What were they thinking?

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the failure of "conservative" economic policy, but you'll also find links and comments about current events. The series started Monday.

If you've ever looked back at economic history, you'll notice that capitalism has the endearing tendency to blow up or melt down every decade or so, a tendency that can be seen as far back as the early 1800s. As the economy became more centralized in the first half of the 1900s, these crises threatened social stability and possibly the survival of capitalism itself.

One thing that has kept the US economy from tanking as deeply as it did during the Great Depression of the 1930s (up to now anyway) has been a degree of government regulation, tax and fiscal policies and the social safety net.

Those reforms, associated in the US with the New Deal, were often hated by those who most benefited from them, i.e. right wing business interests. It was pretty ironic, since those who had the most to gain from a stable capitalist system were the capitalists themselves.

And for several decades, those forces, along with an ideological noise machine, have fought mightily to dismantle some of the structure that held things together. It seems about as rational to me as sawing off the branch you're sitting on.

As I watched this happen over the last few decades, I honestly wondered what they were thinking. Did they believe the economic system had somehow become bubble- or crisis-proof? If they actually did succeed in dismantling all the worker and family friendly gains of the past, how did they think people would react to it? Did they have a plan to contain the popular outrage that would follow sooner or later? If they succeeded in undermining the economic status (and purchasing power) of the middle and working class, did they think the very wealthy alone could keep the economy going?

And most of all, did they really believe this stuff?

It kind of reminds me of someone who stuck their tongue in an electric socket and got shocked really badly, but wanted to try it just one more time...

ARE WE THERE YET on the stimulus? Maybe not.

HEALTH CARE. Krugman says the time is now.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, the US Senate voted to expand health care to around 4 million children. The House previously passed a similar bill.

STATE OF THE UNIONS. Union membership increased slightly in 2008 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are other interesting trends as well.

MORE FUN WITH THE SUPREMES. Massey Energy sees nothing wrong with a state supreme court justice elected with its CEO's money hearing its cases. Now that's a shocker.

And, while we're at it, here's the latest on the Aracoma mine fire case, which killed two miners in 2006.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

YE GODS

The Olympians, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope these days is The Odyssey of Homer, although you will also find links and comments about current events. The series began Aug. 4. If this is your first visit and if you find the subject congenial, please click on earlier posts.

A few years back, I was excited to hear that someone was making a movie about the Trojan War. Fool that I was, I thought they might actually stick a little to the Iliad. It was terrible! AND there weren't even any gods in it. I was mortified.

Talking about Homer without gods is kind of like playing a guitar without notes or chords. They are as much a part of the story as the people.

Still, Greek gods seem a little strange to people brought up on a legacy of monotheism. When many people today hear the word god, they imagine some kind of solitary being that is eternal, all good, all powerful and all knowing. None of these apply to the Greek version. Let's run down that list.

Solitary? Nope. There were a bunch of them. Aside from the Big Twelve (or Thirteen, depending on who you count) on Olympus, there were several dark, scary chthonic gods of the underworld, an older generation of imprisoned Titans, and any number of lesser divinities. It was a pluralistic view of the universe. Sometimes there were even different versions of the same god.

Eternal? Nope, at least not in the sense of always existing. The gods of Olympus were a few generations removed from the primal Chaos that Hesiod says was there "in the beginning." They are immortal and free from aging and sickness however. That's the main difference between us and them.

All good? Hardly. They could be petty, spiteful, lusty and vindictive. The philosopher Xenophanes wrote that

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and disgrace among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving one another.

It's probably more to the point to say that Greek gods were beyond good and evil. Many were related to, if not personifications of, natural forces. And, as you may have noticed, nature isn't very moralistic or puritanical.

All powerful? Not quite, although they are very powerful. As Apollo warns the warrior Diomedes in the Iliad,

Gods are to humans what humans are to crawling bugs.

Still, one nice thing about polytheism is that the power of one god can be checked or influenced by others. A kind of divine coalition politics sometimes prevailed. Although the most powerful god by far is Zeus, even his power is limited by Fate.

All knowing? Not exactly. They know a lot and eventually find out a lot more but they can be fooled and tricked. They sleep and take trips and don't know what goes on at such times. At one point in the Iliad, the goddess Hera tricks Zeus into a zesty bout of lovemaking so that she can work mischief while he sleeps afterward. In the Odyssey, the sea god Poseidon takes a trip to visit the Ethiopians and nearly lets Odysseus get home early in his absence.

All these things made Greek religion a lot different from what we're used to. More on this tomorrow.

LET'S GET DIPLOMATIC. This NY Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof talks sense about America's undervalued and underfunded system of diplomacy. He notes that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been one of the most forceful advocates of a greater investment in this kind of "soft power." You can't bomb your way out of everything.

EVERYTHING IN MODERATION--INCLUDING MODERATION. This item argues that voters are often more attracted by extreme opinions than by reason and moderation. That would explain a lot.

LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS to our economic mess? Here are some solid recommendations from the Economic Policy Institute.

OLYMPIC QUESTION. Who would win in a competition between modern and early humans?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BIG SQUEEZE AND OTHER STUFF

Caption: These chickens had to scratch for a living.

(First, a correction to yesterday's post on "The Two Bums." A closer inspection of the photo reveals that there were in fact three bums in that picture. Second, a reminder that all the posts this week are loosely connected. Please click on the last few days if this is your first visit.)

Something good happened to this country between the end of World War II and the early 1970s. In that period, the US economy grew dramatically.

And, while there has always been great inequality in this country, the benefits of growth were shared among all sectors of the population.

But that positive trend came to an end in the 1970s. Contributing factors were the costs of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and economic stagflation that baffled many economists.

Stagflation refers to a slow economy with high unemployment accompanied by high inflation. This puzzled many economists at the time as the conventional wisdom was that you either had unemployment or inflation but not both at the same time.

Real wages for American workers began to stagnate and fall, a tendency that continued for more than a decade.

This crisis created the political opening for right wing, which had been building its political and ideological base since the mid 1960s , to gain power. They were aided in part by growing resentment among middle income Americans against “welfare queens,” unions, minorities, a backlash against the civil rights movement, etc.

The growth of the religious right enabled this movement to exploit divisive issues and “culture wars" and thus gain support from middle and lower income Americans for an agenda which would ultimately betray them.

Let them eat jihad…

Once in power, the right pursued policies that made the income gap between the very wealthy and everyone else begin to grow. As a result, when the economy grew, the benefits weren’t shared across the population as they had been in the post war period.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (get link) after tax income for the wealthiest one percent of the population grew by 111 percent between 1979 and 2002. It grew by 48 percent for the top fifth.

If the post-war pattern had continued, there would have been similar gains across the board. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the middle fifth gained on 15 percent, while the bottom fifth gained five percent. By other measures, lower income Americans actually lost ground.

As previously noted in this blog, Census data for every year since 2000 has reported increasing poverty, stagnant wages, and a growth in the number of the uninsured for every year since 2000.

It can’t be stressed enough that this growing inequality was not the result of “market” forces acting alone but through the use of political policies to shift budget priorities, promote trade deals benefiting multinational investors at the expense of ordinary people, attacks on unions, and cuts to the safety net.

As Dean Baker, economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has repeatedly pointed out, there has been a conscious and deliberate use of the powers of government for the last 25 years to redistribute wealth upward. He calls it “a right turn leading to a dead end.”

The country can no longer afford the politics of resentment and the circular firing squad it creates.

But there is some good news, about which more tomorrow…

NO COMMENT. This item appeared in the UK Guardian.

WEST VIRGINIANS SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE WAR. A number of groups, including WV Patriots for Peace, WV Citizen Action Group, the AFL-CIO, and AFSC held a press conference yesterday on the occasion of President Bush's veto of the Iraq supplemental.

FIG TREE NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis's Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE HAPPIEST MAN

Caption: Seamus McGoogle would be the happiest of cats if he could get through this window to the birds.

When Solon, the lawgiver of Athens who laid the foundations for its democracy, traveled to Lydia in Asia Minor around 600 BC, he was a guest of Croesus, its fabulously wealthy king.

Herodotus tells us that Croesus had his servants take Solon on a tour of his royal treasuries "and point out the richness and magnificence of everything."

When the inspection was complete, Croesus said,

Well, my Athenian friend, I have heard a great deal about your wisdom, and how widely you have traveled in the pursuit of knowledge. I cannot resist my desire to ask you a question: who is the happiest man you have ever seen?

He was obviously hoping Solon would say "Gee, dude, it's you." (It occurs to El Cabrero that if this guy needed someone else to certify his happiness, it may not have been that great.)

Solon wasn't the flattering kind. He answered simply, "An Athenian named Tellus."

Croesus was taken aback at this answer and the idea of an Athenian nobody being happier than him. He sharply asked "And what is your reason for this choice?"

Solon replied

There are two good reasons. First, his city was prosperous, and he had fine sons, and lived to see children born to each of them, and all these children surviving: secondly, he had wealth enough by our standards; and he had a glorious death. In a battle with the neighboring town of Eleusis, he fought for his countrymen, routed the enemy, and died like a soldier; and the Athenians paid him the high honor of a public funeral on the spot where he fell.

In other words, the happiest mortals have decent and socially useful lives and a dignified death.

Croesus couldn't take the hint and persisted in asking who won the second prize. He didn't like the answer any better, as we'll see tomorrow.

NEW PROGRESSIVE WV BLOG. An amigo of El Cabrero who has adopted the cyber name Antipode has started a new blog with a focus on policy called Mountain State Review, in which he will plumb the nether regions of wonkdom, guiding us through these dark regions in much the manner that Virgil guided Dante in the Divine Comedy. I tried to get him to call it Wonkabilly but he wouldn't. So far there are no gratuitous animal pictures.

AN INTERESTING ITEM on health care appeared in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. It's about the growing but surprising alliance between labor and business in support of universal health care. The author is Jonathan Cohn, who writes regularly and well on policy issues in the New Republic.

THE LUCIFER EFFECT. Over the last few weeks, El Cabrero has been musing over some famous psychology experiments and what they can tell us about ourselves. I was planning on writing about Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment. It turns out that Zimbardo has just written a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. That's going on the list. Here is an interview with the author courtesy of the Times.

NEGLECTED FRIENDS. El Cabrero feels that he has neglected his old friend Wal-Mart lately. I'll try to atone for this lapse tomorrow.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MOVING FORWARD, and more sad news from WV

Caption: We need to start moving in the right direction. This little guy already started.

As El Cabrero recalls, the first lines of Dante's Divine Comedy go something like this:

"In the middle of our life's journey I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, having lost the true path."

That's a common personal feeling for a lot of us, but, sad to say, it's an apt description of current state of the United States under this disastrous regime.

Even leaving aside for now the incalculable damage that has been done to the international standing and security of the country, at the domestic level there is a lot of damage to undo. One place to start is moving from the upward distribution of wealth towards something like the common good.

The Economic Policy Institute thinks the American people could use "an economic agenda that will spur growth, reduce insecurity, and provide broadly shared prosperity." They've recently started a new initiative called the Agenda for Shared Prosperity in which they plan to articulate an economic program that is "comprehensive, understandable, and workable."

Here are the first three points:

1. Health care and retirement security: Building on existing popular and effective programs to provide accessible and affordable health care and ensure retirement security, we will propose: (a) that all Americans have guaranteed access to affordable health care through employer-provided insurance or a public plan; and (b) that retirees receive at least 70% of their pre-retirement income via a supplement to a strengthened Social Security.

2. Fair trade: An alternative approach to globalization and competitiveness will include policies to rebalance trade, to invest in new technologies that generate high-quality domestic manufacturing employment, and to promote environ-mental and labor policies to ensure that globalization benefits working people in both developed and developing nations.

3. Rewarding work: A plan for rebalancing the labor market will include raising and indexing the minimum wage, ensuring the right of workers to organize unions, and making full employment a central commitment of economic policy.

Other items on the agenda include energy policy, investments in infrastructure, family policy, the safety net, fiscal policy, and ensuring opportunity for all. Look for more as this develops.

SAD WEST VIRGINIA NEWS: I'm sad to say that the death toll from the apartment fire in nearby Huntington is now nine. That city has taken some major hits over the years.

MORE SAD WEST VIRGINIA NEWS: Two miners were killed this weekend in a McDowell County roof fall. According to Ken Ward, writing in the Charleston Gazette, the deaths were caused by a risky practice known as "retreat mining," in which the last remaining coal is extracted from pillars holding up the roof of the mine.

In all the mining disasters the state has suffered in the last year, has anyone heard that drug abuse by miners was a factor? I didn't think so. The recent proposal of the state coal industry for mandatory drug testing of all miners seems to me to be a cynical effort to divert attention from mine safety.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED