Brief note: Soros-funded harridans are still trying to cancel Revolver. We are extremely grateful and fortunate to be supported by our generous readership. Subscribers and Donors help Revolver weather any cancel culture storm. Buy a $49 per year Subscription for yourself and for that special someone, and if you are able and willing to give more, don’t hesitate to make a recurring monthly donation — whether it’s $1 or $1,000, every bit helps. You can also now easily give the gift of a Revolver ad-free Subscription. Simply go to the Subscribe page and check the “gift” option. Don’t be a cheap date! — make it an annual subscription.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the second largest country in Africa—only Algeria is larger. It’s located in the center of the continent.

The official language of the DRC is French.

From the 1800s until the 1960s both France and Belgium had a turn controlling the Congo.

When the region was eventually “liberated” from Belgium, corruption and devastation quickly followed. After independence was achieved, a military man by the name of Joseph Kasavubu became president. However, he didn’t last long. He was removed by a savage coup. As a result, in the mid 1960s the Congo — called Zaire at that time – fell under the dictatorship of a corrupt tyrant named Mobutu Sese Seko.

Mobutu Sese Seko ruled from 1965 to 1997. And during that time, he shamelessly looted his country for his own personal gain. Mobutu’s thieving was on such a large-sale that his critics coined the phrase “kleptocracy” to describe him. Kleptocracy is the act of corrupt politicians enriching themselves through kickbacks, bribes, lobbyists and corporations, and stealing funds directly from the government.

There are several US politicians who fit that description. However, as corrupt as we are – and we’re pretty bad – the Congo has us beat.

For now.

Over the decades the Congo has set the stage for revolutions, coups, and assassinations; each giving way to a variety of assorted dictators throughout the years. At one time, the country’s corruption was so bad that it was considered an institutionalized part of the state. Nowadays, the government claims it’s not quite that bad — but of course they’d say that — they’re corrupt.

As result of so much government tyranny, wide-spread violence and horrific poverty seized the country. As of 2022, nearly 64 percent of the Congolese people are poverty stricken.

However, there’s much more to the story. The Congo isn’t just a catchall for wretched dictators, violence, and poverty. It just so happens to be a country that’s overflowing with precious minerals and metals. The Democrat Republic of the Congo is one of the richest countries in natural resources. And one of those natural resources happens to be a particularly hot commodity for a variety of uses; including electric car batteries.

It’s called cobalt.

Cobalt is a hard, lustrous metal. It’s mainly obtained as a by-product of nickel and copper mining. However, the one exception to this rule is in the DRC, where much of the mining is done by hand by tens of thousands of poverty-stricken, slave workers (including trafficked children) called “artisanal miners.” These long-suffering people painstakingly dig and handpick heterogenite from the earth under excruciating and dangerous conditions.

Heterogenite a natural tri-valent cobalt oxyhydroxide mineral and it’s one of the most important cobalt resources in the world—and 70 percent of it is located in the DRC.

Cobalt is nothing new. It was first discovered in the mid 1700s in Sweden. Nowadays, cobalt’s uses are vast and varied. Cobalt is used to make airbags in automobiles, catalysts for the petroleum and chemical industries, cemented carbides, and diamond tools. It’s also used when making drying agents for paints, varnishes, and inks, dyes and pigments; among so many other things. You name it, and cobalt is probably in it. The United States accounts for about one-third of its total world consumption.

So, given that we consume so much, does that mean we are busy mining for cobalt in the US?

No.

As a matter of fact, the only cobalt mine in the United States is located in Idaho, even though the US is estimated to hold about 1 million tons of the precious resource. According to a 2020 study, most of cobalt resources can be found in Minnesota, but other important occurrences are in Alaska, California, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

As it turns out, the US has all but dropped out of the race to control precious metals, and as a result, China became king of resources.

Control the Metal, Control The World:

Today, China controls between 70 to 90% of all rare earth metals on the planet, hinging the fate of our entire technological infrastructure on an increasingly-hostile foreign superpower that has already used its monopoly to punish its enemies. In small gestures, America and its allies have made efforts to re-secure resource independence, which the CCP attempts to thwart at every turn. The reason is obvious. In a technologically-advanced society, whoever controls the world’s supply of rare earth metals controls the world.

So, why did the US abandon the power of the world’s resources to the Chinese? To answer that broad question, first we need to start here at home with a well-known senator from California named Dianne Feinstein.

It turns out that Feinstein drafted a 2019 bill that was signed into law by President Trump, which places restrictions on rare earth mining in the Mojave desert. What makes this bill so interesting is that Feinstein’s husband, who passed away in 2022, just so happened to represent Chinese rare earth interests.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but the Feinstein Chinese ties don’t stop there. Who can forget Senator Feinstein’s alleged “Chinese spy” driver, who she “unknowingly” employed for decades?

