What's really sickening is when it's a choice involving our health, our air or our water, and the special interests still win because they make bigger contributions than we do. When lawmakers (Our Elected Representatives) are perfectly willing to sacrifice us -- literally our bodies -- in favor of campaign contributions, it's enough to gag a maggot.

Unfortunately, such cases are rarely crystal clear; and the clearer the case is, the more high-paid lobbyists you get wandering around making it as unclear as possible. Here's an interesting example of a fight between clean air and clean water and the ethanol lobby.

Violent crime keeps dropping, but the National White Collar Crime Center says that one in three households is now victimized by white-collar crime. This genteel robbery has increased 10 percent to 20 percent in the last five years. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which goes after investment fraud, reports a 20 percent jump in complaints from 1995 to 1999.

The Internet is an especially rich source of rip-offs, so you cutting-edge netizens need to follow the oldest rule in the book: If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

But of course what interests me most is legal crime, the rip-offs about which absolutely nothing can be done -- often because Our Elected Representatives have been bought off by the system of legalized bribery that runs American politics.

For blacks and Hispanics, the reactions to that famous photograph of the Elian snatch by the INS team have been comic in a macabre sort of way. After all, they've been putting up with these no-knock forcible entries by heavily armed cops or INS agents for decades. On the religious right, fears about the onrush of tyranny hardened into certainty back at the time of Waco, in the dawn of the Clinton era.

In the mayoral race, the traditional developer-vs.-preservationist stand-off is given an added cultural je ne sais quoi by fresh developments.

A letter from a supporter on the website of challenger David Bowers, who is gay, referred to incumbent Roger "Bo" Quiroga, who is Hispanic, as the "Macho Nacho." Quiroga, no stranger to the art of insult himself, has referred to the The Galveston Daily News as "the worst disaster to hit Galveston since the 1900 storm."

The latest furor is over whether to continue Beach Party Weekend, a phenomenon that attracts young people, some of whom get all knee-walkin', commode-huggin' drunk and misbehave accordingly.

The Daily News ran a picture of one celebrator holding a puppy by the ear, which an ally of the mayor's says proves the paper has a bias against the mayor. Actually, the photo is sort of interesting on its own merit, in a way.

Today, just six corporations have a forceful grip on America's mass media. We should consider how to break the hammerlock that huge firms currently maintain around the windpipe of the First Amendment. And we'd better hurry.

The trend lines of media ownership are steep and ominous in the United States. When The Media Monopoly first appeared on bookshelves in 1983, author Ben Bagdikian explains, "50 corporations dominated most of every mass medium." With each new edition, that number kept dropping -- to 29 media firms in 1987, 23 in 1990, 14 in 1992, and 10 in 1997.