Alameda County Letter Head: Fill & Download for Free

Yeah, it is time for people to understand what an incredible asshole this man, Ronald Reagan really was. Let’s start at the beginning.Ronald Reagan went to my mom’s church, The Disciples of Christ. My mom knew him mostly in college because he would come by Chapman University recruiting students into the American Socialist Party. Yes, Ronald Reagan future Republican president of the U.S. was a member of the American Socialist Party during and after WWII. My mom talked about him as a really good looking and a really liberal young man who would come around and talk to her and the other students.Ronald Reagan became president of the largest union in Southern California at the time. The union is known as SAG and is also known as The Screen Actors Guild. Reagan knew everyone in the union who was a socialist or member of the Communist Party. He also knew leaders of other unions and one of his best friends, a communist party member was president of another union.It is known that Reagan’s friend was beaten to an inch of his life by studio goons. Labor relations was like that in those days. Ronald Reagan started carrying a pistol after that.So far Ronald Reagan seems like an OK guy. He has lots of friends in the industry and everyone likes him but, then things get strange. No one knows how it happened but J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI turned Ronald Reagan into a covert informant. Was it done with an “Investigative Interview” by COINTELPRO? His covert code name was T-10. How was this done, how could Ronald Reagan be turned against everyone he knew? Ronald Reagan informed on all of his Communist and Socialist friends, people he himself had recruited. He ratted out everyone he knew and then testified against them at the infamous McCarthy hearings.Actors and directors were black listed. The FBI ran some people out of the country. This was part of a wider crackdown on socialism in the United States that included college professors. Lives were ruined. Whole families fled to Europe. The entire political left wing in the U.S. was gutted. Most Americans are completely unaware of this sad period of American history and Reagan played a major high profile role of double crossing all of his friends and ruining people’s lives but, it gets worse. They made this asshole, a man with a complete lack of personal integrity, President of the United States.I was attending U.C. Berkeley when then governor Ronald Reagan decided to dismantle the greatest public education system in the World. Reagan started closing parts of the U.C. System including some of the colleges and institutions at U.C. Berkeley. Reagan promised to sell off the Bancroft Endowment of rare books, letters, maps, manuscripts, scrolls, etc from Cal’s Bancroft Library including the complete Mark Twain collection of original manuscripts and letters. Everyone was flabbergasted by this idea.Finally, when he announced the closing of the School of Criminology the students revolted in mass. The School of Criminology was one of the many colleges that made up U.C. Berkeley. This was the preeminent school for law enforcement. This together with Boalt Hall Law School represented one of the great institutions of law in the world. The School of Criminology specialized in investigating financial crime and Reagan wanted to close it. Gee, I wonder why? I wonder why there would be so much financial crime during the Reagan years including the Savings and Loan Debacle? But I digress.The students, as I said staged a peaceful sit in at the Chancellor’s Office in California Hall. We were doing the Martin Luther King/Ghandi peaceful non-violent protest. However, against Reagan’s State of California, non-violence could not work for the same reason it wouldn’t have worked against Hitler. Reagan hired a private army of thugs, known as the Blue Meanies to the students. Blue Meanies could do things that the police in this country were not allowed to do in those days, which was kill or seriously injure innocent people without due process and get away with it. The prerequisite for becoming a Blue Meanie was young fit male over 6′ tall. Blue meanies wore powder blue jumpsuits, helmet and mask, and carried a 48″ club weighed on the business end with a donut shaped piece of steel.The day of the big confrontation was coming when the Chancellor's office was to be forcibly cleared of protesters by the police. The FBI was everywhere. That’s right the FBI. Why would the FBI be at a student protest you ask? The FBI was there to make sure no one in the press filmed or saw what was about to happen. On that day 5000 students sat on the lawn around and inside of Calfornia Hall. Then the Blue Meanies showed up 400 strong marching two by two followed by the Alameda County SWAT team armed with M-16 rifles, a brand new weapon at that time. There was enough firepower to kill every student if necessary.The Blue meanies lined up and marched swinging their deadly clubs on the heads of peacefully sitting students. No one fought back. They didn’t try to arrest or drag people away, they just hit them on the head. Blood and cracked skulls, I ran for my life. How many hundreds were brutally injured? I guess we will never know. That moment changed my life. I really knew what our government was at that point. The truth was difficult and remains difficult to this day. Ronald Reagan showed it to me but, this was nothing.They made this asshole president and I know how it happened! I was working for one the major government contractors and one day I was told to make a personal $200 donation to The Committee to Elect Ronald Reagan president. It was not a request. You see this company