Reception and Rape
[This post is part of the SUMMER JUSTICE SERIES. You can start with Part 1 here.]
Part 6: Conflict-Free Cell Phones
So I saw my first iPad the other day. Pretty neat. I’ve never been a gadget guy. Most of the time I pick up cool new technology after it’s been out a while. Granted that makes it less cool but way more affordable. I have yet to hold an iPhone or even see a Droid. My last two cell phones have been love-worn hand-me-downs that I’ve switched over to my number. Maybe that’s why I missed so many documented accounts of violence connected to mining minerals necessary for making those little talking rectangles that we just can’t live without.
We’ve arrived at the last major issue of social justice in a series to figure out if and how we can make the world a better place by changing our daily habits. Now to our list of Fair Trade coffee, slave-free chocolate, sweatshop-free clothing and more we add conflict-free cell phones.
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Guerilla warfare, murder, and gang rape are terrifying realities in Congo. The center of Africa is no stranger to civil strife. Nearby Rwanda is still feeling the effects of the 1994 genocide as refugees from that brutal conflict struggle to find peace in a war-torn land.
Squads of fighters battle for control of lucrative mines that produce raw materials found in electronics like cell phones, cameras, video games, and more. These profits fund ongoing acts of violence including mass rape which is used to terrorize anyone who would oppose this brutal system. As we constantly see in Africa, the local people gain no benefit from the lucrative resources beneath their feet.
The most valuable minerals are called the big four: gold, tungsten, tin, and tantalum. Our electronics are filled with these valuable commodities which are sent to nearby African nations and smuggled off to Asia for convoluted processing. According to the organization Enough over 5 million have already died as a result of bloody competition for control of these earthy treasures.
This topic is especially timely right now since the banking reform bill was just signed into law by President Obama last week. Apparently, somewhere in the 2,300+ behemoth of legislation (don’t get me started) there’s a new requirement for companies to prove their materials don’t come from conflicted areas like Congo.* Some folks are jubilant, yet other pundits are quick to point out that:
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1. Proving where minerals came from is very difficult (see video below).
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2. Regulation of this type will turn companies away from Congo altogether thereby destroying the lives of a million plus people reliant on the work from mines.
We’ve seen these types of statements on almost every other similar issue. Evil practices must be stopped whatever it takes. Read more »
Lasting Footprints
[This post is part of the SUMMER JUSTICE SERIES. You can start with Part 1 here.]
Part 5: Reduce Your Waste
A couple of weeks back, Paul Lawrence saw an air conditioner sitting on a sidewalk in Queens, New York. He decided to grab it since the thing had been left for trash. As Lawrence placed the unit in his car, borrowed from an aunt, a city official from the Department of Sanitation approached him, slapped a $2,000 fine on him, and impounded the car. His 73-year-old aunt was also slapped with a $2,000 fine for allowing him to use the vehicle for such a heinous crime.
One of my childhood heroes actually LIVES in garbage.
This is normally the part where I fight back an aneurysm over civilization-dooming government control but not today. We’re past the halfway post of a series on social justice issues, and this week is about how much waste we create, whether or not it matters, and what should be done about it.
Apparently trash on a city sidewalk is city property, and recycling is a major source of revenueso we’ll leave Mr. Lawrence to the court battle he no doubt has coming. Call me naive, but I never realized how massive the business of garbage is in our country. Government controls are just the tip of a trashy heap of problems connected to our waste.
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We live in a disposable world. According to Julie Clawson–whose book Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of our Daily Choices inspired this series–the average American creates a few pounds of trash everyday. She continues by saying:
“…for every 100 pounds of product we acquire, 3,200 pounds of waste were created in the manufacturing process. This waste adds up…”
I agree that waste adds up (check out the video below), but the impact of that waste is being debated by many different voices.
The first argument against waste is usually the claim that we are filling landfills and running out of space. Then I read articles with statistics saying we have way too much space to even come close to filling it all.
Before long recycling enters the debate. I always thought recycling was a fairly positive thing and had no idea how many problems exist worldwide as a result of saving plastics, metals, and more for reuse. I never thought of recycling as an expensive government venture that costs states millions of dollars. The UK found this out not long ago as entire warehouses were filled with discarded products that were supposed to be used as raw materials for future production. That production isn’t always there so governments have to pay to store garbage. But read a few more articles and you’ll hear how recycling creates jobs while saving the planet!
