The Persistence of Slavery in the United States of America

It is tempting to think of slavery as an anachronism in the United States. However, the modern slavery system in the US has three major branches, without any one of which the US economy cannot operate in its current form.
The first branch is mass incarceration and unaccountable police shootings. Prisoners in federal prisons, many privately managed, are forced to work without compensation, and under constant threat of physical violence. The majority of these prisoners have been arrested for marijuana crimes, for which black citizens are far more likely to serve jail time than white citizens arrested for the same offense. The threat of police killings keeps the arrested black citizen in a state of terrified compliance that is part of the discriminating nature of this system.
The second branch is the undocumented worker system. Although some elements loudly call for the expulsion and exclusion of undocumented workers, the fact is that these workers are needed so completely that without them, the entire US agricultural system would collapse overnight. There are already several documented cases where excessive crackdowns on undocumented workers have resulted in massive loss of crops, which cannot be picked without labor. Because the workers are so desperately needed, efforts to exclude them are not genuine. This is why such efforts always have limited effectiveness. It is also why workers in this condition are prosecuted, but the agents and institutions who employ them never are. The Kafkaesque immigration system understands that it really wants the workers, and its only function is to keep the workers in a constant state of fear and disenfranchisement. In other words, the US immigration system serves no other purpose than to guarantee a limitless supply of workers who are completely devoid of legal and human rights, and can therefore be ill-treated, cheated, and subjected to deadly working conditions, with impunity. They receive compensation, and are technically free to leave, but that compensation is very far below minimum wage, carries no fair labor guarantees, and is often arbitrarily withheld in pervasive acts of wage theft. The supposed freedom of the workers to leave is also complicated by the third branch of the modern slavery system, which is the systematic destabilization of governments abroad that serve as sources of immigrant and exported labor.
The third branch of the modern slavery system is the exportation of slavery that began in earnest shortly after the end of slavery in the US. Under presidents T. Roosevelt and W. McKinley, the US began military incursions into the Caribbean, South America, and the Philippines, where it supported the most ruthless dictators and opposed all populist movements. The justification generally offered for these incursions was "to protect US interests." These interests were largely agricultural ventures in fruit and sugar, which required vast labor forces in slavery or near-slavery conditions. This type of foreign policy continues to this day in the form of covert military and economic operations that maintain despotic governments in countries where the US has manufacturing and mining concerns. Among the most egregious examples is the 1973 coup conducted against Chile's Salvador Allende, and more recent examples include US support of the military coup in Honduras, and the effective kidnapping of Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide. These actions occur with consistency through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their effect is that labor in foreign countries is kept from organizing, and maintained in effective slavery conditions, and these conditions also serve as a strong deterrent to the return of immigrant labor, thus reinforcing the second branch of modern slavery. "Free trade" agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP are crucial elements in this system, and should really be thought of as "free exploitation" agreements.
With these three branches of slavery firmly entrenched -- mass incarceration, undocumented labor, and anti-labor interventions abroad -- the US cannot pretend that its economic system has ever subsisted without a massive substrate of slavery to support it. We need to return to first principles to discover and propagate a system of social organization that truly embodies fairness for all, and we cannot deceive ourselves that we have yet achieved that. We cannot pretend that slavery is an artifact of the past. It is an existential reality of the present, and, unless we act, of the future.