| Number 45 | September 10, 1999 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Greetings, I just realized that this is basically the one-year birthday of Nygaard Notes. Since we are only on issue #45, it seems a bit premature to celebrate. Still, considering that this thing started as sort of a combination of a writing exercise and a note to my friends, I’m happy to see that it is still around. As the real birthday (Issue #52) approaches, I will be unveiling some ideas for the evolution of this thing into...well, I can’t say yet, but stay tuned. Confession time: After saying just three weeks ago that I did not want to get my sales tax rebate (NN#42), I must report that I have already spent those ill-gotten gains. And I did not spend it on a Minnesota vacation, as the Governor wanted us to do, nor did I donate it to the building of a new sports stadium, which was the Governor’s other great idea. Ya see, our vacuum cleaner died and had to be replaced, then the cat had to go to the vet, then the car needed new tires, then my health insurance premiums went ‘way up, and....you get the picture. OK, I’m clean. On with the Notes. Nygaard |
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“[I]n recent weeks the United States has faced growing international weariness with the repeated bombing of Iraq. There was a sharp rebuke last week from the Foreign Ministry of France...” This contradictory quote - referring to both “weariness” and “a sharp rebuke” - appeared in the New York Times of August 25th, page A8. Perhaps the real quote of the week, to be filed in the “blaming the victim” category, should have been the headline of that article, which read: “U.S. Says Iraqis Were Killed By Their Own Artillery Fire.” |
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The situation in the small nation of East Timor is absolutely critical right now. For twenty-four years East Timor has been under brutal occupation by Indonesia. Unbelievable as it may sound, up to 1/3 of the nation’s population has been killed by the Indonesian army and paramilitary gangs during this period. Right now the United States can make the situation much better, or allow it to get much worse. During the Kosovo crisis, all we heard was that “We have to do something!” Well, we did something, and it made the entire situation worse. However, in the case of East Timor, there really are a couple of things that we “have to” do if we have any conscience as a nation. I urge you to read this and take some action. Last week, East Timor voted overwhelmingly to become an independent nation. 4 out of 5 voters cast their votes for independence in an election that saw a turnout of almost 99% of the people. Since then, raging pro-Indonesian paramilitary gangs have gone berserk, killing and terrorizing untold numbers of Timorese. Recent news reports say that the military itself is now participating directly, which increases fears of a repeat of the massive slaughter that followed Indonesia’s invasion in 1975. Two very simple actions by the United States government could interrupt this humanitarian disaster, and probably halt it entirely.
Here’s where you come in: Visit the Website of the East Timor Action Network and do what they tell you. (You can get news there, too.) Find it at: http://www.etan.org/do/whatdo.htm Do it now, as every day brings news of new atrocities. For those who are able, there will be a demonstration in support of Timorese independence TOMORROW, Saturday Sept 11 at noon, at the corner of Hennepin Avenue and Lagoon in Uptown Minneapolis (in front of the library). |
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The conventional thinking these days is that the people of the state and the nation are over-taxed and thus in need of something called “tax relief.” I have argued (NN #38, “What Is a Budget Surplus?”) that people in Minnesota, and in the United States as a whole, are actually under-taxed in relation to the needs that could be met by more reasonable funding of public programs. The evidence for this is reported quite frequently, but it’s essentially anecdotal, meaning that each individual case is reported as a story unto itself. The problem with such anecdotal reporting is that the reader often has a difficult time understanding the scope of the problem when confronted with such a diffused picture. It is very likely, as well, that many significant instances of under-funding are never reported at all, but that’s a separate problem. The Nygaard Notes response to this is to begin to publish the “Tax Cut Consequence of the Week.” That is one cumbersome title, but maybe I’ll think of a better one soon. In any case, the idea is to regularly point out the effects of the various budget cuts, failures to fund, chronic shortages, and so on in this paradoxical era of unprecedented prosperity accompanied by a mania for tax cuts. This feature may not appear literally every week, but in the weeks that I notice or track down something in this realm, I will make a brief report. This Week’s Consequence: The September 2nd Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) had a very good article on the front page of the Metro/State section, entitled “Emotionally troubled kids not getting help.” The lengthy but revealing sub-head said that “Ramsey County’s overburdened mental health system is putting kids on hold and delaying treatment, which could be a violation of the Children’s Mental Health Act.” The first paragraph makes the main point clearly: “Hundreds of emotionally disturbed children entitled to mental health services in Ramsey County are being denied assistance or are languishing on long waiting lists because of county budget constraints.” “It's nuts,” said Katherine Meyers, who heads a children's mental health advisory council for Ramsey County. “They're high-risk kids, kids you read about in the newspaper, kids that nobody wants to deal with. But these are children who are going to live in our society - if they stay out of jail.” The possible violation of the Mental Health Act is being investigated by the MN Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Minnesota Disability Law Center. The article contains a number of remarkable quotes. For example:
Not available? Why wouldn’t it be? Are we living in a Third World country, or what? No, it’s “Tax Cut Mania” again, as the article tells us two paragraphs later:
Consider that we live in one of the richest states in the richest country in the world, and that we are at the peak of one of the longest economic expansions in history. That will provide the context for the following quote, which was a strong candidate for Quote of the Week:
Message to kids: Don’t expect property owners to pay an extra fifty bucks a year in property taxes just so you can stay out of jail. I praise reporters Jean Hopfensberger and Mary Lynn Smith for filing this important story. This is what newspapers are supposed to do. Here is the very long Internet address that you can go to in order to read the full article: http://www.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisSlug=KID S02&date=02-Sep-1999&word=ramsey&word=county Late-breaking follow-up: The Star Trib reported yesterday that the Ramsey County board met and decided to increase funding by $1 million for “some of the county's neediest and most troubled children,” but that this funding will still be insufficient to “keep up with increasing demand for child protection and mental health services.” Even worse, the money to provide this insufficient increase “is likely to come at the expense of other social-service programs for elderly, disabled and low-income residents, county officials said.” Read this dismaying article at: http://www.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisSlug=RA M09&date=09-Sep-1999&word=ramsey&word=county |
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On the front page of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) this past Sunday, September 5th, appeared an article headlined “Early-start campaigns draw little voter notice.” I thought this was rather odd. Why not have the headline read: “Here’s an article about something you don’t care about.” Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened up the paper to find that the article in question took up almost an entire page of the newspaper (that’s a big article by daily newspaper standards). Plus, there were two accompanying articles about the same subject that we don’t care about. There was a big chart of “The presidential primary calendar,” the first one of which occurs in January. The Star Trib is a daily newspaper, meaning that there are only 143 days remaining for the paper to squeeze in this breaking news. Unfortunately, since this article appeared under a special little red- white-and-blue logo with the slogan “The early maneuvering,” it looks like we are going to get regular reports on the 2000 campaign despite the fact that, as the Star Trib puts it, “very few people are paying any attention.” In fact, I’ve seen a couple of articles since then with the same logo. The full-page spread came complete with a photo captioned “Political scientist Steven Schier says there’s too much coverage of the ‘silly season.’” So the Star Trib is providing us with coverage of the coverage, including the point that there is too much coverage. And now you’re even reading about it in Nygaard Notes! I love this stuff. |
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Cargill, Inc. this week gave the University of Minnesota $10 million to fund the new Microbial and Plant Genomics Institute on the St. Paul campus. Noting that the gift is the largest in the company’s history, Cargill CEO Warren Staley said that “It represents a unique opportunity for Cargill to help the University of Minnesota to become a world leader in microbial and plant genomics.” Cargill’s gift follows on the heels of a recent $10 million dollar gift to the University from the late Curt Carlson (see NN #39, “Curt Carlson and the Meaning of Generosity”). Despite the general jubilation reported in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) on the part of the recipients, these two gifts raise a few disturbing issues that are worth looking at. Self-Interested Philanthropy Cargill is a giant agribusiness company. Just as it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Mr. Carlson’s gift went to the Carlson School of Management, neither should it be shocking that Cargill’s gift is geared toward agribusiness research. The problem, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago in Nygaard Notes #43, (“Carl’s $13 Million and Jeff’s Thirty Bucks”), is that the power to bestow such large gifts is distributed unequally in our society. Therefore, although there is an unknown number of Minnesotans who would like to support the work of the Institute on Race & Poverty at the University of Minnesota, for example, the likelihood that any one of them (or any large number of them) could come up with a gift of anything like $10 million is small. (By the way, check out the Institute at http://www1.umn.edu/irp.) So what? you say. So, to the degree that our public institutions are dependent upon gifts and donations from the private sector, that is the degree to which the missions and functions of these institutions will reflect the interests of the class of people who can afford to make these gifts and donations. In the case of a public university, that likely means that we are going to have well-funded departments in areas like science, technology, and business, and under-funded departments in the arts and social sciences. A number of people on campus believe that this is in fact what we see already. No Strings Attached? The Star Trib, in its front-page article on the Cargill gift, reported the claims of Cargill CEO Staley and University President Mark Yudof that “Cargill’s gift is without ties or obligations.” Sure it is. I have often been in the room when newspaper editors and/or reporters vehemently deny that advertisers influence their reporting in any way. This statement, like the one about Cargill’s gift being no-strings-attached, falls into that odd category of statements that are simultaneously both true and false. True, in the sense that rarely if ever is there a direct order to alter content or style to please an advertiser or gift-giver. And false, in the sense that the financial support that a newspaper or a university needs will eventually dry up if the recipients don’t behave in the interests of those who are in a position to give that support. As the editor of the Star Trib recently admitted, this is the reason that the paper has a “Motoring” section and does not have, for example, a “Labor” section. (See NN #30, “A Talk With the Editor of the Star Tribune”). For those interested in learning more about the phenomenon of private dollars and their effects on higher education, you may want to take a look at a book entitled “Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia,” by former U of M Professor Lawrence Soley. A good short article on the subject, entitled “Degrees of Influence: The corporatization of higher education,” can be found online at http://www.sojourners.com/soj9901/990141d.html Local activist Drew Hempel can tell you lots more, and direct you to more sources of info on the Cargill/UofMN links. Contact him at hemp0027@tc.umn.edu |