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a forum for anti-authoritarian political opinion, research
and humor
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ELECTRONIC TEXT-ONLY VERSION
October 1, 1996 published weekly #4
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In this issue:
Cleaning Up The U District
Cleaning Up Hanford
Covering Up Boeing
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WANTED
University District merchants who believe that, by
virtue of their owning or leasing a storefront, they have
the right to decide how public space is used, and by whom;
to decide what constitutes "desirable" age, race, dress,
behavior, and tax bracket; and to decide that the primary
function of the state is to enforce a more pleasant shopping
environment for upscale consumers.
Suspects can be identified by their support of a
private, city-supported police force to rid the Ave of youth
(Youth! In the University District! Imagine!); anti-sitting
and anti-loitering laws; anti-panhandling signs; and their
newest, most idiotic yet anti-graffiti posters (complete
with their stereotyped idea of what a tagger looks like).
Suspects use numerous aliases, but most frequently
disguise their identity behind the common mask of
"University Chamber of Commerce" (4714 University Way NE).
If suspects are located they will be immediately exiled
to Bellevue Square, where they'll belong.
Reward: a neighborhood that preserves one of the few
remaining unique public spaces in the city that is actually,
occasionally, inhabited, rather than transitted through or
shopped at. There are plenty of places in Seattle where
consumers feel loved. There are very few where kids and
counter-culturists can roost. Skateboarding is not a crime;
neither is being young or poor. Clean up the U District: get
the yuppie merchants and their hired storm troopers out.
Scar Wars
Anybody who believes that the Cold War is over should
take an afternoon, drive a few hours east and visit the
massive Hanford Nuclear Reservation north of Richland,
Washington.
For the scarred land itself, the Cold War won't be over
for several hundred thousand years; that's how long the
radiation damage incurred over the last 50 years, since the
government stole the land from local ranchers and the Yakama
tribe during World War II, will take to heal.
But even from the surrounding area and the few parts of
the place open to the public, you'll also see that the Cold
War is alive and well in the minds of the people who run
Hanford, the staggering amounts of money poured into it, and
the Strangelovian romance with weapons of mass destruction.
While our fake environmentalist President cuts back on
Superfund and toxic waste cleanup money--the source of much
of Hanford's income since its facilities were decreed too
dangerous and contaminated to continue weapon production--a
new plan has emerged to get Hanford back into the big bang
business. The Clinton Administration is desperately looking
for a new site to produce tritium, an extremely toxic
radioactive material essential for nuclear weapon triggers.
The U.S. supply of tritium is scheduled to run out in 2007,
and Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility, dormant for years, is
being pitched as the place to make more.
Previously, local and state officials have opposed the
project, and a joint Department of Energy and Dept. of
Defense board, earlier this year, recommended against it.
However, Washington's Republican Congresscreatures have
brought the proposal back from the dead, pushing hard to
bring tritium to the Tri-Cities. (Another good reason to
make sure Hastings, Neanderthal, etc. don't get re-elected.)
The Hanford reservation is, arguably, the most
environmentally contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.
Radioactive leaching into the water table (and the adjacent
Columbia River) is an open secret. Newspaper stories last
week of the discovery of a radioactive mouse, miles from
where glowing rodents "should" be, made for comical reading
but no news. Industrial hygienists at Hanford, and any local
with a lick of sense, have known for decades that in a
treeless, desert area where the wind blows constantly, the
ground for thirty miles in every direction is awash in
radioactive rabbit shit. Also open secrets: careless
handling for decades of the most toxic substances on earth,
and the routine lies told by Westinghouse, Bechtel, and
other contractors to their workers about the health risks of
their jobs and sources of their health problems. The only
folks who don't know seem to be the journalists who rely on
government and defense industry handouts for their reporting
tips.
With this kind of track record, the hypocrisy of
politicians supporting a startup of the Hanford test reactor
boggles. The same politicians that voted to cut Superfund
money--which Hanford desperately needs, and the loss of
which cost Hanford 5,000 jobs last year--now trumpet this
proposal as a way to create over 1,000 "new" jobs.
Those jobs come at an extraordinary expensive,
dangerous and immoral price: more environmental
contamination lasting hundreds of millenia, the loss of
still more social needs spending, more worker illness and
death, and an increase in our capacity to end life on the
planet at a time when most nations are on record as
supporting the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.
