Lies, Damn Lies, Goddess Damn Lies...And The Campaign For Measure B...Now Venturing Into "Rescue Mission" Territory?? (Part 1)

The Really Big Lie campaign by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to pass Measure B -- the condom mandate in porn ordinance -- is now kicking into high gear, with the release of the sample ballots for the November 6th election to citizens of Los Angeles County. The sample ballot for Measure B, shall we say, is very revealing of the means to which proponents will resort to distortion and evasion, if not outright lie their asses off, in order to get their measure passed.

Steven St. Croix, whom has been one of the principled activists in opposition to Measure B, got his sample ballot last week, and ripped off a brilliant refutation and smackdown of the arguments used in favor of the measure. His breakdown is worthy of its own read; but there are some elements that deserve special attention. First, here's St. Croix's annotated version of the "Impartial Analysis" segment of the sample ballot:

First off...."impartial"???  From the same counsel that is promoting the ordinance?? Yeah, right.

Right off the bat, we see the first distortion (which St. Croix has annotated brilliantly): the notion that the full costs of enforcement of the ordinance will come exclusively from the forced permits imposed on the "pornographers" (more on that anon). This corresponds with the assertions of Michael Weinstein that no taxpayer money will be needed to enforce Measure B if it is passed, because it will all come out of the producers' hides with the permits forced on them. Problem is, those permits will have to fund the salaries and the activities of the investigators and "inspectors" who will be ensuring that porn shoots be wrapped up...and if it's going to be only fees from the permits funding the enforcement, then chances are that those fees will be through the roof..of the LA Coliseum.

Or: to quote directly the fact sheet from the anti-Measure B group Citizens Against Government Waste:

Film LA, Inc., the county film permitting agency, cites the cost of an average film permit as $625, but early estimates for Measure B permits by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health puts the costs as high as thousands of dollars per permit. The department estimates the initial startup costs to hire new inspectors, implement an inspection program and pay benefits at $300,000 with no idea of the program’s eventual costs.  Many production companies will either leave the county or simply go underground to avoid paying the fees, thereby necessitating the costs needed to develop an enforcement program to track down these productions.

And remember, Clones, that this measure would cover not just the big porn companies who shoot regularly in LA County, but could potentially affect anyone who does camshows or even runs her own website out of her private home. If you shoot any form of explicit sex, then you would be required to have the permit to shoot legally..and you would have to use condoms. Would you like to pay out your life's savings to AHF just to shoot a free condom commercial??

Of course, if no company bites on buying a permit and simply decides to either go rogue and risk fines and jail, or simply move their ops out of LA County, then the latter have a BIG problem of where to find the money to enforce the law. Which makes AHF's pledge not to attempt to issue a RTP for using their money and personnel to help enforce the mandate ring pretty hollow....especially since they have already commited to paying both LA County and the city of LA for all legal fees incured in defending the condom mandate law in court.

This other note of the "impartial analysis" struck me:

The Board of Supervisors reserves the right to amend in order to further the purposes of the measure.

So...does that mean that the LA County BoS can simply, at the first sign of AHF/CalOSHA bitching about not punishing the "pornographers" enough (or, if AHF needs to shake down more porn companies for money), alter the ordinance even further??  How...open ended of them.

But...that's the "impartial analysis". Far more fascinating and disturbing is the actual argument that AHF puts forth to promote Measure B. Again, I borrow from Stephen St. Croix's annotated reproduction.

Notice, if you will, among the signatories of this agitprop -- not including Mr. Weinstein, of course -- are some of the more schemier propagandists for enforcing condoms in porn. Mark McGrath, if you will remember, was the official who first came upon Derrick Burts after the latter soured on AIM, and who  basically presented his original "case" of getting infected in a gay male porn shoot to CalOSHA and the LA County Department of Public Health. Paula Tavrow is the UCLA professor whom has been the chief academic booster for the condom mandate, and whose department of Reproductive Health has been most responsible for those wonderful hearings where the likes of Shelley Lubben have been allowed free reign to bash about "Morals Clauses" and rampant HPV and HIV in porn and how young girls are being "forced" and "abused" by the "diseased" industry.

However, you may not know about the "Senator Retired" Richard Palanco. I'll just let Michael Whiteacre fill in those blanks for you (comment to this post over at Michael Fattorosi's AdultBizLaw.com blog):

As for Richard G. Polanco, in 1991, AHF opened the “Richard Polanco HIV Clinic” in Hollywood. He has authored or sponsored pro-AHF legislation throughout his political career.

Back in 2001, he was seen as the presumptive front-runner to succeed termed-out Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez, but he abruptly dropped out of the race under the shadow of scandal. 

”He plays dirty politics — the Katz race,“ says one political insider, alluding to Polanco’s sponsorship of a last-minute 1998 primary-campaign mailer slandering Assemblyman Richard Katz as anti-Latino on wholly fictional grounds. 

Polanco was heard on a tape recording saying, “I’ll spend whatever it takes to beat that Jew,” according to a source close to the Katz camp who knows Polanco and heard the tape. Roughly a week and a half after that comment was made, Polanco poured $186,000 into (now scandal-plagued) Richard Alarcon’s competing campaign, money which funded the infamous mailer.

”He’s slimy,“ says another insider, citing Polanco‘s role in hardball City Council contests in Lynwood and Commerce, involving the contracting of city-attorney posts to Polanco allies.

Polanco now has a lucrative career as a lobbyist. Earlier this year he, along with LA City Councilmembers Bill Rosendahl and Paul Koretz, spoke at AHF’s 25th anniversary ceremony.

That would be the same Bill Rosendahl and Paul Koretz who got paid with direct contributions from AHF, and who just so happen to be on the very committee who is now charged with enforcing LA's new condom mandate law. (Though, they have said that if the county-wide ordinance passes, they would alter the city law to reflect the tougher language of the county ordinance.)

But, here's where the fascination begins: Let's go to one paragraph of Weinstein's defense of AHF that speaks wonders:

It isn't fair to ask the general public to pick up the tab for irresponsibility of this industry. It isn't fair that people, and the community as a whole, are contracting infections, some of them life threatening and lifelong, in order to make a living. Pornographers should not be exempt from the basic safety rules that protect everyone else. Public health should not be sacrificed on the false claim that this is a free speech issue; this is a public health and safety issue.

Riiiiiight. Except that "pornographers" are NOT exempt from "basic safety rules that protect everyone else", since they are required to report any and all cases of infection of HIV and certain other STI's to the LACDPH. And, no one but Weinstein (and Lubben, and probably Gail Dines and other antiporn "feminists") would even have the gall to argue that STI's begin in the porn industry and then make their way to the general public, and that only condoms are the solution to contain, if not roll back, the pandemic of STI's and HIV.

After all, we don't fight against influenza, which can potentially kill far more people than HIV/AIDS ever has in real life, by mandating that all food workers wear rubber aprons, goggles, face masks, and face shields, or that anyone suffering from the common cold be forced to work with "barrier protection"..or even be forced to gulp down loads of Dayquil or Advil. And, I don't see any cries for forcing NFL players to wear ankle or knee braces to protect themselves from career-killing knee injuries, or legislation forcing said players to wear neck braces to prevent against concussions.

And BTW, Mr. Weinstein, if porn performers are to become "employees" as part of your plan to impose condoms as a condition of employment, that would mean that they would potentially become eligible for workers' comp and medical benefits....meaning that the California taxpayer actually WOULD ultimately pick up at least a bit of the tab for their activities...especially if they become infected anyway with HIV because they had no idea that their screen partner was infected because you did away with the testing regime that protected them, and then the condom by some chance broke.

