Obama will, if things go as planned, in effect confiscate millions of acres
in Utah by designating them " treasured lands." These areas [are]
roughly equivalent in size to [those in] Colorado and Wyoming combined." -BLM's Treasured Lanscapes paper
What's he up to? Perhaps a look back in history will offer guidance.
I specifically went looking for Bill Clinton's 1996 Utah "land grab;"
what I termed Coal-gate on
Free Republic. All
I wanted now was a link to offer as reference, but
guess what? The story has all but disappeared from the webs. Snap.
Now it becomes my job, as National Clinton Crime Archivist, to refresh
the national memory. I'll be brief. It begins this way:
Sept. 18, 1996, President Bill Clinton stood on the edge of the
Grand Canyon on the Arizona side and signed an executive proclamation
making 1.7 million acres of Utah a new national monument.
Previously
|
| “
| The 1994 trade trip to China included a Lippo
backed power project in China with an Arkansas-based company called
Entergy Corp. Former DNC fund-raisers Ira Sockowitz and John Huang
worked at the Commerce Department and were charged by Brown to "vet" or check out the Entergy project in China
….
Lupenberger and Wu attended the trade mission to China on the personal
authority of President Clinton. Lupenberger also personally donated
over $80,000 to Democratic candidates prior to the flight. Wu brought
investors eager to finance the operation, including money laundered from his
family holdings in Macau. Commerce documents show Edwin Lupenberger,
Maria Haley, then head of the Export Import Bank, K.S. Wu, and Li
Ka-Shing all met Madam Wu Yi. Madam Wu was then the Minister of China's
Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC).
The
investments made through Pacific Century were to back a joint
Lippo/Chinese "soft coal" power plant. John Huang, Ron Brown, Edwin
Lupenberger, Senator Rockefeller and K.S. Wu all helped to obtain the
financing from U.S. citizens and taxpayers to build "soft" coal fired
plants in the far east. Coal fired plants that cannot burn American
coal.
The sole source of U.S. soft coal is the state of Utah. Utah also
happens to be the number one state competing with West Virginia on the
coal export market. President Clinton declared most of Utah to be
off-limits to coal mining without legislation, using a Presidential
Executive order. With this single act, Clinton enhanced the standing of
Democratic West Virginia and punished Republican dominated Utah…." [And made a payment on his account with James Riady].
| ” |
*Inserting useful fact*
As
governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton"borrowed" millions of
dollars from an Arkansas teacher retirement fund, and lost it (the Swiss ain't talking) in his and Hillary's myriad land schemes. Shortly after his election in
1992, a court ordered him to return those
funds. Whoops. He didn't have it. Enter James Riaddy, an
Indonesian
billionaire in partnership with the Chinese Red Army. He paid the
money. Ahem Back to my prepared notes.
| “
|
... declaration of 1.7 million Utah acres as a national monument,
thereby depriving an energy-starved U.S. up to 62 billion tons of
environmentally safe low-sulfur coal worth $1.2 trillion and minable
with minimal surface impact, was a political payoff to the family of
James Riady.
He’s the son of Lippo Group owner Mochtar Riady. James was found guilty
of — and paid a multimillion dollar fine for — funneling more than $1
million in illegal political contributions through Lippo Bank into
various American political campaigns, including Bill Clinton’s
presidential run in 1992.
Clinton took off the world market the largest known deposit of
clean-burning coal. And who owned and controlled the second-largest
deposit in the world of this clean coal? The Indonesian Lippo Group of
James Riady. It is found and strip-mined on the Indonesian island of
Kalimantan.
The Utah reserve contains a kind of low-sulfur, low-ash and therefore
low-polluting coal that can be found in only a couple of places in the
world. It burns so cleanly that it meets the requirements of the Clean
Air Act without additional technology.
“The mother of all land grabs,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said at the
time. He has called what was designated as the Grande Staircase of the
Escalante National Monument the “Saudi Arabia of coal.”
When Clinton signed the proclamation, he promised to exchange other
federal lands for the land that was taken. But a fair exchange was
impossible, Hatch said, since no other land in Utah had a trillion
dollars worth of clean coal.
Rep. James Hansen, R-Utah, pointed out that a large portion of the
coal-rich Kaiparowits Plateau within the monument belonged to the
children of Utah. When Utah became a state in 1896, about 220,000 acres
were set aside for development, and a trust fund was created to collect
and hold all the revenues directly for the benefit of schools.
Margaret Bird, trust officer for the fund, said that because the land
will not be developed, the schools stand to lose as much as $1 billion
over the next 50 years. Phyllis Sorensen, head of the Utah chapter of
the National Education Association, called Clinton’s action a
“felonious assault” and “stealing from the schoolchildren.”
Stealing from children to reward Indonesian billionaires.
|
” |
I don't know what financial payoff the Administration may benefit from
here, but "getting even" is a signature Obama personality
trait.
"... and
punished Republican dominated Utah…."
|
