The Unsettling Story of the Company That Ate Montana: Anaconda Copper скачать в хорошем качестве

The Unsettling Story of the Company That Ate Montana: Anaconda Copper

Butte, Montana, 1880. An Irish immigrant paid thirty thousand dollars for a played-out silver mine. One hundred years later, that hole in the ground had produced three hundred billion dollars in copper. It had also produced something else. By 1920, one company owned nine of Montana's fourteen major newspapers. The same company controlled the state legislature. When a judge ruled against them in 1903, they shut down eighty percent of Montana's workforce until the governor changed the law. For eighty years, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company didn't just operate in Montana. It operated Montana. The War of the Copper Kings transformed mining rivalries into political warfare. Marcus Daly, William Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze spent millions buying elections, newspapers, and judges. Underground miners fought hand-to-hand combat with grenades and dynamite over ore veins a mile beneath Butte. The capital fight of 1894 cost three million dollars - $1,356 per voter. The corruption was so blatant it helped pass a constitutional amendment. But the real cost came later. When Anaconda closed the Berkeley Pit in 1982, they left behind a toxic lake one mile wide and fifteen hundred feet deep. Water so acidic it killed four thousand migrating geese in a single day. The largest Superfund site in American history. A pit that must be federally managed forever because the company that created it no longer exists. This is the story of how a corporation became more powerful than the state it operated in. How workers built lives in a system designed to trap them. How the copper that electrified America left behind contamination that will last millennia. How three hundred billion dollars in wealth extracted from Montana returned as poison. Monument to American industry? Or warning about what happens when profit is the only value that matters? Subscribe for investigations into the companies that shaped America and the costs they left behind. Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.