Would you impose a personal use tax for use of your cell phones, computers, and PlayStations?
You can select or design your own use tax to be paid. For example, each day or week you use your cell phone, computer, PlayStation, deposit ten cents (or any amount) into a piggy bank, then donate the money to an organization working to help or end the suffering in Eastern Congo.
Or you may do one of the things suggested by Ellen Hagood (below) on a weekly or monthly in lieu of financial donations. Or you may do both.
The death, destruction and rape of Congolese women and children is indisputably the hideous extension of the rape of Congolese vast natural resources so we can have cell phones , computers, and PlayStations (mineral = coltan) while an unethical few via our tax dollars make megabucks.
Reads like the movie, “Blood Diamonds,” doesn’t it? But in the case of the DRC, there’s much more money to be made and many more “actors” involved. Instead of just diamonds, the DRC possesses the mother loads of a wide diversity of minerals vital to the “innards” of a multitude of high tech. toys/equipment.
In an attempt to gain control over DRC’s minerals, (i.e. coltan, DRC possesses 80 percent of the world’s supply), U.S. tax dollars, along with the tax dollars of unsuspecting citizens in other developed countries, have been used for the past 12 years and are currently being used to:
a. perpetuate the brutal rapes of women and children in the DRC, women as old as 80, children as young as 2.
b. fund the deadliest conflict since World War II with over 6 million people dead, half of them children under the age of 5.
c. contribute to the deaths of 45,000 people each month, which is 5 1/2 times greater than the tragic losses that have occurred and continue to occur in Darfur.What we can do:
1. Ask local newspapers to publish a series of articles about the holocaust in the DRC. (Beware of subsequently published information. Some articles would lead us to believe the crisis in the DRC is just another example of “savage Africans killing each other due to ethnic rivalries.”)
2. Sign the petition developed by Africa Faith and Justice Network, a highly respected Catholic Missions organization that supports the citizens of DRC. (www.afjn.org)
3. Use the toll-free number (800) 828-0498 in Washington, D.C., to call congressional representatives and demand the U.S. immediately hold a hearing on the holocaust in the DRC.
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