Luigi may be just as nuts, but he did choose a more widely reviled target in America, where health insurance is widely acknowledged as being substandard.
Luigi has a lot in common with the Narodnaya Volya.
In the late 1880's, a group of socialist revolutionaries in Imperial Russia called the Narodnaya Volya set out to effect social change through targeted political assassinations. They believed these selective murders would provide the spark that would ignite the peasantry against the regime, as peaceful means of affecting change had yielded no results (it was, after all, an autocratic regime sans elections).
How'd that work out for them?
Not so good.
Luigi seems to be thinking along the same lines and hasn't learned any of the lessons.
Is he an isolated case, or is he the harbinger of much worse to come?
Already, one healthcare company that was going to raise rates decided not to in the wake of Brian Thompson's assassination. On one level, that's good. On another, it sets a very, very bad precedent: it shows violence and intimidation works. And if you let people know that violence works, what will you get more of?
Go on, guess.
The outpouring of anger and derision at Thompson's murder, the crocodile tears and laughing emojis, all show that something is truly, deeply wrong with American healthcare insurance providers. More importantly, it shows there are deep problems in American society in general, in that people are now resorting to assassinations.
That's a glowing, mile high sign that things are bad. It's the red flag of red flags.
With Donald Trump, every oligarch's best buddy, about to reoccupy the Whitehouse and make America safe for rapacious billionaires again, it doesn't look like change is going to be forthcoming any time soon.
We are entering a new Gilded Age, where the rich flaunt their wealth and openly try to buy the political system. According to Robert Reich, "815 billionaires saw their combined wealth sky rocket by at least $280 billion after Trump's win." And new tax cuts are forthcoming... for the rich, naturally. "The net worth of the twelve wealthiest people just passed $2 trillion." Unbelievable. We're going to be talking about trillionaires soon. None of this is good. Wealth polarization is a sign of increasing social instability. Remember, Monopoly the game is and always has been a warning, not a how to.
Ever since The Powell Memo in the Nixon Administration, when Big Business organized to roll back the accomplishments of Organized Labour, 50 trillion has been transferred from the middle to the top. Salaries of executives have exploded, stock buy backs have been made legal again, areas of the economy monopolized, and banks and reckless stockbrokers bailed out and given bonuses, while the rest of the country was left in the dust.
So what to do? Reinvest in the democratic system.
One of the great things about FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society is that they provided a safety net for people who fell on hard times. It helped America avoid becoming a completely polarized dystopia, unlike Europe which became mired in the extremes of Fascism and Communism.
When serial killers get publicized, we tend to get more serial killers. When mass shootings are publicized, we get more mass shootings.
One of the best things about liberal, democratic society is that we solve our issues peacefully. As a result, we have been largely spared the violence, unrest and extremist regimes that have engulfed other areas of the world.
Let's not screw this up.
