Datelines

al., Arthur Jones et.

DATELINES Nancy, You Know Those Folks? WASHINGTON, D.C. Come March 20 and the end of winter, an irritating speck was to have been removed from President Reagan's eye. The Community for Creative...

...A lot of the criticism is correct...
...They hate the sophistication of the modern world...
...Stone and Howard Cosell...
...Weinmann attacked the Mary Carter Agreements when a plaintiff and a defendant hospital in a malpractice suit were about to leave the defendant physician holding the bag...
...Take that and that...
...Late last year, Wisconsin had negotiated the sale to the People's Republic of sophisticated weather analysis equipment developed at the Madison campus...
...On December 22, U.S...
...CCNV suggested, to no avail, that the money would be better spent on the homeless...
...But if Schmidt hews hard to his position and is eventually turned out of office by the peace people, or, less likely, if he adopts an anti-nuclear stance and is defeated by defections to the conservatives, then a Christian Democratic regime that supports the installation of new missiles could take power, perhaps ending the detente policy the SPD has pursued for more than a decade...
...The socialists' deputy leader of the parliament reacts to their presence there with a mixture of sympathy and impatience...
...By the end of our long breakfast in a San Jose fast-food restaurant, after considerable sparring, he confessed he believes in free enterprise...
...The Greens count in their ranks even conservative ecologists who would not support the Left on social or foreign policy...
...Which will give Reagan, unable to gaze in peace from his front window, equally strong reasons to prevent them...
...Schmidt's Dilemma: Green Radicals BONN, WEST GERMANY "We shall win or you will lose.'" That's what German anti-nuclear groups are telling the Social Democratic government these days, and Helmut Schmidt's regime is writhing under the threat of a Left it dismissed lightly just a few years ago...
...Gerald D. Sturc.rs (Gerald D. Sturges is the principal staff author of a House Government Operations Committee report on classification of private ideas...
...It has been a decade marked by peaceful protests and hunger strikes, including one against a Jesuit church that had raised $400,000 to refurbish its building and organ...
...Besides taking environmental stands, the Greens call for direct democracy in a decentralized government, guaranteed training and work for youth, the withdrawal of all troops from foreign territories, and opposition to both NATO and Warsaw Pact missiles...
...The only way to get rid of them was to burn them at reduced atmosphere in a high-temperature blast furnace—but it turned out that even the molten metal retained some of its secret properties, and it clung to the furnace walls, making the furnace secret too...
...The delay may also have led to an inaccurate determination of cause of death...
...Robert (Bob) Weinmann doesn't just rock the boat...
...The agency asked "a lot of funny questions" that "showed some slight concern" about possible military applications, one professor said, but it allowed time for an appeal...
...The mood among Social Democrats in Bonn is grim, but the advocates of alternative politics see no advantage in being ruled by a socialist party if the outcome is death by nuclear explosion...
...They won less than 4 per cent in Berlin's local elections and in West German balloting for the European Parliament, short of the 5 per cent needed to claim seats under the country's proportional representation system...
...Some of the offerings in this billboard of newly patented inventions represent ideas that were suppressed for thirty-five years...
...Because of all the publicity, what Interior is worrying about now is next winter...
...And, "The insurance industry in America and Workers' Compensation in particular represent the most predacious and ravenous element of business life in America...
...Once convinced of his cause, he attacks from all sides and keeps at it...
...China had already made a $200,000 down payment and the State and Defense Departments had approved the deal when, in November, the Commerce Department stepped in...
...Displaying near mastery of the legislative process," he started one story, "the narrow tie guys from Stanford Medical Center hoodwinked the experienced California Medical Association (CMA) and deftly pulled the wool over the eyes of Assemblyman Lawrence Kapiloff (D-San Diego...
...But unaffiliated inventors—called John Does by invention secrecy practitioners—have no recourse except, on paper, to appeal and to be paid "just compensation...
...Social Democratic Chairman Willy Brandt has sought to establish a dialogue with the peace and environmental groups...
...Worse, perhaps, in his eyes, the people in the system failed to take responsibility for the failure...
...His battles tend to be complex, involving, as they do, complex bureaucracies...
...Weinmann claims credit for a virtual ban on use of Mary Carter Agreements...
...Their right to sleep in Lafayette Park had been won in court battles...
...There are two alternative political organizations: the Greens, active throughout West Germany, and the Alternative List in West Berlin...
...When another physician at the hospital raised questions about his co-worker's death, he was formally characterized as mentally ill...
...Without the tents, CCNV in part argued, the homeless might have died of exposure elsewhere in the city during the bitter winter nights...
...The Social Democratic Party (SPD) national conference in April could be its last chance to reverse its stands on nuclear power and weapons, and to stem the tide of desertions that has already knocked it out of power in Frankfurt and Berlin...
...Lucy Komisar (Lucy Komisar is an American free-lance writer who recently spent six weeks in West Germany and Berlin...
...Nervous that China might use Wisconsin's computer-satellite system for military reconnaissance, Commerce gave "negative consideration" to the deal...
...Not surprisingly, after Interior had made the arrests and taken down the tents, CCNV determinedly put them back up and in December was again in court with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union...
...The price: $500,000...
...Weinmann does not like institutions that do not behave as they ought, whether they are university hospitals or medical quality control boards or insurance companies...
...It was still dark the next morning when the Interior solicitor general arrived with his assistants and park police...
...Immediately, he launched an attack on that bastion of sanctimonious hypocrisy, the law...
...If a military agency requests a secrecy order, the Patent and Trademark Office has no choice but to issue it, and it remains in force until it expires or the military agency agrees to its removal...
...Most nights more than a dozen people had huddled for warmth in the tents, or had tried to get a few hours of fitful sleep on camp beds and mattresses...
...Since then, though, the peace movement has taken a quantum leap, marked by the 250,000-strong demonstration in Bonn last October against production of the neutron bomb and the deployment of Pershing missiles...
...We think people in America believe too much in the technical future and the ability to manage everything by technology...
...The Greens hold court in a small, boxlike house just a block away from the modern, glassy headquarters of the SPD in Bonn...
...And it could bolster the efforts of the British Laborites, who opted for unilateral nuclear disarmament at their conference in the fall, and the Scandinavian Social Democrats, who seek a nuclear-free zone...
...Their program is similar to that of the Alternative List...
...For Government contractors, all this can be a blessing...
...In ten years the group has had its divisions...
...I'd rather deal with private individuals, then corporations, then governments, because if the government doesn't like what you're doing, they'll just have you shot...
...He ruled that the homeless had suffered discrimination at the hands of Interior officials...
...In some cases, that defendant then continued to take part in the trial, even helping the plaintiff make the case against other defendants...
...Why all the bother...
...the tents were struck...
...Steve Burkholder (Steve Burkholder is a free-lance writer in Madison, Wisconsin...
...But their common motif sums up nicely: institutional corruption...
...He printed their letters but he did not retract...
...At the University of Minnesota, Qi Yulu is one of 130 Chinese researchers whose work the State Department is asking the university to restrict...
...CCNV remained calm...
...But there will have to be policy changes, not just talk, to attract young voters...
...The contractor may still do classified business with the Government while the order is in effect, then enjoy a seventeen-year patent monopoly when it is lifted...
...He sees youth as the nucleus of the future socialist electorate...
...After Weinmann wrote the case up in the Nightletter, the lawyers involved promptly asked for a retraction of his "libelous article...
...Late in 1979, there were 3,500 such secrecy orders in force, most of them imposed us long ago as 1942 but recently renewed, For example, six orders sponsored by the National Security Agency cover crypto logic inventions made in the 1930s—called "brilliant work" that "still warrants being protected," by former NSA director Admiral B.R...
...In the Hadsall case, he believes the system of assigning incapacitated physicians to state hospitals—a system that he relieves can work—failed...
...Indeed, the social-liberal coalition government at first seemed to mean what it said, passing environmental protection laws before an ecology movement even existed...
...I think what happened was I got tired of standing around with my hands in my pockets watching the sanctimonious hypocrites make a profession of the hypocrisy of sanctimony," he says...
...If the inventor spills the beans, a $10,000 fine, a two-year prison term, or forfeiture of the patent could result...
...McGrath called the proposed restrictions "inappropriate for an American research university" and reminded the State Department that Minnesota has long banned classified research anyway...
...With some 2,000 Chinese scholars now studying in the United States, there are signs that the State and Commerce Departments are warily watching the foreign guests...
...Bob is a small man, but he packs a big punch...
...The reds, browns, and blues of the tents were easily visible from the White House through winter's leafless trees...
...The tiles were classified "Confidential," apparently to keep any adversaries from learning how they worked...
...But what to do with leftover tiles not used in the aircraft...
...By the 1979 convention, it got 40 per cent of the vote—still not enough to turn the Party against nuclear power and the stationing of new American missiles in Germany...
...CCNV, as creative and as non-violent as its name suggests, drove in the tent stakes anyway, and served Thanksgiving dinner, legally, to some 600 homeless or hungry people...
...In 1979, the Department of Energy sponsored 1,117 secrecy order renewals, seventy-six of them on privately owned inventions...
...Watch Out for the Foreign Devils MADISON, WISCONSIN The congenial meeting of East and West on campuses across the country is apparently arousing suspicion and distrust in Washington these days...
...The Christian Democrats get the most votes, but socialists and liberals in coalition rule the country...
...In 1978, the Nightletter told the sad story of a California physician going bankrupt because most of his patients were on Medicaid and the system was slow paying his bills...
...Perhaps the greatest secret of all is how it has stayed with us so long...
...Not quite in those words, but close to it...
...The German activists are taking to the ballot boxes with a vengeance, making conservative social democrats yearn for the good old days of street fighting, headlines, and mere promises of reform...
...University President C. Peter McGrath told the State Department, "Our mission is teaching, research, and public service, and neither our faculty nor our administrators were hired to implement Government-security actions...
...When you're dealing with private interests who encroach upon the public preserve, you can expose it, change it, stop it, reform it," he told me...
...As the homeless battled the thermometer, CCNV took on the Department of the Interior in their behalf...
...Though the Korean War ended, the emergency proclamation was never rescinded, and it shielded the secrecy orders for almost three decades...
...The Nightletter...
...That early victory set the tone for much of Weinmann's later muckraking: He is quick to leap to the defense of an individual physician losing a fight with the system (usually in California but sometimes in other states...
...The Berlin Party has its office in a storefront with its own kneipe, the legendery Berliner cafe, and a meeting place for the nine AL members of the city's parliament...
...Then an appeals court judge himself asked for a full Court of Appeals review of the case, but the full court rejected that request...
...I quote from the San Jose physician's muckraking Nightletter for American Medicine: "No greater foe of health care exists in California than Beverlee Myers, Director of the California Department of Health Services...
...Congress concocted invention secrecy in 1917 as a wartime expedient and perpetuated it with the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, Secrecy orders were supposed to be good for only a year at a time, but orders issued during the national emergency proclaimed in 1950 by President Harry S. Truman were permitted to last as long as the emergency did, plus six months...
...More than twenty folks spent the night in tents...
...He jumps up and down in it, rattles the sides, whirls the wheel, and shouts, "Fie, fie on you villains and hypocrites...
...Three cover FBI inventions from the early 1950s, one of them reportedly an undetectable wiretap device...
...To Weinmann, the delay suggests negligence on the part of the state, which had assumed responsibility for the surgeon...
...In practice, no appellate proceeding has ever been held, and only twenty-nine claims for compensation have been filed with the Defense Department since 1945—about one for every thousand secrecy orders...
...Then, when that forum proved too constricting, he started the Nightletter, literally written at night...
...At the same time, a strong anti-nuclear faction began to grow within the SPD...
...Their election last May, the biggest alternative victory so far, ended thirty years of Social Democratic rule and was a severe blow to the SPD's national prestige...
...But when you ask for the way out, you get horribly simple answers: 'You must stop arming, and there is peace.' " But, he predicts, "They will influence our policy...
...He subscribes to both The Progressive and National Review...
...If you like a good secret, you'll love the Federal Register's periodic column, "'U.S...
...Court of Appeals panel was denied...
...They are against industry, technology, consumption, against the negative sides of the system—loneliness, bureaucracy, corruption...
...I was willing to say at all times that they had been faithful to their fiduciary obligations," he explains, "and that the trouble was not that they were dishonest—but that the law stunk...
...An accompanying letter appealed for his help "in view of how we feel about Communists," he says...
...He fires off documents to reporters from San Jose to New York...
...are bothered about what I do because they cannot predict, on the basis of ideology, what'll happen...
...The outcome of these differences is crucial for Americans...
...He sends out a newsletter to his 1,000 readers (it only goes out when he has something to put in it...
...And when Weinmann does not like something, fur flies...
...Government-owned inventions: Availability for Licensing...
...Just one...
...District Judge Charles R. Richey reversed himself...
...Lines were drawn in November when Interior denied CCNV's application to pitch the tents...
...More recently, Weinmann has taken up the cause of a mentally ill physician who died while he was working at a California state hospital...
...They want to be clear and moral," says Horst Ehmke, a leading SPD intellectual...
...He warmed to the task of exposing hypocrites while editing the Santa Clara County medical society bulletin in the mid-1970s...
...There may be considerable reason to do so...
...says Wolfgang Winz, a young activist from Baden-Wurttemberg...
...In November 1963, one was imposed on a patent application for special tiles that absorb radar signals, manufactured by the Conductron Corporation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the F-lll aircraft...
...That was the year the alternative political movements got started...
...Frank Hadsall's body was not discovered for something like a week, according to the results of an autopsy reported in the Nightletter...
...In February, Commerce finally licensed the sale and did not require the exclusion of the more sophisticated computer components from the system, as the university feared it might...
...To keep Reagan's Interior at bay, no one was permitted to sleep in the tents...
...It was he who made Stanford University Medical Center give back to the Government $1.5 million in ill-gotten gains from double-billing Medicare patients...
...On the wall is a bright yellow map of West Germany, showing the sites of nuclear power plants, atomic weapons, and bomber landing strips...
...Farmers, blacks, and veterans had previously been allowed to "camp" in the capital city...
...But the legacy is a free medical clinic, a center where the homeless can shower and wash clothes, a kitchen that serves stew and salad to 500 people nightly—and a history of startling those who do not have a similar sense of what matters...
...From time to time our system finds that it must take certain members who are ostensibly part of the Establishment and make them scapegoats to prevent exposure of more general problems," says Wein-.mann...
...Yes," he beamed...
...The upshot was a decision by the California Hospital Association Insurance Committee to condemn use of the Mary Carter Agreements as "detrimental to the judicial process" because "the one defendant in effect buys out the case and finances the case against the other defendants...
...At Minnesota, the State Department's special request to control the Chinese hit a great wall...
...The Patent and Trademark Office screens more than 100,000 patent applications a year and refers to military agencies about 5,000 which it thinks contain information whose disclosure might be "detrimental" to the national security...
...In Germany, thousands would have left the area," he says...
...Arthur Jones (Arthur Jones is The Progressive's contributing editor in Washington...
...Take that, you villains, and you hypocrites...
...They don't reduce easily to sketches...
...AL" is generally more radical, reflecting the tradition of Berlin, long a stomping ground for German youth and leftists...
...And he has fun...
...And not everyone in the Party wants to change...
...In basic motivation, they are serious people...
...And at the University of Wisconsin, host to about 175 Chinese academics, just such sensitive computer hardware was the focus of a recent dispute between the school and the Commerce Department...
...And even though the Air Force declassified the tiles that year, the secrecy order was not lifted until 1975...
...The Interior Department was not done...
...But then the world economic crisis intervened, and pressure by business and unions pushed environmental concerns to the background...
...With the 1984 national elections hovering as the nadir of the Party's fortunes, local coalitions of leftists and ecologists have been winning seats in town and state councils around the country, in some cases edging out the liberals (Free Democrats) as the third-largest party...
