COMMENT
Comment the Progressive Back on the Chain Gang The 1988 elections hang in the air like smog, and already the political debate is thick with trendy social issues, none more so these days than...
...For the past twenty years, the National Crime Information Center, housed—where else?—in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has used its massive computer network to track Americans arrested for crimes...
...There have been disclosures in recent months of leaks from the NRC to nuclear-plant operators to help them evade enforcement of safety standards...
...Asselstine is no antinuclear zealot...
...The argument is cute but utterly irrelevant...
...What's worse, poor mothers with dependent children would end up losing money under many of the "workfare" proposals before Congress...
...The NRC, like its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, has always assumed that its primary mission is the promotion and protection of the nuclear industry...
...Virtually every Democratic Presidential candidate has embraced "workfare," and it is sure to be one of the buzzwords of 1988...
...But charity can't make the nation literate...
...But wages at McDonald's and Dairy Queen will not make up for the welfare mother's loss of Medicaid, nor will they pay the costs of child-care...
...The recession of 1982-1983 showed how powerful a role this pool of labor can play in forcing concessions and givebacks...
...The only labor shortages in today's economy are in very low-skilled positions in the service sector...
...So far as we know, it doesn't even have an official name yet...
...The American Civil Liberties Union has announced its opposition to the bill, and a few other critics have spoken out...
...asks Colonel Carl R. Baker, deputy superintendent of the New York State Police, who is vice chairman of the panel...
...Where would these welfare recipients find work...
...The bill is called the "Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987," but its name is as deceptive as its provisions are unconstitutional...
...The practice goes back to the 1940s...
...Just as the automobile begot the tank, the airplane begot the bomber, and the harnessing of electricity begot the electric chair, now computers have brought us invasion of privacy...
...In their eagerness to bash the PLO, must they bash the Constitution, too...
...One such proposal by Representative Harold Ford, Tennessee Democrat, would offer such women less than $2,500 per child per year...
...A new welfare politics would guarantee a universal family allowance, grant an increase in the minimum wage, and implement public job-creation in areas of broad social needs: public transportation, education, low-income housing, and public health...
...Would You Buy a New Car From This Man...
...The policy doesn't have a catchy name like "workfare," but it's the only policy that makes any sense...
...Louis late in June, the Chrysler Corporation has long made it a practice to disconnect the odometers on some new cars, turn those cars over to company executives for private use, and then sell those same cars as new without telling consumers about their accumulated mileage...
...But he's taking care to steer clear of that part of Westchester County where the Indian Point nuclear-power plant has been built...
...There is no such thing as a fail-safe machine or a fail-safe operator...
...Why force them out of the home...
...The other, in New York City, is an observer mission to the United Nations...
...The tyranny of wage labor has now enslaved even our conceptions of what is useful work and what is not...
...Colonel Baker is dutifully following the technological imperative, but there is the small matter of civil rights and civil liberties...
...But what about the likes of Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Donald Riegle of Michigan, Paul Simon of Illinois, and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts...
...We're still working out the physics and the mechanics of the thing," says retired Admiral Sylvester Foley, who heads nuclear-weapons activities at the Department of Energy...
...The nuclear industry's defenders, including As-selstine's former colleagues at the NRC, are quick to dismiss such apprehensions...
...However, persistent unemployment is a boon to business...
...Welfare exists because our Government decided fifty years ago that it was better to pay the poor than to have them camp out in Washington...
...As The Washington Post has pointed out, the measure "does nothing to impede kidnapping, assault, murder, and bombing...
...But sooner or later you're sure to hear more about the latest superbomb—a weapon that would penetrate the earth and then explode underground...
...He doesn't believe the reactors are safe...
...Proponents of "workfare" couch the policy in the most benign terms...
...The latest "workfare" proposals demonstrate how undervalued child-rearing has become in our society...
...Chalk one up for the microchip...
...His five-year term as a Reagan-appointed member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has just expired...
...There is little reason to be surprised that it features such reactionary Senators as Robert Dole of Kansas, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Alfonse D'Amato of New York...
...The indictment charges that in one recent eighteen-month period, as many as 60,000 autos were involved in this consumer fraud...
...We'd like to hear from Chrysler's paragon of capitalist virtue, Lee Iacocca: What did he know and when did he know it...
