Datelines

...Those in power, even though it's convenient for them to have it seem otherwise," wrote Francisco Ca-sero, secretary-general of the SOC, "know perfectly well that our protests have a real base, that they arise from the conditions in Andalusia, and that it's not possible to mobilize the people by the simple will of the few...

...In fact, farm-belt Republicans have often been as emphatic as Democrats in their denunciations of the Reagan Administration's farm policy...

...When they appeared anyway, they were physically barred...

...Marion prisoners filed a class-action suit contesting the lockdown, but U.S...

...Such groups as the Posse Comita-tus, Lyndon LaRouche's Schiller Institute, the Aryan Nation, and the Populist Party send a message of violence, division, and hate...

...Defeats have been more common than victories, but the farmers have learned valuable lessons in lobbying, translating ideas into bills, and distinguishing friends from enemies...

...Chile under Pinochet...

...They are shackled any time they leave their cells for any reason...

...Given this stagnant peace, critics of Czech society hope Gorbachev will shake things up...

...But the Democratic Party's failure to unite behind strong farm legislation has left it without a good claim to rural support...

...District Judge James L. Foreman must decide whether to follow Mey-ers's advice...

...A clandestine jail in Guatemala...

...Over the past two years, the SOC has escalated its activist campaign...

...A group called Mind Your Own Business, founded by Laura Dellinger, a mother of five, collected more than 500 signatures backing the show in just a week...

...An increasing number are starting to explore more far-reaching reforms...

...We would never let Reagan get away with what he's doing to your labor movement...

...It calls for work contracts and cooperative ownership of the land by farmers...

...Dan Carpenter (Dan Carpenter is a reporter for The Indianapolis Star...

...The Far Right has also been active throughout the farm belt, raising the stakes higher than a simple calculus of partisan gains and losses...

...Syndicalists, Alive and Well SEVILLE, SPAIN Though nominally socialist, Spain's government has been under attack from the Left, and nowhere so fiercely as from the farmworkers' union...

...At a Catholic Church gathering in the small Moravian town of Velehrad last July, 150,000 people assembled in front of a baroque basilica and shouted "freedom for the church," cheered Vatican envoy Agostino Casaroli, and booed the Czech minister of culture...

...An important moment is at hand for thousands of American farmers...

...Mass protests at auctions, banks, and courthouses have occurred throughout the Midwest...

...By mid-October nineteen local advertisers had responded to Decency in Broadcasting's appeals by withdrawing their spots from the show...

...The problem is that, interspersed with all that, 60 to 70 per cent is crude, sexist, just bad stuff...

...Attorneys from the Marion Prisoners' Rights Project, after getting word of the beatings, were illegally denied visitation rights...

...Locked Down in Lockup MARION, ILLINOIS Uniformed guards took the handcuffed prisoner clad only in underwear from his cell, walked him out of sight of other prisoners, arid attacked him...

...The stars of the show, Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold, and station general manager Christopher J. Wheat say they have no reason to change the show, which remains on the air, as outrageous as ever...

...PAUL, MINNESOTA In the decades since Populist Party leader Mary Lease advised farmers to "raise less corn and more hell," rural America has fought a rearguard battle to protect the family farm...

...During and immediately after the guards' assault two years ago, prison officials kept lawyers out...

...In 1984 farmers overwhelmingly supported Ronald Reagan's reelection bid...

...Dellinger raises the specter of "an entire community goose-stepping to the dictates of people with limited taste" and suggests that Price is using the issue to build name recognition for a future election campaign...

...Prisoners also report arbitrary denials of their grievances...

...Farm groups have also lobbied state legislators for debt assistance, minimum-price proposals, and other measures...

...They did hold a press conference at which Kevoian asked, "What's more important than making people laugh...

...The lockdown at Marion continues...

...It marked the beginning of a lockdown at Marion—with prisoners locked in their cells twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week—that has now lasted more than two" years, making it the longest lockdown in U.S...

...Every time a progressive initiative is defeated, we lose support to the Far Right...

