How Much Do We Care?

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this.  On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die.  Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.”

NPR.org

This is a question I asked in 2017. What country had the second-highest mortality from noncommunicable conditions — like diabetes, heart disease or violence — and the fourth highest from infectious disease? Also, from adolescence to adulthood to old age, what country has the highest chance of dying an early death?

The answer is the United States of America. Where else, since the U.S. is the only developed country in the world without universal health care? Then why would Donald Trump nominate RFK, Jr., an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy follower with no medical background who is the least qualified person for guarding the health of Americans as Secretary of Health and Human Services?

Timothy Snyder said it best in looking at Trump’s cabinet picks to date:

“Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.

“The foundation of modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population.  We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments.  We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose.  Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy. 

“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this.  On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die.  Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.”

The Republican Party itself has been on the same path with their efforts to dismantle healthcare legislation such as Obamacare in the name of downsizing government.

A recent New York Times Business Insider article by Eduardo Porter highlighted a recent study by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of 16 of the richest countries in the world that set out to assess our nation’s health.

The results are devastating and show how far America has fallen behind in caring for its citizens.

This problem should have nothing to do with ideology, and whether access to affordable health care should be a privilege or a right. Too many Americans are dying of drug overdose and violence. Too many Americans suffer from depression, a major cause of drug abuse.

And too many Americans are obese, making them less productive and more prone to accidents in the workplace. “The United States ranks in the bottom fourth among the 30 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of days lost to disability,” says Porter. “Women will lose 362 days between birth and their 60th birthday: men about 336. Mental health problems like depression will account for most.”

But these statistics hide the real problem—rampant income inequality that has caused many of these unhealthy ouitcomes.

The U.S. ranks 106th of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook; with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality, Germany and France are 12th and 20th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.

And the poorer the person, family, or community, the more prone to illness and drug use is that person, or family, or community. This is where the just defeated Senate version of repeal and replace Obamacare bill would have hurt the most—in the poorer red states that voted for President Trump.

“What’s more, the United States’ higher tolerance of poverty undoubtedly contributes to higher rates of sickness and death,” says Porter. “Americans at all socioeconomic levels are less healthy than people in some other rich countries. But the disparity is greatest among low-income groups.”

Finally contributing to our health crisis is the incredible amount of violence—both due to guns (33,000 per year killed by guns), workplace accidents, and drug abuse, that a universal health care system would treat via mental health coverages as well.

In other words, there are much higher costs because we don’t have a healthy healthcare system and we the citizens are paying those costs.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Antonin Scalia’s White, Male Legacy

 Answering Kennedy's Call

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's passing is a shock to die-hard conservatives for good reason. He was the bastion and spokesperson of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which meant any law had to divine the original intentions of the founding white male fathers of our nation.

AK-47

The two students and two teachers at Appalachee High School were killed by a 14-year old student with an AR-15 assault rifle has brought back the debate on the causes of such gun violence than kills more than 30,000 Americans every year.

Wednesday’s mass shooting marked the 45th school shooting of 2024 and the deadliest US school shooting since the March 2023 massacre at The Covenant School in Nashville,” said CNN.

Military-style assault rifles had been banned for 10 years during the Clinton administration, but the Republican-led Bush administration didn’t renew the ban. Why? One man, SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia, was almost solely responsible for the Supreme Court ruling that legalized assault rifles for use by common citizens.

I wrote about it in Huffington Post at the time of Scalia’s death in 2016.

“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's passing is a shock to die-hard conservatives for good reason. He was the bastion and spokesperson of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which meant any law had to divine the original intentions of the slave-owning, landowning, founding white male fathers of our nation, which excluded women and non-landowning males (and slaves, of course) from representation.”

So that meant turning the clock back at least one century to a time when the white male patriarchy still ruled, which was a much less democratic time. Scalia's most noted opinion was to expand Second Amendment gun owners' rights, which 'protected' every citizen's right to own a gun almost without restriction, because he convinced the majority of SCOTUS that the Second Amendment right to bear arms also protected an individual's right of self-defense.

The result has been record gun sales and gun deaths (30,000+ per year), as well as mass shootings, and no limit to the purchase of military-style assault rifles with unlimited magazines. Another little-noted result was the higher incidence of gun violence in households with guns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In fact, "Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that living in a home where guns are kept increased an individual's risk of death by homicide by between 40 and 170 percent," said the Law Center. "Another study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology similarly found that "persons with guns in the home were at greater risk of dying from a homicide in the home than those without guns in the home." This study determined that the presence of guns in the home increased an individual's risk of death by homicide by 90 percent.

Whereas other developed countries without that Second Amendment 'right', such as Australia, do not allow the purchase of a gun for self-defense to be a sufficient reason for owning such a weapon. And Australia has not had a single incidence of mass shootings since 1996 and the passing of its gun control legislation.

Does it make sense for anyone to own a military-style assault rifle for self-defense when it was manufactured for wartime? The definition of the word, assault, means just that. It was made to assault an enemy during wartime. What purpose could it have in a home, even as a semi-automatic—where children live?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

2nd Amendment Doesn't Protect Children

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Gun rights advocates, the NRA, and Republican Party have never been serious when calling for the enforcement of the 2^nd Amendment, because they have never called for the enforcement of a child’s right of self-defense, the most vulnerable affected by gun violence, only adults’.

Otherwise, they would support U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s first-of-its-kind advisory declaring gun violence a national public health crisis and recommending it be treated as such.

SFGate

The 40-page publication from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released this week outlines the scope of firearm violence, its impact on victims and communities and a slew of policy suggestions for lawmakers, community leaders and health systems.

Dr. Murthy’s advisory said that firearm-related injury has been the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents since 2020 — when it surpassed car accidents — and that ever-common instances of gun violence are taking not only a physical but also a mental toll on survivors, families and community members at large.

A recent national survey found that 54% of U.S. adults or their family members have experienced a firearm-related incident. And, linking gun violence to mental health, the advisory also notes that nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults say they worry either sometimes, almost every day or daily about a loved one becoming a victim.

