It Took Me Two Hours to Get My Hands on an AK-47. Welcome to America
Wednesday, 07 October 2015 13:46
Rodriguez writes: "Until we make it harder for everyone to get guns, it looks like mommies and daddies will instead consider buying their little girls and boys backpacks with bulletproof plates inside, forcing them to carry the weight on their shoulders of our collective inaction as a nation."
AK-47 with ammunition. (photo: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty)
It Took Me Two Hours to Get My Hands on an AK-47. Welcome to America
By Eric Rodriguez, Guardian UK
07 October 15
I wondered if people planning mass shootings found it just as easy to get their hands on illegal weapons on the black market
t’s not hard to get your hands on illegal guns and rifles in America. It took me about two hours. I called a guy from the old neighborhood in LA, said something about a “piece”, and, hours later, I was staring at an AK-47 and an illegally modified AR-15, which were sitting on a kitchen table. Welcome to America.
Admittedly, he was surprised at my interest in being strapped since it’s been a good minute since I was about the life, but when I explained I was simply curious to see how long it’d take for me to get a gat, he agreed to the idea. He had some handguns, too, he said, although I didn’t see ‘em. I took his word for it after seeing the AK-47 and AR-15, because those weapons leave an impression.
Some of the weapons were smuggled in, while others were bought on the up and up – waiting period and all. Moving them is not his thing; he collects, and, on occasion, heads out to the desert with others to shoot. If I needed something, we could talk to another homie and with a few hundred dollars out of pocket, I’d be set. I passed on the opportunity.
I didn’t expect my search to be so successful – especially since the black market usually requires some know-how, something I don’t have much of these days, since, well, I’ve done a complete 180, and I rarely spend anytime even associating with people running afoul of the law. But it was shockingly easy.
Looking at these highly dangerous weapons, I felt deeply disturbed – despite being a veteran and having served in Iraq. There’s something about seeing these weapons here in the US and not in a combat zone; it makes it all too unsettling, as though they’re out of place with the idea I have of a peaceful America in my mind.
I found it hard not to wonder if people planning mass shootings found it just as easy to get their hands on dangerous and illegal weapons as I did. It seems so, unfortunately.
When I was growing up, you lived by the gun and died by the gun. You respected the steel. The sounds of drive-bys would keep me up at night. My Tío Memo and Tío Beto were killed by guns in East LA in the late 1990s. Our aunt’s home in City Terrace was shot at while everyone was sitting outside eating and drinking, celebrating life. And, then, in Fresno, right there off of Ninth Street near the McKenzie Market, tough boys in their Nike Cortez shoes who were “slanging shit” on the block killed a kid for wearing the wrong color or something. On another occasion, after a shooting, my sister Jenny and I saw a body on the floor riddled with bullets on our way home from church.
The first time I saw a gun up close I was a kid – about 12 years old. I remember feeling intimidated by the heavy handgun and its shiny exterior. It was in this purple velvet Crown Royal bag and belonged to a teacher’s assistant at the elementary school, who showed it to me one morning before school in his car, parked near the front of the main building. The next time I saw a gun was when them tough boys, cousins of a childhood friend, rushed another kid because he had stepped to me a day earlier for talking to his sister. The oldest of the cousins walked down the block with a small piece to his side, with little regard for who saw what. People don’t talk on the block. He then told the kid that, the next time he stepped to me, he’d have to answer to him (and his gun). I never heard from the kid or his sister again.
Still, despite the gun violence I lived through, I go shooting at the range to this day. Usually, with a Glock 45 and a Beretta 9. I like guns, especially the physics of ballistics, something I learned about in the military. I also respect the Second Amendment. What concerns me is how easy it is for people who are dangerous to get their hands on weapons.
