Do you think that slavery was abolished?

[sweetheart]

June 19th, 1865 is the date when the slaves were freed, when the
beloved 13th amendment came in to being:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
This was 32 years after the most powerful empire of the time banished
slavery from its realm. (british)

There are 27 million slaves in the world today:
http://www.freetheslaves.net/

So it begs the question of what slavery was abolished, and whether
it was merely outsourced.

So, if britain abolished slavery across its empire in 1833, and america,
the worlds most powerful economic nation, has overseen the growth of
slavery to the largest levels yet seen in history during its global
empire, what was abolished?

[eallen]

1. That was the 13th amendment. But the 14th is also a good one.

[sweetheart]

2. thanks

fixed that goof

[NoPasaran]

3. Actually, the 13th Amendment took effect in December, 1865

June 19, 1865---Juneteenth is when newly arrived military governor General Gordon Granger proclaimed the end of slavery in Texas, the last region of Secessia to come back under Federal control.

[sweetheart]

14. isn't that all moot?

That the congress percieves itself as the global policeman, yet does
nothing about millions of slaves, implies that slavery never was
ended, except a wink and a nudge.

Does it matter, january, february or june. The dates are remembered
and the substance lost.. (not you)... just american culture.

[KurtNYC]

4. How to make $1 an hour in NYC

The Bowery warren is just one of scores set up to house illegal immigrants from China, men and women smuggled in to work in the teeming sweatshops and restaurants of New York City's many Chinatowns. "Here we live like pigs and eat like dogs," says Son Li, 66, who arrived four years ago and works 12-hr. shifts seven days a week as a clothes hanger in a sweatshop on Lafayette Street, a few blocks away from the Bowery barracks. He says he makes about $1 an hour, when his employer pays.
...
"The West Coast has better wages, and the living conditions are better," he says. "But the labor laws there are enforced more strictly. The immigrants come to New York because it is lawless. The 1986 immigration act made employers responsible for hiring undocumented aliens, ceding the New York garment industry to the criminals who take advantage of illegals too afraid or unable to complain." Today, he says, it is common for sweatshops to withhold eight weeks' pay from workers who have no government agency to turn to for help. Says Lam: "Those few who do complain find that an agreement of understanding between the Labor Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service means that anyone who complains about wages or working conditions will be deported. It has created a plantation system where bosses can do virtually anything to workers without fear of penalty."

http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1998/981109/chinatown1.html

If it looks likes slavery and seems like slavery then I think it is slavery. Outrageous.

[sweetheart]

15. Cheap labour

Slaves undermine the market for legal labour. Allowing cloaqued slavery
to resume trade is the republican weapon against labour... the race
to the bottom has no bottom, and it is sickening indeed. OUTRAGEOUS.

[wildeyed]

5. The more I learn about slavery, the more I believe that

it is pure, unadulterated, out-of-control, evil greed. And to make this problem more complicated, it appears that slaves are incredibly cheap in today's economy. From the website:

An average slave in the American South in 1850 cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money; today a slave costs an average of $90. In 1850 it was difficult to capture a slave and then transport them to the US. Today, millions of economically and socially vulnerable people around the world are potential slaves. This “supply” makes slaves today cheaper than they have ever been. Since they are so cheap, slaves are no longer a major investment worth maintaining. If slaves get sick, are injured, outlive their usefulness, or become troublesome to the slaveholder, they are dumped or killed.

[sweetheart]

18. It does indeed smack of "cheap labour"...

opportunism. What better to threaten workers rights than "no pay" and
"no rights"... WOW! That makes the race to the bottom really THE
BOTTOM... and plays in to the hands of the repuke slave state like
wet sloppy sex.

[bloom]

6. I read something recently about how many slaves

basically work for each of us so that we can have what we have.

People don't usually want to think in those terms. But I think it is important to consider.

[bloom]

7. It might have been this - "energy slaves"

"A former board member of Greenpeace, Dr. Durr has developed the concept of "energy slaves" to illustrate the drain on the world's resources by the West.

"I divide energy into manpower, and a manpower is a quarter horse-power. If you make a calculation you will find that behind us there are 130 billion energy slaves working for the world's six billion people.<snip>

"The world's population is six billion, so that means every person is only actually entitled to 15 energy slaves. If you look at the problem, you will find it is really unfairly distributed. America for example has 110 energy slaves per person, Europe has 60, China has eight and a Bangladeshi has one. So you have really to get birth control on energy slaves."

Dr. Durr calculated that the world was presently home to about 130 billion energy slaves - 40 billion more than the world could sustain."<more>

http://worldforum98.percepticon.com/sustainability/article_durr.html

[Ron Green]

11. I think your other post (#6) holds much truth, though.

Most of us in the US live so far above the world mean standard that our lifestyles are supported by slavery, both de facto and de jure. To strive to rectify this fact is to seek to diminish our own safety and comfort, and that's a tall order.

[bloom]

13. This is another take on the "energy slaves"

It had been an article on DUs homepage. Now @

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-p/last-chance.htm

"Today, the average North American utilizes each day the energy equivalent of thousands of slaves (one slave = 1/3 horsepower per day) and horses (one horse = 6 horsepower per day). Fossil energy transports his food thousands of miles to his table. Petroleum products are the source of farm fertilizers and they drive farm machinery. Because of the productivity of fossil fuel driven industrial agriculture the average American farmer now feeds fifty of his fellow citizens. In a very real sense, we "eat petroleum."

If the oil supply were to dry up with no successor fuel at hand, most of our population would have to return to the land to raise their own food, only to find that the fertile land had been sacrificed to suburban sprawl or lost to erosion and desertification."


------

I think what the average American buys could be reduced to how many people in the world have to work for us to have what we have. If anyone has that estimation - I would interested.

[greyl]

8. Define "slavery" ie wage slavery, people as property, addiction...

But I suppose that's the partial point of the rhetorical question you're sharing - that slavery hasn't been eliminated, it's only changed form.

I'm not sure how existential you wanted to go, but I'll offer that in one form or another, slavery is ubiquitous. Static laws against one definition of slavery can be enacted locally, but they have zero effect beyond the boundaries of symantics and geographic jurisdiction.

The issues of personhood and the honor that societies afford their members is at the heart of the matter. The static social level of evolution always enslaves the dynamic intellectual level (individuals) in order to protect itself.

"The analogy with which I began seems more appropriate than I realized at the time. Originally I saw students as niggers and slaves primarily in relation to their teachers and administrators. Now I realize more clearly than before that students are society's slaves and that teachers are no more than overseers. It's a mistake to get hung up exclusively in a struggle against teachers just as it's a mistake to let one's anger toward ghetto cops obscure the larger threat of the racist society that pays their salary and buys their bullets."

from: http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030301studentasnigger.html

[sweetheart]

9. "slavery is ubiquitous"

When you say that personhood and honour are at the heart of the matter,
do you mean the enlightened indivdiual or corporate personhood? (both
reads ok) So the static corporate person enslaves the.."dynamic
intellectual level (individuals) in order to protect itself."

Your post leaves me looking up slavery in the dictionary:
slav·er·y n. pl. slav·er·ies

1. The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.
2.
1. The practice of owning slaves.
2. A mode of production in which slaves constitute the principal work force.
3. The condition of being subject or addicted to a specified influence.
4. A condition of hard work and subjection: wage slavery.


slavery

n 1: the state of being under the control of another person 2: the practice of owning slaves 3: work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay

I'm curious how you see the form that slavery has adopted in our
modern era that it is unnoticed. This is more than kids in bondage
across other nations, but slavery of ourselves. I believe that only
a slave can enslave others, and there is something rotten in
Denmark that so many are enslaved in a BFEE-ocracy *without* slaves.

[forgethell]

10. Are we

responsible for slavery in Africa today? How so? Isn't it rather mainly the Muslims who are enslaving blacks and Christians in Africa? Maybe we should land the Marines? How have we caused said slavery?

The 13th amendment abolished slavery only in the United States, not elsewhere where the US has no legal authority. More important: what are you doing about it?

[noiretextatique]

12. go to the original site for more information

"Since slavery feeds directly into the global economy, it makes sense that we would be concerned by the ways in which slavery flows into our homes through the products we buy and the investments we make. Slaves harvest cocoa in the Ivory Coast, make charcoal used to produce steel in Brazil, and weave carpets in India. These products reach our stores and our homes."

[Deja Q]

16. No. Just redefined. It's been renamed to any of the following:

"minimum wage"
"offshoring"
"offpeopling"
"selling open source"
"salaried employees"

etc.

[sweetheart]

17. Has it really?

I mean, minimum wage is not exactly being "owned" and your parallel
is only a metaphor for that gray area between sovereign individualism
and real slavery. I've gotten a barrage of that on a recent thread
from mondo joe and others that slavery is only "SLAVERY" and everything
else is a shameful fallacy to relate to the big "S"... and i'm not
such a black and white thinker... more inclined to see slavery
re-asserting itself in a form not pre-conceived of.

[forgethell]

19. Yet there is

real chattel slavery current in Africa, generally among the Muslims.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

22. What the hell? Any evidence for THAT?

Please. Inquiring minds want to know. Links?

Also, every now and then the police busts a farm in the far reachs of Brazil holding workers against their will, running the "company store" scam to keep them in "debt." Slavery. And they're hardly Muslims.

[forgethell]

23. Sure

http://www.iabolish.com/

http://www.iabolish.com/slavery_today.htm


Or you could just google up a thousand of them.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

25. Notice that it isn't "Africa" I was skeptic about.

I know the worst offenses happen in Africa. But those stories say nothing about the religion of the perpetrators. There's bound to be many Muslims among them for the sole reason that there's many Muslims in Africa. (Likewise, most of the offenders in Brazil are Christian) Why did you fell necessary to say "generally among Muslims?"

[crimson333]

26. If you click on the Africa map

It does indeed mention the religion of the perpetrators

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

27. It does mention Islam in Mauritania and Sudan

And native religion in other places of Africa. Now, in Asia, I found this:

"More people are enslaved in Asia than any other continent."

and no mention of Islam whatsoever. The bottom line is, I smell a huge axe to grind. Not by you, you just jumped in on the existin exchange.

[crimson333]

28. no problem

and I shall stay out of your exstin exchange, because I don't want to get hit by crossfire.:-)

[forgethell]

29. No, nobody seems to be

concerned about Africa. It's really sad.

Animists and Muslims. Did you see the one about the Christians? Neither did I.

[potatoe]

20. We should be grateful for the British Empire, whose Royal Navy

delivered the crucial force necessary to bring the international slave trade to a halt. The notion that slavery was abhorrent and intolerable anywhere took root in the churches of England and Scotland, thanks to William Wilberforce and others like him, and caused a fire in the minds of believers there. The fire spread to New England. The British began doing what they could to forcibly impose their morality on other cultures, and thank goodness.

[sweetheart]

21. The good side of neoliberalism

Would that the neocriminals were moral to the point of ending slavery,
and totally ironic that the movement to revive slavery is based on
american fundy churches.

[justjones]

24. No. Slavery is still happening around the world.

For example, check out the testimony of this man:

Escape from Slavery

Seems there's plenty of African slaves in the Arab world, something that isn't widely known in the United States.

[applegrove]

30. Link to today's Darfur News: June 04, 2005 thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3786376#