ustxtxb_obs_1987_01_09_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

a private right-wing intelligence-gathering organization building a database on left-wing and liberal activists; and promoting and condoning the use of violence against local Chicano leaders and Professor Actnia. The police action even included agent-initiated discussion of assassinations. Los Angeles police reports were shared with the FBI for the surveillance of Acutia, MECHA, the Raza Unida Party, Raul Ruiz, Centro de Accion Chicano students and community activists. The reports indicate that several agents infiltrated the various Chicano student organizations and groups at the Northridge campus of California State University. They posed as Chicano students and joined La Raza Unida Party, MECHA, CASA. August the anti-war movement during the 1970s. Daily contact was maintained by these police agents with campus security and the local police department. Weekly reports were filed with the ATD of the Los Angeles Police Department and the among participants. TO IGNORE the paper trails found in the files of government, intelligence agencies in particu lar, is to hide the role of government as an instrument for social control. These documents reveal the official, extra-legal repression of the Chicano community. For decades, government policy has been to maintain surveillance of the Chicano community in the United States. Government surveillance has led to a distortion of the lawful activities engaged in by this ethnic group. To ignore the effects and consequences of this surveillance on community groups and leaders of Mexican ancestry is to blind oneself to the contradictions inherent in this model of an egalitarian or democratic, pluralistic state. To ignore government paper trails is to hide the role of government as an instrument of social control. FBI. These reports contained the names of persons attending the meetings of these organizations, identified their leaders, reported on statements made and activities planned, and highlighted the items of dissension and disagreement Port Arthur THE RECENT REQUEST for a rate increase by the Beaumontbased Gulf States Utilities Com pany marks one of the first steps toward getting Texans to pay the bills for nuclear power. Although the nuclear plants being built in Texas have not yet produced any power, the bills for their construction will begin to come due in the next couple of years about $20 billion in capital costs, according to one source. Unfortunately, much of the capacity added by these new plants is unnecesBend nuclear plant, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, gives the company 50 percent excess capacity. where only 15-20 percent overcapacity is recommended. But that remaining 35 percent capacity still has to be paid for. GSU claims it is being pushed to the brink of bankruptcy thus, the current request for a $144.1 million rate increase. The company blames the poor economy and cost overruns at the $4.2 billion River Bend plant. “They put too many eggs in the nuclear basket at a time when the nuclear industry was in trouble and when the risks of cost overruns and schedule delays were astronomical,” says Jim Doug Abrahms is a reporter for the Port Arthur News. Boyle, past director of the Office of Public Counsel. \(Boyle was interviewed while still director of the OPC. See GSU suffers today are 99 or 100 percent a function of GSU deciding to build River Bend after Three Mile Island. The company often tries to confuse its customer by saying that it had to build the plant because it couldn’t continue to build gasand oil-burning plants. The issue is not whether they needed the capacity, but whether the company properly looked at going forward with additional coal or cogeneration capacity or whether the company had looked at how much capacity could be saved through conservation. It appears that the company was going to build River Bend no matter what after Three Mile Island.” GSU officials say they made the right decision to build River Bend back in the late 1970’s and were hurt by the downturn of the economy in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana. “The PUC did not question the advisability of building River Bend, and their staff questioned whether we were building enough nuclear capacity,” says GSU spokesman Dave White. “I think that the way to go is to have a diverse fuel base because no one knows what will happen to fuel prices.” GSU had been asking for and getting substantial yearly rate increases from the Public Utilities Commission to pay for some of the financing costs of building River Bend. But the company finally pushed too far with its rate increase request filed in October of 1985. A $133 million rate increase request was turned into a $180 million decrease, and its summer residential rates fell from $105.50 per 1,000 kilowatt-hours in the summer of 1985 to $68.46 for this summer. Boyle called this rollback the biggest in Texas and possibly the largest in the, nation. At issue was the rate discrepancy between Louisiana and Texas. Even though GSU serves the same brand of electricity to both Texas and Louisiana, Texas residents have paid 10-30 percent higher rates since the mid-1970s. Consumer activist Joyce Roddy successfully created a public awareness of high electric rates and the discrepancy between the rates in the two states. Roddy circulated petitions which collected 44,000 signatures, corralled a busload of Southeast Texans to testify before the commission in Austin, and berated and pleaded with scores of government bodies to seek rate relief for Texas customers. Port Neches City Attorney Harry Wright and his city council pushed through an ordinance last December rolling back electric rates to equal those of Louisiana about 20 percent lower at the time. Even though the law had remained dormant for many years, Texas gives the cities the right to regulate their own utility rates, and Wright was one of the first to use it. Fifteen other Southeast Texas cities, including Beaumont and Port Arthur, passed similar rollback measures last January and February the first time in the state that a city-initiated electric rate rollback was passed. “I want Gulf States to be a strong Paying for Nuclear Overload By Doug Abrahms THE TEXAS OBSERVER 13