Kraft, Massage, and Human Trafficking

Cue the laugh track.

The world can’t stop chuckling at the news that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is one of the hundreds of men charged with soliciting prostitution at a so-called “massage parlor” in Florida. Even the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que got caught up in the fun, offering a special Jerked and Pulled Chicken Sandwich named after the dapper New Englander with the Super Bowl rings getting caught with his pants down. (Kraft denies the charges of solicitation.)

OK, guys. And I do mean guys -- have a good laugh. Then think about this. The illegal activity going on at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida, goes on all across the country, even here in Central New York. Sometimes it’s “just” prostitution, sometimes it’s worse – women trafficked and enslaved. The Polaris Project estimates that nearly 25 million people, most of them women, are coerced, threatened or otherwise forced into involuntary servitude worldwide. Tens of thousands of women are sex slaves in the United States.

Phony massage businesses, often referred to as “massage parlors,” are one of the covers that traffickers use to hide their crimes. Fortunately, New York state has the legal framework to put an end to this practice. Sadly, for generations, law enforcement has failed to act to enforce this protection.

Since 1968, New York has required that anyone practicing massage therapy must have a license from the New York State Education Department. The licensing exam, administered twice annually, can only be taken after completion of a 1,000-hour class at an accredited massage school. These regulations were passed in recognition of massage therapy’s beneficial health effects and to protect the public from unscrupulous and untrained people charging for massage. It also protects those of us in the profession from the stigma that has resulted from past association of the term “massage” (usually accompanied by a wink) with businesses selling sexual services for a fee.

This opens an avenue for law enforcement in New York to address possible trafficking in our community. Law enforcement need not charge an unlicensed spa or massage business with prostitution in order to shut them down. All they need do is ask one simple question – do you have a license? Some officials I have spoken with use the excuse that these places don’t call themselves “massage therapists”. They use terms such as “relaxation therapy” or “day spa.”

The objection is irrelevant. The law is clear. Anyone practicing any of the techniques used by massage therapists (and those techniques are spelled out in detail) without a license is subject to the licensing requirement. It is no more legal for someone to conduct massage without a license than it would be for me to pull teeth without a dental license. Even if I hang out a sign saying, “teeth puller,” I can’t pull teeth. That’s what dentists do.

The statute is clear. The need to protect the public and those who might be trafficked is urgent.

It’s time for law enforcement to stop treating this particular crime like a joke. Stop in to every spa and massage therapy practice in the county and ask to see the license. We’re happy to display ours. Every reputable spa, every Licensed Massage Therapist will be proud to show you their license.

The Polaris Project calls out the human traffickers and their patrons, calling their crime “Stealing Freedom for Profit.” What, I wonder, should we call law enforcement that fails to use this simple tool to find and root out this evil from our community?

It’s no joke.

Saudi Beheadings Sanity 021415

AN UNCOMFORTABLE FOCUS ON HEADS OF STATE

by Ed Griffin-Nolan - Wednesday, February 4th, 2015

Michelle Obama appeared outfitted in a coat over a pant suit but nothing covering her head.

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Last week, when President Barack Obama stopped in Saudi Arabia to pay his respects to the deceased King Abdullah, wags the world over went wild after first lady Michelle Obama appeared at the official welcoming ceremony outfitted in a flowing coat over her blue pant suit but nothing covering her head.

The men who run Saudi Arabia still require women to keep their heads wrapped up in a traditional headdress whenever they are seen in public.

President Barack and first lady Michelle Obama with Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, right, after arriving in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 27, 2015. The first lady inspired blaring headlines and endless Internet chatter this week when she was photographed without headgear during the presidential visit to Riyadh, the capital of a conservative Muslim kingdom where women are compelled to cover their hair. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)

Michelle Obama’s decision was criticized by some as a diplomatic faux pas and praised by others as a statement on behalf of women’s rights.

There were lots of reasons for her not to cover up in Saudi Arabia. For starters, she has great hair. Then there is the possibility that she was making a statement that women shouldn’t be told by their rulers, especially unelected rulers, and most especially male rulers with a demonstrated lack of fashion sense, how to dress.

If the world’s most popular Obama was making a statement on behalf of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, it would have been a bold move. Women in the petropatriarchal theocracy that sits on top of the world’s largest proven oil reserves are decidedly second-class citizens. They cannot vote (not that voting in the kingdom matters much for the men, either). They can’t drive. They can’t even go out of the house without a man’s permission.

And there’s this: The Saudi women, like most male Saudis, don’t seem to complain much. Most native Saudis are content to collect their share of their ruler’s oil largesse in exchange for silence.

