Houses and sniffles

A Rhinovirus, courtesy of wikipedia. I think they magnified it a time or two.

There is a large and growing body of scientific research about how things like inequality, class and social status engrave themselves into our bodies. Generally speaking, people in higher social positions are less likely to develop conditions like heart disease or diabetes than those in lower positions. The same affect seems to apply to infectious diseases as well.

In a fascinating study, healthy adults first answered questions about their socio-economic status (SES) and that of their parents when they were growing up. They were then exposed to one of two forms of rhinovirus (aka common cold viruses) and kept in quarantine to monitor the symptoms.

Here's a surprising finding:

For both viruses, susceptibility to colds decreased with the number of childhood years during which their parents owned their home...This decreased risk was attributable to both lower risk of infection and lower risk of illness in infected subjects. Moreover, those whose parents did not own their home during their early life but did during adolescence were at the same increased risk as those whose parents never owned their home. These associations were independent of parent education level, adult education and home ownership, and personality characteristics.

The researchers concluded that "A marker of low income and wealth during early childhood is associated with decreased resistance to upper respiratory infections in adulthood. Higher risk is not ameliorated by higher SES during adolescence and is independent of adult SES."

In other words, poverty or relative deprivation during early childhood can have negative health affects throughout a lifetime. That's something to think about now, as the recession has driven more families on a downward economic spiral.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Half of all US children and 90 percent of African American young people do or will receive food stamps, according to a new study.

THIS NEEDS FIXED. The House version of health care reform would phase out the Children's Health Insurance Program. Senator Rockefeller is not amused. Nor is El Cabrero. This needs to be fixed in conference.

A FAMOUS UNREADABLE (FOR ME ANYWAY) ANTHROPOLOGIST has died at the age of 100.

HOW SMART ARE DOGS anyway?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Honk if you love the class system

In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen relates the story of an interesting experiment on American attitudes towards social class and status.

It had to do with honking horns and cars.

Two students drove around Burlington, Vermont, first in a new luxury car and then in an old junker. In each case, they would sit at a stoplight after the light turned green to see how long it would take drivers behind them to honk.

The results were pretty striking. It took less than seven seconds for drivers to honk at the junker, but almost twice as long (13.2 seconds) for them to honk at the luxury car.

When you consider that statistically speaking most of the honkers were working class people, this shows how many Americans unconsciously ascribe respect and deference to people who seem to enjoy a higher social position.

That explains a lot.

CHANGING OF THE GUARD. From Ken Ward's uberblog Coal Tattoo, here's a post about Rich Trumka, the new president of the AFLCIO. Trumka is former president of the UMWA.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. Here's a statement from Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on Senator Baucus' health care reform plans and here's Paul Krugman on whether the bill is or can be made to be up to snuff.

WHY THE #*$& DO WE CUSS? Dealing with pain may be part of the answer.

URGENT T REX UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Improvements in human longevity and physical well-being over the last hundred or so years have come more from improvements in public health than in the treatment of individual patients and diseases.

I'm just talking about the basics, like clean water and a sewage system. This is still an issue in many parts of the world. In the developing world today, diarrhea is the leading cause of child deaths--two million per year. Around six million people of all ages die from it annually.

Dr. James Gilligan, author of the 1996 Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, suggests that we take a public health approach to violence prevention and reduction at both the interpersonal and structural level.

Rather than conventional moralistic condemnations,

the only way to explain the causes of violence so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening (and often lethal) pathology which, like all forms of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen. To think of violence as evil--if we confuse hat value judgment about violence with an explanation of it--can only confuse us into thinking we have an explanation when we do not.

Based on experience over 25 years in working with violent offenders, Gilligan believes that he has identified the pathogen or "virus" that causes violence. And that pathogen is shame.

More on that tomorrow.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE UPPER CLASS? They're still there.

TWO FROM THE NEW YORKER. Here's George Packer on the future of movement conservatism. And here's an item on the elusive search for a cure for the common hangover.

NIRVANA. Not the band, the state of being. Here's an interesting article about a brain scientist who experienced it by way of having a stroke.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, more and more therapists and researchers are giving Buddhist-inspired mindfulness meditation a second look.

CLOSING A GAP. Some colleges are trying to break down the barriers between the sciences and the humanities.

