At the 11th hour, afraid to boldly stand for something so egregious, Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona snuck in a rider to a must-pass defense bill. This rider traded away Apache lands, which had been protected from grazing and mining by President Eisenhower in 1955 and President Nixon in 1971, to Resolution Copper Mining, an Australian-British mining company. It's no coincidence that affiliates of Resolution's parent company, Rio Tinto, are McCain campaign contributors.
As the New York Times notes:
By doing this, Congress has handed over a sacred Native American site to a foreign-owned company for what may be the first time in our nation’s history.
UPDATE 3: If any admins read this, please help by frontpaging one of the diaries I've linked to. All of them are better than mine. If this community means anything, it should be capable of getting 100,000 signature behind something like this.
UPDATE 2: Two previously published diaries, one by Hilltop Mama and one by Davej, do a much better job explaining this travesty. Please give them some rec love. They belong on the rec list more than this one.
UPDATE 1: If you do nothing else today, please rec this diary by KDfrAZ (I think we were writing at about the same time) and sign the petition.
Just how egregious is this?
The Apache are occupying Oak Flat to protest this action — to them, a sacrilegious and craven sell-off of a place “where Apaches go to pray,” in the words of the San Carlos Apache tribal chairman, Terry Rambler. The site will doubtless be destroyed for any purpose other than mining; Resolution Copper Mining will hollow out a vast chamber that, when it caves in, will leave a two-mile-wide, 1,000-foot-deep pit. The company itself has likened the result of its planned mining at Oak Flat to that of a nearby meteor crater.
And this is what the stakes are:
“Why is this place sacred?” said Wendsler Nosie Sr., a former chairman of the San Carlos Apache, in a recent interview with Cronkite News. “No difference to Mount Sinai. How the holy spirit came to be.” If you don’t want to take his word for it, the archaeological record at Oak Flat contains abundant evidence that the Apache have been here “since well before recorded history,” according to congressional testimony by the Society for American Archaeology.
John McCain has reached a new low in corruption, even by the standards if the U.S. Congress. All done in secret, at the 11th hour, as befits the coward that he is. John McCain: Corrupt, cowardly scum.
Read the whole article. Then call or write your senators and representatives. And be sure to sign the petition linked to in this diary. McCain's perfidy is even worse than I've made it appear.