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a forum for anti-authoritarian political opinion, research
and humor
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ELECTRONIC TEXT-ONLY VERSION
September 24, 1996 published weekly #3
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In this issue:
Why Eat The State!?
Craswell Saves The Election
The Political Value of Exploding Airplanes
Those Treacherous Suburbs
Eat These Airwaves!
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WHY EAT THE STATE!?
Welcome to this, an initial issue of what we intend to
be a weekly, four-page forum for--like the masthead
says--anti-authoritarian political opinion, research, news
and humor.
While Seattle already has lots of forest-eating print
publications, including some very good political ones, it
doesn't have one that is explicitly anti-statist (by which
we mean both governments and corporations, which these days
are essentially the same); explicitly activist; or published
frequently enough to respond to breaking events, decode the
news and publicize activist initiatives. That's what we
wanna do. We also think being clearly biased in our
approach is not only more honest than so-called "objective"
corporate media, but lots more fun to read.
Short, frequently published broadsheets, interpreting
the news of the day in a way the newspaper barons would not,
were a staple of the radical U.S. labor movement in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. They served to link isolated
communities and provide a voice and soapbox for the
voiceless. The "Democracy Wall" writings of China's student
movement in 1989 filled a similar function. On a more
modest scale, that's what we hope to do, too: avoid
rhetoric, make the issues of the day relevant to our daily
lives, get the word out, inspire, have fun, and encourage
each other to think for ourselves and look beyond what
self-interested corporations and governments hand to us.
OUR MISSION STATEMENT
Missions were used by the Spanish to colonize Mexican
California in the 18th century. Their establishment was
instrumental in the genocide of California's native peoples.
We oppose them.
Craswell Saves The Election
The victory of former state Sen. Ellen Craswell in last
week's Republican primary for Governor was extremely good
news for the citizens of Washington.
Craswell is a near certain, um, lock to lose the
general election. Not that her opponent, King County exec
Gary Locke, is someone to put faith in. His elevation to
Visionary Leader by the media and business parasites who
will be seeking favors from him for the next four years
comes after a rather undistinguished career as a liberal who
"gets things done" (i.e., actively seeks the middle ground
between the public good and unfettered greed). But
Craswell's well-earned reputation as a bigoted fanatic whose
ideas of good government would resonate in Tehran will
terrify virtually everyone not already in her camp - which,
last Tuesday, was about 85% of primary voters.
The real impact of Craswell's presence in the most
visible statewide race, however, will be its impact on other
races. In several lower-profile state races, extremely
destructive people are running who stand a better chance of
winning than Craswell. The attention her views will draw,
whether she can win or not, will make it harder for others
to avoid the attention, and alarm, they deserve. The most
notable:
Ron Taber will face Teresa Bergeson for State
Superintendent of Public Instruction. Bergeson is favored,
but her past career as an NEA head will be used against her.
(A teacher! Eeeek!) Taber, whose platform is essentially to
dismantle public education through vouchers, gets uglier as
he gets more familiar. His remark early in the campaign
(while opposing bilingual education) that Spanish was the
language of doormen and fruit pickers would be tragicomic if
it weren't so widely believed. (Note to Ron and others: Over
half the population of the Western Hemisphere speaks
Spanish. Get over it.) His advocacy of caning in the
schools, and public funding of (conservative) Christian
education, deserve a lot more attention. Taber is a menace
to children.
In the race for Insurance Commissioner, incumbent
Deborah Senn postures as a champion of consumer rights. She
is, in fact, much less of an advocate than she claims to be,
and that ought to be an issue since watchdogging the
insurance industry is the definition of the job. But she,
and what's left of our state's health care reform, has still
pissed off insurance companies so much that they are pouring
truly massive amounts of money into defeating her. Their
paid candidate, Anthony Lowe, would take away your only
recourse should you become ill and some enormous company
decides that your body does not represent a lucrative enough
profit center. Beyond urging Canada to invade, our best bet
is to make sure Lowe loses.
Locally, based on primary results, there's an excellent
chance that property rights wingnut Jeanette Burrage could
lose her King County Superior Court seat. Judicial elections
cause most peoples' eyes to glaze, in large part because
only people who hang out in courtrooms have much of an idea
what these people actually do. But Burrage is a particularly
notorious case of how ideology can be used to extract
maximum damage from the judicial system; her opponent, Doug
North, needs support.
