COMMENT

...To what, after all, would he have taken exception...

...But the industry is now in its dotage, suffering from economic Alzheimer's disease...

...Given such unfettered discretion, the bureaucrats will increase official secrecy and thereby muffle public debate over issues of urgent concern...

...market for many products, and nominally American firms are increasingly shifting production to the Third World to cut labor costs...

...The Commission, which counts among its ninety-six-member staff not one professional historian, has no sense of history...

...All Roads Lead to Rome Moopla in the American press about suppression of dissent in the Roman Catholic Church is puzzling, the Vatican never having offered anyone the promise of free speech...

...Anyone who witnessed and heard the confused ramblings at Reagan's November 19 press conference—his absurd denials of facts that had already been confirmed by some of his aides, his clumsy misstatements that even sycophantic reporters found hard to swallow, and most of all his stubborn insistence on sticking to his own fanciful version of events long after it had been exposed as false—must have concluded that Reagan had no grasp of the particulars, whatever they might be...

...Economic and political power in the United States is in the hands of an elite that acts to limit the structure of choices offered by the political system...

...Stop the Presses Sometimes the news is slow, and sometimes the news is slow...

...She and her associates scrutinized cartoons and other visual images in 372 issues of Playboy published since 1953, 184 issues of Penthouse going back to 1969, and 125 issues of Hustler distributed since 1974...

...Even relatively well-intentioned and reasonably intelligent Presidents have found themselves thwarted by a "national security" apparatus that sets its own priorities, formulates its own policies, and embarks on its own field operations...

...The problem does not reside in a particularly sordid set of policy decisions or in a particularly sociopathic set of Presidential aides...

...policy objectives...

...Also laid to rest are plans for the "Mausoleum on the Mall," a new Washington monument to house statues of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention...

...This time, the plumbers' wrenches were wielded not to re-elect a President but to preserve and extend American hegemony in various strategically important parts of the world...

...So when the nasty details began leaking out only a few days later, it was perfectly plausible for the President to insist, in effect, that he never went down to the White House basement and had no idea what the folks who worked for him down there were up to...

...Alan Wolfe, a sociologist at Queens College in New York, pauses, scratches, and provides an explanation...

...Instead, it seems the people will be treated to the sort of spectacle to which they have become accustomed: the privatization of national treasures...

...To settle matters with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Boesky agreed to cough up an indigestible $ 100 million, plead guilty to one felony count of insider trading, and never show his face on Wall Street again...

...industry relocated many factories abroad, first to save on production costs and then to penetrate the local markets...

...Some of the Bell companies are thinking of putting the text on the covers of telephone books...

...When the domestic market shrinks, capital, like Woody Allen's shark, moves outward to expand...

...companies, the Government did its job too well...

...The debate among politicians and pundits on the drowsy subject of trade divides along hoary lines: Free traders, typically Republicans, tangle with proponents of Government intervention, who tend to be Democrats...

...Explains Reg-nery's successor, Verne L. Speirs, "There are multiple serious flaws in the methodology...

...The infamous drug-control act passed in the last session contains a restriction on the Freedom of Information Act, allowing the FBI to withhold records pertaining to counterintelligence if disclosure might interfere with "law-enforcement proceedings...

...Nor would the President have balked at enlisting the government of Israel to do the U.S...

...There will also be quill pens, placemats, puzzles, ashtrays, comic books, T-shirts, tie clasps, lapel pins, crystal bowls, thermometers, and belt buckles exploiting the Constitution...

...The half that isn't is the implication that he would have done anything differently if he had known and understood...

...If you buy in, giving the Pope the right to tell you what to think is part of the deal...

...Franklin S. Roberts, one of three authors of a twenty-five-minute musical written for the Bicentennial, says several Commission members tried to get him to drop some dialogue he wrote for Benjamin Franklin...

...But the choice a believer makes is whether to belong to the Catholic Church...

...He could, in fact, have made the same claim at any time in the last six years and found us ready to believe him...

...In the Twentieth Century, no product has been more crucial to our growth than the automobile...

...Wolfe's response may not solve the riddle of our dwarfed democracy, but it offers some clues...

