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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
If Congolese slaves are essential in the cobalt trade chain and are essential to the functioning of our digital world, why are their wages below the minimum conditions of survival?
It is not that the sacred market cannot pay workers better, but rather that it is not convenient. A person in a state of need (tied to debt or poverty) is a modern, docile, manipulable, functional slave. Just like the indebted countries—the indebted poor, not the indebted rich.
Why do peasant farmers in Colombia, responsible for the production of almost 80% of the world cocaine market, earn $1,000 a year while just a kilogram (2.2 lbs.) of cocaine sells for $150,000 in the United States? The dogmatic response is one of the biggest scams in the capitalist world that is repeated in other areas, from agriculture and industry to the professional sphere: Wages respond to “the law of supply and demand.”
If wages in any production chain were dictated solely by this law, the toughest jobs at the bottom of the pyramid (where the labor supply is less than at higher levels) or specialists in the academic or scientific elites would be by far the best-paid positions. The reason lies in the same pyramid of power, justified by a plethora of propaganda and excuses that emanate from the micro class in power and are reproduced in its functional links, from managers, assistant managers, public relations experts, communicators, propagandists, politicians, mercenaries, butlers, laborers, and mendicants. All fossilized in institutions (governments, congresses, the media, schools, universities, churches, clubs, armies, police) that guarantee the sacredness of private property as if the existence of a palace and a shack were the demonstration of the universality of this right.
Maintaining a mass population in a state of need is essential to maintain power at the top of the pyramid.
Apart from the capitalist reason that always presses for cost reduction below and profit maximization above, there is a need to keep marginal groups in a state of perpetual production through necessity, such as indebtedness or poverty itself. This perpetual state of deprivation dehumanizes to the point of instructing the slave to become a slaveholder as a reward for his own sacrifice, something that the lucky 0.1% achieve and are later featured on magazine covers and in parental lessons to their young children—not because all parents buy into this historical fiction, but because they must prepare their children to survive in a dehumanized world.
If these semi-slave workers in Colombia had higher wages and better living conditions, they would probably educate themselves and migrate to other sectors of production and services―the same illegality that makes the product expensive also makes the producers cheap.
The same happens (just to give one more example) with slave labor in different regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In many cases, the unpaid slaves of the 19th century were better fed and less poisoned than today’s African workers, from the cobalt mines of Congo to the mountains of electronic waste in Ghana and Tanzania, or the native loggers of Mozambique, with whom I lived in the 90s. Undoubtedly, in the 19th century the social difference between slaves and their masters, although obscene, was not as great as that which exists today between the producers (called free men and women) and the masters of transnational corporations.
As British professor Siddharth Kara put it in his recent book Cobalt Red (2023), today hundreds of thousands of Congolese and tens of thousands of children are subjected to the worst forms of slavery known to extract cobalt with a shovel or with their naked hands. For a salary of $7 a day when they are lucky (and $2 when it is a normal day) these men, women, and children develop different diseases due to the fact that cobalt is toxic just in contact with the skin. Without considering that those $7 barely allow a family to eat insufficiently, while the long and painful work prevents their children from going to school or having a decent childhood.
Cobalt is essential for the rechargeable batteries of phones, computers, and cars around the world, and 75% of it is extracted from Congo, a country that not only has one of the worst records for imperialist killings but also for brutal dictatorships following the assassination of the great Patrice Lumumba by the Belgian businessmen in complicity with the CIA. How could it be otherwise? All in the name of the noble defense of capital, private property (of the rich), and the progress of developed countries―in the name of civilization.
Currently, the first beneficiaries of this new violation of Congo are corporations such as Apple, Tesla, Samsung, and Chinese investors who realized the big business more than a decade ago. Then follow global consumers, who are mostly unaware or prefer to ignore the existence of modern slaves. The first to lose are the hundreds of thousands of Congolese slaves and the global ecosystem, since, for this mining activity to occur, large areas of natural forests have been eliminated and continue to be eliminated―the classic externalities that never enter the equation of any successful business.
The mere fact that artisanal mining is illegal, as is cocaine production, is irrelevant. For the purposes of this analysis, we must ask ourselves again the same question from the beginning: If Congolese slaves are essential in the cobalt trade chain and are essential to the functioning of our digital world, why are their wages below the minimum conditions of survival and their rights below the rights of the slaves of past centuries?
Because dehumanization is a round business: the dehumanization of producers and dehumanization of consumers. And then they are scared that artificial intelligence will one day take over the world? Isn’t it a First World panic, as is the idea that they will stop being parasitic empires? What is the difference for a modern slave, even for the global middle class, between being dominated by robots or continuing to be dominated and exploited by the usual human elites?
It will be necessary to return to the same explanation: Maintaining a mass population in a state of need is essential to maintain power at the top of the pyramid. Every once in a while this brutality meets some legal limit, the product of years of social activism, but these limits are not part of the logic that governs the world. They exist because not everyone has forgotten that there is something called human dignity that, not by mere coincidence, always has to fight against the immeasurable powers (economic, political, and media) of those above—and with the complicity, indifference, or amnesia of not a few of those below.
It's been almost a decade since once-luminous investigative journalist Gary Webb extinguished his own life.
It's been almost a decade since once-luminous investigative journalist Gary Webb extinguished his own life.
It's been 18 years since Webb's "Dark Alliance" series in the San Jose Mercury News exploded across a new medium - the Internet - and definitively linked crack cocaine in Los Angeles and elsewhere to drug traffickers allied with the CIA's rightwing Contra army in Nicaragua. Webb's revelations sparked anger across the country, especially in black communities.
But the 1996 series (which was accompanied by unprecedented online documentation) also sparked one of the most ferocious media assaults ever on an individual reporter - a less-than-honest backlash against Webb by elite newspapers that had long ignored or suppressed evidence of CIA/Contra/cocaine connections.
The assault by the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times drove Webb out of the newspaper business, and ultimately to his death.
Beginning this Friday, the ghost of Gary Webb will haunt his tormenters from movie screens across the country, with the opening of the dramatic film "Kill the Messenger" - based partly on Webb's 1998 "Dark Alliance" book.
The movie dramatizes Webb's investigation of Contra-allied Nicaraguan cocaine traffickers Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon (whose drug activities were apparently protected for reasons of U.S. "national security") and their connection to L.A.'s biggest crack dealer, "Freeway" Ricky Ross.
The original "Dark Alliance" series was powerful in naming names, backed by court documents. Webb added specifics and personalities to the story of Contra drug trafficking first broken by Associated Press in 1985 (ignored by major newspapers) and then expanded in 1989 by John Kerry's Senate subcommittee report which found that Contra drug dealing was tolerated in the U.S. frenzy to overthrow Nicaragua's leftwing Sandinista government. Kerry's work was ignored or attacked in big media -- Newsweek labeled him a "randy conspiracy buff."
There were some flaws and overstatements in the Webb series, mostly in editing and presentation; a controversial graphic had a crack smoker embedded in the CIA seal. But in light of history - and much smoke has cleared since 1996 - Webb's series stands up far better as journalism than the hatchet jobs from the three establishment newspapers.
Don't take my word for it. A player in the backlash against Webb was Jesse Katz, one of 17 reporters assigned by L.A. Times editors to produce a three-day, 20,000 word takedown of "Dark Alliance." Last year, Katz referred to what his paper did as "kind of a tawdry exercise" which "ruined that reporter's career" - explaining during a radio interview: "Most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled onto one lone muckraker up in Northern California."
Katz deserves credit for expressing regrets about the "overkill."
His role in the backlash was to minimize the importance of Ricky Ross, who received large shipments of cocaine from Contra-funder Blandon. In the wake of Webb's series, Katz described Ross as just one of many "interchangeable characters" in the crack deluge, "dwarfed" by other dealers.
But 20 months before Webb's series - before the public knew of any Contra (or CIA) link to Ross' cocaine supply - Katz had written quite the opposite in an L.A. Times profile of Ross: "If there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick." Katz's piece referred to Ross as "South-Central's first millionaire crack lord" and was headlined: "Deposed King of Crack."
One of the more absurd aspects of the backlash against Webb - prominent in the Washington Post and elsewhere -- was criticism over his labeling of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), a Contra army supported by Blandon and Meneses, as "the CIA's army." As I wrote in an obituary when Webb died: "By all accounts, including those of Contra leaders, the CIA set up the group, selected its leaders and paid their salaries, and directed its day-to-day battlefield strategies." The CIA also supervised the FDN's day-to-day propaganda in U.S. media.
It was as much "the CIA's army" as the force that invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
KILL THE MESSENGER - Official TrailerTwo-time Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner ("The Bourne Legacy") leads an all-star cast in a dramatic thriller based on ...
Just weeks ago, new light was shed on this old puzzle with the release of a remarkable CIA internal report - which shows that "the CIA's army" phrase was one of the Agency's main complaints about Webb's series. As silly as the CIA's complaint was, it received serious echo in friendly newspapers. In fact, the CIA author of the report seemed to marvel at how compliant major newspapers were in attacking the "Dark Alliance" series, which he attributed to "a ground base of already productive relations with journalists."
The CIA's internal report mentioned that soon after the "Dark Alliance" series was published, "one major news affiliate, after speaking with a CIA media spokesperson, decided not to run the story." When the Washington Post attack on Webb appeared, the CIA aggressively circulated it to other journalists and to "former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media."
A disturbing feature of the triple-barreled (Washington Post/NY Times/LA Times) backlash against Webb was how readily elite journalists accepted the denials from the CIA - and from unnamed "former senior CIA officials" - of any knowledge of Contra cocaine trafficking. Media critic Norman Solomon noted that the first New York Times piece on Webb's series lacked "any suggestion that the CIA might be a dubious touchstone for veracity."
It's worth remembering that the New York Times and Washington Post editorially endorsed military aid to the human rights-abusing Contras - a position almost as embarrassing now as their faulty coverage in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
The unfolding of history can be helpful in settling disputes - and it has proved kinder to Webb than eagerly gullible establishment newspapers. "Dark Alliance" and the public uproar over the series in black communities and elsewhere pressured the CIA to order a review of Contra cocaine links by CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz. Although barely covered by the big three dailies, Hitz's final volume (published in October 1998) provided significant vindication of Webb.
Journalist Robert Parry, a Webb supporter who broke the Contra-cocaine story in 1985 while at A.P., concluded that Hitz "not only confirmed many of the longstanding allegations about Contra-cocaine trafficking but revealed that the CIA and the Reagan administration knew much more about the criminal activity." In the 1998 volume, "Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s."
Thanks to the magic of the silver screen, the specter of Gary Webb (brought to life by actor Jeremy Renner) will now be vexing the media heavyweights who savaged him. The script for "Kill the Messenger" - based on Webb's book and Nick Schou's "Kill the Messenger" - was written by Peter Landesman, a former investigative writer himself.
In comments last week to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Landesman offered explanations of the triple attack on Webb's series: "Each one of the papers did it for a different reason. The L.A. Times had an envious, jealous reaction of being scooped in their own territory . . . The Washington Post had a very strong quid pro quo relationship with the CIA . . . The New York Times approach was more professional arrogance."
And there's a unifying factor: All three newspapers had avoided the CIA/Contra/cocaine story in the 1980s - they seemed to be punishing Webb for reviving it in 1996.
With "Kill the Messenger" opening in hundreds of theaters, is it possible Gary Webb will get the last word after all?