One more possum story for the road

El Cabrero has recently sworn to stop blogging about possums, at least until the Annual Thanksgiving Possum Recipe edition. In fact, one reader suggested I move on to another topic, such as racoons.

However, a friend just sent me another compelling possum story which I feel obligated to share here. I am nonetheless pleased to say that the story also contains a reference to a raccoon. I'm hoping this will keep everyone happy.

Here's the possum/raccoon story:

When in college I had close encounter of the opossum variety. I was living in a really rundown house in Austin Texas, where one of my housemates was always complaining that a possum was stealing her cat's food. One cold  - well, moderately cool (this is Austin we're talking about) - winter night I went to sleep in my loft only to be awoken by a thump and a furiously scratchy/scrambling sound. A possum had crawled under a rotted eave apparently seeking a warm place to nap, and had fallen through a weak place in the sheet-rock of my ceiling.

I turned on a light and put on my pants. Then with a bit of wary maneuvering I approached Pogo with an emptied trashcan.

"Hiss!" said the possum.

"Hey, give me a break," said I. "I've got classes in the morning."

After what seemed to me to be an entirely unreasonable amount of marsupial teeth-baring and threatening (which probably seemed completely justified to the other party) I managed to get my uninvited guest trapped and moved to a table in the living-room. The next morning we called animal control, but all had to leave (since we did actually have classes) before they came. We left the door open and a note on the overturned trashcan prominently sitting on our livingroom table.

I don 't know exactly what happened to the possum, but the catfood stopped disappearing.

That house was in the city, but it was still regularly visited by animals, many of the more-than-two-legged type. I remember once going outside to put compost on our compost pile, only to find myself in a stare-off with an entirely unrepentant raccoon, who was sitting on the pile with a cantaloup peel in it's very human looking paw.

I could have sworn I heard the bandit say "what? You threw it out."

There you have it.

SOME FACTS ABOUT THE SAFETY NET here.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Class warfare, revisited

Right wingers frequently accuse people of class warfare any time anything related to inequality is discussed, but they are the best ones at waging it. Here's just one example: due to federal budget cuts pushed through last year have resulted in Legal Aid of West Virginia laying off 15 case handlers and closing the office in Logan County.

Legal Aid served over 24,000 West Virginians in 2010.

Similar cuts are taking place around the country. Add to that efforts to restrict access to the ballot and shred safety net programs and the truth becomes a little clearer.

I'd like to be able to call down some kind of cosmic retribution on the perpetrators, but I'm afraid my clout doesn't reach that far. I guess it's up to us.

THE SAFETY NET: WHO NEEDS IT? Lots of folks.

COMFORT FOOD is the theme of the latest edition of Notes From Under the Fig Tree by the Rev. Jim Lewis (disclosure: I gave the woman mentioned in the second part of the newsletter his telephone number).

SIDESHOWS. Here's Ken Ward with more on the tenuous connection between mine safety and drug tests.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

REALITY BASED ECONOMICS

Caption: This rooster, known as Stewpot to his friends, enjoys a strong safety net.

For years, we've been fed on the poisoned propaganda that the price of a growing economy is a shredded safety net, growing inequality, and economic insecurity for millions of working families.

The problem with all that is that it just isn't true. In a recent essay in Scientific American, Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of our Time, compares the economic performance of developed countries with low taxes and weak safety nets with that of Nordic social democracies, including Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. He notes that the latter countries combine "a healthy respect for market forces with a strong commitment to antipoverty programs."

The results:

On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.

Key ingredients in the Nordic formula for prosperity and competitiveness are universal health care and child care, access to education and job training, and supports for the elderly and people with disabilities. Sachs notes that the U.S. pays less than almost all developed nations on services for poor and vulnerable people "and it gets what it pays for." He also draws attention to the fact that health care in the U.S. is "a ramshackle system that yields mediocre results at very high costs."

His conclusion is pretty simple:

In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED