Kiddie porn sales pitches no real surprise
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 008
BOSTON HERALD 8/12/04

HEADLINE: Kiddie porn sales pitches no real surprise

BYLINE: By Mike Barnicle

Tommy Hilfiger designs costly clothing that kids love to wear because the label is a status symbol. A lot of Hilfiger's stuff is probably made by somebody sitting in a steam bath in Sri Lanka, getting paid a buck a day, to stitch dungarees and blouses that sell here for hundreds of dollars each.

Yesterday, I noticed an ad in the Globe promoting a 25 percent off sale on ``Tommy Hilfiger Intimates'' for girls. Because I am a trained observer, I figured that meant underwear.

The ad cost about $25,000 and featured a kid - maybe 14 - who bore an amazing resemblance to Jon Benet Ramsey. She was the murdered 6-year-old from Colorado whose hideous parents made her dress like a pathetic teenage whore.

The little girl in the Hilfiger ad had a come-on look and a whole lot less than 25 percent on her frame. She was posed kneeling in bra and panties, staring into the lens, her mouth pouty, lips glossed and . . . well, you get the idea. It's enough to make any sane parent worry about how quickly kids have childhood stolen by the lurid life around us.

And while the definition of obscenity sure keeps changing in a culture where kids lose innocence and often their virginity at ever mind-boggling ages, it wouldn't be unreasonable to use ``obscene'' as an adjective to describe this ad.

But don't blame the Globe. They're not unlike any other newspaper; they are a business trying to turn a profit.

And slamming Hilfiger is useless, too. After all, his company is simply using the same marketing tool that so many other corporations employ to push products: Sex.

On the way to work today, check out the billboards. Look at the TV ads. There's a common denominator, no matter what is being sold - cars, beer, clothes, longer lasting erections or crispier chips at your next big bash - and it is sex.

If you haven't had sex in the last six minutes, you are a loser. And if you want to have it tonight, tomorrow or in between innings of the Sox game, you better buy Tommy Hilfiger's bras or drink a specific beer otherwise you'll be forced to pop a pill, get breast enhancement surgery or shoot yourself.

Also in yesterday's paper there was the story of three degenerates from Salem charged with the sexual exploitation of a 9-year-old girl. The three adults were held without bail.

One of the three, the mother of the 9-year-old, is thought to have pimped her own daughter for drugs. The little girl performed sex acts on two guys. Mom got a bag of coke.

Now, there ought to be a special reserved section of hell for anyone found guilty of a crime like this, letting adults have sex with a kid for drugs or money. And while it is outrageous it is not surprising. Anyone expressing shock simply hasn't been paying attention.

Kids today are surrounded by sex as never before. It's not like it was back when I was in parochial school and the combination of nuns and parents made you believe your hand would fall off and you would go blind if you even entertained an impure thought about the one item more dangerous than communism: Sex.

Today, nearly everything kids watch or hear nurtures and reinforces the notion that having sex is no different than driving a car. It's just that to do one you're required to learn a little something about the rules of the road and can operate only at a certain age. With the other, there isn't even a STOP sign.

I have no idea if the tart in Tommy Hilfiger's ad will mean more underwear gets bought.

But I figure Hilfiger and other companies know exactly what they're doing using kiddie porn to promote a product and they know precisely who their target audience is: Us.

Mbarnicle@bostonherald.com. Barnicle's radio show airs weekdays at 10 a.m. on 96.9 WTKK-FM.

LOAD-DATE: August 12, 2004

New York Times-Low-Tech or High, Jobs Are Scarce in India's Boom
From the New York Times

Low-Tech or High, Jobs Are Scarce in India's Boom
By AMY WALDMAN

Published: May 6, 2004


YDERABAD, India - Two years ago, with the employment market in his drought-stricken rural district as dry as the earth, Bhaliya made his way to this high-tech capital in southern India and found salvation in a low-tech straw broom.

He became a city street sweeper, earning 1,800 rupees a month, or roughly $40. The pay was so low, and his 1,000 rupee-rent for one room in this inflationary city so high, that his wife became a sweeper too, leaving three toddlers in neighbors' care.

Each day since, they have bent to clear errant flotsam from the curbs, and straightened to see the immaculate imagery of the new India: hundreds of billboards advertising cars, mobile phones and Louis Phillipe shirts.

The temptations are forever out of reach, yet Mr. Bhaliya, 25, counts himself lucky. "We have to work to live," he said, knowing better than to ask for more.

India's economy is spawning a growing middle class, a host of world-class companies, a booming stock market and a new image for this nation of more than one billion people.

But those very reforms and conditions are also reducing the prospects of some of its citizens. India may be "shining," in the description of a controversial and expensive government publicity campaign, but it is also struggling to generate jobs.

That employment problem could prove to be the Achilles' heel of the ruling National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is seeking re-election on the strength of an economy that grew at a breathless 10.4 percent in the first quarter of this year. Three weeks of voting in this vast country conclude on May 10.

The public sector, once a stalwart of security, has lost some 4.5 million jobs in the past six years. In this state, Andhra Pradesh, government recruitment has been frozen, and the government has cottoned to private sector practicalities. Street sweeping, once a government job that paid triple what it does now and came with medical care, a pension, annual leave and job security, has been outsourced to private contractors, who offer none of that.

The streets of Hyderabad have never been cleaner, the city's budget never leaner, and for workers, the insecurity and indigence never greater. On a Friday afternoon, Mr. Bhaliya, who uses only one name, was working two hours past his shift's end - for no overtime pay - to ensure the chief minister a dustfree view when he drove past.

With greater efficiencies, global competition, cheap capital and new technology, private companies are doing more with fewer employees.

For many Indians, then, the dismantling of a quasi-socialist economy that began in 1991, and the growing globalization of the past five years, have meant only the trickle-down of raised expectations and lowered opportunity. As both economic and population growth outpace employment growth, economists say, the country's official unemployment figure of about 8 percent masks a far higher real rate.

This southern state and its chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, capture the challenge facing India as a whole. The lack of work here is bad among educated urbanites, and worse in rural areas, where two-thirds of the work force lives and depends on nature's bounty. Severe drought - and a lack of irrigation and power to ease it - have prompted migration and farmers' suicides, and helped sustain a tenacious left-wing insurgency that nearly succeeded in killing Mr. Naidu last October.

Over time, predicts S. P. Gupta, a member of India's planning commission who specializes in employment, the social consequences of jobless growth will become more severe, whether in mass migration, or in riots like those that broke out last fall when 600,000 people applied for fewer than 3,000 low-level railway jobs.

Mr. Naidu, who is seeking re-election as chief minister and parliamentary seats for his party, has gained a global reputation for his assiduous courtship of multinational technology companies, and for government reforms that have increased efficiency and reduced the state's deficit.

(Page 2 of 2)



Regularly promoted as a model for other states and even the national government, he is largely banking his state's future on processing jobs - notably back-office work for the West. But it is not clear that Mr. Naidu's vision of a high-tech paradise can uplift this state's 75 million people, or indeed India itself.

Employment from outsourcing jobs from the United States, Mr. Gupta noted, is "big for the upper middle class, but for the country as a whole very small."

There is little Mr. Naidu has not done to lure high-tech companies here, from offering virtually free land to declaring information technology an "essential service," meaning employees cannot strike.

For Microsoft, which wanted a rectangular plot, he reconfigured a nearby business school and expedited the building of roads. For Computer Associates, which wanted a piece of land reserved for the financial district, he ordered the financial district shifted.

Even as a lack of water has devastated farmers across the state, Mr. Naidu has ensured Vanenburg IT Park, the idyllic 20-acre campus where Deloitte India and others sit, enough water for meticulously landscaped grounds year-round.

Even as Mr. Naidu has demanded that consumers and farmers pay more for inconsistent power, he has offered 25 percent power discounts to companies locating here.

In part, Mr. Naidu's blandishments reflect the dynamics of the global rush to India. As more cities, from Bangalore to Chennai (formerly Madras), compete for information technology companies, the companies have the leverage.

But it is not clear how much his state is getting in return when it comes to jobs. While nearly 60,000 jobs in information technology have been created here, many have gone to young Indians from across the country, despite this state's 350,000 English-speaking graduates.

Shankar Rao, who runs a placement agency, Our Consultancy, said software workers and especially engineers in the state were having trouble finding work. It is "very, very difficult" to place engineers, Mr. Rao said. "I think no country has as many engineering colleges as this state."

Since taking office, Mr. Naidu has increased the number of engineering colleges from 32 to around 230, and the number of graduates from 8,000 each year to 75,000. By the end of 2002, the state had around 2.6 million educated unemployed residents.

