Chris Hedges's Blog, page 430

Brazil’s New President Could Threaten Human Life on Earth

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s newly elected president, has threatened to jail his political opponents. In 2013 he told an interviewer that he would rather his son die in a car crash than be gay. He speaks glowingly of Brazil’s former military dictatorship (promising jobs in his administration for former leaders) and disparages women, indigenous groups, black people and many other minority groups. His hateful rhetoric and policies have repercussions far beyond Brazil, and especially for the safety of our environment.

Bolsonaro’s win, The New York Times’ Somini Sengupta writes, is not only about the fate of Latin America’s largest country but also is a “referendum on the fate of the Amazon: the world’s largest tropical forest, sometimes known as the lungs of the Earth. The stakes for the planet are huge.”

The president-elect has said Brazil’s environmental policy is “suffocating the country.” He’s called environmental agencies “fines agencies” and campaigned on combining the environmental ministry with the agricultural ministry, which, as The Guardian writes, is “under control of allies from the agribusiness lobby.”

Marcio Astrini, the public policy director at Greenpeace in Brazil, told The Guardian that this new leadership means “[w]e have a serious risk of seeing the deforestation explode and an increase in violence.”

Bolsonaro had originally campaigned on pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, although he has since told reporters he’s changed his mind. Still, as Sengupta writes, “[Bolasaro’s] campaign promises, if carried out, could have dire consequences for the Amazon,” which “acts as a giant sink for the carbon dioxide emissions that the world as a whole produces.”

Even if Brazil stays in the Paris Climate Agreement, the country faces an uphill battle in controlling deforestation and carbon emissions. An analysis by Brazilian scientists found that if current environmental trends continue in the country, Brazil will not meet its emissions reductions targets under the Paris agreement. And Global Witness, in collaboration with The Guardian, found Brazil to be the deadliest place for environmental rights campaigners, with 49 deaths in 2016.

Bolsonaro also rejected the idea of setting aside forest land for indigenous Brazilians who have lived there for centuries, saying, “There won’t be a square centimeter demarcated as an indigenous reserve,” despite growing evidence that, as Sengupta explains, “forest reserves controlled by native people in many countries provide some of the best defenses against deforestation.”

The election result is particularly jarring for a country that was once seen as an environmental leader and, as Sengupta reports, “had pledged zero illegal deforestation by 2030 under the Paris agreement and sharp reductions in its carbon emissions as a whole.”

Reaching those goals will be an uphill battle under a president who cares more about agribusiness’ bottom line than the health of the planet.

Read the entire New York Times article here.

‘The Oval Office Tapes’: Political Comedy That Practically Writes Itself (Audio)

When R.J. Cutler tuned in to CNN during the summer of 2015, he couldn’t tear himself away from his TV. That was just the reaction that media barons such as CNN’s own Jeff Zucker were counting—and banking—on as they gave then-candidate Donald Trump the run of their airwaves, broadcasting his bombastic rallies in full, spreading his every Twitter-borne emission, staging mock-shock shows of outraged punditry over his latest assault on acceptable norms of political duplicity.

We all know how that episode played out. But as he watched, Cutler, himself a kind of show-business , was riveted for reasons other than just his concern for his country. “I, like so many Americans, found myself fascinated by not only the politics and the policy and the fact of the event but by the narrative of it all,” he said, recalling Trump’s rise to power. As a filmmaker, producer and playwright, though, Cutler was also compelled creatively by Trump’s White House blitz.

As he told Truthdig recently during a brief pause at Politicon 2018 in downtown Los Angeles, Cutler followed his interest in what it must be like behind closed doors in Trump’s power center, “to be in the rooms where it happened,” into satirical territory. Last August, Cutler added “podcaster” to a résumé that included production credits on the Clinton-era documentary “The War Room” and the genre-busting horror feature “Get Out” as he launched “The Oval Office Tapes” podcast.

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The premise is simple enough—“We imagine every week that there are microphones in the White House, and we imagine that we’re listening in on the phone call,” Cutler offered—and the Trump camp has come through with nothing short of a content bonanza for the podcast. “It appears before us fully formed,” Cutler said of each week’s installment. “Of course Elizabeth Warren is calling the president this week and saying, ‘Hey, pay up,’ ” he said, describing a recent episode in which the Massachusetts senator produced proof of her Native American heritage, for which Trump had once claimed he’d pay a $1 million reward. In another bit, a voice actor plays the recently Trump-ified Kanye West on a phone call with the president, an episode that aired several days before the real West visited Trump in the Oval Office for their own October surprise.

But would “The Oval Office Tapes” represent a sort of artistic intervention on Cutler’s part? “I see it as reflection, I see it as illumination, I see it as nothing more than artists responding to their world,” he said, before seeming to make a little room for that possibility. “I certainly see it as speaking truth to power,” he added.

Podcast enthusiasts can hear “The Oval Office Tapes” here; below is a teaser clip from the show (courtesy of Cutler Productions):

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/OOT-106-Audiogram-Prince-Salman.mp4

 

 

Trump Targets Citizenship, Stokes Pre-Election Migrant Fears

WASHINGTON — Thousands of U.S. troops to stop an “invasion” of migrants. Tent cities for asylum seekers. An end for the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

With his eyes squarely on next Tuesday’s elections, President Donald Trump is rushing out hardline immigration declarations, promises and actions as he tries to mobilize supporters to retain Republican control of Congress. His own campaign in 2016 concentrated on border fears, and that’s his final-week focus in the midterm fight.

“This has nothing to do with elections,” the president insists. But his timing is striking.

Trump says he will send more than 5,000 military troops to the Mexican border to help defend against caravans of Central American migrants who are on foot hundreds of miles away. Tent cities would not resolve the massive U.S. backlog of asylum seekers. And most legal scholars say it would take a new constitutional amendment to alter the current one granting citizenship to anyone born in America.

Still, Trump plunges ahead with daily alarms and proclamations about immigration in tweets, interviews and policy announcements in the days leading up to elections that Democrats hope will give them at least partial control of Congress.

Trump and many top aides have long seen the immigration issue as the most effective rallying cry for his base of supporters. The president had been expected to make an announcement about new actions at the border on Tuesday, but that was scrapped so he could travel instead to Pittsburgh, where 11 people were massacred in a synagogue on Saturday.

Between the shootings, the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, and the mail bomb scare targeting Democrats and a media organization, the caravan of migrants slowly trudging north had faded from front pages and cable TV.

But with well-timed interviews on Fox and “Axios on HBO,” Trump revived some of his hardest-line immigration ideas:

— An executive order to revoke the right to citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil.

— And the prolonged detention of anyone coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, including those seeking asylum, in “tent cities” erected “all over the place.”

The administration on Monday also announced plans to deploy 5,200 active duty troops — double the 2,000 who are in Syria fighting the Islamic State group — to the border to help stave off the caravans.

The main caravan, still in southern Mexico, was continuing to melt away — from the original 7,000 to about 4,000 — as a smaller group apparently hoped to join it.

Trump insists his immigration moves have nothing to do with politics, even as he rails against the caravans at campaign rallies.

“I’ve been saying this long before the election. I’ve been saying this before I ever thought of running for office. We have to have strong borders,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in an interview Monday.

Critics weren’t buying it.

“They’re playing all of us,” said David W. Leopold, an immigration attorney and counsel to the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice. “This is not about locking people up. This is not about birthright citizenship. This is about winning an election next week.”

Trump’s citizenship proposal would inevitably spark a long-shot legal battle over whether the president can alter the long-accepted understanding that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil, regardless of his parents’ immigration status.

Omar Jadwat, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, said the Constitution is very clear.

“If you are born in the United States, you’re a citizen,” he said. He called it “outrageous that the president can think he can override constitutional guarantees by issuing an executive order,

James Ho, a conservative Trump-appointed federal appeals court judge, wrote in 2006, before his appointment, that birthright citizenship “is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.”

Even House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trump proposals, said on WVLK radio in Kentucky: “Well you obviously cannot do that. You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.”

But Trump says he’s been assured by his lawyers that the change could be made with “just with an executive order” — an argument he has been making since his early days as a candidate, when he dubbed birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration” and pledged to end it.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States,” he said in an Axios interview excerpt released Tuesday.

Not so, according to a 2010 study from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports immigration restrictions, that said at least 30 countries offered birthright citizenship.

