Saturday, March 20, 2010

Gold War

A few months ago, I put out my worst blog post ever (yes, all you 2 die-hard fans who even know about the failure fail blogs "Freedom of Speech" and "Bethlehem Steel", which I didn't even spell right, this was worse than the one blog post on each of them.) "Diamonds aren't forever (James Bond lied, I know)". This was about "Blood Diamonds" and it was horrible. I want to delete it, but I sometimes use it as a benchmark to do better than. This one is about something very similar to the idea of "Diamonds aren't forever (James Bond lied, I know)" (I hesitate to even write that out) but I hope to God that it is better than... that. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, perhaps known better as Zaire as it was called Zaire under former president Mobutu Sese Seko, there is a war that has killed up to 4 million people and this war is about gold.

Okay, so let's break this thing down. In the DR Congo, there's a lot of gold, and in the U.S. and all around the world, (don't yell at me about this one Jake, I was all-inclusive this time) there's a huge demand for gold, but for stupidity purposes, let's just refer to DR Congo as "Country A" and the U.S. and all around the world as "Country B". Country A is on the poorest continent in the world, and if Country A is rich with gold which is worth up to 1000 dollars per ounce. If Country B needs gold for things like money and jewelry (and yes, he went to Jared), the citizens of Country A will try and mine the gold so much that they will risk their lives, work in mountains that are at high elevation and at constant threat for landslides.

How this war was started is nine countries that border or are close to DR Congo invaded "Country A" in effort to get the gold resources of the DR Congo, eventually this invasion ended, but ever since, rebel militias have been trying to take over various mines so that they can control certain mines and get all of the profits of that mine, and these militias will take these $1000 and ounce mines, including killing innocent civilians to create terror and keep the conflict going. The last thing that these militia leaders want is a sudden resolution to this conflict, in fact, they want to keep the conflict going as long as they possibly can. But we the people of the United States need to find a resolution of a conflict.

Now my opinion. I think that this war needs to be ended and the only way to legally end it is by banning all gold that comes from the DR Congo, but even then, there would be jewelry companies who will import these diamonds instead of ones found in mines here in the US because they're cheaper than the ones where there is not a conflict so the US needs to talk with government officials from "Country A" and possibly spread out our industry to the DR Congo so that there are not still people being killed with the entire world turning it's back on this conflict.
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Sam