Making A Killing

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, "make a killing" means "to earn a lot of money in a short time and with little effort." Unfortunately though, there are plenty of examples where the "killing" is to be taken quite literally: earn a lot of money by killing people...

We all know this: the military industrial complex is one of the most profitable industries in the world. Capitalism has incentivized all industries to produce stuff that breaks down or has to be replaced for other reasons, because that way the demand for those products never wanes; that's called "planned obsolescence", one of the main pillars holding up our hyper-consumerist society. Well, producing stuff that blows up, and by doing so destroys a lot of other stuff, is planned obsolescence perfected; the bomb as well as all the stuff it destroyed have to be replaced. War, mayhem and death in the name of everlasting profits is nothing new.

Have you ever had someone in your family die, and had to take care of their funeral? If so, then you know how much money's made in the funeral business. Life insurance and other companies will hound you with special offers for caskets, flower arrangements, funeral stones and the likes, even when you want to do nothing but mourn the recently departed family member. Have you ever been sick in America? If so, then you know how much money's made on sickness. Even when you're insured, the prices of medicine and medical treatments could bankrupt you, or force you to beg for money on a GoFundMe page. It's the businesses and corporations that make money on the dead, the dying and the sick that make a literal killing, just like the corporations in the military industrial complex, although the latter have the added "advantage" of causing the dead and the dying...

I've touched on this recently in my post "Patently Absurd", but right now there's a discussion going on about whether the Big Pharma corporations that own the patents for producing Covid-19 vaccines should relinquish those patents so that vaccines can be produced by and for developing countries. Some of those countries accuse those corporations of hoarding their vaccines, thereby condemning millions of people to death. Almost certainly, the patents won't be relinquished, for two reasons; 1) this would create a precedent that's most unwelcome for the corporations that thrive on sickness and death, and 2) Big Pharma is already preparing to seize on their next killing, the new vaccines that will be necessary to fight the virus's mutations. In fact they increase the chances on new deadly mutations to evolve by NOT allowing developing and poor countries to vaccinate their peoples.

According to a new People's Vaccine Alliance survey of 77 leading epidemiologists from 28 countries, two-thirds said they believe the international community has "a year or less" before Covid-19 mutations proliferate widely enough to make a majority of first-generation vaccines ineffective, requiring the production of new or modified shots—an opportunity that the pharmaceutical industry is already preparing to seize.
_{source: Common Dreams}

"Not all psychopaths are in prison. Some are in the Boardroom." This statement was a casual response by Robert D. Hare, a Psychology Professor at the university of British Colombia in Canada, to a question asked at the end of a 2002 address to the Canadian Police Association meeting in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. The boardrooms of Big Pharma are full of greedy psychopaths, completely detached from real life and bereft of any semblance of empathy. Watch the two linked videos if you feel like getting angry...

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