Congress needs to fix CHIP-fast

Congress needs to protect kids. The other kind.

West Virginia is often at the top or bottom of lists of states. Not in a good way.

One exception to this - at least up to now - is its Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

CHIP was enacted with bipartisan support by Congress in 1997 in the wake of sweeping welfare reform legislation that would lead to millions of poor families with children losing benefits.

In a moment of humanity that seems sadly distant today, Republicans and Democrats recognized that children should not suffer as a result of these policy changes. CHIP was intended to provide coverage to children in working families where the parents didn't have employer-provided health insurance, something which is all too common.

Our then-Sen. Jay Rockefeller played a key role in getting CHIP passed.

In the spirit of the "new federalism" that prevailed at the time, enacting and expanding CHIP was a state option.

It took a bit of a fight - in which churchwomen played a key role - but the West Virginia Legislature moved to enact the program in 1998. At first, the program supplied coverage to children under 100 percent of the federal poverty level.

Since then, the eligibility level has been raised several times, most recently by former Gov. Tomblin in 2011 to cover children under 300 percent of the poverty level.

It's one thing to get something passed and another to get kids signed up. This is where West Virginia really took the lead. Over a period of nearly 20 years, public and private efforts have combined to provide near universal enrollment of eligible children.

As of August 2017, fully 97 percent of state children have health coverage. That put us in the top 10 states for covering kids.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Congress failed to reauthorize the program by the Sept. 30, 2017, deadline. Apparently, it had other priorities, such as making the very rich richer at the expense of everyone else.

At the very last minute before the holidays, Congress finally passed a temporary fix for CHIP - but only through March. At the time, 16 states were going to run out of funding for the program by the end of January and most of the rest will hit bottom soon after. This would have meant around 9 million children and 370,000 pregnant women losing coverage. For some of them, CHIP is matter of life and death.

A temporary fix is nice, but just that. Congress needs to wake up and do the right thing for the long term. And West Virginia's delegation needs to lead the way.

(This op-ed appeared in Sunday's Huntington Herald-Dispatch.)

Leaving kids behind?

While congress has been busy doing whatever it is it does lately, one thing it didn't do is reauthorize the Children's' Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage to millions of children in working families nationwide and to around 38,000 children in West Virginia. The deadline to reauthorize the program was Sept. 30.

To their credit, both of WV's senators support the program and were disappointed by the failure to reauthorize the program. Senator Manchin had this to say:

“It is shameful that Congress is so dysfunctional that we cannot even manage to reauthorize funding for a program that ensures 9 million children across America have access to health insurance. More than 21,000 West Virginia children are enrolled in CHIP and to let this funding expire is nothing short of negligent. The least we can do is put partisanship aside to protect our children, the most vulnerable among us. In the coming days, I will continue working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to ensure no child in West Virginia loses access to healthcare.” 

And Senator Capito said this:

“I understand the benefits the Children’s Health Insurance Program offers to many students in West Virginia. This is why for two decades, dating back to my time in the West Virginia State Legislature, I have championed this important program and support ongoing efforts to reauthorize it. The legislation to reauthorize CHIP that is advancing in the Senate has strong, bipartisan support."

Despite the missed deadline, the bill has recently made some progress in the senate, although it's a long way from being a done deal. 

Here's hoping this gets fixed before millions of kids get thrown under the  metaphorical bus. This might be the time to make some more noise.

It's not all bad, continued

In these dark days, I try to remind myself as frequently as possible that it's not all bad all the time here. So here's the latest example: there are very, very, very few uninsured kids in WV. This took a lot of hard work by a lot of people from former Senator Jay Rockefeller on down to some very good friends of mine from the late 1990s down to today.

Congratulations, all. Victory lap!

A little good news from Congress (no, really)

It doesn't happen very often but the US Congress recently acted in a bipartisan way and did something that made sense. The US Senate overwhelming passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, which among other things extends funding for the popular Children's Health Insurance Program through 2017. There were concerns that this program would have withered away.

CHIP was first enacted in the wake of welfare reform in the 90s to make sure that kids of working families didn't lose coverage if their parents moved from welfare to work. It has proved to be hugely popular and successful. In fact, West Virginia is one of the major CHIP success stories. The program here covers children in families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

The bill also authorized funding for the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, which is also a big deal and a very good thing. A similar bill passed the House by a huge margin earlier. I'm pleased-and a little surprised-that all of WV's congressional delegation, which ain't what it used to be, voted for the measure.

So, yeah, it's not all bad.

Three random observations

At least one recent positive trend is the move, however tentative, away from mass incarceration and a rethinking of the whole "war on drugs," which worked about as well as Prohibition. The latest example is recent legislation from neighboring Kentucky in an effort to deal with its heroin problem.

In another surprise good move, the US House passed bipartisan legislation what will among other things preserve the Children s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). WV's own delegation, which ain't what it used to be, actually voted to preserve CHIP. It may need a nudge in the Senate.

Off topic, I sooo want to see this movie.

Symbolism, not history?

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to read Joseph Campbell's famous book on myths, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I am not a Campbellite and have some political and other issues with him and his ideas, but he makes some interesting points.

One of his intellectual habits that probably shocks people who associate their religion with actual historical events is that for him the story is all, not what really happened.  At one point, after quoting the story of Jesus' Transfiguration, he writes,

We may doubt whether such a scene ever actually took place. But that would not help us any; for we are concerned, at present, with the problems of symbolism, not of historicity. We do not particularly care whether Rip van Winkle, Kamar al-Zaman, or Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Their stories are what concerns us: and these stories are so widely distributed over the world--attached to various heroes in various lands--that the question of whether this or that local carrier of the universal theme may or may not have been a historical, living man can be of only secondary moment. The stressing of this historical element will lead to confusion; it will simply obfuscate the picture message.

It is true that insisting on literal facts can kill the point of the story, but I think at some points what actually happened does matter, to the extent it can be known.

My main problem with Campbell is summed up in the phrase "local carrier of the universal theme." I think a respectful study of myths and folklore doesn't reveal a universal theme; it reveals all kinds of themes. He believed in a mono-myth. I prefer multi-myths.

SO HERE WE ARE IN BISMARCK. Well, I guess I can scratch "visiting North Dakota" off my bucket list. I tagged along when a delegation of WV legislators visited the state to learn about its Legacy Fund. We've been pushing for something similar here for a few years now. Here's coverage from the Bismarck Tribune. The hospitality has been great, as have the accents (a little like Minnesota). I think all of us who came have learned a lot--I just hope we seal the deal in the legislature.

GOOD NEWS FOR WV FAMILIES. Governor Earl Ray Tomblin announced today that he is requesting that federal health regulators allow the children of public employees to sign up for CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program.This move will save families and the state a lot of money. This is something my friends at the WV Center on Budget and Policy advocated in a recent report.

I would blog more, but this is a good local beer town. Don't wait up.

Shoddy gods

By way of wikipedia, The Worship of Mammon, 1909, by Evelyn De Morgan.

Lots of people take up blogging in order to rant. For the most part, I didn't and generally try to keep Goat Rope relatively rant-free or at least keep the impulse under control.

Ordinarily, I go for a fairly serene tone here, with reflections on some ethereal topic followed by links and comments about current events. I'd prefer to be blogging about Beowulf now. However, I feel the need to rant today.

It occurs to me that of all the causes to which people have thrown their lives away or surrendered their ideals, integrity and _____ (fill in the appropriate body parts), the most pathetic is to utterly surrender one's human autonomy to the service of plutocracy and grovel at the feet of it. I'm sure it's a good gig for those who can take it, but it is one utterly devoid of honor.

Of course, people need economic resources to survive and thrive. That's what the fight is about. And in pursuing those things, we all have to do things we'd rather not. But here as elsewhere there is a line that sometimes gets crossed.

I can understand the appeal of many of the lesser gods humans have served, whether these are viewed as mere symbolic personifications or real persons. Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, Hermes, Isis, and even violent ones like Kali and Tlaloc may have their limited place in the scheme of things. But surely Mammon is the shoddiest idol of all.