...Cleansing the Airwaves INDIANAPOLIS Is this conservative city ready for a rock radio show featuring sexual innuendo, ethnic humor, and the Reverend Earnest Honestly of the Church of Blissful Sedation...

...Then, feeling the pressure, Republican Governor Terry Branstad invoked a foreclosure measure from the Farm Holiday era of the 1930s...

...The founder and chief spokesperson for the citizens' group, which claims 4,000 to 5,000 members, is John R. Price, an attorney who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1982 on a platform to restore "America's family values...

...prison history...

...Tierra, Trabajo, y Digni-dad (Land, Work, and Dignity) is the SOC slogan, exuding the old-fashioned syndicalist faith...

...Right now the progressives are ahead, but not by much...

...And last June, when the three major labor unions in Spain held a general strike to protest the socialist government's plan to cut back on social security, only the strike in the farming region of Andalusia was a total success, as work came to a dead halt...

...Verna Safran (Verna Safran is a free-lance writer in Brooklyn...

...After years of immobilization, the dynamics start anew," says Jiri Dienstbier, a spokesman for the human-rights group Charter 77 and a former journalist who was fired after the Prague Spring...

...Now her contact is limited to one ten-minute phone call a month...

...The Sin-dicato Obreros del Campo (SOC) opposes the government's agrarian reform plan, which includes subsidies and unemployment insurance...

...Now they feel betrayed...

...In some ways, it's close to the silent majority in the West: no ideas, everything is dead...

...But for the most part, people ignore politics...

...The hope is that with Gorbachev, we will move toward some kind of democracy," one Czech notes...

...They have to go to vote every four years, to demonstrations every year-and-a-half, to some kind of work brigade four times a year, and to work for two or three hours a day...

...You can only stand this strain so long and then you'll snap...

...I used to go down at Easter and on his birthday and spend from 8:30 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon with him...

...Thousands of farmers have begun to realize that their troubles are not of their own making...

...Price's heavily publicized campaign took place during Arbitron's twelve-week fall ratings period, a piece of timing that prompted media critic Richard K. Shull of the Indianapolis News to describe Price as WFBQ's not-so-secret weapon...

...We are in a time when survival itself demands a fundamental reevaluation of what got us here and what it will take to get us out...

...All share a commitment to the family farm and call for debt relief and prices geared to the cost of production...

...When the station changed management the slogan was dropped, and Price claimed victory...

...According to Warden Jerry Williford, Marion has the "unique mission" of handling the "most difficult and recalcitrant" inmates, those classified "Level Six" by the Bureau...

...In part, they are looking to Moscow because the domestic base for reform has eroded so drastically...

...Price singled out WFBQ because it called its format "Kick-Ass Rock and Roll...

...Their irreverent references to body parts, bodily functions, and religion— and their potential for reaching juvenile ears—fuel the opposition...

...With names like Groundswell, Dakota Survival League, Ohio Farm Movement, and North American Farm Alliance, they vary in size from twenty to 2,000 active members...

...Each carried a three-foot-long club, the end fitted with steel beads...

...The most recent survey gives WFBQ-FM's "Bob and Tom Show" a 17.5 per cent share of the central Indiana audience, second only to a program on an AM station, and "Bob and Tom" is gaining steadily...

...There is no deadline for a decision, and Foreman recently took a year and a half to decide on a related case...

...The "Bob and Tom Show" has not just weathered the storm but has thrived on it...

...Everyone wants to have a cottage and a car...

...The Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, for example, maintained a month-long vigil in support of such legislation...

...When he came to in his cell, he was threatened, choked, and beaten repeatedly in the stomach...

...He says we have to make socialism more attractive...

...One prisoner, for example, complained in January 1984 of twenty-eight windows being broken in his cell block in the middle of winter...

...Now 99 per cent of the nation can live in peace," says a writer who publishes abroad...

...labor movement...

...at its heart is a network of more than thirty new groups that have sprung to life over the past four years...

...As Chrastil says, "We are building a solid base...

...Magistrate Kenneth J. Meyers has ruled in Marion's favor...

...We could sit in the same room, but now you can only visit for an hour without touching...

...Last March, the SOC, concluding a "week of struggle," occupied several abandoned farms in Seville and Cadiz provinces...

...Then he quoted an unnamed executive at a competing station as saying, "I wish Price had picked on us...

...Price insists he's not in the employ of the station, that it's raw coincidence his consciousness-raising attacks on the station should come at a time when every radio station in town is trying to attract attention," Shull wrote on October 28...

...Faced with the loss of their livelihoods, many are examining old beliefs and searching for new directions, taking another look at the role of agribusiness, the credit system, and their place as farmers in the world food production system...

...Legal recourse for the locked-down prisoners seems remote...

...It is for your own people to figure out what is best for your situation...

...In exchange, it promised them a life filled with consumer goods...

...Michael McConnell (Michael McConnell, a Chicago writer, has just completed a book with co-author Renny Golden titled "Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad," Orbis Books, 1985...

...A Congressional study, however, found that only seventy of 343 Marion prisoners were actually Level Six...

...SOC militants usually work the land during a takeover to prove that individually owned farms are "anachronistic" and that large, cooperatively owned farms are more productive...

...Today, there are 400,000 country houses and almost every family has a car...

...A Thaw for Prague Winter...

...Critics have charged that the others are arbitrarily placed there because the Bureau cannot justify operating an entire unit like Marion for just seventy men...

...According to Arbitron, the folks who compile the ratings, it is...

...Workers are more important than governments...

...Lucy Komisar (Lucy Komisar, a free-lance writer in New York, reports frequently from abroad...

...To be sure, anti-Soviet discontent erupts now and again...

...The Federal prison at Marion, buried in rural southern Illinois, houses inmates from all over the United States in a special maximum-security unit which the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses as an experimental laboratory...

...A guard forced his finger up the man's anus, searching, he said, for a hack-saw blade...

...Isolated and humiliated at first, farmers have come together to protest their plight...

...Minnesota Groundswell has organized farm-crisis committees in fifty counties...

...People are looking for answers," says Joe Chrastil of the Family Farm Organizing Resource Center...

...Now U.S...

...In fact, people don't work very much: They fill restaurants and shops during working hours, government officials start their weekends Friday morning, and plant assembly lines shut down while workers take long coffee breaks...

...We need to win...

...Meanwhile, many of Indi-anapolis's other citizens are alarmed at what they view as censorship and witch-hunting and have complained loudly to the former "Bob and Tom" advertisers, including the city's three largest department stores...

...When the Soviet-backed government of Gustav Husak was installed, it made a deal with the people: It didn't ask them to support the government, but just to be quiet and turn to their private lives...

...In deciding that the prison need not revert to prelockdown conditions, Meyers remarked that the litigation "was conceived by a small group of hard-core inmates who are bent on the disruption of the prison system" and that his court "will not be an accomplice to such an endeavor...

...After a lieutenant kicked him four or five times in the groin, the prisoner passed out...

...He's scared to death...

...Members have spearheaded more than twenty foreclosure actions...

...On the one side, the Soviet leadership will be very careful not to start the process of disintegration, and they will keep the reins for some time...

...In February 1984, SOC workers met with the governor of Andalusia, after having locked themselves into the municipal building for several days, to ask for measures ending discrimination against women in hiring...

...We don't tell people what to do," he responds...

...The latest and perhaps gravest threat to family-based agriculture has spurred today's farm movement...

...PRAGUE Liberals in Czechoslovakia are cautiously hoping Moscow will soften the government the Soviets installed when their troops marched into Prague in 1968...

...We are anarchists and don't even dictate to our own workers what methods to adopt...

...The issue then was rock-music lyrics and their alleged promotion of drug abuse and illicit and deviant sex...

...Ambitious campaigns have cropped up throughout the farm belt for state legislation to call a moratorium on foreclosures...

...For 90 per cent of Marion's prisoners, it has meant no contact visits with family or friends, no access to the main law library, no congregational religious services, no jobs, and no school or other programs...

...Both parties have kept the bargain...

...In the present balance of forces," says Jiri Hajek, foreign minister during the Prague Spring, "we are condemned to coexist with the Soviet empire and to try within that community to get through certain reforms...

...But for this structure here, it may be dangerous because they will probably be asked to move, to do something...

...Tom O'Connell (Tom O'Connell, assistant professor of political sociology at Metropolitan State University in St...

...Here the Bureau established the Control Unit—a "prison within a prison"—to test such behavior modification techniques as intense sensory deprivation, indefinite solitary confinement, and forced drugging...

...Campaigns are under way in Wisconsin, the Dako-tas, Missouri, the Carolinas, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, and Nebraska...

...Only when a Federal judge threatened a court order did prison officials let them in, and then they were still prevented from taking pictures of prisoners' scars and bruises...

...This time around, Price has not yet challenged the station's license and concedes that Kevoian and Griswold "have some great humor and some stuff that really cracks me up, but that's not the problem...

...we are looking to Moscow...

...The prohibition of contact visits during the lockdown has hit prisoners particularly hard...

...Paul, has been active in farm/labor politics in Minnesota...

...the organized opposition simply doesn't exist...

...Education, coalition-building, the willingness to try new ideas— these are all on the fast track...

...The advertisers who deserted "Bob and Tom" did not leave WFBQ but merely switched to other times, and Wheat says, "We don't see any format changes in the program unless the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] says our license is at stake...

...And it was not an isolated incident but rather a small part of a violent mass assault by sixty guards against the entire prison population of 350...

...It is a funny situation...

...Prisoners tell of some guards' instructing them not to tell the truth to their lawyers and "debriefing" them after lawyers' visits...

...In two separate incidents, two prisoners killed two guards in 1983, triggering the guards' assault and providing the rationale for the lockdown of the whole population—despite convictions obtained in both murder cases...

...In April the warden admitted it was a legitimate grievance and ordered the windows repaired...

...With 35 per cent of the population in the farming region out of work, the SOC labels such a program "charity...

...The SOC does not worry that its opposition might embarrass and weaken the socialist government...

...The guards were dressed in full riot gear, wearing jumpsuits without nametags, flak jackets, helmets with dark face masks, heavy gloves, and boots...

...The most dramatic "care," though, has been direct action to block farm foreclosures...

...We have to prove that our way will work...

...Health care and education are free, and worker unrest is hard to find...

...This revival of neighborli-ness—or, as a leader of Minnesota Groundswell put it, "a network of care"—translates into hotlines, self-help groups, information meetings, food shelves, a friend with whom to share a trip to the welfare office...

...Unmoved by its popularity, a local citizens' organization called Decency in Broadcasting, Inc., contends that the "Bob and Tom Show" does not meet the community's moral standards and must clean itself up—or else...

...What would you do...

...It's been horrible for me," says Catherine Nance, whose son has been in Marion for more than three years...

...This scene took place on November 7,1983, at the Federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois...

...In hundreds of rural communities, personal problems have been transformed into public issues of justice...

...The visiting booth used for the visits is two feet below and immediately adjacent to a guard station, allowing the guard to read any papers that pass between attorney and client...

...In any case, they have little need to counterattack...

...Family visits last an hour, with the inmate and his visitor looking through a plexiglass panel and talking over a phone which the prisoners believe to be bugged...

...She says she just cannot afford a 600-mile round trip for a one-hour visit...

...Price complained to the FCC, but the agency did not act...

...That's the government's problem," says Casero...

...With this perspective, Casero casts a critical eye on the U.S...

...And its methods involve occupation of abandoned and unproductive lands, hunger strikes, and sit-ins...

...Around that time he also formed Decency in Broadcasting, with WFBQ as its first target...

...The men at the center of the storm have had little to say—or little that is serious, anyway...

...In fact, after two-and-a-half years on the air, the racy music-and-chatter show is number one with listeners under age fifty in the morning "drive-time" category...

...The ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev seems to have given rise to optimism...

...Though the government would not win a free election, there is no hope that change will come from domestic pressure...