Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out. For instance, everywhere one looks government agencies “ostensibly created to protect the public welfare” are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment.

Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale. World class biodiversity is yielding to desertification and monoculture. Money changes hands. The few are getting rich at the expense of the many. The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air. We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest.

The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits “the Holy Grail of American capitalism” are more precious than life itself. The remorseless people in power are without conscience. History confirms that sociopaths do not hesitate to take what they want from their unsuspecting victims by any and all means.

But surely, even among Friedmanites, it must be allowed that some things cannot be commodified or bought and sold. For instance, clean air and potable water are the birthright of every living organism. These are necessities that belong to the commons; they cannot ethically be privately owned. In contrast to this assertion, two edicts of modern capitalism are private ownership and the commodification of workers and nature.

Capitalism, and the market fundamentalism that is associated with it, has stripped bare the Earth’s biodiversity and substituted a world of commodities in its stead. What we see and think we know is not real. It is the product of marketing and perception managers — a hologram.

There is growing conflict between capitalism and the planet’s ecology, its essential life support systems. A fierce struggle between capital and democracy is in progress. The booted foot of capitalism is pressing upon the throat of democracy. We inhabit a dying world and are inheriting dying freedoms. Corporate greed and over-population is the culprit. Conflict is everywhere.

Virtually all of the social upheaval, inequality, and environmental problems of today in some way ensue from capitalism, including overpopulation and armed aggression. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and a burgeoning market for consumers. This is simply not possible on a finite planet.

These tensions are manifested no more clearly than throughout the coal belt and mountains of West Virginia, where I make my home. Here, mountains are cleared of forests before being blown to smithereens in order to cheaply extract coal to enrich Massey Energy Corporation. The process, known as mountaintop removal, has poisoned streams, altered their courses, and changed the contours of the land and its hydrology. It has devastated both human and biological communities while filling the coffers of the timber and coal industries.

Conventional underground mining has claimed the lives of thousands of coal miners trying to scratch out a modest living from the Earth. At times, it has led to armed conflict between miners and the Pinkertons hired by the mining companies in places like Matewan and Blair Mountain.

In West Virginia, King Coal and the gas and oil industry run the state’s legislature. The government is effectively owned by corporate lobbyists. As a result, it is futile to make legal and moral appeals to government for redress of our grievances. If we limit ourselves to the tools that our oppressors provide us, the entire region will become a sacrifice zone. Working people and the poor make the sacrifices; billionaires and industry carry off the profit. We are left to deal with the aftermath.

The illusion of democracy “including voting in the absence of meaningful choice” is a poor substitute for direct action and anarchy. Democracy cannot flourish in the sterile soil that capitalism leaves in its wake. Either we have democracy or we have capitalism, or we create something entirely different. Radically opposing ideas cannot be reconciled.

Modern humans inhabit a human-engineered world of absurdities and contradictions. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s assertions, corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Every sentient human being knows this. However, the law says otherwise. We must deny the corporate state that victory by refusing to capitulate.

The struggle for community rights, egalitarianism, and social, economic, and environmental justice must occur outside of the system that creates inequality and fosters wanton destruction of the commons. Countless species of plants and animals that provide essential ecological services are being eliminated to create space for strip malls, gated communities, gambling casinos and golf courses. As a result, ecological and economic catastrophe loom. We are facing global famine in an anthropocentric over-heated world.

Globally, wealthy multinational corporations are gorging themselves on the biological and mineral wealth of the commons. What could be more absurd or unethical?

The brainchild of Adam Smith, capitalism, which replaced feudalism during the French Revolution, is founded upon demonstrably false premises, many of which were unknown in Smith’s time. Nevertheless, classically trained economists assert that capitalism is a primal force of nature rather than the defective human construct that it is. Modern capitalism has produced pathological symptoms and endorsed an ethos that is antithetical to life and to liberty. It is killing the world and foreclosing evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, ethical considerations aside, and speaking purely from a biological perspective, one may emphatically state that modern capitalism is an aggressive cancer that is devouring its host. But most of us are in denial. People like me are asked not to utter the “C” word in public spaces. It might offend the well-intentioned believers. Whenever this occurs I am reminded of Thoreau, who uttered, “Any truth is better than make believe.” . One has an ethical obligation to state what one knows succinctly and clearly.

It is not in dispute that the ideology of constant expansion on a finite planet is contradicted by inviolable ecological dictums — among them, carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, and die-off. But classical economists act as if these laws do not apply, or they are mysteriously overridden by the irrational exuberance of capitalism.

In reality, every political economy is underlain by ecology and by living, evolving, biological systems. Ecology is the only economy that really matters.

By possessing even a modest degree of ecological literacy, one can make some revealing predictions with mathematical certainty. For example, the continuation of capitalism as the primary political economy can have one of two possible outcomes: the virtual destruction of the biosphere, meaning the death of the host organism, or the abolition of the capitalist system.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work?

Global capitalism, with its dependence on the availability of cheap fossil fuels and petrochemicals for food production, must give way to small-scale local economies and organic agriculture. Food must be locally grown and, as far as possible, other necessities locally produced. The age of cheap fossil fuels is ending. Industrialized man must bravely confront his addictions and embrace sobriety or he will self-destruct.

It is said that nature bats last. Humans do best when they emulate natural systems that have evolved over eons of time.

A moneyless economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Accordingly, goods and services may then be exchanged without the conduit of markets. These exchanges would be of equal value and thus inherently fair.

The classic business models will be replaced by worker-owned and worker-operated cooperatives. In this arrangement, workers – not a board of directors – make all of the business decisions. They share the risks and benefits and distribute the surpluses of production, while significantly reducing the work day and the work week. A portion of the surpluses of production is allocated to the betterment of the community and to the protection of the commons.

New economic models must be predicated upon ecological principles or they will fail. Existing alternatives to capitalism, such as Spain’s Mondragon Worker Cooperative, must be critically analyzed and evaluated as a model that could, with modifications, be implemented elsewhere.

There is no better teacher than evolution and natural selection. History confirms that the most revolutionary ideas are occasionally the oldest. For instance, anthropological studies indicate that early Homo sapiens evolved by implementing egalitarian principles into their tribal clans. People and the cultures they create must either evolve or perish.

The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. Political campaigns and elections will recede into history and quickly forgotten. Evolved societies do not need leaders or elected officials.

Every member of an egalitarian community is a leader. Power flows in a circular form rather than a linear, top-down hierarchy. It is derived directly from the people. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. All people will have equal access to opportunity. Health care and higher education, like pure water and clean air, will be regarded as a right of birth and provided without cost.

Direct action will replace voting in political elections. Rather than consent to be governed, sovereign people can create the world they want to live in. In communities where people are empowered and where they have an equal stake, they will want to participate. Everyone brings something to the table. Everyone contributes and all of society benefits.

Communities will become as interconnected and interdependent as ecological systems. But each will remain autonomous within the larger matrix of nature. States and nations as we know them may eventually recede into history and disappear.

Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities can be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. As in healthy ecosystems, the welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community — and vice versa. No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together.

All living organisms share a common origin and a common destiny. Ecology and economy must merge into an integrated natural system suited to long-term survival in a world already ravaged by industrialized man. Ecological and social healing must be part of the process of building sustainable communities.

The transition from capitalism to cooperation will be neither smooth nor easy. There will be many false starts. At first, there will be fierce resistance to revolutionary change. People cling to the familiar and the comfortable, to what they know, even when the dominant paradigm and popular culture does them harm.

The first tentative steps of a journey are often the most difficult. There are no clear blueprints to follow. There will be trepidation and uncertainty. But we must commit to beginning. The alternative is oblivion. But if we embark on the voyage the survival of the species, and a new age of enlightenment will be possible.

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

1. E-mail correspondence with Keith Harmon Snow

It was 1986, a gorgeous day on the south rim of the Canyon — brilliant sunlight and clear turquoise sky, ravens spiraling down to circle the trees. My friends and I pulled on white radiation suits and gas masks. We linked hands and stepped across the main road in Grand Canyon National Park. A few dozen people waved banners and sang. There was a human raccoon and a human raven laughing up at the scrawwwking birds. A bright red banner read: Uranium? Leave it in the Ground.

The Park police came. My friends and I had, in the tradition of Civil Disobedience, told them of our plan. They knew that eight Earth First! members would face arrest to protect a meadow the Havasupai know is the Belly of the Mother. They knew we were blocking the road to up the ante in stopping a breccia pipe uranium mine from being thrust into the Belly of the Mother.

The arrests were gentle. Perhaps the hardest part was being cuffed behind our backs for the long ride down to the Coconino County Jail. Even that was eased when we saw our support group outside the jail. We were booked. A woman detention officer took me into the Ladies Room to remove my bra. “I know,” she said, “it’s weird. But we have to do it in case you decided to hang yourself.” We laughed. And then for a moment, we were silent. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I had suddenly imagined the other women brought into the jail – not because they chose it. The detention officer leaned in close. “Listen,” she said, “you didn’t hear me say this – lots of us think you guys are great. We’re with you on that uranium business.”

The Hualapai, Havasupai, Hopi, Earth First!, Canyon Under siege and others fought the Canyon uranium mine for four years. We held more demos, filed endless Environmental Impact Statement appeals, gave slide shows around Arizona and wrote articles and press releases. The Havasupai hosted an annual gathering in the big sage meadow at the foot of Red Butte, a sacred site a few miles from the meadow. And a few un-known people monkey-wrenched – cut electrical poles into the mine site, draped buildings with banners that said: Hayduchess Lives. We all held off the mine long enough for the price of uranium to drop. Our victory was not permanent.

*****

Yesterday I stood with thirty people on a main street in Flagstaff, Arizona to bear witness to a sinister uranium mining proposal designed by two Arizona politicians: “GOP lawmakers led by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ)  announced legislation that would open one million acres of public lands  forming Grand Canyon National Park’s watershed to new uranium mining.  The bill would overturn an existing moratorium on new mining and mining claims and block Secretary of the Department of Interior Ken  Salazar’s proposal to extend those protections for the next 20 years.” (Press release issued by the Grand Canyon Trust, October 2011.)

Yet again my friends and I carried bright banners and signs. Yet again we waved at bystanders and smiled. There was no raccoon, nor any raven except the ones dropping to the shopping center parking lot for crumbs. There were two young Dine (Navajo) boys with drums, drums they had been taught to make by Dine activist and musician, Klee Benally. He stood with them, sometimes leading the beat of the drums, sometimes following the boys.

We were Native Americans, Anglos and Hispanics. We were old and young, seasoned veterans of this work and bright-eyed newcomers. People drove by, read the signs, honked and gave us thumbs up — or flipped us off and shook their heads as if we just didn’t get it. High school kids on lunch break stopped to take a sticker and listen to the drumming.

The sun was too bright, my clothes too warm for the day. My legs ached. My hearing aids picked up ravens, traffic, horns and anything that wasn’t the voice of someone I was talking with. I felt cranky and more than a little hopeless. Then Klee began to lead the boys and a dozen of the others out across the road.

The light was green. They stayed in the crosswalk. There were no police, just a brilliant red and yellow banner rippling in the mountain air, people waving signs that said, Protect Grand Canyon — No Uranium Mining, and the two boys and the tall man with their hair tied up in the traditional way, drumming. Norm, my activist friend of twenty years leaned toward me and said, “We just don’t quit, do we?”

In that instant, I remembered the words I’d heard Acoma poet, Simon Ortiz, speak at a lecture a few months earlier: “I believe in land, culture and community. We must behave with continuance — not just with our words, but our actions. Again and again.”

Please join us in fighting Gosar’s and McCain’s plan.

For more information and ways to act click here.

•  This article first appeared on New Clear Vision.

You did your readers and all working people a grave disservice today. By titling a column about hundreds of thousands of miners around the world going on strike for better working and living conditions a “strike contagion” — and thus associating actions by workers with germs, plague, and disease transmission — you forgo journalistic integrity and objectivity for something base and, quite honestly, cruel.

The Pike River disaster, in which two Australian miners were killed, was just one of the deadly accidents that happen almost every day in mines around the world. I know — I blog and tweet each and every one of them @coalmtn.

Miners trying to protect their livelihoods — and their lives — by striking for better wages and safer working conditions are quite simply the opposite of a contagion. They are, in fact, a cure for the deadly disease of corporate greed and rampant safety violations in the global mining sector.

And the Sydney Morning Herald should be embarrassed by calling the cry for justice by these miners, or any working people, a contagion.

Mark Nowak

Even after an independent investigation commissioned by the state’s former governor reported (on May 19, 2011) that the accident had been the clear result of safety violations, even after we learned that Massey had been cited for more than 1300 safety violations in the five years leading up to the explosion, and even after we concluded, bitterly, that Massey was guilty of wanton carelessness and recklessness—we find that we had aimed way too low.

It turns out that Massey executives were not only negligent, they were calculatingly criminal.  On June 28, federal investigators announced they had discovered that Massey Energy was keeping two sets of books (safety logs).  One log reflected actual mine conditions, which, alas, were demonstrably unsafe, and the other log was a fictionalized showpiece, a veritable Potemkin village, used to mislead government safety inspectors.

Maybe our first order of business should be to change the nomenclature.  Given that Massey knew of the unsafe conditions and not only failed to address them, but attempted to conceal them from the very inspectors whose job it was to protect the miners from injury, we should no longer refer to the Big Branch explosion as an accident, disaster or tragedy.  We should refer to it as “manslaughter.”

Also, let’s not forget that the mining industry continues to lobby the U.S. government to reduce its safety regulations, arguing that the industry can “police itself,” and that under the free enterprise system, America’s businesses should be entitled to earn an honest dollar without intrusive government interference.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers support deregulation.

Earlier this month, Massey Energy sold its operation to another company, Alpha Natural Resources.  Alpha management has said that it knew nothing of the double-books and was looking into the allegations.  As for the Massey folks, citing Fifth Amendment protection, eighteen Massey officials (including CEO Don Blankenship) have so far refused to testify in the investigation.

Even though Massey Energy’s Big Branch mine was a non-union operation, the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) has agreed to represent the miners in the investigation.  And while it gives no one any satisfaction to point out the obvious, union mines have significantly better safety records than non-union facilities.  Why?  Because with the UMWA representing them, miners can’t be ignored, particularly when it comes to safety concerns.  Union miners have a legally established, recognized voice.

On June 29, I spoke by telephone with Phil Smith, the UMWA Communications Director.  Although he didn’t wish to discuss the Massey revelations until after UMWA president Cecil Roberts had the opportunity to make an official statement (which Roberts did later that afternoon), Smith did tell me that the U.S. Department of Labor’s MHSA (Mine Health and Safety Administration) had improved greatly over the last year and a half.

Part of the credit for that improvement goes to the Obama administration for having appointed Joe Main to run the agency.  Arguably, no one in the country knows more about mine safety than Joe Main, who started out as a coal miner himself, way back in 1967, and eventually rose to become the UMWA’s safety guru.  So instead of some bureaucratic pencil-pusher, the MHSA now has an actual ex-miner looking out for the well-being of other miners, which is exactly what that industry needs.

Unfortunately, two sets of books isn’t totally unheard of in the mining business.  In 2001, at a coal mine in Brookwood, Alabama, two sets of books were found after an explosion killed 13 miners.  The Bush administration chose not to file criminal charges.

Julia ‘Judy’ Bonds, “(a) coal miner’s daughter… no longer (could) tolerate the blasting that rattled her windows, the coal soot that she suspected was clotting her grandson’s lungs, and the blackwater spills that bellied-up fish in a nearby stream.”

As a result, she moved downstream and joined Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), an activist group against mountaintop removal.

CRMW is an initiative “to stop the destruction of our communities and environment by mountaintop removal, to improve the quality of life in our area, and to help rebuild sustainable communities.”

In January 2011, Bonds died of cancer at age 58, CRMW co-director Vernon Haltom saying:

“Judy endured much personal suffering for her leadership. While people of lesser courage would candy-coat their words or simply shut up and sit down, Judy called it as she saw it. (As a result, she) endured physical assault, verbal abuse, and death threats because she stood up for justice for her community. I never met a more courageous person, one who faced her own death,” yet wouldn’t back down. “Fight harder,” she always said, in the vanguard always doing it.

On January 3, 2011, coal toxins silenced the “passion, conviction, tenacity, courage, and love for her fellow human beings” that coal barons tried and failed to do for years. “Judy will be missed by all in this movement as an icon, a leader, an inspiration, and a friend.”

National Geographic quoted her saying: “What the coal companies are doing to us and our mountains is the best kept dirty little secret in America.”

Because of her efforts and fellow activists, the secret’s out. “Coal companies have obliterated the summits of scores of mountains scattered throughout Appalachia….”

According to iLoveMountains.org, coal companies destroyed or severely impacted about 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres, reclaiming only a small fraction of the land for so-called beneficial economic uses.

In fact, a 2009 Appalachian Voices report (based on 2008 aerial and mining permit data) found “one in every ten (Central Appalachia studied) acres” ravaged by surface mining. Moreover, in some locations, it’s much more. In Wise County, VA, it’s nearly 40%. States affected include Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee.

In June 2006, Vanity Fair writer Michael Shnayerson’s article called it “The Rape of Appalachia,” saying:

Its mountains “are being blasted at a rate of several ridgetops each week. Parents fear for the health of their children. And those trying to fight the devastation have found that coal baron Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, is tougher than bedrock.” So are his counterparts at Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, and CONSOL Energy.

Industry arrogance is hidden underground, except when avoidable disasters kill miners because its profiteers flout laws and regulations for bottom line priorities.

Above ground, miners rarely die, just the environment and human health incrementally over time. The visible evidence includes: “mile after mile of forest-covered range, great swaths of Appalachia, in some places as far as the eye can see, are being blasted and obliterated in one of the greatest acts of physical destruction this country has ever wreaked upon” nature and humanity.

They’re sacrificed for King Coal profiteers, the 1917 title Upton Sinclair used for his novel about Western America’s poor industry working conditions, based on the 1913-15 Colorado coal strikes, including at Ludlow.

In his People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn poignantly described its 1913-14 strike and subsequent massacre, killing 75 or more strikers, strikebreakers, and bystanders for defying what he called “feudal kingdoms run by (coal barons that) made the laws,” imposed curfews, and ran their operations more like despots than businessmen. To this day, little has changed.

As a result, something is very wrong, including in Whitesville, WV. “It looks desolate, its storefronts abandoned, its streets and sidewalks still. Hardly a car is parked here, not a soul to be seen.”

Only two florists remain. Though poor, West Virginians “buy a lot of funeral flowers. Whitesville resembles a wartime town pillaged by an advancing army.” So do many others throughout Appalachia, raped by coal profiteers. For maximum profits, they denuded former panoramic landscapes, blasted away majestic mountaintops, and left desolation behind.

More affluent communities might have stopped them, but not Appalachia, “a land unto itself, cut off by” mountains East and West, its people too poor, isolated and cowed by generations of King Coal dominance to stop the destruction of their communities, homes and lives.

Moreover, few Americans elsewhere know it or even care. They’re oblivious to “three million (daily) pounds of explosives” destroying a mountain culture, producing the most toxic fossil fuel used to supply more than half of the nation’s electricity, as well as power for manufacturers of paper, chemicals, metal products, plastics, ceramics, fertilizers, tar, and high carbon coke used for steel industry metal processing.

In addition, other coal-derived compounds and residues are used in many other manufacturing processes for synthetic rubber, fiber, insecticides, paints, medicines and solvents.

A 2010 Environmental Integrity Project/Sierra Club/EarthJustice study, however, found that ash produced by coal-fired power plants contaminated ground water and air with dangerous toxins, including arsenic, benzene, mercury and lead. They’re linked to cancer, congestive heart failure, nervous system damage, respiratory diseases, asthma, other health related problems, and lower life expectancies.

Moreover, the Union of Concerned Scientists calls coal burning “a leading cause of smog, acid rain, global warming, and air toxins,” saying each year a typical coal plant generates:

– “3,700,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2),” the equivalent of “cutting down 161 million trees;

– 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2),” causing acid rain damaging forests, lakes, and physical structures, as well as harmful airborne particles able to penetrate deeply into lungs;

– “500 tons of small airborne particles, (responsible for) chronic bronchitis, aggravated asthma, and premature death, as well as haze obstructing visibility;”

– 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx),” the equivalent of what’s emitted by half a million late-model cars; it produces lung inflaming ozone, making people susceptible to respiratory diseases; and

– smaller amounts of other toxins, including carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOC), mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, benzene, other toxic heavy metals, and trace amounts of uranium.

No matter. King Coal is empowered to destroy environments and human health for a buck, lots of them, in fact, for well-connected coal barons buying federal, state and local politicians like toothpaste.

As a result, nearly 24,000 people die annually, according to a 2004 Clean Air Task Force study. In 2009, a National Research Council “external costs of coal” report titled, “Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use” estimated a 2005 hidden $62 billion health damage and air pollution cost from electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. The figure excludes the enormous harm to ecosystems.

A 2009 Jonathan Levy/Joel Schwartz/Lisa Baxter Harvard University study titled, “Uncertainty and Variability in Health-Related Damages from Coal-Fired Power Plants in the United States” estimated a range from $30,000-$500,000 (depending on facility age and types of coal used) for every ton of fine particulate matter pollution (PM2.5), with a median rate of $72,000 per ton.

Moreover, damage from each ton of sulfur dioxide ranged from $6,000 to $50,000, with a median rate of $19,000. For nitrogen oxide, it was $500 to $15,000, the median cost being $4,800.

Numerous other studies are just as damning, showing the health and environmental harm from coal production to burning, including a February 2011 Harvard Medical School one titled, “Mining Coal, Mounting Costs: the Life Cycle Consequences of Coal.” It estimated the full public cost of extraction, transportation, processing and combustion at from $175-$500 billion annually.

Nonetheless, King Coal’s power remains strong, including to offload mine reclamation costs to taxpayers,  another way they’re made to pay. Even trying to beat industry giants in court is futile because occasional district court level wins get overturned on appeal by bought and paid for judges, as much in the tank as politicians.

That’s how stories end in Coal River Valley, said Vanity Fair’s Shnayerson, “with a whimper, followed by a bang from blasting,” destroying mountains, communities, ecosystems and people in combination. Judy Bonds called it “stealing our soul.”

Mountaintop Removal: How It’s Done

Mountain Justice calls it “mountain range removal/valley fill mining,” a process that “annihilates ecosystems, transforming some of the most biologically diverse temperate forests in the world into biologically barren moonscapes.” Its steps include:

(1) Clear-cutting forests, including scraping away topsoil, lumber, herbs, and other life forms, denuding the landscape. In the process, wildlife habitat and vegetation are destroyed, leaving areas vulnerable to floods and landslides.

(2) Up to 800 feet of mountaintops are blasted, causing immediate damage to home foundations, structures and wells. Moreover, unleashed “fly rock” boulders endanger lives and property.

(3) Huge shovels rip into soil, loading coal onto trucks to haul away or push into adjacent valleys.

(4) Giant dragline machines dig into rock, exposing coal deposits.

(5) Other machines scoop it out, dumping millions of “overburden” tons (former mountaintops) into valleys below, creating valley fills. As a result, coal giants “forever buried over 1,200 miles of biologically crucial Appalachian headwater streams.”

(6) Mandated land reclamation areas are usually left stripped and bare. Mountains are destroyed and lost. Once maximum coal is extracted, mining communities and jobs disappear. Residents are driven out by dust, blasting, residues, toxins, flooding, landslides, and “dangers from overloaded trucks careening down small, windy mountain roads.”

Enormous amounts of waste are generated. In solid form, it’s valley fills. Liquid is stored in “massive, dangerous coal slurry impoundments, often built in” watershed headwaters. A carcinogenic chemical “witch’s  brew” is used to wash coal for market, leaving behind poisonous residues. Frequent blackwater spills choke life from streams.

For example, the Southeast’s worst ever environmental disaster sent 306 million gallons of sludge up to 15 feet thick into residents’ yards. It also fouled 75 miles of waterways.

Another affected Southern West Virginia’s Buffalo Creek when heavy rain caused a slurry pond to fill up, breaching its containment dam. As a result, “a (132 million gallon) wall of black water” blighted the valley below, killing 125 residents, injuring 1,100, and leaving 4,000 homeless.

In addition, over 1,000 cars and trucks were destroyed, causing $50 million in damage overall. Though warned about the dangerous dam, Pittston Coal Company took no precautions, dismissively calling the disaster an “act of God.”

A Final Comment

EarthJustice and other environmental groups are urging Congress to pass HR 1375: Clean Water Protection Act. Introduced on April 5, 2011, then referred to Committee, it’s legislation to “amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to clarify that fill material cannot be comprised of waste.”

EarthJustice calls it a way to put “tighter restrictions on dumping pollution into Appalachian streams by overturning the dangerous fill rule.” If enacted, it will  restore eroded Clean Water Act protections, even though passage won’t assure coal giants’ compliance. They may, in fact, accept hand slap citations and fines to keep doing business as usual like always in the past.

Another March 2009 bill never made it out of committee – S. 696: Appalachia Restoration Act, “A bill to amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to include a definition of fill material.” If passed, it would have prohibited dumping mountaintop removal “excess spoil” into streams and headwaters. But it would have allowed other mining and industrial waste dumping into waters, practices once prohibited by the Clean Water Act.

EarthJustice and other committed groups also campaign to stop mountaintop removal mining. Former congressman Ken Hechler is involved. A feisty 96, his image is featured on Washington, DC area billboard ads saying:

“My name is Ken. I’m 96 and a fighter. And I’m fighting to save our mountains.” He’s part of EarthJustice’s Mountain Heroes campaign, organizer Liz Judge saying:

We also plan to go to other cities. Our purpose is to tell the stories of people who live in the coalfields, people who deal with the impact of mountaintop removal mining on a daily basis.

Representing West Virginia’s 4th congressional district from 1959 – 1977, Hechler then served as its Secretary of State from 1985-2001, retiring at age 86. A Columbia University Ph D in history and government, he spent decades fighting for miners’ health and safety laws.

Judge called his efforts “heroic,” even coming out of retirement in 2010 at age 95 to run against then Gov. Joe Manchin in the Democrat special primary, solely on ending mountaintop removal.

Like others, he believes there’s “light at the end of the tunnel. But the tougher it gets, the more exciting it gets when you can see victory,” or a chance of getting what so far proved elusive. “I’m still hoping,” says Hechler, “that before I leave this world I get to see that victory, which I’m sure is going to come.”

On June 6, he participated in a five-day march  commemorating the 90th anniversary of the historic 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain when 10,000 or more coal miners courageously participated in the largest US rebellion since the Civil War. Struggling to unionize for basic rights, including decent wages and working conditions, they confronted a coal operator-backed army of police, strikebreakers, and US Army troops.

Dozens were killed or wounded, hundreds arrested. The battle challenged appalling conditions miners faced, culminating later with New Deal labor victories. Eroded later, they’re now lost, but not in the memories of activists struggling to regain them.

At the time, the Battle of Blair Mountain was a watershed event. In April 2008, the National Register of Historic Places nominated the site for its protected places list, a decision the state of West Virginia contested, leaving its status under review.

On or off, Blair Mountain symbolizes a struggle anti-mountaintop removal activists don’t intend to lose.

For them and beleaguered Appalachian residents, winning can’t come a moment too soon.

I went to the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival and spent much of the time waiting in lines hoping to get a seat at one of the free lectures. I am unwaged and subsist on government welfare. Along with up to 30% of my fellow citizens I belong to Australia’s underclass as I am denied the right to work in this country. It is not because we have been critical of the government but because we were born without the right class connections. Our country is not a meritocracy and is riven by inequality. Here it is not what you know but who you know that determines your fate in life.

Anyway after waiting so long for a free seat at the Sydney Writers Festival and just missing out so many times I thought my luck had finally turned when someone offered me a free ticket to the Liao Yiwu lecture: “ The dangers of what we think we know”. Well Liao, I guess I wasn’t so lucky after all because when I arrived a columnist from the Murdoch press, Miriam Cosic of the Australian newspaper, was there to tell us that the Chinese government wouldn’t let you come to the Festival. Cosic explained to the audience that there had been another crackdown on artists and writers in China. She read your letter thanking would-be sponsors. It went on to say how cruelly your government has treated you and how free Australia must be for inviting you. Nodding knowingly to her middle-class audience (many of whom were clutching fistfuls of lecture tickets at $20 and $30 each – enough to feed a welfare family for a week) she pontificated: “We here in Australia have no idea what it must be like to live under constant government crackdowns as they do in China”.

Funny that, because only the previous week the Federal budget announced yet another government crackdown on welfare recipients starting with teenage mums and disabled youth. Teen mums are to be separated from their babies at six months old to do compulsory job training or Work for the Dole programs. Young disabled citizens will not only need specialist medical reports to support their claim for an allowance but letters from at least three employers saying they are unable to employ them because of their disability. The crackdown will put these Australians on the same degrading treadmill of harassment, pernicious activity tests and surveillance as the unemployed who daily run the risk of being breached for even minor infractions. Every waking hour is to be spent justifying their existence to a parasitic bureaucracy and job service goons. Then when they suffer mental breakdown, a bunch of Canberra public servants (in the guise of Get Up!) only dealing with the symptoms not the causes, call for more psychiatrists. This is medicalising the social problems of inequality, lack of meaningful work, economic exclusion and institutional bastardisation of Australia’s underclass.

Many people with secure, well paid jobs are fond of saying that there is no poverty in our country but in reality a third world exists within a first world here. It is a hangover from Victorian England that the have-nots of our country are judged as either deserving or undeserving poor according to warped, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant values dominant since the industrial revolution. The well off mainly empathise with the hardship and injustices suffered by citizens from other parts of the world yet deny the basic human rights violations happening in their own backyard. Despite Australia being a signatory to the United Nations Human Rights Charter guaranteeing every citizen the right to work, job seekers are locked out of our economy.

With all the mineral wealth that lies beneath Australian soil there is never any thought that lower class families should share in this wealth even though as part of our Commonwealth it belongs to all of us. Yet as the mining boom rages, the contrast between high and low income earners has never been greater while money generated from our country creates bloated executive salaries and is siphoned off to other parts of the world. When you look at maps of the world showing each nation’s endowment of natural resources, you find that generally those that have the most minerals and energy per capita also have the largest contrast between rich and poor and Australia is heading the same way.

Australia had almost full employment from the Second World War until the mid-70s when in response to OECD pressure policy makers deliberately created a permanent underclass of unemployed citizens (further research is available from the Centre For Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle). This underemployment was to discipline the workforce and force us to accept lower wages and conditions using the coercion of job insecurity. The government figured that having a workforce terrified of unemployment would make us docile and we would censor ourselves without the need for a heavy-handed secret police. The added advantage was that the steady growth in living standards and workers’ wages occurring after World War II could be diverted into the pockets of company executives, foreign corporations and the ruling elite.

Using the OPEC oil shock as the cover story the government set about shrinking the public sector which had been a traditional employer of workers who couldn’t be absorbed into the private sector. The government printery, shipyards and rail workshops all started closing as jobs were subcontracted offshore. There was further hollowing-out of employment opportunities as essential services became privatised. Factories started closing and the manufacturing sector contracted as import tariffs were steadily removed. While politicians were claiming that it would make Australia more efficient we started hearing new terms bandied about like downsizing, slim-lineing, deregulation and restructuring. Almost overnight jobs became scarcer and our national wealth became redistributed towards the big end of town. For the first time in 1981 when state teacher trainees graduated as high school art teachers virtually none obtained full-time teaching positions with the NSW Education Department and most ended up on 30 year waiting-lists. Rather than employ these Australian graduates the government, driven by ideology, preferred to import teachers from Canada.

To ensure there is never much sympathy for those without work the government and media barons peddle the Orwellian lie that Australia has full employment and simply cook the books. The unemployed and underemployed are labelled as dole bludgers, job snobs, cruisers and losers. They have only their own character flaws to blame for their misfortune so the story goes. Many with university qualifications have tried over 300 times to get a job but are still unemployed so how can that be full employment? Perhaps they lack skills the economy needs and should have trained in something more practical. Maybe if they retrained as Latin graduates, like the CEO of Westpac, they could get a job earning $9.5 million a year.

But the problem really isn’t that there is insufficient employment but only that there is insufficient funding of employment. The Local Government Association alone has identified enough unfunded jobs needing to be done to employ every jobless Australian. If only we could use some of the super mining profits being dug out of the ground to fund these needed jobs with a resource tax. Everyone would have a place in society instead of holding unemployed and casual workers hostage to the job service merry-go-round. All this money from the mining boom employs only 1% of Australians yet miners import trained workers from overseas rather than train the job-seekers that are already here.

In China Liao you got four years gaol for writing a poem about Tiananmen Square. In Australia Lance Sharkey got three years for saying Australian workers would welcome the Soviet army if they arrived here. Four years sentence for a poem, three years gaol for a sentence – what’s the difference? Well Lance certainly wasn’t lionised by the Australian media or showered with glittering prizes and book deals which is a significant difference. And he wasn’t complicit in unwittingly or otherwise airbrushing the plight of the oppressed underclass of one country, supposedly to help publicise the oppression of another. Do you think Australian representatives are discussing China’s human rights at the London Metals Exchange?

There is economic apartheid in Australia today and the situation is akin to the era of racial apartheid in South Africa when local human rights activists called upon other countries for trade boycotts and travel embargoes. Perhaps if Australia’s left wasn’t permanently out to lunch then something would be done along these lines but for now you need to be aware that Australia isn’t free and oppression doesn’t begin or end at national borders. Ever since the eighties when we spiralled into a Dickensian nightmare of extreme capitalism and hidden unemployment Australia has had the highest rate of youth suicide in the Western world.

So next time you send a letter to be read at a writers festival, you could spare a thought for the oppressed of your host country rather than playing into the hands of Australia’s oligarchy. That way, you’d have a credible claim to be advancing the cause of universal human rights rather than providing grist to the mill of Cold War warriors in the Murdoch press et al. Thanks for reading this Liao, hope I haven’t hurt your feelings but I thought it was about time you took a walk in our shoes. Since you can’t come in person to Australia I’m giving you a virtual tour but if you ever get a visa then look me up and I’ll show you the real Australia you don’t see in tourist brochures.

Yours Sincerely,
Bernadette Smith

On May 19, 2011, an independent investigation commissioned by the state’s former governor reported conclusively what everybody involved already knew… that the accident was the result of safety violations by Massey management. In truth, the Upper Big Branch mine was more or less a death trap.

In the investigators’ own words, “The disaster at Upper Big Branch was man-made and could have been prevented had Massey Energy followed basic, well-tested and historically proven safety procedures.” The message couldn’t be any plainer: Had Massey paid as much attention to mine safety as it did to company profits, those 29 miners would still be alive.

And it wasn’t as if safety violations were alien to the company. Indeed, Massey Energy Co. was viewed by many as a major accident waiting to happen. In the previous five years leading up to the 2010 disaster, Massey had been cited for more than 1,300 safety violations by the MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration), including poor ventilation—believed to be the cause of the explosion. In 2009 alone, Massey was cited 64 times for ventilation violations.

As Gary Hardesty, an AWPPW (Assoc. of Western Pulp & Paper Workers) safety consultant, once put it, “Because maintaining a safe facility costs money, many companies see safety only as another form of overhead.” Obviously, while Massey management bears the brunt of the blame for regarding worker safety as “overhead”—money they would just as soon not have to spend—the MSHA deserves much of the blame as well.

Blithely issuing one safety citation after another to a renegade company with a proven record of ignoring them (or getting them reduced in the appeal process) is not what a government watchdog agency is charged to do. Mechanically going through the motions of slapping a company on the wrist, and desultorily filing the necessary paperwork, is not the same as hands-on regulation an industry’s safety practices. The MSHA failed in its duty.

And, of course, there’s another component to this tragedy, one reflecting organized labor’s unfortunate loss of influence, not only in the industry but in the country at large. As anyone who’s been paying attention to the mining industry since the 1970s knows, as the percentage of union-affiliated mines continues to decline, mining accidents continue to increase. Statistics show that 92-percent of all mine accidents occur in non-union facilities.

In an interview I conducted a couple of years ago with Phil Smith, Communications Director of the United Mine Workers (UMW) International, he made it clear that U.S. mine owners are in collusion to keep miners from seeking union representation. And even though collusion is a violation of federal labor law, one that the NLRB hasn’t seriously addressed, the companies continue to do it. They do it through intimidation and old-fashioned black-balling.

Because coal mining is a close-knit community, once your name gets put on a company shit-list as a “union activist” or “union sympathizer,” it’s going to stay on that list, and you’re going to find it difficult to get hired anywhere. Coal miners might be a remarkably tough but courageous breed of worker, but, tough or not, they have to work to eat, and there are only so many mining jobs to go around. Few are willing to rock the boat.

According to Phil Smith, even on those occasions when a mine does go union, companies have been known to shut down the operation, change names by selling it off to a “phantom subsidiary,” and re-open the mine as a non-union facility. And if anyone squawks too loudly about the illegality of this arrangement, they find themselves out of a job.

So while it’s gratifying to see Massey Energy found guilty of egregious safety violations, it didn’t exactly come as a revelation. Massey management knew it all along, the miners knew it, the MSHA knew it, and the UMW knew it. Alas, the families of those 29 men learned it a year too late.

This assault led three of the local campesinos from Intag, Ecuador to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and Copper Mesa Corporation, the Canadian mining company responsible for hiring the “security firm” that sent the paramilitaries to intimidate the anti-mining residents of the region.

“I ask the noble people of Canada,” said Ramírez when she filed the lawsuit in March 2009, “that you demand from your elected authorities significant changes in your national legislation so that what has happened with Copper Mesa in Intag will never happen again, not in Intag nor in any other part of the world.”

John McKay, a Liberal Member of Parliament from Canada, actually introduced legislation that would have been a concrete first step in holding Canadian mining companies accountable for their behavior overseas. Bill C-300 would have sanctioned the Canadian federal government to investigate human rights and environmental complaints filed against companies with the authority to cancel any governmental funding if found guilty. While some activists and NGO’s leveled criticism against the bill for being too tepid, most supported the legislation. Unfortunately the Canadian government, largely perceived to be in the pockets of the mining industry, did not and the bill was voted down. Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, has charged the government with “aiding and abetting” the industry’s inhumane, if not criminal, behavior.

Injustice and Impunity Continues

Last month, when three judges at the Court of Appeals in Canada ruled against the three Intag residents, a lot more than a lawsuit was lost. The court basically said that people overseas have no right to sue a Canadian institution or company for human rights violations in Canadian courts. Their statement to the world reaffirmed what many communities effected by Canadian mining projects in the developing world already know: institutions like the TSX and Copper Mesa will never be held accountable for human rights abuses and environmental destruction they fund and carry out.

“Do Canadians really want to have their legal system on the one hand authorize Canadian mining companies to go abroad to developing countries, and then on the other hand totally absolve the directors in Canada of any responsibility whatsoever for human rights abuses those companies may perpetrate there?” asked Murray Klippenstein, legal counsel for the Ecuadorians, who is also legal counsel for a widow in Guatemala whose husband was murdered by the head of security of a Canadian mining subsidiary because of his outspoken concerns about the activities of the company.

But the ruling also produces another very unsettling effect, or better put, reinforces a widely-held belief in the extractive industry resistance movements overseas: that it is a waste of time, energy and funds to try to use the judicial system in order to have their rights recognized and communities protected. The implications are troubling.

One example to illustrate this point is the infamous Chevron-Texaco case where 18 long years had to pass before the 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous and campesino plaintiffs got a favorable sentence in an Ecuadorian court for their lawsuit based on the grave health impacts from years of petroleum extraction- and contamination- in the Amazon. The destruction has been such that it’s been labeled a “Rainforest Chernobyl”. But even now the case could be held up in courts for an additional decade from appeals, meaning that many of the plaintiffs will have died before the possibility of collecting what is due them.

Canadians don’t hear too much about the environmental destruction and social upheaval their oil, gas and mining industries are spreading overseas. In spite of countless reports of human rights violations all over the world, Canadian corporations have been very successful at greenwashing the news back home and replacing it by images of the “socially responsible” Canadian corporate citizen bringing wealth and development abroad.

However, if the lawsuit contributed to the company being expelled from the TSX, as it was on February 2010, leads to its bankruptcy, and as a result pressures the judicial system in Canada to open itself up to legitimate lawsuits brought by communities overseas against their extractive industries, then it was very much worthwhile. If, in the long run, it will contribute to bringing about legislative reforms that will effectively reduce or stop the murders of anti-mining activists, like what happened in El Salvador and Mexico, and other human rights, social and environmental abuses, then it will have been a major victory. Much depends on how much information is able to filter through to the average Canadian, and what it will take to get them outraged to demand such changes.

Added to this failing of the justice system in Canada, the same week saw the superior court in Quito throw out my (Carlos Zorrilla) lawsuit against film producers working for Ecuacorriente for criminal libel. Unfortunately, this was also no major surprise given the state of the judicial system here. I had initiated a criminal lawsuit against Chinese-owned Ecuacorriente for a 45-minute documentary film paid for by the company where they falsely linked me to anti-mining violence in the south of the country.

The question that begs answering is: When the judicial system so utterly fails to guarantee minimum justice in cases of clear abuses by transnational corporations, or when the litigation is economically so out of reach for the majority of effected people, what other route is there for communities to seek justice? (The costs of the Canadian case was over a $100,000, although luckily it was all pro bono thanks to the law firm Klippensteins in Toronto.)

Communities understand, not only at a gut level but also through experience, that they are politically and legally outmatched by powerful corporations with deep pockets and decades of experience thwarting justice by manipulating the court systems. Rulings such as Ramirez vs. Copper Mesaonly reaffirm this belief.

Therefore, many communities could read into the defeat of the lawsuit that their only practical (and affordable) solution to the threats that mining and other extractive industries pose on their rights, land and cultures lies in physically standing up to these projects – even at the risk of being labeled terrorists or saboteurs. Ramirez vs. Copper Mesa will reinforce the idea that direct, physical resistance is the only way to prevent community members from being murdered, indigenous cultures from being annihilated, and the environment from being decimated. This, at a time when special laws are being enacted in countries rich in natural resources, such as Ecuador, to judicially categorize acts of civil disobedience as terrorism. As of today, there are nearly 300 activists in Ecuador facing terrorism and sabotage charges for standing up to mining and other extractive activities that threaten the livelihood, or well-being of communities and the environment. Over half of these targeted activists are indigenous, including the leaders of the most important indigenous groups in the country. Ironically enough, this happens in the context of Ecuador’s progressive Constitution, which recognizes that nature has rights, and that Ecuadorians have the right to a good life (Sumak Kawsay). Take away the only effective tool that communities and indigenous people have to protect these rights from transnational corporations and you have the making of a major, and sustained, human rights nightmare supported by the State.

This is why the court decision in Canada matters, not just in Ecuador, but throughout the world.

In early September 2010, a small band of Mongolian citizens armed with hunting rifles opened fire on gold mining equipment owned by two foreign mining firms operating illegally in northern Mongolia. One of the four armed activists was Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, a 2007 winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize — the ‘Green Nobel’ — awarded annually to pivotal environmentalists taking a stand around the globe.

“With unwavering passion,” reads the National Geographic Emerging Explorers profile of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, “he inspired thousands of local villagers, held press conferences, organized town hall meetings, lobbied legislators, and led protest marches — mobilizing an unprecedented level of grassroots participation among citizens who previously felt they had no power to shape government policy.”²

Three years after winning the award — and a whole lot more illegal mining and pollution later — Munkhbayar’s little gang of four and their militant actions against the capitalist invasion remain in complete media whiteout in the western press: it’s as if the early September shootings never happened. While the civic activists face possible prosecution and extended jail terms — if not sudden unexplained death — rapacious mining companies further plunder and pollute the land.

The gang of four — Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, G. Bayaraa, D. Tumurbaatar and O. Sambuu-Yondon — are environmentalists from the United Movement of Mongolian Rivers and Lakes (UMMRL), a consortium of Mongolian groups organized to fight foreign extractive industries that have invaded the fledgling ‘democracy’. UMMRL was formed in June 4, 2009 after its predecessor, the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition (MNPC), dissolved in the spring of 2008. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar — and many collaborators he works with — was pivotal to the creation of both MNPC and UMMRL.

Behind the story of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar is a story of greed, private profit, deception, betrayal, stealth and heartbreak. Just three years after becoming a global hero, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar is today shunned by the people who lobbied to make him a Goldman Award winner, and they have even branded him and his colleagues as terrorists.

“The shooters sent a powerful message,” reported EurasiaNet, the only foreign media outlet to report on the recent shooting action. Puraam, a Chinese firm, and Centerra Gold, a Canadian-operated company, “aren’t welcome in the area, one of Mongolia’s only forested regions.”³ Centerra is also operating in Kyrgyzstan, a former Russian republic where paramilitary government forces repressed public protests and shot hundreds of unarmed protesters in 2010.⁴

Centerra Gold and Puraam Mining are operating on 168 hectares of land and contaminating the headwaters of the Selenge, Mongolia’s largest river, and the source for Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake. The Gatsuur deposit, currently exploited by Centerra Gold, contains an estimated 1.3 million ounces of gold valued at tens of billions of dollars. Centerra’s Boroo gold mine began production in 2004 and yields an average of 180,000 ounces of gold annually.

The locals see very little from the gold taken from their lands. At least 70% of the population lives in absolute poverty. Alcoholism is a national epidemic. The social fabric is unraveling. Human trafficking is a big business. Everything is for sale, or already sold.

“[People] see the 1990s privatization rush and years of harsh weather as a kind of economic one-two punch. Twenty years after Mongolia peacefully threw off 70 years of communism, one-third of Mongolia’s 2.9 million people live below the poverty level of less than $2 a day; even white-collar workers like doctors and teachers can earn as little as $300 a month.”⁵

Mining operations devastate the sensitive Mongolian environment. Photo credit: unknown.

The mining companies arrived in Mongolia hand-in-hand with the international NGOs — euphemistically called ‘non-government’ organizations — and they promote the western imposed ideal of ‘privatization’. The unstated assumptions that came along with this are that freedom-loving westerners are uniquely qualified to teach Mongolians about democracy, human rights, good government and environmental stewardship. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar was patronized and promoted by this framework of foreign intervention.

“According to the promoters,” writes Dr. Joan Roelofs, “the precondition for such benefits is a ‘free market’ economy, or the adoption of ‘neoliberalism’, which entails the privatization of most government functions, deregulation of business, abolition of subsidies and welfare, and availability of all assets (land, TV stations, national newspapers, etc.) for purchase by any corporation, regardless of nationality. Freedom also means that foreigners can start any business anywhere…”⁶

A Hero’s Welcome

“Tsetsegee Munkhbayar spent his childhood herding yaks on the banks of the Onggi, one of Mongolia’s largest rivers,” wrote National Geographic in their Emerging Explorers profile.⁷ “About 60,000 people and one million head of livestock depended on the powerful waterway. But in the early 1990s the essential life source began shrinking, grew contaminated, and by 2001 water that had coursed through his village for centuries had vanished — leaving a rocky riverbed, thirsty herds, and devastated families.”⁷

“The dramatic dry-up was the result of unregulated hydraulic mining that used high-pressure water systems to extract gold and other minerals,” the National Geographic continues. “With more than half the nation’s land granted to mining, the effects were rapid and enormous — 1,500 rivers and creeks were cut off and 300 lakes were emptied. Desperate for drinking water, Munkhbayar’s family and neighbors dug wells. But groundwater was so contaminated that dozens [sic] of local children suffered serious liver damage. Munkhbayar’s son was taken ill, and his mother lost her life.”⁷

As a child, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar dreamed of his hero, Chinggis Khan, the great horseman of the Mongolian steppes, and of becoming a respected herder in the long nomadic tradition of his family. After the heartbreak of seeing his native Onggi River run dry due to unregulated foreign mining, and seeing his people and their herds dying from toxic pollution related diseases, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar took action, organized people, challenged corporations and government.

“The Onggi River Movement he co-founded convinced government officials to expand and enforce mining regulations, pass new legislation, establish citizen oversight for the entire mining process, and start environmental restoration work. As a result, 35 of the 37 mining operations in the Onggi river basin stopped destructive operations, the worst offender shut down, and for the first time in years the river flows again. Munkhbayar went on to unite 11 river movements, creating the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition, one of the nation’s most influential civic and environmental organizations.”⁷

It wasn’t long before Tsetsegee Munkhbayar was noticed by the experts at the The Asia Foundation, a San Francisco-based ‘think tank’ and ‘advocacy’ organization that meddles, quite deeply, it turns out, in the foreign affairs of ‘repressive’ nations (e.g. China), little island protectorates involved in ‘counter-insurgencies’ (e.g. Philippines), former Soviet Republics (e.g. Kyrgyzstan) and so-called ‘failed states’ where the United States just happens to be prosecuting all out war (e.g. Afghanistan & Iraq).

“On Monday, April 23, 2007, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar of Mongolia, founder of a mass citizen’s movement to protect Mongolia’s national waterways, won a 2007 Goldman Environmental Prize — the largest accolade in the world for grassroots environmentalists,” wrote TAF’s director at the time, Bill Foerderer Infante. “Often referred to as the ‘Green Nobel,’ the $125,000 annual award was established in 1990 by San Francisco civic leader and philanthropist Richard N. Goldman⁸ and his late wife, Rhoda H. Goldman, to recognize outstanding individuals who are combating pressing environmental challenges, and was created to allow these people to continue their important work.”

“The only Asian recipient of the award this year,” Bill Infante continued, “Mr. Munkhbayar, 40 [at the time], was recognized for having successfully pressured 35 of 37 mining operations working in Mongolia’s Onggi river basin — a precious drinking water supply for rural Mongolians — to permanently stop harmful, ruinous mining and exploration activities. Beginning in 2001, and with a volunteer staff of more than 2,000 people, Mr. Munkhbayar’s Onggi River Movement organized multi-province roundtable discussions and launched high-profile radio and television campaigns to build public awareness.”

After winning the Goldman Environmental prize in 2007, activist Tsetsegee Munkhbayar was widely celebrated by western institutions and the English-speaking press for his peaceful and collaborative achievements in uniting nomads and organizing civil society to protect Mongolia’s environment. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar was not just an environmentalist, he was a national hero, standing up for ordinary people and basic human rights, a former herder turned national spokesman who rose out of the backward and repressive social milieu of communism in collapse. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar was rewarded for speaking up — an action unheard of in Mongolian society — in the former Soviet-run communist republic turned ‘emerging democracy’ of Mongolia.

Home, Home on the Range

I found Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and other key river movement activists from around the country at the offices of the Onggi River Movement in Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar.⁹ Tsetsegee Munkhbayar is every bit a man deserving of awards.

“In Mongolia it is nonsense to speak about ‘pollution’ when the entire water source has disappeared,” Tsetsegee Munkhbayar told me. “Because of climate differences — it is not like the United States — we have to completely prohibit the use of water in Mongolia.”

The year 2000 saw massive livestock die-offs in Mongolia due to a regional climate (drought) condition called ghang — meaning that water resources in Mongolia were always scarce to begin with — exacerbated by global climate instability. On the great Mongol steppe, killing droughts come with the ghang, where summer sunshine scorches grasslands, and the qara zhud, a snowless winter in a waterless desert. Torrential rains bring floods. The caghan zhud is a blizzard of frozen snowy starvation and the tugharai-yin zhud defines another kind of hunger: too many cattle or horses, thousands of hooves ripping apart the land; too many sheep or goats, devouring every last grass. Winter plunges the mercury to minus 35 or minus 40º or colder — minus 70º in recent years — the killing temperatures. Whole herds vanish overnight, and with them the livelihoods of whole families. Hardest hit were small-scale Mongolian herders. Ghang struck again in the winter of 2010, killing some 8 million (17%) of the country’s livestock.

However, ghang and zhud have now also become big businesses in Mongolia: absent the appropriate land management policies, or the enforcement of laws, in a system rife with corruption, the effects of climate mayhem have been exacerbated by government officials with over-sized herds who capitalize on ordinary people’s losses and monopolize government subsidies, capitalize on western donors’ support, and dominate the best grazing land.

A landlocked nation of steppes and desert, Mongolia is known mostly for its nomadic herders and heroic former leader Chinggis Khaan.¹⁰ With an estimated $1.3 trillion worth of untapped mineral assets, according to Eurasia Capital, a predatory Hong Kong-based investment bank, “the investment world is eagerly eyeing opportunities in Mongolia”.

Capitalism arrived in Mongolia circa 1990 and the people saw more than 60 years of communist propaganda dissolve into capitalist propaganda overnight. Suddenly, everything that was bad was good, and everything that was good was bad. Now they are seeing the reality of capitalism.

The rapid expansion of rapacious profit-driven ecotourism is destroying Mongolia’s culture, people and land: Mongolia is the new wild, wild west, the last frontier. Tourist camps and lodges run by ‘entrepreneurs’ wielding the power of private-profit have sprouted up in pristine wilderness where only herders once roamed. More and more herders are landless and herd-less.

Big mining companies have forced more and more nomads into the sprawling poverty of ger cities.¹¹ Communities of herders that have stood up, peacefully and unarmed, for their environmental and human rights — clean air, clean water, clean pastures — for more than a decade. Mining and logging have dried up or poisoned whole rivers. Increasingly aggressive responses from increasingly desperate communities have been met with paramilitary violence and illegal western-style ‘legal’ actions in the elite-controlled courts.

The poverty in cities takes many forms: homelessness, over-crowding, squatting, slave labor. The urban poor — increasingly desperate and disillusioned — have robbed Ulaanbaatar’s graves of sacred artifacts that were long ago buried with the ancestors: pried open and ransacked, skulls and skeletons spill out of crumbling wood caskets.

Hundreds of street children were living in Ulaanbaatar’s underground sewer systems in the dead of the Mongolian winter: temperatures have plummeted to minus 40º Fahrenheit in cities and minus 70º F in rural areas in recent years. One Mongolian researcher who was involved in a street children study in Mongolia reports that according to the national statistics the number of homeless children in Mongolia reached about 2000 at its highest in the early 1990s, but the number hovered steadily around 1000-1400 annually, depending on the season (in winters some kids returned home). However, the numbers suddenly dropped since around 2006: people explain the drop by the trafficking of homeless children to China to use their body parts (kidneys, livers, hearts) for transplants.

Hundreds of people work each day picking through garbage in the city dumps; many of them live there: western charity and aid groups have preyed on them, promising all kinds of changes, using images of them in fancy brochures to win new grants, but providing no substantive relief.

Preying on the country’s 2.9 million people and polluting the vastly unpopulated land, transnational corporations backed by foreign governments and the western intelligence apparatus are plundering what some call ‘the Saudi Arabia of Central Asia’. The same companies are plundering Mongolia as Congo and Canada, for example, and Western mining works in league with NGOs claiming to be working for Mongolia’s conservation and development and freedom. The ‘intelligence apparatus’ includes the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA): The CIA has a long history of foreign interventions, tortures, drugs-running and covert operations — as bad as anything ever done by SAVAK (Iran), KGB (Russia), or STASI (East Germany).

Our Mongolian Land

“The government has sold out to mining companies and the government is fully under their control,” said M. Bold, a leader of the civic movement My Mongolian Land.¹² A former military commander, M. Bold’s movement attracted many other military — former soldiers disillusioned and disenfranchised by government. M. Bold has often been propositioned to take a bribe. He is worried about his life. “But someone has to speak out,” he said. “If not me, no one will.”¹³

Formed in 2005, My Mongolian Land organized 29 public protests between 2005 and 2008, averaging 7000-8000 people in each; the biggest was 13,000 people. To protest corrupt government deals that completely sold out to Ivanhoe Mines — one of the most notorious western corporations in Mongolia¹⁴ — the group camped out for weeks on the streets of Ulaanbaatar in April 2006. One of the largest mass gatherings in Mongolia’s history, they even burned an effigy of Ivanhoe’s mining magnate Robert ‘Toxic Bob’ Friedland. M. Bold shows me the minerals map of Mongolia — specked and dotted with deposits all over the land.

“Many top Mongolian military officials are linked to corrupt government officials,” M. Bold told me. “It’s not the ‘Democratic Party’ and ‘Communist Party’ fighting each other in Mongolia, it’s actually mining companies fighting for power and control.”

Western corporate lawyers sent by the mining companies have helped create tax and mining laws favorable to multinational corporations. Since 1991, the most progressive mining laws — hard fought for, hard won — have been reversed at least three times for the benefit of foreign extractive industries. However, most of the mining laws were copied over from Canada in 1997. Also helping to impose favorable mining and other laws are big western NGOS.

“As a newly developing ‘democracy’ we don’t know how to control these NGOs and their projects,” said M. Bold. “The money just cycles back to foreigners — advisers, experts, consultants — and these foreigners live very comfortably in Mongolia. There are so many of them. And we don’t know what they are doing.”

The big NGOs in Mongolia include the Soros Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and The Asia Foundation — funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Department for International Development (DFID) United Kingdom, Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and the KEIDANREN.¹⁵ The big conservation and human rights NGOs work to ‘protect the environment’, but only selectively. They protect Mongolian resources from western capitalism’s competitors — from China, Korea and Russia, in Mongolia’s case — and blind the Mongolian people to the truth.

Saruul Avgandoorj is a former school teacher turned green movement activist from Hongor village, next to the mining metropolis of Darkhan — where mining has poisoned the whole village with cyanide. We meet in the ‘Veteran’s Building’ in Ulaanbaatar, where green movement and human rights activists have converged to form an alliance against government corruption and human rights abuses. They are also waging a war of occupation to hold onto the last public meeting space they have.

“Babies have been born with deformities,” Saruul Avgandoorj tells me, “and there have been more than 30 miscarriages. There are many birth defects in cattle too. Around 15 people died — not old people — of the same symptoms.”¹⁶

Problems in this case are caused by the Chinese gold mining company ‘Mich’, partnered with the government of Darkhan and a federal parliamentarian official named Mr. Khayanharvaa. “He poisoned the whole village — the cattle, the humans, the environment, the water,” says Saruul Avgandoorj. “He purchased and manipulated votes [in a recent election]. Now the green movement in Mongolia works in solidarity with human rights groups.”

In early July 2008 thousands of people protested the rigged national elections. Police responded with bullets, massive arrests, tortures, disappearances and secret trials. The western press produced superficial reports, but like most substantive news, the post-elections violence was mostly in whiteout. Saruul Avgandoorj, now the National Green Movement leader, and Arslan Gombosuren, leader of the Mongolian Citizens for Justice Movement, were imprisoned for 14 days in August 2008 for sitting down in a public place with pieces of tape emblazoned with the Mongol word for ‘release’ taped over their mouths.¹⁷

The Asia Foundation (TAF) provided ‘election observers’ — more US government funding — but according to Mongolian civil society organizations the entire show was a farce; even foreign expatriates agreed. Director Bill Infante published TAF reports claiming that the elections were ‘free and fair’ — it’s too bad about the elections-related violence, he said, dismissing it — but a good example of an ‘emerging democracy’ in the making.

“They [TAF] called the elections ‘free and fair’, and they were quoted by all the western newspapers,” said ‘Bayarma Ganbold’, a Mongolian civic activist afraid of being targeted for speaking out, “and they never changed their story, even when it became obvious it wasn’t true. Bill Infante’s wife Bettina started a public relations company with government candidates as her clients. Bill and Bettina created all this propaganda about how wonderful the elections were. But the elections were fixed from the beginning to the end.”¹⁸

In October 2008, some 230 innocent civilians — over 70 teenagers and 130 people aged 19-21 — remained locked in brutal Mongolian jails after police swept the streets in early July arresting 823 people. Mongolian witnesses claim that the post-election ‘riots’ of early July were designed to justify arrests, since they were manufactured by neo-Nazi provocateurs tolerated and promoted by police. More than 72 people disappeared, while official tolls reported only five people killed. Far-right groups in Mongolia are proliferating, and the neo-Nazis allegedly serve as mafia thugs for government parliamentarians and other recipients of western largesse.¹⁹

Nazi memorabilia and statues adorn the walls of a popular bar cafe in downtown Ulaanbataar, speaking to the rise of neo-Nazi factions there.

“The government hid the facts,” said ‘Bayarma Ganbold’, “and The Asia Foundation played along. They were partners in crime. We’ve made the human rights situation known to international human rights organizations — Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — but they haven’t responded.”

In 2009, Amnesty International published a report blaming the July 2008 violence on ‘riots’: there was no mention of western interests in elections-rigging or neo-Nazi provocateurs who instigated the ‘riots’.²⁰

Those arrested were tortured into signing confessions, denied legal representation, tried in groups in secret government trials, and some were sentenced to 15-20 years in prison. A few people with money were able to buy their way out: one family paid $11,000 to police to release their son, who they quickly packed off to South Korea for safety.

Saruul Avgandoorj described how the George Soros Foundation funds a lot of police projects in Mongolia, projects like the ‘Police and Community Cooperation’ and ‘Achievement of a New Level’. “But we don’t know what they do,” she said. “Many [foreign] NGOs and organizations are working as agents for [corrupt] politicians. No one realizes the catastrophe that is unfolding here.”

Non-Government Euphemism

In the beginning, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar had a very positive understanding about The Asia Foundation (TAF), which had been working in Mongolia since (at least) 1990. One of the local Mongolia partners for the World Bank, TAF helped build the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition (MNPC), an alliance of eleven domestic civil society conservation NGOs created through the organizational skills and respectful dialog of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and his colleagues.

TAF financed a variety of Onggi River Movement projects with some $10,000 over four years, 2004-2008. In 2007, the first year of the MNPC, TAF donated $US 120,000 to be shared amongst eleven groups of the coalition; TAF gave $60,000 in 2008.

While pitching a few thousand dollars to the MNPC, TAF was at the same time filling its coffers and funding its foreign salaried professionals with money earned by leveraging the success story of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and the Goldman prize TAF won him.

In 2006, for example, TAF used the success story of the Onggi River Movement and MNPC to leverage 2.7 million Euros ($US 3,630,000) from the Dutch government for a TAF project titled ‘To Guarantee the Future’.  It wasn’t long before TAF dropped the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition altogether and the coalition disbanded. By October 2008, the MNPC hadn’t seen a penny of the Dutch funds.

It was the salaried professionals at TAF who nominated Tsetsegee Munkhbayar for the Goldman Prize, and an investigation into their motivations, their ties to big business and other facts, reveals that their agenda is not as pure as they would like the world to believe. In nominating and awarding Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, the people at TAF also wrote the script for his environmental heroism — not out of concerns for the environment, but to guide and shape the environmental movement to suit TAF — and the western corporate template for ‘social activism’ in an ‘emerging democracy’. TAF and their partners and sponsors used Tsetsegee Munkhbayar as a tool in their multibillion dollar plans for ‘shaping’ Mongolian civil society in the interests of western penetration and control.

While pumping money into domestic civic organizations, subversive neocolonial entities like TAF also impose limitations on grant recipients. NGOs affiliated with the MNPC began to notice ‘donor preferences’ — where funds were channeled to the NGOs that remained more silent and acquiescent about government policies, and especially those that did not protest against mining companies. Mongolian NGOs were expected to defer to TAF when dealing with the media, and they were compelled to sign contracts forbidding them from publicly protesting against mining companies or government policies. TAF also worked to determine and control the members of the boards overseeing the environmental coalitions that received TAF funds. Ultimately, river coalition members found they had no control over their own groups: TAF tried to maintain all control.²¹

Indigenous activists like Tsetsegee Munkhbayar are encouraged to ‘cooperate’ and subordinate themselves to powerful foreign NGO entities in a multitude of ways — much like self- and other forms of censorship in the western press model. That they will not cross a certain invisible but tangible line is expected of them. When members of domestic organizations like Tsetsegee Munkhbayar “make ‘noises’ in society they draw[s] public attention to issues which either are not known or were not able to be known previously due to a lack of access to information, secrecy and distance from the areas where issues exist.”²¹

Pictures Worth a Thousand Herds

Due to the influence and subterfuge of western interests, and their lack of accountability or transparency, Mongolian nationals sometimes harbor distorted perceptions. For example, one MNPC activist claimed that “TAF paid one photographer $90,000 to do some pictures in Mongolia. Meanwhile all eleven MNPC organizations, with $120,000 to split between them in the first year [2007], were tasked with buying computers and other equipment and establishing an environmental protection network across all Mongolia.”

Ted Wood claims that the MNPC activist was incorrect (they have not responded to my clarification inquiry of February 2011). “This is complete fiction,” Ted Wood responded [February 2011]. “The only fee I received from TAF for photography was $900 for a 3-day shoot in eastern Mongolia for their ‘Books for Asia’ program.”

Ted Wood would not answer questions about how much money he received from TAF for other projects or purposes. According to his own biography, Ted Wood is a Boulder, Colorado (USA)-based freelance photographer and author “who specializes in natural history and environmental images. He has photographed for Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times Magazine, New York Times, National Wildlife, and Outside,” and his images are copyrighted, marketed and sold through the photo agencies Aurora Photos and Getty Images.

Ted Wood’s photographs from Mongolia were used in part for books peddled by TAF as part of their effort to penetrate Mongolian culture with ‘educational’ materials infused with western values and norms about private profit, individualism, and ‘free-market’ competition. However, not one of the elite US magazines that Ted Wood shoots for have published anything substantive about the western mining, human rights atrocities, or other foreign meddling in Mongolia. Both Ted Wood and TAF capitalize on their relationship: on their ‘Power of a Book: Books for Asia’ web page, TAF promotes Ted Wood; his biography is also listed on a TAF web page. Sponsors for TAF’s international “Books for Asia” program include Chevron Oil and USAID.

“The conclusions you are drawing here are wrong,” Ted Wood wrote me [February 2011], protesting my characterizations of his work. “I donated a couple images to TAF guides concerning citizen rights as they pertained to mining and the environment. I have no control over the editorial content of magazines that license my photos, as you should know. I’ve proposed many mining stories, but mining stories in Mongolia are not at the top of magazines’ lists I’m afraid. The connection you’re making here between my work and the absence of magazine stories is truly unfair.”

In fact, Ted Wood and his journalism colleague Jeremy Schmidt also formed an NGO in the United States called Conservation Ink whose self-advertised mission “is to support conservation and environmental awareness in natural and cultural areas through the production and distribution of educational materials.” The financial sponsors of Conservation Ink include the National Geographic Society, USAID, The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, The Asia Foundation and — no small surprise — the Ivanhoe [Mines] Community Development Fund.²²

“Many corporations have funds or foundations,” Ted Wood replied [letter of complaint, February 2011]. “Ford, Microsoft, etc. Shell even supports Frontline and PBS, even when the story is anti-oil. The Ivanhoe Fund gave us money to translate our educational materials on Gobi Gurvansaikan National Park for use in Mongolian schools.”

“I suggest you contact Ivanhoe,” said Jeremy Schmidt, co-founder of Conservation Ink, responding to questions about their grant from Ivanhoe Mines, for the original publication of this story. “Alyson Croft was our contact with the Fund at the time of the grant we received. It was 2004 or 2005, a small grant to translate our Gobi map-guide into Mongolian for free local distribution.”²³

Alyson Croft is the wife of Layton Croft, the former Mongolia country director for The Asia Foundation and, as we will shortly see, he was one of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar’s primary advocates with the Goldman Foundation.

