Gold and money and glaciers and icebergs (a point of view)

They say that everything that shines is not gold. There’s a bit of truth in that. And gold tends to turn people’s heads around. Even at the expense of what Nature has given us. In Argentina there is gold and there also are glaciers and icebergs. Following a rather perverse process of reasoning, you might argue that the icebergs are nice to look at but don’t bring in much money for the provinces which house them.

Yet, it takes but a small dose of imagination to figure out why the national government has turned thumbs down on a law--previously approved in Congress--to protect the glaciers at the southern tip of the country from the cynide and other chemicals the gold diggers splash on Mother Earth's soil  to extract the much sought after nearby gold.

It seems that when companies such as Barrick Gold--the world's biggest gold mining company, with 27 mines around the world--say they want to exploit gold resting quietly underground, Argentine provincial governors think of money rather than the environment and talk to national government authorities and argue that it would be very important to let the companies exploit the precious mineral because it would bring in a lot of needed income.

The damage to the environment? Well, but just think about the gold that can be exploited. Besides, those ecological groups exagerate things....

How much money the mining companies actually leave local provincial governments is actually quite relative, because they are usually given very generous tax relief and exonerated from paying export duties. It goes without saying that the gold leaves Argentina instead of staying as a national asset. Curious indeed in view of the country enormous efforts to pay off its debts to international banks and financial institutions...

We have not been able to verify the affirmation by Congressman Miguel Bonasso that Barrick Gold was set up in part by weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi with the helping hand of George Bush, father. Nevertheless, and in the light of the present international financial crisis, it is clear that too often  "the top players" get their niche on the market by means John Stewart Mills would probably not approve of. The laws of business only too often are at loggerheads with the laws of nature.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to understand why precious metal mining projects, such as the Pascua Lama bi-national project, are so strongly defended by establishment politicians and so strongly opposed by local residents and environmentalists. The latter, in both Chile and Argentina, have charged that the mining operations would negatively affect the glaciars in the area. Furthermore, for local residents, the use of noxious chemicals to extract the gold--plus enormous quantities of water--constitute a genuine threat for their well being.