HELP FREE AFRICA'S ENSLAVED YOUTHS

HELP FREE AFRICA'S ENSLAVED YOUTHS
Miami Herald: So, what's in that candy bar? Caramel, nuts, chocolate -- and the blood, sweat and tears of thousands of African children sold to cocoa farmers of the Ivory Coast, the world's largest supplier of chocolate. That's the disturbing, not-so-sweet truth laid out by Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee for Knight Ridder newspapers in the series "Unsavory Ingredients."
With promises of money, bicycles, food and housing, children as young as 11 in Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togo are tricked and hustled into cars or buses destined for the Ivory Coast. Once there, they are sold to cocoa farmers and forced to work daybreak to dusk for no pay, are whipped and beaten if they try to run away, or quit working and live in wretched conditions.
Surprise: What are American candy makers, who get the benefit of this slave labor of these children, doing about it? So far, not much. Indeed, they seem to be caught by surprise, though the U.N. Children's Fund, the State Department and International Labor Organization have all issued reports.
According to Larry Graham, president of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, his members plan "a pilot program designed to establish appropriate labor standards, address child labor abuses and monitor the cocoa export pipeline." Another spokesman described the plan as an "education project," which is not to say the plan calls for building schools. It calls for more assessments and talks with the Ivorian government.
American companies could do much more to stop slavery and improve conditions for African children.
The Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group's "campaign for prisoners of commerce" in Africa includes a useful model for fighting child slavery. Among other things it calls for a system that identifies farms and certifies that labor conditions on those farms meet minimum standards. The model has been used successfully in factories producing carpets in India and soccer balls in China.
Globalization of trade ought to produce a global sense of social responsibility. Americans should not pocket their values when they go shopping. It is not acceptable to enslave some children so others can enjoy treats. While chocolate manufacturers send observers and talk with governments, children will still be picking cocoa beans -- unpaid from dawn to dusk.
THE MICROSOFT APPEAL
Washington Post: The impressive decision Thursday by a unanimous D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is being portrayed by many as a big win for Microsoft. That's true in one sense; the threat of a breakup has been averted -- at least for now. But the ideologically diverse court agreed with the Justice Department that Microsoft has used illegal anticompetitive means to preserve its monopoly in the personal computer operating system market. In avoiding earlier settlement, Microsoft bet that it could convince the D.C. Circuit's more conservative judges that the government's case was little more than harassment of a successful company. The company's confidence on this point was presumptuous, and the court did not reward it. It held, rather, that Microsoft was -- as U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had earlier found -- a monopolist that had serially violated the law, including through acts that the company deemed improvements to its products. The opinion, assuming the Supreme Court does not intervene, will now force the company to consider seriously the antitrust implications of future design changes that may serve to inhibit competition.
Bias: But the court also reversed both the weaker of Judge Jackson's liability findings and, more important, his incautious breakup remedy. Judge Jackson gave Microsoft no real chance to propose less dramatic alternatives or to present facts that would cut against a breakup. He made little effort to justify his remedy. And his extrajudicial comments disparaging Microsoft and its officers -- comments the court termed "deliberate, repeated, egregious, and flagrant" -- lent an air of bias to his action against the company. The court rightly sent the case back to a different judge to reconsider the question of remedy.
All of which leaves the original, and still very difficult, question: what to do about a software giant that has been both an engine of innovation and a squelcher of competition. Though the browser wars that gave rise to this litigation are long over, the dilemma is as relevant as ever. Microsoft's critics argue that the company is even now using the power of its operating system monopoly to corner new product areas. As the D.C. Circuit noted, either of the likeliest solutions -- breaking the company or somehow monitoring its conduct -- presents serious problems in a market that can change so completely and so fast. But after this opinion, it is clear that what to do about the Microsoft problem -- not whether a problem exists -- is the question at hand.