Datelines

...Because it was prepared abroad and saved thirty seconds, everyone thought it must be better...

...Is rent control the end-all of tenant politics, or will the movement seek more comprehensive solutions to the nation's housing crisis, changing housing from a speculative commodity and tax shelter to a basic right...

...Many tenants' groups have succeeded in preventing affordable apartments from being turned into expensive condominiums, or have taken other steps to protect their rights and their homes...

...They have acted to investigate landlords involved in "arson for profit...

...What used to cost $1,000 now costs $5,000...

...He knew that when he returned he could speak out—or better, that he could take action...

...Many of those taken in claimed they were minding their own business and were booked without cause...

...In New York, maybe...

...pressure local governments to enforce code standards for building upkeep...

...Steele knew that apartheid could not last without the military...

...Robert Reyes, a twenty-seven-year-old lab technician, went to work on the idea and within three months found ways to recapture several commonly used reagents...

...he asks pointedly, laying out the simple boiling process...

...When Trejos learned of some pay-offs from appreciative drug and laboratory supply firms to local contacts (a common practice in many developing countries) he blew the whistle...

...With help from their counterparts around the nation, the landlords outspent the tenants by more than 100-to-l ($6 million to $50,000), but an effective grass-roots organizing effort by tenants defeated the measure...

...By very crude methods and with next to nothing in the way of a scientific background, I produced trichothecenes, the little-known substance that suddenly achieved biological superstar status last year when the United States identified it as the chemical warfare agent in Soviet-sponsored yellow rain attacks in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan...

...This substitution has cost us about forty million colones since then [about $5 million, based on the former exchange rate], because the local serum cost almost nothing, because it was produced from a byproduct of the blood test," Trejos explains...

...When White went on trial the following spring, the defense argued that White was depressed, in debt, and living on junk food, and therefore unable to judge the consequences of his actions...

...Most middle-class renters squirreled away their savings until they could afford to buy a house of their own, and so were not likely to identify with low-income renters...

...People thought his resistance was an interesting oddity—until Steele's case came up a few months later...

...Alfonso Trejos sees it this way: "Everyone believes that if a method or piece of technology is developed in the industrialized world, it has to be advanced, superior, and should be imitated...

...In 1970, when he tried to reverse the practice, offering to produce enough serum in his laboratory for all the public hospitals, he met a stone wall...

...Clearly, they have less incentive than live-in landlords to maintain their buildings...

...Thom Willenbecher (Thorn Willenbecher is a free-lance writer in San Francisco...

...And since he can be continually called up until he is sixty-five, he can be continually jailed for refusing to serve...

...Complaints of harassment continue to be made in sufficient numbers to arouse concern...

...Some argued they could see the culture more clearly with the plastic dish...

...During his stay, Steele saw Last Grave at Dimbaze, a movie about oppression in his homeland...

...The jury convicted White of manslaughter, sending the killer to prison for less than eight years...

...For the rest of the year, Steele thought hard about his country, about state-sponsored racism, about his own role in perpetuating the status quo of apartheid...

...Two years ago, California landlords backed an initiative that would have eliminated local rent controls throughout the state...

...if the technique is adopted in all the public hospitals, the figure will be about $2 million...

...Add One Cup of Yellow Rain...

...Openly gay Supervisor Harry Britt, Milk's replacement, has complained that the Internal Affairs Bureau is staffed by officers who look after their colleagues and has called for the establishment of a civilian review board...

...Many said they had been beaten...

...On the same day last March that the Senate Armed Services Committee heard yellow rain testimony, it also heard Reagan Administration arguments that the United States must resume nerve gas production...

...Tenant groups see rent control as the only means to slow spiraling rent increases until there is an adequate supply of decent, affordable housing...

...Others said you didn't have to wash them...

...Cullen, who did his doctoral research on trichothecenes, does not doubt the authenticity of the Hmong refugees' reports, but he points out that the samples offered by the State Department contain contaminants, suggesting a crude production process...

...Two months later, after the ruckus had died down somewhat, the House voted to kill the controversial appropriation...

...The recycling will save San Juan de Dios $450,000 this year...

...He must serve six more months in prison in 1983 if he returns to South Africa...

...One officer is reported to have told the clerk, "You have a building full of queers and criminals and we are going to get rid of them for you...

...With these victories behind them, NJTO leaders recognized the limitations of remaining a single-interest group...

...This," he says, "is a disposable petri dish that we use to culture bacteria...

...Learning to Roll Your Own SAN JOSE, COSTA RICA The plastic gallon jug is wedged between last year's lab reports and Clinical Hematology in the office of San Juan de Dios Hospital's clinical laboratory, in downtown San Jose...

...Last year, they sparked a coalition of the state's major progressive groups—including the National Organization for Women, several large unions (the Machinists, Auto Workers, and Communications Workers, among others), and statewide senior citizens', environmental, Hispanic, and peace groups...

...He offers the story of the serum as an example...

...Since the 1970s, the New Jersey Tenants Organization, which now has more than 80,000 dues-paying members and a much larger political following, has organized tenants in middle-class suburbs and declining inner cities into a powerful voting bloc...

...No one wants the boat rocked, because the findings might be embarrassing for influential people...

...He is on the national executive committee of Democratic Socialists of America...

...To a considerable extent, Steele stood alone...

...Some states are considering such collective bargaining legislation...

...For decades, blood was typed in Costa Rica's hospitals with a locally produced serum that took forty seconds to react...

...his purpose would be to prepare for and wage constant civil war...

...obtain fairer leases, and enact laws protecting tenants from retaliatory evictions if they file complaints against landlords or organize a tenant union...

...Biochemist James Bam-burg of Colorado State University told Time magazine, "You can do it in your basement or a converted dog kennel...

...Trichothecenes are a form of mycotoxin produced by a naturally-occurring fungus which often grows on stored grain...

...The game showed the world that in this tolerant town the guardians of the public peace could coexist with those whose private lives varied from the norm...

...Despite strong support for the bill in each house, it has been stymied by a combination of tenant protest and opposition among conservatives who oppose rent control but who see the proposal as unwarranted Federal interference in local matters...

...it struck too close to home...

...In the mid-1940s, however, representatives of foreign drug firms promoted another variety which, when mixed with several drops of blood, took eight to ten seconds...

...Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced last September in Berlin that the United States had "physical evidence" the "Soviet Union and its allies" were waging chemical war in Southeast Asia, a claim the State Department has made several times since last fall...

...In New Jersey and California, where the tenants' movement is strongest, there are signs of engagement in a broader struggle...

...firm...

...of those arrested, only forty, or fewer than 10 per cent, were prosecuted...

...Alfonso Trejos, pointing to the jug, "is our most interesting museum piece...

...The report says there is "no evidence to support any alternative explanaJAN FAUST tion, such as the hypothesis that the Vietnamese produce and employ toxin weapons completely on their own...

...Although Steele got an eighteen-month prison term, his trial received wide coverage and it became clear that a trend had started...

...Similarly, a progressive coalition in Santa Monica, California, bucked the conservative tide last year to elect a liberal-radical majority to the city council...

...In the past, the hospitals used glass dishes for their tests...

...It's pretty far-fetched that you'd be using trichothecenes for chemical weapons if other means were available," he explains...

...On August 6, 1981, plainsclothesmen burst into the Zee Hotel, a low-income gay rooming house, claiming to be looking for drug traffickers...

...Although biochemists have questioned the Government's scientific methods and conclusions and warned that more rigorous proof is needed to support the charge of Soviet involvement, the State Department has made the Soviet connection the cornerstone of the yellow rain issue...

...Following a massive devaluation of the colone (the local currency), the cost of imports jumped by 400 per cent almost overnight...

...Since 1978, for example, more than thirty California communities have approved rent control laws, and tenant groups in other cities are pushing for similar protection...

...We have no dollars to buy scientific journals or books for university libraries...

...Gays continue to register complaints with the police department's Internal Affairs Bureau, the only agency in the city that investigates alleged misconduct by officers, but many are not satisfied with the response...

...For the past three years, tenants and landlords have come to blows over a NMHC-backed proposal initially introduced by three Republicans— Senators Alfonse D'Amato of New York and William Armstrong of Colorado, and Representative Chalmers Wylie of Ohio— to deny Federal housing funds to cities with rent control...

...Police claimed they were being baited while attempting to enforce the law in gay neighborhoods...

...A major State Department report released last March and "based on a massive amount of information" asserts, "The conclusion is inescapable that the toxins and other chemical warfare agents were developed in the Soviet Union, provided to the Lao and Vietnamese either directly or through transfer of know-how, and weaponized with Soviet assistance...

...But can the tenants' movement, like the labor movement before it, move beyond its narrow focus and develop a broader political agenda...

...Recently, however, the recommendation received the stamp-of-approval of the President's Committee on Housing and tenant activists are concerned that it may finally pass—and knock some of the wind out of the movement's sails...

...For several reasons, Cullen and Caldwell are skeptical of Washington's charges...

...That night, May 21,1979, thousands of rioters converged on City Hall, throwing rocks and bottles and torching squad cars...

...The country's foreign debt shot to a staggering $4 billion, and because the interest has not been paid for the past eleven months, neither foreign banks nor suppliers will extend credit...

...Philip Hilts of The Washington Post reported last winter that anyone can obtain a do-it-yourself toxin kit for $75 through the mail...

...The film shocked him...

...By the 1970s, long-term renters were found primarily among the urban poor...

...In the years after World War II, the Federal Government pushed policies designed to encourage home ownership, and the percentage of homeowners in the population rose dramatically...

...Consequently, the city increased police foot patrols and improved municipal services, has supported local union activism, raised taxes on Exxon's underground pipelines, and required developers to build parks, day-care centers, and affordable housing along with hotels and other highly profitable developments...

...What really seems inescapable is that the Government's case is less than airtight...

...Since 1975, Asian refugees, especially Hmong tribesmen, have told of a mysterious yellow or red-colored rain which apparently either kills or causes disabling sickness in those exposed to it...

...The vice squad responded by raiding bars and baths and arresting browsers in adult bookstores...

...This ostensible harmony was shattered on November 27, 1978, when conservative former Supervisor Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk...

...Although 10 per cent were broken annually, replacement costs were a fraction of the price of disposables...

...But over the past decade, a new group of long-term renters has emerged—middle-class tenants who grew up expecting to be homeowners, but who have seen the average price of a single-family house climb from $23,000 in 1970 to more than $80,000 today...

...However, many feel that the hostilities will flare up again when Dan White is released from prison, possibly as early as 1983...

...But, according to Trejos, those in charge were sure the plastic variety were more modern, hygenic, and economical...

...The first CO in 1978 had avoided publicity...

...initiate "sweat equity" programs, in which tenants exchange maintenance work for lower purchase prices or mortgage interest rates...

...Four years ago, large developers and apartment owners formed the National Multi-Housing Council (NMHC), a lobbying group which has already helped landlords defeat rent control proposals in Seattle, San Diego, Oakland, and Minneapolis, and win a court challenge that overturned a rent control victory in Baltimore...

...Last Grave showed him a South Africa he really did not know...

...Recently, things have been quieter between gays and police in San Francisco...

...Like the labor movement, it cannot begin promoting wide social goals until it has a stronger political base...

...Typical of Feinstein critics is Gordon Armstrong, a former state trooper: "The mayor and police chief have declared open season on gays and other minorities...

...These conditions are bringing about a nationwide upsurge in tenant activism, much as the rise of large, absentee-owned factories ushered in a stormy period of union organizing in the 1930s...

...Tenants are the next big wave of angry consumers...

...San Juan de Dios Hospital is a good place to observe some of the imported extras, and how habit-forming they can be...

...One of the National Tenants Union's long-term goals is a Federal tenant-landlord relations statute which, like the landmark National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act that protects union organizing, would require landlords to recognize tenant unions if more than half of the renters voted to form a group to bargain over leases, rents, and housing conditions...

...terms, here it is an enormous sum...

...today, many tenants live in urban high-rises and suburban garden apartment complexes owned by absentee landlords who build and buy apartments for their short-term tax advantages...

...Police representatives have said repeatedly that the department has not singled out gays for harassment, and remind critics that the force is one of the few in the country that openly recruits gay and lesbian applicants...

...Until 1978, none of the resisters stuck around to test the government, but in the past few years, a few young white men have been digging in rather than fleeing...

...More than a year later, Steele and another man, Peter Moll, each came independently to the conclusion that they would say no...

...Whatever the facts about yellow rain, the State Department's conclusion about Soviet involvement seems to be something less than "inescapable...

...No More Fun and Games SAN FRANCISCO Once upon a time, the harmony between San Francisco police and the city's highly visible gay community was symbolized by the annual softball game between police and gay league champions...

...This," says Dr...

...Already, Steele's action has borne fruit...

...But he adds that the crisis has in some ways been beneficial...

...More than 110 cities have rent control, and New Jersey has the toughest landlord-tenant laws in the nation, including strong protection against arbitrary evictions...

...Chief Murphy defends the Polk Street raids, asserting that they were supported by the street's largely gay merchants' association...

...His name became a household word...

...Tenants have formed a counterpart, the National Tenants Union, based in East Orange, New Jersey, to aid the growing number of local tenant groups...

...In October 1980, more than twenty patrons of the Question Mark tavern in the Haight-Ashbury district were rounded up and booked on a variety of drug and loitering charges...

...He decided to resist...

...According to a story in the Bay Area Reporter, a local gay paper, police broke down doors and roughed up tenants, several of whom have filed brutality suits against the city...

