Comment
Comment Looking Out for Number One No less an authority than the Mobil Oil Corporation assures us, in one of those slick, chatty op-ed ads that purvey the petroleum line, that "the buzzword of the...
...Even with such precautions, however, monstrous mistakes are made...
...The paper profits generated by the soaring Dow Jones average, which recently topped the 1,800 mark, have set market analysts twittering and offering heady predictions of domestic prosperity...
...Say that ten times in a row...
...And the free market always knows best...
...Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting, called this "police deception of the shabbiest kind," and correctly noted that "like the police [in this case] the Court has trampled on well-established principles and flouted the spirit of our...
...El Salvador, a beacon of democracy in Reagan's eyes, is an instructive example...
...What's happening at home and abroad, however, casts shadows on the bullish forecasts...
...During her detention, she says, she was repeatedly raped and was forced to hold her hands over her head for hours as cold water jetted over her naked body...
...U.S...
...I think the teacher thing had a value.'— President Reagan, commenting on the space shuttle disaster in a March 12 interview...
...The impulse to entrust the public interest to the private sector is no new thing in America...
...According to The New York Times, the soldiers captured seven seriously wounded rebels, three of them amputees, and two teen-age rebel nurses...
...More than most other nations, we have always been willing to leave such essential services as health care, mass transit, energy, and telecommunications in the hands of providers whose first concern was not to meet the society's needs but to turn a buck...
...The booming value of stock in no way reflects the asset value of a corporation or the dividends paid to shareholders...
...It is in the name of privatization that old people are paying more for medical services, that farmers are losing their land, that children are being shortchanged of education, and that scholars are learning that the world's mightiest nation can no longer afford to keep evening hours at the world's greatest library...
...The notorious Treasury Police proceeded to torture Iglesias, who denies spying for the guerrillas...
...But one can hardly blame the custodians of the criminal justice system for wanting to take every possible precaution before snuffing out a human life...
...and, as in Holland's tulipomania, the bottom is bound to drop out...
...the rich have ample access to recreation and the poor—well, perhaps they'll be motivated to work hard and get rich...
...If government needn't worry about the public interest, why should any private institution...
...In a sense, they have a point: To sit for years on death row is itself an extraordinarily cruel and unusual punishment—one that drives some convicts to embrace the death penalty as a release from unbearable torment...
...what matter if a few more planes fall out of the sky...
...Comment Looking Out for Number One No less an authority than the Mobil Oil Corporation assures us, in one of those slick, chatty op-ed ads that purvey the petroleum line, that "the buzzword of the '80s is privatization...
...The Democratic National Committee—the real one—sent an "alert" to party affiliates in all fifty states warning against LaRouche-aligned candidates, hundreds of whom seem to be poised to cash in on voter indifference...
...Seven people bid for the seats, and two offered $1,500 apiece...
...The central fact is that for most Illinois voters—and for Democrats in particular—the primary election was a total bore and waste of time...
...testing improves our deterrence...
...Protection of the public's air and water, of natural resources, and of working people's health—all these get low-priority or none under privatization, because, as Mobil Oil points out, privatization "is just a modern-day buzzword for an old, old philosophy...
...Other possible initiatives: selling airport landing slots to individual carriers, for example, or letting private companies sort and deliver first-class mail...
...Catch-22 The due-process revolution wrought by the Warren Court, which has been revolving steadily backward for years now, just took another spin in the wrong direction...
...It just isn't politic to admit that the United States is arming itself to the gills to protect the American empire and ensure the profits of the military-industrial complex...
...To Market, to Market Corporate stocks continue registering impressive gains...
...Wild fluctuations in the cost of any energy resource as basic as oil are harmful to our economy...
...The vaunted ascension of the Dow takes place against a backdrop of thirty-three million Americans, most of them women and children, living in poverty, against a domestic farm economy in shambles, and against declining factory output...
...Says Mobil, "We call it a pretty good deal all around...
...The exercise that is going to be done—I can't even tell you when...
...Yes, says the Burger Court, anyone accused of a crime is entitled to have an attorney present during questioning...
...For them, the rush to judgment and execution can't come swiftly enough, and they complain about the appeals, the stays, the delays that go on and on...
...There is no way, they concluded, of sustaining an infallible system of capital punishment...
...He was told that police were not going to do so...
...Iglesias, a Salvadoran citizen, was a highly paid employee of the U.S...
...embassy in San Salvador...
...It wasn't just the LaRouche slate's politics that was a mystery to the electorate...
...While the great gains in energy conservation of the last few years will not be undone overnight, the oil slide will slow still-needed conservation efforts, encourage inappropriate forms of business and consumer spending, and lay the groundwork for further problems...
...The global debt squeeze has already cost 1.6 million American jobs...
...Inadequate news coverage left the electorate in the dark about the National Democratic Policy Committee and its flaky stands...
...taxpayers have spent trillions of dollars on the building of nuclear weapons, assured all along that the tools of mass destruction were necessary for peace...
...How could purveyors of such weird dogma win nomination as the Democratic Party's candidates for the august offices of Illinois lieutenant governor and secretary of state...
...system of justice...
...Mobil is pleased as punch...
...The case of Moran v. Burbine involved Michael Burbine, who was arrested for breaking and entering in Cranston, Rhode Island...
...Caught off guard by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's call for a ban on further tests, the Administration floundered for a credible response...
...But if the police lie to the lawyer to keep him or her away—well, that's just fine with six of the nine justices...
...The NDPC—also known, at various times, as the U.S...
...approval and supervision...
...Let's assume, let's hope, that America is passing through a particularly dark, atavistic phase...
...We call it a scandal and a disgrace...
...The soldiers also displayed crutches, surgical instruments, and medicines they had seized...
...better weapons mean better deterrence...
...Duds to Duds Over the years, U.S...
...Not to burst the bubble, but the forecasts and underlying analyses are slipshod...
...His attorney, alerted to the breaking-and-entering charge by Burbine's sister, called the Cranston police and offered to represent his client if he was to be questioned that evening...
...Privatization pervades the society...
...Party regulars awoke the morning after to discover that proteges of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., the nation's foremost practitioner of the politics of paranoia, had been designated as the official Democratic candidates for two statewide offices...
...But those of us who believe that official murder even of the guilty is an abomination must recoil in utter horror from evidence that innocent lives are being taken in our name...
...Au contraire, said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the majority opinion...
...But on September 16, according to a chilling account by Robert J. McCartney of The Washington Post, U.S...
...Republicans infiltrated the Democratic Comment primary to make mischief...
...Gargantua Takes a Giant Step Once upon a time, a giant nation grown fat on guns and jowly with jingoism stirred one spring to reassert its claim on all lands near and far...
...With a long swipe of one arm, Gargantua sent its forces aloft, continents away, dropping bolts from the sky against a fustian prince and his futile galleys...
...Instead, it demonstrates what many dollars chasing few shares can do to the price of those shares...
...Roger DeGarmo, under death sentence in Texas, auctioned off three of the five witness seats a convict is allowed in the execution chamber...
...Human Rights, Reagan Style Ronald Reagan likes nothing more than to take the moral high ground, accusing his chosen enemies—these days, Nicaragua and Libya—of committing the most heinous crimes...
...When the political process itself becomes a joke, you're bound to elect some clowns...
...The President, his mind uncluttered by facts, merrily plays his part...
...Labor Party and the National Caucus of Labor Committees—embraces nuclear power, anti-Semitism, Star Wars, militarism, and the imposition of martial law to cope with such menaces as rock music and AIDS...
...The Reagan Administration," reported Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, "has begun publicizing once-secret data showing that since the 1960s, the U.S...
...Why should anyone...
...They didn't pay attention because they didn't think it made any difference—and everything in recent experience suggests they were absolutely right...
