Tim Barrus: Greece is a Done Deal and Americans Are not Getting It

THE SMASH STREET BOYS FESTIVAL wishes to thank everyone for sharing their professionalism.

Poetry (from the Greek 'poiesis'/ποίησις [poieo/ποιέω], a making: a forming, creating, or the art of poetry, or a poem) is a form of art in which language may occur in conjunction with other arts; often to suggest differential interpretation to words in lieu of its’ apparent meaning.

Tim Barrus: A couple of our students — Smash Street Boys — were Greek.

The artists had to return to Greece after we lost our funding. Coming back to a country that has lost its funding as well. The new definition of austerity means the little people (the ones who have lost their pensions and their jobs) have to tighten their belts, and eat shit. If you are elderly, do not expect any of that pension you earned because the bankers took it. If you are young, forget about that class you were going to take on computers. It no longer exists, and either do the computers (the school sold them). Today, organized crime is making a come-back in Greece. As are the drug gangs. What goes around comes around. You won’t see any rich people tightening their belts or worrying about their pensions. The two (hiv positive) Smash Street Boys who returned to Greece, also returned to sex work. Sex work is dangerous. It is also inherently connected to human trafficking and the drug trade. I am now of the unshakeable opinion that with the world’s economic crisis, the United Nation’s figures on HIV no longer apply. Those numbers were collected and estimated at another time in history. The reality today is that in many places on the planet, the UN will have to revise its figures (or not — it depends on how relevant the UN wants to be). How does an economic crisis affect the spread of HIV. Are you stupid. Get a fucking clue. Addiction numbers will also be affected. Organized crime will flourish. Is flourishing. As addiction figures go, HIV figures go with them. Any of the WHO statistics are no longer applicable because support systems were fragile in a good year. Expect addiction to rise. Expect HIV to rise as well. The small hotel I used to stay in in Athens, nothing fancy, is located on a small side-street that has an alley. Today, the unemployed men just hang out there. Buying and selling heroin. The opiate route used to be from Afghanistan around to Russia, and then through to Western Europe. That, too, is changing, and the more direct routes through Turkey to France are being reestablished. All of these things have a dramatic impact on cultures. Could the bankers please let me know when they think the people of Greece have been punished enough for their evil sins. European and American futures markets are very nervous about whether or not Greece will stay in the Eurozone. The futures markets are insane. There is no way in fuck and hell that the Greek people are going to say to the economic system as it is set up today that they desire to be the fall-guy in a systematic failure where they have been charged with greed when, in fact, they are fully cognizant that the charge of greed as its rests with them is highly ironic and inappropriate. The two Smash Street Boys who once lived and studied with us have disappeared.

The charge of greed has to be put at the feet of the International commercial banks. The have raped, robbed, and reduced the people of Greece to economic ruin and social chaos. America’s “Occupy” movement will be summarily coopted anyway, and even as it stood, it had little awareness of how people in the rest of the world were affected by the banking crisis that “Occupy” saw as being endemic. It is far, far more endemic than “Occupy” could even imagine.

Tim Barrus: Greece is a Done Deal and Americans Are not Getting It

Take one look at this photograph. This photograph of protestors tells me everything I need to know.

For anyone in this part of the world to be using the terms NAZI or NEONAZI portends a coming economic crisis the likes of which Americans in their protective “stupid-cocoons” haven’t seen in two generations. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime. I am standing in the middle of a cool, dark night, and I hear a train in the distance, and I am thinking: I will be here when this train arrives.

This is a bad, bad thing.

1.) Why isn’t American journalism reporting on the depth of this problem. How IGNORANT is American journalism. The networks don’t even have Greek bureaus. Americans won’t even know what hit them. Americans do not understand how it works. After it hits us, and the big banks start crashing, Journalism is going to try to back-peddle. All the New York Times financial folks will explain in very serious face what went on.

As opposed to what is going on.

When I worked at the Federal Reserve, this was what we existed to prevent.

But the rules have changed. Europe has about a week to turn it around, and there is only one country that can do that, and Germany is seriously balking.

I understand the Greeks. I get it. The Greeks want their lives and their country back. The political aparatus and the economic apparatus are going into clash mode.

The new Greek government is going to ditch the Euro.

They are already blaming the Germans. Blaming the Germans runs deep in Greece. They remember.

This part of the world is a powder keg on a good day.

No American journalist is writing this story.

Spain will be next. Then, Portugal. Then Italy.

I predict bad events as the mid-east becomes unstable. The signs in this are not good signs.

2.) This will be not just the end of a currency. Currencies are only tools that facilitate unions. This is the end of the European Union.

