The murder of that “health insurance” CEO in the USA has blown the lid off a simmering conflict in which most of us are unwilling combatants. I’m not even repeating the dead guy’s name, because it’s irrelevant to my argument. And let’s even leave aside, for now, the person who pulled the trigger of the gun that fired the famously inscribed bullets. In my view, what killed the CEO was the the corporation he served with such brutal enthusiasm, backed by the money system that gives such corporations their apparently invincible power.
As I’ve said before, corporations are a cancer. In fact, I’ve argued that they meet the definition of demons, for all practical purposes. Effectively immortal, capable of possessing and enslaving people, motivated by anti-human goals and routinely inclined to torment and torture people, corporations are practically indistinguishable from the medieval concept of demons.
The dead CEO was – according to my view – a possessed being. The demon that possessed him was the “insurance” company he worked for. I put the word insurance in inverted commas in this case because UnitedHealth Care’s business can’t be honestly described as insurance in the real sense. That is clear from the fact that, as a matter of deliberate practice, the corporation refuses to pay legitimate claims made by its policyholders. The suffering deliberately caused by this business practice is intense and real for many thousands – probably millions – of Americans. Many commentators have stated as fact that this business practice is responsible for numerous deaths that need not have occurred if the corporation actually provided real insurance, as it is paid to do. Why would the murdered man have agreed to participate in such heartless and deadly practices? Well, he was paid a lot of money by the corporation and if he didn’t do the job there were doubtless many rivals waiting to do it instead of him.
This is the key issue in this story, which is by no means new. Corporations can, if they wish, subject any human beings they touch to whatever misery they can get away with, in the raw and undisguised pursuit of more and more money. (Not only humans, of course, but other creatures and anything else they can exploit.) Their entire goal is to make more and more money. That they provide jobs and goods and services is just a side-effect of their main activity of generating profit.
Profit above everything
For a long time many people in the so-called “West” did not worry too much about the depredations of the corporations. They were shielded to a large extent by a number of factors. Competition between corporations operating in the same industries helped, because if one corporation became too noticeably greedy or bad to work for, customers and employees could move to a better one. Regulation helped a lot too. Before the corporations totally captured governments, those governments were willing to enact regulations to curtail the worst excesses of corporate greed and rapacity. These days, however, competition has shrunk almost to nothing in many sectors as the corporations have either merged, organised themselves into cartels or been rolled up into the control of a handful of private equity funds that effectively control all corporate participants in entire markets. Where publicly owned competitors once existed, these have often been either sold or “corporatised”. Governments are now mostly so in thrall to corporations that the latter often effectively write their own regulations to serve their own interests.
Also, corporations have spent huge sums on advertising and public relations, sponsoring sporting teams and linking their names to popular causes and events in order to make people believe they are forces for good in the world. Corporations are masters at setting people against one another. Oppose a corporation’s plan to bulldoze a forest, poison a river or suck an aquifer dry and you will be attacked for wanting to destroy jobs and hurt the economy. Complain about corporations paying starvation wages, smashing unions and forcing terrible work conditions on employees and you will be accused of wanting to wreck the lives of “mum and dad shareholders” who allegedly depend on corporate profits for their investment dividends.
Inevitably, the fact that corporations have managed to stack the deck so comprehensively in their own favour is bringing the system undone. The murder of the “health insurance” CEO is a symptom of this. You only have to look at the massive public response to the event to see the signs. A majority of people responded with only the merest smidgen of sympathy for the murdered man, combined with a visceral insistence that the corporation had brought the event about through its own relentless callous inhumanity to its policyholders. Consequently there is a great outpouring of support and sympathy for the killer.
These two reactions led to the second most notable aspect of the killing: the push by corporate media to frame the victim as an innocent family man who did nothing to incite potential violence against himself, and to portray the perpetrator as somehow politically motivated. This effort on the part of the media to spin the story in favour of the corporate status quo and to avoid, as far as possible, acknowledging the role played by the horrific behaviour of the CEO’s corporation, led to a second backlash. Ordinary people from all sides of the political spectrum furiously denounced the corporate media’s reality-denying spin. This reminded me very much of Australia’s 2020 bushfire crisis, when a similar spin effort by the Murdoch media (which dominates Australia’s news and comment landscape) insisted the the fires were all the work of shadowy arsonists and nothing at all to do with climate change. For its trouble, the Murdoch press was lampooned and showered in scorn, as it always deserves to be.
