Silver is back
The 10-Sterling
is our new money, here in Sleepless-ville
David Bond
July 7, 2004
Wallace, Idaho - The sweet
song of silver is sounding from the bars and countertops here
in the Silver Valley.
Last week, for the first time since 1966, I saw a guy pay for
lunch with silver coinage at the Broken Wheel Restaurant in Kellogg.
Lawanna Watts of Pinehurst will take your silver in payment for
a washer and dryer. Out at the Snakepit Resort in Enaville, I
timbered the table occupied by the Wallace Athletic Club (they
ride bicycles downhill on the Centennial Trail every summer weekend
and stop every few hundred yards for another beer in order to
work off excess weight gained by drinking too much beer during
the winter).
I paid for some photo developing at Indelible Tidbits in Wallace
and settled my tab at the Smokehouse Saloon with silver coins.
Every time I pull out a 10-Sterling silver coin to pay for something,
inevitably the guy on the next stool or behind me in line will
offer to pay me more for it.
Silver is money. Silver AS money. Keep your gold, rich dudes.
No offense, but us po' folk ain't buying your banking schemes
any more. Not playing. Need a jolt? Re-read William Jennings
Bryan's "Cross
of Gold" rant. Bill Murphy is right. Gold is as rigged
and as dirty as the Fed Note. Why jump into their pit, play by
their rules, and expect to prevail over the vipers and the money-changers?
Especially when silver is plentiful and (by gold's accounts)
cheap and available. Leap over the paradigm into a new shift.
The 10-Sterling is our new money, here in Sleepless-ville. Talk
about your paradigm shift. We are driving bad money out with
good! Please stop and re-read this: conventional wisdom (i.e.
the masses who track the Dow as some ungoverned font of Truth)
holds that bad money drives good money out of circulation. BS,
my friends. Good money now is driving bad money to the taff-rail.
It started out as a promotional gimmick, the 10-Sterling coin.
Get a few merchants to start accepting - and selling and offering
as change - triple-nine troy-ounce Sterlings struck at the Sunshine
Mint (they come in denominations of 10 and 20), palm a few off
on the tourists, have some fun. It's now become a deadly serious
game. Given a choice between a paper Fed Note sawbuck or that
round, heavy, mill-edged, double-struck triple-nine one-troy-ounce
10-Sterling coin, folks will take the coin every time. Even though,
at spot, that coin's melt value is about Fed Note 6 dollars.
How can this be so? Why would anyone want to accept $6 in lieu
of $10? Because mankind, whether washed or unwashed, knows in
its loins and in its gut that the paper game is over. Silver
is cheaper than $1 steaks and 10-cent beers right now, and it's
one helluva good time to accumulate it. When I swap my work out
for silver instead of Fed Nots, I know I am getting a thing of
real value in return, whose value cannot be determined by Alan
Greenspan - hang with me here whilst I digress for just one moment:
the span of time during which paper green has prevailed over
precious metals has expired, as always it must, ergo "green
span" - nor by George Bush, Dick Cheney, or even the dreadful
phony-vet greenie John Kerry. These low-life bastards cannot
any longer control my destiny if I have the right to equal measure,
the right to my own wealth. I will set my price for my labours
and for the pain of my hands, and I will accept no less than
I require; no cheques, no Visa, no IOUs, no promissory notes
from a private ponzi-scheme Federal Reserve Bank whose shares
I cannot purchase and whose directors I cannot un-elect and whose
debt I choose not for my children to service. Done. Been there.
Got the T-Shirt. The eyeball scales, once washed, are gone. It's
over, Baby, and for a limited time only, this $100 E-ticket ride
is boarding and anybody holding $6 silver gets in.
The Provisional Revolutionary Headquarters of the Silver Revolution
here in Wallace will establish its first outpost in Coeur d'Alene,
Idaho, Sept. 23, 24 and 25 for the purposes of celebrating Silver
Summit 2004. Three days of silver: underground visits to genuine
working silver mines for a lucky few, visits to Wallace and surface
mine walk-arounds for the fainter of heart; good palaver for
the rest of us. Bob and Barb Moriarty will be there. So will
the Mogambo Guru. Not to mention stock-picker Jason Hommel and
silver's brightest star, David Morgan. Oh, did we forget the
CEOs of Hecla and Coeur and Sterling, who will give presentations.
Oh, also forgot, geologists and economists who know these rocks.
Robert Hopper, owner of the indescribable Bunker Hill Mine, will
give the altar call. To Hell with New York, Paris, or London,
where all anyone does is talk about this stuff.
The Silver Valley is where the silver rocks are. Thank the Precambrian
issues with the Osburn Fault. I wasn't there, I didn't do it.
But here is where the planet's silver ended up. Ten times more
than Potosi or Comstock, and those districts are mined out. The
Silver Valley has just begun and it already has 100 years beneath
its belt.
What would you rather do? Pick up a piece of paper talking about
silver on some far distant continent at some fat convention center,
or bend down and pick up a piece of silver outside the convention
door. Your call.
The thing is already near-full but the folks at the Silver Valley
Mining Association - www.silverminers.org
- tell me that if they have to, they'll grow it. The size of
this event is entirely your call, and the earlier you register,
the better chance you'll find a room. Bring a bicycle and the
kids and we'll shoot the old Milwaukee Road and Union Pacific
silver lines on newly-paved bicycle trails. Or bring a raft to
shoot the Coeur d'Alene and St. Joe rivers. Or bring beer and
we'll share it.
We are about to start something we cannot stop. And by the way,
approved hotels and events will be accepting Sterlings. But you'll
have to come to Wallace to get them.
July 6, 2004
David Bond
David Bond covers gold
and silver mining equities for a number of national and international
publishers, including Platts Metals Week, a division of McGraw-Hill.
He lives in Wallace, Idaho, heart of the planet's richest silver
fields, the Coeur d'Alene Mining District. He is former editor
of the Wallace Miner, and holds regional and national firsts
in investigative journalism from the Atlantic City Press Club
(National Headliner) and from the Society of Professional Journalists
(SDX/SPJ) and has edited or written for newspapers on both coasts,
Canada and Alaska.
________________
321gold Inc
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