Welcome to our tenth anniversary issue! Inside you'll find all sorts of stuff from the past ten years. Some of it you'll remember, some you'd rather forget, some, well, we just had to laugh, right?

Eat the State! is ten years old this week, but the idea first took form even earlier, in September 1994. I was seriously ill, awaiting a hoped-for double organ transplant, and on leave from an activist job. I doodled around with an idea for a weekly political newsletter that would have the kind of valuable information often found in activist groups' publications, but be more topical, livelier, local, more community-based, and more widely distributed. I wanted it to be free, non-sectarian, and accessible to people who didn't live and breathe politics. (That's why we started, and have stayed, in print rather than on the web as our primary focus). The mockup's lead story was on Clinton's threats that week to invade Haiti to displace the thugs the US had helped install three years previously.

It looked great, but I was sick and had no way to afford to print and distribute it. And so the idea sat for two years, while I got and began recovering from the transplants, did occasional mockups, and talked the idea up.

The breakthroughs came in the form of two very generous offers of in-kind donations from local activists. Lance Scott, who published the invaluable Community Catalyst from 1990-93, offered his professional layout services at a deep, ongoing discount. (It continues to this day--Lance has only missed two issues in ETS!'s history, fewer than any other person, and is an invaluable core collective member.) And John Reese, who leased a photocopier for his engineering consulting business, not only offered to let ETS! photocopy its issues at cost, but offered to pay for half of the actual costs himself.

On Tuesday, Sept. 10, 1996, 500 or so photocopied 4-page issues of Eat the State! (photocopied double-sided on 11" x 17" recycled paper, hand-folded by John and me) were distributed free around Seattle. The commentaries flowed as one article, all written by me, on US bombing of Iraq, allegations of the CIA's funneling of crack into poor black neighborhoods, and protests against Seattle visits by "Billybob Clintondole." And, of course, the "Why Eat the State!?" tract and the first appearance of our famous mission statement (see box--the mission statement's on our t-shirt, too...) and an editorial box statement that is essentially unchanged today.

The following Saturday, Sept. 14, was my first 30-minute Saturday morning interview segment on KCMU's "Mind Over Matters," hosted by Mike McCormick. He and I have been on the air, at the same time, almost every week since. Maria Tomchick joined us for several years, and the station is now KEXP, but the program, Saturday mornings at 8:30, is essentially the same.

A week later, issue #2 came out. An early fan, Ben Attias of Northridge, Calif., designed a web site for us and started coding and posting each issue. And ETS! was off and running.

There have been a number of other notable events along the way. The response to ETS! was immediate and phenomenal. Soon we were up to 1,000 copies weekly, and in six months, we went to eight pages from four. (The weekly photocopy/fold/collate work parties were alternately tedious and a blast!) Also by then, we started incorporating other writers--for the first six months, I wrote all of the copy. By June, one of ETS!'s newer volunteers, someone none of us knew named Maria Tomchick, had agreed to help edit. She continued to edit, and write, phenomenally well for eight years. Other early core members are still helping out, too, especially Valerie Rose, Eddie Tews, and our longtime webmaster, Peter Sutherland (now living in San Francisco). You don't see their names in print much, but they're every bit as important to ETS!'s success. Distributors like Bruce Hart (West Seattle) have been at it for years, too, without much in the way of public awareness of the invaluable role they play. It's a group effort.

In late March 1997, on the strength of ETS!, I started writing a weekly political column for The Stranger, which has subsequently led to the Seattle Weekly and, more recently, regular gigs with (briefly) Mother Jones, and later Working Assets, In These Times, and Alternet, plus a syndicated commentary produced at KBCS--phenomenal venues for activist-based political opinion, all made possible by ETS!.

The expansions of our early years were made possible, in part, by a very generous large donation early on; printing that many pages and copies wasn't sustainable without more income, though, and so in June 1998 we went to eight pages of newsprint--a bigger format, slightly more expensive, but also one that made local advertising possible. That helped, but eventually, finances and the desire to get some of our weekends back caused us to "temporarily" pull back to every other week publication in summer 1999.

Eight years later, we've put out about 325 issues in ten years. Troy Skeels added on as co-editor for a few years (he now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico); Jeff Stevens and Tarah Kent stepped into that role a year ago. ETS! has been and remains a financially tenuous outfit--no staff, no real office, horrible cash flow. But most of us who help out (perhaps 30, including all the distributors) have stories of being accosted by people who love ETS!, who are grateful we're here, who think what we're doing is important and essential. It would be great, of course, if ETS! could turn those good vibes into cash to print more papers. But it helps, a lot, to know that plenty of people like what we do; that, more than anything, gives us faith that despite the lack of obvious resources, we'll find a way to keep going for a long time.

So far as we've ever been able to tell, ETS! is a project unique in the US--certainly so, in terms of our remarkable longevity. As always, these days we're just scraping by; we just made it through the generally financially dry months of summer (and will start a new fund drive, our first of the year, next issue---but if you wanna give now, go to www.eatthestate.org, or mail a check or money order for a donation and/or subscription order to PO Box 85541, Seattle WA 98145). We've gotten some interest for our vacant co-editor position, but there's still time to put your name in, and we still need distributors to cover a number of routes we lost over the summer: Capitol Hill, Downtown/Belltown, Ballard, Fremont, Queen Anne. Heck, we always need volunteers, of any kind. Join in!

For our persistence and longevity, you can blame Lance, John, and me, or you can blame the hundreds of other volunteers who've helped along the way (see box). Or blame the advertisers, subscribers, or donors. Or readers. Heck, blame all of us. It's truly a community project; thanks to all of you (us) for making ETS! possible!!!