Monday, June 04, 2012

facts are facts are facts

Many Americans still have an almost cult-like belief that America is the greatest nation on earth. They systematically reject evidence suggesting we have significant room for improvement. It used to be everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. What is important? Truth is what you say it is and nothing anyone else says could possibly be true. Nothing can be accepted that conflicts with the belief that America is still the famed land of opportunity, can it?.

According to the Corruption Perception Index, America ranks 24th in the world (only slightly better than Qatar) for public sector corruption.

The US rank 25th (way behind our peer group) in the OECD for math scores among 15-year-olds.

With the best medical technology and treatment capability in the world  the United States ranks 37th for health system performance by the World Health Organization. America is 50th for longevity and 49th for infant mortality, barely ahead of Belarus, Croatia and Lithuania. The United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn't provide healthcare for all its citizens.

According to a UNICEF study the USA is second worst child-poverty rates out of  35 richer nations. Only Romania had a higher percentage of children living in relative poverty and actually as placed below Romania for the child poverty gap, which measures the gap between the poverty line and the median income of those below the poverty line.

 The wealth gap in the U.S. continues to benefit the wealthy. It benefits the CEO of a major bank who gets paid not 100 times more, but 900 times more than an average teller. 1% of the population has more than 40% of the wealth. There are more billionaires in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world yet one in seven Americans lives in poverty. 54 million Americans live in poverty. That includes one in four children. Forty million American are on food stamps (the highest ever) and the number is expected to rise to forty nine million by the end of 2012. 19 million people lived in working-poor families in 2008. The 2010 census showed a much higher figure approaching 24%. The Feeding America network reports that only 36 percent of their client households have one or more adults working.

American restaurants throw away more than 6000 tons of food every day and grocery stores discard an estimated thirty million pounds of food daily. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Loss Project estimates that Americans throw out 25.9 million tons of food each year. More disturbing: a University of Arizona study reports that 40 to 50 percent of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten.

Americans make up 5 percent of the world population and produces 25 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.

Just some unpleasant and unpalatable truths to ruminate upon.

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