| Number 377 | June 15, 2007 |
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This Week: Climate, Trade, and War
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Greetings, I haven't run my "Off the Front Page" feature in a while, but it's not for lack of material. I've just been too busy with other things. This week I talk about climate change, which really should be on the front pages every day, in my opinion. But it's not. In fact, very little of what I report on this week appeared on any front page in the corporate media, as far as I know. So, in a sense, this whole issue of Nygaard Notes could be called the "Off the Front Page" issue. Nygaard Notes is taking a break for a couple of weeks. So don't expect to see issue number 378 for at least three weeks. Also, since I'll be out of the country, I will not be responding to your emails until my return. Don't think I'm rude! I'll respond as soon as I can after July 5th. Happy summer solstice, all ye of the Northern Hemisphere! (Happy winter solstice to the rest of you!) Until next month, Nygaard |
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The Senlis Council is an international policy think tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris, Brussels and Ottawa. These words are from the Executive Summary of a report published in February 2007 by Senlis called "Countering the Insurgency in Afghanistan: Losing Friends and Making Enemies": "Options for a peaceful settlement of the current conflict in southern Afghanistan are within [the international community's] grasp, but the international community has yet to reach out to the Afghan people. The military are doing an admirable job in a very hostile environment, but the political, development and counter-narcotics efforts of the international community are not having the necessary positive impact. In some instances those policies are acting to further inflame the insurgency. "What is required is a very frank reassessment of the realities of the current insurgency dynamic, the declining credibility of the international community and an acknowledgment of the legitimate grievances of the Afghan people. "The current insurgency consists of two different types of insurgency: one driven by political and religious concerns, another by economic incentives and legitimate grievances. The latter insurgency—a ‘grassroots' movement largely fed by social protest, unemployment and different grievances the people hold against the government and the international community—is significantly larger than the former group. It lacks the political purpose and fundamentalist nature of its counterpart. Structural unemployment, despair and extreme poverty provide an ideal recruiting ground for this insurgency." The full 200-page Senlis
Council report is available online, if you want to look at it.
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On page 17 of the May 1st edition of the New York Times ran a story headlined "Arctic Sea Ice Melting Faster, A Study Finds." Page 17? Is it just me, or is global climate change one of the biggest stories of our lifetime? It turns out that a big study just released "concluded that an open-water Arctic in summers could be more likely in this century than had been estimated in the latest international review of climate research released in February by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." How much more likely? 30 years more likely. The Toronto Star reported that "the Arctic Ocean could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020—three decades sooner than the global science panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050." (The Star's story was not on the front page, either. In fact, I couldn't find this story on any front page, anywhere.) The Times didn't mention it, but no summer ice on the northern ocean would further accelerate global warming. The Toronto paper quoted one Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado (who knew there was such a place?!) who explained that "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster." The Star had Scambos explaining further that this is because the ice reflects light and heat back into space. Without it, the much darker land or sea absorbs more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter. The Toronto paper concluded their story by quoting Mr. Scambos saying, "We just barely now, I think, have enough time and enough collective will to be able to get through this century in good shape. But it means we have to start acting now and in a big way." That seems worthy of the front page to me. |
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Anyone who bothers to look closely can see that the United States does not support anything that might be called "free trade." I've talked about this before, but feel the need again because I recently read in the New York Times that "Free trade agreements with Peru and Panama now seem headed toward Congressional approval." That was on Tuesday, May 29th. Three days earlier the Los Angeles Times had lamented that "the Democratic-controlled Congress is balking at passing a painstakingly negotiated free trade agreement with Colombia." Describing these agreements as "free trade" agreements is in line with the official Bush administration rhetoric, but not with reality. Consider a State Department press release on the agreement from this past November, which said that the "free-trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia... provides for... Greater protection in Colombia for intellectual property rights of such U.S. products as computer software, music and videos, and more protection for U.S. patents and trademarks." Now, one is free to hold the opinion that it is a good idea for the government to provide "greater protection" for the profits of Microsoft, Disney, and the rest. But one is not free to think that such "protection" is "free trade," even if the official terminology is "free trade agreement." If there were such a thing as "free trade" (there is not), then people anywhere could make whatever they want and "freely" trade it. Patents and trademarks, in contrast, are enforced by governments, not by "the market." If we in fact had "free trade," then pharmaceuticals, for example, would not be protected by patents, and would sell for a tiny fraction of the prices that they sell for now. Music CDs would be, essentially, free. (The disks cost 20 cents or so, but the copying of music files, as you may have heard, costs nothing.) And so on. These are forms of so-called "intellectual property" that U.S. corporations want to "protect" through agreements that they call "free trade." George Orwell wrote about this sort of thing. There is a simple solution to the problem of misleading readers and viewers on this subject. Journalists can simply refuse to refer to these agreements as "free trade" agreements. They are "trade agreements," nothing more. Of course, many agreements are officially called "free trade" agreements, such as the "North American