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	Dismantling the business of Human Trafficking by Human Rights First, agencies   May 2016   An estimated 45.8 million men, women and children around the world are today trapped in modern slavery – 28% more than previously estimated. They are enslaved through human trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage, forced or servile marriage or commercial sexual exploitation. This is revealed in the 2016 Global Slavery Index, the flagship research report published today by the Walk Free Foundation.   North Korea is the country with the greatest prevalence of modern slavery, with 4.37% of its population estimated to be enslaved. It is also the country with the weakest government response in terms of actions taken to combat modern slavery. The next highest prevalence of slavery is found in Uzbekistan (3.97%), followed by Cambodia (1.65%).   In terms of absolute numbers, India remains the highest with an estimated 18.35 million enslaved people, followed by China (3.39m), Pakistan (2.13m), Bangladesh (1.53m) and Uzbekistan (1.23m). Combined, these five countries account for almost 58% of the world’s enslaved, or 26.6 million people.   The 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates that 28% more people are enslaved than reported in the 2014 edition. This significant increase is due to enhanced data collection and research methodology. Survey research for the 2016 Global Slavery Index included over 42,000 interviews conducted in 53 languages across 25 countries, including 15 state-level surveys in India. These representative surveys cover 44% of the global population.   The Global Slavery Index also tracks government actions and responses to modern slavery. Of the 161 assessed, 124 countries have criminalised human trafficking in line with the UN Trafficking Protocol and 96 have developed national action plans to coordinate government response.   Some progress has been made by many governments since the publication of the 2014 report. The UK Government introduced the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and has appointed an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. President Barack Obama closed a loophole in US law to now ban the importation of goods made with forced or child labour.   While India has more people enslaved than any other country, it has made some progress in introducing measures to tackle the problem. It has criminalised trafficking, slavery, forced labour, child prostitution and forced marriage. The Indian government is revising legislation against human trafficking, with tougher punishment for repeat offenders. It will offer victims protection and recovery support.   http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/download/   Feb. 2016   This year marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. Yet in the world today there are an estimated 20.9 million people enslaved, and the United States is both a source and destination of victims. While the United States would have a moral responsibility to address this problem even without its history of slavery, its legacy heightens this imperative.   Contemporary slavery manifests in various ways. Many trafficking victims are forced to toil in fields, factories, and fishing boats for little or no pay. Others are held captive in private homes. Forced prostitution rings imprison women, girls, and boys in brothels or force them to work in the streets under threat of abuse. What links all these forms—as well as historic American slavery—is the profit motive.   Human trafficking is a lucrative criminal enterprise, generating $150 billion annually in profits worldwide.   Human trafficking continues to be a horrific human rights problem both in the United States and around the world.   Under U.S. law, trafficking in persons is defined as “sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age;” or “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery."   Human trafficking can be a transnational process where victims are recruited abroad and transported across borders into another country where they are exploited for labor and/or sex. However, human trafficking can also be a domestic phenomenon, where little or no transportation is required.   A Global Problem:   According to a May 2014 report from the International Labor Organization (ILO):   An estimated 21 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery. Of these, 14.2 million (68%) were exploited for labor, 4.5 million (22%) were sexually exploited, and 2.2 million (10%) were exploited in state-imposed forced labor.   Forced labor takes place in many different industries. Of the 14.2 million trafficking victims exploited for labor:   7.1 million forced labor victims work in construction, manufacturing, mining, or utilities; 3.4 million forced labor victims are domestic workers; 3.5 million forced labor victims work in agriculture; 55% of trafficking victims around the world are women and girls and 45% are men and boys.   15.4 million victims are aged 18 or older, with the number of children under the age of 18 estimated at 5.5 million.   The Asia-pacific region accounts for the largest number of forced laborers—11.7 million (56% of the global total). Africa has 3.7 million followed by Latin America and the Caribbean with 1.8 million.   Countries in central, south-eastern and eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States have 1.6 million. The Developed Economies and European Union account for 1.5 million. There are at least 600,000 victims in the Middle East.   Human trafficking does not always involve travel to the destination of exploitation: 9.1 million victims of forced labor moved either internally or internationally, while the majority, 11.8 million, were subjected to forced labor within their place of origin.   Victims spend an average of 18 months in forced labor, although this varied with different forms of forced labor.   Human trafficking earns profits of roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers, according to the ILO. The following is a breakdown of profits, by sector: $99 billion from commercial sexual exploitation; $34 billion in construction, manufacturing, mining and utilities; $9 billion in agriculture, including forestry and fishing; $8 billion dollars is saved annually by private households that employ domestic workers under conditions of forced labor.   According to the 2015 State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, there were only 10,051 prosecutions and 4,443 convictions for trafficking globally in 2014.   Of the estimated 14.5 million forced labor victims worldwide, only 418 cases of forced labor were prosecuted globally in 2014, according to the US Department of State, a 65% decrease from 1,199 cases prosecuted in 2013.   Modern slavery: We have to stop human trafficking, by William Bell.   It was not that long ago that many Americans did not realize slavery existed as a real and rampant problem around the world. Thanks to the tireless works of advocates, including survivors, public awareness of human trafficking has grown. It is now more widely known among Americans that millions of people—20.9 million, according to the International Labor Organization—are enslaved. The United States is also both a source and destination of victims.   Sex trafficking gets most of the attention, and understandably so: it is a horrific crime. But many Americans are also beginning to understand that the products they use and food they eat can be tainted by slavery and trafficking in businesses supply chains.   Late last year, an Associated Press investigation found that major American chain retailers and restaurants were selling shrimp harvested by enslaved workers in very dangerous conditions.   An increased awareness has led to new laws to better help protect victims. But it has not produced the kind of financial investment needed to begin to dismantle the business of human trafficking, the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. Consider this: the U.S. government spends more money in the War on Drugs in a month than it''s spent combating trafficking in the last fifteen years.   It is estimated that over the last decade all governments and non-governmental organizations have spent an average of $124 million a year combined fighting trafficking. It is no wonder, then, that few perpetrators pay for their crimes. According to the 2015 State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, there were only 4,443 convictions for trafficking globally in 2014.   While it is essential to invest in the rescue and care of victims, the virtual impunity for perpetrators means that they continue to prey on vulnerable people and every victim rescued is replaced with new victims.   Money alone does not guarantee success—this effort also requires innovative law enforcement, continued public pressure, international cooperation, and collaboration between government and the private sector—but an insufficient investment guarantees failure.   The U.S. government is in a position to crack down on this insidious industry. Without sustained leadership, traffickers will continue to be able to operate without fear.   The United States should seek to reduce substantially the number of victims by implementing policies and practices that dismantle the business of trafficking.   http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/campaigns/bankrupt-slavery http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/understanding-modern-slavery http://www.walkfree.org/ http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/default.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Slavery/SRSlavery/Pages/SRSlaveryIndex.aspx Visit the related web page
	The religion of inequality has failed us by Bill Moyers The Nation, Moyers & Company USA   In a recent poll, 71% of Americans across lines of ethnicity, class, age, and gender said they believe the U.S. economy is rigged. People reported that they are working harder for financial security. One quarter of the respondents had not taken a vacation in more than five years. Seventy-one percent said that they are afraid of unexpected medical bills; 53% feared not being able to make a mortgage payment; and, among renters, 60% worried that they might not make the monthly rent.   Millions of Americans, in other words, are living on the edge. Yet the country has not confronted the question of how we will continue to prosper without a workforce that can pay for its goods and services.   Who Dunnit? You didn’t have to read Das Kapital to see this coming or to realize that the United States was being transformed into one of the harshest, most unforgiving societies among the industrial democracies.   You could instead have read The Economist, arguably the most influential business-friendly magazine in the English-speaking world. I keep in my files a warning published in that magazine a dozen years ago, on the eve of George W. Bush’s second term. The editors concluded back then that, with income inequality in the United States reaching levels not seen since the first Gilded Age and social mobility diminishing, “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”   And mind you, that was before the financial meltdown of 2007–08, before the bailout of Wall Street, before the recession that only widened the gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Ever since then, the great sucking sound we’ve been hearing is wealth heading upwards. The United States now has a level of income inequality unprecedented in our history and so dramatic it’s almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around.   This the way the world is made to work by those with the money and power. The movers and shakers—the big winners—keep repeating the mantra that this inequality was inevitable, the result of the globalization of finance and advances in technology in an increasingly complex world. Those are part of the story, but only part.   As G.K. Chesterton wrote a century ago, “In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality.”   Exactly. In our case, a religion of invention, not revelation, politically engineered over the last 40 years. Yes, politically engineered.   On this development, you can’t do better than read Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science.   They were mystified by what had happened to the post–World War II notion of “shared prosperity”; puzzled by the ways in which ever more wealth has gone to the rich and super-rich; vexed that hedge-fund managers pull in billions of dollars, yet pay taxes at lower rates than their secretaries; curious about why politicians kept slashing taxes on the very rich and handing huge tax breaks and subsidies to corporations that are downsizing their work forces; troubled that the heart of the American Dream—upward mobility-seemed to have stopped beating; and dumbfounded that all of this could happen in a democracy whose politicians were supposed to serve the greatest good for the greatest number.   So Hacker and Pierson set out to find out “how our economy stopped working to provide prosperity and security for the broad middle class.”   In other words, they wanted to know: “Who dunnit?” They found the culprit. With convincing documentation they concluded, “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many.”   There you have it: The winners bought off the gatekeepers, then gamed the system. And when the fix was in, they turned our economy into a feast for the predators, “saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers, investors, and taxpayers.”   The end result, Hacker and Pierson conclude, is that the United States is looking more and more like the capitalist oligarchies of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by.   Looking back, you have to wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs. In the 1970s, Big Business began to refine its ability to act as a class and gang up on Congress. Even before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, political-action committees deluged politics with dollars. Foundations, corporations, and rich individuals funded think tanks that churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and interests. Political strategists made alliances with the religious right, with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, to zealously wage a cultural holy war that would camouflage the economic assault on working people and the middle class.   To help cover-up this heist of the economy, an appealing intellectual gloss was needed. So public intellectuals were recruited and subsidized to turn “globalization,” “neoliberalism,” and “the Washington consensus” into a theological belief system. The “dismal science of economics” became a miracle of faith. Wall Street glistened as the new Promised Land, while few noticed that those angels dancing on the head of a pin were really witchdoctors with MBAs brewing voodoo magic.   The greed of the Gordon Gekkos—once considered a vice—was transformed into a virtue. One of the high priests of this faith, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, looking in wonder on all that his company had wrought, pronounced it “God’s work.”   A prominent neoconservative religious philosopher even articulated a “theology of the corporation.” I kid you not. And its devotees lifted their voices in hymns of praise to wealth creation as participation in the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. Self-interest became the Gospel of the Gilded Age.   No one today articulates this winner-take-all philosophy more candidly than Ray Dalio. Think of him as the King Midas of hedge funds, with a personal worth estimated at almost $16 billion and a company, Bridgewater Associates, reportedly worth as much as $154 billion.   Dalio fancies himself a philosopher and has written a book of maxims explaining his philosophy. It boils down to: “Be a hyena. Attack the Wildebeest.” (Wildebeests, antelopes native to southern Africa—as I learned when we once filmed a documentary there—are no match for the flesh-eating dog-like spotted hyenas that gorge on them.) Here’s what Dalio wrote about being a Wall Street hyena:   ''when a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad? At face value, this seems terrible; the poor wildebeest suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently evil behavior exists throughout nature through all species… like death itself, this behavior is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life… It is good for both the hyenas, who are operating in their self-interest, and the interests of the greater system, which includes the wildebeest, because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution, i.e., the natural process of improvement.… Like the hyenas attacking the wildebeest, successful people might not even know if or how their pursuit of self-interest helps evolution, but it typically does''.   He concludes: “How much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted…”   Not this time, Ray. This time, the free market for hyenas became a slaughterhouse for the wildebeest. Collapsing shares and house prices destroyed more than a quarter of the wealth of the average household. Many people have yet to recover from the crash and recession that followed. They are still saddled with burdensome debt; their retirement accounts are still anemic. All of this was, by the hyena’s accounting, a social good, “an improvement in the natural process,” as Dalio puts it. Nonsense. Bull. Human beings have struggled long and hard to build civilization; his doctrine of “progress” is taking us back to the jungle.   Our founders warned against the power of privileged factions to capture the machinery of democracies. James Madison, who studied history through a tragic lens, saw that the life cycle of previous republics had degenerated into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy. Like many of his colleagues, he was well aware that the republic they were creating could go the same way.   Distrusting, even detesting concentrated private power, the founders attempted to erect safeguards to prevent private interests from subverting the moral and political compact that begins, “We, the people.” For a while, they succeeded.   When the brilliant young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he was excited by the democratic fervor he witnessed. Perhaps that excitement caused him to exaggerate the equality he celebrated. Close readers of Tocqueville will notice, however, that he did warn of the staying power of the aristocracy, even in this new country. He feared what he called, in the second volume of his masterwork, Democracy in America, an “aristocracy created by business.”   He described it as already among “the harshest that ever existed in the world” and suggested that, “if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”   And so it did. Half a century later, the Gilded Age arrived with a new aristocratic hierarchy of industrialists, robber barons, and Wall Street tycoons in the vanguard. They had their own apologist in the person of William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned professor of political economy at Yale University. He famously explained that “competition…is a law of nature” and that nature “grants her rewards to the fittest, therefore, without regard to other considerations of any kind.”   From Sumner’s essays to the ravenous excesses of Wall Street in the 1920s to the ravings of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News, to the business press’s wide-eyed awe of hyena-like CEOs; from the Republican war on government to the Democratic Party’s shameless obeisance to big corporations and contributors, this “law of nature” has served to legitimate the yawning inequality of income and wealth, even as it has protected networks of privilege and monopolies in major industries like the media, the tech sector, and the airlines.   A plethora of studies conclude that America’s political system has already been transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy (the rule of a wealthy elite). Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, for instance, studied data from 1,800 different policy initiatives launched between 1981 and 2002. They found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”   Whether Republican or Democratic, they concluded, the government more often follows the preferences of major lobbying or business groups than it does those of ordinary citizens.   We can only be amazed that a privileged faction in a fervent culture of politically protected greed brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression, then blamed government and a “dependent” 47 percent of the population for our problems, and ended up richer and more powerful than ever.   The truth of our country isn’t actually so complicated. It’s in the moral compact implicit in the preamble to our Constitution: We’re all in this together. We are all one another’s first responders. As the writer Alberto Rios once put it, “I am in your family tree and you are in mine.”   I realize that the command to love our neighbor is one of the hardest of all religious concepts, but I also recognize that our connection to others goes to the core of life’s mystery and to the survival of democracy. When we claim this as the truth of our lives—when we live as if it’s so-we are threading ourselves into the long train of history and the fabric of civilization; we are becoming “we, the people.”   The religion of inequality-of money and power-has failed us; its gods are false gods. There is something more essential—more profound-in the American experience than the hyena’s appetite. Once we recognize and nurture this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with the work of liberating the country we carry in our hearts.   http://billmoyers.com/story/plutocrats-vs-people/ http://billmoyers.com/tag/economic-inequality/ Visit the related web page
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