Jeff Nygarrd is another one of my favorite journalist. He actually performs the duties that I feel a good journalist should. Research and analysis!!!!!!!!!!.............Please support Nygarrd Notes and help keep independent journalism alive. At least drop him an e-mail or sign up for Nygarrd Notes and let him know where you saw it. Thanks................PEACE..............Scott
Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and AnalysisNumber 351, October 27, 2006
On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/
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This Week: Five More Pledges Needed!
And... Collected "Quotes"
1. What They’re Saying About Nygaard Notes (What They’re REALLY Saying: Send Your Pledge Today!)
2. Fighting “Delusion Disease” With Nygaard Notes; An Essay on Freeing Our Minds
3. A Gallimaufry of “Quotes” of the Week! (Part 1)
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Thank you so much to those who have made pledges to Nygaard Notes during this Pledge Drive! And a special thanks to people who have taken the occasion of the Pledge Drive to renew their pledges, thus saving me the cost of printing and mailing their renewal reminder. Very thoughtful of you!
I would still like to get about five more NEW pledges before the end of this fall’s version of the Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive. Can we do it? I think we can. Send in your pledge—using a stamp or using the online PayPal system—today! Then we’ll be done with this Pledge Drive stuff.
Thankfully yours,
Nygaard
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1.
What They’re Saying About Nygaard Notes (What They’re REALLY Saying: Send Your Pledge Today!)
Just to inspire you to make a pledge of support for the Notes, here are some of the nice things that people have said about Nygaard Notes in the past few months.
“We Need More Jeffs”
A local activist sent out a note to his mailing list to encourage them to read my piece on the gay marriage amendment campaign here in Minnesota a few months ago. Among other things, he said:
“I am SO inspired to know and be around people like this! We definitely and desperately need more Jeffs in the world!”
Actually, what we need at the moment is for you to send in your financial pledge of support for THIS Jeff. That would be a great start!
“Moving Readers to New Depths”
A professor in Indiana is using some Nygaard Notes resources in his graduate Peace Studies seminar. In the course of his correspondence with me to get permission to do so, he said:
“You move readers to new depths. It’s a much needed task and I’m grateful to have been led to the Notes.”
For those of you who have already been led to the Notes: Please lead yourself to your checkbook and make out your 2006 Pledge of support!
“Not a Know-It-All”
A reader in Germany recently discovered the Notes (the miracle of the Internet!) and sent along the following, which is one of my favorites from recent months:
“Really very good, your Notes! No pathos, not this teacher’s ‘I-know-it-all’ finger up.”
It would be “really very good” if YOU made your pledge TODAY. You can go to the Nygaard Notes website, you know, and make your pledge online. Easy. Important. Thank you!
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2.
Fighting “Delusion Disease” With Nygaard Notes; An Essay on Freeing Our Minds
One of the issues I often talk about in Nygaard Notes is the complexity of how we all get our ideas about the world. What are the things that we consider important enough to pay taxes for? To work for? To kill and die for? I constantly check myself on these things, and I encourage my readers to check themselves, to see if they are abiding by my favorite slogan: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
A large part of the point of Nygaard Notes is to constantly remind people that we live in an Age of Propaganda. That is, we live in a time when there are enormous forces organized in our society solely for the purpose of getting us to believe certain things and disbelieve other things. When I say “forces” I am not talking about some general and vague “whatever.” I’m talking about specific social forces, using real people and real dollars to put out whatever message suits them. I’m talking, in part, about the “public relations” industry—$6 to $10 billion in scale—and also the massive amount of creative energy and resources that go into constructing the ideologies upon which the techniques of PR are based.
These forces include the actual PR companies, but also various spin doctors, political campaign managers, presidential press officers, the Office of Public Diplomacy, the Pentagon’s propaganda division, the covert propaganda operations of the so-called “intelligence” agencies (whose budgets are secret), and on and on.
Since we live in a culture saturated with Propaganda, it is inevitable that many people will end up with a bad case of what I call Delusion Disease. That is, many of us will end up having internalized a lot of crazy and dangerous (and untrue!) attitudes, beliefs, and conceptions about how the world works. This Delusion Disease makes us highly susceptible to Propaganda. I’d say it’s epidemic in the U.S. of A., and has been for a long time.
