USA: Healthcare in jeopardy (1)
To understand the war over healthcare currently raging in the United States, one needs to havee a taste of America’s sour stew of politics and race.
For eight years, 2008-2016, the US Republican Party leadership (Senators, Representatives, state governors, state legislators, Republican National Committee members, and the “big money”) stewed in their juice and raved and ranted in chorus against Barack Obama, the youthful black man of the Democratic Party who shocked the nation and the entire world by getting himself elected President of the United States—a miracle that nobody in their right mind thought possible “in our lifetime.”
After all, it was just yesterday (1965) that the Voting Rights Act was passed to remove barriers erected by various states preventing African Americans from voting. The right to vote and be voted for was granted to African Americans, along with all the usual rights of citizenship, shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865. But a whole century of terror and violence had passed, and African Americans were still unable to exercise those rights.
It was 40 short years ago that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers and other leaders were slaughtered for insisting on their people’s right to reside wherever they chose, go to school, use public toilets, eat in any restaurants, and ride in public transportation without racial restrictions.
So, who was this upstart? Barack Hussein Obama? What sort of un-WASPy, un-American name was that? How did the Republican Party so mismanage itself that the American people, white, black, Latino and Asian, could so radically err as to elect President a man whose grandparents a century ago would have been owned as slaves by the Lords of the Grand Old (Republican) Party?
In any case, it was said that Obama’s father was a Kenyan, his mother a white woman from Kansas. Was he born American at all? The man who presently occupies the seat of President, Donald Trump, led the charge to prove that Obama was not born a US citizen. The State of Hawaii, where Obama was born, provided his Birth Certificate, but Trump and his cohorts claimed it was fake. This went on for several years. Totally ridiculous.
But the Republican Party went even further. Since they couldn’t find constitutional or legal grounds for removing Obama from office, they did the next worst thing: they constituted themselves into a hard-rock Great Wall of China in the US Congress to block every effort Obama made to make things better for the middle and lower classes. They formed the “Tea Party,” styled after the outlaw original Boston Tea Party of 1773 whose aim was to overthrow the hated British colonial administration by extra-legal means. They sought, by any means necessary, to grind Obama’s administration to a halt and render him unable to govern.
In all this foolishness, the Republicans forgot, or maybe they were ignorant of the old adage, that if you make rain in order to wet your enemy, it also wets your friends; and of the corollary, that if you cause the sun to shine on your friend, it also shines on your enemies.
Obama’s gifts were bountiful as sunshine. The national economy he inherited was a catastrophe. The horrendous 9-11 terrorist attack of 2001 was a disaster comparable to none in US history. And George Bush’s response was admirable. That he was able to prevent a second terrorist attack was the great achievement of his presidency. Otherwise his presidency was a disaster.
Bush embarked on two wars at once. One was a sensible war to fish out and punish al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden who plotted the 9-11 attack and were hiding in Afghanistan. The other was a senseless war based on fake intelligence to find and destroy Saddam Hussein and his supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Iraq war found and executed Saddam Hussein but found no weapons of mass destruction. The war was a trick put on Bush by his cluster of self-serving advisers (the Neo-Conservatives) whose real goal was to seize Iraqi oil and enrich themselves. Not only did they reap the oil bonanza, they teamed up with Wall Street operatives to wreck the US real estate industry, which severely damaged the banking industry as well as the automobile industry.
Obama’s great achievement was that in his 8-years he not only halted the breakdown but in bold, audacious strokes comparable to those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression, he rebuilt the banking industry, the real estate industry, and the automobile industry, supported the unemployed with generous cash payments over extended periods of time, and created jobs in the millions.
Beyond these, Obama’s spectacular achievement was the enactment, in spite of relentless Republican opposition, of a universal healthcare system—the Affordable Care Act (2009), which the Republicans sought to deride by nicknaming it Obamacare. In inaugurating universal healthcare, Obama “did what Napoleon [Bill Clinton tried but] could not do.”
Obama’s achievements put the Republicans in hell-hot fury. How could any black man do so much? Their racism wouldn’t allow them a moment’s rest. Since 2009, every aspiring Republican presidential candidate has fervently sworn to dismantle Obamacare on his first day (or first week) in office. . . .
· To be continued
Onwuchekwa Jemie
ojemie@gmail.com
0703-946-0162