Long ago, you & others asked me to find any proof there had been a manipulation of gold price. Here are some people which ADMIT to it! They MUST be guilty, they claim responsibility!
Gold Stinks Campaign
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Fri, 04 Sep 1998 08:18:44 -0700
Mike Vandeman (mjvande@pacbell.net)
From: RRosenhek@aol.com
9/2/98
hi Mike,
This is still in the beginning stages but here are some of the beginnings of a Gold Stinks campaign. Thought you might be interested in this.
Got a favorite name for the campaign that you would like to throw into the pool along with Cold Shoulder Gold, Hust the Rush, Lower the Fever and Gold
Stinks?
for the Earth,
Ruth Rosenhek
Rainforest Information Centre forests.org
1-800-555-8839
GOLD STINKS
With Berkeley-based Project Underground and others, we at the Rainforest Information Centre are starting to work with various groups around the world on a campaign to make gold "stink" because of the extraordinary environmental and social damage it causes.
The destruction is all the more deplorable because of the trivial uses gold is put to. The lion's share, 70-84% of gold traded globally goes to jewelers and in the U.S. more than half of that is for for class rings! Each of
us may nsuspectingly carry on his or her wrists and fingers the responsibility for several tons of churned up rainforest top-soil, for the destruction of trees and habitat for parrots and other rainforest birds, orchids, butterflies, beetles ...
We're starting to discuss this issue with some student environmental folks
and this seems a particularly promising opportunity.
These days with cyanide heap mining, mining is done with output as little
as 1 part to 3,000,000.
>From the Timbarra mine being blockaded in Australia where cyanide leach mining presently makes it economic to dynamite a sacred mountain into rubble and lace it with cyanide in order to extract 1 ounce of gold from every 75 tons of ore...
...to Placer Dome's horrendous proposal in Venezuela presently the subject of action alerts from Amazon Watch concerning the blockade by Pemon,
Karina, Akawaio and Arawako Indians trying to prevent their lands being
desecrated by one of S America's largest gold mines and their peoples from
being decimated by diseases such as malaria...
...to US company Freeport-McMoRan using their helicopters in W Papua to transport the Indonesian military on their attacks on the traditional landowners who are protesting the poisoning of their rivers and lives
...to the literally thousands of other disgusting gold mines destroying rainforests and other natural areas, displacing and poisoning indigenous peoples and dribbling mercury and cyanide into rivers all over the world.
Why are we fighting these nightmares one at a time? Let's bring together all the groups working on these issues for a fur-style campaign on gold. Let's go for Molloch's jugular rather than dealing with one symptom after another.
Let's take on the golden calf itself and the insane greed that it represents.
When enough people and governments sell their gold, the price will soon drop to the point where it is no longer economic to mine it because more than
enough recycled gold will be available to meet every demand.
Gold is becoming increasingly irrelevent to world finance. An investment
in gold worth $100 in 1987 would now be worth less than $70, according to
the Economist. Some countries have realized this and started selling their
stocks of gold, especially Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. The
formative European Central Bank has said it won't use gold as a key reserve
to peg to the Euro. Even the Swiss - a country historically wed to gold as
a hedge -- are considering selling two-thirds of their gold (55 million tons)
by referendum next year and the US Federal Reserve has circulated
strategy papers on doing it. All told, we believe the governments of the world
have 30% of all the gold ever mined in vaults - that is equivalent to 18 years
of current production. Given that
$100 worth of gold in 1987 is now worth $70 we don't see why they wouldn't
want to sell. How can we encourage the US and other governments to liquidate
the gold reserves such as those in Fort Knox?
The current depression in the price of gold is good for the planet.
Already twenty gold mines in Australia have been postponed or closed
since the value of gold went below $300 per ounce. We have to keep it
there. In 1996, if you include the cost of exploration, an ounce of gold cost
$317 to produce so the further we can keep it below this amount, the more
gold mines become uneconomic.
However, counter trends exist such as Y2K paranoia with the "smart"
money leaving banks and heading for gold, so I think it's important to weigh
in now.
John and I have put $1000 from our workshop fees into starting the research
to fill in the missing pieces needed to successfully launch this campaign
and our friend Allan Hunt-Badiner has thrown in his $1000 also.
________________________________________________________________________
** STOP THE PRESS **
OUR CAMPAIGN MUST BE STARTING TO BITE!!!!
Published Saturday, August 29, 1998, in the St. Paul Pioneer Press
Bloomberg News
Russia concerns spur plunge in gold prices
Gold fell to a 19-year low on concerns Russia may sell gold from its
reserves, dumping even more on the market at a time when the metal has lost
its appeal as a safe investment.
Gold is no longer the asset investors hoard when other assets tumble. In the
middle of global financial turmoil kicked off by Russia this week, the
precious
metal is down almost 4 percent since Monday. Gold for December delivery
fell $2.20 to $277.90 an ounce in New York Friday, the lowest since June
1979.
The decline, sparked by concern that Russia will have to sell gold to raise
cash to pay its foreign debt, is the latest in a 2 1/2-year slump for gold,
which fetched more than $400 an ounce in February 1996.
Gold is down 35 percent since then because other financial assets, such as
bonds, offer better returns when the pace of consumer price increases is slow.
Central banks have shed gold reserves and economic turmoil in Asia hurt
demand for jewelry.
***************************************************************
One of the groups working with us is Project Underground from Berkeley.
Here's a piece their Pratap Chatterjee had published in the Spanish/English
Magazine Abya Yala.
Gold, Greed & Genocide in the Americas
by Pratap Chatterjee, Project Underground
"The white warriors went across in their long dugouts. The Indians said
they would meet them in peace so when the whites landed the Indians went to welcome them ... Ge-Wi-Lih said he threw up his hand ... but the white man fired and shot him in the arm ... (s)he said when they gathered the dead,
they found all the little ones were killed by being stabbed and many of the
women were also killed by stabbing ... (t)his old lady also told about(how)
the whites hung a man on Emerson island ... and a large fire built
under (him). And another ... was tied to a tree and burnt to death" --
William Benson, Pomo historian, recounts massacres at Clear Lake,
California, May 1850
"A group of loggers and miners near the town of Pontes e Lacerda ambushed and
violently assaulted at least 14 Katitaulhu Indians in the Sarare reserve. The loggers subsequently looted the Indians village, damaging a
health post and school and stealing money, tools and vehicles belonging to
the Indians. Supporters of the Indians, who have attempted to mobilize
federal officials to comply with court orders to remove the illegal loggers and miners from the reserve subsequently received death threats and
intimidation. The Katitaulhu were also threatened with further violence by
the invaders. Medical reports state that 14 Indians were wounded, many by
having been tied up and beaten." -- Environmental Defense Fund report from
Mato Grosso, Brazil, November 1996
Thousands of kilometers, and almost a century and a half, seperate the two violent incidents against the Pomo peoples of California and the Nambikwara peoples of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Yet the root cause for both incidents was exactly the same: settlers in search of gold.
The Clear Lake incident was a direct outcome of the arrival of Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey, two ranchers who arrived at the lake in 1847, who captured and bought hundreds of Pomo, forcing them to work as slaves. Kelsey forced Pomo men into the mountains as virtual slaves to help him look for gold. Evenfually two Pomo cowboys, named Shak and Xasis, took the law into their own hands and executed both settlers bringing the wrath of the United States army upon them in the incidents described above.
The Katitaulhu are one of 12 Nambikwara subgrounded BR 364 road from Cuiaba in Mato Grosso to Porto Velho in Rondonia was opened by Brazil's military government. Decimated by epidemics and forcibly relocated to make way for the road, the Nambikwara died in great numbers making desperatepilgrimages in an attempt to return to their traditional lands. Some 6,000 gold miners invaded the Sarare reservation in the 1990s seriously polluting major watercourses in the area, disrupting local fishing and hunting, spreading malaria and viral diseases. The incident described above is just, one of many attacks on the Nambikwara in the last two decades.
Foundation of empire
Gold is the foundation of empires throughout history as well as the root cause of many genocidal attacks against indigenous peoples around the world. The Romans founded their empire on Spanish gold, the Spanish founded
their empire on Inca gold, the 1849 Gold Rush was the basis of the foundation of the state of California, today the World Bank makes a profit supporting gold mines.
Take Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, who arrived in Cajamarca, now part of Peru, in 1532 to trick Atahualpa, the last Inca king, into an ambush that led to the collapse of his empire. One of the last acts of Atahualpa was an attempt to buy off the Spanish by offering them a room
full of gold and two rooms full of silver. The Spanish took him up on the offer but after they got the gold, they murdered Atahualpa and proceeded to
raze the rest of the city to the ground.
Today the ransom room is the only surving monument to the Inca presence
but the region is still being raped for gold: it is the site of Yanacocha,
the biggest gold mine in Latin America, which is run by Newmont of Colorado
and funded by the World Bank. Almost 500 years, after the Inca died
defending their lands, the people of Cajamarca say that their lands are
still being seized and local people are dying because of the contamination
of local waters.
