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Wallace, Idaho - What,
exactly, is the price of a miner's penance? How much must a miner pay to
cover the shame of being an American miner? (Let us leave alone for a moment
the question of why an American miner should be made to feel ashamed of being
an American miner by the United Snakes Government.)
We have a working number and you should be sitting down for
this. The United Snakes government's shame price, the price which an American
miner must pay to ensure that he will not be further persecuted for producing
metals that for millennia have been used as honest money, and additionally
metals which enable cell-phones, Volvos and Prius cars, refrigerators, is:
Seven hundred and thirty-one thousand and 667 dollars and some change -
$731,666.66 to be precise. Per miner. Per Lucky Friday miner at Hecla's
operations in northern Idaho. All in, $263.4 million: two-hundred sixty-three
point four million dollars.
Miners, that is how much your government despises you, because
you are miners. That three-fourths of a million dollars is how much your
government demands in order not to start loving you but in order to quit
punishing you . . . maybe.
This is the same government that pays - PAYS - farmers not to
grow stuff, and pays them extra if they grow corn and sell it into the rigged
ethanol market at an inflated and miner-subsidized price (50 cents a gallon)
engineered to jack up the commodity price of corn and starve the Third World.
This is the same government that loves to beat up on tiny countries for no
other reason than to keep the R&D money flowing into its favoured
contractors as so designated by those contractors' Congressidijits.
That is $263.4 million, three quarters of a million dollars, per
miner, that Hecla will not be able to spend on wages, benefits, on shaft
and drift development to preserve and extend the productive life of the Lucky
Friday Mine, or to find and develop new ore discoveries of silver, lead and
zinc in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District.
As Motley Fool's Christopher Barker noted on 28th February, this
emerging settlement with the United Snakes tosses a wet blanket over what
otherwise would be Hecla's most stellar performance in its 120-year history.
Opines Mr Barker:
"The resulting accrual of $193.2 million for Hecla - beyond
its previously estimated liability - polluted Hecla's quarterly result,
converting a laudable operating performance into a deeply disappointing $13.1
million net loss! Now, rather than hailing the miner's impressive cash cost
of negative $0.14 per ounce of silver produced - still trailing only Silvercorp
Metals (NYSE:SVM) among the industry's lowest-cost producers - shareholders
are instead left to consider the effect of a $262 million outlay upon this
company's ability to fund growth in the near to medium term . . ."
". . . Hecla essentially now enters this crucial period of
the precious metals bull market with one hand tied behind its back. I remain
a Hecla shareholder, though my enthusiasm has been materially
diminished."
Barker, sadly, is right. Thank-you, United Snakes and the
U.S.E.P.A. So much for the EPA's claim that its beyond-absurd cleanup antics
here in the Silver Valley, now scoped out for 90 years (Which need to end
immediately for the sake of our precious environment!) and which amount to
hauling non-toxic yard dirt from King Street here in Wallace down to its "toxic
waste" dump below a flood plain 20 miles west in Cataldo, Idaho, won't
interfere with "responsible" mining activities in the Coeur d'Alene
Mining District.
It already has. A lot of savvy Wall Street investors read The
Motley Fool. The message, and this is no fault of Barker's, is that EPA's
invasive presence here scares investors away. Better to put your bets down in
China, or the Congo, than in a century-old American mining company mining
silver, lead and zinc in America at per-ounce silver costs rivaling anyone
and everyone on the planet. So much for doing a good job, here in America. No
wonder the sun is setting on the great American Experiment.
And all of this without a rationale from the EPA that 120 years
of mining here have caused any human, flora or fauna harm except as claimed
by the Coeur d'Alene Indian Tribe that mining might have caused cavities in
the teeth of midge-flies.
And EPA as stewards of the environment? Get real. The EPA threw
enough copper-dross flue dust, caught in the filters from the smokestack
bag-houses, from the dismantled Bunker Hill smelter into a ditch alongside
the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River to poison Coeur d'Alene Lake for at
least a millennium, but which could and now never will supply the entire
planet with a year's worth of the critical metal indium. Right into an
underground spring, they tossed it, heaped some creosoted railway ties on top
of it, crapped it all up and lined it with a skinny little plastic bag whose
contents will quickly, likely this decade, eat right through it and leach
into the river.
Before burying this toxic mess right next to a river and into an
aquifer, while it was still safely contained above-ground, the EPA rejected
proposals from no less a concern than Williams Petroleum to haul it off and process
it into market-ready metals. Dave Williams even purchased a proprietary
process from Down Under to separate the dross out into pure ingot lead, pure
ingot indium, and into the necessary ingredients of the wood-preservative
Cuprinol. The Chinese government offered to buy the stuff, as did Canada's
Teck Cominco. Other folks, including the aforementioned Coeur d'Alene
Indians, wanted it as well, as an asset they could attach during Bunker Hill then-owners
Gulf Resources' bankruptcy, to assuage the Tribe's umbrage over tooth decay
in midge-flies. The flue dust had value. No deal, said EPA: we'd rather
poison the locals. No need to export this stuff. So instead of elemental
lead, copper, arsenic and indium being returned to the world's markets for
purchase, EPA decided to murder a river instead - just because they could
and thus would show us where it's at.
Hecla, The New Bunker Hill Bunker Hill Mining Company, and to a
lesser extent U.S. Silver Corp., stare down the barrel of this EPA gun. The
sooner the American miner realizes that his enemy is neither his employer,
not the people who invest in the risky fortunes of his company, but this
cabal of crypto-Nazi Seattle pseudo-academics and lawyers, the sooner my
country will again be free. But until Labor rises up against the destroyers
of our serenity, we are slaves.
David Bond
Editor : The Silver Valley Mining
Journal
www.silverminers.com
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