Making the legal profession great again

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$1699.00

The top rate attorneys at Weil, Gotshal and Manges are charging to handle the bankruptcy of retailer J. Crew (American Lawyer, 22 May 2020)

A year ago J. Crew had 14,500 employees, 10,000 of them part-time.  {Inequality.org)

Meanwhile, America, known worldwide for being the go-to country for lawyers who want to make fortunes, is in the middle of a zillion legal cases. The President starts one every thirty-five minutes, and someone counter-sues every forty.  The law must be the most ( if not the only) thriving industry in the United States.

At one time I thought I would like to be a lawyer, but when I caught myself yawning at the thought I dropped the idea.

 

Light relief

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A 75-year-old man who took up ballet four years ago in memory of his late wife has passed his grade one exam. Bernard Bibby, who was married to Celia for 55 years, said dancing had brought them together because he was “the only boy at the youth club who could jive”.

Following her death in 2015, he decided to sell his TV to force himself to go out and find new ways to entertain himself. After trying ballroom and Latin dancing, as well as tap, he settled on ballet. He took his exam in November at the Bridge Academy of Performing Arts in Rochester, and received the (successful) result two weeks ago.

Comment:  Everyone needs a non- work related hobby or pastime.  To sit all the time in front of a TV is not a good idea ( and, in America, repetitive and not good for stress).  I do drawing and watercolors, very absorbing and relaxing.  And you don’t have to be good at it because it is just for you.

The iniquities of the drug industry

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If ever we find a Covid-19 vaccine, it won’t just be the academics and pharmaceutical giants leading the search we have to thank.  It will also be down to all the funding provided by governments and global charities. Public-private organisations such as Gavi (the global vaccine alliance, supported by the WHO and the Gates Foundation) and Cepi (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have given drug companies over $4.4bn to help them beat Covid-19. Yet despite these huge subsidies, drug firms still charge what they want for the final product.

In 2009, a pneumonia vaccine created with the aid of $1.5bn in Gavi funding was so expensive that low-income countries couldn’t pay for it. And AstraZeneca has received £84m in government funds to help develop a Covid-19 vaccine,  yet still owns the intellectual property rights, can dictate the price, and won’t share research data with a WHO initiative to pool Covid-19 knowledge. The drugs market is a market crying out for more state control. “Medicines are a human necessity, not a profit-making machine.”  (Kenan Malik, The Observer, also carried in The Week, 13 June 2020)

My comment:  Healthcare is a human right, not a type of grocery.  Yes, developing an anti-covid vaccine is a risky and expensive business, and a disaster if you get it wrong and kill people.  But if taxpayer money goes into development there is absolutely no case for the developer to capture all the profits and remain unaccountable.

I used to be a product manager for a major pharmaceutical company.  Among my products was the Ventolin inhaler.  The cost of production was about ten percent of the average selling price.  That was 50 years ago.  Presumably the product stopped being a monopoly item years ago. But the Ventolin inhaler is still being used on a daily basis, especially at this time of year.  I have no idea of the current cost structure of the product, but can make an intelligent guess. (Ventolin was not developed using public money, as far as I know).   My point is that this particular product has been a honeypot for decades.  If you are going to benefit in this way and if the development costs are paid for by the taxpayer ( as the covid research and development is being paid for by the taxpayer), then the government should have the monopoly rights to it while the monopoly is extant.  The system is stacked in favor of the companies, not the public or the patients. This is not right.

 

 

Greed.Inc

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David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, is having trouble getting out from under the shadow of his predecessor, Lloyd Blankfein. Goldman’s profits have dropped to a four-year low, and the bank had to set aside an extra $1.1 billion for legal fees involved in a Malaysian corruption scandal.

But Solomon is pressing ahead amid pandemic economic shock, as if his two-year reign as CEO has been an unqualified success. His first controversial move: buying two ultra-luxury private jets to shuttle Goldman execs to and fro. His second: engineering himself a 20 percent pay hike.

At the bank’s annual meeting last week, conducted online, critics pressed for a shareholder advisory “no” vote on Solomon’s $24.7-million pay, calling his deal out of line at a time of mass unemployment. Countered a Solomon friendly board member: “We believe David’s compensation is aligned with his peers and his predecessor.” In other words, if some CEOs get paid more than they deserve, all should. The “no” vote failed.   (Inequality.org, April 2020)

My comment: Which example in history can we consult to get a clue about what the future holds in store, in view of this fine example of the “Wisdom of Solomon”?   My favorite would be the the overthrow of the Tsar and the greedy, effete system he presided over.  Unless we see the (unlikely) reform of the American economic system and the advent of a modern Roosevelt to moderate the extremes of wealth and poverty,  Mr. Solomon, and people like him, will come to a sticky end, like the Tsarist regime, and the extremes of wealth will be moderated by force.

Oh, yes!  It can happen here, of course.  And it is really stupid to encourage these self-involved, unempathetic, greedy people.   And don’t give me the “That’s the American way”. trope. America used to be better than this.

Epicurus believed in moderation. I doubt whether many of these finance people can even spell moderation.