new york times confessions

One of my favorite categories is when the hegemonic press confesses
something you've been saying all along.

Here are 4 recent examples from the New York Times that you can quote to
amaze your students, colleagues, and friends:


1)  12/28/00
"Economic Engine for Foreign Policy" -David Sanger

"The Asian crisis confirmed what many developing nations had
suspected:  globalization was a rich country's game, and the rules were
rigged to favor the most competitive.  The free-market system let the
United States ship its goods, open its factories, and move capital
anywhere it wanted.  But poorer nations often found that their products
could not compete and that their low-tech exports were suject to tariffs
and quotas that American, European and Japanese industries would not
eliminate.  So when the United States proposed a further opening of world
markets, developing nations struck back, starting at Seattle in late
November 1999."


I think that one speaks for itself.


2)  12/28/00
"China at Gate of Profound Shift"  -Craig S. Smith

"...[N]ew rules are allowing privately owned companies access to the
country's capital markets, which so far have been effectively off limits
for nearly all of them..."

"The change also has political implications:  as China's ranks of private
businesses grow in number and wealth, their owners will become an
increasingly powerful constituency whose demands the government will not
be able to easily ignore."


Amazing!  The growth of a powerful capitalist class is portrayed as
excellent in China, but in the U.S. we're still supposed to believe the
civics class fairy tale that says the government is a democracy based on
"one person, one vote."  But there it is, once there is a large, wealthy
capitalist class, the government can't easily ignore their demands.  I
guess we live in a plutocracy after all!


3)  12/28/00
"For All Russia, Biological Clock Is Running Out"  -Michael Wines

"The twin trends -- rising deaths and declining births -- are both rooted
in the social and public-health upheavals that have swept the nation since
the Soviet Union entered its death throes in 1991.  Both trends have
confounded experts, who expected them to be neither as serious or as
prolonged as they have been.  The country's health care has collapsed in
the last decade, along with the people's health.  Public hospitals and
clinics are short of money and medicine; doctors earn near-poverty
wages; infectious diseases like tuberculosis are epidemic."


This article, on the plummeting birth rate, is part of a series on the
health and demographic catastrophe in the former Soviet Union.  So much
for life getting better after the fall of "communism"!


4)  11/26/00
"Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?  -Roger Cohen

Here's the subhead:

"Student activists, backed by American money and training, undermined the
dictator and his brutal henchman with a clever campaign of nonviolence"

The article reveals National Endowment for Democracy and AID funding for
Otpor, a youth group that means "Resistance."  It also says:

"American assistance to Otpor and the 18 parties that ultimately ousted
Milosevic is still a highly sensitive subject."

"Otpor leaders intimate they also received a lot of covert aid -- a
subject on which there is no comment in Washington."

"By this fall, Otpor was no ramshackle students' group; it was a
well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United
States."


I am no supporter of Milosevic (my mind can easily grasp the possibility
that the regime *AND* U.S./NATO intervention were wrong), but this is very
revealing of the U.S. effort to overthrow a regime it saw/sees as an
obstacle to its dream of unchecked capital.


Alright, thank you for clarifying these issues for us, New York Times.


Richard Hutchinson
Weber State University
Ogden, Utah