Powerful Men Preying on Vulnerable Women!

CNN posted an episode of CNN Replay.

February 25, 2019

From R. Kelly to Robert Kraft, recent headlines are littered with examples of powerful men allegedly preying on vulnerable women.

CNN’s Brooke Baldwin has a simple message: “Enough.”https://cnn.it/2XnxTxK

Brooke Baldwin on powerful men preying on vulnerable women: "Enough."

From R. Kelly to Robert Kraft, recent headlines are littered with examples of powerful men allegedly preying on vulnerable women.CNN's Brooke Baldwin has a simple message: "Enough." https://cnn.it/2XnxTxK

Posted by CNN on Monday, February 25, 2019

America has already terminated Trump!

The Guardian

‘You’re fired!’ America has already terminated Trump

Robert Reich February 24, 2019

The Mueller report looms but the president is doomed anyway – no one who screws the people so blatantly can win re-election.

Donald Trump delivers his “You’re fired!” catchphrase at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire in 2015. Photograph: Dominick Reuter/REUTERS

Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-delivered report will begin months of congressional investigations, subpoenas, court challenges, partisan slugfests, media revelations, and more desperate conspiracy claims by Donald Trump, all against the backdrop of the burning questions: Will he be impeached by the House? Will he be convicted by the Senate? Will he pull a Richard Nixon and resign?

In other words, will America fire Trump?

I have news for you. America has already fired him.

When the public fires a president before election day, as it did Jimmy Carter, Nixon and Herbert Hoover, they don’t send him a letter telling him he’s fired.

They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite him. He’s not literally gone but he might as well be.

It’s happened to Trump. The courts and House Democrats are moving against him. Senate Republicans are quietly subverting him. Even Mitch McConnell told him to end the shutdown.

The Fed is running economic policy. Top-level civil servants are managing day-to-day work of the agencies.

Isolated in the White House, distrustful of aides, at odds with intelligence agencies, distant from his cabinet heads, Trump has no system to make or implement decisions.

His tweets don’t create headlines as before. His rallies are ignored. His lies have become old hat.

Action and excitement have shifted elsewhere, to Democratic challengers, even to a 29-year-old freshman congresswomen too young to run.

Don’t get me wrong. He’s still dangerous, like an old landmine buried in the mud. He could start a nuclear war.

Yet even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping give him tidbits to share with the American public, then do whatever they want.

Why did America fire him? If the nation were to write him a letter informing him he’s no longer president, it would go like this:

Dear Mr President,

While many of us disagree on ideology and values, we agree on practical things like obeying the constitution and not letting big corporations and the wealthy run everything.

Your 35-day government shutdown was a senseless abuse of power. So too your “national emergency” to build your wall with money Congress refused to appropriate.

When you passed your tax bill you promised our paychecks would rise by an average of $4,000 but we never got the raise. Our employers used the tax savings to buy back their shares of stock and give themselves raises instead.

Then you fooled us into thinking we were getting a cut by lowering the amounts withheld from our 2018 paychecks. We know that now because we’re getting smaller tax refunds.

At the same time, many big corporations aren’t paying a dime in taxes. Worse yet, they’re getting refunds.

For example, GM is paying zilch and claiming a $104 m refund on $11.8 bn of profits. Amazon is paying no taxes and claiming a $129 m refund on profits of $11.2 bn. (This is after New York offered it $3 billion to put its second headquarters there.)

They aren’t breaking any tax laws or regulations. That’s because they made the tax laws and regulations. You gave them a free hand.

You’re supposed to be working for us, not for giant corporations. But they’re doing better than ever, as are their top executives and biggest investors. Yet nothing has trickled down. We’re getting shafted.

Which is why more than 75% of us (including 45% who call ourselves Republicans) support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70% tax on dollars earned in excess of $10 million a year.

And over 60% of us support Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 2% annual tax on households with a new worth of $50 million or more.

You’ve also shown you don’t have a clue about healthcare. You promised us something better than the Affordable Care Act but all you’ve done is whittle it back.

A big reason we gave Democrats control of the House last November was your threat to eliminate protection for people with pre-existing conditions.

Are you even aware that 70% of us now favor Medicare for all?

Most of us don’t pay much attention to national policy but we pay a lot of attention to home economics. You’ve made our own home economics worse.

We’ll give you official notice you’re fired on 3 November 2020, if not before. Until then, you can keep the house and perks, but you’re toast.

Respectfully,

America.

