This Week:

Quote of the Week

Sources for Following the Unavoidable Spectacle: Election 2004

U.S. Extorts World, Burger Sales Dip, Ad Tactics Re-Evaluated

Greetings,

I had hoped to find the time this week to write about the 2005 federal budget that was submitted by the “President” last month. Alas, it will have to wait for next week. The good news is, there has been a lot of good analysis of the “President’s” proposal, although readers of the mainstream media wouldn’t know it. The bad news is...well, you’ll see what the bad news is next week. I’ll be talking about Social Security, too, since the reporting on this issue is so pathetic, as soon as I can find the room. In the meantime, check out Nygaard Notes #11 and #120. Or, search the Nygaard Notes site for “Social Security.” It’s not like I haven’t written about a book’s worth of stuff on this subject already...

I’m not entirely convinced that we should “follow” the presidential election campaign at all, as it might just be a big distraction from more important things. I don’t mean the election isn’t important, just that the following of the day-to-day developments might be. Still, it will be on everyone’s TV for a while, meaning that it will be in everyone’s mind for a while. And the public discussion of the horse race, trivial though it can be, will shape public understanding of some key issues for a long, long time. Like it or not. So, I succumb this week and give some ideas of places to go for info on this thing. For what it’s worth.

Welcome to the new readers this week! And thanks to those of you who made donations last month, even without a pledge drive to motivate you!

Gratefully,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

The New York Times on February 20th ran an article headlined “Washington's Arabic TV Effort Gets Mixed Reviews.” The piece spoke about “An American-sponsored satellite television station broadcasting in Arabic, probably Washington's biggest propaganda effort since the attempts to undermine the Soviet bloc and the Castro government...” The station is called Al Hurra (in English: “The Free One”). Commenting on the PR effort, here is Mustafa B. Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan:

“I think the Americans are mistaken if they assume they can change their image in the region. People became anti-American because they don't like American policies.”

Forgive me, but I just have to add the following telling comment contrasting the Arab news station Al Jazeera with Al Hurra, which was buried deep in the article. On a typical broadcasting day in February...

“While Al Jazeera was broadcasting live the afternoon briefing from Baghdad given by a United States general and the senior United States civilian spokesman, Al Hurra was showing a documentary about the actor Anthony Hopkins.”

Sources for Following the Unavoidable Spectacle: Election 2004

Well, like it or not, we will be going through a U.S.-style “election campaign” for the next few months. At the moment, there are 61 registered candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination, and 27 registered candidates for the nomination of the Republican Party. Surprised?

Based on the assumption that there are a lot more things you don’t know—of which I am quite certain—and on the further assumption that you are interested in knowing more—of which I am not so certain—I offer here a few ideas and resources on the 2004 presidential campaign. There’s nothing comprehensive about it, so if you Nygaard Notes readers have any more good sources that I didn’t mention, send them along.

MONEY AND THE CAMPAIGN: The Center for Public Integrity is unequaled in their coverage of the money that corrupts our system—including where it comes from and who gets it. With reports like “Who Bankrolls Bush and his Democratic Rivals? A Look at the Presidential Race,” and “Windfalls of War: U.S. Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan,” this group has made themselves indispensable for serious campaign watchers. They’re at: www.publicintegrity.org.

RACE AND THE CAMPAIGN: “Since the famous Richard Nixon ‘southern strategy’ in 1968, whether by language, actions or positions taken, racism has been a conscious and deliberate part of Presidential election campaigns, as well as local and state campaigns.” Those words appear on the website of “2004 Racism Watch,” a project of the multi-racial Independent Progressive Politics Network. The project, just starting up now, plans to monitor the press, survey the candidates, and get out all kinds of information in an attempt to“put those who use racism for divisive and destructive ends on the defensive and help to get better candidates elected.”

Racism Watch is thinking beyond the election, aiming to “share experiences our members have had in building multi-racial organizations and teach skills such as how to deal with oppressive language when it happens, how to deal with internalized oppression, how to be a good ally, and how to recognize and challenge bad habits.” Racism Watch also says they “will provide ideas for how to counter attempts to use ‘wedge’ issues to divide natural allies on the basis of culture, gender, sexuality, class, or age differences.” I’m pretty excited about the idea of an explicitly anti-racist, organizing-minded group that will be focused specifically on this campaign. We’ll see how successful they are. Learn more about the project and how you can support it at: www.racismwatch.org/.

FACTS ABOUT THE CANDIDATES: Check out Project VoteSmart for basic nuts and bolts information about anyone in elected office (including Presidential candidates, and those not running for anything at the moment). They’re found at www.vote-smart.org/. Pretty mainstream, but they’re good for basic facts and documents. They have stuff like a database of presidential candidates speeches and public statements, and the voting record of all current officeholders. I went to the site and found out, for example, that Minnesota Senator Norm “I Am a 99 Percent Improvement Over Paul Wellstone” Coleman gets a 100 percent approval rating from the anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council, and an 11 percent score from the NAACP. That tells you something.

FUN WITH THE CAMPAIGN: If you want to take a survey and find out which of the “major” presidential candidates most closely represents your views on a few issues, click on www.presidentmatch.com/Main.jsp2 and take their survey. At the end of the survey, it will rank the candidates according to your responses. As with all surveys of this type, this is only a game, and not a very illuminating one, at that. For example, I tried (for 20 seconds) to find out who put the survey together—no luck. Plus, the questions seem arbitrary, and poorly worded, and they oversimplify complex issues, and no radical candidates from either the “right” or the “left” are included. In other words, a typical survey. Still, I took it, and “President” Bush got a ranking of 2 percent in my results. So, it can’t be all bad. It’s kind of fun. There are other versions of this, too. Check out Minnesota Public Radio, for example.

