Companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, GSK, Bristol-Meyers Squibb cause and perpetuate massive amounts of human suffering. I view them on the same level as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Input?
Companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, GSK, Bristol-Meyers Squibb cause and perpetuate massive amounts of human suffering. I view them on the same level as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Input?
I've thought about this particular question a lot because I interact with both pretty much daily because of my area. But I've come to a resolute conclusion.
I think it's not really the case. The function pharma companies fulfill is what gives them the power to extort so much money out of people and put that suffering on them, get them addicted and keep them paying exorbitant bills. There obviously is blood on the hands of the executives and strategists that run those companies, no doubt. But I wouldn't look at someone the same way if I found out they did as much as work an internship at Raytheon. Huge, huge difference between working at a company that produces a good which is so necessary it's got people in debt slavery for the rest of their lives, where as a worker you're just figuring out more cost effective ways to produce medicine; and a company that is enabling the ransacking, r*pe, and genocide of the imperial periphery. There's a reason those ghouls have to literally groom young girls to get more people in the industry: people know how evil it is, no question. Every single person that's ever set foot in a MIC company as anything more than a security guard will surely not see justice, but let me say that if they do, I'll be surprised they found a way to make justice for the kind of thing they deserve for that.
The thing is their evil is more insidious. Sure they aren't blowing people up, but the affect of withholding medical care without monetary compensation has such a widespread impact its unfathomable.
I'd honestly bet the pharmaceutical industry (includes the insurance companies) are responsible for more deaths than the MIC, easily.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31668-4/fulltext
8.6 million a year
This is the number of lives that could be saved worldwide if distribution of high-quality medical care (insulin, cancer screenings, blood pressure maintenance, etc) was done fairly and with the preservation of human lives as the primary goal.
8.6 million a year is a ridiculous, tragic number, but think for a second what the cost of American imperial hegemony is. That's a throne of literal billions of skulls once you consider climate change. Is it Caesar's corpse with all of capital's knives each stuck in various directions? Absolutely, pharma emits as much as anyone, but the ones responsible for empire carry the most blame. To that end, I think we can cite Lenin's Imperialism to call out finance capital as also just as ghoulish and even more responsible for climate collapse than the MIC. No single part of capital, not even the Lockheed vampires, carries as much political power as the finance demons. Those are the ones with their finger hammered down on the button that kills us all.
Yeah I guess what I'm getting at is that us making healthcare for-profit and a commodity is just an extension of the hegemony.
Quite a disgusting society we have built.