The Reality of Regulation

It’s politics, not protection.

I write this as a former regulator.

Whenever a government official, elected or not, speaks of Polymet, the tone is always “concerned” and assures the public that “they want to get this right.” They will then, as is true in almost any public political statement, deflect responsibility and disperse credit while erasing history. Evidence based politics has never existed when it comes to mining. The same is true with the realities of regulation.

We are much better off than before the now existing laws, whether state or federal. The Environmental review process does place limits and requirements on such projects, and pollution regulation does save us, our children and the natural world from much harm. But, laws must actually be enforced for protection to work. That is where the failure almost always lies.

There are many good regulators and scientists who work in Government. They attempt to do their jobs with great care and concern despite all the forces against them. The cynical, ladder climbing opportunists, political appointees and corporate servants exist everywhere, and that’s where the problem starts. The old Roman axiom “Cui Bono?” which asks “Who benefits?” is still true. Human greed has not changed at all, and in these days of revolving door lobbyists and essentially legalized bribery, it might be worse. Given two kids in school and loans to pay off, self-censorship is as common as direct orders to shut up, and not mentioning the potential problems or over-permit discharges is more common than the public knows.

Mining in Minnesota is big business, and unfortunately, it is the also the state’s business. There are statutes obligating state government to develop and support mining. There is an entire division (Lands and Minerals) of the Department of Natural Resources devoted to “developing” and “diversifying” the state’s resources, which does everything from having a mineral core library to supposedly ensuring reclamation or compliance with state rules. Thus, the politicians and spokesman will say “Everything is just fine”, as we have “thorough regulation and review processes.”  Actually, the corporate spokesmen and lobbyists complain of regulation as burdensome and limiting of their fine industry, working behind the scenes with Range politicians to hand over vast chunks of public resources with no oversight for profit. Some elements of the DFL protest and fight back, but Range politicos work with Republicans to get their way. Government is not the public’s friend when it comes to mining, but instead it acts at the political level like a reluctant watchdog, only the shock collar is held by mining supporters. Any bark earns a shock and the dog learns quickly what the master does not like.

In order to understand this, one simply has to look at what exists now to understand the reality of regulation.  The entire northern part of the St. Louis River Watershed is physically altered. Not a tiny bit, but the entire area. Most in the public don’t understand the meaning of this, and they shouldn’t have to. What is Minnesota’s largest tributary to Lake Superior and itself the potentially richest producer of fish in Northeast Minnesota, in its headwaters, is a mangled mess. This means more erosion and more pollution, not just for now, but for centuries. Your children, grandchildren and their grandchildren will deal with the consequences of this. There has not been monitoring for groundwater impacts, which is true for all of Minnesota. Cities and citizens on the Range have had to move or deepen their wells because of mine pit pumping, with the companies never compensating them. We have given them free water and allowed them to pollute it. Wetlands lost have either never been replaced, never met standards or are allowed to be placed in Aitkin County out of the watershed. The politician’s response, including Gov. Dayton, has been to try and make it easier or allow them to move replacement into the Red River valley or to allow already existing wetlands to be used as replacement.  It has long been known by employees and locals that at dusk, certain Taconite plants activate parts of the plant knowing that regulatory authorities are not monitoring at that moment and blow more dust and pollution out their stacks. The outflow at the former LTV Dunka pit has been flowing off permit for over ten years now. Despite their assurances and years of experiments at mostly public expense, they never did solve the pollution problem there.  At Minntac’s Tailngs basin, the sulfates and extra flow had killed Wild Rice on the Sand River, and the state and federal governments had to force them to change their practices.  The reality is this: without the Federal Government regulations, the citizens of Minnesota would be at the utter mercy of mining companies. The state government is almost wholly owned by the mining companies, and this includes a large piece of the DFL. It cannot be trusted.

Despite what is said, this is not a science based decision. It is a political decision based on profits. Once built, the necessity of keeping it going despite the cost to us, our children, grandchildren and ever on, will override any harm. Just as now, the words ‘Save our Jobs” will be repeated, as the desperate people trapped there will search for a way to keep their lives. They will be used like pictures of starving orphans. The words “profits” and “pollution” will never be spoken.  

The latest proposal, which says that water treatment will be needed a minimum of 500 years, if not perpetually, says enough. There was no Jamestown, Saint Augustine or Quebec City 500 years ago. Cortez had not invaded Mexico. The Iroquois were just beginning to dominate the Northeast and the Mississippian mound culture still had large cities throughout what is now the central and southern U.S. The Cheyenne and Dakota were still in Northeast Minnesota. There was no British empire. The very idea that anyone can argue for this proposal as a solution is an absurdist joke and should be laughed out of the room. It is as if the Holy Roman Empire made a proposal for regulating a river diversion on the Rhine until the year 2000.  If you wish to argue for the financial assurance, I have some Swedish Kroner from the Empire of Gustavus Adolphus, along with some Weimar Republic Deutschmarks I would like to cash in. It is imaginary money worth nothing, especially without any water.

This decision is about people. It is about our descendants and what we will leave them. I empathize with people needing incomes, much more so than any cynical mining official or politician. Our society has plenty of resources to help them, it is just currently being sucked up by fraudulent military contractors. If I could, I would give them income and jobs they might actually value. I can’t. But we cannot solve their desperation by handing over our world to mining companies, who will wreck where we live, leave the mess and take their money and run. They will abandon the people there just like the piles of overburden, as they always have, as they have done before and are doing now. None of that will change. I cannot do that to my children, my grandchildren, their grandchildren and the countless others who will have to live with it. I cannot do that just so I can afford a flatscreen tv. It means nothing. This is our world. There is no escape. Here is where we live. 

Petionville

I am currently working in an area of Northern Wisconsin seemingly isolated from much of the world. Scandinavian last names still rule there, and much of the area is filled with lakes and the lake homes that now come with them. The population seems very old and white and in some ways well off. While the towns seem to be withering in some ways, in others they survive, and the remnants of old farms dominate the landscape. These are our Petionville's, the places where the illusion of a comfortable world for privileged whites still exists. Not by law, perhaps, but by wealth. I see why they vote in the disconnected way they do, for they are disconnected from the reality of the country and most people's lives. The older whites, living off the largesse of the old Republic, cast themselves as deserving in a frightening world. They are our fascists, ready to blow up the world for the right to shop at walmart and drink coffee without the bother of all those poor people. Often, as retired rentiers, they provide nothing but empty opinions and traffic problems.

Colony and Collaboration II

In public discussion regarding the Iron Range, two legacies are commonly omitted. One is the environmental, or the impacts to nature. The other, which cannot be separated from that, is the social.

One myth repeated by many officials is that there are no "significant" environmental problems from mining. They will claim  the water resources of the area remain relatively clean, and other impacts are minimal.

While in comparison to other areas of the state, the north and northeast remain relatively unimpaired but is largely a case of small populations and little agriculture.  The St. Louis River, however, is impacted, with much of its northern portion physically altered by mining. The lag time for these impacts affecting the mainstem of the river will be in centuries. The river is impacted, whether by increased mercury, erosion or extirpated species such as Wild Rice. Sub-watersheds such as the East Swan River are completely destabilized by mining and  minor urbanization. Reservoirs have been created. Parts of  small watersheds no longer contribute to the St. Louis River at all. When now active pits are abandoned and fill, their water will exit at different places, much like the Canisteo pit near Bovey. Wild Rice in the Sandy River was eliminated by Minntac's outflow from its tailings pond. Numerous smaller streams have been channeled.  Groundwater has been impacted, with cities boring new wells as aquifers drain out the side of pits during dewatering. The pit lakes, despite the fantasy designs depicting pleasant lakes surrounded by suburban style cabins, will actually be much more like the former pit lakes now. A small zone with adequate habitat for fish, but the depths rich in toxic hydrogen sulfide, far too polluted for anything to survive, except for some very exotic species hardly familiar except to biologists.  The entire landscape has been altered over a large area, and many of the impacts may not be known for centuries.  Much of it is nothing more than a very large and abandoned industrial brownfield.

Socially, the area suffers also. The cities are in decline and have been for three decades now. They are aging, and drug use is common. It is simply no longer  a case of leaving for economic reasons, but leaving also for social reasons. Life in a world of closed down bars and shuttered store fronts is not appealing. The surrounding countryside does fare slightly better, as for many this is where they actually want to live in the region. Why would you live in a ghost town of rentals and overly perceived crime when your goal is to have a forty acre country home ten miles out of town? This is no longer the world of seventy years ago where living in a city made a difference in your access to certain things, except maybe for broadband, the new electricity of infrastructure.  This is not New York.

This is not uncommon. Most mining regions end like this, whether the old Gogebic Range of the Upper Peninsula, Anaconda, Butte and Libby, Montana or the old Cuyuna Range of north central Minnesota. Everywhere mines existed, there are environmental legacies our descendants will curse us for, as we have left them nothing more than pollution and abandoned places. Some are worse than others.  Our pyramids are shrinking, aging towns, old trailer courts, brownfields and billions of wasted resources spent cleaning up the mess.

The question is, why should or will the Range be any different?

The Range communities, because of State investment and subsidy, simply lasted longer then those other places. This perhaps creates a misconception that they  will avoid the same fate. But truthfully, why should Hoyt Lakes or Babbitt, both built specifically for mining projects, not end like Pine Point, Northwest Territories? 

