The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has brought much attention to the topic of corporate greed. Brian Thompson has become the face of this greed, the target of popular outrage, the villain.
The targeting of Mr. Thompson, the individual, distracts us from the real issue of what produced and produces, Mr. Thompson and other profit maximizing CEOs, along with layers of management, whose sole purpose in the economic machine is to maximize profits. What produced these agents of profit maximization? The answer is capitalism.
Capitalism produces goods, services, and the labor force requisite for their production. This includes workers who sweep the shop floor for poverty level wages, all the way through the management ranks up to and including CEOs who may rake in millions, even tens of millions in annual compensation in salary, bonuses, stock awards and stock options. The capitalist society also produces the chronically unemployed–often the result of Federal Reserve policies necessary in order to achieve price stability–a requisite for a smooth functioning capitalist economy.
Corporate CEOs are products; they are commodities, often manufactured in the Nation’ top universities for the sole purpose of creating maximum profits. This is a structural necessity within the capitalist context. There is little discretion in the matter.
Profit maximization is required by shareholders which include individuals, pension plans, hedge funds, insurance companies, and other financial firms. Anyone who has pension plan, like it or not, is a participant in this process.
If higher profits are to be found elsewhere, investors move their funds elsewhere. A disinvested firm’s shrunken equity value reduces its borrowing capacity; its shrunken capital access reduces its ability to invest for growth and development, which further shrinks its competitive position within the marketplace, further perpetuating the firm’s disinvestment, ultimately resulting in the firm’s demise.
To prevent this occurance, firms hire individuals, e.g., Brian Thompson, whom they deem as best able to maximise the firm’s profits. This requires an individual able to maximise revenues while minimizing cost. To acquire this talent In the competitive market, requires extravagant pay packages. This, deemed appropriate as the the system is founded on the principle of greed, it is the incentive for action within the capitalist system, the maximization of income is a premise of the capitalist model.
CEOs and others extravagantly paid in the upper management ranks are commodities; they are products of a system built on greed and the maximization of individual material advancement which allows little regard for the communal or environmental impact of their actions.
Additionally, the elevation of the material relative to the humane, within this system, reinforces the human tendency towards violence, as humans are thought of as things, not as humans with families and friends, but as objects to be utilized in the quest for maximum profits. The diminished value of the humane relative to the enhanced value of material consumption within the capitalist model leads to other catastrophes such as war and environmental destruction as the value of humananity becomes subsumed to other objectives.
Management ranks are groomed for their roles; they are a product of the capitalist ideology of maximum material advancement. One cannot condemn the actions of profit maximizing CEOs, while accepting the system: capitalism, which produces them, and requires their profit maximizing ways.
The murder of CEO Brian Thompson should be condemned, as all violence should be condemned. The murder, and enhanced violence generally, should also be recognized as a product of the capitalist system which elevates the material relative to the humane. Rather than condemn Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, we would be better served to condemn the system, the ideology of capitalism, which produced Brian Thompson and other profit maximizing agents.