COMMENT

Comment theProgressive If Gorbachev Loses.... Even if there were a U.S.-Soviet agreement to eliminate medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe," begins a recent dispatch to The Wall Street...

...When it does so, we can be equally sure that the industry looking for a Federal bailout will invoke "national security...
...Supreme Court recently heard a case challenging this assault on due process...
...To the Uzbekis...
...Bailing Out Oil If there is such a thing as an economic certainty in this homeland of free enterprise, it's that an industry in trouble will immediately run to Washington for help...
...And these days, it's also likely that the industry will blame its troubles either on the greedy Japanese or on the evil Arabs...
...I did not choose my enemy...
...But it all may depend on Gorbachev's survival in office...
...That eagerness has been reflected in Soviet willingness to abandon long-held positions, such as resistance to on-site inspection of military facilities...
...But Gorbachev, like Reagan, must contend with militarists and hard-liners who believe it would be the height of folly—and danger—to reach an accommodation with the other side...
...During Watergate, this rush to self-congratulation trampled any criticism that aimed at the structure of our Government...
...Police said he had been working at a missile base under an assumed name, using a false Social Security number...
...But the Third World offers many examples of former terrorists who now head governments and deal as equals with their sometime enemies—a fact that seems to have eluded former terrorist Yitzhak Shamir...
...I'm not going to tell falsehoods to the American people...
...Indeed...
...Who am I supposed to talk to...
...They talked for a couple of hours and then had dinner together...
...There may never again be so promising a time for bringing the arms race under control...
...The official said Aquino sees these groups as an extension of "people power...
...But from the military and the hardcore Right there is tremendous pressure to shun any kind of accord...
...And so the detection of scandal dismisses it, and each revelation—no matter how damning—serves to confirm the basic soundness of the system: The culprits are being apprehended, we are assured, and proper procedures are being put back in place...
...Economists Gar Alperovitz and Jeff Faux suggested several years ago that a tax on oil, to be varied with its world price, could be coupled with a substantially enlarged oil reserve...
...Increased reliance on mass transit and better planning of bicycle paths, pedestrian walkways, and land use could greatly curb this figure...
...In the case before the Supreme Court, neither of the two defendants had such a record prior to his arrest...
...I'll leave that to others.' President Reagan at a news conference, March 19, 1987 basic laws of supply and demand will bring price into equilibrium and will establish the proper level of production...
...But the Administration's response is not to curb America's reliance on oil, which, whether our own or "Arab," will eventually run out, but to stimulate increased production...
...This is about as fruitful an exercise as trying to square the circle...
...Several ways of managing the price of oil have been proposed and merit further study...
...But we must talk to them, and they must talk to us, and nothing can stop that...
...Perhaps the price should gradually be moved upward to create incentives for effective conservation practices...
...Gorbachev had good reason to complain at the end of March that the U.S...
...oil prices are low and profits are declining...
...In better times—before the rise of "Dirty Harry" jurisprudence—the legal profession would have rallied to defend the rights of accused persons...
...The pressures on Gorbachev may well be strikingly similar...
...Prosecutors invoke preventive detention to jail suspects before trial, ostensibly to protect the community...
...By contrast, the American Civil Liberties Union "opposes all forms of preventive detention and the application of all conditions of bail unrelated to assuring the appearance of the defendant at trial...
...It turns out that, given some options, a majority of Georgians favor alternative sentencing...
...A swift agreement on the intermediate-range missiles could be the stepping stone to some far more significant arms-reduction measures—a ban on all nuclear testing, a dismantling of land-based strategic missiles, and ultimately the process of total nuclear disarmament that the world briefly glimpsed before the Reikjavik summit foundered last fall...
...citizen naturalized under the reform act of 1986...
...The two sides "called for an end to violence and expressed their desires to see negotiations and an active search for peace," according to The New York Times...
...Supporters of the law under which the four will be tried contend that the PLO is an irredeemably terrorist organization, and that contacts with it can only undermine Israeli security...
...That could be true for the rest of us, too...
...Though no major oil firm has filed for bankruptcy, even some of the giant corporations have joined the chorus of pleas for Federal relief...
...The complicity of the International Monetary Fund in imposing economic austerity on Brazil remains unspoken...
...The soonest that can happen, by our calculations and an examination of the rules proposed by the Justice Department, is around Christmas of 1993...
