Datelines

al., Dan Carpenter et.

DATELINES PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE BUTTER INDIANAPOLIS For the time being, the Reagan Administration will have to build bombs and train troops without the help of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic...

...The announcement was greeted with ju-biliation and sense of triumph among area activists...
...Only in agriculture is there any need to import workers, they found, and even there, the need is limited...
...I'm sure that no court would sanction official racist conduct," Friedman said...
...RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA Harvey Rutherford said he left Atlanta expecting to earn $4.25 an hour either loading furniture or picking tobacco in South Carolina...
...There were obvious economic factors, but they were also sacred of the court battles and the fact that half the people in this valley were prepared to occupy the site...
...The possibility of ever getting out of debt under these circumstances is in most instances an absurdity...
...The worker is then made acutely aware through the use of force and threats that he or she may not leave the labor camp until the debt to the crewleader is paid...
...What do we do with them now...
...The Guild report went further...
...U.S...
...AND IMPORTED SAN DIEGO President Reagan's new, 1980s-style bracero program, already hooted down by immigration rights groups, has been hit by yet another tomato, this one hurled by a pair of researchers from the San Francisco-based Rosenberg Foundation...
...Kidnapped, he said...
...Police in eastern North Carolina and elsewhere are so insensitive to slavelike conditions they routinely return "wandering" farmworkers to the nearest labor camp...
...The gesture, he adds, is firmly grounded in recent Catholic teaching—the condemnation of the arms race by the Holy See in 1976, and the position taken by the International Synod of Bishops in 1971 that the denunciation of civil wrong was essential to preaching the gospel...
...Thomas's, a racially integrated, middle-class parish, is no stranger to social action...
...The parish settled on the excise tax as a symbolic target because it has been used as a war levy since 1914, he explains...
...political issue...
...Are you going to replace the old labor with new...
...District Judge M. Joseph Blumenfeld ruled in October that even though "some evidence in the record supported the contention that racial motivation played a role" in popular rejection of the grants, there was not enough evidence to conclude that the town's acquiescence to the voters was discriminatory...
...Barry Jacobs (Barry Jacobs is a free-lance writer in Hillsborough, North Carolina...
...Dan Carpenter (Dan Carpenter is a reporter for The Indianapolis Star...
...Rural Montague—a Connecticut valley town of 8,500—was slated to host a huge 2,300-megawatt twin reactor complex...
...They are particularly annoyed because the Canadian situation has worsened as a result of attempts to keep American skies relatively clean...
...The pastor and his flock led a successful campaign against the whites-only admissions policy of the nearby Riviera swim club, and the associate pastor, Father Cosmas L. Raimondi, is a founder of the local chapter of the Committee for Democracy in Latin America, formed in opposition to U.S...
...Even then, while the law was upheld by the U.S...
...Not all steps taken have been backward...
...The failure to pay the worker required minimum wage, the failure to give the worker an accurate statement of how much he or she earned," concluded a 1977 study by Florida Rural Legal Services, "results in a situation where the crewleader can arbitrarily keep the worker in a state of perpetual debt...
...Drafts of proposed changes to the Clean Air Act suggest that Reagan officials may back revisions that would permit vehicles to double their nitrogen oxide emissions and new power plants to increase their sulfur discharges...
...But non-industry scientists have scoffed at the notion that some pollutants can be reduced by unleashing others, pointing to the greater logic of cutting back on all emissions...
...Moreover, they know local officials will not lend much credence to their complaints...
...Frederickson thinks the Administration's plan could spark a mass labor displacement...
...Though negotiations for a bilateral agreement on acid rain curbs began last summer, the Canadians have shifted their efforts to Congress, assuming that the Reagan Administration's hostility to domestic environmental controls and to the Trudeau government's nationalistic energy policies make treaty prospects dim...
...Glad to have the issue behind them, city officials prepared to enforce the law beginning in early October...
...he asks...
...There, acid rain, which can render an aquatic system too acidic to support life, has killed off the fish in at least 140 lakes in Ontario...
...When American concerns build taller smokestacks to meet local clean air standards, polluting emissions are dispersed over a greater distance, often wafting north of the border...
...One Canadian official says Ottawa's defense of the Clean Air Act is "our most ambitious public relations campaign ever" on a U.S...
