Friday, November 15, 2019
The Secret to Living Longer Is Being Rich, Study Reveals
SEP 09, 2019
The top 400 richest Americans
have more wealth than the 150
million Americans in the bottom 60% of the country’s wealth
distribution, according to a January working paper from University of
California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.
America’s rich
frequently pay lower taxes, use their money
to influence public policy and do not have to choose between paying
medical bills and paying their rent. They also don’t suffer the indignity of
having strangers comment on the groceries they purchase with SNAP benefits,
as Stephanie
Land describes in her memoir, “Maid.” Add to all this another benefit
of wealth, according to a new study from the
Government Accountability Office: a longer lifespan.
Even as life expectancy in
general is on the rise, it “has not increased uniformly across all income
groups, and people who have lower incomes tend to have shorter lives than those
with higher incomes,” the report reveals.
Both poor and middle-class
Americans are less likely than the wealthy to live into their 70s and 80s, the
GAO found. More than 75% of the wealthiest Americans who were in their 50s in
1991 were still alive in their 70s in 2014. By contrast, less than half of the
poorest 20% of 50-somethings surveyed were alive by the same year.
The GAO report attributes this
discrepancy to multiple factors, including a large gap in retirement savings
and a lack of assets like homes to draw on to help offset unexpected costs for
lower-income Americans. This causes a dependence on Social Security benefits to
pay bills of all kinds, including medical bills.
The GAO report’s results echo
previous studies on the relationship between wealth and lifespan in America.
A 2016
study by economists from Stanford, Harvard and McKinsey and Co, among
others, found that “In the United States between 2001 and 2014, higher income
was associated with greater longevity, and differences in life expectancy
across income groups increased over time.” Low-income residents in wealthier
areas, however, tended to live longer than residents of uniformly poor
communities, with a difference of up to 15
years for men, and up to ten for women.
A University of
Washington study from
2017 found the gap could vary by up to 20 years depending on the region of the
United States.
“Over time, the top fifth of
the income distribution is really becoming a lot wealthier — and so much of the
health and wealth gains in America are going toward the top,” Harold Pollack, a
health care expert at the University of Chicago who is not affiliated with the
report told the
Post. He called those disparities “a failure of social policy.”
Senator and presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., commissioned the GAO report in 2016, The
Washington Post explains, after meeting with residents of MacDowell County,
W.Va., where, Sanders aides tell the Post, the average life expectancy is 64 years
old.
“We are in a crisis never
before seen in a rich, industrialized democracy,” Sanders said in a statement.
“For three straight years, overall life expectancy in the wealthiest nation in
the history of the world has been in decline.” He adds, “If we do not urgently
act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation
will be condemned to early death.”
Read the entire GAO
report here.
Let's Ban All Billionaires
NOV 13, 2019
by Negin Owliaei
Bill Gates wants you to know
he pays taxes.
“I’ve paid more than $10
billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes,” Gates told journalist
Andrew Ross Sorkin. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, OK, then I’m
starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”
Supposedly Gate was talking
about a wealth tax 2020 candidates have supported. But no plan yet proposed
would seize $100 billion from the philanthrocapitalist anytime soon. Even if it
did, he’d still be one of the richest men in the world, with $7 billion left
over.
Gates isn’t the only
billionaire who’s worried. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also has
concerns about the rising resentment towards his fellow elites.
“I think you should vilify
Nazis,” Dimon told Lesley Stahl, “but you shouldn’t vilify people who worked hard
to accomplish things.” Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who’s become a
fixture on CNBC,
recently teared up while complaining about the “vilification of billionaires.”
Why do the feelings of the 600
Americans that constitute our billionaire class suck up so much media
attention?
For one thing, billionaires literally own the
news. Buying up media companies is a new rite of passage for the ultra wealthy,
like the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon head Jeff Bezos,
or TIME by tech CEO Marc Benioff.
They’ll say they’re all about
editorial independence, but the truth is billionaire ownership can affect news
output. When billionaire Joe Ricketts found out the staff of DNAinfo, a network
of city-based news sites he owned, was unionizing, he promptly shut down the
entire venture out
of spite.
There are more subtle ways in
which the rich buy media access. The Gates Foundation, for example, has
poured millions
in donations into the media over the last several years to raise
awareness around the foundation’s philanthropic goals — including its controversial funding
of charter schools.
Not all billionaire power is
publicly broadcast, however.
In their book Billionaires
and Stealth Politics, researchers Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, and
Matthew J. Lacombe document how
economic elites have banded together to lobby for extremely conservative
policies, like cutting estate taxes, opposing regulations on the environment
and Wall Street, and gutting social programs.
Because these moves are highly
unpopular, they’ve done this work in the background.
That means there’s a network
of billionaires aligned with the Koch brothers, who’ve poured hundreds of
millions of dollars into anti-labor policies. And Rupert Murdoch, the
media mogul who changed the media landscape with Fox News. And casino magnate
Sheldon Adelson, who’s spending his billions shaping U.S.
foreign policy.
Their enormous wealth offers
them an outlandishly oversized role in our democracy. It’s poisoning both
our politics and our media.
So how about a ban on billionaires?
Let’s tax away their wealth, but let’s get them off our airwaves, too. Imagine
what we’d learn if corporate media didn’t devote entire news cycles to the
whims of the rich.
You may not have heard, but
for the last several months, the sanitation workers at Republic Services have
been fighting for higher wages. “I haven’t had a raise since 2004,” Demetrius
Tart told The
Guardian. Meanwhile, the company is making a killing from the 2017 tax
cuts, and returned more than $1 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks.
The company’s largest
shareholder? Bill Gates. Workers took their fight directly to the
billionaire, protesting outside
a Gates Foundation event in September with signs that read, “Bill Gates treats
his workers like garbage.” He ignored them.
Maybe these sanitation workers
could get the airtime instead.
“No No You Guys, THIS US-Backed Coup Is Perfectly Legitimate!”
Caitlin Johnstone
I just keep tripping on how
dumb this
latest US-backed military coup is. It’s in Bolivia in case you’ve lost
track, which would be perfectly understandable since US-backed coups have
become kind of like US mass shootings–there’s so many of them they’re starting
to blend into each other.
I mean, for starters the
justifications for this one are so cartoonishly reachy and desperate it boggles
the mind a bit. The main argument you’ll see in favor of the coup is that Evo
Morales was elected after Bolivia’s high court ruled that he could run for a fourth
term, but the (democratically
elected) court ruled
against a 2016 referendum on presidential term limits.
That’s it. That weird,
pedantic appeal to a particular interpretation of bureaucratic technicalities
is the whole entire argument in support of a literal military coup backed by
the United States.
And make no mistake, that’s
exactly what this was: the military ousting a government is precisely the thing
that a coup is. The coup’s Christian
fascist leader Luis Fernando Camacho openly tweeted that the military was
actively pursuing Morales’ arrest prior to the ousted leader’s escape to
Mexico, a tweet he later deleted presumably
because the admission makes it much harder to call this military coup anything
other than the thing that it is. The Grayzone has published
an article documenting this coup’s many ties to Washington. Put it all
together, and you’ve got a US-backed military coup.
Camacho has deleted the tweet
Golinger links to openly admitting that the military were pursuing the arrest
of ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales. Luckily it's been archived here: http://archive.is/iSq8U
https://twitter.com/evagolinger/status/1193704121565696000 …
As happens every single time
the US tries to overthrow a government these days, social media is currently
swarming with small, brand-new and suspicious-looking accounts, many
of which are publishing
the same words verbatim, all defending and supporting the coup. Some of
them try to argue that Morales rigged last month’s election, but that’s totally
bogus and evidence-free. Others try to claim that “the people” of Bolivia
opposed Morales, strongly implying that he was universally loathed, but that
claim is invalidated by the
election results and the massive
demonstrations against the coup.
So the only actual argument
really boils down to “Well he ran for another term, and yeah he won, and yeah
the democratically elected high court ruled he could run again, but a loud and
violent minority of Bolivians don’t want him to be president. What choice do
you have in such circumstances other than to support a literal military coup?”
Which is just so crazy. That’s
how low the bar has sunk for supporting the toppling of a government today. They
don’t have to claim he’s starving his own people. They don’t have to claim that
he’s using chemical weapons. They don’t have to claim that he’s governing
without the consent of the voting populace. Just “Yeah well some of us don’t
like him and there’s some paperwork we disagree on.”
I mean really, how much lower
can the bar get for when a US-backed military coup is justified? “Oh, that
government needed to be toppled because the leader got a parking ticket once”?
“Well the president wore white after Labor Day, and that’s a fashion atrocity”?
So the Morales-supporting line
of succession has been ousted and many of his supporters in the
government arrested by
masked men, and now the US-approved interim
president is an appalling
racist and absolute
dimwit who calls to mind a very low-budget Bolivian version of Sarah
Palin.
Bolivian Sarah Palin is the
nation's new US-approved interim president. https://twitter.com/historic_ly/status/1194758297334755328 …
It’s absolutely amazing how
many people all across the political spectrum have been sucked in by this
ridiculousness. How lost do you have to be to believe that this US-backed
military coup is different from all the others? How many times is Charlie Brown
going to run up and try to kick Lucy’s football?
That bitch is never gonna let
you kick that goddamn football, Charlie Brown. And this US-backed military coup
isn’t going to be any more moral, legal or beneficial than all the others.
The Bolivian opposition, @OAS_official, US government and
mainstream media manufactured a phony narrative of election fraud, setting the
stage for the fascist coup against @evoespueblo.
I explain how it happened:
Message from John Feffer Director, FPIF
The impeachment hearings began this week in Washington, DC with opening salvos from both Democrats and Republicans, plus testimony from two top-level government officials in charge of Ukraine policy.
Or, at least, they were supposed to be in charge of Ukraine policy. As it turns out, both the president and his errand boy Rudy Giuliani had hijacked Ukraine policy to serve Trump's reelection campaign.
Everybody but the Republican Party and the president's ardent supporters believe that this hijacking is an impeachable offense. Unfortunately, that's more or less who controls the Senate. But there's always the possibility that the impeachment hearings turn up something so ghastly that even the members of the president's personality cult will reconsider their religious affiliation.
This last weekend was the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In my World Beat column this week, I consider the possibility that this iconic event set into motion a set of developments that has ultimately produced a Trump presidency (among other assorted ills).
Also this week at Foreign Policy In Focus, columnist Walden Bello embarks on a multi-part examination of China as a global power, beginning with an assessment of its use of force.
And Ryan Michael Kehoe looks at the role literature plays in fostering empathy across various divides around the world.
John Feffer
Director, FPIF
JERNEJ KALUŽA, lecture in Ljubljana
|
Series of public lectures
Every second Monday, at 19.00, from November to the end of May at the new post, Robba Street 15, Ljubljana
Monday, November 18 at 19:00
BIG LITTLE MAN INTERNET subsoil • lectures JERNEJ KALUŽA
As Adorno argued, in the heart of "personalized fascist propaganda" lies the concept of "little big man", which is both remarkable and all-powerful, but also generic individual, one of many. Jernej Kaluza will try to present the genealogy of the discourse that addresses this type of exceptional individuals - generic, but paradoxically also the singular reader is able to understand the hypocrisy prevailing morality and decadency existing elite. It will be devoted to how to perform the functions discourse on the "little big man" from the inside. Will try to show: 1) how this discourse effectively spajdaši the myth of "personal ascent" underlying "American dream", 2) how it fits with the web, micro-celebrity culture, and 3) how it manifests itself within the 'intellectual' dark web 'or the network "alternative influencerjev"
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