Three Ways to Treat Delusion Disease
‘Way back in Nygaard Notes Number 317 I made an analogy between how we deal with cancer in this society and how we deal with Delusion Disease. There are three basic ways to deal with any rampant disease, I said, and here they are:
THE FIRST WAY is “treatment.” This is the most INDIVIDUALISTIC and REACTIVE way to deal with disease. This way focuses on what to do about the disease after it appears. In other words, how can I, myself, as an individual, treat my “delusion disease” once I know that I have it? (And we all have it, to greater or lesser degrees.) In Bob Marley’s immortal words, how can we emancipate ourselves from mental slavery?
Nygaard Notes offers “treatment” in the form of offering alternative sources for information, and also by offering all sorts of tricks and techniques that you can then use to evaluate and interpret the various messages that bombard us every day. If you are a regular reader of Nygaard Notes, you will be better prepared to “question authority” when “authority” tries to get in your head with some form of Propaganda—whether the authority is media, or school, or your mom’s side of the family.
ANOTHER WAY to deal with Propaganda is “inoculation.” This is also INDIVIDUALISTIC, but it has the advantage of being PROACTIVE instead of REactive. Inoculation is aimed at preventing a disease from ever infecting you in the first place. If it works, you won’t need “treatment.”
Nygaard Notes helps readers inoculate themselves against Delusion Disease by modeling—and sometimes spelling out some of the steps involved in—a “re-education” process that calls into question much of what we have been taught and have internalized over a lifetime of living in a Propaganda-saturated culture. This can be a very lengthy, very challenging and very difficult process, as it involves no small amount of self-examination and honesty, and you’ll be swimming against some very strong cultural currents, as well. It’s also very exciting, and liberating, and well worth doing. If you read Nygaard Notes regularly, you’ll be happy to find that a lot of the “germs” that are carried by Propaganda will just bounce right off of you. Really!
Yet A THIRD WAY of dealing with Delusion Disease is SOCIAL and PROACTIVE, and that involves seeing oneself as a part of a larger social group—a community, a society, a planet—and asking “What can we do together to prevent ANYONE from getting this disease?”
We know that public health initiatives like sewage treatment and water filtration have prevented innumerable infectious diseases and deaths. In the same way, some radical changes in the ways we produce and distribute ideas and information—something like “information treatment”—could drastically reduce the incidence of Delusion Disease.
Now we are talking about social change, which is what Nygaard Notes is all about! One of the things that distinguishes Nygaard Notes from a lot of publications—and readers tell me this all the time—is that the Notes is optimistic, lacking in cynicism, not “preachy,” and not “depressing.” That’s no accident. It’s because Nygaard Notes constantly focuses on the core values of Solidarity, Justice, Compassion, and Democracy. I don’t judge other people, but I do judge the things they do, and I try to understand exactly why some things in the culture promote certain values and not others. Nygaard Notes is all about pursuing a vision of what could be, not about complaining about what is.
If you support this kind of “reality-based,” visionary writing, done by a plain old small-town guy from rural Minnesota who is willing to have you come along on his journey of discovery and change, then you might want to help make it possible for the project to continue and grow. The way to do that is to make a pledge of support to Nygaard Notes. Thank you!
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3.
A Gallimaufry of “Quotes” of the Week! (Part 1)
Before we begin, allow me to tell a little story of my high-school days. Somewhere in my senior year I took my turn, as all of us seniors were encouraged to do, at reading the “Daily Bulletin” over the school loudspeaker. Those of you who went to public schools in the U.S. probably had something similar. In our school the Daily Bulletin got read at the beginning of the day, and told students what’s for lunch, the time of this meeting or that meeting, the location for driver’s education class, and so forth. It was piped into every homeroom via a school-wide intercom system, so that everyone would know what was on the agenda for the day.
The Daily Bulletin was a terribly tedious and boring thing to endure, which made me decide to use my turn at the microphone to inject a little entertainment into the ritual. So, on my first day I read the script in my best Elmer Fudd voice. That got good reviews from my peers, so on the second day I imitated Lyndon Johnson (and pretty well, too, I thought: “My fellow students, I come to you with a heavy Bulletin...”)
The authorities were not amused, and ordered me to read the Bulletin using my “normal” voice. “The Daily Bulletin is meant to provide information, not entertainment,” I was told by our rather humorless vice-principal. I protested that one could provide both information AND entertainment, but this got me nowhere, so on my third day of reading the Bulletin I impersonated the vice-principal. And that was the end of that.
