However, today Marble, Colorado, miners spend their government existence stipend driving a beat-up 1980 pickup down to a bar that serves beer not made by Coors, but some sort of foreign conglomerate pretending to be American.

This, truthfully is the sad truth. American miners have not only lost their heritage, their paychecks are signed by CFO’s, working for CEO’s, who really don’t think much of the American Miner. We know too well how foreign corporations —and that includes multinationals out of Canada— have taken advantage of America’s lack of interest in being “good stewards” of our wealth of natural resources. The Swedish Director of BMP has so little respect for the American investor, that he actually defined us on European TV as, “Little People.”

China has also passed us, and South Africa by, in gold production. Prime London banks supposedly have a lock on above ground silver bullion reserves, and do not want un-mined ounces being an honest check and balance to the day trading of paper silver certificate dirivites.

When it comes to the international dimensional stone market the big picture gets even more blurred. How is it that Imerys of France owns Georgia Marble? And where did the Belgium Unimin monopoly over nepheline syenite ( which is known in the dimensional rock products world as “Blue Pearl Granite,”) and feldspar, along with industrial minerals as silica sand, silica, kaolin, and ball clay, get the clout to dictate in the late 1990’s, that Congress would not even hear a bill questioning a “less than fair value,” or in “OMG” English a “LTFV” bill, concerning dumping to increase market share, while destroying local competition?

I really don’t want to get into a discussion over the “China-gate” advantages of negotiated during the Clinton Administration as the Chinese seem to be the ones that we will have to go to for quarry equipment. We also owe them too much money to protest. And I know a “free enterprise” system will eventually prevail — through an honest appreciation of the laws of supply and demand, and the costs of shipping rock products.

I state this for having been the advertising agency for a superb American made VSI rock crusher (see www.MacandMurray.com). By using the principles of Edward Demming’s Total Quality Movement we took this incredible machine, inside of seven years, from number 19th worldwide, to number one. The only way to stop us was to be bought out by a mega-multinational-monolopy, and allowed to disappear into a dark corner of a mega factory where the stockholder’s short term, short sighted, “bottom-line” ruled. This, of course, was “just too bad,” that the end user —the actual customer— suddenly had no power over his bottom line endeavoring to protect his reputation for quality.

Also, part of my youth was dealing with my father’s dimensional stone endeavors, and the problems trying to make his property work. Here from my 50-years experience in marble and nepheline is my —free for the reading— assessment of the problems.

A) There is a super abundance of mineable marble, and granite, in this World.

Back in the 1960’s I ran the transit for a world-renown geologist to map Longyear diamond core drill holes on a Western marble property.

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