Month: August 2009

The Politics Of Great-Tasting Food

by tristero

Recently, the UK Food Standards Agency published a review of the available studies on the nutritional and other health benefits of organic food. Their conclusions:

An independent review commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) shows that there are no important differences in the nutrition content, or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food. The focus of the review was the nutritional content of foodstuffs.

Gill Fine, FSA Director of Consumer Choice and Dietary Health, said: ‘Ensuring people have accurate information is absolutely essential in allowing us all to make informed choices about the food we eat. This study does not mean that people should not eat organic food. What it shows is that there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food.

Needless to say, foodies instantly jumped all over the report, retorting that they didn’t look at the harmful effects of pesticides, etc., etc.

I’m in no position to debate knowledgeably the technical details of the study, or the rebuttals. I do know that in my experience, organics (especially local organics) usually, but not always, taste much, much better than the factory farm stuff that’s shipped who-knows-how-many miles to get dumped into my supermarket. Likewise, the factory stuff I’m offered in Manhattan is usually, but not always, lacking in interesting variety while ranging in quality from the tasteless to the more-or-less acceptable.

However, Marion Nestle has a characteristically knowledgeable and nuanced take on the study and its meaning:

I have long argued that functional foods (in which nutrients are added over and above those that are already present in the foods) are not about improving health; they are about improving marketing. Evaluating foods on the basis of their content of one or another nutrient is what Michael Pollan calls “nutritionism.” Nutritionism is about marketing, not health.

I am a great supporter of organic foods because their production reduces the use of unnecessary chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones, and favors more sustainable production practices. Yes, some organic foods will be higher in some nutrients than some conventional foods. But so what? Customers who can afford to buy organic foods are unlikely to be nutrient deficient. What’s at stake in the furor over this issue is market share. What should be at stake is the need to produce food – all food – more sustainably.

That seems to make a lot of sense to me. I’ll focus on the first point in her post, the issue of “nutrtitionism,” and leave for a later time, the other, equally interesting, concerns she brings up.

From what I can tell – ie, your mileage may vary but from my own experience and how I understand that of others, including Pollan and Mark Bittman – if you eat really good food, and by that I simply mean food that tastes great, you really don’t have to worry too much whether you’re getting enough protein, b-12, omega-3’s, or [insert latest ginned-up food fad here]. Of course, learning about the nutrients in your food can make for an interesting hobby, but in general, there’s no reason to sweat the details if you’re eating good stuff. Michael Pollan’s famous semi-tongue-in-cheek mantra, “Eat food, not too much. Mostly plants” probably is about all that most of us without specific dietary problems need as a guide in order to eat for our health.

The trick, of course, is to recognize what really good food tastes like… and also how to eat it!

Sadly, that’s not so easy in modern America. Americans have been trained since birth to eat cruddy-tasting food and think it tastes great. It’s not that burgers taste bad: they don’t, they can taste great. It’s rather that the burgers – and the fries, and the shakes, and so on – made available to the typical American taste awful, with fake flavors that pretend to taste good. But once you have, say, really great chocolate – and, hard as it is to believe, few of us have – you’ll never, ever go back to the fake or adulterated stuff currently marketed as “chocolate.” Other foods are harder to taste than chocolate, of course, but the principle’s the same.

Now it’s not just The Man’s fault. True, big corporations have done an extraordinary job of feeding us huge piles of crappy-tasting slop (and also “disappearing” good food). In doing so, they’ve guaranteed that their owners will make enough of the other green stuff that they’ll never have to eat their own lousy products. But that’s only part of the problem.

If your parents were like mine, you never knew what broccoli could taste like when it wasn’t cooked down to mush, or even how awesome a simple tomato salad could be. Incredibly, if we want to enjoy good food – something other cultures take for granted (and not just Europe!) – we actually need to learn, starting from square one, what it tastes like and how to cook it. That’s how clueless most Americans are about food. (I’m not talking haute cuisine here. I’m talking about what’s come to be called “ingredients:” produce, dairy, meats, seafood. You know: the stuff that was once called “food.”)

That’s not all. We have to learn how to eat good food. Pollan, in one of his most important observations, notes that Americans, when they’re asked about the food they eat, default to touting the health benefits, or lack thereof. We eat oatmeal because it’s good for us. Chocolate is sinful and decadent: we crave it. But once you think about it for a moment or two, this puritanical attitude, which is epidemic in the United States, really is profoundly weird. Health is first and foremost a moral imperative? Pleasure is a degenerate sin? What’s that about?

