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 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.

I thought that was a job perk!

Belgian Police told not to visit Brothels.
Police patrolling the red-light district of the Belgian capital have been ordered to stop visiting brothels and drinking in bars when on duty.
A letter sent to officers in Brussels' northern police district, and published in a Belgian daily on Tuesday, urged them to set a good example and earn the public's respect.
"These officers think their duty hours are to be used to drink alcohol in bars, practice sports..., visit brothels or massage parlors, and entertain (intimate) relationships with residents of the neighborhood during their patrol," said the letter from a local police chief.

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."

I Hope You Guys Are Keeping Your Appointments

Hotmarijke, an Antwerp hooker, is posting the names of all the punters who don't turn up for their appointments, on the Internet.

Hotmarijke gets a little angry if you don't show up. With all those advanced math classes she took, she figures you are cutting into her income, because she could have been cleaning someone elses pipes.

Hotmarijke operates what the paper describes as “a very explicit and widely visited website". So before you begin a mad dash to look it up, I'll save you the trouble. (not safe for work)

"Anybody who files a complaint is admitting that he visits working girls" the prostitute told Het Laatste Nieuws. READ MORE