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If you made $27M working for Big Pharma, you'd be smiling too.
In normal times, someone who held a key leadership role on George W. Bush’s economic team wouldn’t be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. It’s hard to imagine, for example, Andrew Mellon or Ogden Mills running against FDR in 1936.
These aren’t normal times, however, and the Republican field is a mess — so Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is the flavor of the month. But aside from the stink of the many failures of the Bush administration on him, he’s got other skeletons in his closet as well.
…when Daniels worked as a top executive at Eli Lilly & Co., one of the world’s largest drug firms, the pharmaceutical giant’s reputation was tarred by some of the nation’s ugliest drug scandals.
In the decade that Daniels climbed the corporate ladder at Eli Lilly, the company was illegally marketing its leading osteoporosis drug, Evista, as well as its blockbuster antipsychotic, Zyprexa, putting tens of thousands of patients in harm’s way. Lilly pleaded guilty to two criminal misdemeanors, paid more than $2.7 billion in fines and damages, settled more than 32,000 personal injury claims — and copped to one of the largest state consumer protection cases involving a drug company in U.S. history, a review by iWatch News shows.
Big Pharma is about as popular with the public as the health insurance industry, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens to Daniels’ numbers when people find out that’s where he made his money. I don’t mean Republican primary voters, because, to them, being a corporate crook is a feature, not a bug — I mean independents.
What are they going to think of the illegal marketing that made Daniels rich?
“That’s how they [drug companies] operate. They have a fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, and sometimes in their zeal to carry out their fiduciary responsibilities they cheat, lie or engage in criminal activity — and it works.”
Daniels left Eli Lilly to become the director of the Office of Management and Budget for President George W. Bush in January 2001. He liquidated Lilly stock worth $27 million at the time.
In a way, Daniels is the perfect Republican presidential candidate in 2012.
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consumer protection? pfffft. That’s just socialism. When are we going to get the man off our backs to make products as we see fit and cut expenses? Keep up the good fight, Mitch!
A GOP presidential candidate with a criminal past? A criminal past consisting of taking from the poor to amass more wealth for himself?
Noooo. Didn’t see that coming.
Thanks for the post BT.
I don’t think the establishment media will focus on this story much, if at all, so I doubt most independent voters will hear about it. Much of media relies on advertising from Big Pharma and so rarely is there any criticism of it.
Gee, sounds just like (P)rick Scott of FL. He wants to run for prez in 16. Heh, by that time he’ll have been run out of the state on a rail.
That’s the key. They won’t badmouth Daniels on this because they don’t want to lose ad revenue.
Put a fork in phookin’ corporate criminal Eli Lily and Mitch Daniels.
Yeah, I was thinking Scott could run as Daniels’ veep. They would lead the lead the league in the coveted “total corporate fines for illegal activity” stat.
Big Pharma also routinely violates the protocols put into place after the Declaration of Helsinki and the Belmont Report but being a corporation in this country these days means you can’t do anything worth going to jail over. These days it’s a wink, a pat on the back and a fine. It’s figured into their projections and bottom line.
Guerrilla campaigning. Short, hard hitting flyers on windscreens in Wal-Mart, etc, parking lots, on street corners. Folded and put into books in bookstores. Stuck on shelves in grocery stores. Gotta get creative.
What’s a bookstore? You mean that place on Amazon.com where you can download books for your Kindle?
Let’s hope he runs… and I hope whoever the Democratic candidate is, asks him about those lawsuits.
Good grief, I sure hope so. I have relatives living in Florida. One of them is actually a Democrat, who has little use for Rick Scott, because she works for a public school district.
Believe it or not, the fundies who don’t get their Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter books for free by joining some wingnut org actually buy them at bookstores. I used to go to B&N and Borders and put flyers for Samm Simpson in their books, along with the books for rational folks. Only got caught once. *g*
A Voldermort-Gollum ticket? Hmmm … will play well with the Party of Money folks.
they won’t.
it’s all kabuki theater for the gullible masses, that don’t even know it’s just one party – the corporatist party. two branches, R and D.
Back to work.
Namaste
niceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
you got style.
but rational folks? are there any left? seems like everyone has pretty much lost it.
Then get behind an Independent candidate and do something about it.
You may be right… but, let’s hope that we get to ask some of those questions!
im sooooooooooooooooooooo very sick of them…my dad worked with Salk who gave his poilio vaccine to the children of the world
FOR FREE…..F R E E !!!!!
Margs heres my exercise therapy,but where can i get it in the states
http://www.orthotherapiemmg.com/kinesitherapy.htm
Dr. Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine | Personal Liberty Digest24 Mar 2010 … He insisted that, “like the sun,” the vaccine should be free to everyone. … 8 Responses to “Dr. Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine” …
http://www.personalliberty.com/…/dr-jonas-salk-and-the-polio-vaccine/
America is killing itself
“Voldemort” sounds too French.
agreed,they have instruments here to take care of people like that
guess next stop au Canada
Thanks for the link. :)
Good point. How about the Daisy Cutter-Smeagol ticket and we can make the nuclear lobbies happy?
do you have a friend who can give you slow thereputic massage,then there is a book at amazon,mebbe i can get french doc,to photocopy a couple of exercises…..
gonna go get a bite bbl
Mitch Daniels is my governor. What a dipshit. I can’t even think of anything constructive to add to the comments.