...Scapegoating in Brazil Since Brazil announced in February that it was suspending payments on $67 billion of its $108 billion foreign debt, bankers, businessmen, politicians, and the media have been lashing out at Brazilian President Jose Sarney and Finance Minister Dilson Funaro, charging them with failing to formulate a sound economic policy that would guarantee Brazil further growth...
...policy, whose primary objective is to obliterate the insurgency...
...His efforts deserve applause...
...With a sharp decline in oil prices, it should surprise no one that domestic production has lagged and that the demand for imported oil has remained strong...
...He was, it turned out, on a public-relations mission for the White House...
...For example, in Indiana, where a fifteen-year-old black girl has been sentenced to die...
...But we're all very sensitive to the Vietnam-era connotation of that term...
...response at each stage of the negotiating process has been "a whole new package of additional conditions and demands...
...And it might...
...The monstrous overkill capacity that has threatened the survival of the planet for decades will remain virtually intact once the mid-range missiles are gone...
...They are part of a continuing effort by Israelis and Palestinians who believe that sustaining dialogue is an essential first step toward peace...
...Indeed, Aquino has been a godsend for U.S...
...Even if there were a U.S.-Soviet agreement to eliminate medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe," begins a recent dispatch to The Wall Street Journal, "the continent would still have many ways left to blow itself up...
...Where but in America...
...This is a trial about smiling and having dinner," says one of the defendants, Latif Dori of the left-Zionist Mapam Party...
...Our energy difficulties are sure to grow in the next few years, and may soon culminate in another great crisis...
...66 per cent said juvenile offenders should not be executed, and 67 per cent opposed executing the mentally retarded...
...Theory two: Times have changed, and so has the lawyers' lobby...
...Now some researchers at Georgia State University have asked more sophisticated questions...
...One of her cabinet ministers added that she is "fascinated" with right-wing vigilantes, who sometimes murder suspected communist rebels...
...Talking with Terrorists Last November, some two dozen Israelis, members of various peace organizations, flew to Cos-tinesti, Rumania, to meet with a like number of representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...Sarney, aware of the system's pitfalls, seems to be making an effort not to pay off the foreign debt with money from workers' pockets or food from people's mouths...
...The famous doomsday clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will still hover perilously close to the midnight mark...
...A variable tax could be used to force up the price of oil during glut periods...
...These are the pressures that Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, obviously had in mind when he delivered this commnent: "I believe what's at stake here—and I'm not even sure if the President is fully signed on—is a clear determination...
...Such meetings have been held before...
...It's reasonable to assume that some within the Reagan Administration—perhaps even the President himself and the influential First Lady—would welcome an arms-control agreement with the Soviets as a way to redeem Ronald Reagan's badly tarnished image...
...Elsewhere in this issue, media columnist Robert Karl Manoff quotes an arresting remark by Soviet spokesman Vladimir Posner: "If Gorbachev loses, I'm dead...
...The world's attention is riveted on the "zero-option" arms-control negotiations that will, presumably, dominate the agenda of Secretary of State Shultz's scheduled visit to Moscow in mid-April...
...Now, even before Congress and the Independent Counsel have finished their investigations of the Iran-contra affair, we are again being entreated to salute the system that got us into the mess in the first place...
...The Administration seeks, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, "a politically palatable compromise that will demonstrate its commitment to help the industry without abandoning its free-market principles...
...The rules aren't final yet...
...They will also need documents to prove continuous residence...
...Hardly anyone seems to remember that barely a decade ago, the giant oil corporations, wallowing in huge profits, were scornfully dismissing calls for Government intervention in behalf of the consumer...
...She fits perfectly into the Pentagon's mold for low-intensity conflict...
...But the American Bar Association, in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court, takes the position that preventive detention is constitutional...
...The Reagan Administration recently approved a $10 million, two-year plan for increased CIA involvement in the Philippines' antiinsurgency campaign, Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle reported...
...A number of more rational and productive options are open, and every effort should be made to put them on the political agenda before a frenzy to protect "our" sources of oil becomes the basis for more Third World intervention...
...First, the Administration decided that it couldn't afford to spend any money to meet its obligations under the law, so the system is to be financed entirely by fees charged to aliens...
...to believe that we can, in fact, seek and gain nuclear superiority in a way that will enable us to somehow change the way the Soviets do business...
...Fifty-two per cent said they preferred a mandatory twenty-five-year term with restitution to the victim's family...
...If the politicians who make and enforce the laws can be expected to follow the wind of public opinion, it would be a nice idea if some pollsters got busy in other states...
...The labels may change, but the tactics remain frighteningly the same...
...In any case, even if it passes, it won't help Paula Cooper, the condemned teen-ager, since she is specifically excluded...
...Extremely popular, naive, and vulnerable to military pressure from the United States and her own country, Aquino like Duarte has decided to do the Pentagon's bidding...
...The Reagan Administration, always more eager to respond to requests for corporate welfare than for food stamps or aid to dependent children, recently released the findings of its study of oil imports...
...Transportation accounts for about 50 per cent of all energy consumption in the United States, and half of that is for trips of five miles or less...
...She pledged to conquer the forces on the Left and Right the old fashioned way: by killing them...
...Here's what the president of Exxon had to say in 1974: "The A man posing as an NBC correspondent toured two schools in Columbia, Missouri, in advance of a recent visit by President Reagan...
...It was reflected, too, in the long, unilateral suspension of Soviet nuclear-weapons tests...
...Such gatherings were called 'Green meetings.' how his willingness to compromise has brought some tangible results, he will be compelled to take a harder line, or even to make way for a tougher successor...
...Revenues raised by such taxes could be recycled to the taxpayers in the form of tax credits for those who purchase more fuel-efficient furnaces, appliances, and home insulation...
...To the New Zealanders...
...The bankers' insistence that Brazil adopt supposedly flawless models of Western development has brought about a decline in real wages for workers and a deterioration of social conditions for all but the very rich...
...help in military training, but we're carefully going around the 'military-adviser' label...
...The Department of Energy report calls for new incentives—and the revival of such old ones as the notorious oil-depletion allowance—to stimulate an increase in domestic oil production...
...But this March she said it was time to "take out the sword of war...
...And it is conceivable that unless Gorbachev can soon show The Federal Emergency Management Agency has asked Congress to appropriate $20 million for fallout shelters...
...I made it a point not to include her," says the sponsor, "because I think this should be handled in a non-emotional way...
...Some of Reagan's ultraconservative allies have all but accused him of selling out to the Russians for even considering the possibility of an agreement, and in the Pentagon there is still a wistful longing for development of the superweapon that will render the Soviet Union helpless to resist American demands...
...How to explain the discrepancy...
...Trust the Reagan Administration, however, to devise a system draped in so much expensive red tape that most eligible aliens have no hope of jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops without breaking a leg—and remaining illegal, in risk of deportation...
...Because much of suffering humanity hopes, rightly or wrongly, that such an agreement would pave the way to further arms reductions...
...To the Kurds...
...If some lucky person manages all that, and then jumps through several more hoops, he or she will become the first U.S...
...The government wants to make it impossible for me to talk to my enemy...
...When Aquino and "people power" overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in early 1986, she was hailed as an extraordinary woman of peace...
...The Defense Rests In principle and in practice, "preventive detention" undermines one of the fundamental tenets of American justice—the presumption of innocence...
...Great obstacles still block the way to an agreement on the removal of several hundred intermediate-range missiles deployed in Europe or targeted on it, but even if such an agreement is reached, these missiles represent only a negligible portion of the superpowers' bloated nuclear arsenals...
...So far, however, every Soviet concession has been brushed aside, every overture rebuffed...
...The U.S...
...Price of Admission For all its flaws, the immigration reform act passed last year at least offered undocumented aliens who have lived in the United States since 1981 the chance to become legal residents and, eventually, U.S...
...Voices Against Death Among the everyday frustrations of people who work tirelessly to abolish the death penalty and save the lives of condemned prisoners is the steady stream of opinion polls "proving" that most Americans support this barbaric form of official vengeance...
...Acting under a new law that forbids any contact between Israelis and members of the PLO, the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has brought criminal charges against four organizers of the meeting...
...This time, it would be better to direct public energy toward bailing out the great majority of ordinary Americans than toward padding the pockets of the energy conglomerates...
...Today, the basic laws of supply and demand seem to have been repealed...
...What sets the Cos-tinesti conference apart is the response of the Israeli government...
...she is a classy version of Jose Napoleon Duarte...
