>>>>>> 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.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> FORCED LABOR IN THE UNITED
STATEShttp://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-sh...
>
> -----------------------------------------
>
> 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_o...
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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"
>
> Â
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...
>
> --------------------------------------
>
> October 28, 2004
>
> The Ongoing Tragedy of International Slavery and Human Trafficking: An ...
>
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