Packers’ star QB tackles ‘conflict minerals,’ but is a solution right here at home?

By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Reporter

MADISON – Aaron Rodgers has faced some of the most ferocious defensive linemen the National Football League has ever unleashed on professional football fields.

The Green Bay Packers quarterback has passed his way to the top of his game, becoming among the most accurate, respected and highest paid players in NFL history.

Now, Rodgers is taking on a much more brutal enemy: The murderous warlords of the Democratic Republic of Congo in command of a civil conflict that has claimed more than 3 million lives.

Green Bay’s QB has signed up as a celebrity front man for Raise Hope for Congo, a campaign of the Enough Project, which aims to end the bloody struggle and advocate for the human rights of Congolese citizens.

A big part of the campaign is educating — some say shaming – U.S. consumers, raising awareness the smart phones, laptops, iPads and the gazillion other electronic gadgets they love and depend on may be made with critical mineral resources mined in places like Congo, where murder, rape and a long list of other atrocities are committed much more frequently than quarterback sacks.

Raise Hope for Congo pressures U.S. manufacturers to stop buying key component metals, such as tin, tantalum and tungsten, that have paid for Congo’s bloody conflict, and urges consumers to stay away from stores that sell products with Congo-mined minerals.

It’s a message that resonates with the U.S. mining industry, according to one mineral resource expert, who has warned for years about America’s growing dependency on unfriendly nations for the products U.S. consumers crave.

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