Why Corporations Are Getting Rich Off Plague And War

The only rule is ‘line go up’ (art by Hajime Sorayama)

When arms dealers talk about how good war is for business, it’s repulsive but true. When drug dealers talk about how good a pandemic is for business, that’s also just true.

It’s gross to say the quiet parts out loud, but what do you want want them to do? Profiteering is quite profitable. They’re fucking arms dealers and drug dealers. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Arms Dealers

Bombs come down so profits go up (art by Hajime Sorayama)

In a recent call, the CEO of Raytheon quite bloodlessly talked about how their business was war, and business were good. Greg Hayes appeared “to celebrate a potential war over Ukraine and Houthi drone attacks on the UAE as good indicators for future weapons sales.”

via Responsible Statecraft

Hayes sucks and shouldn’t sleep well at night, but he is just doing his job. Saudi Arabia and America dropping very expensive bombs on very poor people is great for business. Some people sell widgets, this guy sells bombs. Yemen is a godsend to him, even though it sends an entire nation to hell.

Then here’s the Northrop Grumman CEO saying that bombs are good for human rights:

via Responsible Statecraft

The truth is that Human Rights™ is good for selling bombs.

Human rights is just advertising for them, and they pay influencers to market hypocrisy like belly tea.

For example, “[Joe] Biden’s campaign took $527,010 from Raytheon, $447,047 from Lockheed Martin, $726,873 from Boeing, $416,276 from Northrop Grumman, and $237,104 from General Dynamics.” The current Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin walked straight out of Raytheon.

It’s a revolving door for the rich and a revolver to the heads of the poor.Whether the wars end or achieve anything is of course immaterial to the earnings report. Wars ever ending is actually bad, look how much the arms dealers looted on the back of Afghanistan:

Stephen Semmler

Arms dealing is a business and the number one rule of business is line go up. Everything else is just marketing. Human Rights is just the fig leaf over the erection these guys get from war.

Drug Dealers

You get better but you never get well (art by Hajime Sorayama)

Drug dealers also get a huge erection when they see junkies, which is what we all are. Why would they want this pandemic to stop growing and mutating? They’d lose customers.

It’s the perfect scam. The public pays to develop the product, and then they buy it back from you. It’s a game of vaccine monopoly, and they drug companies get paid every time a new variant passes GO.

Why they don’t release the patents and share technology? Why on Earth would they? Why would Coca-Cola release its recipe? Why would Apple teach people to make generic iPhones? It makes no business sense at all.

The Pfizer CFO comes of looking ghoulish as fuck here, but he’s just speaking corporate sense. On an earnings call he said:

“We think as this shifts from pandemic to endemic, we think there’s an opportunity here for us.”

It sounds awful when while millions are dying, but not when billions are being made. And you have to look at it through corporate eyes. The dead people are not on their books. It’s simply not this guy’s job to give a fuck.

Pfizer needs to pretend to give a fuck, so they published some bullshit poem/ad in the NYTimes about caring about equity. In real legal terms, however, shareholder equity is the only thing that matters.

Like an arms dealers talking about human rights, you have to remember that this is all just marketing. Even politicians are a promotional expense. Biden took $6.3 million from the pharma industry during the 2020 campaign alone. He’s a real influenzer.

Pfizer is a corporation. They only thing they care about, the only thing they’re legally supposed to care about is shareholder equity. And shareholders give a fuck about the 3 billion unvaccinated people across the world right now. Those people don’t hold shares. Those investors just want their billions of dollars.

If any Pfizer CFO talked about actual equity, he wouldn’t be doing his job. He’d been shown the door and another comprador would take his place. You have to remember that these people are just corporate agents, and corporations are not human beings. They are Capitalist Cyborgs which include some human parts, but their motivations are all machine.

(art by Hajime Sorayama)

Corporations Pretending To Be Human Beings

It’s very important to understand what corporations are. They are legal people. They are another species of artificial life. As I’ve gone into in some detail, corporations are just malevolent AI, another species that has its own ecosystem and cares only about its own survival.

Advertising is just corporations pretending to be human to sell shit to you. To avoid your pitchforks. All this talk about human rights, health equity, and climate neutrality is just marketing copy. These companies sell war, drugs, and oil. Why the fuck would they want their own business to go down? Why would they threaten their own survival for some random apes?

We think of executives as being some all-powerful evil people, but they’re servants. Their job is to serve the corporation, not humanity. Their only imperative is to cast off human morality and serve the machine. They only need to understand morality enough to deceive.

The Capitalist don-daddy Milton Friedman talked about this phenomenon quite openly in an interview. He said:

The Corporation by Joel Bakan

Northrop Grumman talking about human rights is just like ‘putting a good-looking girl in front of an automobile to sell an automobile.’ They put human rights in front of bombs.

As Friedman says, this is good, because it increases shareholder value. And that is all you need to understand. People keep thinking about human values, but corporations don’t think like that. Corporations are not human beings, they are the living embodiment of human greed.

Corporations (and the comprador class we call investors) look at any business as numbers. They could be selling cars or shoes or bombs, it’s all the same. Their only heartbeat is line go up.

If executives don’t do it, they’ll get removed. If leaders resist they’ll get couped. While the individuals are certainly ghouls, this is all shareholder approved.

If the CEO of Raytheon decided to not sell weapons, to not bribe governments, their shareholders would revolt. If the CEO of Pfizer decided to share their patents he would be defendestrated.

Is it reprehensible to provoke wars so 400 people in North Virginia can remodel their kitchens? Is it reprehensible to create pharma billionaires while billions get sick? Absolutely, but it’s each corporate agent is just doing their duty. Executives are just corporate knights with industrial feudalism. For them to be human is actually illegal, because it would interfere with the property rights of their corporate overlords.

The Corporation by Joel Bakan

Hence the problem is not exceptionally bad people, it’s an exceptionally bad system. Capitalism is just what it’s supposed to do. It’s nothing personal, strictly business. As Joel Bakan continues in that book:

The Corporation by Joel Bakan

Hence you have to understand, all this stuff that outrages you as a person, corporations do not give a fuck. They are simply not human beings. You dying or the planet dying is irrelevant to them. They have their own ecosystem, and in that one the line is still going up.

Corporations are never going to be socially responsible because they’re not members of society. They have their own society, high above our bodies and borders and bullshit. Corporations are the malevolent AI that’s been eating our face since the colonial era, but they gives us some trinkets and bribes our leaders and it’s cool.

The problem is not a few bad apples here. It’s the whole bloody applecart. The problem is not profiteering, it’s the very motives of profit. The solution is not ‘green’ or ‘healthy’ growth, it’s degrowth. This is not even a human problem anymore. We are already in an existential conflict with corporate machines.

Why are corporations getting rich off plague and war? Because they’re not fucking human beings. What do Capitalist Cyborgs care about human death and disease? They’re not even our species. As our line goes down, their lineage only goes up.