COMMENT
Comment Budget Hysterics There's a hysteria sweeping Washington, the balanced-budget hysteria. And like all hysterias, this one is based on falsehoods and is bound to do grave damage. The...
...The House also tossed in money for Star Wars, and for standard-issue pork for the arms companies, including more transport ships...
...This brings the United States to the brink of war in Central Europe...
...It's a "method of torture well known to be used by Israel's domestic security service," the pathologist said...
...Enough Snoops Even as the FBI and the Clinton Administration seek greater powers to snoop on all of us, more information comes out almost every day that shows how dangerous Big Brother already is...
...Even in the Republican frenzy to cut foreign aid, Israel's annual allowance was kept intact...
...Its conclusion: "The tax and spending cuts moving through Congress are likely to reduce the after-tax incomes of American families at the bottom of the economic ladder...
...It's part of the general assault on government itself, and on the belief that the people should have any say over their economic lives...
...And it's unlikely to induce Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to recognize Bosnia, which was the thrust of U.S...
...By allowing the FBI to decide which groups to infiltrate, by granting it the right to invade people's privacy, we're giving away our own freedoms...
...Cesar Chavez was followed by the FBI for more than seven years in the 1960s and 1970s, and the agency compiled a 1,434-page file on him...
...But the false modesty shouldn't deceive you...
...intervention will not solve the problem...
...Abd al-Samed Hreizat was suspected of being a member of the armed branch of the Islamic group Hamas...
...The soldiers came looking for Ramirez's cousin, a guerrilla, who wasn't home...
...But U.S...
...For reference, the historian Gabriel Kolko has a new book out, Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914...
...They used to deny what many had long suspected: that they had orders to kill...
...When you slash government spending, you slash jobs...
...No risk of that now...
...They beat Ramirez, burned her with cigarettes, and raped her...
...But there's one agency that's not even getting nicked...
...It is tempting—oh, so tempting—for a superpower to see war-making as the easy answer...
...airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs...
...You know Ralph Reed, the choir boy who fronts for the Christian Coalition...
...On sheer economic grounds, these cuts, and not the deficit itself, will have catastrophic consequences...
...But her lawyers have welcomed the recent decision by the INS, saying that it may help her plea...
...President Clinton had proposed keeping Pentagon spending constant at about $258 billion a year, an amount that far exceeds our true defense needs...
...When this predictably backfired, and the Serbs took U.N...
...Under pressure from both William Safire and Anthony Lewis, Clinton pushed for U.N...
...For many years now, the Israeli government has been committing human-rights abuses against Palestinians...
...We don't need Sidney, or Aunt Polly, or Ralph Reed, or Pat Robertson to tell us what to do and how to think...
...And the FBI may still be snooping...
...Welfare, food stamps, child nutrition, disability insurance, college loans, job training—all will be slashed...
...The deficit will not sink the economy...
...troops would not automatically end the crisis...
...It's not really a new goal, though...
...The Republicans have also placed entire federal agencies on the chopping block, and have proposed gutting many others...
...According to the Los Angeles Times, hundreds of agents kept tabs on Chavez and on the marches, pickets, and meetings of the United Farm Workers...
...The Republicans have voted to slash at least $1 trillion in federal spending over the next seven years...
...The deficit is not growing rapidly right now...
...Looks like we might have to learn them all over again...
...the goal now is simply to kill...
...imperial ventures around the world, and because it is unpopular for politicians to criticize Israel, it just keeps getting a blank check to commit more abuses...
...Instead, they're adding to it, offering more tax cuts to private companies and the rich...
...Because Israel has been a loyal ally for U.S...
...Remember the character, Sidney, in Tom Sawyer, who was always complaining to Aunt Polly when Tom and Huck did something he didn't like...
...trying them in court is no longer the goal...
...But even Clinton's bloated Pentagon is not bloated enough...
...And that's the Pentagon...
...Refuge for Women The Immigration and Naturalization Service finally announced in May that it will recognize rape and other forms of violence against women as grounds for political asylum...
...It also proposed slashing $300 million that was supposed to go toward adapting America's armaments industry for civilian use...
...In a related case, the Board of Immigration Appeals recently overturned a decision regarding a Haitian woman who was raped by a gang of soldiers because she supported President Jean-Bertrand Aristide...
...Is NATO anything more than an excuse for America to subsidize Europe long after it makes sense?' Comment Allowance for Murder There's a subject that rarely gets mentioned in the discussions about foreign aid, but it's time that it did: that subject is U.S...
...Reed and Robertson have just unveiled their "Contract with the American Family...
...But the Republicans want the big decisions about the economy out of the voters' hands—and into the laps of the Federal Reserve Board and the Fortune 500...
...support for brutal Israeli policies...
...Like other U.S...
...He was four feet, six inches tall, and he weighed 95 pounds...
...As in most cases in this century, the virtues of military action are inflated...
