Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada

Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.

Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world's top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.

A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.

On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company's mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.

First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.

The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada's role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.

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Your Tuesday Briefing
Either my standards have gone up or there really isn't much going on right now.
French lawmakers have rejected an immigration bill that would facilitate the deportation of migrants "who pose a serious threat to the public order", increase resources to combat smuggling networks, and grant one-year work visas to irregular migrants working off-the-books in sectors with labour shortages. The right rejected it for being too friendly to migrants - they wanted even greater tools to get rid of them. The left rejected it for being not friendly enough to migrants - they wanted irregular migrants to be given an unconditional right to stay and work in France.
After the PiS party in Poland refused to go gently into that good night after losing a majority in parliament, they tried to rule as a minority government and have now been forced out due to a vote of no confidence, and Donald Tusk has been elected the new Prime Minister, ending the two-term rule of the radical right-wing party.
Iran is launching a joint venture with Chinese tech companies to employ AI to digitalize production in oil and gas fields, hoping for a 20% improvement in efficiency. This is probably just gonna be some kind of advanced algorithm that for some reason is being called "AI" because that's the mandatory buzzword to attract funding. I love that the image that the author chose for this article is something from like, a futuristic citybuilding game. Anyway.
South Korea's President has kicked off a visit to the Netherlands to forge a chip alliance between the two chip powerhouses, visiting, in particular, ASML, which makes the cutting edge chipmaking equipment that the world relies on. I assume that the entire point of this meeting will be to try and find ways to make the sanctions on China actually work, and they will obviously fail, as western sanctions are increasingly meaningless.
Due to a union dispute, 400 miners were underground for four days in South Africa, eventually forced to leave due to hunger and thirst. There was a similar event in October. To be honest, I've read several articles covering this and I have no idea what's going on with South African miners right now.
The UN mission in Mali, MINUSMA, lowered the UN flag at its headquarters in Bamako, closing ten years of deployment after the government ordered them out due to their ineffectiveness in solving the crisis.
The US has hit companies in Turkiye, the UAE, and China with more sanctions to try and stop Russia from obtaining "high priority" goods like microchips. Why are we still doing this? What's the definition of insanity again?

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