Broken-Down Superpower

It's become something of a sports-world cliché: champion athletes who stick around way past their prime, believing they've still got what it takes to come out on top. Eventually, they end up as pathetic, broken-down figures. Does that describe the world's only superpower? Read the following report by The Guardian's Ashley Seager, "Development: US Fails to Measure Up on 'Human Index',"  and decide for yourself.

· Nation slumps from 2nd to 12th in global table
· Richest fifth take home $168,000, poorest $11,000

Despite spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy.

These are some of the startling conclusions from a major new report which attempts to explain why the world's number-one economy has slipped to 12th place - from 2nd in 1990- in terms of human development.

The American Human Development Report, which applies rankings of health, education and income to the US, paints a surprising picture of a country that spends well over $5bn each day on healthcare - more per person than any other country.

The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the US in human development has a lower per-capita income.

Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme.

And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.

Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.

There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.

One of the main problems faced by the US, says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.

As a result, the US is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The US infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday.

"Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it," said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990.

"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over recent years."

The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.

In fact, the report shows that 15% of American children - 10.7 million - live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.

It also reveals 14% of the population - some 40 million Americans - lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks such as understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

And while in much of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia, levels of enrolment of three and four-year-olds in pre-school are running at about 75%, in the US it is little more than 50%.

The report not only highlights the differences between the US and other countries, it also picks up on the huge discrepancies between states, the country's 436 congressional districts and between ethnic groups.

"The Measure of America reveals huge gaps among some groups in our country to access opportunity and reach their potential," said the report's co-author, Sarah Burd-Sharps. "Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.

"For example, the state human development index shows that people in last-ranked Mississippi are living 30 years behind those in first-ranked Connecticut."

Inequality remains stark. The richest fifth of Americans earn on average $168,170 a year, almost 15 times the average of the lowest fifth, who make do with $11,352.

The US is far behind many other countries in the support given to working families, particularly in terms of family leave, sick leave and childcare. The country has no federally mandated maternity leave.

The US also ranks first among the 30 rich countries of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of the number of people in prison, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population.

It has 5% of the world's people but 24% of its prisoners.

Comments

[roger]

scratch out SUPERPOWER substitute with (Protectorate under corporate control.)

[Susan]

We need to get this info out there, to friends and McPatriots everywhere. Not to spread "doom and gloom" but simply because people who think they are "Number ONE!" will not work hard to improve things. Why bother if you think this is as good as it gets?

Spread the word, we are now the most obese, illiterate and violent people in the industrialized world. We don't have to be!

[Marion.Shaw]

None.of.these.statistics.are.really.surprising.to
retired.school.teachers.my.age.and.grandmothers.my
age..The.Goals.2000.program.of.the.Clinton.Era.
destroyed.public.education.and.No.Child.Left.Behind
of.the.Bush.era.buried.it..All.primers.were.ditched;
grammar.and.spelling.books.ditched;.uniform.core
vocabulary.was.ditched.and.children.in.public.schools
were.at.the.mercy.of.the.little.group.in.the.back
room.who.wrote.the.curriculums.willy.nilly.Good
teachers.got.out.or.secretly.taught.behind.closed
doors...Fatherhood.was.detached.from.motherhood.and
family.life.was.reduced.to.the.doctor.and.the.mother's
right.to.go.on.with.life.or.not.Family.meals.disappeared.with.the.families.and.children.grew.up.on.fast.foods,
never.even.knowing.what.a.home.cooked.meal.tasted
like..The.heroes.were.manufactured.in.Hollywood.and
the.youth.were.left.to.write.their.own.values
manuals;only.no.one.ever.taught.them.how.to.write
a.complete.sentence..I.have.taught.children.from
African.countries.who.were.better.educated.and.more
literate.than.half.of.their.American.counterparts.in
the.classroom..The.deconstruction.of.American.education
was.politically.motivated.and.paid.for.by.taxpayer
dollars.from.the.Dept.of.Human.Resources.and.Education.
The.children.of.the.wealthy,of.course,were.sent.to
private.schools,were.properly.educated.and.will.run
the.world;.that.is.unless.the.disenfranchised.wake
up.someday,stop.spending.their.money.on.tattos.and
drugs.and.start.a.revolution.Unfortunately,with.the
exception.of.the.American.Revolution,which.is.now
a.distant.dream,they.usually.end.up.badly.for.all.

[Nunca]

Having recently found this blog, I didn't realize until today that it promoted Leftist nonsense. Pathetic. Get serious.

[roger]

Marion:my God I just found out that Albert Einstein promoted leftist nonsense! what a dummy he must have been!!!!!

[Fu]

Nub City

Times were hard in Vernon, jobs were scarce, so citizens, some of them, began cutting off their own digits to make ends meet, so to speak. "They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially" was how the moviemaker put it.

