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FOCUS: Scott Galindez, Peace Activist, Teacher, Dead at 52 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 October 2017 10:55 |
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Ash writes: "On Tuesday, September 26, Scott Galindez, longtime peace activist and firebrand progressive died at the Hospice of North Iowa. Scott succumbed to complications stemming from diabetes."
Scott Galindez speaking to a group of activists in Philadelphia during the 2016 Democratic National Convention. (video image: PRTV)
Scott Galindez, Peace Activist, Teacher, Dead at 52
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
04 October 17
 n Tuesday, September 26, Scott Galindez, longtime peace activist and firebrand progressive died at the Hospice of North Iowa. Scott succumbed to complications stemming from diabetes.
Scott foretold his own passing in a heart-wrenching editorial published on Reader Supported News three days prior to his death, titled “The Most Important Legislation of My Lifetime.”
In the end, Scott made a decision on his own terms to forgo further dialysis treatments. He passed 10 days later.
Scott was born July 6, 1965, near Utica, New York. He graduated from Clinton Central High School in Clinton, New York, and enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he was stationed in Hawaii. After military service he attended Syracuse University, graduating in 1989 with a degree in Communications and Political Science.
Scott was first drawn to political action at Syracuse. He was at that point a Reagan supporter. In Scott’s words, “The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him to an activist for Peace and Justice.”
As he became disillusioned by the Reagan-Bush years, he became increasingly active, attending rallies and seeking guidance from preeminent peace protest and civil rights icons of the day. Scott cited Philip Berrigan, William Thomas (William Thomas Hallenback Jr.), Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone as primary influences.
Scott learned well. Personal sacrifice was his weapon against injustice. Whether it was climbing over the White House fence to draw attention to U.S. military aggression, only to be arrested, or arriving hours before an organizing event to help set up seating and staging apparatus for the event speakers, Scott saw sacrificing himself as an obligation in an unjust world. In the mode of Berrigan and the others.
Scott was the co-founder of Truthout, both ideologically and in terms of his selfless labors. He worked tirelessly to get the organization off the ground before there was any funding at all. His vision for what the publication would stand for became a critical component of the DNA of Truthout and later Reader Supported News (RSN).
Scott’s journalism career was put on an abrupt albeit relatively brief hold in 2002, after he was arrested for trespassing at a demonstration at Vandenberg Air Force Base. He served six months in federal detention in Los Angeles, along with five co-defendants, for walking onto the Vandenberg grounds and painting peace slogans on a structure in a secure area.
2004 saw Scott, Marc Ash, and a full Truthout crew at the Republican National Convention in New York City. Navigating the maze of security and political personnel was a special challenge. Scott was a key player in engineering coverage of the event under difficult and often dangerous conditions.
In 2005, Scott was Truthout’s eyes, ears, and presence at Camp Casey. Camp Casey was an early Occupy-style demonstration organized by Cindy Sheehan, the mother of U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, killed in action in Iraq on April 4, 2004. It was one of the longest lasting and best-noted demonstrations of the Iraq war. Scott’s reporting did much to propel public awareness of the demonstration’s message and mission.
After joining RSN in 2010, Scott re-established himself as a movement-building force. On scores of issues affecting everyday people, Scott was the first to see the threat and act on it, the first to see an opportunity and urge the organization to put our efforts behind it.
Scott, longtime RSN contributor and Civil Rights attorney Bill Simpich, and courtroom sketch artist Kay Rudin teamed up in 2013 to cover the landmark trial of Army Private and whistleblower Bradley (Chelsea) Manning. At one juncture Bill Simpich, on behalf of RSN, filed a “Media Access Motion” to compel improved access for members of the media to cover a very restrictive environment. Ultimately the motion was denied, but access did improve.
Scott understood early that the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign for President would be a force. He made close contact and coverage of the campaign a central focus. True to form, Scott became a fixture on the Sanders campaign trail.
It was Scott who saw right from the beginning that the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance would be a lightning rod for Progressive organizing and motivated our action on the issue.
Scott’s final issue before his death was single payer healthcare. Healthcare for every American. On par with all economically developed countries in the world. Scott did not live to see it in his lifetime. But what he did see was that the potential is real.
As our colleague, friend, and contributor Bill Simpich said, “Scott, Rest in Power.”
A public service will be held for Scott at 1:00 PM Central on Monday, October 9 at Dunn's Funeral Home 2121 Grand Avenue, Des Moines IA 50312.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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This Is How We Once Changed Gun Laws |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 October 2017 08:39 |
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Pierce writes: "This has been a public service announcement on behalf of how things are supposed to work."
