A.R. Moxon: A System Built to Eat People Never Stops Eating

[Nevilledog]

https://www.the-reframe.com/a-system-built-to-eat-people-never-stops-eating/

I've been thinking a lot these days about the rising religious fascism and murderous oligarchy of the Republican Party, which clearly is the culmination of a decades-long strategy, and also about the near-total capitulation ahead of the fact of the Democratic party, which also seems to have been the result of a decades-long strategy. And I've been thinking a lot about opposition, and what it will look like for us to become the opposition party that we need and which doesn't yet exist.

Let's start with Luigi and Danny.

This month a man murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthCare, which is a company that makes tens of billions of dollars by denying health care for people who desperately need it, in an industry that competes to see who can deny the most health care for the most people. (I read yesterday that they sometimes repossess prosthetic limbs for nonpayment, which holy shit.) They think they caught the guy who did the murder; his name's Luigi Mangione, and people are calling him "Luigi" like a friend, and sort of making a folk hero out of this guy who has murdered the head of a murder company. Luigi is being charged as a terrorist, which is something people have noticed did not happen to people with much bigger body counts—for example Dylann Roof, a young neo Nazi who committed mass murder in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who killed 9 Black people in hopes of starting a race war. And yes, they made a show of perp walking Luigi down the streets of New York, where he was not captured, flanked by an army of storm troopers who did not capture him, as well as New York mayor and famous canned ham Eric Adams, who also didn't do shit to catch him. A McDonald's worker did the thankless job, as McDonald's workers often do, and this ended the nationwide manhunt, which is not the sort of institutional attention that most murder victims receive. Word is they'll seek the death penalty for Luigi, which I've noticed doesn't disturb most of the people who have been saying killing is never the answer. It's reported the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, is proposing structural changes to New York's emergency calling system, creating a new special hotline just for CEOs, one presumably that the police—an institution that costs New York City $5.8 billion annually, for which they provide important services like not stopping murders and shooting into crowds to stop fare jumpers—will actually answer. Anything at all to make CEOs more safe, appears to be the word, now that exactly 1 of them have been murdered, an act that is apparently more disturbing and dangerous to our system than piles of corpses of schoolchildren murdered in one school shooting after another, year after year after year, none of which I'm told can ever result in structural change, because I am told that taking political action to prevent future tragedies would politicize the tragedy, which I am told is the most disrespectful thing you can ever do. Apparently there is a carve-out for CEOs.

What I'm saying is, our system could not be making it more clear, in bipartisan fashion, that the murdered CEO's life matters more than yours or mine or anybody else's who has been murdered in the last year, including all the thousands or millions of people murdered by the murdered CEO.

Meanwhile the entire chattering class spent the better part of this month—which has featured some of the world's most powerful people doing and planning some of the most awful and upsetting things imaginable—wondering what could possibly lead the public to be so callous as to celebrate the murder of another human being, somebody with a life and a family. You can read more of what I think about the killing and the reaction here, but it's understandable the professional chatterboxes would raise an eyebrow; giving murderers first-name-only hero status is very common, but it's usually the exclusive purview of conservatives, who really enjoy the sight of one of their own murdering somebody they think needs killing and getting away with it; however, the celebration of "Luigi" is more of a bipartisan affair, and that seems dangerous to the chatterboxes in a way that celebrating for example "Kyle" is not.

*snip*

[Clouds Passing]

1. That's the way to fix the problem, more free security for ceos

[harumph]

2. This is a must read.

Sardonic and brutally true.

[1WorldHope]

3. We have all been pretty compliant peasants.

[dlk]

4. There has alway been a double standard of justice in this country: one for the rich, and one for everyone else

If you remember the crash of 2008, with rampant malfeasance and criminality in the financial industry, the only person to see jail time was Bernie Madoff.

If you’re wondering why, it’s because he stole from the rich. Otherwise, he would have been given a pass, just like everyone else.