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Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Paul Street at Mar 06, 2005

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Ever get tired of American "leaders" like George W. Bush and others saying again and again that the United States of America is the “greatest country in the world”? For an especially asinine version of this standard patriotic cliché, see Dinesh d'Souza, “10 Great Things: What to Love About the United States” at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-dsouza070203.asp. One of the curious things about this d'Souza piece is that he made a big deal out of how long Americans live --- his Great Thing no.5 proclaims that “People live longer, fuller lives in America” --- when it was generally known that life expectancy was actually not particularly high in the world's “greatest” and “richest” (well, second richest in terms of per-capita GDP, after Norway) nation. Speaking of mortality, the National Center for Health Statistics has some good news on American mortality: US life expectancy has recently reached a new high: 77.6. At the same time, the Associated Press reports, however, “Americans still trail many other countries, according to statistics from the World Health Organization: In 2002 figures, Japan had the longest life expectancy at 81.9 years, followed by Monaco, 81.2, San Marino and Switzerland, 80.6, Australia, 80.4, Andorra, 80.3, and Iceland, 80.1. Other countries topping the United States include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom.” That puts the world's greatest and richest nation at number 25 in terms of life expectancy. See http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050228/ap_on_he_me/living_longer_2 I love this about San Marino, Malta, and Andorra. Get into the American mortality stats and break them down by race and class, of course, and you'll find that blacks and poor people live considerably shorter lives than affluent and white people on the average in the US. American inequality (US is the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far) is a big reason, no doubt, for America's relatively low life expectancy compared to other less collectively wealthy nation states. See the comparative international Social Development and Human Poverty indexes at Nordic News Network: http://www.nnn.se/n-model/indexes.htm. If you're wanting to go deeper into data on American poverty and inequality, including international comparisons, order the latest edition of the Economic Policy Institute's authoritative State of Working America (which always includes an international comparison chapter) see http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/books_swa2004_main. EPI's work over the years doesn't leave much basis for d'Souza's great thing number number 4: “America has achieved greater social equality than any other society.” One of the many things it regularly shows, too, is that right-wing hacks like DD and the Heritage Foundation's speakers are bullshitting their readers and audiences when they claim that our inequality statistics mask great endemic "upward mobility" from poor to rich: we actually experience less of the Horatio Alger American Dream than do European nations. Lack of a national health insurance plan (unique among industrialized democracies) in US Senator (R-Texas) Kay Bailey Hutchinson's “beacon to the world of the way life should be” (the USA) is also part of the nation's poor life expectancy performance. I wonder too what role is played by the incredibly long working hours Americans put in. As UPI reported in the fall of 2003, relying on data from the International Labor Organization, “U.S. workers put in an average of 1,825 hours in 2002, compared to between 1,300 and 1,800 in leading European nations. The Japanese, meanwhile, worked about the same length of time as did the U.S. employees. In fact, so high was the number of hours put in as well as output by U.S. workers that productivity in the United States surpassed both the European Union and Japan in terms of annual output per worker for the first time since World War II." See http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030829-040252-8643r American overwork is not a new story. Left economist Juliet Schor wrote an excellent book about the topic in 1991: The Overworked American. I assigned this book once for an evening business history class for engineers in the Chicago suburbs and two engineers told me that during overseas assignments their European co-workers thought they were “insane” to work 12-hour days. They'd hide in company bathrooms while their French and Belgium colleagues went home to their actual lives, wait until the office buildings were empty, and then proceed to work until midnight. I suspect that many Americans are taking more than a few years off the end of their lives with manic overwork, largely demanded and enforced by employers. Schor drew an interesting connection, by the way, between overwork and the lack of national health insurance. Under the distinctive and frankly idiotic American system of providing health insurance primarily through the workplace --- can you imagine getting your car insurance through the job? ---- employers absorb huge per-employee health care costs. Last I heard health care made up 40 percent of total employee compensation in the “beacon to the world.” A key point here is that health care costs are paid PER EMPLOYEE, NOT PER HOUR WORKED. An employers' employee health care costs don't automatically go up when his or her workers go from 50- to 60-hour work weeks (though of course you can imagine premiums increasing from one fiscal year to the next as more people get sick from over-work). It all amounts to an enormous incentive to get as much work as possible out of as few workers as possible, something that helps account for the ironic simultaneous existence of chronic overwork and chronic under-employment. When possible the employer tries to fill in the extra labor gaps --- the ones that can't be met by pushing salaried/benefit-granted staff yet further --- by putting on workers on a part-time and therefore benefit-ineligible basis. As usual, everything is interconnected through the concentration of wealth and power and the determination of the privileged few to exploit their underlings, which is most of us. I wonder how it all correlates with military spending and commitment to empire. Maybe ruling the world --- or trying to anyway --- is also bad for a nation's mortality rates. That's something to think about as America's empire pushes closer to the end of its own life expectancy.

