The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid - the Outrages

And now we move on the the Outrages.

First, two former health officials have revealed that back in March, Vice President Mike NotWorthAFarthing ordered CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield to use the agency's emergency powers to effectively seal the US borders. Pence was overruling agency scientists who said there was no valid public health reason to issue the order and no evidence the action would slow the spread of the coronavirus. Which it hasn't.

Dr. Redfield, showing the spunk and spine for which he has been so notable, immediately capitulated and ordered his senior staff to get it done.

Until then, public health experts had urged the administration to focus on a national mask mandate, enforce social distancing, and increase the number of contact tracers to track down people exposed to the virus but the hammer came down and the message was "screw all that, seal the borders."

Why? Because while the CDC’s order covered the border with Canada, it has mostly affected the thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants arriving at the border with Mexico.

That is, this has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with blocking immigration. Indeed, the chief proponent of closing the borders was Stephen Miller, a top Tweetie-pie aide and notorious xenophobic bigot, who knew the order could be used to kick asylum seekers and immigrants out of the country with no due process.

And it has. Since the order went into effect on March 20, nearly 150,000 people - including at least 8,800 unaccompanied children who are normally afforded special legal protections under federal law - have been sent back to their countries of origin without normal due process. Many have been returned to dangerous and violent conditions in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, declared that “This is what the Trump administration has been trying to do for four years and they finally saw a window.”

A window they are keeping open: The order was supposed to be a month-long temporary measure, but has been renewed multiple times.

And the administration of course lied about it, claiming it was all about protecting Customs and Border Patrol agents, as NotWorthAFarthing claimed he had nothing to do with it and Tweetie-pie blathered that the order had originated at the CDC.

Dr. Josh Sharfstein, a former FDA deputy commissioner and a Johns Hopkins professor, said of Redfield "I don’t know how he could look another CDC scientist in the eye after doing this."

Hell, I don't know how anyone in that administration could look any honest person in the eye. But they do. Because they are a cabal of moral monsters and crawling cowards.

They are, collectively, an Outrage.

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Our other Outrage is a repeat offender: it's our mainstream news media, by which we are malinformed, misinformed, and uninformed.

Understand, this is not the product of some conspiracy; the media does not have weekly phone calls to get their marching orders as to what will be covered and how. It is, rather, the product of a common mind-set, a common, almost universal way of thinking that leads to groupthink, to so-called pack journalism where everyone winds up pursuing the same story because, after all, everyone else is, a mind-set favors the powerful over the weak and "official" sources over unofficial ones, one that is jealous of protecting their "access," which becomes all important to them, and never forgets that they are in a business and drama makes for ratings. "If it bleeds, it leads" is not obsolete guidance.

The last point leads to examples like this:

After a grand jury declined to indict three white police officers in the death of Breonna Taylor, protest broke out in Louisville.

One night, 28 people were arrested, at least some of them as soon as a 9 p.m. curfew went into effect.

Now quoting a report from ABC News:

Just before the curfew started, orders were given for protesters to clear out of a park in downtown. Many protesters left, but a group sought sanctuary at a nearby First Unitarian Church.

Just before midnight, according to police, a small group of people left the church and began causing destruction in the area. Some windows at nearby schools were broken; one car was set on fire with an incendiary device.

Got it? A crowd was in a park. Most left when curfew came. Around midnight, a "small group" began causing trouble.

This is how the article was headlined:

28 arrests made during Breonna Taylor protests in Louisville; windows smashed, vehicle set ablaze
Police say the arrests followed a wave of destruction in the city

[note: the story is gone from the website]

Does the headline - which is what most people see and beyond which many do not read - reflect the story? No, it doesn't. It ignores the peaceful many in order to emphasize and sensationalize the violence, turning a "small group" of people who broke "some windows" and set one car on fire into "a wave of destruction."

Compare that sort of sensationalism with the pretty much ho-hum reaction to Tweetie-pie's September 23 refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power and suggestion that any election he lost would be by definition corrupt. That was treated as if most of the media said "well, it's an interesting story I suppose, but we can't get worked up about it." It got nothing like the "wave of destruction" treatment that some vandalism got in the Breonna Taylor coverage.

The New York Times, for example, pretty much buried the story. Peter Baker, the paper's chief White House correspondent, attempted to explain it away by citing print publication deadlines. But such deadlines didn't seem to be a problem when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died late in the evening, leading to a page one, above-the-fold feature in the next day's Times print edition.

Meanwhile, the evening network newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC on the day Tweetie-pie in effect threatened to refuse to leave office if he lost the election didn't even cover it, didn't even mention it. It apparently just wasn't important enough to them.

There was some decades ago a sort of "golden age" in journalism, when print newspapers were plentiful and radio and TV news was not expected to make a profit for station owners. But those days are long dead, their death notices signed when media became more and more corporate and those corporations realized that news, particularly broadcast news, could be a profit center. We continue to suffer the effects of that shift.

Make no mistake, there still is quality journalism and original reporting out there - the New York Times' recent reporting on Tweetie-pie's taxes being an example. But we should not and cannot content ourselves with celebrating the outliers. An informed populace is more important now than ever. And on that account, our major media, too focused on profit and too addicted to power, continue to fail us.

And that is an Outrage.

The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid - the Clowns

Now for a regular feature, it's Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages and stating, as usual, with the Clowns.

So. Tweetie-pie engages in a pattern of risky behavior, such as packed campaign rallies and indoor events across the country while refusing to wear a mask and winds up catching COVID-19.

There was lots of commentary, but it took Rep. Matt Gaetz to see the real meaning of Tweetie-pie catching COVID, which is that it proves the protection guidelines put forth by the CDC, the ones Tweetie-pie persistently ignored, don't work.

"What I can tell you," he told Tucks Carlson on October 2, "is if this virus can get into the Oval, into the body of the president, there is no place where it could not possibly infect one of our fellow Americans" and therefore we should just go ahead and open everything up and let the disease run rampant because precautions are useless and, I guess, we all gotta get sick and die sometime.

Matt Gaetz: ghoulish Clown.

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Speaking of Tucks Carlson, on that same day he equated criticizing Tweetie-pie’s behavior in contracting COVID with blaming the victim of a sexual assault.

Carlson claimed the media and the Democrats said Tweetie-pie "deserved what he got" and that their perspective on Trump was: “He asked for it. He was dressed provocatively.”

I guess then in Tucks' mind, if a drunk driver killed someone, you can't criticize them for getting behind the wheel drunk because that would be the same as blaming a rape victim for her rape.

Tucks is an old hand at winning Clown Awards. Nice to see he hasn't lost his touch.

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Someone who used to be on top but has fallen by the wayside in the presence of Clowns more powerful than her is Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

But while she has dropped from the top tier, she still has her moments, as on October 5 when in response to Tweetie-pie leaving the hospital, she tweeted "President Trump has once again defeated China. Welcome home."

There's really nothing else to say Marsha Blackburn: once a clown, always a clown.

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But our winner this time around easily outclassed the field. It was no contest. This time's winner of the Clown Award is Bill Maher, the most undeservedly self-important person in television.

On his September 23 show, he took time out from his usual self-indulgent pontificating to finger exactly who is responsible for everything bad that has happened for the last four years and everything bad that will happen under an even-more right-wing Supreme Court. Because just one group is responsible for it all.

Who? People who voted for Jill Stein. That's right, it's all the fault of people who voted for the Green Party in 2016.

Was it the fault of Hillary Clinton, who ran a crappy campaign based almost entirely around "I'm not Trump," didn't campaign at all in Wisconsin, and did worse among blacks, Latinos, Asians, and the young than Obama did four years earlier? No, it was Jill Stein voters.

Was it the fault of those black, Latino, Asian, and young voters who either switched parties or didn't vote at all? No, it was Jill Stein voters.

Was it the fault of James Comey, who, it was all but universally agreed, threw a monkey wrench into the Clinton campaign with his last-minute announcement of a re-opened investigation, one which, by the way, went nowhere? No, it was Jill Stein voters.

Was it the fault of the media and Democratic party establishments who, after the election, did their best to normalize Trump until they could no longer deny the reality? No, it was Jill Stein voters.

This is all based on the moth-eaten - better yet, dung-encrusted - notion that if only, oh lord, if only all of Stein's voters had instead voted for Hillary Clinton, oh what a wonderful world this would be because in three key states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Stein's vote total exceeded the difference between Clinton and Tweetie-pie.

Except there are two things wrong here: One is that it turned out when all the votes were counted that Stein's vote in Pennsylvania did not exceed the margin. Even if Clinton had won Michigan and Wisconsin, losing Pennsylvania would still mean losing the election.

And two, exit polls found that had she not been on the ballot, some of her voters would have voted for Tweetie-pie and half or maybe more wouldn't have voted at all. If the Green Party wasn't on the ballot at all, the only difference it would have made is that the Democrats would have had one fewer excuse, one fewer target to blame, one fewer way to avoid blaming themselves for their own screw-ups.

Oh, and one final thing on this, you really want to know who to blame for Tweetie-pie? How about the 42% of eligible voters who didn't vote at all? Why were the Democrats incapable of bringing out more voters? If they had been able to rouse just one-tenth of those non-voters, they would have added more votes to their total than all third-party candidates combined. And they failed.

I don't know how it could be, but I'm sure that in light of this Bill Maher would tell us that those non-voters are the fault of Jill Stein voters.

Bill Maher: truly a Clown.

The Erickson Report for Ocrober 14 to 27, Page 3: Voting footnotes

Oh, finally on this for now, two relevant footnotes.

First, there has indeed been voter fraud occurring in this year's election. And the source is exactly who you would expect.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, the state's top election official, has announced his office is investigating reports that the state's Republican Party has set up illegal ballot drop boxes posing as "official" ones in several major counties. Only county election officials can set up ballot drop boxes and these phony ones could be a felony.

And second, we need to remember that GOPpers aren't the only ones whose declared devotion to free and open elections depends on what is to their benefit. So here's a reminder:

Again we go to Pennsylvania where on September 17, in response to a suit filed by a couple of connected Democrats, the State Supreme Court kicked the Green Party off the presidential ballot.

Why? Pennsylvania state law requires that third parties submit 5,000 signatures to appear on the ballot, together with an affidavit of candidacy. The Greens submitted the paperwork, by hand, in August - but they faxed the final affidavit so it was not turned in "together" with the signatures.

This seems like a remarkably trivial error, particularly since no one is disputing that the party gathered enough signatures, but it was enough to enable the Dems to get the party kicked off the ballot entirely with no opportunity to correct the error.

The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27, Page 2: Some Good News

On the other hand, I do have to say that not all the news is bad, in fact, there is some good news to be found.

For example, in Montana. In August, Governor Steve Bullock issued a directive allowing counties to accept voter-requested mail-in ballots for the 2020 election.

The Trump Campaign, the Republican National Committee and Montana Republican State Central Committee jointly filed a lawsuit to block mail-in voting.

On September 30, US District Dana Christensen dismissed the suit in its entirety, calling claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election "fiction."

Also in August, Nevada passed legislation sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters. The T-P campaign, of course, sued. And lost. On September 21, in Nevada, U.S. District Judge James Mahan dismissed the case, saying the Trump campaign does not represent Nevada voters and does not have legal standing to bring the complaint, which he called “impermissibly generalized.”

Meanwhile, another group of right-wing vote-haters sued in state court over the same legislation. And also lost.

On October 7 the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the suit, saying the GOPpers had not presented substantial evidence that the parts of the law being challenged “are not rationally related to the State’s interest in ensuring that all active registered voters have an opportunity to exercise their right to vote in a safe and secure manner during a pandemic” and that they had “presented no concrete evidence" that fraud would occur.

On October 6, US District Judge Michael Shipp rejected the attempt by the Trump campaign to block a plan approved by New Jersey lawmakers allowing election officials to begin counting mailed ballots 10 days before Election Day and accept mailed ballots up to two days after November 3 even if they lacked a postmark.

Shipp noted that while there have been real allegations of voter fraud in New Jersey in previous elections, none of them have anything to do with the issues at hand.

We go back to Pennsylvania, where Philadelphia recently opened seven satellite election offices, deemed legal by the state Supreme Court, where people can register to vote, apply for a mail-in ballot, fill it out and turn it in.

Trump campaign employees promptly showed up at the offices, demanding they be allowed to go in and watch what people were doing. City election officials prevented them. The Tweetie-pie campaign sued.

On October 9, Judge Gary Glazer threw them out of court, finding that Pennsylvania law does not allow such representatives to observe in election offices.

Also in Pennsylvania, the Tweetie-pie campaign and the Republican National Committee sued to block the state from having ballot drop boxes, to force it to do signature matches between voter registration records and ballots, which is a notoriously faulty way to confirm a voter's identity because it takes no account of how handwriting can change over time, and to enable the GOPpers to bring in an army of nonresident “poll watchers” to intimidate voters. They lost on all three issues.

In an opinion issued on October 10, US District Judge Nicholas Ranjan wrote that "While Plaintiffs may not need to prove actual voter fraud, they must at least prove that such fraud is ‘certainly impending.’ They haven’t met that burden. At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions."

This is all Good News, but we need to bear in mind that all of them, with the possible exception of the one by the Nevada Supreme Court, are subject to appeal which means it's possible in each case for the Good News to turn bad. But unless it is done for consciously partisan and ideological reasons - which you have to admit is a possibility - it's unlikely any court would want to overturn one of these decisions just three weeks from Election Day.

But even if this Good News remains good, it still illustrates what has has been going on. It is all part of, the legal face of, a coordinated multi-million dollar, multi-state, campaign to block, hinder, and undermine access to voting for tens of millions of people. These suits are not separate from voter ID laws, not separate from voter purges, not separate from daily screeching about non-existent "fraud," not separate from the deliberate creation of hours-long lines. They are all one and the same, a campaign of deception, intimidation, lies, and deceit to denigrate and delegitimize voting and thorough that undermine the concept of voting as a means of seeking justice, undermine the very concept of self-government that could challenge the power of our social and economic elites.

