How One Trip to the Mall Explains our Dependence Upon Modern-Day Slavery

Yes, we still own slaves. Here are five things we use every day that shows American demand sponsors slavery around the world.

Yes, slavery was common in the ancient world. It is in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. Yes, the Prophet Muhammad owned slaves. Now, as then, slavery is the backbone of the economy. It's just not cool to enslave Americans anymore, that's too visible, but trust me, you still own slaves indirectly, the same way you might sponsor a child in Africa indirectly.


1. Our Cars


After watching a news story about a scandal-plagued factory in Bangladesh that make our clothes, we might feel guilty. We might get in our car-made (by Chrysler/Mercedes) in Mexico to avoid American taxes and high union auto worker salaries. 

Wait, what?

Right across the Rio Grande, factories who left rich countries come to hire workers to work in the maquiladoras, assembly plants where the workers are exploited under all types of abuses. This website, SlaveryInthe21stCentury, explains these conditions further.

We will turn the ignition (soon to be recalled by GM again for defects), made in China sweatshops for GM and Ford, where a deadly explosion last year forced the Chinese government to pay attention to the lack of regulations for worker's safety in the plants.


and turn the tires from rubber plantations using Liberian child labor (Firestone) from the same U.S. company that once stopped production in Liberia, thus depriving their government of being able to collect needed tax money, leading the gov't to miss a loan payment to Firestone, who promptly requested that President FDRoosevelt send a warship to Liberia to enforce the loan repayment. FDR rejected the idea, calling it "gunboat diplomacy".

2. Our Phones

On your way to Kohls or Wal-Mart or Target, while talking on our phones, we steer the vehicle- both of which are made of metal, metal that comes from dictators using slave labor in Africa (Columbite-tantalite or coltan, the colloquial African term, used in our brakes and airbags, cellphones, DVD players, laptops, hard drives, and gaming devices).

Wait, what?

Not only that, the people who manufactured our Apple phones work at a plant (Foxxconn, in China) where worker suicides to protest labor conditions have gotten so bad that the company has installed "suicide nets" and threatened to punish those who attempt to commit suicide.

3. Our Gasoline

We steer our cars into the gas station and merrily fill the tank with crude oil from a Gulf of Arabia elite who uses migrant labor from South Asia in slave-like conditions because their working papers were confiscated by him. 

Wait, what?

The surge in slavery and human trafficking in the Gulf States has come due to the demand for increased construction thanks to oil wealth profits.


4. Our Credit Cards

Finally, we make it to the store. We return the item with our credit card, which has 1/3 of the American public over it's limit.
The credit card industry, with its cycles of poverty traps, likes it this way.

Wait, what?

An article in Mother Jones begins with:
Signing up a new credit card customer: $58. Buying off Congress: $8.5 million. Keeping Americans in hock for life: priceless.
The result? Americans owe $850 billion in credit card debt. The world's 54 poorest countries owe $412 billion in foreign debt.


5. Our Clothes

So we walk out of Kohls or Wal-Mart or Target after returning our clothes, because we were feeling guilty about rampant worker mistreatment in the textile (clothes) industry.

Click here for "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Fashion" to see how cheap clothes that are also fashionable come at an enormous cost to people, particularly those in Southeast Asia toiling under slave-like conditions.


I don't mean to depress you. I mean for you to follow my posts about the Prophet Muhammad and see for yourself how Allah expressed concern and siding with the weak and oppressed, defined righteousness as freeing slaves, and came up with solutions to scarcity, both basic-needs-or-I'll-starve scarcity and I-feel-empty-inside-without-my-toys-and-food-and-sex scarcity.