COMMENT
Comment 'I know what I know is what he knows. ... I don't know that I know everything.' —Vice President Bush, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, on President Reagan's knowledge of the arms...
...That was the message for Managua in Reagan's speech...
...instead, he opted for a flight of World War II bond-rally oratory about "We the People" and "God Bless America," an impassioned pitch for classroom prayer, and a touching tribute to Nellie Reagan, the President's Mom...
...Better not to let the American people know that a breeze of progress is blowing in Moscow...
...And like a junkie determined to get his next fix by fair means or foul, he told Congress he would tolerate no curb on military spending...
...And he ventured not even a passing reference to the patently illegal diversion of funds to the con-tras fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua...
...That kind of thing comes like a drop of rain after a long drought," Tambo said...
...There's nothing like a war to shore up a President's popularity...
...Mayor Washington is an excellent role model for this city's black youth," Ora McConner, an assistant superintendent with the Chicago board of education, told Muwakkil...
...After years of steadily mounting pressure from Washington, the government of Japan caved in shortly after 1987 began, adopting a $23 billion military budget that exceeded the 1 per cent ceiling for the first time...
...Mission to the United Nations objected...
...Echoing Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, in a historic address to the Communist Party's Central Committee in January, denounced not only Stalinism but the encrusted bureaucracy of Leonid Brezhnev...
...It seems the U.S...
...The claim is nonsense...
...the national debt is money that we owe to banks and other financial institutions as well as to a relatively small number of extremely affluent investors in this country and abroad...
...The most pressing problem, from the standpoint of the American people, as far as the President is concerned, is: "What is it with this Iran thing...
...Our young people have to have the education to understand how to use the weapons we devise.' —Senator Robert Stafford, Vermont Republican, urging higher Federal spending for education...
...He wants the Supreme Court to overturn the Miranda decision, the 1966 ruling that requires suspects to be told, before questioning, of their right to silence and to legal counsel—and that requires courts to throw away confessions obtained without the warning...
...The Fourth and Fifth Amendments are at stake here...
...For anyone who doubted that the Soviet leadership is assaying unparalleled reforms, Gorbachev called for secret balloting and a choice of candidates in Party elections, proposed a mechanism for retiring top Kremlin officials, and sought legislation to guarantee open debate and to protect citizens against abuses of power...
...Nobody Home This is the United Nations Year of Shelter for the Homeless, and there is to be a film featuring projects to help the unfortunate people who have no roofs over their heads...
...More bloodshed, more atrocities, and more interventions are on their way...
...See "Message for Managua" below...
...But the remarks by Tambo and Mandela make the case: Taking up arms corrodes the spirit, blinding the eyes and deafening the ears to the suffering of others...
...There must be no Soviet beachhead in Central America," he stated, jaw ajutting...
...Such plans will require abandonment of Japan's postwar defense policy, which has limited the 'self-defense forces' to countering direct attacks on Japanese territory...
...Because of Reagan's two public-policy obsessions—tax cuts and bizarre increases in the bloated military budget—this Administration has doubled the national debt in six years to an unheard-of $2 trillion...
...It is no exaggeration," writes Manning Marable in The Black Scholar, "to draw political parallels between Harold Washington and the first generation of African nationalists who achieved independence, frequently through the mass mobilizations of African peasants and workers against the the racist and colonial-capitalist states imposed upon them...
...And he all but promised more military involvement: "We support diplomatic efforts, but these efforts can never succeed if the Sandinistas win their war against the Nicaraguan people...
...Serious mistakes were made," the President said...
...These moves have not pleased the old guard in the Soviet Union...
...But what were those mistakes...
...history...
...And that they get the evidence without themselves breaking the law...
...The paladin of contemporary American conservatism was alive and well...
...In January, it decided two more cases whose message to the criminal courts is Let's not overdo this miranda business...
...Without Miranda, such individuals would again be deprived of due process...
...To bolster his bellicose stance, Reagan quoted three Democratic Presidents—Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy—who had pledged before him to intervene against communism in this hemisphere...
...A crumbling farm economy, riddled with debt and beset by foreclosures, despite the expenditure of record sums of Federal funds on farm programs that aid primarily the corporate agribusiness monopolies...
...he neither craves "respectability" nor caters to the business community...
...For sheer hypocrisy, the outstanding moment of the State of the Union address was the President's protest against the "outrageous" Federal deficit...
...Arms and Japan After the United States achieved its great World War II victory in the Pacific, it did an enormous favor to the power it had vanquished: It compelled Japan to renounce all future interest in waging aggressive war, and imposed a Peace Constitution that gave Japan only a token military force to be used strictly for defense...
...history...
...Reagan's right on that score: His policy is perfectly in keeping with U.S...
...After ailments, surgery, and serious political reverses, the President appeared to be in ruddy-cheeked good health...
...He offered not a clue, assuring us instead that the goals of shipping arms to Iran were "worthy...
...we are...
...the system is so noxious, the repression so brutal, that resorting to armed struggle seems natural and justifiable...
...He denounced the Soviets' "single-minded determination to expand their power" as if the United States were not engaged in intrigues and military interventions around the globe...
...The Court has also taken a chisel in recent years to defendants' protections against illegal search and seizure, and Meese presumably would like to do away with the Mapp decision as well—the one that bars evidence police have seized in an illegal search...
...Who are these people...
...Yet Washington's accomplishments have been serious and at times profound: ¶ He cut the number of patronage jobs from 40,000 to 800...
...With our matches and our necklaces, we will liberate South Africa," she said, referring to the practice of placing gasoline-soaked tires around the necks of blacks collaborating with Pretoria and then tossing a match on them...
...Or might it simply be that the U.S...
...the national debt is simply money that we owe to ourselves...
...But these, too, were components of Reagan's "economic integrity": ¶ An official unemployment rate that has dropped by barely a fraction of a percentage point since Reagan took office more than six years ago, and that continues to hover at about 7 per cent...
...That's why the conservatives—as Richard Nixon proclaimed in the early 1970s—are all Keynesians now...
...Washington has his flaws, as we have noted in these pages...
...So far, the structure is still standing, but Meese's Justice Department is looking for a test case to topple it...
...Government is ashamed to admit to the rest of the world that it cannot house its people...
...the die-hard Stalinists gag on the mere mention of liberalization...
...Yet the President, sounding for all the world as if the deficit were a Soviet or Sandinista conspiracy, thundered that Congress should approve a balanced-budget amendment—and the members of Congress, who have approved every unjustified tax cut and every insane military appropriation, stood and cheered...
...It's just not politically advantageous to say anything favorable about our arch enemy...
...But it isn't...
...A Breeze of Progress Not since Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin at the Twentieth All Union Party Congress in 1956 has the Soviet system been in such a state of ferment...
...Japan, with a standing army of 160,000, devoted 1 per cent or less of its gross national product to the military...
...That was the hidden meaning of the President's State of the Union address...
...such forthrightness might impede the arms race and hamper U.S...
...When Lord Keynes was asked who would pay off the national debt in the long run, he replied, "In the long run, we'll all be dead...
...Reagan could have addressed these grim realities with substantive proposals for change...
...Keynesian liberals used to dismiss conservative concern about deficit spending...
...The ossified bureaucrats fear for their status and power...
...The ANC decided that the forces of apartheid were too entrenched to be dislodged by peaceful means, and so the armed struggle commenced...
...The current script calls for filming of programs in Brazil and Sri Lanka— but not in New York, as originally planned...
...And they're not going to get [that] from him I don't think.' —House Republican leader Robert Michel 'I've always viewed South Africa as an outpost of Western empire and Western civilization.' White House director of communications Patrick J. Buchanan Matches and Necklaces Twenty-six years ago, the African National Congress (ANC), the leading black liberation organization in South Africa, abandoned its commitment to nonviolence...
...But a real arrest is another thing...
...Washington has invigorated and united the black community...
...Way down at the bottom of his list are the traditional tramps, hobos, and transients who have exercised their individual rights to take to the streets...
...A growing gap between rich and poor...
...Career criminals know their rights, whether or not the arresting officer reads them aloud...
...The major impact that can be demonstrated is that police officers have been motivated to respect defendants' rights with greater regularity than before, if only because they know they must if they want convictions...
...Estimates of the number of homeless Americans range from 350,000 to three million, and Harper's magazine aptly titled its recent examination of the subject "Helping and Hating the Homeless in America...
...As his time clock ticks down, Reagan may order an all-out invasion of Nicaragua...
...Message for Managua He doesn't give up, does he...
...Every twelve-year-old who watches television—be it Barney Miller reruns or Hill Street Blues—probably knows the whole Miranda spiel by heart...
...Entrepreneurs sought out civilian markets instead of whoring after military contracts...
...The social scientists have had twenty years to study the effects of the Warren Court's due-process revolution, and none of them can convincingly demonstrate an adverse impact on convictions...
...He accused the Soviets of dashing hopes for arms reduction at last November's Reykjavik summit, though it was his own mindless insistence on Star Wars—reiterated in the State of the Union address-that sabotaged what may have been the last, best chance for nuclear disarmament...
...These are the rules that Meese and his minions are talking about when they claim hardened criminals are roving the streets, having been set free by "technicalities...
...The Court has, in fact, been chipping away at Miranda for years...
...He opened up municipal jobs to minorities and women: 55 per cent of the people hired by the city in 1985 and 1986 were black and 41 per cent were women...
...Much of the progress has gone unnoticed while the media focused on the "Council Wars" that pitted Washington against the rump of Richard J. Daley's white machine...
...Changes large and small are emanating from Moscow...
...It's up to all of us—in the churches and on the campuses, in our neighborhoods and our workplaces—to try to alter the ignominious course of that history...
...But he has proven to be the most progressive of the black urban mayors...
...Gorbachev appears to recognize the need to end the invasion of Afghanistan, and he is even considering a general amnesty for all domestic political and religious prisoners...
...We have no veto power...
...Freed from the burden of senseless military expenditures, Japan was able to build a flourishing postwar economy...
...The people at risk are the ones the police can trick, browbeat, or coerce into waiving their constitutional rights: nervous, intimidated first offenders, the poor, the ignorant, the unassertive...
...Under his leadership, police shootings of civilians declined by more than 60 per cent...
...Though his voice faltered a bit toward the end, his delivery was smooth...
...agenda...
...Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's government issued bland assurances that Japan would continue to be "a peace-loving nation," but no one doubts that military spending will inexorably rise from now on...
...The former diplomat again: "The fact that these are people who in some cases wish to stay on the streets, roaming around not solely because they have no place to go...
...He is no Wilson Goode or Andrew Young...
...Reagan's discussion of Central America, however, did contain a useful lesson in U.S...
...Capable scientists, engineers, and technicians devoted their talents to development of civilian products rather than weapons...
...That means almost eight million Americans are seeking jobs but can't find them, and millions more—the so-called discouraged unemployed who aren't even included in the Government's statistics—have given up the quest...
...In the United States, Gorbachev's efforts to clean the Augean stables of Stalinism have been largely underplayed...
...IIA deteriorating industrial economy in the Rust Belt that won't find any relief in brave talk about increasing American "competitiveness" by vague means that seem to amount to not much more than the political equivalent of a high-school pep rally...
...Not to worry, they said...
...The Dow Jones Industrial Average did, indeed, stand at an all-time high as Reagan spoke, and Wall Street firms reported record earnings...
...anticommunist crusades abroad...
...The mounting interest on that debt, itself a major contributing factor to the budget deficit, is a transfer payment from the poor, from the working class, and from the middle class, to the rich...
...The case for pacifism is not easy to make in the South African context...
...He has brought together public and private funds to finance construction and rehabilitation of housing...
...Instead, he engaged in crude saber-rattling against the Sandinistas, who have more reason than ever to believe that the United States is likely to mount overt and direct military action against Nicaragua before Reagan leaves office...
