When Industries Value Profit Over Human Life

Any time a party wants to 'take over society' they will move to monopolize life-essentials, making it difficult if not impossible to rebel against the system that provides them.

This article was originally published on Mercola.com and has been slightly revised since its initial publication.

I grew up reading  alternative literature  which included every "conspiracy theory" under the sun.  I have had a relative who had been around black ops conducted overseas and had the misfortune of being  present when a village was executed in cold blood by mercenaries because U.S. investors wanted their land. Beyond being profoundly concerned about the state of the world, all of this led me to wonder, at the end of the day, "What was actually true?"

Disclaimer: some of what I will write here will likely raise strong disagreements with some of you. I am completely fine if you disagree with this piece, particularly since it is not my field of expertise, and I likely made some unintentional errors in writing this.

Since childhood, I've heard stories of highly effective technologies that meet the essential needs of human beings (e.g., transportation, food production, water production, education) being buried to protect business interests. This led me to formulate the hypothesis that anytime a party wants to "take over society," they will move to monopolize each life-essential resource, as in addition to it being highly lucrative, it makes it impossible for the population which depends upon that resource to rebel against the system which provides it. 

For instance, a classic example of this principle is that each time a communist regime takes power, one of its first moves is to eliminate the independent farmers so that food can only be obtained from the state. Sometimes the process of doing this requires carnage on a massive scale, best shown by Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine (and to a lesser extent by Mao's Great Leap Forward).

The two areas of suppressed life-essential technologies I've always been the most drawn to are Energy and Medicine. One of the key things which eventually motivated me to become a doctor was that I felt it would give me a way to see firsthand if all the "conspiracy theories" I had read about suppressed medical innovations* were true (since I could try them on patients and see if they worked), whereas this would be much more difficult to do with energy. Before discussing those topics, I'd like to briefly detour into another predatory industry that paints valuable context for what we see in the energy and medical sectors.

*At this point, I feel some of those forgotten medical technologies are incredible, many others are junk, and many more were effective in earlier eras where the body's vitality had not been decimated by our modern environment, but now only are marginally effective.

The Military-Industrial Complex

When I looked at everything that had happened in the energy sector, it became immediately apparent that the same playbook was being reused. Over and over, I saw the same methods utilized to outlaw effective therapies and force bad medicines on the public used to keep bad energy sources on the market and cover up the good ones. 

If you take a step back, those issues aren’t just consigned to medicine. Any industry that makes a considerable amount of money will go to extreme lengths to put profits before people, and it should come as no surprise that the military-industrial complex holds nothing back here.

Because of my childhood, I feel very strongly about war, and I’ve done a lot of work to try and oppose it. The tragic thing about war is that unless someone has seen it firsthand, people cannot grasp just how horrific war is and just what emerges from  people in war zones. Unfortunately, after Vietnam (which destroyed  public trust in the government), the U.S. Military realized that as long as they could censor all the carnage and provide a positive spin on  war with the national propaganda apparatus, most civilians would not care what happened. Consider for a moment this timeless quote from George Orwell:

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

One of the major challenges of the modern era is that everyone is in a state of malaise because they are so disconnected from many of the things which used to connect us to life and everything around us. Because of this malaise, it is often extremely difficult to motivate people to engage with a challenging topic that does not directly affect them, regardless of its significance or the indirect costs they bear. This in essence, describes the struggle I found when trying to raise people's awareness about the current costly war we have no good reason to be involved in.

In college, I realized that becoming a doctor offered a perfect solution to this issue. This is because the predatory forces that exploit human suffering for profit in medicine are the same ones doing the same thing in numerous other fields. However, what is unique about medicine is that people can directly see how this predatory behavior harms them and are thus motivated to do something about it, thereby providing a way to break through our spiritual malaise.

My theory, in turn, was that in a worst-case scenario, I get to make a big difference in a few individuals' lives (my patients). However, in the best-case scenario (assuming the medical system had really abused those people), once they became red-pilled on the medical-industrial complex and regained their ability to function, they would then be motivated to start looking at how their experiences were also occurring in other areas and start doing something about them too.

Biden’s Wars

I've previously received many requests to publish a post on the war in Ukraine, and I've gone back and forth on publishing a 20-page article I've drafted. However, now feels like the right time to share its key points.

