Another comment worth repeating

On July 23, the estimable Erin Reed posted a piece about a recent column by NYT columnist David Leonhardt in which he proposed that Kamala Harris should be a trimmer on gender rights in order to appear more "moderate."

I replied in a comment which I thought was worth repeating; this is (a very slightly edited and expanded version of) it:

Two points need to be noted about Leonhardt's political, uh, "advice."

One is that it is not driven by either real conviction or the merits of the case but by an underlying attitude of "Well, this doesn't matter to ME, therefore it shouldn't matter to anyone else other than a few flakes who don't count."

Perhaps more to the point, though, is that it presents a line of argument that's been used at some point or another against every liberal, every Democrat, every progressive, every radical, every individual anywhere on the entire left half of the US political spectrum, one that says your arguments must not be couched in the words of conviction or conscience, the words of justice or moral necessity, but rather must be framed by fear, fear of what "they" might say about it, what nasty name "they" might call you.

In fact, unless what you propose is overwhelmingly popular (and even if it is), if "they" can say something nasty, it's likely best not only to not mention it at all, but to openly attack it.

It's a far too common practice that at times has been called "duck and cover" (and if you know what that means without checking, you are older than you look), of politically curling into a defensive position. But I prefer my own name for it: "preemptive capitulation," surrendering before the battle has even been joined.

That is exactly what Leonhardt has proposed Harris do on gender rights: don't mention it and when asked, hold it as far away from you as you can get away with. And I guarantee you there will be a good number of "old hands" among the political jibber-jabberers and the consultant coterie who will regard that as wise counsel.

At moments like this I can't help but draw a comparison to the right-wingers, who, when they are called on their latest lizard-brain inanity will double- and triple-down and after a round or three the media gets bored with asking and the issue fades from the headlines and then from memory. It's sitzfleisch as political strategy¹ while we, when pressed, usually act like we're playing rapid transit², rushing from one mumbled evasion and backtrack to another. I still have memories from a few decades ago of pollsters telling people that their problem with Democrats was less what they stood for than that they didn't seem to stand for anything.

Personally, I'm tired of it. This doesn't mean we don't pay attention to how we say things; in fact, one of my all-time favorite compliments was when after a debate I learned that someone in the audience said I had the ability "to make the most radical positions sound like a voice of sweet moderation." So yeah, I paid attention to how I said things, but there was never any doubt about what it was I was saying. What it does mean is that we should speak the truth as we understand it and when challenged on what we have said, Don't. Back. Down.

That's the message for Kamala Harris and for all of us: If you've changed your mind about something, say so, say "I was wrong about that." Own it. But if you haven't, own that, too. Don't. Back. Down.

¹"Sitzfleisch" is German for "sitting flesh." See my "Rules for Right-wingers," specifically #20.
²Rapid transit is a form of chess where each player has five seconds per move.

Welcome to Fish-Wrapping 101

Or maybe 404.

I have written a number of times in the past about how we are uninformed, malinformed, and misinformed by our mainstream news media and on the impacts on our political discourse that result (some examples here).

Our latest example comes to us from Newsweek. It’s not as egregious as some, where the bias lies in shading and emphasis, but it is so ridiculous that it deserves mention.

One of the things that media outlets, particularly print outlets, know full well is that a good many people never get past the first graph of a news article. That’s why the standard of “the 5 Ws” (who, what, when, where, why) exists; the idea is to get as many of the basic facts as high in the article as possible, if possible in the first graph, to ensure that the greatest number of readers will have them - because that’s often all many readers see and so form the impression they take away from it.

It’s also why the headline is important, as it should (and in practice does) frame the substance of the issue in a single line or two. One thing as readers we should be wary of is that the headline we see on an article from an outside source, for example on a news aggregator or a reprint of a wire service report, may not be the one the original source put on it and so may have a different slant or emphasis than was intended or even present in that original.

So know that in this case, that is not an issue. Newsweek is the original source and the headline involved is theirs.

Okay, the story.

On January 9, there were a series of 13 special elections in Virginia, two for state Senate seats, 11 for ones in the state House of Delegates. How did Newsweek report the results? Here is the headline and first paragraph:

Republicans Annihilate Democrats in Virginia Election Sweep
Republicans scored massive victories in elections held in Virginia on Tuesday, returning two GOP politicians to local legislature following the departure of the incumbents.

So what, beyond the hyperbole, is wrong?

Not one of those 13 races flipped a seat! Not one! The magazine took advantage of two large wins by GOPpers, one in the Senate and one in the House, to use “annihilate,” “sweep,” and “massive” to describe the overall result and focus the first 13 graphs of a 17-graph story on those two races.  Even that overstates it, as the 11 House races were mentioned just once, in the 14th graph, with the final three being about Glen Youngkin, a Biden-Trump poll, and that Newsweek had asked state parties for more comment.

As if that wasn’t enough, the two “big” wins weren’t all that big when you consider that one of the winners had run unopposed in his last race and the other was replacing a GOPper who had retired and also had run unopposed last time. (Thank you, Ballotpedia and Wikipedia.) To say these districts are overwhelmingly GOPper borders on understatement, so the size of the victories were no surprise.

Such is the state of too much of our national news media, where the search from drama frequently outweighs being informative or even making a stab at balance. There is an old saying among newspapers that “if it bleeds, it leads.” A modern version might be using “tricks for clicks” because “if it shocks, it rocks.”

For the moment, though, we have “Newsweak.”

064 The Erickson Report for October 27 to November 10, Page 3: The CPC letter

064 The Erickson Report for October 27 to November 10, Page 3: The CPC letter

So. On October 24, 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to the White House that in effect suggested trying to open a conversation with Russia about a potential diplomatic end to its war on Ukraine.

The result was what Politico called a "firestorm" of hostile reaction, one fueled to no small degree by how the Washington Post described the letter, as one urging Blahden to "dramatically shift his strategy on the Ukraine war," calling it a break with official policy and a rupture in the party.

The reaction was swift enough and hostile enough that by that evening caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal was issuing a "clarification" and by the next day it had been withdrawn altogether.

But it wasn't a break; in fact the letter was quite anodyne, including praise and reasserting support for Blahden and insisting that no agreement can be reached without the approval of Ukraine.

So what got it in so much trouble? It comes down to this sentiment, quoting the letter:

[I]f there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine. The alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks.

In other words, as The Intercept put it, "That the letter was met with fierce opposition is a measure of the space available for debate among congressional Democrats when it comes to support for the war and how it might be stopped before it turns nuclear: roughly zero."

So invested have the Democratic hierarchy and particularly its hack sycophants become in the glories of war and the shimmering image of outright military defeat of Russia that simply proposing the idea of talking about the possibility of a settlement is beyond he pale.

Indeed, it often seems those hack sycophants are more intested in "decisive victory" through "overwhelming force" than that hierarchy is. Bluntly, I believe that's because they see such a victory as proper retibution for Russia's having, in their minds, been single-handedly responsible for inflicting Tweetie-pie on us.

Among the worst of those hack sycophants is Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos, someone fond of calling people "tankies," a 1950s-era anti-communist smear accusing people of maintaining blind support of the Soviet Union even after its invasion of Hungary in 1954. Referring now to the letter, he charged the signers "are now making common cause with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, JD Vance, and the rest of the MAGA crowd. Which Ukrainians do these ‘progressives’ want abandoned to mass murder and rape, in their attempt to prop up a flailing Russia?"

Thus in one statement accusing them both of lining up with the worst of the GOPpers and of being on Russia's side in the war - siding with enemies both domestic and foreign.

But there is another point, which is that part of the reason for the "firestorm" is not what was said but who said it, that at least part of the response was the desire of the party hierarchy to smack down party progressives, who have gradually been gaining in influence.

The letter noted that Blahden himself has echoed some of what it said, having repeatedly expressed that only negotiations can ultimately end the conflict, that nuclear war is more imminent now than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, and that he's worried about the fact that Putin "doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.”

What's more, on October 15, Saint Barack said during an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America,” that he is concerned about the fact that, quoting, "lines of communication between the White House and the Kremlin are probably as weak as they have been in a very long time. Even in some of the lowest points of the Cold War, there was still a sense of the ability to pick up a phone and work through diplomatic channels to send clear signals."

And precisely because Putin has so centralized decision-making, quoting again, "us finding ways in which some of that communication can be reestablished would be important."

Which is hardly different from what the letter said, just without the reference to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, just under a week earlier, retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during an appearance on the ABC show “This Week” that the possibility that Russia might use battlefield nuclear weapons "speaks to the need to ... do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing," adding that it’s up to Secretary of State Blinken and other diplomats “to figure out a way to get both Zelenskyy and Putin to the table.”

Which in some ways goes beyond what the letter said.

Even former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who was one of Obama’s key advisers and a staunch supporter of Ukraine, said he agreed with the idea of making the effort, doubting only it would get very far.

None of those statements - from Biden, from Obama, from Mullen, from McFaul, produced anything like the reaction seen here, in fact hardly any reaction at all beyond some tut-tutting that Biden may have overstated the probability of Putin actually going nuclear.

But no matter. It was members of the CPC that said it and they needed to be smacked down. So effective was that smackdown, so complete the capitulation, that not only was the letter withdrawn, the announcement of the withdrawal included the statement "Every war ends with diplomacy, and this one will too after Ukrainian victory." (That is, of course, my emphasis because it definitely needed to be emphasized.)

And the hierarchy smiles and the hack sycophants go back to scanning for hints of dissent.

Finally something not directly related to the letter and the reaction but something related to Ukraine and something you should be aware of.

Note that Biden said he's worried that Putin "doesn't have a way out." Well, a legitimate question is, once Ukraine didn't collapse immediately upon the invasion, did they ever want him to have one.

First, never forget that the US alone has to date given Ukraine $17.5 billion in direct military aid since the invasion. You can argue that every penny of that was fully justified, but point here is that you can't say we are passive observers of events or merely moral backers of Ukraine. The US and rest of NATO are directly involved. This is not a war of Russia versus Ukraine, it is a proxy war between Russia and NATO, with Ukraine the battlefield on which it is being fought.

With that in mind, recall that back in mid-March, as I noted at the time, there were some negotiations going on between Ukranian and Russian officials with some expressions of optimism coming from both sides. Not that a settlement was imminent but the progress toward one was being made.

Then on April 9, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Kyiv, where, according to the Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda ("Ukranian Truth"), he brought two simple messages to the capitol:

One: Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with.
Two: Even if  Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements with Putin, NATO is not.

Three days later, Putin said negotiations were at a dead end.

Maybe the timing was coincidental, but the fact that Zelenskyy also lost all interest in negotiations right around the same time, a time, remember, well before Ukraine's recent battleground successes, gives a rather obvious interpretation at least some weight, further bolstered by the fact that at the same time - the first week of April - the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft was reporting that

there are several lines of evidence that suggest that the U.S. is inhibiting a diplomatic solution in Ukraine,

including, significantly, it's total absence from those very March negotiations, lending no assistance, offering no support.

Now, it's not certain the conclusion this points to is true but there is reasonable cause to believe it, a conclusion that creates the image not of the US and NATO causing the war, one of the US inviting or perhaps more accurately baiting Putin to attack - although that would not be unprecedented in US foreign policy - but one of the US and NATO allowing it to continue to take advantage of an opportunity to "pressure" Putin.

But "cause" versus "allow to continue" is somthing I would call a distinction without a difference. It surely makes difference to the homeless and the refugees; it even more surely makes no damn difference at all to the dead.

So we don't know if this idea is true, and in fact you have to hope it's not true because it would be quite heinous if it is.

Then again, war usually is.

 

064 The Erickson Report for October 27 to November 10

064 The Erickson Report for October 27 to November 10

This episode of The Erickson Report looks at what and who is behind the attacks on transgender youth before discussing the reaction to the letter from the Congressional Progressive Caucus about trying to talk to Russia about Ukraine.