Craswell's emergence may even help further damage the
state's six freshmen Gingroids running for Congressional
reelection. Most showed themselves vulnerable in the
primary, including the presumed-invincible Linda Smith.
Particularly heartening was the primary loss (it'll rerun in
November) of South County's Randy Tate, a snot-nosed little
creep whose arrogance cannot be explained by either wealth
or intelligence. Tate's accidental election two years ago
may forever be used as an argument against allowing people
under age 30 to hold office, and for that alone he should be
retired (to 40 years as a successful lobbyist, no doubt)
ASAP.
In addition to being valuable for the political issues
at stake, the defeat of people like Tate, Taber, Craswell,
and some of the Christian Coalition loonies infesting
Olympia's legislature would be a huge relief for many
Christians. As with any faith, Christianity's adherents are
mostly decent folks spanning the usual range of humanity.
Intolerant zealots in office endanger everyone, Christians
included, and give faith a bad name.
It's a sad measure of even our local elections that the
best we can hope for again this year is to block the
election of the unusually vicious. In a genuinely
representative system, people would regularly have a chance
to vote for someone who reflects their interests and needs.
There is nobody, in any of these races, with a meaningful
chance of winning who is not at least well-off and is not
being financed primarily by the very wealthy. Even simple
reforms--like meaningful campaign finance laws or
proportional representation--are complex enough to bore
people to tears. But if we're ever going to get beyond
trying to protect ourselves from a few of the very worst
politicians, and on to the real business of creating the
society we WANT, we hafta start learning this stuff.
In that regard, progressive activists would do well to
look at the structure of the Craswell campaign. A so-called
"fringe" candidate defeated far better-financed opponents by
sheer street level organizing; every city, town, hamlet and
cow pasture in the state this year has had someone
delivering the Craswell message. If, as progressives like to
believe, we've got better answers than the Craswells of the
world for peoples' fears, needs and desires, we should look
closely at how she got her message publicized to so many.
The Political Value of Exploding Airplanes
It was dryly noted in the news last week that
investigators of the TWA 800 disaster off Long Island last
month, after having recovered 80% of the plane, have found
no evidence whatsoever of explosives and are now looking
primarily at mechanical failure as the reason for the crash.
It's eerily reminiscent of the Oklahoma City bombing
last year, when politicians and talk-radio yahoos alike were
ready to bomb some Middle Eastern country (pick one; they're
all alike) in retaliation until discovering the likely
culprits came from Michigan. None of these same morons then
advocated bombing Detroit--though years of official malice
toward inner cities have certainly left Detroit with that
appearance--and none minded too much that the repressive,
civil-liberty-stripping "counter-terrorist" border measures
begun in response were containing a phantom threat.
This time, chances are excellent the post office will
not scurry to take down its absurd new signs requiring folks
with packages over a pound to register with the FBI (or
whatever). The climate of terror from these incidents is
primarily generated by official news sources and stoked by a
media hungry for conflict and emotion. People see these
signs, remember the blaring headlines for days about a bomb
on that TWA flight, and it adds to the general sense that We
Are Under Attack. And the corollary, which is that sometimes
you have to give up a few rights in order to secure greater
public safety. Lost in the manipulation of these emotions
for political gain is a simple fact: there was, in all
likelihood, no bomb.
If there was, of course, the destruction of Flight 800
would surely qualify as a dastardly deed--but even then, it
pales as a modern terrorist act. Most of the truly
terroristic acts these days are committed by governments,
against their own or each others' citizens. 567,000 Iraqi
children have died in five years due to U.S. economic
policy, a policy designed to punish innocents so that others
will behave the way we want them to. THAT is terrorism. And
it would take an Oklahoma City-sized bombing every business
day for the next eight years to equal, in tonnage and
carnage, what the U.S. inflicted on the residents of Baghdad
in six weeks in 1991.
Closer to home, in the United States, where our leaders
rush to gut the constitution when a pipe bomb goes off, an
average of one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two women
are reported raped every day. Virtually all of these attacks
are committed by men, a majority by men that the women
know--a brutal way to use power and control to force desired
behavior, and cumulatively representing nearly 700,000 acts
of terrorism a year. Where is the official outrage?
There is no equivalent outrage, of course, for several
reasons. (Among them, that women--like the poor, queers, the
mentally ill, or people of color--are by definition not
considered "innocent" victims.) But the relevant reason here
is that the deaths aren't what's important in headlines
about the TWA crash; what's politically useful is the fear
they instill, the fear that allows greater and greater state
authority. As with Mafia protection rackets, the real thugs
are the ones offering safety.
