ON THE LINE
SLAUGHTER, JANE
ON THE LINE Detroit on Strike Detroit, Michigan The strike at Detroit's daily newspapers this summer and fall raises two big issues, whether De->y. troit will continue to be one of the coun\...
...Margaret Lee ?_M_?_?_?_L_I_ML Organic Farming Success LaFarge, Wisconsin The wooded hills and winding river valleys of southwestern Wisconsin have produced generations of small dairy farmers...
...It is incredible that we are discussing the arms trade in Crossmagien," said Patricia McKenna, a Green Party member of the European Parliament...
...There's people doing drugs they wouldn't normally do to stay up all night," one man said...
...They chanted "Home-lessness is not a crime," as residents cruised by in their BMWs and Mercedes...
...troit will continue to be one of the coun\ try's few remaining tyO'JJiUn two-newspaper ' ¦ towns, and whether it will still be a union town...
...Except for a few boys who had to be stopped from throwing rocks at the British base, the event was remarkable for the lack of signs of conflict...
...Most observers blame low commodity prices and a "get big or get out" mentality...
...Dean Swenson and son-in-law Bob Carpenter are among the Wisconsin farmers who are hanging on to their family farm by going organic...
...Such an amendment was never revealed to the unions nor approved by the Justice Department, however, which finally told the papers they had to publish senaratelv...
...On Earth Day, CROPP farmers visited area grocery stores with calves and baby chickens, handed out cheese samples, and discussed eco-friendly farming, and their mission to preserve the land for future generations...
...About 260 people were arrested after crossing a property line...
...Similar protests elsewhere in Northern Ireland this summer have ended in a rain of plastic bullets...
...CROPP's success is especially remarkable given the farm crisis rocking rural America...
...When the strike started, the two papers began publishing a single edition, using picket-line crossers and managers...
...Union members saw a confrontation like this coming as long ago as 1989, when they vigorously opposed formation of the joint operating agreement between Gannett Co., Inc., owner of the News, and Knight-Ridder, Inc., owner of the Free Press...
...Fish and Wildlife Service with failing to follow the procedures of the Endangered Species Act The judge has now issued a preliminary injunction that will maintain the integrity of the grove until a trial can be held...
...Lama Yeshe, a Buddhist monk, received the loudest cheer of the day upon reading a statement of support from the Dalai Lama...
...Lock-downs and nonviolent blockades by Earth-First...
...Many supporters arc auto workers, but teachers from suburban East Detroit, for example, have hauled out used picket signs from their own strike and slapped we support stickers on them...
...Moss's image is familiar to millions of Americans because of her Calvin Klein jeans ads...
...Mubarak Dahir...
...The rolling farm country surrounding this small town of 3,000 along the north-south border is home to four military bases and nineteen watch towers with cameras, listening devices, and heat sensors...
...Bruin hopes that if enough people boycott Calvin Klein, other companies will take notice and stop using models who look weak and vulnerable...
...Participants included grandmothers, timber workers, toddlers, local housewives, urban Food-not-Bombers, and dreadlocked hippies...
...During the day, below the circling helicopters, children had fun drawing, making sculpture, painting faces, and working on banners for the vigil...
...Provocative rock lyrics are in the same category as comic books and adult materials, which makes them the most vulnerable to attacks...
...Box 77665, San Francisco, CA 94107, (415) 436-0212...
...At the conclusion of the vigil, townspeople placed candles and tied white flags to the wall of the base that houses British troops and the Royal Ulster Constabulary...
...their unacceptable, unhealthy lifestyle shouldn't be forced on the neighbors...
...Hundreds of people have called and written to Bruin's group in response to the posters...
...The produce pool operates much like a cooperative, treating all of its members equally and paying them the same price for their product...
...The unions argued then that the virtual death of within-city competition among newspapers has had a chilling effect on free speech...
...Police in riot gear have used pepper gas and batons against picketers...
...Detroit, MI 48208...
...Gannett, which also publishes USA Today, is the largest newspaper chain in the country, and Knight-Ridder is the second largest...
...The most dramatic event of the weekend was a silent vigil on Friday evening...
...The flags symbolized the 3,187 lives lost in the conflict since 1969—Irish, British, Catholic, and Protestant...
...Many painted the Irish tricolor flag on their faces, and wrote IRA on their arms...
...CROPP is owned and run by farmers...
...Roughly 600 have been cited since the raids began in late August...
