Earth Days, the new film that opens this weekend from acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone, is being promoted as a history of the environmental movement in the United States. But it's more of a road trip, really: the road less travelled. The road not taken. The road to hell, blazed by grassroot good intentions that got asphalted and AstroTurfed.
As promised earlier today, we're liveblogging from the Working Families Party's Mayoral Forum, at the Hotel Trades Council Union Hall in midtown Manhattan. We'll be joined by two leading Democratic candidates, Bill Thompson and Tony Avella, and the incumbent Michael Bloomberg. If you have any questions, comments or thoughts for us, please let us know in the comments, and we'll try to reflect those interests in our coverage.
7:55 Thompson finishing up. They all handled themselves respectably. People are ready for dinner in back. Is it a standing O for Bill or for the food line?
Thanks to Charles, Levitan and crew for welcoming blogging and getting wi-fi back up.
And thank you, WFP, for planning this forum a 3-minute walk from Rudy's...it is Drinking Liberally night (and we're late!). Come on out to keep the conversation going. -jk
7:50 From Thompson's case for his electability: "This is not 2005. The economy was booming, people liked where they were. This is 2009, the economy is failing, people are scared and want change in City Hall." -jb
7:48 To the final question, from Dan Cantor, about convincing WFP Thompson could beat the Bloomberg behemoth, Thompson just had the first laugh-out-loud line of the night: "I'll quote someone who said, 'Rich guys don't always win.'"...which was Bloomberg's defense of spending $100 million on the campaign just 40 minutes ago.
A second reference to Obama too... -jk
7:47 Judging by this forum, one line that is going to be used against Bloomberg consistently is that hat his response to every economic question is "But we love the rich." Oh, and "Why is Michael Bloomberg willing to run on the Republican line if he doesn't believe in parties?" -jb
7:46 Uh-oh, Bill...people in the backroom are starting to eat. You're competing with food!
Good answer on the pride of running on party lines...and asking "Can anyone imagine Barack Obama on the Republican line?" got some laughs. -jk
7:44 By the way, we're not the only ones watching. Public Advocate candidate just made this his Facebook status update: "is not impressed that the Mayor said at the WFP forum that calling 311 is a solution for tenants facing eviction from their home. Wrong answer!" (He's a WFP endorsed candidate) -jk
Later today, the Working Families Party will be hosting a Mayoral Forum for the two leading Democratic candidates, Bill Thompson and Tony Avella, and the incumbent Michael Bloomberg.
One of our spies snuck into a meeting of the evil right-wing group HAARM (Healthy Americans Against Reforming Medicine) last week and uncovered a nasty plot to undermine efforts toward healthcare reform. Prepare to be shocked, disgusted and amused:
If this all sounds a bit unlikely to you, you're half-right: the video is the first in a series that Laughing Liberally, our national comedy tour at Living Liberally, has been working on with SEIU. The video is (we hope!) funny, but the situation it depicts couldn't be more serious - there are real efforts by moneyed interests, meeting as we speak, to make universal healthcare sound like a bad thing.
Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman Originally published on AlterNet; Painting by James Howard Kunstler
I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler's dim view of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.
Kunstler's relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra. But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, "Far from the image of the stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically."
So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler's neck of the woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga Springs' resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation, Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy.
A Thinking Liberally Left-Minded Meditation
by Justin Krebs, Living Liberally
"Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society."
- US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"Stop Whining and Pay Your Taxes"
- Bumper sticker my Dad wanted to print up about 18 years ago.
Congratulations, America. It's April 15th, a day we mark honorably; an annual tradition we've together reached once again. Let's trade some high-fives and puff our chests out in patriotic pride because today is Invest-in-America Day!
You don't hear many people applauding April 15th. Instead you see news stories about long lines at the post office, and businesses try to capitalize on your tax frustration (Dunkin' Donuts offered free donuts as "tax relief" last year). Because it's Tax Day in America...and thanks to an enduring Benjamin Franklin aphorism, many of our fellow citizens are more likely to associate taxes with "death" than with good schools, clean air, a strong military, innovations in health and science and all the other benefits are taxes bring us.
Just try to say "Happy Tax Day" to anyone and see what reactions you get. If you end up in the wrong place, you might even get a teabag thrown at you.
A few weeks back, the FixCNBC Campaign was launched by the PCCC, attempting to get 20,000+ signatories to their letter to CNBC pressuring them to practice responsible journalism. Well, the goal has been reached, and when it was time to send the letter to CNBC Headquarters, the PCCC reached out to several progressive New York comedians, including Laughing Liberally favorites Negin Farsad, Lee Camp, Katie Halper and Baratunde Thurston - and in the three days since it's been posted to YouTube, it's already cracked the 20,000-view mark. Watch the magic, and consider helping to support further work like this:
Seed money for start-ups may be evaporating faster than California's dwindling reservoirs, but this rocky economy's proving to be fertile ground for the seed industry. Cash-strapped consumers, scared by the specter of an empty fridge, are investing in the ultimate low-tech, high-yield start-up: the kitchen garden. The National Gardening Association estimates that some 43 million Americans are gearing up to grow at least some of their own food this spring.
And no wonder. As Roger Doiron, founder of Maine-based Kitchen Gardeners International, has documented, a few dozen seed packets costing $130 can yield more than two thousand dollars worth of produce over the course of the growing season. "We have a fabulous opportunity," C.R. Lawn, the founder of another Maine mainstay, Fedco Seeds, told an audience at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's Farming For The Future conference last month. "The challenge is on us to come through." Lawn, an endearingly shaggy character who looks a bit like a pale Papa Smurf, rocked gently from side to side as he spoke of the challenges that his company faced following the acquisition of Fedco's largest seed supplier, Seminis, by monolithic Monsanto back in 2005.
We wrote earlier this month about how the Working Families Party is doing some of the best work out there in creating an accessible narrative for progressives in the economic crisis, the most recent example being their use of Monty Burns in fighting for Fair Share Tax Reform. Well, in the aftermath of the AIG bonuses debacle, the WFP in Connecticut is doing some wonderful narrative-building of their own - drawing attention for their "Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous" tour of AIG Financial Products Division executive homes - a story in today's New York Times, after some perfunctory "it's so hard to be an executive when people are angry at you" tearjerking, highlights the effort:
The Connecticut Working Families party, which has support from organized labor, is planning a bus tour of A.I.G. executives' homes on Saturday, with a stop at the company's Wilton office.
"We're going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do," said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. "I know there's a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what's happened. We're not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy."
In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new film, Tokyo Sonata, he presents timely and interesting ideas about identity in the modern world in a way that is at times compelling and complex, but at others overwrought and unclear.
The film focuses on the four members of the middle class Sasaki family: the father, Ryuhei (played by Teruyuki Kagawa), his wife Megumi (played by Kyoko Koizumi), and their two sons, Takashi and Kenji (played by Yû Koyanagi and Inowaki Kai). In the opening minutes of the film, Ryuhei finds himself suddenly unemployed after a meeting with the boss. Unsure of what to do, he keeps this from his wife, getting dressed for work the next day and joining the stream of businesspeople walking toward the city. He soon finds that he is not alone when he runs into an old colleague who is also keeping his family in the dark.
The other members of his family embark on difficult journeys of their own: The younger son, Kenji, uses his lunch money to take the piano lessons expressly forbidden by his father, while Takashi joins the U.S. army. Megumi's internal grappling slowly builds, culminating in some surprising actions. Their troubles are similar, and achingly so because they rarely intersect.
Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman (This special St. Patrick's entry cross-posted at The Green Fork)
If toasting the Emerald Isle with a pint of green beer is not your style, why not celebrate St. Patrick's Day with a green corned beef and cabbage? That's green as in photosynthesis; in other words, creating a plant-based version of a classic meat-centric dish, aka "veggie hacking."
With a bit of googling, I found a recipe from chef Brian McCarthy, author of The Vegan Family Cookbook, for seitan corned beef.
Sunshine Cleaning, the new film by Christine Jeffs and Megan Holley, has been done a great disservice, and that's as good a place to begin as anywhere. A deeply moving, fiercely intelligent film about a working-class family struggling to stay afloat has been falsely presented, in an act of marketing malpractice, as a cutesy, oh-so-mischievous parade of twee and cleverness. Every trailer, poster and billboard, with their booming promise/threat of "From the producers of Little Miss Sunshine" and predictable heaping of quasi-indie-ready quirk, is a betrayal. Sunshine Cleaning is a portrait, worthy of pre-sappy James L. Brooks or post-sardonic John Sayles, of an American family suffering the worst of Bush's ownership society, and still managing to cohere via some fragment of a belief in the basic goodness of people.
Oh, and it's funny too.
There's so much to appreciate about this simple, honest film, and so little space in which to express it. Let's begin with the basic plotline: Rose, who isn't played so much as embodied by Amy Adams in a bravura performance, is a single working mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, living with her elementary-school-age son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), who gives some of the signals of high-functioning Aspergers Syndrome, her younger, twenty-something sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), who takes underachiever pride in staying at home and losing a variety of jobs, and her emotionally distant, deteriorating father, Joe (Alan Arkin). This is one of those long-forgotten families, forgotten by American movies at least, straddling the line between working class and working poor, their terror at the lack of a social safety net beneath them "should something happen" coloring almost every decision they make, doing their best to keep the basic family budget up and running. (When's the last major-studio, national-release film you remember with such a backdrop? North Country? Erin Brockovich? Norma Rae?)
Michelle Obama made headlines last week by using those famously toned arms of hers to sling some mushroom risotto, steamed broccoli and fruit salad at Miriam's Kitchen, a D.C.non-profit that serves homemade meals to 4,000 homeless people a year made with fresh local and organic foods instead of processed or canned foods, as the New York Times reported.
Obama told the press who gathered to watch the First Lady ladle:
I want to urge people who are listening that if you have an opportunity, to come by -- not just this soup kitchen but any soup kitchen in your community. And helping is an easy thing to do. Collect some fruits and vegetables. Bring by some good healthy food. You know, we want to make sure that our guests here and across this country are eating nutritious items. Today we had fresh risotto with mushrooms. We had broccoli. We had fresh baked muffins with carrots in it.
And my understanding is that this facility is able to provide that kind of meal for about $1.50. And that's an incredible thing to remember: that we can provide this kind of healthy food for communities across this country, and we can do it by each of us lending a hand. (hat tip: Obama Foodorama)
Nora Eisenberg, whose excellent novel about veterans returning from the Gulf War, When You Come Home, will soon be reviewed on this site, recently penned a piece for Alternet on the lost lessons hidden in the way the Gulf Was has been remembered.
We highly recommend it -- as our Reading Liberally "Read of the Day" -- and will bring you more on her novel soon.
With rare exceptions, American politicians seem incapable of opposing an American war without befriending another in a different place or time.
Barack Obama, an early and ardent enemy of the Iraq War, quickly declared his affinity for a war in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. And like so many Democratic leaders, he has commended Bush 41's Gulf War over Bush 43's, for its justifiable cause, clear goals, quick execution and admirable leadership.
Women farmers are leading the way in the sustainable ag revolution, as the CS Monitor noted last week. I first wrote about this movement back in 2005, and met one of its leaders when we traveled to Iowa in 2007: Denise O'Brien (pictured right, with me), founder of the Women, Food & Agriculture Network. Denise is just back from the Midwest Organic Farming Conference, where the mother of all treehuggers, Vandana Shiva, was one of the keynote speakers. We're pleased to share this dispatch from Eating Liberally's favorite farminist:
Every battle needs a good villain. Not sure if that's a line out of a comic book, or the advice Matt Stoller has often offered on these pages, but it's true.
There's some healthy debate about whether Rush is the right villain or the wrong target. Brave New Films has done a great job their War on Greed to make the likes of Henry Kravis into a known nemesis. And in New York, the proponents for Fair Share Tax Reform just realized: why create a villain, if the entertainment industry's already done it for them.
Enter Monty Burns from the Simpsons, a no-goodnik we love to hate, and the new face of the plutocrats looking to sink New York's working class.
In anticipation of a major rally on Thursday, the Working Families Party -- leaders of the Fair Share push -- have turned to satire. They've circulated a letter from Homer's boss to his fellow fatcats. Who wants to be on the side of Mr. Burns? Well, except for Smithers, of course.
You're probably busy worrying about things like insolvency and unemployment, and rightly so; our banks are taking on water faster than we can bail them out, while the job market--and our waterways--are evaporating as quickly as that pool of color-coded conservatives the GOP's called up to counter the Obama juggernaut.
