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You are probably reading this article on a tablet, smartphone, or laptop computer. If so, your device could very well contain cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, an impoverished yet mineral-rich nation in central Africa, that provides 60 percent of the world's cobalt. (The remaining 40 percent is sourced in smaller amounts from a number of other nations, including China, Canada, Russia, Australia and the Philippines.)
Cobalt is used to build rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an integral part of the mobile technology that has become commonplace in recent years. Tech giants such as Apple and Samsung, as well as automakers like Tesla, GM, and BMW, which are starting to produce electric cars on a mass scale, have an insatiable appetite for cobalt. But unfortunately, this appetite comes at a high cost, both for humans and for the environment.
The Washington Post has an in-depth story, THE COBALT PIPELINE - Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers' phones and laptops. It summarizes the situation:
The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. It moves from small-scale Congolese mines to a single Chinese company — Congo DongFang International Mining, part of one of the world's biggest cobalt producers, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — that for years has supplied some of the world's largest battery makers. They, in turn, have produced the batteries found inside products such as Apple's iPhones — a finding that calls into question corporate assertions that they are capable of monitoring their supply chains for human rights abuses or child labor.
How much culpability do regular people have when they do not have a choice of the source of the components that go into their devices?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:57AM
What, you're saying that this abuse of the workers happened despite, in fact perhaps because of, the freeness of the market they already have - how can that be?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:26AM
Impose democracy, you say?
You are unlikely to get the result you seek.
What is actually needed is the imposition of the rule of law, and once people have become habituated to the functioning of reasonable legal and judicial system, then that is the time to allow a fully functioning democracy. Once you have a generation of people brought up without the rule of law, it becomes incredibly difficult to restore order - just look at Somalia. It takes at least a generation of people growing up under a rule of law before democracy has a fighting chance, and even then it is not guaranteed to work. Folk memories and grudges last a long time.
One thing you can argue the British did well with their empire was to leave their colonies (mostly) before law and order broke down too far.
There are multiple ways to impose law and order: invade and make the place a colony; get a UN mandate to govern; use a company of mercenaries to run the place (like the British did with the East India Company and India). No matter what you do, you will come up against resistance: from the international community; and from local warlords who make more money by exploiting the poor than under a rule of law. The Chinese tend to exert power and influence by control of business, and they have very long experience of doing so. Convincing the Chinese to do what the West wants is a challenging objective. In Chinese eyes, we are a flash in the pan compared to the long continuous history of Han civilization. The Chinese usually get what they want, in the end.
It is probably worth looking at Rwanda and seeing how that country is trying to recover from its past.
The issue is not going in with all guns blazing. Any fool can do that, and declare 'Mission Accomplished'. What happens afterwards is the important bit. Look at Afghanistan, and Iraq.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:45PM
That's not accurate. That's like saying, "In Roman eyes, we are a flash in the pan compared to the long continuous history of Latin civilization." In one sense they'd be correct, because societies in the West are inheritors of Roman civilization, but it's certainly not particularly continuous nor do most of us think of ourselves as part of "Roman" civilization. Chinese civilization has been quite interrupted over time and Chinese identity has also changed quite a bit. The Mongol conquest of China's various states and the Manchu conquest are a couple examples of disruption to Chinese civilization, and the fact that Vietnamese think of themselves as Vietnamese and Koreans think of themselves as Koreans rather than part of Chinese civilization is an example of how much Chinese identity has changed. It might be tempting to say, for example, well, some form of Chinese has been spoken there all that time, but that too has changed a lot. It's kind of like saying Italians speak a form of Latin, which is to say, well, no, not really.
I don't say all this to criticize, but to dilute the notion that China is a monolith. People in the West and in China often describe that place that way, but it's a very heavy gloss on a very fractious society. Many these days fret about how divided American society is, but, man, that's only one fault line. China has more on the order of a dozen.
We also should take care not to build up China into an unstoppable juggernaut. They are far from that. The unstoppable Chinese juggernaut has spent most of the last 300 years getting its ass thoroughly kicked by nearly every country with two bullets to rub together. In fact they think of themselves as "fallen behind" and chide themselves to not give in to "fall behind-ism." (落后主义, luohouzhuyi).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:37AM
Nice comment. Some more interesting things about China:
- There are countless local spoken Chinese "dialects" that are mutually unintelligible. Given the definition of "dialect", those dialects are really different languages from a linguistics point of view. They're basically as different as Spanish and Italian. However, everyone knows and can speak Mandarin, in addition to whatever local "dialects" they can speak.
- China was having a civil war when Japan invaded a few years prior to World War 2. Japan in WW2 was really, really racist against everyone who wasn't Japanese, considered the Chinese as less than human, and committed some of the worst atrocities of WW2 -- Holocaust-level atrocities -- against the Chinese. You'd probably expect the Chinese to put the civil war on hold and fight off the horrifically evil foreign invaders, right? Nope. They formed a united front on paper and then continued attacking each other like complete and total fuckwits.
Reagan liked to publicly assert that the Soviets and the US would completely and enthusiastically cooperate with each other in the event that space aliens invaded Earth, because Reagan had some trouble distinguishing movie plots from reality. Well, if he was right about that assertion, and I think he was, then the Cold War-era US and USSR, polarized as we were at that point in history, still had a metric shitload more good sense than WW2-era China.
I'm honestly mystified by this. I don't know how a people could get so consumed with internecine conflict that the most brutal foreign invasion in modern history didn't snap them out of it. I would love to read a well-researched analysis of what factors led to that debacle. My best guess is that it somehow boils down to "Mao was an asshole", because he was, but still.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:16AM
Because of no reason other than the geography of the territory held by the two main factions, the Japanese invasion fell much harder on the Nationalists. The Communists were happy to let the Japanese wipe out their enemies for them, and the Japanese didn't much care who they were killing, so long as they were Chinese.
Let the world burn so you can rule the ashes? That was the Communists' strategy. And in the long run it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:01AM
And in the long run it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
For whom, exactly? Mao's remaining top associates were politically persecuted by his enemies after Mao's death. Mao's other top associates were eliminated by Mao during his lifetime in order for Mao not to have to share power. Millions of Chinese died basically by Mao's own hand because Mao intentionally starved them to death. Today, China has a dysfunctional one-party government routinely responsible for gross human rights violations and an economy propped up almost entirely by exports rather than domestic demand and by their one-child policy-created demographic dividend -- which is going to come back to bite them BIG TIME as their population ages. I know Slashdotters tend to think China is some sort of super-efficient authoritarian utopia, but it's not. It's a country with advantages and problems, and its political system is responsible for more of the problems than advantages.
Let the world burn so you can rule the ashes? That was the Communists' strategy.
No, it wasn't. The strategy of both sides was to cooperate, but they failed, stabbed each other in the back, and the result was that China fought less effectively than it otherwise may have been able to. The Communist Party of China wasn't able to magically predict in 1940 that the Allies would ultimately and decisively win World War 2, and, at the end of World War 2, Japan was still occupying a large portion of China, which, btw, the US instructed it to turn over to the Nationalists.
If the Axis had won the war, China would have been even more devastated by Japan than it already was. Perhaps there would have been no more Chinese; perhaps Japan would have administered its own Holocaust against them. Perhaps they would have all been enslaved for generations instead. Perhaps some Holocaust + enslavement combination. You're right that Japan didn't care about the Communists and the Nationalists, but, obviously, had the Nationalists been defeated by Japan, the Communists would have been next. The Communists themselves held very little territory at all at the time and were far inferior militarily to the Nationalists. Japan would have made short work of them.
China's only hope for survival was that the Allies won World War 2. Helping the Allies win World War 2 in every way possible, by fighting as effectively as possible in order to drain Japan's resources as much as possible, should have been the goal of every pretender to the government of China, and really anyone at all in China who cared at all about the future of the country, its civilization and culture, and its people. Because the two sides fought each other instead of uniting to together fight the dire and clear existential threat to China's survival, they were fuckwits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @10:48AM
(Un)fortunately, the cobalt market isn't controlled by a cartel like the diamonds or oil. All in a very democratic a free market way of course.