| Number 227 | October 24, 2003 |
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This Week:
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ATTENTION READERS! It is now WEEK NUMBER TWO of the semi-annual NYGAARD NOTES PLEDGE DRIVE Have you donated yet? Some of you haven’t... A big thank-you to those of you who have sent in your contributions to the cause! Those of you who have not donated yet apparently do not understand how unbelievably EASY it is to do so now. First of all, you could go to http://www.nygaardnotes.org/ and donate online, using your handy credit card. Option Two is to take out an old-fashioned envelope right now and address it to:
(Put a check in the envelope, of course, and mail it. All of those steps are necessary.) For more incentive on exactly why you should do such a thing, see the 2nd article in this week’s Notes, “Why Support Independent Media? And Why Nygaard Notes?” |
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Greetings, I was hoping to do another double issue this week, as I often do when I am forced to devote some of my valuable space to the Pledge Drive. The reason I didn’t is that I ran out of time due to spending more time than I expected out on the picket lines supporting the clerical workers at the University of Minnesota, who went out on strike this past Tuesday. For details on how you can support this strike, see Nygaard Notes #225, “Clerical University Employees Need Support.” As it is, I am out of room, so must cut this editor’s note short. Next week I’ll be talking a little bit more about income and wealth, plus reporting on the recently-released “Social Report 2003: A Different Look at America.” Stay tuned. Nygaard |
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This is an excerpt from an interview with economist Edward Wolff that appeared in the May 2003 issue of Multinational Monitor magazine. (To read the entire interview online, go to http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03interviewswolff.html).
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(I was going to write a long and persuasive essay making it crystal-clear why someone should support Nygaard Notes with their hard-earned dollars, when I decided to look at what I wrote on the subject one year and one week ago, during last fall’s Pledge Drive. I decided I couldn’t say it much better than that, so here that piece is once again. Many of you haven’t seen it before, and the rest of you will notice that I have updated it somewhat. ) I was at a meeting a few years ago in which the general manager of a local TV station stated, in talking about their local news show, “We are a commercial TV station. We have to bring in viewers to get the advertising to pay the high costs of doing local news.” She was not implying that viewers would be “brought in” by good journalism, as she made clear in her answer to a later question about why TV news is so focused on gore and crime: “We need to lead with a ‘grabber.’ It may not be good journalism, but we need to keep our ratings up.” And so it goes. Producing a newspaper has just as little to do with informing the public. What it’s all about is producing large numbers of readers to sell to advertisers. Any honest journalist will tell you that this is how it works. This is not how it works at Nygaard Notes. I am not looking to reach a “mass market.” If I were, I wouldn’t jump back and forth between talking about the “Big Picture” (in pieces like last May’s “American-Style Democracy” and last July’s series on foreign aid) and talking about the details (as I did last week in “Schools That Have Benefitted the Most”). Nor would I bother with the complicated process of continually pointing out the myriad ways we can use the Big Picture to understand the Small, and vice versa (as I do this week in “The Meaning of Target Schools”). The for-profit press doesn’t have the time to do all this work, nor do they trust and respect their readers and viewers enough to even try. I do. And that’s one of the things that makes Nygaard Notes different from a lot of periodicals you might look at. If I could get 1,000 people to send me $10 per year, I would have it made, since that would more or less free me from the need to work for The Man and allow me to devote my energies full-time to the Notes and related journalism and activist work. If I get more than that—and I hope to get many more than that—then I either reduce the suggested subscription rate, spend the extra money on paying for project-related expenses, or in some other way use the power that comes with this readership to benefit the community. If you do not need to make ever more money, you are free to act on principle, and to be truly accountable to your community. This freedom is another thing that makes Nygaard Notes different from the Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media. If you think it is worth something for a community to have a media outlet that respects its readership and is completely independent of the pressure that comes with trying to please corporate sponsors, then you should send some money to support Nygaard Notes. If that doesn’t make sense to you right now, please keep reading Nygaard Notes for free, whatever your reasons are. Maybe later you’ll find it valuable enough to support with your hard-earned dollars. |
