Exchange: Does America Stand for Drones? Exchange: Does America Stand for Drones?
London When I was a child at the end of World War II, I was told the good guys won. Reading David Cole’s remarks on drones [“Remote Control Killing,” March 4], I wonder. He writes, “We should not confuse [drones] with assassinations and torture.” Why not? The concept of the “rule of law” he invokes is meaningless as long as the authority to kill without due process is public policy; worse when that authority resides in one man. What profiteth a nation to win a war against fascism only to adopt its policies? JEFFRY KAPLOW Kansas City, Mo. What has happened to The Nation? I wait for some discussion of the fascist takeover of our country and the world. When it was Bush, you covered crimes. Now with Obama, it’s just a slap on the wrist. David Cole, your legal affairs correspondent, says of drones, “We cannot forswear their use.” Yes, we must. Thanks to Katha Pollitt in the same issue, who writes more about the immorality of drones and kill lists. ELIZABETH SMITH New York City David Cole is right that there is something very wrong with the Obama administration’s “targeted killing” program. It is shrouded in unnecessary secrecy, but publicly available information makes clear that the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command have killed hundreds of people without knowing very much about who they are, what they’ve done or whether they present a direct threat to the United States. The administration’s former ambassador to Pakistan, who helped implement the targeted killing program there, has complained that the CIA regards “any male between the ages of 20 and 40” as a lawful target. The British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks drone strikes, estimates that as many as 4,300 people have lost their lives to US drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Lindsey Graham, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says the number of dead is even higher. This is not only a human rights travesty; it is unwise and unlawful. Few things are more certain to swell the ranks of terrorist organizations than the perception that the United States is indifferent to the loss of innocent life. And international law is unambiguous: outside actual battlefields, lethal force may be used only against threats that are truly imminent, and then only as a last resort. The Justice Department white paper recently leaked to the press confirms that the administration’s targeted killing program does not observe these limits. For moral, strategic and legal reasons, the program should be made more discriminating and more transparent. As Cole says, it should also be subject to judicial review—which should take place in federal courts, not in a new security tribunal set up specifically to issue death warrants. The federal courts are accustomed to evaluating the government’s use of lethal force in a domestic law enforcement context. They have also become accustomed to evaluating the lawfulness of national security detentions. They could certainly review the lawfulness of targeted killings. Indeed, as the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights are arguing in a case pending before a district judge in Washington, the Constitution requires the courts to do so. There is no need for a new “kill court,” and the creation of such a court would be more likely to normalize the targeted killing program than to narrow it. JAMEEL JAFFER, deputy legal director American Civil Liberties Union New York City As David Cole rightly notes, targeted killing can be lawful when the United States is in an armed conflict. It can also be lawful if the United States is acting within constitutional and international law recognizing the right of national self-defense. We have faced wars and imminent attacks in the past; we will face them again. We need to have a clear process governing how targeting decisions are made and how those rules are enforced when we do. The US armed forces have such a process. The international law of war—embodied in treaties we have ratified, implemented through domestic regulations applicable force-wide—requires armed forces to establish systems of rules, training and discipline to make sure that targeting operations are conducted lawfully. The US military’s targeting doctrine, including its practices for how targets are chosen and checked, is designed to comply with this law and is available in a joint forces publication online. Members of the armed forces who violate orders within this system may be punished according to, among other things, the rules set forth by statute in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Civilians, at least in Afghanistan, who wrongfully suffer damage from attacks (including the families of those killed) can seek amends through various US compensation programs there. The military system is imperfect. Training requirements should be enhanced. Remedies for the wrongfully injured should be made more robust—including through the availability of civil remedies in US federal courts. But the current conflict has stretched the definition of what counts as an armed conflict, and who within it may be targeted; it is thus a policy-level responsibility to make clear and public which rules are applied. Still, there is a deep infrastructure not only of rules and regulations, but also of professional norms and culture here on which to build. In substantial contrast, the CIA’s targeting authority is not limited by the statute passed by