> My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery, believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned through bloodshed.

Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers, after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history.

This just seems like a bunch of self-promoting nonsense. His great-great-great-grandfather didn't shed blood with the idea that after the US Civil War was over slavery would be eliminated from the face of the Earth forever and ever. The point was to eliminate US Government legal acceptance of slavery.

Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do.

> While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight down to Port au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport

I find this a bit disingenuous. 'Just five hours away' implies something that is a lot closer than New York and Haiti. At least he was nice enough to qualify himself, but stating like that comes across as trying to make this emotionally-charged rather than a rational discussion.

> They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50. Now to put that in context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of about $40,000.

I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go?

There's also the difference that when slaves were being sold for $40K is was to put them to work in a money-making enterprise (i.e. plantations) and the slaver traders were selling them in a US market. Plantations owners weren't shipping themselves across the seas to buy slaves directly in Africa. For that matter, today the costs (and risks) of travel are hugely less than they were in the past.

In this example, he's going to another country and buying a child that will make him no money (housework and personal sexual favors are not a stream of money). Not only that, that $50 or $100 does not account for how he would them import that child back into the US. I would venture a guess that -- especially nowadays -- it's pretty expensive to get papers to bring a slave-girl child into the US (at least through 'public' ports of entry like airports).

> If you were to plot slaves on the map, you'd stick the biggest number of pins in India, followed by Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more slaves In India than the rest of the world combined.

And yet, if you look at international efforts or American pressure, India is largely let off the hook because Indian federal officials claim, "We have no slaves. These are just poor people. And these exploitive labor practices," -- if you're lucky enough to get that term out of them -- "are a byproduct of poverty."

Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt.

Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously). India especially seems to have problems with this due to population density and the caste-system that their society still holds on to.

I'm interested if this is an increase in the percent of the population that are slaves, or just an increase in the number of slaves because the population has exploded across the board. I'll admit that it's also possible that there is an increased demand for slaves as the Indian middle-class has taken off. I remember reading that a lot of Indians work on visas in the US for a while, but end up moving back to India because when their wives move over here they are disappointed that the middle-class doesn't have servants (as one in India would expect to have at that income level).

> Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt.

If this is the case, I hope that he's including 'indentured servants' in the numbers of slaves when he's looking all the way back into history. Indentured servants were often in the same situations he's describing now (even though most elementary school textbooks like to gloss over that fact by claiming that the servants were 'only' there to work off a debt and they were free to leave when they were done; conveniently leaving out the number of servants (or an estimate) that actually worked off their debt).

> They can also get involved with Free the Slaves. And they can talk about the issue more. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy.

Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?