Lyndon B. Johnson. (photo: Getty Images)
This Is How We Once Changed Gun Laws
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
04 October 17
Look at the steps taken by Lyndon B. Johnson.
 y October 22, 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was as lame a duck as ever sat in the White House. Reviled by more than half of his own party, he’d dropped out of a race for re-election in March of that year. His party’s convention had been a bloodbath. Its nominee, Hubert Humphrey, was hated almost as much as Johnson was by most of the same people. The Republicans were gearing up to put Richard Nixon, of all people, into the White House. In Miami, while accepting his party’s nomination, Nixon had said:
For a few moments, let us look at America, let us listen to America to find the answer to that question. As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?
Listen to the answer to those questions. It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land. They are black and they are white—they're native born and foreign born—they're young and they're old. They work in America's factories. They run America's businesses. They serve in government. They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free. They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American Dream. They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.
So, in addition to LBJ's other problems, the howling of backlash and reaction was growing, and Nixon was just the right vehicle for it. But shortly after LBJ had dropped out, Martin Luther King had been shot to death in Memphis and Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. Enough, thought Lyndon Johnson, and he put together a gun control bill and forced its passage even though he was at the nadir of his career in terms of political power. He did not get everything he wanted, but what he got was remarkable enough and, when he signed the bill, this is what he said:
Some of you may be interested in knowing-really-what this bill does:
--It stops murder by mail order. It bars the interstate sale of all guns and the bullets that load them.
--It stops the sale of lethal weapons to those too young to bear their terrible responsibility.
--It puts up a big "off-limits" sign, to stop gunrunners from dumping cheap foreign "$10 specials" on the shores of our country.
Congress adopted most of our recommendations. But this bill--as big as this bill is--still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country--more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country.
The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year. But the key to effective crime control remains, in my judgment, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must--somehow, someday--make our voices felt. We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves-the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted. We have been through a great deal of anguish these last few months and these last few years-too much anguish to forget so quickly.
In case you’d forgotten, that’s what presidential leadership—even from the lamest duck ever to hold the office—looks like.
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of how things are supposed to work.
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The Gun Lobby Is Global: From Yemen to Las Vegas |
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Wednesday, 04 October 2017 08:29 |
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Dabashi writes: "The innocent victims of guns, machine guns, missiles and bombs in Las Vegas, in Palestine, in Yemen, in Myanmar are the identical targets of this global calamity."
'You cannot, as Obama and Trump do, sell billions of dollars' worth of weapons around the globe and then pretend you are denouncing gun violence at home.' (photo: Reuters)
The Gun Lobby Is Global: From Yemen to Las Vegas
By Hamid Dabashi, Al Jazeera
04 October 17
The Saudis, the Israelis, the Myanmar military and all-American shooters in the US use the same guns to kill innocents.
 nother horrific mass killing in the US, yet another round of public mourning for the innocent victims of a murderous act of violence in Las Vegas, this time around though no Barack Obama to come to television and shed some crocodile tears.
According to reports, on Sunday, October 1, a gunman in possession of a massive arsenal of military-grade weaponry ascended to a high floor of a Las Vegas hotel and went on a rampage with rapid-fire barrage of bullets on innocent people attending an outdoor concert, killing more than 50 and injuring hundreds more.
The blood in the streets of Las Vegas was still fresh when the bizarre battle over the identity and possible motive of the mass murderer became matters of political contestations and ideological fireworks in the media. He was a white man, he was not a Muslim, so is this "terrorism", or was he just a "lone wolf". How come if it were a Muslim ... now that he is white ...
After each and every such mass murder perpetrated by a white gunman in the US, and there are plenty of them, there is a perfectly legitimate outcry to force Trump and other white supremacist, racist, xenophobic Islamophobes to admit this is a case of domestic or white terrorism, that the bugbear they have created and call "Islamic terrorism" is not the paramount cause of mass murder in the US and indeed around the globe.
That the Muslim travel ban this nasty racist president has initiated and continues to flaunt has nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. Neither Trump nor his racist supporters will ever admit any such thing. There is good money in the business of "Islamic terrorism".
Since Americans, and on their behalf the British in Europe, have kept the term "terrorism" exclusively for Muslims and mostly for when white people are their victims, such markings of their hypocrisy is perhaps necessary but it is also distracting from another far more serious issue: the fact that the barbaric US gun culture and American and Israeli arms manufacturing industry are the real big fat elephant in the room that no one wants to see or discuss for it sheds light where liberal imperialism prefers kept dark.
Equally distracting from a full recognition of this fact is the other redundant mantra aired on such tragic occasions - the endless and useless cry for "gun control". "477 Days. 521 Mass Shootings. Zero Action from Congress": New York Times headline put it simply and bluntly.
