| Number 35 | June 25, 1999 |
|
This Week: |
|
Greetings, There are so many interesting things this week that I can't possibly comment on them all.
That's not all, but I gotta go to bed. So little time, so much to write! I mentioned that I was feeling under the weather last week, and thank you to all of the readers who sent me get-well wishes. I really appreciated them. I'm feeling much better this week, although the doc says I'm not well. Since it doesn't seem to interfere with my typing, I'm not going to worry about it. As always, welcome to the new subscribers. Every week we seem to get a few more. Thanks to the referring readers. I'm sending this out a day early this week, as I got roped into working all day tomorrow for money! ‘Til next week, Nygaard |
|
Among the many tragic consequences of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was the diversion of attention from the ongoing attack against Iraq. While significant energy still needs to be directed towards the situation in Kosovo, perhaps some of you readers have managed to free up some energy that you could devote toward improving the situation in Iraq, where the suffering is almost incomprehensible, and has been going on for more than eight years. The Iraq Action Coalition maintains an excellent and easy-to-read website. Visit it at: http://iraqaction.org/ Here is a quote from that site:
A petition campaign is underway to demand the lifting of the inhuman sanctions against Iraq. Please consider printing out the petition and sending in whatever signatures you can. Next collection date is July 4th. 5,000 Iraqi children are dying each month because of these sanctions. Please do what you can to call off your government. |
|
Here's my four-step process for learning things from the newspaper:
Editor's note: I always refer to newspapers, rather than television or radio, because that's the media I am addicted to. However, the same basic process applies to television, although the process is so much more difficult with television that my solution is simply to refrain from using that medium for the purpose of learning about the world. It's too hard to glean the truth from television, what with all those powerful pictures getting in the way. As far as radio, I think the degree of difficulty falls somewhere in between television and the papers. The Four Steps Explained 1. Learn the context elsewhere. No news story comes from nowhere. Any story you come across can only be properly understood if you have some working knowledge of the history which preceded it, the relationships between the people and institutions involved, the economics and culture of the community or nation in which it occurred, and so forth. This is what I mean by "context." Daily newspapers usually lack context, so they are really the worst places to educate yourself about an issue. That's not a knock on the hard-working reporters who toil away at the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) or at any other paper. It's an acknowledgment of the fact that the deadlines on a daily paper do not allow time for thoughtful reflection, nor space for the supplying of context. During a crisis is when I see this illustrated most clearly. Given the time crunch, reporters are forced to fall back on their own biases, intuition, and "common sense." All of these things - in particular common sense - are shaped in crucial ways by the background of the reporter - and the context in which he or she works. I discussed this point briefly in Nygaard Notes #24 ("The Context Club and Kosovo.") The point here is that you would be better off getting your background on an issue from something other than a daily publication. A weekly newsletter that you receive via E-mail, for example, is a much better place to start. Something like Nygaard Notes, perhaps. 2. Remember what you have previously read. This seems simple enough, but it never ceases to amaze me how often readers (and writers!) seem to forget information to which they have recently been exposed. Memory is necessary in order to be able to evaluate not only the truth of what is being read, but also the credibility of the writer. Depending on the background of the reporter, it may be less a matter of bad memory than of selective memory. 3. Think about what you are reading, and what you are not reading. Thinking is not easy to do, and I'm not trying to be snide when I say this. Real critical thinking is exhausting, and many people find it too exhausting to do on a consistent basis. Many people fail to see the rewards of all this thinking, too, and there are many good reasons why this is so. In order to think about what you are NOT reading (or hearing) you have to work really hard, because then you are going beyond simply reacting to what is put in front of you, and actually calling on your own inner resources. Our political culture actively discourages this, a point which I will develop in a future NN. No time here. 4. Synthesize. This is the part where you attempt to take the information that is given to you and make some sense out of it. This is a thinking skill, and involves asking such questions as: Where does this fit? Why am I reading this? Does this square with what I have heard about this subject previously? Who is telling me this, and why? Perhaps the most important question here is: Why do I care about this? If you don't care about it, you'll never do any work on it. A lot of what's in the media - need I say this? - is stuff that nobody really cares about. It is quite possible to read the newspaper - even about things you do care about - and learn nothing at all that is helpful to you. In fact, it's quite common to read the newspaper and become dangerously misinformed. For example, the Washington Post recently reported on a Bill Clinton speech as follows: "noting that the United States has about 4.5 percent of the world's population and 22 percent of its income, Clinton said the nation must sell its products to other nations to survive economically." There is no economic relationship between the two facts cited, and one could make the case that a strict protectionist policy, where U.S. goods were only sold to affluent U.S. purchasers, would be the best way to increase the wealth of our own citizens. The technical term for this sort of reporting is "nonsense." The Four Steps again, using other words, are: Don't rely on the daily papers for your introduction to any subject; actively use your memory; think about what you are reading and not reading, and; try to figure out how to make sense out of it all. |
|
