This Week: Symbols and Grassroots Movements

"Quote" of the Week

"Target Said It Was Sorry" Ché Guevara, Martin Luther King, and a Vision for the Future

Single-Payer Health Care: The Invisible Movement

Greetings,

I read a lot of newspapers, and it always surprises me to find that the smallest articles can stimulate the most interesting trains of thought. For a great example, check out my article "Spotting Ideology in the Smallest News Articles" in Nygaard Notes #202.

Again this week, a very small (160-word) article about Ché Guevara and Target Stores that I saw back in December just wouldn't leave me alone. Once I started writing about it, I was amazed to see what that article meant to me. I had no intention of writing this piece! Hope you like it.

I said in Nygaard Notes #365 that I would write more about health care in "the next issue." Well, the secret air war in Iraq and Afghanistan took over that issue, so I follow up this week.

If readers would like me to summarize some of the key points of the National Health Insurance Act, just let me know. I can do it in a future issue.

Never a dull moment,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Last week I talked about the "secret" air war being conducted by the United States against Iraq and Afghanistan. The "secret" part, I said, is largely due to the failure of the U.S. media to report on the air war, or even to acknowledge that there is such a thing. As if to illustrate my point, here is a quotation from a lengthy article in the New York Times on Tuesday, March 20th:

"While no single event stood out [March 19th, the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion] the day was in many ways emblematic of the violence that Iraqis suffer daily—two car bombs, several assassinations, at least one kidnapping and a number of other bombings. Each attack claimed only a few lives, but the pervasiveness of the violence is part of what has eroded Iraqi hopes for the future."

Note the reference to "the violence that Iraqis suffer daily." Anything missing here? The U.S. Air Force reports that 67 airstrikes were conducted in Iraq on Monday, March 19th, with an additional 45 being conducted in Afghanistan.

"Target Said It Was Sorry" Ché Guevara, Martin Luther King, and a Vision for the Future

Some long-time readers may think that I pick on Target Corporation a lot, but it's one of the largest retailers in the country, and it's headquartered here in my home state of Minnesota, so it's in the news a lot around here. Here's a headline I can't get out of my head: "Target Pulls Ché Guevara CD Cases." And, since I can't really improve on the original, here is the entire text of the Associated Press story that had that headline, which ran over the Business wire on December 23rd, datelined "Minneapolis":

"Target Corp. said it had pulled a compact disc case that had a photo of Latin American revolutionary Ché Guevara after some customers complained.

"Guevara photos are often seen on T-shirts and posters, but some critics thought Target went too far when it put Guevara's photo on a Target-branded item it was selling in stores. Guevara, a key figure in the Cuban revolution, has been frequently criticized on the right for his violent tactics.

‘What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose? Target gives this monster a pass, while using common sense on almost everything else it sells,' Investors Business Daily editorialized on Dec. 13.

"Target said it was sorry.

"‘It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we carry,' Target wrote in a statement on Wednesday. ‘We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation may have caused our guests.'"

END OF STORY

That's the whole article, as it came over the AP wires. Such a short story, but it says so much!

First of all, consider the bizarre idea that Ché Guevara belongs in the same category as Hitler and Pol Pot. But it is the irony of invoking Pinochet that is really too much! Readers may recall that the "monster" Augusto Pinochet came to power through a coup d'etat in Chile in 1973, the very year that Fulgencio Batista died. I mention Batista because he was the dictator of Cuba who came to power, like Pinochet, in a military coup, this one in 1952.

Ché Guevara is famous, in no small part, for his role in overthrowing the dictator Batista. So, for the Investor's Business Daily to compare Ché to a man who symbolized—in fact, brought into being and maintained—the very reality against which Ché struggled is historical distortion of the most bizarre kind. Yet it was apparently some sort of sensitivity to this hallucinatory outrage by the investor class that caused Target to say it was "sorry."

