Credit-card contributions in GATA's weeklong fundraising campaign passed $6,000 today, and while some checks by mail have been promised, they have not yet arrived, so with three days to go we are still well short of meeting the $10,000 matching grant challenge posed last Sunday by Stefan Gleason of Money Metals Exchange.
Several donors today apologized for what they saw as the smallness of their contributions. A longtime friend of GATA from Australia who is living on a disability pension regretted that he could send only $10. Yet of course that was a significant amount for his means, and your secretary/treasurer told him not to worry, for his generous donation was $10 more help than GATA has ever received from Newmont Mining. Whereupon he fired off a complaint to an investor relations official at Newmont about the company's failure to join the struggle against the international central bank gold price suppression scheme. That's effort!
Of course he is not likely to get a response, or at least not a response that seriously addresses the issue. Most monetary metals mining companies -- not all, but 99 percent -- are too scared to acknowledge the suppression of the price of their products, for two reasons.
First, governments are behind the price suppression scheme and they heavily regulate mining companies, controlling mining rights, royalty requirements, and enforcement of environmental rules. Indeed, in most jurisdictions mining is the most regulated business.
And second, since mining is the most capital-intensive industry, with hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars of investment required to open a mine, the mining industry is the most dependent on the big investment banks, which are formally agents of central banks. (In the United States the big investment banks are designated primary dealers in U.S. government securities and thus have the most intimate and corrupt relations with the government.)
Even so, monetary metals mining companies are left with the choice of dying on their knees or risking dying on their feet, and if they risked fighting, they might find some protection in exposing what their governments are desperate to conceal. Such exposure might greatly minimize the risk of retaliation.
Until the monetary metals mining industry takes over the fight, GATA will wage it -- if we have your help. Once again, no donation is too small, every donation brings great encouragement, and every donation received by Sunday night can be doubled until we reach $10,000.
There are nearly 8,000 people on GATA's e-mail dispatch list. If each one donated just a dollar, we'd reach the goal easily. So far 71 of you have responded. If you're not among them, please visit our "How to Help" page here:
http://www.gata.org/node/16
