[News] Supreme Court Ruled Against Enslaved Children Even as US Celebrated Juneteenth

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://truthout.org/articles/supreme-court-ruled-against-enslaved-children-even-as-us-celebrated-juneteenth/ 
<https://truthout.org/articles/supreme-court-ruled-against-enslaved-children-even-as-us-celebrated-juneteenth/> 



  Supreme Court Ruled Against Enslaved Children Even as US Celebrated
  Juneteenth

Barbara Ransby - June 22, 2021
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On the very same day last week that President Biden signed legislation 
declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, the conservative-dominated 
Supreme Court effectively declared in /Nestle USA, Inc. v. DOE et al./ 
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-416_i4dj.pdf> that 
slavery was morally acceptable, and U.S. capitalists could continue to 
profit from it, as long as it occurred outside U.S. borders.

While self-congratulatory celebrations proliferated in the wake of the 
new Juneteenth holiday, we are reminded of the wide gulf between 
symbolism and substance. Of course, symbols are extremely important. 
They draw attention to history and offer a frame for understanding it. 
They provide opportunities to affirm values and educate one another 
about how we got to where we are. Conversely, symbols of racism are 
mechanisms of continued trauma and insult. So, far be it for me to 
diminish the importance of symbols and historical markers.

That said, this week there was a churning in my gut as I listened to 
commentaries and condemnations of the evils of slavery, and discussions 
of how unjust it was that our ancestors in Texas were enslaved for two 
and a half years beyond the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment before 
they could free themselves. What got less attention and should have 
triggered widespread outrage was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to 
side with the world’s biggest chocolate producer against former child 
slaves working on cocoa plantations in West Africa: On June 17, the 
Supreme Court ruled that the formerly enslaved children could not sue 
the Nestle and Cargill corporations, because their cocoa suppliers were 
based in Ivory Coast.

West Africa’s booming cocoa industry supplies Virginia-based Nestle 
Corporation and Minnesota-based Cargill with ingredients for chocolate 
products that make these companies billions in profits. Nestle boasted 
over $26 billion in revenue in 2015. In contrast, the young litigants, 
originally from Mali, told horrific stories of being forcibly 
transported to work sites, beaten, kept in locked rooms overnight and 
compelled to work 14-hour days for little or no pay. Some testified that 
they were terrorized, tortured and tied to trees as punishment for 
attempts to escape. A U.S. Labor Department Report from 2015 estimated 
that more than 2 million children work under such conditions 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershey-nestle-mars-chocolate-child-labor-west-africa/> 
in cocoa-growing regions of West Africa.

The lawsuit, which has meandered through the courts, was based on the 
Alien Tort Statute, a nearly obsolete law that has been used in recent 
years by foreign nationals seeking redress from U.S.-based multinational 
companies for human rights abuses.

But in a painful reminder that neoliberalism’s “free market at all 
costs” philosophy is still alive and well, the Supreme Court justices in 
effect looked the other way. Ultra-reactionary Clarence Thomas led the 
way, writing for the majority, determining that since Nestle and Cargill 
had essentially outsourced the abuse and feigned ignorance, it was not 
their fault. Lawyers for Nestle and Cargill argued for a level of 
immunity that enables companies to continue to operate globally with 
impunity, when it comes to labor abuses.

Democratic Party insider Neal Katyal — a former Obama Justice Department 
appointee (as acting solicitor general) — was defense counsel for the 
chocolate magnates. The scurrilous argument that Katyal made in front of 
the court back in December cited as a worthy legal precedent the fact 
that the firm that supplied Zyklon B gas to Nazi death camps in the 
1940s was not held liable at Nuremberg tribunals. Therefore, he argued, 
Nestle and Cargill should not be held accountable for their complicity 
in child slavery today. Katyal went further to argue that holding U.S. 
companies responsible for overseas atrocities would put them at a 
“competitive disadvantage” relative to other countries. He delivered 
this morally bankrupt argument seemingly without shame and with a veiled 
and spurious sympathy for the enslaved children. According to Katyal and 
company, child slavery is not the fault of rich U.S. companies that 
incentivize these practices, but rather it is simply what Africans are 
doing to each other.

So, as we mark our calendars for a yearly federal commemoration of the 
time when Black people in Texas finally achieved at least some modicum 
of freedom from bondage in the 19th century, let us also organize to 
mark Juneteenth with protests against ongoing 21st-century 
manifestations of slavery, from the heinous treatment of unfree child 
laborers on West African cocoa plantations working in service of U.S. 
corporate profits, to the slavery-like conditions that are the bedrock 
of the prison industrial complex in the United States.

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