Visible progress, after all these years. Hematology patients and staff are moving into the long-delayed Ciudad de Salud hospital complex, still under construction. Seguro Social photo.
At least SOMETHING to show
The country and metro area NEEDED a new hospital complex. The Ciudad de Salud, however, was within that generally acknowledged need a series of wrong answers.
There was the idea in Ricky Martinelli times that a new complex would be part of an overall privatization scheme in which primarily Venezuelan doctors, nurses and technicians would be brought in to smash the public health care workers’ unions and there would be a new complex oriented toward medical tourism by bringing in rich gringo tourists. Those ideas were crushed for the time being, but the Ciudad de Salud ambled on in its zombie walk.
There was the eternally thuggish public construction contracting game, with all of its graft, bid rigging and litigation as built-in expectations.
Things were delayed by new budget priorities, or new favoritism, or new administrations coming in to find empty coffers, with each change of government.
It’s not that Nito has significantly cleaned up any of those acts, but he has overseen gears going back into motion. We have at least this to show for all the money, and the promise of more.
The civil war that Republicans want
They published photos of themselves, their spouses and their children toting guns as a political statement. They ran TV ads of themselves firing assault rifles. They’ve been running a nonstop defamation campaign against the LGBTQ communities. They put the Proud Boys into influential positions in the Miami area Republican Party. They laughed about a brutal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s home and husband. They attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to nullify the 2020 US presidential election. They stole a massive cache of public documents, some of them including the identities of vulnerable US agents overseas. They sent armed vigilantes to intimidate people at ballot drop boxes in Arizona. They’re jamming up the courts as best they can. They have called for the suspension of the US Constitution, so that without any procedure they can replace the elected US president with Donald Trump as dictator.
And now they have attacked the power grid in a North Carolina county, because they hate queers and wanted to shut down a drag show.
It didn’t work. Americans can’t and won’t let it work.
Is it an unfair generalization to say “Republicans?” Was it, in 1945, an unfair generalization to say “Nazis?”
Actual conservatives, those who would like to conserve something – like, say, the United States of America as a constitutional republic with democratic institutions – would do well to leave the Republican Party behind.
Bell Hooks speaking at the New School in 2014.
Wikimedia photo by Alex Lozupone (Tduk)
No insurgent intellectual, no dissenting critical voice in this society escapes the pressure to conform…we are all vulnerable. We can all be had, co-opted, bought. There is no special grace that rescues any of us. There is only a constant struggle.
Bell Hooks
Bear in mind…
Ignorant men don’t know what good they hold in their hands until they’ve flung it away.
Sophocles
Write what should not be forgotten.
Isabel Allende
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
René Descartes
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