The Ugly Truth About American Exceptionalism

Politicians of both major political parties bloviate about "American exceptionalism," yet among advanced nations America is exceptional for its failures to provide universal health care and to simply maintain its infrastructure.   The nation is a study in contrasts of immense wealth and abject poverty with the highest child poverty rate, access to the best technology and where poor students have to sit outside of fast food restaurants and Starbucks to access the Internet for virtual schooling during the ongoing pandemic.  Compared to European nations, Americans have little in terms of a social safety net.   Meanwhile, the wealth get richer and richer. This stark picture is the result of decades of vulture capitalism that has made short term profit its god and made employees a disposable commodity despite lip service by corporate CEO's that employees are the most important asset.  The recent fiasco in Texas where the power grid lacked regulation and profits were all that mattered has helped draw attention to some of America's immense flaws.   Some on the right will call me "un-American" for these views, but all I want is to see America be its best and to provide for all of its citizens, not just the wealthy.  A long piece in the New York Times looks at where America finds itself.  Here are article excerpts:

Compared with its developed-world peers, America has always been a study in contrasts, a paradox of exceptional achievement and jaw-dropping deprivation. Rarely have the disparities been rendered as vividly as in recent weeks and months.

Historic breakthroughs in science, medicine and technology coexist intimately — and uneasily — alongside monumental failures of infrastructure, public health and equitable access to basic human needs.

America can put a rover on Mars, but it can’t keep the lights on and water running in the city that birthed the modern space program. It can develop vaccines, in record time, to combat a world-altering illness, but suffers one of the developed world’s highest death rates due to lack of prevention and care. It spins out endless entertainment to keep millions preoccupied during lockdown — and keep tech shares riding high on Wall Street — but leaves kids disconnected from the access they need to do their schoolwork.

“What kind of state are we living in, what kind of society are we living in when kids have to educate themselves on the curb of a Taco Bell?” said Brian Smoot, a Salinas, Calif., chiropractor who invited neighborhood students to use his WiFi after two girls were photographed outside a nearby location of the fast-food chain last year, their Chromebooks wobbling on their laps as they tried to connect to high-speed Internet.

And this in a city just a short drive from the extraordinary wealth of Silicon Valley, a global symbol of American innovation, where Apple, Facebook and Google have gleaming campuses — with record stock prices to match.

The disparities reflect a multitude of factors, experts say, but primarily stem from a few big ones: Compared with other well-to-do nations, the United States has tended to prioritize private wealth over public resources, individualism over equity and the shiny new thing over the dull but necessary task of maintaining its infrastructure, much of which is fast becoming a 20th century relic. 

The nation’s infrastructure — the airports, broadband networks, transit systems, utility lines, ports and sewers that keep society humming — is in a perilous state from decades of underinvestment that has transcended both Republican and Democratic administrations. Perhaps even more important than the lack of cash, Kane said, is the absence of a plan.

“The Eisenhower administration is really the time we really had a goal or a vision for our infrastructure,” he said. “Now we’re in a fundamentally different era with a more unpredictable and extreme climate, more inequality, a lack of accessibility. And we’re still operating as if it’s the 1950s.”

All that neglect is showing: The American Society of Civil Engineers earlier this month gave the country a C-minus for the overall quality of its infrastructure.

That middling mark is actually up slightly from the group’s last report card, four years ago, when the grade was an ignominious D-plus. But it still reflects the decrepitude of a nation where a water main breaks every two minutes, and where nearly half of public roads are in either poor or mediocre condition.

The Biden administration has said that reimagining infrastructure — with increased funding to match — will be a central focus of its legislative agenda this year. In theory, it should be a relatively easy sell: The issue is one of the few that enjoys bipartisan backing.

Yet the same was true during the Trump administration, when the notion of “infrastructure week” became a running gag and the self-described “builder president” ultimately failed to sign legislation to get workers digging and backhoes rumbling.

The federal level is not the only place where lawmakers will be wrestling with the country’s gaping disparities this year. In 38 states and Puerto Rico, legislators will be weighing whether to spend more to bring broadband Internet to poor and rural communities. 

Salinas may be geographically close to Silicon Valley, but in other respects it’s a world away.

The city was made famous by John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” an account of tenant farmers who escaped the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and set out west for California. The “Okies,” as they were called, found exploitation and discrimination rather than relief.

Today, largely Latino field workers harvest lettuce and strawberries, earning low pay and enjoying few protections. The city has the highest child poverty rate in the state, and the lack of basic Internet access has kept many from attending virtual school during the pandemic.

“I can see from my window students working outside a Starbucks right now for the fast WiFi,” said Carissa Purnell, director of the Alisal Family Resource Center, which helps the area’s vulnerable families. “There are thousands of kids still in this situation.”

And that’s just in the Salinas area. Statewide, an estimated 1.5 million students — more than half of them Black, Latino or Native American — lack adequate Internet access . . . . . Nationwide, the number is as high as 16 million.

In most other wealthy countries, health care is considered a basic human right; a view reflected in the universal healthcare systems in place across Europe, Canada and Australia. In the United States, it is a commodity, a fact that Britons took to Twitter to remark upon recently when they noticed — with considerable alarm — all of the medication advertisements aired during Oprah Winfrey’s interview of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “If these medicine ads are what it’s like to not have an NHS [National Healthcare Service] I never want to experience that,” one viewer tweeted.

As with the digital divide, the pandemic has brought disparities in health care into sharp relief.

Even as American scientists, laboratories and pharmaceutical companies working at breakneck pace have helped blaze a path to effective vaccines, the country has consistently lagged behind other developed nations in the more elementary tasks of coronavirus testing and prevention.

Those failings have contributed to a tragic toll: The United States accounts for just four percent of the world’s population but 20 percent of worldwide coronavirus deaths. A disproportionate share are poor or people of color.

In 2019, about 28.9 million non-elderly people in the United States were, like Jones, uninsured, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Roughly 45 percent of non-elderly adults are also considered “inadequately insured”—meaning that even those who have insurance still struggle to afford the care they need. The CEO of GoFundMe in 2019 said that a third of the donations raised through the charitable giving site help people struggling to pay their medical bills.

Back in Houston, the inadequacies of America’s basic support systems were compounding and colliding. A failure to properly weatherize power generation systems after Texas’s last major cold snap, in 2011, had led to a power crisis, which led to a water crisis. And that, in turn, was leading to fears of a health crisis made worse by an inability to take basic precautions to ward off illness.