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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="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/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Supreme Court Ruled Against Enslaved
Children Even as US Celebrated Juneteenth</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Barbara Ransby - June 22,
2021<br>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-416_i4dj.pdf"><em>Nestle
USA, Inc. v. DOE et al.</em></a> that slavery was
morally acceptable, and U.S. capitalists could continue
to profit from it, as long as it occurred outside U.S.
borders.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershey-nestle-mars-chocolate-child-labor-west-africa/">2
million children work under such conditions</a> in
cocoa-growing regions of West Africa.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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