HRC And The Vulture Fund: Making Third World Poverty Pay For LGBT Rights

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest US gay organization, is going international. It’s just been given at least $3 million to spread the word of marriage equality to benighted countries that treat gays badly. Unfortunately, there’s a catch. Its chief partner and donor in this project wants the people in those countries, LGBT folk included, to starve – their economies wrecked, their incomes shipped abroad, their resources squeezed and stolen to pay off odious debt. HRC is receiving its money for gay rights in the Third World from the man who “virtually invented vulture funds”: a form of speculation that’s one of the worst contributors to Third World poverty ever.

But if you’re poor and getting poorer, look on the bright side (as long as river blindness hasn’t got you, that is). You can still have a nice white wedding; and you’ll save on the food bill if your nation has no food...

Scott Long, A Paper Bird.

Now read on...

Number Of The Day: FOUR!

That's the number of people who have been found guilty of breaking Russia's 'gay propaganda to minors' law since it was introduced a year ago.

Source: Russia Year In Review Report, Human Rights Campaign on the impact of the law.

Nikolai Alexeyev, the Moscow Gay Pride founder and publicity-loving provocateur, and an associate, Yaroslav Yevtushenko, who picketed a children's library in Arkhangelsk with pro-gay signs - probably wanting to get arrested again to appeal to the Western media.

Dmitri Isakov, pictured, was arrested after holding a placard in a public square in Kazan, which translates as; 'Being gay and loving gays is normal. Beating gays and killing gays is criminal.'

All three men were fined 4,000 rubles - about £70.

Alexander Suturin, editor of Molodoi Dalnevostochnik, a weekly local newspaper, was fined 50,000 rubles (£850) for publishing an interview with a sacked gay school teacher who said; 'My very existence is effective proof that homosexuality is normal.' Case appealed.

All three cases are every bit as wrong as they are dumb, but predictions that the law would bring about some anti-gay holocaust in Russia appear to have been rather exaggerated.

[The HRC report is an interesting round-up of how things have been reported in the Western media. It includes such hilarious fictions as facts as Neo-Con far-right gay jerk James Kirchick being thrown off Russia Today for showing his rainbow suspenders (you can watch him NOT being thrown off RT here), and Justin Bieber's ex Selena Gomez being banned from performing in Russia - because of her previously invisible support for gay rights. Yeah, that happened. Other quotes give Gay Star News as their source, to which as ever words fail me].

Regular readers may care to read Chomsky & Herman on the Propaganda Model. State homophobia may be available in other countries we are not currently demonising for empire.

Queers For Economic Justice: Closing Due To Economic Injustice

"Queer issues are class issues. They are issues of government and nonprofit violence, both inside and outside LGBQT organizations. The struggles we face go beyond making ends meet; violences of poverty, racism, policing, and ableism pervade our lives" from A Fabulous Attitude.

It is with profound sadness that I write to tell you QEJ is closing.

Funding has always been a challenge for QEJ throughout our 12 years of existence, but this year the financial crisis has been relentless. We finally had to face the painful reality that we cannot keep going. The crisis cannot be resolved simply by a one-time burst of money. Had that been true, we would have turned to you, our community, and asked for help. I am sure of your response.

What the Board and I had to confront was that this financial crisis would remain an ongoing emergency because we had no certain guarantees of future long-term funding. We were looking down the barrel of the funding-world shotgun, and understood that we could not stay alive. We know that QEJ is not unique in this crisis. We see clearly how our radical vision of social change -- including issues of poverty, incarceration, sexuality and racism too often did not align with more mainstream foundation priorities. And we know that this gap between our vision and the funding that enables it is a critical issue for our communities in the future.

We have never had a large number of major donors able to write big checks (though we thank the ones who have). What we have always had was a loyal and committed group of donors who believe in what QEJ does, and who gave—not huge sums—but all they could. Yet that wasn’t enough to keep us afloat. We needed to find another way to stay alive and, though we had a strategy, we did not have the time to implement it. Realizing this, we looked at each other and said what we had never said before: We have to close.

This has broken our hearts...

Queers For Economic Justice, statement on their website.

Annual revenue of Human Rights Camapign [HRC], America's biggest LGB organisation - $9,976,000.

Video Time 2: What's Love Got To Do With It?

