Slavery.Children who are involved in the worst labor abuses come from countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo -- nations that are even more destitute than the impoverished Ivory Coast. Parents in these countries sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send their earnings home. But as soon as they are separated from their families, the young boys are made to work for little or nothing. The children work long and hard -- they head into the fields at 6:00 in the morning and often do not finish until 6:30 at night.
" Though he had worked countless days harvesting cocoa pods -- 400 of which are needed to make a pound of chocolate -- Diabate has never tasted the finished product. "I don't know what chocolate is," he told the press.
For years, US chocolate manufacturers have said they are not responsible for the conditions on cocoa plantations since they don't own them. But the $13 billion chocolate industry is heavily consolidated, with just two firms -- Hershey's and M&M/Mars -- controlling two-thirds of the US chocolate candy market. Surely, these global corporations have the power and the ability to reform problems in the supply chain. What they lack is the will.
After a string of media exposes and the threat of government action jeopardized their image, the chocolate industry finally agreed to take action in 2001. On November 30, 2001 the US chocolate industry released a Protocol and Joint Statement outlining their plans to work toward eliminating the worst forms of child labor (see ILO Convention 182) and forced labor (see ILO Convention 29) in cocoa production.
Unfortunately, the plan does not guarantee stable and sufficient prices for cocoa, or any guarantee that cocoa farmers will receive a fair income in the end. Without such a guarantee, there is now way to ensure that abusive child labor on cocoa farms will cease for good.
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. ... Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
James 5:1,4
You may recall that I raised my eyebrows a wee bit at the reaction of the Luther College gunman's parents, who wanted to reassure the world that their son was a good kid. I grumped a bit about the uselessness of a word that can expand to include almost any behaviour.If the 16-year-old boy in Regina who took 300 students hostage this week and pointed a gun at the school's pastor is a good kid, what does a bad kid look like?
The day after the incident ended with the principal wrestling the gun away from the boy, and his subsequent arrest, lawyer Brad Tilling passed on a message from his parents: "They would like people to know that he is a good kid and obviously there was some difficulty the other day."
A "good kid?" An armed hostage-taking is "some difficulty?"
Today's media offerings on the gunman incident at Luther College High School have mostly consisted of journalistic cud-chewing. However, I did find a couple of interesting things hinted at in today's CBC article.Brad Tilling, the boy's lawyer, told reporters after the brief appearance that his client was calm and understood what was happening.
Tilling said the parents of the youth were shocked by the allegations against their son.
"They would like people to know that he is a good kid and obviously there was some difficulty the other day," Tilling said.
"There's apparently quite a story behind that," Tilling added and suggested that details would come at a later time.
"But basically they want people to know he's a good kid and this is an aberration," he concluded.
Perlson (the College president) said the student was expelled last year, but declined to say why.
"I can tell you there was concern. And we expressed that concern to authorities."
"Evangelicals are the most discussed but least understood group in American society. Observers often assume that they are in lockstep with the Republican Party, but the sociologist Christian Smith has shown that 70 percent of evangelicals do not identify with the religious right. Other observers conclude that evangelicals principally serve their own interests, but Allen D. Hertzke's persuasive Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) shows that evangelicals work as vigorously to protect the religious freedom of Buddhists and Jews around the world as they do that of their fellow Christians. A number of journalists and pundits have written about evangelicals since 2000, but the most interesting and helpful works have been academic studies based on empirical research. (Pick up one of those instead of a best-selling polemic to learn more about the subject. Hint: Avoid any work that includes "theocracy" in the title.)"
He explained to my parents that without mastering the basics I would lag behind. He saw it more as an opportunity for me to learn what I had missed. I can honestly say that had I not repeated Grade 1, I probably would not have graduated from high school. My self-esteem wasn't a concern. My academic development was. Having obtained three university degrees (one in education), in retrospect my Grade 1 teacher did the right thing.
Had I grown up in today's education system, with its tendency to abolish student failure, I would not have been permitted to repeat Grade 1. Today's educational environment believes that failing is taboo. Students don't fail because it's deemed bad for their self-esteem. Feeling good about a subject is now more important than being good at it.
As teachers, we tell our students not to be afraid to ask questions, don't be afraid to make mistakes, and don't be afraid to fail because this is how we learn, but we are being hypocritical because rather than embracing failure as a method of learning, we are now being instructed by administrators to ignore it.
I know I am offending the prevailing dogma here, but you can't sell a product like that without the appropriate warnings. It just ain't true in far too many cases. I personally have watched friends with tin ears and no rhythm convince themselves they can be musicians, squat homely girls dream of being fashion models, and do-nothing students persuade themselves that their future holds lucrative contracts as rap artists. An entire industry has been created to exploit these poor deluded fools and expose them to public ridicule. We all know that American Idol is just as much about mocking the losers - often viciously - as it is about helping the winners. We sell them the dream and then jeer at them as we brutally wake them.
Rafique Tucker at Liberal War Journal is bemoaning the use of "Rovian" tactics by lefty blogger Mike Rogers, who is busy "outing" Republican congressmen. OK, one Republican congressman. Rafique says the tactic smacks of McCarthyism.
Both Spook86 and Steve Janke are explaining why Japan's trading sanctions against North Korea are a much more devastating move than is generally known.The Palestinians can't blame Israel for this. Shootings such as the one that took Rafiq Siam have their origins in a divide that war alone can address now. In the end, neither side can win, because both are essentially nihilistic and will not stop. The Palestinians have created a death cult in two different flavors, and both sides value martyrdom so much that both will fight until everyone is dead in order to keep power in their own hands, once the fighting starts.
Eventually the Palestinian people will have to demand an end to their misery and jettison both factions from their polity. An all-out civil war might wake them from their political coma and shock some sense into them. Siam's father tells the Guardian that he's "sick of both sides because they can't control the situation." This realization that they have failed to produce a rational ruling class might finally force the Palestinians to generate one before the terrorists kill them all.
It is only when we as a nation recognize that every pre-eminent nation that succeeded us fell when they became enamored with sports, entertainment, and thus became consumed with lifestyles of the rich and famous. We must recognize that we can learn quickly from their mistakes and misplaced values so that we can avoid the same decline.Unlike most commentators, he doesn't wallow in gloom and doom though; he sings the praises of a program designed to point children toward academic excellence - the Carson Scholarship program. Hat tip to Booker Rising.
