// DIAGNOSTIC INITIATED: TARGET_ENTITY = 'OMNI_CONSUMER_PRODUCTS (OCP_MODEL_SPREAD)' //
"Take a close look at the track record of this company. You'll see that we have gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration. I say good business is where you find it."
This isn't a line from a Davos keynote or a leaked memo from a Wall Street boardroom, though it chillingly could be. It's the unvarnished philosophy of Dick Jones, Senior President of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) in Paul Verhoeven's 1987 satirical masterpiece, RoboCop. Delivered with cold, corporate conviction, Jones's words are meant to expose him, and OCP by extension, as the unambiguous villain – a rapacious entity seeing only profit margins where society once saw public good, human dignity, or collective aspiration.
Verhoeven's satire was brutal and overt. OCP was a caricature of unchecked Reagan-era corporate power, a monolithic entity prepared to privatize, weaponize, and commodify every facet of life in Old Detroit, up to and including human life itself via the RoboCop program. Dick Jones wasn't presented as a misunderstood innovator; he was a power-mad executive actively hostile to the public interest. Yet, fast forward nearly four decades, and the horrifying truth is that Dick Jones's playbook hasn't just been adopted; it's been lionized, normalized, and aggressively implemented across the globe. The "traditionally nonprofit" sectors he eyed for exploitation are now battlegrounds where the public good is routinely sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value, often by corporations that make OCP look like a modest startup.
// THE OCP MODEL INFECTS HEALTHCARE: FROM HEALING TO HOSTILE TAKEOVER //
Dick Jones named hospitals first. In 1987, the idea of healthcare as just another "market" to be "gambled in" was, for many, a dystopian notion. Today, it's standard operating procedure. In the United States particularly, the healthcare system is a labyrinthine monument to profit extraction. Giant for-profit hospital chains prioritize elective surgeries and well-insured patients over community health needs. Pharmaceutical corporations (Big Pharma) charge exorbitant prices for life-saving drugs developed with significant public funding, driven by patent monopolies and aggressive marketing rather than patient outcomes. Insurance behemoths like UnitedHealth Group function less as care providers and more as financial gatekeepers, their profits directly tied to denying care and limiting payouts.
The "good business" Dick Jones found has resulted in medical debt bankrupting families, life-saving treatments being inaccessible, rural hospitals closing as they fail to meet profit targets, and a system that demonstrably delivers worse health outcomes for higher costs than many developed nations with universal, publicly funded systems. The human cost – lives lost, suffering prolonged, families ruined – is an externality rarely factored into the quarterly earnings reports. This isn't innovation; it's the OCP model achieving market dominance, where your health is a tradable commodity. Investment firms like BlackRock, with significant holdings across the healthcare sector, further entrench this financialization, ensuring that the primary directive remains profit, not patient well-being.
// PRISONS INCORPORATED: THE BUSINESS OF BONDAGE //
Next on Jones's list: prisons. The rise of the private prison industrial complex in the US is perhaps the most grotesque realization of his philosophy. Companies like CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group trade on the stock market, their business model predicated on maximizing inmate populations and minimizing operational costs. This creates perverse incentives: lobbying for stricter sentencing laws and policies that feed more bodies into their facilities, cutting corners on staffing, healthcare, and rehabilitation to boost profits.
The "good business" here is found in human misery. Private prisons are often plagued by higher rates of violence, understaffing, inadequate medical care, and a fundamental conflict of interest: rehabilitation and reduced recidivism are bad for the bottom line. The public good – reducing crime, fostering reintegration – is antithetical to a business model that thrives on a steady supply of incarcerated individuals. RoboCop depicted OCP seeking to privatize the police force; modern reality has seen the state outsource the caging of human beings to corporations answerable to shareholders, not citizens.
// SPACE EXPLORATION: FROM PUBLIC DREAM TO BILLIONAIRE PLAYGROUND //
Finally, Jones mentions space exploration. For decades, this was the domain of nation-states, driven by scientific curiosity, national prestige, and the collective human desire to explore. Today, while NASA and other public agencies still play a role, the narrative and much of the innovation cycle are dominated by private corporations led by billionaire "visionaries." SpaceX (Elon Musk) and Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos) are the new titans, vying for government contracts, launching private satellites, and selling dreams of space tourism and off-world colonies.
While proponents tout innovation and reduced costs, the shift also represents a significant transfer of public investment and scientific heritage into private hands. The "good business" involves monetizing the final frontier, potentially creating new realms of resource extraction and inequality, with access dictated by wealth. The dream of space as a commons for all humanity recedes as it becomes another asset class, another market to be "gambled in," echoing the Off-world colony advertisements that littered RoboCop's decaying Detroit – an escape for the elite, not a collective endeavor.
// SATIRE IGNORED, DYSTOPIA NORMALIZED //
The brilliance of RoboCop was its ability to make its satire so biting and obvious that its warnings seemed impossible to ignore. Yet, modern conservative and libertarian ideologies have effectively championed the OCP/Dick Jones model as a pathway to "freedom" and "efficiency." Deregulation, radical privatization, and the belief that corporate power is inherently benign or innovative are core tenets. The film's critique of an unchecked corporate state gutting public services, exploiting workers, and prioritizing profit over human lives is now often dismissed or, worse, celebrated as the triumph of the market.
When political figures and commentators praise the "efficiencies" of private healthcare, advocate for further privatization of public infrastructure, or laud billionaire space ventures without scrutinizing the underlying power dynamics and social costs, they are, consciously or not, endorsing Dick Jones's vision. The "freedom" they champion often looks remarkably like OCP's freedom to operate without accountability, to profit from misery, and to declare that any sphere of human activity is fair game for exploitation if there's a dollar to be made.
// FINAL DIAGNOSTIC: THE OCP VIRUS IS SYSTEMIC //
Dick Jones was the villain. His philosophy was presented as a clear and present danger to society. The tragedy of our current moment is that his cynical declaration – "good business is where you find it" – has become the accepted, even lauded, mantra of a global economic system. RoboCop wasn't just a movie; it was a diagnostic program for a societal virus. The virus has since gone systemic, and we are all living in its decaying host. Recognizing the symptoms isn't enough; we need to rewrite the code.
// END TRANSMISSION //