Have Yourself a Moral Little Christmas
Just in time for Christmas, a loyal reader sent me a list of ethically challenged products. This was inspired to some extent by the new Leo DiCaprio movie, Blood Diamond, which dramatizes the issue of "blood" or "conflict diamonds," those diamonds that are sold to fund armed conflict and civil war in Africa. (If you're looking to buy diamonds, Amnesty International has a Buyers' Guide (PDF) on blood diamonds, how to avoid them, and what to do about their continued sale.)
The list of other morally problematic items is a Web exclusive from Foreign Policy. The five products, gold, candy bars (because of cocoa powder), teak furniture, shower curtains (polyvinyl chloride), and cell phones (coltan and tin ore), help support more armed conflict, child labor, and environmental damage. Foreign Policy does provide a few alternatives to some of these immoral products, so they don't all need to be stricken from the Christmas list. Because after all, if you can't make positive moral choices at Christmas, when should you do it?
posted by Doug @ 12:17 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Coltan is used in the manufacture of a lot of electronic devices. A scan of the web indicates that it is used in most wireless devices (is the phone in your home wireless?), car computers, laptops, sony playstations. Is it in the iPod? The demand for this is less elective than that of the Diamond or Gold. Status can be achieved by means other than the display of precious items.
It not as if the particular substance is the real issue anyway. Were things better when the need was for natural rubber instead?
In a word: yes.
The rubber trade devastated the population of The Congo, (reducing its population by 50% or to the tune of 22 million or so - over the course of about 75 years) By contrast, over the last eight years Coltan mining has cost 4.5 million lives, reduced the great apes to a state of statistical extinction, and literally poisoned both large swaths of river basin and forest in a way that makes them unrecoverable.
It’s also worth noting that while the rubber-trade gave birth to the first international humanitarian organizations (Teddy Roosevelt wrote in rather stirring terms of the unacceptability of its horror and injustice in the face of the American ideal) Moral responsibility for Coltan mining is either shirked (see above) or flat out ignored.
And here I was thinking it was the general exploitation of the workers in the region that was key across time independent of the essential substance. Are you saying that the problem isn't that the market holds the power of life and death over the people and environment of the region, but rather a dearth of stirring writs and international outrage? Isn't there some basic inequality that needs address?
My dentist was telling me about a pair of earrings he saw at a show (his daughter is an aspiring jeweler). They sold for 86K, but he could have got a deal and had them for 75K. The cellphones and iPods and SUVs are just a bribe paid by the top 2% to the rest of the upper half (50% and 49% of the wealth goes to those two groups) to keep the other 50% in line (the half of the world living on just %1 of the wealth). Once in a while they put on a dog and pony show about doing something, raise the going rate for the slow-death that is labour, play the class traitor, hire more cops, but little is done to really change it. That is part of the reason for the apathy you so despise in your country.
"basic inequality that needs address"
I am unaware of any mildly workable system for actually (as opposed to talking about)doing so -- this side of leveraging market dynamics to a cause -- as the post recomended.
Maybe it's in your blind spot.
That’s possible …or it could be that I’ve seen and noted how badly the “alternatives” have performed in the real world.
If you’re aware of a case study that hasn’t resulted in either cultural stagnation and or mass graves … I’d be more than willing to give that sucker a read.
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