by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
Comedian and political commentator Russell Brand explored how health or energy emergencies that create crises for regular people are opportunities — or ‘crisitunities’ — for the powerful to concentrate their wealth and manipulate the masses.
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Comedian and political commentator Russell Brand explored how crises for regular people — from the COVID-19 pandemic to economic crisis to war — are opportunities for those in power to concentrate their wealth and manipulate the masses, in a recent episode of his show “Stay Free.”
“In various kinds of crises, whether it’s an energy crisis, a health crisis or a military crisis, there are curious profits and benefits to be had,” Brand said.
It seems obvious corporations “shouldn’t be profiteering” in a crisis, he said, but this week BP reported record annual profits of $28 billion for 2022 — more than double the oil giant’s previous year’s profits.
Shell also reported its highest profits in history, Brand said, playing a news clip that attributed Big Oil’s big profits to the war in Ukraine driving up prices.
“For a powerful energy company, an energy crisis is not a crisis — it’s a ‘crisitunity,’ to quote Homer Simpson,” Brand said.
For Brand, the COVID-19 pandemic was another example of corporate profiteering — Pfizer reported a record $31.4 billion in profits on sales of $100.3 billion.
Much corporate profit-making during crises comes directly from taxpayer money, Brand said. “Biden signs a $1.7 trillion government spending bill, 50% of which we know will end up in the hands of companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.”
The federal government funded the development and purchase of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines. If the people pay for these things, “then [they] should share in the benefits.”
Politicians shouldn’t be able to profit from crises either, Brand said, proposing that Congress members shouldn’t own stock in the companies they regulate, and the revolving door between industry and government should be eliminated.
And perhaps most importantly, he said, those in charge of managing a crisis should be prohibited from profiting from it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, in addition to being the highest-paid U.S. public official, now charges $100,000 for speaking engagements.
Bill Gates made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in BioNTech, which was just one of the vaccine makers he invested in.
Mattias Desmet on ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’
Later in the episode, Brand brought on Mattias Desmet, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Ghent University in Belgium, to discuss his book, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”
The book theorizes how leaders manipulate crises as psychological instruments for totalitarian control.
Desmet explained that a totalitarian society, which he believes has been forming throughout the pandemic crisis, is different from classical dictatorship in that it relies on “mass formation” — a group psychological phenomenon where people lose their capacity to critically evaluate the group they identify with.
People in the grips of mass formation, he said, will sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the group narrative and become radically intolerant of dissenting opinions.
He warned that in the final stage of mass formation, which he thinks has yet to arrive in contemporary society, people become willing to commit atrocities against those who do not go along with the masses.
Desmet described the conditions needed for this mass formation to develop across a large population. He said society’s failure to provide strong social bonds leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness.
Before the pandemic, there was already a crisis of loneliness, Desmet said. Lockdowns made the crisis worse.
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