#* adding: we are not automatically NOT complicit just by voting

[hug-your-face]

If. You. Don’t. Vote. In. November.

Then. This. Is. What. You. Support.

Vote blue. Or be (even more*) complicit in this.

Former president of the United States, Donald Trump, has expressed his view that Israel must “finish the problem” in its war on the Gaza Strip, suggesting that the Occupation state should double down on its war crimes and genocidal acts against the Territory’s Palestinian population. In an interview on Fox News on Tuesday, Trump was asked about Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, to which he responded that “You’ve got to finish the problem” and claimed that Israel “had a horrible invasion that took place that would have never happened if I was president.” Despite avoiding giving an explicit answer on whether a ceasefire should be declared in Gaza, the former president’s comments are the most direct and definitive expression of his position regarding Israel’s brutal offensive on the besieged Strip.

Continue Reading

[hogtown-socialist-alternative]

How Socialists Defeated Amazon’s Bid to Buy Seattle’s Elections

By Ty Moore -November 9, 2019

Jeff Bezos’s bid to buy Seattle City Council has backfired. Despite big business dropping unprecedented cash behind Amazon-backed candidates in all seven council races, Seattle voters rejected this attempt to flip the council to the right in all but two of the seven council races. In Seattle’s most-watched, most expensive, and most polarized council in decades, Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant appears to have won a narrow victory.

(Watch the victory press conference here. )

After election night returns showed Sawant behind by 8 points, with 46% to Egan Orion’s 54%, the corporate media and big business sounded triumphalist. But 60% of late arriving ballots counted in the following days swung toward Kshama. By Friday evening’s count Sawant had crested 3.6% past Orion with a lead of 1,515 votes, with that number likely to rise a bit further in the days ahead.

Washington State’s mail-in ballot system allows voters to mail in their ballots up to three weeks before election day. Early voters tend to be older and wealthier, with later voters being disproportionately younger, working class, and renters – those more likely to vote socialist. This year the late ballot bump for Sawant was bigger than ever, a reflection of the huge 58% turnout in District 3. Even our critics in the local media were forced to credit Socialist Alternative’s record-breaking get-out-the-vote operation.

The high turnout also reflected the wave of outrage that swept Seattle in the final three weeks of the election following Amazon’s $1 million “money bomb” dropped on Seattle on October 14. This brought Amazon’s total contribution to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce PAC to $1.5 million, and corporate PAC spending as a whole to over $4.1 million – approaching five times the previous record!

National political figures weighed in against Amazon, followed by a wave of national media attention. The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board complained that “Bernie Sanders tweeted this week that Amazon’s spending in Seattle was ‘a perfect example of the out-of-control corporate greed we are going to end.’ Elizabeth Warren decried Amazon for ‘trying to tilt the Seattle City Council elections in their favor,’ adding that ‘I have a plan to get big money out of politics.’”

A Referendum on Corporate Power

Warning that Bezos’s $1.5 million gamble to defeat Sawant and other progressives may have backfired, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat said: “The election was playing out as a referendum on the performance of the City Council.” An Elway/Crosscut poll showed 67% of likely voters supporting “someone who wants to change” the Council’s direction. Westneat continued: “Now [the election] could well be a referendum on Amazon and corporate power” (10/23/19).

Of course, the Seattle Times is at the forefront of a relentless corporate propaganda offensive to blame Sawant and other so-called “left ideologues” for the failed “performance of the City Council” in addressing Seattle’s homelessness and affordability crisis, the top concern for voters. The paper endorsed Amazon-backed candidates in all seven council races, portraying them as “change” candidates.

In reality, Seattle’s housing crisis is part of the global failure of capitalism, which treats housing as a commodity to enrich billionaire speculators, rather than as a basic human right. Working people are right to be angry at the inaction of city, state, and federal authorities to address the crisis. But blame for this falls squarely on a political establishment that is complicit with corporate power, not on activists and political leaders like Kshama Sawant calling for universal rent control and taxing big business to massively expand quality public housing.

Amazon executives’ chosen opponent for Kshama was Egan Orion, a fully corporate candidate who posed as a “progressive” to win votes. Orion put posters up all over town saying he accepted no corporate PAC money despite the fact that he applied for corporate PAC money, interviewed with the PAC, and thanked them when he got their endorsement. He sent out mailers with lies about Kshama to every household.

