Want to prevent terrorism?  Want to win the “hearts and minds” of people in other parts of the world?  Start here.  This link will take you to the electronic New York Times.  You will need to subscribe in order to read the article.  Do so, I don’t think you’ll regret it.  I read the NYT every day on-line and I love it (for some reason, newsprint makes me sneeze.  I think it might be paper dust or something).

Anyway, at the risk of being accused of being in the “blame America first” crowd…I have to say that the behavior of American companies overseas has been abysmal.  It was here too for a time, and occasionally we still catch them at it…but we’ve got a populace with political power, and watchdog groups and a government that at least has to pay lip-service to protecting us…and that means that American companies can’t push us around and ruin our environment, subvert our local traditions and ways of life (unless we let them), kill off our primary food supply, and bribe our military to shoot us if we complain about it.

The people of Indonesia are not so lucky.

And eventually, they will have had enough.  And when that happens, Freeport and its holdings will be in trouble.  And chances are, our government will decide to bail them out, and our “patriots” will go on and on about how it’s those darned Muslims again that hate our freedom, and we have to go to Indonesia to kill them there before they come to kill us here.

Never mind that from their perspective, “we” have been killing them for some time now…or at least paying dictators and military strong-men to do it for us.  That and gradually making it almost impossible to live there.

Freeport isn’t going to go away, isn’t going to stop poisoning the landscape and destroying the ecology until they are forced out or until the gold goes away.

So we have a couple of choices that I can see:

1)      We can use our clout as citizens and investors and make Freeport clean up their act.

2)      We can ignore it and wait for the civil unrest and uprising to be dramatic enough for Fox and CNN to notice it and wonder why Indonesians hate our freedom so much…and shake our heads at “having to be the world’s policeman” (Code for White Man’s Burden?). 

3)      We can hope that Freeport keeps its house in order, pulls all the gold out of that mountain and leaves peacefully…and then wonder why all of the sudden all of our Taxi drivers are Indonesian.  We can shake our heads at all these poor unfortunate people escaping a sludge-choked hellscape with no local economy, poor health standards, and no way to return to local traditional ways of life due to the wildlife and ecology being destroyed.

You know what?  I think I’m going to be writing some letters when I get back from Bemidji.  If my kids go to Indonesia, I want it to be as Eco-tourists…not draftees.