An underlying reason why we are so screwed

The Christian Science Monitor reported last week on an environmental controversy in Indonesia which has resulted in the detention of executives of a mining corporation.

It started in July when a local organization reported that villagers on Sulawesi Island were suffering from food poisoning, skin rashes, and strange lumps on their bodies. A local environmental group called Walhi claimed the symptoms resembled mercury poisoning, or, as it has come to be known, Minamata disease. Walhi charged that practices of Newmont Mining Corp. - in particular, the use of "submarine tailings," a type of undersea waste disposal that is illegal in the US - had polluted Buyat Bay. A three-month investigation by national police turned up mercury levels 2.5 to 10 times the legal level. Six corporate executives were detained on September 22; five remain in jail.

However, serious questions about the accusations have arisen because other tests by the World Health Organization and the government's Environment Ministry found mercury levels to be well within the legal limit. "Buyat Bay is not polluted with mercury or arsenic," the Ministry concluded on October 14. And the fact is, the symptoms described are not typical of mercury poisoning, which usually manifests itself primarily through neurological effects.

It does appear, then, there is a real question as to whether or not the company is guilty of polluting Buyat Bay, at least with mercury. But other than a legal wrangle, what is the underlying issue I mentioned at the top? Well, this is the opening paragraph of CSM's story:

Five Indonesia-based executives of Newmont Mining Corp. have been sitting in a concrete jail cell in Jakarta for nearly a month, caught up in an environmental controversy that could further impair Indonesia's ability to generate foreign investment.

That's right, the real issue, we're told, is not whether or not a mining company has contaminated a bay and poisoned the residents around it - it's the case's effect on the investment climate. That's what matters: Can Indonesia continue to sufficiently suck up to transnational corporations if the personnel of those corporations can't feel confident that they won't be subject to such indignities as being held responsible for their actions?

And oh, yes, the indignity. We're apparently supposed to feel for these executives in their "concrete cell," who were "caught up" in the case as if they were innocent bystanders swept up in some mass arrest. But suppose they were a group of five inner-city black male teenagers held awaiting trial on a charge of burglary. Would we be expected to gasp "a month? They've been in jail a whole month?" You know the answer to that as well as I do: We'd never even hear about it. But corporate executives? Treated like, well, like criminals, even when it's suspected that's exactly what they are? That's just not supposed to happen! Our social perceptions are really twisted.

Even more, our economic ones. Our economic system is more polluted than Buyat Bay even if Newmont Mining is guilty of everything of which it's accused and more. We are increasingly vassals of the corporate state, our economic futures long stripped from our control and the only countervailing weight - government - long since bought off.

This is not intended as a counsel of despair. Remember that feudalism, as all-powerful as it seemed at one time, did die out. And right now there is a vibrant anti-globalization movement struggling to reverse this trend on an international level. Global Exchange is a good place to start checking that out.

There are also those looking to develop a "green economics" that unites economic questions with environmental protection and human justice. One paired example, focusing on what's called "appropriate level technology," is the E. F. Schumacher Institute in the UK and the E. F. Schumacher Society in the US. On the more overtly domestic political level, there are those parties and organizations whose platforms include environmental awareness and economic justice, such as the Green Party and the Socialist Party USA. So carry on and carry hope.

The CSM ends its article with this quote, made, you'll recall, at a time when no legal determination about the case of Newmont Mining has been made:

Beny Wahyu of the Indonesian Mining Association warns that the detention will further worsen sentiment in the mining industry. "The new government has to explain that things like this won't happen."

That's the attitude we're up against, that governments and we as human societies are supposed to guarantee that "things like this" never happen to corporations or their executives. We may be but drops of water against the boulder but we should throw ourselves against it in whatever way we each as individuals can in the thought that drops of water can eventually reduce rock to sand.

Footnote: Via Japan Today, Kyodo News reports that

[t]he Supreme Court [of Japan] on Friday held the state responsible for the Minamata mercury-poisoning disease in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing to a close the only Minamata disease-related lawsuit that sought government responsibility in the outbreak of the disease.

The ruling marked the first judgment by the top court on government responsibility in preventing the outbreak and spread of the disease, which killed hundreds of people, disabled thousands and produced birth defects in the city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture.

Water on the stone.