Workers World: Long Live the Socialist Museum of Romania
Workers World, strapline “workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite” once campaigned to keep mines open, however, in our strange new world, it has joined billionaire gold-mine owner George Soros, some deep dark greens, “even the Catholic Church” and an unattributable “resident of Rosia Montana” to oppose the terrorist campaign of a big bad mining company - headed by a former “heroin dealer” - hell bent on exterminating the Romanian fish population, poisoning the drinking water with cyanide, re-establishing the “horrific conditions” of the mining industry and destroying the village (especially its houses and schools) all to provide golden trinkets for the rich. You couldn’t make it up.
Workers World is very afraid of the future. In a piece gilded with paeans to the Romanian socialist state it has picked on what is today an easy target: the big bad capitalist corporation. It shares with its new bedfellows, various greens, a fear of development. The past seemed comprehensible, though “greatly flawed” it had full employment planned by state committees of workers and peasants. The capitalist present seems incomprehensible brutish and nasty. Like its new environmentalist friends it has an allergic reaction to the plans of mega-corporations: “please, please let's go back, let's not dig up the earth - you will just destroy everything”.
Fortunately more sensible heads are about:
On the views of the local population: “The local mayor - who supports the mine - was re-elected with a near 90% majority. Candidates openly opposed to the mine polled less than 10%.” (Myth 1
http://www.goldenmyths.com/myth_1.aspx)
On the big bad corporation: The company is “Buying properties at full replacement cost (the amount required to replace assets in their existing condition) rather than the market value for the property, which would be either very low or negligible nothing in such an economically depressed area” (Myth 1
http://www.goldenmyths.com/myth_1.aspx)
On the environment now: “Currently the local environment has 110 times the legal limit of zinc, 64 times the legal limit of iron and 3.4 times the legal limit of arsenic. Leaving the old workings to nature will dramatically increase pollution; this is before Gabriel/RMGC, accused of pollution, has yet to mine a gram of gold. “ (Myth 2
http://www.goldenmyths.com/myth_2.aspx )
On the mine improving the environment: “The valley in which the village lies, the Corna valley, will be filled at the end of the operation, covered with clay, layered then covered with top soil, then re-vegetated. It will end-up as an artificially created plateau, the largest flat-area in the region ready to be handed back to the Romanian people.” (Myth 2
http://www.goldenmyths.com/myth_2.aspx )
On the Romanian government and the golden trinkets: Indeed, the Romanian government actually owns
20 per cent of the mine and so stands to gain at minimum 20 per cent of the $5.9 billion dollars profit, before any taxation is taken into account. (From Myth 6,
http://www.goldenmyths.com/myth_6.aspx )
As Workers World explains the current situation is pretty dire for the locals: “the people of Rosia Montana make an average of $3 a day and live in poverty. The main source of income for the people of Romania’s countryside is now tourism in the summer and what they can fish or grow for themselves in the other seasons.”
So I invite Workers World to read our
humble set of myths and try to embrace progress. Mining has provided employment for the people of Rosia Montana for centuries they know about the industry they are not afraid. The potential to improve the environment, create employment and infrastructure and
possibly give the region a lift into the twenty-first century cannot be ignored.
This may not be the future that Workers World imagined, but rather than hang on to the past and hang out with their “back to the land” buddies – maybe, just maybe, WW could see that to those not infected by the ideology that despises the present and hates the world that man has created, actually want investment and want to give the future a go.
Mark Beachill 4 September 2007
