Let me see the list of Americans dead because they were denied coverage. Then I’ll care!
Those who profit from the status quo are the same who could have that information consolidated for review. They also know that maintaining your apathy is central to their business model.
If they have created a system by which they can profit immensely, but that profit could be taken away by the masses at anytime, the last thing they will do is enable you to care.
Your comment shows that they have been successful in tricking you into not only not caring, but actually advocating against your own interests.
Not caring about their CEO being shot? lol brainwashed!
They should unironically do this (I suppose they would need the family’s permission). But a Senator could make quite a name for themselves by reading off the names of Americans who have died due to being denied coverage.
On the other hand, given the current climate, they’d probably end up getting harassed by red hats so maybe not.
Savages, they don’t deserve any better!
Someone mentioned on Bluesky yesterday that they killed 2100 people a day on average denying people care.
I don’t doubt it!
Frankly my guy no one cares if a person like you cares.
You do lol
I’m out of the loop. Who’s dead?
UnitedHealthcare CEO
Thanks.
This is just another proof that we live in a capitalist dystopia. Only rich lives matter.
Everyone is losing their minds because they’re afraid there’ll be a run on popcorn, not because anyone will miss a waste of space healthcare CEO.
If people don’t feel like we can make things better with negotiation, this is where it goes. I’m not up for pretending I didn’t see this coming.
This may be good time to be an experienced professional body guard, because there’s a lot of healthcare CEOs left and no way was the alleged attacker (I didn’t see shit!) the only person they’ve hurt.
Love that the entire internet, left, right, authoritarian, liberal, and everyone in-between came out to say “lol, get rekt, oligarch.” Nothing I’ve ever seen has been as unifying as this. Running for office under the banner of beheading CEOs might sincerely get you elected.
As someone that could probably best be described as center-left (guillotine oligarchs yes, UBI yes, abolition of private property and free markets no), I do dare say that not a single common person on the right likes the billionaires either. It’s just that their side of the political isle has been co-opted by the billionaires even worse than the “left” side because being anti-tax and anti-regulation is more useful to billionaires than pro-tax and pro-regulation.
The left is not pro “all private property abolished”. Only " all private property of the means of production "
Or, when someone says “abolish private property” they’re not talking about your toothbrush.
In this context, private property is the stuff you can use to generate capital. Personal property is your toothbrush, your phone, clothes, furniture, bike, car, house etc.
If you own a second house for rental income, that’s private property. The house you just live in is personal property.
Yes, they are. Because by destroying the market, you also destroy the toothbrush making machines, and kill the toothbrush makers. Have fun eating the rich, but don’t complain when they end up stuck between your theeth.
When you have no idea what you’re talking about, you should simply say nothing.
Not all second homes are private property necessarily. If you work out of it then it’s personal property, like if you’re using it as a vacation rental and doing all the cleaning and maintenance yourself. If you hire someone else to do the work for you then it becomes private property. My preferred way of explaining the distinction is that private property is akin to absentee ownership, while personal property is stuff that is in active use by you personally.
if you’re using it as a vacation rental and doing all the cleaning and maintenance yourself. If you hire someone else to do the work for you then it becomes private property
Do you guys even listen to yourself? This makes zero sense.
Nah the right has one or three pet billionaires they outright worship.
These one or three pet billionaires have done a lot of image building to achieve this. They’re trying to be the “common man’s billionaire” and “just like us”. Musk spent a decade trying to appear like a nerdy engineer and when people started realizing he’s a shitheel, he pivoted to the “the elites are after me, it’s time for us to stop them together” shtick.
In general, the right (and I mean individual people, NOT politicians) hates billionaires almost as much as we do, but wrongly associates them with the left - but while it’s true that some billionaires are left-wing socially, they’re damn near all right-wing economically, because no billionaire is going to want to have less money.
