The Evils That Big Corporate Do
As I’m coming up to the end of 2015, I had a few
thoughts go into my head that I was trying to get sorted out. One of those thoughts, I believed, would end
up being the subject for this week’s article.
But then I realized that they were all pretty much connected. They all had one thing in common. They all were the problems we have with Big
Corporate.
Now I know someone is going to get all snooty and
pompous and say “Well... there’s no such thing as ‘Big Corporate’!” Yes, there is; and the fact that your
self-righteous ego refuses to recognize it does not detract from the reality
that the collective of corporations with their greedy, self-centered, self-serving,
money-grubbing, predatory practices have been laying waste to the world pretty
much since the Industrial Revolution.
First of all, there’s a sub-group of Big Corporate
called Big Pharma. Much like their sister
sub-group, Big Medical, Big Pharma are pretty much all of the big drug-makers. All of those slick ads on TV about various
pills that you can take to supposedly make your life easier and more manageable
are all from Big Pharma.
Now Big Medical and Big Pharma have been raking in the
money for a long, long time. They have gotten
fat and rich and powerful because they’ve been operating behind-the-scenes in
the healthcare business, thanks in no small part to the government and Big
Insurance. And they don’t want anything
to stop their money train from keeping them fat and rich and powerful. So when they heard that the government was
finally going to do something about healthcare, they threw a fit, they staged
national protests, and then they used their friends on K-Street to quietly
substitute their own fraud into place which we call the “Affordable Care Act”
or “Obamacare”.
It's not what the conservatives and neo-conservatives have
been screaming about. It’s not the
fictional “monster” that Fox News and talk radio and newspaper editorials have programmed
the masses to think it was. It’s not
even what the liberals wanted it to be.
It was worse. It’s not “socialism”
in any stretch of the imagination, and certainly not “communism”... because if
you had a single brain cell in your head that wasn’t pre-programmed by Big
Corporate, you’d know the ACA does not fit any definition of “socialism” or
even “communism” other than the neo-conservative screed of “I
don’t like it, therefore it’s socialism”. It’s actually corporatism. Go ahead and look it up. I won’t hold my breath for your apology when
you realize that I’m right.
So while Big Medical has been raking in the bucks, and
Big Insurance has been wailing and whining like the spoiled bitches they are,
Big Pharma has been doing something very dirty.
They’ve been engaging in raw, naked price-gouging of certain drugs that
one company or another has sole control over.
Take, for instance, a life-saving drug. Let’s suppose the consumer price of that drug
is $1 a pill. Now let’s suppose the
maker of that drug jacks the price up to $500 a pill. You may not think anything of it. “Free Market” and all that B.S., right? “Whatever the market will bear”, right?
Yeah, you’ll chant that corporatist gospel until the
day you die... unless you’re the one that needs the drug to live, or if someone
close to you needs it. What? Insurance?
Right. Unless they tell you they
won’t cover it because it’s now “cost-prohibitive”. And, yes, it’s
happened. A lot of drugs that people
need, especially for things like cancer, are now in the
“top-tier” of costs, which means the insurance companies aren’t going to
pick up the tab for them.
The media has been focusing on the mechanizations of
Turing Pharmaceuticals and their slimy douchebag of a CEO, Martin Shkreli, but
there have been several
other companies that have been doing the same thing. They acquire the rights to an important drug,
then jack up the prices so they can make a blind-stinking profit at the expense
of the patients, who now worry whether their insurance providers – which they
are forced by law to pay because of the corporatist ACA – will even bother to
cover them.
I’ll make it simple, Big Pharma. Stop.
Just stop right now.
Do you really want the government to come down on
you? Do you really want there to be a legal
and political showdown between the Food and Drug Administration and your blind
stinking greed?
Sure, your shyster attorneys may prevail in court,
eventually. You may even get to defend
it in the Supreme Court. But between now
and then, you’re poisoning the very customer base that you need to make your
blind stinking wealth. And that customer
base votes! Especially the ones that are
getting older and older and need those drugs but don’t have the money to feed
your greed.
And if you think that your fellow “Bigs” - Big Medical
and Big Insurance - will somehow back you up in your price-gouging, think
again. Big Medical doesn’t like
hearing that you’re gouging people literally to their deaths, and Big Insurance
won’t be able to cover your greed for very long. And, remember, you’re really not preying on
the patients with this greed of yours, Big Pharma. You’re preying on Big Insurance!
So just knock off the attitude, knock off the greed,
and get your heads out of your asses.
The second “Big Corporate” issue in my wheelhouse
right now deals with an event that has been in the media for years now: Black
Friday.
The ultimate problem is the corporatist takeover of
the Holiday Season and the over-extension of it well beyond the traditional
time from Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day.
I’ve complained in the past about how Big Corporate and their quest for
more and more money have stretched the holiday sales pretty much into the
Fourth of July.
But Big Corporate’s Christmas Day has always been
Black Friday; the supposed time when they can make up for all of their perceived
losses from the rest of the year and be in the financial “black”. It’s always been on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That’s why you see Santa Claus – the secular icon
of the holiday – at
the very end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It officially marks the start of the Holiday
Shopping Season.
Unfortunately for us, the consumers as well as the store
workers, Big Corporate have been stretching this time as well. First it’s the start of business on
Friday. Then it became 6am. Then 3am.
Then right at the stroke of midnight.
Then Thanksgiving night. Then
Thanksgiving afternoon. Then
Thanksgiving. And now it’s a day or two
before Thanksgiving. There are “pre-Black
Friday” sales to tempt the shoppers.
So now it’s happened.
People are sick of Big Corporate’s B.S. over this time of the year and
they’re doing what I’ve been trying to do for years: stay as far away from the
stores as possible. Attendance at these orchestrated
mob gatherings is
lax in many places this year. Stores
are complaining that there’s more merchandise than customers.
Some stores made
the decision on their own to keep their doors closed on Thanksgiving and
let their employees enjoy the day with their families before taking part in the
madness. A wise move on the part of
those store owners.
This leaves people to ask the inevitable question: is
Black Friday doomed?
And my answer is this: no. Not by a long shot.
Yes, Big Corporate is being called out for
being extremely greedy, but let’s get brutally honest here... having one
lax shopping period is not a sign of doom for the whole concept of Black
Friday, as much as we’d hope that it would be.
The rest of Big Corporate certainly kept up the
insanity this year, and some
of the masses still were very much asses when it came to those “doorbuster
sales”. And don’t think for a minute
that this mob sickness wasn’t planned! Getting
people wound up for a really great “sale” and then putting an extremely limited
supply for the mob to fight over is nothing short of Big Corporate’s form of “Bread
and Circuses” entertainment! The Romans
had lions. Corporate execs have stupid
people fighting for big screen HDTV’s at cutthroat prices.
And let’s not forget that Corporate America has
harnessed the power of the Internet as well.
So even if Black Friday is a bust, it doesn’t stop the millions and
millions of shoppers from hitting the online stores for their holiday deals. After all, who do you think created the whole
concept of “Cyber Monday”?
You want to know just how crazy Black Friday deals
are? The people behind “Cards Against
Humanity” gave the ultimate in raw deals for Black Friday. You give them $5, and they give you...
nothing. And I don’t a special pack of
something they called “nothing”; I mean you don’t get a single thing for your
$5! They keep the money. And they were completely honest in their intentions. They minced no words and told no lies when
they said “Give us $5 and we will give you nothing in return.”
Do you know how much they made from that one-day
deal? Over
$70,000! That’s a lot of nothing! That’s how gullible the great unwashed are,
thanks in no small part to Big Corporate.
Listen, despite the wailing and moaning in the media,
Big Corporate isn’t going to go broke because of a mediocre Black Friday. And they sure as hell won’t cancel it anytime
soon. After all, there are still going
to be plenty of people who either don’t trust the Internet, don’t have the
access, or simply like the experience of actually getting the item in the
brick-and-mortar store and taking it home instead of doing all of that waiting
and worrying.
It’s your choice if you want to play Big Corporate’s
games during this time of the year. Just
remember that its by their rules. It is,
after all, the real “reason for the season”.
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