Waiting for More Apologies (Don't Hold Your Breath)

Assuming that a corporation can BE "sorry," one must ask the following questions:

Is Target "sorry" for selling products made in factories like (to take just one example) the Atateks Garment factory in Jordan? According to the National Labor Committee, Atateks:
* engages in human trafficking and involuntary servitude;
* denies the "most basic legal rights" to their "foreign guest workers;"
* pays workers wages that are below the legal minimum wage and "routinely cheats" them of overtime pay "while being forced to work 94-and-a-half hours a week;"

To take another example, Target sells products made at a factory in Guandong, China where, according to Oxfam:
* Workers take on between 80 and 180 hours of uncompensated overtime each month when the legal limit is 36 hours, and;
* 40% of workers are not receiving minimum wage according to the number of hours they work, and;
* Between two and three women each week suffer head injuries after fainting from exhaustion, and;
* Management maintains the appearance of compliance through false records of hours and wages, prepared answers for employees to give inspectors and threats against workers should they expose the truth.

The world awaits Target's apology for condoning such abuses of workers in China and Jordan.

Is Target "sorry" for paying a starting wage of $7.25 to $7.50 an hour while paying its CEO, Robert J. Ulrich, $16.56 million in total compensation including stock option grants? According to the AFL-CIO, Ulrich has also cashed out $34.92 million in stock option exercises, and has another $1139.96 million in unexercised stock options from previous years (all numbers as of 2005, the most recent year available).

No apologies heard from Target for institutionalizing such gross inequality.

Is Target sorry for behaving in such a way that the NAACP gave Target an "F" grade on their 2006 Economic Reciprocity Initiative report? Target, after all, refused to even respond to the survey. The ERI, says the NAACP, is "a sustained consumer movement to measure corporate America's financial relationship with the African American community."

No apologies from Target yet for this snub of the nation's oldest civil rights organization.

Symbols, Values, and Building a Movement

In a profoundly ahistorical society, such as the United States, it is no surprise that a complex historical figure—Ché was neither a "monster" nor a saint, but a human being—is reduced to a logo or a "brand." And in a society that is dominated by public relations, such as the United States, it is no surprise that the presence of a symbol stimulates more response than the existence of the various realities listed above.

What this story illustrates, I think, is that we live in a culture where it's increasingly common for people to react predictably to manipulated symbols in a world that has been reduced to a "marketplace." The alternative is to have a culture in which people engage thoughtfully with complex realities in a world that has life, not dollars, at the center.

It was forty years ago next week that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered what I consider perhaps his greatest speech: "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." In that speech he said that "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented' society to a ‘person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Whatever our favorite "issue" may be, the strategies that we pursue in our work should all, in some way, promote a transformation that aims at such a "revolution of values." Whether we are working for peace, or working for racial justice, or working for economic justice, or working for environmental sanity, or working on any other issue, it is only by maintaining a vision of such a revolution that we can we begin to transform our many small struggles into what might be called a Movement.

We'll always have scary symbols—Pol Pot, Hitler, whoever—and they will always be manipulated to provoke responses. But a "revolution of values" will ask more of us, and as we pursue it we'll begin to see that there IS more to life than our current culture offers us.

Single-Payer Health Care: The Invisible Movement

A couple of issues ago I talked some about health care, and recent polls showing that fully 90 percent of respondents say that the health care system needs "fundamental changes"—at least!—or that we need to throw it out and design an entirely new one. Almost two-thirds say they would be willing to pay higher taxes to make this happen.

In the same issue I mentioned something called the United States National Health Insurance Act. The Act, H.R. 676, was introduced into the U.S. Congress on January 24th and would create a single-payer health care program financed by U.S. taxpayers. The four lead sponsors for this bill are John Conyers, Jim McDermott, Donna Christensen, and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

I said it wouldn't be surprising if you hadn't heard of this legislation, since it "has been almost completely ignored in the U.S. media." Here's a great illustration of what I mean.

This past Saturday, March 24, the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund hosted a "a special forum on health care" in Las Vegas. I noticed pretty good-sized reports on the event in both the Washington Post and the New York Times. The event featured presentations on health care by Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Mike Gravel, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Sen. Barack Obama, and Gov. Bill Richardson.

