COMMENT
COMMENT Chinese roulette The invasion of Vietnam by the People's Republic of China, mounted in mid-February and still continuing as this issue of The Progressive goes to press early in March,...
...In rebuttal, Interior Minister Jesus Reyes Heroles has pointed to the recent award of amnesty to approximately 150 political prisoners as conclusive proof of the absence of repression under the Lopez-Portillo administration...
...Today, when Chinese aggression is real, Washington is so eager to play the Carter Administration's "China card" that not even diplomatic sanctions are invoked...
...Subsequent investigation showed that her car may have been forced off the road, that the documentation she brought with her had disappeared, and that she and other union representatives had been the targets of company and governmental surveillance, including the use of illegal wire-tapping...
...Medina's case furnishes particularly dramatic evidence of the dangers faced by left-wing dissidents in Mexico today...
...Environmentalists recognize the case as a prime example of the wanton disregard for the biosphere that is all too common in the nuclear industry...
...COIN's membership now includes such organizations as the Consumer Federation of America, the National Urban League, and the United Auto Workers...
...If that condemnation applies to Vietnam's conduct — and we certainly reaffirm our judgment that it does — it applies with even greater force to China's, for the government in Peking has the capability not only to devastate its neighbor's land but to plunge the entire world into war...
...It is a hierarchical church of static theology, of truths formulated once for all time and binding even on those who refuse to recognize their divinely sanctioned authority...
...Although his asylum claim is still pending, the U.S...
...Labor can not expect to protect itself during the current crisis by means of conventional collective bargaining...
...There is growing discussion of a possible radical challenge to Carter in the 1980 Presidential primaries by someone like Representative Ronald V. Dellums of California or veteran socialist Michael Harrington...
...To date, the Kremlin has confined itself to supplying its Vietnamese ally, sending a small naval task force to the South China Sea, and issuing repeated warnings to Peking to withdraw its troops "before it is too late...
...Justice Department lawyers, charged with the duty of representing the United States, assume that they discharge that duty by representing the President...
...Even after China resorted to military force, Washington might have prompted a swift withdrawal by threatening to hold up the pending trade and exchange agreements with Peking...
...But the Cold War-tinged heritage of DSOC's Socialist Party past and a reluctance to raise potentially divisive foreign policy questions had combined, until the Houston convention, to prevent any major consideration of international issues...
...food imports now come from the Third World, where American-owned agribusiness relies on cheap labor and lax health and safety standards to grow crops native to U.S...
...Already on appeal are two other counts charging Kerr-McGee and others with a violation of her civil rights and with illegal action against the union she represented, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International...
...The immediate focus is the "legislative" or "Congressional" veto, a device Congress uses to supervise some specific Executive decisions...
...If the Sqviets should decide to pursue the sort of reckless course on which China has embarked — if they should conclude that they must "punish" China just as China is "punishing" Vietnam — the result might well be a conflagration that no force on Earth could keep from spreading...
...It is difficult to see how the President can faithfully execute a law — one that he himself may have signed — when he tries to chip off part of it and have it declared illegal...
...Graciela, on the other hand, is locked into a theology of dependence, a belief in her own impotence and in the paternalistic power of the church, which she must placate so that God will help her...
...Let politics do the job...
...And the new monumental Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in which John Paul formally opened the bishops' meeting, found a new wrinkle: In full-color advertisements worthy of a Hollywood mortician, it offered vaults under the Basilica's high altar to store in perpetuity your corpse and those of your descendants "in return for a tax-deductible contribution...
...Nivita Riley has worked in religious education and community development here and abroad...
...The suits are, however, really a Presidential testing of Congressional powers...
...Stirrings on the Left Among the ruins with which Jimmy Carter's Presidency has littered the political landscape, new stirrings are visible on the Left...
...Copies of the Goldman-Jacoby report may be obtained from the International League for Human Rights, 236 East 46th Street, New York, N.Y...
...Food prices have been rising more rapidly than other prices throughout the 1970s...
...economy...
...The Wall Street Journal reports that at least fifteen merger deals involving more than $ 100 million each are contemplated or in the works, fueled in part by "the huge cash holdings of many of the largest U.S...
...The Justice Department then enters the suit as an " intervener," or files a "friend-of-the-court" brief...
...A judgment against Kerr-McGee could bring a far greater measure of public control over the hazardous by-products of the nuclear industry...
...Mexican Airlines advertised a smiling Pope, arms extended in greeting at the door of a clearly marked airliner, with the simple message, "We deliver...
...Bill Blum (Bill Blum, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer, has written for The Nation, In These Times, and other publications...
...International unions and other groups that have participated in such DSOC projects as the Democratic Agenda challenge to Carter at the Democratic Party's mid-term convention last December sent their greetings...
...Taking the long view The Pentagon, anticipating a 50 per cent increase in its strategic weapons stockpile over the next decade, is paying for some long-range research to determine how it can wage nuclear war on the Soviet Union without bombing it back to the stone age, The Washington Post reports...
...But for others, the Pope's comments were bitterly disappointing...
...Wholesale prices increased by 1.3 per cent during January, and retail prices rose by .9 per cent...
...Another would "eliminate the U.S.S.R...
...While it is not certain that the January rate will be sustained, indications are that the Administration will fare no better in the fight against inflation this year than it did in 1978...
...My grandfather was patient...
...Agribusiness, like its counterparts in other rapidly concentrating sectors of the economy, has displayed a cavalier attitude towards the consumer when it comes to price-setting and quality...
...The farmers are now staring down the long barrel of collapse because their credit is overextended...
...Most of them vowed to stay in Washington until the Carter Administration succumbed to their demands for "90 per cent parity," a complicated system of price supports that would boost the value of their crops to a level almost on a par with other goods in the inflation-fired economy...
...The progressive minority, led by Brazil's bishops, fought tenaciously but had to settle for pious and toothless statements that left church and society in Latin America to continue their decline...
...And there is growing likelihood that gasoline and oil prices will continue to surge...
...State Department has urged, in an "advisory opinion," that the claim be denied as frivolous in view of Mexico's "tradition of civic freedom" and its "policy toward fair trials...
...support for right-wing and racist regimes, and other foreign policy outrages...
...Feminists see Karen Silkwood as an effective fighter for her constituency and a standard-bearer for all women...
...Upon graduation, he founded the country's first popular law collective and rose to prominence as legal counsel for Mexico's Independent Labor Movement, an amalgam of militant and largely anti-government trade unions...
...Salvador, they acknowledge, is probably lost to the institutional church, but he is thinking for himself, recognizing his human potential, and preparing to join with others as an artisan of a new humanity...
...Jeffrey Stein (Jeffrey Stein is Washington correspondentfor the Boston Phoenix...
...By 1977, two-tenths of 1 per cent of the food manufacturers controlled more than half of the industry's assets...
...With help from the Roman Curia, planners of the bishops' conference gerrymandered a reactionary majority...
...So, too, when 140 Federal judges brought suit in the Court of Claims for a salary increase...
...A comprehensive study released in December by three international human rights organizations — the New York-based International League for Human Rights, the French International Federation of Human Rights, and the Italian Pax Romana — indicates, however, that political conditions south of the border are no less troubling than economic conditions...
...But a great majority in DSOC now shares an awareness of how anti-communism has been used in the United States as a weapon against domestic change and international justice...
...Terror in Mexico Two stories have dominated recent U.S...
...Many corporations have decided that high rates of inflation and the possibility of Government regulation make it safer to purchase another company than to invest in new plants and product lines...
...A few years ago, Senator Edward Kennedy successfully challenged President Nixon's pocket-veto of the Family Practice of Medicine Act, thereby setting a bad precedent...
...At the Houston convention, veterans of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war mingled with labor leaders, feminists, Chicano activists from the Southwest, and students whose first political involvement came in the recent anti-apartheid demonstrations...
...The Administration, though obviously troubled by the statistics, is never at a loss for words...
...As food industry specialist Cary Fowler has pointed out, multinational agribusiness conglomerates are doing to U.S...
...The Wall Street Journal pointed out in December that many business leaders now support "fiscal restraint" — not as a cure to inflation but as a means of blunting workers' wage demands...
...there is no middle ground...
...But the allegations of repression and brutality come as no surprise to the victims of the White Brigade...
...Paradoxically, such mergers may fuel inflation while creating few new jobs...
...The organization's change and growth were also reflected in the question of Left unification...
...And to labor her case is a reminder of its stake in the struggle against an industry that has shown little concern for the health and safety of its workers...
...Though there was scattered opposition, the resolution to explore the , idea of merger passed by a margin of more than nine to one...
...There has been increasing discussion of a possible merger that might also involve other local and state democratic socialist organizations and socialist networks in community organizing, professional, women's, minority, and religious constituencies...
...For civil libertarians, Karen Silkwood's fate illustrates the industry's inherent threat to personal freedom and privacy...
...But these statistics, distressing as they are, conceal the full weight of the inflationary burden...
...We wonder why American farmers are paid not to plant crops in a starving world...
...In essence the battle now is one in which each branch of the Government accuses the other of illegality...
...It will have to seek decentralized approaches to food production and distribution...
...Members of Congress have, therefore, become justifiably upset about the cavalier attitude taken by the Justice Department in such cases...
...As a spectacle, his attendance at the Latin American Bishops' conference was an enormous success...
...A welcoming committee headed by the mother and sister of Mexican President Lopez Portillo collected millions from industry, commerce, and banking, to whip up an orgy of vulgar emotionalism...
...However the present crisis is resolved, it should be clear — as, indeed, it has been clear for a long time — that the peoples of the world can not remain hostage to an insane international order that permits recurrent threats to the very survival of the planet...
...If the United States had entered into normal relations with Vietnam, China might presumably have thought twice about mounting its aggression...
...We can do no less to try to steer the world away from the folly of self-destruction...
...Winpisinger, another member, was elected a vice chairman of DSOC...
...What these figures tell us is that inflation — especially when combined with relatively high levels of unemployment — hurts the average working-class American far more than it hurts those who have large amounts of "discretionary income" to spend on non-necessities...
...In a television interview, he called some of them "greedy," and that note found resonance in several quarters...
...Karen Silkwood In November 1974, investigators rummaging through the effects of Karen Silkwood, the victim of an automobile crash, discovered significant amounts of plutonium contamination in her body, in her apartment, and in the food she had stocked in her refrigerator...
...In 1973, an intense publicity campaign was launched against the leaders of the Independent Labor Movement, and Medina was falsely charged with kidnapping and theft...
...An economic program likely to provide relief to the average working American will have to address the structural causes of inflation and unemployment...
...Harry C. Boyte (Harry C. Boyte, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, is active in both the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New A merican Movement...
...When, for example, Ramsey Clark sued the Senate and House over the validity of the "one-House" veto embodied in the Federal Elections Act, the Justice Department openly supported Clark's position...
...As true capitalists, they missed no opportunity to collect secondary benefits: Puebla's national bank offered a colored poster of the Pope to depositors who opened or increased a savings account...
...Few will be unaffected if justice is not done in the Karen Silkwood case, now approaching a critical juncture...
...After receiving repeated allegations of human rights violations in Mexico, the three organizations last spring undertook an intensive investigation of the Mexican criminal justice system...
...For some years now the Chinese leaders have engaged in irresponsible rhetoric about the prospect of nuclear war — rhetoric that suggested China viewed the possibility of world conflict with confidence, if not equanimity...
...The lawsuits are usually brought by private parties who believe they have been harmed by Congressional use of the veto...
...Advocates of what has been called "liberation theology" (now being renamed, less threateningly, "Latin American theology") find both kinds of response disturbing, but Graciela's more than Salvador's...
...She is the prototype of Latin America's traditional Catholicism, and the progressives are convinced that the winds of contemporary change will blow out her anachronistic faith as they blow out the sputtering candles she lights before images of the Virgin...
...He told us to be patient," said blue-collar worker Salvador Perez...
...At best, the Carter anti-inflation program will succeed in helping only the well-off...
...But the Administration's scenario poses several problems: Even if labor unions were to accept the wage guidelines — and indications are that they will not — there would be no guarantee that a managed slowdown will work...
...Representative Peter Peyser, a Republican from affluent and urban Westchester County, New York, attacked the farmers for spending what he calculated to be "some $215,000 on fuel alone to make their point in Washington...
...The farmers--again Farmers calling themselves the American Agriculture Movement drove their tractors into Washington, D.C., again this winter, tying up traffic outside the White House, clogging the halls of Congress and the Agriculture Department, gouging deep ruts into the snow-swollen turf of the mall in front of the Capitol, and generally making a nuisance of themselves...
...See "The Legislative Veto," by Arthur S. Miller, in The Progressive, May 1978...
...President versus Congress "Can it be presumed, that Persons sworn to execute the laws, shall openly counteract and violate them...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service...
...In January's figures, prices of beef, automobiles, and medical care led the increases...
...DSOC's membership has increased more than ten-fold...
...But even here the Pope's tact focused his condemnation primarily on U.S...
...The Goldman-Jacoby findings have, of course, been hotly disputed by Mexican officials...
...as a functioning national entity" while leaving its economy essentially intact...
...Except for an occasional expose of dope smuggling, the press has characterized Mexico as a bastion of democracy (at least by current Latin American standards) deserving of the Carter Administration's seal of approval on human rights...
...His latest book is "The Inner Elite, "a sociological evaluation of the 111 cardinals who elected Pope John Paul II...
...In the labor movement, such leaders as William Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists, and Douglas Fraser, president of the United Auto Workers, have called for broad alliances of American progressives against the corporate "attack on democracy," and are putting their rhetoric into practice through such formations as the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition, the Progressive Alliance, and Citizens Opposed to Inflation in the Necessities...
...No group in DSOC romanticizes the conservative, stagnant, and repressive character of the Soviet Union, nor defends its cynical and sometimes brutal foreign policy...
...And even if Government planners were to hit on the right blend of fiscal and monetary restraint to boost corporate profits, those profits would probably be plowed into unproductive forms of investment — mergers, for example...
...The attempt by American Express to acquire the McGraw-Hill publishing empire is only the most publicized of a current series of friendly and hostile take-over bids...
...military dictators and right-wing vigilantes, as a license to intensify repression...
...Press dispatches from Peking reported that at the height of the invasion of Vietnam, wall posters appeared criticizing the government and urging immediate military withdrawal...
...The unusual circumstances of Karen Silkwood's death are what have given the case a special meaning and have made her a symbol of growing, world-wide resistance to the nuclear enterprise...
...Borrowing on next year's crops is a way of life for them — and it works if their income keeps up with the rest of the economy...
...The case is significant because it is the first trial of a negligence suit against a nuclear energy operator for radioactive contamination away from the site of operations...
...The politics of trickle down Even the Carter Administration's own economists seem to have been jolted by wholesale and retail price figures released in February by the Department of Labor...
...Can the Chief Executive, who swears under the Constitution to faithfully execute the laws, try to kill some of them...
...It is no small irony that less than a decade ago the United States was engaged in a bloody and devastating imperial war in Indochina that was justified, to the world and the American people, as an attempt to contain "Chinese aggression...
...Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland indicated the farmers would not get what they wanted...
...At the center of such developments — and deeply affected by them — has been the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which held its semi-annual convention in Houston in mid-February...
