Big Pharma’s Big Jerk ARRESTED for alleged securities fraud

Martin Shkreli, the Turing Pharmaceuticals executive notorious for raising drug prices by obscene amounts (most notably raising the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat AIDS patients, from $13.50/pill to $750/pill)  and being an in-your-face asshole about it, has been arrested on federal securities fraud charges:

Martin Shkreli, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and former hedge fund manager who has been widely criticized for drug price gouging, was arrested Thursday morning by the federal authorities.

The investigation, in which Mr. Shkreli has been charged with securities fraud, is related to his time as a hedge fund manager and running the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin — not the price-gouging controversy that has swirled around him.

[…]

The federal charges are believed to parallel a civil lawsuit filed against Mr. Shkreli in August by Retrophin, whose board ousted Mr. Shkreli as chief executive in September 2014. In its lawsuit, Retrophin accused Mr. Shkreli of having used the company as a kind of personal piggy bank to help pay off upset investors who lost money at the hedge fund MSMB. Among the ways he did this, the lawsuit says, was by hiring some of these investors as sham consultants to Retrophin.

Big Pharma’s Big Jerk, as I like to call Shkreli, is not being charged over raising drug prices, but over allegations that he used Retrophin, a pharmaceutical company he was once the CEO for, as a piggy bank to pay off investors who lost money at MSMB, the hedge fund Shkreli co-founded. In addition to the criminal charges against Big Pharma’s Big Jerk, there’s an ongoing civil suit into the matter.

This couldn’t happen to a more deserving person if you asked for it.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Commitee took $33,400 from Big Pharma’s big jerk Martin Shkreli

You may have read about Turing Pharmaceuticals owner Martin Shkreli being a total jerk on social media in response to his company raising the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, a medical condition that can be fatal to people with AIDS and developing fetuses, from $13.50/pill to a whopping $750/pill. If not, you can read about it here.

However, when I was looking on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website about political donations that Martin Shkreli made, I managed to find one political donation that I am 100% certain is of Turing Pharmaceuticals’s Martin Shkreli, and that is a $33,400 donation that Shkreli made to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) on July 18th of this year:

Screengrab of FEC Independent Expenditure Search

The fact that the DSCC is taking money from people as odious as Martin Shkreli is disgusting and not in line with the progressive values that the Democratic Party should stand for.

I’ve created an online petition where you can tell U.S. Senator and DSCC Chairman Jon Tester (D-MT) and the DSCC to take the $33,400 they accepted from Shkreli and donate it to charity, preferably one whose mission is to help find a cure for AIDS. You can sign that petition here.