- Guests:
- Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
- Professor Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP, will be here to talk about what she's doing to protect us from the banksters.
- Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. Latest book (and first novel) is "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!". Most recent non-fiction book is "The Seventeen Traditions".
- Topics:
- "Brunch With Bernie"
- The Consumer Financial Protection Agency and what it means for us.
- Supreme Court Decision on Corporate Personhood.
- Anything Goes on Townhall Friday!!
- Bumper Music:
- We Are the Champions, Queen.
- Answer the phone, Sugar Ray (video).
- Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.
- Last DJ, The, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
- You can leave your hat on, Randy Newman.
- Jai Ho, A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire Soundtrack.
- What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong.
- Today's newsletter has details of today's guests and links to the major stories and alerts that Thom covered in the show, plus lots more. If you haven't signed up for the free newsletter yet, please do. If you missed today's newsletter, it is in the archive.
- Quote: "In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength but by perseverance". -- Jackson Brown.
- Thom:
On September 2nd 2009 the transnational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. They had been marketing drugs in a way that almost certainly led to the death of people and definitely led physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended. Because Pfizer is a corporation, a legal abstraction, really, it couldn't go to jail like fraudster Bernie Madoff or killer John Dillenger. In stead it paid a one billion two hundred million dollar criminal fine to the US government, the biggest in US history, as well as a one billion dollar civil fine. And none of its executives, decision makers, stockholders, owners or employees saw even five minutes on the inside of a jail. Now nobody knows about this. But everybody knows that Martha Stewart in 2004 was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Totally different standards for a corporation and for people.
Friday 22 January '10 show notes
By SueN