Extortion, Inc.; We Need a Lady T; Whore on Drugs; Rainbow Escorts
Still, as I say, in sexual pornography some real measure of equality is being realized. I make this claim, in some ways, as a mere amateur in the field, and really only from acquaintance with the subject as displayed on television. It's heartening, for example, to witness the phenomenon of what's called Asian Outcall being so prominently represented on Public Access Channel 35. Asians should absolutely have an Outcall all their own. Equally encouraging is the sensitivity evinced by some of these Outcall centers when they add the inclusionist addendum that "You don't have to be Asian to call." It obviously helps if you are, but you don't have to be. That seems to be the implication, and I can live with that. I have not seen any evidence of outcalling catering to black or Hispanic segments of the community. One assumes that forums referring to "Black Babes" and "Hispanic Chicks" address such issues in-house.
Though one might applaud the public empowerment of gays and people of color in the many-splendored spectrum of American sexuality, the process has inherent pitfalls still. It seems to foster stereotyping and self-stereotyping at every turn. For example, you'd be forgiven for thinking that gay men only come in certain narrow shapes and types: the rugged older man, the slender almost-underage boy, the muscled Italian and so on. The hetero world is no better. One need only glance at personal ads and the space abounds with "submissive Asians" or "naughty nymphettes" or "sexy divorcees."
The stereotyping gene seems hardwired into the very fibers of sexual perception. It reminds me of a friend, an Italian banker who lives and works in London but grew up on the streets of Rome. He's genuinely Italian, but in many ways a stage Italian of the old kind, almost a stereotype of the leering, bottom-pinching variety. His kind has almost disappeared, a victim of the global marketplace and indiscriminate yuppification. I, for one, mourn the loss and celebrate what remains of cultural diversity as embodied in my friend?let's call him Giorgio.
Giorgio's signal talent is that he can watch porno videos while snorting coke and smoking hash, talking on a cell and regular phone at either ear, surfing the Web for solid v.c. investment opportunities, while sitting on his sofa at home in shorts and t-shirt. He does it at least one evening a week for five hours at a stretch. Mention a woman of any kind to Giorgio and he can transform her instantly into a sexual cutout. Thus, if I speak of a Chinese girl I might know, he wiggles his eyebrows salaciously and says, "Ah yes, Chineeeeze," knowingly. Indian, black, blonde all get the same treatment. Of an older woman, he'll say something like, "Expeeerienced, very nice."
Now, you might deplore Giorgio's reductive cookie-cutting of the hardworking female species, but how is it different from what gays and lesbians do to each other, or Asians or people of color, for that matter?
No surprise that the Clinton-Gore-era fusion of rampant market capitalism and whining cultural liberalism loves the "diversity" racket. Cheaper labor and lots of empowerment. But what are we diversifying into? What is the culture everyone's so desperate to join? And what is the cultural result when they do? I remember Farrakhan, or was it Jesse Jackson, banging on about Hollywood being the "new plantation" in which blacks were underpaid and underrepresented. But why on Earth should they even want to participate? Have the numerous roles of women cops or black judges in movies made movies any profounder, or life better for any of us who have to consume the culture?
He's continued to work on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. The hundreds of millions of dollars he has squeezed from governments and corporations have all been collected for the redemptive power they might bring to the lives of the needy. It's just Jackson's good luck that the proletariat keeps multiplying and that America is even wealthier today than it was in the salad days of PUSH. Back then, the big money came primarily from the taxpayers. The Carter administration was particularly generous to PUSH and its offshoot, PUSH-Excel, but subsequent federal audits found financial improprieties and PUSH-Excel had to pay some of it back in fines. By then, however, the Reverend had bigger fish to fry.
The business of boycotting large corporations?Ford, Anheuser-Busch, 7-Eleven, even a smaller entity like Coors, which committed 8 percent of its profits to meeting Jackson's demands?was heating up. In 1982 Jackson set up International Trade Bureau to coordinate all the boycotts he was initiating and let it be known that he would "withdraw enthusiasm" from anyone who did not contribute. To buy racial peace, corporate America paid up. The story of Coca-Cola is typical. Starting in 1981, the company pledged to give preferential treatment to black-owned businesses worth $30 million, and has been caving in ever since. Not that it's done it much good. Having recently consolidated its bottlers, and forced to lay off redundant staffers at its Atlanta headquarters, Coca-Cola has been hit with a race discrimination lawsuit anyway. So this May the company announced that it will become a substantial advertiser on Major Broadcasting Cable Network?launched, coincidentally, by the lawyer leading the race-bias lawsuit against it.
