049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16

 

049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page 4: The Threat to Education

049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16, Page 4: The Threat to Education

We conclude with an episode of our recurring feature "The Threat." And this time it is the threat to public education.

We have all heard, I'm sure, of the battles over omigod critical race theory that has lead to screaming threats and even violence directed against school boards and sometimes their individual members. We've seen, too, how that chaotic social panic quickly spread to attacks on school libraries for daring to contain books or teachers teaching concepts that some parent - the singular is deliberate - found objectionable.

We've seen for example, a bill proposed by a Republican state senator in Oklahoma that would empower a single parent to demand books that discuss gender identity removed from public school libraries.

Under the bill, after receiving a written demand to remove a book, a school district would have 30 days to eliminate all copies of the material from circulation. Librarians could be forced to pay said parent $10,000 a day for as long as the book remains available and be fired and barred from working in public schools for up to two years if they don't cooperate.

In November, one member of the the Spotsylvania County [Virginia] School Board ordered school staff to begin removing books that contain "sexually explicit" and added that they should be burned in a public event. He subsequently became chair of that board.

In January, the Florida state Senate's education committee passed a bill banning public schools and private businesses from making people feel "discomfort" when learning about US racial history, with the immediate result that a school district in central Florida canceled a teacher training seminar about the civil rights movement that had been months in the planning.

Also in January, the Indiana House limited what teachers can say regarding race, history, and politics in Indiana classrooms and allows for the state's secretary of education to suspend or revoke the teacher's license of anyone "willfully or wantonly" violating its provisions.

There were a lot more examples, and of course the books most commonly under attack were about gender, being LGBTQ+, and race, with LGBTQ+ and black authors the targets.

But there are two things important to bring up beyond the obvious bigotry involved.

All these bills have something in common: They make it easier - in fact easy - to get things out of the library, out of the classroom, easy to get things out of public education, while providing no way to get things into it. No way to enrich it, expand it, make it deeper or more meaningful or even just more useful. It's all about stripping away from the right to a public education.

In fact, an Alabama bill does away with any pretense. It proposes to just give parents a check for whatever the state would have spend on their children's education and say they can, quoting the bill's sponsor, "use it to pay for educational whatever" they want. The bill, that is, would be the end of public education in Alabama.

But there's another aspect. The big emerging thing is "transparency," is the "right" of parents to have access to all materials used in public schools right down to an individual teacher's lesson plans. Some are even calling for cameras in the classroom to record everything that goes on for future evaluation. It all sounds so wholesome - after all, who could be against transparency?

But that veil of wholesomeness is deliberate. Because what this really is, is another way to provide for an opportunity to complain, to carp, to nitpick, to attack whine bluster and bully. Another avenue for attack.

Have no doubt, this is what it means. This is not some spontaneous burgeoning of parental frustration, this is the result of a deliberate, conscious, coordinated campaign to destroy public education and those parents you see ranting at school boards are classic useful idiots.

Do not doubt it. Christopher Rufo, the Republican boy wonder who guided the whipping up of the anti-CRT hysteria of the past year and basking in the glory of multiple states having passed laws banning the teaching of basically anything that might make white Republicans uncomfortable, has declared “transparency” the word for 2022.

He has openly declared a desire to have at least 10 states pass laws in 2022 requiring public schools to make all teaching materials easily available to parents via the internet, fully aware that the result would be to create impossible demands for public - note, only public, not private - schools to meet, right down to individualized lesson plans for every child as well as opening those teachers and administrators to constant threats of harassment.

That is what all this manufactured hysteria is really about: ending the very concept of a right to a public education. It must not be allowed to succeed.

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page Three: On NATO

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page Three: On NATO

Next, I want to get back to what I said about permanently barring Ukraine from NATO being a not bad idea. The realiity is that, as I also said, NATO is a military alliance born in, based on, and still driven by thye shibboleths and demons of the Cold War. For decades it was presented as a response to the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, even though NATO predates the Warsaw Pact by six years.

Even if you grant that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evaporation of its control over Eastern Europe, the purpose of NATO, it's reason for existing, evaporated as well.

But instead of being disbanded along with the rest of the predictable celebrations about having "won" the Cold War, it plunged ahead and even aggressively expanded.

Remember the map from last time, the one where every nation in blue to the east of that purple line was added to NATO after Mikhail Gorbachev was assured during discussions about re-uniting Germany it would not expand "one inch" to the east?