...After directing six years of aggression against the government of Nicaragua, Ronald Reagan still isn't satisfied...
...The numbers of the hungry and the homeless are increasing, and more than 33 million Americans live below the Government's austere poverty line...
...Long-term Pentagon plans," John Junkerman wrote in the November 1982 issue of The Progressive, "are based on the complete integration of an armed Japan into a global strategy for containment of the Soviet Union...
...He wants it bad, as anyone who watched the address can attest, and he may need it to distract attention from the debacle of the Iran scandal...
...Furthermore, what little he offered was misleading or downright deceptive...
...If a person is guilty of a crime, is it too much to ask that the police prove it with evidence...
...But as with almost every armed struggle, the campaign of the ANC has led to an acceptance-even exaltation—of murder...
...But what the Constitution calls for is "information of the State of the Union," and that was, for the most part, woefully absent from the President's address...
...There is definitely a new feeling of pride and accomplishment...
...Or, in the clarifying words of a former American diplomat, "We just gave them what we thought was political advice for their own good...
...But it was in his comments on domestic issues that the President was most disingenuous...
...in the United States this year, military costs amount to 6.1 per cent of the GNP...
...Oliver Tambo, head of the ANC, recently said that the occasional killing of South African whites, including children, is necessary to make white people "used to bleeding" and to inspire blacks...
...Winnie Mandela, perhaps the most outspoken black in South Africa today, shares Tambo's callousness...
...Our Kind of Town Chicago politics, long so byzantine and corrupt, have taken a decided turn for the better under Harold Washington, the city's first elected black mayor, who is running for a second term this spring...
...Say what...
...Who made them and why...
...If it were Reagan's constitutional duty to report on the state of the President, we could all draw comfort from his hearty appearance and upbeat presentation...
...He served up his sonorous pieties with his customary panache, and the assembled members of the House and Senate—especially the Republicans—cheered loud and long...
...Harold Washington's Chicago proves that even in a hostile environment, progressive change can be instituted and a popular base maintained...
...Inevitably, the United States was unhappy with the peace-seeking Japan it had brought into being...
...The United States, he claimed, has restored "economic integrity," whatever that may mean...
...Openings on the cultural front have come fast: Boris Pasternak's Dr...
...Washington's reign has ushered in an era of good feelings between many segments of the black community previously at odds," notes Salim Muwakkil of In These Times...
...They just want to hide them...
...In real life, however, it seems to get stuck in their throats, and the nation's top law-enforcement official, Attorney General Edwin Meese, is positively choking...
...Subverting Miranda On Cagney and Lacey, cops have no trouble remembering to reel off the warning to criminals that begins, "You have the right to remain silent...
...Congress—which is currently withholding $110 million in funds the United States owes the world body for 1986—might not like the film because it does not treat the "individual-rights element" of American homelessness...
...A return to something approximating full employment is no longer on the U.S...
...I don't know that I know everything.' —Vice President Bush, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, on President Reagan's knowledge of the arms scandal State of the Union Those who watched on color television as Ronald Reagan delivered his seventh State of the Union address were greeted by a cheery spectacle...
...The most glaring evasion came, as expected, in Reagan's fleeting reference to the Iran/contra arms scandal...
...It seems our diplomats at the United Nations are interested in neither helping nor hating the homeless...
...By Peter Marin's count in Harper's, they are Vietnam veterans, mentally ill people who have been deinstitutionalized, the elderly on fixed inadequate incomes, runaway children, the unemployed, and so forth...
...There was the usual belligerent thrust to the President's remarks about the Soviet Union...
...The "political advice" hinted that the U.S...
...Zhivago will at last be published in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Baryshnikov has been invited to dance at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and Soviet televison has aired a documentary on Lenin which portrays the founder of the Soviet state as a democratic socialist and a critic of the omnipotent Party...
...That's what "peace-loving" has come to mean...
...And he was right...
Vol. 51 • March 1987 • No. 3