David Dayen has a fresh cross-post ready: Schumer Challenges Boehner on Debt Limit
Just another criminal enterprise that might even top Eli Lily and that is brought to you by the coordinated efforts of the bankstas, IMF, World Bank, ECB, Federal Reserve, World Trade Organization, USG and EU (note that Switzerland’s main trading partner is the EU via bilateral agreements and the “United States is the main investor as well as the main destination, in terms of Foreign Direct Investment stock“):
(excerpt from “At Glencore’s pinnacle of capitalism, even hunger is a commodity,” May 5, 2011)
Love yer Andrew Mellon reference, BT.
I’ve tried long and hard to understand the interest the GOP has in Mitch Daniels running for President. Seems to me the job title “Bush Budget Director” would be absolutely anathema to American voters.
Your analogy really ties it up in a bow. Thanks.
Executives don’t often trot out their “fiduciary responsibilities” when their outsized compensation claims conflict with shareholder profits, do they?
Executives’ duties do NOT include being willing to do anything to make money. That revisionist misconception was popularized by Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and parroted by an army of greedy followers.
Skilling famously advocated that anything he did was OK unless and until the government caught him, physically stopped him, and fined his company amounts that far exceeded illegally garnered profits, and made his company (meaning shareholders) actually pay them, after paying the CEO outrageous sums to avoid paying even greater penalties.
In reality, executives are responsible to a lot of constituencies – shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the communities in which they do business. One of their duties is to comply with all applicable laws in the jurisdictions in which they do business – buy, make, warehouse, sell, lobby, dispose. They claim they do that every year in their certified financial statements and in their public disclosure documents. It’s rarely true.
Another of their duties is to protect the assets that shareholders have entrusted to them. The company’s good name, for one. It’s cash, employee goodwill and brands are more.
Brand names in the drug world are as important as they are in the cereal world. Bland, salt and sugar enriched, crushed flake corn stuffed into a box with a stylized rooster on it sells for $4.99; take off the rooster and it sells for $1.99. Let the rooster be caught drunk in the henhouse, and you can’t give that stuff away. The same is true for drugs. Their whopping prices are due to brand cache and excessive patent protections, not the cost of R&D, which is why marketing costs now exceed R&D.
Another executive duty is to manage the company consistently, to add a measure of predictability to chaotic markets. One way to do that is to act responsibly as a way of doing business. That avoids, say, having accumulated externalized costs from illegal dumping or marketing suddenly appear on a financial statement in a way that surprises markets, shareholders, managers, employees and communities. Like, oh, $2.7 billion in fines and penalties.
Those are duties one seldom hears Mitch Daniels and his ilk talk about. They conflict with squeezing the milk of executive compensation out of those dead cows they call going concerns. Protecting shareholder value is more of an irony than most shareholders will ever know. Mitch Daniels won’t be one of the guys telling them.
More on Rick Scott and Republicans battling each other.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/26/970136/-Rick-Scotts-$77-Million-Gift-to-Florida-East-Coast-Railway-Owners
Why thank you, Teddy.
This is a horrible, loose with the facts, and ultimately shameful post not worthy of FDL. You assume that Mitch Daniels had corporate responsibility for the marketing of these drugs. He didn’t. Reading this post, it is pretty clear the anonymous author has no idea how corporations work. Decisions are rarely made by one individual. Even the Center for Public Integrity which has also written on Daniels’ tenure at Eli Lilly cautions that “decisions at pharmaceutical companies, whether scientific or commercial, aren’t made by any one executive, so Daniels’ precise role in decision-making about the controversial drugs is unclear. “These things transcend individuals — it’s more difficult to say this is the work of person A, B, or C,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen. “It’s industry-wide corporate culture.”
Furthermore, the agreements to settle the Evista and Zyprexa criminal allegations did not happen under Daniels’ watch as president of North American operations for Eli Lilly.
We can and should condemn these corporate practices but to pin them on one individual for political purposes is really shameful. Mitch Daniels is not Rick Scott.
It’s fair to tag and go after Daniels for his tenure at OMB which saw a US budget surplus turn into a multi-trillion deficit but this accusation that he is a “corporate crook” is grasping at straws. It’s a baseless accusation being made for partisan purposes. It’s more something I expect to find at Free Republic, not FDL.
Moreover, Daniels and Huntsman are the sane ones in the bunch. The others are certifiable. Given this, it’s unlikely that either can win the GOP nomination in 2012 for theirs is a party that has gone off the rails.
The Eli Lilly *Viva Zyprexa” scam occurred 1996-2003 so Mitch Daniels was 4 years in the thick of it.
Eli Lilly Zyprexa Claims Still Unresolved
Eli Lilly Zyprexa can cause diabetes I took Zyprexa a powerful Lilly schizophrenic drug for 4 years it was prescribed to me off-label for post traumatic stress disorder was ineffective costly and gave me diabetes.
This is a powerful drug that can damage a young person physiologically for life. Please take with caution and learn as much as you can about side effects. Eli Lilly’s #1 cash cow Zyprexa drug sale $40 billion dollars so far,has a ten times greater risk of causing type 2 diabetes over the non-user of Zyprexa. So,here we have a conflict of interest that this same company also is a big profiteer of diabetes treatment.
FIVE at FIVE
The Zyprexa antipsychotic drug,whose side effects can include weight gain and diabetes, was sold for “children in foster care, people who have trouble sleeping, elderly in nursing homes.”
Five at Five was the Zyprexa sales rep slogan, meaning 5mg dispensed at 5pm would keep patients quiet.
Google * Eli Lilly Zyprexa * and read the links. I took Zyprexa it gave me diabetes and was as addictive as tobacco.How so? Because withdrawal is accompanied by severe insomnia for 6 weeks.
— Daniel Haszard Zyprexa Whistle-blower http://www.zyprexa-victims.com