Mining Coal in Iraq - Democratic Underground

arendt

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Sun Jun-18-06 09:13 AM
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Mining Coal in Iraq

Mining Coal in Iraq
by arendt

....I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
....Picked up a shovel and I walked to the mine
....I loaded Sixteen Tons of number 9 coal
....And the straw-boss said, "Well, bless my soul"
....
....(Chorus)
....You load Sixteen Tons, and whadaya get?
....Another day older and deeper in debt
....Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
....I owe my soul to the company store

....- "Sixteen Tons", by Merle Travis

The globalized military-industrial complex (GMIC) has turned the armed forces of the U.S. into a great, clanking machine for gouging energy out of the ground. With the de facto privatization of our country's military by the resource extraction (oil), civil engineering(Bechtel, Haliburton), and mercenary(Blackstone, Carlyle Group) industries, the First Corporate Empire (FCE) is up-and-exploiting. You may be confused by the title of this essay, but consider these similarities to the Age of Coal(AoC).

* There is this black stuff under the ground that is the major energy source for our civilization. Corporations who control this substance have a large amount of political and economic power. The Robber Barons of the AoC used that power to twist a Constitutional amendment that said "slaves are people with rights" into "corporate personhood" in the space of 20 short years. Today, the GMIC has gutted thirty years of constructive and necessary regulation of industry and environment by their cynical revolving-door appointments of foxes to guard the regulatory chicken coop.

* There is something in the way of just extracting that black stuff. With coal, it was just some dirt and rock. In the case of Iraq (and Iran and Venezuela), the "something" in the way is the population of a sovereign state that has not directly threatened America. No matter to the GMIC; to them, the population is just so much mine waste to be pulverized and discarded.

* The GMIC needs workers to do the dirty job of following the coal seam down into the ground. So, just like in the AoC, they brought in the poorest, most exploitable folks they could find. After all, they were just sitting around in Appalachia collecting welfare checks; now, thanks to the FCE, these people are productive oil miners. Their job is to pulverize (shoot, bomb, torture) anyone who gets in the way of turning Iraq into a neocon police state.

* To keep the oil miners from even beginning to think about improving their situation, the GMIC brought in immigrants (today, from South America; in AoC, from Eastern Europe) and members of rival street gangs (Crips, Bloods) to fragment any solidarity that might grow up among men who bond together in battle.

* The bosses do not care about the health, safety, or lives of the workers. They only care about the product. Just as coal mining was, historically, a dangerous occupation; so is occupying Iraq if you are a worker. (If you are an executive, you live behind barbed wire in the air-conditioned Green Zone.) Miners got killed or injured because of inadequate safety equipment, the same way soldiers get killed because of inadequate humvee armor or body armor. Miners got no long-term care for injuries; and the Bush Administration is gutting the VA to make sure that is also the case for horrifically injured soldiers. And this welching on promises goes beyond post-battlefield health care. Recently, even major military bases, like Fort Hood, Texas, have been subjected to deep budget cuts. If this doesn't make clear that the GMIC thinks their "workers" have too many benefits, I don't know what will.

* Miners also got no care for occupationally-induced diseases like "black lung", an insidious crippler that could be prevented with filter masks. For decades, the coal companies either didn't bother to do any research, or decided they had no moral obligation to help the workers. In Iraq today, depleted uranium from our bullets and shells is poisoning everyone there, Americans and Iraqis alike. The consequences are cancers, birth defects, and general physical malaise. Health organizations have been ringing the alarm on DepUr since the Bosnian conflict, but the GMIC isn't interested. After all, its only the lives of ragheads and oil miners, and the survival of the world's environment. This attitude is hardly surprising. Coal companies polluted streams and strip-mined hills until forced, for a few decades at least, to pay some attention to the environment they were raping. Ditto the oil companies. So why should their wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. Military, have any better environmentally policy than its parent corporation?

* Mining is very hard on family life. Go rent "How Green is My Valley" or "Matewan" to see what a desperate, hard-scrabble existence life was in a company-town coal mine. And, just as mining companies extolled family and religion to keep the workers in line, so do the corrupt, flag-waving, Bible-thumping Pharisees shilling for "family values". Just like in a mine, soldiers go "down the hole" for a long time, while spouses and children wait at home and pray that their breadwinner comes out alive. The stress and extended absence eats away at family values; and every dead or maimed soldier represents a huge hit to some poor family's "values".

* The worst thing about the situation of the soldiers/oil miners is that they are their own Pinkertons. The Pinkertons were private armies and rent-a-cops hired by the mining companies to bust unions, break heads, and generally keep the miners from organizing to improve their conditions. Soldiers don't need any Pinkertons. They have been sold a bill of goods, most recently with their eyes wide open. Soldiers have done two things that coal miners never did. First, they took an oath of obedience to the chain of command. This is like the miners taking a blood oath to walk into a decrepit, dangerous mine for a sub-subsistence wage. Second, they perceive their employers (remember, this is a volunteer army) as the personification of all that is good about America. Imagine if the coal miners thought that industrialists like Carnegie or Rockefeller were decent, honorable guys. The worst thing about "coal mining in Iraq" is that the soldiers are mentally impervious to the fact that their sacred oaths and love of country are being abused by the same kind of Robber Barons that roamed free a century ago. We have gone from "What's the Matter with Kansas" to "What's the Matter with Fort Hood".

* One final point, that applies to everyone in America, not just soldiers: Miners were deliberately underpaid, and then offered "credit" to afford the inflated prices at the company store - the only place available to shop. This locked themselves into lives of debt slavery. The famous miners' song "16 Tons" memorializes it. Today, American is a coast-to-coast company store, with Visa and Mastercard supplying the loan-shark level "credit" backed up by harsh new bankruptcy laws. WalMarts, Home Depots, and the other "big box" stores have nearly total control of the market in the FCE. They have achieved this control with sweat-shopped goods from East Asia. And, the GMIC got a two-fer out of the deal. By shipping decent jobs overseas, they increased the number of desperate people willing to sign up for coal mining in Iraq.

----

So welcome to the new, improved version of the 19th century. Working conditions in the mines in Iraq are much better than in the colonial era. You can eat in your favorite junk food franchise while on the job in downtown Baghdad. You can videotape your horrific combat experiences and share them with your friends. And, rest assured that, if some version of the Johnstown Flood wipes out the miners in Iraq, the company owners' picnics at whatever the GMIC's version of a toney suburb of Pittsburgh is will not be disturbed at all.