The Screaming Viking

That’s it. I’m old. No, scratch that. I’m a crotchety old man. It’s confirmed.

See, when I was a kid, I’d get my ass whooped if I did something ‘wrong’. There were laws in our house, and Mom was, like many others I’m sure, the judge, jury and executioner. So of course I grew up with this silly notion that if I acted outside the rules of law, I’d get punished. But apparently things have changed since I was young. For you see, kids, you can do pretty much what you want to, as long as you make the right connections.

Well, anybody else’s kids but my own. If my kids have somehow learned to read and subscribe to blogs in the last 2 days, you can’t do what you want. I still believe crimes deserved to be punished, so don’t test me.

But heck, if you’re someone else’s kids, as long as you can make a big profit and pass it on to elected officials and regulators, crime away!!

Like, say the kids at Pfizer. Or maybe, just the one, same, kid? Reading Jeff Kindler’s write-up on Pfizer’s own site I see that:

“Jeff joined Pfizer in 2002 as Executive Vice President and General Counsel. He was named Vice Chairman in 2005 and appointed CEO in 2006. … He serves on the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,…”

OK, in 2002 he was their General Counsel, which Wikipedia tells me is the “chief lawyer of a legal department”. So when Pfizer plead guilty to promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes in 2004, you’d think Mr. Kindler would have been in the thick of things.

No worries, no one goes to jail, you just pay a 430 million dollar fine and all is well. Pfizer’s got boatloads of cash to spread around. Mr. Kindler must’ve handled that swimmingly, as the bio above says he was promoted to CEO in 2006.

Sweet. Just in time to plead guilty AGAIN in 2009 for promoting a different drug for unauthorized purposes. And just like the first time, they paid a small fee. OK, so the next time it was billions, but heck, they could still afford it.

To recap, if you’ve got loads of money, make promises, but keep your fingers crossed behind your back, and you’ll be golden:

“New York-based Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and the company’s lawyers assured Loucks and three other prosecutors that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes.

What Loucks, who’s now acting U.S. attorney in Boston, didn’t know until years later was that Pfizer managers were breaking that pledge not to practice so-called off-label marketing even before the ink was dry on their plea.

…

For this new felony, Pfizer paid the largest criminal fine in U.S. history: $1.19 billion. On the same day, it paid $1 billion to settle civil cases involving the off-label promotion of Bextra and three other drugs with the U.S. and 49 states.”

So why does the company get to keep doing this? It’s business, baby. And not just any business, but government business. Pockets are lined and they like to stay lined. So you get Too Big To Nail:

“But when it came to prosecuting Pfizer for its fraudulent marketing, the pharmaceutical giant had a trump card: Just as the giant banks on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail, Pfizer was considered too big to nail.

Why? Because any company convicted of a major health care fraud is automatically excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. Convicting Pfizer on Bextra would prevent the company from billing federal health programs for any of its products. It would be a corporate death sentence.

…

So Pfizer and the feds cut a deal. Instead of charging Pfizer with a crime, prosecutors would charge a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc.

The CNN Special Investigation found that the subsidiary is nothing more than a shell company whose only function is to plead guilty.“

OK, I get it. You don’t want to take down a whole company and ruin the lives of many “innocent” people, but why not at least take down some of the key actors that were not so innocent? Call me crazy, but give some of these uppity-up execs a few years “up state” with ol’ Ben Dover, Bubba and “Tiny” and see how fast corporations clean up their acts. Oh, and you can still fine the snot out of them until they “learn” to not break the law.

So whatever happened to poor old Jeff Kindler? Having successfully been at the center of two GUILTY pleas, he’s still the CEO of Pfizer, and on October 1^st of 2009, he was elected to the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And what do they do? The New York Fed implements monetary policy, supervises and regulates financial institutions and helps maintain the nation’s payment systems.

So, kids. Don’t listen to your parents. Break the law whenever you can but ONLY if it makes you money. This will likely lead you to an important role in a government supervisory or regulatory capacity.