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (53)

Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Mar 13, 2005 06:11 AM
I think you'll enjoy Bakan's book, and if you get the chance check out his documentary of the same name. http://www.thecorporation.tv/

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Mar 12, 2005 10:16 AM
It think Joel Bakan's book "The Corporation" mentions that corporations were just beginning to form at this time (1790s or so) in England. Sorry I'm not sure about the dates. Of course a corporation must receive a charter from the state. Hence it does not exist apart from the state. It is a construct of the state. A legal construct, legally protected, and legally bound to do nothing but make a profit. Corporations were legislated into existence (and legislated out of existence for awhile). In a sense they are ‘given life' by the state, –a principle that has also been enshrined in law. A corporation is just another branch of the corporate state. I dunno if Blake was thinking anything like this though.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Mar 11, 2005 13:00 PM
You are right joeblogs. It's not just a prison of walls or the mind, but a prison of institutions. Specifically economic institutions.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Mar 09, 2005 21:39 PM
With regards to prison labor depressing wages, I'm reminded of the phrase that to this day remins on the entry gate to Auschwitz "Arbeit macht frei". --'work makes you free' What goes on inside these prisons has a direct impact on the lives of those outside who remain 'free'. They are every bit as much prisoners as the inmates. Prisoners of the mind, and prisoners of the allmighty dollar. No warped Orwellian languge will change that. It is as you say Paul 'NORMALIZATION of INSANITY'.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 09, 2005 19:08 PM
Left Princeton sociologist Bruce Western says that mass incarceration is itself a very significant statist and regulatory intervention in the labor market - one that artifically reduces the real black unemployment rate and reduces the wages that disproportionately black and male (though female incarceration has been increasing since our marvelous welfare "reform" [I mean elimination])ex-offenders recieve: Western, "Incarceration and Racial Inequality in Men's Employment," Industrial and Labor Relations Review (Oct., 2000): 3-16.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 09, 2005 19:07 PM
bwong's comments are a good follow up and the prostitution/wage-labor/work/sex analogy is dead-on IMO. I commend hoping4anarchy for getting away from the computer. Yes WhiteBear some smart liberal policy wonks talk about the difference between "paying on the front end"(health, education, and human services) and "paying on the back end" (crime, policing, incarceration etc.). On drugs, the RAND corporation in the early 90s did a rigorous cost analysis and found that drug treatment was a hugely more efficient addiction-reducing use of taxpayer dollars than any of the following: crop eradication, drug interdiction, and mass arrest/ incarceration....ctd.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Mar 09, 2005 00:55 AM
"...lest anyone think we are serious about tearing down the interventionist state in regard to the poor, we are setting new incarceration records, with the prison population...it costs about $30,000 a year to house each inmate" Good connection there Paul, we pay these high costs of the 'interventionist state' many times over. The taxpayer has to pay his dues one way or another. If he doesn't pay for schools, scholarships, and drug treatment, then he pays for prisons, hefty police forces, and a bloated court system. If he doesn't demand that his tax dollars be spent on medicine, pensions, etc, then his money will be spent on bombs, wars, and corporate welfare. The politicians have been railing about lowering taxes, but they have never and will never deliver. It's all about where the money is spent, the spending will never stop.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Mar 09, 2005 00:41 AM
Regarding Hesed's post on 'America #1' Michael Parenti has some interesting stats, that complement that article nicely posted here: http://www.michaelparenti.org/HiddenHolocaust.html

