Letters Letters
'FALSE AND DISTORTED' New York City Christopher Hitchens's diatribe on Professor Elie Wiesel's essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times is a false and distor...
Apr 12, 2001 / Letters / Our Readers
Letters Letters
REFORMER IN THE DELLS Milwaukee A postscript to Frances Fox Piven's excellent "Thompson's Easy Ride" [Feb. 26], on the elevation of Wi...
Apr 5, 2001 / Letters / Our Readers
Letters Letters
KEEP THE SUN IN THE SUNSHINE STATE LaFayette, N.Y. In "The Florida Fog" [March 19], David Corn asks, "Will the fog ever lift?" and concludes that a conc...
Mar 30, 2001 / Letters / Our Readers
Some Dare Call It Treason… Some Dare Call It Treason…
Some Dare Call It Treason... With "None Dare Call It Treason" [Feb. 5], an exposé of the crime committed by the Supreme Court when it appointed George W...
Mar 22, 2001 / Letters / Our Readers
Letters Letters
NUCLEAR POWER & US New York City I would like to provide an update on some remarkable events that followed Joseph Mangano's epidemiological discovery tha...
Mar 8, 2001 / Letters / Our Readers
Electoral College–Flunking Out? Electoral College–Flunking Out?
Electoral College--Flunking Out? DeKalb, Ill. Thanks for Lani Guinier's superb critique of the election horror, "Making Every Vote Count" [Dec. 4]. Corporocratic America will never allow genuine democracy in this Republic. STEVE MITCHELL New York City Lani Guinier is right on the mark. We knew she was right when President Clinton bumbled her nomination in 1993. It was, perhaps, his biggest blunder. Given what happened in Florida, we now know what the problem was: Guinier was ahead of her (and our) time. George W. Bush won the election by suppressing votes. Suppressing the vote is an aspect of fascism. It is anathema to democracy, even as imperfect a democracy as ours. FRED J. BERG Miami Lani Guinier's article is 100 percent convincing. Every Nation reader should be solidly in the corner for total election reform. That includes instant-runoff voting (IRV), proportional representation, state-of-the-art electronic voting equipment, weekend voting and the elimination of the Electoral College. Speaking of the Electoral College: We have our fourth graduate with Dubya--the first since 1888. How does a person graduate? By losing the election! It's the worst college in America and needs to be closed down by the enactment of a Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution. In our political adventure novel, The Oakland Statement, published New Year's Day 2000, we predicted that Oakland, California, would be the first major city to initiate IRV, and the citizens did it on November 7. We also predicted that Al Gore would lose the presidency, and that happened on December 12. As we outlined the new amendment in our novel: All citizens shall have the absolute right to the most equitable methods of a representative electoral system. The specific language of the amendment is put forth in legal detail. As Guinier said, "We must not let this once-in-a-generation moment pass." We strongly believe that if this does not happen, our democracy will implode in the elite corporate boardrooms. Barry Goldwater was condemned in 1964 for his famous quote, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." He was correct. We believe that if the people are not given the absolute right to the most equitable methods of a representative electoral system, then, as the Declaration of Independence says, "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends...it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it." Our interpretation of this founding revolutionary document grants citizens the power to take "extraordinary action" in order to save the democracy. We challenge all Nation readers to focus on what Guinier calls a "national conversation," which must end with the enactment of the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution. FREDERICK ELLIS and PAUL FREDERICK Grand Forks, N.D. Lani Guinier made some good points about abolishing the Electoral College, but I have to take offense at her math. Wake me up if I'm wrong, but I thought representation was determined on the basis of a census and not on the voter participation in a given state. Wyoming has three electoral votes. With a population of roughly 450,000, each electoral vote could be said to represent roughly 150,000 people--a factor of two more than Guinier claimed. Her point, however, was to mark the disparity between states like Wyoming and Florida--where roughly 13 million people have 25 electoral votes. In Florida each electoral vote represents 520,000 people. JON JACKSON Brecksville, Ohio Lani Guinier's argument declaring the Electoral College as immorally conceived because it promoted slavery is incorrect. The Electoral College was intended first and foremost to temper the "passions" of the citizens eligible to vote. Considering the electoral map of the 2000 election, it appears that without the Electoral College, much weight would be placed on the opinions of those living on the nation's coasts and northern urban areas. Is that demographic truly representational of the needs and values of the country as a whole? I think not. The reverse is true as well. The Electoral College is part of the fundamental checks and balances that provide approximate equal weight to all citizens of this country. Furthermore I would bet my house that this article would never have been written had Al Gore won the election. JOHN HENRY SCULLY Saginaw, Mich. Lani Guinier argues that the Electoral College was established by the Founders to increase the power of the Southern states, by way of the three-fifths compromise, in the election of the President. While it is true that the compromise increased Southern representation in the House, and thereby in the Electoral College, the assumption that this was intended to increase the powers of the slaveholding states in choosing the chief executive misses an assumption held by many of those who participated in the Constitutional Convention. In the Convention's last comprehensive debate on the method of electing the President, several delegates expressed their belief that in most elections the Electoral College system would result in several candidates receiving electoral votes, making it likely that no one candidate would receive the required majority. In those cases, the House would choose the President, with each state having one vote. The three-fifths compromise would have no effect on a state's power in that eventuality. Of course, the development of the political party system has resulted in the electoral votes being distributed between two major parties, thereby almost guaranteeing that the choice of a President will be made by the electors, contrary to the expectation of the Founders. The Electoral College system is rightfully open to criticism, but making a causal connection between it and the slavery system is a stretch. BOB HANLEY Santa Clara, Calif. Before we scrap our Electoral College, let's remember some of the people we would have gotten without it: Stephen Douglas, Samuel Tilden, Aaron Burr, George McClellan and Charles Evan Hughes. Does Lani Guinier think they would have done better? President Lincoln benefited from it in 1860 and 1864. Thomas Jefferson was also a beneficiary. The Senate, the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court were all created to alleviate fears of states' rights advocates. Nullification, the prelude principle to secessionism, was put forth by Jefferson, the grandfather to neoliberals. So before we start attacking the Founding Fathers about parts of the Constitution that they got wrong, namely the inhuman equation that kept slavery, let's praise what they got right, institutions that may slow us down sometimes but at least help guard against Weimar constitutions. JAMES ROWEN Newport Beach, Calif. Despite her inflammatory attacks on the Founders, Lani Guinier has some valid points. But a more feasible, less extreme step would be to modify the Electoral College system to allocate the "House" votes from each state by Congressional district and give the two "senatorial" votes to the winner on a statewide basis. As a resident of a large state, I recognize the unlikelihood of three-fourths of the states agreeing to abolish the Electoral College, but a reform to allocate votes by district would achieve many of the goals Guinier seeks and would be more likely to be acceptable to the small states. It would also make Congressional redistricting more important and perhaps mitigate the current emphasis on preserving safe districts for incumbents. It would avoid the balkanization that so often attends proportional representation and a proliferation of minor parties. PETER J. TENNYSON Atlanta, Ga. Lani Guinier's comments prove once again that her writings are within the best of the traditions and legacies left to us by the Founding Fathers. When our Founding Fathers met at the Constitutional Convention, the issue regarding the election of the President generated considerable controversy. The debates revolved around how much voice the people should have. Some thought the people were not capable of making a wise choice. Some wanted the states to determine the chief magistrate of the new nation. Many wanted to continue the practice in the Articles of Confederation of having Congress elect the President. Others, led by James Madison, argued for a very radical idea--a popularly elected President chosen directly by the people. The result was the compromise that created the Electoral College. The Electoral College was, then, the mechanism developed to include the people. In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College would provide an obstacle to "cabal, intrigue, and corruption" by not making "the appointment of the President to depend on any pre-existing bodies of men [Congress or the state legislatures], who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes," but rather the Constitution has "referred" the election of the President "to an immediate act of the people of America." In Federalist 10, Madison wrote that the Constitution was "the great desideratum by which" our form of government "can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind." Today, our form of government again labors under an opprobrium that has been, in part, created by the rulings of the Supreme Court and the actions of the Florida legislature. We again need "the great desideratum." Guinier, with her recommendations for more effective ways to include the people in the process of electing the President, has proven herself to be a modern-day Madison whose ideas, if implemented, will once again allow our government to "be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind." JIM SCHMIDT GUINIER REPLIES Cambridge, Mass. I am heartened by the sheer volume of responses generated by my essay, the overwhelming number of which confirm my view that the time is ripe to build a pro-democracy movement out of the wreckage of our last election. LANI GUINIER
Mar 1, 2001 / Letters / Lani Guinier and Our Readers
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 / Letters / 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 / Letters / 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 / Letters / 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 / Letters / Our Readers