Remember it was the first Dodd/Frank bill that brought the housing meltdown that caused thousands of out their homes and cost the taxpayer $billions of dollars. It can not come as a surprise that this same bill is bring chaos to the Congo.
Please explain how such insanity can go on for decades with no relief, no sanity or common sense. Worse of course, there is always more incomprehensible madness coming from our government.
Dodd-Frank Defending Against Another Financial Crisis…in the Congo?
David Grantham
The conflict minerals provision tucked deep inside the gigantic Dodd-Frank Act requires manufacturers to determine their use of minerals sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), namely tungsten, tin, tantalum and gold. These minerals can be found in an assortment of products like clothing, electronics and household goods. Why was a manufacturing regulation attached to a financial reform bill? To protect Main Street from Wall Street? Nope. To curb conflict in the Congo.
The former Belgium colony and second largest country in Africa experienced a brutal, decade-long civil war during the 1990s that claimed millions of lives. The newly established government told a handful of U.S. officials in 2007 that conflict lingered in the east because rebels funded their operations through the sale of minerals. The discussion gave birth to the regulation of conflict minerals. The proposed law would force publicly-owned U.S. businesses to inspect their supply chains and openly admit whether they used minerals sourced from the DRC.
Advocacy groups and Hollywood elites like George Clooney and Matt Damon championed the idea. The strategy assumed public disclosure would shame businesses into action, which would cut off rebels from the market, sap their power and promote stability in the DRC. Experts on the Congo, however, begged congress not to pass this cause célèbre regulation. They argued that the Congo would become a proving ground for soothing Americans’ conscience. Yet, the infamous benevolence of big government outweighed any considerations to the contrary.
In the end, Dodd-Frank ushered in a law that used the state to arbitrarily coerce citizens into accepting the fleeting causes of dilettantes. Supporters stood apparently unaware that the power of the government to compel at random sets a precedence for a rudderless, often tyrannical form of governance. Worse still, there was no serious review of the law’s application in the Congo. Backers simply assumed their goodwill would deliver people from harm. And make no mistake, this provision was not a misguided policy of do-gooders. Indeed, doing good inherently demands a review of the results to determine its effectiveness. No, this was a product of the feel-gooders or those that concern themselves with intent rather than outcome.
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