Shook up

Dammit. West Virginia hardly ever gets anything remotely resembling an earthquake (if you don't count industrial disasters) and I missed this one. Just to be clear, I wouldn't want to experience a big one, but it would have been nice to notice a little one if it actually happened.

I've tried to figure out where I was at 1:51 yesterday afternoon and think it was driving in my old car. The vehicle in question (US and union made by the way) has around 300,000 miles on it and is pretty shaky pretty much all the time. It would have had to have been on an entirely different level of magnitude for me to feel it in that bucket.

Still, one can't be too careful about things like earthquakes. Just for safety's sake, a sacrifice to the Greek god Poseidon might be in order since he has jurisdiction over such things. He's pretty grumpy and it's never a bad idea to stay on his good side.

STANDING WITH WORKERS. Here's what I'm planning on doing Thursday.

BEYOND AUSTERITY. Here are some different ideas for boosting the economy.

HUMANS AND KANGAROOS. Yes, we're cousins. But not very close ones.

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

The word of the day is...

...austerity. You hear calls for it all the time from the crew that runs Congress these days. Apparently, these folks are unaware that things are already pretty austere for the nearly 25 million Americans who are un- or under-employed or the nearly 50 million without health insurance.

If these people have their way, things will get even more austere for the millions of seniors who depend on Medicare and Social Security and the tens of millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid for everything from pre-natal to nursing home care.

AUSTERITY is bad medicine at a time when the world economy is sliding towards a double dip recess.

SPEAKING OF AUSTERITY, you won't find a whole lot of it amongst the very wealthy.

STILL SPEAKING OF AUSTERITY, conservative ideologues seem to want to destroy the economy in order to save it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

First put out the fire (and save lives)

The theme here lately is the current economic and political mess the US finds itself in and how we got there.

Installment one is here. Short version: 30 years of bad policy and bad (supply side) economics set up the Great Recession.

Installment two is here. Short version: the policy response to the Great Recession, TARP and the Recovery Act, might have been enough to restore very modest economic growth but weren't enough to end the jobs crisis. They were thus vulnerable to political attack.

Here's installment three. The shortcomings of the Recovery Act, especially continuing anger over high unemployment, helped fuel Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections, shifting control of the House and weakening the Democratic majority in the Senate. But as soon as the dust of the election had settled, all that supposed concern about jobs disappeared and dealing with debt and deficits became the order of the day.

As someone said, elections matter.

While deficits and debt are important matters, there are several flaws with the right wing take on the issue. One will suffice for today: cutting government spending in the midst of a recession or very weak recovery is likely to make the recession and its related problems--like high unemployment and weak demand--get even worse, which could also make the long term debt problem worse.

After all, fewer people working and more people with reduced incomes means fewer people paying taxes and more people paying less in taxes. And cuts in public spending mean cuts in public sector jobs as well as private sector spin offs at a time when private sector job growth is very weak.

It's a bit like worrying about a new roof on the house when a fire has started in the kitchen. Fixing the roof is fine, but save lives and put out the fire first.

MORE ON DEFICIT LIES here.

MORE ON THE NEGLECTED JOBS CRISIS here.

WANT TO CUT DEBT? Raise revenues.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

In a dark wood

It's starting to look like the United States, like Dante in the opening lines of his Inferno, is finding itself in a dark woods, having lost the true path. Three years after the worst economic decline since the Great Recession, we seem to be headed down a path that will only lead to more misery for ordinary Americans.

And, to throw in a reference to an Irish poet to balance the Italian one mentioned above, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. What happened?

Over the next few days, I'm going to try to unravel this one. Here's the first installment:

The Great Recession, which technically began in 2007 but made itself felt in 2008 was facilitated by 30 years of deregulation, privatization, supply side economic BS and the undermining of policies that promoted shared prosperity. And yet, incredible as it seems to me, the ideas that led to it and which should have been permanently discredited are still being asserted louder than ever.

MEANWHILE, how bout that stock market? Those tea baggers must be really happy now.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. Email subscribers to this blog may have accidentally gotten a not ready for prime time version of installment 2 of this series. I apologize for filling up your inbox.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

NOBODY HURT ME!

Odysseus and his men blinding the cyclops Polyphemus, courtesy of wikipedia.

The Goat Rope series on the Odyssey of Homer continues. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Things aren't looking good for Odysseus and his men at this stage of the game. By day, they are locked in the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus while he grazes his goats and sheep. By night, the one-eyed wonder chomps down on Odysseus' men. The good news is that Polyphemus is feeling generous and gave Odysseus a gift: he'll be the last one to get eaten.

I prefer gift certificates...

The classical scholar Peter Meineck has argued that the story of Odysseus in the cave can be seen as an initiation story. He is separated from the ordinary world and put in a situation where he has to undergo an ordeal and learn something to make it out. His eventual emergence from the cave can be seen as a kind of rebirth. That may be true, but Odysseus doesn't seem to gain a whole lot of insight.

At any rate, he's in a situation where mere force and violence won't help much. If he and his men kill the cyclops, they're doomed to die in the cave, which is sealed by a huge stone.

You probably remember this part of the story. Odysseus gets the Big Boy drunk one night with some super-powered wine he just happened to bring. They have a conversation in which he identifies himself as Nobody. After the cyclops passes out from the wine, he and his remaining crew blind the cyclops with a sharpened pole that has been heated in the fire.

I will spare the Gentle Reader the details. Suffice it to say that Odysseus and his men don't just put it part way in for a second. They plunge it in deep and grind it over and over. The physiological details are excruciating.

When Polyphemus screams, other cyclops gather around and ask what is the problem. Polyphemus screams "Nobody hurt me!"--so they go home.

The rest of the story is also well known. Odysseus and his men sneak out the next morning hanging beneath the Cyclops's sheep and hightail it for the ship to make their escape. Everything might have gone OK had not the hero of this story opened his big mouth. Instead of just getting out of Dodge, when he's at a safe distance, Odysseus announces his real name:

...'Cyclops--
if any man on the face of the earth should ask you
who blinded you, shamed you so--say Odysseus,
raider of cities, he gouged out your eye,
Laertes' son who makes his home in Ithaca!'

Bad move! You might as well give him your home address, phone number, Social Security number and credit cards.

The cyclops, son of the god Poseidon, prays thus:

...Hear me,
Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane who rocks the earth!
If I really am your son and you claim to be my father--
come, grant that Odysseus, raider of cities,
Laertes' son who makes his home in Ithaca,
never reaches home. Or if he's fated to see
his people once again and reach his well-built house
and his own native country, let him come home late
and come a broken man--all shipmates lost,
alone in a stranger's ship--
and let him find a world of pain at home!'

That prayer is granted. By his own lack of self control, Odysseus condemns himself to years of further suffering and his men to certain death.

He has issues...

WHERE'S THE BEEF? The US economy doesn't manufacture much and is short of ideas, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT. The EFCA, which would make it easier--and safer--for workers to organize into unions, received support in the Wall Street Journal, of all places.

BIG WIND. A new study shows that hurricanes and typhoons are getting stronger, apparently as a result of climate change.

LIFE IS SHORT and getting shorter for residents in some WV counties, especially women.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED