Two guest opinions in yesterday’s paper – “Science, innovation answer to massive health care and job crises,” by Charles Lawton, and “India Street’s history of innovations preceded disruption in HIV care,” by Ann Lemire – displayed a stark contrast.

Lawton’s piece expresses the naive faith that innovation will magically make up for the ongoing defunding of public health. We can trace that defunding to the massive transfer of wealth, both to the 1 percent and the apparatus of state-sanctioned violence which we are pleased to call “defense” and “police.”

Lemire, on the other hand, lays out clearly how a highly successful public health program, in the most politically liberal city in Maine, can still end up destroyed by society’s ongoing rightward lurch into privatization.

This contrast epitomizes the decades-long, bipartisan trend toward empowering weapons-making billionaires and abandoning both working-class and poor people. Funding has skyrocketed for military and policing, while it has shrunk for programs that support public health and wellbeing. In our current pandemic, pre-existing weakening of public health in the name of profit combined with presidential incompetence to kill, so far, 180,000 of our fellow Americans. In this century, our amply-funded military has killed over a million people abroad. All these deaths fall most heavily on non-white people.

Whether at the city, state or national level, a budget is a moral document.

The bipartisan moral consensus regarding those budgets has been clear for a long time:

Ever more for destroying life, ever less for saving and sustaining life.

Jeffrey Hotchkiss
Portland

Copy the Story Link