That’s not necessarily how folks from other cultures describe how they eat (and there are exceptions here, too, of course). Eating delicious food can be, to a great extent, an aesthetic act, a source of pleasure, joy, and the honing of one’s skills of discernment. People in many cultures spend an enormous amount of time – by our standards – eating meals together. Somehow, they manage to eat simply for pleasure without killing themselves en masse. And we think they’re weird for sitting down to lavish meals – often with (gasp!) birth=defect inducing libations – that go on for hours.

Naturally, I’m not suggesting we be more like Italians, or drink ourselves into a coma, or ignore the (few) important scientific facts we really need to know about our diets. No. What I’m saying is that the reason it would be a damn good idea for Americans to learn to spend more time together cooking and eating is not because it’s “good” for us, or “useful” – fuck the Puritans! – but because it can be so incredibly enjoyable.

Let me state two self-evident truths with incredibly far-reaching implications for a society habituated to thinking about what constitutes a good life solely through the dreary prism of the ubiquitous, and hypocritical, prigs who dominate our discourse. In a different culture, these truths would be so obvious as to be thought simple-minded. Not here in 21st Century America, boyo:

First and foremost, food should taste great. Equally important: we should enjoy the act of eating it.

Told you they were obvious! But think for a minute about what they really mean. Not that food should be nutritious – it simply is nutritious. Not that food should be profitable at the expense of taste: beans are for eating, not counting. Not that food should be fast: good food, like all great pleasures (translated: sex) is best enjoyed nice and slow. What makes this attitude so radical is that it places human joy back at the center of a central human experience. Not morality, not profit, not ginned-up trivial jolts. Pleasure.

Getting back to organics… of course, our food should be as organic and local as possible. That should go without saying, like, of course we should put on warm clothes when it’s cold. Or, of course we should properly fund the arts and, of course, we should have universal healthcare. But, of course, we don’t.

Nestle’s post has an important implication. Studying the relative nutritional merits of organic vs conventional misses all the most important aspects of food. Even if conventionals were more nutritious, it matters not a whit. They just don’t taste as good and that’s what really matters, or should.

In a future post, I’ll address why I believe this is not an elitist attitude. Just the opposite, in fact.

Here Doggy!

by digby

Never let it be said that Newtie doesn’t know his wingnut dogwhistles:

“You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.”

Why the Democrats haven’t found a way to use the Schiavo mess to their advantage on this, I don’t know. The people of this country viscerally understand why end of life care is complicated and why people need living wills, which can, by the way, specify that they require every machine and extraordinary measure be used to keep them breathing as long as possible if that’s what they want. Very few people actually want that, but without a living will the medical professionals have to keep them alive by every means possible or the family has to try to read the patient’s mind and make the difficult decision themselves. It’s an awful situation and completely preventable if everyone just specifies their wishes in advance.

It’s despicable that these people are using demagoguery on a matter such as living wills. Nothing is more difficult and important when you are dealing with a dying loved one and its despicable that they are actually going out of their way to make this more difficult than it should be for purely political reasons. They are actually trying to get old people to be scared of having a living will and it is going to result in horrifying suffering among them and their families.

Once again, I sencerely hope there is a hell because all these jackasses are going to burn for enternity for the things they have done. The depths to which they’ve sunk in this health care debate is so awful I honestly don’t know if they can go any lower.

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Where Ya Been?

by digby

David Brooks says that Limbaugh’s Hitler characterizations are insane:

Good for Brooks. But it does strike me as odd that Brooks hasn’t heard about Limbaugh’;s ravings this week.

Oh wait, that’s right. The newspaper for which he writes forgot to mention that in their fairnbalanced report on what’s going on at the Town Halls. And good bipartisan villagers don’t dirty their beautiful minds with any of the riff raff media because it’s all partisan and biased and shrill.

This is the same Rush Limbaugh who’s been out there spewing noxious bile and outright lies for decades and who is so powerful the entire Republican Party is forced to kiss his ring or risk him turning of the mob on themselves. While Brooks and the rest of the villagers were all tittering over the odd naughty Rush quote, he’s been out there creating a subculture of know-nothing zombies.

Welcome to 21st century politics Bobo. Hope you enjoy what you’ve wrought.

