You're fired, moron!

Bob:  “Who is the moron who left the cell
phone in the aircraft’s engine compartment?”

Among the fifty attendees at the maintenance
staff meeting, Jill raises her hand, embarrassed
and frightened.

Bob:  “Jill, you are an idiot!  What moron 

leaves a cell phone in the engine cowling? 
Jill, you need to pack up your stuff and go.
You are done!  Let this be a lesson to all
of you to not do such an idiotic move; you
will be fired like Jill.   Jill, get your stuff
and get out!”

In a training session on ethics, we read the scenario (left) for discussion. Some of us initially agreed that Bob did the right thing in firing Jill. We generally agreed it perhaps should have been done in private.

The point of the training was respect in the workplace. Neither the reproof nor the disciplinary action should occur in front of the entire work group, of course.

But there's more.  If anyone should be fired, it’s Bob!

A few of us hung around as the session adjourned to talk further.  Aviation maintenance is a team effort with fairly rigid procedures.  Mechanics and technicians don’t have loose stuff in their pockets.  Tools are checked out and back in afterwards.  If a cell phone or hand-held radio is needed on the flight line, it’s annotated and checked on return.   QA verifies the work.  There are a variety of standards for such things, and it’s impressive when done right.

Bob’s fifty-person aviation maintenance facility wasn't doing it right.  Anger, name-calling, and firing the mechanic, all obscure the cause and don't address the organizational process failure.  Other employees aren't inspired to excellence by Bob's tantrum.  They're more likely to feel threatened and uneasy.  That's probably why company policy says don't do that.

A detailed inquiry, analysis, policy and practice checks, those are perhaps the reasoned response to such things. 

So if I lose my temper and really blast someone, chances are I've got it wrong.

    Yep.

Completely wrong?

    Yep.

A hundred percent wrong??

    Yep.

So I'm an idiot (i.e., acting in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way).

    Yep.

Peace River

Thoughts?

Fault!

Government activity has slowed to an impressive level of inefficiency. Progressively greater polarization has crippled congress and the nation. Government spending produces less benefit. The influence of corporate power and wealth now far exceeds that of the citizenry.  

A common citizen's voice is irrelevant; no individual apart from the mega-financed world of political lobbying has a voice in governmental activity, relevance in the discussions of oversight, or power to affect decisions of importance.   

The president didn't do any of that.

Wailing on Obama for such things is perhaps less thoughtful than one would hope. 

Disappointingly little help is available from
the common media.

Offering trivialities in venues that can't be described or understood in less than 100 or so pages; well, that's not intellect at work.

Armchair quarter-thinking ...

As I was reminded by a friend, we know enough to understand that we should be honoring those who serve and praying for them. Obama and the others find themselves in a world of power players, money grabbers, and the most wicked of mankind.  If they attempt to serve, it's a noble sacrifice; they could use our prayers.

Like them or not, agree with them or not, that's the way it is.  We could participate like many do these days by being whining complainers.  Not recommended.

NOTE:  among the issues for which the parties at large are responsible, we find the following - 

How happy?

Happy vs. unhappy; it's a challenging question of interest to us all.  What are the factors that make us satisfied with our lives and comfortable about our prospects?


The question has been of interest to psychologists, politicians, economists, preachers, and parents since the beginning. Interestingly, the answers emerging from modern studies are what we might expect.  Food and shelter, safety and security, home and family, health and stability, all are part of the equation.

Referred to as 'subjective well-being' (since 'happy' is perhaps an imprecise term), the measurement is complex when applied across cultural and international borders, but the results are enlightening.  What emerges from the studies is that wealth is not the key factor.  Having enough checks the box, having more is of rapidly decreasing significance when subjective well-being is the goal.  We knew that.

[Ref:  More money makes less difference in terms of happiness, and getting it takes up more and more of your life.  Chasing wealth (and more 'things') will likely deprive you of the happiness you hoped to gain.]