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Mnutter2001, Hoping4anarchy at Mar 08, 2005 23:40 PM
Prof. Street, I get the point, and agree wholeheartedly with your analysis. But the reality of my situation that I'm one of the the overworked American populace that George Bush hates so much. But there's no problem there, because the feeling's mutual. So at 2 in the morning, when my printer won't work (because I'd rather print long articles and read them later), I wasn't as comprehensive as I wanted to be in my comment. However, this is a great site, but I have to leave my computer for a week. So, I'll have to catch up on all of this when I get back.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 17:45 PM
hoping4anarchy what I am observing most with the American media lately is the NORMALIZATION of INSANITY...the treatment of unfathomable madness and contradiction as just another ho-hum reality. Bush's stunning deception on Iraq passes into the news archives as no big deal, all things considered. Tens of thousands dead and no real intelligent occupation plan and false justifications for a brazen imperial takeover with new attacks on the messianic militarist horizon? Oh well. There are brief referneces to the prison population hitting a new all time high. Gee, how about that? Incredibly provocative plans to attack Iran - time for a commercial. A new cold war and nuclear escalation is in the works? We'll be back with the sports. The insane deception about the false Social Security crisis is tolerated and propagated. It's all fairly predictable when you examine ownership and ideology at the commanding communications heights.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 17:44 PM
Wandering child see my April 2003 article "Who Hates America?" at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=3422, where I argued that "thanks to [the invasion of Iraq and the strength of propaganda in the imperial homeland] the American people are increasingly joining their government on world civilization's shit list, rightly or wrongly,..." I suppose the pathetic re-coronation of imperial Boy George puts more of us on the list.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Child, Wandering at Mar 08, 2005 13:21 PM
It seems to me that these kind of nonsense "articles" (like the one written by Dinesh D'Souza) explain why the "arrogant and ignorant american" cliché is really spreaded around the world (and particulary in Europe).The demagogic, simplistic and amateurish approach used in the article is the same used by many right-wing (non "thinkers/writers") americans and this is the way the American people (in general) are being perceived in Europe (even by moderate right-wing parties). I think this is a serious issue because since the last election the "US=Bush" idea is really spreaded (and there is no need to explain how Bush is perceived)and everything that has the name "US" in it generates some kind of distrust. I don´t know if this issue is known by the left in the US.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Mnutter2001, Hoping4anarchy at Mar 08, 2005 09:46 AM
It's always interesting, but not surprising to see how slanted the news can be, even with a seemingly non-political issue. But then again, that's what makes the American mass media so powerful.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 08, 2005 04:47 AM
Many European countries have shorter work week, more equitable distribution of income and higher living standard than the U.S. And people who talk like Yarkov Bork will be laughed at and dismissed as morons. I suppose they are all Stalinist tyranny.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 08, 2005 04:34 AM
The old moral appeal for work is a relic from another time, before work and job are seperated and labour became a commodity. It simply does not apply anymore. The "economy" today is more like a game functioning according to more or less arbitrary rules. Many arguments in defence of Capitalism premised on cherished old myths. They sound reasonable or even convincing to supeficial thinking informed by caricatures. But on closer examinations they have little to do with reality.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 08, 2005 04:33 AM
Most jobs nowadays are in service. They do not involve "wealth creation". It is another myth that only those with a paid job(in the private sector of course) contribute to baking the economical pie. The idea that everyone has to pull one's own weight is problematic in mordern society. It is not like in the old days of hunting and farming society where it is easy to define and quantify pulling one's own weight. Most people today simply don't in that sense.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 08, 2005 04:09 AM
Finally Capitalist types such as YB confuse "work" with "paid work"(a job). People always "work" whether they rent their labour out or not. A mother raising future citizens and tax payers is doing very important work even though she doesn't get a paid checque for it. To say that only a paid job is real work is as absurd as saying only prostitution is real sex.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 08, 2005 04:08 AM
Another fallacy of Capitalist types is that remuneration is proportional to one's contribution to society. So the poor are poor because they are contributing less to society than someone who gets a fat pay cheque. There is no positive correlation between the value one contributes to society and the monetary reward.A scientist "working hard" building the bomb and an accountant "working hard" to find tax loop holes for his clients are arguably contributing negatively to society's collective well being, yet they are well paid. At least the "bum" does no harm.

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Person

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Gammon101, Bwong at Mar 08, 2005 04:06 AM
To add to Paul's rebuttal of YB. YB seems to equate poverty with lack of hard work. The truth is many minimum waged workers(do you have minimim wage in the States?)work extremely hard. They have to just in order to pay rent! The working poor are not necessarily poor because of laziness, they may simply be paid too little.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:19 AM
Most people aren't “able to become wealthy” in the US. What would be so great about being wealthy anyway? And what would be wrong with a broadly/roughly equal standard of living for all adults and children? There's more than enough to go around and there's plenty of ways for people to compete without consigning millions to abject misery while a few enjoy remarkable opulence. There's no moral justiifcation for a top slice with over $1 million in income each year while more than a million black kids live at less than half the poverty level in the "world's greatet nation" and whie 2 billion people on the planet live on less than dollar a day. We have gone so far in inverting the 19th century socialist maxim (“from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs") that it ought to blow any decently civilized persons' mind. Talk about the savage disparities and you get the wonderfully human and democratic maxim thrown back at you and told that even mentioning inequality is it to put humanity on the road to Stalinist serfdom and Pol-Pot's Killing fields. How tragically stupid. ”I think Mr. Street said it best when he advocated less work. He's lazy and he wants someone else to support him.” How absurd can YB be? I'm a lot of things but lazy isn't one of them. The personal insult here is really childish in this case. Grow up YakovB.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:18 AM
“This is just another example of ‘from according to ability, to each according to need.' Well, who decides needs and ability? That sounds like a receipe for tyranny. Oh wait, it is looking at every country that has ever advocated Mr. Street's view. Further, is it better to have some people wealthy, and others with the ability to become wealthy, or to have everyone poor with no ability to become wealthy because your labors are taken for another's gain?” There we go again. Raise problems with equity and justice under the American model of empire and inequality and you are an advocate of Stalinist gulags and the endorser of some past or current totalitarian state. Yes, Martin Luther King Jr would have joined the Khmer Rouge. No country has ever advocated my view. Some movements and unions and politicos and activists have --- some of the Paris Communards and some of the the Spanish popular forces in the 1930s and some of the left anarchs (Rudolph Rocker) and some left Bolsheviks and other left Marxists (Rosa L) have I suppose. Please stop calling consistent left egalitarians and libertarian socialists state-terrorist proto-left fascists. Its ridiculous.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:17 AM
The really bizarre thing here is that YB is equating hard work with having the longest employment hours in the industrialized world. If you think that people are suffering from the massive amount of time they are renting themselves out to and for capitalist employers then you are against “hard work.” Nonsense. I never questioned hard work. I love to work hard. I probably work too much, which is very American. That's very different from wanting to put in 70-hour work-weeks for someone else, which would be rather “anti-American” if you look at what people like Abrham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson had to say about wage-labor and the real meaning of the American Dream: independence and self-determination. Understand this, according to YB if you are concerned about the troubling length of the American workday you are lazy and you want a great big welfare state where you don't have to work and you get to sit around watching television all day. What stunning nonsense. And of course YB equates the particular and historical --- work as employment/wage-labor --- with the universal and eternal or human-natural: work as a defining aspect of human species being.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:16 AM
Then we have yakovB, who is at a lower level than realpc. “So let me get this straight, what makes a country great in Mr. Street's eyes is a long life where one doesn't have to work hard? How will one support himself? Will it be the government through taking from those who do work hard and are productive and giving money to those who don't work and are not as productive? “ This is pretty bad. It's hard to imagine that longevity actually has to be defended as a positive indicator. It's a pretty decent indicator of physical and I might add social and spiritual health on the whole I'd say and yes l would expect “the greatest nation on earth” to have the highest lifespan or close to it....ctd.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:15 AM
...institutional and societal racism remain widespread, creating persistent sharp racial inequality that is strongly entrenched by the fact that whites have convinced themselves that Oprah, the black owner of the Minnesota Vikings, Condi Rice, and the integrated 10 O'Clock News team mean that racism is dead and the only blacks who are still suffering have only their own dysfunctional self-sabotaging culture (if not their inferior genetic package, many whites still not-so covertly believe) to blame. “Long lists of everything wrong with this country, leaving off everything that is good, is typical of the left today.” I made no claim to giving a measured and balanced assessment. I gave some basic measures that should lead us to question the hyperbole about “greatest nation.” Pay some serious attention to what I'm saying and to the world you share with other human beings realpc.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:13 AM
“Yes, the US had a race problem from the start, but we ended slavery. The left's protective attitude towards blacks may have helped to slow their progress.” Now this is truly terrible. “A race problem from the start.” Yes, a little race problem called two and a half centuries of chattel enslavement, followed by the de facto slavery of sharecropping and debt peonage, Jim Crow through the mid-1960s, the hyper-segregated urban ghetto, and now the regime of incredibly racially disparate mass incarceration and felony marking and persistent related hyper-segregation and discrimination – all well-documented and easy to access for those who care to look. Yes, a little race problem. “But we overthrew slavery.” Wow: three cheers for America. Now hear this American left: on January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and set America's “colored” people free. I guess nobody told Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that everything was ok a hundred years later. And as for today,..ctd

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:12 AM
“My grandparents came here without even knowing English and, because of their positive attitude and motivation, became successful and sent their kids to college. Millions of people have had similar experiences.” Good for them. And millions have also fallen and experienced phenomenal misery and alienation. Look, people came over via chain migrations or numerous other pathways and often not without considerable advantages over the poorest Americans. Their uncles or brothers or cousins got them jobs in the steel mill or the packinghouse or the wire plant. They did their jobs and made some money and with the help of GI Bill a relatively small number of working-class kids went to college and some even became professors by the 1960s. It was great as far as it went. At the same time blacks were being denied access to college well through the early 1960s and attended separate and unequal schools that did not make more than a few of them into likely college candidate. They still tend to attend separate and unequal schools.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:11 AM
“Good lives” is a subjective term to say the least. If you just mean better than desperate poverty in less advantaged homelands and better than terrible repression in say Tsasrist Russia, then sure. But of course there's been no small amount of danger and pain and misery in the immigrant experience --- to this day (research day laborer experience in LA. NYC, and Chicago, to start) --- as well. Coming to America has also often tended to mean inserting oneself in subordinate ways at or near the bottom of savage private and public hierarchies. By “good lives” do you mean self-actualized, many-sided, democratic creativity and widely participatory citizen engagement in an egalitarian society, with strong values of peace and justice that are richly embedded in core, freely associated institutions of collective self-governance? I do mean all that that but that's because I'm a radical anticapitalist and democratic-socialist with ever-increaisng left-anarchist leanings and so have particular ideas of what constitute a good society and a truly human nature – ideas that you no doubt reject. By my standard, American lives have been extremely challenged in quality. And the truth is they have been and remain highly challenged even by normal bourgeois criteria.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:10 AM
Think of NAFTA's impact on Mexican agriculture; the broad impact of US-sponsored neoliberalism on developing nations; the way we have climbed the ladder of development and then pulled the ladder up by preventing developing nations from doing many of the same, common-sense economic-nationalist things we did to achieve “success” in the world economic order; tending to support repressive forces in developing nations: funding and protecting and equipping terrible people who do nasty things to workers and peasants struggling for decent standards of living and for peace and justice. You can start to get a clue on one small part of the vast history by doing a google search on “Negroponte” (our wonderful new National Intelligence Director) and “Honduras.” ..ctd

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:09 AM
"Poor people have been flooding in for hundreds of years and creating good lives for their families." Sure, we are obviously a relatively prosperous nation, where even with truly gross inequality (off the charts compared to other ‘advanced' states…closer actually to Latin America) the poor can make out better than they would in Haiti or Mexico. People are trying to get from the impoverished periphery into the rich core all over the world…this is not new and will continue into the future. But: (1) the truer relevant living-standard and societal-health comparison states for "the world's greatest nation" are in other advanced or core states and here we tend to take a licking in many interrelated areas (is our comparison Brazil and Haiti instead of Sweden and France?); (2) one of the rarely acknowledged problems (missing from the immigration debate generally) is that our (and other wealthy states') wealth, power, and behavior are parts of why the poor nations are not doing so well and thus tend to lose population to places like the USA..ctd.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:08 AM
..ctd.The first amendment is a double-edged sword in a nation of steep class hierarchy and related imperialism: precisely because we have free speech, those at the top of the socioeconomic and imperial structures have all that much more incentive to invest in what Chomsky calls “the manufacture of consent” or in what Alex Carey called “taking the risk out of democracy” through propaganda. Our free speech rights and general political freedom have been rich markets and targets for advertising and propaganda and a reason to divide us by race. Our democratic freedoms are janus-faced and something of a devils' gift when democracy and equality are not extended to the organization of our daily material and economic life. And I won't even go into the various other ways that concentrated wealth undermines political democracy. Mark Twain got it right: the best democracy money can buy.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:07 AM
..ctd. A big problem with America is its strong commitment to capitalism (which today means to corporate power) and harsh class hierarchy, not to mention race hierarchy. These commitments tend to infect and undermine the nation's “greatest” characteristics. For example, major league baseball games are just endless now, thanks to profit-driven addiction to homeruns (thank steroids and souped-up baseballs and shortened fences) and you can't even watch one pitch without seeing an advertisement (behind the catcher). Taking your family to the game can run you into the hundreds; millions of the working poor are pretty much priced out of baseball games (the crowds look very different and much whiter than what I recall from the 1960s and 1970s).

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 03:07 AM
I decided to act as if my two capitalist critics deserve to be taken seriously. I don't generally have time for this but here goes: "We don't have to think the US is better than every other advanced nation in every possible way to think we belong to something pretty great." No we don't; that's obviously correct. But the original post isn't/wasn't about whether or not America is great (I personally think parts of the American experience are great…like jazz, folk, and rock-and-roll music, baseball, the first amendment….to name a few things). It uses a few rather key areas of comparative international human experience (mainly life expectancy, poverty/inequality, and working hours) to question reactionaries' dangerous and over-the-top rhetoric about American being obviously "the greatest nation in the world."

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Mar 08, 2005 01:28 AM
Great post, Paul! This whole set of ideas is probably the major part of the set of ideas that we need to communicate to the American people if we want to change America. Another aspect of this is the results of the longterm study that compared the height of Americans with the height of other western nations. It turns out that although Americans used to be taller that other nations, say the Netherlands, that is no longer the case: we care shorter now. This is was a detailed study that accounted for many variables such as race and immigration. Read more about it here. But the big problem is getting these ideas and facts in front of most Americans, and in a form that they can absorb in the limited time that they have available. I note that few major American media outlets covered this story, although the New Yorker did.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Bok, Yakov at Mar 08, 2005 00:01 AM
So let me get this straight, what makes a country great in Mr. Street's eyes is a long life where one doesn't have to work hard? How will one support himself? Will it be the government through taking from those who do work hard and are productive and giving money to those who don't work and are not as productive? This is just another example of "from according to ability, to each according to need." Well, who decides needs and ability? That sounds like a receipe for tyranny. Oh wait, it is looking at every country that has ever advocated Mr. Street's view. Further, is it better to have some people wealthy, and others with the ability to become wealthy, or to have everyone poor with no ability to become wealthy because your labors are taken for another's gain? I think Mr. Street said it best when he advocated less work. He's lazy and he wants someone else to support him.

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By Hesed00, Hesed at Mar 07, 2005 20:13 PM
Nemo, don't get sucked in, he's not here to discuss issues, he's here to disrupt them.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 07, 2005 19:05 PM
yes Sceptic he did actually say that. He should have cited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to really drive the point home, yes?. d'Souza has made a career out of shamelessness: he has argued, for example, that Europeans and Americans did blacks a favor by enslaving them from the 1500s through the 1800s. This post was mainly about "homeland" issues, but you are quite dead on.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 07, 2005 10:20 AM
Finally, about your use of terms such as "we" and phrases like "everything wrong with this country", "we" did not end slavery any more than "we" or "America" fought for civil rights. Certain sectors of the society (including the much derided "left") took part in the civil rights movement and struggled against certain other and more powerful sections of the society including those who had at least partial control of the government (depending on your point of view, your designation of "we" would differ). Now we can certainly admire the courage and selflessness (incidently a trait that is not very prized in capitalist societies)of those activists, but this does not translate into national "greatness".In fact from a purely philosophical perspective statements such as "why do you hate America" or "we got rid of slavery" are literally nonsensical. The unphilosophical way of justifying such statements would be to assume that society is an organic whole (much like a human body) with a brain and other organs. Incidentally a certain right wing movement in Italy started from this basis.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 07, 2005 09:45 AM
The point therefore is not that a few hardworkers can or do succeed but why plenty of other equally hard workers do not (unless you believe that all poor people are chronically lazy).

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 07, 2005 09:39 AM
realpc, I'm going to have to ask you to be a little more specific when you use words like "we", "greatness" and phrases such as "everything wrong with this country". "Countries" or "we" are not monolithic entities (unless use equate "we" or "country" with the elites that run the latter). What Paul and the others have been pointing out is the fact that the economic system here is skewed in favor of certain sectors of the society (to put it mildly) and promotes certain kinds of behaviors. In other words certain character traits are rewarded and others are often systematically excluded from the system. Now this does not preclude material success for some (however this has been grossly exaggerated in the popular media; social mobility has actually slowed down since at least the 60s). In fact you will find such success stories in plenty of other countries. The first president of India (where I did most of my field work)grew up in dire poverty and had to walk 20 miles to school every day. All countries have rags to riches (or positions of greatness) lores like this. Continued...

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Hesed00, Hesed at Mar 07, 2005 06:00 AM
Hey-hey, realpc, what's up douche lips?

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Rocstar, Ubermench at Mar 07, 2005 04:49 AM
I believe the cheering section for the USA USA USA (!) are made up of little people, who are isolated in their own little worlds of personal peace and comfort. They are right where the established order wants them to be. They are like the people who saw the Nazi regime coming and said - "I am not a Jew." My answer is your time will come and the only question will be, who will be left yo say something on your behalf?

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 07, 2005 03:44 AM
We don't have to think the US is better than every other advanced nation in every possible way to think we belong to something pretty great. Poor people have been flooding in for hundreds of years and creating good lives for their families. My grandparents came here without even knowing English and, because of their positive attitude and motivation, became successful and sent their kids to college. Millions of people have had similar experiences. Yes, the US had a race problem from the start, but we ended slavery. The left's protective attitude towards blacks may have helped to slow their progress. Long lists of everything wrong with this country, leaving off everything that is good, is typical of the left today.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Mar 07, 2005 03:36 AM
"Nearly one out of four Americans [believe] that using violence to get what they want is acceptable" One in four Americans goes out and mugs someone to get whatever they want? Maybe they should let us know how the survey question was worded. "The leading cause of death of pregnant women in this country is murder" Because Americans enjoy murdering pregnant women, or because the death rate from other causes is low? "Fourteen of the 20 largest commercial banks in the world today are European" They forgot to tell us where the other 7 are. informationclearinghouse.info isn't exactly what I would call a reliable source of unbiased information.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Mar 06, 2005 21:29 PM
From the beginning school teaches how you, as a citizen, are blessed to live in the greatest society man has ever created. This is it, the apex. Lexus cars, yuppie fresh-food markets, $1500 sofa's. Its repeated that anyone can reach the height of material wealth (which is the unstated goal) and live a "great" life. If you're having a hard time surviving, its your fault. Look at Oprah and Mike Tyson, they did it, why can't you? Any idea that a "great life" can come from decent housing, health, and work-freedom is barbaric.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 20:24 PM
When the "conservatives" say they want to shrink the public sector down to the point where they can drown it, remember that they mean the left hand of the state. The right hand is still well-fed and its swelling cell-blocks house a large share of those who have been victimized by the slashing of the left hand. This is what people overseas need to see behind Bush when he visits their more civilized states. Hesed I agree on the pivotal role of television. See the piece I did on the role of Oprah in blinding middle class America further to unpleasant social realities (and see inside that article references to the earlier pivotal role of The Cosby Show): http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,40,5,587

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 20:20 PM
nemo I think its socialism and welfare (state subsidy and protection) for the rich and "market discipline" combined with a considerable measure of fascism for the poor, who are "free" to live without health insurance, without adequate living standards, without affordable housing, without vacations, without access to the means to enjoy the great multi-ethnic dining and other cultural opportunities proliferating in the burgeoning niche markets of the post-modern global metropolis. The global city's glittering world-connected downtowns are littered with beggars. When the people in the forgotten neighbohoods and left behind suburbs try to make it in the underground economy, there's the strong risk of prison (not cheap for taxpayers...it costs about $30,000 a year to house each inmate) and of course there's always the great opportunity to get your ass blown off in service to the petroleum-addicted American Empire Project (it's not unkown for judges to give prospective inmates the armed forces as a wonderful alternative sentencing option).

