“The Right’s Scary Ebola Lesson”: How Anti-Government Mania Is Harming America
If not for serial budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, we would probably have an Ebola vaccine and we would certainly have better treatment, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins tells the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein. This comes on the heels of reporting that the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by half since 2006, and new revelations about how botched protocols at the Dallas hospital that turned away Thomas Eric Duncan and then failed to treat him effectively also led to the infection of one of Duncan’s caregivers.
Yet most of the media coverage of the politics of Ebola to date has centered on whether President Obama has adequately and/or honestly dealt with the disease. “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters. Cruz is probably the wrong guy to talk about seriousness: his government shutdown forced the NIH to delay clinical trials and made the CDC cut back on disease outbreak detection programs this time last year.
I find myself wondering: When, if ever, will the political debate over Ebola center on the way the right-wing libertarian approach to government has made us less safe?
My fans at Newsbusters and other right-wing sites were outraged last week when I raised questions about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry shared some responsibility for the nation’s Ebola crisis with President Obama, since the outbreak occurred in his state on his watch. Now that a second person has been infected there, I think the question is even more relevant.
The GOP approach to public health was crystallized at the 2012 debate where Rep. Ron Paul – another Texas politician — said it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of a hypothetical young man who showed up in the emergency room very sick after he decided not to buy insurance. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul said, deriding “this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …”
“Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!” (For his part Paul answered no, but said hospitals should treat such cases as charity and not be compelled to do so.) Lest you think either Paul or that Florida audience represented a minority sentiment in the GOP, recall that none of his rivals, not even Mitt Romneycare, challenged Paul’s approach at the debate.
But now we know what happens when hospitals fail to adequately care for uninsured people who turn up in the ER: They can die, which is awful, but they may also spread disease and death to many other people. It’s pragmatism, not socialism, that commits governments to a public health agenda.
That agenda, however, has been disowned by the modern GOP. Sarah Kliff got lots of attention for her Vox piece starkly depicting how the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by more than half since 2006. The chart she used actually came from a piece in Scientific American last week, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s must-reading: it dispassionately explained the way we’ve underfunded and degraded our public health infrastructure. And again, it made me think about the Republican policies that have hampered our ability to fight this crisis.
Isn’t there a fair way to say that cutting 45,700 public health workers at the state and local level, largely under GOP governors, was irresponsible? As was slashing the CDC’s prevention budget by half since 2006, or cutting the Affordable Care Act’s prevention budget by a billion? Sen. John McCain wants an “Ebola czar,” but the Senate is blocking confirmation of the Surgeon General. Isn’t it fair to ask whether the constant denigration of government, and the resulting defunding, now makes it harder to handle what everyone agrees are core government functions?
It seems relevant to me that Texas is 33rd in public health funding. It’s clear now that not just the hospital but state and local authorities responded inadequately to Duncan’s illness. His family and friends were quarantined, but left to fend for themselves; county public health officials didn’t even provide clean bedding. “The individuals, it’s up to them … to care for the household,” Erikka Neroes of Dallas County health and human services told the Guardian a week after Duncan had been admitted to the hospital. “Dallas County has not been involved in a disinfection process.”
When the disinfection process began, belatedly, there’s evidence that was botched as well. The Guardian found a team of contractors with no protective clothing simply power-washing the front porch, for instance, when it should have been scrubbed with bleach. A baby stroller sat nearby.
As the great science writer David Dobbs concluded last week: “So the richest country on earth has no team to contain the first appearance of one of the most deadly viruses we’ve ever known.”
I’ve found myself wondering if Ebola is unquestionably a plus for Republicans three weeks before the midterm, as everyone (including me) has assumed. Certainly Republicans think it is; that’s why vulnerable Senate candidates, from Thom Tillis in North Carolina to Scott Brown in New Hampshire, are fear-mongering about it.
But if Democrats are the party of government, and thus seen as culpable by voters when government does wrong, aren’t government-hating, budget-slashing Republicans politically vulnerable when we need government to do something right, and the cuts they’ve pushed have compromised its ability to do so? Or does IOKIYAR mean the media just shrugs when the GOP fear-mongers, but would punish any Democrat respond in kind?
Blogger Kevin Drum likes to complain about a Democratic “Hack Gap” – the fact that liberal pundits are too willing to criticize Democratic leaders, while GOP pundits more often line up behind theirs. I don’t agree with Drum – in the end, Chris Matthews and I didn’t cost the president his re-election in 2012 – but it’s an interesting debate. Personally I think Democrats have a “Brilliant and Ruthless Campaign Operative Gap,” when it comes to shamelessly exploiting the other side’s political weakness.
