Progressive Wednesday

This Wednesday: Death with a Capital Penalty

Problem:

The death penalty is legal in the United States. And the death penalty, from a progressive point of view, is an act of barbarism. It is the ultimate violation of civil liberty taken on by the state. It fails as a deterrent. Innocent people have been and will be electrocuted (the only method used in Nebraska), injected, gassed, and even hung (it's still legal in New Hampshire and Washington) and shot (it's still legal in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Utah). The death penalty leaves a kind of blood on all of our hands as long as we permit this punishment on our shores.

But this Wednesday isn't about philosophy and sociological studies. This Wednesday is about a kind of government-sponsored torture. This Wednesday is about doing unto others as you would have others do unto you. This Wednesday is about forgiveness. And this Wednesday is about human decency, common morality, and Troy Davis, who, by some miracle, was actually given a stay of execution on Monday for the punishment he was set to receive on Tuesday. (To read about his story and how disgusting it is that Georgia is even considering executing this innocent man, just click here or here.)

.

Make Progress:

On the surface, it might seems as though there's little each of us as individuals can do to fight against “capital punishment– (an obvious euphemism right up there with “passing away– and “we're trying to have a baby– ). But there's plenty each of us can do, and there's plenty more that we can do when we put our efforts together with like-minded people, people with empathy and a strong sense of ethics. There is a wrong, and there is a right, and it's our job as citizens to keep the government from doing the former when it thinks it's doing the latter.

The death penalty cannot be abolished quickly enough. It's time for us to do something.

• Join
• Read
• Print

Join:

Amnesty International is an organization we can't praise heavily enough. This sucker's been around for 46 years, has won the Nobel Peace Prize, and boasts 1.8 million members. So why do we dig on A.I. so much? Here's five reasons why:

1. They abhor the death penalty and work to both end the practice and organize volunteers to take action to, in particular, prevent the executions of the innocent.
2. They fight to end torture throughout the world.
3. They work to protect the rights of women worldwide.
4. They believe that: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.–
5. They are, above all else, proponents of peace.

So, here's what we're asking: join Amnesty International USA. You'll be helping end the death penalty, protect the innocent, increase the respect for all human life, and promote peace on earth. Just click this sentence to make a small donation, join Amnesty International, and begin receiving a free subscription to Amnesty International Magazine.

If joining ain't, for some reason, your cup of Earl Grey tea, you can also snag yourself the Instant Karma CD we previously covered. For a refresher, this is an album of John Lennon songs covered by the likes of U2, Avril Lavigne, Green Day, Barenaked Ladies, REM, Christina Aguilera, Matisyahu, OAR, and Jackson Browne. Proceeds from the album sale (and iTunes sales, too) will go towards humanitarian efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. And a genocide is a kind of mass execution.

Read:

Since knowledge is a kind of progress, allow us to share with you the facts about the death penalty. The more we all know, the more we can pass along, the more we can act on our knowledge, and therefore, the wiser and more caring we can become.

So, plain and simple, here are the facts, Jack (and Jill):

• According to an extensive study conducted by John J. Donohue of Yale Law School and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania, the death penalty absolutely does not deter crime and murder.
• Poor people are more likely to be executed than the wealthy. Clinton Duffy, former warden at San Quentin Prison once referred to capital punishment as “a privilege of the poor.–
• Humans are flawed. This means, of course, that judges and juries are flawed, and we can't trust them to accurately condemn our fellow citizens to death. According to the American Civil Liberties Union: “Since 1973, 123 people in 25 states have been released from death row because they were not guilty.– It follows that, particularly before the advent of DNA evidence, we have executed innocent citizens.
• The death penalty is dolled out differently throughout the country. In 2006, 83% of all executions occurred in the South. 0% occurred in the Northeast. Taxpayers spend more money to execute someone than to keep someone in prison for life.
• In some states, such as Texas (which has conducted a third of all executions since 1973), “a defendant [can] get death for a felony in which [she or he] was not responsible for the murder.–
• According to a Gallup poll, more Americans support life without parole for murderers rather than the death penalty.
• According to a 2005 article in the Los Angeles Times, California spends $250 million per execution. There's another interesting twist to the death penalty in California: you can be executed for perjury that leads to an execution. In other words, they have the ultimate punishment set up for people who might help innocent people receive the ultimate punishment. In other words, California law admits there's a chance that innocent people can be executed.
• 128 of the 194 countries in the world have banned the death penalty. Some of the countries still participating in this abomination include: Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and, of course, the United States.
• 14 states (including the District of Columbia) have banned the death penalty or found it to be unconstitutional.
• In 2006, there were 65 executions in Iraq. In 2006, there were 53 executions in the United States.

Print:

If you live in any of the following states, then this “task– is for you: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, or Wyoming. Those are the 37 states with the death penalty. (In New York, the death penalty is still technically on the books, but in 2004 it was ruled unconstitutional.)

So we're asking that you print, sign, fold, envelope, stamp, and mail the following letter to the editor to your hometown newspaper of choice. Remember, letters to the editor are powerful for several reasons, not the least of which is that politicians read them to get a sense of the attitudes and beliefs of their constituents.

Dear Editor:

I'm writing in response to the recent national news surrounding Troy Davis, an innocent man convicted of murder who was 24 hours away from his execution before getting a stay. The mere possibility of executing someone who's innocent should be reason enough to abolish capital punishment in [Your State]. There are, however, several other reasons.

According to an extensive study conducted by John J. Donohue of Yale Law School and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania, the death penalty absolutely does not deter crime and murder. To execute someone, taxpayers spend more money than it would cost to keep that person in prison for life. On top of that, according to a recent Gallup poll, more Americans support life without parole for murderers rather than the death penalty.

Already 128 of the 194 countries in the world have banned the death penalty. Some of the countries still participating in this abomination include: Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and, of course, the United States. Thankfully, we need not wait for the federal government to catch up to Western civilization. We can work to abolish the death penalty in our own state and join the others that have already done so.

No one should face the possibility of this archaic and barbaric punishment. We should never have another last minute stay of execution because we should never have another execution.

Sincerely,

Photo snapped by this news-lover.

I See Trees of Green

“[People have] made at least a start on discovering the meaning

of human life when [they] plants shade trees

under which [they know] full well [they] will never sit.–

— D. Elton Trueblood

.

Problem:

I made the mistake of watching mindless television the other day, and I caught a show called Flip This House. The premise of the show is this: a hot-shot buys a dump of a house, renovates the hell out of it, and tries to sell it for a sizeable profit pronto. On this particular episode, the temporary far-too-capitalistic owner decided to cut down an 80-year-old maple to, and I quote: “Make the property look, I don't know, you know, more modern.– And I literally thought: Poor tree. It was like watching someone chainsaw and wood-chipper my grandma. Well, okay, it wasn't quite like that, but it still sucked like a Dirt Devil. I had to change the channel, and instead I watched a woman get a tattoo of a fire-breathing butterfly on her chest. (I wish I could make up stuff like that.)

We've written about trees a lot already (see here, here, here and here). But we're here again today, getting a jump on April 27: Arbor Day. And besides, there's much more — more than we can even cover this Wednesday — to type about the topic. Why? Two reasons:

1. We're kind of addicted to tree products: toilet paper, sheds, pink tissues, paintings, houses, paper towels, Christmas napkins, fences, Coaco Puffs cereal boxes, chairs, tables, barns, books, Happy Birthday banners, park benches, condos, Marlboro Ultra Lights, wallpaper, ceiling fans, hell, even letters to our aforementioned grandmothers. We're not trying to suggest we don't need this stuff (especially the Coaco Puffs). Most of it we do. But we (and by “we– I mean almost every single one of us including your friendly-neighborhood editors at Progressive Wednesday) forget about how this stuff came to be.

