Slavery is good

Here Michael Medved blithers about the African slaves and how we did them a favor by bringing them to America. One point stood out:

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

Which brought me to this book review: Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy:

In this eye-opening look at the contemporary American scourge of labor abuse and outright slavery, journalist and author Bowe (Gig: Americans Talk About their Jobs) visits locations in Florida, Oklahoma and the U.S.-owned Pacific island of Saipan, where slavery cases have been brought to light as recently as 2006. There, he talks to affected workers, providing many moving and appalling first-hand accounts. In Immokalee, Florida, migrant Latino tomato and orange pickers are barely paid, kept in decrepit conditions and intimidated, violently, to keep quiet about it.

A welding factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma imported workers from India who were forced to pay exorbitant "recruiting fees" and live in squalid barracks with tightly controlled access to the outside world. Considering the tiny island capital of Saipan, Bowe explores how its culture, isolation and American ties made it so favorable an environment for exploitative garment manufacturers and corrupt politicos; alongside the factories sprouted karaoke bars, strip joints and hotels where politicians were entertained by now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The detailed chapter gives readers a lasting image of the island, touted a "miracle of economic development," as a vulnerable, truly suffering community, where poverty rates have climbed as high as 35 percent.

Bowe's deeply researched, well-written treatise on the very real problem of modern American slavery deserves the attention of anyone living, working and consuming in America.

The United States still has slavery?

And this about Bush, Abramoff and the Northern Mariana Islands, John Aravosis of Americablog in 10/16/06:

Remember how just two years ago George Bush claimed he wanted to put a stop to human trafficking - i.e., women being forced into sexual slavery?

Then why was the Bush administration's premiere advocate for stopping such sexual slavery forced out of his job a while back?

According to the Sunday Los Angeles Times, he was fired because convicted criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff was representing one of the countries that most profits from sexual slavery and human trafficking, the Northern Mariana Islands. Abramoff wanted this Bush administration official fired because the official's anti-human-trafficking agenda - now George Bush's agenda - posed a direct threat to Abramoff's pro-sex-slave client.

But Jack Abramoff doesn't have the power to fire a Bush administration official - all he can do is ask. Someone inside the Bush administration had to do Abramoff's dirty work and fire the official on behalf of Abramoff and his client. According to the Los Angeles Times, that someone was former senior Bush White House official, and now head of the Republican party, Ken Mehlman.

And then my post about the collection of illegal immigrants and others being held in concentration camps in the United States with no oversight.

I've been getting consistent hits on this last year's post about a parody site about slavery being good for the economy. It boggles my mind.

What the hell is going on?

Remembering the Confederacy

With fondness:

March 12, 2007 — Guestworkers who come to the United States are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; held virtually captive by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries, according to a new report released by the Center today.

The report — Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States — comes as Congress is about to begin debating immigration legislation that could greatly expand guestworker programs to cover hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new temporary foreign workers.

"Congress should reform our broken immigration system, but reform should not rely on creating a vast new guestworker program," said Mary Bauer, director of the SPLC's Immigrant Justice Project and author of the report. "The current program is shamefully abusive in practice, and there is almost no enforcement of worker rights."

The 48-page report, based on interviews with thousands of guestworkers and dozens of legal cases, describes the systematic abuse of workers under what is known as the H-2 system administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The program was created in 1943 to allow the sugar cane industry to bring in temporary workers and was revised by Congress in 1986 to include non-agricultural workers.