Hasta La Gadget!

Are you one of those people who think it’s never too early to book a flight? A recent study disproves that responsible theory, and it’ll make you want to wait a few weeks to buy those plane tickets.

CheapAir, an online travel agency, recently analyzed 2014 flight data and found that while buying a ticket too late can cost you major money, so can buying a ticket way earlier than you need to. In fact, CheapAir found that tickets are about $50 more expensive when they first go on sale, compared to their eventual low point.

According to Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir.com, “the low point is 47 days in advance, on average.” For example, CheapAir monitored a 7-day flight from Los Angeles to New York to see how many times the price changed. About 320 days before the trip, the flight cost $357. But about 3 months before the trip, the flight dipped to $318. Overall, the price changed 107 times, going as low as $290 and as high as $597.

Rick Seaney, travel expert and CEO of FareCompare, agrees with the three month rule and not booking too far in advance. “There’s such a thing as booking too early,” he told Travel + Leisure. “Airlines don’t really begin managing their domestic flights until about three months in advance — that’s when they start releasing the more affordable seats.”

So while it might be tempting to book a ticket early when trip dates are secure, try waiting until about 47 days out to finalize your purchase.

Happy travels!

Stereotypically, organic leafy greens washed down with a recycled jar of kombucha might be considered a typical meal for those hippie Californians. But those earthy West Coasters aren’t the only ones interested in eating organic anymore.

A new study commissioned by Campbell Soup Company and Sperling’s Best Places analyzed the most organic-eating cities in America, narrowing the list down to a top 10.

As it turns out, eating organic food is growing as a priority nationwide. As reported in a 2014 Gallup study, 45 percent of Americans actively seek out organic foods. This same study found that city-dwellers (as opposed to those who report living in a rural area) and West Coasters are more likely to include organic food in their diets.

According to Campbell Soup Company and Sperling’s Best Places study, these are the 10 most organic cities in America:

1. Portland, OR
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Providence, RI
4. Sacramento, CA
5. Minneapolis, MN
6. Boston, MA
7. Seattle, WA
8. Austin, TX
9. Philadelphia, PA
10. Washington, D.C.

Investigators combined the findings of original research and existing related research and data on this topic to find the most popular cities for organic eating. The data was based on metrics related to consumers’ preferences for organic foods. A poll conducted on Sperling’s Best Places website, which yielded 6,500 responses from participants across the U.S. in three days, was included, as well as Yelp results for “Organic Grocery Stores” and “Organic Restaurants,” local farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture groups (CSAs), and consumers’ buying habits at the grocery store.

So what exactly does “organic” mean, besides more expensive? The USDA National Organic Program (NOP) defines organic as food that is “produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations.” One hundred percent organic meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products are produced from animals that are fed no growth hormones or antibiotics. Organic produce is grown without using conventional pesticides or fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients.

While the term organic is often subjected to the health halo effect, there are cases when organic may be better. For example, a recent study published in Environmental Health Perspectives found that people who eat organic fruits and vegetables may have lower levels of certain pesticides in their bodies compared to those who eat conventionally grown produce.

Before a product is labeled “organic,” it has to be reviewed by a USDA National Organic certifying agent, who inspects the farm from where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is abiding by the required rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.

The market certainly reflects Americans’ increasing interest in eating organic: In 2013, mega-retailer Target launched its “Simply Balanced” grocery wellness brand, in which 40 percent of its products are organic. Campbell’s recently put out a line of organic soups and even American dogs have the option to eat pesticide free.

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With winter hitting its peak, homes are quickly becoming tight quarters as we hole up to ride out the rest of this frosty season. It may be early for spring cleaning, but there’s no time like now to make good on that resolution you’ve been harboring since the new year.

Here’s a list of 35 things in your home you can get rid of RIGHT NOW. Trash, trade, sell or donate — the options for handling this clutter are endless (and could make you some serious money). Having trouble getting started? Choose to tackle one item a day, and you’ll have a clutter-free home in NO time.

1. — Appliances that don’t work anymore (hairdryers, toasters, vacuum cleaners)
2. — Hangars from the dry cleaner
3. — Air mattresses that do nothing but leak (you know you have one)
4. — “Extra” bath towels, aka the ones that hog cupboard space
5. — The excess rags you don’t use
6. — Every last one of your 10,000 high school T-shirts
7. — Expired sunscreen, medicine and beauty products
8. — Crusty old makeup



9. — The plastic silverware you hoard from takeout
10. — Wadded-up plastic grocery bags
11. — The clothes you don’t wear
12. — Decorative throw pillows that do more annoying than decorating
13. — Books you’ve never read and never plan to read
14. — Cookbooks you’ve never read and never plan to use
15. — The shunned mugs, bowls, plates and cups in the waaay back of the cabinet
16. — Stacks of old magazines
17. — DVDs, CDs and VHS tapes
18. — The miscellaneous cables, wires and old phone chargers that don’t get used (The Razr was last eon, people.)



