California has advanced a bill to ban 'blood minerals' from war-torn Congo (while the SEC drags its feet):
A committee of the California State Senate passed a bill Tuesday that will curb the use of conflict minerals from Congo. The unanimous, bipartisan vote in the Governmental Organization Committee is an important first step to making California the first conflict-free state.
If it passes the full assembly, the bill would prohibit the state government from contracting with companies that fail to comply with federal regulations on conflict minerals. Those regulations, laid out in last year's Dodd-Frank financial reform act, require publicly traded companies to disclose whether they use minerals from the Congo and the steps they are taking to make sure the minerals are not funding mass atrocities.
As detailed by the Enough Project, gold and other conflict minerals used in electronic products are being obtained through murder, rape, and war in Africa:
The link between the war in eastern Congo, the deadly trade in conflict minerals, and the use of these minerals in electronics and other high-tech industries has been well understood for a long time. In fact, the first major UN report on this issue was released 10 years ago today, on April 12, 2001. But for most of this decade, companies were content to accept vague assurances from their suppliers about the provenance of their minerals, allowing conflict minerals to continue to flow into international markets, and into our cell phones and laptops. Only in the last two years have we begun to see concrete action from companies. This is a direct result of consumer pressure and federal legislation.
By the Fall of 2008, 1 million people had been displaced from their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The details were covered in the book published in Quebec called Noir Canada: Pillage, Corruption et Criminalite en Afrique', which links Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold to the atrocities.
Barrick helped fund the Republican effort in the 1997-2000 election cycle, after which it was rewarded handsomely with a $10 billion ore deal. The ties go all the way back to 1983, when a Saudi billionaire involved in Iran-Contra provided the funds for Barrick to expand. Then Vice-President George H.W. Bush would become “Honarary Chairman” of Barrick's international Advisory Board in 1995.
60 Minutes touched on the Congo Gold story in 2009:
Gold and other minerals are funding the deadliest war since World War II. More than five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Years ago, the jewelry industry banned the trafficking in so-called blood diamonds, but the same hasn't happened with gold.