Show Details for April 20th, 2008

This week’s Guests:

– SAM PIZZIGATI on inequality — is it enough to make us sick?

— Law Professor MARJORIE COHN– who said what on torture policy?

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- SAM PIZZIGATI on inequality — is it enough to make us sick?

Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson’s guest tonight is SAM PIZZIGATI.  We’ll talk about economic inequality and its unexpected effects on the health of rich, poor and in-between in an inequal society.  Studies across developed countries, US states, and US cities are showing that areas with smaller gaps between rich and poor have better health than areas where the gap is larger.  In fact, even if the absolute economic standard of living is higher in an area, it may fare worse than an area with less overall wealth but more equality.

“By all rights, the United States ought to be the healthiest place in the world.  The United States spends more money to keep people healthy — over $1 trillion annually — than any other nation on the face of the globe.  Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet our medical bills add up to 42 percent of what the world spends on health care…. In 2001, Americans occupied the 25th rung in the world’s health ratings.” — Sam Pizzigati writes in Greed and Good, pp. 316

As economic inequality grows worse in this country, and access to health care becomes increasingly tenuous for people without means, Sam points us to studies that show the inequality hurts everyone’s health.

We’ll also discuss what the presidential campaigns SHOULD be talking about regarding the economy, and examine who the economic advisors are for John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Sam Pizzigati is editor of an online weekly,”Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality.” A labor journalist for over two decades, he is currently Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington, D.C.

His most recent book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives, was an American Library Association “outstanding title” of the year (Choice, January 2006).  He has served on the boards of directors of Progressive Maryland, the state’s most respected voice for working families, and United for a Fair Economy, the Boston-based national economic justice advocacy group.

ARTICLE:
“John McCain’s New Economic Advisor Is an ‘Innovator’ at Hurting Workers”
By Sam Pizzigati
April 10, 2008
AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/election08/81927

RELATED ARTICLE:
“Inequality: Bad for Your Health”
An interview with social epidemiologist Ichiro Kawachi
Dollars & Sense magazine
January/February 2008

BLOG:
“Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality” –http://www.toomuchonline.org
“Dedicated to the notion that our world would be considerably more
caring, prosperous, and democratic if we narrowed the vast gap
that divides our wealthy from everyone else.”

QUOTE:

“British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, in a powerful 1996 book, ‘Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality,’ would collect this mounting international evidence for ‘a strong relationship’ between income distribution and mortality.  ‘In the developed world,’ he would conclude, ‘it is not the richest countries which have the best health, but the most egalitarian.’  This conclusion, noted Wilkinson, rested on a wide and deep pool of research data.

Some ‘eight different groups of researchers,’ working on ‘ten separate sets of data,’ had clearly demonstrated linkages between national mortality rates and income inequality. Investigators would find the same relationships between inequality and death rates when they compared states within the United States. …

In states with greater inequality, all people, from a health standpoint, appeared worse off.” Researchers also examined 282 official metro areas in the U.S.  “Their finding: The more unequal a metropolitan area, the higher the area’s death rate is likely to be.” — Greed and Good, by Sam Pizzigati, pp. 314-315

BOOK by Sam Pizzigati:
Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives

– Law Professor MARJORIE COHN — who said what on torture policy?

Law professor MARJORIE COHN is a frequent legal analyst on The Monitor. She and Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi will discuss the US policy of torture — who discussed it, who approved it? What laws apply? And, they’ll look at central figure John Yoo.  The National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights have called for Yoo to be fired from his job teaching law at the prestigious University of California law school in Berkeley.

Professor Cohn is the President of the National Lawyers Guild, and is a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law.

Her recent book is entitled “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.”
She lectures throughout the world on international human rights and US foreign policy. Professor Cohn has written columns for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Daily Journal, is a news consultant for CBS News, and a legal analyst for Court TV. She has provided legal and political commentary on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, Truthout, and Pacifica Radio.

ARTICLES:
Top Bush Aides Pushed for Guantánamo Torture
By Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian UK
Saturday 19 April 2008
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041908Z.shtml

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON BOALT HALL
TO DISMISS LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO,
WHOSE TORTURE MEMOS LED TO COMMISSION OF WAR CRIMES
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
http://nlg.org/news/index.php?entry=entry080409-083133

Center for Constitutional Rights Supports
National Lawyers Guild Call for
Dismissal and Prosecution of John Yoo
by Marjorie Cohn
April 17, 2008
CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/17/8342/

QUOTE from Marjorie’s above article:

ABC News reported last week that Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft met in the White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding. George W. Bush, the decider-in-chief, admitted, “yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

These top U.S. officials are liable for war crimes under the U.S. War Crimes Act, and for violation of the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, which are all part of U.S. law. They ordered the torture which was carried out by the interrogators.

But John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers, including David Addington, Jay Bybee, William Haynes and Alberto Gonzales, are also liable for the same offenses.

WEBSITE:
http://marjoriecohn.com

BOOK:
“Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law”
The six ways: illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; the policy of
torture; war crimes; Guantanamo’s kangaroo courts; unconstitutional laws; and the
unlawful surveillance of American citizens.