Burnwinter Perhaps the United States can just wait another year, ten years, twenty years for M4A to get legislated?

We aren't waiting, because we don't actually want it. See my previous post. Better to focus our energies on state-level medicaid for all concepts or similar, just like marijuana legalization. National-level entertainment politics, the Trump soap opera, CEO assassinations, etc. aren't worth it.

Burnwinter Violent and illegal actions have always been a vital aspect of resistance to capital, because at its limit capital has always outlawed resistance and met it with violence.

Or, capital has always required violent resistance to justify its violent oppression.

Burnwinter It's the last day of work for an office I'm contracting to in Perth, Western Australia. Everyone in it is about to head off for a 1–2 week break with friends and family that they wouldn't receive were it not for the illegal strikes of 19C Britain.

You know how bourgeois this sounds, right? You don't get these kinds of benefits when you're poor. You just keep working. Workers' movements are a product of capitalism, not its antithesis. I think they are worthwhile, noble, and can sometimes help in certain circumstances, but the jobs they relate to are quickly fading. They also reinscribe the power of capital at every turn.

I helped on a campaign to pass a law that would allow public employees to collectively bargain in Colorado (it's illegal under state law), and when it finally got to the governor's office it was stripped down so much that I myself and everyone who worked on the bill was excluded! I still pay union dues, but it's basically lighting money on fire at this point.

Uprising, demands, revolution, I'm just not interested. Working small, making improvements, helping people face-to-face, this is what feels right to me in the face of all this hell. Think local, act local, change culture, and avoid platform/social media at all costs.

EDIT: I'm probably wrong about all of this, but this is the only way I have found to survive. The years of misery and death have certainly taken their toll. I just can't get any positive emotion out of some guy killing a baddie on the street, I only feel sad.

Coombs Or, capital has always required violent resistance to justify its violent oppression.

I've seen far too many peaceful protests crushed by violent oppression to agree with that.

Coombs You know how bourgeois this sounds, right? You don't get these kinds of benefits when you're poor.

There are loads of working class people who get Christmas holidays. Arguing they are the bourgeoisie just seems like you don't want workers to have a holidays, which I know you don't actually believe. Getting these small concessions doesn't make someone bourgeois.

Qwiss There are loads of working class people who get Christmas holidays.

2 weeks off is crazy long. No poor person can afford that, not one, unless the plan is to stay poor. My father often worked part of Christmas day and got the afternoon off. Countless billions do not get this benefit, even those who are paid decent/living wages. I think there is a disconnect in our experience and understanding. You're talking about some employer who gives time off, but many people don't even have an employer to ask for such a thing. When you're earnings are different every day because you're hustling one gig to the next, there is no time off. Just time you don't get paid for the time you don't work.

Getting a paid, genuine, 2 weeks of actual vacation is not normal in my experience. But that's not the bougie part. I think it sounds bougie to use the fact that someone gets that benefit as a great victory when it seems so inaccessible to so many. 2 weeks off at Christmas would be great, but I don't know any poor or working class person who can afford it. Maybe that's what makes one poor or working class...

Coombs 2 weeks off is crazy long.

To put all this in context before we get too far arguing the toss on this specific detail, I'm currently contracting to a government department that has a mandatory paid 1 week Christmas shutdown for all its permanent staff: this is leave that was negotiated by the union in the workplace agreement. The arrangement suits this department because it's an industry regulator that goes into caretaker mode during the festive season.

Some but not all staff will choose to take 2–3 January as leave as well, so then they're off from 22 December to 3 Jan.

Barring special circumstances, permanent salaried employees in Australia receive 4 weeks of paid leave per annum, plus public holidays, so the 7 "business days" taken as leave in this period are only about a third of the standard entitlement.

I'll actually be working sometimes during the Christmas period, but that's because I'm an independent who negotiates every day of leave I take, and I owe some work to two of my other clients.

Obviously I'm discussing premises of industrial relations and employment conditions that are specific to one country. I'm aware things are in many ways worse in the United States. Next try asking a shopgirl in Hanoi how often she gets a holiday.

The point is that everywhere you will find holders of capital extracting as much from workers as workers will allow, unevenly but unrelentingly.

In Australia, a 1980s covenant of ur-neoliberal revisions to collective bargaining and union wage claims (known as The Accord and introduced by the then Labor government) sounded the death knell of militant trade unionism, even though the economic transformations of 1970s globalisation were already bringing it about.

