… Committee.

That’s what’s staggering to UD – that Baltimore is happening in the richest state in the country.

Longtime readers may recall that UD – a native of the city, born in Johns Hopkins Hospital – was in Baltimore the day after the Freddie Gray riots. Her account of her time there is here. Here. And here.

According to a Senate report released in December, Gilead knew pricing Sovaldi at $75,000 per patient for a 12-month course would restrict patient access by 24% of US payers, and yet it still ended up seeking $84,000 for it. The company priced Harvoni at an even higher $94,500, such that last year barely 2% of the eligible [hepatitis C virus] patients in the US were treated with the drugs.

Sure, that’s much more than one-tenth of one percent.

Nonetheless. Get the picture? Only a small number of rich people get to be cured.

Gilead is so depraved that the Massachusetts Attorney General is stepping in (though she probably can’t do much about it). Yet the story hasn’t even gotten much press, because as Americans we’re so used to homicidal greed.

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Sanders owns this reality. He’s running with it. He’s running on it.

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The letter from the AG went out to Gilead CEO John Martin, a man who has brought his depravity to the board of trustees at the University of Chicago.

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The lovely larger picture.

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Never before has Norman Mailer’s immortal statement felt so true: The shits are killing us.

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.”

[Martin] Shkreli anticipated a blockbuster product just as Turing raised the price, according to a company memo released by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. On August 27, 2015, he wrote in an e-mail that “I think [the drug] will be huge. We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000 … So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000- almost all of it is profit and I think we will get 3 years of that or more.”

Sanders wins Indiana.

Weh Weh Weh Weh Wait. Greed and bad parenting? C’est entendu. It’s not a good look for the New York Times – paper of the privileged – to explicitly fail to say why people who cheat so their rich dumb kids get into better schools than they qualify for (and thereby block smarter, more hardworking, children of non-oligarchs from the education they deserve) are being publicly shamed. If greed and being a bad parent were sufficient cause for public shaming, we’d have nationwide public shaming fatigue syndrome.

Most countries have an utterly corrupt, utterly entitled, utterly immune oligarchy buzzing above sordid cities in private helicopters on their way back from Gstaad, and there’s no sense protesting that cuz it has always been true and always will be true. A teeny number of countries (The Nordics… Canada?…. États–Unis?) seem to have a less baked-in ownership class, and it therefore feels worthwhile to see if the courts will be willing to punish them when they, say, destroy the economy (answer on that one here in the States: no), or, more modestly, destroy the intellectual functioning of our universities through the relentless metastasis of morons into them.

(UD of course has no way of knowing whether these hapless spawn of moral degenerates really are desperately dim; they can thank their parents for allowing us all to proceed on the assumption that they are. We certainly know that some of the kiddies cooperated with the scheme, so their self-appraisal is pretty clear.)

Americans haven’t yet had to settle into the paralyzing, corrosive, bitterness/nihilism that comes from witnessing a class of belligerently destructive people whose essential horror is that they know they act with absolute impunity. Maybe that nihilism is in our future. Maybe that’s why Bernie Sanders is winning – we’re seeking to avoid it. Maybe that’s why it’s only a matter of time before one of the campaigns tells us all about this. The Varsity Blues parents, by the most random, unlikely turn of events, got caught; they got caught and now carry on their shoulders the burden of our knowledge that rich degenerates are destroying our institutions. The important thing is to cut them down to size by laughing at them and, of course, by putting them in jail.

On February 5, when AIPAC’s “Combating BDS” bill passed the Senate, 22 Democrats voted against it. That is a decent number, but the real sign that AIPAC’s power is on the wane is that every Democratic senator who is a candidate for president (except Amy Klobuchar) voted No. They voted No because they are seeking to win support from the Democratic grassroots, which, naturally enough, skews younger and younger, more and more progressive, and less and less white, leading naturally enough to more sympathy for Palestinians and less for Netanyahu’s Israel. That wouldn’t have happened before 2016, when Bernie Sanders embraced Palestinians and their cause as part of his coalition and not only did not lose support because of it but gained it. By 2020, it will be close to impossible for any Democrat to claim the progressive mantle while aligning with AIPAC.

That was this time last year. Now everyone’s all Lawdy Me! because Sanders (and Warren) won’t attend AIPAC’s 2020 convention. He’s been very consistent that AIPAC represents and underwrites a reactionary form of Zionism. His is a plausible and principled position. AIPAC can huff and puff, but there’s no real news story here. In fact, it’s quite old news, as AIPAC well knows.

Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that sentence in an essay about Jerry Falwell, would have been fascinated by the brotherhood on view at Donald Trump’s latest rally, where Trump’s warm-up bigot, a loud-mouth diploma mill graduate (not Trump University; another diploma mill), shrieked that Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God and must be made to come to Jesus.

I wish Hitchens were here to describe this man.

What point does this Washington Post writer think he’s making when – in the voice of Hillary Clinton saying what she should have said about the now-notorious Goldman Sachs speeches – he has her say this?

And the money? Yeah, it’s hard to turn down that kind of money [$675,000 for three speeches]. So I go, I talk for an hour about the complex challenges America faces in an ever-changing world, blah blah blah, do the grip-and-grin and get a six-figure check. You would too, if you could.

I know it’s an article of faith on Wall Street that everyone is gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy. Another word for people who are gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy is psychopaths, and indeed large numbers of Wall Street people are psychopaths or almost-psychopaths. “[Goldman Sachs wants to hire] people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

If a deeply disreputable bank offered to fly you first class to some location where you were wined and dined and then asked to mouth cynical bullshit about a country whose problems are actually worth taking seriously… And then if that bank pressed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into your hands for doing that, for mouthing that bullshit … And then if the bank flew you back first class to the destination of your choice… Would you do it?

Franchement, you couldn’t pay me to swim with vampire squids. Their destructive greed and arrogance disgusts me (and inspires Andy Borowitz), and, as the current presidential campaign suggests, I’m not alone.

You will never catch Bernie Sanders standing in a room as a paid guest of a bank under investigation for ripping billions off pensioners and investors, addressing the audience in the first-person plural.

When mainstream political pundits, like this Washington Post guy, assume we’re all as psychopathically greedy as – well, as he is… And as this observer is… When he makes the same claim that all apologists for America’s culture of wealth inequality make (The rest of us have no considered moral position on this behavior and in fact are simply jealous; every one of us would behave the way psychopathically greedy people behave if we had the opportunity.), he might as well be giving money to the Sanders campaign. Because all he does is make decent Americans angrier.

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There is something disgusting about the spectacle of someone who was already wealthy far beyond the imagining of ordinary Americans continuing to accept what she claims were unsuccessful attempts to bribe her, even as she was on the eve of launching a presidential campaign supposedly dedicated to protecting the interests of those ordinary Americans against the depredations of the very masters of the universe funneling millions of dollars into her personal bank account.

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Notes on greed.

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A bargain at twice the price!

Clinton actually undercharged Goldman Sachs, since she was paid $9,000 less than her average fee.

Friends & Family rate.

Ravi Shankar, until recently a creative writing professor at Central Connecticut State University, writes about his favorite activity: driving at very high speed until he hits something and/or gets arrested.

I mean, the poem whose first line appears as this post’s title doesn’t really go on to describe

driving with a suspended license, and …evading responsibility for an accident that he fled from… two DUIs, operating with a suspended license, reckless driving over 85 mph…

(And that’s only his driving offenses! He’s also into shoplifting and credit card fraud and other stuff.)

No, no, the poem goes on, dutifully, pretentiously, emptily, to gush about a double rainbow. Shankar’s a bad poet (you can read some of his work here), which one would think would add up to two strikes against the guy in terms of being given permanent employment by a university: He writes bad poetry, and he’s always in courtrooms or jails. And he will always be in courtrooms and jails because there are quite a few cases pending against him. Plus I guess he’s still driving! Whatever.

Maybe he’s a helluva teacher! Hm, let’s see.

