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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (800724)	8/10/2014 1:28:18 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1579714

The responsibility part of corporate 'personhood' August 10, 2014 ledger-enquirer.com A trial going on right in our backyard might or might not set any legal precedents, but it very well might be making a kind of history. Right down the road in Albany, three officials of the now-defunct Peanut Corp. of America are standing trial in connection with the infamous salmonella outbreak of 2008-09 that left nine people dead and more than 700 others sick in 46 states, and led to one of the most massive food recalls ever. You read that correctly: (ITAL)People(END ITAL) are standing trial. Among details that have emerged in testimony so far: Food and Drug Administration officials came to nearby Blakely in January 2009, shortly after salmonella-tainted peanut butter had been traced to the plant there. The plant manager, Samuel Lightsey, said the only test that had detected salmonella turned out to be a false positive. "It was finally on day five that Mr. Lightsey revealed they had had three positives for salmonella," FDA inspector Bob Neligan testified, "and that would have been in the last year or so. We had continuously asked that from day one." After the FDA ordered the company to turn over two years of records, inspectors discovered that the company's own lab tests had found salmonella in 12 lots of peanuts, peanut paste and peanut butter since 2007. Now company owner and president Stewart Parnell and his brother, food broker Michael Parnell, face charges of shipping contaminated food to customers and covering up damaging lab results; Steward Parnell and quality assurance manager Mary Wilkerson are charged with obstruction of justice. Lightsey, the plant manager who concealed positive tests from the FDA, pleaded guilty in May to nine criminal counts. Nobody who has followed accounts of corporate wrongdoing over the last few years needs an explanation of how significant this case really is. Whether the issue has been "mere" financial misconduct like banking or defense procurement fraud, or far more tragic problems like automobile safety defects, a deadly sugar plant fire or an offshore oil rig explosion, the process usually involves somebody signing a big check, and nobody ever really being held responsible. But as we have noted in this space before, companies -- their shareholders, their financial backers and their millions of honest, hard-working officers and employees -- aren't responsible for these kinds of wrongs. In every one of the tragedies cited above, human beings with names, faces and moral responsibilities made fateful, and ultimately fatal, decisions. The trial judge in Albany said it could take up to two months just for the prosecution to present its case, and the guilt or innocence of the defendants will then be up to the court to decide. Meanwhile, somebody seems to have figured out that thinly spread "collective" guilt for deadly irresponsibility is a gross perversion of justice. It's about time.

To: i-node who wrote (800724)	8/10/2014 1:35:38 PM
From: FJB	Respond to of 1579714

Obama’s map of misreading: A comment 08/10/2014 8:29 am Power Line (Scott Johnson) I asked the person who is perhaps the most worldly wise man I know if he would comment on Obama’s interview with Obama apostle Tom Friedman as related yesterday in the Times article “Obama on the world.” Noting the stupidity of Obama’s comments to Friedman, and Obama’s incessant yammering, I asked my acquaintance what he made of the whole production. He responded with the following comment, which I thought readers might find of interest: I’ve wondered about this a lot, way before Tom Friedman’s report of this conversation. I’m not sure I’ve figured it out, but I think I’m getting close. Both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. separately and in other contexts said something about “ignorance allied with power” being the worst imaginable combination. I think with Obama it starts with ignorance which in his formative years became a required doctrine of the intelligentsia when it came to understanding the way the world works in matters of international security; to be considered politically correct you had to spurn and despise such painfully developed concepts and practices as the balance of power, the necessity of using strength and diplomacy in tandem, etc. This was allied with a personal drive for High Moralism, he felt need to build a castle around yourself behind a moat of 12-foot thick walls from behind which you could shoot moral arrows at everyone else to demonstrate your superiority and quickly destroy any emerging criticism of yourself. So from this position of invincible ignorance allied with moral perfection and then allied with power, you could become able to cross a line in history to reach a new world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility. This would mean, 1.) taking the US out of its despicable role of world leadership, which has been immoral and has caused almost all the world’s problems over at least the past century, and 2.) “Transforming” American into a country moral enough to be worthy of you, a kind of big Belgium. As the wicked of the world have refused to fall into line behind this vision, it has made the president increasingly sour and feeling put upon. At this point he has been forced to do something like take a presidential decision of the kind that all previous presidents have known they would have to take– the “hard decisions” recognized by the president’s hero Reinhold Niebuhr but never recognized by the president. So he has been forced by events to do it. But he didn’t want to do it. And he keeps making it clear that he is determined not to do it in an effective way, to assure our enemies of the many things he will never do, and to sulk about it for the foreseeable future as he relates his unappreciated fate to those who share his feelings, like Tom Friedman. He then adds a parenthetical postscript: “(this is not unique to the president, it can be seen all through White House personnel and among so many of the younger generations who have never actually had a job or actually dome anything connected to the real world)”