Cleveland-Cliffs & Northshore Mining, for shame

Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines,
It's dark as a dungeon, way down in the mines.

Nothing, but nothing, epitomizes the greed of big corporations more than the innocuous-sounding "surface mining" that is destroying Appalachia just to pull more tons of filthy coal from the mountains. Filthy coal, that sends megatons of carbon emissions into the air along with other pollutants, filthy coal that Minnesota Power burns at Taconite Harbor and releases into our airshed, filthy coal that could within a decade or two choke all of us trying to breathe. This we knew, or at least True knew.
But the merger of Cleveland-Cliffs with the Appalachian coal mining company with the Orwellian name of Alpha Natural Resources makes us accomplices. Last year alone in Kentucky, 50 million tons of coal were dredged from the surface of the Appalachian mountain range by, among other methods, cutting off the tops of the mountains and throwing them down into the valleys. The mountaintops are called "overburden." I shit you not.
Compare this with the five million tons of magnetite pellets being produced annually by Northshore Mining, a subsidiary of Babbitt-based Cleveland-Cliffs, now to be known as Cliffs Natural Resources, "A Leading Diversified Mining and Natural Resources Company."
It is time for residents of northern Minnesota to admit their culpability. The mountaintop leveling now supported by the merged company surely ranks right up their with the proposed Polymet copper-nickel mine that will create dead zones in our watershed.
Where is your outrage, North Shore citizens? What will you leave of earth, water and air to your children? Here's a link to the Duluth Tribune story that conveniently glosses over the devastating truth:

Duluth News Tribune | Cleveland-Cliffs announces merger with Appalachian coal company in $10 billion deal

White trash go for Hillary

Dear True,
I grew up in the Kentucky mountains of Appalachia. So I know from White Trash. They don't want no "Boy" to be president and so they cut off their own faces to vote against him. Obama is the only candidate who cares about the working poor. Hillary? Ha! She is the working rich. She and Hubby sent zillions of good jobs overseas with their trade agreements.
But the White Trash of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia hear from the pulpit how to vote and it ain't for the only guy who cares about them.
A terrifying parallel exists between Appalachia and Northeastern Minnesota. Both are victims of big coal, big mining. In Kentucky the beautiful mountains of my childhood are being cut off at the top to get more coal. The debris of the dynamiting and destruction are plunged into the watershed; toxic chemicals are re-named as the bland label "fill." So it well may be here in Minnesota if Polymet goes ahead with a new copper mine that leaches into the St. Louis county watershed and ultimately creates a new dead zone where life just doesn't go on.
Ya, the White Trash of the South and the dumb shits of the Northeast either don't know or don't give a shit that their lands and waters are being destroyed by big money interest to whom both Clinton and McCain are beholden. BUT, here at least we like Obama. Down there they won't ever, ever vote for a "Boy."

A "Sub-deb" from Kentucky (meaning I was White but not Trash)

PS If it is True that 56 percent of Minnesotans approve of "Pawlenty for the Rich" who was in large part responsible for the Minneapolis bridge collapse and our tanking economy, well I guess you get the government you deserve.

Ugly America

Dear True,

I’m thinking about the Ugly Americans, about what evil they have done to the world so far in the first decade of the 21^st century. Let me count the ways:

First there was what we might call 9/11 revenge: to avenge the deaths of 4,000 Americans on that tragic day we have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens in other nations, mostly Iraq and Afghanistan. We have left millions homeless, we have destroyed their infrastructure and centuries of culture, we have committed rape and murder by our hired mercenaries like Blackwater, we have caused 4,000 soldiers to die and untold others ruined lives, suicides, post traumatic stress unlike any war in living memory and we have failed to provide jobs or health care or training to these fractured souls when they come home. Have we taken enough revenge yet? Can we finally say, yes, we now understand why “they” hate us so much?

Second, the markets of the whole world are reeling from the bad mortgage loans given out by greedy profiteers, yes, here in the US of A. The dollar has tanked for similar reasons and the trillions of dollars of federal debt are owed by and large to other countries like Japan and China.

Next, look at our record on torture of prisoners, warrantless spying on everybody, destruction of a free press by the big media giants, dirty tricks politicking to win at any cost, the Bush-Cheney-Rove cabal’s devastation of our own constitution which so wisely provided separation of powers, the dismantling of all the good and great social nets that brought widespread security and prosperity after the Depression…. This list is endless. Look at the millions of people here and billions elsewhere who can’t meet their basic survival needs for food, clothing and shelter thanks to our ruinous economic policies and the rampant greed of big oil. Look at how everything costs so much because it has to be delivered via oil-based energy, at how diverting grain production to ethanol has caused starvation.