No midterm. Paper worth 50% at the end. I had him for a three hour class on Mondays and we always got out early. Did not give too much homework and we had to watch a movie one class. When it came time for the final I felt like I barely knew any of the material. However, if you want an easy 3 credits do good on the paper and go to class.

[He] missed 5 out of 15 classes (yet if you miss 3 you fail) & had us buy 100 dollars worth of books which were barely used (money down the drain). He liked my poems but was pretentious n rude to students whose work he didn’t like. If you go to him for help, he will ignore you.

Cut him some slack. Do you have any idea how many court appearances we’re talking about?

Great class, when he shows up. Had to meet online a few times, poetry is not the kind of class where online classes are really helpful.

Online, films, missed classes, routine early dismissal, no midterm – No wonder Bernie Sanders is calling for free public university education. This should definitely be free.

Maybe Bern can also look into professors assigning a hundred dollars worth of useless books.

And maybe Bern can figure out how this guy – who was promoted while in pre-trial confinement – got promoted.

UD dearly hopes someone recorded the discussion among his colleagues.

He’s a madman, a wildman, a Hunter S. Thompson right here in New Britain!

A lot of people would just say ‘career criminal’ and drop the guy, but what if they’d said that about Jean Genet?

Despite the university’s effort to keep him, the criminal renown of Shankar reached the stick-in-the-mud state legislature, which has today engineered his exit from the school.

Congressional progressive caucus; against the government shutdown. If a crazy person with a gun shoots me, I become an icon of the far left.

Maybe Bernie Sanders, only Senator in the caucus, will engage me in conversation.

“Any chance you’re a Vermonter?”

“No, but I’m an old friend of Peter Galbraith’s.”

“He’s not popular in the State Senate.”

“Tell me about it.”

The nutty right has royally fucked the country; I will stand with the nutty left against it. I will stand in the rain (it’s raining) and scream crazy shit with the crazy ass progressive caucus.

I don’t know what the p.c.’s platform is. I’m sure I’m opposed to most of it. But a student in my mo/pomo seminar told me about the rally, and I’ve been spouting off in class about postmodern political passivity (in my weaker moments I tell myself this blog, this daily attack on corrupt elements of the American university, constitutes…) and… I dunno. Sometimes there’s no unpacking motive. I’m on the train. I’m going.

Maybe they’ll cancel it due to inclement weather. Optimal outcome. I get points for going without having to listen to the crazy ass progressive caucus say dumb shit. Without having to worry about Our Polarized Nation.

UD‘s wearing her uniform (boots, jeans, black turtleneck, scarf). The other day she attended a meeting of GWU’s highest administrative team, and the contrast between their suits and her jeans was stark. Thready old hippie UD. Representing the humanities faculty whether they like it or not.

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Postlude. Wow, it’s wet out there. Chilled damp UD takes her place on the red line train back to Garrett Park. She carries a red sign with white letters that read

END THE SHUTDOWN!

Capitol trees, bushes, and grasses trembled beautifully around UD as she walked from Union Station to the rally. One tree in particular, planted in circular groves on the grounds of various buildings, had a complex birch-like peeling bark (maybe the tree was a river birch?) and a thick coat of reddening green leaves with black berries. Blue jays shrieked and crows called out from lamp tops. Panicled pampas grass was paired with humpy mums – not a good look.

Employees at various federal entities streamed in to a park at the foot of the Capitol. They banged pots and chanted WORK NOT HURT. One of them gave UD the sign. T-shirts were also available, but who was going to put one on over her poncho? The rain flooded down, and the air was cold.

One guy tromped through the crowd trying out various chants. “We’ve got a Norma Rae,” said one attendee to another, and they laughed.

Police and their dogs were everywhere. At one point a bunch of them converged on an oddball wearing sunglasses, but he was just an oddball.

“Are you on furlough?” a reporter asked UD.

“No.”

He walked away.

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Jesse Jackson spoke. He sounded drunk and old. He offered a halting potted American history. We won in 1862… and… uh… in 2012… Now it’s 2014 and we won’t forget… He didn’t even bother coming up with one of his famous rhyming couplets.

