I have seen stories about "human trafficking" in the news for a while. They tend to sound very unrealistic and are all tinged with either hype or hysteria, depending on the source.

The news has had many articles that say the strip clubs and whorehouses in or near New York City are filled with women who are forced to be there. Forced in the manner said here - "they travelled with an escort who held a gun to their backs" and so forth.

The news even said a strip club which I visited a few times, Gallagher's, was like this. It's just ludicrous. There's no way girls were forced to stay at this strip club. It's risible. I talked to some of the girls there before I read the nonsense article about them. Some were from other countries. They were there for the money.

There are very poor girls all over the world who would and sometimes do work in a strip club or whorehouse if they could make a lot of money. Just like girls in China go to work in Foxconn factories for the same reason.

With so many willing women, why go through all the trouble of hiring a full-time guard to watch three women? What happens when he goes to sleep? They pull out the gun when they travel around? It's possible, but highly improbable.

What is she going to say, she wanted to move to the US to make money doing sex-related stuff, then didn't like it any more with those people and still wanted to stay? These stories that people are in locked rooms with guards who escort them around by gunpoint with their families at home under the gun as well - it sounds like something a 21-year-old Indonesian prostitute who wanted a visa to stay in the US would say. The joke is that anyone would believe this. It's laughable. I mean what else is someone who knowingly came to the US for prostitution going to say? Her only option is to say that. Oh, and she wants to stay in the US as well, of course. I don't have the ability to say if her story is true or not, but it makes no sense. Every hole in the story is plugged by some improbably sounding story ("You were moved from apartment to apartment, why didn't you escape when they were continually moving you?", "Uhh...someone was holding a gun to my back, yaa, that's it". This is what she actually said. It sounds ludicrous).

Of course the shady nature of whorehouses in the US is helped by the fact that it is completely illegal in New York, unlike Nevada or European countries. If there were legal brothels, then business for places like this one would dry up.

The hypocrisy is the US helped drive Indonesians into poverty when the CIA helped an Indonesian coup massacre hundreds of thousands of trade unionists etc. in the 1960s. The hypocrisy is the US has a religious hysteria about sex. The hypocrisy is the US has laws on the book making prostitution illegal, which is what could create something like this theoretically happening. Women in poverty come to the US and work for pittance wages sowing shirts and pants together, but we never hear about how they have the gun at their back as they move from place to place and are enslaved etc. But when religious fundamentalists hear sex is involved, then some form of hysteria sets in.

Then we hear excuses for the PRISM Big Brother government controls everything stuff because of all this hypocrisy. It's a win-win for big money and big government - ban a woman willing to have sex from a man with money from conducting a transaction (driving it underground and allowing situations like this to potentially happen), massacre the Indonesian left and drive Indonesians into poverty, and then get support for Big Brother tactics to stop the invented tales of prostitutes who "escaped their captivity" but surprisingly "still want to stay in the US".