How the Government Kills Us

This episode is an exciting listening experience that uses sociology to map out criminal actions.  Systematic oppression carefully crafted by the government effects all of our daily lives. Tune in to find out more about the governments contribution to America's death toll and decide for yourself if Uncle Sam is guilty as charged.



Link to Red lining maps:

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58
Sources:

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America , by Candace Taylor

The Death Gap, by David Ansell

https://www.healthyfoodaccess.org/access-101-research-your-community

https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/interactives/whereyouliveaffectshowlongyoulive.html

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/life-expectancy/

https://societyhealth.vcu.edu/media/society-health/pdf/CSH-ChicagoMethods.p

https://fortunly.com/statistics/welfare-statistics/#gref

Transcript

1. Death by government neglect

We have looked at death as a result of crime, and death as a result of corporate greed, so now I want us to look at death by government irresponsibility. A lot of these deaths are unrecognized by society because they are of people who are older or groups who’s miseries don’t make the 5 o clock news. The problems are all around us, we need to be more responsible than our legislators and learn about them. We can’t be firefighters witnessing a blaze and not trying to extinguish it. So I provide this information in the hope that it will help you help with a solution to improve things. 

Social scientists have uncovered the obvious fact that neighborhood location has a major impact on health. Your social environment can make you more prone to disease, expose you to more harm, and determine the course and outcome of an illness more than the infectious, genetic, metabolic, malignant, or degenerative properties. Social environment isn’t referring to the weather or if you live near the ocean. Your social environment is your immediate physical and social setting you live in. This includes the culture you live in, as well as the people and institutions you interact with everyday. And it is the responsibility of the reigning government in a place to ensure the social environment of its people is providing good quality of life. 

Obvious examples of poor city design taking lives have surfaced in areas such as Flint Michigan. Flint Michigan was victim to generations of job loss and factory closings. the abandonment of urban centers by nations industrial and manufacturing establishments A less appreciated factor in neighborhood segregation that is nationwide is  Between 1967 and 1987, manufacturing companies moved out of the city centers taking jobs and billions of dollars with them. Detroit lost 51% of manufacturing jobs, New York lost 58%, and Philadelphia lost 64%. Once again, these jobs vanished because company executives chose to move the jobs in other countries that had more relaxed salary laws so they could hire people for longer hours and lower pay. Let’s use Flint Michigan to demonstrate this relationship between a lack of employment opportunities and poor health outcomes. Flint was previously a thriving metropolis supported by an automobile plant. As manufacturing jobs vanished from the area, the town suffered generations of job loss and economic hardship. By 2008, the town was on the verge of bankruptcy. The State of Michigan appointed emergency managers to essentially act as dictators over the towns affairs. These people reported to the treasury department of the state, and not to the towns people, so goodbye democratic process there. In order to save money in 2014, these managers decided to change the town’s water source from the Detroit water and sewage department to the Flint River. Residents immediately expressed concern over the water safety, especially as General Motors reported water from the Flint River was corroding   newly machined parts. State Officials reassured residents the water was safe, but when people grew sicker and the water could literally be ignited with a match straight from the tap, the charade was over. As it turns out, the amount of lead in the water was high enough to classify it as hazardous waste. Consuming this water leads to a phenomenon known as legionnaires disease. Some county officials wanted to investigate the outbreak of the disease in relationship to the water but they were met with resistance from the city and state government. Even the Detroit Water and Sewage d epartment offered to reconnect to the city but the manager at the time declined. Meanwhile, the water continued to poison the people and damage the existing plumbing infrastructure. It wasn’t until a newly elected mayor declared a state of emergency and President Obama released $5 million in emergency relief that officials rethought the situation in Flint. The state of Michigan boasts that only 12 people died as a result of the water.  First of all, I hate the word only combined with anything to do with death. Death is a big deal in any number. Second of all, they lied. On careful examination of the data you will actually find that there were 70 deaths in the same time period as a result of complicated pneumonia, during the summer time, which is when pneumonia related deaths are usually at their lowest. These 70 people died as a result of drinking the water, plain and simple. I would like to revisit this crime of poisoned drinking water again in another episode because it’s a prime example of Elite Deviance or White Collar Crime, so be looking for that release if you want the situation from the perspective of your trusty criminologist. 

While Flint Michigan is an obvious example of city planning gone lethal, I want to focus on the more subtle examples in society. So let’s start by accessing one aspect of the quality of life in America.  A good measure of this is to check the life expectancy. The average life expectancy in the United States is 79 years. That puts us at 46th place compared to other countries in the world. Now, the nationwide rate is of course an average of all the states, so it doesn’t represent the life expectancy of every zip code in America. 

1. The states have variation in their life expectancy rates, with Hawaii being at the top with 81 years expected, and Mississippi ranking the lowest at 74 years. The gap in life expectancy doesn’t stop here though, even cities in the same state can have different life expectancies. People living in Raleigh North Carolina can expect to live 80 years. If you travel 100 miles East to Martin Country NC, life expectancy drops to 73 years. 
2. Even in the same city, you can have different life expectancy rates depending on the zip code you live in. People who live in the southern part of Tulsa Oklahoma can enjoy an additional 10 years of life compared to their fellow Tulsans who live just 18 miles to the north. Apparently, the social environment can change a lot within less than 20 miles. In Miami Florida, you can watch 11 years of life expectancy vanish as you drive 20 minutes from North Beach to the area near the Women’s detention center. And in Las Vegas Nevada, life expectancy drops 16 years in a 10 mile span. That’s not even the most dramatic out of all these. In The Death Gap, the author David Ansell points out that you can walk just half a mile from the Washington Park community in Chicago, to Hyde park and watch life expectancy increase 14 years. If Hyde park was a country it would be ranked in the top 20 of countries with the highest life expectancy. If Washington Park was a country, it would be ranked 140th for life expectancy. What happens in a ½ mile space to cause people to lose 14 years of life? Well I’ll tell you its not an accident. Let’s dig this skeleton out of America’s closet. 

Gaps in health across neighborhoods are caused by a variety of factors that are all related to oppressive policies and racist city design. Communities that have lower tax funds can’t support high-quality education, and jobs are often harder to find. Unsafe or unhealthy housing exposes people to numerous health risks. Stores with fresh produce are scarce in many of these places with lower life expectancies, while convenient stores with processed foods and restaurants that serve heart attacks in an unhappy meal outnumber healthy options. These areas are referred to officially as a food deserts, which describes a place that does not have fresh fruit or vegetables within a two mile radius. Food chains have found that it costs 2-3 % more to operate in low-income areas, and yet consumers in these same areas pay between 5-10% more for their groceries than those living in middle-income areas. PRice gouging by stores in low-income reas also includes raising prices on the 1st and 15th of the  month to mirror dates that welfare is distributed. Grocers in the Mississippi Delta have raised prices on groceries when food stamps were introduced. If that’s not a form of stealing then I don’t know what is. By 1986, the North LAwndale community of Chicago had 66,000 residents but only one bank and one supermarket. The area didn’t have many job opportunities but it did have a surplus of businesses founding in exploitation. That area had 99 liquor stores and bars, 50 currency exchanges, and 48 state lottery agents. If you are someone with a car, food and business offerings in your immediate area might not be a big deal. But if you don’t have access to a car and have to rely on public transportation, if your area even has it, the likelihood of your diet incorporating healthy options is going to be very low.  As it turns out, ownership or access to a private vehicle is important to your life expectancy because Public Transportation in America is a joke. City planners really have not devoted a lot of time to making sure a city layout would be accessible with or without a private vehicle. State governments have largely ignored public accessiblity UNLESS it was to segregate an area. For example, take the state of New York about 100 years ago. At that time,  many car companies refused to sell cars to Black Americans. Thus, the primary mode of transportation for Black Ameriacns in the area was public buses.  In an effort to make sure only white Americans with private cars could use the beaches in the state, the city planners made sure highway overpasses on the route to beaches were too short to accommodate buses, thus, crippling public transportation from reaching these areas. The government was masterful in denying access to an outdoor recreational area, but won’t devote the same energy to increase accessibility to something that might help people. The private sector has had their hand in sabotaging America’s public transportation. The car company GM purchased control of electric trolley and rail systems in the 1920s, then dismantled them so that people had to buy cars. This action increased their business as well as led to  

