Mayor Federico Gutiérrez banned prostitution in tourist areas after an American was caught with two young girls in a hotel room
Yenifer is standing with five other girls on a corner in the San Diego neighborhood, a 15-minute walk from Medellín and Mayor Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez’s office in City Hall. They all have tattoos, show a lot of skin, and look like teenagers. In fact, they’re all minors who have been forced into prostitution. Yenifer insists that’s her name, but it’s clearly a lie. She also claims to be 15 years old, which does seem true because she has the body and face of a child. She seems nervous and giggles a little, revealing blue braces on her teeth. She’s wearing a purple miniskirt and matching tube top that don’t cover the butterfly tattoo on her hip. Yenifer says she started at 9 p.m. and will be “working” until 4. a.m. It’s now 9.30 p.m. and raining. It’s going to be a long night.
Yenifer lowers her gaze and says she started doing this about two months ago “because of some problems.” Her friends almost look like regular teenagers, standing around and playing with their phones. Yenifer says she doesn’t have a pimp and services three or four clients a night, mostly Colombians. A half-hour with Yenifer costs about $26 dollars, the going rate in San Diego. She charges the occasional foreigners triple.
“What happens when they ask how old you are?”
“Depends on what they want.”
I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:
2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.
And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.
Not disagreeing with you, but Norway is the way it is because it sells oil and it has been enough revenue over the years to provide for it’s citizens. Many countries can’t follow this model.
The U.S. is certainly resource-rich though, just lacks the political will/balls to take on corporations.
This article is talking about Colombia, so I thought you were comparing Norway to Colombia. It would be interesting to see the Nordic model applied to the US. There are 370m Americans vs 5m Norwegians but our government budget per capita could theoretically be closer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget_per_capita
Norway has a budget of $36k to spend per citizen and the US $20k. Say we raised our possible budget to $36k I wonder what impact that would make. $16k x 370m Americana would be ~$6b dollars. Looks like annual spend on US Medicare is $808b, so we couldn’t even offer free healthcare. It seems like the US would need to be ground up rebuilt.