Before he left office, Barack Obama used to come to television on such occasions and publicly cry for the victims of gun violence and desperately plead to the US Congress for gun control, which the Congress, of course, never did, for after AIPAC, NRA is the most powerful lobby in the United States. AIPAC keeps feeding the arms-addicted junky state of Israel, and NRA makes sure there are enough lethal weapons easily available to Americans so they can kill themselves with same fanatical precision as Israelis murder Palestinians.
With Trump at least we have no spectacle of Obama hypocrisy any more. He is a heartless racist and stages it boldly.
AIPAC and NRA
To reach for the domestic and global dimensions of the real calamity caused by US violent militarism we need to overcome this false and manufactured binary between Islamic and non-Islamic terrorism, between "jihadism" and "lone wolf" binaries, and look at all such mass shootings collectively and irrespective of who had perpetrated them - a Muslim fanatic or a Christian zealot, a Jewish settler colonialist mass murderer like Baruch Goldstein or a white supremacist mass murderer like Dylann Roof. At the root and the common denominator of all such acts of pernicious violence is the US/Israeli culture of hate and warmongering, predicated on an entire industry of arms manufacturing, of militarism, and of regional and global conquest.
Where do these weapons of mass murder come from? Who manufactures and sells them around the globe? Either the "gun control" debate, or else "terrorism" debate, will camouflage a darker and more persistent foregrounding of episodic violence targeting innocent people. Few will connect the US gun culture and Israeli militarism to their respective warmongering and arms industries.
Yes, there is a "gun lobby" in the US. But that gun lobby is the symptom, not the cause of the disease we regularly see on these frightful scenes of mass murder in the US. Barack Obama and Donald Trump both are the most prominent members of this "gun lobby" if we remember how they consistently push arms around the globe and sell weapons of mass murder to ruling tyrants and mass murderers from Saudi Arabia to commit war crimes in Yemen to the Myanmar junta and their Nobel Laureate leader in Myanmar to burn Rohingya Muslims alive.
When JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Malcolm X uttered a simple truth that "chickens come home to roost," pointing to the climate of hate that US politicians and the massive scale of warmongering that the US military generates and sustains around the globe, and perforce to the gargantuan killing machine put at the disposal of a US president. Malcolm X was ostracised and condemned for uttering this very simple truth. But the truth behind his proverbial phrase still shines true after every act of senseless violence.
You cannot, as Obama and Trump do, sell billions of dollars' worth of weapons around the globe and then pretend you are denouncing gun violence at home.
Innocence Home and Abroad
The innocent victims of guns, machine guns, missiles and bombs in Las Vegas, in Palestine, in Yemen, in Myanmar are the identical targets of this global calamity. The person who pulls the trigger might be different but the victims are the same. The US and Israel are among the top manufacturers and sellers of weapons of mass murder around the globe - both for their own domestic use and for their regional and global militarism. Saudis kill Yemeni children with their American weapons. Israeli slaughter Palestinians with their American weapons. The military junta in Myanmar murders Muslims of Rohingya ethnicity with Israeli weapons. The man who went to a top floor of a hotel in Las Vegas and started shooting innocent people randomly used the selfsame weapons the Saudis, the Israelis and the Myanmar military use.
In an imbecilic and puerile statement, Donald Trump called the senseless act of murder in Las Vegas "pure evil". "Pure evil" is not a deranged man who goes on a rampage slaughtering innocent people in a concert. "Pure evil" is an entire arms industry in US and Israel that manufactures and sells arms to Saudi Arabia and Myanmar with which to murder innocent Yemenis, Palestinians, and the Rohingya. What part of that simple fact is difficult to grasp?
Think of innocent Americans attending a concert in Las Vegas the same way you think of innocent Afghans attending a wedding, innocent Yemenis attending a school, innocent Palestinians playing football at a Gaza beach, innocent Rohingya running away from a burned village ... all of them victims of the merchants of weapons of mass murder in US and Israel - and of course Europe, Russia, and China have their own chunk of the global military sales.
"The gun lobby" is a transnational industry. Barack Obama sold billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia with which to murder the innocent children in Yemen and gave further billions worth of weapons for free to Israel with which to slaughter Palestinians long before he left office, and Donald Trump resumed Obama's ignoble legacy. You cannot sign a document selling billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia or send them to Israel for free in one White House room and then go to another room and cry for the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School. That is the height of barefaced hypocrisy. What is the difference between the Palestinian children that Israelis murder with Barack Obama's weapons, or the Yemeni children the Saudis kill with another shipment from Obama and the innocent concertgoers in Las Vegas? Nothing.
So stop shedding crocodile tears! Only those who categorically oppose gun violence of any and all sorts in or out of the US, in or out of occupied Palestine, are allowed to mourn the precious lives wasted in Las Vegas. Hypocritical Republicans and Democrats, liberal and hardcore Zionists, are not welcome here.