When Trump was president, he did something no one since Carter had done. He started no new wars and, furthermore, pulled America out of  numerous existing conflicts. Once Biden was declared president, I became very worried he would try to make up for  revenue that the defense industry had lost from Trump's policies, so I watched with bated breath to see who Biden nominated for Secretary of Defense.

Once Biden nominated Lloyd Austin on December 8th, I looked into his background and felt a profound degree of sadness that is difficult to describe. Briefly:

•Austin has proven himself to be one of the worst Secretaries of Defense in history (e.g., consider our recent unprecedented recruitment crisis and Austin’s illegal vaccine mandate upon the military. Yet, there has been no criticism of him for any of his conduct by the press. Was he approved strictly based on fulfilling diversity rather than ability?

•Austin left the military in 2016 to be a board member for one of our largest defense contractors, Raytheon (plus a few others). Predatory corporations "bribe" officials to support the industry's interests by promising lucrative board positions (e.g., the FDA commissioner who helped get Pfizer's vaccine to market is now on Pfizer's board). This means Austin was almost certainly abusing his command (he was a four-star general) to give Raytheon defense contracts.

This meant that once Austin became Secretary of Defense, Raytheon was going to get a lot of business, which meant reasons were going to need to be found to kill a lot of people.

Soon after I realized this, a colleague asked me for advice on what to invest in. I said, if it were me, I'd invest in Raytheon, but there is so much bad karma for investing in death (consider the example I shared above of the village being executed once investment capital was raised to fund the mercenaries), I refused to do it. My friend didn't believe me, so I made a bet on the spot that the stock would do well. Let's for a moment consider how Raytheon's stock has done since the election.

In 2014, the existing government in Ukraine was toppled through a violent series of protests and replaced with a strongly anti-Russian government. Many people at the time suspected the U.S. was responsible for these events, which Trump recently confirmed. I felt, given Ukraine's vital strategic importance to Russia (it has always been their buffer state as Ukraine has the traditional land route for invading Russia), it was terrible foreign policy to interfere in this relationship as Russia, nuclear power, would eventually retaliate.

Once the new government came to power, it began aggressively targeting the ethnic Russians, and before long, the military attacked the border regions with significant Russian populations. At the time, I was in Europe and met Russian refugees who had been assaulted for their ethnicity and then sent out of Ukraine by their parents who did not want their children "to take up the Kalashnikov" once war broke out. Shortly after, armed conflict broke out, and despite Russia repeatedly engaging the United Nations to find a way to end it, the conflict remained relatively ignored. 

However, once Biden became president, it rapidly escalated, and before long, something provoked Russia into invading the country. Many theories have been proposed to explain what that provocation was. Since governments always lie when it comes to war, there is no way to know what the provocation was, only that the provocation was sufficient to have Russia decide it needed to enter what it knew would be an extremely costly war.

Many things could be said about the Ukraine conflict, but I will only emphasize a few points:

•It has had a horrendous toll on Ukraine that will likely take the county years to recover from. There has been a horrendous loss of life for the Ukrainians (at least 100,000 on each side of the conflict have died), much of Ukraine’s infrastructure has been destroyed, the stress the war caused will cause a large spike in fatal heart attacks for years to come, many have permanently lost their homes since Russia citizens are now occupying them, and the economy will be a mess for a long time.

•The U.S. (and the U.K.) have had numerous opportunities to prevent the war and to allow peace deals that would end the war but appears to have prevented every one of them from happening. There has also been a breakdown of the U.S. command structure in this war, many within the government are disgusted with how the White House leadership is handling the war, and it is unclear who actually knows what American troops (who have deployed without Congressional authorization) are actually doing.

•The U.S. has made a lot of money selling weapons to Ukraine.

•Like pushing a deadly (or disabling) and ineffective vaccine on the entire population, the risk of a nuclear conflict with Russia outweighs any conceivable benefit of a war with them. It illustrates that the system has been so corrupt the usual common sense that prevents these catastrophic decisions from being made has just gone out the window.

One of the curious things you discover about the current corporate structure is that as people ascend in power, they become more and more detached from the human costs of their decisions (e.g., consider how many different people at Pfizer green-lighted something that was abundantly clear would hurt a lot of people). The most curious thing about this phenomenon is that many of these people aren’t  evil individuals, and in their personal lives they really care about others.

