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He couldnt have been blunter, could he? When President Donald Trump recently addressed the U.N. General Assembly for 15 minutes (whoops! I mean almost an hour!), he dismissed climate change as the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world and didn't stop there. I'm telling you, he assured the global leaders gathered in New York in late September, that if you don't get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. And he even added that the carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they're heading down a path of total destruction.
Well, that couldn't have been blunter, could it? And it wasn't just words either. Only recently, for instance, as the New York Times reported, his Interior Department announced that it would be opening a (mere) 13.1 million acres of federal land for yes, of course! coal mining, while reducing the royalty rates companies would need to pay to extract that coal. Oh, and as that paper also reported, The Energy Department said it would offer $625 million to upgrade existing coal plants around the country, which have been closing at a fast clip, in order to extend their life spans.
Hold on a second, while I wipe the sweat off my face, since its 80 degrees Fahrenheit today in my hometown of New York City with Fall officially already started. Honestly, what could possibly go wrong in such a (falling) world? Like the president, I just cant imagine. Fortunately, today's TomDispatch authors Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner certainly can. They happen to be experts on the history of how we humans have built and continue to build worlds that do indeed have the effect of doing us in. In fact, in the age of Donald Trump, the title of their latest work (which Smithsonian Magazine made its number-one best book of 2024) is all too sadly and appropriately Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History. And today, in the second era of You Know Who and, of course, his once-opponent and now merely the opponent of the rest of us, Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy Jr., let them explore just how (un)healthy the Trump years are likely to make us and how sadly that fits in with an all-American past of disease and death. Tom
Showered with Lies
Kennedy, Trump, and a Reckless Disregard for Science and the Truth
By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz
The Senate Finance Committee hearing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was explosive. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was accused of reckless disregard for science and the truth, and senators from both parties were openly hostile as they questioned him extensively on his vaccine policies, as well as the firing of scientific advisory board members and agency heads and their replacement with ideologically driven anti-vaccine supporters. During that more than three-hour session, he was called a charlatan and a liar, and he returned the insults.
The distrust of his honesty and integrity was palpable. The public health community already mistrusted his views on vaccines and the role of science. There was, however, some modest hope that he would at least follow through on his views on the environmental causes of chronic disease and the food industry's disastrous impact on obesity and diabetes, as well as other diseases. Sadly, that's been anything but the case and there's quite a history behind that reality.
A Long History of Public Health Disasters
In focusing on the environmental causes of disease, Kennedy was building on a public health tradition that saw disease, suffering, and death as, at least in part, a function of the worlds weve constructed for ourselves and others over time. Historically, some instances of unnecessary suffering are glaringly obvious. Take, for instance, the exploitation and often premature death of Africans enslaved and transported to the New World under conditions so inhumane that approximately 10% to 20% of them perished during what came to be known as the Middle Passage. And dont forget the suffering and early deaths of so many who survived and were consigned by Whites to forced labor in the American South, where the average life expectancy of a newborn slave child was less than 22 years, or about half that of a White infant of the same era.
Or, to take another example, in her famous 1906-1907 study Work-Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman, the feminist co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and a social reformer, wrote of 526 men who were killed in accidents in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and another 509 who suffered serious injuries in yes! a single year, arguing that many of those accidents would have been preventable had work conditions been different. As she grimly reported:
Seven men lost a leg, sixteen men were hopelessly crippled in one or both legs, one lost a foot, two lost half a foot, five lost an arm, three lost a hand, ten lost two or more fingers, two were left with crippled left arms, three with crippled right arms, and two with two useless arms. Eleven lost an eye, and three others had the sight of both eyes damaged. Two men have crippled backs, two received internal injuries, one is partially paralyzed, one feebleminded, and two are stricken with the weakness of old age while still in their prime.
Some aspects of the inevitable fatal disease or other devastating genetic and biological conditions are clearly affected by how societies care for their members. Historically, race, social class, geographic location, gender, age, and immigrant status have all been shown to have a tremendous impact on access to medical care and the quality of that care. The social and economic arrangements Americans created have shaped patterns of disease prevalence, distribution, and recovery over the course of our history.
Most obviously, a system dependent on slavery produced untold suffering and death among those most exploited; a commercial economy involving trade between various regions of the country and the world often lent a significant hand to the transmission of diseases from mosquitoes, rats, and other sources of infection. The development of cities with large immigrant populations gave landlords the opportunity to profit from renting airless tenements without adequate sewerage or pure water, producing epidemics of tuberculosis and cholera, among other diseases of poverty.Similarly, the disfiguring accidents and diseases caused by toxic chemicals were often a reflection of the rampant expansion of a laissez-faire industrial system that put profits above human life. And the Trump administrations decision to promote the use of coal and ignore the impact of a fossil-fuel-based economy on the climate and on health is perhaps the most glaring example today of the urge to maintain a world that is (all too literally) killing us.
Smallpox in the eighteenth century, along with typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, and cholera epidemics, and a plague of childhood diseases in the nineteenth century, were all exacerbated by the squalid conditions in which people lived. The industrial revolution created conditions for the development of epidemics of silicosis, lead poisoning, and asbestosis. In more recent decades, agricultural workers in the vineyards of California and elsewhere were regularly showered with pesticides while harvesting the food that agricultural companies packaged and sold to the nation.In that process, millions of people have suffered diseases and deaths that could have been avoided.
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