Terrorism on American Soil

by Walter Brasch

      During this past week a three-year-old boy in Rock Hill, S.C., killed himself when he was playing with a loaded gun in his house.

      He wasn’t the only one in Rock Hill to die from a gunshot. In July, a man killed himself after shooting his wife, her son and the son’s girlfriend. The following month, someone killed a 30-year-old woman; someone else that same week killed a 27-year-old man.

      Rock Hill, a city of about 66,000 is not unique.

      About 2,700 children are killed every year from gunshot violence; about 60 percent of them are homicides, the rest are suicides or unintentional deaths, such as that of the three-year-old. Every year, another 15,000 youth are wounded from gun fire. Overall, about 33,000 die from gunshot violence; 76,000 are injured from gunshot violence, according to data compiled by the Brady Center. The names, faces, and lives of everyone killed or injured just blend into tables of statistics.

      Articles in the Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care reveal an even greater problem. The rate of gun violence leading to death is about 20 times greater than the combined rates of the next highest 22 first world countries. More than 1.7 million American homes have unlocked and loaded guns; the probability that one of those guns will be used in a murder, suicide, domestic dispute, or unintentional shooting is about 22 times more likely than if there was no gun in the house, according to a study led by Dr. Arthur Kellerman, dean of the School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Science.

      The leadership of the NRA doesn’t want anyone anywhere for any reason to mess with its militant stand to allow Americans to own and use guns. They wrap themselves within the cloth of the Second Amendment to advance their arguments and pander to the masses, never understanding that there are limits and exceptions to most of the amendments.

      The paranoid conspiracy-clad leadership, along with their allies and followers, believe civilians need weapons to protect themselves against possible government invasions. That scenario is in the netherland of impossibility, but even if true, anyone with a semi-automatic rifle has little chance against an army of tanks, drones, and missiles.

      The NRA leadership says, apparently not recognizing the absurdity of their statements, that President Obama is coming for your guns. He hasn’t done so in seven years; he won’t do so in his last year in office. But the fear the NRA and its allies spew is more than just blustering rhetoric; it is based upon profits. Every time there is a mass shooting, the gun industry sends out that message. Dealers sell more guns to frightened Americans. This benefits the gun manufacturers, which create more guns to meet more demand, leading to more donations by manufacturers and the public to the NRA and fellow gun lobbyists, and which finds its way to politicians who puff out their chests, claim to believe the Second Amendment is absolute, develop acute panic attacks when all reasonable measures to limit guns are presented, and become part of the reason why there are so many guns and so many gun deaths in the United States.

      Technology exists to mass produce “smart guns” that won’t fire unless they’re in the possession of the owner. The NRA opposes this. Technology exists to code every bullet, which would help law enforcement to better identify who might have killed or wounded 110,000 people every year. The NRA also opposes this.

      The NRA leadership claims the solution to gun violence is better psychological evaluation. But, their paid-for politicians generally don’t like social service programs, especially those that are funded by the taxpayers. More important, the NRA leadership, all of them conservatives, can’t explain how mass psychological evaluations don’t violate the Constitution.

      However, 72 percent of NRA members want stronger background checks before anyone can legally buy a gun, according to a poll by the Center for American Progress. Overall, about 83 percent of Americans want stronger background checks.

After every mass shooting, whether in schools, malls, or theaters, Americans cry, and politicians send crocodile-tear condolences to the media, which then amplify their words, as if they all care about the victims. But, the gun manufacturers, the NRA, the politicians, and the media don’t care. They just go through the motions of pretending they do.

      In Texas, a paranoid state senator, proudly sporting a perfect score by NRA criteria, this past week said he opposed having Syrian refugees admitted into the United States because they might buy guns and commit acts of terrorism. He said it was too easy to get guns, but he has also spent his political career opposing responsible gun control measures.

      This past week in Minneapolis, police arrested three White supremacists who shot five Afro-Americans at a peaceful protest rally; each of the shooters was carrying a legally-purchased gun. In New Orleans, 17 people at a park were injured by gunfire; witnesses identified one of the shooters as having a silver-colored machine gun. In Biloxi, Miss., a man pulled a concealed 9 mm. gun and killed a waitress who had asked him not to smoke in the restaurant. In Colorado Springs, police arrested a 57-year-old man who used an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle to kill three people and wound nine others. One of those killed was a police officer; five of the wounded are police officers. (Three weeks earlier, in Colorado Springs, a man with a semi-automatic rifle killed three people before being killed by police.)

      Next year, when we gather with our families to celebrate Thanksgiving, those of us still alive might wish to give thanks that we weren’t killed intentionally or accidentally by someone wielding one of the 300 million guns that Americans cling to as if they were the essence of their own lives.

[Dr. Brasch is an award-winning journalist and the author of 20 books, most of which fuse history and contemporary social issues; his most recent book is Fracking Pennsylvania. He readily admits to being a mediocre trap shooter.]

The Republicans’ Rhetoric of Hate and Fear

by Walter Brasch

     Fear, laced with paranoia, is driving the American response against allowing Syrian refugees into the United States.

      President Obama has said he would accept 10,000 refugees, all of them subjected to intense scrutiny before being admitted to the country. France, with a population about one-fifth that of the United States, despite the worst attack on its soil since World War II, will accept 30,000 refugees.

      Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told the Senate, “We are not a nation that delivers children back into the hands of ISIS because some politician doesn’t like their religion.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), a Jew, said the nation should “not allow ourselves to be divided and succumb to Islamophobia,” and that when “thousands of people have lost everything—have nothing left but the shirts on their backs—we will not turn our backs on the refugees.”

      They are among a minority. Only 28 percent of Americans believe the nation should allow Syrian refugees into the United States, according to an independent Bloomberg poll. Fifty-three percent say absolutely deny any Syrian refugee, and apparently anyone who is a Muslim, a place in the United States; 11 percent say admit only Christians; 8 percent aren’t sure.

      The governors of 30 states, mostly in the South and Midwest, have also said they don’t want Syrian refugees in their states. Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) has even ordered his state agencies to deny residence to two Syrian families who had undergone extensive background checks by the FBI and other agencies and were scheduled to be relocated in Indianapolis. The governors’ opinion, fueled by politics not compassion, really doesn’t matter; the acceptance and relocation of refugees fleeing oppression is a federal not a state issue.

     Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), born in Canada but with dual American and Canadian citizenship, doesn’t want Syrian refugees in his adopted country. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), whose parents were Cuban refugees, doesn’t want Syrian refugees in the U.S. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), born in the United States three months after his parents left India, doesn’t want his adopted country to admit Syrian refugees.

        Donald Trump, with a northern European heritage and currently the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, had previously declared if he was the president he would build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and round up and deport 11 million undocumented aliens, actions clearly in the fairy-tale netherland of impossibility, but definitely in the land of rhetoric meant to pander to his extreme right-wing following. In response to the murders in France, he says he would require all Muslims to register, and would close mosques. However, not one terrorist attack in the United States was hatched and carried out in a mosque. More important, Trump’s actions would be a violation not only of the First Amendment but everything the Founding Fathers believed.

      Jeb Bush said the U.S. should admit only Syrian refugees who are Christians. It was a stupid comment when he said it; it was just as stupid when he later “clarified” it by saying if the U.S. admitted any Muslim, it should only be after extensive screening. As President Obama tried to explain to the fear-mongers, it takes up to two years for the U.S. to admit any refugee from any country, and only after extensive screening. Even more important than screening refugees, the Constitution clearly doesn’t allow either acceptance or rejection of those who seek U.S. residency because of their religion, something Bush and the conservatives should have known, especially if they wish to run for any office, from local constable to the presidency of the United States.

       Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) says he has an idea how to defeat ISIS. The proselytizing presidential candidate wants to create a government agency to promote Judeo-Christian values around the world. It’s doubtful that many conservatives will be promoting any “Judeo-” values, because American Jews tend to lean more to liberal beliefs than other religions.

      State Rep. Glen Casada, Republican caucus leader in Tennessee, wants the Tennessee National Guard to round up all Syrian refugees who are lawful residents of his state and to deport them—if not back to Syria, at least to some other state. State Sen. Elaine Morgan (R-R.I.) wants to create internment camps for any Syrian refugee admitted into her state. Most Pennsylvania republican legislators, spewing their caucus’s talking points, said they had “grave concerns” about Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to allow Syrian refugees to live in the state where the Declaration of Independence was written.

      Texas State Rep. Tony Dale, one of the nation’s most ardent defenders of the right to own guns, and who consistently receives grades of “A” from the NRA, added yet another reason to deny Syrian refugees admission to the United States. Without recognizing the irony and the hypocrisy, he said it would be too easy for refugees to buy guns.

      In the history of the United States, just the members of the white-hooded Protestant-professing fire-and-brimstone Klan killed and maimed more Americans than all the murders by non-Christian terrorists—and that includes 9/11. Add in the number of serial killers, the racists who killed children in churches, the zealots who killed health care personnel because they performed legal abortions, and the people like the Oklahoma City bombers and the Unabomber, and the number of pretend-Christians killing Americans rises to hundreds of times greater than any Muslim attack.

       Responding to the Islamophobia perpetuated by braggadocio-spewing politicians, an outraged President Obama said that the conservatives believe they could stand up against the leaders of any country, but “Apparently, they’re scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States.” There are some conservatives who say the U.S. should take care of their own first before admitting any refugee. But, conservatives, true to their political ideology, consistently vote against social programs, including aid to combat veterans. When not resorting to inane arguments, the extreme right-wing says the way to destroy ISIS is for the U.S. to send a few hundred thousand soldiers into Syria. It’s jingoistic hysteria couched in fear. It’s also the same logic that didn’t work in Iraq, and isn’t working in Afghanistan.

      In 1939, more than 60 percent of Americans, according to a poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion, said the U.S. should not admit 10,000 European Jewish children. Later that year, the U.S. turned back the MS St. Louis, carrying 908 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees.

      During the early 1930s, there was a politician who blamed Jews for his nation’s problems, and who used the rhetoric of fear, hate, and paranoia to become the elected leader of his countrymen. None of the Republican presidential candidates or their right-wing followers rise to the level of that politician who became a dictator. But, their poisonous hate and Islamophobic rhetoric matches that of Hitler.

     [Dr. Brasch is an award-winning journalist, professor emeritus of mass communications, and author of 20 books. His latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania.]

’Twixt the Cobwebs of Halloween and the Lights of Christmas

by Rosemary and Walter Brasch

      At one time, people placed carved pumpkins with a candle inside on their front porches to announce the beginning of the Halloween season.

And then it became a contest. First, best Halloween pumpkin. And then who could decorate their trees and hedges with the best fake cobwebs, followed by fake witches in trees.

      Next came Pumpkin Chunkin’, where teams make catapults and launch pumpkins.

      The beneficiaries of all this, of course, are the candy companies—which have steadily decreased the number of miniature candies and increased the price of them in giant bags—the card industry that began marketing their products not long after Labor Day, and just about every company that has figured out how to produce their products in orange and black.

      After Halloween comes Christmas decorations, bypassing anything for Veterans Day. At one time, homeowners and businesses set up Christmas displays after Thanksgiving, but it takes more than a month to replace pumpkins with lights, displays, and inflatable snowmen.

For Thanksgiving, wedged between Halloween and Christmas, we get supermarket ads shoving turkeys, cranberries, and sweet potato pies down our wallets.

      Overlooked in national celebrations, and shoved out of the decorating frenzy of the other holidays, is what is probably the most important day of the year—Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Last year, 87 million Americans bought more than $50 billion in merchandise in the four-day period after Thanksgiving. This is definitely not enough. We consumers must push that number even higher.  

      There are no home displays to commemorate what is the busiest buying day of the season.

      We have an idea.

      Instead of replacing the cobwebs of Halloween with the Lights of Christmas, why not decorate our homes and yards with the spirit of commercialism? It’s definitely the American Spirit.

      Because plastic pumpkins are replacing organic ones, and artificial Christmas trees are replacing those pesky biodegradable real ones, we can make sure that Black Friday becomes a truly plastic holiday. Indeed, plastic pumpkins will never go away, much like our plastic credit card debt incurred on that one special day.

      In front of our houses we can decorate trees with maxed-out and cancelled credit cards. Special blacklights can shine upon the new silver data chips in the cards to create a ghoulish effect of avarice and conspicuous consumption. Batteries not included.

      Every season needs its own special clothes. In October, we wear Halloween costumes and orange sweatshirts; in December, it’s Christmas sweaters. For Black Friday, store clerks could wear black hoodies, reminding all of us about the mugging our bank accounts are receiving.

      Black Friday sales allow the human species to determine the survival of the fittest. That leads to thousands injured in car accidents while speeding to 30 sales in one day, and to the survivors of Mall Trampling exercises to reach those elusive 20 percent discount on whatever it is that the retailers think will attract the most customers this year. The benefit, of course, is to hospitals.

      In front of our houses, we can replace inflatable pumpkins with an inflatable ER, complete with an overworked inflatable nurse who automatically deflates after a 12-hour shift.

      On our doors, we can replace Christmas wreaths with Sheriff’s Sale signs or, at the least, “late notices” from the utilities companies.