National Geographic has used some of Ted Wood’s images. In a single on-line story they did which talks in any detail about mining in Mongolia — a story where they cite Tsetsegee Munkhbayar — National Geographic blamed Mongolia’s mining woes on Chinese and Russian firms (who are certainly doing their share of plundering and poising the land) and on small-scale Mongolian miners — mom-and-pop herder families struggling to eke a living out of the harsh, cruel world that wiped out their herds — and the only hint of any western mining involvement was in a quote they inserted by Ivanhoe Mines spokesman Layton Croft.

Mining companies are always downplaying the size of mineral reserves, and western mining companies are not to blame for anything, they say, since they have hardly arrived in Mongolia and haven’t even begun to exploit the resources. Anyways, big things are in store for the lucky communities nearby, they promise.

“Mining to date has been relatively small-scale,” said Layton Croft, an executive with Ivanhoe Mines, a Canadian company with a massive copper and gold mine development project in southern Mongolia. The boom really hasn’t yet started. The prospect of mining is what’s on everyone’s mind.”²⁴

The statement was both true and false at once. More interesting, however, is how the western invaders quote each other, slap each other’s backs and butter each other’s bread, how the western media uses these select experts to give voice to select ideas, and how the money cycles back and forth between them — perpetuating the propaganda and private profits of predatory capitalism.

Follow the Money

Substantial efforts (2005-2006) by Layton Croft, TAF’s former Mongolia Country Director, and William Foerderer Infante, his successor, to lobby the Goldman Fund paid off when Tsetsegee Munkhbayar traveled to San Francisco, California (USA) to receive the $125,000 cash prize (2007).

Robert Redford introduces Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and the other 2007 Goldman Prize winners in the moving Goldman Foundation video.²⁵ The video applauds Tsetsegee Munkhbayar for his organizational skills and peaceful, collaborative approach. One mining company public relations executive –  Mongolian giving mining a Mongolian face — talks about restoration done by their mining company, suggesting a progressive mining climate in Mongolia, where companies comply with environmental stewardship, perform due diligence and work with communities. The video paints a happy and collaborative picture over the brutal realities attendant to the clash of civilizations.

And then, at minute 4:18 in the Goldman Fund 2007 video we meet Mr. Layton Croft, who left TAF in 2005 to become Vice-President, Corporate Affairs & Social Responsibility, for Ivanhoe Mines.

“The key to [Tsetsegee] Munkhbayar’s success as a leader for responsible mining in Mongolia,” says Layton Croft, in the Goldman Prize video, “is that he’s had the courage to acknowledge that mining could be good for Mongolia, as long as it’s done in a very open and participatory way.”

Layton Croft began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia (1994-1997). He later joined the Mongolian office of the big US government and intelligence organization PACT,²⁶ where he was the Program Director for Information Systems for their Gobi Regional Economic Growth Initiative/Mongolia (1999-2002), working for PACT-Mongolia in an alliance with Mercy Corps and USAID.

Mercy Corps has a very euphemistic name suggesting that they are merciful, caring, dedicated to helping — a.k.a. we are supposed to perceive them, as many of their workers perceive themselves, as selfless and charitable and serving a higher moral purpose: to alleviate suffering. However, the Merc Corps partners include at least one multinational weapons manufacturer whose business depends on the proliferation and actuation of war (The Boeing Company).  They are also affiliated with sweatshop companies (NIKE), predatory international banking (International Finance Corporation), and one of the US corporations (ITT) that directly supported the 1970 coup d’etat against Chilean president Salvador Allende and the rise of the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

One of Layton Croft’s USAID-backed projects with PACT involved bringing National Public Radio founder Bill Siemering and NPR personality Corey Flintoff to Mongolia to promote the USAID-funded fiction of ‘free and independent’ media.²⁷ Another PACT project Croft was involved with created and broadcast a TV sit-com “where marginalized herder and non-herder business operators are learning new skills to manage their diversified businesses for higher returns via a 26-episode educational TV soap opera broadcast on Mongolian National TV.” The show had more than 400,000 viewers.²⁸

One of PACT’s nationally broadcast TV dramas was called Endless Labyrinth, described by PACT as “a 26 part drama, focused on a family that had lost its entire herd through natural disaster. Destitute, and in need of income, the family moves to the provincial center in search of employment opportunities. The show addressed issues such as urban migration, and helped to unravel the tangles of life in a modern market economy.”

However, we can be sure that the show did not challenge the basic beliefs and tenants of predatory capitalism, or international finance (George Soros made his billions by currency speculation that facilitated the collapse of former communist countries), or the nature of western propaganda, or the predation that comes side-by-side with the “humanitarian” business sector (with all their attendant human rights and environmental atrocities and their undermining of labor and health standards) or the spread of disease that comes with the penetration of multinational pharmaceutical corporations (dumping outdated or forbidden products or testing untested medicines) and agribusiness (spreading genetically modified seeds) and multinational food corporations (laced with poisons like monosodium glutamate or aspartame).

The urban migration of Mongolian nomads is in PACT’s interest — getting the pesky people out of the way and freeing up the land for exploitation by mining, petroleum or other extractive industries. Meanwhile, the urban migrants can be more easily targeted by corporations peddling western commodities and serving the interests of companies like Nike and Wal-Mart, who also to be PACT partners.

In short, while the scourge of western capitalism penetrates further and further into the Mongolian hinterland, the scourge of western propaganda penetrates deeper and deeper into the psyche of the average Mongolian citizen (who is daily tuned in to these soap operas and herder dramas). The icing on the cake of indoctrination is the advertising that is infused between the segments of the episodes, filing up the airwaves and the minds of anxious listeners with ideas of consumption, the politics of desire, and the pathological western worship of individuality (and hostility to community, a.k.a., socialism).

Such foreign created and controlled propaganda is not purely entertainment: like the ‘educational’ books peddled by TAF and the TV sit-coms created by PACT, these programs rely on ‘behavior change communications’ — analyzing and changing local content to change attitudes and eventually change behaviors; creating desire, opening up new markets for western commodities, and selling advertising.²⁹

Layton Croft’s next career step was TAF, 2003-2005, where he lobbied the Goldman Foundation to recognize Tsetsegee Munkhbayar.

Layton Croft’s experience working with and for the big NGOs — Soros Foundation, Mercy Corps, PACT, USAID, TAF — certainly enhanced his next career move. Since 2005, Layton Croft has been the Executive Vice-President for Corporate Affairs and Community Relations at South Gobi Resources, an Ivanhoe Mines/Rio Tinto megaproject, and he is an “advisor for investor relations in Asia and corporate social responsibility” for Ivanhoe Mines. Alison Croft, his wife, works in ‘community relations’ with Ivanhoe Mines.

As the newly hired public relations executive for Ivanhoe Mines, Layton Croft wasted no time in accusing Mongolian civil society groups — including some of his former allies when he worked at TAF — of betraying the public. One of his first major public relations whitewash came in April 2006, when the effigy of ‘Toxic Bob’ Friedland was burned by My Mongolian Land, the Green Movement, and other civic groups.

“We also overturned Ivanhoe cars in 2007 protests,” M. Bold from My Mongolian Land told me. “Ivanhoe wanted to get a contract like the government had with the Canadian company Boroo Gold. They [Boroo] were robbing us for more than ten years (1997-2007). In one year of operations they used 800 tons of [toxic] chemicals,³⁰ so they were also destroying the place: it’s not useable for centuries. The company produced the only reports about water, for example, and what a wonderful job they were doing.”¹³

“The [Ivanhoe] company deeply regrets the fact that civic movements are misleading the Mongolian public by misrepresenting the real facts in order to further their own political interests,” said Layton Croft, Executive Vice President for Corporate Affairs for Ivanhoe Mines. “As a public company listed and traded on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges, Ivanhoe Mines respects the independence and sovereignty of the countries where it operates. To this end, Ivanhoe has not and will not interfere in internal Mongolian political affairs,” Croft said.³¹

In 2007, Ivanhoe mines came very close to physically changing the direction of the Kherlan River, but it was the intervention of the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition (MNPC) that stopped it. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and Clayton Croft engaged in a heated argument about this at a public meeting.

“Ivanhoe Mines had their own people already elected to Parliament,” said M. Bold of My Mongolian Land. “We don’t want Mongolia to be a playground for these criminals and their corruption. Our country is in grave danger.”³²

Shunned by Sponsors

On May 30, 2005 members of the Onggi River Movement traveled to Arkhangai aimag³³ to organize an MNPC training workshop for local herders facing critical water stoppages on the Nariin Hamar River in Tsenkher soum.³⁴ During the training an excited herder on horseback arrived to alert them that a new mining company was commencing operations at a new site on the river at that very moment. The workshop drew 128 people, and all of them moved quickly to the new site where a Mongolian company called Mongol Gazar was setting up a new ger camp.

Blocked from the site by armed security guards, the herders were attacked after they told the company personnel to immediately leave their land. The security guards tear-gassed the angry herders, beat them and shot into the air. A professional cameraman from Mongolian National Broadcast TV who was attending the rivers movement training was attacked, his equipment destroyed, along with all evidence of the attacks of violence by security guards. Herders were arrested and threatened by the company, who warned that Mongolian law protected all mining companies from protest.

For Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, this incident signaled his evolving awareness of how far mining companies would go — and how ruthless — to protect their stolen interests. Barely one year after Tsetsegee Munkhbayar was awarded the Goldman Prize he and his colleagues asserted their independence even further — much to the disapproval of the people at TAF — and they began to suffer for it immediately.

On May 16, 2008, at another protest in Selenge aimag, herders of the Khuder River Movement — another MNPC member organization — faced similar violence from armed guards with the Erdes Group, an iron and gold company. Erdes guards had guns and batons and they intimidated the river movement herders into keeping their distance.

A Mongolian front company with Chinese investors behind it, Erdes Group is allegedly partnered with Mr. O. Chuluunbat, ex-president of Mongol Bank and the Communist Party parliament member from Selenge aimag. The company clear-cut the local forests, but they left a wall of trees intact at the front of the clear-cut to disguise the devastation behind.³⁵ Similarly, Erdes Group publicly championed ‘restoration’ that never happened. Due to the protest, the company halted mining for two months, bribed everyone they could, and started up again. Bulldozing everything in sight, they turned the forest into mud and chopsticks — processed at their nearby factory, exported to China.⁹

By the spring of 2008, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar finally began to understand that TAF was acting against the interests of Mongolia and protecting the mining companies. When the Onggi River Movement demonstrated its independence, really taking on mining companies aggressively, TAF at first lobbied the Onggi River Movement to soften its approach, and then they attacked them.

Meanwhile, the mining companies had become increasingly violent in response to the successes of the conservationists in organizing civil society against illegal mining, privatization of natural resources, corruption in government, and the overuse and degradation of the commons. More and more, companies deployed armed security guards. Across the country there was a rise in attacks on herders and conservationists who protested the illegal land grab and environmental destruction of mining operations.

Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and his colleagues saw clearly that the government was not enforcing the environmental protections brought into law in previous years. It was the duty of the Mongolian government to regulate companies, they said, but the government was not doing so. There were no protections of citizen’s basic human rights and the environment. More and more herders and their herds were suffering due to mining and whenever the Onggi River Movement organized a protest in the countryside they were met by armed thugs.

Then on May 26, 2008, six of the member organizations of the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition (MNPC) organized a press conference announcing their intentions to defend themselves and their lands with rifles — promising to meet intimidation and violence with a show of armed self-defense. Leading the charge was Tsetsegee Munkhbayar.

Given the MNPC’s commitment to defend their basic rights and sovereignty, on May 30, 2008, TAF dropped the Onggi River Movement and the five coalition partners who had pledged to defend themselves. TAF immediately began smearing and discrediting Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and the other environmentalists by issuing a letter expressing TAF’s ‘disappointment’ that they ‘threatened violence and the use of weapons’. The letter was reportedly picked up by the Mongolian newspapers — the state propaganda apparatus — and stories appeared that discredited and divided the MNPC.³⁶ Soon Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and the six MNPC members who stood firm began hearing stories portraying them as terrorists.

TAF director Bill Infante slammed Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and the others publicly and privately. While Bill Infante and TAF apparently circulated their statement about the MNPC,³⁷ TAF never took a similar stance against the armed violence or plunder of resources by foreign or domestic mining companies.

“Since May 30 [2008] Bill Infante has repeatedly called the six environmental groups terrorist organizations,” MNPC activists told me. “He said this personally, when they met face-to-face.”³⁸

In a meeting with the MNPC just after May 30, 2008, Bill Infante stated that The Asia Foundation activities are based on U.S. laws: TAF doesn’t follow Mongolian laws. TAF then directed its might at further dividing and co-opting the leaders of MNPC member organizations that did not adopt the stance of direct action and armed self-defense. With the defamation by TAF and the bad publicity that followed — and with TAF’s purchasing power buying the silence of groups and individuals — the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition (MNPC) collapsed.

Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, photo by William Infante, The Asia Foundation.

“The [public] letter is in English, and it does accuse them,” said Tracey Naughton, country director for PACT-Mongolia, yet another ‘non-government’ organization — funded by the US State Department — whose mission is to bring about the US system of ‘democracy’ by and for the corporations and the corporate elites. “He [Bill Infante] does use strong language and it does say ‘terrorism’. Bill is very competitive and unpleasant and he slams other NGOs in front of donors. The real people who are running Mongolia are the ‘Infantes’ of the world: they’re in all the spaces.”³⁹

The Asia Foundation also undermined the MNPC by creating petty jealousies and leadership struggles within the Mongolia river organizations; they pitted the Onggi River Movement and Tsetsegee Munkhbayar against the other members of the MNPC.

On October 28, 2008, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and five of the eleven member organizations of the defunct MNPC filed a lawsuit in federal court against The Asia Foundation. The coalition sought $1,000,000 compensation for the damages caused by TAF publicly branding the five organizations ‘terrorists’. TAF filed a counter suit, and the Mongolian courts demonstrated their bias in favor of western interests by rejecting both lawsuits as ‘unjustified’. But the damage was already done.

“The MNPC disintegrated,” said Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, “due to conflict created with and by The Asia Foundation. The main interest of The Asia Foundation is to assist mining companies in Mongolia. All events are showing that The Asia Foundation is behind the mining interests.”

Capitalism’s Trojan Horses

Through the Goldman Prize, TAF created an image of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar as a peaceful and cooperative Mongolian citizen organizing public awareness and politely challenging international mining companies to ‘do the right thing’. According to the TAF video, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar is a local champion of conservation, a proponent of democratic values and the hopeful image of the ‘win-win’ scenario falsely advanced by the mining industry, by NGOs like TAF, and by their agents like Layton Croft and Bill Infante.

But the real mission of TAF is to mold and manipulate domestic challenger groups into positions of cooperative acquiescence and competitive participation with the western plunder of Mongolia — to shape societies, in the interests of predatory capitalism, through cash-driven interventions that divide and conquer domestic groups and create strong constituencies that will serve the interests of the external organizations. It was a condescending relationship from the start, but TAF used Tsetsegee Munkhbayar to enhance their image and advance their interests in the game of international influence-peddling and transnational control.

“The Asia Foundation has really got some slick people.” Conservation expert ‘Jane Smith’ asked that her name be changed to protect her from retaliation. “Using my name and my organizations’ name would jeopardize our lives and years of work here. No one will touch us again. The government and big [international] donors would pounce on us.”

With years of experience in Mongolia, Jane Smith has seen the daily changes. She describes a government with no regulations, a black economy, trading in thugs and violence, where anyone bold enough to take something — those who have the allies and influence — can just take it.

“These big organizations like The Asia Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, WWF [World Wildlife Fund], WCS [Wildlife Conservation Society] and GTZ [German Technical Corporation],” said Jane Smith, “they all came to smaller NGOs like ours and they wanted to learn how to do things — things it took us years to learn — over lunch. They didn’t have any funding for us, and they never took up the ideas that we felt were most important. They have their glossy brochures and they make a show of being interested in the programs that really need to be done, but they don’t really do anything. They are the new wave of colonialists.”⁴⁰

“The Nature Conservancy is one of the richest conservation organizations in the world.” Jane Smith provided examples. “Yet they couldn’t fund their [Mongolian branch] offices here — it took four years to develop the office and it has to fund itself. The ‘sustainable mining’ idea came from The Asia Foundation: they know all the buzz words and jargon. They are really good at throwing around and adapting terminology. It looks good in their presentations and their brochures and government reports, and international donors accept it because they don’t know, or they don’t care.”

“One woman from World Wildlife Fund-Mongolia [WWF],” Jane Smith explained, “Yoko Watanabe, from Japan.⁴¹ She had this long, pedigreed career background. She stood up and gave a beautiful presentation in Ulaanbaatar, for foreign donors, about what WWF was doing across the country. She was talking about all these things WWF supported, like this [redacted project] in [redacted location]. I worked in [redacted] for years, and I thought to myself, ‘Where is this [redacted project]?’ My driver was from the soum center where this [redacted project] was and he cracked up [laughing]. We drove down there and there was this one guy with a shovel…”

“But this [Watanabe] woman was typical of the problem: a young, inexperienced person being hired on and elevated quickly to postions of responsibility, and making decisions on things they know little about, and then they move on to bigger and better things. They are usually removed from, and unaware of, the consequences of those decisions on the ground. They are well-educated, intelligent, not very curious, but they know who butters their bread, and they know exactly what to say and how to say it.”

“I know everyone, they are all nice people,” said Jane Smith. “The head of The Asia Foundation, Bill Infante, he’s really removed from reality and really removed from the local people.⁴² There’s no interest in long term development in the country, it’s all about long term development of their careers. They have to spend money — their careers are based on how many projects they can get going and all the assessments and reports they can show to donors.”

“The Asia Foundation helped bring the rivers movement together as a coalition,” Jane Smith continued. “They [TAF] lobbied very hard — especially Bill Infante — for [Tsetsegee] Munkhbayar to get the Goldman Prize. It makes them look very good, but it had the effect of weakening the river movement, which is counter to what TAF claims they are doing, which is strengthening. They brought the heads of the rural organizations and key figures to Ulaanbaatar, gave them nice offices.”

“They basically cut off the heads of the rural organizations. Rather than fighting the mining companies and protecting the rivers they [leaders] were fighting over offices and who would get the best computers. We worked with movements all over Mongolia, and we cautioned against removing the [movement] heads. We had a lot of experience in community development and organizing so that local people could take advantage of the new system under ‘democracy’. Instead of bringing all these river movements together to unite against the mining companies — and say ‘hey, you guys are killing us’ — The Asia Foundation just dropped them.”

Doublespeak and Gobbledygook

Interview after interview with Mongolian leaders in Ulaanbaatar confirmed the wall that lower level government officials slam up against when trying to enforce environmental regulations. Environment and human rights activists outlined rapacious logging — including logging in ‘strictly protected’ areas — for the building boom in Ulaanbaatar and they pointed to western mining companies who can do anything they want, anywhere, companies bent on destroying the pristine Lake Hovsgol ecosystem, for example, just as they are destroying the rest of the world.

These corporations are fueling an unprecedented disaster in Mongolia. They begin by corrupting officials and paying bribes in the capital city, and then they show up in rural areas where the local people know nothing about their plans, their methods, or their histories of terrorism and environmental destruction. They peddle human rights and democracy, and then they block off whole valleys, divert and drain vast rivers, throw herders off communal lands, and then arm themselves with thugs. They have their economic hit men and their propaganda experts.

My interviews with the foreign ‘experts’ at the big western NGOs were almost identical. They all threw around the language of sustainable development, democracy, and conservation; they knew exactly what to say and how to say it — if they would meet with me at all. They had fancy brochures announcing all their fancy projects, and when it came to answering the hard questions they became mute, squirmed in their chairs, and suddenly had another meeting to attend. They also threw volumes of information at me, demonstrating — in their eyes — their efficacy and indispensable presence.

I met with Rebecca Darling at TAF headquarters in Ulaanbaatar.⁴³ As TAF’s Director of Natural Resources and Development/Securing our Future Program, here was a perfect example of a nice, well-educated, salaried, career-track, western NGO professional who knew what to say and when to say it, and whose tune changed depending on her audience.

“We try to get information into the hands of the policy makers,” Rebecca Darling told me. “The past four years saw a lot of nothing happening. In the next four years some very serious decisions will be made about natural resource use. The environment is still in a pretty good state but headed for a world of hurt. Mining companies here are all frustrated because things have been stalled for four years. Mongolia is on the cusp of major changes.”⁴⁴

“They have transparency in mining Canada,” Rebecca Darling continued. Flags went off in my mind when she expressed sympathy for the mining companies, and now she was defending Canada’s mining policies. “Every piece of paper goes [public] there. Here it’s all behind closed doors, and there are no checks and balances. Western companies, Chinese and Russian companies, Mongolian companies — none of them are doing the right thing.”

She admitted that companies are so far out in the Mongolian bush that they can do anything and get away with it. However, she cited the effectiveness of TAF experts, like her, in formulating policy with government officials. She also acknowledged TAF’s involvement in revisions of mineral laws. “Government officials are under-resourced, undereducated, and understaffed,” she added, underscoring her faith in western expertise.

“For example, there’s a Canadian mining company that has a mining site out in Dornod,” Rebecca Darling says. “They have asked The Asia Foundation to come out and deliver community engagement seminars for them, as one of their goals is to have community engagement. We won’t go out to talk to the people about uranium, we go to talk to them about how to talk to the mining company, teaching them where their rights are, what legal avenues they have. We try to build transparency. We are trying to get them to engage.”

“Some citizens engage in unproductive and illegal ways.” Now Rebecca Darling is responding to my questions about civil society protests against mining operations. “They show up at the gates of companies and threaten violence. There are six organizations that threatened violence — all part of a coalition [MNPC] of 13 organizations from across the country. They are still threatening to take up arms, since April [2008]. Now they are threatening to hurt themselves — civil disobedience and stuff like that.”⁴⁴

“Their leader’s name is Munkhbayar, from the Onggi River Movement. We had to cease and desist all support of the [MNPC] coalition. We are not working with these six groups in any way because they broke the law and they advocate breaking the law. Most of them I have a tremendous amount of respect for, they are civic activists, and it’s true that there have already been environmental problems.”

Rebecca Darling holds up Canada as a model of transparency, good governance, and responsible mining and environmental policy. She maintained her storyline even after I provided evidence that Canada-based mining companies perpetuate poverty, human rights atrocities, terrorism and genocide around the world — even in Canada, where First Nations have recently made news, again, for blockading mining.⁴⁵ ,⁴⁶

“Can you do me a favor?” Rebecca Darling asked me at the end of a long interview where my questions were open and my role as a journalist was understood. “Please don’t quote me on anything that’s going to get my ass in a sling without checking with me.”

I’m quoting Rebecca Darling (above) because her private remarks don’t square with her public advocacy in favor of mining and the private profits to be had by TAF and others, against the people. In one commentary she authored, also published on the PACT web site, she extolled the virtues of mining and of NGOs like The Asia Foundation.

“A paradigm shift is underway in Mongolia,” Rebecca Darling wrote in April 2009. “The integration of ‘responsible mining’ and ecological protection in government policy papers, public speeches by elected officials, and platforms of political parties, reflects Mongolia’s growing environmental awareness and commitment to developing the minerals sector in ways that will protect natural resources and benefit all Mongolians. This is the result of significant advocacy efforts on behalf of a committed group of representatives from industry, government, and civil society.”⁴⁷

“Since 2006, The Asia Foundation in Mongolia has convened a Multi-Stakeholder Forum that brings together representatives from civil society, government, industry and academia,” the Rebecca Darling article continued. “After a year of regular meetings, a definition of responsible mining was developed and the Forum defined eight guiding principles. The Forum later elected a smaller group of 15 leaders, representing different sectors, to form a local non-governmental organization, named the Responsible Mining Initiative (RMI) that spearheads advocacy efforts.”

“No, I don’t agree with this rosy article,” Jane Smith countered. “The prime minister recently issued Government resolution 86, which states the intent to allow minerals (gold) exploration in protected areas, and Government ordinance 26, which forms a working group to discuss the possibility of mining in protected areas and to create a new law to allow this. This effectively undermines the Law on Special Protected Areas… The intent is to open up protected areas for anything they want, anywhere, any time… Some of the article may be true, but it’s not the rosy picture Rebecca [Darling] paints. A new law to undermine the protected areas to allow mining is not responsible, and will only degrade, if not dissolve the whole system.”⁴⁸

Blame the Victims

Who are the real terrorists? Big industry responsible for terrorism has a long history of attacking indigenous people and/or organizations fighting for their rights and labeling them terrorists. The private profit based western media and its clone institutions — domestic media aligned with corrupt elites and often funded by NGOs like TAF and NED — perpetuate this blame-the-victims inversion of reality and protect the mining interests that fund their rag sheets. Marlon Santi, President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, is another heroic indigenous leader recently labeled as a terrorist for taking a stand against murderous and rapacious western extractive industries.⁴⁹

When I first contacted the Goldman Environmental Fund’s media relations office in early November 2010, I was surprised to find that they’d heard nothing about their past prizewinner’s armed protest two months earlier. “Technically, we don’t support winners with any more dollars, but we do step in if something is dire,” said one spokesperson. “The Goldman Foundation has some clout, here in the US, and we do work with the State Department. We don’t know how people will behave after they receive the award. In some cases we just let them slip off into obscurity.”⁵⁰

“The Goldman Environmental Prize has recently become aware of 2007 recipient T. Munkhbayar’s armed protest actions in Mongolia,” the Goldman media office wrote, when pressed, in a formal public statement on November 29, 2010. “The Prize does not condone armed protest of any kind. The Prize honored Mr. Munkhbayar for his leadership in Mongolia’s grassroots movement against mining pollution in the region’s waterways and is concerned about the recent developments. We are working to learn more about the situation as we have heard conflicting reports about his involvement and subsequent actions.”⁵¹

“Does the Goldman Fund condone armed paramilitary forces defending illegal mining companies?” I followed up. “Does the Fund agree with The Asia Foundation labeling Tsetsegee Munkhbayar a terrorist?”

“The Fund does not condone or support violent or armed actions of any kind by anyone,” they replied. “We find it hard to believe that they [TAF] would say this [about Tsetsegee Munkhbayar]. However, we really don’t have enough information from Mongolia to know what’s going on and our questions have not been answered. But no, the Goldman Environmental Fund does not agree with the definition of [Tsetsegee Munkhbayar] being a ‘terrorist’.⁵¹

I contacted The Asia Foundation offices in San Francisco in November 2010. After receiving my questions, they informed me that the people I needed to speak with were busy traveling but would get back to me when they could.⁵²

Invading Western Hordes

Since the early 1990′s, consortiums involving Centerra Gold (Canada/USA), Purram Mining (China), BHP-Billeton (USA), Rio Tinto⁵³ (Australia/UK/Canada), Itochu (Japan), Barrick Gold⁵⁴ (Canada/USA), Hunnu Coal (Australia), Xanadu (Australia), Cold Gold Mongolia (New Zealand), and many more, have snatched up mining and petroleum concessions. Many of these corporations are synonymous with environmental destruction and human rights atrocities all over the world.

QGX Corporation is a Canadian-based company that has been exploring for minerals in Mongolia since 1994.⁵⁵ By 2003, QGX held over 30,000 square kilometers in exploration rights in Mongolia, and was also partnered with Ivanhoe Mines in the South Gobi. QGX had ‘acquired’ 131 concession licenses by 2008. AngloGold Ashanti — who is partnered with De Beers and Barrick Gold elsewhere — has ‘acquired’ exploration ‘rights’ to 1.7 million hectares in northern Mongolia.

Canadian and US companies mining uranium in Mongolia include World Wide Minerals Ltd., Uranium 308 Corp., WM Mining Company, and Khan Resources Inc. WM Mining executive Wallace M. Mays is also tied to other companies in Mongolia, and his mining company IKH TOKHOIROL XXK received a $10,000,000 loan from the US government-controlled Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) in 2009. Uranium mining causes epidemics of cancer and birth defects in workers and surrounding communities. The desert steppes of Mongolia will soon be transformed into vast radiotoxic wastelands — as has happened elsewhere — but the windstorms of the high desert steppes will carry radioactivity and contaminate distant lands.

Toxic mercury is another pitfall of mining and has caused epidemics of disease around Mongolia.

Canada’s infamous Ivanhoe Mines is now in control of more than 90,000 sq. kilometers of copper, gold and coal concessions in Mongolia. Ivanhoe and its subsidiaries are run and owned by Robert Friedland — Toxic Bob⁵⁶ — a known associate of William Jefferson Clinton. Beyond his legacy of toxic cyanide poisoning in Colorado (USA), Friedland achieved notoriety in the 1990′s when his Sierra Leone subsidiary Diamondworks was linked to mercenary companies Executive Outcomes, Sandline International and Branch Energy, and to Colonel Tim Spicer and Tony Buckingham, mercenaries deeply involved in war and plunder in Iraq, Yemen, Uganda and Congo.⁵⁷

Oyu Tolgoi has been known for centuries by the local people as ‘turquoise mountain’ for the visible copper ores. This is the largest copper-gold mine in the world, located near Khobogd village in South Gobi province of southern Mongolia. Oyu Tolgoi LLC is the Mongolian subsidiary for a strategic partnership between the Government of Mongolia (34% stake), Ivanhoe Mines (66%) and Rio Tinto. It is scheduled to begin commercial production in 2013.

According to the Oyu Tolgoi public relations site: “Rio Tinto, which is the third largest mining company in the world, became a strategic partner of Ivanhoe in 2006 after buying 20% of Ivanhoe shares. Rio Tinto has over 150 years of experience in mining, in 30 countries. In recent years Rio Tinto has put a lot of emphasis on social relations and social planning. Oyu Tolgoi has adopted the high standards of social relations and planning set by Rio Tinto.”

“Once the mining begins, the Khobogd site will have a population of 20,000 within a few years and approximately 80,000 when the smelter is finished, potentially making the site the second largest city in Mongolia,” Peter Morrow, the American CEO of Mongolia’s Khan Bank [at the time], was quoted to say.⁵⁸

The article also quotes TAF’s Rebecca Darling. The local Gobi communities are in favor of the project, Darling says, because it will support them economically. There is no mention of any opposition. “Darling said that Ivanhoe and Rio Tinto have participated for three years in The Asia Foundation’s responsible mining project,” the UB Post reported. “‘As far as we’re concerned, they’re models in this country for responsible mining,’ she said.”⁵⁸

Delivering the equivalent of trinkets to the local people — scholarships for a handful of doctors, a few cars and trucks here and there, a few paved roads, token hospitals and token schools — the companies and their ‘responsible civil society partners’ work to shut people up and co-opt them into betraying the greater needs of the communities, and of the country as a whole, just as it is done with predatory extractive industries that are plundering and depopulating the Congo. The token schools and hospitals provided by the mining companies are used to silence the communities that are being mined. Roads are often constructed, or dirt tracks are paved, because it is in mining companies interest to do so: they want to drive their trucks on the roads! Its the same with railways: they want to ship their raw materials out to China or — as in the case of Science Solutions Incorporated, a San Diego (USA) company mining tungsten (wolfram) in Bayan Olgy — by rail to China and by boat to the United States. If the fair value of the natural resources was paid, every village would have a school with an extensive library full of the best books in the world, and every child in that school would have a brand new top-of-the-line computer. Most likely these schools will be little more than cement shells with tin roofs and chalkboards and wooden desks. That is not the American or Canadian standard for a school — at least not the kind of elite private school (in the USA or Europe) that these mining company executives send their children to or the kind that their Mongolian agents, the MPs they have bought, are sending their children to (also in the USA or Europe).

What the Mongolian people deserve as fair compensation are entire universities — with the assurance that every Mongolian who wants can have access to high quality higher education. Sometimes the mining companies even staff the hospitals with their own co-opted doctors — ‘professionals’ paid to conclude that the patients disease was NOT caused by the mercury or cyanide from the company mine. In the end, however, the mining company can say: We made a deal! Your leaders signed and agreed on our terms! We gave you schools and hospitals! The epidemics of tuberculosis and cancers are not our problems! Send your people to the hospital (we gave you)! Your (Mongolian) community leaders are responsible for these problems! Anyways, when all is said and done the foreign mining company executives jet out of the country waving a little American or Canadian or Swedish flag that says “Bye. Bye. See You!” The profits are expatriated. It’s always the same old story: promises, promises in the beginning; poverty, violence, pollution and disease in the end.

For another simple example of how the propaganda and plunder system works, with parallels between Congo and Mongolia, consider again the US-based photojournalists Ted Wood and Jeremy Schmidt. In the spring of 1998 the two journalists were dispatched to Central Africa by the elite US conservation [sic] magazine International Wildlife to report on mountain gorillas. The article appeared in January 1999, and the contexts of the US- and corporate-backed war and bloodshed in Congo/Zaire, or Rwanda, were completely absent. Instead we found only a couple quotes from Wildlife Conservation Society’s expert [sic] Amy Vedder and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Europe (DFGFE) expert [sic] Greg Cummings. [This writer has done an extensive series on how Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, DFGFE (now The Gorilla Organization) and Wildlife Conservation Society profit from the plunder and bloodshed in Congo -- and I have delineated the hidden interests of these organizations and these particular individuals.⁵⁹ ] The International Wildlife story was just fluff — which is all fine, as long as we are honest and admit how we (westerners) participate in, and profit from, the exploitation. International Wildlife is nothing more than the propaganda mouthpiece for big zoo interests and the industries of academic research (zoology, biology, primatology, oceanography), and such stories serve to indoctrinate and immunize the western world and its western readers, rendering western interests invisible and inculcating innocence and arrogance, a.k.a. white superiority.

Back in Mongolia, communities and a coalition of NGOs⁶⁰ have protested the Oyu Tolgoi project — located in the fragile ecosystem of the South Gobi Desert — and hunger strikers have been arrested and jailed. On April 1, 2010, the Mongolian NGOs, assisted by MiningWatch Canada and Rights and Accountability in Development (UK), filed complaints in the UK and Canada against Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe Mines Ltd for alleged breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Companies.⁶¹

Economic Hit Men

Transnational capitalism also achieves its aims in Mongolia by controlling the banks. Mongolia’s Trade Development Bank is 34% owned by Americans but the 66% controlling interest is hidden — people suspect the previous president, Enkhbayar, who privatized it, circa 2005, when he was prime minister. Other people’s collectives, like the Ard Bank, were also privatized.

Mongolia’s Khan Bank was privatized (2000-2004) under the direction of Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a Washington DC intelligence and defense outfit, packed with CIA types, that directly links USAID with the Pentagon (amongst other things, DAI conducts special operations trainings for the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command Europe). Khan Bank is now 52% owned by Sawada Holdings of Japan, with DAI, the International Finance Corporation (World Bank), and Khan Bank CEO Simon Morris (UK) and former CEO and present adviser Peter Morrow (USA). The Khan Bank shareholder Tavan Bogd Group is their Mongolian front company partner. DAI provided the two senior managers of the bank: J. Peter Morrow and Ben Turnbull, Deputy CEO. Establishing a clear link between global capital and military force, DAI’s Vice-President for Global Security is Colonel (Ret.) Barry Shapiro, who spent most of his career conducting U.S. Army Special Forces special operations missions throughout Southeast and Central Asia. DAI director Ann Hudock is a former Country Representative for The Asia Foundation. TAF is teamed with Khan Bank for their ‘Books for Asia’ program in Mongolia, and Khan Bank is funding all kinds of public relations initiatives — green-washing campaigns meant to sanitize their corporate image and blind the public about their true impact on the people and land.

Herders in Mongolia have been hard hit by Khan Bank. Strapped for cash but rich in livestock, slammed by the economic onslaught of capitalism and abandoned by the once-helpful Mongolian state, herders have taken out loans to feed, clothe and educate children, to purchase vehicles and gers and regular supplies. With some 98% of all herders in the country under debt with Khan Bank, almost every herder owes Khan Bank a minimum of 5 million tugriks (US$ 4000). Parliament member D. Baldan-Ochir reported in April 2010 that herders who took out loans using their herds as collateral owed Khan Bank some 63 billion tugriks (US$ 50.5 million), and he advised herders whose herds were wiped out by zhud “to get a good lawyer” and not pay Khan Bank. In 2010, Khan Bank took some 3000 herds from herders in Duut soum in Khovd aimag. In 2008, one herder from Chandmani soum in Khovd aimag who was indebted to Khan Bank lost his herds (zhud) and was unable to repay the loan: he committed suicide. “I can’t live any longer,” he wrote in a note to his family, “because I owe so much to the bank. Please help my wife and children. I am afraid that if I stay alive, I will go to jail.”

The transnational financial plunder of Mongolia is also facilitated through the most secretive multinational corporations on earth: the tax and auditing consultancies Arthur Andersen, Coopers & Lybrand, Deloitte  & Touche and Ernst & Young. These firms exploit taxation loopholes, manipulate profit and loss balance sheets, and help them utilize ‘offshore’ tax havens and subsidiary and front companies to maximize predatory exploitation. Extractive industries (mining, petroleum, logging) will exploit customs and evade tax duties through such illegal practices as ‘transfer-pricing’, over-invoicing, mis-declaration of ores or species (wood), under-measuring and under-reporting, and the practice of declaring maximum ‘losses’ for years — even when maximizing profits. Many of these practices cannot be achieved without the corruption of domestic (Mongolian) agents at all levels of the bureaucracy.  The international consulting and auditing firms put their stamps of approval on the corruption, while taking hundreds of millions of dollars profits, annually, from their global operations. Finally, a near-government organization (NGO) like The Asia Foundation closes the circle by producing reports on ‘good governance’ and ‘accountability’ and they do this, for example, through their multi-stakeholder Responsible Mining Initiatives — involving Mongolian NGOs like the MNPC or UMMRL.

In 2004, OPIC established a $50 million credit fund for US investments in Mongolia, and since then has funded three projects, including a $61,596 insurance loan to The Asia Foundation in 2007. TAF receives millions of dollars annually from OPIC for its other Asia operations.⁶²

American real estate scalper and investment banker Lee Cashell, who operates through his Hong Kong firm, Asia Pacific Investment Partners Corp, received a $250,000 OPIC loan in 2002 for a luxury tourist resort destined for the Mongolian hinterland. Lee Cashell is the founder of The Mongolian Institute for Sustainable Economic Development, he runs Mongolia’s first real estate agency, and he has been scalping properties in Mongolia’s ‘privatization rush’. Lee Cashell is also behind Belgravia Mining, a molybdenum firm with seven exploration licenses in Mongolia.

In 2003, Newsweek lauded American business penetration into ‘democratic’ Mongolia in a typical neoliberal whitewash of reality that applauded, for example, the ‘free-market’ acquisition of ‘low rent’ properties. “The reason: Washington sees strategic gain in supporting a free and democratic Mongolia, sandwiched between Russia and China in a region rife with dictators and swelling Islamic fervor.”⁶³

“Property prices have doubled in the last one and a half years alone,” American Express journalist Ron Gluckman (USA) quoted an excited Lee Cashell to say. “Rents are skyrocketing. Rental yields are the highest in Asia, by far…There are no big-name multinationals here, [just] a lot of guys making $150,000, one dollar at a time.”⁶³

“One day at a time,” said ‘Bayarma Ganbold’, the human rights activist and mother of three who took me around Ulaanbaatar, “these criminals are taking everything that we love: every public space, every publicly owned building, every public park, every river. The Selbe River runs through the city, but it’s quite dead already. We used to play by the water when I was a child. The Tol River is also drying up: Coca Cola has a bottling plant using water from the Tol for the past 5 years.⁶⁴ All the school playgrounds have been chopped up or destroyed.”

“I used to play in the children’s park, it was green and beautiful.” ‘Bayarma Ganbold’ is tearful. “There were carousels, swan boats, merry-go-rounds, people jogging, children laughing, birds flying all around, people kissing each other. There were skating rinks all over the city. It was all free. The Russian wife of President Tsedenbal⁶⁵ did so many things for women and children: she set up social welfare systems, she set up health systems; she built schools, children’s libraries — she built this children’s park. Like everywhere else, the land was bought for almost nothing by ‘private investors’ connected to the government. The park is dead.”⁶⁶

“No one knew what was ‘democracy’ or what was ‘privatization’,” said Tumur, a coal miner who previously worked for the state mining company in Nalaikh city, just west of Ulaanbaatar, for 8 years. “The first four years of democracy were hell. It was chaos and confusion and the mafias stole property and ‘privatized’ it. By now everything is being ripped apart.”⁶⁷

Pimping for Transnational Corporations

The situation in Mongolia is not unique. The very same NGOs involved in Mongolia are involved in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Barrick Gold moved into Congo with Rwandan and Uganda forces in the US-backed invasion of 1996-1998. AngloGold Ashanti is another corporation behind war, genocide and plunder in Congo.⁶⁸

DeBeers will plunder Mongolia’s kimberlite pipes — read: diamonds — just as they have plundered Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Botswana, C.A.R., South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Canada: De Beers is also partnered with AngloGold Ashanti in Mongolia.⁶⁹

PACT-Congo has worked to support western mining corporations even while purporting to challenge them. One PACT official is Donald Easum, a US national security operative who was bad news in every country he worked — programs often coordinated with the Africa-America Institute and USAID, two more CIA fronts.⁷⁰ Similarly, Wildlife Conservation Society is tied to mining and petroleum companies exploiting Congo, and Hans Hoffman, a GTZ director in Mongolia until recently, was formerly working for GTZ in the Congo, where GTZ protects German interests involved in the warfare, genocide and plunder of minerals.⁷¹

TAF, WWF, The Nature Conservancy, GTZ and Wildlife Conservation Society are working to ‘conserve’ and ‘protect’ the Mongolian environment from Chinese, Russian and Mongolian companies, but when US, Canadian or European companies are involved — often tied to these NGOs’ boards of directors and donors — such NGOs are silent, acquiescent to mining interests and private profit plunder. There are plenty of western ties to Chinese and Russian banking and mining mafias, in any case.

It’s the same with the ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian’ NGOs: corporate entities like Save the Children, Mercy Corps, UNICEF and UNDP leverage and protect western corporate interests while co-opting domestic civil society and neutralizing opposition. Powerful US government intelligence and national security front groups — including TAF, the George Soros Foundation (Open Society Institute) — have been engineering elections, engineering laws, and channeling civil society to achieve and ensure political control and access for transnational capitalism in Mongolia. Most prominent amongst these groups is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its core affiliates, Center for Private Enterprise (CIPE), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI).⁷² ,⁷³

In 1983, the Pentagon, USAID, US State Department, and the CIA were all involved in the creation and implementation of ‘Project Democracy’ — National Security Decision Directive 77 (NSDD 77) — and this led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy. After that, many foreign covert interventions were shifted away from the CIA and onto the NED.⁷⁴] NED’s involvement with covert operations and foreign interventions are well-established.⁷⁵ ,⁷⁶ ,⁷⁷ ,⁷⁸

The Asia Foundation (formerly the Committee for Free Asia) was created by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951 and served as the CIA’s main front group for covert operations in Asia for decades.⁷⁹ CIA funding was revealed in 1967 and was reportedly stopped, though TAF continued to operate as a secretive instrument of US foreign policy.⁸⁰ Primarily funded by USAID, US Department of State, US embassies, US Department of Labor, and the US Congress, The Asia Foundation uses the ‘non-government’ euphemism as part of its strategy of camouflage as a US government front group that is part of an extended US state apparatus for intervention.

TAF directors and trustees include national security, defense and intelligence operatives with long careers serving elite US corporate interests. TAF trustee J. Stapleton Roy, also one of TAF’s ‘Benefactor ($5,000-9,999)’ donors, was Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research under Madeleine Albright, 1999-2000, and he has worked for the secretive entities Kissinger Associates and Kissinger Institute. He is a director of Conoco Phillips and Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold — both known for human rights atrocities around the world.⁸¹ ,⁸²

TAF trustee Karl Inderfurth was a high ranking US official at the United Nations (1993-1997) during the war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocides in Rwanda, Congo and the Balkans; a ‘national security council expert’ with ABC News and has served on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees and the National Security Council.

TAF trustee Ellen Laipson, also a former TAF president and CEO, was vice-chairman of the US National Intelligence Council under William Jefferson Clinton (1997-2002); director of the US National Security Council (1993-1995); and US national intelligence officer for Asia. In December 2009, President Barrack Obama appointed Ellen Laipson to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.⁸³

The Asia Foundation works as a conduit for ‘phantom aid’: official funds channeled to ‘pass-through’ organizations that then launder these funds and divert them for covert interventions such as elections rigging, intelligence gathering, and — most relevant to the Mongolian example — surveillance and infiltration of domestic organizations, psychological operations, and dissemination of propaganda. Mathew Nasuti, a former US military official involved in accountability investigations and budgets oversight with the US Department of Defense, claims that TAF operations in Afghanistan have diverted US State Department ‘aid’ funds for unknown operations.⁸⁴ TAF has one of their largest budgets and operations in US and NATO-occupied Afghanistan.⁸⁵

TAF also receives funding from some of the worst multinational corporations on earth, including big oil, banking, mining and defense contractors: Chevron, American International Group, Coca Cola, GE, Walt Disney, Halliburton, Boeing, HSBC, Pfizer, Qualcomm, Raytheon, PepsiCo and Wal-Mart.⁸⁶

Of course, TAF is also funded by the National Geographic Society, by the Goldman Environmental Fund, and by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation, thus completing the circle involving the socially constructed image of Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, in the public mind, as a model of Mongolian civil society’s acceptable behavior — as long as he was civil and pragmatic — and as an instrument (in this case an unwilling one) of US foreign policy.

Groups like TAF, NED, PACT, USAID, World Vision and the American Center for Mongolian Studies are closely aligned with western elites who benefit from neoliberal transnational capitalism that imposes the ‘Washington Consensus’ on Mongolia.⁸⁷ This is a full-blown operation to subvert democracy, control emerging Mongolian social groups and plunder Mongolia. This involves a campaign of attrition against the masses in Mongolia, working to create a situation where sooner or later the poor majority ‘gives up’ and abandons the struggle for basic human rights, basic dignities, and basic freedoms.

This strategy of attrition is accomplished by exacerbating economic hardships, creating difficulties and deprivations for ordinary people; by exploiting any mistakes made by the Mongolian resistance and preying on the vulnerability of the people. At the same time, the international power elite divide and conquer domestic groups by funding and grooming individuals and organizations that serve their agenda, while marginalizing, discrediting or eliminating those that challenge their agenda. Both international and domestic media — outlets like the UB Post are already sufficiently under elite control — highlight the actions and voices of the groomed individuals who are saying what the external elites want people to hear.

“No longer do citizens need to organize on their own behalf and engage in various forms of opposition, including social movements, rallies, and other forms of dissent,” wrote academic Shelly Feldman, in “NGOs and Civil Society: (Un)Stated Contradictions,” pointing out that the rise of the western NGO sector means that the people — in this case the Mongolian people — are no longer necessary and their voices are no longer heard. “Instead, the NGO sector, legitimized as a controlled, organized arena of public debate with institutional and financial support from the donor community, has come to speak on behalf of the citizenry, particularly those groups that have been targeted among the needy, women and the poor.”⁸⁸

Terrorism in Mongolia

The Asia Foundation is committing treasonable offenses against the people and state of Mongolia — imagine a Mongolian ‘non-government organization’ equivalent to TAF operating similarly in the United States! — and they are rewarded for doing so by Mongolian elites who are partnered with transnational capitalism and who use the domestic media and paramilitary forces against the people.

TAF and other big NGOs (NED, IRI, NDI, Open Society Institute, etc.) rig elections, fund political sects, bribe ‘citizen’ groups, and divide communities to gain access to natural resources. Behind the western rhetoric of promoting democracy, human rights and environmental protection is the reality that US foreign policy has nothing to do with these ideals: US interests like NED, PACT and TAF are a threat to democracy everywhere and, in Mongolia, violence, homelessness, poverty, desperation and environmental destruction are increasing.⁸⁹

The bottom line is that North American taxpayers are directly funding U.S.-government organized devastation and disaster in Mongolia and — blinded by corporate propaganda in the guise of daily news media — we don’t know enough to ask anything about it.

Many of those who have access to the big money flooding into Mongolia — from ‘independent’ photographer Ted Wood to the big NGOs GTZ, PACT and TAF — also work to sanction and greenwash mining companies. Ivanhoe Mines offers the perfect example: the NGOs are supportive of Ivanhoe’s massive Oyu Tolgoi copper/gold megaproject, deep in the heart of the Gobi, and they support the euphemisms of ‘good community relations’ and ‘herder relocation’ programs.

Of course, the mining companies also create their own NGOs — to promote their interests, leverage policy and buff their image. One of these is World Growth, a Washington-based NGO believed to be the creation of Ivanhoe Mines and/or Rio Tinto. World Growth Mongolia appeared on the scenes in 2008. Its Mongolian board of advisers includes one former president and several former top ministers.

In Central Africa, ‘relocation programs’ have displaced pygmies from national parks where big western NGOs work. In Botswana, diamond, oil and ‘wildlife conservation’ interests have backed the forcible ‘relocation’ of San bushmen. In Borneo, the nomadic Penan people have been dispossessed of land and resources and ‘relocated’ with only cursory notice by National Geographic or big conservation NGOs. Results are the same in each case: genocide.

The leaders I interviewed from Mongolian conservation, human rights and civil society were sincere, committed, frustrated and undervalued. They work hard, with little or no resources, challenging the roots of problems they know from the inside out. They know what is wrong, on the small scale, and with the big picture, but they have little awareness of the international machinery they are up against. Many have come from rural areas where they knew extreme poverty and hardship of the herders’ way of life, and so they know what would best serve the people and the land. They are Mongolians, they know Mongolia; we don’t and we never will.

They’ve seen rivers dry up and rivers completely diverted. They’ve seen whole villages with epidemics of mining-related diseases — silicosis and bronchitis, cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. They see Mongolian elites using (mostly Chinese) undocumented immigrants for slave labor. They know that young girls and boys are being trafficked in and out of Mongolia, and that prostitution and survival sex are on the rise. They’ve seen people beaten and arrested, others shot.

“People are afraid now to let their children out freely,” says ‘Bayarma Ganbold’, “afraid they will be kidnapped, afraid they will be run over. The Asia Foundation has a huge project dealing with trafficking: they produce fancy reports but they haven’t done anything: after five years not one person has been found — or arrested! — for human trafficking. Mongolian journalists have raised many questions about street children who have disappeared that have never been answered. And Mongolian girls are beautiful — it’s a big mine here: pretty young girls from urban and rural areas. They promise them a great ‘job’ abroad, luring and enticing them, buying them — even drugging them. The girls have no passports and no way to escape afterwards.”⁹⁰

Undocumented Chinese immigrants work for under slave conditions for the Mongolian power elite and for mining and construction companies.

“Chinese bring in at least 40 or 50 illegal workers for these labor camps,” said Tumur, the coal miner in Nalaikh, “and every night they bring 20 to 30 young girls, 17 to 18 years old, from poor districts. They have 20 or 30 girls having sex in these open barracks without caring about privacy. Once girls do this they are ostracized by Mongolian culture. We can’t protect our girls because the government sends in security and police, at the least sign of trouble, to protect the companies. There’s a law that every Mongolian has a right to own seven acres of land, but one morning you wake up and thousands of hectares are owned by foreigners.”⁶⁷

By October 2008 the civil society movements were feeling cornered, their backs against the wall, from the growing western influence-peddling, corruption, bribery, intimidation, and the massive propaganda apparatus backing up the multinational corporations, with government complicity. Since then the situation has only gotten worse. Worst of all, they see salaried western ‘experts’ rolling around in $60,000 4×4 Toyota Landcruisers, living in the best homes, eating at the best restaurants, doling out advice and producing policy papers with an intolerable hubris and righteousness, accountable to no one.

“People are afraid of being seen or photographed. People are being threatened and followed by security agents for organizing,” said Baasan Geleg, an economics teacher and the leader of Mongolia’s iSenior Citizen’s Federationi. After organizing a country-wide registration of all mining in Mongolia, and after informing the public, Baasan Geleg became a public target: she was arrested four times in 2007 and 2008, and held in isolation for up to 20 days. “More and more civic leaders and activists are becoming apathetic, discouraged and disheartened, and thinking nothing will change. So they turn toward the money — the NGOs — and then they are dead.”⁹¹

The Struggle Continues

After the iMongolia Nature Protection Coalitioni dissolved, thanks to The Asia Foundation, river coalition activists formed the United Movement for Mongolian Rivers and Lakes. Goldman Prize winner Tsetsegee Munkhbayar is one of the key organizers, but nothing would happen without the other pivotal activists he works with.

Now, three years after the movement faltered, the United Movement for Mongolian Rivers and Lakes (UMMRL) has worked hard to create, pass and strengthen Mongolian laws to protect communities and the environment. According to UMMRL, the directors and other officials of Puraam Mining and Centerra Gold — the two companies Tsetsegee Munkhbayar’s gang of four shot at — have committed crimes specified in Articles 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 214 of the Mongolian Criminal law.

“Actions of both companies are illegal,” notes UMMRL, “as they are violating Mongolian laws on the prohibition of mining operations at headwaters of rivers, protected zones of water reservoirs and forest areas. Because of these mining companies, local citizens, herders and livestock animals experienced environmental damages including skin irritation and formation of lumps; eye diseases and intoxication of internal organs of humans and livestock animals… in Selenge province. These companies are operating in the headwaters of Gachuurt and Budanch Rivers and have reduced the flows of these rivers. Local people and livestock animals have no access to drinking water sources.”⁹²

On March 10, 2010, the UMMRL established a student chapter named ‘Fresh Water’. Its main goal is to involve Mongolian young people and students in the protection of the environment and natural resources. In May, 2010, the UMMRL and Mongolian Water Agency were working to delineate boundaries to prohibit mining operations in 350 soums and 21 aimags. Another draft law advanced by UMMRL would enable local people and civic organizations to sue mining companies for compensation against environmental destruction and emotional damages.

On July 16, 2010, the Mongolian Parliament authorized a law imposing restrictions on exploration and mining near water resources and empowering local officials to adjudicate mining issues. The UMMRL began a process of petitioning government to enforce laws that have been passed and put some teeth behind their paper proclamations.

On August 24-28, 2010, some 60 participants from Russia, Germany and Mongolia — including Tsetsegee Munkhbayar and other members of UMMRL — participated in a conference to address the past decade of collaboration and future needs to protect the ecology and natural resources in the Lake Baikal and Selenge River basin, from northern Mongolia to southern Siberia.

Protests and conflicts between herder communities and mining companies escalated all summer long, and occurred all over Mongolia. “These clashes occurred because of illegal mining operations,” reported UMMRL, “local residents and herders are facing a lack of drinking water and livestock pastures.”⁹³

On September 2, 2010, UMMRL announced that they will implement the law by force of local citizens if the Mongolian government does not. When the government did not respond, Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, leader of the Onggi River Movement, and G. Bayarra, leader of the Khuder River Movement, and D. Tumurbaatar and O. Sambuu-Yondon from UMMRL, opened fire on the two foreign mining companies. They had previously written to the mining companies, well in advance, but there were no replies.

The Mongolian press reported the September 2nd action, noting that the gang of four Mongolian activists shot at bulldozer blades and other heavy equipment. There were no clashes with security guards and no arrests, though Tsetsegee Munhkbayar was summoned to police offices in Selenge aimag and questioned. (The English translations of the original Mongolian story were very bad and greatly distorted the facts.).

Civil society protests involving thousands of people have continued in Mongolia: more than 10,000 people were reported to have protested government policies against the people in April 2010. However, it remains to be seen whether Mongolia’s civil society leaders can endure and prevail against the big money and power of western mining and their NGO vanguard. Some mining companies use the argument that pollution is the fault of companies that preceded them on the site that is polluted. Companies also argue that any canceled mining licenses or revolved permits must be compensated, in the millions of dollars, no matter that they were stolen in the first place, and no matter that companies have already expatriated hundreds of millions of dollars that Mongolians will never see.

On a visit to Centerra’s ‘Boroo Mine’ site in June, 2010 Mr. John Kazakov, director of Centerra’s Boroo Gold personally warned UMMRL partners that the mining association and mining corporations were working to pass a new law to neutralize the 2009 law that prohibits mineral exploration at the headwaters of rivers, protected zones or water reservoirs and forested areas. “We have a lobby group in the Parliament,” he promised, “and hope that law will be passed very soon.”

On October 21, 2010 the UMMRL filed a lawsuit against Puraam Mining and Centerra Gold for environmental damages and violations of Mongolian environmental protection laws. “We targeted these companies because they are mining illegally in a historically important place,” responds Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, “right next to the headwaters of two crucial rivers in a healthy forest region in defiance of existing laws. They need to be shut down.”

“People have criticized our choice [to take up arms] but, tell me,” said J. Nyamdavaa, head of the NGO Protect the Security of Mongolia, an Onggi River Movement partner, “what could we hope to achieve through peaceful means like meetings and demonstrations in streets?”⁹⁴

In February, 2011, Mongolian news agencies reported that that six members of parliament MPs J. Batsuuri, Y. Batsuuri, O. Chuluunbat, D. Batbayar, A. Tleikhan, and B. Choijilsuren) are fiercely lobbying parliament to change the laws to allow Centerra Gold and other companies to continue plundering and polluting the land, and the six MPs have drafted a new law favorable to mining. Meanwhile, mining MP D. Zorigt issued at least 170 new licenses for exploration and extraction (one Mongolian M.P. claims he issues 192 new licenses) on land protected by current laws.

Not every western policy or idea should be rejected, and not every westerner in Mongolia is there to exploit: some of the most dedicated and honest conservationists and human rights people — like ‘Jane Smith’ who was afraid to go on the record here — can be found in some of the small foreign, reputable NGOs, and there are even a few good people working for some of the rotten NGOs. The former types give their entire lives to doing what is right, while the latter deceive themselves, while always collecting their paycheck, into thinking they can make a difference from the inside. What we are talking about here is dishonesty and deception, and many of the Anglo-Americans or Europeans working in Mongolia harbor deeply racist ideas about Mongolians being barbarians who do not wash and cannot think and could never runs things. Most tourists don’t give a damn, for sure; they are driven by self-interests and become another kind of ‘innocent’ visitor who exploits the people and the land. The mining corporations are determined to get what they want, one way or another, they always have, and they always do. In the Congo they kill the people to get what they want; in Mongolia it has not yet come to that.

1. Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan, Andreevsky Flag Film Company, 2007, was distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Picturehouse Studios, making a Hollywood blockbuster entertainment extravaganza. That is, it made a lot of money.
2. “Tsetsegee Munkhbayar,” Emerging Explorers, National Geographic.
3. Unsigned, “Eco-warriors call attention to Mongolia’s development dilemma,” EurasiaNet, October 26, 2010.
4. Liezel Hill, “Centerra’s Kumtor mine not affected by Kyrgyz violence,” Mining Weekly, April 7, 2010.
5. Daisy Sindelar, “Mongolian Democracy: ‘Unless Your Life Improves, What’s the Point of a Market Economy?’” December 12, 2009.
6. Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, SUNY Press, 2003: p. 161.
7. “Tsetsegee Munkhbayar,” Emerging Explorers, National Geographic.
8. Richard N. Goldman (90) died on November 29, 2010.
9. Private interviews with members of the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 2008: (1) Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, Onggi River Movement; (2) Tserenkhand Yadanbatar, Angir Nuden Mondoohei; (3) J. Tudevdoorj, Salkhin Sardag; (4) Enkhtur Duvchigdamba, Toson Zaamar Tuul Gol; (5) Chimgee Ganbold, Onggi River Movement; (6) Dashdemberul Ganbold, Onggi River Movement.
10. Chinggis Khan is known to the western world as Genghis Khan.
11. Mongolian nomads live in gers: tent-like structures similar to yurts.
12. ‘My Mongolian Land’ is translated from the Mongolian: Minii Mongolyn Gazar Shoroo.
13. Private interview, M. Bold, founder and director, My Mongolian Land: Minii Mongolyn Gazar Shoroo, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 2008.
14. On Ivanhoe Mines history of human rights abuses and environmental destruction elsewhere see, e.g.: Roger Moody, Grave Diggers: A Report on Mining in Burma, Mining Watch Canada, January 5, 2001, http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=1739; and Thomas Maung Shwe, “Canada urged to probe Ivanhoe over ‘arms-for-copper’ deal,” Mizzima, June 30, 2010.
15. The Keidanren is the coalition of the most powerful Japanese trading houses (Soga Shosa), corporations like Marubeni, Mitsubishi, C. Itoh, Hitochi and Sumitomo.
16. Private interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 2008.
17. “Leader of Mongolian Green Movement Arrested during Peaceful Protest,” Global Greens, August 12, 2008.
18. Private interview and tour with ‘Bayarma Ganbold’, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 21, 2010.
19. Chris Hogg, “Discontent fuels Mongolia’s far-right groups,” BBC News, September 5, 2010.
20. See: Amnesty International, “Where should I go from here?” The Legacy of the 1 July 2008 Riot in Mongolia, 2009.
21. Danaasuren Vandangombo, NGOs as Accountability Promoters: in the Mongolian Case, PhD. candidate paper, School of Accounting and Commercial Law, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
22. Conservation Ink.
23. Private communication with Jeremy Schmidt, co-founder of Conservation Ink, November 21, 2010.
24. Stefan Lovgren, “Mongolia Gold Rush Destroying Rivers, Nomadic Lives,” National Geographic News, October 17, 2008.
25. Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, Goldman Foundation.
26. Private Agencies Collaborating Together (PACT).
27. Layton Croft, “Public Radio Veterans Support Independent Mongolian Radio,” EurasiaNet, October 4, 2002.
28. PACT, Annual Report, 2005.
29. See, e.g., Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: the Mask of Pluralism, SUNY Press, 2003.
30. Gold mining typically uses cyanide leaching processes and involves sulfuric acid and arsenic, creating vast expanses of toxic wasteland and poisonous aquifers around heap leeching, processing plants, and open pit mines.
31. Ch. Sumiya, “Opening of spring Parliament session marked by protest,” from UB Post, date unknown, republished on OREADS Daily on April 6, 2006.
32. Private interview, M. Bold, founder and director, My Mongolian Land, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 2008.
33. ‘Aimag’ is the biggest administrative unit in Mongolia. It is similar to a province. There are 24 aimags in Mongolia.
34. ‘Soum’ — similar to a district — is an administrative unit after aimag (province); Mongolia has more than 300 soums.
35. Exactly like western logging companies Maxaam, Weyerhauser and Champion International have disguised clear-cuts in North America with thin barriers of intact forest in front.
36. These stories have not been seen by this writer.
37. From 2001 to 2004, William Foerderer Infante was director of USAID’s Economic Policy and Finance Office and acting mission director in Belgrade, Serbia, then Mongolia Country Director for The Asia Foundation from 2006 until 2009, when he left to work for UNDP in the Balkans.
38. Private interviews, Onggi Rivers Movement offices, Ulaanbaatar, October 28, 2008.
39. Private interview, Tracey Naughton, PACT-Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, October 2008.
40. Private interview, Ulaanbaatar, October 2008.
41. Yoko Watanabe left WWF-Mongolia and at the time of this publication she was working for the Global Environment Facility (GEF). See bio.
42. In 2009, William Foerderer Infante quit The Asia Foundation for a position with UNDP in the Balkans.
43. Rebecca Darling left The Asia Foundation in 2009.
44. Interview with Rebecca Darling, The Asia Foundation, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 23, 2008.
45. Canada is the corporate home for over 75 per cent of the world’s mining companies. The mining and minerals manufacturing sector added $35 billion to Canadian GDP in 2009, according to the Mining Association of Canada, and in the same year the sector was reporting over $56 billion invested overseas. Canadian taxpayers and pension recipients contribute to these impressive numbers for the mining sector. Canada’s National Post recently reported that the taxpayer, mainly through Export Development Canada, supports Canadian mining companies to the tune of $20 billion annually through subsidized financing and insurance. See: Tom Sandborn, “Canadian Mining Firm Accused of Complicity in Congo Killings: Lawsuit highlights need for firmer hand in Ottawa, say human rights groups. Anvil Mining denies culpability,” www.TheTyee.ca, November 26, 2010.
46. For a tiny representative sampling of the criminal and terrorist operations of Canada-based mining companies and the protests or claims against them see: Chris Albin-Lackey, “Canada: Monitoring of Mining Companies Long Overdue,” Human Rights Watch in Toronto Star, October 27, 2010; Jeffery R. Webber, “Indigenous Struggle, Ecology, and Capitalist Resource Extraction in Ecuador: An Interview with Marlon Santi,” The Bullet, e-bulletin #391, July 13, 2010; Dylan Penner, “Canadian Civil Society Demands Canadian Mining Companies Be Held Accountable for Overseas Abuses,” Council of Canadians, November 22, 2010; “Development Protest: Goro delayed by blockade,” Daily News, April 9, 2006; Fernando Sanchez, “Violent protest in Barrick Gold’s Dominican mine injures at least 17,” Dominican Today, November 17, 2010; Nak’azdli Keyoh Huwunline, “Nak’azdli blockade enters second day: Mt Milligan mining project proponent threatens legal action,” Vancouver Media Co-op, November 16, 2010; Tom Sandborn, “Canadian Mining Firm Accused of Complicity in Congo Killings: Lawsuit highlights need for firmer hand in Ottawa, say human rights groups. Anvil Mining denies culpability,” www.TheTyee.ca, November 26, 2010; James Rodriguez, “GOLDCORP: No More Mining Terrorism,” MIMUNDO.org, May 2, 2007.
47. Rebecca Darling, “From Mongolia: A New Paradigm in responsible Mining is Taking Shape,” PACT, April 15, 2009 (blog content updated April 28, 2009).
48. Private communication, ‘Jane Smith’, conservationist with small NGO in Mongolia, May 5, 2009.
49. Jeffery R. Webber, “Indigenous Struggle, Ecology, and Capitalist Resource Extraction in Ecuador: An Interview with Marlon Santi,” The Bullet, e-bulletin #391, July 13, 2010.
50. Private communication, Goldman Foundation media relations, November 4, 2010.
51. Private communication, Goldman Foundation, November 29, 2010.
52. Private communication with The Asia Foundation November 2010.
53. For example, on Rio Tinto’s human rights and environmental atrocities in Papua New Guinea see: Gwen Kinkead, “Battling a Toxic Billionaire,” Men’s Journal, Dec. 1, 2009.
54. Barrick Gold Corporation is also partnered with Anglo-American, and AngloGold Ashanti. Barrick directors have included/include Brian Mulroney, former prime minister of Canada, Howard Baker, former US Senator, and international advisers George Herbert Walker Bush and Vernon Jordon.
55. Barrick Gold Corporation has a 9.5% stake in QGX, mining in Mongolia in a joint venture with Ivanhoe Mines.
56. See Robert Friedland on Sourcewatch.
57. On Robert Friedland, Tony Buckingham and Tim Spicer, see, e.g., Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999; Stan Correy, “Robert Friedland: The King of the Canadian Juniors,” Radio National, April 6, 1997; keith harmon snow & Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink & Deception Over Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Global Research.
58. Danielle Mario, “OT Agreement Passes Parliamentary Committees,” UB Post, July 17, 2009.
59. See Keith Harmon Snow's "KING KONG" series.
60. The members of the NGO coalition include Oyu Tolgoi (OT) Watch, Center for Citizen’s Alliance, Centre for Human Rights and Development, Steps without Border, Drastic Change Movement and National Soyombo Movement.
61. “Mongolian NGOs Appeal to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights to resolve Oyu Tolgoi Mine Dispute,” Press Release, Center for Human Rights and Development (Mongolia), OT Watch (Mongolia), MiningWatch (Canada), Rights and Accountability in Development (UK), April 23, 2010.
62. For example: The Asia Foundation received OPIC funding: 2007: $378,516 South Korea operations; 2007: $168,502 East Timor; 2007: $458,293 Bangladesh; 2007: $562,707 Afghanistan; 2007: $281,441 Thailand; 2007: $764,390 Indonesia. Source: OPIC web site.
63. Ron Gluckman, “Believe it or Not A mini-Boom in Mongolia,” Newsweek, September 2003.
64. In Northampton MA (USA), the local Coca Cola bottling plant uses over 1,000,000 gallons of fresh city water annually, and this is the people’s water.
65. President Yumjaagiyn Tsendenbal was president of Mongolia from 1952 to 1974.
66. Private interview and private tour with ‘Bayarma Ganbold’ in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 22, 2010.
67. Private interview, Tumur, Naliakh coal mines, October 30, 2008.
68. See e.g. “The Curse of Gold: Democratic Republic of Congo,” Human Rights Watch, June 1, 2005, or the many DRC related publications of keith harmon snow.
69. See, e.g., Janine Roberts, Glitter and Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel,” Disinformation Press, 2003; or keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamonds: Doublethink and Deception over those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, July-August, 2007.
70. See: Elizabeth Liagin, “Background to the Recent Nigerian Elections: General Obasandjo more than just a ‘Friend’ of the Americans,” World Socialist Web Site, March 17, 1999.
71. See, for example, keith harmon snow, “Congo: Three Cheers for Eve Ensler?” Toward Freedom, December 24, 2007.
72. On NED funding in Mongolia see NED Annual Report 2009: http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/asia/mongolia; IRI’s 2009 NED funding was $250,000 and NDI’s 2009 NED funding was $240,000. See NED.
73. In 2008 NED granted $137,977 to CIPE “[t]o establish more effective communication between the public and private sectors in Mongolia. CIPE will provide advisory support lending its expertise on policy advocacy and policy reform to its local partner, who will develop and submit official proposals for draft laws and policy recommendations to the government, organize training seminars, and create a monthly television program for educational purposes.” See NED.
74. William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony, Cambridge University Press, 1996: p. 86-116.
75. Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, SUNY Press, 2003.
76. See: Jonah Gindin, “Interview with William I. Robinson: The Battle for Global Civil Society,” International Endowment for Democracy, June 13, 2005. See also: NED’s funding of groups in China, for example, which is considered an anti-democratic challenger state and ideology to the US.
77. See: William Blum, “Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy,” International Endowment for Democracy.
78. William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony, Cambridge University Press, 1996: pp. 86-116.
79. E.g., Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, SUNY Press, 2003: p. 162; and, on TAF involvement in Afghanistan, see, e.g., William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, Common Courage, 2004: p. 343.
80. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Knopf, New York, 1974.
81. See, e.g., Freeport McMoRan’s criminal operations in Papua New Guinea, in league with terrorizing Indonesian security forces: John M. Miller, West Papua Report December 2010, East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, December 2010.
82. Both Conoco Philips and Freeport McMoRan have long histories of devastating interventions, human rights violations and environmental crimes in Latin America, Asia and Africa; Freeport McMoRan is also in Congo.
83. “President Obama Announces Members of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board,” The White House, December 23, 2009.
84. Mathew Nasuti, “Afghan AID Funds Diverted to The Asia Foundation,” Atlantic Free Press, January 31, 2010.
85. On TAF involvement in Afghanistan, see, e.g., William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, Common Courage, 2004: p. 343.
86. QUALCOMM is deeply involved in US government classified ‘top secret’ programs, and is probably, if not certainly, one of the big recipients of funding for ‘black’ programs.
87. James Baker traveled to Mongolia in the early 1990′s to press the ‘Washington Consensus’ as Mongolia’s savior and model for a successful transformation to democracy and free market capitalism.
88. Shelly Feldman, “NGOs and Civil Society: (Un)stated Contradictions,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 554, 1997: p. 44-66, cited in Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, SUNY Press, 2003: p. 168.
89. See: Jonah Gindin, “Interview with William I. Robinson: The Battle for Global Civil Society,” International Endowment for Democracy, June 13, 2005.
90. Private interview and tour with ‘Bayarma Ganbold’, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 22, 2010.
91. Private interview with Baasan Geleg, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, October 2008.
92. United Movement for Mongolian Rivers and Lakes, “Brief Update on UMMRL, Mongolia,” October, 2010.
93. United Movement for Mongolian Rivers and Lakes, “Brief Update on UMMRL, Mongolia,” September 9, 2010.
94. “Interview by Mongolian NGO: Our struggle is to protect our environment and land,” www.news.mn, September 16, 2010.

Though we heard the whispers of rumors of the miners’ all-too-human humanity even during the rescue operations, particularly in the extra-marital affairs of miner Yonni Barrios, media outlets were all too eager to place the trapped (and then rescued) miners on pedestals, drape them with more-than-human accolades, and mythologize their ordeal to an extent that might cause King Midas to blush.

But in recent days, the pendulum has decidedly swung. Earlier this week, reports from CBS News — which featured several of “Los 33″ on 60 Minutes Sunday night — released a story that the trapped miners had “contemplated cannibalism, suicide.” Another report,  based on material from a new book by New York Times reporter Jonathan Franklin reveals the men were “given pornography after an offer to donate 10 sex dolls was deemed inadequate.” The lurid report, akin to a lost episode of “Miners Gone Wild”, goes on to say that “the miners had worked out a system with a separate room for ‘conjugal visits’ to the plastic women they hoped to receive, using condoms for hygiene. But the authorities couldn’t stomach this, concerned that having to share the dolls would lead to jealousies.”

Global working-class heroes or pornography-devouring cannibals? Dope-smokers humping sex dolls hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth or the frontline leaders of the next great proletariat?

Both the grandiose hero-building project of the Chilean mine disaster and rescue coverage as well as the current stream of supermarket check-out line fodder miss the larger possibility that is still largely unexamined in the wake of what happened at the Copiapó mine in 2010. We need to have a large-scale, global conversation about worker safety in an industry whose safety records should be the cause of shame (and revolt). And if the global mining companies (and the national governments whose permits sanction their operations) aren’t willing to come to the table, miners need to be led by the examples of Tunisia and Egypt and demand change. Because their lives, quite literally, depend upon it.

What will happen if activists don’t kick things up a few thousands notches and provoke massive changes in the way humans currently live? Chomsky and I, of course, agree it’d be best to create such change and learn the answer to that question. On a few other points, we didn’t agree.

Our discussion went something like this…

Mickey Z.: I recently watched a video on climate change in which you were one of the featured interviewees. You talked quite somberly about the recent elections being a “death knell” for humanity and us “kissing our species goodbye.” I’ve read your work for decades but can’t seem to recall you using such language in this context. In your view, have we humans waited too long to take action? Do you believe we can/should downsize our industrial culture before it downsizes itself?

Noam Chomsky: If I said the elections are a death knell, I went too far. But I think it’s fair to say that they do threaten that outcome. Even the business press is concerned. Bloomberg Business Week reported that the elections brought into office dozens of climate change deniers, swelling support for Senator James Inhofe, who has declared global warming to be the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people” and feels “vindicated” by the election. He probably is also celebrating the ascendance of representative John Shimkus who assures us that God would prevent dire effects of climate change; analogues would be hard to find in other societies. And probably is also celebrating the fact that according to recent polls, barely a third of Americans now believe that human activities are a factor in climate change – very likely the result of a major corporate propaganda offensive, openly announced, to achieve this result. It’s important to bear in mind that those who orchestrate the campaigns know as well as the rest of us that the “hoax” is real and ominous, but they are pursuing their institutional role: maximizing short-term profit and putting aside “externalities,” in this case the fate of the species. Modifying the core institutions of the society is no small challenge. This confluence of factors should serve as a grim warning. If the US continues to drag its feet on addressing these grave problems, the rest of the world will have even less incentive to proceed with serious measures. I don’t think that entails downsizing industrial culture. Rather, converting it to sustainable form to serve human needs, not private profit. For example high speed rail and solar technology do not downsize industrial culture.

MZ: When I say “downsizing industrial culture,” I’m suggesting that any lifestyle based on relentless resource extraction is by definition, un-sustainable. So, I would counter that “serving human needs” is partly what got us in this mess in the first place. Considering that 80% of the forests have been destroyed and 90% of large fish in the ocean are already gone, maybe we need a more holistic perspective on “needs”?

NC: I’d still give the same answer. Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not “relentless resource extraction.”

MZ: I guess what I mean is what about non-human needs? We can’t survive without a functioning eco-system and most of the accepted suggestions—recycled goods, CFL bulbs, etc.—are way too little, way too late. As someone who has surveyed the shifting tides of human culture, can you foresee Americans stepping up to make the kind of changes and sacrifices required to ensure “coming generations”?

NC: I’m not sure what you mean by “non-human needs.” A functioning eco-system is a human need. Are you thinking of the needs of non-human animals? Say beetles? They’ll probably survive whatever we do to the eco-system. I quite agree that the standard suggestions are too little. If they are too late, then it follows, logically, that we really can kiss each other goodbye. But I think that’s too grim a forecast. On whether Americans can step up, it’s hard to be optimistic. Certainly current trends are in the opposite direction, as I mentioned.

MZ: So, if you’re not optimistic about Americans stepping up, what it is that keeps you from maintaining as “grim” a forecast as I?

NC: Because not being optimistic falls a long way short of predicting that all is finished. There are still options. If you really think the game is over, what’s the point of even discussing these topics?

MZ: The only game I feel is over is the widespread belief that minor tweaks and changes can make enough of a difference. What I’m sincerely wondering is what, as you see it, are the options that remain?

NC: I think we agree on that. The options that remain are much more dramatic and far-reaching initiatives, and the sooner the better.

MZ: Which brings me back to my initial point about downsizing. High-speed rail requires unsustainable and toxic practices like mining, etc. Solar energy is obviously better than fossil fuels but isn’t truly sustainable if it’s solely used to replace fossil fuels in the name of supporting an unsustainable industrial/technological culture. As for those beetles you mentioned earlier, surely you know that valuable insects like bees are being wiped out by this same human culture. So what I’m asking is for a clearer idea of what you see as the dramatic and far-reaching initiatives we need.

NC: Bees are being wiped out, but beetles aren’t. The choice today is not between eliminating transportation and wasting fossil fuels, but between more and less wasteful forms of transportation. Same with regard to solar energy. There’s no point discussing options that haven’t even a remote chance of being implemented, and would be massively destructive if they were. What has to be done today is (1) large-scale conversion (weatherizing, etc.), (2) sharp change in transportation to greater efficiency, like high-speed rail, (3) serious efforts to move to sustainable energy, probably solar in the somewhat longer term, (4) other adjustments that are feasible. If done effectively, that might be enough to stave off disaster. If not, then we can give up the ghost, because there are no alternatives in this world, at least none that I’ve seen suggested.

Also, I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.

MZ: I do so because I feel the “environmental and other costs” are virtually indistinguishable from the “social and human consequences.” Preserving the unsustainable system that has put all life on earth at risk, to me, carries far worse potential consequences than beginning the process of dismantling that system. Neither option is even remotely appetizing but only one option accepts the inherent destructive nature of the industrial infrastructure as it stands now.

NC: Your reply illustrates exactly the problem I see constantly. You are certainly entitled to this opinion, but merely asserted it cannot carry any conviction. I’m sorry that you don’t see that your comment does not address the issue.

MZ: I’m sorry that you can’t see how it does.

NC: Then we agree.

MZ: Although we continued talking at that point, this marked the end of our official interview. However, I feel I would be remiss if I did not voice my fervent disagreement that there are “no alternatives in this world” to the four options Chomsky lists above.

We all know there’s much, much more everyone of us could be doing—right now—and the only reason so many believe these tactics don’t have “even a remote chance of being implemented” is that so few activists can see past (non-indigenous) “human needs” and/or have the stomach for drastic change. To me, the option that’s most “massively destructive” (to use Chomsky’s words) is the option of maintaining the structure that currently threatens all life on earth.

I remember standing in the vestibule of the Boiler House Theatre at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia, following one of the performances of the staged version of my book Coal Mountain Elementary in the spring of 2009. There, several of the relatives of miners who had lost their lives at Sago, stayed afterward to tell the director, the student and community actors and actresses, and myself that, although living through those events again through the play was incredibly difficult, they were so happy that now people were not going to forget what happened at Sago.

So have we done our job to remember? On this fifth anniversary of the Sago Mine disaster–and on the heels of the worst year for coal mining deaths (48) in the U.S. since 1992 – where are the journalists and media to remind us of the disaster? And to investigate whether any changes are being made in the industry? Except for a few brief pieces in West Virginia newspapers, the story of Sago has been condemned to the archives of history. This troubles me greatly. Because not only does Sago represent another one of the seemingly endless string of coal mining disasters that continue to this day in West Virginia, in the U.S.A., and around the globe, Sago represents a significant example of how our insatiable appetite for “news” in the current media environment can also play a role in how disasters such as these are covered and how that coverage can (and has) influence rescue operations and decisions made by those trying to save lives.

As Ken Ward Jr. reminds us in one of the very few substantial editorials on this fifth anniversary of the disaster, it’s important to remember the words from the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, spoken on the Senate floor after Sago:

I’ve seen it all before. First, the disaster, then the weeping and then the outrage. But in a few weeks, when the outrage is gone, when the ink on the editorials is dry, everything returns to business as usual.

It’s also important to keep the pressure on, to keep the memory of the Sago miners alive, to keep writing op-eds and letters to your representatives and senators, to protest, to organize, and to make sure that business is absolutely not allowed to return to business as usual. We’ve seen the record of “business as usual” at Sago, at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, at the Pike River Mine in New Zealand, across China, and around the world. And it’s a pretty deadly sight.

A leading candidate for president in Peru’s April election “took his campaign” to Vancouver, reported the city’s leading daily. Earlier this month Alejandro Toledo — who served a previous term as president — met mining officials, investment bankers and journalists, telling them his government would improve the climate for mineral exploration and mine development.

“One of the reasons why I have interrupted my campaign,” Toledo told the press, “is that I wanted to transmit the message to potential investors — investors who are already involved in Peru, and who are potential investors, that we are interested in their investments.”

For some, Peru is a Canadian success story. Before 1990, no Canadian mining company operated in Peru. Now Canadian corporations dominate the country’s mining sector, operating a number of major projects. According to Bloomberg, “more than 200 junior mining exploration companies, mostly Canadian, are searching for reserves of crude oil, natural gas and other resources across the country.”

As an illustration of the size of Canadian mining investment in Peru, in late 2006 ScotiaBank announced plans to expand its operations in the country to do more business with mining clients. The Toronto-based bank is the third largest in Peru and only a small part of the $5 billion Canadian companies have invested in the country.

Where some see Canadian success, others see problems, at least for many Peruvians. “In Peru,” noted McGill University professor, Daviken Stuenicki Gizbert, “40 percent of conflicts involving local communities are over mining. The majority of the mining sector in Peru is Canadian.” In a short period in 2008 Canadian resource companies in Peru were responsible for a number of socially damaging events; an oil and gas company entered an area inhabited by a nomadic tribe that refused contact with the outside world; a mine destroyed pre-Columbian carvings; the government declared a state of emergency over fears that arsenic, lead and cadmium from a mine near Lima could pollute the capital’s main water supply.

In October 2008, Zuniga, the president of the Achuar indigenous group FENAP, told a local radio: “We, as indigenous people, reject the Canadian company Talisman. We do not want them working in our territory. We want the Peruvian state to respect us and the armed forces to stop helping the company.” In the Spring Achuar leaders traveled to Calgary to tell Talisman to stop drilling in their territory because it caused ecological harm and social conflict.

The world’s largest gold miner, Toronto-based Barrick, has also been embroiled in a number of conflicts in Peru. “Violent conflict at Barrick Gold’s Tierina in North Central Peru,” blared a 2005 Canadian newspaper headline, as the story reported two protesters killed. A year earlier Reuters reported “thousands of protesters angry at a court decision to waive a $141 million tax payment levied on Canadian miner Barrick Gold Inc. clashed with riot police in Peru’s central Andes on Monday, the latest in a run of anti-mining protests in the mineral-rich nation.”

The most high profile mining conflict in Peru took place earlier in the decade at Vancouver-based Manhattan Minerals $240 million project in Tambogrande, a small town in the north of the country. This open pit gold mine would have forced half of the town’s 16,000 residents to relocate while creating only a few hundred jobs. Godofredo Garcia Baca, a leader of the anti-mining opposition movement, was shot and killed under suspicious circumstances.

The federal government has supported many individual mining projects in the country and has worked to provide the industry with a profitable investment climate. Manhattan Minerals obtained its concession in Tambogrande six months after participating in a Department of Natural Resources trade mission to Peru and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) partnered with Barrick on a reforestation project near the company’s Lagunas Norte mine. In 2002 CIDA began a six-year $9.6 million Mineral Resources Reform Project to provide technical assistance and technological support to the country’s Ministry of Energy and Mines. At the end of 2008 CIDA added $4 million to the project and the agreement was extended until 2012. The official goal of the Mineral Resources Reform Project is “development of activities oriented to the consolidation of the institutional capacity of the sector, which means the services provided by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and to contribute to the generation of greater confidence in the Ministry and its regional offices.”

CIDA’s push to improve the prospects for Canadian miners through the Mineral Resources Reform Project warranted a visit in early 2008 by the minister of international cooperation. Embassy magazine reported: “Ms. [Bev Oda] … arrived in Peru meeting with the Latin American nation’s energy and mines minister, as well as Canadian and Peruvian mining companies and NGOs to discuss mining sector reform.”

Last year CIDA chose Peru as a “country of focus” and the federal government signed a trade agreement with Peru largely designed to improve the prospects for Canadian investors. According to Foreign Affairs, “an investment chapter in the Canada-Peru FTA [free-trade agreement] locks in market access for Canadian investors in Peru and provides greater stability, transparency and protection for their investments.”

In truth, the FTA — with environmental and labour safeguards that are “even weaker than NAFTA’s” — might be better characterized as subverting meaningful democracy. The FTA is designed to remove any future Peruvian government’s ability to change mining regulations or expropriate properties of Canadian companies.

For Canadian officials pushing the interests of mining companies Toledo’s visit to Vancouver was definitely a sign of success. But many Canadians may disagree. Instead of “success” they may see imperialism and Canada following in the U.S.’ footsteps.

By “lag behind,” we don’t mean the U.S. simply falls a bit short of the leaders; we mean the U.S. is not even on the same page.  And by “the world,” we’re not referring to countries like Sweden, Norway, Germany and Switzerland; we’re referring to places like Latvia, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, Pakistan and Haiti.

Dr. Jody Heymann is director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy, chairwoman of the Project on Global Working Families, and adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Recently, Dr. Heymann and her team put together some statistics comparing America with the rest of the world.  Among their findings:

• 177 nations guarantee paid leave for new mothers; the U.S. does not.
• 74 nations guarantee paid leave for new fathers; the U.S. does not.
• 132 nations guarantee breastfeeding breaks at work; the U.S. does not.
• 163 nations guarantee paid sick leave; the U.S. does not.
• 48 nations guarantee paid time off to care for children’s health; the U.S. does not.
• 41 nations provide leave that can be used for child education needs; the U.S. does not.
• 33 nations provide paid leave to care for adult family members; the U.S. does not

Clearly, while the overwhelming majority of the world believes that it’s the government’s responsibility and duty to address certain universal phenomena — education, birth, sickness, death — the United States takes a different view.  No matter how universal or inevitable the phenomenon, we consider the government’s involvement to be, at best, an unnecessary intrusion, and at worse, a form of socialism.

It’s been said that in the U.S., anything that has a “value” can also be assumed to have a “price.”  Put another way, anything that can, in theory, be sold for a profit is considered to be automatically for sale, which illustrates our unshakeable confidence and faith in the virtues of commerce, and helps explain how we got in the fix we’re in.

Not to be coarse or frivolous, but to take the premise to its logical conclusion, it was this impulse that led to pay toilets at the airport.  It’s true.  If there was going to be a way to make money off something as biologically imperative as a bowel movement, it was going to be an enterprising American who found it.

Arguably, the only free universal program the U.S. has ever had was public education.  And while the public school system was once a source of enormous national pride, it is today under attack by privatization hounds dedicated to demonizing and exploiting it with skewed statistics and trumped-up arguments.  Seeing private and charter schools as the potential cash cow of the future, they’ve set their sights on jettisoning public education.

A note on the aftermath of that Upper Big Branch (West Virginia) coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners last April.  Despite all the platitudes and somber promises that immediately followed the deaths, pro-business Republicans were successful in halting passage of any meaningful mine safety regulations.

Even though Massey Energy, owner of Upper Big Branch, had 505 safety violations in 2009, the U.S. Congress let them off the hook, rejecting measures that would have made mining significantly safer.  The NAM (National Association of Manufacturers), a powerful business lobby, told the legislators that bolstering safety standards would raise the price of coal… and that was that.

Those of you who follow this blog know that those rare meetings of poets and manual workers — in Orwell’s England or in the present-day global North and global South — are something I’ve both written about and tried in various ways to organize over the course of the past decade. From “poetry” performances at rallies for striking Northwest Airlines mechanics and workers (through AMFA Local 33) to “poetry dialogues” between Ford workers at a closing plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, and workers fearing retrenchment at Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa, I’ve sought to create spaces where poets and manual workers might, as Orwell writes, create language together.

Quite simply, I believe the work we do as poets, as artists, has tremendous potential in its “imaginative militancy” (I borrow the phrase from Kim Moody) — that, when working with trade unions and social movements, we become part of the process to re-imagine something more than the present condition. “Perceptions of what is possible change,” Moody writes, “as new forces come into the struggle and the power of the class, long denied and hidden, becomes visible.”

Poets, artists, imaginative militants… the door into the struggle has never been more wide open.

Last week Tuesday night, I had an opportunity to discuss the issues central to my most recent work (Coal Mountain Elementary) with Al Jazeera TV anchor Shihab Rattansi. Unlike my appearance during the Chilean mine rescue (see my post on that here), this time I was back to speak to that unfortunate and almost daily story in the global extractive industries — 2 more miners were killed at the Los Reyes mine in Chile. And, as I always do (in good times and in bad), I reminded viewers that this is the major narrative of global mining — miners are rarely rescued, miners trapped underground rarely get to sing an Elvis tune on Letterman or run in the NYC marathon. Miners die. Almost every day. Somewhere in the world. Period.

Following my spot on Al Jazeera, I walked just a few blocks to AFL-CIO headquarters to read at the 21st Annual Labor Heritage Foundation Awards ceremony. Honored that night were AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Working America founder (and inspiration for the film 9 to 5) Karen Nussbaum, and the President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, William “Bill” Lucy. Other performers included Renee Barnes, who works in the International Education Department at AFSCME — and who knocked the house out with her voice.

Toward the end of the program, I read just a few brief sections from Coal Mountain Elementary. But it was especially in my introduction that I wanted to articulate poets to workers before these leaders of so many working people. And I wanted to, and did, remind those present, including the President of the United Mine Workers of America, Cecil Roberts, that this language of workers and poets that I was about to present was dedicated to the miners who had died in the past two weeks. “And not only in Western Kentucky,” I said. “But the miners who died in Chile; the miners who died in the Philippines; the miners who died in Russia; the miners who died in South Africa; the miners who died in Rwanda; the miners who died in China; the miners who died in Guyana… and all of these deaths in a period of just two weeks.”

As I neared the end of the list, I heard several shocked sounds from these leaders of various U.S. trade unions — gasps that this many workers had died in just a single industry. And after I read a few entries from the book and stepped off the stage, the President of the United Mine Workers of America was the first person to shake my hand.

It isn’t so much the first half of Orwell’s famous statement that drives my work (though that sentiment is certainly at the core of my writing projects, too), it is the second half: “it is difficult for these two classes to meet.”

This is the challenge of the present moment (it’s that CLR James/Facing Reality quote I return to again and again): “People all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention… Their strivings, their struggles, their methods have few chroniclers.”

Workers and Poets, sharpen your pencils. Open your notebooks (the old school marble ones and the new techno-school ones). Let’s get busy. We’ve got a lot of writing to do.

That the “saviours” were, in fact, the culprits. Three hours before the landslide, the San José miners had requested permission to leave after hearing suspect noises. Their bosses’ refusal imprisoned them under several tons of earth. Is this surprising? No. On the 30th July, a Ministry of Labour report had already flagged up important safety problems at the San José mine, but no action was taken, and the Ministry kept silent.

Of course, everyone was overjoyed at the happy ending. But the rescue show masked the extent of the problem: four hundred Chilean miners have died in the last decade. And more importantly, it masked the causes. “Poor investment and safety standards” said Marco-Enriquez-Ominami, Sebastián Piñera’s opponent in the last presidential elections. In fact, in 2009 alone, 191,000 work accidents were recorded in Chile, in which 443 workers died. And the Chilean government is directly responsible, as it has refused for the last twelve years to ratify the International Labour Organisation Convention C176 on health and safety in mines. Business enjoys unrestricted freedom, while the workers have no rights.

Behind the Saviour Hides a Billionaire

His face appeared constantly on every screen: the Head of State—smiling, focused, concerned for his fellow citizens. But was this idealised image perhaps a little too smooth? Who is the real Sebastián Piñera, elected President in 2009 with 51.61% of the vote?

At 61, he is worth 1.2 billion dollars, which according to Forbes magazine makes him the 701st richest man in the world — a fortune he amassed thanks to measures implemented during the blood-soaked Pinochet dictatorship years (1973-1990). At the time, Chile was the testing ground for the neoliberalism of the extremist economists who came to be known as the Chicago Boys. Piñera was able to profit from these privatisations by helping himself to the credit card sector.

Nicknamed the “Silvio Berlusconi of Latin America”, Piñera now owns Chilevision, one of the country’s largest TV networks, and Colo Colo, one of the biggest football teams and is also involved in distribution, the mining industry and pharmaceuticals. On becoming President, he was obliged to sell his shares in the Lan Chile airline (where he was the majority shareholder). He therefore wears two hats : Head of State and powerful businessman. When asked by the Argentinean newspaper Clarín about this ambiguous status, he responded:  “Only the dead and saints have no conflicts of interest.”

Piñera is certainly no saint. Monica Madariaga, Minister of Justice during the military dictatorship, has admitted to putting pressure on judges at the time when Piñera was a bank manager. The level of fraud rose to nearly 240 million dollars. In 2007, Piñera was also condemned for insider dealing by the financial markets authority following his acquisition of shares in Lan Chile. As the great French writer Honoré de Balzac said, “Behind every great fortune hides a crime”. That of Piñera is the colour of the blood of the dictatorship’s victims.

By hiding his past, and presenting him as a friend of the people, the TV spectacle at the San José mine handed the yellow-helmeted Piñera a real political opportunity. As a result, he rose in the opinion polls. The Chilean right, which dared not show its face after the dictatorship, has regained its prestige.

Piñera, the posthumous victory of Pinochet and the USA

Despite the scandals, Sebastián Piñera knows how to present himself to best advantage. His electoral campaign stressed his “love of democracy” and the fact that he voted against Pinochet remaining in power during the 1988 referendum. His election thus owes much to his image as “the success man” — as if making a personal fortune implied the ability to govern a country. Quite the contrary, his fortune was built precisely on undermining the community.

And he’s getting ready to carry on doing so. This admirer of Nicholas Sarkozy intends to privatise state assets, under the pretext of covering the losses incurred as a result of the great earthquake of February 2010. It would mean selling 40% of Codelco (the no. 1 copper company) as well as another mining company— Cimm T&S — into private hands. This makes perfect sense, given that Chile is the world’s biggest exporter of copper. Remember that certain US multinationals committed the most heinous crimes in order to keep control of this wealth.

In 1970, a progressive government led by Salvador Allende undertook to develop Chile and free its people from poverty. To do this, it had to regain control of the primary source of national wealth— copper — obtaining a fairer price and allocating the revenues to the pressing needs of the population. The United States let fly immediately: a financial embargo, destabilisation by the CIA, terrorist activities, every kind of blackmail… until the military coup d’état and the installation of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. There were thousands of victims, and a whole progressive generation was massacred or exiled.

In his speech to the UN in December 1972, a few months before his assassination, President Allende described the looting of his country by the US copper multinationals, the Anaconda Company and Kennecott Copper Corporation, “The same corporations which have exploited Chilean copper for so many years have made over 4 billion dollars in profits in the course of the last 42 years, although their initial investments amounted to less than 30 million dollars. Take a simple, painful example and a flagrant contrast: in my country there are 600,000 children who will never be able to experience normal human lives because in their first 8 months, they were deprived of essential quantities of protein. My country, Chile, would have been totally transformed by these four billion dollars. A tiny fraction of this amount would have provided all these children from my country with enough protein once and for all.” Piñera’s electoral victory is essentially a posthumous victory for the dictator, the return to power of the United States.

Besides, Piñera is planning to borrow from the Inter-American Development Bank, dominated by the USA — a loan which will also result in new anti-social cutbacks. This general offensive of the private against the public is hardly surprising now that there is a billionaire at the country’s helm. All semblance of independence between the two spheres has vanished: the Minister of Foreign Affairs used to run the Falabella department store chain, while his counterpart at the Ministry of Health was head of Las Condes private clinic, the country’s biggest. Even though they have temporarily abandoned these posts, they continue to take decisions which have a major bearing on their companies’ futures.

With such billionaires in power, it’s hardly surprising that business tax is ridiculously low— 3% in 2011 and 1.5% in 2012— all still under the pretext of the earthquake! In fact, Chile occupies 21st place worldwide in terms of countries which tax capital the least— and first place in Latin America.¹ The TV said nothing about the links between the dictatorship and Piñera, or about these anti-social projects.

Also Covered Up was the Miners’ Anger

In the country where the CEO is King, Piñera was still nevertheless obliged to set up a commission on work safety following the drama of San José — due to deliver its findings on 22nd November. He also set up a Mines Control Authority and ordered a review of mining safety regulations.

1. Price Waterhouse Coopers

Over the past four year Harper’s government has been offside with the world community on a whole host of issues. Canada was among a small number of countries that refused to recognize the human right to water or sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. On two occasions, Ottawa blocked consensus at the Rotterdam Convention to place chrysotile asbestos, a known toxin, on its list of dangerous products, and in November Finance Minister Jim Flaherty refused to even consider British PM Gordon Brown’s idea of a global tax on international financial transactions.

Close to the companies making huge profits on the Tar Sands, the Conservatives repeatedly sabotaged international climate negotiations. They angered many in the Commonwealth by blocking a resolution calling for a “binding commitment” on rich countries to reduce emissions and at a UN climate conference in Bangkok last year, many delegates from poorer countries left a negotiating session in protest after a Canadian suggestion to scrap the Kyoto Protocol as the basis of negotiations.

The Conservatives extreme “Israel no matter what” position definitely hurt its chance on Tuesday. “It’s hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days,” explained Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who emigrated from Moldova when he was 20 but still feels fit to call for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The Conservatives publicly endorsed Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, voted against a host of UN resolutions supporting Palestinian rights and in February Ottawa delighted Israeli hawks by canceling $15 million in funding for the UN agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The money was transferred to Palestinian security reform.

For the past three years, Canada has been heavily invested in training a Palestinian security force designed to oversee Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and “to ensure that the PA [Palestinian Authority] maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas,” as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted as saying by the Canadian Jewish News. According to deputy Foreign Affairs minister Peter Kent, Operation PROTEUS, Canada’s military training mission in the West Bank, is the country’s “second largest deployment after Afghanistan” and it receives “most of the money” from a five-year $300 million Canadian aid program to the Palestinians.

At the same time as Canadian “aid” strengthens the most compliant Palestinian political factions, the Conservatives have refused any criticism of Israel’s onslaught against the 1.5 million people living in Gaza. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for “urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel’s siege of Gaza.”

Later in 2008 Israel unleashed a 22-day military assault on Gaza that left 1,400 Palestinians dead. In response, many governments condemned the bombing and Venezuela broke off all diplomatic relations. Israel didn’t need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. The Canadian embassy now represents Israel’s diplomatic interests in Caracas.

While Brazil and Turkey tried to dissipate hostility towards Iran, Harper used his pulpit as host of the G8 to pave the way for a possible U.S.-Israeli attack. A February 17 Toronto Star article was headlined: “Military action against Iran still on the table, Kent says.” The junior foreign minister explained that “it’s a matter of timing and it’s a matter of how long we can wait without taking more serious preemptive action.”

“Preemptive action” is a euphemism for a bombing campaign. Canadian naval vessels are already running provocative maneuvers off Iran’s coast and by stating that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada,” Kent is trying to create the impression that Iran may attack Israel. But it is Israel that possesses nuclear weapons and threatens to bomb Iran, not the other way around.

While Ottawa considers Iran’s nuclear energy program a major threat, Israel’s atomic bombs have not provoked similar condemnation. The Harper government abstained on a number of near unanimous votes asking Israel to place its nuclear weapons program under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) controls and in September Bloomberg cited Canada as one of three countries that opposed an IAEA probe of Israel’s nuclear facilities as part of an Arab led effort to create a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East.

Not content with taking on Iran, the military-minded Conservatives turned on Russia. Harper referred to Russia as “aggressive” and in a throwback to the Cold War, Defence Minister Peter MacKay added that Ottawa would respond to Russian flights in the Arctic by flying Canadian fighter jets near Russian airspace. Making sure that Moscow got the message, during a July 2007 visit to the Ukraine, MacKay said Canada would help provide a “counterbalance” to Russia.

Ottawa even prioritized the military over aid in the face of the incredible suffering caused by Haiti’s earthquake. Two thousand Canadian troops were deployed while several Heavy Urban Search Rescue Teams were readied but never sent. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon explained that the teams were not needed because “the government had opted to send Canadian Armed Forces instead.”

Overthrown in February 2004 by a joint U.S./France/Canada destabilization campaign, Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, has been barred from participating in elections. The Conservatives supported Fanmi Lavalas’ exclusion, congratulating Haiti’s puppet government for bringing “a period of stabilization” good for “investment and trade.” Ottawa backed up its words with deeds, adding tens of millions of dollars to a Haitian prison and police system that has been massively expanded and militarized since the 2004 coup.

Ottawa gave its tacit support to the Honduran military’s removal of elected president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. Mexico’s Notimex reported that Canada was the only country in the hemisphere that did not explicitly call for Zelaya’s return to power and Canadian officials repeatedly criticized Zelaya at the Organization of American States (OAS). The ousted government complained that Ottawa failed to suspend aid to Honduras, which is the largest recipient of Canadian assistance in Central America. Nor did Ottawa exclude the Honduran military from its Military Training Assistance Program.

The Harper government opposed Zelaya’s move to join the Hugo Chavez led Alba, the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas, which is a response to North American capitalist domination of the region. Canada has actively supported the U.S.-led campaign against the government of Venezuela. In mid-2007 Harper toured South America “to show [the region] that Canada functions and that it can be a better model than Venezuela,” in the words of a high-level foreign affairs official. During the trip, Harper and his entourage made a number of comments critical of the Venezuelan government.

After meeting only members of the opposition during a trip to Venezuela in January, Peter Kent told the media that “democratic space within Venezuela has been shrinking and in this election year, Canada is very concerned about the rights of all Venezuelans to participate in the democratic process.”

Venezuela’s ambassador to the 34-country OAS, Roy Chaderton Matos, responded: “I am talking of a Canada governed by an ultra right that closed its Parliament for various months to (evade) an investigation over the violation of human rights — I am talking about torture and assassinations — by its soldiers in Afghanistan.”

Despite the move to the left among the majority of the region’s governments Harper moved closer to Latin America’s most right-wing state. Colombia’s terrible human rights record did not stop Harper from signing a free-trade agreement that even Washington couldn’t stomach.

The trade agreement as well as the Harper government’s shift of aid from Africa to Latin America was designed to support Canadian corporate interests and the region’s right-wing governments and movements. Barely discussed in the media, the main goal of the shift in aid was to stunt Latin America’s recent rejection of neoliberalism and U.S. dependence.

One issue mentioned in a number of media reports about Canada’s loss last week had to do with the Congo. At the G8 in June the Conservatives pushed for an entire declaration to the final communiqué criticizing the Congo for attempting to gain a greater share of its vast mineral wealth. Months earlier Ottawa began to obstruct international efforts to reschedule the country’s foreign debt, which was mostly accrued during more than three decades of Joseph Mobuto’s dictatorship and the subsequent war.

Canadian officials “have a problem with what’s happened with a Canadian company,” Congolese Information Minister Lambert Mende said referring to the government’s move to revoke a mining concession that Vancouver-based First Quantum acquired under dubious circumstances during the 1998-2003 war. “The Canadian government wants to use the Paris Club [of debtor nations] in order to resolve a particular problem,” explained Mende. “This is unacceptable.”

The mining industry increasingly represents Canada abroad. Canadian miners operate more than 3,000 projects outside this country and many of these mines have displaced communities, destroyed ecosystems and resulted in violence. This doesn’t bother the Harper government, which is close to the most retrograde sectors of the mining industry. Last year they rejected a proposal – agreed to by the Mining Association of Canada under pressure from civil society groups — to make diplomatic and financial support for resource companies operating overseas contingent upon socially responsible conduct. Despite countless horror stories suggesting the contrary, the Conservatives claim that voluntary standards are the best way to improve Canadian mining companies’ social responsibility.

Finally, the Conservatives have knowingly supported torture in Afghanistan and embraced an increasingly violent counterinsurgency war. Apparently, Canadian Joint Task Force 2 commandos regularly take part in nighttime assassination raids, which are highly unpopular with the Afghan population.

Losing the Security Council seat will hopefully cost the Conservatives some votes and temper their more extreme international positions. But, for those of us working to radically transform Canadian foreign policy the consequences of the loss may be much greater. There has probably never been a bigger blow to the carefully crafted image of Canada as a popular international do-gooder, a mythology that blinds so many Canadians to our country’s real role in the world.

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile’s gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile’s privatised mines. The San Jose mine, where the men work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed – but not for long. On 30 July last, a labour department report warned again of “serious safety deficiencies ”, but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.

For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At the Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: “The forgotten past is full of memory.” This was the torture centre where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that General Augusto Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beauty of the Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.

I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara De Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived. Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on 11 September 1973 – Latin America’s own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.

Everywhere, it seems, Allende’s name has been eliminated. Only in the lone memorial in the cemetery are the words engraved “Presidente de la Republica” as part of a remembrance of the “ejecutados Politicos”: those “executed for political reasons”. Allende died by his own hand as Pinochet bombed the presidential palace with British planes as the American ambassador watched.

Today, Chile is a democracy, though many would dispute that, notably those in the barrios forced to scavenge for food and steal electricity. In 1990, Pinochet bequeathed a constitutionally compromised system as a condition of his retirement and the military’s withdrawal to the political shadows. This ensures that the broadly reformist parties, known as Concertacion, are permanently divided or drawn into legitimising the economic designs of the heirs of the dictator. At the last election, the right-wing Coalition for Change, the creation of Pinochet’s ideologue Jaime Guzman, took power under president Sebastian Piñera. The bloody extinction of true democracy that began with the death of Allende was, by stealth, complete.

Piñera is a billionaire who controls a slice of the mining, energy and retail industries. He made his fortune in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and during the free-market “experiments” of the zealots from the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys. His brother and former business partner, Jose Piñera, a labour minister under Pinochet, privatised mining and state pensions and all but destroyed the trade unions. This was applauded in Washington as an “economic miracle”, a model of the new cult of neo-liberalism that would sweep the continent and ensure control from the north.

Today Chile is critical to President Barack Obama’s rollback of the independent democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. Piñera’s closest ally is Washington’s main man, Juan Manuel Santos, the new president of Colombia, home to seven US bases and an infamous human rights record familiar to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet’s terror.

Post-Pinochet Chile has kept its own enduring abuses in shadow. The families still attempting to recover from the torture or disappearance of a loved bear the prejudice of the state and employers. Those not silent are the Mapuche people, the only indigenous nation the Spanish conquistadors could not defeat. In the late 19th century, the European settlers of an independent Chile waged their racist War of Extermination against the Mapuche who were left as impoverished outsiders. During Allende’s thousand days in power this began to change. Some Mapuche lands were returned and a debt of justice was recognised.

Since then, a vicious, largely unreported war has been waged against the Mapuche. Forestry corporations have been allowed to take their land, and their resistance has been met with murders, disappearances and arbitrary prosecutions under “anti terrorism” laws enacted by the dictatorship. In their campaigns of civil disobedience, none of the Mapuche has harmed anyone. The mere accusation of a landowner or businessman that the Mapuche “might” trespass on their own ancestral lands is often enough for the police to charge them with offences that lead to Kafkaesque trials with faceless witnesses and prison sentences of up to 20 years. They are, in effect, political prisoners.

While the world rejoices at the spectacle of the miners’ rescue, 38 Mapuche hunger strikers have not been news. They are demanding an end to the Pinochet laws used against them, such as “terrorist arson”, and the justice of a real democracy. On 9 October, all but one of the hunger strikers ended their protest after 90 days without food. A young Mapuche, Luis Marileo, says he will go on. On 18 October, President Piñera is due to give a lecture on “current events” at the London School of Economics. He should be reminded of their ordeal and why.

The Washington Post feature included a story by journalists David A. Fahrenthold and Kimberly Kindy, brief biographies of the nine miners who have died since early April (Thomas N. Brown, 61; Michael Carter, 28; Justin Travis, 27; Robie Erwin, 55; Jimmy R. Carmack, 42; Bobby L. Smith, 29; Wilbert “Ray” Starcher, 60; John King, 28; Jessie Adkins, 39 — it is important to say and hear their names), and a photo gallery from Montcoal that details the community, families, and after-effects of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster.

While I applaud the journalists and photographers for their continued attention to the ongoing deaths in the coal industry (and for not forgetting about the families in Montcoal), my applause ended when I clicked on the photo gallery to see Pulitzer Prize winning photograph Michael S. Williamson‘s images.

Many of us, unfortunately, are slowly getting used to being force-fed brief commercials before we are allowed to view news videos online. The link to my appearance on the BBC earlier this year to speak on the dangers of global mining, when I clicked on it this morning, was preceded by an ad from British Petroleum “Making it Right” campaign.

It’s one thing to be subjected to Xerox or Amway ads before watching the latest news from around the world (I can’t stand the ads myself, and always mute them). Yet to me, it seems, it’s even more egregious when a corporate energy lobby like AmericasPower.org purchases space to promote the industry that killed the miners. Yet that’s just what happened when I clicked on the Washington Post‘s photo gallery for this feature:

The advertisement accompanying “Deaths at America’s Coal Mines” opens with a symbolic sunrise over a coal facility. Viewers then hear the story about Daniel Connell, an engineer/project manager at Consol Energy, and his work on attempting to find ways to capture and store CO2 (a job, as the images show us, that occurs above the surface of the earth).

As we hear about Dan’s research, the advertisement shows us an iconic image of Pittsburgh, the once sooty industrial town that has slowly been transforming itself in the more sanitized post-industrial age. By contrast, mountain top removal operations in West Virginia or Kentucky, or photos of miners suffering from black lung like those of Les Stone, are–it should go without saying–nowhere to be seen. Remember, coal is clean.

If you visit the website of America’s Power, you can see the entire 2-minute video advertisement. Near the end of the piece, the lobby enlists Dan to proclaim the future they see for coal. “The technical pieces are all there,” Dan says. “The challenge is finding ways to do this on a widespread scale and also to reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of the technology…” There is no mention of the miners who will die mining it–nor the mountains whose tops will be removed to extract coal, or the communities that will be devastated in the removal’s aftermath.

Only then, fortunately and finally, will the patient viewer be rewarded with Williamson’s photographs. And only here, in these images from West Virginia, will we see something beyond the “technical pieces” that are all there; only here will we see the utter and permanent inefficiency of the technology.

The text that accompanies the photograph below reads as follows: “Joan Adkins and Buddy Adkins hold a photo of their deceased son Jesse Adkins.”

Jesse died on July 29, 2010 at the Loveridge Mine in Marion County, West Virgina. The Loveridge Mine is owned by none other than Daniel Connell’s employer, Consul Energy.