Oh my God! Just as you thought it cannot get any worse! Hear we go again!
Yesterday it was the Barclays, Politicians, Police, media, tax-avoiders, bonuses, and… And today is the turn of Britain’s biggest drug maker caught red-handed, forced to pay $3bn (£1.9bn) in the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history.
“GSK targeted the antidepressant Paxil at patients under age 18 when it was approved only for adults, and promoted the drug Wellbutrin for uses it was not approved for, including weight loss and treatment of sexual dysfunction, according to a US justice department investigation.
The company went to extreme lengths to promote the drugs, such as distributing a misleading medical journal article and providing doctors with meals and spa treatments that amounted to illegal kickbacks, prosecutors said.
"The sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high-priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations [and] paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours, to tickets to Madonna concerts," said US attorney Carmin Ortiz.
Believe me, nothing will change and the UK will become a country truly run by, for and of the Mafia, unless there is a sea of change in personal, professional, business and economic culture and moral compass. A change that acknowledges the followings, amongst others:
•Living happily is “the desire of us all, but our minds is blinded to a clear vision of just what it is that makes life happy”. The root of happiness is ethical behaviour, and thus the ancient idea of moral education and cultivation, is essential to ideal of joyfulness.
•Economics, from the time of Plato right through to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, was as deeply concerned with issues of social justice, ethics and morality as it was with economic analysis. Most economics students today learn that Adam Smith was the ‘father of modern economics’ but not that he was also a moral philosopher. In 1759, sixteen years before his famous Wealth of Nations, he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored the self-interested nature of man and his ability nevertheless to make moral decisions based on factors other than selfishness. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith laid the early groundwork for economic analysis, but he embedded it in a broader discussion of social justice and the role of government. Students today know only of his analogy of the ‘invisible hand’ and refer to him as defending free markets. They ignore his insight that the pursuit of wealth should not take precedence over social and moral obligations, and his belief that a ‘divine Being’ gives us ‘the greatest quantity of happiness’. They are taught that the free market as a ‘way of life’ appealed to Adam Smith but not that he distrusted the morality of the market as a morality for society at large. He neither envisioned nor prescribed a capitalist society, but rather a ‘capitalist economy within society, a society held together by communities of non-capitalist and non-market morality’. As it has been noted, morality for Smith included neighbourly love, an obligation to practice justice, a norm of financial support for the government ‘in proportion to [one’s] revenue’, and a tendency in human nature to derive pleasure from the good fortune and happiness of other people…
Therefore, it is vitally important to throwaway into the dustbin of history the current dominant ideology of neo-liberalism, its destructive, amoral values of everything else is no good, but privatisation, marketisation, de-regulation, self-regulation, the highest returns to the shareholders and the highest bonuses to those who make all these possible.
Time has arrived for accountability, responsibility, transparency, justice and humanity. Time is now for the Common Good.
Read more:
GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn for healthcare fraud
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/02/glaxosmithkline-drug-fraud
GCGI: How it began
http://gcgi.info/how-it-began
For further readings please see:
Britain engulfed in corruption Part II: David Cameron invites tax avoiders to London!
The Barclays scandal, Bob Diamond, the Riots, and the Rioters: Where is Justice?
Look All Around You and Pursue the Common Good
http://gcgi.info/kamrans-blog/191-look-all-around-you-and-pursue-the-common-good