Slavery

A Tale Of Two Tyrants: Nestlé’s Role In Prayuth’s Thailand

March 4, 2016 Caroline Holmund for Truthout, www.truth-out.org Educate! Nestle, Slavery, Thailand

By Caroline Holmund for Truthout - In what came as a shock to many, in February, the United States took the step of completely banning the import of goods made by slave labor. Indeed, President Obama signed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, closing an 86-year-old loophole that had allowed the United States to purchase foreign goods produced with child labor or forced labor. Hold the applause, for this moral awakening did not come from Washington, DC, but stemmed from the efforts of journalists working for The Associated Press as well as from Nestlé's surprising admission of guilt that its global supply chain relied on impoverished migrant workers in Thailand.

Native American Slaves In New France

January 20, 2016 Brett Rushforth and Andrew Kahn, www.slate.com Educate! Colonialism, History, Native Americans, Slavery

By Brett Rushforth and Andrew Kahn for Slate - Between 1660 and 1760, French colonists in New France enslaved as many as 10,000 Native Americans, forcing them to work as farm hands, domestic servants, and construction laborers. Enslaved Natives tended livestock, prepared meals, washed laundry, loaded trade goods into warehouses and onto boats, and cared for French children. Despite the trauma of their violent capture and forced transport into an alien culture, they found ways to survive: forming friendships, stealing private moments of solitude, making plans for a future when they would no longer be slaves.

America’s Other Original Sin

January 20, 2016 Rebecca Onion, www.slate.com Educate! Colonialism, Native Americans, Slavery, US history

By Rebecca Onion for Slate - Here are three scenes from the history of slavery in North America. In 1637, a group of Pequot Indians, men and boys, having risen up against English colonists in Connecticut and been defeated, were sold to plantations in the West Indies in exchange for African slaves, allowing the colonists to remove a resistant element from their midst. (The tribe’s women were pressed into service in white homes in New England, where domestic workers were sorely lacking.)

New Book: America Built On Slavery & Was Worse Than You Imagine

October 5, 2015 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org Educate! Slavery, White Supremacy

By Steven Rosenfeld for Alternet - This August, when Hillary Clinton met with Black Lives Matter protesters, they told her that ongoing violence and prejudice against blacks was part of a long historic continuum where, for example, today’s prison system descended from the old Southern plantations. Slavery, Clinton replied, was the “original sin... that America has not recovered from.” But how much do modern Americans really know about slavery in colonial America? In the genocide of Native Americans? In the War of Independence or the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? Or afterward for decades until the Civil War? Chances are, not very much. Not that slaves, for example, were money in the antebellum South—currency and credit—which led to the enforced, systematic break-up of black families in generation after generation. There was no national currency, and little silver or gold, but there was paper tied to slaves bought on credit whose offspring were seen as a dividend that grew over time.

A Brief History Of Slavery & The Origins Of American Policing

September 6, 2015 Victor E. Kappeler, www.plsonline.eku.edu Educate! Police, Racism, Slavery

By Victor E. Kappeler for Police Studies Online - The birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation's first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.

Newsletter – Struggle For Independence Continues

July 4, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter Bankers, fast track, Finance and the Economy, Greece, Independence, indigenous, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Rights, Israel, Palestine, Racism, Slavery, TISA, TPP

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Today, there continue to be struggles for independence in the US and around the world. In the US, as the country celebrates the 4th of July, more are understanding that the so-called "founding fathers" have taken credit for a mass movement of colonists who sought independence, where nearly 100 "Declarations of Independence" were written before the Jefferson version; and where the issues of racism, sexism, and ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous were not recognized. Rather than celebrating the slave-owning plutocrats who hijacked this country we celebrate those who continue the struggle for self-determination here and around the world. The struggle, as we can see in Greece, is against the plutocratic bankers who profit while the 99 percent suffer the consequences of their wealth extraction. True independence is a worldwide struggle that is ongoing.

Celebrating The 4th Of July Is A Cartoon Of Miseducation

July 3, 2015 Bill Bigelow, www.zinnedproject.org Educate! Independence, Indigenous Peoples, Slavery, United States

By Bill Bigelow for Zinn Education Project. The fireworks of the 4th of July turns an immensely complicated time in U.S. history into a cartoon of miseducation. For example, check out Ray Raphael’s “Re-examining the Revolution” at the Zinn Education Project, an article that every history teacher should read before wading into the events leading up to 1776. Raphael analyzed 22 elementary, middle school, and high school texts and found them filled with inaccuracies—some merely silly, but others that leave students with important misunderstandings about U.S. history, and how social change does and does not happen.

America’s Slave Empire

June 23, 2015 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Slavery

By Chris Hedges for Truthdig. “We have to shut down the prisons,” Council, known as Kinetik, one of the founders of the Free Alabama Movement, told me by phone from the Holman Correctional Facility in Escambia County, Ala. He has been in prison for 21 years, serving a sentence of life without parole. “We will not work for free anymore. All the work in prisons, from cleaning to cutting grass to working in the kitchen, is done by inmate labor. [Almost no prisoner] in Alabama is paid. Without us the prisons, which are slave empires, cannot function. Prisons, at the same time, charge us a variety of fees, such as for our identification cards or wrist bracelets, and [impose] numerous fines, especially for possession of contraband. They charge us high phone and commissary prices. Prisons each year are taking larger and larger sums of money from the inmates and their families. The state gets from us millions of dollars in free labor and then imposes fees and fines. You have brothers that work in kitchens 12 to 15 hours a day and have done this for years and have never been paid.”

Newsletter: See You At The Barricades

June 6, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese at Popular Resistance, www.PopularResistance.org Newsletter #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Coal Mining, fast track, Fracking, Human Right, Human Trafficking, Indigenous People, Militarization, NSA, Patriot Act, Slavery, Solar Energy, TISA, TPP, TTIP, USA Freedom Act, Wikileaks

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese at Popular Resistance. We are at a crossroads to either a future of global corporate governance or a chance for democracy. As Chris Hedges writes in his new book, "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt," a revolution is coming but we can't guarantee which way it will go. Will you be there to fight for justice? You have an opportunity to do that now. This is the critical week to stop Fast Track legislation from passing in Congress. Fast Track could last for the next six years and would enable passage of not just the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but also the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). There are different ways to define security. Some would say that security means a police or military force to protect people from those who might cause harm. Others would say that security means the government has a responsibility to make sure that the basic needs of its people are met which in itself would reduce crimes and the need for a violent security force. This is your food for thought for this week. How do you define security?

TPP Reduces Human Trafficking & Child Labor To Misdemeanors

June 3, 2015 Stan Sorscher, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Capitalism, Human Trafficking, Slavery, TPP, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Stan Sorscher in Huffington Post - The most recent US Department of Labor report shows that Malaysia uses forced labor in its electronics and garment industry, and child labor to produce palm oil. Mass graves were recently discovered with 139 bodies of men women and children showing signs of torture. Many of the victims in Malaysia are Rohingya Muslims who are exploited by human traffickers, held for ransom, and traded among other smugglers. In Malaysia, investigations, prosecutions and convictions are down. This deterioration in enforcement occurred while Malaysia was helping negotiate the labor provisions in TPP. On May 19, in an abrupt about-face, Senator Menendez tried to soften the language that he had originally proposed to the Finance Committee, excluding Tier 3 countries from the TPP.

Activists Disrupt For-Profit Prison Corporation Meeting

April 30, 2015 Nadia Prupis, www.commondreams.org Resist! Mass Incarceration, Privatization, Slavery

As the for-profit prison corporation GEO Group held its annual shareholder meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on Wednesday, human rights organizations calling for an end to incarceration converged on the company's headquarters to demand accountability and divestment from the prison industry. The prison-industrial complex "not only profits off the imprisonment of of America's most vulnerable, but also corrupts our system through draconian legislation and our education system," said one activist, Joshua McConnel, who joined the march organized by Dream Defenders, Prison Legal News, Grassroots Leadership, SEIU Florida, and other groups. Taking up the call for other institutions to divest from the prison industry, McConnel continued, "My own university, the University of Central Florida... takes my tuition dollars and so many others and invests in companies just like GEO Group and CCA [Corrections Corporation of America]."

Black Women’s Resistance To The Legacy Of The Arab Slave Trade

April 12, 2015 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Africa, Arab, Slavery, Woman

Blackness and the Islamic Empire slave trade For the past fourteen centuries Arab, Turkish, Persian and some African nations and empires have conducted the Arab slave trade, also known as the “Islamic Empire slave trade” or “Eastern slave trade.” This slave trade was practiced primarily in North Africa, the Horn of Africa and in what is today known as the Middle East, as well as in southern Europe. People were captured from the interior of Africa and then sold in slave markets in the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Even though what the true numbers, a conservative estimate from some historians say that from the 8th century till present day, around 20 million people were taken from southern and central Africa and through the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and the Sahara desert. Black refugee women face further issues in Egyptian society. Single women and Black refugee mothers find it difficult to find housing because Egyptian landlords only want to rent to two-parent households. Furthermore, the common job for refugee in the informal economy is as a domestic workers, in which they often are subjected to psychological, physical and sexual abuse from their employers.

Banking On Slavery

March 24, 2015 Gilda Haas, www.drpop.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, History, Reparations, Slavery

The biggest “aha” for me after reading Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is the extent to which financial speculation is baked into the American economy. From Baptist I learned that 185 years ago, the acquisition of slaves, like any other property, could be financed by mortgages; that bonds were sold to investors based on the value of those mortgages; and, that securities based on enslaved human beings produced a “slave asset bubble” not unlike that produced by the rampant speculation in home mortgage derivatives that helped cause the financial crisis of 2008. In his elegant Atlantic magazine article, The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates works backwards from recent experiences in Chicago to the history that Baptist describes. I cannot recommend this article highly enough, because, as Coates and many others are deeply aware, it is impossible to make a case for reparations without bearing witness to our own shared history.

The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves

March 17, 2015 John Martin, www.globalresearch.ca Educate! Education, History, Ireland, Slavery

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children. Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives. We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.

The Slaves That Time Forgot

March 17, 2015 gjohnsit, www.dailykos.com Educate! History, Ireland, Slavery

For some reason, history likes to call these Irish slaves as 'indentured servants'. As if they were somehow considered better than African slaves. This can be considered an attempt at whitewashing the history of the Irish slave trade. There does exist indentured servitude where two parties sign a contract for a limited amount of time. This is not what happened to the Irish from 1625 onward. They were sold as slaves, pure and simple. In reality, they were considered by some to be even lower than the blacks. African slaves were still relatively new, and were expensive to transport such a long distance (50 sterling in the late 1600's). Irish slaves on the other hand, were relatively cheap in comparison (5 sterling).

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