DEATH'S DOOR. The Rev. Carroll Pickett, for years a prison chaplain at Huntsville, Texas who witnessed 95 executions, has come to oppose the death penalty and is the subject of a new film.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

EXPORTING GOOD JOBS

Caption: These guys are organized.

Yesterday's post looked at some of the benefits of union membership for working people. Short summary: better pay and benefits like health care, paid sick leave, vacations, and pensions. And the benefits of union membership compel many non-union employers to offer competitive benefits.

The fate of the middle class is inextricably linked to the fate of the labor movement.

An obvious question is, if that's the case, why don't more workers join unions? Membership has declined from more than 1/3 of the workforce after WWII to around 12 percent now, even though a recent survey suggests that 60 million workers would join a union if they could.

What's going on?

Part of it has to do with economic trends and policies. In El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, the United Mine Workers was once a huge union with tens of thousands of active members. That number has declined dramatically due to the mechanization of the mining industry. Other union-dense industries such as steel and textiles have been decimated due to deindustrialization, globalization and NAFTA like "free trade" policies. More recently, the privatization of public services has been a factor.

Those factors help explain the loss of union jobs. But there is another huge factor at work here as well: employer hostility and government collusion to prevent workers from organizing to start with.

About which more tomorrow.

PRESENT TENSE. On the same theme, here's a recent column by Bob Herbert on the future of labor.

CLASS BEATDOWN. Here's an item from the UK's Guardian about the US's one sided class war. Short sample:

Long ago the wealthy declared war on the poor in this country. The poor have yet to fight back.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, a woman in Texas believes she has found the remains of a legendary bloodsucking beast called a "chupacabra," which means goat-sucker in Spanish.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WEDGES OR BRIDGES? but first some cool stuff from WV

Caption: Workers rally at WV state capitol in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

BREAKING WV NEWS. It was a hot time in the old town yesterday when workers and citizens held a feisty rally in support of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in the capitol building of El Cabrero's Beloved State of West Virginia (ECBSWV).

(Briefly, EFCA would make it easier for workers to join unions, raise penalties for companies that threaten, fire or otherwise illegally intimidate workers trying to organize, and provide mediation and arbitration for first contracts. For more on EFCA, check the link on Monday's post.)

That bill has just been reported out of committee in the U.S. House of Representatives where it will soon face a floor vote.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LEGISLATURE, the WV House of Delegates yesterday passed a resolution in support of EFCA. I regret to say that I missed the debate, but I'm told the rhetoric was flying like minnie balls in a Civil War battle.

In another interesting WV note, reportedly 25 delegates have signed on to a resolution opposing the "surge" of troops in Iraq. This may come for a vote as soon as Monday.

The resolution is pretty Spartan. It simply states

That the West Virginia House of Delegates and the citizens of West Virginia will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and

Further resolved:

That the West Virginia House of Delegates disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.

Be it further resolved, That a suitable copy of this resolution shall be sent to George W. Bush, President of the United States, to the Congressional delegation of our state, and to the United States Congress.

OK, BACK TO A MAJOR NATIONAL ISSUE. One of the nastier aspects of political life for the last few decades has been the use of wedge issues which have been cynically exploited by clever operators.

Often, these have pitted the middle class against the poor and both against themselves for the benefit of the very wealthy.

It's the old divide and rule thing which I believe was first articulated by Julius Caesar, although the practice is older than him.

In the Feb. 2007 issue of Sojourners, Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, calls for the building of a "grand alliance" between the poor and the middle class.

The challenge to end poverty and improve economic opportunities for low-income households must be linked to the broad economic insecurity plaguing America’s middle class. As the concentration of income and wealth has reached historic proportions, Americans at the bottom and the middle of our income distribution have suffered the consequences. Rising costs of essentials—health care, housing, energy, college—are a shared anxiety. A reliance on high-cost debt, risky home finance (and refinance) deals, and the proliferation of predatory lending threaten to strip the working poor and the middle class of the few assets they can claim.

Some advocates for the poor may see this as a step back, but the fate of the two groups is linked.

And besides, purity is generally politically useless.

(El Cabrero, a modern day student of Aristotle, would argue that the main problem with the middle class is that it isn't big enough. I say let's get the poor folks in there too.)

Draut argues persuasively that

Unless we build a broad coalition around a shared agenda for the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution chart, it's very likely that the next generation will indeed be worse off than their parents.

As they say, do the math.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED