Agreed with Atomic, well said. The number of examples is simply endless.
The arms industry: Benefits if a lot of crime happens so people feel a need to buy arms to feel secure. Benefits from wars between nations.
The insurance industry: Benefits from people feeling insecure and from high crime rates, high risks of disease, homelessness and other tragic conditions so that people are scared to buy their insurance.
The alcohol, tobacco and candy (and drug) industry: Benefits from ruining people's health and productivity.
The pollutive industry: Benefits from promoting propaganda 'research' portraying their pollution as non-existant or trivial.
All companies engaging in capitalist competition: Benefits from keeping their advances and research secret from the public, which other branches of society could benefit from.
The advertisement-funded media: Similarly benefits from positively portraying what they advertise for, and politicians who improve conditions for such companies, in the hope of being able to make better deals.
Industries selling goods to people: Benefits from wasting Earth's limited resources on advertising, made to convince people to further waste resources on things they don't necessarily need.
The clothing industry: Benefits from selling clothes to the west while their workers in Bangladesh and other places are kept in factories under deplorable jail-like conditions.
The coffee industry: Benefits from keeping millions of people as slaves in developing nations and then ship the coffee to the west and selling them for inflated prices, harvesting several times the production costs while the workers get only a tiny fraction of it in wages. A worker's revolution to take control of these injust industries would be more than justified.
The book industry: Benefits from making random, tiny revisions to their books and have the education system make students buy their new books over and over instead of recycling their own books or putting them onto a computer.
The gambling industry: Benefits from people who have no understanding of statistics and sometimes end up as gambling addicts.
The employers and producers: Benefit from unemployment, so that wages can fall as people accept poorer working conditions, lower wages and rights in fear of becoming unemployed. Benefits from creating the capitalist dystopia where fear of losing your job easily means losing your home and basic food security.
The medical industry: Benefits from health care personnel assigning medicine to people who may not actually need the medicine and give them diagnoses simply in order to boost their sales. (In Denmark, we have several cases of health care workers with secondary jobs in the medical industry).
Private hospitals: Benefit from a generally unhealthy society, where a lot of people get sick.
And of course, the pseudo-"medical" industry: Benefits from promoting eucalyptus leaves as the cure for cancer and all those other claims we've heard from people ranging from psychics to gurus to priests, trying to exploit the well-known placebo effect to earn money while the people risk their lives if they substitute proper treatment for this.
I am happy that many of these issues, such as the insurance issues, the healthcare issues, arms industry issues and others are relatively small here in Denmark compared to, for example, USA, Bahrein and Bangladesh. I am happy I can watch news and films without being interrupted by advertising. But I also hope to see a better society, where we move beyond the fundamentally flawed system of capitalism and all people of the world unite in their common interests for peace, cooperation and progress.