...The call to conscience Richard Steele has issued to his fellow citizens may not accomplish much, but any sign of change in South Africa must be viewed with hope...

...And while there are still materials that must be imported—since they can't be produced locally—we can pay for them with the dollars we save elsewhere," the doctor says...

...But the central issue of the mushrooming tenants' movement is rent control...

...So far, the movement has proved that it can build grass-roots organizations and win limited but useful victories...

...To make his case, the doctor, who is chief of clinical laboratories at San Juan de Dios, presents a small round plastic container with built-in dividers...

...Currently, there are two conscientious objectors in prison, two awaiting trial, and six more whose cases will be coming up soon...

...MADISON, WISCONSIN In the cluttered basement laundry room of the housing co-op where I live, I made "yellow rain...

...After three weeks the rice was covered with a layer of white moldy growth which, when analyzed, did contain contaminating bacteria, but also significant levels of T-2 toxin, the same trichothecene found in the State Department's "physical evidence" of yellow rain attacks...

...With this one item, we throw away $100,000 each year throughout the public hospital system...

...Instead of looking into the situation, the authorities started investigating me, he says...

...The landlords, tired of fighting these local brushfire battles, have been looking to Washington for help...

...They do not have gaseous qualities and so, I was assured, would not be dangerous to me unless I ingested a large dose...

...Now we have to produce items here, use our imagination and even relearn techniques we once had but lost...

...Last May, the day after the State Department presented "conclusive evidence" that trichothecenes were being used in Southeast Asia, the Senate narrowly voted to authorize $54 million to resume chemical weapons production for the first time in thirteen years...

...There would be no excuses about "making men" or training for civilian jobs...

...Like the bottles of sterile water, the dishes were imported by the hundreds of thousands from a U.S...

...But now, with the economic crisis, the mood has changed, and officials are scrambling to find ways to save scarce foreign exchange...

...Trejos brought up the subject before a hospital cost-control commission...

...Moll, a selective objector, was prosecuted first...

...Dianne Feinstein has in effect told police that they can go out and beat up gays with impunity...

...Daniel Cullen and Rodney Caldwell are plant pathologists at the University of Wisconsin...

...The story he likes best is about local ingenuity...

...An investigation by the District Attorney's office confirmed that most of the charges were not backed by sufficient evidence...

...The confrontation between landlords and tenants has spurred political organization on both sides...

...If we could separate it out, we could use it again and save a good deal of money," Trejos explains...

...There is also the matter of graft...

...The courage of Richard Steele and those who have come after him is a welcome addition to the South African political landscape...

...after that, he would attend "training camps" on and off for ten years...

...He served two months in jail and that was that...

...rehabilitate apartments though tenant-run cooperatives...

...The experiment suggests to Cullen and Caldwell that the technology necessary to produce the toxin is as easily available to the Vietnamese or Laotian government as it is to the Soviet Union...

...In most large cities and many suburbs, tenants constitute a majority of the population, and thus a potentially powerful political force...

...Feinstein and Murphy rejected Britt's proposal, defending the Bureau's impartiality and promising citizen participation in its investigations...

...In an effort to keep contaminants out, I sterilized my materials with alcohol and kept each pan under a cardboard box...

...Labeled Aqua Pak, it holds sterile water from Respiratory Care, Inc., of Arlington Heights, Illinois...

...In Costa Rica, where labor is so cheap, ridiculous...

...It will be a long time before the softball games resume, and if they ever do, gays and police officers will know they are playing on opposite sides...

...Members of South Africa's English-speaking religious community were prepared to take up the issue of conscientious objection, but their voices were muted and their numbers small...

...The papers went from calling him "military refuser Yeats" in headlines to simply "Yeats...

...Barbara Koeppel (Barbara Koeppel, a Washington freelance, is a contributing editor of The Progressive...

...Captain Don Taylor of the Mission police station, which oversees the largely homosexual Castro area, claimed few gays were held without cause and said the force was trying its best to protect gays from criminals...

...A few months ago, we decided to look for ways to recycle reagents used in some laboratory tests...

...Like Bamburg, they maintain that no sophisticated technology is needed to produce trichothecenes...

...And they represent a dramatic jump from none just foupjvears ago...

...They're one of the greatest under-utilized political forces in America," says Representative Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat...

...In the past, most tenants lived in three- and four-unit buildings owned by mom-and-pop landlords...

...Last year, Costa Rica's economy collapsed...

...Newly elected Mayor Dianne Feinstein replaced Gain with hardliner Cornelius "Con" Murphy at the request of the city Police Officers' Association, and called for a crackdown on public sex and pornography...

