If you read nothing else today, please do see George Packer’s We Are Living in a Failed State at Atlantic. It starts this way:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dys­func­tional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

And so on. Years of corruption, neglect, obstruction, program cutting, and economic inequality left us helpless to deal with with this pandemic in the manner befitting a first-world, industrialized nation, never mind the United States of America. Our federal government and many of our state governments are close to being utterly dysfunctional. Systemic change, anyone?

Not to say I told you so, but back in 2009 I wrote a post called “The U.S. as a Failed State” that holds up fairly well. And that links to a George Monbiot article in The Guardian that lamented our inability to address climate change. “Why do we treat the world’s most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?” Monbiot asks.

As many have said, the breakdown of effective government we are experiencing now has been a long time coming. Trump is a symptom, not the disease itself. However, he’s a late-stage symptom. It is particularly telling that all of our fail-safes built into the Constitution to remove a corrupt or despotic president, such as the 25th Amendment or impeachment, can’t work because there’s too much corruption in the rest of government to make it work. If the U.S. were a cancer patient, we’d be close to the point when the doctor says it’s too late to operate, but maybe we can get you into a research study.

Just one sign of our helplessness is that many of the so-called “stimulus” checks are lost in the system because over the years the IRS has been gutted. See Where’s your check? Ask GOP lawmakers. at the Washington Post.

Congress itself deserves much blame for the undercapacity of the IRS. Years of GOP defunding led to severe underinvestment in staff, technology and customer service, the folly of which is only more obvious now.

In normal times, the big problem with the Republican campaign against the IRS was that it led to lax enforcement of tax laws, which let cheaters skip out on paying massive amounts of money to the Treasury. Small amounts of funding spent to maintain a functional IRS would have yielded large amounts of income that the federal government was owed, at the same time ensuring fairness for the vast majority of Americans who obeyed the law.

Now the big problem is that Congress suddenly needs an efficient, staffed-up agency to help rescue the economy, but it must fight the downturn with the agency lawmakers built. Without the years of cuts, the IRS would be more capable of answering Americans’ many questions about confusing procedures to obtain their stimulus checks. It would also have had more capacity to build the technological tools it had to create on the fly to aid distribution.

Similar stories apply to many other government agencies. And then there’s our rickety health care system that’s been tooled to maximize profit over, you know, providing health care. After years of hospital closings — rural hospitals can’t make a profit, you know — and a large part of our population essentially cut off from health care because of no insurance, we are less able to deal with a pandemic than nations with a healtheir population and a national, taxpayer supported health care system. Bernie Sanders wrote in the New York Times recently,

The absurdity and cruelty of our employer-based, private health insurance system should now be apparent to all. As tens of millions of Americans are losing their jobs and incomes as a result of the pandemic, many of them are also losing their health insurance. That is what happens when health care is seen as an employee benefit, not a guaranteed right. As we move forward beyond the pandemic, we need to pass legislation that finally guarantees health care to every man, woman and child — available to people employed or unemployed, at every age.

The pandemic has also made clear the irrationality of the current system. Unbelievably, in the midst of the worst health care crisis in modern history, thousands of medical workers are being laid off and many hospitals and clinics are on the verge of going bankrupt and shutting down. In truth, we don’t have a health care “system.” We have a byzantine network of medical institutions dominated by the profit-making interests of insurance and drug companies.

So here we are. The old song from Hair seems to fit —

We starve-look

At one another

Short of breath

Walking proudly in our winter coats

Wearing smells from laboratories

Facing a dying nation

Of moving paper fantasy

Listening for the new told lies

With supreme visions of lonely tunes

Yesterday David Wallace-Wells wrote for New York magazine that The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE. I want to write more about that, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense unless you assume that at least part of the confiscated medical supplies are being re-directed into a black market, with Trump and his son-in-law getting a cut of the profits. Do read this for the details of how much has been confiscated by the feds. I’ll skip to the end: