| Number 476 | April 6, 2011 |
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This Week: Theft, Knowledge, Property |
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Greetings, I've been running longer pieces and multi-part series' lately, so I think it's time now for some short and hopefully entertaining looks at recent news items. Please join me for another installment of the occasional feature, A Stroll Through the News with Nygaard. More coming next week. See ya then. Nygaard |
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A feature on Minnesota politics runs in the Sunday edition of my local paper the Star Tribune. It's called, for reasons that completely escape me, "Hot Dish Politics." It's a source of political gossip, or a sort of "reporter's notebook," where hard-working reporters get to type up little things that aren't deserving of entire stories, but... well, here's what they say about it: "With an insider's eye, Hot Dish tracks the tastiest bits of Minnesota's political scene and keep you up-to-date on those elected to serve you." Sometimes the tidbits can be quite revealing. They reveal a little bit about those elected to serve us, and they often reveal a lot about the reporters! Witness this tasty bit from March 6th: The headline was "Dayton: Minnesota's First Wonk." That's Mark Dayton, the recently-elected Democratic governor of Minnesota. For those who don't know the term, to call someone a "wonk" is not a compliment. Depending on which dictionary one looks at, the word wonk is "A disparaging term for a studious or hard-working person," or a term used to refer to "a person who studies a subject or issue in an excessively assiduous and thorough manner." A wonk is a particular kind of nerd: one who knows too much about important things. When it comes to the Governor of Minnesota, the state government reporter for the region's newspaper of record says "No matter the audience, his innate nerdiness leaps out." She then explains why she says this: "To a group of on-deadline reporters last week, the governor had this to say about the state's new revenue forecast: 'The increase in real GPD, as I indicated, is one that has improved over a projection made just three months ago. So it is a pretty remarkable increase of 39 percent of the projected rate of growth from the 2.3 percent to 3.2 percent. I think it's significant that the consulting firm now places a 20 percent probability on the most optimistic scenario for the future compared to a 15 percent probability on the pessimistic.' "He then added this flourish: 'Secondly, I'd say this improvement shows, at the macroeconomic level, the triumph of Keynesian economics.' The reporter then felt moved to comment on the Governor's statement, so she said that "The six numbers and mention of John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who rose to fame in the 1930s, did not make it on the evening news or your daily newspaper." Such comments are too "wonky," we are to believe. It doesn't seem "wonky" to me to use numbers when referring to a budget. And, in contrast to the Star Trib reporter, I think the average person can handle as many as six numbers at a time. I mean, most of us have 10 fingers. As far as Dayton's reference to Keynesian economics, we would be better off as a nation if this concept were reported regularly "on the evening news or your daily newspaper." And that's because "Keynesian economics," as politicians use the term, is shorthand for one side in the current superheated debate about the economy. So-called conservatives say that lower taxes on the rich will leave the rich with more money to spend and—the argument goes—since they already have everything they personally need, they will spend that money on investments, which will result in more stuff being made for sale to the rest of us. This increased supply means more stuff for people to buy, and when they buy it the economy will grow. This argument is sometimes referred to as "supply-side" economics: Lower taxes on owners = more supply of goods = economic growth. The idea that is opposed to this is sometimes called "demand-side economics." This says that when non-rich people (you and me) have more money, since we don't have everything we personally need, a lot of that money will go to buy stuff, thus increasing demand. So if we put people to work (with economic stimulus spending, for instance) or transfer money to them (via unemployment insurance, Social Security, public works programs, etc) they will have more money, which creates more demand, and that's the way to economic growth. The most well-known advocate of "demand side" policies is the English economist John Maynard Keynes. So, when Governor Dayton refers to "Keynesian economics," he's telling us which side he's on in a major current debate. If you understand what I'm talking about, then you can see that it's not that hard to explain what this "wonky" remark was intended to communicate. Surely the reporter knows this. The reporter revealed even more about the corporate media mindset when she said this: "Minnesotans had clues of their chief executive's inner nerd during the campaign. As Dayton campaigned from city to city last year, he traveled with all 3,000 pages out of the state's current budget. And he actually read it." A governor reading his state's budget. How bizarre. Now, all of this makes me wonder which is more shocking here: That the State Capitol reporter for the state's largest newspaper is surprised that the Governor of our state "actually read" the state's budget? Or that the reporter knows, somehow, that most Governors do not read their states' budgets? Some of this stuff should "make it on the evening news or your daily newspaper." Oh, well, at least it made it into Nygaard Notes. |
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In a front-page article on March 9th headlined "Putting Afghan Plan Into Action Proves Difficult," the New York Times started off by saying: "If the American-led fight against the Taliban was once a contest for influence in well-known and conventionally defined areas — the capital and large cities, main roads, the border with Pakistan, and a handful of prominent valleys and towns — today it has become something else. "Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the United States military has settled into a campaign for scattered villages and bits of terrain that few people beyond their immediate environs have heard of." Towards the very end of the article, the Times reports that U.S. "generals have designated scores of rural areas 'key terrain districts.' The soldiers are creating, at cost of money and blood, pockets of security." This comment was followed by this statement, one which is based on a very big lie, indeed: "But when Americans arrive in a new area, attacks and improvised bombs typically follow — making roads and trails more dangerous for the civilians whom, under current Pentagon counterinsurgency doctrine, the soldiers have arrived to protect." This paragraph only makes sense if one doesn't know—or chooses not to believe—that the U.S. is an occupying army in a country that (like virtually any country) has a large number of people who are resisting that occupation. The big lie here—perhaps the biggest lie of the entire Global War on Terror—is that our militarized approach to so-called terrorism is "protecting" anyone. This front-page paragraph expresses the absolutely predictable—and, in fact, predicted—outcome of U.S. "counterinsurgency doctrine." When "Americans"—American soldiers and weapons, that is—arrive in a new area, they will be resisted in many ways, including "attacks and improvised bombs." This has been and will be true in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in any country that the U.S. or any other powerful country tries to dominate. No country, except perhaps for the absolutely weakest and smallest ones, will meekly agree to military occupation by anybody, certainly not by The World's Only Superpower. And that fact should tell us that our awesome military might will, in the end, make us all less safe, not more. |
On December 1, 2009, President Obama made a big speech about Afghanistan in which he announced a major escalation—which we are supposed to call a "surge." Said the President: "I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home." He also called on other nations to send more troops, adding that "additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." Many people assumed that "our forces" meant combat troops. That is, many thought the President was saying that we would begin to de-escalate in July of 2011. By that point the military intervention in Afghanistan would be just about 10 years long, making it either the longest or the second-longest U.S. war ever (Competing for first place: Vietnam.) Since everybody thought the President was promising a de-escalation in July, it should have been big news last month when officials very clearly said that no such de-escalation was going to happen. On March 8th the U.S. Secretary of War, Robert Gates, told the nation, "As I have said time and again, we are not leaving Afghanistan this summer." A week later the NY Times reported that "the first Americans to come home this summer, fulfilling a pledge President Obama made when he committed 30,000 more service members to the war in late 2009, are expected to be engineers and support troops, rather than combat soldiers." This is "fulfilling a pledge"! On the following day the headline in the Baltimore Sun read, "Petraeus Describes a 'Fragile' Afghanistan; U.S. Strategy Working, but Troops Still Needed for Years, Commander Tells Congress." That's General David Petraeus, the top commander of the "international" force in Afghanistan, who was speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Sun noted that "None of the senators who asked questions challenged his premise that a large footprint of American troops is needed in the country for years to come." None! Wait, it's worse than that. The War Secretary said in early March that the U.S. "was starting talks with the Afghans about keeping a security presence in the country beyond 2014." We're not leaving. Three more years. More than three more years. Senators are all just fine with this. This is major stuff yet, as far as I can find out, none of these statements made it into a single front-page headline in the United States. |
On February 4th, speaking on the news program Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky was asked about "what's happening now in Egypt." (This was one week before Hosni Mubarak resigned as President.) Chomsky said, in part: "The United States, so far, is essentially following the usual playbook. I mean, there have been many times when some favored dictator has lost control or is in danger of losing control. There's a kind of a standard routine... keep supporting them as long as possible; then, when it becomes unsustainable—typically, say, if the army shifts sides—switch 180 degrees, claim to have been on the side of the people all along, erase the past, and then make whatever moves are possible to restore the old system under new names. That succeeds or fails depending on the circumstances." That comment seemed eerily prescient exactly two months later when, on April 4th, the lead story on the front page of the New York Times began like this: "The United States, which long supported Yemen's president, even in the face of recent widespread protests, has now quietly shifted positions and has concluded that he is unlikely to bring about the required reforms and must be eased out of office, according to American and Yemeni officials. "The Obama administration had maintained its support of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in private and refrained from directly criticizing him in public, even as his supporters fired on peaceful demonstrators, because he was considered a critical ally in fighting the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda. This position has fueled criticism of the United States in some quarters for hypocrisy for rushing to oust a repressive autocrat in Libya but not in strategic allies like Yemen and Bahrain." No word on who decided which "reforms" were "required." And we should note the absence of argument with the assumption that the U.S. has the right to decide that some other country's head of state—dictator or not—must be "eased out of office." But those who continued reading on the inside pages were able to learn about "the key" to the U.S. "shifting position": "For Washington, the key to his departure would be arranging a transfer of power that would enable the counterterrorism operation in Yemen to continue." What? Isn't the "key" for U.S. policy supposed to be support for ...? Um... I guess not. The word "democracy" does not appear in the article. |
