COMMENT

...Remember, the gays don't give up easily—especially when they've already got their foot in the door...

...The war had broken out when a Minneapolis resource group that for twenty years has provided expert instruction in everything from autoharp strumming to dog training announced a new offering: a panel "which will explain myths and stereotypes and provide information about lesbians and gays in schools, in families, and in history...

...As our economic disarray deepens—and it doubtless will—the stress should be on those reforms that advance the cause of public control...

...It's a safe bet the President's new science adviser, who has spent his professional life in the nuclear physics establishment, won't ever tell them anything they don't want to hear...

...Joseph and Babb, after all, have given up their jobs, and Greenwald has been threatened with civil and criminal charges...

...But we are not obliged to await such a transformation like so many passive spectators at a scoreless game...

...Consequently, in the business community, demands for further budget cuts are already being heard...

...The possibility of heroism A few months ago, a former Government researcher told us a sad but familiar story...

...Within the United Auto Workers, for example, dissidents are 'demanding not only a greater voice in their own union but also greater opportunities for public input into corporate planning—based, among other things, on public access to corporate books...

...Teller's choice George A. Keyworth II was not a big name in the world of science, but he had a big name behind him: Edward Teller, "father of the H-bomb," who believes in achieving peace through the threat of destruction...

...Thus, if we want to combat regional unemployment it is helpful to pursue a strategy that compels corporations to open their books, justify their conduct to affected communities, and pay substantial benefits to laid-off workers...

...Under heavy pressure from the Carter Administration, it was diluted from a mandatory regulation to an advisory recommendation...

...Keyworth was not the choice of the scientific establishment, which preferred Simon Ramo, a giant of a figure in high technology, former chairman of the company he founded, TRW, a man dedicated to restoring the innovative capacity of the United States—and a member of the corporate defense establishment...

...Not long after the gay information.panel was offered, the school board set conditions on its appearance in high schools and banned it completely from the lower grades, making homosexuality the district's first officially taboo subject...

...Having lambasted the Carter Administration for its anti-reprocessing stand and having persuaded the Reagan forces that reprocessing is the only answer to the problem of radioactive waste management, the nuclear industry found itself in the embarrassing position of having to admit it didn't want reprocessing enough to pay for it...

...Ever since, radioactive spent fuel has been accumulating at nuclear power plants around the country...

...In 1972, the nation's first commercial reprocessing facility ceased operation at West Valley, New York, because of technical problems...

...United Nations officials estimate that one million infants die yearly from malnutrition and disease associated with improper formula use...

...Theirs were heroic acts, unexpected from bureaucrats...

...The price of being a hero is not as high for American bureaucrats as it was for Thomas More...

...Attorney General Smith was a Regent...

...Keyworth says he got along with them famously and found them "dedicated Americans...

...The fact is that no President, whether he views himself as a latter-day Keynesian or a hard-shell supply-sider, can afford to let interest rates scale astronomical heights or to let inflation soar out of sight...

...Another reprocessing attempt took a dive in 1975, when General Electric, citing insuperable technical difficulties, gave up on building a reprocessing plant at Morris, Illinois...

...A Washington player more seasoned than the young researcher would have known the score without being told— would have known that in Washington, to get along, you go along...

...There is something special, of course, about the Reagan economic program—its special disregard for human needs, its special indifference to (or even contempt for) those who are disadvantaged in our society...

...This is not the worst of times to mount such an effort...

...no" vote understandably attracted worldwide attention, more significant were the "yes" votes of the other governments, many of which have been too quick in the past to accept almost any corporate product as "progress...

...According to Natividad Clavano, a pediatrician who carried out the study, there was no other explanation for the healthier babies...

...This approach is bound to be resisted by those timid Democrats and leaders of unions, environmental groups, and consumer organizations who seem determined to don the protective coloring of the conservatism they see prevailing in Washington...

...Silencing gays while claiming respect for their civil rights is likely to leave students confused rather than innocent—about homosexuality, which can somehow be acceptable and taboo at the same time, and about school itself, which pretends to be about education while it stamps out unconventional points of view...

...Our country has been less hospitable than most to visions of radical alternatives...

...Stephen C. Joseph was the agency's top health official and Eugene N. Babb was the top agricultural and rural development official...

...Unlike Ronald Reagan, we are confronted with no limits to the options we may feel free to evaluate...

...Falwell, at least, calls his shots openly: Homosexuals are "perverted, immoral individuals" while students are "innocent children...

...We are reminded of that famous bureaucrat, Sir Thomas More, who sacrificed his life for his integrity...

...He had the help of Attorney General William French Smith...

...If gays have a foot in the Minneapolis schoolhouse door, it is not because administrators have thrown out a welcome mat...

...They assume—quite mistakenly, in our judgment—that widespread public disillusionment with inadequate liberal programs is proof that "the country has turned conservative...

...Indeed...

...The climate, it turned out, needs to become a lot more favorable...

...Such efforts, even if multiplied a hundredfold and instantly institutionalized, would hardly constitute a revolutionary transformation of our society...

...This spineless squelching of minority opinion, adorned with liberal free-speech rhetoric, is possibly more pernicious than Jerry Falwell's "war against homosexuals...

...in its present form, it does not ban all formula promotion but urges individual governments to prohibit some of the worst sales ploys of the manufacturers...

...The overwhelming approval of the code suggests a new willingness to challenge America's mystique of "modernization," and to draw distinctions between technology that helps and technology that merely exploits...

...The school board did not want to invoke censorship or limit the civil rights of gays—it just did not want them talking in classrooms...

...Regardless of the promises that may have helped carry him into office or the policies he may have espoused once safely ensconced in the White House, every recent President has felt compelled to try to ease inflation by balancing the budget and inducing recession—by no means the best remedies, but the only ones acceptable to the corporate leaders who are the real shapers of economic policy...

...Teller nominated Key-worth to the post of science adviser to the President, and Keyworth, director of the physics division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, got the job...

...Just by doing the natural way, giving babies where they belong, to their mothers, we were able to do this," she said...

...It should come as no surprise that they would oppose any measure threatening their combined overseas sales of $150 million...

...In the business pages of The New York Times, Leonard Silk cautioned that the President "must prove to the markets that he is prepared to go as far as necessary to halt inflation by altering his budget and tax plans...

...There is, in fact, some evidence at hand of a spreading grass-roots awareness of the true, dimensions and true causes of our economic disarray...

...To refuse to consider the full range of possibilities at this time because some may seem unattainable only adds self-fulfilling prophecy to our burdens...

...Any Federal program geared to promoting a full-employment economy and meeting urgent domestic needs would also create intolerable inflationary pressures in a system that gives corporate monopolies sweeping power to control prices of goods and essential services...

...In effect, the White House decided to find its own man on its own terms...

...But as science adviser he is going to work for a tearn whose foreign policy borders on thuggery...

...That came about because Keyworth, a brilliant young comer at Los Alamos, was appointed to a committee to help select a director for the New Mexico laboratory, which made the nation's first atomic bomb...

...So much for the historic turning point...

...Although the U.S...

...In January 1980, when Jimmy Carter—facing what was sure to be a tough campaign for re-election—submitted his last complete budget to Congress, he made the proud claim that funding levels would be sustained for all of the traditional social programs that had been the Democrats' stock in trade for a couple of generations...

...Since Los Alamos is managed by the University of California, the University Regents had to approve the final selection...

...But for those of us who are committed to something more substantial than a nostalgic yearning for the liberal nostrums of yesteryear, it is time to move to a more difficult agenda—one that focuses on such questions as who controls our economy and to what ends, and how we can place our most urgent and fundamental policy decisions under public rather than private control, so that we can create a society based on justice rather than on profits...

...You're not a team player—and that's an unforgivable sin...

...He has been to the Soviet Union, taught a course there, and has taken up as a hobby the history of Oriental philosophy...

...But outrage at the callous Reagan budget should not divert us from the realization that even a Federal budget grounded in more humane considerations—the proposal of the Congressional Black Caucus, for instance, to impose modest cuts in military spending and modest increases for social programs—could not provide much in the way of economic justice for most Americans...

...Perplexingly, only a few days later the prime interest rate soared to 20 per cent, the bond market was sent into a panic, and the stock market went into retreat...

...they said it's Government's role...

...The truth came out when the pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy, James Edwards, invited key industry leaders— Allied Chemical, General Electric, Exxon Nuclear, West-inghouse, Duke Power, Merrill Lynch, Carolina Light & Power, Commonwealth Edison, International Energy Associates^—to a meeting to assess private interest in commercial nuclear storage and reprocessing...

...In President Reagan's case, the dilemma is even more acutely drawn: As Leonard Silk has reported in The Times, there is deep concern in the bond and stock markets that the President's dreams of steep increases in military spending and substantial tax cuts will compel the Government to borrow heavily, placing intolerable burdens on the credit markets...

...Finally a friend took him aside and said, in essence, "You might as well stop looking...

...Nuclear war is now officially thinkable by the likes of Caspar Weinberger and Alexander Haig, to whom Key-worth will be supplying scientific advice...

...Supply-side pipedreams of cutting taxes while preserving vital domestic programs have already given way to proposed reductions in Social Security benefits and open acknowledgement that the President will accept deferral of some of his tax-cut plans...

...Said Wade Ballard, the Department's deputy director for the nuclear fuel cycle, "They wouldn't invest $2 billion in a new reprocessing plant...

...If the Left is to offer a credible agenda and a hopeful prospect of broad coalition politics, it must openly acknowledge and explain the failures of liberalism...

...A conversation with Keyworth reveals a pleasant personality, even a cultured intellect...

...If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable," Twentieth Century playwright Robert Bolt has More say in A Man for All Seasons, "common sense would make us good and greed would make us saintly...

...But the ink was hardly dry on that budget before Carter was pushing a "revised" version that called for deep slashes in domestic spending, including cuts of $250 million from the funds for higher education, $400 million from the National Institutes of Health, $850 million from job training programs...

...Whatever the final arrangement may be, "it is clear that industry wants Government to take over reprocessing as it has uranium enrichment," says the Energy Department's nuclear fuel cycle chief...

...Ramo wanted that, and more...

...In a number of cities, tenants' rights organizations have carried their politics beyond demands for rent control to such issues as credit allocation and closer scrutiny of the ways in which private capital shapes the housing market...

...But then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, came the moment of truth...

...Even the start-up of the Barnwell plant by Allied Chemical and Gulf Oil awaits a $300 million appropriation from Congress...

...School superintendent Richard Green explained, "I don't stand against public information being available on alternative lifestyles, but the public schools don't necessarily have a right to provide that information...

...rather, he, like his predecessors in the Oval Office, had found his decision-making powers severely circumscribed by the vagaries of our inflation-ridden economy...

...Their preoccupation with the Reagan Administration's cutbacks in.favorite programs, their failure to come up with any notion of broad economic reconstruction, create an unfortunate impression of the Left as narrowly self-interested and intellectually bankrupt...

...Early in 1980, Carter faced an international crisis over a weakening dollar and responded with the only stratagem that seemed to him to make sense—a balanced budget, and one that was balanced not at the expense of military appropriations and business benefits, but at the expense of domestic welfare programs...

...What we can do is concentrate our efforts on promoting those reforms which make genuine progress possible by exposing and attacking the true causes of our crisis...

...Being offered much less, he took his name off the list of candidates, as did a score of others the transition team put forward...

...In a different but equally admirable protest, Carol Greenwald, the president of the year-old National Consumer Cooperative Bank, which was set up to give loans to cooperatives, lifted $60 million of the bank's money and stowed it in a commercial account so that President Reagan (who wants to shut the bank down) could not impound it...

...Nor should it come as a surprise that the Reagan Administration cast the world's only "no" vote on the code...

...Wil Lepkowski (Wil Lepkowski writes for Chemical & Engineering News in Washington, D.C...

...Even the mild and meek proposals of the Congressional Black Caucus, hauntingly reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson's pathetic Great Society, were dismissed by the media as "extreme" and overwhelmingly defeated by the House of Representatives...

...That not being the case, "why then ¦wemust stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes...

...One current proposal to involve the Government is a nuclear version of the U.S...

...Inflation and higher interest rates could push the Government's need for credit even higher—the formal Reagan budget could expand by $20 billion, according to private forecasters...

...Of course, such a change on a global scale would also mean millions of dollars lost to Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers, and American Home Products, America's three leading infant formula makers...

...In any case, the conventional liberal palliatives are no longer viable...

...On the other hand, when the Ba-guio General Hospital in the Philippines placed constraints on formula promotion, a two-year study of 10,000 births showed breast feeding increased by 81 per cent—and infant mortality dropped by 47 per cent...

...Nobody wanted him...

...It must advance genuinely radical alternatives as the only practical, realistic response to our present drift...

...All the more reason to applaud the courage of several seasoned players who, in recent weeks, have refused to go along with the Reagan Administration...

...While the Republican science transition team wanted an upgraded, powerful Office of Science and Technology Policy, adviser Meese wanted something small, headed by a scientist with no ambitious thoughts about a direct communication line to the President...

...Catherine Quigg (Catherine Quigg is a researcher and writer for Pollution and Environmental Problems, a public interest group in Palatine, Illinois...

...For the reality is that the unpredictable ups and downs of our irrational economy—not Presidents or Congress—shape Federal budgets and tax levels...

