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Those Darn Planes

ETS!,

My ears are starting to ring. Not only is there a steady stream of planes taking off and landing from SeaTac Airport to our south, but more and more I've noticed the smaller planes that use Renton and Boeing Fields. The small planes and helicopters that cross over Beacon Hill usually fly much lower than their SeaTac counterparts and make a starker noise than 747s and other jumbo jets. When the East-West traffic from Boeing Field and Renton field are added in to the mix of North-South traffic what eventually comes out is a symphony of loud, harmful noise which wakes us up, is damaging my (and probably others') hearing, keeps us from leaving our homes and makes this possibly quiet community and its parks difficult to enjoy.

Other airports around the country, such as the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, have responded to citizen requests for curfews on flight operations (between 10 PM and 6 AM) as well as made attempts at steeper take-offs and landings and adjusted flight paths. None of this is being considered for Seattle and it should be. Though citizen groups such as the North Beacon Hill Council have been meeting with officials from the various airports and the FAA for years, the situation just seems to keep getting worse rather than better. With expected growth in our communities in the coming years and the increased airport traffic that that will surely bring we ought to be taking steps now to insure that our future is more healthy than our present. To this end all possible steps to mitigate the effects of airport noise and air pollution should be taken into account and acted upon. SeaTac, the FAA, Boeing Field (KCIA), and Renton Field need to stop side-stepping the issues.

To learn more about what one group is doing on this issue, please visit the website of the Seattle Council on Airport Affairs at http://www.scn.org/activism/scaa/ .

--Albert Kaufman, Beacon Hill

Think Small

ETS!,

It was sociologist C. Wright Mills who rightly called small businesses the "shock troops in the battle against labor unions and government controls." For example, small businesses are rarely ever unionized. Since non-union workers earn an average of one-third less than union workers, on average the person who works for a small business earns a third less than workers at larger companies. Another example is the percentage of workers who get health insurance from their employer: 67% for companies with over a 1000 workers, only 27% for companies with 25 workers or less. The odds are that workers at a big "corporate" company are earning more and receiving more benefits than the workers at the allegedly more benign "Mom & Pop" business.

Both the (increasingly threatened) small entrepeneur and the (always threatened) non-propertied class-conscious person often seem in agreement regarding the menace of the big corporate capitalists. However, the issues are not the same for these two groups. Capital always strives to enlarge, to purge its own ranks to survive. Every small capitalist must confront this fact. All class-conscious workers should remember it.

--Barry Stoller, via e-mail

Protesting "RICO and Protest"

Dear ETS!,

The article on "RICO and Protest" missed the mark by a long, long way.

A woman has the right to control her own reproduction. No one has the right to stop her from seeking medical advice concerning her pregnancy, or from seeking medical care to end a pregnancy. Anyone who does so, violently or not, denies her a basic, fundamental right. Since she has empowered the government to protect her rights, she reasonably expects the government to pass laws preventing others from interfering in her exercise of her rights.

When anti-choice protesters knowingly and with malice aforethought collude to break laws protecting her right to choose, then the racketeering statute (RICO) applies. Since RICO targeted organized crime, and agreement to break laws is the definition of organized crime, the National Organization for Women quite properly sued those who decided to break the laws.

Furthermore, the harassment by Operation Rescue et al. forms a disturbing trend. With Referendum 20 (Washington state, 1972) and "Roe v. Wade" in 1973, the government stopped violating a woman's right to choose. Anti-choice lawbreaking represents the privatization of authoritarian human-rights violations, and I find it doubly strange that ETS! supports this.

The article in question contains other shortcomings as well.

First, I do not care where the anti-choice criminals got their beliefs. Whether they are authoritarian right or religious left means nothing in the context of their crimes. The author seems to admire the dedication to harrasment these criminals showed, citing their numbers and tenacity. In this context, this amounts to an endorsement of organized religious zealotry, not the kind of thing I expected ETS! to admire.

Second, their apparent certainty that a single-celled zygote has all the properties, rights, and immunities of an independent, breathing woman is simply unscientific (and not-so-subtly misogynistic). It makes the oxymoronic "creation science" look plausable, and we should not give it any credence, let alone take it as a justification to remove basic human rights from a large chunk of the population.

Third, "civil disobedience" originally meant breaking the unjust laws. Thoreau refused to pay a tax supporting slavery; freedom riders flaunted laws designed to take away freedom of association. Anti-choice criminals acted to prevent citizens from enjoying fundamental freedoms, a different thing entirely. Equating the two gives the anti-choice criminals a moral position they do not deserve.

Finally, let's pretend that Aaron Ostrom, Jan Drago, and their rich friends decided to get together last Fall and nonviolently prevent the publication and distribution of ETS! (acting in their capacities as private citizens). Now, in May, Council Member Ostrom writes an essay stating that he did so in his very sincere belief that he makes a better legislator that Nick Licata ever could. Would ETS! publish this?

If anti-choice protesters obey the laws, they need not fear a RICO lawsuit. If they do decide to break the laws, let's hope they've read all of Thoreau's essay, and understand they must pay the legal penalty for their actions. Their right to wave their bloody fetus-trophies ends at the tip of my nose.

Still Free to Choose,

--Tensor, Seattle

G.P. replies: Congrats on cramming so many red herrings into one letter. To note some of the more obvious: sure, in your bizarre scenario, we'd publish Aaron's letter; we would not file federal felony conspiracy charges against him, in the naive belief that the police state would protect us from his beliefs. ETS!, and Stephen Zunes' article, took no position on abortion itself, rendering much of your letter irrelevant (nobody's arguing about right to choice here); and federal prosecutors do not give a flying fuck as to what Thoreau's original meaning of "civil disobedience" was. He spent one comfortable night in jail in a solitary protest completely unnoticed at the time and that had no impact on policy. Great precedent for moral witness, lousy for a movement. Good writer, though.

Meantime, you've casually thrown out as invalid most mass protest in U.S. history, including slavery abolition, women's suffrage, labor organizing, and (just in the last two generations) civil rights, the (Vietnam) anti-war movement, anti-nukes, AIDS research, and the radical environmental movement (among others)--because protesters weren't accused of breaking the laws or policies they considered unjust. RICO, as championed by the National Organization for Women and placed in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, could have destroyed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues. Do you really doubt it? Do you really think today's political leaders are more ethical when their interests are threatened?

For example: last month, Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran charged two Greenpeace activists with "accomplice liability" for acting as spokespeople during the protest last August in which seven people dangled off the Aurora Bridge, blocking outgoing ocean factory trawlers. Their only crime, according to Sidran, was talking to the media about the actions of others. Mercifully, last week a Seattle Municipal Court judge laughed the charges out of court. Is there any doubt that if he had the jurisdiction, Sidran would use this spiffy new felony weapon NOW has handed to him, possibly prosecuting the dozens of folks who did support work on that action?

Abortion is an emotional issue, and many Operation Rescue supporters are creeps. But your logic has the same fallacy as that of fringe lefties who want armed revolution in the U.S.: even setting aside moral arguments, the pragmatic truth is that people who don't like us have a lot more access to those weapons, and can use them a lot more proficiently, than we can. We have to find other, more creative and life-affirming ways to ensure justice. Abortion access is, after all, about affirming life.