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Constitutional Conventions

by digby

This op-ed in today’s Washington Post ponders one of the favorite quixotic dreams of many liberals: the elimination of the electoral college and the Senate, two of the two most egregiously undemocratic institutions in America. (There are others — the Fed comes to mind.)

This essay discusses the well-known, bizarre fact that in our alleged democracy, Senators who represent 3% of the population have the power to decide something of great national import like health care reform — and routinely do on the basis of narrow parochial interests. For those of us who live in great big states like California, one of the most frustrating things have to put up with is this constant refrain from rural and small population states that they are victimized when they clearly have veto power over the whole damned government and whose residents have far more power relative to their population.

But the really interesting part of the piece discusses the political sausage making that created the Senate in the first place and how its been used over the years to consistently favor the moneyed interests:

[T]he Senate is as much a product of bare-knuckled, self-interested politics as last week’s fight over military earmarks. In Philadelphia in 1787, the smaller states favored the New Jersey Plan — one chamber with equal representation per state — while James Madison argued for two chambers, both apportioned by population, which would benefit his Virginia. The delegates finally settled on the Connecticut Compromise, or the Great Compromise. Seats in the lower chamber would be apportioned by population (with some residents counting more than others, of course) while seats in the upper chamber would be awarded two per state. The idea was to safeguard states’ rights at a time when the former colonies were still trying to get used to this new country of theirs. But the big/small divide was nothing like what we have today. Virginia, the biggest of the original 13 states, had 538,000 people in 1780, or 12 times as many people as the smallest state, Delaware. Today, California is 70 times as large as the smallest state, Wyoming, whose population of 533,000 is smaller than that of the average congressional district, and, yes, smaller than that of Washington D.C., which has zero votes in Congress to Wyoming’s three. The 10 largest states are home to more than half the people in the country, yet have only a fifth of the votes in the Senate.[…]

For the first few decades in Congress’s history, the more democratic House was where the action was. “The authors of the Constitution really thought the House would be the driving engine, and the Senate would just be the senior group that would perfect legislation that came up from the House,” Ritchie said. But after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, it was clear that the battle over slavery would be fought in the upper chamber. After the Civil War, the Senate became the bastion of the GOP as the party pushed to admit pro-Republican states to the union. Nevada was admitted in 1864 to help ratify the Civil War amendments despite being virtually empty; the Dakotas joined in 1889, split in two to provide more votes in the Senate and the Electoral College; Wyoming joined a year later with 63,000 residents. With these added votes in the Senate and the Electoral College, the Republicans dominated throughout the late 19th century despite Democratic strength in the House. High tariffs, land giveaways in the West, lax regulation of railroads and a pro-business Supreme Court were all thanks partly to the underpopulated new states, says MIT historian Charles Stewart III. A few decades later, the politics had flipped, and it was the South relying on the Senate — and the filibuster — as a bulwark against civil rights legislation. In any case, the Senate’s preeminence was established, even as the Britain’s House of Lords and upper chambers in other countries’ legislatures lost sway. Add the rise of the filibuster and the fact that small-state senators tend to stick around longer, gaining powerful chairmanships under the seniority system, and you’ve got today’s change-resistant Senate.

Compared to the rest of the world, then, the United States has actually gone backwards in terms of small d democracy, so it shouldn’t surprise us when we are also slipping behind other first world countries in almost everything but war making and money handling as well. As I’ve written before, every American should stop and ponder once in a while that we have nearly the world’s oldest democracy but in the great global democratization of the past century nobody has adopted our system of government.

It’s the bill of rights that makes the US Constitution great, not the clunky system of governance a bunch of wealthy landowners came up with through a series of deals and compromises. But it must be said that for the most part it’s worked. The country has magnificent resources and its culture of immigration has made it innovative and energetic. You have to wonder if it may not be able to continue down that path if global economic competition, climate change, pandemics — all the sorts of problems we are confronting in this new century — are too big for its outmoded, slow, provincial politics to handle.

I don’t hold out any great hope that this will change any time soon. The Senate can’t even get rid of (or modify) the filibuster even though this is what’s happening:

Of course, modifying the filibuster wouldn’t really change things. The Democrats have 60 votes in their caucus now but they certainly don’t have 60 votes to break a filibuster. I’m not sure there won’t always be some egomaniac or myopic prince protecting his little fiefdom in the Democratic Party willing to side with Republicans for his own reasons. And, obviously, eliminating the Senate is impossible short of a constitutional convention.

