048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2

The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2

This episode:

- "Putin will not invade - unless..." explained

- Government pushes, media embraces, unquestioning acceptance of official claims

- Disband NATO

- "The Threat" to public education

(Sources to follow)

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 4: RIP

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 4: RIP

With only the time to do this quickly:

Meat Loaf died on January 20 at the age of 74. A cause of death was not released.

Howard Hesseman, probably best known as Dr. Johnny Fever on "WKRP in Cincinnati," died on January 29 from complications from surgery for colon cancer. He was 81.

Finally, the one that affected me the most personally, Thích Nhất Hạnh died from complications from an earlier stroke. He was 95. And if you don't know who he was, you owe it to yourself to find out.

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 3: Police Training Needs Changing

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 3: Police Training Needs Changing

Here's a tragedy about which you might have heard, which raises two things I have talked about before with regard to police training and encounters with police.

On January 27 on I-65 south of Nashville Tennessee, a state trooper saw a man named Landon Eastep on the shoulder and pulled over to get him off the highway. Eastep, according to police, pushed away and produced a box cutter which he refused to put down.

Another cop came and tried to de-escalate the situation. More cops arrived until Eastep faced a semicircle of nine cops, most if not all with their guns drawn.

After about a half-hour of this standoff, Eastep pulled from his pocket what police called "a cylindrical object" and held it out toward the cops. They shot him, killed him. The object was not a gun.

First off, I will say that I can't honestly blame the cops for shooting. Look a the picture to the right, a freeze frame from a body cam. You can see Eastep holding out his arms toward the line of cops. I guarantee you every one of those cops thought - and you too would think - "he's pulled out a gun and he's aiming." I would likely be thinking "Omigod he's going to kill me."

We can argue about did all nine of them have to shoot him, or did they have to shoot him more than once, which apparently they did, or a bunch of related questions about the intensity of the response, but I can't blame them for there being a response.

But given that, that's where's where my questions rise. One, why did they have to shoot him - by which I mean, why was that their only present alternative? Why have we devoted so little energy, so little research, so few resources, to the idea of truly non-lethal methods? And no, I don't mean tasers; they are not non-lethal - even the company now calls them "less lethal" or not "intended to be lethal" or some such blather - and really are for relatively close quarters.

Next, one of the cops tried to, again, "de-escalate" things. But in a true sense, he didn't; rather, he avoided further escalation. Which is not the same thing. Remember, this had already gone from one cop to two cops to nine cops with guns drawn. It had already escalated. De-escalating would mean lowering the existing tension, not just avoiding raising it further. What that cop was trying to do was convince Eastep to de-escalate by dropping the box cutter and cooperating.

He was saying all kinds of encouraging things, like "whatever it is, we can work it out; we can get help; I don't want to die, you don't want to die; you're not going to jail," and so on, all of which is good - but, and this is a serious failing, I think, with the training they get and okay maybe it did happen across the half-hour outside of time frame of the video that was released so if it did excellent, but what I noticed is that the cop never asked a question. It was never "what's going on; what would you like us to do for you; what do you hope will happen here." He was just making flat statements. Statements hoping to keep Eastep calm, yes, but still flat statements.

And if asking open questions isn't part of what they're taught in dealing with these kinds of situations, I think it's a terrible mistake. A terrible shortcoming.

Because again: Look at the picture: Where is Eastep going to go? What is he going to do? Unless he is truly clinically insane, so divorced from reality that he can't even comprehend what's going on around him, he can't think he is going to shoot his way out of this. He can't think he's going to fight his way out of this. If he wants to get away, his best, his only, chance is to hop that guardrail and run like hell, hoping either to outrun the cops or they'll decide he's just some vagrant and isn't worth pursuing. But he didn't. He stood there not cooperating for a half-hour and then pulled something from his pocket and held it like it was a gun.

I think we can even determine the critical moment that generated what followed. Remember, this started when a state trooper stopped to get Eastep off the highway. According to Don Aaron, a representative for the Metro Nashville Police Department, I'm quoting NBC News here, "as they approached the trooper’s car, Eastep 'pushed away' from the officer and produced a box cutter." Given that description and what followed, especially when combined with his window's acknowledgement that he was struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction and had relapsed just a few days earlier, I cannot help but think that he was sitting on that highway with a box cutter thinking about suicide and trying to get up the nerve to do it. But as he's approaching the cop's car, he thinks "If I get in that car there's going to be a lot of hassle for my wife and they're going to stop me. I can't let that happen." And then the flash, which may not have even been in words, "I know what I have to do."

In other words, I'm convinced that what we had here is a case of "suicide by cop" and it is a real thing. In fact, a survey of the research literature on the topic a few years ago¹ found that by various estimates, approximately 10 to 29 percent or more of officer-involved shootings involve suicide by cop incidents.

Consider that Eastep stood on that highway for a half-hour, just standing as if waiting, and again it just seems to me that at some point he realized the cops were not going to shoot him so he did something to provoke them - make them think he had a gun. Suicide by cop is a real thing.

And there are in fact training modules, good training modules, for cops on just that, including what it is, how to recognize that it's what you're facing, and ways to deal with it.

But those sorts of materials don't do a damn bit of good if they are not a routine - by which I mean a standard, in fact make that a required - part of police training.

So again again again I say that part of the whole problem with police violence, part of the whole issue of police actions, of what they should be doing, of what we should not expect them to be doing, of what we should not have them dealing with, and of what we should expect them not to be doing, is that the way we train police is deeply screwed up and leads to needless violence and needless death. It remains true that we can't deal with the problem of police violence until we deal with racism in policing and in society - but it is equally true that we can't deal with the problem of police violence until we deal with the way we are training police to think.

¹Patton, Christina L. and Fremouw, William J. “Examining ‘suicide by cop’: A critical review of the literature." Aggression and Violent Behavior, 27 (2016) 107-120. (I couldn't find a direct link.)

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 2: War at Home?

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 2: War at Home?

And while we are being prompted to panic over the prospect of war in Ukraine, we are also being prompted to panic over the prospect of war at home.

On Jan 22, The COVID States Project released the results of asking 23,000 people across the country whether it is "ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?" Note that the word "ever" was emphasized in the polling.

Nearly a quarter - 23% - of Americans say it's sometimes OK to use violence against the government - and 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified "right now."

Now, this was an online poll, so it was nonprobability no error bar, no margin of error. However, there have been other, more scientific, polls in recent months that have found much the same answer.

A post-election University of Chicago poll found almost 1 in 10 Americans believed the use of force was justified to restore Tweetie-pie to the presidency. And this December, the Washington Post and University of Maryland together found that one in three Americans think violence against the government is sometimes justified.