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Much of this issue, including this week’s “Quote” of the Week, underlines the reality that the United States is one of the most unequal societies in the “developed” world. As I have argued many times in these pages, the dominant ideology in the United States is increasingly one based on Individualism and Competitiveness. What happens when these two realities—of inequality and individualized competition—come together in a society? Well, the rich are bound to get richer, in a variety of ways, and the poor are likely to be kept firmly in their place. Last week’s little case study of the “Target Schools Fundraising” program provided what I think is a perfect illustration of this. Let me explain. The “right” of each individual to direct their dollars wherever they wish—as exemplified by the Target program—is protected in this culture by the extreme value we place on individual “freedom.” Since our society is structured as a competitive one, it would be unreasonable to expect individuals to do anything other than use their “freedom” to direct their dollars toward giving their own children the competitive advantage of a good education. Last week, we saw that almost all of the beneficiaries of the funds provided by the “Target Schools Fundraising” program went to private schools and to schools in the most affluent counties in the state. This is predictable since, while every parent wants the best for their children, in an unequal society some parents have more power to act on that desire. So, while each individual parent’s wish to contribute to their own child’s school is perfectly reasonable on the individual level, on the social level it has the effect of steering resources toward those who already have more and away from those who have less. The skewing of benefits toward affluent communities and away from poorer communities, of which last week’s little case study is but one small example, is exactly what one would expect from a “market-based” incentive program such as the “Target School Fundraising” program. As I showed last week, there are no Target stores in Minnesota’s poorest counties, so the program could never have been expected to give the poorest schools much of a boost. Marketing programs, on the other hand, are typically aimed at more affluent consumers, and the Target program makes sense if looked at in this way. That’s why I think it would more accurately be called the “Target Marketing Program Aimed At Capitalizing on Parents’ Legitimate Desire to Support Their Children’s Education” program. The question I posed the last time I wrote about “Target Schools” was whether this society thinks of education as a privilege or as a right. If we thought of education as a right, then any “program”—public or private, state or federal, popular or unpopular—that directs resources away from kids in poor areas and toward kids in affluent ones would be seen as unacceptable. Whatever the intention, that appears to be what the“Target School Fundraising” program does. And the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any audible criticism of a program like this makes me think that we should at least consider the possibility that our actions as a society, if not our words, increasingly indicate that we think of education as a privilege. I’d like to tweak our collective conscience by making this argument in a 2-page ad, as Target did in advertising the supposed virtues of their program, but I’m hard-pressed to find the roughly $40,000 it would cost me to place such an ad. |
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Back in the year 2000 I ran a little chart pointing out a few facts about wealth and income in the United States. The picture hasn’t changed dramatically since then, but here is an update and comparison of then and now. (I should say that the income numbers are updated. No more recent numbers on wealth are available.) It’s a lot of numbers, so don’t worry if your eyes glaze over. Maybe just print it out and paste it on your refrigerator or something. OK, here we go; we’ll start with an overall look at income and where you stand in this country: The median household income in the United States is $42,409 per year. That means that one-half of all households earn more than that, one-half earn less. (“Household” means all the income, even if two adults and a child all earn money.) Here’s how we all stand in terms of household income, as of the 2002 Census figures:
Fifth by Fifth In this next part I break the population down into fifths (called “quintiles” in the world of demographics) based on income or wealth. The lowest-earning “fifth” of the population of the U.S., in other words, would be the “bottom quintile.” The “next quintile” are those who earn more than the bottom 20 percent of United Statesians but less than the 40-to-60 percent group. Et Cetera. I think you’ll get it as we go along. The bottom twenty percent of households in the United States take home less than $1,493 per month, or $17,916 per year (They average $832 per month, or $9,990 per year). Of all the income taken home in the United States in 2002, this 20% of the population took home only 3.5 percent of it. As far as who owns the USA, this 20% of the population owns only 7% of the wealth (2000 figure). The income of the next quintile is between $1,493 and $2,781 per month (or $17,916 and $33,377 per year). As a group, this 20% of the population took home 8.8 percent of all the income taken home in the United States in 2002. And this one-fifth of the population owns 12% of the nation’s wealth (2000 figure). The middle quintile earns between $2,781 and $4,430 per month. (between $33,372 and $53,162 per year). As a group, this 20% of the population took home 14.8 percent of all the income taken home in the United States in 2002. This group’s total share of U.S. wealth is 16% (2000 figure). People in the second-highest-earning quintile earn from $4,430 to $7,001 per month (or $53,160 and $84,016 per year). As a group, this 20% of the population took home 23.3 percent of all the income taken home in the United States in 2002. And they own 20% of the country (2000 figure). The top quintile makes more (a LOT more) than $7,001 per month, or $84,016 per year. This quintile took home 49.7 percent of all the income earned in the United States last year, with the top 5 percent alone taking home 21.7 percent of all of the income. As a group they own 59% of the nation. The richest 1 percent of households owns 38 percent of the United States of America. Next week: Some perspective on these numbers, including a look at the racial dynamics of income and wealth, and how we might go about using and reporting such information in the media. |