...To be sure, such an agenda smacks of "socialism" and is generally assumed to be politically unattainable in the United States...

...COMMENT Reagan's options—and ours It was something less than the Second Coming, but you'd never have guessed that from the way the press treated Congressional approval of Ronald Reagan's budget cuts...

...Reagan, like Carter before him, is the prisoner of an economy that is trapped between constant inflation and induced stagnation...

...Industry's bottom line, Ballard said in an interview, is that "commercial reprocessing is not viable without Government involvement...

...it is much less helpful to demand Federal funds to retrain workers for nonexistent jobs...

...Silencing gays Not long ago, the Moral Majority mailed a letter to members asking for money to finance "the war against homosexuals in Minnesota...

...Yet anything that slows formula feeding may save countless lives in countries where poverty, primitive sanitation, and a lack of refrigeration can make milk substitutes a lethal brew...

...When he saw that a report he had written under contract was about to be gutted, he leaked the uncensored draft to the press...

...It scares me to think for even one moment our children will be exposed to the moral perversion of homosexuality presented as an acceptable lifestyle," fretted the letter, signed by Moral Majority President Jerry Falwell...

...The personal consequences of these protests, which succeeded in bringing attention to the issues, could be painful to the individual protesters...

...The path led in April to the White House and a meeting with Presidential advisers Edwin Meese, James Baker, and Martin Anderson...

...But the need for heroism is no less great...

...For all of Ronald Reagan's sloganeering about new departures to get the American economy moving again, his options are limited, in essence, to those that have been available to his predecessors...

...In 1980, aggrieved by such anti-nuclear stances as his refusal to cooperate in the construction and licensing of a commercial reprocessing plant being built by private industry at Barnwell, South Carolina, the industry campaigned actively against President Carter's reelection...

...In the Agency for International Development, two high-ranking administrators resigned to protest the Administration's opposition to the international infant-formula code...

...But the White House staff had other ideas...

...Recognition of that reality is missing from the liberals' current hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth about the Reagan program...

...That project completed, he began trekking Washington halls in search of new work...

...Some exuberant conservatives proclaimed it as the end of the welfare state, the death of liberalism, and the imminent advent of unimaginable economic stability and prosperity...

...Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO was moved to denounce Carter for embracing "Hooverist Republican" economics...

...There is, in fact, a likelihood that the Administration's supply-side theories will never be put fully to the test—that they will not be given a fair opportunity to fail...

...Carter had not, in fact, been born again as a Hoover Republican...

...He and Keyworth mixed frequently, along with other members of Reagan's "California mafia," and Keyworth's future course was charted...

...Communications Satellite program, COMSAT, a Government-guaranteed private enterprise with its own financial structure and ability to raise capital...

...The nuclear freeloaders Almost a decade has passed since the American nuclear industry had its first unpromising experience with "reprocessing"—the chemical separation of fuel-rich (and radioactive) plutonium and unburned uranium from the spent fuel rods of nuclear reactors...

...through generations of economic growth and expanding empire, many Americans have acquired a profound devotion to the status quo...

...If that is to be the fate of even the most moderate proposals, why not begin to promote public dialogue about genuine, fundamental, structural change...

...But the era of growth and empire is over, and we need no longer dismiss radical solutions as "unrealistic...

...Though the Administration professes deep devotion to the traditional concepts of "family" and "human life"—especially when it comes to opposing such perceived threats to life and family as abortion and contraception for teens—profits remain the first priority, and any possible restraint on profits must be resisted even if it means holding the United States up to worldwide scorn...

...Industry points as an example to government-organized reprocessing companies now operating in Britain, France, and West Germany...

...The President's Famous Victory, handed to him by devoted Republicans and befuddled Democrats, was recorded in the media as an event of almost unparalleled significance: Editorials, op ed columns, and broadcast commentaries were breathless with references to the historic turning point...

...Baby bottle battle The World Health Organization's code for infant formula marketing can hardly be called a hard-line measure...

...The meeting had been instigated by a memo from President Reagan suggesting that the Department of Energy consult with industry to "develop recommendations for my further review on how to create a more favorable climate for private reprocessing efforts...

...And in 1977, although the backlog of highly radioactive fuel rods was beginning to reach serious dimensions, and the nuclear industry was crying for relief, President Jimmy Carter stepped in with an order banning further reprocessing on the ground that recovery of plutonium (which fuels bombs as well as power plants) could enhance the proliferation of nuclear weapons...

...Why should private enterprise pick up the tab for reprocessing plants when, with a little help from a Government bent on restoring the nuclear industry to its former heights, it can have them free...