Friday, August 06, 2010

Land Theft

"...  and punished Republican dominated Utah…."
stuff nobody cares about, but needs restoring


-
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…."

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got an idea: Let preserve All of new England and return it to how it was 500 years ago...
RAK

Anonymous said...

Or, as a certain sage once said, before he lost his mind, "saw it off, and float it out to sea."

Casca

cheesy said...

This is just what we do know about how truly filthy corrupt the clintons are.
I can only guess at what we don't know.

DougM said...

Woo! (again)
You ain't gonna believe this, Rodge.
Check out my comment at the end.

Rodger the Real King of France said...

Wow ... 'mazin Doug.

DougM said...

Yeahman,
any more of this an' I'm puttin' on me ol' tinfoil hat!

MoFiZiX Gr4FiX said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MoFiZiX Gr4FiX said...

I think we know now what they are planning to do with all that national park land...
SELL IT OFF PIECE-MEAL TO PAY FOR OBAMA'S PROGRAMS?!?! O.M.G.!!!

An ignorant dickweed said...

Don't worry, the government will sell it all off and then take it back for the common good.

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