Politics Literal slavery is part of the US supply chain

[Army of Light]

Feds bust 'modern-day slavery' ring amid new immigration enforcement effort

At least 100 immigrant workers were freed from conditions in which at least two died, another was repeatedly raped, and others were kidnapped and threatened with death.

www.nbcnews.com

Even better, it is not unheard of for local officials to be complicit in the operation of these farms. A lot of these slaves have no options when they try to escape, in addition to language barriers, if they go to the police, they may be sent back to the farm, or deported back to the country they were fleeing from

Well it's easy to look at this as an indictment of Georgia and its history, this happens in the North too. It happens in California.

Just don't get the idea that the rest of the country is off the hook. When it came to reconstruction, the rest of the country was complicit in allowing it to end prematurely, they were complicit in allowing violent white supremacist terrorist mobs to murder black political movements and erase towns off the map. The rest of the country was willing to brand black run governments as corrupt. To this day there have been no reparations for slavery, for redlining, for sun down towns. In my own state of Illinois there is a particularly infamous town called Anna which is an obscene acronym. California has farms with slave labor. And to this day it is legal for prisons to use slave labor as a backdoor loophole to the 13th amendment. Mass incarceration was as much about free labor as it was about drugs. The south is bad but so is the rest of the country too. The takeaway from the story shouldn't be that Georgia is bad, but that slavery persists, this farm was part of a supply chain. That supply chain benefited from unpaid and underpaid labor. There are many others out there that must be stopped and collaborators that must be exposed.

While this story is told from the perspective of ICE, don't get the impression that they are the good guys. The article doesn't actually fill in what happens to the people after they are freed from the slavery. But often times ICE just deports them or puts them in detention. Also slavery was illegal before ICE was created. What ICE also does not do is go after the local officials who were complicit in this operation.

Customs and border patrol has had a long history of collaboration with the forces that enslave migrants. From their inception as border militias, they've had to make concessions to farms that depend on exploited migrant labor. Behind the bastards did an episode about it a few months ago. Ice is not the good guys they just happened to shut down a slave plantation this time.

The ugly truth about America is that slavery is part of our supply chain. The 13th amendment has a loophole that allows for slave labor as punishment for the commission of a crime. We also have mass incarceration in the wake of the war on drugs, you do the math.

We need to hold accountable not just the people who every once in awhile get caught after a 3-year sting operation, but the people further down the supply chain that knowingly buy products from them. Back when I was in college Taco Bell got in trouble for using one of these farms as a vendor for their tomatoes. There was a boycott. There needed to be prosecutions to be honest. We need amnesty for migrants who have been affected so that they can tell their stories without fear of deportation or punishment. We need to address the problems in Central America that are pushing people here, namely the ones that we caused.

No human being in the world should be enslaved. No corporation should be allowed to use slave labor even through contractors.

 

[Gashead]

Slavery here in the UK as well, take vulnerable people and lock them away to use in manual labor jobs. In lots of communities, Irish travelers native to the British isles do it, South Asian descent sweatshop owners in the midlands do it, and eastern European gangs from the continent do it for brothels and farming.

Different groups target different people, the mentally ill are used and so are foreigners tricked into thinking they will have better jobs but instead having their documentation taken leaving them too scared to go to the authorities but its truly a multicultural world wide problem of exploitation.

 

[Army of Light]

In Ireland, the Catholic church was doing it. Hasbro was using Magdalene laundries to manufacture some of their board games.

 

[Dekuman]

I mean some of the stuff we buy made in china is made with actual slave labor as well.

 

[Gashead]

I mean some of the stuff we buy made in china is made with actual slave labor as well.

That's my point, it's still everywhere. Parts of West Africa never stopped doing it and the middle east is getting a world cup because of it.

The Atlantic slave trade was neither the start nor end of slavery.

Americas prison system is a crazy legal sort of it.

 

[Nintendianajones64]

America is a slave state. Just read the 13th Amendment. It's literally legalized slavery in the constitution.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT as a punishment for crime"

The quickest way to restaff plantations after emancipation is incarceration. The quickest way to incarceration is prohibition.

 

[Marizza Pia Spiritto]

That happens in pretty much every big global city.

 

[Harina]

I thought this was gonna be about the churches in America doing this, where undocumented immigrants "work" for them.

 

[monsterfundotcom]

I thought everyone who pays attention to politics pretty much knew about the 13th amendment's loophole and yeah this is how tons of undocumented immigrants are treated when they come here. The H-2A visa program ultimately amounts to them getting fucked with and the capitalists making fat profits. We consume a ton of stuff made by slave labor as well, the parts in your phone to the clothes you wear.