Category: True Crime

Halliburton’s Army – LONG BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Halliburton’s Army, How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War” by Pratap Chatterjee, published in 2009.

This slightly sloppily proofread volume was also slightly redundant and very disorganized. Nevertheless, it was extremely well-documented and detailed. The author personally visited various sites and personally interviewed various people– in addition to sourcing information from documents– about which and whom he wrote.

In the late 1930’s, president Franklin Roosevelt, Congressman Lyndon Johnson and the company Brown & Root (BR) formed a public-private partnership to build the Marshall Ford Dam in Texas. In the early 1940’s, the company built the naval air station Corpus Christi. Taxpayers way overpaid for those projects. The reason was partly because the sweetheart terms of its contract guaranteed it a profit.

BR also built warships for World War II. It allegedly financed Lyndon Johnson’s run for the U.S. Senate in 1948. It built military bases during the Vietnam War. In August 1966, U.S. Congressman Donald Rumsfeld contended that, due to conflicts of interest, the federal government had signed contracts with BR that were “illegal by statute.” Of course, Rumsfeld hated President Johnson.

In October 1966, Rumsfeld and Bob Dole reported that BR had refused to let any government officials see documents associated with a BR construction site. The company and its subcontractors had lost track of $120 million and had thefts of millions of dollars of equipment by the end of its ($1.9-billion-in-costs) ten-year contract.

After the First Gulf War, a company named Halliburton pioneered the user-friendly assembly of cheap, prefab structures on military bases that were comfortable for soldiers in global hotspots. In early 1998, Dick Cheney assisted with the creation of Kellogg, Brown & Root when M.W. Kellogg was added to BR. Then Halliburton took over the whole kit and caboodle.

Through the 1990’s, Halliburton finagled $167.7 million worth of contracts from the U.S. government in Rwanda, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Italy. “But it’s hard to convince people that the company had no influence when your entire upper management once worked for the very agencies that awarded the contracts.”

Halliburton’s tentacles also reached into Somalian and Nigerian territory through bribery. It had fun in the Balkans with “… double-billing, inflating prices and providing of unsuitable products.” By the late 1990’s, thanks to Halliburton and Chevron, the previously unspoiled, tourist-filled beaches in Angola’s Cabinda province had turned black.

Donald Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense in the United States beginning in 2001. Just prior to 9/11, “Rumsfeld said that the Pentagon was wasting at least $3 billion a year.” In the next eight years, he proceeded to eliminate most of the military’s in-house operations, including payroll, warehousing and sanitation.

Rumsfeld was adding one more area of American life– the military– to the privatization trend of recent decades. It has already gained traction in education, prisons, government entitlements, student loans, spying and courier services. Curiously, healthcare is going in the opposite direction. Why is that?

Well, medicine has undergone a major cultural change in the last fifty years. The family doctor who made house calls used to be a trusted family friend who charged a reasonable rate for his services. Now depersonalized medicine whose costs are sky-high due to technology and specialization is the norm. Healthcare is a mature industry.

Some aspects of healthcare have become capitalism gone hog-wild, especially those that are a matter of life and death. They have become as out of control as Halliburton.

That is why Americans are welcoming the intervention of government regulation to stem the incompetence, fraud, abuse and waste that have inevitably resulted from too much capitalism. Yes, capitalism is good– up to a point.

Anyway, the George H.W. Bush administration initially signed a military-services contract of a few million dollars with Halliburton. Dick Cheney served as CEO of Halliburton from late summer 1995 through 2000.

In those years and beyond, Cheney successfully spurred specific American foreign policy initiatives to win more lucrative contracts for Halliburton. By January 2002, in one of several nefarious policy changes, he got President George W. Bush to lift economic sanctions against the Muslim country of Azerbaijan, human rights and environmentalism be damned. On Halliburton’s behalf, Cheney engaged in friendly dealings with such oil producers as Iran, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and prior to the war, Iraq.

Azerbaijan’s president, Azeri Aliyev came to the United States for prostate cancer surgery in February 2002. A year later, he ran for reelection and won. As a quid pro quo, in November 2003, President George W. Bush got him a World Bank loan for an oil pipeline.

Of course, in February 2003, the fix was in and Halliburton was automatically awarded the contract that spelled out the terms of the fait accompli restoration of Iraq’s oil fields after the fait accompli war, ethics be damned. To top it off, the contract guaranteed a hefty profit for Halliburton. The company argued that there was no time for a fair, sealed-bid process before the war.

The “… contract would effectively make Halliburton the biggest recipient of Iraq’s oil money, with no input from the Iraqi people.” More than half of the billings for Halliburton’s oil-related services that the U.S. government would presumably pay for, were actually paid with Iraq cash. In other words, the proceeds of Iraq oil sales were used to pay Halliburton.

An organization that studied the quality of Halliburton’s work in Iraq calculated that “… the potential revenue lost from reduced oil production and exports” was $14.8 billion. Gross incompetence, fraud, abuse and waste were not isolated incidents. The holding company’s entities had a few contracts whose epic failures were hushed up until their projects’ entire budgets were spent, at which time those contracts were cancelled.

For example, there were many inexcusable episodes of oil smuggling by corrupt Iraqi officials, right under the noses of U.S. contractors. Halliburton was supposed to be the party responsible for preventing those episodes until it was fired in mid-2005.

In early 2004, due to public outcry over the no-bid, rigged Halliburton contract, there was new bidding, which was still rigged. The military, politicians and top employees of Halliburton were all co-conspirators in the illegality.

Workers of Halliburton’s subsidiaries and its subcontractors have hailed from a range of nations, including but not limited to: Fiji, Uganda, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia, India and America. Both non-American and American hirees are lured by the promise of high pay.

But often that promise comes with a price; the workers are subjected to mean living quarters, do hard manual labor for long hours, such as twelve hours a day, seven days a week in dangerous conditions, get no health insurance and no paid time off, and might go for months with no pay.

If they’re non-American, workers can’t complain because they’ll likely be threatened with dismissal. They likely borrowed money to travel to their expatriate work in the first place. If they quit their jobs, they would be greatly indebted, and their families back home would be made even more impoverished.

Just a few of the kinds of functions the worldwide network of cheap labor fulfills include: food delivery, preparation and catering, lodging, golf course maintenance, civil engineering, motor vehicle transport of the United States Air Force, United States customs inspection and security.

Read the book to learn the details of numerous Halliburton-related outrages in addition to the aforementioned, and how in 2003 and later, the voices of the handful of people who might have had the power to stop the corruption were eventually drowned out by political actions imposed by the powers that were.

The Defense Never Rests – BONUS POST

The  Bonus Book of the Week is “The Defense Never Rests” by F. Lee Bailey with Harvey Aronson, published in 1971. This is the career memoir of a criminal defense attorney best known for the Sam Sheppard and Boston Strangler cases.

Born in 1933, Bailey served in the Marines, and later started practicing law at a firm in Boston. He became a polygraph-test expert, and later argued that test results should have been admissible in all courts. When he started his career in 1961, Massachusetts law still required that in court, a murder suspect be confined to a wire cage.

Read the book to learn of various cases litigated by the author, including those of Sam Sheppard and the Boston Strangler and his own, when he found himself in trouble (not for murder, though). Perhaps that is why he provided no: Notes, Bibliography, Sources, References or Index in this book, although he did provide verbatim excerpts of court transcripts.

Indecent Exposure

The Book of the Week is “Indecent Exposure, A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street” by David McClintick, published in 1982. This volume with the provocative but misleading title had nothing to do with sex. It actually consisted of a suspenseful, albeit long story seen mostly through the eyes of Alan J. Hirschfield, the CEO and officer at Columbia, the movie company. It was about how a lack of honesty, the power of propaganda, and clashing egos basically resulted in the redistribution of wealth among the wealthy. This sort of thing happens all the time.

In February 1977, then-famous actor Cliff Robertson received a document saying he owed taxes in connection with a check he never received. He later found out that the check had been forged and cashed in his name, by David Begelman, a high-level executive at the aforesaid Columbia. Robertson became the victim of cancel culture, for NOT being a tax cheat in Hollywood.

It was common practice for Hollywood studios to send movie actors checks for thousands of dollars (usually unreported to the IRS) that defrayed a small portion of their promotion expenses for a new picture. The IRS had just then begun cracking down on that taxable income. Robertson’s reaction set in motion a series of consequences that affected thousands of people; mostly financially.

Columbia was a public company, and the bad publicity resulting from news of a serious crime committed by one of its executives was a serious public relations problem. Hirschfield, who was on the board of directors, was told by an attorney that he had a duty to inform the executive committee, corporate counsel and the SEC after an internal investigation had been conducted.

As has been the case since the discovery of journalism/tabloidism, (supposedly said by Mark Twain), “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Begelman’s friends in the Hollywood community (of which the check forger had many) rushed to his defense, having heard only vague rumors that described his transgressions in euphemisms. They really had no clue that he had actually committed several felonies, it turned out. They didn’t want to know.

The friends planted tabloidy messages in the media making the excuse “Everybody Does It” because they took unethical liberties with their own expense accounts, and made Hirschfield the villain, saying he was a power-hungry, vindictive executive, as he technically did compete for power with Begelman in the company hierarchy. Hollywood’s and the public’s gullibility in automatically believing in Begelman’s innocence and Hirschfield’s treachery is human nature.

At the board meeting that initiated the long, heated discussion that would determine whether Begelman was fired, Begelman acted like a prisoner on death row who had suddenly found religion. He implied he might kill himself if removed from his primary job. But actually, anyone who knows this kind of person knows that he would be too arrogant to kill himself.

A preliminary inquiry into Begelman’s history yielded more than one serious crime during his Columbia tenure, and previous lying and other worse misdeeds. Hirschfield argued for termination, saying Begelman was unlikely to change his spots, as dishonesty was a lifelong habit with him. Over the next few years, the Hollywood community and the public, however, still having heard only distorted soundbites that minimized Begelman’s sins, fooled itself into believing they weren’t that bad, and continued to defend him.

Interesting sidenote: In 1982, in a joking context, Hirschfield exclaimed to a female friend who was high on the corporate ladder, in front of some colleagues: “Female executives suck!” She laughed. Clearly, if that was uttered in 2018, hilarity would NOT ensue.

Read the book to learn of the consequences of the stupid actions taken by most of the main characters of this entertaining saga.

Grand Delusions – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Grand Delusions, The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean” by Hillel Levin, published in 1983. This volume described the adventures of a car company engineer and entrepreneur, not to mention swindler.

The book’s first chapter was a summary of his entire career, suspense be damned. The section on his makeover and marriages was disorganized and redundant. One more criticism– the author interviewed only the book’s subject twice, and listed no notes, references or bibliography.

Anyhow, born in January 1925 in Detroit, DeLorean was the oldest of five sons. His father was an alcoholic Romanian; his mother, an Austrian. He kept busy while attending Lawrence Tech in Michigan. He wrote for the school newspaper and was on the student council. He joined a fraternity, danced in night clubs and drove a fast car.

DeLorean held a series of jobs including salesman, trainee in a special program at Chrysler, engineer at Packard, head engineer and then general manager of General Motors’ Pontiac division, and by the late 1960’s, general manager of its Chevrolet division.

After departing from his full-time job under murky circumstances, DeLorean and his sidekick Roy Nesseth posed as entrepreneurs who executed crooked business deals. Victims included an auto-parts patent holder, a farmer/rancher, and a financially struggling Cadillac dealership, among others. By the mid-1970’s, the pair had a bunch of business failures and lawsuits against them.

Journalists were suckered into writing about DeLorean’s past glory as a brilliant engineer. He “… must have learned that if he didn’t say too much, the reporter wouldn’t bother to check any further… They were still looking for dirt on General Motors, and the ex-executive was more than willing to give it to them… The maverick auto engineer was too compelling a character to be deflated with investigative journalism.” DeLorean fooled people just like Bernie Madoff did, although not on as grand a scale.

When he started his own car company, DeLorean let his attorney create a complicated network of sister companies to deliberately obfuscate financial and legal matters. It took the entire second half of the Seventies.

A boatload of fundraising was required to pay lavish executives’ salaries, design their offices, choose a manufacturing site, build the factory, sign up the car dealers, etc. The author erroneously used the term “comptroller” instead of “controller” when discussing the pesky bean-counter who complained about the arrogant, greedy DeLorean’s huge monetary outlays on all things for himself. “As Dewey [DeLorean’s first controller] predicted, the improprieties grew exponentially with the influx of money from the British government.”

DeLorean was the type of man who fancied himself as having some of the traits of James Bond. A man such as this, with a big ego, marries a model or actress at least a decade younger than himself. Like DeLorean, other James-Bond wannabes have assumed prominent leadership roles, and become international celebrities. The list includes but is far from limited to: Charlie Chaplin, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Elon Musk and of course, Ian Fleming.

Read the book to learn the details of the combination of honest ineptitude and premeditated, nervy criminality in which DeLorean and his accomplices engaged in the context of how not to become an automaker.

The Greatest Story Ever Sold – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Greatest Story Ever Sold, The Decline and Fall of the Truth from 9/11 to Katrina” by Frank Rich, published in 2006. Rich was right when he said, “…the very idea of truth is an afterthought and an irrelevancy in a culture where the best story wins.” There have been so many “great” stories in history, but Rich obviously thought this one was the greatest.

The author argued that the George W. Bush administration was one big, taxpayer-paid-for propaganda monster that used clever timing to minimize all adverse occurrences, to paper over the greed, incompetence and evilness of its leadership. The administration used insidious strategies, including secrecy, restricting of access to information, and even censorship to muffle opponents. Sounds familiar… Unfortunately, the reason history repeats itself so often is that human nature doesn’t change.

In October 2001, American troops in Afghanistan weren’t made available to journalists– war information came from a press pool. Only Al Jazeera, an Arab network based in Qatar (not viewed in the U.S.), was allowed to show (horrific) images of the war. An organization, the Office of Strategic Influence was specially created to spread fake war-news. The New York Times blew its cover in February 2002.

Next, a year later, the administration aired an ABC-TV reality show (!) about the war in Afghanistan. Too bad it got poor ratings. In order to increase security abroad, Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered plenty of wild goose chases, arresting people left and right. No one was ever proven to be a terrorist. But numerous suspects were denied due process in military tribunals– the proceedings, legal and illegal, were all kept secret, including the torture.

One would have thought America was winning the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and on terror– but only because the American government engaged in extensive efforts to report on only war heroes and battle victories, and smear as “unpatriotic” everyone with any negative utterances (even true ones!) about the troops, the wars, war coverage (or forced lack thereof), etc.

In May 2003, Bush proclaimed, “… major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Tell that to all the members of the American military who were redeployed immediately after their “last” tour and those who died, journalists of all nationalities who died, and Iraqis of all stripes who died in 2004, 2005, 2006…

By 2004, needless deaths numbered in the hundreds. That was before the propaganda blitz helped Bush to beat John Kerry in his re-election bid. A litany of liars from the Bush campaign screamed louder and longer, and apparently more convincingly than Kerry’s.

Another example of how effective repetition can be: Question: How is it known that six million Jews died in the Holocaust? Answer: The Jews have been screaming that figure louder and longer than anyone for the last seventy years.

If, for instance, the Democrats were to scream for the next two years (not that they should, but if they did) that Donald Trump declared business bankruptcy six times (!!!!!!) during his business career, such repetition might influence voters. Not that the Holocaust is comparable to financial ruin.

But a few media outlets would have viewers believe that the current presidency’s recent political scandals have ruined numerous lives and caused permanent ruptures in the fabric of the universe. If any recent presidency has done that, it was the George Bush administration.