Vice President Mike Pence said the administration was “looking at action that would reconsider birthright citizenship.”

“We all know what the 14th Amendment says. We all cherish the language of the 14th Amendment. But the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether or not — whether the language of the 14th Amendment, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, applies specifically to the people who are in the country illegally,” he said at a Politico event.

The non-partisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are more than 4 million U.S.-born children under the age of 18 who have an unauthorized immigrant parent.

A person familiar with the internal White House debate said the topic of birthright citizenship has come up inside the West Wing at various times — and not without some detractors. However, White House lawyers expect to work with the Justice Department to develop a legal justification for the action. The person was not authorized to discuss the policy debate so spoke on condition of anonymity.

In Trump’s Monday interview with Fox, he said the U.S. also plans to build tent cities to house migrants seeking asylum, who would be detained until their cases were completed. Right now, some asylum seekers, particularly families, are being released as their cases progress because there isn’t enough detention space to house them.

“We’re going to put tents up all over the place,” Trump said. “They’re going to be very nice, and they’re going to wait, and if they don’t get asylum they get out.”

The country is facing a massive backlog of immigration cases — some 700,000 — and there are more and more families coming across the border from Central America — groups who cannot be simply returned over the border. But experts question the legality and practicality of what would amount to indefinite detention.

The options are just two of many possibilities currently under discussion, including asylum law changes and simply barring members of the migrant caravans from entering the country using the same mechanism as the president’s much-publicized travel ban for people from certain Muslim countries.

Administration officials say decisions are unlikely until after the midterm elections, in part because of the synagogue shooting and pipe-bomb scare.

But some supporters in Congress are rushing to cheer Trump on.

GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who has introduced legislation to end birthright citizenship, said Trump was deftly seizing on an issue that was sure to help in the midterms.

“That ability to move on instinct without hesitation, that’s why he’s president,” King said.

___

Associated Press Writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California, and Deb Riechmann, Lisa Mascaro, Zeke Miller, Mark Sherman and Eileen Putman in Washington contributed.

A Brutal Normality: Switzerland’s Sex Market

It is 8 a.m. and the rain is coming down in sheets and bouncing off the pavements. The streets are empty except for a dozen women and their pimps. Rue Sismondi, in the heart of the Pâquis district of Geneva, is known for prostitution, drugs and gang violence. It is also home to a number of migrant populations, and often referred to as Geneva’s “global village.”

I am in Switzerland to investigate the sex trade in this liberal country, famous for its perfectionism, precision and punctuality. The Swiss reputation for having a humane asylum system—in which the state recognizes the plight of those coming to Switzerland to escape poverty, violence and degradation—flies in the face of the country’s willingness to see women sold on its streets in broad daylight. These are women from desperately poor regions, such as Moldova, Romania, West Africa and Southeast Asia. The sex trade has been legal in Switzerland since 1942, and its prostitution laws and policies suggest that some forms of slavery are more acceptable than others among its supposedly liberal citizens.

One of the pimps, a young man wearing low-slung jeans and a baseball cap, greets me with a jolly “Bonjour, Madame!” while waving at a man driving a police car. There are regular spot checks by police in the street prostitution areas, but I am told they are checking for drug dealers and ignoring the sexual predators looking for women to buy.

View of a street in the Pâquis prostitution zone of Geneva. (Julie Bindel)

Geneva is the second largest city in Switzerland but has a population of just 200,000. Home to the United Nations, Red Cross and World Health Organization, Geneva is not just a popular tourist location but an important hub for business, trade and political visitors. Well over 2 million people visit the city every year. Many of them are male sex tourists.

I have been researching and writing about the global sex trade for 20 years and have visited numerous countries around the world to do so. But nowhere have I encountered such normalization of prostitution as I saw in Geneva—not even in Germany or the Netherlands.

Until 2013, it was perfectly legal for johns here to pay for sex with 16-year-old girls. That year, however, Parliament raised the legal age to 18, in line with other Western European countries, after pressure from feminists and child protection advocates.

In 2014, inmates of La Paquerette (a social therapy department for prisoners) were allowed to visit prostituted women in a local detention center near Geneva.

In 2016, businessman Bradley Charvet applied to his local municipality in Geneva for a license to open a “fellatio cafe”; Charvet is also involved with the Switzerland-based pimping website Facegirl. The cafe idea has not yet progressed to a venture, but the application stated that for 50 Swiss francs ($50), a customer could choose a woman from photographs on an iPad, then order her to give him a blow job with his cappuccino.

Plenty of organizations and individuals in Switzerland support this laissez-faire approach to prostitution. The largest direct service provider in Geneva, Aspasie, is a Red Umbrella-affiliated organization, which means it supports the decriminalization of the sex trade and is opposed to the abolitionist approach to tackle demand.

There is nowhere in the world where street prostitution has been legalized. However, in Geneva and Zurich, as well as elsewhere in Switzerland, selling sex on the streets is both tolerated and accepted. There are unofficial zones in Geneva where pimps know to take the women and where johns know to go to stalk their prey. The off-street sex trade is also prolific, with numerous brothels, massage parlors and saunas offering women for sale. Unless a complaint is made by a member of the public, the police turn a blind eye.

 * * *

On my arrival in Geneva, I stop for something to eat in the gay area, only a short walk from my hotel in the heart of the red light district. I notice a table of lesbians sitting outside, smoking and laughing. As I finish my meal, they beckon me over to join them for a drink. I tell them what I am doing in the city and ask what they know about the local prostitution scene. They are involved with an LGBT rights organization and explain that some of the young gay men in the city are involved in the sex trade. I ask what they think about legalized prostitution and whether it works in Switzerland. “It used to be OK,” says Emma, a civil servant who grew up in the city. “But I understand that those were the days when local women sold sex. Today the problem comes with trafficking. Most of the women are from Romania and other such countries.”

Genevieve tells me that she thinks legalization is the “only way” to properly handle the sex trade: “Why shouldn’t it be treated like any other business?” She says that people in Switzerland consider themselves liberal and tolerant. I wonder if they know exactly what they are tolerating.

After watching activities in the prostitution area in the early hours, I head off the next morning to Venusia, an infamous brothel on the outskirts of town, to request an interview with Madame Lisa, a regular spokeswoman for the benefits of legalized prostitution. The street that houses the brothel is gray, ugly and near a busy road. As I approach the main entrance, two men walk out laughing, one making a sexual gesture to the woman waving them goodbye.

The brothel owner is not in the building, but I am taken into the reception area and asked to leave my name and contact details. I am told that Lisa will be in touch as soon as she returns. It is not quite midday and already the brothel is busy. Several women walk past me in the reception area, some coming to meet johns and others going into the private area beyond. It is difficult to tell the age of some of the women, but certainly none is over 25. Some are significantly younger. Most appear to be North African or Romanian.

Two doors away from Venusia is a smaller brothel. I would have missed it were it not for the john leaving the building, zipping up his jeans. “Au revoir!” shouts the young woman at the door, wearing a corset and impossibly high spiked heels. As she walks back in, I hear her mutter, “Connard.” It means asshole.

I press the intercom as I read the menu on the window. One hundred thirty Swiss francs ($132) buys full sex with two different women, plus a side order of fellatio. I tell the receptionist I am a reporter investigating legalization in Switzerland and ask if anyone would be interested in speaking to me. Both she and the women working there decline.

I have been told by a couple who run a Christian support service for prostituted women in Geneva to visit a Thai restaurant in the Paquis district, which is frequented by pimps and the women they sell. “They [the pimps] will talk to you,” says my contact. “Especially if they think there’s any money in it for them.” He is right. When I arrive at the restaurant at lunch time, the place is almost full—mainly with women wearing coats over classic street prostitution attire: hot pants, micro skirts, boob tubes and “hooker boots.” The women appear to be of a number of ethnicities, including Eastern European and West African. The men are almost all of North African appearance and under the age of 30.

“You want anything, lady?” asks one of the women, her accent strongly Eastern European. “She want something, she can come to me,” says one of the young men, meeting my eye and holding my gaze. “Anything here you like?” he asks me.

Taking advantage of the fact that I am suspected of being a potential sex buyer, I move into my cover story. “I am not here for myself but for my son,” I say. “He has been paralyzed since he was 15 and can’t have sex. He is desperate to have a normal experience with a woman, and I wanted to bring him somewhere where paying for sex is nothing unusual and not illegal.”

