Your good deed of the day

Today's post is going to be short if not sweet. Please take a few minutes today to call your senators and congressional representatives and urge them to act now to extend unemployment insurance.

As I noted yesterday, if this doesn't happen in the lame duck session of Congress it may not happen at all, which will mean more misery for millions of Americans still stranded in the wake of the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

Here's a toll-free number courtesy of the WV AFLCIO:

1-877-662-2889

and here's another supplied by US Action:

1-866-606-1189

THE PEOPLE SAY "AMEN!" A brand new public opinion poll shows massive support for maintaining unemployment insurance.

SPINE OR NO SPINE? Time (but not a lot of it) will tell for the lame duck congress.

ONCE UPON A TIME, political leaders used to think big about creating full employment.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, Americans believe some weird things.

DON'T DRINK THE WATER. Hundreds of residents of southern WV headed to Charleston for mediation in a lawsuit against Massey Energy over contaminated water from coal slurry injections.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Two bad ideas

Two bad dogs.

It occurs to El Cabrero after reflecting on human history that two really bad ideas have shown up over and over and done lots of harm.

The first one is the belief that we can do X to Y and it will be over and there will be no consequences.

The second is that we can do whatever we want over here and it will have no effect anywhere else.

Does the Gentle Reader have any other suggestions?

IT'S ALIVE. There is movement on health care reform in the US Senate.

AND SO IS support for a public option in health care reform.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH, coal may not be all that good for it.

THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY may have been heart disease.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Strip mining for Jesus

You never know what you're going to find when you browse through the vent lines in the local paper. Occasionally, however one comes across a real gem. Here's one from the Saturday Charleston Gazette-Mail:

Jesus will be awfully angry when he comes back and we didn't use the resources and the coal in the mountains that his Father, God in Heaven, put there for us

.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, enviros!

Sad to say, but that may not be an unrepresentative sample of the state of theological end ecological opinion amongst the "friends of coal."

PUBLIC OPTION. Reports of its death appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

AFTER REFORM--WHAT? Here's Paul Krugman looking ahead on health care.

WE HAPPY (NOT SO) FEW. Historians are reassessing the battle of Agincourt, made famous by Shakespeare's Henry V. The new research may be right, but I like the Bard's version.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Demand and control

Edith is stressing out the turkeys.

El Cabrero has been blogging off and on about how social status affects health and longevity. As mentioned previously, there's a really clear social gradient that seems to work all up and down the scale.

Those in the highest status positions are healthier and live longer than those with "only" high status positions, who live longer than those with moderate social status positions, and so on.

One key factor in all this, according to British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, is having a sense of autonomy and control over life and work. This tends to increase as you climb the ladder and decreases as you descend it. In The Status Syndrome, Marmot cites research that finds that high demand/low control work situations are particularly toxic.

This problem isn't limited to the workplace however. A typical low income person in the US can face control/autonomy issues all the time, i.e. by living in an unsafe neighborhood and/or in bad housing; facing economic insecurity, from juggling bills to dealing with evictions or foreclosures; and dealing with conflicts with landlords, neighbors, bill collectors, etc. These kinds of experience trigger the body's stress reaction and change body chemistry and hormone production.

And here we face an evolutionary lag. Our bodies developed the stress response (or fight or flight syndrome) to deal with short term dangers and threats. If the stress is chronic, this can trigger all kinds of problems, ranging from heart disease to mental disorders such as depression...all of which explains why diseases and early mortality are as unequally distributed as wealth and status, albeit in the other direction.

PUBLIC OPTION. Here's the latest on health care reform in the Senate.

OUCH. The US economy has lost over 5 percent of jobs since Dec. 2007. The numbers are much higher in some areas than others.

KING SOLOMON DON'T LIVE 'ROUND HERE. This analysis from the Charleston Daily Mail talks about how hard it will be to find "balance" in current coal controversies.

THE LATEST TWIST in the Megan Williams saga is here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That's just the stress talking

Workplace stress is probably not a major issue for this green heron.

Goat Rope has been running an off and on series lately about the links between social status health. The short version is that there is a big connection between the two and that people's health tends to be better the higher up the social ladder they are.

It's not just that people who are poor and/or have relatively low social standing get sicker and die younger, although that is true as far as it goes. Rather, it's like a social gradient that works all the way up or down. People who have very high status are healthier than people who just have high status. And so it goes.

