Great article. Keep it
up and always inform new things. Will come back and check this again. Thanks
for sharing. Doncaster
Airport

Unfortunately it’s worse than all this. 

We are a Congolese-owned company trying to export coltan for Congolese miners and leave the profits in the Congo with those miners.  We have contacted all the 20+ smelters of coltan in the world and all the known buyers and none of them are buying coltan from the Congo.  We are not in the 15th month of this de facto embargo and hundreds of thousands of miners have moved from abject poverty to utter destitution as a result of Dodd-Frank and the public relationships disaster perpetrated by Enough Project and Global Witness on the Congolese people.

Worse yet, Enough Project has denied this de facto embargo as it does not fit their political agenda or their fundraising agenda.  So we have a conference call with them to ask them to give us the names of any smelters we could sell to.  They gave us two names which were not interested in buying from the Congo, then shockingly told us in that conference call that we should just sell our coltan to the two slimy Chinese companies still buying. 

Here is a human rights organization telling us to sell to the worst human rights violators on earth so they can tell people we have a buyer.  Do we need any other evidence Enough Project has lost their way on this issue and are no longer working to protect the human rights of the Congolese?

Just as shocking, Global Witness has pointed to the significant increase in smuggling as their proof that the embargo doesn’t exist.  These groups have no interest in the human rights of the Congolese; they are making too much money off the Dodd-Frank Act.

They have also now gotten in bed with giant corporations like Motorla, HP, Intel, AVX and others to push the artisanal miners out of business once and for all.  They will never have the money to go through the complex certification processes being pushed by Enough and Global.

And these groups know that targeting minerals instead of criminals is a proven failure.  Following are the URLs to papers and articles written by Global Witness on the Kimberley Process which Global Witness championed to rid the world of conflict diamonds.  They are patterning the conflict minerals process on Kimberley (according to ICGLR).  At two years, five years, seven years, and here in 2011, Global Witness has declared the Kimberley Process an abject failure and has walked out on the process. 

Yet here they go again pushing forward an identical process for minerals that they themselves have already proven won’t work.  It’s called job security – push an agenda that can’t be successfully implemented, then spend the next 10 years throwing stones at the fact that i the very process they promoted doesn’t work.  It’s great fundraising fodder and unconscionable at its very roots.

As Aloys Tegera of the Pole Institute in Goma, DR Congo said: “they have picked the wrong target.”  We should demonizing criminals, not minerals.  Get rid of the militia – that is the answer.   There is no need for a certification process in Australia for coltan because there are no militia there.  Enough and Global have blood on their hands.

AN ICGLR BASED TRACKING AND CERTIFICATION SYSTEM FOR MINERALS FROM THE
GREAT LAKES REGION OF CENTRAL AFRICA

As Eric Kajemba, the leader of a Congolese civil-society
group has said, “If the advocacy groups aren’t speaking for the people of
eastern Congo, whom are they speaking for?”

We know the answer – for themselves.

Based on data in the European Commission’s socio-economic report, it costs €0.66 to produce 12 battery eggs, €0.82 to produce 12 barn eggs and €0.98 to produce 12 free-range eggs.

So 12 free-range eggs cost €0.32 more to produce than 12 battery eggs, and 12 barn eggs cost €0.16 more to produce than 12 battery eggs.
 
This means that one free-range egg costs 2.6 Eurocents (3.4-US-cents) more to produce than a battery egg, In other words, it costs 42-US-cents more to produce a dozen free range eggs, that those raised in battery cages
 
and a barn egg costs 1.3 Euro cents (1.7-UScents) more to produce than a battery egg, or 20 US-cents more per dozen
 
The Commission’s report concludes that, if costs were to increase by 20%, which it says is the type of percentage increase in terms of variable costs that producers are likely to face as a result of switching to free-range, the industry will potentially suffer a loss of producer surplus of €354 million (EU-25). If, however, this increased cost were borne not by farmers but by consumers paying a little extra for eggs, each EU citizen would only have to pay less than €1 extra per year, as the human population of the EU-25 is around 460 million.

The main point is, that battery cages represents the ugliest side of human behavior, and a very cruel method of torture for these animals, who are already destined to die well before their time. I am certain the vast majority of Americans would gladly pay a few extra dollars more, to allow these hens to spead their wings, and not have to live with dead hens in their cages, and birds defacting from above onto their bodies, and having their beaks buned off. We are not a cruel society, and Americans must demand that the egg farmers let the hens out of their cages. -

There are hundreds of purchases like this every day around the world, so it is far more statistically likely that something like this would happen at some point.

While I take no pleasure in Halliburton breaking out the champagne, they have just been extremely lucky, nothing more. To suggest otherwise is to danerously wander into the world of conspiracy theories and Government cover-ups.