The Washington Post reported that "Edwards was the only candidate who came to the forum having put forth a specific plan for universal coverage..." The Times did mention that Kucinich "offered the most sweeping proposal," but they, too, said, "John Edwards ... offered the most detailed plan for universal coverage..." Even the supposedly liberal Nation Magazine said of the health care forum, "only John Edwards presented a plan with any significant details."

The moderator for the event was Karen Tumulty, National Political Correspondent for TIME Magazine. When she addressed John Edwards, she, too, said, "Of all the candidates that we're going to be hearing from today, you are the only one who has a detailed specific plan as to how you're going to get the universal coverage."

How bizarre! Surely Tumulty and the other media people covering the event know that Dennis Kucinich has actually introduced legislation into the U.S. Congress—that is, a "specific plan," a "detailed plan," a plan with "significant details"—that would create a single-payer "Medicare For All" health care system. Yet somehow, in the eyes of these media people—whose reporting will be the "story" that most United Statesians have of this event—John Edwards is the "only candidate" with such a plan.

I thought maybe the reports reflected Kucinich's failure to offer details in this particular forum, which would have made the news reports technically accurate. But, thanks to the miracle of internet technology, I was able to go and read the transcript of what Mr. Kucinich actually said at the forum. He talked at length about his plan, reminding attendees that "This plan that I'm talking about, I co-authored this plan. I'm one of the ones that wrote the plan." Reporters certainly could go read the details, as I did, and as you can. Just go to the Federal government's Thomas website http://thomas.loc.gov/ and type in bill number "HR676." It's 27 pages of details.

If you'd like to read Kucinich's comments, go to the CAP website and you can watch or read Kucinich's comments: http://www.americanprogressaction.org/events/healthforum/

[As an amusing postscript, here's the final paragraph from the New York Times article on the Las Vegas candidate forum: "Another candidate, former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, called for ‘a universal single-payer plan.' He said he would give people vouchers, which could be used to pay doctors and hospitals, and a choice of five or six health plans."

As any reporter should know, under a single-payer plan, anyone can go to any doctor they like. That IS the "plan." A "single"-payer" plan would not have "a choice of five or six health plans," for criminy sakes!]

Building From the Grassroots

I don't think there is a single issue that better illustrates the anti-democratic nature of our political system than health care in 2007. 9 out of 10 United Statesians say they want "fundamental change" in the system, there is a plan in the Congress that would offer that, and the name of that plan is essentially blacked out of the media.

The result is that most people don't even know what a single-payer system is, let alone that they could have one. (I'm guessing here; there's no way to know this, which is a part of my point)

I could tell you what a single-payer health care system is, but I already did. Go look at Nygaard Notes Numbers 240 and 241, especially "National Health Insurance: The Nuts and Bolts."

The other great way to get up to speed on this is to visit the website of Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) at http://www.pnhp.org/, and click on "New to Single-Payer?"

The point here is that, despite the apparent desire of an overwhelming majority of United Statesians for some REAL change in our criminally-wacky "health care" system, the propaganda system is working to prevent the general population from acquiring the knowledge of a possible solution that is necessary to put pressure on the leadership to get it done. What that means is that people who care about this issue need to work to build a truly grassroots movement that will force the issue onto the national agenda, despite the resistance of the powerful insurance industry and their allies.

Working with PNHP would be a good place to start, and I want to mention two other organizations in addition to PNHP. One is the Universal Health Care Action Network (UHCAN) at http://www.uhcan.org/ You can find a group working on the issue in YOUR state by going here: http://www.uhcan.org/275790/278464.html My own state of Minnesota has the amazing Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition, whose website is http://www.muhcc.org/

The other organization is one that has been set up specifically to organize people around the demand for fundamental change in our health care system, focused on HR 676. The group is "Healthcare NOW." They have lots of concrete "do-able" plans, and they are building quite a network. Find them on the web at http://www.healthcare-now.org/