Make the Next President a Great Emancipator!
This blog post originally appeared on the Free the Slaves Blog.
We need your help to make modern slavery a presidential campaign issue. With tens of millions enslaved worldwide, it’s critical that the next U.S. president make fighting slavery a priority.
Today, the anti-slavery movement is launching the Generation Freedom campaign. The goal: get Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to commit to spending $3 billion a year, if elected, to fight human trafficking inside the U.S. and around the world.
That might seem like a lot. But consider that traffickers haul in $150 billion a year in illicit profits.
“The United States is incredibly powerful when it exercises leadership in the service of a great moral purpose,” says Free the Slaves Executive Director Maurice Middleberg. “The next president of the United States has the opportunity to be the great emancipator of the 21st century by laying the foundation for the global eradication of slavery.”
Here’s how you can help:
- Visit your favorite candidate’s website and submit a comment, or post a comment to their social media platforms. Let them know that fighting slavery is important to you.
- Go to rallies or town halls and ask the candidates or their surrogates what they’ll do to fight slavery. Let them know that fighting slavery is important to you.
- Talk about modern slavery at caucuses and at party or delegate conventions. Let your fellow voters and journalists know that fighting slavery is important to you.
- If a campaigner calls you at home, or knocks on your door, ask them what their candidate will do to fight human trafficking. If a pollster calls, let them know that fighting slavery is important to you.
- Do whatever you can to get the issue of modern slavery and human trafficking on the 2016 presidential radar. Make a sign, print a T-shirt. Get active. Get vocal. Get visible.
- Donate to Free the Slaves to support our advocacy effforts with candidates, elected officials, government agencies and multi-national institutions.
- Visit www.generation-freedom.org to sign the campaign petition and read the entire platform.
There is great bipartisan consensus to combat human trafficking. But the federal investment in fighting this global human rights crisis is anemic – less than $150 million per year spent to combat slavery compared to more than $30 billion a year for the War on Drugs.
“The anti-slavery movement has galvanized global acknowledgement of the persistence of slavery,” Middleberg notes. And we’ve developed solutions that work. “The Congress and the next president must now focus on scaling-up approaches pioneered by the anti-slavery organizations so that the effort to eradicate slavery is commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.”
America can do better. Freedom is an American value.
