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Public Corruption in Chester County, PA

I believe an unlikely mix of alleged drug trafficking related politicos and alleged white nationalist related politicos united to elect the infamous “Bloc of Four” in the abysmal voter turnout election of 2005. During their four year term the drug business was good again and white nationalists used Coatesville as an example on white supremacist websites like “Stormfront”. Strong community organization and support from law enforcement, in particular Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has begun to turn our community around. The Chester County drug trafficking that I believe centers on Coatesville continues and I believe we still have public officials in place that profit from the drug sales. But the people here are amazing and continue to work against the odds to make Coatesville a good place to live.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

My dining room bookcases were plastered with clippings of drug dealers, Coatesville officials, JBS racists, CSPOA docs, CCRC officials & court docs, topped by this hat I can’t wear in public. I know about the mind freeze of overwhelming evidence



"But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. It’s impossible to keep it straight without the kind of chaotic wall charts that Carrie Mathison of “Homeland” assembled during her manic episodes. Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.

That’s why “Collusion” is so essential, and why I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power."

New York Times

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Are some Coatesville City Council members putting off the budget until 2018 so they can lay off police to balance the budget?

Some Coatesville City Council members are calling saying they can’t make it to budget meetings at the last minute. No quorum, no meeting.

The budget meetings can continue in January of 2018 when a new city council comes in. 

Marie Lawson, Carmen Green & Linda Lavender Norris are calling at the last minute saying they aren’t showing up. Are they waiting for newly elected Coatesville City Council member Deborah Bookman and a four member quorum that will lay off police to avoid raising taxes?

I don’t know if some people in Coatesville are getting advice from Harvey Legree. Harvey might know how the drug business works, but his Uncle Richard knew how the drug business works and how the politics of Chester County, PA works. 


I don’t think a Coatesville City Council can again pull off reducing the Coatesville PD to a point where the drug business is good again in Coatesville. I think the politics has changed. 


Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Why Senator Roy Moore? Grover Norquist’s “Way Back Machine” overshot McKinley’s Golden Robber Barron days. Republicans landed in Andrew Jackson Days.

“for hog stealing, death by hanging... for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine.” Republicans are turning back the clock to the wealthy property owners control of government, the proliferation of guns, honor killings and the misogyny of the 18th and 19th Centuries. 



‘Grover Norquist is a creature of the 19th century, the golden age of the 'Robber Barons'.  His ideal presidential administration was William McKinley's, devoted to the prosperity of the Robber Barons, and in turn, complete subservience of the lower and middle classes to the wealthy ruling class. 


‘Yes, the McKinley era, absent the protectionism,’ he agrees, is the goal. "You're looking at the history of the country for the first 120 years, up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that." -- Grover Norquist


Grover Norquist’s “Way Back Machine” overshot McKinley’s America and landed in Andrew Jackson’s America. 



Republicans aren’t turning back the clock to the Robber Baron days of McKinley’s 1890s, they’re turning back the clock to the days of Andrew Jackson’s Southern gentlemen days.



“Backcountry courts tended to punish property crimes with the utmost severity, but to be very lenient with crimes of personal violence. In Cumberland County, Virginia, during the eighteenth century, a court administered the following punishments: for hog stealing, death by hanging; for scolding, five shilling fine; for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine. This structure of values continued for many generations in the backcountry. Historian Edward Ayers finds that in the southern upcountry during the nineteenth century, county courts “treated property offenders much more harshly than those accused of violence.”  


Life was cheap; property was expensive....  


A “benevolent Christian mask hides the barbaric violent behavior of the “Southern Gentleman”. 

“That the culture of honor appears to be such a robust predictor of school violence supports the hypothesis that school violence might be partially a product of long-term or recent experiences of social marginalization, humiliation, rejection, or bullying (Leary et al., 2003; Newman et al., 2005),   all of which represent honor threats with special significance to  people (particularly males) living in culture-of-honor states. 

It’s also at the heart of what Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson sees in the code of the streets 

“At the heart of the street culture is an emphasis on respect, toughness, retribution, and ultimately, violence. Anderson suggested that the street culture emphasizes maintaining the respect of others, toughness, and exacting retribution when someone disrespects you through the use of violence.” This code is eerily similar to Hackett Fischer’s description of Andrew Jackson, the president who was taught to go outside the rule of law and settle things hisself: 

The classical example of this attitude towards violence was Andrew Jackson. A friend who knew him well for forty years said “no man knew better than Andrew Jackson when to get into a passion and when not.” James Parton commented that Jackson’s anger was “a Scotch-Irish anger. It was fierce, but never had any ill effect upon his purposes; on the contrary, he made it serve him, sometimes, by seeming to be much more angry than he was; a way with others of his race. 

But Jackson was brilliant and self-controlled; not all his contemporaries were: “Jackson’s strategy of controlled anger worked because most rage was genuine in this culture. Violence often consisted of blind, unthinking acts of savagery by men and women who were unable to control their own feelings.” Alcohol abuse was frequent, and children started drinking early. “In poorer families,” Wyatt-Brown writes, “a dram of whiskey was the early antebellum schoolboy’s fare for breakfast. Brantley York, a North Carolinian yeoman’s son, seldom left for school, he recalled, without first having a stiff glass.” 

Randolph Roth takes issue with the culture of honor thesis in his longitudinal study American Homicide: 

He has determined that four factors correlate with the homicide rate: faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence. When and where people hold these sentiments, the homicide rate is low; when and where they don’t, it’s high. 

But they are not necessarily contradictory. The mistrust of legal and governmental means of recourse, that no man should “sue anybody for slander, assault, and battery,” is similar to what Robert Sampson, in his study of Chicago neighborhood violence, calls “legal cynicism”: 

A distinction between the tolerance of deviance and cynicism about the applicability of law. One can be highly intolerant of crime, but live in a disadvantaged context bereft of legal sanctions and perceived justice. In fact, we suggest that this is exactly the sort of context found in many  ghetto-poverty areas of our large cities where lower­-income minorities are disproportionately concentrated. Crime there is usually high, but that does not imply, nor is there consistent evidence, that African American residents are tolerant of crime.

Crime was also not tolerated in the rural south of the 19th century; violence as a response to crime, or to pre-empt crime, was. This belief continued well into the 20th century, as the fear of vigilante justice, due to the overwhelmingly large black population, created both vigilante justice in the form of the Klan, which evolved into de facto vigilante justice from law enforcement itself, further undermining faith in just laws and a stable government: “After the Civil War, [slave patrols] seamlessly morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and other extra-legal organizations with the same purpose: to keep the black population cowed and under control. Fear of the black population is also why Southern society long accepted brutality in law enforcement to a greater degree than other parts of the country did.”
MORE AT:

Why is America so much more violent—in particular, so much more homicidal—than other developed countries? One vein of history and social science suggests that its roots are in the South, and the British borderland culture that it originated in.


ALSO SEE:


It's less about Alabama politics and more about the dual and morally opposite faces of "Southern Gentlemen". It's about the deviant sex of Southern Gentlemen. 






Monday, November 20, 2017

Coatesville’ Brandywine Creek Trail is an anomaly, a park in a 1/2 Black community that industry regards as a dumping ground. "A civil rights 'emergency"'

"Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, recently said: 'Civil rights have to include, fundamentally, the right to breathe your air, plant tomatoes in your soil. Civil rights is the right to drink your water. 
'If your children don’t have access to clean air and water, all the ideals we preach in this country are a lie. Environmental justice must be at the center of our activism in our fight to make real the promise of America.”

The land adjoining Coatesville's Riverwalk, a former steel company site that’s called the “Flats” is still zoned “Heavy Industrial”. The City of Coatesville has a Residential Commercial Zoning Overlay of the "Flats" 

The "Flats" is owned by the City of Coatesville's Redevelopment Authority. The City of Coatesville does not own the "Flats."


Coatesville is almost unknown to nationwide retail & commercial developers. It is well known internationally as a town for heavy polluting industries. 

"Bullard said instead of Nimby politics, there was what he called Pibby (Place in blacks’ back yard)."

The only thing keeping a steam to trash, gas power plant or fracking chemical plant out of Coatesville is the Coatesville Redevelopment Authority. If the RDA is dissolved heavy industry will make the City of Coatesville an offer they have no legal ability to refuse.  

Arthur Morton an associate broker with Ambassador Realty of Coatesville gave a brief presentation about a business venture called Blue Sky International or BlueSky International (I haven’t found it on the web yet) seeking the need for about 8 to 10 acres to develop what’s called a proppant plant. 
Proppants are part of the toxic mix of chemicals pumped into the ground to frack natural gas out of stone. 
The proppants are created from slag that would come from the steel mill.  


Coatesville, PA October 2010:




John Pawlowski, 


...But I think Coatesville deserves something better on the flats than an environment that I just heard described there. I can’t believe, I think even the fact it’s called ‘Blue Skies’ makes me suspicious of what it might be or end up being. 

I led the march against the crazy idea of putting in a gas fired electrical plant down there. I cannot believe anybody would seriously consider putting anything down there (like that). Coatesville is not that hard up for a couple of jobs. I don’t think so. And I can’t speak totally against it because I don’t know that much about it. I don’t what to be presumptuous; I’m only commenting on what I think I heard. That area down there has become prime area now that always wasn’t. 

