Mort à la SS
BFidi fr
fixée au 24 avril
2002 par le gouvernement, en accord avec la Commission européenne. M. Jospin
vient de la repousser à la fin de l’année, ce qui soulève la colère de
Bruxelles et
risque fort de se traduire par une nouvelle procédure de manquement contre la
France. Notre pays pourrait se voir condamné par la Cour de justice des
communautés européennes (CJCE) à d’importantes astreintes quotidiennes,
qui
seront dues même si la France se met en règle au terme du nouveau délai
qu’elle
s’est unilatéralement accordé.
.../....
texte complet à :
http://www.conscience-politique.org/politique/reichmanjospinment.htm
--
Nous ne sommes jamais aussi
esclaves que lorsque nous nous
croyons libres sans l'etre (Goethe)
gdm
comme aux usa.
gdm
L'Etat est l'ennemi du citoyen(Professeur Pascal Salin in "Liberalisme")
sites libraux et sites libertariens
http://www.euro92.org
http://www.libres.org
http://www.liberalia.com
http://www.catallaxia.org
http://www.liberalia.com/lien.htm
http://www.lemennicier.com
http://www.quebecoislibre.org
"BFidi fr" <bfi...@aol.comNOSPAM> a écrit dans le message news:
20020216051918...@mb-ml.aol.com...
jerrykan
> vivement la mort de la veille secu et vive les assurance-maladies privées,
> comme aux usa.
>
> gdm
>
Jerrykan
Tiens mange, pauvre imbécile:
"I've had grown men wet this floor with tears, begging for a job. We
have to pray with some to keep them from killing themselves. So many
say they just want to die," says Charlie Tarrance, a director of a
private social agency. His task is to deal with growing lines of
despairing people looking for jobs, housing, and food. The place is
Gadsden, Alabama, but it could be anywhere in the United States.
It could be Washington, D.C., at a Safeway supermarket a mile or so
from the White House where an elderly man is crying and holding a can
of dog food. When asked what's wrong, he says, "I'm hungry. I'm
hungry."
It could be New York City, where a woman begins screaming at the
landlord who evicts her and her several children. The Bureau of Child
Welfare takes her children, which distresses her all the more. She
herself is transported to a New York mental hospital crying
angrily--only to be diagnosed and committed by the all- knowing
psychiatrists as a "paranoid schizophrenic."
There is misery and cruelty in the land. As U.S. leaders move
determinedly toward their free-market Final Solution, stories abound
of hunger, pain, and desperation. Such things have existed for a long
time. Social pathology is as much a part of this society as crime and
capitalism. But life is getting ever more difficult for many.
Some Grim Statistics
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.
5,000 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.
A Happy Nation?
Obviously these estimates include massive duplications. Many of the 20
million unemployed are among the 35 million below the poverty level.
Many of the malnourished children are also among those listed as
growing up with untreated learning disabilities and almost all are
among the 35 million poor. Many of the 37 million regular users of
mind-control drugs also number among the 25 million who seek
psychiatric help.
Some of these deprivations and afflictions are not as serious as
others. The 80 million living below the "comfortably adequate" income
level may compose too vague and inclusive a category for some
observers (who themselves enjoy a greater distance from the poverty
line). The 40 million who are without health insurance are not
afflicted by an actual catastrophe but face only a potential one
(though the absence of health insurance often leads to a lack of care
and eventually a serious health crisis). We might not want to consider
the 5.5 million arrested as having endured a serious affliction, but
what of the 1.5 million who are serving time and what of their
victims? We might want to count only the 150,000 who suffer a serious
job-related disability rather than the five million on-the-job
injuries, only half of the 20 million unemployed and underemployed so
as not to duplicate poverty figures, only 10 percent of the 1.1
million institutionalized elderly as mistreated (although the number
is probably higher), only 10 per cent of the 37 million regular users
of medically prescribed psychogenic drugs as seriously troubled, only
5 per cent of the 160 million living in indebted families as seriously
indebted (although the number is probably higher).
If we consider only those who have endured physical or sexual abuse,
or have been afflicted with a serious disability, or a serious
deprivation such as malnutrition and homelessness, only those who face
untimely deaths due to suicide, murder, battering, drug and alcohol
abuse, industrial and motor vehicle accidents, medical (mis)treatment,
occupational illness, and sexually transmitted diseases, we are still
left with a staggering figure of over 19,000,000 victims. To put the
matter in some perspective, in the 12 years that saw 58,000 Americans
killed in Vietnam, several million died prematurely within the United
States from unnatural and often violent causes.
Official bromides to the contrary, we are faced with a hidden
holocaust, a social pathology of staggering dimensions. Furthermore,
the above figures do not tell the whole story. In almost every
category an unknown number of persons go unreported. For instance, the
official tabulation of 35 million living in poverty is based on census
data that undercount transients, homeless people, and those living in
remote rural and crowded inner-city areas. Also, the designated
poverty line is set at an unrealistically low income level and takes
insufficient account of how inflation especially affects the basics of
food, fuel, housing, and health care that consume such a
disproportionate chunk of lower incomes. Some economists estimate that
actually as many as 46 million live in conditions of acute economic
want.
Left uncounted are the more than two thousand yearly deaths in the
U.S. military due to training and transportation accidents, and the
many murders and suicides in civilian life that are incorrectly judged
as deaths from natural causes, along with the premature deaths from
cancer caused by radioactive and other carcinogenic materials in the
environment. Almost all cancer deaths are now thought to be from
human-made causes.
Fatality figures do not include the people who are incapacitated and
sickened from the one thousand potentially toxic additional chemicals
that industry releases into the environment each year, and who die
years later but still prematurely. At present there are at least
51,000 industrial toxic dump sites across the country that pose
potentially serious health hazards to communities, farmlands, water
tables, and livestock. One government study has concluded that the air
we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are now perhaps
the leading causes of death in the United States.
None of these figures include the unhappiness, bereavement, and
longterm emotional wounds inflicted upon the many millions of loved
ones, friends, and family members who are close to the victims.
Public Policy, Personal Pain
If things are so bad, why then has the U.S. mortality rate been
declining? The decline over the last half-century has been due largely
to the dramatic reduction in infant mortality and the containment of
many contagious diseases, largely through improvement in public health
standards. Furthermore, years of industrial struggle by working
people, especially in the twentieth century, brought a palpable
betterment in certain conditions. In other words, as bad as things are
now, in earlier times some things were even worse. For example, about
14,000 persons are killed on the job annually, but in 1916 the toll
was 35,000, with the labor force less than half what it is today.
The growth in health consciousness that has led millions to quit
smoking, exercise more regularly, and have healthier diets also has
reduced mortality rates, especially among those over 40. The 55-mile
per hour speed limit and the crackdown on drunken driving contributed
by cutting into highway fatalities. But the cancer death rate and most
of the other pathologies and life diminishing conditions listed
earlier continue in an upward direction. Small wonder the climb in
life expectancy has leveled off to a barely perceptible crawl in
recent years.
When compared to other nations, we discover we are not as Number
One-ish as we might think. The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher
than in thirteen other countries. And in life expectancy, 20-year-old
U.S. males rank thirty-sixth among the world's nations, and
20-year-old females are twenty-first. The additional tragedy of these
statistics is that most of the casualties are not inevitable products
of the human condition, but are due mostly to the social and material
conditions created by our profits-before-people corporate system.
Consider a few examples.
First, it may be that industrial production will always carry some
kind of risk, but the present rate of attrition can be largely
ascribed to inadequate safety standards, speedup, and lax enforcement
of safety codes. Better policies can make a difference. In the
chemical industry alone, regulations put out by the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)--at a yearly cost to industry
of $140 per worker--brought a 23 percent drop in accidents and
sickness, averting some 90,000 illnesses and injuries.
OSHA's resources are pathetically inadequate. It has only enough
inspectors to visit each workplace once every eighty years. Workplace
standards to control the tens of thousands of toxic substances are
issued at the rate of less than three a year. Even this feeble effort
has been more than business could tolerate. Under the Reagan and Bush
administrations, OSHA began removing protections, exempting most firms
from routine safety inspections, and weakening the cotton dust,
cancer, and lead safety standards, and a worker's right to see company
medical records.
Second, it may be that in any society some children will sicken and
die. But better nutrition and health care make a difference. The
Women, Infants and Children nutrition program (WIC) did cut down on
starvation and hunger. On the other hand, years after passing a law
making some thirteen million children eligible for medical examination
and treatment, Congress discovered that almost 85 percent of the
youngsters had been left unexamined, causing, in the words of a House
subcommittee report, "unnecessary crippling, retardation, or even
death of thousands of children."
Third, it may be that medical treatment will always have its hazards,
but given the way health care is organized in the United States, money
often makes the difference between life and death. Many sick people
die simply because they receive insufficient care or are treated too
late. Health insurance premiums have risen astronomically and hospital
bills have grown five times faster than the overall cost of living.
Yet it is almost universally agreed that people are not receiving
better care, only more expensive care, and in some areas the quality
of care has deteriorated.
