so is Buffalo/Binghamton....Upstate NY, like other great parts of America they were stripped, beaten down and laughed at as America migrated its fortunes to the south.

Now that we've outsourced our spirit the only ones laughing are the remarkably greedy and arrogant.
You'll see them adorned in the biz press and this sad soul who shot up the imigration center he's symptomatic of a country that now suffers from low self-esteem and despair that we've truly lost our way.

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Today's been a grey day in NY, much like the 7 years I spent in Binghamton and environs. When I heard about the shooting, I wanted to somehow be back to offer comfort to the survivors - and my old friends. So sad.

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I had this naive impression that immigrants got along well, but some friends who owned a factory said that immigrant ethnic groups they hired fought like cats and dogs, constantly tattling, etc.
It was a war zone of sorts.

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I know the darkness/depression theory. Buy a sunlamp and you will feel happier.

But for anyone stripped of a job, with little prospect of reemployment, anger is a normal reaction. Murder is not. Nevertheless, as millions are laid off or have hours reduced to unsustainable levels, anger will grow. The layoffs are widespread.

The media of course idiotically focuses on the stock market or consumer spending- a few minor increases recently and we actually have politicians predicting the end of the recession. The problems however are that the value of money will plummet over the long run and that production in the US can't increase in real dollar terms enough to reemploy the millions out of work.

The "end" of the recession could be a matter of redefinition: we simply accept unemployment at or near 10%, including folks not counted in official figures, and we ignore the growing poverty of the working poor and an eroding middle class.

Inflation kicks in, and you'll have employed people whose paychecks can't cover family basics shooting up the mall, the school, city hall or the local TV station with its Miss USA Weather girl wannabe.

Until we kick out illegal immigrants and put Americans in their jobs at union jobs and full health and retirement benefits, jail or execute those who hire illegals, embargo all trade with China and India, launch an allout energy program run by Americans including green power and new drilling,renegotiate NAFTA, tell the EU and Carla Bruni to go to hell, and reestablish our industries, we will slowly deteriorate in shabby shadows of the American Success of the early to midTwentieth century.

Nor, can we afford schools that are holding pens for adolescents, most of whom should be taught job skills, not sociology and English course that consist of reading "stories" and not developing basic writing skills. People need tangible skills; even AP students should be required to be able to fix a car or build a small shed or start and maintain a garden. Work, real work, not punching in invoices in a computer, does build confidence and interest in others.

Yes Obama we need Change. But you are the change we didn't need. Your community organizer story is phony, as everyone knows. You were a failure at it, and used it solely to build a career with Daley Machine and the wealthy Chicago commodities and real estate circles like Penny Pritzker.

Who needs Obama and his fashion failure wannabe wife? We could have kept Bush by electing McCain, and been about as well off.

What's next Obama? A trillion bucks for health insurance companies? Nothing for the average worker, but the Obama Administration is about the Ivy Leaguers, first and foremost.

No wonder this poor guy in Binghamton blew up.
All those poor dead people. There will be more, I fear.

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THIS REEKS OF A PSYOP, LIKE THE ONE IN AUSTRALIA, 2 WEEKS BEFORE THEY GRABBED ALL THEIR GUNS... THOSE PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ARMED AND THE DEATH TOLL WOULD HAVE BEEN LOWER

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QUESTION: Have you ever had a loved one shot and killed in an act of mindless gun violence?

ANSWER: If you haven't, you will. Count on it. Your elected representatives will see to that.

As Americans arm themselves to the teeth, the law of averages will eventually forbid such an unspeakable tragedy from not touching the lives of almost everyone. It has already happened to my family - twice. Two female cousins of mine - who never even had the joy of meeting one another - (one on my mother's side, the other on my father's) both died as the result of being murdered by men who were stalking them. Don't for a moment reflect on the passive tranquility of your lives and delude yourself into thinking, "It can't happen here". It can. It will. Whether child, parent, sibling, cousin or friend; gun violence will touch your seemingly untouchable lives eventually. Count on it.

I was never a great admirer of the governing style of Bill Clinton. As I mentioned in last week's posting,"....no Democrat since Johnson (Andrew, not Lyndon) was a more bitter disappointment than William Jefferson Clinton." But while Bubbah did get a lot wrong, we must be fair to the poor old bugger by conceding that he did get a lot right. One of the areas in which he was very, VERY right was when his administration initiated a ban on assault rifles. It was George W. Bush who stupidly allowed that ban to expire. You're not surprised. I didn't think you would be.

