Katy of Jezebel passes along some news from UPI (and elsewhere) that now she’s in charge of the State Department Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is following up on her interest in human trafficking that goes back to her alliance with the late Senator Paul Wellstone in the 1990s.

There’s a first time for everything: the US State Department’s annual report on human trafficking has included a rating for the United States. “We believe it is important to keep the spotlight on ourselves,” explained Hillary Clinton.

She said it here.

Incidentally, what’s significant about trafficking isn’t how open-eyed victims are going into their situation. Nor is it how bad things were, or even how much worse they were before they left their homes. It’s whether and how easily they can get out of their situation. And from slaves and convicts transported to America in the 18th Century to the “owe my soul to the company store” miners and loggers of the 19th Century to the sharecroppers and “adopted” orphans of the 20th to sex workers, agricultural workers, domestic servants, and industrial laborers today the U.S. has had an ongoing history of pretending trafficking is somebody else’s problem.

Good for Sec. Clinton.

Oh yeah, and fuck all the assholes who claim it only counts if you’re trafficked for (commercial) sex. It certainly does count, of course, it’s just not the whole story. And never has been.