This just in: Pimps are greedy, vicious, criminal motherfuckers who make their pay through the exploitation, abuse, torture, and outright enslavement of women. Well, duh.

Fortunately, after a major bust and the seizing of a revolting tape apparently used to help train young girls being brought into prostitution, federal charges have been brought against a ring of 14 pimps in Atlanta. Better yet, they are not just going after them with charges of pimping (a misdemeanor in Georgia); they are slamming them with RICO charges.

Of course, the usual dynamics of It’s not our problem, it’s theirs are going on, as the article totally fails to account for how our political economy drives girls and women into grinding poverty, how our epidemic of child rape provides an easy source of psychologically tormented and economically desperate young girls for pimps to prey on, how our pop culture glorifies pimps, how we either ignore or demonize women caught in the system of prostitution, how perfectly ordinary men continue to pay the pimps to sustain the industry of prostitution, and so on ad nauseam. The only time any recognition of our wide-scale cultural responsibility for these kinds of horrendous crimes is allowed to creep in, is when it is in the mouth of the defendant for the pimps: All you have to do today is turn on MTV, turn on any radio station that plays music, and half the songs you hear are about being a pimp. It’s just a part of the culture. True. Too bad that nobody will listen to this person, since he’s already been discredited by defending the pimps.

The Hear Hear! award for the article goes to Detective Glass, who closes it: Let me tell you what pimping is. Pimping is slavery.

David Greenberg’s Riot Act - The last century’s racial disturbances have a common cause: police brutality [Slate.com] provides a good discussion of the past century of riots by black citizens and its links to the white supremacist corruption of the police department and justice system. On the other hand, it has a lingering problem: it attempts to cast all race riots as black people rioting and attacking white people. This neglects the truly vicious white supremacist assaults on blacks in towns such as Tulsa and St. Louis. The article even tries to lump the 1919 Chicago white supremacist riot as a black-initiated race riot similar to Watts, L.A., or Cincinatti.

Yes, I know the article is an attempt to show how the rioters were provoked by massive police brutality and that oppressive police treatment of blacks has got to stop if we want to end the violence. But it has a subtle effect in reinforcing a few dangerous premises. It reinforces the conviction that racial problems mean black problems, and don’t have anything to do with the active brutality of whites. And similarly, it makes it seem as though racial violence is something that blacks initiate, even if we see that initiation as justified. In the vicious race riots of the early 20th century, that simply was not the case. All of this leads to a continuing view of blacks as a problem to be solved, as the (Greenberg’s words) the violent and the lawless element of a race riot.; What about the white thugs in Tulsa who dropped dynamite on black ghettoes from airplanes? What about the white St. Louis rioters who raped and tortured black women and men by the thousands? Blacks are not the only racial troublemakersof the twentieth century.