Yes, twenty-seven million in slavery is a lot of people, but it is just .0043 percent of the world's population. Yes, $23 billion a year in slave-made products as services is a lot of money but it is exactly what Americans spent on Valentine's Day in 2005. If humans trafficking generates $32 billion in profits annually, that is still a tiny drop in the ocean of the world economy.

For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.

It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.

We have to make it clear to the multi-nationals that slavery is too high a price to pay for cheap goods

Throughout all of human history slaves have been expensive capital purchase items. And today they're disposal inputs like styrofoam cups to an economic process.

Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life.

Most of the people who come into slavery today, the people who enter into slavery for the first time in the present moment, are not captured, they're not knocked over the head, it doesn't follow the old sorts of mechanisms.