Month: January 2007

More On Inequality Sickness

Following up on my previous post, in case I wasn’t clear (“Are you following me?”), here is a simple graph that argues much more clearly that inequality is making us sicker: This chart represents diabetes rates by income group (divided simply into thirds; the richest third of the population, the middle third and the poorest third) in the UK and the US. First, note that the poorer you are, the likelier you are to have diabetes. In America, this is not surprising, because our poor lack health care. In the UK, however, the poor has the same health care as the rich (or at least the middle class), and yet they are still more likely to have diabetes, although not nearly as likely as their American counterparts. But now, compare the poorest Brits to the richest Americans. Lower rates of diabetes! Both groups receive similar quality of health care, so […]

Cinema Fascists and Other Ghouls

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a sort of gothic fairy-tale for adults and weird little kids. Like Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” and “Dark Crystal,” this beautifully shot Spanish language film from Guillermo del Toro guides a ten year old girl through a dark fantasy world full of monsters and ghouls with questionable motivations. The world of the labyrinth exists largely in the imagination of the girl, Ofelia (Ivama Baquero), who is interpreting the far more horrific real world she inhabits, in which Franco’s Fascists are exterminating the remaining rebels in the dreary spring of ’44. In a bit of a cop-out, the filmmakers allow the audience to imagine that Ofelia’s fantasy world might be real, thus dulling the impact of a surprisingly sad ending. Sergi Lopez is almost cartoonish in his villainy as the Captain, which is fine by me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my Fascists all snarling and evil. His […]

Dr. Robin Hood

Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with. Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by […]

Another Terrifying Labor Statistic

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has released a report that finds that one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign under George Bush’s watch. Overall, a pro-union worker had a 1.4 percent chance of being illegally fired for his sympathies in 2005. An organizer’s gut reaction to authors John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer’s paper might well be, “Oh, great, just what my organizing committee needs to hear!” The fact is that workers already know that organizing is risky (and organizers don’t suger-coat the risk). Combined with threatened and actual plant closures, terminations and employer animus are the greatest reasons why half of all union representation elections lose and so many more campaigns never even come to election as activists are fired as a chilling example to their coworkers not to step out of line. The report’s numbers are based on cases where […]