The GOP’s anti-government crusade has hampered our ability to face the Ebola challenge. In an election year, there’s nothing wrong with Democrats saying that clearly. Campaigns should be cutting ads right now spotlighting the way Republican budget cuts have devastated the public health infrastructure we need to fight diseases like Ebola. Here’s one such ad from the Agenda Project.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 13, 2014
“Secret Deficit Lovers”: The GOP Deficit Scolds Are Having A Hard Time Letting Go
What if they balanced the budget and nobody knew or cared?
O.K., the federal budget hasn’t actually been balanced. But the Congressional Budget Office has tallied up the totals for fiscal 2014, which ran through the end of September, and reports that the deficit plunge of the past several years continues. You still hear politicians ranting about “trillion dollar deficits,” but last year’s deficit was less than half-a-trillion dollars — or, a more meaningful number, just 2.8 percent of G.D.P. — and it’s still falling.
So where are the ticker-tape parades? For that matter, where are the front-page news reports? After all, talk about the evils of deficits and the grave fiscal danger facing America dominated Washington for years. Shouldn’t we be making a big deal of the fact that the alleged crisis is over?
Well, we aren’t, and once you understand why, you also understand what fiscal hysteria was really about.
First, ordinary Americans aren’t celebrating the deficit’s decline because they don’t know about it.
That’s not mere speculation on my part. Earlier this year, YouGov polled Americans on fiscal issues, asking among other things whether the deficit had increased or declined since President Obama took office. (In case you’re wondering, the pollsters carefully explained the difference between annual deficits and the level of accumulated debt.) More than half of those polled said it had gone up, while only 19 percent correctly said that it had gone down.
Why doesn’t the public know better? Probably because of the way much of the news media report this and other issues, with bad news played up and good news downplayed if it’s reported at all.
This has been glaringly obvious in the case of health reform, where every problem with the Affordable Care Act has been the subject of headlines, while in right-wing media — and to some extent in mainstream news sources — favorable developments go unremarked. As a result, many people — even, in my experience, liberals — have the impression that the rollout of Obamacare has been a disaster, and have no idea that enrollment is above expectations, costs are lower than expected, and the number of Americans without insurance has dropped sharply. Surely something similar has happened on the budget deficit.
But what about people who pay a lot of attention to the budget, the self-proclaimed deficit hawks? (Some of us prefer to call them deficit scolds.) They’ve spent the past few years telling us that budget shortfalls are the most important issue facing the nation, that terrible things will happen unless we act to stem the flow of red ink. Are they expressing satisfaction over the fading of that threat?
Not a chance. Far from celebrating the deficit’s decline, the usual suspects — fiscal-scold think tanks, inside-the-Beltway pundits — seem annoyed by the news. It’s a “false victory,” they declare. “Trillion dollar deficits are coming back,” they warn. And they’re furious with President Obama for saying that it’s time to get past “mindless austerity” and “manufactured crises.” He’s declaring mission accomplished, they say, when he should be making another push for entitlement reform.
All of which demonstrates a truth that has been apparent for a while, if you have been paying close attention: Deficit scolds actually love big budget deficits, and hate it when those deficits get smaller. Why? Because fears of a fiscal crisis — fears that they feed assiduously — are their best hope of getting what they really want: big cuts in social programs. A few years ago they almost managed to bully the nation into cutting Social Security and/or raising the Medicare eligibility age; they even had hopes of turning Medicare into an underfinanced voucher program. Now that window of opportunity is closing fast.
But isn’t the falling deficit just a short-term blip, with the long-run outlook as dire as ever? Actually, no. Falling deficits right now have a lot to do with a strengthening economy plus some of that “mindless austerity” the president condemned. But there has also been a dramatic slowdown in the growth of health spending — and if that continues, the long-run fiscal outlook is much better than anyone thought possible not long ago. Yes, current projections still show a rising ratio of debt to G.D.P. starting some years from now, and uncomfortable levels of debt a generation from now. But given all the clear and present dangers we face, it’s hard to see why dealing with that distant and uncertain prospect should be any kind of policy priority.
So let’s say goodbye to fiscal hysteria. I know that the deficit scolds are having a hard time letting go; they’re still trying to bring back the days when Bowles and Simpson bestrode the Beltway like colossi. But those days aren’t coming back, and we should be glad.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2014
“Outsiders Coordinating With The Insiders”: ‘Citizens United’ Is Turning More Americans Into Bystanders
Are we spending our democracy into oblivion?
