The Greediest Bastard of 2015? You Decide,

For this post I am going to nominate a few individuals as candidates in a contest to decide who is the greediest bastard in the United States in 2015. I will leave comments open so that you can nominate your own candidate and express your vote for a winner.

Bob Iger - Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company

2015 Compensation: $46.5 Million

In October last year Walt Disney told its American information technology workers that they were being laid off and replaced by foreign workers who are in the United States on H-1B visas. But first, the American technology workers would be required to train their replacements. There is no sense passing up an opportunity to add humiliation to financial ruin when you are screwing your workers.

This isn't the first time Disney has screwed its workers. In May of this year, Disney announced another layoff of American technology workers to be replaced by H-1B foreign workers, but put the plans on hold in June. In 2013, Disney laid off its top hand-drawn animation artists. In 2014 Disney laid off 700 workers in another animation division.

This brutal treatment of the employees who create the products and make the machines run was not done to save the company. Indeed in November, Disney announced record financial results. The driving motivation for screwing these employees was greed. Bob Iger was rewarded for his stewardship by raising his total compensation for 2015 to $46.5 million. Bob Iger's net worth is estimated to be about $80 million, so he is a relatively inexperienced at screwing the people who do the work in order to get rich.

Therefore it is with great pleasure that I hereby nominate Robert Allen "Bob" Iger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company as the 2015 Greediest Bastard in the United States of America.

What would Walt say?

Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals

I have mixed feelings about nominating Martin Shkreli. For those of you unfamiliar with this name, Martin is a former hedge fund manager and current CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who made headlines recently when it was revealed that he had obtained in August 2015 a monopoly on production of the generic medicine Daraprim, an FDA-approved therapeutic that is used to treat patients with toxoplasmosis including in AIDS populations. Martin then raised the price of Daraprim from$13.50 per pill to $750, an increase of over 5000%. One wonders why he did not round it up to a neat $1000 per pill, or even $10,000.

Congressional Democrats and candidates joined in a call for an investigation. But this is mere showboating. They all know that what Martin did is legal in America.  In America, it is and has always been perfectly OK for health care providers to charge as much as possible for medical care. Restraint based on the health provider's need for revenue or the patient's ability to pay are gone, discarded anachronisms of a a bygone era when the weakness of a conscience was not considered a character flaw. This noble capitalist model is the reason we have the most expensive healthcare in the world. We can all be proud of the fact that the American capitalist healthcare system has created far more wealth for healthcare providers than in any other nation.

On the one hand, he is obviously a predator using his capital and intelligence to obtain a monopoly on a medicine that is necessary to preserve the life and health of certain individuals and raising the price over 5000% to enrich himself and his backers. There is no doubt that Martin has the intellectual capacity to predict the adverse effects his actions may have on patients, insurance companies, and government healthcare programs that are funding care for some of these patients. Another point in favor of Martin’s nomination is that he has not provided any useful product or service or funded research that may eventually do so. Martin is executing a pure monopolistic money grab leveraging the patient's wish to stay alive to maximize Martin's personal wealth beyond an amount that any person could possible spend on their personal needs in a lifetime. 

On the other hand, Martin’s money grab was so blatant and callous that he has become a poster boy for greed and the evils of mixing free market capitalism with the healthcare business. Perhaps that is due to his youth and inexperience and immersion in the Wall Street culture where there is no right or wrong, only rich or not rich. His egregious example may eventually provoke constructive reform which would imbue his actions with a constructive social purpose thereby seriously weakening his qualification to be the Greedy Bastard of the Year. Another mitigating factor is that Martin did not invent this particular predatory practice; an activist group found that at least 19 other pharmaceutical firms have done the same thing. They make money the old fashion way: monopolies. Unlike J.P. Morgan, the new generation of monopolists see no need for forbearance or moderation, because when you have a billion dollars no one else matters.