The White House sidestepped suggestions that the first lady was making a statement, instead noting the she was following protocols set by her predecessors. Oh, yes, and did we mention that the sheiks are sitting on an ocean of oil? Every U.S. president going back to the Second World War has made a point of sucking up to the Saudi monsters.

But Obama’s hypocrisy stands out even among the long line of American leaders who have worshipped at the altar of Saud. As commander-in-chief of the war on beheadings, Obama’s choice to prominently pay homage to the throne shocks the sensibilities. In the post-9/11 world, we have all grown used to leaders justifying the alliances they draw us into on the basis of expediency, but surely Obama knows that when it comes to beheadings, the Saudis are the unrivalled champions of the Middle East. ISIS head choppers are amateurs compared to the Saudi executioners.

In a recent four-year period, the Saudis executed 345 people, every one of them in public, and the method of execution was beheading. That’s about the same number of beheadings carried out by ISIS in its terror campaign in Syria and Iraq.

In what turned out to be his last year on the throne, King Abdullah had 87 people executed — most for drug-related offenses, a few for religious crimes that included apostasy and sorcery, others for daring to voice opposition to the despots who rule them.

ISIS has earned the disgust of the world. Obama righteously denounced the hideous YouTube beheadings by ISIS as “pure evil.” Yet on the very day he paid his respects to the Saudi monarch, three men were beheaded in the kingdom of the man he chose to praise.

Given that the president couldn’t even be bothered to suggest to the Saudis that they stay their hand for even a day, it’s a sure bet the White House was happy to have all the attention focused on the first lady’s uncovered, intact head.

RealPolitik

FDR in 1933

President Franklin Roosevelt was reported to have once said about his Central American ally, the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

At least Roosevelt gets points for honesty.

We can all understand why the U.S. has kissed the Saudi’s sandy posterior all these many years. But does the Department of Defense really have to sponsor an essay contest in his honor?

The king was barely in the ground when Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that the National Defense University was creating “an important opportunity to honor the memory of the king, while also fostering scholarly research on the Arab-Muslim world.”

“I found the king to be a man of remarkable character and courage,” said Dempsey, according to a news release from the Pentagon.

The essay contest will allow students at the National Defense University to honor the king’s legacy by encouraging “strategic thinking and meaningful research on a crucial part of the world.”

And who can argue with that?

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Ed Griffin-Nolan is a journalist who believes we have to ask the hard questions no matter whose interests are at stake. Sanity Fair is his weekly take on life, politics and society.

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A burst of cruelty

Just six weeks back Ellen and Dia and I stopped  on a sand track along the Chobe river, shut off the engine our Toyota pickup truck and watched as a herd of elephants twice the size of our vehicle passed quietly to our right. It was a scene that will remain forever in my memory, as the creatures who are literally mammoth in size lumbered past us. Only a few of the males bothered to look up, turning their trunks and giant heads toward, eyeing us to make sure we knew they were there.

They left us to sit there undisturbed, to marvel at their massive, mobile beauty, to enjoy their family outing. At one point, later in the day, I counted 74 elephants crossing in front of us.

We knew that a momentary burst of cruelty, or fear - or anything really -  on their part could kill the three of us. These African bush elephants weigh as much as six tons each, and there were dozens of them.

But there in the Chobe National Park in northern Botswana, hunting is banned, poaching is contained by police action, and the elephants, accustomed to visitors with binoculars, left us alone.

Two days ago we learned from a friend in Botswana that more than two dozen of the elephants on the Chobe had been killed by raiding poachers. The invaders, most likely from across the river in Namibia, cut the faces from the grass eating elephants, who flock to the Chobe by the hundreds in search of water. They cut off their trucks and amputated their tusks, which are like gold in some markets.

In an instant, Chobe, the sole safe and wild sanctuary for wildlife in southern Africa, was violated and changed forever.

Horse sense

This post is about #MeToo. This is not about me. It starts with a horse, but bear with me, because it ends with a serious proposal to stop sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry.

In a 1939 Henry Fonda movie, Jesse James, a horse was pushed off a cliff. The horse survived the fall, but got a bit flustered and drowned shortly thereafter. If you are horrified, you should be. Many people were, and the film industry was forced to accept outside supervision of any animals used on set. The Humane Association has ever since kept on eye on the non-human actors and provided the filmmaker with the seal of approval pictured above.

(Does it work? Not always)

Now we have learned  of (or now we have been forced to stop denying), powerful men in the film industry routinely use that power to obtain sexual favors from women. It is not just Harvey Weinstein. It's endemic. My question is - if the death of one horse led to an industry wide enforceable ban on a vile practice, why shouldn't the violations wreaked upon dozens of women by Weinstein lead to a similarly enforceable ban on his nasty practice?

