Letters Letters
THE SUITES & THE SWEATS New York City In "Economists vs. Students" [Feb. 12], Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood cheer on students who demand tha...
Feb 15, 2001 / Doug Henwood, Liza Featherstone, Gene Santoro, and Our Readers
Letters Letters
You Can't Get There From Here San Jose, Calif. JoAnn Wypijewski in "Back to the Back of the Bus" [Dec. 25] sheds much-needed light on the ongoing civil rights struggles, which lack the Bull Connors and Jim Clarks of an earlier era but produce results that discriminate with equal power. However, in her brief summary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she overlooks, as is generally the case, the role of the Women's Political Council. Formed in 1946 by Mary Fair Burks, the WPC, under the leadership of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, printed the leaflets calling for a boycott of the buses in protest of Rosa Parks's arrest. The WPC had been planning a bus boycott for years, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. When word got around to the ministers about the boycott, they agreed to support it, albeit without publicly announcing this support to the white community. E.D. Nixon resented this hesitancy, calling them "little boys" who "lived off these poor washerwomen" and "ain't never done nothing for 'em." The ministers were properly ashamed and--with Martin Luther King Jr.--decided to publicly support the boycott. The rest, of course, is history. Forgetting the role of citizens' groups like the WPC obscures the dynamics of social change. It was the local citizens of Montgomery, working together for years without white publicity, who created and sustained the boycott and in doing so handed the national microphone to Dr. King for the first time. Today the struggle for economic and social justice continues in Montgomery, carried on (again) by "ordinary" citizens like Carolyn Rawls and Johnnie Carr. GABE THOMPSON Montgomery, Ala. To respond to JoAnn Wypijewski's jab at the Southern Poverty Law Center in "Back to the Back of the Bus": We don't remember the Montgomery Transportation Coalition asking us for money, but that's beside the point--we probably wouldn't make a grant to the group unless the request came from a coalition attorney seeking to cover case costs for a particular civil rights action. Because of our historic mission, that's the form that most of our grants for advocacy efforts take (see the Strategic Litigation Project at www.splcenter.org). Contrary to the article, we have worked to help alleviate the transportation problems of the poor, not just in Montgomery but in Alabama as a whole. In the mid-1990s, we filed a case that attacked the state's failure to provide a transportation system for poor people (Medicaid recipients) in need of medical care. Although the court of appeals ruled against us on technical grounds, our victory in the district court caused the state to adopt a transportation program for Medicaid recipients that is still in operation. One of our more recent lawsuits, currently before the US Supreme Court, forced the state to give its driver's license examination in foreign languages. Precisely because public transportation in Alabama is so abysmal, that case addressed an acute problem for poor and working-class immigrants. The issue is whether private parties can enforce the "discriminatory effects" regulations issued under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The enforceability of these regulations is central to the efforts of many advocacy groups across the nation that seek to prod local governments to devote more resources to public transportation. These two cases give some indication not only of our concern about the transportation problems facing the poor but also of the unfairness of Wypijewski's suggestion that we devote all our resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations. Although the public often associates us with this fight because our courtroom successes against hate groups have captured headlines, our supporters know that our work is not limited in this way. Last, to the claim that our new building is "assaulting the Capitol area's landscape," all we can say is, we've never tried very hard to fit in around here! J. RICHARD COHEN, legal director Southern Poverty Law Center WYPIJEWSKI REPLIES New York City Thanks to Gabe Thompson for the history I didn't have the space to recount. Indeed, Jo Ann Robinson was one of the central strategists, with Fred Gray and E.D. Nixon, of the boycott and, with them, had been organizing for just such an opportunity since at least March of 1955, when 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Rosa Parks, who apart from being a seamstress was also secretary and youth director of the Montgomery NAACP, was certainly aware of this. It was also Robinson who suggested that her pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church might be a good leader for the boycott because he was young and articulate and, having not yet involved himself with community politics, would not alienate any of black Montgomery's powerful factions. Robinson herself never held any official position in the boycott organization because to do so almost certainly would have cost her her job as a professor at Alabama State College. She tells her story in The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. A terrific collection of oral histories of the people who made the boycott can be found in The Children Coming On..., edited by