The new slavery

When talking about slavery, the black, chained scene comes to mind, arriving in America in slave ships, in the 17th and 18th centuries. In those days, during the process of invasion and domination of the African and American territories That was an excellent business: the use of people as cheap labor to accumulate wealth. Portugal and Spain were pioneers in the new spaces, destroyed the existing communities and established the loot. England dominated the route and market traffic. It was a large commercial operation designed to enrich a few. This long process was responsible for the destruction of the indigenous peoples in the so-called "new world", our Abya Yala, and for the rupture of the communities in the African spaces. And it was this movement of territorial conquest and slavery that gave power to the capitalist system. Much of the industrial revolution, much praised by the British, would never have existed if it were not for this situation of exploitation, pain and misery. For Europe to become rich, America and Africa had to be destroyed.

For centuries people fought against slavery and it took a lot of blood for this practice to be abolished. And in fact, when the slave system was finally swept from the Americas, the reason was also economic. The slave became a problem for the capitalist system that was then consolidated. The "owners" had a lot of expense with the slaves and still had to take care of their "property". Even better is that people try to take care of their life. It was there that "liberation" arrived. The slaves became free people who could then sell their labor force. In this way, farmers and entrepreneurs would no longer have any cost to sustain labor. Everyone who seeks to sustain himself. It was perfect! This is how factories and urban life were born, with the exploited creating the miserable villages near the workplaces.

Time passed and slavery became the subject of movies and romance, as if it were a mere memory of the past. A mistake. In the bowels of the world, the practice of that vileness was still used. Even so, that was always opposed by the human rights movements and there are many episodes of "liberation" that took place on farms or businesses. Even in cities like São Paulo, for example, there are always cases of foreigners being held as slaves in different types of businesses. Using people as things is still a very common practice.

Institutionalized slavery

But if these seemingly isolated cases are condemned and seen as an attack on human rights, this does not mean that the capitalist system - which is a system of human exploitation - has not found other ways to enslave and dominate. In fact, it's like the same story repeating itself ad infinitum.

If in the past, the great trips that explored new lands, allowed the invasion and looting of these places, nowadays, the anti-terrorist crusades play the same role. Who denounces this situation is the journalist Antony Loewenstein, in the book "Capitalism of disaster: an x-ray of the catastrophe." According to him, all this policy of destruction of the Middle East, which began in the "Arab Spring", is nothing more than a new way of securing the slaves for the movement of the system. He shows that multinational companies like G4S, Serco and Halliburton, had high profits with the calamity in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Haiti and New Guinea. And what is the business of these companies? Private prisons for war refugees.

In an interview for the American journalist Amy Goodman, Loewenstein said how it happens. "These companies set up huge warehouses in the war zones, which serve as refugee detention centers and asylum seekers.When the projector is turned off, and the NGOs already stop helping to move on to the next disaster, those companies appear, with the employees getting high salaries to institutionalize slavery, they come with the promise of recovering the country and they do it with the slavery industry. "

According to the journalist, storing refugees is one of the most lucrative offers of the century. An example given by him is the company Transfield Services, which manages - with money from the Australian government - a detention center in Papua New Guinea. There, about 90% of the prisoners are refugees, who live in inhumane conditions, women are raped and no one can see the conditions of the prisoners. They live in conditions of slavery and still work to guarantee more profits. In other words, his work results in benefit for the company, while they only survive in the worst conditions.

He also pointed out that this is the same in prisons in the United States, like one of them, in the State of Georgia, which is run by the Corrections Corporation of America. It is the same system. Hundreds of prisoners - usually black and poor - who serve as slaves. "And inside there is hell, there are no human rights." And for society, this system seems to be perfect, because a good part supports it. So much so that the current presidential candidate, Donald Trump, speaks openly about the need of the United States. get rid of 11 million undocumented immigrants. Thus, the private prison industry seems to be the perfect solution. Even according to Anthony, companies such as CCA and GEO Group, which run private prisons in the United States and elsewhere, had profits of more than $ 40 million in recent years. To get an idea of ​​the volume of business, in the United States 34,000 refugees are arrested every night. Now imagine these armies working and giving profits, without pay. It's perfect and legal!

Now, in October, during a march against police violence that took place in New York City, another journalist, Chris Hedges, who recently published a book called "The illusion of empire: the closure of literacy and the triumph of the show "He also denounced this new stage of modern slavery embodied in private prisons. According to him, the logic that is placed on the world is the end of literacy for the poor, the withdrawal of the right to education, so that they can become potential "users" of private channels, thus serving as labor to generate Benefits. "There are husbands and separated women, sometimes forever, their spouses, there are brothers and sisters who have been torn apart, mothers and fathers who are locked behind bars, whose lives were destroyed, and children whose childhoods were stolen."

In his speech to the people of New York, he insisted: "We call for all those who have become invisible, those who disappeared behind the walls of the prison, who have become victims of rape, torture, beatings, prolonged isolation. , sensory deprivation, racial discrimination, gangs of prisoners, forced labor, rotten food, without medical attention, with children incarcerated with adults, prisoners forced to take medication to induce lethargy, little or no heating and ventilation, with decades of sanctions for nonviolent crimes, and endemic violence, it is necessary to condemn a state that perpetuates this abuse. "

He also insists that today's incarceration is a very business profitable and that it is not only the prison administrators who earn from the work of inmates. There are those who make the keys, telephone companies, security equipment, food, bedding, and everything that revolves around the complex. Hedges also denounces that pressure groups of companies like Corrections Corporation of America are the ones that write the laws that guarantee longer sentences for common crimes, everything to fill prisons. "In that lobby, the companies that are most involved are: Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Pierre Cardin and Target "