Some of the advisory's recommendations — which, despite being strongly worded, are not enforceable — include increasing federal funding for gun violence prevention research, more community investment in educational programs and mental health resources and nationwide policy changes like an assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

AMA President Bruce A. Scott, M.D,, immediately responded to Dr. Murthy’s advisory: “Across the country, physicians everywhere treat patients and families afflicted by firearm violence. We see the physical and emotional harm firsthand, and we dread the too-often conversations with parents, spouses, and even children in which we tell them their loved one did not make it.

“Firearm violence is indeed a public health crisis in the United States, and the data now show it touches the majority of Americans. We applaud the Office of the Surgeon General for issuing this advisory and for outlining an evidence-based public health approach to addressing firearm violence,” said Dr. Scott.

I wrote a 2016 Huffington Post piece when the American Medical Association first adopted a policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution," at their annual convention.

That was when the tide began turning in some states and a powerful new gun control group emerged called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom's Demand Action. It was when former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was about to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but because it lacked foot soldiers merged with the women’s groups and now totals 3.5 million supporters.

Maybe that is why an eight-member Supreme Court at the time allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in the massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates at the time.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were in fact enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia banned semiautomatic rifles.

Among the stark statistics: 48,204 people have died from firearm-related injuries (including suicides, homicides and unintentional deaths) in 2022, after that number reached a near three-decade high the previous year, reports NPR.

The rate of firearm-related suicide grew by 20% between 2012 and 2022, with the highest increases among young people between 10 and 34 years old—our children!

And Nicholas Kristof wrote an earlier NYTimes Op-ed that said more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States -- a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

A public health approach, Murthy said in the report, can guide the nation’s strategy and actions “as it has done in the past with successful efforts to address tobacco-related disease and motor vehicle crashes.”

Our Surgeon General has now begun a national discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics--eradication of the carriers of that violence, which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons in all states.

Can we hope as much, given the Republican Party has opposed almost any form of gun regulation, given the upcoming Presidential election?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

"Australians Not Like U.S."

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Huffington Post

We happened to be in Australia in 2015 when this Sydney journalist voiced his reaction to another mass killing in America. "The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns."

And as I update this column today, there were four more mass shootings on the first weekend of summer, 2024—27 injured or killed this last weekend.

We are two countries with almost identical demographics, but where the Australian minimum wage for full-time, working adults is more than $16Aus per hour and Australian's have created a health care system that pays for all normal health care costs (as opposed to catastrophic events), though hospital care is free for every Australian citizen.

Yet we cannot control the gun violence that Australians have been able to. It is a startling contrast that I first wrote about during the Obama administration.

"Australia is not like the U.S." said commentator Michael Pascoe in the Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama's remarks on the Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 8 guns at home, in addition to the 6 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours."

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. "Unlike the US," said Pascoe, "we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind."

Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

Current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in 1996. There hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since. At the heart of the new laws was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country's new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a "genuine reason" for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns," said Pasco. "It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way."

It has been known for years by those who research gun violence that more gun killings occur in households owning guns. A new survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine narrows down some of the causal relationship between guns and death by finding conclusively that having a gun in your home makes you more likely to successfully attempt suicide. The authors of the survey also found with a lesser degree of certainty that people with guns in their home are more likely to be the victims of a homicide.

According to data gleaned from State and Justice departments for the period between 2001-2011, there have, in fact, been many, many more Americans killed by gun violence than by terrorism. During that 10-year period, some 130,347 have lost their lives to gun violence, compared to the approximately 3,000 Americans killed in acts of terrorism.

"It's all fodder for the deranged fanatics of the American gun lobby, with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. It's fuel for the paranoid interpretation of a line in the constitution that is a blatant anachronism," said the study

We have to be a very sick society to have allowed this to happen. We are so good at preventing foreign terrorists from attacking us, but not protecting Americans from domestic terrorists. We should understand that gun violence itself is an act of terror. And those that support unrestricted use and purchase of guns are the sponsors of domestic terrorism.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

A Greater Lawlessness Causes Greater Gun Violence

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

I wrote this Huffington Post piece in 2017 after the October 1 killing of 58 people with bump stock-equipped assault rifles at a Las Vegas music festival. It was one in a series on the greater lawlessness tearing apart Americans.

Nothing has changed with the Supreme Court now deciding the executive government, in the form of its ATF agency, did not have the power to outlaw bump stocks because when equipped with same, an assault rifle didn’t fit the exact definition of a machine gun, which is banned for civilian use.

The SCOTUS majority has caused a greater lawlessness because there is now no law or regulation to prevent the use of bump stocks in more mass killings.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has been the credo of NRA, gun lobby and most Republicans since the 1980s when gun manufacturers came up with automatic pistols, so that guns could fire more rapidly.

But Las Vegas shooter Stephan Paddock had no discernible mental illness, criminal record — or anger problems, according to his brothers. The NRA will try in vain to find a reason this inhuman act was committed when there is no reason, other than the fact that military-style weapons are legal in most of America and easily obtainable.

Paddock’s assault rifles reportedly fired 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes, which is more than one round per second (1.5 rounds, actually). How is that not a machine gun?

Only guns can kill that many people — always the most vulnerable unable to defend themselves. His brothers didn’t even know he was a gun nut who owned more than 30 weapons and was able to smuggle in 10 suitcases containing 23 of those weapons without any Mandalay Bay Hotel staff even noticing such an oddity. Who needs that many suitcases in a hotel room?

President Trump’s administration did ban bump stocks at the time. But not for long with the Supreme Court majority now stepping in to make them legal again.

No existing laws now protect children in elementary and high schools from military-style assault rifles because in Justice Alito’s words, congress must decide, which said congress hasn’t been able to do.

For shame on the conservative SCOTUS majority.

Australia, the country most like US in population, had a similar gun problem until 36 people were killed in Port Arthur, and Prime Minister John Howard was able to pass strict gun control laws in 1996, the same year of the Port Arthur massacre. There hasn’t been a mass killing since then in Australia.

Australians apparently don’t believe owning an assault rifle is the ticket to manhood. Their gun control laws are maintained by weapon buyback programs and the requirement that gun owners must belong to a certified gun club.