I heard about it on the metro. I was on my way to Foggy Bottom in the morning, and a group of cultured retired people – probably on their way to a Smithsonian museum – sat near me.

One of them said, “Did you see that poetry thing in the Post? The Bernie Sanders guy who’s an English professor? Who sends poetry to Senate staff members? It renews your faith…”

Everybody nodded; they’d all read it and they all approved.

So here’s the article. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, has a chief of staff who in real life is an English professor.

[Hank Gutman lobs] poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate. Each note offers escape through verse. Meaty, challenging, thought-provoking lines, accompanied by pages and pages of Gutman’s analysis. Poetry that has nothing to do with cloture votes or amendments or motions to recommit. Poetry intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the “huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged” in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.

Gutman’s engaged in Action Poetry, whose Wikipedia page says this:

Action Poetry is the active use of poetry, often spreading in a community. It might include painting poetry on murals, or distributing poetry. It can also involve the encouragement of live poetry recitings and distribution of free poetry.

External link:

“Action Poetry as an Empowering Art: A Manifesto for Didaction in Arts Education” by Francois Victor Tochon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, International Journal of Education & the Arts, Volume 1 Number 2, May 15, 2000

UD loves empowering didactions. She herself is a one-woman empowering didaction machine. Nonetheless, there are ethical questions worth posing about the act of lobbing (the Post‘s word) unasked-for poetry plus reams of your own analysis of that poetry (Here’s a sample of Gutman’s prose.) into the email of people who work in the same building you do.

The Post article about Gutman is full of insults about people with jobs on the Hill. BlackBerry addicts, tunnel-visioned… It goes on and on like that. These people are soulless… mere fragments… robots rather than humans…

Gutman is there to make them whole:

Despite the myriad interactions of government process, Washington often undermines deep human connection; poetry is his attempt to make the fractional city whole.

You can sort of see the Post writer thrashing about here, can’t you, since this sentence makes no effing sense whatsoever.

But my larger point is that when Garrison Keillor comes on the radio to recite the same inescapable lyric Gutman recites in the Post article —

“It is difficult/to get the news from poems,” Gutman says. “Yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

— we can turn off the radio. We can recall August Kleinzahler’s definitive take on these lines:

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else.

We can turn off the radio, but it’s harder to absorb the repeated impact of poetry lobbed into our email by a colleague. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve got to read the shit or he’ll ask you about it and you won’t know what he’s talking about and you need his guy’s vote on some piece of legislation, etc. So you automatically forward the you’re-a-tool-who-needs-me-to-explain-poetry-to-you emails to your assistant, some intern from George Washington University, and she forwards it to her English professor, and…

You get the idea.

 

The win of one would-be commander
Looks dim when he too-left meanders
His answer on Castro
Will put him in last row
Unless someone sits down with Sanders 

West Virginia has been the hardest hit.

The proximate responsibility for this grotesque overprescription of opioid painkillers lies with West Virginia’s doctors. But no conscientious wholesaler could look at how many painkillers they were shipping to low-population areas of the state — and at how many people were dying from overdoses in those areas — and not realize that they were enabling a deadly epidemic.

Bernie’s calling for an investigation.

But it’s good. It’s all good. The worst of the wholesalers – McKesson – has a CEO who sits on the distinguished board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, shaping the political thinking of America’s best and brightest. The same man will soon be lecturing us on health care policy. Arizona State University has bestowed its Executive of the Year award on him.

All of this cuz, you know, he made sooooooo much money.

What’s his corporation’s secret? Here ’tis:

[Y]ou can make a lot of money selling dope to addicts.

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Yes, sadly, addicts die. You just advertise for more.

A wee bird cam’ to his platform, he warbled sweet and early
And aye the o’ercam’ o’ his sang: They’re votin’ for Ol’ Bernie.
And when they heard the wee bird sing, applause cam’ thunderin’ cheerly
They took their bonnets aff their heids, and whistled for Ol’ Bernie.