By Eli Plaskett
A technical journalist with a local Cincinnati publishing company
This week, with a black-humored sigh of relief, millions of people have bitterly mocked the murder of a man whose avarice has caused more human suffering than all but the worst of history’s myriad monsters. And today, a gaggle of pearl-clutching scolds have raised their hands in shock — shock, I tell you — that the average American feels no sympathy for the single man who has done the most to drive other human beings into poverty, homelessness and an early grave.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson helmed a company that denied insurance claims at twice the rate of its competitors, causing hundreds of thousands of human beings to miss out on necessary medications and medical procedures, or else take on enormous debt to access this life-saving and health-making care. He instated and enforced the policies that forced people into poverty or an early grave because denying healthcare to his company’s customers made him and his fellow shareholders obscenely wealthy. Millions of people paid into his company on the promise of having a backstop when their health failed them, and he broke that promise every day to take home more money in a day than the median household earns in a year.
His empire of pain and suffering is part of an industry that is one of the leading causes of poverty and homelessness in this country, and it is at such a scale that no statistician can adequately estimate how many people have died from untreated or poorly treated medical conditions so that he might see the numbers in his numerous bank accounts go up.
Like most CEOs, Thompson expected to be lauded by society for his atrocities, and the wealthy elite are shocked that most Americans find his murder grimly amusing. The murder of one man with a pistol is horrific, they say, while they refuse to state plainly that they find the murder of tens of thousands with through policy choices to be perfectly acceptable.
There is no justice in the United States, and this is by design. In the past twenty years, we have seen widespread financial crime crash the economy while the perpetrators received government bailouts. We have seen the courts legalize all but the most blatant forms of bribery and render the laws left on the books barely enforceable. A president can attempt a coup, solicit bribes and steal classified documents, and he will be elected again.
The executive teams of corporations have proven they can commit every crime imaginable without consequence. The Sackler family can lie to the public about the addictiveness and danger of its medicines, cause an epidemic that drains billions from society and kills tens of thousands every year, and their personal wealth will remain untouched as their company pays a fine that barely scratches their obscene profits. Boeing can ignore basic quality controls, causing two planes full of people to crash and kill everyone on board while whistleblowers die under mysterious circumstances, and not a single person has faced legal consequences.
For decades, the wealthy have bent their will toward ensuring that they cannot face legal consequences for their atrocities, and now they are aghast that someone availed himself of the only means of redress left. They have built a society in which vigilante violence is the only recourse when the wealthy wreak havoc on your life, and they cannot believe that a man has taken the only path left open to him.
Laws exist to limit chaos and violence. Foolishly, this country has sought to line the pockets of the wealthy by defanging and diminishing the laws that would hold them accountable. Without any legal recourse for the limitless crimes of the wealthy, chaos and violence have arrived, as anyone should have expected.
And yet, the political and financial class are outraged. They demand that the public be empathetic to Thompson when he and his peers have abandoned all empathy for the public at large, have inflicted suffering that few can even comprehend. They demand empathy for themselves while most Americans suffer in the shadow of their merciless greed. They demand we respect his family’s loss while his company ruins countless families across the country.
Instead, the population at large recognizes this fundamental truth: Thompson lived a predatory life, and his victims laugh at his death.
The billionaire class has won. The government will do nothing as they prey upon humanity. Their prize is an armed population who sees no humanity in the oligarchs who profit from the nation’s suffering. Violence is unavoidable, and it is foolish to believe otherwise.
But it is also foolish to celebrate this world they have built. Societies developed laws because vigilantism is unreliable and inevitably leads to collateral damage. A society that relies on murder to hold the powerful accountable is an unstable society, and the chaos that will result will cause widespread suffering.
I feel no sympathy for Brian Thompson, nor for his family or for his peers who only just realized what kind of world they have been working toward. But we are entering an era of violence and chaos, and I am afraid.
Feature Image: Photo by Debashis RC Biswas on Unsplash