I love the petty-level ethics discussions swirling around the DC Madam scandal. Maybe we should call them "pathe-ethical."
I've heard many talk show hosts pose their main worry: "What if the DC Madam names a man who's innocent, who just dialed the wrong number for a pizza?"
Pepperoni with onions never came so dear.
When you think of the triple-layers of mendacity that Bush officials have used— the war profiteer cover-ups, the privacy violations, racketeering the entire Federal branch*— how does anyone have a blush left on their cheeks to look askance at a working madam who's mounting a straightforward criminal defense?
I, for one, am thrilled that Ambassador Randall Tobias was exposed as one of Madam's customers, and shamed out of office.
This guy has an ethics problem like a brick in the head. As United States Director of Foreign Assistance, and Admin of the Agency for International Development (USAID), Tobias went around the world preaching abstinence and monogamy. He denied aid to countries who provided condoms, birth control education, or outreach and health care to prostitutes. He led a Fundie Crusade with the USAID purse-strings wrapped around his nuts.
In comments to ABC News after the release of his terse resignation letter, Tobias, who is married, said that he liked "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." He insisted the massages were not sexual.
But the State Department's call for abolition of prostitution is an absolutist moral declaration, which, in principle at least, Tobias appears to have violated.
Tobias spearheaded efforts to prevent AIDS primarily through faith-based values programs that seek to delay first sexual experiences in teenagers, encourage sexual abstinence except for married couples, and encourage faithfulness within marriage...
Last year, Tobias was elevated to the position of deputy secretary of State in a move that consolidated all U.S. foreign aid programs under a single "strategic framework."That framework, defined in the administration's fiscal year 2008 budget request to Congress, requires that poor nations receive American largesse based not on need but on their strategic value for the U.S.
You don't have to look too closely to see that sexual morality plays a role. For 2008, the administration is asking for $70 million less in international family planning funding than it did for 2007. Aid for family planning - which may include abortion services and sex education - has been cut every year since President Bush took office.
Laurie Garrett, LA Times
Why do so few people want to talk about the disgrace known as Bush's Foreign Aid Policy, and would rather fret that some wonk in DC ordered the wrong anchovy?
The Ambassador sure didn't have any personal budget problems. He was regularly ordering special services from "Miz Julia's" escort agency, although he allowed, as only a man of conceit would, that he sometimes "used Central American gals," too.
Sure, I have my own little curiosities about this mess. For one, I thought Madam's prices were awfully low. $275 for ninety minutes? That's an afternoon bar tab for these guys. Plus, if you were able to get a guy off in ten minutes, did you really have to sit there and play Canasta for another seventy?
Finally, what kind of client was Randall Tobias, anyway? —Were his peers surprised?
I found answers from a couple of our dear readers here, and Miz Julia's own records.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey was an experienced madam who used this pseudonym, "Miz Julia, of Pamela Martin Services" for her DC escort service. She ran the whole operation from phone lines in Vallejo, a working class suburb in San Francisco.
Deborah is an outrageous woman who loves to write and editorialize. One of her favorite parts of her business was to publish newsletters for her escorts, advising them how to act, dress, and avoid The Man. Her radical feminist rants are my favorite:
The misogynists get a real kick out of surprising (shocking) you girls, whenever you give them the opportunity!! Often, this is simply done. The motherfuckers bust through an "unbolted" (left unbolted by you) door, with video cameras in hand, while you, the escort, are in various stages of undress. Therefore, you are to lock, double lock, triple lock all doors!! Figure it out, before they "get cha"!
If only Karl Rove was as indiscreet.
Some people wonder how Tobias's protests that he did not have "sex," could possibly save his reputation.
He and "the gals" may know something we don't. They're all aware that prostitution is defined, in criminal terms, as something penetrative: oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse. It's oriented toward a penis going into SOMETHING of someone else's.
If Tobias wanted domination, if he had a fetish, if he wanted to beat off while he got a show; he'd be inside the law. No wait!— Maybe he wanted a woman to dress up like Condi in spike heels and spank him while jeering at his manhood.
As Laurie Garret wrote, "Designing foreign policy to stamp out sexual activity among consenting adults is a fool's errand and a waste of taxpayers' money."
After all that money, all we know is that Tobias never gave a fig about the agenda he was selling.
I was fortunate to get an interview with one of Tobias's staff in the US AID international offices, who we'll call "Sore Throat." The last sixteen months under Tobias, he said, "was like working for a fascist regime."
...My colleagues and I formed an underground cell of resistance, where we talked about the mismanagement of our Agency and shared our letters to our Congressmen. There was no tolerance of open dissent, different opinion, or criticism... so we passed around little barbs and stupid Tobias quotes, and hoped that it would all be over soon.
But we had no idea that he was such a naughty boy, and that his reign would end so suddenly. We heard weeks ago that Tobias would likely leave to take on a governor position in Indiana or else replace Wolfowitz at the World Bank. At this point, it looks like he won't do anything of the sort now that his name is so discredited.
...First time I saw Tobias in person was in Baghdad. He came to speak to the USAID folks there, just a drive-by. Spirits were already low at the mission, but in ten minutes he managed to torpedo morale significantly.
Someone asked how they were supposed to get by with such emaciated aid budgets for Iraq, which had forced the mission to close down our health, education, and infrastructure programs for Iraq.
Tobias answered that, in fact, there's no budget crunch, and we should be tightening our belts further. No one dared disagree. Then he went on to tell us that "all the expertise and local knowledge is in our field offices, which is why we in Washington are going to set our aid strategy." In other words, he deliberately took the people who knew best out of the decision loop.
Then again, in Cairo, he said the same stuff. This time, he didn't even bother to check in with his USAID staff or visit our office, even though he was the head of our Agency and was in town for a week! —Never even dropped by to see the two hundred people who work for him in Cairo. Amazing. It was around that period that I first heard him say, "USAID is trying to do too much for too many people. We're spread too thin. We're a mile wide and an inch deep."Well, now we can guess what was an inch deep... just ask his Central American gals! Funny, though, when he testified before Congress on several occasions in the past two months, he kept saying, "I don't know" whenever they asked specifically what he was going to do that's different from the way we've done aid for decades. He also couldn't answer when they asked why he's cutting aid to key countries like India, Russia, Nepal.
Basically, he was in over his head.
Some of us have been trying to understand what was going on with those escorts. One thought was that he may have been telling the truth about the "no sex" part.
He was a tyrant in his business life, so we speculated that he needed some young smart ladies to put him in his place in his personal life. We could easily imagine that he was into spanking, being forced into submissive stuff.
That would be embarrassing enough that he'd rather resign than have the story come out— but he could honestly say he didn't have "sex." Well, it's just our best guess, knowing him from personal contact and observing him as a leader accused by Congress of 'tycoon-itis' just last month.
I have no notion of what it's like to work in a Foreign Aid office, other than what I've seen in Hollywood movies. I asked "Sore Throat" to give me some perspective... what would a decent high-level official do when visiting his staff overseas?
Ha! Thanks for asking!
Ambassador Tobias' policy was not to meet with anyone below rank of Ambassador or Minister (equivalent to our Secretary). This is why he didn't want to meet with local heads of aid offices (we call them Mission Directors), since they're not high enough rank. Needless to say, he didn't meet with their staff. He was arrogant, out of touch, as you say... and this is not that unusual for high-level political appointees.
But I can happily tell you by comparison that other leaders are not like this. Our acting administrator is Jim Kunder. He's a political appointee, which means a friend of the White House. I've worked a bit with him and others in his group. Kent Hill, the Assistant Administrator for the Bureau for Global Health is another example— a high-level, conservative religious guy who was appointed by our President.
In their cases, I expected to dislike them, since I disagreed with their politics and the high moral ground clichés —"We know what's right, and we're going to tell you and make the world live by our rules."
But these gentlemen have been excellent leaders, and even people who don't agree with their politics respect them.
Jim Kunder told a group of USAID officers in Hungary about three years ago that he was a former Marine who served in Vietnam. Because of that, he told them, he's "un-insult-able." No matter what criticism you have to tell him, he wants to hear it; he's heard worse.
Following that speech, he's not disappointed us. When Jim goes out to USAID missions, he visits our projects in the field, talks with our staff and our host country counterparts, learns about the program... that's how it should be.
Kent Hill is from a similar mold, although he's a PhD scholar and very thoughtful. He told the same group in Budapest that he wants us to find moral leaders in the culture that we're working with.
I found that this surprising, coming from a hardcore former head of a Christian college. Similarly, when Kent Hill went out to a country, he spent a lot of time meeting with staff, visiting projects, getting to meet local religious leaders... he is an impressive guy, and is still another high level official in USAID.
This gets at the core problem with the current administration. Their mistakes have resulted from failure to listen to diverse perspectives, failure to allow debate and competition of ideas. Instead, the top leaders have barricaded themselves and forced bad ideas down to lower levels to implement. It was true for Tobias, and also for all the other guys higher up. They kept denying the real world ("there's no civil war in Iraq") when the lower-level people knew the truth; but the real world has a way of catching up to us.