...Peace activists, most of them from the southern counties of Ireland, attended a conference examining the effect of the international arms trade on human rights...
...CROPP's sales have skyrocketed since the group was formed in 1988...
...Since the Irish Republican Army cease-fire last year, tensions have eased somewhat here between residents and British forces, but the militarization of the region, including regular helicopter surveillance and fortification of bases, has only increased...
...Suddenly, Randy Lee Payton started reciting the words at the top of his lungs...
...Hass says several farms around him are switching to the organic path...
...Box 147, Jewett, OH 43986...
...The group is currently fighting music-censorship laws pending in Pennsylvania, Wash-ipgton, Louisiana, New York, and New Mexico...
...I knew somewhere down the road you were going to pay for it...
...A community coalition, including some religious leaders, meets twice weekly...
...When the unions pointed out that this violated the joint operating agreement, Detroit Newspapers vice president Susie Ellwood lamely maintained that the companies had "filed an amendment, I think a couple of years ago" for a "strike plan" for joint operation...
...The unions had offered to extend the old contracts and keep bargaining, but the papers refused...
...But he made his point...
...Jordan has begun enforcing a curfew at Golden Gate Park, and has dramatically expanded his controversial Matrix program, leading to what activists call vigi-lantism against the homeless...
...Nevertheless, the Justice Department allowed the two papers to combine their business operations, including printing and circulation, on the condition that they continue to publish separately on weekdays...
...On August 30, homeless activists invaded the mayor's posh Pacific Heights neighborhood, mocking Jordan's "Take Back the Parks" initiative...
...Kids took part in the peace festival in Crossmagien, as helicopters hovered overhead, coming in and out of a British base next door...
...313) 396-2600...
...Robert Giles, the News's publisher, has said, "We're going to hire a whole new work force and go on without unions, or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can...
...Christopher Cook Rock Out Censorship Ph iladelphia Last fall, in the Pennsylvania state house, legislators held hearings to discuss a bill to criminalize the sale of obscene music to minors...
...Members of other unions have rallied to the side of the Teamsters, Newspaper Guild, Graphic Communications, and Typographical unions in a way not seen in this town in many years...
...Will Fantle A Call for Peace in Ireland Crossmagien, Ireland When I told Irish people I was going to Crossmagien for a peace and demilitarization festival in September, most looked at me as if I had two heads...
...A homeless man whose street name is Troll said police told him he was "banned for the whole day from Golden Gate, and you can't come back or you will be arrested for trespassing...
...members in front of gates to access roads to timber in the area are continuing...
...word came via cellular phone thai Judge Maxine Chesney of the The emergency rally for redwoods brought out environmentalists and citizens from all over Humboldt County...
...The company has been using these exemptions to the usual timber-harvest process to take "dead, dying, and diseased" trees from 196,000 acres of forest land, and the company was on the verge of beginning operations in 6,000 acres of ancient forests...
...Both big dailies, The Detroit News and the Free Press, and Detroit Newspapers, the company that runs both papers' business operations, are out to bust the six local unions that have been on strike since July 13...
...Federal District Court in San Francisco had just issued a temporary restraining order on all three Pacific Lumber "exemptions...
...A lot of this is stuff the supposed intelligentsia of this country won't defend—art forms they consider too lowly to stick their necks out for," says Payton...
...Large grocery chains in the Midwest and on both coasts have discovered that their shoppers hunger for an organic alternative and have begun stocking the CROPP label...
...She said the lyrics were fouler than anything you'd hear in a men's locker room, and offered $100 to anyone who dared to read them aloud in public...
...Stop Starvation Imagery is calling for 1 a boycott of Calvin Klein products and urges supporters to write to the company's consumer-affairs department...
...As the arrests were taking place around 6 p.m...
...Hass's forty-head herd has been an organic operation for twenty years, a switch he made for health reasons...
...For more information, write Peace Watch Ireland, P.O...
...Jordan said, "The problem is not homelessness, but behavioral problems...
...For most, it was their first trip into the north...
...I hated to handle them...
...The grassroots group behind the posters, Stop Starvation Imagery Campaign, was created by Kathy Bruin, who wants to establish education programs in the schools to foster positive body images and combat eating disorders...
...The joint operating agreement provides that if one paper closes, its parent chain will continue to receive half the profits of the remaining paper...
...Box 2543, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130...
...This is the front lines of freedom of speech in America...
...It was into this environment that eighteen American social-justice activists came in mid-September to help with a peace festival, vigil, and protest...
