Comment

...In the cases of DDT and Sevin, organic alternatives exist...

...Richard Barnard, writing in the military-industrial trade publication Defense Week, observed last fall that the amount of "hidden money" in the Federal budget has increased more than sevenfold from fiscal 1980 to fiscal 1985...

...But the agency conceded that its methodology—interviews with 517 people who had complained about aspartame's effects—was "unlikely" to settle the question...

...But the Secretary's tax package, unveiled late in 1984, contained some unexpected benefits for the poorest segments of society...

...Progress has always involved a certain amount of trial and error," Owen Gingerich, a historian at Harvard University, said in one Times story...

...As of January 1, the three leading sugar-free soft drinks—Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, and Diet Seven-Up-were flavored with aspartame...

...By calling attention to the military mission of the January 23 flight, the Reagan Administration served notice on the Soviets that it is moving full speed ahead in this dangerously-provocative phase of the arms race...

...In late November, for instance, Defense Department officials proposed that the U.S...

...But the most severe measure is the complete and unprecedented lockdown, a "state-of emergency" status in which prisoners' movements and social activities are drastically restricted, their "privileges" taken away...

...The poorest segments of the population could not be counted on to toil in menial, dead-end jobs...

...Government's own studies indicate that a system of insect control called Integrated Pest Management—combining various planting methods, trapping insects, and importing natural predators—can dramatically reduce pesticide use...

...To be sure, a genuinely simple and progressive income tax has never been tried in this country...

...Marion is the U.S...

...Even some of The Progressive's subscribers took us to task for that dour assessment, protesting that we were being "negative" and "shortsighted" in emphasizing the military applications of a program that was bound to represent a great leap forward for humanity...

...Because it is modestly progressive, Regan's plan faces tough sledding...

...The behavior of the oil companies underscores once again the vast difference between competitive market theory and actual practice...

...In these times of international machinations, no line of speculation is so bizarre, so blatantly paranoid that it can be dismissed out of hand...

...corporate obsession with profits and technological quick-fixes made it an all but foregone conclusion...

...Those changes are not likely to come about in the next four years...

...He didn't know who they were or why they were going...

...The Army told them not to expect any support from the U.S...

...This attack was quaintly referred to as "defensive...

...Tracking down the necessary Panglosses, reporters for The Times put the accident in comfortable perspective...

...H The Center for Disease Control recently gave aspartame what seemed to be a clean bill of health...

...The Story of Donald Alvey The folly and fury of Ronald Reagan's undeclared war against Nicaragua show no sign of abating, and almost every week new pieces of this dreary misadventure come to light...

...The contras—that tawdry band of terrorists outfitted, financed, and trained by the CIA—hold no sizable territory and no major city, but that didn't deter the Pentagon's practitioners of realpolitik...

...The Army says he was killed on March 20, 1983, while piloting a helicopter off the shore of Norfolk, Virginia...

...What's more, Union Carbide could have produced Sevin without the toxic chemical methyl isocyanate, which poisoned Bhopal...

...How Sweet It Isn't The year 1985 promises to be a sweet one for G.D...

...The willingness of all the protesters to risk arrest and detention has effectively mobilized public opinion, and has challenged Ronald Reagan and his State Department to stop cozying up to the apartheid regime...

...It hastens the day when the United States—to be followed eventually by the Soviet Union—will be capable of seeding the skies with satellites equipped with laser beams to destroy satellites, missiles, and other targets...

...His job was to fly them in, put them down, be gone six or eight hours, then put in the chopper again and take them back out...

...Arthur Hull Hayes, who then headed the FDA, ignored the Board's recommendation...

...In the spring of 1981, when the United States launched and recovered the Columbia, the world's first reusable space vehicle, The Progressive's voice was one of very few raised in dissent, sounding a discordant note amidst a great chorus of national and, indeed, worldwide approval...

...Government is already supplying the military force—and not just with money and guns but also with American personnel...

...If not a gag, was the Pentagon's secrecy gambit a hoax, a massive effort at "disinformation," designed to divert both the press and the Soviets from ascertaining the shuttle's real military mission...

...Taxing Credulity Donald Regan's Treasury Department would seem to be the least likely place to encounter a proposal for tax equity...

...An enormous pressure cooker of human emotions has been created at Marion," reports Rundle, "and unless the pressure is reduced, staff and inmates alike will taste the poisonous stew made up of mutual suspicion and distrust, fear, hatred, and vengefulness...

...If Most ominous of all is the new thrust toward secrecy in the space program—part of a persistent effort to persuade the mass media and the American people that more and more Government information ought to be placed off limits on grounds of "national security...

...See the Editor's Memo, "Through the Looking Glass," on Page 4 of this issue...

...As The New York Times, relaying the reaction of "former Government officials," was quick to point out, "by making such a highly publicized shift in secrecy in the civilian space program, the Administration...

...When members of the special unit went on their missions, they wore civilian clothes and flew at night...

...official said...

...II Prominent scientists, including a former FDA commissioner, have called Searle's tests and the FDA's review "sloppy science" and "disgraceful...

...Though many of those arrested have had the charges dismissed, some—including Yolanda King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan—have spent time in jail...

...This latest chapter in the evolution of junk food carries some troubling footnotes...

...corporate suites and some probing by the American press, but such reactions were hardly to be found...

...Borrowing their strategy from the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, anti-apartheid organizers—joined by members of Congress, union leaders, and prominent members of the clergy—have been arrested for peacefully demonstrating at the South African embassy in Washington and at consulates across the United States...

...But whom is the State Department trying to kid...

...The reason is obvious: If a tax system were devised that really redistributed substantial amounts of income, it would play havoc with our capitalist economy...

...This year, aspartame will be found in eighty food products...

...He'd go somewhere and pick up a group of people in a clearing in the jungle—armed troops, speaking Spanish—and take them to another clearing in the jungle somewhere...

...Ironically, aspartame has not been shown to help dieters lose weight because, as MIT's Wurtman says, it "fools the brain into wanting more carbohydrates—pretty weird for something in a diet soft drink...

...Searle (which sold $500 million worth of NutraSweet in 1984), the FDA ignored such warning signs...

...The U.S...

...H The secrecy rules for the space shuttle were proclaimed less than a month before the resumption of arms control talks between the United States and the Soviet Union—talks in which the militarization of space was sure to be the most crucial item on the agenda...

...Increasingly, Americans are cheating on their taxes, and as long as they perceive the tax rates to be unfair, they will do so in ever larger numbers...

...The Army also has a piece of the action, in clear violation of the War Powers Act...

...The market is based on the fanciful notion that self-interest creates an automatic equilibrium of competition...

...A more apt description could hardly have been imagined...

...Unquiet Diplomacy Demands for an end to Reagan Administration support for the repressive regime in racially segregated South Africa are growing encouragingly louder...

...So unless the Treasury can manage to write a tax code that seems equitable, it will face a growing underground economy and rampant tax evasion...

...Their faith is firm—even if it entails the sacrifice of2,500 Indian lives...

...And it found that "certain individuals" might have "an unusual sensitivity" to aspartame...

...The Priests of 'Progress* The 2,500 Indian villagers killed in Bhopal as a result of negligence by the Union Carbide Corporation faded swiftly from public consciousness, receiving only passing mention in the mass media's year-end roundups...

...The Army, in its infinite generosity, did provide each soldier with $1,000 to help him find his way back...

...Instead, big business and the obsequious press responded in the manner that has become so familiar that we hardly recognize it as bizarre...

...The unit suffered seventeen fatalities in 1983, almost half of the entire Army total of thirty-five for the year...

...But appearances are deceptive...

...Independent refiners who failed to play ball were denied supplies...

...I have never seen procedures so extreme and so seemingly designed to degrade and aggravate the prisoners," says Joseph Cannon, who has worked in prisons for thirty-five years and is the former warden of the Illinois state prison at State-ville...

...Government if they were caught...

...The first CIA clash occurred on January 6,1984, at an arms storage facility at Potosi, Nicaragua...

...The U.S...

...The CIA, however, is not the only U.S...

...The penitentiary's use of collective punishment has held large numbers of prisoners responsible for actions in which they clearly played no part...

...The public commotion over censoring the next space shuttle flight has already subsided and the next secrecy decree may cause no commotion at all...

...Eager to accommodate G.D...

...Regan's scheme—offered as the Treasury Department's, not the Reagan Administration's—would increase the standard income tax deduction from $1,000 to $2,000 and would leave those with incomes under $12,000 paying no Federal income tax at all...

...penal system...

...And Regan's boss remains officially uncommitted...

...But as the oil companies have demonstrated, competition inevitably leads to collusion, in which the strong lord it over the weak...

...Business Week led the pack with its sensitive cover story, Union Carbide Fights for Its Life, an interesting switch on the old blame-the-victim game...

...Anomalous as it might seem, Treasury's tax reform position makes sense, even from a conservative's viewpoint, for the tax code cuts to the heart of a government's legitimacy...

...Warrant Officer Donald Alvey is dead...

...In response, administrators converted the entire institution into one massive control unit...

...Another type of sugar substitute, cyclamate, was banned in 1969 after it, too, was linked to cancer...

...What kind of sense did it make, after all, for the Defense Department to call attention to the shuttle flight scheduled for January 23 by announcing with much fanfare that its details would be kept under wraps...

