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It is a criss for the freedom movemet and a crisis for the movement of working women and men.

Despite impressive increases in the numbers of black people holding public office, despite our ability now to sit and eat and ride and vote and attend school in places that used to bar black faces, in some important ways nonwhite Americans face restrictions more difficult to attack than in the years that went before.

Labor unions' membership has plummeted -- from 35% of workers in the 1950's to about 15% of the work force today. In 1974 the average Amreican CEO made 34 times as much as the average American worker. By 1995, it was 179 times as much -- recalling the bitter words of Victor Hugo that there was always more misery in the lower classes than there was humanity in the upper classes.

Much of the groundwork for this sorry state of affairs was laid in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's. For much of the latter decade, America was presided over by an amiable incompetent whose sole intent was removing government from every aspect of our lives. He brought to power a band of financial and ideological profiteers who descended on the nation's Capitol like a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts, bent on destroying the rules and laws that protected our people from poisoned air and water and from greed. But nowehre was their assault on the rule of law so great as in their attempt to subvert, ignore, defy and destroy the laws that require an America that is bias free.