TaxScam in a nutshell

Here's what I think we need to know about the highly partisan version of tax "reform" now being pushed through the senate:

1. George W. Bush passed massive tax cuts and what we got was....permanent prosperity? Oh, wait, it was the biggest crash since the Great Depression. I'm not saying the tax cuts were the sole cause, although they did contribute to the financial bubbles that led to it. But it's obvious that tax cuts don't guarantee growth or prosperity or economic stability.

2. This is a Trojan horse. The massive transfer of wealth to those who already have it will eventually crowd out funding for things like Medicare, Medicaid, student aid, food security, housing etc.

3. There are plenty of "starve the beast" Republicans who want that to happen. They hope a crisis will force cuts to domestic programs.

4. Then there's the whole thing about adding $1.5 trillion+ to the deficit for no good reason.

5. Whatever cuts some middle class people will get is a sugar high. Those cuts are temporary, while cuts to corporations and the wealthy are permanent.

6. Due to the tilt of the programs towards the wealthy, people in 19 states, including West Virginia, will eventually pay more in 2027 than they do under current law.

7. Then there's the consequences of repealing the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, which will greatly increase the number of uninsured Americans and drive up costs for everyone else.

I mean, golly, what could possibly go wrong?

Anniversaries

El Cabrero was fated to be a Civil War geek by a combination of geography and genetics. My beloved home state of West Virginia was born out of it and parts of that state were passed back and forth like a football during the conflict.

Fault lines from the conflict ran through my family, my mother being a staunch Unionist who had no use for the Lost Cause, quite unlike those on my father's side of the family. According to family tradition, I had relatives on both sides, the most prominent being a minor Confederate hero who made it into the pages of a history of Tazewell County, Virginia.

I'll take the North for the politics and the South for the personalities.

As the 150th anniversary of the war approaches, we're going to be hearing a lot about anniversaries of various events. One is coming up this week, Nov. 6 being the anniversary of the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. That may give a sense of perspective about the coming election on Tuesday. Yeah, this cycle may be divisive but compared to the one 150 years ago, it's pretty tame.

ON THAT NOTE, here's an op-ed on the subject by the author of the fun book Confederates in the Attic.

MORALIZING about the economy could prolong the slump.

SANITY ON THE MALL. Here's a look at this weekend's Washington rally for sanity and/or fear.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on love.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

100 years in the making

Bully!

When it comes to public policy, it seems that windows of opportunity for action sometimes open--and sometimes they close. And if the boat is missed, it may not come back for a very long time.

Health care reform is a case in point. We now have one of those rare openings to significantly expand access to health care in this country. If we don't get it done soon, we may have to wait for years or decades to try to do this again...or maybe it will never happen.

The idea of providing some kind of system of universal care goes back in mainstream US politics to Republican president Theodore Roosevelt around 100 years ago. It was a plank on his 1912 bid for the presidency on the Progressive ticket.

It was part of his distant cousin Franklin's unfinished New Deal agenda from the 1930s. President Truman made a serious but unsuccessful push for it in the late 1940s, after which it lay dormant for decades.

The 1960s saw a significant expansion of health care with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, which provided coverage for the elderly, the poor, and low income people with disabilities, although comprehensive reform remained elusive.

Another push for universal care began in the early 1970s and peaked briefly during the Carter administration before fading away again. It wasn’t until the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 that the issue again emerged, only to be torpedoed in 1994. Since then progress has been incremental at best, the most notable example being the creation and reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

The chance for reform has been nearly a century in the making--here's hoping we don't blow it this time.

THE BALANCING ACT between debt and recovery is discussed here.

MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM. Here's another whack at one of my favorite targets.

ANOTHER LOW RANKING. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia doesn't usually do too well on state rankings for most topics. Here's the latest low grade.

GOOD-NATURED. Humans may have an innate urge to help, according to some researchers.

HERE ARE THE COOL PICTURES OF MICRO-ORGANISMS you ordered.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

What if?

Greek hoplite versus Persian warrior. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Have you ever racked your brain wondering what if? What if you or I had done something differently at a critical point in our lives?

For that matter, what if, say, Lincoln or Julius Caesar weren't assassinated? What if Alexander the Great lived another 40 years? What if Trotsky won out over Stalin in the early USSR? What if Hitler had died in a mortar attack during World War I? What if....