Willy S. Leventhal. One final historical note: 1955 marked the second time Montgomery's blacks boycotted public conveyances over segregation. The first was in 1900, when transit segregation was put into law. For that whole summer blacks refused to ride the trolleys. The white power structure was forced to make a minor compromise but would not cave for more than a half-century; almost another half-century on, the long walk to transit freedom in Montgomery continues. Meanwhile, here's J. Richard Cohen congratulating himself and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in thirty years of existence has addressed the transportation crisis twice and the transit racism in its own hometown not at all. While the two interventions aren't insignificant, they do nothing to alleviate the transportation problems of the majority of low-income Alabamians, nor do they strike at the root of those problems. And of course they have nothing to do with the local bus system. After my article was published, Jon Broadway of the Transportation Coalition again tried contacting various people at the center, Cohen among them, to see if there might be some way this institution with an endowment of $120 million might assist the struggle going on just outside its heavily fortified doors. Four phone messages and a number of e-mails later, he's still waiting for a reply. Perhaps simple courtesy is also "beside the point" for the center's puffed-up crusaders, seeing as how the coalition's work doesn't fall within their "historic mission"--i.e., bringing headline-grabbing lawsuits. But because even the Federal Transit Administration's Office of Civil Rights advises activists that the fight for transit justice in America is unlikely ever to be won in court, that historic mission turns out here to be a self-serving cloak for indifference. Even at the level of rhetoric, Cohen and his colleagues, who regularly expound on civil rights issues in Op-Ed pieces or letters to the editor in the Montgomery Advertiser, have not bestirred themselves on the bus crisis. What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing instead? Mostly making money. I would never have suggested that it "devote[s] all [its] resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations," because the center doesn't devote all of its resources to any kind of fight. In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million--$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments. A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for "excessive" reserves. On the subject of "hate groups," though, Cohen is almost comically disingenuous. No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center's millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter, "Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years." Hate sells; poor people don't, which is why readers who go to the center's website will find only a handful of cases on such unlucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and '80s. Why the organization continues to keep "Poverty" (or even "Law") in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt. It barely even handles death penalty cases anymore, and lawyers struggling in the South to save the lives of people, mostly poor, on Death Row, will never forget that it was Morris Dees who smoothed the way to a federal judgeship for Ed Carnes, author of Alabama's death penalty statute and a notorious hanging judge. With allies like Carnes and a salary close to $300,000 putting him among the top 2 percent of Americans, Dees needn't worry about "fitting in" with the masses of Montgomery. Naturally, he'd erect a multimillion-dollar office building that's a monstrosity. "I hate it," a security guard across the street told me, as the sun's hot rays bounced off the building's vast brushed-stainless-steel-clad southern exposure and onto his face, making him sweat, roasting his skin while he stood watch for the militia nuts Dees would have his donors believe are lurking around every corner. So, readers, rip up those pledges to the Southern Poverty Law Center. To help people in real struggle, send your money to: § Montgomery Transportation Coalition, c/o Jon Broadway, 600 South Court St., Room 200, Montgomery, AL 36104; (334) 244-3972. (It is pushing for expanded city bus service, a community voice in transportation decisions, spending equity and environmental justice.) § Rosebud Community Center, c/o Mrs. Arzula Johnson, 7376 Highway 10, East Pineapple, AL 36768; (334) 682-9703. (In the countryside where there are no taxis or buses, it provides educational and social activities and owns an old schoolbus but can't afford the insurance to operate it.) § Annemanie Tutoring Program, c/o Mrs. Jeanette McCall, PO Box 354, Catherine, AL 36728; (334) 225-4452. (Another rural project without benefit of public transport, it tutors students after school and conducts adult job training. Unless it can replace its van, it won't be able to continue past this school year. It also needs computers and building materials.) JoANN WYPIJEWSKI
Feb 8, 2001 / JoAnn Wypijewski and Our Readers
Letters Letters
THE TIANANMEN PAPERS New York City Edward Jay Epstein in "The 'Tiananmen Papers'" [Feb. 5] retails a story about 15,000 pages of secret Chinese documents b...
Feb 1, 2001 / Our Readers
Coming of Age in the NSA Coming of Age in the NSA
Coming of Age in the NSA Katonah, N.Y. David Price's "Anthropologists as Spies" [Nov. 20] is a timely and important article because historians of anthropolo...
