The Power of Money and the Money of Power
“Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind.” - Sophocles
Many people still believe that noble, moral principles guide the decisions of the people in leadership positions in their society. It can be disheartening to discover that is not the case. Daily, citizens are subjected to a barrage of examples where their leaders make decisions based on simple greed. The desire to accumulate more money and resources is the prime motivation for most people-especially those in positions of leadership. Below are some recent examples that highlight this dishonorable condition that plagues humanity.
A recent intelligence report explicitly implicated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jamal Khashoggi’s killing, stating that the crown prince “approved” the operation to “capture or kill” the Saudi journalist. The Biden’s administration policy to avoid penalizing the leader of Saudi Arabia for his flagrant violation of International law and basic humanitarian principles is to develop new guidelines to prevent journalists from being killed in the future. These actions are in line with Biden’s predecessor. When then President Trump was told about the role MBS played in the assassination he stated: “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country.” he told reporters referring to his desire to sell $110 billion worth of weapons to the Kingdom. Some people just need to die to ensure profits for the American military industrial complex whether they be journalists or innocent civilians in Yemen.
The deregulation of Texas’s energy sector is a major factor in the many deaths and economic destruction now affecting Texas from the winter storm that visited Texas in February. Local politicians and energy executives have known for years that the state’s power grid was vulnerable to an extreme weather event. Texas power brokers decided not to heed the warnings from previous storms and “winterize” natural gas plants and other energy infrastructure. Some people just need to freeze to death in their homes so that energy investors in a deregulated Texas energy sector can funnel short term profits into an increase in their quarterly reports or their stock portfolio instead of investing in long term protection such as insulating pipelines.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a pitch to claim the “Florida Man” title by ensuring that nearly every eligible resident of a gated community in the Florida Keys had received coronavirus vaccinations by mid-January as the rest of the state struggled to get doses. Residents of the Ocean Reef Club reportedly included the only people from Key Largo to donate to DeSantis’ political committee, with Ocean Reef resident Bruce Rauner, the former Republican governor of Illinois, writing DeSantis’ political committee a $250,000 check, with 17 other residents each giving over $5,000. It seems that if you have the disposable income to write a check for a lot of money to the governor of your state, you are able to move to the front of the line ahead of people with higher risks of suffering the ill effects of a deadly virus during a pandemic.
Pharmaceutical companies are lobbying the White House not to suspend intellectual property rights on Covid vaccines so poor countries can get their citizens vaccinated. A bloc of countries in the World Health Organization, led by India and South Africa, are pushing for a waiver to patent rights on Covid 19 vaccines in an effort to save lives and to avoid “vaccination apartheid”. Wealthy countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are working hard to prevent the proposal from succeeding. Why? Because there is a great deal of money to made administering a vaccine to billions of desperate people. The need is increasingly urgent as the virus is mutating. But maybe that’s what the corporate lobbyists want- continuing mutating variants of the virus that require an endless number of new vaccines, making the pharmaceuticals and Wall Street investors and banks trillions of dollars. It seems like a lot of poor, black and brown people across the planet are going to have to get sick or die from a virus in order for corporations to maintain their government protected monopolies- allowing them to extract profits from poor people just struggling to survive.
Examples like those described above will continue to make headlines so long as our species is remains addicted to the pursuit of money. The foundation of greed is fear. This fear comes from a sense of being disconnected from others in our community. The cure for greed is the rejection of separateness and the acceptance that we are all interconnected and not alone.
