Rachel M. Cohen writes for VOX about national issues. In this post, she explains the Texas decision banning the sale of anti-abortion pills by mail or any other way. The judge said the pill is unsafe, despite its approval by the FDA and careful review of its use for 23 years. This decision conflicts with one in Washington State, which ruled that the FDA must not restrict access to the same drug. Cohen provides a valuable and concise overview of the issue.
Please open the link and read on.
For her Easter post, Mercedes Schneider wrote about the hypocrisy of those who loudly proclaim their love of Jesus, but also pass laws to put adolescents to work in dangerous low-wage jobs.
She writes:
The corporate world is short on workers, sooo, let’s see what states will pass legislation to loosen restrictions on child labor.
This drive reminds me of the blindside on K12 education that is Common Core– the justification (and assumption) being that the chief purpose K12 education is to “prepare students for 21st century jobs.”
Well, its the 21st century, and it seems that business is short on bodies, and any warm body will do.
So, on this Easter as I think of Jesus, who brought to the attention of his male-centric culture the importance of considering children as people valuable in their own right, I also think of the primarily-Republican push to feed children to the god of business and industry.
On March 14, 2023, journalist Jacob Knudsen published a piece in Axios, stunningly entitled, “Lawmakers Target Child Labor Laws to Ease Worker Shortage.”
Forget childhood. We must appease the god of business and industry.
Knudsen writes, in part,
Legislators in multiple states are invoking a widespread labor shortage to push bills that would weaken long-standing child labor laws.
Why it matters: Some bills go beyond expanding eligibility or working hours for run-of-the-mill teen jobs. They’d make it easier for kids to fill physically demanding roles at potentially hazardous work sites. …
Driving the news: A new Arkansas law signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) last week makes it easier for teens as young as 14 to work without obtaining a permit.
Between the lines: The laws and proposals have largely been introduced by Republicans but received support from some Democrats in Ohio and New Jersey. …
Zoom in: Iowa lawmakers are considering Republican legislation that would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work in industrial laundry services and freezers at meatpacking plants. It’d also prevent many of them from receiving worker’s compensation if they are sickened, injured or killed on the job.
The Iowa law specifically excludes businesses who hire teens from any civil liability in the event they suffer harm or even death in the workplace.
Mercedes concludes:
This exploitation (make no mistake that this loosening of child labor laws in numerous states is exactly that) has at its center a lack of planning combined with the desire for a lower bottom line (and greater profits). Many of my teenaged students already drag themselves to school, only to fall asleep in class with the apology that “I had to close last night.” Therefore, making it easier for employers to squeeze even more out of school-aged employees even as society expects of them (and their schools) stellar academic results (dog whistle: test scores) is indeed speaking out of both ends of a hypocritical, corporate-adulating mouth.
Jesus loves the little children, sooo let’s exploit their labor potential, even for dangerous jobs, as we simultaneously absolve ourselves of any responsibility– even death.
Peter Greene has written several columns about the U.S. Supreme Court’s step-by-step effort to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. With its June 21: 2022, decision called Carson v. Makin, the High Court ordered the state of Maine to pay the tuition for students at two religious schools. Under Maine law, districts that do not have a public high school must pay tuition for high school students to attend a private non-religious school. A majority of the justices ruled that Maine violated the students’ free exercise of religion rights by denying them the same benefits as those who go to private schools at the public’s expense.
The decision was 6-3. The majority were all appointed by Republican presidents (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). The minority were appointed by Democratic presidents (Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan). All six of the Justices in the majority were born Catholic; Gorsuch graduated from Georgetown Preparatory Academy, a Jesuit school (Brett Kavanaugh was two years behind him.) Gorsuch and his family now attend an Episcopal church. The minority bloc consists of two Jews and a Catholic (Sotomayer).
Before the case was decided, Peter Greene expressed concern that the two religious schools openly discriminated against student, families, and staff by refusing to accept into the school’s community.
He wrote six months before the decision was released:
Bangor Christian Schools require adherence to a code of conduct; trans or gay students will be expelled, even if celibate. Their religious indoctrination is inseparable from their academic instruction. A fifth grade social studies objective is to “recognize God as Creator of the world,” while a ninth grade objective is to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s word.” Teachers at BCS must certify that they are born again Christians.
