Also included? The day 22 people were killed in 1900 at the Big Game between football rivals Stanford and Berkeley, and a story which concludes “The gunmen immediately started blasting away with shotguns and assault rifles…”

Usually on Thanksgiving, “Good old all-American chaos is down,” writes Marr sardonically. “But not entirely out.”

In you’re truly interested in “serving man” this Thanksgiving Meredith Woerner has a great post on io9.com all about that. Enjoy!

"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914).

Thanksgiving commemorates the successful harvest and a time the Pilgrims gathered to give thanks, sharing a feast with their Native American neighbors, who had made possible their survival in the New England wilderness.

“Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” written by Henry “Dean” Alford, the gifted Christian leader of the 19th century and distinguished theologian and scholar, is considered to be one of the finest harvest and Thanksgiving hymns in all of the hymnals of Christian singing.

Writers and textbook publishers of American history have generally omitted or, if mentioned at all, glossed over historic accounts of genocide and inhumane treatment of American Indian populations.

The mythology of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights is a national story of great significance to the way the United States views itself.

The United States of America was founded on the fundamental principle of freedom of religion. America’s Founding Fathers believed that religious freedom and a strong democratic system were inseparable but only for Christians.

The American Indians worshiped the Earth instead of Jesus Christ, and according to an interpretation of the Bible, they had no soul. Therefore, early settlers believed it was OK with God to break our word, steal their land and slaughter them like the other sentient creatures we torture and kill so we can get a hamburger for a dollar.

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was the battle cry as we let nothing stand in the way of our Manifest Destiny.

The Indians were not violent savage people as they are depicted in our filtered history books, movies and the Encore Western Channel.

Unlike the societies of civilized savages, the indigenous populations didn’t kill for land, resources and power. The Indians were brave warriors that fought hard to try to keep their families safe and worked together to share and provide food, clothing and shelter to people in need (like the Pilgrims).

Every Thanksgiving you will find Leigh Girl doing a live Peace Paint in memory of the Indians that were slaughtered then and throughout history.  She is sorry for what injustice has been done in the past to such a beautiful people.

“I myself am always sad on Thanksgiving when I think of the human rights violations committed against the indigenous populations all over the world, who only wanted to live in harmony with the Earth.” Visit her website www.facepaint.ws.

Actually, the American Indians presented other problems for the “white man” givers.

Indians held a special knowledge of the land and its inhabitants, and believed they were only a small part of the whole circle of life, and that each part of creation played a significant role in the contentment and survival of the other.

Indians accepted the divine idea that all things were equal and no animal, including man, held dominion over other parts of creation. American Indians, also known as the People of the Land, traditionally and historically believed, humans were created to be caretakers of the garden — Mother Earth.  They held all things of creation sacred and respected Nature.

• Never take more than we need;
• Thank Creator for what we have or what we will receive;
• Use all of what we have;
• Give away what we do not need.

Native Americans were environmental communists.

Founding of the Ku Klux Klan, Atlanta, 1915: At 35, failed preacher William Simmons had found his true calling as a fraternal lodge leader. In addition to commanding five regiments of the Woodmen, he was a heavy in several Masonic orders and a Knight Templar.

But his dream was to have his own personal fraternal organization. And he wanted more than funny hats and secret handshakes — he wanted to revive the Ku Klux Klan. His dream came to fruition Thanksgiving Eve when 40 handpicked men gathered to re-launch the Klan. A group of 15 stalwarts recessed to the top of nearby Stone Mountain for an early morning cross-burning. Simmons tied his first recruitment drive in with D.W. Griffith’s famous film The Birth of a Nation, which opened in Atlanta the following week. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Read More on 10 Zen Monkeys

'The First Thanksgiving' by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

This ought to get conversation at your dinner table fired up! Kate Zernike fuels that fire in the New York Times:

Ah, Thanksgiving. A celebration regardless of creed; a time for all Americans to come together after a divisive election year.

But why take a holiday from argument? In these fractious times, even the meaning of Thanksgiving is subject to political debate.

Forget what you learned about the first Thanksgiving being a celebration of a bountiful harvest, or an expression of gratitude to the Indians who helped the Pilgrims through those harsh first months in an unfamiliar land. In the Tea Party view of the holiday, the first settlers were actually early socialists. They realized the error of their collectivist ways and embraced capitalism, producing a bumper year, upon which they decided that it was only right to celebrate the glory of the free market and private property.

Historians quibble with this interpretation. But the story, related by libertarians and conservatives for years, has taken on new life over the last year among Tea Party audiences, who revere early American history, and hunger for any argument against what they believe is the big-government takeover of the United States.

It has made Thanksgiving another proxy in the debate over health care and entitlement spending, and placed it alongside the New Deal and the Constitution on the platter of historical items picked apart by competing narratives.

There are other debates about Thanksgiving — whether the first was in Jamestown, Va., or Plymouth, Mass.; whether it was intended as a religious holiday or not. But broadly, the version passed on to generations of American schoolchildren holds that the settlers who had arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620 were celebrating the next year’s good harvest, sharing in the bounty with Squanto and their other Indian friends, who had taught them how to hunt and farm on new terrain.

All very kumbaya, say Tea Party historians, but missing the economics lesson within.

In one common telling, the pilgrims who came to Plymouth established a communal system, where all had to pool whatever they hunted or grew on their lands. Because they could not reap the fruits of their labors, no one had any incentive to work, and the system failed — confusion, thievery and famine ensued.

