COMMENT
Comment Process, Not People What a repulsive pack of mountebanks and scoundrels has infested the Government's national-security apparatus in these late days of the Reagan Administration! The...
...Another member of the Tower panel, former Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, came much closer to identifying the crux of the problem when he observed that "the single most important fact" in the Iran-contra arms affair was "the over-obsession with secrecy...
...On Penalty of Penury When President Reagan endorsed Health and Human Services Secretary Otis R. Bowen's proposal for catastrophic health insurance, he proclaimed that his Administration would now be providing the "last full measure of security...
...Costs of health coverage have continued to escalate despite a barrage of public and private efforts to contain them...
...But the people come with the process...
...Reagan: Uh, I don't get it...
...Morgan Rides Again It was a scene from another century: Three dozen millionaires gathered at a hilltop mansion and pledged to raise $250,000 each for the Presidential candidate of their choice...
...There is every reason to believe that these procedures will further increase the costs of health care...
...Yes, average citizens can become competent to arrive at such decisions...
...It's even worse in Iowa, where more than one quarter of the state's water wells are contaminated by nitrates or pesticides or both...
...When syndicated columnist Anthony Lewis had the audacity to call Abrams a coward, Abrams's wife Rachel recoiled...
...It's nice to see the two-party system is alive and well, and living in Phoenix...
...too bad pollutants discharged onto the land or waterways don't stay put, like good little toxins...
...Man for All Seasons Trying to select the most despicable official of the Reagan Administration is like trying to find the zebra with the most stripes...
...I thought you should hear directly from me...
...because the belatedly removed White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, was a Wall Street type inept in the ways of Washington...
...It was a victory in the true Pyrrhic sense: "One more such victory," said Pyrrhus, "and I am undone...
...Precisely...
...that I am leaving the Foreign Service in response to your exercise in McCarthyism," McNeil wrote to Abrams...
...The Soviet moratorium was an acute embarrassment to the United States...
...These Democratic fat cats, longing to be modern-day J.P...
...Guess again...
...foreign and military policy for the last four decades...
...The sort of people who can call the President on the phone and say, 'Look, Don Regan's killing you.' The difference is that we're Democrats...
...Even State Department employees are fair game...
...the Labor Department has workplace standards in place—albeit not always enforced—for every other kind of employment...
...Not only has he pursued the contra war with the lust of the Samurai, but he has brought to his office all the grace and class of Babyface Floyd...
...Increasingly, we view death as a preventable condition, its occurrence as a technological failure...
...The rumor is out that they also believe the Earth is flat and is guarded by the tooth fairy...
...I think my father is going to be—now is—very happy...
...I would like to take a machine gun and mow Anthony Lewis down...
...Hades: No, Ronald, that's not the reason...
...While the United States conducted more than two dozen underground tests, the Russians repeatedly extended their unilateral moratorium and issued one invitation after another to Washington to follow suit...
...In California, for instance, a recent survey found that 19 per cent of all wells have trace elements of potentially harmful chemicals...
...The growers continue to insist that the link between field sanitation and disease is unproved...
...Such decisions affect the course of this society as broadly as virtually any other economic or military matter, and they must be made democratically...
...Reagan: Uh, where am I? Hades: The land of the dead...
...That's the Maginot Line of pollution control...
...But when a nation's policies and practices must be kept under wraps, they attract operatives whose proclivities suit them for dirty work...
...Every government is infested, to a greater or lesser extent, with malignant defectives looking for a chance to wreak havoc in the people's name and at the people's expense...
...Fernandez told a judge in U.S...
...Confusing candor with disloyalty is a disservice to American interests and tradition...
...the techniques, and their technicians, control us...
...While we stand in awe of its actual and purported accomplishments, we worry about our growing dependence on distant technology and technocrats...
...Late in February, Soviet patience gave out and Soviet testing resumed...
...They decide whether to sponsor research for artificial hearts, tissue-rejection medications, or nutritional regimens...
...All that may well be true—all that is true—but none of it addresses the central problem...
