Washington escalates its military
interventions abroad, launching simultaneous air and ground attacks in Syria,
Iraq and Afghanistan; multiplying drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia;
training, arming and financing proxy mercenaries in Jordan, the Gulf States and
Iraq; and dispatching National Guard battalions to West Africa, ostensibly to
combat the Ebola epidemic, though they lack the most elementary public health
capabilities. All in all the US spent $3.5 trillion for military invasions over
6 years.
At the same time, the US domestic
public health services have deteriorated. At the state and local level, like
Dallas, Texas and at the national level, officials and major institutions
demonstrate an inability to effectively detect and manage cases of Ebola
infections among the general population in a timely manner. An infected
Liberian immigrant was not diagnosed correctly when he presented to a major
Dallas hospital emergency room. Instead he received irrelevant and unnecessary
‘imaging studies’ and was sent home with oral antibiotics. This confirmed the
widespread belief that Emergency Room physicians and nurses are under pressure
from their administration to order costly CT scans and MRI’s on patients as a
way to make money for the hospital and to cover-up their incompetence at basic
patient history and physical examination. Despite the patient’s informing
hospital workers of his recent arrival from Liberia, an Ebola outbreak
hot-spot, personnel did not put on basic protective gowns, gloves, hoods and
masks and they allowed the febrile, vomiting, desperately sick man to
contaminate large areas of the emergency department, waiting room and MRI
suite. Quarantine was not even considered. . . .
The director of the Dallas hospital
covered up for his organization’s incompetence by a series of victim blaming –
the patient, the computer system, the nurses... National health guidelines may
have been inadequate at the time, but Ebola was clearly on the national radar
and the CDC had provided basic guidelines and measures. All hospitals have
infectious control committees, disaster preparedness committees and receive
state and national alerts.
As the crisis and public panic
deepened, President Obama engaged in vigorous political fund-raising. Meanwhile,
Vice President Biden was preoccupied by his 40+ year-old son’s expulsion from
the Navy Reserve for cocaine use. The Defense Secretary was busy picking
targets to bomb in Syria and Iraq…
The Cabinet met over ‘National
Security’ issues like ISIS, expanding military interventions around the world,
while US medical personnel, international travelers and their family members,
as well as average American citizens felt more threatened by the apparent
breakdown of the public health system, both at the local and national levels,
in the face of a deadly viral infection.
The inadequacy, indeed breakdown, of
the US public health system as it confronts the first cases of Ebola in the US
and the simultaneous escalation of military intervention in Syria and Iraq
typifies, in microcosm, the demise of the US republic accompanying the rise of
the US military empire.
The Dallas hospital, which had at first
turned a desperately sick Liberian immigrant away, was run as a for-profit
enterprise, directed by business managers eager for high returns and dismissive
of basic health procedures and even more of the advice of competent,
experienced health workers: They had made their biggest investments in high
technology and multi-million dollar equipment, irrelevant to the diagnosis and
treatment of tropical and infectious diseases. The pressure to use the most
expensive technology inappropriately and recoup the corporate investment,
resulted in a deadly delay in diagnosis and contaminated at least a dozen
health care workers. The corporate hospital director eventually apologized for
their ‘mistakes’. But the fault goes far beyond “bad decisions”: The procedures
and protocols are built into the ‘for profit’ model emphasizing the need show a
healthy ‘return’ on multi-million dollar advanced technological investments. There
is a stark contrast between the high tech advances in imaging and surgery in a
modern American hospital and the regressive, socially backward ignorance of the
socio-medico context in which critically ill, infectious patients are embedded.
It is as if such patients are not supposed to enter the techno-medical world
where only the most highly remunerative procedures and protocols are available
for those… who can pay.
At the deeper level, the entire
national public health system is increasingly dependent on the formulation of
rules and flows of information, corrupted and distorted by ‘market demands’ and
political priorities heavily weighted toward expanding the police state at home
and militarism abroad. These political priorities in turn, are influenced by
the massive shift in resources to support the permanent war policies of the Obama
regime and the US Congress.
The proliferation and escalation of
military interventions dominates the Obama Administration’s real agenda. According
to Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern European Affairs, Victoria Nuland,
six billion dollars of public money was spent on subverting the elected
government of the Ukraine - $6 billion shifted from US domestic sectors, like
health care and real disaster preparedness. Meanwhile hundreds of hospitals
have been closed in most major US cities and rural clinics abandoned for lack
of personnel. The entire health care system, in its current ‘for profit’
corporate form is devoid of competent, effective leadership. On the other hand,
the US military is seen as the solution to the world’s (and increasingly domestic)
problems, while the social roots of conflict and disaster are ignored with
contempt.
The militarization of the minds of our
political leaders has led to the most grotesque decisions: In the face of the
Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the Obama regime has sent 2000 National Guard
combatants to Africa. These are soldiers who lack the most elementary
knowledge, skill, capability and training to deal with the complexities of a
major public health crisis in a devastated, war torn part of the world. One
must recall how Washington pressured the United Nations to send ‘Peace-keepers’
to Haiti after the earthquake – UN soldiers from Nepal, who brought not peace
but an epidemic of cholera killing additional tens of thousands of Haitian
civilians. The immediate question regarding US National Guard troops in West
Africa is not whether they can build rural clinics or maintain camps of
quarantined Africans, the real concern is whether these heavily armed ‘health
aides’ can avoid being infected and bringing Ebola home. This concern has now
led the Pentagon to impose mandatory quarantine on its own soldiers returning
from West Africa – a knee-jerk reaction motivated more by fear-mongering than
science.
In contrast, Cuba has sent hundreds of
highly skilled health workers, who form teams with proven track records in
confronting public health crises in the tropics and elsewhere. Cuban teams
include skilled epidemiologists who develop effective local programs, based on
real-time, on-the-ground fact-finding and assessment of available resources. The
enormous differences between the Cuban and US responses to the Ebola crisis
reflects the profound contrast in their social and health systems: Cuba has a
free national health system and strong public health and civil defense
structures using rigorous procedures and effective guidelines to set up clinics
and camps appropriate to the objective conditions. They emphasize the social
context of disease and are not invested in expensive high tech medical
equipment and tests irrelevant to the challenges at hand. Their budget is not
skewed toward promoting imperial wars: for the Cubans health and welfare is an
integral political priority.
In contrast ‘health care’ in the US has
become big business while military metaphysics dominate the minds and policies
of the political and business elite. The deterioration of basic health care
delivery in general and the public health sector in particular is not only a
consequence of a failure of political leadership, it also reflects the
recurring and deepening economic crises. Under the ‘War on Terrorism’
fear-mongering over bio-weapons, namely threatened Anthrax attacks, tens of
billions of public money was diverted from public health at the national and
state level and the corrupted, crippled system has never recovered.
The economic crisis, gripping the US,
the European Union (EU) and beyond, is clearly manifested in the stagnation of
the US economy. The private corporate elite, who form the ruling class, are
unable to sustain growth without massive US Treasury subsidies ($4.5 trillion
dollars, according to the Financial Times (10/14/14). The US has experienced
extreme volatility in its stock market, together with the impoverishment of its
working class and diminution of its middle class. Heightened social
inequalities are everywhere, especially in access to decent, effective health
care. In the EU, Germany’s economy is plunging from zero to negative growth,
while France, Italy and Holland are in deep recession. Greece, Spain and
Portugal are in a prolonged depression, burdened by unpayable debts and unable
to escape the downward social and economic spiral because of austerity programs
imposed by Brussels.
Washington’s war policies, the
concentration of state resources on financing military invasions and
subsidizing the grossly inflated financial sector, account for the fatal
deterioration of health and welfare services in the US. Growing majorities feel
the pain, and many more are alienated from the Presidential and Congressional
elite – as well as from their own corrupt, incompetent local elected officials.
To safeguard the power of the
military-financial elite, the political rulers have resorted to a series of
“Horror Shows” – orchestrating vast propaganda spectacles designed to strike
fear and loathing of ‘external enemies’ among the American public, in order to
secure their submission and obedience to police state policies.
Recently, there was the lurid media
shock of the Muslim terrorists in ‘ISIS’ beheading two American captives. The
public ‘horror’ was manipulated to justify the large-scale US military re-entry
in Iraq and the air war against Syria – policies largely opposed by the
war-weary US citizenry.
Close on the heels of the ‘beheading’
atrocities, came the spectacle of a fearsome African “Ebola” epidemic,
spreading to the US and threatening Americans with brutally painful deaths…This
was used to justify Obama’s sending of thousands of US National Guard to West
Africa to act as “health workers”.
The total collapse of the public health
systems throughout Africa follows decades of civil wars, fomented by US and EU
military policies, in order to plunder Africa’s economies and rich natural
resources – while marketing Western arms and mercenaries. Militarizing the
problems of Africa and creating millions of refugees has naturally led to
plagues – Ebola today, malaria yesterday and other infectious diseases and
miseries tomorrow.
The immensely complex and catastrophic
health crisis in West Africa is the stark backdrop to years of western
propaganda hailing the massive growth of foreign investment in Africa’s
extractive sectors – notably energy and mining. The business press (Financial
Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal…) featured images of “Africa; the
Sleeping Giant Awakes”, describing of emergence of wealthy mineral enclaves
powered by large-scale foreign investments, creating vast private foreign and
local fortunes while ignoring the sea of massive poverty, broken public health
clinics, non-existent schools and devastating living conditions, as well as the
war-lord ravaged masses of refugees fleeing the fights over mineral-rich lands.
This created the ‘perfect storm’ for the emergence and spread of epidemics –
like Ebola.
In Africa, under IMF and Western
corporate dictates, entire budgets and foreign aid programs were channeled to
finance infrastructure (roads, transport, ports, etc.) for extractive
imperialism – while virtually nothing, in terms of public policy, was or is
allocated to basic public health and preventative medicine. The ‘focused’
programs of the ‘Gates Foundation’ and others served to divert African health
workers and resources to the ‘NGO’s, rather than national, priorities and
encouraged the flight of African doctors and nurses to the West.
The recent cases of Ebola in the US
highlight the deterioration of national and local public health systems – the
result of deregulation, privatization and corporatization of the medicine. The
‘profit ethos’ permeates medical care in the US. Cutbacks in preventive
medicine, divorcing medical care from the social context of illness, as well as
the lack of accountability and transparency in the face of erroneous diagnoses
and inappropriate or incompetent care are consequences of the larger failures
in public policy. This also explains the emergence and rampant spread of
multi-drug resistant bacterial infections within the hospitals and out in the
communities. The preference for expensive, profitable techno-medicine (marketed
as ‘personalized’ health care) over competent ‘hands on’, science-based
medicine rooted in an understanding of objective social conditions, has fueled
the crisis and spread mass confusion among the public.
When the government engages in
long-term, large-scale wars abroad, when the Treasury allocates trillions of
public dollars to Wall Street for the better part of a decade, when the
government secures submission (“consent”) via horror scenarios that replace
public accountability with fear and loathing, we, the US public pay a steep
price in public health under autocratic elite rule.
The recent ‘police-state’ response to
an American nurse, Kaci Hickox, highlights the corrupt arrogance of US
politicians and opinion leaders, long accustomed to control via fear-mongering
and criminalizing dissent. The fact that Nurse ‘Kaci’ arrived at ‘Liberty’
International Airport in perfect health from her months of heroic work in West
Africa where she set up clinics and hospitals to help stem the Ebola crisis at
its sources, did not dissuade the thuggish governor of New Jersey from
confining her, like an animal, in a clear plastic cage in the parking lot of a
Newark hospital. Her successful fight for freedom against this arbitrary
confinement exposed Governor Christie and his side-kick, New York Governor
Cuomo, as ignorant bellowing thugs, intent on making her ‘an example’. Nurse
Kaci Hickox’ victory of science and civil rights over brutal scare-mongering
may be temporary – as the tendency has long been to militarize crises and erode
citizen rights.
The American public is beginning to
understand the relationship between this policy of scare-mongering, the
bail-out of billionaires and rampant militarism with the daily erosion of their
standard of living, health and security and civil rights. It will take more
than a Nurse ‘Kaci’ to reverse the tide, but one tough competent nurse has set
a glorious example.
© Copyright 2014 by AxisofLogic.com
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