Orion’s supporters tore down over 1,000 Kshama Sawant yard signs throughout the district, and in the final two weeks, they vandalized over 200 signs with spray-painted profanities. Crucial to overcoming the lies and attacks against our campaign was building widespread public awareness about this attempt to buy the election through thousands of conversations on the doors and at street corners by our members and volunteers.

Debate on Seattle’s Left

Once again, Seattle has shown that socialists and working people can take on the most powerful corporate titans and win. This victory should give confidence to movements everywhere, from the recent wave of mass anti-austerity and democracy protests spreading across the globe, to the youth climate strikes, labor battles, as well as other socialist election campaigns including Bernie Sanders’ inspiring fight for the presidency.

Yet it would be a major mistake to imagine that similar victories can be won through struggle and determination alone. The role of Marxist perspectives, program, and organization was essential in Seattle and will be vital to defeating the concentrated power of the capitalist class everywhere.

At the start of the election campaign, a de-facto alliance between big business, key labor leaders, and most liberal political figures had coalesced to try and defeat Sawant and block the election of Democratic Socialists of America candidate Shaun Scott in District 4. This anti-Sawant alliance came to life in the aftermath of the “Tax Amazon” campaign in 2018, which went down in defeat following aggressive bullying by Amazon, including threats to move jobs out of Seattle.

The broad coalition built around the Tax Amazon campaign, in which Sawant’s office and Socialist Alternative played a central role, initially won unanimous passage of the tax on the top 3% of Seattle corporations to pay for affordable housing and homeless services. However, facing intense pressure from big business and a well-funded repeal campaign, this coalition was shattered and city council repealed the tax in a 7-2 vote just one month later.

From left-liberal and pro-business voices alike, blame for the defeat was put on the “divisive” approach of Sawant and Socialist Alternative. Despite support from a number of unions, leaders of the Ironworkers and other trades angrily denounced the campaign as a “tax on jobs,” fearful that Amazon would follow through on their threats to cut back new construction in retaliation.

In the August 6 primary, with no endorsements from her fellow city councilmembers or other prominent Democratic Party politicians, with labor publicly divided, Sawant received just 37% in the primary election. “No incumbent in recent memory has survived a primary showing that low,” wrote Westneat in the Seattle Times (8/7/19). “[T]he days on the council for the crusader for rent control and taxes on big business could be numbered.”

The Fight for Unity Against Amazon

If Sawant and Socialist Alternative had adopted the approach of most liberal and labor leaders to try and avoid a direct confrontation with Amazon, it’s likely Jeff Bezos’ bullying strategy and attempt to buy the city council would have succeeded. There was nothing automatic about the widespread working-class distrust toward corporate power getting organized into a coherent fightback.

In fact, most elections across the U.S. don’t feature bold working-class challenges, given the corporate domination of the two-party system. Even in Seattle, where the local Democratic Party organizations have shifted leftward under the impact of Sanders and other left challengers, this hasn’t resulted in strong working class fighters running for city council in most races.

Socialist Alternative based our electoral strategy on confidence that, if offered a fighting lead, working class and young people in Seattle were capable of defeating Amazon and big business. Crucial to this strategy was the potential for working-class pressure from below to push progressive and labor leaders off the sidelines and into a united fight with us against Seattle’s corporate establishment. Socialist Alternative members provided the Marxist backbone of this strategy. Their energy, self-sacrifice, and political skills successfully built  perhaps the most powerful grassroots election campaign in Seattle history.  

Over 1,000 volunteers and SA members have helped us knock on over 225,000 doors and make 200,000 phone calls. 7,900 working people donated to the campaign, and with a median donation of $20 we raised $570,000, smashing all previous records for both the number of donors and total amount raised. We’ll be publishing a fuller report of this historic effort soon.

The dynamic unleashed after the primary election confirmed our strategy. Candidates backed by Amazon and big business moved on to the general election in all seven council races, facing off against more progressive candidates. With the looming threat of the Chamber of Commerce engineering a wholesale takeover of City Hall, our call for maximum unity against big business rapidly gained traction among grassroots activists, exerting pressure on bigger political players.

More endorsements for Sawant, as well as Shaun Scott, began rolling in from progressive leaders and groups who had sat on the sidelines in the primary. The scandalous effort of conservative labor leaders to win Egan Orion the Labor Council’s endorsement was defeated when over 300 union members signed an open letter in protest. By the final weeks, 21 unions had endorsed Sawant – a substantial majority of the union locals who endorsed in the District 3 race. A joint event promoting a Green New Deal for Seattle was organized with Sawant, Morales, and Scott speaking, an important display of programmatic left unity that was absent in the primary.

In a major defeat for the business-backed Democratic establishment who have long-dominated city  politics, local Democratic Party groups endorsed both Shaun Scott and Kshama Sawant in September (they had already endorsed Morales in the primary). Sawant is the first independent socialist ever endorsed by Seattle’s Democrats, and this endorsement was made despite her very public calls for left Democrats, labor, and social movements to join together to build a new party for working people. This victory, the product of an energetic grassroots effort, was linked to passing resolutions condemning corporate PAC spending  through four Democratic Party organizations.

All this laid the basis for our re-election campaign to become the central driving force behind a unified response when Amazon dropped their $1 million money bomb on October 14th. Alongside the Democratic Party groups, we organized a press conference two days later outside of Amazon headquarters, followed by rally called by Amazon workers a week later.

This broke the dam. A wave of national media coverage followed. In a high profile reversal, even Lorena Gonzalez and Teresa Mosqueda – the liberal city councilmembers who had publicly called for Sawant’s defeat in the primary – felt compelled to speak at the rally against Amazon and announce their endorsement of both Sawant and Scott. A wave of other progressive Democratic Party leaders followed suit.

The  naked attempt by Jeff Bezos to buy Seattle City council backfired, but only because it met a well-prepared united front strategy to mobilize working class anger into a unifying force, pushing even reluctant labor and liberal leaders into alliance with socialists to fight big business. The role of Socialist Alternative, with our clear analysis, strategy, and a politically self-confident membership, was absolutely vital to moving these wider forces into united action.

As the wave of socialist election campaigns across the country continues to expand, the rich lessons of how we defeated Jeff Bezos in his hometown can help serious socialist organizers develop winning strategies for working class struggle everywhere.

https://www.socialistalternative.org

[dontletthemfoolya]

During the posting of this blog, hackers, ( I presume are trying to dictate what I have to say ), have been interfering with the words and order of phrases, in order to try and force their narratives, so, read, then check the absolute truth, against these facts.

The order of phases may also be incorrect, because I haven't been as skillful in using my already limited facilities for editing and posting. Please comment suitably, where you're invoked and or inspired to.

While working on Africa, and ( being able to understand some of their language ), witnessing the slave trade, sat-un-ic worship, and other wickednesses, that I was sure that I didn't want to subject my future children to most of the cultures I had seen there.

I was horrified but realized that that's where my mother had learned it, when I was witness to the horrid, traumatizing mistreatment of their children, in their obedience to satan.

When I brought this to the attention of so-called ' aid agencies ' such as ' save the children ' and ' christian aid ', their reply was, "We can't tell people how to bring up their children."

Then why bother with innoculation and education programs, I ask?

Though black, I was raised as a baby by a western white woman, so I wasn't implicitly taught that " white people are gods ", and " we were alright, until white people kidnapped us and sold us into slavery " nonsense.

They seemed to find a way to tell the people and the kids to find ways to buy automatic kalashnikov 47s, to kill each other, and go to overthrow governments, and cause civil wars though.

It became immediately more clear to me, why after being given $trillions yearly, NOTHING IMPROVES, in the places where satan and the serpents are. In colusion with the ' african mother ', they continue to cunningly conspire to rip the world off. They were constantly trying to cause and make wars. They spent a lot of energy telling the kids of african women, that ' their difficulties were due to the government', and so they needed to ' overthrow the government by coup d'etait '. Cue Rwanda, Nigeria, Libya, etcetera. They do the same kind of thing in USA and America, another peoples who tend to be tricked and persuaded by the ' sat-un / eu ' aesthetic.

Of the so called aid agencies, I found and made it known, that they were adding to and exploiting problems in a highly satanic manner, in collusion with most of the main stream media entities, not solving them. ' US Aid ', ' CAFOD ', ' Oxfam ', ' Action Aid ' and a bunch of red neck American religious and charity entities were the only positive effects on the people their, but most of that would be undermined by eu, and other entities, in collusion with african mothers; just exactly how it's explained in Genesis of the Holy Bible.

However, as most african mothers implicitly as well as overtly taught their babies that ' white people are gods ', ( Europeans, Asians, etcetera ), a child born into such a culture, ( irrespective of the skin colour/ an aesthetic value ), is immediately disadvantaged; that's where the disadvantages is.

Remember; since satan installed ' blacks ' as general secretary of united nations, nigger nations have never been more dangerous. They've even made it an offence in many places to mention our ancestral name, ( Nega, Nigga, Negast, etcetera ), in collusion with our mothers, her kids and their pimps.

The solution to the ' slave trade ' by africans told to me by the women, ( who are deeply complicit and highly active and have been for thousands of years ), is ' don't mention it '. I prefer the Rastafari method;

" Love and serve God Jah First."

This will explain why, whilst a lot of lip flapping and guilt tripping is pushed about " 400 years of slave trade ", and the calls for " reparations in the form of money ", until about 2011 or so, none of the children of ' african cultures ' would reveal the prolific, flea-markets of slaves for sale, ( sometimes at as little as 3 for £10 / $13 ), which are then transported to Europe, where the united nations entity called ' eu ' offers up to $120,000 each, repacked as ' refugees ', and ' migrant workers, seeking a better life'.

Some evil, sat-un-ic rulers describe the respecting of " Human Rights " as " a complex difficulty ".

A place is as good as the woman in it. This will explain why, for dozens of decades, apartheid was operated by a few against most in a country of megawatts an hour of free sunshine.

Question: why am I the only Nigga to state that I know that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is not racist, and certainly no more racist than Gordon Brown or Michael Jackson?

Check the balance sheet.

Russians are white people. Norwegians are white people. White is a color. White people are people of colour. When you say " people of colour ", do you mean " the aesthetic, satanic, society worshipping, peoples, who disadvantage their children, in order to please dead ancestoral ideas?"

The most efficient, successful societies to date are those which love their children. The poorest are those which disadvantage their children, in order to practice some horrid rituals, in worship of aesthetics and possessions.

Micromanagment and using fake news to distract is and has been the way of satan for millenias.

Check the balance sheet.

As written in Genesis of Holy Bible, due to the love of aesthetics and disobeying the Most High God Jah , " our people were put into 400 years of slavery..,". Only Jamaicans have enough love and truth to acknowledge this. The " mother " you choose to subject your children to is a bigger responsibility than the aid agencies and religions allow you to see.

The first love of aid agencies and most religions is their love of money. Their quote is something in the order of " we'll always have poor people to exploit ". By keeping people poor, and using mantras, practices and products to do so, the ' aid agency ', ' main stream media ' and or religion bosses will always be fed by their exploitations.

When in February in Africa we made knee high rains during dry season in 1994, the reaction of the war monger united nations entities amongst each other was, " well, if we don't have any more droughts, how are we going to continue to get governments to fund us?"

Shocked at what I was hearing and seeing them at, I was silent. One of the eu female aid workers suggested that they develop a case to fund a new narrative. The serpent and satan ( main stream media and united nations ) entities conspire and collude to trick ' Eve ' and her children, to be exploited and devoured between them. That's how nine eleven happened.

Mr Gaddafi complied, and sat-un still trashes Libya, Egypt, etcetera for kicks. He should've voted for Me, instead of try to " confirm the divide and rule, family breakdown narratives " put out by sat-un, and its serpents.

I admire His Highness Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who after our conversations and discussions, a couple of years ago, saw through into the Holy Scriptures from our ancestors, the Most High God Jah Servants, the Prophets, and, ( in spite of the pagan and infidel entities of sat-un, eu, msm media, and such ), almost instantly began to change to the godly commands, and as such, removing the oppression of women in Saud Arabia. During one of our conversations, eu east European persons overheard our chat, and were indignant that this fair treatment towards women, ( as instructed by the Most High God Jah ), should be proposed and developed.

I thank the Most High God Jah, I thank you, your Highness, and Iam so proud of you. I was able to briefly see a video of one of the lady Saudi Arabian racing drivers, and I was impressed by her skills in her handling and manoeuvring of the racing cars. In God Jah we trust, or in your language, cousin, " Allah huakbah." Please excuse my mispronunciation, but I can just about speak English, and that was the first language I learned to speak! 🤣😂😁

My sincere greetings to you all in the Royal Family, and to Presaud, ( I think that's how my daddy, late BBB pronounced it ), and a goody goody goody to you all from me.

[democratsunited-blog]

Conservative Confusion About Who and What We’re FightingThe American Spectator

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=7696

Conservative Confusion About Who and What We’re FightingThe American Spectator

At this moment, Ohio Democrats and their Beltway masters are diligently working to steal the state’s 12th Congressional District from Republican Troy Balderson. Balderson’s Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor, refused to concede after narrowly losing the special election and a few hours later — the county where he works — miraculously “discovered” 588 uncounted votes in a “routine audit.” When they were counted, Balderson’s lead shrank by 190. Similar skullduggery will accompany the count of provisional and absentee ballots, which will inevitably lead to an automatic recount, which will ultimately lead to an O’Connor “victory.”

What does this have to do with conservative confusion?

It’s a timely reminder that the Democratic Party is little more than a criminal conspiracy and that any conservative who sits at home during the midterms, griping about “GOPes,” will be complicit in the destruction of the republic. If this sounds over the top, think about who will take over the leadership of crucial committees if the Democrats flip enough seats to regain a majority in the House: Adam Schiff will probably become the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — Adam Schiff! Before we go any further, think about that. This buffoon is still braying about Russian collusion even as he covers up the crimes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Schiff’s first order of business as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be to halt any ongoing investigations into Obama administration abuses of power — particularly the illegal deployment of the FBI, CIA, and IRS against domestic political opponents of the Democratic Party, including the Trump presidential campaign. Schiff will likewise close down all inquiries into Mrs. Clinton’s copious catalogue of crimes. Having thus enabled Obama administration officials to escape justice, Schiff will then pivot to his primary goal — destroying the Trump Presidency. Just three months ago, he wrote the following in the New York Times:

[I]f President Trump participated in a conspiracy to defraud the United States during the campaign by colluding with the Russians, there is a historical basis for the Senate to remove him from office. It is even more clear that if he committed the offense of obstruction of justice while in office, that would provide a legal basis for removal.… During the course of our investigation in the House Intelligence Committee, we have found troubling evidence of both collusion and obstruction of justice.

Schiff will turn the Intelligence Committee into a Trump-seeking missile, and he’ll have lots of help from other committees. Maxine Waters, who calls for the President’s impeachment at every opportunity, is the ranking Democrat on the House Banking Committee. Other top Democrats on House committees who supported last January’s impeachment motion include Tim Walz (Veterans Affairs), Raúl Grijalva (Natural Resources), Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security), Frank Pallone (Energy & Commerce), Eliot Engel (Foreign Affairs), Jim McGovern (Rules), and Nydia Velázquez (Small Business). And this doesn’t include subcommittees.

This will not require a Democratic landslide. All it will take is a few thousand cranky conservatives in each of 23 pivotal congressional districts who can’t figure out who the bad guys are, who think the enemy is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. There are, of course, legitimate reasons to be disappointed with the GOP leadership. They didn’t work hard enough to rid us of Obamacare, and their fiscal incontinence has not exactly been a feather in their cap. But allowing the Democrats to capture a majority would be a disaster for the nation. As former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr writes at Fox News:

Even if the midterm elections do not result in the “blue wave” for which Democrats pine, a bare majority of one Democratic House member will cost the GOP every committee chairmanship, the speakership, and control of the legislative agenda.… Up to now, the question of impeachment has resided on the ideological and financial fringes of the Democratic Party.… All that will change on Nov. 7 if the previous day’s voting confirms a House and possibly a Senate majority win for the Democrats.

It doesn’t matter that the impeachment of the President, for mythical crimes committed in Adam Schiff’s tawdry little mind, wouldn’t result in a Senate conviction. Fighting it would involve so much White House time that virtually nothing else would get done. And this is the Democratic goal. President Trump, to the surprise of yours truly, has been a very effective president: On his watch, unemployment has dropped to 3.8 percent, economic growth is twice what it was under Obama, taxes have been cut for 8 in 10 Americans, Obamacare’s justly reviled individual mandate has been effectively repealed, the VA has been overhauled, ad infinitum.

The Democrats need to stop this, or they will go the way of the Whig Party. But they can’t pull it off by running empty-headed candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks arithmetic is a conservative talking point. They can’t win a majority in either house of Congress by calling for open borders or pimping Medicare-for-All. They plan to regain their lost majorities by vote fraud — as they are demonstrating in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District right now — lying to the voters through their toad eaters in the legacy media, and demoralizing conservatives to the extent that they sit home on November 6, allowing hard-won GOP majorities to collapse.

OH-12 shouldn’t have been close enough for the Democrats to steal. The razor-thin majority by which Balderson won is the result of absent suburban voters who have forgotten that, after 2006, the Democrats nearly destroyed the U.S. economy and set the stage for the Obama era with all its trademark criminality. The Democrats are crooks and liars. Even worse, they are incompetent. If they are allowed to get their tentacles on the levers of power again, they will ruin everything they touch, and it will probably require more than mere votes to get rid of them next time. Conservatives can save the republic from all this by showing up for the midterms.

Rep. Adam Schiff (YouTube screenshot)

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[deniseyallen]

Highlighting Bipartisan Backpage Report, Portman Stands Up for Human Trafficking Victims on Senate Floor

Portman: Backpage “Did Nothing to Stop This Criminal Activity. They Facilitated It. Knowingly” 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) delivered remarks on the Senate floor today to discuss Tuesday’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) committee hearing on “Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking.” Portman, who serves as Chairman of PSI, led an 18-month long bipartisan investigation into the scourge of online sex trafficking along with Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). The widely-praised investigation produced a stunning report detailing how Backpage knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and underage girls and covered up evidence of these crimes in order to increase its own profits. “Backpage,” said Portman, “did nothing to stop this criminal activity. They facilitated it. Knowingly.”

Transcript of the speech can be found below and a video can be found here.

“I rise today during Human Trafficking Awareness month to talk about the scourge of human trafficking and specifically about an investigation that the Senate has just concluded that matters to every single state represented in this chamber and to every American. We’re told now that human trafficking, including sex trafficking, is a $150 billion-a-year industry. This makes it the second biggest criminal enterprise in the world behind the drug trade. Unfortunately, it’s happening in all of our states, including in my home state of Ohio. And it’s growing as a problem. A couple of weeks ago, two people were arrested in my hometown of Cincinnati in connection with sex trafficking. Police charged a woman with luring an underage girl to commit a sex act with a 56-year-old man. That was two weeks after police in Blue Ash, Ohio, just up the road, broke up what they said was a sex trafficking ring in a hotel. Police said that two men and two women rented two rooms at a hotel paying cash, and forced four different women to perform sex acts. The women were given crack cocaine and heroin presumably to keep them dependent on their traffickers. 

“This is what I’m hearing back home a lot when I talk to victims of sex trafficking. Typically drugs are involved. In Ohio it’s usually heroin. These cases are alarming and unfortunately we have reasons to believe that the problem is getting worse, not better. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, really the expert on this issue, particularly of kids who get involved in sex trafficking, reports an 846 percent increase in reports of suspected child sex trafficking from 2010 to 2015. That’s an over 800 percent increase just in those five years. This spike the organization found to be ‘directly correlated to the increased use of internet to sell children for sex.’ So it’s kind of the dark side of the internet, isn’t it? What I’m told sometimes by survivors of trafficking is they say Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the cell phone. There’s widespread evidence that sex trafficking is increasingly doing that all over our country. 

“In order to confront this problem, as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations along with my colleague and Ranking Member Senator Claire McCaskill, I opened a bipartisan investigation into sex traffickers and their use of the internet. The investigation began about two years ago. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says that nearly three-quarters, 73 percent, of all suspected child sex trafficking reports it receives from the general public through its cyber tip line are linked to one website, a single website. That website is called Backpage.com. According to leading anti-trafficking organizations including Shared Hope International, ‘service providers working with child sex trafficking victims have reported that between 80 percent and 100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com.’ Eighty to 100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com. That’s consistent with everything I’ve heard when I’ve been back home and spoken and met with sex trafficking survivors.  “Backpage now operates in 97 countries, 934 cities worldwide and is valued at well over half a billion dollars. According to an industry analysis in 2013, eight out of every ten dollars spent on online commercial sex trafficking advertising in the United States went to this one website, Backpage. Others, by the way, have chosen not to engage in this. There have been a number of cases across the country including in Ohio where Backpage.com was used by traffickers to sell underage girls for sex. Last spring, in my home state of Ohio,  a man, who by the way has nine children of his own, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for trafficking four underage girls who had run away from home in Akron and in Canton, Ohio. He kept them locked in a hotel, supplied them with drugs like marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, and sold them for sex on Backpage.com. When he was arrested he was found with more than 8,000 bags of heroin.

“Just a week later, a man from Fort Wayne, Indiana was charged with human trafficking and child prostitution after he was arrested on his way to Ohio. His intention, police say, was to traffic a 14-year-old girl who he had met on Facebook, raped, and whom he planned to sell on Backpage.com.

“Backapage says it ‘leads the industry’ in its screening of advertisements for illegal activity. In fact, Backpage’s top lawyer described their screening process as the key tool for disrupting and eventually ending human trafficking via the World Wide Web. But despite these boasts, this website and its owners consistently have refused to cooperate with our investigation and with other investigations relating to lawsuits around the country. With regards to our situation, we subpoenaed them for their documents and they still refused to provide the documents to testify. As a result, as my colleagues will remember, this body the United States Senate, for the first time in more than 20 years, voted unanimously to pass a civil contempt citation to require them to supply the documents and come forward with this information. In August, a federal court order rejected Backpage’s objection to that subpoena and compelled the company to turn over the subpoenaed documents to the Subcommittee. Backpage appealed that, asked for a delay in that order. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. But their request was rejected.

“Since then, the Subcommittee has been able to review the documents that were submitted: over one million documents including emails and other internal documents. What we found was very troubling to say the least. After reviewing the documents, the Subcommittee published a staff report on Monday of this week that conclusively shows that Backpage has been more deeply complicit in online underage sex trafficking than anyone imagined.

“We reached three principal findings. First, that Backpage has knowingly covered up evidence of criminal activity by systematically editing its so-called adult ads. Second, that Backpage knows that it facilitates prostitution and even child sex trafficking. Third, despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, taking them outside of the U.S., the true owners of the company are the founders, James Larkin and Michael Lacey and Carl Ferrer, their CEO.

“First, the editing of ads. Our report shows that Backpage has knowingly covered up evidence of crimes by systematically deleting words and images suggestive of illegal conduct, including of child sex trafficking. That editing process sanitized the content of millions of advertisements in order to hide important evidence from law enforcement.

“In 2006, Backpage executives instructed staff to edit the text of adult ads—not to take them down, but to edit them–which is exactly how they facilitated this type of trafficking including child sex trafficking. By October 2010, Backpage executives had a formal process in place of both manual and automated deletion of incriminating words and phrases in ads.

“Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer personally directed his employees to create an electronic filter to delete hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking or prostitution from ads before they were published.

“Again, this filter did not reject ads because of the obvious illegal activity. They only edited the ads to try and cover them up. The filter did not change what was advertised, only the way it was advertised.  Backpage did nothing to stop this criminal activity. They facilitated it.  Knowingly.

“Why did they do it?  Backpage executives were afraid they would erode their profits. It’s a very profitable business. In Ferrer’s words, they were afraid they would ‘piss off a lot’ of customers.