...But subtle racism seems to be O.K...
...That's not true any more...
...Two days after Columbia approved its deposit law for the second time, an Adolph Coors Company representative told the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington that the brewer would support a five-cent national deposit law over varied state and local statutes...
...Officially, the Reagan Administration, like the coal and utility industries, argues that the acid rain question needs further study...
...Yet it was thirty-five years before an American employer stood trial under the peonage statute...
...District Court in Raleigh, promises to reveal conditions that are common knowledge among law enforcement, legal services, and other officials in many rural areas...
...A year later came word of a four-year delay...
...In the Nineteenth Cejitury when we did that we had a frontier we could send the newly unemployed to...
...Father Bourgeois called for tax resistance against the Reagan Administration's military policies in a guest homily at St...
...LAY IT AGAIN, SAM MONTAGUE, MASSACHUSETTS It might be said that the civil disobedience wing of the anti-nuclear reactor movement had its birth here, in the wee starlit hours of a February morning in 1974, two and a half years before the first mass arrests at Sea-brook, New Hampshire...
...It is disturbing," Harrison wrote, "that such involuntary servitude was assisted by the silent and even collaborative acquiescence of local communities...
...But that view runs counter to a number of reports, including one recently completed by the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded: "Continued emission of sulfur and nitrogen oxides at current or accelerated rates in the face of clear evidence of serious hazards to human health and to the biosphere will be extremely risky...
...That thing was defacing the countryside and its lights were keeping people awake," said organizer Sharon Tracy, who had been circulating a petition to remove the tower when NU made its announcement...
...role there...
...That outcome is typical of what becomes of challenges to a modern system of slavery that exploits immigrants, the poor, and the down-and-out and keeps them in constant indebtedness and fear...
...and electronic manufacturing, which has to date made little use of undocumented workers...
...Indeed, on that basis the Federal Government still admits a few thousand foreign farmworkers—mainly West Indians—each year...
...He notes that a growing number of Catholic bishops are demanding butter before guns, linking the arms race to the major powers' indifference to world hunger...
...BUT NOT NEXT DOOR MANCHESTER, CONNECTICUT Manchester, a white suburb of Hartford, is a placid community of Cape Cod houses, sprawling shopping centers, 50,000 or so people—and some good old-time racism...
...factories and coal-fired power plants send two to four times as much sulfur dioxide and eleven times as much nitrogen oxide over the border as Canadian industry sends south...
...The decision was a surprise to many, marking as it did the first time Justice has lost a housing-discrimination case brought against a municipality under the Fair Housing Act of 1968...
...We saw it as an instrument of discussion...
...Thomas's last July, around the same time Bishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle suggested tax resistance as one way to promote unilateral disarmament...
...In fact, the Warren case is but part of a long, sporadic, and not very successful series of prosecutions aimed at ending what boils down to slavery in the United States...
...Now NU is doing it for us...
...A company spokesman said the information was needed to determine which way people should flee in case of accident...
...Canadian scientists estimate that, at present levels, acid rain threatens aquatic life in 48,000 more lakes...
...The courts have given Manchester a sophisticated excuse for racism," says James Patterson Jr., president of the Greater Hartford NAACP...
...A HARD RAIN WASHINGTON, D.C...
...We in no way expected this to pass the parish council," Mason reports...
...food service, which is moderately dependent...
...The plant was due to go on line by 1980...
...In 1867, peonage—the holding of debtors by creditors in forced service to them—was outlawed...
...Last summer, General Motors reported research findings that nitrogen oxides actually fight air pollution...
...Soft-drink and beer distributors couldn't block the environmentalist proposal then with a well-funded media campaign, so they stalled enforcement of the "can ban" by taking it to court, where it languished until the Missouri Supreme Court upheld it last summer...
...NU was terrified of the local people," added Lovejoy, who still lives in Montague...
...The Thirteenth Amendment brought slavery to a legal end in 1865...
...Indiana Bell Telephone Company has told the parish that it would report the tax delinquency to the Internal Revenue Service, but so far the protest has drawn only silence from the Government...
...According to Frederickson and Nalven, the employers they interviewed found foreign—and often undocumented—workers were "more productive, reliable, presented lower labor costs, and were less likely to organize or speak up for themselves...
...Thomas's is withholding the 2 per cent Federal excise tax payment from its telephone bill to protest the Administration's nuclear weapons buildup...
...The Administration may even make matters worse...
...As recently as last November, the U.S...
...Central to the plan is a belief that even if all the needed workers could somehow be found in the United States, they would demand impossible wages...
...The people will have to start thinking rationally about nukes since, for now, the politicians are not...
...Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert J. D'Agostino has recommended that the Department drop a discrimination lawsuit against Yonkers, New York, calling it "one of the opening shots in a new attempt to remake America through coerced residential integration...
...These are cases that could be won by a moron if he wanted to win them...
...The town was promised $1.4 million in Federal grants to rebuild sidewalks, underwrite home-improvement loans, and replace the sewer system if, in return, it would make two commitments: to promote residential integration and build housing for the poor...
...The less nitrogen oxide released into the atmosphere, GM scientists theorize, the greater the amount of ozone there would be to irritate the lungs of southern Californians...
...In any event, the money itself, amounting to "only a few dollars a month," means little to St...
...High-ranking Reagan appointees in the Justice Department already have indicated they will oppose an appeal of the Manchester decision...
...Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton (Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton are the editors of a forthcoming book on the top 100 Reagan appointees and the authors of many newspaper and magazine articles...
...It was too much to ask...
...RlCARDO CHAVIRA (Ricardo Chavira is a reporter for The San Diego Union...
...On October 14—the same day that the Manchester decision was handed down—a Federal appeals court upheld a lower court's finding that officials in Parma, Ohio, a white suburb of Cleveland, were guilty of discriminating against minorities by rejecting an application for a housing project for the poor while approving a luxury development...
...But the tower came to symbolize the plant, the fierce opposition to it, and now, eight years later, its demise...
...In all three industries, employers were generally prepared to pay what unemployed San Diegans would expect to earn...
...The voters went with the volunteers...
...Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church...
...Karen A. Schneider (Karen A. Schneider is a reporter and a suburban bureau chief of The Hartford Cou-rant...
...Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harrison L. Winter noted in an opinion upholding a 1980 slavery conviction in another North Carolina case...
...Then, as now, employers justified the arrangement by saying not enough American workers could be found for stoop labor in the fields...
...In fact, the resolution passed the twelve-member board unanimously, though one member has since recanted, saying he agrees with the objective but thinks civil disobedience is improper and ineffective...
...The Canadians have met with Government and Congressional officials, sponsored conferences at American universities, and taken journalists and Congressional staff members home on inspection tours of blighted regions...
...While there has been other parishioner criticism as well, the response has been "overwhelmingly positive," Father Peter says...
...In Manchester, it was a lot more ethereal...
...The resolution, which went into effect with payment of November's bill for the rectory and parish office phones, invites the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and individual Roman Catholics to consider some form of protest of their own...
...How fitting...
...The Canadian Federal government and the province of Ontario have both hired Washington law firms to help lobby the Congress...
...In its previous form, the bracero program brought Mexican farm laborers to work in the United States between World War II and the early 1960s...
...But before breaking ground, NU put up a 500-foot weather tower to test wind patterns...
...In proposing its new "guestworker" program, the Administration hopes to extend the logic beyond agribusiness to all industries seeking plenty of cheap, docile labor...
...All he's looking for is a way of life, to get in there and get a meal, a bottle of wine, and then go on...
...For this approach, the Administration has come up with an ally of its own...
...Scorning the civil rights strings attached to the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant, townspeople began a drive to take Manchester out of the program...
...But Craig Frederickson and Joe Nalven don't buy that line...
...Berkeley, California, and Fairfax, Virginia, have also passed local deposit laws, but court action has stalled enforcement...
...A day after Lovejoy's acquittal, NU announced a one-year construction delay, blaming financial difficulties...
...Harvey Wasserman (Harvey Wasserman is co-author of'" Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation," to be published by Delacorte in April...
...As they did in 1977, beverage distributors and grocers poured money into a media campaign, outspending Columbians Against Throwaways 18-to-l and setting a new local campaign spending record...
...But the company was having other troubles...
