Deadly Ineptitude

Just what the fuck does it take already?

That’s the boiling question people are asking a lot lately about many different recent events.

For openers, two particularly horrific mass shootings had happened not too long ago.

The first shooting was in Buffalo, NY where a white supremacist massacred grocery store shoppers in an African American neighborhood. His racist manifesto was filled with stock conspiracy theories he had copy & pasted from 4chan and he had targeted an area with a high concentration of blacks for his attack.

The second was an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, TX where the local cops did absolutely nothing to stop the carnage going on inside the school for over an hour. Instead, they tased, pepper sprayed, and handcuffed desperate parents who begged the cops to do their jobs.

And there were two mass shootings just this Fourth of July – one in Highland Park, IL and another in Philadelphia, PA. But there have been very many other mass shootings in between Uvalde and these. Mass shootings are like roaches in that regard: For every one that gets press, there are many more that don’t.

Nearly everyone’s exasperation is palpable. And that’s fueled in large part by the knowledge that nothing is going to change as a result of these infuriatingly familiar tragedies. We’ve all been here too many times before to entertain the cruel fantasy that this will actually change anything.

Our cynical politics regard concrete goals as “unicorns” and “ponies” so only posturing is considered “realistic.” Political pantomime is “adult,” but advocating actual action is “childish.” You can apply this to any number of issues – abortion rights comes to mind right now, but that topic's for my next post.

So let's discuss mass shootings a little longer before going into our country's incompetent Covid response.

So what do pundits think are serious strategies for these recurrent tragedies? Why, giving the police more money, of course! That's the predictable bipartisan fix. This despite the manifest fact that departments are already grossly overfunded, heavily militarized, and violently out of control. That last item was the subject of nationwide protest a couple of years ago, in case you've already forgotten. It was possibly the largest protest movement in U.S. history and it had global impact. 

There's no question that police departments are absolutely bloated. In most cities, the police consume the plurality of the budget.  The Uvalde police force consumes 40% of its city’s budget. America spends more on cops than most other countries do on their armed forces. Seriously, if all our police departments merged into one army, it would be the third biggest military in the world in terms of expenditures. And yet these other countries somehow don’t suffer the frequent waves of mass shootings that we do. Clearly, rewarding cops for their bad behavior is not making us any safer. Who knew?

But smug pundits still sneer at the idea of de-funding the police and hiring social workers – despite its proven success in many cities – places as diverse as New York, NY, Denver, CO, and Alexandria, KY. The corporate media will even cherry pick election results to say real reform polices are not popular. And so we'll continue to waste vast sums of money on massive police forces – a policy that obviously doesn’t work, never has, and never will – because conservatives and centrists alike love the macho status quo.

And make no mistake, doubling-down on dumb fuck machismo helps keep other solutions off the table. Whether it's mass shootings or any other kind of crime, reactive and ineffective action movie fantasies are keeping us from looking at root causes, which in turn perpetuates and augments the problem. That's how we got here and no other developed country comes close to us in per capita gun deaths.

Speaking of newsworthy body counts, let's move onto a much bigger one.

We’re hopefully nearing the tail-end of a very deadly pandemic that has dragged on for over two years now and killed over a million Americans to date (and 557 million worldwide). Yet the Democratic Party’s leadership still superciliously resists calls to seriously deal with it – which predictably perpetuates it.

Yeah, that's a lot of adjectives in that little paragraph. Unfortunately, they were all necessary.

Take COVID testing for example. Remember when NPR reporter Mara Liasson asked Biden's White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki about distributing free at-home tests? Psaki was touting a policy that would allow those with private insurance to file reimbursement claims with their providers for tests they had purchased from pharmacies. (Medicare and Medicaid recipients were ineligible.) After pointing out the unnecessary complexity, Liasson then asked, “Why not just make ’em free and give ’em out, make them available everywhere?” Psaki sarcastically replied, “Should we just send one to every American”? 

Um, YES!? 

After Jen Psaki catastrophized about the cost, Mara Liasson replied, “All I know is that other countries seem to be making them available for- in greater quantities for less money." Indeed, other countries were already doing that. Of course, Psaki knew that because other reporters had peppered her with questions about that in a previous briefing six days earlier. Those reporters had also stressed that other countries were sending out free at-home tests to everyone without any red tape, so Psaki was possibly sick of getting the question. But sneering at trying things that work elsewhere is a centrist reflex.

Fortunately, public blowback to Psaki's dismissiveness got results and the Biden Administration finally followed these other countries' lead – thus proving it was doable policy here too. Granted, it was a miserly unenthusiastic imitation; but it showed that complaining works, which is important to know going forward.

This moment spoke volumes about the administration's attitude towards healthcare in general and the pandemic in particular. But let’s go back and tackle this tragedy chronologically from the beginning. 

Prior to the pandemic, numerous studies had long proved that having government cover everyone's health costs saves both money and lives. Harvard, Yale, and 2o other institutions released studies saying so during the 2020 primaries. Indeed, both the Harvard and Yale studies not only found that Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All plan would save money but that Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg's plans would be even more expensive than our present pricey system. So Sanders' plan was a bargain. And in the bargain, we would “prevent more than 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year." 

But such findings were already familiar by that time. Year after year, we’ve been seeing studies showing that we spend roughly double per capita on health care than other developed countries only to get worse outcomes and it's still true. Yes, we’re demonstrably and chronically the worst – just as we are on the gun stuff. Finally, last February, a CBO report also found that switching to a single payer system would boost household income and free time which would subsequently stimulate the economy. They'd estimated that “average private nonhealth consumption per capita would rise by about 11.5 percent by 2030." 

Plus, it would save lives. So that's cool too.

In the March 15th 2020 primary debate, Biden claimed that Italy's single payer system had failed to handle COVID. Yes Italy's system initially struggled since it was one of the first countries to get hit; but before the month was out, they'd reversed their death rate while our's skyrocketed. It's worth noting that Italy's healthcare system had also been weakened by privatization efforts to make it more like what Biden was proposing. But despite such profit-motivated sabotage, they outperformed our response. Also, other single payer countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and New Zealand were immensely effective at fighting COVID and thus held up as good models to copy. Of course, America was not held up as a model by anyone because our COVID response was absolutely abysmal. Single payer would have helped us greatly.

Indeed, a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that having a single payer system during COVID would have saved 330,000 American lives – and hundreds of billions of dollars, if being frugal is most important to you. As Scientific American reported: “The U.S. also could have saved $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with hospitalizations from the disease—on top of the estimated $438 billion that could be saved in a nonpandemic year."

But, again, the lives saved are more important – I’m just goading the bullshit bean counters here.

Biden got elected in large part by promising to handle the pandemic better than Trump. Not by much. Today, our party “leadership” is basically pretending the pandemic is already over. They’ve hung a “Mission Accomplished” banner over it and given-in to business’ and anti-vaxxers’ demands to relax or drop health protocols. Last December, the CEO of Delta Airlines asked the CDC for a shortened isolation period and promptly got it. Flight attendants were not amused. The following January, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky enraged disability rights activists when she said it was “really encouraging" that, among the fully vaccinated, Omicron was mostly only killing those who already had other serious health issues. It's hard to believe she had had any previous media training, but she has. The tin-eared comment probably would have landed better if we were not already dropping our guard to prioritize the economy.

Yes, diseases generally weaken over time and everyone will get it eventually. But is it really weak enough yet? Shouldn’t we postpone getting it longer when it will be even weaker still? Certainly our weakest people should, but that’s not our policy anymore. Instead, our policy is a Dead Kennedy’s album title: “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.” Of course, it’s mostly others who die; so, sorry grandma, it’s all “Olive Garden Uber Alles” now. Remember this old “Simpsons” bit? “In environmental news, scientists have announced that Springfield’s air is now only dangerous to children and the elderly.” “WHOO-HOO!”

