Failed State?

Gerald Cavanaugh is a retired professor.  He lives in the Ashland, Oregon area and writes an opinion column for the Ashland Daily Tidings.

In Professor Cavanaugh's opinion, America is a "failed state".  In a recent editorial, he set down his reasons.

First, Cavanaugh defines a failed state:

A "failed state" is one in which the authorities and institutions of the state either cannot or will not provide essential services and public goods to its citizens. However, failed nation states can wage war, foreign and domestic, and engage in other forms of coercion and violence.

Exactly what are these things that the country is not delivering?

Looking at recent headlines the case can be made that America, at the national level, and Oregon (among most other states) is failing in just such ways. SOU (Southern Oregon University, vw) has announced budget cuts that will seriously impact its staff and damage its educational efficiency and administrative performance. Our county public libraries are similarly under attack and very likely will remain shut for a long time.

So SOU and the library are under attack.  I think he really means they had their budgets cut.  Next!

Too many of our citizens in Oregon and nationwide lack access to necessary and reliable heath care, giving America a shameful record among industrialized nations for high rates of unnecessary mortality and morbidity, despite a cost far above other states.

Healthcare!  You knew it was coming!  Yes, the streets are piling up with dead bodies. And yes it costs more here.  Guys like John Edwards has seen to that.  Next!

Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world and we have turned prisons into holding cells as well for the mentally ill, with fatal results.

The law says we can't hold people in mental institutions unless they are a danger to themselves or others.  It was the socialists like Cavanaugh that made that happen

Our poverty rate is growing and is higher than that of any EEU nation, Canada or Japan.

Our poverty rate is always growing according to people like this.  Part of the problem is the onerous taxes that are forced upon us. Especially ate the local and state levels.

Public housing for poor and low income Americans is totally inadequate for the need and the federal government is now in charge of callous ideologues who do not believe in government programs for such people.

Government programs should be temporary, not a way of life.  What is more callous Mr. Professor, keeping people enslaved to welfare or attempt to provide them with opportunities to work their way out of the hole?

Higher education costs have soared over the past twenty years and that ladder of upward mobility is now denied to millions of worthy youth. Those who do make it through are "strapped" with loans that will take years to pay back.

First he bemoans that the University has to cut back, tnow he complains that they are costing too much.  You can't have it both ways.

And the obligatory BDS:

Nationally, the Bush administration has shredded the constitution and emasculated the federal government by at once waging a ruinous war and drastically reducing income taxes on higher incomes and taxes on capital, which overwhelmingly benefits only the richest Americans---the top 10 percent.

Shredded the constitution?  You are an idiot, Cavanaugh.  You may not like his policies or the war, but only the unhinged left believes any of that crap.  Bush has not "shredded the Constitution.  Notice that Cavanaugh isn't the least bit specific.

He says the federal government has been "emasculated by the tax cuts and the war".  It's a bald-faced lie.  Revenues are actually higher than when the taxes were higher.  Mr. Cavanaugh is playing a bit fast and loose with the truth here to prove his point.

The end of his rant:

American workers are rendered more exploited and "disposable," made redundant through globalization and outsourcing, while the "middle class" is vanishing.

Our nation's infrastructure, our roads, bridges, school buildings, dams, national parks, waterways and the like are falling apart and together need more that a trillion dollars in repairs and improvements.

American workers are making more than ever and our economy has been on full burn for the past 6 or 7 years.  Yes, our infrastructure needs work, but if we taxed enough to do it, the money would never get there.  The Congress would divert it and spend it on anything but the infrastructure.  Not to mention it would send our economy into a depression to match that of the 1930's.

Our professor of BS ends this way:

In true "failed state" style, we wage impoverishing "wars" for the benefit of special interests. The American Empire is a big failed state, it is true, but a failure nonetheless.

The good prof must have been tokin' on a good one when he wrote that last line.  For all his education, he missed that class on redundancy, it is true, he missed it nonetheless.

I might add that Cavanaugh does not give us an example of a successful state.

America is not a failed state.  It's not a perfect state, but it isn't a failure.  Millions of people still come here, legally and illegally, because they know it is better here than where they are coming from.

Gerald Cavanaugh is just another miserable America hater.

VW

Comments

[beth]

He uses all the words liberals usually use 'empire', etc. As soon as you hear those words you know to get the tinfoil out! lol

They really DO all say the same things.