2. Trees are beautiful. We treat them like they're not.

And, if we needed more reasons to reconsider our treatment of trees, then there are these six brand-spanking-new troubling and weird facts about trees:

• The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed at twice the rate once suspected.
• Billboard owners in Georgia will soon be able to clear-cut up to thousands of trees covering several acres to make it easy to read their drivel on a single sign.
• The second largest rainforest in the world is located in the Congo. And despite a moratorium on logging there, “over 37 million acres of rainforest have already been granted to the logging industry, [in spite of] the fact that the area is vital for its biodiversity.–
• Tasmania is using banned chemicals to (wait for it) blow up trees.
• Global warming — which is partially fueled by Amazon deforestation — is actually causing spruce trees to grow in the Artic tundra, endangering animals that thrive on this land normally covered by permafrost.
• According to a recent article in Time, “900 million [trees] every year become pulp and paper.–

.

Make Progress:

When I sat down and thought about it this week (and I don't mean on the couch in my shrink's office), I realized that I have fond memories of trees. I spent much of my youth in very, very rural America. The current population of my town? 1,488. I'm shocked we even have a zip code. The number of traffic lights? One. It serves no other purpose than decoration. While my area was short on, you know, humans, I did grow up surrounded by beautiful trees.

Swamp elms, silver maples, crabapples, pines, a redbud, a king crimson maple, ornamental pear trees, a little leaf linden, arborvitae, ash, and a river birch thrived in our yard. My parents planted a dwarf red delicious tree, an early Macintosh, a peach tree. We picked fresh fruits and gobbled them up, often able to eat an apple a day. Come early autumn, my mother peeled, pulverized and presser-cooked the fruits into jars of homemade applesauce.

My sister and I called the undeveloped land next to our house “the woods,– and we climbed trees, played with our pals, built forts, swung on vines, and sought out rabbits and groundhogs and squirrels. When a tree died in our yard, my old man pulled out an ax, and we stacked firewood to warm us during the frigid winters. Summers, our trees filled with robins, sparrows, and doves, and I woke, not to an alarm clock, but to the songs of birds.

As stewards of the environment, we have a duty to help trees, those towering plants, flourish. For the sake of the air, the animals, and, lest we forget, ourselves, let us celebrate Arbor Day the right way.

• Plant
• Click
• Write
• Recycle
• Join

.

I See Trees of Green: Join

Join:

We've talked about it before. Let's talk about it again. I'm betting, if you're anything like me, you've resigned yourself to junk mail and at the same time despise it: Pizza Hut coupons and gigantic JC Penny catalogues, flyers about flyers and a plethora of offers for magazines you'd never read (Ferrets USA, Wooden Boat Magazine, Goat Magazine, American Baby, American Cowboy, and, of course, The New Yorker.) Stacked up, you're convinced all this postal white-noise would reach the hole in the damned ozone.

Well, here's your answer: Green Dimes. Green Dimes is a cheap-o service that gets your name and address off junk-mail lists. You read that right: no more freaking, good-for-nothing, fills-up-my-trash, and clogs-my-shredder junk mail. By stopping the annoyance that is a mailbox full of useless crap, you in turn save, quite literally, forests full of trees. There is a hitch, though: it costs you one dime each day. That’s it: 365 FDR heads. (Sorry, I made it sound a hell of a lot more morbid than it is.) That’s 36 smackers a year. That's about four trips to movies you regret seeing in the first place (see our TGIF Movie Reviews for some friendly advice).

But Green Dimes (you can read more about Green Dimes and similar services in this Newsweek article) is more than a junk-mail prevention service: they’re true conservationists. In association with Trees for the Future, Green Dimes “[sponsors] tree planting on behalf of [its] members.”

So let’s break this down old school:

1. Save some trees.
2. Plant some trees.
3. Spend next to nothing.
4. Stop getting the bane that is junk mail.

Another fantastic service is 41 Pounds, which does almost the same thing as Green Dimes, except half of their profits go to nonprofit organizations. An additional benefit of 41 Pounds is that they promise to keep 80% to 95% of your bulk mail away for 5 years.

Whichever one you go with, go with one: your mailbox will thank you. (Please note: your mailbox is an inanimate object and will not in fact thank you; we’re not all-out looney, okay?)