...press coverage of Mexico: First, the rampant inflation and unemployment that have transformed millions of Mexican nationals into economic refugees, or "illegal aliens," in search of jobs and survival in the United States...
...Basic "separation of powers" questions are at issue...
...Continuation of these trends would mean a return to "double-digit" inflation in 1979...
...When the veto has been challenged in several recent cases, the Department of Justice has supported the challenge...
...The recently organized COIN (Consumers Opposed to Inflation in Necessities) appears to be one effort to attack the problems of inflation through a broad-based coalition seeking reforms that go beyond the traditional remedies...
...Amid threats on his life from the White Brigade and paramilitary groups, he was forced to exercise the better part of valor and cross the border...
...Well, maybe not to our knees, but probably to our cars, in which, at a cost of a dollar a gallon for gas, we'll drive a hundred miles into the countryside in desperate search for a real, honest-to-God tomato — no matter what the price...
...It will have to redirect energy production toward such alternative sources as solar and wind power...
...But he made no attempt to offer a systemic analysis of the causes of this distorted development or to address the reality of a world controlled by greed and manipulated by force...
...The only protection he could proffer the oppressed was the leaky umbrella of the inconsistent and naive "social teaching of the church" — the assurance that their lot would improve when the rich were converted to Christ...
...The Senate has created a new office of Senate Counsel to litigate such matters, and a rider on the Department's appropriation now requires it to notify both houses when it will not defend the constitutionality of a-statute...
...Senator Barry Goldwater's suit against President Carter over the abrogation of some treaties with Taiwan should be rejected, just as was Senator Robert Dole's suit over the Panama Canal treaties...
...The Pope at Puebla Twenty million people caught a glimpse of Pope John Paul II in Mexico, and many millions more around the world followed his whirlwind tour by television and the other media...
...And to achieve these objectives it will have to gain more direct public control over major investment decisions...
...And they might give more thought to the bankers and the energy companies and the insurance conglomerates that are eating us all, including the family farmers, alive...
...A little noted but significant power struggle has broken out in Washington over the President's right to challenge the validity of Federal statutes in court...
...The rich, understandably, loved the show...
...He can either veto a bill or sign it...
...Both the President and Congress should stop asking lawyer-judges to umpire their brawls...
...Church conservatives will interpret these statements as sanctions for perpetuating their authoritarian religion...
...But the significance of the Karen Silkwood case goes even further...
...Since DSOC's founding, individual members and leaders had spoken out against the growth in the military budget, U.S...
...The Washington Post, whose news stories seemed to emphasize the high price tags of the tractors and the nice clothes worn by many of the farmers, editorialized that the farmers wanted something that, of course, everybody wants — equal footing in the economy...
...COMMENT Chinese roulette The invasion of Vietnam by the People's Republic of China, mounted in mid-February and still continuing as this issue of The Progressive goes to press early in March, constitutes an act of colossal and potentially catastrophic international irresponsibility...
...An average of 2,000 family-owned farms have been disappearing from the landscape each week since 1950...
...A spokesman for Analytical Assessment Corporation of Marina Del Rey, California, which holds one of the research contracts, explains why: "If we plan to win a nuclear exchange we would want them to be able to recover quickly" because the responsibility for getting the Russian people back on their feet would be a burden on the U.S...
...Next year it may be the Soviet Union that embarks on a course of nuclear roulette — or the United States may walk to the brink again, as it has on a number of occasions in the past quarter of a century...
...DSOC was formed in 1973 by the left wing of the Socialist Party — some 300 activists, led by Harrington, who rejected the more conservative members' unquestioning loyalty to the old-line labor leadership of George Meany and the party's timidity on the Vietnam war...
...Christ could not come himself," said Graciela Gonzalez, a sixty-year-old grandmother who lives in the world's largest and most fetid slum, a cesspool of more than two million people hidden from and ignored by the other thirteen million inhabitants of Mexico City, "so he sent the Pope instead to help the poor...
...Why mess around with half-measures when the United States has what it takes to finish them off for good...
...Investment in new plants and products creates jobs, but merger does not...
...The peace forces in this country and elsewhere must double and redouble their efforts to build a worldwide movement for disarmament — not just for arms "control," not for the false promise of SALT II, which speaks of regulating arms while actually fueling the arms race, but for an end to the development and production of weapons and a dismantling of the huge stockpiles that now exist...
...The invasion of Vietnam provides alarming evidence that China may be willing to translate its rhetoric into reality...
...At the same time, we must begin to build a world order that can effectively curb aggression by the superpowers — against each other or against any of the world's smaller and weaker nations...
...For many of the poor, the Pope's visit provided moral support...
...Micki Nellis, editor of American Agriculture News, warns, "When the same companies which control the energy also control the food, they can bring any nation to its knees — including America...
...Theologian Harvey Cox helped lead a discussion of the large religious socialist caucus in the organization...
...Two well-known Mexican activists seeking political asylum in the United States, Hector Marraquin and Jose Medina, have asserted in deportation hearings that they would face persecution if returned to their native land by the U.S...
...The Houston convention reflected a degree of success in pursuing these goals...
...Lawyers preparing the case have appealed for help...
...The Chinese citizens who publicized their dissent — in time of war, in a highly regimented society — are examples to the rest of us...
...Another would "paralyze, disrupt, or dismember" the Russian government by wiping out the ruling group...
...Arthur S. Miller (Arthur S. Miller, an authority on constitutional law, is the author of "The Supreme Court: Myth and Reality...
...In his less prominently publicized appearances — in his brief stop in the Dominican Republic, with the exploited Indians of Oaxaca, for example — John Paul spoke beautifully of his "primary concern" for those who lack food, clothing, shelter, and work...
...That sentiment, while true enough, misses the point...
...Government economists have been notoriously inept at keeping managed recessions from getting out of hand...
...Representative Elliott Levitas of Georgia, who sponsored the amendment, observes, "When an act of Congress is passed and signed into law, it is the law of the United States, and I do not want the Justice Department to pretend to be defending the United States when it is not...
...One target option would be to destroy the regional areas that support the present Soviet government, and thus "unleash forces of separatism...
...What the Department neglected to mention was that when human rights collide with the economic interests of America's petroleum-hungry multinationals, the Carter Administration sees no evil...
...Her car crashed, under suspicious circumstances, while she was driving to a meeting with a union official and a journalist to report on her investigation of plutonium contamination at Kerr-McGee's plant near Oklahoma City...
...Under the terms of a mutual assistance pact between Moscow and Hanoi signed only last November, each nation has an obligation to take "appropriate and effective measures" if the other is attacked...
...The Constitution does not give line-item veto to the President...
...Since 1975, DSOC has had periodic contact with the New American Movement, a socialist group with its roots in the anti-war, student and ' women's movements of the 1960s...
...Reducing the budget — especially the budget for social programs — is a key element, because such cuts will leave labor in a weaker position to oppose corporate wage offers...
...As a law student and leader of the student mobilizations of 1968, Medina helped organize the famous student-worker strike at Mexico City's prestigious National Autonomous University...
...See Richard Barnet's "Ultimate Terrorism" in the February 1979 issue of The Progressive...
...Whatever the Pope's intentions, his visit has resurrected a church that was believed to have been consigned to benign oblivion by Vatican Council II — a church in which the Gra-cielas of Latin America and the world can feel at home...
...But in its February 1978 human-rights report to Congress, the Department praised Mexico's "good international human rights record" and cited its history as a haven for the "persecuted of other countries...
...At the same time, the recent proclivity of individual members of Congress to run to court to challenge Presidential actions should be halted...
...The Pope emerged clearly as a supporter of the status quo, and Mexico's capitalists had reason to feel that the millions poured into the spectacle had been well invested...
...Together, they agreed on two significant initiatives for DSOC — a vigorous effort to aid in the creation of a movement for world peace and disarmament, and exploration of a merger with the New American Movement, another democratic socialist group...
...Jimmy Carter's great hope is that voluntary wage restraint, along with a curtailed Federal budget, will put a brake on economic growth and weaken labor's bargaining power, thus trimming the corporate wage bill, increasing corporate profits, stimulating new investment, and ultimately encouraging economic growth and creation of more jobs...
...Any decline in the rate of inflation is an occasion for assuring us that the President's program is beginning to take hold, while any setback — such as January's — prompts warnings of the "increased urgency" of adhering to the Carter program...
...For the most part, the two investigators note, such practices are carried out in secret detention centers located in remote areas...
...Humanity should not have to lean on such a slender reed...
...it merely increases economic concentration and makes it easier for conglomerates to keep prices artificially high during periods of slack demand and to resist wage demands from unions in any sector of their enterprise...
...My father was patient...
...American University Law Professor Robert Goldman and French lawyer Daniel Jacoby interviewed scores of inmates held in penal institutions throughout the country, and concluded that the Mexican government maintains a secret police force, "The White Brigade," which is responsible for the arbitrary arrest, torture, and disappearance of hundreds of real and suspected opponents of the ruling political party...
...The sense of purpose, growth, and optimism that pervaded the convention stood out in sharp and welcome contrast in our often bleak political environment...
...If Chinese Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping had not been permitted (and encouraged) to engage in an orgy of anti-Soviet saber-rattling during his highly publicized visit to the United States, Peking might have entertained more doubts about the possible consequences of the invasion...
...food production what was done to the New England textile industry — exporting it...
...In their forty-page report, Goldman and Jacoby charge that the White Brigade's torture techniques, which encompass the application of electric shocks, physical beatings, and threats of death against detainees and relatives, are systematically used to extract confessions to imaginary crimes...
...soil...
...Avoidance of a nuclear confrontation depends, at this writing, on the good judgment of the leaders of the Soviet Union...
...That plaintive question, asked in 1753 by a colonial newspaper, has surfaced again...
...It adheres to a new version of an old economic theory — trickle down...
...10017...
...Commenting last month in these pages on the Vietnamese "incursion" into Kampuchea (Cambodia), we asserted that "one nation's military intervention in another's affairs is repugnant in principle and in practice...
...Congress, was there to give a fiery speech on his favorite theme, the "niggerization of the American majority...
...For the past few years, in most crops, it has not...
...If the Supreme Court does rule on a case involving the legislative veto, the Justices should come down hard on the side of Congress...
...Protests against corporate investment in South Africa have spread across American campuses in the past year — a recent conference of East Coast activists brought together more than 1,200 participants...
...Now, more than four years after the death of the young plutonium worker, an Oklahoma court has begun to hear evidence in an $11.5 million damage suit filed by her father against her employer, the giant Kerr-McGee Corporation...
...Parity would be a quick fix costing consumers a bearable increase in prices (three cents for a loaf of bread), but it is not the long-term solution, as many farmers themselves suspect...
...It is not yet clear how united its members will be on programs that begin to impinge seriously on traditional "business prerogatives," nor is it certain that COIN can make the transition from a loose alliance of organization heads to an activist movement in which rank-and-file members are involved in the development and implementation of programs...
...Once again humanity's survival depends, intolerably, on whether one or another of the superpowers will restrain itself from unleashing the ultimate disaster of nuclear war...
...Although the facts remain to be adjudicated, the case has aroused the concern of a great many people outside of Oklahoma...
...But before they come rolling back next year, they might take more time to understand — and join forces with — the traditionally and truly disadvantaged segments of our society who have been marching (not driving) on Washington for a long time now...
...Its resolution should come not in the courts but in the political arena...
...At the convention, therefore, DSOC supported a series of foreign policy and organizational priorities that add up to a major commitment, as Harrington described in his keynote speech, "to the campaign for disarmament and a truly democratic foreign policy...
