043 The Erickson Report for December 2 to 15, Page Three: Noted in Passing

Now, a few things Noted in Passing, just a minute or two on a couple of things I wanted to mention.

First up, at last, it appears the government is taking corporate crime seriously.

Too bad it's the government of Sweden.

On November 11, prosecutors in Sweden indicted two executives of the Lundin Oil corporation for complicity in war crimes perpetrated in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.

In essence, the charge is that Chairman Ian Lundin and former CEO Alex Schneiter turned security for an oil field where the company had a claim over to the Sudanese military either knowing or criminally indifferent to the fact that the change would (and did) result in war crimes including massacres.

The case marks the first time since Nuremberg that prosecutors have brought “grave war crime” charges and indictments against individuals.

As a footnote, the company released a statement saying "There is no evidence linking any representatives of Lundin to the alleged primary crimes in this case." In other words, "We didn't actually pull the trigger, so nothin' to do with us."

Sorry to tell you, gang, that ain't how it works.

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Here's something interesting. On November 23, the DOD announced it is establishing a new group to investigate reports on the presence of UFOs in restricted airspace.

The formation of the group comes after the government released a report in June, encompassing 144 observations, which concluded there was a lack of sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.

This comes after decades of officialdoms deflecting, debunking, and discrediting observations of UFO's.

What I personally find interesting is that he new group, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, refers not to "unidentified flying objects" but to "unidentified aerial phenomena" or UAPs, which I find interesting because I have been calling them that for a number of years, speculating that they are actually some sort of natural phenomena that are rare enough that we haven't learned yet to recognize them, much like the UFOs that commercial pilots learned not to report for fear of being grounded but which are now known by the names red sprites and blue jets and are types of lightning that strike upwards from the tops of thunderstorms.

Wonder if I'll get any credit for the name.

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Finally, in April 2015, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, a credit card payment processing company, raised the minimum wage at his company to 70,000, which he paid for by cutting his own pay to the same level.

He was mocked as a "socialist," "lunatic of all lunatics," whose employees would soon be on bread lines.

Six years later, company revenue has tripled, the customer base has doubled, 70% of his employees have paid down debt, many bought homes for the first time, 401(k) contributions grew by 155%, and turnover dropped in half.

What's more, when the pandemic broke out, the company lost 55% of its business in one month. Price said the company was four months from bankruptcy. Instead, his employees voluntarily took pay cuts of an amount they each chose, seeing the company through until things improved.

And they have - to the point where those employees have all been given back the amounts they passed up.

Apparently being a socialist lunatic is not such a bad thing.

One final note: When Price made the announcement, Rush Limbaugh declared that he hoped this would become a Harvard Business School cast study of how socialism fails. It is a Harvard Business School case study - just for the opposite reason.

041 The Erickson Report, Page 4: Noted in Passing

041 The Erickson Report, Page 4: Noted in Passing

Next up, we turn to an occasional feature, Noted in Passing, which is where we run through a few things quickly to make sure they get mentioned without spending a whole lot of time on any of them.

First up, the picture below is of Eric Zemmour, a rabble-rousing television pundit in France who is finding fervent audiences for his anti-Islam, anti-immigration invective and may run for president.

The sickening similarities to Tweetie-pie aside, what I wanted to point to was his for lack of a better term smile. Does it ever strike you that all of these reactionary bigots, no matter who they are, no matter where, all seem to have the same sort of supercilious, self-satisfied smirk, that creepy haughty expression that looks like Hannibal Lecter after a good meal?

Seriously. Watch for it.

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Here's something to cheer you up - not.

It seems that in a closed-door meeting on October 26, Democratic leadership advised House progressives that even as Build Back Better was on the verge of "being gutted beyond recognition" they better start acting like they are getting a major win whatever shreds of tattered cloth finally emerge.

"If we don't act like we are winning, the American people won't believe it either," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. So progressives should, according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "Embrace this and have a narrative of success."

Eric Zemmour

In other words, instead of campaigning against the lobbyists, the grifters, the corporations, and their enablers :cough: Manchin Sinema :cough: just lie and proclaim "there's an awful lot good in this package" even though you'd be hard put to find anything that impacts the corporations or the rich, that is, anything that they didn't want there.

That is, we can have whatever small gains or incremental improvements we want so long as the interests of our overlords continue to get priority.

It can be really depressing.

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Quickly noted because it's a topic that requires and deserves a fuller treatment, but I wanted to note that during oral arguments at the Supreme Court on that insane Texas anti-choice law - you know, the one that says you can't sue the state to stop it because the state isn't the one enforcing it, it's a vast sea of potential plaintiffs suing anyone in any way connected with an abortion so you'd have to deal with them one at a time - a couple of the justices who voted in September to allow it to go into effect appeared to be having second thoughts.

Brett Accused Rapist Kavanaugh and Amy Bugs Bunny Barrett both had skeptical questions for the lawyer for Texas - and with John Roberts, who I still think looks at cases with an idea of how the Roberts Court will look to history having in September voted to block the law while appeals continued, a switch by either of those Trumpite wackos would block it.

That wouldn't be the end of it since there's no time frame for a ruling and who knows how many lives will be ruined in that time - but at least it should put a damper on other states such as Ohio already considering their own version of a "ha ha can't touch us" ban.

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Finally, we have an RIP.

Mort Sahl

Mort Sahl, a trailblazing political satirist with a biting wit whose rapid-fire monologues earned him the nickname “Rebel Without a Pause” died October 26 in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 94.

In 2011, his live 1955 recording “Mort Sahl at Sunset” was cited as the first standup comedy album and was named by the Library of Congress to the National Recording Registry.

Unhappily by the 1970s, Sahl had been labeled a conspiracy kook and had lost most of his audience, particularly after he worked for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, whose claims about a wide-ranging conspiracy among anti-Castro activists and the CIA to assassinate John Kennedy eventually came down to a single indictment against a businessman named Claw Shaw, who was acquitted in less than one hour. Sahl didn't return to Broadway until a one-man show in 1985 - but he remained defiantly contrarian until the end of his life.

A favorite quote from Mort Sahl: “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.”

Indeed. RIP, Mort Sahl.

041 The Erickson Report for November 4 to 18

 

Good News:
- Court throws out Tweetie-pie era water rule
- Supreme Court upholds Maine vaccine mandate

COVID-19 deaths worldwide pass 5 million

A Closer Look at critical race theory

Noted in Passing
- The reactionary smirk
- Dem House leadership tells progressive members to pretend they are winning
- Kavanaugh, Barret seem skeptical of Texas anti-choice law
- RIP Mort Sahl

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages
- Clown: teacher tells Arab student re math assignment "We don't negotiate with terrorists"
- Clown: Premier Joe Manchin says all emissions are coming from Asia
- Clown: Texas legislator "investigating" if school libraries hold any of a list of 850 books
- Clown: Missouri governor threatens to prosecute reporter as "computer hacker" for obtaining publicly-available information
- Outrage: Israel labels six Palestinian civil rights groups "terrorists"
- Outrage: judge rules prosecution can't call those shot by Rittenhouse "victims" but defense can call them "rioters" and "arsonists"

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Three: Noted in Passing

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Three: Noted in Passing

Next, an occasional segment called Noted in Passing, where we touch on a couple of things we wanted to make sure got mentioned even if only quickly.

First up, the Ohio legislature is considering a GOPper-backed bill to change the name of an Ohio state park from Mosquito Lake State Park to Donald J. Trump State Park.

So basically changing the name from referencing one disease-carrying pest to another. Doesn't seem like much of a change to me.

It does remind me of the earlier efforts by GOPpers to have something named for Ronald Reagan in every single county in the US. But at least they had the decency to wait until he was dead.

-

And here we go again: Sen. Witless Romney is proposing legislation to deal with the - according to the right-wing - supposed looming financial crisis of Social Security and Medicare, a disaster that is forever imminent but never actually arrives.

This time it's to be bipartisan 12-member "Rescue Committees," one for each of the trust funds with a deadline of 180 days to draft legislation to "improve" each program while securing long-term funding, with any such legislation receiving "expedited consideration" in, that is, to be rushed through, Congress.

It's claimed that this is a "bipartisan" effort because three of the 12 co-sponsors in the Senate are Democrats. The three are Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Mark Warner. Truly a varied group.

Oh, and we have long known the way to secure the long-term funding for SS and Medicare: remove the cap on income subject to the taxes, a change that would only affect those making over $143,000, that is, the richest 8% of Americans.

 

But wait, that's the rub: It would mean taxing the rich, so that's obviously off the table.

-

Elizabeth Warren

On a happier note, here's another sign that Israel is finally losing its stranglehold on US policy in the Middle East, as progressives and even liberals become more open to questioning the so-called "special relationship."

On April 19, Elizabeth Warren, while continuing to support military aid to Israel, proposed conditioning the aid on none of it being used in the occupied territories. Quoting her: "By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course."

Not a very radical proposal by any means - personally, I would simply end military support altogether - but it wasn't that long ago that even suggesting Israel had to "adjust course" was beyond the pale.

-

On an unhappy note, the Arkansas House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a resolution specifically allowing the teaching of creationism in public schools.

Federal courts - including in a case directly involving Arkansas - have repeatedly held that teaching creationism in the public schools is unconstitutional on the grounds that it is religious instruction, a fact to which the bill's main sponsor responded by saying she hoped the newly reactionary SCOTUS might feel differently.

-

Finally, while most Americans have weathered the pandemic financially, about 38 million say they are worse off now than before the outbreak began in the US.

Overall, 55% of Americans say their financial circumstances are about the same now as a year ago, and 30% even say their finances have improved, but 15% say they are worse off.

Not surprisingly, the problem is more pronounced at lower income levels and among non-whites. Some 29% of Americans living below the federal poverty line say their personal finances now are even worse that they obviously were a year ago, while 47% of Hispanics and just 39% of Black Americans say they have been able to put aside some money recently, compared to 57% of whites, and. Black and Hispanic Americans are about twice as likely as white Americans to say they have come up short on bill payments.

Despite some recent degree of recovery, the United States still has 8.4 million fewer jobs than it had in February 2020, just before the pandemic struck.

029 The Erickson Report for January 7 to 19, Page Two: Five Things Noted in Passing about January 6

029 The Erickson Report for January 7 to 19, Page Two: Five Things Noted in Passing about January 6

There is so much more that could be said about this. Every time I see a news item about it, I find something else that deserves comment. It's impossible to cover it all so I think I'm going to wrap this up with some quick takes. Consider it a focused version of Five Things Noted in Passing.

The first, it's been only lightly noted that there were Tweetie-pie-supporting rallies in lots of places outside of DC. Most were peaceful, but not all:

- In Los Angeles, Tweetie-pie troops clashed with police, who declared an unlawful assembly.
- In Olympia, Washington, the governor and his family were moved to a secure location after yahoos broke into the grounds of the governor's mansion.
- In Salem, Oregon, state police declared an unlawful assembly to keep Tweetie-pie acolytes away from the state Capitol.
- In Phoenix, the crowd tried to break into the locked capitol building, smashing a window in the process, while another group brought a guillotine with a letter saying they are ready for war.
- In Atlanta, senior staffers, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had to be escorted out of the state capitol building
- And Georgia, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Utah took precautionary measures such as closing their state legislative buildings for the day.

Second, remember that I referenced the "unfocused rage burning" in Tweetie-pie's supporters. We would be wise to remember that some, maybe a lot, of these folks have genuine grievances, that they are no less liable to economic strains and stresses than the rest of us, that they are no less worried about their futures and the futures of their families than we are about ours. The reactionary corporate elites that dominate our economic lives have long excelled at taking that justified anger and directing it toward someone, anyone, other than them, that is, at getting people to blame the wrong targets.

Around 1998 I think it was, Bill Clinton of all people offered an image of a stereotypical family - working father, stay-at-home mother, couple of kids - with the parents pursuing the idea of a "good life" of sending the kids to college followed by a comfortable retirement.

But now, he said, the father hasn't had a raise in a few years and thinks he might be laid off at any time, and he looks at his family and feels he let them down, wondering "What did I do wrong?"

It's easy, Clinton said, for that sort of person to respond to a hot 30-second ad saying "You didn't do anything wrong. 'They' did it to you." The point being that the "they" here surely is not the corporate bosses.

The particulars may have changed in the last 20-plus years, but the game is the same.

Third, in line with Rule #13 of my "Rules for Right-wingers," which is "When all else has failed - and even when it hasn't - lie," we find various right wing flakes and Faux News hosts claiming that the mob that invaded the Capitol wasn't made of Tweetie-pie supporters, it was actually Antifa in disguise.

Fourth, one good thing - I suppose I can call it that - that came out of January 6 is that it has seemed to break the spell that Tweetie-pie had maintained over a major part of the GOPper party. People are breaking away from him, quitting the administration, openly criticizing him in a way that did not seem possible literally days earlier. It may that they thought it would never go this far, that the forces they unleashed could be contained in a way beneficial to them, or it could just be a calculation that he won't be as potent a figure post-presidency as had been thought.

In either case, it may not seem like much since it'd just mean we'll be dealing with ordinary reactionaries instead of fanatical ones, but I'll take what I can get.

Finally, we end with a Clown Award, given as always for meritorious stupidity. The winner this time is AFP, the French Press Agency.

The picture to the right had been going around to illustrate the difference in Washington DC security between that on January 6 with that, shown here, for a Black Lives Matter protest in June.

An AFP fact check declared the image "misleading" because it was labeled as security for the Capitol when in fact the BLM demonstration was at the other end of the Mall from the Capitol and the photo was the security for the Lincoln Memorial.

And so the Clown Award goes to AFP for noteworthy achievement in straining at a gnat and utterly, utterly, missing the point.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Nine: Some good election news for progressives

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Nine: Some good election news for progressives

We end this time with one last quick look at the election to note not only that according to one analysis, the Democrats may have done about as good as they might and the predictions of large gains were more a matter of over-optimism than facts on the ground but more importantly that, as Jim Hightower points out, for all the hand-wringing about down-ballot losses 2020 was hardly a debacle and for progressives in particular, it was not all that bad a year.

For one thing, there are about a dozen more progressives in Congress than there were before, making it harder for the establishment Democratic Party to continue its long practice of sidelining progressive proposals - not that they won't continue to try.

Progressives also won hundreds of local offices including, significantly, a number of races for sheriffs, district attorneys, and other criminal justice positions, including across the south.

It's an illustration of the growing - slowly growing but growing - progressive prosecutor movement, taking criminal justice reform, a publicly-popular and, 2020 showed, election-winning program, directly to the nuts and bolts of the system.

Not only in not so unexpected areas as California, but, the New York Times reports, in cities and counties in Geogia, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, and Ohio, overcoming the predictable resistance from police unions.

So we should, plagerizing Joe Hill, not mourn but organize. Think of 2020 as one of the 101 blows in the old parable of the stonemason. And carry it on.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Seven: Pennsylvania GOPpers fail (again!) to overturn election

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Seven: Pennsylvania GOPpers fail (again!) to overturn election

On December 8, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Pennsylvania GOPpers to block certification of the state's presidential vote. It was done in an unsigned one line order with no noted dissents. I can hear the justices saying "Do you get it now? Go away!"

I honestly expect the same treatment to be given to the utterly insane move by Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin at the Supreme Court on the grounds that changes they made to election procedures because of the pandemic were illegal. There simply is no way in hell that Texas has standing to bring this suit. [Update: It got exactly that treatment for exactly that reason.]

The question becomes what is the point of these suits. They know they can't win, they know in fact that even if they win they will still lose because enough states certified their results before the "safe harbor" date of December 8 to give Blahden more than the needed 270 electoral votes, after which those results are almost immune to challenge. So other than proving they are sufficiently wacko and sufficiently devoted to Tweetie-pie's personality cult to survive in the modern GOPper party, it's hard to see the point. Which means, in fact, that probably is the point.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Six: COVID relief still stalled

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Five: COVID relief still stalled

I don't know what state this will be at when you see this; hopefully it will be a done deal. But history says be cautious, so I'll cover this now even though I hope it's already outdated.

GOPper Sen. Bill Cassidy of Lousiana predicted on December 6 that Tweetie-pie and Fishface McConnell will wind up backing a $908 billion COVID relief bill being worked out in bipartisan negotiations that went around the GOPper Senate leadership and White House.

It includes continuing the ban on evictions plus money for small business loans and state and local aid, along with renewing the federal unemployment insurance supplement but at a reduced rate of $300 per week. It would also direct funds to COVID vaccine distribution, schools, and the transportation sector.

The downsides, and they are significant, are it does not include any money to replicate the earlier $1200 direct payments despite their demonstrated effect at reducing COVID-driven poverty and does include a supposedly "temporary" federal liability shield for corporations fearful of being held responsible for their COVID-related cruelties and mismanagements - think, for example, of the people forced at the cost of losing their jobs to keep working in meatpacking plants without protective gear.

Those failures have lead to some, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to say they might oppose the bill.

As I prepare this, Congress is apparently planning to pass a one-week spending bill to keep the government running, with the House voting on December 9. The idea is to provide more time to nail down the final language of the proposal, which is part of the omnibus spending package.

So you may know more than I do on this. A final thought for me here is that this is a case where I separate from Bernie and AOC: They are absolutely correct that this is not nearly enough, that there really does need to be at minimum a repeat of the $1200 check program, but with a large number of small businesses on the ropes and people on the verge of losing both the unemployment supplement and protection against eviction, I think the need is so great that we're at the point where we just take what we can get, come back for more, and hope for some surprisingly good news on January 5.

Updates: The one-week extension passed (of course). And Fishface says he won't let this package, which for Democrats is a compromise of a compromise of a compromise, come to the floor. Making the assumption that he is not completely devoid of humanity, the only reason I can think of is that he wants the economy to crash and burn, the better to bring down the Blahden presidency - but after saying that it occurs to me that both of those are probably true.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Five: New US Citizenship Test slaps immigrants

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Five: New US Citizenship Test slaps immigrants

Here's a bit of an Outrage just to make your skin crawl. How low can they go, how cheap can they get?

The US Citizenship Test contains 128 questions. A study guide provides suggested correct answers for each. Of those questions, applicants are asked a randomly-selected 20, of which they must get 12 right to pass. Reasonable enough.

Two of the questions are "Who does a U.S. senator represent?" and "Who does a member of the House of Representatives represent?" For many years, the suggested answer has been "People in their state (or district)."

But the 2020 version of the test has changed that to "citizens" in their state or district. Which is wrong: Senators and Representatives represent all the people in their district, citizens or not. In fact, the House of Representatives website says it in so many words, declaring that “each representative is elected to a two-year term serving the people of a specific congressional district.”

But the guide says "citizens," so I can only assume if you answer "people" or "residents" or some such variation, you'll be regarded as having failed that question.

My gosh, even in such a small, cheap way they feel the need to take a slap at non-citizens. If they weren't in such powerful positions, they'd be truly pathetic.

(If you want to check, the questions are #31 and #33.)

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Four: SCOTUS says religious groups can spread COVID

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Four: SCOTUS says religious groups can spread COVID

I have several items I want to run through, with just maybe two or three minutes on most of them.

We start with the fact that the last week of November, the rightwing gained its first Bugs Bunny Barrett-driven victory at the Supreme Court, ruling 5-4 in favor of two religious organizations challenging New York state orders limiting the number of people attending their religious services due to the risk of spreading COVID.

The majority ruled in favor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, agreeing that the restrictions violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment on the grounds that the regulations treated the houses of worship more harshly than comparable secular facilities - "comparable," in the eyes of the Court, meaning a religious service with at least scores and in one notable case, a couple of thousand often maskless people in an enclosed space for an extended time is essentially the same as a commercial establishment featuring often masked customers coming and going with few remaining for an extended time and not packed together.

The details of the state regulations and the justices' opinions are largely irrelevant in the fact of two things that stand out:

One is that the case should have been dismissed as moot because the state had already significantly modified the orders at issue. It wasn't, on the grounds that the groups "remain under a constant threat" because the restrictions could always be reinstated, a "it can always come up again" standard under which a great many cases dismissed as moot should not have been. It wasn't found moot because the reactionary majority wanted to rule on it, wanted to smack down public health rules because of their ideology of pushing religion into the law.

New York Governor Andrew "I'll never be my dad" Cuomo said the Court didn't find the case to be moot because the majority wanted to make a statement that this is now a different Supreme Court. Which is a different way of saying the same thing: This was about ideology, not the law or the Constitution.

The other notable point is that the decision was scientifically illiterate. Not only because of the idiocy of the "comparable facility" claim but because at bottom it relies on the conviction that what happens in a congregation because of the failure to respect public health guidelines affects no one outside that community. That even if you want to bizarrely say that religious freedom means we have to allow for the spread of an infectious disease within a religious community, you still have to say that those people are incapable of spreading that disease outside it. Which is transparent nonsense to a degree that just stating it is sufficient refutation.

Perhaps dimly aware of that, the majority said "there are many other less restrictive rules that could be adopted" but failed to suggest any that are both enforceable and equally effective - actually, they failed to suggest any at all, turning unsupported speculation into fact, which I suppose is pretty run of the mill for the right wing.

The bottom line is that the result of this decision is that being a religious organization entitles you to risk the public health. As Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University said of the decision, people will die as a result.

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 4: Five things noted in passing

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 4: Five things noted in passing

Next up, an occasional feature called Five Things Noted in Passing, five things on which I'm only going to spend a minute or two each but I wanted to make sure got mentioned.

First, I have a prediction for you.

There is some speculation circulating around that Tweetie-pie will either pardon himself before he's kicked out of office or that he will resign before the Inauguration and let then-President Mike NotWorthAFarthing do the job.

I don't know if either of those will happen but I do say that there is no need for him to do either. Because I predict that a Joe Blahden administration, a Blahden DOJ, will not prosecute Tweetie-pie for any of his crimes, for any of his corruption.

Instead, Blahden will grandly say, just as the Amazing Mr. O said, coming into office faced with clear evidence of Bush the Lesser's war crimes, some version of "We must look forward, not backward, we must unite as one nation moving into a better future." And Tweetie-pie will walk.

Either way, Tweetie-pie may still not be off the hook, because Presidential pardons only apply to federal crimes, so any state-level prosecution, such as New York's case about taxes, would be unaffected.

But prosecuted by the Blahden administration? Not a chance.

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Next, filed under the heading "All Your Data is Belonging to US," Facebook is demanding that a team of New York University researchers stop their work analyzing the micro-targeting of political ads on the platform.

The researchers have a team of 6500 volunteers across the US using a browser plug-in allowing the researchers to see what political ads are being shown to what viewers, enabling them to study how Facebook has been used for disinformation and manipulation.

But on October 16, Facebook demanded that the team disable the  plug-in and destroy all data gathered, threatening "additional enforcement action" if this is not done by November 30. The claim is that the tool violates the site's rule against automated bulk collection of data - the very thing Facebook itself does all the time in order to have the very demographic data it can use to - for its own considerable profit - enable advertisers to micro-target users.

It should be noted that the threatening demand, first reported a week after it was sent, has gotten heavy pushback from journalists, academics, and First Amendment lawyers.

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Another fallout of the COVID pandemic is that the United Nations is facing a financial crisis. As of November 2, nearly one-third of the 193 member states have not paid up their yearly assessments, leading to a shortfall of $5.1 billion, which in the context of the UN budget is enough to threaten to undermine the world-wide operations of the organization.

The UN has never actually lived up to its promise but it's still a valuable organization, particularly in its international agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, the Relief and Works Agency, and the World Health Organization. (You did know that the WHO is part of the UN, yes?)

By the way, over half the shortfall is due to the failure of one nation to pay what it owes. Guess who.

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Speaking of the WHO brings me to some news I have been wanting to share since I heard it, so forgive me for referring to an announcement made back on August 25. That was the day that the WHO declared that polio has been eradicated from the entire continent of Africa.

Polio, for those of you too young to remember it, is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus that attacks the central nervous system, leading to paralysis. As recently at the 1980s, polio - also known as infantile paralysis - was a dread disease, endemic in 125 nations and claiming 350,000 children a year.

Now, it is endemic in just two, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have seen a combined total of 102 cases so far in 2020. That is a reduction of over 99.9% from the 1980s.

This the result of a campaign sparked in 1988 by Rotary International, which gained powerful partners in the form of UNICEF, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), and the WHO, among others. The campaign was to bring polio vaccines, which had been available in the industrialized world for decades, to those still in need.

The goal of making polio join smallpox in the dustbin of history is obviously not achieved, but it is in sight.

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Finally, under the heading "this just in," it appears that the Affordable Care Act will for the third time survive a challenge at the Supreme Court.

At oral arguments on November 10 on the right wing's latest attempt to have the law struck down, two of the right-wing judges - John "The Smirk" Roberts and Brett "The Rapist" Kavanaugh - appeared ready to agree that the law's mandate to have insurance, the penalty for which was eliminated by Congress in 2017, should be thrown out but at the same time seemed prepared to have the rest of the law stand.

For his part, Roberts wondered aloud why, if Congress wanted the ACA to be dependent on the mandate, it didn't revoke the law when it eliminated the penalties while Kavahaugh said that precedent pointed in the direction of striking down the mandate but leaving the rest of the law intact.

Add the three judges considered liberal and you have a 5-4 majority.

Not a sure thing and clearly the whole issue of health care is something we'll be talking about a lot more, but for right now there is cause to be optimistic that we will at least not lose what has been gained.

A decision is expected by late spring.

025 The Erickson Report for November 11-24

 

The Erickson Report for November 11-24
This time:
Heroes and Villains
Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages
Five Things Noted in Passing
Some post-election commentary
A very brief RIP for Alex Trebek

Sources to follow shortly

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

We start this time with Five Things Noted in Passing. Every time I pull out five items I think worth noting but which aren’t going to get a lot of time. So let’s go.

A survey released in September by the Commonwealth Fund found that 58 percent of US small business owners, "small" being defined as fewer than 500 employees, support Medicare for All.

As the Commonwealth Fund pointed out in its overview, small businesses, which make up 99 percent of US employers and create 66 percent of new private-sector jobs, have been harder hit by rising health care costs than large corporations, because they don't have the same economic clout in negotiating with the private insurance industry. Which is likely why, when the survey asked small business owners which of eight issues was the biggest challenge facing their business, "Cost of providing health care coverage to employees" came out on top.

So despite the claims of the nanny-nanny naysayers, small businesses have much to gain from a single-payer system - and many of those owners know it.

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Fun fact, from a calculation someone did: If you came to America in 1619 and made $1 million every day for the next 400 years, and put it in a chest in your backyard, today you would have a few hundred million dollars less than Jeff Bezos.

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Here's something to brighten your day.

The UK's first Chick-fil-A is going to close just six months after it opened.

The Oracle, a shopping center located in Reading, England, decided not to extend Chick-fil-A’s lease beyond a six-month pilot period. A spokesperson for the mall said management had decided it was "the right thing to do," following community backlash against the fast food chain’s history of support of anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

Chick-fil-A tried some CYA, insisting that the company never intended for the Reading location to be open for more than a limited time and trying to imply the non-renewal was a mutual decision. The company claimed that having "pop-up locations" was part of a "long term strategy" to "expand our international presence" - but could not provide any plans for any future such "pop-up" sites.

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In the wake of Tweetie-pie's abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria, Frontier Alliance International, a nonprofit Christian organization that provides medical aid in the Middle East, planned to hold an event titled "A Night of Prayer for the Kurds."
However, the event was abruptly canceled by the hotel where it was scheduled to be held.

The administrator of Frontier Alliance International, Charlene Struebing, said hotel staff had said "they’ve gotten a lot of security concerns and they couldn’t accommodate enough security. I think it’s more related to people protesting our event than it was anything we were doing."

Considering that a DC police spokeswoman said that it had not "received any information regarding potential security threats or concerns with this event" and that who the hell would be protesting a prayer event makes me suspect there was another factor at play: the fact that the event to pray for the Kurds was to be at Tweetie-pie's DC hotel.

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A bit late but still definitely worth noting. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in April, for the first time ever, utility-scale renewable energy generated more power than coal. Renewables - hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass - provided 23% of total generation, with coal at 20%.
That may not persist month after month because coal power generation varies seasonally, but the clear trend can't be denied.

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Five Things Noted in Passing

Next up comes Five Things Noted in Passing, devoted to mentioning at least briefly a few of the many, many pieces of news that can't be included in a half-hour show.

Number One: Emmet Till was a 14 year-old boy from Chicago visiting family in Money, Mississippi in August of 1955, where he allegedly flirted with a white woman cashier at a country store.

Four days later, the woman's husband and brother went to the home where Till was staying, kidnapped him, stripped him, beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and threw his body, tied to a 75-pound cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the the Tallahatchie River.

Emmett Till

His body was found four days later. His murderers were tried for the crime - and were acquitted in under two hours.

Since 2007, there have been several memorial signs near the site of the murder. The signs have been repeatedly vandalized - but for some reason a recent example caused extensive outrage: Three University of Mississippi students posed by one bullet-pocked sign bearing guns and grins.

The result is a new sign, 500 pounds, steel-reinforced, bulletproof, and protected by security.

Which is apparently what it takes, today, to protect a memorial to a black child murdered and mutilated by bigots 64 years ago.

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Number Two: To prove resistance can be joyful, Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San José State University, have installed three pink seesaws along the steel border fence on the outskirts of El Paso in Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.

The seesaws were slid through the fence so that the two ends were in the two different countries, making the wall, the professors said, a literal fulcrum of US-Mexico relations.

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Number Three: The Polar Star is a heavy icebreaker, designed to make its way through Antarctic Sea ice, which can be over 20 feet thick. Its primary job is clearing a path for resupply of the McMurdo research station as part of Deep Freeze, a multi-service operation to support the US Antarctic Program, which is led by the National Science Foundation.

It is the US's only heavy icebreaker and it was launched in 1976 - 43 years ago. Every time it makes the trip, necessary to support the research being done at McMurdo, which can be done nowhere else in the world, things break down, pipes leak, equipment stops working. The boat spends its entire time in homeport in a struggle to be ready for the next time. The Coast Guard and Navy are supposedly cooperating on plans for new icebreakers, but for now every year there is the risk that the researchers at McMurdo could find themselves without supplies.

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Number Four: The case of Parvez Manzoor Khan is before a US magistrate in Jacksonville, Florida. I won't try to go through the details of the case, which gets complex, but I wanted to mention it because of its potential impact: The Justice Department is trying to strip Khan of his citizenship, which he obtained in 2006, on the grounds that in his application he failed to disclose aspects of his immigration history.

Parvez Manzoor Khan

However, it develops that even if he had disclosed those details, it would not have prevented him from becoming a citizen. Nonetheless, the Injustice Dept. is pressing the case while admitting that if it's successful, there is no guarantee that ICE would not renew attempts to deport him to Pakistan.

The even important, the broader, thing is that if Khan loses his citizenship, the DOJ has already made it clear that it intends to pursue similar cases against other naturalized citizens.

I wonder if any of them will be from Norway.

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And Number Five: A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine compared state-by-state rates of gun ownership with rates of gun homicide from 1990 through 2016.

The study found that the rate of domestic-violence-related firearm homicide was 65% higher in states with the highest rate of gun ownership than in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Which I supposed should be filed under the heading of "And this is news how?"

The Erickson Report for August 7 to 20

The Erickson Report for August 7 to 20

This week:

- Keep your "thoughts and prayers."
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/08/04/republican-officials-point-to-video-games-after-el-paso-mass-shooting/23787110/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-governor-greg-abbott-gun-rights-advocate-el-paso-mental-health_n_5d460b30e4b0ca604e330770
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/08/04/after-pair-of-mass-shootings-trump-remains-out-of-sight/23787109/
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/08/04/trump-calls-mass-shootings-a-mental-illness-problem/23787308/
https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1157784971089731587
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2018/06/

- Five Things Noted in Passing
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/emmett-till-bulletproof-memorial_n_5d3b50b7e4b0c31569eaa983
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/30/joyful-act-resistance-pink-seesaws-installed-border-fence
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/07/30/seesaw-border-because-what-goes-goes-down
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https://www.businessinsider.com/us-icebreaker-polar-star-damaged-on-trip-to-antarctica-2019-1
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-02/antarctica-polar-star-icebreaker
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https://theintercept.com/2019/07/31/us-citizenship-status-denaturalization-case/
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/28/1619921/-No-surprise-States-with-the-most-guns-have-highest-rates-of-domestic-violence-gun-deaths

- Heroes and Villains: Olga Misik and Vladimir Putin
https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/02/muscovites-vow-to-protest-again-despite-police-detentions
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/03/747866890/moscow-police-detain-hundreds-at-latest-election-related-protest
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/08/01/we-are-here-peaceful-purposesbut-they-are-not

- Following Up: school lunches
https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snaps-broad-based-categorical-eligibility-supports-working-families-and
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-plan-failed-note-it-could-jeopardize-free-school-lunches-n1035281
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/29/1875152/-500-000-kids-will-lose-free-school-lunch-under-Trump-administration-plan

- A Longer Look: BDS and Israel
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/07/24/right-boycott-under-attack-some-members-congress-are-pushing-back
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/25/progressive-except-palestine-khanna-and-pressley-draw-fire-over-vote-condemning
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/25/sniping-innocent-protesters-however-still-fine-israeli-snipers-now-being-trained
https://www.btselem.org/
https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20190724_military_admits_to_killing_protestors_for_no_reason
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/22/ethnic-cleansing-impunity-israel-denounced-demolishing-dozens-palestinian-homes
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/israeli-forces-prepare-demolish-100-palestinian-homes-190722032443910.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/03/1975-defending-my-charge-that-benjamin.html

- Two Weeks of Stupid [the Clowns]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-21/susan-collins-faces-re-election-as-standing-erodes-in-trump-era
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/25/1874405/-Susan-Collins-is-having-another-pity-party-over-being-held-accountable-for-her-votes
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/politics/ratcliffe-director-intelligence-community-trump/index.html
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Did-Special-Counsel-Robert-Mueller-break-rules-14276252.php
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1155580140392501248
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https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/new-bureau-land-management-head-complained-federal-employees-arent-held-personally
https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/senior-bureau-land-management-official-right-wing-pundit-who-has-said-climate-change-isnt?redirect_source=/blog/2019/07/17/senior-bureau-land-management-official-right-wing-pundit-who-has-said-climate-change-isn-t-real-and/224235
https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/bureau-land-management-senior-official-william-perry-pendley-feds-should-sell-public-land
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-huckabee-thoughts-and-prayers_n_5d489692e4b0244052dfc493

- Two Weeks of Stupid [the Outrages]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-department-plans-to-restart-capital-punishment-after-long-hiatus/2019/07/25/f2cc6402-aee5-11e9-bc5c-e73b603e7f38_story.html
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-government-resume-capital-punishment-after-nearly-two-decade-lapse
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/new-hampshire-death-penalty-abolished-state-senate-governor
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2019/07/25/amnesty-international-response-us-government-decision-resume-federal-executions
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49198565

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Five Things Noted in Passing

We have here the first appearance of another occasional feature, this one called Five Things Noted in Passing, five things worth noting, each of which will be addressed in no more than about a minute. In the course of two weeks, there are always a multitude of things that I simply will not have any time to address. This way I can at least mention some of them.

Okay, Number One: Scientists in Iceland are installing a plaque to memorialize the nation’s first glacier lost to climate change. It will be installed next month at the site of the now-extinct Okjökull glacier in Borgarfjörður and will include a “letter to the future” reminding humans to do better at tackling global warming.

Number Two: Sens. Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy have introduced a resolution to would brand the loose coalition of anti-fascist groups collectively known as Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

However, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found that domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in 2018, making it fourth-deadliest for extremist attacks in the last 50 years. And "every single" one of those 50 "had a link to right-wing extremism."

Also according to the ADL, over the past 10 years, the far right has killed hundreds of people and accounted for about three-quarters of extremist murders in the US. Number connected to Antifa: 0

Number Three: Speaking to Chris Wallace on Faux News, presidential advisor and repeat winner of “Who Wants to be a Zombie” Stephen Miller said “I think the term ‘racist’ has become a label deployed by left/Democrats in this country to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear.”

Quite true. Because “go back to where you came from” and “send her back” is speech that no decent person would want to hear.

The plaque

Number Four: On July 20, hundreds of activists rallied in Lawton, Oklahoma to demand Tweetie-pie stop imprisoning asylum-seeking children. Lawton is the site of Fort Sill, where the government intends to stick up to 1400 migrant children, starting next month.

Fort Sill was also the place where members of the Apache nation were imprisoned in the 1890s as their children were taken away and subjected to forced “assimilation” at the fort’s boarding school.

More recently, it is where 700 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

And Number Five: Finally, just a thought: There have been increasing attacks on Medicare for All, Medicare for All being defined here as universal health coverage that is not simply a minor extension of the ACA combined with increased subsidies for the private insurance industry disguised as “premium support.” A primary basis for these attacks has been the claim that polls say people are happy with their current coverage.

But here’s the thing: Are those people really happy with their insurance? Are they happy with the premiums, the co-pays, the deductibles, the medically-necessary procedures put on hold until you find out if “insurance will cover it,” the not being able to choose your doctor because they are “out of network?” Or are they just happy that they have insurance?

Put another way, are these polls really about public sentiment or are they truly trial balloons trying to determine which lies would be the most effective in scaring people away from universal coverage?