COMMENT

...Callousness and hatred run loose in the land, and cruelty to the poor rides high...

...Newt Gingrich and his fellow legislators aim to dismantle not only particular programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but also the unfashionable notion that the poor deserve any help...

...But the benefits to U.S...

...taxpayers, or Mexican workers...

...We were told that we would all benefit from NAFTA...

...The National Abortion Federation, which runs a computerized tracking system, reports that 1993 and 1994 saw eight attempted murders, four bombings, fourteen incidents of arson, and eleven attempts at bombings and arson...

...companies...

...Nor evidently is it a concern of the U.S...

...You probably won't get to heaven by shooting these people...

...Mail, mass transit, water, electricity, and other basic features of civilization are comparatively cheap and dependable...

...President Clinton, who was waxing so euphoric about the free market in Mexico only a year ago during the NAFTA debate, now was interfering in that market—and with our tax dollars...

...The pro-choice movement can demand police protection, but police have not protected...

...He is allowing private investment in railroads and satellite operations, promising to further liberalize foreign investment rules, and promoting more competition in domestic telephone services," The New York Times reported, deep in its business pages...

...This collapse of the peso and the U.S...

...John Britton, Jim Barrett, and Dr...

...Many Americans believe programs that help the middle-class are earned, whereas programs that help the poor are charity the recipients do not necessarily deserve...

...corporations may be able to exploit its weakness to gain an even bigger stake in the Mexican economy...

...inspiration, not indecision...

...By Blackmun's theory, the state of Texas is perilously close to being a murderer itself...

...workers aren't going to gain in this crisis, either, as Mexican products will now be much cheaper in the U.S...

...Now's the reality...

...States can decide on their own whether poor people are a priority...

...Supreme Court, which voted 6 to 3 to deny Jacobs a stay of execution...

...Comment After the Mourning, Action The murders of two receptionists at two separate abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 30 brings to five the number of persons murdered by anti-abortion fanatics in less than two years...

...But it is simply not true that cutting such entitlements as AFDC and food stamps will save taxpayers big money...

...Martin Luther King Jr...

...It concluded that malls have replaced "the parks, the squares, and the streets, traditionally the home of free speech," and therefore free speech should be allowed in the malls as well...

...In the rush to privatize, we risk losing a fundamental aspect of our democracy—the social contract that provides for certain goods regardless of business cycles...

...Yes, we now have the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act of 1993, but no one is enforcing it...

...In those states, at least, when you go shopping, you're allowed to do more than listen to Muzak and buy, buy, buy...

...Fanatics like Treshman and Trosch don't make the laws...

...how to overcome clinics' fire-protection systems...

...Alive is the hate-filled rhetoric that makes such murders possible—even inevitable...

...But Clinton's courage is nowhere to be found...

...Of the $800 billion that went to entitlement programs last year, the Federal Government spent almost four times as much on Social Security as it did on AFDC, food stamps, and Medicaid combined...

...A few weeks ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that malls must allow access to protesters who want to distribute leaflets on social issues...

...We can't sit around and wait for Clinton to act...

...companies do not translate into benefits to U.S...

...Various invasive and expensive programs to monitor the morality of welfare clients are founded on the premise that aid should be linked to behavior...

...The appalling increase in violence has followed its passage...

...market—not exactly what workers here need just now, since we're having a hard enough time competing as it is...

...The latest murders are "really nothing to get excited about," says Treshman, because until now the casualties in this war have all been on his side, claiming the deaths of "babies" outweigh the deaths of abortion workers...

...It is a measure of the depths of our leaders' cynicism that this was received as good news...

...This is premeditated murder...

...assistance in a desperate effort to prop up the peso...

...We were told that the Mexican economy was safe and secure...

...So, on January 4, the state of Texas went ahead and executed Jesse Dewayne Jacobs...

...This idea fuels the obsession with the distinction between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor that has dominated discussion about welfare for decades...

...When they say they want to privatize Government agencies and properties, Clinton proposes his own privatization schemes...

...The Peso's Plunge So much for free trade...

...Entitlement is the new dirty word in Congress, as Republicans use the term to conjure up images of ungrateful welfare clients bellying up to the public trough...

...murder is the ultimate crime...

...But not in New Jersey—at least not any longer...

...Titled "Ninety-Nine Covert Ways to Stop Abortion," it includes, for example, instructions on how to squirt superglue into clinics' locks so the doors can't be opened...

...Agit-Prop 'Til You Drop All those hours at the malls during the holiday season were enough to do in the hardiest consumers...

...But the Clinton Administration's response has been inadequate, with toothless task forces and tepid temporizing about lack of resources...

