RSN: Robert Reich | America Is Exceptional in All the Wrong Ways

25 June 20

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Robert Reich | America Is Exceptional in All the Wrong Ways

Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "As our incompetent president flounders in the face of crises - leading the worst coronavirus response in the industrialized world, and seeking to crush nationwide protests for black lives - the hard truth about this country comes into focus: America is not exceptional, but it is the exception."

No other industrialized nation was as woefully unprepared for the pandemic as was the United States. With 4.25% of the world population, America has the tragic distinction of accounting for about 30% of pandemic deaths so far.

Why are we so different from other nations facing the same coronavirus threat? Why has everything gone so tragically wrong in America?

Part of it is Donald Trump. 

He and his corrupt administration repeatedly ignored warnings from public health experts and national security officials throughout January and February, only acting on March 16th after the stock market tanked. Researchers estimate that nearly 36,000 deaths could have been prevented if the United States had implemented social distancing policies just one week earlier.

No other industrialized nation has so drastically skirted responsibility by leaving it to subordinate units of government – states and cities – to buy ventilators and personal protective equipment.

In no other industrialized nation have experts in public health and emergency preparedness been muzzled and replaced by political cronies like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in turn has been advised by campaign donors and Fox News.

In no other industrialized nation has Covid-19 so swiftly eviscerated the incomes of the working class. Around the world, governments are providing generous income support to keep their unemployment rates low. Not in the U.S. Nearly 40 million Americans have lost their jobs so far, and more than 30% of American adults have been forced to cut back on buying food and risk going hungry.

At best, Americans have received one-time checks for $1,200, about a week’s worth of rent, groceries and utilities. After a massive backlog, people finally started collecting their expanded unemployment benefits – just in time for the expansion to expire with little to no chance of being renewed.

In no other nation is there such chaos about reopening. While Europe is opening slowly and carefully, the U.S. is opening chaotically, each state on its own. Some are lifting restrictions overnight.

And not even a global pandemic can overshadow the racism embedded in this country’s DNA. Even as black Americans are disproportionately dying from coronavirus, they have nonetheless been forced into the streets in an outpouring of grief and anger over decades of harsh policing and unjust killings. 

As protests erupted across the country in response to more police killings of unarmed black Americans, the protesters have been met with even more police violence. Firing tear gas into crowds of predominantly black protesters, in the middle of a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus that is already disproportionately hurting black communities, is unconscionably cruel.

Indeed, a lot of the responsibility rests with Trump and his hapless and corrupt collection of grifters, buffoons, sycophants, lobbyists and relatives.

But the problems at the core of our broken system, laid bare by this pandemic, have been plaguing this country long before Trump came along.

America is the only industrialized nation without guaranteed, universal healthcare.

No other industrialized nation insists on tying health care to employment, resulting in tens of millions of U.S. citizens losing their health insurance at the very moment they need it most.

We’re the only one out of 22 advanced nations that doesn’t give all workers some form of paid sick leave.

Average wage growth in the United States has long lagged behind average wage growth in most other industrialized countries, even before the pandemic robbed Americans of their jobs and incomes. Since 1980, American workers’ share of total national income has dropped more than in any other rich nation.

And America also has the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap on the planet. In 1965, American CEOs were paid 20 times the typical worker. Today, American CEOs are paid 278 times the typical worker.

Not surprisingly, American workers are far less unionized than workers in other industrialized economies. Only 10.2 percent of all workers in America belong to a union, compared with more than 26% in Canada, 65% in Sweden, and 23% in Britain. With less unionization, American workers are easily overpowered by corporations, and can’t bargain for higher wages or better benefits.

So who and what’s to blame for the largest preventable loss of life in American history?

It’s not just Trump’s malicious incompetence.

It’s decades of America’s failure to provide its people the basic support they need, decades of putting corporations’ bottom lines ahead of workers’ paychecks, decades of letting the rich and powerful pull the strings as the rest of us barely get by.

This pandemic has exposed what has long been true: On the global stage, America is the exception, but not in the way we would like to believe.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (photo: Getty)

ALSO SEE: Trump Plan to Cut Federal Support for Covid-19 Testing Sites Sparks Alarm

White House Ordered NIH to Cancel Coronavirus Research Funding, Fauci Says
Beth Mole, Ars Technica
Mole writes: "The National Institutes of Health abruptly cut off funding to a long-standing, well-regarded research project on bat coronaviruses only after the White House specifically told it to do so, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases."
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Wilmington, North Carolina police car. (photo: WilmingtonNC.Gov)

'We Are Gonna Go Out and Start Slaughtering Them': Three North Carolina Cops Fired After Talk of Killing Black Residents
Tim Elfrink, The Washington Post
Elfrink writes: "Sitting in his patrol car in Wilmington, N.C., Officer Michael 'Kevin' Piner predicted Black Lives Matter protests would soon lead to civil war. 'I'm ready,' Piner told another officer, adding that he planned to buy an assault rifle."
READ MORE

New York Police Department. (photo: Dave Sanders/The New York Times)

Megan Day | We're Learning More About the Relationships Between Race, Class, and Police Brutality
Meagan Day, Jacobin
Day writes: "A new paper finds that for white Americans, socioeconomic status is a major determining factor in susceptibility to fatal police violence, while for black Americans, class is critical but not decisive."
READ MORE

Attorney General Bill Barr. (photo: CNN)

Trump's Department of Justice Is Harassing Legal Weed Companies Because Bill Barr Hates Pot
Greg Walters, VICE
Walters writes: "A DOJ whistleblower says that because of Barr's personal antipathy toward cannabis, the department is using unnecessary antitrust investigations to harass legal weed companies."
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A boy from the Comuna Domingo Playa with skin conditions due to the oil spill. (photo: Alliance of HR Organzations)

Ecuador: 75 Days From Oil Spill, Still No Justice for Victims

teleSUR

Excerpt: "Seventy-five days after some 15,000 barrels of oil gushed into two of Ecuador's most important rivers in the northern Amazon, Indigenous communities are still suffering the consequences while the government is not taking any actions."

"The river water is still polluted, and the communities continue to consume it, due to the lack of other means," Kichwa leader and President of FCUNAE, the region's Indigenous Federation of United Communes, Carlos Jipa, said at the press conference.

Skin problems, an outbreak of dengue fever, and cases with symptoms associated with COVID-19 are increasing in the region. At the same time, local authorities and the State are unable to provide urgent and adequate action. 

"People have received medicines such as ibuprofen or fusidic acid, without consideration of their age group, pathologies, and clinical history," the Alliance denounced.

The spill occurred on April 7, following the breakage of a section of the Heavy Crude Oil Pipeline (OCP) within the Trans-Ecuatorian Oil Pipeline System (SOTE).

Urgent containment measures were not taken at the time to stop the spill, which could reach the waters of the River Coca and Napo, causing severe ecological and environmental problems.

Pollution has affected more than 2,000 families and left some 120,000 people stranded without a safe source of food and water, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The legal action was aimed to demand immediate reparation, relief for affected peoples, and repair or relocation of the pipelines to prevent future spills. But as more than 75 days have passed, authorities are accused of failing to meet their responsibilities toward Indigenous communities.

"Indigenous communities are experiencing four damages at once; pollution from the spill, COVID19, dengue fever, and floods. There is an abandonment of the State," Bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Aguarico Jose Adalberto Jimenez Mendoza said with concern at the press conference.

teleSUR English@telesurenglish

Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples rise against the neoliberal reforms of #LeninMoreno’s government. #ParoNacional #ElParoRecienComienza

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Saiga antelope (pictured, a calf in Russia) roam the steppes, or arid grasslands, of Eastern Europe and most of Central Asia. (photo: Igor Shipilenok/Minden Pictures)

Floppy-Nosed Antelope Has Baby Boom, Raising Hope for Critically Endangered Species
Jason Bittel, National Geographic
Bittel writes: "In 2019, a herd of saiga in Kazakhstan's Ustyurt Plateau produced just four calves. This year, scientists found over 500 - a sign conservation efforts are working." 

ach spring since 2007, scientists have scoured Kazakhstan’s Ustyurt Plateau for baby saiga antelope. Because this population of the critically endangered species is the country’s smallest and most imperiled, the results are usually not encouraging.

