Well, twice a day even a broken clock tells the right time, and in a 'news' (propaganda) organization as big as the Washinton Whore Post, every so often even they will write a timely and informative article. But note how the Post editors put this important story... on page A-21, where only determined readers will find it.
And so it is with today's "The Slaves in our Midst" by WP reporter Colbert I. King. We will let King's report provide the details (click on our headline link or past the url from below, or visit the similar AOL story we highlight below), but the greater issue is that during the "Cold War" America needed and courted third-world friends and allies, meaning programs that BOOSTED THE STANDARD OF LIVING of those living in 'underdeveloped' regions of the world. Once the Soviet Union and "Iron Curtain" collapsed in the early 1990s, America's Right-Wing politics was suddenly DEPRIVED OF AN ENEMY TO HATE, and therefore deprived of an issue to rouse the troops (home-town political supporters) and focus their political identity on. And, just as importantly, Third-World "brown-skin" peoples, instead of being important ALLIES in the war on global terrorism, now become economic adversaries if not potential ENEMIES. Of course the Reagan-Bush administration continued the American tradition of supporting pro-business dictators in South- and Central America, and we Americans financed the genocidal killing of 200,000 highland Guatamalans not as "allies in the war against global communism" but as outright pro-communist enemies in the first place.
THE BOTTOM LINE is that we, the America nation, no longer believes in the Christian precepts of helping the poor and suffering, and instead we have reverted to a Right-Wing agenda of treating local peoples as potential enemies to be contained and controlled by our dictator "friends." Thus the American focus in Afghanistan is NOT one of modernizing that Nation's infrastructure, but instead of attempting to kill all insurgents. The Bush model of "crony contracts and profits for Ameican companies first, modernizing the occupied nation last" is of course also evident in Iraq, a land and culture that had modern agriculture and civilization at a time when the forefathers of many of America's modern business and political leaders were considered savages... by the Romans! (Hadrian's wall was built in 122 AD to keep northern "savages" in what is today England and Scotland out of Roman-occupied England.) Even undert the constraints of the US enforced UN economic sanctions on post-Gulf War1 Iraq, Iraqi craftsment, architects, and engineers were able to create world-class palaces and other modern constructions. Admittedly not the best use of Iraq's limited embargo era funds, but the current American occupation has been marked by giving huge, multi-million dollar contracts to AMERICAN contractors to build even basic schools - schools that never get built, because GRAFT and PROFITEERING are the FIRST PRIORITY of contractors in that nation under the Bush occupation. (Which has contributed significantly to the terrible security situation there.)
American men and women are being killed in Iraq because of the terribly led occupation, and foreign workers right in the nation's capitol are being treated as salves and endentured servants, by the GREED of American employers looking to get something (labor, servants, and "help") for nothing.
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BOSTON (Dec. 22) - A Saudi Arabian princess accused of breaking U.S. immigration laws by locking up her domestics' passports and forcing them to work for low pay was ordered to be deported, prosecutors said Thursday.
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/judge-orders-saudi-princess-deported/20061222031009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
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The Slaves in Our Midst
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 23, 2006; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/22/AR2006122201019_pf.html
Last Tuesday morning, one mile north of the White House, I sat in the upstairs dining room of a Dupont Circle cafe having a cup of tea with a slave. Well actually she's now a runaway slave who's living in the Washington area home of a good Samaritan.
But yes, she could have been considered a slave, if you define that as being bound to a specific area of land, forced to work without compensation, stripped of her passport and left at the absolute disposal of a master.
She is African. However, unlike her ancestors who arrived in America on slave ships, she came here voluntarily. She was, however, deceived about her working conditions, and she began her involuntary servitude once she entered her master's suburban Maryland household.
Our meeting took place in the presence of her lawyer, Elizabeth Keyes of CASA of Maryland Inc.'s Domestic Worker and Trafficked Persons Project. CASA and the Break The Chain Campaign of Washington, D.C., have represented dozens of immigrant domestic workers held in similar slavelike conditions.
The ground rules for the interview limited the amount of information that could be disclosed in today's column because a lawsuit against her alleged employer-master won't be filed in federal court until next month.
But details about the exploitation and degrading treatment of this young woman, and women from other impoverished nations, will appear in future columns devoted to the topic of 21st-century slavery in the nation's capital.
America prides itself on being among the nations that "have eliminated servitude as a state-sanctioned practice," to quote the State Department's June 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report, which documents such abuses in foreign countries. Truth is, traffickers are also at work in the nation's capital. What's worse, they couldn't get away with their abusive practices without the weak oversight of the U.S. government. Chief among the federal enablers: Condoleezza Rice's State Department.
The State Department gets fingered because so many of today's human traffickers and slavers are diplomats, flaunting U.S. and local laws, under the protective shield of the department's interpretation of diplomatic immunity.
Here's a case I can tell you about.
The lawsuit does not allege trafficking or slavery, but it aptly illustrates the claims of egregious labor exploitation by diplomats in Washington.
Lucia Mabel Gonzalez Paredes of Paraguay says she was hired in Argentina two years ago by Jose Luis Vila and his wife, Monica Nielsen, to perform housework and take care of their soon-to-be born baby. Vila, learning he was being posted to the Argentine Embassy in Washington, asked Gonzalez to move here with him and his wife to take care of the infant, because his wife wanted to pursue a legal education in the United States.
To obtain a State Department visa for Gonzalez, Vila and Gonzalez signed a contract specifying that she be paid $6.72 an hour to work a 40-hour week, with overtime pay for extra hours.
In fact, once here, Gonzalez was paid $500 a month for cooking, housecleaning, running errands, doing laundry and caring for the baby, including providing physical therapy. She says she actually worked an average of 77 hours a week performing all of those duties, receiving an average wage of $1.60 an hour. Oh yes, she was promised health insurance, but she ended up having to pay all of her medical bills.
These allegations are contained in a lawsuit that Gonzalez brought against Vila and Nielsen in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The defendants have not responded directly to the charges; instead they have claimed diplomatic immunity at the request, they say, of the government of Argentina. Fortunately for Gonzalez, a very good federal judge, Paul Friedman, is hearing the case.
Gonzalez's claims mirror those made by thousands of other women brought to Washington from impoverished countries. They say they are lured here under false guarantees, exploited with impunity -- sometimes sexually -- and then must endure their abusers dancing away under the defense of diplomatic immunity.
Condoleezza Rice can change all that.
The State Department routinely recommends immunity for diplomats in lawsuits brought by domestic servants, finding that contracts for services, including the hiring of domestic help, don't fall within the meaning of the "professional and commercial activity" exception to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
If Rice wants to show the world that the Bush administration's concerns about trafficking in people and labor and sexual exploitation apply equally in America -- and if she wants to ensure that women such as Lucia Gonzalez have legal redress for violations of their rights -- then the secretary of state has an opportunity.
Judge Friedman has asked for the State Department's views in the Gonzalez case. All that Rice has to do is interpret labor contracts for domestic servants as within the scope of the commercial activities exception. That will keep America from siding with the exploiters.
Even that, as future columns will show, would be only a first step. Much more is needed to end this scourge.
kingc@washpost.com
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