks, President Bush is expected to release his administration's new national space policy. There have been a series of reports since 2001 that essentially advocate deploying space weapons. The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, initially chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, argued that the United States must take steps to avoid a "space Pearl Harbor." The Rumsfeld report said there is no current bar to "placing or using weapons in space, applying force from space to Earth, or conducting military operations in and through space." Not so coincidentally, seven of the 13 members of the Rumsfeld space commission had ties to aerospace companies that could stand to gain from the launching of a major space weapons program. There are also plans afoot to develop Hypervelocity Rod Bundles, frequently called "Rods from God," designed to drop from space and hit targets on Earth.

Note: Why aren't other major newspapers reporting this critical news?

California refiners are simply cashing in on a system that allows a handful of players to keep prices high by carefully controlling supplies. The result is a kind of miracle market in which profits abound, outsiders can't compete and a dwindling cadre of gas station operators has little choice but go along. Refiners "not only control how much supply is in the marketplace, they control who gets it and at what price," said Dennis DeCota, executive director of the California Service Station and Automotive Repair Assn. The recent history of California's fuel industry is a textbook case of how a once-competitive business can become skewed to the advantage of a few, all with the federal government's blessing. Refiners acknowledge their California businesses have become the most profitable in the nation. The rest of the country isn't far behind. Characteristics once unique to California — specialty fuels, a refinery shortage, the growing dominance of a few companies — have begun to plague other gasoline markets.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center ... to ensure complete secrecy. The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. A mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism. But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931. Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans.

Note: A good, though somewhat watered down version of the above article was published in the Boston Globe on July 1, 2005. To see this article on the Globe website, click here. For an excellent report endorsed by dozens of respected doctors and nurses on the serious risks and dangers of vaccines, click here. Watch an excellent video of Emmy award winning reporter Sharyl Attkisson exposing how the government fired an vaccine expert who found links to autism.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. This is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Note: The full speech (available at the link above) is highly inspiring. For some excellent ideas on how to find what you love and develop the courage to follow your heart and intuition, click here.

Despite calls for more transparency after revelations about the side effects of ibuprofen, the FDA has withheld 28 pages of information on a new wave of painkillers. Vital data on prescription medicines found in millions of British homes has been suppressed by the powerful US drug regulators, even though the information could potentially save lives. An investigation by The Independent on Sunday shows that, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, the American Food and Drug Administration routinely conceals information it considers commercially sensitive, leaving medical specialists unable to assess the true risks. Dr Peter Juni, one of the team of Swiss investigators who helped to expose the risk of the new-generation drugs, claims his efforts were obstructed by the FDA. "Too often the FDA saw and continues to see the pharmaceutical industry as its customers, a vital source of funding for its activities, and not as a sector of society in need of strong regulation."

A panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations wants the United States to focus not on the defense of our own borders, but rather create what effectively would be a common border that includes Mexico and Canada. CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: On Capitol Hill, testimony [is] calling for Americans to start thinking like citizens of North America and treat the U.S., Mexico and Canada like one big country. That's the view in a report called "Building a North American Community." It envisions a common border around the U.S., Mexico and Canada in just five years, a border pass for residents of the three countries, and a freer flow of goods and people. [Task force member Robert] PASTOR: What we hope to accomplish by 2010 is a common external tariff which will mean that goods can move easily across the border. We want a common security perimeter around all of North America. ROMANS: Security experts say folding Mexico and Canada into the U.S. is a grave breach of that sovereignty. [The report calls for] temporary migrant worker programs expanded with full mobility of labor between the three countries in the next five years. The idea here is to make North America more like the European Union. [CNN Anchor Lou] DOBBS: Americans must think that our political and academic elites have gone utterly mad at a time when three-and-a-half years, approaching four years after September 11, we still don't have border security. And this group of elites is talking about not defending our borders, finally, but rather creating new ones. It's astonishing.

Note: This agenda is being promoted in key political forums with practically no media reporting. For one of the few media articles reporting on this important topic, click here.

It is no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everyone else behind is not widely known. The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell. Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay ... taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. From 1950 to 1970 ... for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000. An Internal Revenue Service study found that the only taxpayers whose share of taxes declined in 2001 and 2002 were those in the top 0.1 percent. Some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth.

ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration along with major defense contractors in the United States. Some of the most generous contributors to Republican campaigns are also some of the largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold. Most notable of these are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems.

A Times survey of the state's largest companies shows that CEOs' pay is growing at a much faster pace than that of rank-and-file employees. The difference is even sharper at the top rungs of the ladder. The 10 highest-paid executives on this year's list earned 36.7% more than last year's top 10 — garnering a collective $467.5 million. That's enough to buy about 275 homes in Malibu or 1.5 million sets of golf clubs or two 747 jumbo jets. Although limited to California companies, the survey reflects a national trend: a widening chasm between the pay of chief executives and rank-and-file employees. CEOs at California's largest 100 public companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, up almost 20% from 2003. That compares with the 2.9% raise that the average California worker saw last year. The average CEO made 42 times the average worker's pay in 1980. That increased to 85 times in 1990 and is now over 300 times. Sometimes, executive pay soars even in bad years. Sanmina-SCI Corp., a San Jose telecommunications company with $12 billion in sales, lost money in 2003 and 2004. Yet Chief Executive Jure Sola scored a 1,500% hike in total pay during 2004, according to The Times survey. Sola was paid $19.8 million last year, while the company lost $14.9 million.

When the drug industry came under fire last summer for failing to disclose poor results from studies of antidepressants, major drug makers promised to provide more information about their research on new medicines. But nearly a year later, crucial facts about many clinical trials remain hidden. Eli Lilly and some other companies have posted hundreds of trial results on the Web and pledged to disclose all results for all drugs they sell. But other drug makers, including Merck and Pfizer, release less information and are reluctant to add more, citing competitive pressures. As a result, doctors and patients lack critical information about important drugs ... and the companies can hide negative trial results by refusing to publish studies, or by cherry-picking and highlighting the most favorable data. GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle a suit ... alleging that Glaxo had hidden results from trials showing that its antidepressant Paxil might increase suicidal thoughts in children and teenagers. Federal laws require the disclosure of all trials and trial results to the F.D.A. But companies are not required to disclose trial results to scientists or the public. Under pressure from the editors of medical journals, the major drug companies in January agreed to expand the number of trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov. Three companies have filed only vague descriptions of many studies, often failing even to name the drugs under investigation. For example, Merck describes one trial as a "one-year study of an investigational drug in obese patients."

Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food. Details of secret research carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant...shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of their blood. According to the confidential 1,139-page report, these health problems were absent from another batch of rodents fed non-GM food. Although Monsanto last night dismissed the abnormalities in rats as meaningless and due to chance...a senior British government source said ministers were so worried by the findings that they had called for further information. The full details of the rat research are included in the main report, which Monsanto refuses to release on the grounds that "it contains confidential business information which could be of commercial use to our competitors".

Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this vital topic, see our summary of Seeds of Deception.

Carmakers such as Toyota and Honda can't seem to make hybrid vehicles fast enough to keep up with public interest. Interest in this new technology is growing, and one group is highlighting these technical marvels in a yearly event called the Tour de Sol. Top prize for the Monte-Carlo Rally went to a modified Honda Insight driven by Brian Hardegen, of Pepperell, who broke the 100-mile-per-gallon barrier over a 150-mile range. The car actually got 107 miles-per gallon. St. Mark's High School in Southboro, and North Haven Community School, North Haven, ME, demonstrated true zero-oil consumption and true zero climate-change emissions with their modified electric Ford pick-up and Volkswagen bus. More than 60 hybrid, electric and biofueled vehicles from throughout the US and Canada demonstrated that we have the technology today to power our transportation system with zero-oil consumption and zero climate-change emissions.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. If high school students can do it, why aren't the car companies seriously developing these technologies? And why are car manufacturers not able to keep up with demand on hybrid vehicles? For more, click here.

Merck & Co.'s longtime leader Raymond V. Gilmartin abruptly resigned yesterday on the same day congressional investigators released a slew of documents detailing how the company continued to aggressively promote its arthritis drug Vioxx after it knew of potentially serious safety concerns. The documents...showed that Merck directed its 3,000-person Vioxx sales force to avoid discussions with doctors about the cardiovascular risks identified in a major clinical trial of the drug in 2000. Sales representatives were told instead to rely on a "Cardiovascular Card" that said Vioxx was protecting the heart rather than potentially harming it. They were [also] trained how to smile, speak and position themselves most effectively when talking with doctors, and were exhorted to sell Vioxx and other Merck drugs using the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Vioxx was withdrawn from the market last September after another clinical trial found that people who had taken the drug for 18 months were five times more likely to have heart attacks and strokes than those on a placebo. Merck was sharply criticized in a hearing into how the company and the Food and Drug Administration had handled the safety concerns surrounding Vioxx.

Note: The following is the New York Times website's abstract of this article, which is a very good summary.

2003 Medicare bill is object lesson in how special interests hold America's health care system hostage; says law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings, and creates unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that drug benefit be administered by private insurers; says it specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices; notes that Rep Billy Tauzin, who shepherded drug bill through Congress, now heads all-powerful drug-industry lobbying group, and Thomas Scully, former Medicare administrator, negotiated for future health industry lobbying job at same time he was pushing drug bill; calls Medicare bill corrupt deal created by corrupt system.

They're tax havens: 70 mostly tiny nations that offer no-tax or low-tax status to the wealthy so they can stash their money. Usually, the process is so secret that it draws little attention. But the sums - and lost tax revenues - are growing so large that the havens are getting new and unaccustomed scrutiny. There are about 3 million shell companies (set up largely to duck taxes) in offshore tax havens, Komisar reckons. These tiny tax havens hold 31 percent of total world assets and 26 percent of the stock of US multinationals.

ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room [is] the inside story of one of history’s greatest business scandals, in which top executives of America’s seventh largest company walked away with over one billion dollars while investors and employees lost everything. Based on the best-selling book ... this tale of greed, hubris and betrayal reveals the outrageous personal excesses of the Enron hierarchy and the moral vacuum that led CEO Ken Lay - along with other players including accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Skilling and Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow - to manipulate securities trading, bluff the balance sheets and deceive investors. By 2000, the company has grown into the largest natural gas merchant in North America, eventually branching out into trading other commodities. Jeff Skilling is named CEO, and the company stock skyrockets. Meanwhile, Skilling’s “black box” accounting results in declared earnings of 53 million dollars for a collapsing deal that doesn’t profit a cent. And Enron’s West Coast power desk has its most profitable month ever as California citizens become casualties of Enron’s scheme to artificially increase demand for electricity, resulting in rolling blackouts and two deaths. When Enron’s sleight of hand accounting and unethical trading eventually meet the realities of balance sheets that don’t balance and products that don’t exist, unwitting employees who have anchored their financial futures to the Enron ship watch in horror as water rushes in overhead.

Note: Watch this revealing documentary on this webpage. Enron was American's seventh-largest public company and controlled 25 percent of the nation's energy before it failed in 2002. Its stock plummeted from $90 a share to 9 cents a share in a matter of months after fraud was uncovered. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing corporate corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.