Temple Academy is an extension of the Centerpoint Community Church. TA is unlikely to admit students that do not come from a Christian family; that family must sign a Family Covenant saying they agree with TA’s views on abortion, marriage, and homosexuality. Again, only born again Christians may be hired to teach; teachers also sign an employment agreement acknowledging that the Bible says that God considers “homosexuals and other deviants as perverted.”
The issue, he wrote, was not about freedom of religion or free exercise of religion, but about whether taxpayers should pay for schools that discriminated against defined groups of people.
For several years, fans of school choice have been pushing the argument that a religious school is not free to exercise its religious faith if it does not get to share in taxpayer dollars. The wall between church and state has thus been characterized as discrimination against religion. Turns out you can’t be really free without taxpayer funding.
A few weeks ago, Peter returned to the subject and reviewed some of the Justices’ arguments. Quite simply, he wrote, the Supreme Court was ordering the state of Maine to pay tuition at schools that engage in discrimination.
Justice Breyer asked:
What happens once “may” becomes “must”? Does that transformation mean that a school district that pays for public schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools?
Justice Sotomayor said:
In 2017, I feared that the Court was “lead[ing] us . . . to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.” Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.
But the case goes on, because Maine passed a law stating that it would not fund schools that discriminate. The Bangor Christian Academy sued the state and asserted its right to discriminate.
Bangor Christian Schools is now suing the state of Maine, asking first for an injunction against the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) restriction that bars them from receiving state money as long as they continue to discriminate. Their assertion is that the “poison pill” of human rights law in Maine violates their religious liberty, that they cannot exercise that liberty unless they can both receive state funds and continue to discriminate against students and prospective faculty that don’t meet their religious requirements.
The state of Maine insists that it will not fund schools that discriminate:
Attorney General Aaron Frey said that “all Mainers deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, whether it be in their workplace, their housing, or in their classrooms. The Maine Human Rights Act is in place to protect Mainers from discrimination and the Office of the Attorney General is steadfast in upholding the law. If abiding by this state law is unacceptable to the plaintiffs, they are free to forego taxpayer funding.”
Peter continued his dissection of the decision in a third post, wherein he debated the libertarian Neil McCluskey of the CATO Institute. McCluskey asserts that secular schools are hostile to religion, and the only way to secure true freedom of religion is to fund all choices, all religions.
Peter writes:
First, I don’t accept the premise that “secular” requires hostility to religion. If you play in the percussion section, you aren’t hostile to melody–it’s just not your job to handle it. A secular education system doesn’t try to fulfill any religious functions, for a variety of reasons we’ll get into.
There’s another issue in that first point, which is the newly revived idea among some folks that they cannot fully and freely practice their religion unless they are free to discriminate against people of whom they disapprove, like the Mom who objects to having her child taught empathy because she believes there are some people her child should not feel empathy for. This is a whole other post, but my short answer is this–there is no placating these people as long as circumstances find them in a pluralistic society.
But where I really disagree with McCluskey is in his central notion that by allowing everyone to retreat to their own personal bubbles, we can end all the various battles over culture and religion…
The whole choice thesis is that by not using taxpayer funds to support private religious choice, the government is discriminating against religious folks (with the newest legal test of this theory coming to a courtroom in Maine). Again, this reasoning goes, I am not fully free to exercise my religion if the taxpayers aren’t subsidizing my choice.
I should get to practice in my little bubble, and the taxpayers should help pay for the bubble.
That’s how this vision of choice leads to religious discrimination on an unprecedented scale and takes us all the way back to the question of separate but equal.
Peter demonstrates a variety of scenarios that show how thorny this issue is.
A variety of secular schools realize that if they re-configure themselves as religious schools, the “free exercise” clause is a ticket to the Land of Do As You Please and they can start discriminating against students and faculty in pretty much any way they wish as long as they claim that it’s an essential part of their religion. This will force taxpayers to fund all sorts of things that they (and not just liberal especially) object to, from aryan supremacists to gender theory schools. One worst case scenario will be a government agency given the task of figuring out which religious schools are “real” religious schools and which are just playing games. The other worst case scenario will be states figuring out how to regulate these schools so that they can’t discriminate in ways that would be illegal for anyone else. Or maybe we’ll just have a government office of educational equality that makes sure that every religion gets an equal shake in the school funding/free exercise department. No way that could end badly. None of these “solutions” will be popular.