In 2018, for instance, scientists found a total of 58 calves living in these southwestern steppes. In 2019, that number dropped to four newborns.

This decline makes the May discovery of 530 saiga calves hunkered down in the knee-high grass a welcome sign of a possible baby boom for an animal hunted nearly to extinction.

As recently as the 1980s, millions of adult saiga—known for their comical, trunk-like noses—roamed the plains of Central Asia. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, demand for the antelopes’ horns grew in traditional Asian medicine markets, and poachers descended.

Then, in 2015, a lethal bacterial outbreak, which killed around 200,000 of these goat-size animals, dramatically hobbled herds. In short order, more than 70 percent of the remaining population disappeared. In a promising turnaround, a 2019 census reported that the Kazakh population had rebounded to 334,400 animals—more than double the number of saiga found two years prior. (Read more about the saiga antelope mass die-off.)

Not only is the number of baby saiga a good sign, but the aggregation of adults that birthed them is the largest anyone has seen in this area in almost 10 years, says Albert Salemgareyev, a saiga specialist at the nonprofit Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK).

“It’s really exciting for all of us,” says Saken Dildakhmet, press secretary for the Kazakhstan government’s Committee of Forestry and Wildlife. (Fariza Adilbekova, national coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, which is part of the ACBK, translated Dildakhmet’s comments over a video call.)

“Due to good protection and patrolling efforts of the state rangers after the mass die-off, every year we’re seeing a steady growth of the saiga population,” says Dildakhmet.

Population collapse

Although poaching has declined, the sand-colored antelopes continue to face multiple threats. One critical threat was introduced by human infrastructure.

In 2014, the Kazakh government installed fencing along the country’s border with Uzbekistan in an attempt to prevent smuggling and drug trafficking.

“It was never really going to work, because it’s such a remote area, and it’s just barbed wire,” says E.J. Milner-Gulland, a conservation scientist at the University of Oxford and chair of the Saiga Conservation Alliance. “But it works as a saiga trap.”

The migratory animals winter in milder Uzbekistan and travel back northward to Kazakhstan to reproduce and give birth, starting in late April. But the border fence effectively cut this migration in half, though there was evidence that some determined animals did manage to find a way across. “Our specialists found saiga fur on the fences,” says Adilbekova, “and blood.”

Highways and other human developments also thwart migratory movement. (Learn about the world’s great animal migrations.)

A few years ago, Salemgareyev, Adilbekova, and colleagues received government approval to install gaps in the border fence, which would allow for the antelopes to pass. For unknown reasons, the saiga didn’t use the gaps—until this past winter.

“This year, we got the news from our Uzbek colleagues,” says Salemgareyev. “A group of saiga had appeared.”

“Hovering on the brink”

Considering how many saiga formerly to traveled these steppes, a few hundred newborns is a very small number, cautions Milner-Gulland, who was not involved in the discovery. But in a decade during which many experts have been concerned that the Ustyurt Plateau population is on its way to disappearing altogether, it is a promising sign.

The saiga population is “still hovering on the brink, but it’s going in the right direction,” she says. “Any baby saiga is a good news story.”

As research continues, scientists are learning more about the species’ life cycle. “Every year, we find something new,” says Salemgareyev. Recently, he and his colleagues happened upon a herd of about 5,000 saiga in the Ural population to the west; the bleating sounds were so loud, he says, that it was impossible to hear the person standing next to you. (Read more about efforts to save saiga.)

A group that size did not at first appear to be unusual—until the scientists realized the herd was entirely male, which have horns. Salemgareyev searched the scientific literature for similar observations and could not find previous documentation; his supposition is that the males go their own way during the calving season. Researchers have also found that, in some areas, newborn calves seem to skew heavily toward males—a change from findings 20 years ago.

Unknowns aside, one thing for certain about saiga “is that it's a survivor,” says Milner-Gulland. “It’s a species that's been knocked down several times, and it keeps bouncing back.”

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