Part One:
BANISH SEX?!!
We speak with Roxanna Asgarian about Houston’s attempt to banish sex workers. (OK, they’re not banning all sex.) No other solution has worked, so the city decided to “go after the people.” The law is still being challenged in court, but it is already having adverse effects on the lives of sex workers. Part of the law requires the workers’ names to be published, so women are being shamed. (And when the court holds a hearing in the case, their names will be published once again.)
Which people are most likely to be picked up under this law? We think the police will target people (mostly women) who “look like” sex workers. So most of the women profiled under the law will be women who are poor or working class, who dress or style themselves in clothing that the police think sex workers would wear. An upper-class woman who emerge from a BMW wearing a suit or a gown will probably not be arrested.
In addition to the class-based profiling, the law banning sex workers does nothing to protect workers (or their buyers) from sexually-transmitted diseases. Nor to end the desperate poverty which drove these workers to this type of job in the first place.
Part Two:
BILLIONAIRES SUCK!
That is what John Nichols of The Nation told us he wants to talk about today. We look at Michael Bloomberg flirting with entering the race for president (and hoping to buy it with his billions). We see Tom Steyer having already spent many millions squeezing himself into the debates and the ad campaigns. And of course we know that Donald Trump, the faux billionaire, has made (and continues to make) a shambles of our country and the rest of the world. We pray to the gospel of “money is speech.” We look to the very rich to take over the country and save us – from the yawning wealth gap and our economic insecurity.
Meanwhile, mainstream Democrats are worried that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are too “extreme,” because they refuse to grovel to Wall Street and the corporate elites. One of them wants to regulate the mega-corporations and the 1% (their wealthy owners), while the other recommends doing away with the “billionaire class” altogether (on the theory that, under a fair and just system, nobody should be able to accumulate wealth in such a disproportionate way).
Yet these two similar views of the wealth gap consistently garner about 40% of support from Democratic voters. For some reason, the pundits and the media establishment are still not noticing this stunning statistic. Instead, they breathlessly report on “the horse race,” with the headline that Biden, Sanders and Warren are “in a virrtual dead heat” at roughly 20% support (plus or minus) in the Democratic primaries.
These polls are, of course, still quite early, and the race is still fluid. The real test will be whether any Democratic candidate can defeat Pres. Trump in the general election. We remind ourselves, however, that no matter how “extreme” one thinks Warren and Sanders are (play scary music), they are nowhere near as extreme as Trump is. After all, their positions are based on facts (not fiction), and their reasoning is analytical (not emotional or whimsical).
