COMMENT
Comment After the Fall During a plague, everyone's a doctor. And so it's been during the Panic of 1987, which certified anyone with a mouth and a brain to hold forth on the wild rollercoaster ride...
...Some observers have suggested that the market volatility portends a major economic crash along the lines of 1929...
...We're not even going to get into handguns...
...They did nothing to strengthen the foundation of the economy, leading instead to luxury consumption and investment, from new beach homes on Nantucket to lusty speculation on Wall Street...
...Developing nations—in hock to Western bankers, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—have been forced to pursue austerity policies that crush demand for U.S...
...By forgiving the debt and fostering growth in the Third World, the United States could open up huge new markets for U.S...
...Sense departs...
...But worse than the accumulation of debt was its squandering: The debt was not harnessed for infrastructural improvements, educational development, retraining of the work force, new industrial investment, or the kind of social goods that might have been expected to broaden the base of the economy...
...But the only thing bullish was the messy pasture of Wall Street...
...Reagan at his most disingenuous tried to palm off the deficit on fifty years of Democratic Congresses, when in fact it was the signal accomplishment of seven years of Reaganism...
...no restrictions on the carriage of nuclear weapons or the operations of nuclear-propulsion reactors...
...As a result, "there are no constraints on naval nuclear weapons or operations...
...By the same token, if it raises interest rates to keep the foreign creditors, it will increase the cost of money to U.S...
...Justice Department spokesman Patrick Korten said the NRA "made some reasonable arguments that deserve further attention...
...Into a courtroom where a witness is testifying against the Mob...
...no proscribed strategies or doctrines...
...Military spending, skewed toward arcane high-tech projects, is an inefficient jobs program...
...Each new vessel assigned to the region obviously increases the risk of an incident that could lead to a wider war and still further intervention...
...This is a full-employment agenda centered on public goods...
...The NRA likes to present itself as the Washington voice of hundreds of thousands of red-blooded Americans who still believe in the Second Amendment, rather than as the Washington flack for the world's suppliers of deadly weapons...
...Ravi Batra, the author of The Great Depression of 1990, has argued that the instabilities of the financial system, combined with extreme inequalities in wealth and income, will bring about such a crash...
...Alcohol, and Firearms...
...As a result, people are dying...
...Navies tend to be "invisible" and exempt from political scrutiny, Arkin points out...
...But on the racial question, I realized that there are some who belive that somehow I have a prejudice in that way and am a racist...
...Reagan's balmy ignorance and brokers' creaky smiles could not patch over the debacle...
...But even as that book hits the stands, the Government remains criminally negligent...
...I Am Not a Racist' Sigmund Freud observed that jokes have serious meanings, and the Reagan Administration has proved him right...
...But it would create a more just and stable economy whose benefits we all could share...
...ships have already been deployed in the Gulf, and the number seems to be growing weekly...
...Naval Engagement What a godsend the U.S...
...Bell said such comments were most prevalent in the office of then White House counsellor, Edwin Meese III, who is now Attorney General, the nation's chief law-enforcement official...
...That such comments and attitudes were allowed to flourish so high up in the Reagan Administration suggests that the President himself is a racist, as long suspected...
...Until, that is, lobbyists from the National Rifle Association visited Attorney General Edwin Meese III and aides to Vice President George Bush, and talked them into withdrawing the Administration's support...
...Senator Howard Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio, has introduced a bill to ban plastic guns, an eminently good idea...
...America is a nation in economic decline because it has pursued self-destructive patterns of transportation, resource depletion, health care, and land use, because it has chronically underemployed its work force and grossly misallocated its tax dollars...
...Now more than ever, the need to cut military spending is crucial...
...The only two Senators with the courage to oppose this shameful piece of legislation were Lowell Weicker, Republican of Connecticut, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York...
...Welfare programs, unemployment compensation, and other forms of Federal assistance are on the chopping block—everything but Social Security, Reagan warns...
...Uncushioned by rational economic policy, the stock market finally careened dangerously out of control, threatening to drag the rest of the economy along with it...
...And so it's been during the Panic of 1987, which certified anyone with a mouth and a brain to hold forth on the wild rollercoaster ride of the stock market...
...To rectify the record trade deficits, the United States should introduce a gradual process of debt forgiveness to the Third World...
...But Washington's decision to "reflag" Kuwaiti oil tankers and intrude in the nasty war between Iraq and Iran—thereby extending it and making it more bloody—has given the Navy an unexpected chance to engage in actual hostilities...
...A spokesman said their role was purely defensive—'We have no kamikaze animals.' be the unattractive prototype: Selected industries and constituencies receive aid or relief, while the more vulnerable groups—nonunionized workers, welfare recipients, the unemployed, the ill, and the elderly—feel the squeeze...
...With the crunch of recession, the possibility of a peculiarly nasty politics looms...
...In a new forty-six-page study, Nuclear Arms Race at Sea, William Arkin of the Institute for Policy Studies reports that the U.S...
...So did top officials at the Justice and Treasury Departments, including the Secret Service and the Bureau of Tobacco...
...The peace movement should engage it head-on...
...The real crash of 1990 is likely to be felt by the weakest and most vulnerable members of society...
...The jokes, and seven years of policies, tell a different story...
...When scientists needed money for vital research, the money was not made availabe in sufficient amounts...
...While a crash cannot be ruled out, it still remains unlikely, for the Federal Reserve Board seems to have learned the lessons of 1929...
...To be sure, the Government appears in a bind...
...Past the Secret Service checks of White House visitors...
...He and other officials at the financial helm appear to recognize that the economy cannot be allowed to skid too far...
...The amendment was sponsored by that paragon of enlightenment, Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina...
...House Minority Leader Robert Michel, commenting on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica: 'I don't know that the Norwegians have got all that much to say about what goes on in Central America...
...When the public needed explicit warnings from the President, no warnings were forthcoming...
...If there's anything sure on this uncertain planet, it is that the Persian Gulf adventure will result in a sharp boost in Navy funding when the next Pentagon budget is presented to Congress...
...Reagan felt compelled to address this question, in his usual lucid way, at his press conference...
...And I—that is one of the most frustrating things to me, because I was on the other side of that fight long before it became a fight...
...and Soviet navies now possess some 15,000 nuclear bombs and warheads, and "the trend toward deploying more and more weapons at sea is increasing...
...The bailout of New York City in the middle and late 1970s may The Department of Defense employs some 54,000 persons in various functions concerned with military procurement...
...Compassion vanishes...
...This is our moment...
...They can have him...
...To make political hay, Gore has wheeled out his hawkish military record and trumpeted interven-tionism: He boasts of being the "author" of the Midgetman missile system, he supports the B-l bomber and the MX missile, he applauds the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the bombing of Libya in 1986, he defends the reflagging of tankers in the Persian Gulf, he favors "nonmilitary" aid to the contras, and he threatens an "economic boycott leading to a blockade" of Nicaragua if the Sandinistas violate the Central American peace accord...
...Representatives of the financial community could barely muster the energy for false optimism...
...We'll hope that Floridians, once treated to a few more public killings like the one in a Miami brokerage office the week after the stock-market crash, will come to their senses and demand repeal of their new statute that allows just about anyone to carry concealed pistols, knives, and tear-gas guns...
...There is, after all, nothing that so closely resembles a sitting duck as an aircraft carrier on the open seas...
...If enacted, it might not send the stock market back toward the 3,000 mark and it might not lift the gross national product to record heights...
...These initiatives could broaden the base of our economy and make it less vulnerable to international economic shocks, such as oil embargoes or the flight of foreign creditors...
...Gore is the darling of Cold War liberals...
...We're not going to threaten anyone's right to take a rifle into the woods on a fall Saturday and kill furry animals...
...The Administration has delayed and diluted every request from the medical community for research funds to combat the disease...
...Through prejudice, callousness, stinginess, and incompetence, the Administration has casually allowed AIDS to claim tens of thousands of victims...
...Economic skittishness provides the Left with a rare opportunity to present its own economic agenda, to roll out blueprints for a more rational economy...
...For all the ill-spent tax revenues that have gone to the arms contractors, American industry showed only the most sluggish growth...
...He contends that current insurance reserves will be inadequate to bail out banks, failing corporations, and an international economic system in chaos...
...Needlessly...
...products while at the same time improving the lives of the poorest segments of the world's population...
...But the tax cuts depleted the Treasury and increased the Federal deficit...
...We have got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being," Helms told the Senate...
...For once, reality intruded...
...And they called Arabs "sand niggers...
...The only reason anyone would prefer a plastic gun to the usual kind is to get it through a metal detector without being detected...
...The Center for Defense Information reports that some four dozen U.S...
...Having relied on foreign money to cover the deficit, it can't lower interest rates too far for fear that foreigners will take their money elsewhere...
...Police groups of all stripes support it...
...Bell, has revealed that "mid-level right-wing staffers" made the crudest of racial slurs...
...As corporations feel the pinch of tighter money and reduced demand, American workers can expect to see their real earnings dip even further, and the unemployment rate will probably rise to the 10 per cent to 12 per cent range...
...It is possible, however, to have rational and economically sound Government planning...
...Ronald Reagan, who comes only half equipped, mumbled and bumbled his way through his semiannual press conference, rising to coherence just long enough to blame Congress and impersonate Herbert Hoover...
...It's time to consider a massive public-works program not only to improve existing roads and highways but also to initiate new routes and modes of transportation, to build affordable housing for all Americans, to apply greater protections to the environment, and to establish a national health-care system...
...no outlawed maneuvers or harassment techniques...
...The Navy, in other words, has been getting away with murder...
...intervention in the Persian Gulf is to the Navy and its loyal fans...
...We don't need his warmed-over Rea-ganisms...
...Plastic Pistol Packers Forget the usual argument for gun control...
...A new word for useless pursuit of paper money, arbitrageur, entered the vocabulary, billions of dollars changed hands, stock prices soared, but the basis of the economy was neglected...
...They referred to Martin Luther King Jr...
...These conclusions are spelled out in gripping terms in Randy Shilts's new book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic...
...Desperate to get a handle on the budget deficit, Reagan and Congressional leaders seem to be planning a decline, advocating budget cuts and some tax increases that are bound to dampen the already soggy economy...
...Today we want to talk about plastic guns...
...Reagan bet that tax breaks for his rich friends and freshly minted billions of Treasury dollars to armament companies would cure the economy's ills...
...Other NATO nations account for another three dozen or so ships...
...To date, with the exception of the 1930s, the only systematic Government intervention in the economy has been to subsidize arms merchants...
...Reaganomics has been the Grim Reaper...
...That has to change...
...And the multiplier effect of a dollar spent on arms is much smaller than the effect of a dollar spent in the civilian sector...
...On the domestic front, the United States ought to be equally bold...
...Nor is the Persian Gulf the only place where the seas are being polluted by military presence...
...The Administration's former Secretary of Education, T.H...
...Three days after half a million gay men and lesbians marched on Washington to assert their rights, the U.S...
...Patriotic Gore Opportunism dangles like a bunch of overripe grapes in any election campaign, and Albert Gore of Tennessee is ready to pick the vine bare...
...products...
...Ronald Reagan has missed every opportunity to focus national attention on the disease and to marshall the vast resources of Government to find a cure...
...News reports have not specified what a "reasonable argument" consists of, but we suspect it involves the NRA's political-action committee, which has $70 million to give away to politicians willing to bow and scrape before it...
...Years of economic boom based on money borrowed from abroad, high levels of consumer debt, and minimal investment in economic fundamentals have come a cropper...
...For years—for decades—the admirals and their civilian pals have been scratching their heads and wondering how they could keep on justifying the bloated costs of warships in the nuclear age...
...He even won a few hands with this strategy...
...They spend about $28 million an hour...
...The Christopher Reeve lookalike among the contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination has gone out of his way to brand the other candidates as dewy-eyed leftists on foreign policy, calling them apostles of "complacency, doubt, and retreat...
...no prohibited zones for surveillance, steaming, or exercises...
...Immediately following Black Monday, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan pumped money into the system...
...no geographic restraints...
...Meanwhile, the Presidential commission on AIDS has collapsed, the most qualified members having resigned because of backbiting from rightists, some of whom view AIDS as divine retribution...
...consumers, thus softening demand, curtailing spending, and making a recession more probable...
...as "Martin Lucifer Coon," Bell states in his book, The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet Memoir...
...Onto an airplane...
...Reagan's failure to enforce the antitrust laws fueled merger mania and attendant stock shenanigans...
...Senate passed an amendment 94-to-2 to ban the use of Federal funds for education projects or materials that "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual sexual activity"—including information on safe sex...
...Such expenditures, while fueling the arms race, have bloated the budget to no good economic effect...
...And the victims pile up...
...During the final games of the World Series, the chairman of Merrill Lynch screwed a smile on his face and between innings told fans nationwide that he and his company were "still bullish on America...
...A more likely scenario is recession...
...Such an outcome is not inevitable, however...
...The Pentagon dispatched five dolphins to the Persian Gulf to detect underwater Iranian mines...
...Malignant Neglect None of the harm the Reagan Administration has done is so severe or so deadly or so damning or so unforgivable as its malignant neglect of the AIDS epidemic...
...While political leaders grope for answers, the Left can present its own...
...We'll leave aside for the moment an October Gallup Poll in which 60 per cent of adult Americans said, for the umpteenth time, that they favor stricter regulation of handgun sales and 42 per cent said they favor an outright ban on possession of handguns...
Vol. 51 • December 1987 • No. 12