Sources:

- transgender youth
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/doctors-agree-gender-affirming-care-is-life-saving-care
https://transhealthproject.org/resources/medical-organization-statements/
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
https://theintercept.com/2021/04/01/trans-kids-rights-arkansas-gop/
https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1558596561461968900
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/3607955-marjorie-taylor-greene-introduces-bill-to-make-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-youth-a-felony/
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/13/anti-trans-bill-michigan/
https://michiganadvance.com/2022/10/13/parents-providing-gender-affirming-care-for-their-kids-could-get-life-in-prison-under-gop-bill/
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2022/
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2022/assets/static/trevor01_2022survey_final.pdf
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/11/2115986/--Groomer-rhetoric-s-toxic-spread-on-social-media-revolves-around-10-key-far-right-influencers
https://hrc-prod-requests.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/CCDH-HRC-Digital-Hate-Report-2022-single-pages.pdf
https://twitter.com/anthonyLfisher/status/1539335893189804034
https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/2022-08/Report%20To%20The%20Nation8-4-22.pdf

- footnote
https://www.prri.org/research/americas-growing-support-for-transgender-rights/

- the CPC letter
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/25/house-progressives-letter-russia-ukraine-diplomacy/
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/26/obama-ukraine-congress-progressive-caucus/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/10/26/23423574/congressional-progressive-caucus-ukraine-russia-letter-diplomacy
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1584921101020209152?s=20&t=nkp2E8WfEDpUTxTvcuHLEA
https://www.state.gov/625-million-in-additional-u-s-military-assistance-for-ukraine/
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/03/050-erickson-report-for-march-17-to-30_69.html
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/06/boris-johnson-pressured-zelenskyy-ditch-peace-talks-russia-ukrainian-paper
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/04/09/is-the-us-hindering-much-needed-diplomatic-efforts/

The Erickson Report is informed news and commentary from the radical nonviolent American left. Comments and questions are welcome. Please observe rules of courtesy.

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19, Page 3: False claims about the future of Social Security

Oh, guess what! It's "Social Security is going bankrupt!" Season again!

At least every couple of years we experience a spate of articles on how Social Security is on the verge of some sort of catastrophe. It's running out of money! Or it will in a few years! It's unsustainable! Huge benefit cuts are just around the corner! We have to DO SOMETHING! OMG OMG OMG!

And it's always the same old, same old: the same old arguments and the same old predictions and the same old false comparisons. Several years ago someone said debating some climate change deniers was like debating a well-trained parrot that had learned about a dozen phrases it would spew out at random. It really is much the same here except there is even less variety in the arguments.

Our latest example comes from one John Csiszar, a financial planner writing on the "10 biggest problems facing Social Security."

Several of the problems are, frankly, temporary and based on conditions of the moment - for example, low interest rates. Those that aren't, are those same old, same old things that sound drastic but really mean little or nothing. But it's worth going through them so you can arm yourself against them when they come up, which they will because they always do.

One is that "life expectancy is rising" - actually, it hasn't these part few years, but let that pass as another hopefully temporary phenomenon - which makes for longer retirements and a bigger drain on the system. Except that greater life expectancy has also lead to people working longer and even putting off retirement voluntarily, not due to economic need. And many retirees work part time - I do - and so continue to contribute something to the system even during retirement and may even, if they earn more than a certain amount, see some of their benefits taxed back, as some of mine are.

A really deceptive argument is the one that goes "too many beneficiaries" due to the baby boomers. But the demographic bulge represented by that group was seen coming and in 1983 the tax rate for social security was raised specifically to create a surplus to deal with that coming bulge. Baby boomers were in effect pre-financing their own Social Security benefits.

So when you hear about the SS account "going to zero" around 2034, it's that surplus that will have been spent, returning SS to the pay-as-you-go status it has been on for most of its existence, which now extends back over 80 years.

And let me here address something subtle: The talk about looming "massive benefit cuts" that are always part of these discussions. Your social security benefits are calculated on a number of your highest-earning years, which for most people are ones nearing retirement, simply assuming they have been getting raises during their working years. When you hear about the benefit cuts, they are cuts from projected benefits. But over time, wages tend to rise a little faster than inflation, which in turn means that over time, the initial benefits for new retirees, measured in real terms, that is after accounting for inflation and so a measure of how much stuff you can actually buy, those initial benefits gradually provide a somewhat higher standard of living that the initial benefits for previous retirees.

Which means that by the time these benefit cuts come, the result could easily mean that new retirees have the same standard of living - can buy as much stuff - as people retiring now can. That's not something to be welcomed, certainly, but it is even further from the disaster it's intended to sound like by making you think they are cuts from the current level of benefits, not from the higher projected ones.

Getting back to the arguments in this article, another deceptive one is the "not enough workers" claim. This is that the worker-to-retiree ratio is shrinking. Sixty years ago there were five workers for every person receiving SS.  More recently it had been down to 2.8 workers per beneficiary and now, according to Csisza, it's down to - gasp! - just 2.1.

Sounds dreadful - except that the figure itself is useless. Workers don't just support retired people, they support all non-workers, including their children and their spouse or partner if they don't work and in some cases others. Even as the number of retirees is growing, family size is shrinking. So over these decades, even as the ratio of workers to retirees is expected to go down, the ratio of workers to non-workers is expected to go up: more workers per non-worker.

Sixty years ago, there were 1.05 workers per non-worker; by 2030, demographic trends say there will be 1.27. So by the logic of the argument, we will be better able to support Social Security in the future than we are now!

The burden on workers will be much that same, it's just that in effect, some portion of that burden will have shifted from supporting their children to supporting their parents.

But then of course, the real issue is Congressional stalemate, the refusal of politicians to do what's needed to fix this!

It is true that there hasn't been significant Social Security legislation since the 1980s, but a good part of the reason for that is that the only solutions usually offered - and the only ones offered here - are ones that just dump the burden on workers: Raise the retirement age (which in fact has already been done)! Cut benefits! Raise the payroll tax!

Want to know how to protect SS for the next 75 years, which is as far out into the future the trust fund managers' projections go? And do it without harming the interests of workers? First, remove the cap on the SS wage base. Right now, any earned income you make over $142,800 a year is not subject to SS payroll taxes. So someone making, say, 1.4M a year pays the same SS tax as someone earning one-tenth as much. Such a move would only affect the richest 8% of Americans. Which is why, of course, it hasn't been done.

But I'd go even beyond that. Remember, that tax applies to earned income. Income from passive sources, such as dividends, interest, pensions, or income from a business in which you don't have an active role, are not subject to payroll taxes. Frankly as far as I'm concerned, if you can spend it the same, it can be taxable the same. Which again would primarily affect the richest among us - which is why it isn't even on the table.

Bottom line - an appropriate expression here - SS may need some tweaks and fiddles - and it has been tweaked and fiddled with a number of times over its history - but it is not going bankrupt, not about to collapse, not in need of major surgery, and for young folks, yes it will be there for you when the time comes so long as we don't let the economic elites screw you over.

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19, Page 2: Follow Up on the shooting of Shireen Abu Akleh

Back in May, I addressed the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, shot while she was covering an operation by the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, near the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

Now, a new report, the result of a collaboration between the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and a UK-based research agency called Forensic Architecture, has concluded that Abu Akleh was deliberately and repeatedly targeted by Israeli snipers who shot her down despite her being clearly identified as a member of the press.

The new report confirms the findings of half a dozen earlier independent reviews of the incident, which have found that Israeli forces were responsible for Abu Akleh’s killing, including one from the United Nations that described the killing shot as “well aimed.”

But the new report goes beyond those earlier by having produced a detailed digital reconstruction of the shooting based on previously unseen footage recorded by Al Jazeera staff at the scene, open-source video, eyewitness accounts, and a drone survey of the area, and so offers the most conclusive account yet of what happened.

The Israeli response to this issue has been from the beginning both despicable and typical. The first, immediate response, including from then Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, was to say it had to be Palestinian militants. I mean, it just stood to reason. The IDF Chief of Staff, Major General Aviv Kochavi, said it surely was Palestinians because Palestinians shoot "wildly and indiscriminately in every direction" while IDF soldiers "carry out professional and selective firing."

The Israeli Ministry of Defense then produced a video it claimed depicted what it called "Palestinian terrorists" who "likely" killed Abu Akleh - only to have it turn out that the video was shot several hundred yards away in the wrong direction and there was neither any shooting nor any militants around where she was.

Right around that same time, the military declared "there was no need to open a military police investigation" because, they said in effect, there was a lot of shooting and stuff going on and so who knows what really happened.

Oh, but Israel did promise a full investigation, and on September 5 its official review was issued. It actually admitted that Abu Akleh was probably killed by IDF forces, but hey, it was "accidental," so, y'know, hey, they things happen. Get over it.

And so much for Major General Kochavi's "professional and selective firing," as by the official account either that statement is a lie or what happened was a deliberate murder.

The reconstruction in the new report gives every reason to think it was the latter.

It clearly shows that, again, there were neither armed gunners nearby nor were there shots fired in the minutes leading up to Abu Akleh’s killing and during the actual incident the only shots fired came from an IDF position. Moreover, the reconstruction shows that Abu Akleh’s and her colleagues’ “PRESS” insignias were clearly visible from the position of the IDF shooter; that the shooter had a “clear line of fire,” that the pattern of shots indicated “precise aim,” and that the firing continued as the journalists sought shelter. After Abu Akleh was hit, a civilian attempting to provide aid to her was fired upon each time he tried to approach her: When he hid behind a wall, no shots were fired; when he emerged to try to reach Abu Akleh, he was shot at.

So multiple reports had already come to the conclusion that Shireen Abu Akleh - and in case you didn't catch it, she was Palestinian-American; she was an American citizen - Shireen Abu Akleh was deliberately targeted by the Israeli military. And this new report, with the strongest proof yet, renders the same judgment as the rest.

Sadly, also like the rest, I expect it won't make a damn bit of difference.

There have been calls both in and out of Congress for the US to make its own investigation of what is at the least the extrajudicial killing of one of its citizens, all to no effect. US officials claim to have reviewed the findings of Israeli and Palestinian investigators but failed to reach a “definitive conclusion” as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken wistfully says he wishes someone could do an independent investigation - deliberately ignoring the string of such investigations by human rights organizations that have indeed reached a conclusion along with the fact that the US could do its own such independent investigation, but is deterred by the fearful knowledge of what it would be forced to conclude if it did so.

And so it goes on, without consequences, as the US continues to finance Israel's military to the tune of $3.8 billion every year and our policy wobbles between evading responsibility and making excuses for the crimes against human rights that aid helps to enable, also thereby helping to perpetuate a political atmosphere that holds Israel, whatever its policies, whatever its behavior, whatever its crimes, essentially exempt from criticism and speaking the most literal and simple truth, even if carefully expressed, can and if your voice is loud enough to be heard likely will generate charges of antisemitism.

Consider that there is a movement known as BDS. It stands for boycott, divest, and sanction; it's aim is to bring economic and cultural pressure on Israel to change policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories but also Palestinian citizens of Israel.

And the very fact that it calls for such actions, the very fact that it is aimed at Israel, has resulted in it's being labeled antisemitic. Indeed, there are so-called "anti-BDS laws" on the books in 35 states that in some way seek to constrict speech by economically penalizing, through loss of government investment or contracts, any company that might consider joining the boycott.

Shireen Abu Akleh

Consider, too, the recent example of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who, speaking at a Palestine Advocacy Day event on Sept 20, said (and this is an exact quote) “I want you all to know that among progressives, it becomes clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel's apartheid government.”

It took precisely one day for Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, to twist Tlaib's words into her having made a declaration that progressive "American Jews need to pass an anti-Zionist litmus test" and "doubled down on her antisemitism," that antisemitism consisting of "slandering Israel as an apartheid state.”

The same day, Rep. Jerry Nadler said “I fundamentally reject the notion that one cannot support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and be a progressive,” a statement even further removed from what Tlaib said than Greenblatt's.

Other members of Congress, including Reps. Ted Deutch, Haley Stevens, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Juan Vargas, and others, made similar public comments, conflating opposing, quote, "Israel's apartheid government" with rejecting Israel's right to exist altogether and declaring that calling Israel an apartheid state is by definition both slander and antisemitic.

Major media outlets, including CNN, picked up and amplified the message: criticize Israel and you will be labeled an antisemite.

Now beyond the fact that Tlaib said nothing referring to Israel's right to exist, only to it's governing policies, the brutal truth is that Israel is an apartheid state. It has found to be one by Human Rights Watch, by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, by Amnesty International, and by United Nations human rights experts.

For clarity, Amnesty International says, quoting,

The crime against humanity of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statute and customary international law is committed when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.

Apartheid can best be understood as a system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.

That is apartheid. And that is what leading human rights groups have found Israel is guilty of.

And it won't change, not until there are consequences. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will continue to see discrimination, continue to see their homes demolished, their lands seized, their human rights denied, until there are consequences. And they will continue to be killed without recourse and that also applies to journalists, bringing us back full circle to where we started, as Abu Akleh was not the first: There have been at least 45 journalists killed by the "professional and selective[ly] firing" IDF since 2000.

Under US policy, those consequences should include a declaration the US that it will no longer use its veto in the Security Council or its influence in the General Assembly to defend or protect Israel from any UN sanctions, that the DOJ takes the position, which it will pursue in court, that all anti-BDS laws are unconstitutional violations of the rights to free speech and free association, and most importantly, there will be no more military aid to or military cooperation with, and no more security guarantees to, Israel until there is a final and just settlement to guarantee Palestinian rights, including the right to statehood.

Those are the consequences that we, that the US, should impose to end the injustice, end the occupation, end the apartheid. But I confess I have no faith that it will happen, at least until the current generations - including my own - die off.

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19

 

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19

Sources:

Correction regarding school book bans
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/09/062-erickson-report-for-september-22-to.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-bans-opinion-poll-2022-02-22/
https://hartmannreport.com/p/americans-used-to-understand-public
https://www.floridapolicy.org/posts/floridas-hidden-voucher-expansion-over-1-billion-from-public-schools-to-fund-private-education

Follow Up on the shooting of Shireen Abu Akleh
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/05/054-erickson-report-for-may-19-to-june-1.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/06/055-erickson-report-for-june-2-to-15.html
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/20/shireen-abu-akleh-killing-israel/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjVDKILC3s
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1121252
https://theintercept.com/2021/11/29/boycott-film-bds-israel-palestine/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/22/rashida-tlaib-israel-adl/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmZ0ZFgYWf8
https://bit.ly/3xMztNc
https://bit.ly/3dxZyJn
https://bit.ly/3r0OXcG
https://bit.ly/3C3Zlqr

False claims about the future of Social Security
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/search/label/Social%20Security
https://www.gobankingrates.com/retirement/social-security/debt-free-future-biggest-problems-facing-social-security/

Brief comments on Iran and Ukraine
https://www.reuters.com/site-search/?query=iran&date=past_month&offset=0
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/analysis-braced-to-crush-unrest-irans-rulers-heed-lessons-of-shahs-fall-analysts/ar-AA12FAAb
https://ajmuste.org/aj_mustes-life-of-activism

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30, Page Five: A Longer Look: Julian Assange Closer to Being Extradited

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30, Page Five: A Longer Look: Julian Assange Closer to Being Extradited

Okay, this is something I keep meaning to talk about, keep thinking to include but for one reason or another keep not doing. This time I'm doing it. It's time for A Longer Look.

On March 14, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom rejected the request by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to appeal an earlier decision permitting his extradition to the United States, where he faces espionage charges and up to 175 years in prison for publishing classified documents that exposed war crimes.

There is one more option, which is the hope that UK Home Secretary Priti Patel will decline to authorize the extradition. The hope is probably a vain one since three years ago, the then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid was the one who greenlighted the extradition in the first place.

This business actually dates back to Bush administration, through Obama and Tweetie-pie up to today. For well over a decade the US government has been out to destroy Julian Assange and through that to destroy WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing what governments across the world don't want their citizens to know.

The reason for this long campaign is because WikiLeaks dared to release hidden information that was embarrassing to US foreign and military policy, most particularly release in 2010 of what was called the Iraq War Logs, which documented numerous US war crimes including killing of unarmed civilians and torture of Iraqi prisoners. Something that drew particular attention was a video taken from a US helicopter gunship showing its crew shooting down a group of civilians including two journalists, a video that became known by the title "Collateral Murder." Look it up; you can still find it on YouTube.

The problem, of course, was that by prosecuting Assange or WiiLeaks for release of classified information the government risked involving outfits like the Washington "Post" and New York "Times," which published stories based on those documents - in some cases in consultation with WikiLeaks. That, the government was not prepared to do.

That doesn't mean they wouldn't try to find a way around it. I still recall Eric Holder, The Amazing Mr. O's Attorney General, stating that the DOJ would find something with which to charge Assange even if they had to change the laws in order to do it. (And so much for the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws.)

During the Obama administration (Remember how they came into office pledging a new birth of transparency only to imprison more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined?) the idea was floated to relabel WikiLeaks as an “information broker,” something to be declared as entirely separate from journalism and publishing and therefore not deserving of any special First Amendment protection available to the news media. That didn't fly because how then do you separate WikiLeaks from any news aggregator such as, for example, Google News or Yahoo! News.

The Tweetie-pie gang was a little more creative. They got a provision inserted into the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2018 which called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service," a term invented for the occasion by Mike Pompeo, Tweetie-pie's CIA director and Secretary of State and a label subsequently used in proposals from the CIA and the Orange Wig Stand himself to kidnap or kill Assange, then taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Julian Assange

This, by the way, is why Chelsea Manning for several months was held in solitary confinement - torture under international law - by the US military and denied treatment and care for her gender dysphoria: It was an attempt to emotionally or psychologically break her so she would testify against Assange in a charge of conspiracy to release classified documents.

You see, the issue of freedom of the press still hung over the case, but conspiracy - nicknamed "the prosecutor's darling" - was a way around that. But to make it work, they needed Manning's testimony. Because if she initiated contact with WikiLeaks by providing the documents, the government has no case. But if she'd testify that he actually talked her talked her into giving up the information, then two people were involved and ta-da! it's a conspiracy.

That this was the intent became even clearer when not long after her court-martial sentence of 35 years in prison was commuted after seven years - still more time in prison than any other whistleblower in US history - she was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about her dealings with Assange. She spent two months in prison for contempt of court for refusing - and immediately upon her release she was called before another grand jury on the same thing. She again refused and was imprisoned, this time for 10 months plus accumulating $256,000 in fines.

Chelsea Manning

But while it appears the government has given up on trying to break Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is for the moment still free, the government has been able to pretty much cripple WikiLeaks' ability to act. That can be seen from its website by the drying up of new releases since around 2017, with only one release in over two years, that one about two right-wing hate groups in Spain.

This case has sparked on-going concern from press freedom and human rights groups around the world who warn that prosecution of Assange would have far-reaching impacts on journalists and publishers who dare to challenge powerful governments by exposing their secrets.

