#resource-colony — Public Fediverse posts

If We’re Talking about the Violent Occupation and Colonization of Minnesota, Let’s Also Talk about the Play for Minnesota’s Critical Minerals

The ever-prolific docket watcher and political commentator Marcy Wheeler put up a video the other day where, in her words, she “laid out how Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is like his invasion of Minnesota: Tribute and obeisance.” I have been wanting to draw and explore that same analogy, but I am reluctant to paint with the broad brush Wheeler uses here. I do, however, think there’s a way to make the analogy she draws between Venezuela and Minnesota a little more compelling.

Wheeler’s general point is that the “model” of power in both Venezuela and Minnesota is the same: “extract tribute, subjugate the population… and impose your rules on how to govern.” Or, as she puts it near the end of the video,

It is the same model: Stephen Miller is trying to colonize Minnesota, he is trying to colonize Venezuela, he has no fucking interest in bringing benefits to the citizens of either one. He wants extraction and he wants obeisance.

The neo-colonial project, in this view, is to invade, conquer, subdue, and plunder. This is inflammatory language but I have no trouble applying it to Venezuela, where Trump has declared himself “acting President of Venezuela” and in that capacity (it appears) will now control an offshore, Qatar-based fund for Venezuela’s oil proceeds. So what about Minnesota? What form might the “tribute” demanded in Minnesota take?

Wheeler doesn’t say (though she uses the word “extraction”), and I haven’t seen other commentators spell out what form it will take. So for what it’s worth I am going to offer this: it’s important to understand that Trump and those in his circle regard Minnesota not only as a hotbed of Somali daycare fraud, a stronghold of illegal immigration, and the home of whistle-blowing paid agitators and domestic terrorists, but also as a resource play. A critical minerals bonanza.

(As anyone who reads this blog knows, this is a theme I’ve been chasing since Trump was first elected, and Jared and Ivanka moved into the five-million-dollar mansion purchased for them by a Chilean billionaire with a controversial plan to mine copper and nickel in northern Minnesota, on the edge of the Boundary Waters.)

Just last week, when news of Renee Good’s murder broke, there was another Minnesota story in the news that helps illustrate what I’m talking about. You can read it as a story about a cynical abuse of the Congressional Review Act, but it’s also about the convergence of a foreign mining company’s US political project with the Project 2025 authoritarian takeover of the US government.

Once it became clear that there was no lawful path forward for the Twin Metals project, that convergence was bound to happen. The mining company’s case in US District Court had been dismissed (though it is still on appeal at the DC Circuit), their lease applications had been denied, their mining plan of operations was rejected, and the Biden administration had put a 20-year moratorium on copper and nickel mining in the Rainy River watershed. The only way forward for Chilean mining giant Antofagasta was political, as I put it at the time. The company could count on a Trump victory in 2024, on corruption, and on the Project 2025 plan to weaken and hobble the administrative state.

Now that bet is starting to pay off, as the latest chapter in this story shows. Just after the new year, on January 6, this entry was made in the Congressional Record:

Project 2025 specified that the 20-year mineral withdrawal of the Rainy River watershed should be “[abandoned]” if it had “not been completed.” In 2023, that read like a throwaway line. The mineral withdrawal had been announced in January of that year, and it seemed all but certain that the withdrawal would be completed by the end of Biden’s term.

Now, Republicans claim, the Biden administration failed to take one small, final step.

The Biden White House published notice of the withdrawal in the Federal Register, but not in the Congressional Record, as required by law [or not, see the postcript below*]. With this letter, Trump’s Department of the Interior is correcting that oversight. But of course it’s a bad faith gesture. The notice creates an opportunity for the House of Representatives to review and for the Republican majority to reject the mineral withdrawal, as this Reuters article explains. The same notice was sent to Vice President Vance, as head of the Republican-controlled Senate. Opponents of the withdrawal will now have 60 days to muster simple majorities in both houses.

Though it may look like a bureaucratic fix to cure a deficiency, the letter is clearly part of a coordinated effort to advance Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project. It’s a clever ploy, designed to give corruption the appearance of legitimacy. Start with the office issuing the letter, the Office of the Secretariat and Regulatory Affairs (OES) in the Department of the Interior. OES serves as “the primary point of contact” with the White House Office of Management and Budget, and communicates and works regularly with OMB to “ensure” that regulations and policies “comply with…OMB requirements.” That is the principal and legitimate channel of communication for this kind of letter.

However, anyone paying attention for the last year or so knows that OMB is now a fully captured office, under the direction of Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025. At every turn, Vought has directed OMB to dismantle and hamstring federal agencies and undo rules unfavorable to private industry. OMB is most likely the office that ordered this OES review, and the “White House Office” where the Bernhardt Group, according to its most recent disclosure, has been lobbying for the Twin Metals mine. (Next week, we’ll see if Q4 25 lobbying disclosures offer any more clarity on this point.**) Along with OES, OMB, and Antofagasta’s lobbying firm, Rep. Pete Stauber was also in the loop. Or at least he wasted no time doing his part. Less than a week after the letter from OES appeared in the Congressional Record, Stauber introduced a joint resolution of “Congressional disapproval” of the withdrawal.

Communications among these groups would make a particularly ripe target for a FOIA request, and help establish who did exactly what in this latest scheme. At the same time, I doubt that document production would help us make any meaningful connection between what’s going down in Minneapolis right now and these behind-closed-door maneuvers on behalf of a foreign mining company. That’s not really the point, anyway. I am not trying to suggest that extracting the treasures of the Duluth Complex is the main motive for the federal occupation of Minnesota, or that the violent brownshirt tactics we’re seeing on the streets of Minneapolis are primarily intended to pave the way for extractive industry up north. What I am suggesting is that we should look for places where these two Trumpist efforts might come together: the federal occupation of Minnesota and the push to plunder Minnesota’s mineral resources. That’s the intersection where the case for colonialism or analogies with Venezuela or Greenland will gain real traction.

With Trump now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, there are already some worrying signs that the authoritarian takeover of Minnesota could extend beyond subjugation of Minneapolis to demand tribute from the Iron Range. The ICE surge is already providing Stauber, Tom Emmer, and other Minnesota Republicans with an opportunity to attack Twin Cities leadership and widen existing north-south, rural-urban political divides. With his cronies on the House Natural Resources Committee, Stauber has tried to drag environmental groups before Congress on the pretext that they colluded with the Biden administration on the Rainy River withdrawal, and he has made McCarthyite threats about their non-profit status. ICE kidnappings and detention of Oglala Lakota and raids on the Little Earth housing complex suggest that blind racism and utter disregard for tribal sovereignty could (once again) enable extractive industry in the north. And from everything we’ve seen, it’s clear this lawless administration will not hesitate to label environmental defenders and water protectors — or anyone who stands in the way of their booty — domestic terrorists, and deal with them accordingly.

*Postscript Longtime Boundary Waters champion and lawyer Rebecca Rom writes to say the law does not require publication in the Congressional Record:

The issue isn’t the Congressional Record (the claimed technicality) but rather the application of the Congressional Review Act for Interior Dept. Public Land Orders. 

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) governs federal land withdrawals and requires thorough and timely notice to Congress upon the signing of a Public Land Order for a withdrawal. The Interior Department has followed the FLPMA Section 204 notice provisions to Congress for nearly 50 years (since 1976), through Republican and Democrat administrations. This is the pattern and practice of FLPMA notice compliance by the Interior Department.

This did not change with the enactment of the Congressional Review Act in 1996, which applies to notice of rules (not orders) to Congress in a process that is nearly identical to FLPMA.

In the past 25 years, there have been 28 withdrawals. Interior has not sent any of these withdrawals (those that were over 5,000 acres) to Congress pursuant to the Congressional Review Act. All notices that have been to Congress have been FLPMA notices.

The Interior Department delivered FLPMA notices to Congress, as required by law, on Jan. 26, 2023, when Public Land Order 7917 was signed. All members of the MN Congressional delegation received a letter of notice, including Congressman Stauber. The decision was published in the Federal Register, as required.

Any claim by Congressman Stauber of a violation of the Congressional Review Act is wrong. Any claim by Congressman Stauber that Congress did not receive notice of PLO 7917 is wrong; it received the legally required notice under FLPMA.

**Update 23 Jan 26: A little more clarity. The most recent disclosure by the Bernhardt Group corrects “White House Office” to “Executive Office of the President (EOP)” — which is where OMB is housed. It also shows the Bernhardt Group lobbying for Twin Metals at USDA. I found it curious that the Department of Agriculture was not among the agencies listed on the Q3 disclosure form.

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