To be continued...

Of Colony and Collaboration.

When thinking about Northeastern Minnesota and the Iron Range in particular, writers and reporters focus on the last three decades of economic decline. Most often,  the proposed solutions for today's problems follow, the range of debate limited between the  pro-mining and diversification arguments. However, today's debate often avoids historical context. Historian Jeff Manuel's recent study,Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915-2000, is invaluable to understanding today's Iron Range.

Another possible interpretation of Northeastern Minnesota and of the Iron Range is that of a resource colony, a view once common to workers but long forgotten . In this view, one sees not only today's workers, but local and state political officials and their government institutions as colonial collaborators, often personally benefiting from the resource exploitation. Now, they are often the principal project drivers in a (usually) claimed  attempt to save the region from economic depression. 

This once held view disappeared in the taconite plant building boom, where for nearly two decades the economic troubles were largely forgotten as money fell from the sky. While Duluth, especially Western Duluth, faced an exodus as plants closed, the Range grew for the entire decade. It was that era's Western North Dakota. 

What is forgotten, however, is that while workers and local elites benefited,  the ownership still existed elsewhere.  The profits were  shipped out with the ore. 

The State had actually done much of the work developing the method to use taconite, and then altered the tax system, increasing the profits in exchange for building the plants and exploiting the resource. Under the federal tax system at the time, the incentive was to build physical capital as a tax advantage. There was a limit to how much cash could be extracted in any given year.  The plants were thus built and run in a cost-plus structure, not fully subject to market conditions until the early 1980s. 

The histories of this time are of workers with little to do and inherent corruption. Workers often slept, and both theft and destruction of equipment was common.  Businessman and contractors exploited the system, often subject to the whims of purchasing agents and plant managers. But, since the money was flowing freely, there were few complaints other than the occasional strike. The area struggled with growth, not decline.

This changed quickly in the early 1980's, and the Range diaspora continues to this day.

We are a colony. 

It is easy to see the early timber and mining industries as nothing more than financial rapists exploiting both people and nature. An entire ecosystem was destroyed, requiring decades of public intervention and natural re-stocking simply to get inferior second growth forests. Early mining is also easily viewed as exploitative, between mine worker deaths, large scale destruction and blacklisted workers. It is also easy to see the clear assistance of the government, between police assistance during strikes or legal maneuvers such as splitting off mineral from surface property rights, now a source of much absurdest humor. They, and the company men, were collaborators. 

When local, state or federal governments collaborate with the industry, it is now called "economic development." Despite this renaming, at no time is any amount of profit other than taxes and wages exchanged for this. And, at the same time, the industry  exploits the other natural resources, especially water, without compensating either society or the natural world. The state funds basic research, and the IRRRB returns collected taxes if the plants "upgrade", better called a promise to continue the industry. More could be added. In short, they collaborate.

There is no alternative seen but collaboration with far off capital, no matter how they treat the colony. And we are left begging.  

The collaborators are now more extreme than ever. They  use government power and financing to assist multi-national corporations, such as Glencore-Xstrata, naming it "economic development" or a "jobs" program rather than assistance to a private corporation with a record of human rights violations and environmental destruction. Other assistance has been doled out, whether Essar, Mesabi Nugget or Magnetation. Despite this, the people sit begging and waiting again. 

The collaborators have created and refined the system, from IRRRB to state government, so they can extract their own wealth from it. Whether as lobbyists or employees of various agencies, consortia and a myriad of other means, they have learned to skim the cream of the remaining taconite revenue directly, or by funneling it in to favored schemes. The communities and people have not benefited, and both show it. The storefronts are closed, and the diaspora continues, and the officials promise. Yet ultimately, the profits and power go elsewhere, and the collaborators continue. Only occasionally do the the Sepoy's rebel. 

To be continued...

My imaginary friend by David Brooks

His wistfulness for Obama shows David Brook's detachment from reality.He fails to inform us that the Lewinsky "scandal" was largely a fabrication of obsessed right wingers. Or that the same people, his own party, are even more obsessed with the imaginary evils of Obama. Or that Hilary is currently defending herself from another imaginary scandal, Benghazi, and that it again is his party wasting precious resources on it. He just happens to like Obama personally.

Why....

Are young women supporting Bernie more than Hillary?
Because they have debt, the jobs don't pay and they want a future. They don't like hungry children, environmental degradation and millions of people put in prison due to poverty. They're intelligent enough to see through the corporate scam that rules our lives. That overrides listening to the concerns of Vassar graduates with $300,000 lobbying incomes having to roll their eyes when a man makes a stupid sexist statement. And for the first time in a long time, they see it's about class, something the Clinton's don't have a clue about, having spent their lives pandering to the rich in order to make a living off the public. Reality is simply overwhelming the newspeak.