...A recent study by Professors Hugh A. Bedau of Tufts University and Michael L. Radelet of the University of Florida found that at least 343 persons have been wrongfully convicted in this century of offenses punishable by death, and that twenty-five of these convicts have actually been executed...
...Everyone else can choose from among a variety of explanations offered by the media and party politicians: McDonald's spent $302.7 million on television advertising in 1985, and it appears to have been effective...
...The sharp rise in oil prices was only one of many causes of economic stagnation in the last decade...
...And so—not as bright as a baby who, having been burned once, knows enough to steer clear of the furnace—Gargantua lumbers out again, belly first...
...Adam Smith called it the free market...
...And so the Burger Court brings us ever closer to the sort of criminal justice system that only Yos-sarian would understand...
...Like most giants, Gargantua had a puny mind and a short memory...
...While institutional investors and CEOs dicker about mergers, buybacks, and leveraged buyouts, the United States keeps sliding toward the dubious distinction of being the world's number-one debtor nation, though it was a world creditor only a decade ago...
...embassy officials, knowing the reputation of the Treasury Police, can hardly feign innocence in the treatment of Iglesias...
...One or more persons in every year of this century," they wrote, "have been on death row who are eventually shown to be innocent...
...In the wake of the primary results, Adlai E. Stevenson III, the Democrats' approved candidate for governor, was scrambling for a legal loophole that would let him run without the taint of screwball runningmates...
...arsenal of nuclear weapons has been plagued by serious mechanical problems, including a substantial number of duds...
...His speechwriters don't include in Reagan's script the grisly details of human-rights abuses committed by puppet regimes with U.S...
...Oil Slick Few events have provoked as much glee in business circles as the sharp decline in oil prices...
...That's Ronald Reagan's human-rights policy...
...Then, with the other arm, Gargantua ferried soldiers from a vassal nation to provoke a war against an impudent neighbor, who had insulted the great power by merely existing...
...The LaRouche loonies insist, of course, that the Voice of the People spoke at the polls...
...DeGarmo, who won a last-minute stay of execution, said the money would be divided between his family and that of the woman he was convicted of murdering...
...The designation does not begin to do justice to the bizarre amalgam that constitutes his "program...
...Navy was planning operations in the Gulf of Sidra...
...In March, the Salvadoran army dismantled one of the largest guerrilla-run hospitals...
...As columnist Jimmy Breslin has pointed out, the corruption scandals rocking New York City, Chicago, and other urban centers are also part of the Gramm-Rudman mentality: Politicians, like the rest of us, are expected to look out for Number One and devil take the hindmost...
...And unemployment, trade deficits, lower industrial production, and weakening retail sales may put additional dampers on economic growth...
...It doesn't much matter whether you choose to believe any or all or none of the above...
...Murder of the Innocents The blood-lust that seems to propel many champions of capital punishment is manifested in their often-stated impatience with the niceties of due process...
...There is hardly an aspect of our lives that hasn't been affected adversely by the cult of privatization...
...The Constitutional right to request the presence of an attorney belongs solely to the defendant" Not to his lawyer...
...We can't just have a Navy unit sit there doing nothing.' So said President Reagan, six days before the bombing of Libya, in denying a CBS report that the U.S...
...I don't pay that much attention to it-is the same exercise we have done every year...
...When one toddler in Arlington, Virginia, learned to speak, reports Nutrition Action, his first words were, 'Go McDonald's.' Only about 25 per cent of the eligible voters turned out, and many of those didn't bother casting ballots for the two offices captured by the LaRouche followers...
...Its arch villains, denounced by militant bands of airport panhandlers, include Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, and Queen Elizabeth II...
...Localities are contracting out such services as hospital care and airport management, police and fire protection, social welfare and public works...
...Let's determine that we'll do all we can to end this binge of self-destructive privatism, to recapture the values of a decent and humane society, to restore a sense of caring and commitment to our public life...
...Public parks are a foolish frill under privatization...
...LaRouche, who now calls his organization the National Democratic Policy Committee—the latest in a series of deliberately misleading names—is usually referred to by the mass media as an ultracon-servative...