Other types of poor city design that lead to lower life expectancy include no dedicated spaces to enjoying the outdoors. Many of these living areas were built too close to highways, factories, and other places that pump toxic agents into the air. Racism once again shows its evil hand in planning who would be allowed different types of outdoor recreation. National Parks either did not permit Black visitors or did not provide restroom facilities for black visitors for decades. Even today, less than 15% of visitors to National Parks are Black Americans which shouldn’t be surprising after generations of officials doing their best to make these places inaccessible. Not to mention Many National Parks are essentially twice stolen land. The first being the entirety of America stolen from Native Americans, the second time being that Theodore Roosevelt robbed much of the land dedicated to Native Americans as reservations to create the National Parks that attract visitors from around the world. 

Alright sorry for that tangent but it still needed to be said. Back to the social detriments of health in an area, Quality healthcare access is often limited, not to mention hospitals are supplied differently depending on location. One of out every 20 counties in the US does not have a single doctor, and more than half of all counties do not have a pediatrician. The physician shortage is not limited to rural areas. It also extends to urban places. Physicians in private practice are seldom found in neighborhoods characterized by large numbers of poor and nonwhite residents. 

And finally, historic residential segregation known as redlining still has a monumental impact on the health choices available to people. It’s not that people collectively make bad decisions that lead to an earlier death in these places, its that the only choices they have access to naturally lead to an earlier death. 

I would like to map out this concept of Red Lining while we are on the topic.This isn’t taught in public schools, or most of the private ones, so buckle up for some jaw dropping information. It’s all fact but it’s disturbing enough to make you wish it was fiction.Historic city designing was governed under the principle of red lining. Most of those designs have determined the current layout of many cities today. The term red lining denotes the practice of marking some areas of the city with red or yellow lining to indicate these areas will have poor outcomes on people's health or they are the areas that are poor financial investments. This practice started back in the Great Depression, under President Franklin D Roosevelt. He is credited with addressing the housing crisis at the time and created the nations first public housing for civilians who were not engaged in defense work. The legislation he introduced specifically prohibited neighborhoods from being mixed race. It allowed banks to deny mortgages to Black applicants based on nothing income related, only on race. It mandated by federal law, that white Americans would be allowed to live in the safest, healthiest, and most desirable neighborhoods in the nation and forced black families into cramped quarters in poorly designed areas of the city regardless of what their income could afford. The New Deal offered new programs to boost up the nations economy while continuing the old practice of entrenched racism. By the End of WW2, the Lanham Act, the Public Work’s Association, and the US Housing aUthority programs solidifed residential racial segregation in every metropolitan area they operated. WW2 veterans returning from the war were offered mortgage stipends under the GI Bill, but only 3% of returning black veterans were allowed to utilize those. The practice of redlining was upheld by nearly all US presidents from  FDR to Nixon. The maps dedicated to city design are available for public viewing. They include comments from city developers about the race of poeple they wante to live in certain areas. I won’t read these comments because many of them include derogatory comments and racial slurs about people that are not appropriate to repeat. But I highly recommend if you have not heard of Red Lining or seen one of the maps used in this practice, please click on the link in my episode description box and check some of these out. Just because I said historic maps doesn’t mean this practice ended.  As recent as 2020, lenders were denying mortgages for black applicants at a rate 80% higher than white applicants. Further research into these denials reveal that those who were denied did not have lower income, worse credit scores, or higher debt to income ratios, begging the question why were so many people denied mortgages when they had the same financial standing of others. Well, if you look at the racial data, the answer is very obvious. Calculations show that black families hav elost out on at least $212,000 in personal wealth over the last 40 years due to red lining. 

Nature really gave us an X-ray of Redlining in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. I can’t say it better than David Ansell “ Natural Disasters have a way of exposing crevices in society.” Decades of white flight and redlining left concentrated black impoverished neighborhoods below sea level in New Orleans, of the 30% of New Orleans residents living there at the time, 84% were black. When the order to evacuate was given, the most vulnerable didn’t have the ability to leave. Many had never been outside the city limits and didn’t have a place to go even if they could get transportation out. Others were too frail or ill to move. At least 25% of New Orlean residents didn’t have a car at the time. The savior thrown to the people was the Good Samaritan Plan, but it relied on those with vehicles to help those without..So it relied 75% of the residents to pony up and help 25% of the residents without cars…the result was 20,000 people seeking refuge in the Superdome if that tells you anything about the values people had. 

