AIPAC spending in Missouri distracts from local hospital needs
By Josie Calloway · Reporting from Pittsburgh ·
You read about these primaries—the endless, exhausting cycle in Kansas, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington—and what you should feel isn't political fatigue; it’s righteous anger.
When the fight for basic rights is reduced to a primary ballot count
You read about these primaries—the endless, exhausting cycle in Kansas, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington—and what you should feel isn't political fatigue; it’s righteous anger. Because all this noise, all this spending on ad buys (NPR noted Haley Stevens outspending Abdul El-Sayed by at least eight times), is a distraction. It’s designed to keep us focused on who gets the nomination for Congress, when we should be demanding that our local hospitals stop treating public health crises like profit centers. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as intended: keeping the poor and the sick fighting each other while the infrastructure decays around them.
The money trail always dictates the fight’s shape
Look at Missouri, for instance. The primary rematch between Wesley Bell and Cori Bush is framed by AIPAC spending $3.1 million to back Bell against Bush, who advocates for cutting military aid to Israel (Al Jazeera). This isn't a debate about people; it's a proxy battle over foreign policy funding that distracts from the fact that the most vulnerable citizens in Missouri are still struggling with inadequate local care. In Michigan, the race between El-Sayed and Stevens is equally fraught: one candidate campaigning on Medicare for All (270towin.com), the other emphasizing economic pragmatism. The common denominator isn't policy; it’s who can afford to buy the most airtime, or whose donors are the biggest.
This cycle of intense, localized struggle—where candidates must prove their worth to specific donor classes or ideological factions—is a predictable pattern when fundamental rights are at stake. We see this mechanism repeated in history: the Civil Rights Movement. That sustained struggle wasn't waged by simply picking the right candidate; it was a relentless demand for the establishment political system to expand its definition of citizenship and rights, forcing federal law changes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The shared mechanism is clear: when basic civil infrastructure—the right to vote without intimidation, the right to equal treatment under the law—is threatened by entrenched power, the struggle becomes a sustained, exhausting fight for recognition itself.
The quietest patient always gets the worst care
The truth that these primaries obscure is that public health is infrastructure. It’s not just about keeping the lights on; it's about having functioning maternity wards and rural clinics that don't close because they can't afford to hire a full-time staff nurse. When we see candidates fighting over minor procedural wins, when we read reports of voters needing multiple sources (Al Jazeera) or worrying about polling hours across time zones (NPR), we are witnessing the political class distract us from the massive failure at ground level. The quietest patient—the one in the Appalachian county hospital that just lost its federal funding—is always the sickest, and their suffering is always paid for by the public purse, not the private profit motive.
We cannot afford to treat these elections as merely political contests. They are symptoms of a deeper malady: an American system designed to prioritize capital accumulation over human flourishing. Until we redirect this furious energy—the kind that forces legislative change—away from selecting who gets elected and toward rebuilding our public health infrastructure, every single primary poll is just noise covering up the sound of sirens in an underfunded county emergency room.