19. — Excess Tupperware
20. — Random kitchen gadgets that never get used (you know who you are, XXL grapefruit slicer)
21. — The freezer meat that’s been there for a year
22. — Receipts. ALL of the old receipts.
23. — Miscellaneous office supplies
24. — Almost-empty alcohol bottles that have remained untouched since the wedding of ’89
25. — All those ancient ketchup packets
26. — Stationary that lost its envelopes
27. — Any hotel-size toiletry you won’t use in the next year
28. — Ratty hair bands
29. — Expired cleaning products, and ones you never use



30. — Holiday cards
31. — Ancient craft supplies
32. — Old yard toys
33. — Any pot or pan that’s seen better days (then treat yo’self to a new one)
34. — Unused paper goods (plates, napkins, cups — you know the drill)
35. — Tattered board games (It was fun… but now we’re done)

The billionaire Republican Governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, injected himself into ceremonies in Chicago last week presided over by the city’s Democratic mayor and the nation’s Democratic President.

Rauner insisted on attending because he wrongheadedly thought the Democrats were honoring his idol, kingpin George Pullman, the guy who invented the luxury railroad sleeper car, oppressed his workers and suppressed their union.

Rauner, and other kowtow-to-the-rich Republican governors, adhere to the Pullman philosophy that rich people are better than everyone else and that gives them the right to control the lives of everyone else. They don’t comprehend the dreams and desires of the middle class and working poor. So Rauner couldn’t conceive that the ceremony in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood named Pullman by Pullman for his personal self-aggrandizement was not about placing the mogul on a pedestal but really about recognizing the people who ultimately prevailed despite his exploitation.

This 1943 image taken at Union Station in Chicago, Ill., by photographer Jack Delano of a sleeping car porter employed by the Pullman Company is from the U.S. Library of Congress. 

At ceremonies designating the Pullman Historic District as a national monument, President Obama’s speech served as both a rebuke and history lesson for Rauner. The president told the tale of Pullman from the workers’ point of view.

Pullman constructed his first sleeper car three years after the Civil War ended and nine years later employed his first black porters for an expanded service. These black men and women were hired at low wages to work long hours to wait on wealthy white customers hand and foot. This was a Southern plantation travelling America on rails.

Porters, who had to pay for their own uniforms and equipment such as shoe shine boxes, depended on tips for much of their income. As a result, most kept silent as white passengers referred to them all by Pullman’s first name, “George.” This demeaning treatment inspired the 2002 Robert Townsend film 10,000 Black Men Named George.

The community Pullman built around his factory was a company town in all the worst ways. Pullman owned everything, the homes, the hospital, the shops, the hotel named for his daughter Florence, and, of course, the source of all income – the jobs.

Pullman believed he should decide what was best for all the residents. The town contained no taverns because he felt residents were better off without alcohol. He refused to allow workers to own their homes because he feared “the risk of seeing families settle who are not sufficiently accustomed to the habits I wish to develop in the inhabitants of Pullman City.”

During the recession of 1893 and 1894, Pullman slashed wages for workers, but not his own pay. He refused to ease rents and grocery costs, which would have reduced his profits, even as his workers and their children suffered. His row house inhabitants, barely surviving on soup kitchen handouts from Chicago charities, sent a delegation to negotiate with him. He wouldn’t relent, contending, as if he were a benevolent parent and not a insensitive tyrant, that they were “all his children.” 

Not willing to subsist as helpless inhabitants of a rich man’s dollhouse, the community’s workers, who believed in America’s promise of self-determination, organized a strike. It eventually spread across the country as the porters joined in. Pullman got the President to send in federal troops who fixed bayonets on the populace and killed more than 30 workers.

The workers returned to their jobs, but they’d experienced the power of collective action. And that couldn’t be repressed. The workers cheered in 1898 when the state Supreme Court ordered the company town sold. It would take decades longer, but the workers eventually secured their goal of collective action on the job.

In 1925, the porters established a labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and chose civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph to lead it. At that meeting, Randolph explained why workers’ concerted action was essential: “What this is about is making you master of your economic fate.” 