was invested deeply in the SDI which stands for Strategic Defense Initiative which became known as Star Wars. Jimmy Carter cancelled SDI as unworkable, which it was but this company kept working on it. They made a deal with Reagan. We raise hundreds of millions of dollars for your campaign and you give us SDI.Ronald Reagan was the first president in my lifetime who was not a leader of all of the American people and had no interest in leading a united country. He was a leader of some and in the face of the rest of us. Reagan created a division that went deep. He hired in your face people like James Watt to thumb his nose at the left. Reagan is the source of the irreconcilable division in this country that we have now. It gets worse.During the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency a mysterious disease came upon humanity. Young gay men started to die of some kind of wasting disease. Thousands were dying and no one knew why. This of course was the AIDS epidemic. Ronald and Nancy didn’t like gay men. They both knew gay actors in Hollywood and evidently despised them. Reagan forbade the Center for Disease Control from intervening and studying this new and dangerous malady. That’s how low and despicable this man was. By the time CDC was involved 200,000 men had already died of this disease in the United States. People were begging the president to let the CDC loose on this. Reagan would not have it. Ronald Reagan is a mass murderer of gay men and Ronald Reagan allowed this disease to spread beyond the gay community and around the world. How many died because of Reagan’s inaction? What kind of person does this? I ask you.Ronald Reagan is the worst president in U.S. history. He created the wealth inequality that we see now. He hastened the fall of the middle class. He created one of the great financial emergencies in U.S. history and set the stage for the 2008 financial disaster.Yes, we need to reevaluate Reagan. The people of this country and the world are owed an apology.Update: Hollywood: Unmasking Informant T-10I just want to reply to one of the comments that has since disappeared. Ronald Reagan’s dramatic change in long held political beliefs is remarkable in itself. Was it a bad thing to be extremely left wing and seemingly overnight become very right wing? It’s a weird thing just from a mental health standpoint. The church that Reagan attended is the kind of place that takes in homeless each night and works toward resolving poverty. In those days, the Disciples of Christ was the place for left wing Christians. Reagan was a devoted socialist. His first wife, Jane Wyman a lifelong Republican, could not stand that Reagan spent so much of his time promoting left wing causes and left Reagan because of that. Reagan soldiered on. This is not a left vs right judgement. You don’t see this kind of conversion often. Suddenly abandoning such closely held beliefs could be an indication of an underlying personality disorder. It’s also important to understand what is happening here as a whole. J. Edgar Hoover was not a nice man nor was the FBI nice especially when it came to the left wing. Hoover kept files on every politician and everyone who was active politically including actors and Hoover used this information to blackmail and control members of Congress, judges, etc. Hoover was no different than the Stasi in East Germany. If you have any doubt about what kind of organization the FBI was under Hoover read the Congressional testimony about what they did to MLK. Did the FBI use brain washing techniques like mild forms of torture on Reagan? The FBI was certainly up to that. I admit, I don’t know what happened to Reagan regarding how his conversion came about and some of the timeline is hard to put together. We can only guess. When exactly did Reagan become an FBI informant? Was it at about the same time he met and fell in love with Nancy in 1949? Nancy was an arch-conservative and in your face racist. Some of the information that the FBI had has been declassified. That’s how we know about T-10 but not all, not Hoover’s personal files on Reagan. Boy I would love to get hold of those!

Mildly against.The bill, as written, legally bans private transfers; anyone without an FFL seeking to transfer a firearm must transfer it to an FFL, who can then transfer it to the intended party, after going through their required paperwork.The law does heavily imply that a transfer to the FFL for the purpose of then transferring to the transferee must be honored as such; there have been postulated scenarios where the FFL is not legally bound to proceed with the transfer, as they technically receive the firearm free of charge and it becomes their prerogative to complete the other half of the transaction. It also explicitly prevents the “black hole” many State versions have created, where if the transferee can’t receive the weapon because they fail the check, it again technically belongs to the FFL, so the transferor now has to go through the background check process including any waiting period in order to get it back. This law avoids that by specifically stating the FFL doesn’t have any regulatory requirement in returning the gun to the transferor, so the FFL has no excuse to hold on to it if the transferee gets denied.There are still some basic problems:It uses the existing FFL network, long the subject of bad-faith regulation and restriction at all levels. There are approximately 140,000 FFLs in the country, that will now have to process all transfers, temporary or permanent, between the roughly 75 million non-FFLs in the country. And those FFLs are not equally distributed by population; many States - “the usual suspects” on the coasts and bordering