The eagerness of officials and media to embrace a big
bang theory for TWA also points up another interesting and
manipulative bias. It is useful to instill fear in people;
but it is NOT useful to question the infallibility of
machines. Mechanical failure has resulted in far, far more
air fatalities in any given year than terrorist attacks; but
it's the last thing our corporate-friendly, techno-dependent
information sources want us to consider. That's particularly
true in Seattle, where if the icecaps were to melt tomorrow
the local papers' headlines would speculate on the impact
upon future Boeing sales; but it's true everywhere, and not
just with airplanes.
People know in their daily lives that these fancier and
fancier gadgets (computers, cars, VCRs) frequently don't
work right; but the Official Universe of better and better
technology spurring tons of sales to happy consumers does
not find skepticism (or latent neo-Luddism) useful. We can
have acts of God, or acts of terrorists, or acts of
incompetence, but we can never, ever have dangerous,
malfunctioning or useless technology. When this dynamic
influences something as established as airplanes (which are
rather safe compared to, say, cars), it makes ya wonder what
we haven't yet heard about the immediate and long-term risks
of all the new, inscrutable machines in our lives.
Those Treacherous Suburbs
While on the topic of fear and safety, an interesting
study just released by the Northwest Environment Watch busts
another myth. Much of the basis of the growth of suburbs,
and middle-class flight from the inner city, is the idea
that suburbs are safer places for families. Wrong. Turns out
the rate of death from car accidents in the suburbs,
including the rate for kids, is so much higher than the
city that it more than makes up for higher city rates of
drug and violence deaths. The basic geography of suburbs is
constructed around the automobile, with amenities like
sidewalks, bike paths, or public transit--where they exist--
added later. The conclusion? Protect your kids: live in the
city!
Quote of the Week
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -
Benjamin Franklin
Eat These Airwaves!
Eat The State! political commentary is now airing each
Saturday morning from 8:30 to 9:00 on KCMU's Mind Over
Matters. Be sure to tune in--but don't take our presence as
an endorsement of KCMU's management, or its evolving format.
On Sep. 9th, KUOW/KCMU management announced at a staff
meeting that KCMU would be firing its nonpaid weekday air
staff and replacing them with paid DJs. In addition, the
intent is to have all of KCMU's volunteers gone by the end
of the fiscal year, and to hire a full-time ad sales person
for KCMU (remember, this is non-commercial radio!). And the
talks for a Puget Sound Public Radio consortium of KUOW,
KPLU and KCMU--just one of the scenarios whereby KCMU's
alternative music would be banished entirely--are quietly
continuing.
KCMU has never been a community radio station. It's
always belonged to the University of Washington, which has
the right to do whatever it likes with 90.3. If they want to
air all Husky Sports all the time, they could. But for many
years KCMU has appealed for public donations and volunteer
help on the premise of being a community station. The lack
of apparent outrage at the latest erosion of this tradition
can only be attributed to so many folks having already given
up on KCMU.
Seattle desperately needs a community station, AM or
FM, that can cover the whole city (in addition to the micro-
broadcast pirates popping up). The only way we'll get one is
to buy one, or to pry KCMU out of UW's cold, dead fingers.
Some folks are discussing putting a buyers' group together;
to hook up with them, contact us at ETS!. In the meantime,
we're happy to have the air time on KCMU, but we'd be much
happier on a station run by and for the public--like
"public" radio should be.
Eat The Rich...No, Really...
A reader passes along the following--and yes, we do
welcome blurbs, articles, and feedback from ETS! readers. If
we have the money to print more pages (that's another hint)
they will be primarily devoted to your voices.
"Pepperidge Farms has a new line of cookies. They've
recently been using geographical locations (Monterey,
Geneva, etc.). The new one is called `Tahoe.'
"There's a bright label on the package that helps to
explain what the cookies have in common with Tahoe: `Full
of RICH WHITE Chunks!'"
RECLAIM OUR HISTORY
Sep. 25. 1937: City of Los Angeles bans sale of war toys.
Sep. 26. 1937: Bessie Smith dies of injuries from an auto
accident outside a Jim Crow hospital in Mississippi.