My homie with the AK-47 told me that mass shooters don’t go out of their way to find a shady character like him to buy from; they don’t have to. He claimed their arms dealers get those weapons legally, along with some baby formula and peanut butter, depending on where they live in the US. Then they have a bad day, maybe a bad week, and decide everyone else is responsible for it. He asked me: “When was the last time a brown or black kid from the hood was shooting up schools like the white kids?” I didn’t say a word – but I remembered the drive-bys of my childhood, and how differently politicians and the media treated them.
Mass shootings in schools and other public places targeting middle class, sometimes mostly white, America are becoming so widely accepted as a normal way of life people have the audacity to say add more guns. But imagine this being said if we were talking about gang violence in some inner city neighborhood in Los Angeles. It just wouldn’t happen.
Having grown up in the hood, I know the government can take away guns if they want to. I’ve seen it happen. When they crack down on gang violence, they bust down some doors, make arrests, even take some guns regardless of whether they were obtained legally – never mind the Second Amendment. But America seems concerned with taking guns away from some people more than others. This disparity makes no sense.
Guns are just as dangerous in the hands of gang-bangers as in the hands of a young man with mental health issues. It’s time that our politicians acknowledge that it’s way too easy to get guns – legal and illegal – in this country. No one should be able to get an AK-47 through a few phone calls – including me.
Until we make it harder for everyone to get guns, it looks like mommies and daddies will instead consider buying their little girls and boys backpacks with bulletproof plates inside, forcing them to carry the weight on their shoulders of our collective inaction as a nation.
We Should Demand Prison-Free Products as Adamantly as Cage-Free Eggs
Wednesday, 07 October 2015 13:40
Benns writes: "Corporations like Whole Foods need to be held accountable for the human rights abuses facilitated and supported within their supply chains. In the US market of prison labor, however, consumers should be aware of who extracts the lion's share of value from prison labor: federal and state governments."
Mandatory labor is still a reality across US prisons. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
We Should Demand Prison-Free Products as Adamantly as Cage-Free Eggs
By Whitney Benns, Guardian UK
07 October 15
Whole Foods came under fire for using prison workers in their supply chain. But the government has most to answer for when it comes to such practices
or conscious shoppers at Whole Foods, it was a nightmare to learn that the company had US prison labor in its supply chain. After more than a year of negative publicity culminating in protests outside of its stores in Houston, Texas, Whole Foods announced last week that it will stop sourcing foods that are made with prison labor. Happy ending? Not so fast.
Corporations like Whole Foods need to be held accountable for the human rights abuses facilitated and supported within their supply chains. In the US market of prison labor, however, consumers should be aware of who extracts the lion’s share of value from prison labor: federal and state governments.
The model of prison labor highlighted in the Whole Foods story involves a government-owned, corrections-operated organization partnering with for profit businesses in the production of a product or service. Corporations and industries involved in this kind of supply chain are many, and include the automotive industry, garments and as this story demonstrates, grocery products – even those of the “artisanal” variety.
However, the far more common versions of prison labor come in the form of in-house manufacturing, where the products or materials manufactured by incarcerated workers are sold to other government entities (such as schools, government offices, the military) or “big house” work, where prisoners are put to work in jobs that support the upkeep of the prison, such as running the kitchens, doing building maintenance or janitorial work.
Consider that, in the United States this labor can legally be completely involuntary and uncompensated. Refusal to work can and does come with harsh punishment. And wages, if paid at all, are far below minimum wage for the same jobs held by workers on the outside.
Whole foods stated that it will remove the products from its shelves that were made with prison labor by April 2016. The corporation made clear that their doing so is in response to consumers who have vocalized their discomfort with the complicity in worker exploitation that purchasing these products, and shopping in a store that sells them, represents.
But would-be Whole Foods shoppers – and any other grocery store patrons – should appreciate that, whether or not they are buying Haystack’s cheese made from dairy milked by Colorado prisoners, they are likely still consuming prison labor.
If you work in a government office, there is a good chance that your filing cabinet was produced with prison labor. If you have a child in school, they could be sitting at a desk made by incarcerated workers. And if you put on a government uniform, like for the police or military, wear a government-issued holster or are handling government-issued weaponry, that equipment might have been “made in the USA” by incarcerated labor. In the Unites States, we are all consumers and constituents of the government entities that have the biggest market share in the prison labor marketplace.
It makes perfect sense to be uncomfortable with a local grocery store engaging in a shadowy, out-of-sight exploitative practice seemingly contrary to their branding. But this consciousness should not stop at the cheese aisle.
Just as we are consumers of groceries, we are consumers of social policy as constituents. The institutions that make American prison labor possible, in the form it takes today, do so on behalf of its constituent-consumers, the American public. Our demands to “cease and desist” exploitative labor practices in prisons should apply at least equally to state and federal governments.
Whole Foods has promised to stop direct-sourcing from prison labor reliant vendors. Fine. We have the power to do more to protect human dignity.
To start, we can demand of our legislatures that all prison labor programs be based on voluntary participation. Meaning no disciplinary actions, lost good time or solitary confinement for refusing to work.
We can also insist that the terms of employment set by correctional agencies be fair. If prisoners are going to be working jobs similar to those on the outside, they should be protected by the same laws that protect workers on the outside, including wage and hour protections.
These are just a couple of the steps that we should begin taking if we are serious about building a society that has not only cage-free dinner tables but also cage-free industry.
Pope Francis Is Right, Climate Change Is a Moral Imperative
Wednesday, 07 October 2015 13:34
Redford writes: "Sometimes you need a friend to tell you the truth. It took someone from outside the U.S. to come and remind us who we are - and who we are supposed to be."
Robert Redford. (photo: Getty)
Pope Francis Is Right, Climate Change Is a Moral Imperative
By Robert Redford, EcoWatch
07 October 15
ope Francis’ address to Congress will go down in history as a day when the needle finally moved on climate change. The pontiff’s timely message of more dialogue and less discord, respect for life in all of its stages, and a call to protect our common home was irrepressible and impossible to ignore. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you the truth. It took someone from outside the U.S. to come and remind us who we are—nd who we are supposed to be.
The choice has never been clearer. If we carry on polluting our planet with dirty energy, our children will pay the greatest price. Filthy air is already killing hundreds of thousands every year. Flooding, drought, wildfires and hurricanes—all you have to do is open your eyes to see the damage being done, and it’s going to get worse.
Robert Redford. (photo: EcoWatch)
We can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse for inaction. The jury is no longer out—climate change is real. It is not just a threat for the future, but happening here and now. And as Pope Francis so eloquently points out, climate change is a moral imperative that transcends politics.
My sense of urgency is growing, but so is hope for the future. The clean energy revolution is taking off, creating a healthier future for all our families. California is on the front line of drought and wildfires, but it’s also taking the lead in the race toward 100 percent renewable energy. The mayors of San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose are well on the way to this goal, and Los Angeles could soon join them. Some of the world’s largest companies—Google, Apple and Facebook among them—are all committed to going 100 percent clean, investing billions every year to make this future a reality.
Fifty-five countries around the world already get most of their power from renewables. Villages across India and Africa are being lit up by clean energy. The business case is as strong as the moral argument, with the pope himself saying that fossil fuels need to be replaced “without delay.” But while the dirty establishment still sings its siren song, bold leadership is needed to seize these opportunities.
This is the call of our generation. The Global Goals—signed at the United Nations last week – are a new universal declaration of rights for a world freed from the ravages of poverty, inequality and climate change. For the first time ever, they commit to the goal of “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.”
Next in December, world leaders will meet in Paris to hash out a global treaty to prevent runaway climate change. More than fifty countries that are together responsible for the majority of global emissions have already submitted plans, and consensus is building around a goal to mark the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.
Citizens must make our voices heard—without public pressure, politicians can fall short. The Global Goals campaign is working to tell everyone about this vision of a new development path, and to help the world’s seven billion people to hold our leaders accountable.