How did our gun laws become so lax that military-style weapons are this easy to obtain? It was a little-known Supreme Court decision authored by its most extreme ideologue, Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1980s which said that said gun owners no longer must heed the constitutional Second Amendment stricture that owners of such guns be members of a well-regulated militia.

Our founding fathers must have put the works, “a well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment for a reason. Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was not a member of a well-regulated militia.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

'Armed and Ready'...for What?

Answering Kennedy’s Call

NYTimes.com

The NY Times front-page picture of a teacher “armed and ready” to wear a gun in her classroom shocked and disheartened me. I remember the fear I felt as a small child hunkering under classroom desks in civil defense drills during the cold war.

And the irony of teachers wanting to arm themselves to protect their schools shouldn’t be lost with the current celebration of the killing of Al Qaeda’s number two—Ayman al Zuwahiri. This is looking in the rear-view mirror of foreign terrorism now vanquished, when domestic terrorism holds the greatest threat to our national security.

How does that teacher think her children will feel seeing her arming herself, and other staff whose job it is to care for them?

“Today, after a seemingly endless series of mass shootings,’ said the NYTimes, “the strategy has become a leading solution promoted by Republicans and gun rights advocates, who say that allowing teachers, principals and superintendents to be ar.med gives schools a fighting chance in case of attack.”

Really? I fear children will learn that violence is the only answer to combat terrorists in schools, in a country that allows weapons of mass destruction to be owned by 18-year-olds as happened in Uvalde, Texas.

More guns have never been the solution to reducing gun violence, as Australia’s history has shown. Australian demographics are similar in many ways to America’s—similar age distribution, wealth distribution, etc.—yet Australia has only had three mass shootings since it banned military-style assault rifles.

That happened because of a 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania. During that event, a gunman killed 35 people and wounded 28 others with a semi-automatic weapon he bought from an ad in the newspaper. Twenty of those people were killed in just a minute and 15 seconds.

Will we ever subdue gun violence in America, which means enforcing the real intent of the Second Amendment by disarming our unregulated militias?

A country such as ours that cannot protect its children from domestic violence is a country that does not care for the welfare of its future generations that once again will have its children cowering under desks because of the threat of legally acquired assault rifles, which are literally weapons of mass destruction.

Harlan Green © 2022

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

Noozhawk.com

I recently attended the 10^th anniversary of the Goleta Dam Dinner held at Lake Los Carneros, on a dam built long before the City of Goleta, California was formed.

Here in this relatively new and still small city, founded in 2002 and nestled beside its famous neighbor, Santa Barbara, were families of all ages and stages happily celebrating not only their sense of community spirit, but the natural beauty of its surroundings that is a unique blend of mountains and ocean located on the central California coast.

This made me realize how successful was the formation of this new, very livable, California city, where I had been privileged to live and help establish, in spite of the many obstacles to the formation of new governmental entities in recent years.

It was a successful community because of the attention paid to both the environment and safety concerns of its citizens—especially the children.

I know Goleta won’t make the list of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Liveability Index that really only pays attention to larger cities, where we don’t see this community spirit and camaraderie.

Vienna was the top city on The Economists’ list, with Australia and Canada each having three cities in its top 10 listing of the better-known cities that made The Economists’ Liveability Index. .

1. 1. Vienna, Austria
2. 2. Melbourne, Australia
3. 3. Sydney, Australia
4. 4. Osaka, Japan
5. 5. Calgary, Canada
6. 6. Vancouver, Canada
7. 7. Toronto, Canada
8. 8. Tokyo, Japan
9. 9. Copenhagen, Denmark
10. 10. Adelaide, Australia

No U.S. city was in the top 20, with Honolulu ranking highest at No. 22. Atlanta came in 33rd place; Pittsburgh, 34th; and Seattle, 36th. New York was all the way down in the 58th spot, in part because of low scores for infrastructure, stability and possible crime issues.

That could be because it’s easier for the residents of smaller cities to confront city councils with their concerns—at least in the U.S. of A. It has to be why the City of Goleta became one of the 50 safest American cities in 2017, fifteen years after its formation, according to a survey by Safewise, a security firm.

What then does “liveability” mean? The Economist is a UK Magazine, which might serve as a bias for a more European civic viewpoint, perhaps. But the issue of safety is certainly at the forefront of making any community livable—especially for children.

And the rising tide of violence in American cities—so much so that in 1992 U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop declared violence a public health emergency—means the situation in American cities hasn’t improved.
 
And now even more so when U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy was fired by President Trump in 2017 after he spoke against gun violence, calling it a public health issue that needs public investment, and stood in support of the victims in Orlando, Florida, where one of the worst mass shootings in American history had just occurred.

It also has much to do with so-called Smart Urban Planning. Architect Suzanne Lennard, and Psychiatrist Henry L. Lennard have written extensively on what makes communities livable in books such as The Forgotten Child (2000, Gondolier Press, Carmel, CA).


Children are safest where there are neighborhood adults with ‘eyes on the streets’ that watch over them, as in many densely-packed European cities with their public squares. Children are also safer where streets are designed and neighborhoods zoned to allow children to roam and explore, rather than be dependent on the auto to transport them to school, for instance, as is the case in many poorly-planned American suburbs.

Such concerns were incorporated into the City of Goleta—that made it such a close-knit, ‘liveable’ community, in my opinion. It was also why attending the Goleta Dam Dinner’s 10^th anniversary was such a special event.

Harlan Green © 2019

 Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Mr. President, Please Don’t Shoot Anyone!

Financial FAQs

Mother Jones/Wikipedia

Where is President Obama and other national leaders when we need them? Where is someone to refute the neo-Nazi lies of President Donald Trump, who no longer has to brag that he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, because his followers and those who believe his lies of Jewish conspiracies and immigrant invasions are carrying out the mass shootings and violence for him; with the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooter and Florida bomber the latest examples?

Any national leader’s voice will do, as this is happening because Donald Trump has been inciting his followers to avoid impeachment from a Democratic-elected congress in the upcoming November election.

Are there not even voices from his own Republican Party who will stand up to his relentless incitements of age-old fears?

