October 2014

Working Towards a Clean Energy Economy

Flicker/creative commons

Flicker/creative commons

As we reported last week, tomorrow, November 1, kicks off “Beyond Extreme Energy Week of Action” in Washington, DC, and cities across the United States and abroad, and we hope you will somehow participate in or otherwise support these efforts.

Did you know that the U.S. government is the largest energy user at $25 billion per year? Perhaps by coincidence today, Performance.gov has released information on how 38 federal agencies plan to overcome their vulnerabilities to reduce their emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, and implement other government-wide plans, to meet goals set by President Obama in 2010. It is currently on track to achieve the 28% reduction in 2020.

While the administration is working toward a clean energy economy, it is not doing enough to foster the switch to renewable energy. The Department of Energy is still focusing on curbing emissions rather than eradicating the special interests who maintain a stranglehold over dirty energy industries.

These vulnerabilities are stark, according to The Washington Post.

  • The Department of Health and Human Services cites “more frequent or worse extreme heat events” that it calls “the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S.”
  • The Department of Agriculture warns of a “100% increase in the number of acres burned” in wildfires by 2050, further draining its budget because of the added fire suppression expenditures.
  • NASA says about 66% of its assets are already within 16 feet of being lost to rising sea levels.

It’s doubtful Obama will ever get credit for being the first president to make climate action a top priority, but that shouldn’t stop his administration from doing more about the scourge of dirty energy, the overall enemy of climate protection.

Most important, stay informed and take action.

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Ethical Prostitution

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen Flickr/creative commons

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen
Flickr/creative commons

As a follow up to yesterday’s discussion of the decriminalization of sex work, take a look at this video of a sex worker ally drilling down to the issues. While perhaps relying too much on sensational memes based on unreliable data that says most sex workers are sex-trafficked children, she makes a durable case for the complete decriminalization and legalization of sex work.

Social acceptance and legalization of sex work is the key to ending sex-trafficking, not its cause. Sex-traffickers are involved in organized crime and should be pursued and punished vigorously; if they disappear so will their victims. But unless society can recognize a separate and growing sex work industry based on voluntary participation, we will not be able isolate and end the scourge of international sex-trafficking.

The first encounter society has with a voluntary sex worker need not be the result of police and the court system, nor their only portal to adequate support, healthcare, and other medical social services (more here) .

Sexual healing from an out-of-the-closet industry is not a bad thing, and will go a long way to ending sexual oppression.

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Reminder: Win one of VenusPlusX’s prized t-shirts for making a video, writing a poem, or creating a work of art as part of our Sexual Freedom Project, on this subject or any other related to sexual freedom, contact: columbia@venusplusx.org. (More videos, here.)

 

 

Decriminalizing Sex Work: The Work Ahead

Highly-acclaimed, reader-supported news site, Truthout, has once again zeroed in on a pressing matter of social justice, the continued criminalization of sex workers. Mike Ludwig‘s news analysis, well worth a full read, weaves together several different threads of this issue in terms everyone can understand.

Ludwig points our attention to “a great leap forward” in New York’s state court system that has introduced 11 new prostitution courts called Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs). These new courts were designed to treat arrested sex workers as “trafficking victims” deserving of medical and social services instead of jails, and to focus instead on the traffickers.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Sounds good on the surface, right? Except that sex workers have been protesting this controversial new model because: a) its premise is based on unreliable and very narrow data; b) actual data collected by sex workers rights organizations, such as the Red Umbrella Project’s recent report, “Criminal, Victim or Worker?” were flatly rejected; and, most important, c) ignores completely the need to decriminalize sex work to begin with.

Balder Rosado, a member RedUP, told Ludwig that this new court model improves what it replaced but the issue remains that access to these services necessarily starts with an arrest by police.

Not every sex worker is a sex traffic victim as anti-trafficking advocates would have us believe. For many, it is a private and personal choice that should not by criminalized in the first place, and if “treatment” is required to help those who are trafficked or otherwise coerced, it should be within a non-criminal, non-police model.

Shira Hassan, a harm reduction and transformative justice specialist in Chicago, told Ludwig . . .

. . . [A]nti-trafficking advocates often push for laws and special courts that reduce the penalties prostitution defendants face, in the name of “decriminalization.” These efforts are not about decriminalization, she said. They are about “changing the process by which someone is criminalized.”

“Criminalization is about racism, it’s about your neighborhood, it’s about how you are dressed,” Hassan told Truthout. “It’s about policing.”

The needless criminalization of sex work unfairly targets poor people of color and is as unconstitutional as “stop and frisk.” As Ludwig notes, “Police can stop individuals for ‘loitering with intent’ if they are doing as little as wearing revealing clothing or hanging out in the wrong part of town.”

HTICs can only be called a diversion program, at best. They only serve a small number of those arrested, and only a small proportion of these people actually want and need medical or social services. And the HTICs to do not prevent re-arrest for simply walking in the same neighborhood where the first arrest took place thereby nullifying the HTIC’s decision. Only a minuscule number of traffickers every get arrested.

Ludwig quotes advocate Sienna Baskin from Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York:

“If the emphasis is changing to be about offering services and other income options to people who are doing sex work, and intervening in violent situations, and giving people what they need without [harming them], then we need to stop criminalizing them.”

I will add another disturbing dimension, one that Ludwig overlooked or chose not to include: The retired judge, Judy Harris Kluger, who helped develop these HTICs is using the very same faulty data to promote her new business providing the services that the court recommends, reaping financial benefits from the state. Worse still, there no regulations or public standards for non-profit, short-term service providers like hers. Unfortunately, privatization schemes and conflicts of interest now pervade our justice system. Mass incarceration itself is a testimony of how special interests have managed to lobby lawmakers to privatize probation and electronic monitoring services and the prison-industrial complex itself. When will special interests like these, that thrive on increased criminality and the personal pain of others, be brought to justice?

To learn more, get involved in your community to protect sex workers rights. The decriminalization of sex work will begin the end of sexual oppression, a first step towards a world of equality and peace.

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A Week of Climate Action Starts On November 1!

Popular Resistance is driving escalated climate action by calling for a week of demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere around the country, starting on November 1.

Like  Naomi Klein‘s recent, trailblazing book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Popular Resistance says the time for being tentative, simultaneously tapping the break and hitting the accelerator, is over. We are now speeding towards a climate catastrophe.

The November action targets the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), an independent agency whose powers were expanded by the government with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Before you get involved, update yourself on what the FERC actually does, such as licensing and inspecting (regulating) private, municipal, and state energy projects; and, what it does not do, like interfere with anything addressed through through other agencies, such as State Public Utility Commissions and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Nevertheless, FERC is an example of failed government policies because behind all their choices and decisions is a bank of corporate private energy interests, making FERC an excellent media symbol of everything that is wrong with how the U.S. and other countries are dealing with the urgency of climate change. FERC website’s crafty disclaimers aside, this commission’s power in representing special interests exposes in full the major impediment to the social changes that will be needed to meet the challenges of climate change. Simply put, greedy corporations are ruining our planet and must be stopped.

The planet’s life-threatening challenges have already exceeded predictions by shrinking our timeline, cutting it in half to one third of the time we originally believed. We have less time to actually be able to do something. That is why activists across the spectrum of causes have to also be doing something to protect our environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the shorelines we stand on. If not, ending racism and sexual oppression, ending war, solving immigration, equality, economic justice, etc., will never be realized. We will continue to make gains in all these areas but what if life ceases to exist in less than 50 years? Think about and let it chill you.

The well-written demands are attached below, and you can go to the Popular Resistance website for more information on how to get involved in the non-violent civil actions planned for this first week in November, in D.C., or in your own community. (Click here for the Schedule and Logistics, including how you can stay overnight in DC for $5/day.) By working together in larger and larger numbers can we can suppress all the greed-driven special interests, and wield the power we hold in our hands. Please don’t stand still.

WE call on our government to drop its “all of the above” energy strategy. Extreme energy extraction — fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, Arctic drilling, and surface mining and undermining practices such as mountaintop removal and longwall coal mining — of the last fossil fuels condemns us to ravaged landscapes, poisoned water, and weather convulsions. And it ensures catastrophic global warming for future generations.

WE call on FERC to make decisions based on the well-being of current and future generations and the protection of our shared natural resources. Rubber stamping industry pipelines, compressor stations and export facilities contaminates the air, water, land and climate that support all life on Earth. Specifically, we call on FERC to reject the proposal to build a dangerous gas export facility at Cove Point and to place a moratorium on approvals of other export facilities.

WE can no longer allow our government to segment gas projects from all others, thereby hiding the full danger. We must look at the whole picture, evaluating what is happening downstream and upstream. Each export terminal creates hazards not only for the local community, but for communities where the shale gas will be extracted, for communities where pipelines and compressor stations are built to transport the gas, and for communities receiving the exported gas. We must also measure the release of climate-disrupting methane and other greenhouse gases during this whole process, from extraction, transport, export, and eventual burning in faraway communities.

WE call on the Obama administration and FERC to recognize the unfolding disaster guaranteed by fueling our economy from the last dregs of fossil fuels.

Nothing less will protect our communities, the climate and the Earth.

THE ACTION: During the week beginning November 1, our coalition will take to the streets of Washington to make these goals a reality

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE BEYOND EXTREME ENERGY ACTION

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See also: Response to Climate Change Impossible Without a Revolution in Thinking, and more, herehere, and here.

 

 

The Sexual Freedom Project: Freedom vs Assimilation

(También en Español)

It is easy to fall prey to stigma, labels, and general assumptions about our own identity. How can you personally break through and define your own self and your own sexuality?

Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.

More videos.

Response to Climate Change Impossible Without A Revolution in Thinking

Adrian Kenyon's The World's A Balloon Flickr/creative commons

Adrian Kenyon’s
The World’s A Balloon
Flickr/creative commons

I will continue writing about the environment for how can we hope for a new age free from racial and sexual oppression if we destroy the world with our stupid choices?

In reading Naomi Klein‘s trailblazing book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, we are destined for ecological disaster within 50 years or less. Here she succinctly lays out the challenge . . .

. . . [W]e are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.

And, the problem . . .

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, what a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face — and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.

The Real News seconds these ideas, exposing just how delusional government can be in misunderstanding the urgency of our response to  climate change.

 

Every activist concerned with social and economic justice should read Ms. Klein’s book. It’s a call to action that cannot be ignored.

. . . [P]oliticians aren’t the only ones with the power to decide [this] a crises. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-aprtheid movement turned it into one.

Let’s continue the forward momentum of this nascent movement and exercise our power, our people power, to silence or remove those who stand in the way of solving this epic problem. Stay informed. Get active. Your life depends on it.

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Retailers Finally Addressing Income Inequality

As politicians in Washington and state capitals debate raising the minimum wage, a new report from the Center for American Progress gathers new evidence showing that the United States’ top retailers are deeply concerned that stagnant wage growth and middle-class weakness are holding the economy back.

photo by pix.plz Flickr/creative commons

photo by pix.plz
Flickr/creative commons

We have written frequently about the scourge of income equality, from fast food workers‘ demanding a living wage and Wall Street’s response to connecting you to organizations on the forefront of this struggle, summing it all up this past Labor Day. Now this new report, “Retailer Revelations: Why America’s Struggling Middle Class Has Businesses Scared,” drills down further, showing us how flat wages has weakened consumer spending and put their stock prices at risk because of low demand for goods and services and high unemployment.

Retailers could improve their profits by embracing a middle-class-growth-oriented agenda instead of spending their political energy on preventing policies that increase wages. Policies such as a minimum-wage increase could provide the perfect mechanism for coordinating wage growth that could benefit the entire retail sector by fueling more consumer spending.

While banks have been rescued by our government and economic indicators in some sectors have been revived since the 2008 financial crisis, “median household income in 2013 stood 8 percentage points below its 2007 pre-recession level” while the cost of everything else, from health care to college tuition has risen.

The evidence assembled in this report directly repudiates “trickle-down economics”—the idea that the only way to produce economic growth is to redistribute money to the rich, who will create jobs for everyone else. Conservative politicians, lobbyists, and commentators may still be stuck in the trickle-down mindset of the 1980s, but corporate America and the Wall Street analysts who closely follow it know better.

In fighting income equality we have to aim our civil actions squarely on the proponents of trickle-down economics and those working actively against living wages, including lobbyists such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, until they get it. Congress is complicit in keeping the minimum wage low despite all the evidence pouring in from municipalities that have raised the minimum wage to $15/hour and actually created economic growth, including more jobs. These are the people and entities who are responsible. Educate yourself and organize accordingly.

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The Sexual Freedom Project: Birds and the Bees

Meet Ying, who doesn’t really believe in the abstinence-only approach, and tells us why. She received much of her formal sexual education in Catholic school, and shares with us some of the topics they covered. She tells us about her traditional parents and their expectations for her.  And she has some wisdom for us about bonding with and learning about our significant others.

What do you think about sex before marriage? Learning about sex from the Catholic Church? What parents should talk about with their kids? And how well your parents really know each other?

Send us your thoughts at columbia@venusplusx.org — we want to hear from you!  Make us a video, write us an essay or a poem, or create some original art — we’ll thank you with a t-shirt.

More videos.

TRANSCRIPT

Hmm… “Abstinence only”… Uh, I don’t really believe in that
because, I don’t know, I think that people
get really sexually frustrated so…
Like why? I don’t know. I actually went to a
Catholic school between kindergarten until twelfth grade, so…
Sex in religion, so they talk to you all about like the diseases that you can get and like,
the relationships that you should go through,
and like when you get into “walking on eggshells”
and it’s dangerous, but… I mean,I guess
they didn’t really stress out um, maybe, I don’t know, having sex with people or anything,
they just kinda talked about relationships.
They talked about um, you know, sexually transmitted diseases, what they look like, and how, yeah, how you get it,
how you prevent it. My parents um, are very very traditional,
so they don’t even talk like about, like, the birds and the bees.
They just kind of like hope that I don’t have sex before marriage so… yeah. It’s definitely about cultural taboos.
Cultural taboos really, I feel like um, you know, even today
my boyfriend gets questioned about sex by our cleaning person,
like, in the morning at Yaffa. They just like, he justasks him like how many times a day that we have sex,
or how many… like they have no idea.
And I mean it’s kind of weird and
I’m sure it’s very like they have no idea about it
because they ask about it, but it’s like
at the end of the day it’s like these people
don’t bond with each other until they get married. And how much, how healthy is that?
My parents… My mom didn’t even have sex with my father until they were married.
Like, to this day she knows nothing about him…

Reproductive Sex Gets More Abnormal Every Day

Editor’s Note: Periodically we have fun delving into our archives to bring you still relevant items. This one was written in 2011 by our co-founder Dan Massey that puts reproductive sex in its place. Comments welcome, as always.

Last Wednesday night (8/3) we hosted a meet-the-author event for the launch of Gloria Brame’s new book, The Truth About Sex: Volume 1. More than 30 fans of kink and more showed up, many from the Alternative Sexualities conference the same day in DC. There was a lot of Q&A and raunchy banter leading to some observations of how “non-reproductive sex” had come to be widely accepted in the last 50 years as an important part of the total sexual experience.

Adam and Eve

When confronted by an assumption that does not seem warranted, I try reversing my perspective, looking through the opposite end of the telescope so to speak, and often find my altered viewpoint enlightening. In this case, I felt the discussion was overburdened with the millennially long uphill climb of humanity from the pit of obligatory reproduction. No sooner did we figure out what caused children than all the usual scolds came out of the woodwork to try to force us to do it anyway, even when we didn’t want to.

So I spoke up to say that I thought, when you considered all the possible varieties of sex, orientation, affinity, gender identity, and gender orientation, the so-called “normal” (i.e., cisnormative heteronormative) reproductive sex act becomes a mere footnote to this multidimensional space in which we can all freely express our joy in life.

By now it should be clear that reproductive sex (without any form of intentional fertilization control) is something to be avoided unless one is fully prepared to deal with the consequences, namely the birth of a child, with sufficient preparation and capability to safely oversee eir formative life period. No child should ever be born into a situation where they are not desired and respected as the highest good to their parents. No potentially fertile couple should ever consider (or even be allowed to consider) reproduction without having attained some maturity that qualifies them to raise and educate a child.

In short, there is nothing more unusual, abnormal, and potentially self-destructive in the entire domain of sexuality and eroticism than the actual act of breeding. How could anyone possibly have thought masturbation was dangerous relative to actual reproduction? Was nobody paying attention to anything real at all? Even if masturbation really did grow hair on your palms, wouldn’t that be obviously preferable to creating an unwanted child, a child that would suffer endless personal abuse and humiliation until one day he might take vengeance on his tormentors?

Sex is about joy, pleasure, happiness, and personal sanity. Breeding is not about any of these. It is a unique and different aspect of life that, while extremely important to many people, is just one tiny and extremely dangerous corner of the universe of sex. Reproduction is an act in and of itself, which has nothing to do with erotic sex, except for the physical association in the wiring of human body. But the wires that give joy and delight actually don’t have much to do with operating the plumbing that makes babies. For the beast, the erotic senses drive behavior towards reproductive sex; however, for observant and rational humans, they actually have nothing to do with reproduction.

We are not animals. We are human, even transhuman beings, able to orient ourselves in the world, to observe the events and activities of our environment, to decide on the most appropriate next action to take ourselves, and to take such condign action in a timely way. And when we thus become fully, rationally conscious of what is really happening and our role from moment to moment in making things happen, it is easy to see the optimal choice—to finally dispose of the delusion of reproduction as the whole of sex and raise our eyes to the vast opening sky of possibilities.

Planetary society is entering a new and fabulous age of sex and gender freedom, when the range and domain of such experience and exploration is no longer defined by the mechanics of reproduction. At last the challenges of uncontrolled reproduction can be addressed, as all are educated to a life of sexual experience beyond simple interhuman bestiality. The making of babies is separate and secondary to the desires and actions of the lover to do good to the beloved. Fulfill your lovers in every way from the sensory to the transcendent, according to each individual’s sensitivities, and put reproductive sex in its place.

—Dan Massey

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Anti Net Neutrality Lobbyists Will Stop At Nothing

Why Phone and Cable Companies Want to Kill the Internet’s Most Democratic Right

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Lobbyists representing phone and cable companies have now reorganized and doubled down on disinformation campaigns. They are crying censorship against advocates who want to preserve the built-in democracy of the Internet that guarantees everyone a voice.

After all, corporations are people, folks. Therefore, net neutrality advocates are interfering with these large companies free speech rights.

Industry-funded think tanks have argued that any enforceable effort to protect the open Internet denies phone and cable companies their First Amendment right “by compelling them to convey content providers’ messages with which they may disagree.”

What???

This specious argument asserts that these large companies are de facto editors of Internet content and in that role they should be able to delimit the free speech of the rest of us. News flash: they are not the “owners” of the Internet.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon announce its new rules. Will the Internet be re-established as a common carrier, like all other public utilities, or will it allow large corporations own the Internet, charging more for privileged “fast lanes” (a cost to be passed on to consumers) and relegating the rest of us to wobbly “slow lanes” or no lane at all because your content has been censored?

Here is what you need to know . . .

Returning the Internet to the widely used common-carrier standard is what these industry types fear most. It’s a fear that has reached a fever pitch after an overwhelming majority of the public urged the FCC to protect real Net Neutrality and reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

“Are your phone lines censored? Are enterprise lines censored? Are mobile voice services censored? All of these are common carriers. We need the same assurances with our Internet communications.” (Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment scholar and Internet policy consultant, Washington, D.C.)

Any two-way communications network that serves the public is not supposed to block, degrade or otherwise unreasonably discriminate in the transmission of the content it carries across its networks.

Why do we so often champion net neutrality? Believing as we do that all oppression and coercive systems by governments, corporations, and religious hierarchies stand in the way of economic and social justice (and peace), it is important that the powerless always have an unhindered voice. Human rights deserve, need, our active protection whether pertaining equality rights, sexual freedom, the environment, immigration, etc., and the end of all war and racism. For more, check out our related manifesto.

What’s your issue? What do you feel passionately about? Let us know what you are doing. If you are just going to sit there, get up and get busy, okay?

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