January 6, 2016
Page 7
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A Passion for Lying, Cheating and Stealing
My Person of
the Year
d onald K aul
It’s time — past
time, really — to
name the person
of the year. (Time
Magazine does it.
Why not me?)
There were many worthy can-
didates in 2015: the Pope, the
Donald, and Luke Skywalker,
to name just a few. But only one
symbolized the spirit of the year.
I speak, of course, of Martin
Shkreli.
For those of you with short-
term memory problems, he’s the
weasel/drug honcho who bought
the rights to a life-saving drug
that had been on the market for
years, and immediately raised its
$13.50-a-pill price to $750 — a
5,000 percent hike.
He said he’d use the extra
money for research to develop a
life-saving drug of his own, but
nobody believed him. He was just
doing what a long line of drug
company executives do — gouge
desperately sick people.
There’s nothing illegal about
this, and it’s not even the worst ex-
ample. Questcor Pharmaceuticals
paid $100,000 for an existing drug
that treated breathing problems in
by
newborns and raised its price over
a relatively short time from $40 a
vial to $23,000.
New cancer drugs often
cost $10,000 a month or
more.
Drug companies are al-
lowed to charge whatever
they can get away with, so
long as they claim they’re
Now I’m asking you: Does that
make Shkreli the person of the
year or what?
The only real surprise is that he
isn’t running for president on the
Republican ticket as the leader of
the stick-it-to-sick-people caucus.
I’m sure he’d be right up there
with Donald Trump in the polls.
If I hadn’t picked Shkreli for
Apparently, all that tough talk
wasn’t enough, because the last
Republican “debate” sounded like a
strategy meeting of Mafia warlords.
using the profits to develop new
drugs. They don’t have to actual-
ly do it. All they need to do is say
that’s their intent. It’s the Ameri-
can way.
What sets Shkreli apart is that
making a fortune by cheating peo-
ple legally wasn’t enough for him.
He fancied himself a financial
wizard and set up a hedge fund
scheme that allowed him to lie,
cheat, and steal his way to another
fortune. This one was illegal.
The whole thing finally caught
up with the 32-year-old in Decem-
ber. The feds showed up and threw
him in jail, from which he’s been
released on $5 million bail.
this honor, I suppose I’d have
been forced to choose the entire
GOP slate of presidential candi-
dates. What a hoot they are.
They’ve been fighting for the
better part of a year now over
who’s the toughest kid on the
block.
No sooner does one of them
come up with a mean proposal,
like building a fence across the
southern boundary of the United
States to keep out Mexicans, then
another says: “Oh yeah? I’d not
only build a fence, I’d round up
all the Mexicans here illegally and
send them back where they came
from.”
To which another will say:
“I’d not only do all that, I’d make
Mexico pay for the fence. Besides
which, I wouldn’t let any Muslims
in either.”
Which leads another to add,
“I’d make the ones already here
register and wear name tags.”
Apparently, all that tough talk
wasn’t enough, because the last Re-
publican “debate” sounded like a
strategy meeting of Mafia warlords.
One of the candidates wanted
to “carpet bomb” the terrorists.
Another not only wanted to kill all
the terrorists, he wanted to seek
out their children and kill them
too. Sort of a family plan.
All of them agreed that Presi-
dent Barack Obama wasn’t being
tough enough and that any one of
them would be tougher. At any
moment I expected one of them to
jump up and say, “Let’s go to the
mattresses.”
For all that toughness, no one
thought to say an unkind word
about the role that unfettered gun
ownership is playing in the serial
massacres we keep experiencing.
Or a kind word about attempts to
slow down global warming before
it kills us all.
And just think, we’ve got near-
ly a year to go before the election.
Happy New Year.
OtherWords columnist Donald
Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.
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