| Number 363 | February 16, 2007 |
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This Week: A Stroll Through the News With Nygaard!
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Greetings, Welcome, new readers! There are a lot of you, it seems, and I appreciate any feedback you care to send along. I get a lot of emails and letters from readers, and I love them all! As sort-of promised in the last issue, this issue is another edition of what I have taken to calling A Stroll Through the News With Nygaard. "Strolls" are simply the odds-‘n-ends, tidbits, and sundry news items from recent weeks that have accumulated in my files and that I have been unable to find space for in the flow of things. So, although each of these items probably deserves more than the 300-400 words that I typically allow for a Stroll item, it's better than nothing! At the moment I have so many items stored up that I think next week might have to be Stroll Part II. We'll see... I know that the last issue of the Notes just came out four days ago. But that was a Monday, and it has come to my attention that some people like to get the Notes on a Friday, so they can print it out and read it over a leisurely Saturday breakfast. (I actually don't know why they like Fridays; I just made up that breakfast business.) But, anyhow, they do like Fridays, so I pushed the publication date up for this one just to make them happy. I hope everyone is happy, for that matter. Nygaard |
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Here's the headline from the New York Times of February 2nd: "Bush Seeks Medicare and Medicaid Savings of $70 Billion Over 5 Years" Many people would not notice the bias here, but it is revealed in the word "savings." I doubt that it's a conscious bias, but think of it this way: Looked at from the perspective of the people who provide health care under these two programs, or from the perspective of the people who need the health care that is provided under these two programs, "savings" is the wrong word. The proper word to use would be "cuts." So, both "savings" and "cuts" are accurate terms in this context. They just reflect different points of view. It's like your paycheck. To you, it's your livelihood. To your employer it's a "cost." It's not about "right" or "wrong." It's a value judgement, and it reflects who's point of view the reporter identifies with. The article further characterizes these "savings" as "part of a White House plan to balance the budget by 2012." That's just propaganda. I'll have more to say about the federal budget in a future issue of Nygaard Notes.
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[Editor's Note: In the last issue I wrote about the death of former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, but I ran out of room for this piece, so here it is.] In the obituary of Howard Hunt run by the New York Times last month, the Times claimed that the CIA in 1960 had a reputation for "derring-do," that is, "daring action or feats; heroic courage." If this dubious claim is true, it was only because United Statesians were then, as they are now, sensationally ignorant of what the CIA had actually been doing in the previous 14 years. So, for those who don't know (and that's a lot of us), here is a teeny-weeny bit of history. The CIA was formed in 1947. In the 14 years from then until its reputation for "derring-do" was cemented in the public mind in 1960, the CIA engaged in all of the following tactics in various places around the world: * Creation and management of CIA SCHOOLS, where military and police were trained in all sorts of things, including torture techniques; * INFILTRATION AND MANIPULATION OF SELECTED GROUPS, such as political parties, youth groups, unions, and much more; * MANIPULATION OF MEDIA, up to and including direct ownership of media outlets in other countries; * ECONOMIC PRESSURE, exerted through US government agencies, private U.S. corporations, and international financial institutions, and; * the "DIRTY TRICKS, SABOTAGE AND PROPAGANDA" that the Times told us was E. Howard Hunt's "field." The CIA used all of those tactics, and more, in the years 1947 to 1960 in the following countries (and probably others): China, Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Korea, Albania, Germany, Iran, Costa Rica, Syria, Indonesia, British Guiana, the Soviet Union, Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, Algeria, Ecuador, The Congo, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. The above information comes mostly from the 1986 book "The CIA: A Forgotten History," by William Blum. But you could look at the work of any number of other former CIA covert operatives for more information. I'd start with people like Philip Agee, Ray McGovern, John Stockwell, and Ralph McGehee. |
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On the front page of the "Metro" section of the Minneapolis newspaper on December 6th, 2006, ran these two headlines, immediately adjacent to one another: "Closing Three Branch Libraries Now Unlikely." The first headline looked like good news, since the thinking was that the City of Minneapolis was going to find the $400,000 that it would require to keep open the three branch libraries that had been threatened with closure due to lack of tax money. That was temporary good news; they all were closed on December 29th, after all. No money. As for the other article, that one reported on the excitement accompanying the building of a new stadium for our professional baseball team, which is going to be built very shortly (about five blocks from the downtown library) at a cost of $522 million. Now, here's the connection between the two seemingly-unconnected worlds reflected in these two headlines: About three quarters of the $522 million needed for the stadium will be paid for with public tax money generated by a sales tax specially imposed for that purpose. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that this tax "is due to raise $28.5 million... in the first year." OK, Nygaardians, are your calculators ready? You'll see that just 1.4 percent of that stadium tax money would be enough to keep the three libraries open all year. Or, to put it another way: That $28.5 million would be enough to keep the three branch libraries open for 71 years. |