Production jobs, meanwhile, have waned. The sweepers' supervisor, Rama Rao, lost two factory jobs when the factories, one making cigarettes, one home appliances, closed. Now earning 2,500 rupees a month - roughly $57 - no matter how many hours or days he works, he mourned the "time to time" jobs when hours were set.

But even his sweeping job could be swept from under him. Rajiv Babu, the city's deputy executive engineer for solid waste management, said he regularly got offers from both foreign and Indian companies to mechanize the sweeping.

For now, it was still cheaper to use manual labor, although he noted, "As an engineer, I would love to mechanize the whole thing and forget about it."

In some sectors, that has already happened. Outside Mr. Babu's window, a new road overpass was being built. Such projects, he estimated, now require 60 percent less labor than they did a few years ago, thanks to ready-mix cement.

He had heard of suicides among workers who once mixed concrete, but he said he had no choice: the ready-mix was both cheaper and better quality.

Media Blackout in Miami: Right of Free Speech Attacked, Again.
Video Here: YOU DECIDE

...the right of the people peaceably to assemble...
- First Amendment of the US Constitution

I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
-Patrick Henry


Police Disarm Dangerous Woman Protester in Miami


Steel Workers Lead March

Steel Workers Link with Youthful Activists

Further proof that the Internet has replaced the major media as THE serious source of news, you don't know what happened in Miami last month if you only read the papers or watch the 6 o'clock follies. You don't have to agree with what the thousands of protesters were saying (I happen to, they were protesting a conference on FTAA, aka "son-of-NAFTA".) But they were peacably assembled, exercising the "freedoms" that George Bush says we are now fighting for, and they got their heads bashed. Some freedom. This time we have pictures of the police provocateurs who are always present at these things, starting the violence, kidnapping organizers off the street, and other mean, nasty, and un-American things.

Here is an undercover snatch squad in Miami. You can tell they are undercovers because they always dress so silly. Here are more shots of the undercovers.

Beating and arresting peaceful protesters is becoming a regular thing in America, but it never makes much news. Republican Convention 2000 comes to mind, as does Seattle November 28 '99, and a 1000-person December 8, 2001 rally for an Amnesty International-declared political prisoner in Philadelphia (yes, Martha, AI says there are political prisoners in America.) The list is long.

Be warned the footage of Miami last month may be upsetting. Watching Darth Vader-clad cops shooting rubber bullets at peaceful people should be. A note on FTAA, which stands for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. If you have seen your job go overseas, or if you are under-employed because white collar jobs are now going to places like Russia and China, where they kill if you try to start a union, these patriots were fighting for YOU. But whatever your issue, gun owner's rights, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, the following work shows your right to stand and say your piece is now contingent on how the powers like what you are saying.

BIG Question - The "architect" of the "Miami model" of free speech repression, Miami police Chief John Timoney, has been hired by the Democratic National Committee to provide "security" for the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Boston. After Miami he praised his cops for showing "remarkable restraint." Why aren't Democratic politicians, from Boston Mayor Tom Menino on up, demanding the DNC fire this thug? Showing a talent for lying to rival his brother's, Jeb Bush said "sincere protesters, who marched to Miami to express their concerns about FTAA, were afforded the respect and protection of the community. Those who engaged in criminal activity were arrested accordingly to secure a safe environment for the majority on both sides of the FTAA debate." The following is a compilation of videos and photos found on the indymedia websites. All credit to the brave folks who captured the truth.

Video: Unprovoked pepper spraying.
Video: Cops go wilding
Video: Police use tazer stun gun on peaceful woman
Video: American War Zone
Protesting the unlawful arrests on thurs, a large group gathered at the miami jail. Walking backwards chanting 'we are dispersing' the cops surround, tackle and assault a group of unarmed US citizens. Note: this is a 20 MB download, unfortunate if you don't have broadband, but well worth it. This footage is unbelievable.

Photos:
Police infiltrators behind police lines
Wacko Anarchist?
Are we in Bagdhad or America? Armored personnel carriers
Inside the conference: US trade Representative Zollick seals the deal
That'll learn 'em
A beautiful sight
Police marching into position
No comment
Hands
Police fire teargas and rubber bullets into crowd
Police fire paintballs with pepper spray
Nikki praying
Nikki shot in the back
Protesters man barricades
Steel workers call for congressional investigation into Miami
Woman in red
Helicopters over Miami
Miami Chief of Police Timoney
Miami News 7 Report