Editor's Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren't stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We'll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here's some food for thought.
At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don't worry, that doesn't mean he won't accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:
[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we're completely full: the Japanese say "hara hachi bu" ("Eat until you are 4/5 full"); Germans advise eaters to "tie off the sack before it's full." And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, "I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry."
But wait, there's more!
Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA's new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new "enhanced" pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. "Don't touch my junk!" has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body's autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.
Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it's easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.
Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. "This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations," Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey's memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won't go into effect until 2014, so it's hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods' own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Editor's Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren't stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We'll return to our normal schedule next week.
"I am thankful for the Web. It is an enormous potential equalizer in giving progressives without money comparable input into public debate as the right-wingers with lots of money. In this vein, the Huffington Post's webhits are going up. The Washington Post's circulation is going down." - Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
"I'm thankful that Sarah Palin might actually run for president. It will be a lot of fun to watch and we can feel confident that in the end she will be fully refudiated." - Eric Alterman, columnist and author most recently of Why We're Liberals
"That even in a time of broken ideals, our idealism can still keep us pushing forward. I am also thankful that the Fed and the Obama administration have not yet completed their transfer of private wealth to the small handful of too-big-to-exist banks." - Joshua Rosner, Managing Director, Graham Fisher & Co., Inc.
"For all the disappointment, I am thankful John McCain is not president." - Jeff Madrick, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and author of The Case for Big Government
"I'm grateful that we won't have Larry Summers to kick around anymore." - James K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin
"That there aren't enough jobs in our government, political parties, and mass media for the turkeys who want them." - Thomas Ferguson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, Professor of Political Science at U Mass, Boston, and author of Golden Rule
"That the GOP ran three certifiably insane Tea Party candidates in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware, thereby ensuring that the Democrats at least retained control of the Senate, and thereby arresting the complete descent into the abyss." - Marshall Auerback, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow
"I am grateful to Social Security, which made it possible for our family to avoid economic disaster when my father died of a second heart attack when he was 41. I am grateful to a nation in which I could be a serial whistle blower, exposing the misconduct of two presidential employees, the Speaker of the House James Wright, and the 'Keating Five' - and survive. And I am grateful to the Ancients, who faced a vastly crueler world and recognized that the key was for each of us to try to repair it, and whose advice has led generations to make those repairs, rather than accepting cruelty, greed, exploitation, and indifference as the natural state. I am thankful for all who came before and worked to make things better." - Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and white-collar criminologist
"That we still have enough of a semblance of rule of law in this country that judges are not giving banks a free pass on the failure to adhere to the terms of their own contracts and the abuse of legal processes." - Yves Smith, founding editor of Naked Capitalism and author of ECONned
"I'm thankful because every new political dynamic brings its own opportunity for victories. After the Republican victory in 1994, our trouncing them on the government shutdown reminded people of the things they liked about government. After the demoralizing Bush re-election in 2004, when the GOP controlled every branch, our smashing of Social Security privatization sparked a new progressive awakening. We can beat these bastards again if we hang together and don't wimp out." - Mike Lux, CEO of Progressive Strategies, L.L.C.
"I am thankful that the Blue Dog caucus was slashed in half. Also thankful for the blogosphere and dedicated progressive bloggers in particular for their unrelenting work." - Pavlina Tcherneva, assistant professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College
On Wednesday, President Obama pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions "in the range of" 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama also confirmed that he will attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen next month, as Aaron Wiener notes for the Washington Independent. But here's the catch: It's a one-day deal. Obama is only planning to stop by Copenhagen on Dec. 9 before flying to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. The climate talks, on the other hand, span Dec. 7 to Dec. 18.
I traditionally do this loooooooooong drive up to Buffalo with friends on National Get In Your Car and Sit In Traffic Day the day before Thanksgiving, but just could not do it this year. Too burned out. Flights are always too expensive, so I'm going up for Chanukah/Xmas- I haven't been in several years anyway- and staying put this week. Perry flew down to join me. An Indian friend of his from grad school is having some of us over tonight, cooking Indian, and getting destroyed by me and Perry in Taboo. You may gasp at that, but if there is one other cuisine I would rather have than traditional Thanksgiving fare, it would be Indian. Especially since I've already consumed both pumpkin and pecan pie this week, which are really the essential parts, in my view.
Other than that, I'm in the middle of a lazy afternoon sipping chai and reading Barney Frank's biography, which is pretty good.
This is an open Thanksgiving Day thread. Feel free to leave thoughts on where you are, what you're cooking, football, any amusing family political conversations, or whatever else.
I have a Thanksgiving story for your consumption that has nothing to do with turkeys or pumpkin pie or crazy uncles.
Instead, in an effort to remind you what this holiday can really stand for, we'll meet some people who are thankful today for simply being free.
It's a short story today, but an especially touching one, so follow along and we'll take a little hop across the Atlantic for a trip you should not miss.
I don't want to get too gooshy as we go into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by giving you all the stuff I'm thankful for, but it does seem like an appropriate moment to be a little more reflective than usual. The thing I want to focus on today is the hope for a better world.
It is very easy to be pessimistic and cynical about the chance for things to get better as we fight our issue and political battles. Wealthy powerful special interests are entrenched and seem able to run everything. Too many politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Well-intentioned organizations are sometimes pretty ineffectual. The establishment's conventional wisdom seems set in stone. And I think we have seen so many things in the last few decades that have made us cynical about our government and questioning about our leaders, it is easy to think that nothing will ever change. I know for me, reading the Church committee report about the CIA, The Pentagon Papers, and the Nixon White House tapes transcripts as a young man was enough to make me very skeptical about the nature of our government at the time.
I think a certain level of healthy skepticism about our government and the establishment is a very good thing, and should be cultivated. The problem arises when skepticism turns cynical and pessimistic, and infects how we view every single thing in life and politics. At the heart of progressivism is the hope that it is possible to make a better world, that progress is indeed within our reach. When Barack Obama ran a campaign with a slogan he borrowed from Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers, Yes We Can, and preached his gospel of hope, he was tapping into a long progressive tradition dating back to our very founding as a country. Heading into that terrible winter at Valley Forge, Tom Paine, wrote: "Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it and repulse it." Lincoln at Gettysburg, at that terrible moment honoring those tens of thousands of fallen soldiers at their gravesites, spoke of the hope "that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Martin Luther King, Jr., in a discouraging moment in his great work, said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it curves toward justice", and the civil rights movement anthem's chorus sang out "We Shall Overcome".
We progressives should embrace the hope that our movement, the progressive movement, has always carried as its banner. It is conservatives who have always feared change and doused the flames of hope, conservatives who said government could not do anything right or make progress for the American people.
I write this because I see too often the deep cynicism of many friends in the progressive movement, the assumption that virtually every politician is corrupted by being an insider, that every compromise in the legislative process is a sleazy one, that every progressive group is a sell-out. I see it in the responses I sometimes get when I write about my hopes for passing legislation that could be improved on in the future, where people ask why I think any piece of legislation will be improved on given that corporations run America. I see it in articles by progressive thinkers like Jamie Galbraith, who wrote on Monday an entire blog post about how hopeless everything was in terms of making changes in economic policy. I see it in progressive talk show hosts and comedians and media figures: a sense of gloom about any prospects for a better future are everywhere I look.
While righteous anger and cynical humor are an important part of our work, progressivism that is at its core cynical and pessimistic doesn't work over the long run. For one thing, it will burn itself out. When I was a young organizer being trained, I was told that you can't organize people if you are too depressed to be hopeful, that if you were feeling burnt out, you should take a vacation or even get into a different line of work. I still believe that to be true. Righteous anger is a great thing, and can feed you for a while, but if it's not leavened with hope, it won't sustain you over the long good fight. But it also doesn't work because the internal contradiction is too great. Telling people that we can change things for the better while being cynical about any hope for change is a self-defeating philosophy.
Albert Camus wrote in The Plague that "once the faint stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague ended." It is our job as progressives not just to attack the powers that be, not just to fight against the establishment, but to breathe life into those faint stirrings of hope, and to believe in them ourselves. It is easy to be a cynic with all the bad things that happen in the world. It takes more courage to believe that we can, someday soon, overcome. It is our hope and optimism that gives us the strength to keep fighting the odds against us, that keeps us going in the face of the money and power of the entrenched special interests. And history is very clear on this point: those with the faith and hope that they could indeed overcome the odds did quite often prevail. The abolitionists won their 40-year battle, the suffragists prevailed after 90 years of struggle, Jim Crow was finally beaten 90 years after African-American rights were abandoned by the North with the end of reconstruction. Through decades of violence, derision, arrests, intimidation, our progressive ancestors never gave into despair and defeatism. We should take their example to heart, and have hope for the future, hope that we can make progress, hope that we can build a more perfect union. Hope and virtue have survived: now let's make them flourish.
Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Katie Halper On Thanksgiving, The Dallas Cowboys beat the Seattle Seahawks 34 to 9. And the day before, when Bush spared two innocent lives, he achieved his own victory of 16 to 1. When Bush pardoned Pumpkin AND Pecan, who were about to meet the same fate as the turkeys televised behind Sarah Palin, he could boast of having 16 presidential poultry pardons under his belt. But Bush has also compassionately conserved human life, once. During his six-year governorship and eight-year presidency, Bush has pardoned one death row inmate, denied clemency over 50 times, and signed death warrants for 155 people, many of whom were innocent, mentally retarded, juveniles, recipients of unfair trials, and/or represented by incompetent and often narcoleptic lawyers.
From the election of 1968 on, we've just been through 40 years of misrule. During this time, many good things still were done, but they were done against the tide that was, at bottom, fueled by resentment at breakthroughs for racial and gender equality brought about in the 1960s. Although much remains to struggle for and achieve, I am profoundly thankful that that era is behind us.
I am thankful we have just elected our nation's first black president, even though it is far from meaning the end of racism in our land. For it does signal a profound turning point in the ongoing struggle for racial justice.
I am thankful that, in the wake of Proposition 8, there has been a powerful nationwide response from the GLBT community and its allies. Instead of setting gay rights back a decade, this response holds the promise of accelerating it greatly. May it be so.
I am thankful that we are not satisfied with having elected the most progressive President in 40 years, and we are not satisfied with ourselves, either. I am thankful that we want and expect more of ourselves, and more of the leaders we elect.
I could go on, but, I want to know, what are you thankful for?
Looks like plucky Sarah Palin is expanding her fan club from evangelicals to vegangelicals. Seriously, how could any animal rights activist not love the sight of Palin blathering to the press while a worker in blood-spattered overalls blithely slaughters turkeys a few feet away?
...we have ended up in the absurd situation today that most of us, as consumers, know very little about what we eat; and, sensing a "dark side" to our food production, many of us don't even want to know.
Even our most progressive presidents can be addled by Agribiz propaganda. President-elect Obama--thanks to his corn-fed constituents, we presume--is regrettably fond of ethanol, unlike his rival, John McCain. And McCain's not the only Republican who slams the grain-for-gas scam. Arch conservative P.J. O'Rourke airs his aggravation with industrial ag in the current Weekly Standard:
Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. It is rooted in our founding myths, in the struggle of European immigrants to understand and survive in a new land. In the triumph of perseverance and neighborly virtue over the harshness of the world we find ourselves in. We gather together with family and friends and eat new world foods to celebrate the survival of our founding settlers and the most beautiful time of the year for much of our country.
This is my third Thanksgiving in America since spending the prior five Thanksgivings in England. Living there gave me a much greater appreciation of what it means to be an American, to have rights, and to fight for those rights. I am immensely thankful that I am an American and that we have rights for me to defend.
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