The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms
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Yes. It SHOULD ring alarms. It should have rang alarms 100 years ago. It should make the rich and elite sit down and really contemplate the fact that nobody, NOBODY, gives a damn if they die, and we'll openly celebrate the fact that they just got shot in the face. The world will be happy they're gone.
It should make them sit down and ask the all important question of WHY.
Why would a nation cheer wildly at their death? What have they done to deserve that kind of treatment? And when they start asking those questions, hopefully they find the answers. Hopefully something is put right in their face that forces them to empathize with those they've hurt, and those that would not hesitate to shoot.
I do not know the shooters name. I do not know the shooters identity. However we ALL know the shooters story. We may not know the specifics. He may be dying, and was denied his own health. He may be losing or already lost a loved one. Whatever the case, we all know the motive. And what should scare these CEOs is that Brian Thompson never learned a lesson. There was no 3 ghosts of Christmas. Brian Thompson was just walking down the street one day. And suddenly he was dead. He didn't even have time to process it. He never knew his killers name. He may not have even known he was targeted. He may have died before he even realized what's going on.
But the rest of them? They should all be sitting in their homes, thinking about if they're next. WHY they would be next, and what they've done to potentially be targeted in the future. What can they do to stop it?
Because for once in my life, I'm seeing real consequences for corrupt and evil behavior. THATS why everyone is cheering. It's been a long time coming, and we're all just hoping this turns into Americas version of the french revolution.
We're not against the idea of working hard and becoming rich for it. We're against the idea of becoming rich by exploiting the literal lives of those you step on. And that seems to be almost the exclusive way to become rich in this country. It's sickening.
We (in the US) just elected a grifting, criminal "billionaire". I don't think the animosity so loudly and gleefully displayed in the reactions to the murder of this asshole insurance ghoul is representative of a newly heightened consciousness of wealth inequality. I hope that it is the start of something, but I've been disappointed in the public way too many times.
Just dropping in to remind everyone, that there have been 2 assassination attempts on the 'grifting, criminal "billionaire"' in just the last 8 months and he's been hiding behind thick glass in public.
I don't think it will stop, because however many people you manage to manipulate via targeted brainwashing (social media), you create at least a few super angry, unpredictable folks with ever less to lose. And they all have guns.
Edit: Also, nothing stops someone with a gigantic grudge, patience and high motivation from joining a private security company, getting training, a gun, and placed directly in the vicinity of a potential target. Really, there's no good defense except not giving a ton of people reasons to want to get rid of you.
Agreed - the alarm bells should have been ringing long ago.
There was a social contract between the upper and lower class (the middle class is a lie used to further divide us) that was basically - we'll let you have your mansions as long as our quality of life improves as well. But the rich have been hollowing out that agreement for decades. The highest tax bracket (the percentage taxed on income only above a certain amount) has plummeted since the middle of the 20th century. Regulations have been removed and replaced with weaker regulations (like Dodd/Frank) and then THOSE regulations have been hollowed out. Any sense of responsibility and duty the rich might have ever had to the people and place that rewarded them so greatly has vanished and in place of it is cynical and manipulative and greedy - because the only thing that matters is getting more and taking more - removing the safety barriers that keep them from getting more, no matter who it might hurt because somehow acquiring wealth has become the most important thing (not doing something great, improving the world, or helping others).
At each step, the social contract weakens. As long as enough people aren't feeling the pain they're going to abide by their part of the bargain because most of the rest of us ARE actually just trying to live good lives and make sure it's good for those around us. But there will be a moment when enough people are feeling the pain and won't have any other choice but to act. In a system where justice is only dealt to the lower class - that action is guaranteed to be carried out outside the system.
There was never a social contract. Sorry, but that's absolute nonsense. The power of the wealthy has always been engacted through manipulation, intimidation and fraud. Claiming there was a social contract between the wealthy and the rest of us is like claiming that there was a social contract between slaves and slave owners.
There's no contract, there's no agreement, there's no relationship; that's a fantasy concocted by the wealthy to justify their wealth. There is only power and exploitation. And exploitation will always grow worse over time.
They abuse us, and we let them abuse us because we're not desperate enough to stop them.
Not yet.
But it's getting there.
I like ownership and working class. That's the real distinction seperateing us. People who work for money, and people who own things for money. Even 6 figure doctors and lawyers are working class.
Remember when the Panama/Paradise papers came out and there were practically no Americans listed in them because American tax law is already so favorable to the rich that they don't even need to bother hiding assets?
