It's time.

I've been saying for a few months now that yes, it is time for civil disobedience but I kept getting told "after the election" or "after this Congressional vote" or "after" this or that or the other. But always after.

 

So I was heartened and moved by Robert Reich's declaration at the close of this video, when after referencing MLK Jr.'s campaigns, he said "It is time again for civil disobedience, an upheaval across this land."

 

Because yes, it is.

That doesn't mean we stop what we're already doing. So, yes, by all means lobby Congress. Yes, organize for and support progressive candidates in the primaries and the general. But we should be ready, we should be organizing, for more. To do more than lobbying, to go beyond protest¹ to an aggressive (in the social and political senses, not the physical) campaign of active nonviolent civil disobedience, to find the power of, as a '60s quote put it, "doing 'No,'" of stepping beyond "you should not" to "I will stand in your way," a category in which I include among the rest of the tactics a general strike.

My own organizing skills fall woefully short of the level needed to put together such a campaign, so all I can do is plead, argue, and hope. But I genuinely look to see one arise and to which I will pledge, to paraphrase a rather well-known document, my life, my (such as it is) fortune, and my sacred honor.

Footnote: Another response to the same video wrote of using CD "protect your communities." I replied in agreement: 

It is indeed time for organized civil disobedience. "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security" - Declaration of Independence.

While I don't think any of us are talking about overthrowing the government, I think we are talking about, if you will, "overthrowing" certain select parts of it.

 

¹I almost used the adjective "mere" here but there is nothing "mere" about either street protest or individual acts of conscience.
 

My January 20

A group of folks centered around Toms River, NJ have a weekly Tuesday protest downtown. We knew of the January 20th walkout, but as most of us are retired and/or disabled, we really didn’t have anything to walk out of.

So we decided to do our own version. We agreed to join in by having our usual protest at a different site and then walking as a group (which means marching, really) over to the office of our local Congressional rep (Chris Smith, R-NJ4).

Which we did, about 125 mostly oldsters in 25 degree weather with wind chill in the teens, first waving signs at the traffic and getting responses that featured far more thumbs than middle fingers raised, then marching down the sidewalk (which provoked at least a few déjà vu comments) to his office where we lined up to either request a meeting (which we knew would not happen; he hasn’t has a town hall since 1992, according to his staff) or deliver prepared letters.

I was among those with a prepared letter and the whole selfish purpose of this was to have a reason to post it here. Which I now will. :-)

-

Congressman Smith:

 

Despite the range of issues on which we don’t agree, I’m sure there are some on which we do.

There is one in particular facing us at the moment which I hope fits in the second category: The violence and political terror being visited on our cities and communities in the name of combating “illegal immigration.”

There are at this moment 3000 masked armed federal agents in Minneapolis, in effect a secret police who are masked for the avowed purpose of preventing them from being identified (and thus being held responsible for their actions) and there is a threat of 1500 active duty troops being added to that total. They have been sweeping up the innocent (including citizens and non-citizens legally present), repeatedly exceeding their authority, brutalizing and now even killing, while utterly failing in - to the point it can be said lying about - their stated mission of going after “the worst of the worst,” as even DHS admits that less than a majority have any criminal record.

And they are doing all this, note well, not at the request, or with the approval, of state and local officials but over their direct opposition, with many of then calling it an “occupation.”

If we are not to have open borders, then there must be some kind of border control and someone to enforce it. But that is a role which DHS and ICE have proven themselves incapable of carrying out in any humane or even Constitutional way. DHS, consisting of an amalgamation of formerly-separate operations and which was formed only in 2003, should be abolished entirely. ICE should be stripped down and restructured from scratch under strict guidelines; to express it in a way you might find familiar, it should be “repealed and replaced.”

So I call on you to reject any spending for either DHS in general or ICE in particular until we determine how to deal with immigration without resorting to secret police terrorizing communities.

Having returned to New Jersey less than three years ago, I was not here at the time but I’ve been given to understand that during Donald Trump’s first term you were “something of a thorn in his side.”

Certainly, the same cannot be said now. You can do better. You can be better. Please do so.

Does Sarah McBride speak for the trans community? "Moderates" sure hope so.

Updated I suppose this could be considered a type of full disclosure: This was was prompted by Erin Reed’s piece on Rep. Sara McBride’s “New York Times” interview with Ezra Klein.

I admit to a good deal of sympathy for Sarah McBride in that when she first entered Congress, she indicated she wanted to be seen as "the Gentlelady from Delaware," not "the transgender member of the House." That, of course, while understandable was nonetheless impossible and the first thing she encountered as soon as she passed through the door was the bathroom business, followed by daily humiliations like repeated references to "Mr. McBride." So yes, it's a tough path she's negotiating. Credit her with trying to do it with grace.

The problem here is that with her interview with Ezra Klein she now has allowed herself to be presented as some sort of voice of the community, the "most politically powerful transgender official in the country" (says Faux News), someone who is not merely expressing some personal opinions about tactics (some of which she clearly has not thought through) but communicating Significant Views worthy of Serious Consideration by the Serious People. The choruses of "But Sarah McBride said" and "As Sarah McBride said" are already emerging.

If she now wants to be seen as a community leader, she damn well should have pushed harder on behalf of, as she herself put it (referring to Delaware), the people she represents. If she doesn't, if her goal is just to be "the Gentlelady from Delaware," perhaps in hope of quietly normalizing her presence and that of those who may follow, then she should have refused the interview.

Not only because McBride shows serious signs of already falling into old-style Washington insider ways (such as referring to advocates by the dismissive epithet "the groups"), but because she betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of social change. Specifically, she says fighting across a broad front "regardless of whether the public is ready ... misunderstands the role that social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion."

That is utter nonsense. Being where the public is not, being where the public is not immediately ready to go, is exactly the role of social movements. It is their whole purpose.

Indeed, in writing this I recalled writing some years ago that in an odd sort of way, the goal of any movement for social justice is to lose because you should always be somewhat unpopular, somewhat beyond where the public is prepared at that moment to go - and if you do succeed in moving them to where you are, such that they are raising their own voices and you are no longer speaking to them or to power on their behalf, it's time either to shift to a different issue or to a sharper position on the same one. Because there is always more to do.*

The point here is that no movement for justice ever gained broader acceptance by the self-defeating strategy of "follow[ing] the polls." That is a road not to progress but to irrelevance and at best stasis. And whatever it's uses in military campaigns, "strategic retreat" in a political movement is simply giving up ground and at best losing more slowly.

The history of gaining rights is one of leading, not following; is one of struggle, not of settling; is one where compromises follow campaigns, they do not precede them - and, importantly, where such compromises are found only in gains, not losses.

I could go on about this for some time - I certainly have in the past - but to save myself some typing and repetition, I'm going to refer you to my piece called "Newsom and Moulton: A Tale of Two Trimmers" (I'm sure you can guess the topic) which contains some discussion related to "compromise" actually meaning slow-motion surrender.

Instead, I'll repeat something I've said so many times that I should have it tattooed on my forehead to save time:

The movement for peace and social justice in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth without giving a flying damn if anyone was "offended" or not. We didn't build a movement against the Indochina War or for civil rights, women's equality, or a cleaner environment by worrying about how we'd be received by the bigots, sexists, or greedy corporate bosses - or how we'd "look" or who we'd "turn off" if we labeled the discriminators and despoilers for what they were.

And while that referred to movements of the dreaded '60s, it has remained true through all the movements since it was first written about 35 years ago. And, I suspect, will continue to be so.

Which Sara McBride does not understand. Know this clearly: I do not fault her for this. As I said above, she may well see her role is to do her job as a congresswoman and to fit in such that being transgender is no longer remarkable. If so, I wish her the best but I am also old enough to remember the Mattachine Society, which adopted a very similar "we're just like you" strategy only to have to wait for decades until such as Stonewall and Act Up! actually get the needle moving.

No matter; Sarah McBride has to decide how she personally will deal with her own situation. But she is not cut out to be - and may well not want to be - a community voice or leader. And she should not be made into one.

Updated to make note of the fact that this post has been viewed over 8000 times, which makes it one of my most popular posts ever. I'm small-time, always have been, always will be, so this is kind of a big deal for me and in the hope they'll see it, I waned to express gratitude to whoever and however it came to so many people's attention. (I just wish a few of those folks had left a comment. Oh, well.)

*I used to enjoy telling people my political philosophy was that of a “socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclectic-iconoclast.” Part of the point was the “iconoclast” - because I’d say that there ever was a society designed along the lines I imagine, the first thing I’d do is to examine it for its shortcomings that needed to be addressed. The I Jing says “the only thing that doesn’t change is that everything else changes.” My version is “the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer.” There’s always more to do.

Silent encroachment

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, June 1778

 

Here is something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.

 

We are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.

 

People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protest against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," to much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws and regulations.

 

The Guardian offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring

[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines.

 For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.

 

Social movements, the Guardian notes, usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining either “oppressive” or “disguise.”

 

So understand: Protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU,

“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” 

And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said

“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”

That is the goal.

 

And not just the legislatures and the executive, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties and expanding causes for individual action - a means of allowing repressive suits to be filed by individuals rather than government agencies. Such suits, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years, often take the form of a SLAPP* (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements. For example,

[i]n Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.`

Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.

The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them at all pass, especially when any one of them applied with hostile intent - which is the point of them - can do significant damage to our right to protest.

On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.

Years in prison and a bankrupting fine for "conspiracy" and "damage" that wasn't even to the statue and could be cleared up with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.

And don't you ever forget it.

 

*From April 5, 2013: A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.

They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.

 

For more on SLAPP-backs, go here. 

A comment I thought deserved repeating

Chris Geidner at Law Dork, whose writings at Substack and his own site I heartily recommend, just wrote about two recent Circuit Court decisions.

One was out of the 6th Circuit that dismissed a challenge to a Tennessee anti-drag law; in the other the 5th Circuit upheld Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting imposed on people with felony convictions for any of a variety of crimes.

I was moved to make a comment that I thought worthy of repeating here. To fully get the first couple of paragraphs you should read the relevant piece since they refer to the decisions he was analyzing, but I don’t think that’s truly necessary to grasp the point I was really trying to get to.

Any way, this is what I wrote:

"Mathis’s dissenting opinion ... made a strong argument on the merits."

Unfortunately, that's just not good enough these days, not when we have fanatic judges ruling in effect that you can't challenge a law unless you prove you are breaking it and if you do, that just proves you're guilty because the law is valid - a ruling better expressed as "heads I win, tails you lose."

Not when we have judges with hang-ups about sex and sexuality deep enough to rule that, among other things, even drag shows and go-go dancers ("Go-go dancers?" Really??) are inherently "harmful to minors."

Not when we have judges finding the phrase "could be" seen by a minor - not "would be" or "would likely be" or "could reasonably be expected to be," but merely "could be"- is NOT unconstitutionally vague and does NOT positively invite discriminatory enforcement.

Not when we have judges who employ the sneering, condescending dismissal of (paraphrasing slightly) "go and do the hard work of convincing state legislatures" literally at the same time as you tell them that the main method of bringing political pressure - the vote - is denied them.

What we are seeing, especially in that last example, is the emergence of what Viktor Orban dubbed "illiberal democracy," otherwise known as "the tyranny of the majority" - meaning "We are the majority so we'll do whatever we flipping well want. You don't like it? TS. You may think you have rights, but remember that we interpret what they mean."

They are not, in fact, the majority, but enough of us are sufficiently disengaged or discouraged or disinformed that they have positions of power that enable them to act as if they are and use those positions to further entrench themselves and their warped ideology.

We face hard times and I confess I have a combination of short-term despair and long-term hope. But I also think we have to be prepared to be aggressive with more than words and frankly with more than voting. I don't mean violence, I don't mean rioting, acting like we were a bunch of right-wingers - but I do mean being in the streets, being visible, including mass civil disobedience.

But I'll end this screed on a moment of hope. The reason the right wing is trying so hard, pulling every trick, grabbing and pulling on every lever of power they can find, is because they know that in the long run of history they are going to lose and like King Canute in the popular version of the story, they are trying to hold back the tide. Like him, they will fail. It's up to us to determine how long that will take.

Reactions, as always, are welcome.

040 The Erickson Report, Page 2: A Longer Look at Where We are

040 The Erickson Report, Page 2: A Longer Look at Where We are

For the rest of the show we are going to take A Longer Look at where, at least to me, it seems we are now.

I expect we all know that we are facing threats to our very survival as a republic - threats marked by restrictions on voting plus gerrymandering, together creating the real potential for permanent, entrenched minority rule on behalf of an economic and social elite, and less well noticed but equally threatening restrictions on the right to public protest, even as we are aswarm with useful idiots ignoring the real threats and being distracted into wallowing in paranoia and conspiracy theories demonstrated most recently by mob rule at school board meetings.

The degree of threat to our continuing functioning as a free republic is serious; indeed it appears to be greater than it has been in generations if not longer - but it is not new. Every free society is at constant risk of having those freedoms lost through some combination of usurpation by the few and indifference among the many and what we face now we have in various ways and to various degrees faced before. 

Nearly 60 years ago - November 1964 - noted American historian Richard Hofstadter described what he called "the paranoid style in American politics," citing examples from the 1790s up through McCarthyism and the right-wing seizure of the Republican Party and the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater it produced.

Without going into the history of the various movements and upheavals he mentioned, what's of particular note here is the common threads he found running through all of them: Adherents either believed they were holding off threats to what they held dear - what Hofstadter called the "causes and personal types" that were the "established way of life" - or that they had to reclaim, to claw back, those "causes and types," an "established way of life" that was already lost. And always, always, there were conspiracies among powerful hidden forces to undermine, to destroy, that way of life.

Think of that description and you'd think that Hofstadter was writing in 2021, not 57 years earlier. What we're seeing now has been a consistent thread in American history - although I will add as an aside that as Hofstadter noted, it's not only American history, it's human history; in fact as support he cited some examples from other nations.

Be that as it may, the point remains that even with the caveat that its not just us it still does appear that the degree of internal risk to our future is greater than at any time since the Civil War.

What I want to talk about, though, is that part of our problem, something that adds to that risk, is that significant parts of the liberal and progressive left have failed to understand or at least address the underlying nature, by which I mean the roots, of that risk, arguing instead that its just the the GOPpers are irredeemable racists and, displaying a remarkable lack of historical perspective, that it all started with the election of Barack Obama breaking open the damns of racism or the rise of Tweetie-pie or, more sophisticatedly, that Tweetie-pie released, enabled, the already-existing racism.

But while that, particularly the last part, is true, in fact the roots of our current crisis date back well before 2016, well before 2008. In fact, we should look back about 45 years to the mid 1970s.

To see why, jump back a bit further to the political and social climate surrounding the social changes of 1960s.

The Indochina - nee Vietnam - War was every bit as divisive as what we are seeing now, the social conflict was to be blunt every bit as great; it literally shattered not just friendships but families.

Beyond that, a time of dramatic social upheaval. A not-exhaustive list:

The civil rights movement that started in the '50s continued throughout the '60s.

The Port Huron statement came in 1962 and if you don't know what that is, look it up. You  may even want to read it; it's rather long but there is still-relevant material in there.

The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 and the first modern women's liberation groups were founded in 1966 and 1967.

The Stonewall Uprising came in 1969.

The first Earth Day, long before it devolved into a corporate- and government-sponsored paean to picking up litter was in 1970.

And all this amid talk of violent revolution, riots - events such as those Detroit and Newark in 1967 make the so-called "riots" around BLM protests look like tea parties - the counterculture, three assassinations, and demands that all dissent be violently repressed.

But we got through that, not only in spite of but to a significant degree because of the protests and upheavals and a decade later, polls reported that a majority of Americans said we as a people were better for the changes that came as a result.

I'm not here to praise the '60s - the record is enough to need no puffing from me - but rather to ask, what is different this time? Even through all the upheaval of that earlier time, I don't recall ever a pervading sense that our society was disintegrating, unlike today there was no sense that even if we were not on the verge of actual civil war it certainly wasn't over the horizon. It's just not the same this time. So does it seem so now? Why do the stresses now seem so much bigger, the threat so much larger?

Where is where the left's failures to understand come in, failures I will show with three graphs and one headline. First the graphs.

This is from a study based on Census Bureau reports, showing real - that is, after allowing for inflation, so becoming a measure of how much stuff you can actually buy - household income at various levels over a 45 year period 1967-2012. Of course, the higher lines on the graph describe richer levels but what I want you to notice is the third line from the bottom, the gold-colored one. That marks the 50th percentile, that is, the median income, the point at which there are the same number of households below that level as there are above it. Note that it is essentially unchanged over those 45 years. While the rich got richer, pulling away and the richer you were the more away you pulled, half of American households gained almost nothing.

Zoom in a bit and come a little closer in time with the second one. It's from Pew Research, covering 1964 to 2018. While average hourly wages for American workers are nine times what they were in 1964, purchasing power has gone up only a bit over 10% and in fact if you look a bit closer you'll note that purchasing power is actually below where it was in the 1970s. Fifty years of work and the average wage-earner is worse off than they were.

Finally one from the Federal Reserve showing how much of total wealth is held by the top 1% and by the middle class, defined as the middle 60% of Americans by income - that is, ignoring the poorest 20% and the richest 20%. As recently as 1989, the middle class held double the wealth the 1% did, 36.4% to 17.2% - but this year, for the first time, that changed and the rich hold 27% of the nation's wealth o the middle class's 26.6%. 

Another way to look at it is to note that over the past 30 years, 10 percentage points of American wealth has shifted to the top 20% of earners, who now hold 70% of the total, according to the Federal Reserve.

This is one real difference between now and the '60s: Then, even as events and changes - whether welcomed or disturbing - swirled around you, you mostly had a sense of security, economic security, in your own personal life. The economic status of the middle class had been growing and looked like it would continue to do so and people felt they could look forward to a secure retirement and the prospect that - in what I maintain is the true American dream - their children would be better off than they were. It provided a foundation, a stability that made coping with the social changes much easier.

Yes, of course that was less true of blacks and other minorities and of the poor in general, but it was true of that broad middle class and to the extent that middle class was mostly populated by whites, to that same extent it was the genesis of another root of our current crisis, which I'll get too soon.

The point here - I seem to be saying that a lot - the point here is that that sense of economic stability no longer exists. It's something that has been developing for decades as real median family income in the US has gone nowhere since despite the growth of two-income families, which went from 25% of households in 1960 to 60% in 2012.

And while people likely didn't know the facts and figures of that trend, they knew the feel of it, the sense of it, the sense that things were just "not right," that things were not turning out the way they had come to expect not only for themselves but more importantly for their children.

In 1995, that loss of economic security had created what was then called the “angry white male” who I looked at with some sympathy. He is, I wrote, "not without legitimate grievances: His hopes are shrinking, his dreams for his family and his children are fading, he keeps working harder and getting less for it. The result is that he feels pressured, frustrated, haunted by the suspicion that he’s failed his family, that his efforts are unappreciated, which combine to make him bitter and defensive; ready, even eager, to have someone to blame to relieve his own guilt and creeping despair, making him an easy mark for, as Bill Clinton put it, a hot 30-second ad saying 'You didn’t do anything wrong, they did it to you.'"

In 2010 it was the Tea Party, and again, I took what I called "a not altogether unsympathetic look at the teabaggers," saying "they are not without real grievances and not without genuine frustrations," but again, just like before, they were aiming their anger at the wrong target.

These people have been misguided. Misled. Lied to. Manipulated. They are directing their frustrations at the weak, not the strong; at the victims, not the victimizers; at the servants of the powerful (in and out of government), not the powerful themselves (mostly not in government). For all of the noise, all of the shouting, all of the energy, all of the speeches signs slogans, the fact is they for the most part really have no idea what’s going on, what the real causes of their stresses are. They just know they want things to be the way they used to be.

Because when people are under stress they become in the social and psychological sense of the term, rather than the political one, conservative. Cautious, less willing to risk, less able to deal with change, more concerned with holding on to what they still have.

Recall when Barack Obama was attacked for referring to people in western Pennsylvania as “clinging to their guns and their religion.” The point was clumsily expressed and deserved a clearer explanation, but entirely valid: The people in the area were suffering real economic dislocations. Jobs were disappearing and more importantly the sort of stable communities on which those people had depended for generations were disappearing along with them. So of course they clung to their guns and their religion. When you are under pressure, constantly stressed, when the things you have counted on seem to be slipping away, you are going to cling ever more tightly to those things you have left, those parts of your world that still make sense, that you still can control. It is a natural, normal, entirely human reaction.

Some years ago, someone, unfortunately I don't recall who, noted how times of social change can be difficult for those living them, but, he said (and I'm sure it was a he), "people adjust, they move on, and a generation or two later people don't understand what all the fuss was about." But when there is a constant undercurrent of emotional, of psychological, stress rooted in a lack of stability, a lack of economic security, it is that much harder to deal with other issues and that difficulty can be and has been exploited by the very people most responsible for that constricted future, that sense of loss - that is, the corporate elite, the rich, the powerful, those who’ve selfishly gained from the economic trends, those who benefit the most from the old oppressions and divisions, the people who are doing their damnedest to get fingers pointed at anyone except them.

The bottom line, the thing that too much of the liberal and progressive left either fails to understand or at least fails to address is that we can't address the social dangers we face to our future as a free people without addressing the economy, not in a vacuum but as an integral part of achieving the ends we seek, an economy for the 99%, to recall the Occupy Movement 10 years down the road, which means including addressing the legitimate economic concerns, appreciating the economic stresses, of that white middle class which we too often dismiss as unworthy of our attention.

Now. Before I move to the other way the left has failed to grasp the nature of the threat to our future, I want to mention briefly - briefly because it has been discussed by others - that another part of why that threat is greater now than at earlier times is the facility with which the lies can be spread, the opportunities for manipulation that exist. Not only the technological changes such as the founding of outlets like Faux News and Facebook algorithms pushing users to ever-more paranoid content but the simple fact that the right-wing has over time become more adept at exploiting the stresses, at directing where the fingers get pointed. Recall during the time of the "angry white male," it was, as Clinton put it, "a hot 30-second ad during a political campaign." By the time of the Tea Party, is was staged chaos at public meetings of members of Congress. Now it has graduated to staged chaos at school board meetings. Give the devil his due: The puppet-masters of the right have upped their game.

Okay. The other thing that the left has failed to appreciate can be summed up in this headline from AP: "US is diversifying, white population shrinking."

The Census Bureau predicts that the US will become a majority-minority nation, that is, one where no ethnic or racial group makes up a majority of the population, within 25 years. In fact, that is already true from those under 18.

Now yes, this has often been mentioned in lefty discussions, but it is usually in an "In your face, right wing!" style under the notion that this heralds an increasingly liberal/progressive people and electorate. Which may prove to be true; US minorities have voted more liberal than whites. Other lefties, such as me, are less convinced that this will usher in a new, dramatic progressive era but who will look at that headline and react to it as an interesting demographic fact that promises a multiethnic, miultiracial, and therefore more interesting America.

Conservative and even moderate whites look at that same headline and find it threatening.

It’s been demonstrated often enough by both psychological testing and historical analysis that the one common factor that unites those who call themselves politically “conservative,” crossing all lines of age, sex, race, nationality, income level, and gender, is fear of change. Conservatism, bluntly, is based on fear - and I don’t mean fear-mongering as a political tactic here, I mean an internal fear, a personal fear, that the world around you is no longer comprehensible. And the more change there is and the more rapid the change, the more that conservatism grows.

If the world, if society, around you is changing in ways you can’t seem to understand, that don’t fit your personal worldview, you can become disoriented and frightened - and that fear, that fear of the changes, will make you more conservative. And that sort of disorientation is exactly what a significant percentage of white Americans are experiencing.

One of the things that struck me about the Tea Partiers and strikes me again now is that there's an overwhelming, an extreme, sense of what can only be called entitlement in the entire undertaking. Tea Party proponents would say over and over “it’s our country” and they were going to “take it back.” They insist that government failure to do what they wanted was “ignoring the will of the people.” Their progeny today echo all that with their delusions about election fraud and their loud shouts about their "freedom" when it comes to matters of public health.

That notion of entitlement was demonstrated in the results of a NYT/CBSNews survey from April 2010, which included the question “Do the views of the people involved in the Tea Party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans?” Some 25% of all respondents said yes - while 84% of people who identified themselves as Tea Party supporters did. Overwhelmingly, they were convinced that they did represent “the people," that they were "the people," despite the fact that the same survey showed the views of the Tea Partiers to be clearly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes stunningly, to the right of the general public.

With that in mind, consider the teabagger demographics revealed in that survey, demographics I would happily wager are much the same with the current crop: On the whole, white, male, older, somewhat richer, and somewhat more educated than the general populace. Which means that until fairly recently, these people were “the people.” That is, their views, their take on life and society and politics did define what it meant to be American. They did define the standard to which others were expected to hew, the default from which others who diverged were anything from odd to abnormal to aberrant. When someone pictured "an American," they tended to picture a somewhat older, upper-middle-class white male. And it's entirely reasonable to think that those who are now screaming about mask mandates, ivermectin cures, and "stop the steal" came to maturity, just like their forebearers, thinking of themselves in just that way: that they defined "American."

But that has been changing for several decades now. The world in which they grew up, the world in which they formed their worldview, is disappearing, splintering, crumbling. This is not to say that racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and the rest no longer exist, but it is to say the world has changed, it is changing and will continue to even against resistance.
To a significant number of white people, those changes are threats to Hofstadter's "causes and types," an existential threat to that "established way of life" they were raised in and which formed the core of their worldview, their way of making sense of the world around them.

So when people already subjected to social and economic stresses inflicted by forces beyond their control and usually their understanding are faced with the prospect of things becoming in their view even more unhinged, such as the prospect of the US becoming a majority-minority nation, well that just can’t be right and that plus any bigoted leanings provide the seeds for conspiracy theories that serve, ultimately, to deny this really could be happening legitimately.

What all this means, ultimately, is that while we often describe, we dismiss, the protesters, the shouters, the mask-ranters, the "stop the steal" screechers as some dangerous combination of nutso and racist, the fact, the fact we have failed to recognize or address, is that a good many of them are genuinely scared and they don't even truly understand why or even about or of what, they just know it feels wrong. Which is why logical argument seems and often is so unavailing in dealing with them - because emotions are, by definition, not rational. So instead of spending as much time as we do in self-satisfying mockery of their foolishness, what we should do is consider ways we can address that psychic, you could almost call it socially primal, fear.

On that front I admit to have no specifics to offer beyond what could be offered in private conversations if you have any with people across the divide such as reminding them of how many social changes we have seen over the past say 50 or 100 years and how, y'know, we have managed to get through them all and we're still here so we can deal with those to come or, more daringly, if they raise the "great replacement" notion, note that this past June, an article in The Atlantic argued that considering among other things the rising number of multiracial and multiethnic households in the US, those lines are already becoming blurred to the point where by the time this "majority-minority" point is reached, it just won't be that big a deal.

Let's be clear: Bigotry is still bigotry, even if driven by economic stress and manipulated fears. Looking for ways to address those stresses and fears does not mean you give them a pass on the bigotry. It doesn't mean you tolerate their behavior, it doesn't mean you condone it or ignore it. It doesn't mean you refrain from calling it out. It means, rather, that you try to be able to say, in the immortal words of Mr. Spock, "I do not approve. I understand."

And the truth is, ultimately I feel sorry for those sorts of folks. First because some of the changes that are so frightening to them will not be stopped. They can adapt or they can live the rest of their lives in fear because they will not turn the clock back. They are no longer the definition of American and never will be again. Second because they are almost a sort of Greek tragedy with the doomed hero: They have, again, been manipulated and mislead into blaming their troubles on the wrong forces and the wrong people. To the very extent that their effort succeeds, to that very same extent they will lose and find themselves even deeper in the pit they themselves dug on behalf of their real masters who they failed to recognize.

Thoughts on Bernie's withdrawal

[A significant part of what follows is drawn from some things I have written before. I brought them together to express my feelings at this moment.]

The man himself

So just three days after I wrote that Bernie Sanders should not drop out, he did. And so it goes.

Actually, what he did was pretty similar to what I was thinking I would do, having accepting the reality that the nomination was beyond reach: suspend the campaign, continue with the primaries, continue to gather delegates, and use that to exercise some power in the Platform Committee and use that in turn to move the Party and how it approaches the people.  The difference is that while I would have stopped campaigning, I just wouldn't have announced I was doing it, answering any "dropping out" questions with some version of "My intent is to continue to address the issues I have addressed all along and we'll see what happens."

The truth is, although I have long acknowledged that my political heart is more in "on the streets" action than electoral campaigns, his withdrawal still hurts. It's a sad moment, especially because there was a time not that long ago, just a touch over six weeks ago, in fact, when it seemed possible he could get the nomination. So yeah, even though I knew that was no longer in reach, a formal end to the campaign still makes me blue.

But. That just raises the question I touched on in that previous post: What now? Because let it be clear that as I said then, this is not the end. It must not be the end. As someone notable said in 1980 at the end of a different presidential campaign,

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Because as he himself has said, this is not about Bernie Sanders. Even his own campaign slogan declared it: "Not me. Us." This is about, again in his phrase, political revolution.

This is about change. This is about changing the nature and the structure of political, social, and economic power in our country, in our society.

It is about racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual equality and freedom. It is about the economy, about an economy for the many, not the few, for the workers, not the bosses, banks, and billionaires. It is about education. It is about health care. It is about housing. It is about the environment and the climate. It is about peace.

It is about justice.

Justice, as I put it nearly 40 years ago, in its truest sense: economic, social, and political. It is about a justice that rejects the ascendancy of bombs over bread, of private greed over public good, of profits over people. It is about a justice that centers on the preciousness of life and will fight to maintain and even expand that preciousness. It is about a justice that affirms and embraces the right of every human being to a decent life free of hunger, fear, and oppression.

It is about, in the end, revolution.

So while his quitting the race is a real loss, especially when early on it looked truly possible, it's not about Bernie Sanders and it's also in exactly the same sense not about elections. It's not even about voting. It's about the process of change. Voting is a part of that process, which is why, in a sense, for the moment, it was about Bernie Sanders because he has been the vehicle, using electoral politics, to push for that change.

But now, at this point, how do we proceed from here? I have to tell you something: Tweets and Facebook posts and the rest are not gonna cut it. Period. Oh, they can be great for circulating ideas, for passing on information, for keeping each others' spirits up, for organizing, but they themselves will not change anything. Oh, sure, they can affect little bits here and there; they can embarrass a restaurant into changing a policy or an individual store into apologizing for something, and I'm sure someone could come up with some more significant example of a more significant effect, but change the fundamental nature of power in the US? Not a chance.

Way, way, back in the dreaded '60s, I said something along the lines of "the system can withstand any number of people just saying 'No' to that system. That won't change anything. We have to do "No," we have to act on our beliefs."

It's still true. We need to act on our beliefs. If we are going to see the kind of change we talk about, if we are going to see that political revolution, if we are going to change the nature of power in this country, we have to act. We can't just talk - have to act. And we can't just vote - we have to act. We can't even just campaign for a favored candidate, even though, yes, that is a form of action, but it is not near enough. We have to act outside of and beyond electoral politics. We have to be in public, in the streets, even filling the streets, in the jails, even filling the jails.

We have to be loud, noisy, disruptive, but most of all creative; we have to be impolite, rude, to power; and we have to not care what they call us - because they will call us all sorts of things - but keep on going anyway.

I know I haven't offered any concrete proposals, proposed any specific actions, which is because I don't have any to offer. What I want to press home is, the whole point of this is to press home, that if we actually believe in this political revolution, if we actually want to see, in that wonderful Biblical phrase that Martin Luther King quoted in his I Have a Dream speech, if we want to see "justice rolling down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream," if we actually believe what we say, then now is the time, now is the moment, to look beyond the primaries, beyond the convention, beyond November, beyond political candidates, beyond voting, and ask ourselves "What now? And what then?"

Some Good News amid all this

Some Good News amid all this

I wrote a number of time in the past about the struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, as Native American groups staged large-scale civil disobedience and protest in the attempt to block the pipeline from putting water supplies at risk.

Now comes some long overdue Good News on that front.

On March 25, the Washington, DC, federal district court ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers violated federal law when it affirmed federal permits for the pipeline originally issued in 2016.

The ruling, which came in response to a suit filed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, found that in approving the project the Corps had violated the National Environmental Protection Act by, among other things, failing to take into account the criticisms by the Tribe's experts and paying insufficient attention to the safety record of the parent company, one which the court said "does not inspire confidence."

The original parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, has merged with Sunoco over the course of the legal battle over the pipeline.

The pipeline, designed to carry oil 1200 miles (1930 km) from North Dakota to Illinois, crosses the Missouri River near Standing Rock Sioux lands, threatening their water supply. After a lot of dithering, in December 2016 outgoing President The Amazing Mr. O denied the required permits - only to have Tweetie-pie reverse the decision his first week on the throne. The pipeline was completed in June 2017.

However, a suit challenging parts of the approved permits continued. Now, the court has ordered the Corps to undertake a full review and prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement, which the Corps has thus far avoided doing. Such a review could take years, during which the pipeline may - this has not yet been decided - have to be shut down.

Hopefully, in light of the finding that the project went ahead in violation of federal law, the court will do the obvious and shut it down until the review can be completed (since the result could be to find that the pipeline never should have been built, at least in its present configuration or on its present route). But we can't count on it: In 2017 the same court allowed construction of the pipeline to continue and in October 2017 said the pipeline could continue to function while the suit continued.

Still, the order for a full Environmental Impact Statement is different from a remand order to address details, so maybe the court will feel differently this time. In any event, the new decision is still Good News.

39.2 - Goodbye and farewell

Goodbye and farewell

All that talk about hope, about the necessity of hope, brings to mind the phrase "keep hope alive." It's attributed to Jesse Jackson and while I expect he was not the first person to ever say the phrase, he is the one who made it a mantra and so can lay claim to it.

And it's what we have to do, always have to do: keep hope alive.

It's one of the things I've tried to do here - amid the news and views, the anger and the analysis, to maintain hope.

Even in the face of the continuing advances of the reactionaries, in the face of the racism and the sexism and the classism, in the face of the willful ignorance and the denial of science, in the face of the banality of evil as on-going wars become a back-of-the-paper story, in the face of all that and more, I have tried to maintain, even to offer, hope.

Because the truth of the matter is that even many professional grouches (like me) are actually unregenerate romantics whose sharp words are honed on the inexplicable, indefensible, yet utterly unshakable conviction that things not only should be but can be better than they are.

An embarrassingly large number of years ago, a friend asked me for some background information she could use for a presentation on world hunger she'd been talked into giving at her church. She confessed to being very nervous about doing it and said she envied my ease at giving speeches.

I answered that I envied her gregariousness, how comfortable she was one-on-one with strangers, a quality that gave her skill in door-to-door petitioning. I've always found the prospect of going to a street where I know no one and knocking on strange door after strange door, political petition in my hand and earnest expression on my face, rather intimidating.

She half-smiled and said something about how that didn't seem anything special or "important." The truth is, I'm not sure she believed me.

But I meant what I said. Because every one of us has his or her own strengths, has something we can contribute to the struggle for peace, for justice, for the environment, for, in short, life. None of these abilities is inherently more important than any other. All are important, all are necessary, and the question isn't whether your particular skills are "better" or "worse" than any others but whether or not you are using them.

Some, like my friend, are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.

My strength happens to be words. Talking. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I thought I could contribute. What's Left has intended from the beginning to be an example of what's called advocacy journalism, a type of journalism that deals in facts, not propaganda, and wherever possible uses neutral sources but which makes no bones about having a point of view; journalism, that as I have put it, "puts facts into an ethical context in order to spur action."

Put another way, What's Left was from the beginning intended to be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many whose skills in other areas so greatly exceeds mine. Something that helps. Something that keeps hope alive.

In doing the show, I've been guided by four quotes that served as editorial principles:
1) "To thine own self be true." Which, as I expect you know, is a quote from Shakespeare.
2) "The US isn't the worst - but it is the biggest." That's a quote from Joan Baez.
3) "Sometimes a bit of humor contains more inner truth than the most serious seriousness." That's from a chess grandmaster named Aron Nimzovich.
4) "No one but no one, no matter their ideology, political perspective, or status as 'left' or 'right,' 'liberal' or 'conservative,' can be by that reason exempt from either criticism or praise." That's from me.

The reason I bring all this up now is that this is the 300th edition of What's Left, which was born under and in fact has lived most of its life under the name Left Side of the Aisle - a name which I never actually liked because it implied that I'm a Democrat, a description which anyone who has watched the show for any length of time would know was misleading. I recall, for one example, writing in 2012 how I would not vote for Barack Obama because he was too conservative.

So anyway, yes, this is the 300th edition of What's Left.

It is also the last edition of What's Left.

Yes, we are hanging it up, packing it in, closing it down, choose the cliche that pleases you. After something over 6-1/2 years of an almost weekly show, it's time for me to find another way to be useful, to advance the causes in which I believe.

Actually, that's not quite right, there will be one more, a holiday special intended for the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, on the history of why they are on December 25 and January 1 as opposed to any other days of the year.

But yes, we are turning out the lights, closing the door, again choose the cliche you prefer.

I've said this before but it bears repeating. I have been greatly helped over these past years by several people without who this simply would not have happened or even if it did would not have gone on nearly so long as it did.

So I want to say thank you.

First to Donna, just for being Donna. She is my strength, my source, my reason to get up each day.

I want to say thanks to the staff here, to Dylan, Kris, and perhaps especially to Yvanna because she once said that she liked working the camera for the show because she always learned something, which is about the most complimentary thing someone could say to me.

Then there is Will, video editor extraordinaire of song and fable.

And finally there is Rich, the Executive Director of the station and the all-around go-to guy here who was willing to take a chance on me: When I first approached him about doing a weekly show of political commentary, he - I could tell - wasn't too sure that it wouldn't peter out after a few weeks. But he took the chance to let me do it my way and I hope in the time since he was given enough cause to be happy with his decision.

So with that I guess it's time to wrap this up for the last time. This is not the end of my activism, I just need to find a different outlet. It doesn't even mean that What's Left won't reappear at some point in some altered form.

Because for now and for the future, the issue for me, for all of us, is not "What can I do?" It's "Am I doing what I can?" Perhaps that only amounts to a little, to what can seem so trifling as to not matter, but matter it does because none of what we do is for nothing.

We are each of us as individuals called, required by what is right, required by the call of justice, to do what we can. No one can expect more of us - but we should expect nothing less of ourselves.

So instead of saying to you "see you next week," I am going to say "Carry it on." Because like the man in the movie said, "Never give up, never surrender."

And as always, peace.

37.2 - Good News: white supremacist rallies fizzle

Good News: white supremacist rallies fizzle

Two quick bits of kinda good news relating to two so-called "white power" - that is, white supremacist - rallies in Tennessee on October 28. Why it's "kinda" is because they relate to these bigots' banquets but they are nonetheless fun.

First is that in Murfreesboro, the rally was canceled after about 30 white nationalists showed up to discover they were facing off against about 800 to 1,000 counterprotesters chanting "Murfreesboro loves," "Refugees are welcome here" and "This is what democracy looks like."

And one of the things I've long maintained is that we not only have to be determined, we have to be creative.

So I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that in Shelbyville, not only were the 100 or so neo-Nazis outnumbered 2-1 by counterprotesters, but in a great moment, the counterprotesters offered the Master Race-wannabes free genetic testing.

It seems there were no takers.

35.5 - Outrage of the Week: backlash against kneeling NFL players

Outrage of the Week: backlash against kneeling NFL players

Next up, one of our regular features; this is the Outrage of the Week.

This week, the outrage revolves around the backlash against the NFL players who are players taking a knee during the pre-game playing of the national anthem, or are not coming onto the field until after it's played, or some other quiet protest.

It started with Colin Kaepernick, who did it as a quiet personal protest, saying he could not stand with his hand over heart in light of the repeated killings of young black men by police.

The protest caught on and spread. We have seen whole NFL teams kneel as well as teams at other levels; a few times we have even seen NFL owners joining the team.

What we have also seen, however, is pushback from government officials and those in the media who duly parrot the claptrap that such protests are "disrespectful," even "insulting" to the anthem and even somehow to the US flag.

Which is bullshit. The protests cannot be "disrespectful" or "insulting" because they are not about the anthem and they are not about the flag.

They are about police brutality.

They are about police murders of unarmed young black men.

They are about the bigotry of automatically seeing black men as thugs, as menacing, as dangerous.

They are about racism as expressed through the behavior of our police forces.

They are not about the anthem, even less are they about the flag. The anthem is just the organizing point, the symbol around which the protest is organized, not the target. Saying the protest is "about" or "directed at" or "disrespectful to" the anthem is like saying a march in Washington, DC is protesting Pennsylvania Avenue. It's like saying if there is a protest at the White House, that protest is not about some law or social condition or some policy of the current administration, it's about - and "disrespectful" to - the building itself and through that is "insulting" the very idea of the presidency, indeed the very idea of our constitutional form of government.

It's like saying that when Martin Luther King made his famous "I have a dream" speech in August 1963 that he was protesting the Lincoln Memorial. (After all, remember that he turned his back on the statue of Lincoln to give that speech!)

If that sounds silly, the idea that the NFL protests are "disrespecting" anything other than racism is equally silly.

Those who raise the claim know it. They know it. What they are trying to do is not to honesty critique the protests, they are trying to change the subject - because they don't want to deal with the actual topic. They don't want to deal with painful truths involved so they want to demonize the protest by demonizing the protesters.

They are, that is, lying to you, actively trying to mislead you. Lying to you to avoid facing their own bigotry and the bigotry they support though their official duties and their media maunderings and lying to you to enable you to avoid facing your own bigotry.

That's what the pushback is about: not "respecting" the anthem or the flag but about ignoring racism.

And there's one other aspect of this, one that I find particularly infuriating: the claim that kneeling for the anthem is "disrespectful" to "our soldiers," to "our fighting men and women."

Soldiers? Kneeling is wrong because it's disrespectful to soldiers? The anthem, the flag, is directly connected to soldiers?

That is positively un-American. Equating the anthem or the flag with one particular group - any particular group - is un-American. Period.

But this is worse: This is symbolically equating soldiers - symbolically equating the military - with America. Saying the military equals America.

You don't see it? You don't see what the problem is? Try changing "soldiers" to any other group. Say that kneeling during the anthem is insulting to teachers, who after all we call "the guardians of our future." It's insulting to hard-working American union members. It's insulting to peace and social justice activists, who raise the standard of free speech, free association, and the right to petition the government. It's insulting to civil rights lawyers, who are the voices of justice in the courts.

Does any of that sound like it should be the standard? (Remember that there are 2.7 times as many active teachers as active duty military.)

You still don't see it? What if we picked yet another group and said that it was insulting to whites? That seeing these (mostly black) NFL players kneeling during the anthem is insulting to white people?

Does that sound appropriate? No? Then why is it okay to single out soldiers as who are represented by the anthem, by the flag? In fact, what does that say about us as a people?

That threatens to get me off into a different topic, to our devotion to the military and to the militarism that runs though our national veins, so let me leave it for now except to say once more that saying the players' protest is insulting to soldiers, and so identifying soldiers with the anthem and the flag, is flatly un-American.

Let's get back to the actual target of the protest, because on that, the facts speak for themselves.

First off, know that there is no definitive data on the number of people killed by police and the government does terrible job of keeping track. So there is some play in the numbers, but the trends they show are unmistakable.

For one, blacks are far more likely to be killed by cops than whites are. In fact, compared to their percentage of the population, blacks are 5.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than whites are.

Black males aged 15-34 are nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by cops.

Black males aged 15-19 are 21 times more likely to be killed by cops than white males of the same age group.

That racial disparity persists among unarmed victims: Counting all racial minorities, not just blacks, an unarmed minority person is nearly three times as likely to get shot and killed by police than an unarmed white person. When you consider just African-Americans, the rate is five times higher.

And no, it has nothing to do with the crime rate and all the "well, they commit more crimes" mutterings: Multiple studies have found no correlation between police shootings and the local crime rate.

And its not because police are in such terrible danger that they have to repeatedly defend themselves in some supposed war:

Again, there is some play in the numbers, but according to mappingpoliceviolence.org, as of October 12, 931 non-cops had been shot and killed by ops in the US in 2017.

According to killedbypolice.net/, as of that same day - October 12 - the figure was 941.

According to the Washington Post, using a more cautious methodology, the number was 770 as of October 8, which the paper noted is more than at the same point in 2016.

Meanwhile, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which is devoted to memorializing police who died in the line of duty, there had been, as of October 9, just 37 cops shot and killed by non-cops in the whole US in 2017, a number that is, the page noted, 16% below what it was at the same point a year earlier.

Cops shot and killed by non-cops, down. Non-cops killed by cops, up. And a kill ratio of somewhere between 21:1 and 25:1.

Here's a comparison for you, another way of looking at this: In 2016, 266 of the 1093 killed by cops were black. That's 24.4% of the total. If the proportion so far in 2017 is the same, then using lowest figure, the one from the Washington Post, 188 blacks have been killed so far this year by cops. Which means that cops have killed five times as many blacks as the total number of cops killed by everyone, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and anybody else.

There comes a point, one we are or at least by all that's rational should be well beyond, where despite the desperate fantasies such as the recent invention by an FBI Terrorism Task Force of a new threat of "black identity extremism" concocted out of the deaths of eight cops in six incidents spread over three years;

there comes a point where no honest person, no one with basic human decency and cognitive facilities outmatching those of a rabbit;

there comes a point where you simply cannot deny the truth reflected in these numbers. You simply cannot chalk these numbers up to any cause other than flat out racism.

And the fact that there are voices, powerful voices in government and media, that would do and are doing exactly that, that would and do deny that reality, that would and do insistently, persistently lie to you about those trying to raise awareness of that reality, that fact shows that those voices lack that honesty, lack that basic human decency, and that is the deepest sort of outrage.

35.4 - Not Good News: Dakota Access pipeline to continue operations during review

Not Good News: Dakota Access pipeline to continue operations during review

Unfortunately, this week we also have some Not Good New.

You remember, I surely hope, the activism and protest around the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,200-mile oil pipeline to be part of the system to get tar sands oil from Canada across the Midwest and ultimately to the Gulf Coast.

Still, a bit of history to get you up to date. The planned route of the pipeline, being built by a corporation called Energy Transfer Partners, crossed the Missouri River just upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, threatening lands sacred to the tribe as well as its source of drinking water.

The outpouring of support that lead to the mass protests at the site were undoubtedly part of what moved the Obama administration to deny the final permits to cross the river and to promise a full environmental review that considered the Tribe's treaty rights as well as alternative routes.

And of course almost immediately on taking office, TheRump reversed all that and gave the permits.

The Tribe filed a lawsuit to challenge this decision, but construction went ahead and was completed while the case was proceeding.

In June, just weeks after pipeline operations had begun, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers had not complied with environmental review laws before issuing permits for the pipeline to cross the Missouri River. The court ordered the Corps to do a new analysis of critical issues it hadn't properly addressed.

Here's where the Not Good News comes in: The court also ordered a separate briefing to assess whether the pipeline should be shut down while this so-called "remand" process is going on.

On October 11, the DC District Court ruled that the pipeline can keep operating. It rejected the claim that shutting it down would cause substantial economic harm to the company, noting that Energy Transfer Partners got itself into that situation by starting operations while the case was being litigated, but also ruled that because it is "possible" that when the remand is complete the Corps can justify its decision not to conduct a full review, the gunk can keep moving.

The Tribe had also asked for additional measures to reduce the risk of oil spills; that is still before the court.

For now, the Tribe intends to focus on the remand process and has a team of experts assisting it in providing input. The Corps of Engineers has stated that remand process should be complete by April 2018 and the court admonished the Corps not to treat this process as a "bureaucratic formality" but to give "serious consideration" to the errors identified by the court.

So the fight goes on, but right now the news is not good.

What's Left #35

What's Left
for the week of October 13-19, 2017

This week:
Good News: majority of GOPpers say society should accept homosexuality
https://www.salon.com/2017/10/06/a-majority-of-republicans-finally-agree-homosexuality-is-ok/

Good News: transgender boy forced to leave Christian school; elected homecoming king at new one
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/transgender-teen-crowned-homecoming-king_us_59da483ee4b072637c44c02c

Good News: anti-nuclear weapons group wins Nobel Peace Prize
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/10/06/anti-nuclear-campaign-ican-wins-2017-nobel-peace-prize/23234823/
http://www.icanw.org/

Good News: cops who dragged nurse from hospital is fired
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/detective-jeff-payne-fired-nurse-alex-wubbels-video/

Not Good News: Dakota Access pipeline to continue operations during review
https://earthjustice.org/features/dakota-access-what-next?utm_source=crm&utm_content=LearnMoreButton&autologin=true

Outrage of the Week: backlash against kneeling NFL players
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/08/the-counted-police-killings-2016-young-black-men
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/racial-disparity-police-shootings
https://www.vox.com/cards/police-brutality-shootings-us/us-police-racism
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/07/data-police-racial-bias
http://killedbypolice.net/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/
http://www.odmp.org/search?cause=Gunfire&from=2017&to=2017
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/06/fbi-black-identity-extremists-racial-profiling
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-identity-extremism-the-new-reverse-racism_us_59dc2d88e4b0a1bb90b83095

We Are Not Alone: Burma
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/garnett-genuis/to-the-critics-rohingya-really-are-the-victims_a_23235078/
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/save-the-children/the-level-of-suffering-in-the-rohingya-crisis-is-almost-unimaginable_a_23226632/?utm_campaign=canada_dau
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmar-rohingya/myanmar-takes-first-step-to-ease-buddhist-muslim-tension-idUKKBN1CF08D
https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/thousands-gather-interfaith-rallies.html
https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/west-edges-towards-punishing-myanmar-army-leaders-rakhine-crisis-sources.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/04/myanmar-blocks-all-un-aid-to-civilians-at-heart-of-rohingya-crisis

31.2 - Outrage of the Week: threats to the rights of assembly and free press

Outrage of the Week: threats to the rights of assembly and free press

The Good News, unhappily, leads directly to the Outrage of the Week.

Our First Amendment rights, our rights to protest, are under attack. As protests increased and continued, so too did the efforts to shut them down entirely or at least scare people off from taking part.

This spring's state legislative sessions have seen at least 30 bills introduced across 20 states either to limit the right of public protest, to increase punishments for civil disobedience, or both, doing so by measures such as, for example, banning wearing of masks, by declaring some areas "critical infrastructure" forever off-limits to protest, or by changing a charge of blocking a highway from a misdemeanor to a felony. Bills in two states - South Dakota and Tennessee - even proposed to protect drivers who run over protesters blocking streets.

A particular danger lies in use of mass arrests and charges without probable cause.

Back on October 1, 2011, during the Occupy protests, 700 people were peacefully marching across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Police had closed the bridge to vehicular traffic and began walking in the roadway. Protesters, reasonably assuming the police were trying to have the march get over the bridge as quickly and efficiently as possible, followed them into the street - only to have the police stop the march, trap the group from behind, and arrest all 700.

Police claim they told the marchers to stay out of the roadway but there is no way anyone other than those at the very front of the crowd could even have heard them; even assuming police did make such an announcement, those further back could not possibly have known about it. No matter - mass arrest, all guilty of "blocking traffic" - even though there was, again, no traffic to block.

A suit arose, Garcia v. Bloomberg. The Supreme Court recently refused to hear the protestors' appeal of their loss at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. By doing so, the courts have legitimized mass arrests without proper warning and without giving people an opportunity to disperse.

It gets worse:

On January 20, Inauguration Day, police in Washington, DC followed, by their own account, a group of about a couple hundred protesters for about one-half hour. During that time, there were a few people in the group who broke windows. Instead of going in and arresting the people they had probable cause to arrest (because they had observed those people committing a crime), the police waited and then trapped 200 people with police netting, sweeping up demonstrators, journalists covering the event, and even some passers-by, anyone who happened to be there at that moment. Again, a mass arrest without warning, without an opportunity to disperse, and without probable cause to believe most of those arrested had committed any crime.

But those people - all 214 of them - were charged with a crime: felony rioting, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. In April, additional charges of property destruction, inciting or urging to riot, and conspiracy to riot, with penalties of up to 75 years in prison, were added.

While some of those arrested have cut plea bargains, many of the cases are still pending, including against at least one of the journalists - who, remember were there doing their job as reporters.

But here is the point: To indict and try someone, it takes, or at least is supposed to take, probable cause directed to that individual, not some unnamed someone. If these arrests are allowed to stand, if this is accepted by the courts, it means that if you are are at a demonstration, no matter how peaceful and legal, and someone in that group commits some illegal act - breaks a window, say - you and everyone else there could be charged with that crime or, even more likely, conspiracy to commit that crime with no need on the part of police or prosecutors to be able to say you did anything wrongful at all. Guilt - criminal guilt - by association in the purest form, a tool to suppress public protest at its most blatant..

The potential chilling effect on the right to protest is hard to overstate. The potential chilling effect on the right of a free press to cover such protests, when journalists may be held to be participants simply by being present, may be less immediately obvious but just as serious.

Because there is more: On July 25, a group of about 95 disabled people disrupted the vote in the Senate on the motion to proceed to debate about a health insurance bill - the debate that came to nothing - by shouting "Kill the Bill, Don't kill us" and "Shame!"

Capitol police dragged them from the gallery into the hall - the Senate chambers being a First-Amendment-free zone - and then blocked the media from covering the arrests, demanding there be no photographs and no videos and in fact ordering reporters present to delete those they had taken. Why? Because, get this now, "It's a crime scene." And if that makes you go "So what." it should.

In the eyes of the Capitol police, they have the power to say "You will not cover this protest. You will make no record of the protesters. You will make no record of their arrest." Which bluntly is one short step away from being able to say "This event did not happen."

Meanwhile, Jeff "I'm not a racist, really, really!" Sessions darkly intones about press subpoenas and how press freedom "is not unlimited."

No one ever said it was, of course, although it is also true that Thomas Jefferson said - and this is a real quote, not one of those fake ones that keep circulating - "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

The truth is, we are much more threatened by the power of the government to restrict and conceal than we are by the power of protesters and the press to resist and reveal. And as those threats to our rights increase, so does the outrage.