Q. How do countries
go to Hell, and become “failed states?”
A. When a critical
mass of the population have more loyalty to something other than their nation.
My experience in failed states like Iraq and Afghanistan and
close=to-failure countries like Pakistan, Congo and Rwanda, convinces me, it’s
as simple as that.
When enough people have some prior claim of loyalty and
obligation that supersedes their connection to their country and its government,
that state is headed towards dysfunction
and death.
In Iraq today, there are still not enough people who put loyalty
to their nation ahead of their sect or region, or their obligation to some
political party, warlord, imam or sheikh.
There is a government of
Iran-manipulated Shia supremists led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but it
is justly hated by Iraq’s Sunni minority, disregarded by most Kurds, and alienated
from many Shi’ites who are not Tehran fanboys, or want more tolerance for
Others (especially Sunnis with whom many Shiites have intermarried), who resent
government corruption and ineptitude, or simply take orders from their own mosque,
tribe, clan, or some other Shia politician. The result: political paralysis,
and uncontrolled violence beyond the reach of the state.
Afghanistan as a nation-state is even more of a fiction than
Iraq. The Hamid Karzai government is
Pashtun-supremist in a country where Pashtuns are (unlike the Iraqi Shia) not a
majority, just the largest minority. It
generally has only as much support as it can buy, because those not on the
corruption gravy train, including many Pashtuns, are shamed as well as appalled
by the greed and ineffectuality of every arm of the state, civil, military or
police. Minority Uzbeks, Tadjiks, Hazara or Baluch identify their interests
ethnically, religiously, regionally or by diktat of tribal, clan or family
elders. They may be Afghan in their
passports or papers, but not in their hearts.
I grew up believing that “I am an American” was, short of family
loyalty to Mom, Dad and my brothers, what was printed deepest in my heart.
I was conscious and sincere when I pledged my allegiance to
the flag and the country for which it stands.
I was proud to be a Jew and rooted for the Jews in Israel
and for Sandy Koufax and Al Rosen, Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker. But it was sweeter that they, too, were
Jewish Americans.
For a time, growing up in Richmond, (before I became conscious of its racist
politics) I was gratified to be a Virginian, the home state of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and Robert E, Lee, but that was
because of what they meant to American history.
We were Democrats in my family, and we took shots at Ike’s
constant golfing. We were no country-clubbers
and my Uncle Murray taught me a Tech Sergeant’s suspicion of Generals, but he
was our President.
We respected, or at least we tolerated him and his works
because we’d elected him (just without my family’s votes).
We were Americans, and we included everyone who lived here,
everyone who said they, too were Americans.
We had our differences and our disagreements, we prayed in a variety of formulations
to a variety of deities; we traced our lineages to different points of the
globe, but we were a nation united.
Today, we have become a nation divided, fractured into
smithereens, hammered on the hard anvils of race, class, gender, and
accumulated wealth, into particular identities, distinct and distant from a
melded loyalty to the common good.
According to Ed O’Keefe in
the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/09/17/meet-the-house-republicans-who-support-delaying-obamacare/
73 Republican Congressmen are so in hate with Obamacare that
they will close down the government unless it is postponed for a year. At least 45 are willing to stick with their
beef with the healthcare law that they will renounce America’s debt and default,
unless they get to tie the country’s social safety net into a 365-day knot.
Is it loyalty to a Tea Party ideology, a radical take on “conservatism,”
that is more important to these people than the faith and credit of their
country or the functioning of its people’s government?
The demography of the Tea Party as well as the intended
victims of most of its political agenda suggests the loyalty is not ideological
as much as racial. Why should we
generally wealthier and more successful White people be asked to fund services
used disproportionately by poorer, less accomplished Blacks and Browns?
This color-coded politics may help to explain the T-baggers’
obsession with Obamacare, named for and credited to America’s first Black
President. Obama’s overthrow has been
the shocking, Party-at-all-costs-even-those-to-the-country policy of mainstream
Republicans as well as the far-right wing-nuts, since Day 1 of his presidency. They loathed the White Clinton, but with nothing
like the negationality of this.
