If America’s total dependence on corporate profits and stock market/housing bubbles is just fine because the bubbles just keep inflating, there’s nothing left but rot.
It’s becoming a routine story: a whistleblower emerges with copious documentation, revealing the ethical / managerial rot at the very top of Corporate America icons. Recently it was Facebook that was revealed as devoting far more resources to masking corporate guile than to actually improving longstanding ethical and quality issues.
Now it’s Pfizer’s fast and loose treatment of supposedly rigorous protocols that’s been heavily documented. The prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) stated that the whistleblower provided “The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.” BMJ Investigation: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial.
The purpose of playing fast and loose is to maximize profits regardless of any other factors. And while corporations exist to maximize profits, the trend in Corporate America is to sacrifice everything to maximize profits and keep the putrid sewage hidden from regulators, the media and the public.
This isn’t about profit, it’s about hiding the rot that has seeped into every nook and cranny of Corporate America. The foundation of the stock market’s extreme valuations is corporate profits, and the stock market bubble is now the precarious foundation of the entire U.S. economy: should the bubble pop, everyone knows the economy and the financial system will both crash.
The usual corporate strategy–defame the whistleblower and blow smoke to cover the rot–loses traction when the rot is documented by internal memos, recordings, etc. It’s difficult for the lackeys of Corporate America to dismiss the British Medical Journal as just another tin-foil-hat outlet of “fake news,” especially with all the documentation now made public.
Lost in the obsession to profiteer and hide the rot is the notion that corporations have responsibilities to the public and their customers/users, not just to greedy managers and shareholders. These responsibilities have been tossed into the muddy ditch.
Regulations only exist in name in America. Corporate America plays by its own rules. Corporate America is not longer regulated in any consequential fashion, as the list of Pfizer’s actions reveal:
— Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff
— Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events
— Protocol deviations not being reported
— Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures
— Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
— Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems.
The last item appears in virtually every whistleblower case: the corporation doesn’t rush to fix its glaring ethical and quality issues, it rushes to silence the whistleblower and “manage the narrative” to protect its precious profits. Never mind that the public pays the price for corporations saying one thing and doing another, for hiding what they dare not let regulators, users, customers and patients learn about their practices and behind-closed-doors goals.
The Prime Directive of Corporate America is to hide the rot that’s permeated the entire corporation, starting at the top.
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The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard. Visit https://www.lewrockwell.com