pmex
08-06-2009, 04:43 PM
The enemies of mining ?</B>
Wallace, Idaho – In two separate venues and districts, federal bankruptcy judges have in recent weeks weighed in hard against operating American miners. No doubt the anti American-mining community, which comprises greenies, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, and like-minded idiots everywhere are dancing in the streets.
The first bankruptcy instance is of course the one being played out in Coeur d'Alene, in an action which might best be captioned, “Sterling Silver and Roger Van Voorhees v. the Sunshine Mine and the Silver Valley,” about which more, a bit later. The second might as well be captioned, “Government Motors (GM) versus Stillwater M.C., its 1,300 Hard-Rock Miners and American Workers in General.”
In the Stillwater case (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Judge-OKs-GMs-move-to-drop-apf-3928439373.html?x=0&.v=6), a government bankruptcy judge ruled that Government Motors (formerly GM) could dishonour its contracts to purchase palladium and rhodium from Stillwater, while continuing to honour its purchase of these PGM metals from U.S. allies Russia and South Africa.
There are 1,300 guys working at Columbus, Montana-based Stillwater, just over the hill from Butte, where many of Wallace's ancestors hail from. The late General Motors accounted for about 11 percent of Stillwater's business last year. Do the math. You can bet the South Africans and the Russkies, our ever-lovin' friends, have done the math.
So the wages of Stillwater miners, as well as those of other western hard-rock miners have been garnisheed at gunpoint by the United States Government to front the government's bailout of GM and that wing of the Democratic Party known as the UAW, and their wages are now turned against them. “Pay your taxes to bail out somebody who just took your job away and sent it overseas,” says the United States.
This is change we had better learn to believe in. Germany's 1930s-era National Socialist Party could not have been slicker.
Even closer to home, another federal bankruptcy judge has granted Sterling Mining Co. the right to destroy the Sunshine silver mine even as its owner, and at least one interested suitor, strive in vain to save it.
In full view of human witnesses, reporters, cameras, and God Himself, Sterling walked away from the Sunshine Mine and their lease of it back in February. A press release from Sterling to that effect ensued. Yet two months later United States Bankruptcy Judge Terry Myers sided with Sterling, to wit: that said abandonment never really happened so you people who saw it, photographed it, heard it and read about it, must be on drugs.
United States bankruptcy judges are accountable to no-one, except their governing courts of appeals; in Myers' case, the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. Not even Bill Gates can afford to litigate there more than once a semester. A United States bankruptcy judge is God. If he says the red car you're driving is really blue, learn to love the color blue in a whole new light, because you ain't going to have the bucks to call your car red again. And you thought his country was founded on a respect for contracts?
Two judges, two jurisdictions. And two mines, both being summarily destroyed by judicial fiat from the circuit courts of the United States.
Judicial fiat. We are becoming ominously familiar with the term “fiat.” This form of fiat is not an Italian car, any more than fiat money is real money – anymore than judicial fiat is real justice. But what's real and sensible, and what infects the mind of a federal judge, are vastly different critters.
Not that what the federal courts do may even matter, however. There's a government institution even more deadly to miners than those bankruptcy judges: the U.S.E.P.A. An investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own National Ombudsman's Office – abolished by the Bush II Administration, but more needed now than ever they were – into EPA improprieties here in the Silver Valley under the aegis of the federal Superfund law, concluded the following:
“In view of section 113(h) of the Superfund, no person has legal standing to challenge in Court any Superfund decision by EPA once a Record of Decision is signed.” The only entity legally entitled to tangle with the EPA was its own Ombudsman's office which, after putting up the Good Fight here in the Silver Valley on behalf of Bunker Hill and some 70 penny-stock mining companies, was sacked lock, stock and barrel by George W. Bush's CEO of EPA, Christine Toad Whitman.
We were visiting the other day with the CEO of one of those penny-stock mining companies. They hold a property on the west end of the Coeur d'Alene District. While they never operated the mine or its long-defunct mill, they are in the EPA's cross-hairs as a Superfund defendant. When the company decided to log a bit of timber from its patented claims, from which activity they received $100,000, intending to spend same to see if there were any minerals left in the mine, EPA rolled in like an 18-wheeler, saying, in essence, “Give us all that new cash, plus unrestricted access to your private property, and maybe, just maybe, we'll let you off the hook for all the environmental damage you didn't in the first place cause. Or not.”
At precisely the time in which the United States is half-way to the monetization of its debt that in Weimar Germany triggered the most vicious inflation in modern times, a concerted effort by the U.S. Judiciary and Executive branches to destroy the one industry that could save us – the mineral extraction industry is under way. Rather than declaring war on its miners, the United States had better make peace with them. They generate real wealth. And the United States had better make peace with its miners soon, before the tax man cometh, and before the bill-collectors in China start calling in their markers.
The U.S. economy, and the lives and jobs of U.S. miners, would be well-served by an attentive governor, senator or representative to reign in this nonsense. Put the judges and the EPA on notice that they cannot destroy any more jobs. And they'd better not dither while working people suffer and what's left of the U.S. economy circles the drain.
David Bond
Editor : The Silver Valley Mining Journal
www.silverminers.com (http://www.silverminers.com/)
More... (http://www.24hgold.com/english/contributor.aspx?rss=true&article=2247633122G10020&redirect=false&contributor=David+Bond)
Wallace, Idaho – In two separate venues and districts, federal bankruptcy judges have in recent weeks weighed in hard against operating American miners. No doubt the anti American-mining community, which comprises greenies, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, and like-minded idiots everywhere are dancing in the streets.
The first bankruptcy instance is of course the one being played out in Coeur d'Alene, in an action which might best be captioned, “Sterling Silver and Roger Van Voorhees v. the Sunshine Mine and the Silver Valley,” about which more, a bit later. The second might as well be captioned, “Government Motors (GM) versus Stillwater M.C., its 1,300 Hard-Rock Miners and American Workers in General.”
In the Stillwater case (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Judge-OKs-GMs-move-to-drop-apf-3928439373.html?x=0&.v=6), a government bankruptcy judge ruled that Government Motors (formerly GM) could dishonour its contracts to purchase palladium and rhodium from Stillwater, while continuing to honour its purchase of these PGM metals from U.S. allies Russia and South Africa.
There are 1,300 guys working at Columbus, Montana-based Stillwater, just over the hill from Butte, where many of Wallace's ancestors hail from. The late General Motors accounted for about 11 percent of Stillwater's business last year. Do the math. You can bet the South Africans and the Russkies, our ever-lovin' friends, have done the math.
So the wages of Stillwater miners, as well as those of other western hard-rock miners have been garnisheed at gunpoint by the United States Government to front the government's bailout of GM and that wing of the Democratic Party known as the UAW, and their wages are now turned against them. “Pay your taxes to bail out somebody who just took your job away and sent it overseas,” says the United States.
This is change we had better learn to believe in. Germany's 1930s-era National Socialist Party could not have been slicker.
Even closer to home, another federal bankruptcy judge has granted Sterling Mining Co. the right to destroy the Sunshine silver mine even as its owner, and at least one interested suitor, strive in vain to save it.
In full view of human witnesses, reporters, cameras, and God Himself, Sterling walked away from the Sunshine Mine and their lease of it back in February. A press release from Sterling to that effect ensued. Yet two months later United States Bankruptcy Judge Terry Myers sided with Sterling, to wit: that said abandonment never really happened so you people who saw it, photographed it, heard it and read about it, must be on drugs.
United States bankruptcy judges are accountable to no-one, except their governing courts of appeals; in Myers' case, the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. Not even Bill Gates can afford to litigate there more than once a semester. A United States bankruptcy judge is God. If he says the red car you're driving is really blue, learn to love the color blue in a whole new light, because you ain't going to have the bucks to call your car red again. And you thought his country was founded on a respect for contracts?
Two judges, two jurisdictions. And two mines, both being summarily destroyed by judicial fiat from the circuit courts of the United States.
Judicial fiat. We are becoming ominously familiar with the term “fiat.” This form of fiat is not an Italian car, any more than fiat money is real money – anymore than judicial fiat is real justice. But what's real and sensible, and what infects the mind of a federal judge, are vastly different critters.
Not that what the federal courts do may even matter, however. There's a government institution even more deadly to miners than those bankruptcy judges: the U.S.E.P.A. An investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own National Ombudsman's Office – abolished by the Bush II Administration, but more needed now than ever they were – into EPA improprieties here in the Silver Valley under the aegis of the federal Superfund law, concluded the following:
“In view of section 113(h) of the Superfund, no person has legal standing to challenge in Court any Superfund decision by EPA once a Record of Decision is signed.” The only entity legally entitled to tangle with the EPA was its own Ombudsman's office which, after putting up the Good Fight here in the Silver Valley on behalf of Bunker Hill and some 70 penny-stock mining companies, was sacked lock, stock and barrel by George W. Bush's CEO of EPA, Christine Toad Whitman.
We were visiting the other day with the CEO of one of those penny-stock mining companies. They hold a property on the west end of the Coeur d'Alene District. While they never operated the mine or its long-defunct mill, they are in the EPA's cross-hairs as a Superfund defendant. When the company decided to log a bit of timber from its patented claims, from which activity they received $100,000, intending to spend same to see if there were any minerals left in the mine, EPA rolled in like an 18-wheeler, saying, in essence, “Give us all that new cash, plus unrestricted access to your private property, and maybe, just maybe, we'll let you off the hook for all the environmental damage you didn't in the first place cause. Or not.”
At precisely the time in which the United States is half-way to the monetization of its debt that in Weimar Germany triggered the most vicious inflation in modern times, a concerted effort by the U.S. Judiciary and Executive branches to destroy the one industry that could save us – the mineral extraction industry is under way. Rather than declaring war on its miners, the United States had better make peace with them. They generate real wealth. And the United States had better make peace with its miners soon, before the tax man cometh, and before the bill-collectors in China start calling in their markers.
The U.S. economy, and the lives and jobs of U.S. miners, would be well-served by an attentive governor, senator or representative to reign in this nonsense. Put the judges and the EPA on notice that they cannot destroy any more jobs. And they'd better not dither while working people suffer and what's left of the U.S. economy circles the drain.
David Bond
Editor : The Silver Valley Mining Journal
www.silverminers.com (http://www.silverminers.com/)
More... (http://www.24hgold.com/english/contributor.aspx?rss=true&article=2247633122G10020&redirect=false&contributor=David+Bond)