When There's No Money In The Pursuit Of The Good And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of Money

When There's No Money In The Pursuit Of The Good And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of Money

Feb. 23, 2025

U.S. EMPIRE - FOLLOW THE MONEY

Caitlin Johnstone

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels.

Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit.

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping U.S. intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network.

Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the U.S. intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are just a few examples of how depraved you have to be to amass immense amounts of wealth; beyond that there are all the ugly manipulations people engage in to protect the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. The extremely wealthy buy up narrative control in the form of media, think tanks and Silicon Valley platforms in order to influence public political opinion to their benefit.

They influence the government through legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. Sometimes they even hop right in to the actual government itself like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. All to ensure the continuation of the unjust systems which allow them to amass wealth while destroying the biosphere and making everyone else poorer, busier, sicker, more exhausted, and more propagandized.

Reading by Tim Foley

Article with supporting links: https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/02/24/when-theres-no-money-in-the-pursuit-of-the-good-and-no-goodness-in-the-pursuit-of-money/

Original: https://youtu.be/GFlU7iEVtaU

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I write about the end of illusions. 100% reader-funded writer. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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