The DISH

Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use

Vol. 11 Issue 34…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…August 24, 2008

Cell Phones, Coltan and the Congo

In 1908, the U.S. Patent Office issued a wireless telephone patent to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. His patent was applied to "cave radio" telephones, which were not directly related to cellular telephone technology. Radiophones date back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s. In 1947, Bell Laboratory engineers at AT&T invented cells for mobile phone base stations and further developed the technology during the 1960s. The first portable handset was invented by Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher, in 1973.

In 1977, AT&T and Bell Labs produced the first cellular system in Chicago; it consisted of 2000 trial customers. A similar system was developed in Tokyo. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which controls the frequency availability that cell phones require to operate, authorized the first mobile phone in 1983. FCC regulations and slow response to the need and demand are credited with delaying the technology's development. Still, in the span of a few decades, cell phones are widely used throughout the world.

Cell phones and other consumer electronics are made possible by coltan, as it is known in Africa. Short for columbite-tantalite, coltan is a dull black metallic ore used to produce the elements niobium and tantalum. Tantalum from coltan is used primarily in the production of capacitors, particularly for applications requiring a small compact format and high reliability, ranging widely from hearing aids and pacemakers, to airbags, GPS, ignition and anti-lock braking systems in automobiles, to laptop computers, cell phones, video game consoles, video and digital cameras.

Tantalum is primarily produced in Australia, where the largest producer, Taliso Minerals, operates the Wodgina mine. In addition to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 80% of coltan is believed to exist, tantalum minerals are mined in Brazil, Canada, China, Ethiopia and Mozambique.

Coltan mining operations in the Congo are very primitive. Some have likened them to the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. Like the Gold Rush, which drew poor farmers and others to the gold fields, poor Congolese are drawn to the jungle to mine coltan. In the process, the environment is being desecrated, endangered animals, including elephants and gorillas, are being decimated, slaughtered for food by miners and others flooding into the coltan-rich region.

The United Nations and others believe the income from coltan mining is helping to finance the present-day Congo conflict. According to a highly controversial U.N. Security Council report, natural resources, including coltan, from the Congo are exploited by other countries involved in the current war. For instance, forces from neighboring Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi are believed to be involved in smuggling coltan from the Congo and using the revenues from the high price of coltan to sustain their efforts in the conflict. By one estimate, the Rwandan army made at least $250 million over a period of 18 months through the sale of coltan, even though no coltan is mined in Rwanda. All countries involved in the war, much like the consumer electronics industry, deny exploiting the Congo's natural resources. (Sources: www.learnabouthistory.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/ and http://raceandhistory.com)

Intuit's Vibe

The Congo (Their Basic Savagery)

By Vachel Lindsay (1879 - 1931)

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,

Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,

Pounded on the table,

Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,

Hard as they were able,

Boom, boom, Boom,

With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,

Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.

Then I had religion.

Then I had a vision.

I could not turn from their revel in derision.

Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black,

Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.

Then along that river-bank a thousand miles

Tattoed cannibals danced in files;

Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song

And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.

And "BLOOD" screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,

"BLOOD" screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,

"Whirl ye the deadly voodoo rattle,

Harry the uplands, steal all the cattle,

Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,

Bing! Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom,"

A roaring, epic, rag-time tune

From the mouth of the Congo

To the Mountains of the Moon.

Death is an Elephant,

Torch-eyed and horrible,

Foam-flanked and terrible.

Boom, steal the pygmies,

Boom, kill the Arabs,

Boom, kill the white men,

Like the wind

Hoo, Hoo, Hoo.

Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost

Burning in hell for his hand-maimed host.

Hear how the demons chuckle and yell.

Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

Listen to the creepy proclamation,

Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation,

Blown past the white-ants' hill of clay,

Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play:

"Be careful what you do,

Or Mumbo-jumbo', God of the Congo,

And all of the other Gods of the Congo,

Mumbo-jumbo will hoo-doo you,

Mumbo-jumbo will hoo-doo you.

