Corporate evil

[limpid]

45 minutes ago, blandy said:

Not commenting on this particlar case, but the science is/should be done outside of court, but experts on the science (scientists) should be perfectly able to give or present scientific evidence to a court.

Not if the jurors don't understand the scientific basics.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, limpid said:

Not if the jurors don't understand the scientific basics.

In that case, no trial of anyone involved in any science related crime can be tried?

You are accused of poisoning person X with substance Y.

Scientist - substance Y is toxi...

Judge: stop right there, the jurors are too dim to understand your evidence that substance Y has been found to have the following effects. Release the Prisoner!

 

[limpid]

13 minutes ago, blandy said:

In that case, no trial of anyone involved in any science related crime can be tried?

You are accused of poisoning person X with substance Y.

Scientist - substance Y is toxi...

Judge: stop right there, the jurors are too dim to understand your evidence that substance Y has been found to have the following effects. Release the Prisoner!

I didn't comment on the intelligence of the jurors, but on one aspect of their education.

You've taken my mention of lacking basic scientific knowledge and strawmanned it. I'd expect a juror to have basic science literacy like I'd expect them to understand the language the hearing is conducted in. Our legal system only works if the populace is educated.. 

In America, the jurors are selected by the defence attorneys. It's those lawyers that failed, probably because of their own lack of understanding. I expect a different outcome at the next appeal, because the lawyers need to keep the gravy train rolling.

[blandy]

Perhaps you missed my “Not commenting on this particlar case” Simon?

[bickster]

 

 

 

 

3

Quote

Potato farmers cry foul as PepsiCo sues them

They face demand for ₹1.05 crore in damages for growing Lays variety, want government to step in
Just days after multi-billion dollar conglomerate PepsiCo sued four Gujarati farmers, asking them to pay ₹1.05 crore each as damages for ‘infringing its rights’ by growing the potato variety used in its Lays chips, farmers groups have launched a campaign calling for government intervention.

The case is coming up for hearing in an Ahmedabad court on Friday.

Warning that the case could set a precedent for other crops, farmers groups are pointing out that the law allows them to grow and sell any variety of crop or even seed as long as they don’t sell branded seed of registered varieties.

The farmers want the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority (PPV&FRA) to make a submission in court on their behalf and fund legal costs through the National Gene Fund.

When asked for a response, a PepsiCo India spokesperson said: “Given the issue is sub judice, it would not be proper to offer detailed comments.”

T.K. Nagarathna, the PPV&FRA registrar who has jurisdiction for vegetable crops, said that the case had come to the notice of the Authority and it was looking into it. “We can take action based on the court order,” she told The Hindu.

“These farmers are small, holding around 3-4 acres on an average, and had grown a potato crop from farm-saved seed after they accessed the potato seed locally in 2018,” according to a letter sent to the PPV&FRA by farmers groups. They alleged that PepsiCo hired a private detective agency to pose as potential buyers and take secret video footage, and collect samples from farmers’ fields without disclosing its real intent. PepsiCo then filed suit, the letter said. It added that at least nine farmers in three districts have been charged since 2018.

On April 9, an Ahmedabad commercial court judge granted an ex-parte interim injunction against the farmers and appointed a commissioner to prepare an inventory, take samples and send them to a government lab for analysis. The case is coming up again on April 26.

Protective clause
PepsiCo has invoked Section 64 of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights (PPV&FR) Act, 2001 to claim infringement of its rights. However, farmers groups cite Section 39 of the same Act, which specifically says that a farmer is allowed “to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share or sell his farm produce including seed of a variety protected under this Act” so long as he does not sell “branded seed”.

Farmers groups warned that the case could have a snowballing effect on other crops. “These are among the first cases of alleged IPR infringement against farmers in India in a post-WTO world. Wrongly decided, these could set a wrong precedent impacting farmers’ livelihoods quite adversely,” said Badribhai Joshi of the Gujarat Khedut Samaj, in a statement.

The Hindu

[VILLAMARV]

2 hours ago, bickster said:

the case had come to the notice of the Authority

I assumed he was busy with the new nipper

[Xann]

Another US Jury finds that Roundup is a carcinogen.

