about five million for the Senate, and about a hundred million for the White House. Or, increasingly, the candidates themselves are multi-millionaires.

In California, teenagers are being stopped, harassed, photographed and questioned by police purely because their clothing is thought to be gang attire, or of gang colors.

In the early morn, sheriffs deputies are descending upon the homes of parents of suspected gang members, warning them that if they dont take responsibility for their children, they could face criminal charges, even jail.

As in Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Indianapolis in recent years, police in large cities are exhibiting a remarkable level of disdain for the laws of the land: giving false information to courts to secure search warrants, or acting without warrants, committing perjury on the stand, allowing the results of botched tests of drugs to be used in criminal cases, staging drug raids in order to steal drugs, money, guns and other valuables, taking money and drugs from dealers in exchange for immunity, robbing and beating people on the streets of their precinct.

And they are exhibiting the same disdain for individual rights in numerous search-and-destroy missions against private homes: using special shock-lock shotgun rounds to blow apartment doors off their hinges, or shooting off the door locks, tossing in flash-bang grenades, which produce explosions that terrify and disorient people, illegally searching the inhabitants, menacing them with their guns, firing shots at people without cause, killing people, planting drugs or other false evidence on innocent people and arresting them, tampering with evidence, forcing people outside almost naked, filing false arrest reports, or sometimes filing no charges at all after all this, assaulting or threatening people who make charges against them.

New cases are being added to the more than 60,000 people suing the city of New York for being illegally strip-searched after being arrested for minor offenses.

Public relations firms, hired by large corporations and business associations, are utilizing hefty fees, lawyers, detectives, spies and phony grassroots campaigns to influence the media and public opinion against food, environmental and other activists and authors who pose a threat to one of their special-interest clients, trying to make the activists look foolish, if not criminal, as they exercise their political rights.

NBC is canceling an appearance by a nuclear activist because she has criticized General Electric, which owns the network. Another nuclear activist or author, or opponent of military spending, is unwelcome at CBS because it belongs to Westinghouse; while

yet another finds doors closed at ABC because of having treated the Disney conglomerate with less than reverence; ditto at CNN, owned by the AOL-Time-Warner octopus; while the advertisers are increasingly influencing the content of the news stories.

(As A. J. Liebling famously wrote: If you want freedom of the press, you have to own one. )

During a new US invasion abroad, the media is being severely restricted as to what it can report to the American people about the war; reporters are required to submit their copy to the Pentagon censor, and are told where they can go, what they can film, who they can interview; those who dont toe the line are transferred by their employer under heavy Pentagon pressure.

The FBI is placing ads in Vietnamese-language and Russian-language newspapers in the US asking immigrants to report on suspected spies amongst their numbers.

A prison inmates sacramental confession to a Catholic priest is surreptitiously being taped by prison officials. The personal mail of inmates, including those awaiting trial, is being read.

The FBI is staging photos used in a trial, and its crime laboratory is producing scientifically flawed, misleading or altered evidence benefitting the prosecutors case against a defendant, even allowing a judge to be impeached on false charges. A Bureau official is destroying an internal report critical of an FBI action in a particular case and not disclosing its existence to prosecutors or defense attorneys, or the Bureau is allowing inaccurate and/or incomplete expert testimony during court proceedings, tilting it in such a way as to incriminate the accused. A veteran FBI agent who blows the whistle on such goings-on is being harassed and suspended.

Medical records containing peoples most intimate personal information are being gathered and stored in commercial data banks maintained by hospital networks, HMOs, drug companies and insurance companies. These organizations are exerting increasing pressure on doctors and therapists to reveal information about their patients. Corporations are requiring employment applicants to give them full rights to their medical records. Law enforcement and national security agencies are increasingly gaining access to this information. Personal prescription drug information is being marketed.

Police are setting up more and more cameras to observe the citizenry on public streets.

Police sting operations are ensnaring gay men and charging them with soliciting lewdness , under a state anti-sodomy law which prohibits homosexual couples, but not heterosexual couples, from having consensual oral sex in private. Married men leaving gay sex clubs are being photographed by police, who then extort money from them by threatening to inform their wives or bosses.

Students are being suspended by their schools for refusing to stand up for the American flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or for something they wrote in the school newspaper or on their own personal home webpage.

The INS is sending letters to immigrants who have been applying to legalize their status. The letters tell the immigrants to come to the federal building, bring some ID, and

the INS will give them work permit good for a year. When the immigrants eagerly arrive at the INS office, they are promptly arrested and deported.

Police are stopping cars on the road, stealing money and other goods from the passengers, or taking bribes to refrain from making (false) arrests.

Police officers, now armed with a Supreme Court ruling, are searching the belongings of a passenger in a car simply because they suspect the driver has done something wrong.

Undercover vice squads in Arizona, wearing black ski masks, are seizing hundreds of copies of an adult newspaper from vending machines.

Copies of the Cuban newspaper Gramma are being seized by customs officials in one American city or another. Videos taken in Iraq are being seized by Customs from returning American citizens.

Mentally ill people are languishing in prisons all over the country, receiving no treatment and often suffering physical and sexual abuse from other inmates and guards.

Some persons judged to be mentally ill or retarded or in other ways regarded as misfits are being sterilized without their knowledge in secluded corners of various state institutions.

The DEA, other federal and state agents and police are seizing houses, boats, cars, airplanes, real estate, furnishings, bank accounts and other assets belonging to people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, or belonging to their spouses, often without a conviction, and whether or not the assets seized were tied to the alleged crime. In one state, a man is losing his home and his business for selling two grams of cocaine. In another, numerous cars are being confiscated from new car dealerships for failing to report all cash transactions involving more than $10,000. Elsewhere, a 75-year-old grandmother is being dispossessed of her home for the sins of her fugitive, drug-dealing son.

The government agencies are selling these assets and using the proceeds for anything from patrol cars to parties. The expected value of forfeitures is at times a determining factor in the question of who to raid. Police are routinely planting drugs and falsifying police reports to establish probable cause for cash seizures. Plea bargains are struck that commonly favor drug kingpins willing to surrender their assets and penalize mules with nothing to trade. As of early 1999, there was $2.7 billion in the federal governments Asset Forfeiture Fund alone.

The concept of equal access to legal remedy and justice is being invalidated every day after a decade of deep government cutbacks to the legal aid program, thus robbing the poor of what is often their sole defense against unscrupulous landlords, scam artists, battering spouses, home foreclosure, consumer fraud and many other legal predicaments.