Sep. 27. 1983: Five members of Puget Sound Women's Peace
Camp enter Boeing's cruise missile production plant in
Seattle, leaflet workers, and are arrested.
Sep. 28. 1943: Danish underground anti-Nazi activists begin
systematic smuggling of Jews to Sweden. 1994: Indigenous
people from around the world meet in Bolivia to discuss bio-
piracy.
Sep. 29. 1969: 2,000 welfare protestors take over state
capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. 1983: International
arms trade convention prematurely closed by nonviolent
activists, Brussels, Belgium.
Sep. 30. 1991: CIA finances military coup in Haiti. Three
years of state-sponsored murder, rape and theft follow
before the U.S. intervenes to change the government again.
ACTIVIST CALENDAR
Tue. Sep. 24. 11:30 AM, Federal Building, 2nd & Madison.
Celebrate signing of Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty this day
at United Nations. Info: Physicians for Social
Responsibility (PSR), 547-2630.
Tue. Sep. 24. Pay-what-you-can fundraiser for PSR. 7:30 PM,
Wright Auditorium, Children's Hospital, 4800 Sand Point Way
NE with anti-nuclear activist, author & heroine Helen
Caldicott. 547-2630.
Wed. Sep. 25. 4:00 PM local protest as part of National Day
of Action Against Corporate Greed. At AT&T Wireless, 617
Eastlake Ave. E. Jobs With Justice, 448-7348.
Thu. Sep. 26. 2:00 PM City Council chambers, hearing on the
U District Chamber of Commerce's plan to use uniformed
police in a private security force to "clean up" the U
District of youth, homeless and other horrors. Call the
Council, call the mayor, and be there. Info: Seattle
Displacement Coalition, 523-2569.
Thu. Sep. 26. 7:00 PM, Leffler House at St. Mark's
Cathedral, 1229 10th Ave. E. Global Economy Discussion
series. This month, "The Commodification of Women in the New
Global Economy." Church Council of Greater Seattle, 525-
1213.
Fri. Sep. 27. 5:30 PM, meet at Westlake Park, 4th & Pine,
for Critical Mass Bike Ride through downtown to promote non-
motorized transportation. Info:
http://www.oz.net/~nic/cm.html.
Sat. Sep. 28. Women Take Back The Night. Info: Seattle Rape
Relief, 325-5531.
Sun. Sep. 29. 3 PM, meeting of Citizens Concerned for the
People of Iraq. For location call Fellowship of
Reconciliation, 789-5565.
For an excellent and much, much longer compilation of
upcoming and ongoinng progressive events in Seattle, check
out Jean Buskin's Peace Calendar:
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~buskin or e-mail her at
bb369@scn.org.
The tiny print: EAT THE STATE! is a shamelessly biased
political journal. We want an end to poverty, exploitation,
imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, heterosexism,
environmental destruction, television, and large ugly
buildings, and we want it fucking now. We are not
affiliated with any political group or party. We publish
EAT THE STATE! as a way of sharing information, resources,
opinions, and hopefully inspiring ACTION in our community.
Please help!
EAT THE STATE! is published and distributed each
Tuesday in Western Washington. We welcome articles,
letters, comments, and feedback. Write us at EAT THE
STATE!, P.O. Box 85541, Seattle WA 98145; or email
ets@scn.org.
EAT THE STATE! is edited by Geov Parrish; layout and
production assistance is provided by Northwest Forest Action
Group, Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia, and
Catalytic Communications. All rights are cast to the wind;
feel free to reproduce. We'd appreciate it if you credit
us, and let us know, when you quote or reprint our stuff.
Subscriptions by mail to EAT THE STATE! are available
for $13 for 26 weeks or $24 for one year. E-mail
subscriptions in text-only format are free. Donations are
welcome; if you value publications like EAT THE STATE!,
support us, because we're always money-hemorrhaging
propositions. We are supported in part by donations from
readers like you, and in part from redirection of resisted
federal taxes donated by people who in conscience refuse to
willingly pay for militarism and class warfare. We accept
paid advertising only from enterprises which actively work
to further our goals of a vibrant, decentralized, free
society.
EAT THE STATE! is also distributed free at numerous
outlets in Western Washington, and will be available at a
web site as soon as we can figure the damn thing out.
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Posted as a public service to the anti-authoritarian community by Ben Attias
Last Update: 2:48 AM on Saturday, October 5, 1996.
Please Send Comments, Suggestions, etc. to
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