I say that my son attends a college in Geneva and that I can bring him to meet one of the women at her convenience. I ask how much it will cost. “Depends on what you want,” says the pimp. “A girlfriend? A fuck? Something special? There are different prices for different girls. Does he want a black one? I can get him a black one.” The pimp introduces himself as Ali, but I figure that’s not his real name. I tell him I will come back and see him after talking to my son about it.

Ali stares at me as I leave the cafe. I feel very uncomfortable. “Don’t go to the street looking for a woman; they all have diseases,” he says. “Mine are all tested. Every month I take them to the clinic and I pay. If you want, you can see their certificates. And these ones have proper documents. Some of the girls don’t even have passports.”

* * *

I walk around Rue Sismondi, the most notorious street for prostitution in the area. It is still raining, although less heavily, and at least 15 women stand on corners or walk up and down looking for trade. I see a commuter in a suit wander up to a very young-looking woman. He stands under her umbrella and smokes a cigarette. The john removes his wallet and points to the alley to the left, which is home to a large “gentleman’s club.” There are red velvet chairs in the windows, and posters showing women in bikinis lining the walls. It looks like a clip joint: an old-style brothel that sells overpriced alcohol, with the pimps regularly extorting money from the sex buyers. Several barely dressed women are sitting on red velvet thrones with a red light shining behind them. I ask the security man hovering outside the door what kind of a venue it is. He tells me it is for “les hommes à venir se détendre”—for “men to come to relax.”

* * *

That night I meet a contact who, for several years, has worked for one of the major human rights organizations based in the city. This person would not only lose his/her job if exposed as a whistleblower, but also would be vilified by colleagues and possibly blacklisted from other jobs within the sector. Under strict instruction not to reveal his/her identity, my contact gives me horrifying details of the prolific sexual exploitation perpetrated by so-called human rights officials within the city.

The whistleblower, whom I will call Jay, tells me that “Friday night is known as ‘ho’ night” within the office of this large organization. “The men in my team literally brag about going to prostitutes,” Jay says. “One of the roles in the team is to raise awareness about trafficking and irregular migration, but these guys go out and abuse them without any thought.”

Jay once confronted a colleague who was bragging in the office about a night he had enjoyed with an “oversexed Romanian,” laughing with another male employee that he was terrified his “dick would drop off.”

Jay asked how the man knew that she was not trafficked or pressured into prostitution. “We don’t have sex with the trafficked ones, just the ones that want to be there,” was the reply. “How do you know whether they are trafficked?” Jay persisted. “We ask them,” he said.

Jay tells me about an instance when several colleagues visited a brothel en masse. “They were bragging that five of them had sex with one woman in this place, and that she could not speak any English. When they were leaving, the woman was crying. One of the men said, without any [self-awareness] whatsoever, that she was probably upset because she wanted one of us to take her home.”

The regular profile of a trafficking victim, Jay says, is that of a young woman who has been promised a good salary, a work permit and the reimbursement of travel costs by an agent in her home country. The reputation of Switzerland as a democratic country with a good human rights record inspires trust in many women from Eastern Europe.

Jay tells me of planning to report these men to a senior manager, adding: “If I lose my job, I will take them to court. But I can’t sit back and let this continue.”

There is very little research on the numbers of men who pay for sex in Switzerland, but one 2008 study found that almost one-quarter (23 percent) of men between the ages of 17 and 45 have done so at least once. I meet Robert, who owns a small business and is originally from Paris. “I didn’t visit brothels when I lived in France,” he says. “But in Geneva, it is acceptable and almost even respectable. The [prostitutes] do things that are not considered nice for wives and girlfriends to do.”

I ask Robert why he pays for sex, aside from being able to demand oral and anal sex from the women, and he tells me something I have heard from johns countless times in numerous countries. “If I take a girl out,” he says, “buy her dinner and do all the flirting and things, but at the end of the evening she tells me she doesn’t want sex, I have wasted my time and a lot of money. So why don’t I just go straight for the sex? That way, she has earned good money and I am happy.”

The legal definition of prostitution in Geneva is “the act of selling sex.” The buyer is invisible, both in legislation and public awareness. Trafficking is increasing, but, according to johns such as Jay’s colleagues and Robert, the assumption is that these women somehow pinpoint Geneva from their tiny villages in Senegal, Hungary, the Dominican Republic, Thailand or Ukraine and flock here to work in the sex trade. Switzerland has some of the most stringent immigration and labor laws in the world, but these women, johns seem to think, miraculously manage to get Swiss “work” permits and then choose prostitution over every other possible source of revenue.

Taina Bien Aimee is co-director of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW), a New York City-based international nongovernmental organization. “The Swiss government’s indifference to the suffering of trafficked and prostituted women is abhorrent,” says Aimee, who was raised in Geneva. “Officials hide behind the notion of choice and a woman’s consent to being bought and sold in the Swiss sex trade. But it would not take rigorous investigations to uncover that a disenfranchised young Nigerian woman from Edo state, for example, would have difficulty finding Zurich or Geneva on a map, let alone purchasing a one-way ticket to a brothel or a ‘sex box’ without a trafficker or pimp owning her fate.”

* * *

Trafficking is a much bigger problem in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand, which have legalized, or “normalized,” sex trades, than in those that have adopted the Nordic model, in which the sex buyer is criminalized and the prostituted person is decriminalized and assisted out of prostitution.

Switzerland is a primary destination for sex traffickers in Europe. Victims originate mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from Thailand, Nigeria, China, Brazil, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic and Morocco.

In recent years, the numbers have increased. The women (and, in far fewer numbers, men) operate using newspaper advertisements, cellphones and apartments rented by pimps. Some pimps accept credit cards as payment—because, after all, this is a legitimate business.

The increase in free movement of people between Switzerland and the EU is often cited as being integral to the increase of prostitution in the country. From what I saw and heard while there, however, it is more likely that because men face no consequences for paying for sex, they are more likely to do so. To meet the increasing demand, traffickers import women from poor and war-torn nations.

According to CATW, around 14,000 women are sold into the Swiss sex trade, with approximately 70 percent coming from other countries. A report estimates that 350,000 men—about 20 percent of the population—purchase sexual acts. The Swiss sex trade reaps an estimated 3.5 billion Swiss francs ($3.5 billion) in profits per year.

Across Switzerland, brothel raids turn up trafficked women from Brazil and Eastern Europe. As in other countries with legal brothels, the illegal side of prostitution does not diminish with legalization. Instead, it often grows.

A four-story brothel in Zurich. (Julie Bindel)

Switzerland legalized its sex trade almost 80 years ago—yet another piece of evidence that normalizing prostitution helps no one except pimps and other exploiters. In 2016, a trafficker was convicted of trafficking 80 women from Thailand, who were sent to brothels in the cantons of Bern, Solothurn, Lucerne, Basel, St. Gallen and Zurich. The women were kept under lock and key and forced to service numerous sex buyers to pay off enormous debts to the pimps who had transported them from their home country.

There are also significant levels of violence committed against the women by pimps and johns. One case in 2017 involved an investment banker who murdered a prostituted woman, stuffed her body in a suitcase and placed the suitcase in a wine cellar in his cellar.

Conversely, to date there has been only one murder of a prostituted person by a pimp or john in Norway, and none in the other seven countries that have criminalized paying for sex.

* * *

On the train from Geneva to Zurich, I talk to Anna, a woman in her 20s who attends a university in the capital. She asks me what I am doing in Switzerland. I tell her I am investigating the sex trade. She is instantly attentive, asking, “Does that include sugar baby stuff?”

So-called sugar-baby hook-ups are largely facilitated by the website Seeking Arrangement, which boasts more than 10 million users across 139 countries, with substantial numbers of Switzerland-based men on its books. Older men—“sugar daddies”—target young students in need of money—“sugar babies”—as “dates.” Many desperate young women even auction their virginity on the site. It is a classic example of the sanitization of the sex trade.

“I have three friends who do this,” Anna tells me on the train, looking upset. “They tell me it is not prostitution, but all of them have had sex with the men they hook up with.” The men are “much older,” and one friend described her date as “repulsive.” Anna seems worried about the safety of “sugar-dating.” Most shockingly, the university her friends attended had “dating websites” on its list of suggested casual jobs for students.

* * *

In Zurich, I stay at a hotel within walking distance of the notorious “sex performance box” zone—or, more accurately, the drive-thru outdoor brothel on the outskirts of the city, near the main railway line in Sihlquai.

As I check in, the hotel manager tells me that men often stay there to “have a good time” in the prostitution area. “They are not Swiss, maybe some English,” he tells me. “Perhaps you don’t have anything like this at home? Here we are very open about sex in Switzerland. Very liberal.”

I had been hearing about the so-called sex performance boxes since they were raised in 2011 as a potential solution to the problems inherent to street prostitution. The following year, just over half (52 percent) of citizens voted in favor of Zurich spending $2 million to set up the zone. The intention was to make street prostitution safer and reduce trafficking and other forms of violence. The boxes opened in 2013; so far, there is no evidence that trafficking or violence has been reduced.

I was told it is impossible to visit the drive-thru brothels without my own car. Later in the evening, however, as the facilities open, I ask a taxi driver who speaks good English—and who appears to be somewhat of an expert on prostitution—to drive me there and to ask the security people if I can speak with the women, or be shown around.

As the taxi driver speaks to members of the outreach team at Flora Dora, a government funded nongovernmental organization that provides condoms and safety tips to the women, I watch cars drive through, counting 22 cars entering—and several leaving—during the 15 minutes we are inside the area.

Some of the women in the outdoor brothel enclosure appear intoxicated, and many are thin and frail in appearance. Prostitution takes a terrible toll on women’s physical and mental health. One survey of 193 prostituted women in Zurich (5 percent of whom were registered with the government) found that more than 50 percent suffered psychiatric ailments such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders and psychosis, as well as alcohol dependency. By comparison, 18 percent of nonprostituted women suffer psychiatric ailments.

Prices are around 50 Swiss francs for “hand relief,” full sex is $100; and anal sex is $200.

I watch as the johns drive into the small, circular park, cruise the women from their cars and then wave to whichever woman takes their fancy. The women are standing outside of door-less, alarmed buildings in which they keep their belongings and change into skimpy outfits from their “day clothes.”

Once the john has chosen a woman, she joins him in his car, and he drives into one of the teak-colored wooden garages that surround one side of the cordoned-off area. Each has space for a single car; johns on foot or bikes are not allowed in.

Sex boxes in Zurich. (Julie Bindel)

Each of the 10 boxes is lit up in red, green or yellow. A vending machine, which sells condoms, lubricant, soft drinks and chocolate bars, sits at the end of the row, next to an ATM. Posters advocating safe sex decorate the walls.

The boxes contain nothing but a panic button and a waste bin for condoms and tissues. There are no surveillance cameras for the johns to worry about. I assumed the lack of security cameras are due to the fact that johns might be scared off if they were filmed entering and leaving, but I am told by various sources that police and city officials followed advice from those running similar zones in Utrecht and elsewhere, and decided that cameras are inadequate, because a woman will already have been assaulted by the time the footage is viewed, and that an on-site security presence is the best deterrence to violence.

The prostituted women in the enclosure have access to on-site social workers, and police increase patrols around the area to protect the women when they enter and leave. Clearly, the authorities are under no illusion about the dangers inherent to prostitution, even in such a public, monitored space.

I am told that no one from Flora Dora is able to speak to me, and I am not allowed to approach either the women or the johns. I am handed the leaflets the organization gives to the prostituted women, which provide tips on how to identify violent johns. The materials are in Spanish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian.

Facilitating the “right” of men to pay for sex is an expensive business. The Swiss government spends $800,000 each year maintaining the booths, which includes the on-site security and social services.

The drive-thru brothels were deemed a great success by the Swiss during the summer. But observing the bins filled with condoms and the clinical organization of the area, all I can think about is what a lot of public money is being spent by the Swiss government in order to make it easier for men to pay for sex with financially desperate women. I wonder how many women could be supported out of prostitution with the amount of money spent so far on these facilities.

Roughly 3,000 women are registered as prostitutes in Zurich—a number that continues to increase, although rising competition among the women has led to a sharp drop in “service” prices. The Altstetten district of Zurich and one road where street prostitution was allowed was closed when the drive-thru brothel site opened, and street prostitution is illegal in most areas of the city. The same year the drive-thru brothel opened, street prostitutes in Zurich had to start buying nightly permits, at a cost of 5 francs each, from a vending machine installed in the area. In addition, since 2003, legislation has been put in place to ban “window prostitution.”

After my visit to the drive-thru brothels, the taxi driver takes me to see one of the city’s 300 registered brothels. This one is on Langstrasse (Long Street), the most notorious red-light area in the city. The four-story building has five brightly lit windows per floor, through which young women in underwear are visible. Although the women are clearly being advertised, this is different from what is known as “window prostitution,” which is distinctive in that the women are always on ground level and in single-occupancy brothels, as opposed to multiroomed premises.

“I get many customers asking me to take them there,” says my driver. “The women are out on the streets all day and night, but the ones from that house [the brothel] come out onto the street around 10 p.m. to meet customers face to face and then take them inside.” I ask if the police ever patrol the street, and he tells me, “You see them sometimes, but they are just looking for drugs or violence.”

“This is Langstrasse, very dangerous,” the taxi driver says, on seeing a group of men spill out of a sex club, drunk and shouting loudly at passers-by. “At 10 o’clock at night it’s very dangerous.”

I ask if he knows where the women on the streets are from. “They come from Poland, Italy, France and Romania, Morocco. Swiss ladies, not much.”

The taxi driver tells me that there is “definitely more” prostitution on the street, and more visible customers since the sex boxes were opened. “But it is safer for the ladies,” he says. I ask him how he knows it is safer for the women to be in the drive-thru enclosures rather than the streets. Who has he heard it from? “I don’t know if anyone told me,” he says, “but it must be.”

I head off to meet Ben (not his real name), a British police officer who until recently worked as a consultant for an anti-trafficking organization. Ben knows a lot about prostitution: He has been involved in policing what used to be known as “vice” for 30 years. He has led a number of operations to detect international pimping operations.

We talk in a busy bar close to Niederhof, the cobbled street known to be one of the main street prostitution zones. “The girls are young,” says Ben, “maybe no older than 18, 19. And they are all controlled in one way or another. The pimps are in the building every day. If they call themselves landlords, it still doesn’t alter the fact that they are living off prostitution.

Rules for johns, posted at the entrance of “sex boxes” in Zurich. (Julie Bindel)

“So Niederhof is a street prostitution area which is always busy,” Ben continues. “Even since the sex boxes. In the street it is dangerous for the girls.”

I see dozens of prostituted women, openly touting for johns on the streets. The installation of the sex boxes has clearly not done what the government promised—remove or drastically reduce street prostitution in other areas of the city.

During my time with Ben, I hear about the growth of temporary pop-up salons in subleased apartments or hotels, and Airbnb brothels. According to Ben, legalization provides the perfect cover for the illegal trade. The small owner-occupied brothels in New Zealand, for instance, do not need a license to operate, so long as no more than four individuals sell sex from the premises at any one time. In Zurich, since July 2017, mini-salons with up to two rooms in any one premise are exempt from licensing requirements. These salons are allowed in residential areas where there is currently a ban on licensed brothels.

“Let’s face it,” Ben says, “pimps know where they can make lots of money, and it isn’t going to be in Sweden.”

* * *

The most vocal campaigners for prostitution and trafficking are those who argue for blanket decriminalization of the sex trade and against the Nordic model.

For example, Aspasie is part of the pro-prostitution Global Network of Sex Work Projects, which is funded by the Open Society Foundation, brainchild of George Soros. Based in Geneva, Aspasie campaigns nationwide for the abolition of laws against pimping.

The Don Juan Project in Switzerland was developed and funded by Swiss AIDS Control. It is considered a best-practice model. The education program run by Don Juan in a number of Swiss cantons focused on condom use and “safe sex,” not on dissuading johns to stop paying for sex in the first place, a strategy that has proved successful in Nordic model countries.

Janice Raymond, in her 2013 book, “Not a Choice, Not a Job,” wrote about Don Juan’s report of its “success” with its “client re-education” project: “The wording of the Don Juan report is interesting. Of the 800 prostitution users who came into the tent and were found not to use condoms regularly when buying women in prostitution, about two-thirds said they would consider changes in their behaviour. What they weren’t asked to consider was to stop buying women in prostitution.”