I have much more sympathy for those who sin in the service of some love or passion for an individual, a group or an ideal than those who choose greed for the filthy lucre or servility to those who command it.

(Regarding the applications of the above rant, which are Legion, as Bob Marley sang, "Who the cap fit, let them wear it.")

KOCHED RED HANDED. Here's more on the Koch crank call to Wisconsin's governor about billionaire backed union busting.

AND, WHILE WE'RE AT IT, a friend pointed out to me today that the aforementioned Wisconsin governor in his conversation with an imagined Koch didn't really talk about the state budget. Wasn't that what all this was supposed to be about? But, as Paul Krugman argues, in reality it's a classic case of applying what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine.

A MODEST PROPOSAL. Here's an idea for West Virginia: set aside a portion of severance tax revenues to create a trust fund that could be used to promote job creation once extractive industries decline.

HOWEVER, rather than bold endeavours, it looks like the WV legislature is scaling back legislation to regulate the Marcellus Shale gas boom.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. The West Virginia CHIP (Children's Health Insurance) board voted yesterday to raise eligibility for the program to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. Previously, benefits were capped at 250 percent. As I understand it, this will cover around an additional 800+ children when fully implemented, although the news article linked above uses a slightly lower figure.

A LITTLE NOT SO AWFUL NEWS. Jobless claims dropped more than expected last week.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That little monster problem

I've been on an on again/off again Beowulf jag here lately, although there are also links and comments about current events. Click on earlier posts if you like this kind of thing (although the last few days have been all about the labor protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere).

When Beowulf arrives in the land of the Danes with 14 warrior buddies on a quest for monster-killing glory, he is met by a coast-guard whose duty it is to check him out. This requires a bit of diplomacy on his part. It would not do, for example, for him to say

"I'm here to kill that monster you guys are too pansy to handle."

Or:

"I thought Denmark could use someone who wasn't a total candy ass to take care of your Grendel problem."

After all, having a man-eating monster you can't get rid of is a bit of a tender subject for a warrior king. (OK, so the pun was intended.)

Beowulf instead assures the guard of his good intentions and desire to help, saying,

So tell us if what we have heard is true
about this threat, whatever it is,
this danger abroad in the dark nights,
this corpse-maker mongering death
in the Shieldings' country. I come to proffer
my wholehearted help and counsel
I can show the wise Hrothgar a way
to defeat his enemy and find respite--
if any respite is to reach him, ever.
I can calm the turmoil and terror in his mind.
Otherwise, he must endure woes
and live with grief for as long as his hall
stands at the horizon, on its high ground.

That's good enough for the guard, who agrees to take the band to Hrothgar. It seems that even monster slaying requires diplomacy.

WHILE UNION SUPPORTERS STRUGGLE, President Obama is keeping a low profile. Meanwhile, back in Wisconsin, a crank Koch call to the governor has made some headlines.

THE LATEST BAD IDEA: turning Medicaid into a block grant program.

MORE ON RECENT BAD IDEAS here.

A LITTLE WV NEWS. Acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin is calling for raising eligibility for the Children's Health Insurance Program from 250 to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

NOTE TO SELF: in event of an attempt to shoplift a chainsaw, don't attempt to conceal it in pants.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FISH AND WHISTLE

Caption: Seamus McGoogle has a tragic sense of life.

El Cabrero has been musing on optimism and pessimism lately. It has occurred to me that I know some pretty miserable people who consider themselves to be optimists.

I tend to be pessimistic at times about the Big Picture by virtue of temperament and persuasion but otherwise am pretty content. I'm even optimistic about small things. The universe as a whole may be tending towards entropy but not all parts of it are at any given moment.

Camus once said that while he was pessimistic about human destiny, he was optimistic about people.