...And thirty-five Republicans, among them the most conservative members of Congress, sent a letter to South Africa's ambassador to Washington, threatening to support economic sanctions against his country unless it ceases its violent suppression of dissent and demonstrates "urgency about ending apartheid...

...the Board could not rule out the possibility of brain tumors...

...Searle, a Chicago drug company, but consumers may be left with a bitter taste in their mouths from at least one Searle product...

...Government formally recognize the contras as the sole, legitimate government of Nicarauga...

...Predictably, the shuttle's "secret" cargo—an intelligence satellite that will collect electronic signals from the Soviet Union and redirect them to a U.S...

...Whether the intent is to foreclose the possibility of Soviet-American agreement or merely to add one more "bargaining chip" to the formidable stack already barring the way to meaningful arms reduction, the effect is bound to diminish the prospects of any useful agreement at Geneva...

...Prison experts who recently toured the Federal penitentiary there say that if repressive conditions are not remedied quickly, the prison will be rocked by explosions of violence...

...Many farmers, including large-scale agribusiness, have found they can do without pesticides entirely...

...That could be precisely what the Pentagon had in mind...

...the richest would take flight, diminishing investment...

...But for soothing rhetoric, Gingerich was outdone by Melvin Kranzberg of the Georgia Institute of Technology: "Of those people killed" at Bhopal, Kranzberg told The Times, "half would not have been alive today if it weren't for that plant and the modern health standards made possible by wide use of pesticides...

...Ode to Adam Smith During the debates over energy policy that dragged on through the 1970s, the major oil companies repeatedly proclaimed their faith that the marketplace would solve all problems of pricing and supply...

...Sevin is less likely than DDT to enter the food chain because it breaks down faster...

...the CIA returned the volley...

...The new Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, spoke out against current South Africa policy...

...Tell that to the families of the victims...

...in fact, they knew they would be disavowed...

...But because it is not persistent, Sevin must be applied often for maximum effectiveness...

...I Richard Wurtman, a neuroendocri-nologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has reported that aspartame consumption can cause changes in mood...

...Searle manufactures aspartame, an artificial sweetener marketed under the brand name NutraSweet...

...CIA helicopters fired on the Nicara-guan armed forces at least two times last year, the press reported at year's end...

...Footnote: Not surprisingly, the oil companies fought the release of the court documents on grounds that they reveal "trade secrets...

...What was the point of proclaiming new secrecy rules to hide the shuttle's launching time and payload, when the launch will be instantly detectable by Soviet radar and the payload is a matter of common chitchat in the saloons around Cape Canaveral that are frequented by space engineers, reporters, and—it can safely be assumed-spies...

...Aspartame was approved by the U.S...

...According to some estimates, the next budget presented to Congress by President Reagan will include approximately $10 billion in disguised military expenditures subject to no public discussion or review...

...The Board focused on the application of the additive in dry foods and did not examine the chemical breakdown of aspartame in solution...

...Though aspartame is today's additive of choice, its dangers have received scant publicity...

...receiving station—was a matter of public knowledge within twenty-four hours of the Pentagon's censorship edict...

...They sought recognition for the contras so the Administration could make a pitch to Congress for overt government-to-government military assistance—an end-run around the Congressional ban on aid to the contras...

...Rather than dwell on Union Carbide and Anderson, it offered musings on "progress": The Pain of Progress Racks the Third World ran the headline over The Times's week-in-review article...

...The proposal didn't fly, according to The New York Times, because of "strong opposition from the State Department, including warnings that if the United States recognized the rebels and gave them military aid, Washington might ultimately be forced to come to their defense with military force...

...The second attack, on March 7, took place at the southern port of San Juan del Sur and accompanied the CIA's mining of Nicaragua's harbors...

...As intended, such coverage obscures the nub of the issue: The accident did not have to happen, but the U.S...

...Don flew a bunch of trips into Nicaragua," his father said...

...Products containing aspartame bear a message alerting those with phenylketonuria, a metabolic abnormality...

...But today, cosmic official rhetoric about the challenging task of conquering new frontiers in outer space has given way to the familiar old goal of the Cold War—the search for an edge in superpower rivalry that will bring the Soviets to their knees...

...To see it is to gasp...

...Previously, the soda makers used a mix of aspartame and saccharin, the controversial and carcinogenic sweetener...

...The main insecticide manufactured at the Bhopal plant, Sevin, was designed to replace DDT, the infamous spray that kills wildlife as well as insects...

...Nauta says aspartame "may be harmful in the long run...

...Perhaps a Pentagon public information officer, slightly the worse for wear after a heavy round of office parties, had proposed restricting news coverage of the military space shuttle mission to befuddle his gullible pals in the press corps...

...But worshippers of short-term profits and priests of technological power will hear nothing of it...

...This move "offends basic fairness and individual justice," says penology expert Craig Haney...

