DATELINES
Price, Jennifer & Huebner, Albert L. & Neuburger, Jerrold J. & Podesta, Anthony T. & Davidson, Osha
DATE LINES Dryland Farmers Say No to Water DOLORES, COLORADO R.R. "Junior" Hollen has decided to fight to save his farm, a thousand acres of beans and alfalfa in a high, dry valley of southwestern...
...Charles Schwartz is a physics professor at the University of California at Berkeley who stopped teaching classes in higher physics because he felt that even that seemingly neutral act fuels the nuclear-arms race...
...Even a much larger saving would be no compensation, however, for the 10.9 million workers put at risk when Cal-OSHA's much stricter workplace regulations are replaced by Federal standards...
...the book suggests that the states should be free to sponsor their own religions...
...He made his withdrawal without fanfare...
...Six months before his decision, in the spring of 1985, he sent fifty friends and colleagues a copy of his "Proposed Physicists' Experiment to End the Nuclear Arms Race...
...All in all, this book claiming to be a history text is afflicted with a serious dose of politicking, but that has done little to hinder Skousen's efforts to pass it off as a legitimate scholarly work...
...Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Taylor, who directs Boss Lift, says the purpose of the program is to encourage support among companies for military operations by their employees in the Guard and Reserve...
...But, he says, "It hasn't sunk in...
...By the end of this decade, according to Taylor, the military plans to have one reservist for every soldier on active duty...
...In fact," Taylor says, "I had the Adjutant General of the Louisiana National Guard here recently, and he said that if the balloon goes up [if war breaks out], the entire National Guard of Louisiana is scheduled to go within sixty days—some in two days...
...After sitting through those briefings, I'm convinced that Russia won't stop at anything...
...This is not a national-security system, this is a mutual-suicide system...
...You just sit back and look at this, this is total insanity...
...the device makes it easier to oversee farm workers but causes disabling back injury...
...Jerrold J. Neuburger (Jerrold J. Neuburger is,a freelance writer in San Francisco...
...Water has always been so sacred...
...The chairman called him "a Don Quixote...
...The editors of the university newspaper were unaware of Schwartz's decision, and so are some of the other sixty-five physics professors...
...We're a busy bunch," says Taylor...
...Social responsibility in science," Schwartz says, "means that a scientist should try to anticipate as best he or she can the consequences of the work on society...
...Traditionally, Western farmers have been the Bureau's biggest fans...
...OSHA has cited several major corporations for willfully filing false injury statements, but it isn't clear that the agency can stop this...
...that's "as many as we have brought in the County of Los Angeles in the last eighteen months," says Jan Chatten-Brown, Reiner's special assistant for occupational and environmental safety and health...
...Organized labor and progressive members of the state legislature are strongly opposed to Deukmejian's proposal...
...Environmentalists, yes, but not farmers...
...The publicly funded California Commission On the Bicentennial endorsed the book and even sold it as a fundraiser, until word of its contents got out and public pressure stopped the effort...
...If they haven't got the people of this country apathetic enough or behind them enough, they're not going to be able to carry out this Administration's misguided and deadly foreign policy...
...It's incredible...
...The party included the former public-relations director of the Des Moines Register, the publisher of the Record-Herald in Indianola, and the publisher of the Garner Leader, who says he had his eyes opened at the Pentagon...
...It requires that all workers be given information about potentially hazardous materials they may use...
...Nevertheless, I am a radical...
...Consequently, companies have an incentive to un-der-report so they remain below the average and avoid inspections...
...It urged fellow physicists to see that problems with the arms race are "imbedded within the existing structure of political power...
...Schwartz is encouraged by the boycott of Star Wars research in many physics departments, although he doesn't think it is nearly comprehensive enough...
...Because physics is central to the arms race, he wrote, physicists working on weapons or in weapons-related areas should gradually withdraw their services until the Government supports a bilateral nuclear-weapons freeze...
...When a drill hit an obstacle during excavation of an elevator shaft for a downtown office building, he was ordered to check out the trouble...
...My boss is so media-oriented you can't believe it...
...The department chairman reluctantly agreed to put the subject on a faculty-meeting agenda if Schwartz could find four other members to join him in asking for a discussion...
...He sought out the first four he saw in the hallway...
...Vows Senate president David Roberti, "We're going to give this selfish, vindictive, dictatorial governor one hell of a fight...