Let me explain the pessimistic part first. While I don't think the universe is out to get us, it probably won't go out of its way to cut us any slack. In the human world, bad things happen to good people and vice versa all the time. The distribution of wealth, power, and prestige seems to me to have more to do with randomness than with merit. As the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes put it:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (9:11)

Another prophet, Leonard Cohen, put it this way:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

(Parenthetically, the next verse of the song pretty well sums up life under the Bush administration:

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died)

Then there's the whole Buddhist thing about the noble truth of suffering. That tradition speaks of six major kinds of suffering that can happen to everyone: birth/becoming, death/dying, sickness, aging and the loss of abilities, having what you don't want and wanting what you don't have. That's a pretty good list.

Many religions teach that all this will be straightened out farther along. That would be nice, but it's beyond the view of the naked eye.

Not that I'm complaining or anything. All this doesn't mean we can't win sometimes--it makes it sweeter when we do. And even though we can't fix everything, we can fix a lot.

Nietzsche spoke about "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems."

That works for me.

THE LAST WORD on President Bush's CHIP veto goes to Jon Stewart.

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES. The US invasion of Iraq and subsequent events is threatening the survival of what may be the world's last remaining authentic Gnostic sect, the Mandeans. Gnosticism was once a powerful movement within early Christianity and had pagan and Jewish varieties. Here's an interesting op-ed on the subject.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL. At first I thought this was a joke, but it looks like for a time some folks at the Air Force considered the development of a bomb that would lead to rampant homosexual activity. It even won an "award" of sorts. The possibilities of snark are overwhelming to me at this point, so I'll just pass.

FACTOIDS DEPARTMENT. According to The Week Magazine

The salary of Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, works out to $493 a day. Senior managers of Blackwater, a private contractor paid by the U.S. government to provide security in Iraq, make $1,075 a day.

and

More than three times as many blacks live in prison cells than in college dorms, according to a new Census Bureau report. For Latinos, the ration is 2.7 inmates for every dorm dweller. Twice as many whites live in college housing as in prison.

PUT UP OR... E.J. Dionne's newest column asks "Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?" Speaking of which, I actually got something useful out of a George Will column, to wit this Adam Smith quote:

Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by a revenue raised within the year...wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

RENEGADES, HERETICS AND DISSENTERS

Caption: There's one of each.

Along with links and comments about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is the sociology of conflict. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Basically, this week El Cabrero has been strip-mining Lewis Coser's (1913-2003)sociological classic, The Functions of Social Conflict, which was published in 1956. It holds up pretty well after more than 50 years.

Coser had some interesting ideas about how different groups handle internal conflicts. Generally, open societies and loosely knit groups can handle lots of conflict without threatening the overall consensus:

In flexible social structures, multiple conflicts crisscross each other and thereby prevent basic cleavages along one axis. The multiple group affiliations of individuals makes them participate in various group conflicts so that their total personalities are not involved in any single one of them. Thus segmental participation in a multiplicity of conflicts constitutes a balancing mechanism within the structure.

In loosely structured groups and open societies, conflict, which aims at a resolution of tension between antagonists, is likely to have stabilizing and integrative functions for the relationship. By permitting immediate and direct expression of rival claims, such social systems are able to readjust their structures by eliminating the sources of dissatisfaction. The multiple conflicts which they experience may serve to eliminate the causes for dissociation and to re-establish unity. These systems avail themselves, through the toleration and institutionalisation of conflict, of an important stabilizing mechanism.

In totalitarian societies or sectarian groups (religious, political or otherwise), internal conflicts or antagonisms are often repressed. Often groups like this define themselves as being in conflict with other groups and need some kind of external enemy to function. If one isn't readily available, it will have to be invented. If internal conflict does break out, it is likely to be very intense and could threaten the group as a whole.

For example, if someone in such a group goes over to "the enemy," this threatens the boundaries of the in-group:

Therefore the group must fight the renegade with all its might since he threatens symbolically, if not in fact, its existence as an ongoing concern. In the religious sphere, for example, apostasy strikes at the very life of a church, hence the violence of denunciation of the apostate contained in the pronouncements of the early Church fathers or in rabbinical statements from the time of the Maccabees onward.

