Many of the great civilizations on this planet, including America, depended upon the labor of slaves for centuries. Each and every time that a slave was bought, sold, or forced into unpaid labor, those acts created packets of energy that affected wealth. Since these acts have been ongoing for thousands of years, one can safely say that the energy of slavery has touched a large part of the wealth of this world.
3. The Sex Trade
Sex is one of the oldest and most profitable businesses in the history of the planet. Every day, hundreds of thousands of transactions related to sex and sexual activity take place in the world. Most of this activity is illegal and is never reported. It has been suggested that human sex trafficking is the fastest growing form of contemporary slavery, and is the third largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world.
“Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors,” reports the US Department of State in a 2008 study. Due to the illegal and underground nature of sex trafficking, the exact extent of women and children forced into prostitution is unknown.
Children are sold into the global sex trade every year. They are often kidnapped or orphaned, and are sometimes sold by their own families. According to the International Labour Organization, the problem is especially alarming in Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, and India.
Poverty, social exclusion, and war are at the heart of human trafficking. Some women are hoodwinked into believing promises of a better life, sometimes by people who are known to, and trusted by, them. Traffickers may own legitimate travel agencies, modeling agencies, and employment offices in order to gain women's trust. Others are simply kidnapped. Once overseas, it is common for their passport to be confiscated by the trafficker, and for them to be warned of the consequences should they attempt to escape. Such consequences include beatings, rape, threats of violence against their families, and death threats. It is common, particularly in Eastern Europe, that should they manage to return to their families, they will only be trafficked once again.
Globally, forced labor generates $31 billion dollars annually, half of it in the industrialized world, and a tenth in transition countries, according to the International Labour Organization in a report on forced labour (“A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour”, ILO, 11 May 2005). Trafficking in people has been facilitated by porous borders and advanced communication technologies. It has become increasingly transnational in scope and highly lucrative within its barbarity.
According to a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the most common destinations for victims of human trafficking are Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and the United States. Due to the illicit nature of the business, it is difficult to estimate the true impact of the sex trade on the world's wealth. Once again, however, each illegal act related to the sex trade creates energy that has an effect on the world's wealth.
2. Gambling
Gambling is one of the oldest known pursuits of mankind. Archeological evidence suggests that even the earliest caveman was a gambler. Dice-like objects made from the ankle bone of a sheep or dog, called Astragali, dating back 40,000 years, have been found. Cave drawings depicting gambling offer further proof of the existence of early gamblers. Pairs of dice have even turned up in the ruins of Pompeii; some of them “loaded” to fall a certain way.
Around 2,300 B.C., the Chinese invented a game of chance using tiles, and 1,100 years later, Greek soldiers amused themselves with dice games, though, in ancient Greece, gambling was illegal. In Egypt, a pair of ivory dice was found in Thebes dating back to 1,500 B.C., and ancient gambling artifacts have been unearthed in China, Japan, India, and Rome.
In ancient Rome, Claudius redesigned his carriage so that he would have more room to throw dice. Caligula confiscated knights' property to cover his gambling debts, and Roman soldiers gambled for the robes of Christ after his crucifixion. At the height of the Roman Empire, lawmakers decreed that all children were to be taught to gamble and throw dice.
During the 14th century, and in spite of being an inveterate gambler himself, King Henry VIII outlawed gambling when he discovered that his soldiers spent more time gambling than improving their battle skills. When Henry's wife, Anne Boleyn, and her brother were tried for treason and incest, the odds were 10-to-1 on acquittal.
In the New World, Native Americans, believing that the gods themselves invented games of chance, played dice with plum stones painted white or black. In addition to wagering possessions, Native Americans also played to predict future harvests, and in hopes of curing seriously ill tribal members.
During the Revolutionary War, lotteries bankrolled the Continental Army. Washington himself bought the first ticket for a federal lottery in 1793, sponsored to finance improvements in the District of Columbia, and nearly all state governments sanctioned lotteries. By the 1830s, more than 420 lotteries nationwide offered prizes. Lotteries remained a popular fundraising method throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Riverboats and frontier towns in the New World emerged, providing new gambling venues, sometimes legal, sometimes not. And one risked much more than a few gold pieces when gambling in the frontier days. Card cheats and conmen were often lynched, denoting the public's attitude toward professional gamblers, or “sharpers” as they were often known.
In the 1830s, refugee sharpers from the South moved to Cincinnati and opened the nation's first “Wolf-Traps” or “10 Percent Houses”, named for the house's cut of the action. Cincinnati was also the birthplace of the “Horse-Hair game”, a method for cheating in cards by which a player, aided by an accomplice's distractions, manipulated cards and chips by the use of a horse hair attached to a vest button.
After the Civil War, evangelical reform wiped out most of the lotteries. In the 1890s, the flagrant fraud of the nationally marketed Louisiana lottery led Congress to outlaw the remaining games, creating public disdain for lotteries, and in 1910, Nevada made it a felony to operate a gambling game.
Prohibition sent drinking and gambling underground. But it didn't stay down for long. In the 1930s, restrictions eased up and legalized betting on horse racing became popular. In 1931, Nevada legalized gambling again, and casinos literally sprouted from the sands of the desert. Atlantic City followed suit in 1978 and, since then, other states have legalized various forms of gambling.
Today, when a casino counts money, it often does so by weighing it. The energy of gambling has affected the wealth of this world for thousands of years. Each and every act of gambling issues more of this energy into the world's money supply.
1. War
War is a constant in human society. War can be seen as a growth of economic competition in a competitive international system. Based on this view, wars begin as a pursuit of markets for natural resources and wealth. While this theory has been applied to many conflicts, such counter arguments become less valid as the increasing mobility of capital and information level the distributions of wealth worldwide, or when considering that it is relative, not absolute, wealth differences that may fuel wars. Once a war has ended, the losing nations are sometimes required to pay war reparations to the victorious nations. In certain cases, land is ceded to the victorious nations. For example, the territory of