...Arms-control schemes are debated and implemented...
...It is because nuclear materials are inherently dangerous that human error poses so formidable a risk...
...On the first anniversary of the accident that destroyed the Number 4 reactor at Chernobyl and sent a cloud of radioactive poison around the world, Soviet officials announced that construction of the fifth and sixth reactors at Chernobyl would be suspended at least until the 1990s...
...Summit meetings are held and forgotten...
...A Show of Charity Six years ago, industrialist Eugene Lang started a trend among millionaires when he promised all sixth-graders at his alma mater, Public School 121 in East Harlem, that if they could manage to graduate from high school, he would assure them of a college education...
...Miles of Files Calling all sociologists: We need a new indicator that would calculate the time between a technological innovation and its corruption for repressive purposes...
...Since then, Lang's I Have a Dream Foundation has adopted more than 100 classes of underprivileged students in fifteen cities...
...That's the most ominous human error of all...
...The net result of "reform" that forces single women off welfare and into these low-paying, dead-end jobs will be simply to plunge them deeper into poverty...
...There is no direct nexus that can be drawn between [the Soviet] reactors and ours at a technical level," says Harold R. Denton of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff...
...Now, according to The New York Times, a Federal advisory committee stacked with police officers has proposed expanding the network to allow law-enforcement agencies to exhange information on Americans who have no criminal record...
...According to an indictment handed down by a Federal grand jury in St...
...Their principal service is not to impoverished students but to our inequitable system, for their well-publicized charity eases the pressure for systemic change...
...they would have to work the chain gang first...
...Representative Don Edwards, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, won't pull over for the troopers...
...But he believes "the level of safety at nuclear reactors around the country is so low that a fatal meltdown in the next ten to twenty years would not be a surprise...
...That sounds dandy, but it isn't much of a compact, for the welfare recipient has little choice but to accept the terms...
...The mother who cares for her children at home is less valued than the person who cares for those same children at a day-care center—and neither receives the recognition deserved...
...American capitalism has always enjoyed having a pool of poor, marginal workers whose mere availability poses a threat to upstart employees demanding better wages and working conditions...
...When mishaps occur, as at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, they are attributable to "human error...
...Senate, and a comparable contingent in the House of Representatives, is sponsoring legislation that would padlock the PLO offices and put them out of business...
...Operation Excavation...
...Blaming welfare recipients for our economic problems has always appealed to politicians...
...Now the Democrats, eager to prove their mettle, have found a new and more harmful way to exploit welfare recipients...
...Imagine, a bomb that can vaporize Soviet underground command centers or blow up missiles deep in their hardened silos...
...What the bill would impede is speech—specifically speech intended to present the Palestinian point of view to the peoples of the United States and of the world...
...Such a policy would support, not deter, child-rearing in the home for those who wish it, improve the wages of those on the bottom who can barely subsist at current levels, and begin the much-neglected task of providing valuable social goods and services to all Americans...
...In Western European countries, any adult caring for small children receives some governmental support...
...whether work will ever be resumed remains to be seen...
...In addition, the Ford bill would terminate child-care benefits six months after the recipient had found a job...
...People will make mistakes in any undertaking, but mistakes at a nuclear facility can take a calamitous toll...
...Federal, state, and local governments would have no trouble coming up with adequate school funding if it weren't for the tax revenues lost to loopholes and giveaways or squandered on weaponry and war...
...But what is remarkable is the measure's roster of supporters...
...This is ugly coercion...
...The Human Factor James K. Asselstine is changing jobs and moving from Washington, D.C., to the New York metropolitan area...
...The new proposal, he says, would bring about "a revolutionary change, permitting law-enforcement agencies to pass around investigative information, much of it rumor and gossip, over a national computer system run by Big Brother in Washington...
...In addition to the technical problems waiting to be solved, there's the question of where the nuclear fuel will come from...
...Now there's an irresistible incentive...
...The prevailing ethos dictates that anyone who doesn't receive a paycheck is not pulling her weight...
...It's enough to revive the fetching notion of first strike...
...Project Corkscrew...
...indeed, between 1 and 2 per cent of gross national products are devoted to such family-assistance programs...
...In this country, however, the nuclear promoters cling tenaciously to their vision of an atomic-powered future...
...In Western Europe, which bore the brunt of exposure to the fallout from the Soviet accident, nuclear power is under scrutiny—and under attack—as never before...
...The media lap up such philanthropy, praising the rich benefactor who comes to the rescue of the underprivileged...
...Nonetheless, a brigade of some three dozen members of the U.S...
...Geneva negotiations come and go...
...We need a new politics of welfare that would seek to build coalitions of those who now stand isolated and divided...
...From the beginning of the atomic age, the shills for nuclear energy have proceeded on the assumption that they could somehow beat the odds that point to the inevitability of terrible accidents...
...That would pay for home-based child-care only in the least expensive states, and it would hardly be enough to cover commercial child-care anywhere, a recent Dollars & Sense article noted...
...Neither office has been accused of criminal activity...
...For workers trapped in relatively low-paying and menial occupations, the welfare recipient is a convenient scapegoat...
...A shortage already exists because we're building so many bombs...
...But state-sponsored nuclear terrorism goes on forever, time without end...
...Comment the Progressive Back on the Chain Gang The 1988 elections hang in the air like smog, and already the political debate is thick with trendy social issues, none more so these days than "work-fare"—forcing welfare recipients to take low-paying jobs...
...Welfare mothers are working—and they are performing socially more useful work than frying potato sticks or swirling soft ice cream...
...But here in America, family-assistance programs may be on the way out—if the Democrats have their way...
...The National Governors' Conference, for instance, endorsed the notion of a "compact" between welfare recipients and government: The clients would strive to become economically self-sufficient, while government would provide the training and day-care assistance to make the recipients become self-sufficient...
...Official records of violations have been destroyed by NRC commissioners...
...Pushing the "welfare bum" back into the labor market has a certain gut-level appeal, especially for those struggling with the additional burden of raising their own children...
...Dig We Must It's only a concept right now, a relatively remote prospect, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand...
...Once workfare laws are in place, failure to enroll would result in loss of benefits...
...Between 1962 and 1981, the Federal Government poured $63 billion into various job-training programs, but the number of jobless has only risen...
...In some instances, cars involved in serious accidents were given cosmetic treatment and sold as new...
...NASA has asked the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, to withdraw an advertisement that shows the Challenger going up in flames and asks, 'If the press didn't tell us, who would?' The ad, says NASA, 'would undermine the strong base of public support for America's civil space program in a critical period...
...only a large-scale commitment of public resources for education can do that...
...Ronald Reagan trots out his exhausted stories of diamond-studded welfare queens at every impossible turn...
...One, in Washington, D.C., is an information center that is duly registered with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act...
...The Padlock Brigade The Palestine Liberation Organization operates two offices in the United States...
...It need not be this way...
...But to cater to base prejudices ought not to be the task of policymakers...
...No retraining program will alter this essential fact about our economy, for job-training programs do not create jobs...
...Then, as now, the economy was not dynamic 'Today I leave one proud institution in American life, the FBI, to join another one, the Central Intelligence Agency.' -William H. Webster, May 26, 1987 Retired Admiral Sylvester Foley, in charge of nuclear weapons development at the Department of Energy, commenting on the fact that at least one nuclear weapon in three doesn't work properly: 'Hypothetically, it could be catastrophic if you ever wanted to use it and you pushed the button and nothing happened.' enough to provide jobs that paid a living wage to all those who sought work...
...But the idea is quickening pulses at the Pentagon...
...The wealthy sponsors want to demonstrate that poor youngsters can escape from teen-age pregnancy, delinquency, unemployment, and crime, but at best they extend that hope to a minuscule minority, a chosen few...
...There have been no cost estimates, no Congressional hearings, no authorization or appropriation bills for the Bomb that Bores...
...The technology is perfectly safe, they tell us...
...Right now, the agency is battling the governors of New York and Massachusetts to open major facilities at Shoreham and Seabrook that threaten densely populated areas...
...Chrysler's official response is that this is a "legitimate quality-assurance program...
...Poor mothers who don't earn enough to feed themselves or their children would no longer be guaranteed Federal support...
...The Russians appear to have learned at least part of that lesson...
...If the technology is available, why not use it...
Vol. 51 • August 1987 • No. 8
