In case you needed reminding how completely deviod of morals and ethics unbridled capitalism is, meet dead peasant insurance.
Here’s Mark Ames of Exiled Online‘s beautiful rant against employers making money off their workers’ deaths, and the whole screwed up, unethical, inhuman system:
It’s part of an ongoing pattern for our ruling class and their view of America and Americans. It’s time we faced up to this grim fact. Too many of them are against us and against this country, weakening America to the point where it threatens to be permanently crippled, much like how the communists deformed Russia for decades. They had their bolsheviks; we have our billionaire-bolsheviks. The effect of these two rapacious ruling elites is the same: the state and the people serve the tiny ruling class; and when we’re not serving them, we can fuck off and die. Literally. Because that serves them too.
For practical purposes, here is a small handy list of 8 Reasons To Hate Our Billionaire Bolsheviks [or “The H8 8”]:
1. According to Harvard Medical Researchers, 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. That’s one American dying every 12 minutes; it also means that our fucked up health care system kills as many Americans every month as Al Qaeda managed on September 11th, with another 9,000 American dead thrown in for good measure. Doesn’t this count as corporate terrorism? Doesn’t this mean we should go to war against our murderers, to protect ourselves?
2. Those hundreds of thousands of American corpses enriched a handful of American health care CEOs like William McGuire of UnitedHealth: he earned hundreds of millions in annual bonuses in the mid-2000s ($125 million in 2004, more in 2005) along with as much as $1.8 billion in stock options (some of which was clawed back by the SEC), and a $5 million annual pension guaranteed for life; at one point, $1 out of every $700 Americans paid in health care went directly to McGuire’s obscene billion-dollar payout.
3. ‘Dead Peasants Insurance’: Companies paid out $8 billion in premiums on millions of their employees, and expect to earn $9 billion in the next 5 years when these employees die. To make sure that the life insurance companies can pay out the winnings on our deaths, $22 billion in TARP moneyour money was set aside this spring for insurance companies.
4. Herbert Perone, spokesman for the American Council of Life Insurers, told the San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Nobody gets upset when a company insures its plant or its fleet of cars or land or any other business asset. To think that your labor force is not a business asset is extremely shortsighted.’
5. The gap between wealthiest 10 percent and the rest of America is worse than at any time on record. Two-thirds of all income gains from 2002-7 went to the top 1 percent. The Walton family alone is worth more than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. Wal-Mart is a major player in the ‘dead peasants insurance’ game; it’s alleged that dead peasant insurance payouts are used for executive bonuses.
6. Bank of America chief Ken Lewis will earn a $125 million retirement package after soaking US taxpayers for $45 billion in bailout funds and $118 billion in guarnatees. Meanwhile, banks like BofA earned $24 billion in overdraft fees in 2008, charging some 51 million Americans an average of $470 each in highly dubious circumstances. It’s thought that banks will pocket even more this year.
7. Mortgages: financial institutions get taxpayers to subsidize losses via $700 billion TARP program, $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities buyback program, hundreds of billions in ‘toxic assets’ guarantees, at least $400 billion shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $30 billion for PPIP, etc.
8. Mortgages: homeowners. Two headlines tell the story: ‘Mortgage-relief program helps relatively few troubled homeowner’ [McClatchy, Sept 10.] and ‘Firms are getting billions, but homeowners still in trouble’ [McClatchy, Oct 4.] The latter article details how even the meager funds earmarked for homeowner relief winds up getting looted by the mortgage servicers who created the problems in the first place.
And on, and on
It’s one of the more grotesque yet inevitable examples of just how badly the super-wealthy have warped America so that it’s become little more than a rigged game in which we the people always lose, just like Mr. Lebowski said we would.
In 1965, Ronald Reagan said in a speech: ‘A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always vote[s] for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by dictatorship.’ [Quoted in David Cay Johnston’s book Free Lunch.]
The great irony of course is that it wasn’t the voters who plundered the public treasury, but rather, the super-wealthy who plundered the public and subverted democracy. But this is worse than mere irony; Reagan was the billionaire’s Trojan Horse to power. They rode on his drooling senile smile into power, on the worst assumptions about the American people and how we’d use our democratic power to take their wealth; so the minute they got the reigns, they plundered us first, before we could get to them. This is what I mean by America’s billionaire class as an alien, colonial overlord class: they hate us, quite simply, and the more they plunder America, the more they both loathe us and fear us, or what we might do to themor should do.
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