 |
||
| Is Wall Street’s control of the stock market a monopoly made possible by street walking professionals, and PAC style contributions of public spirited “advice” to the SEC? Being as there was no guaranteed end result being promoted, was there a similarity between dot com startups and mineral exploration, other than the greed factor of high pressure stock salesmen overriding standard methods of evaluating a project? Did it really make sense for the US to export the “pollution” of mining to Peru, and the risk of exploration capitalization to the Mongolian Stock Exchange, or is this a “big mining” ploy to control labor costs, and do away with “junior” competition? The editor of a number of online mineral prospecting magazines has some very strong alternative opinion answers to these questions, presented here as an Information Age white paper for the investor reader looking for opportunity created by adversity. The View Looking Outside-In Back in the days when mining was considered to be important to the United States there existed a method, a process, a methodology where a prospector could bring his ore, and the title of his claims, to a place where he could form a stock company and sell said stock for the express purpose of driving a drift, sink a shaft, or raise a raise so many feet in the direction he felt might prove/disprove his arm waving. In Nevada, buildings that have Miners Exchange chiseled into stone above the entrance, have been all converted into casinos, offering a similar toss of the dice. But then, as now, you do not see widows and orphans bellying up to the bar to gamble their lifes savings. Were there winners in this exchange system? Absolutely yes. Most of the old family names of the Old West, had their foundations in just happening to own 5% of, say the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota. What families? Would you believe the Hearst publishing fortune, given the fact that their pages today are so politically correct that they have been a factor in driving mining investment away to the number one ranked location in the world Chile. Chile also is winning the apple battle with US farmers in Hood River, Oregon. Chile really isnt a better place to grow apples than the nature-blessed combination found in the Columbia River Gorge. But big multi-national corporations have found that cheap labor, and an absence of environmental regulations, is "good for the economy" of the USA. This means, for now, that the smoke and mirrors guys manipulating electronic money that really isnt (M2) have sort of won. At a time when court challenges are being made over the mention of God in the classroom, we are still supposed to rely on the "In God We Trust," printed on the hard cash representations we pass back and forth as a means of transferring the value of our labor. Unfortunately money also used to represent hard assets also, as gold, and golden delicious apples. Wealth was considered to have come from the earth, either by being grown, or mined.Today, wealth really is measured by what other pieces of paper (or the electronic symbols of) closed at on a particular day. This usually has no relationship to what actually transpired that day, deep in an underground mine, but what people toiling away mining the miners (or mining investors) say it is. Or even worse, what all the self appointed people in control of our day-to-day life say it is. Who am I pointing fingers at? The Good Old Boys VPs acting in their own best interest. The plethora of vice presidents that are so connected to members of the club that they even contributed Arthur Anderson Fellows to help the SEC formulate acceptable accounting practices. Stockbrokers who are not broke having made millions trading clients into bankruptcy. The fines imposed on Merrill Lynch by the New York Attorney General (not the SEC!) have been estimated to be the equivalent of one of their days trading. And let us not forget the securities lawyers whose self-serving full employment plan is to write the difficult to understand regulations, that require another legal mind to decipher. Am I anti-business in mentioning all the white collar crime that have been exposed of late, of trusted institutions as mutual funds, or the sacrificial female men love to hate? No. I am a entrepreneur, in media, and the mining business, struggling to compete for developmental capital tied up by Wall Street, or not available because our national debt has gobbled up of individual savings. What I am saying, in this full disclosure, though round-about manner, is that Americas mining business has been free-traded right out of county, thanks to the dictates of big business, combined with the best government regulations PAC money can buy. Poo-poo that statement? Then look at what has happened to our merchant marine fleet, lumber and steel industry, and now high tech sectors. Do you really believe that at refinanced housing industry will lead us out of a recession? Make that deflation. Mortage refinance is such a Ponzi scheme, or are we "OK" today as one square foot of American soil ("since they are not making anymore of it") is worth much more than the ridiculous real estate values pledged in Japan, before their inflationary crash? Obviously I am not up to date in international economics. An old fashioned Western prospector, I even have problems understanding things even work at home, explained in plain old English. On the IRS form I am expected to fill out one day when I do make some money, the government identifies prospecting with a SIC code of mineral exploration. Not at all the same as being a mining company, which for the purposes of the "Small" Business Administration is a, mine that employs 500 people. It gets worse. Mention that I have a mineral prospect for sale, lease, joint venture, and I get spit on for being a "mining promoter". To feel good about myself I need to cross the border now and then into Canada, where in British Columbia mining is their third largest industry. Problem is that their mining exchanges promote Canadian prospects, and as Canadian mining investment has flow through incentives, all their exploration money stays there. Course, it also should be known that the really big Canadian mining companies have been only mining the market of late, with mergers, which then merge again, and then hedge their position with forward calls. When it comes to SEC regulations, mineral exploration is singled out expressly to be excluded from SCOR filings, a do-it-without a lawyer form of financing. So, here I am, with two prospects that need funding. My Alaska silver claims need a $1.5 million dollar drill program to prove/disprove that there is enough proven ore to mine the deposit (at least on paper) at a profit. If you want to know the basis of the calculations of of the samples taken by the US Geological Survey, the State of Alaska, and consulting geologists hired by Homestake Mining, Canada, then click through to my full disclosure www.silverminingclaims.com site. Risking the cost of what some laywers/stockbrokers have spent on their co-op apartment in Manhattan, to block out ore that easily could be 100 times that value, has not had much appeal when I have approached finance professionals. Many have suggested they would make an IPO happen, but usually this had a hook hidden in the worm dangling before a fish. I recently had an English financier promise that he could raise $3 million, for the $1.5 million drill program, but only if I gave him a 50% position, of my position! He also mentioned that hopefully, using an Enron style spreadsheet management system, we would never have to dirty our hands by actually mining the property. That proposal didnt have any appeal, as it is not in my character to go along with making obscene amounts of money, in a silk stocking format of the really smart people being the ones to win, at the expense of someone else. That is why my silver claims are named the Win Group. The excitement of mining should be uncovering a pocket of hidden values of a mineral prospect, rather than what is hidden in a prospects pocket. I also have to object to the attitude that the people I really need to pay attention to in New York and London, really have for: 1) Frontier (even if it is the last) Americans 2) And, what is harder for them to comprehend, how we care for our land, as it is our home. Where is it written that living in the city, and buying a Sierra Club calendar for the office makes one a conservationist? This anti-prospector attitude really doesnt make much sense to the guy they are point fingers at as the abuses in mineral investment in the past have usually benefited stock promoters, not claim holders. Witness the last such scandal (10 years ago?) involving a large company in New Guinea, and a company geologist. Our tale is more of stories about a prospector in Ely, Nevada selling out for a few thousand dollars to Newmont, what became the Carlin Pit that for many years was the largest operating gold mine in the country. Also consider, more recently, who made the most money out of electronic pages similar to what you are reading right now. Obviously as you are online, the dotcom failure was not the media the message to click on a the investor relations button was at fault. Yes, some founders got out in time. Some ideas have continued on, with adaptations, to prosper. Those that were despoiled by the money miners are no longer in business. Which brings me to a conclusion. Sorry it was so in the style of that interesting TV program on PBS a number of years ago, Connections. It too followed a pathway in the development of an idea or invention, to come right back to a beginning.I can do this forward, or backwards: 7) The original definition of sin was an archer missing his mark. In this interpretation, stockbrokers who exploited the market during the dotcom bubble, or prior to that, mining, promotions, without having any intention of following the project through to the planned projection, sinned. These people are still getting away with theft. 6) The let me sell you a mine, line never really was about mining anything, other than investors. I resent that the line is associated with buying the Brooklyn Bridge. 5) Thanks to regulations supposedly protecting the chance that a widow, or orphan, might loose their life savings, is difficult to raise money for anything doing with mineral exploration. This is stupidity in action. Pay attention instead to that widow's SS check. 4) There really are only two natural forms of creating wealth —mining, or harvesting the bounty of the earth. We used to be a powerfull nation, thanks to our natural wealth. 3) What we really need to sustain life, as we know it in the USA, no matter what Wall Street, the goverment, or movie star environmentalists say, is either mined, or grown. 2) Prospectors in the old days could raise risk capital direct in mining camps miners exchanges. Many fortunes were built on mineral exploration. 1) Perhaps, today, thanks to the strength of documenting a mining prospect on the Internet, as the video tour as shown on www.nepheline.com, virtual visitors can actually buy directly into a mineral exploration program, by coming full circle to a miners exchange. Click on through for my suggestion as to how that can be done. Cut Out The Middleman Want a definition of a middleman. Take a look at the guy holding up the shovel.You know he is babbling away telling the one guy working in this picture how to pan for gold. Notice also the very desirable female (a rarity in a gold camp) is listening intently to the guy-not-doing-the-work, which is so typical of the type today that need to be in control (have a hand on the shovel), have a power over those kneeling, all with the intent of attracting available females through a promise of riches. In short, your typical stock brokers. Oh? Have I gone too far? Not fair? Perhaps, but then how is it that they, who have controlled the media for years and years have