"The Weathering Away Of Poor People"

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The following article from The New York Times certainly seems to be an example from a topic discussed in Laura's thread titled, "America's Darkest Secret".

First a quote from the thread by Martha Rose Crow M.S.

American autogenicide is the deliberate, systematic, and legal murder of American citizens by socially engineering the die off of populations that are problematic fom the interests of wealth and power. Most victims prematurely die from social forces targeted at them to cause them to wear out by stress. This process is called "Weathering Away" or "Attrition by Stress"

If I had not previously read the information in Laura's thread, I may not have perceived it as a possible example in the pattern of "Attrition by Stress".

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/nyregion/05citywide.html?ex=1367726400&en=a13ab67ee1f35609&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

May 5, 2008
Citywide
The Lost Supermarket: A Breed in Need of Replenishment
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Even Kings and Queens are facing their own food crisis.

Kings and Queens Counties, that is.

A continuing decline in the number of neighborhood supermarkets has made it harder for millions of New Yorkers to find fresh and affordable food within walking distance of their homes, according to a recent city study. The dearth of nearby supermarkets is most severe in minority and poor neighborhoods already beset by obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

According to the food workers union, only 550 decently sized supermarkets — each occupying at least 10,000 square feet — remain in the city.

In one corner of southeast Queens, four supermarkets have closed in the last two years. Over a similar period in East Harlem, six small supermarkets have closed, and two more are on the brink, local officials said. In some cases, the old storefronts have been converted to drug stores that stand to make money coming and going — first selling processed foods and sodas, then selling medicines for illnesses that could have been prevented by a better diet.

The supermarket closings — not confined to poor neighborhoods — result from rising rents and slim profit margins, among other causes. They have forced residents to take buses or cabs to the closest supermarkets in some areas. Those with cars can drive, but the price of gasoline is making some think twice about that option. In many places, residents said the lack of competition has led to rising prices in the remaining stores.

The residents of the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, have been without their local supermarket since last year, when it was razed along with a strip of stores and restaurants to make room for new housing and retail developments. What used to be a quick jaunt across the street for Della Dorsett is now a tricky trek, as she maneuvers her electric wheelchair several blocks uphill along Myrtle Avenue, returning home with plastic bags dangling from handles and nestled between her feet.

“I’m tired of going uphill,” she said. “But we have nothing around here now. From Myrtle to St. Edwards and down to Flatbush, not one store.”

The lack of easily available fresh food has prompted city and state officials to convene several task forces to address the public health implications.

The recent study conducted by the Department of City Planning estimated that as many as three million New Yorkers live in what are considered high-need neighborhoods — communities characterized by not enough supermarkets and too many health problems. Within those dense, urban areas, the study estimated that 750,000 people live more than five blocks from a grocery or supermarket.

“Many people in low-income neighborhoods are spending their food budget at discount stores or pharmacies where there is no fresh produce,” said Amanda Burden, the city’s planning director. “In our study, a significant percentage of them reported that in the day before our survey, they had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables. Not one. That really is a health crisis in the city.”

The study, which was released last Friday, found that there is enough need in the city to support another 100 groceries or supermarkets. To spur supermarket growth, officials could consider using city-owned property or economic incentives, or relaxing requirements to make it easier to set up stores in areas zoned for manufacturing, Ms. Burden said.

“We have to determine why the stores are closing and what the barriers are,” Ms. Burden said. “Stimulating the investment of supermarket owners in these communities is essential to the future of the city.”

Jimmy Proscia, the co-manager of a Key Food in Flushing, says the business has gotten a lot harder in the 33 years since he started. Competitors, he said, cut costs by hiring nonunion workers. Big-box stores buy in bulk and further eat into his sales. Some days it looks like everybody is in the food business.

“You got gas stations now selling milk for $2.99,” he said. “Go to the drug store and they’re selling what we have. It’s ridiculous.”

In St. Albans, Queens, several empty supermarkets line the streets. Every day, Desiree Gaylord walks past a shuttered Associated store on Farmers Boulevard and on to her elderly mother’s house.

“Before I go to work, I call to see what she needs,” Ms. Gaylord said. “I’ll buy it somewhere else and bring it to her. I don’t know why they closed that store. It was an asset, especially for the elderly. Now I see them on the bus with the shopping carts.”

She walked down the street, past the corner house where Elizabeth Lopez moved in just last month. Ms. Lopez had been told there were plenty of places to shop in her new neighborhood. What she found were bodegas. By the time she gets home from her job driving a school bus, the closest supermarket is usually closed. So she drives to Brooklyn each week for her groceries.

“My husband hasn’t even seen this house yet because he’s been in Puerto Rico dealing with his relatives,” she said. “He is going to have a fit. He likes his stores close by.”

