| Number 38 | July 16, 1999 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Nygaard Notes seeks to give you information that will help you understand how the world works, and some motivation to work to change how the world works. I hope that's how you see it. In that spirit, I include a quote on rage in this edition because I hope it is obvious that a sense of rage motivates much of my writing. I don't apologize for it, although I realize that this sort of writing is not too popular these days. That's why I publish my own newsletter, after all. To allow oneself to engage in a futile striking out against the machine that brings on the rage is worse than useless; it's counterproductive if we want to change things. We need to keep our sense of humor and keep our thinking clear as we seek to change things for the better. Otherwise we run the risk of veering off into political nihilism or depressed resignation. I am sending out another Nygaard Notes Extra! this week, but for entirely different reasons than last week. Last week I just lacked the discipline to hold down my output to manageable proportions. This week there is an urgency attached to the defense of an old friend of mine, Sara Jane Olson. Please take the time to read it, as events are unfolding very quickly. Welcome to the new subscribers, and I look forward to next week when I talk about health care (and NOT the #%&@ Patient's Bill of Rights!) and the state of the world's poor. Until then, Nygaard |
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Headlines and Quotes of the Week, Month, Whatever Headlines of the Week (courtesy of the Iraq Action Coalition, http://iraqaction.org/):
Quote of the week:
Quote of the month (yes, I know it's my second Quote of the Month this month!):
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Many years ago I worked in a solidarity group called the Twin Cities Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa. We did fund-raising, rabble-rousing, and general consciousness-raising around issues of apartheid, the independence struggles in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Angola, Namibia (then Southwest Africa), and related issues. One of my colleagues at that time was a committed and hard-working woman named Sara Olson. Sara is currently in custody in California, with bail set at $1 million, on charges stemming from her involvement in the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the 1970s, when her name was Kathleen Soliah. As a separate E-mail (I know, I did this last week, too!) I am forwarding a notice about Sara's support committee and defense fund. I encourage you to donate time or money to help. For more information, read on. I have lost touch with Sara over the years; still, I have nothing but good memories of the friendship I had with her and her husband Fred in those days. Many friends of mine have maintained close relationships with Sara, and have now started the support committee I mentioned above, attempting to raise money to allow her to receive a fair trial. The SLA is alleged to have planted bombs in police cars in the mid-1970s. Sara is alleged to have been connected to that, and now prosecutors say that they want to connect her as well to a 1975 SLA bank robbery in which a woman was killed. Even the prosecutors admit that they have a pretty weak case, but that's not the point. Sara never spoke of her life in California, so none of her friends know any more about her story than what has been in the papers. Neither is that the point. The point is that Sara, like everyone else, deserves a fair trial. And the chance that she will get one has a lot to do with money and politics. Her support committee is attempting to raise the money, and I'll say a few words about the political context which leads me to recommend that you support them. Despite the admittedly weak legal case, the prosecutor in the case appears to be on a mission. There are reports that the prosecutor is the son of a member of the LA police department in the mid-70s, and so has a vendetta against Sara and the SLA, born in his childhood when his father would rant about the group at the dinner table. Whether that is true or not, those of you who remember those days will find it easy to understand how difficult it will be for Sara to receive a fair trial in California. California is a "tough on crime" state, the home of Ronald Reagan and "three-strikes-you're out" legislation. Despite the Constitution, it is increasingly the opinion of many Americans that an accused person is guilty until proven innocent. This is especially true in political cases, as Sara's case most certainly is. In the 1970s, the SLA was one of a number of small Trotskyist urban guerrilla groups that grew out of the 1960s civil rights/antiwar environment. I always liked the substance of the SLA's goals, although the rhetoric was as impossible for me to stomach then as it is now. (To read those goals, go to http://www.claykeck.com/patty/docs/slagoals.htm.) The nihilistic tactics of the SLA were counterproductive, in my opinion, and never had a chance of moving anything forward. They used to rob banks and attempt to kill police, tactics which guaranteed that their goals would never reach a wide audience, regardless of their content. The revolutionary idea of destroying oppressive institutions in order to allow revolutionary institutions to rise in their place, to which the SLA apparently subscribed, requires conditions that simply did not exist in the United States in the 1970s. Be that as it may, the SLA became famous when they kidnapped millionaire newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 (coincidentally, in 1976 I was living in the San Francisco neighborhood where Patty Hearst was arrested in a mistaken search for Kathy Soliah - small world.) Patty Hearst may end up being a witness in Sara's trial, even though nothing that she says can be believed. This entire digression is by way of saying that the mistaken tactics of targeting police