We're not against the idea of working hard and becoming rich for it. We're against the idea of becoming rich by exploiting the literal lives of those you step on. And that seems to be almost the exclusive way to become rich in this country. It's sickening.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
I don't care if you make money. I don't care if you make a lot of money. I care when you pull out all the stops in order to make ALL OF THE MONEY, FOREVER, without any regard for what you destroy, or who you hurt or even kill in order to get it.
Brian Thompson built his fortune off the pain, suffering, and deaths of others, and the world is a slightly better place without him.
The better technology gets, the better the oppression and suppression will get, the worse it will be before people revolt, eventually they will be too feeble to revolt effectively.
Where do you think we are in that progression?
Maybe, maybe not. There's no way to predict what direction technology will go with certainty.
It could be the case that it eventually becomes impossible to revolt due to technology being insurmountable. Maybe it won't be the case.
But what is certain is that people will revolt in mass if they have their backs against the wall and nothing to lose. And we've been circling the drain on that.
The better the control systems get, the better will get the working class at circumventing them. Remember that those who write and compile the codes used to keep us in check are also part of the working class. There's always space for a backdoor or an exploit in all codes, one just have to learn how to use them to return to an unknown status.
There is no thing like a people too feeble to revolt. A people who cannot revolt is a people who cannot work nor produce (see every dictatorship in the world, they are surviving but they are not thriving nor innovating anything. The best they can do is copy [China] or using old technologies [Russia, North Korea, Iran]). If the elites want to have their iPhone 20 or their self-driving cars they need us to be productive, and with that comes a certain degree of freedom which entails a degree of risk for their health and lives
Wish people channeled this sentiment at the voting booth when Trump got on national TV and said he'd replace Obamacare with "concepts" of a plan he apparently was clueless of after 8 years of actively trying to destroy Obamacare.
Wish Harris channeled that sentiment in her campaign by championing M4A, so people might actually want to vote for her
Or any sentiment at all beyond rightwing nonsense.
I've been telling everyone I know for years that Healthcare is Americas biggest problem. The country is designed to pick your body clean before you die. You can work your entire life here and everything can be taken from you if you get sick.
The country is designed to pick your body clean before you die
This is called extracting value and people pay a lot of money to learn how to do it.
they did channel callous neolibralism in the defense of wealthy, white institutions at the voting both. you just think one of the choices would not have been that.
If the murder of the United Healthcare CEO is horrible news...
At the very annual general meeting that would have occurred had this not happened, would there have been a word describing the horribleness of the news that United made billions more than last year off the backs of American policy holders, American doctors/nurses/physicians/pharmacists, American taxpayers? I highly doubt it.
Every dollar in profit is the standard extraction of value from people, which may be warranted at a fixed rate for the services provided. Every dollar in increased profit is a squeezing of their customers, hopefully for an enhanced service to them in return. In healthcare, it was found that an enhanced return in value to customers was no longer necessary, when making money in crushing people's lives is more profitable, legal and encouraged by shareholders and management.
It is bad that vigilantism is being celebrated (though I'll admit to being aboard the "laugh about this specific murder" train).
But I think the reason that this is being celebrated is that this is the only kind of justice this guy could have ever faced because his crime is legal
Dont beat yourself up about it. Look at the context the public still has the last time billionaire died it was a submersible.
The reaction to that and this are very similar except the challenge deep wasn't involved to making healthcare unaffordable.
Not to mention Rick Scott also defrauded millions from medicare in Fl
It's a moment of catharsis, its that drop of blood against a psychopathic group of people using their power and control to decide whether we get to live or die and mostly choose to let us die.
At this point it feels like we're in general are mostly out of options. Legislation hasn't worked the ACA didn't address the power health insurance companies have over us, voting with our wallet doesn't work on an inelastic industry where every single person needs health care, the courts are bought out by these wealthy psychos.
Either we just live with the current and keep dying unnecessarily or we use the last box of civic engagement.
I think that what is… idk, encouraging? about it is that we finally saw them flinch. After years of seeing justice go unserved and the villains thumb their nose at the law with full confidence that they’ll walk away unscathed, we got to see a slight chill, like they just learned that they may be mortal after all. Unfortunately, it’s also shown that the institutions can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and as long as they continue to be as feckless as they are, we’re going to see more of this. So, ultimately, inadvertently, the institutions are encouraging this vigilantism.*
I fully expect this to fade away soon as our “society” has the collective attention span of a dust mite, but we have to celebrate small victories wherever they come.
*or they could be encouraging it intentionally as a means to further break down our foundations
</tinfoil>
One thing is that a company does work, gets a fair payment from that, and if you do a lot of work, you get a lot of payment
A whole other subject is when you squeeze every last dejt out of the people you say you work for
A completely different subject is when your company's policies are so bad that you cause untold suffering and literally thousands of preventable deaths.