The Chinese undoubtedly benefit when the US stays out of the precious resource game. The US slammed the door on mining for resources here at home, but what about taking control of mining abroad, in places like the Congo?

The Chinese got a jump on global resources and once again outsmarted the US. They played the game perfectly, and now they control a huge chunk of ingredients needed to create the left’s “green agenda.”

Politico:

Used for millennia to make rich blue pigment for ceramics, cobalt now plays an important role in lithium-ion batteries — conducting heat to prevent them from catching fire in smart phones and electric vehicles. Cobalt’s other commercial, industrial and military applications, from jet engines to magnets, spurred the U.S. government in 2018 to deem it a commodity of “strategic and critical” importance to U.S. security.

Yet today’s global cobalt supply chains are dominated by China — the result of two decades of Beijing’s relentless efforts to dominate what it assesses as likely to be key industries of the future, according to interviews for a new episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast being released Wednesday.

“This is a strategic thinking on their part — that ‘these are materials that are strategic for our needs and we’re going to make sure that we have access to them,’” Nedal Nassar, chief of the Materials Flow Analysis Section at the National Minerals Information Center at the U.S. Geological Survey, told the podcast.

China is literally the king of cobalt.

In a USGS review of 50 commodities, Nassar identified cobalt as one of the of materials at highest risk of supply disruptions. Most of the world’s cobalt is currently produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nedal estimates that somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of the DRC’s cobalt production is owned by Chinese companies. “A lot of it leaves the DRC and gets shipped to China for further processing,” said Nassar, adding that about two-thirds of the entire world’s cobalt refining takes place in China.

And mining life in the DRC is hell on earth. Most artisanal slave-workers make less than $2.00 USD per day, while working in upwards of 12 grueling hours in subhuman conditions.

But what exactly is an “artisanal miner?” The “comfortable” definition is as follows:

Pact World:

Artisanal and small-scale mining, or ASM, is a largely informal economic sector that includes workers around the world who use basic tools to extract from the earth everything from gold and gemstones to vital metals such as cobalt, tin, tungsten and tantalum.

But the ugly reality of “artisanal miners” is actually a a lot worse. It’s a life of hellish slavery—a life so horrible, you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

And while people outside of the Congo love to differentiate between cobalt that’s extracted by the country’s “high-tech industrial mining” companies and cobalt that’s dug out by artisanal miners, “Kara,” a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, says the two are fundamentally intertwined.

The sad reality is that Chinese and western companies who own and operate the “high tech” mines are probably well aware of the slave labor inside artisan mines, and in some cases, they might play a key role in their operations. After all, approximately 20 thousand people work everyday, rain or shine in the artisanal mines, so they’d be hard to miss.

Life in the artisanal mines is brutal. These poor people are digging and dying for cobalt.

Watch:

Imagine poverty-stricken, starving people who, if they want to eat that day, must work in deadly conditions in every kind of weather, using only rudimentary tools, and sometimes digging for cobalt with their bare hands so they can feed their family, and so the rest of us can use our phones, or paint our barns, or tootle around in an electric car, pretending to “save the planet.”

NPR:

Kara says the mining industry has ravaged the landscape of the DRC. Millions of trees have been cut down, the air around mines is hazy with dust and grit, and the water has been contaminated with toxic effluents from the mining processing. What’s more, he says, “Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust.”

Many wonder, if we hadn’t abandoned the global race for rare minerals to China, could life have been better for Congolese miners under US control?

“There’s complete cross-contamination between industrial excavator-derived cobalt and cobalt dug by women and children with their bare hands,” he says. “Industrial mines, almost all of them, have artisanal miners working, digging in and around them, feeding cobalt into the formal supply chain.”

Kara acknowledges the important role cobalt plays in tech devices and in the transition to sustainable energy sources. Rather than renouncing cobalt entirely, he says people should focus on fixing the supply chain.

Thousands of people work at the Shabara artisanal mine in the DRC, in shifts of 5,000 at a time.

This copper mine in Zambia looks very similar to the artisanal mines in the DRC:

Under the law, artisanal mining shouldn’t be taking place at any industrial mine. But it probably won’t shock you to discover that artisanal mining is not only happening at most of the industrial mines, but in many instances, it’s the predominant form of extracting cobalt.

The NPR piece continues:

[…] imagine you’re in a part of the world where there are millions of people who barely get a dollar or two a day who are grindingly poor and will accept almost any labor arrangement just to survive. Well, you put them in a tight pit, cram them with 10,000 other people and pay them a couple of dollars, and they’ll produce thousands of tons of cobalt per year for almost no wages. And so that’s not legal, but it’s happening.

Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, ‘Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?’

The piece goes on to say that what’s happening in these artisanal mines is “21st century slavery,” not 18th century slavery, where people were bought and sold.

But they do admit that the level of degradation and exploitation these people are facing is equal to (or greater than) “old world” slavery.

But sadly, there is a very real element of “old world” slavery taking place in these mines. It’s called child trafficking.

If you thought the idea of hungry grown adults working in subhuman conditions was horrific, wait until you hear about the trafficked children who are kidnapped and forced to work 10-hour days under these dangerous, and abusive conditions.

The NPR piece discusses the child trafficking nightmare:

There’s money to be made in every corner and every direction. And you’ve got these militias. Sometimes they’re called commandos and they will abduct children, traffic children, recruit children from even other parts of the Congo. I met children who had come from hundreds of miles away and have been brought through militia networks down into the copper cobalt mines to dig. And as they dig and earn their dollar or two, that’s what funds these militia groups. So children are the most heavily exploited of all the people down there. They’re the most vulnerable and oftentimes trafficked and exploited in some cases in very violent circumstances.

This 5-year-old video from the BBC, titled, “Inside the Congo cobalt mines that exploit children” is a heartbreaking up-close and personal look inside the child slave labor network surrounding cobalt. The situation is now likely much worse.

Watch:

NPR continues:

I spoke with many families whose children, husbands, spouses, had suffered horrific injuries. Oftentimes, digging in these larger open-air pits, there are pit wall collapses. Imagine a mountain of gravel and stone just avalanching down on people, crushing legs and arms, spines. I met people whose legs had been amputated, who had metal bars in where their legs used to be. And then the worst of all is what happens in tunnel digging. There are probably 10,000 to 15,000 tunnels that are dug by hand by artisanal miners. None of them have supports, ventilation shafts, rock bolts, anything like that. And these tunnels collapse all the time, burying alive everyone who is down there, including children.

Western globalists (who want to confiscate your gas stoves) along with their Chinese Communist counterparts are not only aware of this abhorrent slavery and child trafficking, they’re actually fostering it.

But this is nothing new. The battle over cobalt in the DRC has been going on for a very long time. Back in 1960, the Congo’s first “democratically-elected” president, Patrice Lumumba, made a vow to the people of his country. He said that the country’s tremendous mineral riches and resources would be used first and foremost for the benefit of the citizens of the Congo.

That sounds great, so what what went wrong? Well, he was quickly deposed, assassinated, chopped to bits, and dissolved in acid. And shortly after, tyrant Mobutu Sese Sek took over and the rest is history.

S

Cobalt became a bargaining chip for evil government officials instead of a reward for the citizens of the Congo, and that hasn’t changed over the years. The need for cobalt has increased greatly, thanks to the left’s big push to end fossil fuels and force everyone to drive an electric car.

The electric vehicle industry relies on cobalt as a crucial part of their lithium-ion battery chemistry. It turns out that cobalt-containing cathodes play a huge role in that makeup due to their energy density and performance. Simply put, cobalt is key for stability and safety in electric vehicles.

There hasn’t been a tremendous amount of pushback from the left against the inhumane conditions surrounding cobalt, but some groups re making waves. For example, the NPR piece is fantastic and really “went there” in terms of exposing what’s actually going on in these artisanal mines. As a result, some far-left groups are calling for the end of cobalt usage in electric cars; claiming they don’t need it anymore thanks to nickel and manganese, which they say can do the same job cobalt does, only better.

And while it may sound great to end slavery and child abuse in the Congo, it’s never that simple. Firstly, the world’s never-ending need for cobalt will not abate, regardless of changes in the technology used to build  electric car batteries, and neither will the artisanal slave mines.

Secondly, the likelihood of the nickel and manganese mining industry eventually devolving into similar hellish conditions that we see in the Congo are pretty high, since most of the same players will probably be in charge. And again, the US will be on the outside looking in.

Unfortunately, the left will try to “solve” this problem by creating new ones. The slave colonies in the Congo will continue with the addition of new ones in South Africa’s manganese mines and the nickel mines of Indonesia.

And sadly, because the US bowed out of this critical race and handed China “precious resources” on a silver platter, in many respects, our hands are now tied and we’re unable to create the necessary changes in this industry.

It is indeed a great irony that the Western world’s squeamish reluctance to appear “colonialist” has had the unintended consequence of fostering a mining industry in which poor African children labor under inhuman conditions beneath the whip-hand of communist China.

PLEASE SUPPORT REVOLVER NEWS — Donate — Subscribe

Ditch the ads… just $49 per year or $5 per month…

S

NEWS FEED — FOLLOW US ON GAB — GETTR — TRUTH SOCIAL — TWITTER