According Mary Sarotte, a post-Cold War historian who wrote a book about those negotiations, contemporaneous notes, letters, speeches, and interviews show that Western leaders were already contemplating NATO enlargement by the time those talks took place. It was always the plan.

So what I would say is revive what was for some decades an issue for the left and the international peace movement, but which for some reason faded - actually I can name several but I'll skip that for now: don't just not expand NATO, disband NATO. Break it up. Shut it down. It is a Cold War dinosaur that has become, as it is at this moment, more of a threat to spark a war - intentionally or otherwise - than it ever was to prevent one. It's time, it's part time, for it to just go away.

If you want cooperation, including on mutual security, you have the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, of which Russia and Ukraine are already members.

If it's more economic and cultural ties you're interested in, you have the European Union.

What we don't need is a re-hash of the Cold War, but that it what we're seeing. And frankly I am damn sure that there are people in Washington, the capitals of Europe, and yes Moscow that are delighted at the prospect, even if not consciously, but who are thrilled at the prospect of a return to a simpler, clearer, age when there wasn't a complex and very messy political world to deal with but one with the comfort and stability of a clear, identifiable enemy presenting an always rather vague, diffuse, but ever-present existential threat.

I have to tell you, I remember that comfortable, stable time with its proxy wars, militarism, and leitmotif of Red-baiting. I have no desire to reprise it.

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page Two: Just Trust Us

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page Two: Just Trust Us

Moving on to two related not directly but related points:

One is how as soon as the government mentions war or even just foreign policy, we are supposed to just shut up and believe.

On February 3 State Department PR agent Ned Price claimed the US had intelligence suggesting Russia was planning a “false flag operation” propaganda video to justify an invasion of Ukraine, complete with dead bodies and crisis actors posing as weeping mourners. When AP reporter Matt Lee asked for evidence, Price repeatedly said the evidence was what he just said before cutting it off by telling Lee
“If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government, of other governments and want to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”

The same day, White Hoose PR ad rep Jen Psaki reacted with incredulity when NPR White House Correspondent Ayesha Rascoe asked if there would be any evidence offered of the claim that ISIS militant Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi detonated a suicide bomb that killed himself, his wife, and his children rather than being the victims of a US attack.

Psaki responded by saying "People are skeptical of the U.S. military’s assessment ... that they are not providing accurate information and ISIS is?"

In both cases, the immediate response to a question, to wanting evidence, is "either you shut up and believe us or you are saying you believe our enemies" with just a soupçon of "believe or you are un-American."

What's really disturbing is how much of the media willingly embraces that same idea. For an example, that Politico's National Security Daily I mentioned said that "Putin wants to reclaim the narrative after the US exposed many of Russia’s plots," making specific reference to the business about "his false flag video operation" - that is, unquestioningly absorbing and repeating the very claim for which Ned Price repeatedly failed to meet the challenge of providing any evidence.

And if you doubt that liberals are as ready to go along, just watch MSNBC pretty much every night.

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page 1: Ukraine

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page 1: Ukraine

I start with a warning that as I write this, events in Ukraine are in serious flux, with Russia saying it's pulling back some troops and NATO countries saying they see no signs of it and one even suggesting a drawdown could be a trick while hints about talks on other topics are being bandied about on both sides.

As I do this, the February 16 "day it will happen" is passing but the "it'll be by February 20" deadline is still ahead. Russia says it is pulling back troops but the US and NATO call b.s. So maybe tension is easing except maybe it isn't.

But it doesn't matter because as Politico's National Security Daily would have it today, February 16 was always "overhyped" and the real important day is February 20. Or soon after February 20. Or March 1. Or it doesn't matter because as one person they quoted said "Just because these dates come and go doesn’t mean the risk is any less." Just be worried all the time.

Things could be - in fact very likely will be in at least some ways - quite different by the time you see this: the difficulty of trying to discuss changing current events in a two-week time frame.

So I decided to plunge ahead with what I intended to say and if events prove that I got things totally and disastrously wrong, so be it and I won't hide from my failure. So onward.

Last time amid the growing drum beat of war at any moment, I made the prediction that Putin not invade Ukraine. 

Among the reasons were my contention that if he intended to invade he would have done it already rather than this extended slo-mo buildup giving both Ukraine NATO plenty of time to prepare a response and that his real intention was to make a declaration that NATO could not continue to act on matters of European security as if Russia did not exist, that is, to remind the West that Russia is still a player in these matters and it does have what it regards as legitimate security concerns about NATO expansion.

