Closing Arguments

This Tuesday, Americans will make a fateful decision regarding the direction the country will take in coming years.

On one side, we have Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State, senator from New York and Fist Lady who started her career working at the Children's Defense Fund and who has been, for better and for worse, at the heart of the nation’s politics, both foreign and domestic, for the last 25 years.

On the other side, we have a man who represents a threat to American democracy unique in the country’s 240 year history.

During this past primary season, Republican voters had, in the persons of Jeb Bush and John Kasich, a chance to nominate the popular current or former governors of vital swing states who had a clearly articulated vision of conservative principals and had demonstrable records of reaching across the aisle and working with those of the other party in the day to day business of keeping their states chugging along.

Instead, Republican voters chose a television curiosity with no political experience and a glaring ignorance of national and international affairs, a confessed sexual predator, a publicly committed racist and misogynist who said he would ban an entire religion, kill innocents in a nebulous war on terrorism, called on a hostile foreign intelligence agency to disrupt the democratic process of the United States, conspired (at least rhetorically) with a fugitive accused rapist openly hostile to U.S. interests, who vowed to destroy the separation of powers, who pledges to put both his opponent and journalists like myself in prison and who traffics in dark conspiracy theories in a brazen appeal to white nationalism and the most putrid strain of America’s polarized politics.

Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of the institutional Republican Party itself. Once an internationally minded entity run on an ethos of voter enfranchisement, especially of African–Americans (anyone who doubts that fact should read John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction After the Civil War), decided, with the election of the country’s first African–American president, that, when in opposition, its job wasn’t, in fact, to help govern the nation and that indeed it wasn’t beholden to the rules of democracy, after all.

The threats of violence from the Republican “base” against President Obama began from almost the day he took office as well as Democratic members of congress, which in the case of  Arizona’s then–congresswoman Gabby Giffords were acted on with catastrophic results. Rather than reasoned debate on the issues, policy differences were met with a government shutdown and reckless threats to default on the country’s debt. Realizing that the shifting demographics of the United States were against the party’s increasing drift into a white identity entity, the party whose members once died trying to register black voters became, nationwide, the party of voter suppression. The president’s prerogative of filling Supreme Court vacancies was met by an unprecedented stonewalling.

Enter Donald J. Trump, reality tv host and dubious businessman who began his campaign by deriding citizens of Mexico, our southern neighbor and one of our most important trading partners, as murderers and rapists and who has continued through the months selling a vision of our country is little more than a nightmare tapestry of lies held together by threads of racial and social rancour.

Consistently from the stage, Trump has claimed that the murder rate in the United States is the ‘highest it’s been in 45 years.” That is a lie, and it is not. He has demeaned the Indiana–born judge overseeing the lawsuit against Trump’s bogus “university” based on the Mexican heritage of the judge’s parents. He unforgivably slandered the family of Captain Humayun Khan, killed fighting in Iraq in 2004 with anti–Muslim slurs. He has promoted an economic plan that has been denounced by economists as “a dangerous, destructive choice for the country” based on “magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.” He has all but vowed to default on America’s debt, depriving the economy of a crucial safety net, in what the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman called an example of “extrapolating from his own business career, in which he has done very well by running up debts, then walking away from them.” His refusal to release his tax returns, and his dishonest explanations for why he would not do so, means voters are in the dark about his web of debts and financial entanglements. Both Trump and his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, have praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, with Trump also lavishing praise on the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He has grotesquely hinted at the potential desirability of the assassination of his opponent, and for months has been calling for violence against any and all who speak out against him.

The violent rhetoric of Trump and his supporters directed at journalists in general and Jewish journalists in particular, many of whom appear, with great justification, to sense the threat Trump poses on a molecular level, should be the canary in the coal mine for all of us to see. Though I am not Jewish, after I spoke against Trump’s recycling of far right anti–semitic conspiracy theories about “international bankers” and “George Soros,” I was deluged with hundreds of death threats on Twitter, threats which Twitter refused to act against claiming they didn’t violate their terms of service. It is not for nothing that Bradley Burston, a columnist for Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, looked aghast at Trump and wrote that he is “sadistically vindictive, flagrantly hypocritical, proudly divisive. He will harm anyone, say anything, declare the opposite, to get what he wants.” Lest anyone miss the point, Trump concluded his campaign with a nakedly anti–semitic ad basically suggesting a trio of prominent Jews are responsible for all of the country's financial woes.

We have been forced to live in Trump’s gutter so long I think that many of my fellow Americans have simply been battered into believing that such behaviour and discourse is normal for a presidential candidate. It is not normal, and if such a thought process is married to all the tools at the disposal of the president, it will lead the country over the cliff on which it now teeters and into the abyss.

There have been precious few voices raised against Trump within his own party, but those that have done so deserve mention. In March, Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential candidate, warned that Trump’s “imagination must not be married to real power.” In May, Jeb Bush declared that Trump had “not demonstrated that temperament or strength of character (to be president and that) he has not displayed a respect for the Constitution....I cannot support his candidacy.” The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote that “Trump is a fundamentally dishonorable and dishonest person, and has been his whole adult life...An insecure, morally ugly, man-child who thinks boasting about how he can get away with groping women ‘because you’re a star’ impresses people. He’s a grotesque, as a businessman and a man full stop.” The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephen’s wrote that “it will not do for Republicans to say they denounce Mr. Trump’s personal slanders; his nativism and protectionism and isolationism; his mendacity and meanness and crassness; his disdain for constitutional protections, and still campaign for his election. There is no redemption in saying you went along with it, but only halfway; that with Mr. Trump you maintained technical virginity. To lie down with him is to wake up with him. It’s as simple as that.” While other evangelicals have spat upon their own professed beliefs to endorse him,  veteran GOP operative Peter Wehner wrote that “Trump’s character is antithetical to many of the qualities evangelicals should prize in a political leader: integrity, compassion and reasoned convictions, wisdom and prudence, trustworthiness, a commitment to the moral good.” More than 50  members of the Republican national security community signed a joint letter in which they warned that they were “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency...His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle” and that “Mr. Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.”

But most of the Republican establishment has demonstrated no such courage. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Trump after an untold number of outrages, and though the latter declined to campaign for Trump after a recording revealing the nominee bragging about sexually assaulting women came to light he supinely ran back into the fold in recent days. They have indelibly stained the GOP to such a degree that its image as a coherent party with a set of principals and values has almost ceased to exist. Should Trump win, Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Jess Sessions will be remembered for playing with alacrity their roles as the American equivalents of Franz von Papen, Constantin von Neurath and other career politicians who gave Adolf Hitler the political cover he needed to form his first cabinet, complimenting Steve Bannon in his role as Joseph Goebbels and Breitbart News in its role as Der Stürmer.

(I won’t even mention the so called third party candidates, a pothead former governor with memory recall issues and a daffy heiress who believes being “founder and past co-chair of a local recycling committee appointed by the Lexington Board of Selectmen” is qualification of being president of the world’s most influential country, save to say it is a sad state of affairs that the fate of the republic may hang in the balance of their candidacies.)

Americans are cocooned and cushioned by the reality many (though not Native Americans or African–Americans) have shared since the country’s founding, decades of stable institutions and, in the national main, political fair play. They cannot imagine how quickly, and how violently, things can change. Those who dismiss Trump’s rhetoric as simply buffoonish bluster will be startled at how quickly things go downhill should he enter the office of the presidency. But make no mistake, with the powers bestowed on that office, Trump’s shredding of the constitution is not only a possibility but a forgone conclusion

In my 20 years as a journalist reporting on international affairs, I have come across the Trump template before, employed by those whose political behavior is marked by, as Robert Paxton said in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism

(An) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In Côte d’Ivoire I saw how Laurent Gbagbo’s promoting his ethno supremacist cult of Ivorité took one of Africa’s richest countries and toppled it over into civil war. In Haiti, I saw how Jean Bertrand Aristide took the rancour of the masses and stoked it into an attempt to create a kind of garish fiefdom modeled on those of Uganda’s Idi Amin and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa. In Guatemala, I watched former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who oversaw the country’s worst period of genocidal bloodletting, form a political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), whose entire motor ran on anti–elite rage and was eventually revealed to be more criminal enterprise than political vessel.