Sadly, there wasn’t room enough in the book to mention the numerous other ways the president’s henchmen employed thought-control on the American populace during the Bush/Kerry election. However, one was a viral, comedic, animated/cgi music video created by the Spiridellis brothers, “This Land!”– a parody of the folk song “This Land is Your Land, This Land Is My Land.” It helped to give the impression that Kerry was big on bragging about his three purple hearts he received fighting in the Vietnam War while Bush was macho. Arguably, the video favored Bush.

Other memorable messages the media spewed against Kerry was that he was “un-presidential” and his wife displayed behavior unbecoming a potential first lady.

Read the book to learn why the author thought that Bush was worse than the late former president Richard Nixon; and how much taxpayers shelled out for the scripted, repulsive, libelous, slanderous reality-show featuring a morally bankrupt cast of characters that was the George W. Bush administration.

On Trial

The Book of the Week is “On Trial” by Gerald Dickler, published in 1993. This book described thirteen of the most famous court cases in the history of the world. These cases show that there’s nothing new under the sun. Political and religious battles will never cease, due to human nature.

Socrates was tried in 399 B.C. in Athens, when he was seventy. A scholarly wiseass, Socrates believed that most members of Greece’s government were “…crude politicians lacking in wisdom and ill-equipped for high office … I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish, and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better.”

Sad to say, some of the personality traits that cause one to be perceived as a good leader and popular are also those that inevitably leads to unethical behavior: dishonesty (also known as public relations), greed (fundraising and pork-barrel-amassing abilities), power hunger (perhaps perceived as taking charge), and bullying (perceived as refusing to suffer fools gladly- or avenging others on the politician’s behalf). In government, people in possession of the above are handsomely rewarded.

Granted, most political candidates run with the best of intentions. However, when they get elected, they realize how fraught with conflicts of interest the job is and can’t help but be hypocrites if they want to get reelected. Excuse the cliche, but fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.

Andrew Johnson wasn’t careful with what he wished for. He was promoted from vice president to president after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. He was a Democrat from the South, post-civil war, outnumbered by Republicans from the North, whose goal was to continue rubbing salt into the wounds of the South. The Republicans were mean of spirit, petty and vengeful. They tried to get an impeachment case together first against Lincoln, and then actually voted concerning  Johnson. That means that they voted to have a trial to remove the president from office.

With Johnson, the key question was, “Was the Senate sitting as a court or as a legislative body?” The trial took place in 1868.

People put on trial on political grounds also included King Charles I of England, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the Reichstag fire perpetrator (for an alleged Communist plot).

Jesus was put on trial for blasphemy. His philosophy happened to clash with that of powerful capitalists and religious leaders in his community. The fact that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the Messiah was the charge on which he was convicted, though.

Galileo was yet another figure who was seen as a heretic, in 1633. Unfortunately, he was trying to teach science in a time of extreme religious strife. The advancement of science occurred after his death, when the religious craziness had subsided and logic and reason came into vogue. More observations led scientists to adopt the heliocentric model of the solar system– that the planets revolve around the sun; not the earth, and not around Pope Urban VIII or any other pope.

Some cases were both religious and political:  John T. Scopes, Nuremberg and Dreyfus.

Dreyfus was a French army captain perceived to be Jewish. He was accused to spying on behalf of the enemy Germany in the 1890’s. Upon his court-martial, he was imprisoned forthwith for more than a decade while a huge number of people jumped on the bandwagon of anti-Semitic hatred-spewing; random events also conspired against him. The case involved hundreds of phony anti-Dreyfus documents, a rumor mill, rioting, looting, etc., etc.

Many of the above trials can be summed up thusly: “As so often happens, the hysteria ground to a halt through its own excesses.”

Read the book to learn more about the court cases– that became very, very famous internationally– because they had far-reaching consequences in history.

The World According to Monsanto – URGENT POST

The Book of the Decade is  “The World According to Monsanto– Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply” by Marie-Monique Robin, published in 2010.

The author wrote, “When one dissects Monsanto’s activity reports (contained in 10-K forms [annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States]) since 1997, one is struck by the place taken up by litigation.”

There are no companies that can fairly be compared to Monsanto in terms of payments to victims for irreparable harm, permanent injury and wrongful deaths caused by the environmental damage done by Monsanto. They couldn’t possibly compete. But the following is a summary of recent expenses of the legal bullying of, and financial punishments handed down, to Monsanto.

Monsanto’s 2017 annual report’s footnotes showed $33 million in expenses associated with “environmental and litigation matters.” The company’s 2015 Restructuring Plan included $167 million of the same kinds of aforementioned expenses and “a SEC settlement.” The cost of goods sold was $101 million. That means, its litigation expenses exceeded the costs of producing its products. Besides, annual reports don’t normally contain the exact phrase “environmental and litigation matters.”

Another item included $32 million of expenses related to “legacy environmental settlements.” Monsanto recorded the settlement of its polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) legal troubles for $280 million in fiscal 2016. Lastly (finally!), the “Long-Term Portion of Environmental and Litigation Liabilities” accounts for almost 1 1/2% of the company’s “Total Liabilities” for the year.

What makes Monsanto’s excessive litigation egregious is that it has so much worldwide hegemony that it wins its cases most of the time– the company itself sues everyone who gets in the way of its profit-making, and successfully defends itself against the countless plaintiffs who have legitimate causes of action against it.

Not to mention the fact that it had basically formed a public-private partnership (largely via political contributions and lobbying), with the American government as of the book’s writing. That is why whistleblowers and activists get crushed in its wake.

Sounds familiar… Unfortunately, the reason history repeats itself so often is that human nature doesn’t change. What makes Monsanto’s case so much scarier than the situations with other, similar monstrous entities is that Monsanto has the potential to permanently contaminate nearly the entire world’s food supply, and there have already been significant consequences of that nature due to its unbridled greed. Yes, it is that bad.

Founded as a chemical and plastics company in 1901 in Saint Louis, Missouri– Monsanto went public in 1929. It made DDT, dioxin, aspartame, (and inadvertently but knowingly and ruthlessly, PCBs), among other substances that have done permanent harm to a large number of people.

As of this book’s writing, Monsanto had a presence in 46 nations and owned 90% of the patents for all Genetically Modified Organisms internationally grown. It makes billions of dollars in profit annually.

The author traveled extensively to interview numerous people to gather a voluminous amount of data on Monsanto’s quest to make the maximum amount of money it possibly can, at the expense of humanity. The scientists she interviewed– including friends and foes of Monsanto– all said they wouldn’t eat the genetically modified foods borne of Monsanto products.

The author tells lots of anecdotes about people from all different geographic areas who have been adversely affected by the chemicals and genetically modified organisms sold by Monsanto, plus about several people previously affiliated with the company and U.S. government agencies, who were clearly still loyal to their former employers. One such interviewee displayed the body language of a liar: excessive blinking when answering her pressing questions. She also pored over declassified documents that indicate outrageous corporate wrongdoing.

Monsanto’s employees currently research, apply for patents to, and sell genetically modified seeds for growing soybeans, corn, cotton and rapeseed; plus a herbicide– Roundup, an insecticide– Bt toxin, and the bovine growth hormone rBST.

The author wrote that in 1983, the American federal government set aside funds called the Superfund Program to decontaminate toxic waste sites around the nation. When some of those funds were diverted to “… finance the electoral campaigns of Republican candidates, Congress discovered that documents that would compromise the companies[,] disappeared.”

As might be recalled, the Reagan administration had a reputation for being staunchly pro-business; so much so that it made EPA worker Anne Burford and her colleague Rita Lavelle the scapegoats of a scandal after pressuring them to shred documents (which would have implicated Monsanto) and commit other crimes in connection with the town of Times Beach, Missouri– a dioxin-and-PCBs-contaminated site.

That contamination resulted in the deaths of numerous animals, serious health problems for the people there, and forced permanent evacuation of the eight-hundred family resort town.

