Progressive Wednesday

Organic v. Local – head to head

Progressivism is a big tent. The catalyst that moves someone to progressivism can be race, religion, social or economic status, the environment, civil liberties, or antiauthoritarianism, just to name some. True progressives have a concern about all of these issues.

But what happens when two of these collide? How do we decide what positions to support and what to do about it? When the United Auto Workers union expresses its concern about increasing fuel economy while climatologists warn us of the consequences of inaction, how do we decide?

Of course, we prioritize. We weigh the consequences against the potential benefit, and then determine the best course of action. While I sympathize with the UAW (though I think that better fuel economy would lead to a huge increase in production and jobs in the long run), I feel that the consequences facing the planet due to global warming far outweigh the short-term consequences raising fuel efficiency to the UAW.

I frequently find two sides of my progressivism playing tug-of-war with my conscience when I'm at the local grocery store. As I stand there surveying the produce one side wants me to buy the locally grown tomatoes while the other tells me to put those with the “certified organic– label in my basket. Fortunately, organic produce is frequently homegrown, allowing my two sides to come to a truce and making my decision easy, but not always. Since I came across this article from Terrapass.com, I have started to listen more to the organic angel.

Food miles are actually a minor portion of the total ecological footprint of food. In the study of a basket of foods in Cardiff, transport amounted to only 2% of the total environmental cost. Growing conditions, packaging and processing made up the bulk of the impact. In fact– ¦ local food systems actually have slightly higher carbon emissions!

This doesn't push me completely over to the “organic side of the farm,– nor do I think it should for you. But I don't want to make decisions without knowing as many facts as possible; I don't want to be that kind of progressive.

This photographer buys local, but this one goes organic.

A labor movement in the house

There has been a trend in this country over the past couple of decades that makes my blood boil. (The 90 plus-degree heat in June in upstate New York might be contributing as well.) I'm not talking about the rise and fall in popularity of leg warmers and sweater vests. No, ever since Reagan took his acting career to the Oval Office, there has been an unprecedented anti-labor movement in this country. The privileged and the über-rich have become even more beau monde and über-richer, all while the honest workers who actually turn the American wheels work longer and harder for less money and fewer benefits.

This extends further than just the Wal-Marts and Exxon-Mobiles; smaller corporations and even small businesses have adopted many of those same rebarbative business practices in order to stay in stride with the “big boys.– There is even a multi-million dollar anti-labor lobbying business dedicated to spreading lies about unions

But for the first time in a great while there is a bill up for a vote in the Senate to dam up that torrent anti-labor river. It's called Employee Free Choice Act and, according to the AFL-CIO and AmericanRightsAtWork.org, this bill would:

• Establish stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations.
• Provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.
• Allow employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation.
• Force employers to stop dragging out contract negotiations.

If you're fluent in “Lawyer-ese,– you can peruse the full bill here.

The aforementioned American Rights At Work group has put together a petition to Congress to support this progressive, yet bi-partisan legislation. It only takes a second, okay, maybe ten seconds, but time is of the essence here. Hop on over to the site (don't let your boss see you) and add your signature. They are aiming for 30,000 e-signatures and are only a couple thousand short. Let's have the Progressive Wednesday community give them that push over the edge.

To make an even bigger impact, you can also contact your Senator or Representative by following this link. Either way, we need to do what we can to stem the tide, change the winds, stop the bleeding, reverse the flow– ¦ hey, just make progress.

Go fly a hybrid kite!

After reading a recent article in Business 2.0, I learned that I was shocked that 90% of all goods sent overseas are hauled by “50,000 diesel-powered containerships.”

But a Germany company is about to set-sail a ship with a creative hitch:

A giant kite [will be attached] that files 1,000 feet above the bow, connected to an automated telescoping mast. Wind power won’t displace the ship’s giant diesel engines, but it will take a load off, slashing fuel consumption by as much as 30 percent.

These kites are designed by SkySails, and they hope to expand the use of their kites to “oil tankers, fish trawlers, and big yachts.” The company “[aims] to reduce fuel consumption of modern shipping by the utilization of environmentally friendly, free-of-charge wind energy.”

It seems to us that wind energy is a place where American companies could start increasing jobs on our shores. Someone needs to build these kites. Someone needs to build wind turbines. Why not us? Why not now?

While you try to answer those only somewhat rhetorical questions, you can see this sail in action in the video below. (Since the company is German, you know, the dialogue is also in German. We really don’t know what they’re saying. We’ll assume it’s good stuff.)

I’m not lovin’ it: Stop

Stop eating fast food, plain and simple. Okay, plain, but maybe not so simple. We have become a society on the move (at least in our cars) and sometimes a quick meal at KFC is the only thing we seem to have time for. Plus, we've grown to like the food, maybe even love it. It's fast, convenient, tasty, cheap, and deadly. To prove my point, the ever useful numbered list:

1. Chicken served at McDonald’s, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Outback, Applebee’s, Chili’s and TGI Friday’s was found by the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine to contain PhIPm, a carcinogenic compound. In other words, it causes cancer and they didn't tell us.
2. To quote Eric Schlosser, author of Fast-Food Nation: “Fast food has become the operating system of today's retail economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code.– To quote me: “It's like Wal-Mart that makes you fat.–
3. In the “duh– category, eating fast food regularly greatly increases your chance of becoming obese and developing diabetes. Even, or especially, in children.
4. The 142 billion dollars we spend annually on fast food exceeds the amount we spend on higher education. That would help explain more than just our weight problem.
5. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 12 percent of the national healthcare budget goes toward treating ailments caused by obesity.
6. Animal rights groups have won many lawsuits against every major fast food chain. Conditions have since gotten better, but are still a long ways from good.
7. The production of food by major fast food chains contributes exponentially to soil depletion, water and air pollution, the loss of family farms and rural communities, and even global warming.
8. Every fast food hamburger you eat contains meat from hundreds of cattle. Each burger potentially contains diseases from all of those animals.
9. Because fast food is so highly processed, much of its flavor is destroyed, so the tastes of most fast food are manufactured at a series of special chemical plants in New Jersey.
10. Major fast food companies are frequently involved in civil rights lawsuits for the treatment of workers at their supplier's farms, from Florida to China.

Monday Morning Motherhood: Shortage

Many of you may have noticed some of the recent Monday Morning Motherhood columns have been delayed. One of the reasons cited was severe medical problems. Yup, those would be mine. This week's column will take a slightly different approach. Instead of focusing on parenting, I'd like to talk about the state of health care. Not health insurance, which I will cover later, but health care in the form of those who give us care when we're ill, most notably, nurses.

In the past month, I've been admitted to the hospital 3, count – ˜em, 3 times. This doesn't include the two other emergency room visits I had to make. I like to think I've involuntarily become a hospital connoisseur of sorts, able to determine the age of a bowl of Jello with just one bite. To make a long story short, it wasn't until the third hospital admittance, which took place at different hospital than the first two, that they finally figure out what was the matter. Two wrong diagnoses and several weeks of pretty bad pain occurred before I received some answers and a necessary surgery. Only now, after over a month of dealing with all this, have I received the full medical care and treatment needed to facilitate my recovery. And what was the main conduit to my needs in the hospital? The nurses.

There is no question that in hospitals from sea to shining sea, nurses are overworked, understaffed, and underpaid. When you head to an emergency room, the first person you see is a triage nurse. When you're finally taken back to a bed, the person you are going to have the most interaction with is a nurse. Once or twice you'll see the doctor, but mostly, the nurse is going to be giving the majority of your care. They're the ones who obtain all the information about your illness, take your vital signs, administer medication, and are the ones who check in on you. This is also true if you are unfortunate enough to be admitted to the hospital. These nurses serve all of the patients, and like cups at a kegger, there just aren't enough LPNs and RNs to go around. Because of this, patient care suffers. Patients can feel that they're being ignored, that their nurses are rude and cranky (my own personal experience), and that their needs are not being met (which in many cases is true — again, speaking from personal experience).

By 2010 it is estimated that there will be 20% less nurses than needed. This is an enormous gap. In 2000 the demand for nurses was 2 million, while the actual supply of nurses was 1.89 million. That's a 6% gap, or a shortage of 110,000 nurses. Imagine what a 20% gap would do to the quality of care patients receive? The thought of it is shocking.

In August of 2002, President Bush signed the Nurse Reinvestment Act into law. The Nurse Reinvestment Act (H.R.3487), is designed to encourage people to enter and remain in nursing careers, thus helping to alleviate the nation’s growing nursing shortage. This law establishes scholarships, loan repayments, retention grants, career ladders, geriatric training grants, and loan cancellation for nursing faculty. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

So, in short, be nice to your nurses. While you're in pain, frustrated, and awaiting assistance, it's very, very difficult. You're ill and need attention. They're doing their best though. It's not an easy profession. They deal with things on a daily basis that we wouldn't want to encounter — extremely long hours (working an average shift over 12 ½ hours ain't exactly gonna put you in the grandest of moods), uncooperative patients, arrogant and unappreciative doctors, and, you know, bed pans. The average pay rate for an LPN in a hospital is $36,700. Not nearly enough for the amount of work that is expected of them.

That said, if you feel that you're not getting the care you deserve, you absolutely have the right to speak up. However, even when you're fighting the temptation to scream expletives and walk out the door, please try to be patient. As frustrating as it is, they really are trying.

Doing Work for Hard-Working Families

Problem:

Eric and I have held oodles of very different jobs. Here's a list: bookseller, McDonald’s cashier, factory worker, shop foreman for a construction company, maintenance worker at a state park, newspaper reporter, office assistant, courier, audio/visual equipment operator, audio/visual specialist, college professor, substitute teacher, children's writing instructor, home theatre sales associate, customer service associate in a bank, residence life assistant at a college, and phone surveyor. Most of these jobs are the kind that could best be most kindly described as “learning experiences.–

Partly because of these variegated occupations and partly because of where we've been lucky enough to end up in our careers, we have intense sympathy for hard-working families. We know first-hand how hard it can be to sweat all day and feel depressed by the lack of digits in our paychecks, to watch the walls of a cubicle, to live below the poverty line and live payday to payday, to run up credit card debt to make ends meet, to lack health care and have to struggle through illness because we couldn't afford a doctor's visit. Now that we're in better financial positions, we want to do more to help the kind of people we used to call co-workers, the kind of people we still think of as friends.

Work is something Americans think of as the most identifying quality of a person after their name, and yet we tend to treat our hardest working Americans as lesser citizens, as if their low-paying jobs are their own fault. It's a myth that working harder will necessarily make you more money: we know folks who've slaved away at 60-hour-per-week jobs with no advancement. It's a myth that a higher education means a better paying gig: we know PhDs who work in bookstores. There's a myth in America that we live in a meritocracy. We don't.

The American Dream shouldn't be work. The American Dream shouldn't be to make ends meet. The American Dream should be pleasure in all its permutations like spending time with your friends and family, doing things that strengthen, stimulate, and lift our bodies, minds and spirits.

We owe it to one another to care more about how we all make a living. It's that last word, “living,– that we seem to forget.

Photo thanks to this hard worker.

- – - – -

Make Progress:

The Declaration of Independence reaffirms that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it's hard to pursue happiness when you lack health care, when you run up ridiculous dept to survive, when you can barely pay for meals, when you can't see an end in sight for a desk job that you despise. It's hard to pursue happiness when you bring work home with you, literally and mentally. Work is hard for all of us, nurses to farmers, temp workers to truck drivers, pastors and cops and folks who man the factory belts.

Dear readers, work is one of the few things that unites us all as people and states. It's about time we made some 9-to-5 progress.

• Listen
• Tell
• Change
• Print
• Vote

Doing Work for Hard-Working Families: Print

Print:

The new U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the first raise in the minimum wage in 10 years. This is fantastic, and well, well, well, well (you get the picture) overdue. But this isn't enough. If someone were to work a minimum wage job 40 hours a week for a year at this new amount, which won't fully go into effect for two years, they'd make a whopping (note the sarcasm) $15,080. This isn't nearly enough money to pay for rent, health care, transportation, food, and utilities.

There's a movement being made by progressive organizations for a so-called “living wage,– a wage that, you know, people could actually live on. We think that this framing could be better simply because the situation is graver than even word “living– can indicate.

So, we're calling for a moral wage, one that is driven by an ethical imperative. Our citizens need to have their minds changed, and this starts, in large part, through the media. Thankfully, we control the media in that we can write letters to the editor. Below you'll find a letter we've written that we think does the not-so-magical trick.

We've kept the letter to exactly 250 words, the maximum allowed at many newspapers across this land o' ours. Feel free to copy, paste, print, sign, fold, envelope, stamp and mail the sucker. In fact, we hope you will. To find the necessary information for newspaper near you, just click this sentence.

Picture c/o this fit-for-print photographer.

- – - – -

Dear Editor:

I applaud the new House of Representatives and the speed with which they passed a raise in the minimum wage. Since this bare bones wage hadn't been raised in a decade, the increase was overdue.

But this increase, if it passes in the Senate, won't begin to touch the problem of poverty in the richest country in the world. According to the latest Census Bureau statistics, 37 million live in poverty. Thankfully, we needn't rely on the slow-as-sludge federal government — we can tackle this on a state level.

I believe we need to eliminate the minimum wage and institute a “moral wage,– a wage that real people can really live on. A common sense moral wage would be $12 per hour. This wouldn't need to happen overnight. As you know, we can ask our state representatives to institute this shift gradually to keep the rate moving along with natural inflation.

At this salary, the state and federal government would make significantly more in tax revenue, and this money could be used to subsidize the increase for small businesses. Consumers would have more disposable income, which would generate taxes and help businesses. Families wouldn't rely as much on Medicaid or child care assistance, further reducing the tax burden.

We have a moral imperative to do this. We owe it to our fellow Americans. Why? Because the American Dream shouldn't be to make ends meet. Because it's patriotic to care for our fellow citizens. Because that's the right thing to do.

Sincerely,

You