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I wanted to send to my friends greetings for the Fourth of July.

It's a tough year to celebrate independence from Britain, when we know that we have slid back from freedoms for which the Revolutionary War was fought. The celebrated dumping of tea into Boston harbor, for example, was a protest against the power of corporations, or Crown charters as they were known. Until the latter half of the 19th century, the longevity and scope of corporations were strictly limited, and their liability was not.

Or take religious liberty. One of the major achievements of the Constitution was the widespread agreement that it was risky to mingle religion and politics-- either the state would take over the business of religion and use it for tyrannical purposes, or one sect would seize power and use it to harass other sects. To this day, Baptists support separation of church and state because they remember Baptists being stoned out of Culpepper County Virginia. The Quakers remember the members of their congregation who were hanged for their religious beliefs. And those Catholics that know their history remember that at one time, they were driven from Massachusetts by intolerance. Considering this, it is astonishing that two hundred years later, there are still people conspiring to establish a sectarian government (and, like our kleptomaniac Speaker, often using your tax dollars to do it with, too!) .

But this year has been especially worrisome because of the wholesale assault on privacy conducted by various people, but especially by Kenneth Starr. We cannot, unfortunately, say that Starr's actions will affect only Bill Clinton and forget about them. The way that the court system works is that once a precedent gets set, it tends to be set in concrete. Kenneth Starr has been ambitiously testing the limits of what prosecutor may do: using illegally obtained tapes as evidence before a Grand Jury, invading attorney-client privilege, using the contempt statutes to confine a person indefinitely for refusing to testify, coercing a person to testify and then using coerced testimony to charge that person with a crime, and now I believe, knowingly using the fabricated evidence of the so-called Talking Points for a prosecution. He has been turned back on several fronts, but--make no mistake-- a great deal of damage to *your* rights and *your* liberties has been done.

Unfortunately, Bill Clinton and the Congress joined in the assault on the Constitution. The power of the government to target you covertly, invade your privacy, detain you improperly, and deny you counsel has never been greater in the post-War era. Orrin Hatch got his long-sought goal-- virtual elimination of the time-honored principle of habeus corpus. And the drug wars, which Clinton is so determined to win, justify ever-expanding prosecutorial authority. At the same time, reining in the power of the IRS has been done in such a manner that it will simply encourage the scofflaws that evade tens or hundreds of billions in taxes every year. You just got a tax hike in the guise of IRS reform.

And then there is freedom of the press, which has dissolved into Mcnewspapers owned by giant chains, and telepandering by celebrities. Issues of major importance to large groups of Americans-- global warming, the handling and mishandling of plutonium, the positive achievements of labor unions, the lives of the disabled, the state of American universities-- are very occasionally examined as novelties. And no wonder we often believe that news people are living on a different planet. The Washington press corps, at least, is vastly more wealthy than the average American-- 31% take home more than $150K, while the median family income is more like 36K.

There *is* one thing to celebrate this Fourth of July, namely the people that dedicate themselves to making this a better nation. I count among my friends many people who talk back to the system, who refuse to accept our drift toward a corporate state, who work to protect religious and civil liberties. These people would make the Founders proud.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

Regards, JS