What do you call one health insurance CEO shot dead in front of a Manhattan hotel? A damn good start.
Jokes aside, I’m not going to pussyfoot here. The only objection I have to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is that it may have been an assassination. He should have gotten due process. His death should have been an execution after a fair and public trial by jury with reasonable opportunity for appeal. However, he is not guilty of any crime meriting capital punishment under the law as it exists today — at least none that I know of.
Nevertheless, I think Brian Thompson is a despicable man working in a despicable industry. The health insurance industry makes its profits by second-guessing physicians and denying needed healthcare. This industry exists for no better reason than that in the US we’ve allowed access to healthcare to remain subject to market forces. When the Affordable Care Act was working its way through Congress, its opponents complained about “socialist death panels” as if those were somehow worse than the capitalist death panels we already have via corporations like UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Anthem, Cigna, etc. Furthermore, UnitedHealthcare is the biggest provider of Medicare Advantage plans in the US, and thus profits from the exploitation of the elderly.
Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. It is government-subsidized private health insurance, heavily marketed using deceptive advertising to senior citizens who might not understand the difference. Once these senior citizens are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, they often find themselves with limited choices in doctors and hospitals, higher copayments, and routine denial of needed care due to “prior authorizations” leading to large and unexpected bills when they can least afford to pay them.
As CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson presumably knew all of this and did nothing about it. This makes him responsible for everything UnitedHealthcare employees did under his leadership. Were Thompson a general instead of a CEO, we might talk about command responsibility and draw parallels to the war crimes of Tomoyuki Yamashita and Ernest Medina.
However, I have not heard of command responsibility being applied to corporate leadership. Nevertheless, I regard Thompson as a con artist for pushing Medicare Advantage, even if his con is not only legal, but subsided by the US government.
If I still believed in the rule of law, I would denounce his assassination. However, the rule of law protects men like Brian Thompson without binding him, and binds the rest of us without protecting us. Therefore — rule of law and the opinions of our leaders be damned — this asshole had it coming, and I instead celebrate his death.
Furthermore, I hope this is but the start. I want to see billionaires and CEOs living in fear of wildcat strikes and assassinations. It should be an occupational hazard for these overpaid, overprivileged self-styled “masters of the universe”. I certainly didn’t do it myself, but if they find the gunman and put him on trial, they’d better not put me on the jury. I might just vote to acquit, state’s evidence be damned.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny.
When labor fears capital, there is poverty.
When the government fears the people, there is liberty.
When capital fears labor, there is prosperity.
It would nevertheless be better if the law clamped down on the exploitation of the vulnerable by corporations so that men like Thompson could be brought to justice instead of gunned down in the streets of Manhattan like mad dogs. After all, we can’t count on vigilantes having consistently good aim and not shooting innocent bystanders by mistake. But if crimes like Thompson’s are permitted by law, is it really so shocking that people might figure out that the law is no shield — and seek recourse in the sword?
To paraphrase Michael Moorcock’s introduction to one of his collections of Elric stories, if the people at the top reach for a gun as the first solution to every problem, can those at the bottom be reasonably expected to not do the same? Americans have been remarkably restrained in the use of violence against the privileged and powerful, but perhaps that is finally changing. This almost certainly isn’t what some Republicans meant by ‘Second Amendment solutions’, but I’ll take it in the absence of a rule of law and a justice system where equal justice under law isn’t a hollow slogan. For my part, I’m glad somebody with a gun shot somebody who might actually have had it coming, instead of turning yet another classroom into a turkey shoot.
Why do I not only hold such sentiments, but express them? It’s simple: the powers that be profit from the way things are. As long as the richest and most powerful among us benefit from the status quo, nothing will change. If assassinating CEOs is what it takes to make those who profit from the way things are pay for it instead, then I have a hard time insisting that the end cannot justify the means.
If the lives of the poor don‘t matter to the rich, then why shouldn’t the poor eat the rich? There may once have been a time when the richest among us understood noblesse oblige as enlightened self-interest, but that time seems long past. If there was ever a social contract, the richest and most powerful have rendered it null and void; the rest of us are just starting to figure out that we owe our so-called betters nothing. Perhaps, instead, the time of the guillotine has come around again?
If we’re gonna party like it’s 1789, hold on to your heads.
This didn’t end so well the last time around, for the logic of the guillotine is no more than a siren’s song.
Or, perhaps, a song by Twisted Sister.
Since the law don’t seem to care / Then don’t you think it’s only fair? / Call for street justice!
I think we’ll find out; the next four years might prove to be a fimbulwinter of discontent. In the meantime, don‘t bother to remonstrate with me if you’re offended by my lack of sympathy for a man who got rich off others’ misery. He’s not in my network, and his claim to my empathy requires prior authorization.
Don’t tell me that Brian Thompson was a human being, either. Nor do I care that he was a loving husband and father. Adolf Eichmann surely loved his wife and children, too. Did that didn’t stop him from presiding over the Final Solution, the industrialized mass murder of over six million Jews, Communists, trade unionists, queers, and Roma? Of course not.
Being a loving husband and father didn’t stop Brian Thompson from presiding over every death that resulted from the determination of the corporation he led to deny as many claims as possible. As far as I’m concerned, Brian Thompson is guilty of one count of negligent homicide for every death resulting from a denied claim. Somebody should have reminded him that the patients denied care by the company he ran were no less human than he was. That knowledge might have saved his life, if he had been willing to give up his blood money. But he’s dead, and he was no friend of mine, so I can’t even be bothered to piss on his grave. What empathy I possess is reserved for those who suffered as a result of Thompson's actions.
Hell, I’m a devoted husband myself. No kids, but it’s not like my wife and I didn’t have fun trying. Nevertheless, I can also be heartless enough to despise Thompson for the harm he did in life. Why? Simple: Catherine is one of my people. Brian Thompson is no more one of my people than I was one of his. Reserving kindness and concern for one’s in-group is only human.
And if somebody died because of the software I helped write, neither the person I had gotten killed nor their friends and family would care about how good I was to my wife or that I’d pet every stray cat that came to me. Why should they? To them, I’d just be the murderer of somebody who mattered to them. And if I was cut down in turn, that would be no more than my rightful due. If you live by the sword, you run the risk of dying by the sword in turn.
If I were in Thompson’s position I might have been no better than he: merely another careerist doing my job, collecting my pay, and not considering the consequence of my work as long as nobody thought to rub my nose in it. Evil is often as situational as it is banal. That’s the goddamn problem: if you put a person in a position where they must make decisions affecting people they’ll never see, speak to, or think about except in abstract terms, that person will end up doing heinous shit. When those in power come to think of those without it as claimants, taxpayers, subjects, illegals, undesirables, human resources, or human capital, they reduce living, breathing people to mere things. And sometimes systemic violence begets the sort of personal violence that befell Thompson. So it goes.
We are mere things to people like Thompson, not people. What they do to us, or allow to be done, is just business. But we’re supposed to care when one of the numbers retaliates against systemic violence with personal, direct violence? Well, I refuse. Let his surviving family and friends mourn him, if they want to, and be damned to them. Because it’s always personal when you hurt people, or make decisions that lead to needless suffering for people who can’t fight back. Brian Thompson learned this the hard way, and he did not survive the lesson. Too bad for him, but he’s out of network to the working class, gunshot wounds are a pre-existing condition, and treatment for the consequences of your decisions as a CEO requires prior authorization.
Admittedly, the assassination of a CEO is murder in the eyes of the law. But mine are the eyes of a working-class man, and I call it street justice. Or, if you prefer legalistic language, justifiable homicide. This is how we do things in New York. If the law does not bind and protect all of the people equally, then the people are under no obligation to obey it. Nor do the people owe empathy to the ruling classes when one of them becomes a casualty of the class war they effectively wage on the rest of us through their indifference to any consideration save ever-increasing profits.
Every other motherfucker like Brian Thompson and his bosses and shareholders ought to be in the dock for the shit they do to turn a profit: denial of valid claims, wage theft, price gouging, mass automated copyright infringement to train AI, buying Republican politicians — I don’t care if it’s currently legal. Make that shit illegal first, and if these assholes don’t get the message, then bust them. Indict them, try them, convict them, confiscate every penny’s worth of assets they’ve got, and then put them up against a wall and give ’em a blindfold and one last cigarette. ’Cause I’m sick of all of this bullshit. Nobody should be above the law in the USA. Not even God. But if the rich and powerful want to set themselves above the law, they can answer directly to the people.