Big pharma — Maximum earnings, minimum responsibilities

Richa Chintan

People’s Dispatch | August 24, 2021

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The contrast between the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives and livelihood of the working-class population and the soaring profits of big pharma companies in the corresponding period is abhorrent.

Despite the huge jump in revenues during the global crisis and a forecast for the continuation of the good run—owing to an assured market for vaccines, drugs and diagnostics in the years to come—big pharma is reportedly lobbying against the proposed global deal on tax overhaul. Last month, about 130 countries agreed to the US call for a global minimum rate of corporate tax of 15%.

David Whyte

BOOK REVIEW

Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before it Kills Us

Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2020. 236 pp., £9.99 pb
ISBN 9781526146984

Reviewed by Scott Poynting

The title signals it succinctly: this book is an urgent exhortation to avert ‘the deliberate destruction of our natural environment’ (2). It pulls no punches, but is carefully argued, with abundant historical, political-economic and socio-legal evidence that the capitalist corporation is ‘killing the planet’. David Whyte makes his argument admirably accessible, in language leavened with sometimes dark and sometimes biting humour.

Farm Bills will Benefit Big Corporates, Not Farmers: P. Sainath

FARMERS’ PLIGHT IN INDIA

Noted journalist and Founder-Editor of People’s Archive of Rural India P. Sainath talks about the three farm bills pushed through parliament by the Modi government despite protests.

Newsclick | September 22, 2020

Noted journalist and Founder-Editor of People’s Archive of Rural India P. Sainath talks about the three farm bills pushed through parliament by the Modi government despite protests. Sainath explains the implications of these bills and their impact on the farmers of the country.

Corporations Profit from Peoples’ Suffering

CAPITALISM

Richard D Wolff

Prof. Richard Wolff argues that the system in the US is falling apart. Capitalism is surviving because of all the support provided by the American government to corporations — who are receiving the bulk — and to Americans.

For a Safe Climate, We Need to Tear Up the Corporate Death Warrant

CLIMATE CRISIS 

Peter Boyle

Green Left | September 03, 2020

Graphic: climateaccountability.org

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has argued that one clear reason why we need system change if the world is going to avert catastrophic climate change is that fossil fuel corporations have already planned production to 2030 that will exceed by 120% the carbon budget required to have a chance at keeping climate change to 1.5° Celsius.

Capitalists have already signed a climate death warrant for life on our planet.

The Giant Virus in the Room: Corporate Vaccine Makers Need More Pandemics to Grow

by Dady Chery

teleSUR | May 24, 2020

The phase I trials on its putative SARS-CoV-2 vaccine started on April 3. | Photo: AFP

The greater the number of epidemics and vaccine-associated diseases, the greater the boon will be for pharmaceutical companies, and the faster they will grow.

As drug makers prepare to make a killing on supposed vaccines against COVID-19, it is important, particularly for those who consider vaccines to be a wise investment today, or those whose retirement savings might get invested in such vaccines without their knowledge, to reflect on the fact that corporations are themselves viruses that can only make money for their investors by growing. The way they will grow is by making more vaccines for yet more pandemics. The new pandemics might come of their own accord, or they might get a little nudge. 

U.S.A: As One of the Largest Bailouts in History Looms, “Crisis-Ridden” Corporations Reap Record Profits

by Alan Macleod

MintPressNews | April 15, 2020

Hospitals overflowing with sick and dying patients. Overworked staff risking their lives wearing garbage bags as makeshift protective equipment against an invisible but deadly virus. Refrigerated containers left outside medical facilities, filling with the dead. Mass graves being dug in the city. It is like something out of a horror movie. But it is very real and is happening right now in America. “We are doing the best we can,” Derrick Smith, a certified registered nurse anesthetist in New York City told MintPress last week, “but people are dying left and right, no exaggeration.” “I’ve never imagined or seen our healthcare system take such a beating before,” he said. “This is something that none of us have ever really seen.”

Editor’s Log: NYTimes says many big US firms are rethinking their pro-Hong Kong posture

The Greanville Post | October 17, 2019

ABOVE: An Apple store in a shopping mall in Hong Kong. (Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times)

EDITOR’S LOG
Lenin famously quipped that capitalists would happily sell anyone the rope with which to hang them. The revolutionary leader was obviously betting on the fact that for the big industrialists profits always came first, way ahead of principles, and even at the risk of their own lives. In the midst of a large (second) insidious color revolution against China, this time anchored in Hong Kong, a test of such ideas is under way, as major American firms begin to realise that their eagerness to support America’s Deep State and its hybrid war against China may come at a high price.  As NYT technology editor Jack Nicas reports, Apple, which, like many tech giants, had already jumped onto the “pro-democracy” propaganda wagon without thinking much about the possible consequences, (the firm furnished the Hong Kong rioters with an app [“HKmap.live”] to track police movements), is now beating a quick retreat,  as Tim Cook, the company’s chief honcho, sheepishly eats double portions of humble pie in order to preserve Apple’s enormously profitable foothold in mainland China:

U.S: How Housing Wealth Transferred From Families to Corporations

by Richard Florida

CityLab | October 04, 2019

When most people think of housing, they separate it into two types: single-family suburban homes that people own, and apartments, largely in cities and urban centers, that people rent. Until recently, the popular image was more or less correct. Most single-family houses provided homes for the families that owned them.

But more than 12 million single-family homes are currently being rented in the United States. Those homes, valued at more than $2.3 trillion, make up 35 percent of all rental housing around the country. In the past, the great majority of single-family homes that were rented out were done so by their owners or small real-estate companies. But today, a large and growing share of single-family rental homes are owned and managed by large corporations, real-estate firms, and financial institutions. The percentage of home owners is at its lowest level since the 1960s.

Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience

by Andrew Marantz

The New Yorker | August 19, 2019

Silicon Valley is reckoning with the effects of its technology. Is this evidence of deep introspection, or of canny P.R.?
Illustration by Nick Little

There are two kinds of people: those who know nothing about Esalen and those who purport to know everything about it. To find out which kind of person you’re talking to, simply utter the three syllables (stress on the first, slant-rhyme with “mescaline”) and wait. In response, you’ll get either an uncomprehending stare or an effusion of tall tales. Have you heard the one about the poet and the astrophysicist who met in the Esalen hot springs and eloped the next week? How about the accountant who visited for the weekend, cured his depression with a single dose of ketamine, and became a Zen monk? The secret full-moon dance parties? The billionaire-C.E.O. sightings? “This isn’t a place,” a staffer told me while rolling a joint on a piece of rough-hewn garden furniture. “It’s a diaspora, a guiding light out of our collective darkness, an arrow pointing us toward the best way to be fully human.”