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TechnoratiSlavery's Staying Power
It's not a relic of the past; it's here and now and ensnaring more people than ever.
One hot june day in 2006, I saw what slavery really meant. In a rundown mansion in a slum of Bucharest, Romania, a pimp offered to sell me a young woman he described as "a blond." She had bleached hair, hastily applied makeup, and she apparently suffered from Down syndrome. On her right arm were at least 10 angry, fresh slashes where, I can only assume, she had attempted suicide. The pimp claimed that he made 200 euros per night renting her out to local clients. He offered to sell her outright to me in exchange for a used car.
It wasn't the first time I had encountered a slave in bondage. It wasn't even the first time I had been offered a slave for sale. Over five years on five continents, I had infiltrated trafficking networks and witnessed other negotiations to buy and sell human beings. Worldwide, I'd met more than 100 current and former slaves.
Many people are surprised to learn that there are still slaves. Many imagined that slavery died along with the 360,000 Union soldiers whose blood fertilized the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Many thought that slavery was brought to an end around the world when most countries outlawed it in the 19th century.
But, in fact, there are more slaves today than at any point in history. Although a precise census is impossible, as most masters keep their slaves hidden, baseline estimates from United Nations and other international researchers range from 12 million to 27 million slaves worldwide. The U.S. State Department estimates that from 600,000 to 800,000 people -- primarily women and children -- are trafficked across national borders each year, and that doesn't count the millions of slaves who are held in bondage within their own countries.
Let me be clear: By "slaves" I mean, very simply, those who are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. That is the nice, neat, horrible definition I have used since I began studying the subject in 2001. It was brought home to me more vividly than ever by the tears of that young woman in Bucharest.
In the United States today, we tend to use the word "slave" loosely. Merriam-Webster offers as its first definition of the word, "drudgery; toil." Well-intentioned activists will say that a worker at a shoe factory in Indonesia is "paid a slave wage" of $1.25 per hour, despite the fact the worker can walk away from the job at any time. An investment banker in New York will claim to be "worked like a slave" because, despite his six-figure salary, he is required to work up to 18 hours a day on occasion. During his last few years with Warner Bros. Records, Prince wore the word "slave" scrawled across his face to protest a binding contract he couldn't get out of -- even though it paid him $10-million advances for each album.
But that's not what slavery is, as Rambho Kumar can attest. Kumar was born into wilting poverty in a village in Bihar, the poorest state in India, the country with more slaves than any other, according to U.N. estimates. In 2001, desperate to keep him and his five brothers from starving, his mother accepted 700 rupees ($15) as an advance from a local trafficker, who promised more money once 9-year-old Rambho started working many miles away in India's carpet belt.
After he received Rambho from the trafficker, the loom owner treated his new acquisition like any other low-value industrial tool. He never allowed Rambho and the other slaves to leave the loom, forcing them to work for 19 hours a day, starting at 4 in the morning. The work itself tore into Rambho's small hands, and when he whimpered in pain, the owner's brother stuck his finger in boiling oil to cauterize the wound -- and then told him to get back to work. When other boys attempted escape or made a mistake in the intricate designs of the rugs, which were destined for Western markets, the owner beat them savagely.
On July 12, 2005, local police, in coordination with activists supported by Free the Slaves, an organization based in Washington, liberated Rambho and nine other emaciated boys.
I've met and talked with slaves and former slaves like Rambho in a dozen countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Romania, India, Sudan and Haiti. The International Labor Organization of the United Nations estimates that in Asia alone, there are about 10 million slaves.
Even in the United States, low-end Justice Department figures estimate that there are about 50,000 people languishing in hidden bondage at any one time. On March 4, for instance, two south Florida women were convicted on charges of enslaving and torturing a teenage Haitian girl named Simone Celestine. The two women face 10 years in prison. Celestine was freed by the FBI last year after being held as a domestic slave for six years, during which time she said she was beaten with closed fists, forced to shower outside with a garden hose, rented to other homes and not allowed to attend school.
Celestine's case is eerily similar to that of Williathe Narcisse, a courageous young woman I got to know after she escaped a life of domestic slavery in suburban Miami. Narcisse, who was 12 when she was freed in 1999, had been smuggled into the U.S. from Haiti to work as a domestic servant. During her three years in slavery, she was required to keep the family's home spotless, eat garbage and sleep on the floor. She was repeatedly raped by the family's adult son.
In its first term, the Bush administration spoke out strongly against human trafficking, laying out the most aggressive anti-slavery agenda since Reconstruction. But politics hamstrung its implementation. Pressed by a coalition of academic feminists and evangelical conservatives, American officials focused mainly on eliminating prostitution, despite overwhelming evidence that, worldwide, more than 90% of modern-day slaves are not held in commercial sexual slavery.
Before his reelection, President Bush spoke frequently about slavery, including two rousing speeches he gave before the U.N. General Assembly. But in each case, the president only detailed his concern for those in the commercial sex industry, never mentioning debt bondage (in which a person is forced into slavery in order to pay off an initial debt) or labor trafficking. Over the last two years, the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons has dedicated four times as much of its budget to fighting sex slavery as it did to combating other forms of slavery.
"It is a vicious myth that women and children who work as prostitutes have voluntarily chosen such a life for themselves," asserted a 2005 State Department fact sheet. Thus the victimization of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the high-priced call girl frequented by Eliot Spitzer, who until Monday was New York's governor, is equated to the slavery of the young woman in the Bucharest brothel.
Even though there are more slaves in the world today than ever, as a percentage of world population, there are fewer than ever. In a generation, bondage could be eradicated. But for this to happen, the U.S. must lead the way.
First, however, it must define the terms carefully. A current legislative fight is underway about just what slavery means. Over the objections of a few anti-slavery stalwarts in the Justice Department, the House of Representatives passed a bill in December that expands the current anti-trafficking legislation to cover most forms of prostitution, coerced or not. If approved in its current form by the Senate and signed by the president, the law will no longer address slavery exclusively and will instead become a federal mandate to fight prostitution on a broad scale.
Prostitution is always degrading, and it is often brutal -- but it is not always slavery. Equating the scourge of slavery with run-of-the-mill, non-coerced prostitution is not only misleading, it will weaken the world's efforts to end real forced labor and human trafficking.
Slavery in all its forms is a crime against humanity. Rambho's bondage is no more or less tolerable than that of the young woman offered to me in Bucharest. Both are abominations, and both are our collective burden to abolish.
E. Benjamin Skinner is the author of "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery."
© 2008 Los Angeles Times
23 Comments so far
Show AllThe root issue is that our civilization still uses a "hierarchy of beings" as its basis. Slavery, indentured servitude, corporatism, factory animal farming, sexism, ideological/religious terrorism, etc. are all consequences of this flawed guiding priniciple.
It is time that we moved our civilization to an order based on a "heirarchy of actions and values."
The reason the Bush Conservatives are working to pass tougher Prostitution laws isn't to Eliminate the problem. History of various "Prohibition" laws worldwide, Alcohol, Drugs, Prostitution, etc. proves that these laws have only Two effects:
1. They drive the Price up.
2. The Increase in price Increases the "illegal" behavior.
It's a simple "Follow the Money" equation. Someone expects to increase Profits by having stricter laws.
How many of Bush's Corporate Buddies have hidden ties to Prostitution through untraceable Jamaican bank accounts?
How many of the people who will be arrested will end up in "Private Prisons" run by Bush's Corporate Buddies?
Morbidly fantastic article! These numbers are astounding. Great example of the ugly underbelly of globalism and how even reasonably well-informed people are absolutely clueless to its scope.
People always try to look for perspective in these things -- and this does make slaving away all day in a cubicle sound just a tad better. One person's simmering job depression is another's dream vacation...
Mike, you said everything I wanted to say and you said it better than I could have. Nobody who has not lived it can understand it, and the people who benefit pretend it doesn't exist. By the way, we all benefit.
Whether it's laboring without escape to produce a carpet or a newborn baby, whether it takes place in India or USA or Canada, whether it's young and vulnerable (fertile) girl-women and trafficked newborns- it's kids slaving for the arogant elite and it is always ugly.
Were such a fate to befall adult white males, the sky would come down.
What Skinner is talking about is not 'slavery', but 'indentured slavery'. Wherein he says, "In the United States today, we tend to use the word "slave" loosely. Merriam-Webster offers as its first definition of the word, "drudgery; toil."", this is very okay to do, really; as long as it's not the sole usage of 'slavery'.
Instead of creating a zillion words, meaning people would have to endlessly add to their or our vocabulary, it's much simpler to use [qualifiers]. It's better to allow terms like 'slavery' and 'war', f.e., to be usable with varying meanings.
It is sufficiently legitimate to say that we can and [do] have both 'indentured' and 'un-' or 'non-indentured' forms of slavery, the indentured being the worst of the two kinds; usually, that is, and given they can both be and sometimes are deadly.
Deadly unindentured economic slavery is the reason many Mexicans try to flee northward, where they are again and often finding themselves in slave states of living, but while earning more money than they would back home, etc. It's not a form of slavery that they're guaranteed to never be able to get out of, but for the time that it does last, it's slavery enough.
It's okay to employ vocabulary in these ways; we just have to be able to think [flexibly], instead of rigidly. We have both economic and military wars, while the latter, and when considering imperialist-West's wars anyway, include the former type of war; the military component being used for the elites to profit and to spread dominion, empire. There's no need to restrict usage of 'war' to military battles; it's totally okay to say or use 'economic war'. It only takes a little flexibility in terms of how we think about and therefore perceive reality.
This is totally acceptable for general purposes. When it comes to defining legal legislation, however, then restriction, stricter usage may be opted for. I don't see any problem with the latter; only believing that we can be less rigid and more flexibly qualifying for general communications.
I agree that no form of slavery exists at all when the so-called victim still earns more than adequate income; to use 'slavery' for such cases is to majorly and hellishly, fiendishly mock real and severe slavery, and the victims of it. Instead, such well-off people may be able to claim inequitable compensation, maybe. Inequity, when it causes no suffering, so NO real injustice, is not to be treated as significant; it's a ho-hum matter, and the so-called victim should consider eating some 'humble pie', instead.
To treat such cases as if deserving of attention is to be pushers of GREED, extreme selfishness, childishness, etc. And that sort of character instead deserves to receive 'the bird' from by far MOST of humanity.
However, I otherwise will flexibly treat 'slavery' as I've been describing.
In that sense, we also have the 'mind' or 'mental' or 'psychological' or 'socio-psychological' (whatever) 'slaves'; like all of the mindlessly slavish addicts of the propagandist, yellow-journalistic reporting from imperialist-West's elites' U.S. or western msm "news" corporations, or the vast majority of "Americans" who mentally-slavishly supported the war of aggression on Iraq as if these schmuck "leaders" wouldn't likely be LIARS, f.e. They suffered from serious brainwashing, dumbing down, and thereby became a type of slave; in my flexible usage of the term.
What's essential is to clearly, so effectively communicate. Once we achieve this, we have plenty gained. It's then [adequate].
Skinner's speaking of brutal indentured slavery, yet while the numbers range from 12mn to 27mn 'worldwide', MANY more slaves of the unindentured kind also brutally suffer and die because of the socio-economic and political injustices causing billions to suffer and very much so. What's the average lifespan of plighted peoples who are extremely impoverished? I believe to have last read that it's in the 40s age range among very impoverished peoples of Africa, f.e. And it's NOT their fault; it's due to the rapacious, greedy, etc., elitists and their corporations corrupting govts, which therefore makes it also the fault of politicians.
Those are brutal, extremely unjust cases, but they don't leave any visible marks of physical brutality. Is that sufficient to justly claim that 'slavery', and with an appropriate qualifier, can not be used to refer to the plights of these extremely impoverished people and [victims] of extreme injustices? I DO NOT THINK SO! And I will not agree with anyone who cares to argue the contrary. I might technically agree, but will not agree for general communication.
Sure, I'm affected by the visible signs of brutality; I'm a very visually sensitive person, sometimes to the point that I wish I was optically blind, literally so. I'm not going to poke my eyes out, or jab them with sharp instruments to cause physical blindness to myself, though; definitely not. It's just that it literally sometimes is a [nuisance].
I will not diminish the extreme impacts on the extremely impoverished peoples of planet Earth. We have to see every form of [real] and serious suffering and injustice that exists, and to act as much as we can to try to help all of these people.
Skinner says, "Let me be clear: By "slaves" I mean, very simply, those who are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence".
Helping to rescue 12mn while complacently living and hundreds of millions or billions are starving to death, many millions are hellishly, fiendishly denied generic medicines they have a human right to and could afford with their extremely bare monetary means, etcetera! Now that is NOT a way that I will adopt for living my life.
I have read multiple times that around 1 BILLION people live on $1 and less per day, and another billion live on $2 a day or less. Why? It's definitely NOT their fault. It's due to the extreme injustices of the elites of our world corrupting our govts and therefore politicians, who accept to be corrupted; accept, or else welcome it with open arms. It's also due to the UN contributing, by letting the fiend rulers get their way; letting, when it's not aiding and abetting, instead.
Those billions of victims can't flee, there's no way for them to do so; therefore, these extremely impoverished circumstances and all of the related injustices are actually, literally [forced] upon them [all]. Sure, a tiny few might make it out of these situations, but often or usually (?) not without it being because they were rescued.
