Some Cabinet members keep tuxedos hanging in their office closets. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's has a fire pack stuffed with a hard hat, goggles, sleeping bag, tent, boots, water and "fire-line handbook."
But Babbitt has had little time recently to fight fires on federal lands because he's too busy presiding over the biggest fire sale in U.S. history: the multibillion-dollar giveaway of mineral-rich public lands. As they are attacking Medicare, Western Republicans are also leading the charge to kill mining reform."I've already given away probably $15 billion in value, and much more than a billion dollars in royalties," said Babbitt, who may be the angriest member of the Clinton Cabinet. "What motivates (Congress) is the mining companies and their money in the political process . . . . It's incomprehensible," he added.
It's actually just business as usual. Under the antiquated 1872 Mining Law, for just $2.50 to $5 an acre, mining companies receive title to the surface land and mineral rights and pay no royalties on any hardrock minerals they find. Last year a Canadian mining company used the law to purchase a mine with $10 billion in gold deposits for about $10,000 - which Babbitt branded "the biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy."
Republicans have been effective in bottling up Babbitt's efforts to reform the law. Although Babbitt normally uses the wilderness as a backdrop for these "gold heists," he recently tapped Wall Street to highlight the scandal.
On the most recent occasion, he charged that an estimated $68 million in gold reserves were "being given away to a mining company that already owns one of the richest gold properties" in the country. As he ruefully noted, the Newmont Gold Co. will hold title to 118 acres in northeastern Nevada "for about $540 and pay no royalties, and the amazing part is that it's all perfectly legal."
Some of the same Republicans who rail against welfare mothers and midnight basketball for inner-city youths have always been in the vanguard of protecting welfare for Westerners and subsidies for multinational corporations.
The mining industry's chief apologist is Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who once protested mining reform by reading the Communist Manifesto aloud to colleagues. During a 1993 debate over the National Biological Survey, Young condemned the plan as "the socialist agenda to make sure that Big Brother, big government controls all and everyone."
Mining-related industries donated $17 million to congressional candidates from 1987 to 1994, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Not a bad investment considering they extracted $26 billion worth of minerals in recent years, and the cleanup of abandoned mines could cost as much as $60 billion. As a recent Common Cause study reveals, it's part of a syndrome of cowboy capitalism that now reigns.