Where are the profiteers?

Particularly from the Edwards campaign, I keep hearing about these elusive profiteers. I have spent a long time as a lawyer in private practice representing corporations, and I am now an in-house general counsel, and I have yet to meet one of them. Instead, I keep meeting corporate officers who are trying to run their companies the best way they can, meet the competition, and give a decent return to their shareholders, most of whom are, directly or indirectly, the American people. Like any large group of people, some of those I have met are nice; some are not. Some seem more charitable or humane than others, but, as a group, they stack up pretty well against, say, lawyers or journalists or politicians.

So where are these evil profiteers? In fact, what does that even mean? The goal and purpose of a for-profit company is to make profits. When they continually lose money, corporate officers are criticized and fired, and rightly so. So are they somehow evil because they are just doing the very job for which they have been hired? Are they deficient because a free market system is driven by the profit motive?

Frankly, I have no idea.