In recent years, governments have been challenged to refocus on the well-being of their citizenry rather than on economic factors alone.  A recent survey (Easton, 2006) found that 81% of the UK population agreed that the Government’s primary objective should be the creation of happiness not wealth. David Cameron, HM Leader of the Opposition, put happiness firmly on the political agenda by arguing that “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general well-being" (BBC, 2006).

Poverty, as one might expect, is a significant impediment to happiness, but it is not just the lack of money.  The factors involved in poverty cover all categories.  Lack of a way out is the big one, but the list of relevant factors affecting 'subjective well-being' includes adequate food and shelter, safety and security, healthcare, equal access to education, opportunity for upward mobility, a voice in things that matter.  

Poverty is not a circumstance anyone chooses, and given the opportunity, all will take the first exit regardless of how hard the path might be.  From every study, we understand that poverty is externally imposed as a sub-category under oppression.  It is something that is done to others by policy, prejudice, corruption, indifference, and selfishness.  The results are marginalization and disempowerment. 

What does the map show?  It might easily and accurately be described as a representation of the degree of freedom a nation provides.  A recognition of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Not that any nation is perfect, of course; so much remains inadequately addressed and unresolved in even the best of the lot, but such freedom as they provide has remarkable impact on how people view their lives, their well-being.

So, what do we have to offer the world?

Note from generations past:  "Happiness is for pigs," according to my father and his side of the family, but they were farmers and had pigs that rolled around happily in the mud, so you can perhaps allow them their perspective.  "Joy," however, he would go on to explain, "comes from doing for others."  That, and a lot more; he was a wise gentlemen.  After so many years now, I'm inclined to agree, and fortunately, my wife thinks the same way.  Thank you Dad.  Thank you Father.

You wonder where the money went ...

Henry Ford possessed the clarity that is perhaps lacking in today's corporate leadership. Ford gave his workers substantial salary increases so that they could afford the products of their labor. It worked. Soon, his employees were filling the factory parking lots with the "tin Lizzies" they were making on his innovative and successful production lines.

Our current crop of corporate leaders are products of the bottom-line thinking taught in business curricula. It began in the 70's.  Did you notice?

Right Thinking

Thoughts follow culturally defined paths, it seems. Not uniformly in every individual, but more or less in line across a given cultural group.

Did you know that the way you think about something may never cross the mind of someone from another culture?

Us and Them

"I was once in charge of an English language summer course in North Wales for adult students from three countries - Italy, Japan, and Finland. Intensive instruction was relieved by entertainment in the evenings and by day excursions to places of scenic or historical interest. We had scheduled a trip up Mount Snowdon on a particular Wednesday, but on the Tuesday evening it rained heavily. Around 10 o’clock that night, during the after-dinner dancing, a dozen or so Finns approached me and suggested that we cancel the excursion, as it would be no fun climbing the muddy slopes of Snowdon in heavy rain. I, of course, agreed and announced the cancellation.  Immediately I was surrounded by protesting Italians disputing the decision. Why cancel the trip - they had been looking forward to it (escape from lessons), they had paid for it in their all-inclusive fee, a little rain would not hurt anyone and what was the matter with the Finns anyway - weren't they supposed to be tough people? A little embarrassed, I consulted the Japanese contingent. They were very, very nice. If the Italians wanted to go, they would go, too. If, on the other hand, we cancelled the trip they would be quite happy to stay in and take more lessons. The Italians jeered at the Finns, the Finns mumbled and scowled, and eventually, in order not to lose face, agreed they would go. The excursion was declared on. It rained torrentially all night and also while I took a quick breakfast. The bus was scheduled to leave at half past eight, and at twenty-five past, taking my umbrella in the downpour, I ran to the vehicle. Inside were 18 scowling Finns, 12 smiling Japanese, and no Italians. We left on time and had a terrible day. The rain never let up, we lunched in cloud at the summit, and returned covered in mud at 5 o'clock, in time to see the Italians taking tea and chocolate biscuits. They had sensibly stayed in bed. When the Finns asked them why, they said because it was raining..."

~ Richard Lewis, from the preface to When Cultures Collide, 3rd Edition

The GAP - Part VI - global

Friends in Djibouti; they struggle against a 

difficult international economy.

What happens in the developing world when Wall Street extracts their profit from the international market place?

The billions made at the top of the marketplace come from the productivity and resources of workers around the world.  It doesn't trickle down, and the rising tide doesn't float all boats equally.  Wealth is extracted from developing countries in the form of debt, perhaps primarily, and from trade in goods and raw materials.

International participation in Kenya's marketplace affects local prices; did you know?

A family in Kenya, dear friends of ours, has an income of around $60 a month.  About half is spent on cornmeal (maize meal) which is their staple.  In '07 when a few hundred Wall Street players crashed the marketplace, the price of cornmeal doubled in Kenya.  They had to choose between school and food for their children.  Many kids lost a year from their schooling.
 Wealth didn't trickle down, it trickled away to the rich people.

Such things are deliberate.  One Wall Street executive at Chase Manhattan described his job as (1) analyzing a developing country and determining its max earnings, and (2) creating a debt instrument by which that max could be extracted in the form of interest payments.  Sucking wealth out of a developing country; deliberately maximizing the cash flow despite the deadly effect on the targeted country.

In the 80's, western businesses moved from multidimensional focus to just the bottom line of profitability.  Gone were the community benefit considerations, the fair business practices, and the win-win collaborations.  Just the money was left as the definitive metric.  Did you notice?

That's where we are today; what are the possible paths forward?

Note:  I was encouraged by a town in Texas; family there tells me the community is aggressively pursuing local business with no ties to the larger marketplace.  Local workers, local suppliers, local customers; seems to be going well, at least on the small scale.



The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor. 

The GAP - Part V - the money flow

Despite this administration’s rhetoric against oligarchy, we have seen a rapid concentration of wealth and depressed conditions for the middle class. The trend began in earnest in the Reagan years and is now firmly entrenched.  Is that good or bad?
In today's economy, money flows away from the communities where people work, off down the road and across the country it flows to the coffers of corporations.  These are the companies that now are larger than many of the world's countries, economically speaking.  Money now flows out from every community to the coffers of Wall Street and Wal-Mart.

Business began as local labor and collaboration and mutual benefit.  Farmers and stores, suppliers and consumers, locally connected.  As industries grew, some problems arose, like unfair competition.

It's been against the law for a hundred years to monopolize a segment of the business arena.  Monopolies emerged with large business ventures.  Steel mills and railroads were early examples.  Railroading was widely viewed as a “natural” monopoly.  It didn't make sense to have two railroads laid side by side in competition with each other because of the cost. Problems arose when the powers in that monopoly were left unregulated, and powerful people like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie used those natural monopolies to capture control of other businesses that had to ride the railway to get to the market.

For a little while, the railroad corporations themselves became the most powerful enterprises in America, but then a few people figured out how to leverage the railroad monopolies to make something even bigger, like Standard Oil.  Rockefeller’s greatest skill was in leveraging the railroad monopolies to make his company more powerful.

Interestingly, the first public uprising against monopoly was the Boston Tea Party. Everyone nowadays says it was a rebellion against taxation. But if you go back and read the actual writings of that moment, it was a purposeful rebellion against the British East India company which had swallowed the trade and transport segment of the economy. 

So, we eventually made laws and limited the marketplace.  ITT got broken up into competitive smaller companies.  The goal was at least 4 or 5 companies in any business segment to keep things under control.  Mergers required federal approval and if they consolidated more than 5% or so of a business segment, they weren't approved.  The biggest company couldn't buy its nearest competitors.

During the Reagan years, the administration with informed congressional concurrence directed a reinterpretation of antimonopoly laws that opened the door to abuse by big business.  Mergers went ahead with government approval, citing 'efficiency' and lowered costs after they fired all the unnecessary people.

Today, we have all sorts of monopolies and near monopolies in the United States. Many are created simply by one company purchasing all their competitors. Some years back a company named Tyco decided to take over the business of making plastic clothes hangers. It went out and bought at least four companies, and that gave it the power to jack up prices to clothing retailers. 


In the glasses and corrective lens market, one company holds 80% of the market; the world market. Most brands come from the one company; Luxottica. Monopoly.

