Corporate billionaires are wrecking the supply chain

Before these past two years, if you were polling passersby on the street, you would have been hard pressed to find anyone ready to admit that they were seriously concerned about the supply chain. You’d be hard pressed, for that matter, to find many who could describe what the supply chain actually is (present company included). That is certainly not the case today. From shortages—and correspondingly high costs—of groceries and consumer goods like baby formula and sunflower oil to medical devices, “supply chain issues” have become a pronounced source of anxiety and frustration for consumers, workers, businesses, and politicians alike.

“The supply chain is in chaos,” Will Knight wrote for WIRED in late March, “and it’s getting worse.” Unsurprisingly, however, the pain resulting from that chaos—like most things in this world—is not evenly distributed. As the economy contracts, inflation continues to skyrocket, and Wall Street tucks tail and runs, everyday workers are the ones left holding the bag.

The supply chain is a lot like the cardiovascular system of global commerce, a vast pulsing web of innumerable veins, arteries, and capillaries connecting points of extraction, production, and trade to points of sale around the world. Moving through that web at any given time is a dizzying menagerie of trains, trucks, ships, and planes transporting raw materials and finished goods.

While these massive geopolitical and environmental events have intuitively served as a sort of taken-for-granted, catch-all explanation for supply chain disruptions and rising costs, they have also conveniently obscured another, sorely under-acknowledged cause of our collective supply chain woes: corporate greed. The fact that corporations have been raking in record profits while simultaneously jacking up prices on everyone (and shareholders have been bragging about it on quarterly earnings calls) certainly has more consumers catching the stench of something rotten beneath the prevailing narrative about inflation and supply chain issues. But corporate extortion via price gouging is not the only issue here.

https://therealnews.com/corporate-billionaires-are-wrecking-the-supply-chain-just-look-at-the-railroads