When My Profit is More Important Than Your Life

Both were excesses caused by the overweening pride of those who call themselves bankers but are really just brokers for the ultra-wealthy and power-hungry. 

Collectively, the new Kings and Queens of the world. 

Inequality is both created and driven by defining progress in solely economic terms. The neoliberal mentality that arose with Reagan requires that even ethics be quantified and rated based on its impact on the GDP. 

When our lives politically and socially are circumscribed by consumption, so long as profits are positive (or can be manipulated to appear so), the humanitarian concerns of health and happiness, tolerance and acceptance, collective development and world peace, and personal growth and satisfaction are trivialized. 

When my profit is more important than your life, we get the current situation that has led directly to global warming, environmental destruction, starvation, and genocide. Is this a way to run a world? 

The world’s financial markets see opportunity in any disruption; they are too often able to capitalize on one side or the other or both of human suffering. 

From mid-2020 through the end of 2021 some of the uber-rich were raking it in, not because they made anything but because they could capitalize on the rising stock prices. Even when no specific information was given, their understanding bred from sources cultivated inside the government made for more lucrative returns. 

And a number of our elected officials seemed to have benefited through investments they or family members have made in companies where stock prices have risen in response to the pandemic and now militarization. 

Others’ companies and their owners have capitalized on supply chain disruptions, or even contributed to creating shortages by not picking up shipments or outright hoarding. This allowed for maximum profits in jacking up prices for basic necessities from toilet paper to cars, from PPE to chicken. 

Amazon, Tyson, Walmart, more than 75 lawmakers on Capitol Hill… how many others have profited while Main Street Americans risked their lives by working in their warehouses, factories and stores? 

And too often, when companies do offer to help, it rarely ranks as true altruism but as just another way for them to leverage profits from a given crisis and get free publicity. Our corporate entities have lost their way. 

This past six weeks, the oil companies have been sitting pretty by playing with the price of gas for our cars and heating for our homes. This is a pretty ugly optic taken against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The wealth of the commons has now been almost entirely absorbed into the wealth of Wall Street. 

The cost of a war, rising gas prices, hyper-inflation, broken supply chains, expense of military operations – for corporations, these represent opportunities to generate profits for stakeholders and distribute lucrative bonuses to the bosses. 

The pandemic was a war with death, but little blood and the corporate class made out like bandits. How much do you think they will make from a full-scale war where ships and planes must be manufactured posthaste rather than masks and hand sanitizer? 

How much more can they extract by playing the scarcity game? 

Wall Street will salivate and seize the opportunity to emulate their European counterparts in the early years of the last decade, manipulating the situation to extract stringent claims against whole countries at the cost of destruction of healthcare and retirement plans, leaving ruined economies. 

Which will foster the discontent that will lead to more war. 

Losses by companies doing business in Ukraine and Russia will impact their home countries’ economies and the ability of those countries to purchase American goods. And give rise to another dispossessed class who can be lured into terrorist action and push for invasions of other territories. 

Some companies here and abroad are actively pursuing higher goals with regards to the importance of the environment, society and human capital. 

Some companies have come to understand that there is an increased perception that company value is subjective and that investors are starting to look to the moral compass of entities as much as to their productivity and quarterly profit. 

But not all. 

In 2021 Shell reported $19.3 billion in profits while BP made only $12.8 billion, far more than in preceding years due to post-pandemic high demand pushing up gas prices paired with overly favorable tax treatment. 

Meanwhile, annual household energy costs could climb almost $1,000 in England. 

Pfizer made nearly $37 billion from its Covid-19 vaccine profiteering off public health systems with mark-ups of close to 300%,  and is hoping for even more in fiscal year 2022 with demand for its Covid-curing Paxlovid. 

This despite the fact that research for both included public financing. 

And it’s not just corporations putting profit over people. 

The American government entered that game lock, stock and barrel in the decades following the Second World War, overturning legitimately elected governments from Iran to Panama to allow corporations to flourish at the expense of those nation’s inhabitants. 

Furthermore, it has been paid for by the American taxpayer - $1 trillion for Vietnam, $8 trillion for the so-called War on Terror including Afghanistan and Iraq – not to mention our flesh and blood losses. 

It doesn’t matter that the United States has won none of the wars in which it has engaged in this period, despite multiple attempts to spin it otherwise, the ultimate goal of profit for the U.S. armaments industry was successful. 

And our government continues to subsidize the armaments industry and promote weapons sales around the world to dictators and to the middlemen who supply terrorists. 

It doesn’t matter that people here and in other countries kept suffering and their quality of life kept deteriorating. 

It doesn’t matter that the United States has transformed itself from the world’s savior into its greatest bully and its vaunted image as leader of the free world is securely jammed in the lower story of the outhouse, as long as the rich keep getting richer and the American oligarchs continue to buy our elections, nothing will change. 

Following in the footsteps of the Thirteen Colonies, Americans today must take the steps necessary to encourage right-thinking by our companies and elected officials, and force the abdication of our economic Kings and Queens to raise up the good folks of Main Street.

(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)