Corporate Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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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.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside an exclusive California retreat for government and business leaders Saturday to challenge the right of a "ruling elite" to make policy decisions without public scrutiny. The annual Bohemian Grove retreat has attracted powerful men such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, philanthropist David Rockefeller, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It's also become a magnet for all types of activists who increasingly use the event to network and organize their campaigns. The men who attend the Bohemian Grove retreat spend two weeks performing plays, eating gourmet camp grub, listening to speakers and power-bonding at the 2,700-acre compound near the Russian River in Sonoma County. The retreat is organized by the exclusive San Francisco-based Bohemian Club. The club and event are shrouded in mystery, much like Yale University's most-famous secret society, Skull and Bones, whose members include President George W. Bush and his presidential rival Sen. John Kerry.

Note: This article strangely has been removed from the San Francisco Chronicle website. To see it in the Internet Archive, click here. For an informative five-minute ABC news clip on the power elite gathering Bohemian Grove reported in 1981, click here. And for reliable information on the most secretive meeting of the world's elite reported by the major media, see our Bilderberg Group compilation available here.

Though the 100 mpg car sounds like a myth, it turns out that such vehicles do exist -- only they're built in your neighbor's garage, not a giant production plant. Known as plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles ... they’re basically Priuses or similar hybrids that have been equipped with extra batteries, so that they rarely use their gasoline engines at all. "People are salivating for plug-ins," says Bradley Berman, editor of the site HybridCars.com. A hybrid vehicle today like a Prius has both a gasoline engine and a battery, which is fed by the braking energy produced by the car. It can’t be plugged in. A plug-in hybrid keeps those components, but essentially gets an extra fuel tank, in the form of an added battery bank ... that allows the car to run exclusively off battery power for most driving. Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of high-efficiency, low-emission cars, owns the first consumer plug-in in North America. Not surprisingly, he loves it. "Many days I use no gasoline, because I go at neighborhood speeds for under 30 miles, and I’m just all-electric all day," he says. And the mileage? "At highway speeds, you can easily get over 100 mpg." Other plug-in owners offer up similar results. "I used to fill up every 400 miles or so," he says ... "and now I fill up every 800 miles or so." Advocates estimate that it costs less than $1 per gallon to replenish a plug-in hybrid. "Our goal is to have a $3,000 kit," CalCars' Kramer says. (That number, coincidentally, is also what many plug-in evangelists think that the technology would cost for Toyota to add to its hybrids.)

Note: If people are doing this in their garage, why aren't the auto makers already producing them? In fact, a similar vehicle was produced to be marketed in 2002, but then pulled off the market. To find why average car mileage has remained virtually unchanged for 100 years, click here.

The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to reap a windfall from a surprisingly lucrative niche market: drugs for poor people. The windfall, which by some estimates could be $2 billion or more this year, is a result of the transfer of millions of low-income people into the new Medicare Part D drug program that went into effect in January. Under that program...the prices paid by insurers, and eventually the taxpayer, for the medications given to those transferred are likely to be higher than what was paid under the federal-state Medicaid programs. Analysts expect it to generate hundreds of millions of additional dollars this year for the drug companies. Drugs tend to be cheaper under the Medicaid programs because the states are the buyers and by law they receive the lowest available prices for drugs. But in creating the federal Part D program, Congress -- in what critics saw as a sop to the drug industry -- barred the government from having a negotiating role. The windfall for the drug makers was made possible by a provision of the 2003 Medicare law that exempts Part D drugs from "best price" rebates that the drug makers have been required to give to the state Medicaid programs. Those rebates are meant to make sure that state Medicaid agencies pay no more than the best prices drug companies offer to any big commercial insurer. Now, under Part D, all sorts of price deals will be negotiated by dozens of Medicare drug plans. The prices will be reported to Medicare, but under a provision of the law pushed by industry lobbyists, they will otherwise be kept secret.

For the second time in two months, The Journal of the American Medical Association says it was misled by researchers who failed to reveal financial ties to drug companies. The latest incident, disclosed in letters to the editor and a correction in Wednesday's journal, involves a study showing that pregnant women who stop taking antidepressants risk slipping back into depression. Most of the 13 authors have financial ties to drug companies including antidepressant makers, but only two of them revealed their ties when the study was published in February.

Note: To understand how the drug companies manipulate results and even exert tremendous influence over the U.S. Congress, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Chris Paine´s documentary film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" argues convincingly that there was indeed a market for the cars — and a devoted one, ... but that GM [General Motors] squashed the EV1 because, quite simply, it threatened the livelihood of the entire automotive industry. The car used no gasoline, no oil and no mufflers, and it required only sporadic brake maintenance. Each of these components represents billions of dollars in profits for the industry. GM, the oil companies and various government agencies argued that the car wasn´t practical, didn´t have enough range for consumers and was less promising than the apparently imminent hydrogen technology. The reality was exactly the opposite, Paine´s film suggests — the viability of hydrogen as an automotive fuel source alone is in fact almost comically optimistic. The whisper-quiet EV1 was designed by [an] aviation pioneer, Paul MacCready of AeroVironment. In the 1970s, MacCready built the only successful human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Condor and the Gossamer Albatross. His solar-powered electric car Sunraycer, built for GM, won the 1987 World Solar Challenge Race in Australia. His corporate mantra is "do more with less" — that is, focus on creating vehicles that require less energy to operate, not on finding ways to pump more power into inefficient systems. His team´s battery-powered EV1 was a triumph of engineering and a joy to operate.

Note: For lots more on key suppressed automotive and energy inventions, click here.

A poignant new documentary asks who killed GM's promising electric car project? A new documentary released June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, appropriately titled Who Killed The Electric Car? tries in Clue-like fashion to figure out why GM pulled the plug on its EV1 electric vehicle program, which by most accounts was approaching success when the first prototype was introduced in the mid-1990s. "It was a revolutionary, modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no mufflers, and rare brake maintenance," according to a synopsis of the film. In the 1990s a strict clean-air mandate introduced in California that called for zero-emission vehicles was what led GM to introduce the EV1. Eventually that California mandate got watered down from "zero" to "low" emissions, and the automakers decided to literally blow up their EV programs. GM, which leased out the EV1 cars it produced, called them all back after California changed its policy. The cars were crushed and shredded. Who were the people leasing these vehicles? Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Ted Danson, among others, many of whom appear in the movie and talk favourably about their electric cars. If the implications of an advance means loss of future business to a paradigm, the key players of that paradigm will lobby to kill it. The paradigm? Big oil. Similarly, the auto industry has an interest in perpetuating the manufacture of vehicles that require routine, costly maintenance.

Note: For more information and showing times on the highly revealing Who Killed The Electric Car, visit www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. For even deeper information www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

AT&T Inc. said on Wednesday it was revising its privacy policy, explaining to customers that it owns their phone records and can hand them over to law enforcers if necessary. The changes...come at a time when AT&T and other phone companies face lawsuits claiming they aided a U.S. government domestic spying program by giving the National Security Agency call records of millions of customers without their permission. The new policy, unlike the old one, spells out the fact that AT&T...customer information constitutes "business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process." The earlier policy had simply said that...the company could share customer information to "respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process, to the extent required and/or permitted by law." Under the new policy...the company also said that it would track viewing information for customers of a television service it is developing in order to help it make recommendations to customers based on their viewing habits. It also said that before customers use its services they must agree to the policy, an element that was not in its previous guidelines.

Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005. In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The typical worker's compensation averaged just under $42,000 for the year, while the average CEO brought home almost $11 million. In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies earned 24 times a worker's pay. In recent years, compensation has been a hot issue with shareholders who have been bombarded with news stories about chief executives who are given multimillion dollar bonus and pay packages even if shares have declined. The chief executives of 11 of the largest companies were awarded a total of $865 million in pay in the last two years, even as they presided over a total loss of $640 billion in shareholder value, a recent study from governance firm the Corporate Library, found.

Dozens of members of the Bush administration's domestic-security team...are collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run. At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security...are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars' worth of domestic-security business. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge...stands to profit now that Savi Technology, a maker of radio-frequency-identification equipment that the department pushed while he was secretary, is being bought by Lockheed Martin. He was appointed to the Savi board three months after resigning from the department. Former Homeland Security undersecretary Asa Hutchinson...the biggest potential for profit among Hutchinson's ventures appears to come from his role as an investor in Fortress America Acquisition. Hutchinson, before the [company's] stock was sold publicly, bought 200,000 shares for $25,000. At Friday's trading price the stock was worth more than $1.2 million. More than two-thirds of the department's most senior executives in its first years have moved through the revolving door. Federal law prohibits senior executive-branch officials from lobbying former government colleagues or subordinates for at least a year after leaving public service. But by exploiting loopholes in the law...it is often easy for former officials to do just that.

Among prominent attendees at this year's conference of the Bilderberg group, a secretive society that includes some of the world's most powerful people: Jacques Aigrain, CEO of Swiss Re. Ahmad Chalabi, former deputy prime minister of Iraq and long-time opponent of Saddam Hussein. George A. David, chairman of Coca-Cola. Paul Desmarais, CEO of Power Corporation. Richard Holbrooke, key American negotiator for 1995 Bosnian peace accords. Vernon Jordan, friend and onetime presidential aide to Bill Clinton. Henry Kissinger, foreign-policy guru and secretary of state under Richard Nixon. Ed Kronenburg, director of NATO's private office. Bernardino Leon Gross, Spain's foreign minister. Ronald S. Lloyd, chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston. Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands. Gordon Nixon, Royal Bank of Canada president, CEO. George Pataki, governor of New York state. Richard Perle, senior foreign policy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush. David Rockefeller, retired banker, heir to oil fortune. Dennis Ross, former Clinton Mideast negotiator. Giulio Tremonti, VP of Italy's chamber of deputies. James Wolfensohn, U.S. Mideast envoy, former head of the World Bank. Robert Zoellick, deputy U.S. secretary of state.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For those who know about the pre-war manipulations involving weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the participation of Ahmed Chalabi speaks volumes. And for a revealing three-minute video clip on CNN about this highly secretive group, click here.

Ottawa. On the outskirts of the nation's capital, a tony high-rise hotel beside a golf course is hosting the annual meeting for one of the world's most secretive and powerful societies. They're called the Bilderberg group. Those who follow the Bilderberg group say it got Europe to adopt a common currency, got Bill Clinton elected after he agreed to support NAFTA, and is spending this week deciding what to do about high oil prices and that pesky fundamentalist president of Iran. The Bilderberg group is a half-century-old organization comprising about 130 of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people. They don't have a website. Bilderberg says the privacy of its meetings helps encourage freewheeling discussion. An unsigned press release...confirmed this year's meeting would deal with energy issues, Iran, the Middle East, terrorism, immigration, Russia, European-American relations and Asia. The 2006 group includes David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Queen Beatrix of Holland, New York Gov. George Pataki, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Canada, cabinet ministers from Spain, Greece and a number of media moguls. The group also includes a pair of prominent figures involved in planning the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- Richard Perle and Ahmad Chalabi. Fellow White House power-players Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank, have spoken to the group in the past. The prime ministers of Britain and Canada -- Tony Blair and Stephen Harper -- have addressed the group before.

Note: For two excellent articles from BBC describing this incredibly powerful, highly secretive group of elites:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/051115secretsocietiesbilderberg

In Northern California's Humboldt County, voters decided by a 55-45 margin that corporations do not have the same rights...as citizens when it comes to participating in local political campaigns. Until Tuesday in Humboldt County, corporations were able to claim citizenship rights, as they do elsewhere in the United States. With the passage of Measure T...voters have signaled that they want out-of-town corporations barred from meddling in local elections. The "Yes on T" campaign was rooted in regard for the American experiment, from...references to Tuesday's election as a modern-day "Boston Tea Party," to the quote from Thomas Jefferson: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government." Just as Jefferson and his contemporaries were angered by dominance of the affairs of the American colonies by King George III and the British business combines...so Humboldt County residents were angered by the attempts of outside corporate interests to dominate local politics. Humboldt County residents...put Measure T on the ballot, declaring, "Our Founding Fathers never intended corporations to have this kind of power." Let us hope that the spirit of '76 prevailed Tuesday in Humboldt County will spread until that day when American democracy is guided by the will of the people rather than the campaign contribution checks of the corporations that are the rampaging "empires" of our age.

Just how far will corporate lobbyists go to tilt governmental decisions in their favor? Last fall, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the Clean Air Act does not require regulating carbon dioxide emissions that are heating up the planet at an unprecedented rate. It turns out that two of the jurists who helped decide the case -- Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg and Judge David B. Sentelle -- attended a six-day global warming seminar at Yellowstone National Park sponsored by a free-market foundation and featuring presentations from companies with a clear financial interest in limiting regulation. Exxon Mobil Corp. and other large businesses contribute to conservative think tanks to help "educate" federal judges through seminars like the one at Yellowstone. The Code of Conduct for federal judges does not prohibit attending such seminars -- as long as participation does not "cast reasonable doubt on the capacity to decide impartially issues that may come before them." Leaders of Congress and the federal courts seem to recognize that the federal judiciary ought to be out of bounds for lobbyists. Judges are appointed for life, and allowing insider access threatens the integrity of the one branch of government that should stand above politics. Court cases must be won by argument, not by influence, and that means putting a stop to judicial junkets that give one side of the debate an unfair advantage.

Shareholders of Exxon Mobil Corp., whose departing chief executive got a $357 million retirement package, overwhelmingly rejected resolutions to rein in compensation at the company's annual meeting yesterday. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex W. Tillerson said predecessor Lee Raymond deserved a $357 million retirement package that he received in January because he delivered record profits.

Note: So price gouging at the gas pumps brings record oil profits and one of the CEO's responsible gets hundreds of millions of dollars as a retirement gift. What kind of message does that send? Why didn't other major newspapers pick up this little "detail."

The American Diabetes Association...privately enlisted an Eli Lilly & Co. executive to chart its growth strategy. The National Alliance on Mental Illness...lobbies for treatment programs that also benefit its drug-company donors. The National Gaucher Foundation...gets nearly all its revenue from one drugmaker, Genzyme Corp. Many patient groups and drug companies maintain close, multimillion-dollar relationships while disclosing limited or no details about the ties. An Inquirer examination of six groups, each a leading advocate for patients in a disease area, found that the groups rarely disclose such ties when commenting or lobbying about donors' drugs. Combined, the six received at least $29 million from drug companies last year. The amount ranged from 2 percent to 7 percent of revenue at the Arthritis Foundation, to 89 percent to 91 percent at the much smaller National Gaucher Foundation. The funding usually comes from the companies' marketing or sales divisions, not charity offices. Grants often rise with promotional spending as a drug hits the market and fall when sales ebb. Donations from Merck and Pfizer Inc. to the Arthritis Foundation more than doubled, to at least $1.65 million combined, in 2000 as they launched Vioxx and Celebrex. Merck explicitly wove the foundation into sales strategies. In 2000-2001, the American Diabetes Association did not disclose an unusual gift from Lilly: a lent executive, Emerson "Randy" Hall Jr., who moved into its Alexandria, Va., headquarters and coached it on growth strategies, all paid by Lilly.

Note: If you want to understand how the huge pharmaceutical industry influences what you know about their drugs, this article is a must read. You may first want to read a riveting two-page summary of an exposé by the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, who details major collusion and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Imagine the dilemma of having so much cash in your bank account that you didn't know what to do with it. This pipe dream for the average American is now reality for the country's biggest corporations. The industrial companies that make up the Standard & Poor's 500 index...have a staggering $643 billion in cash and equivalents. "We're in a time that is out of whack with all historical numbers," said Howard Silverblatt, equity market analyst at Standard & Poor's. "People are demanding why corporations need so much cash, what are they going to do with it?" Companies began propping up their reserves through 16 straight quarters of double-digit profit growth. Leading the pack with the most cash is Exxon Mobil Corp., which has about $36.55 billion on its balance sheet. That amount is nearly equal to its 2005 profit of $36.13 billion, the highest ever for a U.S. company. Some results of the cash riches: An unprecedented $500 billion of stock buybacks. Last year, ExxonMobil spent $18.2 billion buying its shares. One of the biggest avenues in which companies have spent this excess money has been through mergers and acquisitions. Some 75.4 percent of all deals under $1 billion so far this year were done purely with cash.