Pullman refused to recognize the union and tried to squelch it, firing as many members of the brotherhood as his spies could find. It took the workers 12 years, but finally after passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which provided a clear legal path to unionization, Pullman was forced to acknowledge and negotiate with the brotherhood.

Standing in the Pullman Historic District Thursday, President Obama said, “So this site is at the heart of what would become America’s labor movement — and as a consequence, at the heart of what would become America’s middle class.”

“As Americans we believe workers’ rights are civil rights. That dignity and opportunity aren’t just gifts to be handed down by a generous government or by a generous employer; they are rights given by God, as undeniable and worth protecting as the Grand Canyon or the Great Smoky Mountains.” President Obama said.

That, however, is not what Republicans like Bruce Rauner believe. They think, just as Pullman did, that workers’ rights should be circumvented, slighted and squashed for the benefit of the rich. 

And they’re striving to accomplish that. In one of his first acts as governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker slashed the rights, pay and benefits of public sector union members. Republicans in Indiana and Michigan passed laws to ensure their citizens could work for less than what a labor union could bargain for them, and several other Republican-dominated states including Wisconsin, Nevada and West Virginia are considering measures to constrain the ability of workers to collectively seek better wages and working conditions.

The Republican governor of Ohio tried to restrict the rights of public sector workers to collectively bargain, but citizens overwhelmingly reversed him in a referendum.

In the weeks before the ceremony in Chicago, Rauner attempted by executive fiat to financially hobble labor unions representing state workers and urged the state’s cities and counties to ignore state and federal labor laws by creating zones where employees would have the right to work for less than the amount labor unions could negotiate for them. 

Similarly, he proposed in the budget he offered last week that the middle class and working poor take all of the hits to mend the state’s finances. He plans, for example, to cut Medicaid for the poor and elderly, health insurance and pensions for government workers, mass transit used by the working poor to get to jobs, and services to vulnerable former foster kids.

In the meantime, he had the state hire a $100,000-a-year assistant for his wife and plans to renovate the governor’s Civil War-era mansion.

Like Pullman, “Daddy” Rauner is intent on controlling Illinois’ “children.”  He said as he issued his budget, “Instilling discipline is not easy, saying ‘no’ is not popular.” That is a budget requiring no discipline for billionaire private equity CEOs like Rauner. His aides said he never even considered new taxes on his country club buddies. Only workers are to endure austerity in Rauner’s Illinois.

Rauner is making a bid for a new film set in Chicago. This one will be called 13 Million Illinois Citizens Named Bruce. Already it’s a flop with the populace.  

American Jews are Asking Our non-Jewish Neighbors To Stand With us Against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s alliance with American Militarists.

We have a big problem: the Israeli Prime Minister wants to drag the US into a proxy war for Israel against Iran, and Jews are likely to get the blame when that war turns out be an even bigger disaster than the US war in Iraq. We need our non-Jewish neighbors to help us get out the message that Netanyahu does not speak for us and his policies are actually the opposite of what most American Jews support.

The problem is intensified, because the media continually quotes the leaders of the 20% of our most reactionary Jews rather than those who are more in tune with the 70-80% of liberal and progressive American Jews. That one reason why I want you (our non-Jewish neighbors as well as Jews) in signing and donating to an ad we will take in major American media to make our case and not let the militarists drown out our voice.

You can help us by signing and donating to help us buy a full page ad in the NY Times to get our message to the decision makers. Click see the ad here. And send info to everyone on your email lists and place this whole article on your Facebook or other social media, tweet about it, and let people: there is something you can do besides containing your anger as the reactionary Congress gives him standing ovation after standing ovation. You can get a different voice heard by getting everyone you know to sign and support the voice as we say together: “NO, Mr. Netanyahu! We won’t let you drag the U.S. into war with Iran.

More on the media ads below, but first let me explain the situation.

A few weeks ago, after having arranged with House Speaker Boehner to address a joint session of the newly minted Republican-dominated Congress while intentionally snubbing the normal protocol of first approaching the U.S. President, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed to speak for all of the world Jews.

Yet all the polls of American Jews resoundingly reject the politics that Netanyahu has followed. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for us. While he has did everything possible to undermine US sponsored peace negotiations with the Palestinians, the American Jewish majority supports the creation of an economically and politically viable Palestinian state. While he rejects policies that would alleviate the extreme disparity between rich and poor in Israel, among the worst in the advanced industrial countries, most American Jews believe that governments should be doing more to bridge this gap. While he believes that Jews can never be safe anywhere but Israel, meanwhile pursuing policies toward Palestinians that have made most Israelis feel less safe than ever in this past year, most American Jews believe that we can count on the goodness and fairness of the American people and do not need to prepare an escape route to Israel.