Since this period the various forms of precarious labour have steadily grown as a share of total labour, leading to today's situation where there are a lot of Australian workers who have to hold down multiple casual jobs to survive with housing very unaffordable to rent or buy.

Thing is, calling this new precarity a result of the failures of the historical left gets it backwards: we only understand with certainty that this situation sucks because of what was achieved historically.

It's not unusual for any worker here to be taking the next two weeks off. That's something the majority of the workforce will do.

All businesses are obligated by law to provide 4 weeks of paid holiday here. Certainly nothing luxurious about it. If anything, many employees might be pressured into taking some of that time during Christmas since there's less work to do.

Weird interpretation of his posts, but I guess "so you're fine with mass-murderers being shot" doesn't have the same edge to it.

You’re right man, let’s shoot all the “mass-murderers”. And you get to decide who they are.

Let’s blame the unregulated crooks for doing what voters allow them to do. Let’s not blame over half the country that believes if you’re poor and can’t pay your medical bills, you deserve to die. Just ignore that issue and keep shooting CEOs, surely something will change.

Do you think the people killed by UnitedHealthcare are morally defensible because the law allows them to kill people?

That the CEO is a mass murderer doesn't mean I think Luigi shouldn't be sentenced. I'm against death penalty.

Burnwinter Instead, it's more about how we choose to explain for ourselves why anyone would get upset about a CEO taking a bullet, supposing they then tacitly accept the same CEO's company denying its customers life-saving treatments at the highest rate in its industry and thereby hastening the deaths of thousands.

What? You are making an unnecessary leap here. It's not about that at all. Not even slightly.

You can't say it's not about good and evil, and then play some kind of cosmic morality card.

You were right the first time. It's about ethics, not universal truths. Frameworks for living together in our societies. Neither framework that the players in this particular melodrama suggest is particularly compelling to me.

JazzG you didn't answer the question.

Burnwinter There is plenty of long-standing insider insight into the sector showing that its leaders and investors deny access to vital health care for profit with full knowledge of what they're doing.

And it's even worse than that when you realize that the outsider outsight shows that they are often operating in accordance with the law when doing so. Shareholder primacy results in a fiduciary duty that essentially demands denial of coverage whenever possible. Sure, they deny care illegally on a routine basis, but there are plenty of legal ways to do it, too. For instance, employers often opt to provide cheaper, self-funded plans to their employees that are exempt from state laws, a type of plan offered by - you guessed it - UnitedHealthcare. They can claim bogus, vague reasons like "lack of medical evidence" or what-have-you and put the burden of proof on the patient.

The law in this country is built to deny health coverage for profit.

A stupid example: I went for an annual checkup last year and my old primary had retired. New guy checks my ears, and casually recommended a wax removal as there was some obstruction, said we could just get it done then and there. I'm on a state research university's basic health plan as full time faculty.

A few days later, got a bill for $1,500...no mistake. That shit was legitimately not covered. Had to be on the premium plan and even then I'd have to pay some amount out of pocket. It didn't even occur to me that I was having a "minor procedure" because it was so casual and off the cuff in the moment. Just squirting some salinated water into my ear. This place is fucking wild.

There is a certain degree of privilege in being able to follow the absolute "moral" approach to any conflict. Hence when judging the principal actors an analysis of the level of privilege involved is always necessary.

Mangione deserves to be tried and should probably be convicted if found guilty (he's admitted not guilty so just wait for the trial). But his actions must be viewed from the lens of someone in his position, not from us who've never had anything close to the motive for what he ended up doing.

My first instinct is always that we should never condone murder. Yet I am open to violent acts being committed by the oppressed. Like in Palestine. Like Haiti in the past. Like South Africa in the past. Victims of societal violence. They have tried every outlet to change things.

Injustice is just slow violence. Let's not pretend there's not been all the different tried ways to reform healthcare in the US. Everybody knows it's broken except the most privileged, even those outside the States. Through that lens, I can perfectly understand that while he should be punished, Mangione would nevertheless be seen as a hero.

yuppa Had to give up on this thread

If you hadn't maybe you would have read my clarification. Poor choice of words on my part (I was using it colloquially, not literally) but from the rest of your post it seems we'd disagree on this anyway.

Capital doesn't just exist in the abstract. It's a tool used by actual people. Nobody serves capital, that doesn't make any sense. It is used, mostly it to exploit others through processes of exclusion and sequestration.

No cracks in any mysterious promise was opened. The inherent violence of capitalism was reaffirmed and reinscribed, and so, too, the power dynamics it engenders across classes.