DATELINES
DATELINES CHEERING VETS austin, texas What does a U.S. veteran who may have been exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war have to cheer about? Not much, until September 1, when a new law is...
...Garcia, a former Organizer for the United Farm Workers, praised the workers Willing to risk deportation by stepping forward...
...Los Angeles is one of dozens of cities around the country with long histories of police spying...
...The smuggler is able t? make bail because he usually has money...
...At General Public Utilities, which operates the TMI plant, public relations manager Philip Fine dismisses their charges as "fiction...
...Critics have argued that the court-sanctioned guidelines are still too vague to curtail surveillance...
...Pushed through the Texas legislature at a speed that astonished even the Sponsoring veterans' group, the law requires the State not only to monitor Agent Orange patients, but to provide them, on request, with state-paid diagnostic testing...
...Even some engineers joined in," said Christina Mork, assistant editor of Metall's Metalworkers Magazine...
...I feit like a criminal," she says...
...He ought to put down the binoculars and pick up a mirror...
...The workers charged Retlaw and its local managers, Anthony Paino and Allyn Ro-setta, with paying workers as little as $1 an hour and with conspiring to keep them in the dark about minimum wage laws...
...PEERING COPS los angeles For more than two years, activists in the Santa Monica-Venice chapter of the anti-nuclear Alliance for Survival knew Richard Gibbey as a soft-spoken member who regu-larly attended meetings, rallies, and forums and frequently volunteered to help with se-curity at Alliance events...
...With the sacrament perched on the hood of his worn sedan, Donovan opened mass with a ques-tion: "For what shall we preach...
...The Thompsons, both thirty, monitored radiation at the crippled Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania for a month after the accident in 1979...
...Later, it was found that the police had also spied on members of the city Council and the board of education...
...All this offers little encouragement to the Thompsons, but though frightened, they remain determined to get their message across...
...Jack Norman (Jack Norman is a free-lance writer in Mil-waukee, Wisconsin...
...Randall Thompson told me why in a recent interview at the Oklahoma home of his parents...
...The lawsuit brings to nine the number of Los Angeles police officers accused of spying in suits filed over the past three years...
...Funding for the project began to dry up under a skeptical Carter Administration, and the Energy Department's SPS office "is now working in other areas," according to Project Director Fred Koomanoff...
...Word of the Texas success spread rap-idly to other states, where veterans hope to pass similar measures...
...The multi-union effort was especially big news in Sweden since a ma-jority of the sympathy strikers were white-collar workers from corporate headquar-ters, not blue-collar machinists...
...Pior no se puede quedar...
...Rod Davis (Rod Davis, former editor of The Texas Ob-server, is afree-lance writer in Dallas...
...As a result, Gibbey is now a de-fendant in a lawsuit filed in July by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), charging the Los Angeles Police Department with spying on lawful political groups...
...As an aide to one of its most ardent Congressional backers says, the satellite system has been "put on hold" and is likely to remain that way for a long time...
...Bluntly stating that further money spent on the System would be wasted, the Academy found that the $3.2 trillion System "compared poorly on technical and economic grounds" with advanced coal technologies and terrestrial solar cells...
...That's a powerful political force, and it provided clout for the Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans (BVV), the Austin vets' group that spearheaded the Texas legislative campaign...
...A more miserly Congress, however, is not the only reason the satellite concept is faring so poorly...
...What the Thompsons and Bloombaum are saying is that residents of Middletown, Pennsylvania, received higher doses of ra-dioactive iodine-131 than reported...
...For...
...Evidence is mounting that other local law-enforcement agencies may be involved in spying as well...
...11 National Academy of Science: Re-examining the DOE's assumptions and findings, the Academy thoroughly debunked previous cost estimates, finding them "off by a wide margin, making the price tag two and a half times too low even in the most optimistic view...
...With 18,000 employes and annual sales of $1.5 billion, it is one of Sweden's dozen largest industrial firms...
...The strike began over economic issues but has turned into a case of union-busting...
...mothers and children transferred quickly to a local Salvation Army center for "dis-placed" families and to place older juveniles in foster homes...
...But Marta, a fifteen-year-old from the Mexican border city of Mexicali who spent a few days in the Federal prison, disputes that...