British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, who has spent decades studying this, identifies some key components that might explain the gradient. One big one has to do with autonomy and a sense of control. This is especially true in the workplace.

While most people on the job talk about stress, research indicates that not all stresses are created equal. As Marmot puts it,

Ask more successful people if they are stressed at work and they will tell you, in slightly macho fashion, about how many e-mails they receive a day, how much in demand they are, how many different tasks await their attention, about their deadlines. If you ask about stress, they are unlikely to tell you that work is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; that they die a little when they come to work each day because their work touches no part of them that is them. But this is the reality of many jobs; and the lower the status, the more likely that is to be so. Ask the people with all the e-mails which job they would rather be doing, the high-status job with continuous demands, and the company BMW and the firm's credit card, or the soul-destroying job with tasks that ask for little use of skills, that are completely determined by others, and, oh yes, that offer little in the way of self-fulfillment, financial rewards, or status enhancement. There are not too many high-status people who would swap their "stressed" place in the boardroom for a place on the production line.

More on that to come.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. A new poll shows strong support for a public option.

TWO CENTS MORE. Here's economist Dean Baker on the same.

CHILD WELFARE. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia doesn't come out too well in this report.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. There's been another strange turn of events.

URGENT GIANT SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

All shook up

Engraving of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

Goat Rope has been running an occasional series lately about how things like inequality and social status affect health and mortality. Brief recap: they do; a lot; all across the board.

Some factors already examined include things like money and material conditions, while others have more to do with one's relative position within a given society. Another key factor is power, as in one's ability to have some control over what life throws at us.

Michael Marmot uses an interesting analogy in The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity,

Imagine that if you were caught in an earthquake you could simply turn it off. Earthquakes might, then, be part of life's rich tapestry instead of being an uncontrollable stress. Imagine further that your ability to turn it off depended on your place in the social hierarchy. High-status people could turn it off at will; low-status people could not affect it at all; and there were gradations of power over earthquakes from top to bottom of the social ladder. If stress led to illness, such differences in power could have a profound affect on the health gradient. Stress does, and differences in power do.

We've recently been reminded of the terrible power that real earthquakes have over people in areas prone to them. But metaphorical earthquakes, in the form of shocks over which we have little control and which we can't predict, happen all the time and people at the lower end of the money/status/power spectrum are the hardest hit.

More on this to come.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Here are two items highlighting the need for action to create employment and here is something on the Obama administration's likely response.

PUBLIC OPTION. The administration has been quietly trying to build support for it, according to this McClatchy report.

SCORE A POINT FOR ZEN. Sometimes nonsense or things that defy rational expectations can jog creative thinking. El Cabrero feels vindicated.

URGENT T REX COUSIN UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Pre-Copernican economics

The astronomer Ptolemy, circa 90-168 AD.

Lately Goat Rope has been looking at some of the flaws of some schools of economic of economic theory, especially those of the market fundamentalist variety with their warped view of humans as organic calculators.

Just as I was about to head once more into the breech, a friend passed on a link to this op-ed from the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson that speaks my mind. Here are the first three paragraphs:

"The worldly philosophers" was economist Robert Heilbroner's term for such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Today's free-market economists, by contrast, aren't merely not philosophers. They're not even worldly.

Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk.

As it was with the pre- (or anti-) Copernicans, so it is with today's mainstream economists. Theirs is an elegant system, a thing of beauty in itself, as the New York Times' Paul Krugman has argued. It just fails to jell with reality. And unlike the pre-Copernicans, whose dogma posed a threat to those who challenged it but not, at least directly, to anyone else, their latter-day equivalents in the economic profession pose a clear and present danger to the well-being of damned near everyone.

The rest is here and methinks it's well worth reading.

IT'S NOT OVER YET. Support for a public option in health care reform is high despite Tuesday's vote in the Senate finance committee.

WHACKADOODLES revisited.

THE OFFICE-CAR is a dangerous place.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The ultimatum game--don't monkey around with it

Don't offer this guy a bum deal.

A classic experiment in behavior economics challenges the image of people as rational agents who always act in their own material self interest. It's called the ultimatum game and it works like this:

there are two players, one with say $10 and the other with nothing. Player A decides how to split the money and makes a take it or leave it offer to Player B. Player B can either accept what is offered or veto the whole deal.

While it would technically be in Player B's rational interest to accept whatever is offered, even if it's only $1, most people in that position insist on a fairer division, even if it means walking away from a bad deal with nothing at all.

In most games, the average amount offered was $4.71. When people in Player B's position were asked what the lowest amount they would take would be, the average answer was $2.59. As Michael Marmot put in in The Status Syndrome,

"Players were prepared to tolerate a degree of inequality if the absolute reward to them was great enough. But if the inequality increased sufficiently, or the absolute rewarded went down enough, the game wasn't worth it, and they opted for both getting nothing."

That's also the way some monkeys play it. James Surowiecki in an old New Yorker column relates the following:

...the primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal released a study showing that female brown capuchin monkeys seem to have a sense of fairness, too. Pairs of capuchins had been trained to give Brosnan pebbles in exchange for slices of cucumber. This idyllic monkey market economy was disrupted, though, when the scientists changed the pay scale, rewarding one monkey with a delicious grape and the other with the same measly old cucumber. Exposed to this injustice, the capuchins who were given cucumbers often refused to eat; forty per cent of the time, they stopped trading entirely. Things got worse when one monkey in each pair was given a grape for doing nothing at all. The other monkeys often responded by tossing away their pebbles; eighty per cent of the time, they stopped trading. The capuchins were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to express their displeasure at their partners’ unearned riches.

The point was not—as some of the news coverage suggested—that capuchins are innate sharers. (The capuchin who got the grape showed no inclination to give it up.) The monkeys want to distribute things fairly, not equally. They seem to believe that there should be a clear connection between work and pay. One variation of the ultimatum game shows that humans feel this way, too: instead of randomly assigning the proposer role, the researchers had the participants take a trivia quiz beforehand, and the ones who did best became proposers. Not one of their offers was rejected; apparently, people believed that a proposer who might be worthy of his status deserved to keep more of the money.

Our sense of fairness, in other words, demands that there be at least some relationship (however tenuous) between accomplishment and reward...

It looks like a sense of justice is a primate thing.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, justice lost a round yesterday in the US Senate finance committee. WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's public option amendment to the Baucus health care reform bill was voted down. It's not over yet as there is still a chance to amend the bill on the floor or when the House and Senate meet to reconcile their bills.
Here's a big Goat Rope "Thank You!" to Rockefeller for fighting the good fight.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s might have had a silver lining, according to this scientific study. Thanks to a certain hermit for passing this along.

IN THE HOLE. Economist Dean Baker takes on the deficit here.

ADVICE FOR PARENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN: talk early, talk often.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

It's relative

Would you rather be a big cat or a small dog?

Developments in behavioral economics have challenged the old idea of humans as belonging to the species "homo economicus," a fabled creature that purportedly rationally acts in accord with its material self interest. Real humans often have other priorities, including things like a need for social status and a sense of fairness (which admittedly aren't always compatible).

One experiment cited by Michael Marmot in The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity is a case in point:

...people are asked to imagine two situations. First, you live in a society where the average income is $100,000 and your income is $125,000. Now consider a new situation. Average incomes are now $200,00 and your income is $175,000. In the two societies, a dollar has the same purchasing power. Which situation would you prefer?

If people were really out to go for the bottom line, they would pick scenario #2. In reality, most people pick #1. As Marmot puts it, "They would rather sacrifice material gains for better social standing."

There are several ways to interpret these results. One would be that people are obsessed not just with keeping up with the Joneses but with burying them in the dust. A more charitable interpretation--and one that makes sense in light of other research--is that a key factor in peoples' sense of well being, and even of health and mortality, is the ability to fully participate in society.

Being at a material disadvantage in comparison with others in the same society can limit our sense of being able to fully participate. For that matter, a lot of research on things from health to violence indicates that relative poverty, i.e. one's position in comparison with others, is a major factor in causing lots of problems--and not just for those who are relatively poor.

More on this to come.

PAYING MORE TO DIE SOONER. Here's another critique of the American health care system.

ONE THING NOT TO FEAR, Dean Baker argues, is the public option in health care reform.

By the way, I heard last week that the vote on the public option may take place today in the Senate. I don't know whether this has changed. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea to make yet another call.

STATING THE OBVIOUS. The AFLCIO blog points out that millions of Americans already rely on government-provided health care. And they're not trying to get rid of it.

