April - May 2001 Letters

18 April, 2001

Dear Tom,

I've enjoyed lurking on your website. I think you have done a nice job with the Jackson Progressive and I would be sorry to see it disappear. I appreciate the labor of love it has been but all of us need to keep our priorities straight.

I agree with you that a publication focused on naysaying is not effective. Your eloquent comment I think hits the nail on the head, that:

There must be powerful, believable and practical ideas for a better nation and world injected into the universe of discourse in order to displace the established religion of Chicago-school economics which serves the power elite almost as well as the medieval church served the power elite of its time. People do not give up what they have, no matter how odious, decadent and corrupt it may be, unless they can find a superior alternative. Thusfar, the left and the greens have failed to supply that alternative, or if they have indeed supplied an alternative, they have failed to do so in a way that convinces more than a small minority of the American public to abandon the unsustainable path upon which they now proceed.

I just read an interesting book that I recommend, Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2001). She gives a very nice, and very well written, analysis of the poverty industry as a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor.

But what I don't think she discusses, and nor does Robert Putnam and other barons of the current Poverty Industry is the responsibility of the political left for the doldrums of our current debate. The argument being made by some of the African-American conservatives such as Robert L. Woodson, Sr. (Triumphs of Joseph) I think is compelling. The left views people as victims and uses that to assert its prominence in the poverty industry. Someone once commented that the only thing that separates nonprofit organizatins from for profit ones is an accounting device. I think that is true. I think nonprofits are very self-serving and in many respects exacerbate the problems they claim it is their mission to eliminate.

I've lived for extended periods of time in two places: Hartford, Connecticut and New York City. The capitol region in Connecticut has a medium population density and many opportunities for people to know each other, yet there is an informal norm of isolation that people expect from each other. Residential neighbors maintain a respectful distance, the churches, which are the only meeting places, are dominated by cliques that jealously guard their power position, and the political centers both at local government level and at the state level are dominated by special interests. While it is easier for an individual citizen to make his/her voice heard than it is in NYC, nonetheless it requires an enormous effort to be assertive. The pressures to conform are enormous and anyone who resists conformity has to keep a very low profile or risk ostracism. But what I noticed was that isolation and conformity are encouraged by the political and economic elites.

I'm still pushing my team-based approach to achieving goals. I've attached a brief paper I presented at a literacy conference a few years ago that you might find interesting. But in my view, fundamentally people need to find ways to connect with each other in their neighborhoods before we can connect as a polity. I think there is a very deep hunger for connection among people, but they don't know how to do it. Everywhere people turn they are faced with very cold-hearted competition, and one never knows when that power will attack. So, it is safer to not become too attached beyond immediate family, we simply don't know who to trust.

I think Putnam takes a very simplistic view of civic engagement. Alice O'Connor, while she acknowledges the problem, doesn't address it directly or maybe she avoids it. So I think the work that needs to be done is for the political left to introspectively analyze its own assumptions, values and objectives. The political right has been successful because it is very clear about that. The political left was never able to translate the New Deal into community engagement. It doesn't have a soothsayer comparable to Any Rand Ð and I don't think Nader qualifies.

If it would help the Jackson Progressive continue, I would be willing to do anything I could. Let me know what you need that I could supply online. And good luck with the law practice.

All my best to you.

Hugh McGuire

Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 18:52:56 -0400
From: "J.K. Richards"

Hello Tom,

I'm embarrassed to say that I just now discovered that you had suspended publication of the Progressive in January. I've been working on a book and the job entails lots of travel. Shows you where my head has been.

I read your quandry about seeking positive solutions in lieu of naysaying and I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that I assumed that as an editor of a publication you saw the process and your place in it.

Bottom line solutions are not posted like a manifesto...at least not often. They come from a national discourse and a free exchange of ideas. Some of those exchanges start with a smart aleck like me posting a point of view. As a writer, I consider it far less important that my individual views are given credence than the fact that by stating them I can help start people thinking and discussing various issues.

Like many writers, I have posed perspectives, not always because I held them strongly, but because I felt it was the best way to get readers to think and talk about them.

I think one of the ills in this country is a collective impatience and lack of understanding about how change is brought about.

As an attorney I'm sure you enjoyed the film "To Kill a Mockingbird".

When the little girl was trying to make Attacus feel better about losing the case he told her that he never expected to win...but he took great satisfaction at making a white jury stay out for 8 hours instead of just one. Therefore he considered his effort a success. He knew how to measure progress. He understood that all of us are tiny cogs and the only way to bring about real change is to be patient enough to allow it to happen.

You are right. The Jackson Progressive in and of itself is probably not going to bring about substantial social change.

But the idea of The Jackson Progressive IS what will bring about change.

At ther risk of sounding hokey...if one person is inspired to action as a result of something they read here then you will have done your job.

If The Progressive and other independent voices wither and die...then the only accountings will be versions served up by the AP and Reuters. That is not only sad, it is dangerous.

Best of luck.

Jim Richards
Village Idiom

From: "CLAUDIO GIUSTI"
Subject: LETTER
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 23:04:21 +0200

Forl“, 27th may 2001

Dear Editors,

Europe is proud to be a "death penalty free land".

Europe does not care do justify why it is without the capital punishment, as it does not justify why it is without torture, slavery and racial discrimination.

There are countries with torture and capital punishment (China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc,) which do not care to explain why they have them.; and there is a country (United States of America) which tries to justify why it has capital punishment, as it tried to explain why it had slavery and racial discrimination.

The President of USA declared his faith in the death penalty as a deterrent for crime and homicide. He said:

"I don't think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I don't think that's right. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people lives."

President George W. Bush is completely wrong! The capital punishment not only is not a deterrent for homicide but, with its brutalizing effects, it can be an incentive to commit murders. In the last 50 years an enormous amount of papers, documents, rapports and studies was published in the world and in USA about this issue. Official commissions, jurists, lawyers, university professors, law scholars, governmental and non governmental organizations worked for years about the presumed deterrent effect of the imposition of death by the State. The answer is always the same: the death penalty has no effect on the level of homicide and crime. In United States it is easy to see that the jurisdictions without the capital punishment have not worse homicide rates than the jurisdictions which has this penalty, and that the abolition of it did not bring to a grow of capital crimes. This is only one of the many good practical reasons for which Europe is a death penalty free land. The other ones are that capital punishment is an expensive, racist, cruel, stupid, class related, not working, brutal violation of human rights that kills the innocent, the poor, the mad, and that capital punishment means that those without the capital get the punishment.

But the most important reasons are the moral ones: i.e. death penalty is, as such, an immoral violation of the most fundamental human rights. That is why the majority of the countries in the world lives without killing their own citizens. United States is the only western country and, with Japan, the only industrialized democracy with this punishment. USA is on the uncomfortably side of countries like Iran, Iraq, Communist China, Saudi Arabia, etc.

United States of America is preparing its first federal execution in forty years: that of Timothy McVeigh. I have not any sympathy for that wretch, but I am against the death penalty as such and not only when the condemn is innocent. In this last quarter of century I fought for the victims of human rights violations, but I never ask for the death of killers like Pinochet or Milosevic. McVeigh is a terrorist, the last person in the world who can be deterred by the capital punishment. More, he wants to became a martyr, so he dropped his rights to appeal. In United States there are hundreds if not thousands of people who think that the bombing in Oklahoma City was a legitimate revenge for Waco. That people will see him as a victim of the Federal Govern and, sooner or later, will revenge his death. The former terrorist Menachem Begin remembered us that it is very dangerous to play tit for tat with terrorists.

President Bush can stop this absurd spiral of violence and revenge with an act of wisdom.

DOTT. CLAUDIO GIUSTI
COMMITTEE "3 JULY 1849"
FORLI', ITALY

We are in complete sympathy with you on the matter of the death penalty. It is not what it does to the victim, but what it does to the rest of us. As for our so-called president, don't expect much from him in the way of wisdom or compassion; it's just not a part of his character. --Ed.