prostitution – dowackado

“Whores-Race Politics”

By timmukyPosted on January 21, 2010Posted in corporatism, law, politics, prostitutionTagged attack ads, business plot of 1933, campaign finance, chief justice roberts, dahlia lithwick, john paul stevens, money is speech, Smedley Butler, supreme court, whores-race politicsNo Comments

Supreme Court rejects limits on corporate spending in electoral campaigns:

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday swept away decades of legislative efforts to restrict the role of corporations in election campaigns, ruling that severe restrictions on corporate spending are inconsistent with the First Amendment’s protection of political speech.

Chris Lehmann has the best headline: High Court Upholds Whores-Race Politics, although the metafilter one-liner (“The Business Plot of 1933 has reached a logical conclusion”) comes close, and gives me a chance to name-check Smedley Butler again.

Lehmann’s analysis:

The ruling also effectively rolls back many curbs on “soft-money” campaign financing–the coy corporate practice of doling out dosh on candidates’ behalf via dummy interest-group expenditures–during the homestretch of elections that were instituted in the already weak McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy stirringly pronounced that “the censorship we confront is now vast in its reach,” neglecting of course to mention that virtually every other Western democracy has far stricter curbs on rampant private-sector electioneering while also mysteriously permitting their private citizens to express themselves just fine.

And Dahlia Lithwick’s The Pinocchio Project has the best subhed: “Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy.”

The court had to reach out far beyond any place it needed to go to strike down century-old restrictions on corporate spending in federal elections. This started off as a case about a single movie. It morphed into John Roberts’ Golden Globe night.

Funny. This is a silly case, and what the Court has wrung from it is so preposterous that you want to laugh. But no.

But you can plainly see the weariness in [dissenting Justice John Paul] Stevens[‘] eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out.

“A Constitutional Frankenstein moment.” It has been a pretty awful week.

Prostitutes = sex offenders in New Orleans

By timmukyPosted on January 20, 2010Posted in law, prostitutionTagged law, new orleans, new orleans police, prostitution, sex offenderNo Comments

In New Orleans, the cops and the DA’s office are using a 200-year-old state law written for child molesters to charge hundreds of sex workers as sex offenders.

sex_worker-2 — photo by Abdul Aziz for Colorlines

The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation”—a term New Orleans cops and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean anal or oral sex. Sex workers convicted of breaking this law are charged with felonies, issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver’s license with the label “sex offender” printed on it.

An article in Colorlines, the national newsmagazine of race and politics, quotes community activist Deona’s assertion that this weird manipulation of the law “is part of an overall policy by the New Orleans Police Department to go after petty offenses.” Colorlines reports that New Orleans police arrest more than 58,000 people every year. Of those arrested, nearly 50 percent are for traffic and municipal offenses, and only 5 percent are for violent crimes.

Sex workers accused as sex offenders face discrimination in every aspect of the system. In most cases, they cannot get released on bond, because they are seen as a higher risk of flight than people charged with violent crimes. “This is the level of stigma and dysfunction that we’re talking about here,” said [Josh] Perry [a former attorney with the Orleans Public Defenders office]. “Realistically, they’re not getting out.”

The prospect of challenging sex offender charges is made especially difficult by yet another weird Louisiana legal catch-22. According to Perry, “The way Louisiana’s habitual offender law works, if you challenge your sentence in court and lose, and it’s a third offense, the mandatory minimum is 20 years. The maximum is life.”

If you fall on the wrong side of the law just once, as was the case for many of the women interviewed for this article, you are going to have a major struggle ever getting your life back on track. Beyond the ongoing weirdness of this obsessive criminalization of sexual behavior, this seems to be one more glaring instance of the criminalization of being poor and helpless.