in the 1970s have set up a situation in which it will be extremely difficult for Sara to get a fair trial in the 1990s. The police are big on symbols, and Sara has become one. The DA's office would love to have a conviction in this case. As with all high-profile cases, and especially political ones, the desire for a conviction overrides any concern for justice. What they want is to convict the symbol that is known as Kathleen Soliah. What the defense fund wants is to assure a fair trial for the human being known as Sara Jane Olson. The first thing you can do is come to the first of several planned fundraising parties, which will be held tomorrow night, Saturday, July 17, at 7 pm, hosted by Robert Brake at 1925 3rd Ave. N in Minneapolis (South of Glenwood Ave). There you can contribute some funds, have a good time, and speak to some friends of Sara Olson. See the separate E-mail for information on other events and ideas. |
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Anybody who lives in Minnesota has to know that the state has a large and growing "budget surplus." If you don't know it, you will in a few weeks when you get your special refund check of several hundred dollars in the mail. The "surplus" phenomenon is not limited to Minnesota; it's lots of states, maybe most of them, and everyone knows about the federal government and it's HUGE budget surplus which is supposedly being raided by the Social Security Trust Fund (Hahaha - I'll talk about this next week). I have mentioned before that the phenomenon that we know as "budget surpluses" could also be thought of as "undertaxing," or a "lack of will to serve the public." This would change the debate completely, as it would involve an acknowledgment that the state (or the feds) have a reasonable role to play in spending money for the public welfare. Seen in this light, the collection of taxes becomes a function of the public's right to receive services, rather than a "confiscation" of OUR money by "big government." This would be a more reasonable conception since, in the words of Seymour Martin Lipset in his book American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, "Even before Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, the United States had a lower rate of taxation, a less developed welfare state, and many fewer government-owned industries than other industrialized nations." That's even more true in the budget-balancing 90s than it was under Reagan, and it in part explains the dramatic and growing wealth gap in this country. With this in mind, consider two articles that appeared in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) in the past week (I'm sure readers in other states can find similar examples). The first article, titled "MnSCU tuitions set to rise" (Star Tribune, July 8th, 1999 p.1B) reported on the financial state of the public institutions that make up the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system. Why are tuitions set to rise? Well, it seems that MnSCU had submitted a budget request to the state legislature in the amount of $231 million. The legislature only gave them $104 million, or less than half of what they asked for. So, what is this article really saying? Minnesota, as I endlessly point out, has a moderately progressive tax system, in which the wealthy still pay proportionately more than the poor. This article tells us that the state is refusing to tax our relatively well-off population at a rate sufficiently high to fund our state colleges at a reasonable level. This policy of putting more of the financial burden onto individual students rather than the state has two predictable outcomes. The first is that fewer students can afford to go to college, making college even more of an elitist club than it is already (and this in an age when we are told that we live in a "knowledge economy" in which higher education is increasingly required to hold a decent job). Secondly, an investment in the overall education of our population, which only the government can make, not only benefits each student but also builds the strength of our aggregate economy by supplying the state with educated workers. So we all benefit. That's why this article fairly cries out for a Nygaard Notes alternative headline: "State colleges budget being cut despite huge surplus." The second article appeared just yesterday, on the front page of the Metro/State section. The headline read "Strapped Department of Natural Resources to close 20 campgrounds; Agency says a tight budget and staff shortages caused temporary closures at less-popular facilities." Besides the fact that I was pondering a camping trip to several of these "less-popular facilities" in the next month, this article provides more evidence of the consequences of our "huge budget surplus." I guess the thinking here is that I can use my $200 tax refund check next month to buy some land for myself to camp on, which would be more in the spirit of market forces, individual initiative and so on than having the state maintain these facilities. This is a sick joke, of course. The problem is that no one perceives it as a joke, and our tax "refunds" are in the mail. We can just recycle the above alternative headline here: "State Parks budget being cut despite huge surplus." What we have been taught to call a "budget surplus" is really an ideological construct, not an economic one. We are saying that individual control of our wealth (that is, "the free market") is superior to collective (that is, democratic) control . Along with many other non-elites around the globe, I disagree with this ideology. By way of pursuing this theme, next week I will talk about the recently released Human Development Report 1999, put out by the United Nations Development Programme. They say that free market globalization has brought about a "grotesque and dangerous polarization between people and countries benefitting from the system and those that are merely passive recipients of its effects." Imagine that. |