We will have to live with this strange system that doesn’t work very well unless some cataclysm forces a change, so it would probably be a good idea to try to figure out a better way to govern as progressives. One obvious place to start would be the seniority system. There is no reason that a guy like Max Baucus, bought a paid for by big business and representing fewer people than live within 20 square miles of my house, should not only have the outsized power of his vote, but the power of his committee chairmanship for years on end. Unfortunately, the Senate is the most exclusive club in the world and they all take care of each other, so that’s a tough one.

The House of Lords is a problem and I honestly don’t know what the answer is.

I wrote more on this at The Big Con a while back, delving into a different aspect of it referencing some scholarly work by Law professor Lawrence Tushnet. It’s a deep topic.

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Faith Healingby digby
David Frum is worried:

What would it mean to “win” the healthcare fight? For some, the answer is obvious: beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself. The problem is that if we do that… we’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus immense pressure for future tax increases, (3) small businesses and self-employed individuals priced out of the insurance market, and (4) a lot of uninsured or underinsured people imposing costs on hospitals and local governments. We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.

Frum seems to be operating under the illusion that the Republicans will be blamed for this, which I think is unlikely. Obama will be held responsible for the failure, just as Clinton was. it will be seen as a failure of legislative tactics —- that’s how liberal politics is discussed. (I do it too, of course, just like every other political blowhard.) This is especialy true of health care, which has been exclusively seen and mapped out as a tactical challenge since Harry Truman failed to pass comprehensive reform in the 1940s. It’s why we got health care for the elderly when Johnson had the liberal mandate rather than universal coverage. And the predictable result of failure this time will be that when health care comes to the table again some years down the road (when the crisis is even more acute) the lessons learned will be all about legislative tactics as well. They wil fight the last war — again.
Frum is fretting over the actual repercussions of failing to reform the health care system, which is completely beside the point for his fellow Republicans. Health care has officially joined the “faith based” constellation of issues, which includes global warming and evolution. They are now simply denying there is a crisis at all. And if there is one, there is simply no solution other than prayer and dogmatic belief in American exceptionalism and free markets.
The next couple of weeks will tell us whether the Republican obstructionism will result in backlash and give the progressives some room to maneuver. It’s always possible the wingnuts have succumbed to hubris again — having Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as the spokesmen for their obstructionism might end up being a mistake similar to having Newtie push the government shut-down back in 1995. They often overreach and the hysterical, far right rhetoric people are seeing at these Town Halls may not resonate in the rest of the country quite the way the villagers think it will. We’ll see.
But regardless of what actually happens, if health reform fails, I believe that when the history is written it will be seen as a Democratic failure. If you put an issue on the table and are given a mandate to enact it, you are blamed for its failure, particularly when the whole promise of your campaign was based upon the magical notion that you would change the very nature of the political system. Sadly, if that happens, the likely result will not be a newly invigorated, liberal president with lessons learned and a fresh approach. It will be a chastened and weakened president newly committed to the status quo, just as the Village ordered from the beginning. And that, in the end, may be what was being promised all along: symbolism over substance. It wouldn’t be the first time.

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“An Intelligent Version Of Libertarianism”

by tristero

Tyler Cowen, after cynically misrepresenting (albeit cleverly) progressivism poses a challenge:

It would be interesting to see a progressive try to sum up an intelligent version of libertarianism.

As a general rule, I think it is wise to ignore conservatives when they double dare you. This one is easy, however.

The dare is one more example of rightwing bullshit. There is no such thing as an intelligent version of libertarianism. It simply doesn’t exist, any more than compassionate conservativm or the tooth fairy. More precisely, there is nothing intelligent that libertarianism brings to the table that isn’t already part and parcel of liberalism.

But don’t take my word for it. In a review of Daniel Wessel’s In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, Paul Barrett writes:

If there’s a villain looming over the Wessel version of why the government was so overwhelmed [in the face of the growing financial crisis], it is [Alan] Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve from 1987 until 2006. As Wessel explains, Greenspan’s strong libertarian leanings led him to scorn the ability of government employees to keep track of bonus-crazed bankers and traders. Greenspan preached a free-market theory that the self-interest of large financial players would cause them to drive hard bargains with one another and prevent the sort of mischief that could bring markets crashing down. He encouraged the “financial engineering” that created securities no one fully understood, and he helped shield the mad scientists of Wall Street from government restraints.

But don’t take Barrett’s or Wessel’s word for libertarianism’s stupidity, either:

Then, in October 2008, Greenspan admitted to a House committee he had been, well, totally wrong: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.”

