Number 26

April 23, 1999

This Week: Reporter, read thy paper! Citizens, when it comes to Kosovo, read thy paper carefully!

Greetings, I attended an interesting meeting a couple of nights ago with Tim McGuire, the editor of the Star Tribune. Too late to write about it for this week, but suffice it to say he got a bit defensive when I asked him my little question. Tune in next week for details. For this week, I take another look at how to read the paper, specifically the local version, and put in another brief note about Kosovo. ‘Til next week, Nygaard

Reporter, read thy paper!

You might think that reporters would read their own newspaper, but this isn't always the case. The Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) had a front-page article on April 19th about a "forum" that took place last Sunday in South St. Paul. Organized by somebody whom the reporter failed to name, the forum-that-sounds-to-me-like-a-protest brought 600 farmers from 12 states to "meet" with the head of the Justice Department's anti-trust division. Minnetonka-based Cargill was the center of attention at this forum, as it is attempting to merge with Continental Grain, a merger that would create the nation's largest grain-trading company. The article points out that this proposal is "one of the first agricultural acquisitions that has hit a major delay from the Justice Department." As reporter Jill Barshay put it, "back-to-back years of low commodity prices have crippled many small farms and driven hundreds of others out of business." Organizers of the forum erected a "Corporate Hall of Shame" to highlight the multimillion-dollar profits and executive pay at four agricultural giants, including Minnesota-based Land O'Lakes as well as Cargill which, even before the merger, is the nation's largest privately-owned company. Farmers accuse Cargill and other giants of making sweetheart deals with large ranchers and farmers that put small farmers at a disadvantage, and otherwise unfairly manipulating commodity prices to increase the profits of the corporations. The very next day, April 20th, the Strib carried an article by the same reporter in the business section (p. D3) entitled "Citing restructuring, Cargill posts its first earnings increase in three years. CFO: Low prices are no help to company." In the article, Robert Lumpkins, Chief Financial Officer of Cargill, is said to have told Ms. Barshay that " the company isn't profiting from low commodity prices at the expense of farmers." [Editor's note: Heavens! Who would think such a thing?] He attributed the increased profits ($192 million in the fourth quarter of 1998, up from "only" $125 million in the same period of 1997) to "increased efficiencies." Thus, the day after farmers had come from all over the Midwest to accuse Cargill of driving family farmers out of business by manipulating commodity prices for profit, Cargill reports record profits and goes out of its way to stress that low commodity prices have nothing to do with it. For many reporters, the Skept-o-meter would be going off loudly at this point. But the oddest part is yet to come. Three days earlier, in the very same Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) there appeared in the Business section an advance report about the very same Cargill on the very same subject of profits. Entitled "Cargill expects fiscal 3Q to increase 53% over year-ago" (April 17, 1999) the lead paragraph went like this: "Cargill Inc., benefitting from low prices of livestock and grain, will report next week that earnings for its third quarter climbed about 53 percent to $192 million." This article draws on a "confidential document that Cargill is having sent to a small group of investors interested in buying $250 million of it's 10-year notes." There is no byline on this informative article, but the confidential document was dug up by the Wall Street Journal, not the Strib. Cargill is privately-owned, so they don't have to report much of anything to the public, unlike publicly-owned companies which have to make all sorts of reports to the government. That makes this secret document quite important because, as the article puts it, it "provides an unusually detailed peek inside Cargill." Whoever actually wrote it, the article is full of interesting things, including an explanation of exactly how Cargill stands to make money off of low commodity prices, and how Cargill makes 45% of its profits outside of the U.S. The article also brings to light the fact that Cargill recently made $106 million from the sale of one of their businesses, which will be used not to invest in "increased efficiencies," but rather to "repurchase shares from descendants of the founding families." That is, to increase the wealth of our locally-grown agricultural oligarchs. Here's the chronological summary of what was in the paper, with my own interpretation of the facts: Friday: Cargill, one of the largest and most powerful corporations in Minnesota, secretly tells some rich people from whom it wants to borrow money that it is making lots of profit off of the same market forces that are driving small farmers out of business. Sunday: 600 of the people who are being driven out of business gather in the Twin Cities to confront the government with evidence of the above, and make their case that multinationals have been seeking and will continue to seek profits by using practices that are destroying our family farms. Monday: Cargill releases the "official" report on their record profits, complete with a denial that those profits are sucked, more or less directly, from the guts of Minnesota's family farmers. Keep this summary in mind as I make a brief point about Kosovo.

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Citizens, when it comes to Kosovo, read thy paper carefully!

Last night I attended an event (we used to call them "teach-ins") about the NATO bombing of Kosovo and everything in the vicinity. The speakers stressed that there is something very important going on there, and that we must all be very careful in terms of how we get our information about it. "Read between the lines," they said. In the above note on Cargill and the farm crisis, almost every single fact that I used came from the Star Tribune itself (I did check other sources to verify a few things). But the interpretation that I presented to you is radically different from the one that most people would get from reading any of those articles independently. Even if you read all three articles, if you didn't have the time, knowledge of the context, and the memory to combine them in your mind, it would be hard to draw meaningful conclusions from them. Not to mention the fact that some of the most important things were never included (such as the seven demands that were apparently presented to the Justice Department by the organizers of the South St. Paul forum/protest), or that the most important of the articles was buried in the Business section instead of being on the front page. Since I have some knowledge of economics, and agriculture, and of how the media works, I am able to "translate," if you will, these very misleading, almost mysterious, reports into something that I hope is useful in understanding how the world works. What does this have to do with Kosovo? As I've said before (NN #24), if you do not have some knowledge of the history, culture, and economics of the Balkans, as well as some grasp of the historical motivations that continue to drive U.S. foreign and economic policy, you have almost no chance of getting any useful information from the mainstream media. Doesn't matter if it's TV, radio, or newspapers. You need to find sources you trust to get your intellectual feet on the ground. Many say that "We had to do SOMETHING!" If that is true, then bombing is not the "something" that is needed. Every bad thing that has been happening in Kosovo is being made worse by the NATO bombings: More refugees, stronger Milosevich, weaker international law, more dead, more debt, higher tensions in the region. All of these things were very predictable, and that fact, plus a knowledge of the history of U.S. interventions around the world, gives the lie to any claims of "humanitarian" motives. If it's not a humanitarian mission, and it's making everything worse, then it is easy to throw up your hands and say "This doesn't make any sense!" But it does make sense. The United States government is not stupid, and it's not crazy. You just have to work really hard to figure out what it is that is really driving our policy, whether it's in the Balkans, in Iraq, in Africa, or wherever. It's a lot of work, but I encourage you to do that work. After all, that's what democracy is about, isn't it?

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