The author spoke with several whistleblowers. All were punished by their employers. One from the EPA distributed an inflammatory memo saying Monsanto published false research results on its products. Another from the FDA wrote a report on the flaws in Monsanto’s application for approval of the artificial growth hormone rBST. He was fired in 1989, sued, and years later, won a job back at the FDA, but not one for which he was suited.

Monsanto’s rBST (still currently used at some dairy farms), when injected into cows, causes them to produce more milk (translation: more money). With the hormone, other substances are also likely to get into the milk, such as pus and antibiotics. This is because the injection sites on the cows form abscesses, necessitating the administering of antibiotics to the cows. Further, with rBST, the cows develop serious health problems, like ovarian cysts, mastitis and uterine disorders. Never mind humans who drink their milk.

In an unprecedented move, the FDA changed its own rules and approved rBST in November 1993 without forcing Monsanto to reply to its concerns and recommendations.

In the late 1980’s, a genetically modified dietary supplement sold by prescription only caused serious health problems, killing at least 37 and permanently disabling 1,500. If that kind of harm was done by a regulated item meant to be eaten that was genetically modified around the same time that Monsanto was testing rBST– a part of a product that millions of people would consume, shouldn’t the FDA have been more prudent in its approval process of rBST??

Monsanto sued the dairies that said on their milk-container labels that their milk contained no rBST. The defendants were forced to change their labeling.

In the late 1990’s, there was the TV-journalist-couple who were working on a show with negative coverage on Monsanto, when their employer was taken over by Fox News. They were fired because they refused to switch from telling the truth, to lying about Monsanto.

In 2003, after the couple suffered years of emotionally and bank-account draining litigation, “The [federal] judges considered that no law prohibited a television network or a newspaper company from lying to the public. To be sure, the rules established by the FCC prohibited it, but they did not have the force of law.” No wonder journalism is dead.

Conflicts of interest abounded in the 1990’s , when supposedly scholarly journal (peer-reviewed) articles (like Science, Nature and the Journal of the American Medical Association) declared that Monsanto’s products were safe; those articles were written by people paid by Monsanto.

Reputable scientists pointed out that Monsanto’s scientific testing involved non-standard procedures, and was statistically suspect as it was of too short a duration, and had too small a sample size.

Read the book to learn about:

  • horror stories resulting from Monsanto’s underhanded tactics regarding testing and use of its products, including the herbicide Roundup;
  • its victims in Anniston, Alabama who were subjected to PCBs;
  • which of Monsanto’s products was banned in 2000 in Canada and Europe;
  • how Monsanto is active in the United Nations;
  • how deregulation perpetuates Monsanto’s worldwide hegemony;
  • which ten or so individual American government officials acted on Monsanto’s behalf, but had undisclosed conflicts of interest [there was scant room in the book to list all those who were ethically challenged Monsanto affiliates— wait, that’s redundant];
  • the percentages of all foods genetically modified in specific categories in 2005;
  • how taxpayers footed the bill for Monsanto’s aggressive use of legal and political weaponry against American soybean farmers (whom it seriously harmed by taking away their livelihoods through duress and illegally spying on them in the late 1990’s) from 1999 into 2002;
  • why Monsanto dropped its initiative to introduce a transgenic wheat, even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars in connection therewith;
  • how Mexico has been harmed by Monsanto’s transgenic corn;
  • how Argentina and Paraguay have been harmed by Monsanto’s transgenic soybeans;
  • how India has been harmed by Monsanto’s transgenic cotton;
  • how Canadian farmers have been harmed by transgenic canola;
  • what transpired when, in January 2005, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched a legal proceeding against Monsanto for corruption in Indonesia;
  • why the World Trade Organization should share some blame for allowing the worldwide spread of Monsanto’s tentacles;
  • and much more.

Endnote:  Feel free to browse other posts for additional examples of entities behaving badly under the category “Business Ethics.”

A Lawyer’s Life – BONUS POST

The Book of the Week is “A Lawyer’s Life” by Johnnie Cochran With David Fisher, published in 2002. This is obviously the autobiography of Johnnie Cochran, of O.J. Simpson defense-attorney fame.

