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Mike Cartier
beigetreten: Aug 7, 2002
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New Slavery in the Global Economy
September 3, 2003 - 10:09 AM
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I recently ran across an article in the magazine, "World and I". It addresses the issue of modern-day slavery and the reluctance of people to do anything about it. It warrants careful consideration. It is rather long, so I had to divide it into two posts. Although, I disagree with the implication that the United States is somehow to blame for the continuation of these conditions, I do believe that the article makes some very valid points. -Michael Cartier
Author : Charles Jacobs
Charles Jacobs is president of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
While acknowledging shock, Western publics tend to ignore the plights of slaves for fear of offending another culture or religion.
DISPOSABLE PEOPLE
New Slavery in the Global Economy
Kevin Bales
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999
298 pp., $24.95
Just as much of the industrialized world is set to celebrate its vast economic boom, Kevin Bales barges in with an awful secret: Hidden at the underbelly of our thriving global markets, contributing to our general wealth and well-being, are 27 million slaves.
Around the globe, in places we might have guessed--but also in Paris, New York, and London--men, women, and children are forced to work for no pay, under the threat of violence. Their stolen labor makes our lives easier, our delights cheaper. At least some of the carpets we walk on, cars we drive, jewelry we wear, and tea we drink is made all the more accessible because someone, usually far away, has slaves. The sugar in your morning coffee may come from slave labor. This is bitter news.
In a detailed and careful study, Disposable People, Bales establishes beyond doubt the extent and reality of contemporary human bondage. But surely before this we've seen clues. For years, journalists have been providing glimpses of modern slaves. We've seen reports of children in India and Nepal having to weave carpets from dawn to dusk, from toddlerhood to adolescence, for no pay. We have come to know something of the girls (and boys) in Thailand who are forced to rent their bodies to strangers in order to enrich people who have become their owners. Some might remember hearing that in the Dominican Republic, Haitian slaves cut sugarcane for no pay.
Yet, for the most part, after registering an initial shock, Western publics have generally ignored the slaves' plight. There are no powerful abolitionist lobbies. No important human rights group has added abolition to its mandate. This, though the West rightly prides itself as a champion of decency, though personaliberty stands at the foundation of our civilization, and though Western consumers benefit, albeit indirectly, from the stolen labor.
Disposable People may do much to change that. For one, it is more than a journalistic report. Bales' research took him to five countries: India, Pakistan, Mauritania, Thailand, and Brazil, where he stayed on and studied slavery's patterns and conditions with a seriousness and depth absent in news accounts. By collecting, comparing, and contrasting his cases, Bales develops a broad view, from which he sees a modernized "new slavery" whose victims are not legally owned but temporarily used: They are "disposable people," more efficient even than traditional slaves.
Traditional slavery took place in a different moral universe than the one we now inhabit. People in traditional societies felt a need to live morally justifiable lives, and so the taking of a man's labor and the chaining of people for one's own purposes were accompanied by complex (some would say "tortured" justifications: The slaves (nearly always of a different race or lower caste) were "inferior people," "aimless," requiring guidance and care. Owners, who needed to believe that they were acting morally, created systems in which slaves existed as cared-for property. Among other things, this meant that during their nonproductive years--as infants and toddlers, when sick, and when they grew old--slaves lived from the master's hand.
No more. Nowadays, power and profit are sufficient "self-evident" justifications for stealing other people's lives. With such ground rules, slaving can be made incredibly efficient, enormously profitable. Why buy and care for the cow when you can steal the milk?
Bales shows just how this works in Thailand and Brazil, where slave owners have created something very like the "just-in-time" method now used widely in modern industrial production. The idea is to acquire resources and parts just as they are needed, preserving capital and avoiding the costs of dead storage. Automobile manufacturers buy and deliver parts to their assembly lines "just-in-time." Similarly, Bales explains, Thai and Brazilian slavers employ slaves only when they are productive--and dispose of them the minute they cease being so. All the costs of owning people and caring for them years before and after they can work are avoided.
In Brazil, desperately poor young men are promised decent wages, then taken hundreds of miles to the jungle where they are met by armed men and told the truth: They've been enslaved. They owe the boss for the relatively lavish meals and drink provided on the long trip and the tools they are handed on arrival. They are then forced to fell trees and make charcoal. Bales is careful to describe the method of charcoal manufacture and to analyze the enormous inbuilt profit structure. The heat of the charcoal furnaces is brain deadening. The men are burned frequently. They are totally isolated, miles from nowhere, and cannot escape without high risk of recapture and severe, even deadly, beatings. The charcoal is used to smelt iron and make the steel for automobiles. When the men are injured or used up, they are discarded.
