http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/17/wik...gerian_attorney

this is just nuts, and reads like something out of a shadowrun...

yup and pretty old news and terrible common. Look at what Toyota did earlier htis year when they had a serious problem with their cars. They denied there was nay problem, then said bad drivers then floor mats and when an illinois scientist came up with an actual design error in the electrics that was causing the issue, they went out of their way to discredit him rather than go 'oh, thank you, we'll fix it now."

Between bribing doctors under the banner of education to prescribe their compounds, inventing new diseases to extend their patents (shyness was never social anxiety disorder until we needed to sell antipsychotics), producing fake medical journals touting their products, and maintaining private armies of lawyers, pharmaceutical companies are a fairly good source of material for how megacorporations would act. Reality turned cyberpunk, as you put it, decades ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed

Scroll down to "Industry Response".

this time round however, there will be no forced apology...

I'm reminded of the speech from "Fight Club" about just this thing...

That's because they don't want to get sued.

Lawsuits have had the social impact of legitimizing lying, and penalizing honesty and conscientiousness. You can't just admit you did wrong and fix the problem, or else you get sued for more than the vast majority of people could ever afford or scrape together to pay even to save their own life.

Toyota is better off if a bunch of their engineers died, than if they get sued, based on the amount of money lost.