Actually, absolutely. We DO pay royalties to the land owners who have mineral rights.
Yeah, right.
Let me tell you a little story. I'm originally from Southwest Virginia, which is rich in coal and natural gas. About ten years ago, a prominent energy corporation cut a shady deal with the Board of Supervisors of my home county. The agreement was that the Supervisors would look the other way, in exchange for kick-backs, while the corporation's drillers moved deep into the mountains overnight and quietly began extracting natural gas using a sludge injection method. It was a virtual bonanza, and the operation went on for several years.
No property owners were notified about what was going on, nor given the opportunity to review the agreement nor claim royalties, and no one knew about it until after the deed was done and a lot of water wells went bad from the injected sludge. No one ever received any royalties and some bureaucrats and elected officials subsequently went to jail because of it.
My folks not only were robbed of the natural gas that sat under their property but lost their well because of the corruption of both our elected officials and the corporation.
True story.
So please pardon me when I decline to accept your rosy assertion at face value.
For someone who was a longtime member of the Palin PING list, you know as well as I do that Jim gets pinged hundreds of times per week and generally ignores most of them. He knows me, and so I don't bother whenever I use his quotes and comments to drive home the point that neither he nor FR supports RINOs like Romney and Perry.
I would especially like to thank the state of Ohio and West Virginia for letting me in to rape and pillage all the evil profits we are taking from under the ground there.
Are you paying royalties to the people from under whose properties you are extracting the natural gas? I doubt it.
The oil industry is just as corrupt as the two major political parties in this country. That's why Palin put their feet to the fire in Alaska and sent a couple of corrupt GOP hacks to jail up there. And it's why she beat Murkowski for governor in the first place, because together, the Alaska GOP and the oil companies were robbing the state blind.
I still have that Esquire mag interview years ago where he stated that he does not have a chair in his negotiating/staff room because sitting down accomplishes nothing.
In fact, one difference between Palin and Christie is that while the Republican and financial elite have backed Christie, Palins support comes from her fervent grassroots supporters who disdain and loathe the GOP establishment and what Palin has referred to as the permanent political class, almost as much as they love Palin.
Who didn’t see this coming. They can now thank Boehner and McConnell for putting them in this situation after they had the Rats by the short ones last time.
From 1897 to 1933, with the exception of 1917-1921, the governors of WV were ALL Republicans. They were also in bed with the out-of-state mine owners and helped them exploit the miners. Memories are long in the coal fields.
And President Harding sent the U.S. Army into the West Virginia coal fields to put down the Blair Mountain marchers on behalf of the mine owners too. Lots of grandfathers and great-grandfathers never forgot this.