Thursday, October 16, 2014

EBOLA EXPOSES GOP

EBOLA EXPOSES FAILED GOP POLICIES--A COUNTRY IN DECAY

Francis Fukuyama: the USA "a country in decay"*

The recent responses to the Ebola virus which tragically emerged in Texas has revealed  distressing weaknesses in the health care industry and in Washington. It is only the most recent in a series of events both domestic and foreign which suggest that the USA is on a path toward decline and decay.  The events in Dallas were shocking.  In a modern US hospital first responders, the nurses and the physicians, were obviously unprepared for this emergency. They sent a critically ill patient, who informed them he had been in Africa, away. They made grievous mistakes in judgement, and standard protocol which were then compounded by hospital administrators in Dallas, and by government officials in the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and in Washington. The US agency supposedly in control, the  CDC actually permitted a nurse who was being monitored for Ebola to take a commercial flight out of the state, potentially exposing more than a hundred passengers to this deathly pathogen. (They then denied that they did it.)  In Washington, the President took a long while to respond to the problem of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He is still unwilling, citing some muddled reasoning, to take the most reasonable step to stop commercial airlines flights to the stricken nations.

Is the USA really a Third World State?  Or are these screw ups only symptomatic of a nation which for the last decades has been actively hollowing out its domestic infrastructure, cutting its social safety net, and its medical care system at the behest of ideologues on the right (urged on and financially supported by a tiny radical minority of super-wealthy business tycoons)?  The events in Dallas (and elsewhere recently) have underscored the fact that the ideologues have been in control for too long. We are no longer functioning as a unified political entity   We are torn apart....according to Fukuyama, a nation torn by polarization and bound by its encrusted Constitution which codifies systematic conflict.  The result has been a steady drift to the right, toward limited ineffective government and toward a  "nation in decay."

After the decades under the sway of political ideologues of the right, such as those associated with  Reaganism, Neoconservatism, and Bush and Cheney, we find our nation weakened and diminished.  The rise of the right and of policies fostered by a reactionary GOP  which focused on "limiting government", cutting entitlements, cutting government regulations, and getting "government off our backs" has finally achieved its goal. It has strangled and hollowed out government agencies and infrastructure to the point where it is so degraded it is ineffective, and we no longer have confidence in its efficacy and ability to deal with critical or even existential issues.  We find ourselves a nation only a shadow of our former selves, a nation closer to the Third World than with the great industrial, inventive, creative force we were in the latter half of the 20th Century. Is that what we want for America and our children and grandchildren?  

We can lay much of this problem at the feet of the GOP and their facilitators in the Democratic party who should have known better.   During this election cycle we should remember the Ebola scandal in Dallas...a good part of which is a result of irrational Republican policies of austerity and debasing essential government services.


*Political Order And Political Decay, Vol 2.  by  Francis Fukuyama

In Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama states that in the west, many nations  have achieved a balance between the rule of law and democratic accountability. This balance has contributed to their manifest success.  One aspect of Fukuyama's book discusses political decay.  In regard to "decay" in the USA , Fukuyama states (in a recent Economist interview)  that  the present problems of the USA, relates to the collision of its vaunted "checks and balances" (designed in the 18th century to oppose the tyranny of competing elite groups of that period) with modern political polarization.  Polarization in the twenty first century is in conflict with the nations institutional checks and balances system bringing the operation of a massive government to a grinding halt and to the precipice of disaster..  Fukuyama indicates that in the 18th century and for nearly two hundred years the two political parties had significant overlap and an ability to reach compromise decisions.  At the present time..( this author adds here: with corruption of money in politics, pervasive gerrymandering to "politically cleanse" election districts, the abuse and use of money by lobbyists, and special interest groups to control issues and policy, the effects of massive amounts of corporation money on government after the Citizens United ruling, as well as the excessive power, grandstanding and do nothing of a grossly undemocratic Senate) this antiquated system of checks and balance adds to the the dysfunction "at a time when Republicans and  Democrats have no overlap of political space."  The result is  "a country not a grown up"  The USA is "a country in decay".