For example, in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists stated that the US's prosecution of Assange would set "a deeply harmful legal precedent that would allow the prosecution of reporters for news gathering activities" and called on the DOJ drop both the extradition request and charges against Assange.

Meanwhile, Julia Hall, Amnesty International's deputy research director for Europe called the UK Supreme Court ruling "a blow to justice" and said "the US should immediately drop the charges against Julian Assange."

She noted the lower court ruling the UK Supreme Court overturned had recognized that extradition could present a threat to Assange's life or mental health, a risk the Supreme Court airily dismissed based on breezy US assurances that "don't worry, he'll be fine", which Hall dismissed as "empty promises." Considering the US's record of CIA black sites, Gitmo, along with the conditions to be found in almost any US prison, not to mention the treatment inflicted on Chelsea Manning in pursuit of this case and that the US government has a been pursuing Assange for a dozen years across three presidents, the description "empty promises" is extremely hard to deny.

Reporters Without Borders said it was "deeply disappointed" by the court decision and called on the Home Office to refuse extradition and release Assange without further delay.

So why have you heard so little about this? Why has this case not been bigger news? Well, for one reason, major media outlets are convinced that whatever is done to Assange and WikiLeaks will be carefully defined in such a way that it won't affect powerful interests like them. Put more bluntly, they figure they're safe so they don't care what happens to him. "He was useful when he was around, but if he's not, well, so it goes." It's the "He's not really a journalist, so the idea of a free press doesn't apply to him" dodge.

Which is actually quite astonishing, because a key part of what Assange is accused of amounts to working with Manning to conceal her identity, that is, remain anonymous to avoid being caught and prosecuted. But if that is criminal, those outlets are equally at risk. Consider the screen shot from a page of the New York "Times" website: nyt.com/tips. It openly invites people to send tips and information to the "Times" and goes on to discuss ways for the tipster to remain anonymous, including SecureDrop, a system set up by the "Times" for just that purpose.

Screenshot of nyt.com/tips

Which really means that the major media's essential ignoring of this case is based less on "He's not really a journalist" and more on "We're too powerful, they don't dare come after us."

Which may be true of the publishers but not of their reporters, without which the publishers can't get the scoops that bring in the eyes and ears of the public: After the government lost the famous Pentagon Papers case against the NY "Times," the government tried to go after reporter Neil Sheehan on exactly the same charge Assange now faces, using exactly the same "It's a conspiracy!" argument, but failed to get an indictment.

Okay, even leaving all that "can't touch this" corporate attitude aside, you'd think the progressive left would keep pushing it - or even the libertarian right, usually on the correct side when it comes to things like press freedom. Well, some on the left did try - heck I've at least mentioned the case more than 20 times over the years - but the major voices of what passes for the left in the US these days, the faux-progressives, those whose progressive and radical proposals expand and contract with the ideas prominent in current intra-Democratic Party debates, have fallen largely silent. And frankly, we can even pinpoint when that happened. And why.

When Wikileaks released documents embarrassing to the Bush administration, when it released footage useful in opposing the Iraq War, Wikileaks was the hero.

But as soon as Wikileaks first released documents embarrassing to Barack Obama's administration, those faux-progressives started to attack it and stood by silently as the Amazing Mr. O tried to bankrupt WikiLeaks by blocking its access to donations and desperately searched for a way to imprison Assange.

The final break came when WikiLeaks invoked the unforgivable curse in 2016 by releasing emails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, emails showing that during the primaries, her campaign and the DNC had colluded to the detriment of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Well, that was it, criticize the Democratic presidential nominee, and Assange and Wikileaks instantly became part of some anti-American cabal.

Indeed, on one of the and possibly the biggest of the faux-progressive sites, DailyKos, Assange became routinely described by the homophobic term "Putin's butt-boy" with the frequent addendum that he always has been about, that WikiLeaks has always been about, pushing pro-Russian, anti-American propaganda, probably under the direction of the Kremlin.

The fact that this also amounted to an admission that they had been useful idiots during the time they had celebrated WikiLeaks was, naturally, passed over without comment.

This case is something that I have let slide too long and which too much of the supposedly progressive left have simply ignored or even dismissed. That silence can't be allowed to continue. The case against Julian Assange presents a genuine threat to journalism as a principle. This silence must stop. The case should be dropped. Julian Assange should be freed.

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30

 

050 The Erickson Report for March 17 to 30

Good News: Relief for the USPS
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/08/usps-senate-biden/

Ukraine: "The War Drags On"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeH5rVUgios
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/10/2085119/-Ukraine-update-A-war-on-the-concept-of-civilization-itself
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22967674/russia-ukraine-no-fly-zone-limited-nuclear-war
https://twitter.com/MMazarr/status/1501688603042361346
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/03/no-fly-zone-test/363099/
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-europe-congress-058c8b72b81044f861b30b7ceb500a15
https://www.politico.eu/article/zelenskyy-peace-talks-russia-realistic-accept-compromise-nato/

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages
Clowns:
    DC "truckers convoy"
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/11/2085314/-D-C-freedom-truckers-threaten-to-abuse-911-system-if-Washingtonians-don-t-stop-flipping-them-off
    US Senate
    https://www.aol.com/news/u-senate-approves-bill-daylight-184244252-204613821.html

Outrage:
    Illegitimate "state secrets privilege" used to conceal torture and spying
    https://freedom.press/news/supreme-court-entrenches-state-secrets-privilege-dealing-a-blow-to-accountability/
    https://www.aclu.org/other/background-state-secrets-privilege
    http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/04/must-read.html

Julian Assange closer to being extradited
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/14/uk-top-court-rejects-assanges-request-appeal-extradition-decision
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/06/13/worlds-most-powerful-imprison-julian-assange-his-virtues-not-his-vices
https://rsf.org/en/news/uk-home-secretary-gives-green-light-extradite-julian-assange-us
https://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/06/wikileaks.investigation/index.html
https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2010/12/once-more-into-breach.html
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/assange-kidnapping-wikileaks-cia-senate/
https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london-shoot-out-inside-the-ci-as-secret-war-plans-against-wiki-leaks-090057786.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2010/12/once-more-into-leak.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2017/06/245-news-on-chelsea-manning-and-julian.html
https://rsf.org/en/news/uk-rsf-calls-home-office-block-assange-extradition-following-supreme-court-refusal-consider-appeal
https://freedom.press/news/appeals-court-says-that-nixons-attempt-to-prosecute-pentagon-papers-reporter-must-stay-secret-50-years-later/

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

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 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.

039 The Erickson Report, June 17

 

The Erickson Report, June 17

Good News
   - SCOTUS dismisses Obamacare suit
   - Title IX applies to LGBTQ youth
   - Reality Winner moved to halfway house
Update on Israel-Palestine
Afghanistan becoming new drone war
Biden pushes federal death sentence
Mass news media misinforms
Clown Award: Rep. Louis Gohmert
Goodbye for now

030 The Erickson Report for January 21 to February 3, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid, Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

030 The Erickson Report for January 21 to February 3, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid, Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

That last item tees up the first of our Outrages, whith is yet another example of how we are uninformed, malinformed, and misinformed by our majpr news media.

In reporting on the deal and a plan to open a US consulate in Western Sahara, Reuters, ABC News, AP, and Politico all used some variation of the term "territorial dispute" to describe what's been happening there. Reuters and AP also described the Polisario Front as, respectively, "a breakaway movement" and "an organization pressing for the territory's independence," as if Western Sahara had always been part of Morocco and they want to secede.

Get it straight, people: This is not a "territorial dispute." This is not a secessionist movement. This is people denied their right to self-determination, first by the Spanish and then by the Moroccans with the help of the US and the passivity of the UN, an oppressed people who are resisting an invasion and foreign occupation.

You may think they are foolish, you may think it's pointless to continue and they should give up and just accept whatever deal Morocco offers them, just as some think about the Palestinians and Israel, you may think that, but at least do not buy the bull in the major media.

Because it's an outrage.

=

Okay. This past week saw the annual federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

And there is one thing about it that infuriates me every year. Every year, without fail, every year, regular as clockwork, every year we are treated to the spectacle of rightwingers, reactionaries, and the rest of the bozos and bigots declaring how omigosh wasn't he so amazing and oh, yes, we believe in, we share, his dream and oh my yes, we do, we really really do, honor his memory.

And I am freaking sick to death of it. Sick to death of the transparent, grinning, smug hypocrisy of people who would have been among those who reviled King when he was alive, who would have applauded Bull Conner's fire hoses and dogs, who today revile, condemn, and tear gas those protesting continuing inequality and police violence and who think that smarmily quoting a line about judging people by "the content of their character" once a year covers all their sins.

The FBI - the FBI - tweeted out a picture of a monument at the reflection garden at the FBI headquarters in Virginia graced by King's words that "the time is always right to do what’s right.”

The FBI - the agency that the day after the famous "I Have a Dream" speech wanted to, quoting a memo from FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan, mark MLK as “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation,” and to “use every resource at our disposal to destroy him.”

The FBI - the agency that harassed him, spied on him, wiretapped him, the agency that, having obtained proof of his having affairs, anonymously sent him an audio tape with a letter calling him a "filthy, abnormal animal" and trying to blackmail him into committing suicideThe FBI - the agency whose director J. Edgar Hoover feared the rise of what he called a "Black Messiah" and for years strove to undermine and discredit black activists of all types, that FBI - now has the gall to claim to be inspired by King's words.

And they are hardly alone.

This year we got among others, Kayleigh McEnany, RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, Melania Trump, former Vice President Mike NotWorthAFarthing, former Senate Majority Leader Fishface McConnell, Lindsey Grahamcracker, and Ted Ooze all proclaiming what an inspiration King is to them.

More than that, there is and has been for at least 10 years a damn industry among the right to twist the words and message of Martin Luther King into the service of racism, classism, and elitism, rightwingers cherry-picking his words and deleting their context to claim King was actually one of them.

The very sort of people who would have been relieved by if not outright applauding his murder are now trading on his legacy for their own selfish interests, trying, as a columnist at the Michigan Advance wrote, to make him not only colorblind but raceless, sent not to challenge whites but to forgive them, join hands, and sing.

They ignore the true radicalism of his message, not just the radicalism of active nonviolence, the power found in stubbornly demanding what is right, the power found in simply stubbornly refusing to back down, the embracing of, as King put it, "peace is not the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice," not just that.

But the radicalism of the program, of the commitments, of the ideas he proposed, of the vision he advanced. A vision not only of racial justice but of economic justice, such that he once said that "if we are to achieve a real equality, the US will have to adopt a modified form of socialism," that is, a democratic socialism.

We forget that the last major campaign of his life was the Poor Peoples March, the reason he was in Memphis was to support a sanitation workers strike, and in the speech he gave the night before his murder he urged his Black audience to take their money out of white banks and put it in Black banks.

So I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear a single damn rightwinger saying "let freedom ring" or anything at all about a "dream," claiming to honor the - the term is particularly apt here - whitewashed version of Martin Luther King while by their actions they spit on the real man and his legacy every other day of the year. They do not have the moral standing to invoke his name or anything else about him.

And it is a profound outrage when they do.

030 The Erickson Report for January 21 to February 3

 030 The Erickson Report for January 21 to February 3

This episode: 
- The best thing that happened at the Inauguration is that nothing happened 

- Good News
https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania-supreme-court-police-warrantless-vehicle-searches-commonwealth-alexander-gary-odor-marijuana-20201222.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/falsely-claiming-someone-gay-no-longer-defamation-se-n-y-n1254175
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/
https://www.aol.com/news/trump-appointees-pressure-census-report-144949540-022320987.html
https://www.aol.com/nra-seeks-bankruptcy-protection-plans-222201836.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/betty-white-99th-birthday_n_60037324c5b697df1a06250c
https://www.aol.com/news/u-court-deals-final-blow-161627823-164453168.html

- Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages
https://digg.com/2021/one-main-character-sarah-huckabee-sanders
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/pastor-robert-henderson/
https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/19-24.htm
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-insurrection-2649882126/
https://www.rawstory.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-2649963543/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/534178-marjorie-taylor-greene-says-she-will-introduce-impeachment-articles-against
https://greene.house.gov/media/in-the-news/congresswoman-marjorie-greene-makes-statement-masks-house
https://www.inforum.com/news/government-and-politics/6840725-North-Dakota-rep-wants-American-as-race-option-on-forms-says-Black-Americans-glad-their-ancestors-were-brought-here
https://www.aol.com/trump-receives-moroccos-highest-award-190526011-021545219.html
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/24/western_sahara_a_rare_look_inside
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2021
https://freedomhouse.org/country/western-sahara/freedom-world/2020
https://www.aol.com/trump-receives-moroccos-highest-award-190526011-021545219.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-consulate-turning-point-disputed-western-sahara-75160219
https://www.king5.com/article/news/nation-world/us-official-presence-in-western-sahara/507-d5a10e16-2c0f-4324-a66c-4ff38e45bd82
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/24/pompeo-us-consulate-western-sahara-450371
https://www.fastcompany.com/90594683/the-damning-mlk-fbi-doc-shows-how-poorly-martin-luther-king-jr-was-treated-in-his-time
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/7204453/martin-luther-king-fbi-letter
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/mlk-fbi-surveillance/617719/
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/01/18/ostracized-conservatives-not-allowed-to-honor-mlk-after-they-enabled-a-racist-president-1018116/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/don-lemon-attacks-republicans-quoting-mlk
https://www.michiganadvance.com/2021/01/18/column-republican-praise-of-martin-luther-king-sounds-even-more-hollow-and-hypocritical-now/
https://gsgriffin.com/2016/12/08/the-socialism-of-martin-luther-king-jr/

Read This!

Read This!

So here I was tonight watching MS-DNC with hosts going on about Tweetie-pie's latest efforts to overturn the election, this time by pressuring GOPper election officials to refuse to certify the results, thus leaving it to their legislstures to choose (of course pro-Trump) electors for the Electoral College.

The reactions varied between the shock of "He can't do that, can he?" to the shock of  "That's outrageous!" The common denominator was the shock.

Why are they shocked? Not only can this be happening, it was predicted!

The following is from The Erickson Report for September 30 to October 13:

There has been open talk within the right about two ways to simply ignore the election and literally hand the election to Tweetie-pie.

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

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

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

This wasn't my insight, it was from the work of a number of others, including two cited in the same post: investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has been on the voter suppression beat for a long time, and progressive populist Jim Hightower. The idea of one way or another blocking the certification of the election in order to install King Tweetie-pie I on the throne was no secret, it was being openly discussed - and yet our mainstream media, including that supposedly progressive part of it, remained blissfully unaware.

The inability of that mainstream media to consider the perspective or the insights of those outside their centrist bubble has left them constantly running behind, constantly taken aback by, what the reactionaries who now define the right wing are prepared to do. And I fear that they will continue to do so.

Put it this way: If (When?) push comes to shove and we need to fill the streets and the jails, do not expect them to be out there with us.

The Erickson Report for October 28 to November 10, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

The Erickson Report for October 28 to November 10, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

For our outrages, we have two this time, the first of which involves a repeat offender: our major news media.

Okay, on October 19, as USPS carrier named Crystal Nicole Myrie was charged with embezzling mail which she was supposed to deliver.

When questioned on October 16, she admitted to stealing several prepaid debit cards and using them at retail stores. She also admitted she had been stealing mail sporadically for almost two years. She was taken to her car, where investigators found several postal service satchels containing nearly 200 pieces of mail - one of which, it turned out, was a mail-in ballot.

Okay, stealing mail for two years, stealing prepaid debit cards, found with 200 pieces of mail including one mail-in ballot.

Guess which part of that was the lede?  No, don't guess, you already know.

This is how AP opened its story: "A U.S. Postal Service carrier is accused of stealing a Miami-Dade County mail-in ballot, 10 gift cards and four prepaid debit cards earlier this month, federal authorities said."

The headline was "Postal carrier accused of stealing mail-in ballot in Miami."

This is just disgraceful. At a time when the right wing is doing its damnedest to undermine mail-in voting, at a time when they invoke "fraud" like they used to invoke "Benghazi," to deliberately emphasize that one item that clearly was there by coincidence, that one item having nothing to do with any intention on Myrie's part about the election, to emphasize that one item is outright journalistic malpractice.

It is offensive. It is an Outrage.

-

The other relates to the election but in a different way. It might seem a bit esoteric but it really struck me.

Texas is one of the states that uses signature matching for ballot security. It actually uses a somewhat better method than many: Apparently there are two panels, one of local election officials and one independent one, that make the comparison and if either one of them by simple majority vote accepts the ballot, it is accepted even if the other panel disagrees.

But the system has one major flaw: Voters must be notified that their ballots were rejected within 10 days after the election is already over. Which makes it impossible for voters to have any opportunity to correct what is a technical error.

In September, US District Judge for the Western District of Texas Orlando Garcia required election officials to notify voters whose ballots were rejected due to a signature mismatch issue and if they failed to set up a system to do that, they couldn't reject any ballots based on signature mismatch.

On October 19, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling in a decision thoroughly immersed in right wing mythology about mail-in ballot fraud, going on and on about Texas "preserving the integrity of its elections" while ignoring the unknown thousands of legitimate voters disenfanchised by the state's use of an astonishingly error-prone method - remember that 97% figure - of doing so.

Okay, so why is this decision here with the Outrages rather than in my earlier voter suppression discussion?

Because a main part of the court's argument for tossing the earlier ruling is the finding that the plaintiffs in the case don’t have what's called a 14th Amendment liberty interest in the right to vote by mail. A "liberty interest" is defined as a right conferred on an individual by the Due Process clauses of the state and federal constitutions.

And they said the plaintiffs didn't have one.

In fact, the decision spent several pages upbraiding lower courts for having previously endorsed the idea that voting is protected by the Constitution’s guarantee of procedural due process.

And here is the Outrage: If this decision accurately reflects the facts, no federal court has determined that you have a right to vote. At all. Lots of decisions about regulating voting, lots of provisions in the US Constitution about how you can't be discriminated in voting if there is voting, but nothing that says that voting itself is a fundamental right. So if your state constitution does not have such a provision, you - or more correctly we as a people - have no constitutional right to vote.

That may not have a lot of practical impact, for now anyway, but I find it outrageous even if all it does is point up the fragility of our rights and freedoms and liberties and how much they are based on assumptions of things just working as they should and everyone accepting that. We are now or at least should be now, in the face of organized voting chaos and the possibility of a violent response to an election loss, recognizing that we can't take even what should be the most basic, obvious part of what is supposed to be a self-governing society for granted.

It's an Outrage.