How A Rising Anti-Mining Movement Is Challenging Portugal’s ‘White Gold’ Rush

The global transition to renewable energy and electric vehicles — technologies that are currently powered by lithium-ion batteries — is creating a high demand for lithium, popularly known as white gold, among other minerals. In Portugal, where some of the largest reserves of lithium in Europe are located, the government recently launched a strategy to increase mining and supply of the mineral for this emerging market. However, residents and organizations throughout the country are questioning the impacts of that large-scale mining plan and who will really benefit from it.

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Mining Culture Wars Escalate In Oaxaca

Tourism is on the rise in the picturesque city of Oaxaca, known for its smoky mezcal, activist art scene, and diverse patchwork of Indigenous cultures. This year, visitors to the tiny airport in southern Mexico—where traffic is up 34 percent—were greeted by a billboard depicting smiling miners in a verdant field. “Welcome to Oaxaca,” the sign read, “where progress and nature coexist. Cuzcatlán Mining Company.” Cuzcatlán is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Fortuna Silver Mines, a Vancouver-based company that operates a gold and silver mine an hour south of the airport.

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Former San Carlos Apache Tribe Chair Walking To Traditional Lands To Protest Copper Mine

The former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe will walk to his tribe’s traditional lands near Superior, where Resolution Copper plans to build a large underground mine.

Wendsler Nosie Sr., who was the chairman from 2006-2010, wrote in a letter to the U.S. Forest Service he’s starting his 44-mile walk from the San Carlos Apache Tribe’s reservation Thursday to Oak Flat. Oak Flat is a sacred site that sits inside the Tonto National Forest east of Phoenix. He said he wants to raise awareness about the environmental and religious impacts of the mine.

“I have to vacate where you put my family as prisoners of war where you’ve instructed us, even programmed us, that this is where we originated from,” Nosie said in reference to his conversation with the Forest Service.

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Multinational Mining Corporations Are Exploiting U.S. Taxpayers

Under the Trump administration, corporate profits have taken priority over public lands time and time again. However, the biggest of all handouts to the mining industry started decades before Donald Trump was even born: the General Mining Act of 1872, a woefully outdated law that governs extraction of hardrock minerals in the United States. This law allows companies to mine for metals and other minerals on public lands for free; exposes nearby communities and rivers to perpetual toxic waste; and gives tribes and land managers no meaningful opportunity for input.

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Extractivism And Resistance In North Africa

Large-scale oil and gas extraction in Algeria, phosphate mining; water-intensive agribusiness and mass tourism in Morocco and Tunisia, are all aspects of an extractivist model of development that is accompanied by disastrous social and environmental consequences, affecting the most marginalised sections in society. Extractivism refers to activities that over-exploit natural resources destined particularly for export to world markets. As such, it is not limited to minerals and oil: it extends to productive activities which overexploit land, water and biodiversity…

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The Coup In Bolivia Has Everything To Do With The Screen You’re Using To Read This

When you look at your computer screen, or the screen on your smartphone or the screen of your television set, it is a liquid crystal display (LCD). An important component of the LCD screen is indium, a rare metallic element that is processed out of zinc concentrate. The two largest sources of indium can be found in eastern Canada (Mount Pleasant) and in Bolivia (Malku Khota). Canada’s deposits have the potential to produce 38.5 tons of indium per year, while Bolivia’s considerable mines would be able to produce 80 tons per year.

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Uranium Mining And My Family’s Story

My name is Tommy Rock, PhD., and I am from the Navajo tribe in the southwest U.S. I live in Monument Valley, Utah, which is in southeastern Utah near the Four Corners area (where the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet). Monument Valley is also on the Navajo Nation.  Monument Valley was made famous by John Wayne and John Ford when it appeared in their western movies such as She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache, just to name a few. This place has a beautiful red stone hovering above the arid desert landscape.

