Translated from original with Deepl.

$4,000,000,000 profit. Not revenue. Profit. That’s how much the oil and gas companies alone raked in profits last year. An increase of nearly 200 percent on the already obscene returns before that.

And then there are the rest of the energy companies, the banks, the insurance companies, the food companies, the building materials companies, the commodities conglomerates, the digital oligopolies ala Microsoft, Facebook and the like, and many more. They all took in more last year than at any time in their corporate history before that.

Is this the thanks they get for the pandemic?

Over two years of pandemic, when it was suddenly no longer true that entrepreneurs have to bear risk, we all financed the corporate profits with our money. With the Cofag even massively oversubsidized and some entrepreneurs have made more money and profit during Corona, than before. And what is the thanks for that? That now very many of them are shamelessly taking advantage of the inflation crisis, triggered by the Russian dictator and his increased desires for gas revenues. Yes, many prices have had to be raised in the short term due to increased energy prices, but it didn’t stop there. Many companies significantly increased their profit margins, triggering the extreme inflation rates. This was not a natural disaster, something beyond our control, but a very conscious decision.

And what is the turquoise-green coalition doing?

After obviously learning absolutely nothing from the Cofag, which was recently declared illegal by the Constitutional Court, companies are once again being subsidized.Irrespective of whether they need it, highly profitable corporations are being subsidized with our money in the form of the energy cost subsidy.So taxpayers are once again financing the profits and excess profits of companies.

And this at a time when the rich and uber-rich are richer than ever before in the history of mankind. Which is, of course, absolutely self-evident, because the profits of the companies belong to someone, the shareholders, and these are usually rich and uber-rich people.Thus, the richest one percent of the world’s population has increased its excess wealth by $26 trillion in just two years from 2021 to 2022. So a multiple of the huge number at the beginning of this text and the bulk of wealth increases in general. For example, between 2020 and 2021 in Germany, the top 1 percent received 81 percent of all wealth gains, while the rest, the 99 percent in total, received only 19 percent more.

At the same time, we are again living in a world, and it has been different for a long time, where poverty is on the rise again. Already about one billion people are starving again and almost two billion workers live in countries where inflation is currently higher than wage increases.But all this no longer affects only people in the global South.Today, poverty is also growing everywhere in the rich North, with the result that in London, for example, one in fifty people is now homeless.

So when we bail out banks with taxpayer money. When we carry businesses through pandemics.When we transfer energy subsidies to companies. Then we are funding profits that end up in the accounts of the richest of the rich, and we are also ensuring that there is much less left for the rest of the peoples.

This no longer has anything to do with the capitalism of the post-war period, although of course it is still capitalism. It continues to be about unconditional profit maximization, which does not even shy away from the destruction of the environment and the climate, only nowadays less and less consideration has to be given due to politically and unionically non-existent opposition.And so, socially, an incredible amount is changing, and a kind of new aristocracy or super-aristocracy is emerging, because the wealth of today’s super-rich dwarfs everything that has gone before.To speak of a neo-feudalism probably makes sense to illustrate the status quo.

But there is also a ray of hope, because the system is cracking at every turn and the greed of the rich has brought them and the world into exactly the same situation that we had once before at the beginning of the 20th century. Pride comes before a fall and this is not far today as it was then.