Scanning the news you can sometimes discern a theme. Or if you have a certain cast of mind, a conspiracy. I won’t go that far, but I will argue that decades of bad-mouthing government and underfunding services has contributed to a pervasive distrust of institutions, which leads perversely to more underfunding, dysfunction and distrust, a downward death spiral.
Take, for example, Flint. In an outrageous abdication of responsibility a cut-rate solution led to the poisoning of people and a bill to fix the broken water system magnitudes higher than if they’d done it right in the first place.
Bad for Flint, but how about the rest of us? Do we have any idea how unsafe our own drinking water is? We do not. And substituting expensive bottled water or elaborate purifiers is no guarantee we’ll be safer. We’re back where our ancestors were. They spent their lives drinking beer or hard cider in preference to water that regularly gave them cholera, typhoid and dysentery. Water borne diseases killed Stephen Douglas, Wilbur Wright, Zachery Taylor, James K. Polk, the young sons of Abe Lincoln ad Leland Stanford, as well as tens of thousands of lesser known Americans
We rely on municipalities, states and the federal government for safe drinking water and can no longer count on their delivering, in part because of decades of deferred maintenance thanks to anti-tax zealotry powered by powerful interests.
The same story cam be told of underfunded food and drug protections, environmental regulation, too few meat inspectors and financial hijinks watchdogs at SEC, the IRS and so on. It’s a long list. Nobody likes taxes, but I like risking my life and financial well-bang even less. Let the buyer beware is hardly useful when it comes to medicine, food, tap water and banks. Who knows the well is poisoned are until it’s too late in a complex, technical world.
What sort of magical thinking makes the tax-hating plutocracy think they are immune? A gated community doesn’t protect you from tainted meat, polluted water and air, or Bernie Madoff. A schadenfreude moment occurred years ago when the ill-paid minority kitchen staff of a white’s only country club unwittingly infected the city grandees with hepatitis. Tunes out we really are all in this together. One man’s lack of health care can quickly become another man’s infectious disease. That’s why they call it public health.
The anti-government, anti-tax wave is well on its way to turning a vibrant first world country into a decaying third world sinkhole. You can’t rust the roads and bridges. You can’t trust the water and sewer department. And you shouldn’t have trusted the supply side pied pipers who said cutting taxes would make everyone richer instead of less safe. Will your hospital cure you today or send you home with an antibiotic resistant infection? How do you know? Is someone policing the doctors, the hospital corporations, the minimum wage orderlies, the pharmaceutical titans? Not so much.
The lack of trust engendered by multiple civic failures means there is no faith that funding needed measures will solve the problems, since we have been taught to trust no one. The country has internalized the Reagan mantra: Government is not the solution, government is the problem. But that way madness lies.
Yet this state of affairs suits the malefactors just fine. Profits are higher if you don’t have to worry about regulators making you play by the rules or take the common good into account. Profits are astronomical if you use Citizens United to purchase Senators and Congressmen and get them to rejigger the rules in your favor or simply to do nothing to make the country safe. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s business as usual
A piquant example reported this week in the Wall Street Journal shows, in microcosm, how the world really works. As we all know, the second Justice Scalia died, the Republicans vowed to block the President from naming a replacement. They preferred leaving the Court a Justice short until October 2017, twenty months from now, rather than risk a Democratic appointee able to tilt the court in favor of liberal decisions.
A lot more than ideology is at stake. There’s also money at issue. According to the Journal “Scalia was an ally to companies in their decades-long push to block multi-party lawsuits…” These class action suits bundle cases by many aggrieved parties who have been damaged by a corporation. Defendants like Dow Chemical, Tyson Foods, and many others have pending cases and were relying on Scalia to ensure 5-4 decisions in their favor. With him gone, injured parties may have a chance.
Just this week, with Scalia no longer available to protect them from their misbehavior, price-fixing in this case, Dow threw in the towel and agreed to pay $835 million to plaintiffs. Maybe all three government branches can make a difference for good, not just for ill. Maybe if the cop is put back on the beat, predation can be curbed. Maybe spending to update infrastructure that endangers lives, can save them. Maybe its time for citizens to start acting in their own best interest.