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JPMorgan Chase Metals Desk Charged With Being A Criminal Enterprise For Rigging Metals Prices

Two notable things happened on Monday, September 16, 2019. Rates started to spike in the overnight loan (repo) market, reaching a high of 10 percent the next day and forcing the Federal Reserve to step in as a lender of last resort for the first time since the financial crisis. The Fed has had to intervene every business day since then with overnight loans, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to its primary dealers, while also providing $150 billion in 14-day term loans to unnamed banks.

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While ‘Zombie’ Mines Idle, Cleanup And Workers Suffer In Limbo

PARADOX, COLO. — The sound of metal banging against metal broke the calm on the high mesa separating Colorado’s Paradox and Big Gypsum valleys. An old rusted headframe marked the entrance to an abandoned uranium mine that, from a distance, looked as if its workers were simply off on a lunch break. Jennifer Thurston, a local environmentalist, paused at the edge of the dirt road, wondering what caused the noise. Then she walked closer, finding ample evidence of the site’s long disuse.

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Tribes Win Ruling Against Copper Mine On Ancestral Territory

Phoenix – A federal judge has halted plans to begin digging an open-pit copper mine this month south of Tucson, citing an “inherently flawed” analysis of surface-use rights by the U.S. Forest Service. The Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains has for more than a decade been tied up in litigation over the permits needed to open what would be the third largest copper mine in the U.S. Construction had been slated to begin Thursday. Wednesday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge James Soto of Arizona overturns a decision by the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 that granted Rosemont Copper Co. final approval to dig a large-scale pit mine in the Coronado National Forest.

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‘No Pay, We Stay’; Protesting Miners In Harlan County Are Not Going Anywhere

People and organizations continued to stop by a railroad track in Cumberland Tuesday, bringing food and water to protesting miners. The miners have prevented a train hauling coal from the Cloverlick #3 mine for more than 24 hours. One group among the endless stream of supporters came from JonEvan Jack’s in Corbin. They rolled their mobile kitchen to Harlan to feed the miners free of charge. “I just seen these people and they need help. I know what it’s like to go without a paycheck,” said owner Nathan Brown. “I think they already know their community supports them.

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Corporate Gangster: Adani’s Pursuit Of Scientists

The Adani conglomerate should be best described as a bloated gangster, promising the earth even as it mines it.  Like other corporate thugs of such disposition, it will do things within, and if necessary outside, the regulatory framework it encounters.  Where necessary, it will libel detractors and bribe critics, speak of a fictional number of as yet non-existent jobs, and claim that it is green in its coaling practices. It will also hire legal firms claiming to be trained attack dogs and hector the national broadcaster to pull unflattering stories from publication and discussion.

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Mining Corporations Flagrantly Plunder the Global South Without Consequence

The big driver of the world economy is a plundering process where powerful corporations loot the natural resources of low-income countries.

These highly influential multinational corporations (MNCs) facilitate the expatriation of profits and natural assets from resource-rich but capital-poor countries by engaging in a wide range of morally egregious profit maximization practices. Predatory practices carried out by MNCs deprive developing countries of being able to benefit equitably from their own natural resource supply and ultimately undermine their pursuit of emancipatory economic development policies.

How do systematic underdevelopment and exploitation of developing countries and their peoples occur? Two common strategies of corporate plunder through global extractive industries are rent-seeking and wage exploitation.

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Corporate Trade Tribunals Used By Mining Companies Against Communities And Governments

The right of foreign investors to sue governments in international tribunals is one of the most extreme examples of excessive power granted to corporations through free trade agreements and investment treaties. For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

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Welcome To Hell: The Peruvian Mining City Of La Rinconada

No one can agree how high above the sea level that La Rinconada really lies at: 5,300 meters or 5,200 meters?On the access road, a metal plate says 5,015. But who really cares? It is indisputably the highest settlement in the world; a gold mining town, a concentration of misery,a community of around 70,000 inhabitants, many of whom have beenpoisoned by mercury. A place where countless women and children get regularly raped, where law and order collapsed quite some time ago, where young girls are sent to garbage dumps in order to ‘recycle’ terribly smelling waste…

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