This is the time of year when media scribblers bemoan how nasty political campaigns have become. The complainers are accused of a dainty form of historical ignorance by defenders of mud-slinging who drag out Finley Peter Dunne’s 1895 assertion that “politics ain’t beanbag.” Politics has always been nasty, the argument goes, so we should get over it.
In fact, structural changes in our politics are making campaigns more mean and personal than ever. Even Dunne might be surprised. Outside groups empowered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision are using mass media in ways that turn off Americans to democracy, aggravate divisions between the political parties and heighten animosities among citizens of differing views.
Studies of this year’s political advertising show that outside groups are blanketing the airwaves with messages far more negative than those purveyed by the candidates themselves. That shouldn’t surprise us in the least. “Candidates can be held accountable for their ads,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a consumer organization that is trying to encourage candidates to disown “dark money.” “The outside groups are unknown, and have confusing names.”
No one is advertising under the moniker “Influence Peddlers for Crummy Politics.”
There is far too much complacency about big money’s role in this year’s campaigns, on the grounds that both sides have plenty of it. This misses the point. “It doesn’t balance it out if you have billionaire Republicans battling billionaire Democrats,” says Weissman. “You still have billionaires setting the agenda for the election.”
Moreover, a focus just on this year’s competitive Senate and House races misses the enormous impact a handful of very wealthy people can have on state and local campaigns. A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice details how, at a relatively modest cost to themselves, a privileged few can change how government that is supposed to be nearest to the people is actually carried out.
“At this scale, you don’t have to be a Koch brother to be a kingmaker,” the report informs us. Worse, the supposedly “independent” spending of the super-rich kingmakers isn’t independent at all. The report documents how closely the activities of supposedly outside groups are coordinated with insiders and the candidates themselves.
Like everything else in our politics these days, Citizens United is usually debated along ideological lines. Progressives typically hate it. Conservatives usually defend it. But citizens of every persuasion should be worried about what this precedent-shattering decision has unleashed. More than ever, politics is the only profession that regularly advertises against itself. If voters feel cynical, the outside groups — on both sides — are doing all they can to encourage their disenchantment.
A study by the Wesleyan Media Project of ads aired between Aug. 29 and Sept. 11 found that 55 percent of ads in U.S. Senate elections were negative, up from 43.7 percent over the same period in 2010. Wesleyan found that 91.4 percent of the ads run by outside groups in support of Democrats were negative, compared with 41.9 percent of those run by Democratic candidates themselves. For Republicans, 77.9 percent of the group ads were negative, compared with only 12.3 percent of the candidate ads. Negative ads were down slightly in the next two-week period, but there were still more negative commercials run this year than in the comparable period in 2010.
Defenders of massive spending on advertising, positive or negative, will make the case that at least the ads engage voters. Not necessarily, and certainly not this year. Indeed, the Pew Research Center found in early October that only 15 percent of Americans are following the elections “very closely.” Interest in the campaign, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew, “is the lowest it has been at this point in an off-year election in at least two decades.”
Hardly a day goes by without someone lamenting how polarized our politics has become. Can anyone seriously contend that the current way of running and financing elections is disconnected from the difficulty politicians have in working together? “How are they supposed to get along with the other side the day after the election?” Weissman asks. Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, the sometimes dissident conservative writer David Frum argues that “the radicalization of the party’s donor base has led Republicans in Congress to try tactics they would never have dared use before.”
Thus the tragic irony: Citizens United is deepening our divisions and turning more citizens into bystanders. Our republic can do better.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 12, 2014
“A Much More Difficult Response”: Should The Democrats Abandon Hope Of Getting Relief From Voter Suppression In The Courts?
Yesterday there were two rulings on voting rights cases, both of which were decided in favor of the liberal side of the argument. But don’t get too excited. I hate to be an eternal pessimist on this issue, but neither case is likely to turn out the way liberals and Democrats want. In fact, we’re almost at the point where — until the current makeup of the Supreme Court changes — liberals should keep themselves from ever thinking the courts are going to stop Republican efforts at voter suppression.
I’ll get to the consequences of that in a moment, but first let’s look at the two cases yesterday. The first was in Texas, where a federal judge struck down the state’s voter ID law. In refreshingly blunt language, the judge called the law an “unconstitutional poll tax,” and said that the legislators who passed it “were motivated, at the very least in part, because of and not merely in spite of the voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate.” Which is absolutely true, but that doesn’t mean the ruling is going to be upheld by a Supreme Court that has made it clear that they have little problem with almost any restrictions on voting rights.
