Partus Sequitur Ventrum: In 1662 Virginia passed a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrum (called partus, for short), stating that any children of an enslaved mother would take her status and be born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman. This was a reversal of common law practice, which ruled that children of English subjects took the status of the father. The change institutionalized the power relationships between slave owners and slave women, freed the white men from the legal responsibility to acknowledge or financially support their mixed-race children, and somewhat confined the open scandal of mixed-race children and miscegenation to within the slave quarters. And thus open slavery took hold in America. Because of slavery directly connected to cotton production in the South, the U.S. economy quickly blossomed to second largest in the world behind Great Britain. One interesting statistic to me is the fact that the slave trade was financed by big banks, who put up the money to collect and transfer slaves from Africa to America. We can thank the banks and the slaves for creating the commerce that has led to our modern economic engine, and therefor the success of our free enterprise system in our grand land. So, my question is simply this, is slavery really gone from America? The American fast food giant Taco Bell has been buying tomatoes produced by slave and sweatshop labor, according to a group of Florida tomato pickers who held a 10-day hunger strike outside the companys headquarters. Some of the tomato pickers earn barely one cent - less than a penny - for each pound of tomatoes picked and others have been forced to work under threat of violence in what has been classified as slavery by law enforcement agencies. These workers are expected to pick 4000 pounds of tomatoes a day working a 12 hour shift. They earn about seven thousand dollars a year, and must support themselves in places like California, where the cost of living is through the roof. The immigrant farm worker is the new slave in America. I chose to talk about one subject, tomatoes. The same environment exists for vegetable and fruit pickers and other immigrant workers as well. Do you think the big farm owners in California give a damn whether their workers are legal or not? All they care about is poor peeps showing up as day laborers to pick the fruit and veggies and do the other menial tasks on the farm for slave wages. Think about that the next time you slice one of your cheap tomatoes, (average price is $2.00 a pound) or other produce in your gourmet kitchen, in your luxury shack, before retiring to your recliner in front of your TV. Every time we draw a knife from the rack, we should pray a little prayer for the poor brown slave dog that keeps us in cheap tomatoes. Be well my friends!!!!!
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 08:46:06 +0000
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