Americans think they are immune. I do wonder if they are even taught history. It’s happening again, folks. You are not immune. What you are is ignorant. Your institutions are failing you right and left.

This is where your educations should be kicking on.

This is where your journalists should be kicking in.

But here’s the Big Mama: Your financial system should have worked. It didn’t. It has been utterly undermined by the biggest systemic failure of capitolism: greed.

The greed you have tolerated in order to facilitate your personal versions of the American dream is causing the whole system to collapse.

The EU is imploding at the same time big American banks are reporting gambling losses in the billions. You did NOT reform the system. You did NOT build firewalls that will hold. What you did was more of the same. The latest round of recession was not severe enough to scare you. Be scared. Be very, very scared. Because it’s going to come home to roost where it began. In America. And Americans are going to sit there on their asses, scratching their heads, and they will be totally clueless as to what hit them.

And here’s another kicker.

You are probably going to elect someone who represents the PROBLEM. Not the SOLUTION. Remember, the problem and the solution are NOT the same.

I’ve been dealing with European parents for a while now. In the past they have paid me to help educate their sons. Which is a simplistic way to put it, but there it is.

Some of those people are bankers. They’re sitting in their offices and they’re scared. From their perspective, the Euro is failing in a crisis of confidence. To them, it means a run on their banks, and no one but one country has the cash.

This is the long hour before the storm hits, but the storm may be so tightly formed, no one can unravel it.

Germany needs to be reminded. They won’t like being reminded. Too fucking bad. It’s coming their way, too.

Germany only HAS a government and a culture in the first fucking place BECAUSE the rest of the world PAID for it. Germany OWES us. You will not find it in a balance sheet or a Google Doc or a power point presentation. You will find it in the new Greek government. They are going to throw austerity out the door. By the end of this year, inflation will have eaten away at the value of the drachma, and Greeks will be hefting wheelbarrows of cash to pay for things like milk. Those signs — anywhere in that part of Europe or even the mid-east — say everything.

The drachma will last one trading day. The system, anywhere you look, doesn’t have the cash to pay for a run, and the big banks will be at the head of the line. They are going to FAIL and the bankers know it.

The bankers are feeling impotent toward having any influence at all with the people of Greece. And they should. The system they loved to LOOT has been looted. No one has the money to make good on what they owe. The big banks, especially the big European banks, will fail first.

You can sit on your fat American butts and think it doesn’t mean you. Buba, it means you.

There probably isn’t enough time now for even Germany to move quickly enough. The time dynamic is relevant because the computer moves the money easily and quickly. But the human beings with the passwords do not.

Germany bears a responsibility in this. They have a direct bearing on everything the central European banks do.

My take is that Germany doesn’t have the will.

I hate going there. Because the people are so big. I feel so small there. I feel like I am this tiny person surrounded by the Big People (the serious adults) on their serious way to work, work, work.

Germany is going to protect Germany. For that to happen, again, in anyone’s lifetime who is still alive, portends a doom that means the bread doesn’t get baked, the bills don’t get paid, gasoline inflates to awesome levels, your local Wal-Mart will not have either milk or medication.

3.) People will look to China (forget Germany, it’s a done deal). I have been to China. CHINA IS A BUBBLE.

The gap between the rich and the poor in China is going to burst the bubble. Journalism is showing you the shiny hotels of Shanghai. What they are not showing you is just west (and I mean two blocks west) of the downtown hotel district.

Old Shanghai. Miles and miles and miles of poverty. You can put a coat of make-up on an old whore, but she’s still old, and she’s still a whore.

There is a long, long history of it. The Chinese can forget about drinking champagne. They will not have milk.

4.) There are some very nervous people out there. Today, most of them will be in France. The French investors in Greek corporations are in for billions in default. The French have poured more money into Greece than any other country. The Germans only pour money into Greece when they have to, and they do it kicking and screaming, and they do not kick in the full kick. The Greek bailout is a joke. It’s ten cents on the dollar. If France fails, we are in for the ride of our lives. My advice is to plant a garden.

5.) Your economic system doesn’t work. The few people who it works for do not matter. What matters is that confidence remain high. Confidence may be gone.

You economic system, and your cultural “dream” of ladders and hierarchy lends itself to greed. Greed is not confidence. One is the problem, and the other is the solution.

To see the word NAZI on a protest sign is more story and indicator than Americans in their cocoons want to know. That word is not used promiscuously.

It’s too late.

You had your chance to reign the big commercial banks in. You didn’t do it. You sat on your fat, comfortable asses, and you clung greedily to your dream. Now, you are going to elect a Ken doll who was a venture capitolist. Electing Herbert Hoover is so stupid as to be breath-taking. You need a government to STEP IN and spend money because there is not enough money in the system to keep the thing afloat. Your dream and your systems have failed you just like your institutions are failing you — journalism is failing you, not informing you. 

This is like giving the aristocracy EXACTLY what they are given (a piggy bank and a hammer) every single time in history they have started a war.

Aristocracies wage war against other aristocracies. Who do you think the royal family in Europe is related to. The last time it happened, it was the Germans against the French.

America was not immune. America got seriously involved. Haven’t you learned anything from all the old European wars?

6.) History will want a fall guy. There is only one fall guy, and metaphorically he lives and works and breathes Wall Street.

The big banks are actually in mid-town but the metaphor of Wall Street holds.

The fall-guy is American. Which doesn’t mean that technically he’s an American. It just means that he works for one of the Big American Banks. Today, the bankers are going to start to shit.

And today, the fall-guy will be watching the markets on a minute to minute basis. He will be watching Greece. He knows Germany is not going to pony up.

He will be making phone calls to France.

He will have a one word vocabulary. Sell.

The real problem on a huge scale is that your dream, your American dream, has failed you. It never had the infrastructure built into it to support anything more substantial than an illusion it cannot sustain.

Because it isn’t real.

SHOW ME YOUR LIFE, Takis (Greece)

We’ve only known for two days, now.

The doctors examine him, handle him.  It hurts. It is humiliating. It is painful.  He is a boy.

He uses sign language.

My experience is that deaf people are not the only people who use their hands to communicate. I have worked with children with autism who use sign, too. This is nothing unique to me. Communicating with a kid in sign. It’s ordinary. This boy used to be able to hear; so he does have some deaf speech. He is Greek. We stick with sign.
 

Ελληνική Νοηματική Γλώσσα.

It’s almost like our secret language.
 

A trick beat him up with some kind of club. The exact kind of club has never been established.

Every now and then, a trick will turn violent. Ever since HIV, lots and lots and lots of tricks have turned violent. How can you tell the ones who might turn violent. You can’t. You can run them through a filter but repeat tricks know all the tricks to the prostitution trade. And most fourteen-year-olds don’t know shit regardless of how sophisticated they want you to believe they are.

This Boy has heard and seen it all. Every time I attempt to build his self-concept up, there’s something or someone out there willing, ready, and available to chop my legs off at the knee.

There’s a funny thing to this kid, too. You can never let his silence imply he has nothing to say.

He’s sitting on his hands and looking at the floor.

What does it mean.

It means he’s contemplating to what extent he will be shutting down. I happen to know this language backwards, forwards, sideways, and through the woods in the middle of the night.

“Don’t shut down on me,” I sign.

“It’s not happening to you. It’s happening to me.”

“YOU are happening to me,” I sign. On that last one I just make a fist and hit my chest a little bit too hard.

He rolls his eyes.

There are no simple stories. Anymore than there are simple people who can be divided up into simple parts.

The two of us no longer journey to islands where we can keep the dark away. We divide the light that comes to us when it comes to us. Here, have some of mine.

 

the night was desert dry and moody as his lion’s lips upon my neck; i could feel him breathing, purring, breathing/

i was taking him to delos where we would spend the night among the lions guarding apollo there/

this is forbidden/

to see the slender cracks between nights and days/

death so wide it shuddered/

to know the ruins and the music in an empty room you spend the night there visible but forever out of the demon’s reach/

the magical dogs running moonlight flash against the darkened blaze of land/

apollo calling our names wrought in suffocation matters to the end/

there are twelve people who live on delos/

we were careful to avoid them/

avoiding the ghosts was a different story/

we were the owners of pain’s abyss/

takis with his emphasis on dying/

melanoma on the underside of his cock/

just below the moist cock’s head down about an inch from the piss hole/

we did not know that then but it had to have been growing, brown cancer spreading to his lymph glands/

you have to peel the foreskin back to see it, and you can really only see it when he’s erect/

We’ve only known for two days, now.

Death’s privilege. They used to sell up to ten thousand slaves a day on Delos. He had enjoyed our small if forbidden adventure to know Delos in the dark. “So how are we getting back,” he signed.

Everyone who has talked to us has cautioned us to not be hopeful.

The morning sun of Delos was in our face. I pointed to our too small boat. “We’ll just turn the wind around.”

 

There are well-kept statistics accumulated by organizations such as the United Nations (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and the additional Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons),  the International Child Sexual Exploitation Image database, and Interpol have lead to greater public awareness of the extent to which the traffic in human beings exists. 

Most of the statistical emphasis has been on females since a majority of the people trafficked are, indeed, female. Numbers are ascertained for females trafficked for sexual exploitation and for labor. Child labor is also tracked. But there are no numbers kept (because there are no numbers collected) as to the traffic of males; especially boys who are trafficked for prostitution. The number of boys trafficked to the U.A.E alone is estimated to be in the tens of thousands. The operant word is estimated. When local law enforcement officials participate in the prosecution of traffickers, more accurate data is en-massed. Many Asian countries are culturally reluctant to participate in data collection because there are cultural prohibitions against recognizing young males within a sexual and social context. 

The African Union is currently attempting to enforce African laws as they regard human being on ships and their access to ships.  There have been, however, no known maritime boarding and seizure law enforcement efforts targeting sexually trafficked children.  If you take the estimated annual number of twelve million people being trafficked, and extrapolate even ten percent (as opposed to an over-inflated fifty) as being male you have one to two million males. Even if you cut that in half, you still have 500,000 to 750,000 males in transit. Even if three-quarters of those are being trafficked for slave labor, you are left with numbers approaching 150,000 boys a year being trafficked for sex. If you take that number and apply a low estimation of HIV Third World infection rate at between fifteen to twenty percent, you arrive at figures between twenty to thirty thousand boys being trafficked who are infected with HIV. 

The African Union’s enforcement paradigm employs the use of ports: both coming and going to and from African locations. So far, no one has been arrested or prosecuted for trafficking boys for sexual exploitation. What is needed is a transnational task force imbued with the powers of arrest whose reach transcends borders. Any such law enforcement entity created to stem the tide in human trafficking should be educated as to how to address HIV/AIDS issues at the immediate point and place of arrest. Within this organization, safe houses need to be established for HIV positive children to live in a safe place that treats their HIV at the same time it provides a safe and confidential shelter from organized crime, parents, and government officials who have colluded with traffickers. Children who will testify against any of these people must be protected and their HIV must be vigorously treated with medical models constructed by the United Nations and the World Health Organization as to accepted treatments.

 

INTERPOL 2012.

Most law enforcement agencies working with child sexual abuse material believe it is time to stop the use of the misleading term “child pornography” when describing images of sexual abuse of children.

Child abuse is not pornography

A sexual image of a child is “abuse” or “exploitation” and should never be described as “pornography”.

Pornography is a term used for adults engaging in consensual sexual acts distributed (mostly) legally to the general public for their sexual pleasure. Child abuse images are not. They involve children who cannot and would not consent and who are victims of a crime.

Serious crime, serious definition

The terms "kiddy porn" and "child porn" are used by criminals and should not be legitimate language used by law enforcement, judiciary, the public or media.

Legislation in some countries, or even the departments dealing with child sexual abuse within the police, may use terms like "child pornography", making the term difficult to avoid. Such definitions and names reflect an era where the impact of sexual abuse was not fully understood. It is slowly changing as legislation is revised and the victims are given better protection and rights. The law enforcement community should contribute to this change by being precise in its terminology.

Children who have been sexually abused and photographed deserve to be protected and respected and not have the seriousness of their abuse trivialized by the term "porn".

Recommended terminology

Precise definitions are essential. More accurate definitions of such material are: "Documented child sexual abuse"; "Child sexual abuse material"; "Child sexual exploitive material"; "Depicted child sexual abuse"; "Child abuse images"; and the abbreviations "CAM", "CEM" "CAI".

***

Given this suggestion by INTERPOL perhaps the CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD should consider revising their categorizations and terminologies. Although the expense that would be incurred in such an exercise would, in our opinion, be best spent securing safe spaces, appropriate and consistent healthcare, and programs that provide powerful therapy and skills that best serve the interests of a child (under 18 year old) who has been subjected to sexualized violence and human rights violations.

Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). OPTIONAL PROTOCOL: Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography (2000). (Today 57 UN Member Countries have NOT yet ratified this significant set of ideas to protect our communities' children).

• Article 1: States Parties shall prohibit the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography as provided for by the present Protocol.

2012: United States of America: Although the USA has not yet ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, they have ratified the Convention's optional protocol: Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. The USA are THEREBY responsible for ensuring their judicial and healthcare systems serve the best interests of each sexually violated child and sexually violated child infected with HIV surviving within their territories. Today the USA is currently discussing how best to implement a coordinated and Federal Response. It should be noted here... It is not easy for a child to survive in abusive adult environments, whilst responsible adults discuss, lobby and debate what to do and how to do it. Even what to call the sexualized violence.