Even more threatening than the apostate is the heretic, i.e. someone who claims to uphold the values of the group in a different way. Heretics threaten to split the group. Hostility to heretics (religious, political or otherwise) is often even greater than hostility to renegades:

It is less dangerous for a group if the one who breaks with it goes over to the enemy than if, as a heretic, he forms his own rival group...

The contrast between open and closed groups is pretty stark in the case of handing dissent. In flexible groups and open societies, crisscrossing conflicts and different tendencies can actually help hold the group together.

In closed societies or sects, internal dissent is seen as dangerous and will be suppressed or repressed. Instead of allowing realistic conflicts to take place, they may engage in scapegoating or other kinds of unrealistic conflicts as a safety valve. If the conflict ever manages to surface, it's likely to be nasty and threaten the group's survival.

Given the choice, I prefer an open society...

SCREWED UP PRIORITIES DEPARTMENT. This item from Wired Science contrasts the costs of CHIP with that of two months of the Iraq war. I used some different numbers and came up with something slightly different: six weeks of war=$35 billion for CHIP but the point is the same.

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Just before vetoing the Children's Health Insurance Program, President Bush proclaimed Oct. 1 Child Health Day...

THE GOOD GUYS. Here's an op-ed from the Washington Post about the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a truly outstanding group that has done a great job of advocating for low income and working families. We are in the early stages of setting up an affiliated group in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

CREATIONISM IN EUROPE may be a non-starter according to Wired Science.

REASON #9763 why we need the Employee Free Choice Act...and a new NLRB.

JOHNNY, GET YOUR ETHNOLOGIST. Here's an item about the Human Terrain Team, which involves anthropologists working with U.S. military units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever the politics and ethics involved may entail, El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology has become a practical major.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LOVE AND HATE

Caption: Sometimes these guys get on each other's nerves.

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope is social conflict and how it works. You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

It has long been observed that there's a fine line between love and hate and that sometimes people have some of both kinds of feelings for people they are close to. Freud called it ambivalence. As he wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,

Almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time--marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children--leaves a sediment of feeling of aversion and hostility, which have first to be eliminated by repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in large units. Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns, each is the other's most jealous rival.

The closer the relationship, the more occasions for conflicts of interest and often the more intense the conflicts. As Coser said,

Closely knit groups in which there exists a high frequency of interaction and high personality involvement of the members have a tendency to suppress conflict. While they provide frequent occasions for hostility (since both sentiments of love and hatred are intensified through frequency of interaction), the acting out of such feelings is sensed as a danger to such intimate relationships, and hence there is a tendency to suppress rather than allow the expression of hostile feelings. In close-knit groups, the feelings of hostility tend, therefor, to accumulate and hence to intensify.

If conflict does break out in such a group,

it will be particularly intense for two reasons: First, because the conflict does not merely aim at resolving the immediate issue which led to its outbreak; all accumulated grievances which were denied expression previously are apt to emerge at this occasion. Second, because the total personality involvement of the group members makes for mobilization of all sentiments in the conduct of the struggle.

Speaking of love and hate, one interesting feature of conflict between groups is that it can, with time, bring the opposing parties closer together.

SHAME ON PRESIDENT BUSH for vetoing expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. In his statement on the subject, the president spoke of the dangers of a federalized health care system. Last I heard, he enjoys federal health care benefits. Yesterday, El Cabrero participated in a press conference protesting that decision. Here's the Gazette coverage.

All of WV's congressional delegation supported CHIP. Gov. Manchin issued a statement that said in part: “I have joined with other states in writing to the president to urge him to sign this legislation into law, and am disappointed in his decision to use his veto power."

NO U.S. TORTURE POLICY 'ROUND HERE. Just the same thing with a different name.

MORE ON THE LOGAN COUNTY VIGIL in support of Megan Williams can be found here.

IMAGE PROBLEM. According to this interesting item from Time, some Christians are giving Christianity a bad name. That problem has been around a while...

IF I'M READING THIS RIGHT, Massey Energy is suing two law firms that represented them and lost. So like...what will happen if the guys filing this one lose?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FOR REAL

Caption: This man is enacting an unrealistic conflict on an inoffensive monkey.

