Preparing for the G20 in Pittsburgh: A Historical Review of the Mellonsand the Rise of Monopoly Capitalism

Mellons over Pittsburgh and the planet

By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 8, 2009 3:16 PM

The Rockefeller and Du Pont billionaire dynasties are hated around the world. Outside of Pennsylvania the super rich Mellon family isn’t as well known.

They should be. When Fortune magazine listed the eight richest people in the United States in 1957, four of them were Mellons. The family’s crown jewels then included Alcoa Aluminum, Gulf Oil—which merged with Rockefeller’s Chevron in 1984—and the Mellon National Bank.

Alcoa had sales of nearly $27 billion in 2008. Chevron was ten times bigger with sales of $273 billion.

In 2007 the Mellon Bank merged with the Bank of New York to form a financial octopus that operates in 34 countries. Bank of New York vice president Lucy Edwards admitted conspiring to launder more than $7 billion from Russia. (Bloomberg News, July 26, 2006)

The Bank of New York Mellon has $20.7 trillion in assets under custody or administration. That’s $6 trillion more than the entire gross domestic product of the United States.

Yet it still received a bailout of $3 billion while it was supposed to “oversee” the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

Much of the Mellon wealth is locked up in tax-dodging foundations. The Andrew W. Mellon foundation had $6.5 billion in assets in 2007.

Political power went along with this loot. George Bush made Paul O’Neill—the former CEO of Mellon-controlled Alcoa—his first treasury secretary in 2001.

Eighty years earlier, Andrew Mellon had to resign from 51 corporation boards when he became treasury secretary in 1921. Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover took orders from the financier.

Mellon’s reign—the longest of any treasury secretary—extended the misery of the Great Depression. According to Herbert Hoover’s memoirs, Andrew Mellon’s attitude was to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.”

“Liquidate labor” is exactly what happened to Pittsburgh where the Mellon fortune originated. Pittsburgh finally recovered from the Depression. But in the early 1980s the area lost 56,000 steel industry jobs and 54,000 other manufacturing jobs. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, May 16.)

Deindustrialization has led to 21 percent of Pittsburgh’s total population and a third of its African Americans living under the poverty line. Pittsburgh is where the G-20 summit is being held in September.

A bigoted miser

Founder of the family fortune was Thomas A. Mellon, an immigrant from Ulster who was born in 1813. He took great pride that his ancestors had crossed over from Scotland to Ulster after Oliver Cromwell slaughtered the local Irish population.

Mellon wrote in his autobiography, “It is very manifest that it would have been well for Ireland had this policy of extirpation been carried into effect throughout the entire island.”

This bigot became a lawyer and a loan shark. Mellon lent money at high interest rates and foreclosed on those who couldn’t pay up. He started a real estate empire that benefited from Pittsburgh becoming the steel capital.

By 1860 Thomas Mellon got himself elected judge. Later he wrote that there was nothing wrong with condemned prisoners committing suicide: “This growing tendency of self-destruction … is not to be discouraged.”

The same year Mellon became a hanging judge Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Over 360,000 Pennsylvanians joined the Union Army to fight the slave masters. Pennsylvania Congressperson Thaddeus Stevens demanded land and freedom for Black people.

Even James Mellon, Thomas Mellon’s second son, wanted to enlist. Judge Mellon was furious. “It is only greenhorns who enlist,” wrote the father to his son. “There are plenty of other lives less valuable.”

It is “less valuable” workers who continue to fill Veterans Administration hospitals and military cemeteries.

The Mellon fortune takes off

As soon as his judgeship ended, Thomas Mellon opened a private bank on Jan. 2, 1870, on Smithfield Street. “T. Mellon & Sons’ Bank” had to close its doors during the 1873 crisis but reopened in a few months.

It was Thomas’s son Andrew who really sent the Mellon fortune into orbit. Daddy Mellon was already financing Henry Clay Frick and swindling farmers out of their land that lay over valuable coal deposits.

Like Wall Street’s J.P. Morgan, who started General Electric and U.S. Steel, Andrew Mellon began organizing corporations.

Charles Martin Hall discovered how to separate alumina from bauxite rock at the same time French inventor Paul Heroult did so.

Joining forces with metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt, they turned to the Mellon Bank seeking money to exploit Hall’s invention. In 1888 the Mellons financed the Pittsburgh Reduction Company—now called Alcoa—keeping 40 percent of the stock for themselves.

Hall’s U.S. patent—not recognized in Europe—and high tariffs gave Alcoa an absolute monopoly on aluminum in the Unites States until World War II.

But oil provided even more profits than aluminum. The Mellons were able to take over the fabulous Spindletop oilfield in Texas to form Gulf Oil.

After Andrew Mellon left the Treasury, he became U.S. ambassador to Britain. He demanded and got 50 percent of any oil found in Kuwait, which was then a British colony.

Sixty years later U.S. imperialism went to war with Iraq to protect Gulf Oil’s stake in Kuwait.

The Mellon family war against workers

Coal mines and machine guns

By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 17, 2009 6:50 PM

“You could not run a coal company without machine guns,” sums up the Mellon style of labor relations.

Richard Mellon broke the United Mine Workers union at the family’s Pittsburgh Coal Company in 1925. Three years later the U.S. Senate’s Interstate Commerce Committee traveled to Pittsburgh to question this strike-breaking brother of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

They asked Richard Mellon about the machine guns of Pennsylvania’s Coal and Iron Police, a notorious private strike-breaking outfit that functioned like Blackwater (now named XE) mercenaries do. Mellon answered, “It is necessary. You could not run without them.”

While Mellon was testifying, his coal bosses had been told to “keep our police in the background.” Eleven months later on Feb. 9, 1929, they beat union miner John Barkoski to death. Union supporter John Philipovich was shot to death on the porch of his store.

Much bloodier were the East St. Louis, Ill., race riots in 1917. Two thousand workers had gone on strike there at the Mellon-controlled Aluminum Ore Company plant. Unionists were conducting organizing drives at other local plants.

Mellon and other employers recruited thousands of African Americans from the South with false promises of employment. Whites were told that Black workers were going to take their jobs. The strike at Mellon’s plant was broken.

Unlike future Communist leader William Z. Foster, who was then organizing African-American and white meatpacking workers in Chicago’s stockyards, the white AFL union leaders in East St. Louis catered to racism.

These misleaders demanded Black workers be driven out of the city while local newspapers printed lurid, lying stories of a Black “crime wave.”

This deliberate instigation of racism led to a mob of thousands of armed whites hunting Black people on the streets on July 2, 1917. W.E.B. Du Bois estimated in his autobiography that 125 African Americans were murdered then.

Years before railroad tycoon Jay Gould bragged he could “hire half of the working class to shoot the other half.” Big capitalists became experts at pitting one group of workers against another.

The anger of white and U.S.-born workers against their bosses would often be diverted into hatred for African Americans, Latinas/os and immigrants.

Mellons are again today involved in attacking the working class and oppressed—this time in the debate on health care. Right-wing groups are conducting a vicious fight against any reforms of a rotten system where nearly 50 million people are uninsured. One of the biggest backers of the tax-free foundations leading this smear campaign is Richard Mellon Scaife, whose fortune is an estimated $1.2 billion.

Bayoneting workers

Family patriarch Thomas A. Mellon hated unions. He called union leaders “labor parasites” who were “promoters of socialism and anarchy.”

In 1880 Thomas Mellon busted a strike at the Waverly Coal Coke Company, which he partially owned. Mellon even had union leader David Jones prosecuted on “criminal conspiracy” charges for seeking to fix the price of labor!

Andrew Mellon’s friend and financial partner Henry Clay Frick broke the Homestead steel strike in 1892. Workers at Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant outside Pittsburgh had driven out Pinkerton private police thugs.

The 1892 presidential campaign receded into the background as the whole country focused on the long strike. Frick was so hated that anarchist Alexander Berkman tried to kill him. Berkman spent 14 years in prison for his deed.

It took the whole summer and 8,000 Pennsylvania National Guard troops to finally break the strike. Not until 45 years later in 1937 did the workers at Homestead win a union.

Alcoa workers spent decades winning a union. The Industrial Workers of the World led a 1913 strike at the company’s New Kensington plant, 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Women armed themselves with blacksnake whips and lashed strikebreakers.

After six weeks of state troopers attacking picket lines, the workers had to settle for promises of arbitration.

Two years later in 1915 workers revolted at the Mellon’s Massena, N.Y., aluminum mill. Anticipating the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, they captured every section of the big plant while management fled.

St. Lawrence County Sheriff Thaddeus Day deputized a gang of businessmen to break the strike. New York state Gov. Whitman sent in two companies of the National Guard who bayoneted workers. They killed strike leader Joseph Solunski, who died in an Ogdensburg hospital on Aug. 2, 1915.

Aluminum Workers Local 19256 finally compelled the company to sign a contract in 1941.

In 1919 William Z. Foster led a national steel strike against the 12-hour day that was drowned in police violence. Members of Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary assaulted workers at Mellon’s Standard Steel Company plant outside Butler, Pa.

As terrible as the conditions in these U.S. plants were, workers were treated even worse in Mellon’s aluminum trust mines in Guyana, Surinam, Jamaica and Guinea.

Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor; “Mellon” by David Cannadine; Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the “Kerner Commission.”

The Mellons: Keeping Pittsburgh poor

By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 23, 2009 8:46 PM

Pittsburgh made the Mellons rich. The city was hell for workers.

A 12-hour day was standard in the steel mills.

Five hundred twenty-six workers were killed on the job in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, between July 1, 1906, and June 30, 1907.

Sixty percent of women workers earned less than $7 per week, according to the “Pittsburgh Survey,” a pioneering sociological study.

Pittsburgh had the highest death rate from typhoid fever in the country, since the water wasn’t even filtrated until 1907. Children suffered the worst. Between 1900 and 1907, an average of 226 out of 1,000 babies died before their first birthday.

This misery mattered to the Mellons about as much as the Johnstown, Pa., flood did.

Henry Clay Frick established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for Pittsburgh’s wealthy elite, including steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Frick’s friend Andrew Mellon was one of the first members.

On May 31, 1889, the club’s poorly maintained dam broke, pouring out 20 million tons of water that would kill 2,209 people in Johnstown. It conveniently put out of action the Cambria Iron and Steel works, Carnegie’s biggest competitor, for more than a year.

Bighearted Andy Mellon gave $1,000—45 cents per victim—in chump change to the relief fund.

In those “good old days” before successful lawsuits, legal cases against the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were thrown out of court. Club member and Mellon family lawyer Philander Knox successfully claimed the Johnstown flood was an “act of God.”

Knox collected his reward by being selected to be a U.S. senator, attorney general and secretary of state. After Panama was stolen to build a canal, Attorney General Knox advised President Teddy Roosevelt, “Do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

Summoning Black labor to Pittsburgh

The “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to Pittsburgh started during World War I. The Pittsburgh Courier became one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country.

By August 1917 there were 4,000 Black workers in the U.S. Steel plants around Pittsburgh. Jones and Laughlin Steel employed 1,400 African Americans. A generation later, in 1944, there were 11,500 Black workers in the area’s steel mills.

The dirty and dangerous jobs that African Americans held often gave them a chokehold on production. Steel mills need coke, and apartheid in steel had reserved coke ovens for Black workers.

African Americans at U.S. Steel’s Clairton, Pa., works carried out a series of strikes against discrimination between December 1943 and February 1944. They threatened to idle nearly 30,000 employees by cutting off coke and coal gas.

African-American communist Ben Careathers signed up 2,000 Black workers at J&L in the late 1930s.

In 1943, 450 Black workers at J&L’s Aliquippa plant went on strike after the company refused to upgrade two African Americans. The same year 28 Black firemen at J&L’s South Side Works in Pittsburgh—incensed that white counterparts were earning 11 cents more per hour—shut down the power plant and idled 11,000 workers.

Millions of Black sharecroppers never had the power that thousands of Black steel workers were using against the mightiest corporations in the land.

Urban removal

The Mellons didn’t like this power. Pittsburgh had the worst anti-communist witch hunt.

Ben Careathers and fellow Communist Party members were framed in both state and federal courts on thought-control charges. Steve Nelson, who fought in Spain against fascists, spent two years in jail.

In 1940 the Census counted 90,060 Black people in Allegheny County. Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, had 87,145 African Americans.

By 1970 the Black population in Cuyahoga County had increased more than four times to 351,574. African Americans in Allegheny County saw their numbers increase by only 67 percent, to 150,118.

Why the difference in these two industrial areas just 130 miles apart? No other Black community in a major Northern metropolitan area grew more slowly than Pittsburgh’s. No other metropolitan area is under the thumb of one billionaire family—the Mellons.

“We have saved this city from becoming a Camden or a Gary,” bragged John P. Robin in 1980. The head of the local urban removal authority was actually claiming he prevented Pittsburgh from becoming a Black and Latino/a majority city.

“The philanthropist Richard King Mellon” was described by the New York Times (May 13, 2000) as having led this urban removal campaign, dubbed “Renaissance I.” In the Lower Hill District 1,500 Black families were driven out so an arena and luxury apartments could be built.

One result of this relatively smaller Black community was Local 1199 being thrown back when it tried to organize Pittsburgh’s hospitals in 1970. John Black, a founding member of Workers World Party who died in 2006, was one of the organizers. Even today health-care workers’ wages in Pittsburgh are among the lowest in the country.

Source: “Out of the Crucible, Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980,” by Dennis C. Dickerson

The Mellons: Blood, oil and profits

By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 30, 2009 11:54 PM

The Mellon fortune drips with blood and oil from every pore.

Gulf Oil Corp. became the biggest gusher of money for the Mellon family empire. By 1956 it was taking $160 million annually in profits out of Kuwait alone.

Violence was a vital ingredient of this stolen wealth. President Barack Obama admitted in his June 4th Cairo speech that “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”

The CIA’s “Operation Ajax” overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. It was masterminded by CIA executive Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt. Mossadegh’s “crime” was nationalizing his country’s oil.

Iran was plunged into 26 years of dictatorship under the U.S.-imposed Shah. Thousands were tortured to death by the SAVAK secret police, which was modeled on the Nazi Gestapo. SAVAK agents were trained by Herman Norman Schwarzkopf, whose son, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., led the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

This was wonderful for the Mellons, since Gulf Oil got a slice of Iranian oil. Kermit Roosevelt left the CIA and became a Gulf Oil vice president.

As in 1953, the U.S. is once again trying to overthrow a “democratically elected Iranian government.” Congress has approved $400 million for a new CIA destabilization campaign.

U.S. billionaires want to overthrow Iranian President Ahmadinejad, just like they got rid of Prime Minister Mossadegh.

It started in Texas

Croatian immigrant Anthony Lucas was convinced there was oil under an East Texas salt dome. Native people had known this for centuries.

Vindication came on Jan. 10, 1901, when the Spindletop gusher began throwing 100,000 barrels of oil into the sky every day. Nearby Beaumont became a boomtown.

The prospector—whose original name was Luchich—was forced to sell seven-eighths of his stake to Pittsburgh oilmen J.M. Guffey and John H. Galey. These oilmen needed more financing from the biggest Pittsburgh moneylenders—the Mellons.

The J.M. Guffey Petroleum Co. was born with a $15 million capitalization. Lucas—who was a classmate of Serbian electrical genius Nikola Tesla—got $400,000. Galey got something. The workers who risked their lives to put out a huge oil fire at Spindletop got nothing.

Guffey was kicked out by the Mellons in 1907 when Gulf Oil was incorporated. Andrew Mellon’s nephew, William Larimer Mellon, was installed as Gulf’s president.

He had organized the Crescent pipeline, which stretched across Pennsylvania. The Mellons sold it to the Rockefellers’ National Transit pipeline in 1895 for $4 million.

W.L. Mellon then organized a Pittsburgh streetcar monopoly in 1901 valued at $110 million. The Mellons were big into trolleys at that time, since it served their real estate interests.

Big Oil later spent decades destroying trolley systems in the interests of promoting the use of gas-guzzling automobiles. The 700-mile-long Pacific Electric system that once served the Los Angeles area shut down its last line to Long Beach in 1961.

Killing people around the world

Gulf Oil’s pipelines extended into Sapulpa, Okla., where oil was stolen from Native people. The prosperous Greenwood neighborhood in nearby Tulsa—called “Black Wall Street”—was destroyed by white racist mobs in 1921, with hundreds of African Americans killed.

The Gulf Oil refinery at Port Arthur, Texas, became the largest in the world in the 1920s. Black and Mexican workers did the dirtiest work there and got only 25 cents per hour.

Twenty-five sailors burned to death when the company’s tanker “Gulf of Venezuela” blew up in Port Arthur in 1926.

By this time Gulf had plenty of oil wells in Venezuela. The Mellons and Rockefellers backed Juan Vicente Gómez, who was the country’s dictator from 1908 until his death in 1935.

Gómez crushed unions and threw student protesters into chain gangs. Presently, democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías, with Cuban assistance, has brought health care to millions. Yet the corporate media that today attack President Chávez never even mentioned the dictator Gómez.

Gulf Oil was exploiting Mexico before it began ripping off Venezuela. But the Mellons didn’t like one important anti-imperialist result of the Mexican Revolution. In 1938 all the U.S. and British oil companies were thrown out of that country.

Colombia’s congress rejected concessions to Gulf and Standard Oil in 1928. Mellon lawyer Allen Dulles—who later was to be the CIA head during Mossadegh’s overthrow—was outraged. Colombia was forced to back down when its credit was shut off by Wall Street.

Gen. René Barrientos Ortuño staged a phony 1966 election in Bolivia with $800,000 in Gulf Oil bribes. The next year he and the CIA assassinated the heroic revolutionary, Che Guevara.

But Big Oil has now been kicked out of Bolivia.

Next the Mellons went to the Middle East and Africa. U.S. Ambassador to Britain Andrew Mellon demanded and got half of Kuwait’s oil deposits from its colonial overlords in London.

Gulf Oil was the paymaster for the Portuguese fascist regime’s war against the African people of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.

But African liberation fighters won independence for these countries and their victories also aided the successful struggle against fascism by the Portuguese workers, who overthrew dictator Marcelo Caetano in 1974.

What did working people in Pittsburgh get out of Gulf Oil’s crimes?

When Gulf Oil was taken over by Chevron in 1984, thousands of jobs were lost at its skyscraper headquarters in Pittsburgh. Mellon foundation grants to Carnegie-Mellon University didn’t stop 500 Gulf Oil scientists from being fired.

Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor and “Paul Mellon: Portrait of an Oil Baron” by William S. Hoffman.

The Mellons: Making people miserable with aluminum

By Stephen Millies
Published Sep 2, 2009 7:18 PM

In 2007 Alcoa’s top boss, Alain Belda, got $25,646,420– nearly a half-million dollars a week. That year the aluminum giant racked up $2.8 billion in profits.

In 2005 workers at Alcoa’s plants in Honduras were making between 68 to 87 cents per hour, according to the International Metalworkers Federation. Alcoa fired all its workers in Honduras when the automotive market plunged in 2008.

In 2001 base pay for the 15,600 Alcoa workers assembling automotive electrical systems in Mexico was $1.20 per hour. Alcoa provoked a work action in Mexico and fired 236 workers. It even sued nine union leaders for $1 million.

This fantastic exploitation of human beings is called imperialism. It’s why people are coming to Pittsburgh in late September to protest the G-20 summit, a gathering of treasury officials and bankers from 20 countries who are plotting how to protect their profits. A National March for Jobs will be held on Sept. 20, which will be followed by a Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed.

A 50-year monopoly

Alcoa was founded by the super-rich Mellon family as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1888. Pittsburgh Reduction became the Aluminum Company of America in 1907 and then Alcoa in 1999.

Pittsburgh is also the home of the United Steelworkers union, which represents more than 15,000 Alcoa workers in the U.S. and Canada. The Steelworkers union has endorsed the Sept. 20 Jobs March in Pittsburgh, initiated by the Bail Out the People Movement.

Over the ages, people have learned to use copper, tin, iron and dozens of other metals. It took the Mellons to enforce a 50-year monopoly on aluminum in the United States. They controlled the patents of Charles Hall, who found out how to get alumina from bauxite—aluminum ore—at the same time French inventor Paul Heroult did.

The Cowles brothers, owners of the Electric Smelting & Aluminum Company in Lockport, N.Y., contested Hall’s patent. The brothers claimed that Hall got his ideas from their similar efforts.

But they lost a court battle when federal Judge William Howard Taft ruled for the Pittsburgh Reduction Company and its patents in 1894. Author Harvey O’Connor estimates that Taft’s decision was worth $100 million to the Mellons.

It was a smart decision for Taft, who became a U.S. president and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Taft also served as U.S. Governor-General of the Philippines when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were massacred.

The Mellons responded to Taft’s decree by jacking up the price of aluminum. After their patents expired, the Mellons used high tariffs to maintain their aluminum monopoly inside the United States. It didn’t hurt that Andrew Mellon was treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932. They also grabbed every bauxite mine.

Prices were kept so high that even Henry Ford complained that he couldn’t afford to use aluminum in his cars. Despite an antitrust suit filed in 1937, Alcoa still controlled 100 percent of all aluminum smelting in the United States as World War II began. They even made half of the country’s aluminum kitchen utensils.

