| Number 32 | June 4, 1999 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I’m in a hurry because I’ve gotta go to Washington D.C. pretty quick to protest against the NATO bombing. Hello to our new subscribers this week. I appreciate the feedback on the formatting. I hope this is better. Let me know. Next week I hope to have a few words from the demo in D.C. Take care and keep doing what you can do to make some lives a little better. Nygaard |
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The following notice was forwarded to us by Nygaard Notes reader Drew Hempel. Coming up this Tuesday. Sounds like fun! "Greetings. As part of a collaborative effort to reclaim our histories, a group of women at the U of M have put together An Alternative History Tour of the U Twin Cities Campus. The tour focuses on activist history of the U, but also examines the historical distribution of wealth throughout the campus. We would like to extend an invitation to all members of the campus community to participate in our tour. We are holding two runs of the tour, Tuesday, June 8th, at one and three p.m. The tour will begin and end in front of Morrill Hall, with discussion to follow." WOST 5400: History as Activism: Radical Walking Tours of the University of Minnesota
For further information, email Angie Anderson at: ande0840@tc.umn.edu. |
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The GLBT Host Home Program is an extension of the GLBT case management services offered by Project OffStreets, a drop-in center for homeless and sexually exploited youth. It recruits, screen, trains, and supports stable, nurturing adults who volunteer to open their homes to homeless gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth (ages 18-21) as they work towards self-sufficiency. If you are interested in learning about the GLBT Host Home Program, please come to an informational meeting. If after the informational meeting you decide to apply to become a host volunteer, the application process ends with a mandatory 16-hour training. It is crucial that the pool of volunteers reflect the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the homeless youth population. For information about the program, call Raquel, the Program’s coordinator, at (612) 252-1205. |
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We can have democracy, or we can have a free market economy, but we cannot have both. Now there’s a statement that you’ll never hear on National Public Radio. I shouldn’t pick on NPR. In the current political climate in the United States, a statement like the one above is essentially unthinkable to the people who make the decisions about what goes over the airwaves, be they “public” or private. Since this gets to the very heart of why I produce Nygaard Notes, I’d like to say a few words about the above “unthinkable” statement. Markets and Democracy Let’s consider the idea that a “market economy,” whatever its virtues or faults, is almost a textbook example of what “democracy” is not. To understand this, we have to agree on what “democracy” is and on what “markets” are. “Democracy” is defined in standard American dictionaries as “equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment.” A “market” according to the Penguin Dictionary of Economics, is created “whenever potential sellers of a good or service are brought into contact with potential buyers and a means of exchange is available....” Or, “in the business view, the market is a collection of selling opportunities.” Penguin says that the “medium of exchange may be money or barter,” but when we talk about modern-day capitalism, we’re not talking about a global barter system; we’re talking about money. As I have pointed out in previous issues of Nygaard Notes, there are something like 1.5 billion people in the world of the 1990s living on less than $1 per day. Since they have essentially no “means of exchange”, it should not be controversial to state that these people are essentially excluded from “the market.” To promote a “free market” global economy, then, is in effect to promote an economy from which between one quarter and one- third of the human race is excluded. It’s pretty hard to imagine how these people could have “equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment,” which is the definition of democracy. Therefore, it seems to me that it should not be controversial to say that democracy and free markets are incompatible. But it’s not only controversial in the U.S. media; it’s essentially unthinkable. |
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“Oligarchy” is another word that you’ll rarely hear in the media, but I think it would have been a good word to hear on National Public Radio last February. That’s when I was listening to NPR and caught part of a report on a conference of the OECD nations which was going on at the time. The OECD, or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is a club of twenty-nine countries, mostly rich ones, who meet to plan how to run the world in their best interests. (I’m not trying to be dramatic; I mean this quite literally.) The National Public Radio reporter noted that the wealthy negotiators inside the conference were “discussing how much money should be shared with the poor.” He then went on to remark that, “ironically,” protesters were outside the hall demanding that the rich “share more of their money with the poor.” Why this would have been “ironic” was hard to tell, since he didn’t bother to say anything about the protesters, like where they came from, the specifics of their dissent, or how many of them there were. In any case, it seemed to me that these must not have been very serious protesters. Serious protesters would not be asking the rich to “share” more of their wealth; they would be demanding that structural changes be made to insure a more fair distribution of wealth, so that we could rid ourselves of these oligarchs and remove the need to have to begging them to “share.” Had NPR seen fit to introduce the word “oligarchy” into their report, it could have gone a long way toward explaining not only why those protesters were out there, but also why NPR listeners might want to know about the OECD in the first place. Since “oligarchy” is another word that is off-limits in polite discourse, I’ll