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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If CEOs get to celebrate making money by killing people we get to celebrate vigilantism.
At least with vigilantism fewer people die.
People should have re-optimized the economy a long time ago.
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
Almost as if the media values billionaires way more than the average person does.
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.
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.
Thats when paranoia hits.
Let them feel uncomfortable for the rest of their existence.
With a big enough crowd, no matter the size of the gun, the crowd wins.
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.
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.
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.
Wish Harris channeled that sentiment in her campaign by championing M4A, so people might actually want to vote for her
The only ringing in my head is that tingtingtingting of the starter ship in no man's sky
My eyes started rolling the second the writer said “the horrifying news.”
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.
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.
It’s really bringing the corporate shills out of the woodwork.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
In a system where justice is only dealt to the lower class - that action is guaranteed to be carried out outside the system.
Ironically it appears that the solution is the second amendment solution that is championed by the right.
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.
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.
Not to mention the use of DIY suicide drones.
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.
In before it gets rebranded Critical Structure Therory.
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.