COMMENT

...But Nicaragua's motives seem clear: Racked by seven years of U.S.-sponsored military and economic warfare, the Sandinistas desperately need peace...

...Senate voted to insure the U.S...

...troops to a protracted war in the Third World...

...When it is replaced by the expertise of the technocrat or the pollster, it preserves the forms of democratic government but deprives us of the real substance of democracy...

...And it pleaded with the Hondurans to bomb Nicaragua and engage the Sandinista troops...

...Kathleen Welch, energy-policy coordinator for the Public Interest Research Group, says the failure to pass these safety provisions represents "a raw deal for millions of Americans and the sweetheart deal of the century for the nuclear industry...

...Too often in the past, some leftists have shied from uttering these views aloud for fear of alienating the fabled conservative masses...

...The U.S...

...Pox Populi Polls are in...

...It "samples" at most a couple of thousand individuals, and extrapolates from them the opinions of the entire public...

...There's little doubt that Noriega has used his position to enrich himself and his friends, that he has imposed harsh authoritarian rule on his people, and that he has trafficked in such sordid substances as narcotics and weapons...

...Government has no right to dictate a solution...

...Another would have created an independent board to oversee safety at Federal nuclear plants...

...Twenty-five years ago, the U.S...

...And Kissinger doesn't confine his helpfulness to public pronouncements...

...They—and the Sandinistas—were the ones doing the dying...

...No matter that the polls have already been proven woefully inept this year, missing George Bush's victory in New Hampshire, Paul Simon's in Illinois, and Jesse Jackson's in Michigan...

...Peace can be embarrassing, at least for the Reagan Administration...

...But naivete is no crime...

...Despite the exertions of the Reagan Administration and its Democratic Party allies, the era of gunboat diplomacy is over...

...And still, or hence, he is winning millions of votes...

...intervention was greeted with less than lockstep enthusiasm by Congress...

...The troop movement was, in fact, a trial balloon for all-out war...

...There's ample evidence that Noriega is a truly terrible man, though it's difficult to see how he's any worse today than when he was the pet of several successive U.S...

...By providing an artificial buffer to the nuclear industry and the Department of Energy, the Senate has prolonged the disastrous experiment with the atom...

...Pollsters and those who rely on them forget that language and political ideals evolve through the active interplay of individuals and community...

...Though he hasn't held public office since Gerald Ford left the White House in January 1977, the former Secretary of State is always ready to lend a helping hand...

...It's not that members of Congress are more enlightened than they were in years past...

...Not peace...

...The Jackson Message The success of the Jesse Jackson campaign gives the lie to the pragmatists and pessimists on the Left, who have claimed year after year that the American electorate is too conservative to tolerate undiluted progressive ideas...

...Like the moviegoer who waits to read a review in the newspaper before deciding how he or she likes the film, a citizen is left to read an opinion poll before reaching a decision on a particular candidate or issue...

...The Administration couldn't even gull the gullible...

...Jackson's campaign demonstrates that a sizable constituency in America is receptive to leftist proposals for controlling corporate power, promoting economic democracy, cutting the military budget, halting intervention in the Third World, supporting gay and lesbian rights, obtaining comparable worth for women, and ending the Israeli occupation of the occupied territories...

...One of these amendments would have held Department of Energy contractors, such as General Electric and West-inghouse, liable if they caused an accident through gross negligence or willful misconduct...

...It was an old Pentagon ploy...

...What amazes is that he can still find takers, in this country and abroad, for the kind of realpolitik that flourished at the Congress of Vienna 175 years ago—and that was discredited even then...

...The days of hiding, shrinking, and skulking are over...

...It was the kind of thinking that made American policy in Vietnam such an overwhelming success two decades ago...

...nuclear industry against potentially crippling lawsuits from catastrophic accidents...

...troops to Honduras, spontaneous protests erupted in some eighty cities across the country...

...They have been getting on the witness stand and swearing, with straight faces, that they didn't think cigarette smoking would cause lung cancer...

...He's available for private consultations, such as his recent off-the-record breakfast with a group of American Jewish leaders...

...Noriega is a problem the Panamanian people ought to solve...

...A similar bill has passed the House...

...This conceit is especially dangerous since the individual's ability to participate in decisions affecting his or her own life is already in question...

...it's just that they know how to count...

...But the very assumption behind such questions (an assumption we are given no opportunity to assess or challenge and which is, therefore, reinforced) is that these are discrete, unrelated issues...

...According to one of the participants (whose notes made their way to The New York Times), Kissinger offered these thoughts on the Palestinian uprising in the territories occupied by Israel: "Israel should bar the media from entry into the territories involved in the present demonstrations, accept the short-term criticism of the world press for such conduct, and put down the insurrection as quickly as possible—overwhelmingly, brutally, and rapidly...

...The Administration hyped an alleged incursion into Honduras by Sandinista troops, calling it—against all evidence—an "invasion...

...To a remarkable extent, members of Congress and the media displayed outright skepticism at this shopworn means of flexing American muscle...

...In Panama as elsewhere on the planet, Washington should keep its cotton-pickin' fingers off...

...Presidents and a favorite "asset" of the CIA...

...either-or world...

...intervention in poll after poll and in meeting after meeting with their elected representatives...

...Polls freeze political discourse...

...From Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, Boston to Chicago, Madison and Minneapolis to Seattle, demonstrators expressed their outrage, burning American flags, chaining themselves to Federal buildings, and offering themselves up for arrest...

...But more than at any time since World War II, the initiation of U.S...

...It took no special insight to realize that if the Administration were to proceed with its interventionist plans, domestic tranquility would go down the drain—and in an election year, at that...

...Smoking Gun People who have been paying attention to the news for the past twenty-five years—even those who continue to smoke—have had reason to wince a bit at the spate of product-liability lawsuits brought recently against the manufacturers of cigarettes...

...While this is ten times the amount currently on the books, it could not begin to cover the claims of a Chernobyl...

...The nuclear bailout would place a $7 billion cap on the compensation that victims would be entitled to receive from companies or the Federal Government...

...They doubted the Administration's statements and questioned its motives...

...The documents demonstrate," the Project has announced, "that the cigarette manufacturers knew that smoking probably caused lung cancer as early as 1946, had replicated animal experiments confirming the causal relationship by the mid-1950s, had precise knowledge of the carcinogens in cigarettes by 1961, and had figured out how to neutralize the most dangerous carcinogens by the early 1970s...

...Few people were fooled when Reagan dispatched 3,200 U.S...

...Their long-nourished hopes of marching on Managua were crushed by a few pen strokes...

...On the other hand, there are the cigarette manufacturers...

...They carry the air of authority, so much so that they make the act of voting seem superfluous...

...invasion of Nicaragua...

...Washington begged the Honduran government to ask for U.S...

...But today, though the Government's impulses remain as bellicose as ever, the American people are no longer willing to commit U.S...

...The American people have overwhelmingly rejected the option of U.S...

...Oh, no...

...This is the rough and tumble of politics, as it should be...

...Theirs is an At its Fukaya videocassette plant, Toshiba uses life-sized cardboard cutouts of workers to illustrate how much the company is saving on labor costs by relying on automation...

...How could anyone get on the witness stand and swear, with a straight face, that he didn't know he'd get lung cancer if he smoked three packs a day...

...The Pledge of Resistance, the Sanctuary churches, and the Central American solidarity organizations tilled the soil of protest, and we all reaped the harvest...

...But the balloon never got off the ground...

...The prudent may think any smoker who believed the cigarette makers rather than the Surgeon General was hopelessly naive...

...The contras finally turned their backs on the Administration that created, supplied, and financed their army...

...With full Congressional support—there wasn't a single dissenting vote in the U.S...

...Credit here goes to the activists who have been steadily and faithfully organizing for seven years to prevent a U.S...

...The Nuclear Fix In the week of the ninth anniversary of the accident at Three Mile Island, the U.S...

...The Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University's School of Law recently released a collection of several tobacco companies' internal documents going back more than forty years...

...And who can blame them...

...They are to be commended for releasing political prisoners, pledging to grant amnesty to all political exiles, and promising complete freedom of expression...

...Let them, at last, savor it...

...But despite the elaborate connivances of his Administration, it was not to be...

...When the contras and the Sandinistas worked out a sixty-day cease-fire agreement without assistance from Washington, Administration officials could barely disguise their disappointment and dismay...

...the Capitol will never lack for cowards...

...For those of us who have opposed the contra effort from the very beginning, there was a delicious irony in this turn of events...

...But for the moment, the people of Nicaragua—for the first time since the days of their revolution—can taste peace...

...When Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms make common cause, and both of them find themselves aligned with Ronald Reagan, it's time to head for the hills...

...That Kissinger should still be peddling the same line is hardly surprising...

...The Project—a clearinghouse and technical-assistance center for lawyers suing tobacco companies—has found the smoking gun...

...help...

...it's the only line he knows, and new ideas have never been his stock in trade...

...Caught off guard, the Administration gave its grudging consent, quibbled about compliance, and impugned the motives of the Nicaraguan government...

...Kissinger to the Rescue You just can't stop Henry Kissinger from doing good...

...Senate—the Reagan Administration has been putting the squeeze on Panama, fomenting civil strife and imposing cruel economic hardship on a nation already maimed by decades of U.S...

...But polls do as much to create as to reflect a certain kind of political consciousness...

...Polls help create the impression that our institutions are, in fact, responsive to our needs...

...By and large, his is a left-wing campaign, undipped by expediency...

...colonial exploitation...

...Surgeon General just didn't have proof...

...There's a great deal more in the 400 pages uncovered by the Project, and it amounts to corporate crime of enormous magnitude...

...When they address issues, polls almost always sever connections that might exist...

...In our age of huge governments, corporations, and labor unions, a citizen has few opportunities for direct participation...

...combat troops to Honduras...

...They have insisted that the U.S...

...The greater failure was to pass the bill at all...

...Unholy Alliance When Congressional liberals and conservatives march arm in arm, it's an odds-on bet they're heading in the wrong direction...

...Hardly a week goes by without a Kissinger guest spot on one or another of the television networks, where he dispenses advice on how to run the world just as if he were still getting paid for it—which, come to think of it, he is...

...Our opinions are taken as given, processed, and spit back to us as objective truths to guide a "rational" policy process...

...But what if the way our economy functions has something to do with the character of our international relations and the nature of the arms race...

...That's why they were willing to meet the contras half way...

...All this was not merely a stratagem designed to pry more contra aid out of a reluctant Congress...

...Comment One of President Reagan's advisers, quoted in The New Republic on the dispatch of 82d Airborne troops to Honduras: 'If I were a Sandinista soldier and saw those American planes, I'd have crapped in my pants.' The Invasion That Wasn't For a day or two in March, it seemed Ronald Reagan just might fulfill his dream of invading Nicaragua and installing a government more to his liking...

...Murder is...

...What's more, the Senate rejected amendments that would have imposed some much-needed safeguards on the nuclear industry...

...The cease-fire may yet break down, the hostilities may resume, and Congress has already coughed up some $48 million in "humanitarian" aid to the contras...

...Just as these large institutions neglect ordinary people, so too does the opinion poll...

...They treat our opinions as nothing more than gut responses to questions thrown at us, thereby fostering the impression that opinions exist in a vacuum, disconnected from the political, cultural, and economic setting in which these opinions are developed...

...So it has been with Washington's all but unanimous agreement that the U.S...

...With each Presidential campaign, new and more detailed polls come out, assessing with seeming objectivity every conceivable preference the citizenry might have...

...He has, in other words, behaved the way America's chosen allies— often drawn, like Noriega, from the ranks of the military—tend to behave all over the world...

...the Administation recognized, as did the contras, that more aid would not alter the balance of power in Nicaragua...

...Government would have invaded without giving it a second thought...

...But the loudest—and most persuasive—voices against intervention were raised in the streets...

...The documents also show how, beginning in 1953, the cigarette companies developed and successfully executed a joint strategy to deny the dangers, pretend to be doing relevant research, prevent regulation, and discourage litigation...

...For instance, various polls ask us to rate which political problem is uppermost: the economy, international relations, or the arms race...

...Within hours of the movement of U.S...

...But not Jackson...

...They have been lying...

...Twenty-five years ago, the Congress, the media, and the American people would have gone along...

...To be sure, some Senators and Representatives took the bait...

...Jeb Stuart Magruder, a former White House aide who served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal, has been named to head a mayoral commission on values and ethics in Columbus, Ohio...

...Government has a right, a duty, and a sacred obligation to oust General Antonio Manuel Noriega from his position of power in Panama and, for that matter, from the Western Hemisphere...

...His message to the Left is clear: Be candid about our values, and the people will respond...