...Like so many other utilities pulling the plug on planned reactors, NU cited slumping electrical demand, soaring construction costs, and regulatory constraints...
...David Mason, a Butler University political science professor and member of the parish council, says the tax protest idea was broached by Father Roy Bourgeois, the Maryknoll missionary who went underground in El Salvador and emerged as a passionate foe of the U.S...
...And there, once again, fair housing lost out...
...The next year, partly in reaction to the selling of people into slavery in Cuba and Brazil, the Thirtyninth Congress made it illegal to kidnap or otherwise force people into involuntary servitude...
...In the early morning hours of George Washington's birthday, 1974, a local organic farmer named Sam Lovejoy walked onto the frozen site carrying a chain wrench, a crowbar, and a typed four-page statement protesting the dangers of nuclear power...
...Studies show that U.S...
...For every study bottlers produced showing the law would increase beverage prices, Thelen's forces produced a credible reply showing the opposite...
...The Warren trial, slated to begin in January in U.S...
...About half of Canada's sulfur and nitrogen pollution comes from American sources, mostly in Midwestern states, Canadian federal and provincial officials contend...
...That's what they are trying to achieve throughout America...
...We base our stands on social justice on that statement," he says...
...Both times, returnable bottles helped prove the point...
...Congratulatory messages have come from as far away as Los Angeles, and the National Catholic Reporter recently praised the tax balk in an editorial...
...The issue uniting them is acid rain, the destructive compound of sulfuric and nitric acid that results when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides combine with cloud moisture...
...Why, then, the insistence on a "guestworker" plan...
...Proposed by Northeast Utilities (NU) in 1973, the project's price tag was $1.35 billion, well in excess of the entire assessed value of the town...
...Farmworkers fear for their lives if they testify against labor contractors who post armed guards outside of bunkhouses at night and announce reveille with a pistol shot...
...Farmworkers Legal Services attorney Steve Edelstein estimates that in North Carolina alone, the number of workers forced into farm labor "conservatively is in the high hundreds, going to the low thousands...
...With the rhetorical arguments balanced, the campaign boiled down to a confrontation between beverage distributor commercials and volunteers who went door-to-door on behalf of the can ban...
...The Federal Government '"is not in the business of telling localities what to build and where to build it," Assistant Attorney General W. Bradford Reynolds, head of the department's civil rights division, has said...
...environmentalists opposing the Reagan Administration's efforts to take the wind out of the Clean Air Act have picked up some unusual allies: Canadian entrepreneurs, fishermen, loggers, environmentalists, and liberals and conservatives in government...
...One reason little is done, according to a 1981 report by the North Carolina chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, is that "only 1 per cent to one-third of the cases of violence [against farmworkers] are ever reported...
...So the decision, coming at a time when Washington is backing off from enforcement of civil rights statutes, the flow of Federal funds for subsidized housing is slowing to a trickle, and legal aid agencies are struggling to stay alive, does not bode well for racial progress...
...And I think that stinks...
...Then, in early 1981, NU announced it was cancelling the project altogether...
...In the face of local opposition, NU went limp...
...It was viewed as a test case of the willingness of the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan to pursue still pending discrimination cases...
...According to a six-count Federal indictment against crewleaders Dennis and Richard Warren and two associates, all three workers wound up in a migrant labor camp at Rainbow Farms in Nash County in eastern North Carolina...
...Willie Cunningham said he was recruited in Baltimore with a promise he'd be taken to work on a farm in Pennsylvania at $3.35 an hour...
...We figured taking it down would symbolize a victory for the anti-nuke movement...
...Since any construction at the site was at least "twenty years in the future," the company said , the tower was no longer needed...
...Rusty Todd (Rusty Todd is a city editor at the Columbia Missourian and assistant professor at the University of Missouri school of journalism...
...Following a resolution passed in October by the parish council and ratified by its pastor, St...
...In the end, of course, the police are merely doing what's expected of them, as U.S...
...This is all [about] racial balance," one opponent said...
...Justice Department's civil rights division was investigating twenty-five involuntary servitude cases (including the Warrens') in eleven states, from Washington to Arizona, Florida to New York...
...During the 1960s, when foes of the Vietnam war withheld the Federal tax from their phone bill payments, the IRS routinely attached their checking accounts and extracted the back taxes plus interest...