Small town stores, family businesses that are part of the community, they've failed and closed as Wal-Mart steps in across the country.  Small towns have changed.  Is it for better?  Or worse?


The real issue with Wal-Mart is not that it sucks to live in a small town, it’s that the Walton family now controls more wealth than the bottom third of all Americans. One family with as much wealth as 100 million Americans. Now, who’s gonna get listened to when they show up on Capitol Hill? Or in the State House? Or the Town Hall? Is it Mrs. Smith? Or is it going to be the Walton family? (cross check 1, 2 3)

Rather than business and profit going to local folks who do the work, the profit runs away to corporate coffers in another state.  Or country.  Wealth is sucked from every locale by big business with no commitment or involvement in the well-being of the communities.  

The GAP widens from such practices.  What is the impact and what are the future implications of the money flow?




The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor. 

The GAP - Part IV - the cost

Tip-over

At some point, the laborer will no longer work and sacrifice his life and the lives of his children for the benefit of another's opulence and privilege.

There are crimes and there are causes.  Among the many known causes, economic inequality has direct correlation to crime rate.  Our increasing inequality in the U.S. is visible in the crime and incarceration rate.

In a 2002 study by World Bank economists found that crime rates and inequality are positively correlated within countries and also between countries. The correlation is a causation – inequality induces crime.

This finding parallels crime theory by economist Gary Becker, who shows that an increase in income inequality has a direct effect of increasing crime. Not only that, but a country’s economic growth (GDP rate) has significant impact in lessening incidence of crimes. Since reduction in income inequality gap and a richer economy has an alleviating effect on poverty level, it implies that poverty alleviation has a crime-reducing effect.

A portion of the problem, therefore, theoretically rests on the two factors being able to produce the desired effects; poverty alleviation and lesser crime rate. For now, however, reality gives us shaky economic growth and worsening income inequality.

The U.S., which ranks 3rd among the most income-unequal nations, and the worst in terms of income gap growth, also has the largest percentage of its population in prison among industrialized democratic nations.  Is it a mere coincidence or does it reflect the social ills that a big wealth disparity and overt rich-poor distinction brings?

Besides criminal activity, other warning signs point to the cause.  Protests, resistance, public demonstrations, political divisiveness and radical movements are all the norm when faced with visible injustice and inequality.

Disappointingly, government appears to consistently favor the wealthy and their corporate counterparts.  Regulations, programs, decisions, and priorities all seem to favor the wealthy to the detriment of the bottom 90% of their citizenry.  Such has been the circumstance entering each of the nation destruction eras in human history.

While there are many ways to interpret the numbers, the common perception is of an ever-widening gap; a loss of substance, of representation, of opportunity, of equality, of fairness, of liberty and a voice in shaping your own life.  Ask.

The task ahead is a difficult one, both for us as individuals and as nations.

The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor. 

A Nation's IQ

Nonsense.  Suggesting a national or cultural or racial IQ is controversial, primarily because the science doesn't support such a characterization.  Intelligence has been shown to be distributed across all lines without inherent distinguishable differences.

The chart here is based on standardized tests but reflects exposure to test-taking and education rather than a measure of 'genius' intelligence.

One of the passionate hopes of America's founders was for the availability of education; that anyone could go as far down that road as they were willing and able.  The intent has been served well but not uniformly with poverty being the primary hindrance today.  In earlier years, race and class were the limiting factors.

In Kenya, tribe determines what opportunities are available for a youngster.  My friend Joseph, now in his twenties, is bright, gracious and well-spoken, multilingual, and a handsome fellow, but his education ended at the sixth grade, and his opportunities for employment are limited to day labor.  Wrong tribe; he's Mijikenda.  If he'd been Kikuku, the ruling tribe/class, he would have gone to college and would be employed in the business or government sector.

Poverty, corrupt government, economic oppression of developing regions, all contribute to inequality.  None are chosen circumstances by common folks; all are done to them by others, usually the rich and influential.  Yes, poverty is imposed, not chosen.  The way out of poverty is discoverable if, and only if, there's a just, equitable environment.

The opportunity for education isn't the same everywhere.
That's the challenge; we can make a difference.

www.TexasEx.Org

NOTE (see full article):  In recent years, researchers in Africa, Asia and elsewhere have found that people in non-Western cultures often have ideas about intelligence that differ fundamentally from those that have shaped Western intelligence tests.  Research on those differences is already providing support for some of the more inclusive Western definitions of intelligence, such as those proposed by APA President Robert J. Sternberg, PhD, of Yale University and Howard Gardner, PhD, of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education (see related article). Eventually, it may also help researchers design new intelligence tests that are sensitive to the values of the cultures in which they are used.

Travel is fatal

Children on the beach just minutes from our worksite; their families took us in and made a place for us in their world.  It changed everything for us.  Everything.

So much we'd never have known, and it was more fun than staying in our own little world.  It was the chance of a lifetime to be sent to such places; an unusual blessing.

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime, the author says.  Probably true, probably true.

Simple

Saying goodbye to friends in rural Djibouti is hard as  I leave for home and an easier life.
Is there a way to share?  Am I doing what I can?

When I think about my friends and the way they live, I'm tempted to sell everything and go work where they do.  Is there a way to balance things out?  In Texas yesterday, I saw a grocery store the size of a small town; it had dozens of kinds of pretty much everything, and I remember my friends who've never been in a grocery store.

It's hard to imagine one of them walking down the block-long, air conditioned aisles, seeing a hundred different kinds of cookies or cereal or canned things.  And a cart full of groceries would cost them three months income or more.  We live in such a fractured world.

What churches do

A famine on the West Bank in the first century brought difficult times for the churches.  Famine on top of persistent food shortages, double taxation, and overpopulation crippled an already precarious Palestinian economy.  Churches in the eastern Mediterranean took up collections to keep them alive.  It wasn't easy for any of them, but they did it because that's what you do when there's a need.

Children in Mpeketoni
left without fathers.

The church in Corinth was the first of several churches to give and did so eagerly, according to the history.  They asked Paul how to save up such monies. He told them to do like the Galatian churches: each person should set aside a sum every week according to their income. That way no big collections would be necessary when next Paul visited. Their surplus was small, and the week-by-week savings were how they achieved a generous gift in the end.

In Kenya just days ago, a terrorist attack on the village of Mpeketoni left 48 men dead.  They'd been asked if they were Christian and shot if they were.  Families were shattered and the town was set ablaze before security forces arrived to drive off the attackers.

The pastors in Mpeketoni asked for help, so churches in the region raised some money and sent the bishop and a truckload of food and other supplies to help out. There is much to do in the community to begin the process of recovery, of healing, but they're not alone. It's what churches do.

The Corinth church wasn't perfect. In the couple of years between Paul's letters, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, the collection effort fell by the wayside. Titus visited the church and rekindled interest in the relief fund, but after he left, it again came to a halt. Second Corinthians 8 & 9 is Paul's encouragement to the church folks to finish what they had pledged to do the previous year.  Difficult, even in the best of times, of course, so reminders and encouragement are part of the deal.

Sincere thanks come from Kenya for those who joined in the effort.
Let us know if you'd like to lend a hand.

The GAP - Part III - what he told his mother

Goldman Sachs trader is suing; his bonus of $8.25 million was five million less than he told his mother he was getting.  

Deeb Salem said in an arbitration hearing that he was expecting $13 million, down from a $15 million award for 2009 when he was paid more than the CEO, Lloyd C. Blankfein. Salem said his bonus was unfairly docked because of a written warning he received for his 2007 performance.

Salem said his group put on a large short bet against the housing market, reaping billions of dollars for Goldman Sachs and helping it weather the financial crisis better than peers. He said Blankfein told the desk to cover its bet in early 2007, forcing the group to sell almost $5 billion of positions to Harbinger Capital Partners LLC, the hedge-fund firm run by Phil Falcone that made billions betting against subprime mortgages.

In 2011, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said Salem and other Goldman Sachs traders manipulated prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in 2007 for their own benefit. The subcommittee’s assertions were based in part on Salem’s self-evaluation, in which he wrote “we began to encourage the squeeze with plans of getting very short again after the short squeeze caused capitulation of these shorts.”

Summary: one of the primary blood-suckers that precipitated the Great Recession and the collapse of my retirement savings by gambling, betting against the market tumble he helped create... he is complaining because he didn't make more millions personally for his performance.  This miscreant crashed the world marketplace, he and a few others like him, by gambling!  That was illegal until recently when big business and government colluded to provide yet another path for extracting wealth from the working class.  My loss was endurable, but my friends in Kenya saw the price of their food double.  The toll was and continues to be deadly.  

This particular tantrum by a Wall Streeter offers us insight into the power-player thinking that pervades the financial industry in the developed world.  

We know how it works now. We've created venues for an individual or team to manipulate the marketplace with multi-billion dollar wagers.  Win or lose, the cost is extracted from the world's working class. Functionally identical to Los Vegas gaming, it continues today, largely unregulated and unimpeded. The lower-income folks of the world pay for that play, and the GAP widens.  

If banks were countries, Goldman Sachs would be in the world's top 100 countries for wealth.  Had enough yet?




The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

The GAP - Part II - nice try Mr. President

Barack Obama thoughtfully opened discussion on the widening gap between rich and poor in America in 2013, intending to focus on the issue for the remainder of his presidency. In describing the “relentless decades-long trend” of a “dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility,” Obama acknowledged that his administration has not arrested two stubborn trends: widening income inequality and declining mobility, where lower-income people have a harder time finding a path to the middle class.  

“The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough, but the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care or a community that views her future as their own — that should offend all of us.”

“Some of the social patterns that contribute to declining mobility, that were once attributed to the urban poor . . . it turns out now we're seeing that pop up everywhere.  Government can’t stand on the sidelines in our efforts, because government is us. It can and should reflect our deepest values and commitments.”  ~Barack Obama

The bitter truth is that poverty and income inequality have always been a political football. The reason is perhaps simple. The poor don't have an active and viable political lobby to fight for their interests.


Both democrats and republicans turned a predictable deaf ear in favor of more politically palatable subjects. House Speaker John Boehner lashed out that whatever poverty and income inequality there is can be blamed on Obama's programs.  That's nonsense, of course, just uninformed rhetoric and lacking substance; the gap has been growing for decades. With such words, the parties contend for position rather than solutions. Neither party has offered a coherent view nor a course of action; their various talking points would be laughed out of a freshman Economics 101 class.

Government is us, as Obama says.  And it does in fact reflect our collective values and commitments.

In the U.S., the southern states in particular have been bludgeoned by economic policy, economic decline, and an increase in the number of folks living in poverty. North Carolina and a handful of other Southern U.S. states saw the biggest increases in the number of people living in what are known as "poverty areas" between 2000 and 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Today, 25.7 percent of all Americans live in such areas, up from 18.1 percent in 2000, according to the report. Having a quarter of the nation living this way is a problem: Poverty areas are typically marked by "higher crime rates, poor housing conditions, and fewer job opportunities," the report points out.

See The GAP - Part I for additional information.  In the U.S., the gap is growing faster than in other developed countries.

See Class and the absence thereof for a look at underlying cultural issues.

The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

Furious Freedom

Freedom is uncommon.

It's worth remembering on this Independence Day...

However inalienable and proper freedom might be, oppression, bondage, and involuntary servitude persist today more so than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

The freedom to choose what you say and believe, where you go to live and work, to pursue knowledge, where you choose to call home and whom you will serve ... these are uncommon today. Uncommon, as in not available to most people.  Today.

Freedom's story is about more than taxes on tea or people in chains. 

Our American Revolution included twenty years of political upheaval and eight years of bloody war that ended in 1783, but there was more.

The French Revolution followed in the same decade, and the western world was born.  Personal freedom and inalienable rights were recognized in 1791 by the first amendments to our constitution, but it was well into the next century before such rights began to emerge for blacks, even later for women, and another century before segregation began to rot away.  There's more.

Humanity and the world were explosively changed by the freedom these few in the New World had won, but they and their predecessors had been fighting for such freedom since the Bronze Age.  It is a perpetual fire that has burned in every heart since the beginning.

At the other end of the spectrum from freedom is enslavement, perhaps.  Slavery is broad-reaching and not confined to the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the new world.  Slavery existed thousands of years before in ancient China, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, India, Rome, Greece, Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

Slavery in antiquity may have begun simply.  From year to year, there might be a good harvest, a successful season, or a dry spell lasting years; success wasn't guaranteed.  A family or a community might have plenty for generations or be driven out when the rains failed or the nearby forests were exhausted.  Having lost their livelihood, they might offer themselves as laborers in a more fruitful region to those who had good land for crops or nets for fishing.  Problems arose when those who 'had' took advantage of those who 'had not', and varying degrees of indenture and servitude were imposed.  In distress, a family might sell a child in hopes of saving the child and themselves as well.  A successful herdsman might offer a cow or two for a pretty wife.  Or servant.  Slavery by class, by birth, by conquest, by desperate choice ...

Beyond self-indenture, we find capture and forced service. Forced enslavement has a long history and persists today as human trafficking.

Only recently having returned to worldwide public attention, the slave trade affects perhaps millions.  There are 10,000+ per year that we know about. Actual (undetected) numbers will be much higher.

Children are still being bought and sold. Women and girls make up about 70% of trafficking victims.  

To continue bringing the issue forward, take a look at indentured servitude.

Indentured service was a labor system, most common in the 18th century British colonies, where young folks would sell themselves for a period of years as laborers.  They began by first selling themselves to a European sea captain who transported them and in turn sold their indenture to employers in the colonies who needed labor.

Indenture was a way for the poor youth of Britain and Germany to try for a new life in the New World.  Their plan was to work for a period of years and then be released.

During the late 17th and early 18th centuries poor children from England and France were kidnapped and sold into indentured labor in the Caribbean for a minimum of five years, but most times their contracts were bought and sold repeatedly and some laborers never attained their freedom.

Our modern version has several elements, particularly since the industrial age began.

Indebtedness is a bondage, encouraged and enforced by western culture.  Particularly for students, the legally enforced obligation of debt confines the individual to a narrow path of employment and availability in the workforce, usually for decades.  (Student debt tops $1.2 trillion, more than all credit card and auto loans combined.)  When you're dealing with millions of workers, the averages play out pretty impressively for the finance industry and the wealthy.

Wages were tied to productivity for 25 years following WWII.  In college economics, we
were taught that the two were tied by economic law, and that if they deviated, marketplace
response would force them back together.  They couldn't separate.  All that ended by the 70's
when corporations began to extract wealth specifically for the benefit of the few.  Executive
wages increased radically while labor pay rates stalled for the next half-century.  The financial
industry was turned loose to continue the wealth extraction.  Deregulation made the theft legal,
and Wall Street has extracted trillions from the economy's productivity without a penny going
 to the workers who provide it all.

Minimum wage traps unskilled workers in poor working conditions and inadequate support for a healthy life.  At first, after the plague in Europe had decimated the population and labor was in short supply, maximum wages were set to control costs for the benefit of the wealthy.  Later minimum wages were set to provide a 'living wage'.  If the U.S. minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it would be more than double the current rate.

Poverty, we know, is not something anyone chooses; it's done to you.

The big players these days are the 0.01% richest folks.  Economic warfare, rather poorly disguised in the west as free market capitalism, has formalized the process by which the super-rich advance at the expense of the indentured many.  The war is now global as financial institutions extract the wealth of developing nations.  Governments serve the wealthy and the gap widens.

Freedom is not the power to rise on the backs of others.
Freedom is not the chance to get ahead and leave others behind.
The full declaration is a world-changer.

"THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME, BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES, AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND, TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED, TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD." 

The triumph of freedom is not a war's victory of one people or ideology over another ... that which we have isn't real freedom.  It's just a taste, and there's more to come.