Cue the libertarians amongst us, not the brightest of bulbs, to retort, “So, you’re saying government is always right, people can’t be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves, and more regulation is always a good thing?”

The fact is that any intelligent form of progressivism recognizes that there is a complex interplay between government and the so-called private sector; that good government is as absolute necessary to a good society as responsible individual freedom is; and that there are many inherent conflicts between the two that are resolved on a contingent basis as the definitions of all the terms in play – “good,” “government,” “responsible,” “individual,” “freedom,” etc – change over time. The notion that “less regulation is a moral good” is, for lack of a better phrase, simply stupid. It sets up a patently false dichotomy because obviously, it’s not more or less regulation that is a problem, but the quality and kind of regulation. Sometimes, we need more, and efficient, regulation – eg, over derivatives. Sometimes, we need less – for example, over who can marry.

Duh. Or, to put it another way, the social conflict between freedom and restriction is an argument that liberals and progressives have been struggling with since the days of Spinoza, if not earlier. Libertarianism brings nothing new that is of value to the table. Just ask Alan Greenspan, one of the most influential libertarians of all times.

Special note to real philosophers and scholars: Of course, “libertarianism” is as impossible to discuss in general as “Christianity,” “Islam,” or any other creed; there are social libertarians, economic libertarians, left libertarians, and so on. Just as when we speak of communists, most commentators don’t typically use the Shakers as an example but instead discuss the Soviet Union or modern China, I am talking about libertarians as they are more typically understood, the Ayn Rands (of whom Greenspan was a drooling acolyte), the Ron Pauls, and so on. No doubt, if you care about libertarianism (I don’t), that is the tip of the iceberg.

Nevertheless, to the extent that libertarians hold up the individual as primary and fail to recognize that individuals simply cannot physically exist without a social/cultural/environmental context, libertarianism is worthless. To the extent that libertarianism does recognize the complex dialectic between the individual and her/his social and physical environment, libertarianism is indistinguishable from liberalism.

As a moral philosophy, by failing to recognize an indisputable physical and ethical reality – namely, that the conflict between the one and the many is primary – libertarianism is all but useless. As a political philosophy, especially when it comes to issues affecting the “rights of businesses”, libertarianism is often deeply immoral, providing flimsy rationales for destructive acquisition, thievery, fraud, and greed – typically, and ironically, in the service of the largest corporations, not individuals. When political libertarianism does pursue goals worthwhile to the individual and to society – eg, in calling for the end of sodomy laws – they add no arguments to the debate that liberals and progressives haven’t already expressed.

(I discussed other aspects of Cowen’s post here)

Saturday Night At The Movies

Generals and majors, ah ah

By Dennis Hartley

In the Loop: Kennedy and Gandolfini discuss policy

Here’s a revelation, smack dab in the midst of summer movie torpor: The political satire is not dead; it’s just been, er, resting …at least since Wag the Dog sped in and out of theatres in 1997, barely noticed by all but the film critics (who pays attention to those wankers, anyway…heh). Writer-director Armando Iannucci and co-writers Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Ian Martin and Tony Roche (much of the same team responsible for the popular BBC series The Thick Of It) have mined the headlines and produced a nugget of pure satirical gold with In the Loop (in limited release and on PPV). I daresay that it recalls the halcyon days of Terry Southern and Paddy Chayefsky, whose sharp, barb-tongued screenplays once ripped the body politic with savage aplomb.

When the British Minister for International Development (Tom Hollander) gets tongue-tied during a BBC news interview and blurts out that “War is unforeseeable” in response to a question about his stance on a possible U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, it stirs up a trans-Atlantic political shit storm, as hawks and doves on both sides of the pond scramble to spin his nebulous statement into an endorsement for their respective agendas. When he later attempts to backpedal by adlibbing “Sometimes, to walk the road of peace, we have to…climb the mountains of conflict” it raises murderous ire from the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications (Peter Capaldi, in an award-worthy turn as a classic Type-A prick) who tells the minister (amongst other colorful admonishments) that his awkward metaphor made him come off like some kind of “Nazi Julie Andrews”.

