And yet it's so much more

Demographers and health researchers are noticing a dramatic drop in women's life expectancy is some areas of the United States:

The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women's life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

It may also represent the leading edge of the obesity epidemic. If so, women's life expectancy could decline broadly across the United States in coming years, ending a nearly unbroken rise that dates to the mid-1800s.

[...]

"This is a story about smoking, blood pressure and obesity," said Majid Ezzati, of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, a co-author of the paper.

The drop in life expectancy is about those things, but it's about a helluva lot more too.

It's the story of a nation that has a dangerously broken for-profit insurance to provide health coverage for most of its citizens, while leaving some 47 million uninsured. The coverage that people do have isn't necessarily even adequate to actually obtain decent health care.

It's the story of a nation that doesn't have - has never had - any sort of cohesive public health policies.

It's a story about cheap, processed foods of marginal nutritional value and mass advertising.

It's a story about poverty, and the conditions which cause poverty.

Limiting the story to just smoking, blood pressure, and obesity limits the solutions to the problems which vex us when it comes to public health in this country. By focusing on these three items, the solutions come in the form of individual interventions, in a manner of speaking. Educate people to make good choices, the logic goes. It, of course, elides over the much more complicated, and in the long-run, more damaging, structural problems that underlie the proximate causes of the decline in life expectancy.

There needs to be a much more expansive conversation about public health in this country, and it's a conversation that should make some people feel very, very uncomfortable.

Iko Iko

To be sure, I had a fun time in New Orleans. Friday evening led to jazz on Bourbon Street (although the beer price there made DC prices look reasonable), and on Saturday I got to catch one of the Mardi Gras parades that will be snaking through the Quarter over the next few weeks - I got to watch it from a balcony, which was neat.

But all the fun in the Quarter was jarringly incongruous with everything else I saw and learned about the city during that time. To be blunt, I think that the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans is the most important (and least talked about) political issue facing the United States. Within the recovery effort are distilled - in their entirety - the problems facing the nation. The privatization of public infrastructure (including - and most germane to my own work - the privatization of public education). Our relationship with the environment (coastal restoration, climate change). Racism. Poverty. Our capacity to deal with disaster and the inevitable dislocations that follow. The erosion of democratic institutions and accountability. All of these conundrums are being stared down, simultaneously and in fast-forward, in the NOLA recovery efforts. I wish I could say that this reckoning was leading towards a positive resolution, but right now, it's an uphill battle.

I wonder what the culture of New Orleans will look like in 20 years - will the vibrancy of the jazz scene, nurtured in the poor neighborhoods, remain so vital? What happens when a city's cultural flower is cut off from its roots, when the people who are vital to cultural reproduction have been displaced, the vast majority of them with no means to return - or indeed, nothing to which to return? Bourbon Street has always seemed a caricature of the culture of the rest of the city, with its neon lights, hawkers trying to cajole you into the nearest strip club, throngs of college kids stumbling down the streets with their slushee cocktails. Bourbon Street will always be there, a kind of adult Disneyland. But what about the little clubs in the quieter sections of the Quarter, or in the rest of the city, for that matter? Will the city be able to sustain the talent necessary to keep these out of the way havens viable?

The post-Katrina recovery has been notably absent from our election year discourse. To my knowledge, John Edwards has been the only candidate to make an issue of New Orleans' revival, but the impact of that effort has been negligible. But it needs to be talked about. The issues faced by New Orleans are our issues, waiting for a storm, literal or otherwise, to force them to the surface. How the Crescent City deals with these issues will serve as a template, for good of for ill (and right now, for the ill), on how we grapple with these issues on a national scale. It deserves to be at the forefront of our own thoughts and of our political discussions.

Soak the rich

digby has struck the populist chord with me tonight. For the last six years, the GOP and its wealthy benefactors have thrown the nastiest orgy since the good lord rained fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and now they want to know who is going to clean the santorum off of the suede.

So let's tax the ever-living shit out of them. Really. Tax the holy hell out of the richest .1%'s income. We'll worry about the wealth later. Let's start here. And much higher rates for the wealthiest 10% as well.

Oh, and since so many of them were so gung-ho about the Bush wars when Chicken Little was a hero for those couple of years, since so many acted as enablers to this gang of paranoid delusionists, let's draft their children.

Eat the rich

via the General

Us lefties are often charged with hating the rich and fomenting class warfare. Sometimes the accusation is accurate:

what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: cashmoney on 10-25-2006 6:21 pm
gifts? education? do you draw your line at maintenance?

RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pm
Someone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.

Meet the heirs of the ruling class. Domhoff must be having a blast.