The Marjorie Taylor Greene thread.

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MTG celebrating release of Pharma Bro from prison. I guess she appoves of price gouging a life-saving medicine by raising its price 5,000%.

"I hear Martin Shkreli has been released, having paid his debt to society. 2016 energy everywhere you look!"
In March 2018, after being convicted of securities fraud for scamming investors in hedge funds in 2017, Shkreli, 39, was sentenced to seven years in prison, according to CNBC. Shkreli's release comes after having served less than five years of his sentence and also reflects, CNBC reported, the almost six months he spent in custody before his sentence as well as good behavior while in prison.

Shkreli received the nickname "Pharma Bro" after increasing the price of the lifesaving anti-parasitic drug, Daraprim, by 5,000 percent. The price went from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
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(https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-t...-martin-shkreli-halfway-house-release-1707938)
 
Norman Alexander said:
She's fine with that if the Dems and RINOs have to pay that price. If she needed it, that would be a gun of a different calibre.
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Well, I'm sure she's all for free enterprise, and that's it in spades. Of course in this case health insurance takes most of the hit, but that's all right because I'm betting she's against compulsory health insurance too. So in her ideal world, the poor would not get the drug, and they'd die, and then the law of supply and demand would bring the price back down to only a thousand percent of what it should be, and she could run around saying "the system works, the system works!" and the poor suckers left to vote for her will flock to the polls, thinking, "yeah, the system works, and when I win the lottery I'll be a Shkreli too."

e.t.a. writing this, I think that if "Shkreli" has not yet become an epithet for a certain kind of *******, it really ought to.
 
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If you invent a wonder drug and charge a lot for it, there's a (somewhat) potential moral debate there because you could argue an expensive drug is at least better than no drug.

But Shkreli didn't invent Daraprim. Gertrude Elion did. In 1953. He's just a bloodsucker.
 
JoeMorgue said:
If you invent a wonder drug and charge a lot for it, there's a (somewhat) potential moral debate there because you could argue an expensive drug is at least better than no drug.

But Shkreli didn't invent Daraprim. Gertrude Elion did. In 1953. He's just a bloodsucker.
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You misspelled capitalist hero. He saw a product that had a market that would bear massively higher prices so really isn't it his moral obligation to his shareholders to make the most he can from it? This is just capitalism 101.
 
Matthew Best said:
Did he even have shareholders?
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Why would his moral obligation to his shareholders change if he was the only shareholder? Maximizing value is the moral good and he was doing that by the price hikes people object to. In doing so they are questioning and undermining the very foundations of capitalism.
 
Matthew Best said:
Not the question I asked.

It's OK to say "I don't know" if you don't know the answer to a question, you know.
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I thought you were being tongue-in-cheek myself, I think he was answering flippantly.

Really, that's the point: whether they own 1% or 100% of the company, they can always say "I have a responsibility to the shareholders." **** social responsibility.
 
Shkreli was involved with various companies and hedge funds and Turing, the company that raised the price of Daraprim, was a privately held corporation created by Shkreli after his previous company, Retrophin, threw him out over his egregious financial hanky-panky. He also did some hefty price raising there, but not as outrageous as with daraprim. Turing changed its name, and is currently listed as privately held. Since the company still exists without Shkrely directly involved, one must assume other investors, but it's not clear who they are or how much they have in. But court rulings forbid him to have more than an 8 percent share in any pharmaceutical company, and Shkreli still, apparently, has 30-50 million bucks' worth of their stock.

The Wikipedia page on him is rather interesting if dense. He's apparently pretty smart in some ways, but manages to compensate for that by being ten times more nasty. He'd be a pretty poor specimen even without the Daraprim scandal. And, of course, being the sort of thing he is, he comes out of the whole thing still plenty rich enough. Right now, he could put all his money in a mattress, live on a million dollars a year for the rest of his life, and leave a nice estate. The American dream!
 
bruto said:
Well, I'm sure she's all for free enterprise, and that's it in spades. Of course in this case health insurance takes most of the hit, but that's all right because I'm betting she's against compulsory health insurance too. So in her ideal world, the poor would not get the drug, and they'd die, and then the law of supply and demand would bring the price back down to only a thousand percent of what it should be, and she could run around saying "the system works, the system works!" and the poor suckers left to vote for her will flock to the polls, thinking, "yeah, the system works, and when I win the lottery I'll be a Shkreli too."
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I don't think EmptyG thinks at all. She just reacts with her crocodile brain stem.
 
From a Newsweek article, Martin Shkreli operated a hedge fund. It doesn't mention "shareholders," but Shkreli did have "investors." They were the reason he was in prison; he fleeced them.
In March 2018, after being convicted of securities fraud for scamming investors in hedge funds in 2017, Shkreli, 39, was sentenced to seven years in prison, according to CNBC. Newsweek link
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Politicians like emptyg, Bobo and, another one discussed here recently, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, seem to operate on another wavelength. They regularly make statements that any reasonable person would recognize as being untrue. Apparently they know their main appeal is to a certain subset of voters who want to believe the nonsense they spew whether it's true or not. Another feature of politicians like Greene is, they almost never respond to criticism. They maneuver around that by always being on the attack. They're the embodiment of an old National Football League saying: The best defense is a strong offense.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli being taken for perp walk by NYPD after his 2017 arrest.
 

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I don't really understand the audience that Greene was trying to appeal to with this. Is there anyone - whether Republican or Democrat - who actually thinks Shkreli is someone to be admired? I thought it was pretty universal that he was a scumbag, who behaved abominably - and illegally. I know her main aim is to annoy liberals, but surely disdain for Shkreli crosses party lines?

Or doesn't it?
 
Matthew Best said:
I don't really understand the audience that Greene was trying to appeal to with this. Is there anyone - whether Republican or Democrat - who actually thinks Shkreli is someone to be admired? I thought it was pretty universal that he was a scumbag, who behaved abominably - and illegally. I know her main aim is to annoy liberals, but surely disdain for Shkreli crosses party lines?

Or doesn't it?
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I think Shkreli is a remote enough figure that it doesn't really matter for most people. It's essentially celebrity gossip, not a material issue, in which case being a contrarian gets MTG's name back in the press.
 
Matthew Best said:
I don't really understand the audience that Greene was trying to appeal to with this. Is there anyone - whether Republican or Democrat - who actually thinks Shkreli is someone to be admired? I thought it was pretty universal that he was a scumbag, who behaved abominably - and illegally. I know her main aim is to annoy liberals, but surely disdain for Shkreli crosses party lines?

Or doesn't it?
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I'd imagine there's a fair few free-market libertarians who saw nothing nothing wrong in hiking the price of drugs, thinking the owner and manufacutrer of a product has every right to name the price of the product he/she is selling.

Edit: See also the recent legislation on an insulin cost cap, in which 193 Republicans saw nothing wrong in diabetics facing extortion-like costs in obtaining medicin they need to live, in some case peddling horrific falsehoods in the process. Oh, and said legislation is doomed to die in the Senate.
 
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