...But the people he smug-gled are denied their liberty...
...We come here and they treat us like animals...
...They feed you and you can watch TV, but they always have a guard watching you...
...Retlaw is Walter spelled backward, and the firm is controlled by members of Disney's corporate family...
...G&H hired "permanent replacements" and says it will rehire only twenty-five strikers...
...Humanitarian trappings, however, can-not change the fact that the Federal Government is imprisoning innocent children...
...There, the machinists have been on strike against G&H Products for more than a year...
...SWEDISH SOLIDARITY stockholm Have you heard about the strike by eighty-eight members of the International Association of Machinists in Kenosha, Wisconsin...
...The VA has consistently denied a link between Agent Orange and the cancer, birth defects, and nervous disorders afflicting some of the veterans exposed to the defoliant...
...Witnesses with children are segregated from other inmates, prison officials add, and every effort is made to get IAN DRYDEN San Diego's prison was temporary home last year to 200 children...
...After a few hours in Border Patrol cus-tody, Ana Maria and her boys were taken to San Diego's high-rise maximum security Federal prison, booked, given medical ex-aminations, and locked in a small cell...
...They say the Company has blamed TMI's Operators, but in fact the real problem lies with the mechanics of reactors...
...when Omang told.the Thompsons it was be-ing held, the skittish family vanished...
...Some states have Agent Orange monitoring Councils, but nowhere is there a law as extensive as the one passed in Texas...
...In the past, we've been more con-cerned about what the American multina-tionals were doing here...
...They also speculate that the Three Mile Island accident was not caused by a loss of coolant— the official explanation—but by faulty ura-nium fuel...
...State laws may or may not be successful in bucking the VA, but veterans believe widespread action at the State level may eventually budge Washington...
...Allied on one side in the case are the illegal workers, a Mexican consular officer who has pledged assistance from his government, and California Rural Legal Assistance, a Federally funded public-interest law firm which Ronald Reagan tried to shut down when he was governor...
...The warehousing may last for as long as three months, until whatever time the trial attorneys need the witnesses...
...Now, we're more and more concerned about what Swedish multinationals are doing abroad...
...Alfa-Laval owns G&H...
...He told a story of continuing fear—of a flight to Texas, of a call on friends by the Secret Service, of a trip where they met with Dr...
...From such desperation, a new movement among farmworkers has sprung...
...It also predicted that the System would interfere with radio Communications and with optical and radio astronomy...
...In 1978 and again in 1979, legislation calling for expenditures of $270 million on the satellite over five years swept through the House of Representatives only to be shelved by the Senate...
...Far below, their receiving stations, each covering ninety miles, convert the microwaves to electricity for distribution through a greatly expanded Utility grid network...
...But few will listen—and fewer still will believe their hypotheses...
...Several oc-currences at the emergency room and funeral home made the edgy Thompsons suspicious of the accident...
...It has been that way since 1971, when a Federal court ruled that to release some witnesses before they could testify denied the accused smuggler due process in preparing a legal defense...
...There's no doubt that rac-ism makes it possible for something like this to happen...
...It was the first time ever that Swedish workers had gone on strike in support of foreign workers...
...The problem is that it's unfair...
...The BVV presented the measure as a "veterans' bill," not a radi-cal challenge to the Federal Government—or to the chemical industry...
...The point is there are laws in this country, laws people fought hard for, and you've got to demand that they're followed...
...11 Office of Technology Assessment: Re-lying on panels of experts from varied scientific and social fields, OTA found the System would foster international political tensions, could have military applications, might disrupt the Signals of Communications satellites, and would not reduce U.S...
...What Alliance members did not know was that Gibbey was also a Los Angeles police officer assigned to the department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division—the modern Version of the city's old "Red Squad...
...Tom Winters of the Physicians for Social Responsibility...
...One Consultant who also worked for the National.Academy of Sciences, Dr...
...Three other Alfa-Laval unions joined Metall for the two-hour sympathy strikes in June and July...
...In fact, at a time when NASA cannot even se-cure the comparative pocket change for a 1986 Halley's Comet fly-by mission, it is in-conceivable that the SPS will fly within this decade...
...Maybe that wouldn't be so bad...
