| Number 255 | May 7, 2004 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Well, the Spring 2004 edition of the Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive is officially over, and I want to thank each and every reader who chose to put their money where their mouth is and send in their pledge. You won’t hear me ask for money again for six months. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need your support. If the pledge drives just don’t seem to happen at a good time for you, please remember that you can send in your pledge (or transmit it electronically) at any time, not just during a Pledge Drive. To all of you who did take this opportunity to send in a pledge, my message is simple: Thank you, thank you, thank you! Now, as if to celebrate the end of another Pledge Drive, we have one of my favorite irregular features: A Stroll Through The News With Nygaard. This one may actually stretch into next week, as I wasn’t nearly finished when I ran out of room. We’ll see. A Nygaard Notes “Stroll” is simply a collection of my comments on recent items in what I like to call the Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media. Much information is to be found there – contrary to many people’s opinions – and much is false, as well. People tell me that, after they read the Notes for a while, it gets easier for them to sort the media wheat from the media chaff, and they get better at using their own intelligence to make sense of the bizarre conglomeration of words and images that we call “The News.” I hope that’s true for you, as well. See ya next week, Nygaard |
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Paired “quotes” this week. First, here’s U.N Secretary General Kofi Annan, speaking on April 28th of the U.S. occupation of Iraq:
Second, here’s the front page headline in the New York Times of May 6, one week later:
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It is an odd fact of reporting on the never-ending “War On Drugs” that things which are reported as “successes” have little effect on the rate of drug abuse or on the crime associated with drugs. An article in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of April 25th is a case in point. Headlined “Bush Would Scale Back Drug Grants; A Proposal Would Reduce Funds Used by Local Task Forces That Fight the War on Drugs,” the article began:
The article then goes on to tell of plans by the Bush administration to cut back on the federal Byrne Grant program, which is the source of the federal funds that make all this possible. “For police officers and congressional supporters,” the article continues, “the [Byrne Grant] program is viewed as a cornerstone in the nation's war against drugs, but they fear it's about to fall victim to the budget ax.” Now, go back and read carefully the paragraph before the last one, the one about how these programs “have been paying off.” Raids, seizures, dognappings, etc. Now, is it your impression that the point of the War On Drugs is to raid people’s homes and seize things? No? Then what is the point of this “war?” One might think that it has something to do with decreasing drug abuse. Or, one might think it has something to do with reducing the crime associated with drug dealing and addiction. One would, apparently, be incorrect, as was pointed out by the Star Trib itself, in the very same article. Toward the end of the piece, Star Trib reporter Emily Johns reports that “The program is not without controversy.” The American Civil Liberties Union, she reports, “says the drug task forces are expensive...and, in some cases, corrupt. And it says they lack the government oversight they need to be effective.” Johns then says that “The ACLU's biggest complaint, however, is that the task forces are simply inefficient.” She then cites Graham Boyd, director of the ACLU's drug-policy litigation project, as saying that “the federal government spends 10 times as much as it does on the Byrne program on prosecuting people for low-level drug crimes.” Boyd then is quoted as saying something that anyone who knows anything about the War On Drugs knows all too well: “But there is literally no evidence that drug crime, drug use, drug addiction, or crime overall has been reduced as a result of these efforts.” Dear readers, this is not evidence of “inefficiency.” This is evidence of complete failure. Or is it? If the point of the “War On Drugs” is to reduce drug abuse, addiction, and crime, then yes, it is a failure, and we have to conclude that the bipartisan effort to wage it is evidence of lunacy or idiocy on the part of our political leaders. After all, we’ve had more than 30 years of the War On Drugs, yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. If you are not willing to believe that your elected leaders are loony-tunes, then you will have to consider the possibility that the “War On Drugs” is, in fact, “paying off” in some other way. Otherwise, why would we keep doing it? I’ll have something to say about this enigma in a future edition of Nygaard Notes. |
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In the news business, a story that is so important that it generates ongoing interest, reports, and updates is said to “have legs.” The torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces, for example, “has legs.” That is, since the story “broke,” there have been regular reports on developments and reactions to the basic story, about which everyone wants to know more. A story that has legs will often get a follow-up article even on a day when nothing happens, since the fact that nothing is happening on an important issue is news in itself. In contrast... Back in mid-April there was a story in the papers about some missing money here in Minnesota. Here’s the gist of it, from the Star Tribune of April 14: “According to the state's most recent quarterly economic update, corporate profits have reached record levels in Minnesota, but corporate tax receipts are $26 million below projections and down more than one-fourth from where they were five years ago.” State economist Tom Stinson was quoted as saying, “It is conceivable that some advantage in the Minnesota tax code is causing this. It's also possible that has nothing to do with this. We just really don't know what's going on.” Minnesota is apparently in a class by itself on this one. “There are a few other states that have posted some drops in corporate tax revenues despite rising profits,” said Scott Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, “but we've not seen it to this extent in other states. It seems a little more dramatic in Minnesota, and we're not sure why.” How serious is this drop in revenue? Well, the following arithmetic was not included in the news reports I saw, but consider: 1. Corporate taxes for the 2004-2005 budget period (called a “biennium”)
are projected at roughly 1.4 billion dollars. To put it in plain language, if our corporate sector were to pony up their share of taxes at the rate they did as recently as five years ago, it looks like our state would go from a deficit of $160 million to a surplus of $305 million for the current biennium. That’s a big story, doncha think? Yet, since this story broke, there has been no follow-up in the media that I’ve been able to find. That is, for the Minnesota media this story seems to have no legs. Why not? |
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The Star Tribune on March 27th, 2004, ran a major story at the top of the front page headlined “The First Lady’s Dueling Roles,” about the Governor’s wife, Mary, and how she manages to “juggle two high-powered roles: wife of Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty and full-time district court judge for Dakota County.” Under a photo of the First Lady standing in front of a school classroom (a huge, 4-inch-by-eight-inch photo, I might add) the Star Trib ran the following caption: “First Lady Mary Pawlenty spoke to the combined fifth-grade classes at Monroe Elementary School in Brooklyn Park last month about the importance of forming good reading habits at an early age.” That was the only reference to reading or education in the article. So, just to fill in a rather obvious gap, let’s pull in a couple of quotations on the subject from other local media. First, from an editorial in the St. Paul Pioneer Press March 3, 2003, commenting on Governor Tim Pawlenty’s proposed state budget under consideration at that time: “He [the Governor] wants to cut $10.8 million from the early childhood family education fund that annually serves 300,000 Minnesota families. The program teaches childhood development and parenting skills.” And here is the Twin Cities weekly City Pages of January 14, 2004: “After promising that education would be ‘held harmless’ during the last session, [Governor Pawlenty] hacked $185 million out of the education budget – the first real dollar cuts to education in modern state history – and deferred another $437 million in aid payments, which has forced school districts to borrow money to make ends meet. As a result, thousands of teachers across the state have been laid off.” What was that about helping kids to “form good reading habits,” Ms. Pawlenty? To add weirdness to hypocrisy, here is a comment that Reporter Patricia Lopez inserted in the Star Trib article, in paragraph 24 of the front-page article. After following the First Lady around for a day in her job as a judge, Lopez wrote, “On this day, when [Judge Mary] Pawlenty's calendar is dominated by juveniles in distress, each case comes with its own contingent of helpers: social workers, public defenders, psychologists. [Pawlenty] openly praises the work they do. The dissonance between that and the budget cuts to those same services that her husband has supported is something Pawlenty tries not to dwell on.” How can this be, you ask? Lopez explains that, for the Governor of the State of Minnesota and his wife, “budgetary matters and governance in general are not subjects that the couple talks about.” |