“If America loses this war,” said Interior Secretary Harold Ickes on June 26, 1941, “it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America.”

The emerging military-industrial complex was forced to break Alcoa’s total monopoly just to get enough aluminum to build planes. A federal court in 1950 carved up production capacity, with Alcoa getting 51 percent, Reynolds 31 percent and Kaiser 18 percent.

Worldwide plunder & strikebreaking in the U.S.

Alcoa also spread misery around the world. Pollutants from the company’s plants in Massena, N.Y., and other industries on the St. Lawrence River have poisoned fish caught downstream by the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne.

Alcoa came to Suriname, then a Dutch colony, in 1916. During World War II, 75 percent of U.S. bauxite imports came from Suriname. In 1963 Alcoa flooded 600 square miles of Surinamese land when the Afobaka Dam was built. Six thousand Maroons, descendants of escaped

enslaved Africans, were driven out; each was given $3 in compensation.

Alcoa imposed draconian trade policies on other countries as well. Jamaica got only 12 cents per ton for its bauxite. When Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley imposed a 7.5 percent levy on the selling price of alumina in 1972, Jamaica’s bauxite revenues increased nine-fold in seven years.

Alcoa retaliated, and Jamaica’s percentage of world bauxite production fell from 27 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 1975. Production was shifted to Guinea and Australia.

In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister and then president of the country, planned to industrialize Ghana by harnessing the Volta River. The plan was thwarted by Alcoa. And in 1966 the company’s friends at the CIA overthrew Nkrumah.

Alcoa was also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the 1965 coup in Indonesia, in which a million people were killed.

The company also brutalized U.S. workers. The New York National Guard broke a 1915 strike at Alcoa’s Massena works and bayoneted strike leader Joseph Solunski to death. In appreciation, Alcoa plant manager Charles Moritz tried to give each guardsman a set of aluminum cooking utensils.

In 1917 an Alcoa subsidiary sparked the race riots in East St. Louis, Ill., in which at least 125 African Americans were murdered.

Workers at Alcoa, Tennessee went on strike in 1934 and 1937, where two strikers were killed. This company town had a segregated neighborhood for Black people.

Only in 1941 were many of Alcoa’s plants organized. The Steelworkers won recognition at the Cressona, Penn., plant in October 2008.

Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor; “Alcoa’s High Tech Sweatshop in Mexico” by Charles Kernaghan, published by the National Labor Committee.

Next: Mellon’s million-dollar lie machine.

Part 1: Mellons over Pittsburgh and the planet
Part 2: Coal mines and machine guns
Part 3: Keeping Pittsburgh poor
Part 4: Blood, oil and profits
Part 5: Making people miserable with aluminum
——————————————————————————–
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Gaza water crisis prompts UN call for immediate opening of crossings

The top United Nations humanitarian official in the occupied Palestinian territory today joined aid agencies in calling for the immediate opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow the entry of spare parts and materials critical to restoring the area’s water and sanitation services.

One-shot flu vaccine

Finally some good news about swine flu: the Swiss firm Novartis reports that its pandemic flu vaccine works with only one shot

South African Police Commissioner Says Criminals Greedy But Not Racist

JOHANNESBURG 2 September 2009 Sapa

CRIMINALS GREEDY BUT NOT RACIST: CELE

Criminals do not target people because of their skin colour,
national police commissioner Bheki Cele said on Wednesday.

“Criminals in South Africa… they look at what you have, rather
than looking at your face,” Cele said at a Southern African
Regional Police Chiefs Co-operation Organisation meeting in
Johannesburg.

He was reacting to a decision by Canadian authorities to grant
South African Brandon Huntley refugee status for alleging that the
government could not protect white South Africans from criminal
attacks by “African South Africans”.

“My house was broken into and some stuff was taken… and I
remain black. Surely, my house was never broken into because I am
black,” said Cele.

Huntley told immigration officials in Canada that black people
had attacked him on seven different occasions and that white people
were not safe in South Africa.

He did not lay any charges with the police after any of the
incidents, The Star newspaper reported on Wednesday.

“I’ve opened people’s eyes,” Huntley told the daily.

Canadian authorities granted him refugee status, to the ire of
the ruling African National Congress.

The South African government was not asked to make any
presentation in the case.

The chairman of the board who made the decision, William Davis,
ruled that Huntley “was a victim because of his race rather than a
victim of criminality”.

“The evidence… shows a picture of indifference and inability
or unwillingness of the government and the security forces to
protect white South Africans from persecution by African South
Africans,” said Davis.

Home affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said the decision was
based on “absolute rubbish”, while the ANC described it as racist.

JOHANNESBURG 2 September 2009 Sapa-dpa

NEWS FEATURE: BLACK SA CRIME VICTIM SAYS BLACKS ALSO “PERSECUTED”

Thuli Ndlovu doesn’t buy the claim of fellow South African,
Brandon Huntley, the country’s first-known “crime refugee”, that he
was singled out by criminals because he was white.

Canada’s refugee authorities sensationally granted Huntley’s
refugee status in August after accepting his assertion that he was
marked by criminals in South Africa because of his skin colour and
that the South African state was unwilling or unable to protect
him.

Cape Town native Huntley, 31, applied for refugee status last
year after his work permit ran out. Huntley said he had been mugged
and stabbed during several attempted robberies and been called a
“white dog” or “settler” by his “African South African” attackers.

The immigration and refugee board found “clear and convincing
proof” that Huntley was a “victim of his race rather than a victim
of criminality” and of an “indifference and inability, or
unwillingness, of the government and security forces to protect
white South Africans from persecution by African South Africans.”

The ruling has caused a firestorm of controversy in South
Africa, which has a well-documented violent crime problem but where most of the victims are not whites, but poor blacks, whose stories go unnoticed.

Like Thuli, a 36-year-old tour guide and social worker from
Soweto township outside Johannesburg. “First it was my auntie,” she
says, listing off the victims of violent crime in her family.

Thuli’s aunt used to run a shebeen (unlicensed tavern) from her
home in eastern Johannesburg. It was there Makhosi was gunned down in front of her two children and patrons in the early hours of one
Sunday morning in 2000.

“I think they were trying to rob here but something went wrong
and they shot her,” Thuli says.

The family were still mourning Makhosi, when four months later,
on a Lenten Good Friday, they were back at the graveside, burying
Thuli’s brother.

Thokozani Ndlovu, 24, was attacked by two unknown men while
returning home to his pregnant fiance in Soweto from his job in a
bottle shop one evening.

They took his cellphone and wallet and, when he fought back,
pumped his head, chest and stomach with bullets. After his death,
his fiancee suffered a miscarriage.

And then there was Thuli’s own brush with death in 1998 when she
was walking from the bus to her backyard home in another part of
Soweto.

After being robbed at gunpoint of her phone, money, watch, ring,
even earrings, she was shot twice for trying to get away, fearing
the next stage was rape.

After six months in hospital she was back on her feet, but one
bullet is still lodged in her spine and beeps when she passes
through metal detectors. No one was ever arrested in connection
with the murders. “They said they didn’t have any lead,” she said.

Understandably, Thuli disagrees with Huntley’s claim that whites
are being singled out by criminals.

“They want what you have, whether you’re what or black. It’s
about unemployment (of 27.9 per cent),” she says with a resigned
air.

The South African government said it was “disgusted” at the
ruling which the ruling African National Congress called “racist.”
Human rights groups, including the South African Institute of
Race Relations (SAIRR) and South African Human Rights Commission, also rubbished Huntley’s claims of persecution.

“While South Africa is a very violent society the vast majority
of the victims of violent crime are black,” SAIRR noted.

Whites, who make up 9 per cent of the population of 49.3
million, are generally safer because they can afford to pay for
private security, SAIRR deputy president Frans Cronje said,
referring to the legions of private security guards that watch over
the homes of the wealthy.

While a racial motive was sometimes detected in crimes, there
was no “general pattern of racial attacks on white South Africans
by black South Africans,” SAIRR said.

And the racism, as the CEO of the Human Rights Commission
Tseliso Thipanyane points out, cuts both ways.

Unions representing white farmers in South Africa allege a
racial motive to the high number of violent farm attacks, but a
number of attacks by trigger-happy white farmers on farmworkers or
community members in recent years have also smacked of racism.

Popular reaction continued to pour in to radio phone-in
programmes and internet sites Wednesday, with most condemning
Huntley but a few saluting him for highlighting the crime scourge.

“I’ve opened people’s eyes,” Huntley told Johannesburg’s The
Star newspaper.

In Egypt: Building churches is a sin against God

Last of L.A. wildfire evacuees return

Firefighters, helped again by favorable weather, made new gains on Wednesday against the wildfire raging through mountains near Los Angeles as evacuation orders were lifted for the last of those forced to flee earlier.

Having removed the immediate threat to thousands of homes around the outer fringe of the 8-day-old blaze in the San Gabriel Mountains, firefighters turned their focus to two interior fronts at either end of the 20-mile-long (32 km-long) fire zone.

Officials said they were especially determined to keep the southeastern flank of the fire from creeping into heavily populated areas below it in the San Gabriel Valley, including Pasadena.

“That’s our No. 1 priority for the next several days,” fire commander Mike Dietrich said in an evening update. “That area is requiring a lot of work.

A wave of elevated humidity and light clouds gave firefighters a second day of respite from hot, dry weather.

Improved weather was key in the battle, so far successful, to save Mount Wilson, home to a world-famous observatory and a telecommunications and broadcasting hub for the region.

Additional neighborhoods closed by the fire were reopened as well. Police said that by late Wednesday night, the last few evacuation orders would be lifted.

By Wednesday evening, fire crews had carved containment lines around 28 percent of the blaze. Commanders predict it may take two more weeks to fully enclose the flames.

“We’re fighting for every foot of containment,” Dietrich said.

SCHWARZENEGGER SHRUGS OFF COSTS

While the financial cost of battling the fire swelled to $21 million, the most of several blazes around California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shrugged off concerns that state budget problems would short-change firefighters.

“Even though we have a budget crunch and a financial crisis … we always have the money available to fight fires,” he said.

After scorching over 140,000 acres, an area roughly the size of Chicago, the so-called Station Fire was poised to become one of the 10 largest wildfires in California history.

Since erupting last Wednesday in the Angeles National Forest about 15 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, the blaze has destroyed at least 64 homes, killed two firefighters and injured several others.

Three people who ignored evacuation orders also were injured.

While U.S. Forest Service officials maintained that nothing has been ruled out in the fire investigation, Dietrich said earlier that said human activity, accidental or deliberate, was presumed to be the cause. That is the case with the overwhelming majority of Southern California wildfires.

With the Station Fire and several other blazes flaring up across California in recent weeks, the state already has more than half depleted its emergency firefighting budget.

But Schwarzenegger said California, which boasts the world’s eighth-largest economy, can still tap a $500 million reserve fund created primarily through cuts in social services.

Moreover, state and local agencies stand to recover 75 percent of California’s wild-land firefighting costs this year from a federal grant already approved, officials said.

Some 4,700 firefighters have been assembled to battle the Station Fire, many from distant parts of California and elsewhere across the Western United States.

One of their biggest single victories so far has been the pitched battle at Mount Wilson.

Days after predicting the 5,700-foot (1,740-meter) summit was virtually doomed to be engulfed in a firestorm, officials said Wednesday they hoped the site would largely be spared.

Muffled fire activity attributed to higher moisture levels in the air gave fire crews time to launch a renewed, all-out campaign to clear dense brush around the mountain and to treat the slopes with heavy doses of fire retardant. Fire crews also were standing by to douse buildings and other structures with special foam if flames approach.

Source:
Reuters, “Last of L.A. wildfire evacuees return“, accessed September 2, 2009

Drought, death grips Kenyan heartland

Peraguan Lesagut brought 200 cattle to Mount Kenya, but 160 have died from altitude, disease and starvation.

For as long as anyone cares to remember, the pastoralists of Kenya’s Rift Valley have fled with their herds to the fertile slopes of Mount Kenya when times are tough.

When the rains failed this year they set off once again in search of water and pasture — but they found only despair.

“I could have stayed home or I could have come here, but it is all the same. All that you find is death,” said Peraguan Lesagut, an aging pastoralist who came five months ago with his herd.

After years of persistent drought Lesagut left his two wives and 16 children and drove 200 cattle to the foothills of Mount Kenya — Africa’s second highest summit. Now, only 40 are left; the rest succumbing to cold, disease and exposure.

Just four young cows survive of this herd of 200 cattle. Many pastoralists spend decades building up their herds.

Across the folds of this mountain everyone has the same story. Hundreds of dead cattle dot the forests, young herdsmen try to coax ailing calves onto their feet, knowing that if they don’t get up they will die.

“I am hopeless because I have seen almost all of my animals die,” Lesagut said. “If the rains are delayed for even another week two, then I will lose everything.”

Millions of Kenyans are facing the same stark reality. The World Food Program (WFP) says that, together with the Kenyan government, they will need to feed 3.8 million people across the country. (Left: dead cow from drought)

Successive years of failed crops, drought and erratic rains caused by climate change have all had an impact. Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti all face similar crises. Despite this, the U.N. agency says that its emergency programs are facing massive shortfalls.

“We are facing a really difficult situation. We realize that the world economic crisis has affected the amount that countries can give to us,” says WFP spokesperson Gabrielle Menezes, “But at the same time we are seeing an awful situation in Kenya. If we don’t start feeding people now things are only going to get worse.”

For many Kenyan farmers, the situation is already bad enough. Eunice Wairimu has seen four successive crops fail. This is harvest time in Kenya but her corn plants barely reach her knees and she will have to use her meager harvest as animal feed.

“I don’t even like to go to my farm because I become very upset,” she said. “There is nothing for me to get there for my family.”

Wairimu used to sell her surplus, but now she depends on food rations. She accepts them grudgingly.

“According to our tribal culture we aren’t used to being given food. We have always been willing to work hard. If it is the will of God to bring rain, he will bring rain. But he also brings drought.”

Source:
Cable News Network, “Drought, death grips Kenyan heartland“, accessed September 2, 2009

From the Inbox - This Labor Day Work for Polar Bears

Make the Call for Polar Bears A warming climate could doom polar bears in the U.S. Please call your senators and urge them to support decisive action to reduce carbon emissions and help our wildlife survive the impacts of global warming: Labor Day is coming up and America’s wildlife needs your senators to get working on legislation to address climate change. Please urge your senators to stand up for polar bears and other wildlife struggling in a warming world with a quick phone call or email to their local offices.… and deliver this message: My name is [your name] and I’m calling from [city] today to remind my senators that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to human communities, fish and wildlife habitat and the natural resources we depend on — resources like clean air and water — and recreational opportunities such as fishing, boating and hiking. As someone who cares about wildlife and the irreplaceable value of our naturalworld, I ask Senator [Your Senator’s Name] to pass climate change legislation that will: Significantly reduce greenhouse gas emmissions in the U.S., and Provide 5% dedicated funding from the funds generated under the bill to safeguard fish, wildlife and the natural resources that we need to survive. Please fill out this quick survey to let me know that you called your senators. Based on your feedback, I will be following up with high-priority senate offices to remind them that you called and that you care about global warming and wildlife. A recent White House report predicts that climate change could cause Alaska’s polar bears to disappear from the wild within 75 years. [1] Recent polls indicate broad public support for legislation that would curb harmful greenhouse gas emissions. But that hasn’t stopped Big Oil and their allies from using scare tactics and misinformation to oppose common-sense efforts to address global warming — the single greatest threat that America’s wildlife faces today. Please call your senators today — then let us know you called. With your help, we can ensure a brighter future for our wildlife — and our planet. With Gratitude, Marcia Lesky Director of National Outreach Defenders of Wildlife Notes 1] http://www.globalchange.gov/images/cir/pdf/ecosystems.pdf