INCONSISTENCIES. This Gazette op-ed by a friend of mine looks at some of these on the right.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Getting warmer

This is Holden 22, where Don Blankenship's Labor Day inversion was held. The picture was taken when there was still a mountain there.

I had planned on leading with another topic today, but an item from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo blog caught my eye.

Since Labor Day, I've written here and elsewhere about the contrast between the United Mine Workers of America and Don Blankenship's effort to present himself as the voice and protector of coal miners. The subject of Ward's post, an interview with union president Cecil Roberts on Living on Earth, is a case in point.

In contrast to Blankenship and allies, who are taking the position that climate change cannot be real because it may cut into their profits, UMWA president Cecil Robert admits that it's a reality that must be faced. Roberts said:

The union has never taken a position arguing against the science of climate change. We've engaged in the debate as to how to deal with it.

That realistic response to a problem from labor is a welcome contrast to the ruling class hissy fit we've been subjected to lately. It shows once again the need for workers to have a voice independent of their employers. It is also reason #9484 why we need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

SPEAKING OF HISSY FITS, here's Dean Baker on the opposition to a public option in health care reform.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Washington Post columnist Marie Cocco pointing out that we already have several public options and they're working pretty well. Senator Rockefeller said yesterday that he wouldn't support a bill without one.

STILL THERE. Cost of health insurance have increased faster than wages and inflation.

WONKY BUT IMPORTANT. Parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dealing with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), can be used to do interesting things like beef up emergency assistance for families or even create subsidized employment. The catch is that states have to be willing to do it. Here's info about the possibilities. This is something I'm going to be pushing for with folks in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Inequality and health

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Topics like economic inequality and health outcomes show up frequently in this blog, but lately I've been nudged into looking at the overlap between the two. In the public health field, a growing amount of attention has been paid to what is called the "social determinants of health," which kind of is what it sounds like.

A large body of scientific research has shown that how long we live and how well we are is influenced in no small degree by our social standing. It has long been known that life can be nasty brutish and short for the very poor, but the latest research shows that this applies all across the board.

This also means that negative health outcomes increase as inequality grows.

It's not all about money or education level, although they are a major part of it. As Michael Marmot put it in The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity,

...for people above a certain threshold of material well-being, another kind of well-being is central. Autonomy--how much control you have over your life--and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participation are crucial for health, well-being, and longevity. It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient and health. Degrees of control and participation underlie the status syndrome.

In our society, autonomy and participation are closely correlated with income and education. And, as I've written about many times before, one of the nastiest things about poverty is that it robs you of both. The interesting thing about the latest research is that it shows the effect of status on health at all levels of education and income. In other words, it's everybody's business.

More on this to come.

HOW DID I MISS THIS? Here's a major NY Times article about water quality that highlights mining's effect on health in West Virginia. And here's way more on the subject from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

HEALTH CARE. One positive feature of proposed health care reform is an expansion of eligibility for Medicaid benefits, but the politics are complicated. And here is an op-ed by a friend about the public option.

UNEMPLOYMENT is up in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, but is still below the national average.

HEALTH ADVICE. Your mama got it right sometimes. Other times, not so much.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

How to spot a commie kindergartener

El Cabrero is on high alert. I have a grandson who started kindergarten in a public school this year. This means there is a fair degree of possibility that he could have been exposed, however briefly, to President Obama's speech to American schoolchildren and as a result may well be a hardened and disciplined professional communist revolutionary.

Perhaps you too have a loved one who may have been indoctrinated in Bolshevism as well. Here are some telltale signs and tests you may administer:

*First, listen for any new and unusual phrases, such as "means of production," "expropriation of the expropriators," "surplus value," and/or "exploitation of the proletariat."

*Second, check for Marx, Engels or Lenin action figures. If you don't recognize them, suspect anything with a beard.

*Third, check reading material for comic book editions of things like State and Revolution, What is to be Done?, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Critique of the Gotha Program.

*Fourth, look for new and unusual behavior, such as attempting to sell subversive newspapers at factory gates.

*Fifth, try the Internationale test. Walk up to the child in question and sing the following words: "Arise, you prisoners of starvation." If the child responds by belting out "Arise, you wretched of the earth," we can reasonably suspect indoctrination.

If the worst has happened, all hope is not lost. There is a fair to middling chance that the child may split from or expelled from the Party over doctrinal and sectarian disputes. With any luck, he or she may even in time become a neo-con.

DON'T CLICK HERE or you might become a commie too.

PUBLIC OPTION. Here's Paul Krugman on why it matters for health care reform. And here's something on how the prospects for reform look at the moment.

MONEY ON THE TABLE. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set aside $5 billion in emergency funds for states to help needy families, but so far few have taken advantage of it.

IF YOU'VE BEEN PONDERING WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH SEVERED GECKO TAILS, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The fullness of time

There seems to be an irregular but natural rhythm in working for social justice. Certain periods of time are more full of crisis, opportunity, and chances for movement than others. The ancient Greeks referred to these critical moments as kairos, in contrast with more ordinary times which were called chronos.

In the Bible, for example, the word kairos is used for important moments and in such phrases as "the fullness of time" or "the time is at hand."

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), periods of kairos don’t last forever. Many people interested in social change have been shaped by such periods but were often not able to cope well with the more common periods of relative calm. And, like a record that is stuck, they may become inflexible in terms of tactics and analysis. Recognizing the inevitable rhythm of life and change and adapting to it requires a continual need for renewal or shedding one’s skin.

West Virginia author Denise Giardina captures well what kairos feels like (and the difficulty in surviving its passing) in Storming Heaven, her novel about the mine wars:

I loved that phrase, ‘the fullness of time.’ I shivered to whisper it to myself, for I sensed I was living in it, right then. Nothing afterward would be so important…We are put on earth for the fullness of time, we spend our days reaching it, and then we pass on. Some people die right then, with the passing of the fullness, and others breathe on, grieving all their lives that time is being strangled and they are not yet dead. I didn’t fret about this last. I couldn’t imagine it for myself.

The Tao Te Ching, an ancient book of Chinese philosophy often discussed here, contains a phrase which has become a proverb in many parts of the world: “Returning is the motion of the Tao.” Everything changes. To become rigid in a changing world is to die. Or, as Dylan said, “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

Periods of kairos demand all one’s attention, but probably the most important work is done during periods of chronos (when the time isn’t full, so to speak). These activities would better place one in position to take advantage of the situation when the next period of kairos rolls around.

I'd say right now is a time of kairos.

HEALTH CARE. The president of the American Medical Association said that the organization is open to a government-funded health care program for the uninsured.

LOSING YOUR JOB can be bad for your health.

PRISONS. A governor's commission in WV just released a study about prison overcrowding in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. Some of the measures called for include reduced and alternative sentencing for offenders not believed to be a danger to the public, treatment for addictions, and help with re-entry...in addition to the inevitable call to build a new prison. Meanwhile, at a public meeting sponsored by the WV Council of Churches, participants preferred other measures to prison construction.

EMPATHY ON THE BRAIN. Research suggests people feel more of it for those in the same social group.

URGENT GIANT EARTHWORM UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The wheels on the bus

From earliest infancy, it has been the height of my ambition to spend the better part of two summer nights on an extremely uncomfortable bus seat in pursuit of a good cause. Imagine my delight when the opportunity came along this week!

Somewhere between Wednesday night and Thursday morning I joined a few hundred fellow West Virginians and thousands of Americans on a bus ride to DC to support health care for all Americans. The trip, lunch and tee shirts were provided by a WV local of the Communication Workers of America.

Thousands of people attended the rally in the Upper Senate Park. Speakers included several members of the House and Senate, labor leaders, actress Edie Falco, Howard Dean and more.



After the rally, state delegations held town hall-type meetings with congressional staff and elected officials. West Virginia's was packed and attended by the staff of senators Byrd and Rockefeller and representatives Rahall and Mollohan. Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito did not attend or send staff.




The main event was the appearance of Senator Jay Rockefeller, long a leader in health care reform, who is playing a key role in health care reform efforts. Rockefeller is the author of one health care plan which emphasizes a public option to compete with private plans, a key element in any effective reform.



All and all a good time was had by all.

Here's some coverage by the Charleston Gazette and here's one of several posts on the AFLCIO blog.

Has anybody seen my spine?

Me tired. See y'all Monday

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Road Trip!

El Cabrero is not the world's biggest fans of marches or rallies in Washington. It's not that they're a bad idea; it's just that any tactic repeated too often tends to diminish in value.

Having said that, I'm in the process of spending a long hot day and a minimum of 16 hours of bus time attending what participants hope will be a decent-sized health care rally up that way. At last word, five buses were going from West Virginia alone.