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It's Time to Politicize the Terror Attack in Las Vegas |
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Tuesday, 03 October 2017 14:22 |
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Dickinson writes: "On Sunday night, a domestic terrorist, using weapons suited for battle, took aim from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel and rained bullets down on a country music festival - killing at least 58 people, wounding more than 500 others and sending a crowd of 22,000 fleeing in panic."
A man in a wheelchair is taken away from the site of Sunday night's shooting in Las Vegas. (photo: David Becker/Getty Images)
It's Time to Politicize the Terror Attack in Las Vegas
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
03 October 17
America is vulnerable to terrorist attack because of the political power of the National Rifle Association – full stop
n Sunday night, a domestic terrorist, using weapons suited for battle, took aim from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel and rained bullets down on a country music festival – killing at least 58 people, wounding more than 500 others and sending a crowd of 22,000 fleeing in panic.
The headlines scream "worst gun massacre in modern history" – and indeed, the massacre surpasses the death toll at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando just last year.
But Las Vegas was also the third deadliest modern terror attack on American soil, trailing only 9/11 and the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.
America needs to confront this terrorism – and the forces that enable it.
Some definitions of terrorism hold that the violence must be perpetrated toward a political end. We do not yet know the motive behind the targeting of a music festival. The alleged gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, is dead, and the logic of his attack may have died with him. But if a man who brings more than a dozen weapons into a hotel room for the express purpose of exterminating innocent civilians – and prompting tens of thousands of others to flee for their lives – does not qualify as a "terrorist," then the word has lost any functional meaning.
Mark Kelly – the retired Navy captain and astronaut and husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords – underscored this idea on Monday. "This is the worst-case scenario. It's haunted our dreams, that we would wake up to the news of a massacre like this: weapons of war, in the hands of a determined killer, with a tactical advantage. This was an ambush if there ever was one," he said. "This was domestic terrorism."
The Las Vegas massacre also plainly qualifies as an "act of terrorism" as defined by Nevada law – encompassing "any act that involves the use … [of] violence which is intended to: Cause great bodily harm or death to the general population."
The category error – labeling terrorism as "gun violence" – has dire consequences. America is at war with terrorism. We have made peace with gun violence.
In this country, we move heaven and earth to root out terrorism. We've launched trillion-dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our Congress passed the the USA Patriot Act, and we have curtailed our Fourth Amendment rights – trading freedom for FISA warrants and other encroachments of a surveillance state. We endure the indignities of airport scanners and pat-downs, and perform the security ritual of removing our shoes and belts at TSA checkpoints.
But when terrorists attack with high-capacity rifles, our moral clarity – and our national will to action – falters. Part of this category error is driven by racism. We call white shooters "lone wolves" and not "terrorists." Regardless, we are enduring terrorist attacks on our own soil. They are hitting soft targets: schools, nightclubs and now music festivals.
Despite the carnage, we have done nothing at the federal level to restrict access to war-bred assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. This is a political problem, not a Second Amendment question. Despite what the NRA claims, U.S. courts have repeatedly held that these weapons are not constitutionally protected.
We do not yet have a full accounting for the arsenal used in Las Vegas, which included "more than 19 rifles," according to The New York Times. Audio from the attack suggests the attacker had a weapon that fired like a machine gun. It is possible to obtain machine guns legally under federal law; in Nevada, it is legal to carry an automatic weapon as though it were any other gun.
America's national inaction comes in the face of our enemies laughing at us. Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups have openly called on would-be jihadists to build an arsenal by exploiting America's lax gun laws, as I detailed after the Orlando attack:
"A terrorist manual discovered in Afghanistan in the early 2000s titled 'How can I train myself for Jihad' encourages would-be terrorists to obtain military-grade weapons in America: In 'some states of USA,' it reads, 'it is perfectly legal for members of the public to own certain types of firearms. If you live in such a country, obtain an assault rifle legally....'
"A 2011 Al Qaeda recruitment video included similar advice: 'America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with [an] assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?'"
America's soft underbelly is vulnerable to terrorist attack because of the political power of the National Rifle Association. Full stop.
And we have never had a president more indebted to the NRA than Donald Trump. Trump took office thanks to more than $30 million in NRA spending on his behalf. Appearing at the gun lobby's national convention earlier this year, Trump thanked the NRA and promised to advance its agenda. "You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you," he said.
On Monday, President Trump piously quoted the Bible and condemned an "act of pure evil." But he made no promise of federal action or intention to prevent future bloodshed. The president only directed that "our great flag" be flown at half mast. In the War on Terror – as prosecuted at home, against those who would commit atrocities with guns – the president might as well be waving a white flag of surrender.
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hen asked about major threats to their country, Europeans are more likely than Americans to cite global climate change, according to a 
