America's Healthcare System is the Third Leading Cause of Death

http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm    America's Healthcare System is the Third Leading Cause of Death   Barbara Starfield, M.D. (2000)    Summary by Kah Ying Choo This Journal of the American Medical Association article illuminates the failure of the U.S. medical system in providing  decent medical care for Americans. In spite of the rising health care costs that provide the illusion of improving health care, the American people do not enjoy good health, compared with their counterparts in the industrialized nations. Among thirteen countries including Japan, Sweden, France and Canada, the U.S. was ranked 12th, based on the measurement of 16 health indicators such as life expectancy, low-birth-weight averages and infant mortality.  In another comparison reported by the World Health Organization that used a different set of health indicators, the U.S. also fared poorly with a ranking of 15 among 25 industrialized nations. Although many people attribute poor health to the bad habits of the American public, Starfield (2000) points out that the  Americans do not lead an unhealthy lifestyle compared to their  counterparts.  For example, only 28 percent of the male population  in the U.S. smoked, thus making it the third best nation in the category of smoking among the 13 industrialized nations. The U.S. population also achieved a high ranking (5th best) for alcohol consumption.  In the category of men aged 50 to 70 years, the U.S. had the third lowest mean cholesterol concentrations among 13 industrialized nations. Therefore, the perception that the American public’s poor health is a result of their  negative health habits is false. Even more significantly, the medical system has played a large role in undermining the health of Americans.  According to several research studies in the last decade, a total of 225,000 Americans per year have died as a result of their medical treatments: • 12,000 deaths per year due to unnecessary surgery • 7000 deaths per year due to medication errors in hospitals • 20,000 deaths per year due to other errors in hospitals • 80,000 deaths per year due to infections in hospitals • 106,000 deaths per year due to negative effects of drugs    Thus, America's healthcare-system-induced deaths are the third leading cause of the death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer.    One of the key problems of the U.S. health system is that as many as 40 million people in the U.S. do not have access to healthcare.  The social and economic inequalities that are an integral part of American  society are mirrored in the inequality of access to the health care system.  Essentially, families of low socioeconomic status are cut off from receiving a decent level of health care. By citing these statistics, Starfield (2000) highlights  the need to examine the type of health care provided to the U.S. population.  The traditional medical paradigm that emphasizes the use of prescription medicine and medical treatment has not only failed to  improve the health of Americans, but also led to the decline in the overall well-being of Americans. [...] Starfield’s (2000) article is invaluable in unveiling  the catastrophic effects of the medical treatments  provided to the American people.   In order to improve the medical system,  American policymakers and the medical   establishment need to adopt a comprehensive  approach and critically examine the failure of the  richest country in the world to provide  decent health care for its people. […]

Economic globalization has undermined the legitimacy of western democracies

Žižek on the future of the Occupy movement

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next

[…]

Economic globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Due to their international character, large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by definition, limited to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to capture their vital interests.

It is here that Marx’s key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the “apolitical” social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory, etc – all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by “extending” democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing “democratic” banks under people’s control. In such “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is sought in applying the democratic mechanisms – which, one should never forget, are part of the state apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction.

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn’t know to what they are answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program will emerge.

[…]

Slavoj Žižek - Public Lecture - A reply to my critics

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/slavoj-zizek-public-lecture-a-reply-to-my-critics

Starts Feb 28, 2013 02:30 PM

Finishes Feb 28, 2013 05:00 PM

Venue Room B01, Clore Management Centre and B34, Main Building

Booking details

Free entry; booking required

Add to calendar

Add event to calendar

Event description

Public Lecture. - Slavoj Žižek - A reply to my critics

Although most of the critiques to which my work was exposed in the last years are “so-called,” fast denunciations not worthy of a serious reply, some of them do at least raise pertinent questions : which, exactly, is the status of violence in social life, and how can one justify resort to it? Is in our societies a radical social change – not just a revolt but the imposition of a new order - objectively possible?   What is materialism today, beyond the usual versions of deconstructionist discursive materialism, Deleuzian “new materialism,” and scientific naturalism? And, last but not least, what immanent role do jokes play in theory?