...When another character asks who was not in attendance, Roberts's Franklin says the words Roberts refuses to change: "Well, no women, no freed slaves, and no poor men...

...When someone reminded the staff of several major wars, the Great Depression, modern poverty, and three-quarters of a century of slavery, the slogan was snuffed...

...Honk If You Love the Constitution As it happens, the idea of distributing bumper stickers to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the signing of the U.S...

...Unfortunately for U.S...

...The November announcement that General Motors was closing eleven plants and eliminating 29,000 jobs is sure to rally the troops in the Democratic camp to impose higher trade barriers on Japanese auto imports...

...What is needed is a break with the logic of capitalist growth itself...

...That's the half of the Reagan alibi that's credible...

...The social contract of modern liberal democracy, then, is one in which the state agrees to provide growth and security on the condition that the citizens accept the state's objectives as their objectives...

...It had the personal approval of Alfred Regnery, who was then director of the Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention...

...By the time Carter left office four years later, the arms race had accelerated significantly and Carter's Presidential Directive 59 had made an unprecedented commitment to waging aggressive nuclear war...

...Ignorance of history is bad enough for a historical commission, but this one has also tried to rewrite it...

...Today, the average hourly wage in Japan is $10.50...

...Unfortunately, Congress has simultaneously made its own contribution to intensified official secrecy...

...Americans have developed a strikingly inauthentic politics," Wolfe writes in the current Studies in Political Economy...

...the marketing people are now at work on logistics...

...Public life in the United States can be understood as a mechanism for the translation of authentic urges into inauthentic responses," says Wolfe...

...Also, says Burger, "We hope to have copies of the Constitution on the checkout counter of every supermarket in the U.S...

...It was Richard Nixon (or one of his co-conspirators) who coined the felicitous name "plumbers" for the squad of goons who secretly carried out the President's shadier and more repellent sorties against his political enemies...

...Citizens then are forced to choose between options they find undesirable...

...It was conducted by researcher Judith Reisman...

...They've summed up their findings in a three-volume report which will not be made public...

...More technologically advanced and more productive foreign firms are absorbing the U.S...

...Government's dirty work...

...Government played an important role in this expansion by sponsoring the Marshall Plan 'What good is the moon if you can't buy it and sell it?' —Ivan F. Boesky in happier times 'Nicaragua does not pose a military threat to the United States.' —Paul Gorman, former top U.S...

...Sympathy for such American Catholics as Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen and former Catholic University theologian Charles E. Curran, who try to liberalize Church practices on social issues, is deep and understandable...

...the CIA mining of Nicaraguan waters and, more recently, the case of the hapless arms smuggler, Eugene Hasenfus, offered ample evidence of that...

...The answer to the decline of U.S...

...After World War II, this movement accelerated at an unprecedented rate, as U.S...

...The crux of the matter is that our Government's conduct will not stand scrutiny in the light of day...

...And he has proved his sincerity by suggesting to the president of a big food company that it put a copy of the Constitution into every box of its breakfast cereal...

...For starters, the Government could invest in mass-transit systems, stress energy conservation, establish regional networks of food production and distribution, and provide universal health care...

...Information so designated could not be disseminated outside the Government...

...That's the way it goes—the way it has gone in every Administration since Harry Truman's...

...A Riddle Clued To live in the United States is to wonder at the limits of democracy...

...Despite the hullabaloo generated in the mass media and the righteous indignation emanating from Congress, should anyone really have been surprised by the revelations of back-door dealings in arms for Iran and dollars for the contrast In this latest and greatest controversy surrounding Reagan—the one that should irreparably crack the surface of his Teflon Presidency—we find ourselves perversely sympathetic toward the beleaguered incumbent: His claim that he didn't know what was really going on rings at least half true...

...In response, Japan could raise its walls against U.S...

...But memory is dangerous to the State...

...A more appropriate question is this: Is there any law the Government won't break, any principle it won't violate, any lie it won't tell to advance what it perceives to be its national-security objectives...

...the Israelis have, after all, long been willing (and well-paid) accomplices of reactionary U.S...

...American labor, especially workers in the well-established industries of steel and autos, have been primary victims of the process...

...Now another plumbing operation has gone awry, and Americans have learned things they were not supposed to know...

...American University says it, too, has no plans to publish the findings...

...Crimes So Suite While Harper's magazine conducts a symposium on the morality of capitalism, the marketplace holds its own instructive seminars...

...We need to begin debating ways to scale down the entire economy, to select the goods and services that can best meet the basic needs of the citizenry—for food, shelter, health care—regardless of competition from Japan or Germany...

...As a result, U.S...

...And certainly Reagan would not have minded furtively funneling U.S...

...The study was sponsored by American University in Washington, D.C...

...This is as natural to capitalism as the time clock...

...seems beet sugar and cane syrup were cheaper than the 100 per cent apple juice specified on the label...

...policies, particularly when it comes to shoring up right-wing dictatorships in Central America...

...Constitution, which occurs next September 17, has already been scrapped...

...goods, and international trade would screech and sputter...

...It turned out to be the perfect 1984 decree, fraught with Orwellian implications...

...Through it all, no one examines the root and soil of the problem...

...We are taught to worship it every day, and our faith is reflected in the gross national product...

...A few years ago, it was fashionable in some segments of the media to talk about the CIA as a rogue elephant out of control...

...Some officials involved in this latest outrage have resigned or have been dismissed, and in the currently popular phrase, more heads will presumably roll...

...Once a simple showcase for the prettiest and most popular female students and agile male students," The Times story said, "cheerleading has come far since the days when, aside from waving one's arms while grasping a pom-pon, the most strenuous activity was standing on one foot while kicking the other in the air...

...Reagan explicitly and energetically defended that, and as a general principle his Administration (like those of his predecessors) has always eagerly espoused the distribution of instruments of death and destruction as a fine way of advancing U.S...

...military officer in Latin America Comment and overseeing Japan's reconstruction...

...But the real rogue is the entire Government and the rogue empire over which it presides...

...Growth is our golden calf...

...Capitalist societies grow by inventing and marketing new technologies...

...The Silencers The language sounded innocuous enough: National Security Decision Directive 145, signed by President Reagan in 1984, urged a "comprehensive and coordinated approach" to protect the Government's telephones and computers from electronic eavesdropping...

...What makes it in-authentic, Wolfe says, is not "false consciousness"—the inability to discern what is in one's interest—but false outcomes, the inability to effect one's interests...

...Department of Justice...

...Next Saturday, we are told by anonymous sources high up in The Times, the paper plans to publish front-page exposes on how bat boys are exploited and team mascots maltreated...

...As a society matures technologically, the amount of internally generated growth ebbs...

...well, underwhelming...

...On the front page of The New York Times for November 15 ran an astonishingly pressing story, with the headline, New Height's, and Dangers, for Cheerleaders...

...The contract was awarded in 1984 by the U.S...

...That's why subalterns in the White House basement are assigned to conduct the nation's vital business behind locked doors...

...That's why the overheated paper shredders have been working 'round the clock again...

...The first speaker last month was the Beech-Nut Nutrition Corp., which hawked bogus apple juice for infants from 1978 to 1983...

...Certainly the President would not have objected to the traffic in arms with the Ayatollah's regime...

...But we can be sure no basic change will ensue from any investigation mounted by this Administration or, for that matter, by the Democratic Congress...

...See, for example, the article on Page 32 of this issue...

...We are not supposed to differentiate between products—a missile is as good as a muffin—we're just supposed to produce...

...nuclear stockpile to 200 warheads ("Off With Their Heads," Page 29...

...Boesky apparently had more than divine assistance to guide him in choosing which stocks to buy and which to sell...

...Modern liberal democracies are inauthentic because they can only survive if the assumptions of modernity itself are selected out of the political process," Wolfe says...

...What, then, should one have expected of Ronald Reagan, whose intentions have always been mischievous and whose intelligence is...

...Beech-Nut and two of its executives were slapped with a 470-count indictment...

...Now that's subversive...

...In the Watergate Affair, they failed in both tasks...

