Obviously, the war on terrorism must be going so well that we can afford to waste considerable Federal assets chasing providers. Gee, I know I feel safer.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/798748.asp

-- Modified on 8/26/2002 3:01:57 PM

If it were discovered that one of these call girl rings had proceeds that were being funneled back to support terrorism.  It is already an established fact that the Russian Maffia amongst others has substantial cash businesses running in the US.  I don't think these guys are contributing to Easter Seals, at least not the last time I looked.

EBS

and a waste of time, not to mention tax payer dollars, that the Justice Department practices this type of law enforcement. I'm quite sure Ashcroft says a little prayer for every one of these lost souls that got busted, business savvy or not. I love the quote, these weren't dumb girls, as if you would have to be dumb to be escorting.

Everyone of the clients that was mentioned in this article, has gone on to see other local or traveling ladies that are in his city. IOW, the Feds haven't accomplished jack s%^t. Until you reduce guy's demand for s$x, which isn't going to happen as long as the earth keeps spinning, these high profiles busts will make the news.

This is why the independent traveling lady is so important in this whole equation. Think about it, some of these gals are the true entrepeneurs, getting by on their looks, charm and business sense. Meanwhile the poor cop has to sit on his hemmoroids, drinking cold coffee, smoking stale cigarettes, waiting for a lady to say the few magic words, so they can bust in, maybe rough her up a little, and put the bracelets on. Rant concluded MfSD.

One way to reduce client demand is to do what Sweden does..make it extremely uncomfortable for men to be caught soliciting.  You realize that in Sweden it is an automatic six months in jail.
Here, better than 90% of those arrested are female.  Where's the outcry about that?

EBS



-- Modified on 8/26/2002 4:48:56 PM

I think it's a given that, if these funds were laundered in anyway to support terrorism, that Ashcroft & Co. would have been touting it non-stop on the evening news. Indeed, these women would have been swept up along with other "detainees", for whom the Constitution and Bill-of-Rights apparently doesn't apply.

From the evidence presented, this looks to be just a garden variety agency for escorts.

The sums of money that went to underwrite the 9/11 attack were pretty modest, something in the range of $500K. My understanding is that some was financed by Al Qaida, and the rest from identity thefts here in the States.

If you want to make your case, you'll have to make come up with more realistic hypotheticals than that.

-- Modified on 8/26/2002 4:40:08 PM

-- Modified on 8/26/2002 4:58:07 PM

Well,

Who was trying to make a case.  I ask how would you feel about the involvement of the FBI in investigating these types of activities, IF it was found that the proceeds were being funneled to terrorism. I think I understand the fact that the present investigation is ludicrous and don't require your further explanation.  If you'd like to comment on that, then please do.  

---or do you satisfy yourself with an occasional HJ in the stinky confines of the toilet? You know, you can go to Hell for "self abuse", too. With your attitude, and the legions of others like you who endeavor to control other people's lives, you are little better than the Taliban. Next, it will be music, and any school that doesn't teach your World view. You can leave this community any time; you will not be missed.  
We who enjoy this "hobby" don't need your judgement. You do your thing we'll do ours.

Just about any business  could be financing all kinds of stuff.  That's what makes America great---but the legit business have standards and things to follow and if they slip as we have seen they get caught.  It is the morality businesses (drugs and this for a example) that we have stupidly continued to leave as a criminal offense.  Therefore since we can't run our busineses using the standard universal practices it makes it a great place for real criminals to imbed themselves and set-up shop.  The checks and balances aren't getting to be applied.  I would be upset to know any business was the backing for any activity that led to innocent people being hurt.  The approach should be to decriminalize and save those funds to pursue crimes where there are victims.  Not haul a bunch of women to jail who did nothing but put a smile on a guys face.  By the way I do file and pay lots of taxes and do not cheat in that arena.  

Men get caught soliciting all the time in the US EL B S. There are "John's" schools much like traffic school in San Fran, and other cities. In San Diego, they impound your car, and print your name and picture in the paper. It doesn't cut down on demand, and neither would imposing stiffer fines.

The outcry isn't being sounded because by and large prostitution is considered a victimless crime and the ladies are the suppliers. Having said that, I think municipal zoning codes and enforcement, keeping street sex away from schools, residential districts and business zones is a good policy, because it's proven that street walkers also attract drugs(many of them are addicts), booze and violence and drive away retail customers.

Street walkers are rarely part of the discussions here, which is where the vast majority of men caught soliciting get busted, by female LE posing as hookers. The recent client busts in Tampa, to build a case against TBD himself is a notable exception. Bottom line, men are going to seek out sex workers, and those men on the lower end of the economic totem pole are going after street walkers. MfSD.

PS - I'm a Libertarian. But I trust the Repubs with
my tax dollar more than your guys. And now, the thought
of nullifying your vote (Hillary in '04, right?) is
somewhat enjoyable.

-- Modified on 8/26/2002 8:22:44 PM

Reid Ashcroft steal your girlfriend? Stop the ranting

Rant, discuss, debate, call it what you want. We're discussing the escort biz here, well at least some of us are.

You trust the Reps. more than us guys with your tax dollars. I hope so, we're just guys here talking about girls who happen to charge by the hour, not politicians.

Libertarian, conservative, liberal, moderate and all the rest of those terms people throw around blah, blah, blah. MfSD.

Good for you, so do I: I wish though I had the money each and every April
I have been in this country for over 20 years and yet have to grasp what's all this baloney about taxes. The US taxation system is among the fairest if not the fairest in the world. Additionally, it is the place where its revenues use is the most transparent: what a fucking huge red herring. Somehow They (msharkm buddies) have been able to channel people's frustrations against taxes (and at the same time brought to bear privatization of services, [tsk, what a coinkidentze]) and it has been so for, in point of fact, 20 years (CA tax revolts...)
Blah

You can't legislate morality.  Legalizing the so called "victimless crimes"  would do more to stamp out the mafia and other dangerous elements in our society than any "war" on drugs or prostitution.  We are stuck in a mind set that came to us from the Puritans who helped found this society.  It's a fear, really, of what might happen if we just stopped all the bullshit, and let people actually take responsibility for their own choices.

Capitalists don't support anarchy. Criminals keep the cash, they don't give it away. That's done by churches raising money for Shin Fein, mosques raising money for Al Queda and Islamic Jihad, or charitable organizations like Catholic Charities raising funds for the Sandinistas, Red Banner and Machetteros...

Useful idiots... are everywhere...

But people profiting from the system (even the underground economy) don't funnel cash to causes that draw attention from the true badass LE organizations. That's bad business...

The key to these busts is political. Look where the busts took place, where the indictments were filed and the press behind them.... Very conservative locations with heavy "Old School" political machines (ie. the Good Old Boy's network). Women successfully cutting out the squeeze... That's bad for the Good Old Boys, ya know...

Hey Whippit, either you don't make enough to care, make so much it's just paper to you, or like many foreign nationals living in the US because it's a helluva lot better than home, you keep two sets of books.

Taxation policies affect all aspects of the economy. The reason the US economy is stronger that any on Earth is that it allows Citizens to keep much of what they earn rather than confiscate and "re-distribute."

As taxation levels grow, capital is taken out of the productive sector and inefficiently pissed away. A government employee (non-military, public safety or research & development) produces not one damn thing for the economy. A parking enforcement twerp citing and towing cars is nothing but a drag on the economy. Higher taxes equal more twerps on the public payrolls and fewer people out there making something.

The California Tax Revolt happened because government was confiscating people's homes and chasing business out of the State. Government was growing at a rate of 12.5% per year! Prop 13 passed by a 3 to 1 margin. With the cap on property taxes, government had to tax income and/or sales to replace revenues lost by Prop 13. So they do. Current income tax, sales tax and license fees are at about 16% of the income you earn. Add 28% or so federal tax and you are paying 44% of your income to the government...