But what about the Wisconsin case? There, the Supreme Court halted the implementation of a voter ID law yesterday, so doesn’t that mean they’re open to striking down voter ID laws? Not really. Ian Millhiser explains:
Although the Supreme Court’s order does not explain why the Court halted the law, a short dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito provides a window into the Court’s reasoning. Alito begins his dissent by admitting that “[t]here is a colorable basis for the Court’s decision due to the proximity of the upcoming general election.” In a 2006 case called Purcell v. Gonzalez, the Supreme Court explained that judges should be reluctant to issue orders affecting a state’s election law as an election approaches. “Court orders affecting elections,” according to Purcell, “can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.” It is likely that the six justices who agreed to halt the Wisconsin law relied on Purcell in reaching this decision.
Just the other day, the Court allowed a North Carolina voter suppression law to go forward, but in that case the law had already been implemented. And that’s why we shouldn’t be encouraged by the Wisconsin ruling: it doesn’t imply that the Court believes these restrictions are unconstitutional, only that it would be a mess to have them take effect just a few weeks before the election. It’s a narrow question of election procedure.
It would be going too far to say that Democrats should just abandon all court challenges to these voting laws. You never know what might happen—by the time the next major case reaches the Supreme Court, one of the five conservatives could have retired. But the only real response is the much more difficult one: a sustained, state-by-state campaign to counter voting suppression laws by registering as many people as possible, helping them acquire the ID the state is demanding, and getting them to the polls. That’s incredibly hard, time-consuming, and resource-intensive work—much more so than filing lawsuits. But Democrats don’t have much choice.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 10, 2014
“Ebola Doesn’t Abide By Borders”: Ensuring Our Public Health System Is Adequately Funded And Allowed To Do Its Job Is Key
The U.S. should not implement travel restrictions on countries impacted by the Ebola crisis and here is why. The Ebola outbreak has reminded the world what public health officials have known for centuries: Infectious disease does not respect geographical borders.
There was a time when we travelled the globe in ships and across land. In those days travel took months and diseases died out or were easy to contain using quarantine measures and broad travel restrictions.
We now live in a global society during a time when the variables we are trying to compute are numerous and complex. The vast number of people traveling around the world, the speed of travel, the large number of conveyances and the presence of multiple ports of entry into our country argues for a focused, well-tested and science-based approach to reducing the risk of exposure to this highly lethal infectious disease.
I’ve just returned from South Africa with a connection through Amsterdam, Netherlands. While this is far from West Africa, I saw a system of health and customs officials on high alert looking for ill passengers, passenger screenings using temperature monitors at airports and health advisories in airports to inform passengers how to protect themselves. What I saw, in fact, was a responsive, competent public health approach at work.
Preventing travel from affected countries is an inadequate measure. Not only do we need to ensure rapid passage of people in and out of the area for response purposes, but we also need to ensure the continued flow of supplies desperately needed to address the outbreak at its source, which is the best way to break the chain of infection. With the number of people passing through airports all over the world, identifying those who could have come into contact with people from affected countries is an impossible task. Multiply this by the number of connecting flights through European or other international hubs and it becomes even harder.
While we are appropriately worried about Ebola, enterovirus-68 has sickened more than 628 people in 44 states and the District of Columbia, a severe coronavirus – the Middle East respiratory syndrome – is circulating in the Middle East and chikungunya virus has entered our country. We have many significant biological threats, and they are all managed best through proven public health measures.
I have yet to hear calls to quarantine our borders between states while these serious diseases are already here because such a measure, of course, would be ineffective. Sound disease surveillance, case finding, monitoring and treatment is the appropriate approach. Ebola, although highly lethal, can be managed using these proven methods. We know its epidemiology, its biology and how to defeat it.
A strong, well-developed and adequately funded public health system is the key to containing Ebola and all of these other infectious threats. Unfortunately, ongoing budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies continue to put a strain on resources. Policymakers who want to be part of the solution need only to support ensuring our public health system is adequately funded and allowed to do its job.
Yes, we should screen travelers, but restricting travel is not the solution. A focused, robust and science-based public health response is.
By: Georges Benjamin, M.D., Executive Director, American Public Health Association; Publisher, Control of Communicable Diseases Manuel; Debate Club, U. S. News and World Report, October 10, 2014
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