...It was "the assassination on Embassy Row"—the 1976 murder of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Le-telier and his U.S...
...The Republicans have got a couple of hundred...
...Be a good soldier, tough it out, and this problem will have a happy end," Pinochet told him, Fernandez recalls...
...Court of Appeals told the Labor Department to shape up and issue the rules, calling the dispute "a disgraceful chapter of legal neglect...
...The structure was—and is—faulty...
...He was not an aberration, but part of a White House team whose full scope of operations has yet to be unraveled...
...Hades: Ronald, I hate to break it to you, but you just blew up the world...
...Fernandez's father, a former army attache at the Chilean embassy in Washington, had urged him to leave DINA...
...But I] don't care...
...And we are not in control of the techniques...
...It has been estimated that if every woman in America were to follow the American Cancer Society's guidelines on mammography, most radiologists would do little else...
...Hades: Do you recall approving something that might have had harmful consequences...
...These are the natural consequences of our Porta Potti style of economic development...
...That the need for broad coverage is compelling there can be no doubt...
...The record clearly shows that hundreds of thousands work in fields lacking such facilities, and the result is the spread of contagious diseases, bladder infections, heat prostration, and dehydration...
...These are the real issues—the control, direction, and nature of health care—that demand attention...
...When the United States emerged from World War II as a great superpower with "vital interests" all over the world and a fierce determination to protect and advance those interests by all means fair or foul, pervasive secrecy became an indispensable component of American statecraft...
...J.P...
...After the murder, "the chief met with Fernandez and urged him not to flee to the United States as he intended...
...Not To Be Cultural benchmark, 1987: "Which would you rather read, Hamlet or TV Guide...
...Diluted measures won't solve this mess fit for Noah...
...With that, the order for Fernandez's head may have been issued...
...The Administration further assured us that this last full measure would come on the cheap—a mere $4.92 a month in added Medicare premiums to cover an unlimited number of days of hospital care...
...I take a chance to go to jail ten years...
...Harvest of Neglect Fifteen years ago, farmworkers and their advocates asked the Federal Government to require that growers provide drinking water, toilets, and other sanitary facilities in the fields where they labor...
...The big growers and their flacks are typically among the weightiest lobbies in the governments of agricultural states...
...For eighteen months, the Soviets had refrained from nuclear testing...
...Grove passed the remark on to her husband, who responded with a grin and said: "I wouldn't waste the bullets...
...Fernandez said he was told by the head of DINA that the orders to assassinate Letelier had come from "the chief himself...
...Secrecy—obsessive secrecy—has been the operating mode of U.S...
...Much of the controversy over health care today—from the debate over catastrophic health care to the right-to-die movement—reflects a widespread anxiety about our medical system...
...Reagan: Well, then, what was it...
...Reagan: Gee, no, I don't...
...McNeil resigned in protest...
...Reagan: Well, is Mommie on her way...
...Health Maintenace Organizations, Preferred Provider Groups, and Diagnostic Related Groups have littered the medical landscape with acronyms but have not kept costs in check...
...In February, at long last, the U.S...
...As a result, we are losing the capacity to face death and to console those who confront it...
...These bodies determine whether to emphasize research into the occupational origins of cancer or pursue new wonder drugs...
...the defect is in the process as well as in the people who operate it...
...It was not that the structure was faulty," he was dead wrong...
...The degree to which Berry's proposal sounds Utopian is the degree to which we have departed from sensible and healthy practices...
...Hades: I'm sorry, Nancy won't be coming...
...This is one more chapter of the official myth that farmworkers are not really people...
...But the legislative victory leaves a bad taste in the mouth because the law does virtually nothing to block pollution at its headwaters...
...Reagan: I did...
...More than 200,000 coronary-bypass operations are done each year, but many physicians now believe that as many as 90 per cent of these operations have done nothing to extend life...
...American policy-makers heaved a sigh of relief and called it a victory for our side...