...Did anyone in Washington remember that most of these people are here because they fled poverty somewhere else and are at the bottom of the American economic heap because they don't have documents...
...Add fees for required medical examinations and assorted miscellany, and the experts say it will cost a family of four about $700 to obtain legal status...
...The battered wife says "I love you...
...Funaro, in particular, has been singled out as the scapegoat...
...National Insecurity In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Edward S. Michno was arrested on ten-year-old charges of child-abduction...
...The United States now imports about 38 per cent of its oil, up from 27 per cent just a year ago...
...The CIA will provide technical assistance and engage in covert political action, Bronstein wrote...
...A large strategic reserve would prevent rapid upward swings in price, which also disrupt the economy...
...Her renunciation of peaceful means has not gone unrewarded...
...The System Is Dissolution Already the sighs fade to applause, the blushes turn to braggadocio, and the caverns of American politics echo with the chant: "The system works...
...citizens...
...It seems unlikely that anyone in the Soviet government would assert—as Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming recently asserted—that any attempt to curb the arms race is a "disease...
...This is a legitimate cause for alarm...
...So we're not sending military advisers in the strict sense of the word...
...Whenever scandal descends upon Washington, the reflex of pundits and politicians is not to ferret out the root causes of the problem but to bellow blandishments about the resilience of our system and proclaim the genius of James Madison's checks and balances...
...These are the pressures that account for the President's insistence on pursuing his Star Wars scheme even if it means a flagrant breach by the United States of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty...
...Theory one: The two defendants are reputed mobsters, and we all know that mobsters have no rights...
...They never should be...
...Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North went by the code name 'Green' when he met with conservative fundraisers last year to solicit contributions for the contras...
...But the polls have been reporting respondents' simple "yes" or "no" to a simple question: "Do you support the death penalty...
...The Reagan Administration has belatedly arrived at the conclusion that a resource crucial to the nation's well-being can't be left to the whims and vagaries of the international market...
...Under the direction of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet government has repeatedly demonstrated that it is eager to end the costly and perilous process of ever-spiraling nuclear rivalry with the United States...
...And this is the state that has put more people to death than any other, the state with more people on death row than all but Florida and Texas...
...Why, then, the intense interest in an accord on the medium-range missiles...
...Neither side, however, committed itself explicitly to any final map for a peace settlement...
...The Energy Department proposals, if enacted into law, would further deplete the Federal treasury and send us down the familiar road of wasteful and dangerous energy consumption...
...They will stand trial in June, and face up to three years' imprisonment if convicted...
...The national-security apparatus is so preoccupied with arms deals, covert operations, exclusion of foreign critics, and censorship of Federal employees that there's no time for such trivial tasks as checking out the people who have access to our ultimate weapons...
...The application fee is to be $185 per adult and $50 per child under eighteen, up to a maximum of $420 per family...
...That consideration, rather than any inherent significance that may reside in the medium-range missiles, makes it so important that the current negotiations be carried to a successful conclusion...
...This, then, is a rare moment of opportunity as well as danger—a time when the leaders of both superpowers need to produce a spectacular success that will enhance their standing among multitudes who are weary of the threat of nuclear holocaust, but also a time when the unregenerated Cold Warriors are determined to protect their discredited policies...
...We'll be providing U.S...
...The Bar Association's stance contradicts its own Criminal Justice Standards, which approve of preventive detention only in situations where a defendant has previously been detained for or convicted of a violent crime...
...Oh well...
...the cuckold sends roses to his betrayer...
...Manila Wavers AFilipino activist recently visited our office to talk with us about political prospects in the post-Marcos era, noting that the administration of Corazon Aquino has presented the leftist opposition with some vexing problems: "It's hard to organize against a mixture of the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc," he said with barely a smirk...
...And not just the continent...
...The bankers deserve the criticism...
...The oil industry, the latest to come hat-in-hand to Washington, is running true to form...
...The price of oil must be managed not by an international oil cartel but by the Government itself...
...Though legislators are considering a proposal to raise the minimum age for execution, they seem less concerned with the merits of the bill than with the fact that Indianapolis is hosting this summer's Pan American Games...
...financial interests are pressing for his resignation...
...It's very important that our image not be crippled," says one of the bill's sponsors...
...The report also calls for increased production and use of coal and nuclear energy...
...Teams of advisers in the field were discussed," one source said...

Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5


 
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