Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html?_r=2&ex=1363924800&en=ba91823f2ee64f8d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

WASHINGTON — New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

Growing Disparities

Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, the researchers said, but affluent people have experienced greater gains, and this, in turn, has caused a widening gap.

One of the researchers, Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said “the growing inequalities in life expectancy” mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death from heart disease and certain cancers.

The gaps have been increasing despite efforts by the federal government to reduce them. One of the top goals of “Healthy People 2010,” an official statement of national health objectives issued in 2000, is to “eliminate health disparities among different segments of the population,” including higher- and lower-income groups and people of different racial and ethnic background.

Dr. Singh said last week that federal officials had found “widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy” at birth and at every age level.

He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

The Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, have championed legislation to reduce such disparities, as have some Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality. There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”

Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining for people who have attained a given age.

While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:

Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.

Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.

Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.

Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.

Even among people who have insurance, many studies have documented racial disparities.

In a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that black patients “tend to receive less aggressive medical care than whites” at its hospitals and clinics, in part because doctors provide them with less information and see them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of surgery.

Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said one reason for the growing disparities might be “a very significant gap in health literacy” — what people know about diet, exercise and healthy lifestyles. Middle-class and upper-income people have greater access to the huge amounts of health information on the Internet, Mr. Moffit said.

Thomas P. Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed.

“People with more education tend to have a longer time horizon,” Mr. Miller said. “They are more likely to look at the long-term consequences of their health behavior. They are more assertive in seeking out treatments and more likely to adhere to treatment advice from physicians.”

A recent study by Ellen R. Meara, a health economist at Harvard Medical School, found that in the 1980s and 1990s, “virtually all gains in life expectancy occurred among highly educated groups.”

Trends in smoking explain a large part of the widening gap, she said in an article this month in the journal Health Affairs.

Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.

The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that heart attack survivors with higher levels of education and income were much more likely to receive cardiac rehabilitation care, which lowers the risk of future heart problems. Likewise, it said, the odds of receiving tests for colon cancer increase with a person’s education and income.

MoveOn Pressure the Democrats on Iraq? Don’t Hold Your Breath

http://www.prwatch.org/node/7143

Two leading anti-war journalists are challenging MoveOn, one “of the most prominent anti-war voices,” to turn its activism against Democratic Party presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein write, “we should direct our energy where it can still have an impact: the leading Democratic contenders. … While Clinton and Obama denounce the war with great passion, they both have detailed plans to continue it.”

But why would MoveOn pressure the Democrats or Barack Obama? Blaming the Iraq war on the Republicans and avoiding criticism of Democrats has been MoveOn’s strategy for years. MoveOn is now raising and spending millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama, but has made it clear it will support Clinton if she is the nominee.

Furthermore, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes of Hildebrand Tewes Consulting simultaneously run MoveOn’s anti-war coalition, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), while also employed by Obama as two of his top campaign officials. Tom Matzzie, previously the top lobbyist for MoveOn and AAEI, is trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the Campaign to Defend America, a new organization run by him and MoveOn’s founder Wes Boyd to attack John McCain. Simply put, MoveOn refuses to pressure the Democrats because they are the Democrats.

Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?

http://labornotes.org/node/1559

— Jane Slaughter

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Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, and demonstrated at stockholder meetings (above). The company cites these actions as evidence of a racketeering conspiracy. Photo: Metro Washington Council, AFL-CIO. Click to enlarge.

Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company’s business practices? Is it a “conspiracy” if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies?

Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. The suit aims to halt the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign to unionize 4,600 workers in its Tar Heel, North Carolina, slaughterhouse. The company is using a 1970 statute originally designed to battle gangsters’ extortion schemes—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

“This is a terrible menace to rights of free speech and protest, and constitutional rights and freedom of expression,” said Lance Compa, Cornell University labor relations professor and an expert on the meatpacking industry. “It’s a really dangerous new offensive that employers have seized on to try to snuff out legitimate protest about abusive employer conduct.”

Jobs with Justice, which is named as a defendant in the suit, is launching a campaign against corporations’ use of the RICO act, which has surfaced intermittently as one legal tactic among an arsenal to silence corporate critics. The act has been used to file suits in recent months against campaigns by the Service Employees (SEIU) at the Wackenhut security firm, and the UFCW at an Arizona-based grocery chain.

JWJ expects to work with unions, central labor councils, and city councils to pass fresh resolutions condemning the lawsuit.

“Our goal is to protect the right of not only unions to engage in these activities, but everybody fighting corporate abuses,” said Russ Davis, director of Massachusetts JWJ. “Hopefully we can deter corporations from going down this road. But if these things occur again we want to be ready.”

A VAST CONSPIRACY?

Smithfield sees a wide array of plotters conspiring against it, naming UFCW, JWJ, Research Associates of America, and Change To Win, the labor federation to which the UFCW belongs. Also named are eight individuals, including UFCW President Joe Hansen, the union’s Smithfield campaign director Gene Bruskin, and Andy Stern, SEIU president.

The defendants’ supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.

Photo: Jeff Hicks/LUPA 3520

Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in June 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, demonstrated at stockholder meetings, and filed health and safety complaints with OSHA. Stores in Massachusetts pulled Smithfield products from their shelves.

All these actions the company cites in its lawsuit as evidence of “formation of the conspiracy,” “delivery of the threat,” and “publication of false, misleading, baseless, negative and/or damaging information on the Internet and in the newspapers.”

“Whatever economic consequences flow, they are not considered in the law sufficient to deprive people of free speech,” said Joan Bertin, director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a member of the anti-RICO coalition.

The defendants’ supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.

The union said it had to turn to an aggressive campaign for consumer and community support because Smithfield repeatedly violated laws that are supposed to allow workers to organize.

The UFCW has lost two National Labor Relations Board elections at the plant, both of which were overturned after reams of unfair labor practice charges were sustained against the company. Smithfield’s violations include firing workers for talking about the union, and attempts to spy on and intimidate them.

“A TERRIBLE DISTRACTION”

“They’re trying to box us into a slow, NLRB process, because it doesn’t punish them for violations—all (workers) get is back-pay and reinstatement,” said Renee Bowser, UFCW’s assistant general counsel.

Court-watchers doubt the suit will survive. A similar RICO suit brought by Detroit’s newspapers last decade against striking newspaper workers ultimately failed.

“This form of coalition building, holding demonstrations—all of these are classic forms of freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly,” Compa said. “Ultimately the case won’t hold up. In the meantime it’s a terrible distraction.”

10 reasons your taxes are going up

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B2DA65225%2DC2F9%2D48C9%2DA828%2DD52C52621C6C%7D&siteid=rss

Paul B. Farrell
Market Watch
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:03 EDTReason No. 1: “Most Americans have yet to feel any of the costs of the Iraq war,” write Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in an excerpt of their new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” in Vanity Fair. “The price in blood has been paid by members of the volunteer military. The price in treasure has been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for the war.”

Well, folks, the party’s over. Campaign rhetoric won’t hide America’s excesses, denial, incompetence and arrogance much longer. No matter who’s elected, taxes will increase to cover massive debts. Greed has driven America’s great economic engine into a “debt contagion” ditch with a recession, bear market, price inflation, and weak job and housing markets … you bet your taxes will increase.

Yes, our five-year war was totally financed by borrowing. But unfortunately, “deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed. They cannot. Americans will have to pay for the war at some point — and when they do, they will be paying not the Bush markdown but the full price,” the authors say.

We’ve been mislead by Washington’s Enron-style accounting that hides many costs:

* Supplemental financing bills, outside the budget
* No veterans health-care estimates included
* No equipment replacement costs to restore our military
* Nothing about increases in state and homeland security

The real cost isn’t $800 billion, it’s already $3 trillion. And still, it doesn’t include

* Interest on the ever-increasing $9.3 trillion federal debt
* Damage to our credibility from a weak dollar
* Out-of-control inflation in energy
* And the brutal damage to Iraq and other Gulf states

Washington’s hiding all that from us. We were sold a war-on-the-cheap, to cost a mere $50 billion to $60 billion, to be self-financed out of oil revenues. Today we’re spending $50 billion every month! This war is already an economic disaster for America and the bill’s still coming due.Still, we know there’s strong opposition to taxes. But can a new president change much? Certainly not with two-thirds of the budget in untouchable entitlements and interest costs. Besides, Washington’s not run by our 537 elected officials but by 35,000 lobbyists. And after the elections, all 35,537 will still be part of a conspiracy that hates change and loves to spend the $3 trillion Federal budget.

Mark my words: Taxes will (must!) be increased to recover from years of excessive spending, accumulating deficits and future earmarks. A new president may expose the problems but without Congressional restraint the taxpayers will get stuck paying “the full price.”