...Every town and city should be required to operate an organic-waste depot where sewage, garbage, waste paper, and the like would be composted and given or sold at cost to farmers," wrote Wendell Berry a decade ago in his classic, The Unsettling of America...
...The major health-care decisions of our lives are made by government health bureaucracies, private pharmaceutical firms, and giant medical corporations largely insulated from public scrutiny...
...As far as I'm concerned, he's a deserter," Pinochet said...
...And Federal officials expect state legislatures to do their job for them...
...These men want to be the sort of people who show up at the New Year's party that Walter An-nenberg throws every year for Reagan," Duane Garrett, a San Francisco lawyer and art and coin collector, told Paul Taylor of The Washington Post...
...In recent years, Department administrators have admitted the problem but maintain that the states, not they, should do something about it...
...Biopsy surgeons would also be in high demand...
...District Court in February...
...They would use them to more effect...
...Well, now, I don't remember approving that...
...The law's only gesture in the direction of pollution control is a provision restricting the discharge of dangerous chemicals into rivers and lakes that already have high concentrations of such pollutants...
...The New England Journal of Medicine reports that despite a nearly two-decade "war on cancer," little progress has been made against this disease...
...When government is open and subject to public scrutiny, these sociopaths are deterred by the fear and likelihood of exposure...
...Fernandez's confession pointed a finger at the Chilean leader, General Augusto Pinochet, whose sanguinary regime was helped to power by the U.S...
...this is intrusion...
...At a more fundamental level, we must begin to face the limits of the medical system, for we are becoming slaves to health care...
...Through democratic processes we need to decide whether billions of dollars spent for respirators, magnetic-resonance imaging, and new chemotherapies might better be spent scrubbing the workplace, cleansing the environment, and modifying our eating habits...
...All over trie world, people noted that the Russians were making a significant move toward halting the arms race, while the United States insisted on testing as usual in preparation for new generations of nuclear weapons...
...Hades: Don't you know why you've been sent down here...
...It's time to return to a more natural, respectful way of disposing of our wastes...
...Honest, I don't...
...But Elliot Abrams may be just that animal...
...And that obsession will not be laid aside even if the President manages to muster some energy, adopts a new hands-on management style, and fills all of his staff positions with bright-eyed Eagle Scouts...
...This is not prevention...
...There are maybe fifty of us in the country who raise our kind of money...
...because he has a hands-off management style and fails to exert sufficient control over his aides...
...Sympathy for the Devil Hades: Welcome, Ronald, you have just crossed the river Styx...
...As Seymour M. Hersh observed recently in The New York Times Magazine, "It is now apparent that [Lieutenant Colonel Oliver] North was but one of many at work in the White House who believed in force, stealth, and operations behind the back of the citizenry and the Congress...
...Each revelation has brought protests of astonishment, investigations, dismissals or reprimands, and assurances that "the problem, at the heart, was one of people, not of process...
...I would rather have them go to the contras...
...In recent weeks we have been told that the Iran-contra arms scandal, with all of its lurid implications and reverberations, came about because President Reagan is lazy...
...If we want better people acting on our behalf, we'll have to begin by instituting better policies and a better process...
...Health care as a percentage of GNP has billowed from 6 per cent twenty years ago to more than 11 per cent today...
...because the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense failed to apply the brakes to a runaway national-security staff...
...As befits a society in thrall to technology, America's health-care system adores the costly, complicated maneuver and shuns the inexpensive, simple treatment...
...A public given access to information can gain both the opportunity and the confidence to participate in its own health care...
...But this was 1987, and the participants at the quarter-of-a-million-dollar-a-plate festivity in Phoenix were not Republicans but Democrats...
...Playing Raskolnikov was Major Armando Fernandez Larios, a former agent of DINA, the Chilean secret police...
...colleague Ronni Moffitt of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...
...When Pinochet heard of Fernandez's recent confession, he responded in typical fashion...
...Our Government was no longer engaged in conduct that could stand the light of day...
...This would greatly improve the health of both the rivers and the fields, and it would lower the cost of food...