Court demands Bayer stump up $2 Billion in punitive damages.

They're expected to appeal.

[Xann]

[Xann]

Shkreli appeal rejected. Staying in jail he is.

[TheAuthority]

On 25/04/2019 at 16:40, VILLAMARV said:

I assumed he was busy with the new nipper

Absolutely!

[peterms]

Discussion on the decision of Boeing executives to spend large amounts of money on buying back shares to increase the wealth of Boeing executives rather than on investing in the business.

 

[choffer]

The world's gone mad.

 

[HanoiVillan]

Frankly, I might support the Saudis getting their bone saw out this time. 

[Xann]

Quote

 

Hedge Funds in Line for $250 Million on Thomas Cook CDS Payout

Payouts triggered for funds that bet on the company defaulting

Panel ruled company’s liquidation triggered default swaps

 

Bloomberg

[HanoiVillan]

Could have gone in several threads, but this episode from the American health care system and the opioid crisis is fairly mind-blowing:

Extracts from the article (which isn't behind the paywall, if you want to read it all):

'Using laws designed to catch mob bosses, prosecutors secured the conviction of John Kapoor and six other Insys executives and employees last year on charges including racketeering conspiracy. The company funnelled money to doctors to boost sales of Subsys, a painkilling spray containing fentanyl, an opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin.

Earlier in the day, Alec Burlakoff, Insys’s former head of sales, received a 26-month sentence for the same charges. Michael Babich, the former chief executive, has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years.

[...]

Acknowledging that he did not have “morals, ethics and values” and that he did his job knowing the scheme orchestrated with Mr Kapoor was illegal, Mr Burlakoff said he still had “no idea that criminally there would be consequences . . . I don’t want to go to jail. Who wants to go to jail?” He described his thinking: “Not only is the company going to get fined an astronomical amount of money, which I’ve seen a million times, but worse case scenario, which I’ve never seen before, they might actually take my money.”

[...]

Speaker programmes sponsored by drug companies are common practice, paying doctors to educate their peers, but Mr Burlakoff described how Insys went far beyond what was legal to create a quid pro quo with those who prescribed its painkiller. Some 13 medical professionals have already been charged and some have served jail time.

[...]

The court heard how Insys sales representatives also pushed doctors to increase patients’ dose of Subsys, a medical practice known as titration, because higher doses generated more revenue. Prosecutors said that it was tantamount to bribing doctors to overdose their patients. The callous culture was demonstrated by an internal video played to the jury, in which Insys sales reps perform a rap about the drug while a man dressed as a giant Subsys bottle dances around. “I love titration, yeah, it’s not a problem,” they rap. “I got new patients and I got a lot of them.” At the end, it is revealed that Mr Burlakoff is inside the costume — though he claimed he was not wearing it for the entire video.'

 

[AJ]

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/county-in-kansas-is-jailing-people-over-unpaid-medical-debt/ar-BBZPsre?ocid=spartanntp

"In rural Coffeyville, where the poverty rate is twice the national average, attorneys like Michael Hassenplug have built successful practices representing medical providers to collect debt owed by their neighbors (sic)."

This is all due to a lawyer taking advantage of the ridiculous costs of health care in the US, by recommending a law to the local judge that anyone who is unable to pay their medical bills should be thrown in jail.

How it works, is if ( or when) people are unable to pay their medical bill, they face a " debtors exam", where they must show up in court every three months. Of course, this costs money, which they don't have. To avoid jail, they must pay the bail. Normally, when the bail has been paid, the money is returned to the person after they have appeared in court, but instead, the money is paid to Hassenplug and his cronies, or to the medical companies, in which Hassenplug gets a percentage of.

Now this piece of shit proclaims that " He is just doing his job", but it is a job that he has set up himself for him to exploit America's pathetic health care system, and the people who need it but cant afford it.

I hope there is a special place in Hell reserved for Michael Hassenplug. Its a room fool of sodomists with barbed wire Prince Alberts.

[VILLAMARV]

Quite the parting shot from Amazon VP Tim Bray as he resigns over the sacking of BAME and female staff.

more of his open letter at link

Quote

... remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Let’s give one of those names a voice. Bashir Mohamed said “They fired me to make others scared.” Do you disagree?

[There used to be a list of adjectives here, but voices I respect told me it was mean-spirited and I decided it didn’t add anything so I took it out.]

What about the warehouses? · It’s a matter of fact that workers are saying they’re at risk in the warehouses. I don’t think the media’s done a terribly good job of telling their stories. I went to the video chat that got Maren and Emily fired, and found listening to them moving. You can listen too if you’d like. Up on YouTube is another full-day videochat; it’s nine hours long, but there’s a table of contents, you can decide whether you want to hear people from Poland, Germany, France, or multiple places in the USA. Here’s more reportage from the NY Times. 

It’s not just workers who are upset. Here are Attorneys-general from 14 states speaking out. Here’s the New York State Attorney-general with more detailed complaints. Here’s Amazon losing in French courts, twice.

On the other hand, Amazon’s messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety. I actually believe this: I have heard detailed descriptions from people I trust of the intense work and huge investments. Good for them; and let’s grant that you don’t turn a supertanker on a dime.

But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it.

Poison · Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison... (It carries on)

(I pasted as plain text so the links 'here' are actually, well, there on his webpage)

[HanoiVillan]

Stories about what British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco are up to in north Africa:

Where there's corporate evil, there's accountants looking the other way. From the story in the first tweet:

'The rampant tobacco smuggling in Mali isn’t only down to the cigarette companies. OCCRP’s reporting indicates there is little state oversight of the industry.

For one thing, the government has overlooked blatant inaccuracies in figures from BAT’s distribution partner, Imperial, which for two consecutive years stated in its public accounts that SONATAM paid 5.5 million euros in taxes more every year than its total turnover.

West African financial analyst Oumar Ndiaye called the numbers “impossible.” Some former tobacco executives in Mali dismissed the SONATAM turnover figures as deliberate lies to fiscal authorities.

Imperial attributed them to an error in currency conversion, with West African CFA francs mistakenly not converted into euros. The company declined to provide documentation, however, and referred reporters to the Malian government, which did not respond to several requests for comment.

Alex Cobham, the chief executive officer of the Tax Justice Network and an expert on tax avoidance by multinationals, said Imperial’s explanation “doesn’t stand up,” and that repeating the same numbers over multiple years is “implausible.”

“Whoever wrote these numbers down thought nobody would ever look at them,” he said. “They’re either making extraordinary mistakes, year after year, or they’re telling you barefaced lies, or both.”

He also faulted the company’s auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, for apparently accepting the shoddy accounting.

“The idea that one of the world’s leading accounting firms, that prides itself on the auditing of multinationals to ensure they’re behaving as they should do, would not have picked up any of this in their rigorous annual audit process is difficult to square with any claim that corporate tax is being paid or audited on an appropriate basis,” he said.'

worth reading the whole story IMO: https://www.occrp.org/en/loosetobacco/british-american-tobacco-fights-dirty-in-west-africa

[HanoiVillan]

From a Twitter thread on anti-social Silicon Valley company ideas, this one is a work of such banal shittiness that I actually LOLd:

 

[Davkaus]

Tbh, their defence is quite compelling, and from the latimes article linked in the thread, the indictment of the IRS supports something like this being started up. There's a staggering stat that they only ever answer about a quarter of their calls. The suggestion that this company 'created' the problem is clearly false, and the labelling of it as a "DDoS" only makes sense if there's a reason to believe that they're causing even a significant amount of the calls to the line.

Here's a post about their stats from CallEnq in 2017, they claim to have called the IRS 10,000 times between April 2016 and April 2017. That sounds like a lot, but the IRS recieves around 100m calls a year. that 10,000 miught have ramped up a lot since 2017, but I find it hard to believe they're anything but a drop in the bucket.

It sounds outrageous on the face of it, that's Doctorow's whole schtick, but dig a little deeper and it doesn't seem that much of a story to me.