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20 Септември 2002 09:44
The United States of America
Research from Dirty Truths
City Light Books, 1996
by Michael Parenti
"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.
50,000 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.
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, as some of the little jefitos running around. You want names? Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the denizens of the Defense Policy Board, an unpaid in-house think tank headed by Reaganite retread Richard Perle, a.k.a. "The Prince of Darkness," a moniker he earned in the 1980s for his love of confrontation for the sake of confrontation and of all things nuclear.