...Obviously, many do not believe that the danger of nuclear war is worth the risks to career and comfort...
...The focus of decades of struggle, the short-handled hoe is now forbidden by Cal-OSHA but allowed by Federal law...
...The Constitution is based on the Bible...
...Skousen, former police chief of Salt Lake City, now heads the National Center for Constitutional Studies and has been promoting his book, The Making of America, replete with a variety of radically right-wing theories...
...He wanted to create a potent political force from outside...
...The Bureau's budget has been repeatedly slashed, and most projects are stalled, perhaps forever...
...Hollen says the water project was poorly planned and wouldn't help even in a booming farm economy...
...False, false, and false...
...It would be foolish for us to back away...
...Junior Hollen is a new kind of critic...
...Federal law requires only that workers in manufacturing jobs be given such information...
...But the current projects typically propose to irrigate land that has been profitably farmed without the dams...
...The Guard's National Committee, which has an annual budget of $2.5 million for several programs, sponsors more than thirty Boss Lifts a year—each lifting about forty bosses—half to Washington and half to other military installations...
...Unlike many of his strapped counterparts throughout the country, however, Hollen thinks he can do it in just one step—by suing the Bureau of Reclamation...
...A discussion of the Bill of Rights questions the separation of church and state...
...Louis...
...Since 1973, there have been only fourteen Federal prosecutions of workplace violations nationwide...
...The Federal agency spent $461 million to dam the Dolores River, it says, for the area's farmers and for the town of Cortez...
...Slavery wasn't really all that bad, according to one passage from Skousen's text: "Numerous observers...
...In a series of seminars across the country, Skousen has been taking his far-right message to students, state legislators, members of Congress, and anyone else who will listen...
...Without a harness and without testing the air—safety procedures required by law— Bauman slipped his foot into a loop at the end of a cable and was lowered into the shaft...
...whether they were environmentally or economically sound, or even needed...
...And Chatten-Brown deplores the fact that the Federal Government has not set permissible exposure limits on 170 widely used toxic substances regulated by Cal-OSHA...
...he says...
...The first dams turned deserts into farms and irrigation was a magic word...
...It's part of the military's latest campaign to win support for interventionist U.S...
...The textbook from which children learn about the Constitution should explain that the greatness of the document lies in its promise of individual liberties, a promise W. Cleon Skousen would have us break...
...I thought about that for a moment," Schwartz recalls...
...Accident' is the category routinely utilized in industrial deaths," Reiner said then...
...The governor claims he wants this transfer because it will cut the state budget by $8 million (out of a total of $39 billion...
...Elsewhere, it says the public schools should teach children to "recognize and worship" God...
...The Bill of Rights should be rewritten...
...In 1987, the water is ready to run, but its cost has more than doubled, half of last year's hay crop is still in the barn, and the banks have stopped making loans...
...Hollen says, "They didn't build it for the farmers...
...The Bureau has sent local officials and flown in its regional chief to make Hollen understand that he really does want the water and must pay for it...
...This public-relations blitz, called "Boss Lift," is run by the National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve...
...The purpose: to propagate the Defense Department's views on topics ranging from Central America to the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...A Physicist Objects BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA The day Charles Schwartz spoke to the physics department chairman, he didn't know how his letter of withdrawal would be received...
...Pentagon Gives Lifts to Bosses DES MOINES, IOWA In the past two years, more than a thousand business and community leaders across the United States—from corporate executives to state legislators and YMCA directors-have been flown to the Pentagon at taxpayers' expense...
...His Dryland Farmers group remains adamant...
...Schwartz went on to tell the Livermore scientists that, among other things, being a radical means working hard...
...California's right-to-know law is a good example...
...It's not just hard on the brain to dig deeply and understand something...
...At the bottom he immediately reported trouble breathing, but he had suffocated by the time he was pulled up...
...But the book sprang up elsewhere...
...agreed that brutality was no more common in the black belt than among free labor elsewhere, and that the slave owners were the worst victims of the system...
...And when one of our members was called to go to Grenada, he called his boss and said something to the effect of: T can't tell you where I'm going and I can't tell you when I'll be back.' Now, who's to say this won't happen again...
...California has better and more frequent inspections and more up-to-date standards...
...They have to be," says Peggy Moore...
...Undeterred, he spoke to physicists and engineers at various colloquia...
...In Utah, it is on the state-approved list of supplemental history texts for use in public schools...