...Washington's complicity in the present crisis should not be overlooked...
...It held that such coalitions could be built around what DSOC called "the left wing of possibility" — programs of structural change that would begin to challenge the corporate stranglehold in such areas as energy, transportation, taxes, employment, and social services...
...Furthermore, the Department must declare in court that it represents the Executive, not "the United States...
...second, Mexico's proven and possible reserves of natural gas and oil that may exceed even those of Saudi Arabia and could, given proper coddling of President Lopez Portillo, translate into an energy bonanza for American-owned multinational corporations...
...Only once did they almost lose control of the scenario: In the industrial city of Monterrey, the Pope insisted on denouncing employers who pay slave wages to migratory labor...
...consumer cooperatives and grain reserves to control food prices, and a major national effort to develop renewable energy sources...
...For an account of Hector Marra-quin's case, see the June 1978 issue of The Progressive...
...Still other studies examine the possibilities of knocking out just the electric-power component of Soviet industrial technology...
...Isolated physically and emotionally behind nine-foot-high walls, they could not hear the cries of suffering from all parts of the hemisphere that pervaded the streets and meeting halls nearby...
...But the political and legal climate of our southern neighbor has been largely ignored by the mass media...
...20018...
...As its designation as an "organizing committee" suggested, the group set itself the task of bringing together progressive constituencies far broader than the socialist Left itself...
...GARY MACEOIN andNlVITA RILEY (Gary MacEoin wrote "A Continent in Agony: Latin America on the Road to Fascism," in the March issue of The Progressive...
...But what did it all mean...
...China's invasion of Vietnam demonstrates that there is little time left to achieve these goals...
...The Supreme Court has backed away so far from all opportunities to decide the question, but the constitutional struggle will ultimately have to be resolved...
...companies...
...COIN's program encompasses lower interest rates and credit allocation to ease housing prices...
...More than 70 per cent of U.S...
...At the same time, DSOC hoped that through such coalition building it would make democratic socialism a respected and legitimate current in American political life...
...In their emergency, the farmers understandably will keep banging on the Carter Administration's closed door...
...Most understand, moreover, that human survival itself depends upon substantive progress toward disarmament...
...Even coordinated efforts by the 20 per cent of American workers organized in unions will not be adequate...
...Low-income and moderate-income consumers spend at least 70 per cent of the earnings on necessities, and during the past year prices of those necessities — including food, energy, housing, and health care — rose at almost twice the rate of non-necessities...
...In both cases the orders for Justice Department intervention came from the White House, and in both cases the Justice Department acted without notifying Congress...
...But COIN's efforts represent a promising beginning toward something better than the politics of trickle down...
...A Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and Sandinist guerrilla leader spoke for them at Puebla, addressing not the self-incarcerated bishops but the world: "No ecclesiastical document can stop us from doing what the Gospel tells us to do...
...exploitation of undocumented Mexicans...
...But for progressive leaders, as for the more than 100,000 grass-roots communities hidden in urban and rural slums, there will be no turning back...
...Individual unions are no match for a widespread corporate and Government offensive against the interests of working men and women...
...A "substantial number" of the prisoners interviewed had been jailed without trial or sentence for periods in excess of the one-year constitutional limit on bringing an accused to trial...
...Contributions may be sent to the non-profit Karen Silkwood Fund, Box 10037, Washington D.C...
...Judges are ill suited to decide delicate questions of this type — questions that the Constitution does not settle in its express language...
...At this writing, the State Department has issued no official response to the Goldman-Jacoby investigation...
...The Consumer Price Index rose by 9 per cent last year, and American workers suffered a 3.4 per cent drop in real income...
...Representative Dellums, a member who likes to call himself » "the socialist caucus" of the U.S...
...Still, the Administration's approach is neither mindless nor lacking in support...
Vol. 43 • April 1979 • No. 4
