Datelines
Hughes, Tom Chaffin, Keenen Peck, Mike Jendrzejczyk, John Stamets, Bev Fingerhood, and Kathleen
DATELINES Mom & Pop's Power Shop TRINITY COUNTY, CALIFORNIA From high in the timberlands of California's Klamath Mountains, rains cut streambeds through granite and serpentine. For Barbara...
...The Manila Connection SEATTLE After more than eighteen months and the imprisonment of three men for the crime, the murder case of two Filipino-American labor activists in Seattle has not been put to rest...
...De Antonio grins at the irony of that 1978 entry, but he doesn't conceal his anger at being the target of Government spying...
...Then the Malletts' livelihood will become "mostly a matter of watching the meter turn and waiting for the checks to come in," says Barbara Mallett...
...That's not decentralizing electricity...
...Keenen Peck (Keenen Peck is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...On June 4, 1982, the group drafted an appeal addressed to the "governments and publics of the U.S.S.R...
...One member, Yuri Khronopulo, was told he would be dismissed from his job if he continued his peace activities, and was threatened with criminal prosecution under the treason article of the Soviet Criminal Code...
...Six weeks before they were killed, Domingo and Viernes persuaded the international leadership of the ILWU to send a team of unionists to the Philippines to investigate Marcos's crackdown on the labor movement there...
...an assault on my rights as an artist and an individual...
...Telleen ignored the threat, and continued to inspect the way he always had...
...My crimes are very simple: I practice the First Amendment...
...After six or eight years, however, they expect to have paid back the loans they took out to finance the $150,000 plant...
...Lax enforcement," he testified, "allows contaminated products bearing the mark of inspection to be sold all over the world and at home...
...According to Telleen, inspectors were instructed instead to compose "circuit summaries" that evaluated forty to sixty plants in a single report without identifying them by name...
...The plaintiffs claim the murders were carried out as part of an illegal "Philippine Infiltration Plan," designed to spy on, harass, and even kill outspoken opponents of the Marcos regime living in this country...
...I want to see renewable resources developed so we won't have to use nuclear...
...Tom Chaffin (Tom Chaffin is a free-lance writer in San Francisco...
...But Telleen and his wife did, indeed, make the move...
...There was no real interest or commitment to getting small entrepreneurs involved...
...That may explain why, after years of harassment, de Antonio continues to make films that challenge the official line...
...On November 1, the group scheduled a press conference to protest the arrest of one of its members, but the conference never came off...
...I had taken so much by then," he says, "nothing could stop me...
...The appeal, which had reportedly been signed by at least 500 Soviet citizens as of September 1982, reflects the group's strengths as well as its limitations...
...This incident was the latest in the six-month-old conflict between the Soviet government and the fledgling peace group...
...Crucial to his work were the reports he filed with USD A detailing health code violations...
...A pivotal figure in the alleged conspiracy is former cannery union president Tony Baruso, an ardent Marcos loyalist who made no secret of his dislike for Domingo and Viernes and their reform efforts...
...There are indications that the Soviet authorities may soon step up their efforts to squelch the Trust Group...
...In 1982, the Reagan Administration—in a move purportedly designed to reduce red tape-^-cut back plant inspectors' responsibilities and devised a new system of paperwork that did not oblige inspectors to report such "minor" infractions as dirty equipment and mislabeled packages...
...Other members were placed under surveillance...
...Outrage over the murders has catapulted members of the union reform movement into control of Local 37...
...Meanwhile, thanks to PURPA, Northern California's giant Pacific Gas and Electric Company pays Mom & Pop Power Company between 5.8 and 6 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity...
...Trinity County statistics support her projection...
...The Trust Group's lack of criticism of the Soviet Union, however, is not an oversight...
...To the furtive scribes of the FBI, though, the movies are more: Emile de Antonio has been assigned a spot in the bureau's own documentary history...
...And there were other incidents: suspicious auto accidents, interrogations, and house arrests...
...I don't see the advantage of developing small hydroelectric energy here, then dumping it into a large grid where it's shipped out . . . and then sold back to us at a higher rate by Pacific Gas and Electric," he says...
...Among those named in the legal action are Marcos, the U.S...
