alias Bruce.

The Republican presidential wannabees,

of whom only Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum appear to have survived as real contenders, are interesting solely for what they reveal about the murderous meanness of core Republican voters.

In televised debates, the Republican suitors drew lusty cheers from live G.O.P. audiences for having executed record numbers of prison inmates in Texas, for advocating government control over how American women occupy their bodies, and for calling for ruthless treatment of economic refugees from America's closest neocolonial neighbor to the south.

The only remaining question is whether the Republican Party is terminally short-sighted in its pursuit of the Kill-the-Pig-Drink-Its-Blood vote, or whether the party is betting on some, uh, tragic calamity that would permanently remove Barack Obama from the scene (I think you know what I'm talking about) and would subsequently leave the 2012 election open to the G.O.P.'s brand of raving fascist nationalism, or whether they are patiently building the foundation for what they hope will be a future decisively fascist majority of fearful, resentful voters.

The latest "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" civil disobedience action in NYC took place

on Saturday with a march to the 103rd police precinct in Queens, near where the unarmed Sean Bell was shot to death on the eve of his wedding day by five NYPD officers who fired 50 bullets.

Saturday's SS&F action, one of a continuing series of protests that have involved Cornel West, Carl Dix, and community residents and members of Occupy Wall Street among others, was in part a memorial to Bell. 20 people were arrested and jailed. Reports here and here provide details.

More protests are planned against Stop and Frisk, an outright police state tactic by which NYC police stop, jack up, and feel up hundreds of thousands of citizens each year for no defined cause. The vast majority are black and Latino and nearly all of them are innocent of any crime; practically none are arrested. The obscene statistics are here. It's all about police using fear, trauma, and intimidation as weapons of power.

More and more people are stepping forward to insist that this unconstitutional police thuggery has to stop.

"Occupy Wall Street" and "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" are two things happening in New York City that you

need to know about:

1.) The occupation of Wall Street over the past 11 days by protesters, some of whom have camped out in an echo of the protests in Egypt and Yemen (and have endured police abuse in the process), is bigger news than you may have gathered from TV and newspaper accounts. For one thing, similar actions are either taking place or being organized in more than 50 cities, according to OccupyWallStreet.org, the organization behind the New York protest. (Michael Moore spoke at the NYC protest Monday; Cornel West spoke Tuesday.) Further, such protests are bound to grow both in frequency and in size as corporate-dictated economic and political policies -- enforced by both the Christofascist right and the increasingly irrelevant speechifier Barack Obama -- leave more and more frantic Americans with nowhere to take their anger but the streets. Just as my parents' generation of striving black Americans was politicized by the simple refusal of mid-20th-century America to grant them access to a better life, so are millions of today's Americans of all colors being quietly radicalized by the simple refusal of today's corporate regime to grant them any measure of economic security. Close off all of a dam's outflows but one, and you'll get a violent rush at that single aperture -- and eventually a burst dam. Yesterday's so-called "far left" will soon be today's angry center because yesterday's meager mainstream social safety valves are, today, plugged and padlocked.

Add to this the grim prospects for American and European stock markets, thanks in part to the congenitally stubborn refusal of the world's boss financiers to entertain anything like meaningful change in their industry. For a dose of fiscal insider candor about this that will drop your jaw to your knees, watch this BBC interview with a trader about the outlook for the European economy.

It all adds up to more stonewalling in Washington and on Wall Street on behalf of the wealthiest, and more angry gathering at the stone gates in the coming months and years by folks who would never have dreamed of hitting the streets in protest: the hardening ranks of broke, jobless, hungry, sick, and otherwise enraged folks who constitute the majority of the nation.

Call it impossible if you want to. But the Wall Street occupations are just the beginning. You can quote me on that.

2.) The "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" initiative is a call by Carl Dix and Cornel West for citizens to resist the clearly unconstitutional practice of police officers in New York City stopping and frisking anyone who they want to at any time -- with a hugely disproportionate number of those stopped and frisked being black, Latino, and innocent.

How large is the problem? Better sit down before you read these stats from the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD stopped and interrogated more than 161,000 completely innocent New Yorkers in the first quarter of 2011, the highest number over a three-month period since the Police Department began reporting data on its troubling stop-and-frisk program. About 88 percent of the 183,326 stop-and-frisk encounters recorded from January through March resulted in neither an arrest nor a summons, according to figures the NYPD released quietly over the holiday weekend. About 84 percent of those stopped by police were black or Latino.

