Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2010/05/01/mining/
The earth in the western United States is flush with minerals. Coal in Colorado and Wyoming. Copper in Arizona and New Mexico. Uranium in Utah and Arizona. Silver in New Mexico, Nevada, and California. Gypsum, potash, trona, and borax in the California, Utah, Wyoming, and Nevada deserts. Lead and zinc in New Mexico. Gold damned near everywhere. Many of these minerals have been and are critical to modern capitalist industry and finance, and so their exploitation was inevitable once our economic system took a firm hold on production and distribution. From the perspective of the native peoples, the workers, and the earth itself, the consequences have been catastrophic. I will have more to say about native peoples in later posts. But for now, consider the Navajo in Arizona, who not only worked in outsider-owned uranium mines on their land but used mine waste to construct flooring for their homes, not knowing and not being informed of the dangers, as they could and should have been. Cancer was rare among the Navajo, but now it is epidemic.
For many days after we left Boulder, Colorado, we wandered around the arid deserts and canyons of the southwest. You can’t help but see mining and the devastation mining has wrought in these places. Coal is being ripped right off the top of the land, with the help of colossal shovels and trucks in Gillette, Wyoming, a town we visited several years ago. On our way to Tucson, we detoured into the mountains to Silver City, New Mexico. The drive was steep and spectacular, but just before Silver City, near the town of Santa Rita, we saw the “El Chino” mine, once owned by Phelps-Dodge and now the property of Freeport-McMoRan. It is a gigantic open pit copper mine, the third oldest in the world and once the world’s largest. Copper mining and processing destroys the earth, poisons the water, and kills the workers. The size of the pit and the extensiveness of the damage done have to be soon to be believed. Both the current and the past owners are notorious union busters and gross violators of human rights and environmental laws. Freport-McMoRan was in league with the murderous Suharto regime in Indonesia, actively participating with the Indonesian military in acts of violence, including murder, against workers and other “enemies” of the government. Phelps-Dodge’s labor and human rights violations are legendary, including the infamous Bisbee (Arizona) deportation, in which more than 1,000 striking Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) miners were arrested, at the behest of Phelps-Dodge executives, and transported by force without food or water for sixteen hours and left stranded in the deserts of New Mexico. In the 1980s, Phelps-Dodge locked out employers at its Arizona mines and in the course of a multi-year strike defeated the copper workers’ union (part of the United Steel Workers union). The parallels to the Bisbee strike are remarkable:
COMMENTS, ADDITIONS, AND CORRECTIONS WELCOMED