But alongside other countries that have legalized their sex trade, such as the Netherlands, Germany and some states in Australia, the feminist abolitionist movement is beginning to emerge.

I meet Ursula Nakamura-Stoecklin at a Zurich train station. She is a retired medical professional and is involved in various women’s groups in and around Basel, which is Switzerland’s third most populous city, after Zurich and Geneva.

“The debate about sex-work versus abolition is boiling in Switzerland at the moment,” she tells me. “In some women’s groups, we dare not take it up, as it may well divide us. In June, the influential coordination of different women’s organizations by Frauenzentrale Zurich (Zurich Women’s Centre) strongly voiced the support of the Nordic model, which decriminalizes those selling sex, whilst criminalizing the johns.”

In June, this small nongovernmental organization launched its campaign for a ban on prostitution, and the introduction of the Nordic model. A video by the group has been circulated throughout Switzerland and beyond. “But still most of the media is against us,” Nakamura-Stoecklin says, “with different organizations that are pro-prostitution, [along with] police, saying it is too expensive to arrest the johns.”

It is difficult to see how much more expensive this strategy would be than the massive expense of maintaining the so-called sex boxes—which constitute merely a fraction of the sex trade across the city.

“These [pro-prostitution] organizations close their eyes to the fact that around 80 percent of the prostitutes are victims of sex trafficking,” Nakamura-Stoecklin says. “I simply cannot understand this blindness. We have one national organization, FIZ, which does an excellent job helping women to get out of the claws of traffickers. They have a specialized migrant section, which gives the women protection. But this organization is a strong advocate of prostitution by arguing that in [countries that have adopted the Nordic model], clandestine crimes against these women have increased.”

It is almost always the same story, Nakamura-Stoecklin says. “We hear it on TV and see it in the newspapers, but still people here think our system works. A poor woman from Moldova or somewhere, she wants to get a better job, be a teacher or something, and was promised a good job in Switzerland. She leaves her family in Moldova and she arrives here, and she lands in a brothel and she cannot get out. Why don’t Swiss people realize what is happening here?”

My trip to Switzerland is coming to an end. The window brothels, sex clubs, strip joints, street procurement and four-story brothels are all operating with impunity, with the numbers of women being procured into prostitution growing, and the traffickers, pimps and johns arrogantly going about their business, with little fear of condemnation or criminalization. I reflect on how little I knew previously about how prevalent and normalized the sex trade is here, despite my years of intensive research and reporting on the global sex market.

The normalization of the Swiss sex trade comes down to entrenched and long-term legalization.

The stereotype is that the Swiss like order, rules and cleanliness. But it is impossible to sanitize prostitution—no government can. The Swiss indifference to harm and violence perpetrated against women in the sex trade comes from a long official history of misogyny and sex discrimination. Swiss women gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1971, and the last canton that granted women the vote on local issues was Appenzell, in 1991. If a government resists seeing women as full human beings deserving of equal voting rights, it will certainly resist looking at the sex trade as a manifestation of inequality and violence against women.

To tackle its prostitution problems, the Swiss must look to France for its law targeting sex buyers and providing protection for prostituted women. Its other neighbor, Germany, is the worst example to follow, where legalized prostitution continues to generate massive human rights violations for the profit of the state, including dozens of murders of prostituted women since 2002.

What my anonymous contacts in the worlds of human rights and law enforcement told me during my trip left me further convinced that legalization of the sex trade results in an increase in both legal and illegal sex markets, which in turn leads to further normalization of prostitution and the devaluation of women in Switzerland. Acceptance of the sex trade is a green light to traffickers and other exploiters, and at the same time, encourages a laissez-faire attitude among the police.

“I can see why [my colleagues] have ended up convincing themselves it is OK to pay for a foreign prostitute,” Jay, from the human rights organization in Geneva, told me. “They probably think it is just the same as being served in a restaurant by a Romanian.”

In the meantime, numbers of women trafficked into and throughout Switzerland increase. The spotlight needs to be firmly on this country. So far, Switzerland has elicited the least attention and outrage from the feminist abolitionist movement than anywhere else in the world.

For all that Switzerland presents itself on the international stage as progressive and humanitarian, its disregard of the human rights abuses being perpetrated every day against prostituted women is nothing short of a disgrace.

Pittsburgh Buries Its Dead as Trump Faces Protesters

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh’s Jewish community began burying its dead Tuesday after the synagogue massacre, holding funerals for a beloved family doctor, a pillar of the congregation, and two 50-something brothers known as the Rosenthal “boys.”

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, arrived in Pittsburgh to pay his respects and encountered hundreds of shouting, chanting protesters with signs such as “It’s your fault” and “Words matter,” a reference to allegations his bellicose language has emboldened bigots. Pennsylvania’s governor and the mayor of Pittsburgh declined to join him during the visit.

Earlier in the day, thousands of mourners jammed a synagogue, a Jewish community center and a third, undisclosed site for the first in a weeklong series of funerals for victims of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein and Cecil and David Rosenthal were among 11 people killed in the shooting rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday. Robert Gregory Bowers, a 46-year-old truck driver who authorities say raged against Jews, was arrested on federal hate-crime charges that could bring the death penalty.

With Tree of Life still cordoned off as a crime scene, more than 1,000 people poured into Rodef Shalom, one of the city’s oldest and largest synagogues, to mourn the Rosenthal brothers, ages 59 and 54.

The two intellectually disabled men were “beautiful souls” who had “not an ounce of hate in them — something we’re terribly missing today,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, a survivor of the massacre, said at their funeral.

Myers, his voice quivering, told the Rosenthals’ parents and other family members: “The entire world is sharing its grief with you, so you don’t walk alone.”

The brothers were widely known as “the boys,” the Rosenthals’ sister, Diane Hirt, noted. “They were innocent like boys, not hardened like men,” she said.

She said Cecil — a gregarious man with a booming voice who was lightheartedly known as the mayor of Squirrel Hall and the “town crier” for the gossip he managed to gather — would have especially enjoyed the media attention this week, a thought that brought laughter from the congregation.

Rabinowitz’s funeral was held at the Jewish Community Center in the city’s Squirrel Hill section, the historic Jewish neighborhood where the rampage took place. Two police vehicles were posted at a side door and two at the main entrance.

A line stretched around the block as mourners — some in white medical coats, some wearing yarmulkes, black hats or head scarves — passed beneath the blue Romanesque arches into the brick building.

The 66-year-old Rabinowitz was a go-to doctor for HIV patients in the epidemic’s early and desperate days, a physician who always hugged his patients as they left his office.

“A lot of people are feeling really angry about this. A lot of rage built up inside about this, because of it being a hate crime. Don’t get me wrong; I do. But I’m so overwhelmed with sadness right now that I can’t even be angry right now,” said Robin Faulkner, whose family had seen Rabinowitz for 30 years and counted him as a dear friend. “It’s just such a loss. Just tragic.”

A private funeral was also held for Stein, the 71-year-old men’s club president at Tree of Life.

The other victims’ funerals have been scheduled through Friday.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump landed in Pittsburgh after the day’s services and lit candles at Tree of Life for the victims. Outside, they laid white roses as well as stones for each of the dead, a Jewish burial tradition. The president and first lady later went to a hospital to visit with survivors.

They were joined by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, as well as Myers, the Tree of Life rabbi, and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer.

Hundreds of protesters gathered near the synagogue and the hospital.

“He didn’t pull the trigger, but his verbiage and actions don’t help,” said Squirrel Hill resident Paul Carberry, 55, wearing anti-Trump patches on his hat and jacket.

Another Squirrel Hill resident, Shayna Marcus, who had hoped to catch the presidential motorcade with her young sons but just missed it, said the anger at Trump is misplaced.

“I don’t think focusing on Trump is the answer, or on politics,” said Marcus, a 34-year-old nurse and Trump supporter.

Democratic Mayor Bill Peduto had asked Trump not to come while the city was burying its dead. He and Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat, said they would skip the president’s visit.

“Community leaders expressed to the governor that they did not feel it was appropriate for Trump to come, so the governor made a decision not to join him on his visit out of respect for the families and the community,” said Beth Melena, Wolf’s campaign spokeswoman.

Among the mourners at the Rosenthal brothers’ funeral was Dr. Abe Friedman, who typically sat in the back row of Tree of Life with the two men but was late to synagogue on Saturday and was not there when the gunman opened fire.

As he stood in line at the funeral, Friedman wondered why he had been spared.

“Why did things fall into place for me?” he asked. “I usually sit in the back row. In the last row, everyone got killed.”

Associated Press reporter Claudia Lauer reported from Philadelphia. Associated Press journalists Robert Bumsted, Adam Geller and Mark Scolforo in Pittsburgh and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed.

Boston Gangster Whitey Bulger Slain in Prison

Truthdig update: Gangster James “Whitey” Bulger “was slain in federal prison,” The Associated Press reported late Tuesday. The death is “being investigated as a homicide,” AP wrote in paraphrasing a prison union official.

BOSTON — James “Whitey” Bulger, the murderous Boston gangster who benefited from a corrupt relationship with the FBI before spending 16 years as one of America’s most wanted men, died in federal prison. He was 89.

Bulger was found unresponsive Tuesday morning at the U.S. penitentiary in West Virginia where he’d just been transferred, and a medical examiner declared him dead shortly afterward, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Authorities did not immediately release a cause of death but said the FBI was notified and is investigating.

Bulger, the model for Jack Nicholson’s ruthless crime boss in the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, “The Departed,” led a largely Irish mob that ran loan-sharking, gambling and drug rackets. He also was an FBI informant who ratted on the New England mob, his gang’s main rival, in an era when bringing down the Mafia was a top national priority for the FBI.

Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 after his FBI handler, John Connolly Jr., warned him he was about to be indicted. With a $2 million reward on his head, Bulger became one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” criminals, with a place just below Osama bin Laden.

When the extent of his crimes and the FBI’s role in overlooking them became public in the late 1990s, Bulger became a source of embarrassment for the FBI. During the years he was a fugitive, the FBI battled a public perception that it had not tried very hard to find him.

After more than 16 years on the run, Bulger was captured at age 81 in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living in a rent-controlled apartment near the beach with his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

In 2013, he was convicted in the slayings, as well as extortion, and money-laundering after a sensational racketeering trial that included graphic testimony from three former Bulger cohorts: a hit man, a protege and a partner. He was sentenced nearly five years ago to two consecutive life sentences plus five years.

Bulger had just been moved to USP Hazelton, a high-security prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. He had been in a prison in Florida before a stopover at a transfer facility in Oklahoma City. Federal Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney had declined to comment on why he was being moved.

Bulger, nicknamed “Whitey” for his bright platinum hair, grew up in a gritty South Boston housing project and became known as one of the most ruthless gangsters in Boston. His younger brother, William Bulger, became one of the most powerful politicians in Massachusetts, leading the state Senate for 17 years.

In working-class “Southie,” Jim Bulger was known for helping old ladies across the street and giving turkey dinners to his neighbors at Thanksgiving. He had a kind of Robin Hood-like image among some locals, but authorities said he would put a bullet in the brain of anyone who he even suspected of double-crossing him.

“You could go back in the annals of criminal history and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone as diabolical as Bulger,” said Tom Duffy, a retired state police major who investigated Bulger.

“Killing people was his first option. They don’t get any colder than him,” Duffy said after Bulger was finally captured in June 2011.

Bulger was accused of strangling Debra Davis, the 26-year-old girlfriend of his partner, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, and Deborah Hussey, also 26, the daughter of Flemmi’s common-law wife. In both cases, Bulger insisted on pulling out the women’s teeth so they would be difficult to identify, Flemmi testified.

During a search of his Santa Monica apartment, agents found over $800,000 in cash and more than 30 guns, many hidden in holes in the walls. A property manager at the building said Bulger and Greig, who used the names Charles and Carol Gasko, had lived there for 15 years and always paid the rent-controlled rate of $1,145 a month in cash.

They were caught days after the FBI began a new publicity campaign focusing on Greig. The daytime TV announcements showed photos of Greig and noted that she was known to frequent beauty salons and have her teeth cleaned once a month.

A woman from Iceland who knew Bulger and Greig in Santa Monica saw a report on CNN about the latest publicity campaign and called in the tip that led agents to them. The Boston Globe identified the tipster as a former Miss Iceland, a former actress who starred in Noxzema shaving cream commercials in the 1970s.

Bulger, a physical fitness buff, had been taken to a Boston hospital from his jail cell at least three times, complaining of chest pains, since being brought back to Boston to stand trial.

Thom Hartmann: Trump and Fox News Have Blood on Their Hands

It’s already started. They’re messaging, texting, tweeting, and even calling into my radio/TV show. Breitbart is even bragging that they got it on CNN.

“This killing in Pittsburgh has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He’s not an anti-Semite; his daughter converted to Judaism and his grandkids are Jews! How can you blame him for the ‘mentally ill’ guy [a phrase used to describe terrorists only when they’re white]?”

But the shooter, by his own words—words that are almost entirely missing from most TV coverage—acted because of what both Trump and Newt Gingrich have said was the main election-year message of Trump and the entire Republican Party: Immigration by people of color.

As the terrorist himself posted on social media just a few hours before he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15, he was going to kill members of a congregation that supported the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).

HIAS (whose slogan is “Welcome the stranger; Protect the refugee”) had designated October 19 and 20 of this year as the “National Refugee Shabbat”—and when they did so, the terrorist posted on a right-wing social media site, “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided.”

HIAS was founded in New York in 1881 to help resettle Jewish refugees, but in recent years has moved many of its efforts toward other refugees, including people from Africa, the Americas, and people who practice Islam. As HIAS’s president, Mark Hetfield, told the New York Times, “We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish. Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish.”

Dark skin and “Muslim” are triggers for bigots like the cowardly terrorist and his buddies on social media. In another post, presumably referencing HIAS, he wrote, “Open you [sic] Eyes! It’s the filthy evil jews [sic] Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!”

HIAS used to have a link on its website to the 270 congregations in 32 states that were participating in the work to bring refugees into the United States (and elsewhere), although that link now just points back to their homepage (perhaps because the event is over, or maybe because of the terrorist’s threat).

Noting the terrorist’s pointing out that link to the congregations, which included Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, the Times of Israel reported, “To mark the organization’s personal involvement, at the back of the hall, information on volunteer opportunities in the refugee and immigration committees of participating synagogues and HIAS materials were available for attendees to take home, including a bookmark with the words ‘My People Were Refugees Too.’”

Apparently this festered with the terrorist, because just a few hours before he walked past those brochures and started murdering people at Tree of Life, he posted to a right-wing social media site, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

And in he went, guns blazing.

So, Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. This white American terrorist gets increasingly agitated by it all, freaked out that more people of color (or even Muslims!) might be coming to our border to legally apply to asylum, and decides it’s time to take out one of the groups associated with HIAS, who is helping refugees.

It’s a straight line—through Fox and right-wing hate radio—from Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants to the terrorist himself.

Certainly this terrorist had a history of hating Jews; he had repeatedly posted on one of his snowflake “safe places” for haters, “Kill all the Jews!” and “There is no MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.”

But this wasn’t entirely an anti-Semitic attack, by the attacker’s own words.

A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America.

And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.

This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism.

This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.

We all know how well that turned out for Germany and the world.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Daniel Ellsberg: The Threat of Nuclear Catastrophe Is All Too Real

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay, and this is Reality Asserts Itself. And I’m in Berkeley, California.

Daniel Ellsberg is a former U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision making about the Vietnam War. He has written many books and has been the subject of documentary films. Perhaps no single whistleblower has made such a heroic contribution in exposing the real aims of U.S. foreign policy and war planning. His recent book is entitled “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”

“The Doomsday Machine” is, to my mind, the most important modern history book certainly I’ve ever read. Ellsberg not only debunks the central thesis of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy for the last 75 years, but warns of the current danger of nuclear catastrophe. Because of what’s at stake it’s an absolute must-read for anyone that cares about our future.

Here’s how Ellsberg describes the book’s objective:

“The hidden reality I aim to expose is that for over 50 years all-out thermonuclear war—an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on Earth—has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima, and before these World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these. And that is still true today.

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”

Now joining us in Berkeley, California is Daniel Ellsberg. Thanks so much for joining us.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you very much.

PAUL JAY: I had enormous respect for you before I read this book. And you truly scared the hell out of me with this book, and I think it’s just what we need.