My proposal is simple - an outside human rights group, presumably including lawyers, would verify that they monitored the filming of the movie (or TV show), and that no woman was harmed in the making of it. To ascertain this, the lawyers would interview every woman involved in the project under veil of anonymity. Any scoundrels would be prosecuted or banned, or the label would not be attached to the film. That would leave the producers with some 'splainin to do.

Why not give it a try? They saved horses, didn't they?

Clear Eyes over Syria

The US military, following orders of the 45^th President, did something in Syria this week. Lots of people were heard to say, “finally”. The Commander-in-Chief who boasts he has never changed a diaper grieved publicly for the lost Syrian children who died slow deaths choking on sarin gas. “No child of god should have to suffer such harms.” A statement no one save atheists can argue with.

You might be tempted to see this as a rupture with the recent past, but if we listen carefully we will see not a break with the 44^th President’s policy, but rather continuity. The current administration, like its predecessor, is reacting not to the generalized horror of the Assad regime’s assault on its people, but on its use of this specific horror – chemical weapons. Since World War I, with few and notable exceptions, the world has agreed that chemical weapons should not be deployed.

When Assad used these poisons in 2013, the previous administration reacted. We’ve grown so accustomed to hearing the chorus saying that Obama did “nothing” at the time. Which is only because in the minds of too many in the media and among conventional thinkers in both parties, you are doing “nothing” unless you are doing “something” that involves weapons.

The previous administration did react. Here is what they did: they forced Syria to sign a treaty against the use of chemical weapons, charged Russia with removing and destroying them, and put the force of the United Nations behind that sentiment.

That action, frequently described by commentators and hawks as “doing nothing” worked for four years. Four years without a chemical attack in this war – if I were a Syrian family trying to stay alive, I would take that. Four years to find safe haven, to find more effective means of resistance, four years to stay alive. I would take that. Call it what you will, it’s not nothing.

Enter 45. Assad attacks Idlib with chemical weapons, probing to find out if the current President really means what he said in 2013, that this was not really our concern, and that we should stay out. Assad learned when the US launched the 59 missiles that destroyed his 20 planes and shut down his airfield for 24 hours, that the ban on chemical weapons - a red line, if you will – was still in effect.

Both actions – Obama’s diplomacy, Trump’s gunplay – have the same result. They remind Assad that there is no percentage in using these particular weapons. And that is, by any realistic standpoint, about all we can do in this situation (that plus open our doors to those who flee).

The partisan bickering that goes on just masks this fundamental consistency. If you needed any more proof of continuity you should watch Hillary Clinton, hours before the Tomahawks flew, egging on the man who she beat by 3 million votes in November to rev his engines.

The good news in all, a sanity within the unbearably painful insanity of this conflict, is that both administrations seem to recognize limits. There is little that we can do to end this war, short of sending an army as populous as the city of Miami to spend decades in Damascus, and so every day we stay away, and every day that chemical weapons remain in their sheaths, is what passes for a good day.

Sigh.

Happy Botswana Independence Day, Everyone

Happy Botswana Independence Day, Everyone!

Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a dusty village south of the Tropic of Capricorn, a few hours from the border with South Africa, our daughter Dia has been up all night with her neighbors singing and praying and cooking, as apparently most of Botswana’s two million people are doing, to celebrate fifty years of independence.

Botswana isn’t a place you hear of much in the news. It’s a big country, about the size of Texas. It’s very sparsely populated, and a lot of it is given over to the forbidding Kalahari desert. It’s got the largest inland delta in the world (two years ago I didn’t even know there were such things), and the most numerous elephant herd of any country in the world.

On the subject of elephants - Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates, recently paid for a crew of scientists to fly small planes all over Africa and count elephants, and his Great Elephant Census reports that there are about 130,000 elephants in Botswana.

I don’t have Paul Allen’s money, but we did go to Botswana earlier this year, and one afternoon I stopped our pickup truck on a dusty sand track near the Chobe River because an elephant had just emerged from the bush right in front of us. I shut off the engine (the only prudent response when a six-ton mammal lumbers anywhere in your general direction). Then I began to count.

Seventy four.

Seventy four elephants paraded in front of us on their way to the river that morning. That is a lot of elephants. In Botswana the elephant herd is growing – and that’s not the only thing. The preservation of wildlife has made the country a magnet for tourists around the world, a boom that employs one in every 20 working age Batswana (that’s what you call a citizen of Botswana).

Driving around Botswana (the highways are modern even by US standards) you see a country undergoing rapid growth. Stopping for breakfast in a chain restaurant in Francistown, the first thing the waitress asked me was if I wanted the wi-fi code. (Sure, I said, but mostly I needed coffee – the Bats do not share my addiction to caffeine). As we drove from Dia’s village back to the capital of Gabarone, (a city without stoplights as recently as 1989) a colleague of hers told us that the four-hour trip, again along a splendid highway, would have taken 10 or 12 hours just a few years back.

Botswana has some advantages that other post-colonial African nations do not. Landlocked and sparsely populated, it was not considered a prize by predatory European colonists, who preferred to pounce on South African and Namibian mines and coastland. Botswana asked to become a British protectorate in the early 20^th century, and then dissolved the pseudo-colonial relationship with a handshake fifty years ago.

A year later they discovered the diamonds. It was like finding a winning lottery ticket in your pockets as you sort laundry.

The first President, Seretse Khama (whose two sons now serve as President and Minister of Tourism) had been disowned by his own tribe when he married a white British woman. Khama’s interracial marriage also greatly irritated apartheid South Africa. As a result, Khama set out to develop a national, not tribal, political base, and a multi-racial democracy. He let foreign companies bid on mining rights to the diamonds under terms favorable to Botswana, and invested the funds in public health, education and infrastructure. This served the country well and by the mid 1970’s Botswana was doing well enough to ask the Peace Corps to cease and desist in its development efforts.

Then came HIV. As many as one in four adults in Botswana were infected in the early years of the epidemic. Life expectancy dropped from first world levels (65 years on average) to below 40 years. In 1995, a 15-year-old in Botswana had a 50% chance of dying from an AIDS related illness.

Botswana responded to the epidemic slowly at first, but in time adopted educational, treatment, and preventive measures that are considered models for other countries.

Since 2002 it has been policy for the government to make anti-retroviral medications available free of charge, and nearly 70% of those infected are receiving the life-saving drugs. And Dia’s work with the Peace Corps is a part of that effort, one that makes her mother and I smile with pride.

So tonight, if you hear dancing and singing late into the night in a tongue that only the most devoted non-natives can master (we hear that Dia has gotten very good at it!), raise a glass to Bots 50, a proud moment for a small country that is trying, against some pretty heavy odds, to do right by its people.

Obama "Directly Responsible" for Orlando Murders, says McCain

This used to the be image of the two wings of the Republican Party. Independent minded war hero John McCain of Arizona, and, to his right, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. McCain chose Palin to run with him in 2008 against Barack Obama in hopes of winning the votes of Republicans who felt he was too liberal, or too much of a "maverick" to earn their support.

I resist the urge to say that Palin was selected to win over more "conservative" voters, because I do not wish to dishonor legitimate conservatives. Palin was, and remains, a part of the growing sector of Republicans who portray themselves as conservatives but are in fact either lazy politicians allergic to facts or opportunists who build their careers on encouraging ignorance. That Palin lives and dies by this is no surprise - her inability or unwillingness to think things through even got her fired from Fox News, no small feat. Some call it "shooting from the hip", which Donald Trump has elevated to an art form. President Obama called it "making stuff up", which I second, substituting a shorter and stinkier S word.

The news is that Palin's former running mate, the senior Senator from Arizona, a man whose name is half the moniker for our one standing piece of campaign finance reform (McCain-Feingold), has joined the fringe. As if Donald Trump's victory in the Republican primary process was not enough to convince us, John McCain's surrender to the fantasy land created by Fox News and nurtured by folks like Palin confirms - the moderate wing of the Republican party is dead.

McCain yesterday called President Obama "directly responsible" for the massacre in Orlando. Then a few hours later he mentioned that he "misspoke". Misspoke? Misspeaking is when you get the capital of Ohio wrong, it's when you confuse the budget deficit with the national debt, it might even be when you say, as Donald Trump did, that the murderer who shot up the Pulse nightclub was born in "Afghan", wherever that is.

When you call the sitting President an accomplice to mass murder at the very moment he is consoling the survivors, that is no misstatement. It is a clear statement of McCain's beliefs. And his core belief is this - that without the support of the crazy people in his party, he cannot win his sixth term in the Senate. Eight years ago a similar calculus pushed him to pick Palin, but we had the good sense to kick her to the curb. Whatever once passed for decency and common sense even among principled conservatives is no longer viable in the age of Trump.

Don't be confused by McCain's subsequent apology for his misstatement. All he needs is that tape of himself blaming Obama to serve up as red meat to the lunatic fringe, while the mainstream media allows him to "walk back" his story.

And all the rest of us are left to do is to watch as the party of Lincoln and Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Dwight Eisenhower, tumble into incoherent rambling divorced from the truth and the serious business of running a country.