Comments

...Can the spreading of nonviolent civil disobedience make a difference...

...The scene takes place not in Santiago or Brasilia or Warsaw, but in New York City...

...The preserves of state or city bureaucracies, the schools have become arenas of interest-group politics rather than focal points for parental and student involvement and control...

...Presumably, a group of police can treat a group of citizens in autos as guilty until proven innocent...

...America's schools are inadequate, and Federal funds have not brought them up to the standards they should meet...

...There is, of course, no cause-and-effect relationship between the crusade against drunk driving and the Court's cavalier attitude toward civil liberties...

...Supreme Court has ruled, are acceptable because they do not involve the "unbridled discretion" of an individual officer...

...Spokesman Catto conceded, "The breakfast meeting has, in my experience, tended to bring out tongues in gear before minds are in gear...

...II Cleared the way for customs officials to detain ships at random...

...We are already witnessing the consequences of diminished sensitivity to civil liberties...

...It was legal to amass incredible overstrike capacity in an unrelenting effort to maintain America's nuclear edge...

...The Court ruled that customs officers need not suspect a crime is being committed before boarding a vessel...

...Failing Grade With his usual uncanny ability to exploit public fears and hostilities when it suits his purposes, President Reagan recently lambasted the U.S...

...I think it is only the resisting people...

...educational system, asserting that Americans are not "getting their money's worth out of the schools...

...Is labor's cause lost...

...At the same time, the Court voided a number of legislative restrictions on abortion procedures...

...If they can't be trusted to meet with reporters before the dew has dried on the Pentagon's well-tended lawns, they obviously can't be trusted to fight a war before noon...

...The AFL-CIO was a zealous booster of the Cold War from its beginnings and dutifully purged its own ranks of "subversives" who were, as it happened, often its most militant and effective organizers...

...No more Corn Flakes with correspondents...

...The articles beginning on Page 18 make it clear that the decline in labor's fortunes is real, whether or not it is permanent...

...About 1,400 people were arrested—with the support of additional thousands—in civil disobedience actions at a dozen places...

...Even conservative courts—such as the one that handed down Roe v. Wade—usually defer to the will of the majority when that will is clearly and emphatically expressed...

...As drivers wait to get through the checkpoint, uniformed police walk up and down the lanes, peering into windows and asking an occasional occupant to step out...

...And it is waiting to be found...

...The "get-tough-on-drunks" mood sweeping the nation has produced stiffer penalties and stricter enforcement...

...Decades of rampant militarism have contributed in no small measure to the decay of key industries and their loss of competitive edge to foreign rivals...

...But if the misguided surge of eagerness to clamp down on criminals spreads, the Court will have an easy time gutting the rule...

...Surveying today's troubled union scene, we can all too easily overlook the substantial gains labor has scored in these last five decades...

...Since the end of May, police there have been stopping and checking drivers every night—about 185,000 in one month— in an attempt to curb drunken driving...

...Unfettered corporate freedom to make investment decisions, to move and export jobs, to reorganize and redefine the very nature of work, has put the unions on the defensive with their own members and undermined their appeal to the unorganized majority of the work force...

...In the crisis of the Great Depression, American workers found they had to fashion a new kind of labor movement to serve their own urgent interests...

...A movement that has become timid, topheavy, and self-satisfied (with little cause for self-satisfaction) needs to re-examine every one of its assumptions-beginning with its all too narrow definition of its own responsibilities and prerogatives...

...And if it is, what does it mean...

...The Court will consider permitting a "good-faith exception," which would allow use of evidence obtained in violation of a suspect's rights if the police thought they were acting constitutionally...

...But we also found that some promising experiments turned sour before we could even get the details into print...

...Ronald Reagan, using a contrived "news flash" during his regular weekly radio address, reappointed Paul Volcker to his post of Federal Reserve Board chairman, ending months of speculation that the President might name his "own man" to head the Fed...

...Those who confront weapons, weapons-makers, and their immaculate guardian—the law...

...And as the articles we had commissioned began to cross our desks, we noted that various writers, reporting on diverse aspects of the labor movement from scattered sections of the country, came up with a composite picture that was distressingly dark and dispiriting...

...If rights can be abridged in one instance, they can be violated in another...

...Specifically, labor has conceded to management the full right to produce whatever it wants wherever it chooses by whatever technological means it finds most profitable...

...McCloy insists there was no racist motive in the internment, and that even if the relocation of Japanese Americans was "traumatic," it would be fruitless to hold an "innocent" generation accountable...

...It was legal for Truman and his successors, backed by Congress and most of the American people, to threaten the use of the bomb for political and military leverage in the postwar period...

...In our demand for excellence," Alvarado said, "we must be careful that we do not wind up with a system that becomes elitist, that increases standards for a significant upper percentage of those who can, and refuses to deal with those who will not...

...Reagan is betting that the economy will continue its upswing, without generating renewed inflation, until November 1984...

...Regardless of the personal views President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry Stimson may have held, the policies were racist: They discriminated against a group of people on the basis of their racial identity...

...Decline Expected to Be Permanent...

...As in the past, hundreds were hauled off to jail from such familiar protest sites as the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory in California and the Electric Boat Company's Trident submarine shipyard in Connecticut...

...Labor's abject surrender in the area of economic decision-making has its political parallel in the unions' slavish support of American imperial adventures abroad and repression at home...

...Americans, it would seem, are willing to sacrifice their rights to cope with an admittedly serious problem—drunks who are responsible for more than half the fatalities on our highways...

...Some of it probably is, though harsh mandatory sentences have made some judges and juries reluctant to convict...

...This year, the struggle for peace is intensifying...

...Senior Defense officials and military officers, he announced, would no longer be permitted to hold breakfast meetings with reporters...

...It is legal to point the weapons at other nations and threaten to push the button...

...And once inflation takes off, Volcker will in all likelihood clamp down on the money supply again, a move that would throw workers on the dole and Reagan votes down the drain...

...The presumption of innocence is often subjected to further abuse when the police make an arrest for driving while intoxicated...

...There is hope...

...When their days in Washington come to an end, enterprising advertising executives might induce the two to star in commercials for Miller Lite...

...only stronger parental interest and a return to educational basics would suffice...

...Once cracks begin to open in our constitutional bulwark, the fissures can't be patched or checked...

...And pushing the button would itself be legal...

...There are two traditions that have been in conflict through much of American history...

...In this context, it is not surprising that many parents and young people are disenchanted with public education...

...Can the new resistance accomplish what thirty-eight years of voting, letter-writing, lobbying, and doorbell-ringing have failed to do...

...A Demand of History Though forty-one years have elapsed since the internment of Japanese Americans, this country still bears a guilty conscience—and for good reason...

...And in New York and other states, refusal to submit to a blood or breath test can mean punishment as severe as that meted out to convicted drunk drivers...

...American labor in permanent decline...

...By then, of course, it's 8 p.m...

...Only in the face of the recent excesses of the Reagan Administration has labor begun to rethink its all-out backing of the arms race and the national security state...

...Three of these four cases involve drugs, like alcohol a subject of much popular disapproval...

...After the war, when labor had consolidated its gains, the merger of the old American Federation of Labor and the new Congress of Industrial Organizations into a single, unified labor confederation suggested a force to be reckoned with from then on—a movement that would continue to gain strength as it enrolled new members and made new friends...

...Politically, labor won power enough to obtain Congressional and judicial guarantees of the right to organize and bargain collectively and to play a significant role in fashioning social legislation...

...Rarely has the United States inflicted so basic and blatant a denial of civil liberties on a group of Americans whose disloyalty was never established...

...It needs to return control of the unions to those who are its rightful owners—the rank and file...

...In so doing, New York and the other states sanctioning roadblocks have violated the Fourth Amendment right of citizens to be free of "unreasonable searches and seizures...

...And as a consequence of their comfortable compact with management, the unions have slid into a rut of bureaucratic complacency...

...No more Wheaties with writers...

...It was legal for President Roosevelt to authorize the development of the atomic bomb...

...The editors of USA Today are so confident they're getting the message right that they don't even bother with a letters column...

...Important though they are as symbolic actions, such efforts still fall far short of disrupting the arms race as a whole...

...But now Volcker will be easily confirmed by a Senate that strongly denounced him only months ago...

...Today, it is still legal to design, build, and deploy a nuclear arsenal capable of obliterating humanity and all of its works...

...Also in June, the Justices agreed (for the second time) to review the so-called exclusionary rule that bars prosecutors from using evidence illegally obtained by police...

...Organizing the unorganized was once labor's highest mission...

...For the past decade, anti-abortionists have attempted to limit abortion at the state and local level...

...Supreme Court ruling on abortion...

...Headlines from the future: We're Happy...

...But the clamor to "get tough" by suspending basic civil liberties poses a grave danger to us all...

...But there are some, including former Presidential adviser John J. McCloy, who oppose any compensation to the victims of this State-sponsored domestic repression...

...His is a risky wager, for in our economy long-term, noninflationary growth is a virtual impossibility...

...No, it has merely been mislaid...

...It detaches us from our political history and relieves us of our moral duty...

...But roadblocks, the U.S...

...They Shall Not Pass Thirty-eight years have passed since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...H Ruled that military personnel may not bring damage suits against their commanding officers for violating their constitutional rights—holding, in effect, that the Constitution's due process and equal protection guarantees do not apply to the military, even in peacetime...

...Sometimes the folks at USA Today go with the pronoun to highlight such hardhitting investigative stories as Men, Women: We're Still Different...

...asks Daniel Berrigan, one of the nation's earliest and best-known practitioners of civil disobedience against laws sanctioning the arms race...

...That act and every subsequent step this nation has taken in the nuclear arms race has been sanctioned by U.S...

...Predictably, the National Education Association shot back with a defense of Federal aid...

...It needs to tone up its flaccid muscles by exerting itself in behalf of those it has always neglected—women, minorities, the unskilled and underemployed...

...Police officers have no authority to stop an auto unless they suspect a law has been broken...

...The driver must establish innocence...

...Over Easy and Out At a recent meeting with members of the Pentagon press corps, the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Henry E. Catto Jr., brought up breakfast...

...Last year, some 4,000 were arrested for trespassing, blockading, or in some other way breaking the laws that protect business-as-usual at offices and factories carrying out nuclear weapons policies...

...Mobilizing political opinion remains the most powerful long-term strategy...

...The goal of the paper, after all, is to serve as a forum for "unity to help make the USA truly one nation," Allen Neuharth, chairman of Gannett, has said...

...The schools' problems, though, won't be solved as easily as our simplistic President suggests...

...But Disarmament Action Day provided unmistakable evidence that the momentum of civil disobedience is continuing to rise...

...Organized, large-scale nonviolent direct action against the arms race occurred on June 20, the summer solstice, designated by the Livermore Action Group, Mobilization for Survival, and other peace organizations as International Disarmament Action Day...

...How, then, can one account for the drastic change in labor's prospects and performance...

...Senate decisively rejected a proposed amendment that would have empowered legislatures to restrict or outlaw abortion...

...But praise of the ruling shouldn't obscure an important reality: A woman's right to control her own body is anything but absolute...

...The other is individualistic, fostering acquisitiveness, hierarchy, exploitation, and the manipulation of our fellow beings...

...Securing rights for women cannot, of course, be left to the Supreme Court...

...What's worse, many of our public schools are not truly locally oriented...

...In June, the Justices: 11 Made it easier for police to obtain search warrants based on anonymous tips...

...If these were the trade-offs labor had to yield in order to win and retain basic bread-and-butter benefits for workers, they also became components of labor's current crisis...

...H Held that "canine sniffs" of luggage by police are "much less intrusive than a typical search" and therefore require no suspicion of criminal activity...

...Reagan said increasing Federal aid would not solve the problems of the schools...

...It is important to bear in mind that the share of the gross national product going into wages has risen substantially, that unionized workers have won at least limited protection against the ravages of inflation, and that in some industries they have even achieved a measure of relief from the devastating impact of unemployment...

...As World War II began, a dynamic and increasingly effective union movement held out a credible promise of a better life to millions of American workers...

...Evidently, dissent—even in the form of a critical note—will threaten that image of unity...

...This was part of a larger international peace observance involving tens of thousands of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans at demonstrations and rallies in almost every state and in several countries...

...But Reagan does have a point...

...Who will confront this crime...

...Today's labor crisis requires a similar surge of creative militancy...

...A Presidential commission appointed in 1980 has condemned the internment and recommended that each of the approximately 60,000 survivors be paid $20,000 as "an act of national apology...

...Some are arrested, all are suspected...

...By striking down that ordinance and similar provisions in seventeen other states, the Court effectively blocked the New Right's strategy of chipping away at abortion rights...

...they need someone like Volcker to deflect public discontent when the economy sours...

...To accept our responsibility for their fate forty-one years ago is part of the necessary re-constitution of our political and moral community today...

...Or they choose it for comic relief, as in their Car Pool: 19M of Us Share Ride...

...The Court and Free Choice There's good reason to praise the recent U.S...

...Within two weeks of the Court decision, however, the U.S...

...A recent headline in The New York Times declared, Union Membership Falls Sharply...

...The ban on breakfast briefings, approved at the highest level by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, was apparently prompted by concern that scrambled eggs induce the brass to commit indiscretions...

...Can that be true...

...They serve the same masters, after all...

...Can the power of flesh and blood move the might of governments...

...By a 6-to-3 majority, the Court reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion...

...Beyond this obvious point, the argument by McCloy—and others who say the present generation has no responsibility to redress the wrongs prior generations visited on blacks and Native Americans—is critically flawed...

...Now that's a big station wagon...

...Nobody Here but Us It's been several months now since the Gannett chain's USA Today began hitting newsstands around the country, dazzling readers with multi-colored graphics, bite-sized news stories, gossipy interviews with celebrities, and even a thirteen-inch national weather map...

...Furthermore, the Court's decision let stand a Missouri law requiring minors to obtain parental or judicial consent before having an abortion...

...Economically, it won power enough to achieve significant increases in wages and benefits-more than any American worker would have thought possible earlier in the century...

...The Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination is apparently inoperative in drunken-driving cases...

...With the great new industrial unions in the lead—miners, steel and auto workers, machinists, electrical workers—labor set out to wield a kind of clout it never had before...

...For almost seventy years, the exclusionary rule has been the primary deterrent to police lawlessness—and an important guardian of privacy...

...It was legal for President Truman to destroy the two Japanese cities with weapons a thousand times more powerful than any previously devised...

...The new Chancellor of New York City's public schools, Anthony Alvarado, pointed out in recent Congressional testimony that the demand for educational quality can mask reactionary and antidemocratic impulses—as is clearly the case with Reagan's suddenly discovered interest in the schools...

...deployment of a new generation of nuclear missiles in Britain and Western Europe...

...The Court's ruling has provoked renewed calls from so-called pro-lifers—including President Reagan—for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion...

...The Justices can smell the citizens smelling blood...

...We're Patriotic...

...For now, though, the big boys are friends...

...Thirty-four states have an "illegal-per-se" rule, under which a person registering a certain alcohol level in a breathalyzer is automatically found guilty...

...Elsewhere, though, anti-nuclear civil disobedience was practiced for the first time—at a B-l bomber parts factory near Chicago, a naval facility in San Diego, and the University of Wisconsin's Army-funded Mathematics Research Center (where, we note with pride, the eighty to ninety blockaders included readers and staff members of The Progressive...