As with arguments for the ever-expanding prison system,
it makes one wonder if there were local power brokers in the
early '40s at Auschwitz and Dachau, arguing that the new
concentration camps were a great source of local jobs. At
what point--if any--is the moral price, is the damage to the
public good, worth more than a short-term profit to these
people?
There is a silver (well, lead) lining in this sordid
tale. In deciding whether to pursue the Hanford site for
tritium production, Department of Energy Undersecretary Tom
Grumbly was quoted last week as saying that his agency
"wants to go where people want us," and would not locate the
plant at Hanford without state and regional support.
Coming from the DoE, this is a somewhat ludicrous
statement. To cite one obvious example, the same DoE is
going ahead with plans to build a permanent nuclear waste
disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, despite the
combined opposition of Nevada's governor, state legislature
and Congressional delegation. (And, incidentally, the
Western Shoshone people from whom the land was stolen.)
Congress passed a specific bill, known locally as the "Screw
Nevada" Act, to override Nevada laws enacted to prevent
Yucca Mountain.
Nonetheless, the DoE should be taken at their word.
They should hear from the opposition. Loudly. Hanford needs
more money to--well, "clean up" isn't exactly accurate in
this case, but at least mitigate, not compound, some of the
worst damage to workers, the land and the Columbia River
ecosystem. Write the DoE at Box 550, Richland WA 99352, or
the office that will actually make the tritium decision:
Office of Reconfiguration, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Box 3417,
Alexandria VA 22302, phone (800) 776-2765, fax (703) 931-
9222.
The Seattle Times Sucks Up Again
The Seattle Times--your "locally owned" "independent"
newspaper actually owned by corporate chain Knight Ridder--
has a long and miserable record as the willing mouthpiece of
the region's big employers. Bill Gates, the University of
Washington, Boeing, and anyone who regularly buys ad inserts
can count on the reprinting of fawning press releases in any
and every section of the paper (including Sports), often on
the front page. But the Times' recent suppression of an
investigative series by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Donald
Bartlett and James Steele managed an unusual low point in
integrity.
In case you missed it, the two Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporters wrote a ten-part series called "Who Stole the
American Dream?" A follow-up to their widely read 1991
series, "America: What Went Wrong," it focused on corporate
welfare, abuses of the public trust, and how in our
WTO/NAFTA Brave New Global Mall a few are getting richer,
with the U.S. government's enthusiastic help, while the rest
of us get screwed. The Times ran the first installment of
the series on the front page September 1st, and then
mysteriously dropped it. Executive Editor Michael Fancher's
column Sept. 15, in response to many complaints, stated that
the series didn't live up to the Times' high standards for
investigative reporting, wasn't objective, and that besides,
it was all stuff we'd read before.
Well, any glance at the Times verifies that having read
it before, even if it were true in this case, is rarely used
as a criteria for refusing stories (or ads); the objectivity
of corporate media is a sick joke; and nobody's noticed a
whole lot of Pulitzer-toting staff people at Fairview and
John. What wasn't said by Fancher was that the second piece
in the series dealt with how corporations that rely heavily
on government subsidies get parts made on the cheap
overseas, shipping out U.S. jobs. The story focused on
Boeing, which outsources to Mexico and several East and
Southeast Asian countries for much of its work these days,
as a prime example of this syndrome. And the Times censored
it.
Parts of the Inquirer series are available at a web
site (www.phillynews.com). To get the full series, one must
subscribe to the Inquirer's on-line service, which is what
one loyal ETS! reader did. For the first time in the Puget
Sound, here are some Boeing highlights that offended the
Times' "local interest" sensibilities:
Airplane parts once made in America by Boeing employees
now are manufactured by subcontractors in other countries
and shipped back to the United States for assembly. To sell
planes in those countries, Boeing agreed to move a portion
of its manufacturing to those nations--to provide employment
for people there to make aircraft parts. That eliminated
jobs of U.S. workers.
For example, Boeing buys parts of 737 and 747 wings
from China's Xian Aircraft Co. China has imposed that
requirement as a condition of buying Boeing jets.
Eventually, the Chinese factory--where some 20,000 workers
earn $50 a month and live in government-run barracks
[Communism: a workers' paradise!--ETS! ed.]--will produce
the tail section for the 737, which now is made at the
Boeing plant in Wichita.
An American labor leader who has observed the Boeing-
China trade process close-up, and who is sympathetic to
Boeing's predicament, had this to say about the arrangement:
"Because China is such a huge market, they say to
Boeing or Airbus or whoever wants to sell there: `We'll buy
30 737s. We'll want to produce the back end of the 737 in
China. You give us the machinery. You give us the engineers.