Among the messages that I hope get delivered loud and clear are 1. that it's unacceptable that more than 45 million Americans lack health care and that many who do have some kind of insurance can't afford the coverage they have; and 2. if we're serious about health care reform, there needs to be a public option to compete with private plans.

This is a critical time for real health care reform in this country and it could be a long time before it rolls around again on the guitar if this chance is missed. As the saying goes, (no pun intended), this would be one of those times to leave it all on the road.

(Note: This post was scheduled to be published several hours after the bus left at midnight, so it may not have links to anything really good or bad that happened after Wednesday evening. In such cases, please accept congratulations or condolences as appropriate.)

((Final comment: if anyone starts singing "100 Bottles of Beer" on the bus, I may wind up doing jail time.))

I HOPE HE MEANS IT. Obama discusses the public option among other things here.

POLICY MATTERS. Some countries use labor market policies to reduce unemployment. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute looks at the example of Germany.

PLAIN TALK. By way of Coal Tattoo, the United Mine Workers of America takes aim at Massey CEO Don Blankenship.

WHALE CULTURE. Some of them may have it. What would Melville say?

IN ONE EAR BUT NOT THE OTHER. You are more likely to get what you want if you whisper in someone's right ear than the left.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Why we need health care reform

WV, like most of the US is swamped with health care problems.

Here are some state specific factoids about the state of health care (or the lack of it) in West Virginia from Health Care for American Now:

*Health insurance premiums for West Virginia working families have skyrocketed, increasing 75 percent from 2000 to 2007.

*For family health coverage in West Virginia during that time, the average annual combined premium for employers and employees rose from $6,844 to $11,970.

*The combined cost to employers and workers of health insurance for a West Virginia family of four is equal to 30 percent of the state’s median family income. Given current trends, that share will grow to 53 percent in 2016.

*The cost of employer-sponsored health insurance in West Virginia is growing at an annual rate of 8.5 percent, compared with a 1.8 percent growth rate for income.

*About 140,000 non-elderly adults in West Virginia hold jobs that don’t offer health insurance benefits. That comprises 61 percent of all non-elderly uninsured
people.

*In West Virginia 13.8 percent of working adults reported spending 20 percent or more of their income on out-of-pocket health care expenses in 2004, a 48.4 percent increase from three years earlier.

*Between 2000 and 2007, the median earnings of West Virginia workers increased 19 percent, from $19,876 to $23,599. During that time health insurance premiums for West Virginia working families rose four times faster than median earnings.

*In West Virginia 249,384 were uninsured in 2007.

*The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7.5 percent of West Virginia’s labor force was unemployed in April 2009.

*A recent report estimated that 62 percent of bankruptcies were directly related to medical bills; in West Virginia there were 5,133 non-business bankruptcies in 2008.

(Note: footnotes removed from the original document.)

Those are admittedly just WV numbers, but while things may be a little different here it's pretty much the same story all over the country.

Houston, we have a problem...

ON THAT NOTE, here's more on the strong support Americans have shown for a public option in health care reform.

GETTING ON THE BUS. El Cabrero and amigos will be attending what we hope will be a major rally for health care in DC that leaves at midnight. I hear that five buses will be going from WV alone.

GREEN JOBS are a growing sector of the economy.

"SYNTHETIC TREES" may be a way of capturing atmospheric carbon.

FAMILY FRIENDLY? Mother's Day and Father's Day have come and gone while the US lags behind other industrialized nations in paid family leave for parents.

A GREEK IDEA: call no one happy until they have died.

STRANGE DAYS in the coalfields.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on junk food.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mediscare

This is what can happen when you don't have health care.

Opponents of a pubic option for health coverage have been trying to scare people with the prospect of a government run health care system. As noted in yesterday's post, it isn't working.

There are any number of reasons for this but here's a big one: millions of Americans already receive health coverage from one form or another of public insurance. Consider:

Medicaid in 2006 covered almost 59 million Americans, mostly those with low incomes and/or disabilities.

Medicare in 2008 covered almost 45 million Americans, mostly the elderly.

TRICARE, a health program for military personnel and retirees, covers more than 9 million Americans.

And this doesn't count the many other kinds of health coverage directly or indirectly provided by federal, state, and local governments. What the country needs is a public insurance option to compete with private plans for those not eligible for the programs listed above.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Paul Krugman again on health care. He's worried that some senators want to party like it's 1993.