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 20:10 PM
...look at the Norwegian source linked in the post, which points out that even and perhaps especially Sweden is under business class pressure to take the American path...because (author says) of "the structure of its economy, which is more heavily dominated [than other Nordic states] by large international corporations whose leaders tend to regard the United States as the measure of all things." As the measure of all things? They should see Marc Miringoff, The Social Health of the Nation (2000?) - not a pretty picture. See also my article "The Economy is Doing Fine, It's Just the People Who Aren't," Z Magazine (November 2000), available online at http://www.zmag.org/zmag//articles/nov00street.htm

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 20:00 PM
Here in the urban heartland, where we are excited to have recently been designated one of the world's 15 top "global cities" (Chicago is the "second-tier," beneath the elite global-connected coordinator metropolises London, Tokyo, and NYC), we send so many poor blacks to "downstate" incarceration facilities that there were 20,000 more black males in state prison than enrolled in state universities (in Illinois that is) in 2001. It's driven by white-on-black drug busts which are driven by savagely disproportionate black joblessness, segregation, the criminalization of drugs (which makes their trade profitable in the first place), and incredible racial disparity in surveillance, arrest, prosecution, and sentencing. Just part of the great American model that overseas business elites hold up as the path to take.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 20:00 PM
smith777 that's exactly right: it's damn-near a utopia if you're rich and tends towards a living Hell for many of the poor, who are very disproportionately non-white. That describes my city of Chicago, where there were fifteen neighboods (14 of which were more than 2/3ds black and most of which were more than 90 percent black) with a quarter of their children living at LESS THAN HALF the notoriously inadequate US poverty level in 1999 --- at the peak of the long "Clinton boom." We have aggressively slashed the family public cash assistance rolls but lest anytone think we are serious about tearing down the interventionist state in regard to the poor, we are setting new incarceration records, with the prison poulation (betwen 40 and 50 percent black in a nation that is 12 percent black) going well above 2 million....

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Hesed00, Hesed at Mar 06, 2005 19:57 PM
I've found that the more TV you watch, the better this country looks. People have many illusions about where we stand as a society, thanks to the idiot box. Here's a related article which goes into detail about how the US ranks among developed nations on issues which progressives concern themselves with: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8191.htm ...all facts are referenced.

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 06, 2005 18:35 PM
Should have been "Khazakhstan".

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 06, 2005 18:32 PM
Finally, American "greatness" is most often compared to lack of "greatness" in dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and the erstwhile Iraq(conveniently leaving out some of their histories)or with economically developing or underdeveloped countries ("isn't it so much better to live in the here rather than in Nigeria or kazakhistan?"). It is like asking, "are the rich not better off than the poor?"

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Re: Life Expectancy, Inequality, Overwork, Insurance, and Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 06, 2005 18:23 PM
I've had similar arguments about whether the U.S. is the "greatest" nation in the world. I have come to the conclusion that most people who hold this view aren't quite sure what they mean by "greatest". Most (if they are not reflexively parroting what they have been hearing since they were kids) seem to associate "greatness" with military strength and having the largest economy in the world. Basically this is the view of the managers of the American state (otherwise why would "greatness" be equated with military strength?)which has gained wide(er) acceptance. A second reason holds some more water. The U.S. does have some of the most far reaching civil liberties protection laws in the world. But as Chomsky has observed, these are legacies of past popular struggles against the state and its leaders and managers. Thus it escapes me why this should be an example of the greatness of the government or its leaders who sought to suppress such movements. As for American capitalism, it is basically laissez faire for "us" (capital) unless of course "we" need state help (which is frequently)and "personal responsibility" for all others. Continued...

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