...The first test came in 1977, when voters approved a law that banned no-deposit/no-return beverage cans and bottles and placed a nickel deposit on returnables...
...Violence plays an inherent and deliberate role in the agricultural economy, that of coercing workers into working and living conditions of deplorable inhumanity...
...Six states—Iowa, Oregon, Maine, Michigan, Connecticut, and Vermont—have deposit laws, all of which seem to work on a statewide basis...
...From there, the matter went to Federal district court by way of a suit filed by the Justice Department and legal aid lawyers on behalf of Manchester's poor...
...It is hard to know what the extent of the problem really is, since the Justice Department has for years dragged its feet where such abuses are concerned...
...Six months later, Lovejoy pleaded self-defense before a packed Franklin County courtroom...
...Led by University of Missouri history professor David Thelen, who helped write the original can-ban proposal in 1976, defenders of the ordinance took to the streets, canvassing much of the town in the days before the November 3 repeal vote...
...There, the workers claim, the threat of violence kept them from leaving, and was used to keep balking coworker Robert Anderson picking sweet potatoes even though he got so sick he spat up blood, and later collapsed and died...
...Thomas's, says Father Martin Peter, the pastor...
...Then, in October, NU confirmed rumors that the second weather tower would come down—legally...
...They have just completed a study of the San Diego County employment market focusing on three industries: agriculture, because of its heavy dependence on undocumented workers...
...The Manchester lawsuit was also the first fair-housing case prosecuted since the end of the Carter Administration...
...The local growers, if they truly do not know this is going on, effectively do not care...
...In the past, this kind of action was thought to be a thing that a few radicals or a few liberals did—not mainline Catholics...
...All the national and local publicity will at least cause people to think about the [nuclear weapons] issue, whether they agree with our position or not," the pastor says...
...YOU CANT KEEP A GOOD BAN DOWN COLUMBIA, MISSOURI Twice in the last four years, this midwestern city of 65,000 has proved that special-interest money cannot always buy an election...
...Joseph Simes said he didn't choose to go anywhere, but was grabbed off a street in Raleigh, North Carolina...
...SLAVERY AMERICAN STYLE...
...Fair housing lawyer Avery Friedman of Cleveland explained the difference between the Manchester and Parma cases: "In Parma,- you had this pants-down vaudeville kind of discrimination...
...The bottlers were back, though, this time with a petition drive to force yet another vote on the can ban...
...A local film company, Green Mountain Post, recorded it all in a one-hour documentary, "Lovejoy's Nuclear War," which was eventually seen by several million people and came to serve as a primer on atomic power and civil disobedience...
...He then marched to a nearby road, flagged down the first passing vehicle—which happened to be a police patrol car—and turned himself and his statement in at the local police station...
...After a dramatic seven-day trial, he was acquitted on a technicality, although a poll of the jurors showed they would have set him free anyway...
...intervention in El Salvador...
...He undid three of the twenty-one guy wires supporting the structure, and Sam Lovejoy atop toppled tower then watched it crash to earth, its aircraft warning lights still flashing...
...The question for Columbia is whether such a law will work when residents can leave the city, buy throwaways, and then head home...
...In a special election in 1979, voters said no to the HUD deal...
...The Coors statement seems to foretell the ultimate wish of can-banners: that enough states and cities will adopt deposit laws to make a national bill inevitable...
...Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the migrants are bums, drunks, winos, been burned up on drugs, or else running from the law and they aren't going to stay anywhere else than in [such an] environment," one deputy sheriff told Guild investigators...
...Washington is signaling retreat...
...The 545-page report, believed to be the first analysis of the need for a large-scale, retooled bracero scheme, also found that "the claimed 'need' for foreign labor results in the bypassing of available domestic labor, thereby contributing to the unemployment rate...
...Meanwhile, the original tower had been sold for scrap to a local windmill developer, and NU put up a new one...
...Following a six-week trial last spring, U.S...
...Supreme Court, little changed for the principals in the case: The Georgia man who kidnapped two black farmworkers, claiming they owed him money, never served time in jail, and the workers he had carried off were never seen again...

Vol. 46 • January 1982 • No. 1


 
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