You may have heard that recently the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company, was slain in the streets of New York City. Then you may have heard that some people are celebrating this murder, and others are condemning this celebration.
This is sad on all counts.
It is sad that this man was murdered.
It is sad that he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people by denying them the healthcare that THEY HAD PAID FOR through their insurance, and that he used this money to enrich himself.
It is sad that someone was so disgruntled, they felt they had to take this CEO out.
And it is sad that from a large swath of our country, there is full-throated support to the point of worship of the small but mighty ruling class, our oligarchs.
It would appear that there is some amount of brainwashing happening.
In the late-seventeen hundreds, the peasants in France rose up, aligned with the bourgeoisie, and overthrew the ruling class by force, beginning the dismantling of the feudal system. And thank goodness. As a result of revolutions like this, we live in a world with some level of mobility between the classes. There is a chance, however small, that one can be born poor but work their way out of poverty.
Today there seems to be a small but mighty (and growing mightier by the day) group of oligarchs who would love to see the return to a feudal-like system, in which the poor stay poor and the rich grow richer. And I believe that if the French Revolution were to occur today, here, in the United States, it would be an upside-down revolution in which the poor fight amongst and kill themselves, rather than fighting the aristocrats who are holding them down. Actually, I don’t just believe that that is what would happen, I am seeing it happen presently.
There is a loud and vocal portion of the population in the U.S. who openly worship the folks who actively work to disenfranchise them. It’s wild. These people are championed as the “job creators,” when in reality, in many instances, they are exploiting the labor of many to enrich themselves.
In 1950 the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 20 to 1. Today it is over 300 to 1. Sounds pretty feudal (or futile?) to me.
So many in our country work several jobs to make ends meet, all while CEOs reap the fruits of this labor, hoarding it all for themselves, and paying $8 an hour while they buy multiple mansions and yachts.
And so many of us cheer them.
“They’ve worked hard,” we reason! "They shouldn’t be punished or scrutinized for their success!"
But they should be scrutinized for exploiting their workers, and stealing the vaaaast majority of the profits generated by these workers.
In the case of this CEO, he took it one step further. Not only did he rake in a massive CEO salary (and bonuses, no doubt) while lower-level workers in his company (without whom the company could not exist and profit) were paid a pittance, but additionally, his practices allowed thousands of innocent people to die.
I think most of us can agree that murder is bad. But when you deny healthcare to millions of people to make billions in profit...you are also murdering people. Many people.
We don't know who the killer is, but I imagine it was someone who had lost a loved one or who had gone bankrupt as a result of policies this CEO put in place to enrich himself. And I get it. It would be agonizing to lose someone so some rich prick could become richer.
From any angle, murder is bad. And this CEO murdered a lot of people. I don't celebrate his death, but I understand the inclination to do so.
He was the CEO. He made the rules. And the rules he made and played by extracted as much money out of people as possible for their “health insurance,” and then denied them the very thing for which they had paid so he could make a massive profit – resulting in their death or bankruptcy.
Did he care about these people who died as a result of his work as CEO? Did he mourn their loss? Did he empathize with their financial struggles that he caused? It wouldn't appear so. He provided a lavish lifestyle for himself and his family by stealing from others and refusing to pay for the care they thought they had insured.
What is crazy and perplexing about this is that so many of us gleefully and full-throatedly support monsters like this.
I know a woman who is staunchly against universal healthcare, and votes for candidates that support her view, but who also recently had to launch a Go-Fund-Me campaign for her husband who has leukemia. She hasn’t changed her mind about universal healthcare, and she can’t see the connection.
I can only believe this is due to the massive amount of disinformation at our fingertips, and to the slow dismantling of our education system over many years. We are being dumbed-down and this is intentional.
It is sad that someone felt so disgruntled that they needed to hunt a man down and take his life. But the circumstances that precipitated this event are even more sad – that thousands of people were left to die so this man could become rich.
And maybe saddest of all is that there is a growing faction of folks in our country who admire and worship these oligarchs who should instead be condemned, ensuring occurrences like this will become more and more frequent.
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