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Sunday, April 27, 2019
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
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Biden Beats Trump by 8 Points? Poppycock.
BY TYLER O'NEIL
President-elect Donald J. Trump shakes hands with Vice President Joe Biden as he arrives for his inauguration on January 20, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Trump becomes the 45th President of the United States. Photo by Pat Benic/UPI - NO WIRE SERVICE- Photo by: Pat Benic/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president in 2020. The latest Morning Consult/Politico poll puts him eight points ahead of President Donald Trump, but that's no reason for Biden to start celebrating. Polls this early into a presidential race have almost no bearing on the final results of the election.
The poll, conducted between April 19 and April 21 among nearly 2,000 registered voters, found Biden with 42 percent against Trump's 34 percent. This poll may show Biden's strength at this point in the race, but 19 months is a long time, and Biden may not even be the Democratic candidate in November 2020. (He leads among Democrats now, but that is very likely to change.)
As John Merline over at Issues & Insights pointed out, at this point in the 1984 presidential election, astronaut and Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) was handily beating President Ronald Reagan. According to The New York Times, Glenn led Reagan, 54 percent to 37 percent. The eventual Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, also beat Reagan, 49 percent to 43 percent, in July 1983.
Those polls were more than reversed in the general election of November 1984. Reagan cruised to re-election with almost 59 percent of the vote, winning every state except Mondale's home state of Minnesota. His 525-electoral-vote victory remains the second greatest landslide in American history, behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 — not counting George Washington's unanimous wins in 1789 and 1792.
In March 2003, a Quinnipiac poll found that an unnamed Democratic candidate would beat incumbent President George W. Bush, 48 percent to 44 percent. Bush beat Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), 50.7 percent to 48.3 percent in November 2004.
Even President Trump's current low approval rating does not bode ill for 2020. "There are several examples when presidents who had nationwide approval ratings in the 40% range in the year before the election won a second term, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama," Gallup's Jeffery Jones reported. "All managed to get to 50% approval by the time of the presidential election."
Trump's nationwide approval in Gallup's poll, 45 percent, is identical to Barack Obama's approval rating at this time in his presidency. Reagan's approval rating at this point in the 1984 election was lower than Trump's is now, and Clinton's approval rating at this point in the 1996 election was only two points above Trump's current score.
None of this guarantees a Trump win, of course, but it should remind political prognosticators to hesitate before reading too much into a poll this early in a presidential election. The Drudge Report headline screamed the news of this pro-Biden poll, but Uncle Joe is far from a done deal — even if he beats the other Democrats.
President Trump to the NRA: ‘Second Amendment Is Not Going Anywhere’
AWR HAWKINS
President Trump addressed the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum, where he said, “The Second Amendment is not going anywhere.”
He looked out at the thousands in attendance and said, “You are great American patriots.”
Trump warned, “Democrats want to take away your guns.” He explained that Democrats are talking about “banning new guns and confiscating existing guns from law-abiding citizens.”
Breitbart News reported that Democrat presidential hopeful Eric Swalwell is campaigning on banning “assault weapons” and forcing current owners to surrender the guns to government via a buyback. Democrat hopeful Kamala Harris is campaigning on using executive orders to secure more gun control, should she win.
Trump observed that Democrats fail to understand that “the bad guys aren’t giving up their guns.” Then he smiled and said, “[And] you’re not going to be giving up your guns either.”
Trump said, “We know that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Trump said, “We believe in the right to self-defense and the right to protect your family, your community, and your loved ones.” He added, “We believe in the right to keep and bear arms.” And he noted, “We will always protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
Bernie Sanders set off a firestorm over prisoners voting, but his facts are straight
In comments that flooded national headlines, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Monday night that he believes all prisoners — including "terrible people" like the Boston Marathon bomber — should be allowed to vote. He said people serving time, no matter how serious their offense, deserve enfranchisement.
"I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy," Sanders said. "Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say that person committed a terrible crime, not gonna let him vote, or that person did that, not gonna let that person vote — you’re running down a slippery slope."
The debate over whether released felons should vote was at the center of recent election in Florida. "When they get out of jail, they certainly should have the right to vote," Sanders said this week. "I do believe that even if they are in jail, they’re paying their price to society, but that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy."
Sanders said this ideal has been the reality in Vermont since the state’s founding. "In my own state of Vermont, from the very first days of our state’s history, what our Constitution says is that everybody can vote," he said. "That is true. So people in jail can vote."
It’s certainly true that all of Vermont’s prisoners currently enjoy the right to vote, but has that been true since day 1 of the state’s founding? The Sanders camp said it could not immediately reply to questions about the candidate’s claim.
Vermont is one of just two states, the other being Maine, where prisoners currently have the right to vote. The Burlington Free Press described Vermont’s prison voting system in an article following on Sanders’ remarks. Even prisoners being held out-of-state in Mississippi are given the opportunity to cast ballots in their most recent "voluntary" address back home.
Dylan Lynch, a policy associate from the National Conference on State Legislatures, noted that four other states introduced legislation this year that would allow people to vote while incarcerated for a felony. In Connecticut, the measure failed, but in Louisiana, Massachusetts and New Jersey, bills are still pending.
It’s also true that Vermont has allowed incarcerated people to vote since its founding. Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos confirmed that incarcerated Vermonters have "never had their right to vote taken away during incarceration."
In the 1790s, the Vermont Legislature tried to outlaw inmate voting, but it was overruled in a 1799 decision by the Council of Censors, a "now-defunct fourth branch of government that met every seven years to decide constitutional questions," according to a 2008 Associated Press story. Vermont’s 1793 Constitution was interpreted to mean that the loss of voting rights could only occur in response to voter fraud. That case was cited as precedent as recently as the 1980s, in the most recent attempt to outlaw inmate voting in Vermont.
Vermont’s current Constitution states that every person who is 18 years old and a citizen of the United States, "having resided in this State for the period established by the General Assembly and who is of a quiet and peaceable behavior … shall be entitled to all the privileges of a voter of this state."
Sean Morales-Doyle, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute, said there are certain phrases about voting that are common in state Constitutions, but that being of "quiet and peaceable behavior" is not one of them, making it difficult to know exactly what it means. But he said specific laws around inmate voting, as opposed to the language in state constitutions, often decided whether prisoners can cast ballots.
Morales-Doyle said the timing of when disenfranchisement for prisoners was codified in states’ laws is far from random. Before the passage of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing men the right to vote regardless of race, Morales-Doyle said very few states bothered to disenfranchise prisoners. But after the amendment passed, he said there was a wave of states that passed laws or amendments to take away prisoners’ right to vote.
He said the fact that 48 states still don’t allow incarcerated people to vote is unquestionably a relic of Jim Crow-era laws. But, Morales-Doyle said, after Florida’s 2018 vote to enfranchise felons who have completed their sentences, there has been an increased interest in efforts to return voting rights to people across the criminal justice system.
In Vermont, though, even having total enfranchisement for prisoners still leaves a narrower field of voters than there once was. Peter Teachout, a professor at Vermont Law School, said from 1777 to 1824, the state was "so hungry for voters" that even non-U.S. citizens had the right to vote in Vermont. (Vermont’s capital city voted last year to allow non-citizens to vote once again, a charter change now being debated in the state Legislature.)
The question that cannot be answered is whether Vermont’s prisoners actually employed their Constitutional rights throughout history. Condos said the state doesn’t track how many incarcerated Vermonters vote. Rather, they appear on the voter checklist in the same manner as all other voters. Condos said there’s very little evidence to suggest inmates in Vermont institutions were historically able to exercise that right.
"That doesn’t mean it’s not the case, only that we have yet to find any evidence of it," Condos said. "Voting is the bedrock of our democracy, and we have worked hard to ensure that we’re breaking down barriers for eligible voters to register and cast their ballots."
Our ruling
Sanders said: "In my own state of Vermont, from the very first days of our state’s history, what our Constitution says is that everybody can vote. That is true. So people in jail can vote."
It’s true that Vermont felons can vote from prison today, and we can’t find anything to suggest that hasn’t always been the case in the state. Though it seems quite possible that the efforts being made today to allow them to cast ballots hasn’t always been made.
The Vermont Constitution requires people to be of "quiet and peaceable behavior," but otherwise places no restrictions on who can vote. And Sanders said prisoners "can" vote, not that they always have voted.
We rate this claim True.
Warren Condemns ‘Obscene’ Profiting off Students, Charged $430,000 To Teach for 1 Year
Warren Condemns ‘Obscene’ Profiting off Students, Charged $430,000 To Teach for 1 Year
The
BY C. DOUGLAS GOLDEN
BY C. DOUGLAS GOLDEN
If Elizabeth Warren wants to solve student loan debt, I have one small way she can contribute to it. She probably won’t like it, though.
If you haven’t been paying attention to the Massachusetts senator’s campaign, you might have missed the fact that she’s made canceling student debt a major part of her platform. She has proposed eliminating up to $50,000 of debt for households earning less than $100,000, on top of a proposal to make all public colleges tuition-free.
She proposes to pay through this through a wealth tax — colloquially referred to by her campaign as an “ultra-millionaire tax” — which would tax households worth more than $50 million at 2 percent per year for every dollar over that amount; households worth more than $1 billion would be taxed at 3 percent marginally for every dollar over that amount.
“For two cents on the dollar, we could pay for universal child care, universal pre-K, universal college and knock back the student loan debt burden for about 43 million Americans and still have nearly, just short, of $1 trillion leftover,” Warren told CNN.
“It tells you how badly out of whack our economy is right now.”
TRENDING:
Forget that her numbers on the plan are dodgy or that she’s targeting the group of people who are most easily able to cloak or move their wealth to avoid taxes. When it comes to education, it doesn’t address the root problem: The fact that the cost structure of education is profoundly inflated by treating government and private loans as “free money” without any impetus to restrain the price tag.
Warren has long insisted that the government is partially responsible because it profits off of student loans. Back in 2013, for instance, she called this profit “obscene.”
“Instead of helping our students, the government is making a profit on student loans,” Warren said during a speech before a conference that skewed young, according to the Huffington Post.
“That is wrong. It is morally wrong. That is obscene.
“The government should not be making profits off the backs of our students,” she added. “Period.”
Those students booed at the government profiting off of the loans. If only they knew how the speaker was profiting off of them.
You may recall that Warren was a law professor at Harvard University. You may not recall how well she was remunerated for her work in that position.
“Even though she has outlined a plan for “debt-free college,” Warren made a salary of $430,000 from Harvard,” Lisa Boothe wrote in the Washington Examiner back in 2016.
“Also, according to CNN Money, the vast bulk of her wealth is held in mutual funds with ‘TIAA-CREF, a financial services company that provides retirement services to universities.’ Investing in the fund offers Warren ‘three guarantees: you’ll never lose your principal, you’ll always get a minimum interest rate and you’ll receive a lifetime income stream.'”
Boothe was attacking Warren at the time for fomenting class warfare while simultaneously being extraordinarily wealthy. Beyond that, though, there’s the deeper problem of Warren earning nearly half a million dollars a year from Harvard.
The reason we’re even talking about this is that higher education doesn’t really try to contain costs — or, when they do so, they aren’t all that successful. Between 1985 and 2011, while inflation was a cumulative 114.85 percent, college inflation clocked in at 498.49 percent.
Costs are clearly out of control, which is why it’s arrant hypocrisy to see a candidate who was taking home $430,000 a year from an institution of higher education talking about the “obscenity” of government profiting from student loans. She’s grabbing for cash at the same time she’s condemning cash-grabbers in government.
To be fair, I think a good case could be made that neither is a desirable state of affairs, but it’s not as if the Massachusetts senator has a leg to stand on here.
If Warren was serious about stopping crippling student debt, the first thing she could do is encourage institutions of higher education to contain their costs. Instead, she’s forgiving student debt and instead passing the cost on to “ultra-millionaires” — though good luck extracting everything she needs to pay for her sweeping plan of free stuff. Which means, of course, more free money for universities, which means more tuition hyper-inflation.
It’s like the circle of life, except redesigned to impose crushing burdens on those just starting out in life. If it’s not student debt they’ll be paying for, they’re going to be on the hook for the federal debt. Neither is going to be a palatable option.
POTUS teases bombshell ‘coup’ revelations: ‘We’re gonna be seeing a lot that people haven’t seen’
By Jon Dougherty
During a press conference Friday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, POTUS Donald Trump teased that new revelations regarding the deep state coup attempt against him by the Obama regime are coming “in a few weeks.”
In response to a question from a reporter about his earlier “coup” comments, the president hinted strongly that new details that have yet to be released to the public are forthcoming “in a few weeks.”
“Oh, I think absolutely,” POTUS said when asked if ‘coup’ is an accurate description of what has taken place regarding events that have occurred up to this point including the recently completed special counsel investigation and revelations regarding key FBI and Justice Department figures.
“If you look at what’s been happening and all the things you’ve been seeing with the ‘insurance policy’ statement from two [FBI] agents that are now gone [Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page], if you look at many of the elements of intrigue and…frankly, we’re going to be seeing a lot over the next couple of weeks, things that a lot of people haven’t seen.”
Continuing, POTUS noted, “What took place here was a very, very terrible situation. How this whole, ridiculous, $35 million, unlimited personnel [Mueller probe]…how this all started, I think, you will find of great interest.
“Most of you know the answer to it anyway,” the president said to reporters — which, of course, is precisely right. “The fair press, the good press, really, the people that know what they’re doing, or that people that are, indeed, fair, they know the answer to it.
“So, uh, we’re gonna see, it’s going to be very interesting,” the president added. “What took place over the past two years, and really before that…in all fairness to Robert Mueller, things happened long before he even started.
“What took place is a disgrace to our country.”
Watch:
On Friday, we reported that POTUS Trump has confirmed to Fox News host and friend Sean Hannity that he plans to declassify FISA warrant applications and other related documents that the Obama co-conspirators filed with the court; these documents, some believe, contain fraudulent information in order to obtain a counterintelligence surveillance warrant under false pretenses, a felony — and gross violations of the law and the Constitution.
When asked by Hannity on Thursday if he planned to declassify the FISA court documents, the president promptly answered, “Yes.”
“Yes. Everything is gonna be declassified and more — much more than what you just mentioned — it will all be declassified,” the president said, adding, “And I’m glad I waited because I thought that maybe they would obstruct if I did it early and I think I was right, so I’m glad I waited and now the Attorney General can take a very strong look at whatever it is.
POTUS continued, “It will be declassified and more than what you just mentioned.”
Additionally, we noted that insider and former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova, who was once considered as a White House counsel to POTUS Trump, also said additional information that most Americans have not yet heard about is coming over the next few weeks as investigations wrap up.
One of them involves fired FBI Director James Comey.
“This is pretty simple stuff for career prosecutors like Rudy [Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer] and myself. It has been evident since day one that there has been a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton illegally and then if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump,” said diGenova.
“This dossier was a knowing part of that. It was created by Hillary Clinton. It was created knowingly by John Brennan as part of a scheme to do everything they could to harm Donald Trump. The problem for Brennan and [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and Comey and [former FBI lawyer James] Baker and all of them now is the FISA Court has already communicated with the Justice Department about its findings,” he continued.
Specifically, diGenova indicated that judges on the FISA court who may have been involved in approving the counterintelligence surveillance on onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — and who were duped into granting the warrant based on the very bogus “Russia dossier” — have been in contact with Attorney General William Barr’s office.
“And their findings are that for more than four years before the election of Donald Trump there was an illegal spying operation going on by FBI contractors, four of them, to steal information on Americans and to use it against the Republican Party,” diGenova said, in revealing something that few people outside of the inner Trump circle were aware of.
“There are going to be indictments. There are going to be grand juries. John Brennan is not going to need one lawyer. He’s going to need five,” he added.
Then diGenova dropped this bomb:
The [DoJ Inspector General Michael] Horowitz report is coming out in May or early June. There’s another report that everyone has forgotten about involving James Comey alone. That will be out in two weeks.
That report is going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note and there are going to be criminal referrals in it.
These revelations also come on the heels of criminal referrals from House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes to Attorney General William Barr.
Few in Congress have worked harder and more diligently than House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes to bring those who concocted “Spygate” and conspired in a coup attempt to oust POTUS Donald Trump.
In recent weeks, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has been teasing that he was preparing a number of criminal referrals for the Trump Justice Department involving Deep State figures allegedly tied to Spygate.
Biden’s Presidential Bid Puts Spotlight on Spygate Scandal
Joe Biden’s April 25 announcement that he is running for president has raised questions about what he knew about the spying on the Trump campaign as vice president under the Obama administration
During the 2016 elections, officials within the Obama administration—including those at the Cabinet level—spied on the Trump campaign in a number of ways.
The known methods of spying include the FBI’s FISA warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the unmasking of members of the Trump campaign by Obama officials Susan Rice and Samantha Power, informant Stefan Halper, national security letters, and foreign intelligence gathering.
The spying on the Trump campaign is currently under investigation by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Attorney General William Barr has said he is personally looking into the matter as well.
“[Joe Biden] was vice president and presided over the biggest political scandal in history,” Jason Meister, an advisory board member for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told The Epoch Times.
“High ranking Obama-Biden appointees used a phony dossier … to fraudulently obtain a warrant from the FISA court to wiretap, phone-tap, and email-tap Trump and his associates who were all private citizens.”
The dossier, which played a key role in the opening of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who has been credited with creating the dossier, alongside Glenn Simpson, co-founder of political research firm Fusion GPS, spread it to members of the media and Congress, as well as the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department.
A nearly two-year-long investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, concluded in March, showed that there was no evidence to support the claims contained in the dossier.
“What did [Biden] know? He was vice president, did he know anything of what was going on?” Meister asked. “That is a big cloud over candidate Joe Biden.”
Marc Ruskin, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a 27-year veteran of the FBI, believes it is highly unlikely that the Obama White House wasn’t aware of the investigations into the Trump campaign.
“I can’t imagine a set of parameters or circumstances where the director of the FBI, or the director of intelligence services, would have restrained themselves and not informed the White House,” Ruskin told The Epoch Times.
Ruskin said that “a very strong argument could be made that the White House, at the very least, was aware of what was going on, and perhaps complicit, and this is why a thorough investigation needs to be conducted.”
Key questions remain about the investigation: Why was the FBI using false information paid for by a political candidate to investigate an opposing candidate, what role did unofficial foreign intelligence play in the investigation, and did then-President Barack Obama have any direct involvement himself?
Meister said: “We need to know, what did Obama know and when did he know it? Was Obama authorizing the spying?”
A key player in starting the investigation into the Trump campaign was Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who has acknowledged in public interviews and in congressional testimony that the agency had obtained unofficial foreign intelligence on the Trump campaign, which Brennan then passed on to the FBI.
“You have a mix of intelligence officer chiefs, such as Brennan, [James] Clapper, and [James] Comey, participating along with officials who are political officials. They really shouldn’t,” Ruskin said.
“In my experience, intelligence officers in the intelligence services and special agents in the FBI abhor this type of activity, the fact that their leaders were engaging with essentially politically motivated behavior.”
The Essence Of Evil: Sex With Children Has Become Big Business In America
This is America’s dirty little secret.
By John Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute
The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in Americ...
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“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Children, young girls – some as young as 9 years old – are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.
This is America’s dirty little secret.
Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”
According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,”said prosecutor Krishna Patel.
This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves.
They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.
In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.
For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.
No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.
Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“
“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”
Where did this appetite for young girls come from?
Look around you.
Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.
“All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”
In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.
While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:
Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”
What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”
Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”
This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”
A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.
Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.
Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.
Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.
So what can you do?
Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.
Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.
This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.
Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.
Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.
G’day…Ciao…
Helen and Moe Lauzier
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