Comment

...The early assessments of the Exxon Valdez disaster suggest that we may never have a way of measuring the horrendous consequences of that record-breaking oil spill...

...We support the Democratic process, and we are prepared to support the person who emerges from that democratic process," said State Department spokesman Charles Redman...

...Bush can have it his way, but it is not the best way for America...

...The Government should get out of the business of subsidizing capital-intensive agriculture and begin to emphasize sustainable agriculture for the family farm...

...Take commodity price supports: The Government has sought to peg the price level of a few major crops (wheat, corn, soybeans) to the price level of industrial goods the farmer must buy...

...Frank Shortly after the accident at Three Mile Island, nuclear-power experts predicted that the clean-up might cost as much as $40 million...

...Their warnings were dismissed by industry and government as the hysterical fears of those who wanted to stop "progress...

...The government of Honduras had signed the accord and intended to oust the 11,000 contras in its territory—until the Bush Administration twisted its arm...

...Human Error' Off Alaska It wasn't hard to assign the blame for the catastrophic oil spill that ensued when the Exxon Val-dez rammed a charted reef and ran aground in Prince William Sound off Alaska...

...That's why it is so disturbing that leading Senate Democrats—such as Ted Kennedy and Christopher Dodd—have gleefully embraced this agreement...

...For the first time in a decade, the labor movement has demonstrated that it has the muscle—and the will—to discipline an abusive employer...

...The crew, it appears, was something less than a spit-and-pol-ish snap-to outfit...

...The farmer would be compensated for production up to a certain level of such crops and could sell the remainder at prevailing market prices...

...That is all the more reason for lending the effort all possible support and participation...

...participation rates), the count was apparently fair, and more often than not, the good guys won—the good guys being those who challenged entrenched bureaucrats, political hacks, and party aparatchiks...

...Lorenzo, the head of Eastern, aided the unions by being such an unpopular and autocratic figure...

...a mistake that results in execution can't be remedied...

...But for all the gentle rhetoric, the Bush Administration is still trying "to order the politics of Nicaragua"—only this time not by means of direct military aid to the contras...

...In nuclear energy, too, the technological imperative was allowed to hold sway despite ample evidence that unacceptable risk was the price of "progress...

...This is what is called "parity...

...Lindsey Gruson of The Times bent her pen backwards in describing Cristiani the day after his election: "A soft-spoken, American-educated scion of a Salvadoran coffee-growing family," she wrote, Cristiani "is the personification of what pary leaders bill as the new, nonviolent ARENA...

...After a visit by Robert M. Kimmitt, Bush's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Honduran government pulled an about-face and allowed the contras to stay...

...So far, it has cost $ I billion, and years of work still lie ahead...

...The staggering financial costs of the Three Mile Island Accident are still accumulating, and the damage to people and the planet is not yet fully understood...

...More content to play compromise politics than to stand up for principle, they have passed up an excellent opportunity to pull the plug on the contras and stand up for nonintervention...

...policy...

...The First Hurrah From almost any perspective, the first election for the Soviet Union's new Congress of People's Deputies should be a source of comfort and encouragement...

...For a few short years it was possible to believe that America had taken an overdue step toward fashioning a civil and humane society...

...But even now, after everything that has happened, we allow morally bankrupt corporations and their government stooges to call the shots...

...In Washington and dozens of state capitals, legislators are mindlessly sponsoring new death-penalty bills directed at drug dealers, "terrorists," and other undesirables...

...The effort is jointly sponsored by the National In-terreligious Task Force on Criminal Justice, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and Amnesty International...

...And Bush invited him to the White House for a meeting in early April...

...There's lots of room left for perestroika and glas-nost...

...it is a crucial lever for union activity...

...The environmentalists pointed out that to move such massive quantities of oil on the high seas in one vulnerable vessel was to invite disaster...

...What's wrong with that...

...The large commercial farm, with its emphasis on sophisticated technologies and harmful pesticides, is neither efficient nor inevitable...

...Campaigning against the perquisites provided for high officials, Yeltsin said he would not avail himself of special stores where shoppers need not stand in line...

...Bush and Baker pledged to participate more closely with the five Central American presidents involved in the implementation of the Arias peace plan, but their continued support of the contras violates that peace plan...

...And Baker even talked about easing some economic sanctions against Managua...

...Third, capital punishment always falls most heavily—in fact, almost exclusively—on minorities and the poor...