This event is now fully booked with a long waiting list

White Power to the Rescue

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/white_power_to_the_rescue_20130128/

Posted on Jan 28, 2013

By Chris Hedges

On a windy afternoon a few days ago I went to a depressed section of North Memphis to visit an old clapboard house that was once owned by a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle. Oral history—and oral history is all anyone has in this case since no written documents survive—holds that Burkle used his house as a stop on the underground railroad for escaped slaves in the decade before the Civil War. The house is now a small museum called Slave Haven. It has artifacts such as leg irons, iron collars and broadsheets advertising the sale of men, women and children. In the gray floor of the porch there is a trapdoor that leads to a long crawl space and a jagged hole in a brick cellar wall where fugitives could have pushed themselves down into the basement. Escaped slaves were purportedly guided by Burkle at night down a tunnel or trench toward the nearby Mississippi River and turned over to sympathetic river traders who took them north to Cairo, Ill., and on to freedom in Canada.

Burkle and his descendants had good reason to avoid written records and to keep their activities secret. Memphis, on the eve of the Civil War, was one of the biggest slave markets in the South. After the war the city was an epicenter for Ku Klux Klan terror that included lynching, the nighttime burning of black churches and schools and the killing of black leaders and their white supporters, atrocities that continued into the 20th century. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. If word had gotten out that Burkle used his home to help slaves escape, the structure would almost certainly have been burned and Burkle or his descendants, at the very least, driven out of the city. The story of Burkle’s aid to slaves fleeing bondage became public knowledge only a couple of decades ago.

The modest public profile of the Burkle house stands in stunning contrast with the monument in the center of Memphis to native son Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest, who is buried in Forrest Park under a statue of himself in his Confederate general’s uniform and mounted on a horse, is one of the most odious figures in American history. A moody, barely literate, violent man—he was not averse to shooting his own troops if he deemed them to be cowards—he became a millionaire before the war as a slave trader. As a Confederate general he was noted for moronic aphorisms such as “War means fighting and fighting means killing.” He was, even by the accounts of those who served under him, a butcher. He led a massacre at Fort Pillow in Henning, Tenn., of some 300 black Union troops—who had surrendered and put down their weapons—as well as women and children who had sheltered in the fort. Forrest was, after the war, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He used his skills as a former cavalry commander to lead armed night raids to terrorize blacks.

Forrest, like many other white racists of the antebellum South, is enjoying a disquieting renaissance. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and the West Tennessee Historical Commission last summer put up a 1,000-pound granite marker at the entrance to the park that read “Forrest Park.” The city, saying the groups had not obtained a permit, removed it with a crane. A dispute over the park name, now raging in the Memphis City Council, exposes the deep divide in Memphis and throughout much of the South between those who laud the Confederacy and those who detest it, a split that runs like a wide fault down racial lines.

A call last week by Memphis City Councilwoman Janis Fullilove, who is African-American, to strip Forrest’s name from the park and rename it after the crusading black journalist Ida B. Wells set off such an acrimonious debate between her and some white council members that Fullilove left a meeting in tears.

Wells was one of the nation’s most courageous and important journalists. She moved to Memphis as a young woman to live with her aunt. Her investigations revealed that lynching was fundamentally a mechanism to rid white businessmen of black competitors. When Thomas Moss of Memphis, a black man who ran the People’s Grocery Co., was murdered with his partners by a mob of whites and his store was looted and destroyed, Wells was incensed. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” she wrote. She noted “that the Southerner had never gotten over this resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” and was using charges of rape against black business owners to mask this resentment. The lynching of Moss, she wrote, was “[a]n excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’ ”

Her newspaper, Free Speech, which railed against white mob violence, the inadequate black schools, segregation, discrimination and a corrupt legal system that denied justice to blacks, was destroyed by whites. Wells was forced to flee the city, becoming, as she wrote, “an exile from home for hinting at the truth.”