But now people want to come in and kind of kill a dream. That’s what it is. When the RDA bought that property it was with the idea of putting in something good down there, something nice. 

G.O. Carlson could have stayed there and had this stuff right in their building they wouldn’t have to tear them down. What’s the point?”

Mr. Morton,  

"I brought to the city several weeks ago, perhaps three or four weeks, a business venture by a company called Blue Sky International seeking the need for about ten acres to develop what’s called proppant plant. Proppants are metallic balls that are created from slag material. And all this obviously comes together because of the steel mill and the slag that is ultimately produced from making steel. It’s then reprocessed by Stine, which is, I guess the old Brown Company… 

Essentially, the company that the office represents is a company called Blue Sky International. Material has been given to Rob Barry and Ted Reed. A business plan and executive summary also the request for information has been received by your office." 

Mr. Barry, “Right, and all those documents, reports have been recorded accepted and we have received." 

Mr. Morton, “Additional reports by the company, labiality.”  

Mr. Morton, “The initial meeting that I had was with Mr. Gary Smith from the Chester County Economic Development Council bringing the project to his attention for its violability for financing. I think we see a vital positive response. Our investors in this project are financially very capable…. 
But what we have is a thirty million dollar plant to be erected that will produce about a thousand tons of proppants a year. Which is essentially the amount of slag produced from the mill; or a thousand tons a day, I should say… 

The concept is; ArcelorMittal makes the steel, there is slag produced, Stine… takes that slag reprocesses it. They take out all the remaining metals and what have you and then sell it back to the steel mill. The remaining is to a large degree used…for roads et cetera. That material…we would make the units called proppants which are used in the oil and gas industries to force down into the well to open up the fissures that allow low producing wells release their gas and oil actually making Marcellus Shale a lot --- We have a relationship with Halliburton… 

We use 100 percent of the slag material that comes into the facility; it’s not a noisy facility. It’s clean; we have scrubber and everything, its waste water going in and scrubbers, recycling systems all in play. The company in the long run will probably be a one hundred million dollar producer plus. It will employ directly somewhere around eighty people, twenty four-seven…. 

As a result of coming to the City and speaking with Rob and Ted we identified the flats the north side of the flats, although it did stress the velodrome’s position et cetera… That’s where we are today… So we’ve got one hundred thousand dollars for the corner of Lincoln and Church and a million dollars for the eight acres or less on the north side of the flats. We think we have the financial wherewithal to meet the requirements for the Economic Development Council…. 

The principals are meeting with Stine on Monday…. A letter of interest has already been submitted to negotiate a contract to sell to Blue Sky all the slag they need to do this project."

MORE AT:


Thursday, October 7, 2010





"Black, Latino and disadvantaged people have long been disproportionately afflicted by toxins from industrial plants, cars, hazardous housing conditions and other sources. 


But political leaders, academics and activists spoke of a growing urgency around the struggle for environmental justice as the Trump administration peels away rules designed to protect clean air and water. 

'What we are seeing is the institutionalization of discrimination again, the thing we’ve fought for 40 years,' said Robert Bullard, an academic widely considered the father of the environmental justice movement. 

'There are people in fence line communities who are now very worried. If the federal government doesn’t monitor and regulate, and gives the states a green light to do what they want, we are going to get more pollution, more people will get sick. There will be more deaths.' 

Activists and some in Congress now view the blight of pollution as a vast, largely overlooked civil rights issue that places an unbearable burden on people of color and low-income communities. 

Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, recently said: “Civil rights have to include, fundamentally, the right to breathe your air, plant tomatoes in your soil. Civil rights is the right to drink your water. 

'If your children don’t have access to clean air and water, all the ideals we preach in this country are a lie. Environmental justice must be at the center of our activism in our fight to make real the promise of America.” 

MORE AT:

There is a growing urgency around the struggle for environmental justice as the Trump administration peels away rules designed to protect clean air and water, say political leaders, academics and activists

Monday, November 13, 2017

Roy Moore to Koch Brothers, The GOP is regressing to backcountry values. “Hog stealing, death by hanging. “Rape of 11 year old, one shilling fine.”

It's less about Alabama politics and more about the dual and morally opposite faces of "Southern Gentlemen". It's about the deviant sex of Southern Gentlemen. 

Republicans aren’t turning back the clock to the Robber Baron days of McKinley’s 1890s, they’re turning back the clock to the days of Andrew Jackson’s Southern gentlemen days.

Republicans are turning back the clock to the wealthy property owners control of government, the proliferation of guns, honor killings and the misogyny of the 18th and 19th Centuries. 

A “benevolent Christian mask hides the barbaric violent behavior of the “Southern Gentleman”. 


The best and most brutal example of the dual morality of "Southern Gentlemen" is the first series of HBO's True Detective.







The Republican Party's Regression to backcountry values.

“for hog stealing, death by hanging... for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine.”

Republicans are turning back the clock to the wealthy property owners control of government, the proliferation of guns, honor killings and the misogyny of the 18th and 19th Centuries. 

“Backcountry courts tended to punish property crimes with the utmost severity, but to be very lenient with crimes of personal violence. In Cumberland County, Virginia, during the eighteenth century, a court administered the following punishments: for hog stealing, death by hanging; for scolding, five shilling fine; for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine. This structure of values continued for many generations in the backcountry. Historian Edward Ayers finds that in the southern upcountry during the nineteenth century, county courts “treated property offenders much more harshly than those accused of violence.” 

Life was cheap; property was expensive.... 

Crime was also not tolerated in the rural south of the 19th century; violence as a response to crime, or to pre-empt crime, was. This belief continued well into the 20th century, as the fear of vigilante justice, due to the overwhelmingly large black population, created both vigilante justice in the form of the Klan, which evolved into de facto vigilante justice from law enforcement itself, further undermining faith in just laws and a stable government: “After the Civil War, [slave patrols] seamlessly morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and other extra-legal organizations with the same purpose: to keep the black population cowed and under control. Fear of the black population is also why Southern society long accepted brutality in law enforcement to a greater degree than other parts of the country did.” 

Is it crazy to think that British folkways were the seed of American violence? Perhaps not. America’s legal system is intimately tied to British common law, where we get habeas corpus and jury trials. U.S. v. Miller, the first significant Second Amendment decision of the 20th century, is based in Blackstone, The Wealth of Nations, and the colonial history of militias, divining the limits of gun control in the gangster era from 17th-century militia laws. It’s not unthinkable that the codes outlining the use of power and violence, particularly in places where there was less recourse to the law, have also followed the same principle of stare decisis. 

The shootings in Aurora, and to a certain extent the rise in homicides in Chicago this year, have brought gun control to the forefront for the first time in awhile. Both Obama and Romney addressed it this week, as one might expect. Romney’s response was brusque: “And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential, to improve the lots of the American people.” 

But in some small way it does contain a point. America is a very violent country. Duke sociologist Kieran Healy (via Ezra Klein) produced a chart comparing the U.S. to OECD countries (besides Mexico and Estonia) in terms of deaths from all forms of assault:




The U.S. is simply much more violent than other developed countries. And the region that brings up the national average is the South: 


MORE AT:

American Violence and Southern Culture

Why is America so much more violent—in particular, so much more homicidal—than other developed countries? One vein of history and social science suggests that its roots are in the South, and the British borderland culture that it originated in.




ALSO SEE:

Friday, November 10, 2017

Sunday, November 12, 2017

My Uncles fought Nazis. Now Nazis march with torches, chanting "Blood and Honor"


My Uncle Fred landed as a Combat Engineer on Omaha Beach.  My Uncle Louis fought Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge in Patton's Army.

The VFW put up the flags at Saint Cecilia Cemetery in Coatesville.








I can't reconcile their service and this:

Friday, November 10, 2017

Short Eyes Good Old Boy-Roy Moore-“It’s all a dream. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.”




“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus,” Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler told The Washington Examiner. “There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.”

Alabama state official defends Roy Moore, citing Joseph and Mary: ‘They became parents of Jesus’


By Michelle Boorstein November 9 at 5:52 PM 


The Real 'True Detective'?

"Ten years ago, the town of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, was traumatized when a local church's secret Satan worship, ritualized child molestation, and animal sacrifices came to light. Rust Cohle may be a fictional character, and time may not really be a flat circle, but that sounds an awful lot like the events of the first season of HBO's hit True Detective. In this episode of our brand-new series The Real, we went down to Ponchatoula to meet Stuart Murphy and Tom Tedder, two law enforcement officials who helped put these terrible, true events in Ponchatoula's rearview mirror."


Thursday, November 9, 2017

Wednesday morning I made a Freudian slip referring to the “Chester County Statehouse”

Wednesday morning I made a Freudian slip referring to the “Chester County Statehouse”

My wife corrected me, “The Pennsylvania Statehouse”. 

But when I thought about it, yes, It’s the Chester County Statehouse. 

Chester County was the traditionally forever Republican Kingdom in the wealthiest County in PA since about 1854. That makes it the powerhouse of the Republicans in Pennsylvania State Government. Or it was until Tuesday. 

Two Democratic County commissioners will complete the Democratic transition. 

It began changing well before Trump. I think when George W. Bush crashed the economy. 



From: 
The Bomb Shelter and my Uncle’s Little Store. 

I walked to 1st grade at Carl O Benner Elementary School, mostly downhill from my home at 539 Black Horse Hill Road.  

In September of 1949, soon after my first day in school, all the students were herded into the lowest floor of the school next door, Gordon Jr. High School.  

In 1949, while other kids covered their heads under their desk, we sat on the basketball court that was in a pit on the lowest floor of the Gordon Jr. High.  

It’s a scene etched into my memory. I asked the principal if we were there because the bomb couldn’t get through all the floors above us. He smiled and said “yes, that’s about it.”  

Having a real bomb shelter was an upgrade on the usual “duck and cover” other kids did.  

The walk back home was mostly uphill, which didn’t bother me. I liked walking over the Graham Avenue bridge over the Pennsylvania Railroad where I could often see a steam engine smoke up the entire bridge. The steam engine moved short trains of sometimes just one car in and out of the sidings in Coatesville.  

Trains were fun but on the way home from school I usually walked three mostly downhill blocks to my Uncle Nick’s store where I would “work” restocking candy, weeding out the broken hard pretzels in the hard pretzel jar and putting out new magazines and taking down the old ones. I would also put out and take down comic books. Reading comic books and an occasional magazine was how I learned to read, and love reading.  

I still eat the broken pieces of hard pretzels first. 

Like all children I was aware of everything going on around me. Unlike my 74 year old self, my 6 year old ears picked up every spoken word. I had no idea what the Italian words meant. They were usually funny words because the men laughed.  

Sometimes the men talked about “the horses” and “the horses in the back”. 
I wanted to see The horsies.  

I was at the why stage. After the thousandth time I asked to see the horsies, my Daddy took me way in the back of my Uncle’s store. He slid open a heavy door. Angry looking men with phones turned and looked at us. A green chalk board was in front of them. 
My Dad said, “He wanted to see the horsies.” 

The bookie wasn’t in my Uncles store. I guess my Uncle’s store was a kind of emergency exit. It wasn’t my Uncles store anyway, he rented.  

Much later a friend told me when he was 6 years old the county sheriff was eating at his dad’s restaurant. He excitedly brought the sheriff to see the “one armed bandit”. His dad had to get rid of the “one armed bandit”. A much better story than mine. 

Politics  

Politics was talked about at Uncle Nick’s store. Not so much issues. More general.   
Democrats were steelworkers. Republicans were doctors, sometimes judges and at times somewhat shady criminal types.  

Local Police were all OK. They never paid for anything. State police from the “coal region” were to be avoided by both steelworker Democrats and shady Republicans. 
This is just how I think. It’s automatic, since sometime in 1949-50 when I was in first grade and learned about “politics” from the men talking in my Uncle Nicks store:


Organized crime is impossible without cooperating public officials. 

Look for a few county workers taking early retirements. 

A bunch of black Coatesville Republicans that were Republicans since Richard Legree was chair of CCRC Area 14 have changed to Democrat in the past year. 

There's going to be a period when Republicans can't help out organized crime and Democrats aren't into it yet. I don't know how it will happen, but organized crime can't exist without help from corrupt public officials. 

The transition from Republican to Democrat could be rough on people like the Norcini family. David & Daniel over at the Junkyard on Elm St. in Coatesville are allegedly colors wearing Road Runner members. I don’t think they run drugs. Joe Carroll told me that the Coatesville PD keeps an eye on them.

David and Daniel were allegedly put in Jefferson Hospital by some Hell’s Angels members in March of 2009. The Norcini’s began building their junkyard in Coatesville a few months later.

“Biker bar fight 
Those involved are not speaking out about a biker brawl that broke out March 5 at a neighborhood bar. 

Details of the fight at Quattro Bar and Grille, 2535 S. 13th. St., are vague as gang members and bar patrons have been mum on what happened that night at 11:24 p.m., Detective Danielle Tolliver of South Detective Division said. 

Four men wearing “Road Runner” jackets were taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. One had head trauma, but all were in stable condition. A group of Pagans arrived at the hospital to visit the men, Tolliver said. 

Another man, a bar patron, was taken to Methodist Hospital in stable condition, Tolliver said. 

To report information, call South Detectives at 215–686–3013.” 

From:
https://southphillyreview.com/bad-medicine-3955e6dd6b81

SEE:
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

AND

Friday, October 19, 2012