| John "Land Exchange" McCain Senator John McCain has been quietly legislating land exchanges, or "land swaps" for almost 18 years. These land exchanges repeatedly trade public lands to wealthy developers and billion dollar corporations. The land that McCain is giving away is public land - national forests and other lands that are owned by all Americans. |
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In every case, a McCain land exchange has been a redistribution of public wealth to a wealthy individual or company. McCain's land swaps are not about conservation or the public good. They are about pandering to the powerful and paying back campaign favors to multimillionaires and billionaires, all of which has been documented in the national press.
"When the public trust intersects with private interests, basically, he has favored land development . . . in every case"
-Rob Smith, director of the Sierra Club's Arizona affiliate. [146]
The Kly - McCain mining land swap would hand foreign companies over $142 billion of mineral assets in exchange for a few million dollars and a few thousand acres of low-value ranch land. This is a shameful and unprecedented giveaway of American public resources to foreign special interests.
By quietly co-sponsoring the legislation, instead of directly sponsoring it himself, McCain may have tried to avoid the spotlight on this deal. Perhaps his presidential campaign has made him back away from this land exchange this year, but McCain's fingerprints have been all over this land swap for almost 4 years now, beginning in 2005. He has had more than enough time to judge the merits of the mine and the companies Arizona would be doing business with for decades.
Comments seen on an Australian Mining Web Site:
MY favourite resource project in the world is the Resolution mine in Arizona. It is the biggest untapped copper resource of the US. It sits one mile below the mine that brought BHP Ltd to its knees in 1998: the Superior Mine. And it is now owned mostly and operated by Rio Tinto.
Resolution has the support of some pretty influential people, mind you. For the past three years the draft bill for the land transfer has been presented by a Republican senator from Arizona called John McCain. [13]
Pork is McCain's Red Herring
While John McCain and Sarah Palin's campaign with battle cries of "Cutting Pork" and "eliminating earmarks" they have been working to give away nearly a half trillion of American wealth to a handful of foreign mining companies for pennies on the dollar. With just two mining deals, McCain and Palin prove that government PORK is small potatoes compared to mining:
TOTAL PORK ⁄ EARMARKS IN 2007 - $17.2 billion
TWO MINING RESOURCE GIVEAWAYS - $442 BILLION*
*THE MCCAIN⁄KYL SUPERIOR AZ LAND EXCHANGE - $142 BILLION in Copper, Molybedenum
PALIN PRO-MINING, ANTI-CLEAN WATER POSITION - $300 BILLION in Gold, Copper, Molybedenum (Pebble Mine only)
The two mining deals John McCain and Sarah Palin are promoting would rob America of nearly a half trillion dollars in mineral wealth. That's 24 years of PORK, given away to foreign mining interests in exchange for a few hundred jobs. When you can legislate billions of dollars away like this, who needs pork?