...And even if an acccident did occur, the industry experts intoned, technological ingenuity would swiftly and effectively contain the damage...

...That makes the death penalty the most gruesome form of homicide...

...Using his typical grandstanding at rallies, D'Aubuisson would hold a machete in one hand and a watermelon in another...

...Instead, it hopes to lure or bribe Nicaragua into adopting a style of government more to Washington's liking...

...But credit also goes to William Winpisinger, the leader of the International Association of Machinists and a self-described "seat-of-the-pants socialist...

...Government found it easy to gull the mainstream media in America into believing that El Salvador was a democracy, however "fragile...

...The third mate, who was at the helm, was not properly certified...

...For the first time in a decade, union members and their leaders have honored the crucial principle of solidarity...

...It's time to wash our bloody hands...

...The Democrats in Congress ought to insist that the U.S...

...intervention in Nicaragua...

...The scope and likelihood of the oil spill were anticipated years ago—with remarkable precision of detail—by the environmental activists who campaigned against exploitation of the Alaskan fields...

...The Alaska oil spill came just as the mass media were marking the tenth anniversary of the nuclear power-plant accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania...

...Our agriculture system works for such large agribusiness interests as Pillsbury but it ill serves the needs of taxpayers, consumers, and most farmers...

...Government should leave the Sandinistas alone, period...

...Without solidarity, without the full and enthusiastic support of Eastern's pilots, the machinists who called the strike would have gone down to defeat as quickly and haplessly as the air-traffic controllers did at the beginning of the Reagan Administration...

...Simply ending tax breaks for agribusiness and taxing the sale of pesticides would go a long way toward straightening the Government's skewed farming priorities...

...Murder Most Foul In 1972, the Supreme Court overturned all of the death-penalty statutes then in effect throughout the United States...

...That system would provide income supports for virtually all of the important agricultural crops...

...The ascendancy of Cristiani and ARENA strips the veneer off the U.S...

...First, exhaustive reviews of all available data have never come up with persuasive evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent...

...Bush and Baker simply faced reality: The American people do not support military aid to the con-tras and will not stand for U.S...

...Shortly after the election results were in, Bush telephoned Cristiani to congratulate him on his victory...

...With Nicaragua on the back burner, the Bush Administration must now contend with the boiling cauldron of El Salvador...

...He would send his wife to stand in line like everybody else...

...Government has been underwriting...

...These liberals remain unwilling to say that the U.S...

...Cristiani himself, one week before the elections, took to the oped pages of The New York Times with a piece entitled In El Salvador, A New Arena Party, in which he distanced himself from D'Aubuisson...

...There is no excuse for George Bush to continue that policy now...

...What's more, Baker left the door open for a resumption of military aid to the contras...

...This makeup job cannot hold, however...

...During that fiesta, the Salvadoran military killed three foreign journalists...

...But the worst news is that both kinds of accident are certain to occur again and again so long as such inherently high-risk technology remains in use...

...These warnings, too, were dismissed as the frantic anxieties of bird-watchers and business-haters...

...Back Burner, Front Burner George Bush and James Baker, his Secretary of State, are getting a lot of undeserved credit these days for the accord they worked out with Congress on contra aid...

...Three-Piece Farmers #%uietly, George Bush is filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with the lieutenants of corporate America...

...No matter the eventual ending of the Eastern strike, its meaning already is clear: Only by sticking to the union can workers exercise power...

...Second, we've all had painful experience with the fallibility of the legal system...

...In nuclear power, too, profit-hungry corporations and their obedient servants in government and academia were allowed to ride roughshod over the concerns expressed by those who placed a premium on human health and environmental protection...

...The watermelon, he told his enthusiastic supporters, represents the Christian Democrats...

...We aim to build from the bottom up/ —Sister Helen Prejean, a leader in the new campaign against the death penalty...

...So it went, too, with those lonely voices that were raised against the huge supertankers that now ply the oceans...

...He was president of Pillsbury's Distron Division, which oversees the Burger King Corporation...

...It was sheer coincidence, but some useful parallels can be drawn...

...On April 14, some two dozen religious leaders representing major Christian denominations as well as Jewish and Islamic bodies are to meet in Atlanta to launch a campaign against capital punishment...

...There's been enough blather about bipartisanship...

...This time, separate unions recognized the importance and the power of standing together...

...We need a much more broadly based commodity-support structure of the sort proposed by the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska...

...In February, for instance, a regional accord called for the dismantling of the contra bases in Honduras...

