Comments on: Got Gold? Then You’re Supporting Child Labor in Africa!

By: Lance Uppercut

Lance Uppercut — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:28:59 +0000

Capitalist conditions, created and maintained by the capitalist class, cause and promote child labor. Period.

IMO: American is the biggest offender. You don’t have to look any further than US farms to see examples of this situation right here and now.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:01:50 +0000

“Their parents must have had some say on what their kids are doing”

you cant possibly be that ignorant… not everyone in the world has the same luxuries as you do, not everyone has the chance to control their lives

By: Kaboom

Kaboom — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:38:06 +0000

What a bullshit article – this is simple subsistence mining! It is a chosen economic activity throughout the lesser-developed areas of the world.

Stamp out the practice, and you send thousands of families into abject poverty and starvation, unless their family income can be supplemented by some other form of “child labour”.

The on-site refining techniques using cyanide or (more usually) mercury presents significant health dangers to all participants, and many attempts to educate subsistence miners have had little effect.

Also, the lack of a “DNA” for gold is also complete bullshit – each local component of even highly refined .995 gold can be identified.

By: ted

ted — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:31:04 +0000

I make my own clothes out of dog hair and hemp. I only eat locally-grown vegetables, and I live in a house made out of used popsicle sticks.

By: glassmusic

glassmusic — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:00:19 +0000

do you buy shoes? or clothes in general? shop at wal-mart? then chances are, you’re supporting child labor.

it’s a sad fact but… welcome to the world as we know it.

By: Tim Giachetti

Tim Giachetti — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:44:07 +0000

Gots me a Diamond grill all up in da houz! Now there is a filthy commodity. Hundreds die a month mining for DeBeers Corp.
Truth be told if the 5 vaults DeBeers owned were opened for sales, the worth of the Diamond itself would be like to belly button lint, if it weren’t the cost of the human lives lost in the mining of them.

DeBeers is the KKK of the world.
Ladies should think about who died in the pursuit of that piece of shit on their engagement ring.

By: Thebes

Thebes — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:35:47 +0000

Eat chocolate?
Guess what, you also support child labor in Africa. Of course the chocolate beans are coated in toxic pesticides which cripple the kiddies fingers too, so its even MORE EVIL than gold.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:58:12 +0000

I agree with this. No one needs to own gold. Placing so much value on something that is just a metal, it’s so arbitrary. I follow the same vow that Buddhist monks do and do not even touch gold (or silver).

The same goes for diamonds, which I knew about long before the movie Blood Diamond.

If anyone is interested, I write more about this in my BLOOD DIAMOND review here:

http://jasoncollin.org/2007/01/28/blood-diamond-2006-review/

By: iHATEsigningIN-SOiWONT

iHATEsigningIN-SOiWONT — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:00:19 +0000

dirty diamonds.

dirty gold.

dirty clothes.

dirty oil.

want it clean? stop complaining that prices are too high here. why are our product so cheap? why does wal mart exist? oh– because we demand cheap-as-dirt prices. if we still had VALUE in the things we purchased as modern luxuries, poor people would not be able to buy the same things as rich people from their neighborhood department stores. it used to be that only rich people could show off their new flat-screen TVs and huge stereo systems. poor people idolized it, had to save their money, and were absolutely PROUD PROUD PROUD of their new toy when they brought it home. now that you can get a f*cking six-pack of TVs from costco, what’s the point?

By: Tweeker

Tweeker — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:33:47 +0000

“Their parents must have had some say on what their kids are doing”

Eating?
And no, not necessarily. See also: child soldier.

You may as well blame Cecil Rhodes, for all that good it will do.

By: fg

fg — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:28:07 +0000

What a naive article.

By: Monyet Miskin

Monyet Miskin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:24:40 +0000

Yay! let’s blame the 3rd world for not living up to our standards!

By: Neatoramawontsendmeapassword

Neatoramawontsendmeapassword — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:56:31 +0000

Don’t forget chocolate! But nobody wants to talk about that one.

By: kevin

kevin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:31:34 +0000

got clothes? guess where
got gas? same deal

By: Agencies NY

Agencies NY — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:58:18 +0000

Their parents must have had some say on what their kids are doing.

Are they not to blame or can we even judge this society that we know very little about who might see even the impoverished lifestyles of the US as a step up in living standards

By: Sofar

Sofar — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:24:21 +0000

All the gold I own is over a century old.

By: andrew

andrew — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:08:53 +0000

Besides the small amount of gold in my electronics the most gold I own is probably in the form a wedding band.

But it’s repurposed, reccyled gold from http://www.brilliantearth.com/ One of the rings I bought also contains conflict free diamonds from Australia.

full disclosure: I do NOT work for brilliant earth and have no connection to them, I just love the 2 wedding rings I have bought from them.

By: luxe

luxe — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:47:16 +0000

Gold? no thanks, I prever a beautiful luxurious Platinum.

By: bean

bean — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:20:37 +0000

There is only a finite amount of gold on Earth. Most of what people currently possess was mined an extremely long time ago, and was bought as scrap and remelted. It’s one of the most recycled substances around.

By: Mattie

Mattie — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:12:05 +0000

So what? Pretty much any product you own can somehow be connected to some sort of labor that is considered immoral/unethical/illegal in the States.

It took several hundred years for our economy to evolve to the one we have. At some point those evolutionary points will happen to growing third world economies. Perhaps they will evolve slightly differently, perhaps not. But expecting other countries to subscribe to our economic standards when it took use centuries to get here is ludicrous. These things take time.