On March 9, Martin
Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison. What, if anything, does
Shkreli’s downfall tell us about modern America?
Shkreli’s early life
exemplified the rags-to-riches American success story.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in April 1983, to parents who immigrated from Albania and worked as janitors in New York apartment buildings.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in April 1983, to parents who immigrated from Albania and worked as janitors in New York apartment buildings.
Shkreli attended New
York’s Hunter College High School, a public school for intellectually gifted
young people, and in 2005 received a bachelor’s degree in business
administration from Baruch College.
But soon thereafter,
Shkreli turned toward shady deals. He started his own hedge fund, betting that
the stock prices of certain biotech companies would drop. Then he used
financial chat rooms on the Internet to savage the companies he bet against,
causing their prices to drop and his bets to pay off.
Under his direction Turing spent $55 million for the U.S. rights to sell a drug called Daraprim. Developed in 1953, Daraprim is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a rare parasitic disease that can cause birth defects in unborn babies, and lead to seizures, blindness, and death in cancer patients and people with AIDS.
Months after he bought
the drug, Schkreli raised its price by over 5,000 percent, from $13.50 a pill
to $750.00.
Shkreli was roundly
criticized, but he was defiant: “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,
but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”
He said he wished he
had raised the price even higher, and would buy another essential drug and
raise its price, too.
In February 2016,
Shkreli was called before a congressional committee to justify his price
increase on Daraprim. He refused to answer any questions, pleading the Fifth
Amendment. After the hearing Shkreli tweeted, “Hard to accept that these
imbeciles represent the people in our government.”
Shkreli was
subsequently arrested in connection with an unrelated scheme to defraud his
former hedge fund investors.
In anticipation of his
criminal trial, Shkreli boasted to the New Yorker magazine, “I
think they’ll return a not-guilty verdict in two hours. There are going to be
jurors who will be fans of mine. I walk down the streets of New York and people
shake my hand. They say, ‘I want to be just like you.’”
During his trial,
Shkreli strolled into a room filled with reporters and made light of a particular
witness, for which the trial judge rebuked him.
On his Facebook page
he mocked the prosecutors, and told news outlets they were a “junior
varsity” team.
He retaliated
against journalists who criticized him by purchasing
internet domains associated with their names and ridiculing them on the sites.
“I wouldn’t call these people ‘journalists,’” he wrote in an email to Business
Insider.
He said on Facebook
that if he were acquitted he’d be able to have sex with a female journalist he
often posted about online.
After his conviction,
Shkreli called the case “a witch hunt of epic proportions, and maybe they found
one or two broomsticks.” As she imposed sentence last Friday, the judge cited
Shkrili’s “egregious multitude of lies,” noting also that he “repeatedly
minimized” his conduct.
Shkreli’s story
is tragic and pathetic, but I ask you: How different is Martin
Shkreli from other figures who dominate American life today, even at the
highest rungs?
Shkreli will do
whatever it takes to win, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. He
believes that the norms other people live by don’t apply to him. His attitude
toward the law is that anything he wants to do is okay unless it is clearly
illegal – and even if illegal, it’s okay if he can get away with it.
He’s contemptuous
of anyone who gets in his way – whether judges, prosecutors, members of Congress,
or journalists. He remains unapologetic for what he did. He is utterly
shameless.
Sound familiar?
The Shkreli
personality disorder can be found on Wall Street, in the executive suites of
some of America’s largest corporations, in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in
some of our most prestigious universities, and in Washington. If you look hard
enough, you might even find it in Trump’s White House.
Face it: America has a
Shkreli problem.
Martin Shkleri will
spend the next seven years of his life in prison. What will happen the other
unbridled narcissists now in positions of power in America, who also blatantly
defy the common good?
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books,
including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of
Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
"Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common
Good." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving
Capitalism," which is streaming now.