Congress authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda and associates. The CIA, from what can be intuited from its rare public statements, does not necessarily consider itself legally bound by the law of war. According to some reports, the CIA has its own “kill lists,” based on its own criteria, which are publicly unknown. How CIA targeting personnel are trained to comply with what rules there are, what measures of discipline they may be subject to if they do not, what kinds of compensation may be made available to those who wrongfully suffer a misdirected attack—all of these are unknown. It may be possible to develop an elaborate parallel system of rules, training and accountability mechanisms to ensure that the CIA complies at least to the same extent as the military with US and international law. Or there is another approach: relieve the CIA of its targeting mission. What do we lose? Not capacity—over the past decade, the CIA and the military have come to work closely in joint operations, and intelligence and force capabilities can be shared while keeping operations under military legal authority. Neither need we lose secrecy—the military has proven itself able to operate in a remarkably clandestine fashion. What of deniability—the fiction that if the CIA is doing it, the government is not officially, diplomatically responsible? There are circumstances in which that may matter. But today, there is no one in the world who doubts that the United States is responsible for the ongoing drone operations in, for example, the tribal areas in Pakistan. For the price of shedding this fig leaf of denial, we could begin to reclaim the mantle of law. DEBORAH PEARLSTEIN Cardozo School of Law Cole Replies Washington, D.C. Jeffry Kaplow and Elizabeth Smith equate targeted killing with fascism. That would make every country that has ever gone to war, even in self-defense, a fascist regime. There is plenty to be concerned about regarding Obama’s drone policy, but killing is a part of war and not in itself unlawful. Notably, both Jameel Jaffer and Deborah Pearlstein—one at the ACLU and the other formerly with Human Rights First—agree with me that targeted killing, unlike torture, is sometimes permissible. The issue is how broadly the administration is employing this power, and subject to what checks and balances. I agree that the administration’s program remains unacceptably shrouded in secrecy, that it goes too far in extending beyond the battlefield to situations that do not pose an immediate threat, and that the CIA, which lacks the structure, experience and rules of the military, should not be conducting strikes. I’m skeptical that the administration believes it can target “any male between the ages of 20 and 40.” If that is really the case, why the reportedly extensive internal wrangling over who should or should not be on a “kill list”? They’re not spending all that time debating their targets’ ages. But there are serious unanswered questions about the scope of the administration’s “signature strikes,” which target people based not on individualized intelligence, but on patterns of activity. What should be clear—and what is uniting not only human rights activists and civil libertarians, but also voices on the right such as Rand Paul—is that the executive branch cannot be allowed the authority to kill in secret, far beyond the battlefield, without clear rules and public accountability. DAVID COLE
Mar 20, 2013 / Our Readers and David Cole
Letters Letters
Immigration, second-class wages, torture and taboo
Mar 12, 2013 / Our Readers and Samuel Moyn
Exchange: Adrienne Rich—Fact Check Exchange: Adrienne Rich—Fact Check
Brooklyn, N.Y. I have always been a huge admirer of Ange Mlinko’s poetry and her shrewd criticism. But I must part ways with her opinions in her review of Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems, “Diagram This” [Feb. 18]. Mlinko uses swaths of my essay to buttress her point that Rich is no longer relevant to a younger generation of poets because that generation favors indeterminacy as opposed to Rich’s poetry of conviction. I’m afraid that Mlinko greatly misread my essay, which is in fact a celebration of Rich. Mlinko quotes me as follows: I “had a period when I reacted against her in college…. It was a reaction against white bourgeois feminists who assumed their plight was universal.” Mlinko does not include my rebuttal to my younger, knee-jerk self in the essay: “I misread her of course. It wasn’t until after college that I read ‘Diving Into the Wreck’ and I realized that her poetry was so breathtaking and so powerful because of her commitment to the collective.” I did imply that perhaps a younger generation does favor play over conviction, but this was actually an implied criticism of present trends in poetry. It was also an inward critical look at my own cynicism about poetry’s social function. “At such cynical moments,” I wrote in my essay, ”I turn to Rich for her courage.” But I would also caution against making such polarizing generational distinctions. There is so much negative capability in Rich’s poetry. Re-examine her “Twenty-One Love Poems,” which struggles to remake the sonnet so that it makes room for lesbian love. Read her open-ended ghazals and her “Phenomenology of Anger.” Her lines “quiver with equivocation,” but they also quiver with a rage that was not permitted in poetry. There is no irony in Rich’s writing, which is the largest distinction between her work and poetry like my own and some of my peers. But at the same time, she