Have you wondered lately why we haven't heard a peep out of one of America's most reviled media personalities, Martin Shkreli? That's easy; he was arrested in 2015, found guilty in 2017, bad his bail revoked a month later after he posted on Facebook that he would pay $5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair and soon after that was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for three counts of securities fraud. (Aside from being thrown into prison, he was ordered to forfeit $7.4 million in assets and pay $388,000 in restitution.) He is federal inmate number 87850-053 and residing at a minimum security federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey.So how has he been behaving in prison? Yesterday the NY Post announced he was thrown into solitary confinement a few week ago for using a cell phone illegally to run his company.How did the prison find out he was using a contraband cell phone to run his pharma company, Phoenixus AG (a reincarnation of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG)? Someone bragged to the Wall Street Journal and they ran a piece on March 7 that someone in the prison system saw. The Journal reported that Shkreli fired the firm's interim CEO over the phone, though he let him stay on the board. He expects the firm to become a multibillion-dollar business while he directs it from cell phones that he presumably buys from corrupt guards. (The phones go for $1,000 each.) And speaking of Pharma and healthcare and all,Tim Russo had an eye-opening post on how Bernie is looking at... well doing the opposite of what Shkreli and Trump do. They raise prices on drugs so only the rich can afford them. Bernie has a different plan and if it has to be "socialism," let it be socialism-- like Medicare. Russo wrote on Sunday that Bernie "launched the hardest leftward shot across any bow I’ve ever seen in presidential politics. This morning on Face the Nation Bernie promised to cut prescription drug prices by 50% if elected, which would be standard puffery from a presidential candidate, except of course, this is Bernie. Asked how he would do that, Bernie listed the litany of big pharma’s greed, then said about a 50% cut in drug prices, "if they don’t like that, then we’ll take a look at their patents.” Forward comrades!
An August 2018 poll by Data For Progress has suggested that despite the red scare tactics, a majority of Americans support seizing pharmaceutical patents, with huge net positives even among Trump voters. The poll question’s wording was, “Would you support or oppose having the government produce generic versions of life-saving drugs, even if it required revoking patents held by pharmaceutical companies?”“Revoke” the means of production, “seize” the means of production, however you wanna phrase it, Bernie Sanders ain’t playin’.
And still speaking healthcare, the gaslighting asshole Putin installed in the White House who's pretending to be president, says his party is developing a "really great" health care plan that will be "far less expensive and much more usable" than Obamacare. The vote will come "right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate and win back the House."Most Republicans in Congress are just rolling their eyes and hoping he dies before 2020
