Capitalism and mortality: Death rate soars for middle-aged US workers
A study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents a sharp rise in the mortality rate for white, middle-aged working-class Americans over the past fifteen years. The report’s authors are Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case, both economists at Princeton University.
Their calculations show that the rising death rate since 1999 for this segment of the population translates into 96,000 more deaths than if the mortality rate had remained flat. Had the rate continued on its declining trajectory for the period 1978-1998, the authors state, there would be 500,000 more people alive today in the United States.
“Only HIV/AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” commented Deaton.
The increase in the mortality rate is due mainly to a dramatic rise in the rate of deaths from suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism—all expressions of social and personal crisis.
Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/04/pers-n04.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I find your metrics of social progress... odd.
I wonder if your glee schadenfreude might be subdued if it were pointed out that white women aren't immune?
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/rising-death-rates-among-middle-aged-white-americans-due-epidemic-drugs-alcohol
From Princeton
All-cause mortality rose by 22 percent for this least-educated group. Those with some college education saw little change in overall death rates, and those with a bachelor's degree or higher actually saw death rates decline.
Yes, I'd describe a four-fold increase "soaring".
for years, maybe hundreds of years now, the Native American, African American, and Latin American communities have been down trodden and oppressed. White Americans have been treated to a standard of privilege in this nation. Many benefits afforded to white Americans have not been afforded to minority communities. There has been redlining by the banks where minority communities have been concerned, even the G.I. Bill, and Social Security were skewed in their written instruction in order to try to keep the benefit strictly for white communities. The destruction of the minds of white people by those in power has been devastating. Minority communities have learned to live with oppression, and have found ways to cope. Now comes the time when those in power are no longer able to separate the races in order to make a profit so everybody who isn't a part of the Oligarchy will become just as the communities they have used to rape, rob, and pillage in this nation....no more privilege for those they used to get to where they are, from now on middle class and the poor are equal and will suffer the devastation equally....Welcome to the club!
I can imagine this group that is now taking their own lives by whatever means, death by gun, death by drugs, or death by alcoholism have come to the realization that the world in which they thought they were living, has been a fantasy...the American Dream, (LOL!!! Nice slogan the Oligarchs used to dangle the carrot before the cart) has for them turned into a nightmare, and though they wait for their benefit as usual, many have come to the realization that that benefit will no longer come their way. They, like all minorities before them are going to have to learn to thicken their skin, and cope with reality. I believe this is part of the reason we have so many militias in this nation. Many have come to the realization that they are not now, nor have they ever been a part of the establishment, and just as they have been terrorizing the minority communities in this nation, now the powers that be have begun terrorizing them...services no longer needed so to speak...we are now GLOBAL.
Sad indeed that many have decided to end their lives rather than stand up and fight back. Yes, that is what is needed. We need the communities in this nation, all communities those that have been oppressed, and those that are now beginning to be oppressed to stand together and challenge the oppressor boycott, resist, in whatever manner necessary. No, it won't be easy, just look for instance at what happened to the Occupy movement. I say, for those who care about their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers, their Aunts and Uncles, their Cousins stand up and face the truth....you have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, lied to, and above all used to help commit genocide against your brothers and sisters of other races and cultures by those who now prey upon you. Stand with the rest of the 99%, come out of your dream world and fight back....or, continue killing yourselves with guns, drugs, and alcohol. I guess it's up to you.
Thanks for posting this info TexasTowelie, maybe it will open some eyes and improve the thinking of those who have had it easier than they should have for so long. 
outside the sanitized version - for years. DU's own Octafish has been my inspiration, rabbi and guide; he's been at it for decades.
The next must read that explains just why it has become so hot in this handcart is David Talbot's "The Devil's Chessboard." Or as I refer to it, How Allen Dulles created and Nazified the US Intelligence Establishment." They got essentially complete control over foreign policy in all its aspects on 11/22/1963. The coup de grace, getting control of domestic policy, was begun with Zombie King Raygun's election and fundamentally sealed for good with the installation of the Little Chimp.
See:http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/book-review-devils-chessboard-david-talbot
ETA: It'snot so much a matter of people being dumb - though this country has always had a disproportionate population of nitwits because of fundy religion - so much as it is the omnipresence and success of the conditioning techniques. The CIA was hip deep in developing and investigating mind-control techniques as far back as the early 1950s. When a pliant and cooperative media asks to participate in the process of mind-controlling the population, as it has since it turned on Jimmy Carter for the purpose of helping elect Reagan, it assumes a less-obvious, almost subliminal character. This was accelerated by Slick Willie's facilitation of the grotesque media consolidation we now see.
We have been turned into
an excellent program on H2, (History2) regarding Allen Dulles and U.S. Intelligence. They also had a great program discussing how the Nazi Scientist were brought to the U.S. and helped in developing the Atom Bomb and getting NASA up and running.
I haven't read David Talbot's book, and I haven't had an opportunity to read any of the post of Octafish. Is there a way you can link me to some of his post? btw thanks for the link to the Motherjones book review, I will read it before I buy the book. 
Awful, awful kids. And they are the ones* screwing America now.
What's different today, is we have no Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.
Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, share a moment and some information, back in the day.
* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.
Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained seven times more wealth than all of history until 1981 put together.
Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the hard work and little wealth of the many onto themselves.
And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero, their weapon of enslavement is "Neo-Liberal Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down. To the planet, it means doom.
Tack on all the nice things that have happened since September 11 and the NSA sea-to-shining-sea surveil the USA and we are getting the transfer of wealth (and political power) from the many to the very, very few down to a very undemocratic science.
Ideas like "Justice," "Liberty" and "Democracy" may be missing from humanity's thoughts in the future if we don't wake the heck up now.
Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.
[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]
A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside
Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.
This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.
CONTINUED...
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/
Why does this matter, when my house is about to get foreclosed because my job got offshored? It's tied in, when Wall Street and War Inc. are where the really Big Bucks go to get made. For We the People are the ones who ALWAYS get "the haircut."
Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."
CIA moonlights in corporate world
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.
SNIP...
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh
Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.
Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph
A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.
Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.
SNIP...
Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html
Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
The Knights of the Revolving Door
When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013
Paris.
A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.
For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.
For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC
Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.
Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.
Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..
Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.
One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/
This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude. And these are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.
PS: hifiguy is too kind. He is the teacher and the rabbi and all the good things. Me, I'm more of a democratic Funes.
PPS: Please let me know if you've any questions. My DU3 or DU2 journals are a decent repository of what's happened to democracy in the USA over the past few years. While the links eventually go bad, the names and dates and narratives that remain are the kernels for further investigation.
Thanks for taking the time to post all of this wonderful information. I especially like the way you intertwined your comment with pictures from High Plains Drifter etc. How do you add pictures and videos to comments on this site?
I know about all of the information you have posted here and am in agreement with your assessment of how terrible it is for this nation and the world. I don't believe the rest of the world is taking this laying down though. Many foreign countries have began fighting back by setting up their own intelligence services that counteract much of what the U.S. and the U.K. are doing. I look at this as an updated version of what took place centuries ago. You only need to read books that explain the days of colonialism, slavery, and even centuries before that back to the days of the Roman Empire and other empires that have come and gone to realize that what is happening is a continuation of the same.
The British government on Wednesday published a proposed new law to reform and dramatically expand surveillance powers in the United Kingdom. The 190-page Investigatory Powers Bill is thick with detail and it will probably take weeks and months of analysis until its full ramifications are understood. In the meantime, I’ve read through the bill and noted down a few key aspects of the proposed powers that stood out to me – including unprecedented new data retention measures, a loophole that allows spies to monitor journalists’ and their sources, powers enabling the government to conduct large-scale hacking operations, and more.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/05/seven-major-takeaways-from-the-u-k-s-proposed-surveillance-rules/
I agree that those that were responsible for many of the disastrous things that have been perpetrated upon the globe, did not do these things without leaving a play book for their offspring. I believe they, just like all of the rest of us attempted to teach their kids to get ahead in the manner in which they did, even though what they did was atrocious as far as you and I are concerned, they somehow don't seem to see it that way. They think of it as progress, as early bird getting the worm, as being proactive and taking advantage of others before they take advantage of you rather than doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. The problem with counteracting this is as it was in days of old, complacency IMHO. As in the days of the Kings, Lords, and Serfs, although the serfs outnumbered the Kings and Lords and could have at any moment rebelled and changed their situation, they did nothing. It is the same today...just look at the turnout in recent elections, 20% voting here, 30% there, etc. Oh yes, I know, the recent election was not a General, a more or less off season election if you will, but as in the days of the serfs, if you don't participate in the government that has the power over your life, then you probably don't have a right to object when things go against your best interest in a terrible way.