...industry and the unfavorable balance of trade lies not in erecting protectionist barriers, nor in resurrecting the halcyon days of free trade...

...Soon it, too, will be classified...

...Had there been debate on that measure—there wasn't—someone might have remembered that the FBI's counterintelligence program used to go by the now notorious name COINTELPRO...

...As reported in The Washington Post, Poindexter wrote a memorandum that "grants to the heads of Federal agencies authority to apply the new 'sensitive' label as they choose...

...Authoritarian regimes have succeeded in conquering these rights...

...A personal favorite: The Philip Morris Companies will hold a national essay contest on the topic Does a tobacco company have the right to advertise in the media...

...It suggested, for example, that Government stationery get a new slogan saluting 200 years of peace, prosperity, and liberty...

...jobs are now being lost in the international market in two ways...

...So the hauntingly familiar question that has now been revived by the media— What did the President know and when did he know it?— strikes us as only marginally relevant...

...Government"—a loophole big enough to fire a ballistic missile through...

...Boesky and Beech-Nut make awfully good teachers...

...Now there is similar talk about the National Security Council staff as a rogue elephant...

...The U.S...

...The Justice Department says, "We have made a decision not to officially issue the report...

...It's time to draw some essential distinctions...

...In the musical, Roberts has old Ben describing the delegates to the Convention...

...When blacks, Hispanics, women, and the poor are grossly underrepresented in the seats of power, when less than half the citizenry bothers to vote in national elections, and when the minority that votes chooses and applauds the likes of Ronald Reagan, you have to pause and scratch your head...

...And that question needs to be asked not only of this Administration but of all its recent predecessors...

...Jalopy Road Beware the new trade wars...

...In the pursuit of these objectives, modern states tend to repress individual rights...

...Playing both sides of the fence is not unusual....' —Stansfield Turner, CIA director in the Carter Administration President re-elected at any cost...

...Until we do something about that, we'll have the experience again and again of discovering that we are governed by plumbers...

...It cost the taxpayers $734,371...

...The Church may, in fact, be the most openly dictatorial institution on Earth, considering its flat assertion that, on matters of theological policy, God guarantees the infallibility of his representative here below...

...Wanna Buy a Feelthy Study...

...In the United States, it is $9.50...

...But the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S...

...Two weeks later, Ivan F. Boesky, king of the Wall Street traders, took the podium...

...he cultivated sources within companies, found out when these companies were about to make a decision influencing the price of their stock, and traded accordingly...

...Their mission was to get their 'I hope it will someday be said that one of the enduring legacies of my Administration was that in these years America at last put in the past the divisions of more than a decade ago and united in a new bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.' —President Reagan, November 18, 1986 'I have no knowledge that the Reagan Administration is giving money to the Iranian exile groups, but I see no reason not to give them money and at the same time extend a hand to Khomeini...

...modern democracies like the United States survive by allowing them some room for exercise, but only within a carefully circumscribed area...

...Constitution, the outfit that Warren Burger quit the Supreme Court to head up, does have other plans—though they hardly amount to the national civics lesson that many scholars had hoped for...

...Reagan's recently departed national security adviser, John Poindexter, decided to implement NSDD 145 by inventing a new level of classification called "sensitive...

...This is a great irony, because the AFL-CIO has constantly supported the foreign economic and military policy of the United States...

...This distortion process derives from the nature of the United States as a modern regime...

...German and Japanese industry have since outdistanced our own...

...The Hilton Hotels Corporation, Marriott Corporation, and other hotel chains may put the Constitution into every room, right next to the Gideon Bible...

...Burger has frequently expressed distaste for commercializing the celebration...

...The United States, Wolfe argues, like all modern states, both authoritarian and democratic, has two fundamental objectives: economic growth and military security...

...aid to the contras against the express intent of Congress...

...By producing what we need, we might begin to construct a more rational and stable economy...

...The only curb on their activities was not to get caught—or, if they were caught, to preserve the President's "deniabil-ity...

...But we'll bet they all had fun...

...Poindexter defined "sensitive" information as "unclassified matters that are related to national defense or foreign relations of the U.S...