“What terms did they delete? Beginning in 2010, Backpage automatically deleted words including ‘lolita,’ referencing the 12-year-old girl in a book sold for sex, ‘teenage,’ ‘rape,’ ‘young,’ ‘little girl,’ ‘teen,’ ‘fresh,’ ‘innocent,’ ‘school girl,’ and even ‘amber alert’—and then published the edited versions of the ads to their website.  Backpage also systematically deleted dozens of words related to prostitution.

“This filter made these deletions before anyone at Backpage even looked at the ad. When law enforcement officials asked for more information about suspicious ads—as they have routinely done—Backpage had already destroyed the original ad posted by the trafficker, and the evidence was gone. So this notion that they were trying to help law enforcement is in the face of the fact that they actually destroyed the ads that had the evidence.

“We will never know for sure how many girls and women were victimized as a result. By Backpage’s own estimate, the company was editing 70 to 80 percent of the ads in the adult section by late 2010. Based on our best estimate, this means that Backpage was editing more than half a million ads every year. Internal emails indicate that the company was using the filter to some extent as late as April 2014. We simply don’t know if they are still using a filter.

“Eventually, Backpage reprogrammed its filters to reject some ads if they contained certain egregious words suggestive of sex trafficking. But the company did this by coaching its customers on how to post ‘clean’ ads to help facilitate the criminal conduct of these traffickers. So they did reject some ads, but then they went back to the customer to say this is how you could do it better. For example, starting in 2012, a user advertising sex with a ‘teen’ would get the error message: ‘Sorry, ‘teen’ is a banned word.’  With a one-word change to the ad, the user would be permitted to post the same ad with the same offer.

“In October 2011, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer directed his technology consultant to create an error message when a user entered an age under 18 years old. Just like with the word filter, the customer could just enter a new age and the ad would post.

“With regard to ownership, our investigation revealed that, acting through a series of domestic and international shell companies, Backpage’s founders lent their CEO Carl Ferrer more than $600 million to buy the website. While Ferrer is, on paper, the owner of Backpage, Backpage’s previous owners retain near-total debt equity in the company, continue to reap Backpage’s profits in the form of loan repayments. They can also exercise control over Backpage’s operations and financial affairs pursuant to the loan and to other agreements. The elaborate corporate structure under which Ferrer purchased Backpage through a series of foreign entities appears to provide absolutely no tax benefit based on their accountants information to us and serves only to obscure Ferrer’s U.S.-based ownership.

“Based on all of these findings it is clear that Backpage actively and knowingly covered up criminal sexual activity, sex trafficking that was taking place on its website, all in order to increase its profits at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.

“Backpage has not denied a word of these findings.  Instead, several hours after our report was issued, the company closed what they call their adult section. They closed it down. Frankly, this just validates our findings.  The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said this about Backpage’s closure of its ‘adult’ site an hour after it had been closed:  ‘as a result [of this closure], a child is now less likely to be sold for sex on Backpage.com.’

“No one is interested in shutting down legitimate commercial activity and speech, but we do want to put a stop to criminal activity.

“I want to thank Senator McCaskill and her staff for their shoulder-to-shoulder work with my team on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on this bipartisan investigation. I am also grateful to the members of the full Committee and the Senate as a whole for unanimously supporting us as we pursued the enforcement of a subpoena against Backpage.com.

“We’re not done. In the weeks and months ahead, I intend to explore whether potential legislative remedies are necessary and appropriate to end this type of facilitation of online trafficking.

“At a hearing on the report on Tuesday, the Backpage CEO and other company officials plead the Fifth Amendment, invoking their right against self-incrimination – rather than respond to questions about the report’s findings. The Subcommittee also heard powerful testimony from parents whose children had been trafficked on Backpage. One mother talked about seeing her missing daughter’s photograph on Backpage.com, frantically calling the company to tell them that that was her daughter and to please take down the ad. Their response? ‘Did you post the ad?” Her response? ‘Of course I didn’t post the ad, that’s my daughter, please take it down.’ Their response? ‘We can only take it down if you paid for the ad.’

“I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort to ensure that does not happen again. What has happened to these kids is not just tragic; it’s evil. I urge my colleagues to join me in reforming our laws so that they work better to protect these children. Mr. President, thank you. I yield back my time.”

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  from Rob Portman http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=770C4345-5AEF-49F6-8A84-3B20981EBB7E