Finally, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, abolished this system and gave each household a parcel of land. With private property to call their own, the Pilgrims were suddenly very industrious and found themselves with more corn than they knew what to do with. So they invited the Indians over to celebrate. (In some other versions, the first Thanksgiving is not a feast but a brief respite from famine. But the moral is always the same: socialism doesn’t work.) The same commune-to-capitalism, famine-to-feast story is told of Jamestown, the first English settlement, in 1607. Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and Texas congressman who has become a Tea Party promoter, related it as a cautionary tale in a speech to the National Press Club earlier this year.

Rush Limbaugh repeats the Thanksgiving story of Plymouth every year…

[continues in the New York Times]

PETA purchased ad spot airtime on NBC during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, however the network rejected PETA’s ad because the “commercial does not meet NBC Universal standards.” I guess they found PETA’s take on Thanksgiving a little disturbing.

The Shops at Wiregrass in Wesley Chapel, Florida. Photo: Wdwic Pictures (CC)

If you read this argument before, it’s because I have been making it since 2007, year in and year out.  That’s on account of the reality that our economy is driven more by consumption than production, and most consuming takes place during the holidays.

So once again we are being asked to join a global ritual even if we are broke.

Get in gear people, and get your wallets back to the mall: do your duty for Santa and Wall Street. It will be difficult for the economic recovery to make much headway without a pick-up in consumer spending as it accounts for two-thirds of the economy.

Here’s the scenario as this Thanksgiving rolls around. Once again the economy is in deep doo-doo with unemployment high, millions on food stamps, and millions more facing foreclosures. The big banks seem to have “recovered;” most Americans haven’t.

Nevertheless, Christmas is for the shopping, a time to feign merriment through gift gifting, to spend what you don’t have. And the process will be “stimulated” and we will be guilted and mesemerized in our own homes by a non-stop electronic sellathon as TV advertising goes into hyperspeed.

Local TV channels will soon start hyping the “action” at the local malls announcing plans to “go live” without mentioning that they are doing it to attract more advertising, or as part of the deal they already have with sponsors to add news time to ad time.

If the past is any guide, we will be told how packed the parking lots are—and they will, thanks to the hype, probably be packed. Part of the reason is the deep discounting and special sales –what are called “lost leaders” to get customers into the store even if you have to bribe them to come. All night sales are the latest marketing shtick.

What happened last year was that most consumers only bought the sales items and left most of the other goods untouched. No wonder, a number of malls are now in foreclosure.

At the same time, all we hear publically from business is optimism, including the use of the term “surge” that has been used so deceptively in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Example news boilerplate: “Some e-retailers expect a strong surge in Thanksgiving weekend sales”

“Having already unleashed a flurry of deals, discounts and other incentives, web retailers are looking for strong sales the day after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. And unlike last year, when the tough economy reined in spending, many retailers believe this Friday after Thanksgiving, often referred to as Black Friday, will deliver significantly higher web sales.”

Higher until the credit card bills come and the returns start when folks realize they can’t afford what they bought. Almost every year, after Christmas, the credit card companies report sales described at the time as “historic”  became  in the end “disappointing” or didn’t “didn’t live up to expectations.”

But consumption requires people with money to spend or with credit cards that are not tapped out. This is no longer a sure thing especially as unemployment benefits run out and discretionary income freezes.

Quiet as its kept, banks are in many cases as tapped out as their customers. And at long last, some are being probed for criminal conduct. Reuters reports: “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) is conducting about 50 criminal investigations at U.S. banks that have failed since the start of the financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal said.

The FDIC, which is responsible for dealing with bank failures, is probing former executives, directors and employees at failed U.S. banks and is taking efforts to punish alleged recklessness, fraud and other criminal behavior, the Journal said.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Paul Farrell offers 15 reasons on Marketwatch about how the people behind the economic collapse continue to get away with it.

Here are 5 of them.

1. Gross denial of any moral damage caused by their rampant greed

2. Narcissistic egomaniacs with secret ‘God complexes’

Today, all of Wall Street is dual diagnosed: They’re morally blind money addicts who believe they’re “God’s chosen.” AA would say: They haven’t “bottomed,” won’t recover from their disease till a disaster hits, with another market meltdown and the “Great Depression 2.” Then maybe they’ll “quit playing God.”

3. Paranoid obsessives about secrecy, guilt and non-disclosure

4. Power-hungry need to control government using Trojan Horses

5. Borderline personalities who regularly ignore conflicts of interest

He goes on with an indictment that clearly suggests nothing has really changed when it comes to the folks who are making money and sucking in bonuses when others aren’t.

(This is the reason I an others have launched a “Jailout campaign” with a national petition calling for more prosecutions and incarcerations of wrong doers. See newsdissector.com/blog.)

So we go back to square one: A distorted and troubled economy. A population addicted to buying things. A manipulated media. And, many signs of deeper trouble ahead as wars are escalated and extended while the Congress is paralyzed along parochial and partisan lines.

The resurgent Republicans will not be ringing jingle bells but playing Scrooge this year. Many consumers will not be able to shop until they drop this year because they have already dropped to new lows.

Unfortunately, a feast followed by days at the mall will not change any of this, and remember, if you will, the price our first Americans paid so that we could stuff ourselves on the road to national obesity.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Thanksgiving Leftovers Sandwich: Leftover turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, mac and cheese, spinach balls, Puerto Rican rice, Brussels sprouts, pearl onions, bacon, white castle hamburgers and ravioli inside a foot long bun. (Submitted by Paul Cozzi)