Tag: collusion

How One Photographer Documented The Segregated South

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❝ Monumental shifts were occurring in America during the time that photographer Hugh Mangum was working in North Carolina and the Virginias. It was the height of the Jim Crow era, when the nation was starting to see laws separating whites from blacks. But as a businessman who needed to support his family, Mangum didn’t discriminate between clientele, therefore leaving behind an archive that tells a different story of the segregated South at the turn of the 20th century…

❝ Mangum, I learned, often used a Penny Picture Camera that was designed to allow multiple and distinct exposures on a single glass plate negative. This was ideal for creating inexpensive novelty pictures because it meant multiple subjects could be photographed on a single negative. The order of the images on a single glass plate mirrored the order in which Mangum’s diverse clientele rotated through the studio. Thus, the negatives reasonably represent a day’s work for this gregarious photographer.

❝ The vibrancy of black communities building new identities and creating futures in Durham and elsewhere is not lost on Mangum’s negatives. His black clients present themselves as lighthearted, resolute and everything in between. They bring their children to the studio to be photographed, an ode to the hope they have for the lives their sons and daughters will live. Though we don’t know the identity of most of Mangum’s sitters, it’s probable that many of the black men and women pictured were working publicly and privately to establish black agency, independence and community vitality.

All while the two old parties worked their abuse of Constitutional freedoms to rebuild the edifice of bigotry through Jim Crow laws. Methodology, dedication, sleaze and hypocrisy repeated in following decades to support US involvement in colonial wars, populist puppet shows and more.

Road map through the Trump/Putin collusion swamp

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Click to enlarge

Can’t tell the players without a scorecard – and in this case a map to all their connections. As much as the Fake President blathered to the gullible about draining the political swamp in DC – he’s spent years developing a parallel universe focussed on greed, acquisition, a Mussolini poseur. New York Magazine did us all a favor and mapped it out.

Was our healthcare system created to enrich Big Pharma?

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❝ An Irish drugmaker has jacked up the price of a painkiller to nearly $3,000 a bottle. The drug is 22 times more expensive than when the company acquired it in late 2013.

The sticker shock for Horizon Pharma’s Vimovo drug is magnified by the fact that the painkiller’s two main ingredients can be purchased separately — for just $36.

❝ Although patients typically pay just a fraction of the price for Vimovo, the dramatic price increase underlines what critics describe as a murky and wasteful system that ultimately leads to higher health care costs for all Americans.

Everything from corporate taxes to transport to insurance hustles are constructed around optimizing profits for pharmaceutical companies. We shouldn’t call this “healthcare” — it’s “profitcare”!

Court rules gun shop must pay millions to injured police officers

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NRA dementia
NRA preaching to the choir

Badger Guns, then known as Badger Outdoors, was once the top seller of guns later used in crimes in the whole country — selling 537 guns that were recovered from crime scenes in 2005 alone, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

When 18-year-old Julius Burton was looking to get his hands on a gun in 2009, he grabbed a 21-year-old friend and headed to Badger Guns where a sales associate helped his friend correct the paperwork for purchase of a semiautomatic pistol. The friend had correctly marked the box indicating that he was purchasing the gun for Burton, who was underage. Such an exchange, known as a “straw” purchase, is illegal and the Badger Guns shop clerk helped Burton’s friend cover up that slip of honesty, as seen on footage from the store’s surveillance video from that day.

The video also showed Burton pointing to the pistol, saying, “that’s the one that I want.”

A month later, Burton would use that gun to shoot Milwaukee police Officer Bryan Norberg and now-retired Officer Graham Kunisch in the face.

Kunisch lost an eye and suffered brain injury, forcing him to retire from the police department, but along with Norberg and the city of Milwaukee, he filed a lawsuit against Badger Guns in state court, charging that the shop clerk should have known that the purchase was illegal…

In fact, the officers’ lawsuit contends that between 2007 and 2009, six other Milwaukee cops were shot by weapons sold by Badger Guns.

The jury’s finding that Badger Guns was negligent and its award of of $3.6 million for Kunisch and $1.5 million, plus another $730,000 in punitive damages, for Norberg will be appealed but for now it stands as a landmark decision…

According to the New York Times, there are at least 10 other similar cases making their way up the courts across the country, including from two other Milwaukee officers shot by guns sold by Badger Guns…

Finally,a jury has put the NRA gun-flunkies on notice that one portion of our tripartite government will respond to irresponsible politics with justice.

I sincerely doubt that a majority of Congress will have the integrity to stand up on their hind legs and vote for any legislation defending the American people from a sickness worse than typhoid fever — the dementia that convinces grown men and women to believe that a rather ordinary assemblage of bureaucrats and politicians is out to take away their sacred firearm icons.

A Democrat presidential victory combined with any reasonable sorting out of Congress should make moderately sane laws possible. I hope the voters of America have the minimum of good sense in the period 2016-2020 to make it happen.