The Real Ugliness of the Robert Kraft Story

The New Yorker – Sporting Scene

The Real Ugliness of the Robert Kraft Story

By Louisa Thomas February 22, 2019

The New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, one of the most famous sports-team owners in America, was charged this week with soliciting prostitution, in Florida. Photograph by John Lamparski / Getty

The owner of a sports team is an odd species of celebrity. He—or, occasionally, she—is not known primarily for his money, though, as a rule, he has a lot of it. He is not known for a particular skill. What he is known for, really, is his ability to walk into a locker room filled with some of the richest and most famous athletes in the world and receive deference. In short, he’s known for his position with regard to the people he pays.

Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, is one of the most famous team owners in America. That is due, mostly, to his team’s stupendous success—which is, in turn, largely due to the team’s mastermind coach, Bill Belichick, and its quarterback, Tom Brady, who was chosen in the sixth round of the 2000 N.F.L. draft and has become the greatest quarterback in the league’s history. Earlier this month, wearing a tightly knotted pink tie, with his thick white hair swept back, Kraft accepted the Lombardi trophy, after the Patriots beat the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl—his sixth championship as an owner. But Kraft’s notoriety doesn’t begin or end there. He is also known for his prominent place in the small cabal of N.F.L. owners, and for his friendship with Donald Trump. (The Kraft Group, of which Kraft is the chairman and the C.E.O, donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee.) Now Kraft is known for something else, too: on Friday, police in Florida announced that he had been charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution at Orchids of Asia Day Spa, in Jupiter. Police say that there is video evidence. A spokesperson for Kraft issued a statement insisting that Kraft did not engage “in any illegal activity,” and informing the press that he would not be commenting further.

According to the Jupiter police, the price of an hour-long massage at Orchids of Asia was seventy-nine dollars; fifty-nine dollars would get you thirty minutes. Kraft is worth a reported $6.6 billion. It may seem surprising that a billionaire would have any interest in frequenting an establishment where, according to Martin County police, hygiene was “minimal.” After the death of his wife, Myra—to whom, by all accounts, Kraft was devoted—the Patriots owner was connected with a number of attractive young women. But Kraft is hardly the first sports-world figure to have been seen in public with many attractive women and later to have been charged with soliciting prostitution. Sometimes, these financial transactions have less to do with sex than they do with something that Kraft, certainly, knows well: power.

Rarely are power asymmetries as stark as those that exist between a man of Kraft’s stature and wealth and the sex workers who toil at places like Orchids of Asia Day Spa. The investigation, which has been going on for months, found evidence that women were lured from China as part of an international human-trafficking ring. They were reportedly not given days off and were not allowed to leave the massage parlors, where they were forced to live, often in squalid conditions.

Kraft lives in a very different world, one where spending lots of money can help big problems disappear. Now he finds himself caught up in a world where money is even harder to follow. It is impossible to put a figure on the scope of the problem of human trafficking; according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, there is no methodologically sound estimate, because instances of it are so rarely reported. Sexual exploitation is by far the most commonly identified form of human trafficking.

In Florida, first-time offenders for the solicitation of prostitution are subject, at the least, to mandatory community service, education, S.T.D. screening, and a five-thousand-dollar penalty. If, in fact, he is levied with the fine, Kraft will be able to pay it easily enough. What happens to the people he paid—and the unknown numbers like them?

“These girls are there all day long, into the evening. They can’t leave, and they’re performing sex acts,” the Vero Beach police chief, David Currey, said on Thursday. “Some of them may tell us they’re O.K., but they’re not.” He added, “Even though we may have charges on some of them, we’d rather them be victims.” Last year, in a piece for the Appeal, Melissa Gira Grant and Emma Whitford noted that even organizations that sought to help victims of human trafficking sometimes ended up hurting them, and others, by exposing them to arrest or deportation. “For Chinese and Korean immigrant women, the potential consequences of law enforcement contact are grave, ranging from loss of massage license to arrest, deportation, and even loss of life,” they wrote. “When a massage business shuts down, its workers — trafficked or not — are likely to remain vulnerable.”

Sex trafficking is rampant across US!

USA Today

It’s not just the Florida spa investigation allegedly tied to Robert Kraft. Sex trafficking is rampant across US

Robert Kraft could face disciplinary action from NFL after prostitution charge

While charges against New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for soliciting prostitution brought national attention to the issue of sex trafficking on Friday, data, expert opinion and cases from around the USA show how widespread the problem is.

Sex trafficking accounted for 6,081 of the more than 8,500 reported cases of human trafficking in the United States in 2017, according to statistics from the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

There is no official estimate of the total number of human trafficking victims in the U.S. Polaris, a non-profit that operates the hotline on human trafficking, estimates that the total number of victims nationally reaches into the hundreds of thousands when estimates of both adults and minors and sex trafficking and labor trafficking are aggregated.

Illicit massage or spa businesses, similar to the ones in the Florida case, were the top location or industry where sex trafficking occurred in 2017, with 714 reported cases, according to the hotline’s data.

More than 9,000 illicit massage businesses operate in every state around the country, bringing in a stunning $2.5 billion each year, according to estimates in a 2018 report by Polaris on trafficking in these businesses.

“It’s not accurate to understand these cases as local,” Bradley Myles, CEO of Polaris, told USA TODAY on Friday. “The places are being overlooked and underestimated.”

More: ‘We’re talking tens of millions of dollars’: Sex spas are big business, investigator says

Characteristics of the average illegal spa that Polaris details fit with how prosecutors described ones in Florida.

Ten spas were shut down in Orlando, Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast after a several months of investigation revealed women there were in “sexual servitude,” according to arrest records.

At Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida, where Kraft allegedly paid for sexual services, women – many of them from China – lived in the spa and were not permitted to leave, according to Martin County Sheriff Will Snyder.

Kraft, who has been charged but not arrested, denied the allegation. He is one of hundreds of alleged clients facing charges in the recent Florida stings.

More: Robert Kraft investigation: What we know about Patriots owner’s sex solicitation allegations

Like some of the spas that allegedly engaged in sex trafficking in Florida, the average illicit massage business is connected to at least one other, according to Polaris.

Myles said most are tied to larger criminal networks that have links to the countries where many of the women at the spas are from. Many of the women are coerced to work in the businesses and often earn no wages and have no autonomy, Myles said.

“These girls are there all day long, into the evening. They can’t leave and they are performing sex acts,” Vero Beach police Chief David Currey said of the investigation. “Some of them may tell us they’re OK, but they’re not.”

Beyond sex-trafficking at just massage spas, the United States prosecutes hundreds of cases each year and wins scores of convictions on charges of trafficking with respect to slavery and sex trafficking of children by force, fraud or coercion, according to an analysis of federal records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

In fiscal year 2018, 189 cases resulted in convictions, according to TRAC’s data.

Here’s a look at how sex trafficking has affected areas across the country:

‘Mecca of sex trafficking’

In March last year, a report estimated 340 young adults and children have been victims of sex trafficking in Milwaukee in a four-year period.

“We’ve heard from different sources that we’re the mecca of sex trafficking, but we need to be able to measure that,” Mallory O’Brien, director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, which participated in the report, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time.

“This was our opportunity to do that,” she said.

Research found 340 people ages 25 and younger who were confirmed or believed to have been victims of sex trafficking in Milwaukee between Jan. 1, 2013, and Dec. 31, 2016.

Overall in Wisconsin, child welfare workers confirmed 99 incidents of children and youth sex trafficking statewide from June 2017 through August, 2018, the state Department of Children and Families said in January.

Backpage and effects of its shutdown

The CEO and co-founder of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty in April to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering after the Justice Department seized the controversial online classifieds site.

The website’s other co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin, as well as five other executives, faced 93 charges involving facilitating prostitution through the Backpage site and money laundering.

While some praised Backpage’s demise as a blow to an abusive industry, sex workers across the United States and Canada swarmed social media to air concerns rarely heard in political discourse: To them, Backpage’s demise meant the end of safeguards and a reliable revenue stream in a profession that’s not going anywhere.

More: Sex workers ‘devastated,’ look to alternatives after Backpage closure

“They’re devastated,” Laura Dilley, executive director of PACE, a Vancouver-based non-profit that advocates for decriminalizing prostitution, told the Arizona Republic in April.

While many sex workers said they would keep posting on smaller websites, they also worried about the future.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty; a lot of grief and fear,” Jelena Vermilion, a sex worker based outside of Toronto told the Arizona Republic in April. “A lot of people are essentially planning to be homeless, planning how to fall gracefully as much as possible.”

On the flip side, Backpage’s shutdown affected law enforcement trying to help victims of sex trafficking.

Before Backpage was terminated, Cpl. Chris Heid could locate sex trafficking victims exclusively on the website.

