CURRENT AFFAIRS

We Are All the Same

The murdered CEO, in death, like all of us, must be made to own his life

Gaddafi wearing an insignia showing the image of the African continent —( C.C. 3.0 by)

When people complained about how bad people were talking about the CEO who was murdered on a Manhattan street last week, I thought of Mummar Qaddafi, the late, great, and authoritarian leader of Libya for over 40 years. If there is an example of how death makes us all equal, it is murder and especially so when it happens to someone controversial and famous.

Qaddafi, a legend in geopolitics, Africa, the Arab world, and a nemesis to the American empire, was murdered by his own people in 2011. It has been said many times that his own people killed him and the U.S. made it happen. It no longer matters what happened really. Qaddafi is gone and the record of his life, like all of our deaths, belongs to history, to the ages.

So it is for Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, who now belongs to the ages. He will be forever associated with the “why” he was killed and the “how” he was killed than anything else. This is the second Gilded Age where corporations are dominating our lives, getting bigger and stronger, merging, and then merging, and more and more, we are at their whim.

Thompson was part of that world. He is part of that unholy American system of corporate…