This is possibly an unpopular time to mention a large portion of the left is opposed to capital punishment and the logic of empire.
Summary executions are exactly the kind of brutality I've witnessed from Israel for the last year and from the US empire my entire life, so while I won't mourn for Brian Thompson, who surely played a role in structural violence that ruined or ended countless lives, I do mourn a society that embraces the logic of empire regardless of whether it seems just from one lens or another.
I know this may be unpopular to point out, but summary executions and capital punishment are an authoritarian impulse, rooted in cultures of domination that the prison abolition movement has long been opposed to. As a supporter of this movement and a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, I have to see how staying in integrity with those principles means opposing capital punishment even for my enemies.
Is the lack of empathy towards this CEO and the rage at private insurance companies justified? Absolutely.
Like riots, this act of extremism should be seen as the language of the unheard, a response to decades of normalized corporate extremism, which has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US, due to lack of health insurance or denied care. Private insurance companies are effectively mass killers who obfuscate their crimes through layers of bureaucracy and the theology of profit-maximization. Just by lobbying the government and preventing Medicare For All, they are deeply complicit in ruining countless lives.
Our rage should absolutely focus on the structural violence that these corporations engage in every day, which both major political parties uphold. But the posts suggesting or cheering for copy cat acts mirror aspects of the status quo I will always oppose.
Is this a tiny minority view not even worth commenting on? Probably. Should the satire, memes and justified anger at the system be separated from the folks who genuinely want to see more vigilante justice? For sure. But allow this student of Thich Nhat Hanh to say his peace.
Empire wins not just through brute force but through the internalization of its values. The logic of empire is the belief that violence can solve systemic problems, and that "we" have a right to use violence to achieve our goals- that we alone (or our in-group) have the right to take life. This is the essence of state-sanctioned violence around the world. Since I oppose this poison when empires and "democratic" nations do it I have to oppose it when anyone does it.
Self defense is another matter. But how often do we see that logic twisted just as much too?
The real solution to this decades-old crisis is an organized movement to abolish private healthcare entirely and get a universal payer system.
We need a dramatic escalation in true people power. Massive union strikes like what we're seeing in South Korea could bring the system to a halt and bring about this change through mass non-cooperation.
Relying on fear to force corporations to behave better will prove a losing strategy in the long run. It may lead many executives to go into hiding, but it will not motivate corporate entities to voluntarily be less parasitic. They will invest in tighter security and lobby governments to suppress dissent because their corporate charters mandate ever increasing profits, as demanded by shareholders. Politicians will likewise rally to defend the system rather than capitulate to vigilante justice.
In total fairness, however, this event has succeeded in sparking a national conversation about our rotten healthcare system. It's awakened our latent anger, which before was suppressed by layers of apathy and resignation. This event pierced the veil of moral ambiguity - in taking a life in response to taking countless lives, it's brought the ugliness of structural violence into full view, and revealed the moral dimensions that so easily get obscured.
So long as this rotten system remains intact, we must blame the system for it's ugly side-effects. Malcolm X would call it the chickens coming home to roost. But if we truly want to see systemic change, we cannot sit passively, waiting and hoping that isolated acts of violence will destabilize the system. Moments like this demand a strong nonviolent movement to rise in its wake to give the ruling class a "reasonable" voice to negotiate with. We must articulate our demands and use strikes and other classic tools to force legislative reforms.
As anyone should be able to predict, the slain CEO will soon be replaced by someone just like him, because the constraints of pathological corporations demand pathological behavior from whoever is in those positions.
Ultimately, going after individuals is like going after the illuminati. It leaves the system off the hook. It also reinforces the capitalist notion that "the problem is a few bad apples." UnitedHealthcare is one of the most rotten of the bunch, but its operations are sustained and upheld daily by tens of thousands of people. This includes the shareholders, the politicians who have been bought off for decades, and the corporate media, which attacks healthcare reform and public champions like Bernie Sanders relentlessly to manufacture consent.
From healthcare to the media, the legal mandates of corporate charters are “rotten apple machines.” We have to keep pointing that out, again and again, as the documentary The Corporation did in 2003 and Sicko did in 2007.
Private insurance companies don't need to be regulated or reigned in. They need to be abolished, as virtually every other advanced nation in the world did decades ago. Let's not waste this moment. It's time we abolish private healthcare and organize to win.
Tim Hjersted is the director of Films For Action.
Corporations
Health
Human Rights
Politics