...The Dow hit record peaks in 1972 and 1973, just one year before the United States was strapped with its most severe recession since the Great Depression...
...Higher inflation rates preceded the oil price runup, as did declines in the rate of growth in productivity...
...In other words, we can't have peace because our weapons aren't reliable enough...
...Professor Ernest van den Haag, a leading defender of the death penalty, says twenty-five wrongful executions is "a very acceptable number...
...The usually sedate Business Week dreamed up a "fanciful but plausible scenario" that included falling mortgage rates, a housing boom, and the return to larger cars...
...the regular candidates, too, had nothing to say that anyone needed to hear...
...Lyndon LaRouche and the Loony Vote If any further proof was needed that the process of electoral politics in the United States has sunk to the level of utter irrelevance, the mid-March Democratic primary in Illinois provided the clincher...
...It failed to recall the wounds it had inflicted on itself just fifteen years before, when it dispensed its fire power against a tiny foreign land...
...The Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction scheme has as its operating principle the notion that public programs are inherently undesirable (unless, of course, they help propel the war machine...
...Meanwhile, Providence detectives extracted a confession to the murder and never told their suspect about his attorney's effort to see him...
...indifference or hostility to the notion of commonweal, however, what is happening now reflects a shameful decline in humane values...
...But the problem posed by the loonies won't be solved by tighter ballot-access laws or by public-relations campaigns...
...Comes now the distressing-yet-encouraging news that many of the damn things don't even work...
...They told me my father and mother were going to die, but everything could be different if I collaborated...
...Housing, petrochemical, and automotive booms would trigger new shortages and impose further social and environmental strains, adversely affecting the economy...
...The Reagan Administration has made this startling disclosure not, of course, to abandon the arms race but to lobby for more nuclear testing...
...But the sacking of the hospital pales in comparison to the horrifying treatment of Graciela Menendez de Iglesias...
...Time for a syllogism: Testing improves our faulty weapons...
...And let's acknowledge that even if all goes well, it will still take us a terribly long time to repair the damage that's been done to the fabric of our society...
...The push for privatization, Mobil is happy to report, isn't confined to Federal programs...
...Even in the context of historic U.S...
...The NDPC candidates, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, won because they had top billing on the ballot in many places, or because their WASP names were preferred over those of their opponents, George Sangmeister and Aurelia Pucinski...
...They are one of the ways the free market promotes long-range economic disruptions and ensures future hardships...
...Oil price declines may continue over many months or years, but it is a safe bet they portend no economic miracle...
...A recent New York Times op-ed piece argued that declining gasoline prices can justify ending the unduly restrictive fifty-five-mile speed limit...
...If I let down my arms, there was always somebody to say, lift them up again," she recalled to McCartney...
...Not everyone finds such data disturbing...
...What's even more appalling, embassy representatives actually participated in the questioning of Iglesias at Treasury Police barracks...
...It all brings to mind the tulip craze of Seventeenth Century Holland, when speculators raised the price of a single bulb to several thousand dollars until government intervention finally calmed the frenzied market...
...Phoenix, Arizona, "has saved millions of dollars by having its municipal agencies bid against outside companies for city contracts...
...This not-so-novel counterinsurgency tactic happens to be in direct violation of Protocol 2 of the Geneva Convention, which states that "medical units and transports shall be respected and protected at all times and shall not be the object of attack...
...Public air-traffic controllers are expendable under privatization...
...Then the police got a tip linking Burbine to a year-old murder case in nearby Providence...
...Prompted by the need to cut the deficit," Mobil explains, "the Reagan Administration is seeking to cut costs by turning over to private operators such traditional loss leaders as Amtrak and the Federal Housing Administration, which insures private mortgages...
...embassy officials handed her over to El Salvador's Treasury Police and accused her of slipping information to the guerrillas...
...No, something more subtle was needed...
...The great bulls-and-bears paper chase under way in the financial markets does little for the national economy...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