It will take a clarion call from a moral national leader to refute the lies that there is an “invasion” of several thousand Central Americans seeking asylum from their own country’s violence, and who are about to overwhelm 325 million American citizens. There is no invasion of immigrants, as even a Fox News host has said.

The number of mass shootings around the country in 2018 continues to climb.  According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a total of 293 mass shooting incidents have occurred as of October 27.

Saturday's mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, with 'multiple casualties' and multiple officers injured, marks the 294th mass shooting. In 2017, the U.S. saw a total of 346 mass shootings. 

Where are our national leaders, including past presidents, who still believe in the rule of law and want to stop this President’s call to violence, a man who will do and say anything to stay in power?

Harlan Green © 2018

ollow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Is Killing Our Children?

Popular Economics Weekly

The fact that the NRA contributed $30 million to Donald Trump’s campaign is all we need to know about who is responsible for deaths of 14 high school children and 3 adults in Florida, or the 58 killed and 851 wounded in Las Vegas.

What made the NRA the killing machine it has become, from the sporting association it once was? The NRA contributed a total of $55 million to 2016 presidential campaigns.

We can thank the Second Amendment of our Constitution that enshrined gun ownership as an unalienable right, and to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 2008 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller that interpreted its original wording: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” to mean every individual has the right to bear arms. But he added, that does not prevent the state from banning “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

We can also thank the gun manufacturers themselves that fund the lobbyists that keep Republican congressmen opposing all forms of gun control. We really should be talking about gun safety, rather than gun control, since gun owners aren’t required to have a license or training to own a gun, as is required for operators of other dangerous machines, like car owners.

We also know the carnage that guns can wreak. In 2016 alone there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths, according to the Center for Disease Control. Just-released autopsy reports from the Las Vegas carnage show the damage done by military-style assault rifles at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.

A military-style assault rifle bullet travels 3,000 feet per second—more than 3 times the speed of a pistol bullet because it is meant to kill instantaneously. It has such power that many bodies of the Las Vegas victims were literally torn apart by bullets that were probably tumbling by the time they reached the victims more than 500 yards away from Stephen Paddock, the Mandalay Bay Hotel’s 32^nd story shooter.

Graph: Mother Jones

Military-style assault rifles have been banned before; during the Tommy gun era of 1930’s gangster wars, and in 1994 after a series of similar mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons. But it had a ten-year sunset clause that was never renewed when Republicans again dominated Congress.

There have been 1600 mass shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children, according to Maureen Dowd.

When will American children again feel protected? When a Congress is elected that admits military-style, semi-automatic guns of all shapes and sizes are “dangerous and unusual weapons” needed only by those trained to use them—the police and members of our military.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

It's Time For 2018

Financial FAQs

We will need the 2018 elections now more than ever to vote out the greed and cowardice of those members of our national legislature who oppose all forms of gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre of innocents.  It is those who have supported gun-rights groups that need to be replaced to protect Americans from such random acts of violence.

Gun-rights groups have allowed the killing of thousands of Americans in mass shootings over the past decade, including 521 mass shootings in just the last 477 days, according to New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.

That’s also because we have to vote out supporters of the largest terrorist organization in the U.S., the National Rifle Association, that opposes any controls on military-style weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, that’s right. Military weapons, such as the AK-47 developed by the Soviets because it was cheap to manufacture and easy to use, are responsible for more American deaths than ISIS; or any other terrorist organization that has killed maybe 15-20 Americans in all, yet we spend $billions trying to eliminate them, but nothing on eliminating American terrorism.

Instead those monies are donated to the candidates that support American anti-gun control organizations, such as the NRA. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were the top recipients of monies from organizations that oppose any form of gun control in 2016, reports Marketwatch — no surprise, since they both ran for president.

Cruz raked in $360,727 to lead the way, according to OpenSecrets.org. Just two years earlier, Cruz had collected $18,300 when he was the junior senator from Texas and lacked any significant influence in the Senate.

Third on the list of recipients of their largesse is House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said of the Las Vegas massacre, “this is not who we are”. Do we really believe him when he was the recipient of $171,977 from such organizations?

Who are we when President Trump, our elected President said, “You came through big for me, so I will come through big for you,” at the NRA’s latest convention?

Graph: Marketwatch.com

That is in fact “who we are” at the moment, but not who we can become if we will take on such American terrorist organizations as the NRA that are responsible for the indiscriminate killing of so many women and children.

The big lie broadcast by gun-rights groups is that banning military-style weapons is banning the Second Amendment right to bear arms. No, that right is protected by the Second Amendment, but not the right to bear arms that slaughter so many innocents.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Guns Kill People

Popular Economics Weekly

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has been the credo of the NRA, gun lobby and most Republicans since the 1980s when gun manufacturers came up with automatic pistols, so that guns could kill more people.

But Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock had no discernable mental illness, criminal record—or anger problems, according to his brothers. The NRA will try in vain to find a reason this inhuman act was committed when there is no reason, other than the fact that semi-automatic military-style weapons are legal in much of America and easily obtainable.

Only guns can kill that many people—including women and children. His brothers didn’t even know he was a gun nut who owned more than 30 weapons, and was able to smuggle in 10 suitcases containing 23 of those weapons without any Mandalay Bay staff even noticing such an oddity. Who needs that many suitcases in a hotel room?

The odds are that nothing will be done about this massacre, as long as President Trump and Republicans are in power. President Trump called it an act of evil, yet he won’t look at the evil in his own soul; the countless times he has lied and cheated to build his real estate empire that have been documented in many of the 3,500 lawsuits he has been involved in.

Australia had a similar gun problem until 36 people were killed in Port Arthur, and Prime Minister John Howard was able to pass strict gun control laws in 1996, the same year of the Port Arthur massacre. There hasn’t been a mass killing since then in Australia.

Australians apparently don’t believe owning an assault rifle is the ticket to manhood. Their gun control laws are maintained by weapon buyback programs and the requirement that gun owners must belong to a certified gun club.

How did our gun laws become so lax that military-style weapons are easy to obtain? It was a little known Supreme Court decision authored by its most extreme ideologue, Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s, which said that gun owners no longer must heed the constitutional Second Amendment stricture that gun owners are members of a well-regulated militia in order to bear arms.

