Perpetually Indebted
by digby
… otherwise known as slavery:
Jewel Goodman eases back into his porch chair and breaks the filter off a peach-flavored Clipper cigar. He rolls it absentmindedly in his fingers and closes his eyes to smell the breeze tattle on an incoming storm. In his 57 years, he’s seen enough hard days to know not to rush an easy one.
For most of his life he has toiled long days in hot fields picking cabbage, potatoes and tobacco. Eight of those years were spent on a farm in Hastings, south of St. Augustine. In 2007, Ronald Evans was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison after holding Goodman and other farm workers “perpetually indebted” in what the U.S. Department of Justice called “a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible.”
Goodman is one of more than 1,000 slaves who have gained freedom in Florida since 1997.
Goodman lights his cigar, takes a slow draw, leans back and remembers.
“I had to scrap with the devil for my living. And by the devil, I mean contractors,” he says. “All the camps I been in, some of them was good and some of them wasn’t, but Evans . . . that was slavery time. No playing around.”
It started one day in the early ’90s, when a white van stopped him in front of the Fruit Stand grocery store in Hastings and asked if he needed work. He did. But as soon as he met Evans he knew he had found trouble. Evans was mean in a way that made Goodman feel suddenly aware of how far out of town they were. There was no phone. Chain link and barbed wired surrounded the property. The crew leaders looked hardened, “like they just come out of prison.” The field workers called them henchmen.
One of them gave him a pair of bloodstained work boots.
“He said ‘These belong to the last guy who ran. If I catch you trying to get down that road, you’re going to answer to me too.’ “
He eventually got away. The man who enslaved him is serving a 30 year sentence. Imagine what happens to undocumented workers who can’t go to the police.
I wonder if Rand Paul thinks the government should have enforced the oral “contract” this man made with his boss rather than intervening on the side of the “perpetually indebted.” I’m guessing he would think the dispute should have been adjudicated in civil court at the very least.
Right wing libertarians do speak out against indentured servitude, however. It’s just that they define it as the Federal reserve forcing them to pay taxes. Never say they don’t have principles:
Socialist politicians in our government, for almost 100 years, for the purposes of remaining in power by exploiting the weakness in individuals who were looking for a free handout, worked in conjunction with the Federal Reserve to expand the money supply (debt) to pay for the handouts. Not only was the public treasury pillaged for purely political reasons (that should be treason), but the American taxpayer also picked up the tab for the interest paid to the Federal Reserve and other countries for the loans and the hidden cost of inflation because of diluting the number of dollars in circulation. This evil is still going on today, but the numbers are escalating exponentially…
[A]s long as there are corrupt politicians who will exploit the weakness in humans for their votes and conspire with special interest groups, giant, international corporations and the Federal Reserve to create money out of thin air to pay for unconstitutional welfare and environmental protection programs, America’s airplane is on fire and is in a crash dive to the deadly sea of national bankruptcy, while Americans are headed for perpetual indentured servitude.
h/t to bb