Political violence has become part of everyday life. The social media celebration of the killing of the CEO of a leading health insurance company, as well as the support for Trump's takeover team, come from the same source where the right questions are given the wrong answers.
Za "Time" from New York
On the traffic light across from the "Zara" store on Broadway Street, a poster appeared these days with a crossed out photo of the murdered director of "United Heltker" Brian Thomson, and then pictures of other leaders of the health industry with the inscription "wanted" were plastered all over Manhattan. The text about corporate profits from these "warrants" not only reminds the citizens of what they know well, but also why they got a new president whose promises resemble the sermons on the billboards next to the highways around the city. The support for Luigi Mangioni on the streets of New York revealed once again all the anger and dissatisfaction of the citizens that led to Donald Trump assembling a new team of his associates to return to the White House, while thousands of likes are accumulating on social networks on posts about the tragic end of the head of the leading house for health insurance.
Not only are kids killing other kids in schools—which happened again in Wisconsin—but political violence has become part of America's everyday life. The celebration on social media over the killing of the CEO of a leading health insurance company, as well as the support for the Trump team to take office, come from the same source where the right questions are given the wrong or controversial answers.
How did a twenty-six-year-old young man from a prominent Maryland family, having previously graduated from the most elite schools, become a kind of folk hero? And why there are no flowers in front of the "Hilton" for a man who left behind two children and a wife, partially explains what many have spoken about publicly for the first time:
"Ironically, today is a wonderful day for United Healthcare to deny me injections to treat cancer." “I'm sitting in the emergency room with a one-year-old baby who was about to be flown to New York for emergency brain surgery; instead, we spent three days in hospital because United HealthCare refused to allow an ambulance." "Six months before Mom passed away, her health insurance sent a notice that the medical expenses she had had in recent years would no longer be covered." "I guarantee we all know someone who has been rejected, rejected and rejected by health insurance companies... If you want to live, pay. And then they wonder why we don't cry."
COUNTRY WITHOUT INSURANCE
Behind these stories is an extremely chaotic health insurance system. America is the only rich country in the world that does not guarantee its residents mandatory medical care. Regardless of the fact that detailed explanations about the type of health insurance - usually obtained with the employment contract - are written on dozens of pages, no one knows for sure which of the doctor's or dentist's expenses will be paid, or in what amount.
Before entering the doctor's office, hours are always spent looking for the necessary information in those documents because two things very often happen: for example, at the dentist, they tell you that what you need is not covered by the insurance plan you have; second, to accept your card, charge nothing, but send you a bill after a few days, because the insurance refused to pay for the doctor's service. If you don't send a check for the amount they're asking for, they'll regularly send you reminders for the debt, which, month after month, gets bigger and bigger, followed by a letter from one of the debt collection agencies after a while. They call on the phone, send messages, and then start legal proceedings. They always get lawsuits, people have their bank accounts blocked, so they have no choice but to make arrangements to pay off debts that can stretch for decades. In worse cases, bankruptcy and house foreclosure follow, because being sick is a severe punishment.
Paradoxically, those who need health care the most have the hardest time getting medical care. Insurance companies have databases of citizens, everyone who has some problems has to pay much more than healthy ones. Data from KFF Health News shows that more than 100 million Americans, nearly a third of the country's population, have medical debt, and about 15 percent will not be able to pay it off in their lifetime, primarily because of the increasingly brutal treatment of health insurance companies. to their clients. On average, United Healthcare turned down one in three requests for treatment, in job ads you can see vacancies for nurses whose only job is to say "no" to patients.
All this is made even more difficult by the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which sells the same drugs in America at many times higher prices than in Europe. Those who have patience and sales skills can negotiate discounts at Walgreens and CVS counters that reduce drug prices, but the story with the coupons of these pharmacies is as clear as the explanations about the health insurance plan. Once understood, it will be understood better.
Although he had no such problems, Luigi Mangioni vented the collective anger of citizens against corporate America, which makes billions off people struggling to survive. In the notebook found in his backpack after the murder, he wrote that "parasites deserved it", because they "abuse the country for profit. I apologize for the trouble and trauma, but this had to be done."
Instead of sympathizing with Thomson, citizens gloated on social media: if insurance companies don't care about their lives, they don't care about the fate of those who make such policies.
Just as the election of Trump revealed the face of this country politically, showing that he is not an anomaly but the majority of America, so the assassination of the health insurance chief laid bare the pent-up anger against corporations whose executives earn tens of millions of dollars a year while patients die waiting for approval for treatment. The first follows from the second. That could be clearly seen in the worried voice of Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro as he spoke of "deeply disturbing support" instead of "conviction of a murderer," and Trump's transition team was silent as if it were nobody's business. Any attack on order comes in handy during a run-up to a takeover that shows Trump has grasped the lessons of his first term: Loyalty trumps expertise. And those who criticized him for many years understood the same thing.
REORGANIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY
After dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, who once terminated Trump's Facebook account, the one whom the president-elect has called Zuckerschmuck (kitsch) and Facebook the "enemy of the people" for years, decided to donate $1 million to the inaugural fund. the new head of the White House. Shortly before that, at the prestigious DilBook summit, the owner of "Amazon" Jeff Bezos said that he is optimistic and hopeful about Trump's second term, expressing his willingness to help the new president, which was just joined by the head of OpenAI. The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has long been among the closest associates of the future president.
It is more than clear why Zuckerberg or Bezos do not want to be at war with someone who constantly threatens to deal with opponents, but the respected "New York Times" columnist Thomas Friedman also writes that Donald Trump can win the Nobel Prize if he establishes peace in the Middle East based on the two-state plan.
Bernie Sanders, one of the most progressive representatives sitting in Congress and who has called Trump a "pathological liar" and a "racist" many times, recently told this liberal daily that there are areas in which he is ready to cooperate with the future president. For the senator from Vermont, it is Trump's announcement that he will limit interest rates on credit cards to ten percent, given that they are currently up to 40 percent, which means that a debt of 1000 a month is paid about a hundred dollars.
SUPPORT FOR A BETTER WORLD
Friedman and Sanders are not the only ones, but the ones with the most integrity who do not hesitate to support some of Trump's plans, and no one tells them that they are "wretched", "poor", "martyrs" or "blackmailed people sticking out of someone else's ass". . What they are doing is not cheap American pragmatism, as it appears on the surface, but support for what makes the world a better place. Well-known economist Paul Krugman explained it extremely simply when Trump, after praising his plan for peace in the Middle East, called him on the phone. "I can't believe that the 'New York Times' allowed you to write that," he heard on the other end of the phone, after which the future president of America got the answer: "Donald, I can write whatever I want." And you know that. When you do the right thing, I'll support it. When you don't do the right thing, I won't support it. By the way, I do not support your re-election as president.”
Things are neither black nor white, but one gets the impression that America will fondly remember Trump's first term, not because of his "fascism" with which political opponents scared the voters, but because of the lack of experience of the future members of the government for the tasks they should perform. The days when the Republican-majority Congress during Trump's first term rejected his proposal to repeal Obamacare, approved sanctions against Russia and voted to end military aid to Saudi Arabia will not be repeated.
The names of Robert F. Kennedy as Secretary of Health, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of Intelligence or Kash Patel at the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, far exceed what the Democrats used to scare voters. Not only because Patel says he would shut down the FBI headquarters, open a "deep state" museum in that building, and send 7000 employees to chase criminals around the country, but because there will no longer be anyone to stand up to a president who is compared to a driver in a car without brakes, throttles downhill. Consistent with his style of driving, the future head of the White House, when asked by "The Times", which declared him Person of the Year for the second time, repeated that he would not separate relatives with mixed immigration status, but in the style of black jokes, he immediately added that " would rather deport whole such families together”.
As scary as these things may seem to many, it cannot be denied that there is some dark humor in them. Republicans, who by nature should be conservative, have stolen the corrosive effect of humor from those on the opposite side of the political spectrum, to whom it is by nature much more appropriate and appropriate. The destroyers are always more cheerful than the defenders of the status quo, but these are strange times when the future Trump cabinet, filled with billionaires, should defend the rights of the working class that brought him to power.
And other things were mixed up - the scion of a rich family Luigi Mangioni killed working class child Brian Thomson as a symbol of corporate America. In Washington Square Park, a competition has just been concluded to see who looks the most like Mangioni in terms of clothing style - a hood on his head and a covered face - while on the surrounding fences around the construction site you can see his pictures with the saint's halo drawn on them.
Obviously, in this confusion of ideas, the problem was not the very concept of neoliberal America, but the autocratic matrix in the behavior of those who ruled and had the opportunity to create a world in which mothers would not soothe in their arms children awaiting brain surgery, cancer patients to hear that they were denied medicines without which they will not live long, nor will citizens fear whether the eighty-fourth school shooting will happen by the end of the year. They had a chance. Now it's up to others to do what they want.
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