There’s no doubt the recession has spurred interest in living more affordably—cutting back, scaling down, and doing more with less. There’s just one hitch with the prevailing frugal ethos: A fair number of penny-pinching Americans have confused thrifty with cheap, bargain hunting in discount shops that rely, for example, on low-wage labor or disposable design.

Taking a page from Ellen Rupel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Noreen Malone expounds in the American Prospect: “Houses won’t last and clothes won’t be handed down because we no longer ask that they be built for the long run. . . . We might be cheap, but we’re no longer thrifty. In fact, even if we recover that instinct, we’ll have left ourselves with gaping holes in the reusable products ecosystem.”

In a nutshell, an Ikea couch makes an unlikely family heirloom. And the longer cheap culture prevails, so ebbs the flow of quality goods to thrift stores and reuse centers.

As a sort of antidote to the cheapening of thrift culture, I’d enthusiastically suggest picking up a copy of Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills by Raleigh Briggs. Recently published by Microcosm, it’s an adorable, addictive, pint-sized compendium of DIY advice, ranging from house-cleaning solutions and garden-tending skills to nontoxic bodycare products and natural remedies.

It’s not that I don’t have anywhere else to turn for this type of advice and information; on the contrary, here at the Utne Reader library we have a regular embarrassment of resources. As a matter of fact, our sister publication Natural Home just published a bang-up breakdown of the essential ingredients in a nontoxic cleaning kit. Another one of our sister magazines, Herb Companion, focuses an entire sector of its coverage on herbal remedies and using herbs for health.

There is an extra spoonful magic in Briggs’ pages, though. Make Your Place is neatly hand-lettered and illustrated throughout; the first two chapters began life as zines. When looking to disrupt the low-wage, productivity-maximizing philosophy of cheap, picking up a book that’s been crafted with such care, it seems to me, is quite an appropriate rebuttal.

Source: American Prospect, Make Your Place, Natural Home, Herb Companion

Barack Obama has engaged in a delicate balancing act since he took office, continually placating the myriad special interest groups that take partial credit for getting him elected. The American Prospect reports “the ability to coerce, engage and, yes, distract his own progressive coalition has become one of Obama’s signature achievements.” The Obama administration places a priority on making groups feel included, inviting them into the White House, and, according to the article, blurring the line “between tourism and negotiation.”

The near-constant “babysitting” doesn’t always translate into concrete action, as many organizations have discovered. LGTB groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights Watch have all received personal attention, only to see their concerns go unaddressed by the administration. The question, according to the American Prospect, is “whether progressive groups know the difference between managing expectations and producing results.”

Source: The American Prospect

Image of White Castle Tapas, from  Fancy Fast Food .

Penny pinching is in fashion in the current economic crisis. Many people simply can’t afford expensive food, clothing, and consumer goods anymore. The extravagance of 2006 seems gauche and out of touch today. Science Daily reports that economic pressures are forcing people to rethink their desperate need to differentiate themselves from others using expensive consumer goods.

“Cheap is having a moment,” Noreen Malone writes in the American Prospect. Buzzwords like “recessionista” and “frugalista” have crept into American vocabularies and companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds are enjoying profits in the down economy. In reviewing the book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Malone explores the ways “we’ve been seduced by low prices into forgetting our best interests.” Quality and durability are being sacrificed in favor of cheapness and convenience, often to the detriment of the environment and our own budgets.

Frugal extroverts don’t have to give up all the pleasures in life, though, just because people are cutting back on their budgets. In a hilarious piece in the latest issue of Utne Reader, Mark G. Hannah shows how people can entertain during the recession. His advice: Fake it. Cheap Smirnoff vodka can be poured into the expensive Grey Goose bottle. And Spam can replace the more expensive Virginia ham, with none of your guests the wiser.

To prove the point, the intrepid folks behind Fancy Fast Food give step-by-step instructions on turning White Castle, Taco Bell, and Dominoes into attractive, if not tasty, dinner party fare.

Sources: Science Daily, American Prospect, Fancy Fast Food 

Statistics Day is right around the corner! No, seriously. Over at American Prospect, Paul Waldman ponders this Japanese holiday (with its slogan: “Statistical Surveys Owe You and You Owe Statistical Data”) and dreams of a day when Americans might revere responsibly parsed data so much that we have our own national celebration that “speaks of a culture that values precision and holds numbers in high esteem”:

We ought to be in a golden age of data. We have more data than we have ever had before, more computing capacity to analyze it, and an information delivery system—the Internet—we couldn't have dreamed of 20 years ago. With a few clicks, you can have at your fingertips the mountains of U.S. Census data. You can access the 36 years worth of data gathered by the General Social Survey or the 60 years of data collected by the National Election Studies. You can get oodles of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or the CIA's World Factbook. I could go on—almost forever...Why is it that misleading or manipulative uses of numbers are no less likely to carry the day for their dishonesty?

...The lesson isn't that one shouldn't listen to people who know a lot about numbers. It's that one has to know which questions can be answered by data and which can't. Too often, too many of us can't tell the difference.

Let’s make Paul Waldman proud and make this the best Statistics Day ever. I’ll bring the hats.

Now go crunch some numbers!

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Source: American Prospect 

Image by  ArtemFinland . Licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Before Barack Obama won the 2008 election, pundits and politicos were already planning his first 100 days in office. Since then, the situation in the United States has gotten worse and the urgent calls for reform have gotten louder. 

“No president in recent memory has come into office with so many and such varied crises to deal with,” John D. Donahue and Max Stier wrote for the Washington Monthly. Obama’s agenda includes, but is not limited to, averting a global recession, ending the war in Iraq, stabilizing Afghanistan, closing Guantanamo Bay, and “passing and (the hard part) implementing universal health care,” Donahue and Stier report. 

After a campaign based on such amorphous themes as “hope” and “change,” some expect the myriad problems to evaporate as soon as the new president takes office. “I think that we've replaced the housing bubble in the United States with an Obama bubble,” Steve Clemons, a senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation told Salon.com. Clemons and others are calling for quick, decisive action on foreign policy and other initiatives. According to Clemons, “He's got a very short window to make the Obama bubble mean something before it explodes.”

A huge challenge for the incoming administration is deciding which issues should be dealt with first. Shirley Ann Jackson, writing for the Scientific American, has joined a multitude of scientists and environmentalists calling energy security, “the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time.” In his first 100 days in office, Jackson wants Obama to update the national power grid, create a $200-billion “clean energy” bank for investment in sustainable energies, and “triple the currently paltry federal investment in basic and applied energy research and development.”

Though energy reform and foreign policy may garner big headlines, the most important tasks of the new administration may be the most mundane. Donahue and Stier report for the Washington Monthly that Obama should focus on fixing the federal bureaucracy, before moving on to bigger ticket items. “To put it bluntly” Donahue and Stier write, “even with brilliant policy ideas and flawless political instincts, Barack Obama’s administration is likely to fail if it doesn’t reverse the erosion in federal capacity.”

The disastrous example of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during Hurricane Katrina has shown what can go wrong when a federal agency is dysfunctional, and Donahue and Stier report that many important federal offices have fallen into disrepair. Donahue and Stier provide an urgent call to reform Medicare and Medicaid, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Defense Contract Management Agency, the Defense Nuclear Detection Office, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and especially FEMA, now under the Department of Homeland Security.

Most people realize that Obama’s promised “change” won’t come overnight, and that’s not a bad thing, according to Mark Schmitt writing for the American Prospect. Many politicos and pundits urged Obama to hit the panic button at various points throughout the 2008 election, but the candidate won with “a long, patient strategy of assembling a majority of delegates, one at a time, in friendly and unfriendly states alike.” Schmitt writes that the President-elect will need to use that same patient style to truly turn the country around in 2009.

 Image by  Ragesoss , licensed under Creative Commons.

One of the most unpopular administrations in U.S. history will leave office this January, passing the presidency on to Barack Obama, a man millions expect to be a transformative leader. Obama will take the reigns in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown, with American troops fighting two wars abroad, the climate in crisis, and that’s just the beginning.

The time is ripe for political resolutions to ring in the New Year.