...The brief, handwritten statement signed by fifteen members of the Trust Group urges "all sides in all military clashes and conflicts to stop their military actions...
...Only 3 per cent of those are now being used to produce electricity...
...The FBI's records on him are so detailed that de Antonio plans to use them as the basis for a fictional, autobiographical movie, tentatively entitled The Life of a Middle-aged Radical as Seen Through the Eyes of His Government...
...The inquiry was set into motion by an employee of WHA-TV, the public television station in Madison...
...The inspector's crusade worried department officials...
...John Stamets (John Stamets is a free-lance journalist in Seattle...
...The week before 200 Scandinavians were scheduled to arrive in Moscow on a Committee-hosted peace march, members of the group were arrested and jailed for two weeks...
...But now the relatives of the slain men have filed a civil suit charging that the murders were part of a larger conspiracy organized by the government of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos...
...And small hydro plants have the backing of environmentalists who see them as a benign method of using safe and renewable resources...
...On November 5, Khronopulo was called into KGB headquarters for two hours and given a written warning that unless he stopped his peace work, he would be formally charged with criminal activities and put on trial...
...Trinity County residents are concerned about this trend in hydro plant ownership...
...Despite elaborate machinations and an attempted break-in at the studio, the bureau couldn't find the radicals or use the film for mug shots...
...Gene and Silme were the fire behind this investigation," says David Delia, an officer of Local 37...
...Mike Jendrzejczyk (Mike Jendrzejczyk is disarmament director for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York, and is coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation!American Friends Service Committee nuclear weapons facilities project...
...All my films are about the history of my country in my time," says de Antonio...
...human rights groups such as Helsinki Watch believe the police wanted to prevent any possible meeting between the local peace agitators and the Scandinavians...
...In January, an increased real estate tax will take effect in Philadelphia...
...Naval Intelligence...
...But the Trust Group seems determined to ignore such warnings, and has called for an expression of international solidarity with ten minutes of silence on January 1 at 15:00 Greenwich Mean Time...
...Government gave its tacit approval to the infiltration plan...
...Kathleen Hughes (Kathleen Hughes is a staff writer for the Center for Study of Responsive Law in Washington, D.C...
...Tayoun estimates that the increased land tax will lower taxes of small homeowners by only $15 to $30 per year...
...Under Philadelphia's current property tax structure, speculators can afford to hold abandoned properties for years until a neighborhood is recycled and property values shoot up...
...It busily looked into what de Antonio had to say about how he had obtained the film of Richard Nixon's 1952 Checkers speech, which had been incorporated into Millhouse...
...De, as he is known to friends, could well rely on the files for a celluloid sketch of his life: The FBI began keeping tabs on the nineteen-year-old de Antonio when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in World War II after belonging to several left-wing groups at Harvard...
...He also began to publicly criticize the USD A by alerting elected officials and the press...
...The U.S...
...De Antonio discovered that Nixon owned the rights to the film and wouldn't authorize its release...
...The silence has been cracked, and inspectors around the country are following his example and beginning to speak out...
...I didn't see that professionally they had the right to suppress or edit any of the material we collected," that inspector said...
...she says with resignation...
...In addition, Telleen says, some of his inspection reports were altered to remove any critical edge...
...But, he emphasizes that the overall stability the tax will bring to a neighborhood undergoing reinvestment will be dramatic...
...Telleen spent most of his life monitoring meat-packing plants in Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and upstate New York for the United States Department of Agriculture...
...Madore believes this land tax, in effect in Pittsburgh since 1914, would go a long way toward stemming the displacement of long-term residents and would reduce speculator activity...
...These two engines, some transmission cable, and the conduits that deliver water to and from the nearby stream, are the makings of a business the Malletts expect will net an annual $80,000 in six years or so...
...The Group to Establish Mutual Trust Between the U.S...
...it states that the bureau was "advised that de Antonio had commented during this interview about the making of another movie concerning the Weather Underground...
...Although the Trust Group attempts to circumvent the official contrivances of the Committee, Committee activities inevitably affect Trust Group members...
...Telleen was appalled by the new reporting system, and charged it would "insulate packers from the review team" and create "a free-for-all industry...
...Refitting those plants to produce electricity could add 54.6 million kilowatts— equivalent to the power output of more than fifty nuclear plants—to the national energy grid...
...For Barbara Mallett, a retired schoolteacher who lives in these uplands, and for an increasing number of residents in this Northern California watershed, these waters are the means to a potentially lucrative livelihood...
...The "plant," a small wooden pitched-roof building of board-and-batten construction, houses a small turbine and a 300-kilowatt generator...
...State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI, and U.S...
...There was a lot of anxiety about future energy supplies, and they were looking for a way to take the pressure off imported oil," he said...
...The interview I "did not provide any significant information" concerning the fugitive radicals, but the FBI took another tack...
...It's alive in committee," he said...
...The two men had been fighting corruption in the union since the 1970s and, as active members of the socialist Union of Democratic Filipinos, advocated the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship...
...Ostrovsky and members of U.S...
...Telleen was told he would be reassigned to Washington...
...The New Yorker and CBS television exhibited hydro plant owners as the new energy pioneers who were attaining self-reliance and collecting their due from the large utilities...
...If this weren't enough to put Domingo and Viernes on some hired gun's hit list, their activities within the ILWU were...
...The ILWU investigation of labor conditions in the Philippines appears to have stalled, however—perhaps indefinitely...
...The FBI's Checkered Record MADISON, WISCONSIN Among some 4,000-odd pages in the FBI's dossier on Emile de Antonio is a document asserting that the veteran filmmaker entertains "ill-informed fantasies concerning FBI investigative activities...
...Packing a Protest WASHINGTON, D.C...
...Mallettt, forty-four, and her forty-six-year-old husband, George, are the sole proprietors of the Mom & Pop Power Company, a hydroelectric plant located on a far corner of the couple's 260-acre ranch in Trinity County, California...
...They are bothered very little by the low carrying costs of a small land tax and a nominal improvements tax resulting from a dilapidated property's assessed valuation...
...they support the declared disarmament goals of their government, but don't believe the government's tactics will bring about "an authentic movement" for peace...
...Its founders are fifteen scientists, engineers, physicians, and other professionals who had been meeting informally for eight months or so to discuss the danger of the arms race and the failure of governments to control or reverse it...
...County Planning Director Jeff Shields believes people have misconstrued PURPA's intent...
...At the age of sixty-eight, Carl Telleen, now of Washington, is determined to keep doing the job that's been pulled out from under him: protecting meat-eating Americans...
...But the Malletts doubt that such opportunities will be available much longer to small hydroelectric entrepreneurs...
...Such increased visibility has put the Trust Group under increasing Soviet scrutiny and repression...
...What makes the Malletts' business possible is PURPA, the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, signed in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter...
...Of sixty-three applications before the Federal Energy Resource Council (FERC) to develop small hydro sites in the county, only eleven were filed by small, local entrepreneurs...
...On May 20,1982, James Tayoun, a City Council member, introduced a bill proposing a change in Philadelphia's property tax schedule...
...Her three years of dealing with finance packages, government regulators, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the mechanics of building a generating system left her with an unpopulist view of the future of small hydro...
...If you intend to keep on recycling neighborhoods and moving blacks out, then why don't you just put them on roller skates," Madore said, "and let them roll from place to place...
...Soviet peace policy is conveyed through the officially sanctioned Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace...
...No," he says, "I'm not afraid of them...
...When this didn't get the desired results, he was badgered during staff meetings...
...and the U.S.S.R.— known as the Trust Group—was formed last June at the time of the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament...
...It did make forty-five prints of the movie for regional bureaus, prompting de Antonio to sue over copyright infringement...
...After the WHA interview, the FBI spent eight months working with NBC executives to make a case against de Antonio as a receiver of stolen goods—but the probe produced no hard evidence and no prosecution...
...On May 3, 1982, Telleen received a memo from a supervisor, in Washington, advising him of his "incompatibility with Programs Review Branch efforts to carry out its assigned functions...
...Evidence of this inefficiency is Philadelphia's 23,000 long-term vacant houses, most of which are concentrated in low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...Opposition to the bill, Tayoun says, is tremendous, especially from major land owners, dock holders, trucking companies, oil companies, and others in businesses dependent on large land parcels, who will have to pay more under the Tayoun proposal...
...In Tayoun's new scheme, owners of all land parcels in the city would pay lower property taxes...
...Trust Busting NEW YORK CITY In the Soviet Union, it is an anomoly: a small group of citizens organizing an independent, international disarmament movement...
...I'm no threat to any branch of the Government," he said during a recent visit here...
...Some returned home to find that their phones had been shut off and that they were under house arrest, unable to see visitors or foreign correspondents...
...that's the way it's always been...
...Plainclothesmen lined up in front of the apartment building where it was to be held and refused to let reporters enter...
...And who's going to develop things like small hydro if the oil companies don't...
...This bill came about right after the Shah of Iran fell...
...Several utilities have mounted legal challenges to this requirement, and have won in the lower courts...
...Four other inspectors experienced similar "editing," and one quit "in disgust" as a result...
...His tireless efforts paid off last August when Telleen was permitted to tell his story to Congress...
...But Barbara Mallett rejects such romantic notions about small hydros and is not optimistic about the future of small-plant ownership...
...But Barbara Mallett has little faith that the future of hydro plants will be with people like herself...
...Mikhail Ostrovsky, one of the original members of the Trust Group who was granted an exit visa last July and now lives in New York City, says Trust Group members do not see themselves as dissidents...
...PURPA requires large utilities to purchase at market price any electricity produced by small hydroelectric, wind-powered, or cogeneration plants...
...PURPA was designed to bring small hydro on line in a very short time...
...and the U.S.A.," urging the "progressive and finally complete abolition of nuclear weapons stockpiles and other means of massive destruction...
...We appeal for ten minutes of stable peace...
...His most recent, In the King of Prussia, dramatically recreates the trial of the Plowshares Eight, the pacifists who broke into a General Electric weapons plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, to protest the arms race...
...According to a recent survey by the Army Corps of Engineers, there are 49,500 dams in the United States...
...Domingo and Viernes were murdered, the plaintiffs say, to stop their anti-Marcos organizing activities...
...owners of idle land would assume a greater tax burden, according to a study conducted by the Henry School of Social Science in Philadelphia...
...When PURPA was signed, there was talk among energy reformers that the bill marked the arrival of the small entrepreneur in the energy industry...
...Telleen suspects that the officials didn't believe he would leave his home and friends in Kansas...
...Asserting that "only trust between nations can create a firm faith in the future," the group called for a "four-sided dialogue" between the Soviet and American people and their governments...
...Rather, she sees hydro power moving increasingly into the hands of big business...
...For John Madore, research specialist at the Housing Association of Delaware Valley, a not-for-profit agency that seeks improved housing for low- to moderate-income families, this cycle of displacement is frustrating...
...The suit also charges that the U.S...
...in an apparent effort to silence him, they suggested he take early retirement...
...Some of the peace activists never reached the apartment and were presumed to have been intercepted by the police, according to a New York Times report...
...Large oil companies built this country...
...The process is encouraged, in part, by the property tax practices in many American cities...
...Madore believes the new tax could end what he calls "the gutting of poor neighborhoods...
...De Antonio says that for someone at public television to have called the FBI is "outrageous...
...The activists play themselves and Hollywood's Martin Sheen portrays the judge...
...In the Soviet Union, the Trust Group's membership has climbed steadily, and the organization now has chapters in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, and Novosibirsk in Siberia...
...Those who praise the Trust Group applaud its courage and praise its clear-sighted commitment to building trust between the superpowers...
...He tried to pass this word on to his supervisors at USDA's Programs Review Branch, but was told "that those who could not go along with this program would have to quit," he says...
...So when "a voice that I vaguely recognized" called de Antonio one day to offer him NBC's print of the film, he agreed to "liberate Checkers...
...Early last June, all but one of the group's members were taken to local police stations and district public prosecutors' offices and warned that their activities were "provocative, antisocial and illegal...
...Hiner says he called the FBI after screening a tape of the interview because "under the FCC law at that time, we were required to notify an organization or individual who was personally attacked and give them seven days to respond...
...The next round's in January...
...Delia says the local plans to raise the issue at the ILWU convention next April, but for now, the murders seem to have done their job of intimidation...
...Tayoun believes that the new tax may generate support for his proposal, which will come before the Philadelphia city council that same month...
...The Kremlin has not masked its hostility toward this "Group to Establish Mutual Trust Between the U.S.A...
...The eighty-million-member committee organizes peace demonstrations, sponsors tours of peace delegations from other countries, and circulates petitions in support of the government's positions on peace and disarmament issues...
...Armed with a media tip—^'It doesn't happen frequently," conceded Milwaukee FBI spokesman Tony Richardson—a special agent monitored and transcribed the interview as it was broadcast...
...Shields doubts that PURPA could help develop decentralized energy...
...Briefs filed by the complainants contend that the Marcos government wanted to break the ties that Domingo and Viernes were forging between the ILWU and the Philippine free-trade-union movement...
...The FBI report contains no mention of the Fairness Doctrine...
...Supreme Court has agreed to review the matter during its current term...
...For whoever develops them, hydro resources promise a bright future...
...In Philadelphia, for example, real estate taxes are based not on the worth of an individual property holding, but on overall neighborhood value...
...But the most intense FBI surveillance came years later, when the filmmaker was arranging to shoot interviews with five fugitive members of the Weather Underground...
...The G-men delved deep at that time, and interviewed people who had known de Antonio when he was all of ten...
...Moving On Up PHILADELPHIA It's called "redevelopment" by some, "urban renewal" by others, but for low-income families living in so-called up-and-coming neighborhoods, the nationwide trend to upgrade once "undesirable" areas only spells displacement...
...The union has been debilitated by internal corruption for more than twenty years, but most of the reforms advocated by the slain men have been instituted in the short time since their deaths...
...And critics are quick to point out that the appeal carefully avoids direct criticism of current Soviet policy...
...Have the G-men dogging him slowed de Antonio down...
...Six years ago, his association with the Weather Underground sparked a bizarre FBI investigation into possible copyright violations on de Antonio's part...
...The others are from the Southern Pacific Railroad, various California agribusiness interests, and Consolidated Petroleum Industry of Houston, a Texas-based independent oil company...
...Another member, Igor Sobkov, a psychiatrist, had his apartment searched and his books confiscated...
...Bev Fingerhood (Bev Fingerhood is a free-lance writer in Philadelphia...
...When Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were gunned down in the Seattle offices of the Alaska Cannery Workers Union—Local 37 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU)—the killings seemed to be the tragic result of a struggle between union reformers and local racketeers...
...According to Hiner, the call was made to "fulfill my legal obligations under the Fairness Doctrine...
...Station Manager Richard Hiner called the FBI's Milwaukee office in May 1977 and, in the words of the official report, "advised that his station would televise an interview with Emile de Antonio subsequent to his station's showing of a movie produced by de Antonio entitled 'Milhouse' [sic...
...But Madore sees some hope for Phila-delphians in the lower middle class...
...Telleen's office is now in the huge Agriculture Department complex on Capitol Hill, and from there he continues his crusade...
...Critics say the appeal is a vague statement that offers little analysis of the causes of the arms race or useful guidance for ending it...
...The detention in August of one of its founders, Sergei Batovrin, in a psychiatric hospital spurred the group's supporters in the Soviet Union and in the West to speak out in defense of Russian peace partisans...
...Through the Freedom of Information Act—"which is really the eleventh Article of the Bill of Rights," he says—de Antonio obtained proof that the FBI kept watch on him while he chronicled Government abuses of power in his documentaries about Joe McCarthy (Point of Order, 1963), Vietnam (In the Year of the Pig, 1968), Richard Nixon (Millhouse: A White Comedy, 1971), and the Weather Underground (Underground, 1975...
...The speech, it seems, had not been seen since the year Nixon made it to salvage his political life...
...The proposed inquiry threatened to cause damaging headlines for Marcos at the same time he was trying to convince the world that he had done away with martial law...
...As improvements are made within an area, the neighborhood's assessment goes up, forcing many long-term residents either to pay the higher taxes or to move out...
...While the Malletts expect Mom & Pop to gross approximately $80,000 during its first year, they estimate their net will be much thinner—in the $12,000-to-$16,000 range—for the first few years...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