Frankly, since both parties are mired in narrow ideologies, it’s questionable whether either can manage a $15 trillion GDP economy. Read “Mismanagement 101,” Dan Gross’s Newsweek column: “As oil hovered near $100 a barrel, President Bush complained to OPEC about high oil prices. OPEC president Chakib Khelil responded acidly that crude’s remarkable run had nothing to do with the reluctance of Persian Gulf nations to pump oil, and everything to do with the ‘mismanagement of the U.S. economy.’” And our heavy reliance on borrowing keeps making it even more difficult for the next president.

But unfortunately, even though the party’s over, that $3 trillion war debt is just a fraction of America’s out-of-control debt which is bigger than the official $9.3 trillion federal debt. It’s reason No. 1 taxes are going up.

Here are another nine problems increasing our government’s debt and adding pressures for new tax hikes. I’m sure you can think of many others:

2. America’s new Wall Street welfare program

This one’s scary. For the first time in almost a century, the Fed’s bailing out the investment bankers, those wild speculators who got us in this mess — bailed out while two million homeowners face foreclosures and increasing interest rates.
The real sinners are free to sin again! Like J.P. Morgan Chase’s $2 — now $10 — freebie of Bear Stern’s equity, while the Fed stuck the taxpayers with billions of Bear’s junk debt. Now Wall Street’s greedy traders are free to start speculating again, playing in the same old $516 trillion high-risk derivatives casino. Bad move: The Fed’s setting America up for an even bigger crash around 2012.

3. The Fed’s nationalizing America’s financial industry

Bear Sterns is a symptom of a systemic disease. As BusinessWeek put it: “Financiers preached the free-market gospel and pocketed unheard-of sums of money, yet when times got tough they called for a government bailout.”

The Fed’s dealing with America like a third-world banana republic, effectively nationalizing our financial industry! Wall Street’s speculators have over $200 billion in junk write-offs. But like the government accounting tricks hiding war costs, Wall Street has also been inflating junk asset values and ginning up profits. And now the Fed’s even helping them mask losses to prevent panic. Eventually this PR stunt will cut Wall Street’s future earnings and increase taxes.

4. Huge resistance to cutting social and entitlement programs

Lobbyists like AARP will fight all cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security entitlements, even though those unfunded benefits will balloon to $50 trillion to $65 trillion within a generation. Economists say solving this problem will take Draconian cuts of 40% in benefits or tax increases of 40%. If we don’t, entitlements will consume the entire budget in a generation. Untouchable near-term: Ergo, minimal cuts, higher taxes.

5. America’s pork barrel lobbying machine

The Washington Post says lobbying is “Washington’s biggest business.” All those 35,000 lobbyists will be around for the entire 2009-2012 first term of the next president, and all screaming for government handouts. The Democrats need them. And while McCain promises to veto earmarks, his campaign’s inner circle is made up of special interest lobbyists, ostensibly working for “free.”

Expect little change. Lobbyists earn big bucks squeezing megabucks out of the federal budget, and your taxes pay the bills.

6. White House’s free market nonaction policies

“We’re on top of it,” said the President in his St. Patrick’s Day speech at the New York Economics Club, as if the credit meltdown had little effect on the economy. The Treasury secretary even got a Katrina-style “great job, Hank” for working one whole weekend to magically fix the crisis.

Unfortunately, the Treasury and the Fed are following the same playbook that pushed the 1970s economy into a long, deep recession. Pimco’s Bill Gross says we need an aggressive Rooseveltian fiscal package. No chance. This administration only knows a free market (for business) and tax cuts (for the top).

7. Aging infrastructure: roads, bridges, water, sewer, etc.

Imagine taking that $50 billion monthly cost of fighting and rebuilding Iraq and shifting it to upgrading our own highways, hospitals, power, sewer and water plants. Dream on. Yet our deterioration continues and deferred maintenance only works so long. Expect higher gas taxes, plus sizeable cutbacks in state and local services, or general tax increases.

8. Paradigm shift: consumer spending vs. consumer savings

In one generation our savings rate declined below zero. Policymakers favored a consumer-driven economy, capital formation fell and debt piled up. Meanwhile, consumers took a cue from an out-of-control “spend and borrow” government piling up huge deficits.

