Saudi princess arrested for slavery in Calif.

A Saudi princess charged with a felony count of human tracking is in an Orange County jail on $5 million bail.

That's the polite way of saving she enslaved five maids but so far only got charged with one.

The Daily Caller has the story about the escape of one of the five maids enslaved by Princess Meshal Albayan, wife of the Saudi Arabian prince Abdulraham bin Nassar bin Abdulazis al Saud:

The Kenyan maid who escaped Albayan’s third story apartment reported to police that she was forced to work 16 hour days for only $220 a month, a drastic difference from the $1600 a month her two-year contract promised. 

Albayan kept her five maids confined to the apartment and permitted no days off. In order to flee her working environment, the maid escaped the house and flagged down a bus to reach the Irvine Police. 

Albayan hired the Kenyan maid in 2012 as a domestic servant in Syria while residing in her family’s palace. She allegedly stole passports from the maid upon her arrival in the U.S.
The four remaining Filipino maids eagerly agreed to leave with the police after authorities searched the home.

You didn't think slavery ended with the Civil war, did you? We learned just yesterday that the National Archives has box after box of pleas from the relatives of people sold into slavery decades after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. A letter from Carrie Kinsey begs President Theodore Roosevelt for help in freeing her brother, sold at the age of 14 into involuntary servitude at a huge plantation called Kinderlou. Politics 365 tells us:

As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking-as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey’s tale. It is the same in the next box on the shelf. And the one before. And the ones on either side of those. And the next and the next. And on and on. Thousands and thousands of plaintive letters and grimly bureaucratic responses-altogether at least 30,000 pages of original material-chronicle cases of forced labor and involuntary servitude in the South decades after the end of the Civil War.

Of course if you're paying attention to Walmart you know the giant retailer  had dealings with human traffickers as recently as last year.

Mary Goudie, a member of Britain's House of Lords, has taken up the fight against slavery. Today, she writes in The Guardian:

Across the board, there has been a fundamental failure to address the reality of modern-day slavery – an estimated 21 million people are trapped in some form.

She cites an estimate by the International Labor Organization that slavers earn profits of $32 billion each year.

It isn't only criminals who are profiteering from the trade in human labour. Modern-day slavery is an underground business, intrinsically linked to global supply chains. Individuals and companies are making a huge amount of money out of this business and can make it extremely hard for campaigners and governments to chase the cash back to its true source.

One reason for inaction, she writes, is disbelief that slavery is a problem. But when a Saudi princess gets busted in Orange County, Calif., for enslaving five maids, it's pretty obvious there's a problem.

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Monday, July 15, 2013