Big Business as Usual
Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2024 3:05 am
“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind …”
“It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero sum game — somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made; it’s simply transferred — from one perception to another. Like magic.”
—the morbidly greedy and corrupt bank-financier Gordon Gekko’s reply to his increasingly exasperated young stockbroker protégé Bud Fox’s blunt question: When will it all be enough money for his mentor? (Wall Street, 1987)
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Human greed — in particular that of the very profitable corporation — is basically as reliable as general relativity, though in a purely human-nature sense. The unlimited-profit objective/nature is somehow irresistible. It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
Corporate officers will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. The shareholders, meanwhile, shrug their shoulders while defensively stating that they just collect the dividends and that the corporate officers are the ones to make the moral and ethical decisions.
The more that they make, all the more they want — nay, need! — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, yet the corporate news-media, which make up virtually all of Western mainstream news media, will implicitly or explicitly celebrate their successful greed [a.k.a. ‘stock market gains’].
As for consequential greed, there notably was the pharmaceutical industry knowingly pushing a new opiate that was very profitable and just as addictive — an ethical and moral crime for which they got off relatively lightly considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
And there were Boeing’s two quite-preventable 737 Max jetliner-crash atrocities, together horrifically killing all 346 people onboard.
And there was significant corporate greed-based neglect that resulted in numerous Covid-19 illnesses and deaths of vulnerable elderly people in for-profit long-term care homes. However, that neglect was around long before the crisis, although the actual extent was made horrifically clear only after the pandemic really hit.
Maximizing profits by risking the health or lives of product consumers will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast. Therefore, families likely still have reason to worry over their loved-ones being left vulnerable by measures taken by some long-term care-home businesses to maximize profits.
Western business mentality and, by extension, collective society allowed the well-being of our oldest family members to be decided by corporate profit-margin measures. And governments dared not intervene, perhaps fearing being labelled as anti-business in our avidly capitalist culture. …
As for potent corporate manipulation of government oversight bodies that are supposed to protect consumers’ wellbeing but instead put big business interests first, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada are prime examples of such compromisation.
In the case of Health Canada, it allowed novelty-flavored vaping products to be fully marketed — even on corner stores’ candy counters — without conclusive independent scientific proof that the product, as claimed by the tobacco industry, would not seriously harm consumers but rather just help nicotine addicts wean themselves off of the more carcinogenic cigarette means of nicotine deliverance.
A few years before that, Health Canada had sat on its own research results that indicated seatbelts on buses would save lives and reduce injury; it wanted even more proof of safety through seatbelts before ordering big bus manufacturers to install them in every bus.
Also noteworthy is that over the last 18 years or so, Health Canada has dramatically diverted a large portion of its resources from consumers’ health/wellbeing and onto the pharmaceutical industry’s business interests.
Health Canada places about four times more of its resources, such as staffing and funding, toward getting new drugs onto the market than it does on consumers’ safety, the latter which includes monitoring and recording adverse effects caused by the drugs.
“It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero sum game — somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made; it’s simply transferred — from one perception to another. Like magic.”
—the morbidly greedy and corrupt bank-financier Gordon Gekko’s reply to his increasingly exasperated young stockbroker protégé Bud Fox’s blunt question: When will it all be enough money for his mentor? (Wall Street, 1987)
____________
Human greed — in particular that of the very profitable corporation — is basically as reliable as general relativity, though in a purely human-nature sense. The unlimited-profit objective/nature is somehow irresistible. It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
Corporate officers will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. The shareholders, meanwhile, shrug their shoulders while defensively stating that they just collect the dividends and that the corporate officers are the ones to make the moral and ethical decisions.
The more that they make, all the more they want — nay, need! — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, yet the corporate news-media, which make up virtually all of Western mainstream news media, will implicitly or explicitly celebrate their successful greed [a.k.a. ‘stock market gains’].
As for consequential greed, there notably was the pharmaceutical industry knowingly pushing a new opiate that was very profitable and just as addictive — an ethical and moral crime for which they got off relatively lightly considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
And there were Boeing’s two quite-preventable 737 Max jetliner-crash atrocities, together horrifically killing all 346 people onboard.
And there was significant corporate greed-based neglect that resulted in numerous Covid-19 illnesses and deaths of vulnerable elderly people in for-profit long-term care homes. However, that neglect was around long before the crisis, although the actual extent was made horrifically clear only after the pandemic really hit.
Maximizing profits by risking the health or lives of product consumers will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast. Therefore, families likely still have reason to worry over their loved-ones being left vulnerable by measures taken by some long-term care-home businesses to maximize profits.
Western business mentality and, by extension, collective society allowed the well-being of our oldest family members to be decided by corporate profit-margin measures. And governments dared not intervene, perhaps fearing being labelled as anti-business in our avidly capitalist culture. …
As for potent corporate manipulation of government oversight bodies that are supposed to protect consumers’ wellbeing but instead put big business interests first, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada are prime examples of such compromisation.
In the case of Health Canada, it allowed novelty-flavored vaping products to be fully marketed — even on corner stores’ candy counters — without conclusive independent scientific proof that the product, as claimed by the tobacco industry, would not seriously harm consumers but rather just help nicotine addicts wean themselves off of the more carcinogenic cigarette means of nicotine deliverance.
A few years before that, Health Canada had sat on its own research results that indicated seatbelts on buses would save lives and reduce injury; it wanted even more proof of safety through seatbelts before ordering big bus manufacturers to install them in every bus.
Also noteworthy is that over the last 18 years or so, Health Canada has dramatically diverted a large portion of its resources from consumers’ health/wellbeing and onto the pharmaceutical industry’s business interests.
Health Canada places about four times more of its resources, such as staffing and funding, toward getting new drugs onto the market than it does on consumers’ safety, the latter which includes monitoring and recording adverse effects caused by the drugs.
