A few minor kitchen notes: We've still got some of those spiffy 2002 WRL peace calendars, and since it's now, well, 2002, we're marking them down to $10 (basically, with postage thrown in, that's what we paid for them). Get yours while they last! Thanks to everyone who's sent us donations at the end of the year, and all thru 2001, for that matter--it's what makes us possible! One housekeeping note: ETS! offers great, affordable rates for putting ad inserts (for events, groups, small businesses), etc. into our paper. But we've been having some confusion and logistical difficulty over deadlines. For folks interested in putting an insert in ETS!, please remember that it needs to be folded or a half-sized sheet to fit (otherwise it's a lot more work for us), and we need to know it's coming by the Wednesday before publication date. The fine gentleman who coordinates our inserts is Eddie Tews--folks interested in availing themselves should contact him at etews@hotmail.com.--Geov Parrish

Professor Peter Phillips and his students at Sonoma State University recently published a study that statistically demonstrates something we already know, a living wage makes good economic sense for local communities. Not only do living wages make sure that the lowest paid full time workers can actually cover their basic needs and stay off welfare, they are good for local businesses. If the lowest paid workers in any large city made a living wage, they would quickly use their new income to cover their basic needs such as housing, clothing, food and auto purchases, pumping millions of dollars into the community. Opponents of living wage ordinances claim that increased wages will cause inflation and higher unemployment. In actuality, in cities where living wages have been implemented, the actual costs to businesses average less than 3% of their revenue, and increased sales or small price increases easily cover these added wages. The long-term effects get even better after workers have a chance to establish themselves. Tell a friend: a living wage makes sense for everybody, and the poor don't have to stay in poverty.--David Cahn

Hey, how 'bout some good news? 2001 was such an abysmal year that it was easy to miss two wonderful developments in late December. In one, US District Judge William H. Yohn, Jr. stunned all sides in the case by overturning the death sentence given nearly 20 years ago to celebrity death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia's state-sponsored death, in the last year or so, has appeared all but inevitable. Mumia Abu-Jamal may or may not be guilty; his more strident advocates were actually outraged at Yohn's decision because it didn't declare Abu-Jamal innocent and free him on the spot. But we don't know what happened on that fateful Dec. 1981 night, because Mumia clearly never received anything remotely close to a fair trial. This was true, in both the guilt and the sentencing phases, on any number of glaring grounds. The most obvious was the presiding judge: the relentlessly biased and racist Judge Albert Sabo. Out of his endless displays of prejudicial behavior in the trial and sentencing, Yohn only acted on one, but that one was enough--Judge Sabo did not explain to jurors that they need not agree unanimously for any of them to consider mitigating circumstances that would weigh against the death penalty. That's not a technicality; it's the essence of the additional checks and balances at the core of capital cases. Yohn ordered that if Philadelphia did not hold a new sentencing trial within six months, Abu-Jamal would automatically receive a life sentence. It will now take another jury, at least, to kill him. And that is such an unexpected and welcome piece of news that all of Mumia's supporters--and the past advocates who fought for the appeals processes now being gutted--and Mumia himself, an eloquent "Voice for the Voiceless" even while living in the most desolate circumstances imaginable--should take a bow, and celebrate. --GP

Here's another reason to celebrate--like the slasher finally killed for the third and last time at the end of a bad horror movie, Dept. of Energy head Spencer Abraham decided once and for all last month that Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility will not resume nuclear production. The hare-brained FFTF plan (sorry, rabbits) was supposed to be dead for the last time a year ago, when outgoing Clinton DOE secretary Bill Richardson shot down a private tritium medical isotope scheme after previous plans to produce tritium for weapons and plutonium for space were shot down. Now, about the $35 million or so per year, every year, that's been diverted (illegally) from already-underfunded Hanford clean-up programs to keep the FFTF on "hot standby" for tritium production ... the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is still an unthinkably contaminated mess, and the DOE, EPA, and state Dept. of Ecology (under Gov. Gary Locke's "leadership" are all responsible for violating their own laws and not even trying to get appropriations for a fraction of the money needed to fix this environmental catastrophe.--GP

A study released last month by the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs admits, for the first time, a link between illness and military service in the Gulf War. The epidemiological study, conducted over the past 18 months, found that Army and Air Force veterans of the Gulf War were over twice as likely as other veterans to suffer from the rare, fatal disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS--Lou Gehrig's disease. Even more tellingly, almost all Gulf War vets with the disease were young--and ALS usually strikes older people. The announcement came as euphoric news to veterans' groups who have been battling for years to get the Pentagon to acknowledge any kind of a link between Gulf War service and illness. Of the 700,000 Americans who fought in that war, over 100,000 have reported a range of health problems known collectively as Gulf War Syndrome; in the decade since the term was coined, the Pentagon has been in steady denial mode.

Meanwhile, Congress has been considering bioterror legislation that would provide big drug companies with relief from antitrust legislation, so that companies can work together to develop and market vaccines against anthrax, smallpox, and other dangers; the lifting of FDA requirements for safe manufacturing and product testing in a time of emergency; and a guarantee that the government will cover any exposure to lawsuits arising from harm caused by such vaccines. Before encouraging drug companies to cut safety corners, and absolving them of any liability for the consequences, Congresspeople just might want to stop by a VA hospital and ask around as to the potential impact of that sort of corporate largesse. --GP

Why has George Bush decided now to trash the ABM treaty? Well, simply put, he no longer needs Putin's help for the Afghan war. Absent that imperative, the Bush Administration is back to its usual habits of telling the rest of the world to go take a flying fucking leap at the moon. I wrote at some length in a July cover story in In These Times ("The Pentagon's Trojan Horse," still posted at www.inthesetimes.com) about the truly terrifying global conquest agenda behind ditching the ABM--the article is still as pertinent as ever, listing the alarming variety of global dominance kill toys envisioned by post-ABM Pentagon planners. Ditching the ABM has nothing to do with defense and very little to do with "National Missile Defense" or the actual defense of the US mainland; among other things, forward-deployed "Theater Missile Defense" systems, enjoying broad bipartisan support and much further along in development than NMD, are supposed to be smaller, regional systems used to protect US bases and allies, but without the ABM they can be "bundled" as a coordinated, global grid of short-range, first-strike weapons. Of course, countless other countries will feel free to develop weapons of mass destruction with the world's arms control structure gone, but the Strangeloves in DC and Arlington seem to think that the US can become so powerful that nobody else's weapons will matter. Based on technologies that don't work, are obscenely expensive, and are predicated on the notion of killing innocent civilians. Bush's abandonment of the ABM is a truly terrifying move that, as with Bush's attacks on Afghan civilians, make people in the US (and around the world) far less safe--a pure and straight violation of the oath Bush took upon his fraudulent ascension to the White House. --G.P.

The anthrax media coverage has largely died down, but some of the most important information about the anthrax scare is only now coming to light. On the Saturday before Christmas, an AP wire story broke the news that security at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick is so lax that it's harder to take stuff into the complex than smuggle stuff out. Former army employees emphasized the ease with which researchers could walk out with a petri dish or just smear a few samples on their clothing for later retrieval. One researcher claims that USAMRIID never audited the contents of his lab once in the 11 years that he worked there. Said Mark Wheelis, a University of California microbiologist: "No matter what you do, there is not any way you can prevent a determined, skillful microbiologist from stealing traces of a microbial culture that he is working with, because it takes so few microbes to start a culture."

The national media is still focused on foreign sources for anthrax and other biological weapons. In fact, the "weaponized" anthrax used in the attacks genetically resembles US army stocks. Granted, it's difficult to turn the liquid form of anthrax used in USAMRIID labs into a weaponized powder form, which is why experts believe it was made in a government lab. This brings up the nasty question of the existence of US government biological weapons programs. Our government has always officially claimed that it performs research on infectious diseases in order to develop ways to protect US soldiers from biological agents, but doesn't make such weapons itself. But the anthrax investigation has revealed that the US Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah has recently been making finely-milled weapons-grade anthrax, some of it of the same strain as found in the anthrax letters. By adding two and two together, we find that a biological weapon made by the US government is being used against the US public. It's a fine line between "defense" and "offense," and often all it takes to cross the line is one disgruntled employee.--Maria Tomchick

Here at ETS!, we come across far more quotes than can possibly be used in our "Quote of the Week" box. Here are a few that we didn't have room for this time, but tell their own stories without need for further comment:

"The collapse of the Taliban was expected to ease the food crisis. But instead, a deadly combination of lawlessness among Northern Alliance factions and closed borders by neighboring states is continuing to block life-saving aid from reaching millions of destitute civilians."--Sarah Zaidi, who has just returned from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, is research director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights.

"Many Afghans urge the immediate deployment of UN peacekeepers, but the US government is still hindering such attempts."--Deborah James, a member of Global Exchange's women's delegation to Afghanistan.

"Military tribunals are not legitimate. What we should be building is an International Criminal Court, but the US government has blocked creating the legal structures necessary to ensuring a safer and more just world ... It is horrifying that the US worked to prevent the surrender of Taliban forces; indeed, that could be criminal."--Michael Ratner, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the sixth, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the second, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the first amendment and I can't say anything at all." --E-mail tagline of unknown origin.