Ugh. Sorry, its much more boring than this. He’s just another narcissist trying to recast himself as something he’s not. He isn’t some kind of performance artist laying the ugly truth of capitalism bare.
If you do the most cursory research you can find that they had been investigating him well before he pulled the pharma shenanigans. He is not wealthy; he is broke, spending other peoples’ money and seized an opportunity when thrust into the media spotlight. Pure and simple narcism and delusions of grandeur. Stop giving this dirtbag fraud a microphone.
Indeed. Both the utility of extirpating the finance criminals and the demands of even-handed justice argue in favor of purging them all.
That said, it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if weeding out the sociopathic dickheads with delusions of grandeur, whether or not specific supporting reasons are available, is some sort of survival instinct as old as tribal kin groups. Might actually be one that is inhibited by rule of law, since rule of law means that rules lawyers have a chance of not just getting beaten to death by angry mobs.
To the couple people who are saying that Pharma companies pay for research – ehhh, I think the vast majority of the work is actually done via public funding research grants by underpaid grad students and post docs.
Most drugs are developed by the NIH. The big pharma companies spend some money on research, but the number bandied about is that the spend double their research spend on marketing. That means that for every dollar that GlaxoSmithKline is spending on curing something, they’re spending two dollars on reminding us about it 10 times an hour on TV.
That’s the issue, they owned the marketing rights, not the douchebag guilty of embezzlement rights! Damn legal team should have snapped those up years ago.
For those with short memories: it was a Republican-controlled Congress which passed a law banning Medicare/Medicaid from negotiating drug prices. What were the pharmas supposed to do then? Negotiate themselves down like a character from Blazing Saddles?
Can we get a little real here? Rank and file Westerners are among the richest people on the planet. The planetary 1%-ers (household income 48K) are not about to revolt because they have it so bad.
If there’s any revolution coming, it’s the rest of the planet deciding that our obscenely rich lifestyle needs to be taken down a few dozen pegs.
I’m grateful for my lifestyle, but I recognize that by any objective standard, sharing a smallish house among 4 individuals and running a 15 year old car makes me ridiculously wealthy (not to mention owning my own computer, access to health care, etc.).
If the revolution ever does come, the fact we can point out the odd Duke or Prince isn’t going to save us from the fact that we’re all Barons and Counts in the eyes of the world.
(Yes the rant is overblown - but comparing our woes to those who are truly suffering enough to risk death to destroy the system? Please!)
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck.’” ― Robert A. Heinlein
More people are doing better now than at any point in human history. And you want to respect those who “risk death to destroy the system” that has produced this result? Why, because it hasn’t yet made everyone as rich as we are - yet? Have some faith in humanity. The system needs repair. Not destruction. (I mean, yeah, GeekMan was over the top, but come on…)
“Beating the person up and then trying to find the merits to make up for it – I would have hoped the government wouldn’t take that kind of approach.”
Is he for real? That happens literally to poor people every day of the week. The police just go ahead and shoot young black men and make up excuses for it later. Getting arrested for something you actually did isn’t quite the same thing. He would have hoped the government wouldn’t take that approach? Does he mean against someone as wealthy as him?
If I 100% buy into his narrative, then the only injustice is that other people are not being charged, not that he is being charged. Please, Shkreli, if you have the goods on anyone, now is the time to go on a revenge fueled binge of whistleblowing. Simultaneously show us how corrupt the system is and what a petty asshole you continue to be.
I am convinced this man is a hoax, but I can’t imagine what the end game could be. Bill Murray has to break into prison to steal back Once Upon a Time In Shaolin? The overthrow of market economics?
I had never heard that one before, but what stands out to me after reading that wikipedia page, to me, is that in the US, they really were lynching “Negroes” and the killing of black men continues to this day.
OTOH, I don’t see any Tu Quoque in Humbabella’s original post. The point wasn’t “Shkreli is a bastard, therefore it’s okay to be unjust to him”; it was “the unjust impunity of other rich people does not make Shkreli’s prosecution unjust”.
Justice for Shkreli involves a long time in prison. Bring on the day when we see justice for the rest of 'em as well.
This new yorker story lays out the case against shkreli pretty persuasively.
Essentially, a corporate officer cannot use his position to personally enrich himself at the expense of the company (and the other shareholders). And while that’s a low bar, using one company’s assets for paying off the debts of an unrelated Shkreli hedge fund is pretty dodgy.
