Ninety hours of sex work would have been more fitting.

A judge in Painesville, Ohio, has sentenced three men to 30 days of standing outside the courthouse in a chicken costume, holding a sign that says “No Chicken Ranch in Painesville.” The men were arrested after they solicited sex from an undercover police officer. “Chicken Ranch” is a reference to a brothel in Nevada, where commercial sex work is legal.

Judge Michael Cicconetti, famous for his unusual sentences, once ordered a man who called a policeman a pig to stand next to a live pig in a pen and hold a sign that read “This Is Not a Police Officer.” A couple who stole a baby Jesus statue from a manger were sentenced to dress as Mary and Joseph and walk with a donkey.

But wearing a chicken costume three hours a day for 30 days doesn’t seem stiff enough a penalty for taking advantage of women who—through no fault of their own—are forced to sell sex. For these men to really understand what it’s like for these women, three hours a day in a chicken suit just won’t do. They should have been ordered to dress in drag and stand on a street corner while sleezy men drove by and offered to pay them for sex.

In the meantime, wouldn’t it be great if we lived in a society where women wouldn’t have to choose this demeaning line of work?

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Mombasa Prostitutes Get No Breaks!

According to the BBC, prostitutes in the predominantly Muslim city of Mombasa, which sits on the Kenyan coast, are increasingly ditching their typically revealing work attire in favor of traditional head-to-toe garb.

Some of the prostitutes say they do it to hide their identities because they are ashamed to be seen plying their trade, which they consider to be a sin. Others choose to fully cover themselves to avoid arrest because police can not distinguish them from non–working women.

But the switch to more modest attire has not been met with universal approval. Local women who are not engaged in sex work complain that they now feel there is nothing to distinguish them from prostitutes.

To these women I say, “Too bad!” Isn’t it bad enough for the prostitutes that they have to sell sex and risk their lives and health just so they can earn a living? I mean, give these poor women a break! Don’t you think it’s hard enough to go against the rules of tradition and religion in pursuit of a living? Now you’re unhappy because they dress like you? Come on! Maybe you hoity-toity women would prefer prostitutes to endure further humiliation in your conservative society by openly identifying themselves as sex workers.

But I am curious about how customers know who is a prostitute and who isn’t?

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Lessons From Katrina

I decided to give the first post of the day over to someone with more hands-on experience. Read on . . .

 

How to Destroy an African American City in
Thirty Three Steps – Lessons from Katrina
 
By Bill Quigley

 

Step One.  Delay. If there is one word that sums up the way to destroy an African-American city after a disaster, that word is DELAY. If you are in doubt about any of the following steps – just remember to delay and you will probably be doing the right thing.

Step Two. When a disaster is coming, do not arrange a public evacuation. Rely only on individual resources. People with cars and money for hotels will leave. The elderly, the disabled and the poor will not be able to leave. Most of those without cars – 25% of households of New Orleans, overwhelmingly African-Americans – will not be able to leave. Most of the working poor, overwhelmingly African-American, will not be able to leave. Many will then permanently accuse the victims who were left behind of creating their own human disaster because of their own poor planning. It is critical to start by having people blame the victims for their own problems.

Step Three. When the disaster hits, make certain the national response is overseen by someone who has no experience at all handling anything on a large scale, particularly disasters. In fact, you can even inject some humor into the response – have the disaster coordinator be someone whose last job was the head of a dancing horse association.

Step Four. Make sure that the President and national leaders remain aloof and only slightly concerned. This sends an important message to the rest of the country.

Step Five. Make certain the local, state, and national governments do not respond in a coordinated, effective way. This will create more chaos on the ground.

Step Six. Do not bring in food or water or communications right away. This will make everyone left behind more frantic and create incredible scenes for the media.

Step Seven. Make certain that the media focus of the disaster is not on the heroic community work of thousands of women, men and young people helping the elderly, the sick and the trapped survive, but mainly on acts of people looting. Also spread and repeat the rumors that people trapped on rooftops are shooting guns, not to attract attention and get help, but AT the helicopters. This will reinforce the message that “those people” left behind are different from the rest of us and are beyond help.

Step Eight. Refuse help from other countries. If we accept help, it looks like we cannot or choose not to handle this problem ourselves. This cannot be the message. The message we want to put out over and over is that we have plenty of resources and there is plenty of help. Then if people are not receiving help, it is their own fault. This should be done quietly.

Step Nine. Once the evacuation of those left behind actually starts, make sure people do not know where they are going or have any way to know where the rest of their family has gone. In fact, make sure that African-Americans end up much farther away from home than others.

Step Ten. Make sure that when government assistance finally has to be given out, it is given out in a totally arbitrary way. People will have lost their homes, jobs, churches, doctors, schools, neighbors and friends. Give them a little bit of money, but not too much. Make people dependent. Then cut off the money. Then give it to some and not others. Refuse to assist more than one person in every household. This will create conflicts where more than one generation live together. Make it impossible for people to get consistent answers to their questions. Long lines and busy phones will discourage people from looking for help.

Step Eleven. Insist the President suspend federal laws requiring living wages and affirmative action for contractors working on the disaster. While local workers are still displaced, import white workers from outside the city for the high-paying jobs like crane and bulldozer operators. Import Latino workers from outside the city for the low-paying dangerous jobs. Make sure to have elected officials, black and white, blame job problems on the lowest wage immigrant workers. This will create divisions between black and brown workers that can be exploited by those at the top. Because many of the brown workers do not have legal papers, those at the top will not have to worry about paying decent wages, providing health insurance, following safety laws, unemployment compensation, workers compensation, or union organizing. These become, essentially, disposable workers – use them, then lose them.

Step Twelve. Whatever you do, keep people away from their city for as long as possible. This is the key to long-term success in destroying the African-American city. Do not permit people to come home. Keep people guessing about what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. Set numerous deadlines and then break them. This will discourage people and make it increasingly difficult for people to return.

Step Thirteen. When you finally have to reopen the city, make sure to reopen the African-American sections last. This will aggravate racial tensions in the city and create conflicts between those who are able to make it home and those who are not.

Step Fourteen. When the big money is given out, make sure it is all directed to homeowners and not to renters. This is particularly helpful in a town like New Orleans that was majority African-American and majority renter. Then, after you have excluded renters, mess up the program for the homeowners so that they must wait for years to get money to fix their homes.

Step Fifteen. Close down all the public schools for months. This will prevent families with children in the public school system, overwhelmingly African-Americans, from coming home.

Step Sixteen. Fire all the public school teachers, teacher aides, cafeteria workers and bus drivers and de-certify the teachers union – the largest in the state. This will primarily hurt middle class African Americans and make them look for jobs elsewhere.

Step Seventeen. Even better, take this opportunity to flip the public school system into a charter system and push foundations and the government for extra money to the new charter schools. Give the schools with the best test scores away first. Then give the least flooded schools away next. Turn 70% of schools into charters so that the kids with good test scores or solid parental involvement will go to the charters. That way, the kids with average scores, or learning disabilities, or single parent families, who are still displaced, are kept segregated away from the “good” kids. You will have to set up a few schools for those other kids, but make sure those schools do not get any extra money, do not have libraries, nor doors on the toilets, nor enough teachers. In fact, because of this, you better make certain there are more security guards than teachers.

Step Eighteen. Let the market do what it does best. When rent goes up 70%, say there is nothing we can do about it. This will have two great results: it will keep many former residents away from the city and it will make landlords happy. If wages go up, immediately import more outside workers and wages will settle down.

Step Nineteen. Make sure all the predominately white suburbs surrounding the African-American city make it very difficult for the people displaced from the city to return to the metro area. Have one suburb refuse to allow any new subsidized housing at all. Have the Sheriff of another threaten to stop and investigate anyone wearing dreadlocks. Throw in a little humor and have one nearly all-white suburb pass a law that makes it illegal for homeowners to rent to people other than their blood relatives! The courts may strike these down, but it will take time and the message will be clear – do not think about returning to the suburbs.

Step Twenty. Reduce public transportation by more than 80%. The people without cars will understand the message.

Step Twenty-One. Keep affordable housing to a minimum. Instead, use the money to reopen the Superdome and create tourism campaigns. Refuse to boldly create massive homeownership opportunities for former renters. Delay re-opening apartment complexes in African American neighborhoods. As long as less than half the renters can return to affordable housing, they will not return.

Step Twenty-Two. Keep all public housing closed. Since it is 100% African-American, this is a no-brainer. Make sure to have African-Americans be the people who deliver the message. This step will also help by putting more pressure on the rental market, as 5000 more families will then have to compete for rental housing with low-income workers. This will provide another opportunity for hundreds of millions of government funds to be funneled to corporations when these buildings are torn down and developers can build up other less-secure buildings in their place. Make sure to tell the 5000 families evicted from public housing that you are not letting them back for their own good. Tell them you are trying to save them from living in a segregated neighborhood. This will also send a good signal – if the government can refuse to allow people back, private concerns are free to do the same or worse.

Step Twenty-Three. Shut down as much public health as possible. Sick and elderly people and moms with little kids need access to public healthcare. Keep the public hospital, which hosted about 350,000 visits a year before the disaster, closed. Keep the neighborhood clinics closed. Put all the pressure on the private healthcare facilities and provoke economic and racial tensions there between the insured and uninsured.

Step Twenty-Four. Close as many public mental healthcare providers as possible. The trauma of the disaster will seriously increase stress on everyone. Left untreated, medical experts tell us this will dramatically increase domestic violence, self-medication and drug and alcohol abuse and, of course, crime.

Step Twenty-Five. Keep the city environment unfriendly to women. Women were already widely discriminated against before the storm. Make sure that you do not reopen day care centers. This, combined with the lack of healthcare, lack of affordable housing, and lack of transportation, will keep moms with kids away. If you can keep women with kids away, the city will destroy itself.

Step Twenty-Six. Create and maintain an environment where black on black crime will flourish. As long as you can keep parents out of town, keep the schools hostile to kids without parents, keep public healthcare closed, make only low-paying jobs available, not fund social workers or prosecutors or public defenders or police, and keep chaos the norm, young black men will certainly kill other young black men. To increase the visibility of the crime problem, bring in the National Guard in fatigues to patrol the streets in their camouflage hummers.

Step Twenty-Seven. Strip the local elected, predominately African American government of its powers. Make certain the money that is coming in to fix up the region is not under their control. Privatize as much as you can as quickly as you can – housing, healthcare, and education for starters. When in doubt, privatize. Create an appointed commission of people who have no experience in government to make all the decisions. In fact, it is better to create several such commissions; that way, no one will really be sure who is in charge and there will be much more delay and conflict. Treat the local people like they are stupid; you know what is best for them much better than they do.

Step Twenty-Eight. Create lots of planning processes but give them no authority. Overlap them where possible. Give people conflicting signals whether their neighborhood will be allowed to rebuild or be turned into green space. This will create confusion, conflict and aggravation. People will blame the officials closest to them – the local African-American officials, even though they do not have any authority to do anything about these plans, since they do not control the rebuilding money.

Step Twenty-Nine. Hold an election but make it very difficult for displaced voters to participate. In fact, do not allow any voting in any place outside the state, even though we do it for Americans in other countries and even though hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced. This is very important because when people are not able to vote, those who have been able to return can say, “Well, they didn’t even vote, so I guess they are not interested in returning.”

Step Thirty. Get the elected officials out of the way and make room for corporations to make a profit. There are billions to be made in this process for well-connected national and international corporations. There is so much chaos that no one will be able to figure out, for a long time, exactly where the money went. There is no real attempt to make sure that local businesses, especially African-American businesses, get contracts – at best they get modest subcontracts from the corporations that got the big money. Make sure the authorities prosecute a couple of little people who ripped off $2,000 – that will temporarily satisfy people who know they are being ripped off and divert attention from the big money rip-offs. This will also provide another opportunity to blame the victims – as critics can say, “Well, we gave them lots of money, they must have wasted it, how much more can they expect from us?”

Step Thirty One. Keep people’s attention diverted from the African-American city. Pour money into Iraq instead of the Gulf Coast . Corporations have figured out how to make big bucks whether we are winning or losing the war. It is easier to convince the country to support war – support for cities is much, much tougher. When the war goes badly, you can change the focus of the message to supporting the troops. Everyone loves the troops. No one can say we all love African-Americans. Focus on terrorists – that always seems to work.

Step Thirty-Two. Refuse to talk about or look seriously at race. Condemn anyone who dares to challenge the racism of what is going on – accuse them of “playing the race card” or say they are paranoid. Criticize people who challenge the exclusion of African-Americans as people who “just want to go back to the bad old days.” Repeat the message that you want something better for everyone. Use African American spokespersons where possible.

Step Thirty-Three. Repeat these steps.

Note to readers: Every fact in this list actually happened and continues to happen in New Orleans, after Katrina.

Bill Quigley is a law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977 and has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. He has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years.

This column was originally published on the Black Commentator.

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We made our bed so now we have to lie in it.

In the past week, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by chief justice and Bush appointee John Roberts, capped off a general rightward swing by ruling 5–4 against several progressive issues once thought sacrosanct. The result of this rightward swing is that the court ruled in favor of conservatives twice as often as it ruled against them. 

Among the major decisions handed down by the court was one stating that it was unconstitutional to use race as the basis of school diversity and integration programs. Critics and opponents of the decision say it will reverse decades of progress in desegrating public schools.

The court also upheld a nationwide ban on late-term abortions, thereby throwing a bone to the anti-choice elements that form the basis of George Bush’s presidency and possibly paving the way for an all-out ban on all abortions. After all, the reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the U.S. has been a major goal of the pro-life movement.

Free speech was another casualty of the new Supreme Court. Well, free speech for students anyway. In a 5–4 decision, the court ruled against free speech for students in the “Bong hits 4 Jesus” case. At the same time, the court ruled that the restrictions placed on corporations and unions running last-minute election campaign advertisements on television would seriously limit political speech. The restrictions had been introduced in 2002 after passage of the McCain-Feingold campain finance law. So, I guess free speech is for corporations but not students.

Certainly, not everyone is as troubled by these decisions or the court’s general shift to the right. On the contrary, many people—especially the die-hard conservatives who voted for George Bush—are quite pleased with these decisions.

The rest of us, however, are now stuck with a right-wing court with two of the most conservative judges aged 52 and 57. Justice Stephen Breyer is right to say, in a dissenting opinion, that “It is not often that so few have so quickly changed so much.”

I shudder to think about what else they’ll change over the remainder of their terms on the court.

Oh, did I mention these guys are appointed for life?

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Prison Spending to Outpace Education Spending in California.

“Nothing predicts future success better than a good education, and nothing guarantees failure more than the lack of one.”

Despite the irrefutability of the above statement, the state of California is projected to increase spending on construction of new prisons and correctional facilities by nine percent annually over the next five years. In this same period, the state is projected to increase spending on higher education by only five percent annually.

When you think about how many kids drop out of school and how many of these kids (especially the poor White, Black, and Latino ones) end up in prison, it’s astounding that anybody would even contemplate spending less on schools than on prisons. I’d love to see a study counting the number of people in jails and prisons around the countries who hold high school diplomas versus Associates, Bachelors, and Masters degrees. I bet that as education increases, the likelihood of incarceration decreases and I bet there are many more high school dropouts in prison than M.A. or Ph.D. holders.

If our society were genuinely concerned about ensuring that people do well enough to not wind up in prison, we would spend a lot less on correctional facilities and more on education and educational programs that reduce dropout rates and make sure more and more kids can go to college.

But if we did that, who would do our dirty, dangerous and low-wage work? And who would fill our private prisons and line the pockets of the “entrepreneurs” who captain the prison industrial complex?

I got the link to this story from PEN Weekly NewsBlast.

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The U.S. has always benefited from low-skill, low-wage labor.

In January 2004, the White House issued a fact sheet in which it stated that “illegal immigration . . . creates an underclass of workers . . . vulnerable to exploitation.” Despite the rhetoric, the fact remains that our society has always depended on an underclass of workers vulnerable to exploitation.

From indentured European servants to African slaves to Chinese railroad workers to Braceros  to the Italian, Polish, and Irish immigrants who flocked to East Coast cities at the turn of the last century, the U.S. has always been a willing recepient of the “huddled masses” of the world. And these poor immigrants have always taken work that was too dangerous, too dirty, or didn’t pay enough for American citizens.

Immigrants have served the U.S. with their labor in the military, agriculture, manufacturing, domestic work and other low-wage, low-skill work. The U.S. in turn has always rewarded these hard-working people with citizenship, granting them the right to full participation in our society.

Today’s immigrants are no different. They risk their lives to come to the U.S. to seek a shot at a better life. They work hard at jobs most Americans would never take. They harvest our food, clean our homes, raise our children, build our condos, repair our roads and they deserve to be rewarded for their hard work. They keep coming because we keep hiring them, because we need them.

We need to do right by these people and fight to make sure they are given the right to live and participate fully in our society.

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Starbucks deal with Ethiopian gov’t may put more money in coffee growers’ hands!!!

Starbucks, the largest coffee retailer in the world, has given in to pressure from fair trade advocates and the Ethiopian government!

“A licensing deal between coffee giant Starbucks and the East-African country of Ethiopia is expected to be completed this month that could bring in millions of dollars for Ethiopian coffee farmers.”

Read full report here.

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The real cost of coffee.

The BBC just did a documentary on coffee, following coffee beans from the farm to the mug.

 Listen to the whole program here.

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Conservatism has failed wherever it has been tried.

Rush Limbaugh, a well-known American radio talk-show host, is fond of saying that conservatism has succeeded wherever it has been tried. But since conservatism is rooted in a reluctance or outright unwillingness to change the existing order, can anyone truly argue this to be the case? After all, as human society progresses towards greater rights and protections for more and more people, conservatism has been characterized more by failures rather than successes.

The premise behind conservatism is simple. Conservatives prefer things to stay the way they are, believing the status quo to be better than any possible or potential system. In extreme cases, some “conservatives” even seek to revert to a previously existing order but, since reactionaries are not necessarily the same as conservatives, we’ll focus on conservatism and leave reactionism for another day.

Historically, conservativism has lost out because things do not stay the way they are. At every stage of human history, some people have looked forward to a better, fairer, and more inclusive world while conservatives have preferred to keep things the way they are. During the colonial period, conservatives wanted to preserve the status quo, i.e., British rule. In the 1860s, conservatives opposed the abolition of slavery. In the early part of the 20th Century, conservatives opposed giving women the right to vote. During the Great Depression, conservatives opposed the social programs of the New Deal. In the 1960s, conservatives opposed civil rights and equal rights legislation. And today, conservatives have come out against expanding federal hate crimes legislation.

Internationally, there is a similar pattern. In 1980s South Africa, conservatives were the most vocal supporters of Apartheid.

In every one of these cases, however, conservatives have lost. People have listened to their hearts and chosen progress over stagnation. Little by little, progressive ideas are being adopted by more and more people. How many people today can say that women shouldn’t have equality under the law or the right to vote? How many people today advocate the segregationst policy of “separate but equal“?

Certainly there are still many battles to be fought. At every step in human society’s advance towards a more just world, conservatives have popped up and argued for a halt to progress, warning mankind of the dire consequences of progressive ideas. Today, some people continue to openly make disparaging and dismissive remarks about Black people, women, and immigrants. Gay people are still denied many rights and benefits enjoyed by heterosexuals and ostracized by many religious groups. Poor people and minorities are over-represented on death rows across the country. In many places, it is becoming harder for a woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Millions of immigrants still languish in legal limbo, victimized many times over by ruthless coyotes, unscrupulous employers, domestic hate groups, and an overzealously punitive government policy of detentions and deportations.

But all in all, there is cause for optimism. Human society has never stayed stagnant and the status quo is always under challenge. Progress is inevitable. Today, abortion is illegal in only three European countries while the U.S. is the only industrialized country that enforces the death penalty and women in most countries have the right to go to school and vote.

As progressive ideas become more mainstream, conservatives are constantly being forced to back up, draw another line in the sand and say, “OK, but you’re definitely not crossing this one.” Thanks to progressives, today’s world is very different from what it was a hundred years ago. And much better too. How many of today’s people would rather live in the world as it was in the past? How many women would rather live in 1900? How many Black Americans would like to go back to 1850? Very few, I’d imagine because, thanks to progressive policies, the world today is a safer and fairer place, especially for women and minorities. Fifty years from now, gay and lesbian Americans might look back with horror and shame on a country in which most states barred them from getting married or having/raising children. If progressive policies win the day in the next half-century, how many gay Americans would prefer to live in today’s America, which denies them so much?

The fundamental irony about conservatism is that change is the only thing that remains constant in human society. Looking back on a human history characterized by  progressive change, and with progressive ideas becoming more and more mainstream, how can conservatives honestly claim to be winning?

Full disclosure: In my late teens, I shared a workplace with some Limbaugh fans so I have listened to many, many hours of right-wing radio.

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Buchanan redux . . .

Quoted from:

FAIR Report:
PATRICK BUCHANAN — IN HIS OWN WORDS
February 26, 1996

“In the flap over Larry Pratt and other unsavory characters associated with the Patrick Buchanan campaign, journalists typically framed the question: Is Buchanan linked to extremists and bigots?  But there is a more basic question journalists should ask: Is Patrick Buchanan himself an extremist and bigot?”

Here’s a taste of what’s contained in the report: 

White House advisor Buchanan urged President Nixon in an April 1969 memo not to visit “the Widow King” on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, warning that a visit would “outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse…. Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.” (New York Daily News, 10/1/90).

On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: “There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.” (Right from the Beginning, Buchanan’s 1988 autobiography, p. 131).

Trying to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the notion that “white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong.  Where did we get that idea?  The Founding Fathers did not believe this” (syndicated column, 2/7/90). He referred admiringly to the apartheid regime as the “Boer Republic”: “Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin her with sanctions?” (syndicated column, 9/17/89).

Writing of “group fantasies of martyrdom,” Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.” (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan’s columns have run in the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.

In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan declared: “Our culture is superior.  Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.” (ADL Report, 1994).

Read the full report (and see Pat Buchanan’s musings on Black people, Jews, Anti-Semitism, Homosexuals, and Immigrants) at: http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/buchanan.html

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