Life, Love, and Liberty

As a prelude to a pro-prostitute post, I am posting a wonderful piece that details the horrific treatment of prostitutes. You can click on the word piece, and go to the page that I got it from.

Copyright 2001. American Revolutionary Vanguard. All rights reserved.

The Last Minority

Like chattel slavery and religious persecution, the mistreatment of prostitutes’ is an age-old practice rooted in the social structure of very ancient times. In earlier civilizations, women were literally bought and sold as property. Prostitutes were considered “used goods” in the same way as used cars and hand-me-down clothes in our own culture. The social position of prostitute women was further diminished by the membership of many of them in the slave classes. Women who entered prostitution voluntarily were considered an affront and a danger to male authority. Historically, prostitutes have been flogged, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, exiled and executed.

Contemporary American anti-prostitute laws are rooted in the “eugenics” beliefs and practices adopted by many physicians in the late nineteenth century. The goal of the eugenics movement was to eliminate birth defects, venereal diseases and persons regarded as sexual deviates by means of castration, clitoridectomy, sterilization, electric shock, criminalization and imprisonment. Targets included homosexuals, orphaned children, the mentally handicapped and prostitutes. Many of the laws enacted during this time remain on the books today.

Nearly a thousand arrests are made in the Richmond area each year for solicitation, prostitution and sodomy. Richmond’s prostitute population includes both males and females. Most of them come from the poorer classes. The majority are African-American. Many are single parents. Many are addicted to drugs. All of them practice prostitution as a means of supporting their habits, feeding their kids, paying the rent and surviving.

Hostility to prostitutes comes primarily from elite “civic” organizations, such as the Fan District Association, who view the presence of prostitutes on city streets as a threat to their own class position, property values, lifestyle interests and status of artificial superiority. Persecution of prostitutes is also a lucrative business for the police and the city administration. So-called “vice enforcement” is a source of employment for police. Cops are sometimes paid a bounty for every prostitute they drag in off the streets. Arrests for prostitution are a way for police to inflate arrest statistics in order to demand a larger budget. In many urban areas, prostitution enforcement is the single largest item in the police budget. Many cops use vice-related work as a means of career advancement. Former Richmond vice lieutenant Walter Allman was recently promoted to police captain. Prostitution cases also provide business for prosecutors and the city of Richmond generates nearly half a million dollars a year in revenue from fines collected from prostitutes.

Richmond prostitutes are frequently subjected to physical and sexual assault by vice cops. one member of the Richmond vice squad, Mark Williams, is a known sexual sadist. He once inflicted a brutal beating on a 43-year-old African American female prostitute who was subsequently hospitalized for four days. Williams has inflicted beatins on other prostitutes as well. Vice cops sometimes engage in sexual acts such as fellatio, fondling, disrobing and even vaginal penetration with prostitutes before arresting them. Other vice cops have engaged in drug use with prostitutes whom they subsequently arrested. Some Richmond vice cops and uniformed policemen alike accept bribes and sexual favors as a payment for looking the other way. Some cops have used prostitutes as a means of blackmailing rival members of the police force.

Vice enforcement often involves the sleaziest tactics imaginable. Vice agents use intrusive and degrading surveillance methods hoping to catch prostitutes “in the act” with their clients. Vice agents pretending to be “cruising” johns often take prostitutes to private locations and expose themselves and arrest the prostitute when she/he responds. Vice cops sit in local bars, drink and attempt to approach and entrap women known to be prostitutes. Surveillance cameras are sometimes hidden in the rooms of Richmond hotels known to be “hot spots” for prostitution.

Vice officials deliberately present fraudulent information to the media regarding HIV/AIDS rates among Richmond prostitutes. The vice squad has at times claimed that ninety-nine percent of Richmond prostitutes are HIV-positive and that the average prostitute in Richmond carries four or five venereal diseases. A check with the Department of Health will disprove these claims. Prostitutes are publicly scapegoated for AID by the Fan District Association. Privately, the association claims prostitutes are a threat to their property values.

The vice cops usually attempt to have prostitution cases heard under Judge Ralph B. Robertson who typically hands out jail terms five times greater than the Richmond norm. Robertson has at times denounced prostitutes from the bench as depraved AIDS carriers as a means of degrading and humiliating them. At the same time, Robertson looks the other way for prostitutes who are clients of attorneys who are friends of his. Robertson also covers up for vice cops who assault prostitutes by refusing to allow them to tell their side of the story in court.

Vice agents often solicit oral rather than vaginal sex from prostitutes. This way, the prostitute can be charged with sodomy, a felony. The felony charge is then used by prosecutors to gain legal leverage in plea bargain egotitations and to obtain parole and probation violations. Police refuse to investigate crimes committed against prositutes. One Richmond female prostitute was detained and interrogated after being harassed and threatened by a car load of aggressive young men. Signs throughout Richmond neighborhoods declare “Prostitute-Free Zones” just as signs proclaiming “Jew-Free Zones” were place in German neighborhoods sixty years ago.

Many prominent Richmond officials are involved in the persecution of prostitutes. Mayor Kaine provides the names of johns arrested for solicitation to the Fan District Association who then informs the family of the arrested person. This creates the potential for violent domestic conflict. Police Chief Jerry Oliver has publicly blamed prostitutes for the drug trade. Councilwoman Reva Trammell began her career by waging a bigoted harassment against prostitutes on Richmond’s south side. The Phillip Morris corporation provides fake employee identification cards to undercover vice agents. The Martin Agency and the Fan District Association have pressured the state government to raise prostitution from a misdemeanor to a felony.

The mistreatment of prostitutes is a crime against humanity. It is a crime every bit as heinous as racial and religious persecution or the abuse of children, the elderly or the handicapped. It should be recognized as such.

I pretty much started my former blog, and this subsequent website, with the intent of delivering fiery analysis on the horrors of U.S. government policy or American culture, yet it has grown into so much more for me. I’ve learned things about my writing style — assisted by the education I am receiving in my Creative Writing 1 class — that let me understand how I’d like to expand my writing experience. A lot of the writing I do is very logical or analytical , yet I’d like to do more expressive emotional work too.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t had passion or emotion in my writings on gay marriage, or the war in Iraq, but I’d like to engage in writing that is more creative than re-creative — to borrow a term from Rita Mae Brown — or, in other words: I want to write porn, inspiring fictional tales of intrigue, and other types of work that require me to create something new, rather than deal with the real world events that I make use of, after the fact.

I’ll still be sticking to the topics I’ve always wrote about on here, yet I do feel this urge to dramatically expand the content of the site.

“Regrettable Misjudgments”: The Shocking Immortality of Our
Constricted Thought by Arthur Silber

No Remembrance, No Remorse for the Fallen of Iraq by John Pilger

Stop the Lies, Stop the Funding, Stop the Genocide: STOP IT! by Arthur Silber

Voucher or School Choice? by Sheldon Richman

Szasz, Vindicated by Max Raskin

The American Dictatorship Institute by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The Goal is Freedom: Individualism, Collectivism, and Other Murky
Labels by Sheldon Richman

Wars to Watch Out For
2008 will bring us abundant crop of overseas crises by Justin Raimando

Rove New Newsweek columnist by The Onion

Tells it like it is:

First of all, I’m just amazed they can’t figure out, the Republicans are worried we can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where ya gonna get that money? You going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement. This bill would provide healthcare for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care. […]

But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.

Of course, this kind of reality check is not welcomed by everyone in the allegedly “anti- Iraq War” Congress, so Nancy Pelosi had to step in to offer the following:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rebuked a fellow San Francisco Bay-area liberal Friday for what she said were “inappropriate” comments about Iraq during a congressional debate.
During a debate on children’s health care Thursday, Rep. Pete Stark accused Republicans of sending troops to Iraq to “get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Condemnations rolled in from Republican politicians, right-leaning bloggers had a field day, and a White House spokesman declined to “dignify those remarks” with a response.

Pelosi issued a statement Friday evening rapping Stark, who is in his 18th term representing the liberal East Bay. He’s California’s longest-serving House members.

“While members of Congress are passionate about their views, what Congressman Stark said during the debate was inappropriate and distracted from the seriousness of the subject at hand—providing health care for America’s children,” Pelosi said.

I don’t think there are adequate words in the English language to describe how angry I am with the Democrats in Congress. They are complete partisans of the imperial project with only a few notable exceptions. And people will go to the polls in 2008 with the intent of voting for Clinton or Obama, or whichever militaristic candidate — and I’ll be pretty shocked if somebody like Kucinich gets it — gets the nomination. They will expect some kind of end to the slaughter and they will be entirely going about it the wrong way.

To any Democratic friends of peace reading this, please don’t vote at all, or if you must try to elect a Democrat, then choose somebody like Kucinich who has admirably stood up to the warfare state like virtually no other members of Congress have.

To the left-libertarians reading this, I know the guy is advocating government health insurance rather than something delightfully anarchistic like mutual aid societies combined with systemic overhaul, but he does let the Republicans know that being opposed to big government spending also means not starting trillion dollar wars.

And I do believe that stolen money is better spent insuring sick children living in the context of a statist tainted healthcare market rather than on killing Iraqis.

Compliments to the fiery Chris Floyd for alerting me to this story.

Rove New Newsweek Columnist

Newsweek magazine hired the president’s former deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, as a columnist last week. What do you think?

In The Know: Are America’s Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?

The next quarterly fundraising drive for Antiwar.com is upon us, so be sure to consider making a donation.

Also, for anyone wondering where the 70,000 dollars goes, it would be a good idea to take a look at the Who we Are part of the site. They have a list of advisors, researchers and other folks who might be paid for their efforts. I can’t verify it for you, so it’s just a speculation.

I am setting myself the goal of doing a minimum of one post a day. I have quite a few on the backburner, and some of them have been promised for awhile now. As long as I still have an interest in writing them, you’ll be treated to them.

Stay tuned!
 

Americans Announce They’re Dropping Out Of Presidential Race

WASHINGTON—Intense media coverage of trivial issues, partisan bickering, and the relentless exploitation of 9/11 discouraged Americans from making it to Election Day.

What is safety without freedom? It is the life of a man in a jail cell, free from the cares of the world, without responsibility and without choice.

If liberty is the price of safety, I don’t want to be safe. I want to be free.

- Burt Frazier

I couldn’t agree more.

Long live anarchy!