[A] The DRC, along with eastern neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, has been implicated by the United Nations in exporting coltan (columbite-tantalite), an ore containing tantalum, an essential element in the manufacture of digital capacitors for cellular/mobile phones and a host of other electronic products. The tantalum has been extracted in North and South Kivu provinces under conditions of warlordism and serfdom, where rebels have seized the mines and force local miners to extract the mineral by hand. Human porters are forced to deliver the product to specified collection sites by carrying 50kg sacks of ore physically along equatorial forest paths for 50km distances. Armed militia extract tolls along the route. The UN Security Council has passed resolutions prohibiting companies from engaging commercially with rebel forces in the Eastern Congo. The US congress has passed the Dodd-Frank Act requiring US manufacturers to review their supply chains and exclude conflict minerals originating from the DRC. This is currently being contested in US circuit courts by the US manufacturing, chemicals and plastics lobby. Despite efforts to restrain consumption of conflict minerals, the trade continues. Consumers of digital products need to be mindful that the source minerals for these may be implicated in the conflicts in the Eastern Congo.

[B] Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise. Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.

It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way. The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point—and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors. It is a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue—and regularly do—that, if it were their own money, of course they would not fire lifelong employees a week before retirement, or dump carcinogenic waste next to schools. Yet they are morally bound to ignore such considerations, because they are mere employees whose only responsibility is to provide the maximum return on investment for the company’s stockholders. (The stockholders, of course, are not given any say.)