more than just three months salary

There's a new DiCaprio movie coming out called The Blood Diamond, and apparently the diamond cartel (yes, cartel, as in hegemonist monopoly) doesn't like the fact that this movie will show how much suffering is involved in their rape of the planet's mineral wealth. As the apex of hypocrisy, the flack for the World Diamond Council ominously warned that exposing the grave injustices in Sierra Leone and other parts of West africa that stem from diamond mining will make things worse for the people they are exploiting:

Eli Izhakoff, the chairman and chief executive of the World Diamond Council (WDC), said: "The people that the movie is trying to help could be hurt the most if it's left without an explanation, since livelihoods in Africa depend on diamonds."

Another ride on the Irresponsible Media trope, glossing over the over three million people that Amnesty International estimates have died in the conflicts fueled by lust for shiny rocks. Meanwhile, the same shills now say this is not a problem because of voluntary regulation which itself took years to enact.

The solution is simple and technologically feasible: synthetic diamonds. People could still get flawless diamonds, but they can be grown in a reactor rather than chipped out of an abyssal This involves either the Swedish method of giant pressure cookers or a variety of newer vapor depositing methods, which grow wafers of diamondoid carbon atom-by-atom. widespread adoption of artificial bloodless diamonds which can be made indistinguishable from and even superior to natural diamonds (despite the diamond industry PR) will depress the international market for diamonds so that boys in Sierra Leone will not be sent off to murder one another. In fact the monopolists are scared to death that it is possible, searching for a method to tell them from natural diamonds. Artificial diamond manufacturers receive death threats because of this hideous dominion; if the demand for diamonds cannot be abated the moral thing to do would be to leverage the power of the market by introducing an age of inexpensive manmade gems. if you don't believe me, just listen to that old crank  Karl Marx in Das Capital:

"If we could succeed, at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks"

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