COAL'S COSTS outweigh its benefits, according to a new study. Here's Ken Ward's story from the Sunday Gazette-Mail and more from Coal Tattoo.

STATES FEEL THE PAIN of the recession as they make painful cuts or look for ways to raise revenue.

SOCIAL COMPETITION in early humans may made our brains get so big.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. El Cabrero has been busted more than once for yesterday's post which made a play on words about ducks when in fact geese were pictured. As one correspondent put suggested, a better caption might have been “We’re tired of getting goosed on health care.”

HAS ANYBODY NOTICED that I've managed to go four days without posting anything about Greek tragedy? It's really tough.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Health scare

This is no time to duck the issue of real health care reform.

Right wingers in Congress and elsewhere have been trying to scare people lately with dark rumors of a "Washington takeover" of the nation's health care system. They are referring to the creation of a public option for health coverage for those who aren't covered adequately by private insurance plans. However, they seem to be way out of step with the American people.

Here are some of the findings from a New York Times/CBS poll:

Across a number of questions, the poll detected substantial support for a greater government role in health care, a position generally identified with the Democratic Party. When asked which party was more likely to improve health care, only 18 percent of respondents said the Republicans, compared with 57 percent who picked the Democrats. Even one of four Republicans said the Democrats would do better.

The national telephone survey, which was conducted from June 12 to 16, found that 72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65 — that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed.

In addition, 64 percent believed the government should guarantee coverage and nearly 60 percent would be willing to pay higher taxes to make sure everyone was covered. Support for a government option was strong across the political spectrum, with support from half of self-identified Republicans, around three-fourths of independents and nearly nine out of ten Democrats.

In El Cabrero's humble opinion, if any health care reform plan does not include a public option, they might as well leave things as they are--which is unacceptable. I hope this survey fortifies the will of the Obama administration as well as congressional leaders not to trade away the public option in a search for what Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne has called "the bipartisanship of fools."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Worship the Mean

"The Remorse of Orestes" by William Adolphe Bougereau, by way of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope's series on Greek tragedy. You'll also find links and comments about current events if you scroll down. Right now we're finishing up Aeschylus with the last play of the only surviving trilogy, The Eumenides.

"Neither anarchy nor tyranny, my people.
Worship the Mean, I urge you..."--spoken by Athena

This play brings to a close the terrible saga of the house of Atreus, which has been plagued with violence, excess and outrage for five generations. For more on the back story or the preceding plays, please click on earlier posts.

Brief recap: in The Agamemnon, first play in the series, the title character who led the Greeks to Troy returns home and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. For Clytemnestra, this was in revenge for his sacrificing of their daughter Iphigenia ten years earlier at the command of Artemis to gain fair winds for Troy. For Aegisthus, it's about avenging an outrage Agamemnon's father perpetrated on his side of the family.

In the second play, The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon's son Orestes returns from exile and kills Aegisthus and his mother to avenge his father at the command of Apollo and then is struck mad and haunted by the avenging Furies, dark underworld goddesses who punish those who kill blood relations.

In The Eumenides, Orestes seeks sanctuary at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, who puts the Furies to sleep. He is told to go to the city of Athena and seek mercy at her shrine. Once there, the goddess determines to end the cycle once and for all by appointing a jury of 12 citizens of the city to hear the case and judge between Orestes and the Furies. When the jury reaches a tie, she casts the deciding vote and acquits Orestes, who is free to return to Argos.

The Furies are outraged and threaten to strike Athens with plague but are placated by being given a special place of honor in the city. Their name is changed to "the kindly ones," which is the English translation of the title.

The great theme is the triumph of democracy and the rule of law over generations of bloodshed and violence. The trilogy has been called The Divine Comedy of ancient Greece. Like Dante's classic, it is a journey through hell and purgatory not to an unworldly paradise but rather to a state of human justice.

As Robert Fagles and W.B. Stanford put it, "The Oresteia is our rite of passage from savagery to civilization."

GAME ON for health care reform.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, hundreds of state legislators have sent a message to Congress in support of a public option in any reform package.

ANOTHER GOOD FIGHT in the pipeline is the TRADE Act, which will be introduced in Congress any day now. It would revamp our approach to trade deals and make sure they include more protections for workers, the environment and consumers.

CLIMATE CHANGE, right here right now.

NUTS! are what this newly discovered dinosaur ate.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED