-
-
Shakespeare Said It: ‘All That Glisters Is Not Gold’
-
“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
- no responses
-
-
-
Mugabe, the Jeweled Raptor
-
Diamonds are a dictator's best friend. Just ask Robert Mugabe, president and dictator of Zimbabwe. When things seemed to be at their worst for Mugabe, diamonds were discovered at Marange, in eastern Zimbabwe. The old monster was saved because he got enough money to pay his thugs. One of the first lessons of dictatorship: Keep the thugs happy. Mugabe, who had destroyed his currency, starved his people and turned the breadbasket of Africa into yet another begging bowl, looked as though he was through, when in 2006 diamonds were found in an unexpected place. Thousands of itinerants flooded into Marange to lay claim to the riches, under the colonial-era mining laws. They had few tools, but they had hope. Sadly, they also had Mugabe. He sent in his military to evict the miners. They used helicopter gunships; at least 200 miners were slaughtered and the rest were driven off. The army took over the diamond fields and Mugabe was renewed in power. There has been enough money (about $1.7 billion a year), through official and unofficial diamond sales, not only to keep the thugs in power and their Mercedes-Benzes fueled. But there also may have been enough money quiet Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and impotent prime minister. When I asked two very brave women, who have cycled in and out of jail because they tried to do something about the pitiful condition of women in Zimbabwe, whether they were hopeful about Tsvangirai and the opposition, one of them snorted: “Government in Zimbabwe is about who gets a Mercedes-Benz.” Peter Godwin, who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1957 and who has been a fearless chronicler of the decline and fall of his homeland in books and articles, has pointed out the evil of these “coalition” governments. It is, he has said, a spoils system where elections are negated when the contestants decide they both won; and in a united government, they can just divide up the spoils instead of fighting over them. In Zimbabwe the fear is that Tsvangirai, rather than resolving to get rid of the Mugabe government apparatus, if he ever becomes president, will keep it and perfect it. Mugagbe preserved the most repressive colonial laws to use at will himself, while blaming the white settlers for them. One of Mugabe's gambits, detailed by Godwin, is particularly cruel: How you appear to win elections fairly when you have coerced the electorate cruelly. Suspected opposition supporters are seized by the police and the military in the rural areas and then are taken to torture centers -- located in schools -- where they are beaten and maimed. Often, their feet and legs are pulped. The children of dictatorships learn their lessons early. The victims are sent back to their villages as a perpetual reminder of what happens if you vote against the “Big Man.” Even so, it should be noted the Mugabe lost the last election and simply stayed. His concession to the winner, Tsvangirai, was to stop bringing treason charges against him and to make him prime minister. Not so much power-sharing as loot-sharing. Watch for more of it as faux democracy continues in Africa, south of the Sahara and possibly north of it. Like Godwin, I was born in Rhodesia. Like many young people at the time, inside and outside of the country, we dreamed of a free, multi-ethnic Africa -- the whole continent a kind of Garden of Eden. Our template for that was Rhodesia of the time: peaceful, prosperous, idyllic, but in need of extending the franchise genuinely to all the people -- de facto ensuring black government. Instead, we got Ian Smith: a brave fool who tried to extend the status quo and brought on a race war which brought Mugabe to power. In his first days as president, while Mugabe was feted around the world and showered with honors, he sent his dreaded 5th Brigade into Matabeleland; the stronghold of his opponent Joshua Nkomo, later to be incorporated into the Mugabe system of government, but not before 20,000 of his Ndbele people had been killed by the Mugabe men. For 31 years, the government of Mugabe and his “security” men has reduced Zimbabwe to ruin, driving maybe as many as 3 million people into refugee status in neighboring countries, starving and beating the people of my childhood. The tears of Africa, like diamonds, seem to be forever. -- For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
- no responses
-
-
-
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Voting
-
I shall be voting today. I shall toddle down to the Episcopal church hall in my town, once described by Washington Post writer Hank Burchard as “a hotbed of social rest.”
Polling place volunteers will check my ID, and apologize for so doing. All very civilized, like a Norman Rockwell painting. None of the ugliness of the campaign will penetrate the faux England of the Virginia Hunt Country.
A wretch like myself, though, will wonder which of our billionaires, so decorously standing in line with farmhands and exurbanites, gave big money for attack ads or whether one of the nice lawyers, with his multimillion-dollar, class-action practice, has paid to have a politician’s private life made public.
Yet, when it comes to voting, my cynicism is contained. I carry the scars of failed democracy, but my passion for voting is undimmed.
It all goes back to the late 1950s, when I was a wild-eyed teenaged reformer—is there another kind? The place was Southern Rhodesia and the issue was white minority rule.
We, the wild-eyed, had an almost messianic faith in the curative powers of voting. We even believed that democracy in Africa would be more gentlemanly and idealistic than it was in Europe or America. Oddly, this belief later affected liberal American newspaper columnists like Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times.
Our belief, naive and well-meaning, was that without the old colonial restrictions, stronger, better societies would rise in Africa than had existed in the rest of the world. Our belief was akin to that of Jews who had high hopes that the State of Israel, informed by the suffering of European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, would produce a kinder, gentler nation than the world had yet seen.