The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27, Page 1: More on voter suppression

We start this time with some news on voter suppression. I think I said last time that I couldn't begin to catalog all the efforts in states across the country to block, limit, purge, and intimidate voters and voting, but I do want to note a few more.

First, quickly because I suspect you have heard about this, the GOPpers are spending $20 million to recruit 50,000 volunteers in 15 states to "observe" polling places on election day, with the expected targets being minority districts, taking advantage of the fact that the courts allowed a consent decree banning voter intimidation to expire in 2018.

Next, Republican Sen. Rick Scott - known to us here a Voldemort - has introduced legislation that would have the effect of having millions of mail-in votes not counted.

Under the proposal, counting of mail-in ballots could not start until the morning of Election Day and would have to be completed within 24 hours of when voting closes, with any state laws to the contrary being preempted.

That is, all mail-in ballots would have to be counted within one roughly 36-hour window, and any not counted in that time would just be dumped, the same as if they had arrived too late.

The bill won't pass if only because it won't get through the House - but it does show the lengths to which the GOPpers will go in their attempts to attack voting.

Meanwhile, telegraphing the GOPper plan, Lindsey Grahamcracker insists the GOPpers will allow for a peaceful transition of power - defined as accepting whatever decision the Supreme Court reaches, the voters, apparently, be damned. Which is why, he insisted, we just have to rush through to get Amy Bugs Bunny Barrett on the bench because we can't have a 4-4 tie. I wonder which of the reactionaries currently on the Court the GOppers are worried will not vote as they order.

They may not have to worry, considering that in July that reactionary majority approved of what amounts to a poll tax, supposedly banned by the Constitution.

In 2018, Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution giving convicted felons who had done their time the right to vote. The right wing state legislature immediately undermined the decision of the voters by requiring that ex-felons must also have paid all fines and fees - even though the state imposes a mind-boggling array of fees on defendants to the degree that at trial level in the case that followed it was revealed that the state has no idea how much those folks owe.

So it's "pay up or don't vote" - which is a poll tax by any reasonable standard - "even though even if you want to pay, we can't tell you how much you owe or for what."

The trial judge blocked the measure only to be over turned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing this poll tax to go into effect. SCOTUS then refused to hear an appeal, in essence saying "Sure, go ahead, we're fine with that."

Next, you know, I'm sure, about the attacks on the US Postal Service. In late September, documents released in a court case revealed that despite their lies about it, top executives at the United States Postal Service were instrumental in pushing, were the ones driving, strategies that delayed mail delivery at a time when everyone was expecting an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, delays that could cause unknown thousands of such ballots to arrive too late to be counted.

On October 1, Texas Gov. Greg Abattoir issued an executive order that drop-off balloting locations must be limited to one per county - despite the enormous population differences among counties and despite the fact that Harris County, the state's most populous and a major Democratic stronghold, has an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. Actually, scratch "despite" amd substitute "because of."

Next: For at least 40 years, it has been policy at the Department of Injustice to make no announcements and take no public actions close to an election if the surrounding publicity could potentially affect the outcome.

On October 2, that was changed. Now if a US attorney’s office suspects election fraud, investigators will be allowed to take public actions before the polls close, even if those actions do risk affecting the outcome of the election.

Singled out in the announcement were cases involving postal workers and military employees - in other words, the people who might in some way be connected to mail-in ballots.

Last at least for now, GOPpers in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives are proposing a GOPper-dominated special committee "to investigate, review, and make recommendations concerning the regulation and conduct of the 2020 general election," with powers including subpoenaing witnesses and documents - including, it would appear, as-yet uncounted ballots - and with a goal of recommending legislation even before the election.

The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27

 

The Erickson Report for October 14 to 27

This time:

 - More on voter suppression, including some Good News where it has been blocked

- Clowns: Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, Marsha Blackburn, Bill Maher

- Outrages: US borders were not sealed because of COVID-19 but to kick out asylum seekers; corporate news media continues to fail us

The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13, Page 4: A final thought

Look, I'm running out of time so I have to stop here. But I think that's more than enough to support my insistence that our right to vote and our right to seek justice are both under serious threat.

Maybe I can get back to a little more normal of a show next time.

I have time to stick in one last thought:

According to the US Crisis Monitor, a joint project between the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University. over 93% of this year's racial justice protests have been entirely peaceful.

But you wouldn't know that with all the right wing frothing over the violence that did occur, frothing eagerly abetted by a drama-addicted media.

So I want to re-emphasize what I said last time. We've known all along about the levels of anger, frustration, and despair in minority communities in our country, but we as a dominant white society have simply chosen to ignore it.

So yes, there has been some violence, some destruction. But what we've seen is nothing compared to events like Watts 1965, Newark 1967, Detroit 1967, three outbreaks which together ended with 103 dead, over 2400 wounded, and over $50 million in property damage. I say again: We should not have been surprised at the violence; we should have been surprised there wasn't more.

The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13, Page 3: Dissenting

At the same time as our ability to vote is under attack, so is our ability to seek justice.

This attack has been on-going for some time, it's not a new thing, but it has really come to the fore during the on-going demonstrations over police brutality and murders of unarmed black people. That's because rather than addressing the injustices, the racism, the militarization of police, the white supremacy at the root of this, the right wing prefers to simply set about crushing the protests by means of increasing and in other cases outright creating criminal penalties with the idea of raising the risks and costs of protesting above what people can bear.

It's known as "rule by law," a relatively new idea to stand in contrast to the "rule of law," the abstract concept that all are equal in the eyes of the law - which of course isn't the reality, but we are talking about a concept. The point is, rule by law means those in power weaponize the law as a means to maintain that power - and that is exactly what is happening.

Again, this summer brought a new level of intensity. but it has been happening.

Just since 2015 - in the wake of protests set off by the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson - states have introduced at least 154 bills or executive orders to restrict peaceful protest. A number of them are not directly connected to the Black Lives Matter protests, in fact some, including three just this spring, are about protecting fossil fuel facilities. They want no more Dakota Access Pipeline water protectors.

But no matter the target, all such measures are threatening the same rights. So far, nearly 60 if not more of that 154 have become law, many of them since nationwide protests broke out over the murder - and honestly I don't know what else you could call it - the murder of George Floyd. As of June, more than two dozen such bills were pending. I don't know what's happened with all of them, but I know at least two have passed.

Here's one: After Floyd's murder, protesters in Tennessee started an around-the-clock protest on capitol grounds in Nashville. After two months of this, the GOPpers controlling the legislature and the governorship decided they'd had enough. Unable to buy off the protesters with mealy-mouthed promises to address “racial reconciliation” and unable to crush them with rounds of misdemeanor arrests and seizure of their equipment, they decided to make protesting on capital grounds a felony, punishable with six years in prison and loss of voting rights.

A number of places aren't even bothering to pass new laws, they are just re-purposing old ones. Prosecutors in states ranging from New York to Utah are using decades-old gang laws to go after protesters, treating protests as if they were actions by criminal gangs. In Utah, adding a "gang enhancement" to a charge carries a sentence of five years to life. And yes, a woman in Utah was charged just that way in August, although the enhancement was later dropped even as the underlying charge was not.
And there are more such "rule by law" measures coming. Recently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a bill that would, among a number of other things, make it a felony to obstruct traffic while also allowing motorists to injure or kill protesters if they claim to be "fleeing a mob." It would make it a felony for anyone gathered in a group of seven or more people "to cause damage to property or injury to other persons" - that is, if you are in a group of seven or more and anyone in that group damages property or injures someone, you can be charged with a felony. It attaches Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, liability to "anyone who organizes or funds a violent or disorderly assembly" - treating protests as organized crime - and bars state grants to municipalities that reduce police budgets.

A few days later, Texas Gov. Greg Abattoir laid out legislative proposals to raise penalties and create new crimes that would require jail time for offenses committed at protests. This as Texas state cops are spending hundreds of hours to track down people suspected of misdemeanors during anti-brutality protests.

And, of course, don't think the feds are slouches in this regard.

In June, Attorney General William Barr said the Department of Injustice and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces would look at protests, “identify people in the crowd, pull them out and prosecute them.”

This past month, Sens. Rancid Paul and Tex Ooze called for the DOJ to pursue RICO charges against protesters and Black Lives Matter - and acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said that the department is looking into doing just that.

A couple of weeks ago, Barr told US attorneys to seek federal charges against protesters, including considering charging them with sedition, that is, with plotting to overthrow the government. The charge, which is in effect a step or two down from treason, carries a penalty of 20 years in prison. Shortly thereafter, deputy attorney general Jeffrey Rosen seconded the idea.

And of course the was the designation of New York, Portland, and Seattle as "anarchist jurisdictions" with an associated loss of federal funds, a designation created out of whole cloth by the White House on the grounds that, when you come right down to it, those cities have not harsh enough on protests, not doing enough to crush them out of existence - which to the right wing is the only acceptable goal.

A key to this, not sufficiently appreciated, is that it's not enough to punish dissent sufficiently to repress it. It has to be if you will the right sort of dissent. You want to keep your opponents off the streets, but you don't want to hinder your supporters, even if they do get let's call it a little rambunctious from time to time - that is, you want them free to act so long as they are of benefit to you. Succeed in suppressing left-wing dissent sufficiently, then gangs like the Proud Boys and Boogaloos are no longer useful, after which, they likely would - much to their shock, I would expect - become targets.

The point here is that for this to work, you need at least for now to redefine right-wing violence as "self-defense." Because the right wing cannot be violent, cannot be seen as violent, the better to use them as a tool.

Consider Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two protesters in  Kenosha. To the media voices of the right, with backing from the Whitest House, he's not an out-of-state - you know, an "outside agitator" - heavily-armed vigilante with visions of Rambo, he's a hero acting in self-defense.

The end of August, a group of right-wing thugs staged a pro-Tweetie-pie truck rally, with a number of them driving though central Portland in an obvious attempt at terrorizing. There is video of some of them shooting unarmed people with paint balls and pepper spray from back of pick-up trucks and driving through crowds. At a press conference, Tweetie-pie called it a "peaceful protest" and described paint as a "defensive mechanism."

The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13, Page 2: Voting

We start with voting.

Last time I briefly mentioned the issue of voter suppression, the attempt to establish self-perpetuating reactionary control of government by controlling and limiting who is allowed to vote, who is able to vote.

That is how the racists, most particularly but not exclusively in the South, maintained their power for so long: by preventing black people from voting by means such as poll taxes, aimed at poor people in general but particularly poor blacks, literacy tests with the results judged by the very white racists using them to keep their power, and whenever those failed, there was always outright physical intimidation and murder.

The methods now are more subtle but also effective. A primary one, as again I noted last time, are voter ID laws, laws which by pure coincidence, of course, demand forms of ID that minorities and the poor and students - three main groups the right-wing wants to keep away from the voting booth - are less likely to have. In fact, for example in Texas, an NRA membership card is acceptable as ID but a student ID at a university in the state is not.

These laws, which could disenfranchise millions of people across the country, are, it's invariably claimed, to prevent in-person voter fraud, where someone pretends to be someone else at the polls - the incidence of which is so vanishingly small that it is literally hard to even measure. A study by Justin Levitt, a professor at the Loyola School of Law and an expert in constitutional law, looked at local, state, and federal elections between 2000 and 2014, covering more than a billion votes could find only 31 credible accusations - not convictions, not even prosecutions, but mere accusations - of such fraud.

That's not the only evidence that claims of widespread election fraud are totally false. The right-wing Heritage Foundation maintains an online database of election fraud cases in the US covering the last 20 years and even that shows fewer than 1,300 cases of voter fraud in all forms, resulting in 1,100 criminal convictions, over that time.

Revealingly, while playing up the number of cases, the Foundation provides no information about the number of votes involved. Which is probably because counting only presidential elections, not state or local or for other national office, but only votes for president, there were about 630,000,000 votes cast 2000-2016, so 1300 cases makes for a fraud rate of at most 0.0002% - that's 2/10,000 of one percent.

In fact, studies by various researchers have repeatedly, insistently, reliably, come to the same conclusion: Voter fraud in the US in all forms is so rare as to be essentially nonexistent. Even Tweetie-pie's hand-picked Election Integrity Commission failed spectacularly in 2018 at sniffing out the supposed "widespread fraud" and his own FBI director told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on September 24 that "we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”

That last bit is important because this year, mail-in balloting is going to be particularly important and the same claims about rampant fraud, claims that the right-wing has been peddling for decades without any proof or truth, are being loudly and daily made about mail-in voting in particular, with the same measure of truth.

Consider: Over the past 20 years, about 250 million votes have been cast by a mail ballot nationally. That same Heritage Foundation database shows merely 204 cases involving the fraudulent use of absentee ballots over that time, 143 of which resulted in criminal convictions. That is a fraud rate of at most 0.00008%.

Meanwhile, Oregon started mailing ballots to all voters in 2000. In the years since, there have been over 50 million ballots cast, leading to precisely two convictions for mail-ballot fraud. That is 0.000004%. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are five times greater.

But then again, bogus claims of "fraud" are just that - bogus and lies. Even those making the claims cannot believe them, cannot take them seriously. They may be fanatics but they are not stupid. The claims of fraud are just an excuse, just a tactic - or considering how long they've been at it, maybe strategy is the better word. It has nothing to with fraud, nothing to with "protecting the integrity of voting" and everything to do with undermining faith in the process of voting, everything to do with destroying the very concept that voting means anything, carries any value.

They - and by they I mean the political right wing in this country, including the associated concentrated wealth and economic power - they want you to think that fraud is so rampant that the results of elections simply cannot be trusted so why bother, want you to become so discouraged, so disenchanted with the very idea that self-governance can function, the very idea that you can have a say in governance, so discouraged that you will simply give up trying and leave the field to the reactionaries.

And if they can't discourage you that way, they'll block you with another, a different means of voter suppression, such as voter list purges.

Voter list purges are supposedly merely a bureaucratic exercise intended to keep voter rolls up to date by removing those who have died or moved out of the district. They are not intrinsically evil but are still something that has been weaponized as another means to suppress voting.

To see why, first realize that minorities are disproportionately poor and that poor people, compared to those richer, are more likely to be renters than homeowners and so they tend to move more often. So right at the start they are more likely to be the target of a purge.

In fact, these "purges" always make me think of "pograms," especially because minorities are so often the target of these attacks on their rights, purges which - oh my what a coincidence - primarily disenfranchise minorities and the poor.

The problem - more accurately the opportunity for the right - is that such purges or often riddled with errors affecting scores of thousands of voters who may not even know they have been purged until they get to the polls and are turned away.

For example, this year Wisconsin attempted to purge 129,000 voters from the rolls on the claim that they had moved away only to have an independent analysis show 38% of those people had moved within the county - which should not have removed them from the rolls - and another 26% hadn't moved at all!

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist who has been on the voter suppression beat for years. In fact, he was responsible for arranging for that independent analysis in Wisconsin. As part of his recent book How Trump Stole 2020, he goes into how and why voter purges became a favorite tool of the right wing, not even despite the numerous errors but because of them, because even if the voter can correct the errors, it likely will not be before election day and so their vote is lost anyway.

And even these are not all the means the right wing is using and is talking about using to deny people the right to vote, to - to be direct - steal the election for Tweetie-pie and institute what amounts to authoritarian rule.

Populist Jim Hightower list a number of ways the right wing is trying to undermine the right to vote - that is, steal the election this time and eviscerate the meaning of voting along with it. In addition to what I've mentioned, he has "unleash the lawyers," with the blizzard of lawsuits challenging every attempt to make it easier to vote, "advance thuggery," noting that a consent decree that blocked most forms of voter intimidation expired in 2018, "shut the doors," suppressing the vote by closing polling places and reducing the number of voting machines in minority precincts, "kill the post office," to screw up mail-in voting, and "supreme suppression," using the Supreme Court to disenfranchise undesired voters.

And to push these anti-democratic claims, to try to advance this fundamentally un-American line of crap, no lie is too big, no hypocrisy too much. You want an example? Here's one:

You likely heard about the "NINE TRUMP BALLOTS WERE THROWN OUT! OMG! THE DEMOCRATS ARE STEALING THE ELECTION!" hysteria generated by the right wing. If all you heard was the headline, your reaction was likely along the lines of "what's going on there?" - or, if you're a Trumpster "I told ya so!"

But go a little deeper, read past the headline, and this is what you get: First, it turned out there were nine ballots, but only seven were for Trump. It's "not known" who the other votes were for. Exactly how they can know that seven were for Tweetie-pie without knowing who the others were for I don't understand and I expect neither do you beyond the obvious conclusion that they do know but just didn't want to say his name because we certainly don't want to suggest that screwups could affect anyone other than Tweetie-pie, because that would hinder the spread of the "THEY'RE STEALING THE ELECTION!" meme.

Oh, quick sidebar: It was improper for the DOJ to announce such an investigation this close to election day. And it was improper to say what candidate was potentially effected. They don't care.

Okay. Absentee ballots usually involve two envelopes, an inner one with your actual vote and an outer one with your information. The idea is simple: The other envelope contains the proof that you are you and that you voted, while your actual vote remains anonymous, put in a pile to be opened with the rest of the pile of mail-in ballots on election day. By the way, I assume I do not have to explain that there is no difference between an absentee and a mail-in ballot, that they are the same thing.

What happened is that there were absentee or mail-in ballots coming in and there were also requests for such ballots coming in. The envelopes look similar and some of the ballots were opened my mistake, thinking they were requests. If a mail-in ballot envelope is opened and the vote card is not inside the inner envelope, it's called a "naked ballot."

The incident in question happened in a county in Pennsylvania. According to reports at this point, the ballots in questions were naked ballots and in accordance with the rules, not counted, because that's what was done with naked ballots. (It appears they should not have been discarded but preserved for later canvassing, but that does not affect the fact that they would not have been counted.)

Okay, and here's the punch line: Why were those the rules? Because the Tweetie-pie campaign and the Pennsylvania GOPpers had won a lawsuit in the state Supreme Court saying that naked ballots should not be counted! So the GOPpers are now claiming election fraud based on following the very rules they insisted on.

But again, they don't care. They are transparent hypocrites. They don't care. They are transparent liars. They don't care. They are a disgrace to what it means to have a free society. They don't care. Nothing means anything to them other than what maintains and increases their power.

But don't think mere hypocrisy or lying is as far as it goes. Don't think mere voter suppression or purges or any of the rest of it is enough. There has been open talk within the right about two ways to simply ignore the election and literally hand the election to Tweetie-pie.

One is based on the fact that the constitution leaves it to each state to determine how to choose their electors to the electoral college. The idea is that states with GOPper-controlled legislatures would scream about fraud spreading through the vote like wildfire to the point where the legislature claims that it is impossible to determine the will of the people so they are simply going to appoint electors to - guess what - go vote for His High Orangeness.

The other is to use the 12th Amendment. First, right-wing goons set about creating chaos on election day and the days leading up to it. Enough right-wing legislatures use that as an excuse to say there's so much disorder, the elections can be held of there or the ballots can't be accurately counted and so the election can't be certified, with the end result that no one gets 270 electoral votes. At that point, under the 12th Amendment, the issue goes to the House. Good? No - because in that case, each state gets one vote. Wyoming counts the same as California, Alaska the same as New York.

This does not mean that either of these two scenarios is likely but the very fact they are being seriously discussed, the very fact that the right wing feels comfortable considering them, feels safe openly discussing how to literally ignore the results of elections, shows how far gone things are, how wildly power-hungry the right wing has become as it senses true lasting dominance possibly within its grasp, show how great is the risk.

The battle, I need to emphasize now, is not lost. There are groups waging the fight in the courts, there are other groups doing public education and working on ways to make sure people can get to the polls.

As individuals, right now, the best thing we can do now is, bluntly, to vote. To not let them deter or discourage us. To vote and to make damn sure it counts. Which means if you're going to vote by mail, do at ASAP. Do not wait a single day.

And if you vote in person, either early or same-day, be prepared for a wait. Bring a folding chair. Bring a book. Bring a bottle of water. But don't be stopped.

The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13, Page 1: The Threat

There have been any number of times when I have been distressed or depressed by the road our country, our society, our future, is on. At times I have been angry or frustrated - and yes, sometimes hopeful.

But now I am none of those things. I am frightened.

I am frightened because, as I said last time, our democracy is at risk. Quite literally. Our ability to govern ourselves, to have a government, to quote a line I'm sure you know, "of the people, by the people, for the people" is under serious threat.

There are two if you will categories of this threat which can be hard to disentangle because they overlap so much.  

One is attacks on voting, involving not just short term manipulation and suppression in search of immediate gain but a long term, on-going attack on the very concept of voting as a means of governing.

The other is an intensifying wave of attacks on our rights and civil liberties, specifically the ability to dissent from official stands and doctrines, to publicly question the status quo, to publicly seek change and justice. Attacks intended to delegitimize the notion of opposition, to make us afraid of raising our voices above the sort of private whispers found under the sorts of governments President Tweetie-pie so admires and wishes to emulate.

You may think all that is overstated, but I intend to prove my argument.

The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13

 

The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13

This episode of the Erickson Report focuses on "The Threat," the overlapping efforts that are creating a genuine threat to the US continuing as a democracy where voting means something and dissent is (at least in our philosophy) embraced as a means of finding our way to a more just society.

First is voter suppression and the campaign to denigrate and deligitimize elections in general.

Second is the moves to repress dissent by increasing the risks and costs of protest beyond what most people can bear, such as by making what had been lawful, criminal, and turning minor offenses into felonies.

The Erickson Report is news and commentary from the perspective of the radical nonviolent American left. Comments are welcome.

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages (the Outrages)

Moving on to the outrages, on September 3, the Tweetie-pie administration proposed rule changes to the Endangered Species Act, changes that Noah Greenwald, director of the endangered species program at the Center for Biological Diversity, called "a disaster for endangered species and the natural world."

One of the purposes of the Act is to protect endangered species by labeling certain areas "critical habitat," areas necessary for the species' well-being and continued survival.
 
The proposed changes would require the US Fish and Wildlife Service to "assign weight" to industry claims of an economic impact if a given area is to be declared critical habitat and to on that basis exclude federal lands essential to the recovery of species from protection of the Endangered Species Act. To make that clearer: Currently, areas may be excluded from protection of the Act if that exclusion would have no impact on the survival of the species; the changes, as I understand them, would allow for such exclusion even if there is such an impact, thus raising the economic interests of polluters and despoilers over the preservation of nature.

Even worse, according to Greenwald, the polluters and despoilers would not even have to prove the economic impacts they are claiming.

It's just another of the thousand cuts, the thousand outrages, the Tweetie-pie gang has inflicted on protection of the environment and those who live in it - including, yes, people - just to make sure their fat cats pals can afford to put another addition on their mansions.

As a footnote to that, I'll just mention there is a movement developing called Rights of Nature that looks to obtain for ecosystems legal status in our court system as rights-bearing entities. The idea is not, as sarcasm would have it, giving every tree a lawyer, but rather that an ecosystem is to be regarded in court as a party with legal interests. The big asset here is that this would enable organizations and even individuals to sue polluters on behalf of an ecosystem without having to prove that they themselves individually were injured and where, if successful, the damages involved and so the remediation  involved would be to the ecosystem rather than just to the particular individual. Toledo, Ohio actually tried it in 2019 but lost in trial court this spring and the city felt it didn't have the financial resources to push the matter further.

Suing on behalf of some third party is hardly new, even suing on behalf of some defined non-living entity is not new. So Rights of Nature at the very least isn't outside the reach of legal theory. But yes, it is radical. And for that reason it is worthy of respect and our attention.

-

Next is the Outrage that never seems to end. It's an asymptote - which, if you don't know, is a curve on a graph that keeps getting closer and closer to zero but never gets there. The value gets smaller and smaller but never actually disappears.

I am talking about the death penalty. Even as public support continues to decline, even as fewer states even have the death penalty on the books and most of those that have it use it less and less, still it persists like some noxious weed.

On August 28, Keith Dwayne Nelson became the fifth person the Trump administration has legally murdered this summer.

Before this summer, the federal government has not had an execution in 17 years. Since July there have now been five, with two more scheduled for late September and new dates rumored to be on their way. Even without those, our Killer-in-Chief has already carried out more federal executions in 2020 than his predecessors had in the previous 57 years combined.

The death penalty is notoriously ineffective in controlling crime and notoriously racist in its operation, not only in who is sentenced to death but in who is convicted: If you are a white person accused of killing someone and are claiming self-defense, you are 2.5 times more likely to succeed if your victim was black than if they were white.

I started to say that the death penalty is a lingering remnant of a barbarous age - but then I thought that we're really not that far removed from barbarity, are we? We just find politer ways to do it.

In any event, the death penalty remains what it always has been: an outrage.

-

Finally for this time out, on August 11, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene won a GOPper primary for Georgia's 14th congressional district.

She won with the backing of GOPper megadonors along with such as the chair of the board of the Heritage Foundation and groups connected to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his wife.

Her win makes her the odds-on favorite to fill the seat in the heavily-GOPper district come November. Despite the fact that she is, again, a racist, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic QAnon devotee.

Perhaps to celebrate her victory, on her Facebook page, Greene recently posted an image of herself holding a gun alongside images of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar and wrote: "We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists."

That transparent incitement to murder was too much even for Facebook, which has bent over backwards to prove it is "fair" to the right wing but took this one down as a violation of terms of service.

The outrage here is even not so much at her victory and her bigotry and her violence-promoting fear-mongering but at how far the amorphous blob of conspiracy fables that is QAnon has penetrated the body of the GOPper party and how eager some among that body - including some megadonors - are to embrace it while others in that party sit in cowardly silence for fear of losing their position and their perks.

But an even deeper point here is that while almost any right-wing fever dream can be made to fit under the heading of QAnon, there is a core that reveals something older and more let's call it familiar.

Consider what QAnon claims, notes Gregory Stanton, an expert on genocide, writing at justsecurity.org on September 9: A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, finance, and the news media. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They want to marginalize the white race so it will lose its power.

Except, wait. Yes, that is what QAnon claims - among other fantasies. But in the original, it was not "marginalize" but "mongrelize" and with that one change you now have the plot, if you can call it that, of the notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a work fabricated around 1902 by piling together whatever anti-Jewish tropes were lying around.

The Nazis had their hero, Adolph Hitler, to rescue them from this "plot." QAnon fanatics have Tweetie-pie.

In short and despite, yes, some differences in the details of the fantasies, QAnon is nothing more than a rebranding of the most notorious anti-Semitic work in history, right down to Hitler's "storm troopers" that helped him come to power and QAnon's awaiting of "The Storm," the day when supporters of this fantastical cabal will be rounded up and executed. And it could well lead to the same bloody result.

Stanton's insight, drawn from his experience studying genocide and the conditions leading up to it, brought to mind the old saying that "nothing is as obvious as the truth - once someone has said it."

The targets may have moved from - or more properly expanded beyond - Jews to include "socialists," immigrants, and any other opponents of the dream of a lily-white society that never actually existed, but the meaning is the same and the threat just as real.

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages (the Clowns)

Okay, for the rest of the show we are turning to one our regular - and perhaps most popular - segments, called "Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages."

Going first, as we usually do, with the clowns, we note that Mifeprex, also known as RU-486, is a widely-used medication to induce a medical abortion. It's even included on the World Health Organization's list of Essential Medicines.

However, blockhead right-winger Ted Cruz is pushing to have the FDA declare it "dangerous." His reasoning?

Quoteth he: “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease.”

Um, what? Pregnancy, while not properly called an "illness," most certainly can be life-threatening.

The CDC says “about 700 women die each year in the United States as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications” and that around 50,000 experience serious complications, some with long-term consequences.

Meanwhile, the WHO reports that around the world, nearly 300,000 women die yearly from complications of pregnancy.

And you know what is deadlier than RU-486, what is associated with orders of magnitude more deaths but seems of no concern to Cruz? Viagra.