Make no mistake about it: we are fighting a war. I don't know if it's right to say it is a war on terror, or a war between liberalism and fundamentalism, a war against poverty and disease (that's our battle in my field), or between Western and Islamic paths... but there's a war out here. Not only in the Middle East, but mainly here.
In a war, the top brass who go out to the front lines are usually serving two main purposes: they want to ground-truth their own view of the war, and learn what they can from the grunt's perspective. They want to motivate and inspire troops. —Only two things, shouldn't be too hard. But if the leader fails to look and listen during the visit, and fails to speak in a sincere and motivational way... then s/he is not serving as a good wartime leader.
It's one thing to have incompetent bureaucrats during peacetime, they only waste our time and taxpayers' money. During wartime, incompetent leaders cost thousands or even millions of lives. We are fighting a worldwide war on HIV/AIDS, for instance; how many people may have died as a result of our administration's insistence that abstinence (not condoms) is the way to prevent transmission? Science has debunked that approach...
Thank you, Sore Throat... talk about straight from the trenches.
It's impossible to think about this war, AIDS, or any global dilemma without seeing lots of zeros... the number of deaths, the number of dollars. It really does put the DC Madam's income in perspective. I'm sure the DC cops have already spent more money on her prosecution than she made this past year.
Being the Madam, she couldn't make tips for "extra" services. She relied on her booking commissions, so she's making about $150 for those 90-minute calls. Her newsletter spelled out what she expected from her girls:
We, here at Pamela Martin, try very hard to do things a step or two above that of our competitors. We want the client to always enjoy his appointment and to never feel rushed!
Often, an hour is not quite enough time, but an hour and a half is for completing enjoyment. Nonetheless, in the course of implementing this 90 minute policy. Management. has discovered that certain clients and even certain escorts for that matter, tend to interpret this 90 minute time frame "rather literally."
It needs to be clarified once and for all, that the client is paying for the "activity" conducted within the one-and-a-half hour period— not for the ninety minutes itself! If there is a problem, refer the client to Julia. Again, 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes is reasonable. Let's not see any 20 to 30 minute stuff, OK?
Okay! But I'm going to bring a pack of cards just in case!
I asked my friend and retired call girl, "Oakland Peach," if she could weigh in on the going rate, and my assumption that tips are where you really make an "appointment" memorable!
Yeah, Palfrey's price sheet does seem cheap, but in all honesty, the market doesn't think much of pussy.
Madams RARELY work the very high end— and, besides, rich guys don't always play in the high end.
It was really the L.A. girls with their coke-dealing madams in the early 90's that got the rates jacked up, and then the Internet created the independent scene.
I was in the first wave of that, which is why my rates got so high. It was pure experimentation. Those high rates were unheard of before, and are still somewhat unusual. The big money independent girls with websites is a mostly California phenom.
The only other big money stuff, with the Arabs, is out of the modeling agencies and super, super, discreet. Those people never get caught because it's not really run like a business, and it's mostly out of Europe.
The real money is made in the mid-range— hourly fee: 150-300. That's what it sounds like Miz Julia was doing. It's your standard big-city escort service, with what I imagine are unwritten "menu options" once you get private with a girl.
I worked for a local circuit madam when I was 23. $200/hour, 60/40 split, no upsales allowed. She had an "in" at the Republican Party gatherings they used to have up at the Bohemian Grove, so her guys were lots of big-money rightwingers.
I worked one day a week, never saw fewer than five. It was usually six or seven and that's just because I cried "uncle"— plus, I was chubby and older (!) and therefore a difficult sell. I met very pretty girls there who would see nine or ten a day for a week, and travel city to city. There were usually two gals at her house per day. So you do the math. She was making a lot more than 150K per year, I'll tell you that much. [150K per annum is what Palfrey is claiming]. Some of her best clients were spending almost half that a year on their habit.
"So why did you finally go out on your own?" I asked.
I was really more of an opportunist than an innovator. And evidently a hell of a lay, but ahhhh, those were the days. Now I am an earnest sensual masseuse with inviolable boundaries and a much more stable love life. But as you quoted Tracy Quan saying, right on your blog, "I came about my prudishness honestly." Honey, ain't that the truth!
*Frank Rich reported this weekend:
"By my rough, conservative calculation— feel free to add— there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development.
I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006.
—Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout.
I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously— an all-time record."
Superpower tshirt/poster from WhiteHouse.org. Check out Tracy Quan, on this podcast, for a insight on a sex worker's legal prerogatives in this situation!And yes, that is the panel from the old "To Tell The Truth" TV show. I just loved that program!