And in fact, that has recently been made more explicit, with Putin complaining the US and NATO have “freely interpreted” the principle of the "indivisibility of security," the idea that no country should strengthen its security at the expense of others, a principle that is enshrined in international agreements involving both sides. That is, he is sarcastically accusing NATO of interpreting the phrase in whatever way it finds most convenient at the moment, without regard to any concerns of objections Russia may have.
 
Another reason I gave was that an invasion would be a bloody and difficult undertaking,
the biggest Russian military operation since World War 2, and that includes Afghanistan.

And I also noted that I had some backup of my doubts to be found in statements from various diplomats and officials of non-US countries.

So my conclusion was that Putin would not invade - unless.

Which is where I left it, saying if the following two weeks had not yet proved that I am a lousy prognosticator, I'd finish that sentence this time. Time has not yet proved my failings, so here we are.

Simply put, the "unless" revovles around the NATO - which really means the US - response to Putin's posturing.

Putin is trying to lay down a marker, saying "We will be heard, we will not be ignored." Putin is regarded by some analysts as a gambler in foreign affairs, as being "risk-tolerant" as it's put, but in laying down his marker in this case, he's taking the risk he's making a bet he can't cover.

The risk can be seen most easily and clearly in the frankly bellicose words of US officials.

For one, there was the statement by Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley, who said late in January, quoting, “We strongly encourage Russia to stand down and to pursue a resolution through diplomacy.”

For another, that same week the Biden administration and NATO told Russia there will be no US or NATO concessions on Moscow’s main demands, which revolve around Ukraine being kept out of NATO and the withdrawal of NATO forces from near Russia's border.

Some years ago I read a statement - I can't remember who, I'd like to give credit where it's due but I can't - that "faced with the choice between humiliation and war, nations historically have shown a depressingly persistent preference for the latter." The point and the relevance here is that if you don't want a war, you have to give the other side a way to back out of a confrontation without appearing to back down, a way to say at the very least "OK, I can live with that; it's not everything I wanted but I can live with it." Lacking such a way out, nations historically prefer war to humiliation. That concern is central to where we stand now.

And realize this notion of giving the other side a graceful exit is not an out-there idea: On February 14, Rep. Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, told MSNBC that “If we're going to prevent a war, Putin has to get something out of this. He has to have some sort of diplomatic face-saving mechanism to back down."

The idea has even been mentioned in mainstream news articles, often coupled with claims that the US is now offering Putin such an off-ramp. Unfortunately, that off-ramp consists of saying if Putin totally backs down, that is, withdraws all his troops from near Ukraine and drops all his other demands, including any objection to Ukraine joining NATO, we would be willing to talk about some tangentially-related issues outside the bounds of those demands. It's hard to think of that as being an acceptable alternative to Russia. Such discussions and even some decent results arising from them are certainly not out of the question - on February 15 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made specific reference to them - but they will not address the central questions.

Which just brings us back to the US-NATO position of "stand down, no concessions."

There are really only four reasons they would say such a thing.
- They are totally ignorant of that history of nations preferring war to humiliation.
- They actually want a war.
- They are really convinced an attack won't happen and taking the opportunity to look tough because they are convinced they can bully Putin into retreat.
- Or there is something going on behind the scenes of which no one is talking about even on background and so of which we know nothing.

Of those, the last is the most hopeful, although hard to credit considering how many potential leaky points there are. Nonetheless, I can hope it's true; it certainly wouldn't be the first time some back-channel deal proved to be the way out of a crisis.

The first reason I simply cannot believe to be true and the second one I have to believe and fervently hope is not true.

Which leaves what I think is the most plausible reason: They think they can bully Putin into backing down. In fact, a hint of that confidence can be seen in that at the same time the US was declaring "no concessions," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared that Russia should not only pull its forces from in and around Ukraine but also from Georgia and Moldova.

Frankly, if that's the game being played here, it is an insanely dangerous one, particularly when you bear in mind that Putin holds the 1990s as a "decade of humiliation" for his country, an experience he is unlikely to be willing to repeat.

Okay, so what can be done? There have been several ideas advanced; let's run through a few.

You have to realize the Ukraine is the key. So one idea is to simply accept Moscow's insistence that Ukraine be permanently barred from NATO. Now, that's actually not a bad one and I'd even go beyond that which I'll get to later, but right now it's not politically viable. It would be almost as much a humiliating retreat for NATO as the one being pushed on Russia by NATO. So in the present, it's a nonstarter.

However, what could be done is to emphasize the fact - and it is a fact - that there is no reasonable prospect for Ukraine to be part of NATO any time in the foreseeable future, if in fact ever.

The prospect of its joining what is a Cold War military alliance is based on a 2008 NATO statement which in the nearly 14 full years since has not produced what's called a Membership Action Plan - a pathway to eventual membership - for Ukraine. And Germany and France were and remain opposed to Ukraine's membership and getting in requires unanimous support from existing members. So Ukraine may never be able to join NATO.

Even Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has essentially acknowledged that. During a meeting with German chancellor Olaf Scholz on February 14, Zelenskyy said membership in NATO would take “longer than expected" and described it as a "dream," something Kyiv hopes to get to someday, but who knows when or, bluntly, if.

But instead of pointing that out except occasionally in passing, NATO and the US keep banging on the "anyone can join" drum as if it were a done deal and it's just a matter of some details.

Admittedly, President Blahden did say that Ukraine does not have the go-ahead to join NATO - but that was last June and is not found in the current rhetoric, at least as how anyone would notice. It's dispiriting and indicative of the idea that the US thinks Putin can be bullied because it is pushing pride over practicality, made clearer by that last week Jean-Marie Guehenno, former UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, described NATO’s non-stop enlargement as a "mistake" and said the 2008 promise was "hypocritical to claim that NATO enlargement was compatible with the development of real friendship with Russia."

Another related idea of what could be done is for NATO, rather than barring Ukraine or emphasizing membership is only long-term possibility, to declare a moratorium on new member states, a way to finesse Ukrainian membership without directly acknowledging the connection. Yet another proposal is the so-called "Finlandization" of Ukraine, which has a bad air about it because it has implied being subject to informal domination by Russia, but would really mean Ukraine declaring itself neutral and trying to maintain contacts and good relations with both Russia and the West, which wouldn't be popular with the pro-Europe western parts of Ukraine and would require a formal change in Ukrainian policy but still could be a viable option and over time become the normal state of affairs.

Yet another potential off-ramp for Putin, a way for him to, if you will, stand down without appearing to kneel, something that would give him that "face-saving mechanism" would be for the US and NATO to insist that Ukraine fulfill its obligations under a 2015 peace deal regarding two breakaway pro-Russia provinces in the Donbas region in the southeast of the country, a deal that was brokered by France and Germany and required Kyiv to offer self-rule to the rebel-held territories. Its implementation has stalled because of domestic opposition in the anti-Russian western Ukraine, but granting that self-rule plus surrendering even if not formally to the reality that Crimea is gone could well be enough to provide the "flexibility" to avoid a major war without anyone on either side giving up anything over which they actually have control.

Personally, I think that is the best option available and could be made even better if only because more saleable is for Ukraine to be admitted to the European Union - something to which it appears Russia has not objected - which would to some degree satisfy Kyiv's desire to closer ties to the West without involving any commitments of Europe or the US to the military defense of Ukraine or allowing for the stationing of any NATO forces or bases within it.

In fact, I'm going to go way out on a limb here. On February 15, Putin declared, without offering any evidence, that what is going on in Donbas is "genocide" - that is, genocide against the ethnic Russians there. Analysts are as you'd expect claiming that this is intend as a pretext for an invasion. Which, I have to acknowledge, it could be. However, he has been saying the same thing since 2014. It has served as the excuse for Russian military support of the rebels. Which prompts me to think that raising it right now, in this context, is a tell that what I just raised - a deal involving self-rule to the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk - could be the key to a settlement.

As events unfold, we'll see how I do.

048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2

The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2

This episode:

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

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

- Disband NATO

- "The Threat" to public education

(Sources to follow)

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

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

With only the time to do this quickly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at the second map.

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

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

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

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

And it's not just me that has doubts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now that future has come.

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

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

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

The case is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The death penalty should disappear.

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

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

First up, this is just feel-good news.

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

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

Karma can be a bitch.

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

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

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

On January 14, the were acquitted by a jury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's still a win.

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

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

Which brings me to something that is definitely good News.

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

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

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

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

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2

 

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2

Good News

- Cyber Ninjas closing

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

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

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- Climate protesters acquitted

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

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- Group wins fight to feed hungry

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

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- Migrant arrest unconstitutional

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

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- Police reform in NYC

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

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

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

https://www.sentencingproject.org/

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

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

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

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

The Threat to Voting Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Speech for Me

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

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

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

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

And we have two, both from astronomy.

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

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

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

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

Science is cool.