COMMENT
Comment 'We Republicans are going to fight you every inch of the way.... Indeed, when we take firmer control of the Congress next year, we are going to vote for a big change, repealing the minimum...
...We must insist not only on decent pay, but on universal health care, universal access to education and training for family-supporting jobs, and a higher minimum standard of compassion...
...Comprehensive" is not quite the right word...
...The report figures in the usual costs—medical bills, lost work time, property losses, legal fees, and the price of police work—adding up to $150 billion annually...
...Instead, the editors chose to go to the poetry mafia, who can't abide a female poet who writes about unladylike things...
...Never mind that wages and standards of living for working-class Americans have declined disastrously over the last two decades...
...he wrote, mimicking the language of same-sex marriage advocates...
...Dark Fields of the Republic, he derides her for writing about themes "ad feminam," trying to play off of "ad nauseam" as much as "ad hominem...
...But so was Israel's wholly disproportionate response...
...He went on to advocate a watered-down version of marriage called "legalized unions," arguing that "gays understandably want not just equal economic treatment but equal moral status," but "most Americans are not ready to go beyond tolerance to active approval...
...Peres was rewarded with a promise of new intelligence and technology to fend off future Hezbollah attacks...
...The Wall Street Journal would like its readers to think that the interests of working people and the interests of millionaires are one and the same...
...He was pointing out the obvious, number-one fact in America, which is declining wages and living standards for the vast majority of people in this country," says political essayist Barbara Ehrenreich...
...It's an amazing thing to keep quiet...
...That law will make it impossible for women like Fauziya to win asylum in the future...
...In most mainstream news coverage, Israeli casualties are apt to have names, faces, and bereaved relatives, while Arab victims are likely to be fleeting images: nameless, faceless, and distant.' —Norman Solomon 'I thought the United States was a place of justice...
...To blame everything on Hezbollah takes a vers' convenient form of amnesia, one that manages to blot out the fact that Israel is occupying territory in Lebanon, the so-called "security zone" that it unilaterally claimed when it invaded in 197S...
...But under a bill approved overwhelmingly by the Senate in May, immigrants will face an even more hostile environment in the United States than Kasinga did when she arrived here...
...The Wisconsin plan is among fifteen state proposals awaiting federal waivers to set time limits on AFDC...
...A 'Good' Shelling Imagine the reaction in Washington if, say, Libya had spent sixteen days shelling Egypt, killing more than 150 civilians and making 10 percent of the Egyptian population into instant refugees...
...The poems a reader will encounter in this book," Auden wrote back then, "are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs...
...When she arrived, she naively confided in U.S...
...Instead of receiving protection I was punished by being put in jail...
...Otherwise, the politics of greed will rule the day...
...Safire is so itchy on this topic, his version of "tolerance" sounds like an allergy, as in "I'll let you in ay neighborhood, but you give me hives...
...refugee camp in Lebanon, killing seventy-five civilians, many of them children...
...In so doing, it triples the supposed annual cost of crime to $450 billion...
...Get ready to open the floodgates on corrections spending...
...The increase in the minimum wage proposed by the Democrats in Congress is long overdue...
...He adduces proof of his last, most scandalous charge by willfully misreading her verse...
...Bill McCollum, Republican chairman of the subcommittee, also found the report to his liking...
...Even as the minimum-wage debate inches forward, we are rapidly moving backward on other fronts...
...He quotes—approvingly and with no recognition of its condescension—W.H...
...The President himself has proposed a lifetime limit on welfare of five years, and he is running television spots that advertise his toughness on the issue, saying that all welfare recipients must be put to work...
...Analysts say it has become increasingly clear that the economy has pulled back from what many regarded last winter as the brink of recession," The New York Times reported...
...But the shelling itself, said the Times, "is sound policy, and smart politics for Mr...
...The fact that there are distinct economic classes in America with opposing economic interests is not exactly breaking news...
...media, the high moral ground in the Middle East belongs to Israel's government— even when it slaughters Lebanese civilians as a matter of policy...
...They made us feel like we are not human beings.' —Fauztya Kasinga, speaking to the National Press Club after her release When Kasinga's father, who did not believe in genital mutilation, died suddenly, she found herself at the mercy of relatives who married her off without her consent and imposed a date for the ritual mutilation...
...It is this occupation that Hezbollah opposes...
...workers' wages increased by 1 percent in the first quarter of this year—the sharpest increase they've seen since 1991—economists on Wall Street began to worry...
...government would have roundly condemned Libya, if not attacked it...
...First he tried humor...
...If lesbian and gay couples bend the rules of marriage, as they have bent starched and stilted gender categories for centuries, so much the better...
...Who could oppose this modest proposal to extend connubial rights, inheritance tax advantages, and benefits blessings to millions of lonely women and angry extra males...
...At ninety cents an hour, spread over the next two years, it would put American workers a whopping two cents ahead of where they were forty years ago...
...Fauziya Kasinga has never been convicted of a crime...
...More than two-thirds of AFDC recipients have spent plenty of time working...
...So, at the end of April, Safire tried again...
...Never mind that the value of the minimum wage, currently $4.25 an hour, has been shrinking steadily for forty years, and is now worth eighty-eight cents an hour less than in 1956...
...Finally, on April 24, after her lawyer, human-rights groups, and the Celia Dugger piece raised a big enough stink, Fauziya Kasinga was released...
...But Donoghue's chief dig is that Adrienne Rich doesn't know her place...
...immigration policy, and the shamefulness of the U.S...
...Instead of exploiting the suffering of crime victims for the benefit of the prison industry, the National Institute of Justice might want to do another comprehensive survey—this one on crime prevention...
...A Plot Against Poetry On April 21, The New York Times Book Review attempted a literary assassination...
...According to David Rosenbaum of The New York Times, during 1993 and 1994, when the Democrats controlled Congress, President Clinton never once made a public statement supporting an increase in the minimum wage...
...prison system...
...Charles E. Schumer, a Democratic member of the House Subcommittee on Crime, was quick to suggest that the new estimates should justify allocations of real dollars to law enforcement and corrections...
...Everything was Hezbollah's fault, the Clinton Administration said, a line echoed by Bob Dole and the editorialists at The New York Times, who, by the way...
...Immigration Tragedy Fauziya Kasinga is nineteen...
...But then the study attaches a dollar value to such immeasurable costs as fear, lost affection for a murder victim's family, and compromised quality of life...
...Is that/what you would have me do...
...This anxious attempt at satire drew a lot of criticism, and did nothing to stave off the imminent legalization of gay marriage in Hawaii...
...Then came the following dig: "Few of her new poems achieve the autonomy of a work of art, floating free of their autobiographical contexts...
...lauded the shelling but just wanted it to end sooner, because it "risks creating new Hezbollah supporters among the Lebanese civilians uprooted by the Israeli raids...
...Walt Whitman couldn't pass that test...
...Welfare-reform rhetoric emanating from the White House and state houses promotes the idea that AFDC recipients are a drain on taxpayers...
...When a child gets sick, or a car breaks down, or another emergency crops up, people who work in low-wage, service-sector jobs often fall into the government safety net...
...During the primaries, the only Presidential candidate to raise the issue of economic inequality was rightwing nutball Pat Buchanan, and it made him very popular...
...Now, all of a sudden, the issue is hot...
...The INS repeatedly turned down her requests for asylum and her requests to be released from prison...
...It "demonstrates that the costs of building prisons and adding police are justified in terms of the cost to our society," he said...
...Hezbollah's rocket attacks were wrong...
...According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when U.S...
...The problem is that they work for low wages with no benefits, and cycle in and out of the labor market...
...But when Israel spent sixteen days shelling Lebanon—raining devastation down onto that country, destroying homes, schools, roads, bridges, water lines—what was the reaction in Washington...
...She was seventeen when she came to the United States, but until April 24 of this year, she'd spent every one of her days in the United States behind bars...
...Because they are concerned about the poor, of course: "We believe the minimum wage hurts poor people, killing jobs on the first rung of the career ladder for the most vulnerable members of society...
...she asks...
...Besides doubling the size of the Border Patrol and restricting public benefits to all immigrants, the bill speeds up the deportation process, limiting the opportunity for asylum-seekers to appeal...
...Libertarians like me have a tough time with same-sex marriage because we despise discrimination, cherish privacy, and reject homophobia," he wrote...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Since they are very poor and have no health insurance, they are extremely vulnerable...
...We need a much more comprehensive approach to the growing problem of poverty in the United States...
...In the opening sentence of his "review" of Rich's latest collection of poetry...
...But it isn't just cranky conservative editors who won't admit it...
...Take a trip to Lebanon to see your tax dollars at work...
...Today, says Donoghue, Rich's poems "are not notable for modesty of dress, they never mumble but they do not always speak quietly, they repudiate their elders as if on principle, and if they do not tell fibs they sometimes say things that are not true...
...The bill shamelessly caters to public resentment against immigrants...
...Why...
...Images of Qaddafi as the devil incarnate would have filled the network news...
...She came to America seeking asylum, having fled her native Togo, where she faced the imminent fate of genital mutilation—a clitoridectomy without anesthesia, a procedure that's not only painful in the extreme, but potentially fatal as well...
...They were indefensible...
...immigration officials, who immediately turned her over to the privately run INS detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey...
...he said, "because it shows that while most people think a $1 billion anti-crime program is a large number, it's really just a drop in the bucket...
...No doubt the U.S...
...The corrections industry is big business...
...Yet up until recently, when the Democrats noticed that Buchanan's economic populism did well in the polls, politicians of both parties were noticeably mute about the growing number of Americans confronting impoverishment...
