| Number 80 | July 28, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, In last week's issue I promised that this week I would bring you news on "The International Criminal Court, the local Ford Plant, Drugs! Race! Money! And more!" Well, you'll have to settle for Corporate Crime, Labor Victory, Child Poverty, and more!, since I once again ran out of room. ("Nygaard Notes Daily," anyone?) Next week I really will talk about Race, Drugs, Money, and Crime. As Bullwinkle the Moose used to say: "This time for sure!" On a serious note, I plan to address the lack of time (and, indirectly, space) in the next couple of weeks, with a special edition that will ask for your help. Keep your eyes peeled. Also coming next week: I announce the winners of the free Z Magazine subscriptions. I much appreciate the comments that people sent along with their entries. I appreciate the positive comments, and apologize in advance for my inability to address in print all of the great suggestions that people sent along with their entries. Refer to the above-mentioned problem with lack of space for the relevant excuse. OK, gotta take this edition to the printer. Next week, y'all, Nygaard |
-- John McMurtry, from a 1996 article "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism," recently published as a book with the same name. Thanks to David Shove for sending the article along. |
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I recently mentioned a group called the Women's Prison Book Project (WPBP). This is a remarkable group of local women who, since 1994, have been making free reading materials available to women in prison. As I mentioned in Nygaard Notes #69, women in prison face a whole set of unique challenges, on top of the many challenges faced by anyone who is locked up by our punitive and racist prison-industrial complex. By focusing on the particular needs of women in prison, WPBP meets a need that few other groups around the country, to my knowledge, are meeting. Now, at long last, WPBP has their own website, and it's a good one. Go check it out for information on how to volunteer, how to donate books (and what kinds are needed), and to find out more about the project. They also post their informative newsletter on the site. If you want to open your heart, and receive some positive motivation to help with the project, go to the website right now – http://www.prisonactivist.org/wpbp/Default.htm – and read "Letter from Another World." |
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As a result of a "breathtakingly quick" organizing drive, the largely Spanish-speaking meatpackers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul voted overwhelmingly on July 21st to become unionized. At stake was workplace safety and respect for injured workers. In addition, wages at the plant are a miserly $8.50 to $9.00 per hour. After spontaneously shutting down the Dakota plant in protest on June 1st, the workers approached Local 789 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to represent them. Three weeks later, 60% of the workers voted in favor of the union. This is noteworthy for several reasons. For one thing, unions haven't won many elections in Minnesota this year (only one of eight elections involving 100 or more workers). Plus, it was only a few months ago that eight Mexican workers at the Minneapolis Holiday Inn Express won the right to stay in the country after the Holiday Inn called the Immigration and Naturalization Service in retaliation for the workers having the NERVE to attempt to organize a union. That was big news, and the workers' victory, limited though it was, gave hope to many workers throughout the country. Possibly including the workers at Dakota Premium Foods. One might think that the nervy effort of these immigrant workers, coming as it did on the heels of the much-publicized ordeal of the Holiday Inn workers, might merit at least a mention in the Star Tribune. After all, they do call themselves the "Newspaper of the Twin Cities." I believe that Twin Cities workers of all nationalities might be interested in hearing about the labor solidarity shown by leaders of Local 789, who said upon being approached by the immigrant workers "we don't care about green cards; we care about union cards." This should have been on the front page of the Labor Section of the Star Trib. OOPS! There is no Labor Section, only a Business Section. No room in there for news like this. The daily St. Paul paper, the Pioneer Press, did a little better: although they said not a word about the struggle before the vote, they did at least have a report on the election results in the July 22nd edition. In the United States, winning a union election is just the first step. Actually getting a fair contract (or any contract!) can be a long, and often unsuccessful, battle. To learn more about how the workers are doing since the vote, check out the UFCW's website at www.ufcw789.org/newsupdate.htm or call Jennifer or Francisco at 651-451-6240. I myself learned about the vote by reading the Union Advocate, the excellent bi-weekly out of St. Paul. Call 651-227-0106 for subscription information. |
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As part of his ongoing attempt to dismantle the Social Security program, Minnesota Senator Rod Grams brought a special guest to town on July 6th. The visit was faithfully reported by the Star Trib in an article entitled "Chilean Brings Support for Private Social Security System at Grams' Invitation." The name of that Chilean guest is Jose Piñera, whom the Strib describes as "the architect of Chile's highly touted and much copied privatized pension program." True enough, I guess; Chile's system certainly is "touted" by right-wing ideologues the world over, and several countries have "copied" Chile's system. But the rest of the article is almost surreal in the picture it paints of the Chilean reality. While reporter Eric Black identifies Mr. Piñera as "a member of Chile's cabinet under the regime of former dictator Augusto Pinochet," he doesn't seem to have any problems with that fact. Instead, Piñera is credited with "convert[ing] a corrupt, struggling pay-as-you-go pension system into millions of private accounts that he said have earned Chileans average annual returns of 11 percent above inflation." This is the Chile of Rod Grams' dreams. In an article entitled "Retiring the Chilean Myth: Privatized Pensions Bring Social Insecurity," labor journalist Fred Solowey has reported that "Piñera credits the Chilean pension model with producing just about everything short of the second coming of Christ." Which appears to be exactly what he did in his visit to Minnesota. Reporter Black does point out that "Critics have said Chile is so different that its experience cannot be applied to the United States." Our lack of a dictatorship to impose such a system would be one of the main differences, I suppose. To even repeat the overblown and unsubstantiated claims of this discredited ideologue gives them an undeserved patina of respectability so, unlike the Star Tribune, I will not do so. I'll just repeat what I have written elsewhere: "The ‘private' Chilean system fails to match the United States' system of Social Security on six [major] counts: it offers no guarantees; it does not protect against poverty; the costs and the risks are unevenly distributed among the population; it is inefficient; it is a drain on the public treasury; and it assumes and promotes anti-social values." To run Piñera's wild claims to the contrary, even with the numerous disclaimers sprinkled throughout the article, is irresponsible journalism. Before publishing his account of Piñera's visit, reporter Black should have visited our "other" website, the Social Security Project of Minnesota (www.freespeech.org/sspm) and checked out the section on Chile. |
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On the front page of the "Variety" Section of the Star Tribune, which is the section with the comics, TV listings, and the crossword puzzle, there is a section that appears every day on the border of the front page called "FYI" ("For Your Information?") where you find little paragraphs on such subjects as "Famous Driveways," "Picnic Smarts," and "Libraries Feel Demand for Harry Potter." Imagine my surprise on July 1st when I spotted an "FYI" item entitled "Covert Copies." This was a report from the New York Times documenting a mid-60s plot between Xerox and the CIA to install "tiny movie cameras" inside Xerox copy machines that were rented to the Soviet Embassy. According to the article, "every time a document was copied, the camera would snap enough frames to film the entire document. The device was installed by a Xerox maintenance man who was paid by the CIA. During maintenance visits, he would pick up the exposed film and insert new rolls. This technique was so successful, says the magazine [conservative weekly U.S News and World Report, where the story was recently published], that it was broadened to include many embassies, including those of ‘friendly' countries." Why is this article appearing now, thirty-five years later? The report doesn't say, but 30 years or so is a fairly typical schedule for declassification of secret government documents. Who knows? What the article does say is that, old news or not, "Xerox has refused to confirm or deny the story." That's why we have journalists, I guess. Besides being evidence of odd "news judgement," the placement of this story in the Variety section has a more serious meaning. In the age of the Internet, newspapers and magazines make their archives available largely through the use of computer databases. Most items in the Variety Section (and certainly in the FYI section) are deemed unsuitable for cataloguing. Thus, if an item is only mentioned in sections like these, journalists of today and historians of the future will find no references if they search Minnesota's "Newspaper of Record" for mention of Xerox, the CIA, or espionage. |
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Also in the Variety Section of the Star Tribune (which locals affectionately refer to as the "Strib") was found on July 24th a story from the Newhouse News Service entitled, "Everyone Pays When Children Are Born Into Poverty." Why this noteworthy article was buried in Variety, page 3, next to the movie listings, is a mystery to me. The Variety section used to be called the "Women's" section. Maybe somebody thinks that only women care about child poverty? We can only speculate. For those who (understandably) missed it, the article makes the point that the United States' neglect of its children is costly and shortsighted, for "moral, economic, and personal" reasons. Reporter Maurice Elias points out that, for many years "we have known that poverty and poor health early in life create tremendous burdens for children to overcome," and that these burdens impose costs on society in the health care, education, and criminal justice systems. To address these needs, Elias says, "We all pay, and we all pay a great deal." The last four paragraphs of this brief article bear quoting in full:
The United Nations has estimated that it would cost the world $40 billion a year to "provide basic sanitation and drinking water safety, basic nutritional needs, basic health care and significant education" for every child in the world that needs it. Current projections are for the United States alone to have federal budget surpluses averaging $217 billion every year for the next ten years. Many thanks to Maurice Elias for producing such an important article on child poverty. And thanks to the Star Tribune for publishing it, although it never should have ended up in the Variety Section. |