[Arraya]

Both the mechanisms that propel women into the
sex industry, and the discourses of clients who demand commercial sex have been analyized extensively. The selling of sexual services is a form of alienation as well as an exploitative relation of appropriated labor. It is a phenomenon, much like slavery, that has proliferated with the spread of capitalist markets, and with gender, sexual, and racial oppression. Yes, slavery made a huge comeback with the spread of market relations in the 1500s.

the selling of a body and as an inherently self-estranging activity.2 What makes prostitution
more problematic than other activities is not just the use of the human body but
the sexual use of a woman’s body (Pateman 1988, 204). Sexuality is regarded as one
of the most intimate aspects of the self. It is integral to and cannot be separated from
the self; therefore, a prostitute who sells her sexuality is also selling her “self.” In order
to protect her “self” psychologically, a prostitute must distance herself from her sexual
use (Pateman 1988, 207). While this process of emotional distancing, disengagement,
and segmentation is vital to women’s survival in prostitution, it is also “destructive of
women’s humanity” and intensifies the damage and psychological toll on them (Barry
1995, 32). The buying and selling of sexuality for the client’s own use transforms the
body into a vessel or object; the body becomes alienated as it is used as a “thing” for
someone else. This process of objectification is also seen to spill over to the objectification
of all women.

[Arraya]

[quote=briansd1]Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. The secret agents who indulged are proof of it.

Sex has been used as a means to an end forever. Sex is a powerful incentive. You can use it to obtain power, money, secrets, etc…[/quote]

I remember seeing an old video of Chimpanzees(our closest relative)years back. A female chimp tried to take some food that was in the vicinity of a male. The male chimp sees this and goes to hit the female with a stick. The female quickly turns around and gets in “postition”. Which, of course, stopped the attack. That is core of “prostitution”.

Of course, shown through a cultural filter, financialized and glorified, it looks a little different. But, basically, the same dynamic

[Arraya]

[quote=walterwhite]many women apparently go into prostitution because it pays well and they prefer it to other forms of work.[/quote]

This is a monumental oversimplification of what goes on. Many go into to it for there children – because they have no skills and a child to support. Overall, its a vicious business that ruins women. Mentally and physically.

[quote=walterwhite]
Also, many women have sex with men for reasons that may be because of bad childhoods and don’t get paid. would you criminalize that type of sex as well?[/quote]

I wouldn’t criminalize any “kind” of sex. You change the environments that cause that kind of condition. Arresting prostitutes is about as rational and humane as arresting drug users.

[Arraya]

[quote=walterwhite]Human trafficking is probably a vanishingly small portion of paid sex encounters. Some housecleaners may have been procured under similar circa but we don’t criminalize housecleaning.[/quote]

Besides the fact that human trafficing is on the rise. Women don’t go into prostitution because they like to have random sex with strangers(though I am sure you could find one). It usually starts with an ACE (adverse childhood experiance) which is followed up by some type economic coercion and ends with PTSD and a disese. It’s the same thing with porn.

[Arraya]

[quote=UCGal]oartypup left the building for her ranch in another state a while back. With her gold/silver/guns/farming supplies. She was the biggest doomsayer.

Arraya is still here. Still predicting a dramatic change.

Both are/were interesting to read.

[/quote]

Well, at least we’re interesting.

PP had an interestng take, though it was lacking an academic/historical perspective. She was stuck in the secret cabal planning evil deeds which has a little truthieness to it yet at the same time irrelevent. There are plenty of social scientists throughout academia with studies on societal collapse/evolution. Hell, history is littered with failed systems so we have plenty to study. Couple that with the ample scientific data on the earths physical systems degradation. You add it all up and say – it’s fucking over. The truth is we don’t know what we are doing.

Though, this setting up a “doomstead” with solar panels and a bomb shelter is, IMO, a product of the hyper-individualistic capitalist mind. People seem to find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. They think if modern-industrial society malfunctions people are going to turn into brain-hungry zombies. Zero faith in humanity.

