Morning Headlines 11/6/20

Lynne, we have approximately 49% of this country that erroneously believes government-funded healthcare means the government will direct your individual course of treatment, and that obviously this is the same as a totalitarian communist regime. Instead they voted for Trump, who literally said his healthcare ‘plan’ was “great healthcare” during a national debate. And that was enough detail to convince 69M Americans and counting. Most voters didn’t list COVID as one of their concerns. I think we might be struggling a bit with things like “object permanence”.

We elected a woman to congress who thinks the world is run by cannibalistic pedophiles. I heard a group of senior citizen women this summer at a restaurant bragging about how everyone comes to the United States for our healthcare, and that the Democrats want to use healthcare to impose socialism, and then we will have no food. They weren’t clear on the intermediate steps though. These are pretty mainstream political beliefs in a large swath of this country (see: the states which repeatedly vote for the GOP despite having consistently lower GDP/capita than their blue state counterparts – don’t even get me started on the uneven distribution of federal tax dollars to the red states that rail against the elites in Washington).

We have a fear-driven media system where the cable news entities have no accountability for blatantly lying, or fear mongering. We have stations like Fox News that bill themselves as “entertainment” in lawsuits so they can dodge accountability for the harms they inflict on society. I like to pick on Fox, but most of our national TV news outlets outside of PBS (how sexy) are simply not that good. Our population is deliberately and horrendously misinformed (try reading a Texas textbook), and many take pride in their ignorance. I know a lot of white guys in the rural town I grew up in who think that intelligence is a sign of a weakness. We have white people who say we live in a post-racial society, and yet are simultaneously completely unaware of the Tulsa Race Massacre, or the fact that the Emmit Till memorial STILL gets vandalized.

Our political system is broken by design. No matter how much good you do as an individual, it’s not going to fix a massively broken federal government. The GOP has actively sought to deny statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico so that they can retain control of the Senate, despite representing a minority of the American population. Mitch McConnell takes pride in doing nothing to help Americans, if it means he can score some political points. There are state-level legislatures where the GOP gets ~42% of the state-wide vote yet somehow ends up with 65% of the legislative seats due to horrendous gerrymandering. When we see that happening in South America, Africa, or Asia we generally call that phenomena a “failed state”.

The GOP is very good at appealing to the idea of “individualism”. Trump is a man, and he beat COVID, so if you’re a manly man you can beat COVID too! They exploit people’s reluctance to ask for help, stoke their fears, and tell them that the Left is coming for what little they have left. Only the “free market” will set them free. Meanwhile our government deficits and debt grow, your internet and cable bill goes up year after year because despite a $400Bn windfall for telecoms there is not even a whisper of anti-trust action against their monopolistic practices, those telecoms and the websites you visit sell your data and violate your privacy because we are asleep at the wheel on digital privacy legislation. A handful of companies and individuals own the majority of the assets in this country, and use that power to act anti-competitively, yet some people think its a good thing. The “free market”.

COVID is going to absolutely decimate this country this winter. Americans are simply not going to save themselves. The last 40 years should demonstrate that, and especially the last 9 months.