History Lessons: Your Letters

We want to hear from our readers. Please submit all letters to the editor through our feedback form [1], and remember to specify which article your letter is in response to. Letters may be edited for length and content.

Covering Islam

Re: Can’t Tell A Koran By Its Cover [2]

Thank you for your article. I thought it was very good, but I do take exception to a few statements that are—despite the author's efforts—a result of centuries-old Western views on Islam.

First the idea of "long and bitter clashes between Islam and Christianity" are extremely misleading. Historically, Muslims waged war on Christian countries not because they were Christian and they wanted to convert them, but because Islam was expanding its territories. Christians were allowed to keep their religion and culture. The Islamic view is that you don't have to be Muslim to go to heaven (this is well-established) and that Christians and Jews enjoy a special status as "People of an Earlier Scripture." So clashes between Muslims and Christians were not usually religious in nature, at least on the Muslim side. (The Christian Crusades might tell a different story.)

The other statement that I found inflammatory is that "Americans now know about Islam is that it harbors fractious, often violent sects." It's not the sects that are violent. If the statement refers to the Iraqis, that is a civil war that the U.S. has fostered and that is based on political power, not some innate religious conflict between Sunni and Shi'a. If the statement refers to al-Qaida, that's not a religious sect, either, but more equivalent to the militant IRA, ETA in Spain or other terrorist groups that operate from a nationalist ideology and that (sometimes) use religion to further their causes. And to talk about the violent sects of Islam while ignoring the violent sects of Christianity and Judaism is misleading.

Thank you.

S.P. Ali

Alec Dubro replies :

Maybe I didn't make the point clear enough: The fact that Americans know something doesn't mean it's true. As for the use of the word "sects," I should have another, less loaded, word. Actually, I was thinking of Wahabism and its conflict with—to be more accuarte—some practitioners of Shia Islam. Of course, religion is only one facet of a conflict, but my point was about religion. And at no point did I imply that Islam was the only faith with internecine conflicts and territorial aggression. A similar dissection of Christianity or Judaism will just have to wait for another time.

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Tempted By Democracy

Re: National Security Temptations [3]

Shadi Hamid and Mark Grinberg’s piece seems to say that the Democrats should ignore public opinion when it comes to foreign policy. It seems to me that that is the reason why they were elected, because Bush was not listening to Americans.

While everyone must follow his or her own conscience when it comes to their views on issues, it is also true that elected officials are there to represent the will of the people. That is why there are elections. If politicians ignore public opinion, we might as well appoint our officials like some monarchy.

Democrats must avoid the pitfalls the GOP fell into if they want to retain power. I am of the view that a good deal of recent election was a message to the Republicans stating this: "Who the hell do you think you are?"

Peggy McCann

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More Reasons To Eat The Rich

Re: Eat The Rich (Starting With Bill Gates) [4] 

Please also mention The Wall Street Journal article:
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2002-May/003052.html [5]

The foundation's investments in 'Big Pharma' could spur controversy, given Mr. Gates' staunch support of strict intellectual-property protections for drugs in poor countries. Mr. Gates' stance on intellectual property is as important to Microsoft's software business as it is to drugmakers... Poor countries have sometimes threatened to seize patents in order to produce affordable generic drugs for sick citizens, making the field of intellectual-property law a flash point between pharmaceutical companies and poor countries.

Tayssir John Gabbour

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A couple of small quibbles with the "Eat the Rich" piece re: Bill Gates:

1. Private foundations don't have to "give away" five percent of their assets, they only have to spend (in "qualifying distributions") five percent of their assets. The actual amount of grantmaking for many foundations is less than five percent as a result, as part of their five percent spending is spent on themselves.

2. Buffett didn't double the assets of the Gates Foundation. He is actually making annual infusions of capital into the foundation, infusions that have to be spent in their entirety during that calendar year. (Actually, it is annual transfusions of five percent of 10 million class B shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock, which I assume that the Gates Foundation either sells or invests and sells other stock to generate the cash to give out in that calendar year). So the Gates Foundation won't have $66 billion to invest; the Buffett piece will still be invested by Berkshire Hathaway, with only pieces of $31 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock given annually to the Gates Foundation.

3. The story of foundations investing in the very corporate activities that their grants are trying to address is not unique to Gates. There are plenty of examples, and the social responsibility investment practices of foundations (other than the very basic screens of tobacco, firearms, etc.) are pretty weak.

4. The Gates Foundation may not invest in tobacco companies, but Buffett was well known for investing in tobacco, in that cigarettes were cheap to make, easy to sell and habit-forming (there's a well known quote of Buffett on this). Remember that not only is Buffett on the board of the Gates Foundation, but Bill Gates has been on the board of Berkshire Hathaway for some years now.

