- "I've had grown men wet this floor with tears, begging
for a job. We have to pray with some to keep them from killing themselves.
So many say they just want to die," says Charlie Tarrance, a director
of a private social agency. His task is to deal with growing lines of despairing
people looking for jobs, housing, and food. The place is Gadsden, Alabama,
but it could be anywhere in the United States.
-
- It could be Washington, D.C., at a Safeway supermarket
a mile or so from the White House where an elderly man is crying and holding
a can of dog food. When asked what's wrong, he says, "I'm hungry.
I'm hungry."
-
- It could be New York City, where a woman begins screaming
at the landlord who evicts her and her several children. The Bureau of
Child Welfare takes her children, which distresses her all the more. She
herself is transported to a New York mental hospital crying angrily--only
to be diagnosed and committed by the all- knowing psychiatrists as a "paranoid
schizophrenic."
-
- There is misery and cruelty in the land. As U.S. leaders
move determinedly toward their free-market Final Solution, stories abound
of hunger, pain, and desperation. Such things have existed for a long time.
Social pathology is as much a part of this society as crime and capitalism.
But life is getting ever more difficult for many.
-
-
- Some Grim Statistics
- Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful,
happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love
of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who
live in it. To their ears the anguished cries of the dispossessed sound
like the peevish whines of malcontents. They denounce as "bleeding
hearts" those of us who criticize existing conditions, who show some
concern for our fellow citizens. But the dirty truth is that there exists
a startling amount of hardship, abuse, affliction, illness, violence, and
pathology in this country. The figures reveal a casualty list that runs
into many millions. Consider the following estimates. In any one year:
-
- * 27,000 Americans commit suicide.
- * 5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.
- * 26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
- * 23,000 are murdered.
- * 85,000 are wounded by firearms.
- * 38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
- * 13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault,
rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.
- * 135,000 children take guns to school.
- * 5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not
including traffic violations).
- * 125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
- * 473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses;
53,000 of these are nonsmokers.
- * 6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or
some other hard drug on a regular basis.
- * 5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer
serious debilitations.
- * 1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found
under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth-graders have "huffed"
toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.
- * 31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy
usuers.
- * 37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly
use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The
pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits
are stupendous.
- * 2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful
mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
- * 5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
- * 200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments
that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.
- * 600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.
- * 25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek
help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental
and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
- * 6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers,
welfare agencies, and social counselors for help with emotional troubles.
In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling
in their lifetimes.
- * 1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment
at hospitals.
- * 2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations;
10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
- * 180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments,
more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.
- * 14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
- * 45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars
and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation
is reduced.
- * 1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents;
but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.
- * 126,000 children are born with a major birth defect,
mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental
toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.
- * 2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious
neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.
- * 5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
- * 30,000 or more children are left permanently physically
disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts
more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious
diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless
parents is increasing dramatically.
- * 1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because
of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults.
Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come from
white families.
- * 150,000 children are reported missing.
- * 50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from
one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, "Some of these
are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this
country are unidentified kids."
- * 900,000 children, some as young as seven years old,
are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm
hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours
a day in violation of child labor laws.
- * 2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic
violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause
of death to U.S. women.
- * 700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
- * 5,000,000 workers are injured on the job; 150,000 of
whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis,
impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.
- * 100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases,
including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.
- * 14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are
men.
- * 100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.
- * 60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants
or contaminants in food, water, or air.
- * 4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
- * 20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7,
the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to
lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection
with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so
would vegetarianism.
- At present:
-
- * 5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole;
2,700,000 of these are either locked up in county, state or federal prisons
or under legal supervision. Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than
leave. The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980.
Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug related crimes.
African Americans constitute 13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of
drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences.
For nondrug offenses, African Americans get prison terms that average about
10 percent longer than Caucasians for similar crimes.
- * 15,000+ have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing
rapidly; 10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large
numbers among the economically deprived or addicted.
- * 10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism
is on the rise.
- * 16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983
as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes
can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
- * 160,000 will die from diabetes this year.
- * 280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or
mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of
mind control drugs.
- * 255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily
released in recent years. Many of the "deinstitutionalized" are
now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
- * 3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps
including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate
number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected
with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions.
- * 2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously
incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome.
- * 10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase
of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted
quality of the air we breathe.
- * 40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or
protection from catastrophic illness.
- * 1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are
subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and
beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other
close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions worsen.
- * 1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large
but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and
abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible
profit.
- * 1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages,
reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions
or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most
are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual
assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some
cases psychosurgery.
- * 1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over
250,000 have died of that disease.
- * 950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind
control drugs for "hyperactivity" every year--with side effects
like weight loss, growth retardation and acute psychosis.
- * 4,000,000 children are growing up with unattended learning
disabilities.
- * 4,500,000+ children, or more than half of the 9,000,000
children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer brain
damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.
- * 40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and
more than one of every ten men, are estimated to have been sexually molested
as children, most often between the ages of 9 and 12, usually by close
relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always extends into
their early teens and is a part of their continual memory and not a product
of memory retrieval in therapy.
- * 7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary
with the business cycle. Increasing numbers of the chronically unemployed
show signs of stress and emotional depression.
- * 6,000,000 are in "contingent" jobs, or jobs
structured to last only temporarily. About 60 percent of these would prefer
permanent employment.
- * 15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time "contract"
workers who need full-time jobs and who work without benefits.
- * 3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted
because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never qualified
for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they joined the
armed forces because they were unable to find work.
- * 80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department
of Labor as below a "comfortable adequacy"; 35,000,000 of these
live below the poverty level.
- * 12,000,000 of those at poverty's rock bottom suffer
from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living
at or below the poverty level experience hunger during some portion of
the year.
- * 2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the
streets or in makeshift shelters.
- * 160,000,000+ are members of households that are in
debt, a sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago.
A majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for necessities.
Mounting debts threaten a financial crack-up in more and more families.
-
- A Happy Nation?
- Obviously these estimates include massive duplications.
Many of the 20 million unemployed are among the 35 million below the poverty
level. Many of the malnourished children are also among those listed as
growing up with untreated learning disabilities and almost all are among
the 35 million poor. Many of the 37 million regular users of mind-control
drugs also number among the 25 million who seek psychiatric help.
-
- Some of these deprivations and afflictions are not as
serious as others. The 80 million living below the "comfortably adequate"
income level may compose too vague and inclusive a category for some observers
(who themselves enjoy a greater distance from the poverty line). The 40
million who are without health insurance are not afflicted by an actual
catastrophe but face only a potential one (though the absence of health
insurance often leads to a lack of care and eventually a serious health
crisis). We might not want to consider the 5.5 million arrested as having
endured a serious affliction, but what of the 1.5 million who are serving
time and what of their victims? We might want to count only the 150,000
who suffer a serious job-related disability rather than the five million
on-the-job injuries, only half of the 20 million unemployed and underemployed
so as not to duplicate poverty figures, only 10 percent of the 1.1 million
institutionalized elderly as mistreated (although the number is probably
higher), only 10 per cent of the 37 million regular users of medically
prescribed psychogenic drugs as seriously troubled, only 5 per cent of
the 160 million living in indebted families as seriously indebted (although
the number is probably higher).
-
- If we consider only those who have endured physical or
sexual abuse, or have been afflicted with a serious disability, or a serious
deprivation such as malnutrition and homelessness, only those who face
untimely deaths due to suicide, murder, battering, drug and alcohol abuse,
industrial and motor vehicle accidents, medical (mis)treatment, occupational
illness, and sexually transmitted diseases, we are still left with a staggering
figure of over 19,000,000 victims. To put the matter in some perspective,
in the 12 years that saw 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, several million
died prematurely within the United States from unnatural and often violent
causes.
-
- Official bromides to the contrary, we are faced with
a hidden holocaust, a social pathology of staggering dimensions. Furthermore,
the above figures do not tell the whole story. In almost every category
an unknown number of persons go unreported. For instance, the official
tabulation of 35 million living in poverty is based on census data that
undercount transients, homeless people, and those living in remote rural
and crowded inner-city areas. Also, the designated poverty line is set
at an unrealistically low income level and takes insufficient account of
how inflation especially affects the basics of food, fuel, housing, and
health care that consume such a disproportionate chunk of lower incomes.
Some economists estimate that actually as many as 46 million live in conditions
of acute economic want.
-
- Left uncounted are the more than two thousand yearly
deaths in the U.S. military due to training and transportation accidents,
and the many murders and suicides in civilian life that are incorrectly
judged as deaths from natural causes, along with the premature deaths from
cancer caused by radioactive and other carcinogenic materials in the environment.
Almost all cancer deaths are now thought to be from human-made causes.
-
- Fatality figures do not include the people who are incapacitated
and sickened from the one thousand potentially toxic additional chemicals
that industry releases into the environment each year, and who die years
later but still prematurely. At present there are at least 51,000 industrial
toxic dump sites across the country that pose potentially serious health
hazards to communities, farmlands, water tables, and livestock. One government
study has concluded that the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the
food we eat are now perhaps the leading causes of death in the United States.
-
- None of these figures include the unhappiness, bereavement,
and longterm emotional wounds inflicted upon the many millions of loved
ones, friends, and family members who are close to the victims.
-
-
- Public Policy, Personal Pain
- If things are so bad, why then has the U.S. mortality
rate been declining? The decline over the last half-century has been due
largely to the dramatic reduction in infant mortality and the containment
of many contagious diseases, largely through improvement in public health
standards. Furthermore, years of industrial struggle by working people,
especially in the twentieth century, brought a palpable betterment in certain
conditions. In other words, as bad as things are now, in earlier times
some things were even worse. For example, about 14,000 persons are killed
on the job annually, but in 1916 the toll was 35,000, with the labor force
less than half what it is today.
-
- The growth in health consciousness that has led millions
to quit smoking, exercise more regularly, and have healthier diets also
has reduced mortality rates, especially among those over 40. The 55-mile
per hour speed limit and the crackdown on drunken driving contributed by
cutting into highway fatalities. But the cancer death rate and most of
the other pathologies and life diminishing conditions listed earlier continue
in an upward direction. Small wonder the climb in life expectancy has leveled
off to a barely perceptible crawl in recent years.
-
- When compared to other nations, we discover we are not
as Number One-ish as we might think. The U.S. infant mortality rate is
higher than in thirteen other countries. And in life expectancy, 20-year-old
U.S. males rank thirty-sixth among the world's nations, and 20-year-old
females are twenty-first. The additional tragedy of these statistics is
that most of the casualties are not inevitable products of the human condition,
but are due mostly to the social and material conditions created by our
profits-before-people corporate system. Consider a few examples.
-
- First, it may be that industrial production will always
carry some kind of risk, but the present rate of attrition can be largely
ascribed to inadequate safety standards, speedup, and lax enforcement of
safety codes. Better policies can make a difference. In the chemical industry
alone, regulations put out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA)--at a yearly cost to industry of $140 per worker--brought a 23 percent
drop in accidents and sickness, averting some 90,000 illnesses and injuries.
-
- OSHA's resources are pathetically inadequate. It has
only enough inspectors to visit each workplace once every eighty years.
Workplace standards to control the tens of thousands of toxic substances
are issued at the rate of less than three a year. Even this feeble effort
has been more than business could tolerate. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations,
OSHA began removing protections, exempting most firms from routine safety
inspections, and weakening the cotton dust, cancer, and lead safety standards,
and a worker's right to see company medical records.
-
- Second, it may be that in any society some children will
sicken and die. But better nutrition and health care make a difference.
The Women, Infants and Children nutrition program (WIC) did cut down on
starvation and hunger. On the other hand, years after passing a law making
some thirteen million children eligible for medical examination and treatment,
Congress discovered that almost 85 percent of the youngsters had been left
unexamined, causing, in the words of a House subcommittee report, "unnecessary
crippling, retardation, or even death of thousands of children."
-
- Third, it may be that medical treatment will always have
its hazards, but given the way health care is organized in the United States,
money often makes the difference between life and death. Many sick people
die simply because they receive insufficient care or are treated too late.
Health insurance premiums have risen astronomically and hospital bills
have grown five times faster than the overall cost of living. Yet it is
almost universally agreed that people are not receiving better care, only
more expensive care, and in some areas the quality of care has deteriorated.
-
- Some physicians have cheated Medicaid and Medicare of
hundreds of millions of dollars by consistently overcharging for services
and tests; fraudulently billing for nonexistent patients or for services
not rendered; charging for unneeded treatments, tests, and hospital admissions--and
most unforgivable of all-- performing unnecessary surgery. Meanwhile, private
health insurance companies make profits by raising premiums and withholding
care. So people are paying more than ever for health insurance while getting
less than ever.
-
- Fourth, it may be that automobile accidents are unavoidable
in any society with millions of motor vehicles, but why have we become
increasingly dependent on this costly, dangerous, and ecologically disastrous
form of transportation? In transporting people, one railroad or subway
car can do the work of fifty automobiles. Railroads consume a sixth of
the energy used by trucks to transport goods.
-
- These very efficiencies are what make railroads so undesirable
to the oil and auto lobbies. For over a half-century, giant corporations
like General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tires bought
up most of the nation's clean and safe electric streetcar networks, dismantled
them, and cut back on all public transportation, thereby forcing people
to rely more and more on private cars. The monorail in Japan, a commuter
train that travels much faster than any train, has transported some three
billion passengers without an injury or fatality. The big oil and auto
companies in the U.S. have successfully blocked the construction of monorails
here.
-
- In ways not yet mentioned corporate and public policies
gravely affect private lives. Birth deformities, for instance, are not
just a quirk of nature, as the heartbroken parents of Love Canal or the
thalidomide children can testify. Many such defects are caused by fast-buck
companies that treat our environment like a septic tank. Unsafe products
are another cause; there are hundreds of hair dyes, food additives, cosmetics,
and medicines marketed for quick profits which have been linked to cancer,
birth defects, and other illnesses.
-
- The food industry, seeking to maximize profits, offers
ever increasing amounts of highly processed, chemicalized, low-nutrition
foods. Bombarded by junk-food advertising over the last thirty years, TV
viewers, especially younger ones, have changed their eating habits dramatically.
Per capita consumption of vegetables and fruits is down 20 to 25 per cent
while consumption of cakes, pastry, soft drinks, and other snacks is up
70 to 80 per cent. According to a U.S. Senate report, the increased consumption
of junk foods "may be as damaging to the nation's health as the widespread
contagious diseases of the early part of the century." All this may
start showing up on the actuarial charts when greater numbers of the younger
junk-food generation move into middle age.
-
- In 1995-96, a Republican-controlled Congress pushed for
further cuts in environmental and consumer safety standards and in the
regulation of industry, cuts in various public health programs, and cuts
in nutritional programs for children and pregnant women. State and local
governments are also cutting back on public protection programs and human
services in order to pay the enormous sums owed to the banks and to compensate
for reductions in federal aid. Thus New York City took such "economy
measures" as closing all of its venereal disease clinics and most
of its drug rehabilitation and health centers.
-
- We are told that wife-beating, child abuse, alcoholism,
drug abuse, and other such pathologies know no class boundaries and are
found at all income levels. This is true but misleading. The impression
left is that these pathologies are randomly distributed across the social
spectrum and are purely a matter of individual pathology. Actually, many
of them are skewed heavily toward the low-income, the unemployed, and the
dispossessed. As economic conditions worsen, so afflictions increase. Behind
many of these statistics is the story of class, racial, sexual, and age
oppressions that have long been among the legacies of our social order,
oppressions that are seldom discussed in any depth by political leaders,
news media, or educators.
-
- In addition, more and more middle-income people are hurting
from the Third Worldization of America, suffering from acute stress, alcoholism,
job insecurity, insufficient income, high rents, heavy mortgage payments,
high taxes, and crushing educational and medical costs. And almost all
of us eat the pesticide-ridden foods, breathe the chemicalized air, and
risk drinking the toxic water and being exposed to the contaminating wastes
of our increasingly chemicalized, putrefied environment. I say "almost
all of us" because the favored few live on country estates, ranches,
seashore mansions, and summer hideaways where the air is relatively fresh.
And, like President Reagan, they eat only the freshest food and meat derived
from organically fed steers that are kept free of chemical hormones--while
telling the rest of us not to get hysterical about pesticides and herbicides
and chemical additives.
-
- All this explains why many of us find little cause for
rejoicing about America the Beautiful. It is not that we don't love our
country, but that we do. We love not just an abstraction called "the
USA" but the people who live in it. And we believe that the pride
of a nation should not be used to hide the social and economic disorder
that is its shame. The American dream is becoming a nightmare for many.
A concern for collective betterment, for ending the abuses of free-market
plunder, is of the utmost importance. "People before profits"
is not just a slogan, it is our only hope.
-
-
- Copyright © 2003 Michael Parenti. All rights reserved.
-
-
-
- http://www.michaelparenti.org/HiddenHolocaust.html
|