In other words, at the rate at which NYPD's use of this tactic is increasing over last year, NYC police will stop and frisk more than 700,000 citizens this year (last year's figure was 601,000). Nearly 90 percent of those stopped will be innocent of any wrongdoing. And more than 8 in 10 will be black or Latino.

Longtime activist and organizer Carl Dix (he served two years in Leavenworth Prison for refusing to join the Vietnam War, and is co-founder of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and Princeton professor and advocate Cornel West have issued a joint call for an October 22nd day of nonviolent civil disobedience in protest and defiance of Stop & Frisk. The event dovetails with that day's National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality.

If police officers' accosting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians -- and zeroing in on people of color for such abuse -- isn't your idea of law enforcement or justice, you'll find more about "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" at stopmassincarceration.tumblr.com.

Three weeks into a hunger strike at California prisons,

some inmates are showing signs of starvation, reports the Huffington Post.

If you have not yet heard about the widespread hunger strike, in which as many as 6,600 California inmates have participated, join the club. I had not heard of it, either, until a friend told me. It has been spottily covered by national media. Read this excerpt from a New York Times account of the confinement conditions inmates are protesting, and you will see why many Americans, including many journalists, would prefer that this story remain invisible behind concrete walls:

The protest was organized by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit, where prisoners are kept in isolation more than 22 hours a day. ...Most of the prisoners who remain on hunger strike are in security housing units like the one at Pelican Bay, where they are kept alone in windowless, soundproof concrete cells. ...The lack of human contact often leads to depression and bouts of rage, psychologists say.

Prisoners and activists say that such conditions are cruel and unusual punishment. Most inmates end up in these extreme isolation blocks because of ties to gang activities. To get back into the general prison population, activists say, they are pressured to divulge information about other gang members in prison, a process known as “debriefing,” which can jeopardize their safety.

“We do see this long isolation and debriefing process as torture,” said Carol Strickman, a staff lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, an advocacy group in San Francisco. “These are inhumane conditions designed to extract information from someone.”

But a Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman, Terry Thornton, said that the restrictive conditions at Pelican Bay had been litigated numerous times.

Got that? Twenty-two hours a day in windowless, soundproofed concrete cells. All in an effort to force prisoners to rat out other prisoners' alleged gang connections. And to thereby endanger their own lives. (In the joint, there is no such thing as a witness protection program.) And the State of California's answer to this moral obscenity is, in effect, Well, nobody's told us to stop.

Notice, too, that California prison officials employ a sterile euphemism -- "debriefing" -- because they cannot bring themselves to call their actions what they are: torture.

Hmm. What was the euphemism at Guantanamo again? Oh, yeah: "Enhanced" or "harsh" interrogation techniques. AKA simulated drowning, extreme sleep deprivation, locking prisoners in agonizing positions for days, putting prisoners on leashes and making them perform like dogs, slamming them against walls, wrapping their heads in duct tape. Again, all done invisibly, concealed behind walls and the pretext of a no-holds-barred "war" against "enemy combatants." (St. Petersburg Times story detailing these Guantanamo practices here.)

So here we are again, folks. Just as we were asked to excuse these wicked acts at Guantanamo and at secret prisons abroad in the name of "national security," we are now being asked to look away when it comes to horrific treatment of prisoners right here on the mainland. You, as a voter, are being asked to not think about what is happening to "those people" (that is, chiefly nonviolent offenders convicted on drug charges) hidden behind the thick walls of the prisons in your own neck of the woods. You are being asked to drive past the prisons in your community, on your way to the park or the mall, and to not wonder what is being done in your name in these places. You are being asked to keep your eyes straight ahead and your ears and mouth shut when it comes to the increasingly for-profit human abuse industry that you subsidize with taxes taken out of your income.

Which means, if you are an obedient citizen, you won't read the details in the New York Times story about how prisoners in these California prisons are treated; and you won't read the Huffington Post story about the hunger strike involving inmates at one-third of California's prisons, some of whom are making good on their pledge to starve themselves to death; and you won't visit the blog created by prisoner advocates providing updates on attempts by the strikers and their supporters to gain political and public support for their demands for human rights in prisons.

Or will you?

Thanks to Linda.