NOT ONE PORTION OF THE FOLLOWING PUBLICATION HAS BEEN MADE POSSIBLE BY A GRANT FROM BOEING, WEYERHAUESER, ARCHER-DANIELS-MIDLAND, MICROSOFT, TEXACO, THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE, OR ANY OTHER FORTUNE 500 MEMBER.

Dear reader,

Eat The State! comes out every week, distributed free of charge to thousands of print readers locally and thousands more around the world electronically. For 15 months and 65 issues (and counting), we've survived solely on your donations and subscriptions, and we've done it without the constant nagging for money and support you might expect. So please indulge us while we hit you up now.

ETS! is--thanks to the work of a number of dedicated people--published on the very cheap. It's an all-volunteer labor of love. Much of our reproduction and layout costs are donated. So is all of the labor for production and distribution, and all of the editorial content--including nationally distributed folks like cartoonists Tom Tomorrow, John Jonik, Roberta Gregory, and Donna Barr, and local writers Wayne Grytting, Maria Tomchick, and Geov Parrish. It only costs us about $400 a week to publish ETS!, and almost all of that is spent directly on printing, layout, and postage for print subscriptions. (Not everybody has e-mail or web access, and not everybody with it will stumble across us. Plus, the cartoons are really cool.)

But that's still nearly $2,000 a month, and climbing. ETS! is being victimized, in a way, by our own success. In the last year we've covered-- often long before anyone else--a remarkable array of stories. Here's a small sample: Norm Rice's Nordstrom/HUD loans; privatization of Westlake Park; the Paul Allen/Seahawks stadium scam (starting with one of our first issues 15 months ago!); corporate ads in Seattle schools; the Jan Drago- Aaron Ostrom connection; abuses by Seattle police; who owns local media, and why it's a wasteland; state legislative horrors; Boeing's arms deals; the lowdown on obscure ballot proposals and candidates and the obscure contributors and financial interests of major candidates; Seattle's plans to clearcut its watershed; the local perfidies of corporate shills like Patty Murray and Gary Locke, how it ties in globally with the assaults of Bill Clinton, transnational corporations, and the corporate state, and the efforts of countless local heroes to make a difference and improve our lives.

We could (and will) go on; you get the idea. There's simply nobody else in local media doing what we do so consistently--for that matter, so far as we can tell there's no local publication quite like ETS! anywhere in the country. And the demand, from our first week, has been for more than we could print. We've more than tripled our initial production runs, and doubled our pages, and it's still nowhere near the demand, even in the areas (central Seattle and parts of the Eastside) where we're distributed each week. We could distribute far more widely, both in the city and throughout King County, if we had the funds to print more.

We're looking at several steps--going to newsprint or increasing to 12 pages, taking on inserts and advertising from progressive groups and businesses--to do just that, with the additional benefit of more column inches for more stories, humor, and rants from us and from you. But those steps would only cover expansion; we're still running up $2,000 a month in bills. Mainstream TV, radio, and newspapers (including "non-commercial" ones like PBS and NPR) have corporations to help fund their message; we have you. If you think ETS! is valuable and worth supporting--and SOMEONE must, judging from all the people reading it--help us out:

Subscribe, or just send us money (or both): P.O. Box 85541, Seattle WA 98145. Print subscriptions are $16 for 6 months, $29 for one year in the U.S.; $22/$39 in Canada; and $35/$65 to all other countries (U.S. funds,please).
Consider advertising for your progressive group or business. It's cheap, it supports the community, and it reaches a whole bunch of cool people.
Throw us a fund-raising event.

ETS! has had an amazing impact locally and has developed a national (and even international) readership with its combination of information, insight, and attitude. It's even more amazing that we do it on so little cash--but it still takes some. From you. Thanks for helping!

Happy holiday meals, The publishers of Eat The State!

P.S. Questions? Call us: 206-215-1156, or e-mail ets@scn.org.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled rants: