Shame

There was a time when we could feel shame.

Those days are long gone.

Take a gander at this excerpt from a time before we were shameless. George Romney, Papa to Mittens, DECLINED a hundred thousand dollar bonus in 1960 because he already made more than enough money...

WTF???

Shame?

George was in thrall to an outdated concept called the "social contract." At some level, the social contract assumed we were all in this thing called the "economy" together.

Fast forward 65 years or so, and you've got pharma-bro. Martin Shkreli had a simple strategy for success. Buy up companies that market life-saving medicines and jack up the prices!

Brilliant!

Shame doesn't even come into the discussion. He's just a brilliant entrepreneur...

It's the same kind of brilliance that allows greed-bags like Bill Ackman and his henchman Harrison "Hitman" Hunter to "save" railways by making the trains longer and running them faster, all the while pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars for their noble efforts.

Shame? No way!

Ackman and Hunter have oodles of laudatory press clippings documenting their genius.

According to the Globe and Mail and the rest of the business press, you're a genius if you can kill 6,000 great working class jobs in Canada as long as you enrich yourself and your investors.

There is no shame in making 6,000 good jobs go away.

Instead, there are accolades.

How did we get from a place where A-list capitalists would refuse a bonus, to a place where destroying working class jobs and working class communities and screwing the sick and infirm is considered legitimate business activity?


I don't have the answer yet, but I'm working on it...

America's aristocracy of A-holes

Here at Falling Downs we're detecting the first signs of revulsion by America's mainstream opinion-makers at the excesses of the finance elite.

You know, the kind of folks who inspired us to speculate why the words hedge, fund, manager, shit, and bag are so often found in the same sentence.

The truly vomit-worthy antics of Martin Shkreli have garnered umbrage even from Bezos' Washington Post.

Shkreli, a former Jim Cramer protege, bought the rights to the prescription drug Daraprim, a staple in the drug regimen of many HIV/Aids patients, and promptly jacked the price 5,455%!

Because he could!

What a genius!