British Labour MP Tom Watson wrote a scathing must-read essay for nsfwcorp.com on L’affaire Miranda and the news that some boneheads from Scotland Yard thought getting all heavy at The Guardian offices was, like, a good idea:

We still don’t know the full circumstances surrounding David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow airport but I think we probably know enough to conclude that: a) he is not a terrorist and b) it is not a coincidence that he is Glenn Greenwald’s partner.

I think that we can also usefully assume that the spooks did not find enough to detain David Miranda under any UK law and that Greenwald and The Guardian are not dumb enough to forget to make copies of the files that prove illegal state surveillance.

The spooks are not going to get the NSA files back; that genie is well and truly out of the bottle. So why do it? The conclusion must be, as Greenwald speculates, that we were just roughing up his boyfriend in order to psyche him out. I am no Carrie Mathieson but I think the wrong case officer is in charge of this investigation if they think this will shut Greenwald up. He thrives on this stuff. The UK intelligence services have created a global audience for the spectacle of him beating them with a big stick of indignant rebuke.

And they have horrified people across Westminster who know the “inside.” As a former defence minister I have authorised special forces to conduct hostage rescues, covert military entry to foil terrorist plots, as well as approved nuclear submarines to travel to places you do not want to know. So I think I can assess an ill-conceived plan when I see one. And this was a howler.

LOL! Real Tom Watson’s full editorial at nsfwcorp.com
 

 
Thank you Michael Backes of Los Angeles, California!

 
This is a guest editorial by Hunter Heaney, executive director of The Voice Project, a US-based NGO that has raised over $100,000 for support and safety monitoring efforts for the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot.

They were tired of their rights being stripped away. Tired of their government not representing them any more. Tired of ultra right-wing policies that seemed to be driven by oligarchs and secret concentrations of wealth divorced from the needs of everyday citizens and oppressive to those with less political power in the current plutocracy that seems and acts more and more intimidatingly, more authoritarian every day.

So they sing. In public. They raise their voices as a way to express the basic human right to be heard by those would purport to govern them. And for that they are arrested. Sounds familiar.

It’s not Pussy Riot.

It’s not Russia.

It’s America.

The Solidarity Singers and the Raging Grannies gather every weekday at the Wisconsin state house to sing. They are trying to express their feelings about Governor Scott Walker and the run amok right-wing policies their state seems to be implementing at ALEC’s behest. And the powers that be are having none of it. Not only are the singers being arrested, but so are the spectators, just for attending, just for watching, just for reporting on it. And remember this is all happening in the public space of the state capitol building, the people’s building, the people’s property.

Free speech? Free press? The right to peaceably assemble? Not so much in Russia, not so much in Wisconsin, not so much in a lot of places these days.

Welcome to the modern world, welcome to modern America. Bit by bit we’ve lost the things we held dear. We’ve slowly let the freedoms we were so proud of, that were associated with our dream of this country, be disappeared like an extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo.  No trial, no explanation, just a black bag over the head. Habeas corpus is just a thing we once had, or we thought we had. An effective free press, well, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert remind us every weeknight where that’s gone (and they help us laugh to keep us from sinking into a national depression).

We’re surveilled like something out of the pages of Orwell, propagandized like scenes from V for Vendetta with fear campaigns like The War on Terror, beaten and pepper sprayed for peaceful protests, resigned to our running jokes about how Congress seems to have now abandoned even the facade of representing the people in favor of the supranational corporations and the 1% who finance their campaigns and their lives.

And the poor, well, forget about them. At least that seems to be the hope anyway. How much have you personally heard about one in four kids in this country being on food stamps now? Pensions being stripped away from those who worked and saved for them, just like George Carlin predicted they would be? It happens now through “strategic municipal bankruptcies” and other financial and legal maneuvers. It starts with carefully planned campaigns hatched by conservative think-tanks that talk endlessly about “entitlements.” Isn’t that clever?

We are now a shadow of our former selves. The “Greatest Generation” are dying. My dad was one. There are a few left, but they must not be impressed by what they see, what we are doing with what they fought for. Some of them certainly know that in no universe of realistic thought does Scott Walker’s Wisconsin or our modern America respect the sentiments they held dear enough to defend. They’re codified in Wisconsin’s State Constitution as:

“Every person may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right, and no laws shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.”

and

“The right of the people peaceably to assemble, to consult for the common good, and to petition the government, or any department thereof, shall never be abridged.”

No wonder the dystopian-future fantasies are so popular at the box office, they must ring true, or maybe they let us think it’s not quite so bad right now in comparison. But make no mistake, we’re there, welcome to Dystopia. You’re soaking in it. Sometimes I think we’ll wake up from it all—take the red pill.  It does seem to be happening in other places around the world, like Gezi Park and the streets of São Paulo, even if the dissent suppression machines seem stronger than ever.
 

 
Here in America though, I often think we’re just like slow boiling frogs, nodding off to sleep while the heat is steadily turned up, too late realizing what happened as things fade to black. Hopeless and specious tropes about how protest songs don’t matter anymore appear to have even some musicians convinced, and seem to signal our giving up. And that’s when I give thanks for Pussy Riot, for the Solidarity Singers, for the Raging Grannies. Let the armchair quarterbacks debate their musical quality or performance characteristics or predict the demise of protest singing. While they’re at it perhaps spoken and written words, literature, ideas and the rest of the humanities should be thrown in there too.

Of course there are ideas and words and performances that matter, like “I Have a Dream” or “We Shall Overcome” or “Redemption Song” or yes, “Punk Prayer” that will speak truth to power, that will inspire, that provide aid and succor to those who will resist. The Solidarity Sing-Alongs are to me without a doubt among the most important performances taking place today. Same with the 40-second performance that landed Pussy Riot in labor camps for two years.

Content matters. Ideas matter. So Pussy Riot is my band. The Raging Grannies are my band and the Solidarity Singers, too. They’ve inspired me to write this, and I’m going to go check and see if some friends want to join me in supporting these singers and what’s going on in Wisconsin.

When members of Pussy Riot were here in New York this past spring, they stayed over and we had some long talks. “Shaiba” said, “It feels like we’re building this great mafia around the world, friends everywhere.” I hope so. I think this is the way it’s going to need to work if we’re ever going to stage a comeback here. We’re going to need to look out for each other, work with each other in the face of great concentrations of power. Some say the key will be localism, a renewed reliance on our geographically proximate communities, but I sometimes worry an overzealous application of these ideas as a solution may lead to isolationism. I believe we’ll need to help each other, even across great distances and divides.

“Helotism” is a word I learned from Pussy Riot. Worth checking out the etymology on that one. One of the many things I learned from the girls. These are the kinds of things I’m remembering today, that I’m thinking about on this anniversary. That we can learn from each other, help each other, that we can stick together, we can make songs matter and turn ideas into action, that we can inspire each other, and we can decide to lay down and take it… or not.

Hunter Heaney is executive director of The Voice Project, a US based NGO that has raised over $100,000 for support and safety monitoring efforts for the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot.
 

 

 
Back in May, a Russian newscaster, Anton Kraskovsky, was fired from his job at KontrTV for coming out on live TV, on a government-backed cable network that Mr. Kraskovsky had in fact helped to launch himself. Video of his statement “I’m gay, and I’m just the same person as you, my dear audience, as President Putin, as Prime Minister Medvedev and the deputies of our Duma,” was posted and then immediately pulled down from both YouTube and KontrTV’s website. Then later they returned, apparently, with no explanation.

Kraskovsky told CNN that he knew he would lose his job for coming out. Via The Advocate:

“Somebody should do it,” he said. “I decided it’s time to be open for me. That’s it.”

He told Snob.ru that he felt like a hypocrite after covering the so-called gay propaganda law on a show.

“The meaning of this whole story we are discussing now is that throughout my whole life, I’ve been struggling with myself,” Kraskovsky said. “And this — as you call it — coming out is just another battle with myself, with my own hypocrisy, my own lies, and my own cowardice.”

He said after making the announcement at the end of the show, Angry Guyzzz, the audience and the crew applauded. He said he then went into his dressing rom and cried for 20 minutes before being fired a few hours later.

“They immediately blocked all my corporative accounts, my email. Literally immediately, overnight,” Kraskovsky said.

“They deleted not only my face from the website, but also all of my TV shows, as if I’d never really existed. The next day I wrote to [network head Sergey] Minaev that I was totally shocked. Because it takes them half a day to put up a banner when I ask them to, and here we had such efficiency. One could say they can when they want to. Now they’ve put everything back, but you couldn’t say why, really.”

Good on Anton Kraskovsky, he’s a very brave man. You can read an in-depth interview with him, here.

Personally I’m not one to make a lot of Hitler comparisons—I’ll leave that to the Tea partiers—but if there is anyone who doesn’t think that the Russian crackdown on LGBT people has ominous parallels to Germany back in the day, you need to have your head examined.

(Surely I can’t be the only one watching this clip who wishes the CNN newscaster would just spontaneously combust, am I?)
 

 
This is just a small sampling of Good as You‘s looong compilation of sodomy-themed tweets from the deeply confused hate-mongering, Bible-thumping shithead Bryan Fischer, the hateful crazypants who hosts the talk radio program “Focal Point” on American Family Radio.
 

 
Voice of Russia radio considers Bryan Fischer to be a gay “expert” (if by “expert” they mean “closet case,” I suppose). Really, just how many supposedly straight Christian guys are as focused on other men’s cocks with the laser-like intensity that Bryan Fischer is?

Certainly Ted Haggard comes readily to mind… I cannot wait until someone figures out which Grindr profile belongs to Bryan Fischer.

In the audio clip below, listen to what happened back in May when Alan Colmes asked Fischer if he had ever experienced any gay impulses. Hilarity ensues!
 

 
Below, homosexual “expert” Fischer goes off on “sodomy marriage” on his podcast recently. You can choose virtually ANY YouTube clip of Bryan Fischer and he’s saying THE EXACT SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN. WHO besides Right Wing Watch has the patience to listen to this man? I’m guessing his daily Internet show reaches merely a few dozen people a day. How BORED WITH LIFE would you have to be to tune into this hateful monotony??? Make it stop!!!
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
One step forward, one step back… Ken Bencomo, a gay San Bernadino, CA man who teaches at an all girls Catholic high school was fired after his wedding was covered by local news. Bencomo and his husband, Christopher Persky were amongst the very first same-sex couples to get married in San Bernardino county, CA after Prop 8 was repealed and their wedding announcement and marriage were covered in local papers. An outpouring of community well-wishes came for the newlyweds, many from Mr. Bencomo’s students over the years.

Less than two weeks after their big day, Mr. Bencomo was handed his walking papers from his longtime job at St. Lucy’s Priory High School in Glendora, as reported by KCAL, Los Angeles:

School administrators declined to discuss the firing on camera. But they did issue a statement that read, in part, “We respect and protect privacy interests and, to be respectful of those involved, the school does not comment on confidential matters. St. Lucy’s wishes to reassure all in our community that upholding its mission to educate students in the tradition of the Catholic faith is of paramount importance.”

[Ken] Bencomo, 45, had been a teacher at St. Lucy’s for 17 years. He was head of the English department and he coached the dance squad. His attorney says the school knew Bencomo was gay and continued to renew his contract every year — until he got married.

Which is now legal in the state of California. So what’s THIS?

An online petition has been started by former St. Lucy’s student Brittany Littleton demanding that the school reinstate Mr. Bencomo. Over 9000 people have signed as I type this. Ken’s lawyers have said that he hasn’t decided yet what the best outcome could be from this unfortunate event. I say sue the fuckers—he’ll win—and set a legal precedent against this sort of outdated, small-minded bullshit happening again to someone else.

Via Joe.My.God
 

 

Look like anyone you know?

Data from an as-yet unpublished survey reported on by The Associated Press today predicts that four out of five U.S. adults—an astonishing 80%, so guess what, this depressing figure probably includes YOU, bucko, unless you were born rich—will face grinding unemployment, near-poverty and a reliance on welfare for at least a part of their lives. The stated reason for this widespread economic insecurity is the lack of stable, good-paying manufacturing jobs, but isn’t that just a polite way of saying “because the fucking system is rigged by the 1%”? Of course it is.

Eighty percent? EIGHTY PERCENT???

Yeah, that’s right, eighty percent. How much longer will people put up with this? All for them and none for you? The pessimistic answer would be to shrug it off and say “it’ll never happen”—I thought this myself for decades—but I’m not so sure about that anymore. With grim figures like these—and so many “have nots” standing on the same side of the gated communities—this country will surely become a tinderbox. Sooner rather than later, I’d suspect.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

For non-whites the economic insecurity figure rises to an an even more astonishing 90%!

And right at the time when the GOP wants to gut welfare, Social Security and stop the implementation of the Affordable Care Act cruelly denying healthcare coverage to all those poorz who thought they finally were gonna get some. Nice timing Republicans, you must really like the thought of your heads being hoist on pointy sticks by pitchfork wielding mobs. You’d have to think that even a rah-rah red state Fox News viewer might finally wake up to the abject stupidity of voting for a Republican who wants to gut social programs, when they are OVERWHELMINGLY STATISTICALLY LIKELY to amongst the legions of the shit-out-of-luck themselves—HELLO NORTH CAROLINA—but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that.

By 2030, it’ll be even worse: Based on current trends of widening income inequality, in a blink of an eye, historically speaking, 85% of EVERY working-age adults in the U.S. will experience economic insecurity. What’s wrong with a system like this BESIDES EVERY DAMNED THING?

Do they OWE US a living? Of course they fucking do!

Think about it, under such circumstances, obviously being in the top 20% would be the way to swing, but even so, would you WANT to live in that sort of Mad Max scarcity society? How walled off would the wealthy have to be in a world like that to feel truly safe? Their children would have to have armed guards at all times!

What was it again, that Senator Huey Long said in his famous “Every Man a King” speech? Oh yeah:

How many of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights of the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and it said, further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.”

Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?

Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children’s children could ever dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal of “That we hold that all men are created equal.”

Now was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?

Of course Huey Long was assassinated for saying things like this in the 1930s, but things are different these days.

This simply can’t hold. It’s not going to. It can’t.

Hey Mr. Tea party man, try telling someone who is 26, owes over $100,000 in student loans and who works slinging coffee because no law firms are hiring that cutting taxes for the rich and abolishing the minimum wage is going to create jobs. Try telling them that the way things worked in the 20th century are the way things are always going to be and that “the system”—this system that is keeping them from realizing their full potential as human beings—should be preserved and that the same solutions that (supposedly) worked back in the Ronnie Raygun era are exactly what the doctor ordered. If they’re even remotely aware of the world around them, they will laugh right in your fool face. No wonder the millennials can’t wait for the baby boomers to die off. I can’t say I blame them.

It’s just getting to be a joke. The Democrats are a booby prize, of this I am only too well aware, but for all of their faults, at least they tend to be SANE. The Republicans, well, they have to be pushed out of the way. And soon. Hopefully this will be achieved democratically, but if not, the entire shithouse looks increasingly like it’ll blow in the coming years.

Look at the options. YOUR options. They’re closing down. Look at what they are taking from us. In the near future, these roads will become even narrower, more crowded, more dog-eat-dog for your children, should you be lucky enough to be able to afford to raise a family.

This is what we’re facing. What should be done about this? And WHO is going to do it?

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
American Obscenity: Corporate CEOs make 380x the wage of the average American worker!

Below, George Carlin on the American Dream
 

 
If there is a more loathsome, puke-worthy family of billion-heirs than the Waltons, who are, IMO, straight up, enemies of humanity on so many, many levels, it would have to be the Koch brothers, who are, of course, also dead set against the minimum wage.

S. Robson Walton: $ 19.7 Billion

Helen Walton: $ 16.4 billion

In 2004, the Waltons got a tax break of $91,500 an hour. AN HOUR!!!

All the while, their employees lived on poverty-level wages and received BILLIONS of dollars a year from taxpayers!

I mean, how much did they MAKE per hour to get a TAX BREAK like that? It boggles the mind.

At what point will the “off with their heads” moment occur? When “the system” pits one family and their stockholders against much of the world, how long before that camel’s back is going to break?

I think it’s definitely going to happen, more just a matter of when at this point.
 

 

 
Via Senator Bernie Sanders

 
In which Stephen Colbert uses an old adage to expose the preposterously illogical position the House Republicans have taken on the matter of food stamps:

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Take away his food stamps, and he’ll found FishCo, a multinational food conglomerate that gets a massive subsidy in the next Farm Bill.

In the harsh daylight of, I dunno, REALITY, what do the GOP really think is going to happen if they gut the food stamp program? That the 47 million Americans currently dependent on them—the most ever, double what it was five years ago—are just going to curl up in the middle of the road and die? They’re simply going to say “Hey, kids, the jig’s up, let’s just stop eating. The Republicans are right. Why don’t we all buy one last pizza and eat it in the garage with the car’s engine running?”

Or will they come into the rich neighborhoods looking for a snack?

Starve poor families out and they might be forced to become entrepreneurial, it’s true!

They just won’t be the kind of entrepreneurs that these Republican halfwits want…
 

 
A beautifully worded, very brief think piece by Prof. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, is making the rounds that puts the behavior of the nation’s 1% into stark relief.

Are the rich committing treason? Certainly they’re committing something…

Permit me an impertinent question (or three).

Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. government by (1) finding and bankrolling new candidates pledged to shrinking and dismembering it; (2) intimidating or bribing many current senators and representatives to block all proposed legislation, prevent the appointment of presidential nominees, eliminate funds to implement and enforce laws, and threaten to default on the nation’s debt; (3) taking over state governments in order to redistrict, gerrymander, require voter IDs, purge voter rolls, and otherwise suppress the votes of the majority in federal elections; (4) running a vast PR campaign designed to convince the American public of certain big lies, such as climate change is a hoax, and (5) buying up the media so the public cannot know the truth.

Would you call this treason?

If not, what would you call it?

And what would you do about it?

Nicely done, Robert Reich!

Discuss!
 

Just look how many of them showed up…

A bizarre event with ties to a notorious white-supremacist organizer John Tanton (“The organized anti-immigration ‘movement,’ increasingly in bed with racist hate groups, is dominated by one man, John Tanton.”—SPLC) as well as other front groups that have long been trying to drive a wedge between US blacks and Latinos, such as the “Black American Leadership Alliance,” is, right now, occurring in Washington, DC.

Billing itself as a gathering that will bring together “grassroots Americans from across the political spectrum” to march against immigration reform, the so-called “March for Jobs,” heavily promoted by Brietbart.com (who are webcasting the event live) will feature/is currently featuring speeches from anti-immigration reform members of Congress, fun fun peeps like Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), Reps. Steve King (R-IA) and Mo Brooks (R-AL), and not to mention former Florida Republican Congressman Col. Allen West.

Talk about a Republican brain trust… If not for Harvard Law grad Cruz, the collective IQ of that bunch would be about 250…

One of the speakers today is “Progressives for Immigration Reform” executive director Leah Durant. Durant, who also helms the “Black American Leadership Alliance,” is frequently heard on rightwing talk radio and Fox News, and preposterously billed as a “progressive” voice(!!) for the most regressive and intellectually indefensible bullshit that reichwingers just LOVE to hear black people spout, such as Durant’s greatest (s)hit, the debunked myth that the Senate’s immigration reform bill would disproportionately spike African-American unemployment rates (despite plenty of studies which show that the opposite would, in fact, occur):

Durant told Breitbart News on Sunday evening that this event is meant to ensure that all working Americans, especially black Americans, get a voice in the immigration debate. “At a time when nearly 22 million Americans are either out of work or underemployed, it is our strong belief that now is no time to engage in policies that would artificially add millions more workers to US labor markets, dramatically increasing competition for scare U.S. jobs,” Durant said. “At 13.8%, black unemployment is nearly double that of the national average.  Our coalition - the Black American Leadership Alliance reflects the views of everyday middle-class Americans rather than the political elites and big business interests from both the right and left, that have championed large-scale immigration to the US.”

Is Leah Durant a useful idiot for a slicker generation of less-overt, more urbane, 21st century Klans-types? Or worse?

Honestly, who cares how cynical she is? This march looks not only to be one of the least influential events to take place in Washinton, DC this entire year, these people are preaching to the goddamned choir anyways. Look at that photo above, tweeted by sad Brietbart toady Matthew Boyle. The entire event, it seems fair to wager, will see more African-American faces on the stage than off it.

Do dip into the LiveStream webcast on Brietbart, it’s really interesting, trust me. As are the live comments whizzing past. Here’s one I just caught:

“When an honest man finds he is wrong, he either stops being wrong, or stops being honest. Allen West chose to stop being honest.”

Someone else puked up “Amnesty is just another name for slavery for the Mexicans!” via their Cheetos-stained keyboard…

The camera angle being used by Brietbart livestream doesn’t allow the viewer to see how few folks turned up, but tweets from the event like “Standing ovation of Col. Allen West!” are given away by the “plop plop” nature of the applause that you can (barely) hear. Here’s a link to the “March for Jobs” LiveStream, if I embed it, it’s on auto-play.

Below, note how many actual black people have showed up for the Black American Leadership Alliance’s event. Notice also, if you will, how much of the audience appears to be related to Ted Nugent, or each other for that matter. Just sayin’