As Charles Blow points out, the US has highest infant mortality rate among the "advanced economies." (Let's examine that "advanced economy" claim later.) The path that got us to where we are began in... You know answer. It began with the "R" president, Republican and Reagan. We were at 13th in 1980 having lost a couple of points during the Nixon era. Between 1980 and 2000, we shot up to 2nd highest and achieved "highest" during the Bush era.
During the Bush administration, private organizations tried to do something about it and began to succeed. Now Republicans in Congress are about to put a stop to progress. Blow lists the proposals.
• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.
This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood.
So here's the bottom line. Republicans force women to remain pregnant and then, as a society, deliberately abandon infants.
It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?
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Are we indeed the "advanced economy" we claim to be? That may be a little like calling a killer missile "an advanced aircraft." How can an economy be "advanced" if it's immoral?
Joe Nocera, Times columnist, wonders about the latest signs of immorality. Leaving aside all the skullduggery we saw at Goldman Sachs and other investment banks like Lehman, Nocera focuses on the Justice Department's decision to let Angelo Mozilo off the hook.
Late last week, word leaked out that Mr. Mozilo, who had co-founded Countrywide Financial in 1969 — and, for nearly 40 years, presided over its astonishing rise and its equally astonishing fall — would not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Not for insider trading. Not for failing to disclose to investors his private worries about subprime loans. Not for helping to create a culture at Countrywide in which mortgage originators were rewarded for pushing fraudulent loans on borrowers.
In its article about the Justice Department’s decision, The Los Angeles Times said prosecutors had concluded that Mr. Mozilo’s actions “did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.”
Just months earlier, the Justice Department concluded that Joe Cassano shouldn’t take the fall for the financial crisis either. Mr. Cassano, you’ll recall, is the former head of the financial products unit of the American International Group, a man whose enthusiasm for credit-default swaps led, pretty directly, to the need for a huge government bailout of A.I.G. There was a time when it appeared that there was no way the government would let Mr. Cassano walk. But it did.
There are plenty of crash-related perps out there to keep the Department of Justice busy for a long time and no sane reason why they shouldn't be pursued. Well, yes there is one big reasons. Between the savings and loan crisis and now, we have drained the resources of the departments investigating financial crimes. Here's something that should make your ears perk up: we switched them over to "terrorism."
Before you even get into the politics of that, think about the damage done to Americans by terrorism compared to the damage done by financial malfeasance. From bad loans to bad mortgages, financial crimes have knocked down rows of World Trade Centers, buried millions of Americans in debt, and left them homeless and jobless. You'd kind of think someone would have to pay for all that.
Nope. Worse, the perps don't even think they're guilty.
A few days ago, I listened to a recording of a lengthy interview with Mr. Mozilo conducted by investigators working for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and posted recently on the commission’s Web site. It was a remarkable performance; Mr. Mozilo expressed no regrets and no remorse. He extolled subprime loans as a way to allow lower-income Americans to get a piece of the American dream and “really build wealth” — just like people used to do during the housing bubble. He bragged that Countrywide, unlike the too-big-to-fail banks, never took a penny of government money. He said that Countrywide had helped put 25 million Americans in homes.
His voice rising passionately, he said finally, “Countrywide was one of the greatest companies in the history of this country.”
Which is a final reason Mr. Mozilo would have been difficult to prosecute. Delusion is an iron-clad defense.
