Friday, March 3, 2017

THIS IS CAPITALISM! Smartphones made by blood; child labour in Congo’s cobalt mines

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/03/this-is-capitalism-smartphones-made-by.html

It’s Capitalism, Stupid…

 

A Sky News investigation has found children as young as four working in Congolese mines where cobalt is extracted for smartphones.The mineral is an essential component of batteries for smartphones and laptops, making billions for multinationals such as Apple and Samsung, yet many of those working to extract it are earning as little as 8p a day in desperately dangerous conditions.

With little regulation requiring companies to trace their cobalt supply lines, and most of the world’s cobalt coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the chances are your smartphone contains a battery with cobalt mined by children in the central African nation.The Sky News team visited a string of mines in the DRC’s former Katanga Province and found children working at all of them.

Eight pence a day for backbreaking work

At one cobalt mine, children toiled in the drenching rain carrying huge sacks of the mineral. Dorsen, eight, had no shoes and told us he hadn’t made enough money to eat for the past two days – despite working for about 12 hours a day.

His friend Richard, 11, talked about how his whole body ached every day from the tough physical work.

The mine tunnels are dug by hand by miners who have no protective equipment. The tunnels have no supports and are prone to collapse, especially in the rain.

At one mine we travelled to, workers had downed tools in support of a fellow miner who had died after one such collapse.

There are thousands of unofficial, unregulated, unmonitored mines where men, women and children work in what can only be described as slave conditions. In one group, we found a circle of children with a four-year-old girl picking out cobalt stones.

Other children younger than her were sitting among the mineral or playing nearby. A pregnant woman already carrying a toddler on her back was also in the group. None of them wore gloves or masks, yet the World Health Organisation says exposure to cobalt and breathing in its dust fumes can cause long-term health problems.

Certainly, many of those involved in the mining industry believe they’re suffering poor health as a result.

Makumba Mateba has a huge tumour on his throat which he believes has grown because the water in his village is contaminated by cobalt mining.

He said: “We only drink the water which comes from the mining sites after all the minerals have been washed in it. “It comes right through our village and I drink it and I’m sure it’s that which has made me sick.”

Monica, four years old, picks out cobalt stones at a mine.

Mystery illnesses

Becha Gibu, a doctor in the village of Kimpesa, said many of the babies he delivered had mysterious illnesses. “There are lots of infections they’re born with, sometimes rashes, sometimes their bodies are covered in spots,” he said.

“The mothers are also just not strong when giving birth – this is all a consequence of the mining.”

 

The DRC sits on one of the richest mineral deposits in the world, with huge amounts of gold, tin and cobalt underneath its soil. It produces 60% of the world’s cobalt – a fifth of which is extracted by hand or artisanal miners known locally as creusseurs.

 

Cobalt collected by small mining operations is sold to mostly Chinese traders, who we filmed secretly. They don’t ask questions about where their cobalt comes from or who has worked to extract it – they just want the best price. Traders then sell it mostly to exporter Congo Dongfang International, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, which supplies most of the world’s largest battery makers.

The supply line is chaotic, informal and unregulated, with unofficial, non-standardised prices paid out to groups, individuals and larger networks.

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Film Review: “Pride” (2014)

Feb 20, 2015 07:48 pm | drew

by Róisín Lyder

Pride is a dramatized version of a series of events that took place in England and Wales during the 1983-5 miner’s strike, which was brutally crushed by Margaret Thatcher and her Tory government as part of their efforts to break the British trade union movement. The movie opens with the song ‘Solidarity Forever’ playing overtop of historical images of the strike and the song punctuates the rest of the film. Indeed solidarity is the real theme of Pride, a film that is a light-hearted meditation on the possibilities created when members of the working class overcome what may seem like insurmountable differences.

At the 1984 gay pride march in London we are introduced to Mark Ashton as he begins taking up a collection for the striking miners. It is at this march that the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) is formed. Ashton persuades the others to join by asking: “Who hates miners? Thatcher, the police, the public and the tabloids. Sound familiar?” The young queer people see the parallels; one suggests that the usual police harassers have been absent from the gay nightclubs lately because they have been too busy harassing the miners. The group sets about fundraising and eventually finds a mining town reluctantly willing to accept the cash. Following the usual practice of thanking solidarity groups, the LGSM are invited to the small Welsh town of Onllwyn where they meet an assorted cast of characters ranging from those who effortlessly lack prejudice, to the mildly uncomfortable, to the outright and staunchly homophobic. A series of predictable yet entertaining moments of bigotry and acceptance ensue.

Pride is not your average historical film; it is more glitter than grit. Reflection on the significance of LGSM to the history of the British left probably should not end here. Pride is silly, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek and will leave you laughing out loud the whole way through. In between the disco dancing and occasional outbreak of song, however, the film does manage to be thought provoking; raising a series of questions about what working class solidarity means.

The question that seems to linger most is what the members of LGSM receive in exchange for their unrelenting, unwavering commitment to the needs and the struggle of this mining town. How does solidarity emerge? One young gay man asks: “When did the miners ever come to our aid? Those bastards kicked the shit out of me every day.” However, the group is clearly touched by the kindness they receive from members of the mining community and for some of them the experience is an opportunity to work through their own difficult relationships with the small towns and families that raised them, but the real political exchange of solidarity only becomes clear at the end of the movie. It is here that Pride manages to pull off the happy ending the genre requires despite the obviously grim crushing of the strike movement. The film closes exactly one year after it starts at the 1985 gay pride march with dozens of buses filled with miners and their families descend upon London unannounced to march in support of the queer community.

As heartwarming – and truthful – as the ending is, Pride comes up short in explaining the motivations of LGSM. The film would have benefited from a more fully developed articulation of class politics. The inspiring commitment of LGSM to the strike cause comes off, at worst, as an odd and slightly masochistic hobby and, at best, as a result of a vague understanding of the shared experiences of groups targeted by the state. The real and more convincing explanation comes from the class-consciousness of the leadership of the LGSM. It is Mark Ashton who pushes forward with almost unfailing confidence in both the ability to the miners to overcome their prejudices and the absolute necessity of supporting the strike. Ashton was, in fact, a communist organizer and the leader of the YCL-Britain during the strike and before his untimely death of HIV AIDS at the age of 26. The only nod to Ashton’s political commitments happens when he is on stage at a nightclub in London someone in the audience yells ‘commie’. Clearly Ashton and other key members of LGSM had a deep commitment to revolutionary politics and the interests of the working class as a whole but the movie leaves this part of the story untouched.

Some have suggested that Ashton’s political background was left out in an attempt not to alienate audiences. If true, the irony is palpable. For a film clearly articulating the lessons that we should be proud of who we are when we participate in the struggle (“this is a gay and lesbian group and we are unapologetic about that”), and that we shouldn’t take heed of what our enemies say about us (“I don’t believe what they say about us miners, why should I listen to what they say about the gays?”), the choice to skirt Ashton’s revolutionary politics seems a shame.
This and other great articles will be in the next print issue of Rebel Youth! It’s a special issue on the struggle for full equality to be released for International Women’s Day 2015. Be sure to check it out!

Via: http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv01ju12.html#JTHEUS

By Darrell Rankin

Do you wonder what the US war machine thinks about the Quebec student protests?

Usually I love it when top imperialists say what they actually think, except when the stakes are high and the ideas threaten actual violence of some sort.
An article by David T. Jones (Allowing student protests to continue threatens Quebec democracy, ca.news.yahoo.com, June 15, 2012) offers a glimpse into the thinking of the US military establishment about the Quebec student protests. Jones is a retired U.S. State Department senior officer who served the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.

Jones had a long career getting the ear of top US military officers and is an author and frequent commentator on US Canada relations. His articles at the American Diplomacy blog cover issues such as the top level of the US general staff, ruptures in NATO, Quebec separatism, and the “good news” of Harper’s election.

He tries to establish that there is a plan in Quebec for “seizure/displacement of power” a union backed coup d’etat that would protect Quebec’s unions, for the wrong reasons. He believes that the unions are corrupt and up to no good, ignoring the actual source of the construction corruption scandal under investigation in Quebec.

In fact Jones presents the tuition struggle as a “red herring.” He says the real “stake” in the struggle is “the legitimacy of Quebec’s governing authority” and “radical students, supported by union funding and presumably organizers, are seeking to force the resignation of the Charest government and early elections.”

His greater worry is that “students elsewhere (may) determine Quebec has provided a `learning experience.'” The common reactionary interest of the corporate ruling class in both Quebec and Washington is fully expressed by Jones, especially against the spread of protest movements that take aim at corporate greed and support democratic aims.

Most alarmingly, he offers free advice to the Charest government: “If you want to end demonstrations/wars, you need overwhelming force with mass arrests, quick trials (no “catch and release” policy), and jail sentences…” Jones is very critical of Charest’s “feckless” efforts.

The article is actually a call or alarm for Washington to help Charest hold on to power. Either Jones is a loony tunes to whom no one will listen, or we should expect that the US will work openly or secretly to protect the incompetent Charest government.

Charest is actually following much of Jones’ advice, using truncheons, mass arrests and lethal plastic bullets. Jones’ extreme reactionary views require us to increase our efforts to develop another kind of international class solidarity in support of the students and unions fighting for a just society in Quebec, and to say to the U.S.: Hands off Quebec!

(The above article is from the July 1-31, 2012, issue of People’s Voice, Canada’s leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers – $45 US per year; other overseas readers – $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People’s Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

The corporate news media is obsessed with the “tea party” dominating the Republicans. This conservative movement does not attract many young people and actually seems restricted to the white, wealthier, and older base of the Republican Party, although it does try to speak to the concerns of working people under the Great Recession.

In fact, the tea party and the capitalist forces that back it hope to use fear to attack the historic victories of workers, such as Social Security. One of the most important of their “divide-and-conquer” tactics, both historically and now, is racism. Whether it takes the form of passing SB 1070 in Arizona or denouncing social spending as “redistribution” to attack an African-American in the White House, the name of their game is to scare white workers into aligning themselves with the rich.

Read more »

The Young Communist League kicked off the start of the school year with its Red School Bus Tour. Here’s some video of a California stop.

December 14, 2010

‘The student protesters of this winter of discontent
are my heroes. Instead of giving up on politicians who
failed to deliver their promises on tuition fees, the
students have been galvanised into action. Their
demonstrations and occupations are the antidote to the
cynical bile that is spewed out on internet forums
against anybody who dares challenge the notion that
free-market capitalism is the answer to all our
problems’

Billy Bragg.English alternative rock
musician and activist

Guardian (UK)
September 14, 2010

http://tinyurl.com/2wrj3cs