You give us the technology. You help us set up the facility.
And then we'll buy the airplanes.' The Chinese see this as a
blueprint for the development of their aerospace industry.
You see a top Boeing executive saying, Boeing is committed
to developing the Chinese aerospace industry..."
Like much of American business today, the Boeing-China
deal was made for short-term gain, at the expense of any
long-term commitment in America. It was also made at the
expense of the American taxpayer--on two counts.
First, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, an
independent agency of the federal government, guaranteed
loans totaling $1.4 billion from 1993 to 1995 for China's
purchase of Boeing aircraft. Thus, a U.S. government agency
supported by American taxpayers helped finance the sale of
planes to China that will be built, in part, by workers in
China. Or, if you will, U.S. government financing will
create jobs in China.
Second, Boeing and rest of the civilian aviation
industry--perhaps more than any other U.S. industry--owe
their technology leadership to the tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars spent on research and development of
military aircraft. Now, some of Boeing's technology is being
given away to the Chinese.
Boeing's role in the global economy underscores why
Washington's trade policies have been such a failure for the
ordinary working American...
What's most surprising is that none of this should be
news to anyone with even a dim awareness of how the global
economy now works. Indeed, the same info could easily be
pieced together from the Times' business pages. What's
missing, and what the Times apparently didn't see fit to
print, is what those pieces add up to--what they actually
mean not just to Boeing stockholders, but, say, to 32,000
machinists who waged a bitter strike last year over exactly
this issue, and to the rest of us whose tax dollars are
making Boeing richer.
This writer travelled in the Soviet Union in 1988 and
was astounded at how much better informed on world issues
Soviet citizens were than their U.S. counterparts, even when
all media was heavily censored by the government. Because it
was obvious that the state-controlled media was biased and
self-serving, nobody trusted it and they knew to look
elsewhere (e.g., shortwave radio) for information. And
eventually, they brought down their repressive government.
Mainstream media in the U.S. has become many heads with
one monotonous corporate state voice, serving the interests
of those who own it and advertise with it. We would do well
to learn from the Russians and Ukrainians I met: know the
bias, seek news elsewhere, and draw your own conclusions.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Beware of the newspapers. They will have you hating the
oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." -
Malcolm X
RECLAIM OUR HISTORY
Oct. 1. 1946: Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal rejects defense
of "following orders" for crimes against humanity. 1969:
Canadian protestors shut down the border crossing at Blaine,
Wash., in opposition to U.S. nuclear testing in Alaska.
Oct. 4. 1957: Soviet Union launches world's first artificial
satellite, Sputnik. "Leave It To Beaver" debuts on CBS.
Oct. 5. 1968: Seattle police kill Black Panther member
Welton "Butch" Armstead during an arrest for suspicion of
car theft. 1994: Italy becomes 54th country to abolish the
death penalty. 1995: In a protest of proposed Medicaid and
Medicare cuts, 31 are arrested for occupying King County
Republican Party offices in Seattle.
Oct. 6. 1845: First co-op store in U.S. opens in Boston.
1970: About 200 stage a "bike-in" in downtown Seattle to
protest automobiles.
Oct. 7. 1879: Birth of Joe Hill. 1931: Birth of Desmond
Tutu.
ACTIVIST CALENDAR
Sat. Oct. 5. Rainier Beach H.S. Mothers Against Violence In
America conference, "Solutions to Violence in Our Lives."
323-2303.
Sun. Oct. 6. Martin Luther King Park. Washington Ceasefire
holds 3rd Annual Day of Remembrance for victims of gun
violence. 322-7564.
Mon. Oct. 7. 7:30 PM Museum of History & Industry, 2700 24th
Ave. E. Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Friends.
60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. Commemoration,
film series showing "The Good Fight," $2. Info 632-7402 or
284-9349.
For an excellent and much, much longer compilation of
upcoming and ongoing 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 new, slightly revised 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, tips,
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. The more bucks we get in donations and ads, the
more copies we can print and the sooner we can go to eight
pages a week, so give it up!
EAT THE STATE! is also distributed free at numerous
outlets in Western Washington; write or e-mail for the
location nearest you. And we'll have a web site really,
really soon, honest, with back issues and our famous mission
statement. Stay tuned for further instructions.
WHY EAT THE STATE!?
Welcome to this, the fourth issue of 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.
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Last Update: 2:42 AM on Saturday, October 5, 1996.
Please Send Comments, Suggestions, etc. to
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