Sorry I must have done something terribly wrong!

Sir, yesterday I suddenly received a pop-up in my computer informing me that since I had sent one same message on one same day to 500 recipients, Gmail had reasons to believe I was involved in some very dirty spam activity and so they had decided to sentence me to 24 hours suspension, which luckily did not include receiving emails. The sentence was carried out immediately, there was no court of appeal, and when I write this, I am already on my 36th hour and yet no release.

What did I do? I had just created a blogspot that contains some fresh questions that I think should be made to the candidates for the presidency of the US in 2008, so as to get to know them better, and I was communicating this to a list of professors and PhD students that I had found on the official web sites of the universities. To be able to send my other routine emails, as well as this one, I had to speedily open a competitor address ,yahoo, though I still shiver at the thought of what would have happened if they had suspended my incoming mail too leaving me totally incommunicado.

I am absolutely certain that in one of those small printed documents of understanding that I must have clicked I have accepted Gmail´s right to do as it pleases with me, but does this really mean they have the right to do so?, without any forewarning?, when they also make a living by transmitting their spam like ads with our private e-letters? I really do not know how to answer those questions but at least I immediately confessed to my wife and daughters what had happened, and they took it well, which lifted a very big load of bewildered shame from my shoulders.

Yours truly,
(Name withheld)
A presumably dirty spammer

Bewildered

Sir I was a bit disoriented by the title of Christopher Caldwell’s “Harsh policing goes transatlantic”, March 31, since it caused me to start reading his article as if he was discussing something going from Europe to America and not the other way round. My fault, clearly I should have remembered that in a globalized world there is no clear definition of what is here and what is over there.

Having said that Mr Caldwell left me even more confused when after he had in “Financial crime and punishment”, March 24, preached the need to be more lenient with “white collar crime” as we should understand that “it is a less serious crime” then, only seven days later, he now ends with a “get the police out of the business of ‘understanding’ the societies they police”. Of course, again it could just be that globalization causes such a short duration of any ism; or perhaps that since Caldwell’s current article has to do with multicultural problems, we should have read him before as arguing about white white collar problems; or perhaps, just as likely, that it really has nothing to do with his confused writing but only with my confused reading; or perhaps, most likely, that the whole issue is so complex it can only have muddled answers… whatever.

Is Caldwell singing praise Graham Nash's Prison Song?

I always read Christopher Caldwell with much interest but, this time, his “Financial crime and punishment” March 24, leaves me quite at loss about where he wants to take us.

Yes, of course there is a qualitatively difference between those who use guns and crowbars to violate people physically and those that defraud, but let us acknowledge that part of it could be explained by guns and crowbars not being the most appropriate tools for crimes in the financial world, where dirty accounting will get you much further.

When Caldwell hints that the current drive to persecute white collar crime could be a way to average out a reality where so many black, poor, or both are in jail on drug related charges, he must be aware of that he is solely speculating. With 740 imprisoned for each 100.000 of their population, compared to UK’s 124, it is clear that the US cannot afford such solution. It is indeed shameful when white collar crime get prosecuted only for political reasons, but also when the same happens to blue collar crime.

Finally let me comment about the economic crimes that are committed by those who do not live up to their political responsibility. It is never quite clear what color of collar the politicians wear, since they change them a lot depending on the audience, but yet, when we look around in the world at the damages they cause, we must conclude that most bank robbers and Skillings and Ebbers, do frequently look like very small fish. I ask, where do they prosecute a Zimbabwe’s Mugabe?