ETS! encourages comments, feedback, tips, corrections, and info! Please keep them as concise as possible so we can print as many different voices as possible: ETS!, P.O. Box 85541, Seattle WA 98145, or e-mail ets@scn.org.

A Conspiracy Called Capitalism

ETS!,

The answer to which is worse, "tobacco" companies or insurers, is: It's a trick question...they're both the SAME. The whole "smoking" thing...like seat-belt laws, etc...is about insurance. We are supposed to protect ourselves from dangers caused by insurance companies' business/investment pals! Insurance is the thread that links all the slimeball industries.

John Jonik, Philadelphia

Unsolicited editorial plug: John is also an exceptionally talented political cartoonist (and one of the artists whose work we're now running), and really deserves broader exposure and more money for what he does. If you have or know of a publication that could use his work, contact him at 2049 E. Dauphin St., Philadelphia PA 19125.

MeterGate

ETS!,

Some interesting info I picked up on the job today (and thus you did not hear it from me): late Dec. or early Jan., Seattle City Council approved a $2.90 monthly meter charge for all City Light customers, scheduled to take effect March 1. It probably won't show up on bills for a few more months due to bill processing hang-ups. Apparently the idea was to make up for the loss of revenue when the "roads" tax was repealed and refunded, but that may be just hear-say.

Even though City Light is going to take the blame for this, it was apparently not their idea--they don't need the money. But the city does, and has a wide assortment of ways to milk it out of City Light. Also overheard that the cost of meters is not much more than $30. Not sure about that, but with deregulation coming in a few years and the ability to buy a meter at K-mart (wait and see), the city is set to gouge the public.

Name withheld, Seattle

Dante's Pique

ETS!,

In the coverage of the poor fellow whose head caught on fire while being murdered by the state of Florida, there was plenty of in-depth, technical explanation of the workings of the electric chair, and dire warnings from Florida's Attorney General that murderers better not come to Florida, but there was nothing about how the death penalty is not a deterrent; how in fact, states that have the death penalty have higher homicide rates and in fact murder rates go up in the months immediately following a state murder.

No death penalty opponents were quoted in the piece. The issue was cast as a debate on the relative merits of various methods of state murder. Most egregiously, the point (at least in the P-I and Reuters coverage I read) that this execution was a blatant violation of the Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore illegal, like all other murders, was not made.

Dan "Dante" Tenenbaum, Seattle

Albania's Woes

Dear Culinary Artists,

I've just finished my new, improved, super-sized "Eat the State!" and I must say, it's even tastier than the old bite-sized issues. A great choice for your first cartoon, too--a subject I'll get to in a moment.

Stuck in my craw, however, was the section on the revolting peasants of Albania. In little over 150 words, your writer(s) manage to cram in as much bad information and sloppy analysis as any in the mainstream media. Um, congratulations. And, for a bonus, the important lesson got ignored.

First, the "financial crisis" was not anything like "the economic despair that much of post-Communist Eastern Europe has been subjected to." The investment schemes that collapsed bear little resemblance to events elsewhere, which in turn bear little resemblance to each other. The post-Communist experiences of Poland, eastern Germany, Belarus and Bosnia could not be more different, given they each started with a wretched Communist-built industrial infrastructure and environmental pollution obscene by Western standards. A glance at the International Monetary Fund's "International Financial Statistics" should demonstrate the divergence nicely. (The Czech Republic has a 3.0% unemployment rate, which hardly sounds like "despair" to me. If we had that, our political hacks would never stop crowing.) The portions of Europe suffering most are the ones still under the ham-fisted "leadership" of the former Communists, like Belarus, Serbia-- and Albania.

For almost fifty years, Albanians were forbidden to learn anything about market economy. They could see prosperous, well-run places like Italy (!) on their TV sets, and they wanted a piece of the action. (Were I stuck in a crumbling concrete housing project, I'd want more money too.) The pyramid schemes didn't offer pie-in-the-sky returns; the rates were comparable to the paper profits currently racked up on the casino economy of Wall Street. Told "you've got to invest money to make money," which is true, and that unregulated free-market economies power the West (if that's not the Big Lie of our time, nothing is), they jumped in wholeheartedly.

Very quickly, the unregulated, laissez faire, free market did what it always does best: collapsed in fraud, dragging innocents down with it. Unrest soon followed, as it would have here if our regulatory agencies had failed in so spectacular a manner. Pretty soon, looting of the armories produced a population as armed and untrained as that of Los Angeles, with similar results.

We should shout this from the housetops: "unregulated 'free markets' always collapse in FRAUD!" until somebody out there gets it. The peddling of dangerous deregulation--the point of your excellent cartoon-- is intellectual fraud of the first order, and "respected economists" (how's THAT for an oxymoron?) should be tarred and feathered when they push it. Or dumped in downtown Tirana without so much as a water pistol. Other than that, ETS! continues to improve. Keep up the hard work, and keep the goodies coming.

Burp,

Tensor@speakeasy.com