Our founding fathers must have thought it would help to curb the random gun violence we have today.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What Healthcare System Do Americans Want?

Popular Economics Weekly

This is a quiz. What country had the second-highest mortality from noncommunicable conditions — like diabetes, heart disease or violence — and the fourth highest from infectious disease? Also, from adolescence to adulthood to old age, what country has the highest chance of dying an early death?

The United States of America—where else, since the U.S. is the only developed country in the world without universal health care? A recent New York Times Business Insider article by Eduardo Porter highlighted a recent study by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of 16 of the richest countries in the world that set out to assess our nation’s health.

The results are devastating, and show how far America has fallen behind in caring for its citizens. And the new Senate version of repeal and replace Obamacare strips even more benefits and money from Obamacare

This problem should have nothing to do with ideology, and whether access to affordable health care should be a privilege or a right. Too many Americans are dying of drug overdose and violence. Too many Americans suffer from depression, a major cause of drug abuse.

And too many Americans are obese, making them less productive and more prone to accidents in the workplace. “The United States ranks in the bottom fourth among the 30 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of days lost to disability,” says Porter. “Women will lose 362 days between birth and their 60th birthday; men about 336. Mental health problems like depression will account for most.”

Graph: LastTechAge.com

But all of these statistics hide the real problem—rampant income inequality. The U.S. ranks 106^th of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook; with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality, Germany and France are 12^th and 20^th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.

And the poorer the person, family, or community, the more prone to illness and drug use is that person, or family, or community. This is where the Senate version of repeal and replace Obamacare hurts the most—in the poorer red states that voted for President Trump.

“What’s more, the United States’ higher tolerance of poverty undoubtedly contributes to higher rates of sickness and death,” says Porter. “Americans at all socioeconomic levels are less healthy than people in some other rich countries. But the disparity is greatest among low-income groups.”

Finally contributing to our health crisis is the incredible amount of violence—both due to guns (33,000 per year killed by guns), workplace accidents, and drug abuse, that a universal health care system could treat via mental health coverages as well.

In other words, there are much higher costs because we don’t have a healthy healthcare system and we the citizens are paying those costs, rather than those that are pushing the $1.1 trillion in tax cuts that Obamacare utilizes to pay for many of those costs.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Divided States of America

Financial FAQs

It is now becoming obvious that we are not a United States of America. There are many states that restrict voting rights, abortion rights, immigration, even the collective bargaining rights of workers that are no longer able to negotiate for their own living wages.

This is when the media is lamenting the possible breakup of the European Union with Great Britain’s Brexit vote to depart from the EU. But the US is breaking up in far more serious ways, even without the influx of millions of Muslim refugees that Europe has to deal with and is causing its drift to xenophobia and the fear of foreigners.

The US in many ways is still fighting the Civil War of 150 years ago, with the defacto apartheid of poor vs. wealthy neighborhoods, and the police killing of blacks at traffic stops. A recent study by the New York based Center For Policing Equity showed that African Americans are more than 3 times as likely to be beaten, bitten by police dogs, pepper sprayed, Tasered, or shot, according to the New York Times.

There are now 26 right-to-work states that either don’t allow workers to join unions, or pay dues, or bargain collectively for their wages, even when their workplace may be under a union contract. This has resulted in those states having the greatest income inequality and lowest wage-earners.

Graph: Wikipedia

There are a very similar number that restrict abortions—even in the case of rape for women—and restrict voting rights when the Voting Rights Act was gutted by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in 2015.

And it is many of those same states that don’t allow convicted felons that have served their time from voting—as many as 30 percent of voter-age African Americans in southern states, thanks to the War on Drugs, according to Michael Moore’s movie, Where To Invade Next. GW Bush probably only won Florida because some 80,000 ex-felons were stricken from the voting roles—mostly in Democratic-leaning counties.

This is why African-Americans now comprise 50 percent of our 2.3 million prison population when they are 12 percent of our population. It provides the cheap labor that prison factories have used to generate products for most large corporations plus the military—another form of slave labor.

Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, "Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men.” If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, "Florida would no longer be a swing state."

But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole. All told, felony disenfranchisement prevents more than from voting. And of the four states that permanently bar voting by former felons—Kentucky, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia—the latter three are battleground states.

Then there are the gun laws. Only 6 states restrict or outright ban the sale of military-style assault weapons, when more than 30,000 gun deaths are recorded every year, and Orlando-style massacres occur because of unlimited magazine sizes of those same assault weapons.

What is behind the defacto civil war still raging? Many economists says it’s the globalization and export of good jobs to developing countries with cheaper wages that have hurt those blue collar workers in the poorer states.  But too many blame immigrants, or nonwhites, or anyone not belonging to their tribe. But we also have to look at the monopoly power of corporations that have pushed such free trade treaties, suppressing their employees’ wages while paying their executives record incomes.

In fact, these states have in many ways already withdrawn from the United States of America in trumpeting state and local rights over inalienable rights. It is just a modern incarnation of our ongoing Civil War.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Stricter Gun Controls Now Inevitable

Financial FAQs

You know the tide has turned against gun violence when even the American Medical Association calls it a public health menace at the finish of its annual convention.

“CHICAGO – In the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history and with more than 6,000 deaths already in 2016 from gun violence, the American Medical Association (AMA) today adopted policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution,” said its press release.

Additionally, at the Annual Meeting of its House of Delegates, the AMA resolved to actively lobby Congress to overturn legislation that for 20 years has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching gun violence.

This is after the US Senate could not even agree on banning gun purchases for anyone on the terrorism watch list in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre. You know it’s a public health menace when such mass killings are the work of both domestic and foreign terrorists, whether at Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Orlando.

You know more effective gun control measures are coming, including the banning of military assault weapons like the AR-15, when Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed stating that more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States — a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

“When 50 people were shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando,” wrote Kristof, “the toll from gun murders this year rose to somewhere around 6,000 deaths, which means if the trend continues, this year may end up with the highest gun homicide count since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Add to the homicide number the 550 or so victims of police shootings, roughly the same number of accidental gun deaths and the 21,000+ Americans who use a gun to end their own lives, and the total gun mortality number this year may go above 35,000.”

And now the women are getting together, as did those MADD women that enabled stricter drunk driving laws. (You would think the insurance companies would be behind this initiative as well, for all the money in lawsuits they would save.)

Recently, a powerful new gun control group has emerged, called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom’s Demand Action.

This is while former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was getting ready to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but it lacked foot soldiers. So today Bloomberg and the women’s groups have merged together with 3.5 million supporters.

And the nail in the coffin of unregulated gun violence may have been supplied by the now 8-member Supreme Court which allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in last week's massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia ban semiautomatic rifles.

“"With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence," said AMA President Steven J. Stack, M.D. "Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries."

So we can now have a discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics—eradication of the carriers of that violence; which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Please Protect US, Mr. President!

Popular Economics Weekly

What has happened to our gun laws—especially the assault rifle ban that expired in 2004? Australians had the courage to pass tougher gun regulations—Australia’s Prime Minister in particular, at the time. It takes political courage, in other words, something U.S. politicians seem to lack.

Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a close ally of George W. Bush, faced political and public resistance to the laws. After just three months as the country's leader, Howard wore a bulletproof vest as he addressed a hostile 3,000-strong crowd opposed to the reforms.

How did he do it? The current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in a 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania.  The shooter was able to buy his assault rifle, even though later he was later determined by authorities to have an IQ of 11. There hasn’t been a mass shooting in Australia since then.

Twelve days after the Port Arthur massacre, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, announced a sweeping package of gun reforms in a country where firearms had long been considered an essential prop in the national mythology of life in the bush.

“At that stage the gun lobby was the ruling lobby in Australia,” says Philip Alpers, associate professor at the University of Sydney. “What happened at Port Arthur is that they were outpaced, outflanked and outwitted by a man who had the power to move in 12 remarkable days.”

Tim Fischer was leader of the National party and Howard’s deputy prime minister in the Coalition government, charged with persuading skeptical country voters to support, or at least accept, reforms. “Port Arthur was our Sandy Hook,” he says. “Port Arthur we acted on. The USA is not prepared to act on their tragedies.”

It was called the National Firearms Agreement — legislation that outlawed automatic and semi-automatic rifles, as well as pump-action shotguns. At the heart of the new law was a massive buyback of about one-fifth—640,000—of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense could not be a reason.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The laws had widespread public support but faced fierce opposition from some rural supporters … because they believed they were unfairly paying a price for the misdeeds of others," Howard told NBC News in a statement. "This resentment assisted the rise of a new political party which damaged the government at the following election."

Howard persisted with introducing the laws, and went on to win that election and lead the nation for more than a decade. He considers the reforms as a key part of his legacy. An article published online in July by the NRA claimed there was "growing consensus" that the laws hadn't made Australians safer.

Howard acknowledges that "major cultural and historical differences" make it difficult to draw comparisons between the gun cultures in the U.S. and Australia. "Although I had not anticipated the need to act on this matter so early in my term of government, I had always believed there was a clear link between the ready availability of guns and gun-related death," Howard said.

"The national gun control laws enacted after the Port Arthur massacre remain one of the major social reforms ... of [my] government," he added. "All the credible research both in Australia and elsewhere shows that the gun control laws have markedly reduced gun-related deaths."

Graph: The Guardian

Total intentional gun deaths fell by half in the decade after the 1996 restrictions were put in place, even as Australia’s population grew nearly 14 percent. The rate of gun suicides per 100,000 people dropped 65 percent from 1995 to 2006, and the rate of gun homicides fell 59 percent, according to a 2010 study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University.

“Australia is not like the U.S.” said commentator Michael Pascoe in the  Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama’s remarks on last year’s Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 7 guns at home, in addition to the  8 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours.”

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. “Unlike the US,” said Pascoe, “we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind.”
Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

“The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns,” said the Sydney Morning Herald’s Pasco. “It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way.”

We do not at present have a leader or leaders with enough courage to stand up to the gun lobby, as Australia’s John Howard was able to do. Their most important job should be to protect our citizens, regardless of creed or color.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

NRA Uses Gun Violence to Maximize Profits

Financial FAQs

How can we believe the National Rifle Association opposes gun violence when every mass murder committed with guns is answered by the NRA’s call to buy more weapons? There have been 3 mass killings by crazed gunmen just over the past week, and the gun industry’s reponse via the NRA is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

The latest attempt by the gun industry to boost sales is to compete with a Washington State ballot initiative that limits gun sales. Initiative 594 would require universal background checks, whereas their Initiative 591 bars universal background checks. Guess which one is backed by the gun industry? So restricting gun sales via universal background checks won’t stop the killers? Really?

It means those gun makers who fund the NRA are directly responsible for the bizarre mass shootings that have discriminately killed so many children and adults. Their only answer has been to blame the victims who hadn’t purchased guns (with high capacity magazines) for not being ‘cocked and ready’ when a crazed gunman commits mayhem.

Yet large capacity ammunition magazines are the common thread uniting all of the high-profile mass shootings in America, according to the Washington DC Violence Policy Center that listed the mind-numbing results—42 mass killings from 1984 to June 2013, with 380 killed and 365 wounded by the gunmen. Two of the shooters used assault rifles with 75-round high capacity drum magazines enabling the huge body count.

The shooter who killed 20 children and 7 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 equipped his assault weapon with 30-round magazines, which enabled him to fire 154 rounds in less than five minutes.

The gunman in Tucson, Arizona who killed six people and injured 13 others, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in a supermarket parking lot in 2011, used a handgun equipped with a 33-round magazine.  His shooting spree was only interrupted when he was tackled by a bystander as he finally stopped to reload his weapon.

We have to look at when gun manufacturers began to manufacture large magazine weapons in order to increase their profits for the origins of the mass killings. In fact, prior to the 1980s, the most popular type of handgun was the revolver, which typically holds six rounds of ammunition in a rotating cylinder. During the 1980s, however, the firearms industry began mass producing and marketing semiautomatic pistols, which can accept ammunition magazines.

In 1980, semiautomatic pistols accounted for only 32 percent of the 2.3 million handguns produced in America.⁹ By 2008, however, such pistols accounted for 76 percent of the 1.8 million handguns produced that year.

How has the gun industry been able to fool so many people for so long on the facts of gun violence? Factcheck.org points out how the NRA’s reflex response to any gun violence is to mount truly bizarre campaigns that deny any culpability for the mayhem.

The NRA’s response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School killing of 20 children and 7 adults is but one example. "We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work -- and by that I mean armed security," said the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre just one week after the massacre.

Why would the NRA so blatantly ignore the revulsion felt by so many over the massacre? New Jersey Governor Chris Christy highlighted the callous absurdity of Wayne Lapierre’s response. “In general I don't think that the solution to safety in schools is putting an armed guard because for it to be really effective in my view, from a law enforcement perspective, you have to have an armed guard at every classroom,” he said. “Because if you just have an armed guard at the front door then what if this guy had gone around to the side door? There's many doors in and out of schools.”

So the gun industry would be much happier it they could sell every teacher a firearm that would have to be kept in every classroom to be an effective deterrent. That would really boost their profits!

The Sandy Hook massacre even caused the U.S. Senate to attempt to take action to tighten gun regulations with universal background checks, including for gun show and online sales. Yet it was still voted down because of a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by the gun industry.

“I agree wholeheartedly with the goal of the NRA,” Joe Manchin, one of the bill’s sponsors. “I was surprised when the latest alert from the NRA was full of misinformation. ... They are telling members that our legislation would criminalize the private transfer of firearms by honest, law-abiding citizens. ... That is a lie.”

The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence spells out the loopholes that allow gun sales to grow and gun companies to make even more profits. Online and gun show sales require no background checks, even though the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms documents U.S. gun shows as a major source of bulk weapons’ sales to Mexican Drug Cartels.

The NRA’s excuses for Elliot Rogers Isla Vista, California, mass murder was that it was the result of California’s stringent gun regulation that prevents lawful citizens from owning guns. But that is an outright lie, as the California law only bans assault rifles with large magazine clips. California has banned the sale of Semi-automatic firearms that the state has classified as assault weapons, .50 BMG caliber rifles, and magazines that can hold more than ten rounds of

Since 2005, the gun industry and its corporate allies have given between $20 million and $52.6 million to the NRA through the NRA Ring of Freedom sponsor program. Donors include firearm companies like Midway USA, Springfield Armory Inc, Pierce Bullet Seal Target Systems, and Beretta USA Corporation. Other supporters from the gun industry include Cabala's, Sturm Rugar & Co, and Smith & Wesson.

And industry profits have soared. According to the Christian Science Monitor, $6 billion in estimated revenue was earned by the US gun and ammunition manufacturing industry in 2012, according to a financial report by the research firm D&B First Research based in Austin, Texas. The major manufacturers include Browning Arms, Freedom Group, Olin, Aliant Tech Systems, Sturm, Ruger & Company, and Smith & Wesson.  The biggest companies are Ruger and Smith & Wesson, which represent about 30 percent of the industry.

The estimated number of guns in circulation in the United States as of 2009 was 310 million, according to a survey from the National Institute of Justice. That number includes 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 82 million shotguns. The number of available guns has increased 62 percent since 1994, when there were about 192 million firearms in circulation. "Per capita, the civilian gun stock has roughly doubled since 1968, from one gun per every two persons to one gun per person," according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.

Need we say more to uncover the tactics used by gun manufactures to increase their profits, regardless of public safety concerns? The Brady Campaign’s numbers tell it all:

• One in three people in the U.S. know someone who has been shot.
• On average, 32 Americans are murdered with guns every day and 140 are treated for a gun assault in an emergency room.
• Every day on average, 51 people kill themselves with a firearm, and 45 people are shot or killed in an accident with a gun.
• The U.S. firearm homicide rate is 20 times higher than the combined rates of 22 countries that are our peers in wealth and population.
• A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense.

Gun manufacturers and the NRA are maximizing profits at the expense of public safety. They have become in fact a danger to civil society, rather than protector of public safety.

Harlan Green © 2014

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Opposing the Bully Mentality—Part II

Financial FAQs

How does one stop the bullies? Put simply, find a way to stand up to them. Economic bullies behave no differently than individuals when confronted by a person or organization willing to oppose them. But how are the 80 percent that are wage and salary earners to do that whose incomes has been whittled away since the 1970s by anti-union legislation and outright banning of collective bargaining in many of the right to work states?

Popular culture has enshrined the superhuman heroes who have tamed bullies; from Superman and Wonder Woman, to Batman, and now Captain America taming Nazi bullies. But taming economic bullies doesn’t have a popular precedent other than Robin Hood, it seems.

And Robin Hood was an English legend. America can only come up with its opposite, reverse Robin Hoodism, or taking from the poor and giving to the rich. That is how Nobelist Paul Krugman characterizes Republican attempts to cut taxes further and oppose raising the minimum wage.

“In the past, Republicans would justify tax cuts for the rich either by claiming that they would pay for themselves or by claiming that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting wasteful spending. But what we’re seeing now is open, explicit reverse Robin Hoodism: taking from ordinary families and giving to the rich. That is, even as Republicans look for a way to sound more sympathetic and less extreme, their actual policies are taking another sharp right turn.”

So the cards seem to be politically stacked against those who oppose the economic bullies. “(But) It wasn’t always this way,” says Marketwatch’s Rex Nutting. “In the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, trade barriers, strong unions and discrimination gave workers (white male workers, that is) more bargaining power to get higher pay. It created the middle class.”

The result of such economic bullyism is that American wages haven’t grown since the 1970s, except for a brief period in the 1990s, when the Federal Reserve allowed the unemployment rate to fall to 4 percent, before beginning to raise interest rates. Thank you, President Clinton (and then Fed Chairman Greenspan during his easy money phase).

The share of national income that goes to labor (including the CEO’s salary and his stock options) has plunged from about 63 percent to 57 percent, says Nutting. The 6 percent of national income that’s going to profits instead of wages amounts to nearly $900 billion a year.

Graph: WSJMarketwatch

“For corporate businesses, after-tax profits are at record levels as a share of national income,” says Nutting. “Since the recession ended, profits are up 65 percent to $1.68 trillion last year. Small businesses aren’t doing quite so spectacularly, but their income is up 13 percent and their net worth is up 33 percent to $8.7 trillion since the recession ended. And the workers? Even after a big gain in the first quarter, median wages are down 3 percent since the recession ended.”

Many commentators and sociologists in particular assert 9/11 brought modern economic bullying to a high point. It’s rationale was the US put on a semi-permanent war footing, so that “Allegiance to the old public virtues—respect of the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the rule of domestic and international law—was mocked and dismissed as quaint and soft by our new drill sergeants, according to a recent Canadian study. “From then on a state of emergency replaced the rule of law and set itself up as the norm.”

On a personal, workplace level, “If we are in a constant war-like mode societally, it sounds trivial, it sounds child-like, it sounds naively utopian to say, ‘Can’t we all get along?’” says Gary Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute. “If you call for civility or a suspension of unmitigated, unfettered aggression, they call you a wimp. They think you are a wimp.”

There is another term for economic bullies, used by Professor Krugman, among others, in his most recent NYTimes column. They are sadomonetarists, or bankers and economists who want to tighten credit even during such tough economic times, as now: “At some level it has to reflect an instinctive identification with the interests of wealthy creditors as opposed to usually poorer debtors. But it’s also driven, I believe, by the desire of many monetary officials to pose as serious, tough-minded people — and to demonstrate how tough they are by inflicting pain.”

That, of course, is the most cogent definition of a bully. They want to demonstrate how tough they are, regardless of the consequences. For instance, the NAACP recently posted a report by Devin Burghart, Leonard Zeskind and the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights called “Tea Party Nationalism,” exposing what it calls links between various Tea Party organizations and racist hate groups in the United States, such as white-supremacist groups, anti-immigrant organizations and militias, who have by definition, the bully mentality.

The bully mentality manifests in many forms, besides politically. The gun lobby via the NRA, ALEC, and other organizations have succeeded in blocking government study of the causes of gun violence, even though 31,000 gun-related death occur per year, the highest by a factor of 10 of any country in the world. Needless to say that inhibits development of policies and laws that might lower gun violence, whether in the schools or our inner cities.

So it turns out the bully mentality is part of human nature, really, and so part of our culture. It is then up to those employees who want to better themselves to find a way to oppose that culture and mentality. That means pushing back against the fear that such bullying engenders in all of us—against the ‘boss’ mentality, as well. Remember, such fear has to also be felt by those economists and politicians that allow it.

Harlan Green © 2014

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Gun Violence Has Too Many Causes

Popular Economics Weekly

The tragic Newtown, Connecticut elementary school mass shooting is just the latest in a string of mass shootings that have contributed to more than 1 million dead by guns over the past 3 decades in the U.S.—an average of almost 32,000 per year.
This is when no other country in the developed world has had more than 400 documented gun killings in a year, outside of wartime. The problem in understanding the causes of such mass shootings may be that much gun violence has many causes that make it difficult if not impossible to understand in isolation.
But not if we look at the culture of violence that has made U.S. the most violent nation on earth. In fact, gun violence, as violence in general, has too many causes. Studies bear out that record income inequality, a poor social safety net and lax, almost nonexistent gun control laws all contribute to the U.S. record as the most gun violent culture in the world.
The Trayvon Martin killing illustrated this culture with the Stand Your Ground Laws being enacted in several states. And thereby we are beginning to see where the National Rifle Association, backed by some elements of Big Business, is leading this country—into a greater lawlessness, at the very least. For the Stand Your Ground Law enshrines the gangster code—shoot first and ask questions later.
As Paul Krugman said in a March New York Times Op-ed after the Trayvon Martin killing:

“Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.”

Krugman was exposing the links between corporations and the NRA that continues to push for guns to be worn by everyone everywhere, with or without background checks or even licenses.
Why the push by the NRA, and Big Business for more guns, as I said back in April? The reason most gun advocates and the NRA give, is that it is for the purpose of self-defense in an increasingly violent world. The NRA even asserts it decreases violence. But studies cited in an excellent book, Gun Violence: The Real Costs by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig show that gun use tends to increase gun violence—i.e., there are almost 4 times more fatalities in gun-related robberies than other robberies with knives, clubs, etc.
And a study cited in the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) on home invasions found that just 3 percent were able to use guns against someone who broke in (or attempted to do so) while they were at home, when 40 percent of households have guns.
So it turns out guns are not very helpful in self-defense. Also overlooked is the fact that criminals are predators, and predators prey on the weakest and most vulnerable, not those who look like they can defend themselves. So really, does the agenda of the NRA to abolish all gun controls do more than reinforce the fear factor, the fear that your neighbor may be your assailant?

“But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture?” asks Krugman. “In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.”

The culture of violence is not a pretty picture in our crowded cities in particular. Philadelphia averaged more than 30 gun-related deaths per month in 2011, when Europe as a whole had less than 300 per year. The last time U.S. gun violence was this high was during the Great Depression, when we had gangsters like Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde.
English Sociologist Richard Wilkinson has brought this out in books and lectures, especially his TEDx lecture on the roots of violence and crime, in which he charts that countries with the most inequality in wealth are also the most violent countries. And surprise, the U.S. is now one of the most unequal countries—in terms of wealth and opportunities for wealth—in the world, as has been brought out by the CIA World Factbook. It is ranked 94th of the 136 countries ranked by the CIA for income inequality, next to Camaroon, Zimbabwe, which are some of Africa’s poorest countries.
There are many who will say that the deeds of a psychopath cannot be prevented. But is that the point when it is so ridiculously easy for an individual to purchase an arsenal without an alarm being set off? Why would anyone such as the Aurora, Colo. shooter need 6,000 rounds, for instance, said the New York Times?

“With a few keystrokes, the suspect, James E. Holmes, ordered 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun — an amount of firepower that costs roughly $3,000 at the online sites — in the four months before the shooting, according to the police. It was pretty much as easy as ordering a book from Amazon.”

Do we need another reason to require reporting such weapon sales, other than for war?

Harlan Green © 2012