...They showed me a catalog from which I could order the culture, and with a simple page of instructions I set about making yellow rain...

...The cops later retaliated by bashing their way into the Elephant Walk, a gay bar, overturning tables and clubbing patrons at random...

...The brainwashing was hard to undo...

...Later that month, police began a series of massive sweeps of Polk Street, a bazaar of hustlers, Johns, and bar-hoppers...

...A South African's Call to Conscience SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA Every year, more than 100 young men flee South Africa to escape conscription...

...For example, when we test for blood sugar, we use acetic acid, which forms a new compound during the process...

...Police awaited an order from liberal Police Chief Charles Gain to charge the crowd, but the order never came...

...One even said they were prettier...

...Charles Yeats, a young South African living in self-imposed exile in Europe, returned to South Africa after reading about Steele and Moll...

...He disagrees...

...He, too, refused military service, and his trial and sentencing were even bigger news in South Africa than his predecessors' had been...

...I sprinkled soil and the fungus culture on a nutrient base of cooked rice which I had placed in three large aluminum turkey pans...

...Military service is required of all white South Africans after they turn seventeen...

...Student activists did not address the issue at all...

...Dave A. Denison (Dave A. Denison was recently an editorial intern at The Progressive...

...As a result, some serums are being produced locally...

...Along with the skills comes advanced technology, which the new professionals attempt to transplant back home—though it may be exactly what underdeveloped countries do not need: costly, wasteful, polluting, and capital-intensive luxuries in places where unemployment is a paramount problem...

...Gays reacted to the verdict with rage...

...NJTO helped elect members of the state legislature as well as former Governor Brendan Byrne and Essex County Executive Peter Shapiro...

...As a middle-class white, he had little sense of what life was like for the black majority in his country...

...Today's middle-class renters, with the dream of home ownership slipping away, are getting their first taste of the powerlessness and insecurity of renting and are joining the urban poor in a growing renters' rights movement...

...You know how to produce sterile water...

...But why not...

...The numbers may be small, but they loom large in a yearly draft pool of only 30,000...

...Steele is now touring the Americas and Europe, studying struggles for social change first-hand...

...On his arrival, he would be expected to serve two years in the South African Defense Force...

...At a time when the nationwide vacancy rate is at its lowest in three decades, and construction of new rental housing is almost at a standstill, many tenants who have lost the option to move are banding together to fight rent increases, condominium conversions, unfair evictions, and poorly maintained buildings...

...Many gay activists blame Feinstein and Murphy for worsening gay-police relations...

...officials seem certain they have solved the yellow rain mystery...

...Charges against all were soon dropped, although the police raided the bar again in April 1981...

...Steven Belling (Steven Belling, a free-lance writer in Santa Cruz, recently interviewed Richard Steele in California...

...One of the first was Richard Steele...

...Steele would have joined up when his time came, but he was accepted that year as a Rotary exchange student to the United States, where he spent a year in upstate New York...

...The tenant's movement is still in its infancy...

...Tenants in more than 200 cities (including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and its suburbs, and more than 110 communities in New Jersey) have successfully lobbied for rent control laws...

...He not only argues that the Soviet Union, an advanced technological power, would be more likely to produce a pure form of T-2 toxin, but questions whether the Soviets would produce the toxins at all, since they are only a fiftieth as harmful as nerve gas...

...The timing of the Government's chemical warfare concerns may be significant...

...The desk clerk alleged that the police had refused to display a search warrant...

...But in the long run, by politicizing and mobilizing renters and by electing pro-tenant candidates (who tend to be progressive on other issues as well), the tenants' movement can also help promote political and economic democracy...

...The money just isn't there, even for essentials," Trejos says...

...Here we import it, since imported water is 'better.' " In Costa Rica, as elsewhere in the Third World, the best and brightest have streamed off for decades to schools in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe to train in medicine, physics, economics, business administration, and the like...

...Though this may seem small in U.S...

...During the next three weeks, more than 440 people were arrested, most for misdemeanors such as loitering and prostitution...

...Gays claimed they were being singled out for selective enforcement of sex laws as arrests of gays and complaints of harassment shot up over the next year...

...The city's tenants' movement (which a year earlier had passed a strong rent control and condo-conversion law) took the lead, but the victorious coalition did not focus solely on tenant issues...

...The New Jersey Public Interest PAC (PIPAC) is now raising money for staff, training its groups to mobilize members for the elections, and targeting races for the 1982 and 1983 state legislative sessions...

...Peter Dreier (Peter Dreier, an assistant professor of sociology at Tufts University, b writing a book on the housing crisis and the tenants' movement...