The gaffe-prone minister is given a chance to redeem his now rather precarious career status with a “fact finding” visit to D.C., under the watchful eye of Capaldi (“So have you come here to insult me in a different time zone?” the exasperated minister dryly asks him at one point). Also along for the trip is the minister’s ambitious new advisor and chief handler (Chris Addison). They are feted by the dovish Assistant Secretary of Diplomacy (a brilliantly funny Mimi Kennedy) who is desperately trying to keep him from the clutches of the extremely hawkish Assistant Secretary of State (a wry David Rasche) who is like an amalgam of Rumsfeld and Cheney, and of whom Kennedy observes “…the voices in his head are now singing barbershop together.” Things really get interesting when a vacillating, war-weary general turned desk-bound Pentagon brass (James Gandolfini, refreshing to see in a genuinely comic performance) gets tossed into the mix.

The filmmakers take aim at many targets here, and hit the bull’s eye nearly every time (Hullabaloo readers who follow the “Oh no they didn’t!” shenanigans annotated here daily by our intrepid political observers already know that taking the piss out of the Beltway is tantamount to shooting fish in a barrel). One thing I will tell you is that I guarantee you haven’t heard such creatively honed insults and deliciously profane pentameter singsonging from the mouths of thespians since HBO’s Deadwoodwent dark (or at least since David Mamet last churned out a screenplay). Capaldi’s character in particular gets to spout some of the most uproariously clever lines I’ve heard in any film in years. As for my personal favorite, I’d say that it’s a tossup between (a) “I’m putting you on a probationary period…from today until the end of recorded time” or (b) “I will marshal all the media forces of darkness to hound you to an assisted suicide.” Hey, I know what you’re thinking…I’m a People Person. Maybe I should go into politics (not!).

…and one more thing

Where were you in ‘69?

There’s another politically-themed film of note in theatres his summer that I wanted to bring to your attention. A spiffy new 35mm 40th anniversary revival print of the classic thriller, Z is making the rounds in selected cities right now (it just ended a one-week engagement here in Seattle; you might want to scour your local art house theatre listings).

The film (based on a true story) was a landmark for director Costa-Gavras, and a high-watermark for the cycle of “radical chic” cinema that flourished during that politically tumultuous time. While many of its contemporaries have not aged well, Z retains a palpable sense of immediacy. This is due in part to the director’s decision to place the events in a non-specified country (it was filmed in Algeria, the dialog is in French, but Mikis Theodorakis’ score and the director’s heritage suggest a Baltic nation). Yves Montand plays a leftist politician who is assassinated after giving a speech at a pro-Peace rally. What at first appears to be an open and shut case of a violent action by an isolated group of right wing extremists reveals to be a much more byzantine and far-reaching conspiracy. The story of what really happened (and why) unfolds with great suspense, through the eyes of two characters-a photojournalist (a very young Jacques Perrin, future director of the award-winning 2001 doc Winged Migration) and an investigating magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant). The great Irene Papas is on hand as Montand’s wife.

Although the film is more of a static affair than its exalted reputation as a “fast-moving” political thriller may lead you to believe (trust me, there’s much more talk than action), it is still essential viewing. It’s a little bit Kafka, a little bit Rashomon , but ultimately a cautionary tale about what happens when corrupt officialdom, unchecked police oppression and partisan-sanctioned extremism get into bed together. With the increasingly alarming (and thuggish) nature of the assorted backlash movements floating around lately (the teabaggers, birthers, anti-universal healthcare agitators and the more violent pro-life extremists), perhaps it is more important than ever to heed its warning.

P.S. If the revival run isn’t hitting your town, don’t despair. Although currently out of print on DVD, the film is due for the deluxe Criterion Collection treatment this fall.

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Matt Taibbi Is Shrillby digby … or so I’ve heard. But not everyone sees it that way. Ezra Klein writes:

The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman writes an able defense of Matt Taibbi against those who would drum him from journalism for using too many curse words or daring to express outrage beneath his byline. But toward the end, Starkman engages in some tut-tutting of his own, writing that “the weakness of the piece is where others might find strength, its polemical nature and its hyperbole.” In particular, he says that “when you call Goldman a ‘great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,’ you’re in a sense offering a big fat disclaimer—this piece is not to be taken literally and perhaps not even seriously.” But you’re also doing something else: You’re saying this piece is to be read. You’re signaling to the readers that you are writing for them. That you have decided that the difficulty of these issues increases the responsibility of the writer, not the reader. Putting that liner in the opening of the piece is a clear message that the reader can relax. This will be interesting. This will not be homework.