...Since he didn't want to force people to talk about something they didn't want to talk about, Schwartz dropped it...
...However, he has learned that other physics professors don't want to talk about the arms race in connection with their own work...
...No one should think it's only the workers who will suffer...
...He attacks the nation's monetary system, calling for a return to the gold or silver standard and proposing the imposition of a Federal sales tax...
...And many believe that if U.S...
...But Charles Schwartz already had a reputation...
...Moore says the Boss Lift program "is designed to convince the opinion leaders in communities beforehand that it's okay for local people to go fight in Nicaragua or wherever...
...Should the farmers pull out, the beleaguered agency will lose a crucial base of local support, one it has always taken for granted...
...quences of his work in higher physics were immoral, and he quit...
...Whether justice has been fully served in this case may be open to debate...
...It's a way of affecting people at a leadership level in the community, who will then set the tone when they take troops out of that area...
...Other endorsements come his way from the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who has lobbied hard for one of Skousen's pet causes, a constitutional convention that could rewrite the Bill of Rights...
...However, many of these deaths are homicide, and my office intends to appropriately prosecute employers for these deaths...
...Jennifer Price (Jennifer Price is a free-lance writer in Thoreau, New Mexico...
...Fifty years ago, few would have had anything but admiration for the Bureau of Reclamation...
...The transfer to Federal standards will also make Reiner's job more difficult, if not impossible...
...But, as the Bureau proceeded to build thousands more dams, many questioned The Dolores Project, with its dam backing the river up into three canyons, provides water that farmers neither need nor can afford...
...Most of us are exasperated by Reagan's ignoring overtures from Gorbachev," says Buford Price, current chair of Berkeley's physics department...
...I never thought I'd see something like this in southwest Colorado," says one reporter who has covered the area for years...
...Easy, that is, unless you are W. Cleon Skousen, the author of a controversial textbook on the United States Constitution...
...He has organized one-third of the farm families to sue the Bureau for breach of contract and fraud...
...scientists slowed down arms development, Soviet scientists would get ahead...
...Cal-OSHA's investigative bureau, which is specifically mandated to provide information on cases that may warrant criminal prosecution, will be eliminated...
...They went out and built us this Cadillac system," says Hollen, "when all we needed was a Model T Ford...
...The West grew by wrapping itself around these enormous faucets of water and electric power...
...Another passage asserts: "If the pickaninnies ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates...
...Also encouraging are the pledges that many of Berkeley's physics students have signed, saying that military-related research projects, given the current political climate, are not in their career plans...
...The Bureau does not believe it either...
...fighting forces...
...State-of-the-art irrigation systems that Bureau of Reclamation engineers have designed to handle their water are beyond the means of the farmers as well...
...Skousen calls for the abolition of Federal enforcement of health and safety standards and environmental protection...
...They don't want to talk about his resignation decision, either...
...By contrast, Federal OSHA does not provide information to local prosecutors...
...Meanwhile, Charles Schwartz remains at Berkeley, teaching introductory physics classes to non-physics majors, a sort of "conscientious objector" in a profession of weapons-architects...
...The state agency's standards are also much more stringent in such important hazardous occupations as tunneling, petroleum drilling and production, logging and sawmill operations, work with high-voltage lines, and farm labor...
...But the Bureau refuses to take the water back...
...That's the kind of weapon that's being built, and that's the kind of military doctrine that's being developed...
...I am some kind of radical," he told an audience at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in August 1985...
...Everything is set up to shoot first, escalate first, and knock out first," he says...
...OSHA now concentrates its inspections on plants that report injuries at rates above the national average...
...Junior" Hollen has decided to fight to save his farm, a thousand acres of beans and alfalfa in a high, dry valley of southwestern Colorado...
...all shunned the idea...
...it's hard on the body and soul, particularly when your whole career is involved in it...
...CAUSA USA, the political arm of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, has picked up the tab...
...That's easy, right...
...Before the trip," he says, "I opposed SDL But I came away a believer...
...A Word from the Right on Rights WASHINGTON, B.C...
...It is precisely that possibility that alarms critics like Peggy Moore, director of the National Guard Clearinghouse in St...
...But Price disagrees with Schwartz's proposal because he believes it could destroy the physics department...
...They built it as a monument to the Bureau of Reclamation...
...he mailed no press releases...
...Reiner has kept his promise...
