ustxtxb_obs_1987_06_12_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

like Pantex,” she said, “but we must integrate into the peace movement the different things that happen because of the bombs.” Prescod, who represents the 15-yearold International Wages for Housework Campaign, founded in England by her mother-in-law, said “We want all women in all countries to get paid for and be counted for the work we do for the state in producing, rearing, and caring for the labor force, husbands, children and ourselves. “We want that pay to come from each country’s military budget. The focus must narrow and the military budgets must be slashed,” Prescod said. “Why is carrying and rearing children not considered work [by state definitions] while being in the military and killing is [considered work]?” “In most countries,” Prescod continued, “when cutbacks are made, those cuts come from the budgets for women and children, and that is because most of the work that women do is invisible and unpaid, so that welfare . . . or services we receive are considered charity and not a right or a wage.” Once a monetary value is established, she believes, worth is recognized and greater power will follow that recognition. TWO YEARS AGO at the Decade for Women’s Conference in Nairobi, the campaign won a major victory: U.N. representatives agreed to measure women’s contributions, paid and unpaid, to agriculture, food production, reproduction and household work, including child rearing, and to include those values in the Gross National Product. \(When included, Prescod says, the GNP will only Australia has begun counting. But another U.N. agency in the Dominican Republic is “figuring out how to count” women’s work and the Rand Corporation in this country is exploring the idea. Nina Lopez-Jones is an organizer for the English Prostitutes Cooperative and “Black women are not present in great numbers in the peace movement because black women are struggling to survive daily.” has been part of the Women’s Peace Encampment at Greenham Common outside the Cruise Missile base there for the past five years. “I used to go to jail for prostitution,” Lopez-Jones said, “now I go to jail for peace.” She is also in this country organizing on behalf of a “no bad women, just bad laws” campaign to protect the rights of prostitutes. Lopez-Jones urged peace organizers to make the connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear power a feminist issue, and said that female workers within the industry must have protection and advocates. In the final analysis, Prescod and Lopez-Jones said, they are fighting for greater rights for all people. They point to one sentence in the Petition for All Women to All Governments, which sums up their commitments, “There is no peace as long as people anywhere, beginning with women and children first, are struggling to survive the holocaust of overwork, ecological devastation and famine. . . .” The only way to make the peace movement work, they say, is to rally the numbers “who will finally shut the war machinery down” by organizing “from the bottom up.” “We are making the connections here,” Prescod said, “in Amarillo, in Los Angeles, in Greenham Common. There’s a coming together of people who are ordinarily divided. It’s the wave of the future.” Not all of the Mother’s Day activists were comfortable with the views expressed or the political actions called for by the two women. But the feminists’ intent was to challenge conventional ways of thinking. “Besides,” said Dr. Larry Egbert of Dallas, who last year was arrested at the Nevada Peace Test site, “how many times do you get the opportunity to have a woman like Margaret Prescod come and waggle her finger in your face?” POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE v “You sold us down the river,” Texas Interfaith Director Ernesto Cortes told San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros at a May 18 meeting. Cortes, in an unusually public criticism of a public official, was referring to a torrent of developers’ plans for 22,000 acres of Edwards Aquifer recharge zone controlled by the city. And perhaps the working arrangement that Communities has wrought out with San Antonio’s city government. Cisneros had promised considerable balance and public access to a committee that he appointed to draft new guidelines for aquifer recharge zone development restrictions. At the May 18 meeting he made it clear that the committee would be a city council committee. Council members Cisneros had appointed, according to some local environmentalists, all had consistent records of pro-development voting. Cisneros refused to appoint City Coun cilmember Maria Berriozabal insisting that he did not want to appoint biased or factional members to the committee. Berriozabal described the mayor’s decision on the committee as “politics of exclusion” and claimed that the group appointed by Cisneros leaves the council “void of legitimate concerns which are shared by other San Antonians.” Cisneros responded to the criticism offering that, “both \(developers and disappointed because we’re going to do what the facts justify.” Environmentalists are wondering, whose facts? Voting records of councilmembers Weir Labatt, Joe Webb, Frank Wing and Nelson Wolff, who join Cisneros on the aquifer committee, suggest that facts considered are likely to be developers’ facts. Cisneros moved to make amends with COPS and other alienated community organizations by appointing a group of intervenors who will participate, without vote, in the committee’s hearings. Cisneros warned committee members and intervenors against “posturing.” v Cisneros spent the final hours of the 70th legislative session lobbying both chambers for a bill that would allow San Antonio voters to authorize a one-half percent local sales tax to raise funds for a stadium. Cisneros’ effort on behalf of an eleventh-hour local bill was sufficient and his presence kept reporters and TV crews occupied while both chamber worked to move legislation that had been in the pipeline for weeks. And the little acts of obeisance, like East Texas Dixiecrat Bill Sims’s personal and private introduction to the Mayor who made the senator feel, well, special, made the long night easier to endure. Cisneros warned one TV crew that San Antonio would continue to be ignored by the NFL as long as it could only offer to football franchisers a high school stadium built in the 18 JUNE 12, 1987