Backpage was responsive to the Maryland State Police corporal’s requests for records and his agency’s warrants and subpoenas. When he asked the site to remove advertisements he determined were trafficking-related, moderators complied – sometimes within minutes.

While anti-trafficking operations by Maryland State Police yielded three more arrests in 2018 (when Backpage was seized) than the year prior, the number of victims police came in contact with dropped 38 percent, from 113 in 2017 to 70 last year, the Salisbury Daily Times reported in February.

‘There’s a place for them. They just don’t know it yet’

Opened in February 2018, Sanctum House became the first human trafficking shelter of its kind in southeastern Michigan.

Survivors who come to live there enter a two-year program that includes drug and alcohol rehabilitation as well as education, counseling, job training and support.

Speaking with the Detroit Free Press, founder Edee Franklin described human trafficking as a snare of tiny strings that pulls victims back again and again.

One by one, she’s trying to snip those strings to free women who want to get out, but have yet to find a way because they don’t have a safe place to live or are without access to drug or alcohol rehab, financial security, job training or an education.

“There are women out there right now that are being raped and brutalized and they are saying, ‘Dear God, get me out of this.’ And there’s a place for them. They just don’t know it yet,” Franklin said in December 2017.

“Somebody is going to say to them – whether it’s at the jail or the ER or the judge – somebody is going to say: ‘Well, you can go to a three-night shelter or you can go to jail or you can go to a detox for three weeks. You can go back to your pimp, you can go to the streets or to your abusive family or you can go to Sanctum House if you would like to change your life.”

Need help? See something?

The National Human Trafficking Hotline is confidential, toll-free and available 24/7 in more than 200 languages.

Call: 1-888-373-7888
Text: “BeFree” (233733)
Chat: humantraffickinghotline.org

Contributing: Cara Kelly and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY; Mary Helen Moore and Will Greenlee, Treasure Coast Newspapers; Ashley Luthern and Mary Spicuzza, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Megan Cassidy and Richard Ruelas, The Arizona Republic; Kristen Jordan Shamus, Detroit Free Press

Death Panels Really do Exist!

Business Leaders for Medicare for All

February 22, 2019

This is EXACTLY what a functional health care system looks like…

Image may contain: text that says 'CNN CNN Health health @cnnhealth 375,000 price leads disabled mom to ration meds Joe Kassabian @jkass99 Death panels really do exist and they're pharmaceutical companies.'

Business Leaders for Medicare for All

The Head Honcho on Trump’s New Climate Change Panel Compared Carbon Dioxide to Jewish People

Esquire

The Head Honcho on Trump’s New Climate Change Panel Compared Carbon Dioxide to Jewish People

Jack Holmes, Esquire February 21, 2019

Photo Credit: The Washington Post / Getty Images

Haven’t we had enough of these old codgers who won’t be alive when the worst consequences of climate change are upon us telling us it’s no big deal? Certainly, the President of the United States is in that group. Privately, the 72-year-old probably views the issue in the same terms he does The National Debt: “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” In public, he can be found “joking” that global warming isn’t real because it’s cold outside. Reportedly, he can also be found looking to assemble a so-called “Presidential Committee on Climate Security,” which will be tasked with questioning the findings of climate scientists and the Pentagon that climate change is real and poses a national security risk.

Here is the person who will “spearhead” the panel:

John Whitehouse: William Happer is set to lead a Trump panel on climate change. Happer has previously argued that “the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

Surely, the Jewish People appreciate being compared to a molecule that an overwhelming majority of scientists who have studied the issue agree is fueling a phenomenon that endangers life as we know it on Planet Earth. Surely, climate scientists appreciate being compared to Nazis because they went to Greenland to study ice loss or have constructed models based on the Greenhouse Effect. Meanwhile, we actually are overseeing the sixth mass extinction event in this planet’s history.

Jesus Christ, these people. Sometimes, you have to wonder whether the human race deserves to survive. We have wreaked destruction on this planet and, now that it is fast becoming uninhabitable for human civilization as we know it, we have elected not to address the issue but to elevate people who dispute that it’s happening and, in the case of Mr. William Happer here, to claim that Actually, More CO2 in the Atmosphere Is Good. Well, at least that’s what the United States of America has decided to do.

