'Capitalism Saved the Miners'? Only in Wonder Land

By Steve Rendall
Fairness & Accuracy in reporting (FAIR)
blog
October 15, 2010

http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/10/15/capitalism-saved-the-miners-only-in-wonder-land/

After the miners' rescue Wednesday, talk in Chile
turned to mine safety and the  conduct of Companía
Minera San Esteban, the corporation that owns the San
Jose mines where the miners were trapped. On Thursday,
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera publicly addressed
safety issues,  vowing "fundamental changes in how
businesses treat their workers."

Stories about San Esteban's horrible record are legion
(e.g., here http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/10/14/chile-mine-safety-104.html
and here http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/chil-s03.shtml).
The company has been host to a
number of deaths at its mines in recent years, and
accusations of safety violations including the charge
that it ignored orders to install safety equipment--a
condition of its reopening after a previous accident--
which might have made an earlier escape possible for
some miners.

Moreover, during the debacle, San Esteban, which played
no part in the miners' rescue, pled poverty and claimed
it could not pay the trapped miners wages. As London's
Independent reported, San Esteban "says it has no money
to continue paying their wages, let alone cope with the
lawsuits that will inevitably arise from the ordeal."

All in all, one might say it wasn't an episode in which
capitalism cloaked itself in glory. That is, unless one
is Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page director
and "Wonder Land" columnist Daniel Henninger. In his
October 14 column, "Capitalism Saved the Miners: The
Profit = Innovation Dynamic Was Everywhere at the Mine
Rescue Site," Henninger argued that the miners owed
their rescue to a special drill bit developed by a
private U.S. company. That was his entire argument.

Henninger's real motive seemed to be to use the miners'
rescue to rebut a bit of Obama campaign rhetoric in
which the president had sarcastically dismissed notion
of unqualified faith in markets:

    The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in
    the market and we let corporations do whatever they
    want and we leave everybody else to fend for
    themselves, then America somehow automatically is
    going to grow and prosper.

Henninger's response to Obama's remark:

    Uh, yeah. That's a caricature of the basic idea,
    but basically that's right. Ask the miners.

I'm sure the miners are thankful for the heroic drill
bit, but their opinion of the role of capitalism in
their debacle might be less breathless than
Henninger's. Indeed, most of the miners have weighed in
on the central capitalist actor in the story: At least
29 of the 33 miners' families have filed lawsuits
against San Esteban.

Also inconvenient for Henninger's argument: The rescue
was run by the Chilean government and its relevant
ministries, not by the capitalist company. Oh, and the
U.S. government's space agency, NASA, also played a
crucial role, designing the rescue capsule and
consulting on safety issues.

Moreover, it's worth noting that, while Chile's larger,
government-owned mines have relatively good safety
records, the same cannot be said for its smaller,
capitalist-run mines, such as San Esteban's.

No one argues that capitalism does not produce new
innovations (while sometimes stifling innovations too),
but in Henninger's capitalist Wonder Land, the bad
actions of capitalists, as well as the the good and
vital acts of governments, are banished to the real
world.

_____________________________________________

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