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| Re: Slave labour that shames America today! But good for business and cheaper prices for shoppers |
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Group: alt.philosophy · Group Profile
Author: Ynot B. HappieYnot B. Happie Date: Mar 10, 2008 19:23
> On Mar 10, 5:12 pm, "Ynot B. Happie" bored.com> wrote:>>>> On Mar 9, 1:47 pm, lorad...@ cs.com wrote: >>
>>
>>>>>> The nutters are scared to death the GOP tax cut recession will
>>>>>> usher
>>>>>> in a new age of gun grabbing.
>>
>>>>>> The Chairman of the DNC, Howard Dean, is correct that Dems should
>>>>>> drop
>>>>>> that issue.
>>
>>>>>> The Repugs will just use it to bottom fish for the dumbest of the
>>>>>> dumb.
>>
>>>>>> Bret Cahill
>>
>>>>> Your horrendously mis-juxtaposed similies are just plain stupid.
>>
>>>>> One does not attempt to stop economic disaster with a weapon...
>>
>>>> We'll have to explain that to nutters some other time.
>>
>>>> Bret Cahill
>>
>>> What kind of nutters are you talking about? Pecan growers?
>>
>> Florida orange and tomatoe growers need guns to keep the illegal pickers
>> inline so they don't escape before their free-marketeer debts are paid
>> back.
>> Those nutters maybe? :)
>
> Gee you really don't know much do you? Florida fruit growers hire
> by the
> day and don't need force to keep people "inline".
I really don't know much? Me? Not you?
Your attention span appears to be about zero.
OK, here goes FYI [ that means For YOUR Information ] THIS IS NOT NEW IN THE
USA ... DOCUMENTARIES HAVE BEEN DONE, PROSECUTIONS HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL,
IT'S REAL, IT'S TRUE, AND IT'S BEEN GOING ON FOR DECADES....................
Right up to today.
You need to ask yourself, why didn't i know this, and what else don't i know
about my own nation? I visited florida as a tourist, and I knew about it.
All the locals knew this sort of shit happens, it's pretty well common
knowledge but all swept under the carpet for ages. Only recently has there
been any serious or consistent push by Law enforcement and Politicians to
tackle the problem.
I live on the other side of the world, and known this for a DECADE ... WHY
don't you?
--------------------------------------------------
FORCED LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
http://www.hrcberkeley.org/download/hiddenslaves_report.pdf
THREE MIAMI AREA WOMEN INDICTED ON FORCED LABOR CHARGES AND ONE NEW JERSEY
MAN INDICTED WITH ALIEN HARBORING
April 20, 2007 -
The prosecution of individuals involved in human trafficking is a top
priority of the Justice Department. Since 2001, the Justice Department has
charged more than 300 human traffickers and secured more than 200
convictions. From 2001 through 2005, the Justice Department convicted over
twice as many persons for trafficking compared to the previous five years.
Mr. Acosta commended the investigative efforts of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Detectives of the Miami-Dade Police Department. The case
is being prosecuted by Edward Chung, Trial Attorney from the Civil Rights
Division of the United States Department of Justice and Brent Tantillo,
Assistant United States Attorney from the United States Attorney's Office
for the Southern District of Florida.
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/fls/PressReleases/070420-05.html
Immokalee, Florida, Family Charged with Forcing Immigrants into Farm Labor
WASHINGTON - Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division
Grace Chung Becker and U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida
Robert E. O'Neill today announced the indictment of six Immokalee, Fla.,
family members for enslaving Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants and forcing
them into agricultural labor.
According to the 17-count indictment, Cesar Navarrete and Geovanni Navarrete
beat, threatened, restrained and locked workers in trucks to force them to
work for them as agricultural laborers. The defendants underpaid the workers
and imposed escalating debts on them, threatening physical harm if workers
left their employment before their debts had been repaid.
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/January/08_crt_034.html
-------------------------------------------------
Slave labour that shames America
Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost
of producing cheap food
By Leonard Doyle in Immokalee, Floride
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer
for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their
way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned.
Once outside, they dashed for freedom.
When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of
heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty,
untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man
had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping,
leaving his wrists swollen.
The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but
mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay
for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket,
it cost them $5.
Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida
threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America
today.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/slave-labour-that-shames-america...
-----------------------------------------
The New York Times
By Eric Schlosser
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Monterey, Calif. - And now a word of good news from the world of fast food.
Last month, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group that represents farm
workers in southern Florida, announced that it was ending a four-year
boycott of Taco Bell. The most remarkable thing about the announcement was
the reason behind it: Taco Bell had acceded to all of the coalition's
demands.
The working conditions in the fields of Florida are especially bad.
According to a recent study by the Urban Institute, perhaps 80 percent of
the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants. They are usually employed by
labor contractors, who charge them for food, housing, transportation - and,
on occasion, smuggling fees. These charges are often deducted from workers'
paychecks, trapping migrants in debt. Since 1996, six cases of involuntary
servitude have resulted in convictions in Florida; many others have probably
gone undetected. In one of these cases, hundreds of farm workers were held
captive by labor contractors based in La Belle and Immokalee, Fla., forced
to work without pay and warned that their tongues would be cut off if they
tried to escape. The Florida legislature has done little to help migrants.
Agriculture is the state's second-largest industry, after tourism, and many
legislators have close ties with leading growers.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is one of the few organizations willing
to fight for migrant workers in Florida. Founded in 1996 and based in the
town of Immokalee, amid lush tomato fields and citrus groves, the group
helped the United States Justice Department gain convictions in five of the
six slavery cases. During the late 1990's members of the coalition learned
that Taco Bell was a major purchaser of tomatoes grown in Immokalee, where
the wages of migrants (adjusted for inflation) had fallen by as much as 60
percent during the previous two decades.
http://www.ciw-online.org/schlossernyt.html
----------------------------------------------
The last word: Our slaves
'Involuntary servitude' still exists in America today, says author John
Bowe.
A brutal murder in a migrant farmworkers community in Florida shows how that's
possible.
On April 20, 1997, at around 10 p.m., the Highlands County, Fla., Sheriff's
Office received a 911 call; something strange had happened out in the
migrant-worker ghetto near Highlands Boulevard. The "neighborhood," a
mishmash of rotting trailer homes and plywood shacks, was hidden outside the
town of Lake Placid, a mile or two back from the main road. By day, the
place was forbidding and cheerless, silent. By night, it was downright
menacing, humid and thick with mosquitoes.
When the sheriff's officers arrived, they found an empty van parked beside a
lonely, narrow lane. The doors were closed, the lights were still on, and a
few feet away, in the steamy hiss of night, a man lay facedown in a pool of
blood. He had been shot once in the back of the head, execution-style. The
911 caller had offered a description of a truck the sheriff's officers
recognized as belonging to a local labor contractor named Ramiro Ramos.
http://www.theweekdaily.com/news_opinion/extras/29574/the_last_word_our_slaves.h...
-----------------------------------------------------------
In 2006 they told me the story of a family member who had immigrated to the
United States and ended up in a farm where he was held against his will.
There were Mexicans and Salvadorian immigrants at this farm. When some of
the Salvadorian men tried to rape the young man, he escaped, found help in a
nearby town and was able to move on to a more normal type of job.
More recently, the Texas Observer published an article on the same subject
"Buy Some Stuff - Enslave Somebody"
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2654 .
Why is it that only the Texas Observer and the London Independent are making
noise about this problem? I'd be curious who owns the farms that have turned
immigrant labor into slave labor.
http://dreamacttexas.blogspot.com/2007/12/21st-century-slave-labor-in-florida.ht...
--------------------------------------
October 28, 2004
The Ongoing Tragedy of International Slavery and Human Trafficking: An
Overview
Julia Gabriel is a Guatemalan Mayan farm worker from a poor peasant family.
Julia first came to her work in human rights in 1992, through her experience
of being held captive on in South Carolina fields with hundreds of other
Guatemalan and Mexican workers of indigenous Mayan and Aztec origin. When
she arrived from Arizona to work in South Carolina, the employers told her
and the rest of the crew that everyone owed a debt for the transportation to
the labor camp; if anyone tried to escape, they would be killed. Gunmen kept
workers under armed guard, and the employers would regularly rouse the
workers at 4 am by firing gunshots. Ms. Gabriel and her co-workers worked 12
hours a day, 7 days a week harvesting cucumbers. At the end of each week,
the employers took out rent, food, the transportation fee, and other
charges, leaving the workers with as little as $20 for the week.
Visitors to the camp - vendors in vans, priests, relatives - were forbidden
entry and run off the camp, at times with gunshots and beatings. The bosses,
who ran a 400-person slavery ring operating in Florida, South Carolina, and
Georgia, physically abused the men and sexually abused the women in their
employ.
One day, a co-worker of Ms. Gabriel
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