Worst of all, don’t look too hard at how fast the Arctic permafrost is melting and releasing poisonous methane into the air we breathe, or at the dizzying speed of carbon emissions already spiraled beyond sustainable levels (i.e. that 350 ppm). Don’t look because you will recoil in terror, because there is probably no turning back from global disaster even if we stopped all coal-fired plants NOW and we won’t. No it’s bidness as usual in the good old US of A, the greed and hubris capitol of the world. It’s ME, NOW, SPEND, PILLAGE and PLUNDER. It’s cut down the mountaintops and create dead zones where no life survives just to mine a little more treasure trove out of Mother Earth, an astonishing and horrific metaphor for all we have done, all we have become.

Anonymous

The Gunsmoke Monologues: Oh those f*****g PC Police!

Dear True,

Now the PC police are raising the “bar”: charging bar owners who allow smoking when a play is in progress, a loophole in the new Minnesota ordinance, the so-called “Freedom to Breathe” Act. Yep, in Babbitt. Presumably everybody there was either watching or participating in the play, “Gunsmoke Monologues,” (get it?) and chose not to breathe all on their own.

What the hell? If y’all want to police smokers, if you PLEASE, make them stop smoking right outside the building where I can’t escape the fumes. But, NO. This is considered on the level of “nuisance crimes” like littering our precious forests, that nobody bothers to enforce.

Smokers get to have a life and they ought to get regularly screened for lung cancer—which also attacks non-smokers but usually gets diagnosed too late to save their lives because the PC Police decree that they are Bad, that they Deserve to Die.

I used to be a smoker. In the 20th century there were allowances made. Railroads had smoking cars, clubs had smoking rooms. Now in the 21^st it would be so easy to create comfortable and pleasant rooms for smokers, with our high tech options to mitigate, ventilate, and separate. But, NO. The evil Smokers must be punished. No leeway is permitted, no comfort allowed, no recognition for the social community of smokers (Think, a ciggie after sex? After dinner?). NOT, you say: They are so bad, bad, bad, even if you were once one of them.

Well, except for letting them puff away while I am trying to enter a building, any building, y’all make me want to smoke again (in a comfortable room at home with the window open or lazing on my deck). After 13 years, I Need a Smoke! In Kentucky where I come from tobacco is a good thing. For Native Americans, tobacco is a sacred thing.

Minnesota is one of the worst states in terms of trying to find a sensible solution for non-smokers and smokers alike. Ugh. I wish I could move to Canada, but with Repugs like Pawlenty, Bachmann, Bush & Cheney in charge, the dollar is tanked and so I can’t afford to leave this stupid state. Don’t forget, it wasn’t the best and the brightest who left the old country for the New World (as dear Garrison Keillor has pointed out)!

Last but not least, Minnesota “allows” corporate polluters hundreds of thousands of pounds per year for environmental pollutants discharged in the course of their business activities. The state wants to invest in more filthy coal-powered electrical plants and a copper mine (Polymet) that will destroy all life in local lakes and streams. The state has jumped on the Ethanol Bandwagon even though it is widely understood that the consequences of ethanol production will increase poverty and hunger while destroying wildlife habitat around the increasingly fragile world we inhabit.

Minnesotans, get your priorities straight. Have a little compassion for smokers, give them a filtered space to light up, and think outside the PC Police Law. If you want to be really PC, start charging those corporate giants with the “new sin” of pollution as per the Pope and letting THEM pay the big fines.

Anonymous

Scrubbing the air

True hates ugly, smelly, polluting and global-warming coal plants. Minnesota Power's Tac Harbor project was reviewed in this Strib story. Two points of interest:
One, "air shed." This means the area covered by polluting toxic emissions from Tac Harbor and it covers all of Cook County including our national and state forests. The glowing PowerPoint presentations by MP don't really say much about this damage. They are basically trying to keep their filthy coal plant going far into the future by posing as cutting edge clean.
Two, "scrubbing" to reduce mercury and other toxic emissions has ZERO effect on global warming. Read the story below.
True

Scrubbing the air

Reasons Not to GlowOn Not Jumping Out of The Frying Pan Into The Eternal Fires - CommonDreams.org

True is nearly as old as Woody Guthrie. Surely old enough to remember Chernobyl and angry NIMBY debates about nuclear waste disposal.

Shock and awe, to learn that some Sixties apostates ala Newt G and Gang are now trumpeting nuclear power as the "clean" energy solution. Not, not, not. Nuclear power is even more dirty than coal mining, even more invasive than carbon emissions, even more evil than the Iraq war for oil.

There is NO safe nuclear power, whether to nuke Iran with or to create radioactive peacetime waste that won't self-destruct for a zillion years. I would have thought that we might have learned by now the dreadful lessons of Hiroshima, But. Maybe not, since the Japs were the enemy. Does it make a difference that in the 1950's American civilians were the innocent subjects of military experiments in nuclear and chemical weapons in schools and neighborhoods? That some of these citizens, including one dear friend of True, have died or nearly died from the toxic results of these cruel games akin to pulling the wings off of butterflies?

Reasons Not to GlowOn Not Jumping Out of The Frying Pan Into The Eternal Fires - CommonDreams.org

Better living through electricity in the 21st century

Dear True,
When I was a kid in the 1950's "Better Living Through Electricity" was a watch word. In class we saw movies made by General Electric about the wonders of dishwashers, refrigerators, washing machines, and even vacuum cleaners that transformed the life of the family.
There's been a lot of water over the dam in the last half-century or so. We've learned about global warming, carbon dioxide emissions, dirty plants that rely on filthy coal, and the terrible risks of nuclear energy. We've been told to decrease our carbon footprint on the earth, and to start by buying new light bulbs. We've done our best but blaming the victims doesn't really solve the problem.
We've been fed a fat lot of fluff about .... for example, the Minnesota Power cutting edge technology to reduce the damage from its Tac Harbor coal plant emissions which does not address the crucial issue of using coal in the first place.
Anyway, to the point. Yesterday the Grand Marais Public Utilities Commission announced a day-long shutdown of power in the west end of its service district.
I am a recipient of power in this district. I am given to understand that power will be shut off during at least 10 hours of the day tomorrow.
Insult to injury? Also yesterday the PUC invaded my land and cut down trees, more trees than we had agreed upon, in order to allow their Bobcat access to my power line. I was still grieving for the loss of my trees, and for the destruction of my footpath to the power line.
When I realized that a path at least double the four feet I agreed to had been cleared, leaving no vegetation or trees between my cabin and the power line, it was too late. My personally owned woods were utterly destroyed.
So. To proceed to tomorrow, when the PUC has announced its intention to cut off my power for at least 10 hours beginning at 9 a.m.
What can possibly justify such a long shutdown?
I am the unfortunate victim of the Better Living lobby; I can't do a single damn thing without electric power. I can't brew a cup of coffee, or give well water to my pets to drink, or cook on my stove, or turn on a fan, or work at my computer, or make a phone call, or check my email, or ensure the safety of the food in my refrigerator, or even tell the time. My friends and clients won't be able to reach me...
Some years back the PUC trashed the residents of Rec Park and demanded fantastic fee increases. They got away with it despite letters to the papers from dozens of long-term summer friends. This in fact was a gambit in a larger play to get rid of Rec Park and replace it with a super-sized marina, which thanks to our new and wise City Council has failed. Cheers to the new City Council!
Still. Today I am only writing to protest the 10-plus hours in which I can neither work nor eat nor drink water nor cook nor wash nor use the accoutrements of my home office business.

Nancye Belding
Grand Marais

Why am I not surprised?

Dear True,
I have been reading with interest the recent posts that taconite dust can cause cancer and that the public officials charged with public safety have withheld this information from workers.
Hmm, I just have one comment. This concerns the statements by some powers that be that there is no reason to suspect any culprit other than asbestos in the killer cancer.
I am a descendant of Appalachian coal miners from the Kentucky mountains. From my earliest memories I heard about "black lung disease." The lungs turn black from exposure to coal dust. Let's not quibble about coal, taconite, or asbestos. They all are poisonous.
Duh, it seems like a no-brainer to me. In the 50 years since my childhood, other poisons have entered the environment freely and what was once "only" a lung affliction has now turned to the deadliest cancer.
Nancye Belding
Grand Marais

Congressman James L Oberstar -- Global Warming Bill Passes Committee

Trust our congressman Jim to be in the forefront of global warming issues:

Congressman James L Oberstar -- Global Warming Bill Passes Committee

Coal Plants Prompt Warning

Here's a national story about the impact of coal-fired power plant emissions. We have a proposal from Minnesota Power to mitigate the damage but so far as I know it does not affect global warming. The latest word from international scientists is that fossil fuels are the biggest culprit in the imminent collapse of world ecosystems (i.e., within the next century).

Let's think twice or three times about expanding present energy consuming plants or even mitigating some of their negative environmental impacts. Let's think: do we want to leave a good planet to our children and grandchildren?

-True

Coal Plans Prompt Warning