First of all, before we start going through some of the main historic points of the book, for a lot of people—and this is a, the nuclear danger that—you know, the idea of a potential catastrophe, we’re past that. You know, the Soviet Union is gone. We’re no longer in, supposedly in a Cold War, although some people seem to want to start another one. Talk a bit about what you think is the current danger, and why this history matters so much.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: As you say, we are, unfortunately, reproducing some of our own worst past history of the last century. The Cold War, I think, was itself a catastrophic policy course, since it resulted in the creation of two doomsday machines, U.S. and Russia, each of them capable of near extinction of human life, and together coupled by hair triggers form a mutual doomsday machine that’s even far worse and twice as dangerous as one of them alone.

So that was a terrible price of the Cold War, whatever else can be said in favor of the policies, or in support of the idea that it was inevitable, which I used to believe and which I think was very deceptive. But we see people now without the same ideological conflict that could be appealed to before with the Soviet Union, or with Russia. Without that we see them demonizing the Russian great power atrocities, in the same way we characterized the Soviet Union, in various ways. And both of those amounted to this basic premise that what we were facing in Russia or the Soviet Union was Hitler with nuclear weapons.

Now, there was plausibility to that because Stalin was as ruthless as Hitler toward his own people, essentially. Perhaps killed more Communists than Hitler did, over the course of decades. And was in occupation of Eastern Europe, which was presented to us plausibly, but I think wrongly, and simply a stepping point toward trying to occupy all of Western Europe and achieve world domination in some form. And the idea then was that anything was justified in opposing this, deterring it, preventing this from happening, and protecting the freedom of other people in the world. And that’s how it was presented to us. Anything meant anything, because in this case the nuclear scientists had presented us, and the labs and the corporations that produce these weapons and are still producing them, had presented us with weapons that were capable of irreversible effects on human civilization.

So our policy has rested really, since the beginning of the Cold War and since the formation of NATO, on using as an instrument of policy the threat to destroy civilization, or most of humanity, with- backed up by the capability to do it. Keeping it modern, keeping it up to date, replacing old weapons with- that were finishing their production lines with new weapons, to produce more profits and jobs and votes. We’ll come back to that. Our economy, to a considerable extent, depended on this process of peacetime armament, or Cold War armament, indefinitely, as though we were preparing for war indefinitely. And that’s what we have been doing.

I don’t think that any of our presidents wanted a nuclear war at all. But they did want to threaten that they wanted to base alliances on that threat and that promise, and to prepare for it. And the preparing was not a cost, really. It was a benefit to General Dynamics, and Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, who to this day depend for most of their sales and their profits and their jobs on new weapons, despite the fact that we’ve had the ability to blow up most humanity for over half a century.

So that cost is being maintained, essentially. Why? I’ve asked myself this, and I’ve asked others, in the last 10 and 15 years. Why again is Russia and Putin, no longer leaders of a communist philosophy which at least pretended to global ambitions, not that it was ever able to come close to achieving those. But Russia makes no appearance of that. You know, with the loss of East Europe and the Warsaw Pact, their economy, I’ve been told, their GDP, GNP, is somewhat on the level of Italy.

But they are not—not a great world power, ever. And why this- the, why this fear? And I think the answer is much as it was 70 years ago, that only Russia provides a rationale for this defense mobilization, these budgets, year after year. I think we found in the first part of this century you just can’t justify new Trident submarines, or new ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, against ISIS or against Afghanistan, really. Only Russia will do. Someday perhaps China will present itself as a military power that needs this kind of mobilization on our part. Not now.

So it’s Russia or nothing. And I think when they realize that it’s very hard to run an empire—and that’s what presidents do—without an enemy, a hostile—an allegedly hostile power as big as Russia and as widespread as Russia, with a lot of targets, to buy vehicles to destroy them with, it’s a necessary component of our political economy, I would say, and of our alliances, which provide us a hegemony even in the capitalist world.

PAUL JAY: Going through your book, you talk about the, essentially a mythology. Whatever Stalin was domestically, Stalin was not a Hitler, was not poised to try to take over the world.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The difference, as I said, Stalin and Hitler were very comparably ruthless murderers. Killed many millions of people, tens of millions, even. But the idea that Stalin was reckless, expansionist, determined by military means to take over a large part of the world, which Hitler was, was wrong. It was plausible. As I said, he looked enough like Hitler. And that was the ideology that I was brought up in, in a way, since I was 17 or so, right at the beginnings of the Cold War. But I think in retrospect that was not only wrong, but essentially our intelligence people always knew that was wrong. That Stalin, in terms of expansion, was a much more conservative figure, and understood very well that he was number two in the world; that he was not vying to take over, take over the world from the United States. Did not want war with the United States.

And by the way, I think that’s true now. The expansionist tendencies of Putin are being enormously exaggerated. And I think, from all I can see, and why, I think, for much the same reason: that it justifies a $1.7 trillion dollar expansion, which is very hard to justify in the war on terror. Let’s say, you know, we needed the war on Russia still. And that doesn’t mean, by the way, that Russia is totally passive in this point. They, too, are spending more than a trillion dollars. Do they need that in some military sense, if I were advising? And I knew a lot of the people that used to be in the Gorbachev period, policy advisers in that period. I’m certain they would agree with me, certain, that they cannot militarily justify the new weapons they’re building.

But what almost nobody has pointed out is they have the same motives that our corporations do for building these things. They know those, those weapons are not being donated pro bono any more than General Dynamics or Lockheed. They have their Lockheeds and their Boeings, and they have profits and jobs. And maybe even votes. They still do have elections, unlike China, for example.

PAUL JAY: And compete with the United States for arms—and compete with the Americans to sell arms to other countries. That’s an important piece.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: That’s right, in sales, in sales of arms. It was a major thing for them.

So—but their motives are not justifiable any more than ours are, but not worse.

PAUL JAY: You’re talking about the budget over 30 years?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The $1.7 trillion is a 30-year budget for the U.S. for nuclear [crosstalk] for nuclear, a nuclear—a complete, what they call modernization, but replacement of our ICBMs, our submarines, our ballistic missile submarines, our attack submarines, and our bombers, strategic bombers. All the aspects of what we call the nuclear triad, which is simply a marketing device for selling weapons to the Defense Department, and to our allies. And by the same token, we see the same phenomena in Russia and always have. Various labs competing for ICBMs, each one claiming it has the best. The answer being, OK, both. Do them all. And the result being that each has maintained a doomsday machine for over half a century.

And Putin, I believe, has a modernization program going on. That’s very comparable in size to ours for the next decade. I’m not sure that he’s projected it as far as we have.

PAUL JAY: The trillion-dollar number you mentioned for the Russians is for their Russian nuclear weapons program over how many years?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh, over 10 years or so. That’s my understanding.

Notice, for example, that, you know, when Putin made a speech earlier this year about his wonderful, unstoppable weapons, absolutely new, including one that will create a nuclear tsunami off our ports. A drone submarine making an enormous explosion. Other missiles that he had going around the world; you know, under the pole, and coming at Florida, or Mar-a-Lago, like Kim Jong Un’s missiles in their posters. Somehow Mar-a-Lago was a … And if the war comes before Mar-a-Lago is submerged by climate change, and the growing waters, it might be a target.

Do they have to have that? Is that justified by the weapons we’re building? No. The idea of parity, that we don’t want to look weak, which is a good excuse for keeping up with Russia, and Russia for keeping up with the U.S., I think both- both countries have for long had military-industrial complexes. As a matter of fact, the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson said many years ago it’s misleading to say that the U.S. and the Soviet Union have military-industrial complexes. From his point of view, they are military-industrial complexes.

PAUL JAY: The whole economy is so militarized.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: And the economy, the research and development—the role of the engineering and scientific development, and so forth, subsidized and financed by the Defense Department in our country. Well, in their country these weren’t private corporations. They had bureaucratic reasons for competing with each other for budget, and for jobs, and for prestige. And now they have profit, too, just like us.

And as a matter of fact, I’ve heard Gorbachev quoted, just to someone who saw him just a month ago, actually, told me that he had said, like a good Marxist—to the extent he is still a Marxist—said in the U.S. the motives for this arms buildup, which he regards as catastrophic, is profit. And it’s the same in our country. That’s what he said. Now, that’s a quotation I heard. It’s certainly, I’m sure, a correct comment.

