The Profit Beast is humanity’s nemesis,
the ‘end times’ foe we should all lift our heads and take a good look at.
Nothing at all that we need so desperately to deal with; the approaching
climate crisis tipping point, ill-health, destitution, abuse, exploitation,
environmental damage – none of these things can or will be dealt with because
doing so would enrage the Profit Beast.
The Profit Beast is vast, invulnerable and on his
final course, Truth.
The Profit Beast, fed by out-of-control consumerism and
co-conspirator advertising, are now such a perfect symbiotic mechanism that we
stand little chance of outrunning this man-made monster.
Is this just scare-mongering about a grim dystopia? Pause
for a moment and look up from amnesia-inducing smartphone or mind-numbing TV
and take a quick glance at real reality.
Two commonplace UK cases of catastrophic consumerism
and profit before people-ism - are the obesity epidemic, fuelled by the sugar
saturated processed food industry and more recently the insidious youth Vaping trend.
According to The Lancet – global obesity levels
tripled between 1975 and 2019. Obesity related deaths in the US are around
30,000 annually and 3,000 in the UK. According to the UK government’s
Department of Health and Social Care, obesity costs the NHS £6.5 billion
annually and is the second biggest cause of preventable cancer. Private profit,
public cost – which we’ll come to later.
Still, one of the main culprits – sugary drinks - are
not blanket banned in schools. Over and above that, as an additive to the most
surprising foods, often those we regard as savoury, quantities of sugar have
gone up exponentially in the last 4 decades. In the US, sugar consumption increased
30% between 1977 and 2010.
And of course, there is profit to be made in both causing
and then treating the harm when it inevitably occurs. But more of that later
too.
Sugar is a marketing preference for the processed food
industry. It helps get people hooked on their products and it’s a very cheap
bulk additive. The fact that it decimates body and dental health and kills does
not matter.
A more recent phenomenon, one that has taken off in
the UK like a nuclear-powered rocket, is Vaping. The sheer number of youngsters
vaping on my local buses is a depressing sight.
The delivery system for the latest nicotine addiction
is not biodegradable and is also an ignition hazard. Ah progress…
The youngest child I’ve seen vaping appeared to be
about 9.
But the new vape shops selling the death dummies on my
local high-street, look like sweetie shops.
The CDC (Centre for Disease Control) lists one of the
known e-cigarette harms as detriment to adolescent brain development.
E-cigarette ‘juice’ usually contains nicotine which is addictive. Vapes often
also contain carcinogenic chemicals. Plus -
· Heavy
metals such as nickel, tin, and lead in many flavours
· Tiny
particles that can be inhaled deep into the lungs
· Volatile
organic compounds
· Flavourings
such as diacetyl, a chemical linked to a serious lung disease.
But mostly, scientists agree we just don’t yet know
the full range of harms though my local vape shop happily displays a neon sign
claiming vaping is 95% safer than smoking. How they know what the scientists
don’t is anyone’s guess
E-cigarettes attained a fast pass because they were
supposed to encourage traditional cigarette smokers to stop. Most young people
addicted to vaping have never smoked cigarettes.
Meanwhile we all have to go on being swamped by those
huge clouds of exhaled, warm toilet-cleaner-scented lung farts.
The Fentanyl crisis in North America is the much more
extreme end of death4profit with opioid deaths outstripping gun deaths in the
most gunny place in the world. I hesitate to say that it’s as bad as it could
get because where late-stage capitalism and out of control consumerism are
concerned, there’s no extreme that is too extreme.
The price to society is not in truncated lives,
ill-health and misery alone. It is a huge hit to public services. On the other side, a
secretive few, siphon off profits Midas would have blushed at.
The public sector clears up the private sector’s mess.
Private profit – state clear-up. Private wealth – public cost; medical
services, police, charities, social services etc. All paid for - not by the
wealthy who hide their obscene wealth and avoid the taxes that would fund the
very services they over-burden with their greed.