...Creakingly, the system is beginning to become more oriented toward preventive medicine...
...When retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, a member of the Tower panel, declared, "The problem, at the heart, was one of people, not of process...
...But even here, the leaders of the medical establishment stress technological quick-fixes instead of nutritional or environmental prescriptions...
...I am going to clean my name and also the name of a person who died ten years...
...In an effort to induce the United States to join the test ban, the Soviets took the unprecedented step of agreeing to on-site inspections to confirm compliance...
...The Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American affairs scores high in the ratings for being seamy, smarmy, and small...
...Given that sleazy cast of characters and the likelihood of further revelations of their wretched misconduct, it is understandable that every effort is being made to assign blame to individuals rather than to the system...
...Farmworkers and their friends are claiming victory, but they probably haven't won yet...
...All but the super-rich face the penalty of penury if a member of their family becomes seriously ill...
...Francis McNeil, a leading Foreign Service expert on Latin America, apparently wasn't ardent enough in distorting intelligence for the contra cause and so Abrams accused him of leaking documents to the media and prevented him from obtaining an ambassadorship...
...But this was not just any murder case...
...Finger in the Dike When Congress voted to override Ronald Reagan's veto of the Clean Water Act in February, environmental groups scored a small triumph: Spending $18 billion during the next six years will help some of our major urban areas cope with their growing sewage-treatment problems...
...That is my father...
...the commercial begins...
...Fernandez didn't actually set the fuse to the bomb that killed Letelier and Moffitt, but he did provide crucial information—Letelier's home and work addresses—to the assassin, Michael Townley...
...The push is on to increase dramatically the screening of asymptomatic individuals for a variety of conditions—breast cancer, colo-rectal cancer, uterine cancer...
...With few goals except magnifying their self-image, the political meddlers are trying to buy their way to the White House...
...Pyrrhic Victory On Thursday, February 26, the Soviet Union handed a great propaganda victory to the United States...
...Reagan: Was it to tell some old jokes about welfare cheats...
...The picture that emerges from the report of the President's own investigative panel headed by former Senator John Tower of Texas, as well as from various other recent disclosures, is one of cynical manipulation and deception that knew no scruples and acknowledged no restraint...
...Morgans, have come up with the brilliant idea of pooling their funds into a political organization called "Impac '88...
...Unfortunately, the program is mostly gloss: It does little to address the three largest factors that inflate the medical bills of the elderly: nursing-home costs, outpatient prescription drugs, and physician charges in excess of those allowed by Medicare...
...In 1986, health expenditures rose at seven times the overall inflation rate...
...TVGuide,"thecleancut American man responds with a giggle...
...But Abrams's viperous excretions aren't aimed only at foreigners...
...He single-handedly denied Colombian journalist Patricia Lara entry into the United States, tarring her as a terrorist—a calumny so caustic that Lara's life stands in jeopardy...
...The result has been a series of unsavory disclosures, all attended by clumsy attempts at concealment or deception, including among many others the U-2 spy flights, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the vast array of war crimes committed in Indochina, the assassination attempts on foreign leaders, the CIA-engineered coups in Iran, Guatemala, Cambodia, and Chile, and the contra war against the government of Nicaragua...
...There is still time to appeal, and a "senior Reagan Administration official who asked not to be identified" told The New York Times an appeal is likely "because the Court's reasoning undermined the Administration's notion of Federalism...
...she told Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post...
...Ten years, twenty years, a life...
...Indifferent to the law, contemptuous of the will of Congress, scornful of the interests of the American people, unmindful even of the potential damage to the image of their President, the Reagan national-security aparatchiks invented their own foreign policy, played by their own rules, and fought their own wars as they went along...
...Murder Most Foul It was a scene out of Dostoevsky: A man involved in a murder ten years ago turned himself in because his guilt was devouring him...
...Charming fellow...
...We spend a large portion of our lives working to pay for techniques which at best slightly extend the lives of a very few...
Vol. 51 • April 1987 • No. 4
