This is your Moment of Clarity #216: Is the invisible hand of the free market slowly erasing our national and regional identities? What happens when profit defeats all else?

Keep fighting,

Lee

Americans are "far" unhealthier than their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan, Britain, France, Portugal, Italy and Germany and eight other countries, according to a study from the National Academy of Sciences.

These findings come even though here in the U.S. we spend $8,600 a year per person on healthcare, which is more than twice as much Britain, France and Sweden, "even with their universal healthcare systems."

NBC News:

“The size of the health disadvantage was pretty stunning,” Woolf told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Americans did worse in nine areas: infant mortality; injury and homicide rates; teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases; the AIDS virus; drug abuse; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; lung disease; and disabilities.

And many of these affect young people, not the elderly. Americans are seven times more likely to be murdered than people in the other countries, and 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun.

"I don't think most parents know that, on average, infants, children, and adolescents in the U.S. die younger and have greater rates of illness and injury than youth in other countries,” Woolf said.

“For many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high-income countries,” the expert panel wrote.

We also have a higher infant mortality rate than the other countries, with 32.7 deaths per 100,000. Other countries have infant mortality rates between 15 and 25 deaths per 100,000.

The report wasn't all bad for the U.S., Americans have lower death rates from cancer, the No. 2 cause of death, and do better at controlling blood pressure and cholesterol. “Americans who reach age 75 can expect to live longer than people in the peer countries,” the report reads.

The experts who wrote the report suggested that our culture here in the U.S. has much to do with the negative findings, and suggested that "policymakers" take action to reverse the trend.

Food waste is a big deal in America. As grocery stores stock their shelves with holiday goodies, preparing for the rush of feasting consumers, much of what retailers sell won’t end up in people’s stomachs -- it’ll end up in the trash.

Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted around the world, much of it in rich countries where grocery stores throw out imperfect products and consumers toss uneaten food. Since the 1970′s, America has seen a 50 percent jump in the amount of food wasted, according to the National Resources Defense Council. Consumers play a major role, tossing away roughly 250 pounds of food per person every year. But supermarkets play an even bigger role, discarding 10 percent of America’s total food supply at the retail level.

All that uneaten food accounts for nearly one quarter of U.S. methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than CO2.

This problem has spawned a range of reports and education programs designed to get Americans and retailers to waste less. But there’s another option that often gets overlooked: why don’t we just eat more of the food that grocery stores are throwing in the dumpster? That cuts back on both consumer and retailer waste.

There are already plenty of people, often called “freegans,” who do this.The term freegan, which blends together “free” and “vegan,” is finally becoming more widely known in mainstream culture -- even if it is a practice that has been around for as long as food itself.

Part money-saving opportunity, part political-statement, and part environmentalism, the modern freeganism movement -- also known simply as dumpster diving -- has spawned a culture of its own.

A new short documentary film, called “Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest,” intimately explores this culture. The film follows groups of dumpster divers in New York City and paints a portrait of the people who dig for wasted food.

The film because doesn’t try to pretentiously puff up the importance of dumpster diving, it simply provides a raw look at how it’s done. Freegans are in a way, the urban equivalent to our romanticized notion of indigenous cultures that “live off the land” and take only what they need.

Something to think about as you sit down for your Thanksgiving feast.

Occupied Cascadia Trailer from Cascadia Matters on Vimeo.

The first full-length known documentary on the bioregional movement happening in Cascadia is making its Portland premier this Sunday, October 7th at 7PM at Clinton Street Theater. If you’ve wondered what those blue, white and green flags are at various Occupy Portland events, wonder no more.

Exploring the emerging understanding of bioregionalism within the lands and waters of the Northeast Pacific Rim, the filmmakers interweave intimate landscape portraits with human voices both ideological and indigenous. Stories from the land contrast critique of dominant culture, while an embrace of the radical unknown informs a re-birthed and growing culture of resistance. Filming began during the outset of the populist “Occupy” movement, and finished by joining the voices seeking to re-contextualize popular revolt within our life-world as a movement to decolonize, un-occupy, and re-inhabit the living Earth through deep understanding and identification with our specific bioregions (literally “Life-Place”).

Film will be shown at 7PM with a Q&A period with the directors afterwards. For more information, contact cascadianmycelium (AT) gmail.com

website: Cascadiamatters.org

Clinton Street Theater – 2522 Clinton St. Portland, OR, Cascadia

Cost: $6 general admission, $5 student admission with ID, no one turned away for lack of funds. All money goes to continue showing this film and facilitating discussions with communities across Cascadia.

A culture jammer in London demonstrates several new ways to clean up mental toxins in our cities. Join his campaign against visual pollution and outdoor advertising at Liberated Landscapes.

Weeks before Republican Paul Ryan was selected to run for vice president, Sister Simone Campbell — who heads NETWORK, a Catholic policy and lobbying group – hit the road to protest the so-called “Ryan budget” recently passed by the House of Representatives. She and some of her sister nuns rolled across the heartland on a bus trip designed to arouse public concern over what the Ryan plan would mean for social services in America, especially its slashing of programs for the poor. Sister Simone says his budget is inconsistent with Catholic social teaching. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agrees.

[Via]

One year after the Madrid anti-capitalism riots of June 15, 28, and 29th, 2011...

The series of protests demands a radical change in Spanish politics, as protesters do not consider themselves to be represented by any traditional party nor favored by the measures approved by politicians.

Even though protesters form a heterogeneous and ambiguous group, they share a strong rejection of unemployment, welfare cuts, Spanish politicians, the current two-party system in Spain between the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the People's Party, as well as the current political system, capitalism, banks and bankers, political corruption and firmly support what they call basic rights: home, work, culture, health and education.

According to statistics published by RTVE, the Spanish public broadcasting company, between 6.5 and 8 million Spaniards have participated in these protests.

Please Note All times are Eastern Standard Time.

Latino Vote Matters: Immigration, Power, and an Interactive Look at the Map

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 10:30am, Ballroom A

The War on Voting

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 01:30pm, Ballroom A

Winning Without a Vote: Working with Federal Agencies to Advance a Progressive Agenda

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 03:00pm, Ballroom A

Safeguarding Democracy: Innovations in Technology and Human Rights

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 10:30am, Ballroom B

Intervention, Isolation and the Future of Progressive Security Policy

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 01:30pm, Ballroom B

The Worst Immigration Law in the United States

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 03:00pm, Ballroom B

Continue reading »

An interesting op-ed in today's New York Times is written by a Goldman Sachs executive, who announces his resignation in the opinion piece titled "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs."

You know things are bad when the quitting employees refer to the "Vampire Squid."

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
...
Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

The author, Greg Smith is - for a few more hours today - Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Goldman Sachs is already fighting back, and denying Mr. Smith's claims in where else but The Wall Street Journal.