Apparently Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the biggest drug company in the world, needs all the bad publicity it can get. One of the last things Jane Jacobs wrote was a friend-of-the-court letter in the Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London where eminent domain was used to take property from private landowners and give it to a private corporation (Pfizer). It was just as outrageous as that sounds. And Pfizer got away with it. Now Pfizer is abandoning the site. Leaving a large empty lot where houses used to be. The CEO of Pfizer is Jeff Kindler.
Dude, who’s the worse one here – the capitalist drug company simply seeking profits, the politicians that make the actual decision to ruin people’s lives (the company doesn’t have a say in this – it’s the politicians making the decision!) or the sheepish voters that elected those politicians?
“the company doesn’t have a say in this – it’s the politicians making the decision!”
lol, awwww, that’s cute.
I guess I’m daft but I just can’t understand what Pfizer can do besides lobbying and taking the corrupt politicians for expensive lunches. It’s the local politicans that have the final saying and approve the tax breaks and the eminent domain.
Right, and all you have to do is make sure your politicians aren’t corrupt and that Pfizer doesn’t straddle any ethical loopholes. Why hasn’t anyone thought of that?
user@example.com: Your statement implies the dangerous, indeed fatal, misunderstanding held by a majority of liberals and progressives in the world today.
They somehow see government as being some sort of bulwark against corporate power.
But if you look at the reality, the government is really an extension of corporate power. Money is,. unfortunately, just overwhelmingly more powerful in deciding government policy that popular voice. Government is generally used as the pit bull to justify the use of coercion in achieving the corporate agenda.
Sure, the corporations may cry for their mommy, and say all kinds of nonsense about how oppressed they are. But that is an intentional smokescreen.
This is a case of corporations and government getting together to screw the citizenry, as it is 90+% of the time.
Sasha, I think you and user@example.com agree.
user@example.com – Ummm… How exactly is Pres Obama responsible for this? The court case happened a few years ago under the previous administration, and in any event, it was the courts, not the white house, that made this call.
I’m coming to dislike all the hate speech, (left or right) I see in these postings almost as much as I am disappointed by all the grammatical and spelling errors. No wonder the world laughs at us. Sigh.
hmm. I guess my previous comment was unclear. user@example is joking.