I don't know the name of the person who designed the first rapid-fire weapon, but whatever his name was (and he had to be a man - women just aren't that cruel) he only had one purpose in mind: to kill as many human beings as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The corrupt Republican (and more than a few Democratic) politicians who are bought and paid for by the National Rifle Association have the blood of innocents on their greedy little hands. The people who manufacture these weapons are making a killing - figuratively and literally. And nowhere has the pungent aroma of their profit been more apparent in recent years than on the southern side of the Mexican/American border. Ninety percent of the guns that are being used in the atrocities committed daily are being purchased - legally - on the northern side of the border.

And now the violence between Mexico's drug cartels is spilling over into the good ol' U.S. of A. Regular Americans are becoming the hapless victims of this mindless narco-insanity. And why not? It is America's mind-fuckingly stupid gun laws that are pouring fuel in the inferno. Maybe that's poetic justice - who knows? But it is nonetheless exasperating in the heat of what can only be described as an international crisis, to hear these foolish American extremists declare that Mexico's problem should not interfere with our Second Amendment rights. Right.

"We got guns. They got guns. All God's chil'en got guns."

The Marx Brothers
From the 1932 film Duck Soup

And now a MAJOR massacre has happened in Binghampton - in seemingly placid upstate New York (Lake Placid? Really???) - just an hour and a half up Rte. 17 from where I now sit. This is the new reality. Get used to it.

LETHAL NATION

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

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this is a very funny and accurate 30 second video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y14Q6SdbkJI& feature=channel_page


this stupid site wont let me post my videolink in its entirety!! GRRRRRR! commies


put the title in you tube... i am seeing more baxck al;ley censorship on the free internet

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-most, if not all, of these tragedies, can be traced to bigPharma:the 'happy'pills that the shooter was prescribed. Very rarely do we get this info,as it is quickly deleted from public reports...

suicide antidepressants
Results 1 - 1,960,000
1 - 44,500 for homicide antidepressants.
Antidepressants May Trigger Violent Behavior
http://blogs.mercola.com/
www.baumhedlundlaw.com/media/ssri/Paxil_murder.htm

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All of NY outside of the "Big Apple" has been devistated for decades... people think of the "rust belt" as something that hangs out in Michigan, but that belt runs through the entirety of NY state also. For many years Rochester was the only glimmer of light in an otherwise dark area, and it has finally succumbed to the darkness. Industry after industry has received incentives from the state, used those incentives to improve equipment, and then loaded it all onto boats bound for China, starting long before the demise of the auto industry.
The housing bust itself had little impact in greater New York because there never was a boom to go bust. For folks in NY State (and I'm sure it's no different in many other areas) it's that they have been living on the edge for decades, barely scraping by, with no decent prospects for employment ever. Now the economy goes bust and even the shitty minimum wage jobs suddenly are gone.
Folks are conservative for the most part, and anything but "worldly", they just keep plugging away at their lives, never far from poverty, and generally unmindful of real politics because politics never gave them anything and they see no use in it.
Now with the boom they never felt going bust they're the first ones to suffer, the poverty and hopelessness comes home to roost, and they've seen the industry leave for foreign states and foreign countries and heard the rhetoric time and time again from the fascists telling them that the problem is immigrants, welfare recipients, whatever. The regime makes sure to point fingers and lay blame on others for its greed and shortcoming, and the people for their lack of exposure to and understanding of how things really work end up believing it, and in desperation, acting on it.
And if gun ownership was a cause we'd have hundreds of these kinds of events because in this area of the country gun ownership is the norm. Were it not many more would starve, we have a large deer population in NY and it's played a big part in the ability of the population to get by. Handguns are another story, they're far more rare and the permit process in NY is arduous.
Will the people ever wake up hereabouts, and in the other areas of the U.S. like this? Hard to say... I have a hard time talking to them about politics because the crappy NY State educational system taught them to believe in lies and they don't see the world outside their area and don't understand how what happens out there plays a huge part in their lives even in this relatively isolated, rural area. Places like NYC and D.C. and the events there are almost imaginary to them, unreal. I argue with well-educated people about things like welfare because they don't realize what a tiny part it plays in their tax dollar and their well being. I'll keep trying, wish me luck...

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This shooting is a terrible thing. So was the incident outside of Boston a few days ago, where a young man stabbed two of his younger sisters (one was five years old) to death and would have killed a third if police (alerted by the older of the sisters who died) hadn't broke down the door, told him to stop, and (when he didn't) killed him. That young man was demoralized because he couldn't get a job because of his prison record. Did he kill his sisters because he couldn't get a job, or because the deck is stacked against poor men with a prison record? The overwhelming majority of young men in similar straits don't kill, or threaten to kill, anyone, never mind their five-year-old sisters.

These killings are horrific. If they happen in your neighborhood or your hometown or at your college or to people you know, of course you're going to plumb your own experience looking for the reasons why. Maybe you, and we, will be able to figure out ways to prevent future tragedies. But it's also important to remember that these incidents are rare. That's why they get reported, and that's why we drop whatever we're doing to talk or write about them. Sure, it's tempting to blame them on "the economic downturn" because that way we can persuade ourselves that the financial fatcats and their deregulation cronies are guilty of gruesome murders. Do they have to be? Let's focus on what they themselves did with their own two hands: disregard all ethical, human, political, and commonsense considerations in order to maximize paper profits.

One huge problem with contemporary U.S. journalism is that it tends to focus on isolated incidents and human-interest stories without making much attempt to connect the dots -- and, worse, it treats first-magnitude stories like 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and the crash of the financial system as if they're isolated incidents -- provoked by the sheer cussedness of a few individuals. I look to AlterNet and other alternative media to help me connect those dots. Without the connections, we get stuck in react-react-reactionary mode, and it becomes just about impossible to either identify problems or feel our way toward solutions.

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avenue to keeping a roof and food in the tummy for the family, the human reaction is to go from hope, to frustration, to deep depression, to rage... this man crossed over into rage...

the gun issue doesn't matter... if you outlaw everything that can be weaponized, people will resort to rocks if necessary... how to outlaw rocks???

another thing noticed... in the recent past, seems that every person who does go on a homicidal or threatening rampage...

no, not all hostage or gun related, many are knife or words with the perception that the person is 'armed' in some way...

yes armed can be a set of house keys (yes we had a case a few weeks ago around here where the armed part consisted of words and a keyring, keys only no knife or pepper spray etc)...

haven't heard of one case that has not been either killed one way or another... suicide by cop is the norm now...

do we really need a swat wagon in every town with paramilitary uniforms and snipers???

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I grew up just outside of Binghamton proper, and after living in NYC and CT for several years, I returned to the area to raise my daughters. It may be gray here, but it is home. Yesterday's shooting has left me with such sorrow, such a sense of loss of innocence. Early reports indicate that one of the victims may have been the mother of one of my daughters doctors. A man that works security at night where I work was employed by the Civic Assoc part time and was lucky enough to have been on an errand when the shooting broke out. While I don't wish for anyone to commit suicide, I don't understand the compulsion to take innocent victims who they didn't even know.

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Back during the Great Depression, people didn't use guns to solve their problems in life. While I support the rights of people to defend themselves, I say we need to step back and see where we're missing our chances at success. Despite all our hard efforts, we're still being given more bad pols and bad policies and half of Main Street still acts like "Joe the Plumber" and confronts those of us on Main Street trying to actually fight for economic justice and hold the corporate goons on Wall $treet accountable. I would also add that I've noticed a lot of times that people often shirk responsibility and yet preach others about it. This has got to stop big time. I have also come across people who would make fun of others' misfortunes or at least disabilities and keep having sadistic pleasure telling them that they'll fail and no, I'm not talking about the pols. Bullying students and coworkers into thinking they'll fail can produce unexpected hair trigger responses such as the shootings we hear about so often. There's more I could add but I think you all get the idea.

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IBM disposed of an unneeded worker. This guy just passed the favor along.

Either everybody's life has value and deserves the respect of adequate food, shelter, health care and livelihood or nobody's does. He was probably thinking he was going to be homeless with no health care, no job and no respect.

All of us together or none.

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That's the rumor. And my car can't speed or run in to another car. Unless of course I'm driving it. This is a lame excuse made up by people who justify any fool being able to own a gun, legally or otherwise. It's easier to buy a gun in most states than it is to get a drivers' license. ANNA

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Three police officers have just been killed in Pittsburgh, PA.

No comment.

Tom Degan

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"Murder in the Heartland, It's work is never done..

Murder in the Heartland, from Hollywood to Washington..

Murder in the Heartland, We'll blast it into Space..

That's why Murder in the Heartland, Loves the Human Race.."



From: Murder in the Heartland last four verses..by Me aka TJ Cole..

Use by Permission..TJ

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Another depressing policy story, this time the location was an immigrant community center in Binghamton, N.Y. It has occurred all over the country and in some other parts of the world. Reporters have seen and covered these incidents so many times that their eyes should glaze over. The model for this tragedy occurred at Columbine High School a number of years ago.

In N.Y.’s southern tier Friday, a gunman started shooting people in a building. Like a show made for TV, an alphabet soup of police arrived, BPD, NYSP, ATF, FBI, VPD, SWAT, etc., looking menacing with all their militaristic body armor, sniper weapons, helmets, shields and electronics. They start shooing reporters from the scene (lest they might ask embarrassing questions, or worse yet, question authority) and posturing among themselves. After it was eventually over, they thanked each other publicly for a job well done.

To wit, a critically wounded receptionist at the center called 911. Police started arriving within two minutes. One building, one shooter, and a brave woman who was giving police inside information for 90 minutes. To quote the Syracuse Post Standard, “Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for an about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers. They then spent two hours searching the building.”

What about the safety of the people in the building? I wonder how many wounded bled to death or worsened during those hours. At Columbine H.S., students and teachers continued to be murdered and others bled to death during the wasted hours of an uncoordinated response.

Ask yourself a question. How long would it take a squad of United States Marines to clear and secure a small building? Would they hang around for hours, waiting to make sure it was “safe”?

The recipe is simple. All it takes are small quantities of leadership, training and direction, stirred with a dash of courage. We watch it every night on TV from Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, if the personnel in our local fire departments acted with same confusion, risk aversion, and stunning lack of initiative, our homes and cities would now be piles of smoldering ashes. Fires do not allow the luxury of extended time.

Spending huge sums of taxpayer monies in making police look tough, then act incompetently, possessing little sense of immediate mission, doesn’t make sense but is now ingrained in many of our criminal justice agencies. Unfortunately, this example is a metaphor for much of America, and the modus operandi of the U.S. Congress. Much form, little substance.

We need to restart and rewrite many of our laws and priorities right now. Otherwise we risk the revolution Malcolm X spoke of many decades ago.

Then again, maybe a revolution is just what we need. It worked for us over two hundred years ago.

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Being a Mi'er, we've come accustom to economic plight- but it doesn't make it any easier every time a new round of lay offs are announced. Now with the Big 3 on shaky ground- the tenativeness of just doing daily errands is unnerving.
I was never expecting Bin laden to lay waste to my local grocery store, or community center or church- they were never his targets anyway.
americans have been suffering Self Inflicted Terrorist attacks for Decades now- all thanks to the ideology of 'Trickle Down'- which assured the slow steady descimation through emmaciation of the Production class.There is blood on the hands of those who have pushed for this obvious Feudalistic Cast system and those they used to provide 'moralistic' justification. "oppression" by any other name would be called The Republican party.Once again "Heckova Job", Take a bow for facilitating Yet another Attack upon the innocents of this country. You have driven our eocnomy into the ground and continue to incite violence with your fear and hate mongering rhetoric. We've suffered many Attacks,for Decades and they've all come from with in your Party.

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Quoting David Gil, Brandeis University social policy professor and child advocate :

"'Fulfilled people don't hurt other people. . . People who have their material, emotional, and spiritual needs met are generally very nice, likable people. People whose needs are blocked and whose development is blocked, their constructive energy is transformed."

The very basic ill of capitalism is that it sets most people up to have their needs thwarted and their dreams shuttered.

And 'Merkuh continues to drink the owning class kool-aid.... maybe if I slam my head into the brick wall one more time... it'll turn into a window....

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If EVERYBODY had an AK-47, like the gentleman in Pittsburgh, we would ALL be a little safer.

It seems almost every day I read that there is someone protecting his family, household, or self from gunmen with their OWN AK-47s, as opposed to those that kill people at random with their AK-47s.

I mean, think about it, if everyone in Binghamton had guns, probably no one would have been killed.

In fact I would actually recommend HK-416 instead. It weighs less, fires faster, it's tougher, and it doesn't get hot. You can get a dual 200 round drum magazine for those extended 'hunting trips'.

Which reminds me, I will have to trade my AK in and get one for my wife and 8 year old.

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