John Caughlan, long time Seattle "movement lawyer" and activist, passed away on April 17 aftre a long illness. He was 89. He will be missed.--Geov Parrish

Amidst the war/massacre in Serbia, there's also still plenty of folks trying to draw attention to our other bombing campaign and war--the one still exacting hundreds of deaths a day among the civilian population of Iraq. During the week of April 25-May 1, there are three sets of coordinated initiatives being sponsored by national and local organizations throughout the United States: the Student Days of Action April 25 to May 1 (http://iraqaction.org/call2action.html); an April 27 National Day of Action called by such national groups as Peace Action, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, War Resisters League, and others (http://iraqaction.org/april27.html); and a national lobbying effort scheduled for Washington D.C. for April 25-28 sponsored by Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) (http://leb.net/epic/LobbyDays.html ). -- G.P.

War is good for business...After four weeks we felt a need to give the headlines of ETS! a break on the Kosovo war, and instead expand the letters section this week; we've gotten unusually heavy mail on the issue. But there's still plenty of items to take note of. Boeing is angling for over $40 million as its share of the Pentagon pork that military contractors are scrambling for as Congress gets ready to allocate billions more for the Serbia conflict--up to $10 billion more than the $6 bil Clinton originally asked for. Boeing Co., joined by two Utah weapons makers, has seized on the conflict in Kosovo to lobby Congress and the Pentagon to restart mothballed assembly lines that once manufactured cruise missiles. The stock of Raytheon, which makes the Tomahawk cruise missile--used to destroy and kill in the Balkans--is up 17 percent in the past two weeks. Twelve big military manufacturers--including Ameritech, Daimler Chrysler, Boeing, GM, Honeywell, Motorola, and TRW--ponied up $250,000 each to underwrite NATO's big shindig in Washington for its 50th anniversary. Letter writers have asked ETS! why we insinuate that U.S. and NATO are, for the purposes of this conflict, interchangable. The answer is because the U.S. is making all of NATO's major policy decisions and running the show. But one wonders in turn how much of U.S. policy is being run by the big arms makers and their stockholders and execs.--G.P.

Last Thursday, I volunteered to serve as a peacekeeper for the Seattle march and rally against the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. My main duties were to watch out for counter-demonstrators and assorted wackos attacking people during the march (there weren't any); later I passed around a collection can during the rally. My overall impression of the event was this: great march, awful rally. At least 300 people turned out for the march--many of them folks I'd never seen before. The crowd didn't disperse immediately after the rally; most stayed to listen to the speakers, which indicates the level of confusion about this war. People have a lot of questions, and they wanted to hear what the organizers of the march thought about Kosovo. Unfortunately, they were treated to a peppering of anti-imperialist sloganeering from an alphabet soup of socialist groups and their affiliated sub-groups. Laced with lots of praise for Tito (teenagers standing near me asked, "who's Tito?") and the usual refrains of "it's all about oil," the crowd thinned down to less than a hundred inside 30 minutes. By the time it was over, 30 or 40 diehards stood shivering in the lengthening shadows of Westlake Mall while the FSP, ISO, and RCP trotted out their patriarchs for the open mike. Happily, one man of Yugoslavian origin (probably Serbian) took advantage of the open mike to guilt-trip us all; he should have spoken earlier in the program. So my question is this: why has this issue been left to the socialist Left in Seattle--especially when it's the socialist politicians of Europe who are waging this attack on Kosovo and Serbia (from Tony Blair to Lionel Jospin to the Socialist/Green coalition in Germany)? Where are the other peace and social justice groups in Seattle and why wouldn't they come out to speak at this event? Surely they haven't decided that Bill Clinton & Co. deserves their absolute faith and support...have they?--M.T.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my close friends called me up on the phone and asked: "Are the Greens bombing Kosovo?" He was referring, of course, to the Socialist/Green coalition government in Germany. To understand his distress, you should know that my friend is a volunteer for the local Green Party and has 35 years of political activism under his belt, including a stint as a GI resistor during the Vietnam War. He was the first to point out to me that the Serbian evacuation and burning of ethnic Albanian villages in Kosovo reminded him of what U.S. and South Vietnamese troops did under the Phoenix Program: evacuate and destroy whole South Vietnamese villages and force their inhabitants into concentration camps (supposedly to undermine support for socialist organizations). Undoubtedly, the Serbs believe this same strategy will work to undermine the KLA. But to answer my friend's question: "Yes, the Greens--or at least the Greens' elected representatives--are bombing Kosovo and Serbia." It seems that Green politicians are no more immune to the patronage system of big-money politics than their Socialist and Labor counterparts in France and the U.K. One of the first politicians to have ditched his Green principles upon election to higher office is German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who no longer supports German demilitarization and withdrawal from NATO--a key element of the Green platform.--M.T.

Talk about another liberal to ditch his principles: Gov. Gary Locke has backed out of giving the keynote speech to graduating students at the Evergreen State College in Olympia. His reason: he won't share a podium with Mumia Abu-Jamal, a reporter convicted under dubious testimony of killing a cop in Philadelphia. Mumia's case has drawn worldwide attention to the issues of racism, the death penalty, and the corruption of the U.S. justice system. But Gov. Locke, who's a descendent of Chinese immigrants (a fact he's used liberally to garner political support), pretends to know nothing about such issues. Instead, he's worried about losing the support of the Washington State Troopers Association. Locke is up for re-election next year; obviously he thinks students don't vote.--M.T.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times (along, probably, with hundreds of other papers across the country) shafted Abu-Jamal and his supporters again by downplaying the size of the "Millions for Mumia" rallies on April 24. The one-paragraph "In Brief" item in Sunday's Times, culled from an AP report, said "more than 3,000" came to the rally in Philadelphia. According to one reader, the story was truncated from the full AP article (which he found in the Washington Post, but we couldn't find when we went to check it--already old news 24 hours later). In the fuller version, the second paragraph reportedly went on to explain that those 3,000 joined 25,000 others already in Philly--closer to the organizer's estimate of the crowd size. There was no mention at all of the San Francisco rally, which one attendee pegged (probably too optimistically) at 70,000. Regardless, it was a big rally, it was ignored, and Mumia is still on death row.--G.P.

A coalition of electric utility companies calling themselves the "Greening Earth Society" took advantage of Earth Day to advertise the benefits of "today's higher CO2 levels." A full page advertisement in the Washington Post argues that "doomsayers won't listen to the good news about CO2," which the ad says includes "more abundant plant life and greater agricultural yields." The group distributed a 30 minute video entitled "The Greening of Planet Earth" to all Members of Congress today, and promises an annual "State of the Climate" report. The Society says they are a "membership organization created to provide materials to educators, grassroots activists...and policy makers about the often overlooked beneficial effects of the Earth's rising atmospheric level of CO2;" find them on the web at www.greeningearthsociety.org. As if we needed a reminder that polluting industries are engaged in an enormous disinformation campaign on global climate change, the "Greening Earth Society" has created one of the more imaginative Earth Day scams.