Operating under another nonprofit, Citizenship Education Fund, Jackson, as president of PUSH, has expanded his reach to where the real money is. There is, so far, his Wall Street Project, for which shrewd businessman Donald Trump has provided office space, LaSalle Street Project, Silicon Valley Project and 9th Street Project in Cleveland, all designed to redistribute money from those who have too much to those who, Jackson feels, are entitled to more. The three-year-old Wall Street Project can be declared a success. One participating firm's business has tripled since 1997, and a black trader it employs now makes $700,000 a year, a lot more than the $50,000 he had earned as a salesman elsewhere. The fellow, as George Packer reported, has been "able to take his kid, put him in a $20,00 a year private school and hire a Mexican maid." One can only hope that the Mexican señorita appreciates the Reverend's good works.
Jackson's own income and its sources are, as someone put it, "known to Jackson and to God" only. What is better known, however, is that he enjoys a fabulous lifestyle, paid for almost entirely by others. Being on 24-hour call to carry out his self-appointed missions, he expects the best and woe unto anyone who fails to provide it. Boarding a Teamster jet after a protest against the Reagan administration, the Reverend screamed, "Where's all the grand food, the lobster, the shrimp and the caviar? Don't tell me that fat son of a bitch [Teamster President Jackie Presser] hasn't laid out supper for me!"
Jackson is hardly the first con artist to have a financially brilliant career, nor the only one operating under the illusion that his pronouncements are more than mere blather. Still, his range is astounding. Alas, the message, whether about the MCI-Sprint merger, "digital connections," Coca-Cola or when the Green Bay Packers may fire their black coach, is always the same?entitlement based on the color of one's skin. He may be having fun sticking it to the high and mighty, but it is difficult to see how his antics do anything but promote racial conflict and the dangerous fantasy that somehow blacks can achieve economic integration through means different from anyone else's.
So, who is to be trusted with American foreign policy? An easy question to answer if one is honest. Strobe Talbott, the egregious deputy secretary of state, and an ex-editor at Time, was among those who canonized Gorbachev and named him Man of the Decade. Talbott was and is particularly mendacious when it comes to assessing Ronald Reagan. He has argued that Reagan had nothing to do with the Soviet collapse, and that the Reagan doctrine was counterproductive. Having been proved completely wrong, one would expect Talbott to admit something, anything. But no. The big lie immediately goes into effect. After all, working for the greatest liar ever to inhabit the White House, it would be out of character to tell the truth, even when it only deals with past history.
Given the honesty and straightforwardness that was the hallmark of Lady Thatcher, it is hard to swallow an administration that more than any in living memory lacks principle or ideology and is only concerned with spin. What is depressing is that Gore and Lieberman will be more of the same. Only without the sex in the Oval Office. Mind you, I'm in disagreement with MUGGER about the coming election. House Republicans have a greater number of races in which no incumbent is running, while in the Senate many Republican incumbents are in trouble. Those who come to mind are Delaware's William Roth, Michigan's Spence Abraham, Missouri's John Ashcroft and Minnesota's Rod Grams. This is bad news. The only good news is that Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania might make it because he has been strong on the issues.
In fact, this could be a disastrous year for the Republicans, and both houses could go down. Only if George W. runs a perfect campaign can things be salvaged. I am not a defeatist by nature, but, even if I say so myself, I have called every election right since 1976. In 1995, following the ruinous-for-the-Democrats midterm election of '94, I was ready to place an extremely large wager on Clinton winning in '96. I had a friend, Chuck Pfeiffer, speak to some bookies, and I contacted Ladbrooke's in London. The bet was enormous and I was given very good odds. Then I had the bad luck to go out with my friend Bob Tyrrell, the editor of American Spectator. He warned me off, saying it was numerically impossible for the Draft Dodger to win the electoral votes needed. Conrad Black, a man well informed and the owner of London's Spectator, told me the same thing. "My people who know better than you say that Clinton is finished..."
