The United States is facing problems it should not have as the most wealthy nation on the planet. It is about cruelty over competence. So far, cruelty still plays a significant part in many areas.
Politics can kill
While listening to Morning Joe on MSNBC, Mike Barnacle made a prescient statement this morning.
“We are talking about cruelty versus incompetence,” Mike Barnacle said. “The Republican proven cruelty and the president’s proven competence.”
This correlates perfectly with Common Dreams’ journalist Jim Naureckas’ article referencing Washington Post’s Akilah Johnson’s piece titled “Can politics kill you? Research says the answer increasingly is yes.”
Naureckas’ critique is that even as the Washington Post’s article presented the case of the danger of purported conservative politics on the well-being of Americans, they went into the false balance of both sides. His ending paragraphs summed it up.
You know what would actually benefit politics in the United States? A media system that was willing to point out who was causing demonstrable problems, rather than pretending that “both sides” are always to blame. Reporting like that could actually save lives.
This is quite evident in the first paragraph of the Washington Post piece.
As the coronavirus pandemic approaches its third full winter, two studies reveal an uncomfortable truth: The toxicity of partisan politics is fueling an overall increase in mortality rates for working-age Americans.
When one analyses that paragraph, it makes it seem as if the unnecessary deaths from COVID are equally the fault of the two parties. That is entirely false, and even the article makes that clear. The following paragraph dispels the notion that there should be equal weight given to the causes of COVID deaths and other illnesses.
In one study, researchers concluded that people living in more conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to covid-19. The other, which looked at health outcomes more broadly, found that the more conservative a state’s policies, the shorter the lives of working-age people.
The article did not only release the gross numbers. It pointed out that competent research provided a district-by-district analysis normalized for every possible criterion to prevent false comparisons. The results were stunning.
Harvard researchers analyzed data on covid-19 mortality rates and the stress on hospital intensive care units across all 435 congressional districts from April 2021 to March 2022. They also examined congressional members’ overall voting records, how they voted on four coronavirus relief bills, and whether the governor’s office and legislature of a state were controlled by one party.
The study, published this month in the Lancet Regional Health-Americas, found that the more conservative the voting records of members of Congress and state legislators, the higher the age-adjusted covid mortality rates — even after taking into account the racial, education and income characteristics of each congressional district along with vaccination rates.
Covid death rates were 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments and 26 percent higher in areas where voters lean conservative. Similar results emerged about hospital ICU capacity when the concentration of political power in a state was conservative.
Conservative politicians, pundits, and talking heads were providing bad advice to their constituents. They did it even as most were following proper protocol. Mike Barnicle’s statement, “Cruelty versus Competence,” is apropos.
The article pointed out that as the Federal Government created policies like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other nationalized program, poorer states were pulled up faster.
The following conclusion of the report should be a gut punch for the conservative party; read the Republican leadership and their orthodoxy.
The October report found that if all states implemented liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, criminal justice, health and welfare, labor, marijuana, and economic and tobacco taxes, more than 170,000 lives would have been saved in 2019. On the flip side, if states went with conservative versions of those policies, there would have been about 217,000 more deaths that year — “the equivalent of a 600-passenger airplane crashing every day of the year,” the study said.
The article has a positive. When the masses, even in Conservative states, have the option to vote on policy, they have been choosing more progressive policies. The disconnection is that their identity gets in the way of who they elect to serve them.
We must apply two solutions to ensure all Americans have equal access to success, happiness, and health. First, we must give these people space to articulate their beliefs even as we challenge their positions civilly. Often, you convince them, but their attachment to a false conservative association gets in the way. The second solution is the let them know they can give themselves permission in that voting booth to vote the way their intellect tells them to vote. Only they and their supreme being know who they voted for without question. They can leave that voting booth to tell any story they want.