...A dollar spent on building bombs does not help the economy as much as a dollar spent on education, or energy conservation, or mass transit—investments that are labor-intensive and ripple through local economies...
...But under the new guidelines, "The whole atmosphere for women has changed," Deborah Anker, a founding member of the Women Refugees Project at Harvard Law School, told the Times...
...The Republicans are swinging the axe wildly at any social program in sight...
...Bosnia may just add to the toll...
...In other words, don't spy on us...
...Government spending creates jobs...
...Ironically, a large part of our federal deficit resulted from the inefficient military spending of the Reagan and Bush years...
...Sending in U.S...
...But lest you think all FBI violations occurred in ancient history, listen up: as recently as 1991, the FBI was spying on AIDS activists and infiltrating gay-rights groups...
...The United States is not the savior on a white horse...
...And Democrats joined them in this folly...
...In late April, another Palestinian died in Israeli custody...
...The Bosnian Muslims were trying to exercise their right of self-determination when they broke off from part of what used to be Yugoslavia...
...The U.S...
...The Republicans want the government completely out of fiscal policy, the one area that elected officials—and by extension, the voters—can control...
...He's been on all the talk shows, his sweet baby face a mask for his repugnant master, Pat Robertson...
...Ramirez's case is still pending...
...The problem with the distorted spending priorities is economic, as well as social...
...Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S...
...military bases, and $200 million for cleaning up radiation leaks at the Department of Energy's nuclear-weapons labs...
...And we haven't yet begun to wrestle with it...
...When she heard that they were looking for her, Ramirez fled to the United States and applied for political asylum, despite the fact that the United States had traditionally turned down other applications like hers...
...Those who have guided and run the world's warring nations throughout this century have, in varying degrees, been inherently ignorant of what they were doing in terms of both their ability to manage the processes of war as well as insight into the grave consequences of their decisions," he writes...
...Aunt Polly...
...Israeli soldiers have killed dozens in the occupied territories in recent years...
...As Miriam Davidson reported in The Progressive ("Second-Class Refugees," May 1994), asylum officers and immigration judges in this country had failed to consider gender-specific crimes, including sexual assault, genital mutilation, dowry murders, and arrest for violating restrictions on dress and behavior as worthy of refugee status: "Instead, these crimes are considered 'acts of random violence,' or 'private,' or 'culturally related.' " Davidson reported on the case of Marta Ramirez, who was brutally raped by Salvadoran soldiers when she was thirteen...
...They would limit the right to abortion and gut the First Amendment...
...It's not...
...That's precisely the wrong conclusion to draw...
...When she was twenty-one years old, soldiers killed her common-law husband—also a guerrilla...
...In the last fifty years, U.S...
...A pathologist who examined Hreizat said he suffered fatal brain damage when Israeli interrogators violently shook and forcefully jerked his head back...
...We are one of the most attractive markets in the world for investors...
...The hysteria about the deficit is a political ploy designed by conservatives and corporate interests to justify vicious cuts in domestic spending and to hack away at government regulations on the private sector...
...At last, the United States has recognized that human rights apply to women, too...
...And it is not jeopardizing the health of the American economy...
...In fact, it's likely to harden the resolve of the Bosnian Serbs to keep fighting...
...But other items are much more serious...
...The crisis in Bosnia does tug at any moral person...
...Here are three recent items that have emerged since all the moaning and groaning began about how the FBI's hands are tied...
...Well-ordered arguments and logic for the illogical, and the consummate irresponsibility of playing with the lives of anonymous people who are either sent off to die or will be engulfed in battles, become the rule for a self-contained leadership that in each nation feeds itself information that in the end reflects its desires, interests, and illusions...
...Bosnia Bog President Clinton is drawing the United States closer and closer to calamity in Bosnia...
...peacekeepers hostage, Clinton said he was prepared to send U.S...
...The Christian Coalition has proposed a Religious Equality Amendment that will enshrine prayer in public schools and at public events...
...Medicaid more than $175 billion...
...The House has $353 billion in cuts...
...The only place the House wanted to trim Pentagon spending was in areas that actually might do some good...
...The only thing new is the announcement...
...troops not only to rescue the U.N...
...The FBI has no business monitoring or infiltrating any group or any American citizen...
...Quite obviously, these programs would make unequal incomes even more unequal, particularly at the extremes: the very rich and the very poor.' —Paul Krugman, Stanford University economist Then there's the way in which these cuts are going 'to be made...
...The Supreme Court has ruled such prayers unconstitutional, and for good reason: Why should those of us who don't believe in religion, or who don't want the state to ram religion down our throats, be forced to endure this indoctrination...
...foreign aid...
...The House proposed additional spending on a new and improved Seawolf nuclear-attack submarine, and on the B-2 Stealth bomber, a boondoggle that is seemingly indestructible...
...we now spend nearly 10 percent more in real terms on the military than we did in 1980, and if the Republicans have their way, this will grow even more out of proportion...
...Reed intends to rain lightning and locusts upon any politician who doesn't bow before them...
...Reed was all sweetness and light, saying, "These are the ten suggestions, not the Ten Commandments...
...And it will sink the hopes of those who want to impose some semblance of democratic control over our economic system...
...policy before the airstrikes...
...Medicare will lose more than $250 billion...
...Even the Republicans admit, when pressed, that their budget-cutting will increase unemployment by 750,000 jobs and bring the economy to a screeching halt...
...The poor are being asked to bear a large share of the burden of this economic program," Isabel Sawhill of the Urban Institute told The Washington Post...
...This shames the ideals of the United States, and it shames the ideals of Israel, as well...
...But the Republicans, and their Democratic allies, don't like to talk about priorities, even though theirs are patently obvious...
...The FBI not only snooped on him but distributed damaging information to the press in order to undermine him...
...slashing the deficit will—or at least it will sink those in the smallest boats...
...And they have been the victims of grotesque human-rights abuses carried out systematically by the Serbs...
...That newspaper conducted an in-depth study of the winners and the losers...
...Republicans in the House, joined by many Democrats, voted to throw an additional $9 billion into the Pentagon's maw this year alone...
...Some of the items in the Christian Coalition's contract are a joke, like the one that would require cable companies to fully block porn channels from nonsub-scribers...
...Hreizat was not an imposing man...
...Phil Gramm kissed Ralph Reed's ring at his press conference, and Bob Dole welcomed the recommendations when he met with Reed after the press conference...
...All you viewers who've been getting dizzy trying to decipher those wavy, scrambled images are going to miss out on your fun...
...The Center for Constitutional Rights obtained FBI documents that show surveillance of the group ACT-UP...
...the Senate, $170 billion, and they're going to hash out the difference over the next few weeks...
...The real question about deficit spending should be about social and economic priorities, not simply size...
...And as the FBI's sordid record indicates, that's a danger to us all...
...Here at The Progressive, we oppose U.S...
...government is in no danger whatsoever of going bankrupt...
...wars and meddlings abroad have cost millions of lives...
...Leonard Bernstein was monitored by both the CIA and the FBI for four decades...
...Just a week after Hreizat was murdered in prison, the Israeli Army commander in the occupied West Bank said he has ordered his soldiers to kill fugitive Palestinian militants...
...even murders them...
...Well, that's who Ralph Reed reminds us of...
...It may aggravate the situation even further and threaten a regionalization of the conflict...
...tortures them behind bars...
...mission but to reinforce it...
...spy on them...
...imprisons them without charges...
...Anyone who recalls the start of World War I should look on this possibility and despair...
...Advocates for women refugees have been pushing the United States to recognize gender-related persecution for years...
...He says the FBI "should monitor and infiltrate groups that talk about guns, violence, and hate...
...The immigration judge who first heard the woman's appeal denied her asylum, saying that the rape was not a form of political persecution...
...interventions, it is an undeclared war—an unconstitutional arrogation of power by the President...
...It confiscates their land...
...While the Israeli government is investigating the death, it is unrepentant about its harsh treatment of militants...
...That's not true...
...Last year, it got $1.2 billion in economic assistance and $1.8 billion in military aid...
...The three Democratic Senators to vote along with the Republicans were Charles Robb of Virginia, Sam Nunn of Georgia, and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Democratic powerbrokers all...
...The Republicans in the House and in the Senate have succeeded in persuading the American people that the budget deficit is growing so fast that it is going to overwhelm our children and our grandchildren...
...It's the hard problem...
...It was a witch hunt and an exercise in guilt by association.' —Jerry Cohen, former general counsel to the United Farm Workers And so the politicians came genuflecting...
...The House proposed cutting $300 million that was earmarked for cleaning up toxic contamination at U.S...
...Our deficit as a proportion of our gross domestic product is holding steady, and our debt burden is smaller than almost any other advanced industrial country...
...Given this largess, you'd think that Israel's human-rights abuses would be the subject of hearings in Washington...
...intervention abroad as a matter of principle...
...Michael Deutsch, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says the FBI is "wasting time and money on peaceful, nonviolent groups...
...No use for that denial now...
...By now, you'd have thought we would have learned the lessons of Korea and Vietnam, but apparently not...
...Meanwhile, the Republicans are not cutting corporate welfare...
...But the hysterics have won the day...
...It has a 199-page file on ACT-UP and it refused to release most of its pages, claiming "ongoing law-enforcement activity...
...Not so...
...In the past, sexual abuse had been largely viewed by the [INS] and immigration courts as a private act, even when committed by soldiers or government officials," The New York Times reported...
...Capturing them is no longer the goal...
Vol. 59 • July 1995 • No. 7