define it and explain why it might be a useful word to know in the context of the OECD. The OECD as Oligarchy Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines “oligarchy” as “a form of government in which the supreme power is placed in the hands of a small exclusive class.” Let’s look at the OECD with this definition in mind. In their own words, the OECD exists to “...discuss, develop and perfect economic and social policy.” That seems quite accurate. The point is well-illustrated by looking at the case of the “Multilateral Agreement on Investment,” or MAI. In 1995 the OECD began secret negotiations to develop the MAI, which would essentially lay out new rules for international capitalism that would further tilt the balance of global power away from elected governments and toward transnational corporations. According to OECD officials, the MAI negotiators were considering rules that would “go well beyond the...provisions of other international agreements” and would “provide path-breaking disciplines on areas of major interest to foreign investors.” Activists have unearthed various documents from this secret process that reveal what this would mean: The agreement would further erode what little remaining power that national, state, and local governments still have to enact laws and regulations in the interests of their citizens against the interests of corporations. Examples of laws that would likely be illegal under the MAI include environmental laws, public health laws, laws supporting local economic development, anti-sweatshop laws, and any number of other laws that a people may impose through their government. Furthermore, a central part of the MAI as negotiated under the auspices of the OECD is that corporations would have the right to sue national governments for violations of the agreement, but governments would not have the right to sue corporations. The cases would be tried not in the nation’s courts, but in an international tribunal, which would have supreme authority. The MAI has thus been a major attempt by the members of the OECD to change the economic, and political, rules under which we all live. If an agreement such as the MAI were to come into effect, the effects on the non-wealthy of the world would certainly be largely negative. That means you, Nygaard Notes readers. That’s why National Public Radio has a responsibility to tell us exactly who those protesters were and what the heck they were trying to tell us. (You shouldn’t have to read Nygaard Notes to learn this stuff.) The MAI is now officially out of the hands of the OECD, but we can thank them for getting the process going. For more information on the MAI and its latest incarnations, some very good and understandable information can be found at the Preamble Center website at: http://www.preamble.org/MAI/maihome.html. In their official propaganda, the OECD itself says this: “The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich, in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy.” That sure sounds like an exclusive club to me. It rules out any country that is not “committed” to unfettered capitalism, for one thing. In addition, since it seems to me that a market economy and democracy are incompatible, one could argue that membership in the OECD is limited to countries that are led by people who are either dishonest or delusional. But we’ll leave that aside for now. The OECD club is exclusive in fact, not just in theory. The 29 members of the OECD are almost entirely the rich nations of Europe and North America. It includes no countries at all from Africa or South America (Antarctica also lacks representation). The sole representatives from Asia are Japan, Korea, and, oddly, Turkey, so Asia is spectacularly under represented. Although OECD member countries produce two-thirds of the world’s goods and services, they contain only 1/5 of the world’s people. Given their agenda of promoting “free markets” over human rights, as evidenced by their sponsorship of the MAI negotiations, it’s not outrageous to infer that the representatives which the various countries send to the OECD are probably more representative of the owners of the nation’s wealth than of the population at large. The fact that the members of this group have somehow come up with the idea that they have the right to “...discuss, develop and perfect economic and social policy” for the entire world is evidence of the profoundly anti-democratic nature of their organization. I have argued that the OECD is trying to set up a world-wide economic system in which the rights of capital would supersede the rights of people, and even governments. This would be enforced by law, backed up by the economic power of the “exclusive club” of wealthy capitalist countries that make the rules, and judged by representatives of those same countries. That’s a lot of power. One might even say that’s a lot of power held in the hands of a small exclusive class, which is the very definition of oligarchy. Looked at in this way, it should be seen as far from “ironic” that there would be protesters outside of a meeting of this powerful rich man’s club. By accepting ideological barriers to the use of descriptive language, reporters are essentially forced to serve as de facto propagandists. As I always take pains to point out, this is not a conspiracy. It’s much more complicated than that. In order to build a committed resistance to such undemocratic forces as the OECD, the IMF, the World Bank, and, yes, NATO (whose membership, not coincidentally, closely mirrors that of the OECD) we will need a new, independent media that delivers honest reporting of the information necessary to good citizenship. This new media will have to be unfettered by the political correctness that I have been describing, which is dictated by subservience to real power and is very different from the “political correctness” that you read about in Time and Newsweek. As long as our media are large, for-profit corporations, dependent for their profits on other large, for-profit corporations, the prospects for change are bleak indeed. But when we do have a new, truly independent media, the presence of protesters at the meetings of the OECD will not be reported as “ironic.” They, and their analysis, will be seen as central to the story. |