APR 24, 2018
Goldman Sachs has outdone
itself this time. That’s saying a lot for an investment firm that both helped
cause and then exploited a global economic meltdown, increasing its own wealth
and power while helping to boot millions of Americans out
of their homes.
But now Goldman Sachs is
openly saying in financial reports that curing people of terrible diseases is
not good for business.
I wish this were a joke. It
sounds like a joke. In fact, I’ll show you later that it used to be one of my
favorite jokes. But first, the facts.
In a recent report, a
Goldman analyst
asked clients: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Salveen
Richter wrote:
“The potential to deliver ‘one-shot cures’ is one of the most attractive
aspects of gene therapy. … However, such treatments offer a very different
outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies. … While this
proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could
represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash
flow.”
Yes, a Goldman analyst has
said outright that curing people will hurt their cash flow. And he said that in
a note designed to steer clients away from investing in cures. Can “human
progress” have a bottom? Because if so, this is the bottom of so-called human
progress—down where the mud eels mate with the cephalopods. (Or at least that’s
how I picture the bottom.)
This analyst note is one of
the best outright examples I’ve ever seen of how brutal our market economy is.
In the past, this truth would not have been spoken. It would’ve lived deep
within a banker’s soul and nowhere else. It would’ve been viewed as too
repulsive for the wealthy elite to say, “We don’t want to cure diseases because
that will be bad for our wallet. We want people to suffer for as long as
possible. Every suffering human enriches us a little bit more.”
We’re circling the drain in
the toilet bowl, and as you know, the contents speed up as they near the end,
the event horizon. We are beginning to see more and more how disgusting a
profit-above-all-else economy really is. When Donald Trump bombed Syria, the
stocks of weapons contractors shot
up. That spike in stocks is a spike in the gravity of capitalism, pulling
people toward death and destruction. Profit has power. And its power is exerted
on the society as a whole.
Furthermore, there is no
debate about this on your mainstream outlets. There is no discussion as to
whether war profiteering is what we really want out of our society. None. You
tell me: How many perfectly coiffed CNN or Fox News hosts stated: “Weapons
contractors benefited from our bombing. Isn’t that revolting? Doesn’t that just
make you gag in your soup? Doesn’t that mean we’ve created an upside-down
system that rewards barbaric bullshit?”
You will not hear that
discussion. You’re more likely to hear them discuss the best blind pingpong
player to ever star in a short film about self-harm. Hard news topics do not
see the light of day on our suffocated corporate airwaves.
And believe it or not, the
Goldman note gets even worse. The analyst
says, “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing
existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the
virus to new patients. …”
Decreases the number of
carriers? Goldman Sachs … is in a financial partnership … with fucking
infectious diseases.
Let that sink in. Sit with
that and decide whether you want to keep your seat on spaceship earth. I’ll
wait.
When I first read about
this—after I stopped choking on my tongue—I realized it made more sense than I
first thought. I’ve always felt Lloyd Blankfein had
a striking resemblance to Hepatitis C. But it turns out he just works with Hepatitis
C. They’re just really close friends and business partners. (But I heard Ebola
is the godfather to his kids.)
Our aggressive strain of
unfettered capitalism has blasted beyond satire in many ways. In one of my
favorite Chris Rock specials, “Bigger & Blacker,” which I first saw when I
was a teenager, he had a joke that blew my mind. He said something like, “They
ain’t never gonna cure AIDS. They ain’t nevergonna cure AIDS. There’s too
much money in it. The money’s not in the cure. The money’s in the comeback! The
money’s in the comeback.”
And I found that bit
hilarious. I loved it. Because I thought it was a joke. Now, I see—it ain’t no
joke. He’s goddamn right. They aren’t even trying to cure infectious diseases
that make them piles of cash. Instead, the moneyed interests are complaining to
their clients that they need to avoid curing these diseases. Because not only
do they lose money on the patient who no longer needs meds, they also lose
money because that patient won’t pass the disease onto others.
I swear these drug companies
are roughly two weeks away from just going, “Hey, what if we send Bruce—that
guy in the copy room—out to stab people in the back of the neck with infected
needles? Is that over the line? Because that would increase our cash flow. And
not only do we make money from the newly infected person, but they’re likely to
pass it on to other people. How great is that?”
A profit-driven world creates
a disgusting reality with a contorted value system. A world where oil companies
view oil spills that destroy whole coastal communities as the price of doing
business. In fact, they even declared it’s good
for the local economy. A world where millions of animals abused for their
entire lives is just the price of doing brunch. A world where massive hurricane
destruction is a business
opportunity rather than a tragedy. “Honey, check the weather report.
Are there any 155-mile-per-hour business opportunities ripping through any
Caribbean islands?”
And now corporations no longer
fret over government interference—because they own the government. For them to
worry about that would be like you worrying that your carpet might stop you
from going out to a movie this evening. I think we’ve established what the
carpet does. It lays there. Corporations now spew forth their true goals and
motivations without much concern for the backlash. They can do things like
use attack
dogs on protesters at Standing Rock and not worry about the
consequences. Who cares? The worst that could happen to them is they pay a
fine—a “sorry we bit you with vicious man-eating dogs” fine.
We have a value systems
disorder. A large percentage of our society now views this Goldman Sachs-style
thinking as acceptable. It should be viewed as equally grotesque as beating
someone over the head and then selling them bandages. Now imagine that’s your
company’s business model. And you get investors to help you achieve it. Next to
a glowing PowerPoint presentation you say, “You guys help me pay for the
baseball bat. I’ll beat people over the head with that bat. My bat-swinging
skills are well documented. I then sell the bloodied victims our top-shelf
bandages. And with little effort on your part, you get a cut of the profits.
It’s a rock-solid investment.”
That’s how we need to view
what Goldman Sachs is saying in this analyst note.
The only way a system ends up
at this point—with our values this far upside down—is with endless advertising
in a profit-driven society. This is a system built on the exploitation of
others for gain. There was no time when that was not true. And that’s why we
need a revolution of the mind.
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