...Those who can afford to pay get garbage collection and other basic goods but, without a dependable infrastructure, everyone else slips through the cracks...

...They have arrested—after deeds are done...

...We take some personal satisfaction in this ruling because former Progressive editor Erwin Knoll, former associate editor Keenen Peck, and several friends tried unsuccessfully to distribute copies of the Bill of Rights—of all things—in a shopping mall in Madison, Wisconsin, several years ago but they were summarily booted off the premises and sued for trespassing...

...We must defend the clinics...

...There is not going to be an execution...

...Abortion is a legal right in this country...

...David Gunn in Pensacola...

...The state used Jacobs's testimony at his sister's trial, where Texas prosecutors actually acknowledged that Jacobs didn't kill the victim, and that he wasn't aware that his sister had a gun and was planning the murder...

...it obviously isn't working at all...

...Given the current mood of the country, that's a grim prospect...

...By ending the entitlement status of a variety of emergency aid programs, the Republicans will do away with the guarantee that people can get help simply because they desperately need it...

...There are many important goals of public services that "competitiveness" cannot be counted on to serve, such as safety, in the case of the Federal Aviation Administration, and affordability, in the case of public housing...

...Jacobs had confessed to the murder, but then recanted and accused his own sister of committing the crime...

...And it urges fellow fanatics who are terminally ill to take acts of "terminal courage"—including "torching two killing chambers every other day in different cities...

...The death penalty is an abomination in all cases, but the execution in early January of Jesse Dewayne Jacobs was a particularly appalling example...

...So why the bailout...

...When the Republicans say they want tax cuts, Clinton proposes his own tax cuts...

...Now that the Mexican government is more dependent than ever on Washington, U.S...

...But while some of the gripes about bureaucratic slowness are legitimate, privatization is no panacea...

...once said, "On some positions, cowardice asks the question, 'Is it expedient?' And then expedience comes along and asks the question, Ts it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' Conscience asks the question, Ts it right?'" Clinton should stop listening to cowardice, expedience, and vanity, and start listening to conscience for a change...

...This attitude has been brewing for some time, and both parties are to blame with their rhetoric about "personal responsibility" and exaggerated emphasis on the costs of welfare...

...What makes this case uniquely grotesque is that the state of Texas agreed with Jacobs's revised version in order to try and convict his sister...

...It's also bad for Mexican workers...

...It threatens only to get worse...

...Jacobs was convicted in Texas in 1987 for fatally shooting someone...

...The Court, basing its decision on New Jersey state law, ruled that the right to free speech in the malls was "unmistakable and compelling...

...It's time for the churches to say, "No, no, no...

...It advocates "thumb removal"—cutting off the thumbs of doctors...

...We owe it to the memory of Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols in Brookline, and Dr...

...And the Federation counts 4,157 incidences of disruption, a category which includes hate mail, phone calls, bomb threats, and picketing...

...That's a really sick message to send those grieving for two dead women in Brookline, and it's a sick message to everyone in this country who believes in the rule of law...

...The idea that entitlements—programs the Government has a legal obligation to provide, regardless of other budget considerations—represent a giant drain on tax dollars is virtually unchallenged by political leaders of both parties...

...Words have consequences—we now know they have deadly consequences...

...In his last words, Jacobs said, "I have news for you...

...Just as the bombing of a church in Birmingham in 1963 galvanized the civil-rights movement, so, too, should the murders in Massachusetts galvanize an aggressively nonviolent movement to assure a woman's constitutional right to an abortion...

...Third-world countries squeezed by neoliberal reforms are a good model of the down side of privatization...

...But the whole idea that people who "work hard and play by the rules" are more worthy than others is a fantasy...

...Few politicians put the point so bluntly, but they knew which side to choose and, whether Democrat or Republican, they took their uncompromising stands—bold as eagles, brave as lions—under the beach umbrellas of big money.' —Lewis H. Lapham in Harper's Unfortunately, the courts in Wisconsin are not as devoted to free speech as they are in New Jersey...

...You can actually open your mouth and speak...

...already we are paying the price...

...These murders are a call for progressives to mobilize in defense of a woman's right to choose abortion...

...Complaints about Government waste and inefficiency often lead to the suggestion that the United States should impose businesslike efficiency on the public sector...

...Nor are the poor the primary beneficiaries of Government largess...

...Other states, including California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Massachusetts, have also opened the mall doors to free speech...

...The reckless rhetoric of violence is responsible for these murders...

...When they dump on the welfare system, Clinton dumps on the welfare system...

...There is, for example, the Reverend David Trosch, a Roman Catholic priest in Alabama whose theology leads him to the conclusion that killing abortion workers is "justifiable homicide" and who predicted, in a letter to members of Congress last July, "massive killing of abortionists and their staffs...

...The Drive to Privatize One of the things that separates the United States and other wealthy countries from the Third World is the reliability of our infrastructure and public services...

...If the anti-abortion forces can be out in force, blockading clinics in sub-zero weather and scorching heat, so can we...

...Seems clearer now than ever that we were sold a bill of goods with NAFTA, which has quickly come a cropper...

...This is the movement that calls itself "pro-life...

...It's the workers who once more are bearing the greatest cost.' —Elba Esther Gordillo, general secretary of Mexico's national teachers' union Lethal Innocence Shortly before he retired, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that "the execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to murder...

...Who's Entitled...

...Paradoxically, politicians argue that the middle class has a grievance against entitlement programs, even though middle-class people get far more aid than the poor through Government entitlements...

...But given the new, anti-government mood in Government, it's no surprise that President Clinton is jumping on the Republican bandwagon by proposing to sell off various public agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, to private firms...

...All those steps are likely to eventually benefit American companies racing for a firmer foothold in the Mexican economy...

...Clinton is precisely the wrong kind of leader for our country...

...We can give some meaning to these five deaths...

...workers, U.S...

...This is a jihad...

...He also issued a "target list" of members of organizations he doesn't like, such as Planned Parenthood, NOW, and the ACLU, and said they would be "sought out and terminated as vermin are terminated...

...American banks don't want their Mexican loans and their peso speculations to go belly up, and U.S...

...The state of Texas is so eager to convict, imprison, and execute as many people as possible that the fact of innocence is no longer a concern...

...it obviously was wobbly and rickety...

...We are faced with a horrific increase in violence on the part of anti-abortion forces...

...They based their defense on the very grounds that the malls were the contemporary equivalent of the public square...

...That was the myth of NAFTA...

...bailout is bad for American taxpayers, since we're the ones who are shelling out the money...

...Society as a whole suffers when cowboy capitalism becomes the law of the land...

...All of these murders have been done in the name of God...

...Such a moment cries out for leadership, not compromise...

...they are not judge, jury, and executioner, much as they'd like to be...

...vision, not blinders...

...We need protection from these anti-abortion fanatics...

...And there is the manual found at the home of Shelley Shannon, the Oregon woman who is now serving a ten-year prison term for the attempted murder of an abortion-provider in Wichita, Kansas, and who has been charged with setting fire to eight clinics in four states...

...When murders at abortion clinics shake our civil society, when violence against lesbians and gays is on the rise, when hatred against immigrants swells, when the poor are being sold down the river, where is Clinton...

...they have seen their real wages fall by 30 percent practically overnight...

...courage, not cowardice...

...That's exactly what it was, and it's a more horrible crime than Jacobs himself was killed for...

...Yet neither party has proposed interfering with the entitlement status of Social Security, Medicare, home-mortgage deductions, and other middle-class benefits...

...Don Treshman, the national director of the militant anti-abortion group Rescue America, calls this "a war," and it has already gotten serious...

...how to drill holes into the roofs of clinics to cause "pesky roof leaks...

...corporations still look to Mexico as a place to make quick profits...

...Bob Dole opened the new session of Congress with a promise to repeal Government functions "from A to Z, from Amtrak to zoological studies...

...What a concept...

...The Me-Too Man Bill Clinton is the original copycat...

...However, the prosecutors refused to throw out the previous conviction of Jacobs for the very crime they later convicted his sister of committing...

...The Federation also cites 153 cases of vandalism, 128 death threats against clinic workers, 204 cases of the "stalking" of abortion providers, clinic workers, or patients away from the clinic...

...Clinton vowed to bail out Mexico with billions of dollars in U.S...

...Dead are five people—the two women in Brookline, and one clinic escort and two physicians who provided abortions in Pensacola, Florida...

...When the very notion of a humane society is under constant attack from the Republicans, where is Clinton...

...Mexico's president, Ernesto Zedillo, is now offering more generous incentives than ever to U.S...

...We must act ourselves...

...When the Mexican peso plummeted in December, all of a sudden Washington's much-heralded faith in the free market went south with it...

...We were told that the mythical free market would work wonders...

...Most members of the middle class got where they are because they were born with social or economic advantages that gave them a leg up...

...Making the experience even more dreadful, the mall owners want you to check your mouth at the door: In many states, if you dare to engage your fellow shoppers in political conversation, you're committing a crime...