This Alternet story about the traffic in slaves was thought-provoking and horrifying. This U.S. State Department report from 2005 has the same effect.
But the Tier List, taken from the above mentioned State Department report, made me look twice. Look at who's on Tier 3, which is the worst offenders. Do you recognize the names of any of the United States' "good, strong allies" there? How about the ones on the Tier 2 Watch List (the ones heading to Tier 3 if they don't clean up their acts.)
If that were a United Nations report, I could almost understand how the State Department justified our alliances. After all, our present administration dislikes and mistrusts the U.N. in the first place. But this is an internal report, one done at the behest (well, officially at the behest, although it probably wasn't her idea to begin with) of Condi Rice, the Secretary of Helmet Hair and State.
We clearly forgive our allies for sins many of us cannot forgive ourselves. While our government tries to come to terms with African American descendants of slaves asking for restitution on behalf of their ancestors, it is silently permitting its wealthy allies to keep human beings, many of them extremely young children, in conditions of involuntary servitude that would have offended many of the most hard-hearted slave masters in American history.
Tipped by a story on Alternet.
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