life expectancy despair
===
---
AN 2 25
'Diseases of despair': Rural Americans don’t live as long as those in cities - Alternet.org
Rural Americans – particularly men – are expected to live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than their urban counterparts, according to our research, recently published in the Journal of Rural Health.
We found that a 60-year-old man living in a rural area is expected on average to live two fewer years than an urban man. For women, the rural-urban gap is six months.
A key reason is worse rates among rural people for smoking, obesity and chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. These conditions are condemning millions to disability and shortened lives.
What’s more, these same people live in areas where medical care is evaporating. Living in rural areas, with their relatively sparse populations, often means a shortage of doctors, longer travel distances for medical care and inadequate investments in public health, driven partly by declines in economic opportunities.
Our team arrived at these findings by using a simulation called the Future Elderly Model. With that, we were able to simulate the future life course of Americans currently age 60 living in either an urban or rural area.
The model is based on relationships observed in 20 years of data from the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing survey that follows people from age 51 through the rest of their lives. Specifically, the model showed how long these Americans might live, the expected quality of their future years, and how certain changes in lifestyle would affect the results.
We describe the conditions that drive our results as “diseases of despair,” building off the landmark work of pioneering researchers who coined the now widely used term “deaths of despair.” They documented rising mortality among Americans without a college degree and related these deaths to declines in social and economic prospects.
The main causes of deaths of despair – drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide – have also been called “diseases of despair.” But the conditions we study, such as heart disease, could similarly be influenced by social and economic prospects. And they can profoundly reduce quality of life.
We also found that if rural education levels were as high as in urban areas, this would eliminate almost half of the rural-urban life-expectancy gap. Our data shows 65% of urban 60-year-olds were educated beyond high school, compared with 53% of rural residents the same age.
One possible reason for the difference is that getting a bachelor’s degree may make a person more able or willing to follow scientific recommendations – and more likely to work out for 150 minutes a week or eat their veggies as their doctor advises them to.
Rural communities are increasingly hampered by their lack of access to health care.
Why it matters
The gap between urban and rural health outcomes has widened over recent decades. Yet the problem goes beyond disparities between urban and rural health: It also splits down some of the party lines and social divides that separate U.S. citizens, such as education and lifestyle.
Scholarship on the decline of rural America suggests that people living outside larger cities are resentful of the economic forces that may have eroded their economic power. The interplay between these forces and the health conditions we study are less appreciated.
Economic circumstances can contribute to health outcomes. For example, increased stress and sedentary lifestyle due to joblessness can contribute to chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease. Declines in economic prospects due to automation and trade liberalization are linked to increases in mortality.
But health can also have a strong influence on economic outcomes. Hospitalizations cause high medical costs, loss of work and earnings, and increases in bankruptcy. The onset of chronic disease and disability can lead to long-lasting declines in income. Even health events experienced early in childhood can have economic consequences decades later.
In tandem, these health and economic trends might reinforce each other and help fuel inequality between rural and urban areas that produces a profoundly different quality of life.
What still isn’t known
It should be noted that our results, like many studies, are describing outcomes on average; the rural population is not a monolith. In fact, some of the most physically active and healthy people we know live in rural areas.
Just how much your location affects your health is an ongoing area of research. But as researchers begin to understand more, we can come up with strategies to promote health among all Americans, regardless of where they live.
*:{The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy, University of Southern California; Bryan Tysinger, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, University of Southern California, and Jack Chapel, Postdoctoral Scholar in Economics, University of Southern California
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
---
NOTE HOW BIDEN HELPED
an 4 24
rural white voters have, in many cases, far more political power than suburban or urban voters, and they’re using that outsized power to push our nation toward disaster. While they’re only 20 percent of the country, for example, because of gerrymandering they control fully 42 percent of seats in the House of Representatives.
The authors of new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy point out that rural whites are measurably more bigoted and xenophobic than suburban or urban voters, 13 points more likely to hate on queer people, 15 points more likely to support Trump’s Muslim ban.
They’re also far more likely to agree that setting democracy aside for a strongman like Trump or another Putin wannabee will “fix the mess and drain the swamp.” And fully 74% of the members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election represented rural districts.
The majority of rural white voters disagree with the statement (or have no opinion) that “diversity makes America stronger.” And while only 22 percent of city dwellers believe Trump won the 2020 election and Biden and Democrats “stole” it, a mind-boggling 47 percent of rural whites are certain Biden is illegitimately occupying the White House.
READ:Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances
The astonishing paradox, though, is how Republican politicians regularly crap on their own voters in rural America. Instead of offering help or solutions to rural problems, the GOP and conservative media instead feed them a steady diet of xenophobic and racist fear and hate.
And they eat it up! The racist buffoons among them are one and a half times more likely to be QAnon followers than people who live in cities or suburbs.
Democrats created — and Republicans opposed — virtually all the programs that are keeping rural America from sinking even farther into poverty and despair. Social Security, unemployment insurance, SS Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, over 60 farm subsidy programs that funnel billions in taxpayer dollars into rural communities, food stamps, the Women and Infant Children (WIC) program, anti-addiction programs, etc.
The only real accomplishment of the Trump presidency was passing a massive $2 trillion dollar tax cut for the morbidly rich that had virtually no effect on rural voters. Nonetheless, 71 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020.
There are still 11 mostly rural states where hospitals are closing and people are dying younger than necessary because Republicans in those states have refused to expand Medicaid.
Republicans in Congress fought against legislation to expand rural broadband access. They constantly try to cut or gut rural health and nutrition programs, and fought against expanding Obamacare in a way that would help rural people.
gerry SUPERMAJORITY
Most of the Red State Republican politicians in America know their seats will never be in danger, so they take millions from special interest groups to write loopholes into the tax code, vote for larger fossil fuel subsidies, and vote against efforts to lower prescription drug prices or do anything about global warming.
They get rich while the people who put them into office struggle to get by. Ted Cruz escapes to Cancun with the $600,000+ in cash he just got for his podcast, laughing at Texas voters all the way. JD Vance, a multimillionaire Wall Street guy, lives in an elite townhouse and travels by first class while people in Ohio watch Republican politicians gut their public schools and try to outlaw abortion and birth control.
Republican members of Congress representing rural states went all the way to the Supreme Court to successfully block President Biden’s first attempt at reducing student debt while rural students carry 60% more student debt than urban students by age 25.
One of the most chilling quotes from the book is about how rural voters are willing to both abandon democracy and embrace a violent rightwing coup:
“[R]ural Americans are more likely to believe that ‘it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.’ Indeed, more than one out of four rural residents agree that Trump should be returned to office by force if necessary.”
White rural voters are more likely than any other demographic group — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans — to be willing to overturn our democracy, and the people who represent them are in the majority of legislators who voted to overturn the 2020 election the day after the January 6th attack on our capitol.
If, say, Black people held that view, rightwing media would be trumpeting it every day from coast to coast. But because it’s rural white people, the so-called “heartland Americans,” it gets largely ignored by American media.
After all, most mainstream outlets treat rural people as if they’re an exotic species who must be listened to: going to rural diners to interview people is so common it’s become a cliché. In the past month I’ve seen dozens of such interviews played on MSNBC and CNN, but not once have I seen those same reporters go into a city and ask why people are voting for Biden.
The Biden administration has done more for rural America than any president since Lyndon Johnson rolled out Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Biden’s American Rescue Plan provided specific tax breaks and credits targeted at rural poverty, subsidized mortgage payments, and provided rent assistance to tens of thousands of rural residents:
— Rural Americans are nine times more likely to lack access to affordable child care, so Biden’s program allocated $39 billion for subsidies for child care providers, with the money disproportionately going to rural communities. There was also $350 billion specifically allocated for small towns in rural areas to help them run basic government functions and upgrade their infrastructure. He even put up $198 million in funding for rural colleges and universities.
— Biden and Democrats delivered a 15% increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits that have a huge impact in rural areas, reaching “2.9 million people in rural areas, including 800,000 children, reducing rural poverty by 11 percent and rural child poverty by 20 percent.” Biden’s USDA, over Republican objections, also put a billion dollars into rural food banks.
— Biden and Democrats “invested a historic $3 billion in the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) Economic Development Administration (EDA) to build local [rural] economies that are resilient to future economic shocks, including a $300 million Coal Communities Commitment.”
— Biden and Democrats — over GOP objections — expanded hunting and fishing opportunities on 2.1 million acres of public lands, the largest such expansion in U.S. history, and provided $1.5 billion in annual funding for wildlife and habitat conservation efforts. Another $2 billion went “for funding communities in the Rural Partners Network to spur job creation and build infrastructure.”
— They put $5 billion in “investments to help rural areas update infrastructure, boost high-speed internet access, and aid agricultural producers and small businesses in implementing climate-focused practices” and “$1.7 billion in funding to assist farmers, ranchers and foresters in adopting techniques to adapt to the changing climate, such as cover crops, nutrient management, and carbon storage.”
And that’s just the beginning: for a full list of the ways the Biden administration, over the objection of Republicans in Congress, has helped rural people click here.
Not one single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for any of the things listed above: in fact, almost all voted against these helps to rural America.
Instead of concerning themselves with the well-being of rural people, they’re trying to block clean air standards that prevent rural communities from being poisoned, block clean water standards in rivers that supply water to rural communities, cut taxes on billionaires, and increase subsidies to the fossil fuel and banking industries.
All while taking huge campaign contributions, private jet rides, taxpayer funded junkets overseas, and the promise of million-dollar-a-year jobs when they leave Congress if only they vote the right way.
Because Republican politicians are more interested in feathering their own nests than helping out the people they were elected to represent, rural Red states are massively subsidized by urban Blue states just to keep their heads above water. As the Associated Press recently reported:
“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.
“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”
It’s undeniably true (and documented with each hotlink below) that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:
— Spousal abuse
— [Obesity — Smoking](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/10/1994653/-Decades-of-Republican-Mismanagement-Have-Left-Red-States-Mired-in-the-Past-at-the-Bottom)
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape — Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty — Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths
So, why do Red state voters tolerate being conned and ripped off by their own elected representatives? Are they just stupid?
One theory is that “they hate the same people we hate.” And, indeed, for a significant and measurable cohort of rural white voters, racial fear and hatred is a primary motivating factor in their embrace of the GOP, although that’s only, according to this new book, about 20% of rural people.
Others vote Republican because the party has been so effective at branding itself with county fairs, NASCAR, country music, and the overall rural lifestyle including a faux paean to rugged individuality and independence.
Having over 1500 radio stations daily broadcasting a rightwing Republican message to literally every nook and cranny of rural America is another large factor. As is the dominance of Australian billionaire Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox “News.”
Will rural voters ever wake up to how badly they’re being screwed now and have been screwed by Republicans ever since Reagan started the whole neoliberal austerity and free trade movement that shipped over 60,000 factories and 20 million jobs overseas?
Or is the GOP’s cynical manipulation of religion, gender, and race enough to keep them voting to hurt themselves and further enrich Republican fat-cats?
So far, all indications seem like that’s the case and will stay that way for at least the next election cycle.
While the media struggles with trying to “understand” the rural white voter every election cycle, instead they should be running stories on how the very real problems and crises of rural America are daily made worse by Republicans in Congress and at the helm of their Red States.
How to break through?
Democrats need to get smart and start using the “negative partisanship” strategies Rachel Bitecofer recommends in her new book Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. They can do this by pointing out, with ad buys and media appearances, just how bad Red state Republicans politicians have been for rural people and their communities.
And they need to do it soon. As the authors of White Rural Rage point out:
“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators — past, present, and forever.”
Our mainstream media have made it clear, for over 40 years, that they won’t expose the damage Republicans are doing to rural areas because their TV programs will fail if Republican politicians boycott them.
So, the job falls to us and the Democrats. Can we do it? I believe so; we just need to get started.
NOW READ:GOP Senators back away from MTG's 'ridiculous' speaker threat
---
homicide (vs crime) spike b/c of covid lockdown?
no lnx twt an 4 22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ny-times/
NY Times pummeled over piece on 8 conservative men who don’t feel 'free to be themselves in the culture'
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 13, 2022
Some might say The New York Times is the king of normalizing views from the right, even views that could be considered disturbing or, in some cases, even dangerous to their fellow citizens, the nation, or the world. The Times’ pre-World War II profiles of a young Adolf Hitler are a legendary example.
In 2015 The Times republished what it calls “1922: Hitler in Bavaria,” patting itself on the back for getting “a lot of things right,” like its “description of his ability to work a crowd into a fever pitch, ready then and there to stage a coup.”
The Times that year also reported that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea thatHitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”
History knows how that turned out.
Fast forward to 2017, when The Times published a profile commonly referred to as “The Nazi Next Door,” originally titled, “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door,” which was written by Richard Fausset.
Salon’s Matthew Smith described the piece, bemoaning the “creepy trend of media outlets attempting to humanize Nazis and white supremacists.”
“Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall,” Fausset’s story begins. “They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.”
“Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.”
A caption of a photo reads: “Mr. Hovater and others in the loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make their ideas less than shocking, even normal.”
Some felt The Times, intentionally or not, certainly appeared as if it were trying to lend a hand. And in fact, after massive outrage, which forced a headline change (along with removing a link it included to “a webpage that sells swastika armbands,”) the Times’ editors defended publishing the piece by saying they thought “it was important to do so.”
Between 1922, and 2017, and after, no doubt the Times has published other works that normalize the radical right, extremism, and fascism.
Earlier this year a Twitter user posted his take on how the Times in 1935 covered a “large anti-Hitler protest in front of a Nazi ocean liner.”
And oh yes, 1924:
“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in [Madison Square] Garden; Police Check Foes,” was a front-page headline in the Times about a stunningly disturbing NYC event in 1939.
Meanwhile, fast forward to today.
“These 8 Conservative Men Are Making No Apologies” is the headline in Tuesday’s Times Opinion section. The piece is by the Times’ deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy and the Opinion section’s editorial assistant Adrian J. Rivera. And while no one should make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis, the question some are asking is why did The Times think it important to profile a group of conservative men, since conservative men have pretty much been in charge for decades?
“There was no talk of a stolen election, no conspiracy theories about voter fraud or rants about President Biden’s legitimacy. Yet listening to our 90-minute focus group with eight conservative men, you couldn’t help but worry for our democracy a bit,” it begins.
“The men didn’t see themselves fitting into American society today. They didn’t feel free to be themselves in the culture,” the piece claims. “Seven of them said they felt like a stranger in their own country. At a time when democratic institutions are under pressure — and even under attack — and the United States feels so ununited, what causes these Americans to feel so alienated from America?”
The Times, to my knowledge, has never done a focus group of, say, eight LGBTQ men over 50. Or eight LGBTQ people of any age. What about doing a focus group of eight Northeast Democrats? How about visiting a diner and listening to supporters of President Joe Biden? Or Senator Elizabeth Warren? Or Reps. Jamie Raskin or Val Demmings?
When does the paper of record start highlighting views of people from the left, rather than a Nazi from 1922 or conservatives from 2022?
Again, The Times defends its piece, claiming these are “Americans whose voices are often not heard in opinion journalism.”
The Times apparently has never heard of Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, or Facebook.
The Times piece includes one hour and 22 minutes of audio it titled, “8 Conservative Men On Being a Man in America Today.”
To give a taste, here are some of the men and their top concerns about America or American society:
Tony (white, 72, retired, Massachusetts): Government spending.
Derrick (Black, 63, software engineer, Georgia): Inflation.
Michael (white, 67, retired, Florida): Economy.
Christopher (Black, 51, small-business loan broker, Maryland): Elitism.
Danny (Middle Eastern, 47, Realtor, Florida): Disgraceful.
Joe (white, 37, apparel manufacturing, New York): Weak.
Joe says: “This is not the America I remember growing up in, and it’s just sad to see what’s going on.”
Robert says: “You’re not free to be yourself anymore because of crime. You’ve got to be concerned about ‘If I go out, am I going to be a victim of crime?'”
(Most crime is actually at historic lows, but you won’t hear that on TV or social media. The Brennan Center reports the “violent crime rate in the United States has decreased sharply over the past 25 years.”)
Later in the piece, Robert reveals, “I voted for Trump. I like Trump from when he was with ‘The Apprentice.’ I knew him as a businessperson. That’s why I voted for him. And then — oh, Lord — from church to every place, people just had a problem with it. You can’t have a different viewpoint.”
One interviewer asked questions like “What does it mean to be a man?” “Is masculinity important to you?” “Who would you all think of as good examples of masculinity or manliness these days? Who’s a good example?”
Responses to The Times’ piece were strong and appropriately unforgiving:
===
===
11 23 thom
something terrible and deadly is happening here in the United States, and House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced that he wants to double down on it. More on that in a moment.
If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia.
It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand.
Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78.
A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78.
And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.
And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.
That’s the main conclusion of a new study published in PLOS One, one of the world’s leading publications of peer-reviewed science across a wide variety of fields.
The report, rigorously scientific, was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH).
They concluded that if, in 2019, “liberals” (Democrats) had run all the Red states, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year. On the other hand, if “conservatives” (Republicans) had succeeded in imposing their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.
This follows the Brookings Institution study published two years ago that concluded Republican anti-mask and pro-snake-oil (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.) policies unnecessarily killed 400,000 Americans during the first year of the pandemic.
That study, along with a report from Congress detailing Trump’s incompetent --> malicious response to the pandemic, provoked psychologist Mary Trump to refer to her uncle as a “mass murderer.”
Add to that the Republican anti-vax propaganda and, as The New York Times reports, GOP policies are continuing to kill Americans:
“Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.”
And the majority of those dying are Republican followers. Not the Republican politicians and multimillionaire TV commentators, who are all well-vaccinated (Fox required vaccination for all employees), but the people who listen to them, watch them on television, and believe their lies about vaccines and masks.
None of this is new and none should be surprising.
In 2014 the International Journal of Epidemiology*published a report titled “US Infant Mortality and the President's Party” looking at the years between 1965 and 2010. They concluded:
“Across all nine presidential administrations, infant mortality rates were below trend when the President was a Democrat and above trend when the President was a Republican. … Republican administrations were characterized by infant mortality rates that were, on average, 3% higher than Democratic administrations.”
The results were, they wrote, solid. Very solid, in fact:
“Conclusions: We found a robust, quantitatively important association between net of trend US infant mortality rates and the party affiliation of the president.”
It turns out it’s not just American conservatives whose policies kill their own people.
Back in 2002 researchers looked at 100 years of data from Australia and England in a paper for theJournal of Epidemiological Public Health(JEPH) titled “Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000.”
They controlled the study for years of both war and drought, and concluded that more people kill themselves when conservatives are in power — in both countries, even at different times — than when liberals control the government. The subtitle of an editorial in the JEPH about their paper, in fact, was: “Do conservative governments make people want to die?”
The answer, according to the data, is yes. Noting an excess death rate of around 17% among the 238,431 suicides during years of conservative rule, the final sentence of that editorial was:
“[R]oughly 35,000 of these people would not have died had these Conservative governments not been in government. This is one suicide for every day of the century, or more appropriately, two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”
Drenching the country in blood seems to be a popular sport for conservatives and Republican politicians.
— United Republican opposition to negotiating drug prices is why here in the United States we’re paying $38,398 for an anti-cancer shot that costs $260 in the United Kingdom.
— Twelve Red states still refuse to offer Medicaid to their low-income workers, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. But while you can’t get healthcare in Red states, you sure can get a weapon of war.
— And with 120 guns for every 100 citizens, these deadly weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill humans — have become the leading cause of death for American children, a horror not found in any other country in the world.
— By the end of last year, fully half of American states abandoned all meaningful gun regulations, allowing permit-less carry, further increasing the carnage as The New York Times documented in heartbreaking detail.
— Republican advocacy for fossil fuels and lies about climate change are also killing Americans. An estimated 32,000 deaths a year come about just because of tailpipe and smokestack pollution.
— This doesn’t begin to measure the people who’ve died from extreme weather events causing wildfires across the West, derechos and flooding across the Midwest and South, and warming-amplified hurricanes in Mexico and the American Southeast. Or the people who’ve simply lost everything when their homes and jobs are wiped out.
Instead of doing anything about these issues, Republicans in Congress and state houses vote in a block to support the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaigns rather than supporting their states’ citizens who are getting whacked by the carbon pollution that industry lied to us about for over six decades.
And now House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” What he fails to mention is that 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.
As my colleague Chauncey DeVegapoints out:
“Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in ‘red State’ America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic ‘blue’ cities and regions.”
While all this is shocking in aggregate, it shouldn’t surprise us that a political party that swears its first allegiance to billionaires and giant multinational corporations would choose money and profits over health and life.
The Republican Party, as I noted lastyear, has ceased to be a legitimate political party with actual policy positions and become, instead, a loose collection of Nazis, cult-based “Christians,” antisemites, predatory hustlers, misogynists, gun nuts, bigots, and government haters, all funded by billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.
This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party; it’s barely Nixon’s anymore.
America can do better, but first we must overcome the billions that are being spent right now to put the GOP back in charge of the White House and Senate.
And that means we all have to do everything we can to wake people up and get out the vote.
===
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-study-finds-republican-policies-lead-to-shorter-lives/
==
guys generally angry for a while at loss of status [but anger by ppl more generally to McC for no aid bill covid 3?]
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/columnist-explains-how-the-rnc-dressed-up-the-fury-smoldering-at-the-center-of-the-populist-republican-party/
alex h
during the 2020 Republican National Convention last week, it was painfully clear that President Donald Trump was emphasizing white grievance along with fear-mongering. Some of the speakers tried to soften Trump’s image and show empathy, including First Lady Melania Trump and White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump (the president’s daughter). But journalist David Ignatius, in his Washington Post column, stresses that Trumpism continues to be a very bitter and angry ideology.
Republicans, Ignatius writes, “dressed up their rage in prettier colors at this year’s convention.”
“Speakers from First Lady Melania Trump to Vice President Pence tried to make the GOP sound like a party of healing and tolerance,” Ignatius explains. “But smoldering at the center of the populist Republican Party, there’s still the bright orange ball of fury that is Donald Trump — wounded and angry and promising white men in his trademark, code-worded slogan that he’s going to ‘Make America Great Again.’”
The United States, Ignatius stresses, is a very “wounded” country in the Trump era. But he applauds former Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, for calling out Trump’s racism as well as violence at protests. And he warns that Trumpian rage is as strong now as it was four years ago.
"When historians try to understand what happened to the United States in these years, they will study what spawned the Trump spasm of rage,” Ignatius argues. “Perhaps the most striking demographic change in the years preceding his election was the catastrophic decline in the health, income and cohesion of white men without college educations. That group voted 64% for Trump in 2016, making it one of his largest voting blocs, according to the Pew Research Center. The best account of this white collapse is ‘Deaths of Despairand the Future of Capitalism,’ published this year by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.”
Research by Case and Deaton showed how high suicide rates have become, in recent years, among whites who lack a college degree. And Ignatius cites “the loss of income and respect for working-class white men” as one of the things that fuels the anger and bitterness of Trumpism.
“For white men without a college degree,” Ignatius explains, “their ‘median earnings lost 13% of their purchasing power between 1979 and 2017,’ even as per capita national income rose 85%, write Case and Deaton….A freewheeling democracy that prizes individualism is our great American gift. But it’s also why we need good leaders so badly — to hold together and avoid the abyss of social disintegration.
===
===
'deaths of despair’: Economists’ work reveals the grim forces preying on American workers
Bashing European countries and their social and economic programs is a popular pastime among the “American exceptionalists” in right-wing media. But when economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton compare the…
==