Decades ago, I made a commitment to myself to raise whatever small voice I had to make a change. Today we can join our voices around the world like never before and set the agenda for presidents and prime ministers.
But the most important action starts close to home. Most of us today live in cities, which account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions, and are found mostly in vulnerable and coastal areas. Cities like Los Angeles, Paris and London can lead the way on climate change, and cities like Sydney, Stockholm and Bogota are already on the road to 100 percent clean energy.
Groups such as the Compact of Mayors are doing impressive work on everything from electric buses to eco-roofs and LED streetlights, reaping savings for their budgets and their inhabitants.
So here’s my ask of you. Please join me by using your own voice. Search out the Global Goals and share them with your friends and leaders. Support the transition to clean energy in your own community. Help move the needle and hold your leaders—from mayors to ministers—accountable. This is our only planet, our only source of life. If we join together, we can become who we are truly supposed to be.
FOCUS: The CIA Keeps (Accidentally) Legitimizing JFK Conspiracy Theories
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Wednesday, 07 October 2015 12:09
Pierce writes: "It should be no surprise that, after President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the national security establishment's first objective was not to tell the truth to the American people about how their president was snuffed in broad daylight. It was to concoct fictions and diversions, most devoted to bureaucratic ass-covering."
President John F. Kennedy. (photo: Getty/AFP)
The CIA Keeps (Accidentally) Legitimizing JFK Conspiracy Theories
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
07 October 15
Now we learn that the CIA chief at the time did all he could to bury "incendiary" information.
t is somewhat lost to history what a writhing ball of snakes the national security establishment was during the three years of John F. Kennedy's presidency, especially after the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion and, subsequently, Kennedy's rejection of that establishment's more bellicose proposals during the Cuban Missile Crisis. These were the days of Operation Northwoods, a proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to manufacture a casus belli that would have so inflamed American public opinion as to make an invasion of Cuba inevitable. One of the possibilities suggested in the memo was blowing up John Glenn on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. The memo is stored in the archives of the Kennedy Library in Boston. I've held it in my hand. It is an altogether remarkable government document, and it made it all the way up the policy chain to the Secretary of Defense before Robert McNamara turned it off. That's what it was like back in those days.
(Which is not to say the Kennedy brothers didn't contribute to the atmosphere in their own way, with their off-the-books attempts to rid the world of Fidel Castro.)
So it should be no surprise that, after the president was murdered in Dallas, the national security establishment's first objective was not to tell the truth to the American people about how their president was snuffed in broad daylight. It was to concoct fictions and diversions, most devoted to bureaucratic ass-covering. This brings us to Philip Shenon's report today in the magazine version of Tiger Beat On The Potomac, in which Shenon tells us of how John McCone, who was put in charge of the CIA after Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, did all he could to bury "incendiary" information where the bumbling Warren Commission couldn't find it.?
But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions. Half a century after JFK's death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA's top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were "complicit" in keeping "incendiary" information from the Warren Commission. According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a "benign cover-up" at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on "what the Agency believed at the time was the 'best truth'—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy." The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.
?While I have neither the time nor the patience to go down America's deepest, darkest, and most mystical rabbit hole, I should note that I always thought this would be the fallback story if the Warren Commission's fabulism ever truly fell apart – that Castro had ordered a retaliatory strike on the president and that the unsung heroes of our intelligence agencies kept the lid on it so as to prevent an overwhelming public outcry in favor of invading the island. In other words, the same complex network of operators and interests who wanted to blow up Glenn on the launching pad, when presented with an actual casus belli, chose instead to deceive the American people in the interest of hemispheric peace. OK.
(Again, it should be noted that Robert Kennedy believed, and was haunted by, the notion that his brother's murder was blowback from the administration's attempts to kill Castro.)
What is made plain (again) by this latest revelation is that the Warren Commission's investigation was next to worthless except as an exercise in pacification through propaganda. First of all, in one of the great conflicts of interest in American history, Dulles was on the commission. Almost every important witness from inside the government either lied to investigators, or shaded the truth so deeply that it began to grow mushrooms. It's been 40 years now since the plots against Castro were revealed and, when they were, the surviving commission staffers went up the wall at having been denied this information at the time they were working the case. Comes now the CIA itself, to explain that McCone was substantially less than forthcoming with relevant information.
It's increasingly difficult to accept the notion that so flawed an investigation, honeycombed by people with agendas contrary to its stated purpose, hobbled by lying witnesses, and denied access to relevant documents and information that might have related to the motive behind the crime, somehow stumbled into the correct conclusion anyway. It's also hard to believe that, in case it all came apart suddenly, those same people with those same agendas didn't have a backup plan that covered their asses and made them look wise and noble. As I've often said, I'm an agnostic on who shot from where and why. (If you want to convince me it was Oswald, alone, then you've got to give me a believable motive, which nobody ever has.) We may never know the truth about the mechanics of the murder. But we do know there was a cover-up, and that we never were told the whole truth about the events surrounding the murder of a president. That is a crime against history that remains unsolved.
FOCUS: How the Republicans Are Rehabbing Hillary Clinton's Image
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
Wednesday, 07 October 2015 10:19
Rich writes: "The issue is not going to be what happened at Benghazi but Congress's waste of taxpayers' money and time on a wild-goose chase that sullies and insults the memories of the Americans who were slaughtered there. Clinton is already playing the moral-outrage card brilliantly in public statements and in an ad in wide circulation on the web."
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
How the Republicans Are Rehabbing Hillary Clinton's Image
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
07 October 15
omorrow marks the one-month anniversary of Hillary Clinton's much-publicized plan to appear more personable, which so far has culminated with her appearance on SNL last weekend. What's worked best for her, and what's been most awkward so far?
What’s working best for Clinton is the Republicans. House-speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy’s statement that his party was pursuing its endless Benghazi investigation to bring down her poll numbers was manna from heaven for the Clinton campaign. The September 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi has never gained any real traction as a partisan political issue — just ask Mitt Romney, who tried to milk it in the stretch of his ill-fated campaign. But McCarthy’s truthful admission has flipped the question entirely: Now the issue is not going to be what happened at Benghazi but Congress’s waste of taxpayers’ money and time on a wild-goose chase that sullies and insults the memories of the Americans who were slaughtered there. Clinton is already playing the moral-outrage card brilliantly in public statements and in an ad in wide circulation on the web. Her scheduled October 22 appearance before the Benghazi committee — once thought to be a D-Day for Trey Gowdy and his fellow House inquisitors — looms as a self-inflicted Waterloo for them instead.
Clinton’s SNL appearance, hitting just the right note of cheerful self-mockery, was winning. But her subsequent attempts to show humor and spontaneity and heart (all words used by her own campaign team to describe the latest re-branding of her candidacy) will not have the benefit of SNL writers, or cue cards, or Darrell Hammond, whose brief cameo as Bill provided the biggest laugh in the sketch. And should Joe Biden get into the race, as Washington increasingly seems to believe, he’ll have the advantage on humor and spontaneity in the Democratic race. Or he will unless Bernie Sanders reveals heretofore hidden comic chops when he appears on Ellen DeGeneres’s show next week.
Clinton has also laid out a plan for gun reform, the first real proposal from a presidential candidate in the wake of last week's Oregon shooting. Do you think there's enough momentum for things to change?
