From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti
http://www.michaelparenti.org/HiddenHolocaust.html
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.
Michael Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/HiddenHolocaust.html
Copyright © 1996 Vida Communications and Michael Parenti. All rights reserved.