| Number 55 | January 21, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Welcome to our many new readers this week! The feature articles for this edition build on the feature last week, so if you would like to see that one, just contact me and I’ll send it along. One of these days we’ll have a website for things like this... I really appreciate all of the nice things that readers have been saying to me. You don’t know how much it means to me. Several readers contacted me this past week for help with academic, work- related, and political issues. I was glad to help, and am very happy that Nygaard Notes can be useful in this way. I hope to see some of you at the universal health care conference next week (Item #2). I hope to have a few words to say about it, and about health care in general. There’s a lot going on. Until then, Nygaard |
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“The winners increasingly are less interested in public goods that support everybody and more interested in segregating themselves from social problems which they will never experience.” Economist Timothy J. Smeeding of Syracuse University, on why the growing gap between the rich and poor is a problem. |
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Minnesota COACT will sponsor a state-wide Education Conference on the Minnesota Universal Health Care Bill at the State Office Building in the Basement Conference Room on January 27th, 2000 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. The public is invited to attend. For more information, please contact Paula Fynboh at 651-645-3733. You are encouraged to call your legislators and urge them to take part in this important Single-Payer Education Conference. I am happy to pass on the above notice from the MN COACT website at www.coact.org. It would be great to have a high turnout to support the idea of universal health care. Come hear about the “Minnesota Universal, Single-payer Health Care Bill,” among other things. Maybe I’ll see you there! |
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Last week I promised more information on how to get active on Colombia. One of the immediate things that anyone can do to prevent the U.S. from immeasurably increasing the suffering in that country is to sign on, as an individual or as an organization, to the following statement put together by activists on the issue:
You can find out how to sign on by calling or E-mailing the CISPES Anti-War Committee. They are one of the groups gathering support for the above statement. Call them at 612-872- 0944, or E-mail them at: tccispes@hotmail.com Their website is www.angelfire.com/mn/cispes The Anti-War Committee sponsored a meeting this week with staff people from the offices of our two Minnesota Senators, Grams and Wellstone, as well as someone from the office of Minnesota Representative Jim Ramstad. Perhaps the most disturbing statement at that meeting was made by Merna Pease, State Director of Senator Grams’ office. Speaking of President Clinton’s request for $1.6 billion in deadly “aid” to Colombia, Ms. Pease stated that it was the Senator’s sense of the Congress right now that “nobody is really against the Clinton aid plan.” All of the aides at the meeting shared the opinion that “the American people” don’t know anything about Colombia, which explains why our elected officials aren’t hearing much on the issue. This despite the fact that Colombia is the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere, is the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world, and has graduated more soldiers from the infamous U.S.-run “School of the Americas” than any other Latin country. The aides are probably right, though. I doubt many U.S. citizens know much about what their tax dollars are doing in Colombia. In the absence of a groundswell of public opposition to Clinton’s murderous aid proposal, the Congress will undoubtedly approve all or most of what they have been asked for, since “balancing the budget” only applies to programs that serve our citizens, not to those that serve the military. According to Ms. Pease, “the question right now is not so much ‘if,’ but ‘how much’ aid will be approved” for Colombia. If she is right, and if we don’t want another 80s-style Latin American human rights disaster on our hands - paid for with our tax dollars! - then we definitely have our work cut out for us. Hearings on the package will likely begin within a couple of weeks. Many readers may wish to become a little more knowledgeable on the issue before calling or writing their elected officials in Washington. On-line people can go to the website of the Colombia Support Network at http://www.igc.apc.org/csn/. For those getting the paper version of Nygaard Notes, you can write or call CSN at PO Box 1505, Madison, WI 53701; (608) 257-8753. Or write to me. In any case, please do what you can. |
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Last week I published several quotes from presidential candidate George W. Bush to the effect that he didn’t know or refused to acknowledge that there were people in Texas suffering from hunger. I left out one great quote, though, in which Mr. Bush challenged the authors of the report, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to tell him where the heck he might find those hungry people in Texas. Said Mr. Bush, “I want to know the facts. I would like for the Department of Agriculture to show who, where they are, and we’ll respond.” I don’t think it’s the job of the USDA to tell the Governor where the hungry people are in his own state, even if they had the time and the funding to do so. But I’m happy to do it. Hey, Mr. Bush! Since there is a strong correlation between poverty and hunger, maybe you should check out Starr County, Texas, where the your own Texas Health and Human Services Commission reports that over 45% of the population is living in poverty. Or you could head over to Maverick, Zavala, Willacy, or Dimmit Counties; more than 40% of the people in all of those counties live in poverty, by your own administration’s count. In fact, since your state as a whole recently ranked 11th-highest among states in percent of the population in poverty (at 17.4%) while you- all ranked 47th in per capita AFDC (welfare) payments, you could probably just walk out of the Governor’s residence and go a mile in any direction and find some hunger, if you cared to. So quit bugging the USDA! And since the number of Texans receiving food stamps has dropped by 50% since you became Governor in 1995, maybe you could “respond” first of all by restoring some of the cuts that have occurred under your administration. OK, enough on Mr. Bush. For those readers interested in getting more information about the state of affairs in Texas (which is by far the best way to predict the state of affairs in the country under a Bush administration), I recommend you contact the Center for Public Policy Priorities, the Texas-based non-profit public policy organization I quoted last week. They have lots of information on hunger and poverty in the state. They have a website at http://www.cppp.org/ or you can contact them by mail at: Center for Public Policy Priorities, 900 Lydia St., Austin, TX 78702, or by phone at (512)-320-0222. I still don’t think we’ve established conclusively whether Mr. Bush is consciously lying on this issue or is just willfully ignorant of the reality of hunger. But, really, what’s the difference? |