Last night I sashayed into our local watering hole and found the bar crowded not with the usual suspects. "Who are all these folks?" I asked Tiffany the bartendress. "Miners," she said, "the mine's shut down". Ah, usually as I finish my day shift and walk into The Grand Bar and Restaurant, the big Greyhound buses taking the night shift to the mine up the Old Boulder Road passes me by. I always make a mental note about day and night shifts and office working and mine working.
The Stillwater Mine, the only palladium and platinum mine in the Western hemisphere, "idled" its East Boulder mine that is in Sweet Grass County, Montana. It's where they shot "The River Runs Thru It" and "The Horse Whisperer" so you get the visuals.
So along with trout, the river runs through a place that holds the minerals used in catalytic converters. So in this small county the size of the state of Rhode Island with only 3500 people in it, the financial meltdown and crisis of the Big 3 all started to make the people at the bar connect the dots. Known as the local liberal, I had a new audience for wonky talk about the Glass Steagall and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Acts and how those chickens are all roosting right here in Big Sky Country.
The Billings Gazette has a story here on the numbers involved in the layoffs.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/...
But there is more to the story than just another business cutting its workforce. In 2003,the mine's majority (56%)share was bought by a Russian company, Norlisk Nickel. Russia has the largest palladium mine in the world and the only other large deposit is in South Africa. Together they account for 83% of the world's palladium. Even though the mine had no other takers and was in a credit crunch, it seemed to me like a bad idea to have Russia controlling our palladium. The Big Three automakers buy 98% of Stillwater's palladium. http://billingsgazette.net/...
Mother Jones broke this story that no one paid attention to in 2004 called "The Russians are Coming". http://www.motherjones.com/...
The source of this prospective fortune is the Montana-based Stillwater Mining Co., which is the only domestic producer of two platinum group metals (PGM) -- platinum and palladium. Last year Vladimir Potanin, a Russian billionaire whose empire already includes vast PGM reserves in Siberia, took control of Stillwater. Regulators from the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) quickly approved the deal even though it gave Potanin greater power over metals that could be critical to the nation's future.
The author Peter Keating makes the connection between Bush pushing hydrogen cell technology and the fact that palladium and platinum would be used if we finally develop these fuel cells. But in the meantime, there is a lot of money to be made for the cronies of Bush.
Could this disaster for my county that now gets 40% of its revenue from the mine finally show my neighbors who vote overwhelmingly Republican that we are all in this together? Can they connect the dots between the workers in Detroit and here in Montana? Can they connect the dots between 4 years of greedy capitalists making millions off this transaction while the downside of capitalism, overproduction, took away the miners jobs and the counties money for schools?
Yes, there was still a smidge of anti-union talk, but it's getting drowned out more and more by saner voices. The unions at the mine did not cause overproduction. They made good money while the price was good, but now the metals aren't worth much. Welcome to boom and bust. Now that unemployment insurance doesn't look so communistic.
The mine is worth right now 230 million. I say that Governor Schweitzer ought to buy it on behalf of the people of Montana if we can get a contract with automakers to buy our palladium and not ship it in from Russia, South Africa or Canada. Simply make a law prohibiting the export or import of the stuff. Protectionist talk is the new thing and is coming home to roost with the chickens.
Read James Galbraith's "The Predator State" for a clear eyed head turning view of how we allowed and are still allowing a false ideology of the free market to keep us in a permanent feudal state.
My friend and movie star neighbor, a former "Batman" remarked last night that this bar represented a microcosm of America. Here we artistic types were mingling in this one room with miners, their managers, ranchers, welders, real estate agents, and car salesmen and talking turkey about Wall Street and Main Street. It is becoming increasingly clear to everybody in this spot that we are in a world of hurt. One conservative said that now he realized that the two parties were keeping us apart and that we needed to find solutions for ourselves and not fight each other.
And now its dawning on people that while the ranchers here worried about the wolves coming out of Yellowstone Park devouring their sheep and cattle, the real predators are the finance thieve, banksters, and their lawyers who make money on misfortune and crisis while we the people are left with the mess.