I have often wondered why so little of journalistic navel gazing contemplates this question. Actually, I don’t wonder at all: the last thing any writer wants to admit or even consider, is that his or her writing is boring. As a kind of-sort of writer myself, I can sympathize. But as a news consumer and as a blogger, I think Ezra is absolutely right, particularly when it comes to tough subjects like the failure of the banking system and wall street perfidy.
I was on a panel with David Sirota and Taibbi a couple of months ago about the forces that are standing in the way of the progressive agenda. Taibbi talked about the reasons for the banking failure and recapitulated the main points of his Rolling Stone article. And the audience was totally captivated. They crowded around him after the panel not to ask for his autograph, but instead peppering him with questions about the bailouts and wall street, many of them commenting that this was the first time they really understood what had happened.
As I listened to him speak, I realized it wasn’t just that he had attitude (which he has) or that he takes a point of view (which he does.) A good part of his talk was spent explaining the arcane mechanisms that fueled the crisis, much of which I think is terribly confusing to lay people and makes it hard to grasp exactly what happened and why we should care. And I realized that in all of his discussion, Taibbi didn’t use any of the usual journalistic conventions and he never uses jargon, ever, in his speech or in his writing. Yes, he’s funny and profane, but he’s also very, very clear.As those of you who have read this blog for a while already know, one of my pet peeves about modern reporting is that the conventions have become so arcane that you can’t decipher what’s really going on. In their quest to protect sources, be “professional,” “balanced” and maintain “objectivity” they’ve created a style that’s often indecipherable to the reader. Without insider knowledge you have to read between the lines or put together several different articles to get a sense of what’s happening. When it involves complex, technical issues it’s even worse.The reason so many people read Taibbi’s work on the banking crisis is not simply because he calls a spade a spade, but because he does it by writing (and speaking) in such a way that makes the issue itself comprehensible. His conclusions about motives and guilt are obviously open for criticism. Anyone’s are. But his explanations of what happened, how these financial instruments worked, what precipitated the crisis and how the industry is constructed are clear, informative and comprehensive. Unlike so many others who write on this topic, he has fulfilled his duty as a journalist without making it “homework,” as Ezra says, or effectively helping to obfuscate the issue on behalf of those who seek to keep people in the dark.Naturally, the powers that be don’t like critics and call them “shrill.” Same as it ever was. The last thing they want is for people to actually understand what’s happening. But journalists, (many of whom loathe Taibbi for “lowering the discourse”) by perpetuating this ever more ritualistic form of writing, are helping them. And I believe they are losing a fair portion of their audience because of it.
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He said/She said/Shut Up

by digby

Joan Walsh has a great post up today about the town hall nonsense and taking the press to task for its coverage of the health care debate in general (while giving Stephen Pearlstein a well deserved shout-out for this excellent article in the Washington Post.) She rightfully singles out the New York Times for its tepid, he said/she said (and tardy) coverage today of the town hall mobs and rightfully so. It just doesn’t get any worse than this:

The tenor of some of the debates has become extreme. Ms. Pelosi has accused people at recent protests of carrying signs associating the Democratic plan with Nazi swastikas and SS symbols, and some photographs showing such signs have been posted on the Web.

Far be it for the NY Times to actually assess whether such things are true. Maybe Pelosi’s lying when she “accuses” people of such things. After all, the pictures that have been posted on the web don’t prove anything , right? Or the videos. Or the non-stop Nazi analogies coming from talk radio gasbags and Fox News nutballs. It just too much to expect that the NY Times would actually investigate such a charge and report on their findings.

But then I’m finding that media is behaving even more irresponsibly than usual, particularly in the cable gasbag world. For instance, take the GE/Newscorp scandal, which Glenn Greenwald has analyzed extensively. Here’s the latest from today’s NY Times:

Executives at two of the country’s largest media companies are still trying to salvage what was essentially a cease-fire between MSNBC and the Fox News Channel.

