May 17 2008
Slavery is in your refrigerator
“From fruit to beef, from sugar to coffee, slave labor brings food to our tables,” Loretta Napoleoni writes on Countercurrents.org.
(source: di+mars/macxoom/disc0stu/flickr)
How do we respond to this? Our first instinct, Napoleoni writes in The Challenge of Modern Slavery, is often to boycott items we know to have been produced by slaves (and most of the time, we don’t even know it).
But is this really effective? Or is it actually detrimental?
Napoleoni, who has written books about the darker side of economics, including Terror Incorporated and Rogue Economics, writes:
Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering. We know very little about these economic secrets because modern consumers live inside the market matrix.
Listen to Napoleoni talk about what “rogue economics” means on Democracy Now!
For more on Loretta Napoleoni, visit her website.