An existential issue
It is clear that a great many people in the USA and elsewhere are getting desperately fed up with the cruel and dishonest behaviour of the corporations that effectively run the global economy and which do, very largely, as they please. In the case of health “insurance”, this is not simply a matter of annoyance or irritation: it is actually existential for many people. And the really big problem behind all of this is that for most people there is no possibility of recourse or effective appeal against ruthless corporate power. The financial might of the corporations has neutered regulation, corrupted politicians and turned the courts into an expensive and highly risky dice-roll.
As former US president John F. Kennedy once said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. I don’t quote that as a call to arms, just so you know. It’s a dispassionate observation that, if you make it impossible for really big problems to get fixed without violence then sooner or later you can expect some people to start trying to fix them with violence. People have been screaming and complaining about the US “health” system for ages and very little has been done to fix it. So it’s not exactly amazing that somebody finally pulled a gun. And remember, the USA is a country where people resort to the gun very, very often, over all kinds of issues.
Not surprisingly, the reaction of “the system” in the USA has been to double down. I heard that some health “insurers” have backtracked on some plans to make their products even worse than they already were, but otherwise it seems to be business as usual. About the only change is that more CEOs are being paranoid about their safety, hiring more bodyguards and getting their profiles off social media.
And then of course there is the law enforcement and justice system. Not surprisingly, the bloke who pulled the trigger has been charged not just with murder, but with “murder as an act of terrorism”. The explanation is that he was trying to influence corporate leaders, through fear, to stop being horrible. Using exemplary violence to influence a group of people is considered to be terrorism (sometimes).
The system shows its hand
When corporate interests are threatened, it is notable that the system reacts with so much more vigour than when the rights and welfare of ordinary people are being trampled. Note the case of a health “insurance” policyholder in Florida, who was recorded in a conversation with a health “insurance” representative complaining about her claims being denied. She was recorded saying: “Delay, deny, depose, you people are next”. The 42-year-old mother of three has no criminal record and doesn’t own a weapon. But she is now behind bars, charged with threatening to conduct an act of terrorism. As at least one writer has pointed out, the policyholder is not being punished because she poses a genuine threat to the well-being of a corporate entity, but is simply being used as an example to warn other members of the public that corporations have the whole system in their corner.
Meanwhile, in the real world, try telling the police that your cranky ex has been threatening to kill you. With luck you will get an apprehended violence order, but otherwise you might well be told that, in the absence of any real action by the cranky ex, there’s nothing to be done. You might wish, then, that you were a corporation, with the kind of status and rights that the system would be keen to protect.
The message seems to be that corporations can act as ruthlessly as they like with little or no chance of being held to account, but if ordinary people – frustrated at the lack of avenues for protest against injustice – take matters into their own hands (or even hint that they think somebody else ought to do so) they will be dealt with by the law to the fullest extent possible. In a sense, it’s a form of violence being used by the state on behalf of corporations to influence citizens to accept their lot quietly and without protest. But that’s not called terrorism, this time.
Where was the reaction when supporters of Donald Trump advocated hanging then Vice President Mike Pence? When the Murdoch press went for the jugular of Jeremy Corbyn? When the Murdoch press published a front page with crosshairs over the head of the Queensland Premier? All of those instances were far more serious and dangerous than the poor woman now being tormented for losing her temper with a demonstrably nasty corporation.
As corporations continue to tighten their grip on every aspect of the lives of ordinary people, as their abuses become more blatant and transparent, as the refusal of governments to act meaningfully against them becomes too much for people to bear, then expect those being ground under their hard corporate heels to start protesting more and more noisily. And much as we may disapprove, some people will consider violence among their options.
Corporations and governments could do something to prevent it. They could stop being sociopaths. But sociopathy means higher profits so I guess that option isn’t on the table. I guess that means we have to expect corporate behaviour to keep getting progressively worse until things really explode. And then won’t they act surprised!
Very well written, you hit the nail on the head. Look into the straw man the legal fiction…you.
Also the unum sanctum (Vatican). Canon Law article 100. The Cestu Quie Vie Trust. It will explain why corporations have it over we the people and how its been done. It will shock you.
One more thing look up the meaning of PERSON (Corporation) in the Black Laws Dictionary 4th addition. Its what the courts use.
Keep up the good work iam very impressed in your view and research