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Shakespeare Said It: ‘All That Glisters Is Not Gold’
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“There's gold in them thar hills,” goes the old saying. There’s also human blood and nerve damage in that gold. And there's dying animals and destroyed rivers.
The greatest gold rush in all of human history is on. It's not a pretty, a romantic or a benign business. Indeed, it's a catastrophe for the environment and for human and animal health.
The high price of gold – it has tripled since 2000 – is such that every gold-bearing plot of land and river is being ravaged in more than 70 countries. As many as 50 million of the world’s poorest people now depend
on this kind of plunder for a living.It's the mining equivalent of subsistence farming, but it's lethal in the cruelest ways. Mercury is used to identify the gold (2 grams of mercury for 1 gram of gold) to which it adheres. With each use, some of the mercury is washed away and vapor escapes into the air. In another variant of this practice, cyanide is used to leach gold out of ore in vats or ponds. Either way, two deadly substances are released without control into the environment.
The problem isn't with the deep mines of Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States – the hard-rock mines. It's with two other categories of mining that use mercury or cyanide: alluvial and artisan.
Alluvial is working a river with pans and sluice tables, which are primitive devices that trap gold granules in a blanket or grease. Artisan – a term used by the United Nations and environmental groups — uses
bigger machines and expensive “shaker tables,” which process earth by the ton rather than the bucket. These can be found in surface gold deposits in rivers and farther away. This is a mechanized version of finding gold that is not deep in the ground.While artisan mining may conjure images of dedicated craftsmen coaxing gold out of rock with love and skill, don’t be deceived. The activity is savage and brutal; the plundered rock and soil is left to wash away, causing death and destruction over many years.
The Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, and its cohorts at the U.N. Development Program and the World Bank, consider cyanide to be
the lesser of the two threats. Maybe. But I've seen great piles of mining spoil which the cyanide has rendered lifeless. Nothing lives in it or grows on it.Certainly, mercury is the largest of the real-and-present danger of subsistence mining. In Indonesia, men stand in rivers with their hands in buckets of water, muck and mercury, according to one Associated Press
report. The BBC also has reported promiscuous use of mercury in Indonesia and Peru.From China to Romania, in much of Latin America and throughout Africa, there is extensive mining on the surface — and that means mercury use. Miners in these countries are well aware of the dangers — miners often
are. But the economics of their lives dictate that they mine until it kills them, or the food chain collapses and their families are poisoned, or the operation has to move to a pristine area to be repeated.The economic life that sustains also destroys.
The United States and the European Union have restricted the export of mercury. But that's only increased the price, while there appears to be
plenty in international trade – enough for the nomadic miners of those 70 or so countries.I have to declare a personal interest in alluvial gold mining at its simplest: panning and sluicing. My father, whenever his many little business endeavors failed, headed for the beautiful Angwa River in Zimbabwe, both before and after World War II, to look for gold. He mined it with picks, shovels, pans and sluices. The activity was so minor it left no lasting mark. In those days gold fetched $35 an ounce, hardly enough to sustain him and his family, but better than nothing. Now it's about
$1,600 an ounce.My father loved that river. He often spoke about its beauty and tranquility. I've been reviewing photographs of it today: a ravaged moonscape of pits and waste piles. Crime is unchecked, murder is common.
Shakespeare said it: “All that glisters is not gold.” Indeed not. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Nuclear Power’s Undeserved Bad Year
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The great event of the nuclear calendar for 2011 was the earthquake and tsunami that hammered three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.
If you are a nuclear power believer, these sturdy old machines proved their mettle. They withstood all that nature could throw at them; although terrible damage resulted from the loss of external power and the swamping of the emergency diesel generators. The result was core melting and trouble in the used fuel storage pools.
If you are doubtful about nuclear power, or you are simply a political opportunist, this event was the final nail in the coffin, the proof that the end had arrived. For you, it provided more evidence that nuclear power
is inherently unsafe and that its use, as American scientist Alvin Weinberg once said, is a Faustian bargain. (It was a remark that Weinberg wished he had not made and which his staff and supporters tried to justify by explaining that in the German legend, Faust finally gets his soul back, having foolishly pledged it to the devil.)Such nonsense aside, the extraordinary thing about Fukushima is that although almost 25,000 Japanese died as the result of the earthquake and tsunami, no one died directly from the nuclear accident or from the
release of radioactivity. The buildings and containment structures survived as they were designed to 40 years ago. This, despite a wall of water 45 feet high with incalculable force.Each year, thousands of people are killed in coal mine accidents around the world. In 2010, 2,433 people were killed in China's mines, the world's deadliest.
Yet it was nuclear that had the world holding its breath. As with all accidents or even incidents, nuclear is held to a standard of safety orders of magnitude stricter than is applied to any other industrial activity, including other big energy undertakings, like oil refining, chemical production and transportation, and aviation.
The suspicion that falls upon nuclear technology is not only unfair – it is uneven.
The peace has been kept for five decades by the U.S. nuclear navy. In home waters and ports, nuclear ships and submarines sail without criticism.
Even the two organizations which appear to make their livings from relentless attacks on nuclear, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, have not dared to attack the nuclear navy. They do not protest, say, the USS Enterprise, when the great aircraft carrier sails blithely into domestic ports with eight reactors at work.
No one raises issues of waste, terrorist attacks or the consequences of military action. Those who make a living out of opposing nuclear power do not have the temerity to go after nuclear propulsion in warships. The
public would not tolerate the disarmament that that would entail.So the opponents go after nuclear's soft underbelly: civilian power. It is hard to imagine that it is more dangerous to operate a nuclear facility built to be safe on land than one built for war-fighting on the high seas
and in ports and harbors.There are times in history when triumph is recorded as failure. The British and the Prussians finished off Napoleon in the Belgian town of Waterloo. But in the English Language, “Waterloo” — a British victory –
is a synonym for catastrophic defeat. Americans believe the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the Vietnam War, even though the combined forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were roundly defeated by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.Fukushima, a once-in-history accident, was a victory of design and construction for its time. Even the radiation releases are now found to be lower than expected, even those in the exclusion zone are surprisingly low. Despite eager attempts to find a surge in new cancers around the plant, none has shown up.
The lessons are to incorporate more passive features, better power supply and to protect the emergency generators. Newer designs already incorporate
some of these features — and all will going forward. The industry has reacted with unusual alacrity in the past to new lessons, something uncommon across the broad range of industrial endeavor from aircraft to automobiles. As with aviation, nuclear safety is always a work in progress, a striving.To my mind, after 40 years of chronicling nuclear power, the industry makes a mistake in rushing to advertise the safety of nuclear power plants. That way the seeds of doubt are sown.
Aircraft makers learned that lesson back in the 1930s. They learned that the trick was to shut up and do better.
If nuclear plants are unsafe, they should be closed down. Now. Today.
If not, their virtues should be trumpeted. Now. Today. Where are the trumpets? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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A Cotton Wool Christmas
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It wasn’t the Grinch who stole Christmas; it was Northern Europe.
As a child born and raised in Central Africa, I was very aware of this confiscation. It outraged my mother, who was also born and raised in Africa.
We lived in British colony of Southern Rhodesia; and we were dominated by British immigrants who insisted on “dreaming of a white Christmas.” Well, tough luck.
As my mother liked to point out, not one more flake of snow fell in Central Africa than fell in the Holy Land, where Jesus Christ was born.
But we were — indigenous Africans and settlers alike — in the thrall of snow imperialism.
Being so close to the equator, snowfall was a meteorological impossibility. So those under the European cultural thumb decorated everything in sight with cotton wool. We could only dream of a cotton-wool
Christmas.Unlike my mother, my father felt no pressure from the European and North American inauthentic portrayal of Christmas as a white, cold affair. He didn't mind that the retailers edged their windows in cotton wool or that the Anglican Church went along with the Northern Hemisphere’s implication that Joseph and Mary struggled through the snow to get to the manger in
Bethlehem.The one thing my parents agreed upon was that Christmas began on December 24 and lasted for the traditional 12 days.
Not only was no snow substitute allowed in our house, but also no commercially produced ornaments; flowers and greenery were fine. As a result the whole family would go to a marshy area, known as a vlei, on Christmas Eve and cut great quantities of ferns which would be strung along the picture rails.
Decorations could be added to the green frieze, but only if we made them out of painted paper. Mostly, we stuck fresh flowers in it. It was a green Christmas.
When it came to food, my mother relented completely and we made English Christmas pudding (boiled for hours in muslin), fruit cake and pies made with mincemeat (an all-fruit mixture).
We weren't a drinking family, but a bottle of sweet sherry appeared at Christmas. My mother — who otherwise drank only tea and sometimes coffee (no water, milk, alcohol or sodas) — would take, ostentatiously, a very small glass of sherry. Having downed this half-ounce or so of fortified wine, she'd announce that she wasn't responsible for her actions, that she could feel her legs getting heavy and that she was drunk.
My brother and I watched Christmas after Christmas to see if there was any sign that there had been a physiological or psychological change in Mamma,
but none was recorded.We then ate a very English meal and listened to very English Christmas carols, like “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” My mother, who hadn’t signed her separate peace treaty with Germany, wasn’t too keen on “Silent Night.”
It wasn't until I had turned 20 and was working in London at United Press International that I saw real snow. Sorry, Mamma, it beats cotton wool and it makes for a splendid Christmas, even if things were a bit different in Royal David’s City two millennia ago.
Now for some wassail. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Time for Congress to Belly Up
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At Christmas, vintners, distillers, and brewers dance a discreet jig. They know that maiden aunts who drink only Communion wine all year will get red-faced on Cabernet Sauvignon this time of year. Accountants will lose count of their sips of eggnog. Lawyers will surrender to the siren song of gin descending on ice. O holy night!
The English song claims that a "little bit of what you like does you good." Those words encapsulate the abandon and jollity of the secular Christmas.
But there is a terrible exception: Congress. Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throats like pit bulls, releasing their jaws only to get a better grip.
If ever there was a need for an intervention by John Barleycorn, it is now.
Republicans and Democrats need to meet each other in what Australians call the raising of the glass. A laugh, a nudge, a wink, an off-color remark, and the nation's legislators may again be able to take care of the nation's business.
Only 30 or 40 years ago, Congress was more like the House of Commons in London, the Dail in Ireland, and the Palace of Deputies in Paris: It was awash in what Thomas Jefferson called "ardent spirits" – and bipartisanship.
Congress contained some unlikely party animals. One committee chairman, the epitome of severity by day, would at 6 p.m. break out a bottle of Scotch whisky. Another legislator revered for his sagacity would have a tray of drinks served by his mistress at 11 a.m. Journalists would exchange information on which offices to hang around for better stories after the corks had popped.
Those were also days when one did not necessarily know a particular member's party or voting record. In newsrooms, journalists would sing out, "What party is so-and-so from California?" Apparently, those who had enjoyed a noggin the night before found it easier to make accommodation by day.
How, then, did the greatest deliberative body ever conceived dry out, abandon conviviality and good sense, and become the hissing reptile house we know?
If you want, you can blame Newt Gingrich and the 1994 GOP revolution, after which calls of "Cheers!" gave way to vindictive leaks to journalists about the after-hours activities of one's colleagues.
There also was a journalistic revolution. After Watergate, reporters began to cover the foibles as well as the purposes of politicians. Blind eyes weren't turned to romancers or drinkers. Cameras on the floor scared Congress into sobriety. The irony is that journalists, known for their intemperance, helped drive the political class to abstinence.
Even so, our democracy is in fearful shape, so try and get a congressman to have a little Christmas cheer. Not enough, mind you, to get Nancy Pelosi dancing on a table or John Boehner embracing her. We don't want Mitch McConnell crying in his beer, and we are stuck with Harry Reid the way he is. He's a Mormon.
Merry Christmas to all. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Newt Gingrich Then and Now
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As Newt Gingrich rises in the polls, so do eyebrows in Washington.
A lot of people in Washington — lobbyists, political groupies and
journalists — know Newt. Some have known him since he first came to
Washington in 1979 as a young congressman from Georgia.That was back before the name had a distinctive persona associated with
it. Before, too, some of his outlandish statements on foreign policy,
himself and anyone who doesn't agree with him. Before, also, his own
outlandish personal conduct during the impeachment of President Bill
Clinton, made him a study in hypocrisy.When I was publishing the trade and policy journal Defense Week, Gingrich
gave a speech at the publication's annual conference. He projected the
image of a enthusiastic, idealist congressman who wanted to do the best
for the defense of the nation.Afterward, I walked him to his car and he asked me to come up to Capitol
Hill and help him with his writing. I didn't think I could help him and,
as
a journalist, I didn't think that would be a good idea. But I did tell him
that I was sure that he probably wrote well because he spoke well. That is
a truism that I stand by.Clearly, Gingrich had plans for himself and he had seen the importance of
projecting his ideas through good or at least capable writing.It wasn't until Gingrich began what has been called the “bomb throwing” in
Congress, the rise that would lead him to the House speaker's chair and
his chaotic term there that we became aware of the three dominant forces
that make Newt Newt.Also why people have been watching Newt's poll numbers with apprehension.
Gingrich is known for his ideas (a moveable feast), his passion (for
whatever he is involved in or whomever he is supporting) and his love of
history (as his personal possession).When Gingrich assumed the speakership, Gingrich the revolutionary became
Gingrich the post-revolutionary autocrat.He conducted himself as though he were not speaker but prime minister.
Former supporters were appalled. And many congressmen, including Joe
Scarborough, turned permanently against him.The blatant way Gingrich encouraged his talk-radio supporters with special
accommodations in the House upset the press corps. He acted in ways that
even the most world-weary scribes were appalled by. Gingrich was good copy
and bad news all at the same time.One legacy is the pervasive lack of civility in Congress.
In the end, after being censored for ethics violations by the House and
the kind of frenetic managerial incompetence Gingrich was known for, even
Republicans had had enough and Gingrich fell in a palace coup – the way
prime ministers fall in Britain.Mark Twain said if you tell people you are an early riser, you can sleep
'til noon. Gingrich has worked out that if you tell people you are an
intellectual and an historian, you can cherry pick history to your own
purposes with no fear of serious contradiction.Gingrich the politician has found it useful to parlay his time teaching
history at West Georgia College into a treasure trove of half-truths and
self-likenesses that have kept the less-educated enthralled with the
self-confessed great man.In fact Gingrich, who does have a lot of ideas and who has produced more
than 20 books, including volumes of historical fiction, is obsessed with
history in as much as he sees himself as an historical figure: a change
agent. He has made clear that he — this fairground barker of a politician –
combs history for figures he can find something of himself in.I once told Gingrich that his hair, which was very spiky at the time,
was a metaphor for his ideas – going off in all directions. I'm pretty
sure he wanted to be compared to some figure of English history –
Cromwell, Pitt, Disraeli or, the real compliment, Churchill. He has said
that he is a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.My experience with Thatcher is that she didn't like pretentious people.
She would have snorted, I think.Recently, Gingrich boasted that he commanded $60,000 as a public speaker.
Really? I didn't pay him anything, but that was when he was new and humble.
— For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers