Consider one of Bernie’s fellow University of Chicago grads, John Martin, who has been honored by that university: He sits on the board of trustees. Martin heads the price-gouging drug firm, Gilead. Here’s a summary of his 2014 compensation.
Gilead — whose hepatitis C treatment, Sovaldi, can cost patients up to $84,000 for a 12-week treatment — said Martin received compensation valued at $18.9 million last year and gained $187.4 million from previously awarded stock options and restricted shares.
Martin’s 2014 pay included a $1.6 million salary, stock award valued at $8.4 million, stock options worth $5.2 million and $3.7 million incentive award. Excluding gains from exercised stock options and vested shares, Martin’s compensation rose 22% from $15.5 million in 2013, Gilead said Friday in an annual proxy filing.
Martin, CEO since 1996, has scored eye-popping equity gains before.
He exercised stock options for a $158.9 million gain and received $4.8 million from vested shares in 2013. And in 2012, his compensation was valued at $95.8 million after receiving about $54.5 million in 2011 and $53.2 million in 2010, according to company filings.
What’s he making this year? You have to figure he’s pulling in around two hundred million. Just this one guy.
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Who cares? Not shareholders. Not one of America’s best universities, which has put one of the country’s great icons of greed and cruelty in charge of its students’ educations. No one who matters cares. On the contrary. They’re thrilled.
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Gilead and Martin play a very small part in a very large story that Americans are having trouble ignoring. 2015 was the year in which everyone loved to hate Martin Shkreli – in the world of vicious rapacity, he got the spotlight. For a few months, Shkreli stood for all the CEOs holding hundreds of millions of dollars while watching people who could benefit from their medications die, or ruin their lives trying to survive.
But Shkreli is the lowlife, the lurid loudmouth easy to see and easy to hate. John Martin is the quiet, dressed for success, face of income inequality. To focus on John Martin is to understand that income inequality and wealth inequality aren’t mere phrases, mere abstractions. To listen to Bernie Sanders is to hear the only politician willing to bring clarity and outrage to what he calls “the great moral issue of our time.”
… UD finds amusing the doublespeak the new policies generate. England has not only given schools the right to ban the burqa, it has given school inspectors the right to “mark down” schools where the burqa seems to hinder learning and interaction.
Outrageous! After all…
‘The veil doesn’t make pupils intelligent or not. It gives them their identity…’
The identity of fully veiled women is that of no identity. Your very mouth is covered. The identity is that of hushed invisibility.
And note the language: It gives them their identity. These are very young girls to whom an identity has been given long before they are even able to formulate the concept ‘identity’ for themselves.
But that’s just the point. The younger you veil them, the better.
Keeping them dumb in Wyoming.
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And okay – today’s theme on University Diaries seems to be stupidity. I mean, UD keeps reading more and more Americans worrying about how stupid we are. The context seems to be the GOP presidential front-runners, and it’s not confined to the left.
I don’t mean obvious stuff like Bill Maher’s. The Weekly Standard, which UD thought was Sarah Palin’s biggest booster, just ran a review of a book called Too Dumb to Fail. Excerpts from the review:
I had thought that Matt Lewis’s new book about the conservative Republican future, Too Dumb To Fail, had a title that was accurate but a bit ahead of its time. Then, on the eve of the book’s publication, Sarah Palin endorsed the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, with a rambling “speech” that thoroughly earned a New York Daily News front page headline “I’m With Stupid”…
[Southern evangelicals] as a group tend to lack intellectual curiosity and rigor. Bringing a decidedly unintellectual group into the [conservative] movement, Lewis contends, encouraged the movement itself to move away from its strength, its use of argument to explain America’s challenges and propose real solutions that solve them…
Pandered to by [media] “leaders” who profit enormously from keeping their flock sheltered, this has created a worldview in which conservatives are an embattled majority suppressed only by the betrayal of elites and their putative leaders. “Informed” by such falsehoods, it is no wonder when we ponder a future as I write of a Republican party led either by a demagogue or a charlatan.
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And here’s a description of the highest-profile student/athlete at one of America’s highest-profile public universities.
[Maty] Mauk isn’t just stupid. He’s a true hard working moron.
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There’s one thing UD likes about this sudden national freeing of stupidity from the closet.
When La Kid was a kid, she and I loved a series of books called The Stupids. Then we were instructed by a child-something specialist among our acquaintance that it was very very wrong to read The Stupids, very wrong to use the word, let alone laugh at The Stupids.
Of course UD and La Kid ignored this person. But it’s always sort of been in the back of UD‘s mind as an annoyance that this person said this to her and to her daughter. It makes UD happy to see how far we’ve come as a country just in the last couple of decades in terms of naming the problem openly.
… line.
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Yes, after the drunken bar fight and after the fleeing the scene of an accident thing and after other unnamed disciplinary whatnots, the seriously fucked up hero of the Mizzou gridiron seems to have crossed one line too many, even for the University of Missouri, one of America’s sleaziest jockshops. Let’s review:
Seven Mizzou football and men’s basketball players have been arrested eight times since January [2014]… That tally also doesn’t count an independent investigation scheduled to be released Friday about the alleged rape and eventual suicide of former swimmer Sasha Menu Courey… [A] football coach was suspended after a drunken-driving arrest two years ago, and [a] basketball coach was suspended last season by the NCAA.
There’s the other celebrated Mizzou football YouTube (Maty doing coke has gone viral) of Maty’s last coach trying to recite the alphabet. There’s the coach’s reward for generating this sort of publicity. There’s one of Maty’s recent predecessors as quarterback:
[Blaine] Dalton was arrested on suspicion of felony possession of a controlled substance, minor in possession of alcohol, possession of false identification and three traffic charges, including a lane violation and failure to provide insurance.
Sextuple play! Beat that, Maty!
At Mizzou, it’s not just about getting filmed. Look at the people who do the filming.
Director of video operations Michael Schumacher spent $7,605.50 [on a Mizzou corporate credit card] in a single night at Olympic Garden, a club conveniently located on the Strip that “feature[s] literally hundreds of the world’s most beautiful ladies (known as the Dreamgirls) in a relaxing and spacious setting.” One of those charges included a $2,000 tip on a $4,400 bill. Maybe I don’t understand how strip clubs work, but was Schumacher being extra generous, or is “tip” just how you say “blowjob” on a receipt?
The University of Missouri: America’s most amazing video operation.
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Hold on there a minute! The white line never moves!
We don’t really know what’s on the table. At first glance, if we had to make a guess, we know what our first answer would be. I would say cocaine, but we don’t know with 100% certainty. Also, I’ve watched the video at least 20 times and the white substance that is on the table, never really appears to go up Mauk’s nose. That white line never moves.
A trustee at the University of South Carolina is on trial in federal court on seven charges of “unlawfully trapping and killing multiple federally protected migratory hawks.”
Some damn reporter approached this guy on his way out of the courtroom. The trustee didn’t know his damn trial was valuable. “Why you want to put something in the paper like this … whatever.”
I mean sure he imported tons of quail to his property so he could shoot and eat ’em but see quail attracts hawks which he didn’t know I guess. Hyuk. Simple solution: Kill the hawks moving in on your kill. Maybe he and his hired hands (also on trial) didn’t know hawks were protected. Maybe they didn’t care. Fuck the federal gummit thing maybe. Maybe the USC trustee will do a Bundy Standoff and stand there shooting hawks until the feds try to stop him and then he can threaten to kill the feds which are also a protected species but maybe he doesn’t know.
Now this is South Carolina. North Carolina you got a trustee arrested for carrying his handgun into a congressional building up here in UD‘s hometown.
Them trigger happy trustee boys will get into trouble at home or abroad and you really need to keep an eye on them.
One thing the University of South Carolina might look into in regard to helping out this trustee is it might want to introduce this trustee to this USC professor. Right there on their own faculty USC’s got a guy who specializes in dwindling birds and the ways they get dwindled. UD thinks a little sitdown with Professor Mousseau, a cup of tea, a semi-automatic, and a hawk corpse might be damn valuable.
Tucker Readdy, kinesiology and health professor and Faculty Senate chair, spoke for himself saying it’s unfair to only look at additional athletics monies and ignore the millions going to other [University of Wyoming] departments.
“In the short term, sure, it’s easy to question priorities,” he said. “But in the long term, we’re talking about the development of the whole university — we can easily be talking about why the Science Initiative is getting funding but other academic areas aren’t. I don’t think it’s a fair question to isolate athletics and say, ‘Why is athletics getting some money right now and these academic programs aren’t?’”
At a time of significant cutbacks in state funds, a UW professor warns against thinking of athletics as somehow … different from other parts of a university.
Reading it now.
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What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America … features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage?
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As Susan Margulies, a concussion expert at the University of Pennsylvania, explained to Charlie Rose, no helmet has been devised that can “effectively reduce the rotational acceleration, that sloshing within the head that’s happening in the brain itself.”
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Randle El is just one of many players to point out that the violent nature of the game — the focus of our guilty pleasure — is the same thing that breaks spines, shatters bones, renders middle-aged men demented.
Just now, with thin innocuous drifts.
I’ll watch the show from a bedroom whose sliding doors give me all I’d like of the white as it falls on the forest.
UD‘s been down with bronchitis for a couple of weeks anyway, so settling in’s no big deal. She’s in a warm bed with tightly layered blankets and a heating pad and her dog Emilia. Three eucalyptus soy candles rest on a small Tunisian plate in front of the window. Eucalyptus is good for the lungs.
My soundtrack: The mad madrigals of the mad Gesualdo (“the highest expression of pain in music”). Eerie chords for eerie snow.
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It’s sticking to the holly leaves and coming down more thickly. They tell me this snowfall’s in it for the long haul. Okay.
Although we worry about outages and treefalls, we’re basically calm. And why not? The setting is sedate to the point of morbid. Our lives are calm, settled lives. Settled far away from peril. The inside/outside contrast puts this protection in high relief.
There’s a poem for that, by Hayden Carruth. Read it here. Read my commentary below.
The Curtain
[The poem will compare the curtain of snow now obscuring and now revealing the reality of the world to the poet’s troubled conscience as he lives his comfortable life, fitfully aware of a world of atrocities.]
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
[From their easeful bed, the poet and his lover can figuratively hear – cannot intellectually escape – the perennial actuality of human suffering.]
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful.
[Suffering is way up over the hill; in their snug valley the lovers now experience the smoothing and silencing of even the sound of suffering by the blanketing snow, which makes the world a beautiful fantasy.]
In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time.
[The camera gradually moves in more intimately on the lovers, placid, with cutely-named cats, on their massive “undisturbed” bed. They watch the snow.]
“Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale.
[Maybe a reference to John Greenleaf Whittier, author of “Snowbound,” which narrates a snowbound family passing the time telling each other stories. The lines perhaps also allude to Whittier’s many anti-slavery poems; that is, Whittier was the sort of poet Carruth would like to be – someone whose writing might have some impact on human suffering. “We felt that if we could get enough people to read T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams and other great poets of that period, then something good would happen in American civilization. We felt a genuine vocation, a calling, to try and make this happen. And we succeeded. Today thousands of people are going to colleges and attending workshops and taking courses in twentieth-century literature. Eliot and Stevens are very well known, very well read; and American civilization has sunk steadily, progressively, further and further down until most of the sensible people are in a state of despair. It’s pretty obvious that good writing doesn’t really have very much impact on social events …”]
In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.
[They can stay warm amid the cold; their cozy woodburning stove is softly, aromatically doing its thing. Plenty of food, too, and all their exotic spicy (hot: another form of heat) favorites. Alcohol too of course will warm them, calm them.
This evocation of the delightful private small habits of their private life reminds UD of this passage, from Paul Monette’s essay collection, Last Watch of the Night:
In the moving premonitory memoir of his approaching death from cancer, Donald Hall discovers that what he will miss the most are the dailiest of things. Padding out onto his porch to retrieve the morning’s Globe; a quiet cup of coffee as he peruses the headlines; the dozen small nesting motions that bring him at last to his desk. Finally the picking up of his pen to start afresh. The things of life are so ordinary, the habits so engrained, that it’s stupefying to think of them taken away. One wonders that the universe would bother to kill off such a modestly focused life, circumscribed by hours of quiet on every side.]
For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives — for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak.
[The deeply interior, deeply comfortable scene, the doubly deep warmth inside all that cold, temporarily suspends their awareness – via indexed image rather than personal experience – of the suffering over the horizon.]
But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close.
[The poem is an offering to the implacability of suffering; the poem is written out of the poet’s inability to close the index.]
And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.
[Why don’t we die of our anguish at what human beings do to one another? Not only don’t we die; we live for the most part quite comfortable lives. We survive our knowledge of the suffering of others quite nicely. Maybe someday suffering will spread to the point where it has no other place to go but our own quiet little valley.]
Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.
The genial – even self-celebratory – self-absorption of private life prevails. The snowy curtain that had been drawn aside to give the poet a glimpse of how stark things really are has fallen back, leaving him comfortably numb, with cognac.