Note: A Google search reveals that though this Associated Press article was widely picked up by medium-sized newspapers in the U.S., none of the top 10 papers picked it up. The Seattle newspaper above also removed the word "huge" from the title after it was published. $36 billion means that more than $100 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. went into ExxonMobil profits last year, and another $100 for each person went into their cash reserves. If ExxonMobil and other oil companies have so much extra cash, why are gas prices so high? It's also quite interesting that the advertisements of these mega-corporations continually invite us to go into debt buying their products, while their profits and cash reserves grow ever higher.

Drug companies fund a growing number of the studies in leading psychiatric journals, and drugs fare much better in these company-funded studies than in trials done independently or by competitors, researchers reported Wednesday. About 57% of published studies were paid for by drug companies in 2002, compared with 25% in 1992, says psychiatrist Igor Galynker of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. His team looked at clinical research in four influential journals: American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. In the report, released at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Toronto, reviewers did not know who paid for the studies they evaluated, Galynker says. There were favorable outcomes for a medication in about: eight out of 10 studies paid for by the company that makes the drug; five out of 10 studies done with no industry support; three out of 10 studies done by competitors of the firm making the drug. As drug companies increasingly fund research that yields favorable outcomes for their drugs, there may be a built-in bias because journals are reluctant to publish studies with negative or inconclusive findings.

Note: To learn more about the astonishing profits and power of the major drug companies, read our concise summary of a major insider's research at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye. Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision. The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only six days later ... USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official. In addition to refusing to explain why Bush decided to delegate this authority to Negroponte, the White House declined to say whether Bush or any other President has ever exercised the authority and allowed a company to avoid standard securities disclosure and accounting requirements.

Note: For many revealing reports on government secrecy from major media sources, click here.

Is there a case for conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the Iraq war? About 10 minutes into the ultra-low-budget documentary 'Loose Change,' now making its way around the Internet, that late, great genius of addled truth-telling, Hunter S. Thompson, is heard giving his gonzo opinion of the way the American press behaved after 9/11. "Well, let's see, 'shamefully' is the word that comes to mind," he says. The kernel of truth in all the conspiracy theories is that the Bush administration's biggest supporters and closest political allies have benefited mightily from its policy of open-ended war. Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company -- which is all about both oil and defense -- has seen its stock rise from about $12 a share to about $80 a share under this administration. ExxonMobil, which has contributed mightily to the Republican Party, has seen its stock soar from about $32 to $64 since Bush took office. Share prices in both companies, and in their industries, were plunging before the Bush administration came to office in early 2001. 'Loose Change' doesn't present a plausible case for conspiracy, only a collection of innuendoes. But the invasion of Iraq, well, that's a rather different matter. As a whole raft of books by former members of the administration, Bush admirers and outside analysts have established over the last couple of years, the president and vice president were hell-bent on toppling Saddam Hussein even before September 2001.

Note: Though the author belittles 'Loose Change,' he also makes some great points and alerts people to the fact that this free documentary has gained wide popularity.

Beginning in 1997, Pharmacia, currently a subsidiary of Pfizer, sought to boost its sales of the drug Genotropin. To that end, the company illegally marketed the drug to spur growth in short children and as an anti-aging drug for adults looking for the fountain of youth. In a nutshell, the off-label marketing scheme included direct payments to doctors, all-expense paid junkets for doctors, financial incentives to distributors and phony consultant contracts to funnel payments for the off-label promotion. As a result of the scheme's success, sales of the Genotropin sky-rocketed and over the years, Medicaid and other public healthcare programs paid millions of dollars for its improper use. The full amount of damage to health care programs is not yet known. "But this much is certain," former Pfizer Vice President turned whistleblower, Dr Peter Rost, says, "Pharmacia turned Genotropin into a cash cow by illegally peddling a dangerous drug to make short kids tall and their grandparents young." Genotropin is a man made human growth hormone approved to treat a limited range of hormonal deficiencies. The FDA has never approved the drug to spur growth for children without hormonal deficiencies or to prevent aging. Dr Rost joined Pharmacia in June of 2001 as a VP of Marketing. On May 22, 2003, Dr Rost became aware of the pervasive nature of ongoing illegal activity. [He then] decided to file a lawsuit ... alleging fraud relating to the off-label marketing of Genotropin and delivered a copy of the complaint to the US Attorney's Office on June 4, 2003.

Note: Read an excellent article on Dr. Rost and other major whistleblowers from the pharmaceutical industry.

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.