Walmart prostitutes now on sale in Amsterdam

The recession is hurting Amsterdam's prostitutes so badly that they have been forced to cut rates...... they are turning into mini Wal-Marts. You see.....this recession is not all bad. The law of unintended consequences strikes again!

Prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red-light district are complaining that the World Economic Downturn is so bad that many hookers are discounting their services just to make ends meet, which makes it harder for all the other girls to make a living:
“Some of the girls are now doing it for 30 euros. My price is still 50 euros, but the men are playing us off against each other. Some want to pay only 20 euros,” she said.

Twenty-six-year-old Oxana, who shares Eva’s window, says her income has halved in six months while her window rent went up 25 percent in January.
On a “good day” she sees six clients but sometimes only one — at 50 euros per visitor not enough to cover her half of the 150 euro daily rent.
“But I can’t do it for 20 or 30 euros like some of the others. That is not money.”

The official airline of Gay Pride Day....Northwest Airlines is now serving penis

The flights to Amsterdam will be increasing

Dutch plan to shift coffeeshops worries Belgium

The marijuana equivalent of out-of-town shopping malls would serve the 1.5 to 2 million people who pour into the MAASTRICHT each year in search of a powerful puff.

Most buyers come at the weekends but even on a weekday morning, there are Belgian cars clustered around coffeeshops. "Slow Motion", near the station, is anything but, with a stream of customers in and out within minutes.

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The prostitution "crackdown" in Amsterdam

Amsterdam said it would close nearly one-third of the 350 windows that prostitutes use in the city's notorious Red Light District, invoking a 2003 law that allows it to revoke the licenses of brothels when it suspects that they are being used for money laundering or other illegal financial activities. ''We're not knights on a morality crusade, and this is intended to target financial crime, not prostitution per se,'' the city spokesman, Martien Maten, told The Associated Press. The Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000, but even before then, the Red Light District was tolerated and had become a tourist attraction.

Read this for a public choice interpretation, and here are some real Dutch facts. The real point is real estate. The red light district is in the oldest, most beautiful area of Amsterdam. In the last 20 years, it has changed from a mixed neighborhood to one almost exclusively peopled by the very well to do. They pay a fortune for those apartments and homes. The talk of cleaning up the neighborhood for the sake of the prostitutes and to lessen criminal behavior is simply a smokescreen. What they wish to do is to create a more up-scale neighborhood - it is gentrification pure and simple.
What is offensive in all this is that anyone who bought a home in that area knew what they were getting into - large crowds every night and all night long. It is to lessen this that the district is being “shrunk”. Less windows for the prostitutes - a more compact area for the tourists - less annoyance for the wealthy.
Prostitutes play the same role as gays and artists elsewhere? They move into a run down area, build it up, and along come the yuppies. It is not about anything more than that.

More Car-B-Ques in Brussels

But Freddy says Brussels can't have a 9/11 peaceful demonstration.
Heavy rioting erupted in Turkish quarters of Brussels Wednesday. Buses and trams were attacked. Several cars were torched and shops destroyed. Police forces were unable to restore law and order in the boroughs of Sint-Joost-ten-Node and Schaarbeek where since last Sunday the animosity among Turks is running high. Turkish flags are omnipresent. In some streets the Turkish crescent and star adorns almost every house.
Wednesday in Freddy Thielemans pro-Islamist Brussels, violence erupted in the evening, with Turks attacking buses, cars, trains and shops. In a re-run of Ottoman bigotry, on Sunday night in the district of Sint-Joost, a bar owned by Armenian Peter Petrossian was attacked. On Monday, a cafe belonging to an Iraqi Kurd was ransacked by Turkish nationalists. On Wednesday, Turkish youths began to attack Kurdish shops in Brussels. Similar demonstrations by Turks took place in Antwerp.
The rioting on Wednesday caused 10 police officers to be injured. The violence followed a demonstration by 800 people against Kurds which turned violent.
Brussels journal has the story

Amsterdam buys out "Emperor of Sex"

Now here's a leveraged buyout I would be interested in. In a deal worth £18m, officials will buy 18 buildings from Charlie Geerts - known as Amsterdam's Emperor of Sex - and close down the 'windows'. The final decision came from the city's mayor, Job Cohen, who argued that the brothels were attracting crime and money-laundering to the area. 'We want to get rid of the underlying criminality,' he told a TV station last week.
The Dutch tradition of tolerance — or gedoogbeleid — allowed prostitution to flourish long before it was legalized. Same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia and use of marijuana also are legal here.
Brothel closures run counter to that tradition, those in the district say. "It will never work," says Ton Van den Brink, 53, who owns a lunch counter near brothels, sex shops and "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold and smoked. The Wallen "is like a supermarket. Everybody needs to go there for things they need."