Jobs may have been an exceptional designer, but when it comes to the multifaceted corporate malfeasance that has come to characterize the global electronics industry, Apple is exceptional for its profit margins alone.
For the past couple of months, the National Association of Manufacturing, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their public relations hoplites have launched a campaign to invalidate Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The legislation, which was passed July 21, 2010, ostensibly requires public corporations to practice supply-chain due diligence. If a U.S. company gets its minerals from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it must be able to verify that it did not buy them from militias or warlords.
The path an ore for Apple’s batteries takes to the marketplace is roughly analogous to that of “Blood Diamonds.”
For the past 14 years, more than six million Congolese have perished in the ongoing conflict triggered by U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda when they invaded Congo in 1996. As the world focuses on the Western intervention in Libya under the guise of moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable, the global community must question the lack of action by the United States and the coalition on the millions dead in the Congo.
Dear President Obama,
You’re not the man I thought you were.
Most progressives have no problem finding flaws with your first years as President to criticize you about, whether it’s the whittling down of the healthcare bill, decision to ramp up military operations in Afghanistan, failure to close Guantanamo, or deal effectively with Climate Change at Copenhagen.
For me however, it is the moments in which you have an opportunity to make a clear decision, with profound moral implications, and yet choose to act in a way that makes me ashamed to call you my President…
The Rising Continent assesses the performance of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and UN peacekeepers’ forces in DR Congo (MONUSCO), and concludes that both failed to live up to their mandate: ‘[In] November 2010 it will be sixteen years that ICTR will have been put in place. The budget spent on its operations will be almost 1.5 billion $ by the end of 2010. The Tribunal has so far investigated and sentenced only one side to the Rwandan genocide…
The United States has a chance to bring war criminals to justice – if it supports the International Criminal Court at the upcoming review conference in Kampala.
In early February, The New York Times released information detailing the involvement of the U.S. military in the bungled Ugandan mission to oust the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) from northeastern DR Congo. Seventeen military advisors from AFRICOM worked closely with the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) to plan the attack, which the United States further subsidized through the donation of satellite phones and $1 million worth of fuel. Although the United States has been training the Ugandan military for years, this is the first time it has directly assisted in carrying out an operation.