Around this time two years ago, I attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and stumbled upon a panel organized by the CO2 Coalition, of which Happer is president. He is now, also, a senior director on the White House National Security Council. Here, from my story at the time, is how the panel explained that More CO2 Is Good:

…a pair of men besuited in various shades of olive and brown discussed how the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (which they granted were up 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution) had led to a phenomenon called “global greening.” Plants need CO ₂ to grow, they told a captivated audience of a couple dozen people, and when there’s more of it, they grow faster, larger, and-since they need less water-in drier areas…

Photo credit: Jack Holmes

…Because of increased CO ₂levels, “the Earth is in a far better place today,” [said] Craig Idso of CO ₂Science and the board of directors of the CO ₂ Coalition…Taken by itself, the greening argument is solid enough. In fact, it does not contradict the scientific consensus on climate change, which holds that higher carbon dioxide levels lead to warmer temperatures and, in turn, among other things, to melting sea ice and rising sea levels. Both can be true at once. Except the CO ₂ Coalition’s shtick is effectively a red herring; these guys also don’t believe in man-made climate change.

“Temperatures have not risen very much, and most of the temperature rise is probably completely natural, and has nothing to do with increasing CO ₂,” William Happer, the coalition’s president, told me over the phone. “Industrialization probably played a small role, but I think it’s very hard to tell how much.”

This directly contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change, which Happer has long disputed in his many roles at various conservative think tanks. It also tells you Happer’s newest group is not actually committed to lionizing CO2, but to muddying the waters around climate science.

Before he founded the CO2 Coalition, Happer chaired the George Marshall Institute and developed a reputation as one of the nation’s premier climate “skeptics.” The Institute received $865,000 from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2011. (Elsewhere, ExxonMobil-funded think tanks have been found offering scientists $10,000-a-pop to undermine climate reports.) With a degree in physics from Princeton, Happer is unusually qualified to serve in this area-the various other deniers I spoke to for the story had degrees like a bachelor’s in political science or a PhD in geography-but he is a professional denier all the same.

Also, there’s this:

John Whitehouse@existentialfish: But my favorite Happer anecdote is the time that an undercover Greenpeace employee emailed him and blew the lid off the entire climate denier scam.

Now this fine gentleman will lead a planned Presidential Climate Change Panel that, according to the Washington Post, will “question” the peer-reviewed findings of experts in science and the American military-the latter of which has long acknowledged climate change is real and poses a threat to our way of life. I wonder what conclusion he will come to? Surely he will evaluate the evidence on the merits.

Is the economy actually better under Trump? Spoiler alert: No!!!!

Splinter

February 20, 2019

Is the economy actually better under Trump?

Spoiler alert: No!!!!

The Myth of Trump Economy Explained | In 2 Minutes

Is the economy actually better under Trump?Spoiler alert: No!!!!

Posted by Splinter on Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Border residents file lawsuit against Trump to stop wall

Digital Smoke Signals shared a post.

February 19, 2019

Border residents file lawsuit against Trump to stop wall

⭕️ UPDATE re: #NoBorderWall

There are many complex aspects to the #NoBorderWall fight. People, land, homes, livelihoods, farms, family cemeteries, traditional medicines and sacred sites of natives in Texas are at risk.

Border residents file lawsuit against Trump to stop wall

"Private landowners filing suits could be a huge headache for Pres. Donald Trump as he tries to erect more barrier in Texas."Gary Tuchman travelled to Texas to visit individuals who are suing Trump in order to prevent the border wall from being built on their land.

Posted by CNN Replay on Monday, February 18, 2019

trump’s “Border Lies”

Randy Rainbow

February 19, 2019

***NEW VIDEO***

National Emergency??? Nothing a little 80’s pop throwback can’t fix. 🎶💄🎹👩🏻‍🎤🤥🌈👍🏻

BORDER LIES – Randy Rainbow Song Parody

***NEW VIDEO***National Emergency??? Nothing a little 80s pop throwback can't fix. 🎶💄🎹👩🏻‍🎤🤥🌈👍🏻

Posted by Randy Rainbow on Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Warmer waters in the Pacific Northwest are killing salmon

EcoWatch

February 17, 2019

Warmer waters in the Pacific Northwest are killing salmon before they can reproduce.

This is particularly devastating to the Tulalip people, who trace their cultural heritage to salmon.

Here’s the written story: ecowatch.com/climate-change-salmon-pacific-northwest

Climate Change Is Cooking Salmon in the Pacific Northwest

Warmer waters in the Pacific Northwest are killing salmon before they can reproduce. This is particulatly devastating to the Tulalip people, who trace their cultural heritage to salmon.Here's the written story: ecowatch.com/climate-change-salmon-pacific-northwestNexus Media News

Posted by EcoWatch on Wednesday, February 13, 2019