The United States is the kingdom of paradoxes: the richest country in the world, but with millions in poverty; the nation capable of sending men into space for long months but unable to ensure rail transport. Recent news reveals many other contradictions in the powerful nation:
Bittersweet
The high price of insulin has forced diabetics to ration the drug. Photo: Taken from Getty Images
Diabetes patients in the United States face a difficult dilemma between eating appropriately to manage their disease or taking the systematic insulin they need to maintain a good quality of life.
Although insulin was discovered more than a century ago and is inexpensive to produce, Brand name insulin often sells for around $300 per vial. The high cost has forced many people with diabetes to ration or skip drugs that help the body control blood sugar, reports La Opinión newspaper.
According to the American Diabetes Association, about 30 million people in the United States have diabetes and about 7 million need insulin on a daily basis.
Faced with this situation, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced that the state will partner with non-profit generic drugmaker Civica Rx to produce more affordable insulin.
“People should not be forced into debt to get life-saving prescriptions,” Newsom said in a statement.
The club will provide Californians with insulin for $30 per 10 milliliterssaid the official. Production is scheduled to be available by 2024. In the meantime…
Shareholders of the Oil Party
Although President Biden repeatedly threatened oil companies over high fuel prices and called for continued investment in renewable energy sources throughout 2022, amid the inflationary pressures the US economy was facing, fossil fuel leaders paid little attention to him.
Denying direct requests from the US government has perhaps never been more profitable for Big Oil, since the White House is already known as the real power. Except when the capital of the world’s largest corporations is at stake.
Shareholders of US oil companies made a profit of 128 billion dollars in 2022 thanks to a combination of global supply disruptions such as Russia’s war in Ukraine and mounting pressure from Wall Street to prioritize earnings over the search for untapped crude oil reserves. It’s the highest gain since at least 2012.
For the first time in at least a decade, U.S. drillers spent more on stock buybacks and dividends than on capital projects last year, according to Bloomberg calculations.
International oil majors are reluctant to invest in low-emission energy projects because of the increased cost of capital, which hurts their profitability compared to short-cycle oil and gas projects, coupled with uncertainty about commodities, warns Marlen Shokhitbayev, head of corporate ratings at Scope Ratings.
evil philanthropy
Credit: Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica
Not only the tankers win. Billionaires in the United States saw their fortunes grow in 2022. And the more they earn, the less they pay into the treasury and, among other things, wrap themselves in the cloak of pious philanthropy.
Fidelity Charitable announced that it distributed nearly $1 billion more in donor-recommended grants to charities in 2022 than in the previous year.
Funds donated by Fidelity Charitable to charitable organizations have more than quintupled over the past 10 years, the philanthropic organization said.
But the truth is that so much charity is pure charity from the rich. According to OXFAM’s annual report, the richest 1% (led by US billionaires) have generated nearly two-thirds of the world’s new wealth (more than $42 trillion) since 2020. Over the past decade, the richest 1% have grabbed around 50% of new wealth.
Since 2020, with the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, the richest 1% has received $26 trillion (63% of newly created wealth), while only $16 trillion (37%) has come to the remaining 99% of humanity .
For every dollar of new global wealth given to a person in the bottom 90% of humanity, a billionaire rakes in $1.7 million. Billionaire fortunes have grown by $2.7 billion every day.
As the OXFAM report shows, 95 major energy and food companies have more than doubled their profits through 2022. They generated a total of $306 billion in windfall profits and spent $257 billion (84%) to reward their wealthy shareholders. The Walton family dynasty, which owns 50% of the multinational Walmart, received $8.5 billion in dividends last year.
A recent study calculates that 54% of inflation in the United States is due to the increase in these corporate earnings
And to top it off, the more wealth they amass, the less tax they pay (which reduces what they supposedly give in charity). Decades of cuts and tax privileges for the big wealth and big corporations have contributed to increasing inequality, so that in practice in many countries lower-income earners pay higher effective tax rates than billionaires pay taxes.
A ProPublica investigation shows that Jeff Bezos, who became the richest man in the world, didn’t have to pay taxes on his earnings in 2007 and 2011. The same thing happened in 2018 with Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and the current leader of the global billionaire rankings. George Soros didn’t pay taxes between 2016 and 2018 because he “lost money on his investments.”
The publication compared how much the 25 richest Americans paid in real-world taxes between 2013 and 2018, and found that the amount represented just 3.4% of the enormous wealth they had amassed. To do this, the wealthy resorted to numerous schemes and their army of accountants, lawyers, bankers, and secret accounts designed to evade taxes, income deductions for charitable donations, and to earn a salary for earning capital gains instead of capital gains.
That’s how paradoxical the empire is. It punishes those it should reward and over-rewards those it should punish. As the 18th-century English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft said, “The world needs justice, not charity.”