Goggle-eyed protesters swim against carbon trading tide

Climate Camp activists sat in kayaks and wore goggles at DECC headquarters to protest against carbon trading and capture
Alok Jha
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 September 2009 13.15 BST
Visitors to the department for energy and climate change (DECC) headquarters in London this morning would have noticed something odd about the reception area: 15 climate activists wearing arm bands, goggles and sitting in kayaks. The protest, organised by members of the Camp for Climate Action, is a stand against carbon trading and carbon capture and storage technology, ideas the activists say are “false solutions” to climate change.
The activists said they wanted to highlight the problems of rising sea levels as a result of climate change.
“We thought that DECC’s staff and Ed Miliband might appreciate some goggles and floats because if they continue with their destructive policies they will need them,” said Jane Roberts, one of the protesters. “It really is sink or survive for the future of humanity now.
“Climate change is being caused by the same economic and political system that has caused the economic meltdown. Rather than getting serious about tackling climate change, DECC is simply seeking to preserve these failed systems with false solutions, such as carbon trading.”
The protesters have a particular gripe with carbon trading, which puts a price on polluting with carbon dioxide and is one of the mechanisms proposed by international governments as a way to regulate carbon emissions.
Hassan Beg, a climate camp activist, also criticised government plans to ensure future UK coal power stations are built with technology to capture and store 20-25% of their carbon emissions. “Considering DECC’s vested interest in the coal industry, it is no coincidence that they are promoting unproven carbon capture and storage technology to justify E.ON building a new dirty coal-power station at Kingsnorth and a new generation of open-cast coal mines,” said Beg. “One can’t help wondering whether the Vestas wind turbine factory would have been given the financial assistance necessary to stay open if it had been coal.”
A DECC spokesperson said: “We all value our freedoms to speak out, gather together and demonstrate. This action has not disrupted the department’s work to fight climate change and safeguard the nation’s energy security. We are the first country in the world to set out a comprehensive plan to cut our emissions – by at least a third by 2020. Our action here will help us push for an ambitious global deal at Copenhagen to tackle global warming.”

India will be key player at Copenhagen conference, says Miliband

Climate change secretary praises India’s renewable targets and ‘big ambitions’, cementing cordial relations between the countries
Randeep Ramesh in Delhi
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 September 2009 18.31 BST
Ed Miliband, Britain’s climate change secretary, hailed India as a potential “deal maker” in the forthcoming talks in Copenhagen for an international treaty to tackle global warming, stating that the country would not face targets to cut its emissions in the near future because it “took climate change seriously”.
The UK’s “softly-softly” approach has won plaudits in India, and contrasts with that of US secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, whose visit in July resulted in a spat with environment minister Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh. India has categorically ruled out greenhouse gas cuts, arguing that rich nations caused the problem and must not deny Indians the opportunity to grow out of poverty.
In an interview with the Guardian, Miliband and development secretary Douglas Alexander said India would not have to reduce emissions by 2020 – the year when the European Union has offered to cut by a third its greenhouse gas output – given that Delhi was “not doing things on a ‘business as usual basis’”.
“India has very stretching targets on solar energy, on renewable energy … it has big ambitions on energy efficiency … I think India wants to be a deal maker not a deal breaker in Copenhagen,” said Miliband.
India already generates 8% of its power from renewables – more than the UK. It says it aims to have 20,000MW of solar energy in place by 2020 and make fuel efficiency standards mandatory for cars from 2011 as part of a package to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint.
After Clinton’s visit, Delhi accused the United States of applying pressure on India to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. The United States wants big developing countries such as India and China, whose emissions are quickly rising as their economies grow, to agree to rein them in before Washington commits to any global deal.
Today the Indian government released a series of studies showing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise – citing a range between 2.8 and 5.0 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person in 2031. The government estimates India’s current per-capita emissions at 1.2 tonnes – significantly below the current global average of 4 tonnes.
“Even two decades from now, India’s per-capita greenhouse gas emissions will be below the global average of 25 years earlier,” said the Indian minister.
Although Miliband welcomed the report, the British minister said the negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen centred on when “emissions in different countries peak past 2020″.
Miliband highlighted July’s L’Aquila agreement – where the world’s richest nations reached a symbolic deal with India, China and other major polluters on the need to limit global warming to within 2 degrees centigrade to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Despite this pledge Miliband stopped short of calling of emission reduction targets for big, emerging economies such as India after 2020. “That is one of the questions we have got to resolve… we want to work with India”.
Another key area of difference revolves around carbon capture and storage technologies that Britain has promoted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Indian officials have complained about the cost of such plants, which aim to capture carbon dioxide created by industry and pump them deep underground.
However Miliband pointed to India’s rising reliance on coal as a source of power as a reason why the Asian nation might embrace the technology. “India seems to be most interested in solar technology. Let me be honest with you there is no solution to the problem of climate change that does not solve the problem of coal.”
Campaigners said British ministers’ softly-softly approach showed the west had “come a long way”. “I think they are beginning to understand the ground realities in India. You have to talk to each other not at each other,” said Sunita Narain of Delhi’s Centre for Science and the Environment.
However Narain said that there was still some way to go. She said industrial nations must curb their own pollution and provide funding and technology to help developing nations before the latter are asked to set limits that could crimp their economic expansion.
Douglas Alexander, Britain’s development secretary, pointed out that Gordon Brown had proposed $100bn (£62bn) a year for a global green fund that could “unlock new sources of financing”.