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How Our Money Goes to Support the Slave Trade (pt. 1)
Sudhama Ranganathan - 26.04.2011 17:55
Right now conservatives and progressives across my country, America, are considering ways to cut government spending. One of the options tossed about concerns cuts to military spending. Within this area there are so many things to consider. There are so many things to discuss and ways to break each of them down.
Most people in my country think about our military and assume we have soldiers in places where they are needed. We believe bases are located where they need to be in order to protect Americans. When people think about those bases we picture Americans being on them with maybe a few locals working there, but that’s about it. That also goes for how we view our military installations located on foreign soil. Americans believe the majority of what goes on is all above boards with the exception of the basic occasional ‘drunken sailor’ riff raff r&r (rest and relaxation) stuff. Nothing serious for the most part.
Yet as it happens, once folks look more in depth at what goes on surrounding and even within certain US military installations the story can take a quite different path. These things can be troubling in terms of the events themselves. Depending on what’s being discussed the level of comfort can move from feelings of discomfort to being downright repulsed and even angered.
When I first saw a television show on the sex trade and how it is tied to slavery I was shocked. I knew it was a trade that involved many bad and terrible things, especially regarding the transmission of fatal diseases and drug addiction, but slavery was a connection that was never made. Women tricked by people claiming to be recruiting international models or millionaire marriage brokerage services, etc. that are then kidnapped and sold into bondage almost seemed fictional, but it happens every day.
It occurs all over the world from Eastern Asia to Eastern Europe and Russia, people (mostly women) are taken in or outright kidnapped and then moved to other locations across the globe as sex slaves. The stories are heartbreaking and really make you re-think how bad you think you have it. Nothing can be so low so crushing as being human sex cattle forced to be raped continuously with no way out. Can anything humans do to one another be so savage and inhumane?
Here people think of these things and believe them to be happening outside our reach. We believe there is not much able to be done. But scrape off the surface and there is more than just images of slaves – there are large quantities of American cash floating around and much of that money is tax dollars.
Regarding connections to the armed services it touches us in a number of ways one of which is something we all know about, but turn a blind eye to – that’s servicemen and their patronizing prostitutes for sex. Though engaging in prostitution is officially banned by the military it still continues. That in and of itself may bring yawns as most people above a certain age realize this happens. It has been a part of wars and the lives of soldiers for centuries. We see it in movies and on TV all the time.
The fact it is degrading to women is something which has just been considered in military circles since the 1990’s. Questions about how right or wrong it is have only been discussed openly by top brass for about the same amount of time – at least here in America.
In this article, the issue being addressed is the larger issue of human slaves and slavery. The issue being discussed here is more that concerning the kidnapping of adults and children for the purpose of using them as human sex slaves and how that ties into the US military and thus American tax dollars.
The rules regarding prostitution are pretty much window dressing. “Military prostitution continues despite the military’s declared ‘zero tolerance’ policy, affirmed in Department of Defense memoranda and Executive Order 13387 that President George W. Bush signed in October 2005. These days, most women working in clubs near U.S. bases in South Korea and Japan/Okinawa are from the Philippines due to low wages, high unemployment, and the absence of sustainable economic development at home. These governments admit Philippine women on short-term entertainer visas.” ( http://www.fpif.org/articles/gender_and_us_bases_in_asia-pacific)
But it gets deeper and worse – much worse. An article in Counterpunch states a major change in our current military is, “the reliance of the U.S. military on private contractors, who have now surpassed the number of soldiers in Iraq. Public attention has begun to focus on the role of these contractors in U.S. war zones. Less attention has been paid to how private contractors are changing the nature of military prostitution. In the best known example, DynCorp employees were caught trafficking women in Bosnia, and some indications suggest that similar acts may be taking place in Iraq.” ( http://www.counterpunch.org/mcnutt07112007.html)
Most people don’t know “DynCorp International is a United States-based private military company (PMC) and aircraft maintenance company. DynCorp receives more than 96% of its $2 billion in annual revenues from the US federal government.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp#cite_note-Soldiers_of_Good_Fortune-2) ( http://motherjones.com/politics/2003/05/soldiers-good-fortune)
Regarding DynCorp, an article in the Huffington Post states, “A contractor died when a DynCorp manager used an employee's armored car to transport prostitutes. According to Barry Halley, a Worldwide Network Services employee working under a DynCorp subcontract, ’DynCorp's site manager was involved in bringing prostitutes into hotels operated by DynCorp. A co-worker unrelated to the ring was killed when he was traveling in an unsecure car and shot performing a high-risk mission. I believe that my co-worker could have survived if he had been riding in an armored car. At the time, the armored car that he would otherwise have been riding in was being used by the contractor's manager to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.’" ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/29/us-military-contractor-us_n_99175.html)
Many of the prostitutes secured in DynCorp’s employee prostitution rings are from Eastern Europe and the tales regarding those women and children are harrowing and bone-chilling. Salon.com reports, “Ben Johnston recoiled in horror when he heard one of his fellow helicopter mechanics at a U.S. Army base near Tuzla, Bosnia, brag one day in early 2000: ‘My girl's not a day over 12.’
“The man who uttered the statement -- a man in his 60s, by Johnston's estimate -- was not talking fondly about his granddaughter or daughter or another relative. He was bragging about the preteen he had purchased from a local brothel. […] Johnston often saw co-workers out on the streets of Dubrave, the closest town to the base, with the young female consorts that inspired their braggadocio. They'd bring them to company functions, and on one occasion, Johnston says, over to his house for dinner. Occasionally he'd see the young girls riding bikes and playing with other children, with their ‘owners’ standing by, watching. […]
“Says Martina Vandenberg, a women's rights researcher with Human Rights Watch, and in a 1999 tour of Bosnia, she saw little effort to stop it. ‘I found that Bosnia was absolutely littered with brothels and those brothels were full of trafficked women […] We're talking about women sold as chattel for $600 to $700, with all the rights of ownership attaching.’ […]
“In his deposition, Johnston names at least seven co-workers who, he says, openly admitted buying women. An eighth man, according to Johnston, bragged about owning half interest in a brothel and called himself ‘pimp daddy.’ […]
“At work, Johnston says, the prostitution talk had spiraled out of control. Co-workers, he says, would talk about ‘how good it was to have a sex slave at home,’ and discuss the possibility of selling ‘them back for half price’ when they grew tired of them.
“Johnston says that one employee he invited over for dinner brought his sex slave with him. He says the man complained about the woman's wanting to return to her home country and how the man was afraid to let her, because he feared she wouldn't come back” ( http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/06/26/bosnia/index.html)
The men employed by DynCorp involved in buying sex slaves are under contract to work for the American government working on this nation’s military aircraft. They get paid by tax dollars to maintain American military aircraft. Of course the girls and women kidnapped or duped get prostituted to American soldiers along with American contractors among other people all around the world.
There are places we need to have troops right now, but there are places where we maintain bases that are remnants of wars long passed. Further, there are places we pay for the US military to be protecting interests for large corporations that barely even pay what they owe in US taxes if any. ( http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-washington-corporate-taxes.html) ( http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/04/exxon-mobil-paid-zero-income-tax-offshore%20shelter-wal-mart-general-electric-forbes) As our troops are protecting the backsides of companies shirking the same responsibilities the rest of us would go to jail for being remiss on and that do not employ a significant amount if any Americans where they are located, it isn’t American interests being protected, just those of wealthy the corporations.
Where there are theaters of conflict we need to be in our, troops should be there. But as in Bosnia, there are many locations where we really do not need to be. Our involvement there means not only do average middle class and poor Americans end up spending their ever dwindling resources on what amounts to security guards for rich people, but that we are spending tax dollars on things that make the average American feel sick to their stomach just hearing about. Actually we are going into greater and greater debt in part to do so.
This is not only an example of corruption connected to government waste and bloat, but of our military brass becoming the very opposite of the principles relating to the ideas of freedom and liberty. It is a case of people in the Pentagon becoming so powerful and desirous of maintaining that power, they have forgotten why America fights. This nation can’t contribute to slavery and say we protect our interests or the freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness or participation in democracy of others. Cash earned by those giant companies does not come home in most cases and those billion dollar corporations can well afford to hire their own security contractors.
Our tax dollars are not only wasted in those places, but are contributing to the very things our nation stands against. Slavery was abolished in America and though we can’t control what goes on in other countries we can control any contributions to all slave trades via American tax dollars. When private contractors hired by this nation become involved in such practices it is a clear indication of when, why and where we should be drawing down American troop involvement. If anything we should be fighting to free those people.
Sadly there are more cases like those discussed. We can stop many of them by cutting the practice of paying the people that in turn pay slave traders for human sex cattle. We can tell billion dollar corporations that don’t pay taxes and hardly have any Americans working for them it’s time they fend for themselves. Further, we can mandate any American companies caught turning a blind eye to such practices suffer severe penalties. They are our tax dollars the decision is up to us. We can decide what we want done with those dollars and what will we turn a blind eye to by making it a priority and voting accordingly.
We paid for the stinging bailouts on Wall Street. Will we be forced to fund the slave trade too? While American kids drop in test scores compared to nations (that we send troops to in order to protect millionaire and billionaire owned factories) kids and adults from the Philippines and Bulgaria are being forced to have sex with people bought and paid for with American tax dollars. We could help cut the trade there and better train and educate our kids and adults here.
Our middle class shrinks and the average Americans become poorer, yet we are still forced to pay to watch rich guys’ factories that provide jobs and ever growing middle classes to other nations while US tax dollars are going to support the slave trade. Lines of credit are being taken out in the name of the American taxpayer that in part go on to pay for slavery. For this to be happening in 2011 is hard to swallow. .
To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
 E-Mail: uconnharassment@gmail.com  Website: http://www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com
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