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Stolen Airwaves

I've never been one to say that anti-state types shouldn't vote if they want to. I've even cast a few ballots myself. But maybe there's a slippery slope here after all: Why else would Geov Parrish, hoping to clean up the electoral process, suggest we "ban all political TV and radio ads"? What's next--banning political newspapers?

--Jesse Walker, Reason Magazine, Los Angeles

G.P. responds: Jesse, I know y'all free marketeers have a hard time grasping this, but unlike print publications, the airwaves are a scarce and publicly owned commodity, albeit one generally given away to media megacompanies for free. Most political ads are concentrated in radio and TV rather than print, billboard, etc. Rather than the standard liberal campaign reform prescription of giving candidates free ads and/or air time (which is tantamount to forcing media corporations to give away part of their inventory), or the status quo of jacked up rates for political ads that in turn raise campaign costs and cause Democrats and Republicans alike to do what they're inclined to do anyway (supplicate transnationals on bended knee), let's ban them. The ads certainly don't help the public good; they both raise campaign costs and give well-funded candidates and/or their allies seemingly limitless opportunities, on a public facility, to lie conceptually if not literally about themselves, their records, their intended policies, and their opponents. These candidates aren't just selling a product when they lie; they're subverting democracy, and it's in the public interest to focus their campaigns on forums where their claims can be challenged.

Zero Capitalist Growth

It speaks volumes about the class background and "radicalism" of the ecology movement today that it still trundles out human population growth as the "core" of our ecological crisis. Recycled Malthusianism has long been used as an excuse for simplifying complex social problems into tidy biological equations. This approach concerns itself only with the numbers, not the nature of the ecological crisis.

It ignores the grow-or-die logic of capitalism that dictates the ruthless exploitation of the natural world (including us) regardless of how many people carry it out. Large portions of this country were clearcut by relatively small numbers of people equipped with hand tools. The once vast herds of bison were wiped out when our population barely topped 60 million. It was social factors like capitalism and imperialist expansion that were (and still are) the root causes, while the numbers and technology were merely fuel for the fire.

Ecological solutions like those of Zero Population Growth and "green capitalists" will be allowed to flourish by the powers that be so long as they keep asking the wrong questions and getting the wrong answers. It would do anti-authoritarians well to consider the implications of "population bomb" theories when Third World families are forced--by socially constructed markets and institutions like the IMF--to reproduce more workers to grow ever more cash crops for the First World, instead of meeting their own needs.

Will population concerns then provide the excuse for an arrogant eco-fascism, with even more state control over our lives, not unlike China's reproductive policies? It is a little known fact that Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term "ecology," laid the philosophical groundwork for the Social Darwinism of the Nazis, who so easily melded environmental concerns with racist population reduction policies. The "even bolder steps" towards population reduction that Mr. Kaufman speaks of in his letter can be a very slippery slope.

If the ecology movement is to be a liberatory movement, instead of a dystopic Mad Max war for scarce resources, then we must understand ecological problems as complex social problems, not mere questions of numbers or biology. To treat these issues the same as simple animal vs. resources equations is to obliterate the malleability of human society, ignore complex social realities, and thus ultimately reinforce the world as it currently exists. Our critique must go deeper to include the logic undergirding consumption, to question the inherently unsustainable cancer-like ideology of capitalism, and to the institutions that diminish control over our own lives and force us into destructive systems in order to survive. Developing this broader analysis, rather than a reactionary fixation on population, would be a much more useful step towards creating a truly ecological society.

--Blair Taylor, Association of Northwest Anarchists, Seattle

Tale of Two Pills

Maria Tomchick has mixed up her pills. "Morning after" contraception (also called emergency contraception or EC) is not the same thing as RU-486. Morning-after pills--"Preven" (progestin) and "Plan B" (progestin and estrogen)--are effective only for the first 72 hours after intercourse, the sooner the better. They work by preventing the implantation in the uterus of a fertilized egg. If a fertilized egg has already implanted, morning-after contraception won't affect it. It is, therefore, not an abortifacient and even people who oppose abortion strongly should have no problem with it.

RU-486 (also called "the French abortion pill") is a completely different drug, mifepristone. Used in France and other European countries and China for about a dozen years, it was just approved by the Food and Drug Administration this September. In combination with another drug, misoprostol, RU-486 causes a miscarriage, aka abortion, in early pregnancies (it's approved for pregnancies up to seven weeks since last menstrual period, but studies suggest it is effective for at least another week after that, and possibly two weeks). An RU-486 abortion requires three visits to the doctor and costs about the same as a surgical abortion.

The AMA's proposal was that the morning-after pill be sold over the counter--it's a great idea, but it has nothing to do with abortion.

--Katha Pollitt, New York City

But my main assertion was that abortion is birth control and should be supported as such. In addition, splitting hairs by focusing on the desirability of "contraception" (with its emphasis on preventing conception) at the expense of abortion, which is birth control (with its emphasis on preventing unwanted births), surrenders a portion of our hard-won rights to the anti-choice movement. I'd prefer to not give an inch. I hope you agree.

Holding Court

I believe your headline story in the December 20th issue, "The Dubya Prospects," has an error that make it misleading: "The odds that five Republican justices would just happen to find for their guy, and four Democratic justices would just happen to dissent for their guy..."

But two of the dissenting justices are Republican appointees: Stevens (by Ford) and Souter (by Bush the First). Yes, they're much less right-wing than most of the others, but that doesn't make them Democrats.

I believe that contradicts your effort to portray the decision as a strictly partisan vote.

--John Franco, Seattle

G.P. replies: Mea culpa. I wrote the article immediately after the decision, and the source I'd seen on the topic referred to "five Republican justices and four Democratic justices," naming the majority's appointers but not the dissenters'. By the time the ETS! article hit print I knew better, but it slipped through proofreading. But I don't think it undermines the point that the decision was partisan--quite the opposite. If two Republican-appointed justices were even agreeing (Stevens in quite scathing terms) that the opinion was constructed from thin air, that makes it that much more apparent that the majority ruling contorted existing case law from an ideologically- driven desire to make Bush the next President.