A belated birthday

Sometimes I miss a birthday by a day or even a few. Such is the case this time with the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act. 

Personal note: I have put my time into that puppy, from supporting its passage, to pushing for Medicaid expansion to defending it from attacks. It was a far from perfect piece of legislation, but it was what we could get at the time.

Just for fun, below is an excerpt from a Goat Rope post I wrote at the time. The title was Signed. Sealed. Delivered.

It's official. President Obama signed the health care reform bill into law yesterday.
He told those in attendance that "We have just now enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care."

Critics of the bill may point out that this isn't exactly the case, but there's no denying that this is a landmark piece of legislation that will extend health coverage to millions who have been doing without it. The New York Times calls it "the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."

It remains to be seen whether the immediate benefits (political and otherwise) will outweigh the blowback. This item from Politico argues that the former will come before the latter, but I'm not sure I agree. It always seemed to me that a major drawback of the legislation was that the major expansion of health coverage via Medicaid and subsidies won't hit until several years down the line, meaning that the risks might hit earlier than the benefits.

Still, it probably will be hard for those who want to repeal it to win much of a crowd by saying "Bring back the donut hole" for Medicare Part D, or "let's cut those young people off their parent's insurance" or "Bring back denials of coverage for pre-existing conditions!"

The game has changed, although it's hard to guess just how or how much.

Rediscovered

If you're anything like me you are probably SOOO over the political convention season. Nevertheless, WV unusually got a lot of attention this time around. That's the subject on this week's Front Porch.

Addiction, politics, biscuits

Here's the latest Front Porch, which among other things talks about President Obama's recent visit to WV to discuss the addiction problem. It includes a few shameless appeals to get a local biscuit chain to underwrite the program.

Big news day in WV

The big news in WV today is the visit of President Obama to Charleston to discuss the opioid addiction crisis. This state leads the nation in overdose deaths.

You can read more or watch the whole thing here. The president also gave Gazette Mail reporter David Gutman and exclusive interview here.

Not surprisingly, coal supporters, many of whom blame all the ills of the industry on the president, also rallied. There was some racial dog whistling at the event. It is my long held position that the blackness of the president has been a gift from the gods both to the industry and to certain politicians.

The state's attorney general also used the visit to show his....position.

Annals of paranoia

Here's the latest from the realm of Whack. A conservative website has found further proof that President Barack Obama is a communist. So that explains why the stock market is doing so well...

The evidence proof? The writer opines that Obama's daughter Sasha's real name is Natasha, which is obviously Russian. I guess the fact that Sasha was born 10 years after the collapse of communism in the former USSR only proves how devious these guys are. Besides, we all know that anyone named Natasha has to be a pinko.

But I'll do him one better. Sasha was actually the nickname of V. I. Lenin's brother Alexander, who was executed by the czarist government for his revolutionary activities in 1887. Some people believe the failure of Sasha's anarchist friends to unsettle the government ultimately inspired him to create the Bolshevik party.

Hmmmm....I guess now we need to decode Malia.

"The defining challenge of our time"

President Obama's recent speech on economic inequality is certainly one of the strongest statements on that subject from a major bully pulpit for a long time, although it remains to be seen whether anything will come of it in this political climate. 

Here are three takes on the subject, from the NY Times, Oxfam, and The Nation.

One issue highlighted in the speech was the need to raise the minimum wage, which the president noted "right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office."

Meanwhile, at hundreds of locations around the country today, people took to the streets to protest low wages at actions targeting fast food restaurants. The one I attended featured the song in yesterday's post, which turned out to be quite a hit. More on the minimum wage drive from WV Metro News here.

Momentum is building.

An idea whose time has gone

Austerity was all the rage and still is in some circles, especially those that favor government by artificially created crisis, like the fiscal cliff, debt ceiling blackmail and the idiotic sequester.

Here are several looks a why austerity in a weak economy is a bad idea and why more people are walking away from it. Note: some of these are wonky but you'll have that some days.

First, it isn't doing that great in Europe.

Second, groups like the Center for American Progress are walking away from the idea of a "grand bargain"/bad deal, something they had previously supported.

Third, here's why they're calling for a reset to the fiscal debate.

Fourth, it makes more sense these days to be an infrastructure hawk than a deficit hawk.

WILL HE LISTEN? Here's E.J. Dionne's advice to the president.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. WV's high school graduation rate is improving and has now caught up to the national average.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Life is our dictionary

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the work of 19th century American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a current focus on his essay/lecture The American Scholar. The essay didn't make a huge splash at the time but over the years its influence grew and he is now seen as a forerunner of those pragmatists and reformers who wanted to broaden the definition of education and scholarship to include knowledge of practical life.

This passage is typical:

Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town--in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get the tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

That sounds lie a precursor to the current support for vocational education, although it is also about how practical life enriches and creates living language.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. Here's a critique of the Obama administrations approach to the deficit debate.

IN CASE THIS BLOG HAS BEEN TOO MODERATE FOR YOUR TASTES, read this.

NO CLIMATE CHANGE HERE, BOSS, even though an Arctic sea route is probably going to open up later in this century.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Good point

We hear a whole lot in this political season about President Obama's "War on Coal," which is basically a cynical way to assign the blame for the industry's woes, many of which are due to basic market forces, on a person who just happens not to be white. The specific political subtext in all this is the assumption that if the president's opponent wins, everything will be all good here all the time.

Meanwhile, nobody around here seems to have noticed that programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which Romeny/Ryan have targeted for gutting, have an even bigger impact on the state's economy than the coal industry.

The folks at the WV Center on Budget and Policy point out here that

...in 2011 approximately $12.7 billion or 20.5 percent of the state’s $62 billion in personal income came from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The U.S. average was 12.8 percent...

For comparison, only 5.5 percent or $3.4 billion of personal income in 2011 was derived from coal mining and natural gas extraction – two of the largest industries in the state.

I don't mean to belittle the economic hardships in the coalfields. These need to be faced in a proactive way rather than used to score dubious political points. But imagine how bad things would look in places like southern West Virginia if drastic cuts to the bedrock safety net--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid--went hand in hand with market-driven declines in mining.

MORE ON THAT here.

A TALE OF TWO STORMS. Krugman does a heckuva job contrasting Katrina and Sandy.

IT'S ALREADY WORKING. Here's a cheer for the Affordable Care Act.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

For the hell of it

I'm not sure what this says about the state of marital bliss at Goat Rope Farm, but the Spousal Unit and I plan to celebrate Valentine's Day by watching a 1911 silent film adaptation of Dante's Inferno.

OBAMA'S BUDGET. Here's a preliminary take by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

MORE ON MINE SAFETY AND DRUG TESTING here.

ANIMAL ART, ANYONE? Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Grab bag

El Cabrero just read his first John Le Carre novel, to wit The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. This is probably going to sound really bad but it kind of made me almost nostalgic for the Cold War. When it came to an end, while other people were celebrating, I remember wondering what other kinds of demons would be loosened which had been held in check before. It turned out to be quite a few.

 I hope I'm wrong about this, but it occurred to me then that the dangers of the future might make that nearly 50 year period of relative equilibrium, also known as a balance of terror, look like good old days.

On that cheery note, here are a few items that caught my eye today...

RATING THE SOTU. Here's Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute on President Obama's state of the union address.

DUMBING US DOWN. Working in groups can do just that.

DOGS appear to have been domesticated as long as 33,000 years ago. Next question: have they found any fossilized squeaky toys?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Three for the road

It's starting to feel a bit like fall in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, which means among other things that I need to get to work on that wood pile this weekend.

Meanwhile, a few items caught my eye today. First, here's Dean Baker and what to like and not like about Obama's jobs plan. Second, here's Paul Krugman on the GOP's "let em die" approach to health care. And finally, here's an urgent dinosaur feather update.

Cheers!

Profits or jobs?

President Obama's jobs speech last night laid out a vision for giving a boost to a fragile recovery. Here are some reactions from the Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, the Campaign for America's Future and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

My short take is that, while the proposed American Jobs Act is not perfect (I'd prefer less in tax breaks and more in direct job creation), it is a step in the right direction.

Choose a weaker enemy

It is a sad fact of social and political life that people often suffer outrageous oppression or exploitation from the very powerful but end up taking their frustrations out on some powerless group that is easy to scapegoat.

It's way safer...

I've been in a medieval mood since visiting Italy this summer and one book on my current pile is Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. There's a great illustration of the above point in that novel when the young monk Adso converses with the whacked out Salvatore, who resides at the monastery where the action takes place.

Salvatore grew up in extreme poverty and was swept up in radical and heretical movements. Although the "horde of shepherds and humble folk" he joined dreamed of bringing down the overlords, they mostly wound up massacring defenseless Jews instead. Adso then asks why the Jews were attacked when their main oppressors were greedy lords and bishops. To quote from the book,

He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are.

Gee whiz, it's a good thing that nothing like that can happen any more, huh?

A MODEST PROPOSAL. Here's a suggestion that this country needs some good jobs.

POLITICS TODAY is getting pretty weird. On all sides.

STAY COOL. Fiddler crabs chill out with their big claws.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Drilling for gold with silver

Grassroots groups and plenty of ordinary citizens are losing their patience with the WV legislature for its failure so far to regulate Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling, which can have all kinds of negative consequences for citizens, landowners, taxpayers and the natural environment.

A number of groups joined together today in the state capitol for a well-attended press conference on the subject. You know it's a good press conference when the reporters outnumber the speakers and this would definitely qualify.

Some speakers were landowners who told gut wrenching stories about damage to health, family and property and even the loss of a beloved home. Others addressed broader issues.

Aside from compelling stories, for me the stickiest soundbite had to do with water, which is something that will be trashed in massive quantities in the hyraulic fracking process used in Marcellus drilling. As one speaker put it, "Water is life. Everyone knows that."

Water is likely to be the most valuable commodity (and it's really sad that water is becoming a commodity) in the coming century. The speaker predicted that water will continue to be a precious and declining resource long after the drilling is done. Squandering water in this way is like "using gold to drill for silver."

Here's my take on the issue. If memory serves, F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there were no second acts in American life. I don't think that's the case. The Marcellus Shale issue gives WV leaders something like a second chance to have some control over how powerful extractive industries treat the state and its people. State leaders had the same chance 100 or so years ago and blew it.

In their defense, it probably would have been hard for a state politician living in the 1880s to imagine the abuses and exploitation the coal industry would inflict on the state. Current lawmakers have no such excuse.

GO LONG. E.J. Dionne Jr. advises President Obama to try something other than capitulation here.

RELIGIOUS RIGHT: the sequel.

A WORTHY SUBJECT. This item on the art of airplane sleeping speaks to my condition as it is yet another valuable art I haven't mastered.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Nothing but shame

Holy Neville Chamberlain, Batman! I don't have much to say about the massive cave-in on the debt ceiling, but here are three people who do:

Dean Baker

Paul Krugman; and

Robert Reich.

Giving away the store

As debt ceiling negotiations proceed in Washington, I can't help but wonder how much of the store President Obama is willing to give away in pursuit of a deal. My guess is...a lot.

It's kind of hard to believe that in barely two years, things have got to the point where the hard right is close to achieving the kind of drastic cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that some of them have been dreaming about for years.

There's a new study out about one of the most vulnerable programs. As NPR reports of an examination of Medicaid,

"What we found in a nutshell is that having Medicaid makes a big difference in people's lives," said Amy Finkelstein, another MIT economist and one of the study's principal investigators.

Overall, researchers found that compared to people without insurance, those with Medicaid had better access to and used more health care; they were less likely to experience unpaid medical bills; they were more likely to report being in good health; and they were less likely to report feeling depressed.

In fact, says Finkelstein, among those with Medicaid, "We report almost a one-third increase in the probability that you report yourself as being happy."

Of course, things like human health and well being seem to matter a lot less these days than extending tax cuts for people who don't need them.

MORE ON BUDGET CAVING here.

INEQUALITY. Here's a brief look at some gaps in well being.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Round and round

One economist I try to follow is Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I've learned a lot from several of his works, including a study of how abundance of natural resources affects economic growth, and such books as The End of Poverty and Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. (I even used the latter as a textbook in a college class I taught.)

This piece by Sachs in the Huffington Post caught my eye. And this quote jumped off the page:

In the end, we have gotten from President Obama what we feared from Senator McCain: an expanded war in Afghanistan, an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, sharp cuts in spending for communities and programs for the poor, a continuation of Guantanamo and military tribunals, unchecked bankers' pay and bonuses, and enough loopholes to reduce corporate taxes to less than 2 percent of GDP this year, despite a boom in corporate profits.

Yippee! Not.

That's not the whole story. But, alas, it is part of it.

ALONG THOSE LINES, here's a political rant.

DEALING WITH BULLIES. Capitulation doesn't work too well.

RISKY BUSINESS. The House Republican plan to gut Medicare carries political risks.

URGENT DINOSAUR/SAUROPOD UPDATE here.

FRACK! Marcellus shale drilling methods might wind up polluting more than burning coal.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Like the swift flight of a sparrow

The English church historian Bede, from a 1493 illustration.

The theme here lately is Beowulf, although you will also find links and comments about current events below. One of the interesting things about that poem is the light it sheds on religion in the Anglo-Saxon world.

It would seem that when these Germanic tribes invaded or migrated to England in the 500s, most of them were pagan and held to some variety of Norse religion, which survives in such places as the names of several weekdays (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named after gods). An effort to convert them to Christianity got into high gear around the year 600, give or take a few.

Unlike in other places, it seems to have taken place without much in the way of martyrdoms on either the Christian or pagan side. Maybe one reason why Christianity appealed to them was that it offered a less dark view of the world than the old religion. In Norse mythology, gods, humans and the whole shooting match were expected to go down in a cataclysm known as Ragnarok.

According to the Venerable Bede (circa 672-735), an early chronicler of English church history, a pagan priest was consulted about the new religion and he was fairly open to it. Bede says that he described the human condition thus:

The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

If that isn't one of the world's best analogies, I don't know what is. But if I was the sparrow, I'd have stayed in the mead hall.

THIS IS OUR CONCERN, DUDE. Some economists warn that spending cuts and freezes advocated by President Obama and his "friends" in Congress could be the real job killers. Here's another take on it while we're at it, along with Dean Baker's response.

ROADBLOCKS. Here's Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, in a Rolling Stone article on the 12 politicians who are doing the most to block progress on dealing with climate change. West Virginia's senior senator made the list, which makes me wonder if our junior senator is jealous. One startling change from the past is that Don Blankenship didn't make the list this time. The former CEO of Massey Energy appears to be taking a time out. Thanks to Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo for the heads up.

WHAT I'M SCREAMING. WV needs to modernize its unemployment system now.

GOOD TO KNOW. Legislators in Utah may soon make the M1911 the official state gun.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, optimism in America is at a four year high (which may not be saying much).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Deja vu again

It seems to me that President Obama isn't as lucky as FDR was in dealing with the last massive economic meltdown. The Crash of 1929 happened three years before Roosevelt was elected president. This gave Hoover plenty of time to own it and FDR quite a bit of leeway in dealing with it.

The Great Recession, on the other hand, started in late 2007 but it didn't really hit hard until 2008 and 2009. While it was brought on by the excesses of nearly 30 years of deregulation and supply side policies, that chain of cause and effect isn't visible to many Americans.

Paul Krugman sums things up pretty well in today's NY Times:

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

Roosevelt hit a similar rough patch in 1937 and 1938. In the end, the Depression was ended through deficit spending associated with World War II. It will probably take additional deficit spending to spur job growth, at least until the economy is firing on all cylinders. Krugman again:

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

The problem, of course, is that the current political situation makes that hard to do, and it will probably get harder in the future. This could lead to prolonged economic misery as well as social and political nastiness.

As Oliver Goldsmith put it in the 1700s, "Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay..."

ONE GOOD COLUMN DESERVES ANOTHER. Here's E.J. Dionne on what the labor movement has meant to the building of the middle class.

WHY NOT ONE MORE? Here's Harold Meyerson while we're at it on the state of labor (short version: it isn't good).

STUDY THIS. New research on how people learn questions some old beliefs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED