Bizarre. I’m glad he’s free. But from what little we know, there are many prisoners in North Korea that will live and die in slave labor camps.
We buy lots of stuff made by Chinese slaves. The only way to avoid it is not to buy ANYTHING made in China.
Right....because not buying things will suddenly make places with long histories of human rights abuses utopic.
The way prison works in China is that inmates have to literally earn their keep. While I have no idea if whatever is produced actually pays for the cost of incarceration, I’ve read (only from English-language sources, owing to the limits of my Berlitz-acquired conversational Chinese skills) that meals are served, contingent on individual production quotas.
I used to work at Kerrville State Hospital. I would get donated items from Volunteer Services for prizes for games with the patients. One donated item was a wooden keychain bearing the words “Help, Get me out of here”. The keychains were made locally at a ranch....
later named the Ellebracht Slave Ranch when it was discovered the owner picked up hitchikers, and enslaved, even murdered them for free labor. It wasn’t until later when the slave ranch was exposed that I wondered if the maker of the key chain was issuing a cry for help.
http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/01/the-modern-day-texas-slave-ranch/
I found a note in a Chinese Fortune Cookie at the Peking Moon almost like that. I took the note to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC and asked them to help him.
They said they’d look into the matter. That was 30 years ago and I haven’t heard from them.
This guy is an African and it’s either a scam, or it’s a hoax by some class-warfare loving lefty to guilt rich people into not shopping Saks.
SCAM SCAM SCAM
Pretty shrewd.
Yahoo email address, huh?
From a desperate African guy, huh...?
Kay, well, ANY person who responds to that email addy is SOMEONE SYMPATHETIC.
Who shops at Saks Avenue.
See where this is going...?
This is just the latest twist on the “General Mombutu bids you kindest warm salutations in the highest confidence, and asks you for cooperation in sensitive banking matter, though your commission will sadly be limited to only FOURTEEN MILLION U.S. DOLLARS.”
And most people don’t realize that that is an African variation on a scam that dates literally from the French Revolution, the ole,
“I am a deposed French royal stuck in a Spanish prison, and I need a small amount of money to get out of jail and later access my enormous gold fortune, spirited out of pre-Revolutionary France...”
Yeah, that’s where those guys in Lagos got that —they didn’t even make it up, not really.
And even THAT scam is a twist on another one that goes back several hundred MORE years.
The Chinese probably figure if their new friends the Arabs can take African slaves anytime they want, why can’t we do it too. The Western liberals don’t care. They only care about slavery from 150 years ago, not slavery today. Slavery today is fine, as long as you are Arab, or I guess now it’s ok for the Chinese, too. Certainly no one at Brandeis University will care about it.