END SLAVERY NOW!!!(didn't we already do that?)

NPR had an article about a man that is working to end slavery.  It was a good story and perhaps the worst story I have ever heard.

Despite the current trend to show slavery in the USA as happy slaves and happy owners, we all tend to view slavery as ending 150+ years ago and good riddance.

Despite many of our exaggerated complaints about our lives and jobs being barely better than slavery--and some of us are living pretty close to the bone, in horrible conditions, without shelter from weather or nutritious food or even potable water, very few of us understand how bad slavery is.  We can imagine, we can empathize, we can be horrified, but most of us have not been there.

So when this person starts talking about current slavery, right now, I'm thinking---OMG! where is this happening?

The slave trade in Africa was officially banned in the early 1880s, but forced labor continues to be practiced in West and Central Africa today. UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from this region are sold into slavery each year. Many of these children are from Benin and Togo, and are sold into the domestic, agricultural, and sex industries of wealthier, neighboring countries such as Nigeria and Gabon.
  http://www.infoplease.com/spot/slavery1.html

We are not talking about people in low-paying jobs, with poor access to education and very poor  access to opportunities.  We are talking about domestic servants, hereditary slavery where groups of people have been held for generations to work mines, or sold young as concubines, laborers on farms, mines, factories, and sex workers.

When we hear about such things in India,Pakistan, the Sudan, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, Mauritania, Arabia, we think, "oh, well of course, those places"  But it is estimated that over 60,000 slave are in the USA.  
http://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/indicators-human-trafficking

The above site on our own government Homeland security page showed the signs of human trafficking, so we can all recognize it and know what to do when we find it.  Who knew we needed that information.  But in my own little geographic area, I have seen a small news storm over a local factory business that had brought in immigrants to work, then fixed it where they couldn't leave, slept on the premises, ate what they were given and had no contact.  Someone got loose is how it was discovered.
More recently, in a strange little recreational vehicle park, they discovered women from another country working as prostitutes that described their own lack of freedoms.  They had been promised jobs and a start in the land of the free, and were being sold by the hour.

It is estimated that there are 60,000 slave in our country right now.  RIGHT NOW!

How can that happen.  What kind of people are all right with using people, owning people, treating people like property?

• The people growing Tobacco  for Phillip Morris (why expect the tobacco industry to care about people, but just because you are addicted to nicotine doesn't mean you don't care.)
• People growing Cotton for Victoria's Secret
• People making electronics in China for Microsoft, XBox, HP, Apple, Nokia (why?  why?  aren't they  fortune 500 companies? don't they make more profit than God?)
• Cotton grown for Forever 21, Aeropostale, Toys R US, and Urban Outfitters
• Cocoa Beans for Hersheys.

Are there others?  The place in my town was making cardboard boxes or some such thing, and 2 towns over is a glass plant where the employees never spoke English and were always escorted in and out by a company manager that did all the talking and paid the bills (shades of small town ER visits)  and the rumors were not good.

Has slavery always been present?  Is it coming back?  Why does it exist?  How can someone do that to someone else?

I'm going to go have a good cry.