9. Recession reality replacing arrogant optimism

The past five years the Wall Street Bubble Machine relied on an artificially low 1% Fed rate to create the housing boom and then the subprime-credit meltdown. Meanwhile our optimism and faith in capitalism sank with all the phony asset values and stock prices concocted by Wall Street … and it’ll happen again … because Wall Street’s relentless, all-consuming greed is setting up the economy to crash and burn again, all too soon … and the taxpayer will pick up the tab … again.

10. Now your turn, what’s your top reason taxes will increase?

Seriously, you tell us, what did we miss? Or do you honestly believe we can “stay the course” and not increase taxes? If so, tell us how. Tell us why we’re wrong in saying: “No matter who’s the next president, your taxes are going up.”

Is Bush the worst U.S. president ever?

http://www.thestar.com/Canada/Columnist/article/349621

Historians might argue over ranking, but there’s no doubt he has been an unmitigated disaster

Mar 22, 2008 04:30 AM

Thomas Walkom
Columnist
Historians will argue over whether George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever endured. But that is not the point. Five years after Bush’s ill-starred invasion of Iraq, three years after Hurricane Katrina and seven months into the unravelling of the U.S. financial system, the point is that the 43rd president of the United States – regardless of his ranking in the pantheon – is a unique and unmitigated disaster.

Whether Bush is more of a warmonger than James Polk, who in 1846 manufactured a crisis with Mexico in order to seize what is now California, more tolerant of cronyism than poker-playing Warren Harding (1921 to 1923), or more unlucky than William Harrison (he died after catching cold at his 1841 inauguration) is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that this president, this “decider” (to use his favoured term), decided his way into a war that has destroyed the nation he was allegedly trying to free, destabilized further an already rickety Middle East and given Islamic terrorism a whole new raison d’etre.

Bush is not the first U.S. president to take a cavalier attitude to civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln did so during the Civil War, while modern presidents reaching back to at least John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower have sanctioned the use of illegal assassination.

During the 1960s, when Bush was still a hard-drinking frat boy, American experts operating under presidential authority were teaching enhanced torture techniques to their Latin American counterparts. Bush didn’t initiate the practice of extraordinary rendition – sending suspects abroad to be tortured. That honour goes to Bill Clinton.

In short, the road to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay was open well before Bush took office in January 2001. But the current president has soared to new heights. His predecessors at least had the grace to be embarrassed about dabbling on the dark side. By contrast, Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney positively gloat about their attempts to subvert human rights.

True, most of the bad press against Bush stems less from his actions themselves than from the fact that they have failed. Had Lincoln lost the Civil War, history might well have treated him as a bum. Had the U.S. succeeded in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush might be considered one of America’s great presidents.

But Bush did not succeed there, or indeed in most of his efforts. With a few notable exceptions, such as stacking the Supreme Court with conservative justices, his record is one of failure. His attempt to beef up the government-subsidized health-care system for seniors has bogged down in confusion. His thrusts at social security reform were stillborn.

An alleged fiscal conservative, he drove the U.S. treasury into deficit to pay for his wars and tax cuts.

Part of the reason is ideology. Bush did little when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, in large part because he does not think governments should involve themselves in matters of social welfare. His efforts in the current financial crisis are equally half-hearted and for much the same reason.

But there is something else, something disturbingly feckless about Bush. This has nothing to do with his malapropisms (“The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done”), his insistence on snuggling into bed early every night or his alarming propensity for bicycle accidents.

At a very basic level, Bush is incompetent. He likes to play at commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. But in any other country a commander-in-chief who orchestrated an adventure as disastrous as the Iraq war would be court-martialled.

He clearly has a native cunning that stands him well in the game of politics. But at a deeper level, there seems to be something missing – a neural disconnect in his brain that at crucial moments causes him to be divorced from the constraints of rational thought. How else to explain the abrupt turnarounds such as his 2003 decision to disband the entire Iraqi army (a decision that fuelled the subsequent insurgency) just a few weeks after agreeing that these forces should be kept intact?

In some public events, he seems fully at ease. But in others – particularly his infrequent, televised press conferences – he seems to be observing events from another dimension.

Among U.S. historians, it has become great sport to rank the country’s presidents. Bush vies with many for the title of absolute worst – from Ulysses S. Grant, who oversaw a post-Civil War era so corrupt it was known as Grant’s Barbecue, to Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, to Herbert Hoover, the hapless president in charge during the stock market crash of 1929.

But Grant, Hoover and even Nixon did not do as much damage worldwide. Americans may still be debating Bush’s legacy. I suspect the rest of the world has made up its mind.