Protest of the day

Most workers remain on strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in Markiana, South Africa. And, it seems, strike activity is spreading to other mines in that country.

Update

From a reader:

“I went to Marikana on Friday of last week to see the situation on the ground and evaluate possible engagements by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. . .in terms of psycho-social work and in terms of getting a civil society coalition to be involved in the commission of inquiry.

“The sense we got from the miners that we spoke to was, “we’re not going back to work until we get our demands, the massacre of miners has only forced us to hold to our demands” (paraphrase). There is some kind of self-policing in terms of assuring that miners aren’t carrying around their Lonmin ID cards, which would suggest that they are reporting to work.”

Protest of the day

Fewer than a third of the striking miners returned to work at the Lonmin platinum mine in South Africa, and the mineowners were forced to back down on their threat to fire the miners who are continuing their strike.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Through a class, darkly

It just can’t be denied any longer: class is central to much of what is happening in the midst of the Second Great Depression.*

For Will Hutton [ht: ja], the “economic and social crises are merging” because of the hardening of class distinctions.

The protracted “contained” depression is making life ever harder and disillusioning for those, and their children, trapped at the bottom – while making those at the top ever more robust about looking after themselves and their own. A mean world growing still meaner fosters division and mutual suspicion.

Paul Krugman, for his part, sees this year’s election as an example of class warfare.

like it or not, we have an election in which one candidate is proposing a redistribution from the top — which is currently paying lower taxes than it has in 80 years— downward, mainly to lower-income workers, while the other is proposing a large redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the top.

So the next time someone tut-tuts about “class warfare”, remember that the class war is already happening, in real policy — with the top .01 percent on offense.

Meanwhile, Globescan found, in a poll of 23 nations [pdf], that in only six countries did more than half feel that rich people deserve their wealth. Sam Mountford, GlobeScan’s Director of Global Insights, comments:

These figures show that citizens around the world remain far from convinced that the way wealth is divided in their country is fair. This underlying sense of economic inequity may well present a challenge to governments planning to cut and deregulate their way back to prosperity.

The latest attempt to recognize the existence of a class divide in the United States—but then to deflect attention from its economic roots—focuses on marriage patterns, as if changes in family structure were an independent cause rather than a consequence of growing inequality.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Finally, to show what is at stake in the current forms of class war, we need look no further than the cash payments made to the families of the miners who died in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia—without a single high-ranking Massey Energy executive having been criminally charged or a single new piece of federal mine safety legislation having passed. As one commentator noted:

These people want justice, not money. Some of you posters seem to be lacking the gift of empathy. No amount of money replaces a lost loved one. In taking the money they, the survivers actually feel guilty because that the amounts they receive will allow them to live a different lifestyle. The problem is somebody had to die in order for that to happen. Furthethmore there seems to be nothing they can do to get the justice they Desire in the form of criminal convictions for Massey managers and executives. This problem should be disturbing to us all.

What the families wanted, as a fitting memorial for their dead children and spouses and for all the surviving miners, was class justice. And they didn’t get it.

Not when a war is being waged against them and all the lower classes by the tiny minority on top—who, instead of offering agape (1 Corinthians 13), look at the world through a class, darkly.

*Class is, of course, not the only determinant of current events—either in the first or last instance. What’s interesting, however, is that after decades of deriding the existence and significance of class, a wide variety of commentators and news reports just can’t overlook or ignore the injuries and insults of class any longer.

Protest of the day

 

Spanish miners are protesting in Madrid against government cuts that threaten their livelihoods. More than 8,000 have been on indefinite strike since the end of May.

Protest of the day

The Peruvian government has declared a state of emergency in the mountain region of Cajamarca where thousands have gathered in recent days to protest the expansion of a gold mine owned by the U.S.-based Newmont Mining that is already the largest in South America.

“Big coal don’t like this man at all”

 

Kentucky miner Charles Scott Howard lost his job at Cumberland River Coal Company last May, after years of tangling with management over safety issues at the mine. Now, more than 13 months later, Cumberland was ordered to reinstate and pay damages to Howard in a decision by Margaret A. Miller, an administrative law judge for the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.

The song was written by Australian folksinger Raymond Crooke.

Protest of the day

Police arrested more than 20 opponents of mountaintop mining [ht: db] at four U.S. House offices Wednesday, including six people from Kentucky who had pushed to meet with Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers.

Here is Teri Blanton, who was one of those arrested:

The Appalachian Mountains have been our home for generations. People have survived here for centuries and now the coal industry is making the land impossible to live on. These beautiful mountains are the oldest mountains on earth, and we need to protect them if we want to protect ourselves.

I want a well-educated, healthy future for Eastern Kentucky. My hope is that the people who have been producing energy for this nation for over 100 years will be a part of the new energy revolution. People need healthy, well-paying jobs that doesn’t destroy their lives or the lives of those around them.

I just hope our message will ring with my neighbors in Appalachia, and help them to realize that what we’re doing is fighting for our survival. Without clean air and clean water, we will not survive.

Protest of the day

The photo [ht: db] was taken by photojournalist Katie Falkenberg, who gave it this caption:

Erica and Rully Urias must bathe their daughter, Makayla, age 5, in contaminated water that is the color of tea. Their water has been tested and contains high levels of arsenic. The family attributes this water problem primarily to the blasting which they believe has disrupted the water table and cracked the casing in their well, allowing seepage of heavy metals into their water, and also to the runoff from the mountaintop removal sites surrounding their home. The coal company that mines the land around their home has never admitted to causing this problem, but they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking. Contaminated and colored water in has occurred in other coalfield communities as well where mountaintop mining is practiced.

Maria Gunnoe of West Virginia, an award-winning coal-mining activist, was questioned for 45 minutes by police on suspicion of child pornography after U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn’s energy and mineral resources subcommittee decided the photo she was planning to use in her testimony was “inappropriate.”