That kind of thinking can drive you crazy, but it does serve to point out that personal and world history has lots of places where things could have gone lots of different ways.

One such turning point in the ancient world was the war between Greece and the Persian empire. If anyone was taking bets then, the smart money would have been on the might of Persia rather than on Greece, which was not a nation but a number of independent city states that spent much of their time warring against each other.

Greek tragedy, the theme lately here at Goat Rope, came into its own in the aftermath of the Greek victory over the might of Persia. Aeschylus, the earliest tragedian whose works survive, was himself a veteran of that war. He fought at the battle of Marathon and possibly at Salamis and Plataea.

Although he wrote as many as 90 plays (of which only seven survive) and won many honors for this, his epitaph mentions none of this. Instead, it says:

Aeschylus, Euphorion's son, this tablet hides
Who passed away in Gela where the wheat fields grow:
His bravery the glorious shrine of Marathon can tell
Where the deep-maned Medes had learnt it well.

Interestingly, one of Aeschylus' surviving tragedies portrays this world historic conflict from the point of view of his enemies--and he does it well and respectfully. We seem to have lost that ability.

More on that tomorrow.

CLIMATE CHANGE. Here's something else for the coal industry to deny.

CENTER WHAT? This article argues that American attitudes are leaning in a progressive direction.

DEREGULATION. In this op-ed, Paul Krugman suggests that the roots of the current economic crisis can be traced to the explosion of debt from Reagan era deregulation.

SUSTAIN THIS. Four animals from Goat Rope Farm (eight counting humans) were represented at Charleston WV's Sustainabilty Fair.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Good advice

Don't corner this guy.

It recently occurred to me that I have sometimes been profoundly influenced by brief and seemingly random conversations with people. What follows is one example.

In another lifetime, El Cabrero had a happy but impoverished career working in public libraries in my beloved state of West Virginia. I started out as a janitor at the branch in my small town and started working with the public when they figured out I could read and write.

A big change came when I was transferred, not entirely voluntarily, from that small place to the main library in one of the state's biggest cities. The clientele was a little more...interesting, and sometimes kind of unpredictable.

Someone who worked there a long time gave me what turned out to be very good advice: "Never back a crazy person into a corner."

The person meant it literally at the time. If a patron was emotionally disturbed, they could become dangerous if they were backed into an aisle with no way out. But if you think about it, even a small animal will fight back fiercely if driven into a corner with no way out. That's even more true of people.

I have since modified that rule with a corollary: we're all crazy sometimes. I still try to adhere to the practice of not putting another person in a situation in which his or her only way out is to tear a hole through me. Taken together, those are pretty useful things to keep in mind in de-escalating potentially dangerous situations and defusing conflict.

SUBURBS. Lots of people moved there over the last few decades. Now poverty is moving in too.

SPEAKING OF POVERTY, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities issued a new report that warns

the current downturn is likely to cause significant increases both in the number of Americans who are poor and the number living in “deep poverty,” with incomes below half of the poverty line. Because this recession is likely to be deep and the government safety net for very poor families who lack jobs has weakened significantly in recent years, increases in deep poverty in this recession are likely to be severe.

CBPP recommends several steps to soften the blow, including expanding access to food stamps, expanding and extending unemployment benefits and contingency TANF funding, and providing fiscal aid to states so that these won't have to cut vital programs.

ELEMENTS OF A STIMULUS PACKAGE are discussed here. And Paul Krugman argues here that this isn't the time to be a deficit hawk.

WORTH A LOOK. Dollars, debt, dealing with crises, and even Dickens are the subject of the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE FIRST OLYMPIANS

Dionysus and friends, courtesy of wikipedia.

The series on the Odyssey continues, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If you like an occasional ancient Greek fix, please click on earlier posts. The series started Aug. 4.

As noted yesterday, the Greek gods who were such major characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey were a lot different from what we're used to these days.

Here's a striking contrast. In a monotheistic framework, it is idolatrous and impious to worship more than one god. In the Greek religious system, it would be just as impious to worship only one at the expense of the whole. That was one theme in the Greek tragedy Hippolytus by Euripides, in which the title character worshiped only Artemis the hunter goddess and neglected the love goddess Aphrodite to his own destruction. Like the letters of the alphabet or chess pieces or a deck of cards, the gods only made sense as part of a system.

Greek religion had no creeds or scriptures and didn't place an emphasis on personal piety or beliefs. Nor did it have as elaborate a system of priests and religious officials as many other societies.