We shouldn't need not want a vigilante shooter, these people (CEO's of these kinds of companies) should all be in jail for life.
I'm a CTO at a small medical supplier company and I work hard to make sure we're ethical. I can honestly claim were ethnical. We're a bunch of people trying to make life easier for others, for doctors and patients. None of us are rich, but we are passionate and we honestly want to grow the company not by squeezing every cent out of our customers, we grow by just making sure we're the best and fairest. It is very possible to be c level and to be ethical, but it has to be a choice.
I’m a CTO at a small medical supplier company and I work hard to make sure we’re ethical.
Good for you, tell me, what is the average wage/compensation for your company? What is the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay?
Do you know those numbers off the top of your head? Does anyone but the CFO know? If you don't know those numbers off the top of your head, you aren't really trying your best to be ethical.
And the dead who they killed by denying people what they paid for...there are dead victims here from this shit company and shit leaders.
Considering how many people a year die at the hands of insurance companies delaying and denying life-saving treatments to make a quick buck, the glee over this insurance CEO's death is a fairly rational response - a reminder to the 0.1% that they're not quite as immune to consequences as they think they are.
Structural violence is s great term that should get more use in cases like this.
I hope we'll get some data on how much more money and effort is spend on this compared to cases where the target is just some regular nobody.
This case is a great reminder of who the police really work for. If/when the shit hits the fan, you know whose side they’ll be on.
In before it gets rebranded Critical Structure Therory.
If we have more politicians like Bernie and AOC, we’d see less of this kind of mess. Where’s the movement that gets people like them more support?
Suppressed by the people in power. It's better for them if we fight over culture war bullshit and that's (IMO) why the right pushes so hard against things being "woke" or "dei" or whatever new scary buzzword those dumb fucks come up with.
We're too busy arguing amongst ourselves to realise we should all be looking up at the corrupt rich. But with bought off media and the ability to push propaganda at a previously impossible level just a few decades ago, a ton of the population is kept perpetually angry because non-white/straight people have the audacity to exist.
I'm a native (aka native American/indigenous however you want to call it) and over the last few years I've noticed people are increasingly comfortable showing their racism. I get followed around in stores while I'm shopping for groceries occasionally, I get managers staring me down because I took too long looking around and they think I was trying to steal and that my debit card will be declined, people happily making small talk with others and then blankly staring at me and saying nothing to me even when I'm being pleasant to them etc. All anecdotal of course and I could just be getting more bitter as I get older, but it honestly feels like a trend to me.
I've been dealing with that shit since I was a teen, you always get judged just for having the audacity to be born the wrong skin color anywhere but it's (anecdotally) gotten much worse over the last few years, which just so happens to coincide with the rise of the right all over the world.
I really hate the world sometimes tbh.
2016 was the year that people demanded a populist leader. The DNC sabotaged Bernie, which lead to low D voter turnout and the RNC bent at the knee at Trump's threats to run as a third party.
The morons outnumber us, sadly.
Tbh, I don’t even have faith in them.
If people had half a brain then the alarms have been ringing nonstop for years and any attempt to explain why so we can fix it resulted in failure.
Sadly, what they have is shit for brain.
Most interesting how many right wingers and boomers also support it.
They aren't as stupid as they come off as. They know things are bad and that the rich are fucking them they're just wrong about how and why
They know things are bad and that the rich are fucking them
Which they 100% enabled.
Yes they are
You're mostly angry at the same thing. You've just come to different conclusions as to what to do about it.
Sure is. Class politics is ultimately more powerful than culture war spectacle. Events like this bring that truth to the forefront - the worker class is United against the owning class, for the most part.
My eyes started rolling the second the writer said “the horrifying news.”
It’s really bringing the corporate shills out of the woodwork.
This incident is casting fresh light on norms that has basically become invisible to us in our lives - like the media's natural tendency to side with the establishment.
like the media’s natural tendency to side with the establishment.
The right wing media openly shills for the rich.
The mainstream media works for the rich also but is just more subtle about it. The main thing they do is bury or cover up important stories that are most likely to affect average people. That's why it never told you Harris had an 82 page plan of economic changes.
What the media treats as important is almost never what is actually important.
If you push past that, they do essentially conclude that this is an inevitable consequence of our current situation. It's a better take than I expected.
I'm more horrified that it took this long for the backlash, but I've been expecting it for years.
expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns.
Protecting oneself from gunmen by surrounding oneself with gunmen with bigger guns sounds great until you think about it a bit more.
Thats when paranoia hits.
With a big enough crowd, no matter the size of the gun, the crowd wins.
Thats when paranoia hits.
Let them feel uncomfortable for the rest of their existence.
People seem to be forgetting the existence of robots (such as Spot and Atlas from Boston Dynamics) that can be adapted with guns and programmed to serve the rich in a way that (supposedly) won't turn against them.... (Until someone gets to hack those metallic dogs)
These robots (particularly Spot) are already being used for security and guarding purposes. It's a matter of not if, but when, they get transformed into dystopian real-life Cyberdyne machines.
That's why you end up with an army that is too powerful for anyone civilian to resist.
Protecting oneself from gunmen by surrounding oneself with gunmen with bigger guns sounds great until you think about it a bit more.
Doesnt sound too great if you're dead. Guns make ridiculously terrible defensive weapons. Gun nuts dont seem to understand this. Whoever gets bullet into meat first wins, and surrounding yourself with guns just guarantees vengeance after you're dead meat, not safety. The size of your clip doesnt matter either. Its argued over as a distraction-- and was chosen as a legal battleground because its a pointless concern.
What a painfully milquetoast article. The writing on the wall was there for a long time, and thinkpieces like this are nothing more than a shrug and "it do be like that".
Again, people on Lemmy are frustrated that something “we all know already” was written down.
Can't the world just hop on here and read our lemmy commentary instead?
I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns.
Unfortunately the alarms are ringing for the wrong people. This is worrying as modern technology can allow these people to deal with mobs and riots a lot more effectively.
This is also why in certain grassroots communities people have been pressing for more radical, immediate action. If the big guys at the top start getting spooked then it could be too late for any efforts at dethroning them.
Yeah Bashar al-Assad knew there were a lot of people in his country that wanted to remove him from power. Because of this a movement to remove him from power completely failed. Oh wait, no, the opposite of that happened.
It's actually more the norm that smaller actions (successful or not) snowball into larger actions. A movement isn't a bunch of academics discussing ideology. It requires real actions non-academics can relate to.
Honestly it would be better for the people in power if this guy is never found. If they kill him, he becomes a martyr. If he's put on trial, that's an event that could spark protests. It's better for the powers that be if everyone just forgets this ever happened.
I agree that it most likely is in the best interests for those in power to just drop the assassination story and pretend it never happened, but if it is the best choice it's the best in a series of bad choices for the powerful. Underneath the immediate concern of one of the peonage getting up the courage to kill one of the Princes of the Universe is the general public response.
Every day the assassin stays free and in the news is a day everyone can see that the American public supports and condones the killing of people in C-suite (and likely beyond C-suite). That is one hell of a permission structure now in place. If the Powers That Be then pretend the killing didn't even happen letting the assassin off the hook, that's them giving carte blanche to copycats to do as they will, nobody is going to stop you. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Yeah, the thing about that is it extends to not just those you dislike. Using your Syria example, you as a private citizen can be murdered in the street by another private citizen with no repercussions, too.
You are an American, you don't live in Syria. As bad as America is, it's not Syria. Wanting it to get that bad is not smart.
Ring all alarms you say? Like that alarm for our world burning down? Or people living in ever shittier conditions? Or do you mean the one for sick people dying because they can’t afford the inhumane prices for treatment?
Just a rhetorical question, my friend. The writing was on the wall for a long time.
I'll ring that alarm in their fucking face
In the immortal words of Heavy Weapons Guy:
Waaa! Waaaaaaa! CRY SOME MORE!
You are dead. Not big surprise.
Mostly glee though
The only ringing in my head is that tingtingtingting of the starter ship in no man's sky
There's a plethora of contradictions. Americans hate for-profit healthcare, inequality, and CEOs, but love to vote Republican and worship Elon Musk. The sad reality is the people did this to themselves and will keep doing it to themselves.
No problem, just give us fewer reasons to hate the ultra rich and the systems that lift them up while pushing the rest of us down.
I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest.
I wonder if the general public will face collective retaliation. If the rich feel secure, they're going to want to put people in thier place.
You would see the exact same if a president was assassinated, regardless of the side you choose. Super happy people, super angry people.
A political figure of either party getting assassinated would spark some very ugly times. A bunch of universally hated CEOs? Not so much.
Fuck off bootlicker.
my neighbor was, in my opinion, one of the cops that murdered michael reinoehl in a death squad.
i didn't accept that as a good thing for the republic.
obama used a drone to murder a us citizen who was out of the country.
i didn't accept that as a good thing for the republic.
i do not accept any of the narratives about this death squad of one either.
and i don't accept that as a good thing for the republic.
luckily i will be dead ~Jan 20, 2025. so i won't have to watch the democrats, republicans, and maga burn the nation down.
I hope your death goes well. It sounds really peaceful.
If you're on the way out might as well take that neighbor cop along...