This mural of “St. Luigi ” was projected onto the side of a building in New York’s Lower Manhattan.
We have always had a cut-and-dried definition of murder: a person or persons kills another. It’s a serious crime and a capital offense that can warrant the death penalty, depending on the state. It’s occasionally mitigated by self-defense, but not always. It’s occasionally not punished at all, as in the Rittenhouse case, when a young, psychologically damaged dimwit crossed state lines to go to a rally and kill people because he didn’t like their politics. (He is getting punished by life instead; no one wants to hire him.) On the other hand, a woman in Ohio was sent to prison for forty years, last October, for poisoning her violently abusive husband. Which of these two murderers had just cause or self-preservation to offer as reason for the crime, and which got the full hammer of the law? We see that justice is hardly blind and it can be very, very biased— certainly in America.
The Luigi Mangione case, the killing of the CEO of United Healthcare, provides a watershed event in our definition of murder. The projected mural of St. Luigi, pictured above, and the massive quantity of supportive mail sent to him in jail, makes it clear that his crime is a heroic act to those whose insurance companies have deprived them of life-saving care; he’s not a criminal to them, but a Robin Hood.
But what about the victim, Brian Thompson? His job was to make sure that the company made a huge profit that rewarded shareholders with fat checks on a regular basis. Enhancing profitability required denying claims, beefing up the bottom line. Denial is based on an unknown algorithm. We don’t know what that entails, but we can speculate: could they sell the farm to pay for treatment instead, after decades of paying insurance premiums? There isn’t any human compassion involved, or there wouldn’t be so much support for the guy who killed the CEO responsible for the company’s decisions. How many people died because their claims were denied and they couldn’t afford life-saving treatment—or didn’t want to leave the family penniless? Is a corporate CEO ever seen as a murderer, even when responsible for a lot more people dying than Luigi Mangione?
We have a federal agency, the Federal Insurance Office, that was set up as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. These people are supposed to be making sure that insurance companies are working in the interests of consumers. Are they accessories to the deaths of people turned down for insurance payouts? Are the politicians who got campaign donations from insurance companies, and turned a blind eye to their donors letting people die, just as responsible for untimely deaths as the CEOs who deprived clients of their needs? Are the government’s spokespersons who intentionally advise against life-saving practices, like vaccinations or wearing masks, accessories to murder? Or are charges of murder only applied when the perpetrator is relatively helpless against the powers that be?
Over the last century or more, we’ve allowed industry to dump one poison after another into our fragile ecosystem, without real consequence. The fact that burning fossil fuels has been knowingly destroying that ecosystem for decades, creating climate changes affecting human survival, is never viewed as intentional killing, and deaths from the effects of environmental toxicity, if reported, are viewed as collateral damage, if examined at all. The plastics in our environment are now found in significant quantities in our brains, and the consequences are just now under examination. The foods we eat are too often loaded with chemicals that have no place in human biology. But are these things, which sicken people, considered murder weapons? Of course not—but why not?
We’ve had an Environmental Protection Agency since 1970, which of course, under the current administration, has had funds frozen, and the shadow president is selling this idiocy as a cost savings to families. Regulations that keep corporations from poisoning us further are cut back now or eliminated; vaccines that have eradicated diseases are discouraged, and people are dying from them again. We’re in a state of anti-progress.
It seems hard to believe that our current “leaders” are not going to be here forever, but they won’t. The very people who elected them, who risked imprisonment for a coup to restore their candidate to power, might very well be the force that removes him. After all, they didn’t believe that their guy was going to take their government jobs, get rid of Medicaid, close the agencies that help them, or even threaten their Social Security. But here we are, and if these people were mad before, they are much madder now. There are a lot of furious people in America, on both sides, just weeks into the current administration, and the damage already done is nothing compared to what four more years could bring.
By the time the ostensible Kremlin plants have reduced America to a relative rubble, we’ll have to start all over again defining what we stand for. It will be time for another constitutional convention, where we determine the rules we’re going to live by when the monsters are gone, giving the Constitution a 21st century refresh. That’s when we can stop murder for profit, a colder, harsher crime than murders of passion or self-preservation.
While we’re upgrading the Constitution, we should also look at what is murdering Americans, other than the obvious. Some deaths can ultimately be tracked to people, like the anti-abortion politicians who caused pregnant women to die, despite medical evidence, or the manufacturer of cars that explode. Things that kill can be traced to an industry, if not a person, like cancer-causing pesticides. Our definition of murder is simplistic and without nuance, and leaves too much killing unpunished. Far fewer people would die before their time if there were consequences for denying them needed care. Denying care to bolster the profit margin is sociopathic, and in a just world, it would be a crime.
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“…death was everywhere at work and had at the same time become indefinite.”
—Time Regained
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Proust Said That 