...Autobiographical contexts...
...To justify more prisons by puffing up the costs of crime suits the industry just fine, but it is based on the worst possible logic...
...But in the 'good news equals bad news' environment that often prevails on Wall Street, some economists have begun to worry that faster growth and higher incomes might rekindle inflation...
...Nor did the Congressional Democrats hold a single hearing on the minimum wage during those two years...
...The states could then administer the money however they saw fit—even if that means denying aid to people who desperately need it...
...The Times Book Review could have found 100 poets or critics who had even a passing appreciation of Rich's continuously impressive work—as well as her extraordinary place in contemporary American poetry...
...Her latest poems deflect the blade: "Is it necessary for me to write/obliquely about the situation...
...Instead of addressing the problems of a labor market that leaves people in such desperate straits, politicians of both parties are currently contemplating doing away with the net altogether...
...So does the new counterterrorism bill, signed into law by President Clinton the day after Fauziya Kasinga was released...
...crude caricatures would have adorned the covers of Time and Newsweek...
...The target was Adrienne Rich, one of the most accomplished and influential poets of our age, who more than anyone else has nourished two generations of poets concerned with the condition of women and the general condition ol America...
...Our government gives Israel $3 billion in aid every year—$1.8 billion in military aid...
...He's been worrying about the possibility of gay marriage for months now and can't seem to decide just what harm it might do...
...Donoghue wields the rusty ax of the old poetry establishment, but Rich will not lie still...
...There, according to an extraordinary report by Celia Dugger of The New York Times, Kasinga was strip-searched, shackled, denied sanitary napkins, put in isolation, teargassed, and beaten...
...New Math Areport by the National Institute of Justice touts itself as "the most comprehensive survey ever done on the price of violence...
...In the world according to the U.S...
...Indeed, when we take firmer control of the Congress next year, we are going to vote for a big change, repealing the minimum wage kit, kat, and caboodle.' —The Wall Street journal Greed Lives Not only does The Wall Street Journal oppose increasing the minimum wage, the Journal's editors recently editorialized against the whole concept of a minimum wage, calling it "a crackpot idea...
...In other words, the interests of the wealthy run counter to the interests of most working Americans...
...He is nostalgic for the days when women vowed to "honor and obey" crusty old patriarchs like him...
...Peres, who faces an election later this spring...
...In a March 17 op-ed for The New York Times, Safire suggests that same-sex marriage will so devastate the tradition of matrimony that polyandry (the marriage of one woman to multiple men) might as well be the next step...
...His intentions were clear at the outset...
...A note to American taxpayers: Israel is far and away the largest recipient of U.S...
...This report could change the debate...
...She came here with a false passport—grounds for automatic denial of asylum under the new law...
...Nowhere is the government's dangerously reactionary attitude toward the poor more evident than in the debate about welfare reform...
...Child poverty, homelessness, and other social ills associated with economic neglect are sure to get worse unless we address the political climate that brought us to this terrible point...
...We must push for recognition that low-wage workers, welfare recipients, and all of us who want a humane society share the same interests...
...In Wisconsin, Governor Tommy Thompson recently signed legislation to abolish AFDC altogether by the fall of 1997...
...Thus does the Times sanction mass violence for the sake of political expediency...
...It's "extremely appropriate" to be greeting Shimon Peres at this time, said Clinton, who didn't raise a whimper of protest even after the Israeli military blasted a U.N...
...Au-den's foreword to Rich's first book of poems, published forty-five years ago...
...President Clinton has been all too willing to sign waivers endorsing draconian welfare-reform experiments...
...The Journal likes to call people at the bottom of the economy "beginning workers"—ignoring the reality that many of those who work at low-wage, dead-end jobs are not moving up...
...Satire's Hives William Safire is nervous...
...So she fled her home in terror, using a false passport to get to the United States...
...It pits the working poor against people who collect AFDC, ignoring the fact that those two groups overlap...
...But, "why break the age-old pattern of defining marriage as the union of one man, one woman...
...That was the crime Rich was accused of by the literary executioners at the almighty Times Book Review, who hired Professor Denis Donoghue to serve as henchman...
...Approval, silence, then applause for Israel's leader, Shimon Peres, who received a hero's welcome in Washington just three days after the last Israeli shell dropped on Lebanon...
...The bipartisan National Governor's Association proposal on welfare reform would do away with the federal guarantee of support for poor families, and would provide money for public assistance to states in the form of block grants...
...They may even manage to bend marriage into a more equitable institution...
...The study is already being put to the most political use...
...The case of Fauziya Kasinga raises many troubling issues, including the widespread brutality of clitoridec-tomies, the callousness of U.S...
...If President Clinton signs block-grant legislation, which he seems likely to do, it will revoke the guarantee that poor families in America won't starve...
Vol. 60 • June 1996 • No. 6