Now that we’re establishing that I can’t have freedom to exercise my religion without enough of a taxpayer subsidy, who is going to decide how much subsidy is enough?…
I can imagine taxpayers rejecting bond unissued because they don’t to subsidize all those religious schools.
Peter concludes:
I can imagine plenty of awful scenarios. What I can’t imagine is how vouchers + religious schools results in a free and adequate education for every child or greater harmony and cohesions for our pluralistic nation. Yes, yes, I understand we haven’t exactly mastered either of those things currently, but I don’t see how vouchers + religious schools does anything except make matters worse.
Peter Greene has moved his wonderful blog Curmudgucation to Substack. Here is his first Substack submission. It describes the importance of Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s proposal to end the federal testing mandate, which was enacted 22 years ago. The tests have proved to be useless (the results come in after the students has moved to a different teacher); the ratings on the test are based on NAEP achievement levels, which is confusing and inaccurate. Most people think that most students should rank “proficient,” but NAEP Proficient is equivalent to an A. Most students are never at A performance unless standards are dumbed down.
Greene writes:
Rex Nelson is a lifelong Republican and an opinion writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He remembers when the state had moderate, pragmatic governors, both Republican and Democrat.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not one of them. Instead of surrounding herself with knowledgeable locals, she has imported leftovers from the Trump administration, with no connection to Arkansas.
Her tweets and comments are nasty, just like Trump’s. She lashes out at enemies, some imaginary, and insults them. She learned at Trump’s feet.
He writes:
Though my expectations were low based on the hyper-partisan, angry, shallow campaign run last year by Sarah Sanders, I held off writing this column in the hope that our governor–who had never held elected office and never had a job in the private sector outside of political consulting–would mature once in office.
I’m a conservative. I spent 15 years working for Republican candidates and officeholders. I remember a time in the early 1980s when there were so few of us in Arkansas who identified as Republicans that we all knew each other on a first-name basis. In fact, the people who seem the saddest about the tragedy that is the Sanders administration are those Arkansas Republicans I met four decades ago. They no longer recognize their party.
“I just want to cry,” one of them told me after calling my house on a Sunday afternoon.
I can’t help but think back to 1996 when Mike Huckabee was thrust into the governor’s office following Tucker’s resignation. Huckabee dropped out of a U.S. Senate race he was going to win, choosing Arkansas over the lure of national politics. He surrounded himself with experienced Arkansans. His senior management team included highly respected former legislators such as Dick Barclay, Jim von Gremp and Joe Yates.
Huckabee also brought to his administration a string of strong women, all native Arkansans with long years of service to the state. There was former legislator Carolyn Pollan of Fort Smith and Judge Betty Dickey of Pine Bluff. Huckabee’s chief of staff his entire time in office was Brenda Turner of Texarkana. Turner worked behind the scenes and kept a low profile, but she was a force of nature.
Sanders has surrounded herself with political journeymen who have no concern about the people of Arkansas or this state’s future. It’s all about the boss’ national political standing. These aides will simply move on to other states when they’re done here, leaving the rest of us to deal with the damage.
Sanders and her top aides seem intent on bringing the chaos and divisiveness of the comical Trump administration to state government–rushing through a major education overhaul in order to avoid needed debate, avoiding the Arkansas media, relying on national far-right outlets, and putting out mindless tweets about national politics that have nothing to do with Arkansas.
Rex Nelson refers to Sanders and her team of inexperienced staff as “the Trumpettes.”
Open the link and read the entire article.
YOU ARE INVITED TO A “DAY OF ACTION” AT THE STATEHOUSE
Pastors for Indiana Children is a nonpartisan, independent ministry, not beholden to any special interest group, political party, or church office. We believe in local democracy, cooperation across lines of difference, and organizing to support public education opportunities for Indiana children.
WHO: Any Pastor, Community Leader, Parent, Student, Advocate who wants to keep public schools public, fully funded, and equitably meet the needs of ALL students. Pastor Charles Johnson, Executive Director of Pastors for Texas Children is planning to join us.
WHAT: Pastors for Indiana Children is hosting an Day of Action. We will be speaking with State Legislators directly about HB 1001, HB 1002 and HB 1591. These bills threaten the further destroy public education.
WHEN: Thursday, April 13th, 2023 from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Press Conference to follow at 12:30PM
WHERE: Indiana State Capitol Building
200 W Washington St, Indianapolis, IN 46204
WHY SHOULD PASTORS STAND UP FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION:
There are several reasons why pastors should stand up for public education:
By standing up for public education, Pastors can help to promote equity, justice, and the common good, while also strengthening our communities and living out our values.
Pastors, Ministers and Congregants please take the opportunity to share with other Pastors who may not know what is going on. Although, I have listed 3 bills that are a problem, there are many bills floating through and being passed in our statehouse. We must stand together to push back on this attack of public education and in specific the most vulnerable, OUR CHILDREN.
See you at the State House on April 13, 2023!
Sincerely,
Dr. Ramon L. Batts
State Director
Pastors for Indiana Children
www.PastorsForIndianaChildren.org
Fred Klonsky is a retired teacher who blogs regularly about Chicago, Illinois, the nation, politics, and culture. In this post, he draws an interesting comparison between the recent expulsion of two Black legislators in Tennessee and events concurrent with the end of the Reconstruction era and the reign of Jim Crow. There is this difference: The two ousted members are very likely to be restored to their seats in the legislature by their local elected officials. The Tennessee Three are now national figures revealing the fascist hand in the iron glove of the Republican Party when it has the majority.
Robert Smalls, Congressman during Reconstruction.
The expulsion of Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson from the Tennessee legislature has a direct historical link to the overthrow of real democracy and Reconstruction following the Civil War.
On May 13, 1862 an enslaved man named Robert Smalls, who labored on a Confederate steamer in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor, set into motion a daring plan.
As his great-great-grandson Michael Boulware Moore explained, “He saw that the Confederate crew had left, and he knew that oftentimes they left for the evening, not to come back until the next day.”
For Smalls and six other enslaved people and their families, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. “They knew that if they got caught, that they would be, not just killed, but probably tortured in a particularly egregious and public manner,” said Moore.
Disguising himself in the straw hat and long overcoat of the ship’s white captain, Smalls piloted the ship past Fort Sumter towards the Union blockade, and freedom.
After serving on a Union Naval vessel during the Civil War, Smalls returned home to Beaufort, S.C., and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives – one of more than a dozen African Americans to serve in Congress during the period known as Reconstruction, when the formerly-rebel states were reabsorbed into the Union, and four million newly-freed African Americans were made citizens.
South Carolina, and throughout the former Confederacy, the era of Reconstruction saw the rise of Black political power and representation in both the U.S. Congress and Southern state legislatures.
During the 1870s, more than a dozen African American men, many of whom had been born into slavery, were elected to the U.S. Congress.
It was a great democratic movement that ended all too quickly.
Former Southern insurrectionists, aided by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, violently organized an anti-democratic counterrevolution.
Born in South Carolina, Aaron A. Bradley was a shoemaker in Augusta Georgia. Sometime around 1834 he ran away to the North, where he became a lawyer.
In 1865 he returned to Georgia. He was the most outspoken member of the Black delegation to the constitutional convention.
In 1868 he was elected state senator from the First District. Bradley rallied plantation workers around Savanah with his insistence that the formerly enslaved people be given land.
But Black political power and Reconstruction was short lived.
One quarter of the Black legislators in Georgia were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. In the December 1870 elections the Democrats won an overwhelming victory in overthrowing democracy and Reconstruction.
In 1906 W. H. Rogers from McIntosh County was the last Black legislator to be elected before Black voters were legally disenfranchised in 1908.
The actions by white Republican members of the Tennessee legislature to expel two elected Black members has all the stench of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow.
The New York Times published an important article by David Wallace-Wells about the mortality rate in the USA. Shockingly, the biggest increase in mortality is among the young. CNN reported only days ago that gun deaths are now the leading cause of death among children, having passed car accidents in 2020. “Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database.”
Wallace-Wells wrote:
How long a person can expect to live is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country, and here, in the richest country in the world, the answer is not just bleak but increasingly so. Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.
You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80 or perhaps about the so-called deaths of despair among white middle-aged men. These were the predominant explanations five years ago, after the country’s longevity statistics first flatlined and then took a turn for the worse — alone among wealthy nations in the modern history of the world.
But increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers. One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19. Over three pandemic years, Covid-19 was responsible for just 2 percent of American pediatric and juvenile deaths.
Firearms account for almost half of the increase. Homicide accounted for 6.9 percent of deaths among that group, defined as those 19 years old or younger, and suicide accounted for 6.8 percent, according to a January analysis published in JAMA Network Open. Car crashes and accidental drug overdoses — which the National Center for Health Statistics collates along with other accidental deaths as “unintentional injuries” — accounted for 18.4 percent. In 2021, according to a JAMA essay published in March, more than twice as many kids died from poisoning, including drug overdoses, as from Covid-19. More than three times as many died of suicide, more than four times as many died from homicide, and more than five times as many died in car crashes and other transportation accidents (which began increasing during the pandemic after a long, steady decline).
Last week, the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called the deepening life expectancy crisis, documented in recent surveys and studies, “the most disturbing set of data on America that I have encountered in a long time” and “especially scary remembering that demographics were the best early warning on the collapse of the U.S.S.R.” In many ways this feels like hyperbole. And yet, by the most fundamental measures of human flourishing, the United States is moving not forward but backward, at unprecedented speed, and now the country’s catastrophic mortality anomaly has spread to its children.
The new life expectancy studies pick up the thread of work by Anne Case and the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, economists who, beginning in 2015, suggested that a broad social malady was visible in the growing mortality rates of non-college-educated white men in middle age. Their research into what they called “deaths of despair” offered a sort of data-based corollary to a narrative about the country’s left behind, stitched together in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise, in part to make sense of it. In the years since, the same data has invited a whole competitive roster of divergent analyses: that such deaths reflected social dysfunctions driven by ballooning income inequality; that they illustrated health disparities that frequently tracked those inequalities, from obesity and cigarette smoking; that they showcased the country’s threadbare social safety net, which briefly expanded during the pandemic and then abruptly shrank; that they arose from striking declines in what conservatives often call prosocial values like patriotism and religiosity.
The new data tells a somewhat different story. In the big picture, opioids still play a large role, and suicide contributes, too. But that pattern of elevated middle-aged mortality is giving way to a growing crisis of juvenile death. The demographics are shifting away from those narrow markers of class and race identified by Case and Deaton, as well.
Mortality is still increasing more quickly for those without a college degree, but as John Burn-Murdoch demonstrated vividly in The Financial Times, except for a few superrich Americans, individuals at every percentile of income are now dying sooner than their counterparts in Britain, for instance. For the poorer half of the country, simply being an American is equivalent to about four full years of life lost compared with the average Brit. For the richer half, being an American is not quite as bad but is still the equivalent of losing, on average, about two years of life. And this is even though an American earning an income in the 75th percentile is much richer than a Brit at the same income percentile, since American incomes are much higher.
This is not to say that longevity declines are uniform, exactly. Black Americans, on average, can expect to live five fewer years than white Americans; Black American men have lower life expectancies than men in Rwanda, Laos and North Korea. White Americans, in turn, can expect to live seven fewer years than Asian Americans. Life expectancy in the Black Belt of the Deep South is as much as 20 years lower than it is north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, according to the American Inequality Project. And there is even a notable difference between counties that supported Joe Biden in 2020 and counties that supported Trump.
While the past few years of data are skewed by Covid mortality, you still see the American anomaly even if you subtract the pandemic: In all other nations of that counterfactual world, The Financial Times calculated, life expectancy would have either stabilized or increased, while in the United States the huge surge in violent deaths alone would have cut the country’s life expectancy by a full year.
For earlier generations, life expectancy at birth was often a misleading statistic, because before modern medicine, if a person survived childhood and adolescence, he or she could be expected to live at least to contemporary middle age, and so the remarkably low median life expectancy estimate was suppressed by how many newborns did not make it to 10 or 20. (Thomas Jefferson wasn’t an old man when he wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33, when life expectancy was probably about 45, but only two of his six children with his wife, Martha, survived to adulthood.)
In modern America, a similar if less dramatic threshold appears to have emerged. If you make it to retirement age, you can expect to live about as long as your counterparts in other wealthy countries. This is its own kind of failure, given how much more money Americans spend on health care. But it is merely a waste, not a horror. The horror is that, as Burn-Murdoch memorably put it, in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents. The country’s exceptionalism of violence is more striking among the young but extends into early adulthood; from age 25 to 34, Americans’ chances of dying are, by some estimates, more than twice as high, on average, as their counterparts’ in Britain and Japan.
