*
[Cheering and applause]
Welcome, welcome, welcome to "Last Week Tonight."
I'm John Oliver.
Just time for a quick recap of the week.
If you haven't watched the news at all this week, congratulations.
You've probably had a much nicer time than the rest of us.
We will be talking about the terrible events in Missouri later in the show,
but before we make you sad, please let us make you happy.
In the world of sport, a new star emerged this week.
WOMAN: 13-year-old ace Mo'ne Davis is officially the first girl to pitch a shutout
in the 68-year history of the Little League World Series.
And the strikes keep coming...
MAN: And she picks up her first strikeout of the game.
WOMAN: and coming...
I love this girl.
[Laughter]
The best part of Mo'ne Davis is not that she happens to be female,
it's that she also happens to be awesome, waving her fingers after strikeouts--
which, by the way, is absolutely what I'm going to do after any successful joke in the future--
and also displaying remarkable self-confidence.
I want my curveball like Clayton Kershaw's
and my fastball like Mo'ne Davis, so...
Ha ha ha!
JOHN: Yes!
How is she that self-confident at 13 years old?
I'm not that self-confident now, and I have a TV show.
[Laughter]
But of all the wonderful things Mo'ne Davis did this week, this is my favorite.
WOMAN: A ton of media attention surrounding you coming into this game,
but you have handled it so well.
Has it been hard for you?
Not really. I can always say no, so...
Ha ha ha!
That's, like, my special weapon for the media.
[Laughter]
This girl is incredible.
Saying no to dumb questions from the media is a special weapon that everyone should use.
"Oh, who are you wearing?" "No!"
[Laughter]
"What do you think of the 2016 candidate?"
"No!"
"If you were a tree, what tree--"
"No, no, no, no, no!"
Moving on to overseas news now,
and there were some strange developments concerning Iranian men's testicles.
Iran may be on the verge of a baby boom.
Media reports say Parliament has banned vasectomies for men and similar procedures for women,
after Ayatollah Khamenei issued a decree to increase the population.
Wow. The Ayatollah has given vasectomies a vasectomy-ectomy.
And he's actively encouraging the country to procreate.
That is one hell of a pickup line.
"Hey, baby, uh, want to come up to my apartment and fully obey the Ayatollah?"
[Laughter]
And the thing is, they're not even stopping there.
WOMAN: The ban would also make it illegal to advertise birth control.
Violators would face fines and prison time.
Prison time for advertising birth control.
Good luck with that conversation.
"Oh, what are you in for?" "Murder. How about you?"
"I tried to get the word out about a ribbed condom."
[Laughter]
This is especially bad news for contraception mascots like
Iran's famous Ivan the Living I.U.D.
[High-pitched voice] "Hey, kids, I'm made of copper,
and if used as directed, I work for 5 years. Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!"
And finally this week, Crimea.
It has been 5 months since it was annexed by Russia,
and last weekend there was a celebration concert
featuring pretty much the last person that anyone was expecting.
Freedom to believe in what you believe in.
No man has the right to condemn another man
for believing what he believes in.
Thank you.
In case you're wondering, that is not Bono having an allergic reaction.
That is Steven Seagal, and incredibly...
[Laughter]
and incredibly, that wasn't even...
[Applause]
that wasn't even the weirdest annexation-themed entertainment
that the people of Crimea experienced because the day before,
a Russian motorcycle gang called the Night Wolves
produced a dramatic retelling of the Crimean crisis, and it had everything.
Dancers forming a flaming swastika? Check.
Robots vomiting red paint onto their drums? Check.
Man running around on fire? Check.
Guy doing motorbike tricks in front of confused violinists? Check, check, check.
The whole thing looked like Leni Riefenstahl hired a colorblind pyromaniac
to choreograph a Spinal Tap-themed
Cirque du Soleil performance at the request of Satan himself.
And you know what?
It was phenomenal because say what you will about Russians.
You might not want them running Crimea, but on this evidence,
you definitely want them running every Super Bowl halftime show in the future.
And now, this.
ANNOUNCER: And now, people on TV saying what people are saying.
Sooner or later, you have to believe what people are saying.
I mean, we can pull out a montage.
People are saying we're against immigrants.
People are saying buy, sell, hold.
People are saying, "Yeah, guys, what'd you think?"
People are saying, "Hmm, on second thought,
we probably should have chosen the other guy."
People are saying something to me, and I said,
"But you don't know what I've been through."
People are saying they have tiny little tattoos
on the back of their neck.
People are saying, "I need to fly.
It's Fourth of July. When do I go?"
People are saying, "Listen, even with this insulin inhaler,
it's still not gonna sell."
People are saying, "Why bother having laws at all?"
It's just stuff people are saying.
Moving on...
[Applause]
Moving on.
Our main story tonight concerns the past week's
terrible events in Missouri.
FEMALE ANCHOR: An officer shot an 18-year-old man outside an apartment complex
in Ferguson, Missouri.
MALE ANCHOR: It is unclear at this hour what led to the shooting,
but witnesses say the teenager was unarmed.
MALE REPORTER: Angry confrontations between protesters
and police in riot gear...
the same anger and outrage that exploded into a chaotic night of looting and violence.
This whole story is depressingly familiar,
and there are so many unanswered questions regarding why an officer
would shoot an unarmed teenager.
What is absolutely clear is that the police have handled everything since then terribly,
and the tone-deafness began with this.
FEMALE REPORTER: Asked how many times Brown was shot,
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said...
It was more than just a couple, but I don't think it was, uh, uh, many more than that.
Just--just think about what he's saying there--not much more than more than twice.
Could you try and minimize this any more?
"Look, listen, everyone, only very many more than one bullet was fired,
so everybody calm down, shall we?"
The police then refused for days to release the name of the officer involved,
and when they eventually did, they packaged it with a DVD extra that no one wanted.
At the same time, they released video of Michael Brown allegedly
carrying out a store robbery minutes before he was shot and killed,
and that has sparked new outrage.
Yeah, of course it has because it's irrelevant.
If the police wanted to distract everyone with a video
that has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Brown's shooting,
they should have just released "Ghostbusters" instead.
It's exactly as relevant to everything that happened afterwards.
But the more the week went on,
the more you got the sense that those in charge in Ferguson
don't have the best sense of how their community feels.
Just listen to the mayor.
We've never seen this kind of violence.
We've never seen this kind of frustration or tension
between the races.
I've always been proud to say that to people.
I know we've always gotten along,
and I know our community still gets along very well.
"Oh, we're absolutely famous for it.
"Presumably, that is why I, the mayor of Ferguson,
"am currently on national fucking television.
Presumably we're talking about how well our town is getting along right now and always has."
The thing is, if you ask around in Ferguson, you get a slightly different story.
MAN: The cops' harassment is frequently.
It's all through the day. It's all through the night.
Then they're not beating us physically, they're doing it verbally.
Here's the thing the mayor doesn't understand.
As a general rule, no one should ever be allowed to say
there is no history of racial tension here
because that sentence has never been true anywhere on Earth.
[Applause]
Even in Antarctica... even in Antarctica,
there is tension between emperor penguins and gentoo penguins.
"Fuck you, gentoo penguins, flapping over here, stealing our fish.
Not you, chinstrap penguins. You're cool."
[Laughter]
"You guys are good at math."
So which one of these two men is right about what life as a young African-American
in Ferguson is like?
Well, to answer that, let's look at the police force.
What does it look like in a town which is about 2/3 African-American?
What is the makeup of your police force; the number
and how many of them are white?
I just want clarification of that.
KNOWLES: Uh, they keep saying 3 are African-American,
but that's--I actually believe it's 5.
There was 6, but one left fairly recently.
We also have a Hispanic and two Asian Pacific Islanders.
Exactly. "Look, it doesn't stop there, guys.
"We got a couple of white guys
"who occasionally listen to hip-hop music.
"I mean, Macklemore, sure, but still.
"Also, we have 6 Norwegian-Americans
"who really enjoyed The Lion King on Broadway,
so it's not--it's more diverse than it seems."
But despite the presence of both of the Pacific Islanders
and, of course, "the Hispanic"--
[Laughter]
let's not forget him--the Ferguson Police do seem to target minorities.
FEMALE ANCHOR: 86% of police stops are African-Americans;
92% of police searches, nearly 93% of arrests.
Even though they stopped more blacks, more whites had contraband.
Yeah, of course more whites had contraband.
They knew that if you look like this, you don't get stopped.
If you're white in Ferguson,
you would need to be snorting cocaine directly off your dashboard
to get stopped by the police,
whereas, if you're an African-American in Ferguson--
like, say, Henry Davis here-- you may have a slightly different experience,
because while in custody in the Ferguson jail in 2009,
officers grabbed him and pushed him and struck him multiple times.
They say they were provoked, although, oddly, "There is no video of this incident,
despite the fact the jail is equipped with video cameras."
And what is known, though, at this point,
is that he was later charged with 4 counts of destruction of city property
for bleeding on their uniforms.
[Groaning]
And I've got to say, he was lucky that he wasn't eating spaghetti
at the time of his beating,
or they would have upgraded that charge to a felony.
And that is just the local police.
The county police also have had their share of problems.
A St. Louis County police lieutenant is without a job tonight.
He was fired for allegedly ordering patrol officers
to arrest black people shopping in South County.
Oh, it wasn't just that he ordered racial profiling.
It was how he allegedly did it, with his colleagues claiming
that he said things like, "Let's have a black day"
and "Let's make the jail cells more colorful."
Now, let's be fair. Let's be fair here.
"Let's have a black day" is an awesome thing to say if you are Shaft.
[Laughter]
And "Let's make the jail cells more colorful"
is entirely appropriate if you're an interior designer
with a folder full of paint swatches.
However, if you're a white police officer,
it's not ideal to say either of those,
which is not to say that all cops are bad.
They are clearly not.
Also, the people of Ferguson want and need an effective police force,
but perhaps their relationship was best summed up by this photo from earlier this week.
Not just ludicrously aggressive police facing off against an unarmed man,
but also the fact that someone had clearly written "Fuck the police" on the post box,
something that apparently CNN did not notice when they
were using this photo during all of their coverage.
[Laughter]
So they didn't see it.
Now, you might also notice in that photo that the police are
troublingly dressed like they're about to launch an assault on Fallujah.
Well, it turns out that that is no coincidence.
Since 1996, in response to the war on drugs,
the Department of Defense transferred $4.3 billion in military equipment
to local and state police.
After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security
made additional equipment available to local law enforcement
through federal funds for terrorism prevention.
That's right, and this has happened on such a scale
that it's enabled small towns like Keene, New Hampshire,
to apply for a Bearcat, a military-grade,
armored personnel truck, which they needed because,
as their application argued, "The terrorism threat is far reaching and often unforeseen"
and cited as a possible target their annual Pumpkin Festival.
[Laughter]
Specifically, this Pumpkin Festival, which is now being protected by this.
And good luck easily outmaneuvering that,
teenagers with baseball bats.
[Laughter]
And if you are wondering what it feels like to have a mine-resistant vehicle
on the streets of your town,
I give you a YouTube video of two dudes from Saginaw, Michigan.
MAN: Holy shit, dude.
SECOND MAN: Super-armored, dude.
Damn! Look, he doesn't want anybody to see him in there.
Dude, you can't even see him! Dude! That's crazy.
[Audience laughter]
Saginaw County Sheriff, dude.
That's cool, dude. Look how big these tires are compared to our--
It's taller than-- It's--dude.
That's awesome!
Now, to be fair, to be fair,
that is exactly how they reacted when a Chipotle first opened there.
[Laughter]
But the point is, listen carefully as one of them suddenly realizes something.
Here's the thing: no, it hasn't got that bad,
because unless you live in downtown Kabul,
there is no practical need for anything like that in your town.
Just ask the people that it came from.
The Army itself, actually, in a newsletter a few months ago,
recommended against using MRAPs even at U.S. military bases.
You know, on paved streets in the United States, they're actually unsafe.
They tear up the streets, they have a high rollover potential.
Exactly. The only vehicle that should be tearing up the streets of Saginaw
is Chad's souped-up Honda Civic.
"Dudes! Dude, my car is sick, dude!"
[Laughter]
The police are not soldiers, so why, in this photo from Ferguson,
are they wearing fucking camo?
They are northwest of St. Louis, not northwest of the Amazon.
If they want to blend in with their surroundings, they should be dressed as a dollar store.
[Laughter and cheers]
And also, look in the photo at where their guns are pointed.
If you were actually in the military, you would know that you are not supposed to do that.
In the military, we're trained on something called escalation of force,
which basically means the only time that you are really gonna point a weapon
directly at someone is when you're ready to pull the trigger.
And instead of that, we've seen in Ferguson
that police are just wandering around with their
weapons up at all times,
pointing them at people that obviously didn't pose a threat.
Whoa. Well, they don't currently pose a threat, but, you know,
it's really all about what they might do.
Now, they could, for instance, join the police,
be given a gun they're not trained to use properly,
and then wander around pointing it at people.
That would be fucking terrifying.
[Laughter and applause]
The point here is...
[Cheers]
the point is, if you are a cop in the United States,
you should dress for the job you have, not the job you want,
because if you have all this equipment, it's going to go to your head.
Look at Doraville, Georgia, population 8,500.
The police there got a tank a while back, and up until a few days ago,
this video was on the front page of their website.
[Heavy metal music playing]
* We're gonna stop a burglary at Little Caesar's *
* Aah! Aah!
[Coughs]
The name of that song is-- and this is true--
"Die, Motherfucker, Die."
[Laughter]
And it was a good choice because, believe me,
that video does not pair well with Simon and Garfunkel.
SIMON AND GARFUNKEL: * Lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy *
Now, that video was just a training exercise,
but the problem is police departments don't just use this stuff for training.
Thanks in part to this kind of access to military hardware,
there has been a massive rise in both the number and the use of police department SWAT teams.
NARRATOR: The number of SWAT raids have gone up by 1,400% since the 1980s.
An estimated 50,000 now take place every year.
MAN: Face down!
[Woman screaming and crying]
Face down!
Just keep that clip in mind when I tell you
that 79% of SWAT deployments are now for executing search warrants,
and most of those were for drug investigations.
So, yes, if you are getting high in your dorm room right now, you are not paranoid.
There is a SWAT team outside,
and they are coming to get you...
[Cheers and applause]
all of which brings us back to this week and to Ferguson.
So how do you improve things there?
Well, you could de-militarize the police force to stop things looking like this,
but that would just change the optics.
The substance of the problem would still be there,
as was embodied by a police officer on the streets of Ferguson this week,
who was dressed entirely normally.
The phrase "bring it, you fucking animals"
is barely acceptable during a zoo escape.
[Laughter]
It's not even acceptable in the restaurant in "Mary Poppins" where penguins are waiters.
"Bring it, you fucking animal."
"Hey, don't treat them like that.
"They'll piss in your soup.
They'll piss in your soup, and you'll deserve it."
That kind of statement betrays
an inability to see the citizens of Ferguson as individuals
and instead treats them as a threatening whole.
And that is a top-down problem because last night,
this is how the governor of Missouri decided to try and rebuild trust
between the police and the community.
I signed an order declaring a state of emergency
and ordering the implementation of a curfew
in the impacted area of Ferguson.
Oh, perfect.
So you took a community tired of being treated as criminals
and imprisoned them all in their own houses for a night,
and in doing so, employed the tone of a pissed-off vice principal
trying to restore order at an assembly.
If we're going to achieve justice,
we must first have
and maintain peace.
This is a test.
The eyes of the world are watching.
That is profoundly patronizing.
"Look, let's see if you can all remain quiet for 20 minutes,
and then we'll see if you can all go and play outside."
If even the governor can't distinguish
between the good and the bad elements of the community
and has decided to punish everyone equally,
then that should go both ways.
I know the police love their ridiculous, unnecessary military equipment,
so here's another patronizing test.
Let's take it all away from them,
and if they can make it through a whole month without killing a single unarmed black man,
then and only then can they get their fucking toys back.
[Cheers and applause]
And now, this.
ANNOUNCER: And now...
I think I need to have my ears fixed.
Did I hear this?
Did I hear you say they went back some days later?
Did I hear you say that both parents worked a graveyard shift?
GRACE: Whoa, whoa, wait, wait. Did I hear you say house arrest?
Did you say that?
Sex every night? Is that what I just heard?
GRACE: Did I hear that right, or did my IFB just flip out?
All right, what did you say?
You had to say something then because I'd do a back flip if I heard that.
Have you ever smoked pot?
I'm sorry. What?
[Laughter]
Finally, finally tonight, women.
What do they want?
It's a question that's plagued no less an authority than movie star
and noted humanitarian Mel Gibson.
Uh, not to be confused with his far less successful follow-up,
"Why Are Jews?"
[Laughter]
But for most-- but for most American women,
one thing they might want is to be paid the same as men,
and one prominent man currently agrees.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Women deserve equal pay for equal work!
[Cheers and applause]
Equal pay kicked off your presidency.
It's become really a theme,
one of the themes of your time here.
Well, that's nice. Equal pay is not such a bad theme.
It's certainly an improvement over previous presidential themes,
including "Let's lock up all the Japanese" and "Destroy the Seminole scourge."
Unfortunately, as is so often the case for this president,
his laudable goal was muddled right from the outset.
Today, the average full-time working woman earns
just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.
Equal pay for equal work. It's not that complicated.
Yeah, it shouldn't be that complicated,
and as long as he hasn't overlooked something which complicates this significantly,
everything should still be on track.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: In 2013,
female staffers in the Obama
White House were paid
less than 88 cents
for every dollar paid
to male staffers.
Well, that's OK, that's OK.
Maybe that just means the president was 88% sincere
when he talked about equal pay, which, if you round it up,
is basically 100% anyway, so why is everyone complaining?
And with that, all anyone could focus on
was not how to fix this problem but how to quantify it.
The Labor Department itself,
the president's own Labor Department
says it's 81 cents.
SCOTT PELLEY: Another Federal study, for example,
says the disparity is more like 88 cents for every dollar.
The studies do show that when you do
the controlling, there's about a 9% gap.
MAN: The wage gap is really somewhere between 5 and 7 cents.
Women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap.
They earn 96 cents for every dollar a man makes.
Look, look, even if 96 cents is the number,
which it isn't, it's still terrible.
Let me put this in terms that are, perhaps,
easier to understand.
If someone takes a dump on my desk,
the size of the dump is not the issue.
I'm not gonna say, "Well, how big of a dump is it?
"8 inches? 10 inches?
"Oh, just 3 inches?
"Well, that's almost like you didn't take a dump
on my desk at all."
[Cheers and applause]
And this--
And so this is where we are right now.
The one equal-pay act in Congress
has already been killed,
and there is seemingly nothing on the horizon,
but to listen to some, that's not a problem
because not only does the gap barely exist,
if it does, it's actually women's fault.
Women make different choices
about what kinds of jobs they seek,
they make different choices
in reaction to marriage and childbirth.
When those things, those factors are taken
into consideration, studies have indicated
that the pay gap all but evaporates.
Classic.
Women are paid less because they choose to have children,
although, to be fair, they didn't
technically choose to be the sole gender
biologically capable of pregnancy
with the notable exception, of course, of seahorses
and Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Junior," so that--
just let's be balanced here.
The second popular argument for why the wage gap
is women's fault is that they choose
to enter lower-paying professions.
When you compare men and women
in the same positions and with the same experience,
the same education, there is no pay gap.
You need to look at, yes, what the position is
and you need to compare apples to apples,
not pick and choose.
OK, apples to apples.
OK, well, in which case, I actually have
a question for you.
How do you like these apples?
A recent study out of Yale University
that is interesting, where professors were
given the identical resume--
one had the name John on the top,
and one had the name Jennifer on top--
and the male candidate
was rated more favorably...
Really?
and they were offered, on average, $4,000 more
than the female candidate.
OK, OK, so it seems we either address the root
of this problem and fight entrenched sexism
in our society,
or all women simply change their names to John.
Sure, it'll be confusing for a while,
but you'll have $4,000 extra a year just to take
the edge off the confusion.
And also, don't despair just yet
because apparently, if women can just hang in there,
there is hope.
If you're unmarried and childless,
between the ages of 35 and 43,
the statistics show you make $1.08
on average to every male dollar.
So there you have it, ladies.
If you can just remain single,
not accidentally have children,
and never turn 44, you're gonna be golden.
Look, here's the thing.
[Cheers and applause]
Paying people less for the same work
is clearly wrong.
Even monkeys know that.
Scientists actually ran a test where two monkeys
performed exactly the same task.
One was paid with a grape and the other
with just a cucumber.
Watch how the monkey who got the cucumber
reacted when it realized it was underpaid.
[Laughter]
"Hey, hey, calm down, monkey!
"You don't know what the other monkey's experience
"and education were.
"You've just made different choices in your life.
Besides, a cucumber is virtually the same as a grape."
Now, some people are always going to want to
pay women less, even if it is, let's say,
83 cents on the dollar.
But if we're not going to get legislation,
it should at least be obvious
who is choosing to do that.
So, to that end, we would like to suggest this.
ANNOUNCER: Are you a middle-aged man running
a financial firm
or a multinational conglomerate?
Do you find that pushy female employees
have been nagging you with unreasonable demands
for equal pay?
What if I told you about a revolutionary
new product that lets you pay women just as much as men
without sacrificing the sheer convenience
of paying them less?
Introducing Ladybucks,
dollars for female employees
that are worth just 83 cents on the dollar.
Ladybucks is the new currency for women
from the Federal Reserve
and the creators of Playtex Gentle Glide 360.
Available in a variety of colors and scents,
Ladybucks feature America's most celebrated
female presidents, like Geena Davis,
Julia Louis-Dreyfus,
and "Battlestar Galactica's" Laura Roslin,
who only became president
after almost all of mankind was destroyed.
It's an amount that could be described as...
and...
So why not try Ladybucks?
Show the women in your workplace that they're
truly 0.83 in a million.
Ladybucks are not for everyone.
Consult your lawyer before using Ladybucks.
Use of Ladybucks may result in class-action lawsuits,
adverse publicity, failure to retain staff,
or being kicked in the dick.
That's our show.
We're off for the next two weeks.
We'll be back the first week in September
with a new episode.
Thank you so much for watching.
Have a great night!
[Cheers and applause]
*