The split between those in Memphis who hold up authentic heroes—those who fought to protect, defend and preserve life, such as Wells and Burkle—and those who memorialize slave traders and bigots such as Forrest points up a disturbing rise of a neo-Confederate ideology in the South. Honoring figures like Forrest in Memphis while ignoring Wells would be like erecting a statue to the Nazi death camp commander Amon Goeth in the Czech Republic town of Svitavy, the birthplace of Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,200 Jews.

The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement.

“Lord, have mercy,” Fullilove muttered as she listened.

But Forrest is only one of numerous flashpoints. Fliers reading “Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Wants You to Join” appeared in the mailboxes of white families in Memphis in early January. The Ku Klux Klan also distributed pamphlets a few days ago in an Atlanta suburb. The Tennessee Legislature last year officially declared July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day to honor his birthday. There are 32 historical markers honoring Forrest in Tennessee alone and several in other Southern states. Montgomery, Ala., which I visited last fall, has a gigantic Confederate flag on the outskirts of the city, planted there by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Confederate monuments dot Montgomery’s city center. There are three Confederate state holidays in Alabama, including Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi also honor Lee’s birthday. Jefferson Davis’ birthday is a state holiday in Alabama and Florida. And re-enactments of Confederate victories in the Civil War crowd Southern calendars.

The steady rise of ethnic nationalism over the past decade, the replacing of history with mendacious and sanitized versions of lost glory, is part of the moral decay that infects a dying culture. It is a frightening attempt, by those who are desperate and trapped, to escape through invented history their despair, impoverishment and hopelessness. It breeds intolerance and eventually violence. Violence becomes in this perverted belief system a cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost world. There are ample historical records that disprove the myths espoused by the neo-Confederates, who insist the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights and the protection of traditional Christianity. But these records are useless in puncturing their self-delusion, just as documentary evidence does nothing to blunt the self-delusion of Holocaust deniers. 

Those who retreat into fantasy cannot be engaged in rational discussion, for fantasy is all that is left of their tattered self-esteem. When their myths are attacked as untrue it triggers not a discussion of facts and evidence but a ferocious emotional backlash. The challenge of the myth threatens what is left of hope. And as the economy unravels, as the future looks bleaker and bleaker, this terrifying myth gains potency. 

Achilles V. Clark, a soldier with the 20th Tennessee Cavalry under Forrest during the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow, wrote to his sister after the attack: “The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. … I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.”

Normalizing torture so liberals don’t feel guilty

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable

[…]

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. 

Where is Bigelow here?

Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture. When Maya, the film's heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, "If you don't talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel". 

Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms. Much more ominous is her partner, a young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken (lighting his cigarette and sharing jokes). There is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat. This is normalisation at its purest and most efficient – there is a little unease, more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, but the job has to be done. This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.

[…]

The Arts Catalyst / John Hansard Gallery

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/transformism/




Left: Revital Cohen, "Kingyo Kingdom" (video still), 2012. Photo: Cohen Van Balen. Right: Melanie Jackson, "The Urpflanze (Part 2)" (still), 2012. Commissioned by The Arts Catalyst.


Transformism – two new commissions
by Melanie Jackson and Revital Cohen
22 January–9 March 2013

John Hansard Gallery
University of Southampton
University Road, Southampton
Hampshire SO17 1BJ, UK
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 11–5pm, Saturday 11–4pm

T + 44 (0) 23 8059 2158
info@hansardgallery.org.uk

www.hansardgallery.org.uk
www.artscatalyst.org


Transformism, an exhibition of two new works by Melanie Jackson and Revital Cohen, has been commissioned by The Arts Catalyst. Both artists through their distinctive practices have made new works exploring their interests in how cultural archetypes and ideas interweave science and technology to create new shapes, visual forms and structures.

As we develop the tools to manipulate and engineer new forms and systems of life, the exhibition considers our historical and contemporary entanglements with nature, technology and the economy, and how these relationships influence emergent forms in biological and synthetic matter, through new sculpture, installation and moving image works.

The Urpflanze (Part 2) is the second part of Melanie Jackson's ongoing investigation into mutability and transformation that takes its lead from Goethe's concept of an imaginary primal plant, the Urpflanze, that contained coiled up within it the potential to unfurl all possible future forms. Contemporary science likewise imagines the potential to grow or print any form we can imagine, by recasting physical, chemical and biological function as a substrate that can be programmed into being. Jackson's work begins in the botanical garden and looks to the laboratory, from clay pits to the factory floor, from analogue to digital clay, from its own animated pixels to the interior of the screen in a series of moving image works and ceramic sculptures. She has collaborated with Esther Leslie on a text that has informed the work and a new publication, THE UR-PHENOMENON, that will be distributed as part of the exhibition.

In Kingyo Kingdom, Revital Cohen, whose projects often test the ethical parameters of biological design, explores the genus of fish that have been designed for aesthetic purposes, questioning the definitions used to indicate living creatures. Does one denominate a manipulated organism as an object, product, animal or pet? What consequences does this entail for our feelings and behaviours? Cohen's interest in the cultural perceptions and aesthetics of animal-as-product took her to Japan, where exotic goldfish have been developed over centuries of meticulous cultivation, breeding out dorsal fins and sculpting kimono-like Ranchu fish tails. Kingyo Kingdom explores the unique culture of breeders, collectors and connoisseurs with footage from the Japanese national goldfish competition, questioning the design and commodification of this species.

An illustrated exhibition guide with an essay by Isobel Harbison will be available in print and as an eBook.

Saturday 26 January
12–2pm Private view
2–4pm Crafting Life: Materiality, Science and Technology symposium

Melanie Jackson's The Urpflanze (Part 2) will be exhibited at Flat Time House, 210 Bellenden Road, London SE15 4BW, UK, 28 March–12 May 2013

Revital Cohen's continuing project will be exhibited later in the year.
Details of both will be posted on www.artscatalyst.org

[...]

Django Unchained: Who frees who?

http://kasamaproject.org/culture/4319-django-unchained-political-power-flows-from-the-barrel-of-a-gun

Written by Ed Thompson

“We all intellectually ‘know’ the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, but after you do the research it’s no longer intellectual any more, no longer just historical record—you feel it in your bones. It makes you angry, and want to do something.…

"I’m here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie, a lot worse shit actually happened. When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arm’s-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it.” 

Quentin Tarentino, Guardian, December 7, 2012

Django is a grandiose mixture of spaghetti western and blacksploitation films. The story is about a slave Django and a German bounty hunter Dr. Schultz who journey to free Django's wife Hilde.

Don't be fooled by the theatrical use of blood or flying bodies. The themes here are quite serious: slavery, black liberation, master and slave, inter-racism and the nature of America. 

Django comes out shortly after the film Lincoln. These two films lock together in a duel. In Spielberg's Lincoln, Black people appear in static forms whose liberation is handed to them through the courage of white men.

Django offers a counter to this narrative.

Tarentino spoke about his desire to do 'a Southern' (not a Western). Meaning: A film placed in the Deep South and dealing with “America's horrible past with slavery but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.” (from the Telegraph)

Tarentino doesn't explictly say why he makes the film oriented towards popular culture, as opposed to 'big issue films', but the point is that serious topics, even if dealt with through humor, are still exposed. Our laughter only lets us view the phenomenon from a different perspective. This is obvious in the scene where hooded riders, with the intent to hunt down Django and Dr. Schultz, have a group conversation about the tailor job on their hoods. The problem? Nobody can see out of them. The result is a demystification of the hooded riders as a terror. Instead, they barely know their doing. And in the end, most of them are killed off.

In the theatre that I saw the film, the audience (at least 90% black) laughed hardest at this scene. It made me realize how humor is connected to power: the KKK didn't symbolize fear, but vulnerability and theatrics.

Dr. Schultz

Usually, the story goes like this: white man finds black man in misery. White man frees black man. White man and black man become friends. The two fight evil. One dies, the other weeps.

This film avoided this cliché. Yes, there is death. Alot of it, actually. And the plot starts as something, typical. Dr. Schultz is a German who we find in America. He is a bounty hunter, a former dentist. He has tact, a master of social maneuvering. His wit is outdone only by the accuracy he performs with his guns. We don't get much background to his character, but his dialog more then makes up for this. Still, we are left to assume much here.

