Documentary - Corporations Became People
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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unequal protection, How corporations became people and How You Can Fight Back. By Tom Hartman. On September 2nd 2000 and nine, the transnational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people and that definitely lead physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended. Because Visor is a corporation, legal abstraction, really, it couldn't go to jail like fraudster Bernie Madoff or killer John Dillinger. Instead, it paid a $1.2 billion criminal fine to the U. S government, the biggest in history, as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties. The total settlement was more than $2.3 billion another record. None of its executives, decision makers, stockholders, owners or employees saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell. Most Americans don't even know about this huge and massive crime, nor do they know that the criminal never spent a day in jail. But they do know that in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women's prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century, in particularly the past 40 years, corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are in fact, persons and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights In 2000 and nine. The right wing advocacy group Citizens United argued before the Supreme Court that they had the First Amendment right to free speech and to influence elections through the production and distribution of a slasher documentary designed to destroy Hillary Clinton's ability to win the Democratic nomination. Some political observers assert that they did this in part because they believe that a black man whose first name sounded like Osama and whose middle name was Hussein could never, ever possibly win against the Republican. No matter how poor a candidate they put up