Some physicians have cheated Medicaid and Medicare of hundreds of
millions of dollars by consistently overcharging for services and
tests; fraudulently billing for nonexistent patients or for services
not rendered; charging for unneeded treatments, tests, and hospital
admissions--and most unforgivable of all-- performing unnecessary
surgery. Meanwhile, private health insurance companies make profits by
raising premiums and withholding care. So people are paying more than
ever for health insurance while getting less than ever.
Fourth, it may be that automobile accidents are unavoidable in any
society with millions of motor vehicles, but why have we become
increasingly dependent on this costly, dangerous, and ecologically
disastrous form of transportation? In transporting people, one
railroad or subway car can do the work of fifty automobiles. Railroads
consume a sixth of the energy used by trucks to transport goods.
These very efficiencies are what make railroads so undesirable to the
oil and auto lobbies. For over a half-century, giant corporations like
General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tires bought
up most of the nation's clean and safe electric streetcar networks,
dismantled them, and cut back on all public transportation, thereby
forcing people to rely more and more on private cars. The monorail in
Japan, a commuter train that travels much faster than any train, has
transported some three billion passengers without an injury or
fatality. The big oil and auto companies in the U.S. have successfully
blocked the construction of monorails here.
In ways not yet mentioned corporate and public policies gravely affect
private lives. Birth deformities, for instance, are not just a quirk
of nature, as the heartbroken parents of Love Canal or the thalidomide
children can testify. Many such defects are caused by fast-buck
companies that treat our environment like a septic tank. Unsafe
products are another cause; there are hundreds of hair dyes, food
additives, cosmetics, and medicines marketed for quick profits which
have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and other illnesses.
The food industry, seeking to maximize profits, offers ever increasing
amounts of highly processed, chemicalized, low-nutrition foods.
Bombarded by junk-food advertising over the last thirty years, TV
viewers, especially younger ones, have changed their eating habits
dramatically. Per capita consumption of vegetables and fruits is down
20 to 25 per cent while consumption of cakes, pastry, soft drinks, and
other snacks is up 70 to 80 per cent. According to a U.S. Senate
report, the increased consumption of junk foods "may be as damaging to
the nation's health as the widespread contagious diseases of the early
part of the century." All this may start showing up on the actuarial
charts when greater numbers of the younger junk-food generation move
into middle age.
In 1995-96, a Republican-controlled Congress pushed for further cuts
in environmental and consumer safety standards and in the regulation
of industry, cuts in various public health programs, and cuts in
nutritional programs for children and pregnant women. State and local
governments are also cutting back on public protection programs and
human services in order to pay the enormous sums owed to the banks and
to compensate for reductions in federal aid. Thus New York City took
such "economy measures" as closing all of its venereal disease clinics
and most of its drug rehabilitation and health centers.
We are told that wife-beating, child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse,
and other such pathologies know no class boundaries and are found at
all income levels. This is true but misleading. The impression left is
that these pathologies are randomly distributed across the social
spectrum and are purely a matter of individual pathology. Actually,
many of them are skewed heavily toward the low-income, the unemployed,
and the dispossessed. As economic conditions worsen, so afflictions
increase. Behind many of these statistics is the story of class,
racial, sexual, and age oppressions that have long been among the
legacies of our social order, oppressions that are seldom discussed in
any depth by political leaders, news media, or educators.
In addition, more and more middle-income people are hurting from the
Third Worldization of America, suffering from acute stress,
alcoholism, job insecurity, insufficient income, high rents, heavy
mortgage payments, high taxes, and crushing educational and medical
costs. And almost all of us eat the pesticide-ridden foods, breathe
the chemicalized air, and risk drinking the toxic water and being
exposed to the contaminating wastes of our increasingly chemicalized,
putrefied environment. I say "almost all of us" because the favored
few live on country estates, ranches, seashore mansions, and summer
hideaways where the air is relatively fresh. And, like President
Reagan, they eat only the freshest food and meat derived from
organically fed steers that are kept free of chemical hormones--while
telling the rest of us not to get hysterical about pesticides and
herbicides and chemical additives.
All this explains why many of us find little cause for rejoicing about
America the Beautiful. It is not that we don't love our country, but
that we do. We love not just an abstraction called "the USA" but the
people who live in it. And we believe that the pride of a nation
should not be used to hide the social and economic disorder that is
its shame. The American dream is becoming a nightmare for many. A
concern for collective betterment, for ending the abuses of
free-market plunder, is of the utmost importance. "People before
profits" is not just a slogan, it is our only hope."