National Geographic article about slavery today uses the figure 27 million, that is 27,000,000!
There is, in fact, a current worldwide abolitionist movement
And it really is all economic because human life has become so cheap, given the disparity in income and power.
There are some folks who rather than being “Democrats” or “Republicans” are in fact today’s abolitionists – and their top award is The Frederick Douglas Award given to a former slave, who has survived slavery and fights to free other slaves. In fact, nominations are being taken for 2011 because as much as you and I might have believed, or wanted to believe that was part of Civil War history, in fact the fight against slavery is live right now, and real, and going on today with some folks giving up their lives to free others.
What was done in eliminating the living wage at the Hyatt, and instead, denigrating those jobs into non-living wage peonage jobs while not as extreme, shows the same worldview on the part of an international elite.
There is an elite that believes if you are not an owner, you are owned or deserve to be owned. And all too many powerless people, often women and children, are owned like chattels in 2010.
So my thanks to Siddarth Kara for speaking truth to the insidious power of slavery, and coming up with a battle plan against it based on economic pragmatism.
Without economic freedom, there can not be – and will not be – political freedom.
FDR knew this and in his Four Freedoms Address to Congress stated that without freedom from want, there cannot be political freedom.
So, yes, perhaps Massachusetts will again be home to abolitionism – courage to all in these hard times because what certain members of the elite seek appears to me to be a form of slavery for everyone else; for some 27,000,000 or so fellow humans that is already reality.
What am NOT talking about is ordinary wealth, a few million doesn’t bother me at all, but economic control where individuals control more than nations; already, I fear, a reality for many of our fellow human beings.
Child marriage is one of the forms of contemporary slavery recognized by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. In the developing world one in seven girls is married by the age of 15. She’s probably condemned to a life of poverty and illness.
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p>So when the U.S. Senate (rarely considered these days as a source of progressive thinking), passed legislation on December 1 to recognize child marriage as a human rights violation and to work on strategies to prevent it, its action was praised by international leaders Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu in a Washington Post editorial.
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p>Win-win-win? Not so fast.
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p>When the billreached the House of Representatives, a two-thirds vote was required to suspend the rules in order to pass it. Speaker-to-be John Boehner opposed iton the grounds that it
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(Sure, we’re gullible enough to believe that the Senate would have passed a bill – unanimously no less — that promoted abortion.)
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p>The bill received majority support but not supermajority support, and therefore was defeated in the House on December 16.
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p>Welcome, I fear, to 2011.
A handmaid’s tale
As you say, Boehner’s views eerily suggest the theocracy of Gilead in A Handmaid’s Tale.
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p>On the other side, arch Islamophobe Pamela Geller (titan against the “Ground Zero Mosque”in NYC) is working the child marriage issue as another indictment of Islam. See her website here. On this issue she has some affinities with the today’s abolitionists.
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p>I’m not sure how happy John Boeher can make the anti-abortion folks on this issue without alienating the anti-Islamists.
I certainly don’t think that Geller would be a welcome ally in the fight against modern slavery — her xenophobia would make that impossible.
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p>Just that her opposition to child marriage, despite its hateful origins, could make things a little warm for Mr. Boehner.
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