Perfume tycoons found guilty of slavery

I guess justice can still be won in America - if you scratch and claw your way to it.

At a mansion in an exclusive Long Island neighborhood, a multimillionaire couple who owned the Royal Mirage perfume brand held 2 Indonesian women as slaves, forcing them to work as housekeepers for 21 hours a day while physically and psychologically torturing them.

But now the couple has been convicted of all 12 charges in a federal indictment that accused them of offenses such as conspiracy, involuntary servitude, and harboring aliens. They may face up to 40 years in the slammer. I hope they serve every second of it - but lawyers say they'll probably receive a lot less prison time. (Guess they can't cramp the poor multimillionaires' style too much, can they?)

The dour couple was arrested back in May after it was found that they seized the housekeepers' passports and refused to pay them for their work. Prosecutors said the couple subjected the enslaved women to an assortment of tortures, including throwing scalding water at them, making them eat 25 hot chili peppers at once, forcing them to eat their own vomit, and cutting them behind the ears with a knife. It only ended when one of the women fled.

That multimillionaires would enslave housekeepers just shows how out of control all the greed and meanness is.

Luckily, slavery is illegal in almost every country in the world. (I'm sure it's illegal in Indonesia as it is in most places.) Slavery is allowed in practice in a few nations, but generally these are countries that the Bush regime considers its "democratic" allies. The next step America must take is to cut off trade with countries with bad human rights records. (Of course, as long as Bush is in power, that means America would have to cut off trade with itself, but that's another matter.)

(Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22941664-23109,00.html;
http://www.nriinternet.com/NRI_Discrimination/USA/2007/Mahender_%20Sabhnani;
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/17/america/NA-GEN-US-Forced-Labor.php)