Now, what with Cruz only having the support of 20 Senate GOPpers, not even half the caucus, it seems unlikely this will go anywhere, at least for now, but what this does is prove yet again that Republican men talking about reproductive issues are both hopelessly ignorant and thoroughgoing clowns.

-

Next up: So - on September 10, the NFL opened its season with the Houston Texans playing the Kansas City Chiefs in KC.

Before the opening kickoff, the players on both teams joined together, linking arms in what was billed as a "moment of unity" in support of racial equality. A nice, symbolic, if quite anodyne, quite inoffensive, moment.

At least you'd think it would be anodyne. But what could you clearly hear from the stands during that moment? Boos.

That's right: Although in fairness it clearly wasn't most of the fans, a significant number of those in the stands were booing the idea of racial equality.

Color me unsurprised. And color them clowns.

-

Finally, here we offer proof that having liberal, even progressive, credentials is no protection against being a doofus.

Frederick Joseph, a former national surrogate for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and regarded as a respected commenter on race in America, rented an Airbnb in the Catskills but then claimed on Twitter that he and his family had to flee the house because they were, his word, "terrified" of what they claimed was evidence of "satanic items and stuff for witchcraft rituals."

He was particularly incensed - he put it in all caps - at finding A BAPHOMET STATUE.

Baphomet is a deity that the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping in the early 1300s and subsequently was incorporated into occult and mystical traditions.

The small statue in question is actually a so-called "Sabbatic Goat." The image is intended to represent what its 1856 creator called the "equilibrium of opposites" - half-human and half-animal, male and female, good and evil, on and off, and so on. In the years since its creation, the image has become associated with the name Baphomet.

Other "terrifying" supposedly satanic items included, among others, a really tacky plastic toy of a woman having sex with a dog, two small framed photos, a man and a woman, both topless, a taxidermy pheasant in a plastic bag, and some candles - in other words, a bunch of kitsch.

Wait! Joseph said there were satanic makings on the floor of the basement! Um, except that when Vice.com was able to go on a video tour of the house with the owner, they looked a lot more like paint smudges. Oh well.

One last this: He apparently was also set off by, quoting, "a bridge from the woods behind the house to the back patio." Why that would be threatening is unclear to me, but when it turned  out the this "bridge" was a board someone threw over a stream and was not even connected to the patio, that really sealed Joseph's status for me:

Frederick Joseph: a progressive - and a Clown.

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29, Page 2: But wait, there's more!

Moving on to another issue raised by the summer, one equally happy.

I must tell you this bluntly: Our democracy is at risk. It is at risk of becoming - at least at the national level - just a shell, a facade of demonstration elections with outcomes predetermined to benefit those who already need no benefits, a game we play, a story we tell ourselves.

Understand I do not say this lightly. But what we need to realize is that we do not have to become an overt right-wing police state in order to make our elections meaningless. It isn't necessary for the right-wing to control everything about our elections - it's only necessary for them to control enough. Enough electoral votes to keep the presidency in their control, enough precincts in enough states to keep the Senate in their control, enough state legislatures to control redistricting to keep - or at the moment, regain - enough House seats to control that as well.

The weapon being used is voter suppression because in each case, at each level, the key for them is not winning enough votes but controlling who can vote, striving to ensure that only those most likely to vote as they would desire be able to vote and those least likely to support them be prevented from doing so. Which means, ultimately, keeping minorities, students, and the poor away from the ballot box.

This actually is not new. Not by any means. In her recent book One Person, No Vote, Professor Carol Anderson, Chair of African-American studies at Emory University, described how ever since the 15th Amendment, which banned preventing people from voting on account of race, racists, especially but not exclusively in the South, have been trying to find ways to exclude blacks from voting while being able to claim it has nothing to do with race. And every time one method was struck down, they came up with another one. Some of those methods persisted into the 1960s: Literacy tests were around until the Voting Rights Act in 1965; poll taxes persisted until the adoption of the 24th amendment in 1964 and a Supreme Court decision in 1966.

It's nothing new. Only the methods have changed. Now it's ID laws that just by chance of course, affect far more blacks than whites and far more of the poor than those wealthier, it's voter purges that just by chance of course, wind up kicking far more blacks than whites off the voter rolls, it's "provisional ballots" to make people who have been challenged that they have voted when they haven't.

And this year, something new has been added: With the prospect of a massive increase in mail ballots, we have "administrative reforms" in the US Postal Service which, and always just by coincidence of course, threaten to significantly slow down the delivery of mail-in ballots, which just by coincidence of course are more heavily used by Democratic voters than GOPper ones.

If you intend to vote by mail, do it as soon as possible, in fact do it now!

And this: I normally tell people in presidential elections that if you live in a safe state, one that will certainly go red or blue, then vote for a third party. But this year - and I feel really creepy saying this - I'm telling you to vote for Joe Biden. Because I want President Tweetie-pie to not only lose the electoral vote, I also want him to lose the popular vote by such a margin that even he could not rationally claim the result was rigged - because I truly fear that if he can make such a claim no matter how far-fetched, he will and I fear even more what could come of that.
 

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29, Page 1: The Fire This Time

One thing from the summer, these months brought race back to the fore of national consciousness. Protest for days, weeks, months - maintained by the repeated blows of new stories, with a new heartbreak coming whenever the pain of the last one is starting to fade. We don't even have the time to call out "say her name" or "say his name" because there is always a new name.

On March 20 it was Breonna Taylor in Louisville, killed in a hail of gunfire leaving dozens of shell casings and scattered holes proving cops just shot wildly at anything in front of them.

On April 24 it was Nicolas Chavez in Houston, shot down in the midst of a mental health episode.

On May 25 it was George Floyd in Minneapolis, slowly suffocated over the course of more than 8 minutes with a cop's knee in his neck.

On August 23 it was Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot in the back in front of his kids.

On September 2 it was Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York, lying naked on a wet street without even a blanket, a hood over his head and knees in his back, after experiencing a mental health crisis - of which the police were informed when the call was made.

Of those, only Jacob Blake survived.

And finally, one incident in which no one was hurt but which shows what is wrong with policing in the US and what is wrong with our society at a whole.

Breonna Taylor

September 5, Tempe, Arizona. A cop responds to a report of a trespasser at a hotel. The manager says the guy has a gun and described him as white, wearing a black shirt and tan pants. Cop goes around to a side door, sees a black man, an employee named Tre, coming out, dressed in a light gray shirt and black pants. Cops holds the guy at gun point for over two minutes, claiming he matches the description of the guy with the gun.

Okay, white guy, black shirt, tan pants. Black guy, light gray shirt, black pants. Cop looks at the black guy and thinks "that looks like the guy." The question, and I think the answer is obvious, is why. Why do cops - no less than the rest of white society, but they have guns - see a black man and think "criminal. Suspect. Dangerous." You know as well as I do.

The response to this string of outrages has been an on-going wave of street protests over police violence and brutality, most particularly over police shootings of unarmed black men.

