Letters

...What I did say was that the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) investigator, Agnes Pucher, criticized an earlier, favorable report as "whitewashed" or biased because the previous LSC investigator was black...

...It was a celebration of friendship and of the life of a unique human being who had untiringly asserted his individuality against any repressive authority, state-appointed or self-appointed, and who had stubbornly refused, as he said on one of the videotapes we watched, to "let the bastards change me...

...The co-op's role is to set an example and to motivate people in the larger community to exercise their rightful power...

...It is a gem...

...Rothburd seems to assume that co-ops should become permanent institutions—a common error pervading the co-op movement...

...Joseph Danison Berkeley, California Co-ops Co-opted Carrie Rothburd's "Co-opted" (May issue) was generally accurate but incomplete...

...We shouldn't assume that the dissolution of a co-op denotes failure...

...Co-ops changed because the old visions didn't work...

...A management collective makes management decisions based on consensus...

...More than anything else it is a legacy of hope, for perseverance is hope...

...Eugene Werntz Friday Harbor, Washington The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...

...But the true measure of success for this co-op has more to do with subjective ideals than with graphs and numbers...

...Bernard J. Sussman Washington, D.C...

...It has posted growth in each of the last several years...

...His saving grace was that he shared with the humanist Erasmus the gift for humor and satire which, I believe, enabled him to bear more easily the pain caused by the oppression he saw around him...

...Community involvement is at a high...

...From then on, while our paths were mostly separated, we were always heading in the same direction, and it was a great joy when we had occasion to get together...

...Baby Jane...

...So it ain't the complexion, it's the competence...

...The purpose of the co-op is the "active promotion of economic democracy...

...This environment includes market factors such as competition, consumer trends, and the general economy, but it also includes the values and desires of the co-op's members and workers...

...NCC's mission statement says consumers and workers have the right to control the economic system...

...More important, Antioch Law School is in deep trouble, and not because its students are swarthy or liberal...

...I doubt that the book's typos and uneven style bother them nearly as much as the fact that someone else got a word in edgewise...

...What is important is community-building, empowerment of consumers, learning and educating about food and the impacts of the food system, and reestablishing a partnership of consumers with farmers...

...His irreverence toward authority was rooted in that reverence for human life that had made him a life-long pacifist...

...Over the past forty years I have considered his writings well worth the price of my subscription, so that the rest of each issue came as a kind of bonus...

...Alfred McClung Lee Madison, New Jersey LaRouche and the Loonies Your Comment, "Lyndon LaRouche and the Loony Vote" (May issue), parroted the mainstream media in its assessment of the political success of Lyndon LaRouche...

...Though he was passionately impatient of hypocrisy and ideological inflexibility, he could listen with great patience and unwavering kindness to all views sincerely held and intelligently argued...

...In this regard, too, NCC demonstrates success...

...It takes a chance with people who have been locked out of opportunities elsewhere and makes achievers out of them...

...The spaces in between were filled with his books and articles and those informal post cards that were likely to come from almost any point on the compass, bringing us up to date on what he was doing and how things were going with "Ms...

...The debilitated Left cannot afford the casual contempt and flippancy in such empty labels as "loony...

...I plan to continue being a naughty old lady and will refuse any such medication for aches and pains...

...Wouldn't it be worthwhile to present LaRouche's programs and proposals, as it might also have been worthwhile to read Mein Kampf in 1933...

...For all their idealistic talk about becoming new Clarence Darrows, Antioch students are uncommonly likely to flunk the bar exam, and if they do pass they are rarely hired by major law firms or Government agencies...

...The age of ten is a good time for most kids to begin to see that there are two sides to most questions...

...Jack McLanahan Richmond, Kentucky Ihave just returned from a Meeting for Thanksgiving for Milton Mayer...

...For minority and women students, Antioch graduates average 20 per cent higher pass rates than most other law schools, including Georgetown, UCLA, Yale, etc...

...However, there are teams and levels of appropriate decision-making...

...This is the legacy Milton left us...

...Co-ops tried to change the world but, unfortunately, in most cases the world changed without them...

...Thomas Crimmins Tacoma, Washington Aco-op, for better or worse, is a reflection of its environment...

...W.N...

...This was not "tolerance"— Milton would have dismissed that as condescension, and he was not a condescending man...

...The death, as well as the life, of each co-op should be greeted with joyous and somber expectation, appreciation, and acceptance...

...Remembering Milton Mayer Imet Milton Mayer in the flesh only once, at a co-op conference in 1943, but my time as a reader of The Progressive coincides more or less with his time as a writer for the magazine...