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On November 30th the U.S. Fed News wire service ran a story headlined "One in Every 32 Adults Was in a Prison, Jail, on Probation, or on Parole at End of 2005." As many other news services reported, the absolute number of what is called the "U.S. correctional population" has now reached seven (7) million, which is an all-time record. Here are a few other unreported facts worth knowing about this report: * "The United States now incarcerates its citizens at a rate 5 to 8 times that of most industrialized nations. The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people is the highest ever recorded, outpacing the next highest rates of 611 for Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and Nevis. Rates in other Western nations include: United Kingdom – 148; Canada – 107; Germany – 95; and France – 85." * "African-American males are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white males, and Hispanic [sic] males more than double the rate. Black females are incarcerated at three times the rate of white females and Hispanic [sic] females at nearly double the rate." * On the state level, "the lowest rate of incarceration among blacks (851 in Hawaii) is greater than that of the highest white rate (740 in Oklahoma)." * At the same time, "jurisdictions that have invested heavily in incarceration have not necessarily produced significant gains in crime control." (See next article.) All of the above facts come directly from the Sentencing Project press release on the report, which is why you see all those quotation marks. http://www.sentencingproject.org |
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Just one week before that story about the outrageous prison numbers in the U.S. came out (and was ignored), the Washington Post reported on "one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting." That story is summarized by New York City Commissioner Martin F. Horn, "who oversees the city lockups". He told the Post that "What we've seen in New York is the fastest drop in crime in the nation, and we did it while locking up a lot less people." Horn, according to the Post, says that "New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade." This "runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time." The Post points out that, "For three decades, Congress and dozens of legislatures have worked to write tougher anti-crime measures," adding that "Often the only controversy has centered on how to finance the construction of prison cells." Contrast New York's experience with several other states that had different experiences. In Idaho, says the Post, "the prison population grew by 174 percent, the largest percentage increase in the nation,... Yet violent crime in that state rose by 14 percent. In West Virginia, the prison population increased by 171 percent, and violent crime rose 10 percent. In Texas, the prison population jumped by 168 percent, and crime dropped by 11 percent." In addition, "Canada experienced a sharp drop in crime as its prison population fell." The Post quotes a former New York correction commissioner as saying "I can't tell you exactly why violent crime in New York declined by twice the national rate. But I can tell you this: It wasn't because we locked up more people." And, it may surprise some, but that "national rate" of crime has gone down, a lot, since the early 1990s. How come? "Analysis finds," the Sentencing Project tells us, "that three-quarters of the current decline in crime can be attributed to multiple factors other than incarceration." Those factors include "growing job opportunities for low-wage workers" and "strategic policing tactics" such as community policing. Addressing the addiction and mental-health issues that are a huge part of the crime story is also a key ingredient. (The Post hints at the importance of this when they tell us that "City and state prisons in New York [in the 1990s] also turned aggressively to drug treatment and mental health counseling." What this story, from the inside pages of the Washington Post, is telling us is that crime is not as simple as "bad guys" that must be locked up. Crime is more complex than that, and our response to crime had better be more complex, as well. |
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"Most Americans Have Premarital Sex, Study Says." That was the headline in my local paper on December 22nd, and an intriguing headline it was! "Why is this news?" you may ask. I mean, we may not have known the details, but did anyone think otherwise before this study was released? (Yes, and some still do, as we'll see in a moment.) The study, by the Guttmacher Institute, reports that "99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage." Says the Associated Press report, "The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past." This is based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people, which is a pretty good-sized study. A few media outlets provided "balance" on the release of the Guttmacher study by quoting such reliable sources as "Focus on the Family," who reminds us that the Guttmacher Institute is part of "the condom cartel." A 64-year-old spokesman for the American Life League ("Your Pro-life Information Source") commented on the part about a large number of his generation having non-state-sanctioned sex , saying "It just didn't happen. It is a lie." And the only reason that the Guttmacher Institute would say such a thing, he added, is that it is nothing more than "another industry lapdog." (What "industry" would that be? He doesn't say.) The original AP story quoted the infamous Wade Horn, the Bush appointee who is the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who "insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults. ‘Absolutely not,' Horn said. ‘The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults." And here is where the reporter failed the memory test. It was just three months ago, back in Nygaard Notes #353, that I last wrote about Wade Horn, in an article called "Just Say No To Sex (If You Want Money)" On October 31st USA Today reported that "Now the [federal] government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs," by revising federal guidelines. That newspaper quoted Wade "Absolutely Not!" Horn saying that "the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children." (As I pointed out at the time, that's because more women in general in that age group are having children, because that's the age group that has the most children. Duh.) Horn went on to say, "We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents." Horn then "reminded" the nation's adults that "It's better to wait until you're married to bear or father children. The only 100-percent effective way of getting there is abstinence." The Nygaard Notes lesson? The only 100-percent effective way that journalists can help readers evaluate the statements of public officials is to remind readers of what those officials said (and that the same journalists reported) in the past. |
