PROTECT CONSUMER JUSTICE.ORG

Philip Mattera, one of our favorite bloggers, does Forbes magazine one better.

Forbes offered its view of the biggest corporate outrages of 2009. There are plenty from which to choose, and Forbes offered some worthy nominees–Edward Libby of American International Group, John Thain of Merrill Lynch, and Lloyd Blankein of Goldman Sachs.

Mattera and his Good Jobs First organization came up with some real doozies this week. He writes:

Take, for example, the case of Stewart Parnell and his now defunct Peanut Corporation of America, accused earlier this year of knowingly shipping salmonella-tainted food products from a filthy plant in Georgia, thereby contributing to one of the country’s worst outbreaks of food poisoning, including about nine deaths.

Then there’s the case of the managers at Bayer CropScience, who, according to a Congressional report released in April, withheld critical information from emergency responders during an accident at a plant in West Virginia that nearly resulted in the release of methyl isocyanate, the same chemical involved in the Bhopal catastrophe.

Or what about the executives at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer who illegally marketed the painkiller Bextra, causing the company to have to agree in September to pay $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal charges brought by federal prosecutors?  One Pfizer sales rep told prosecutors: “If you didn’t sell drugs illegally, you were not seen as a team player.”

Mattera regularly comes up with hard-hitting, readable and accurate postings.

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