...Now you can believe me or you can believe this team of experts...
...In Sweden, not only white-collar workers but Supervisors and foremen are unionized, and they also took part...
...some place to live...
...The ©WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS answers came scattershot in Spanish: "Preach for those of us hiding in these h?ls...
...it demands that returning strikers go to the bottom of the seniority list...
...Marshai James Laffoon contends that con-ditions at the prison "are as comfortable as these people are used to...
...The conditions are worse here than in any other county in the State...
...Union members agree that it had a good record...
...Garcia asked, falling in shadow now behind a nearby avocado grove...
...Even lobbyists for the chemical companies worked sub rosa to mute industry Opposition, and such unlikely bedfellows as the Veterans of Foreign Wars gotinontheact...
...In the Los Angeles cases, which will probably be com-bined in one major trial that may not be held for at least two more years, the Citizens' Commission and the ACLU are seeking a permanent ban on spying with criminal penalties for violations...
...When the mass was over, Rural Legal Assistance staff worker Roberto Garcia gathered the workers around him for a pep talk...
...After several years in the courts, suits against spying in New York and Chicago have recently been settled, al-though the merits of the Settlements are be-ing hotly debated...
...Finally, San Diego officials point with pride to their ultramodern prison, complete with carpeting, large Windows, and color television...
...Doug Foster (Doug Foster is an associate ofthe Center for Investigative Reporting in Oakland, California...
...dependence on foreign oil in this Century...
...In addition, the bill allows the Texas attorney general to sue the U.S...
...Attorney General William French Smith is a partner in the firm...
...The farm, spread through rolling h?ls on the western edge of California's lush Coachella Valley, has suddenly become the setting for a major battle over the rights of illegal aliens...
...it insists that the union shop be eliminated, and it Supports a decertification election in which the union could be thrown out of the plant altogether...
...But instead of Willing publishers, the three found threats and harassment when they tried to get their story into print...
...Ignoring all this, satellite advocates have touted one positive finding of the study: The United States does have the technological expertise to build the System...
...Se-riously frightened, the Thompsons fled Pennsylvania for Taos...
...Times change, however...
...But a remake of the previous bills has languished since January in the House Science and Technology Committee, and its initial Sponsor considers its passage in the near future a "long shot...
...For a jail it wasn't real bad, but my children could not understand why we were locked up and they kept asking me, 'Can we go home now?' " Each year, several thousand undocu-mented aliens, many of them children, are arrested and jailed along the border near San Diego, not for unlawfully entering the country, but merely for having witnessed an alleged crime—their own smuggling into the United States...
...Be-tween 1974 and 1980, some $26.2 million was poured into Department of Energy (DOE) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) efforts to determine the concept's feasibility...
...DOWN TO EARTH WASHINGTON, D.C...
...Think of it: Sixty satellites, each the size of Manhattan Island, slowly circling the globe, Converting solar radiation and beaming the captured energy via microwaves to Earth...
...When the state's historic Agri-cultural Labor Relations Act was passed more than five years ago, most observers as-sumed California's "farm labor problem" had been solved...
...To you and me, this may sound like some Star Wars fantasy, but until recently the Solar Power Satellite (SPS) program won real support from the likes of the Sun-sat Energy Council (the aerospace and Utility lobby) and the pro-space L-5 Society...
...INNOCENTS IMMURED san diego Ana Maria, a young Mexican undocu-mented immigrant, spoke nervously of her four days in prison...
...With case after case of police surveillance surfacing in Los Angeles, Police Chief Daryl Gates's stock reply to critics has been, "I don't know what police spying is...
...The Congressional outlook for the sky-borne behemoths is not much better...
...They sleep in the canyons and streambeds, in shelters con-structed from rolls of old plastic stretched across sticks lashed together with twine...
...So the worst that can happen to you is that you'd get sent away from here...
...What got Swedes so upset is that "it's a Swedish Company involved in union-busting," said Thorsten Wetterblad, director of international affairs for the Swedish Metalworkers Union, known as Metall...
...If not racism, certainly an attitude of cultural superiority makes it possible...
...There's no question that it's legal to hold material witnesses," says Edward Infante, a San Diego Federal magistrate who, as a lawyer, successfully argued the 1971 case...