Dwight from the office gets it,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiFjneqJQV8

[Arraya]

Collapse is a proccess not an event, as party pup would have it.

My prepping is much different from stocking up on canned goods and other silly things.

[Arraya]

http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/23/real_estate/million_dollar_foreclosures/index.htm
Five years after the housing bubble burst, America’s wealthiest families are now losing their homes to foreclosure at a faster rate than the rest of the country — and many of them are doing so voluntarily.

But with a recovery in the housing market still years away, foreclosure has turned out to be a worthwhile option after all. Saddled with bloated mortgages after a long run up in property values, many high-end homeowners have chosen to pursue a “strategic default.” Even though they can afford the monthly mortgage payments, they still decide to walk away from their home because they owe more on the property than it is worth.

[Arraya]

Uneconomic Growth Deepens Depression

By Herman Daly

05 March, 2012
The Daly News

The US and Western Europe are in a recession threatening to become a depression as bad as that of the 1930s. Therefore we look to Keynesian policies as the cure, namely stimulate consumption and investment—that is, stimulate growth of the economy. It seemed to work in the past, so why not now? Should not ecological economics and steady-state ideas give way to Keynesian growth economics in view of the present crisis?

Certainly not! Why? Because we no longer live in the empty world of the 1930s — we live in a full world. Furthermore, in the 1930s the goal was full employment and growth was the means to it. Nowadays growth itself has become the goal and the means to it are off-shoring of jobs, automation, mergers, union busting, importing cheap labor, and other employment-cutting policies. The former goal of full employment has been sacrificed to the modern ideology of “growth in share holder value.”

Growth has filled the world with us and our products. I was born in 1938, and in my lifetime world population has tripled. That is unprecedented. But even more unprecedented is the growth in populations of artifacts — “our stuff” — cars, houses, livestock, refrigerators, TVs, cell phones, ships, airplanes, etc. These populations of things have vastly more than tripled. The matter-energy embodied in these living and nonliving populations was extracted from the ecosystem. The matter-energy required to maintain and replace these stocks also comes from the ecosystem. The populations or stocks of all these things have in common that they are what physicists call “dissipative structures” — i.e., their natural tendency, thanks to the entropy law, is to fall apart, to die, to dissipate. The dissipated matter-energy returns to the ecosystem as waste, to be reabsorbed by natural cycles or accumulated as pollution. All these dissipative structures exist in the midst of an entropic throughput of matter-energy that both depletes and pollutes the finite ecosphere of which the economy is a wholly contained subsystem. When the subsystem outgrows the regenerative capacity of the parent system then further growth becomes biophysically impossible.

But long before growth becomes impossible it becomes uneconomic — it begins to cost more than it is worth at the margin. We refer to growth in the economy as “economic growth,” — even after such growth has become uneconomic in the more basic sense of increasing illth faster than wealth. That is where we are now, but we are unable to recognize it.

Why this inability? Partly because our national accounting system, GDP, only measures “economic activity,” not true income, much less welfare. Rather than separate costs from benefits and compare them at the margin we just add up all final goods and services, including anti-bads (without subtracting the bads that made the anti-bad necessary). Also depletion of natural capital and natural services are counted as income, as are financial transactions that are nothing but bets on debts, and then further bets on those bets.

Also since no one wants to buy illth, it has no market price and is often ignored. But illth is a joint product with wealth and is everywhere: nuclear wastes, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic trash in the oceans, the ozone hole, biodiversity loss, climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, depleted mines, eroded topsoil, dry wells, exhausting and dangerous labor, exploding debt, etc. Standard economists claim that the solution to poverty is more growth — without ever asking if growth still makes us richer, as it did back when the world was empty and the goal was full employment, rather than growth itself. Or has growth begun to make us poorer in a world that is now too full of us, and all our products, counted or not in GDP?

Does growth now increase illth faster than wealth? This is a threatening question, because if growth has become uneconomic then the solution to poverty becomes sharing now, not growth in the future. Sharing is frequently referred to as “class warfare.” But it is really the alternative to the class warfare that will result from the current uneconomic growth in which the dwindling benefits are privatized to the elite, while the exploding costs are socialized to the poor, the future, and to other species.http://www.countercurrents.org/daly050312.htm

[Arraya]

[quote=CA renter]From the original article:
It is not a problem that bankers are prepared to solve. They want to turn the problem over to governments – and define the problem as how governments can “make them whole.” What they call a “solution” to the bad-debt problem is for the government to give them good bonds for bad loans (“cash for trash”) – to be paid in full by taxpayers. Having engineered an enormous increase in wealth for themselves, bankers now want to take the money and run – leaving economies debt ridden. The revenue that debtors cannot pay will now be spread over the entire economy to pay – vastly increasing everyone’s cost of living and doing business.”

[/quote]

And of course, they need to tighten the noose on the common debtor.

http://theautomaticearth.org/Finance/our-depraved-future-of-debt-slavery-part-iii.html
This settlement essentially gives the banks free license to go on a rampage of financial harassment and foreclosure without any interference from state governments. That’s why it was noted in Part II that traditional protections found in contract law have been rendered completely worthless for the vast majority of people on this planet, including all but the wealthiest individuals in the West. These protections were rooted in decades of British common law that developed through judicial precedents during the so-called “Enlightenment” era. They offered the average white male citizen a way to protect himself from having to make payments or perform under a contract if it was generally secured in one of the following ways:

snip

If a court established one of these situations to exist in any given case, then the complaining party had a right to void the contract. The problem for victimized debtors now is that the legal system only performs this protective function well when the economy is growing and wealthy private interests can claim an increasingly large share of the pie despite these common law hurdles-turned-artifacts. In an era of widespread economic contraction and deleveraging by consumers and businesses, the large private interests will instead seek to extract value through the seizing of assets (“foreclosure” implies a legitimate process) and the subjugation of distressed debtors.

Human labor, after all, is simply a form of energy that can be applied to various inputs and productive processes, including the harvesting of other energy sources and the development of infrastructure necessary for large-scale societies. Most middle to upper-middle class Americans have forgotten all about the labor expended and the lives lost by their not-so-distant ancestors in the course of such work. Yet, they may very well be forced into laying railway tracks and mining coal or constructing/repairing roads, highways, bridges and canals in the near future. College and graduate students steeped in debt who are expecting cushy office jobs that no longer exist will find out they have effectively been sold into slavery by their system of “education”.

[Arraya]

[quote=paramount]Slightly off-topic, but would a Greek default trigger a tsunami of credit default swaps?[/quote]

Eh, greece is not that big, so, nothing another round of bailouts can’t fix!

[Arraya]

Peak oil dynamics peppered with a little geopolitical tension and speculators that bet on it.

It looks to be about $120 per barrel that puts a break on growth and throws us into recession.

Hey Brian, this is for you:

[Arraya]

[quote=briansd1]Arraya, so you don’t care about the mass hardship and upheaval that you mentioned earlier?

Wouldn’t there be billions of innocent people caught in that spiraling out of control?[/quote]

It would be the end of the capitalist world system. We would have to organize in a new way.

CTL-ALT-DEL

[Arraya]

[quote=briansd1][quote=Arraya]Contraction = mass hardship [/quote]

Given that’s the case, why would you ever want contraction?[/quote]

I want to see a fast, hard and deep contraction to spiral the world out of control – which it would, if left alone.

[Arraya]

[quote=briansd1][quote=Arraya]Contraction = mass hardship [/quote]

Given that’s the case, why would you ever want contraction?[/quote]

Within the context of a capitalist market system. The system is geared towards perpetual growth. You want to see politicians and economists panic see a GDP reported at less than 0.

[Arraya]

Contraction = mass hardship, social upheaval and, ultimately, fighting.

Capitalism does not hold it’s composure under extended periods of contraction very well

[Author]

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