GLENCORE, POLYMET, ANTOFAGASTA
MINNESOTA'S UNALIENABLE RIGHTS
By: Tim Duff, Tonka Bay, Minnesota
Thomas Jefferson, inspired by Thomas Paine, wrote eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
In the exhilaration of those revolutionary times, he changed the usual idealistic Enlightenment-era rights normally listed as "life, liberty and property," replacing "property" with "pursuit of happiness." It was this language that impelled and mobilized the common people to bear arms and put their lives on the line to win independence from Britain.
The desires of the commoners who fought for liberty from the foreign empire were forgotten when George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and other rich Federalists crafted the current US Constitution.
The thirty-nine delegates who signed the Constitution, agreed that the country could live without honoring royal privileges, but they felt that veneration for a wealthy landowning, propertied class, to which they all belonged, was vital for good governance.
They were on their way to enthrone wealth as the repository of the right to govern, as seen today in the case of Glencore and PolyMet.
Let's take a look at the criminal past of Glencore's founder, Marc Rich. While the world was watching oil-price fluctuations in 1973, a less noticed development was that OPEC countries broke the stranglehold of the monopoly oil companies on marketing. OPEC began negotiating with buyers through commodity traders, who had in the past, stayed out of the oil business. The primary trader of oil was former Phillips Bros. executive, Marc Rich. Within a decade Marc Rich & Co., the forerunner of Glencore, became the world's largest single commodity-trading firm. At its peak, Rich ran an annual $15 billion worth of commodities through its operations. The profits traveled through a maze of shell companies in the Bahamas, Caymans, Liberia, Panama, Liechtenstein, and other money laundering operations.
Marc Rich & Co.'s power over commodity markets determined the fate of small countries and large banks. All of Bolivia's mineral exports, except smuggled gold, passed through the companies hands, and in 1981 Marc Rich joined with his personal friend Abdul Ramhin Aki, head of the Malaysian state tin monopoly, in a play to rig the world's tin market by stockpiling the output. The scam worked briefly, until the US government released its strategic stockpile of tin, and the tin market crashed, putting a $60 million dollar hit on Marc Rich & Co.
Marc Rich remained undeterred, and maintaining the neutrality of the marketplace, he sold below market price Saudi Arabian oil to Israel, Soviet oil to the West, and Nigerian oil to South Africa.
Marc Rich & Co. was essentially an American CIA proprietary operation, but it kept its headquarters in the small Swiss town of Zug. Marc Rich, after the oil price increases of 1973, bought oil from old Price-controlled wells, and passed it through a daisy chain of intermediate 'sales' to hide its origin, and then brought it to market falsely labeled as new oil, which could then be sold at world market prices.
In order to funnel the profits to his Swiss headquarters, Rich would buy tanker loads of crude oil from its own Swiss parent and resell them at a much lower price to the American affiliate, 'losing' tens of millions of dollars on the deals. According to the US government, the result was the largest tax fraud to date.
The US government brought charges against Marc Rich, but he struck a deal by pleading guilty and paying the US government close to $200 million. The US government, however would unfreeze his assets, and Marc Rich & Co. could then reopen, and the business secrets that had generated enough profit to permit the company to survive such a large monetary penalty would remain safe in Marc Rich headquarters in Switzerland.
Marc Rich would resurface again in the early 1990s, when Business Week magazine named him the most powerful commodities trader in Russia. The IMF 'shock therapy' of structural adjustments widely opened the doors of the former Soviet bloc to dollar-holding Western speculators like Marc Rich, the fugitive metals trader. Asset stripping was Russia's baptism of fire onto the world of "free" markets, thanks to the criminal acts of Marc Rich, and IMF policies, with key help of Marc Rich, and American hedge fund billionaires, and a handful of Russian businessmen, mostly former Communist party or KGB functionaries, who had seized invaluable state-owned raw material assets during the corrupt Yeltsin era, and looted the 'Crown Jewels' of Russia for pennies, making them billionaires overnight.
Marc Rich, has another dubious distinction. He was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001, on his last moment in the Oval Office. Rich had been a fugitive from the US since 1985, and faced a combined 325 year prison sentence for fifty-one charges of racketeering, mail and wire fraud, tax evasion on $100 million of unreported income, not to mention trading with enemy, during the Iran hostage crisis. The FBI had offered a $750,000 reward for his capture. Yet, Clinton let Rich go free with the stroke of a pen, pardoning him because he helped bust Russia economically.
The London newspaper The Guardian has exposed the current criminal operations of Glencore in their investigative titled, the Paradise Papers, of November 2017. The Paradise Papers disclosed, that Glencore, still the largest commodity trader in the world, has consistently used the Appleby Investment Firm in the tax haven of Bermuda and the Och-Ziff hedge fund on Wall Street to pay bribery money of more than 100 million dollars over a decade, to “influence” politicians in foreign countries to buy their countries mineral resources. Och-Ziff has been convicted of bribery and paid a 412 million dollar penalty. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Glencore made a loan of 45 million dollars to Israeli diamond merchant Dan Gertler to “persuade” Congo president Joseph Kabala to obtain the rights to mine copper at the state run Katanga Mining. Glencore has also used cross country currency swaps of 170 billion a year, producing staggering poverty and starvation, with lost revenues to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Glencore faces money laundering, corruption charges, and has created massive environmental devastation, as it has destroyed the Luilu River in the Congo with acid runoff. They face more law suits than any other company on the African continent, and are doing everything they can to avoid criminal sanctions.
Antofagasta, based in Northern Chile, the owner of Twin Metals is the largest polluter in Latin America. It currently holds 1.7 million tonnes of toxic waste at the Mauro Dam at the Minera Los Pelambres copper mines that stands 270 feet tall and is one-half mile in length. Antofagasta has polluted and destroyed the natural course of the Pupio River. Antofagasta and its owner the Luksic Group, have for years been at the center of scandals in Chile of water depletion, corruption and devastating environmental degradation and contamination. Antofagasta to this day, has done nothing to deal with the environmental damage and destroy the Mauro Dam.
When exploitation of foreign resources becomes slowed, a turn toward the domestic economy and the cannibalization of domestic resources, both human and natural becomes inevitable. Exempted from obeying local laws, corporate elitist oligarchs treat states and municipalities like the Iron Range and the pristine waters of the BWCA, as resource colonies. Property's empirical cancerous conceit metastasizes as it devours its own.
A privileged minority own immense tracks of land and deposits of ore and oil and gas and water, in addition to commoditized ideas and titled rights to inventions, and stores of information, and creative works. They have no rightful claim to accumulate and monopolize and leverage for power those things that belong to all of us.
Our unalienable rights to protect the cannibalization of our domestic resources, both human and natural are the highest law and justification for proper government as our Declaration of Independence makes clear.
It was the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that stated, "to secure these unalienable Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it."
Justification for the American Revolution was based on entirely different values than those held by the Federalists who drafted the counter revolutionary property and commerce constitution. They were not comfortable and no friends of the democracy of "we the people."
We must recognize the unalienable rights of the nature that surrounds us, and not allow the corporate juggernaut of rights that have been unjustly attached to the legal rights of property. When nature is no longer categorized as property, when forests, mountaintops, aquifers like the BWCA, coal and ore deposits, genetic material, natural medicines and every strata of the natural world are freed from the cancer of the legal status of property, then the challenge to our rights and our common inheritance threatened by the dominance of private ownership can be stopped forever.
We must educate and inspire the people of Minnesota to act on the premise that our unalienable rights are the highest law and the justification for government, as the Declaration of Independence makes clear.
“We the People,” and all mankind will remain in want of true Democracy, so long as we neglect to stand up for our legitimate Constitutional rights, namely the right to govern collectively with our neighbors in our communities.
Self- government is our duty to carry forward, not political parties, not rapacious criminal businesses like Glencore and Antofagasta, and their hand- picked tools.