More attention should be on the social causes of health outcomes because it shows the entrenched racism and classism that run our system. It’s evidence that our leaders at all levels have shirked their responsibility. The only reason some people live longer in one area of a city compared to another is that our cities were designed to produce advantage for some neighborhoods and disadvantages depending on your neighborhood. Even insurance companies are aware of this and have made it into a science to save them money.  Those promotions they offer about some kind of discount if you download their app isl so they can track your location data. Depending on the type of insurance, if they track you driving through areas they consider to be dangerous or harmful to your health in the long run, they can either deny you coverage or hike your rates up without giving you an explanation. 

The thing is, local, state, and federal leaders are not ignorant to income differences and social resources in an area. They are quite in tune with people's habits and living conditions. I would like to use the lottery as evidence for this. 

Okay, that is out of the way lets get back to the lottery. In 2014, Americans spent more than $70.1 billion on lottery tickets across the 43 states it is legal. That’s more than the entire country spent on books, sporting events, movie tickets, video games, and recorded music combined. Households in the lowest ⅓ income level bought over half those lottery tickets. Now, the government is aware of this data just like I am, it’s not hard to find. The state of Ohio decided they would capitalize on this. State officials in charge of lottery sales released lottery ads on the same day government benefits came out because they have research that shows welfare being disbursed and lottery ticket sales are highly connected. Did you also know the state of Ohio made more money off lottery taxes than corporate income tax in 2009. This means people in the lowest income bracket carried more of the state’s expenses than any corporations in that area.  In this country, 44 states rely almost entirely on their state lottery sales to fund public education. In 1955, the 400 richest Americans paid over 51% of their income in federal taxes, which I will give them is quite high. By 2007, the Americans occupying this same bracket paid under 17%. Tax cuts for the wealthy and coportaions cost the US Treasury $700 billion between 2001 and 2008. In order to compensate the nations budget for these tax cuts, safety net programs providing government assistance were slashed.  Government officials are aware of how to increase lottery ticket sales, but they won’t devote the time to make sure everyone has access to healthy food options within a mile radius? Seems to me like they have more than the energy and resources to devote to the research in this area but they are using it on marketing strategies for lottery tickets.

 Let me also say, habitual spending on lottery tickets is a gambling addiction or a desperate prayer out of bad financial situation. It isn’t done for entertainment because movie ticket sales do not rise with lottery ticket sales in the same area. So don’t judge someone for that. Especially when the government is devoting so many resources into wrapping up lottery tickets in a shiny package promising a fortune with just a few bucks. I’m sure we have all been tempted by a lottery jackpot at some point. Even this week People flocked to buy a Mega Millions ticket as it topped at 1.3 billion dollars. Lottery tickets support the false notion of Upward mobility. This idea itself is a branch of the Ameircan Dream which boasts that if you just work hard enough you can have whatever you want. I won’t deny that hardwork produces desirable outputs, but True Upward Moblity is another myth. 80% of Black Americans and 70% of White Americans  living in high poverty neighborhoods stay stuck in those same places for generations. The US now boasts more high-poverty neighborhoods than any time since the 1960s. What exactly is being done to improve the quality of life in this country for people who have lower incomes? Not much. Almost half of all children under 5 live in poverty. 

Let me tie all this together. From the information in this episode, we have uncovered that life expectancy is highly dependent on your zipcode. We have also proven how the government purposefully designed the layout of cities to have worse quality of life in certain areas. Further, the evidence is clear that the government is aware of of the spending habits that happen in disadvantaged areas and contributes to exploiting people instead of ensuring they have access to advantageous options for food or jobs. I doubt we would be on the brink of the collapse of democracy  if the US government made it policy that a supermarket with fresh produce affordable for a minimum wage paycheck was within walking distance in every urban area. 

1. Sources

https://www.healthyfoodaccess.org/access-101-research-your-community

https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/interactives/whereyouliveaffectshowlongyoulive.html

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/life-expectancy/

https://www.texashealthmaps.com/lfex

https://societyhealth.vcu.edu/media/society-health/pdf/CSH-ChicagoMethods.p

https://fortunly.com/statistics/welfare-statistics/#gref