The residents who live in the high-rises and private homes that ring Bruckner Plaza in the Bronx can relate to that. Their local supermarket, a Key Food on White Plains Road and the Bruckner Expressway, is the only one south of the expressway, tucked into a corner of the outdoor shopping center that also features a Kmart and assorted smaller stores.

Executives at Pick Quick Foods, which owns the supermarket, say that Vornado Realty Trust, which bought the shopping plaza for $165 million last year, wants to double their rent to $50 a square foot. They fear the landlord wants to push them out.

Pick Quick used to own 15 Key Food stores, which are part of a buying cooperative. Now they are down to six. The smaller stores — those under 10,000 square feet — could not make enough of a profit to stay open. Other stores were priced out of their spaces by rent increases.

At stake at the Bronx store are more than 100 jobs, many of them filled by local residents, including teenagers and single mothers. Some of the employees more or less grew up in the business, starting as teenagers with part-time, unionized jobs. The pay and benefits have helped them support their families, and even prosper.

“What does this job mean to me?” said James Hutcherson, the store’s frozen foods manager. “I got a house and a daughter in college. That’s what I got out of this place.”

He is 46, and values his job so much that he takes three buses each day from his house in Queens. Both his father and his uncle worked for the company.

“I’m used to the people around here,” he said. “I’m used to the whole neighborhood.”

He excused himself to help a customer find several bags of ravioli that were on sale. Nearby, Efrain Rosa, 66, carefully read the list of ingredients on some Lean Cuisine meals. He is a diabetic, and he has to watch his diet. Like other older people in the neighborhood, he is worried that if Key Food closes, the shopping choices on his side of Bruckner Boulevard would be severely limited. Getting to the next closest supermarket — a Pathmark on the north side of the boulevard — would add more than a half-mile to the round-trip walk. Other options are not appealing.

“There is a grocery store across from me,” he acknowledged. “But they don’t carry the kind of groceries we want. Of course, their prices are higher too.”

Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents the store’s workers, have made this Key Food in the Bronx the poster child for a citywide campaign to preserve local supermarkets.

“We’re at a point where landlords do not feel any concern that they are taking supermarkets out of communities,” said Pat Purcell, the union’s director of special projects. “They just want to maximize their profit. I get that, up to a point. But food is different. It affects your health.”

Wendi Kopsick, a spokeswoman for Vornado, said she would not comment on the record about the company’s plans to renew Key Food’s lease. But Vornado’s Web site lists the Bronx parcel as available for “proposed retail.”

Whatever plans the company has for the site are bound to face opposition from the local community board, whose members expect to meet with Vornado executives this week. Enrique Vega, the chairman of Community Board 9 in the Bronx, said the board would not allow anything but a supermarket on the site.

“They are in deep trouble if they think they are going to put another type of store there,” Mr. Vega said. “They’ll need a variance or an agreement with the community board, and they are not going to get it. We want a supermarke

This decline in the number of supermarkets in New York City neighborhoods is troubling as that it adds to the stress already experienced due to the massive restructuring of schools undertaken by the Bloomberg Adminsistration since 2003. In addition, as private developers move in to raze neighborhoods "for development" (Code for forcing poor people out), the stress increases even more. Add to that, lack of health care, a recession with its corresponding job loss and uncertainty, inflation, and the challenge of putting children through college, and the result is major stress.

Here is the rest of Martha's Crow's excerpt as quoted in Laura's thread:

What Autogenocide Means

Auto comes from the Greek reflexive pronoun while genocide comes from the Latin words gens meaning "race, tribe" and -cidere meaning "kill." (source: http://wikipedia.org)

Although it has to be "legal," autogenocide is always committed under the radar so the media won't be compelled to report it and so the people won't see it or understand it. More, the genocide is blamed on the victims and their deaths are hidden-attributed-to other causes rather than the primary one of autogenocide.

What is different between this genocide and other genocides is that this unique genocide doesn't produce mass graves.Instead, the victims are spread over a large geographic area and buried singly, thereby hiding the body count. This keeps the deaths sanitized and homogenized. It also keeps the autogenocide surreal; thus enabling the village to deny It's existence when clues to It's existence are ambundant and abundantly transparent.

Six Primary Factors to Genocide

There are six primary factors underlying genocide. First, there is an overpopulation of people from groups that are not economically or socially important and/or viable to the political and economic elite.

Second, genocides usually happen in times of shortages. The shortage behind the current American autogenocide is work. America is losing jobs while the population continues to grow. The wealthy and industry are loathe to pay taxes to support negative or low producers (useless eaters) because the costs of maintaining these people (via increased taxes and social costs) affects their profits and earnings.

- Note: At the time of this writing, food shortages have been added to the job shortages.
In addition to the actual shortages in food, the Times article identifies a new
condition causing stress: the shortage of outlets for food distribution.
-WEBGLIDER

More, when there are too many people in times of great shortages, they become restless and can group together to force democratic and social changes the economic/political/military elite don't want and work tirelessly and relentlessly against.