Yet economists, historians and media alike continue to celebrate the
metal for its role. In 1994 World Bank economists lavished praise on Peru
for beoming the fastest growing economy in the world by inviting in the new
gold mines while in 1998 the historians and media launched into a
celebratory frency over 150th aniversary of the foundation of California
after the famous 1849 Gold Rush.
But for isolated indigenous communities the arrival of gold miners has
always meant disease and death, whether it be among the Nomlaki peoples of
north-western California in the 1850s or the Yanomami of the Amazon in the
1990s as the two examples below demonstrate.
Deadly diseases
"They (the Native Americans) had been hiding in the hills. There was no
rain for three years and fighting going on every day. No clover, no acorn,
juniper berries or peppergrass. Nothing for three years. Finally the
Indians got smallpox and the Indian doctor couldn't cure them. Gonorrhea
came among the Indians. They died by the thousands." -- Andrew Freeman,
Nomlaki historian, recounting the story of his peoples in the 1850s.
"The biggest problem for the Yanomami now are the garimpeiro (goldminers)
who are in our land, and the illnesses they bring with them. Among them
some have illnesses like flu, tubercolosis and venereal diseases, and
contaminate my people. Now we are afraid they will bring measles and also
AIDS, this illness which is so dangerous that we do not want it among us.
But the worst illness for us is malaria, which comes in with the
goldminers. The government's National Health Foundation say that 1300
Yanomami had got malaria up until May this year." -- statement by Davi
Yanomami, August 1997.
Some 60 percent of the estimated 150,000 native peoples of California
were wiped out by famine and disease between the years of 1850 and 1870
while another 20 percent were killed by settlers. The rate of destruction
of the Brazilian Yanomami is terrifyingly similar, today there are an
estimated 8,000 people left, a 60 percent drop from the estimated 20,000
lived in the region just 20 years ago.
Mercury Madness
Armed militia and deadly diseases are not the only terror that stalked the
native peoples of California in the 1850s and the native peoples of the
Amazon in the 1980s. Mercury, a highly toxic metal, used for centuries by
small-scale gold miners to extract the tiny flecks of shiny metal from the
ore, has taken a major toll also.
Mercury can disssolve as much as 60 percent of gold out of ore into a
physical solution, known as an amalgam. This amalgam can be broken down
quickly and easily by heating off the mercury rather like the way salt can
be recovered from sea water. This mercury vapor gets trapped in atmospheric
moisture and precipitates down into local water supplies where it can
poison fish and animals higher up in the food chain.
The California Gold Rush of 1849, perhaps the most celebrated in
history, left a deadly legacy of an estimated 7,600 tons of mercury in the
lakes, rivers and sediments of the state while over one thousand tons of
mercury are currently being dumped by small miners in the fragile
rainforests of the Amazon.
Just one gram of mercury poured into eighty million liters of water
would be cause for concern under United States federal human health
standards for drinking water, enough to contaminate a small lake. Mercury
is a persistent toxin which can destroy fetuses, the human central nervous
system, reproductive organs and auto-immune system.
Well over a century after the miners invaded California, decades after
the mines were shut down, fishing is still prohibited in Clear Lake,
California, because of the heavy mercury contamination of the lake while
environmental experts on the tribal reservations in north-western
California are realizing that they may have to seek help cleaning up the
waste that contaminates the Trinity river.
Meanwhile nobody knows the full extent of the problems in the Brazilian
Amazon but initial studies have shown that the levels of mercury in Tapojos
river fish in 1995 were 3.8 parts per million (ppm), almost eight times the
permitted federal maximum of 0.5 pppm while fish in the Madeira river in
1989 tested as high as 2.7 ppm.
Good news, bad news
Mercury is no longer used in California and the small-scale miners were
evicted from the Yanomami territory in January 1998 by the Brazilian army.
There's more good news, the Macuxi peoples of Roraima, Brazil, blockaded
roads in 1997 to successfully demand the removal of gold miners from their
territory.
Now for the bad news. Today the lands of native peoples in North
America are the subject of a new invasion of gold miners and the indiegnous
peoples of Latin America are next on the list as described below.
Cyanide: the new terror
In the 1960s Newmont corporation of Colorado teamed up with the United
States Bureau of Mines to perfect a technique to extract 97 percent of gold
from ore dug up in the deserts of Nevada using a chemical called cyanide.
These desert lands are the sacred and traditional lands of the Western
Shoshone are now the source of half the gold in the United States today.
