Comment
Comment Read Me My Rights Sooner or later, a government—any government—grows infatuated with its power and the rights of the governed, if they ever existed at all fade like so many discarded New...
...After all, there were hijackers and murderers aboard that plane—and that made it perfectly all right for us to engage in hijacking and to threaten murder...
...Scene One, Take Two T—hey just don't learn, do they...
...Nice Guys Finish Last About half a century ago, in the nostalgia-tinged times before the United States assumed the burdens of empire, a sports writer named Grant-land Rice summed up a favorite portion of the national myth...
...But these spies, it turns out, work for the U.S...
...Surveys in the developing world consistently show that many people there want to plan their families...
...This is a choice no less political than any other...
...it was the way Americans liked to think of themselves...
...The United States is ensuring that the Soviet Union's Vietnam turns into another Iran or Cambodia...
...we've been bombarded with enough Clint Eastwood, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and Cagney and Lacey to dull the sensitivities of all but the most ardent civil libertarians...
...But while the report points up this "tragic dilemma," it omits concrete proposals for addressing the problem...
...In their world, all rights inhere to government...
...We pay the price in pollution and illness, in higher deficits and diminished productivity, in alienation and social disarray...
...Since then the Copper 7 has replaced the Dalkon Shield as the most widely used IUD in the United States, but it too carries grave health hazards...
...But as Business Week recently noted, Searle's internal documents indicate that the company misled the FDA about the results of the testing...
...A position that upholds constitutional claims only if they were within the specific contemplation of the Framers in effect establishes a presumption of resolving textual ambiguities against the claim of constitutional right...
...it's just plain old hostility to liberty...
...The condition of black children provides one shameful example...
...The Reagan Administration, from the President down, doesn't trust the people to exercise their rights...
...When people invoke "victims' rights," they really are saying ulto hell with the Constitution," for it is the Constitution they feel victimized by...
...Claiming he was joking and didn't know his microphone was on, Welch later added, 'I apologize, but I don't think I had the gay vote anyway.' Two Plus Two Pure logic at the Pentagon: Hoping to frighten Congress into going along with a new round of nerve gas production, the Department of Defense recently announced that hundreds of poison-gas weapons in storage around the country are leaking and pose a "safety concern...
...You install a regime to your liking in some far-off place in the Third World, you pour billions of dollars into the coffers of that nation's treasury (and into the pockets of your puppet), you provide your ally with state-of-the-art weapons so he can squash any rebellion, and the ingrate thumbs his nose at you...
...So, as it tried to do with Diem, Somoza, and the Shah, the United States is desperately yanking the marionette's strings...
...A related story appeared a few weeks after that jolt, but it didn't arouse nearly as much response: Spies have compiled computerized records on 114 million of us—one out of two Americans...
...We sec all the same injuries with Copper 7 patients Comment that we saw with Dalkon Shield patients," Patricia Jo Stone, a Denver attorney who has handled claims against both manufacturers, told The Wall Street Journal...
...Meese apparently can't read the Fourteenth Amendment and won't be bothered by sixty years of judicial precedent...
...citizens are mere subjects...
...The money rolls in, even as the injuries pile up...
...No money at all has been set aside for the U.N...
...A large tax cut and massive escalation of military spending, which caused the record deficits in the first place, have also increased consumer demand, thus feeding the recovery...
...Like the nine other commands under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it has the authority to deploy forces...
...To one extent or another, every U.S...
...funds at population control in the Third World...
...However popular the attack on the Federal deficit, it makes more sense to recognize the imbalance as a symptom, rather than a cause, of an economy out of whack...
...military installations abroad...
...Instead, it recommends targeting and focusing current appropriations...
...there aren't too many people, there's just too little free enterprise taking care of them...
...In addition to the frightening figures just cited, the investigators found that twenty-five Government agencies employ closed-circuit television cameras...
...This "stop-me-before-I-kill-agairf drama becomes all the more farcical when one realizes lhat the Reagan recovery, feeble and limited as it is, results from old-fashioned military K.eynesianism...
...The technology to design such programs is available, and the proposals to implement them have been formulated...
...LLWho needs due process...
...twelve use sensors to monitor movements, and seven listen in on telephone conversations...
...to rulers, they are at best a nuisance and at worst an evil to be eradicated...
...With effective birth control, infant arid maternal mortality is lowered, women postpone pregnancies to complete schooling or support themselves, and the dangerous back-alley abortions that are so prevalent decrease...
...Shoot the queers,' Houston mayoral candidate Louie Welch said on a local live television news program...
...The occupation enters its seventh year...
...All that remains is the technology—and the foolishness to use it...
...If you don't believe that, just ask yourself which was the last Administration to broaden freedom of speech, assembly, or religion...
...Space Command was inaugurated in Colorado Springs, Colorado...
...Born Again (and Again) President Reagan has decided that the population explosion isn't really a problem...
...So much for the presumption of innocence and the rights of the accused...
...Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed' —Barbara Tuchman Meese and Reagan simply want the Constitution interpreted in their own parched way, one that would obliterate all references to individual nghts, "Today," as Ira Glasser, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, points out, "ironically only a short time away from the bicentennial of the Constitution, its most important component, the Bill of Rights, is in jeopardy of being compromised for the remainder of our lives, and perhaps for the lives of our children...
...Welcome Aboard Amid all the talk about whether to go forward with Star Wars or use it as a bargaining chip, the Pentagon has quietly moved to establish Star Wars as a permanent element in the U.S...
...According to news dispatches from neighboring Pakistan, resistance leaders are using the U.S...
...Under the budget-balancing amendment...
...Yet health care programs stressing prenatal care for poor women are almost nonexistent...
...They're also stockpiling weapons for the civil war that is expected to break out after Soviet troops pull out—a second jihad...
...The Afghan guerrillas have no better chance of overthrowing the government in Kabul than the contras do of marching into Managua...
...they cheered themselves hoarse...
...Of course, birth control and abortion are legal in this country, and groups receiving Federal funds can and do refer women for both...
...Indiana's seventy-two-year-old electric chair took seventeen minutes and five jolts of electricity on October 16 to execute a man for stabbing and dismembering his father-in-law...
...A mechanical cut of the deficit would squelch consumer demand and prompt a deep recession or a depression...
...Congress will cede to the President its constitutional duly to handle the purse strings of the Federal Government...
...The Puppet and the Puppeteer It's rough being an imperial power...
...The Health Hole When she was sent packing from the Department of Health and Human Services last month, Margaret Heckler left something worth noting on her desk: A Federal study showing a "persistent, distressing disparity" in death rates between black and white Americans...
...Comes now the Reagan Administration, hell-bent on diluting, withdrawing, or repealing the Bill of Rights...
...That's the way the game is played these days...
...Ruthless and besotted with cupidity, these dictators inevitably engender a radical opposition...
...The Copper 7 remains on the market...
...We all may be suspects some day...
...As Meese, the spokesman for "victims' rights," would have us believe, "Most innocent people are glad to talk to the police...
...what mattered was whether we won or lost...
...But apparently reproductive freedom is an American right that, like so many others, doesn't extend to the Third World, where, if Reagan has his way, biology will remain destiny...
...and John Paul Stevens, have been so deeply offended by this bit of sophistry' thai they recently voiced rare public exception to Meese's constitutional trashing...
...it expresses antipathy to claims of the minority to rights against the majority...
...Washington can teach the KGB a thing or two...
...Air Force's European headquarters has forbidden men to wear earrings on base even when they are off duty...
...Marcos is no exception...
...The fiasco in Nicaragua is small potatoes by comparison...
...The black infant mortality rate is twice that of white infants, largely because of poor prenatal care...
...A few years later, Vince Lombardi, a football coach, proclaimed the new national motto, "Winning is the only thing...
...It makes no call for increased funding to the nation's beleaguered public health programs...
...Judge Learned Hand once wrote: "Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women...
...When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it...
...We won, didn't we...
...This from the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States: "You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime...
...And in part, he merely mirrors the images of mass culture...
...It has in it the destructive characteristics of what happened during the Depression...
...And these numbers do not encompass the activities of the CIA or the National Security Agency...
...When the smoke clears, the Soviets will bear primary responsibility for tearing Afghanistan apart, but the Americans will have played a deadly supporting role...
...If Durocher was right, America is bound to finish first...
...arsenal...
...aircraft managed to intercept an Egyptian plane and compel it to land in Italy, virtually the entire nation applauded...
...in fact, more than one million women are using it...
...Consistent with that philosophy, Reagan has quietly and effectively gutted programs that aim U.S...
...In mid-October, President Reagan dispatched Senator Paul Laxalt to Manila to deliver "the bluntest Presidential message ever delivered to a friend," as one Administration official put it...
...Yet Searle stubbornly maintains—as did Robins years ago with the Dalkon Shield—that its IUD is "a safe and effective form of contraception...
...In part, he appeals to the fear everyone has of falling victim to violence or theft...
...The U.S...
...this, too, increases the deficit...
...The weapons are dangerous...
...And the Framers, having lived under capricious and tyrannical rule, enacted a Constitution and a Bill of Rights to protect those whom the Government would prosecute...
...Many of us, at one time or another, may be criminals...
...no empire likes to lose its possessions...
...That's the way it goes when you try to rule the world: The all-powerful master cannot even control his slave...
...the man replied...
...his long reign of excess has fueled support for the New People's Army, the communist insurgency that increasingly poses a threat to his rule...
...The Philippines, as it happens, is home to Clark Air Force Base and the Subic Bay Naval Station, the largest U.S...
...The balanced budget plan is an "order for disaster" Franco Modigliani, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for economics, (old Congress in October...
...So flawed is the economy that a large part of the budget goes to compensate, however belatedly and inadequately, the victims of the system...
...No amount of targeting and focusing will help the people who fall outside what remains of the safety net...
...While proponents of this facile historicism justify it as depoliticization of the judiciary," Brennan said, "the political underpinnings of such a choice should not escape notice...
...The President has a history of support for technologies that take control of people's lives, but he has a problem when technology allows people to control their own lives...
...The Budget Diversion Congress is at it again, doing what it does best: abdicating authority...
...When he's not crudely displaying his prejudices, Meese calls on judges and justices "to resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide...
...The Administration has also issued a warning to other international family planning programs that they, too, will have their funds cut if they advocate or even counsel women on abortion...
...Almost forty years ago, shortly after World War II, Mtlton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, spent a year in Germany interviewing men and women who lived under and supported Adolf Hitler...
...When Meese calls the Miranda decision (which requires that an accused be advised of his or her rights) "infamous," when he says that "Miranda only helps guilty defendants," he strikes a responsive chord among millions of Americans...
...Fund in 1986...
...And when U.S...
...Searle, alleging that the device has caused pelvic inflammatory' disease, infertility, and ectopic pregnancies...
...Washington has faced this kind of insubordination throughout its tenure as global bully: with Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, with Anastasio So-moza in Nicaragua, with Shah Reza Pahlevi in Iran, and now with Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines...
...The fundamentalists will start fighting for control with the more secular moderates," a European diplomat in Pakistan says, "and the bloodshed will just continue...
...The line won instant fame and popularity...
...And more often than not, their high-sounding slogan reduces to "lock the niggers up...
...That's contradictory...
...funds are anti-abortion groups advocating "natural family planning" (the rhythm method) as the only acceptable means of birth control...
...Our efforts are probably making the Soviet generals more determined to stay put...
...Indeed, Reagan and Meese bridle at the whole notion of individual rights...
...All that remains is the political will to place these proposals on the political agenda and fight for their enactment...
...Searle is quick to point out that unlike the Dalkon Shield, the Copper 7 was subjected to extensive testing before it was approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration...
...Our economy and our culture are tied to models of industrial affluence that place an intolerable burden on individuals and on the environment...
...If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect...
...If Marcos went down tomorrow, we're in trouble," says Minnesota Senator Dave Durenberger, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee...
...Now the New People's Army is knocking on their door...
...Working with the Strategic Air Command, the new Space Command sets into play the military structures necessary to launch a preemptive first strike...
...But Marcos, vain, puffy, and shrewd, figured that the United States was in no position to cut him adrift...
...twenty-one use night-vision systems...
...rather than truckle before his benefactor, Marcos snubbed him...
...Government might wish to overthrow Marcos as it did Diem, but no viable successor stands at the ready, and the rebellion is at the gates...
...Washington doesn't want to lose the bases, and it doesn't want the Philippines "to go communist...
...military aid to the rebels will total about $480 million for the fiscal year, making this the largest covert operation since the Vietnam war...
...Moscow on the Potomac Soviets Spy on Colleges, screamed the giant front-page headline on a recent issue of the Chicago Sun-Times...
...Government...
...Scary stuff—until the reader discovers that the Russians have "penetrated" U.S...
...Attorney General, is leading the charge...
...Congress admits as much, but it keeps money flowing into Afghanistan to nettle the Soviets...
...My Enemy's Enemy The CIA has quietly stepped up its role in Afghanistan...
...The lucky few who have received an increase in U.S...
...It has not died yet, but it is gasping for air...
...nineteen utilize miniature radio transmitters...
...When U.S...
...Even the Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union voiced his enthusiastic approval...
...Today's version in America is...
...universities mostly by acquiring unclassified scientific papers...
...Administration has chipped away at the precious rights thai are enshrined in the Constitution and its amendments...
...Unfortunately, the Reagan-Meese attack on the Bill of Rights reflects a popular indifference to, or resentment of, our constitutional safeguards...
...forces invaded Grenada, pitting the world's mightiest military power against a tiny Caribbean Island, millions of flag-waving Americans didn't laugh or cry...
...If Congress fails to enact budgets reducing the deficit 10 zero by 1991, the President will have arbitrary authority to cut a wide range of Federal programs...
...thirteen attach tracking beepers to autos...
...Fear and propaganda have launched the "victims' rights" movement, perhaps the single most retrograde social phenomenon of our time...
...The aging dictator may have guessed right...
...Searle and Company began selling its intrauterine device, the Copper 7, in 1974—the same year that the A.H...
...From an Associated Press dispatch datelined Ramstein, West Germany: The U.S...
...In response to a Congressional inquiry, the Office of Technology Assessment calculated the amount of spying conducted by the Executive Branch...
...Leo Durocher, a baseball manager, ushered in the new era with the observation, "Nice guys finish last...
...Nowhere else has the principle of federalism been dealt so politically violent and constitutionally suspect a.blow as by the theory of incorporation," which holds that the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights must be respected by the states as well as by the Federal Government...
...they lust after vengeance inflicted by the State...
...A prison official said the machine will be tested again 'to reconfirm what we already know—that it was not malfunctioning in any way.' Women who were implanted with the Copper 7 have filed hundreds of lawsuits against G.D...
...Comment Read Me My Rights Sooner or later, a government—any government—grows infatuated with its power and the rights of the governed, if they ever existed at all fade like so many discarded New Year's resolutions...
...We need a whole new pattern of public and private investment...
...The snoops operate through thirty-five agencies...
...Last year, Reagan stopped funding the International Planned Parenthood Federation and held back part of the money going to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities...
...Two Supreme Court justices, William J. Brennan Jr...
...Victims" do have rights—the same rights the rest of us have...
...But devotion to good sportsmanship is a luxury a superpower can't afford...
...And accessible, reliable birth control is such an empowering technology...
...It recently sent the Afghan guerrillas $240 million for weapons, and U.S...
...A sign now hangs above the safety net: Whites Only...
...Robins Company was forced lo withdraw its deadly Dalkon Shield from the market...
...let's build more of them...
...The fundamental problem is that far too much Federal money is squandered on unproductive expenditures—the military, in particular, but also social investments whose costs are beginning to outweigh their benefits, such as the deadly interstate highway system and many high-technology health programs...
...Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the area of "victims' rights...
...Once we had dropped the Bomb and entered into the Cold War, how we played the game no longer mattered...
...Rights interfere with the exercise of force...
...On September 23, the U.S...
...largesse to smuggle heroin and acquire fancy villas...
...The Government should stimulate new modes of regional and self-sufficient agriculture, preventive health care, decent housing, and sensible transportation...
...LLWho wants to make a speech...
...They don't seek justice achieved by due process...
...The Bill of Rights," Meese told the American Bar Association in a July speech, "was designed to apply only to the national government...
...Edwin Meese III, the county prosecutor turned U.S...
...Mayer asked one good German how he fell when Hitler took away his freedom of speech...
...The wearing of earrings is not consistent with a military image,' a spokesman said...
...There aren't many nice guys left...
...What matters, he wrote, is "not that you won or lost, but how you played the game...
...Money for those groups has increased twentyfold since Reagan took office...
...But it's not ignorance that fuels the assault...
Vol. 49 • December 1985 • No. 12
