if profiting from selling lives is wrong, so is profit from taking them

[yurbud]

The LA Times ran an excellent piece today on the birth of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. If they could convince people that businesses profiting from buying and selling human beings, we should be able to convince others today that businesses profiting from killing and torturing others is wrong.

We should not go to war or overthrow a democratically elected government to increase the profits of an oil company or a sweatshop or plantation owner. It should be considered treason for a company to advocate such a policy.


We should devise firewalls and severe penalties to keep our elected officials from doing this.

This would do more to stop terrorism and anti-American sentiments than anything our last ten presidents have done.

KEY EXCERPTS:

...On that May afternoon, after the pressmen and typesetters had gone home for the day, 12 men filed through his doors. They formed themselves into a committee with what seemed to their fellow Londoners a hopelessly idealistic and impractical aim: ending first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the most powerful empire on Earth.

The interests they were taking on were entrenched and influential. Britain dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Roughly half the slaves taken across the ocean to its lucrative West Indian sugar islands, to the United States and to other European colonies were transported in British ships. Starting an anti-slavery movement in Britain in 1787 was like starting a renewable energy movement in Saudi Arabia today.


...what made the movement that grew out of the George Yard meeting so unprecedented was this: It was the first time that a large number of people in one country became outraged — and stayed outraged for many years — over the plight of other people, of another color, in other parts of the world.

The movement took off immediately, in a way that earlier scattered abolitionist efforts, in both Britain and North America, never had. Petitions flooded Parliament, which the following year took the timid first step of regulating conditions on the slave ships. Slavery became the prime topic of the London debating societies. Anti-slavery books and posters flooded the country...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hochschild25jan25,1,4959331,print.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions&ctrack=2&cset=true