Imagine the following situation: A small group of wealthy countries bombs a little poor country "back to the Stone Age," as reporters like to say. Afterwards, the richest of these countries get together and decide to tell the poor country that they (the rich) now get to tell the poor country how to run their economy and their government. And if the poor country doesn't like it, then the rich countries will not give them any money and the people in the poor country will just have to suffer their devastation far into the foreseeable future. Well, that's exactly the situation that we had in the past week, but I'll bet that most readers of the New York Times and the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) don't see it that way. Why not? Read on. I saw two versions of (almost) the same article in two different newspapers this past Monday, the New York Times and the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!). The two, rather bland, headlines read: "Reform Urged as Condition for Yugoslavia to Get Aid" (The Times) and "G-8 leaders detail plan for Balkan aid" (Star Trib). Bland headlines, perhaps, but what a lead paragraph! "Leaders of the seven wealthiest nations and Russia outlined a plan Sunday for ending eight years of war in the Balkans through a vast program of aid and political support, but they said Yugoslavia must undertake democratic and economic reforms to take part." The first thing you notice is the wimpy headline: Reform "Urged?" The article itself tells us that the rich countries "said Yugoslavia MUST undertake" the reforms. That's not exactly "urging." But, leaving that aside, what did the articles actually say? Step One: Learn the Context Elsewhere I read both articles, and then employed Step One: Learn the context. What is this "G-8" that just met in Germany? I meandered over to the website of the University of Toronto's G8 Information Centre, and they said that "The [annual G-8 Economic] Summit...gives direction to the international community by setting priorities, defining new issues, and providing guidance to established international organizations. At times it arrives at decisions that address pressing problems or shape international order more generally." It went on to say that "In recognition of its centrality in the process of global governance, the Summit since its inception has attracted the attention of thousands of journalists at each leaders' meeting, and of a number of countries seeking admittance to this exclusive and powerful club." The original seven countries were England, France, Germany, the U.S., Italy, Canada, and Japan. The 8th, recently added, is Russia, and I don't know exactly why. Probably because they have a big military. So, the G-8 is "an exclusive and powerful club" that "gives direction" to the world in order to "shape international order." That's part of the context for this article. Step Two: Remember what you have previously read "The wealthiest nations..." Now, where have I read that recently? Oh, yeah, in Nygaard Notes #32 ("The Oligarchy for Economic Cooperation and Development") In that issue, I talked about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is a group of 29 of the richest countries that meet regularly to plan how to run the world. Turns out that the G-8 is the "richest of the rich," with all the members (save oddball Russia) also being members of the OECD, as well as NATO. The G-8, therefore, as it is composed of the richest of the rich countries, could be thought of as a sort of "Executive Committee" of the international oligarchy, specifically of the OECD and the NATO bombmeisters. Step Three: Think about what you are reading, and what you are not reading Down in the body of the Star Trib's version of the article (but, oddly, not in the original NY Times article) I found the following paragraph: "A final communique stated [the G-8's] support for a number of important causes, including debt relief, lifelong education, more employment, a balance between social security and greater personal initiative, democracy in Nigeria and peace in the Middle East. But the main thrust of the discussions dealt with Kosovo." Yo! That's a pretty major paragraph, if you ask me. What a list! "Lifelong education." What does that mean? "Democracy in Nigeria?" How about East Timor, or NATO member Turkey? You'd think that, since the meeting attracted "thousands of journalists," we might get a little information about this list. In fact, how about a separate report on this "final communique?" Alas, despite the presence of "thousands of journalists," such a report is nowhere to be found in the mainstream, not in these parts anyway. As the founder of the Social Security Project of Minnesota (http://www.freespeech.org/sspm/) I was particularly interested in the part about Social Security. "A balance between social security and greater personal initiative" sounded like a veiled attack on the very idea of social security, which is based on the principle of collective support for all members of society, as opposed to "personal initiative." Through the magic of the Internet I went and looked up the actual text of this "final communique" to see what it really said about social security. Sure enough, it was an attack, albeit an attack in code. What it actually said was: "Social security policies, including social safety nets, must be strong enough to encourage and enable individuals to embrace global change and liberalization and to improve their chances on the labor market, while enhancing social cohesion. We recognize that faced with financial constraints, it is vital to strike a sustainable balance between social support programs and greater personal responsibility and initiative." Step 4: Synthesize It's a rare person who can read something like this and make sense out of it. Unless it's your job, or unless you are something of a fanatic like myself. Since I've been following the social security issue for a couple of years now, I think I understand it. Here's the Nygaard Notes translation: "Global capitalism is going to exploit people around the world to the max in order to make as much money for the oligarchy as possible. After the globalization steamroller flattens people, somebody is going to have to take minimal care of them, or else we're going to create the conditions for revolution, as we learned in the 1930s. That 'somebody' better be the public (i.e. governments), because it sure as heck isn't going to be the corporadoes who are doing the exploiting. Of course, providing security to people costs money, and the bosses don't want to even indirectly bear the costs of that through paying taxes, so let's try to put as much of the cost and risk of that security onto individual workers. In other words, let's privatize social security systems around the world whenever we can get away with it." I'll never get a job in the mainstream media with translations like this, I realize. The full 22 pages of this final communique turned out to be so interesting, and full of revealing quotes, that the next Nygaard Notes will publish some highlights for your reading pleasure. This is the kind of stuff that citizens should be seeing in our newspapers. In the meantime, you'll have to stick with Nygaard Notes. Tune in next week. |