      With proper merchandising, corporate America and fraggled homeowners can spend the last four months of the year, from Labor Day onward, in one long holiday. We can call it The Months of Con. Or, maybe, Months of Fusion. Or, perhaps, The Season of Debt and Con-Fusion.

      [Rosemary Brasch is a retired secretary, Red Cross family services disaster specialist, and labor studies college instructor; Walter Brasch is a journalist/author. His latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania.]

Snuggling Up to Celebrities Not Part of Journalism Training

by Walter Brasch

    

     One of the basic tenets of journalism ethics and practices is that reporters must keep their distance from news sources.

     They’re allowed to be friendly. They’re even allowed to share a meal with a news source. But, they must be independent. It’s a “Caesar’s wife” thing—they must be above suspicion.

     This past week, Lara Spencer, co-anchor of ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” snuggled up to Donald Trump.

     In a photo posted to Instagram, she is seen with her left arm around Trump’s shoulder, her right hand across his stomach. Both are looking at each other and smiling. Spencer posted the following message to the photo: “Can’t beat having the REAL DonaldJTrump on.” She added the emoticon of a smiley face.

     When Spencer was anchoring “Inside Edition,” a news-and-gossip half-hour syndicated show that focuses on celebrities, she was mostly deferential to the celebrities. That was expected. Hosts of those shows gain access to their sources not by asking tough questions or raising critical social issues.     But, “Good Morning America” is in ABC’s news division, not its entertainment division.

     Unfortunately, Spencer isn’t the only one to get close to her news sources. Reporters on the local police beat or who regularly cover local government often have a closer working relationship with their sources than they do with their editors and public. In the nation’s capital, reporters who should know better often attend parties and receptions with our elected officials and various members of the governing establishment. Some have been known to play tennis or go to the same social clubs with news sources. Some even enjoy taking all-expense-paid trips, set up by PR agencies for their clients who are hoping for a good story. The explanation by reporters is that it helps them get closer to their sources to get more information, which they pass onto their readers, listeners, and viewers.

     This is plainly bull.

     Reporters who get socially close to their sources do so because they enjoy the closeness to celebrities, politicians, business executives, and even PR hacks more than they enjoy talking to the homeless, to the marginally-poor, to those who are citizens with no financial or political power. Reporters assigned to the White House didn’t dig into the facts and challenge Richard Nixon about allegations of a burglary at the Watergate or of a cover-up; that was left to two general assignment reporters, who were mocked and scorned by the nation’s “elite” reporters. Failure of reporters to challenge George W. Bush about reasons for the invasion of Iraq led to the nation becoming involved in a war that cost the lives of 4,425 Americans, and injuries, some life-threatening and permanent, to about 32,000.

     Lara Spencer is a broadcast journalism graduate from Penn State. Cuddling up to sources for a photo-op is not what is taught at Penn State. Spencer should have known better.

These Judges Don’t Put Criminals into Prison

by Walter Brasch

     

       By Tuesday’s election, the seven candidates for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will have spent about $10 million.

      Their expenditures can be seen in lawn signs decorating almost every part of the state’s landscape, in millions of full color postcards, some as large as 8-1/2 x 11, mailed to almost every voter in the state, and in TV ads.

      They have already spent about $4 million for TV ads, many promoting each one’s own qualifications, most of the ads attacking the other candidates.

      There are three vacancies on the Court because two of the justices had to resign over scandals. One justice used her staff to do personal work for her. One justice was implicated in a sex scandal. The other reached the mandatory retirement age of 70.

      In most elections, the voters barely know who the candidates are and randomly select one. Because of a massive publicity campaign—largely funded by outside organizations—we have had as much exposure to the judicial candidates as we are enduring from the presidential candidates.

      The judicial candidates are primarily focusing on how tough and how fair they are as judges who will put the bad guys and gals into prison, and how they will be able to bring integrity back to the Supreme Court.

      But, bringing integrity to the court and putting away the guilty is not the role of the state Supreme Court.

      Supreme Court justices review appeals in both civil and criminal cases to see if there were judicial improprieties or if there were defendant’s rights violations. The Supreme Court also looks at cases, which may be an individual suing government, to determine if there were constitutional violations. The Supreme Court also oversees the conduct and business operations of the lower courts.

      The Supreme Court, at least in theory, is non-partisan. But, with this campaign looking more like a political contest, and with the Republican slate of 3 candidates and the Democratic slate of three candidates viciously attacking each other, the voters should be more concerned with why does this race seem to be more important than any other, and what will be the direction this branch of government will be taking, and not if a candidate is tough on crime.