Lord of War is an excellent movie that depicts Nicholas Cage simultaneously playing the role of a mass-murdering arms dealer and a kind family man. His character was based on Victor Bout, a Russian arms dealer colloquially known as the Merchant of Death. To illustrate the human costs of one of Bout’s many “business” deals:

He was the main supplier of arms and ammunition…to that terrible conflict in West Africa [Sierra Leone], which saw the murder, rape, maiming and mutilation of over 1.2 million human beings.

It took a lot of work, but the United States eventually arrested Bout for brokering an arms deal to Columbian rebels with weapons that they intended to use on US forces, and in 2010, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for this.

Once Biden was president, Brittney Griner (a basketball player well known for advancing diversity in her sport) was arrested and sentenced in Russia for illegally bringing hash oil (a form of concentrated marijuana) into the country. After some deliberation, Biden decided she was worth exchanging for Viktor Bout.

I would now like to share my favorite scene from Lord of War (if you haven’t watched the movie and plan to, this somewhat spoils it). This iconic scene conveys many of the core themes of this article, and I hope that you can find the time to watch it.

Not too long ago, my friend met someone through his peer group he thought was a bit intense but otherwise was a very ordinary individual he’d have a beer with. Midway through the conversation, my friend asked him what he did for work, and he said nonchalantly:

Oh you know that movie* about the arms dealers? I’m like the big guy in it. The US government needs people to move arms for them, so its fingerprints aren’t on them, and we’ve gotten over 100 million dollars of merchandise over to Ukraine.
*He was referring to a different movie than Lord of War.

What my friend was so appalled about with this (as was I when I heard the story) was that the guy had no guilt whatsoever about his actions (think for a moment about how many deaths his sales were directly responsible for), but simultaneously genuinely cared about the people around him.

When I shared this story with a colleague, he stated that it represented the “banality of evil,” a term coined after the Holocaust to describe Nazis who committed horrific crimes but had neither malice, fanaticism, or sociopathy. Instead, they did not even think about their actions and were simply motivated by a desire to follow orders and fit in.

Since the initial conversation, my friend has periodically run into this arms dealer, and in the most recent encounter, informed without a shred of guilt that business is sill booming in Ukraine.

Note: after publishing this article, I received a comment from a reader I wanted to share.

Tensions in Taiwan

Since I have friends in Taiwan, I was concerned about the recent Chinese military buildup there and Warren Buffet’s decision to divest himself from Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. When I asked a Chinese friend who was well connected to the Chinese financial markets if there were any chance Taiwan would be attacked, he said:

There is absolutely no way that will happen right now. Biden is a *********** and is just using this to have a way to make Taiwan buy a bunch of our armaments.

As “luck” would have it, when China’s exercises around Taiwan started, we had one of the largest leaks of classified US military documents in history (and still no explanation as to how they were made available to the leaker who should not have been authorized to access them). The media oddly chose to publicize the leaks and repeatedly (in different ways) cite one thing that had been unearthed about Taiwan:

The classified documents seen by the Washington Post reveal that Taiwan’s military leaders doubt their air defenses can “accurately detect missile launches” and that only about half of the island’s aircraft are capable of effectively engaging the enemy.

Just in case you are wondering, that is a lot of sales.

Environmental Pollution

One of the sad facts about humans that has been repeatedly observed is that whenever there is a shared resource, everyone will exploit it for their own benefit until it becomes unusable for everyone. Furthermore, because they do not consider the far greater cost everyone has to bear for that exploitation (not unlike the individuals mentioned in the previous section), this behavior will go to the point the local environment is made dysfunctional and sometimes not even livable.

This dynamic is known as the tragedy of the commons and inevitably eventually creates enough damage that the public is inspired to do something about it. Presently, one of the best examples we have is the epidemic of microplastics:

At least 14 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, and plastic makes up 80% of all marine debris found from surface waters to deep-sea sediments.

Marine species ingest or are entangled by plastic debris, which causes severe injuries and death.

Plastic pollution threatens marine ecosystems, food safety and quality, human health, coastal tourism.