has inspired and continues to inspire legions of young poets. True, you will rarely see her being taught next to John Ashbery and Charles Olson in a graduate poetry seminar. But when I teach her in grad and undergrad workshops, students are awed by her poems and not just by her legacy. Rich had an omnivorously diverse aesthetic appetite—unlike some of the other “old guard” poets, she didn’t care about camps. What mattered was that the poem took risks conceptually and formally. She inspired an aesthetically diverse field of poets: Elizabeth Willis, Anne Waldman, Ed Pavlic, Peter Gizzi, Suzanne Gardinier and, yes, even Charles Bernstein. When I was in Cape Town, young South African poets all cited Rich as the American poet who inspired them the most. Her influence travels widely and divergently. I’m glad that Mlinko wrote the review. Debates should be generated from Rich’s poetry. Rich, in her poetry and as a poet, was divisive. She was not uniformly venerated; she did not play it safe or quietly wait her turn until she won her big awards. She pissed people off with her poetry, with her stances, with her contrarian opinions, with her strong conviction for justice. This is why she’s so important and why she’s been so transformative. It’s only appropriate, then, that Rich’s work continues to generate heated debate today. CATHY PARK HONG Paris; Wakefield, R.I.; Tarrytown, N.Y.; Brooklyn, N.Y. Ange Mlinko’s review includes a surprising number of factual errors. She refers to “poetry collections from younger white or Jewish poets whose emotional lives are inextricably bound up with new motherhood” and includes Brenda Shaughnessy. Leaving aside the peculiarity of “white or Jewish,” we note that Shaughnessy is neither. (It is opinion to add this, but to imply that younger women poets writing about motherhood are reacting against Rich seems peculiar: poets, not all “white or Jewish,” have been writing such work since the resurgence of the women’s movement in the 1970s.) Mlinko cites “Paul Valéry’s words to Edgar Degas: ‘A poem is not made of ideas, it is made of words.’” But it was Mallarmé who said, “Mais, Degas, ce n’est point avec des idées que l’on fait des vers…. C’est avec des mots.” Mlinko says “the famous sequence ‘Twenty-One Love Songs’ feels misnamed; these aren’t songs…but further meditations, addresses, in a rhetorical mode.” But the sequence is in fact titled “Twenty-One Love Poems” (and is referred to as such earlier in the review). “Feels misnamed”—but it’s Mlinko who does the misnaming. In addition to making these possibly trivial but cumulatively disconcerting errors, Mlinko quotes selectively from a recent essay by Cathy Park Hong. Claiming that younger poets are not influenced by Rich and are not attracted to the poetry of “commitment,” Mlinko writes, “Cathy Park Hong…has admitted that she ‘had a period when I reacted against her in college,’” but does not mention that further in her essay, Hong repudiates that view. Mlinko again quotes approvingly from Hong, who writes: “I thought about the word commitment. This is a word that rarely comes up in workshop. Instead, there is this word: play.” But, again, Hong is repudiating, not endorsing, this position. How could Mlinko have missed this? MARILYN HACKER, LINDA GARDINER, ALFRED CORN, JESSICA GREENBAUM, JESSICA REED Mlinko Replies Houston The letter writers are chagrined that their idol is not unequivocally praised in the pages of The Nation. But Marilyn Hacker et al. see animosity where none was intended. Going by Emily Dickinson’s criterion for poetry, I don’t feel as though the top of my head were taken off. Hong’s poetry does not “repudiate” the aesthetics of play—she is the very model of the linguistically playful, daring poet. I quote Hong’s first impressions of Rich’s work because it is a viewpoint shared by many (much as it may pain the letter writers to hear it). If Hong softened her stance, one cannot wholly discount the fact that Rich bestowed a huge prize on her and subsequently befriended her. This is not to disparage Hong, or to question her devotion to Rich, but to point out the obvious: having lunch with elders who give you prizes may have a mellowing effect on your aesthetic judgment. In any case, she didn’t feel the top of her head taken off at first read, either. If this is controversial, then as Hong suggests, let the controversy rage. The Shaughnessy criticism is trivial. Is she Japanese because she was born in Japan? Or Japanese-American because she was raised in the United States? If she is a Japanese-American poet, then I, with two immigrant parents, demand to be known henceforth as a Belorussian-Hungarian-American poet. Clarification on a Million Moms Katha Pollitt, in “Subject to Debate” [Aug. 27/Sept. 3], referred to the Million Mom March, in May 2000, as being “loosely tied to the Gore campaign.” The Nation confirms that this statement is not true. Donna Dees, who founded the Million Mom March and had a leadership role within it, has issued the following statement: “MMM was not connected to any political party, candidate or representative from the White House. In particular, MMM was not affiliated with Al Gore’s presidential campaign, and there is no basis in fact for any supposition to infer inappropriate political affiliations. MMM has always been an independent grassroots advocacy organization to promote sensible gun regulations, which include, but are not limited to, childproofing handguns, universal background checks on all gun sales, licensing gun owners and registering their firearms.”
Mar 5, 2013 / Our Readers and Ange Mlinko
Exchange: ‘Stripping Down and Lighting Up’ Exchange: ‘Stripping Down and Lighting Up’
San Francisco Steve Wasserman has taken liberties with history and with my book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power [“Exit Stage Left,” Oct. 29, 2012]. Wasserman, a former Berkeley radical, opens his essay with an anecdote from 1969. He’d spent the day “battling cops” trying to quell a protest at UC Berkeley, and that evening attended the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, a performance meant to shock with its outré references to pot and sex. Some in the audience disrupted the show by stripping down and lighting up (though Wasserman demurely doesn’t say if he joined in). “Bedazzled as we were by the spectacle of our own high ideals and the intoxications of making history,” he writes, “we perhaps might be forgiven for mistaking the theater in the streets as the main event.” This episode may reflect Wasserman’s experience of late ’60s Berkeley, but not the broader period I examined or the role of most students, professors and university officials targeted by the FBI. Subversives tells the story of J. Edgar Hoover’s covert operations at the University of California during the Cold War. It starts with the FBI’s investigation of Soviet nuclear espionage at Berkeley in the ’40s and shows how the bureau veered from this mission to focus on citizens engaged in constitutionally protected dissent. The book does this by tracing the FBI’s converging involvements with three iconic figures who clashed at Berkeley in the ’60s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the inspiring student leader Mario Savio and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. As the prologue notes, “It shows how the FBI’s dirty tricks at Berkeley helped fuel the student movement, damage the Democratic Party, launch Ronald Reagan’s political career, and exacerbate the nation’s continuing culture wars. Above all, it illustrates the dangers that the combination of secrecy and power pose to democracy, especially during turbulent times.” Wasserman shoots past all this, writing, “Did the bureau, despite its legal, extralegal and often criminal manipulations, actually bend history’s arrow? For all its provocations, did it really derail or significantly disrupt the New Left? Did it truly succeed in putting the kibosh on student protest? Was it an important factor in propelling Reagan to the pinnacle of power—a summit to which he somehow might not, on the strength of his own political genius, have risen? The answer, contre Rosenfeld, is no.” “History’s arrow” is a nice conceit, but history is not one archer and arrow but many archers and arrows. And in many instances, Hoover’s hidden hand did alter the arrow’s arc. Consider some 1,000 professors dismissed without due process under the FBI’s unauthorized Responsibilities Program in the ’50s. Or Kerr, whom Hoover undermined with the public, the regents and President Johnson, who dropped him as a cabinet candidate. Or the FBI’s steady leaking of allegations to political and media allies, which darkened public opinion of UC and helped build a conservative consensus, both of which benefited candidate Reagan. I don’t claim that the FBI “significantly disrupted” the New Left or put “the kibosh” on student protest. I do show that the FBI’s dirty tricks not only failed to stop the Free Speech Movement and other protests, but backfired and strengthened the student movement. Thus, Hoover inadvertently drew Savio to Berkeley. Nor do I say Reagan won office because of Hoover. I show that Reagan was an active informer in Hollywood, that Hoover repaid him with personal and political favors, and that this covert—and improper—relationship significantly influenced Reagan’s political transformation. Absurdly, Wasserman suggests I believe everyone named in FBI records was involved in un-American conspiracies. I make clear that the bureau focused on legitimate protest. (He even misses the title’s double entendre.) He complains I lack irony, but he’s being a trifle farinaceous. One needn’t begin passages with a neon “Ironically….” The facts speak for themselves, and readers may conclude certain events are “ironic”—or are the logical result of a dictatorial director demanding agents validate his undue obsession with subversives. Beginning my research in 1981, I knew Senator Frank Church had exposed FBI activities elsewhere, and I was inspired to investigate them at Berkeley. I brought five FOIA lawsuits over twenty-seven years and forced the FBI to release 300,000-plus pages. Wasserman suggests the FBI tried to thwart their release because they reveal the bureau’s “thoroughgoing incompetence.” Amusing, perhaps, but the courts overruled FBI secrecy claims after finding the investigations unlawful. As the judge concluded, “The records in this case go [to] the very essence of what the government was up to during a turbulent, historic period.” But contrary to Wasserman, I didn’t rely solely on them but also conducted more than 150 interviews and other research. Was the systemic political corruption of the FBI really a “sideshow” to the New Left’s protests? Many might say just the opposite. Why did Wasserman so bend his review? Is he still “bedazzled” by his own spectacle? Or is his motive manifest in his conclusion: “But we did not need Hoover’s hooligans to prompt us to embrace the terrible logic of politics as a total art form. We came all on our own to believe that only by increasingly provocative spectacle could the veil of public apathy be pierced. It is we who elevated extremism to the level of strategy. It was a dialectic of defeat.” Such “extremism” may have contributed to the New Left’s decline, but it wasn’t the style of most activists during the Cold War; and other forces may have played a greater role, including the end of the Vietnam War. And who’s to say the loose amalgam of the New Left was meant to become a political institution, as Wasserman suggests. There’s a strong argument, too, that the era’s tumult led to a more democratic society. But as Wasserman makes clear, his true aim was bashing the ’60s and indulging in public self-renunciation; perhaps he did get naked. SETH ROSENFELD Wasserman Replies New Haven, Conn. Gosh. Seth Rosenfeld is an exemplary reporter. Subversives is, as I wrote, “welcome,” “important” and “adds nuance and appalling detail” to our sense of the ’60s, “whose many tumults and contradictions still lie buried beneath a carapace of cliché.” I added, “Rosenfeld’s labors help to deepen our understanding,” and I praised his “admirable dedication” to exposing what the FBI tried to hide. Rosenfeld’s aggrieved letter gives me a chance to go further: his book is indispensable though flawed (how and to what degree are matters reasonable people may reasonably disagree about). Still, I urge everyone to read it—without, however, checking your critical faculties at the title page. Read it with an open mind, but not so open that, as the old adage warns, your brains fall out. STEVE WASSERMAN
Feb 19, 2013 / Seth Rosenfeld and Steve Wasserman
Letters Letters
Art for change, change for art; Haiti: hotels or houses?
Feb 5, 2013 / Our Readers and Amy Wilentz
Safety Net: On Thomas Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld Safety Net: On Thomas Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld
In his writing and life, Thomas Bernhard led a charge in the opposite direction. His publisher always broke his fall.
Jan 30, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Holly Case
Letters Letters
The Morgen Freiheit; let's get real on Cuba; Bach...
Jan 30, 2013 / Our Readers and Eric Alterman
Exchange Exchange
Quo Vadis, Democrats? Columbus, Ohio Thank you, thank you, thank you for L.R. Runner’s “How to Save the Democratic Party” [Dec. 24/31, 2012]. I absolutely agree. Special thanks to Runner for noting the damage done to the party by its current hero Bill Clinton. He took pride in giving away the party’s influence and abandoning its principles, helping to start the United States on the downward path from which it will not return soon or easily. The talk of Hillary Clinton as a 2016 presidential candidate makes my blood run cold. LINDA SLEFFEL New Paltz, N.Y. Is this where The Nation has sunk to? A cover story on how to “save the Democratic Party”? Really? This is the new “progressive” rallying cry? Shame. GLENN GIDALY Kigali, Rwanda Thanks, Nation, for L.R. Runner’s passionate commentary on the state of the Democratic Party. More than one of the responses critiqued Runner for expecting an aggressively progressive party in the absence of a social movement pushing it to be so, as the labor and civil rights movements did in the 1930s and ’60s. I have to ask if these folks missed the vibrant demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and after, the antiwar demonstrations that attracted millions into the streets in 2003, and the Occupy movement that blossomed in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street–created financial crisis. The movement is there; the Democrats just don’t seem to be listening. The party helped gut banking regulation and voted for the Iraq invasion en masse, to name just two times the party tacked in the opposite direction from progressives in the street. MARK PICKENS Richmond, Va. I made it through two pages of “How to Save the Democratic Party” before the yawns set in. The Democratic Party is just what its members want it to be, despite whatever fantasy L.R. Runner has for it. The best thing the party can do for itself and the country is to marginalize the nativist yahoos who dominate the Republican Party. It can do that by coalition-building in Texas and Arizona, not engaging in a “showdown” between its “reformist” (read: do-nothing) and “accommodationist” (read: politically realistic) elements. Instead of helping the GOP by fighting among ourselves, how much better to take their electoral crown jewels while they eat one another alive. Runner may settle for being a “second party.” I want to be first. PAUL GOODE Embarrass, Minn. L.R. Runner’s subhead that “America needs an unapologetically partisan party” is right on. The Democratic Party is not a vehicle for real change. Its simpering bipartisanship abhors hints that our sacred economic system must be considered the culprit. Capitalism is so deeply embedded in the gray matter of most Americans that it is unthinkable that it could be the cause of our waning economy. WILLIAM R. LAMPA Bremerton, Wash. I agree with a lot of what L.R. Runner says. The progressives in the Democratic Party need to take the party back. I disagree with those who want to give the party the credit for the progressive actions of the past few years. Moveon.org with its millions of members, along with dozens of other progressive organizations, have been very active doing what the Democratic Party should be doing. Bring back Howard Dean! MICHAEL J. BENEFIEL Bradenton, Fla. L.R. Runner says, “In the two most representative elections—the direct popular vote for the presidency and the House of Representatives—the Democratic Party won the former by less than 4 percent and lost the latter.” Readers should remember that Democrats won the popular vote for the House but lost the House itself because of aggressive redistricting by Republicans. ROBERT SALZBERG Runner Replies En Route, USA Too many comments on my “How to Save the Democratic Party”—published with it in the magazine, appearing at TheNation.com and now on the letters page—confirm the adage that in politics people, including progressives, it turns out, stand where they sit. The heads and other representatives of well-established progressive groups, from Congress, a state third party and a university to “grassroots” and “social” movements, flatly reject my call for a liberal-progressive struggle to take over the Democratic Party establishment. They assure us instead that they have already accomplished a lot and will achieve even more sometime in the future. Even apart from their self-referential tone and considerable exaggeration of “victories” on November 6, their argument is unpersuasive—and perhaps a bit uncaring. They can’t explain the Democratic Party’s longstanding complicity in the bipartisan policies that have wrecked tens of millions of American lives. And their assurances that their “progressive infrastructure,” “grassroots organizing expertise” and “legislative sausage-making” will eventually prevail, “slowly and subtly,” will not save more tens of millions of our fellow citizens facing the same fate. In this progressive long run, all of these gravely endangered Americans, like all of us, to recall Keynes, will be dead. As for historical objections to my manifesto, unlike Dick Flacks I don’t know all the parties that “exist on the planet,” but his odd assertion that “a political party, even if it is controlled by the government,” cannot “lead major change” misses much of the history of the twentieth century. And the historian Michael Kazin’s fear of “tearing apart the existing Democratic coalition,” referring (somewhat misleadingly) to 1972, seems to have missed Benjamin Todd Jealous’s documented observation: “It would be folly for Democrats to assume that their majority coalitions will continue to hold in key swing states.” Instead, let’s heed those Nation commentators, including Jim Hightower, Fred Harris, Andy Schmookler and Amy Dean, several of whom speak from personal experience, bitter and sweet: progressives should “hate losing when we win”; adopt “militancy” against “Democrats as Chamberlain”; and rebel against being “captives” in their own party. A great twentieth-century transformational leader once remarked, reflecting on his own struggles, that radical reform always begins as heresy. In our context, I’d say it means that too many American progressives aren’t progressive enough. L.R. RUNNER Thoughts on the Good Book New Berlin, Pa. Re Christian Parenti’s “The Book That Launched a Movement” [Dec. 24/31]: Wingnut foghorns like George Will like to repeat the Margaret Thatcher quote, “The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money [to spend].” After reading about the book The Limits to Growth, I thought of a rebuttal (and you can quote me): “The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of planet [to wreck].” GARY KENDALL
Jan 15, 2013 / Our Readers and L.R. Runner
Letters Letters
“Financial, economic, military and political” inertia, fracking, National Socialism, Henry James, the Battle in Seattle
Jan 9, 2013 / Our Readers and Leo Robson