Knowledge is a wonderful thing, knowing about oppression and oppressors helps one to understand why things are the way they are, it also leads one to believe that for some reason, those that perpetrate the crimes, and their offspring after them, somehow are more intelligent than the majority of people, are better con artist or, have gained the power over the lives of the majority through work opportunities, inequality where justice and freedom is concerned, and so many other ways that this board would fail to be able to stand up to the list.
The question is, how do we get the masses, or at least that infamous 99% of us to stand up and fight back, or at least begin to challenge the status quo. My answer to it is that we begin to forget our petty differences and unite. What's your answer? BTW, I will be reading your journals and may have questions from time to time if that is alright with you. Thanks again Octafish. 
Art Before Power
New Jenny Holzer Exhibition
Showcases Archive's Documents;
Artist Projects Former Secrets onto
Buildings, Walls, Floors, Memories
Posted - June 17, 2004
Washington D.C., June 17, 2004 - Noted modern artist Jenny Holzer, whose signature "xenon" film projectors have cast monumental light images of texts and truisms on the sides of buildings and landscapes from Florence to Buenos Aires, features the National Security Archive's declassified documents in her latest exhibition, which opened on June 11 in Bregenz, Austria, through September 5.
Holzer's texts for the Bregenz show, titled "Truth Before Power," include more than 30 former secrets obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act (primarily on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, especially Iraq), as well as an essay by the Archive's director, Thomas Blanton, titled "The World's Right to Know," from the July/August 2002 issue of Foreign Policy.
The texts appear in a series of projections, from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. each night between June 11 and June 18, onto such surfaces as the façade of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Rhomberg rock quarry, the Vermunt reservoir dam, and the "West Side Story" floating stage on Lake Constance. In addition, the top three floors of the Kunsthaus feature Holzer's electronic sign arrays as they stream extracts of the texts.
"Jenny Holzer does for the digital age what a nail and broadsheet used to do, for example when Martin Luther pounded his theses onto the church door," commented Thomas Blanton, the Archive's director. "She turns every surface into a page, she illuminates not only texts but perception, and by projecting these secrets into the night she transforms the words of power into transitory bolts of lightning."
SOURCE: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/20040617/index.htm
PS: You are most welcome, monicaangela. Thank you for the kind words.
We will win because the warmongers, plutocrats, kleptocrats, kakistocrats and traitors who've hijacked Wall Street-on-the-Potomac can't kill an idea, Democracy. Their rule is based on the bullet. That got old long ago.
and welcome to DU.
You are correct with your analysis of the chaos that our economic system has inflicted upon the public at large. I recall when they changed the name from employees to human resources--a resource is a commodity to be used and then discarded afterwards. I recognized the underlying message of that terminology and was disgusted by its implications.
As far as the "American Dream" is concerned it is an elusive goal that only a few are able to achieve. I made a decent income when I was employed, but there wasn't much extra to save and enjoy life to the fullest--it was a challenge to survive from one paycheck to the next and the threat of being unemployed loomed in the background so there was never a sense of security. Usually it came down to what can postpone or do without until the next check was deposited into the account. That kind of stress weighs heavily upon the human psyche and is a contributing cause for why we are seeing the trend that was indicated in the OP.
Life for many of us has been that way, only through self sacrifice and diligence are the majority of us able to keep our heads above water. I sacrificed much for my family when I was in the workforce, but everyday I used the anger to provide energy so that I could eventually find a way to get ahead. I married well, and some of the stress was relieved by that, but it was still a struggle trying to help our children understand the true history of this country so that they would know how to avoid some of the hurdles we had to jump.
Thank you for welcoming me to DU. I enjoyed your post, and look forward to interaction with you in the future.
Yes, and a very vivid imagination it must be.
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
~~~~~ ― Albert Einstein
“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
~~~~~~~ ― Mark Twain
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
~~~~~~~― Albert Einstein
