ETS! encourages comments, feedback, tips, corrections, and info! 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.

E-Jerks

ETS!,

If you really want to feel like the self-gratified, middle-class, white person you are, then go to www.thehungersite.com and click on the "donate food" button. Despite how "kooky" it seems, this web site IS sponsored by the UN and its "corporate sponsors" donate three cups of grain to a country in need every time you click on the button. The only draw back ... you can only click on it once a day.

And coming soon ... click and destroy a third-world family with America's newest orbital lasers! (Brought to you by your friends at Boeing and Starbucks ... "Destroying Third-World hunger, one family at a time.)

James Taylor, via e-mail

E-Guns

ETS!,

Excuse me, but:

Gun control is racism. Plain and simple. The "gun control lobby" has as its goal disarming the general populace--it is worth noting that such luminaries as Dianne Feinstein and Ted Kennedy either are armed themselves or have heavily armed bodyguards.

Gun control was originally a KKK objective in the 1920s; today it is heavily promoted by white elites and astroturf blacks in order to "protect" whites from violence. One might note that little or nothing has been done to protect blacks from violence--especially the violence of white police in minority communities.

Gun control makes white elites who live in gated communities feel warm and fuzzy--and does nothing for the poor folks in the inner city or in rural areas where 911 takes several hours to result in service.

But gun control, with its many exceptions for folks like pistol-packing Dianne is a lot cheaper and more comfortable than addressing the issue of racism in U.S. society.

Personally, I don't think that the folks who can get all the heroin they want will have any problem getting all the weapons they want--especially when one notes that in NYC crooked cops were found to be major providers of illegal weapons to criminals. Nor do I intend to be disarmed--my grandfather and great-grandfather resisted a KKK lynch mob at gun point in Eastern Colorado, and I myself have used a firearm to encourage a naked, knife-wielding home invader to leave my bedroom. I have always thought the history of Europe would have been far different had the common people been allowed weapons.

Nadja Adolf, via e-mail

I'm sorry, but if a KKK lynch mob showed up at your house today armed with Tech 9s, your pistol wouldn't stop them for a second.

E-Bummer

ETS!,

Some comments:

1. Although there is much talk of "free market," what goes for that is not actually a free market, but rather an oligopoly. Adam Smith's idea of a free market was specifically formulated in a context of many small producers and consumers, without the ability of anyone to dictate prices or laws. They use the words, but Smith's ideas would actually be embarrassing to them. Not that I like Smith's images or believe in them, but they are different from what we have today.

2. A corporatist state is not one led by corporations as we know them in the U.S. Corporatism European-style is a different animal, based on an older meaning of the term corporation.

3. Although I am not looking for a solution (as one of your readers seems to be), I am looking for a hopeful perspective. I am subscribing to your publication (via e-mail) because I receive information I don't believe I would get anywhere else, but I dislike your style. I like YES! magazine for precisely this reason. For people to rise up and do something that isn't just either a reform or a revolution that only changes who is in power (and there haven't been, to my mind, any other revolutions), they have got to believe some things: that the human beings who take the actions that are oppressive and demeaning, are themselves human beings just like those suffering from their actions, that there are others besides themselves who see reality and want to transform it, and that such transformation is at least in principle possible. Your magazine does not contribute, in my perception, to any of those. I am sad about that.

Miki Kashtan, via e-mail

E-Nice

Dear ETS!,

I just now found your site. You are doing GOOD work. I am excited to learn that you meet at UBC [Univ. Baptist Church]. I was baptized there when I was 12. I quit going when I was 17 and my parents moved out of town. I heard that UBC declared itself a haven for Central American refugees about 15 years ago. It's good that they are still supporting outre progressive work. I have been a peace activist for 35 years now and I'm as angry and anti-capitalist as ever. Keep up the work! Necessary now more than ever.

Roger Ferguson, via e-mail