While some may see the slaughter of 59 people in Las Vegas and injuring of more than 500 others, some of whom will likely be added to the total of the dead as attempts to save them fail, the rich will benefit handsomely from this.
In the Land of the Free, where, as Michael Parenti points out, the top one fourth of one percent own over half of the investment wealth, the rich get richer when bad things happen. War, imprisonment, sickness, injury, death, and natural disasters may be bad for us peasants, but the rich make money from it hand over fist.
You see, restricting weapons sales cuts into profits in many ways. First, the guns, and associated ammunition, ammo clips, tripods, rifle scopes and other associated firearm components and accessories, with billions in profits annually. But that’s not the half of it.
The rich also benefit from that which passes as “health care” in the land of the free, raking in billions in profits from pain and suffering, unlike any other nation on earth. The Las Vegas gunman has provided the rich with millions of dollars in profits from private hospitals, health insurance, and Big Pharma’s cut, since we are the only industrialized nation without a health care system for its people.
The rich also now own most of the funeral parlors, purchased in recent decades and often keeping the old family name to disguise them as though they were small businesses. The rich make fortunes from our deaths in addition to profiting from our being shot.
So is there any wonder in a nation whose elected officials take campaign money from the gun lobby, the medical mafia and other gangsters who pull their puppet strings, sensible gun control is not allowed.
The plutocrats and their lackeys do not care about the Second Amendment. If they didn’t make billions from allowing guns to be sold to psychopaths, you can bet your life we’d have reasonable gun control as they stopped reining in Congress.
Just as if they didn’t make billions from polluting the environment they’d allow us to have a clean biosphere.
If they didn’t make billions from senseless wars, we’d be allowed to have peace.
And if they didn’t make billions from controlling the mainstream media, we’d have citizens largely armed with facts in place of the nonsense which reeks from sea to shining sea from masses fed propaganda through sitcoms, dramas, and the evening “news.”
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.
Right on Jack, keep up the good work just as in the good old LUV days.