The Greek gods weren't all that interested in micromanaging human morality either, although they did have some standards. Zeus, for instance, was the patron of oaths and the laws of hospitality which protected guests and hosts. Hera was the goddess of marriage (not entirely successfully). The gods tended to punish human excess and arrogance to protect the rights of supplicants and sanctuary.

If they didn't crave personal piety, they wanted respect. In a way, the gods couldn't exist without people to worship them and they enjoyed the aroma of sacrifices.

Aside from that, they didn't care too much about people. Some had their favorites, such as Odysseus' patron Athena, but in general they probably cared less for people than some people care for their pets.

On the positive side, it probably would occur to the Olympians to punish the majority of mankind in eternal fire, although they did reserve special punishments for people who personally ticked them off.

Next time: the lineup.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN should be welcomed back to the public sphere like the Prodigal Son, as this piece argues.

TIMETABLE? McClatchy reports that the US and Iraq are approaching an agreement on the withdrawal of US troops.

LEAVING WAR TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR. The US has spent $100 billion on private contractors in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

CREDIT CARD DEBT is a serious issue for college students. In one survey, typical respondents will graduate with more than $2,600 of it. That's not counting student loans.

BIG BOXES GO SOLAR. A number of retail giants are installing solar panels on their roofs to capture energy.

ALMOST UFO HEAVEN. El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia has yet another distinction, as the Beckley Register Herald suggest:

West Virginia prides itself as a land of majestic mountains, sparkling streams, coal to feed hungry power plants, a unique place in American history and a fiercely independent people accustomed to overcoming hard times with a resiliency unrivaled by anyone else.

Now add another chapter to the 35th state’s storied history — more documented UFO activity than any other place in America.

Even eclipsing Roswell.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LESSONS LEARNED?

Salem witch trial, courtesy of wikipedia.

It would be nice to think that people who have experienced violence, oppression or discrimination would ever thereafter sympathize with people in similar situations. Sometimes it works out that way, but it could just as easily have the opposite effect.

El Cabrero has often shown the PBS documentary A Class Divided to sociology classes and other groups. It showed how elementary school teacher Jane Elliot tried to teach a group of white children what discrimination was like by segregating them on the basis of eye color. One day students with blue eyes are given top status and extra privileges, while the brown eyed students were marginalized.

On the next day, the roles were switched. One might hope that those who had been unfairly treated would refuse to treat others in the same way.

Not a chance. They couldn't wait to claim top status. It was only after a period of debriefing that students could begin to process the experience and learn from it.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil puts it like this:

...what are the deeper lessons to be learned from such situations? Admire power; detest weakness. Dominate, don't negotiate. Hit first when they turn the other cheek. The golden rule is for them, not us. Authority rules, rules are authority.

These are also some of the lessons learned by boys of abusive fathers, half of whom are transformed into abusive fathers themselves, abusing their children, spouses, and parents. Perhaps half of them identify with the aggressor and perpetuate his violence, while others learn to identify with the abused and reject aggression for compassion. However, research does not help us to predict which abused kids will later become abusers and which will turn out to be compassionate adults.

Thus it is that in history the children of the oppressed can quickly become the oppressors and persecuted groups sometimes persecute others in kind when the opportunity occurs.

DEEP IN DEBT. The NY Times had an interesting item about the nation's debt crisis. Here's an excerpt:

Just two generations ago, America was a nation of mostly thrifty people living within their means, even setting money aside for unforeseen expenses.

Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22 percent since 2000 alone, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The average household’s credit card debt is $8,565, up almost 15 percent from 2000.

College debt has more than doubled since 1995. The average student emerges from college carrying $20,000 in educational debt.

Household debt, including mortgages and credit cards, represents 19 percent of household assets, according to the Fed, compared with 13 percent in 1980

SELF HELP NATION. Also from the Times, here's an entertaining item about the burgeoning self help publishing industry.

OPPOSING THE NEXT WAR. People around the country are mobilizing to prevent a possible war with Iran.

STATE OF THE UNION. A new book makes the case for how labor unions strengthen working families. But the author says we need to help the general public connect the dots.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Baruch Spinoza, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero recently took the plunge into the serene but bracing waters of one of history's greatest philosophers, Baruch aka Benedict Spinoza, who lived from 1632 to 1677.

