How The Fed Is Selling The United States Right Out From Under Your Feet
This might take me to a rather bitter place so let me start with a bee pic I caught earlier this spring to be my second entry into @killerwhale's #KillerPix contest this week, because it is adorable. If I get pissy, look back up at the adorable bee and keep reading. It is important...
Ten years ago I tried to get "silver vigilantes" to band together and start claiming up as much of Idaho as we legally could, which is actually a LOT. You do not even have to work the mine any more, pay an annual fee and it is yours to have and to hold the mineral rights to. Now, there are hoops, red tape, papers and legwork to be done. We live here, we were willing to do that, we just needed people to understand the problem and help us do something about it. No one "got it." I suspect they thought we were trying to run a scam, that is what people usually assume.
Here was the general concept:
You may hold 8 placer claims, each may be 20 acres PER STAKEHOLDER. You may have 7 other stakeholders on each of your claims. You may sign over your interest in any claim, any time, to another stakeholder.
Stay with me now... If 8 of us were to go make 8 claims, then sign off to let one person have it, then go stake 8 more claims and sign of and let another person have it, then stake 8 more claims... You see where this leads? You end up with 8 claims each, and they are all 160 acres. Yes, you DO have to bring fresh signatories in at some point, as each person gets their 8th claim they can no longer sign on for the last round of claims. If NO children, friends or family could be convinced, you may end up with your eighth claim as small as 20 acres. OK, not a bad plan... but it never happened.
The reason we made the plea was because the last claim we staked, we made an alarming discovery. You can't just pick a spot by map and claim it, you actually have to go there, check for stakes, and post your own stakes. In that process we found much of Idaho's minerals were being claimed by China, Russia and Canada.
Soon after that discovery, all sorts of strange things started happening. We almost had "little China" installed south of Boise. I am sure by now snopes will tell you that never happened but I lived here. I was in the political mix still and I watched the Governor back peddle, tap dance and flip-flop all at once. Furthermore, I took a drive out to the desert area in question and something was up, something was absophuckinglutely up.
The little county we lived in when all this started soon had GREAT economic news... A Canadian mining company was coming with JOBS!!! My husband and I squealed like pigs, no one heard us. We were about to have the highest mountain in our county become the biggest hole in the country. Silver, molybdenum and copper would be extracted, and we would get half a dozen minimum wage jobs! Yippee! STILL we could not convince our neighbors to go STAKE CLAIMS!!! If I had a stick for every time I heard "I don't want to be a miner" I would have been well-armed to poke some idiots with a stick. It is too late, the CuMo mine is almost certain to happen. Ironically, the county that sits upon such a wealth of metals (there was a full on gold rush there in the 1800's) and rare earth minerals recently declared bankruptcy...
And here we go again. The next county over is a jackpot of a VERY rare mineral, stibnite. I first caught wind of the "Jobs are coming!" rumor a month or so ago. Stibnite is another name for antimony, and the name of a little ghost town in Idaho. The rumor around here is a man just held his claim and started doing the paperwork and hopping the hoops, and apparently has the only mine in the US that has been given permission to mine the stuff. The town boomed in WW2 because antimony is critical in wartime, I forget why. Helps kill people somehow, yay...
I still have not heard of anyone actually getting hired on, or of anyone even working at the mine, but I did find this. There may be an Idahoan who holds the claim, but he appears to have cut a deal to give the mining rights to Canadian mining companies.
Do not get me wrong, I love me some Canadians, and some Russians and some Chinese too... but I do not want them coming to THIS country and extracting OUR WEALTH. If you think our nation's wealth is born at the printing press, well... (don't be pissy, fishy...) you probably went to public school. I will leave it at that. (Did I do good...?)
OK, I DO love the humans and I would truly prefer if we all got over our government worship and our flag worship and our "authority" worship and learned to self govern but I live in the real world. Around here people are highly prone to rallying behind flags and shooting stuff at each other. I find it absurd that the things we need to shoot IN SELF DEFENSE (which is a Sacred right, not a government issued one) are being EXTRACTED FROM OUR LAND and taken to the countries most likely to shoot it at US.
So, snopes says Jefferson never said it but someone did, and it was the truth... “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.” (Commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson)
Even that prescient warning (which was uttered at least as early as 1937 even according to snopes) failed to foresee a future where Federal agencies would sell The People's land right out from under them, one mineral at a time. Yet that is what is happening, right now. Please learn about the Uranium 1 deal... I will be talking a LOT more about that next week.
OK, better put up some kind of shinyporn, can't expect all metalheads to appreciate bee butts...
Thank you for stopping by!
Sad but most people assume there's always someone else behind the deal with a lot more money then themselves could ever muster for a fight. We have the same thing close by here with Nestle wanting to extract water underground. People in that own are constantly fighting against them, Nestle with all their money just takes the fight higher up the chain of command where big pockets are open for campaign contributions.
That is sort of my hope for crypto, level that financial playing field but I can't say I have a lot of confidence it will work out. Yeah, people may never notice the antimony but they will miss the water when they have to buy every drop they use.
I applaud you for taking a stand and for posting this. Disgusting. It is disgusting how we let greed drive disastrous outcomes and how those with a voice are silenced. Shame I don't live in your state. I'd be all over it!
Try to take comfort in the fact you are informed and paying attention. You are not alone and we must believe that over time, we will tip the scales in favor of what is right! Until then, preach on!
Thanks for the encouraging words, it really does help! :)
There is a reason I don't fight the government. They are bad players and cheat. It is much better to self-govern than let these yahoos ruin your life for you.
I wish I would understand more of this politics, and possibilities. Can you buy a plot of land just with a click? I do understand you as you say I like Chinese and russians, but they do not all have to get here, that counts for every other nation in this world. In Holland we first got the Chinese I think but they as community did not cause problems, they did not integrate they learned Dutch that was as far as that went, they stayed there own community without butting in our affairs, but then came the portoricans the Surinamers and the Turks. And they all claimed there thoughts about the country, pressed it up to us, because offcourse it is important to them. We had the feeling we lost our identity as being pure Dutch. My dad saw it as a problem and moved with us to Belgium, now this is just a neighbour of holland and they even speak about the same lanquage, but Oh my god they were so different! Anyway as a easy dutch girl I adepted quick enough and started loving the country. And that I think is the only reason why people should move to an other country, loving the soil under your feet, not the dollar you make on the bank. I hope you understand what I mean I feel my English is not strong enough to go in this discussion :-)
Your English is WONDERFUL, I hear you loud and clear and you are spot on. Our heritage is important! And US mineral rights are a complicated affair. The big mining companies do not own the land, they own the mineral rights. The land, supposedly, belongs to The People - US citizens. We have huge swaths of the west that the Federal government - in violation of the Constitution - claimed up when the Western states were given statehood. It was an illegal move, and any REALLY good lawyer could probably void the statehood but the politicians running these states all want to tap into the Federal funds, so they just play along. Thanks for that thoughtful reply, and crossing the language barrier. If I were forced to try to speak your language, I think I could say "Guten morgen!" and actually communicate. After than, I would be making hand gestures and drawing pictures...
Ugh... It's happening in Minnesota, too. Minnesotans banded together and managed to block a PolyMet (Canadian mineral extraction company with a terrible environmental track record) mining permit, only to have the Trump administration over-rule it. A lot of people in northern Minnesota are happy about the whole 80 jobs coming, all of which are high-skilled engineering jobs that they're not qualified for.
The best part? It's right on the edge of the Boundary Waters, a huge national wildlife area in Northern Minnesota. The mine will include a huge holding pond of highly acidic liquid. Even better, there is a river that runs right into Lake Superior, so if there's a flood, we can destroy the largest of the Great Lakes, too.
But hey! Someone will make a bunch of money.
That is just messed up. Well, I guess Nestle is looking to drain the Great Lakes and sell them back to us in bottles, maybe they will step in to protect the water... HAHAHA! Oh, that is not really funny...
omg! Can that not be stopped? We are frucking the world up :-(
There is a pretty strong opposition and they're planning on suing, but greed and big business seen to generally get their easy.
:-(
So agree with you regarding the takeover of our own precious goods to foreign countries. Few other countries even consider Americans to own property. It really makes me angry as well. Great post. Who will speak out if not us? Thank you! 🐓🐓
We have a joke around here, about our retirement plan. We are going to sneak over to Mexico then sneak back in and ask for free health care... except that sneaking into Mexico is TOO DANGEROUS! (Just to be clear, I do not hate Mexican people, I hate the political theater playing out at the border.)
Great idea! Can I join you? I love the Mexican people, but the politics have got to change. They have a beautiful country and culture. 🐓🐓
At the start of our first trip to Mexico, an old guy was laughing at us. "You Americans think you are free, we are free. I do what I want when I want." Of course we thought he was being ridiculous, we were from the USA! By the time we left, we realized he was mostly right.
Very interesting, never heard of this but your plan sounds great, shame youbdidnt get people to go along
Have you ever played politics? It is crazy, you are forced to work with and functionally "trust" your allies, but the truth is they are the ones who will get the clear shot at your back and they will make a pin cushion of you and everyone just keeps smiling and acting like it is one big happy family... but no one REALLY trusts anyone.
The other aspect is they all thought I was being "doomsday"ish, these are all people who firmly believed we could vote our way out of the mess we are in. In the end, I suppose I am glad I am not entangled with them...
Yes we agree, we played it for a while but we decided it was not for us, so much drama and stress. And if we are being honest being "doomsday"ish is not a bad thing, better to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Yup. To both thoughts.
People and governments don't understand once you sell your mineral rights they are gone. Quick buck maybe but someone else can make a lot of money on minerals extracted right under your feet. Sad.
And this new age of fracking means they put your entire aquifer and fault zones at risk. But the Hammonds sit in prison for lighting a backfire to save their ranch...
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