...Carol Poi.sgrove (Carol Polsgrove, a contributing editor of The Progressive, lives in Oakland...
...Stanford was getting paid by more than one agency for the same work and getting paid, too, for more work than was done...
...Schmidt thinks these voters are "peripheral," and SPD parliamentary leader Herbert Wehner has called them "social dropouts...
...If this were a more civil libertarian Administration, there would not be all this screaming and shouting about a few people sleeping in the park," said CCNV's Mitch Snyder...
...The use of alternative political action to turn around SPD policy could be a major defeat for President Reagan...
...The judge agreed...
...They joined in the early 1970s, lured by promises of a new order by party leader Willy Brandt...
...He voted Libertarian in the last national election...
...By 1970, Conductron had 27,IKK) pounds of secret junk on its hands...
...When you don't get to change it, expose it, is when that particular abuse is sanctioned by government...
...All of which left Interior ninety days to file an appeal before the Supreme Court, which it may well do-before the April deadline...
...The Community for Creative Nonviolence developed more than a decade ago out of the George Washington University Catholic student center...
...Still, delivery to the Chinese is being held up by yet another hurdle: Something called the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, consisting of the NATO countries and Japan, must now okay the deal...
...In which case, their presence in the park still would have been marked—by small white crosses among almost 600 already planted there by CCNV as mute testimony to Americans who have died of the cold in recent winters...
...He writes letters to politicians...
...When Assemblyman Kapiloff tumbled to Stanford's act at the last moment, the CMA was caught holding Stanford's royal mantle while the Stanfords themselves were caught red-faced with both fists plunged into the proverbial cooky jar...
...The scene shifted to a Federal court, where Interior argued, "We don't allow camping...
...inman...
...The secrecy orders can border on the absurd...
...What happened to turn a cheerful neurologist into a medical cross between I.F...
...In California civil suits involving several defendants, lawyers sometimes used what were known as Mary Carter Agreements, in which the plaintiff agreed to limit the liability of one defendant before the jury made the award...
...Many of the new activists come out of the SPD...
...Since the patent application and approval process typically takes less than two years, the only plausible explanation for the delays is that the inventions were covered by secrecy orders...
...He didn't complete the form...
...That was his biggest triumph, but there have been others since 1976, when he started putting out his little newsletter, two pages at first, now up to four...
...Six people were arrested...
...the homeless could, too...
...Students concerned about aggression and oppression in Vietnam developed a parallel concern for the oppressed closer to them, and that meant the homeless in Washington, D.C...
...There should be no access to the design, construction, or maintenance data relevant to individual items of computer hardware...
...Arresting Ideas WASHINGTON, D.C...
...In January its appeal before a three-judge U.S...
...At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, the head of the physics department says the State Department recently sent him a page of questions about the work and professional associations of one scholar from Beijing...
...By then, of course, other groups may well want to join in with what CCNV has begun...
...It is suggested that Qi be restricted from any access to unpublished or classified Government-funded work," wrote Keith Powell II, State's exchange officer for China...
...Had he ever, I asked, been associated with any institution, public or private, that did what it said it was going to do...
...Reaganville" was a blot on Reagan's landscape if ever he looked out toward Pennsylvania Avenue...
...A year later, they dropped to less than 2 per cent nationally, due largely to fear among voters that rightist Franz Josef Strauss might replace Helmut Schmidt...
...The Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) planned that day to dismantle "Reaganville," a tent city for the homeless in Lafayette Park, opposite the White House front door...
...Democrat of the Breakfast Table SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA Dr...
...He points out that the Greens were astonished at the relatively mild American reaction to the Three Mile Island accident...
...Not long ago, a letter from Foggy Bottom came to the head of Minnesota's computer science department...
...The practice of invention secrecy is now being examined by Congress for the first time in thirty years...
...The same thing happens to privately owned applications, only the private inventor—or his or her estate—can not ballyhoo the inventions in the Federal Register years later when the secrecy lid is finally lifted...
...Aside from a distrust of systems, Weinmann disclaims any ideological base for his crusading: "Many doctors, especially in the medical societies...

Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4


 
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