Free Trade Agreement," the "Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement," the "U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement," and a number of others. In that case, then, reporters can do what Nygaard Notes does, which is to put the phrase "free trade" in quotation marks. This says, in effect, "This is THEIR term, not mine!" And, is it too much to ask that the corporate media outlets who report on these things might occasionally run an article explaining why these trade agreements are not about "freedom?" It probably is too much to ask... By the way, some of these agreements are not even officially called "free trade" agreements. The section of the U.S. Commerce Department has set up an official "Export.gov" website "to assist American businesses in planning their international sales strategies and succeed in today's global marketplace." And, it's true, the section of that website that tells the world about such agreements is called "Free Trade Agreements." But the two agreements that the New York Times specifically mentioned a couple of weeks ago as having "free trade agreements" with the U.S. (Peru and Panama") actually have agreements called the "U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement" and the "U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement." So, are these agreements aimed at "free trade"? Or simply "more trade"? The first is a propaganda term. The second is a descriptive term. Which one does your newspaper typically use? |
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On January 21, 2007, Associated Press reporter Jason Straziuso wrote that "2006 saw a spike in violence [in Afghanistan] in which 4,000 people died, more than 600 of them civilians killed by NATO or U.S. military action, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission." Three weeks later, on February 15th, the Ottawa Citizen ran an article headlined, "Report Blasts Afghan War as a Failure: Allied Forces' Policies Have Driven People to Sign up for Taliban: Study." Here's the lead paragraph of that article: "Canada and its allies in Afghanistan are waging a losing war against the Taliban that's killed thousands of innocent civilians, harmed the reputation of coalition forces and fueled support for the insurgency in the past year, says a new report on the conflict by the Senlis Council." (The Senlis Council is an international policy think tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels, and Ottawa.) Halfway through the article we find the following: "The council is particularly critical of the use of aerial attacks in southern Afghanistan, where it says NATO carried out more than 2,000 bomb attacks in 2006, leading to the deaths of an estimated 4,000 civilians." Exactly one month after that, on March 15th, I saw an Associated Press article by the same reporter cited above, Jason Straziuso, in my local paper the Star Tribune. It was on the front page of a section called "The World," and told of three young boys who were killed in Afghanistan by a U.S. airstrike on March 10. In it appeared the following words: "AP counted at least 95 Afghan civilians killed during assaults by NATO and the U.S.-led coalition in 2006. It tallied 512 total civilian combat deaths for the year." Leave aside for the moment the difficult-to-decipher phrase "civilian combat deaths" (?!) and note that, over a three-month period, the corporate media reported that there were 600 Afghan civilians "killed by NATO or U.S. military action" in 2006. Then they reported that it was 4,000. And, finally, it was "at least 95." And two of those numbers were reported by the same person! Meanwhile, Canadian Brig. Gen. David Fraser was the commander of all of NATO's forces in southern Afghanistan a few months ago when he told the Toronto Globe and Mail, "I don't talk about body counts." (Note: Fully one-half of the "NATO" force of 35,500 troops in Afghanistan are U.S. troops, and most of the airstrikes are carried out by the U.S.) In summary, then, here's how it looks: The military doesn't count the innocent people it kills. The corporate press reports some numbers, but doesn't seem to care enough to verify them or explain the wildly-differing numbers they report. What numbers there are virtually never make onto the front pages (the numbers reported above appeared on pages 24, page 8, and on the front of an inside section, respectively). The overall impression we're left with is that the number of innocent civilians killed by the U.S. war machine is not important. No wonder the ongoing campaign in Afghanistan is often called "The Forgotten War."
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Two stories appeared in the corporate press in April, three days apart. I think they each tell interesting stories. When put side by side they tell an even more interesting—and more important—story. See what you think. Story Number 1 In the New York Times of April 12 this headline appeared on the bottom
of the front page: The Times tells us that "The Foreign Claims Act, which governs such compensation, does not deal with combat-related cases. For those cases, including the boy's, the Army may offer a condolence payment as a gesture of regret with no admission of fault, of usually no higher than $2,500 per person killed." Story Number 2 Now, here's a headline that appeared three days later, on page 4 of the Houston Chronicle of Sunday April 15th: "Columbia Families Received Settlement; NASA Paid Them $26.6 Million, but Kept it under Wraps." This story began: "NASA paid $26.6 million to the families of seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia—a settlement that has been kept secret for more than 2 ½ years." I got out my calculator and figured out that the families of the U.S. astronauts were paid, on average, $3,800,000.00 each for their tragic losses. For their tragic losses, the average Afghan civilian—who, after all, did not volunteer for a high-risk job, as did the astronauts—gets paid "usually no higher than $2,500 per person killed." That's seven-tenths of one percent of the amount paid to the families of the astronauts. Don't get me wrong: If we are going to put any sort of dollar value on a human life, I don't think $3.8 million is too much. And, it's true, the relative income of the two countries is quite different (Afghan income is roughly 1/40th the average U.S. income). If we factor in those differences in national per capita income, then an equivalent compensation for an Afghan family's tragic loss at the hands of U.S. forces would have to equal about $100,000.00. The actual compensation paid to Afghan victims of U.S. violence—somewhat less than $2,500—is about 2.5 percent of the amount that the astronauts' families received. As I was reading these stories, I tried to imagine how I would explain this discrepancy to my relatives. Then I tried to imagine how I might explain it to an Afghan farmer, if I had the chance. How would you try to explain it to these two groups? Would your explanations be different? |