Yes, there has been some destruction, some rioting, but frankly we shouldn't have been surprised any more than we should have been surprised by the media's abject and repeated failure to put that "rioting" in context, to ever refer to the anger and frustration that they knew, they had to know, was there, preferring to repeatedly focus on any violence, equate protest with violence, and grudgingly refer to the 99% of nonviolent protests with the backhanded compliment that they were "mostly" or "generally" peaceful before getting to what they want to show not because it's the most important or the most meaningful or most expressive of actual events but because it's the most dramatic, makes for the most exciting visuals, is the most fun for them.

We shouldn't have been surprised. In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked by the acquittal of the cops who brutally beat Rodney King, I wrote that we knew the anger was there, we knew the desperation was there, we knew the rage was there, the only question was what would be the proximate cause for their expression. The same is true now.

Then, the spark was Rodney King. This time, it was Breonna Taylor who lit the fuse and George Floyd who set off the blast.

We shouldn't have been surprised that among all the marches and protests there was some destruction, some rioting. If anything, we should have been surprised there wasn't more.

Because we've known all along. We've know about the bigotry and about the anger.

George Floyd

We knew it two years ago when the US Commission on Civil Rights issues a report called "Police Use of Force" which concluded that "The best available evidence reflects high rates of use of force nationally, and increased likelihood of police use of force against people of color, people with disabilities, LGBT people, people with mental health concerns, people with low incomes, and those at the intersections of these groups."

We knew it 52 years ago. The Kerner Commission, set up by Lyndon Johnson to consider the causes of the so-called "long hot summer" of 1967, when there were riots in 159 cities, found that the causes were poverty and institutional racism. What's more, quoting the report now, "White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." The nation, the Commission warned, was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies - one black, one white.

We knew it over 70 years ago, when a commission appointed by Harry Truman declared that "There is evidence of lawless police action against whites and Negroes alike, but the dominant pattern is that of race prejudice. Negroes have been shot, supposedly in self-defense, under circumstances indicating, at best, unsatisfactory police work in the handling of criminals, and, at worst, a callous willingness to kill."

We knew it almost a hundred years ago. In 1922, in the aftermath of a so-called "race riot" in Chicago three years earlier, a Commission on Race Relations found that the "Negro problem," as it was called, was not the making of black men and women. Quoting: "No group in our population is less responsible for its existence."

We have known all along. And we - and here I mean specifically white society - did our best to ignore it. Over the years, over the decades, over the century, we did our best to ignore it, to say it was their fault, it was their failure, only being roused to some palliatives when that boiling, roiling, anger broke free to a degree we could not ignore. That is, until things calmed down a bit - when we went right back to ignoring it.

Face facts, white people: It's our fault. We are responsible. We are guilty. We are to blame. And we are doubly to blame because we are the ones with the political and economic power to do something about it and we continually fail to do so even as we go around bragging how generous we are.

Last thing on this for now: Don't even bother telling me the destruction, what there was of it, was caused by the rioters unless you are prepared to consider the question of who caused the rioters. Because I doubt you would care for the direction that consideration would take you.

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29

So we are back. This is our first show since March.

The first problem, of course, was COVID-19. You know, the "hoax" that has as of this moment killed 212,000 in the US, along with an additional 800,000 in the rest of the world.

So the studio where I do the show was shut down and no studio, no show. We talked about trying to do it from my home, but that proved impractical.

Even now, we're being careful. I'm alone in this studio, with the camera operator just coming in at the start, the break, and the end. But things are operating, so we hope and expect to be back to our regular two-week schedule.

We could have come back sooner, but something happened in my personal life in May. I won't bore you with any details but it did set back our resumption.

And then - you know the phrase good things come in threes? Apparently bad things can too. I was actually preparing a show when - well, you know how we're always told to backup our stuff? He's some advice for you: Backup your backup! A computer disaster cost me almost all my relevant files - including the backups.

I'll be honest: At that point, I felt like giving up. I wasn't sure I wanted to start from scratch. But after a few days of licking my wounds, I figured what the hell, let's go anyway.

And so here we are. Coming off certainly an eventful spring and summer and I wasn't referring to my own spring and summer but our collective one.

I'm not even going to try to recap these past months, rather, I'm going to have some observations about some things that have come up over that time.

We're back. Let's go.

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29

 

 

The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29

I will be back

I know I haven't posted anything for a while. The truth is that I have no heart for it, no spirit for it. It's two days short of four weeks since my wife died and I'm still finding it hard to do more than make my way through the days.

It won't always be that way; I know - even though there are too many moments when I don't see how - but I know that people do get through this, that people do manage to get on with their lives, to again feel the passion about the injustices that moved them before.

So I know I will be back at some point. But that point is not yet here.

For the moment, I will offer this: Three posts selected sort of randomly from the past couple of years about police violence against African-Americans.

From June 2017 - https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2017/06/262-another-black-man-dead-another-cop.html
From October 2017 - https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2017/10/355-outrage-of-week-backlash-against.html
From June 2019 - https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-erickson-report-page-3-listen-up.html

And one other thing: I hope, I can't help but hope, I hope even though that same hope has been lost so many times before, I hope that this time will be the time that we as a nation, as a society as a whole, more particularly the time that the rest of us face up to the reality of the day-to-day racism, the built-in racism, the systemic degradations and denigrations visited on our non-white brothers and sisters.

So despite my well-earned cynicism, I still hope. Change is in the air. Carry it on.

Death in the time of COVID-19 is different

There seems no point to saying this; I don't know if anyone would even care. But I just feel I want it said somewhere.

Death in the time of COVID-19 is different. And it's not just about the virus.

My wife died this morning. She had been terrified of contracting and dying of COVID-19. Not without good cause: She was a diabetic and had a heart attack in her history, so she had a compromised immune system - and that plus being 69 put her well intro the high-risk category.

But, no. She died of a heart attack.

Last night she was complaining of painful breathing and asked me to call 911. The EMTs were there in no more than 10 minutes. As they checked her out, she was alert and aware and a quick ECG didn't indicate any major problems - but because of her history, they took her to the ER for observation.

As the EMTs worked on her in the ambulance, I stood in the rain, determined not to turn away until they left and were gone from my sight. I recalled a time I was working away from home for some time and she would come by train to visit me - and when she left to go home, I would do much the same: I would watch the train leave until it was out of sight. A way to hold on to her presence a bit longer.

So I stood in the rain and I watched and waited because I couldn't be with her in the ER. I couldn't be with her when a few hours later I was told she had deteriorated badly and had been moved to critical care and put on a ventilator. I couldn't be with her a couple of hours after that when her heart finally gave up trying. I couldn't sing to her one last time. I couldn't let her know she was not alone.

All because of that damn disease, all because of precautions against spreading it.

I understand the need, I do - but still it hurts so very much.

And it hurts extra thinking of all the others who have died and who will die, not just from the virus but from a multitude of causes, dying without a familiar face, without a familiar touch, there at the end, all those who, no matter how caring the hospital staff may be, still in a very real sense die alone.

As my wife did.

Because of that damn disease.

Death in the time of COVID-19 is different.

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A PS, which I include strictly for the sake of the record. I learned later from her cardiologist that it wasn't her heart. It was a massive bacterial infection that got into her blood, sending her into sepsis and her compromised immune system simply wasn't capable of fighting it off. It changes nothing.