| Number 406 | May 13, 2008 |
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This Week: Hunger and Profits, and Reflecting on Mothers' Day
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Greetings, In the past couple of months Nygaard Notes has been coming out less frequently than usual. It's simply because I have been too busy, and I'll explain why in the next issue of the Notes. It is my intention that this week, which is mostly a reprint from an earlier Nygaard Notes, will mark a return to the more-frequent publication schedule to which all of you faithful readers have become accustomed. There's lots to talk about, that's certainly not the problem! The reason that this issue contains this particular reprint is that I heard a story about Mother's Day on National Public Radio's Morning Edition on May 11th. It was actually an Associated Press story that NPR recorded and broadcast but, in any case, they got it all wrong. They said it was the 100th anniversary of the holiday, for example, and it's not, really, except in a very peculiar way. Since I had published a different and, I think, more accurate version five years ago, I thought it would be good to reprint it for the 2008 occasion. Happy Belated Mothers' Day! Nygaard |
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The following astonishing "Quote" is an excerpt from a CBS
News Transcript of the April 27th edition of the television show 60
Minutes. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was speaking with Lesley
Stahl about the Constitution's prohibition of "cruel and unusual
punishment." We'll pick it up with Stahl asking the Justice, |
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The story of food riots has recently been all over the news, all over the world. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 5th that "tens of thousands of people rioted over high food prices in Somalia's capital Monday." The international press service Agence France Press reports that "food costs also sparked riots last month in Egypt and Haiti as well as protests in other countries and restrictions on food exports in Brazil, Vietnam, India and Egypt." And the Nation newspaper of Kenya led off a May 4th story by saying, "The rising price of food is sending shivers down the spines of many world leaders who are aware that the skyrocketing prices have the potential effect of causing a ‘real economic and humanitarian tsunami in developing countries.'" It's clear that there are many losers in this time of rising food costs, and the media is telling us about them, as it should. However, in a competitive world economy, losers are never present without winners, and we're hearing a lot less about those who are "winning" in this time of increased starvation. Among the "winners" at the moment are the large grain companies. Here's a headline from the Associated Press (AP) of April 30th: "Grain Companies' Profits Soar as Global Food Crisis Mounts." The headline in the London Independent of May 4th was more descriptive: "Multinationals Make Billions in Profit out of Growing Global Food Crisis; Speculators Blamed for Driving up Price of Basic Foods as 100 Million Face Severe Hunger." Here in Minneapolis we have the world headquarters of not only Nygaard
Notes, but also one of the largest of the large grain companies: Cargill
Incorporated. Cargill is the second largest privately held corporation
in the United States, and the world's largest agribusiness company by
sales. The local newspaper, the Star Tribune, had an article in the
April 15th Business Section with the ungainly headline, "At $471,611
an Hour, Cargill Posts Fine Quarter; the Company Broke the $1 Billion
Mark on Profit amid Global Food Shortages and Growing Energy Demands." In its Policy Brief #13 of March 2008 the excellent group Food First! explains how this works: "Because corporations like ... Cargill both buy and sell grain, they stand to gain from either low or high prices. When grain prices drop, they buy. Because of their market power they can withhold grain from the market—hoarding supplies until the price goes up again. When grain prices rise, they sell." Or, as Brewster Kneen puts it in his book Invisible Giant: Cargill and Its Transnational Strategies, "Cargill is building the kind of industrial agricultural system it can best profit by, not necessarily the one that serves the farmers or the public best, or the system that ensures that everyone everywhere is adequately nourished." Food Aid and Profits Meanwhile, the AP reported on May Day that "President Bush urged Congress Thursday to approve $770 million to help alleviate dramatically escalating food prices that threaten widespread hunger and increasing social unrest around the world." Adds the AP, "The money ... is being included in a broader $70 billion Iraq war funding measure for 2009..." Nygaard Notes readers, are your calculators ready? How much is Bush's proposed food aid in relation to his proposed war spending? The answer: 1.1 percent. The AP goes on to report that "Bush called [the $770 million] ‘just the beginning' of the U.S. effort to help. He said the United States would spend a total of $5 billion this year and next on food aid and related programs." Calculators ready? That would be about 60 percent of the net profit that Cargill expects to make in those two years at current profit levels. Postscript: It's not just Cargill that's making a killing (and the phrase is chillingly apt in the current context). According to the AP, another company headquartered in my historically-agricultural state, General Mills, "recently raised its 2008 profit forecast and in March, the Minneapolis-based cereal maker reported fiscal third-quarter profit rose by 60 percent from the previous year's quarter." |
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The following is a reprint from Nygaard Notes #204 from May 9, 2003. I am not reprinting that issue's "Quote" of the Week, but it also has to do with Mother's Day—or Mothers' Day (note the apostrophe)—and it's worth a visit to the NN website to see what it said. On this occasion of the U.S. holiday called Mother's Day, I'd like to encourage Nygaard Notes readers to gather with their mothers—or with anyone who's ever had a mother—and read aloud one of the early Mothers' Day proclamations. I recommend the one issued in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe, which was a call to women around the world to gather in a "general congress...without limit of nationality...to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace." Howe's proclamation can be found all over the internet. Perhaps the most easily-printed version (with a thoughtful commentary attached) is at http://www.peace.ca/mothersdayproclamation.htm Howe the Abolitionist Julia Ward Howe is best known for writing the words to the song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" which, like millions of other children, I learned by heart in the public schools of the USA in the early 1960s. I never learned the lyrics which preceded the ones penned by Ms. Howe. Indeed, I don't recall being told that there had been an earlier version of the song. That earlier version, with many variations, was known as "John Brown's Body," and was a popular song commemorating the raid by the radical white abolitionist John Brown and his band of 19 black and white men on the U.S. arsenal in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia in 1859. The raid ended with Brown being captured by Robert E. Lee's troops and executed for treason. Brown's death came to be understood by many slaves and freedom-loving whites alike as martyrdom to the cause of abolition, and his life of service to the cause continues to inspire anti-racists around the globe. His near-success at Harper's Ferry sewed terror in the hearts of many Southern slaveholders. His final speech during his trial is inspiring to read. Find it at http://www.nationalcenter.org/JohnBrown'sSpeech.html I'm glad I learned the Battle Hymn; it's a stirring song that no doubt inspired the troops of the Union Army as they fought in the Civil War. But I can only speculate what difference it might have made in the life of a politically-minded white kid from rural Minnesota to learn a song glorifying—using poetic Christian images—a white martyr to the abolitionist cause, as the predecessor to the Battle Hymn did with lyrics like these: "He captured Harper's Ferry, with his nineteen men so few, I connected the Battle Hymn with the Civil War—I'm sure I was told to do so—but I don't recall being told that Julia Ward Howe was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Free Soil Party (slogan: "Free soil, Free speech, Free labour, and Free men"), nor that she edited, with her husband Samuel Gridley Howe, the anti-slavery journal "Commonwealth." It's somewhat ironic that the poetic but arguably pro-war lyrics of this abolitionist poet came to completely supplant the overtly abolitionist lyrics of one of America's best-known songs (it's ironic if you consider that the North's motivation for waging war was only secondarily about slavery, and primarily about preserving the Union). Without considerable help, a kid like me could never see this irony, and, like so many, I had no help in this regard. Howe and Mothers' Day In 1870 Howe found herself horrified not only by the searing memory of the bloody Civil War, but also by stories of the ongoing war between Germany and France, the so-called "Franco-Prussian War." I won't go into the details of that war—which was a precursor to World War I, among other things—beyond commenting that it began with a campaign of "shock and awe" by the Germans, followed by unexpected resistance from the French, followed by ultimate victory on the part of the far-stronger German army, with the result that Germany collected immense wealth from France, along with the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. In her book REMINISCENCES, 1819-1899, Ms. Howe recorded her thoughts on that war as follows: "When to the immense war indemnity the conquerors added the spoliation of two important provinces, indignation added itself to regret. The suspicion at once suggested itself that Germany had very willingly given a pretext for the war, having known enough of the demoralized condition of France to be sure of an easy victory, and intending to make the opportunity serve for the forcible annexation of provinces long coveted." It isn't too hard to take these words from 1899 and imagine them spoken in 2003. Just substitute the nation "United States" for "Germany," and the word "resources" for the word "provinces." "As I was revolving these matters in my mind," Howe continued, "I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?' I had never thought of this before. The August dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect..." Howe then was moved to issue her famous 1870 proclamation, which demanded, among other things, that "Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause." In 1872 Howe went to London to promote an international Woman's Peace Congress, with little success. As she put it, "The ladies who spoke in public in those days mostly confined their labors to the advocacy of woman suffrage, and were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war." Back in the States, Howe initiated a Mothers' Peace Day observance on the second Sunday in June. It was reportedly celebrated widely in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other Eastern states until the turn of the century, all without the blessings of the state or federal governments. Before Julia There Was Anna It's inspiring to recall Julia Ward Howe's stirring call for peace as the origin of our modern "Mother's Day" holiday, but it's not the whole story. In 1858, twelve years before Howe published her call, a woman named Anna Reeves Jarvis initiated what she called "Mothers' Work Days." Clubs associated with these Mothers' Days worked to improve sanitary conditions in the cities, raise money to supply medicines, food, and bottled milk to the poor, and to provide domestic services for ill women in her part of the Appalachian mountain region of West Virginia. After Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, campaigned to have a special day set aside for mothers. I'll let historian Stephanie Coontz tell the rest of that story: "[B]y this period, there was already considerable pressure to sever the personal meaning of motherhood from its earlier political associations. The mobilization of women as community organizers was the last thing on the minds of the prominent merchants, racist politicians, and anti-suffragist activists who, sometimes to Jarvis's dismay, quickly jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, the adoption of Mother's Day by the 63rd Congress on May 8, 1914 represented a reversal of everything the nineteenth-century mothers' days had stood for.... "Politicians found that the day provided as many opportunities for self-promotion as did the Fourth of July. Merchants hung testimonials to their own mothers above the wares they hoped to convince customers to buy for other mothers. A day that had once been linked to controversial causes was reduced to an occasion for platitudes and sales pitches. Its bond with social reform movements broken, Mother's Day immediately drifted into the orbit of the marketing industry. The young Jarvis had proposed that inexpensive carnations be worn to honor one's mother. Outraged when the flowers began to sell for a dollar apiece, she attacked the florists as ‘profiteers' and began a campaign to protect Mother's Day from such exploitation." After years of trying unsuccessfully to honor her mother's vision, Anna Jarvis died poor and ill in 1948. |
