Recently by Robert Wenzel: Are Regulators Attempting to Kill Off the Money Market Mutual Fund Industry?

Rough-diamond consultant, Jack Jolis, has an informative op-ed piece at WSJ on the absurd goings on in The Hague. Here are some snippets.

Thanks to Naomi Campbell’s clueless testimony before the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, the manufactured nonscandal of "blood diamonds" is once again being trundled before the collective gullibility of the world.

The hoopla is over some diamonds that allegedly were given during a gala fund-raiser hosted by the sainted Nelson Mandela to Ms. Campbell by Charles Taylor, the apparently infatuated accused mass murderer and ex-president of Liberia (and erstwhile friend of Americans such as Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter).

But despite what much media coverage would have you believe, the parallel occurrences of diamonds and internecine mayhem in Africa are in no way related – certainly no more than are violence and any other commercial commodity found on the continent. When was the last time we heard of "blood manganese," or "blood copper," or, for that matter, "blood bananas" or "blood cut flowers"?

The fact is that most African diamonds are produced in places that are reasonably-to-perfectly peaceful (such as Botswana, Namibia and South Africa), whereas there are murderous African conflicts that rage elsewhere without the slightest "assistance" from diamonds (such as Rwanda, Uganda and the Sudan).

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Alas, this simple truth is no match for the combined forces of liberal guilt and the commercial interests of a few players in the diamond industry. So the "blood diamond" charade has marched on unimpeded, passing through Congress (where I testified about the absurdity of the whole notion 10 years ago), through Hollywood in the hands of Leonardo DiCaprio (in "Blood Diamond"), and most recently last week with a supermodel’s testimony in The Hague about her "dirty pebbles." In this faux-morality play, everyone has an assigned role:

• Cover-seeking panjandrums of the diamond industry – egged on by the canny PR spinners at DeBeers. The latter’s main interest is in eliminating independent diamond production. But the campaign against "blood diamonds" is eagerly latched onto by many others in the industry who see any intergovernmental anti-"blood diamond" scheme, no matter how unworkable or feckless, as an opportunity to reap respectability and goodwill.

• Cynical NGO charlatans who know a good racket when they’ve stumbled on one, and who know that emotive images of amputees and child soldiers, when pictured (no matter how incongruously or unjustifiably) beside diamond-bedecked Naomi Campbell types, will prove irresistible to the unknowing public.

• Venal politicians on every continent, who will leap onto any bandwagon that provides a vehicle for cheap moral preening…..

….diamonds have no legally dispositive geographical DNA. As I believe they say on 47th Street, "fuggeddabahdit."

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To the extent that this intercontinental tail-chasing of a "Kimberley Process" results in anything at all (other than the moral salving of the consciences of the world’s bien-pensants), it is to diminish the desperately needed revenue of those who are most courageous and blameless in the entire diamond pipeline – i.e., the independent, artisanal local diggers in Africa (and to a lesser extent, in South America).

If the campaigns of groups like Global Witness result in any fewer sales of diamonds from Sierra Leone, Liberia or the Congo, it will not diminish the income of Harry Winston or Cartier or Bulgari, nor of Africa’s "Big Men," whether in presidential palaces or rebel redoubts. The only loser would be the poor devil in torn shorts and flip-flops on a muddy riverbed with a shovel and a wheelbarrow, who, if he knew what was being done supposedly in his name, would not be grateful in the slightest.

As for the real reason Taylor was ousted from Liberia, it was strictly international global politics, with various U.S. factions using Liberia as something akin to a parlor game.

I happened to have something of a front row seat to observe the player that the then out-of-office Colin Powell was promoting to replace Taylor. This new man was to end all the corruption going on in Liberia under Taylor, or so the propaganda went. Of course, the son of Powell’s man was not in Liberia but in D.C. trying to sell off concessions to every piece of Liberian business he could think of, before his father was even in office.

Read the rest of the article

August 12, 2010

2010 Economic Policy Journal

The Best of Robert Wenzel

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