US COVID-19 crisis failure of democracy

[struggle4progress]

Washington
Published on: May 23, 2020 15:06 IST

David Litt, a speechwriter for former US President Barack Obama, has said the COVID-19 pandemic in America is a "failure of democracy" at the root. "It's become commonplace to refer to COVID-19 as 'the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes'. But what has cost the US so many lives and jobs during the pandemic is not, at root, a failure of public health. It's a failure of democracy," Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday citing Litt as saying in an article published by the Time magazine.

"Poll after poll has shown that a clear majority of Americans trust, want our leaders to heed the experts' advice. Yet that hasn't happened. We were far too slow to implement social-distancing guidelines -- a delay epidemiologists found is responsible for 90 per cent of US coronavirus deaths.

"Now we're acting far too quickly to reopen the economy," Litt, also the author of "Democracy in One Book or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn't, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think" and "Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years", added ...

https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/us-covid-19-crisis-failure-of-democracy-says-obama-s-ex-speechwriter-619773

[SWBTATTReg]

1. When people elect republicans they don't have a voice anymore. Simple as that. NT

[2naSalit]

2. After three years of rampant dismantling, of course it's going to fail...

Just like the officeholders intended.

[Igel]

3. Beware the Chinese CP's definition of "democracy."

One of Stalin's pet phrases was "deepening democracy"--that's what he billed himself as doing, and the Soviet definition of "democracy" had no problem with his usage.

Same with the PRC definition. They want to "improve" Hong Kong, for instance, and make it more democratic through more restrictive laws and monitoring.

They're also heavily invested in making sure that US democracy is as unpleasant and untempting as possible. Echo what's taken as a slam against Trump and you're echoing a slam against the US itself. Consider Litt to be somebody with his own views that happen to support and encourage those he'd probably hate, if not for a short-term tactical advantage or benefit. There were no shortage of Americans and British cited in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s', '70s, and '80s in the Soviet press, all of them taken to say how wonderful the C&C economy of the USSR was, how wonderful Stalin was, how just and right and forward-thinking Soviet ideology was.


If a clear majority wanted to heed the experts' advice, they could have. Nothing was preventing them--and phone data show that they did, actually. And if Cuomo and de Blasio wanted to lock things down earlier, they could have. Nobody was preventing them.