Unequal treatment
Re: “Retail Therapy” (5/2/2019): Recent data suggests black people are almost four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though black people and white people use it at roughly the same rate. We should really be evaluating whether this “church” would be treated substantially differently if it was run by a group of black people/POC. I doubt local authorities would be following a long and arduous bureaucratic process in order to shut it down. I would like to see more attention paid to this topic in regard to racial disparity.
— Danielle Falcone, via email
Shortsighted
Re: “High Hopes” (4/25/2019): Michael Lenehan’s story about the Cardinal Hickory Creek transmission line is shortsighted. If we want to achieve a clean energy future with low-cost, renewable electricity, new high-voltage transmission lines are fundamental. Opposition to this line exemplifies the “not in my backyard” opponents that are commonplace for large infrastructure projects. What the article fails to mention is the enthusiastic support from clean energy organizations and the renewables industry.
Cardinal Hickory Creek is specifically designed to add renewables to the Midwest grid, including in Wisconsin, and thousands of megawatts of wind and solar development in the Midwest’s best wind and solar resource areas are at risk without it. Because more renewables and cheaper electricity brought by this line benefit the whole region, the line’s cost is shared — leaving Wisconsin customers paying about $67 million rather than the grossly incorrect $2-3 billion in the article.
Transmission lines are not “yesterday’s electricity system;” rather, they are part-and-parcel of an energy network and essential for the delivery of renewable energy to our homes and businesses.
— Allen Gleckner, Fresh Energy
Communist Party history
Re: “A Good American Son” (5/2/2019): Two generations of social and cultural historians have been actively exploring the history of the American Communist Party and the Popular Front. The estimated half-million who passed through the CP proper and millions who were on its fringes could be largely wrong about Russia but right and active in the best ways in building industrial unions, striving for racial equality as well as fairness to immigrants, creating what we call folk music, writing some of the most highly awarded Hollywood films, building wartime antifascism and so on. Here in Madison, young Popular Front activists of the 1930s founded food and living coops, worked on The Daily Cardinal and gained wide admiration for their efforts. It is no secret that well into the 1960s-’90s, Madison activists with past ties to the Popular Front played crucial roles in reform movements of every kind.
— Paul Buhle, co-editor of the American Left
Correction: Last week’s story on Heather Renken’s play, Shiny Things, should have noted that Mae West represents Eliza’s subconscious.