On the other hand, the middling social and economic rank of
most members of the Earl Grey Brigade, married to policies that consistently transfer
economic resources and opportunities from the middle class to the top 1%,
suggests a manipulation of poorer fools by much better-off politicians to benefit
the really rich who pay for their public careers.
In Florida, for example (and, report Lizette Alvarez and
Robert Pear in the NY Times,
in Republican-run Missouri, Ohio and Georgia), Obamacare is
being undermined to prevent citizens from getting the best medical insurance
bang for their bucks. Among the cheap
tricks, with potentially expensive consequences for mostly poor and elderly
people of African- or Latin-American backgrounds, (but also millions of poor
and middle-class Florida Whites), include barring Federally-funded “navigators”
from access to county health facilities – where many poor and uninsured people
go for medical treatment. The idea is to
prevent them from guiding customers to the medical insurance coverage that best
suits their needs and budgets.
Florida Governor Rick Scott says he’s afraid the “navigators,” in
gathering facts to help them refine their searches for the best deal available,
will breach citizens’ privacy. Of
course, every one of the navigators’ questions and more would have been
routinely asked of any of those citizens had they sought care at one of Scott’s
dozens of Columbia/HCA hospitals back in the 1990s.
That was when Scott had leveraged Columbia/HCA into the largest
medical care network in the country. He
did this with almost no invested capital, but a pyramid of debt – the very
arrangement he most despises when government does it. Of course, the company he ran had to plead
guilty to more than a dozen federal charges of overbilling Medicare and
Medicaid and trying to cover it up, and wound up paying close to $2 billion in
settlement money, which also made it number one in its field in America.
Scott crawled away from the wreckage with a $10 million golden
parachute and an estimated $350 million in stock, and although his own Board
forced him to resign, a Republican Justice Department in Washington chose not
to prosecute him.
Hey, the guy’s a pioneer, too big to jail before bigness really went
bad. .
Gov. Scott’s loyalty to the moguls of medical care has superseded his
responsibilities to his state’s citizens in a uniquely egregious way.
No other state has done this: even if assisted shopping and
open competition get Florida customers lower healthcare prices, they won’t be
allowed to benefit from them for at least two years. That’s how long the Legislature has banned
the State Insurance Commissioner from setting new (presumably lower) rates for
health insurance.
“In other states,” the Times notes, Obamacare has allowed “insurance
commissioners to obtain better deals for consumers.”
says Florida presently
has 4 million people with no health insurance, of whom close to 600,000 are
Hispanics. Chang reports Federal Health
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius emphasized that “a higher proportion of Hispanic Americans are
uninsured and eligible for health coverage benefits under the law than the rest
of the population.”
Once Americans would have seen this concentration of injustice
as a cause for concern. But Scott and
his fellow Republicans are running on a record of “cutting the herd” of
American citizens by denying subsidized medical coverage to those who need it
most
The Governor, who largely financed his own election with
money he “earned” at his criminal corporation, conspired with the Legislature
to refuse Federal funding (100% for the first 3 years, 90% thereafter) to
extend Medicaid to what the Herald says is “an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million residents
who are now uninsured.”
The expansion, the
Herald says, would offer Medicaid “to those earning up to 133 percent of the federal
poverty level -- about $15,000 a year for an individual. Now, “In Florida, an adult must have a
dependent child and earn no more than 19 percent of the poverty level to be
eligible for Medicaid.”
Do the math:
that means, to get Medicaid coverage in Florida you can make no more than
$36.50 a week. $40 a week, $160 a month,
you’re out! Pay for your own medical
bills.
Of
course, you can’t, which is why Jacksonville’s Florida Sun-Times reports,
“Florida’s failure to take federal dollars
and extend Medicaid coverage could have serious consequences for the state’s
major teaching hospitals such as UF Health Jacksonville (formerly Shands
Jacksonville) and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, because they treat a
disproportionate number of uninsured patients, U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown said.”
Is it that rich Gov. Scott so hates poor
people and the hospitals that serve them that he’d let ‘em all die rather than
breach his commitment to “conservative philosophy?” Or is just that his loyalty to the Republican
Party, or the private institutions that profit from the health care industry is
simply greater than his loyalty to America and its commonweal?
Either way, he and the rest of the disloyal
opposition are killing our country.