...Oh, I do...

...Samson B. Knoll Carmel Highlands, California Fan Mail Ilike Molly Ivins...

...Its library is too small, haphazLETTERS to the Editor ardly organized, and located about three blocks from the classrooms, so that students are discouraged from using it...

...Eugene Zwenig Gordon, Georgia Antioch School of Law Allan Ebert's article suggesting that the Reagan Administration "set out to destroy Antioch School of Law" because the school has too many black students or too many whose views are "pink" (Datelines, May issue) is pure crap...

...I expect easy labels from the commercial media, but I look for more than an echo of "loony" from The Progressive...

...the reason is that Paradise it ain't...

...We've missed them greatly...

...In the context of this democratic process, NCC has changed in several areas-product selection, store appearance, business planning, financial acuity...

...Antioch is in trouble with the American Bar Association and the profession generally because it is not much of a law school...

...In this instance, the LSC was granting some funds to Antioch to subsidize certain projects, but the LSC can change its mind about the projects or the school...

...Perhaps it is time for fourth-graders to get a look at this perspective...

...Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called Antioch "the most innovative law school in America...

...One other governor has publicly stated he will not allow the troops under his command to be sent to Honduras: Governor Toney An-aya of New Mexico...

...While Roth-burd challenges co-ops to respond to current needs, she seems to have a romantic view of what those needs really are...

...There is no manager...

...Steve Cobble Special Assistant to the Governor Santa Fe, New Mexico Death by Prescription Matthew Rothschild's "Death by Prescription" (June issue) provided a good summary of the piroxicam (Feldene) story...

...find it easy to exploit...

...Allan Ebert Washington, D.C...

...However, readers should not believe that the actions of Pfizer Laboratories were in any way unique...

...they tend to wind up in those cut-rate legal clinics where, if your legal problem is a bit too complicated to be accommodated with a preprinted form, you're out of luck...

...Modern cities exist largely because some of us out here in the boonies struggle to provide the raw materials they consume...

...He has said, "If the national Administration is trying to use the National Guard to do indirectly what they don't want to do directly—send our military in—then I don't want to be a part of it...

...I simply reported Pucher's racial slur...

...On such occasions, he revealed a rare ability to acknowledge not only what was said but why it was said...

...Mayer, it seems to me, was in the line of prophets like Jeremiah, who genuinely loved their compatriots and were pained by the need to predict a bad end if their people did not repent of their sins...

...And I would suggest less reporting on vodka and more on the possible lowering of Soviet bestiality in the future...

...As I reflect on this Meeting for Thanksgiving, what echoes most in my mind is something Milton quoted in his videotaped "Objection to War": "It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake...

...Co-ops didn't change because of a loss of vision or lack of imagination...

...NCC is a recognized success...

...In March I read an article on this drug and its dangers and sent it to my doctor, who replied that problems were experienced with most medications in this classification and that a photosensitivity reaction is possible with almost any medication...

...In a small neighborhood-oriented storefront, NCC runs a lively business with yearly sales that exceed a million dollars...

...It is difficult for people outside the medical-pharmaceutical combine to realize how utterly routine is its crassness, cynicism, and pub-lic-be-damned attitude...

...There is a business understanding that was eschewed in former days, but this knowledge is held in careful perspective...

...I do...

...It is not really part of a university...

...Sinful it was, but certainly not unique...

...It is, in fact, our only hope, and it may well be our last...

...it was simply part of that deep humanity that sparked his long and determined struggle against the dehumanization of the world in which we live...

...As Milton suggests, it is never too late to evaluate the time that is left for us to help change the world and its coordinate, ourselves...

...What's important is that cooperation and communication are keys to human survival...

...Steven Tiger Monroe, New York I read "Death by Prescription" with great interest because I took Feldene for a month last September and suffered a most unpleasant phototoxic reaction...

...An elected board of directors represents the members...

...But Adam Hochschild's "Moment in the Sun" (The Last Word, May issue) touches me remotely...

...The article mentioned three other governors—of Maine, Vermont, and New York—who have followed Governor Dukakis's lead...

...When there is no forthcoming election to provide some check on their allegations, opinion pollsters can produce almost any picture they want through a careful selection of respondents and wording of questions...

...As a former editor of two medical journals, I had daily experience with the kind of pressure that drug advertising places on editorial decisions...

...Communication is essential...

...My doctor told me I might have to take Feldene for the rest of my life...

...Thank you for reproducing that particular article...

...From somewhere along the grapevine we learned a couple of years ago that Milton was ill...

...I have met Anti-och third-year students who did not understand elementary legal principles and could not do simple law-library research...