Since there are no penalties for putting plastic in the ocean, this is where it often ends up. Similarly, humans are presently ingesting around 5 grams or 50,000 pieces of microplastics a year, which is not good for your health. However, while the previous things are abysmal, the more significant issue is that plastic pollution has a real chance of collapsing the ocean ecosystems, something all life on this planet (including humans) depends upon.

The most common resources that get destroyed by a polluter are either the air or water. Typically people do not appreciate the consequences of this until they directly have to deal with their communities being destroyed (at which point the economic costs to everyone greatly exceed any profit made by cutting corners on basic pollution control measures). This was best shown by the recent train derailment and “controlled” explosion in East Palestine, Ohio, which has made the area unlivable and killed off a lot of wildlife, but is being largely ignored by much of the population, including self-proclaimed environmental activists. 

This situation is somewhat analogous to what I have observed throughout my life with medical injuries. People don’t think about them (and often actively dismiss them) until they or an immediate family member is affected. Once it affects them personally, however, they become perplexed as to how everyone, including those who espouse the importance of medical rights (e.g., protecting patients from micro-aggressions, making healthcare accessible to everyone) can be so blind to the dangers of that life-impacting drug. In this light, I view the extreme harm the COVID-19 vaccines have created everywhere as having one significant upside—they’ve made such a debacle this time around it is impossible to sweep their injuries under the rug.

When you look at each case where a company destroyed the air or water around it (there are so many tragic cases in America I don’t even know where to start), you repeatedly see a very familiar playbook being used by the polluter:

•It will do everything it can to stonewall investigation of the subject by denying any issue is present.

•It will launch initiatives to claim it is a steward of the environment.

•It will pay off scientists and non-profit groups to claim either no damage is happening or that the polluter is not responsible for the destruction everyone can see.

•It will do everything possible to sow doubt about the science on the subject (e.g., by using its scientists to author fraudulent papers).

•It will often directly attack and go after anyone criticizing their polluting.

Due to how corrupt the system is, this is often very challenging to win against it. For example, I had a good friend who was a lawyer in one of the top environmental litigation firms and was able to score quite a few monumental victories against air and water polluters. Nonetheless, he eventually became so disheartened with the process that he decided to move into a completely different field where he felt he could do much more to help people.

Because of this, I have immense respect for the earlier work RFK Jr. did taking air and water polluters to task as he was able to secure meaningful victories to protect our air and water. This is extremely difficult to do due to how corrupt our regulators currently are—it requires a lot of grit and intelligence to pull off.

Greenwashing

One of the sad things about corporate crime is that regardless of how much you misbehave, a good public relations campaign can typically get the public to forgive what you do and allow business to continue as usual. For this reason, most polluters choose to pollute because the public relations (and legal) costs to fix the consequences of their misconduct are typically much less than what it would cost them to raise their cost of production and not pollute in the first place.

Back in the day, activists noticed that polluters would put together some token environmental initiative and make a big deal about how it showed they were remarkable stewards of the environment. The public would somehow always fall for this and completely ignore their ongoing pollution. This eventually became known as greenwashing, a wordplay on the corporation whitewashing its crimes.

In the last decade, I’ve noticed a variant of this strategy play out where a corporation that does lots of bad things (e.g., Nike habitually using cruel sweatshops overseas to make their products) will make a point to promote some token social justice cause alongside promoting the diversity issue of the day. Because they do this, a lot of young liberals view the corporation as a steward of social justice and take pride in affiliating with their brand. At the same time, they ignore all the human rights violations that the company participates in. For example, beyond Nike, consider how Apple’s products are made and the extent to which Apple has enabled China to conduct human rights abuses against its citizens.

I’ve never heard a term coined for this, so I refer to it as social justice washing, and it is so sad for me to watch how well it has captured the current generation who would have been the activists who stood up against predatory global capitalism. For example, many of you may remember the violent 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. We have not had anything similar for decades.

Unfortunately, what was done with social justice washing pales in comparison to the greenwashing that has since conducted over the last few decades.

Global Warming

One of the things I used to do on the side was work with and support environmental activists and scientists fighting to prevent air and water pollution. While I was doing this, the global warming thing took off. If I had not seen this happen firsthand, I never would have believed it; I watched all the people I’d worked with who previously sincerely cared about legitimate sources of environmental pollution (e.g., acid rain) start getting fixated on carbon dioxide (a harmless gas), while concern over almost every other pollutant was thrown out the window.

Sadder still, I soon after watched them get hooked onto the marketing pitch for the first Prius (drive a hybrid to fight global warming). They zealously began refocusing all their activism on selling Toyota’s product. Once I saw this kick into gear, I did a quick check and found this out:

The nickel for the [Prius] battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.

The clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining, manufacturing, and transporting weren’t the only thing that worried green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall smokestack that spewed huge puffs of sulfur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene from the depths of hell.

On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA  have practiced driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate of the Moon's landscape.

David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told the London Daily Mail: "The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid down off the hillside."

I tried to explain to my fellow activists that promoting these cars might not be the best idea and we instead should focus on promoting biodiesel since it was carbon neutral (whereas the Priuses were not), affordable to everyone (you just needed a compatible used diesel) and didn’t require incredibly environmentally destructive batteries. Although I tried to be diplomatic, as you might have guessed, I was kicked out of the group.

Two of the common strategies malignant industries use to keep their products on the market are:

•Make a vague and unreachable target they’ll fix in the “future,” so people forgive the current issues with their product.

•Get people to focus on something that has nothing to do with the industry’s malfeasance so the malfeasance is ignored.

When I watched the Prius drama play out, I went, “oh no…oh no…are they going to use this to make the environmental movement become a whole bunch of people complaining about global warming and give the industry a free pass on everything else?”

I then started looking into the global warming thing and realized three important points:

1. No one was interested in doing the things I thought would most directly reduce carbon dioxide levels and were easy to implement (e.g., enacting economic tariffs to prevent slash-and-burn deforestation of the Amazon).

2. No solid evidence links carbon dioxide levels (which currently comprise 0.04% of the atmosphere) to atmospheric temperatures.

3. Countless erroneous models had been put forward and trumpeted in the media regarding how a climate apocalypse would happen. All of them have failed to materialize—for example, did you know in the 1970s, everyone was freaking out over the coming disaster of global cooling? The interesting thing about these models is that they had no objective basis for their predictions, and no establishment source ever criticized them once they abjectly failed to provide their predicted result. 

Somewhat analogously, British epidemiologist, Neil Furgeson’s catastrophic predictions with COVID-19 were largely responsible for imposing the lockdowns we saw around the world. Despite the fact for decades, he had repeatedly made extreme overestimations of the severity of previous infectious diseases, and his COVID-19 model made no sense, it was never challenged or  updated once data was made available questioning its fundamental assumptions.

To give you an idea of just how inaccurate it was:

I don’t think Ferguson even believed his model (the Imperial College one) because during the strict lockdowns, he was responsible for imposing on England, he got caught breaking them to see his mistress. This a is somewhat analogous to people like Obama, who have preached about the dangers of climate change and rising sea levels, nonetheless choosing to buy oceanfront properties in Hawaii (he even got himself a controversial exemption from environmental protection laws designed to protect Hawaii’s beaches). Similarly, people often point out how the global elite often use private jets to visit climate conferences.

Because of how erroneous the Global Warming models were, they, of course, failed to play out. For example, the catastrophic melting predictions in Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth never materialized (although they did help Gore, who is now estimated to now be worth 330 million dollars). This in turn, has led to many memes like this one being created:

I find this meme fascinating because it almost perfectly encapsulates a scene in Fauci’s recent PBS documentary. He and Washington D.C.’s mayor go door to door attempting to use their authority to convince a black neighborhood to vaccinate under the logic this poor community just needs to be graced with their magnanimous presence (and deliberate lies about the vaccine) to finally vaccinate. The whole thing was so comical to watch that it became a running joke around the country, especially due to a   resident challenging the vaccine’s ability to prevent infection or transmission of the virus and directly calling Fauci out for  his dishonesty.

Sometimes you have to keep the dream alive.

Conclusion

Now that we have looked at the common patterns in observed in predatory industries that value profits over human life, we need to explore how this same playbook has unfolded with climate change. In the second part of this series, we will explore the corruption and lust for control that is central to the war against COVID-19 has also been used in the war against climate change. Numerous solutions exist for the “climate crisis,” but like many of the treatments for COVID-19, they have been deliberately suppressed so that as much profiteering can occur as possible.