To illustrate just how bad things are in Germany, prostitution was legalised two years ago and brothel owners " who must pay tax and employee health insurance " were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job " including in the sex industry " or lose her unemployment benefit.

Now it appears (from a story published in the Telegraph U.K., which is a world-class newspaper having a daily subscription of close to 1 million) that a 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefits. The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job center telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should call them. Then the woman called and discovered the employer-in-waiting was a brothel.

This is not a story; it is fact (according to The Telegraph U.K.).

So people, whether or not the Telegraph story is 100 pct factual, the point I'd like to make is please wake up to what is going on in the world today. Society is breaking down faster than many of you realize.

When the common person is subjected to gross indignity, and to the loss of legitimately earned tax and health insurance benefits in Germany, or the loss of hard-earned pension plan benefits in the U.S., I begin to worry that economic crime will soon spiral out of control.

For many years I have been concerned about social equity. Now there is cause for everybody to be concerned.

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Follow-up:

The information on which I based my blog item above was published in the Telegraph Newspaper Online. Here is the link, followed by the accolades this mainstream information source has received:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/30/wgerm30.xml

Telegraph Group Limited

Telegraph Group Limited (TGL) publishes telegraph.co.uk, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Weekly Telegraph.

About telegraph.co.uk: telegraph.co.uk was created in November 1994, establishing the Telegraph as the first online daily UK newspaper in the UK. Extensive developments in recent months include the creation of a film site, music downloads and video streaming, a personal finance product comparison service, theatre, music event and gallery bookings.

The 2005 Newspaper Awards saw telegraph.co.uk highly commended in the Best Daily Newspaper on the World Wide Web category. The 2004 Newspaper Awards commended telegraph.co.uk in the 'Most Innovative Technology of the Year' category.

In addition to content from the print editions, covering everything from news to lifestyle features, telegraph.co.uk enables readers to take advantage of online insurance or holiday bookings and enhanced and interactive content including crosswords and fantasy gaming.

Having that basis for my belief in the story by Clare Chapman, I wrote about it. Then the reader's comments came in. People are concerned, so I looked further, and discovered:

http://thefactis.org/TheThingIs/archive/2005/02/16/564.aspx

So maybe the newspapers don't report the facts. Maybe some of their stories realy are "stories". It happens.

It also happens that observers like me do get fooled, even if, as and when we (often) suggest that it takes a good "story" to fool us.

I'll now contact the Telegraph and get their position on the Clare Chapman story, and then write a follow up article. If I happen to have been misled, then I'll apologize.