Family Values

Nicholas Kristoff writes in the NYT today about sex slavery and the vicious torture of girl slaves in the trade in Cambodia. Read it, if you dare. This grisly, filthy business actually isn't a world away. To the extent that it caters to them, it begins in the consciousness of Western men. It exists because they like it and because Cambodian men and women slave-traders and brothel owners can profit from it.

Kristoff concludes:

"Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s. . . .

"I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists."

Everything Kristoff says is true and urgent. And yet. . .

Is Kristoff really unaware of the slavery that underpins much of US business? Florida's and Texas' citrus and vegetable industries are equally brutal, routinely practicing beatings, starvations, and murders--not to mention gross wage theft. Growers know it, local residents and authorities know it, state officials know it, ICE knows it, and so does Congress. Everyone winks.

Is it somehow easier to focus on Cambodia's sex trafficking than on the domestic variety? Ask any big city US mayor whether there's a thriving underground economy in trafficking and torturing girls (and boys)--whether Cambodian, Vietnamese, Russian, Texan, or New Yorker. Ask the Attorneys General in Utah, Texas, and Arizona whether sex slavery exists in remote fundamentalist Mormon enclaves, protected by whole townships. Ask them whether torture is involved. If they don't mention re-assigning wives, dumping boys too young to fend for themselves and without any means of support, and handing over pre-teen girls for the sexual pleasure of men old enough to be their grandfathers, point out that these things, too, constitute torture.

I don't knock Kristoff's service in publicizing the horror of the Cambodian sex slave trade. Good for him. But it's breathlessly naive to assert that sex slavery (abroad) "is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery." (It's this kind of thing that makes me think of Kristoff as such a lightweight.)

"Truly the 21st century's version of slavery"? Well, no.

Sex slavery is merely ONE of 21st century America's versions of slavery. We have several.

Wherever wage theft occurs, there is some degree of forced labor, one criterion for defining slavery. This includes the legions of mostly foreign domestics brought here and then imprisoned in the blight of a million McMansions.

There are legions of undocumented workers lured and brought here and sold off by "coyotes" to complicit managers in construction, agriculture, meat processing, landscaping, and entertainment.

There are legions of girls and boys bought and sold as sex slaves for guys we see in suits every day. There are legions of children who are being circulated among pedophiles, and raped by their fathers and uncles and brothers and cousins. These, too, are forms of sex slavery.

So you might wish that Kristoff would place the Cambodian sex slave trade in its larger global context, and that he would also illuminate the myriad forms of slavery happening right here, right now. The home-grown variety.

And you might think that, in addition to challenging Obama and Clinton, Kristoff would challenge, oh, say, the "religious" Right.

You might think that it's a far, far worthier cause to target slavery in any of its loathesome manifestations than it is to target the right of GLBT persons to marry, adopt, and serve openly in the US military.

Free Trade, Sex/Slave Trade, and Immigration

Naomi Klein's explosive book about US global economic policy explains everything from the Iraq catastrophe and the Gulf Coast/New Orleans fiasco to Bush's near-wrecking of the national economy. The diabolical practice misleadingly called "free trade" or "globalism" is actually about how, over more than three decades, the wealthy have tested and perfected ways to dispossess the middle classes and the poor. Klein's work is painstakingly documented. There are more than a dozen examples involving Latin American, Asian, Pacific Rim, Middle Eastern, and European countries, as well as a close look at New Orleans. It's all there, and in my opinion, nobody who hopes to understand the main currents of contemporary life can afford not to read it.

The connections are deep and wide. When multinational corporations and their political, academic, and military allies conspire to create or capitalize (literally) on the conditions Klein explains--distracting disasters--the result is that the middle class is destroyed and the poor are abandoned, left to starve or drown.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how this practice--"free trade"--is, then, also fundamentally responsible for creating the conditions that lead to global worker migrations and to the international sex trade.

The former is obvious. If Monsanto introduces genetically altered crops into a country, the natural, organic counterpart is overtaken, erased, as it were, by cross-pollination. In time, crop monopolization occurs, genetically. If aggressive lawsuits then carefully ensure that no one can grow and market Monsanto's trade-marked hybrid without paying royalties to the corporation, small farmers and local growers are forced out of business or driven off their lands to other parts of the country. Then it becomes a race against time.

In the end, wind pollinates, and Monsanto wins. Thus, without their permission, and often over their urgent protest, their fields have been filled with Monsanto's trade-marked corn, maize, rice, soy--whatever--which they are not allowed to grow or sell. Left with few if any alternatives, few skills, and no money, they are forced off their own lands and, ultimately, often out of their own countries.

The connection between "free trade" and the international sex/slave trade is perhaps not so obvious, and I am indebted to a good friend for bringing it to my attention this morning. The dynamics are essentially the same: Extreme poverty with no alternatives forces extreme actions. For instance, what happens to village peasants when post-tsunami developers seize their lands, raze what's left of their villages, and put up luxury tourist spots? Dispossessed of village, family, trade, market, and all means to survive, some of them sell their daughters into the sex/slave trade, not necessarily knowing that it is the sex/slave trade.

These desperate, illiterate people are easy prey to outsiders' promises that their daughters will have a better life, a good education, a fine marriage if only . . . . After all, it doesn't take much to abandon a girl child in a culture where girls are regarded as liabilities due to dowry customs and lower wage prospects (if outside work is permitted at all). All this and pending starvation is a mighty persuader.

The moral depravity of these economic practices is just boggling. Unfortunately, the moral responsibility for ending them extends to us. Pick your cause: Environmental degradation? Sex/slave trade? Immigration? Women's rights? The rights of people of color? Minimum wage? Elder rights? There's virtually nothing that "free trade"--privatization, demolished social safety nets, zero taxes for the wealthy and the corporations, and cuts in wages and benefits--doesn't make worse. So it's imperative to act. Pick your cause, get informed, and get busy. The earth itself is counting on you and me.