Born in 1938, he grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and Los Angeles, California. Cochran never saw a piece of legal business he didn’t like. He was passionate about the law, handling or assisting with, cases of various practice areas. He conveniently forgot to mention that he wasn’t licensed to practice law in New York State or other states, so he glozed over that by saying he preferred to work with a legal team. He described a number of non-California litigation cases where he was asked to join the team– slap his sensational name on a case– merely for publicity purposes, to scare the opposition. He explicitly stated, “…the one thing I bring to every case in which I get involved is the media.”

When he started practicing law in the 1960’s, the system was rife with discrimination against poor people, who happened to not have light-colored skin. He wrote of those days (sarcastically), “Apparently, the police have an amazing ability to arrest only guilty people, they never make a mistake.”

Cochran was extremely busy after the Watts Riots in California in the mid-1960’s, and again after the South Central Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992.

For three years, starting in 1997, Cochran was host or co-host of a show on Court TV out of New York that discussed legal issues. Some of the time, he read from a TelePrompTer like everyone else. Concurrent with that, he was helping to represent black plaintiffs who were victims of racial incidents in the city.

The then-mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to sweep police-brutality complaints under the rug. However, the Abner Louima case was too egregious to ignore, so he appointed a committee to research police brutality. A year later when its report was issued, he made excuses as to why no recommendations could be implemented. “Rudy Giuliani stayed as far away as possible from this case.” Further, “Most members of New York’s minority community did not believe the mayor ever acted in their interests.”

Cochran made a couple of rather naive statements showing his lack of historical knowledge; first, saying that the O.J. Simpson trial “… had created… law as entertainment.” and second, saying of the Latrell Sprewell case, “It was an ugly incident, and there had never been anything like it in sports.”

One tyro error to which Cochran admitted was a legal case in Buffalo, New York. He expressed his displeasure with the nature of the jury. Of course, the media twisted his words and the jury wasn’t sequestered. There was a chance that a newspaper headline had tainted the jury, but fortunately, nothing came of it.

Read the book to learn the details of diverse cases with which Cochran was involved. His goal was not only to make maximum money for himself and his client, but according to him, to effect change in a court/political/social system that made racial discrimination possible.

Rat Island

The Book of the Week is “Rat Island” by William Stolzenburg, published in 2011. This series of anecdotes described what frequently happens when some humans observe that a particular species is in danger, and with the best of intentions, attempt to counteract the perceived adverse effects of the situation.

Such campaigns have been repeated for centuries, always with unintended consequences and mixed results. For, the people involved have impure motives, and the manipulation of nature over the course of decades inevitably results in a “pox on everyone’s house.”

In the 1800’s, for instance, explorers introduced cats to eliminate an excess of rats in Oceania. Unsurprisingly, the food chain was disrupted, and the rabbit population increased. Rabbits killed the sheep in New Zealand, upsetting the people there. The latter took action by bringing in ferrets, weasels and stoats. The duck and parrot numbers were negatively affected.

Sometimes people are the predators. Other causes of the near-extinction of a species include statistically unusual weather, oil spills or disease. In New Zealand, people almost eliminated green parrots, poaching and smuggling them for their looks.

In another instance, the kakapo (another bird) was endangered by other animals. In the mid-1890’s, some sympathetic New Zealanders therefore sequestered the birds on an isolated island so they could multiply in peace. However, weasels found their way into the protected habitat, anyway.

Some tools of the trade among supposed “friends” of the environment who are only trying to prevent extinctions, include:  poison, guns, traps, hunting dogs, and ammunition shot from helicopters. And on at least one occasion:  hormonally-juiced Judas pigs that led to a spike in the number of eagles and drop in foxes on one island. Moreover, there are people who derive pleasure from cruelty to animals in the name of saving endangered species.

Read the book to learn of the checkered fortunes of the birds of the Aleutian Islands and Anacapa Island, the wildlife around Bering Island and other regions, and the constant tug-of-war among government agencies (such as Fish and Wildlife) responsible for those regions, conservationists and animal-rights activists.