The coming year should be the time we “return to integrity and put pressure on our government and corporate leaders, our employers and colleagues, to do the same,” Courtney E. Martin writes for the American Prospect. It’s time to “hold one another accountable to our highest selves,” she argues.

Taking a global perspective, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon trumpeted a more concrete resolution at his last press conference of the year, the AFP reports: “2009 will be the year of climate change.” He continued, “We must reach a global climate change deal before the end of the year [2009]—one that is balanced, comprehensive and ratifiable by all nations.”

Obama is widely expected to heed the call to step-up American leadership on climate change. And he’s already made a slew of other promises for new direction, including pledges to “value science,” create millions of jobs, initiate health care reform in his first year in office, shutter Guantanamo Bay, and restore America’s stature on the world stage. Here’s hoping these New Year’s resolutions aren’t forgotten by March.

Have any political New Year's resolutions of your own? Share them in the Utne Salons, or in the comments section below.

Image by Waldo Jaquith, licensed under Creative Commons.

Forget the culture war, Ann Friedman argues in the latest issue of the American Prospect. Gay rights are a civil-rights issue. And that means the fight can’t wait around for culture to catch up.

The proof came on November 4th. Amidst hosannas from progressives celebrating Barack Obama’s victory, four state ballot initiatives successfully blasted gay rights in California, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas.

In the wake of those votes, Friedman launches an eloquent call to action: 

Culture changes slowly. This is something I've heard a lot in the wake of the passage of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. "History is on our side! Don't worry, the demographic trends are with us!"

I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough. These are the kind of conciliatory comments that go part and parcel with the culture-war frame. Civil-rights era activists knew history was on their side. But their goal was not to make every white American comfortable with the idea of sharing public spaces and power with people of color. It was to guarantee people of color those rights, regardless of where the culture stood. That's the thing about rights. You have to claim them.

We won't win victories on LGBT rights as long as we see the issue as part of a liberal--versus-conservative war. If we're at war, it's not with conservatives. Our enemy is not James Dobson or Sarah Palin. It is the sadly accepted notion that anti-gay measures are shoo-ins on the ballot, and that same-sex couples just have to sit tight for a decade or two and wait for public opinion to catch up.

A civil-rights frame is not only more proactive -- because it doesn't allow progressives to swaddle themselves in comforting demographic trends -- it is more persuasive. It is also less divisive. The very act of invoking the term "culture war" signals that we think something is controversial, when in fact, equal rights should be the furthest thing from it.

With less than a month to go until Election Day, Barack Obama and John McCain are pegging their hopes on two very different campaign strategies. Obama is waging a ground war to get out the vote, while McCain is lobbing grenades at his opponent’s character. Which tack wins in November will say as much about Americans as it does about the two candidates.

The two camps’ approaches have come into stark relief over the last few days. On Saturday, Greg Strimple, a top adviser to McCain, dimwittedly announced to the Washington Post that “We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans.” Then the surrogates were unleashed on the Sunday talk-show circuit to stoke the fear about Obama’s association with Weather Underground cofounder Bill Ayers. Here’s a quick-and-dirty video roundup from the weekend smearfest by TPM:

Sarah Palin has beaten the same drum on the stump, saying Obama was “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” And in Bill Kristol’s column in the New York Times today, she resurrected—at the conservative shill’s prodding—the specter of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

And in advance of Tuesday’s debate, McCain unleashed his own vitriol. “Who is the real Barack Obama?” McCain asked a cheering crowd in Albuquerque, tipping his hand to show what will surely be the strategy from now until November 4: Scare people away from this Barack (Hussein) Obama. 

Meanwhile, on Monday, Obama’s key strategy came center stage as the deadline for registering new voters in several states hit. The Washington Post parsed the preliminary numbers, and things do not look good for McCain: 

In the past year, the rolls have expanded by about 4 million voters in a dozen key states -- 11 Obama targets that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 (Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) plus Pennsylvania, the largest state carried by Sen. John F. Kerry that Sen. John McCain is targeting.  

