Letters
Letters Old and Dangerous While I agree with Charles Peters’ note in the March issue about the problem posed by the growing fleet of sport-utility vehicles, I find the argument that things...
...Schmemann’s statement that the hostages held by Israel with the approval of the Israeli Supreme Court were innocent Lebanese citizens not guilty of any crimes was blatantly incorrect...
...Earlier, in his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait, he wrote that the nation must “incorporate into its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he [the Negro] has inherited from the past...
...Thus, for purposes of developing rent-income ratios, many families have rents, up to 90 percent of which can be covered by Section 8, that are hundreds of dollars a month more than their income - which is primarily public assistance...
...According to the authors, 25 percent of all New Yorkers spend over 75 percent of their income on housing...
...Without their incompetence in this issue, I believe a plan that resembled FEHBP would have come out of the legislative process that the Clinton administration should have allowed to occur...
...Such an idea was very much at the middle of what the debate was back then...
...The article raises the serious and longstanding problem of the shortage of housing for low-income New Yorkers...
...Because of Clinton’s failure, someone from the right now needs to push this issue...
...Clearly, this is not what the authors meant to illustrate...
...It’s funny how so many people who do not understand what happened back then feel free to comment on the failed health system reform debate in simplistic conservative and liberal terms...
...that is rural and undeveloped, and for that matter undevelopable, than the area in urban land...
...Thus, millions of rupees are set aside each year to provide scholarships, financial grants, and employment opportunities for the untouchable.’’ King argued for compensatory and preferential treatment for America’s blacks...
...ROY BERCAW via e-mail Missed Opportunities I read with great interest Eric B. Schnurer’s April article entitled ‘R Health Care Plan Most of Us Could Buy...
...It still amazes me that the Clinton administration so badly messed up the political end of the reform debate...
...There is a great deal more land in the U.S...
...One CIA employee was censured for telling Harbury what he knew about her husband...
...The American people would be well served...
...In 1967 he urged his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to take action against businesses that failed to hire black Americans in proportion to their numbers in the population...
...MARSHALCLA RTER-TRIPP via e-mail State Failures The response of the embassy in Guatemala to an attack on an American is typical (“Tilting at Windmills,” April 1998...
...The Negro should be granted equality, they agree...
...It mirrors what the insurance industry itself was proposing, what physicians would have accepted since AhWs own plan incorporated the essence of the plan, and what conservatives would have lived with if no mandate on employers or individuals were included...
...Consider the family farm...
...JOHN P. HUMPHREY Horse Shoe, NC Rereading King Martin Luther King did support affirmative action, despite attempts by Robert Worth (“Beyond Racial Preferences,” March 1998) and others to corral him for the opposite side of the argument...
...During the health system reform crisis, I was employed as an attorney/ health-policy manager at the American Medical Association and worked directly in health system reform...
...NELSONM ARANS Silver Spring, MD Land Scam I object to the ad in your April issue by the so-called Center for the Study of Economics, advocating increased land taxes...
...What the authors fail to understand is that these studies (we’ve never actually seen one with numbers as high as those quoted by the authors) do not count rental subsidies as income...
...Jennifer Harbury reports in her book, Search for Everardo, that the U.S...
...How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a more just and equal basis...
...With respect to the city’s continuing commitment to provide permanent housing to homeless families, under Mayor Giuliani, we have placed over 19,000 homeless families into subsidized housing...
...JULIAN BOND CHAIRMANN,A ACP Washington, DC Housing Costs I was disappointed that The Washington Monthly chose to publish an article on our family shelter programs that so seriously misstates basic facts and distorts our philosophy and mission (“Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” April 1998...
...State Department knew about the torture and murder of her husband by the Guatemalan Army under CIA orders...
...It is impossible to create a formula for the future that does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years...
...Schnurer keeps alive in his article...
...It might make some sense to tax the latter more heavily, although that in itself would only drive more development to the hinterland...
...The authors propose that we give all of these families housing subsidies because subsidies, on a monthly basis, are cheaper than shelter...
...According to the authors, “300,000 poor New Yorkers...
...GORDOJN...
...You, in turn, do us a disservice by highlighting their position...
...Maybe someone like John McCain can do for health system reform what Nixon did for China...
...about 500 more families than were placed within a similar time frame under previous administrations...
...lack their own living space...
...For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner...
...but he should ask for nothing more...
...The market for insurance would have improved dramatically for the great bulk of uninsured, leaving a more manageable group of chronically underinsured to deal with in other ways, perhaps with an expansion of a revamped Medicaid along the same lines...
...Yet she was not told what they knew until after she went on two hunger strikes...
...It made provisions not alone for equahty, but for special treatment to enable the victims of discrimination to leap the gap from backwardness to competence...
...The land tax advocates have failed to think through the likely outcomes of their program...
...C AMPBELL COMMISSIONER NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF HOMELESSESR VICES New York, NY...
...DAVID HEIDORN via e-mail Not So Innocent I noted with regret that Charles Peters did not delve further into the article by Serge Schmemann of The New York Times when he reported verbatim the words of that correspondent (“Tilting at Windmills,” April 1998...
...On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic...
...So much of what was being discussed at the time - by physicians, by insurers, by people from all sides of the debate - centered on the basic idea that Mr...
...Why else would Israel expect that these individuals would serve as bargaining tools in the continuing effort to free Israelis...
...While the precise number is open to discussion, there are certainly many thousands of New York families sharing apartments and homes with other people, usually family members...
...But taxing rural land more will only hasten its sale for development purposes by owners who will no longer be able to afford to keep it...
...In the same book, King praised India’s affirmative action program for untouchables...
...While the notion is superficially appealing, housing vouchers, as HUD has discovered, are enormously expensive...
...He wrote, “Whenever the issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the American Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror...
...Not only is this article full of simple factual errors - the number of families in hotels, the number of HPD apartments available, the number of Tier I1 shelters, the number of EARP vouchers used - it also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of much of the basic information on which the premises are rooted...
...The hostages held by Israel in hope of exchange for Israeli soldiers and citizens held by Lebanon, Syria, and the Hezbollah were not innocent bystanders but had participated in terrorist attacks against Israel...
...Letters Old and Dangerous While I agree with Charles Peters’ note in the March issue about the problem posed by the growing fleet of sport-utility vehicles, I find the argument that things are not too bad now because 60 percent of the drivers are in the 40- to 65-years-old group to be rather surprising...
...They should go back to the study of economics and complete the course...
...First, right now 40 percent of these vehicles are not being driven by the supposedly safe 40- to 65-year-old folks, and second, what on earth makes you think that “drunks” have to wait until cars are cheap before they can buy them, or indeed that “drunks” are not a problem in the 4065 age group...
Vol. 30 • June 1998 • No. 6
