COMMENT

...It can rally troops from both parties and across several Administrations whenever it feels threatened...

...The case was that of an individual—Warren McCleskey, a Georgia black man convicted of killing a white police officer—but the evidence involved 2,484 Georgia murder cases subjected to sophisticated statistical analysis...

...politicians content themselves with cosmetic answers to the most superficial symptoms...

...in 1985, it was 109 million...

...The dizzier the speculation, the more fragile the system becomes...

...Ronald Reagan slaps Japan's wrist for dumping semiconductors on the U.S...

...Of the ten Latin American nations that have undergone a transition from military to civilian rule since 1979, Argentina is the only one where the military was ousted and where the new government brought army officers to trial...

...How in the world is anyone to know what "contemporary community standards" means...

...In the other nine, the military stepped down voluntarily and evaded prosecution...

...The right-wing fundamentalists who have been among the President's most ardent supporters are, to put it gently, in acute disarray—their faithful followers dismayed, their credibility devastated, their treasuries depleted by the PTL Club hijinks...

...If the Republicans are for an arms-control agreement, the Democrats must be opposed: It's the ruffled-potato-chips view of American politics...

...Ninety-five per cent of the victims were white...

...They did not prevail...

...The Administration unloaded truckloads of money at the Pentagon, bringing a 50 per cent growth in military equipment from 1979 to 1984...

...Washington, we are told, is awash in rumors about disclosures of official wrongdoing...

...The problems of our economy are rooted not in Japan but in the United States...

...On Wall Street, paragons of free enterprise are marched off in handcuffs for dealing in inside information—or in cocaine...

...Now, it makes no sense at all...

...There will be more to follow, and they may succeed—unless mass, popular pressure can counteract the hawks and Hydras of our time...

...Apostles of the microchip claim that the revolution in high technology may provide a jump-start to the stalled economy, but this seems unlikely: It's unclear how the demand for high-tech goods will Lee A. lacocca, explaining the $20.6 million he received from Chrysler Corporation last year in salary, bonuses, stock grants, and stock options: 'That's the American way...

...Service-sector jobs pay less, resulting in reduced consumer demand, and the service industry does not create nearly as many secondary jobs as manufacturing...

...Of those currently awaiting execution on the nation's death rows, 42 per cent are black and 8 per cent are members of other minority groups...

...each time we try to rid ourselves of them, they reappear in more grotesque form...

...Government regulators ought to keep their meddlesome fingers off the content of broadcasting—or any other form of communication...

...In 1975, the average number of shares traded daily on the New York Stock Exchange was nineteen million...

...It must be profoundly hoped that a future Court will agree...

...This is the same FCC that was among the first and most enthusiastic passengers on the Reagan Administration's "deregulation" bandwagon...

...Soon their offspring, both within the Administration and without, took up the war whoop...

...Even after years of recovery, the official unemployment rate has dipped just barely below the 7 per cent mark—an open admission that the free-market economy doesn't work...

...Almost alone, Magdoff and Sweezy argue that the feeding frenzy on Wall Street actually spurred the economy by bringing more dollars into circulation...

...Vulnerable to a rise in oil prices, a trade war, or debt repudiation by the Third World, the financial sector lurches precariously from crisis to crisis...

...These involve not only individuals who took part in the Iran-contra arms scandal, enriching themselves while trafficking in instruments of death, but other members of the Reagan Administration who violated various conflict-of-interest statutes...

...The Morning After For Ronald Reagan, this spring hasn't been a season of unalloyed joy...

...economy is not a Band-aid here and a trade barrier there...

...Human-rights abuses remain widespread in Guatemala and El Salvador, and in Brazil, elections to choose the next president remain an unfulfilled promise...

...moreover, a trade war could push already strapped Third World countries into debt repudiation, directly threatenening the U.S...

...The marketplace that needs to be free is the marketplace of ideas—even when the ideas take on an off-color tinge...

...If the kids don't aspire to make money like I did, what the hell good is this country...

...And for another, the Chicken Littles of the Left have been wrong before: As a conservative economist recently chided, the Left has predicted twenty-five of the last three recessions...

...The proposal "worries me a very, very great deal," says Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee...

...The lobbying firm of Nixon, Kissinger, Aspin, Byrd, and Nunn is only the latest to bend ears for arms...

...But now, suddenly and without warning, the FCC has climbed back on the broadcasters' backs, advising them that they face fines or loss of licenses if they are found to have aired "indecent" material dealing with "sexual or excretory matters" in a way that offends "contemporary community standards...

...Such cheap politics helps no one...

...Simply stated, a person whose murder victim is white is eleven times more likely to be sentenced to Georgia's electric chair than is a person whose victim is black...

...Supreme Court struck down all the old state death-penalty statutes in 1972, the "wanton and freakish" nature of the laws was a decisive factor...

...carpe diem becomes corpus delicti...

...In this field as in so many others, the right-wing, pseudo-libertarian deregulators have it exactly backwards...

...The Reagan Adminstration likes to champion the transitions from military to civilian rule, but to a large extent, these changes have been superficial...

...After the first revolt broke out, President Raul Alfonsin promised the Argentine people that "democracy will not be negotiated...

...Ironically, even amid the sustained recovery the economy is not operating nearly at capacity...

...So when death-penalty opponents went back to the Court last year bearing proof of racial discrimination, they had hopes of a broad invalidation of current death-sentencing procedures...

...Race, Death, and Justice When the U.S...

...What is more likely is that the U.S...

...One can only trust that the outraged and eloquent Court minority will have the last word...

...It's time to meet the needs of American citizens, not American corporations...

...And how does this new venture in Big Brotherism square with the Commission's professed determination to leave the industry's guidance to the workings of the ever-benign marketplace...

...Government and especially Paul Volcker, the autocratic chair of the Federal Reserve Board, appear willing to go to any length to preserve the economic equilibrium, whether that entails bailing out Continental Bank or Mexico, Citibank or Brazil...

...The vast majority of the American people want an arms-control agreement, but these politicians don't care...

...The agencies responsible for investigating the Moscow spy scandal—among them Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department—are reported to have botched the job so thoroughly that the U.S...

...Real change would strip the military of power, but that wouldn't fit into Washington's agenda...

...As the economy shifts inexorably from the production of goods toward the swapping of services, the potential for growth diminishes...

...Friends of former Presidential aide Michael Deaver, accused of committing perjury in connection with his conflicts of interest, are spreading the word that his misconduct may have been induced by the effects of prescription drugs...

...And Sam Nunn, As-pin's counterpart in the Senate, echoes the misgivings, pipe in hand...

...Their constituency is the military establishment...

...Now, as American auto companies falter in foreign competition and set up shop abroad, the engine of the economy isn't hitting on all cylinders...

...Just when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev appear within a whisker of a significant accord to eliminate medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe, up spring the Democratic hawks...

...economy will continue to limp and hobble along, with anemic growth rates and appalling levels of unemployment...

...Bending Ears for Arms Leave it to the Democrats to derail the current arms-control negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States...

...Government regulation ought to protect the public from corporate crime and the freewheeling excess of the marketplace...

...Stocks soar, even as growth sputters...

...Less obvious was the impact of rampant financial speculation as a stimulus to the economy...

...If they didn't suffer from such a severe case of missile envy, the Democratic bigwigs might have some sense of shame, for they are making common cause with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger...

...The rebels were demanding amnesty for army officers who committed human-rights violations from 1976 to 1983...

...Only fundamental change can shake the economy out of its doldrums...

...The dollar dives, even as the trade imbalance persists...

...For one thing, the U.S...

...As David Bruck, a South Carolina lawyer who works on capital cases, puts it, "If [the McCleskey] case involved race discrimination in the way Georgia hires prison guards or assigns first graders to public schools, Georgia would almost certainly lose...

...During that period between 12,000 and 30,000 people disappeared into the murderous clutches of the country's armed forces...

...only 13 per cent of their victims were black...

...The jump in futures trading—sheer legalized gambling—went from 11.9 million transactions in 1970 to 160 million in 1985...

...What's worse, such moves could actually blow the economic house down: An out-and-out trade war would raise the price of consumer goods, decreasing demand across the board...

...Still Under Martial Law Turmoil threatened Argentine peace this spring, when military mutinies broke out in four army units...

...Standards and Measures Put a disc jockey on the air who specializes in playing raunchy lyrics and dispensing patter packed with leering sexual innuendo, and odds are that his audience ratings will soon outpull those of his competitors...