Clearly not. President Obama, in full-throated, liberated lame-duck mode, spoke for many when he expressed his frustration, even anger, about the unwillingness of America to face up to, let alone curb, its gun epidemic. Until it does, neither Clinton nor any other single politician can make a significant difference. Nor can the usual round of op-eds (which increasingly read like boilerplate, no matter how much the volume of the outrage is pumped up), or a heartfelt monologue by Stephen Colbert, or all the money poured into gun-control campaigns (including in Oregon) by Michael Bloomberg. It’s good to see Clinton step up her rhetoric after she waffled on gun issues in her last presidential campaign. (In 2008, she took to bragging about her own childhood experiences as a suburban Annie Oakley after Obama was caught on video decrying Americans who “cling to guns or religion.”) And we must hope that the executive orders she proposes for a putative Clinton presidency could make some difference on the margins. But Republicans and red-state Democrats remain immovable on gun control. When Jeb Bush dismissed the latest massacre as “stuff happens” — all too revealingly, the same phrase his brother’s secretary of Defense used to trivialize the lethal Iraq insurgency in 2003 — it revealed that gun-control measures aren’t on the table for serious discussion even among supposedly more moderate Establishment Republicans. Indeed, George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote yesterday that gun reforms are doomed in part because “Obama doesn’t know how to work with Congress” — as if a single Republican leader in either the Senate or the House would work with any president on any challenge to the theoretical sanctity of the Second Amendment.
With his Benghazi gaffe, Kevin McCarthy opened the door for competitors also hoping to be the next House speaker, and Planned Parenthood attack dog Jason Chaffetz has jumped in. What should we expect from the next leader of the House?
Chaos! Even the process of selecting the new leadership team has already broken down. The votes that the Republican caucus had scheduled for Thursday have been postponed until October 29. This timing could not be more perfect for the tea-party hardliners who have been celebrating John Boehner’s departure and angling for leverage to precipitate a government shutdown. October 29 is the same day that the government’s transportation authority expires; November 5 is the drop-dead date by which the government’s debt ceiling must be raised to avoid defaulting on its fiscal obligations. By then Boehner will be gone, but the party’s civil war will be intact, no matter who is his successor — assuming there can even be an agreement on who the successor is.
Not that the identity of the speaker much matters in the big picture, but few believe that McCarthy is seriously threatened by Chaffetz, whose humiliating deployment of a fictitious graph in his interrogation of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards suggests that he lacks the basic competence to run his own congressional office. The leadership ranks in the House are so barren that the conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg has seriously proposed that Republicans draft Newt Gingrich to return as speaker instead. Or, if that gambit fails, the GOP can turn to another former speaker, Denny Hastert, a onetime wrestling coach who at the very least can put a chokehold on recalcitrant members. True, there is that little matter of the $3.5 million in hush money that Hastert allegedly paid to silence a former student’s sexual-abuse allegations. But the good news, reported by TheWall Street Journal last week, is that “a possible plea agreement” is in the works, potentially freeing Hastert for further public service at his party’s time of need. Surely he’d be no worse than the presumed new House majority leader, Steve Scalise, the Louisiana congressman whose résumé includes having addressed a white-supremacist organization founded by David Duke, formerly of the Ku Klux Klan.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
t’s not hard to get your hands on illegal guns and rifles in America. It took me about two hours. I called a guy from the old neighborhood in LA, said something about a “piece”, and, hours later, I was staring at an AK-47 and an illegally modified AR-15, which were sitting on a kitchen table. Welcome to America.
or conscious shoppers at Whole Foods, it was a nightmare to learn that the company had US prison labor in its supply chain. After more than a year of negative publicity culminating in protests outside of its stores in Houston, Texas, Whole Foods announced last week that it will stop sourcing foods that are made with prison labor. Happy ending? Not so fast.
ope Francis’ address to Congress will go down in history as a day when the needle finally moved on climate change. The pontiff’s timely message of more dialogue and less discord, respect for life in all of its stages, and a call to protect our common home was irrepressible and impossible to ignore. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you the truth. It took someone from outside the U.S. to come and remind us who we are—nd who we are supposed to be.
omorrow marks the one-month anniversary of Hillary Clinton's much-publicized 
