Atrocity for profit: Who really holds the key to Britain's 'invisible handcuffs'?

[Tony Gosling]

Who really holds the key to Britain's 'invisible handcuffs'?

http://www.rt.com/op-edge/uk-modern-slavery-crime-555/

Beginning his working life in the aviation 
industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is 
a British land rights activist, historian & 
investigative radio journalist. Over the last 20 
years he has been exposing the secret power of 
the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and 
élite Bilderberg Conferences where the dark 
forces of corporations, media, banks and royalty 
conspire to accumulate wealth and power through 
extortion and war. Tony has spent much of his 
life too advocating solutions which heal the 
wealth divide, such as free housing for all and a 
press which reflects the concerns of ordinary 
people rather than attempting to lead opinion, 
sensationalise or dumb-down. Tony tweets at 
@TonyGosling. Tune in to his Friday politics show at BCfm.
Published time: 20 Dec, 2013 14:10
<http://on.rt.com/9kcuxx>Get short URL
Reuters / Phil Noble

Reuters / Phil Noble / Reuters
1.1K1
The latest menace to society was splashed across 
the London press this week: the scourge is 
“Modern Slavery,” and a new parliamentary bill 
has been drafted to put an end to it.
Tags<http://www.rt.com/tags/crime/>Crime, 
<http://www.rt.com/tags/uk/>UK, 
<http://www.rt.com/tags/human-rights/>Human 
rights, 
<http://www.rt.com/tags/immigration/>Immigration,<http://www.rt.com/tags/violence/>Violence

But this is not the debt slavery, hastened by the 
2008 bailout that comes from our 30 million 
landless people's uphill struggle to earn a “living wage.”

No. This new slavery is conducted by “ruthless” 
individuals housing and feeding Britain's growing 
army of destitute citizens in exchange for labor. 
Home Secretary Teresa May triumphantly tells us 
the punishment for the modern slave-keeper will be “life imprisonment.”

Kind or cruel, the morality of employers that 
provide only food and accommodation depends 
entirely on their character: the quality of 
accommodation, how many hours “resident 
employees” have to work and how much, if any, 
cash they get. The sad contrast, lost on the Home 
Secretary, is that many normal wage paying 
employers treat their employees as expendable 
nobodies and pay barely enough to cover Britain's 
grossly inflated housing, transport, food and 
energy costs, leaving these “non-slave” workers 
with no disposable income at all.


Britain's establishment no strangers to slavery

To discover Britain's role in sponsoring slavery, 
ancient and modern, perhaps we should look at the 
ruthless grip on trade secured by English 
corporations of the past. Similar to the model of 
Germany's earlier Hanseatic League, England's 
Merchant Adventurers were a commercial alliance 
formed in 1407, soon controlling three-quarters of the nation's foreign trade.

By 1689, the monopolistic profit creaming of the 
Merchant Adventurers had become so parasitic to 
all forms of business that their Royal Charter 
was revoked, but all was not lost for the privileged merchant elite.

Anticipating this demise, many of the old 
Medieval Templar ports had established formal 
cartels and a Bristol-based corporation had been 
established in 1552 called the Merchant Venturers.

They took over where monopolists like the 
Merchant Adventurers had left off and became 
prime movers behind the infamous and highly 
profitable “triangular trade” in African slaves.

Arms and manufactured goods were shipped from 
Bristol to the West African colonial stations 
where black slaves were kidnapped by rival 
tribes, usually at gunpoint, chained, sold and 
shipped to the West Indies. From there molasses 
and other lucrative foodstuffs from the slave 
plantations were shipped back to Bristol and other European markets.

The “Middle Passage” was the one side of the 
triangle that did not touch Europe, so the 
Merchant Venturers' horrific human trade was kept 
quiet, one step removed from Bristol. Between 
1600 and eventual abolition in 1807, scholars 
estimate around 15 million African slaves were 
trafficked in chains across the Atlantic.

Reuters / Stefan Wermuth



Atrocity for profit

One in eight, that's a staggering 2 million, did 
not survive the journey and most of those who 
died in the appalling conditions were ignominiously thrown overboard.

London's Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, an 
elite Oxford Bullingdon Club initiate with 
Cameron and Osborne, recently declared that 
"greed ... is a valid motivator ... for economic 
progress." A wide gap, he attested, between rich 
and poor is essential in fostering "the spirit of 
envy," reminding us once again that greed is a 
"valuable spur to economic activity."

The slave traders produced good figures, enormous 
rates of return for merchants and investors 
alike. Other than the seminal 1977 US TV series 
“Roots” and one of Marlon Brando's most 
brilliant, if obscure, feature films, “Burn!” 
(1969), the wicked inhumanity of the slave 
profiteers has been all but expunged from dumbed 
down 21st Century Western culture.


The slave traders - where are they now?

The Merchant Venturers did not die with William 
Wilberforce's 1807 Slavery Abolition Act, they 
diversified. Just as the Rockefeller family found 
they could make more money pressing buttons in 
banks than in the dynasty's traditional oil 
business, so the Merchant Venturers moved from 
dealing in human souls into downtown property... and finance.

They are now Merchant “Venturer Capitalists.” No 
longer needing white-sailed and red-crossed 
ships, they simply lend and invest their billions 
wherever the returns are good, salving their 
conscience with a public profile of charitable 
work. These are our owners – their original Latin 
motto “Indocilis Pauperiem Pati” has not changed 
to this day. It is most readily translated as, 
“The poor are stupid and will suffer much.”


2013 ‘Modern Slavery' diversionary tactics

So where has this government fad to end modern 
slavery actually come from? In December 2010, 11 
people were arrested for “enslaving” 19 Eastern 
European migrant workers in the Kent towns of 
Canterbury and Thanet, in southeast England. They 
were thought by police to have been held against 
their will and to have been living in substandard 
accommodation as economic slaves.

Then in November 2013, a Maoist group based in 
London were arrested and paraded before news 
cameras, accused of keeping three women “captive” 
for 30 years. There was at least some critical 
coverage of these arrests, with some journalists 
and local people questioning whether or not 
people living with the Maoists could be 
considered slaves when they were seen regularly 
by neighbors on the street talking to local cops. 
Police, in turn, explained that the three women 
were being kept in “invisible handcuffs.”

Sociologist Frank Furedi has been virtually a 
lone voice in criticizing the knee-jerk coverage 
of the raids and rush to legislation. Writing 
“Modern Slavery, An Invented Crime” in the online 
current affairs magazine, Spiked. He points out 
that"...there were only eight prosecutions for 
trafficking in 2011 – after all, we are meant to 
be in the grip of an epidemic."

London Mayor Boris Johnson (Reuters / Tyrone Siu)


Whilst aspects of these cases of “modern slavery” 
are abhorrent and testimony at subsequent court 
cases may well show maltreatment by “employers,” 
there is something entirely reasonable about some 
of Britain's hundreds of thousands of destitute 
and homeless seeking that warm bed and a roof 
over their head which the government is now 
failing to provide. One relief valve route off 
the streets since the dawn of man, squatting, has 
been criminalized by the Cameron government, too.

A total of 700,000 people were “sanctioned” by 
Britain's welfare system last year, leaving them 
with nothing to pay the bills or feed themselves. 
The millions of families now joining queues for 
food banks' free handouts were shocked to hear 
this week that the Coalition government has 
refused an offer by the EU to help these food banks feed Britain's hungry.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 
agricultural subsidies of tens of million of 
pounds to arguably the world's richest 
individual, the Queen, will, of course, continue.

It's quite clear now the Cameron government's 
viciousness towards the poor is both sadistic and 
deliberate. It seems to be the way “modern 
slaves” collectively organize to share their 
space and food that the establishment finds so 
abhorrent. Whatever the real reason for their 
cruelty the real challenge is to ban all economic 
exploitation, not just that conducted by those 
that house homeless people or economic migrants in exchange for work.


Wage, welfare slavery now UK govt policy

The need to get every single human being 
throughout their lives dependent on an individual 
umbilical cord of money is the apparent object of 
the Coalition government's “Modern Slavery Bill.” 
This sits menacingly alongside their 
proposed“Digital ID” which, though administered 
by private companies, they want to be obligatory 
to complete all online money transactions.

These invisible handcuffs are not being clapped 
on us by small groups who give work and shelter 
to destitute people, but by merchant banks and 
corporations' forcing millions below the poverty 
line into dehumanizing wage slavery. With 
covering fire from the London media and their 
political puppets, these faceless merchant 
financiers are determined to make us dependent, 
week by feeble week, on an umbilical cord of 
money over which they have total control.

Soon these plutocrats will have us all, in or out 
of work, in their “invisible handcuffs.” They 
will be able to switch on or off any ordinary 
person's access to the basic essentials of life, 
food, warmth and shelter, at the drop of a hat.

Meanwhile the real criminals, the City of 
London's HSBC money launderers, Barclay's 
mortgage rate fraudsters and UBS, RBS, Citigroup 
and Deutsche Bank foreign exchange rate fixers get pay rises and promotions.

At the heart of this brutal nation now is a 
secret statute: greed is indeed good. Perhaps we should call it Boris's law?

The statements, views and opinions expressed in 
this column are solely those of the author and do 
not necessarily represent those of RT.
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