In the US in the case brought by Oklahoma City after
years of opioid carnage – one lawyer estimated the opioid epidemic – started by
the prescription medications for a quick fix for pain in a society addicted to
quick fixes - accounted for 80 percent of city crime. Yet another cost to the
many for the gargantuan profits of a tiny few. In Oklahoma’s case the ‘few’ making
eye-watering profits out of the deaths of young athletes, workers with back
pain, teachers, nurses etc, were Perdue Pharma who assured people that their
killer drug Oxycontin was safe – while in possession of proof it was not.
And while advertising is the inducement mechanism, The
Profit Beast also protects itself pouring large fortunes into lobbying.
Statista reckoned that in 2022 the US food industry
spent $7.5 billion on advertising processed food. Perdue used false figures
when advertising OxyContin as a miracle drug and spent $800m+ lobbying to block
warnings that it was unsafe. And the Sackler family who own Perdue and
knowingly promoted the killer opioids, became so rich from their product of
mass destruction, they featured on Forbes rich list. Now they’ve taken their
murderous product to countries even more poorly regulated than the US.
Of course, if profit can be made out of causing the
problem, it can also be made offering solutions. Big Pharma gave the world Oxycontin. It also
now provides a drug to keep users alive if they OD – so they can carry on using.
No one gives addicts their lives back. The food industry gifts us global
obesity but then, especially in the ‘developed’ world, profits massively off the
diet industry. We now have ‘miracle’ drugs to reverse the obesity The Profit Beast
gifted us. Side-note – as early as 2023 the hysteria surrounding the new wonder
anti-obesity drug Ozempic was apparently triggering eating disorders. We won’t
continue down the hell hole on that one.
Try this one. The drug alcohol (no one who uses it
calls it that obviously) has been consumed by humans for most of civilisation
but, as with other consumables, it changed with industrialised production. It
now accounts for around 3m deaths globally and wretchedness, ill health and disease
for countless more.
The Institute
of Alcohol Studies in London – in reporting how alcohol is marketed to children
and young people - stated in 2023 that UK primary school children develop early
alcohol brand loyalty and were more able to id alcohol brands than ice-cream or
biscuits.
There is no low too low.
Heineken used prostitutes to help get brand foothold
in Africa. Just to put things in perspective, global sales of the alcohol
market are $1,300 BILLION. Meanwhile the WHO have identified 200 illnesses
caused or made worse by alcohol…
Global human catastrophe and crises are no dampener to
PB. During Covid, here in the UK, the pandemic was seen by the Conservative
government (under Boris Johnson) and their rich pals – fast tracked to
government contracts – as just another chance to get richer with £millions of
public monies spent on contracts for medical equipment that either did not work
or did not materialise. During WWII we’d have called that behaviour profiteering
and members of that same party then believed profiteering should be punishable
by firing squad.
Even the perverse profits related to butchering women’s
bodies not for health but for money, has gone stratospheric. The plastic
surgery industry, which used to be the preserve (literally) of the rich and
famous and ‘fading Hollywood stars’ is now on any street here in the form of
trout-lipped young women with orange skin, fillers and Botox that looks both
ugly and painful. One currently popular procedure, the infamous Brazilian Butt Lift
or BBL has a rate of 1 death per 4,000 procedures. It’s just another example of
wealthy (predominantly men) profiting from deaths of, mainly young, insecure
women. Often in private clinics like those that came under scrutiny after a
cluster of horrific deaths in Miami Florida, where surgeons were performing up
to 8 procedures per day with public hospitals – or morgues - picking up the
pieces. The Profit Beast chewed up the whole principle of ‘first do no harm’.
And not only does the public sector pick up the pieces
– which is a huge financial benefit for the private sector that rarely pay for
their mistakes or corporate criminal conduct - the wealthy and powerful never
seem to shoulder any responsibility or repercussions which simply drives the
behaviour. Are they all sociopaths?
This question occurred to me recently when Tony Blair
(yes – the UK war criminal) was yet again being platformed by the London media earlier
this month, complaining that the UK benefits budget was over-burdened by those
claiming sickness assistance. And there are issues with how sickness assistance
is administered in the UK however, if you or I had been responsible for an
illegal invasion on the far side of the world leading to innumerable civilian deaths,
decimated an entire country, de-stabilised the region, harmed military personnel
and birthed ISIS – we’d keep a more modest profile. Not call-me-Tony.
Furthermore, Blair is the man who turned UK
universities into Ponzi schemes, introducing US-style tuition fees that have
left millions of young folks in life-limiting debt and stress while he has
never known a day’s want in his life.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald said of the rich “they are
different from me and you”. The problem is they run everything from that
position of unknowing and uncaring. What they are aware of is that
repercussions will not touch them so they experiment and gamble with our lives.
Sometimes you may not even intend to consume a product.
It’s forced on you or your family without knowledge or consent. But you still
pay. For example, the ‘forever’ chemicals produced by companies like 3M
(subject of the film Dark Waters staring Mark Ruffalo).
3M were found to have polluted huge swathes of
Minesota over decades, increasing rare cancers among children. And – yes – like
Perdue – the company knew their product was dangerous.
The dumping of both chemicals and plastics is a global
problem especially in poor countries or those with poor regulations e.g. the
horrific chemical pesticide leak from the US company Union Carbide in Bhopal
India in 1984 which killed nearly 4,000 immediately and poisoned the lives of
thousands more in the following years. Of course – because it was in India and
not the US, victims and their families stood little chance of being properly
compensated. Low-grade safety concerns are integral to a consumer industry
where profit is everything and consequences are for mugs.
OR
You could just casually hand money over to the chronically
wealthy in exchange for anxiety and debt. No need to lug STUFF home from the
shops or get it delivered or spend years knowingly or passively consuming
poison. We call this gambling and that too is epidemic (post 513 Gargantuan Gambling Gremlin).
But if you thought gambling was the bottom, the
ultimate way for con artists to fleece the gullible – the 21st century gave us
a new low. Crypto. And if we needed a more perfectly timed example – there was
Trump fleecing his own supporters with what is technically called a meme coin
or ‘shit’ coin, on the eve of his inauguration, flanked by his pet billionaire
oligarchs.
Natural disasters kill people indiscriminately, but out-of-control
profit motive is killing us and rotting our world and poisoning our children
with no curbs on its euthanising enthusiasm.
There is no area you could now point to, it has not
corrupted and corroded. Cheap deadly housing like Grenfell here in the UK. Mass
housing built for quick profit on flood areas or known earthquake fault lines. Housing
crises – again I’ll use the example here in the UK; after good quality council
housing was sold off by Thatcher it was never re-invested. The post-war
dividend of good healthcare, affordable decent housing and decent state
education was sold down the river (the river flowing with effluent thanks to
privatisation of water companies) for the profit of the few whose response is
to hide their ill-gotten wealth in off-shore accounts.
At the more immediately violent end - war.
Industrialists benefitted in WWII from the sale of
armaments just as arms companies have been raking it in from the genocide in
Gaza and the slaughter and devastation in Ukraine. But wars make countries and
ordinary people poorer in all ways. The few have profits; the many have
incalculable loss and deep lasting scars.
True, The Profit Beast is no recent manifestation, its
dehumanising effect has haunted us for centuries. The Atlantic Slave Trade is a
grim and iconic example which besmirches human history with infamy and shame as
possibly the contemporary world’s most heinous, long lived
‘civilisation-sanctioned’ act of profit-before-people. As a side issue – for
anyone who thinks black slavery ever fully ended in the Southern US states - do
read up on The Restitution Centres of Mississippi!
Go walk the famine roads of Ireland – built in the
late 1840s, belated public works meant to provide literal starvation wages. The
horrific trauma of The Great Famine in Ireland is often, rightly, put at the
feet of an uncaring English government that had a racist and merciless view of
the Irish and treated Ireland as a colony, useful for its land and resources –
its people barely regarded as human. What is often missed is that Irish
Catholic mid-level farmers – who saw the devastation of their fellows all
around them – continued to sell good quality food abroad that could have stayed
in Ireland, because they got a higher price.
During The Highland Clearances here in Scotland (1750
– 1860) around 150,000 highlanders were turned out of their crofts. Homes were
burnt, communities destroyed and possessions smashed, food spoiled and even milk
poured out so they could not return. Sheep were deemed more profitable than
people.
The Profit Beast devours the soul.
Interestingly, though not surprisingly, when the
system collapses under weight of greed as it did in the banking crisis of 2008,
caused by the bankers, it was the banks that were bailed out to save the
economy not the people at the bottom, crushed under personal debt they had no
control over. The Profit Beast never pays. It devours then spews out our
remains.
The problem we have today is that The Profit Beast becomes
bigger, more ravenous and faster moving the more it’s fed and – like much else
– it has gone Global. There is no corner it cannot/does not reach.
However - and it is a huge however – if what you
conclude here – as I do – is that the poverty, misery, suffering, instability, chaos
and destruction is all unnecessary - that is the very point. These are all –
and always have been – problems engineered by greed. Specifically, it is
created by a tiny handful of men who think they should have all the power and
all the resources and more money than anyone could ever know what to do with.
They are the moving parts of The Profit Beast. Why we’ve let them have it, is the
massive question only psychologists and possibly historians will be able to
answer. If, that is, humanity has much history left to make…
In the very most basic terms - if three people grab
97% of an available cake – the other 97 have to survive on 3%. It is that
simple. It’s always been that simple. There have been very few times in human
history when, if we had equality, we could not adequately feed, clothe, care
for and house the vast majority if we had the will to do so.
Argentina is a good microcosm. A hugely wealth country
just 100 years ago – it was plundered by its wealthy elite. Now ordinary people
cannot afford the basics; inflation is out of control and many have returned to
medieval bartering to get the essentials of life. And – of course – they have
elected a right-wing nutter Javier Milie who wants to punish the poor more
because that is what you do when it’s the rich who’ve run off with everything…
Spectacularly, here in the UK, we continue with that
most idiotic remnant of long-gone empire - The Royal Family. £millions of
public monies go every year to one of the wealthiest families and certainly the
biggest landowners and hoarders of ill-gotten gains, making King Charles the
greatest ‘benefits queen’ of all time. This is a man who had a public temper
tantrum because a pen didn’t work…
Brexit. While xenophobia and racism were used to get
the result, obeisance to The Profit Beast was the driver. The deregulation that
leaving the EU delivered was the jewel in the crown for the wealthy, in a
country already brought low by 45 years of privatisation and lack of investment
in public infrastructure and institutions. Shame on many of the big unions and
their blokey bosses for supporting it.
In America, The Profit Beast is on his last course –
no longer hiding as it drools and dribbles. Trump is just a
manifestation/personification of this phenomena.
Yes, its basic greed but it’s much more. The Profit Beast
is willing to cannibalise our fellow human beings just for a fast buck down to
the last man woman and child.
And we know. We’ve known for all time.
There is no major religion, creed or philosophy that
does not site greed as a danger/evil to humanity. “Money is the root of all
evil” is a mantra anyone could recite. I guarantee that for most people in our
secular world – asked to list The Seven Deadly Sins - the one they are least
likely to miss out is Greed.
But we don’t need deep religion or high philosophy, we
can look to the shallow glitzy end of town.
In the quadrilogy Aliens (yup, no. 3 with its panto
penal colony isn’t great) we’re repeatedly shown, it is not the horrific aliens
that threaten all humanity. It’s the avaricious corporations and the grasping
individuals who make them up.
In the fourth film, Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver,
is spliced and cloned for profit and dramatically dehumanised before our eyes
in 8 manifestations kept in a science facility in what I think is the most
gruesome scene in any of the four films.
But, in the second film, in case we don’t get it, Ripley
confronts Burke – the rapacious company guy who is prepared to sacrifice
everyone and everything for gain – she says
“I don’t know which species is worse, you don’t see
them fucking each other over for a goddam percentage…”
We know. We’ve always known.
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Zero One Zero Two - In this dystopian novella which combines poetry prose, I dally with the delusion of hoping off to another
planet when we’ve destroyed this one.
Casey & the Surfmen – In this environmental poem in the
epic tradition (audio) I've examine people power. Why do we use it so seldom?
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Reminder (re some recent 2nd hand enquiries) I am not on ANY social media - no smartphone either yada yada - apart from this little blog I only exist in the 'real' world. I think there is a contact avail via the Casey and the Surfmen bandcamp site...
Thank you so much for reading. Normally I post weekly but as this piece is more substantive than usual, and like a lot of folk I am entirely overwhelmed by the current state of the world I’ll leave this to brew for a while. See you in March.