American inequality highlighted by 30-year gap in life expectancy

independent.co.uk

American inequality highlighted by 30-year gap in life expectancy
By Leonard Doyle in Washington

The United States of America is becoming less united by the day. A 30-year gap now exists in the average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England.

Huge disparities have also opened up in income, health and education depending on where people live in the US, according to a report published yesterday.

The American Human Development Index has applied to the US an aid agency approach to measuring well-being – more familiar to observers of the Third World – with shocking results. The US finds itself ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in survival of infants to age. Suicide and murder are among the top 15 causes of death and although the US is home to just 5 per cent of the global population it accounts for 24 per cent of the world’s prisoners.

Despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities.

“The report shows that although America is one of the richest nations in the world, it is woefully behind when it comes to providing opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life,” the authors said.

Some of its more shocking findings reveal that, in parts of Texas, the percentage of adults who pass through high school has not improved since the 1970s.

Asian-American males have the best quality of life and black Americans the lowest, with a staggering 50-year life expectancy gap between the two groups.

Despite the fact that the US spends roughly $5.2bn (£2.6bn) every day on health care, more per capita than any other nation in the world, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of every western European and Nordic country, bar Denmark..

Using official government statistics, the study points out that because American schools are funded primarily from local property taxes, rich districts get the best state education. The US has no federally mandated sick pay, paternity leave or annual paid vacation.

“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,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps co-author of the report.

Although the US is one of the most powerful and rich nations in the world, the study concludes it is “woefully behind when it comes to providing opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life”.

According to a United Nations human development report, the US is in 12th place in a league table of wealthy developed nations.

New Yorkers Use Classic Salsa to Fight Gentrification

New York’s salsa scene, still going strong in Spanish Harlem, valiantly beats back the McCondo purge
by Raquel Cepeda

I almost broke my neck the other day, walking across the intersection of Third Avenue and 109th Street in Spanish Harlem—better known as El Barrio—to pick my daughter up from school. I whirled around at the sight of a man I thought didn’t exist anymore in New York City. He was a local titere (a street tough), sauntering down the very same “Calle Luna, Calle Sol” that salsa legend Héctor Lavoe sang about on a song from friend and fellow icon Willie Colón’s classic 1973 album, Lo Mato.

The cautionary tale, sung in Spanish, warns the citizens of John Lindsay’s New York to stay clear of the matóns (hoodlums) locking down the streets unless they’re prepared to go fisticuffs, or worse. But here, in 2008, the older, weathered man—well into his fifties—strutted right past me rocking a beaded Puerto Rican flag necklace and matching T-shirt, carrying a shoddy boombox on his shoulder that blared yet another of Lavoe’s many emblematic collaborations with Colón, “Che Che Colé,” from its rustic speakers.

I couldn’t help but flash back to a rare interview—obviously one of his last, now canonized on YouTube—wherein a melancholic, barely recognizable Lavoe slurred that “Che Che Colé” was, to him, the most indelible song among all his nonpareil repertoire, because it transported him back to happier days when he had money, and his wife Nilda and son Héctor Jr. were in his life.

Sung in the authentically jibaro, rural timbre that makes every listen a visceral experience, the opening track off Colón’s (recently remastered) 1969 long-player Cosa Nuestra feels like an astral excursion into the countryside of Lavoe’s native Puerto Rico.

But to hear it now? In Manhattan?

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Happy Malcolm X Day

“Brothers and sisters, if you and I would just realize, that once we learn to talk the language that they understand, they will then get the point. You can’t ever reach a man if you don’t speak his language. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why goodnight! He’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can’t speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can’t communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out, what does this man speak? Once you know his language, learn how to speak his language. He’ll get the point, there will be some dialogue, some communication, and some understanding will be developed. You’ve been in this country long enough to know the language the Klan speaks, they only know one language. What you and I have to start doing in 1965, I mean that’s what you have to do because most of us have already been doing it, is start learning a new language. Learn the language that they understand, and then when they come up on our door step to talk, we can talk.”

“It is a duty, it is your and my duty, as men, as human beings, it’s our duty to our people, to organize ourselves. Let the government know if they don’t stop that Klan, we’ll stop it ourselves. Then you’ll see the government start doing something about it. But don’t ever think they are going to do it on some morality basis, no. So I don’t believe in violence, that’s why I want to stop it.”

“I am not a Republican nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I am one of the 22 million Black victims of the Democrats, and one of the 22 million Black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million Black victims of Americanism…. You and I have never seen Democracy, all we’ve seen is hypocracy…. If you go to jail, so what. If you are Black, you were born in jail. If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.”

Paul Robeson: Words Like Freedom

“I defy any part of this insolent, dominating America, however powerful; to challenge my Americanism; because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death.”

“The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

Paul Robeson: Words Like Freedom is not only the history of Paul Robeson as a freedom fighter but also the history of the fight for freedom in the U.S. It is Paul Robeson’s voice we hear; it is his spirit that gives voice to the Black struggle. In the voice, we hear a resolve to be alive with the struggle of resistance.

Featuring a collection of Robeson’s interviews and speeches, Words Like Freedom includes a little more than eleven minutes of riveting testimony by Robeson to the HUAC, June 12, 1956.

The CD also includes an excerpt from Here I Stand, Robeson’s autobiography, written in 1958, in which his concept of the “oneness of people” resonates with the force and the dignity of a commitment to freedom for all suffering injustice and inequality through the system of capitalism.

In his autobiography, Robeson talked about his belief in the principles of scientific socialism an his conviction that a “scientific socialism” would represent “an advance to a higher stage of life—that it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally, and ethnically superior to a system based upon production for private profit.”

Robeson lectured tirelessly across the country and around the world urging people of color and workers to unite and to organize in order to bring about a radical new world in which people are truly free. We hear him urge the audience to unite, in the “Harlem Speech: Communists.” “We must unite. We must know our strength.” Black people, Robeson declared, “must be the decisive voice” in the struggle for freedom. “We must shout at the top of our voices” about the injustices committed in the U.S.

In his interview with Elsa Knight Thompson, he called on Black people to be “militant” and at the fore front for freedom because Black Americans “we have a tradition of tremendous consistent speaking out.”

Since the days of slavery and the abolition movement, Blacks have followed the footsteps of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth who did not, along with others enslaved, settle for the lesser brand of slavery. In his speech to the Progressive Party, “Lesser Evil,” Robeson reminds the audience that those enslaved ancestors “refused to settle for less.” Certainly now we will not settle for less in our struggle for freedom. Masses of Americans, Robeson declared, will be inspired by the Blacks and the workers fight and will join the fight, “working on the level of complete equality.”

This was a man who “never separated his work as an artist from my work as a human being.” “To me, my art is always a weapon.” And indeed, from his beginnings in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898, Words Like Freedom offers Robeson’s own voice exuberant and strong even in the telling of his personal tragedies and harassment by the U.S. government.

Words Like Freedom should find its way in the high schools and college classrooms. We hear the voice of a warrior, a radical voice who did not talk of triangulation! Robeson had convictions and was committed to fighting for the human rights of Black Americans and workers—but all Americans and all of humankind. We hear the voice of a warrior for freedom and we should not fear this voice.

Official Website

Evo Morales: 10 Commandments to save the planet, life and humanity

The 10 commandments President Evo Morales suggested to save the planet, life and humanity are:

1-Acabar con el sistema capitalista
1-End the capitalist system

2-Renunciar a las guerras
2-Renouncing wars

3-Un mundo sin imperialismo ni colonialismo
3-A world without imperialism or colonialism

4-Derecho al agua
4-Right to water

5-Desarrollo de energi­as limpias
5-Development of clean energies

6-Respeto a la madre tierra
6-Respect for Mother Earth

7-Servicios basicos como derechos humanos
7-Basic services such as human rights

8-Combatir las desigualdades
8-Fighting inequalities

9-Promover la diversidad de culturas y economias
9-Promoting diversity of cultures and economies

10-Vivir bien, no vivir mejor a costa del otro
10-Living well, not living better at the expense of others

Income Inequality Rises in Most States

Same old story. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The largest level of income inequality is in my home state of New York. Not surprising though, considering the large concentration of wealth that is there and obscenely exists alongside wide spread poverty.

This report is significant in that, among other things, it examines income inequality on a state by state basis. A real in depth look at the economic divide in the US.

Beyond the research and statistics, a conclusion that to me, is only reinforced by this report, is that the market economy is not fair, just or humane. The market economy can not reduce inequality. It can not do so because it needs such social and economic conditions to exist in order for it to function properly for the benefit of society’s wealthy ruling class.

This report is a damning indictment of the American economic and political system.

INCOME INEQUALITY GREW IN MOST STATES OVER PAST TWO DECADES:
Low-Income Families Lost Ground Since Late 1990s

The gap between the richest and poorest families, and between the richest and middle-income families, grew significantly in most states over the past two decades, according to a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute.

In fact, the nation’s longstanding trend of growing inequality accelerated since the late 1990s as incomes fell for poor families and stagnated for middle-income families in a number of states.

Low- and middle-income families have reaped few gains since the late 1990s, despite the recent years of economic prosperity. Average incomes actually fell by 2.5% for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale and rose by just 1.3% for those in the middle fifth. Meanwhile, incomes climbed 9% for those in the top fifth.

State Fact Sheets

Full Report