ETS! encourages comments, feedback, tips, corrections, and info! No poetry, please. Please keep them as concise as possible so we can print as many different voices as possible: ETS!, P.O. Box 85541, Seattle WA 98145, or e-mail ets@scn.org.

Wow

Brothers & Sisters,

Thank you so much for existing and publishing this wonderful journal. We must all persevere and do whatever we each can do in order to reach the goal of a once more peaceful and beautiful world. I look forward to reading more of your work in the future as well as visiting your city in the near future (hopefully in April) as I've heard it's much like the one I've lived my entire in, Austin, Texas.

Peace and Love, Mark J. Lester, Austin TX

Lynch the CEOs!

Dear ETS!,

Would you be interested in an opinion column touting the idea of CAPITAL PUNISHMENT FOR WHITE COLLAR CRIME. The article has run in a couple of papers (SF Bay Guardian, Shelton-Mason Co. Journal) in slightly different forms. The underlying argument is that the death penalty only works on perps who have something to lose (status, property, family) and can be deterred, and that if retribution is the object, white collar crimes earn far high death counts (AH Robins' Dalkon Shield killed more women per year than all armed robberies combined).

I'm thinking about working up a WA state initiative to promote the idea, which might be an attempt merely to tweak the 3-strikes law to remove a number of crimes from the existing list and add an equal number of white collar crimes in their stead. Getting some ink would let me see if there's any mojo around the idea, or if it's merely a rational slam-dunk w/no wide base of support.

--Jeff Angus, Seattle

G.P. replies: Here's yer idea. There are, however, some obvious flaws to your "rational slam-dunk": 1) High-level white collar crimes are virtually never prosecuted; if prosecuted, chances that, because of defendants' political influence and access to the very best in lawyerdom (sic), there will be any meaningful conviction or consequence (even the ones now on the books) are similarly negligible. Unless that changes, your proposed laws would have no effect--except, perhaps, as a tool for larger companies to harass smaller ones. 2) The death penalty is overwhelmingly applied in the U.S. against the poor and non-white. That, again, is not how the laws are written--it's how they work. Rich execs are quite safe under such a system. 3) You've bought into one of the biggest of all tough-on-crime myths: that capital punishment or three strikes laws act as deterrents. They don't. Period. They especially wouldn't for a class of criminals who heretofore have acted with near-total impunity. 4) Corporations have already, in civil suits and criminal trials, started fingering middle- management employees so as to avoid higher-level corporate culpability. They then hire replacements to do the same shit. How'd you like to die for your company? 5) I don't trust any government, anywhere, to decide who lives or dies. Do you?