In response to this latest poll, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace expressed concern over the fact that the number of Americans who express support for the idea of violent political protests has doubled over the last decade.

Well, Listen Up, people: There are at least two good reasons to think such results are meaningless and the panic they generate is more dangerous than the results themselves.

One was raised by COVID States Project co-director David Lazer, who said the same thing I thought whenever one of these polls appeared. Quoting him: "We began with the American Revolution and so we are, in a sense, taught from grade school that it is at some points in history justifiable to engage in violent protest," he said.

In fact, I can't see how any good old-fashioned patriotic American can read the Declaration of Independence and still say it is never okay to use violence against the established government, the established order.

Indeed, shortly after Shays' Rebellion was quashed in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. ... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

The other question is even more fundamental: What constitutes violence? What constitutes "against the government?" What do those term mean in this context?

Consider the Plowshares Movement. These people are Christian pacifists who engage in direct action to promote the vision behind idea of beating swords into plowshares. One time, they boldly walked into a factory making nosecones for nuclear missiles, found where some were stored, took our hammers, and beat on them until they were to make unusable. Here's the question: Was this a violent demonstration? They used hammers; in fact something they were charged with was possession of lethal weapons: the hammers. And they damaged government property. So was this violent?

Suppose there was a nighttime march with some folks carrying tiki torches to light it. One gets dropped and a fire starts. Maybe a storefront gets damaged; maybe a car burns. Is the action violent? There was property destruction, but it was an accident.

Suppose there is a BLM protest and people are facing off with a line of cops. Someone in the crowd throws a plastic water bottle and hits a cop. Is this now a violent demonstration? A crime has been committed, assaulting a cop. Does that constitute violence against the government?

What does the term "the government" mean in this context? Ask the Plowshares people they'll say it's not about the government, it's about government policy. Ask a BLM protester if they're protesting the government, they likely would say they are protesting police violence, that it's about racism, about conditions.

The point isn't that there is any right answer to these and similar questions, it's that how you answer them will determine how you answer the question on the poll. Which means those percentages don't tell us anything; they provide no useful information.

In fact, Sean Westwood, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, is working on a paper that tries to correct for the errors in measurement that exist when people are questioned about a vague concept like political violence, errors that he feels tend to overstate American support for - and thus the prospect of - such violence.

Bottom line is that while because of the changes in the percentages over the last decade that Rachel Kleinfeld cited, we can reasonably say that the overall approval of political violence however defined has increased, we honestly don't know how much the actual potential for it has, especially when we consider that for all our talk about looming civil war, there is far less political violence in the US today than there was in the 1970s.

From the late 60s to the late 70s, nearly a dozen radical underground groups such as the Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN set off hundreds of bombs.

The first bombing campaign ran between August and November 1969 and involved attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan.

Bombings by the Weather Underground began in early 1970 and by June, then-president Tricky Dick Nixon was saying “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.

As late as 1976, after a series of attacks in San Francisco, an FBI representative called the city “the Belfast of North America.”

Why don't we remember this? Well, for one thing we as a people have short memories and this was 50 years ago; for another, the "workers' uprising" many of those radicals predicted never came about; and just as importantly, we didn't have things like TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and a 24-hour news cycle featuring outfits like Faux News to magnify events even as context gets stripped away.

My point here is not that we should be unconcerned, January 6 - which was an attack on the government, on the process of elections and so the structure of government - disproved that. It's rather that first, in terms of political violence we have been here before and more and second and more important, that is not the real threat we face. The real threat can be found in the words of James Madison, who in June 1778 said "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation."

The threat we face is not that of violent insurrection, but that of "silent" and indeed not-so-silent but overt "encroachment" on our right to vote, on the process of conducting elections, on the process of counting votes; threats to our right of public protest, to the free press; there is more threat to our future as a reasonably free political society in restrictions on mail-in voting than in a whole string of Nazi parades and Florida Gov. Ron DeSandTick is far more of a danger than that QAnon Shaman guy from the Capitol insurrection could hope to be.

No, of course this doesn't mean ignore the violence or tolerate the violence or excuse the violence. It means keep your cool, don't let the violence panic you, like the old song says "carry it on," and always remember the difference between the puppets and the puppet masters, between the useful idiots and the users.

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 1: War in Ukraine?

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 1: War in Ukraine?

I was going to do a big thing about Ukraine, including going into some of the background, including the divisions within Ukraine between the anti-Russian western parts which resent a history of Russian domination and the ethnic Russian eastern parts which for that reason are more oriented toward Russia. We'd have to look at the Orange Revolution, the Euromaiden protests and the Revolution of Dignity, the Russian seizure of Crimea, the on-going slow-motion war in eastern Ukraine involving two breakaway provinces, none of which even gets to the competing great power claims about the present day situation.

It soon became clear that all that was too much. So I'm going to pass on that.

Instead, I'm going to make a bold prediction. Which by the time you see this could already have proven me disastrously wrong. But - I predict that Russia is not going to attack Ukraine.

Frankly, I think that if Putin was intending to attack, he would have done it. The seizure of Crimea came within days after the Revolution of Dignity had forced the resignation of the pro-Russia president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. In the case of Georgia in 2008, Russian forces invaded within hours of government forces seizing the capital of the pro-Russia breakaway province of South Ossetia. Instead, we have this dragged-out posturing and looming presence but no direct action.

Rajan Menon, director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities and a senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, had I think a much likelier vision of events than the "Omigod, it's war any moment" version: “Some of this," he said, "is Putin saying, ‘We matter as a country, and you can't do in European security whatever you want, pretending that we don't exist.’” In other words, "We will not be ignored, our concerns will not be waved off."

Could Russia legitimate security concerns? Or could they at the very least honestly feel such concerns?

Okay. On February 9, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker told both Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and President Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for Soviet cooperation in the reunification of Germany, that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward" out of respect for Soviet security concerns. In fact, he apparently said the same thing three different ways.

Look at the second map.

You can see it's a map of Europe with this funny purplish line through it. The countries in blue are members of NATO. Every one of those blue countries to the east, to the right, of that line joined NATO after that promise was made. The pale blue country is Bosnia and it is in the process of entering NATO. The green nations are Ukraine and Georgia and the plan is for them to also join NATO.

So if you were a Russian government official, could you feel that you had been tricked or lied to, that you had security concerns which had been ignored?

Now for the sake of completeness I'll add that US officials have striven mightily to insist that "one inch eastward" didn't mean that, it only applied to the former East Germany, not anywhere else, which bluntly is a real stretch but even at that doesn't address the fact that the Russians could honestly feel differently, honestly feel betrayed, honestly feel that NATO can't be trusted and despite all the pretty words is not actually interested in mutual security but in dominance.

Okay, given that, why no invasion? Because even if Putin intended to - which I say he doesn't - he has to know it would be hard and bloody. It wouldn't be like when Russians rolled into Georgia. Ukraine is nearly 10 times the size of Georgia and its military is seven or eight times bigger. We keep hearing about the 100,000 troops Russia has along its border with Ukraine. The Ukranian army has 150,000 members plus another 50-100,000 in a navy, air force, and National Guard, plus the arms and equipment that has been coming in from NATO nations. There are those who say that's irrelevant because Putin would attack with cruise missiles and other long-range weaponry which is a stupid argument because first then what's the big deal about the 100K troops and second, that would provoke the same sort of NATO response that a ground invasion would.

And it's not just me that has doubts.

Ukrainian authorities have projected calm. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Ukrainians not to panic, saying "There is no reason to pack your bags." A week ago, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told parliament that “as of today, there are no grounds to believe” Russia will invade imminently.

Meanwhile, Newsweek reports that several current and former US, Russian, and Ukrainian officials have said that US intelligence of an imminent Russian invasion is being exaggerated, a number that apparently includes some within Zelenskyy's inner circle.

In fact, Newsweek says, the US intelligence community has yet to establish a consensus on whether Russia was truly preparing to take on what would be an intensive military operation.

Even US Sec of War Lloyd Austin has said publicly that we don't know if Putin has actually decided to go to war and White press secretary Jen Psaki says the administration will no longer use word "imminent."

Well, I maintain he hasn't intended to, that he doesn't intend to, that his real concern is to make the declaration that Russia and its concerns are still something to which the West must pay attention, and that he won't invade Ukraine - unless...

And I'm going to leave you hanging there. If in two weeks I have not yet been shown to be a lousy prognosticator, I will go into what the greatest threat of war here is - except to say as a teaser that, as is so often true, it will not be as the result of someone's or some nation's unforced choice.

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16

Episode 47 of The Erickson Report takes a slightly different tack from the usual.

We address only three topics because they involve things we just want to say.

One is a prediction regarding war in or over Ukraine. A second is an incident relating to police training. And the third is polls about support for political violence.

The Erickson Report is news and informed commentary from the perspective of the radical nonviolent American left. It is an example of what is known as advocacy journalism, using facts and logic but never denying it has a point of view. Including its earlier titles Left Side of the Aisle and What's Left, it is now approaching 350 episodes across 11 years.

Comments and reactions are always welcome either by message here or by email at whoviating at aol dot com.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 4: Free Speech for Me

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 4: Free Speech for Me

I've got just a couple of minutes so I'm going to wrap up with this:

On January 14, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from a high school football coach in Bremerton, Washington, who lost his job after defying school administrators by kneeling and praying at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

The coach says the actions of school board violated his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion. The officials responded that the school was entitled to require that its employees refrain from public prayer to avoid the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.

When the Supreme Court declined to hear an earlier appeal in the case in 2019, four justices - Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas - issued a statement questioning a preliminary ruling in favor of the officials from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, saying that court's "understanding of the free speech rights of public-school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future.”

And now that future has come.

The coach "led the team in prayer in the locker room before each game, and some players began to join him for his postgame prayer, too, where his practice ultimately evolved to include full-blown religious speeches to, and prayers with, players from both teams after the game, conducted while the players were still on the field and while fans remained in the stands." In other words, he clearly was on the clock.

But that didn't matter to the dissenters at the Ninth Circuit, one of who wrote “It is axiomatic that teachers do not shed their First Amendment protections at the schoolhouse gate. Yet the opinion in this case obliterates such constitutional protections by announcing a new rule that any speech by a public-school teacher or coach, while on the clock and in earshot of others, is subject to plenary control by the government.”

But what really mattered to that judge, as it surely will to the sanctimonious six at SCOTUS, is that the speech involved was Christian prayer. I have no doubt that this case will ultimately come out in the coach's favor and the right wing will celebrate madly, after which I will await the occasion watching with bitter amusement the rapid shuffling of papers and redefinitions of meanings when some public school teacher gets into trouble for hurting the fee-fees of some white kinds by discussing in class white privilege or present-day racism and then says it's their freedom of speech so nyah nyah can't touch me.

The case is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

One last last thing: Kelly Shackelford, the president of First Liberty Institute, which represents the coach, said in a statement “By taking this case, the Supreme Court can protect the right of every American to engage in private religious expression, including praying in public, without fear of punishment.”

Protect the private expression of public prayer. For his next trick, Kelly Shackelford will square a circle.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 3: The Threat to Voting Rights

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 3: The Threat to Voting Rights

Okay, this is our first installment of what promises to be a long series, one my intent is to have as part of every or at least most every show. It's called The Threat.

To start, I want to lay out what I mean by the term and the sort of things this series will cover. We are faced with a wide variety of internal threats to our functioning as a free society driven by the reactionary - which these days pretty much means the entire - right sometimes in pursuit of power and sometimes in a pathetic but still damaging effort to keep the future from happening.

There are for example the threats to our ability to vote coupled with moves to turn election administration and vote counting into a partisan enterprise.

There are the attacks on the right to abortion and on the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+, now particularly transgender, people.

There are attacks on First Amendment rights relating to press, speech, and assembly.

Threats to our personal privacy, those coming as much from corporations as government.

Basic social services, particularly right now public education, are under attack.

And of course, there is the very major overlying, existential threat of climate change.

The idea is that every show I will address and cover some news and commentary relating to one or more such issues. This time, as you might have been expecting, it the threats to our right to vote.

We start by noting that a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice finds that GOPper state legislatures are showing no signs of slowing down what the report calls the "tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation" that we saw in 2021.

That tsunami of bills involved 49 states seeing a total of 440 proposed laws restricting the right to vote introduced between January 1 and December 7. Nineteen states passed 34 such laws, more than in any year since the Brennan Center began tracking such laws in 2011.

The group's analysis pointed to several categories of anti-voting restrictions, including restricting access to voting by mail, new or expanded voter ID requirements, the criminalization of "ordinary, lawful behavior by election officials" who try to help voters, and laws allowing voter purges.

It also highlighted what the Center called "a new trend" in which "legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely." That surely will continue in 2022: In at least five states, six bills that have been pre-filed aim to establish "illegitimate partisan review boards of election results." Pre-filed means they are already on record to be introduced in the 2022 legislative session. Revealingly of the actual intention here assuming it wasn't already obvious, four of those six focus on continuing reviews of the 2020 election results.

And all of this in the name of "election integrity" despite zero states having found any evidence of any level of voter fraud worth mentioning.

A big target of the attacks has been mail-in voting and there is every reason to expect that will continue in 2022. There are dozens of carryover bills, ones carried over from the 2021 session to this year's, that focus on restricting access to mail-in voting, ranging from shortening deadlines for applying for and delivering mail ballots to imposing criminal penalties for election officials who mail out unsolicited ballots or even for individuals who assist voters - including people with disabilities - with returning mail ballots.

In addition, there are at least 74 pre-filed bills assailing voting rights in various ways, at least seven of which specifically target voting by mail, including among others eliminating reasons that justified voting by mail and expanding the grounds on which a submitted absentee ballot can be rejected.

These efforts are already seeing results. Texas has one of the harshest laws attacking voting rights, one which among other provisions tightens the requirements for requesting an absentee ballot. Those are already hard to get in Texas, available to only a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents, or voters who will be absent from their county during the entire period of early voting plus Election Day.

But one of the new demands is that the person making the request supply either their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, which must match the number they supplied when they registered. Which not only means a single-digit mistake could get your request denied, voters often face what Travis County clerk Dana DeBeauvoir called "a guessing game" because they can't recall which number they used to register in some cases decades earlier and there is no easy way to find out.

The result has been that Travis County officials said they have rejected around half of the requests for vote-by-mail applications they have received. Harris County has rejected over a quarter, Bexar County nearly the same.

Note that the primary is in March, leaving little time for a voter to determine what the error is and correct it.

By the way, some other new restrictions in Texas are barring residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives and spouses; making it harder for voters with disabilities or language access barriers to get help; constraining election workers’ ability to stop harassment or intimidation of voters by partisan poll watchers; and banning 24-hour and drive-thru voting.

Meanwhile, there also has been action in the courts on related matters.

In December, the NAACP and other civil rights groups filed suit in federal court, looking to overturn South Carolina's new and gerrymandered map of its state legislative districts. They charge that the map was created "in a flawed and nontransparent process" with the deliberate intent of disempowering Black voters and solidifying GOPper control of the state legislature.

The map used a mixture of "packing," the practice of placing people of color in the same district in order to prevent them from having greater political power in surrounding districts, and "cracking," the splitting of communities of color to dilute their power in a given district. The idea is to find the mixture that leaves Black South Carolinians with as little power as possible.

A similar story is playing out regarding Georgia, where voting rights groups and Georgia voters sued in federal court early in January charging that three of the districts in the state's newly drawn congressional map were packed and cracked to intentionally deny Black communities in Georgia fair representation and so are unconstitutional.

There was bad news out of North Carolina, where on January 11 a three-judge Superior Court panel ruled that Republicans' newly drawn political districts, which will give GOPpers an edge in future elections, do not violate the state's constitution - despite finding that the proposed districts were obviously drawn with and had heavy partisan advantage. As too often happens, the judges threw up their hands and declared that "redistricting is an inherently political process" that does "not impinge on the right to vote." Perhaps not in a narrow legalistic sense, but it surely impinges on the right to fair representation, which is after all what voting is all about.

On the other hand, some of the news is even good, as there was a double victory in Ohio.

On January 12, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out GOPper-drawn state legislative district maps. A majority of the justices found the map violated the state constitution because failed to "draw legislative districts that correspond with the statewide voter preference of Ohioans." That is, they were gerrymandered for partisan advantage.

Then just two days later, that same court also struck down the new GOPper-drawn map of congressional districts on the same basis.

The decision called the map "infused with undue partisan bias" which "perhaps explains," the ruling went on, "how a party that generally musters no more than 55% of the statewide popular vote is positioned to reliably win anywhere from 75% to 80% of the seats in the Ohio congressional delegation. By any rational measure, that skewed result just does not add up."

The advantage that voting rights advocates had here is that in 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly - by 75-25 - approved an amendment to the state constitution intended to limit as much as possible partisanship in redistricting, so the "it's all political" dodge wasn't available to the court and it was clear what voters wanted done.

Finally on this wrap for this time, a warning: There is a "bipartisan" proposal - assuming we can regard agreement of Fishface McConnell and Joe Maniac as being "bipartisan" - proposal to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act. This is the one that despite have functioned just fine for 35 presidential elections still had sufficient vagueness to be the basis for the claims that Mike NotWorthAFarthing could overturn the vote of the Electoral College or throw that vote to the House.

So there is the idea of reforming it so we don't risk facing in 2024 what we could have faced in 2020.

Which is fine but beware of conservatives bearing compromises. Because there is also a fear that such a reform would be presented as a substitute for election law reform rather than an addition to it. That is, that the anti-voter faction in Congress would agree to this and then say "Okay, we've dealt with election law reform. Let's move on." We can't let that happen.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 2: The Death Penalty and Criminal Justice

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 2: The Death Penalty and Criminal Justice

Okay, I'm going to put this in here.

On December 9, Bigler Stouffer II, 79, was executed for murder at the State Penitentiary in McAlester, OK. He had been convicted of the 1985 shooting death of one Linda Reaves, an incident that also left her boyfriend, Doug Ivens, seriously injured.

He originally was convicted in 1986 and sentenced to death but the verdict was oveturned on the grounds he had been provided an inadequate defense. He was re-convicted in 2003, meaning he spent the last 35 years of his life on death row.

Without going into details of competing assertions, I'll note that to the very end, to the moment he entered the death chamber, Stouffer maintained his innocence. As recently as a hearing before the Pardon and Parole Board in November, he insisted that Ivens was shot as the two men fought over a gun at Ivens' home, and that Reaves was already dead when he arrived.

That board recommended that Stouffer's sentence be commuted to life without parole, but Gov. Kevin Stitt rejected the idea, not surprising since attorneys for the state opposed clemency, saying that Stouffer's "heinous actions, his lies and manipulations, and his complete lack of sorrow and remorse for the hurt he caused should dictate one conclusion - the jury's death sentence must be carried out."

That last part is why I bring this up. A gaping hole at the center of our supposed criminal justice system reveals it to be in reality a prosecution procedure system, one where truth is not pursued, it is created, something most markedly obvious in death penalty cases, where the notion of "finality" takes on a lethal meaning.

If you are convicted at trial, that becomes not our best societal judgement of the reality of the events involved, it becomes revealed truth, holy writ, and this "finding of fact," whether by judge or jury, can't be challenged on appeal except under special limited circumstances; only the legal technicalities in reaching it can be. Not only must the courts accept your guilt as utter truth, so must you to the point where absolute proof of your innocence of the crime may not save you unless that proof could not have been presented at trial - not was not, could not.

In fact, just last month the state of Arizona told the Supreme Court in oral arguments related to the case Shinn v. Ramirez that “innocence isn’t enough here" to allow two men to challenge their convictions in federal court - and they were in fact preaching to the choir, because SCOTUS has in the past said essentially the same thing.

As so we have Bigler Stouffer, who frankly may or may not have been guilty, I don't know, but who in either event encountered the fact, as so many others have, that continuing to insist on your innocence after conviction will be used as a weapon against you in seeking any sort of mercy or understanding or justice.

Because the system will admit "we did it wrong," but will - pardon the expression - fight to the death to avoid saying "We got it wrong."

The death penalty should disappear.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 1: Good News

We are going to start with some bits of Good News from over the past couple of weeks.

First up, this is just feel-good news.

The Cyber Ninjas, the outfit which faced months of criticism over its shoddy practices and partisan roots in conducting that lie-driven "audit" of the 2020 presidential count in Arizona which despite it all still concluded that Biden won the state, is closing down.

This follows a rebuttal from officials in Maricopa County, the target of the fraudulent recount, who asserted that of the 77 claims the Cyber Ninjas made about the balloting, 76 were false or misleading along with a county judge holding the company in contempt and ordering it to pay $50,000 per day in sanctions for failing to provide records related to the so-called audit to the Arizona Republic newspaper.

Karma can be a bitch.

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Next, a bit of Good News out of the UK.

On October 17, 2019, three members of Christian Climate Action, an arm of Extinction Rebellion, blocked a train in London for over an hour during morning rush hour. The train was headed into the city's financial district, and the group said the protest was to symbolize how business-as-usual must be stopped and was a proportionate response to the existential threat of climate change.

The three - Reverend Sue Parfitt, 79; Father Martin Newell, 54; and former university lecturer Phil Kingston, 85 - were charged with violating the Malicious Damages Act, carrying a potential sentence of, if I read the Act correctly, two years in prison.

On January 14, the were acquitted by a jury.

What's more, on the same day, Extinction Rebellion (or XR) protester James Brown had his sentence cut from 12 months to four after super-gluing himself to the roof of a plane at London City Airport and those events followed the December acquittal six of XR members who were charged with the blocking a train during a similar action at Canary Wharf station in April 2019; that jury took less than an hour.

It appears that the people, if not the government, of the UK are coming to see the climate crisis for what it is.

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Next: Anti-hunger and anti-war activists in Florida have won their seven-year legal battle against the city of Fort Lauderdale, which has been trying to prevent the local chapter of Food Not Bombs from giving free food to people in need at a downtown park.

Last August, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th District ruled unanimously that the rule "unconstitutional as applied to Food Not Bombs" and the city's requirement for a permit - which could cost up to $6000 - can't qualify as a "valid regulation" of Food Not Bombs' First Amendment rights because it is "utterly standardless," that is, it could be denied for literally any reason or no reason at all.

On January 5, the group announced a settlement with the city, under which the city admits it was wrong, pays the group a small amount of damages, and covers at least some significant part, if not all, of the group's legal expenses.

The reason Fort Lauderdale and other cities have tried and are trying to impose bans like these comes down to one issue: wanting to hide the issue of homelessness because that seems easier and cheaper than doing anything about it.

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Another: Last March, Texas Gov. Greg Abattoir launched Operation Lone Star, deploying thousands of National Guardsmen, Texas Department of Public Safety cops, and other state resources to the border with Mexico and giving them the authority to arrest suspected migrants under suspicion of criminal trespassing on private and state property.

One such person arrested is Jesús Alberto Guzmán Curipoma, an engineer from Ecuador who hoped to submit a request for asylum. He was arrested in September at a railroad switching yard on a charge of criminal trespass.

On January 13, Travis County Judge Jan Soifer declared his arrest unconstitutional, making some immigration advocates hopeful the ruling could create a pathway for other migrants arrested under the program.

Guzmán Curipoma's attorneys successfully argued that Operation Lone Star violates the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution and therefore prohibits state laws form interfering with immigration enforcement by the federal government.

What makes this remarkable is that the Travis County District Attorney's Office, which represented the state in the hearing, agreed. Travis County District Attorney José Garza said in a statement that the program is "an impermissible attempt to intrude on federal immigration policy" and "has failed to satisfy basic, fundamental, and procedural state and federal constitutional safeguards."

A spokesperson for Gov. Abattoir said they expect the ruling will be overturned because the judge couldn't issue that ruling without hearing from the Attorney General. Which seems doubly weird because I was not aware a judge had to check with Abattoir's administration before issuing a ruling and how are they going to appeal when there was someone representing the state of Texas at the hearing who agreed with the decision. But that kind of thing never stopped them before, so who knows.

It's still a win.

=

Next, something I don't know I can truly call Good News for reasons I will try to make clear, but the news here is that Greg and Travis McMichael, two of the men convicted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, have been sentenced to life without parole and the third, William "Roddie" Bryan, to life with parole possible after 30 years.

I take satisfaction in the fact that this is an indication that maybe, at long last, we as a people are taking racist murder more seriously. Still, I can't be entirely happy about this because of my conviction that our so-called criminal justice system is deeply screwed up.

Which brings me to something that is definitely good News.

Early this month, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced sweeping changes to the borough’s criminal justice system. Among other changes, he said prosecutors should no longer seek prison sentences of more than 20 years except in exceptional circumstances and urged them to only pursue prison for the most serious offenses, looking instead to "diversion and alternatives to incarceration." The idea is to shift away from pursuing lesser crimes like marijuana misdemeanors, prostitution, and fare evasion to focus more on violent crime including guns and domestic violence.

The Sentencing Project applauded the changes, noting it has previously recommended a 20-year cap on prison sentences and noting that "Virtually no other nation in the world routinely pursues extreme sentences beyond 20 years. The United States is a clear and appalling outlier."

But of course Bragg faces extreme vituperation from the usual suspects, including right-wing grifters going on about "bloodbaths"and cops, including city Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell, who sent an email to every member of the NYPD saying "I am very concerned about the implications to your safety" - or, in other words, "Look out, he's gonna get you killed." Although I strongly suspect she's more fearful for the impact on her department's budget than any on the safety of cops.

It remains to be see how strong Bragg can be in the face if the vicious reactions, ones he surely should have seen coming, but at the very least a marker has been laid down: This can be a notion of what "defund the police" can look like in practice. And that is decidedly Good News.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2

 

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2

Good News

- Cyber Ninjas closing

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/07/politics/cyber-ninjas-shutting-down-arizona/index.html

https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/spokesman-cyber-ninjas-is-being-shut-down

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- Climate protesters acquitted

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/14/juries-get-it-climate-activists-acquitted-after-train-protest

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- Group wins fight to feed hungry

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/05/after-7-years-anti-war-group-fed-hungry-wins-fight-fort-lauderdale

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- Migrant arrest unconstitutional

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/migrant-s-arrest-under-operation-lone-star-ruled-unconstitutional/ar-AASNlbK

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- Police reform in NYC

https://apnews.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-georgia-race-and-ethnicity-sentencing-savannah-0d1a8ed25f1a075844160f253a9d0535

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2022/01/07/extensive-research-supports-manhattan-das-new-20-year-cap-prison-sentences-says

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2022/01/09/manhattan-district-attorney-alvin-bragg-criminal-justice-reform-marijuana-guns-crime/

https://www.sentencingproject.org/

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/no-end-in-sight-americas-enduring-reliance-on-life-imprisonment/

The Death Penalty and Criminal Justice
https://www.aol.com/news/oklahoma-prepares-execute-man-1985-050314469-184404277.html

https://theforgivenessfoundation.org/2021/11/09/bigler-stouffer-executed-on-december-9-2021-in-oklahoma/

https://deathpenalty.org/innocence-isnt-enough-here-arizona-tells-scotus/

The Threat to Voting Rights

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/21/gop-tidal-wave-voter-suppression-set-intensify-2022-analysis-warns

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/14/half-mail-ballot-requests-rejected-key-texas-county

https://www.aol.com/news/texas-rejects-hundreds-mail-ballot-232705241-022957930.html

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/24/packing-and-cracking-new-lawsuit-challenges-south-carolinas-racial-redistricting

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2022/01/07/splc-georgia-voters-and-voting-rights-groups-challenge-georgias-racially

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/georgia_redistricting_complaint_01072022.pdf

https://www.nccourts.gov/assets/inline-files/22.01.22%20-%20Final%20Judgment.pdf

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/12/victory-ohio-supreme-court-strikes-down-gop-partisan-gerrymandering

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/0/2022/2022-ohio-65.pdf

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/14/ohio-supreme-court-strikes-down-rigged-congressional-maps

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/01/08/whats-next-corporate-democrat-plotters-voting-rights

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/05/eca-jan-6/

Free Speech for Me

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/us/supreme-court-football-coach-prayer.html

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 7: And Another Thing

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 7: And Another Thing

We close on a happier note, which is that we have an occasion of And Another Thing, where we step aside from politics to look at some cool science stuff.

And we have two, both from astronomy.

First, on Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space.

It is the largest, most powerful telescope ever sent up and once in place and deployed, will be able to do everything from giving close-ups of neighboring planets to seeing the first galaxies formed to aiding the search for extra-terrestrial life.

Twenty years in the design and development, the telescope, which "sees" in infrared, should be producing its first images in about six months.

Second, a couple of weeks ago, NASA announced that it has been confirmed that in April the Parker Solar Probe, which has been orbiting the Sun, passed through the corona, the upper atmosphere of the Sun - in effect, you could say the probe touched the Sun, surviving a three year journey and a roughly 2 million degree Fahrenheit environment to do what was previously thought impossible, a journey which already had provided more information about our source of heat and life while revealing new mysteries still to be explained.

Science is cool.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 6: RIP Desmond Tutu

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 6: RIP Desmond Tutu

Okay, I've got just a couple of minutes so let me run through three things very quickly.

First, we have an RIP. Desmond Tutu, aptly described by Reuters as "The anti-apartheid hero who never stopped fighting for 'Rainbow Nation'," died in Cape Town, South Africa on December 26. He was 90.

The best reaction in my mind was that of Rev. William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign: "

Let we who believe in freedom and justice be his legacy always.

Indeed.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 5: A Year of Stupid Special Merit Award

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 5: A Year of Stupid Special Merit Award

But there is one more award, an award for the achievement of combining stupidity, jackassery, and outrage in one package. So herewith a Special Merit Award to someone who wasn't even nominated this year but whose contributions to the spirit of these awards can't be overlooked.

So congratulations to "President" Joe Manchin.

Joe Manchin makes me miss Lyndon Johnson. LBJ would not have put up with his crap. Her would have dragged - not invited, not asked, dragged - Manchin into the Oval Office, reamed him a new one and said "You know that money you wanted for that project in West Virginia? Get in line or forget it."

For those who say that's not fair and he can't do more because he's from this incredibly red state, let me start by reminding you of the many times he shifted the goal posts, always suggesting that if we just got rid of this or adjusted that he could support Build Back Better only to have a new this or that when he got what he wanted.

And let's not forget that it appears his real issue with the bill is the inclusion of the Child Tax Credit, which significantly cut child poverty, because this multimillionaire twerp who lives on a yacht and drives a Maserati while together with his wife sucking down a million bucks a year from the coal industry for doing and creating nothing thinks that poor people will just blow the money on drugs - because, y'know, poor people.

But more directly, the idea that he can't sell the bill to his constituents is bull. First, he is popular, well-connected, and well-known. He has a 61% approval rating and 70% of West Virginians say he's an "independent voice," a substantial shield against any threat to his political future a "yes" vote could raise.

Second, the polls in West Virginia on the bill are all over the place depending heavily on the way the question is phrased - for example, one phased the issue as "Joe Biden's trillion-dollar spending plan" and got 70% opposition while another phrased it in terms of some of the provisions and got 68% support.

And even ignoring all that, the fact remains that even if supporting BBB, doing the right thing for the people of West Virginia, even if it were to cost him his seat, it is still the right thing to do. No excuses.

Finally, for those who say we can't go the LBJ route, we can't do that, we can't push him or he'll just switch parties, and then where will we be: He's not going to switch parties, at least not before the midterms. No way. Right now, his entire power, his entire influence, the thing that gets him on TV most every night, is the fact that it's a 50-50 Senate. Period. He switches parties and it goes to 51-49 GOPper and he is back to "Joe who," just another schmuck in Fishface McConnell's army.

Joe Manchin may be a self-centered, egomaniacal, glory-hunting creep on a power trip, and he is, but he is not stupid.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 4: A Year of Stupid: Outrage of the Year

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 4: A Year of Stupid: Outrage of the Year

Here's another reason for skipping Two Weeks of Stupid: Because this week's choice has been elevated to Outrage of the Year. And it can be told very easily:

In just six weeks, the six weeks prior to Christmas, the US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union together secured more coronavirus vaccine doses than the entire continent of Africa received in the entire year.

According to an analysis by the People's Vaccine Alliance, between November 11 and December 21, the EU, UK, and US obtained 513 million vaccine doses. African countries got just 500 million doses across the whole of 2021.

A good part of this is the greed-driven selfishness of the pharmaceutical industry, which maintains a stranglehold on vaccine production, abetted by some developed nations such as the UK and Germany which are blocking action at the World Trade Organization on a temporary waiver of patent rights on the vaccines so poorer countries could produce their own.

And in case you're wondering, the combined population of the EU, UK, and US is about 810 million. The population of Africa is about 1.4 billion, over 70% more.

This is not only inhumane, it's stupid. Remember the Omicron variant first appeared in southern Africa and as we are constantly telling the anti-vaxxers here at home, unvaccinated people are providing a genetic breeding ground for new variants to emerge.

Inhumanity, greed, selfishness, and stupidity in one package. That is a gold-medal worthy Outrage. It is in fact the Outrage of the Year.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 3: A Year of Stupid: Clowns of the Year

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 3: A Year of Stupid: Clowns of the Year

We are going to skip the Two Weeks of Stupid this time - which in a way is too bad because we had a good one for Clown: Candace Owens, the right-wing talk show host who got owned by Tweetie-pie about vaccines on her own show and then tried to whine it away by tweeting that he's an old guy from before the time people could "do their own research."

Instead, as this is the last show of the year, it's a good time for one of those yearly wrap-ups. So I'm going to use the occasion to give out awards for Clown of the Year and Outrage of the Year. This was a shortened year for various personal reasons so we don't have as many nominees as we normally would, but we still have some worthy winners.

For Clown, there are two categories: Basic Stupid and Total Jackassery. And in the category of Basic Stupid, the Clown of the Year is the man who put the "gomer" in Gohmert - Representative Louis Gohmert of Texas.

At a June 8th hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee he put this question to Jennifer Eberlin, the assistant deputy chief of the National Forest System, quote:

"I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they found that the Moon's orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth's orbit around the Sun. We know there's been significant solar flare activities and so is there anything the National Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management can do to change the course of the Moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Obviously that would have a profound effect on our climate."

And apparently this is not sarcastic; he was serious about this. Louis Gomer was actually raising the idea of changing the orbit of the Earth in order to deal with climate change. He is hands down the Clown of the Year, Basic Stupid category.

A quick science aside here because this is just the thing to demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect, where in effect the less you know about something the more you think you know.

It is true the Moon's orbit is changing slightly. That has to do with interaction with the tides on Earth. It's also true that the Earth's orbit is subject to some for lack of a better term wobbling and those cyclical shifts in the Earth's motion and the resulting change in its position relative to the Sun can be a driver of long-term climate change, including things like triggering the beginning or the end of glaciation periods or ice ages.

The thing is, those cycles run on time frames ranging from 24,000 to over one hundred thousand years and the warming we are now seeing is from a time frame of maybe one hundred-fifty years. Those cycles and the warming we're seeing now have absolutely nothing to do with each other and Louis Gohmert really really really is a Clown

Okay, moving to the Total Jackassery category, we have another clear winner: smug transphobe Dave Chappelle.

Chappelle released a new special the beginning of October and got flak over the offensive transphobia it included, up to and including a walkout by some employees of Netflix, where it was streamed.

He responded by claiming he is the actual victim, saying "You said you want a safe working environment at Netflix. Well, it seems like I'm the only one that can't go to the office anymore."

Then, at the November 22 screening of his new documentary, Chappelle tossed around the "f-word," made jokes about people’s use of various pronouns, and pretended to identify as a woman to get a cushier prison cell, proving to one and all that he has learned nothing and doesn't intend to.

Which actually had been clear from the start. Back in October, he supposedly offered to meet with members of the transgender community, but, he said, "You will not summon me. I am not bending to anybody's demands." But he'd meet - under certain conditions. Quoting:

"You cannot come if you have not watched my special from beginning to end. You must come to a place of my choosing at a time of my choosing." (In other words, "You will not summon me; I will summon you.") "And thirdly, you must admit that Hannah Gadsby" - another comedian and a member of the LGBTQ+ community - "is not funny."

An "offer" which doesn't even attempt to hide the fact that is neither serious nor sincere.

You'd think that growing up as a black person in the US Chappelle had to deal with some issues of personal identity, so he'd be able to have some understanding of the feelings of others dealing with a similar sort of question. But he doesn't and he won't - because he finds it easier and more profitable to punch down with cheap shots. Dave Chappelle is a Total Jackass.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 2: The case of Kim Potter and Duante Wright

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 2: The case of Kim Potter and Duante Wright

Kim Potter                             Duante Wright

Okay, let's get to this.

On December 23, Minnesota local cop Kim Potter was convicted of first- and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of 20-year-old Duante Wright during a traffic stop in April. You probably recall this was the case where she shot him, thinking, she said, she was using her Taser, a claim that at the time was widely mocked by civil right activists and the local community and numerous places on the left.

Potter was jailed immediately after the verdict with sentencing set for February 22. I don't know why it should take two months for that, but that's the date.

Overall, I think the best reaction came from the ACLU, which tweeted "This verdict is still not justice. True justice doesn't come one verdict at a time. Real justice means that these situations do not happen in the first place."

I'll get to my own take on this outcome later but first, I want to talk about something else, something that this case raised for me when it first hit the news in April, something I have talked about before but which has gotten far too little attention and to which this case should draw attention but I fear won't: the fact that the screwed-up way we train police in this country leads to, produces, cases such as this one.

Because the fact is, we are teaching police to be afraid. We are teaching, and I mean actively teaching, cops to be in constant fear of instant death, to be prepared to shoot first and ask questions later, to feel it's not only their right but their duty to avoid to the extent possible any degree of risk even when that means just shifting the risk onto non-cops.

One notorious example is the so-called "21-foot rule" or "Tueller drill." Even though it was only intended as a training exercise, it is actively taught in some police academies and widely accepted informally among police forces. It is the idea that someone with a bladed weapon who is 21 feet away can attack and kill you before you as a cop can unholster your gun and get off a good shot. Not only has it been debunked, it has been twisted and distorted to mean that if you are carrying a blade within 21 feet of a cop, they are justified in shooting you on the grounds that they felt they were at immediate risk of death; no actual aggressive move on your part is required.

There is the widely-used "Bulletproof Warrior" seminars from Illinois-based outfit called Calibre Press, seminars which press the idea that "officer safety" is the overriding consideration in any interaction with non-cops and pushes the implicit notion that general public views cops as their enemy.

There was the so-called "research document" promoted by the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association a year ago that called Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists "terrorists" who were plotting "extreme violence" and described civil right protesters as "useful idiots."
    
We are both formally and informally, officially and unofficially, teaching police to be afraid. We are teaching them to be scared all the time. We are teaching them to think of every non-cop as a potential suspect and even a potential assailant.

That's why, for example, to cops there are police and there are "civilians," a term that by default defines the police as a military force, an army. It's why in any encounter with police we will likely be regarded as a "suspect" and therefore by definition dangerous to some degree or another.

It's an overall pattern, and overall way of thinking, that gets instilled in cops that leaves them in a constant state of stress. And note I didn't say alertness, I said stress.

I've talked about this before, how in watching videos of shootings by police, I was struck by how often the cops sounded scared. I particularly remember the video of the killing of Philando Castile in 2016. The cop has the gun, it is pointed at Castile, who is sitting and obviously unarmed, but I clearly recall thinking that despite that, the cop sounded terrified - and that wasn't the only example.

Which brings us back around to Kim Potter and Duante Wright. I'm going to revisit something I said in the spring, shortly after this hit the news, because, as I said at the time, it demonstrated what I maintain are multiple things wrong with how we train police. Some of what fllows is quoting that earlier post.

We start the incident with the male cop, Potter's partner, approaching Wright's car after he was pulled over. The cop approaches the car with his gun out and demands Wright get out of the car. Immediately: Why is his gun out? The tension is mounting before anything even happens.

Wright says "For what?" and the cop answers "I'll explain to you when you get out of the car." Again: Cops are taught they they have to be in control of the situation, to dominate the situation, at all times. Why couldn't he have said "You have an expired inspection sticker," which is supposedly the reason they pulled him over in the first place? Why couldn't he just answer the question instead of responding, in effect, "Be quiet and do what I tell you" and so raising the tension further and giving Wright cause not to cooperate but to fear cooperation? So why? Because that's what cops are taught: to be in charge and accept nothing other than passive submission.

Wright starts to get out of his car but then tries to get back in. Potter runs up to join the other cop. There is a struggle. The tension is stretched to the limit. Potter is heard shouting "I'll tase you! Taser! Taser! Taser!" - then a bang and a second later, "Holy shit, I shot him."

In the wake of this, the police chief said he believed Potter intended to use a Taser but mistakenly drew her gun, a claim that was, as I said, widely ridiculed.

And on its face, it does seem absurd. A cop's gun is about a pound heavier than a Taser, is a different color and an at least somewhat different feel.

So here's the question: Did I believe, do I believe Potter told the truth? Did I believe, do I believe that she shot Daunte Wright thinking she was Tasering him? The answer is yes, I did and I do. And again it relates to failures in how we train police.

Most police departments, including the one here, require that officers carry their guns on their dominant side and Tasers on the opposite side, which is supposed to lower the risk of confusing the two. But the instant I heard that, I said "That's wrong, that's ridiculous, that's the opposite of what it should be." Because under stress, in a high-stress, adrenaline-pumping situation, you are going to default to your dominant hand. Having your gun on your dominant side is going to increase the risk of tragedies such as that of Daunte Wright.

Betsy Brantner Smith of the National Police Association said it's called "slip and capture" and likened it to getting into a rental car, going to start it up, and reaching for how you start your own car before realizing that's not where you are.

It's also called "muscle memory" and you know damn well you have experienced it. Hell, I had my current car for six months before I finally stopped reaching for the gear shift in the wrong place. You've experienced it, you know you have, and you weren't even under stress.

What's more, this is certainly not the first time this has happened, of a cop shooting someone thinking they were firing a Taser. There are documented cases of it. So can I believe that Kim Potter shot Daunte Wright believing at that moment that she was Tasering him? Yes, I can. Because of the way she was trained. That, it shouldn't need to be said but probably is, does not excuse it. In the immortal words of Mr. Spock, "I understand. I do not approve."

So if I were the sentencing judge, what would I do? I have genuine sympathy for Kim Potter. I believe it was a genuine mistake - something on which, I will note, it seems most observers now agree. Not, however, some places on the left; the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, used the term "murder," which while technically legally correct, still carries a heavy connotation of deliberateness, something made explicit by Color of Change which said of Potter "her actions were not accidental," which if it means anything at all it means they're saying she shot Wright on purpose.

I also noted more a recent video, from the body cam of a cop who arrived soon enough to see what happened but not soon enough to be involved, showing the immediate aftermath of the shooting, showing Kim Potter on the ground, crying, her remorse both immediate and extreme, extreme to the point where that cop took her gun for evidence but let her hold his - and then went back and took his gun back because of fear of what she might do as she leaned on a fence going "I just want to die."

So I do have genuine sympathy for her. But at the same time, we can't let this go. We can't let it pass. She made a mistake and she's sorry, but someone died. There has to be punishment; there have to be consequences.

So with all that in mind, if I were the sentencing judge I would go for 3.5 years followed by several years of probation and community service and I would very likely say she could never again be a cop. Anywhere - none of this going to another jurisdiction and getting hired there. Anywhere.

I guarantee you that for some people that would not be nearly enough and some news accounts say prosecutors intend to push for something close to the maximum of 15 years to "make a point." But I think that would only add another tragedy to a tale that already had enough of them.

Because the point I would make is that while it is true as we so often say that we can't address police violence and brutality without addressing racism, particularly in our police forces but in our society as well, it's equally true that we can't address police violence and brutality without addressing the screwed-up way we are training them to think.

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 1: Good News on the Minimum Wage

045 The Erickson Report for December 29 to January 12, Page 1: Good News on the Minimum Wage

I know we're all aching for some Good News, so try this on: On January 1, the minimum wage will rise in 21 states and dozens of cities and counties, with four more states acting later in the year. This is the result of nine years of labor activism springing from the "Fight for 15" movement among fast food workers, which started in 2012.

These increases are due to cost-of-living adjustments and scheduled raises written into local minimum wage laws as more states and localities act on their own in the face of determined inaction at the federal level. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and hasn't been raised for 12 years, the longest it has gone without an increase in its history, which dates back to the Great Depression.

As of January 1, the lowest minimum wage among those 21 states will be $8.42 for small employers in Minnesota, a rather paltry amount but still more than a dollar an hour and more than $2400 a year above the federal level, and in over half of the 21 states the minimum will be at least $12 per hour. In two cases - large employers in California and in New York City along with Long Island and Westchester county - the minimum hourly wage has hit the magic number of $15.

Although several states already have planned increases that will eventually raise their minimum hourly wage to $15, there is still a long way to go, considering not only that by the time they get to $15 it won't be worth $15 any more - in fact it already isn't - but that in 20 states the minimum wage is still the poverty federal level of $7.25.

And I do mean poverty level: Working full time, year-round at $7.25 an hour is $15,080. The federal poverty guideline for a household of two people is $17,420.

But don't let that stop you from savoring the fact that a combination of labor activism and consumer concern - the latter of which, by the way, is why Amazon raised its minimum to $15, as it is so loudly trumpeting now - activism and concern are what has made these gains possible.