Corporations around the world have followed suit, using this cyanide
technology together with the powerful explosives and massive earth-moving
equipment that allows them to blast apart entire mountains, to take over
the business of gold mining.
A teaspoonful of two-percent solution of cyanide can kill a human adult.
Cyanide blocks the absorption of oxygen by cells, causing the victim to
effectively "suffocate." Adverse impacts of cyanide on fish have been
reported at levels of 0.01 ppm, concentrations as low as five parts per
billion have been found to inhibit fish reproduction, while levels of 0.03
ppm are known to kill fish.
Human beings can experience decreased respiratory and thyroid
functions, cardiac pain, vomiting, headaches and central nervous system
toxicity from oral exposure to low levels of cyanide. Short term exposures
to high levels of cyanide compounds can cause breathing problems, central
nervous system toxicity and gastro-intestinal corrosion.
This deadly chemical is being used today in North America on the lands
of peoples like the Pomo in California, the Western Shoshone of Nevada, the
Sioux of South Dakota, the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre of Montana. Also under
threat are the Quechan of Arizona, the Paiute of Nevada, and the
Colvilles of Washington state whose lands are being targetted for new gold
mines.
Also poisoned by cyanide are the peoples who live on the Essequibo river
in Guyana, where dead fish and hogs were reported in August 1995 after a
waste water dam at the Omai gold mine broke and spilt 3.2 billion litres of
cyanide-laced waste into the river in what is believed to be the biggest
such disaster in history. Studies by the Pan American Health Organisation
have shown that all aquatic life in the four-kilometre-long creek that runs
from the mine to the Essequibo was killed. Suspicous fish, cattle and even
human deaths have also been reported among the people of Cajamarca, Peru,
where Newmont is using cyanide to extract gold.
Meanwhile a number of other indigenous and traditional communities
around Latin America are being targetted for new gold mines like the Maroon
community of Nieuw Koffiekamp in Suriname where Golden Star of Colorado
(also the joint operators of the Omai gold mine in Guyana) have reportedly
threatened and harassed community members by using live ammunition to
frighten them away from areas in which the company is exploring for gold.
In central America the Panamanian Natural Resources Directorate reports
that 70 percent of approximately 20,000 square kilometers of Panama, deemed
to have mining potential, is on land claimed by indigenous groups. For
example the government has already approved extensive copper and gold
mining concessions within the Ngobe-Bugle and Kuna reservations.
Yet communities are fighting back across the Americas. The Assiniboine,
the Colville Federated Tribes, the Gros Ventre, the Sioux and the Western
Shoshone have gone to court to protest the gold mines while the peoples of
Latin America are also putting up a spirited opposition through road
blockades in Panama
to complaints to international bodies by the Surinamese Maroons.
It is high time for people around the world to support these struggles
and demand an end to the status of gold as a barbaric custom. For pure
water, traditional cultures and life are more precious than all the gold
dug up from under the ground, as the leaders of the first peoples of the
Americas have testified below.
"We have the right to put up opposition because history has made us
sceptical of certain white men, because we have lost millions of human
lives, millions of hectares of land and millions of tonnes of gold, silver
and copper with no compensation," - Atencio Lopez, Kuna peoples of Panama,
August 1996.
"We want progress without destruction. We want to study, to learn new ways
of cultivating the land, living from its fruits. We do not want to live
without trees, hunting, fish and clean water. If this happens misery will
come to our people. I hope that you will help me in this fight" - Davi
Kopenawa Yanomami, August 1997
"To dig under the earth to get to that gold, to pump out that water to get
to that gold, is a crime, it's a crime against humanity, a crime against
life, the very life upon which all people depend, not only people but we
have other things out there-- we have the deer, we have the eagle, we have
the rabbits, we have all life out there and the gold mining today is going
to destroy that, it is destroying that, the life for the future generations
is going to be gone" -- Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone traditional elder,
spring 1997
____________________________________________________
"Contrary to the common culturally ingrained misreading of history, the
disappearance of native peoples and the degradation of the natural world is
not the result of some abstract and inevitable "development" process. Both
these evils can be traced to a particular and identifiable source -- the
resource-acquisition and profit-maximizing activities of some of the most
powerful institutions in the industrial economy. More satisfying, more
sustainable ways of living on this planet are possible, of course. We do not
have to submit or acquiesce to the multinational corporations' war against
native peoples and the natural world. We can in fact fight back and help give
birth to more democratic and humane societies that are better able to protect
and restore the earth".
The New Resource Wars by Al Gedicks
---
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8 years
fighting auto dependence and road construction.)
imaja.com
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