| Number 34 | June 18, 1999 |
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This Week: |
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Greetings, The story of East Timor is a story of human rights violations that makes Kosovo look mild in comparison. As is often the case, the United States government was on the wrong side of this conflict, arming and supporting the Indonesian government as they killed over one-third of the entire population of the former Portuguese colony. The killing, torture, unlawful detentions, and general oppression continues today. I encourage you to learn a little bit about East Timor (see below), and then write a letter, make a phone call, or do whatever you can to get our government to do the right thing. Your author has been a little under the weather this week, so in place of a single essay (which takes a considerable amount of brainpower) I offer a collection of brief pieces which I have culled out of various news sources. It should be obvious why each of them is included, but just in case I put a revealing headline on each one to make the point clear. I have always enjoyed the feature that appears in The Progressive magazine entitled "No Comment." So this is a shameless rip-off of that feature. My apologies to the Progressive, and I hope to be back next week with a full-length something-or-other. Nygaard Notes is planning another trip out of the country, believe it or not. This time I hope to travel to Vancouver, British Columbia in November for a conference on the World Trade Organization, from where I will zip down to Seattle to take part in some actions related to "Ministerial Summit" of that organization. (Plus, I get to say hi to my friends Jim and Thitiya, who just moved to Vancouver!) More on this as the time approaches. Welcome to our new subscribers. Good to have you aboard. Hope you enjoy the Notes. ‘Til next week, Nygaard |
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Here is a message from a man named Kevin Nugent, who is a member of the Resource Center of the Americas. This was forwarded to me by a friend at the Center, and I thought it might be of interest to Nygaard Notes readers: Hi. I have been in Washington this past week lobbying for East Timor. Yesterday I had a meeting with Minnesota Senator Rod Grams and I think, with your help, we might be able to pressure him to take a stronger stand on East Timor. A brief background: While East Timor is to have a referendum on August 8th, the path to self-determination has been marred by paramilitary violence. These paramilitaries, armed and funded by the Indonesian military, have terrorized anyone (even entire communities) thought to be leaning towards independence. Right now there are at least 50,000 internal refugees; in the past two months at least 150 defenseless civilians have been murdered. These numbers are probably higher since human rights observers can not travel freely outside the capitol Dili. [For more information, see the excellent website of the East Timor Action Network, found at http://www.etan.org/ Nygaard] |
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In a story published on June 15th entitled "Ventura Promises to Aid Farmers," Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Gene Hugoson said a funny thing. According to the article, Wilmont, Minnesota farmer Jim Joens "asked Hugoson whether he saw much hope for farmers with small- to medium-size operations." Hugoson reportedly responded that "many of those farmers can stay in business, but they must be flexible and often supplement their farm revenues with off-farm jobs." Can somebody tell Gene that it doesn't really count as "staying in business" when you have to actually earn your money doing something else? NATO bombed Kosovo more than 25,000 times In it's lead editorial of June 10th, entitled "Constructing Peace in Kosovo," the New York Times states its opinion that the recent agreement "leaves NATO's core goals intact." It then laments the fact that "Kosovo has been devastated by the brutal Serbian assault." Citizens Keep Out The June 11th New York Times once again incorrectly claimed that the Social Security system is struggling "to insure it can weather the retirement of the baby boom generation." (The system is projected to be fully funded without making a single change until the year 2034, by which time the last baby boom will have already retired.) In this context the Times reported that, in an attempt to "shore up" Social Security, "the House Ways and Means Committee would meet in private sessions to explore whether the two parties can bridge their differences." What do you suppose they want to keep secret? The Times never asked. Dominating the World Is Not Cheap Minnesota representatives Sabo, Vento, Peterson, Minge, and Oberstar voted no, and Representatives Gutknecht and Ramstad voted yes (Luther did not vote) last week on a $289 billion military-spending bill, which passed the House by a vote of 365 to 58. This amount is, in the words of the June 11th New York Times (unreported in the local newspapers) "greater than the budgets for all other agencies combined, greater than all military spending by the ten biggest foreign armies in the world taken together." We Don't Wanna Talk About It While the House's military-spending bill increases spending for just about everything, the budget for declassifying Pentagon documents was cut by 90 percent, from $200 million to $20 million. Beauty and The Beast Scientists released a report last month on a new breed of genetically-engineered corn, which was designed to "protect itself from pests by producing a toxin in its tissues," according to the New York Times. It turns out that this "increasingly popular transgenic plant" also kills the Monarch butterfly, which breeds heavily in the corn belt. The Times reports that this may become part of the debate about genetically-engineered crops, which "may have unforeseen effects on the environment." Assuming that the agribusiness engineers that developed this corn did not "foresee" the killing of butterflies, then I guess we could say that genetically-engineered crops do have unforeseen effects on the environment. Remembering the 80s In a ballot recently conducted by the U.S. postal service asking Americans which topic they would most like to see on a postage stamp commemorating the 1980s, the top vote-getter was video games. The fall of the Berlin Wall came in second. Myself, I was kind of rooting for punk rock. Work Units Need to Breathe NPR's Morning Edition recently aired a report on the steps that the city of Atlanta may soon be taking to cope with problems brought on by its rapid population growth over the past two decades. By way of explaining exactly what might be the problem with such things as urban sprawl, traffic congestion, air pollution, and inadequate municipal services, reporter Joshua Levs stated that "Business needs quality of life to attract workers, so Atlanta needs quality of life to attract business." And if "business" doesn't need quality of life, then.... Wealthy Readers Wanted Clay Steinman, professor of communications studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, was quoted as follows in the City Pages of April 7th: "More and more, the main customers for the newspaper aren't the readers, but the advertisers. And that means to the extent the papers are under pressures to increase revenues, they're going to look for increasingly affluent audiences attractive to those advertisers." Every publically-owned business is under intense pressure to increase revenues, including the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) Keep Looking, Don, And Call Me When You Find Something Local TV news anchor and local celebrity Don Shelby, when asked in an interview with the local newspaper to compare news reporting in the Twin Cities with reporting in other American cities: "One difference here is that an investigative reporter can go out of work: I came here in 1970 as an investigative reporter and it took me about five years to find a story. It's not a very good news town - but it's a wonderful place to live for that same reason." |