Aside from comments and links about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is the sociology of conflict. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

You have probably noticed that sometimes people want to fight about specific issues and sometimes they just wanna fight.

Sociologist Lewis Coser in his little classic The Functions of Social Conflict referred to those two very different situations as realistic and unrealistic conflict, which is a pretty useful distinction.

Realistic conflicts engaged in because of clashing interests

contain an element of limitation insofar as the struggle is only a means to an end; if the desired result can be attained as well or better by other means, such other means may be employed. In such instances, conflict is only one of several functional alternatives.

Unrealistic conflicts are quite different:

There are cases, however, where the conflict arises exclusively from aggressive impulses which seek expression no matter what the object, where in the conflict the choice of object is purely accidental. In such cases, no such limitations exist, since it is not the attainment of a result, but rather the acting out of aggressive energies which occasions the outbreak.

While realistic conflict will cease when resolved or when a better way is found to deal with the problem, unrealistic conflict is less stable:

The underlying aggressiveness can more easily be led into other channels, precisely because it is not directly bound to the object which has become a target by "situational accident." It is likely to manifest itself in different ways if the particular object is no longer available.

Obviously, these are models or ideal types. In the real world, some unrealistic elements can enter into a realistic conflict. And sometimes the frustrations caused by real grievances are displaced onto convenient targets in an unrealistic conflict. For example, blame for the real economic grievances of German workers was displaced onto Jews and other convenient targets in the Nazi era.

One way of distinguishing between the two is whether conflict is engaged in as a means to an end or whether it is an end in itself. The former kind is more likely to be resolvable by rational means.

LOGAN COUNTY VIGIL. Less than a mile from the place where police say Megan Williams was held captive, tortured, and sexually abused, around 40 people gathered for a vigil calling for justice and unity. The event was organized by the American Friends Service Committee and the Logan County Improvement League. This was the lead story on local television. Here's coverage from the Charleston Gazette, State Journal, AP, and Metro News. I think the best coverage was produced by Scott Finn at WV Public Radio, but it's not available online yet.

THE WHEELS OF COMMERCE. Speaking of unleashing capitalism, which we weren't, according to the NY Times,

The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study to be released Monday. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.

The global arms market is highly competitive, with manufacturing nations seeking both to increase profits and to expand political influence through weapons sales to developing nations, which reached nearly $28.8 billion in 2006.

No doubt all these arms will find good homes among people of good will...

POLL SHOWS BUSH OUT OF TOUCH...AGAIN. A new poll shows that 72 percent of Americans support expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program, which Bush as threatened to veto.

ON THE SAME NOTE, here's Dean Baker on Bush's latest Social Security scare tactics.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IN THIS CORNER...

El Cabrero is on another ancient Greek jag this week, with a special focus on the tragic Peloponnesian War that ended the "Golden Age" of Athens (there's also lots of stuff on current events).

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

The two principle powers that collided in that 27 year long war provided a huge contrast. Sparta was a warlike, aristocratic,conservative, fairly closed society. To their credit, they were not particularly acquisitive after wealth or a large empire. Athens was creative, chaotic, democratic, and imperialist. As mentioned yesterday, Athenian imperialism was the main cause of the war, although the Spartans were the first to invade their rival's territory.

Early on in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, a Corinthian ambassador describes the contrast to the Spartans:

The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine: your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger then is no release. Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they an never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions,you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind.

The Athenians were bold, even reckless:

They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country’s cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss... they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their lives, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.

In a word, they could be dangerous not only to their enemies but to themselves.

(Uhhh, do they sound like anybody we know? I didn't think so.)

AFSC CALLS FOR STRONGER MINE SAFETY LAWS. In the wake of the Utah mine disaster, the American Friends Service Committee calls for stronger mine safety rules:

Congress should move swiftly to pass recently introduced legislation that, among other things, immediately requires mining companies to use systems that can track and communicate with miners," says Rick Wilson, director of the American Friends Service Committee West Virginia Economic Justice Project. "The law would also require companies to upgrade to better communications systems as they become available."

That legislation, HR 2768 and 2769 and S. 1655, introduced in June of this year by Representatives George Miller (D-CA), Nick Rahall (D-WV), and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), and Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Patty Murray (D-WA), would improve health and safety in U.S. mines and immediately require companies to use the best available technology to stay in contact with miners.

THE COAL INDUSTRY'S BEST FRIEND. The NY Times reports that the Bush administration is about to issue a regulation expanding mountaintop removal mining, a practice that literally blows their tops off and fills in valleys with debris. El Cabrero is of the opinion that this is not what Isaiah was talking about when he said that every mountain should be brought down and every valley exalted.

CHILDREN'S HEALTH SMACKDOWN. This post from the AFLCIO blog asks a pertinent question: "If Stomping on Children’s Health Care Is OK, Why Do Bushies Bury News on Weekend?"

INEQUALITY GONE WILD. Does this sound good?

The top 10 percent of income earners in the United States now owns 70 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest one percent owns more than the bottom 95 percent, according to the Federal Reserve. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans enjoyed about the same share of the nation's income -- 21.8 percent -- as the bottom 150 million.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

KANT WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

Caption: These guys have figured it out. Why can't we?

Is there any chance that the human race might eventually get its act together? That's the question this week on Goat Rope.

According to 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, we may just have a chance. He thought that the craftiness of Nature (or what Hegel called "the cunning of Reason") could make use of even our nasty side to get us there. That's the subject of his 1784 essay, Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

To briefly recap, he thought our "unsociable socialness" compelled humans both to live together and to constantly struggle to outdo each other. This competition and antagonism forced us to develop our potential. And, while individual human lives are short, the life of humanity is long, so the gains in culture, knowledge, science, etc. build up over time.

Over time, people are or will be gradually compelled to arrive at some kind of social order which balances the striving of individuals with the need for social order. That means a free society based on the rule of law.

Of course, one major problem is that even if people reach that level within a given country, different countries treat each other like "barbarians" in a state of nature (an international Wild Wild West, if you will).

He believed that the same process would repeat itself on a larger scale between nations:

The same unsociability which drives man to this causes any single commonwealth to stand in unrestricted freedom in relation to others; consequently, each of them must expect from another precisely the evil which oppressed the individuals and forced them to enter into a lawful civic state. The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security.

In other words, after lots of wars, international crises, suffering, etc,

Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations...

He was basically an optimist, at least in the long term. This long view of history "gives hope finally that after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop."

Of course, Kant lived before weapons of mass destruction (the real ones) and ecological collapse. I'd say we're in a race between Nature's cunning and humanity's self-destructiveness and the odds are even at best...which means we've got our work cut out for us.

Before we dismiss this view as a naive view of progress, some people today have explored similar themes and possibilities, including Robert Wright, author of Nonzero.

Game theory also explores how cooperation can emerge among self interested parties over time.For more, see an earlier Goat Rope series on the work of Robert Axelrod (if you go there, start at the bottom and scroll up).

On the level of popular culture, the emergence of cooperation and culture out of lawlessness was also the main theme of the HBO series "Deadwood." (Why did they cancel that, anyway?)

EVIL MONSTER RATS, ANYONE? The Russians have bred some in case you're looking.

EDUCATED AND UNINSURED. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows that a growing number of entry level jobs for college graduates lack employer-provided health care.

SPEAKING OF THE UNINSURED, a Senate panel including all Democrats and a majority of Republicans yesterday recommended expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program. WV's Senator Jay Rockefeller has played a key role in this. The measure now faces a veto threat from President Bush.

According to the NY Times, Rockefeller described the attitude of Bush and DHHS secretary Michael O. Leavitt to the bill as “pretty belligerent” in criticizing the bill.

But Mr. Rockefeller said, “It’s not clear to me that the president has any intention of vetoing this,” because the political consequences of such an action could be disastrous.

“There are very few symbols as powerful as kids,” Mr. Rockefeller said.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED