TEVA, “traumatized,” sees its “legal clouds darken.”

I fuckin love the way these stories get written! Here’s a totally filthy organization – among the biggest drug companies in the world, as it happens – whose self-inflicted collapse inspires The Sorrow and the Pity-strength keening all over the business media. In one short article, one writer touches on four massive ongoing criminal cases against TEVA, and the company faces far more trouble than this.

What evil agent traumatized TEVA? Why should it suffer like this?

Oh, right. Because its business model is bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations, bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations. Why can’t we just leave it alone and stop traumatizing it?

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More like it.

Scandal-Ridden Teva Pharmaceutical Is Fishing for a Bottom

Investors take note: There is very likely no bottom.

And where, UD wonders, is the long New York Times article about the relentlessly criminal enterprise that is TEVA? Doesn’t anyone think it’s newsworthy that the world’s most powerful pharma corporation – arguably – is indescribably corrupt?

2020 Targets: Teva, and John Hammergren.

The Imperial Family of Oxy, the Sacklers, are getting it up the ass, which is fine; but let’s focus, this year, on other worthies. If the point is to make others who fatally addicted America take a very deep bow, the choices are practically infinite among pharma corporations, drug distribution companies, pharmacies, the whorish FDA, doctors, bogus industry-bought pain organizations, members of Congress… So UD’s choice of these two – the mind-bogglingly filthy pharma giant, Teva, and the happily retired billionaire head of McKesson, one of the country’s biggest drug distributors – is somewhat random. But the scandal of Teva continuing to be treated like a business instead of a criminal enterprise, and CSIS’s lucrative, white-washing embrace of Hammergren, who now doles out health-advice to the nation, stand out as landmark evils within the larger landscape of drug-dead America. Li’l UD is only one blogger, and though by her lights she’s amazingly well-off, she can’t exactly compete with the resources of dirty rotten billionaire scoundrels. But she pledges to do her bit, in the year ahead, to keep her own modest spotlight on these two.

‘Teva Discusses Plans for Diversification of its Business’

Top management is slated to fan out to prisons across the world to promote generics while serving their sentences for bribery, price fixing, and violation of the Controlled Substance Act.

Or… whatever. If you prefer to read an entire article which discusses the incredibly corrupt pharmaceutical giant without once mentioning that they’re in spectacular legal (not to mention financial) trouble, go to this curious publication.

Teva.
 Once upon a time there was a business
Where we used to raise a price or two
Remember how we settled suits for peanuts
And dreamed up all the dirty deals we'd do
Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
Inflation schemes, price fixing, bribery
We'd gut the lives we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were rich and sure to have our way
 Now generic prices are in tatters
For distribution too we'll have to pay
Our current debt load's
twenty seven billion
Ruefully we smile and weep and say
Yes I remember well
We were corrupt as hell
And now our smiles have all turned into frowns.
But then you take my hand and tell me Here's the plan
We're gonna take our cash and double-down

‘Price-fixing lawsuit deals another blow to already fragile Teva…’

Fragile. Fragile. Such a pretty, gentle word… Not really a word UD would instinctively apply to a massive, criminally insane pharma company, but okay, fragile. Teva is fragile. Fragile Teva.

When I say insane, I mean crazy like a fox… If your bottom line’s looking shitty, you illegally and conspiratorially increase the price of your drugs by… oh… a fragile one thousand percent or so. Yes, you might in doing so attract the attention of attorneys general all over the United States and some fragile shit could hit the fan and make things even worse for you… But… maybe you’ll get away with it!

Meanwhile, the rest of the big strong world whose only fragility is advanced MS or ALS wonders how it will pay for its medicine because fragile Teva keeps increasing the price..

‘In About Chinese Women (1974), Kristeva, for her part, carried this uniquely French “pro-Chinese” mania to unprecedented heights. She disqualified all Western criticism of postrevolutionary China as suffused with illicit cultural bias. And she rationalized the traditional Chinese custom of “foot binding” — ignoring its debilitating and disfiguring consequences for millions of Chinese women — as a legitimate local cultural practice, comparable to ritual circumcision in Judaism. In fact, when perceived in the right light, Kristeva continued, foot binding constituted an emblem of Chinese female empowerment.’

Was Julia Kristeva a spy for the Bulgarian communists?

Who cares. This is what we should care about – that a serious intellectual, in an early version of similar defenses today of the burqa, was capable of writing that forced female foot-binding in China was, you know, fine for them, and even empowering.

Reflecting on [the radical journal] Tel Quel’s delusional infatuation with Cultural Revolutionary China, the French-American essayist Guy Sorman faults them for having succumbed to the temptations of a “boundless amoralism”: an “amoralism” that is inseparable from a distinctively French tradition of “revolutionary romanticism.” He continues: “What links the French intelligentsia to tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, Castro has very little to do with the quest for liberty, justice, and democracy. Such values were dismissed as suitable for dopes and stooges. … Our intelligentsia adored revolutionary violence and the aesthetics of violence. Was it not this spectacle of revolution that attracted Sartre, Barthes, and company?”

Anyone who has read Richard Rorty’s shattering attacks on radical theorists knows what happened next for Kristeva. Richard Wolin writes:

Kristeva … responded to her [earlier] political excesses by renouncing politics in toto — including feminism — as inherently totalitarian: as a sphere that perpetually sacrifices individuals to the injustices and repressions of the “collective superego.” As she explained in a 1989 interview: “We must try not to propose global models. I think that we, then, risk making politics into a sort of religion. … Of the political there is already too much.” Instead of striving for political solutions, Kristeva recommended that everyone who could afford it should enter into psychoanalysis — her new field of professional expertise.

Rorty spent his life preaching against radically transformative “global models” and in favor of pragmatic incremental change within particular countries. Even with the catastrophe of Bulgaria and other revolutionary states in front of her, Kristeva opted to go global — until she didn’t. Until in a kind of reverse-thrust globalism – one of absolute withdrawal rather than absolute embrace – she took her toys and went home.

Julia Kristeva on the Burqa.

I [disagree] with Muslim women from the left who contend we have to honor women’s free choice to cover their faces … I want to recall here Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that freedom does not end with choice. Choice is the starting point of freedom. True freedom is crossing selfhood borders and opening up to others.

Price fixing, bribery, lying about the danger of the opioids they push…

Even by pharma standards, Israel’s Teva is a real ugly standout. Where’s the long punishing article about this dirty enterprise in the NYT? Far as UD can tell, the place has long been a committed bad actor, and one wonders, with its latest massive settlement, whether anyone will bother looking at its scandalous history and writing about it. I mean, it’s clearly able to handle hundreds of millions in penalties every year as the cost of doing business, so pressure needs to come from elsewhere if we are going to stop these predators.

‘[C]ash conversion that low sparks a little paranoia about its ability to extinguish debt.’

And Teva Pharmaceuticals – the remarkably corrupt megacorp we’ve followed on this blog for years – does have one dumpster fire of debt. It’s way up there in the billions.

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But what’s this? Teva stock “is on fire today.”

See, they just settled – again, for several billions – the latest of … billions? … of criminal cases against them, these involving the company having been a big ol’ drug dealer during the heyday of opioid addiction (I guess we’re still in the heyday). Now that Teva has paid its way out of its most recent vileness, the company looks much more stable, and investors can heave a sigh of relief, all the while preparing to withdraw their winnings before the next gigantic criminal scheme takes Teva down for good.

The University’s Symbolic Capital, and Capital.

Aggressive, acquisitive, not terribly moral, hyper-rich people will always want to be associated with universities, and will often pay immense sums for the association. Universities – meditative, morally serious, non-materialistic – stand for everything these people are not.

Some super-wealthy want a trusteeship for cover. For Bernard Madoff to sit on a Yeshiva University board – as he did – was obviously a great coup for him, a great whitewashing.

But most of the venture capitalists panting to be trustees have more complex motives. Certainly some see it as an opportunity to make yet more money by getting the university to invest in their companies. More broadly, some know that they’ll make a useful set of social and business connections in this way.

And of course it’s good for the ego. Being a university trustee has a high hoity-toity factor; it impresses people.


**********************

The contemporary American university is well within its rights to trade on its symbolic capital in exchange for real capital. If Steven A. Cohen desperately wants, along with his eight billion dollars, to be a Brown University trustee, let him for God’s sake. Are you an idiot?

***********************

And what are the deeper motives here? What precisely is that symbolic capital which can be worth so much in sheer dollars to the university?

A lot of people yearn to be perceived not merely as smart, but as cultured. The contemporary art market would collapse if it had to rely on people actually understanding and liking particular pieces or traditions of art.

Art and culture acquisitions are quick ways of making oneself aesthetically and intellectually superior, and this is important to many people, since it seems to be the case that the more material goods you acquire, the more anxious you become not to be perceived as motivated by material gain.

It’s an odd paradox – the more sixty million dollar yearly bonuses Lloyd Blankfein gets, the more antsy Lloyd Blankfein becomes not to be perceived as greedy.

Offsetting that remarkable level of personal greed is not easy, however, and something like a university trusteeship says two important things at once: I’m not spending all of my time as a vampire squid. And I have a soul; it’s not all about money for me.

*************************

There are exceptions to this craving for university capital. Donald Trump is a true blue American vulgarian. But as a general rule, the finer the university, the higher the price it can place on its capacity to shed non-materialism upon the materialistic.

Hence the University of Chicago acted rationally when it made Rajat Gupta a trustee. I guess appointing Steve Stevanovich was also rational. But after awhile, as Yeshiva University learned, a critical mass problem may develop. After awhile, you take on one too many suspected insider traders or whatever, and your university’s reputation begins to suffer.

Your reputation is the source of your symbolic capital. Fuck it up, and Steve Cohen isn’t buying.

***************************

In the case of the University of Virginia, the problem seems not so much lawsuits and questionable business practices as the decision to put trustees with no discernible sense of the nature of universities in positions of great power. Fiascos of the sort U Va is dealing with will eventually happen when you give your entire board of trustees over to the corporate world.

UD’s a sucker for university stories that involve…

… the simple gratitude of former students for professors who were memorably kind to them. In these stories, students who go on to make some money come back to the school and endow scholarships to honor the professors.

Most recently, a Chinese couple who twenty years ago studied with David Kaplan, a music professor at the University of Saskatchewan, just gave a million dollars – the largest donation in its history – to the music school.

Kaplan… was singled out by the two former international students for his effort to help them navigate a new university, a new city and a new culture.

… “David Kaplan took them under his wing and gave them all kinds of encouragement and made sure they succeeded,” said current music department head Gerald Langner.

… Also a former student of Kaplan’s, Langner knows why Xu and Chen remembered their professor 20 after they left the U of S.

“Kaplan has inspired so many students,” Langner said. “He’s one of the best instructors I’ve ever had, period. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be in music right now.”

This method of a university getting money seems much more attractive to UD than the school, in a quid pro quo, putting its absolutely richest hedge fund guy on the board of trustees.

UD acknowledges that if the hedgie approach works, the university gets not one million but one billion. Yes. She can’t deny this. Game, set, and match. But…

Like hedge funds themselves, it’s very risky.

Very.

Did the University of Chicago Do the Math Wrong?

In a story over-invested with irony, a new financial research center at the University of Chicago which studies how to “measure, price, and hedge risk” may have disastrously failed in its own founding act of risk assessment.

Its donor, University of Chicago trustee Steven Stevanovich, allegedly made some of his immense fortune rather in the way Ezra Merkin made his — feeding funds to someone who turned out to be a Ponzi schemer. He’s being sued for 3.2 billion in clawback litigation arising from the Tom Petters scandal.

Stevanovich can’t be reached, and the University of Chicago is making no comment.

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