In addition..the old "public safety trumps freedom of speech" card is an old tried and true canard that has been used by authoritarians everywhere since the Age of Ever to suppress and beat down those who challenge their attempts to impose their fascist rule on others. Including, I might add, gay men. When you channel the likes of Jerry Falwell and Bryan Fischer to promote your initiatives, you can't call yourself "progressive".

Oh, but that's just the appetizer...here's the paragraph that precedes that last one:

Porn producers claim that requiring condoms will be a financial hardship on their industry. However, the lifetime cost of treating an HIV infection is more than $567,000. Since these performers are not provided health insurance by porn producers, this cost is most likely to be borne by taxpayers of Los Angeles County, as health care provider of last resort. The taxpayers are subsidizing the porn business. On the other hand, 100% of all costs of the permits and inspections required by this initiative are covered by the pornographers.

No, Mr. Weinstein...requiring condoms is not the financial hardship here. Having the county force a condom mandate that would require them to produce video content that has been thoroughly rejected by the consuming public time and time again, and forcing them to pay what amounts to shakedown money to AHF for free condom placement ads, and turning performers into guniea pigs for "safer sex" at the expense of their creative autonomy and their ability to make a living?? THAT would be the hardship.

And, that $567K figure for a lifetime of treatment for HIV?? (Which Weinstein really isn't complaining about in the first place, since most of that is money in his pocket and more scare tactics and fear he can use to shame people into submission.) Using the true stats about how many straight performers (4 in the 2004 outbreak, NONE since then) have actually been infected from HIV from porn shoots, that figure would amout to a whopping.....<gasp>....$2,448,000 of taxpayer expense. In 2004. (And, in the years following to the present time. That's a whopping $306,000 per person.

Not cheap, buuuuuttttttt...

By contrast, in 2004 ALONE, according to stats from the California Dept. of Public Health, during the period from January 2004 to January 2005 there were 4,646 confirmed cases of HIV in LA County...which, if multiplied by the supposed average cost of treating one single HIV infected person quoted by Weinstein, would come out to...$2.63+ BILLION!! In Los Angeles County ALONE. For people infected with HIV IN A SINGLE YEAR....ALONE.

Yeah, that's some bit of subsidy....for AHF. For the porn industry, which has not seen even ONE single HIV infection since Darren James/Lara Roxx et. al.?? Meh. Not so much.

(BTW..I got the numbers for confirmed HIV cases by surfing the CA Dept. of Public Health statistics and subtracting the cumulative numbers of confirmed HIV infections  in LA County for the period ending January 2004 (chart here-pdf) from the cumulative numbers from January 2005 (chart here). Unlike Weinstein, I back up my numbers.)

BTW, as well...please note that I am NOT making any case against having public funding of treatment of HIV-infected people; in fact, as a single payer radical, I find it to be the moral and right thing to do. But, to use public funding of HIV treatment as a cash cow for your organization and oppose so rabidly vaccines and other alternatives of HIV/AIDS treatment, while simultaneously clucking about how "the pornographers" are using the taxpayers' dime to infect the society at large.....that is what you call real hubris. Or...just plain gall.

There is more to the Lies of the Measure B proponents, though...and that will be for my next post.

Vote NO on Measure B!!

Kayden Kross. BADASS. Fine ASS. SmartASS. (Literally.) And, All Up In Measure B's Grillz.

Today, there was an Internet social media protest action launched by former performer/current producer Stephen St. Croix, in which numerous performers, producers, and fans formed a flash mob to promote two YouTube videos he had created as part of the campaign against Measure B, the Los Angeles County proposed initative to mandate condoms for porn shoots there. Unfortunately, due to prior work commitments, BPPA wasn't able to actively participate in this action....but we wholeheartedly in spirit and in solidarity support St. Croix's efforts to inform the public on the dangers and misdirections of Measure  B. For those of you wanting to see the two video ads, here they are:

Original vids can be found here and here. 

But...if that isn't enough to convince you of the demerits of Measure B, then perhaps a testimonial from an active porn performer will do??

May I then present the powerful testimony of Kayden Kross, which was posted today to XBiz through her insider blog, The Dish. I will simply repost it in its entirity and let you read for yourself, because it says what needs to be said.

— but about Measure B

If you’re reading this you should care. If you’re reading this you should care because I am a pornstar and you are reading one of my blog pages. You’ve probably whacked it to me. If this is not the case, please change that. I’ll wait.

And I’ll assume from here forward that anyone reading has whacked it to my porn, or at least taken a quick glimpse, and not whacked it. If the non-whacking is my fault, I apologize. Beside the point though, the whacking. Please notice — in a quick mental shuffle through the Rolodex of my porn — the conspicuous absence of condoms in my scenes. They are not there. I did condom scenes in my first movie, and that turned out to suck major monkey balls. The added friction the condoms caused over the course of the shoot was ridiculous. The condoms were not a birth control measure. They were, theoretically, an STD protection. But all the performers were tested. So in my first movie I was protected from STDs that my coworkers didn’t have.

In the next movie I opted out of condoms, and have ever since. Six years I’ve been doing this with a perfect testing record. The system has worked for me.

And in that time, yes, performers have caught gonorrhea. They have caught chlamydia. When this has happened they have taken antibiotics and a week off and then returned to work, good as new. They have not caught HIV. Not a single case of HIV has been transmitted on one of our porn sets in the entire time I’ve been in this industry, and some years before that. Not one fucking case.

And yes, people in the industry have caught HIV off set, in the wild. They have been flagged by the testing procedures and removed from the pool of performers available to work. But they have not transmitted it on a porn set to other performers.

And, yes. There is the recent bad business of this syphilis scare. One of our own faked his test and continued working knowing he had it. That’s shitty. We bungled that one bad. Shitty shitty shitty. Two people caught syphilis this way. With all the bungling. They had to take antibiotics.

And the industry reformed its testing measures to better control against this happening in the future.

In the wild, on average, there are around 2,150 new cases of HIV reported in Los Angeles County each year. This is possibly because there are a lot of people having sex with a lot of other people without verifying one another’s STD status. We are not those people. We’re verified. We are card-carrying motherfuckers.

And who wants to see condoms in porn anyway? Porn is fantasy. It is fantastical with fantastically crazy situations wherein incredibly unlikely women with incredibly unlikely breasts suddenly fall to their knees over men who have their own incredibly unlikely anatomy at the slightest provocation. Never mind the lack of realism behind the perfect shaves and the matching lingerie these women all sport, bent over as they are, waggling their asses with spontaneity. Surely this really happens. Surely women just go around like that, clean-shaven and in designer lingerie, with designer breasts, twenty-four-fucking-seven, horny out of their minds. We beg you to suspend your disbelief in porn. We practically grovel for it. We push limits that would make even a puppet show retch — everything from the dialogue to the story holes to the errors in continuity that are just positively and irreverently savage. But… Measure B would have us get all real-world on your ass and strap a condom on the unlikely dicks and remind everybody sitting at home that fantasy time isn’t very fantastical at all because in the real world there is heartache and death and disease and — god forbid — pregnancy?

Fuck that.

Porn is legal because it is protected under free speech. Free speech protects expression. Measure B wants to force us to amend our free expression to include their message about safe sex.

You know about safe sex, right? Because you’re not twelve? Well just in case, here’s the long and short of it:

Sex is the biological function of procreation. As such, procreation sometimes happens. Condoms will help prevent that, as will birth control pills, spermicide, tube tying, and more extreme measures.