I come from the exact strata of American society – the white, blue collar, Rust Belt working class – among whom Trump’s message has the most resonance, relatively unworldly people with a strong work ethic who feel all their hard work has been spat upon and shunted aside by years of free trade deals championed by both parties and a tax system that lavishes breaks on the wealthy and penalizes those of more modest means (championed, ironically, by the very same party to which they now claim allegiance). There is real pain and real despair there. I see it every time I go back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. But there is also a whining self pity that often can’t see anyone’s struggle as worthy as their own and a nearly millenarian sense of grievance that sees politics not as the art of the possible but as an apocalyptic struggle between a largely white industrial world that has gone and will never return against a confusing kaleidoscope of liberal urban elites, the country’s burgeoning non–white population, immigrants, alternative sexual orientations and other shocks to their system. If Trump voters often sound as if they think the world is about to end, it’s because the world as they have known it is ending. But these forces of demography cannot be reversed, by Trump or anyone else, and it is not a world my fellow working–class whites need to fear, but fear is the currency on which Trump trades.

The American democratic project has been characterized by inconsistencies since it commenced in 1776. Some of these tensions involved America’s actions abroad, and some in the way it treated its most vulnerable citizens at home. But, with the exception of a wrenching civil war that saw over 600,000 Americans die, few have ever questioned the value of the project itself.

When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of dissident officers in the Continental Army all but suggested a coup against the newly inaugurated Congress in what came to be known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, the army's commander in chief (and future first U.S. President) George Washington gave an impassioned speech in which he inveighed on behalf “of our common country,” charging

As you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.

This Tuesday we will find out if the ethos of the man we call the Father of the Country is still subscribed to by the people who live here now.

History has amply warned us of the path we are poised to go down.

In the July 1932 elections in Germany, also a democracy at the time, the Nazis received 37% of the vote, the most they every got. In the next election four months later, their share shrank to 32%. But by then it was too late. The serpent was already in the garden.  In the 1990s, the people of the Balkans put their faith in leaders like Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić who led the region into ethnic cleansing, genocide, NATO bombing and bloody war for a decade. In 1999, the people of Venezuela, desperate and vengeful after being ignored by their politicians for years, turned the reigns of their country over to former coup leader Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro and their “Bolivarian socialism.” They haven’t gotten it back since.

In Cuba, where I spend a lot of time these days and which has its own experience with strongmen promising to expunge a collective grievance through a cleansing release of violence, after the 1959 overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista, the new government, led by Fidel Castro, executed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people tied to the ancien régime after only the most summary trials (and many with no trial at all). Whether all or even most of them were guilty will never be known. The cry of paredón (to the wall) resounded, and the will of the maximum leader had to be obeyed. Today, one can still visit El Morro, where so many of them died, and El Capitolio, where Cuba’s congress met and debated, but which was shuttered after 1959, and remains so to this day.

Now, at another time, in another place, that cry raises its sanguinary voice again, in my own country in the form of a candidate and his supporters who call for his opponent to be jailed, for journalists to be arrested and killed, and for all those who speak out against hm to be attacked and battered into submission.

To Trump’s supporters, I say this: Today it might be the Democrats who are sent to the wall. It might be Jewish journalists, or Muslims, or Latinos or immigrants. But should this man ascend to to power, one of these days, not too long from now, his mob will scream for blood and it will be someone you love who is brought to the wall, for some transgression real or imagined. It might even be you. In my 20 years as a journalist I’ve seen it in countless countries before. People think it can’t happen here, but it can.

On Tuesday, when you go to the polls, vote as if your life depends on it. Because it does.

Notes from a fading democracy?

Donald Trump - who I have resisted writing about until now - has for months advocated deporting/excluding millions of people on an ethnic/religious basis and seen his poll numbers continue to climb and won three primaries in a row. You think the fact that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz yelled at him last night will halt his ascent? Don't be so naive.

What I watched last night, as I have noted before, appeared to be half reality tv show, half Nuremberg Rally, with Trump playing his rivals so skillfully that at one point he had Rubio and Cruz arguing over who would be more willing to let people die in the street without healthcare as if it were a good thing. 

Make no mistake, terrifying as he is - xenophobic, bigoted, corrupt, tapping into a fetid well of nativism, racism and paranoia - Trump is one of the most naturally gifted politicians to come along in many years. The Dems need to seriously weigh their options this fall. I was leaning towards Sanders - though I am not a reflexive Clinton hater like some - but if Facebook news feeds convinces you that endorsements by the Cornel Wests of the world will sway voters in places like Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania and Hillsborough County, Florida, I ask you to step outside your bubble and the weird religious cult aspects the Sanders campaign has begun to assume. Hillary has her own stark negatives, as well. 

The Dems have two flawed candidates, and whoever wins will have their work cut out for them beating someone who represents a lot of things in America I think many wish we had left behind.

We should be worried.

Why I am voting for Barack Obama

The vagaries of the Democratic presidential primary in my native state of Pennsylvania may seem, literally and figuratively, miles away from the struggles of Central Africa, but as Pennsylvania approaches its crucial vote in determining the Democratic nominee, I feel compelled to weigh in with a few thoughts on the decision before us on 22 April.

Democratic voters in Pennsylvania are presented with a simple and stark choice: Barack Hussein Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois who first assumed his senatorial duties in January 2005, or Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic senator from New York and former First Lady who first assumed her senatorial duties in January 2001.

In recent days, much has been made of comments that Obama made regarding Pennsylvania at a fundraiser in San Francisco. Clinton, who has been losing delegates left and right to Obama, seized on the comments in an attempt to portray Obama as elitist and out of touch with the state’s working-class voters.

The most authoritative account I have seen of what Obama said runs as follows:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

As a product of this milieu, of the working-class, small-town Pennsylvania that Obama was speaking of (though, indeed, for me, that experience seems like a lifetime ago), I see nothing at all elitist about Obama’s comments, and rather find them extremely perceptive, and I will try and explain why.

I have seen first-hand the struggles of working-class people in the region not as part of some study but rather in the experiences of my friends and family, growing up first in the city of Lancaster (about 55,000 people and three hours away from New York City) and later in the small town of Strasburg (about 3,000 people). Though I spent time visiting New York and Philadelphia while in high-school, my first real taste of the world outside was when I left for university in New York in 1992 and, especially, when I did a semester aboard studying at University College Galway in Galway, Ireland in 1994 and did a bit of traveling throughout Europe.

I have seen people like those in the cities and towns where I spent my youth watch as their ability to support their families on an honest day’s work was gradually eroded, as their ability to seek and afford quality medical care for their families disappeared and as, often, cynical and opportunistic politicians of the right exploited this sense of frustration and loss for political gain. Though Pennsylvania boasts two major urban centers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and despite an increasingly large number of Latino residents, the majority of the state (where I grew up) might be best described as Budweiser-drinking, Merle Haggard-listening, gun-owning and very much white working class. Though I have moved far away from those days, I would be foolish to deny that at least some element of that background is still present within me, and I believe that it is most noticeable in my often visceral dislike for pampered elites of any political stripe, who pontificate while never having had to eek out an honest day’s work in their entire lives. I believe that, far more than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama understands the struggles of the kind of people I grew up with and is thus in a position to effectively address them.

To me, Hilary Clinton, much in the same way as George W. Bush though to a lesser extent, represents much of what is wrong with the current political system of the United States. Aside from her penchant for outright lying about serious matters when the truth would do just fine, Clinton seems to feel, as George W. Bush did when he ran for the office in 2000, that she is entitled to the presidency as a result of her proximity to the throne of power for so many years. But a look at Bill Clinton’s eight years in office paints a far different picture to the one that many, including myself, were content to believe at the time. I voted for Bill Clinton, and happily so, in the 1990s and, given the choices we had at the time, I would probably do so again, but in the intervening years I have come to the conclusion that he and his wife are two of the most destructive, cynical people in U.S. politics, which, given the current climate, is saying a lot.

How easily we (and I include myself in this) forget that Bill Clinton was the candidate who flew home to Arkansas to execute a retarded black man to gain political mileage out of it in the middle of his first run for the presidency. Or that he signed into law the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy, which denied gays the right to serve openly in the armed forces. Or that his wife voted in favor of the Iraq War Resolution and for the USA Patriot Act. But all this pales, in my view to President Clinton's Africa policy, which was probably the worst of any president in American history. People like to forget that Bill Clinton, with his wife at his side, sat on his hands during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and then, out of guilt or geopolitical skulduggery, green-lighted the newly Tutsi-led Rwandan government's dismembering of Eastern Congo and their own genocide against Hutu refugees there, thus helping to set in motion a war that has killed over 5 million people thus far. By holding up profoundly undemocratic leaders such as Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni as paradigms for the continent, Clinton exposed his deep cynicism about Africa and Africans and did incalculable damage to the region.. One of his chief advisers for this disastrous policy was Madeleine Albright, currently one of Hilary Clinton’s top advisers on foreign policy matters.

