Greed Has Good Odds

Corporate executives worried about becoming the targets of the next Brian Thompson-style killing of those who run an evil company have to choose between a chance of losing their lives versus the certainty of making more profits.

Taking Stock

The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thomas coupled with the overwhelmingly gleeful public reaction thereto has corporate executives at evil companies thinking twice–not about their actions, but upping their personal security.

TMI Show Ep 33: “Deny, Defend, Depose”: Health insurance Horror Stories

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has shocked the nation, not because of the killing itself, but rather due to the widespread and gleeful public reaction to it. As the manhunt continues, social media and mainstream media comment sections are full of horror stories of desperately-ill people and their loved ones attempting to navigate a byzantine health insurance system designed to thwart easy access to medical care and payments to doctors.

Co-host Manila Chan is out today, suffering from pneumonia as well as the vicissitudes of the healthcare system—she got worse because she couldn’t get easy access to antibiotics. Holding down the fort with co-host Ted Rall is TMI Show producer Robby West, who “enjoys” a front row seat amid the chaos and cruelty that is America’s healthcare system.

TMI Show Ep 32: Did Brian Thompson Have It Coming?

Yesterday morning the 50-year-old CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot to death on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. Even including the reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s hard to think of another high-profile murder that has been greeted with as much glee and schadenfreude by the American public.

Comments sections in news stories and social media were filled with comments about how Brian Thompson had it coming, hopefully this is the first of many, and countless jokes about the bullet that killed him being a pre-existing condition. Almost no one expressed sympathy. TMI Show co-host Ted Rall and, filling in for Manila Chan, producer Robby West, explore this remarkable phenomenon.

United Healthcare is one of the most hated big companies in the United States, in large part because it denies its customers claims at a higher percentage rate than any other insurer. Thompson, paid over $10 million a year, was a poster boy for an industry whose profit model relied upon making people sick and dead to maximize earnings. The hatred was internal as well as external: even as company executives raised their own pay, they laid off thousands of their own workers.

Adding to the intrigue, Thompson was being investigated by the Justice Department over a $15 million sale of United stock suspected as insider trading, and which caused a selloff.

What was the motivation behind the assassination? Will other healthcare executives reconsider their business practices? Or will they just hire additional security? Could this help to spark a national conversation about for-profit healthcare? One thing is for sure: it is 100% clear of that Americans of all political stripes hate the healthcare industry. Because in America, whether you have insurance or not, you don’t get healthcare.

Some Exceptions May Apply

The Ten Commandments are back in the news now that Louisiana has ordered them posted in public school classrooms. It may violate the separation of church of state, but sometimes it’s interesting to see just how little Americans, who claim to be mostly Christian, uphold these basic tenets.

Killed Them All? Did Robert Durst Kill More Than Three Victims?

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Dead-eyed mass murder suspect Robert Durst’s riveting open-mic soliloquy in the last episode of HBO’s “The Jinx” true-crime miniseries places him at the center of a media frenzy that obsessed over a dramatic couplet that may or may not constitute a confession: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Who is or who was this “all?”

How many?

Lost in the haze of discussion and debate about this “Gone Girl”-esque mash-up of infotainment and policing — the cops arrested him the day of the documentary’s finale — is another line uttered by Durst in that restroom, one that has been ignored by the media:

“But, you can’t imagine.”

Can’t imagine what?

Here’s a complete transcript of Durst talking to himself:

There it is. You’re caught. You’re right, of course. But, you can’t imagine. Arrest him. I don’t know what’s in the house. Oh, I want this. What a disaster. He was right. I was wrong. And the burping. I’m having difficulty with the question ‘What the hell did I do?’ Killed them all, of course.”

Usually, like when news anchors were blaming Al Qaeda within hours after the 9/11 attacks, the media speculates too much. This time, a failure to speculate may be missing a bigger story: that Durst may have killed more than three people.

“You can’t imagine.” What did Durst mean?

There are several ways to interpret that. The first one that came to my mind was: You can’t imagine how much bigger this is…how many more victims there really are.

Durst has been charged with the 2000 execution-style murder of his friend Susan Berman, possibly to prevent her from testifying against him about the disappearance and presumed murder of his first wife, Kathleen, in 1982. He killed and chopped up a neighbor’s body in Texas in 2003. A Texas jury declared it self-defense and acquitted him.

robert durstAssuming that Durst killed all three, the 18-year gap between the Kathleen Durst and Susan Berman murders would be unusual. It wouldn’t be unprecedented — California’s Lonnie Franklin Jr. earned the nickname the “Grim Sleeper” due to a 13-year space between killings of sex workers. Still, 18 years is a long time for a serial killer to refrain from taking a life.

In several respects, Durst fits the typical profile of a psychopathic serial killer more than of a man who killed his wife in a fit of range during a domestic dispute. This includes a history of cruelty to animals that predates his first known killing.

His brother Douglas, who lived in fear of his brother, claims that as a young man Robert owned seven malamutes, all named Igor, who “died, mysteriously, of different things, within six months of his owning them. We don’t know how they died, and what happened to their bodies. In retrospect, I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing his wife with those dogs.”

Durst reportedly used the term “doing an Igor” to refer to murdering someone.

The judge who presided over Robert’s trial in the Texas case found “a perfectly clean and preserved cat head cut up by someone who knew what they were doing” at her front door after his acquittal. She believes it was Durst.

Serial killers sometimes mark their territory. Douglas’ break with his brother moved toward finality in the 1990s, when he discovered that Robert had been urinating in the wastepaper basket at the New York real estate company where both worked.

Robert was considered a “prime suspect” in the 1997 disappearance of Karen Mitchell, 16, in Eureka, California. He was never charged.

“You can’t imagine.”

Profiling the Mass Murderer

Friends and neighbors are shocked to learn the identity of the man suspected of coldly taking the lives of six people, all members of the same ethnic group. To those who keep track of extremist hate groups, however, the violence was not a surprise. For one thing, he was already under investigation for earlier, similar crimes

Zombies

Americans go crazy after a gunman shoots 12 people to death at a movie theater. Meanwhile, 12 Pakistanis are killed by a US drones–and nobody cares.

Trade-Offs

Many women plan to vote for Obama because he supports abortion rights, even though they deplore his drone assassinations and wars. What other trade-offs can Obama offer to light-on-integrity pseudo-progressive voters?

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