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.
Keith Gargus is a good baseball player. He was a ringer in games between the ATF & FBI on Long Island, NY.
Keith sold recording tapes to the FBI & ATF in New York City deep under Manhattan in a copper mesh lined room. I think Keith worked for Memorex back in 1970s to 1999.
When I lived in Montgomery County I looked for old furniture & cheap Chinese made stuff at the Perkiomenville Auction & Flea Market.
Once just as I arrived in the outer parking lot about 500 feet from the Auction, PA State Troopers pulled up. The signal that the Troopers arrived got to the market before they could walk in. The Troopers were looking for guns.
When he left Coatesville to live in North Carolina, Keith gave me the ATF hat he wore in baseball games with the FBI. He said "don't wear it in public."
"I researched gun trafficking for four years for my book Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. In the process I traveled from the biggest firearms trade show in the world, in Las Vegas, to the open air drug markets of Baltimore, to the mass graves of Mexico. The investigation left me staggered by the scale of the trafficking and by America’s political failure to take basic measures to stop it.
Between 2007 and 2019, more than 179,000 firearms were captured in Mexico and five Central American countries and traced to gun shops and gun factories in the United States. Mexico’s foreign ministry believes this is the tip of the iceberg, and estimates thatmore than two million guns crossed the Rio Grande over the last decade.
The weapons originate in the legal US gun market – the biggest in the world by far, with 393 million firearms in civilian hands, according to the last count. They then cross into a parallel black market through four main methods: a private sale loophole; straw buyers (people with clean records paid to buy guns); theft from gun shops; and the sale of parts to make un-serialized weapons, or “ghost guns”.
Traffickers take these guns from states with looser laws, such as Virginia and Georgia, to cities with stricter laws, including Washington and New York, which are suffering from sharp increases in gun violence. They also smuggle them south to Mexico, over the 2,000-mile border, hidden in cars and trucks.
In Florida, smugglers stash firearms in cargo ships that sail across the Caribbean and far beyond. “You go to a shipper and you drop off a box and you say what’s in there, ‘household goods.’ They don’t care,” said Steve Barborini, a former agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. For US guns, this is a commonroute to Honduras."
An iron river of illegal guns flows from the US to Mexico, Central America, and across the hemisphere
Fri 16 Apr 2021 06.23 EDT
Keith Gargus lived in a home inside Valley Forge Park and commuted to New York when he was selling recording tapes to the FBI & ATF. The Perkiomenville Auction & Flea Market is on his on the way.
Keith moved to Coatesville, PA. He was very active working for the Coatesville PA Democratic Committee and the Election campaign for Barack Obama in the 2008 Election
He doesn’t like how he looks in the photo below. Keith is plowing for the Coatesville Community Garden we had in the Fifth Ward:
Keith with Ed Rendell
AND THERE'S THIS:
I wonder what the Vietnam veterans in Coatesville were thinking when their sleep was interrupted by fully automatic fire from an AK-47 on May 18, 2007.
“Kathy McDonnell has a colorful way of describing what could happen if the Castle Doctrine's expanded.
"What this bill does is basically create what I call the Dr. Seuss defense," said McDonnell, "You can shoot 'em in your car, you can shoot 'em on your roof, you can shoot 'em on the porch, you can shoot 'em just about anywhere, if you have a legal right to be there."
McDonnell is with the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, and is a Legislative liaison for the Pennsylvania District Attorney's Association, which represents all the DA's across the state. She said even a case like a drug dealer who shoots a rival could end up getting thrown out under the expanded law.”
President Reagan promoted China as a manufacturer of U.S. corporations products. China made it Americans bought it. It was “Morning in America” we could spend family time at the pool while Chinese people made our stuff with what we called “slave labor.”
When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spoke repeatedly of how to use China as a manufacturing facility for U.S. corporations I called it the U.S./China Chamber of Commerce. The location, location, location for manufacturing was China, China & China.
More recently the U.S. Chamber had conferences in the Middle East. Was the theme “look what extravagant wealth can get you” like an Amway rally? Or, Look what your government bailout can buy. I don’t really know.
The pandemic mostly strengthened the manufacture products in China that Americans consumed economic syndrome.
Furniture can be made to outlast the people that buy it, and passed on to future generations. Americans move from home to home a lot. When they do sometimes their furniture won't fit. There is a constant need for new furniture.
One of the few U.S. manufacturing industries not totally damaged by the pandemic is the furniture manufacturing industry.
In the mid-1960s I worked for a short time in a small furniture making shop in Hanover PA called Hans Koch Works. Hans was maybe 25 years old newly immigrated from Germany. Hans imported a carving machine from Austria. He offered to train me to operate it. It generated lots of dust and I have asthma. I refused the offer.
The real expert cabinet maker at Hans Koch Works was Ferdinand Wolf. Fred was trained in the German apprentice system in pre-II World War Germany.
Freddy made a scale model of a dresser I transferred from original size to a miniature size in a plan drawing. He pointed out that I got some of the transfers from metric to American wrong. He used mostly hand tools.
Fred was an artillery man in Hitler's Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. He forced marched with others to be captured by Americans. Fred saw Hanover PA on the map and decided to spend the rest of his life in Hanover.
“Still Made in the U.S.A."
“The rising tide of the global economy was supposed to float all boats, but as the Bassetts soon discovered, it didn’t. Yes, American consumers initially benefited from the availability of cheaper furniture made offshore, and the workers in poor countries started enjoying better lives. But the Americans who actually made things — and whose labor made families like the Bassetts rich — began to suffer.
With local factories closing, families began losing their jobs, their homes and their life savings, along with their hopes. “If somebody wants to predatorily kill your industry and take market share, that’s fine as long as the consumer can get it a little cheaper?” Bassett’s son Wyatt asked Macy at one point. “But what happens when they destroy your industry and then raise prices 30 percent once all your factories are gone?”
What had been a thriving business was soon decimated. From 2000 to 2002, furniture imports from China jumped 121 percent, and by 2003, offshoring had cost American furniture makers and related companies 73,000 jobs.
Faced with closing his factories and laying off loyal employees, Bassett chose to take a stand. Instead of capitulating — selling out for zillions and letting his workers go hang — he cut costs, upgraded product lines and kept layoffs to a minimum. Bassett, a “Republican-leaning independent,” in Macy’s words, even turned to the federal government for help, pushing representatives to enforce trade regulations against the Chinese. The company broke even in 2012, with shareholder equity at $114.5 million, which Bassett considered a victory.”
Most U.S. furniture manufacturers relied on China to make their furniture. IKEA furniture shelves were empty during the pandemic.
A few U.S. furniture manufactures did not use China to make their products. They continued to operate and send furniture to stores during the pandemic. But they were the only furniture makers to do that. It’s why new furniture now sits on the store floors for minutes instead of months.
***
“Mr. Wang noted that more than 80 countries at the United Nations Human Rights Council had expressed support for China’s actions in Xinjiang, the far western region where the authorities have detained and interned Uyghur Muslims in a campaign the United States declared a genocide.
As a result, the world is increasingly dividing into distinct, if not purely ideological, camps, with both China and the United States hoping to lure in supporters. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that Mr. Wang secured an endorsement of its Xinjiang policies, as well as its quashing of dissent in Hong Kong, from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, though a Saudi statement did not mention Xinjiang.
China’s most striking alignment is with Russia, where Mr. Putin has long complained about American hegemony and its use — abuse, in his view — of the global financial system as an instrument of foreign policy.”
The really scary part:
“The Russian foreign minister arrived in China last Monday railing about American sanctions and saying the world needed to reduce its reliance on the U.S. dollar.”
“In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power—from the 1890s through the Cold War—and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, boldly laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.”
The VA gave my Uncle Fred maggots to eat the dead flesh on his foot caused by a fungus. A medic saw the fungus after he took his boots off for the first time in three months of fighting in France. The Army sent him to England to treat his foot.
While in England the Combat Engineer squad he was a part of were killed in an accidental explosion. He thought it might not of happened if he was there. Uncle Fred landed on D-Day on Omaha Beach to clear a path for tanks. The part that really haunted him was the accidental explosion he thought he could have stopped.
I guess they called it a war injury because maggots are cheap. Fred Pitcherella is 4th from right.
"The science is clear and treatments are available now. Everyone—advocates, researchers, and officials alike—say there’s reason to expect even more progress, and more solutions, soon. But for decades, the Department of Veterans Affairs has focused on data collection that experts say will not increase health care outcomes and has ignored study after study as 250,000 veterans continue to suffer symptoms that make it impossible to lead healthy, pain-free lives.
* * * *
"As veterans returned to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, after Operation Desert Storm, Kimberly Sullivan started seeing symptoms that startled her:
“Our leadership, the current administration, is meeting with senior leaders and is interested in military exposures,” Rumm said. He also said that, at his level, “We’re committed to doing whatever needs to be done.”
And 30 years after a three-day ground war, Sullivan has more good news about treatments that can be used now by the hundreds of thousands of veterans sick with Gulf War illness."
“Here are our veterans in their 20s and 30s, trying to come back from a deployment and trying to go back to full-time civilian work and go to school on the GI Bill and raise a family,” Sullivan said. “And they should have been able to do all that—and more—at that age. And it was very clear that many of our veterans were having difficulty with that.”
“Initially, the question was, was this a stress-related disorder—was this post-traumatic stress disorder?” Sullivan told The War Horse. “And it became clear relatively quickly that that was not the case.”
Early on, everyone had a theory about what caused the cluster of symptoms known as Gulf War illness: Vaccines. Depleted uranium. Sand fleas. Oil fires. Some things have been ruled out, like the depleted uranium. Others didn’t make sense, because not everyone rolled into Kuwait, where the oil fires raged, and not everyone encountered sand fleas. And the neurological symptoms were puzzling.
The doctors, as well as veterans’ advocates, could also see, almost immediately, that having a lot of symptoms and a lot of possible causes would make it easy to obfuscate the real issue—and avoid paying for the disability benefits of as many as 250,000 troops.
The problem seemed obvious, even to a group of scientists known for not jumping to conclusions. In the early 1990s, as the Boston researchers and doctors talked to sick veterans, they started to see a trend: chemicals, specifically acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors.
It started with the DEET cream, which troops used to protect themselves from insect-borne illness: AChE inhibitor. Then, as the war geared up and fear grew that Saddam Hussein would hit U.S. service members with nerve agent, ground troops took pyridostigmine bromide—a drug approved for treatment of myasthenia gravis but experimental as a nerve agent blocker: AChE inhibitor. They washed their laundry, often by hand, with another pesticide, permethrin: AChE inhibitor. And then, as troops moved into Iraq, the United States blew up containers filled with sarin gas: AChE inhibitor.
“Our Gulf War veterans really had a unique toxic soup of exposures—of similar types of chemicals,” Sullivan said.
With each slather of cream or pill taken, the troops increased their doses.
Sullivan, with Roberta White leading a team as the head of the neuropsychology programs at Boston University and VA Boston Medical Center, began to look at whether the chemicals could be causing the illness.
“We’ve come to see that Gulf War illness is related to these exposures,” Sullivan said.
Acetylcholine sends the messages that tell your smooth muscles to contract, your vessels to push blood, your tears to flow, and your heart rate to slow. It also makes sure food moves through your gut, enables you to learn and remember, and sends messages to the muscles that control the airways in your lungs.
The stress of battle, wonky immune system response after exposure to smoke and dust, and high heat levels may have increased the problems for some people, but ultimately, those factors did not matter: The research shows exposure to AChE inhibitors causes the series of symptoms experienced by Gulf War veterans, Sullivan said.
When the researchers realized those acetylcholine messages were not getting through for veterans who had served in Desert Storm, Sullivan said they coined a term more recent veterans may be familiar with: toxic wounds.
But even though the researchers say they suspected early on what caused Gulf War illness, three decades’ worth of frustrations followed, reading like conspiracy theories from a crime novel: misleading claims from Veterans Affairs that the veterans’ issues were psychological rather than physical; VA officials’ refusals to look at animal research or research that didn’t include a defined dose of toxins—a requirement researchers classify as impossible; the government releasing the information five years after the fact that a cloud of sarin gas had made its way to the troops; and, to this day, an acrimonious relationship between advocates for the sick veterans and VA that includes battles over even the name of the series of ailments that struck the veterans: Gulf War illness.
War planners for the United States projected as many as 40% of their troops would be lost in battle. The losses were much lower: 148 Americans were killed in action, with another 145 losses to nonhostile actions, such as vehicle accidents. But as veterans returned home from the Gulf War in 1991, as many as one-third of them—approximately 250,000—developed symptoms of Gulf War illness. There was no known cure, just lives filled with bouts of pain and exhaustion so extreme that some veterans spent those days in bed. There were rashes and debilitating headaches. There were brain cancers.
Gulf War illness has similarities to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. And, just as people who deal with those illnesses have fought for validation, sick veterans continue, 30 years later, to fight to prove service connection for disability benefits for an illness that, until recently, couldn’t be physically seen, with 80% of their claims being disapproved, as well as fighting to show the symptoms are physical—not psychiatric.
Still, just as with the medical advancements made for war—prosthetics and blood-staunching bandages and brain injury tests—the treatments, some already in use, for Gulf War illness may also help those who suffer with everything from fibromyalgia to multiple sclerosis to Alzheimer’s, all of which may be tied to brain inflammation.
And the advocates, researchers, and VA officials all say it’s time to move forward: to fix the disability claims issue, to celebrate research that will soon produce more treatments and possibly biomarkers for diagnosis, to work together for future generations of veterans.
“We can’t go back in time,” Peter Rumm, director of pre-9/11-era environmental health services at VA’s Post-Deployment Health Services, told The War Horse. “All we can do is go forward. And we’re going forward. We’re trying to do a lot of research and a lot of therapy, and if those things come about, veterans will be served better.”
After years of funding in spite of the fighting, new research is coming that may provide relief for veterans sick with Gulf War illness, as well as for other diseases where both the cause and the cure remain mysteries.
And as a new administration settles into the executive offices, some see hope for veterans past and future in a president who believes his son may have died from a war-zone exposure, as well as politicians from both sides of the aisle who say they support research and benefits for veterans exposed to toxins in war zones.
“I do think the current administration has a vested interest given that they personally have suffered from military toxic exposures and losing family members,” Sullivan said. President Joe Biden has said he wonders if his son Beau’s glioblastoma, as well as his death, came about after exposure to burn pits while he served in the Army. “I think that brought it home, that this is an issue that really needs to finally be taken much more seriously,” Sullivan said.
That connection led to an election campaign plan that included making it easier for veterans to get disability benefits after exposure to burn pits or environmental toxins, as well as increasing research money by $300 million to look at both toxic exposures and traumatic brain injuries.
That commitment appears to have already seeped down.
“Our leadership, the current administration, is meeting with senior leaders and is interested in military exposures,” Rumm said. He also said that, at his level, “We’re committed to doing whatever needs to be done.”
And 30 years after a three-day ground war, Sullivan has more good news about treatments that can be used now by the hundreds of thousands of veterans sick with Gulf War illness."
Swanson TV Dinner millionaire Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is keeping Fox News alive.
Tucker skirts outright lies mostly by posing carefully scripted questions.
Fox News is an unofficial propaganda source for the Republican Party. What will happen to the Republican Party base without Fox News cable TV?
KKK leader David Duke on Tucker Carlson.
“David Duke RADIO SHOW” July 9, 2020
“…He doesn’t use the word ‘white’ very often, but that’s the underlying message that he’s showing. And he says that there is massive racism in America against white people, while at the same time saying there’s no systematic racism. But people get the message.
I went to this Southern Poverty Law Center Meeting. At the meeting they showed a slide. On one side was a heavily tattooed man with a swastika on his forehead. The other side a photo of a man wearing a white shirt and tie. They said the dangerous one is wearing the white shirt and tie.
It’s the second voting-systems company to file suit against Fox over the bogus allegations aired by President Donald Trump’s allies after the 2020 election.
Cable TV is dying but white nationalist leader Tucker Carlson will stay alive on the internet.
I think the important question is will the Republican Party base of mostly old white men and a few young white supremacists be consequential without Fox News on cable TV?
Coatesville’s not on the BuzzFeed list of Police with Clearview AI facial recognition software. Caln & several other Chester County PDs are on the list. Coatesville police talk to citizens & citizens talk to Coatesville police to know who is who. It’s called community policing.
Search through BuzzFeed News’ database to find out if the police department in your community is among the hundreds of taxpayer-funded entities that used Clearview AI’s facial recognition.
Elwood Dixon and me tried to educate Black voters on the importance of voting in off year elections, the elections for state and local candidates. Those elections decide on who gets to vote in presidential elections.
The usual answer I got from Black voters is “I vote for the president.”
The reason to vote is making your communities voice heard. Don’t let Republicans take your voice away. Vote in all elections.
"In The Keystone State
In Pennsylvania last week, county election officials from across the commonwealth told lawmakers on Tuesday that they’re burnt out and beleaguered after rolling out a new vote-by-mail program during the contentious 2020 race, the Capital-Star previously reported.
The local officials said they felt defeated by vagaries and tight deadlines in the law the General Assembly passed in 2019, which they spent much of the last year asking lawmakers to amend.
Now, with barely two months to go until the May primary race, they’re preparing to hold another election under conditions that they say are less than ideal.
“The stress level in our profession is at a breaking point,” Lawrence County Election Director Ed Allison said Tuesday, when he testified alongside four other county election officials at a hearing held by the Senate Election Integrity Commission. Senate Republican leaders convened the committee this year to study election policies and recommend changes to Pennsylvania’s election code.
Nearly two dozen election directors departed their jobs in 2020, when the new vote-by-mail law required them to complete new administrative tasks under deadlines that left little room for error.
The seismic change to Pennsylvania’s election system became more difficult when COVID-19 hit last March, and the state promoted mail-in ballots as a safe alternative to in-person voting. County election bureaus had to mail out more than 1.5 million mail-in ballots in the May 2020 primary and 3 million in November’s General Election.
One Pennsylvania lawmaker, Rep. Jim Gregory, R-Blair, has called for the repeal of no-excuse mail-in ballots in a memo sent to his colleagues Tuesday.
That expansion of voting rights was approved in fall 2019 in a compromise between Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly. Known as Act 77, it was approved by all but two Republicans. Gregory was among those who voted for it.
The Impact on Voters of Color
For voters of color, many of these Republican-led measures that would cut voting hours or add burdensome steps to casting an absentee ballot feel like an attempt by White lawmakers to retain power in a rapidly diversifying nation.
That feeling resonates for Black activists in Georgia, where Black voters accounted for nearly half of the growth in the state’s voter population between 2000 and 2019, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds the center and Stateline.)
Republican-sponsored bills in Georgia would reduce absentee voting periods, eliminate mobile voting units and increase voter ID requirements for absentee ballots. Another bill would allow poll watchers at tabulation areas.
“They’re giving people this stamp of approval and saying you can challenge as many people as you want,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, of the poll watchers. “It’s a vestige of Jim Crow.”
In Iowa, Republican lawmakers passed a bill that reduced early voting by nine days to 20 and cut Election Day hours by an hour to 8 p.m. The measure, which Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed earlier this month, also criminalizes ballot collection by people outside of a household, immediate family or caregiver.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino rights group, is now suing the Hawkeye State to repeal the law, which it says would hurt people with multiple jobs. Iowa is also an English-only state, meaning all ballots are solely written in English. Latino advocates worry that their work assisting non-English speakers with their ballot would now be illegal.
“Hopefully in a courtroom, it will be clear that this has nothing to do with voter security,” said Joe Henry, the group’s Iowa political director. “It’s voter restriction. It’s voter suppression. It’s racism. It’s targeting new voters.”
His organization, which during the pandemic has been fighting for the safety of the thousands of workers in Iowa’s meatpacking plants, is going to have to shift a lot of its attention to educating Latino voters about these new law changes, he said.
In a news release, Reynolds said it was her duty to “protect the integrity of every election,” and give Iowans more confidence in their vote.
The Ongoing Fight
Bills that would expand ballot access still vastly outnumber those that would restrict access for voters. According to the Brennan Center, lawmakers in 43 states introduced more than 700 bills that would widen access by allowing absentee voting without a state-approved excuse, adding same-day voter registration and streamlining the ballot-counting process.
The Vermont Senate, for example, passed legislation that would allow the state to mail ballots to all voters in general elections. Meanwhile, the Illinois House passed a bill that would increase the number of ballot drop boxes.
Many of these bills, written mostly by Democratic lawmakers, attempt to build off an election that was more reliant on voting by mail. During the pandemic, voting by mail was seen by election experts as a safe, convenient way to cast a ballot. It’s also a method of voting that does not benefit one party over another, several studies show.
It is frustrating that, after such a successful election with record turnout, some states would want to roll back access to the ballot, said Patti Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, a voter education nonprofit. It is especially troubling that this “voter suppression” is built off fabrications by Trump and his allies in the aftermath of an unsuccessful election, she said.
“Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric has consequences, and those consequences are that many voters believed it,” said Brigham. “This is obviously opportunistic to continue to play to those who believe there was massive voter fraud in 2020, which we know was completely untrue.”
Many Republicans still hold onto that belief and want to add what they see as commonsense protections to the election system. To some conservatives, these measures also are important to bring consistency to election procedures that varied during the pandemic, when local election officials tried to find ways to expand voting by mail without definitive state guidance.