And the death rates are growing at a startling speed. According to that March JAMA essay, the death rate among America’s youths increased by 10.7 percent from 2019 to 2020 and 8.3 percent from 2020 to 2021. The phenomenon was more pronounced among older children and adolescents, but the death rate among those age 1 to 9 increased by 8.4 percent from 2020 to 2021, and almost none of that effect was the result of the pandemic itself.
The pandemic years look even grimmer when we examine pediatric mortality by cause. Guns were responsible for almost half of the increase from 2019 to 2020, as homicides among children age 10 to 19 grew more than 39 percent. Deaths from drug overdoses for that age cohort more than doubled. In 2021, as schools reopened, pediatric deaths from Covid nearly doubled but still accounted for only one-fifth of the increase in overall pediatric deaths — a large increase on top of the previous year’s even larger one.
The disparities are remarkable and striking, as well. Most of the increase in pediatric mortality was among males, with female deaths making only a small jump. Almost two-thirds of the victims of homicide were non-Hispanic Black youths 10 to 19, who had a homicide rate six times as high as that of Hispanic children and teenagers, and more than 20 times as high as that of white children and teenagers. In recent years, the authors of the JAMA essay write, deaths from overdose were higher among white children and teenagers, but increases in the death rates among Black and Hispanic children and teenagers erased that gap, statistically speaking, in 2020.
In this way, the new data manages to invert and upend the deaths of despair story while only confirming the country’s longstanding patterns of tragic inequality. That narrative, focused on the self-destruction of older and less-educated white men, took hold in part because it pointed to an intuitive sense of national psychic malaise and postindustrial decline. But the familiar narratives about the country’s problems are proving more enduring: The country is a violent place and is getting more violent, and the footfall of that violence and social brutality is not felt equally, however much attention is paid to the travails of the “forgotten” working class. Probably we should be much more focused on protecting our young.
NPR interviewed scientists who study life expectancy and found that the rates in the U.S. are declining, unlike comparable nations.
The scientists point out that a major report was released a decade ago, warning of this trend, but it was generally ignored. Now, the situation has gotten worse, so that even less developed countries have longer life expectancy rates than we do.
NPR reports:
Just before Christmas, federal health officials confirmed life expectancy in America had dropped for a nearly unprecedented second year in a row – down to 76 years. While countries all over the world saw life expectancy rebound during the second year of the pandemic after the arrival of vaccines, the U.S. did not.
Then, last week, more bad news: Maternal mortality in the U.S. reached a high in 2021. Also, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found rising mortality rates among U.S. children and adolescents.
“This is the first time in my career that I’ve ever seen [an increase in pediatric mortality] – it’s always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember,” says the JAMA paper’s lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Now, it’s increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred at least for half a century.”
Across the lifespan, and across every demographic group, Americans die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations.
How could this happen? In a country that prides itself on scientific excellence and innovation, and spends an incredible amount of money on health care, the population keeps dying at younger and younger ages….
“American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries,” the authors write on the second page. It goes on: “Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries….”
Yes, Americans eat more calories and lack universal access to health care. But there’s also higher child poverty, racial segregation, social isolation, and more. Even the way cities are designed makes access to good food more difficult…
“Two years difference in life expectancy probably comes from the fact that firearms are so available in the United States,” Crimmins says. “There’s the opioid epidemic, which is clearly ours – that was our drug companies and other countries didn’t have that because those drugs were more controlled. Some of the difference comes from the fact that we are more likely to drive more miles. We have more cars,” and ultimately, more fatal crashes.
The scientists noted that New Hampshire’s state slogan is “Live Free or Die,” but nationally we seem to have adopted a mantra of “Live Free and Die.” They estimate the cost of poor health and excessive mortality to the economy at $100 billion.
We all know that the gun industry has succeeded in controlling one major political party through the power of political contributions; Big Pharma owns its share of politicians. Money in politics is literally killing us and our children, but the Citizens United decision in the Supreme Court has blocked regulation of the corrupting power of financial contributions to politicians.
Perhaps we should be grateful that the automobile industry did not control state legislatures, Congress, and the courts when autobiles were first introduced. If autos were like guns, we would have no regulation of speed, no stop signs or traffic lights, no regular inspections of auto safety, no seat belts. Every time you went for a drive, you would prepare for disaster. That’s the current state of gun laws.
What will it take to persuade the public that living a healthy life and surviving to adulthood should not be a matter of luck?
Robert B. Hubbell is a daily blogger whose reflections on the news are consistently interesting:
Religious extremists have continued their assault on the status of women as equal citizens under the law and full participants in the liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. After the Supreme Court’s reactionary majority engaged in the charade of “returning the question” of reproductive liberty “to the people’s representatives,” a rogue federal judge in Texas has issued a nationwide ban on mifepristone because of his personal disagreement with the FDA’s scientific conclusions regarding safety of the drug. The opinion is equal parts junk science and religious screed. It is an insult to the rule of law and the dignity of women as human beings with control over their bodies and reproductive choices.
The opinion is even more pernicious because mifepristone is frequently prescribed to help women safely manage miscarriages. In the absence of mifepristone and because of dozens of laws criminalizing abortion, a single federal judge with no science or medical training has ordered millions of women to risk infection, sepsis, and death before they can receive medical intervention in a miscarriage.
The DOJ has announced that it will appeal the ruling to the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which may uphold the ruling. A competing and contrary ruling in Washington state suggests that the US Supreme Court will be forced to intervene soon.
The religious extremists who successfully took down Roe are now using that victory as a roving license to attack fundamental liberties everywhere. They have misread Dobbs, their limited mandate, the will of the electorate, and the rule of law. Whatever Dobbs stands for, it did not convert our democracy into a theocracy—which is the premise of Judge Kacsmaryk’s first in our nation’s history ruling by a federal judge overturning the scientific judgments of the FDA.
Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling is not only wrong, but it is also dangerous in its implications. Under the reasoning adopted by Judge Kacsmaryk, the next logical step is a ruling declaring fetal personhood under the Constitution and an order mandating every state to criminalize abortion. I am not being hyperbolic. I urge you to reach this superb analysis by Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling against mifepristone will force the Supreme Court to act fast. Stern writes:
[Kacsmaryk] deemed fetuses to “arguably” be “people” who are killed by mifepristone, seeking to establish the “fetal personhood” that has always been the end goal of the movement. For support, he cited a brief by anti-abortion advocate Robert P. George asserting that the Constitution compels every state to outlaw abortion.
There are more dangerous statements in Kacsmaryk’s opinion, which are detailed in Stern’s analysis. While we should not surrender to alarmism (not a comment directed to Stern), we must be realistic about the path to victory. Republican leaders know they have overstepped; editorials in conservative newspapers and conservative commentators are raising the alarm that Republicans have overstepped the advantage granted in Dobbs. See op-ed by Michele Golberg in NYTimes, The Abortion Ban Backlash Is Starting to Freak Out Republicans
But the Republican Party is captive to the religious extremists whose endorsements are now the price of election in Republican primaries. In other words, there is no going back for the GOP, and things may get worse for us before they get better. But Republicans have locked themselves into irreversible losing trajectory and are already paying the price. But we must step our efforts as they ratchet theirs. We can do that; we have begun to do that; we must continue, and most not lose hope. We will win; they will lose. It is just a matter of time.
Tennessee.
The anti-democratic, racially based expulsion of two young Black representatives from the Tennessee House by the GOP has attracted worldwide condemnation. People outside of America who had never heard the name “Tennessee” now associate it with the historical birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the modern home for the most virulent strains of racism in America. A reader (“CC”) posted selected citations in the Comments section, with a brief comment:
Justin Jones told the Tennessee legislature that the whole world was watching. Looks like he could be right.
GREAT BRITAIN: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65206459
GERMANY: https://www.dw.com/en/us-republicans-in-tennessee-vote-to-expel-2-democrats/a-65255635
Should Tennessee legislators care what the world media thinks about Tennessee? Only if Tennessee aspires to be part of the global, interconnected business community that will drive commerce in the future (like Nissan and Volkswagen, which both have plants in Tennessee). If Tennessee wants to rely on its other leading industry—entertainment—for future growth, it should consider whether most performers in the entertainment industry want to be associated with a state whose current top export is hate.