That is extortion level taxation.... When bands like Rage Against the Machine or NOFX creens about "the machine" then turns around and crows the virtues of socialism, I just gotta shake my head... Useful idiots like Fat Mike would make Stalin proud... Sometimes I think they should get what they ask for, but then remember I'd have to live with it too...

I don't think anyone in this country would care WHO YOU WERE if you were funding terrorism, of course the FBI should be involved. DUH!

What matters here is that these ladies are NOT, thus the question is totally irrelevant, off the board, and barely worth answering!

Nicole

Thanks for the echo of my own thoughts in what your replies in this thread have said...you made the point using far less words than I porbably would have been guilty of in attempting to convey the same thoughts.  My hat, if I wore one, would be off to you for that.

Barely worth answering.huh.  And yet you did make some faint-hearted attempt at admonishment..LOL.  I see you know little about the applicability of laws and the jurisdiction of the FBI, so indeed it is barely worth you answering...hehe..

EBS

I thought it was a war on oil wells and civil rights, not terrorists. The real terrorists are in D.C.

Straightman,

Thanks for some useful discourse.  I agree that Asscrafts motivations are political.  Law enforcement priorities often are. But do you not agree that the reason these women were targeted and the FBI is involved is because of the interstate nature of the trade?  People talk here as if the US is the only country that's intolerant of the sex trade.  Europe has had numerous busts of this type recently.  One common denominator..greed and crossing juridictional lines got the "big boys" involved.

I believe these women got popped because they got greedy.  Is that not why other well known figures in this business recently got taken down?  

EBS

EBS

You must be a genius.  Most people do not understand the tax code even if they spend their whole life studying it.  You have managed to master it in only 20 years.  How can the use of the tax revenues be transparent when the governement can't tell you how they spent the money.  After years of trying only a small section of the Federal government can produce financial statements that can be audited.  The rest can't even produce financial statements.  The government can't provide you with acccurate information if they don't have accurate information.

Virtually all basic research in the United States is funded through governmental programs such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Defense Department, etc. Support for these research programs, of course, comes from our taxes.

Where does this money go? Typically, to principal investigators to support research projects at universities, but also to national laboratories such as Livermore, Los Alamos, and Fort Detrick.

So what do we get for all of this investment? Is it all just a waste, as stated by straightman and affirmed by greywolf and girlcrazy? Only if you consider such things as the Internet to be worthless. The nascent Internet was funded by the Defense Department in the early '70's to interconnect universities. Only very late did "private enterprise" enter the game ('90's). Without your taxes supporting this useless, basic research, we'd all be scribbling on bathroom walls, "For a good time, call Jenny at 867-5309".

Anything else useful come from basic research supported by taxes. Oh, just pretty much the entire human genome project supported in large part by your U.S. taxes. Results from the human genome project are maintained on the Web for the use of everyone by guess who? That's right, U.S. governmental scientists.

That (reference to "Jenny") was very funny and I agree with what you said.

Sorry for not being more clear. Reaseach & Development, Military spending and Public Safety are investments in a dynamic society. Necessary for the long term, just as real defense of the envirnment is necessary.

HEY: Did you know that the Internet is a gift of DoD? YEAH! The idea was cooked up by Reagan era NSA (well before they officially existed) and Department of Defense geeks that were running interdepartmental BBS's. They realized that information distributed over conventional phone wires could not be "edited" by a government or the press. Free inforation! The true enemy of freedom! They got the major libraries and universities online and it took off from there. Alta Vista search engine is a product of DEC and DoD!!!! DoD paid to write the system.

Geez, keep your panties on!  If you sport that purple angry butt around you might risk to get nailed and no longer be that Straight a Man. And thanks for the usual innuendo on foreign nationals, another predictable banality that could be expected from your likes.

The US economy is, (actually used to be) a supertanker because of productivity and investment (public), and other trifles like technology, science, and furthermore (probably terra incognita for you and your problem with foreigners) an incomparable reach in partnering with the rest of the globe, another small matter jumpstarted by Roosevelt and followers. And further beyond (I know, I am sorry, you probably can't go farther back than the last "Surviver" episode) a gigantic consumer base generated by the New Deal's Social Pact.  Taxes had nothing to do with it, you clown. Go sell that hump-hump Panama bar crap to the crazies: we are all stocked up here. Taxation growth and capital decline? What in the hell are you talking about? They just blasted 10 years of future budget surpluses with the 1.3 trillion cut extravaganza, all bankable capital (in the Caymans, that is). So, where's the full thrust rockets-all-go recovery? Perhaps in Bumfuck Texas they are selling more pine nuts to Alabama tourists, but here in New York everyone has battened down the hatches and is waiting for the tax cutting crowd to just go the hell away and let the grown ups come back in.

On California, I truly didn't know it was a Soviet style republic where the poor residents were expropriated of their properties and tossed in the bitter streets. Please refresh my memory: when did they suspend the Constitution there?
I must admitt I am quite ignorant about it but I find it somewhat suspicious.  Anyhow, I have been following California news only recently, when Enron and Friends in High Places tried to bankrupt the state playing the energy card, and truly put people in the street.

Anyhow, all in good spirit
Just stay away from those pesky foreign girls with two sets of books, provided you knew what a book looked like.


-- Modified on 8/27/2002 5:10:52 PM

are religous. If you don't think so, then you haven't read enough about the man or his history. There was an excellent articled posted about this guy a few threads back, and I have read others.

El BS, you sound glad that these ladies got busted. These New Orleans ladies didn't get greedy, they got targeted by an overzealous, ultra religous Attorney General who decided to go after them and bust them because of what they do.

Go back to the Leahy hearings, and take a look at the amount of time and resources that DOJ spent on these busts. Then ask yourself this question, could that time, money and human capital have been better spent securing our borders and identifying terrorist threats? MfSD.

-- Modified on 8/27/2002 5:56:01 PM

FAA air traffic control, aircraft and pilot certification, without either of which you'd have no air commerce and an American economy that would grind to a halt within a week.

Simply look at the tremendous pounding our economy took when the US airspace was closed for a few days after 9-11, we still haven't recovered from that hammer blow. No economic impact from federal employees, guess again. MfSD

-- Modified on 8/27/2002 5:00:52 PM

-- Modified on 8/27/2002 5:01:21 PM

Yes, I am.
But on this matter, all you have to do is just to follow the link below... and proceed to live abroad for a few years to realize how well this country works– Arian Brotherhood notwithstanding...

The last time I looked, everyone serving in the Armed Forces is a government employee, paid for by Federal Taxes.

And no, I don't think we'd be better served by letting private enterprise (e.g., Enron, Worldcomm, Globalcrossing, Halliburton) do our fighting for us. Come to think of it, the Hessians didn't do all that great a job for England in the Revolutionary War.

There are lots of wastes in government spending.  Just look at the latest farm bill and the sugar and peanut subsidies.  Witness the hugh cost overrun in the Big Dig in Boston - a whopping 300%, 10+ Billions of dollars - most of it from the federal government.  Those are money from pockets of you and me.

The funding for internet and the genome project are modest compared to other spending.  So don't exaggerate it.  Although I didn't live in US when Prop 13 was adopted, looking back and reading all the pros and cons, it was a landmark victory for average citizens in US and played an important role in subsequent tax cuts that ushered the unprecedented prosperity in the last 20 some years.  Compared that with what happened in Europe during the same period of time, I believed it was a home run.

Of course, times changed and one can argue back and forth about the wisdom of further tax cuts.  I will be on the side of more cuts.  But, that is beside the point.

Anyway, it is better to talk about sex than politics.  May be we should follow NOSC’s suggestion and set up a board for politics and let anyone interested to air their views.  I, for one, will not be a frequent visitor.

....PLEASE, let's not turn this into another of those friggin' endless political belief threads where no one EVER changes anyone else's mind.  Whatever opinions we have will remain as they are & were, regardless of the eloquence or "logic" posted in oppostion to what we indiviually blieve.  You guys are beginning to remind me why I make every attempt to avoid all this pointless nonesense.  I should've know better than to have posted a single word pro or con of anyone's positon.  What the hell was I thinking adding in any way to a fire that I really wish would die out?  Weak moment I guess.  

How often do we have to bury this horse??  Maybe TER should do away with one of the existing message boards & add one for political & philosphical discussions. When will people actually realize that those who are so eager to share such views don't really want to hear any in oppostion??

OK,  I'll quit. Just one more tinsy winsy thing: if you don't take care of politics, politics will take care of you. That also reads as Feds going after girls, rather than anthrax terrorists – as the beginning of this thread illustrates...

OK. Done. Finished. That's it.

At the bottom of the article is a rating poll that Newsweek put which allows you to rate the story.  Try clicking the "1" which tells them you didn't like the story or felt it was newsworthy. If the public doesn't think stories of prostitution are worthwhile, then the press will report it less.  If it's in the media less, then perhaps LE won't feel so motivated to pursue these types of crimes because the public doesn't care.

Maybe it's a far stretch, but it can't hurt to click "1" and then submit.

John Ashcroft is a mighty strange dude. He's the religious right's equivalent of Bin Laden. He'll do anyhting to promot his extreme religious beliefs. His is a god of retribution and repression.
He's notching away at our rights. The first amendment is close to being completely trashed. Forget the entire Bill of Rights if these guys are in office beyond the first term.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It irritated the hell out of me that you would even bring such an asinine idea into this conversation. And no, I don't know the FBI's codes and regulations, nor do I care to, as it has no relevance to ME personally! Nor does it have any relevance to a silly random idea of throwing terrorism into a prostitution bust which is just RIDICULOUS by all accounts.

Nicole

Confiscated thru property tax liens and forced foreclosure. But that's constitutional.... I see that you are an articulate useful idiot. Don't let facts stand in the way of your point of view.

I will stay away from whomever you declare off limits... Afterall, that is your political style... isn't it... You know best what's good for me. Thank you for looking out for me.

We mean the same thing.

I beleive, especially in the Northeast and the South, the political machine is absolutely corrupt. When a cash rich subterranian business like prostitution drops out of the squeeze flow of the machine, it draws LE attention. The fact that the Fed's led this one demonstrates that someone (or some group... call it an Organization...") with heavy political clout influenced Puritan John Ashcroft to force local US Attorney's on this. After allocating Federal resources, they had to show results. Do you think a shiny new US Attorney in Lousiania would rather chase political corruption with his budget or hookers? See what happens when you kick all the Righteous Cops out of the FBI and put in Lawyers with political motive... Golly thanks Judge Freeh (who never worked a day in his life as a cop...)

This "crackdown" is nothing more than the Old Time Southern Political Machine cracking down on "upstart women" taking cream for themselves.... Afterall it IS their cream, ya know...

I agree with the outrage expressed at Puritan John.... Manipulated by the Good Old, ah I mean Big Boys.... What a joke this guy's turning out to be.

If I remember correctly, in mid 70s, property value of California skyrocketed due to inflation and mass migration from other parts of the country.

The assessed taxable property value of a home was reassessed every year based on their market value.  Lots of retirees or low income household could not afford 20% to 30% annual increase of property tax year after year.  Failure to pay property tax resulted in foreclosure.

I consider that a pseudo-expropriation of properties.