"What's so hard about saying the system sucks, yeah, but it sucks less for a lot of people than it did a few years ago." -- Doug Henwood, 28.09.00 --------------------------------- 7 Million children die each year as a result of the debt crisis 5169045 children have died since the start of the year 2000. OVER 20 MILLION PEOPLE ARE SLAVES TODAY http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/ 25 September 2000 'It is an international disgrace that over 20 million people are working as slaves in the world today, ' Mike Dottridge, Director of Anti-Slavery International said. Poverty and the growing demand for cheap, expendable labour is expanding slavery to every continent requiring the fight against this human rights abuse to take new forms. Women from eastern Europe are trafficked to the west as prostitutes; men in India are forced into bonded labour giving their labour in return for a debt for which they have no record; and children are sold for their labour in West Africa. Most people do not believe that slavery still exits in the 21st century. One of our biggest challenges is convincing the public that slavery exists on a massive scale and that we all have a role to play in eradicating it. Anti-Slavery's website, www.antislavery.org, provides information on all forms of slavery today. Anti-Slavery is the world's oldest international human rights organisation and is the only organisation in the UK that works exclusively for the elimination of all forms of slavery around the world. Violence and complicity Past and present http://www.channel4.com/ Several factors converged after the Second World War to give birth to new kinds of slavery. One was population growth: from around two billion people in 1945, the world population exploded to six billion. Most of this growth was in the developing world. Meanwhile, the economic growth that should have been improving the lives of these growing millions was actually pushing them towards slavery. Whole populations were driven from stable poverty into destitution. The evidence for this is clear in the vast shanty towns that surround the major cities of the developing world. About half of Mexico City�s population of 20 million, for instance, live under cardboard and scrap wood without basic services. For the most part these families used to be subsistence farmers. They were dispossessed of their land as governments (in turn often under pressure from �global� institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF) pushed for large-scale �cash crop� economies. Theirs is a tough situation, but poverty on its own doesn�t make people slaves. To turn the poor into slaves requires violence. Violence and complicity To enslave people you must keep them beyond the protection of the law. In some cases this means locking them up. But in many parts of the world a simple payment to the local police allows someone to use violence without fear of arrest. In Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, slavery mostly happens in spite of the efforts of law enforcement, but in many countries slavery grows with the connivance of the police. Around the world people are brutalised and reduced to slavery through violence. Their free will is taken away. Their labour, their minds and their lives are consumed by someone else�s greed. It is not about legal ownership, it is not about buying and selling people, and it is not about race or colour. Slavery today may include any of these things, but they are not essential to enslavement. For the film Slavery and for this website, the definition of a slave is someone who is: unpaid; controlled by violence or the threat of violence; unable to leave. Past and present Slavery exists in many different forms around the world. But these forms share two key characteristics that distinguish them from slavery in the past: slaves today are cheap and they are disposable. This new kind of slavery arrived in the late 20th century. Slaves are cheaper than they have ever been. The fall in their price has been so dramatic that the basic economy of slavery has changed. An average slave in the American South in 1850 cost the equivalent of �40,000; today a slave costs only about �60. When the price of anything drops so much, supply and demand change as well. Today there is a glut of potential slaves on the market, and that means they are worth very little. This in turn means that a slave does not require special care as a major investment, and it means slaves are easily replaced. If slaves get ill, are injured, outlive their usefulness or become troublesome to the slaveholder, they are dumped or worse. _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
