FD #70: They forgot this was the compromise.

With news that the United Healthcare CEO shooter left a backpack in Central Park with a jacket and Monopoly money inside, but got nabbed after showing up at a McDonalds in Altoona PA, polite society and aggressive centrists want us all to be horrified by this “senseless act of violence” from a “disturbed individual.” I don’t think that’s the case. During a recent bout of insomnia, on TikTok at 3am (like ya do), I came across a discussion we desperately need to be having about the hit. CJ Trowbridge summarizes it as:

Essentially, VA, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Board, Labor Union protections, and a ton of corporate oversight & regulatory law exists, as a compromise. This compromise was struck to prevent radical leftist or anti-police movements from emerging out of the populace. These organizations create the social safety net while also pushing back against corporate excesses & abuses within the boundaries of the law. Those of us not alive from 1870 to around the death of Jimmy Hoffa, might not remember what happened instead of the NLRB getting sassed by Amazon. What was that alternative? Shooting members of the landed gentry in the face and blowing up their factories.

@cjtrowbridge

The implications of dismantling the systems designed to make activist movements manageable

Americans saw how corrupt things got in the post Civil War era and weren’t too jazzed about it. So much so, they created The Knights of Labor, a prototype labor and worker’s rights organization. Coincidentally, also the class of my Paladin for D&D one-off campaigns.

A multi-century war has been waged with skirmish lines drawn from the Knights, Mother Jones & the Molly Maguires in 1870s, through Reagan breaking the air traffic controller union in 1981, to Biden walking the picket line in 2023. Have you ever heard of the Bonus Army?

Imagine 43,000 activists, living on the lawn in front of the Capitol building. Not “living” as in having a room at the DC Hilton, bringing megaphones and chanting in the morning & drum circles in the evening, Living Living:

WWI soldiers, home from the worst thing humanity has ever done to itself, had been promised a bonus of $1 per day they were in service stateside, $1.25 for every day they were serving overseas. The catch was that the bonus wouldn’t be sent until 1945. But by 1932, tens of thousands of veterans were broke & homeless, unable to find work in the antechamber of the Great Depression. So they built a shantytown or Hooverville, as they were called in honor of President Herbert Hoover, and harangued our gov’t for what was rightfully owed to them. After a vote for immediate awards passed the House but failed the Senate, US AG William Mitchell ordered DC police to disburse the gathered veterans. When they tried to move the homeless veterans out of the buildings they’d begun to squat in, a riot broke out.

When the police failed to remove the Bonus Army veterans, the US Army was called in. Led by the nightmare blunt rotation of General Douglas MacArthur, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, and tank commander Major George S. Patton, their orders were to empty the camp and push the protesters back to the Anacostia River. Given Macarthur & Patton’s legendary restraint, casual historians of WWII might be able to guess what happened next.

Macarthur advanced on his fellow soldiers with tanks, infantry with fixed bayonets, and tear gas. While Hoover messaged MacArthur twice to not cross the DC Rubicon, those messages were ignored, and 10,000 veterans were flushed out with first tear gas, then tanks, then an infantry charge, setting fire to the shantytown. The resulting mayhem overwhelmed DC hospitals, that were flooded by wounded homeless veterans. The first use of the US Army against civilians, on American soil (in our nation’s capital no less) was received about as well as you imagine:

To quote the National Park Service article on the Bonus Expeditionary forces:

Even the Washington Daily News, typically sympathetic to Hoover’s Republicans called it “A pitiful spectacle,” to see “the mightiest government in the world chasing unarmed men, women, and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”

The spectacle, combined with the Great Depression, earned FDR the White House, pushing Republicans out of the highest office in the land until Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953. Interestingly his foreign service in WWII pushed his domestic actions out of the spotlight, along with MacArthur & Patton’s recklessness turning from bug into feature. This is just the most stark example of America not giving a shit about its workers, throwing them under the bus when things got expensive.

But there are dozens of these in the push/pull of labor v. capital. Eugene Debs & the Pullman Strike, Sinclair’s Jungle exposing the meatpacking industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and those are just the ones taught in school. Did capital fight back? Absolutely! Just Google “Pinkertons” if you want to see how labor used to be treated. Pinkerton being employed by literally every major corporation (to this day! Google contracts with Pinkerton!), being the same corporation so awful that Congress had to pass The Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893. which specifically prevents the federal government from hiring mercenaries, private security, or other “quasi-military” forces. In modern day, we’ve all forgotten. Liberals complaining when people Boo Sarah Huckabee Sanders at dinner? They used to firebomb the business! 

In this vein, the CEO of the largest healthcare tollbooth in the country, who was on the way to a meeting with his investors, to be congratulated on the profits generated from denying claims 32% of the time, and employing a model with a 90% error rate. The CEO & his family had already received multiple threats, but chose to ignore them. Instead of taking this event to heart, insurance companies are stripping CEO photo & identifying info off of their websites, with the richest among us employing a firm literally named Sauron to protect them. Because we exist beyond parody now, the all-seeing eye of Morgoth’s protégé is now a symbol of security for the privileged class.

So, to bring it back to CJ’s point, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the rest of the goons in “Trump 2: Revenge of the Used Car Salesman” have no idea the forces they’re toying with. MuskViv is eyeing the VA healthcare and disability fund for “efficiency cuts.” Which made perfect sense 100 years ago as well. And then the administration had a homeless veteran shantytown on its lawn. UHC has made billions denying care and letting millions die from not getting critical care. When norms go out the window, and you’re the face of a company that is responsible for so much misery, the expectation of safety is a very, very recent one. There are 19 million current users of the VA, receiving healthcare, social services, gov’t assistance, and community. I wonder how many would go WaLuigi if the incoming administration started treating its veterans the way UHC treats its customers.

To commemorate the event, here’s a modern dance remix of Bella Ciao, a perfect metaphor for Luigi’s ill-fated modernized entrée into the history books.

Keep your head up, we’re almost to our annual savepoint,
tnh