...This was Reagan's WPA, except that the initials stood for War Production Administration...

...market, and Representative Richard Gephardt, Democratic Presidential hopeful, introduces hairy-chested legislation threatening any trading partner that beats us to the buyer...

...In 1986, less than 80 per cent of the nation's manufacturing potential was being utilized...

...The pattern is the same nationwide...

...For the better part of the century, our economy revolved around automobile production, which generated growth industries in related fields of steel, rubber, glass, and construction...

...At bottom, these peculiar spasms point to the basic condition of an economy in dotage...

...Faced with chronic stagnation, U.S...

...There's an obvious reason for the persistence of joblessness: "Put simply," Magdoff and Sweezy write, "private enterprise has not been able to provide enough jobs to keep pace with the growth in the population, and Government has been unwilling to do so...

...banging the protectionist drums only fuels illusions...

...Yet to predict an imminent severe recession or depression seems unwarranted...

...The cure for what ails the U.S...

...Those may be unattractive and even pathological aspects of our culture, but they are real— and they make a mockery of the Federal Communications Commission's new-found interest in "contemporary community standards...

...This time, they took to the op-ed pages to thunder against a "false peace...

...You gotta give them a role model, right?' move beyond the financial sector and into the consumer economy...

...These are three of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, and their posture illustrates the supine state of the Democratic Party...

...And their notion of what the Democratic Party stands for is strictly product differentiation...

...Debts and deficits reach Himalayan heights, yet the economy hasn't caught frostbite...

...It's time to wrest control of the economy from private hands and put it into public hands...

...McCleskey's evidence is also precisely the sort the Supreme Court uses when it's considering other kinds of civil-rights suits—ones that aren't a matter of life and death to the victims of racism...

...Stagnation is the order and essence of the day...

...Nothing could be clearer than the racist manner in which the states impose the death penalty...

...It "is cosmetically attractive but, at bottom, works against the cohesion and steadfastness of the Atlantic Alliance," says Senate majority leader Robert Byrd...

...Like Hydra, Nixon and Kissinger won't go away...

...Justice Brennan has long maintained, as he said in his dissent, "that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment forbidden by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments...

...Knowing that tough talk about the trade deficit will play in Peoria and Detroit, they villainize the Japanese and impose import sanctions...

...The tendency to stagnation is inherent in the system, deeply rooted and in continuous operation," point out Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, the perceptive Marxist economists who edit Monthly Review...

...Seventy people have been executed since 1977: forty-two blacks, twenty-six whites, and two Hispanics...

...Now, however, with some 300 officers due to stand trial, Alfonsin may sacrifice his commitment to democracy by reducing that number...

...Marines charged with succumbing to the charms of Soviet agents may never be brought to trial...

...In a five-to-four decision that will certainly lead to a rash of executions, the Supreme Court ignored their evidence and upheld the barbarism of the criminal "justice" system...

...The nuclear industry is perhaps the strongest special-interest group in the country...

...Images of two computers in every rec room are surely fanciful...

...While the armed forces have vacated the presidential palaces in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Brazil, they continue to defy democracy...

...Of particular concern to the majority was the threat that blacks could be treated more harshly than whites...

...financial system...

...In the last few years it has abolished or diluted almost every rule and regulation formerly applied to broadcasters, so that a radio and television license has become a permit not only to print money—it always has been that—but to print it in perpetuity and without restraint or accountability of any kind...

...Justice William Brennan said in his dissenting opinion, "McCleskey has demonstrated precisely the type of risk of irrationality in sentencing that we have consistently condemned in our Eighth Amendment jurisprudence...

...Produce a flick that luxuriates in gross excess, and before you know it long lines will be waiting to check it out of the video lending libraries...

...There is mounting evidence that the CIA, in carrying out its covert missions in Central America, has actively encouraged, if not directly participated in, the international narcotics trade...

...The propitious decline of oil prices, of course, helped the Reagan recovery along...

...It never made much sense to entrust our economic health to the greed of private business...

...Millions of Americans are unemployed, millions are hungry, millions are without adequate health care, millions are without decent housing...

...As the President used to say (but doesn't any more), it's morning again in America...

...For the first years of the "Reagan recovery," this tendency was held at bay by Keynesian pump-priming, particularly in its military manifestation...