...Co-ops have been forced to change because of the changing market, but they have also changed because old, idealistic structures such as non-hierarchical staffs and working conditions no longer meet the needs of the business or of the people involved...

...and it is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere...

...The rest of my life might have been much shorter than I had planned...

...Harriet D. Pennington Santa Fe, New Mexico Textbook Influence Ihave been following with interest Oregon's infighting over the fourth-grade social-studies text, Get Oregonized ("A Textbook Case of Influence," Datelines, June issue...

...My experience with the Food Bag Co-op here in Tacoma and many observations of other co-ops in the Northwest suggest that a transitory orientation is preferable...

...McCaw Lowden, Washington Easy Enemies You do well to denounce ("Easy Enemies," Comment, June issue) the current variations on demonology that Reagan & Co...

...A year or so ago, charges that the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association had been influenced by pharmaceutical advertisers' interests were greeted as if this were a revelation of a unique sin...

...It seems to me that the environmental types are too easily upset...

...Mass media mythmaking makes it very difficult to know what Americans feel, how they react to a Libyan bombing or to escalating conflict in Nicaragua...

...No law school is guaranteed funding from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which has its own budget problems and cannot afford to toss money at every law school that comes with its begging bowl...

...Like each of the softwood trees that is succeeded by harder-wood trees in the development of a forest, a co-op that lives a full, vibrant life and then dies is not a failure...

...the national average is about 30 per cent lower...

...That is a better mark of a good education than whether someone lands a thankless job with a large law firm or a Government agency...

...It was, as you would imagine, not the usual "memorial service" but what would have pleased Milton most—a gathering of friends who came not just to pay tribute to Milton but to reflect, to reminisce, and, above all, to be together...

...Who will produce the food, lumber, textiles, and yes, even the paper for good magazines if all natural resources are placed off limits...

...I thought you might like to know that at least one Western governor has joined with his four Eastern colleagues in refusing to "invade Honduras...

...If this is true, it does not seem right that these drugs are prescribed so freely, often with little warning...

...Robert Grott Glenwood, Oregon The experience of North Country Co-op (NCC) here in the Twin Cities is very different from that described in "Co-opted...

...I'm glad you saw fit to reprint his fiftieth anniversary essay ("Swing Lower, Sweet Chariot," June issue...

...We shall not soon see his like again...

...The teachers are yet another story...

...But I do quarrel with your contention that jingoism is as popular as you and the mass media and the kept opinion polls portray it to be...

...When I opened the June issue and saw Milton's name in the table of contents, I shouted, "Milton's back...

...Even then, we would quickly take up each issue of The Progressive to see whether he had been able to write one more article...

...A real failure is when a spirit-dead co-op is perpetuated as a de-facto oligarchy, working against its original democratic values and undermining trust in collective systems...

...The author replies: If Bernard Sussman had read my article more carefully, he would have noticed that I didn't accuse the Reagan Administration of trying to close Antioch because "too many black students" attend...

...LETTERS to the Editor New Mexico Won't Invade Mona R. Hochberg's "Massachusetts Won't Invade Honduras" (Datelines, June issue) told how Governor Michael Dukakis had taken the admirable stand of refusing to allow the Massachusetts National Guard to be sent to Honduras for "training...

...I doubt that the author can cite an example of an enterprise where nondif-ferentiated wages worked out in the long run...

...Egalitarianism also extends to management style, where NCC continues honing its own process...

...John A. Leininger Waverly, Ohio Ifirst met Milton Mayer when he was not yet in his mid-twenties, while I was a student at the University of Chicago...

...only to read that he had died on April 20...

...In response to Sussman's charges that Antioch "is not much of a law school" and that its students "are uncommonly likely to flunk the bar exam," here are a few facts: Between 1981 and 1983, 90 per cent of Antioch students who were located, had sat for the bar, and had received their results had passed...

...I would suggest that out of the massive Soviet arms expenditures, a few kopecks might be channeled into rebuilding the bombed-out church with its onion-shaped dome...

...You owe it to us to identify this irrationality and to speculate on why people in America's heartland would embrace extremist perspectives...

...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...

...It does not surprise me that the local Zvenigorod citizens dig up bodies to retrieve gold teeth, but the reason is not the "mujik mentality" implied in the reference to peasants...

...Lyndon Torstenson Coordinator North Country Co-op Minneapolis, Minnesota Moment in the Sun Ordinarily, cloying articles on the Workers' Paradise are merely annoying...

...More than 100 active worker-members join the sixteen paid staff in running the daily business and determining how business is done...