...It's not a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at a fancy art museum...
...Jane Slaughter Thousands of union members blocked entrances to the Detroit Newspapers printing plant during a strike marked by police violence and an outpouring of solidarity...
...He and John Woods keep their followers informed through a bimonthly paper called The ROC, produced on Woods's home computer...
...Wisconsin has seen half of its dairy operators slide out of business during the past fifteen years...
...The protest prompted the mayor to appear for a hasty press conference behind police barricades...
...Years ago we used some pesticides," he says...
...Many spend their time focusing on far-away places like Bosnia, Central America, and East Timor, but are not involved in the struggle for justice in the north of Ireland...
...For those hoping to join CROPP, it is a four-year process, including a three-year history of no chemical use on the farm, and four years of providing only organic feed to the dairy herd...
...Stories abound of police horses trampling over people's belongings, and of homeless people taking speed and walking bleary-eyed through city streets all night to avoid the police...
...Revenue from its organic milk, cheeses, yogurt, and other dairy foods, marketed under the Organic Valley label, doubled last year, topping $6.5 million...
...For more information, write Rock Out Censorship, P.O...
...For more information or to support the strike, contact DNA Striker Release Fund, Metro Detroit AFL-CIO, 2550 W. Grand Boulevard...
...Some 200 residents of Crossmagien and nearby Cullyhana marched in the shadows of the watch towers that loom over the town square...
...American activists went to Crossmagien under the auspices of Peacewatch Ireland/Arnean Siochan Eireann, a Boston-based group formed last year to show support for peace and justice activists in Ireland...
...We have the largest group of organic dairy operators in the country," says George Siemon, a charter CROPP member...
...It's Jim Crow laws with a 1990s spin," says Paul Boden, director of the Coalition on Home-lessness...
...CROPP also markets organic vegetables, eggs, and apple cider from the region's farmers...
...Payton is co-founder of Rock Out Censorship, an Ohio-based group...
...The Garberville-based Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) filed the papers for the federal lawsuit on the day of the rally, charging Pacifc Lumber and the U.S...
...Heavily Republican and anti-British, the residents of Crossma-glen have endured twenty-six years of house searches, summary arrest, strip searches of schoolchildren, and shoot-to-kill murders by British occupational forces...
...Protesters vowed to "Take Back Pacific Heights...
...For more information, contact Stop Starvation Imagery Campaign...
...NO MORE WAIFS In August, hundreds of posters picturing supermodel Kate Moss and emblazoned with the slogan Emaciation Stinks appeared on San Francisco streets and alleyways...
...Police squads on horseback and motorcycles have conducted dawn raids in city parks and neighborhoods, rousing the homeless from sleep, sometimes by kicking them or tossing pine cones at them...
...Thousands of supporters have swelled Saturday-night picket lines at the printing plant, aimed at stopping distribution of the lucrative Sunday newspaper...
...Although both company and union officials scoff at the rumors, talk is that one paper could use the strike as an excuse to petition the Justice Department for permission to close down...
...After a two-hour program in a field next to the belching mill (where business went on as usual), the crowd marched to Pacific Lumber's log deck...
...In the late 1980s, a group of farmers, including Ray Hass of Viro-qua, Wisconsin, banded together to start the Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool, or CROPP, the top organic dairy-foods producer in the country...
...David Kupfer Election-year Crackdown Just in time for elections on November 7, San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan has ordered massive new sweeps of homeless people from city parks and neighborhoods...
...Payton regularly travels around the country, testifying at hearings and lobbying officials...
...Delores Tucker of the National Political Congress of Black Women stood in front of the crowd, holding a blow-up of lyrics from a Snoop Doggy Dogg song...
...Payton was finally silenced, and Tucker never did pay up...
...Crossmagien is notorious as a site of violent conflict in the war between Britain and Ireland...
...Rock Out Censorship has twelve chapters nationwide, and spends most of its energy fighting state laws that threaten musical expression, including mandatory labeling on certain tapes and CDs...
...Sean Cahill RALLY AND COURT ORDER HALT LOGGING More than 2,000 people came to a specially timed Headwaters Forest rally at the Pacific Lumber mill in Humboldt County, California, to protest salvage logging plans for the largest remaining unprotected old-growth redwood groves in the world...
...Fifty-nine dairy farmers from Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota form the heart of the produce pool...
Vol. 59 • November 1995 • No. 11