The sex industry
In Thailand, an economic boom, macho culture, and the social acceptance of prostitution combine to create and drive the booming business of sex for sale. Rural girls are lured--as are the men in Brazil--by the promise of good jobs, kidnapped off the streets, or, tragically, sold by their parents into a life of forced prostitution. Thailand's form of Buddhism lends support for prostitution: Women are inferior beings who cannot attain "enlightenment." Sex is an impersonal attachment to the natural, material world; if you have it, best to make it as impersonal as possible. Buddhist writings sanction prostitution and prescribe resignation in the face of life's difficulties.
Bales' interviews with sex slaves--little girls whose lives have been turned into hell--rip at the heart. They are beaten and raped, forced to service up to eighteen men a day. They face high risk of death from AIDS. When they get sick or too old to fetch customers, they are discarded. To survive this, they do become resigned.
Thailand's "disposable" girls are incredibly profitable. One of the merits of Bales' book is that he does the math. He wants to show how good a business slavery is. From his calculations of a Thai brothel's ledger: monthly expenses: rent, utilities, food and drink, pimp's salary, cashier, cook, bribes to police, taxis, beer and whiskey = $10,280. Income: commercial sex (20 slaves averaging 14 clients/day for 30 days ostitutes, sale of condoms, sale of drinks, virgin premium, "interest" on slaves' debt bonds = $88,000. Net monthly income: $78,280
In Pakistan the traditional peshgi system of advancing workers money for work to be done often evolves into debt-bondage. The system is old but expanded dramatically after World War II. The population of landless peasants surged to 15 million when owners, who feared that land reform would redistribute their farm holdings, threw the peasants off the land and bought new farm machines. Many of those left homeless sold themselves into debt-bondage. Bales studied a major peshgi industry: brickmaking, where 750,000 people take on debt to eat and shelter their families, then labor to get even in primitive kilns across Pakistan. These people make 65 billion bricks each year, by hand. Mostly the debts are not repaid but passed down to the next generations: The children are born enslaved. At many of the kilns, brickworkers are terrorized by owners and their thugs. Wives and daughters are assaulted. A worker who "picks up his head" or makes trouble will have his leg put in the kiln and burned while others are made to watch.
In India, Bales tells us, "each worker trapped by debt receives no money for his or her daily labor, instead getting just over one kilogram of wheat, rice or beans. In return É the laborers will work all day, every day." Estimates of bonded laborers in India range from 2 to 20 million. They produce tea, bricks, timber, sugar, cloth, and rugs. They also make and sell food, beg, and sell their bodies for sex. To make the matter plain, Bales enjoins us to watch them prepare their daily fare.
What is it like to be a debt-bonded slave in India? Bales suggests an experiment we might try at home:
"In the kitchen find a bag of rice, or even better some plain, unground wheat. Fill up a coffee mug four times with the rice or wheat. Now feed a family of five for one day with the grain you have measured out. For every meal you'll need to give each person only one-third of a coffee mug of grain so that it will last all day. If you are having wheat, you'll need to grind it into flour and mix it with water to make soft unleavened bread. If it's rice you can just boil it as usual. Repeat this recipe every day for the rest of your life."
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Mike Cartier
beigetreten: Aug 7, 2002
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Between a Rock and a Hard Place
September 3, 2003 - 04:37 AM
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In reading the previous article, we can't help but wonder, what we can do to fix this ... to make it right. But, then we are reminded that the term 'right' is subjective; and that other countries should be able to decide what is 'right' for them (although I can't imagine anyone thinking that the current situation is 'right' by any standards).
I would like to make a point to consider regarding the United States involvement in issues such as these: If the U.S. stays out, then it is asked, “Why don’t you do something, don't you care?” Yet, if the U.S. goes in, then it is condemned for imposing itself on others. And, of course, if there are deaths of innocents, as there inevitably would be, given the very nature of the situation; then the US is accused of brutality.
The US continually remains in that unenviable position of … Rock … United States … Hardplace.
Michael Cartier
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Mike Cartier
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New Slavery in the Global Economy, Pt.2
September 3, 2003 - 10:12 AM
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Part 2, posted by Michael Cartier
Author : Charles Jacobs
President of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
DISPOSABLE PEOPLE
New Slavery in the Global Economy
Kevin Bales
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999
298 pp., $24.95
Born into slavery
There is nothing new about slavery in Mauritania, which may have the largest slave population in the world. Here, traditional slavery holds sway. Slaves are owned and kept from birth. "Everywhere you look," writes Bales, "you see slaves." They carry water, cook and clean and care for children, tend sheep, haul bricks, build houses.
Mauritania is a former French colony, with only 2 million people and no oil. Almost by definition then, it is off the radar screen. Based on the work of the American Anti-Slavery Group, we know that Arab-Berbers have always held Africans as slaves. Seven hundred years ago, African villages were raided, the men killed, the women and children carted off. Now, there are no more raids: The slaves have simply been bred, like farm animals. Africans in Mauritania converted to Islam centuries ago, and though the Qur'an forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims, here racism trumps religious doctrine, resulting in a population of perhaps up to a million black Muslim slaves.
According to Bales, this kind of slavery, which exists nowhere else in the world, treats the slaves more humanely and leaves them more helpless. He is certainly right about helpless. Moctar Teyeb is an escaped slave working with the American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston. He explains that African slaves are raised to believe (falsely) that according to the Qur'an their black skin has condemned them to this portion in life, that they will go to heaven only under the foot of their masters. With no other reference point in their isolated worlds, this makes for mental chains more powerful than iron. The majority of Moctar's people, the Haratines, cannot conceive of freedom.
Bales only briefly mentions Sudan, where tens of thousands of Africans have been enslaved by a "holy war" waged by the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum. Like the Haratines, the Sudanese slaves are victims of the false use of Islam. Unlike their Haratine counterparts, however, they were born in freedom and know they should be free. They have also attracted supporters in the West, from Christian and human rights communities. The black Muslim slaves of Mauritania, an embarrassment to Western Muslims, especially militant black Muslims, have far fewer champions.
Bales recognizes some of the reasons contemporary slavery has been ignored but misses others. He rightly points out that we know slavery by the form it took in the American South. Absent whips and chains and public sales, it is hard to get people to attend to unfamiliar horrors. Slavery is no longer legal anywhere: It happens where governments ignore or collude with feudal lords and their thugs, which means that new weapons and strategies wait to be created. (Bales' next book promises to do just that.) Meanwhile he suggests that laws need to address conspiracy to enslave and attack the profits from slavery.
Liberal racism
But there are, I think, deeper reasons why slavery has been ignored. The first has to do with the origins and nature of human rights campaigning in the West, born of our reaction to the suppression of political rights and speech in the communist world. The human rights victims we fought for were intellectuals or social activists, like us. Their crimes were to demand political liberty and expression--rights won here in the very battles that defined our national characters. And the oppressors were governments that could be pressured, publicly embarrassed, or punished economically.
In contrast, the victims of slavery are not at all "like us." Slaves come from the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Illiterate, innumerate, innocent of indoor plumbing use, they are not little Thomas Jeffersons, or as Amnesty International calls the people it mobilizes to help, "prisoners of conscience." They are punished not for what they say or even want but for no ideological reasons at all; they are made to suffer simply for individual profit. Furthermore, those who hold them are not government bureaucrats but class thugs, individuals who belong to a class--or several classes--above their victims. In many cases, their governments have less power than they; in others, the governments are peopled by the thugs themselves.
Another, related reason for Western inaction is that the problems seem intractable and complex, a result or at least a function of the depressing poverty of the slave societies themselves, or sometimes the result of the cultures and religions of the affected places. Few Westerners want to speak to this.
There is another, perhaps even more intractable problem: The oppressors of these slaves are by and large nonwhite and non-Western. When decent white people see whites do evil, they explode in moral fury. Their evil behavior must not "stand for" or represent "us." There is a special moral urge to act. Apartheid was furiously fought by whites. But when whites see evil done by nonwhites, or non-Westerners, by people who are not "us," they tend to become paralyzed. This is, I suggest, either because of what some have called "liberal racism" (that is, one can't expect much from "them" or because of a feeling that the West has no right to intervene. "Who are we, who napalmed Vietnam, to criticize them?" Finally, when the problem is caused or exacerbated by a non-Western religion, Westerners are reticent to speak out. No one wants to be thought of as "bashing" Islam or Buddhism. Tragically then, rights victims unlucky enough to have non-Western oppressors are abandoned by the very Western human rights activists who should be rushing to their aid.
Bales is harsh on the United Nations but not harsh enough. He points out that since it is supported by member states, "it bends over backward to avoid upsetting them." Actually, in the case of Sudan and Mauritania, UNICEF has abandoned tens of thousands of black child slaves and their mothers. Recently UNICEF publicly criticized those who have redeemed slaves in Sudan (this author included), while the agency itself helps redeem slaves in India. This can only be explained by UN politics, not human rights principles. The United Nations has done nothing about the hundreds of thousands of children born into slavery in Mauritania. For the same reasons.
Bales has performed a powerful and significant service. He shows us the horrid facts and then asks, "If there are still slaves, how can you be proud of your freedom?" And, "If we can't choose to stop slavery, how can we say that we are free?"
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Umajanu
beigetreten: Sep 3, 2003
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ADOPTING A CHILD FROM SRILANKA.
September 3, 2003 - 11:12 AM
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Hi. I'm intersted in adopting hunger children from SriLanka. If anyone can give me any sort of information related to this subject, it will be great.
Thanks.
email me : umajanu@hotmail.com
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