In Florida, Democratic registration gains this year are more than double those made by Republicans; in Colorado and Nevada the ratio is 4 to 1, and in North Carolina it is 6 to 1. Even in states with nonpartisan registration, the trend is clear -- of the 310,000 new voters in Virginia, a disproportionate share live in Democratic strongholds. 

(USA Today has a handy chart showing the two sides’ gains in battleground states. And to read a great account of what this effort looks like on the ground, read FiveThirtyEight’s dispatch yesterday from Tippecanoe County, Indiana.)

And so as McCain, Palin, & Co. rumble in the muck, the Obama team is still steadily hitting the pavement, reaching out to new voters in an attempt to remake the electoral map. (For an excellent dissection of Obama’s long-term strategy, read the American Prospect’s September cover story, “It’s His Party.”) 

Now, that’s not to say the Obama campaign hasn’t launched its own negative assault. Today, they unveiled their Keating Economics documentary and website. But, as Utne.com’s Jake Mohan notes, “it remains to be seen whether anyone besides the die-hard wonks will sit through a 13-minute video about the economy—and how well Obama’s attack will stick” amidst the McCain camp’s sharper jabs.

Then there’s the qualitative difference between the two negative tacks. The Keating punches are based in criticisms of policy, while McCain’s assaults are meant to question Obama’s character. If Obama wanted to take that lower road, he could, of course, run ad after ad showing Palin being blessed by a witch hunter who wants to ensure she’s elected so she can put God back into the public schools. Or, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala noted on Meet the Press, the Obama campaign could start hammering McCain for sitting on the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom. Begala explains:

You know, you can go back, I have written a book about McCain, I had a dozen researchers go through him, I didn’t even put this in the book. But John McCain sat on the board of a very right-wing organization, it was the U.S. Council for World Freedom, it was chaired by a guy named John Singlaub, who wound up involved in the Iran contra scandal. It was an ultra conservative, right-wing group. The Anti-Defamation League, in 1981 when McCain was on the board, said this about this organization. It was affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League – the parent organization – which ADL said “has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.”

Now, that's not John McCain, I don't think he is that. But you know, the problem is that a lot of people know John McCain’s record better than Governor Palin. And he does not want to play guilt by association or this thing could blow up in his face.

Bye, bye, Florida.

Instead, though, Obama seems focused on the ground war, a strategy that tends to make Dems fret about not swinging back hard enough (see Kerry, Swift Boat). And the nervous Nellies could prove to be right, though I can’t help but think back to 2000, when Bush’s evangelical get-out-the-vote effort stealthily won the day.

It all depends on whether American voters opt to open their hearts to seedy fear-mongering, and, if they do, whether a crop of newly franchised voters outnumber their weaker fellow citizens. In that way, this election seems more a test of Americans than of John McCain or Barack Obama.

Adapted from image by  realjameso16 , licensed under Creative Commons.

We all have different definitions of financial security and wealth, but some are more realistic than others. When asked to define a “rich” income level at the Saddleback Forum this past weekend, the responses from Barack Obama and John McCain were revealing. Obama said $150,000, while McCain posited, “How about $5 million?” He was ostensibly joking, but his response is the perfect example of sincerity cloaked in fatuousness, and completely in line with his party’s economic philosophy.

Ezra Klein, at the American Prospect, made a chart to contextualize the candidates’ definitions of wealth:

Klein concludes that McCain’s “profoundly out of touch” answer, facetious or not, is frustrating but inevitable: He's been richer, for longer, than Obama and most of his fellow Americans. “Nothing weird or malign: Just the naturally skewed perspective of someone who lives on a particular extreme, in this case, the extreme edge of the wealth distribution.” Obama is, by his own definition, undeniably wealthy, but Klein argues that because his family’s acquisition of wealth is relatively recent, Obama’s outlook is more realistic.

McCain and his companions in the richest slice of America’s population have no concept of what it is to barely get by on a middle-class income, much less at or below the unrealistically low poverty line. While statistically unsurprising, this warped economic outlook will have dire consequences for the middle and lower classes if McCain becomes president, all but ensuring an extension of the Bush Administration’s apparent mandate that the rich get richer at the expense of pretty much everyone else.

Chart courtesy of Ezra Klein.