US Drones and National Religion

By David Swanson

If our courts killed without trials there would be by definition a risk of killing the innocent. The same should be understood when a president and his flying robots, or missiles, or night raids, kill without trial.

Obama loves the drone

If we were being bombed we would not deem it any more acceptable to kill those who resisted than those who did not. Therefore, the category of "innocent civilian" (as distinct from guilty non-civilian) is suspect at best."

The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance.

The flag's powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A "Dream Act" that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief. Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees. If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.

What happens to myths like these when we discover that flying killer robots make better soldiers than soldiers do? Or when we learn that the president is using those flying robots to kill U.S. citizens? Which beliefs do we jettison to reduce the dissonance in our troubled brains?

Some 85% of U.S.ians, and shrinking rapidly, are theists. Flag worship may be on the decline as well, but its numbers are still high. A majority supports a ban on flag burning. A majority supports the power of the president to kill non-U.S.ians with drones, while a significantly smaller percentage supports the president's power to kill U.S. citizens with drones abroad. That is to say, if the high priest declares someone an enemy of god, many people believe he should have the power to kill that enemy . . . unless that enemy is a U.S. citizen. In secular terms, which make this reality seem all the crazier, many of us support acts of murder based on the citizenship of the victim.

Of course, the Commander in Chief kills U.S. citizens all the time by sending them into wars. Drones don't change that. Drone pilots have committed suicide. Drone pilots have been targeted and killed by retaliatory suicide bombings. Drones have killed U.S. citizens through accidental "friendly" fire. The hostility that drones are generating abroad has motivated terrorist attacks and attempted attacks abroad and within the national borders of the United States.

But feeding corpses to our holy flag looks different when we're feeding them directly to the president's flying robots without a foreign intermediary. And yet to approximately a quarter of the U.S. public it doesn't look different after all. The president, in their own view, should have the power to kill them, or at least the power to kill anyone (including U.S. citizens) so contaminated as to be standing outside the United States of America -- a frightening and primitive realm that many U.S.ians have never visited and feel no need to ever visit.

Popular support for murder-by-president drops off significantly if "innocent civilians may also be killed." But a religious belief system perpetuates itself not through the positions it takes on existing facts so much as through its ability to select which facts one becomes aware of and which facts remain unknown.

Many U.S.ians have avoided knowing that U.S. citizens, including minors, have been targeted and killed, that women and children are on the list of those to be killed, that hundreds of civilian deaths have been documented by serious journalists including victims' names and identities, that U.S. peace activists went to Pakistan and met with victims' families, that the U.S. ambassador in Pakistan said there was a U.S. government count of how many civilians had been killed but he wouldn't say what it was, that the vast majority of those killed are not important leaders in any organization, that people are targeted and killed without knowing their name, that people are targeted and killed merely for the act of trying to rescue victims of previous strikes, that the wounded outnumber the dead, that the traumatized outnumber the wounded, that the refugees who have fled the drone strikes are over a million, that the drone wars did not replace ground wars but began war making in new nations so destabilized now by the drone strikes that ground wars may develop, that some top U.S. military officials have said the drones are creating more new enemies than they kill, or that what drones are doing to our reputation abroad makes Abu Ghraib look like the fun and games our media pundits said it was.

If our courts killed without trials there would be by definition a risk of killing the innocent. The same should be understood when a president and his flying robots, or missiles, or night raids, kill without trial.

If we were being bombed we would not deem it any more acceptable to kill those who resisted than those who did not. Therefore, the category of "innocent civilian" (as distinct from guilty non-civilian) is suspect at best.

The vast majority of the "worst of the worst" locked away in Guantanamo have been exonerated and freed, something that cannot be done with drone victims. Yet John Brennan, once deemed unacceptable for his role in detention and torture, is now deemed acceptable. The goodness of his murdering evil beings outweighs the badness of his detaining and torturing people who were sometimes misidentified. The dead cannot be misidentified. The president has declared that any unidentified dead male of fighting age was, by definition, a militant. After all, he was killed.

Yet, this we know for certain: He was someone's child. He was someone's loved one. He was someone's friend.

We have a responsibility right now to grow up very, very quickly. Our government is breaking down the rule of law and stripping away our rights in the name of protecting us from an enemy it generates through the same process. Drones are not inevitable. Drones are not in charge of us. We don't have to fill our local skies with "surveillance" drones and "crowd control" drones. That's a choice that is up to us to make. We don't have to transfer to mindless hunks of metal the heroism heretofore bestowed just as nonsensically on soldiers. There is no excuse for supporting the murder of foreigners in cases in which we would not support the murder of U.S. citizens. There is no excuse for supporting a policy of murdering anyone at all.

There is no excuse for allowing your government to take your son or daughter and give you back a flag. There is no excuse for allowing your government to take someone else's son or daughter. Ever. Anywhere. No matter how scared you are. No matter what oath of loyalty you've robotically pledged to a colored piece of fabric since Kindergarten. Actual robots can perform the pledge of allegiance as well as any human. They do not, however, have any heart to place their hand over. We should reserve our hearts for actions robots cannot do.

A deadly drone

“They” have one purpose, to gut the impact and credibility of real independent journalism and to “water down” real work, flooding every “in box” with smears, rumors and utter insanity.

Journalism is dead, not wounded, not damaged; its corpse has long rotted away. The process began when the “pop culture media” began relying on press releases and fat paychecks rather than investigative journalism.

Mythology, dogma and propaganda, the endless unsubstantiated blither from government liars became “certified” as fact, the only truth, the only “conspiracy theories” that were not “wild or dangerous.”

The failure to get any story right, not just 9/11 or the War on Terror, but Iran or the Arab Spring, the Syrian War, now the Mali War, none of it has been understood, none of it reported and none of the “who” or “why” has ever been addressed.

Thus, the mainstream or “pop culture” media died, leaving open alternative networks like Press TV and Russia Today. But the problem is there are 5000 others, hiding behind web proxies, activists with no history of activism, “experts” with no expertise, “op-ed” writers whose opinions do everything but educate.

At one time, we knew where our news came from. Reputations mattered; journalists learned their craft under fire, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite or even Peter Jennings. We knew David Frost, we knew John Cameron Swayze.

Journalists could call out the government on lies, could confront presidents, journalists were experience, trusted and incorruptible. Remember Helen Thomas?

The phenomenon of “soft sell” alternative news, Arianna Huffington, Matt Drudge or Andrew Breitbart, cheap opportunists who sold their souls to the prevailing easy dollar set the bar for standards, the combination of tabloid sleaze, celebrity gossip, conspiracy theory, character assassination and innuendo replaced research, replaced facts, replaced accountability.

Today, calling information “news” is insanity. News is a commodity, “give me a half pound of gun confiscation scare and a few slices of “creeping socialism.”

For every real “whistleblower” or “leaker,” there are a dozen paid phonies. What is the typical “bio” of a “shock jock” podcast host or “blogger/debunker?” Most have done prison time. None have ever been gainfully employed for more than three months. CVs or resumes describe them as “consultants” or “administrative assistants.”

Most have histories of being sexually abused and of being sexual abusers, particularly of children. Some publications actually cross over into print, such as the Village Voice/Backpage. This pro-Zionist publication uses its front pages to spew attacks at what it calls “anti-Semites” while using its “Backpage” to sell kidnapped children into sexual slavery.

From a 2012 article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof:

"Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage. 'You can’t buy a child at Wal-Mart, can you?' she asked me. 'No, but you can go to Backpage and buy me on Backpage.'

"Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it’s not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper.

"Attorneys general from 48 states have written a joint letter to Village Voice Media, pleading with it to get out of the flesh trade. An online petition at Change.org has gathered 94,000 signatures asking Village Voice Media to stop taking prostitution advertising. Instead, the company has used The Village Voice to mock its critics. Alissa thought about using her real name for this article but decided not to for fear that Village Voice would retaliate.

"Court records and public officials back Alissa’s account, and there is plenty of evidence that under-age girls are marketed on Backpage. Arrests in such cases have been reported in at least 22 states."

Who and what is Village Voice media aligned with? Some are surprised by the answer but should not be. Their message is identical to that of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center.They support and attack the same people, using the exact same language.

The internet counterparts are almost impossible to count. One anonymous website can be traced to an IP address that will have, over the years, passed itself off as both “white supremacist” and “pro-Zionist.” They do not expect anyone to look at anything beyond blind proxies at a “whois” network search site.

Phone numbers, IP and street addresses, contact names, this information leads to the real identities of the “pundits” and “global affairs” experts of the internet, as they sit in rented rooms in their underwear, waiting for a “technical consultant” to help them establish a dozen new identities so they can fill the comment sections of the real journalists with venom.

There are solutions. The first step is to recognize, once and for all, that the corporate media is totally controlled, to bring it to an accounting, not just for its lack of objectivity but its long history of criminal complicity in crimes, crimes of war, massive fraud, propaganda, racism, fomenting social and religious strife, espionage and even terrorism.

Any publication, television show, radio broadcast, podcast, or even internet site that evidences control by a single ethnicity, political belief, religion or agenda should carry the same warning that is on a package of cigarettes.

“This show/movie contains views known to be racist propaganda and is dangerous to the political, social and mental wellbeing of viewers. Everything from Hollywood should carry such a warning.

As for “internet bloggers,” there is currently underway a movement to provide certification for those who can prove they exist and write based on genuine sources of information, personal expertise and a history of social and political activism. “No hirelings allowed.”

LIFE SENTENCES FOR SAHRAWIS 

A saharawi Refugees Camp

Life sentences have been imposed on nine Sahrawi activists by a Moroccan Military Court, sparking international outrage.

 

The Court also sentenced 14 other defendants to between 20-30 years each.

 Two other defendants were released having served their two- year sentences in pre-trial detention.

During the trial, the Sahrawi alleged that they had been systematically tortured and coerced to make confessions.

 The convictions relate to violence during and after the Moroccan security forces attempted the dismantling of the Gdim Izik protest camp in November, 2010, during which 11 members of the Security forces and two Sahrawi’s were killed.

 Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa says “the Moroccan authorities have ignored calls to try defendants in an independent, impartial civilian court. Instead they have opted for a military court where civilian can never receive a fair trial.

 “It is disturbing that the authorities have also ignored the Sahrawi defendants allegations of torture and coerced confessions” she said

On November 8, 2010, violence broke out when Moroccan security forces  tried forcibly to remove people  from and dismantle the Gdim Izik protest camp a few Kilometers east of the  town of Laayoune, in the Moroccan   administered Western Sahara.

Britain’s Harry: A prince among thieves 

Prince Harry

By Finian Cunningham

­Britain’s Afghan-killing Prince Harry, the Malvinas Islands in the South Atlantic and Northern Ireland are all in the news recently for seemingly disparate reasons. But there is a unifying link - British imperialist thievery, violence and deception.

Let’s start with young Prince Harry. He is finishing “a tour of duty” for British forces as an Apache helicopter pilot in Afghanistan, a land that was once stolen by the British Empire and is currently undergoing a modern imperialist smash-and-grab operation under the auspices of NATO.

Harry caused a media stir this week with his glib admission of shooting-to-kill Afghans. “Take a life to save a life,” was how Captain Wales justified murdering people from the skies, during his interview with the Press Association, conducted from the fortress of Camp Bastion in Helmand Province.

What’s more, the prince thought it was all jolly good fun, by comparing the firing of air-to-surface Hellfire missiles or 30mm machinegun cannon to playing a video game. “I’m useful with my thumb,” he says with a smirk. Given the controversy over civilian casualties from NATO air and drone strikes in Afghanistan, one wonders how the British royal media handlers could have let such a crass comment out?

We can be sure that such a high-profile interview was permitted under tight scrutiny, with every word vetted by Buckingham Palace. So, we have to conclude that the prince’s callous remarks were aimed with a purpose. What is that?

Well, it may be recalled that last year while the fun-loving prince was undergoing Apache pilot training in Nevada, he found time to shoot the British royal family in the foot by being photographed naked with a bunch of young ladies in a Las Vegas luxury hotel room.

In this latest interview, Harry is rehabilitated as the “soldier prince” - “just one of the lads” who is “doing his bit” for Queen and country and “making Afghanistan safe”. His royal handlers must be aware of the public sensitivity to civilian deaths in Afghanistan - reckoned at more than 20,000. It is saying something of the depth of cynicism and callousness of the British monarchy that it would ignore or be oblivious to the deaths of thousands of men, women and children - the collateral damage of NATO’s 12-year illegal occupation of that country - in its haste to refurbish a tarnished media image.

The British Royal Family

But there is a more subtle ideological level to the “killer prince” story. Bear in mind that the British monarchy is the head of that state. Constitutionally, the British royals are the source of sovereignty and, although such claptrap is not expounded too loudly, the monarch is defined as ruling by divine right. God save our glorious queen is the outward expression of this imperial delusion.

To that end, the British royals are deliberately made the figureheads of Britain’s military establishment. Queen Elizabeth II is the titular head of all British forces. Next in line to the throne, Prince Charles, and father of Harry, is the commander of the Parachute Regiment - Britain’s storm-troopers.

The British royal family is not just some quaint tourist attraction. It has a deadly serious ideological function, which is to enable British rulers to justify to their people and the world all their military and imperialist adventures overseas - as a God-given right - no matter how criminal and barbaric. Afghanistan is thus transformed from a giant thieving and killing zone under British (and NATO) forces into a noble duty in which “God is on our side”.

Which brings us to Las Malvinas, or as the British like to call them, the Falkland Islands. Tensions have been boiling again between Argentina and Britain over disputed territorial claims, sparked by the 30th anniversary last year of the war between these two countries. Argentina accuses Britain of militarizing the South Atlantic after it dispatched a nuclear submarine and its most advanced destroyer, HMS Dauntless, to the islands. Argentine President Christina de Kirchner has called on British Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate the row - as various United Nations resolutions stipulate - but Britain remains adamant that there is nothing to discuss. The South Atlantic territory is British and that’s it. Indeed, earlier this month Cameron warned that Britain would go to war again if pushed too far.

During last year’s commemorative war anniversary it was notable that Prince William, the older brother of Harry, was sent as part of a military delegation to the islands. William, who is also a helicopter pilot, was dressed in full military gear - a pointed statement of sorts that irked the Argentine government.

The dispatch of Prince William to the South Atlantic along with a nuclear submarine and warships is another illustration of Britain believing that it has royal, and therefore divine, prerogative to whatever it lays claim to - no matter that these islands are more than 13,000 kilometers from London and that the name Las Malvinas predates that of Falklands.

Part of the rationale and legal justification for Britain retaining sovereignty over the islands - apart from the scarcely mentioned vast oil reserves yet untapped in the surrounding seabed - is that the old colonial power claims the Falkland islanders are exercising the right of self-determination to declare themselves British.

In a recent rebuff to Argentina, David Cameron said the territory will stay British as long as the inhabitants want that. “The future of the Falkland Islands should be determined by the Falkland Islanders themselves - the people who live there,” said Cameron with typical British haughtiness and affected sense of propriety.

A referendum to be held in March on the future sovereignty of the islands is a foregone conclusion. This is because most of the islanders are descendants of British expatriates whom the British authorities placed there when they took possession of the territory in 1833 and onwards.

A spokesman for the Falkland Islands local government said: “Unlike the government of Argentina, the United Kingdom respects the right of our people to determine our own affairs, a right that is enshrined in the UN Charter and which is ignored by Argentina.”

This mendacious a la carte use of the principle of self-determination is a specialty of British colonialism. Which, appropriately, brings us to the issue of Northern Ireland.

The British-controlled northern province on the island of Ireland has been racked by more than a month of sectarian riots. Most of the violence is carried out by gangs and paramilitaries proclaiming to be pro-British. Their grievance is over a decision by the Belfast City Council to reduce the number of days that the British Union flag is flown from 365 days a year to 17. Fearing that concession represents an erosion of British identity in Northern Ireland, pro-Unionist youths and paramilitaries have gone on the rampage, clashing with police and Irish Nationalist communities.

The London government has deplored the upsurge in violence with its usual hand-wringing piousness. And there are concerns that Northern Ireland may be plunged back into the deadly conflict that prevailed for nearly 30 years, which claimed more than 3,000 lives, before that bloodshed was largely - though perhaps temporarily - halted by the Good Friday Agreement signed between Unionists and Nationalists in 1998. That deal was overseen by the talented Mr Tony Blair.

Why does the specter of recurring sectarian violence in Northern Ireland persist? This is because the root of the Irish problem was not addressed, in fact was furtively concealed, by the so-called peace process that the British government congratulates itself on. The root of the Irish problem is Britain’s unlawful partition of Ireland and its continuing possession of the northern Irish territory - in defiance of Irish national rights.

Queen Elizabeth

Just like Las Malvinas, Britain gerrymandered a demographic mandate for its presence and meddling in Ireland, which it ascribes to “self-determination”. When Britain partitioned the island of Ireland under imperialist aggression in 1921, it claimed that it had a mandate to do so from the majority pro-British Unionist population that resided in the northern counties. That population was only a minority on the island as a whole and was introduced into Ireland as British colonizers over the preceding centuries. Ever since 1921, successive British governments claim that Northern Ireland will remain British “so long as the people there demand it”. That false premise underpinned the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and continues to justify British manipulation of Irish national rights.

Conveniently, however, British governments have successively abnegated the right to self-determination for the Irish people, collectively, on the whole of the island. It’s another case of British rulers deftly moving the goalposts to score their imperial aims - albeit warping history and denying norms of justice in the process.

Tragically, as the resurgence in violence shows, the poisonous sectarian conflict injected into Ireland historically by Britain, as a means of colonial rule, continues to be a scourge because the sectarian division and theft of Irish national rights by Britain continues to this day.

But don’t expect British truth or abiding by international law. As the killer-Prince-Harry story illustrates, the British ruling class always has a knack for glib self-justification in the face of outrageous imperialist crimes. A prince among thieves indeed.

When Prostitution Wasn't a Crime: The Fascinating History of Sex Work in America By AlterNet

You've heard this before: What two consenting adults do behind closed doors is their own business. In the United States, it's even almost true  arguments guarding sexual rights and privacy won out in the landmark Supreme Court ruling Lawrence v. Texas, in which state sodomy laws were declared unconstitutional. But that does not apply to people who wish to exchange sex for money. Sex workers' rights are largely unprotected, and remain a political battleground; meanwhile, people who buy and sell sexual services are arrested, shamed, compelled into rehabilitation programs, and branded with criminal records.

But there was a time in American history when it wasn't quite so. Laws against selling sex are fairly new just about 100 years old and came onto the books long after the sex trade took root in American cities. Does that mean there was a time when selling sex was more tolerated? Or did the law simply take some time to catch up to the new American people's prejudices?

First Ladies

The miners came in forty-nine,
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they got together
They produced the native son.
- 19th century San Francisco song

From New Amsterdam to the Louisiana colony to San Francisco's Gold Rush founding, historians have identified prostitutes, or women who make some or all of their earnings selling sex, as some of the first women in early American settlements. (I'm using the word prostitute, because it's historically accurate to the time. The term sex worker only became popular in the 1970s, when it was invented by Scarlot Harlot, a prostitute and activist living in San Francisco.) But we shouldn't forget that the women who immigrated here to sell sex arrived on land already populated and governed by indigenous peoples. What would become the United States is intimately connected to colonial European ideas about the value both sexual and economic of the new migrants and of Native American women.

Take New Orleans, future home of America's largest licensed red light district. In 1721, there were fewer than 700 men settled in the whole colony of Louisiana, a number which excludes men held in slavery. The French government sent 80 women to the colony by ship, in the hopes that Louisiana's free men would marry these women and would refrain from having sex with Native American women. Many of the migrant women, however, had been serving time for prostitution charges in French prisons, and upon arriving in the colony found the sex trade provided them more independence than any arranged marriage to settlers.

These women were followed later in the same year by, as legal historian Judith Kelleher Schaffer described them, "other more respectable women. She continued:

"One historian has remarked on the incredible fecundity [of these new women] and the tragic infertility of the prostitutes, as almost all of Louisiana's most important families of French descent trace their origin to the former while none claim to have descended from the latter."

The French prostitutes-as-pioneers thing continued: 120 years later, in the early years of the California Gold Rush, another raft of fabled migrants arrived in San Francisco. At the time, only 300 women called San Francisco home, according to journalist Herbert Asbury in his 1933 "informal history" The Barbary Coast, a third of which were harlots from Mexico, Peru, and Chili [sic]. The Pacific News printed a story in 1850 to announce the departure of 900 women carefully chosen from the bagnios of Paris and Marseille, wrote Asbury, to be sent to San Francisco, yet somehow only 50 arrived. “It has been said, Asbury wrote, that by the end of 1852, there was no country in the world that was not represented in San Francisco by at least one prostitute.

San Francisco's famed Barbary Coast days also saw the arrival of Asian women migrants working in the sex trade. Many lived in cheap single-room occupancies known as cribs, isolated in Chinatown alongside dives and gambling houses. White women (in quotes as, in Asbury's words, an Franciscans were inclined to regard as white only natives of the United States and of a few European countries) were free to operate parlor houses well-appointed Victorians with multiple sitting rooms and bedrooms in the Uptown Tenderloin (today's Lower Nob Hill), near theaters, hotels and the business district and their more high-earning clients. However, as Asbury wrote, the differences between the brothels of the Barbary Coast and those of the Uptown Tenderloin were more apparent than real; precisely the same profession was practiced in the latter as in the former, and in much the same fashion.

Lower Nob Hill still boasts studio apartments functioning as part-time brothels, though almost no one would use that word to describe the discreet Art Deco buildings where business travelers can go to meet women for an hour at a time, hired over the Internet.

The Invention of Red-Light Districts

Though a red-light district wasn't formally established and governed in San Francisco, landlords and police were in a position to both enforce and profit from the segregation of prostitution into specific neighborhoods. Rents for houses of prostitution were jacked up artificially, and as few women owned their own property from which to operate a business, they were required to pay far above market rates. In New York, it was more common for madams to own their place of business, but they were still as in many cities pressured by cops to pay expensive bribes in order to operate without fear of raids.

But it wasn't an acceptance of prostitution that led to the establishment of red-light districts; rather, it was the perceived failure of such informal governance (or corruption or tolerance, depending how you looked at it) that led New Orleans to create America's largest legal red-light district in 1897.

The red-light district, or the place in a city where commercial sex is isolated or encouraged (or both), might be a concept now most associated with Europe and Asia, but it's an American invention. The Oxford English Dictionary puts the first print appearance of the phrase at 1894, in the Ohio newspaper the Sandusky Register, in reference to a group of Salvation Army volunteers who had set up shop in town to minister to presumed prostitutes. The term has its origins in the practice not of prostitutes, but their customers: in this case, rail workers who left red lanterns outside the doors and windows of the houses where they met prostitutes between their own work shifts. If their boss needed to find them, he could look for the light.

Storyville may have been the most fully realized red-light district in the United States, centralizing brothels and cribs into one neighborhood, conveniently near the rail station. In addition to creating a measure of safety for women by giving them a reasonably safe space to work, brothels created employment opportunities for house staff, including house piano players referred to slyly as professors. In bars and saloons at the outskirts of Storyville, both the curious and the committed could purchase brothel directories, or blue books, detailing the workers and specials available in each house. In a series of famous portraits of prostitutes from this period, the women appear relaxed, smiling and at ease.

Outside the Law

It's important to remember that even prior to the establishment of American red-light districts, the act of selling sex or sexual entertainment wasn't universally illegal in the United States, and the law didn't recognize a behavior called prostitution or a person called a prostitute. This isn't to say that people who sold sex weren't targeted by cops: they were, and they were charged with a host of crimes put on the books largely in order to target them. The women who came to be known as prostitutes were still viewed, before that, as social outcasts: for living without men, having sex outside marriage and making their own money. There were also many women and some men who made a living trading sex, and did so discreetly, but who did not attract police attention since they, through advantage, could pass more easily in polite society.

Some of the laws used to target women who sold sex were holdovers from English common law, which outlawed vagrancy and nightwalking in other words, appearing in public at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or while poor and female. One typical example is an 1817 law in New Orleans, which levied a $25 fine against any woman or girl 'notoriously abandoned to lewdness, writes historian Judith Kelleher Schaffer, who committed scandal or disturbance of the peace. If she could not pay the fine, she was to serve one month in prison. Thus the ordinance did not prohibit prostitution, observes Schaffer, as long as no scandal
or disturbance occurred.

Other laws used against women in the sex trade in New Orleans in the pre-Storyville era included insulting a white person, a charge used against free women of color, improprieties of conduct, and cross-dressing, which some women did for work, for pleasure or simply to evade restrictive laws on women's public behavior. According to court reports and newspaper accounts, 21 New Orleans women were charged with cross-dressing in the 1850s. The papers mocked the women, but also provided some hints as to why they wore men's clothing. More than simply masquerading as men, Schaffer writes, the prostitutes were making savage fun of their clients."

When laws did target actual sexual conduct, they didn't just go after people in the sex trade. In the state of Louisiana, people in the sex trade along with men caught having sex with men could be charged with violating an 1805 law that declared engaging in oral or anal intercourse, for compensation or for free, to be a crime against nature. This law was ruled unconstitutional in 2012.

Though people in the sex trade experienced a disproportionate amount of profiling and arrest even in the 1800s, the ambiguous legal status of prostitution also gave them more room to demand fair treatment from police and city officials. Digging into New Orleans court cases dating before the Civil War, Judith Kelleher Schaffer found that most of the women who filed writs of habeas corpus during this period did so on their own behalf, contesting their own imprisonment because they had been charged with vagrancy or some trumped-up charge designed to get them off the streets.

In New York, prostitutes demanded equal treatment under the law, as well. One well-documented example comes from the 1830s, the era of the brothel riots, in which civilians forcibly entered and vandalized prostitutes' homes and workplaces. The targets for the riots, writes historian Timothy J. Gilfoye in City of Eros, were not necessarily prostitutes themselves, but their property: the accoutrements of a prostitute's trade – her bed, furniture, glassware, and crockery were destroyed. Some of these assaults were random and isolated; some were spurred on by angry residents taken with the notion of kicking these women and their businesses out of the neighborhood. However, writes Gilfoye, prostitutes used the law to protect themselves :

Before the creation of a municipal police force in 1845, criminal prosecution in New York was a private matter. Individual citizens, not public officials, initiated most criminal charges. Shrewdly bringing legal proceedings against their aggressors, prostitutes utilized the machinery of the state to defend their interests and their property rights, firmly entrenching their profession in the fabric of metropolitan life... [they] rejected a defensive, reticent posture when subjected to violent terror. By asserting their rights, they foreswore surrender.

From "Sin" to "Social Evil"

So what happened?

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, social reformers took up the cause of ending prostitution outright, reframing prostitution as a social disease that could, through their efforts, be cured that is, prohibited and abolished. They encouraged police to crack down on brothels and red-light districts. At the same time anti-prostitution policing and social campaigns were stepped up, cops who had enjoyed bribes and graft for protecting brothels came under increased scrutiny from religious reformers and early women's rights campaigners. The turn of the 20th century saw the opening of New York's first women's jail.

Reformers also pushed for policies that took aim at organized red-light districts, seeking to criminalize the third-party businesses that prostitutes relied on, like rooming houses and saloons. Those campaigns were successful in getting Red Light Abatement laws on the books in most states, making property owners liable and culpable for prostitution on their premises. By 1916, 47 cities had closed red-light districts. Washington DC-area prostitutes fought back, writing a group letter to the New York Evening Journal:

Knowing that public opinion is against us, and that the passing of the Kenyon 'red Light' Bill is certain, we, the inmates of the underworld, want to know how the public expects to provide for us in the future? We don't want 'homes.' All we ask is that positions be provided for us. The majority will accept them. We must live somehow. We are human.

Finally, two key federal policies hastened the end of red-light districts: the passage of the Mann Act, or white slave traffic act, created the first federal law around prostitution in 1910; and at the start of the first world war, a Navy decree demanded the closure of all sex-related businesses in close range of military bases, under the premise of protecting enlisted men from sexually transmitted infections. Based on fear and opportunity, Storyville was closed.

 

The rapid changes in this 20-year period for a time gave the sex trade a boost into the mainstream of civic life, but ultimately exiled it even further to the margins. Before 1917, most laws had been directed at commercialized vice, rather than at the prostitute herself, writes historian Ruth Rosen in The Lost Sisterhood, her study of prostitution at the turn of the last century. By the end of the war, however, the law had recognized a class of prostitutes who would constitute a social group of criminal outcasts.

Profits and Policing

For all of the social ills pinned on prostitution crime, decaying property values, disease, violence, and a whole host of supposed moral failings – history shows us that none are inherent to the practice of selling sex. In fact, the only constant in prostitution, aside from the exchange itself, is the willingness of people who sell sex to maneuver around the law, discrimination, and social stigma in order to continue to work.

I say willing in a deliberate pushback against our contemporary ideas about sex, sex for sale and consent: the false premise that no one, and in particular, no woman would sell sex if she had any other options. It's an absurd notion, given the endurance of the sex trade and the explosion of considerable other options for women's employment. From personal experience, I can tell you that there are as many reasons people sell sex as there are people who do it. This is the truth that shapes the social, legal, and economic environments in which we produce and consume commercial sex.

Cops, governments and social reformers are part of those environments, too, and in their own ways, each profits from commercial sex. In these same American cities today, vice cops arrest suspected customers to fill seats in johns' schools, where the men are lectured by employees of social reform projects that aim to abolish prostitution with scared straight tactics. Vice cops draw a salary from making these arrests, and the anti-prostitution lecturers are paid, too sometimes from the fees paid by those arrested and funneled into the programs as a way to avoid conviction. The programs themselves create an incentive for cops to police the sex trade, and they support a professional class of people anti-prostitution campaigners who make a living attempting to abolish the ways other people make a living.

When we ask ourselves what prostitution is really like, and imagine what it could be like, we have to consider the role that those opposed to prostitution have played in perpetuating social ills in the sex trade, so that it's nearly impossible to imagine the sex trade without them. Still, they fight to contain and isolate the sex trade in America, as have they have for centuries now. Yet, despite ensuring that their targets now have little recourse against them, they just keep losing.