Another Bonehead US House of Representative from San Mateo County

11/30/07

What do you get when you cross a feminist researcher, who provided false information about prostitution with Evangelical Christians. Sprinkle liberally with bunch of cry baby x-hookers looking to profit of the criminalization of prostitution and wha la, you’ve got the Trafficking Victims Protection Ax, oops, I mean, Act.

Add in some bonehead US house of representative from San Mateo County
California who has the wrong idea about what the word progressive means and you have the sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act for 2007/11 that would mandate the FBI to investigate and charge under the Mann Act that all prostitution is in affect interstate commerce, which is potentially all prostitution or at least all prostitution as conducted on the internet. Previous versions of the TVPRA defined all commercial sex i.e. prostitutes, porn stars, webcam performers, exotic dancers and Asian massage parlor workers, as ‘victims of trafficking’, a form of forced labor at the federal level. And Mapping our industry, on behalf of the US govermemnt has been the passion of University of San Francisco Students and one of their professors who use hidden cameras to spy on workers regularly under the guise of rescuing them.

And not that the FBI would want to pass up a chance to fondle for free those who labor erotically like the all the local law enforcement agents has been getting away with since the criminalization of prostitution at the state level for the last 100 years. But the feds learned their lesson in 2001 while wiring taping the phones of Jeanette Maier, the New Orleans Madam. They missed the plot for the destruction of the world trade centers as it was being hatched on the other line, the one they weren’t listening to. Jeannette was called before congress to explain why the FBI thought that listening to her business was a matter of national security.

The TVPA was the first brain child of Bush administration. It was no a brainier, everyone hates forced sex labor especially involving children. This version has even more jail time for laws already on the books, laws that are already selectively enforced: the child labor laws and child sexual abuse laws. I wonder what effect this new version will have on the legal Nevada brothel workers who travel to work by Greyhound Buses driven by black men?

The Mann Act, like the TVPRA was based on faulty logic from the beginning, the hallmark of this administration. Instead of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ this time the state department’s estimates have been downgraded from 50,000 slaves arriving in this country every year in 1999 to 14,500 to 17,500 in 2004. Since its inception, the TVPRA has funded 42 Justice Department task forces to spend more than $150 million federal dollars to find 1,400 people that have been certified as human trafficking victims in this country. That’s $10,714.29 per victim unit of service delivered by non profits who profit off of the criminalization of migration and prostitution. Victims are eligible for temporary visas, work cards, shelter, Medicare, English as second language classes and drivers licenses. One wonders why 59 Korean women chose deportation over victim status after raids were conducted on the Asian massage parlors they were working in the summer of 2005 in California. Dignity, I guess. That exercise involved 400 law enforcement officers. The SAGE project in San Francisco got $428,629 in 2005 from Homeland Security. And the SFPD gets a few hundred thousand every year. Despite popular belief, some of us do pay taxes, but not when we get busted.


Maybe you don’t like hookers because you are afraid that your husband is having sex with one or maybe you don’t like hookers because we charged what we are worth. Either way, the continued enforcement of the anti prostitution and migration for work laws has cost America our money and our dignity. The San Francisco taxpayers pay the police department over time to run sting operations on customers of prostitutes to make sure there are enough men who can in turn pay up to $1000 to attend the shame based sex negative First Offender Prostitution Program where the proceeds are split between the police department, the district attorney’s office and the poverty pimping non profit known as the SAGE project Inc. This hustle is to extort money from the customers, so you can say you are using the money to provide services to recently arrested and forced out of work women and call it progressive. Cha Ching. One recent graduate from the SAGE program said that she spent 9 months being told everyday that she was a victim but never received assistance in finding other employment. And what does the public get? More affordable housing? Better public schools? More foot patrols in your neighborhood? Clean streets? More parking? Less corruption in law enforcement?

If the US government was sincere about ending forced labor they’d set an example by cleaning up their own continent. They’d repeal the North America Free Trade Agreement. They’d amend that worthless piece of legislation called the National labor Relations Act so that legally working Americans can get some economic justice on their jobs. Or maybe practice some economy and start charging American employers under the TVPRA for “holding someone in a workplace through force, fraud or coercion” by paying us low wages, no healthcare, no pensions and other benefits congress already mandates. Now under the proposed TVPRA 2007/11, “force, fraud or coercion” will no longer be required elements to bring charges. So, if I drive myself to visit a customer, I can be charged with a federal felony. Congress needs to get busy enfranchising the 12 million undocumented workers already working and paying taxes in this country and issue green cards to those who want to work in the sex industry. But with the US dollar devalued, that line won’t be long.

What next? One won’t need to have performed an act of prostitution in order to be charged with prostitution.

The standard has to be that all workers must be self determined in having our own agency when negotiating our labor and work conditions irregardless of our occupation, our country of origin, our documentation status and legal work status or lack thereof. The TVPRA 2007/11 offers none of that.

Join us in stopping the madness on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 11:30 am at US House of Representative Tom Lantos’s District Office: 400 South El Camino Real, Suite 410 San Mateo, CA 94402-1704 Voice: 650-342-0300 FAX: 650-375-8270

He’s on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Hurry.

In Sexual Solidarity Somewhere,
Maxine Doogan
Erotic Service Providing for 19 years.


http://video.nbc11.com/player/?id=184134
NBC News aired a 15-minute feature on an
operation to investigate and map the commercial people trade in San
Francisco by USF professor and students.