PAUL JAY: OK. In the next segment of our interview we’re going to start digging into the history as told in the book Doomsday Machine, and it’s chilling. So please join us for Part 2 of our series of interviews with Daniel Ellsberg on Reality Asserts Itself, on The Real News Network.

The Insidious Myth of the Magical American Soldier

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com. 

We aren’t miracle workers. We’re just soldiers after all—kids barely out of their teens and officers in their mid-20s do most of the fighting. Still, policymakers in Washington, and citizens on Main Street both seem convinced that the mere presence of a few hundred or thousand American troops can alter societies, vanquish the wicked, and remake the world.

A colleague of mine refers to this as the myth of the magic soldier: sprinkle US troops in some horrific mess of a country and voilà—problem solved!

It sounds great, but this sort of delusional thinking has led the United States into one failed quagmire after another, killing some 7,000 US troops and close to one million locals. After 17 years of fruitless, indecisive war, its quite incredible that a bipartisan coalition of mainstream Republicans (neocons, mostly) and Democrats (neo-liberal relics) still cling to the idea that American soldiers wield magic powers. It’s long past time to review the record of our over-adulated troopers and reframe the actual—limited—capabilities of military force.

The standard Washington-media-military narrative goes something like this: take any unstable Muslim country that has any presence of Islamists at all; drop in a few thousand US Army advisors, trainers, or combat troops; stay indefinitely—and loudly proclaim that if ever those soldiers should leave said Muslim country it will undoubtedly collapse and the US of A will be directly threatened.

Some version of that exact formula has been tried in, sequentially, Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraq (2003-present), and Syria (2011-present), along with numerous smaller regional locales: Libya, Niger, Somalia, Yemen, etc. Sometimes the troop levels topped out at nearly 150,000 (Iraq), other times the ground forces and special operator teams are smaller (Yemen, Somalia), but the basic blueprint is the same—US airpower, plus commando raids, plus trainers and advisers can somehow stabilize the unstable, secure the insecure, and—ultimately—we hope, craft a “Little America” in the Muslim world. There’re just a couple problems with this veritable religion of US militarism: 1) we rarely consult with the locals before beginning each “crusade”, and 2) It. Has. Yet. To. Work.

Let us enter, then, the world of the absurd—US interventions since 9/11. In Afghanistan, the ultra hawks told (and tell) us, repeatedly, that more soldiers were needed to back up the government in Kabul. Without those magic troops, we’re warned, Al Qaeda will be back and the US Homeland in grave danger. Of course, the fact is there are relatively few such fighters in Afghanistan, and the Taliban—our primary opponent—has neither the capacity or intent to threaten the US These folks want to conquer Kandahar not Kalamazoo…

Then there was the Iraq invasion, euphemistically titled Operation Iraqi Freedom, which began as a fantastical attempt to craft a liberal democracy between the Tigris and Euphrates – all at the point of a bayonet. By 2006, that adventure had all but fallen apart as the country tumbled into outright civil war. Only then, according the popular, prevailing military and political myth, a new general—David Petraeus—and some 30,000 more “magic” U.S. troopers, turned the tide. In hindsight that was never the case. The US military bought off former enemies with American blood on their hands and temporarily lessened violence. Washington never achieved a more vital political settlement in Baghdad and within three years of America’s departure, Iraq was back in chaos. And back to Mesopotamia flew our soldier miracle workers.

This is when a second mainstream—and utterly bunk—myth developed: that if only Obama had left 10,000 “magic” soldiers in country that Iraq would have been just fine and ISIS would never have formed. Such an assertion denies agency to the Iraqis (who ultimately determine their own destiny), overestimates the capabilities of American troops, and ignores the fact that it was the Iraqi government that refused to sign a treaty to keep a US military presence on the ground. In the soldiers-as-miracles narrative, of course, all that is omitted or ignored.

The same goes for the smaller US presence in Syria, Africa, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and on and on. We’re assured that just a bit more airpower, a smidgen more commando raids, and a few more military advisors will turn the tide, stabilize the unstable, and ensure American security. The problem is this: in each case, no one seems able to articulate an exit strategy. That’s because there is none! And there’s the rub—so long as Americans are convinced of the preternatural capabilities of US troops, Washington will be forced to keep them forever deployed. Should they leave (any of these various locales) we’re told that chaos and transnational terror will explode in the region and in American cities. If that’s not a formula for perpetual war, then I don’t know what is!

The various interventions of the “War on Terror” have, at best, a checkered record. Most were, and are, complete strategic failures. They demonstrate the inherent limits of US military power and the need for tough cost/benefit analyses before taking the fateful step of deploying American men and women in harm’s way.

Yet on the wars churn, with no end in sight. And why not? Presidents (from both parties) wield force almost unilaterally; Congress is derelict in its duty to oversee the wars; the politicized Supreme Court demonstrates no intent to rule on the constitutionality of presidential war powers; and the citizenry, well, they could care less. With no conscription, innumerable technological distractions, and regularly fed information from a media focused more on minutiae than substance, how could we expect the American people to take much interest at all?

The truth is the war for the Greater Middle East is over. America already lost—it just hasn’t accepted it yet. The tragedy – and farce—of it all is that some number of US troops and innumerable local civilians are sure to die before Washington comes out of denial and accepts strategic defeat.

I can’t say when that will be; but odds are my own young children will be of military age by then…and so will yours.

Trump Falsely Claims Power to End Birthright Citizenship

Denouncing the U.S. right to birthright citizenship—guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—as “ridiculous,” President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that he has the power to subvert that guarantee by presidential fiat—his latest effort to mainstream a noxious lie and xenophobic trope while also furthering what critics call his authoritarian approach to governance by once more exploiting certain members of the White House press corps willing to carry his water for him.

Injected into a White House interview by Axios’ Jonathan Swan, a reporter who prides himself on receiving inside information from  anonymous top-level Trump officials, the president appeared surprised (or feigned surprise) that anybody knew his internal desire and plan to end birthright citizenship but said “it will happen” and that “now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

It’s not clear who Trump is referring to when he says “they,” but it’s reasonable to assume—given that Trump says he didn’t think anybody else knew about it—that it’s the very same staff person or people who told Swan to ask him the question in the first place.

Watch:

But pushing back against the idea that Swan had somehow scooped a new White House proposal, other journalists warned that Swan was playing—wittingly or not—right into Trump’s hands by letting the president and his White House staff put out into the world another piece of red meat for Trump’s racist, xenophobic base.

Guys. Trump can’t terminate amendments via executive order. To respond as if he’s ending birthright citizenship because he told an outlet he is ending birthright citizenship is to allow him to be our assignment editor. It’s an obvious stunt

— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 30, 2018

News organizations shouldn’t tweet quotes that are lies without labeling them lies. Many other countries, including Canada and Mexico, have birthright citizenship. https://t.co/0XGcQxyNix

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) October 30, 2018

30 countries offer birthright citizenship. https://t.co/J76DwMIige pic.twitter.com/hp5bvqIKr1

— Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch (@froomkin) October 30, 2018

Sam Sacks, reporter and co-founder of the DC Sentinel, minced no words. “Jonathan Swan is an operative of the Trump White House and all his ‘scoops’ are really just messaging that this fascist administration wants disseminated to the public,” Sacks said in a tweeted response to the report. “Much like Fox News, except Axios caters to beltway elites that have long enabled this extremism.”

Axios enabling fascism. Notice how Jonathan Swan does a lot of the heavy lifting for Trump’s racist and unconstitutional proposal by prefacing question with: “Some legal scholars believe you can get rid of birthright citizenship without changing the constitution.”

— DC Sentinel Manager to be talked to (@SamSacks) October 30, 2018

And that wasn’t the end of fellow journalists criticizing both the nature and implication of the reporting. Matthew Yglesias of Vox was among those pointing out how Trump’s false legal claims went unchallenged by both Swan and VandeHei. The legal practice of birthright citizenship, also known by the Latin Jus Soli (or right of the soil), explained Yglesias, “is standard procedure in most Western Hemisphere countries and the rule Trump says nobody follows can be found in such exotic locales as Canada and Mexico.” Also a very clear mistruth, he added, “The President cannot change the Constitution by executive order.”

I think when the President makes a factual misstatement the centerpiece of his argument it’s a bad idea to just uncritically quote him as if what he were saying was true. https://t.co/PZapVhkVQR

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 30, 2018