Lake Michigan and the Mississippi - have done everything they can to chase FFLs out of their jurisdictions, mainly through a combination of zoning restrictions, regulatory hell, and frivolous lawsuits for selling to someone that then used it in a crime, even if the FFL followed all the laws and despite the existence of the PLCAA. In DC, a 70-square-mile box with three quarters of a million people in it, there is one FFL - one - that will handle handgun transfers in the enclave. And he charges $125 to do it, because he can, because nobody else in the District (and there are only five other FFLs at last count) is willing to put up with the hassle and potential felony charges under District law at any price.It makes no provision for transfer between concealed carry permittees, those with security clearance, or others already much more heavily vetted than by NICS. In virtually all states that have such a permit, a comprehensive background check is a requisite, and in most such states the permit must be surrendered if the person is even charged with a disqualifying crime. Concealed carry permittees can often use their permits to bypass NICS checks, but this law makes no exception for a transfer to a person holding a valid concealed carry permit of the state of residence of the transferor and transferee. The same goes for those with Federal security clearance, which also requires a comprehensive background check, as well as many other similar statuses.The exceptions it does make are reasonable, but include transfers between “domestic partners” which is a major loophole. Transfers among immediate family and temporary transfers in the interest of public safety or while engage in a firearm-related activity are exempt, and I generally agree with that. However, gay rights connotations aside, the dictionary definition of “domestic partner” is “a person who shares a residence with a sexual partner, especially without a legally recognized union”, and the legal definition is usually similar, encompassing any formal or informal ongoing cohabitation between two unmarried people who can be reasonably presumed to be getting it on.Transfers between “live-ins” are the source of virtually all guns obtained illegally as “straw purchases”, which in turn are between 30 and 40% of all guns used in crimes, and it makes the law useless at one of its primary public raisons d’etre. Straw buys are already hard to prosecute, and this law makes it explicitly legal to give a gun to your live-in boyfriend without going through the NICS check, as long as you can plausibly deny you had any knowledge of what he does for money.There is no funding, mandate or other legal or financial tools in this Act by which the ATF, FBI or DoJ are encouraged to actually prosecute NICS rejections. If you fill out a 4473 with the answers that would have the FFL actually bother to call it in, and NICS denies you, the probability is better than 98% that the denial is due to a “life event” that would be hard for you to legitimately not know about, and therefore the evidence is fairly plain that you have just falsified a sworn Federal document (5 years and $10,000) and attempted to purchase a firearm while knowingly prohibited (another 5 years and $10,000).However, of the roughly 115,000 denials issued by NICS annually, just 1% of those, about 1,200, are referred by the FBI to an AAG in the Justice Department for consideration, and only 1 in 100 of those are actually prosecuted. Meanwhile, the Aurora Illinois shooting was committed by a convicted felon who still passed a NICS check, and when this error finally came to light when he applied for a carry permit, instead of a court order to police to confiscate the purchased weapon, the shooter got a form letter to please appear at the nearest police station at his convenience to surrender the firearm. Before he bothered to do that, he went postal after being fired.NICS is a joke to criminal actors in our society; they might as well try to buy one from a store first before paying back-alley markup, because they’re statistically more likely to be approved by the system than to be prosecuted for being denied by it. That should be the focus of Federal legislators; Fix NICS (which passed last March and will hopefully improve the completeness and correctness of NICS data by providing actual penalties to State and Federal agencies who fail to report) is a big step in the right direction, but the system’s biggest failure right now is not what transfers are or aren’t being vetted, it’s the enforcement of the law against over a hundred thousand people who know they can’t buy a gun from an FFL and yet try anyway.As I’ve said several times in answers here, I support the concept of UBCs, but the devil’s in the details. This is not the right approach, because not only does it not do what it’s supposed to in preventing criminal access to guns, it plays directly into the hands of state lawmakers who have been giving a middle finger to the 2A and to SCOTUS rulings on the topic for decades.FFLs will be targeted even more heavily than they already are, because they are how guns move in the US, and if the California Assembly doesn’t want them to move at all, all they need to do is make it impractical to be an FFL in their state. Ninth Circuit has already held that the 2A does not recognize a right to sell guns, in upholding an Alameda County zoning law that makes it demonstrably impossible to open a gun store anywhere in that county (and existing stores, while grandfathered, can’t change hands in any way that requires a new State permit as it will not be granted), so California has a pretty good head start here. This bill would just nationalize the same opportunity.

This is an interesting question.By the time I graduated from High School and entered college, Martin Luther King had already been assassinated. The U.S. government had learned a lot and taken strong measures to combat the kind of social and economic changes that the 1960’s had produced. In essence the U.S. at the beginning of the 1970s was already preparing to rollback the 1960’s.The Powell ManifestoIn 1971, two months prior of his appointment to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, Lewis Powell wrote a secret memo, known as “The Powell Manifesto” to his friend, Eugene Sydnor, Jr who was director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The letter was kept a secret until after Powell was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the Senate. The contents of this memo can be found here: The Powell Memo (also known as the Powell Manifesto).In his letter Powell points out that the U.S. system of “Free Enterprise” is threatened. Here is a quote from the letter:The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as “Selling of the Pentagon”), but to the daily “news analysis” which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system.12 Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in “business” and free enterprise.It is a long memo and highly quotable, but I will try to be brief here. Here is another interesting quote:There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.Everyone should read the full letter at the link above. I find it interesting that Powell thought any criticism of capitalism as an attempt to destroy it rather than improve it. At any rate, it is clear that the contents of this 1971 Manifesto have been meticulously implemented by the business community to the point that there is now only their voice and no others.There is an excellent book by Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent (pdf), which details how the news media skews what Americans hear about the world. This is Justice Powell’s Manifesto implemented. What really got me in the book was a in-depth study of the guest commentators on National Public Television’s McNeil-Lehrer report. More than 80% of the guest commentators were from business sponsored Think Tanks. McNeil-Lehrer had, previous to my reading of Chomsky, been one of my favorite shows! While the other 20% were liberal voices but no one anyone really knew except for their appearances on the show.The political establishment of the two parties, up until recently, cleanly split the voters down the middle. One party offers small tokens of progressive social change, while the other party offers small tokens of preventing said social change. People, conservative and liberal, vote against the other party in each of the elections. This has been going on for decades.Another major change came, by the time I participated in protests. We had all learned the power of nonviolent action thanks to Martin Luther King’s brave example; so had, as it turns out, our government. What follows is my personal experience:Governor of California Ronald Reagan was very proud of how he handled student protests. Almost immediately after Powell’s memo, Reagan began to reorganize California’s public University system to get rid of or isolate some of the social science faculty that Powell complained about. Reagan went after the social science departments at the University of California at Berkeley with an axe. At one point he proposed selling off the Bancroft Library’s books to collectors, but the legal nature of the endowment prevented him. The Bancroft Library contains rare collections of books, manuscript, and ancient maps used by scholars from around the world.The draconian changes to the University provoked outrage and outright rebellion by the student body. A protest was organized to occupy on campus a building known as California Hall which contains office of the Chancellor of the University. Several dozen people sat down in the Chancellor’s Office. The University gave the occupiers an ultimatum that they would be removed on a certain day if they did not leave voluntarily. The response was a larger sit-in was planned involving thousands of students in and around the building.That’s when the FBI showed up. You might wonder what jurisdiction the FBI has in this protest? So do I. At anyrate the FBI was everywhere and I was one of the people passing food to the occupiers. The FBI, and it was obvious as no one else in Berkeley wears a suit, followed us around, stood in front of our residence with their radios, took photos of us, and generally tried to intimidate people.The day of the mass sit-in came and 5000 students sat down on the lawn around California Hall. Non-violent protest did not work that day against Ronald Reagan and the State of California for the same reason that non-violent protest by Jews against Hitler would not have worked.Ronald Reagan’s administration had hired a private army known to the students as the “Blue Meanies”. To become a Blue Meanie, you had to be a fit male over 6 feet tall. I was told that most of them were off-duty prison guards. Each man wore a powder blue jumpsuit with no visible insignia. Each man had 48″ club weighted on the business end with a donut shaped metal weight. Each man wore a helmet and a face mask that hid his identity. About 500 Blue Meanies marched in a double line and surrounded the seated students on two sides.The Blue Meanies were backed up by a 200 strong Alameda County Swat team armed with M-16 rifles; a state of the art assault rifle of the time. The FBI and the police kept the public and the press away from the scene.The Blue Meanies began to move on the crowd. They did not try to pick up and move the seated non-resisting students. They simply hit the seated students on the head with their weighted clubs. Blood was everywhere. They were killing us. I ran for my life.The next day there was a small article on the second page of the San Francisco Chronicle which mentioned only that there had been “student unrest” the day before on the Berkeley campus. It did not mention why or that people had been injured or killed. A year before, a student was killed by a policeman’s errant shotgun blast from a People’s Park protest while the victim studied at his desk in Erhman Dorm where I lived. The press did not bother to mention that incident either.The lesson was that non-violence doesn’t work in the United States if the protestors are isolated from witnesses because the government of the United States has no regard for human life.The state has another strategy for handling peaceful protests. I am a witness to this tactic as well. It was visible at the protests of the 2nd Iraq war. This strategy involves the use of provocateurs. The two dozen extremely fit young men were dressed in black, wearing masks and claimed to be Anarchists. Exactly what kind of anarchist they were pretending to be was unclear. They handed out leaflets that said there would be an illegal protest at 1;00 PM that would leave the permitted route. Earlier, I had seen these same young men waving large red hammer and sickle flags in front of the CNN camera station. There is no kind of anarchism including anarcho-socialists that have that are interested in Soviet Style Communism. How is it that each of the anarchists has a military haircut, military commando level fitness, and is about the same young age?At the 1999 Seattle protests of the WTO, a group of similar young men, moved out of the very peaceful parade of protestors and started breaking windows on the street, prompting the police to move on the rest of the crowd, but for some reason not on the group that broke the windows. I have seen similar groups in each of the protests I have attended.