Well, for once I listened, and you know the rest. The bookies were delighted I let them off as they hate large wagers with good odds for the bettor. But I know the American media, and how they would play down any Clinton lies. Ditto for this year. George W. Bush is being Quayled as I write, while Gore is being canonized. The "people" versus the "powerful" is an effective slogan if one is dumb, naive and believes the electronic media and the liberal press. The layers of narcissism and guile exhibited in Los Angeles by Clinton and Gore were so thick as to defy analysis. Yet the press didn't even try. All that smarmy moralism by some of the biggest liars on Earth went unnoticed and unwritten. When that pig of a governor presented a fake Oscar to that other pig for being the best president, I realized this is Hollywood's finest hour. Truth no longer counts. Just illusion. And the big, big lie helps no end. If only we had an American Maggie Thatcher in our midsts.
The US. can spray with herbicides every field from the Gulf of Mexico to Antarctica. But someone else will always be there to provide Americans with their drug fix. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar?the list of candidates is long.
No, the latest round in America's melodramatic "war on drugs" has nothing whatsoever to do with drugs. It is about corporations with substantial investments in Colombia lobbying the U.S. government to step in and take over the country on their behalf. In Pastrana they have found a happily compliant Colombian leader. Colombia is burdened with a large international debt, which it must pay off with its oil exports. Pastrana has signed on to the usual IMF austerity program of public spending cuts and devaluation. The result has been misery, strikes and, naturally, a shot in the arm for the narcotics industry. Colombia's economy shrank 4.5 percent in 1999. Earlier this month, tanks and troops were called out to the streets of Bogota as 700,000 state workers staged a 24-hour strike protesting government austerity measures.
But how did drugs get into the picture? It was the corporations that came up with this wheeze. Lockheed Martin approached the Clinton administration with a poll it had commissioned, showing a majority of the public believing drug use to be on the rise, with Democrats, not Republicans, being held responsible. Therefore, Democrats should do something dramatic. Lockheed Martin's day job, incidentally, includes making aircraft for use in military operations against drug smugglers. One of the most ardent advocates of American military involvement in Colombia was the U.S.-Colombia Business Partnership?which includes such corporations as Occidental, Enron, BP Amoco and Colgate-Palmolive. Drugs are "disruptive of any normal business relationship," explained Lawrence Meriage, Occidental's vice president for public affairs. But what was really troubling him was the $100 million Occidental has lost as a result of the repeated rebel assaults on the Limon Covenas pipeline by various armed groups. Every year, the oil companies are forced to shell out a "war tax," which they pay directly to the Colombian army and police for their protection.
Earlier this month, Occidental suspended oil production and declared force majeure at Colombia's second largest oil field because of repeated bombing of the pipeline. In 1999 alone it had allegedly been attacked 79 times. Clearly, they would be saving themselves a lot of money if the U.S. government took over protecting the pipelines.
The Plan Colombia, allegedly a joint product of the U.S. and Colombian governments, reads very much as if it were conceived and written in Washington. It is full of the usual "market democracy" or "do what we tell you or else" bromides: "Free trade agreements that attract foreign and domestic investment"; "a fiscal and financial strategy that includes tough austerity and adjustment measures"; "state-owned companies and banks are to be privatized"; "foreign investment" will be "crucial in modernizing the industrial backbone of the country"; "steps" must be taken "to promote a favorable environment for electronic trade." The Plan gets hilarious when it describes Colombia's economic plight. After first commending the country for opening up "its traditionally closed economy," the author notes sorrowfully that "production of cereals, such as wheat, corn, and barley?were shown to be noncompetitive in world markets. The result was the loss of 700,000 hectares of agricultural production to imports during the decade, which in turn proved to be a critical blow to employment in the rural areas where Colombia's conflict is mainly staged."
Yes, but why had Colombia's traditional agriculture become so "noncompetitive"? Could it possibly have something to do with the explosion of subsidies afforded to U.S. farmers in recent years?
U.S. Special Forces trainers have already arrived in Colombia. Congress conditioned the $1.3 billion package on the Colombian government's ability to curb human rights abuses by its armed forces. Pastrana was made to promise that military personnel accused of human rights abuses would be brought to justice in the country's civilian courts. Of all the demands made on his government, this is the one it will least likely be held to.
The U.S. has too much invested in Colombia to waste time chasing up "bad apples." Even the recent murder of six schoolchildren by Colombian soldiers did nothing to dampen Washington's enthusiasm for the venture. As always, the wealth of the few trumps the welfare of the many.