"Hot damn!" Morris must have thought. Greed, degeneracy, self-mutilation, all set in the sweaty, small-town South. Just the sort of thing that would appeal to discerning film-folks in Manhattan, Los Angles and Atlanta. A winner at Cannes for sure.

So Morris moved in, set up shop, got to know people.

And hit a gothic goldmine.

He found a preacher who rhapsodized euphorically on the number of times Saint Paul used "therefore" in his letters (119 by his count) and who told his congregation that to find peace they needed to have a "therefore experience" of their own.

He met a local policeman who sat patiently for hours, waiting for something to happen, while philosophizing on why it didn’t.

And he discovered a turkey hunter whose passion for the sport took on an ethereal, existential quality as he observed how "you hear a turkey gobble, you forget all about diarrhea and everything."

However, the glue that Morris expected to hold it all together, the characters around whom the story would swirl, were the folks who weren’t quite all there, the amputees — he was gonna call the film "Nub City."

But he didn’t.

Seems that some of the subjects discovered what he was doing and the "king of the nubbies" told him that if he kept at it then the nub would be his neck ’cause his head would be gone. Now, Morris figured that anyone who would cut off something that was theirs would not hesitate to cut off something that was his, so the filmmaker decided to focus instead on preachers, policemen, turkey hunters and such, and be discretely silent about the rest.

---------------
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of trading body parts for cash on accident policies had just one name among insurance investigators around the country: Vernon, Florida. A backwoods town in the Florida Panhandle, Vernon had a general store, a combination post office/barber shop, one police car, and a main street that stretched only a block and a half. Selling reptiles from a roadside stand was a good business in Vernon, hunting turkeys, an obsession for some. For a time, though, losing limbs, fingers, arms, or legs in freak accidents became the town fashion. More than fifty such cases came out of Vernon in just a few years, a number that becomes all the more unusual when it is understood that the town's total population was less than 500. Investigators refused to name the town at the time, telling newspaper reporters only that they referred to it as Nub City. Self-amputees from the city, investigators said, were casually referred to as members of the Nub Club. “Somehow they always shoot off the parts they seem to need least,” one investigator remarked of the disproportionate number of left hands claimed lost as compared with right ones. Another investigator, John J. Healy of New York, worked cases in Vernon for a number of major insurers and later wrote about it at some length. “The second biggest occupation [in Vernon] seems to be the observation of hound dogs mating in the town square,” he noted back in 1975. “The biggest occupation was the deliberate maiming or severance of limbs to collect insurance money.” … To sit in your car on a sweltering summer evening on the main street of Nub City, watching anywhere from eight to a dozen cripples walking along the street, gives the place a ghoulish, eerie atmosphere.”

Most of the limbs lost in Nub City were shot off at close range with hunting rifles. The contrived accidents were all similar: triggers pulled unexpectedly as victims climbed fences; guns misfiring in the middle of being cleaned or after being dropped. And all of the mishaps involved men. (“Women never do dismemberments,” Healy later observed.) In the late 1950s, when the first claims came out of Nub City, a typical dismemberment was worth $1,500; by the early 1970s, the average claim was bringing tens of thousands of dollars. Over the years, Nub City got under the skin of investigator Healy, a nationally known expert in murder for insurance cases. “As inured as I am to all kinds of maimings and weird dismemberments, Nub City holds a morbid fascination for me,” he wrote. “I keep asking myself: How did it all start? What drove these people to sacrifice their limbs for money?” Healy tried to imagine the conversations that might have taken place between those who had already profited from losing a limb and those who were considering it. One man talks about the ten thousand dollars he got for his left hand and how he could use the money to buy a house or a car or a color television. “The other man looks at his own hand-the hand that probably has not earned him ten thousand dollars in five years,” Healy writes.

It is dirty, worn, the index finger crooked from a fracture that never was set straight. The fingers are tobacco-stained. He looks at it, turning it slowly, reflectively. Ten thousand dollars or more, he thinks. In one fell swoop. That's more money than he's ever seen in his life, probably more than he will ever see. He’s fifty years old and has been doing odd jobs for twenty years. He’s tired. His 1947 Plymouth may or may not start in the morning to get him to whatever job he may have.

In the end, the man completes a calculation that has been made by Americans at least since the depression of the 1890s, and probably earlier. “Does it hurt much?” he asks his friend, now talking more about strategy than principle. And with that, the deal is done, but for the bloody doing itself. A knowing look washes over the man’s face as he weighs the relative merits of knives, axes, or shotguns, and debates with friends the relative anesthetic properties of different brands of whiskey. “I hope I never have to go into that town again and see the mangled stump of an arm or a leg and listen to the old familiar story,” Healy concluded of Nub City. “But deep down inside me, I know that I will.”

From Ken Dornstein, Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pages 265–6, footnotes omitted.