: re: Don’t Kill the Export-Import Bank

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:37 AM
Subject: re: Don’t Kill the Export-Import Bank
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Even while publicly trumpeting the magic of the Free Market and his commitment to a "level playing field", president Reagan made sure that big American businesses cheated just as well as our major competitors. 

    The consequence was that American arms and farm equipment and jets continues to provide American jobs. But "the bank focused on very large companies". So it had the perverse effect of destroying any competition in the sectors it backed, at home as abroad. No start-up could challenge Boeing or Caterpillar or Raytheon. And farmers in West Africa can't send their daughters to school, because subsidized American cotton  undercuts the incomes from their family farms.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/opinion/dont-kill-the-export-import-bank.html?_r=0

: re: China’s Energy Plans Will Worsen Climate Change, Greenpeace Says

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 11:27 AM
Subject: re: China’s Energy Plans Will Worsen Climate Change, Greenpeace Says
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Over the last 200 years, and at an ever-accelerating pace, we have pumped gigatons of carbon from the fossil pool into our atmosphere and oceans. This is now manifest as acidified oceans and deranged climate.  We need urgently to reverse this, sequestering carbon back from the atmosphere. And the ideal form in which to sequester carbon is coal. It's dense, it's non-volatile and it has been proven to be stable for hundreds of millions of years at a time. Nothing else comes close. To go on mining and burning (or gasifying) coal in the 21st century is--as professor Stephen Chu put it--an abomination.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/world/asia/greenpeace-says-chinas-energy-plans-exacerbate-climate-change.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

: re: A Chokehold and a Tragedy

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:10 AM
Subject: re: A Chokehold and a Tragedy
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   In modern American parlance, an offense that consistently doesn't get punishment is said to be "decriminalized". That's not a power that properly lies with a police commission or a mayor (with regard to chokeholds) or with a president or an Attorney General (with regard to torture).  We the People--through our Congress--makes the laws. It is for our Executives to take care that these laws be faithfully executed.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/opinion/eric-garner-staten-island-chokehold-tragedy.html?_r=0

: re: Helping Big Companies Compete

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 10:29 AM
Subject: re: Helping Big Companies Compete
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   If "[w]ithout the help it gets from the Ex-Im Bank, Boeing would undoubtedly lose business", then it is getting--maybe even relying on--government subsidies. And it is not "competing with the likes of Europe’s Airbus and Canada’s Bombardier" in anything like a free market.  Maybe if the U.S. were to play by the principles we preach so loudly, the WTO would take our claims against e.g. China and India more seriously.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/opinion/joe-nocera-export-import-bank-big-companies-compete.html?_r=0

: re: U.S. Sees Risks in Assisting a Compromised Iraqi Force

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 12:13 PM
Subject: re: U.S. Sees Risks in Assisting a Compromised Iraqi Force
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  The U.S. can play no productive role in Iraq until we disown al-Maliki's lie. He is not in command of the Iraqi army. He is in command of a Shiite sectarian militia in army uniforms. L. Paul Bremer and he purged that force of all other elements. Sunnis were segregated into "Awakening" brigades and the Kurds have kept their own PeshMerga.  If there is to be a legitimate government of Iraq, it--and its armed forces--will have to represent more than the majority. It will have to represent the people. al-Maliki has shown neither inclination nor competence to do that. To back him now would be to set ourselves against legitimate government.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/world/middleeast/us-sees-risks-in-assisting-a-compromised-iraqi-force.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

: re: Bahrain’s Bad Decision

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 3:16 PM
Subject: re: Bahrain’s Bad Decision
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   The minority Sunni government in Bahrain is three years past its expiration date. Any legitimacy a monarchy claimed in the 21st century died when the King's forces gunned down peaceful protesters in Pearl Square. The family Khalifa now gets to choose between a cushy exile and getting beaten to death in the streets like col. Qaddafi. There will be no peace short of one of those ends.

   Of course the U.S. should keep diplomatic channels open throughout. but we should grant them nothing for their tantrums. And we must not be party to their oppression of Bahrainis.
Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/bahrains-bad-decision.html?_r=0