...The owner of Maggio Drilling Company eventually pleaded no contest to charges of involuntary manslaughter filed by District Attorney Ira Reiner...
...The projects are a source of tension in farm communities, as individual farmers examine the economics and decide whether to irrigate or fight...
...No employer prosecuted under Federal statute went to jail, she added, "while in the County of Los Angeles we have already placed two employers whose negligence resulted in a death of a worker in jail...
...True or false: White slaveholders were the real victims of American slavery...
...But until Reiner took office, similar cases usually weren't even brought to court...
...John Peters, professor of occupational health at the University of Southern California...
...What they're doing," she says, "will allow them to carry out the next major U.S...
...Although the greatest burden would fall on workers, Deukmejian's plan could cause much wider harm...
...Albert L. Huebner (Albert L. Huebner is a freelancer who writes frequently for the Datelines section of The Progressive...
...Labor officials, in arguing to save Cal-OSHA, point out that injury rates are actually much worse than the Federal statistics disclose, because Reagan Administration policy encourages employers to falsify injury reports...
...Skousen is, of course, free to hawk his political wares— but not in the form of an officially approved history text...
...policies...
...A glance at a recent Iowa trip's guest list removes any doubt...
...That doesn't mean I am thoroughly stupid, naive, Utopian, or violent: none of those things...
...I said, 'Okay, I accept that.' Don Quixote was a fanatic, looking for truth and reality in life...
...The weight of knowing that his work could well contribute to disaster is something Charles Schwartz yearns to share with colleagues at Berkeley...
...The fifty-five-year-old professor, who earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been at Berkeley since 1960, says he came to the conclusion that he had been giving fundamental training to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scientists and engineers who now produce first-strike weaponry...
...When we chose to invade and bomb Libya," Taylor explains, "the refueling was done by the Air National Guard...
...Osha Davidson (Osha Davidson is a free-lance writer in Mechanicsville, Iowa...
...They say, 'Someone take care of those dumb farmers.' " The Bureau of Reclamation, perhaps, cannot afford to believe it...
...Failure to have sufficient standards in the workplace can have a deleterious effect on the community," Chatten-Brown points out...
...Worker Safety Comes Under Attack LOS ANGELES Kevin Bauman died in October 1985, at the bottom of a thirty-three-foot-deep hole only eighteen inches wide...
...But Schwartz is serious about physicists' withholding their services...
...Some of the bureaucrats reason that environmentalist "radicals" are commuting to the valley to stir up trouble...
...The Guard and Reserve are fast becoming the backbone of U.S...
...At the beginning of this year, Governor George Deukme-jian announced a plan to abolish the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) and turn responsibility for the state's private-sector workers over to the Federal OSHA...
...Begun as a New Deal program, the agency built one technological wonder after another—Hoover Dam, Shasta, the Grand Coulee— across the West's "untamable" rivers...
...Michael Maggio served forty-five days in jail, was placed on five years' probation, and was ordered to pay $12,000 in restitution to Bau-man's son, a minor...
...Scientists flinch at what Schwartz proposes...
...Nobody interviewed him...
...Taylor says the Boss Lift program targets members of the media...
...He decided that the conseProfessor Charles Schwartz wants his fellow physicists to join him in withdrawing from the race to perfect our mutual-suicide system of weaponry...
...I am very thoughtful, complex, realistic, practical...
...His group, called the Dryland Farmers, has been raising money and talking with state and national legislators...
...In 1977, the Bureau signed up the valley's farmers for irrigation water, which was to come from a massive reservoir called the Dolores Project, then under construction...
...Schwartz got only two replies...
...military operation...
...In the last case, the short-handled hoe is of prime concern...
...I view this as a giant step backward in public health," says Dr...
...The efforts to reduce the danger to workers now face a major threat in California...
...The farmers are finding that they cannot afford the costly water from the fancy Federal waterworks and the increased yields would only pad their commodity surpluses...
...Yet the agency continues to push through a few, like the Dolores, each year: It has a large staff that, as one engineer says, "enjoys pushing rivers around...
...Anthony T. Podesta (Anthony T. Podesta is founding president of People for the American Way, a nonpartisan group devoted to safeguarding constitutional liberties...
...In Mesa, Arizona, it was the centerpiece of an extra-credit project for high-school history students...
...The farmers face bankruptcy if they are forced to buy the water and machinery to irrigate...
Vol. 51 • July 1987 • No. 7
