"The Corporate Left has made a dirty deal with Communist China to divide and conquer America."

Daniel Greenfield writes in FrontPage Magazine,

While Coca-Cola pounds the Black Lives Matter pulpit, it’s got a present-day slavery problem.

...The Congressional-Executive Commission on China had released a report in March on China's forced labor practices. The CECC is a bipartisan group that includes a wide range of national politicians from Senator Tom Cotton and Senator Marco Rubio to Senator Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Marcy Kaptur.

That report led to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which, among others, named Coca Cola and Nike. Why did the media bury the story? Because it had bad things to say about its advertisers.

The CECC report and the accompanying legislation noted that Coca-Cola, Adidas, Calvin Klein, the Campbell Soup Company, Costco, Esprit, H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, Patagonia, and Nike were among those companies suspected of complicity in China's forced labor camps.

...A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute cast an even wider net, tying Apple, BMW Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, GM, LL Bean, North Face, Gap, Volkswagen, and Nike, among others, to supply chains based around workers laboring "under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour."

A factory making shoes for Nike was "equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences and police guard boxes." Nike Shox were discovered being made in another factory by slave laborers shipped far from home to produce shoes for the sportswear giant. Too far for them to run away.

...All this leaves the executives with plenty of time to come up with new social justice initiatives and call the country and the American people whose wealth, future, and hopes they’ve stolen, racists.

Foreign plantations, slave labor forces doing the dirty work in the cotton fields, aren’t in America, but they are the source of the wealth of a new class of politically correct plutocrats who subsidize the Democrat Party and the Left, preaching about social justice from their mansions, while their slaves are kept out of sight thousands of miles away by the commissars of the Communist slave trade.

The Corporate Left has made a dirty deal with Communist China to divide and conquer America.

...Slavery existed throughout history. The 1619 Project is a lie, but China, unlike America, was built on slave labor. And China is expanding its colonial presence into Africa, building factories, and abusing the native population in a search of cheap labor. The products of that new black slavery in Africa, like the trade in slaves in Asia, will be sold by all the familiar brands now declaring that Black Lives Matter.

Read more here.

Who made your cotton shirt and dress?

Jianli Yang and Lianchao Han report in the Wall Street Journal,

U.S. Customs and Border Protection accuses Hetian Taida Apparel Co. in China’s Xinjiang province of using forced or prison labor, and last month the agency banned U.S. imports of the company’s garments. It’s a first step, but the U.S. should go much further. China, the world’s largest cotton producer, has built the world’s largest prison system to provide the labor needed to sustain cotton production.

This cotton gulag is primarily based in Xinjiang, home to most of China’s Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic groups.

...In 2014 the Chinese government implemented a strategy to suppress Uighurs in Xinjiang even more. It involves the detention of large numbers of Uighurs in so-called re-education camps or vocational training centers, intended to cleanse them of their ethnic identity and make them loyal to the Communist Party. Observers estimate that China has detained more than one million Uighurs in this system.

...Since 2014 some 2,200 new cotton and apparel companies have been set up to participate in the vertical-integration program. Some boast that they are suppliers for major international brands. As of 2018 China documented the employment of 450,000 new Uighur workers from impoverished households, relatives of the convicted and detained, and re-education camp inmates.

...Inmates in Xinjiang prisons serve as a key labor force in the cotton value chain, from cotton-field reclamation and construction of irrigation systems to planting, harvesting, processing and garment production.

...While prison and labor camps are the traditional means of control, China has also begun perfecting a new model of imprisonment. Beijing has deployed the most expansive and intrusive surveillance system in the world in Xinjiang, making the province essentially an open-air prison. Companies sourcing from China can’t effectively audit their suppliers. China doesn’t need to rely on barbed wire to enslave workers when they have blanketed cities with facial-recognition cameras and sophisticated voice-recognition technology to keep track of residents.

The U.S. has the world’s most stringent law—the Tariff Act of 1930—to protect against the importation of goods made with forced labor. It is little enforced, as evidence can be hard to verify. But the evidence is clear when it comes to Xinjiang, where forced labor is ubiquitous. Since Xinjiang is by far the largest supplier of China’s apparel supply chain, Western governments, companies and consumers should assume that any cotton products made in China are a product of the cotton gulag.

It is time to stop this modern slavery. We urge the U.S. government to enforce the ban on the importation of forced labor goods by banning all cotton, textile and apparel products from China.

Read more here.