Finally, I’ve heard that the real problem of disposable things is the pollution it creates in our rivers and oceans while harmful toxins are released into the air. So I’m hearing a lot, but what is true? Read more »
Are Sweatshops A Necessary Evil?
[This post is part of the SUMMER JUSTICE SERIES. You can start with Part 1 here.]
Part 4: Sweatshop-Free Goods
What do you think of when you hear the word sweatshop? What images enter your mind? Maybe you’re picturing a dark room somewhere on the other side of the world. What type of people are there? What are these individuals doing? Have you formed some kind of scene in your mind?
The ideas that inform our perspective come from many different places. Depending on your personal view you could have envisioned women in Asia, children in Africa, illegal immigrants in the United States, or even poor white folks somewhere in Alabama. Regardless of your view, most people immediately think of negative, perhaps evil, things. Sweatshops are violative places where laws, rights, and sometimes even workers are abused. You don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong with such pratices.
Like the previous issues in this Summer Justice series, most of us would never support systems that promote injustice if we knew what they were and how to disconnect. The problem is that the line we seek is often blurry and gray. That’s why we’re examining the most common ways people around the world are exploited. The existence of sweatshops gets people passionate in a hurry, but the debate includes prominent voices from all sides.
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Sweatshops are most easily defined as places that produce goods while violating labor laws. They are most common in developing countries but still exist in the most powerful nations on the earth. These facilities exist in the largest cities of the world, and that includes New York and Los Angeles. Common violations include child labor, low pay, long hours, and poor working conditions.
One common misconception is that sweatshops have only existed in recent years. They’ve acutally been around since the Industrial Revolution early in the 19th century. Governments have been instituting labor laws since the 1820s and 30s. Some groups (abolitionists) of those times fought to eliminate slavery. Once they accomplished that objective they turned their attention to abusive labor practices. America finally changed laws to end some of the worst of these practices in the early 20th century.
In the past century companies have continued to receive goods, finished and raw, from facilities where the overhead is low enough to increase profits. Everybody talks about “made in China” but you’ll find goods made in Honduras, Bangladesh, Jordan, Taiwan, and beyond. I just saw hacky sacks at the mall made in Guatemala. In America we swim through millions of products made cheaply in a variety of ways in countries all over the world.
The system is not going to change. Globalization is not going to end. So what are we to do? Some people tell us to stop buying clothing and goods made in sweatshops, but that’s easier said than done when you consider the confusion over the origins of our products and the amount of cheap labor involved in our national marketplace. We’ve already established that we consume too much, but that doesn’t mean we will never consume.
The average person can’t always afford to buy from companies offering a sweatshop-free guarantee. In some ways, you’ll do just as much good buying your goods second-hand. March with me fellow thrift-shoppers and we’ll change the world! Read more »
Blood Chocolate?
[This post is part of the SUMMER JUSTICE SERIES. You can start with Part 1 here.]
Part 3: Slave-Free Chocolate
How many of us really think about child slavery when we grab a candy bar? Most of us just don’t; that doesn’t make us bad people. What is slave chocolate? I set out to learn if any of my snack money could possibly be going to companies that are operating a business on the backs of children falling victims to human trafficking.
To be honest, I didn’t know very much about the exploitation of people to produce one of our favorite treats, but I’ve been eager to learn more for some time. This issue is one of the main reasons I chose to focus on what is often called social justice for these few short weeks.
In case you’re not sure how this works, chocolate comes from cocoa beans. Most of the world’s chocolate originates from the Cote d’Ivoire or Ivory Coast in Africa. Chocolate became all the rage in Europe by the 1600s after the Spaniards discovered it as a favored treat of Aztec royalty. Moctezuma was a huge fan, a total chocoholic by modern standards.
Although centuries have passed, reports indicate that our basest cruelty instincts persist. Let’s establish two straight-forward aspects here. First, what kind of abuse is reportedly taking place in pursuit of “brown gold” as it’s called around the globe? Secondly, are we supporting companies that offer products tainted by these terrible practices?
“The Bitter Truth”
The involvement of slave labor in chocolate production became a major issue about a decade ago. Since then, international community leaders including the U.S. Congress have been setting threatening deadlines warning the global chocolate industry to avoid all involvement with child slavery.
Nothing pierces the heart like some of the first-hand accounts of young people who have escaped or been rescued from these farms. A recent entry on Tropic Post details a small bit of the experiences of these children, usually boys but sometimes girls between ages 11-16.
“The children work under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse, working with sharp machetes and poisonous sprays, from 6 in the morning, till 6 at night…One ex-child slave said 18 children were locked into a 24 X 20 foot room, sleeping on a wooden plank. A small hole was just big enough to let in some air, but they were forced to urinate in a can.”
The article goes onto say the kids were too afraid to attempt escape after others were caught and brutally beaten for attempting to do so.
At this point, slave chocolate gets a lot more attention in other parts of the world than here in the states. BBC News produced this short video on child cocoa workers in 2007. More recently, Paul Kenyon went undercover for a BBC Panorama investigation called Chocolate: The Bitter Truth. He discovered plenty of injustices still occuring in West Africa. Read more »
Is Fair Trade A Farce?
[This post is part of the SUMMER JUSTICE SERIES. You can start with Part 1 here.]
Part 2: Coffee and Commies and Nazis, Oh My!
When Adolf Hitler’s name is dropped, you probably don’t immediately think of Starbucks. Don’t worry latte lovers, I don’t have any secret demons to reveal about the top coffee establishment in the world. You may be surprised, however, to learn the interesting tale that bridges the gap between Nazi Germany and your favorite Frappuccino.
We’re in part 2 of a series and following some ideas by Julie Clawson, author of last year’s Everyday Justice (IVP), a book about the impact our decisions can have on folks all over the world.
You might not think of coffee as a world changer, but individuals all over the planet believe this hot commodity to actually be a consistent cause of injustice. After pouring over some facts, I’m not so sure about that. Regardless, we should examine what we know with open minds.
Many right-leaning folks assume that topics like fair trade and social justice are simply machinations of the left. Many lefties just want to find injustice everywhere they turn, so they have an excuse to tell rich people why they’re so terrible. Either way, this issue warrants investigation. After oil, coffee is the world’s second most valuable traded commodity.
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Many of you have probably seen the Fair Trade label on coffee products. The stated goal of that movement is to provide coffee farmers with a decent income for their work. Most of these poor farmers toil in Latin America, but they didn’t always struggle to earn a decent wage.
For most of the 20th century, Western nations abided by agreements to ensure good wages for coffee farmers. An International American Coffee Agreement (IACA) was established way back during World War II. The fear was that if poor people weren’t paid they might turn to Nazi Germany or some other fascist group for help. The IACA was dead by 1948, and coffee prices declined into the 1950s.
Cold War fears of communism became all too real by 1959 when Fidel Castro took power in nearby Cuba. By that time, African nations were also pressuring the international community for help. JFK took office and America began backing the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), another attempt to fix prices in order to prevent instability in Third World nations that could turn to communist powers if they got desperate enough.
The ICA had a sorted history and plenty of problems to go around yet kept prices up enough until 1989 when communism proved to be one of the worst failures in human history and the Soviet Union fell apart. That was great news for Eastern Europeans and freedom lovers, but without any type of agreement coffee prices soon took another swan dive. Those poor coffee farmers again faced the challenge of getting paid a fair price for their labor.
Enter Fair Trade Certified Coffee.
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The goal of Fair Trade Coffee is to ensure a good living wage by assuring a floor for coffee prices. Think of it as coffee insurance. The program involves other things like access to credit and more. In the past decade, a lot of big money has gotten behind the fair trade label. Retailers such as Starbucks, Sam’s Club, Green Mountain, McDonald’s and many more include coffee products with the guarantee to assist struggling farmers.
The alleged moral dilemma comes in when someone tells you that if you drink coffee without a fair trade label you are actually endorsing evil practices of big companies who cheat laborers out of their profits. If we want to alleviate the pain of some 25 million bean growers worldwide, they say, be sure to purchase the Fair Trade label.
That might be true if we knew the system worked, but critics of Fair Trade have emerged from both sides of the political spectrum. Read more »
Life. Culture. Education.
Life as Pop Culture Professor Clay Morgan
In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo he can take the blue pill and go on believing whatever he wants to believe. Or he can take the red pill to stay in Wonderland and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
This is a red pill type site that provides information in an entertaining way. It’s about clear thinking and good writing. It’s about finding meaning amidst the absurd. It’s about humor and truth.
I’m a writer / speaker who teaches history and political courses at a couple of local colleges. Where is local, you say? Well, that would be Wonderland of course.
On topics ranging from pop culture to the meaning of life, my brain’s always poppin’. Take the red pill and unplug.