Yeah the big issue is as you said. Ask someone on the right to name a bad billionaire. They will mention musk, bezos, Tim Cook, but probably only hating cook for being woke and money grubbing. The ones who pull the strings hide themselves. Nobody knows who they are they’re just CEO of x y z. There’s 150 billionaires in the US, 3 in every state. And they’ve spent a boatload of money getting very smart people to convince everyone they can that the problem is Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris. Tribalism is strong, and unfortunately people just lap it up.
3 in every state
On average…
There’s a bit like this in Daredevil. They’ve been tracing some shadowy acts back to Wilson Fisk, a horrible rich man nobody’s heard of. A top journalist is preparing an article on his actions based on circumstantial evidence.
Fisk, reading the situation and retaliating, opens a press conference introducing himself and voluntarily makes his name known to get on people’s good side.
Name them. I’d genuinely like to know who you’re referring to.
Liberals worship Gates, and Soros. Liberals are not actually left, they are the poor imitation we get in the states. Gates and Soros have spent permits for them rehabilitating their image and the liberals are lapping it up.
And the center loves Buffet and Bloomberg
Billionaires have the US political system fully in the pocket
For real? On top of Musk and Kochs, how about Miriam Adelson?
You don’t know Elon musk or the Koch brothers? There’s three off the cuff
guillotine oligarchs yes, UBI yes
That’s called center left now? I thought that was far left.
Center left is what we used to have after WWII.
Far left is what we worked for during the labour movement. Or so I thought.
You’re thinking eu not us. Overton window shifts in the us
If you aren’t working towards the establishment of Socialism, you can hardly be called “far left.”
Getting rid of the oligarchs and implementing UBI would be the first step before you nationalize key industries and introduce worker co-ops.
Imo both above is what I call far left without the whole flip the game board and starting again, in my experience saying that really scares people.
Capitalists can’t be ousted by asking nicely, that happens with revolutionary pressure. Since you can’t do step 1, UBI would only come alongside austerity measures as a way to “simplify government” and erode social programs. You also can’t translate that to nationalizing key industries either, let alone worker coops. We have hundreds of years of history telling us this.
Secondly, revolution isn’t “flipping the gane board and starting again,” it’s a wresting of control from Capitalists and establishing a new state owned and run by the working class, in its interests. Industry must be preserved and carried forward, and that doesn’t include immediately siezing all industry but doing so with respect to the degree that sectors and entities have developed and established effective internal planning, making markets less efficient vectors for growth and public ownership and central planning superceding it.
You also can’t translate that to nationalizing key industries either, let alone worker coops. We have hundreds of years of history telling us this.
I don’t agree with this. Worker coops exists in many places in Europe, and in said continent, some key industries are heavily controlled by the government.
In my country, Canada, we socialized healthcare without any revolution.
Down south, they had the labour movement that gave us the 40 hour week, the weekend and labour laws all throughout unionization and putting pressure on the capitalist class without “revolutionary pressure”, unless unionization is what you mean by revolutionary pressure. If so, the I agree.
You’re ignoring that these advancements in labor movements came as concessions from the bourgeoisie in the context of trying to prevent what happened in Russia from happening in Canada and the US.
There’s a funny hodgepodge of ideology here… “Guillotine oligarchs” sounds pretty cool, invokes the French Revolution, which was radical left, at the time. But then the unwillingness to abolish private property is either an erroneous conflation of “private” and “personal” or an unwillingness to actually change the system that produces the oligarchs.
It’s like bailing out the boat but when someone says “patch the hole” your like “but we need the hole!”
No, it’s more like I know we are not ready to have the patch the hole conversation.
I rather bail out the boat and during that time, when people slowly realize that these solutions work and have merit, and when people stop being scared of the word socialism, then it would be pragmatic to talk about patching the hole.
Before that, talking about patching the hole might actually be counter productive as most people don’t have critical thinking and would be turned off by “radical” solutions.
The biggest issue with implementing socialism today imo is people not realizing the solutions can be beneficial. I rather focus on socialists solutions that are “low hanging fruit” so people warm up to the idea.
I commented on a politics@lemmy.world post about a bunch of CEOs of publicly traded companies endorsing Kamala Harris saying that it hurts her campaign more than it helps and I got downvoted and had people replying to me saying “um, actually most people look up to CEOs, you’re the one out of touch.” I’m feeling pretty vindicated rn.
Private property ≠ personal property. Private property is mostly owned by businesses and corporations, not a person.
As we can see in the US, housing should never be private property, since the number of units that have sat empty for at least 12 months outnumbers our homeless population by a factor of over 70:1 counting all residential types (apartments, condos, duplexes.) If you only count single family detached homes, those still outnumber the homeless population by a factor of 30:1
How make no billionaires if capitalists allowed to keep owning means of production? Allow to get rich, and then kill?
Here’s a small set of proposals, definitely well thought of and not made up specifically for this comment to make a point:
Start taxing them heavily on wealth INCLUDING unrealized gains once it hits a threshold, but no wealth tax for normal people. Force companies to become either co-ops or publicly traded when certain thresholds are met - and if the founder has too much stock, the taxes on unrealized gains will force them to sell. But if it’s a co-op, don’t count anyone’s share in it as wealth for taxation, only any profit actually paid out by the co-op. My prediction is that companies with high profit per employee (think Steam) will become worker-owned co-ops and companies with lower profit per employee will be publicly traded (think Walmart, except of course Walmart is already publicly traded)
How’s public trading supposed to reduce wealth accumulation? Tesla is publicly traded but Elon still had enough money to buy and ruin Twitter.
Ultra high taxes on unrealized gains. There are no taxes on unrealized gains presently, nor a wealth tax. Which is why if his wealth increases 2x, his taxation… just does not, unless Tesla pays him dividends or a salary.
If Elon had to live with a, say, 99% tax rate on anything above a billion dollars and it included his Tesla stock not just money he has for real, he’d be forced to sell, or go to jail for unpaid taxes.
Why 99% and not 100%? Just to mock them.
Taxes. Tax anything over one billion at 100%
Over one billion? Way too fucking high.
We used t have “progressive” income taxes where higher income paid more, but tax breaks have largely gone to the wealthy over the last half century. While we still have tax brackets, they top off much lower than they used to. More importantly we have a really complex tax code, where some people are able to use loopholes and exceptions, such that many wealthy people pay at a lower rate. Were effectively a “regressive” tax code now
How stop 999 millionaire from buying government and changing tax law?
Limit personally donations by law. Block corporate donations completely. Force donations into a central pool for equal distribution to the parties.
I mean… If they’re forced to game the system so they stay just below the “rich” threshold all that extra money has to go somewhere besides their pocket.
Yeah, it’ll go to their friends and family.
You don’t fuck with the tax man. They got Al Capone, they’ll get you, and they’ll get the billionaires, if the laws are right and there’s enough funding to investigate ownership structures of large companies, and the relationships between different major shareholders.
Plus I don’t think anyone has hundreds of family members to hide away hundreds of billions.
Besides, you’d have to divide it before the company gets large enough for it to matter. If your company is worth 800 mill and you’re the only shareholder, selling off half to anyone for anything significantly less than the perceived value of the company, would be investigated as potential tax evasion.
I think a lot of people forget that tax authorities are supposed to look for these cases of hiding wealth. In many civilized countries, they do it for real.
You don’t see the difference between Al Capone, an open criminal who was known for peddling alcohol during prohibition (and probably a murder or three), and billionaires who have enough capital so that they’re basically under the jurisdiction of no individual nation? I’m not even talking about criminality, let’s take that element out completely… You still don’t see the difference between these people?
Also, you understand that the “taxman” is the IRS, right? And that Trump is going to pretty much defund them (probably leave just enough for him to target his perceived enemies).
So how come Jeff Bezos pays less tax than drag does?
Because the current tax code is designed for him, not drag. That’s what I would like to change if I was elected benevolent dictator for life with no risk of being deposed by the oligarchs. For the super wealthy, tax all assets, for the super poor, tax nothing and give UBI, and for the working and middle class, a fair progressive income tax, and property tax on homes you don’t live in year-round, but none on your primary residence. In terms of income tax, the tax brackets would go up slowly at first and then ramp up really high. Someone making 100k a year should pay roughly what they pay now, those making less should pay less, and those making 500k+ a year should pay a lot more than they pay now.
I think the powers that be underestimate our thirst for justice. This is the closest thing to justice for the rich we’ve seen in - maybe our lives?
I don’t want to live in a world of vigilante justice but this kind of thing is inevitable when the system fails us for as long as it has.
This is the closest thing to justice for the rich we’ve seen in - maybe our lives?
That submarine popping.
Karmic justice sure - aside from the kid who got roped into taking that voyage by his dad. Billionaires hubris treats the world as their plaything, and find out that nature doesn’t care about your net worth
I think that’s more hubris leading to death by misadventure. Ikarus got a little too warm.
I do want to live in that world. Make the plutocrats be afraid of breaking 1 billion in net worth, because everyone would know that’s how you end up on the hit list.
Is it preferable to status quo? It may even be morally justifiable. But the world I’d want to live in is one where people like this face justice through the same system you and I would.
the system changes the laws to make this behaviour legal. therefore no crime. no trial. no retribution. lots of profit for investors.
Deny that you know or even saw them. Defend them if they do get caught, through protest, fundraising, bail, etc. Depose those who put them in jail if they are sentenced.
I hope we never find out who did it. The killer just becomes this DB Cooper-esque legend who came out of nowhere, kill a CEO, and disappear never to be seen again. And even better, proving the complete and utter incompence of the NYPD, when they can’t manage to catch someone who killed in broad daylight in a city of cameras.
They will find someone on the street and frame them if they can’t find the legit shooter.
What? The politics of right / liberal free market capitalism creates those! Did anyone read Marx and Piketty?
Except the CEOs would have you beheaded first.
Yeah but there’s nearly 4,000,000 of us for each of them. It’s a numbers game.
Every billionaire has a place called home
They have to fall asleep at some point.
That’s the one enemy everyone has in common. We need more like those.
“Running for office under the banner of beheading CEOs might sincerely get you elected.”
Found my quote of the year.
Running for office under the banner of beheading CEOs might sincerely get you elected.
That would get my vote.
I couldn’t agree more, every Trump supporter I’ve seen or talked to is just gleeful about this. Liberal, Conservative, Progressive, Oldschool, it doesn’t matter, everyone in the 99% loves this. The day Brian Thompson was shot put a smile on the face of America.
He’s not even an oligarch. He’s the oligarchs’ toadie.
If this reaches the real oligarchs, we might see some change—and backlash but backlash is inevitable if before real change.
Everyone except the .world mods who keep tripping over themselves to blabber about how he was such a great man and should be respected for his hard work and stuff.
I’ve spent 10 minutes searching and came up empty. Any links?
Never mind I got my instances mixed up. https://sh.itjust.works/u/imaqtpie
Dude’s just a communist, and I mean that literally, trying to reconcile the world as it currently is with the way they want it to be. They blame the system, not the man. And there’s definitely an argument to be made there, but I’m too busy reveling
It could be the one thing that heals the country.
We have people like the Joker who give us philosophical questions about our civilization but we’ve yet to see a billionaire use their infinite money and resources to dress up in a suit and mask, fight crime and build a fancy car or jet with exotic weapons to fight real life villains.
To be fair, the Joker was a psychopathic murderer. He wasn’t just laying out deep questions.
“the Joker was a psychopathic murderer”
So a CEO then.
we’ve yet to see a billionaire use their infinite money and resources to dress up in a suit and mask, fight crime and build a fancy car or jet with exotic weapons to fight real life villains.
That’s a good thing, though. They may make for great movie and comic book fodder, but in real life, superheroes are pretty much just cops with fewer rules: rather than doing anything about the underlying causes of crime, they just beat up symptoms and theoretical bogeymen.
With his vast resources, Bruce Wayne could reduce crime by 75%+ by investing in prevention, but he prefers beating up people, most of whom are low level goons who probably turned to crime out of desperation, a lack of better options, or varying levels of coercion if not downright brainwashing by the main villains and their middle managers.
Batman would TOTALLY beat up a ton of entry level employees who AREN’T at fault as well as the CEO if insurance profiteering was illegal.
bruce wayne does in fact fight crime with money too. But it’s not enough, so he also needs to be the batman.
Yeah? What exactly does he spend on that diminishes the underlying causes of crime?
Does he provide housing for the unhoused?
Does he provide food for the food insecure?
Does his company provide a livable wage and reasonable benefits for every employee?
Does the hospital his dad worked at provide care that is free at the point of service?
Does he provide for schools with no cops to initiate the middle school to prison pipeline?
Does he pay for high quality pro bono legal aid for those who would otherwise be steamrolled by representatives of a system that incentivizes convictions regardless of guilt?
Or does he just cut a check to a Dickensian orphanage once in a while?
yes to all of those…
I’m gonna have to insist on sources for it all if I’m gonna believe you…
Um in the cartoon yes he was a huge philanthropist iirc.
Yeah the reality would be closer to The Boys or The Watchmen.
Just real pieces of shit, likely corporatized with a massive amount of PR keeping them popular while they murder babies and shit.
That’s what I’ve been saying. Or they could at least hire and outfit someone to do it. These people don’t have any imagination at all.
Spot effing on.
Yikes, can we not glorify the Joker? This is some cringe incel level stuff.
Wanna know how I got these downvotes?
I agree that glorifying him is an absolute incel take, but like the other commenter said, this is actually an appropriate use for this template. This isn’t glorifying him or anything.
Yes it is. This is a cringe “we live in a society” memes rebranded with a current event.
You get what you deserve.
Joker isn’t a real person, he cannot hurt you.
“Yikes”
Go back to Reddit.
Welcome to Lemmy. It’s cringe incel level stuff all the way down.
Well, go on back to reddit lol
I mean this meme template is old as a donkey, we’re not “glorifying” the joker. Just so happens the meme is fittingly dark. A perfect 5/7 meme
Nowadays nobody knows what a perfect 5/7 means.
skill issue
Even if it’s with rice?
Where the Joker excels is pointing out horrifying issues within our society. This is, in fact, one of those situations. It isn’t saying it’s good that the CEO was murdered, rather pointing out that society at large doesn’t care if it’s poor people who die by the millions. One CEO and it’s the most important thing happening. If this amount of effort and money went towards helping poor people then their issues would be solved, but instead we’re wasting it talking about one rich bastard only.
My wife always has the good morning America shit on in the morning and they didn’t say a damn thing today about the shooting. I wonder if the media billionaires have told their faces not to talk about this anymore.
I don’t think Good Morning America is that kind of show… It has been over a decade since I have watched broadcast TV so maybe I’m wrong, but I always remember that show as being one of those super positive, bubbly, morning shows that are all human interest stories and fluff? They’re not going to talk about dark shit like that unless it’ s like… 9/11 level. And at that point, they’d just cut to breaking news.
No, the Joker doesn’t. We used to mock “we live in a society” memes. This is that.
As the other comment says, different joker. Also, yeah a lot of its stupid and cringy. It all depends on the author and the context. As with all art though, it’s a tool for the author to send a message. Almost every hero and villain is a vessel for the author to talk through. They are making art and have something to say. You aren’t supposed to like the Joker, but he is supposed to carry a message still. That message is usually that our society is inhumane and flawed and treats people horribly.
That was a different Joker
Concern trolling is some cring incel level stuff.
While I wasn’t personally concerned (Joker was amazing in Dark Knight, a bad dude who is also worthy of being in memes)…
@iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works assuming you were concern posting not concern trolling
I have no idea what you’re trying to say, tbh.
This guy doesn’t live in a society
This 16 million thing is really making the rounds. It’s not 16 million deaths. It’s 16 million requests for insurance to pay the bill being denied. Yes, it almost assuredly results in lowered quality of life and probably even shortens lifespan (I don’t know how dramatically), but 16 million dying on the regular would wipe out the population pretty quickly.
Wow I think this is the first time I’ve seen this meme template used so appropriately.
Are people losing their minds, though? I thought the reaction was pretty muted. There was some celebration, to be sure, but I think that is a pretty rational response.
People seem to be losing their minds in a very positive way
Repeat after me: healthcare should not be profit driven…
Insurance is just a bad model for healthcare.
I don’t have any problem with hospital workers being fairly compensated. They have difficult jobs, and doctors are highly skilled and have expensive student loans to pay off. But the cost of care in the US is astronomical compared to any other industrialized nation.
Healthcare should not be profit driven.
You asked me to.
I’m glad that I live in a country with socialized healthcare.
I’m glad for you too. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if my parents had stayed in one of three countries we lived in before settling in the US.
More Americans die every year because of lack of access to medical care than from all of our wars combined.
Can I get a source on this? This sounds like a wild figure!
Actual research finds that annual “deaths caused due to lack of insurance” is around 40-50 thousand (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2775760/)
and “if the usa had healthcare as good as france, 101 thousand annual deaths would be prevented” (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deaths-rankings-idUSN0765165020080108/)
as for war deaths, the ~100 thousand barrier is breached when all wars back to the korean war (1950-1953) are included. Then world war 2 is massively over
so the literal truth of the original statement is that it’s maybe mostly correct if you consider “our wars” to only be wars that the usa played a key role in starting, and only count the last century, but false if not
(eg. the civil war would totally blow the number out of the water, world war 2 would totally blow the number out of the water, and with the unpopular vietnam war it would depend on what exactly your standards of “lack of access to medical care” are)
You’re only considering people without health insurance, not people who have it, but are denied coverage, or can’t afford it even with coverage.
if you totally ignore the second study, sure
People without health insurance are still victims of our broken health system.
3000 a day from heart disease
Actual research finds that annual “deaths caused due to lack of insurance” is around 40-50 thousand
The executive protection business will have an upswing.
Probably drone business too I bet
Why drones?
Ukraine v Russia has altered the modern landscape of suprise attacks. I anticipate as security groups increase, so will the methods of public retribution.
Now I’m following.
I was thinking about drone sales increasing as a means of protection, not as a means to liquidate CEOs.
I am for this.
I sure hope it’s not staffed with people that find CEOs repugnant…
There are no good billionaires and corporations are not your friend.
It’s a good reminder that the people who oppress us have names and addresses.
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Today I decided to collect a small mountain of Facebook posts of people who had claims denied by United Healthcare prior to 2024. I’m not shocked but also I am.
And we know their names and surnames, especially for CEOs.
Luckily, bullets outnumber evil CEOs.
Who’s losing their mind? I find this based as hell.
Who’s losing their mind?
Other insurance company CEOs.
Tim Walz made some gross tweet mourning this guy and calling it a tragic loss. Kinda underlines the whole “Democratic establishment is out of touch” line we’ve been hearing since the election
To be fair, the lead filled CEO was from Walz’s state. He is kind of required to make a statement and he couldnt exactly say “fuck that guy”.
He definitely could have said that. If the party of morons followed that line they would have won the damn election.