News You Use

Cell Phone Warning

"The question is do you want to play Russian roulette with your brain. I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe." Devra Lee Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Environmental Oncology

Studies on the safety of cell phones remain somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, studies and surveys conducted by the Australian Health Research Institute indicate the sheer volume of electromagnetic radiation emitted by billions of cell phones and wireless communication data transmission will render almost one-third of the world's population (about two billions) patients of ear, eye and brain cancer and/or other major body disorders, such as heart ailments, impotency, migraine and epilepsy. Their research reports the tissues of children are tender and are likely to be more effected by using any wireless devices and they should not be encouraged to use mobile phones.

On the other hand, Japanese scientists participating in Interphone published partial findings, based on their research, in the British Journal of Cancer, which "observed no increase in overall risk of (tumors) in relation to regular mobile-phone use among our Japanese subjects." While some experts hailed the research as providing evidence that mobile phones do not cause cancer, others dispute the conclusion.

Dr. Ronald B. Herberman of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute is cautioning parents to limit cell phone use by kids to emergencies because he claims the electromagnetic energy the phones emits likely penetrates the brain of a child more deeply than that of an adult. Similar warnings were recently issued by Canadian experts that suggests children under 10 use land lines as much as possible and limit cell phone use to short and infrequent calls.

It took years for the experts to agree that tobacco use posed a significant health risk. It may be prudent to listen to the experts that are advising caution in using cell phones.

While We Slept

By John Burl Smith

While most Americans slumbered in quiet comfort, dreaming of good jobs, big bonuses and retirement with secure pensions, Wall Street was busily rolling out a new game that threatens to turn their quiescent chimeras into nightmares of poverty. Snoozing through the onset of the subprime debacle, they found it impossible to believe the iconic gods of Wall Street were so devilish. Knocked senseless by the rude awakening of lost equity, foreclosures and tight credit, erstwhile dreamers cowed at the approaching night.

Engineered by heavies like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Prudential Financial and others, the subprime meltdown backfired on these Wall Street wizards and produced a credit crisis that is sucking their assets away like a giant vacuum cleaner. However, completely under the radar, a broad coalition of Wall Street prospectors including banks, insurers, hedge funds and private equity firms are trying to tunnel their way into the national treasury via the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). The PBGC is the federal insurer of last resort of corporate pension plans. It must make good on pension plan promises when the holders or managers go belly up.

The new game is to get Congress to rewrite the law so that Wall Street can buy and manage so-called frozen corporate pension plans which no longer accept new members but continue to cover current members. This goose and its golden nest eggs amount to approximately $500 billion in pensions of employees at big companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, Alcoa and others. This new pea and shell game would amount to huge profits for Wall Street wizards but could wipe out the life savings of employees -- shades of ENRON and the loses its employees and investors suffered as a result of their bosses playing fast and loose with their life's savings.

The winners in this game would be companies that in recent years gave generous pensions while they enjoyed huge surpluses but are now experiencing similar deficits. Wall Street is licking its chops at the fees firms would charge based on total assets under management, as much as 2%, for managing offloaded pension plans. The boogeymen under the bed for Wall Street, if the light is turned out on this game, are new regulations that took affect in 2007. They require companies to list pension-fund figures on their balance sheets.

Although that is a frightening bedtime story, the monster in the closet is even scarier for a subprime spooked Wall Street. New accounting standards that will take affect over the next two years will require companies to include fluctuations in the value of pension assets or liabilities as part of their quarterly earnings totals, which could devastate profit statements. For instance, Ford Motor reported an $8.7 billion loss last quarter and has a pension plan that is under-funded by $9 billion, according to Credit Suisse. Dumping pension plans onto Wall Street will be an opportunity for companies with shaky bottom lines to avoid this nightmare scenario.

The downside for employees is financial firms won't necessarily have workers' best interest at heart. Consequently, this nightmarish scenario could make some 44 million current and future retirees big losers in this slight of hand game. Historically, pension portfolios have been managed conservatively. If financial firms are allowed access to pension plans, fees earned from investing in hedge funds, derivatives, and asset-backed securities would be a huge financial incentive to boost assets under management. Opening pension plans up to risky and riskier big profit schemes would put the fox in charge of the hen house. Under such conditions, like the subprime debacle, the seedier side of Wall Street will come out, like vampires at night. Pension portfolios could become the dumping ground for ailing investments, like the auction-rate securities market, where regulators allege some Wall Street firms pushed stockpiles of failing stocks off on unsuspecting clients.

In the end, if Wall Street gambles with pension plan assets and lose, as with the subprime meltdown, who pays? You guessed it -- taxpayers. Enter the PBGC and why some eyes on Capitol Hill glazed over when Charles Millard, Director of the PBGC, signed on to this pig in a poke to allow Wall Street into the pension business. After recently bankrolling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of $19 billion to bail out foreign investors caught up in the subprime debacle, only the blind and very hard sleepers can fail to see what is on the horizon for pension plans. Looking back over the last fifty or so years, one should see the stockpile of dead bodies from financial scandals including the S&Ls, the DOT.COM bubble, the millennium bug and the subprime raid on the national treasury.

"The buck stops here!" should be Congress' watch words, but currently the American people have the best Congress money can buy. So, what we should say is "The bucks start here!" Wall Street has bought enough congressmen and women to walk on heads all the way to the White House and never touch the ground. The only hope pension plan employees have is that Congress refuses to change the law. While you slept, the wheels were being greased with millions of dollars in campaign contributions given to politicians from presidential candidates to your beloved representative. If Congress refuses to save Social Security, what would make it throw itself in front of this steamroller bearing down on Washington?

Hood Notes

Media Diversity?

We can get feel-good human interest "news" stories about dogs and cats on local network television stations and newspapers on a regular basis. Conversely, if the news coverage is about American blacks, the adage it only leads if it bleeds ugly is truly applicable. Ever wonder why most of the network news coverage of blacks is negative and/or whacked?

A survey conducted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) of newsroom managers at major network-owned television stations found a dearth of people of color, with almost no diversity in the uppermost ranks. The study, which can be found at www.nabj.org/newsroom/special_reports/index.php, found that only 16.6% of the managers at 61 stations owned and operated by ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are people of color. Moreover, more than a third of the network stations have no people of color at all in the managerial ranks.

According to the US Census Bureau, people of color comprise 33 percent of the national population. However, the demographic makeup of management at the network television stations does not reflect this diversity. The NABJ survey of 367 managers at the stations found only 42 or 11.4% were blacks, 15 or 4% Hispanic and 4 or 1% Asian. The survey found no Native Americans in managerial positions at any of these stations.

Twenty-three of the stations had no people of color and 17 had only one person of color in management. At the general manager level, the highest-ranking position at a television news station, only three of the 57 general managers, 5.2% -- were non-white. All were black men and worked for ABC, Fox and NBC. CBS had no non-white general managers. There was no Hispanic or Asian general managers, nor any women of color. Among the 58 news directors, 17% were non-white: eight were black, 1 Hispanic and 1 Asian. All the news directors of color worked for NBC or Fox. There was no news director of color at ABC or CBS. Of the 53 assistant news directors, 5 or 9.4%, were black, 1or 1.8% Hispanic and 1 Asian. There were 45 managing editors, of which 2 or 4.4%, were black and 3 or 6.6% Hispanic. Of the 152 executive producers, 25 or 16.4% were black, 8 or 5.3% Hispanic and 2 or 1.3% Asian.

In response to the survey, NABJ president Barbara Ciara said, "I look at the calendar and it reads 2008, but our survey numbers reflect the year 1978. Industry leaders should be embarrassed that diversity has not taken a permanent root in their hiring practices. Diversity is good business and to practice otherwise the business runs the risk of losing the financial support in the diverse community it serves."

Disgruntled wants to know: Those who looked for change and dreamed of Senator Barack Obama as its personification were rudely awakened by his choice for vice presidential running mate. Senator Joseph Biden is a longtime Democratic insider, which is why his candidacy was soundly rejected by change seekers early in the primary. A nightmare for those whose chimeras included an election cycle that recast the good ol' boy mold as the new face of American politics, Biden's selection is a clear signal that Obama is a defender of the status quo. Observing Obama, many believe a shape shifter has donned the archetypical mask of the holy man, and that in truth a dark wizard and jester are part and parcel of his inner nature. Claiming to be a Christian and 'God is on our side" have excused some dreaded and despicable deeds. According to Isaiah (58: 6-7), God is on the side of the oppressed, hungry and poor. Thus, the question one must ask is Obama on God's side or does he serve the God of Wall Street?

Disgruntled feels: Gagged! During the Clinton administration, there were two things one could be sure of wherever President Bill Clinton went across the nation - throngs of admirers cheering and detractors protesting. The media made a point of showing both groups waving signs and shouting; that all came to a screeching halt when the Bush junta seized power. The media ceased broadcasting protests, partially because protestors were relegated to "free speech zones," an oxymoron for those fenced off areas far away from wherever George W. Bush was delivering a speech or holding a fundraiser. Now, of course, this draconian assault on free speech has been adopted by both political parties, and the media have hardly made a peep in opposition to what is clearly a constitutional infringement of free speech. The American people have been effectively gagged and the press does not seem to give a damn. The nation's founding fathers, the country's first protesters, are surely rolling over in their graves with disgust at the press and us for putting up with such abuse.

Disgruntled says: A recent analysis of governmental data showed a nearly four-fold increase in the risk of diabetes in people with low arsenic concentrations in their urine compared to people with even lower levels. The arsenic exposure could possibly come from drinking water. More studies are required before scientists can definitively declare arsenic is the link to Type 2 diabetes. In the interim, the thought that our drinking water is making us sick is really scary. We have long assumed diet and exercise were adequate precautions against the onset of diabetes. Now, it may not be a bad idea to take extra care with our water to ensure we are not drinking poison, which may be linked to what we assumed was a lifestyle illness.

Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Phone Calls

Email www.financialsense.com Q2 GDP: Gross Leveraged Lie...By Jim Willie...THE TRUTH: As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "The greatest homage one can pay to the truth is to tell it." When the US financial lattice work was showing clear signals of near total destruction, if not simple decimation, when US Govt. bailouts seemed certain to cost in the trillion$ from mortgage agency rescues and FHA mortgage loan mulligans (second chance shot in golf), when US banks seemed caught in a race to raise more cash for equity from friendly foreign fools who fail to read the news, when the US Economic recession has been turning broad and deep, when General Motors and Ford seem caught managing their death process toward a certain bankruptcy, THE US GOVT NEEDED A REALLY GOOD LIE FROM WHICH TO BUILD A DOLLAR BOUNCE. The Q2 report for the US Gross Domestic Product was a Gross Deception Perpetrated upon the world. The degree of its inherent lie was staggering to be sure, powerful in its impact. The acceleration of the economic recession is as grandiose as the official lie was grotesque. The importance of the accepted lie was momentous, enough to generate a significant US Dollar bounce. The story told at home in the Untied States was that the US Economy would be the first to exit the troubled times since first to enter it with the explosion of the subprime mortgage crisis last August. The story told at home was that the Untied States is the only nation to eek out some positive growth, while Europe (including Germany), England, and Japan are officially showing negative GDP readings for the first time. The story told overseas was that the US has come clean on bank balance sheet damage, when the US Govt. has finally installed powerful rescue plans to deal with the problem. Not a single theme is true. In fact, the lies have grown worse and the public scrutiny of the lies has grown almost totally absent.

Email Mwananchi@yahoogroups.com...Africa's wealth for Africans...By Tsitsi Makwande...Africa, is without doubt, the richest continent in the world in terms of both natural and human resources yet, ironically, it is also the poorest. This may be difficult to understand for someone who appreciates the vast wealth of minerals to be found across the length and breadth of the continent. Countless valleys, innumerable mountain ranges, limitless flowing rivers, a variety of flora and fauna, the most beautiful natural tourist attractions and so many more features of wealth and interest abound in Africa. This picture contrasts sharply with the levels of poverty on the ground.

Email http://news.yahoo.com ...SEC short-selling ban on Fannie, Freddie to end...By Marcy Gordon...A government order expires Tuesday that temporarily banned a certain kind of short-selling of the stocks of mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and 17 large investment banks. The companies' shares have stabilized since the ban took effect July 21. The Securities and Exchange Commission says its order helped prevent stock manipulation, and that regulators will be able to analyze data to gauge its effectiveness. But some experts say that may be difficult to determine. The SEC instituted the emergency ban last month after a precipitous slide in the shares of Fannie and Freddie, the government-sponsored companies that together hold or guarantee more than $5 trillion in home mortgages, nearly half the U.S. total.