And my apologies and sympathy for Democrats and Independents in Tennessee who are fighting the good fight. We need you and will continue to support you. Everyone understands that the hate is coming from the GOP leadership, not from the good people of Tennessee who are struggling to create a more perfect democracy.
But Tennessee Republicans have not learned their lesson. Despite universal condemnation, major media outlets are reporting that Republican leaders are threatening the county commissions that might re-appoint Justin Pearson and Justin Jones—as they are legally entitled to do. Worse, Republicans are threatening not to seat Jones and Pearson if they are re-elected. It simply doesn’t get more totalitarian than that.
The reaction from the business community has been muted because the events occurred late in a week that included observances for Easter and Passover. But it is hard to fathom that the Memphis Grizzlies NBA playoff games next week will not be affected by Black athletes speaking their views on the events of Thursday. It is difficult to see why a nearly all-Black University of Tennessee football team would play in the face of such blatant racism. It is difficult to see why FedEx, Jack Daniels, Tractor Supply, and Nissan would want to support GOP legislators who committed one of the most overtly racist acts in a generation.
The state of Tennessee has yet to feel the business backlash that will follow the legislature’s action on Thursday. When it does, Tennessee Republicans will realize they have roused a sleeping giant.
Clarence Thomas.
Clarence Thomas issued a dissembling non-denial of his grotesque violation of judicial norms over two decades. Let’s set the quibbling aside and focus on the essence: The scale of Thomas’s corruption shocks the conscience. It appears that in some years, Thomas received more free travel by jet and luxury yacht that exceeded his salary by a significant percentage. Whatever the rules are, when someone is bestowing economic benefits on you that exceed your salary, it does not matter whether those benefits are hospitality, gifts, travel, or bribes—the amount of the benefit is corrupt. Period.
Thomas’s evasive non-denial studiously avoided any mention of free travel on a private jet—the clearest violation of the pre-existing rules. Despite his denial, Thomas was dishonest when he claimed that he understood—based on conversations with others—that he was not required to report “hospitality” in the range of a half-million-dollars. Thomas did not believe his own denial because in 2004, he was reporting “hospitality” in the from Harlan Crowe—and then suddenly stopped reporting gifts from Crow after the LATimers article. See After an L.A. Times story on Thomas’ gifts, he stopped disclosing – Los Angeles Times.com) [Behind a paywall.]
In other words, when Thomas’s compliance with the rules attracted attention from the media, he simply stopped reporting. There was no “misunderstanding,” just an intent to conceal corrupt benefits from a conservative mega-donor. Thomas’s flouting of the rules and norms of judicial conduct is entirely out of step with the conduct of most judges in the federal judiciary.
Here’s a personal story: I clerked for a federal court of appeals judge before cell phones were widely available. The federal court system participated in the federal WATS phone utility (“wide area telephone system”) that effectively allowed you to call toll-free anywhere in the US. At the time most landline calls outside of the immediate exchange area cost a dime for the first ten minutes, and then a nickel for each five minutes thereafter. Because the federal WATS system effectively conferred an economic benefit, personal use was prohibited.
The judge for whom I clerked was married to a leader in the civil rights community. Because of that fact and to avoid any appearances of impropriety by using the WATS line for personal communications, the judge installed a personal land line in chambers at great cost to him (about which he complained vociferously; he was complainer by nature).
Having spent countless hours in the judge’s interior office helping to draft opinions, I can attest that 99% of his conversations on his personal land line went something like this: “I’ll be working late again, tonight. . . . I love you, too.”
I don’t mean to hold up my judge as a hero; I mean to say that his attitude about avoiding the appearance of conflicts is emblematic of the high ethical standards followed by most federal judges. Against that backdrop, Thomas’s manifest disregard of judicial ethics is shocking.
You undoubtedly noticed that the federal judicial center issued guidelines a few weeks ago that now explicitly require Thomas to report most of the largesse he received from Crow. As Yogi Berra never said, “That’s too much of coincidence to be a coincidence.” Thomas (or Roberts) obviously got wind of the investigative work by Pro Publica and decided to provide a fig leaf of deniability for Thomas. There is more to this story. It will only take enterprising journalists and Supreme Court practitioners to speak up for the full story to emerge. It won’t be pretty. It isn’t now.
Diane Ravitch's blog 