MEDIA ACTIVISM AND THE CAMPAIGN: Media For Democracy is a non-partisan citizens' initiative aiming to monitor mainstream election coverage and advocate for fairer, more democratic and issue-oriented standards of reporting. They spell out key issues and then give you the opportunity to send letters to the media bigwigs who have the power to change things. Find them at www.mediachannel.org/mediaocracy/.

MEDIA PERFORMANCE AND THE CAMPAIGN: Less activist, but still good for those interested in monitoring the daily performance of the media, is a project from the prestigious (in mainstream journalism circles, anyway) Columbia Journalism Review. Called “The Campaign Desk,” the project says it provides “critique and analysis of 2004 campaign coverage,” and it sort of does that. It can be found at www.campaigndesk.org/.

AND, FINALLY... Remember to take some time to back up and look at the bigger picture. For a thought-provoking take on how to relate to the bizarre spectacle that we call a presidential election, I still think the best I’ve seen lately is the essay by Michael Albert that I recommended back in Nygaard Notes #225. It’s called “Election Plan?” and it can be found on the web at: www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=4041.

U.S. Extorts World, Burger Sales Dip, Ad Tactics Re-Evaluated

A couple of weeks ago I noted the comment by the official State Department propagandist, Margaret Tutwiler, that it would take “many years of hard, focused work” to “restore” the “standing” of the U.S. in the eyes of the world. But it’s not just the State Department that’s worried about this. In the Advertising Section of the New York Times of January 20th appeared a revealing article headlined “Concern about U.S. Foreign Policy Has Some Re-evaluating Ad Tactics.”

Among other amusing (and telling) things, the article stated,

“A survey by Edelman Public Relations to be presented this week at the World Economic Forum, found that 66 percent of consumers polled in Germany said they were less likely to buy American products as a result of their opposition to the United States-led war in Iraq. In France, the figure was 64 percent. While 66 percent of American consumers polled said they trusted the Coca-Cola brand, only 40 percent said so in Europe, the poll showed. [Editor’s note: What in the world it means to “trust” a cola was not spelled out.] ‘American companies have to do a better job of disabusing Europeans of the notion that they are the font of all environmental problems, obesity and wars,’ said Richard Edelman, chief executive of Edelman.”

U.S. corporations are doing all sorts of creative things to try to retain their American-style, low-taxed profits, while presenting themselves as somehow not “American.” Listen to the Times: “McDonald's emphasizes the local sourcing of its products and its employees in Europe, trying to sidestep its image as a symbol of American-led globalization.”

That’s quite a “sidestep,” but the interesting thing about this article is that it reveals, yet again, that U.S. elites continue to think that the primary cause of the poor “standing” of the U.S. in the world is bad public relations. This week’s “Quote” of the Week has an Arab scholar pointing to a more substantial cause, that being the actual behavior of the U.S. around the world.

That Which We Call Extortion, By Any Other Name...

One of the actual behaviors that people around the world doubtless understand and resent would have to be the ongoing use of U.S. power to extort concessions and official support from weaker, dependent countries. Although the U.S. media would never use the word “extortion” to describe U.S. foreign policy, they do on occasion report the facts that must lead any honest observer to see it for what it is.

According to my Oxford English Dictionary, to “extort” is to “obtain (money, a promise, a concession, etc.) from a reluctant person by threat, force, persistency or insistency in demanding, etc.” Now let’s take a look at excerpts from a few recent news reports (none of which used the word “extort,” I might add).

The first example is from the January 9th New York Times (in an amazingly offensive front-page article headlined “Latin Allies of the U.S.: Docile and Reliable No Longer”):

This example highlights the increasingly U.S.-dependent nation of Colombia:

“Colombia ran into trouble with the [Bush] administration on the issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC). When Bogota balked at signing an exemption from prosecution for American personnel, the administration withheld some aid and threatened to cut off $160 million more. Colombia, which gets more American aid than any other country except Israel and Egypt, eventually acceded.”

(This is just part of a pattern of extortion on the ICC exemption issue; an article in the Times ten days later mentioned this same strong-arming of Colombia, then points out that “Sixty-one poor nations heavily dependent on American aid have signed similar agreements.”)

The second example is from that same offensive article, but this time the subject is Mexico:

“Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, who served as Mexico's ambassador to the United Nations throughout the debate on war in Iraq, gave a speech in November that asserted that the United States sought a subservient relationship with Mexico. ‘It sees us as a backyard,’ he said. Mr. Aguilar Zinser was promptly fired, Mexican officials said—under pressure from the United States.”

The most well-known example of attempted U.S. extortion in recent months is probably the December announcement of the Bush administration's decision to ban certain countries from bidding on reconstruction projects in Iraq. The December 11th London Observer didn’t mince words:

“In a blatant act of retaliation against those countries that opposed the war in Iraq, the United States has banned France, Germany, Russia and Canada from bidding for billions of dollars worth of reconstruction contracts. A directive issued by the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, ruled that 26 contracts worth $18.6 billion should be available only to companies from America, its coalition partners such as Britain and Spain and other countries that sent troops in support of the occupation. It was essential to restrict other countries, he claimed, ‘for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States.’”

Most non-U.S.ers would likely laugh at this transparent lie.

The December 10th NY Times spelled it out quite clearly, noting that “The [directive] does say...that allowing only members of the allied force to bid for the contracts was intended both as a reward and an incentive for further cooperation in the future.” A “reward” for one is, of course, a withholding from another—i.e., extortion—and the world knows it, no matter what our advertising tactics.