The two cable news channels temporarily resumed their long-running feud this week after The New York Times reported that their parent companies, General Electric and the News Corporation, had struck a deal to stop each other’s televised personal attacks. Fox News executives felt that MSNBC had broken the deal when Keith Olbermann, in an apparent show of independence, insulted his 8 p.m. rival, Bill O’Reilly, and the News Corporation’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, on Monday. On his show, “Countdown,” Mr. Olbermann called Mr. O’Reilly a “racist clown.” Mr. O’Reilly responded with his own attack two days later on his program, “The O’Reilly Factor,” where he claimed that G.E., through MSNBC, was “promoting the election of Barack Obama and then seeking to profit from his policies.” The chief executives at General Electric, whose NBC News division operates MSNBC, and News Corporation, which owns Fox News, reached an unusual agreement last spring to halt the regular personal assaults on each other’s channels. Eric Burns, the former host of Fox’s media criticism show “Fox News Watch” and the author of “All the News Unfit to Print,” said, “Even in an age where there seemed to be no boundaries, people at the very top of two networks thought, ‘Well, I guess there are boundaries, because they’ve been crossed.’ ”

Let’s just stop right there. It’s ok for the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly to compare liberals to Nazis and incite poeple to murder doctors, but things have really gone too far when they start criticizng corporations and insulting talk show hosts? Can everyone see just how absurd this is? As I wrote before, the fact that NBC was willing to shut down criticism of O’Reilly in order to protect their corporate brand and keep Fox from sending angry mobs to their CEOs house and shareholder meetings is another sign of the corruption of journalism by its corporate owners. On the heels of the Washington Post Pay2Play scandal, it’s a stunner.
But as bad as that is, I still just can’t get past the fact that Roger Ailes went nuclear on NBC merely to protect Fox’s insane gasbags from insults.

The deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly occupy. Employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members. The employees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.[…]
Frustrated by the refusal by NBC’s chief executive, Jeffrey Zucker, to halt the attacks on Mr. O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, personally instructed Mr. O’Reilly’s program to aim at Mr. Immelt, people familiar with the situation said. Peace talks, such as they were, resumed in the spring between G.E. and News Corporation executives. At a lunch in April, Mr. Ailes and Mr. Immelt agreed to tone down the attacks. It was not visible to viewers until after Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch shook hands at an off-the-record conference sponsored by Microsoft in May and word of a cease-fire trickled down to both news divisions.[…]
In the months after, when MSNBC would say something that strained the agreement, Fox News would respond accordingly, and vice versa. In July, after Mr. Olbermann condemned Fox’s Glenn Beck for letting a guest assert that a terrorist attack in the United States might be a good thing, Mr. Beck booked a segment about G.E. and declared that a “merger between G.E. and the Obama administration” was “nearly complete.” After the detente was reported by The Times on Monday, the fighting resumed and Mr. Olbermann claimed there was no deal among the parent companies. That was met by heated skepticism among bloggers. Two days later, Mr. O’Reilly had his turn. His news hook: The Securities and Exchange Commission had fined G.E. $50 million on charges of misleading investors. And on Thursday, Mr. O’Reilly showed Mr. Immelt’s and Mr. Zucker’s faces and wondered how long they could allow “this barbaric display” — that is an Olbermann reference — “under the NBC News banner.”[…]
“At this point,” a Fox spokeswoman said Friday, “the entire situation is more about major issues at NBC and G.E. than it is about Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann.”

Nice little corporation you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
Again, I am not defending GE. Their behavior is worse than cowardly and it should bar them from media ownership. But the thuggish behavior of Fox for the trivial purpose of protecting Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly strikes me as bordering on psychotic. These demagogues are out there every night fomenting revolution, inciting violence and assassinating the characters of everyone they consider an “enemy.” And their bosses are blackmailing those who criticize them for this with thinly veiled threats to unleash the wingnut mobs on the corporation and its executives.
And the corporation is capitulating. After all, GE is not without its resources. It could, presumably, unleash hell on News Corps the same way if it chose to play Ailes’ game. It’s not like Rupert Murdoch is beyond criticism. But they won’t because they know that Fox can mobilize its viewers in ways that NBC can’t — and the executives just don’t think freedom of the press is worth fighting for: it’s not a profit center.
This is a serious problem. If Ailes can shut down criticism of its network by blackmailing the corporations that own the others, then they are exerting a form of corporate power that far outstrips any other, at least in the political realm. Fox News, by successfully blackmailing GE, has sent a message. And the rest of the corporate owned media have undoubtedly received it. Don’t cross them — or their agenda — because there will be hell to pay. With the media in financial turmoil, that’s a powerful message indeed.One can’t help but notice that while the NY Times mentioned in passing that Limbaugh had commented on a supposed similarity between Obama’s health care logo and Nazi symbols (which was the most benign of such things he said all week) they didn’t mention the numerous examples of the Hitler imagery coming from Fox News or that Glen Beck’s web site is credited with getting the mobs out in force.

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