The United States passed an ignominious milestone two days ago -- 500,000 deaths from the coronavirus. That milestone was absolutely avoidable. And, in the UK, there have also been thousands of avoidable deaths. Owen Jones writes:
A government that is able to get away with the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of its own citizens can get away with anything. In the coming months, the days will become lighter and warmer, and a population that has been through the most severe national emergency since the second world war will be ever freer. Playgrounds will fill with laughing children, rounds will be bought in pubs and friends will hug. As the “before times” come roaring back, the relief will fuse with a desire to scrub the nightmare away from our collective consciousness, and leave it to the history books and future Netflix dramas to unpick.
We have witnessed governments that have failed to take COVID seriously -- and insisted that the economy was the first priority:
From the very start, Conservative strategy was to prioritise economic interests over human life: a calamity on its own terms, which left us simultaneously with one of the world’s worst death tolls and recessions – because it was always the virus that threatened our economy the most. Years of austerity left Britain with depleted personal protective equipment (PPE) stocks and the government failed to build up testing capacity even as the virus left China’s shores. While health experts such as Prof Anthony Costello warned that “every day of delay will kill”, the government briefed journalists that it would pursue herd immunity and allow the virus to run rampant. The government finally U-turned, but no other major European country entered lockdown with infections so high. An underfunded and under-resourced NHS with 40,000 nursing vacancies was expected to pick up the pieces, while the government was reduced to paying extortionate prices for PPE, some of which was unusable.
That immoral strategy has been on full display in Texas over the last two weeks.
When are we going to hold our leaders to account?
Image: SmartCompany
6 comments:
From Texas, "Top board leaders of Texas’ embattled power grid operator said Tuesday they will resign following outrage . . . All of the five board directors who are stepping down, including Chairwoman Sally Talberg, live outside of Texas . . ."
https://www.castanet.net/news/World/326003/Top-board-leaders-resign-after-deadly-Texas-power-outages
Weak, corrupt government is a chronic problem everywhere and it's designed that way. It may have become bad enough in Texas to cause enough outrage but I won't hold my breath. The rats will scoot away and some poor slobs will wind up holding the bag. In the meantime the loud mouthed politicians who created the mess will blame the Socialists in Washington; they're already blaming windmills.
Here in Canada we won't hold our leaders to account; we're too nice.
It's interesting that the people resigning live outside of Texas, Toby. That fact says a great deal.
That "immoral strategy," as you rightly put it, has been on full display at home here in Ontario. In fact, we can see it right now, as Toronto's neighbour to the north, York region, is allowed to open up with daily new cases still in the hundreds. York's restaurants, bars, gyms and bingo halls are all open, while Toronto's remain closed.
This is madness. Where do you think Torontonians are going to eat, drink and use their GoodLife memberships? Yet variants are spreading, over 400 Ontario B117 cases now, and epidemiologists are predicting a variant-driven third wave in March.
It makes no sense at all to re-open any part of the Golden Horseshoe right now. Indeed, all of Ontario should remain under stay-at-home orders until provincial daily cases are in the single digits. That's the proven way to save lives until everyone can be vaccinated. Anything less puts profits over human life.
Cap
Our leaders don't have the intestinal fortitude to do what must be done, Cap.
Governments, certainly our own, no longer lead. They administer. They facilitate. What falls outside of administration they defer wherever possible. Initiatives must be based on electoral cycles rather than need.
The NYT has an item today on Texas as the poster child for looming infrastructure collapse across the United States. A cold snap hit and the energy infrastructure failed - wind farms, natural gas plants, the electrical grid, water lines, sewers, the lot. Those responsible for these failures reacted predictably by trying to shift the blame to others no matter how ludicrous their arguments.
Critical infrastructure, the arteries of our economies, is failing. To remedy the problem, including the largest cost - years, sometimes decades of neglect, will be a punishing burden but the additional costs of neglecting remediation for another decade will be astronomical. In Canada the tab is estimated to be upwards of a trillion dollars.
Tom Friedman captures the mood of the moment in his op-ed, "Can You Believe This Is Happening in America?" As chaos unfolds in America from the Texas disaster to Donald Trump to the storming of the Capitol, a bewildered and frightened public keeps asking "Can you believe this is happening in America?" I think we find ourselves in the same boat.
Steve Bannon put it succinctly, Mound. Despite the claim to administer things, the goal is "to deconstruct the administrative state.'
Post a Comment