HOW MANY YEARS A SLAVE?

Minimum wage earners and illegal immigrants should be allowed to sell their children. The constitution must be re-interpreted. Perhaps we can take New York back to the London of William Blake --

When my mother died I was very young

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry weep weep weep  weep

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

The market in chimney sweepers has sadly declined, but sophisticated contemporary parents now sell their children as sex toys for adults. Who says child sex slaves are pitiable? Those not purchased directly from parents are homeless and easily abducted off the street, They are used and sold and re-sold rapidly, and filmed, and marketed, and ultimately -- I don't know -- murdered? An associate editor at Unmuzzled OX trusted the wrong guy and was sold to a Mexican brothel. After six months she fortunately escaped. But she did not recover. The last I heard she was a Times Square junkie street whore. When she worked for me she was finishing her MFA at Columbia.

Slavery is concealed. But it persists. As inequality grows, slavery grows. People have eyes but do not see. A man might ogle and despise a woman or girl reduced to a sexual chattel. He does not see how she got there. But a Mexican laborer and a Chinese scullion are simply invisible men.

The 85 richest people have more money than half the human race -- 3.5 billion people. There are more African Americans now in prison, on parole, or on probation than there were enslaved in 1850. The population of imprisoned impoverished white meth users is rapidly catching up. Police protect the rich and imprison drug users. Crime is reported less and less. American drug users are treated like Germany’s Jews c.1936. But we are all enslaved.