All Out have made a predictably stupid and pukey video imagining What If A Gay Olympian Won At Sochi?
Well, I guess they've gotta spend all that money they get on something.
"The Russian government just made it a crime for gay people to show their love in public", the video claims, falsely.
All Out's press release admits this claim is untrue - or rather says it is "unclear" ie it's not what the new propaganda law actually says.
When there are so many anti-gay things going on in Russia, why say you're against something that hasn't happened?
The video imagines a female ice-skater who gets a gold medal but can't kiss her girlfriend in celebration.
Imagine if a gay man won an Olympic gold medal and thanked and embraced his boyfriend!
Just like Matthew Mitcham did in 2008, you mean?
US TV networks edited out all mentions of his then boyfriend, Lachlan Fletcher.
And what reassurance is the trite title and message here, Love Always Wins, when gay and bisexual men are being beaten up after being found through gay sex sites on the internet?
Similarly the new law against "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors" - and the rhetoric behind it - seems most concerned with propagating the myth that gay men prey on kids.
It is a grave tactical error to reduce this campaign to gay love, when Russian homophobes keep going on about gay SEX.
If we base our arguments on mendacity, tomfoolery, and most of all on prudery - and willingly submitting to our castration as gay men - they have won.

Remember: If you think this short film is a load of silly old sentimental wank that only serves Western power, that means you DON'T CARE and are WORSE THAN HITLER!
All Out believe there is "an anti-gay war waging in Russia" right now.
Well, it's always good to keep things in perspective.
And if history has shown us there's one sure-fire way to stop a war, it's by asking people to click on an e-petition.
Or alternatively why not ask some celebrities to wear a crappy t-shirt?
That'll learn 'em!

PS Human Rights Campaign - America's largest/wealthiest gay organisation - has come up with the inspired "campaign" to get famous Americans to support LGBT Russians by wearing a t-shirt.
HRC have been given $3 million to spread the gay word across the world.
Scott Long writes on HRC and the Vulture Fund: Making Third World poverty pay for LGBT rights.

Russia: Today's Balls

Cause big businesses are moral agents and they're the only people who can save us, yes?
Do you seriously think there's any point in asking the bastards behind McDonald's and the corporate killers at ATOS to play nice?
What causes more misery in the world - McDonald's and ATOS or some silly law that threatens to fine people £100 (5,000 roubles) for "distributing information among minors... promoting non-traditional lifestyles"?
What's pouring Coca-Cola down the drain going to change, and why is this pointless gesture getting so much coverage?
While your own country gets ready to bomb the fuck out of Syria - how's that for a human rights violation?
And this is all you will protest about during a summit of the G20 world's richest countries?
My friends, the "gay movement" is now officially fucked to buggery by this apolitical delusional crap.
This outbreak of mass hysteria - surely the most embarrassing since Princess Diana died - just makes me despair for our future.

Clicktivism: Meaningless

As SCOTUS debates the constitutionality of Proposition 8 and DOMA this week, Facebook users all over the nation have become part of a burgeoning social media trend. Supporters of marriage equality have been changing their profile pictures to the icon on the left, a version of the Human Rights Campaign logo designed specifically to indicate support for same-sex marriage rights. 
Although many people have said that it’s been personally meaningful to sign onto Facebook and see a screen full of red avatars, many have criticized the trend for being a silly way of “showing support” without actually accomplishing anything significant...

Scientific American. 

Still, if you're really committed to meaningless self-serving gestures, you could always click on an e-petition.
Or buy a crappy 'Legalize Gay' t-shirt from American Apparel, that'll show the bastards!

Goldman Sachs: "Equality Is Just Good Business"

Fagburn liked this piece on The Guardian online about Goldman Sach's CEO Lloyd Blankfein's coming out for "marriage equality".
It even points out how "marriage equality" can be a banal non-committal apolitical euphemism.
Jason Farago writes;

"Traders use the phrase "priced in" to describe how markets account for the likelihood of future events when determining an asset's current value – and the legalization of same-sex marriage has surely been priced in to Blankfein's calculus. Supporting gay marriage, for the CEO of Goldman, is not only so wholly unthreatening to his bottom line that he risks nothing by endorsing it. More than that: gay marriage in the United States, from the bank's view, is probably a fait accompli. Our relationships and their legal status have become a PR no-brainer, a cause so devoid of risk that a CEO facing unprecedented populist backlash can support them as much as your favorite Occupier.
"As Karl Rove taught us in 2004, same-sex marriage is an uncommonly useful tool to distract citizens from questions of economic justice or political responsibility. Eight years later, the public view of equal rights for gays and lesbians has shifted. But the use value of marriage in the political sphere remains: it shifts the focus of political discourse away from tougher, more fundamental questions of economics and power. And in this moment of anti-elitist consolidation, that is just as the lords of finance would like.
"Gays [sic] should muster as many supporters as we can, of course. But gay equality is not the only kind of equality we should care about – and as this naked PR layup should remind us, the battle for economic fairness is going to be a much greater struggle."

Quite.
Thanks for next-to-nothing.

• Human Rights Campaign - America's most respectable and wealthiest gay lobby/advocacy group - has been much a-wooing and officially honouring corporate global crooks Goldman Sachs of late.
This has been rightly criticised and protested as an act of moral myopia.