...Restaurants, however, are not required to warn customers of the potential hazard...

...The United States dissented—on grounds that the listing "could unfairly discriminate against the export and sale of products of certain companies...

...And the average American consumes forty gallons of pop each year...

...The Crimes of Punishment Marion, Illinois, seems like a quiet little town...

...The Government's ability to wrap its most critical decisions in a mantle of secrecy may well be the single greatest danger that confronts us...

...Psychiatrist Frank Rundle says conditions at Marion are worse than they were at the New Mexico state prison, which he inspected months before it was inundated by a wave of violence that left more than com mi: m forty persons dead...

...Furthermore, it seems reasonable to conjecture that the January 23 launching will receive far closer attention, here and abroad, than it would have without the clumsy attempt to cut off information...

...The company only began using the substance in 1978 because it made for a more efficient process—and thus for more profits...

...The technological achievement, we observed in these pages, was significant primarily as "a giant step in the militarization of outer space...

...The potential for violence is being generated hourly by the administrative policies and managerial procedures at this institution...

...But even the uncamouflaged aspects of the Defense Department's latest foray into the bog of censorship are disturbing: H The announcement of secrecy rules for the space shuttle at a news briefing conducted by Air Force Brigadier General Richard Abel was an overt acknowledgment, after years of coy dissimulation, that the military establishment has assumed the dominant role in what is still misleadingly referred to as the "civilian space program...

...The lockdown was imposed more than a year ago when violence erupted in Marion's control unit, a cramped and quarantined area used to punish prison dissidents...

...Evidently, Nic-araguan troops discovered the mining operation and opened fire...

...Warren M. Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide, went on a public-relations binge and the media eagerly bought the corporate pitch, shifting coverage from the disaster to the fine job Anderson was doing in handling it...

...The documents also suggest that the giant oil refiners conspired to concoct fuel shortages during the OPEC oil embargo and to maintain an artificially low price for the crude oil purchased from the city of Long Beach and the state of California...

...The protests serve as a reminder that a little civil disobedience can go a long way toward fostering change...

...Even as they spouted these slick assurances, the big oil firms were engaging in price-fixing schemes and other shenanigans designed to subvert the market to an extent surpassing even the wildest suspicions of the industry's critics...

...H A 1980 Public Board of Inquiry, convened by the FDA to examine aspartame's effects on the brain, recommended against Government approval...

...Don told me that if he ever failed to return from one of those missions, the Army already had a story to make up for his and his crew's disappearance and nobody would ever know the difference," said William Donald Alvey, whose son, Warrant Officer Donald Alvey, was one of the participants...

...Throughout the prisoner population, explosive tensions are seething just below the surface...

...The health hazards of saccharin are spelled out in a warning label required on every product...

...In taxation as in a good magic show, appearance is everything...

...Walle Nauta, who chaired the Board, told Common Cause Magazine that the 1980 scientific review of aspartame "specifically excluded use in soft drinks...

...military agency doing battle in Nicaragua...

...Recently released court records show that for more than twenty years, the major oil companies were in collusion to maintain unnaturally high prices...

...One might have hoped for some soul-searching within U.S...

...Two weeks after the calamity at Bhopal, the United Nations voted 147-1 to continue publishing a directory of500 hazardous products...

...Among those procedures are beatings, forced rectal searches, and the denial of religious freedom...

...The New York Times was not much better—only more sophisticated...

...Even Ronald Reagan cannot impose a regressive flat tax...

...may have undermined its stated goal of denying Moscow information about a new generation of American intelligence satellites...

...He was kind of vague about the missions...

...As much as 10 per cent of the population has this problem, but many don't know it...

...Real tax reform won't occur without more fundamental changes—changes that shift political and economic power away from corporate America...

...Several business groups oppose the Treasury's effort to rescind the investment tax credit and end preferential treatment of capital gains...

...The potential for gross mismanagement, waste, and corruption is obvious, but even more frightening is the potential for an act of miscalculation or malice that could bring on the ultimate catastrophe of nuclear war...

...Food and Drug Administration (FDA) despite serious concerns over the safety of the substance: H Aspartame poses a risk to persons who have difficulty metabolizing the amino acid phenylalanine—especially pregnant women...

...The CIA led the attack after the contras had failed to do the job, one anonymous U.S...

...Turning up the heat has turned on the light in surprising places...

...Some odd voices swelled the chorus of criticism...

...The President himself, according to White House officials, voiced concern about the elimination of the deduction for country-club dues, among other things," The Wall Street Journal reported...

...Don said one time you could tell damn well they had been in a fight because a lot of them were wounded...

...The 160th Task Force of the 101st Airborne Division has flown many clandestine missions in Central America, according to some enterprising reporting by the Knight-Ridder Newspapers...