THE MAKING OF A NEW LEFT IN AMERICA ....

 

While you are reading these words, somebody in this country will die needlessly. Under cause of death, the coroners’ report should read, “political neglect.” We made the political choice to let them die

One of the most straightforward ways to measure our lethal neglect is through deaths by uninsurance. The lack of health insurance is killing someone as we speak. By my calculations (which I explain here), slightly more than 30,000 people die every year from lack of insurance in this country. That’s nearly 83 deaths per day, or 3.45 deaths every hour. That’s one death, on average, every 17 minutes or so.

Those figures don’t include death from under-insurance, but that’s common in the United States, too. Americans routinely tell pollsters that they have put off needed medical care because they can’t afford the copayments and deductibles. Sometimes they die as a result. Those figures are not easy to find, but they certainly bump up the likelihood that someone will die because of our political choices while you’re reading this.

That someone may well be a child. Before the day is over, more than thirty children will be dead because of our indifference to economic inequality, structural racism, and the destruction of our environment. That’s based on the UN Rapporteur’s finding that 600,000 children had died needlessly in the United States over a 50-year period. That comes to 32 children per day, or more than one child per hour.

We haven’t even factored Covid-19 into these figures yet. The pandemic may have peaked, but people continue to die from it. And the death toll increased exponentially because of our political choices. According to one analysis, one out of every three COVID-19 deaths in this country “are linked to health insurance gaps.” That’s slightly more than 200,000 deaths in the last year.

As of this writing, the weekly rolling average for Covid-19 deaths is 192 per day, sharply down from pandemic highs. If the ratio holds, that means 64 people are still dying every day from deaths associated with inadequate insurance coverage. That’s 2.6 deaths per hour, or one death every 22 minutes on average.

Then there’s air pollution. According to one study, it kills nearly 200,000 people in this country every year. That death toll disproportionately targets Black, Brown, and poor communities. That comes to more than 520 deaths per day, or one death every 1.65 minutes. Political neglect causes other deaths, too, but how much mortality can the human spirit take at one time?

If you read at the college-educated average of 300 words per minute, you’ll be done with this material within two or three minutes. That doesn’t give you much chance of outracing the Grim Reaper, but you’ll never know for sure. That’s the point, isn’t it? We never know these anonymous people, the faces and lives that make up these statistics. That’s why we don’t feel it. That’s why we let them die.

At this point. mainstream Democrats and their supporters will often step in to point out that the Affordable Care Act has saved a lot of lives. That’s true. Before the ACA was passed, an estimated 45,000 people died every year in this country from a lack of health insurance. That figure has been reduced substantially, which raises what you could call an interesting philosophical point: Should we celebrate the lives that have been saved, or focus on those that continue to be lost?  It’s a “morgue half full, morgue half empty” question, I suppose.

Except that the deaths haven’t been reduced by half, but by roughly one-third. And the problem isn’t numerical, but moral. It seems to me we’re obligated to focus on the lives we aren’t saving, not the ones we’ve saved.  Those lives include the uninsured, the under-insured, the children dying from poverty and neglect, and the massive death toll from environmental pollution.

Which brings us to the progressive Democrats in Congress. They haven’t been saying much lately about Medicare For All, and they seem to be deferring the Green New Deal for another day. They’ve been focusing on tactical gains: lowering the Medicare eligibility age, broadening its coverage, and expanding other forms of health care access. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I applaud them for attempting to embrace the responsibility that comes with proximity to power (if not power itself). But I can’t forget that somebody’s dying right now.

Those incremental gains would save more lives. But one of the left’s greatest strengths has been its moral clarity, its urgent insistence that every life matters. If it leaves single-payer healthcare and the Green New Deal on the battlefield, it will have lost the moral clarity that makes its message so compelling. That clarity contributed to the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, to the rise of a new left contingent in Congress, to the progressive shift among millions of rank-and-file voters. It will also leave thousands of lives on the battlefield.

This is arithmetic, but it’s arithmetic that hurts. It’s an arithmetic of the heart. As long as progressives stay silent about the lives that are still being lost, something doesn’t add up. Nothing does, in fact, except the number of lost lives – a number that went up while you were reading this.

Copied from Absolute Zero; A news letter from Richard (RJ) Eskow

https://eskow.substack.com/p/before-youre-done-reading-this-someone?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyMjI1NzkzOCwicG9zdF9pZCI6Mzg1NDM5MDgsIl8iOiJkK09TKyIsImlhdCI6 

SET AND CLEAR INTERNATIONAL LAW ......

 Agence France Presse, (July 9th 2021).

GENEVA: A top UN rights expert called Friday for Israeli settlements to be classified as war crimes, urging the international community to finally demand accountability for a practice it has long deemed illegal.

Presenting his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Michael Lynk, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the settlements constitute a "violation of the absolute prohibition against settler implantation".

This practice, which involves an occupying power transferring parts of its civilian population into an occupied territory, was designated as a war crime in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Lynk insisted that "this finding compels the international community to assess the plentiful accountability measures on its diplomatic and legal menu."

It was time, he said, "to make it clear to Israel that its illegal occupation, and its defiance of international law and international opinion, can and will no longer be cost-free."

Israel, which does not recognize Lynk's mandate and has never granted him access to the Palestinian territories, boycotted the session.

The expert pointed to the wide range of UN resolutions labelling Israel's settlement activity as illegal.

"The illegality of the Israeli settlements is one of the most settled and uncontentious issues in modern international law," he said.

But, Lynk added, "it is a tragic paradox that, while the Israeli settlements are clearly prohibited by international law, the international community has been remarkably reluctant to enforce its own laws."

The UN expert said the number of Jewish settlements had reached almost 300 in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, with more than 680,000 Israeli settlers.

The settlements have become "the engine of Israel's 54-year-old occupation, the longest in the modern world", Lynk added.

International action, not just words, was needed to resolve the situation, he said.

"As long as the international community criticizes Israel without seeking consequences and accountability, it is magical thinking to believe that the 54-year-old occupation will end and the Palestinians will finally realize their right to self-determination." 

This report is a repeat of many like it by different UN and international experts, law makers, annalists, and human rights watchers, unfortunately the entire world keeps its mouth shut, but the main culprit without any doubt are the successive U.S administrations, mostly the last one. Who not only encourages and funds such behavior but vetoes any international resolution condemning it. It is high time we start reanalyzing our positions and fairness, and consider our double standards in international affairs and politics, especially in the Middle-East.

As always, my profound thanks to all my good readers, stay safe and well.  

REVISITING AN AMERICAN DILEMA .....

 America loves always to have some type of a worthy adversary, we make them sometimes starch enemies, and we deal with them harshly when convenient, after the cold war with the Russian empire, and the war on terrorism taking us to different countries around the globe, and defending Israel by destroying all its unwanted neighbors, we are now in the process of creating a new adversary to re-energize our populations and internal differences, it is China, we are slowly building our enmity and justifying it by all means. of course different administrations have their different approaches and tactical variations, but the essence is the same.

Here's a good article by a smart man of political experience, as he served under various administrations and as secretary of labor under the Clinton administration. and is still actively involved in our political process as a writer, progressive thinker and an astute analytical mind, Robert Reich is an economist, a professor and a political commentator, I hope I'm not infringing by republishing his thoughts in my humble blog, he has a fair description of how and what should be done vis-a-vis our newest bitter enemy. 

China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical and economic stance in the world is unleashing a fierce bipartisan backlash in America.

That’s fine if it leads to more public investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure – as did the Sputnik shock of the late 1950s. But it poses dangers as well.

More than 60 years ago, the sudden and palpable fear that the Soviet Union was lurching ahead of us shook America out of a postwar complacency and caused the nation to do what it should have been doing for many years. Even though we did it under the pretext of national defense – we called it the National Defense Education Act and the National Defense Highway Act and relied on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration for basic research leading to semiconductors, satellite technology, and the Internet – the result was to boost US productivity and American wages for a generation

When the Soviet Union began to implode, America found its next foil in Japan. Japanese-made cars were taking market share away from the Big Three automakers. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi bought a substantial interest in the Rockefeller Center, Sony purchased Columbia Pictures, and Nintendo considered buying the Seattle Mariners. By the late 1980s and start of the 1990s, countless congressional hearings were held on the Japanese “challenge” to American competitiveness and the Japanese “threat” to American jobs.

A tide of books demonized Japan – Pat Choate’s Agents of Influence alleged Tokyo’s alleged payoffs to influential Americans were designed to achieve “effective political domination over the United States”. Clyde Prestowitz’s Trading Places argued that because of our failure to respond adequately to the Japanese challenge “the power of the United States and the quality of American life is diminishing rapidly in every respect”. William S Dietrich’s In the Shadow of the Rising Sun claimed Japan “threatens our way of life and ultimately our freedoms as much as past dangers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union”.

Robert Zielinski and Nigel Holloway’s Unequal Equities argued that Japan rigged its capital markets to undermine American corporations. Daniel Burstein’s Yen! Japan’s New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America asserted that Japan’s growing power put the United States at risk of falling prey to a “hostile Japanese ... world order”.

And on it went: The Japanese Power Game, The Coming War with Japan, Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms are Colonizing Vital US Industries, The Silent War, Trade Wars.

But there was no vicious plot. We failed to notice that Japan had invested heavily in its own education and infrastructure – which enabled it to make high-quality products that American consumers wanted to buy. We didn’t see that our own financial system resembled a casino and demanded immediate profits. We overlooked that our educational system left almost 80% of our young people unable to comprehend a news magazine and many others unprepared for work. And our infrastructure of unsafe bridges and potholed roads were draining our productivity.

In the present case of China, the geopolitical rivalry is palpable. Yet at the same time, American corporations and investors are quietly making bundles by running low-wage factories there and selling technology to their Chinese “partners”. And American banks and venture capitalists are busily underwriting deals in China.

I don’t mean to downplay the challenge China represents to the United States. But throughout America’s postwar history it has been easier to blame others than to blame ourselves.

The greatest danger we face today is not coming from China. It is our drift toward proto-fascism. We must be careful not to demonize China so much that we encourage a new paranoia that further distorts our priorities, encourages nativism and xenophobia, and leads to larger military outlays rather than public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research on which America’s future prosperity and security critically depend.

The central question for America – an ever more diverse America, whose economy and culture are rapidly fusing with the economies and cultures of the rest of the globe – is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity and our mutual responsibility without creating another enemy.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Reich

As always, my thanks to all, be safe and well.