CHINA'S AFRICAN EMPIRE

The Merry Widow called this article from the Daily Mail to my attention:

...These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

[...]

Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery...

Go HERE to read the entire article and see the photographs.

And, as the U.S. Congress engineers a Wall Street bailout and cites greed as the culprit, the left harps on and on about American greed?

China is rising and moving to establish an empire. In all the turmoil, don't overlook the doings of that communist nation.