In looking back the odd thing is how kind and gentle, though skewed to the whites, Southern Rhodesia was. There was little crime, no measurable social unrest, but a profound sense that things would change for the better when one man, one vote was the law of the land.
Democracy was the balm and elixir that would move Africa to Winston Churchill’s “sunlit uplands.”
In 1980, after a brutal civil war, Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, got its vote. It was rigged from the beginning, and Robert Mugabe began to lay waste what had been literally and figuratively a sunlit upland.
His first action was one of genocide in the southern part of the country, called Matabeleland. Mugabe’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 people who, being of a different tribal grouping, had had the temerity to vote against him in the first free election.
The new reality of African democracy was “one man, one vote, once.”
Even so, the idealists clung to their hopes. As late as 1996, the dwindling white minority was still hopeful. At that point in time, they had not suffered direct reprisals; Mugabe’s evolving hatred of the white minority had not been seen. It soon would, with seizure of the farms and later businesses.Zimbabwe elections lost all validity with intimidation, violence and phony prosecutions. Yet the people voted even if they risked brutality for doing so. They had signed on to the hope implicit in voting.
Sadly, democracy elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Botswana and South Africa, also failed awfully in Uganda under Idi Amin and foolishly in Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. Democracy had become a contrivance to set up a dictatorship.
We, the boy soldiers of democracy marching around Salisbury, the Southern Rhodesian capital, with placards, did not understand that democracy is learned and it thrives only where it is husbanded by the voters and protected by a phalanx of independent institutions.
We were not alone in not seeing this. Neither, by the way, did the British, French and Portuguese governments. Neither, one fears, did the advocates for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, get out there and vote. Cherish the moment. You will not get a gun butt against your head outside the polling place.
- 3 responses
-
-
-
Put the Kettle on, Sarah Palin
-
Sarah m’dear, it’s not about the party. It’s about the tea.
For those of us of the British persuasion, tea is black tea. It was the tea on which the British built the empire.
It was also, I might add, the tea that Margaret Thatcher served at No. 10 Downing Street. I enjoyed some with her there. A Conservative traditionalist, she served it with milk for certain and sugar as an option.
Thatcher did not ask her guests, as bad hotels do now, what kind of tea they would like. Tea to Thatcher was black tea, sometimes known as Indian tea, though it might have been grown in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was neither flavored nor some herbal muck masquerading as tea.
The former prime minister knew that good tea is made in the kitchen, where stove-boiled water is poured from a kettle onto tea in a pot, not tepid water poured from a pot on a table into a cup with a tea bag.
Boiling water in a kettle, or pot, on the stove is important in making good tea. In a microwave, the water doesn’t bubble. Tea needs the bubbles.
While the Chinese drank green tea hundreds of years before Christ, the British developed their tea-drinking habit in the 17th century. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted permission for the charter of the British East India Company, establishing the trade in spice and silk that lead to the formal annexation of India and the establishment of the Raj.
Initially, tea was a sideline but it became increasingly important and started to define the British. The coffee shops–like the one that launched the insurer Lloyds of London around 1688–continued, but at all levels of society tea was becoming the British obsession.
By the 18th century, tea drinking was classless in Britain. Duchesses and workmen enjoyed it alike.
Tea was the fuel of the empire: the war drink, the social drink, the comfort drink and the consolation drink. Coffee had an upmarket connotation. It wasn’t widely available and the British didn’t make it very well.
Also as coffee was well established on the continent, it had to be shunned. To this day the British are divided about continental Europe and what they see as the emblems of Euro-depravity: coffee, garlic, scents and bidets.
Although tea is standardized, the British play their class games over the tea packers. For three centuries, most tea has been shipped in bulk to various packing houses throughout the British Isles. But the posh prefer Twinings to Lipton.
Offering tea with fancy cakes, clotted cream and fine jams separates the workers from the ruling classes. One of Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting, Anna Maria Stanhope, known as the Duchess of Bedford, is credited as the creator of afternoon tea time; which the hotels turned into formal, expensive afternoon “teas.” The Ritz in London is famous for them.
The British believe that tea sustained them through many wars. “Let’s have a nice cup of tea. Things will get better.” I’ve always believed that America’s revenge against the British crown was to ice their beloved tea. Toss it into Boston Harbor, but don’t ice it. If you should have the good fortune to be asked to tea at No. 10, or at Buckingham Palace, don’t expect it to be iced.
Incidentally tea bags are fine, and it’s now just pretentious to serve loose tea with a strainer. Of course, if you want to read the political tea leaves you’ll have to use loose tea.
If you’re serving tea to the thousands at your tea parties, Sarah, remember that unlike politics, tea is very forgiving. It can be revived just with more boiling water. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
- no responses
-
The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
January 30th, 2012
Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
January 23rd, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
January 16th, 2012
Guest Craig Shirley, author
World events as the U.S. elections get fully underway
January 9th, 2012
Guests Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrei Sitov, Itar-Tass; Al Leeds, The Washington Post
The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
Guests Bill Gouse, Transportation Consultant – Originally Broadcast October 16, 2011