good Alternet article on modern slavery

[sam]

When I first saw it I thought to myself, "If they kick at sexual enslavement just to get a dig in at the Bush Administration..." but I was pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong and the author did no such thing. Instead, she steps back and gives a wide-ranging view of global slavery that doesn't pit one form against another but integrates them into a whole picture of Western people's gratuitous greed and the poverty-stricken people who suffer to feed their demands.

I'd say all the women I learned radical feminism from are staunchly anti-captialist and are among the most critical voices against compartmentalizing oppressions that overlap to ridiculous degrees. Pornography is capitalism meeting prostitution in the modern neoliberal model and I've found allies from capitalism-critical mindsets easier to persuade and more willing to open themselves to rejecting prostitution than many liberal feminists who don't delve into class and economic issues outside how they affect women specifically.

True Tales of Modern-Day Slaves

http://www.alternet.org/story/38684/?co ... 50#c152571

Despite the Civil War, slavery hasn't gone away. Three writers consider what life is like for the more than 27 million people on Earth who don't even own themselves.

Say what you will about the USA, but slavery has been illegal here since the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, and was outlawed long before that in many states. North Americans tend to see slavery in sepia tones, as a legacy, because in practice it belongs to our receding past.

OK, not for the preteen girl forced to serve the large Orange County family of Abdelnasser Eid Youssef Ibrahim and Amal Ahmed Ewis-abd Motelib from 2000 to 2002 while being slapped and threatened and forbidden to go outside. But Ibrahim and Motelib are on trial, charged with keeping a child in involuntary servitude, facing an October 23 sentencing. As part of a plea deal, they must pay the now-16-year-old some $100,000 in restitution and back wages. In the courtroom, Motelib told the judge through a translator: "We did a mistake here in the United States of America because … at that time we were new here." The Los Angeles Times called the keeping of poor children as servants in wealthy households "a common though illegal practice in Egypt."

Slavery thrives. From Albanian sex workers to Indian cigarette-rollers to black Africans bought and sold in Mauritania and Sudan: According to latter-day abolitionists such as the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, more people -- AASG estimates some 27 million -- are owned now than ever before.