...But these commodity price supports have fostered monocroppoing, and the unlimited nature of the subsidy has strengthened the largest farmers, who can take advantage of economies of scale...

...He took a risk in calling the strike in the first place, and by doing so, managed to demonstrate that solidarity is more than just a left-wing singalong...

...The orgy of officially sanctioned homicide is likely to intensify...

...Through much of the election campaign, D'Aubuisson accompanied Cristiania, whipping up crowds with his primitive anticommunism...

...It didn't take long, however, for the U.S...

...The captain, it turned out, had been drinking...

...Wrong...

...What are Crowder's farming credentials...

...Government had a hand in drafting Cristiani's drivel...

...Government to swing behind Cristiani, even though the elections were largely boycotted in the countryside...

...Ever obliging, the American media started running stories about how Cristiani represented the "moderate" wing within ARENA...

...The campaign was vigorous and open, the turnout was inordinately high (especially when compared to U.S...

...Green on the outside," he would say, swinging his machete into the fruit, "and red on the inside...

...But with Cristiani and ARENA, the grotesqueness of the policy should be visible to all...

...Sticking to the Union The Eastern Airlines strike marks a turning point in late Twentieth Century unionism in America...

...One kind of change that still needs to find a place on the agenda of Soviet reformers was illustrated by Boris Yeltsin, the Communist maverick who won almost 90 per cent of the Moscow vote in his race against a party-approved time-server...

...Over the last eight years, Washington has spent $3.5 billion propping up the regime in San Salvador...

...The victory of Alfredo Cristiani of the ultraright Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) in El Salvador's presidential elections in March is sure to deepen the bloody conflict the U.S...

...But the respite lasted only until 1976...

...For the price we will all have to pay for clean-up and damage control, we could have moved a long way toward deployment of safe, sound, efficient energy alternatives...

...A set of interrelated Federal policies has boosted agribusiness at the expense of small farmers...

...Once again, "human error" was at fault...

...The agreement with Congress calls for continued funding to the contras to the tune of $4.5 million a month in "humanitarian" aid for the next eleven months...

...There is no bar or prohibition to that in this agreement in the event that conditions should deteriorate substantially," Baker said...

...since then, there have been at least 107 executions, and almost 2,200 condemned prisoners sit on death rows...

...In March, for instance, Bush selected Richard Thomas Crowder to be Under Secretary of Agriculture for international affairs...

...That is for the Nica-raguan people to decide...

...That comes to more than $ 1 million a day for a system in which 1 per cent of the landowners control 41 per cent of the arable land and for an army that has murdered tens of thousands of its own people...

...It's reasonable to assume the U.S...

...But Bush and Baker have not made a clean break from the monomaniacal policy of their predecessors...

...Such a policy would encourage conservation and greater crop divesity...

...With Jose Napoleon Duarte as president, the U.S...

...support for the government of El Salvador has been an unceasing scandal for the last eight years...

...ARENA is sure to continue its sanguinary ways, and the ditches and roadsides of El Salvador will fill with bodies, dumped with less ceremony than so many discarded Christmas trees...

...ARENA is the political vehicle of Roberto D'Au-buisson, the leader of El Salvador's Death Squads, who has been implicated in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero...

...In nuclear power, too, well-grounded apprehensions were dismissed as fatuous alarmism...

...We do not claim the right to order the politics of Nicaragua," Bush said...

...ambassador in San Salvador, William Walker, referred to the elections as a "civic fiesta...

...While most major religious bodies have official positions against capital punishment, that opposition has not filtered into the pews in any meaningful way...

...The income support would be based on the farm's conservation practices and income requirements...

...But George Bush would rather hold the pickles and the relish...

...The U.S...

...Bush and Baker have, however, turned down the decibel level on bellicose rhetoric, and they seem less obsessed with invading Nicaragua than did Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Elliot Abrams, and Oliver North...

...We are sending a clear message to the Government that if they escalate their war in El Salvador, we will escalate our protests/ said protester Robert Jones in San Francisco...

...But the most important reason for recoiling from the horror of capital punishment is that in taking a life, the state makes all of us its accomplices: It acts in our name, at our behest, with our acquiescence...

...If you listen closely, you can almost hear Managua sighing in relief...

...Now there's a real human error for you...

...In today's climate, opposition to capital punishment faces long odds and a difficult struggle...

...Government cut off all aid to San Salvador at once...

...Will the winds of change continue to blow, or has the season passed for now...