...But the story never saw print...
...Why the support...
...A few miles away in a dirt Clearing, Father Edward Donovan, a priest who ministers to migrant farmworkers, con-ducted a special outdoor mass for the un-documented workers Irving a shadowy exis-tence in these remote canyons...
...It prides itself on a high level of lab?r relations, which is impor-tant in a country as heavily unionized as Sweden...
...Jordan is now 100 per cent disabled...
...Because they are often the only persons who can provide prosecutors with testimony to convict the accused smugglers, and because they are undocu-mented immigrants who would presumably flee if released, the witnesses are arrested and imprisoned...
...COMING UP FOR AIR wilburton, oklahoma Randall Thompson, his wife, Marian, and their two children, Tashah and Stephan, who caused a stir last February with their sudden and mysterious disappearance from Taos, New Mexico, have resurfaced...
...But the United Farm Workers Union has grown less rapidly than predicted, and more than two-thirds of the state's field laborers—most of them illegal aliens—have been left unprotected...
...Trouble followed the Thompsons...
...It has been the talk of Sweden recently...
...Thus the Disneylandia workers have turned to the courts for redress...
...Three major studies of its viability were completed recently, and their findings must have been like a cold shower to SPS enthusiasts: f DOEINASA: Three years of study as-certained that creation of the satellite System could seriously affect the environment during construction, endanger the health and safety of space workers, deplete scarce resources, be vulnerable to space- or earth-borne attack, centralize control and Operation of the nation's Utility network, con-sume large areas of land, and cost about a trillion dollars...
...For health...
...At a meeting of more than thirty persons, the undercover officer got up and, according to sworn affidavits filed in the case, said, "I think that the only way we can stop the murdering of children in Atlanta is for us to go out and kill white babies...
...Along with thirty-four-year-old David Bloombaum, like Thompson a dropout nuclear techni-cian, they wrote a book about their find-ings...
...They have vowed to stick together—dodging the Border Patrol and grubbing out subsistence on nearby farms—because they believe the lawsuit is only the opening shot of a long campaign to improve conditions and wages in the Coachella Valley...
...Last year, almost 200 children were locked up' at the Federal prison in San Diego...
...We've been talking a lot about fear, but what are you so afraid of...
...Apologists for the System argue that it is actually humanitarian: If kids arrive with their mothers, it would be heartless then to separate them...
...Last June, the ACLU filed suit against the Los Angeles school district, charging that a special school security agent had infiltrated a group formed to conduct public education about the murders of black children in Atlanta...
...Says Thompson, "All I want is the chance to say, 'Hey, I was one of the highest ranking radiation technicians that worked at Three Mile Island and I saw all this bullshit going on and here's what I saw and here's what I did...
...She and her two sons, four and five years old, had been seized a few days earlier by U.S...
...he was subjected to direct aerial spraying of Agent Orange in 1968...
...It was also the first time in memory that workers anywhere outside the United States strack in support of American workers...
...Things couldn't get worse...
...For our families back home...
...In-deed, for a while the program's budget resembled the huge sums pumped into Hollywood's space-saga blockbusters...
...Not much, until September 1, when a new law is scheduled to go into effect in Texas...
...On the other side are the employers, represented by the prestigious law firm of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher...
...We have to let the world know what kind of suffering is here...
...Tom H. Sharpe (Tom H. Sharpe is a free-lance writer in Taos, New Mexico...
...THE NOT SO WONDERFUL WORLD OF 'DISNEYLANDIA' TEMECULA, CALIFORNIA Ninety miles from Anaheim, California, where Walt Disney built his fantasy kingdom, is a 1,000-acre avocado farm called "Disneylandia" by farmworkers who live there in holes in the ground...
...In-cluded were local chapters of the National Organization for Women, the National Council of Churches, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Gay Community Services Center, United Farm Workers, and the National Women's Political Caucus...
...Its only SPS-related ac-tivity these days is "answering correspon-dence...
...They called Washington Post science reporter Joanne Omang, who wrote a story about their charges...
...Proponents thought the new, big-business-oriented Congress might give the SPS a chance this year...
...We settled with the doctors by compromising on who keeps the records, and we kept the Chemical Council (a powerful Texas lobby) away by not seeking damages," explained a legislative aide...
...Bloombaum set out for California on his bicycle...
...Only one city in the nation—Seattle—currently has such an ordinance on the books...
...Just be-cause we don't have immigration papers...
...It was, well, frightening for me, but very hard on my children," she said...
...It's still a prison...
...More than 2,000 Swedes went on sympathy strikes against their employer, a Swedish multinational Corporation, because of its role in the Wisconsin strike...
...Last October, Marian's brother was killed in a one-car accident while driving with Randall down a winding mountain road...
...The action made front-page news for days in Stockholm...
...In December, six Disneylandia workers filed a class-action suit for $1.2 million against their employer, Retlaw Enterprises, Inc...
...Then, once they have done their part for justice by testi-fying, immigration officials throw them out of the country...
...Border Patrol agents as a smuggler was bringing them from Tijuana into San Diego...
...It was the kind of thing nobody could be against," said Dan Jordan, a former in-fantryman who foundedthe BVV...
...Mork said her union has acted before in support of labor struggles outside Sweden, mainly in connection with Latin America...
...Government for the military records of veterans who want to determine their exposure to Agent Orange, which was sprayed across Vietnam for more than half a decade in the most extensive use of chemical warfare since World War I. As if that were not surprising enough, the bill won the backing of Governor William P. Clements Jr., a Republican who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Nixon Administration, and received a unanimous vote of support from both houses of the legislature...
...California, the first State to grant agri-cultural laborers collective bargaining rights, makes an ironic setting for the new battle...
...Joe Foreman of the Naval Research Labora-tory, found that energy from the SPS would cost from ten to more than 100 times the cost of energy generated by a photovoltaic System on the ground and take up three times as much land...
...In one of these camps, twenty-one-year-old Gregorio Perez, a Disneylandia worker, gestured toward his lean-to and shook his head violently...
...Behind the scenes, the bill had ardent support from Clements's aide Allen B. Clark, a Vietnam vet and double amputee who was later DAVID SUTER picked for the number-two slot at the Veterans Administration but resigned after ten days...
...The terrain is steep, a patchwork pattern of deep green avocado trees alternating with Stretches of fine, uncultivated soil, narrow roads lacing the h?ls...
...For what reason...
...Ricardo Chavira (Ricardo Chavira is a reporter for The San Diego Union...
...The story was killed after she made our allegations to all the wrong people, not the public," he said...
...But we've never gone on strike for something like this, and we never expected to have to do something for North America," she said...
...Given these rather pronounced reservations and the new stinginess on Capitol Hill, it is doubfful that the solar satellite concept will get off the ground in the near future...
...In Mexico we have houses...
...It wasnobigger than this," she said, gesturing to indicate a space perhaps fifteen by twenty feet...
...The study concluded that the System would make sense only if future demand for electricity were higher than currently pro-jected...
...Scott Denman (Scott Denman is the senior researcher for the Citizens' Energy Project in Washington, D.C...
...The nation's three million Vietnam veterans have heard a lot about lights at the ends of tunnels, but for those exposed to Agent Orange, this law may at last offer a gleam of hope...
...Winters said he found Thompson knowl-edgeable about radiation: "I think what he's saying is totally likely, but there's no way I can proveit...
...Herm?n Baca, who heads the San Diego-based Committee on Chicano Rights, asks, "I wonder what would happen if Mexico, for whatever reason, started locking up American kids...
...In Texas, there are half a million Vietnam veterans, and almost three times that many veterans of other conflicts...
...Children in the Company of adults are also held...
...The extent of the department's political spying became clear in 1978, when the Citizens' Commission on Police Repression, a Los Angeles-based watchdog group, re-leased a list it had obtained of 200 organiza-tions the police had under surveillance...
...The Swedish Company is Alfa-Laval, a world-wide manufacturer of machinery, agricultural equipment, and food technology...
...Michael Balter (Michael Balter is an American Friends Service Committee staff member and coor-dinator ofthe Citizens' Commission on Police Repression...
...Until the Kenosha Situation...
...The workers set up camp far from the maze-like pattern of roads to prevent detection...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
