Cobalt Mining Case Update; and American Spring: Unfolding Crisis

Cobalt Mining Case Update

Tech titans Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and Dell aided and abetted in the death and serious injury of child laborers working in African cobalt mines. That’s the claim put forth in a class action lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. by International Rights Advocates.

Cobalt is used in the lithium-ion batteries that run smartphones, laptop computers, and electric cars. For the past several years, production has increased three-fold. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces over 60% of the world’s cobalt. Its a nation that has been torn apart by civil war and is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Young children there are forced to work full time in highly dangerous mining jobs for less than $1 a day, often because their parents were killed or incapacitated by cobalt mining. These minors are regularly maimed and killed by tunnel collapses and other known hazards common to cobalt mining.

Guest – Attorney Terry Collingsworth, on behalf of Burmese victims of forced labor, Terry initiated the landmark case under the Alien Tort Statute, seeking to hold Unocal liable for human rights violations occurring during the construction of its gas pipeline in Burma. He filed similar cases against Coca-Cola, for allowing the murder and torture of trade union leaders at its bottling plants in Colombia; Exxon Mobil, for human rights violations of its military security forces in Indonesia; Drummond Company, for collaborating with paramilitary groups in Colombia which murdered of hundreds of innocent civilians living in the areas around Drummond’s operations and executing Drummond’s union leaders; and Del Monte, for using paramilitary thugs to torture leaders of the banana workers union in Guatemala. Terry was also instrumental in establishing the RUGMARK program, a unique system of certifying that hand-knotted carpets are not made with child labor that also sponsors education programs for former child workers.

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American Spring: Unfolding Crisis

The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters. One means danger, the other means opportunity. We currently are in an historically unprecedented situation fraught with both danger and possibilities. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that sometimes nothing happens in decades and other times decades happen in a few weeks. This is our situation now. We see an American spring unfolding.

The public lynching of George Floyd has triggered massive outpourings in several thousands of American cities, both large and small. Black Lives Matter is supported by a majority of Americans including a majority of whites. This kind of broad solidarity was absent during the time of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The demonstrations are in large part led by people of color, mostly young people. Elected officials and traditional civil rights leaders are not leading the current uprising. As the L.A. Progressive has written, The gross underlying inequality, racially and more broadly economically, affects every aspect of life in the US. and is the root cause of the volcanic anger irruption against the veneer of obsolete institutions.

Guest – Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report. Ford founded the Black Agenda Report and has edited it since 2006. He was a founding member of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and he has delivered presentations at many colleges and universities.

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