Of the Democrats’ Republican rival, I believe my friend Sutton Stokes was accurate when he noted that , in many ways, John McCain is “the closest thing to a human being that party has put forward since Eisenhower, but that ain't saying much.” Though I have been glad that McCain has taken the right stand on issues such as the use or torture and the pernicious influence of big money on the American political process, his eight year embrace of George W. Bush, at a time when the latter was manifesting malevolence and incompetence on every issue from Iraq to the Middle East to Hurricane Katrina to healthcare to the environment for me definitively rules him out as the man to lead the United States at this critical time.

Barack Obama isn’t perfect. He isn’t the messiah. He is the junior senator from a Midwestern state, and yet I do believe he is the person for this moment. in our history. As he has served as local legislator for a decade in Illinois, and as he has served in the senate for the last three years during one of the most tumultuous times in American history, I believe that he is admirably qualified for the job. Yet beyond that, as the son of an ethnic Luo Kenyan father and a white American mother from Kansas, born in Honolulu,, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, schooled in politics in Chicago, I believe that Obama, by pointing towards a definitive and hopeful break with the poisonous cynicism that has informed our national political dialogue in recent decades, represents that best chance for the United States of America to move beyond the disastrous legacy of the last eight years.

Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote about “bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” I don’t know if Barack Obama will be able to bring the country that far back from the path onto which it has strayed, but after hearing his thoughtful, intelligent and brave speech on race delivered in Philadelphia last month, for example, I do believe that, far more than Hilary Clinton, Obama recognizes the country’s ills and knows where we should be heading as a nation.

I hope that we, as a nation, are given the chance to start our journey there together.

How Cigna HealthCare killed Nataline Sarkisyan

I had a very pleasurable break visiting family and friends in the United States for Christmas and then visiting an old friend in Roma for New Year’s. Back in Paris, awaiting my eventual departure for Congo, the skies roll across the city, briefly blue in the morning and then various shades of gray for the rest of the day. 2008 stretches out before us all, with presidential elections this fall capping off what I hope will be a gentler, more humane and healthier year, with greater freedom married to a greater sense of local and global community than we saw in the one that just passed.

It is fitting I suppose, to this hoped-for sense of shared community, that my first post of the year pay tribute to the 150-odd people, including nurses, students and relatives, who rallied in front of the headquarters of Cigna HealthCare in Glendale, California last month, to demand that the health insurance company reverse its refusal to pay for an emergency liver transplant for 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan . The California teenager, who wanted to be a fashion designer and had battled leukemia for three years, was fully insured by Cigna when her brother became a donor for a bone marrow transplant that doctors hoped would save her life. When complications arose after the transplant and Sarkisyan’s liver failed, doctors recommended the emergency transplant procedure

Cigna, which expects to earn an income of around U $1.2bn next year, thought otherwise, though, and refused to pay for the liver transplant on December 11th, on the grounds that Sarkisyan’s health plan "does not cover experimental, investigational and unproven services.”

The doctors at UCLA's Pediatric Liver Transplant Program and elsewhere at the hospital called CIGNA begging them to reconsider their decision but, to their own eternal shame, if true, would not perform the procedure unless the Sarkisyan family placed an immediate down payment of US$75,000 which it was, needless to say, beyond their power to do.

Faced with over a hundred protesters on its front law, CIGNA finally reversed itself, but only after Sarkisyan had lapsed into a coma while her fate was decided. CIGNA’s momentary drift into magnanimity came too late, though, and Nataline Sarkisyan died on December 20th, the liver transplant having never been performed.

As one of the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, I know that this is the nightmare that many Americans dread every day. But even for the Americans, like Nataline Sarkisyan's family, who are lucky enough to have health insurance, what is the value of that insurance when it lets you die in a hospital while denying you a life-saving procedure? What kind of country would allow such a system to flourish in the first place? How do CIGNA executives like CEO H. Edward Hanway and Executive Vice President Michael W. Bell not throw themselves from the windows of their lavishly appointed offices when they realize what they have overseen?

In this election year, perhaps the American public’s patience with the malevolent joke our health care system has reached its limit. The three major Democratic candidates - Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John Edwards - all have substantial plans to revise the nation’s avaricious, inefficient health care industry, although none go as far towards the French model of low-cost (though paid through taxes), high-quality, universal health care as I would like them to.

In the meantime, Nataline Sarkisyan has been laid to rest and the family’s attorney, Mark Geragos, has announced his intention to press the Los Angeles district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna, on the grounds that the firm "maliciously killed" Nataline Sarkisyan with its unconscionable refusal to provide her with treatment. I hope that he succeeds in getting the courts to act and hold the executives of CIGNA responsible for its murderously adversarial and exploitative relationship with its customers (behaviour which, among health insurance companies, is the rule rather than the exception). And I hope that someone is elected in the United States this fall with the courage to implement the radical change that such a faltering system demands.

Here we come, 2008. Deye mon gen mon.

W’s Christmas present to American children: Vetoing health insurance

As one of the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, my feelings about the American healthcare system - where private health insurance companies and physicians reap enormous profits by charging exorbitant premiums, denying care to the sick and artificially inflating the price of drugs - could not be more vehement. The American healthcare system is utterly, completely broken and even some of the more well-known proposals for rectifying it (such as that of U.S. presidential candidate and New York senator Hillary Clinton) strike me as woefully feeble in terms of addressing what is a terrible crisis for so many Americans. Speaking as an American who has spent much of his life living abroad, I can say with some authority that I don’t think I have ever seen a more predatory, exploitative approach to healthcare than I have seen in the United States. When taken in tandem with a consumer culture than encourages people to eat unhealthy foods packed with unnecessary sugars and hormones, the approach seems doubly cynical.

Along with the Bush administration’s irresponsible, negligent approach to climate change (which has lead the European Union to threaten to “boycott U.S.-led climate talks next month unless Washington accepts a range of numbers for negotiating deep reductions of global-warming emissions”), the healthcare debacle has, in the last week, thrown in the starkest relief possible to me how terribly out of synch the U.S., for so long a leader on so many issues, is becoming with the rest of the world.

This week, as the United States enters its holiday season, President Bush marked the occasion by vetoing an extension of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which attempts to provides health insurance to children from families earning too much to qualify for Medicaid (a very low threshold indeed) but unable to afford private insurance. The SCHIP proposal sought to increase federal funding for the program by $35 billion over five years, adding around 4 million people, partially funded by a 61-cent rise on a package of cigarettes. To give you an example of the context of the price tag, the cost of the war in Iraq, by end of fiscal year 2007, was at least $456 billion, to say nothing of the lives of nearly 4,000 American service personnel and those of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Bush vetoed a similar bill in October and, in July, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that the bill was a step toward “government-run health care for every American,” "

You mean like every other country in the industrialized world? As the U.S. government has taken responsibility for the post office, the police, the fire department and the national defense, so should it take responsibility for providing health care for every American. Despite the many problems I have with the French government and other aspects of society here, I think that their health system, like that of some other European countries, remains a model of a responsible state approach to taking care of its citizens well-being that the United States could learn much from.

My native country simply cannot continue being so out-of-step with the rest of the world, so easily suckered by the false piety (married to brutal cynicism) of political snake oil salesmen like Bush and company. If the Democrats had any conviction at all and took their responsibility as guardians of the constitution seriously, we would be deep in impeachment proceedings by now. But alas, they greet this, like other outrages, with the feeblest murmurs of dissent.

My fellow countrymen have been fooled and lied to for so long by their government, I wonder if they will recognize the truth when it finally comes crashing down. Starting with the ridiculous banana republic farce of the 2000 election in Florida, continuing through the illegal use of torture and detention without trials of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, through the illegal invasion of Iraq and the naked profiteering there that the administration’s cronies engaged in, the terrible abandonment of the people of Mississippi and Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina and now continuing with the denial of basic healthcare for American citizens, in a just world Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Feith, Mr Gonzales and many more fellow travelers would at least be facing criminal and civil prosecution in the United States if not an appearance at a tribunal in the Hague.

It a strange time to be an American with an internationalist outlook on the world, proud of the open, optimistic spirit and intense creative drive of my country, but very worried about the direction that its political leaders appear intent on taking it, which seems to be straight over a cliff, ever angrier, more closed-off from the rest of the world and more authoritarian by the day. It’s still not too late to change course, but I fear that the hour is growing ever more late.

I’ll be in a better mood next post, I promise.