The fact that most people, including most progressives, turn a blind eye to how institutional philanthropy spends and invests the more than half trillion dollars in its control is unfathomable. Philanthropy is big business and worth the attention of observers concerned about the social justice implications of that kind of concentration of wealth.

Rick Cohen, National Correspondent
Nonprofit Quarterly [6]

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The Other Ford's Failures

Re: Ford: Pay Workers Well! [7]

Any message that gets the shift started from trickle-down to bottom-up, from "investor first" to "worker first," is a good one. And everyone knows that Henry Ford wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars they made. This seems to be what he said, but it doesn't seem to have been his actual motivation. There is a long section in Henry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital on the effects of "fordism" and the developing production of the model T (pp. 146-151).

As Ford introduced the endless belt and the flat wage paid to workers who assembled the cars on it, his workers began to desert him. By 1913 turnover reached 380%. "So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963" (p. 149).

And in the summer of 1913 the Wobblies began an organizing drive at Ford as well.

As Ford himself later wrote in his autobiography, "The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made."

It may be true that we can get nothing done in this country that cannot get the approval of the business barons in some form, but I do not think they are ever volunteers in making life better for their workers in any comprehensive way that does not benefit themselves even more.

Take care, hope we meet again soon.

Bob Marshall

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Actually, despite a lot of publicity and hype Henry Ford did not make good on his promise to more than double the daily wage to $5. He fought unionization efforts, the only cause of higher wages until 1941 when the Roosevelt administration forced him to recognize the union on penalty of losing defense contracts.

Stanley Aronowitz

Dmitri Iglitzin replies:

The truth about any important historical event is usually too complicated to be summed up in a few paragraphs, and the significance of Henry Ford's much-vaunted decision, in January of 1914, to pay his workers a minimum wage of $5 per day for eight hours work is no exception.  
 
Ford's decision to create a five-dollar minimum wage was regarded as revolutionary by Ford's business colleagues and the business press. The Wall Street Journal reportedly accused Ford of promoting socialism by paying such high wages. 
 
In the most  dramatic fashion, however, Ford's initiation of the five-dollar-a-day profit-sharing plan moved into the popular consciousness the concept that paying  higher wages to workers could be good both for their  employer and for the economy overall.
 
Dmitri Iglitzin

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Napoleonic Visions

Re: Surgin’ Generals’ Warning [8]

Forget the "recent history of Iraq." Open a history text and try to find the last instance of any conventional army's having won an urban guerilla war. What Bush, with his keen, Napoleonic eye for strategy, plans to do with his additional 20,000 nameless, faceless grunts is nothing short of a suicide mission. As their commander-in-chief, the man is a swine.

Ellie Remore

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Who's Anti-War?

Re: Using The War To Win [9]

David Corn and other columnists and editorial writers at The Nation—who have given us some fine commentary on issues—should stop referring to Barack Obama as an opponent of the war in iraq.

He said he opposed the original resolution for the war, but has voted for every funding bill to continue the slaughter—as has Hillary Clinton.

If you vote money for the guns, bombs and other means to continue the invasion of Iraq, you are for the war, not against it.

Stop insulting us with a pathetic effort to make pro-war democrats into anti-war patriots.

John Marciano

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While I found David Corn's article on "Using the War to Win" inciteful, I was disappointed on his failure to mention Democratic presidential candidate Tom Vilsack. While I know he's an underdog, he is in a unique position of having never voted to support the war in Iraq. And thus far, he has been more vocal than Edwards in his criticism of both the president's and John McCain's support for the war. I know the mainstream media is already counting him out—but I expect more from the contributors to Tom Paine.common sense.

Stephanie Dangel

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Fake Energy

Re: Harmonizing Shades Of Green [10]

Thanks for bringing into relief the three lame "clean" energy paths preferred by Bush and the Crony Crew. One thing you can say for Bush, he's consistent in choosing the easy way out that further enriches his filthy rich friends at the cost of real, lasting solutions that benefit all people.

It's important that we, the peeps, stop the corn ethanol track before it gets propped up with billions of tax dollar subsidies to benefit Big Ag. This right after it was announced that food corn crops would be seriously compromised with the shift in emphasis to corn production for ethanol. How stupid can you be to grow corn to use the cellulose from the husk. We need to focus on a purely cellulosic crop. That could be accomplished by harvesting native grasses grown without fertilizer—we're talking weeds here—in areas that could be repopulated with native grasses throughout the country—talk abou win-win.

Also, why is it that no one in the press, not even online progressives, is shouting the mantra daily that nuclear energy is a non-option because the waste cannot be neutralized and it kills for hundreds of thousands of years? This is and always has been a no-brainer—no wonder Bush and Co. are on board.

Jerell Lambert