not been fair in their definition of prospectors? Would it surprise you to know that I still have most of my teeth, do not end all of my sentences with Yessir, and ride a flashy white horse instead of dragging around a jackass. Point taken? I will backup a bit, and define the role of a stockbroker, once again. He is a guy that sells stock to those wishing to build a retirement fund, by making their money work for them, so they wont end up, as promised in 1950s magazine ads You too can retire with $300 per month income. Brokers will also sell stock for you, in the hopes they can make a commission by churning it right back into something else. This point can be proven by my asking, other than Martha Stewart, when was the last time you had a sell recommendation from a broker? Recent events that have come to the attention of the very people stockbrokers have referred to as Whales, meaning very, very big fish have led to TV ads suggesting small investors take over the heavy work of supporting the shovel and do their own research. OK. Thanks to the freedom of the Internet you can go around the dribble-down pap prestigious publications have peddled in their papers for years, along with profitable tombstone ads, it is possible today to do their own research by typing into a Google search query, invest + "tulip bulbs". Surprised that a bush Alaskan that doesn’t get the Wall Street Journal delivered to the doorstep of his cabin (bears love newspaper boys on bicycles, up here called “meals on wheels”) would know about the worlds first bubble failure? Shouldn’t be. We had satellite communications installed, in an effort to leapfrog technology, years before you dial-up people. Which meant that overnight our library was bigger than the quaint little place in New York guarded by stone lions. Also, someone who didn't understand the importance of hierocracy, actually tought us to read. What has happened is that Toto pulled the curtain aside to show that these Wizards of Ahs, are really in fact nothing more than, salespersons. We may be made of straw, but guess what, we have a way to communicate. We too can connect as “insiders,” and we can make sound buy decisions, based on any tagline you care to mention. We know them all. “We make money the old fashioned way.” When “Blah blah talks, everyone listens.” And my favorite TV ad, being a country boy, where BS something-the-other actually brings a bull into a trusting couples living room. Now that truly is respect for a client in action. Speaking in symbols, bears can make money if they tap dance fast enough. Bulls can make money if they stampede with the latest release of inflated government figures. But, how is it that hogs still get the most of any condition, by controlling the trough? Again, am I just a crazy ole coot from Wilderness Alaska? Yes? Then please explain to this simpleton once againand the numbers escape me for being unbelievable what the salary of the President of the New York Stock Exchange, was truly in exchange for? To use another buzz-phrase popular today by hombres wearing black hats, instead of white, save yourself some front-end load (please explain: is that the opposite of that a back-end load, which happens when you take it in the shorts?) money by firing the middleman. There is no regulation that you need to give up your hard earned money to smooth talking stockbrokers. They may have had an unjust self-supporting influence upon how the game is played, but the golden rule that those that have the gold, rule has, in the collective sense of investors across America, yet to be repealed. So, if these guys are only salesmen, whose promise is to help you build a strong portfolio instead of taking investors on a trip to the race track to place bets on the pick of the day, then what do we need them for? Isnt the idea to find an investment opportunity where your money will be working, instead of resting on the shovel? Do It Yourself This is the difficult part for me to write without a little Chicago, the movie, lawyer style tap dancing myself. The do-it-yourself purpose of buying this URL, and www.theprospector.com, and developing the www.westernminer.com database (I control a total of 26 different mining doorways) truthfully, was to get my own properties developed. What has happened is, from a background of making a living freelancing to magazines, I seem to have a knack of reaching readers of a certain demographic (yes you!) through a media not controlled by a chosen few. The plan now, after I sell my prospects, is to continue on as a place where others can “exchange” —with our help in our formatting, photographing, videotaping — information about their claims, or investment projects. If this does come to be then how then do I not expose myself to the temptations of Wall Street. Merrill Lynch may think they solved their conflict of interest problem by issuing an internal directive (as I was told by an employee) suggesting that market researchers not be seen getting off the elevator when it stopped at the (boiler room) floor where the stock brokers (salesmen) worked the phones. I however do not have a floor full of lawyers to keep me out of court battles used as a means of control. Mistake my admission that I do not have a the legal team of Bloodsucker & Leech on retainer as a weekness, go right ahead and step on me. Rattlesnakes too know how file do-it-yourself outrageous lawsuit, I know the defense for lible is the truth, and I have watched enough television to shout, at least to the public, “I object!” If this does come to be then how then do I not expose myself to the temptations of Wall Street. Merrill Lynch may think they solved their conflict of interest problem by issuing an internal directive (as I was told by an employee) suggesting that market researchers not be seen getting off the elevator when it stopped at the (boiler room) floor where the stock broker (salesmen) worked the phones, but I do not have a floor full of lawyers to keep me out of court battles used as a means of control [go ahead and mistake that admission as a weakness, as I too know how to do-it-myself-filing of an outrageous lawsuit, and I have watched enough television to shout, at least to the public, I object!]. Just in case, let me keep more than an arms length away from attorneys on the other side, and under my rights of the protection of free speech suggest that their are ways that (though convoluted) a group of investors can form a company, acquire the rights to sell shares, or resell shares, to additional investors, of a mineral prospect/project of merit. What this chapter is really waiting on is the editorial contribution of a lawyer from a stock formation company, most likely in Nevada, that understands the real need of legal assistance and guidance through the broken barbed wire of the fences erected by the influence of Eastern investment bankers, big wig CPAs, stock underwriters, and their sidekicks, the so called independent financial press. They have for years been trying to corral the open range of stock offerings. Gun slinging lawyers use convoluted laws to keep the small player out of green pastures. My defense in wanting to do it myself, by bucking the system, is based upon actually believing the words of Back In The Saddle Again, that state, where you sleep out every night, and the only law is right. Going back East (or to branch offices in San Francisco, etc.) with hat in hand to spend $1 million, to raise $3 million, to fund a $1.5 million dollar drill program doesnt really make that much sense to a guy whose experience with packing dynamite is cinching it down under a well thrown diamond hitch. Where I want the big boom to be, what I am looking for here, is a straight shooter that is not afraid of the gang that took over the bank in town, and is willing to walk right down Main Street with a sandwich board advertising "Reg Ds for sale. Let us advise you on -----" ! Such a circumstance truly would be newsworthy, and it would be my duty as an editor of www.mininginvestment.com, and www.diversifiedinvestments.net to comment on this dramatic happening. Until I find the qualified source that totally understands and can explain what the available funding resources are all about (?) then I need to suggest you may have to do your own homework. Step one is to click through to find a program that can be truly presented to widows and orphans, as valid, based upon the documentation of professionals in the field, instead of a researcher employed by the same firm selling the stock. Full disclosure, again, is that is the purpose of this site. Funding Needed The easy part, being these are my prospects in need of funding, I, as the "salesman" have listened to all of the objections voiced by promoters, who supposedly had the money to make these projects work, even if using circumstances and situations to hammer out a lopsided deal in their favor, have come to the conclusion that one way to really show I am "putting my money where my mouth happens to be," is to offer to accept a 1% royalty out of gross production. Given that I have a lot of seed money into these prospects that I need returned to keep prospecting, and given that there are "middlemen" out there that would love to advertise on cable TV a seminar on "how to buy into mining projects with no money down," I also have a stipulation other than actually spending money on a promised drill or development program of a minimum annual royalty payment until $5 million had been reached, before the claim titles are released from escrow. My projects are detailed at: www.silverminingclaims.com and, www. nepheline.com. Hopefully I can find other projects of merit, where management is willing to accept such terms, to present here as an editorial service of value to our readers. Who We Are Quick, for $1,000,000 (MPM*) tell me what this is? Tick, tick, tick. Give up? It is a boomer, an Alaskan way of collecting water in our deserts you didnt know we had deserts in Alaska? to wash gold through a sluice. *MPM is Monopoly Money But, having operated a boomer, I still wont stand in front of you and tell you I know all there is to know about placer mining in Alaska. Or having explored for gold in the jungles of Panama, that I even have a big picture of the industry as a whole. I can claim freelance magazine credits as a writer/photographer, as seven pages in LIFE Magazine, and Holiday, etc., and the experience of being the editor of a print publication, Economic Currents, yet I really do not feel qualified to set myself up as a media expert. My terrible secret is that I do not have a degree in mining, or business, or communications, as I have yet to graduate. The advantage is I have had to try harder to keep up with those who stopped learning the moment they were awarded a degree. The disadvantage is that real life experience makes it difficult for a layman to understand, why and when the business of business ceased to be business? Is it that simplistic of me to suggest that if a prospect has document able values, and an recommendation from an outside professional recommending a diamond drill program, that funding this recommendation should be the focus of any program to raise capital? By teaching myself at least I have the edge of understanding somewhat on how to make the web work through a lot of techniques still not taught in schools, as many of the Information Age tools of today are too far ahead of the knowledge curve to have made it into a dead tree publications, for use in an educational system designed to turn out the cogs that made Industrial Age machines work. So perhaps the best way to validate the credentials of Barry Murray is to take a look at an advertising portfolio and the web presence (www.macandmurray.com) leading to a cumulative track record of $20 million in online sales for clients (that could be recorded) and the pioneering of video article magazines (www.alaskatravelmagazine.com) in both mining and media matters. |
||
|
||