Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1153 Editor's Choice: 107
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The UAW's lack of vision
[Read the article: Win or lose, the UAW is doomed]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let's not let industrial labor organizations off the hook quite so fast. Historically, while unions have by no means been the most racist institutions in America they have most definitely been closer to the tail end of the curve than the nose in terms of integration and racial progress.
That has done them huge injury in the past, and it's been their fault. I know, auto workers are not the most broadly or liberally educated people on earth, but you emphatically do not need to be well-educated to be open-minded, let alone self-interested.
Now, in the age of globalization, the total lack of an ingrained, institutionalized perspective beyond the borders of the US is no longer merely crippling but has become fatal.
It's worth noting that, by contrast, the SEIU is thriving. For one thing of course blue-collar service work is much harder to export. But for another, the union has adopted a strategy that centers on solidarity, not defensive retrenchment. When they struck all across Boston a few years ago, management folded in under a day.
A generation ago, even a few years ago as Andrew Leonard documents, the UAW could have been a powerful and persuasive voice in support of design-intensive manufacturing in America and industrial labor solidarity abroad. It was neither, and union workers have only their own parochiality and maleducation to blame for that.
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Straightforward
[Read the article: Poland's female politicos disrobe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"... uncommunicative men with their black tie outfits.
It seems to me that the code here is simpler than Tracy Clark-Flory might realize. "Uncommunicative" obviously means "not naked enough."
Seriously, nobody batted an eyelash when Le Pen used to run around at nude beaches — in fact people admired his (metaphorical) balls. Bush fils is well known for his bedenimed ass-shots during brush-clearing season, and people still pay good green money for those goofball posters of him painted with bare, muscular forearms.
http://savageminds.org/wp-content/image-upload/bush.jpg
And ogling isn't just for fascists, either. How many firemen, nurses, secretaries, librarians, and local politicians have appeared in fundraising pinup calendars in the past few years all across America?
So now we have discreetly nude Eastern European centrist feminists? What's not to like?
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There is no Democratic majority
[Read the article: Iraq and roll over]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is not a hard riddle to figure out.
The Senate is being run by what would be referred to in a parliamentary system a three-way coalition — between the minority Democrats, led by Harry Reid, and the extreme minority Socialist and what you might call American Kadima parties, represented by Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, respectively.
Ask anyone in Canada, Israel, England, or anywhere with an energetic parliamentary democracy — multi-way coalitions are arrangements of last resort, notoriously fragile and never more so than when single defections are all it takes to break them apart.
The cardinal rule of parliamentary politics is that if you want to get done the 60% that you all agree on, you have to sacrifice the other 40%. Otherwise you get done 0% of anything because one of your coalition members bolts for the opposition, which becomes the new majority and now you're out of power completely.
So yeah, maybe it's true that the Democrats won't force an anti-war bill through even with a Senate majority — but we won't know until they actually have one, will we? And right now, they don't. What about that isn't clear?
Or if you would rather see the Democrats undertake minority (read: futile) opposition to the war and don't care that it would cost them every other aspect of legislative power and influence they currently have, then say so.
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Lesson to learn
[Read the article: I'm working for a cokehead at a free arts magazine]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It sounds like Despondent and Disappointed already knows what to do in a fairly cut and dry situation and, fittingly, Cary's advice is brief and to the point.
One thing that Cary doesn't cover, though, is the question how this disappointment over the evaporating raise came about. The steps in that process are worth looking at more closely because there is a lesson to learn there that's entirely separate from the (valuable) lesson about leaving out-of-control users no matter what your relationship is to them.
Despondent feels that her (I'm assuming for various reasons that Despondent is a woman) boss betrayed her by promising her a raise that the boss then took back. But her boss doesn't quite see it that way — the boss is evidently one of those people who feels that talk is talk and you say today whatever gets you through to tomorrow, and what actually happens tomorrow is a whole other story.
What Despondent has discovered, in short, is the importance of getting things in writing.
It's nice to think of the written word as the dull, soulless obsession of petty bureaucracy and weaselly management — the sort of culture we work for organizations like arts magazines precisely to avoid. But this is a lesson that keeps coming up, from Despondent's issue to other writers who have had problems with leases or divorces — or any relationship where money is involved. We put down our business affairs in writing not because we want to be legalistic or "corporate" but because, like a resident of a fault zone who stores fresh water and a survival kit "just in case," we're planning for bad outcomes that we hope never to see.
Hopefully Despondent will remember that casual promises made by people with whom one has a financial relationship just do not count. If it's not in writing, preferably signed and dated, then it pretty much may as well never have been said — and it's a sure bet that anyone who balks at being asked to initial a memo reiterating a lunchtime conversation about a raise never intended to follow through in the first place.