Despite having lived over 300 years ago, his thought is strikingly modern. His view of the universe influenced Einstein and many other scientists and thinkers and is in some respects very similar to Buddhism. He has been called both an atheist and a "God-intoxicated man." (Official Goat Rope verdict: he was definitely the latter.)

Spinoza descended from a Jewish family forced to flee the persecutions of Inquisition in the Spain or Portugal. He was born in Amsterdam at a time when Holland was a relative bastion of religious freedom and a haven of safety for Jews.

He attended the Rabbinical School and studied the Hebrew Bible and Talmud as well as the works of Jewish and Arab medieval philosophers who were influenced by Aristotle, Plato and the neo-Platonists. Spinoza learned Latin in order to read the philosophical, scientific and mathematical works of Renee Descartes, who was widely considered to be the founder of modern philosophy.

His rabbinical teachers were disturbed by his lack of interest in traditional studies as well as his embrace of unorthodox ideas and his rational treatment of the supernaturnal stories of the Bible. In all probability, they were also concerned about testing the limits of Christian tolerance--which has often been an oxymoron--in one of the few places tolerant of Jews. After repeated warnings, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community.

And what an excommunication it was. Here's a sample:

By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law. But you that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day.

In other words, they were kind of upset with him.

The excommunication also included the following warning to the faithful:

That no one should communicate with him neither in writing nor accord him any favor nor stay with him under the same roof nor within four cubits in his vicinity; nor shall he read any treatise composed or written by him.

After that, Spinoza lived an austere life of reclusive scholarship, supporting himself by grinding lenses until his death by consumption at the age of 45. Some of his main works were not published until after his death.'

More about his thought next time around.

WE'RE ALL KEYNESIANS NOW from the near consensus on the need for some kind of economic stimulus. But as this item from the UK Guardian argues, we're leaving out the main part of the great economist John Maynard Keynes' ideas: the need for shared prosperity.

A MISSING PIECE in the debate about dealing with recession and stimulus is the role of debt. Harvard law professor and debt expert Elizabeth Warren points out here that never has a recession occurred in American when so many people were so much in debt. Factoid: in 2006, credit card companies collected $90 billion in fees, interest and late charges from American families.

STATING THE OBVIOUS. An AP poll shows most Americans think the best way to stimulate the economy is to get out of the Iraq war.

HARD TIMES FOR VETERANS. From the Chicago Tribune:

Strained by war, recently discharged veterans are having a harder time finding civilian jobs and are more likely to earn lower wages for years due partly to employer concerns about their mental health and overall skills, a government study says.

The Veterans Affairs Department report, obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, points to continuing problems with the Bush administration's efforts to help 4.4 million troops who have been discharged from active duty since 1990.

The 2007 study by the consulting firm Abt Associates Inc. found that 18 percent of the veterans were unemployed within one to three years of discharge, while one out of four who did find jobs earned less than $21,840 a year. Many had taken advantage of government programs such as the GI Bill to boost job prospects, but there was little evidence that education benefits yielded higher pay or better advancement.

There's more to the article.

ON THE POSITIVE SIDE OF THE LEDGER, it looks like two baby Komodo dragons were born without male fertilization.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED (ALTHOUGH THE KOMODO DRAGON THING IS KIND OF COOL)

SYMBOLS AND MYTHS

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is the nature of faith, which is an interesting subject whether you have any at the moment or not. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Yesterday's post was about symbols, which are always a part of faith. A friend emailed me to point out that the most recognized symbol in the world today is McDonald's golden arches. Holy fetishism of commodities, Batman! That point goes to Marx...

According to the influential 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, faith is about whatever concerns us ultimately and is always symbolic. This is true of traditional religion as well as of things like nationalism or the goal of "success":

everything which is a matter of unconditional concern is made into a god. If the nation is some one's ultimate concern, the name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of the being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate, but in an idolatrous way.

Success as ultimate concern is not the natural desire of actualizing potentialities, but is readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being a success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success is grace; lack of success, ultimate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idolatrous symbols of ultimate concern.

Symbols are united with myths. Unfortunately, the term myth is sadly abused in current speech, where it means something that just isn't true. Myths are stories often of God or the gods that convey meaning to human life. We can't do without them:

Myths are always present in every act of faith, because the language of faith is the symbol.

Most great religious traditions eventually criticize their mythic elements, such as stories that depict God or the gods acting like humans. Most religions eventually recognize that many of their sacred stories have meanings that are true but metaphorical rather than factual and literal. Tillich calls a myth that is recognized as such a "broken myth." Still you can't get rid of them:

All the mythological elements in the Bible, and doctrine and liturgy should be recognized as mythological, but they should be maintained in their symbolic form and not be replaced by scientific substitutes. For there is no substitute for the use of symbols and myths: they are the language of faith...

Symbols of faith cannot be replaced by other symbols, such as artistic ones, and they cannot be removed by scientific criticism. They have a genuine standing in the human mind, just as science and art have. Their symbolic character is their truth and their power. Nothing less than symbols and myths can express our ultimate concerns.

LIES AND LIES. A study by two nonprofit investigative groups found that the road to the Iraq war was paved by hundreds of "false statements."

DEBT CRISIS. Here's Chalmers Johnson on how excessive war spending and national debt is damaging the country and economy.

REBUILD USA. Here's an op-ed from the Huntington WV Herald Dispatch by Tim Millne about the wealth squandered in Iraq and the need to reinvest in our own infrastructure.

RECESSION. Here's Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on how we should respond to a slowing economy.

OLD BEN. Here's a fun New Yorker article about Benjamin Franklin and his famous almanac.

JAH LIVE. Here's one about a new Smithsonian exhibit on Rastafarianism.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. WV Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher is calling for an investigation of recent conduct there in the wake of the case involving Massey Energy and CEO Don Blankenship. Here's his memo and here are more links from WV Uberblog Lincoln Walks at Midnight..

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

APPROACHING FIVE YEARS

It's hard to believe, but we're approaching the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unnecessary war in Iraq. That's longer than the US Civil War and our involvement in World War II.

For the latest reckoning of US casualties, click here. As mentioned here earlier this week, the World Health Organization estimates over 150,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion.

Financially, the war has been estimated to cost over $1 trillion in the first four years. Now it's costing around $720 million per day or $500,000 per minute.

Over the last several days this blog has been exploring how people interested in a less violent and more just world can learn from studying conflict and strategy, with a special focus on Sun Tzu, who believed the highest level of accomplishment is to accomplish one's objectives without a struggle.

It's only fitting at this time to quote his warnings on the dangers of a long war, from Chapter 2 of The Art of War:

If battle is protracted, your weapons will be blunted and your troops demoralized. If you lay siege to a walled city, you exhaust your strength. If your armies are kept in the field for a long time, your national reserves will not suffice. Where you have blunted your weapons, demoralized your troops, exhausted your strength and depleted all available resources, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of your adversity to strike. And even with the wisest counsel, you will not be able to turn the ensuing consequences to the good.

Thus in war, I have heard tell of a foolish haste, but I have yet to see a case of cleverly dragging on the hostilities. There has never been a state that has benefited from an extended war. Hence, if one is not fully cognizant of the evils of waging war, he cannot be fully cognizant either of how to turn it to best account.

BLOOM AND BUST. Yale literary professor Harold Bloom doesn't care much for the Iraq war, Harry Potter, or Stephen King. I'm with him on the first, have no opinion on the second, but must admit a certain occasional flirtation with the works of the third. Especially the older stuff.

LIKE A SPRINGSTEEN SONG. This item from yesterday's NY Times about the loss of blue collar jobs points to a sad trend.

MORTGAGE CRISIS AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY. According to this item from The Nation,

Black homeowners have been hit particularly hard, largely because predatory lenders have been steering them toward subprime loans for years at more than twice the rate of white homeowners, even when they could afford prime rates. According to the Urban League, home equity accounts for almost 90 percent of black homeowners' net worth. So as the housing market collapses, much of the new wealth that has accumulated in black communities in recent decades will go with it.

The Urban League and Rainbow/PUSH are planning a Jan. 22 march on the Department of Housing and Urban Development in DC to bring attention to this crisis.

FEAR AND TREMBLING. As the 2008 elections approach, some management types are scared about the prospects of a new Congress passing the Employee Free Choice Act which just might help rebuild the middle class. El Cabrero is temporarily overcome with sympathy for their plight. OK, I'm over it.

MORE ON MASSEYGATE. Here's the latest AP coverage about the ties between Massey CEO Don Blankenship and WV Supreme Court chief Justice Spike Maynard. Selection:

Since his election as justice in 1996, Maynard has helped decide at least eight cases at the Supreme Court involving Massey or one of its subsidiaries, an AP review shows. Maynard voted in Massey’s favor in all eight, dissenting from the court’s ruling in four of those cases.

PHYS ED. Here's something on a more rational approach to physical education and lifetime activity.

TWO BURNING ISSUES. This article suggest that blaming erratic behavior on a midlife crisis is a lame excuse. Damn. I was just getting ready to try that one. And, if you've ever spent sleepless nights wondering where, exactly, the fortune cookie came from, you can now rest in peace.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, how 'bout a rodent big as a bull?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHICH WAY USA?

Caption: This man has been squeezed out of the middle class.

El Cabrero is winding up the week of New Year by highlighting some important books published in 2007. If this is your first visit, please click on previous posts.

Today's selection is Paul Krugman's The Conscience of A Liberal. Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton but is best known for his columns in the New York Times. An earlier book of his, The Great Unraveling, is also worth a look.

(Come to think of it, this is probably also true of his earlier works, but I haven't read them. Yet.)

Conscience is a very readable guide to where we've come from, where we are, and where we might go as a nation in terms of economic policy and shared prosperity. Krugman looks first at the post-Civil War Gilded Age, with huge disparities of wealth and little, no safety net for working people, and disenfranchisement of millions of Americans.

This system was challenged by populists and progressives and was only overcome through the struggles of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and post-World War II policies which helped create the American middle class.

He calls this period, which lasted from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s as "the Great Compression." Taxes were high on the wealthy, some big businesses were regulated, pro-union policies were in effect, and government programs protected incomes, safety, education, and home ownership--and the country prospered as never before.

Things have obviously changed, due largely to the rise of what he calls "movement conservatism" (and what Jonathan Chait calls "crackpot economics"):

The American I grew up in was a relatively equal middle-class society. Over the past generation, however, the country has returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

Krugman offers a number of market and "aftermarket" policy measures to reverse this trend and builds a strong case for the "health care imperative"--the need to create a universal system of care. He notes that a weird reversal has occurred in our current political climate:

One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early twenty-first century is that those of us who call themselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend long-standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture.

There's a lot of history, ideas, and information here. I'd recommend checking it out. As Maude Lebowski said in that classic of American cinematography, "He's a good man--and thorough."

ANOTHER ROADBLOCK to a fresh war with Iran may have emerged. The U.S. military reports that Iran is no longer supplying training or materials to militants in Iraq.

MORAL VALUES DEPARTMENT. By way of the Washington Post, here are a series of questions religion professor R. Gustav Niebuhr would ask candidates.

UNKIND. Here's the Bush administration's latest smackdown of efforts to expand health care.

DEBT. El Cabrero has recently been trying to make sense of the massive debt/credit goat rope that is tripping up the nation. Here's a new blog by six academics on these issues: Credit Slips.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOWS AND WHYS

Caption: Auschwitz. Photo credit: Photo by betauser courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

Recently I renewed my acquaintance with a classic book, Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Victor Frankl (1905-1997). The book is his account both of his experiences as an inmate of Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the Third Reich era and of his psychological theories. It has had a huge impact, with millions of copies in print.

Frankl's book contains his ordeal and that of many others in the most extreme and dehumanizing conditions as well as his insights into how to remain human in spite of it all. Fortunately, one doesn't have to be in an extreme situation to benefit from his basic ideas.

Prior to his imprisonment, Frankl was a Viennese physician and psychologist who had me Freud and Adler. In 1942, Frankl, his wife, and parents were deported to Thereisenstadt, where, in spite of everything, he gave lectures on mental health and related topics. He was later shipped to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Turkheim.

Frankl lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust, with the exception of a sister who escaped to Australia.

After the war, he resumed his practice in Vienna, where he developed his insights into a method he called logotherapy, from the Greek words for reason and healing.

In a very real sense, his work was a practical commentary on a line from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols:

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

About which more tomorrow...

HEALTH CARE BLUES. According to Business Week, a new survey shows that more Americans want a total overhaul of the health care system than do citizens of six other industrialized nations.

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS...NOT. Also from Business Week, this interesting article shows that big financial institutions are still collecting from consumers whose debts were supposedly cancelled by bankruptcy.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH. Here's Charleston Gazette coverage for a march organized by Black Lawyers for Justice yesterday. The march was peaceful, although name-calling continued. A number of local organizations, including branches of the NAACP, the Charleston Black Ministerial Alliance, the Logan County Improvement League, and West Virginians United for Social and Economic Justice did not support the event, in part due to concerns about its possible impact on the case against her alleged attackers.

WHAT WOULD SUSTAINABILITY LOOK LIKE? Here's a suggestion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A JUDICIOUS MIX: PRIVATIZATION AND VET HEALTH CARE, CORPORATE TAX CUTS, "THE OFFICE," AND DEBT

Caption: This guy really needs cable.

FIRST ITEM...Here's more on the breaking story from Tom Paine.com of how privatization and outsourcing hurt wounded U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan vets at Walter Reed and elsewhere.

WEST VIRGINIA ACTION ALERT: If you live in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, please contact your representatives in the House of Delegates and urge them to reject the state Senate's irresponsible corporate tax cuts, which would force cuts to K-12 education, the college and university system, health care and human services, etc. Thanks to Prevent Child Abuse WV, here's an easy way to do it.


THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID. We will now move on to the topic of Cabrero's favorite TV show.

And, no, it's not American Idol.

It's...what else? The Office! (American version, although the British is OK too.)
The show is sometimes excruciating, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes very realistic. That's Thursdays on NBC at 8:30.

It's also the subject of the "That's What She Said" blog by Julie Elgar, a labor and employment attorney. The subject of the blog is all the legal and other trouble that could happen if people really acted that way in the workplace.

My favorite episode was the one about diversity training...

Still, if I had to pick, I'd prefer a workplace that tilts more towards craziness than to inhuman efficiency.

Full disclosure: El Cabrero received no compensation for this unsolicited endorsement of a network TV show. A tour of Scranton would be nice though.

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS, REVISITED. Earlier GR posts have noted America's current negative savings rate, which is about where it was in the depths of the great depression.

Here are some nuggets from the March 12 issue of Business Week:

...The average U.S. consumer has four credit cards, according to a recent nationwide sampling of 3 million consumer credit files. The most credit-happy states: New Hampshire and New Jersey, where 20% of customers carry 10 cards or more...

According to the survey, 51% of Americans have at least two credit cards, 14% have at least 10, and 14% use at least 50% of available credit.

Can you imagine what would happen to the U.S. economy if people had to live on what they actually earned? Holy crisis of overproduction and/or underconsumption, Batman!


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED.

MINIMUM WAGE PASSES SENATE, PLUS NEWS ON DEBT AND TRADE AND CATS

Goat Rope...It's not just for people. Do your animals read it?

We received the following note and this photo yesterday from the Direct Action Welfare Group (DAWG), an allied organization.

According to DAWG, the feline Goat Rope fan is

one of three children born out of wedlock to Wednesday, a single mother we rescued from the homeless cat shelter just in time for her to have triplets. Soon as she can find a daycare she will be out pounding the pavement for a minimum wage job but currently she is receiving welfare and foodstamps to help feed her brood.

It looks like his mom will be working for a higher minimum wage soon.

(Random thought: if you have a cat, grab it and show it this post. Then it will be a cat looking at Goat Rope looking at another cat looking at Goat Rope. Then, if you have a camera, take a picture of the cat looking at the picture of a cat. That would almost be an infinite regression. That would rule...)

Lots of news today, first,

SENATE PASSES MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE 94-3! That's a positive development, although the bill wasn't clean (meaning that it had extraneous amendments attached). Now it goes to conference with the House. Ideally, the amendments would be removed but that remains to be seen. Congratulations though for everyone who worked on this! We've come a long way...

Did I mention that El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia (ECBSWV) was the first state under the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign umbrella to increase it at the state level? (OK, so others had done it before the campaign kicked off, but let's not get too technical.)

HERE'S SOME GLOOMIER NEWS that reflects the current state of (the lack of) economic justice in the U.S. According to the AP, personal savings have dropped to their lowest level in 74 years (that would be 1933, not exactly a banner year for shared prosperity):

People once again spent everything they made and then some last year, pushing the personal savings rate to the lowest level since the Great Depression more than seven decades ago.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005 and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Depression.

BUT HERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE BETTER: There are signs that the new Congress will no longer rubber stamp "free" trade agreements. This item from The Hill indicated that Democrats may delay moving on trade deals unless labor and environment standards are strengthened.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: HOPPIN' LIKE A TOAD