Profit motive

A People’s Guide To The War Industry: Portfolio Of Conflicts

June 4, 2021 Christian Sorensen, Consortium News. Educate! Military Industrial Complex, Profit motive, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

Without looking at military adventurism through the lens of the corporation, analysts are bound to produce error-filled studies. For example, one analyst contended in an interview on The Real News Network, “Military force is almost never going to achieve your political aims. The Americans learned this in Vietnam. They’re learning it in Afghanistan. They’re learning it in Syria… So [President Barack] Obama supporting the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen is a sign really of incoherence on the part of the United States.” Far from incoherence, the behavior actually is quite rational. A variety of conflicts, disparate and some seemingly futile, is precisely the aim. Conflict itself — producing untold mountains of profit for war corporations and Wall Street — is the goal.

Contrasting Health Systems

April 19, 2020 Pasqualina Curcio Curcio, Ultimas Noticias, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Profit motive, Socialism

In the catalog of health provision and financing systems, we find a wide range, from the most private to the public and free of charge. There are systems whose provision and financing are completely privatized, such as the United States, Chile and Colombia, where the facilities that provide health services are private and in order to enter and be served, people have two options: either they pay for the service out of their own pockets or they take out an insurance policy so that when a contingency arises, they pay the bill. This type of health system based on the intermediation of insurance companies in which a “third party” pays, in addition to being extremely costly (the insurance company keeps a margin of the business’ profit) is the most exclusive: 1) if you do not have how to take out a policy, the safest thing, worth the redundancy, is to be left out, and in this unequal world in which 1% of the world’s population appropriates 82% of the wealth, it is many, many people who do not have sufficient resources to take out health insurance.

Top Industries Would Fail If They Paid For Natural Capital

March 19, 2017 David Roberts, www.grist.org Educate! Capitalism, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Industrialization, Profit motive

By David Roberts for Grist. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics — it makes them sound Serious — but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary. To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB asked Trucost to tally up the total “unpriced natural capital” consumed by the world’s top industrial sectors.

Prisoners Become A Commodity

February 24, 2014 Charles M. Blow www.nytimes.com Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Profit motive

It also means that criminal sentences must remain stiff, which the sheriff’s association has supported. This has meant that Louisiana has some of the stiffest sentencing guidelines in the country. Writing bad checks in Louisiana can earn you up to 10 years in prison. In California, by comparison, jail time would be no more than a year. There is another problem with this unsavory system: prisoners who wind up in these local for-profit jails, where many of the inmates are short-timers, get fewer rehabilitative services than those in state institutions, where many of the prisoners are lifers. That is because the per-diem per prisoner in local prisons is half that of state prisons.

Defining a Bold New Standard for Fair Pay

January 22, 2014 toomuchonline, toomuchonline.org Educate! Profit motive

Typical employees at Goldman, of course, didn’t take home anything near that $383,374. How much do typical Goldman employees actually make? We don’t know. U.S. banks and corporations don’t have to reveal how much they pay their workers. They do have to reveal how much they pay their top execs. In 2012, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein took home $26 million. Bank clerks nationally, the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center reported last month, only average $24,100 a year. Lloyd Blankfein last year likely took home somewhere close to 1,000 times the pay of his bank’s lowest-paid workers.

Environmental Groups React to Royal Dutch Shell Reporting 48% Decline

January 20, 2014 Aaron Pickus, Steve Kretzman, Keiller MacDuff, commondreams.org Educate! Environement, Profit motive, shell

"Given Shell's appalling profit warning, how we can we expect to trust Shell with the fragile Arctic environment? They can barely make money in the most profitable business the world has ever known," said Gustavo Ampugnani, a Greenpeace Arctic Campaigner in Washington D.C. “Shell’s announcement today is just one example of the mounting body of evidence that fossil fuel investments are not only bad for the planet, but bad for bottom lines,” said Jay Carmona, National Divestment Campaign Manager of 350.org in Oakland, CA. “Pension funds, university endowments and future retirees should take note.”

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