Think that’s hyperbole? Then think again: The latest variant has been even deadlier to the elderly and immuno-compromised than any of its predecessors. As for kids, hospitalizations of children under five have surged during Omicron. In fact, last February, the Omicron's body count surpassed the Delta variant's since it's more transmissible. As John Hopkins University epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo explained, “Even if on a per-case basis fewer people develop severe illness and die, when you apply a small percentage to a very large number, you get a substantial number.”

And death isn't the only risk to consider. The debilitating effects of long COVID – brain fog, fatigue, etc. – are already showing up in labor statistics. Like a major war, COVID has become a mass disabling event.

Here’s a handy-dandy economic history analogy for our COVID response: During the Great Depression, New Deal programs often started to turn things around – proving that they worked. Yet, as soon as things began to improve, those programs got cut because fools assumed that they were not needed anymore. Momentum would do the rest, right? So the economy repeatedly plunged back into the Depression again because the plug repeatedly got pulled on recovery. Thus, the Great Depression contained many completely unnecessary relapses which prolonged the agony a decade. It was not until World War II forced sustained government spending that the economy really recovered and began to boom. 

We’re seeing the same infuriating stupidity on COVID: Things improve when we get serious – but then we get complacent and things collapse again. Repeat. And of course, we're also prolonging the pandemic by doing this. In both cases, conservatives urged ending treatment prematurely. Giving-in to them kills – it kills the economy and, more importantly, kills people. Alas, centrists live to give in. 

We must take the long view in all things here and it’s obvious our society has shirked its responsibility across the board. Nihilistic happy talk is precipitating a pretty dismal future.

Every informed person knows the next pandemic is not long off, yet we’re essentially pretending that we've vanquished all disease forever – as if viruses don’t evolve and come back stronger than before. As Scientific American reported in 2018, income inequality is a “major driver" of such second acts.

Shit and grits! Last year, one in five healthcare workers quit their jobs from extreme burnout. Over one in three nurses plan to quit by the end of this year. This pandemic has not only exposed problems in our healthcare system but profound ones in our economy as well. People are living on the precipice and those in power do not really appreciate this. 

We’re woefully unprepared for the next pandemic or the next economic shock – and we're not yet out of our current ones. We’re not prepared for the next anything. We’re now a house of cards which will not withstand the next inevitable stiff breeze that comes wafting across the waters because we have not seriously engaged with any of our obvious long-standing problems.

It’s unfortunately the American Way: We always do this. For example, we refused to confront slavery for almost a century before the U.S. Civil War. We likewise allowed institutional discrimination to continue for another near century thereafter. Petulant procrastination is an all-American trait. As Winston Churchill is said to have quipped, “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Whether he really said it is irrelevant because it's absolutely accurate regardless.

Expect the same ridiculous irresponsibility with the climate crisis or any other massive calamity that hits the poor and unfortunate first and hardest. Those folks are always the proverbial “the canary in the coal mine.” But what happens if we don’t really care about the canary and accordingly ignore it? What happens to us after that, given that people are creatures of habit who dislike troubling thoughts? Empathy is an early warning system and compassion fatigue has disconnected it. Nature's retribution will not be pretty.

The second shooting in Uvalde, Texas is the perfect metaphor for our political situation. Republicans are the gunman in this metaphor and Democrats are the cowardly cops who always do too little too late after abusing those they're supposed to be protect.

Of course, being the perfect metaphor, many others out there have already thought of it:

Let’s not spin shit here: The so-called “pro-life” party is actually a death cult and centrist Democrats are its auxiliary body. Ignore offended obfuscations and excuses. Consciously or not, “moderate Democrats” have been chronic accomplices to decades of needless death and misery because the supposed opposition party doesn’t really oppose. Evil wins when good does nothing. And evil has been winning for a while now.

And again, I have not forgotten centrist timidity and perfidy on abortion rights. But as I said before, that's for my next post. I've gone on too long, and maybe it’s best to regulate my rage intake.