Most importantly, while he is coming to align himself with American militarists in both parties with the aim of pressuring President Obama to make demands on the Iranians that will be impossible for them to meet, and then pushing the U.S. into military action against Iran, most American Jews support President Obama’s attempts to negotiate a peaceful path that would allow Iran to develop nuclear power for peaceful purpose but would prohibit it from developing nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu’s strategy is clear and clever. If he can push the Obama policymakers to stick with demands that Iran will find impossible to give, essentially asking of them to give up any form of nuclear power, a demand we do not make on most other countries in the region (not China, not India,not Pakistan, and certainly not Israel), Netanyahu will set the stage for the failure of those negotiations. At that point, the Republican Congress will insist on higher and higher levels of sanctions, which will further entrench the most militaristic elements in Iran who will insist that the US and Israel are clearly hankering for a military confrontation and that Iran’s only protection is to develop nuclear weapons. And once Iran starts in that direction, the direction that Israel has pursued for the past forty years, Israel will appeal to the American people to save it from “another Holocaust”–and many decent Americans, remembering the failure of the Christian world to come to our defense when the Nazis were murdering us Jews by the millions, will feel inclined to support a military strike against Iran, which will in turn lead Iran to strike at Israel (as the U.S.’s nearest proxy), and from there the U.S. will be dragged into yet another impossible-to-win Middle East war, achieving Israel’s goal of wiping out Iran as a Middle East power.

I am one of many American Jews who would be happy to see the mullahs nonviolently replaced by a democratic and human rights regime in Iran. But when we see what happened with U.S. intervention in Iraq, similarly motivated by the Republican militarists’ lie that Iraq had nuclear weapons, we don’t see an outcome of democracy triumphing, but rather the emergence of more primitive forces coming to the fore in the form of ISIS (the Islamic State). The most likely outcome of a war with Iran will be the strengthening of the most extreme Islamic forces and the further curtailing of human rights, or the emergence of forces like the Islamic State through even larger swaths of the Middle East. Faced with increasing sanctions that have transparently been imposed by Israeli influence over US foreign policy, Iranians will be less likely to support moderation, more likely to take seriously the kind of anti-Semitism that the previous Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to foster, but was repudiated at the polls in the last Iranian election.

Most Americans have indicated in recent polls that they do not support the way Netanyahu and the Republican Congress have created this scenario. Most Americans support a path of negotiations and do not want those negotiations derailed by militarists in both political parties, some of whom are responding to the most right-wing elements in the Jewish world, others to the Christian fundamentalists who mistakenly believe they are serving the interests of the Jewish people when they back the repressive policies of the Netanyahu government.

Yet should Netanyahu and the militarists prevail–and those some militarist forces have prevailed over and over again in setting US policy even while a majority of Americans sought another path–the resulting disaster will almost certainly result in growing distaste for Israel and might even lead to the surfacing of anti-Semitism as a returning force in American politics where it has been underground since the Holocaust and the US war with the Nazis made it “poor taste” to articulate the anti-Semitism that continues to resonate in some passages of the New Testament. This, of course, would be a delight to the Netanyahu-style Zionists who would feel that their view that Jews should leave their countries of birth and move to Israel as the only place they can be safe. We saw that play out in the past month when some Jews were killed in France, and then In Denmark, and Netanyahu then appealed to all French and Danish Jews to move to Israel.

But there is nothing inevitable about this. While President Obama has capitulated to the militarists over and over again in his presidency, the apparent rudeness and disrespect publicly demonstrated by Netanyahu gives us peace forces a unique opportunity. What is needed are two things by liberal and progressive forces: 1. An alternative strategy, and 2. The means to communicate that to the American people.

We at Tikkun magazine and our interfaith and secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives have the strategy. We are calling upon the liberal and progressive forces to challenge the central paradigm of politics and economics in the Western world, namely, the view that teaches that the only way we can ever achieve “homeland security” is through military, economic, cultural, political and diplomatic “power over” others (I call it “the Strategy of Domination”).

Instead, we must advocate for a “Strategy of Generosity” as the best path to security–a path in which we show others that we genuinely care about them and their well being, respect their culture or religion (while acknowledging that their religions, like Western religions, have both a generous side and a domination side, so we don’t have to pander to the domination side as a sign of value-free ‘respect’), and that we can acknowledge that Western-sponsored capitalist corporations and the culture, economics and politics they promote has played a destructive and destabilizing role in much of the global south and global east, most particularly in the Middle East.

So the Global Marshall Plan proposed by Tikkun (please download and read the full version of it at www.tikkun.org/gmp) avoids the pitfalls of previous attempts to provide aid, insists on putting local indigenous people and not their national leaders in charge of rebuilding locally viable economies, and requires the US and other Western powers to abandon trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the now secretly negotiated TTP Trans Pacific Partnership and replaced by trade arrangements that foster those local economies rather than benefit Western multi-national corporations. This kind of approach will be a huge challenge to the capitalist-fostered consciousness which sees the world as an endless struggle for growth and superiority, but it is precisely what is needed to develop a foreign policy that can create the groundwork for international environmental sanity as well as genuine security for the peoples of the world.

But how do we get this idea better known? For that we need financial support (know anyone in liberal foundations who can think beyond short-term “results” and imagine supporting a long-term consciousness-transformation approach?), organizing skills, and the media savvy to build a large popular movement. Will you help us? I hope it’s clear by now that being part of this process is not something exclusively for Jews–it is for people of every possible ethnic, religious, and national background who wants to build a world of love and justice, generosity and caring for each other and the planet. And that is precisely what our interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is all about. Our central goal is to change public discourse and imagination so that we can get people to adopt “a New Bottom Line” in which institutions, corporations, government polices, our educational system, our legal system, our health care system and even our personal behavior is understood to be efficient, rational or productive not primarily to the extent that they maximize money, power, growth, or power over others (the Old Bottom Line) but to the extent that they maximize our capacities to be loving, caring, kind, generous, generating environmentally sustainable behavior, and capable of transcending a narrow utilitarian or instrumental way of seeing others (“what can they do for me”) and the earth (“what can I use it for to advance my own interests”) so that we can respond to others as embodiments of the sacred and to Nature with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of the universe. That way of thinking is the defining aspect of being a “spiritual progressive”–you don’t have to believe in God or in any New Age woo-woo to be a spiritual progressive, only to want this New Bottom Line.

First step? Sign and donate to the ad we are hoping to raise enough money to put into the New York Times this week around the time Netanyahu comes to the U.S. March 3rd. The ad proudly proclaims in the name of Jews and our non-Jewish allies that “NO Mr. Netanyahu, you don’t speak for American Jews” and “Americans Don’t Want A War With Iran.” If you want to see what the ad will look like, go to https://org.salsalabs.com/o/525/images/Netenyahu_NYT_Mar.4%20(1).pdf

If you’d help us put this ad in the New York Times and other media in the U.S. and Israel, please go to www.tikkun.org/peaceproject to use your credit card to donate, or do it on the phone by calling Leila at 510 644 1200 9-5 Pacific Standard Time M-F or by sending a check to Tikkun at 2342 Shattuck Ave, Box #1200, Berkeley, Ca. 94704.

Please put this ad and this message on your own social media (Facebook, etc.), tweet about it, put on your home page and ask your friends to read and sign it, please!!! Don’t let the conservative voices dominate in public discourse and drag the week kneed Administration into a disastrous path that leads to war. Sign and donate to the ad! If you give at least $300 your name will appear in the NY Times ad. If you give less, it may still appear (though of course you can opt out by telling us that you just want to donate, but not have your name appear).

And for the long-run, please join our NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives and be part of the movement for a New Bottom Line, support the Global Marshall Plan and support our proposed ESRA Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (read them all and join at our home page www.spiritualprogressives.org). When you join the NSP at $50 or more you’ll get a one year subscription to Tikkun magazine (and you can opt to have it come electronically if you don’t want it on paper).

All sounds unrealistic? Well, what I’ve learned in the 51 years since I became a social change activist is this: you never know what is realistic until you begin to put your energies behind what is desirable. That is the main lesson of the struggle to end segregation and apartheid, overcome 10,000 years of patriarchy, acquire marriage rights for gays and lesbians! Don’t be realistic!!! Put your energies behind your highest dreams for the world you really want. And help us make that world possible step by step by step!

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, co-chair with India’s environmental activist Vandana Shiva of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, Ca. and author of 11 books,including two national best sellers: Jewish Renewal:A Path of Healing and Transformation and The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. He is happy to hear from anyone who has signed and donated to the ad: rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com