After reading comments in here tonight, we wanted to give you some additional information about some of the things we are doing.
Much that we are currently doing is not publicized. The reason for this is we know that those who oppose small mining, public land use and other issue’s we take on read every single thing we write. With that in mind, we don’t let them know what we are doing until they get something certified in the mail from us or our attorney……..make sense? Because of this, many of you don’t know exactly what we have going on.
Last night we spoke at the Houndsmen meeting in Modesto to unite and inform other public land users as to the seriousness of what we face right now.
Today, WMA and AMRA met with Congressman McClintock’s staff in Sacramento to discuss the unbelievable moves by regulatory and management agencies like the USFS, EPA and BLM. These agencies are unilaterally being Congress and making up laws to close public lands and further the destruction of small mining in America. We are pushing for, and demanding a Congressional investigation into the issue’s we raised today and we provided them with some pretty conclusive and smoking gun type of proof. We are going to continually pursue this action…….aggressively.
We’ve hired James Buchal, Brandon Rinehart’s attorney for the Idaho issues of restricting the number of dredges on the SF Clearwater to just 15 dredges. We are going public with our response tomorrow (when they will get our letter). They are also trying to set the precedence of requiring a NOI (Notice of Intent) or POO (Plan of Operations) to suction dredge which is fundamentally not required as litigated and proven in court.
We are also working with many, many GPAA chapters and other gold clubs all across the west with their problems of road closures and gates being installed to restrict access to their claims and real property (what claims are). Realistically, we are getting an email or phone call every other day now with some type of road closure being brought forth.
We are also working with several groups who are battling new listings of (potentially, maybe, possibly, might…..just kinda) endangered plant and animal closures of public lands all across the west. This has now become an issue which raises its head about every other day as well.
We currently have two FOIA’s out, one with the EPA and one with the USFS on some documents we believe are going to further expose the things we already know but are not publicly stating right now.
We have an investigative TV news program set to air very, very soon on the USFS Taser incident in the Stanislaus NF which was filmed fairly and we believe it will show precisely what happened. After that airing, we plan another little surprise for the people who should be held accountable for violating people’s fundamental civil rights.
We are working closely with several Constitutional Sheriff’s in several states about the authorities and over-stepping of regulatory and management agencies.
We are attending and have booths at nearly every GPAA gold show on the calendar this year so we are traveling extensively. Connie and Jere are in Portland right now and setting up the booth tomorrow, next week, Tom is in Seattle.
We do get asked about MMAC frequently, and frankly, we don’t follow much that is going on there anymore, we have our own battles. It has now been a year and a half since we were approached about the MMAC idea of mining districts. In theory, we like the idea but they have significant obstacles to overcome. We have heard PLP is paying a lobbyist, but have not confirmed that. If you have questions about MMAC, please contact PLP.
The issue of lobbyists is a prime example of what is wrong with government. As a public citizen, we should not have to hire a lobbyist, pay them over a hundred thousand dollars to get our Representative to listen to us or our ideas. What the hell do we elect these people to do anyway?
In closing, we have fights on a lot of fronts people, and are dedicated to moving forward on these fights.
Throughout all of this going on, our AMRA staff continues to donate their time, efforts, expertise and life treasure to stay true to our mission statement of defending the rights of miners and public land users. We do this because we must.
We could use your support and as you have seen now for 3 1/3 years, we rarely just outright as for donations, but we are here. We could use the financial support.
Please consider joining us, or making a donation.