UNJUST is it to have such conditions as Skinner describes forced upon us, and this must be stopped. However, if they have 'subsistence', then we can consider that extremely exploited cheap labour are often not forced to work, but are still paid so little that it doesn't provide for 'subsistence', or very barely does; and many of those "paid" workers are physically and psychologically abused, sometimes brutally enough. These workers do not take the jobs because they really have a choice; not if they wish to survive anyway.
I'm not going to say that they're not in conditions of a form of slavery just because they could instead opt to just die of starvation, instead. That's like NO real choice at all.
Also, some historically indentured slaves in the USA had more, materially, than my white and French grandparents, mother's side, had in Quebec, Canada, during the first decades of the 20th century. They knew poverty that I've never heard of indentured slaves in the USA having needed to endure. My grandparents were not physically abused, not brutalised anyway, and could've opted to instead die of starvation, ... great. But the poverty they [had] to live through was [extreme] and they had to accept an awful choice. Even the poorest Africans I've read of have their own huts, which is something my grandparents couldn't afford.
My mother had to stop going to school in 4th grade in order to work full-time to help her mother meet daily production quotas on the greedy boss's farm they worked and lived on; living, i.e., existing or surviving, 12 months a year in the non-insulated attic (gets deeply cold up here during winters, ya know), along with the rats attracted by the bags of corn; and booted back up to the attic when caught at night by the kitchen wood stove to try to get some heat. After the latter happened a few times, my grandmother would tell her family to stay upstairs, in the attic, while she snuck down to the kitchen with a can into which she scooped some red-hot coals from the stove, to bring that back up to provide a [little] warmth.
Each member of the family was to be paid some pennies per week, for those who worked, and the farm went months withholding pay a number of times; and permanently withheld the last three months worth of pay for several members of the family.
My grandparents could have fled with their children, but would've starved and been absolutely without roofing over their family's heads. They economically had no choice, but were fortunately and finally rescued by a cousin (of I believe my grandmother) after three years of this hardship.
That's close enough to slavery to be referred to as such, except with the qualifiers need to make what's precisely meant clear.
And wherein Skinner says, "But for this to happen, the U.S. must lead the way", now that sounds like a good idea, but also is a real "joke". All we have to do is to consider the real nature of the US govt, what it's main use is, and this will tell us that "the U.S. must lead the way" is UTOPIC ideology.
The USA must first correct itself, and it is majorly owing to billions of people on planet Earth. It still continues, in extremely underreported ways, the genocides against the indigenous of US territory; as Canada does within Canadian territory, and so on.
If we can't get the imperialist-West's ruling elites to see to these aforementioned musts, from seeking to profit from wars of aggression and corporatisation of govt, and so on, then Skinner's definitely lost in utopic dreams about what the USA may be brought to do. After all, wars of aggression, so against peace, [are] the [supreme] crime; and genocide is extreme injustice and criminal. They're principal 'trademarks' of USA.
Nonetheless, I personally am appreciative of Skinner's article; I just won't treat the term 'slavery' as restrictively as he does, and I mean that for general communication. For matters of legislating laws, then they can restrict the permitted uses of the term; I see no problem at all in his respect.
My father could've opted for being unemployed, so without any income at all in the USA, but he instead accepted employment as a farmhand for the Medfield State Hospital of Massachusetts, and the wage was 'slave wage'. After all, he didn't have a choice, having a wife and two children to provide what he possibly could for, and didn't have higher than 8th grade education, but was definitely and very experienced in farm work, and the state could have easily paid employees even at his obviously looked-down-upon level 'livable wages'. They weren't just poverty; he could not even afford the rent, heating, and food when we lived in the poverty ghetto of Woonsocket, R.I.; it was either getting kerosene for the furnace, or food, but definitely not both.
'Slave wage' is therefore acceptable; we just need to understand what's meant by it and to therefore not be like pointy-headed bosses or else infantile about language. Learn to think [flexibly].
Again, however, let'em restrict usage for legal matters. This would be understandable and easily acceptable. I definitely wouldn't oppose this even at proposal stage; it'd be a waste of my time, and foolish of me to oppose restriction of usage of words for legal (law) matters.
I sure hope this is not too redundant.
We go organic in order to save our planet. But the elites just want a green slave planet.
American officials focused mainly on eliminating prostitution, despite overwhelming evidence that, worldwide, more than 90% of modern-day slaves are not held in commercial sexual slavery.
The Imperial Chimps seized on slavery purely for political gain. Their focus on the 10% that are sex slaves and their neglect of the 90% that are economic slaves clearly illustrate their determination to protect the capitalist beast at all cost, and keep the "values voters" on their side. Does anyone appreciate the full destruction potential of this systematic corruption of US public policy?
Does wage slavery count?
Hey people, we are talking about real slaves here. Prisoners are made to work but aren't sold to whoever can pay. Most of the slaves are young girls and in many cases are actually chained down at night. Like, REAL slaves.
Slavery still exists even here in the good ol U.S. of A. Anyone taken a look at, oh say Angola State Prison in Louisiana? This is a working plantation that produces a huge financial income as well as huge agricultural output. The labor to produce everything here is from prisoners, many of whom were imprisoned for nonviolent crimes and had no legal representation. Angola however is but one example. We have, as most folks are well aware, the largest per capita prison population in the world. Many are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses and once imprisoned, are forced to work. Does anyone REALLY wonder why we have such a huge prison population and so many laws that affect the population so disproportionately?
As indicated in an earlier comment, there are different kinds of slaves.
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/debt-serfdom.php
"This form of "debt slavery" or "debt peonage" was not just an accidental development of history. It was a deliberately-planned alternative to the slave arrangement in which owners were responsible for the feeding and care of a dependent population, and it is still with us today. Although European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery. They preferred "the European plan": capital could exploit labor by controlling the money supply, while letting the laborers feed themselves. In July 1862, this ploy was revealed in a notorious document called the Hazard Circular, which was circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts. It said:
"Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. To accomplish this, the bonds [government debt to the bankers] must be used as a banking basis. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.""
Those with a family and mortgage who walk away from a job or are forced out, must then pay 100% of the 12K for health insurance, and their mortgage, etc. Your standard of living has been intentionally reduced over the last 30 years for this purpose.
Of course, one can argue you still have your freedoms while slaves do not.
Heh-heh, really? Technically, perhaps. But Big Brother can shut that down real quick with the laws and executive orders over the last 7 years. Just has to declare an emergency.
Welcome to the New World Order.
"hablano" writes that the ruling class is "vulnerable to feelings of solidarity..."
Harharharhar!!!
If there is any "evolutionary" basis for this claim whatsoever, it applies to the immediate, primary group... the "hunting group," as some anthropologists call it, and for the rich the primary group is obviously themselves.
George W. Bush may be loyal to the rich out of some such feeling, but it's important to remember that he was also paid off $15 million at the beginning of his career for playing poster boy for the Texas Rangers.
You could call it a bribe in advance, or the rich taking care of their own, but whatever feelings of solidarity George W. Bush and his friends may feel for each other, if any of that feeling extended to the poor, we probably would have seen some evidence of it by now.
In the United States, the rich take care of the rich, the middle class takes care of the middle class, and the disenfranchised lower classes fight for scraps and tatters among themselves.
Jacob Freeze--yes I do expect the ruling class to pay, well, some of the price for eradicating slavery. Here's why: the ruling class is made up of individuals, and each of these individuals is vulnerable to feelings of solidarity on the basis of many aspects of their identity, not merely as members of the ruling class. Solidarity is a biological capacity which has been the basis of our evolutionary success (such as it is), but there's nothing about it that limits its applicability to the psychological fact of economic class identity. Marx is a great thinker from the prehistory of sociology and his analysis is incomplete.
Michael Albert has written about this I believe.
Sustained programs worldwide eliminated smallpox, because the ruling class understands that smallpox can strike the rich and their families just as easily as it strikes the poor.
But of all the ways slavery is different from smallpox, beginning with the apparently salient difference between a societal evil and a microbe, the only difference that really matters to the ruling class is that when they eradicate smallpox, they are protecting themselves.
It isn't the children of the rich who get sold into slavery, so slavery really isn't a problem for the ruling class, unless you count moral problems, and when you start talking about the moral problems of the ruling class, as if they mattered to the ruling class...
You must be joking!
So the ruling class may finance rockets to the moon, as an amusement, and it may finance multi-billion dollar research programs to improve cosmetic surgery, so the ruling class can hang onto the mirage of youth forever, and the ruling class may support trillion dollar wars under the delusion that invasions and occupations can keep terrorists out of the financial district on Manhattan Island, but if you think the ruling class is ever going to pay the price for eradicating slavery...
You must be joking!
Slavery has not been done away with. I cannot walk away from my low-wage job
unless I am prepared to starve. The forms change, the essense remains the same.
Until we are prepared to say,"we will pay as we go, we will do our best to provide for everyone, and we will ask that everyone contribute what they can
in the way of productive work", we leave the door open to slavery in whatever form it takes.
"Well-intentioned activists will say that a worker at a shoe factory in Indonesia is 'paid a slave wage' of $1.25 per hour, despite the fact the worker can walk away from the job at any time."
Unfortunately, workers can't always walk away from the job at any time. Some bosses lock their workers inside the factories to discourage slacking. Sometimes a fire breaks out and prevents the workers from escaping. Even in the absence of locked doors, some workers can't just leave their jobs for a variety of reasons.
Otherwise, this article was pretty much right on.
Wouldn't it be cool if the trafficers in slaves had themselves and their spouses and children assigned to such a lifestyle? They would be worked 14-16 hours a day, beaten to a bloody pulp when they didn't make quota or measure up, and fed from a garbage can. I expect it might make those who practice and supply users of such a lifestyle a little more reluctant to do so.
I also believe if we arrested the executives and boards of directors responsible for running businesses that employ undocumented immigrants along with the undocumented it would greatly reduce the attractiveness of such a labor pool and raise wages and benefits for those who work in the effected industries.
Send 'em all to the psycho sherrif Joe Arpighyo (spelling?) who runs the tent city concentration camp lock up outside of Phoenix AZ. Feed 'em white wonder bread green bologna sandwiches and work 'em cleaning up highway right of ways for a few years and lets see if that doesn't make our business titans a little more careful about how they run their businesses and who they hire.
Next, let's get all those slick operators and their facilitators of prison industries that use captive convict labor to produce cheap goods (after all when you have a "captive labor force" which is being housed and fed at taxpayers expense what's not to love about your fixed costs of production?)a chance to be locked up for 15-20 years and worked for the profit of the taxpayers. Every purchase of thier manufactured goods would be added to the general funds coffers of the state where they were incarcerated.
For some people it is neccessary that they feel the heat before they finally see the light.
I agree Lord Trigo... legalize it, regulate it and tax it! This would at least go a long way to eliminating the 'pimp factor'. The problem is the evangelical, holier-than-thou, right-wingers who actually advocate harsher sentencing for those who sell their bodies.
But one of the best ways to reduce or eliminate slavery AND prostitution is by improving the basic living standards of the poorest members of society.
I must disagree with the author though when he said..." Even though there are more slaves in the world today than ever, as a percentage of world population, there are fewer than ever. In a generation, bondage could be eradicated. But for this to happen, the U.S. must lead the way."
The U.S. is a poor example of a country that opposed slavery. Slavery didn't end in the U.S. until 1865 but it took another 100 years (1965) until the U.S. abolished apartheid in the American Bible Belt. Our moral footing is far behind our European counterparts despite our multi-cultural demographics. Like most third world countries, the U.S. still has its cities divided along racial lines with gated communities to keep out the 'colored people' and sections of town where no white man will go because it's a 'black neighbourhood'.
Once the U.S. openly addresses and resolves it's own racial inequalities by providing equal opportunities for everyone, America is in no position to take the moral high ground.
It is a time of hardening of hearts and blackening of souls. No longer can the well dressed fit bodies of the perps be disguised, the smell of internal rot is overpowering.
I have known for a long time that there are more slaves than ever before. I remember a price of 12 dollars to purchase a girl in Sudan. If we really must save the world through military interventions, how about taking care of this situation? If tha aim was to help people, which it isn't, there are countless places where an invasion would truly be appreciated, as in Zimbabwe. But of course, our only concern is in preserving the sanctity of gluttony and consumerism. Sushi anyone?
>Thus the victimization of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the high-priced call girl frequented by Eliot Spitzer, who until Monday was New York's governor, is equated to the slavery of the young woman in the Bucharest brothel.<
That's right. I've never heard of a slave making $1500 an hour. If that's the norm, where do I sign up? Fact is, some people choose prostitution because, well, it pays better than waiting tables, flipping burgers or working in a convenience store. That may say something about the low wages in those fields, but it's an individual's choice to sell a different part of their body if it means more money. Prostitution: legalize it, regulate it and tax it.
Wouldn't GWB addressing domestic slavery be a betrayal of his constituancy? Domestic slaves usually work for the rich. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few of them on the ranch at Crawford and up at the Cheney spread in Wyoming. Why else the smoke and mirror tactic of getting everyone to worry about one small aspect of the problem while ignoring the big picture?