STDs are those diseases that are primarily transmitted via sex, although they are not limited to sexual transmission. The nature of communicable disease by definition requires it to be shared between organisms. It must be communicated — by blood or by semen, by air, by skin-to-skin contact, by snot or by spit or by tears — by something. So yeah, sex will bring a person in contact with a lot of these things. All of them, if you’re an avid deepthroater. Sex is messy and in your face. It’s arguably the only acceptable way to interact with two ends of a digestive system that isn’t your own without a medical license. But yeah, condoms will prevent some communicable diseases with 85% accuracy if you use them exactly right. Having sex with people who have been medically verified as not infected with sexually communicable diseases will also prevent this. So will abstinence. Your best bet, though, is agoraphobia.

So now you know that condoms are an option in safe sex. You are a responsible adult. You will make your choices from here.

But we are not responsible adults, obviously. Because Measure B would like to make the choice for us.

Consider this: Do you remember High School Biology? Remember the concept of Spontaneous Generation and how Louis Pasteur disproved it with the squiggly-necked flask that microbes couldn’t get through? Maybe I’m the only one who remembers this because back then I liked textbooks instead of people. But anyway he proved that things don’t spontaneously generate. They don’t just arise out of thin air. And remember that paragraph I wrote a couple of paragraphs ago? I talked about how diseases must be communicated. And remember that other paragraph, up higher, where I talked about how all performers are tested? We are tested every fifteen days now. It used to be every thirty. And I hate needles. The point is that diseases don’t arise within porn. They are brought into porn by contact with partners on the outside.

And yet porn is treated like disease starts with us and we bring it to you people.
No. Disease ends with us. Maybe we’re doing the local population a small favor. Because we, for the most part, have an open and honest line of communication about STDs. STDs don’t carry the stigma for us that the general population associates with them. We talk about it. We’re on the frontlines and it is in our economic interest to stay disease free, not to mention we’re vain about our genitalia. Most STDs are silent. That means that for the most part people don’t know they have gonorrhea or chlamydia. HIV takes a while to manifest. Stage 1 syphilis is a single painless bump. The general population only knows there is something up if there are symptoms, and even then, they don’t always do anything about it. They definitely don’t go stick a godforsaken needle in their arm every fifteen days even though needles give them that scary-sinky feeling they get on the rides at Six Flags that drop too fast. Or again, maybe that’s just me. But anyhoo, in the general population, STDs travel silently. We porn performers are the variables that light them up. If one of us contracts an STD from one of you we catch it fast and we fix it fast and most of us then go back to you (not you-you, but the hypothetical sexual diseased person I am creating for this example. You know what I mean) and you, the hypothetical carrier, are alerted and told to fix it and then you, the hypothetical carrier, stop spreading it. See what just happened there? We are the end of the line.

Imagine if that one of our number who faked his test had just gone on in the real world instead. Not only would he have never tested, but it would have spread on silently, and those people who he spread it to would have spread it, and on and on, and then eventually someone would have had the sense to go to a doctor once Stage 2 flared up on his balls like one of Moses’ plagues. But that person who went to the doctor would have been so far removed from the original source, the incubation period being what it is, and the stigma being what it is, that the person would probably would have treated it silently and gone on with life, and the others would hopefully have done the same at some point, but not before infecting more people, or maybe they would never have treated it and just gone blind and insane. That is an option. Also known as Stage 3.

You’re probably reading this at work, right? If you’re paid hourly this math will be easier, but if you’re not, break it down. How many hours of your day today will be taken from you in the form of the cash you traded them for by the government. I mean taxes, of course. And then the government, being what it is, will reallocate your money, which is a tangible manifestation of your hours of your life that you traded doing what hopefully you love, but very likely don’t love. Some of the reallocation will be nice. Roads and schools and people not holding you up with machetes and taking your lunch money on the way home from work. These are good things. But some things… some things are not good things. Some things get your money by running a propaganda-driven campaign that the government buys into and then funds (with your money).

Like what is happening with AHF (AIDS Healthcare Foundation). AHF is the force behind Measure B. They are a non-profit foundation that possibly doesn’t profit because profits are diverted to Michael Weinstein in the form of a really ridiculous salary, plus perks. A salary to the tune of $366,096.00 as reported on his 2010 income taxes, to be exact (plus additional compensation that is hard to get a figure on). AHF will benefit greatly if this Measure passes. It is in their best interest. If it were in the interest of the performers it seeks to regulate, the performers would be the ones getting behind it.

And because a lot of performers are not behind it, Measure B has decided that it will cost California $300,000 (which is, to the budget’s credit, less than Michael Weinstein’s salary) annually to enforce it. That’s California, just to be clear. You know, the broke state. The one that already needs more dollars from you as it is. So under Measure B, they’d need to find dollars to send officers to porn sets to babysit, to watch hard dicks, specifically, to make sure, the whole time, that there is a latex barrier between the one willing adult participant and the other. Someone will be paid with your money to do this.

And also, because it’s a capitalist system, as in a free market system, a lot of porn will simply cease to be produced in California under Measure B. Because the market for porn with condoms is almost no market at all. So these businesses will likely move or close down. Either way, they stop paying taxes in California. You know, that broke state. There is talk of Nevada, some other states. I thought about what I would do in Nevada. Gambling bores me and I’m asocial. Nightclubs scare me. Magicians aren’t magical. I cannot live there. I thought about it, and I thought, No, that would suck. No offense, Nevada.

And there are people like me who agree with the Nevada thing. Where do their jobs go? Those people like me are people like you. They have families. Some have kids. They’re rooted in the cities they live in. They’re not all performers. They’re caterers and lighting crews and audio technicians and editors and PAs and producers and make-up artists and directors and agents and copywriters and receptionists and on and on. That’s a lot of fucking people with a lot of fucking jobs in this state in an industry where job security is precarious as it is. Piracy. Remember that? There was a worldwide recession, you may have noticed.

But if none of this appeals to your logos or your ethos, let me appeal to your pathos. Imagine yourself whacking it. Obviously I’d like to insert a case here re: why you should whack it to my porn but you can whack it to anything, almost. It is your imagination. So you’re whacking it, see. Maybe it’s the only free five minutes you get out of this day, because your kids are screaming and they need things and your wife needs things and your boss needs things and there is always traffic and emails piled up and taxes due and smaller bills and the dog needs a check up or maybe you do or maybe your grandmother does and the news is scary and you have dry cleaning to pick up, things to mail, a million petty endless errands and maybe today you’ll get them all done but tomorrow you’re going to wake up and start it all over again, and its been going like this for years, this adult life, and you have five fucking minutes to yourself. And you just want to whack it. So you’re tucked away in the bathroom stall or behind the closed door of your office or maybe you’re in your car parked behind an alley — you’re anywhere — and you have five minutes to whack it before the real world sinks its real world teeth in and pulls you back. And you start scrolling through the available porn and everything is condoms, fucking condoms everywhere with their hospital smell and their real world reminders and the funny bunching they do. You dig deeper. You’re looking for a scene with your favorite chick, or not — doesn’t have to be a chick and doesn’t have to be your favorite, it’s your call — so you’re looking for one scene you can really enjoy in your five fucking minutes of reprieve. But you don’t find it. Your five little minutes of pure selfish happiness, your you time, is slightly diminished by this. Imagine that. The real world creeping in on that last bit of sacred space.

Vote No on Measure B. 

— This message brought to you by a girl who would like to maintain autonomy over her vagina. 

The 25-year-old, Sacramento native is among the most sought-after actresses in adult today. The winner of the 2011 XBIZ Award for Acting Performance of the Year for her role in "Body Heat" is currently exclusive with Digital Playground and has been making adult movies since 2006. She is the only starlet in porn to have had exclusive contracts with Vivid Entertainment, Adam & Eve Pictures and now Digital Playground.

An itenerary of posts opposed to Measure B can be found over at Julie Meadows/Lydia Lee's blog here. Also, check out Steven St. Croix's powerful personal testimonial against Measure B here.