Everyone knows Bin Laden because his name was plastered all over the news for months on end. People have been angry at United Healthcare for a lot longer but it was always a faceless corporation. This event has put a name to that corporation and a focus for that anger. If the media covers this like they did Bin Laden I guarantee everyone would remember his name.
If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, we'd have been talking about him already. It's not like United anonymized their CEO position or anything, there's been a face to the corp the whole time. It's just that nobody cared.
I get that people are glad he's dead. But be realistic; he's a piece of shit, but he's not fucking Bin Laden. Gross indifference to suffering patients and flying planes into buildings are both despicable acts, but on two completely different orders of magnitude.
See, that’s an additional problem. Companies like this absolutely kill significantly more people than one religious cult leading terrorist did. And the CEOs, and C-Suite as a whole, are to blame for those deaths.
It’s like theft, everyone is scared of their house being broken into, and the media loves pointing to street criminals as the real person to watch out for. But, by and large corporations steal significantly more from their own employees (wage theft) than street criminals ever do, not to say anything about white collar criminals and how much they steal and how absolutely bonkers Justice is biased there too in comparisons to street criminals.
The reason Joe CEO isn’t a recognizable name is because corporations don’t want to demonize their own, they want you afraid of your desperate neighbors and those they’ve ‘other’d (minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+), not the rich. The media will always make you afraid of the others and the lower class, instead of the ones that are actually killing you; the %1.
Companies like this absolutely kill significantly more people than one religious cult leading terrorist did. And the CEOs, and C-Suite as a whole, are to blame for those deaths.
Which is why we should hold them accountable, instead of offering them an easy way out of facing any consequences like this numbnuts vigilante did by granting Thompson a swift and early death.
You can’t win against the corporations when they own the politicians and courts and their behavior is ignored or condoned. Thats why this is absolutely a moment where the C-suites will see some fear of consequences.
The whole point of a corporation is so that the people involved don't get held personally responsible when bad things happen. It's virtually impossible for them to be held accountable with our current laws.
It's virtually impossible for them to be held accountable with our current laws.
Then we change the laws, because it's completely impossible to hold them accountable when they're killed before a trial could ever occur. Now all his ill-gotten earnings will be given to his already-wealthy family instead of distributed back to his victims and surviving families of his victims.
Not in the slightest. He's free. His money is safe and secure. He won't spend a day behind bars. Just because he stops breathing doesn't rectify his wrongdoing. There are still victims of his actions right now who would probably love to have seen him face a trial and be forced to pay back everything he took.
He felt like... what... A minute of pain, before his lights faded out? How the fuck is that justice? If I oversaw the deaths of thousands of innocent people, I could only hope to be so lucky that being shot in the street is the worst punishment I'd face.
Not to rain on your parade, but how do we do that when they're the ones "lobbying" (aka paying) for the laws to be changed? Money speaks, and they can spend a ridiculously large quantity of it without worrying about making ends meet.
It’s not the type of change people want. However if violent retribution is all that’s on offer it makes perfect sense that someone would eventually take that deal and that people would celebrate it.