Mining The good and the bad

1
BY FR. SHAY CULLEN ON AUGUST 9, 2014FEATURED COLUMNS, OP-ED COLUMNS

If you cook your dinner in a stainless steel pot or pan, have a computer for your e-mail and
research or wear a watch, the chances are that you have nickel helping you along. Its a
very valuable and important metal, its in most of the things we use daily and the world is
hungry for it.

So hungry that the global mining companies in collusion with locals in developing countries
are gouging the earth, blasting mountains, digging huge holes, tunneling into the earth and
criminally polluting rivers, cutting forests and creating environmental havoc in the stampede
of greed. Its likely also that the nickel in your appliances and kitchen ware, computer or
watch comes from the Philippines.

The Philippines where one third of the people numbering over 100 million are living below
the poverty line has vast reserves of mineral wealth but they benefit little or not at all. The
mining of the precious metals, gold, silver, chromium, copper, nickel is reaping billions of
pesos mostly for the wealthy.

Those who benefit are the large scale multinational mining companies and investors from
Britain, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, the USA and China. They do with the help of the
ruling industrial families. They make up one percent of the population but control or own up
to 70 percent of the national wealth. Some of that comes from the earth and the land of the
tribal indigenous people and has caused conflict throughout the nation.

Such global exploitation is not only confined to the Philippines but is similar in most
developed countries where the ruling oligarchy is part of the incredible and large scale theft
operation. In Nigeria the oil wealth is disappearing by the billions of dollars.

The exploitation of the Filipinos and their natural resources is made possible by the rich
Filipino elite who controls the Philippine Congress. They passed the 1995 mining law that
benefits the Philippine mining interests, in cahoots with the multinational mining
corporations. They bring little benefit to the country. The International Monetary Fund made
a study in 2012 showing that the mining industry reaps vast profits but contributes a fraction
in taxes.

The law gives huge tax holidays to mining corporations and allows them to import
machinery tax free and other exemptions. The tax rate is one of the lowest in the world,
around 2% to 3% percent of net earnings. In Australia it is close to 35 percent.

Environmentalists protested and campaigned against the law and the scale of destruction
and damage to the environment and to the loss of ancestral lands and the killing of human
rights advocates. Even priests and pastors and church workers have been assassinated for
giving their lives to protect the indigenous people and their ancestral lands and traditions.
The protests still go on.
In Santa Cruz, Zambales, a successful campaign led by Benito E. Molino, a medical doctor,
and other environmentalists won a victory last July against nickel mining companies in
Santa Cruz when the Mines and Geo-sciences Bureau (MGB) suspended their mining
operating permits because of their destructive mining practices and environmental damage.

The companies are enraged and are striking back by paying people to campaign against
the good doctor and his supporters. Some mining managers around the country have
divided communities turning the people against each other so that the mining company can
continue their destructive practice. Its easy to get someone killed in some of these
countries. Decapitate the leader of the movement and then buy off everyone elsethats
standard procedure, Said Phil Robertson, Asian Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch.

In Mindanao Italian Catholic priest Faustino Tentorio of the PIME missionaries was shot
dead by assassins for his support of the people of the Manobo tribe who are struggling to
save their ancestral lands and forests from mining interests.

As many as fifty people have been killed for taking a stand against environmental
exploitation and advocating for a new mining law in the Philippines. That new law will
promote safe and responsible small scale mining. The large scale mining operations can
remove half a mountain and its forests, pollute its rivers and in a decade and leave a pit half
a kilometer deep.

President Aquino responded to the mounting protests and outrage over the mining issue
with an executive order in 2012 that excluded certain areas from mining. The Executive
Order also asserted national authority over local laws. Several governors and local officials
who are against large scale mining protested. This favored the powerful mining corporations
who have well paid lawyers who can overturn local ordinances that ban large scale mining
so as to protect the environment.

Thats something that we all can do in our own small way. We can all be advocates for a
healthy planet, we can campaign over the social media, march for a free countryside, help
by planting flowers or trees, speaking out to save a pond or a tree from being cut down,
recycling our waste.

Small actions together make one great powerful action. Change for the better is made up of
millions of small acts of preservation and love of life and creation. We will preserve and
enhance life, and give us greater meaning to our lives, existence and purpose on this
troubled planet.

shaycullen@preda.org, www.preda.org.
 KEY CONCEPTS ABOUT MEDIA LITERACY

Media literacy is concerned with helping students develop an informed and

critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used
by them, and the impact of these techniques. Media literacy also aims to
provide students with the ability to create media products. The following
eight key concepts, which provide a theoretical base for all media literacy,
give teachers a common language and framework for discussion.

1. All media are constructions. This is arguably the most important concept. The media do not simply
reflect external reality. Rather, they present carefully crafted constructions that reflect many decisions
and are the result of many determining factors. Media Literacy works towards deconstructing these
constructions ( taking them apart to show how they are made).

2. The media construct versions of reality. The media are responsible for the majority of the observations
and experiences from which we build up our personal understandings of the world and how it works. Much
of our view of reality is based on media messages that have been preconstructed and have attitudes,
interpretations, and conclusions already built in. Thus the media, to a great extent, give us our sense of
reality.

3. Audiences negotiate meaning in media. If the media provides us with much of the material upon which
we build our picture of reality, each of us finds or "negotiates" meaning according to individual factors:
personal needs and anxieties, the pleasures or troubles of the day, racial and sexual attitudes, family and
cultural background, moral standpoint, and so forth.

4. Media messages have commercial implications. Media literacy aims to encourage awareness of how
the media are influenced by commercial considerations, and how they impinge on content, technique, and
distribution." Most media production is a business, and so must make a profit. Questions of ownership
and control are central: a relatively small number of individuals control what we watch, read and hear in
the media.

5. Media messages contain ideological and value messages. All media products are advertising in some
sense proclaiming values and ways of life. The mainstream media convey, explicitly or implicitly,
ideological messages about such issues as the nature of the good life, the virtue of consumerism, the role
of women, the acceptance of authority, and unquestioning patriotism.

6. Media messages contain social and political implications. The media have great influence in politics and
in forming social change. Television can greatly influence the election of a national leader on the basis of
image. The media involve us in concerns such as civil rights issues, famines in Africa, and the AIDS
epidemic. They give us an intimate sense of national issues and global concerns so that we have become
McLuhan's Global Village.

7. Form and content are closely related in media messages. As Marshall McLuhan noted, each medium
has its own grammar and codifies reality in its own particular way. Different media will report the same
event, but create different impressions and messages.

8. Each medium has a unique aesthetic form. Just as we notice the pleasing rhythms of certain pieces of
poetry or prose, so ought we be able to enjoy the pleasing forms and effects of the different media.