The third factor is that genocides are common to patriarchal societies. The stronger the institutional and cultural patriarchy, the stronger the chances for acts of genocide to exist, whether external or internal.

Threat to power (now or in the future) is the fourth underlying factor of genocide. For example, approximately one-third of all Americans are minorities and that number is expected to rise unless that population begins to die off. If minorities become the majority, the old, established rule of the country by white male elite will not hold for long unless the country becomes a dictatorship.

The fifth primary factor to genocide is that women and children are the primary targets. Women are exterminated because of their fertility. Eliminate them and the next generation of unwanted people will automatically be eliminated or at least be considerably downsized. This applies to the elimination of children as well.

Six, modern autogenocides don't happen without the help of the media. They constantly distribute the propaganda preparing the village psyche for acceptance of the deaths. They officially ignore the suffering and premature death, thus lending approval to its justification and execution.

As good servants to the status quo, the media "hides" the parts of America the ruling and economic elite don't want the majority of the village to see. Only when a fluke thing happens, like an Act of God like Hurricane Katrina, will America see its other, darker side. Now even that has faded and become buried as the national media has mostly forgotten it at the request of their elite masters. Autogenocide has to be hidden until all the people that are considered liabilities (debit people) in the books of the Patriarchal Capitalist Country are disappeared.

There is much more information in Laura's thread, "America's Darkest Secret" that provide explain the paradigm for the conditions that we are seeing unfold today.

I found an article today in "The New York Times" that may be being used to test public opinion on denying health care to elderly people who have chronic conditions. The setting of the article is in a wealthy senior citizens' residende. The concept is called slow-medicine, a seemingly benign term for a policy of not using aggressive treatments in the elderly. The cases presented in the article did seemed to justify this policy by allowing those who chose it to die with dignity.

My concern is that it will be imposed and mandated against poor older people who are not as old as the people in the article, and may have years of life left if treated. Here is the article. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/health/05slow.html?ex=1367726400&en=1b4e1a08fd8b7247&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

May 5, 2008
For the Elderly, Being Heard About Life’s End
By JANE GROSS
HANOVER, N.H. — Edie Gieg, 85, strides ahead of people half her age and plays a fast-paced game of tennis. But when it comes to health care, she is a champion of “slow medicine,” an approach that encourages less aggressive — and less costly — care at the end of life.

Grounded in research at the Dartmouth Medical School, slow medicine encourages physicians to put on the brakes when considering care that may have high risks and limited rewards for the elderly, and it educates patients and families how to push back against emergency room trips and hospitalizations designed for those with treatable illnesses, not the inevitable erosion of advanced age.

Slow medicine, which shares with hospice care the goal of comfort rather than cure, is increasingly available in nursing homes, but for those living at home or in assisted living, a medical scare usually prompts a call to 911, with little opportunity to choose otherwise.

At the end of her husband’s life, Ms. Gieg was spared these extreme options because she lives in Kendal at Hanover, a retirement community affiliated with Dartmouth Medical School that has become a laboratory for the slow medicine movement. At Kendal, it is possible — even routine — for residents to say “No” to hospitalization, tests, surgery, medication or nutrition.

Charley Gieg, 86 at the time, was suffering from a heart problem, an intestinal disorder and the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease when doctors suspected he also had throat cancer.

A specialist outlined what he was facing: biopsies, anesthesia, surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. Ms. Gieg doubted he had the resilience to bounce back. She worried, instead, that such treatments would accelerate his downward trajectory, ushering in a prolonged period of decline and dependence. This is what the Giegs said they feared even more than dying, what some call “death by intensive care.”

Such fears are rarely shared among old people, health care professionals or family members, because etiquette discourages it. But at Kendal — which offers a continuum of care, from independent living apartments to a nursing home — death and dying is central to the conversation from Day 1.

So it was natural for Ms. Gieg to stay in touch with Joanne Sandberg-Cook, a nurse practitioner there, during her husband’s out-of-town consultation.

“I think that it is imperative that none of this be rushed!” Ms. Sandberg-Cook wrote in an e-mail message to Ms. Gieg. The doctor the Giegs had chosen, the nurse explained, “tends to be a ‘do-it-now’ kind of guy.” But the Giegs’ circumstances “demand the time to think about all the what-ifs.”

Ms. Sandberg-Cook asked whether Mr. Gieg would want treatment if he was found to have cancer. If not, why go through a biopsy, which might further weaken his voice? Or risk anesthesia, which could accelerate her husband’s dementia?

“Those are the very questions on my mind, too,” Ms. Gieg replied. The Giegs took their time, opted for no further tests or treatment, and Charley came back to the retirement community to die.

Such decisions are not made lightly, and not without debate, especially in an aging society.

Many in their 80s and 90s — and their boomer children — want to pull out all the stops to stay alive, and doctors get paid for doing a procedure, not discussing whether it should be done. The costliest patients — the elderly with chronic illnesses — are the only group with universal health coverage under Medicare, leading to huge federal expenditures that experts agree are unsustainable as boomers age.

Most of that money is spent at certain academic medical centers, which offer the most advanced tests, the newest remedies, the most renowned specialists. According to the Dartmouth Health Atlas, which ranks hospitals on the cost and quantity of medical care to elderly patients, New York University Medical Center in Manhattan, for instance, spends $105,000 on an elderly patient with multiple chronic conditions during the last two years of life; U.C.L.A. Medical Center spends $94,000. By contrast, the Mayo Clinic’s main teaching hospital in Rochester, Minn., spends $53, 432.

The chief medical officer at U.C.L.A., Dr. Tom Rosenthal, said that aggressive treatment for the elderly at acute care hospitals can be “inhumane,” and that once a patient and family were drawn into that system, “it’s really hard to pull back from it.”

“The culture has a built-in bias that everything that can be done will be done,” Dr. Rosenthal said, adding that the pace of a hospital also discourages “real heart-to-heart discussions.”

Beginning that conversation earlier, as they do at Kendal, he said, “sounds like fundamentally the right way to practice.”

That means explaining that elderly people are rarely saved from cardiac arrest by CPR, or advising women with broken hips that they may never walk again, with or without surgery, unless they can stand physical therapy.

“It’s almost an accident when someone gets what they want,” said Dr. Mark B. McClellan, a former administrator of Medicare and now at the Brookings Institution. “Personal control, quality of life and the opportunity to make good decisions is not automatic in our system. We have to do better.”

The term slow medicine was coined by Dr. Dennis McCullough, a Dartmouth geriatrician, Kendal’s founding medical director and author of “My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing Slow Medicine, the Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aging Loved One.”

Among the hard truths, he said, is that 9 of 10 people who live into their 80s will wind up unable to take care of themselves, either because of frailty or dementia. “Everyone thinks they’ll be the lucky one, but we can’t go along with that myth,” Dr. McCullough said.

Ms. Sandberg-Cook agrees. “If you’re never again going to live independently or face an indeterminate period in a disabled state, you may have to reorganize your thinking,” she said. “You need to understand what you face, what you most want to avoid and what you most want to happen.”

Kendal begins by asking newcomers whether they want to be resuscitated or go to the hospital and under what circumstances. “They give me an amazingly puzzled look, like ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ “ said Brenda Jordan, Kendal’s second nurse practitioner.

She replies with CPR survival statistics: A 2002 study, published in the journal Heart, found that fewer than 2 percent of people in their 80s and 90s who had been resuscitated for cardiac arrest at home lived for one month. “They about fall out of their chairs when they find out the extent to which we’ll go to let people choose,” Ms. Jordan said.

Kendal, where the average age is 84, is generally not a place where people want heroics. Dr. George Klabaugh, 88, a resident and retired internist, found himself at the center of controversy a few years back when he tried to revive a 93-year-old neighbor who had collapsed from cardiac arrest during a theatrical performance. Dr. Klabaugh, who was unaware that the man had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, said he regretted his “automatic reaction,” a vestige of a professional training that predisposes most physicians to aggressive care.

Ms. Jordan surveyed Kendal residents and found only one that wanted CPR — Brad Dewey, 92, who dismissed the statistics. “I want them to try anyway,” he said. “Our daughter saved a man on a tennis court. Who’s to say I won’t recover?”

Some of the 400 residents, who pay $120,000 to $400,000 for an entry fee, and monthly rent from $2,000, which includes all health care, pursue no-holds-barred treatment longer than others. One woman, for example, arrived with cardiac and pulmonary disease but was still capable of living in her own apartment. First, she had cataract surgery that left her vision worse. Next, during surgery to replace a worn-out artificial hip, her thigh bone snapped. She spent a year in bed and wound up with blood clots. Then she broke the other leg.

Only then, Ms. Jordan said, did the woman decide to forgo further surgery or hospitalizations. The woman was too ill to be interviewed.

Some of those most in tune with slow medicine are the adult children who watch a parent’s daily decline. Suzanne Brian, for one, was grateful that her father, then 88 and debilitated by congestive heart failure, was able to stop medications to end his life.

“It wasn’t ‘Oh, you have to do this or do that,’ “ Ms. Brian said. “It was my father’s choice. He could have changed his mind at any time. They slowly weaned him from the meds and he was comfortable the whole time. All he wanted was honor and dignity, and that’s what he got.”

Again, I am concerned that this article is being used in the same way as the articles attacking the social safety net are always being used. First they present a negative reason why the current situation is harmful; then they suggest a solution that sounds benign but may actually be genocidal in its aim.