Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: We're Number One, On American Superiority by James Gustave Speth :

To see where America stands not so proud, consider the advanced, well-to-do democracies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the rich countries’ club. To focus on America’s peers, I am excluding the former Soviet bloc countries as well as Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Greece. In the remaining group of 20 affluent countries, America is, indeed, Number 1 or close to it in a number of categories: the 26 indicators of poor performance listed below.

It’s a good idea to set aside the rhetoric of national greatness and ask ourselves how we dropped to the basement on so many important issues—and what we should do to climb out.

To our great shame, America now has:

• The highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• The greatest inequality of incomes;
• The lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
• The lowest number of paid holiday, annual and maternity leaves;
• The lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• The worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;
• The lowest social mobility;
• The highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP, 
yet accompanied by the highest:
• Infant mortality rate
• Prevalence of mental health problems
• Obesity rate
• Portion of people going without health care due to cost
• Low birth weight children per capita (except for Japan)
• Consumption of anti-depressants per capita

That was just a partial list.  There are other good links, including one describing the radioactive water at the Fukashimi plant indicating at least a partial meltdown, one on the GOP's hispanic problem which fails to mention that Republicans probably shouldn't be so racist, and one that highlights Obama administration political review of emails prior to release for FOIA requests.