We’d read Kevin Bales’ important expose in 1999 when it was first published, attracted by the strong cover photo as much as anything. And when we were asked, six years later, if we’d like to film any part of Bales’ three-day marathon of speaking engagements in western Pennsylvania – and do an interview with him -- we jumped at the opportunity, and so spent a day chasing him around several campuses in Erie. When he sat down for an outdoor interview with me, I’d filmed him at two events. By this time it had sunk in that Bales, though he saw new slavery to be a consequence of globalism, it wasn’t an inevitable let alone an intended consequence, but rather a grotesque phenomenon that could be addressed and corrected (over many years) within the context of globalism. Further, Bales was reluctant to draw political conclusions from his research because, as he stated, it might jeopardize the 501c3 status of his organization as well as the NGO status of Free The Slaves.

From the nature of our questions it became clear to Bales that we thought his approach was flawed, in part because it failed to look at the clear criminality of the Bush administration and its aggressive pursuit of the ongoing neo-liberal globalist agenda. And our couple of questions about 9-11, given his acceptance of the “official story,” convinced him to proceed with caution and clipped answers during the rest of our subsequently brief interview.

After filming Bales’ evening lecture (the questions to him were for the most part excellent), I had over seven hours of video from four separate events. Karen edited it down to an hour to play for cable access television (Chautauqua County, Channel 5, Mayville) and we sent a copy out to the Erie sisters. They never responded, and we promptly forgot about all, chalking their silence off as one more instance anti-war activists’ (religious or secular) fear of those associated with “conspiracy theory.”

A year later, while working on a vid that touches on a couple of chapters of Barrie Zwicker’s forthcoming book, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, I came across a U. of Pennsylvania lecture by Noam Chomsky of Oct. 3, 2002. Chomsky’s overview of globalism brought to mind Bales’ lecture. I had made no attempt to put his talk of a year ago into perspective, letting it drop and rushing off to the next project. Putting globalism in context has been readily done by Michel Chossudovsky in his book The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order:

“Humanity is undergoing, in the post-Cold War era, an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population…The New World Order feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the natural environment.”

Prof Chossudovsky’s book is an explication of the IMF/World Bank New World Order program of “Economic Genocide.” (note 1)

Of course, mass extermination is a frightful project, apt to get messy when the victims find out. So here we turn to Prof Chomsky in his “Masters of the World” (see below) talk, October 3, 2002, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He begins:

“Looking forward, what’s likely to happen in the years ahead, I think a good place to start is with expectations of the masters of the world, the expectations of the powerful: what do they anticipate?” Chomsky calls attention to two plans that outline the “masters of the world” strategy: Global Trends 2015 (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html) which projects “chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide” as globalism continues. Those are the euphemistic words of mass murderers, eugenicists. As Chomsky notes, the paper was produced “the US National Intelligence Council, that’s the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. The publication was put together jointly with representatives of the business world and the academic profession.”

Chomsky then discusses a 2nd document: Vision For 2020 produced by the Space Command (which Chomsky points out speaks for the “masters of the world” during the “Clinton era.” How do the “masters of the world” intend to cope with their mass killing? Vision For 2020, parallels Global Trends 2015 in its description of the protracted consequences of the globalist agenda: the “growing number of have-nots as the globalization proceeds with deepening stagnation and a widening economic divide which is going to foster extremism, violence” which will be addressed by the weapons in space program that will “…provide the United States with absolute freedom in using or threatening to use force in international relations, cementing US hegemony and making Americans the masters of the world.” In his next breath, Chomsky says of the plan, in his dismissive way, “It’s not going to work, but that’s another story.” Chomsky’s a blue-pill sort of guy. For are more insightful look at the Space Command document, see Bruce Gagnon (http://www.space4peace.org). Filmmakers Notebook #106

by Ron Harvey

SLAVERY TODAY: KEVIN BALES (Human Trafficking Conference, Erie PA, April 19, 2005) There are more than 27 million slaves in the world today, and more in the making, and rapidly. Kevin Bales, PhD, the world’s leading expert on contemporary slavery, author of the exp, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, and president of Free The Slaves. In a series of public lectures and class talks, Bales distinguishes the “old” slavery versus the new where there is no investment necessary in the easily acquired property. A slave can be bought for as cheap as $50, discarded when no longer useful (or dead), and another bought. Close to a million people are trafficked across international borders every year, 70 percent are female and 50 percent are children, Bales reveals. Event sponsored Gannon University, Edinboro University, Mercyhurst College, and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Northwestern Pennsylvania. (58 min., Snowshoefilms)