...Guilty Until Proven Innocent A roadblock is thrown up and passing cars are stopped...

...We found a few of those success stories, and they are part of this special issue...

...Neither the demagogic right-wing critics of the schools nor their knee-jerk liberal defenders offer any substantive solution to what is clearly a crisis of competence in American education...

...The move," reported The Wall Street Journal, "may be the most direct attack to date by the high court under the direction of Chief Justice Burger against the proliferating rights of criminal defendants recognized in the 1960s under the previous Chief Justice, Earl Warren...

...One is social, embracing participation, civil liberties, and equality...

...But the Court is attuned to the public mood...

...On the contrary, we mounted a deliberate effort to find "success stories"— accounts of innovative organizing drives, creative bargaining strategies, effective tactics in the never-ending struggle for improved wages, working conditions, benefits, and rights...

...The Fed would again come in for some tongue-lashing...

...It's nice to know that Americans have finally found their voice...

...Democrats in Congress were also raising havoc about the Fed's role in bringing on the recession...

...in Moscow...

...The growing defiance of the law can be expected to have an increasing impact on the body politic, here and abroad...

...Reagan bowed to heavy pressure from the business and financial communities to retain Volcker, a man they can trust...

...The internment of Japanese Americans was but one outgrowth of the crude Hobbesian strands within our culture...

...First-trimester abortions can cost between $ 150 and $200, a prohibitive sum for many women...

...We're Going To War...

...But the labor movement has paid an enormous price for those gains...

...Following the example of Berrigan and others, increasing numbers of Americans are taking to nonviolent civil disobedience—deliberate, open flouting of the law— as a way of escalating their resistance to the continuing escalations of the arms race...

...thirty-five states enacted new drunk-driving statutes last year, and twenty-seven states have already strengthened or supplemented drunk-driving laws in 1983...

...Fed Up with Folly While Yankees owner George Steinbren-ner and manager Billy Martin were tussling again, another rocky couple patched up its differences...

...Not too long ago, Administration officials were suggesting that the failure of the Reagan supply-side miracle could be laid at Volcker's doorstep...

...the State is relieved of the burden of establishing guilt...

...There we have it at long last: official confirmation that the minds of our foremost strategic thinkers are mere mush (or, at best, oatmeal) in the morning...

...Politicians with no real answers to the economic crisis don't actually dislike the cigar-chomping chief...

...today, a dwindling union movement is barely beginning to recognize that its only hope may be to tap the immeasurable potential of those who remain outside its ranks...

...The school system, like the rest of our society, remains inegalitarian: The poor and the rich, blacks and whites, boys and girls—all receive different educations...

...It has entered into a tacit compact with American capitalism to seek no fundamental change in the way the system works...

...In Akron, Ohio, for instance, an ordinance required physicians to inform patients that "the unborn child is a human life from the moment of conception...

...Another opportunity to resist in this way will occur October 24, a day chosen by peace activists to protest U.S...

...Still, pro-choice advocates cannot afford to lapse into complacency because of the Court's decision and must continue their struggle to guarantee equality of access...

...Such a distinction would suit Chile's General Augusto Pinochet, but it should outrage Americans who cherish freedom and due process...

...The Supreme Court, responding to popular "tolerance," has been whittling away at our rights...

...It just about shoots the day...

...Is any of this helping...

...With Federal funding for abortions withheld under most circumstances, poor women have little freedom of choice...

...But the most striking feature of the "McPaper" is its regular use of the first person plural pronoun—"we" and "us"— especially in front-page headlines...

...When we began last winter to compile a special issue of The Progressive devoted to the status of the American labor movement, it was not our intention to portray the unions in a state of dissolution and decay...

...In the abortion decision, as on other issues, the Court bowed to public sentiment: The majority of Americans favor abortion rights...