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Science break, folks. :)
As the cheery title of the post suggests we can see the one universal maxim that all of humanity can get behind in action – “greed is good”.
“Trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery are big business generating profits estimated at $150 billion a year, the UN labour agency said Tuesday.
The report by the International Labour Organization finds global profits from involuntary workers — an estimated 21 million of them — have more than tripled over the past decade from its estimate of at least $44 billion in 2005.”
So friends, the number of slaves, or those in debt bondage is growing in our world. I really need the optimistic technology orientated futurists to shut the fuck up about our supposedly rosy future and how supposedly, technology “x” is going to fix things.
“We need to strengthen social protection floors to prevent households from sliding into the poverty that pushes people into forced labour,” he said. “We need to improve levels of education and literacy so that household decision-makers can understand their own vulnerability to forced labour and know their rights as workers.
It says 55 per cent of the victims are women and girls, primarily in commercial sexual exploitation and domestic work, while men and boys were primarily in forced economic exploitation in agriculture, construction and mining.”
Futurism and its variants ply one of the most earnest of human vulnerabilities namely, “hope”. We can look past all of the evil that is currently being perpetrated against humanity, to gaze on a brighter world where the fundamental inhumanities we face now have been solved and all is peachy-fracking-keen. What is missing though, is the intermediary steps that get us to said bright rosy future.
We have more than enough resources to properly feed, clothe, and shelter all of humanity. With poverty reduction and education we might be able to stop one of the drivers in our keen drive toward human extinction – overpopulation.
With regards to population control finally giving women full human being status the world wide would be huge stride toward preserving human civilization, that should go without saying, but again it is the world we live in.
My optimism about our collective future is quite low at the moment.
Howard Zinn was an active and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. He brings insight, like Noam Chomsky, to the issues that our liberal societies won’t acknowledge. The diffusion of Personal responsibility – and no, not the ‘personal responsibility’ (bootstraps!?!!!!) wielded by the corporatist right to bludgeon the poor, but actual personal responsibility is what is being discussed in the quote. It happens all to often when it comes to how we react to the actions taken in our stead by our government.
“I didn’t vote for them,” or “I’m just doing my job…” or <insert excuse here> does not make you any less responsible for the actions committed in your name.
“The fact that there is only an indirect connection between Dow recruiting students and napalm dropped on Vietnamese villages, does not vitiate the moral issue. It is precisely the nature of modern mass murder that it is not visibly direct like individual murder, but takes on a corporate character, where every participant has limited liability. The total effect, however, is a thousand times more pernicious, than that of the individual entrepreneur of violence. If the world is destroyed, it will be a white-collar crime, done in a business-like way, by large numbers of individuals involved in a chain of actions, each one having a touch of innocence.”
-Howard Zinn. On War (second edition). p. 64.
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