When costs go up, so do profits? That’s not how capitalism is supposed to work, but that is the recent trend. For over a year now, consumers and businesses, both in the U.S. and worldwide, have struggled with stubborn inflation. But the soaring costs haven’t prevented corporations from raking in record profits. The companies in last year’s Fortune 500 alone generated an all-time high $1.8 trillion in profit on $16.1 trillion in revenue. Voices largely on the left side of the political spectrum have been sounding the alarm on this—think: Bernie Sanders in Congress or Jon Stewart’s recent grilling of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—but now an economist at one of the world’s oldest and greatest investment banks is singing the same tune.

Albert Edwards, a global strategist at the 159-year-old bank Société Générale, just released a blistering note on the phenomenon that has come to be called Greedflation. Corporations, particularly in developed economies like the U.S. and U.K., have used rising raw material costs amid the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as an “excuse” to raise prices and expand profit margins to new heights, he said. And the French investment bank isn’t just historic: It’s one of the select banks considered to be “systemically important” by the Financial Stability Board, the G20’s international body dedicated to safeguarding the global financial system.

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Creeping calamities have become routine. They are matched only by a civic culture that is under siege by the apostles of neoliberalism promoting privatization, consumerism, anti-intellectualism and a brutal market ideology purposefully bereft of any sense of social responsibility. Americans now live in an age when historical consciousness no longer functions to inform the present and has become the target of white supremacists and a far-right Republican Party that is silent about the dark past that informs its authoritarian politics. As the violent terrors of the past tear into the present, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his political allies enact school policies that freeze history in an ideological straitjacket, claiming they are liberating history when in fact they are denying it.

America is becoming a country that can no longer question itself, invest in the public good or imagine a future beyond the dreamscapes of the rich and ruling elite. Apocalyptic fears, uncertainties and anxieties feed a rising tsunami of violence that has become the organizing principle of governance, everyday life and society itself. American society is caught in the daily routines of lies, corruption and manufactured ignorance; one consequence is the withering of individual and social agency along with civic culture and the public imagination. American optimism has turned bleak. In the age of gangster capitalism, people lose their interconnections, community and sense of security. Isolation and anxiety gives way to mass depression and is ripe for expressions of rage and hatred. The guard rails of justice, compassion, the welfare state, politics, democratic values and the institutions that nourish them are under threat of disappearing. Apocalyptic terrors have moved from the realm of fiction into the social fabric of everyday life.

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