In that spirit, the next couple of weeks in Nygaard Notes will be will be a potpourri, a festival, a cornucopia—a gallimaufry, if you will!—of various odds-‘n-ends, tidbits, and sundry news items from the past couple of months that I have neglected and that you may have missed, or that you may have seen but failed to sufficiently appreciate. Information, certainly. But also, I hope, a little bit of entertainment. They’re not mutually exclusive, y’know. This week, money, money, and money are the subjects.
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U.S. Higher Education: “Stalled.” Or “Going Backwards.” Take Your Pick
On October 4th the New York Times reported (on page 24) that “The United States, long the world leader in higher education, has fallen behind other nations in its college enrollment and completion rates, as the affordability of American colleges and universities has declined, according to a new report” from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCPPHE).
The bottom line: “Over all, the report said, while other nations have significantly improved and expanded their higher education systems, the United States' higher education performance has stalled since the early 1990's.”
The article notes that “for most American families, college is becoming increasingly unaffordable. While federal Pell grants for low-income students covered 70 percent of the cost of a year at a four-year public university in the 1990's, [NCPPHE president Patrick M.] Callan said, that has dropped to less than half.” Callan added:
“It's going backwards. Tuition is going up faster than family income, faster than inflation, faster even than health care.”
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Consider a Major In Thought Policing; That’s Where the Money Is
‘Way back on page 24 of the October 4th New York Times ran a story headlined “Software Being Developed To Monitor Opinions of U.S.” It seems that the U.S. government has awarded $2.4 million to “a consortium of major universities” to “develop software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.”
Well into the article we hear from Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who simply says of the program:
“It is just creepy and Orwellian.”
Better watch out, Lucy. You never know where your “negative opinion” might land you.
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That’s Not the ONLY Place the Money Is
And in the September 21st NY Times the headline read: “G.O.P. Gains Big Fund-Raising Advantage.” The gist of it was that “new fund-raising reports show that at the beginning of September, Republicans had $39 million in the bank, compared with $11 million for Democrats.”
Here’s my favorite line from the article: “Republicans concede that fund-raising, at least by the Republican National Committee, is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise frustrating political season.” It’s frustrating, no doubt, since it occasionally touches on the issues, as opposed to vague appeals to voters’ fears. Not too often, but too often for the fund-raising champs.
In case anyone is feeling confident that the Republicans will be thrown out of office on November 7th, consider the words of Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who remarked on where some of that money is going: “We've been building our turnout operation since 2005.”
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1. A Gallimaufry of “Quotes” of the Week! (Part 2)
2. Election 2006: A Word About Voting
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Greetings,
The Autumn 2006 Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive is over! Thank you to the new pledgers. I not only appreciate the financial support, but so many of you sent along with your pledge some very encouraging words of support for what this project is trying to do. Amazing! And a special thanks to the many of you who increased your existing pledges, or sent them in early, thus saving me a stamp or two. As I so often tell you, I literally could not do this without your help. What kind of a community can support—even part-time!—an independent, working-class intellectual who serves as a volunteer resource for the larger community? An amazing community, that’s what kind!
For those who didn’t bother to look it up when you saw the headline last week—A Gallimaufry of “Quotes” of the Week! (Part 1)—here is what “gallimaufry” means: “a hodgepodge; jumble; confused medley.” It’s just such an odd word I had to throw it in there! Plus, it’s quite accurate in this case... Part II is this week, and we’ll see if there’s a Part III after that. It’s kind of fun, and I’ve got lots more notes to build on. This stuff never ends, really... We’ll see.
Thanks again to everyone who helped make the Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive of Autumn 2006 a success!
Gratefully yours,
Nygaard
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1.
A Gallimaufry of “Quotes” of the Week! (Part 2)
“Character Counts”
On October 20th my local paper ran a story headlined “President Bush Campaigns for Two Struggling GOP Candidates.” Here’s the lead paragraph of that story from the Cox News Service:
“President Bush, who designated this week as ‘National Character Counts Week,’ put his full faith and fundraising ability yesterday behind two embattled GOP incumbents whose campaigns have been sidetracked by apologies for infidelity and an ethnic slur.”
The article doesn’t say how much cash the Prez raised for Pennsylvania Rep. Don Sherwood, but he “raised $500,000 for [Virginia Sen. George] Allen's campaign.”
Maybe, instead of “Character Counts,” the slogan could be “These Characters Know How to Count (Their Campaign Contributions).”
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Concerned About AIDS? Take Your Tax Cut and Buy a “Red” Dress
Perhaps some of you have noticed a new advertising campaign for “Red.” That campaign is advertising a new line of products from companies like GAP, Armani Exchange and Motorola, the sale of which supposedly “aims to raise money to help fight AIDS in Africa.”
If you didn’t read the article in the October 4th New York Times you wouldn’t know that “Those companies, along with Converse and American Express, created the new products, which bear the brand name Red and are to begin appearing in stores this month. The companies are committed to selling the products for at least five years, and plan to donate part of their profits to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.”
Part of their profits? Sure! Ron G. Garriques, president of mobile devices at Motorola, says, “I don't believe it's giving up profit. What I believe it is, is making more profit.”
The campaign was created by the musician Bono and Bobby Shriver, “a California politician and member of the Kennedy family,” who was speaking about GAP when he said, “we want them to make money. We don't want anyone to be thinking, ‘I'm not making money on this thing,’ because then we failed. We want people buying houses in the Hamptons based on this because, if that happens, this thing is sustainable.”
The Times then quoted Tommy G. Thompson, the former secretary of health and human services and current honorary chairman of the Global Fund, who said,
“The reason the private sector's got to be involved is there's just not enough money coming in from the government. This is a huge thing and the demand and the need is so great that we just don't have enough money coming in from the governments to do it.”
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“Strategic Importance” vs Democracy. (Guess Who Wins)
Here’s a front-page story for you: “Balancing Act: U.S. Welcomes Kazakh Leader.” That was the front page of the September 28th New York Times. It seems that “President” Bush was “preparing to receive the Kazakh president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, at a state dinner in Washington” the next day. But, as the Times comments, there is a “delicate balance the administration has struck with a country of growing strategic importance that has a record of corruption, flawed elections and rights violations, including the killings of two opposition leaders in the last year in disputed circumstances.”
To its credit, the Times mentioned some unnamed “critics” who say that all of this “illustrates the Bush administration's willingness to sacrifice democracy, a centerpiece of its foreign policy, when it conflicts with other foreign policy goals.”
Indeed, as a spokesman for a human rights group in Kazakhstan put it,
“There are four enemies of human rights: oil, gas, the war on terror and geopolitical considerations. And we have all four.”
Hmm... So does Iraq. And Iran. And Venezuela. And Indonesia. And Libya. And....
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Fearful People in the United States
The “willingness to sacrifice democracy” mentioned above seems to be out of sight of the average United Statesian, as evidenced by a thought-provoking piece that my local paper the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) ran on September 11th. Called “Reflections,” the piece was introduced thusly: “A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, a Pew Research Center survey showed half of all Americans felt that the attack changed their lives. Now, five years later, we asked readers to share their thoughts about that day.”
Here’s one response, from one Kimberly Lang, who lives in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis called Minnetonka. She said:
“Five years after the attack on America... I still search for a reason why. When I look at all of the humanitarian undertakings we as a country perform in all parts of the world, I have difficulty understanding why Americans have a bad reputation.”
Maybe she should visit Kazakhstan.
And here’s a “reflection” from another terrorized United Statesian, from a middle-class suburb north of Minneapolis:
“Diplomatic relations should be terminated, deport all non-citizens, any and all U.S. troops withdrawn and all financial and commodity aid stopped with ANY country remotely considered to be a threat to our nation and its citizens. Our freedoms have permitted this atrocity to be played out on our soil. Let's not have this happen again. Ever.”
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Fearful People In Afghanistan
On September 20th the New York Times ran an opinion piece by one Joel Hafvenstein, described as “an international development consultant.” His piece, entitled “Afghanistan's Drug Habit,” spoke of how the rampant crime and street-level violence in today’s Afghanistan is creating conditions for the return of the Taliban, or any government that can restore order. He closed with this amazing paragraph:
“Security was the Taliban's main selling point when it took control of the country in the 1990's; it could be again.”
What he is saying is that, if people are freaked-out enough about threats to their lives and those of their loved ones—in other words, sufficiently terrorized—an authoritarian, or even dictatorial, government that promises “security” may begin to seem attractive.
That’s why it will be so interesting to see the choices that terrorized United Statesians make in next week’s elections.
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“The Big Leagues of Philanthropy”
Right here in Minnesota we have been observing the downfall of one William McGuire, who had been the chief executive officer of UnitedHealth Group Inc. McGuire, “one of the wealthiest executives in the country,” earned a salary of $2.2 million in 2005, in addition to which he had accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion as of April of this year.
Apparently that wasn’t enough, because the news came out in September that McGuire may face civil and criminal charges for raking in something like $333 million from stock options that might have been backdated to raise their value. This is, as Fortune Magazine put it in a recent issue “stealing, pure and simple.”
McGuire and his wife have used some of the stolen money to donate “nearly $100 million to charities, schools and the arts,” according to the Star Tribune, adding that this “puts them into the big leagues of local philanthropists.” Scandal or no scandal, the upscale Walker Art Center announced that it has “given no thought to changing the name of its McGuire Theater.”
The practice of backdating stock options is, apparently, quite widespread among the jet-setting crowd: Bloomberg News reports that “At least 144 companies are conducting internal investigations or are subject to government probes” into the way they grant stock options.
I’m not sure exactly why McGuire got caught, but it’s interesting to note how “one of the most powerful figures in American health care” is being remembered in light of being fired by the UnitedHealth board and possibly ending up in jail. A hint of how serious his company takes the charges is the fact that they plan to pay him an annual pension of “about $5 million per year.”
Another hint of how such white-collar criminals are thought of was found in a business column in the local paper of October 17th, headlined “A visionary CEO stumbled over his stock options...” The column quoted a local “investment manager” who reminded us that “This is a man who's been an outstanding leader in the health care industry and this community.” Adds an academic expert cited by the newspaper: “His reputation as a businessman is still fairly high.”
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2.
Election 2006: A Word About Voting
As I pointed out in Nygaard Notes # 189 (“The Two Types of Government”), government really operates on two levels: What I call the Business Government is the one that serves the interest of the powerful, taking various actions to help the winners win, and to keep the losers out of the way. What I call the Popular Government is the one that enacts and carries out the various laws and programs that many workers and poor people benefit from and depend on, such as Social Security, workers’ compensation, Medicaid, public transit, environmental and workplace regulations, public health initiatives, the National Weather Service, nursing home safety standards, public health laws—among many others.
My point is that, while it could and should do a lot more, government—as it actually is, right now—does do some things that make a positive difference in people’s lives. And the outcome of next week’s election, like any election, could either make things better or make things worse for some people. Maybe you. Certainly me.
People working for social change always need to think strategically. One of the things we need to think about is whether or not it makes any difference if one “major” party or another is in power in Washington. I think, at the moment, it does. There’s one (unnamed) party which doesn’t plan to do much to move us forward, it’s true. But there’s another (unnamed) party which seems pretty intent on moving us backward. Which party is in power, therefore, will have an effect on how much of their time and energy organizers and activists will have to spend taking defensive action in the next couple of years (“Don’t let them privatize Social Security!” “No more cuts to Medicaid!” etc.) All the energy spent taking those defensive actions is energy not being spent organizing to move us forward.
So, as November 7th approaches, here are four points that I think Nygaard Notes readers would do well to consider:
1. When the upcoming election is over, the United States Congress is going to be composed—like it or not—almost entirely of people who call themselves Republicans and Democrats.
2. Neither of these parties is prepared to initiate anything like the big changes we need to keep us—ALL of us—safe, healthy, and prosperous, let alone the changes we need to preserve life on the planet.
3. Having said that, we need to ask ourselves if the leadership of one party is more intent on dismantling the Popular Government—and limiting the power of people to stop them—than the leadership of the other party.
I can hear my third-party friends yelling at me already, so here’s a postscript: There are good arguments to be made for voting for so-called “third” party candidates, and I wouldn’t argue against anyone planning to do that. The question to ask is: Will more or less votes for a “third party” right now—remember, they won’t take power—be more useful in helping to build an effective social-change movement than getting rid of the Republican power monopoly?
These are all things to think about as you prepare to vote. And I hope you ARE preparing to vote, if you are able.
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If you have received this issue of Nygaard Notes from a friend, or by accident, or through some other bizarre quirk of inexplicable fate which leaves you with no useful return address, be aware that you can receive your own free subscription by asking for it in an E-mail sent to Nygaard Notes at
I would like to continue to provide this service for free. You could help by making a voluntary contribution (anything you can afford, whether $5.00 or $500.00) You can donate online by going to the Nygaard Notes website at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/ Then just get out your credit card and follow the instructions. Of course, you can always just send a good old check through the mail. Make checks payable to “Nygaard Notes” and send to: Nygaard Notes, P.O. Box 14354, Minneapolis, MN 55414. Thank you!
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Jeff Nygaard
National Writers Union
Twin Cities Local #13 UAW
Nygaard Notes
http://www.nygaardnotes.org
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