Mike Ely has written about German immigrant communists and beer during Civil War times. And although we don't hear about Marx or the '48 revolution in Django, we do know that this German, Dr. Schultz, despises slavery. Still, he makes the mistake of assuming that he has given Django freedom.

All in all he makes an attempt to be partners with Django, but because he feels 'responsible' to him. The paternalism is still there. He compares his job of bounty hunting to slavery, in that both deal with flesh: Slavery deals in bodies, whereas he deals in corpses. As the film progresses, we see Dr. Schultz face a moral dilemma of enjoying his freedom in contrast to the horrific world around him. He can kill freely as a bounty hunter, and this puts him in a similar position of power to the slave owner: both have power over life.

This reaches a boiling point. Dr. Schultz' ethics (which are perhaps proto-communist because of the experience that Germans like him had in Germany's 1848 revolution), freely chooses his own death over shaking the hand of the slave owner Calvin Candie. The redemption here is in the choice: Death over affirming the Candie.

The name here is no arbitrary decision: Candie, candy, sweets. The poem "Sweet meat has sour sauce" is exemplary here. Dr. Schultz choose death over comfort derived from misery, resolving that contradiction.

The Other

Calvin Candie : Dr. Schultz

Stephen : Django

Each confronts their other in this film. Each set is a contradiction. The film shows how each of these contradictions influence one another, and yet are resolved internally.

The cliché would have been either Django or Schultz (or both with one dieing through the battle) against Calvin Candie. What happens in the end is Django fighting Stephen. Now, no other actor could have pulled of Stephen like Samuel Jackson. It was suberb. But the metaphor here is surprisingly advanced for a white American film director, as it points towards the complexity of race: there is no heterogenous 'black' form.

Self-determination

After their plan is thwarted, Django finds himself back as a slave. Here, the lesson of the film Burn! (Queimada) is applied: you cannot be freed by another. This is when the film negates the genre's trope: instead of a white man coming to free Django, Django uses lessons learned through struggle to free himself. Django develops from a slave to an apprentice of Dr. Schultz to his equal to having the final word. The scene were he frees himself ends with two powerful sequences.

First, Django washes the white dust from a dynamite explosion off him. The water takes away the dust and reveals a rejuvenated blackness. This is him washing himself of a white coating, of his dependency on whites.

Second, a slave who formerly detested Django watches him ride off on a horse. His smile illuminates the screen. He is affirmed by his people.

Django then returns to free his wife and finish off those who wronged him. The final vengeance upon Stephen is the resolution of the internal struggle of blackness. Liberation is achieved only by the negation of the Django's other: the slave who has become subservient to the white man and willingly sends his own kind to their death.

Who Writes History?

As the film ended, the audience applauded. I heard one comment afterwards, “That shit was hot”. The soundtrack was a mix of Ennio Morricone and hip-hop. I'd never seen something like this before. The film itself was a success, although a bit lengthy and contained a usual failure of static-female characters. 

What do communists say about all this?

A lot of the debate revolves around one fact about the  film: that is a narrative of slavery that was directed by a white man. And some assume the whole issue is simple: Can a white director create film and narrative about the black experience?

I think the answer to that question is obviously yes. And any work like this should be evaluated in its own right (by its stand, politics and impact), not simply by the identity of the author.

From there however more difficult questions follow:

The question of liberation: how do an oppressed people achieve their freedom? In the U.S. the end of slavery involved the heroic sacrifice of African American soldiers, runaways, and resistors on the plantations. 

But it also involved them (necessarily, inevitably) in a broad, complex and highly contradictory alliance with antislavery and Unionist whites -- including literally millions of white soldiers, and the Lincoln government.

There is contradiction here. And that contradiction erupted in a terrible resolution with the ultimate betrayal of Black people that followed the initial emancipation.

And so: what is the relation between communist internationalism and black nationalism in a country like the U.S.? What kind of an alliance can lead to liberation today?"