Jan 26, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
POLL-AXED Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Anna Greenberg was directly on point with her thoughtful piece, "Why the Polls Were Wrong" [Jan. 1]. As someone who lives in the heart of the south Florida battleground, in Democratic-vote-rich Broward County, I would also provide an addendum. Just as the major polls were wrong for the reasons cited by Greenberg, let's also credit the election night Voter News Service with being accurate. While Republicans like James Baker decry the networks' "erroneous" initial call for Gore, all one has to do--besides debate recounts, chads and hanging chads--is to factor in the 22,400 intended Gore votes in Palm Beach County, apportioned between overvotes for President and erroneously cast votes for Pat Buchanan. These people, whose votes did not ultimately count, were certainly factored into projected totals favoring Gore on election night. As Greenberg asserted, it was the second call, which went to Bush early Wednesday morning, that was in error. Of course, Baker and the Republican high command touted that projection as accurate. WILIAM HARE New York City It was not the polls that got it wrong this election. It was Anna Greenberg. The national pre-election polls reported by the media had their best polling performance since 1976. All ten traditional polls were within the margin of error. These polls had an average error on the winner of 1.1 percent. In the election Bush and Gore were almost dead even. Two polls had Gore ahead slightly, six had Bush ahead slightly, one was off by an average of 2.5 points each on Bush and on Gore and the Harris poll had the race even. There was one other poll that was significantly off. It used experimental interviewing methods and was not reported widely by the media. Rasmussen conducted it and issued an apology after the election. Contrary to Greenberg's assertion, only two polls "'weighted up' the GOP share" to match the parties' usual share of the vote. Greenberg complimented one of those polls for its fine performance. None of the polls got the voter turnout wrong. All used the same methods they have used for years to assess likely voters. Linking the pre-election polls to the networks' mistaken call of Bush as the winner in Florida on election night is just plain silly. None of the pollsters involved in the pre-election polls had any connection to the election night projections. The Bush projection was made from the 97 percent of the vote that had been counted by Florida voting officials. One assertion Greenberg makes is disingenuous. The "internal Gore polling" she uses as a benchmark for what the public polls should have shown (a) was not available to the public, and therefore not subject to peer scrutiny; (b) was not constant over the last two weeks as she asserts; and (c) was partially the work of her father. The Nation should not be citing private partisan political polling as a standard against which to measure the public polls. The public polls disclose their methods, data and results. The partisan polls do none of these things. WARREN MITOFSKY HUMPHREY TAYLOR HARRY O'NEILL Polling Review Board National Council on Public Polls GREENBERG REPLIES Cambridge, Mass. I thank William Hare for his letter. Mitofsky, Taylor and O'Neill correctly note, as I did in my editorial, that many of the national poll results released on or close to Election Day fell within the margin of error. First of all, using the margin of error as the measure of accuracy is rather narrow, given the great volatility of the tracking polls and the wide variation among the polls during this election season. Second, the margin of error is somewhat tangential to the larger point that most of the national public polls favored Bush and that this perception of Bush's ascendancy influenced press coverage of the race prior to and after the election. Finally, while there were no official ties between these national public polls and the exit polls conducted by Voter News Service (a link I did not make in my editorial), to argue that the collective weight of these surveys did not influence press coverage of the election is also a bit silly. The most perplexing aspect of the Mitofsky, Taylor and O'Neill letter is the notion that all the public polls release their "methods, data and results," making them subject to scrutiny and presumably greater accuracy than polls conducted for candidates. In fact, most national surveys commissioned by the media or released publicly for the purpose of public relations do not reveal either their likely voter screen or their weighting scheme. For instance, Harris Interactive Inc., headed by Humphrey Taylor, will not release the "propensity weighting" model it uses to weight its online political polls, despite the great interest of scholars and pollsters. If this election demonstrates anything, it is the need for even greater disclosure and scrutiny of the national public polls that so profoundly affect press coverage. It should be said that it is rather gratuitous to suggest that my lineage prevents me from commenting on these matters. My observations stem from my training as a survey researcher, my scholarship as faculty at Harvard and my experience as a consultant to the Gore polling project. It is troubling that the representatives of the National Council on Public Polls feel they need to challenge criticism of the national polls in such a manner after an election season of widely acknowledged volatility and variation among the polls and the disastrous miscalls on election night. ANNA GREENBERG HEIL TO THE THIEF Visalia, Calif. Thank you for your editorial proposing electoral disobedience ["Wanted: Three Electors," Dec. 25]. It is horrifying to observe the country calmly accepting the hijacked "selection"--not election--of George W. Bush as President. He should be called the President-select, not -elect. GAIL JENSEN SANFORD ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE Milwaukee Thanks for Gore Vidal's "Democratic Vistas" [Jan. 8/15]. There are only two things that help me sleep through the night since that Black Day of American History, December 12, 2000: (1) At least Twig got my lousy governor out of my great state of Wisconsin. (2) Bring on the gridlock! MONICA VAN LIESHOUT Chicago "Welcome to Asunción." Not a bad line for Gore Vidal to end an editorial with. But my question is: So what are we going to do about it? Not about the simian shrub: He's the properly buttressed puppet his daddy wanted when he invited GOP pols down to Austin over the past few years to look him over--nice specimen, amenable, gets along with people, not a challenger. Hey boys, time to turn in your chits on my boy's (repeatedly) failed oil ventures (they'd already taken the tax write-offs), and let's make some hay! So they did. And they will own him because he owes them. Big time. Lotta chits. But something concrete can come out of this if a movement coalesces to update voting technology around the country. Simian shrub enters the big house with the biggest surplus in history. Any reason why, prior to a budget-blowing tax cut for the rich, we can't dole out some to the 3,000+ counties for techie updating? Not to fight the simian shrub--he's in, and we don't care for the spectacle of civil war, thank you. Been there, done that, great for local pageantry, not for a national agenda. What if, as a result of this fiasco that saw underfunded counties throw away thousands of votes for god-only-knows-who, everybody said, You know, it doesn't have to be that inane next time. We can do something about this. The fiasco, including the Supreme Court's choosing the President, may be great fodder for journalists and their magazines, but it doesn't do much to inspire faith in the system that's supposed to have fairness as its social glue. Not much glue left. But we can fix squeaky voting methods. We may not be able to stop Plan Colombia or shut down the war machine. There will be plenty of rhetoric to ignore. Simians shriek in the jungle, and so will these. But we can modernize the voting booth. Anybody want to get concrete, start talking about such a stodgy, nonideological point? Anybody want to get practical? I thought so. Asunción is so much more romantic. ANN P. WHITE TWO. TWO. TWO VOTES IN ONE! Scarsdale, N.Y. I had only one vote to give to George W. Bush, but Chief Justice Rehnquist apparently had two. (Though I favored Bush, I was shocked by the decision of the Supreme Court cutting off Gore from a recount.) It might interest your readers to know how Rehnquist came to have two. It is probable that Rehnquist obtained his confirmation as Associate Justice in 1971, and later as Chief Justice in 1986, by making false statements before the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning his writing in 1952, when he was clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, of a legal memorandum in support of segregation when Brown v. Board of Education was before the Court. Jackson died in 1954. In 1971, when Rehnquist, a Nixon nominee, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was confronted with his 1952 memo. He stated that the memo was written, at Jackson's request, for use at a conference of the Justices as a statement of Jackson's views concerning the constitutionality of segregation. Rehnquist restated his claim before the committee in 1986 when nominated for Chief Justice. If, as it appears, Rehnquist lied, he committed the despicable act of putting into the mouth of the dead Jackson a racist position that Jackson would have denounced from his grave, if that had been possible. After Rehnquist's confirmation as Chief Justice, an examination of the papers of Justice Jackson at the Library of Congress disclosed Jackson's draft of his unissued concurrence in Brown, a document unequivocally declaring segregation unconstitutional, and wholly "inconsistent with Rehnquist's assertion that his memo was intended to state Jackson's rather than Rehnquist's view on the constitutionality of segregation." Thus, the pointed judgment of one of the great scholars of our constitutional law, Bernard Schwartz in A History of the Supreme Court, and Richard Kluger in his monumental work, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. Had Jackson's draft of his unissued concurrence in Brown been known to the Senate when it voted on Rehnquist's nomination in 1971, it undoubtedly would have deprived Rehnquist of a seat on the Supreme Court, to say nothing of the Chief Justiceship. Chief Justice Warren, however, had rightly persuaded the court in Brown to speak in one, unanimous opinion. Had Jackson issued his concurring opinion in Brown, Rehnquist would not be on the Court and would have had, like me, only one vote to give to Bush. HAROLD REYNOLDS
Jan 18, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
THE CHAD MAN COMETH... Providence, R.I. For nearly four decades, the fine New York Yankee outfielder, Roger Maris, suffered the ignominy of the asterisk after his...
Jan 12, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
FEMINIST GENERATION GAP? New York City It certainly is flattering to have a five-page comprehensive review of our book, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism an...
Jan 5, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
DIVORCE, AMERICAN STYLE REDUX Las Vegas Perhaps I can have the last word on Katha Pollitt's review of Judith Wallerstein's Legacy of Divorce ["Subject to Debate," Oct. 23; "Exchange," Dec. 4]. I'm a sociologist who has written and taught about marriage and family for seven years. Whatever the merits of the methodological debate on Wallerstein, I have my own method of truth, which although nonscientific has proven extremely reliable. Every semester I ask my students to raise their hands if their parents are divorced. As in the rest of the population, around half raise their hands. I then ask them to keep their hands raised if they wish their parents had not divorced. Without exception, all but one or two hands fall. When I ask those who lowered their hands, "Why?" they respond that the stress and conflict of unhappy parents took an intense emotional toll on them. If the children themselves have no regrets, why should we? DR. ROBERT MANIS THE TENNIS, POKER & BLACKLIST BOYS New York City The recent moving tributes to the late Ring Lardner Jr. by Victor Navasky [Nov. 27] and Roger Kahn [Dec. 4] encourage me to add my own, as one of Ring's few contemporaries still alive. Ring and I were both born in Chicago on the same day--August 19, 1915. I was privileged to be part of a poker game that began in the 1950s when Ring and Ian Hunter, with Maurice Rapf and the composer Sol Kaplan, moved to New York after the blacklist drove them out of Hollywood, and included many of the lawyers who defended them, like Martin Popper, Jerry Lurie and his law partner Sidney Cohen. Sidney had invented what came to be known as the "diminished Fifth," which would have permitted answers to the key question raised by HUAC without naming names, which Ring famously said he could answer but that he would hate himself in the morning. We had all reached the age when we felt that for health reasons we would meet every Thursday to play two hours of tennis at 4 pm before reassembling for poker in the evening. For about thirty years, until we could no longer play either tennis or poker, Thursday became for all of us the high spot of the week. We began by occasionally joining a poker game on 28th Street, dominated by Zero Mostel and his former WPA artist friends, that had begun back in the Depression; but the high decibel level of any game with both Zero and sculptor Herb Kallem drove us to organize our own Upper West Side tennis/poker group. To fulfill our wildest fantasies, we decided to play our first game at a Turkish bath at Al Roon's on West 73rd Street, as suggested by a short story by Irwin Shaw, but we found that the steam melted the cards, and we were forced to rent a room to finish the evening. For the next thirty years the game was held at Ian's apartment in the Belnord on 86th Street. Ian was a great cook and would sometimes prepare a delicious roast beef for us. Otherwise, the kitty would permit us to order from the Stage Door Delicatessen or the Tip Toe Inn. When the blacklist was finally broken and Ring could write under his own name, I like to think that we all had a hand in his script for The Cincinnati Kid. After Ring's second Oscar, for M*A*S*H, we all enjoyed hearing that the pendulum in Hollywood had swung to the point that blacklisted writers had become social lions, and some people were now lying that they had been blacklisted. While we almost never talked about our personal problems all through those years, the weekly meeting became a refuge from a hostile world for those of us who retained the ideals we had formed in the Depression years. In addition to the original group, we were later joined by Bella Abzug's husband, Martin, Peter Bernard and Jesse Reed. Maurice and I, alas, are the sole survivors. The group left an important legacy to our children--to appreciate the joys of living a life of principle. JAY M. GOULD WHAT WORKS: METROPOLITICS Orange, Va. Thanks to Jay Walljasper for a terrific article ["From the 'Burbs to the 'Hood," Nov. 20] on Myron Orfield and his plans (and achievements) for metropolitics! Orfield explains why, in the words of many a Republican, "schools need more than just money." Schools--all schools--need more money and lots of it. But the concentration of severely poor students in certain schools, not relative underfunding, is key to their relative failure. Vouchers will only aggravate this problem, but voucher proponents have one thing right: Students do better in schools with other students who bring learning from home. Orfield's ideas for regional planning offer an actual solution to this national disaster--the reduction of concentrated poverty. Walljasper concluded by suggesting we promote metropolitics as something "pragmatic" rather than just. I'm not sure, but it sounds like an underestimation. Increasingly, labor unions and environmental groups are forming blue-green alliances against sprawl, big-box employers, the defunding of mass transit and affordable housing, the lengthening of commuting time and the transfer of jobs to suburban un-unionized companies. "Unions are basically an urban institution," Don Turner, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor told me in arguing for such efforts, which are being led by a group called Good Jobs First (www.goodjobsfirst.org). At a national conference on living-wage campaigns in Baltimore recently, ACORN discussed building coalitions with environmentalists. Wade Rathke of ACORN and SEIU in New Orleans (where a living wage of $1 above the minimum wage will be on a ballot soon) said, "You cannot separate economic development from income policy." Other conferees recommended working for laws requiring economic development commissions to bring any decision above a certain dollar figure before elected officials for a public vote. In Minnesota a law now requires these commissions to establish criteria for giving out their (that is, the public's) money. With advocates for the working poor pushing such issues, it's hard not to see regional planning as a matter of justice. DAVID SWANSON A KVITCH, A KVETCH, A KRECHTZ Morris Plains, N.J. Ilan Stavans criticizes Ruth Wisse for neglecting the Sephardic contribution to Jewish literature, but in his own anthology, The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, less than 10 percent of the authors are Sephardic ["Mr. Sammler's Planet," Nov. 27]. There's a good reason, and it has nothing to do with bias. Modern Jewish literature flourished in Europe among Ashkenazic Jews, because of the influence of the Enlightenment. Few Sephardic Jews lived there. The heyday of Sephardic literature was the Golden Age in Spain, and US Jewish scholars have not neglected these writings, as Stavans claims. They can be found in well-known sources, including Lewis Browne's The Wisdom of Israel, Nahum Glatzer's The Judaic Tradition and Nathan Ausubel's A Treasury of Jewish Poetry. Stavans's claim that Jews have not created their own literary canon is also questionable. In addition to his own anthology, which Stavans is perhaps too modest to mention, there are excellent collections edited by Joseph Leftwich, Leo W. Schwarz and Saul Bellow. Other peculiarities in his review include his characterization of Bialik, the Hebrew poet, as "proto-Zionist" and Wisse's book as "proto-Ashkenazic." In both cases, the prefix "proto" is superfluous. Finally the first name of Peretz, the Yiddish writer, can be written as Yitchak or Isaac, but never "Itzjak," and kvetch is a perfectly good Yiddish word, not "Yinglish." So please accept this kvetch as an antidote to Stavans's. BENNETT MURASKIN GIVE THE FALUN GONG A BREAK New York City Something weird happens to people of the left persuasion when they travel to countries flying the red star (I know, it happened to me). They tend to lose perspective, as has my old pal Christopher Hitchens, judging by his vitriolic put-down of Falun Gong ["Minority Report," Nov. 20]. How odd that he echoes the language of a Chinese Communist Party campaign of defamation, cult-bashing and false allegations in a crackdown even Hitch calls "clumsy" and "probably counterproductive" (probably?). Yo, brother, we are talking about more than seventy people dead in police custody so far, and as many as 50,000 detained, many of them subjected to torture and abuse (including being involuntarily tossed into mental hospitals). I have just published Falun Gong's Challenge to China (Akashic Books) and have also produced a film by the same title, which offer an independent assessment of this crisis. In all my research, I didn't find a shred of evidence to substantiate the state media's accusations that Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi has used "tricks" to "induce the credulous to part with their money" (Hitchens's words, though they sound like they come from Beijing's People's Daily) or to suggest that these nonviolent practitioners have been programmed to protest. (Remember the civil rights movement?) Ironically, many are pro-party and pro-government and have been appealing for justice from a regime that won't hear them. These folks preach tolerance and compassion. How about showing some? DANNY SCHECHTER HITCHENS REPLIES Washington, D.C. Danny Schechter--who is not my old pal--can certainly speak for himself when it comes to credulity. He fell for everything from the Khmer Rouge to Clinton, and now the Falun Gong has helped him get in touch with his inner swastika. Check out the FG website (www.falundafa.org) if you think I jest. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS PRONOUNCE IT 'PERFECTION' Santa Rosa, Calif. After all these years of wondering, I finally have heard the way to say "Klawans"! The eminent film critic would not divulge this information when a reader wrote in some time back ["Letters," July 19, 1999]. Many of us consider Mr. K the best movie critic in the (small n) nation if not the world, so now when we read a review in his excellent style, we'll know it's Kla-wans. Anyway, so said the MC introducing him during the TMC movie classics program. CELIA TALBOT New York City If you ever fire Stuart Klawans as your reviewer, I'll drop your rag like a Republican Party membership card. In a world gone mad, he is my only idol. CARL SKUTSCH
Dec 22, 2000 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
LEAVE IT TO THE PROS Austin, Tex. Dang! You guys missed the point again! If this electoral brouhaha proved anything, it is this: Electing the President of the United States is too important to entrust to the people. We can't read a simple ballot. We can't poke a sharp object through a piece of paper. Heck, half of us didn't even show up to vote. Clearly, we need to turn this over to professionals. So, here's what we do. First, every four years, the Democratic and Republican parties each nominate a candidate for President by means known only to themselves and their... sponsors. This puts the nomination process squarely and publicly in the hands of professional kingmakers, who know what's best for us. We all agree that only the Democrats and the Republicans are competent to lead the nation, so we only need the two candidates. Next, we commission two presidential opinion polls, one by each party. This gives the evaluation process to the professional opinion-makers, who know what's best for us. This is elegant for two reasons. First, there will be no more bumbling over confusing ballots or struggling with recalcitrant punches. Second, the sampling will represent 100 percent of the population! We need exactly two polls. That way, the two parties will keep each other honest, as they have for the past century, without making the process too confusing. Surely, we will not elect a President by opinion poll, I hear you think. You are correct! The opinion polls will only be guidelines for the state legislatures, which will elect the representatives to the Electoral College. So we will have professional lawmakers, who know what is best for us, selecting our electors. That brings us to the Electoral College. That hoary institution is in serious need of reform. Take, for example, the thousands of disfranchised felons. I propose that we count 60 percent of them for purposes of allocating electoral votes. I also propose 60 percent for legal aliens and, say, 40 percent for illegal aliens. But the important thing is a process that makes sense. We can work out the details later. ROBERT L. BLAU 'THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULERS' Pristina, Kosovo I had the pleasure and privilege of working with Amy Goodman as guest producer for a few days some months ago ["For Democracy Now!" Nov. 13]. I come from years of working with mainstream radio, and the Democracy Now! team and show felt like an oxygen tent. The attention paid to issues that never make it to the front pages, the use of critical and dissenting voices, and, more important, voices from the grassroots, make the program both compelling and indispensable. It was an exhilarating experience when Thomas Pickering's direct line was jammed by calls following DN!'s exposure of how FBI agents let a Peruvian torturer leave the United States scot-free. Similarly, the office was inundated by calls after DN! gave prominent coverage to another example of police brutality in New York. For me, this was further proof that issues like this are of interest to listeners and that the airwaves can be an effective means of mobilization. I had understood this was part of Pacifica's mandate and that DN!'s slogan, "The exception to the rulers," was based on a common Pacifica vision. The DN! show is what journalism should be about--for, with and of the people. It would be a shame to let the management get away with destroying it. SPUTNIK KILAMBI Free Speech Radio News Contributor $KY-HIGH PRE$CRIPTION DRUG PRICES Washington, D.C. I appreciated William Greider's November 13 editorial, "If Politics Got Real...," challenging the rationale sustaining this country's laissez-faire attitude toward inflated prescription drug prices. As the author of legislation (The Affordable Prescription Drugs Act) that would codify the compulsory licensing approach mentioned in the piece, I am quite familiar with the "lower prices imperil medical advancement" threat used by the drug industry to protect its current pricing practices. This well-worn threat implies that drug companies are the only source of funding for research and development. As Greider pointed out, pharmaceutical manufacturers fund only a portion of the R&D conducted in the United States today, and if they continue to abuse their power in the marketplace, the public may see to it that their role in R&D is diminished even further. It also implies that inflated drug prices are the only way to generate R&D dollars. High prices are an expedient way to make money, but not the only way. Sales volume matters, too. Lower prices, which make the number of purchasers and the volume of purchases more important, might be just the incentive the industry needs to diversify and expand its R&D investment beyond a handful of blockbuster and copycat drugs. In 1983, the drug industry was confronted with legislation paving the way for a robust generic-drug industry. At that time, brand-name drug manufacturers claimed that generic competition and lower prices would have a significant dampening effect on R&D. Still, the Hatch-Waxman Act was signed into law, and the generic-drug industry now manufactures nearly 50 percent of all drugs dispensed in the United States. By the drug industry's own estimates, R&D skyrocketed. Annual R&D outlays increased 600 percent, from $3 billion in 1983 to $21 billion in 1998. A third premise underlying the R&D threat is that drug industry revenues depend on whether US consumers pay more than consumers in other industrialized nations for the same drugs. Again, it is convenient for drug manufacturers to charge the United States more to compensate for discounts negotiated with other countries--it certainly takes some pressure off those negotiations--but it is not necessary. Other industrialized countries and the drug industry are benefiting from our laissez-faire attitude toward prescription drug prices. Greider's editorial cuts through drug industry rhetoric to get to the basic point: If the drug industry won't voluntarily price in a manner that reflects the essential nature of prescription drugs, the United States is going to have to take matters into its own hands. The question is: How bad does the situation have to get before political expediency gives way to the public interest? Thank you for helping to educate the public and provoke their interest in this issue. SHERROD BROWN US Representative AFRICA FALLS OFF THE MAP New York City; Washington, D.C. It is disappointing to find a writer in The Nation echoing George W. Bush's view that Africa does not make it onto the list of US foreign policy priorities. Sherle R. Schwenninger ["America and the World: The End of Easy Dominance," Nov. 20] deals at length with George W. Bush's list of priorities--Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. But Africa and such global issues vital to Africa as debt cancellation, structural adjustment policies and UN peacekeeping win at best passing mentions. The global health crisis, including the AIDS pandemic devastating Africa, is entirely off Schwenninger's map of world issues. Leaving Africa (and South Asia as well) as "invisible continents" in an article titled "America and the World" is the no doubt unintended reflection of the current world order of global apartheid. Africa, with more than one-eighth of the world's population, is also at the heart of today's "global" issues, such as the universal right to health and democratic accountability of global institutions. In foreign policy, just as on the domestic front, there can be no plausible progressive alternative without confronting the hard realities of race. Schwenninger speaks of popular support for a US posture based on partnership rather than dominance. But moves in that direction will be abortive as long as pundits on the left join those on the right in keeping Africa invisible. SALIH BOOKER WILLIAM MINTER Africa Policy Information Center SCHWENNINGER REPLIES New York City I agree almost entirely with Salih Booker and William Minter about the importance of the issues they identify. But the focus of my article was not on what US foreign policy priorities should be; it was on the end of America's easy dominance. As important as the problems they cite are, none of them go to the heart of the easy dominance the United States enjoyed over the past decade, or to the forces that are bringing that easy dominance to an end. SHERLE R. SCHWENNINGER LAWMAKERS, NOT LAWYERS Washington, D.C. The Nation editorial advocating a civil-suit remedy for the Ford/Firestone debacle ["Firestonewalling," Oct. 2] makes the same error that many otherwise intelligent liberals have made for years, arguing that because no one will pursue criminal charges (a premise that turns out to be incorrect, thanks to the surprising legislation put forward by Senator John McCain), the only recourse for justice is massive litigation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lawsuit "justice," backed by Association of Trial Lawyers of America money and rhetoric, targets the innocent, overlooks the guilty and rewards the undeserving. If a successful suit is brought against Firestone, the following are certain: § The settlement will be paid by consumers and innocent, low-end Firestone employees. No one believes payment will come from top executives' salaries, nor would a firm that has just inherited a shaky public image further endanger its stock price by paying damages out of profits. If corporate history is any guide, Firestone will pay the settlement by enacting a combination of price hikes and cuts in labor and benefits. § Guilty executives will go free. Not only will executives pay no part of the damages, those who had to know that Firestone was selling demonstrably lethal tires will, in all likelihood, retain their jobs. In the extreme case, guilty executives asked to resign can safely glide in their golden parachutes to other pastures. § Lawyers who never have owned a Ford or Firestone will become fabulously wealthy (or more so). However hard they work on the case, the attorneys enjoy a lottery-type windfall that far exceeds any justifiable compensation for their "services." Again, this booty comes not from the guilty but from innocent bystanders. However rare criminal prosecution of corporate misdeeds may be, civil litigation proliferation is no substitute. Tough, clearly written, well-enforced regulation--including criminal prosecution--is the only answer to corporate crime. JOSH HILGART
Dec 14, 2000 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
OH CHADS, POOR CHADS... Hayward, Calif. I share William Greider's glee about the election stalemate ["Stupefied Democracy," Dec. 4] and the opportunity ...
Dec 7, 2000 / Our Readers