By Jeff Dahl, CEO
Samex Mining Corp.
Address to Gold Rush 21
Dawson City, Yukon, Canada
August 9, 2005

Fellow Adventurers:

First, I want to thank so many of you for traveling so far for this unique gathering. You are a big part of why this meeting is historic. I believe that the ideas and plans that have been shared by our esteemed panel of speakers will usher in greater freedom and equity for many in this world.

This morning I’m not going to fill your heads with a plethora of facts and figures. I’m just briefly going to mention what I believe are three common-sense issues relating to why junior exploration companies in the mining industry should support GATA.

The first and most important reason, in my opinion, is that we need higher gold and silver prices to justify our exploration business plans. One of the prominent fund-managers in our sector, John Hathaway of Tocqueville Funds, wrote eloquently back in 2001 that to facilitate and justify the exploration and mining of gold, our industry needed a sustained gold price of approximately US$450 per ounce. Remember, this was back in 2001 when gold was roughly $320 per ounce and oil was under $25 a barrel, copper was 65 cents a pound, and the CRB basket of commodities was only 190. Now look around you and we see oil at over $61 a barrel, copper at over a $1.60 a pound, and the CRB approaching 320.

So I believe that it's fair to speculate that the industry’s overall encompassing costs to discover, prove, engineer, environmentally prepare, construct recovery systems for, and produce an ounce of gold is north of $600. Yet all the miners want to chat about, it seems, is their respective "cash costs" to mine an ounce. What a pile of baloney.

Yes they may have amortized and expensed everything to hell and back so that, balance-sheet-wise, they’re accurate. But reality is a very different animal and I don’t believe that miners can replace 80 million ounces of new reserves every single year without admitting that they’re in dire need of a higher price and return on their product.

Would you invest in or trust the automotive industry if they reported their "cash costs" to manufacture a car and left out the cost of steel, plastic, and rubber? Would you applaud them for selling a car without recovering all their raw material costs? Would you invest in or support companies like GM, FORD, or Toyota if they had even the remote possibility of being unable to produce more cars within 10 years? Of course not.

I think you see my point. Without a higher gold price we, as an industry, are probably unviable. So we must fight for free and fair precious metal prices or risk becoming irrelevant -- which, by the way, is the dream of most central bankers.

My second reason is a little more subjective. We junior exploration companies need to support GATA in part because few if any of the majors are. Why are they not here at Gold Rush 21? Many of my bosses -- the shareholders -- are pleased that we do what we can to support GATA. With the majors, I postulate that maybe their management is respecting the interests of their largest stakeholders -- of the debt or equity kind.

Bill Murphy and Chris Powell have spearheaded many e-mail campaigns to demonstrate to mining company managements the concern that multitudes of individual investors have about metal prices, but to no avail. So I must conclude that these same managers must be receiving other directives from other sources.

I wonder if the big "inside" bankers have not taken a few pointers from some of the agriculture and pharmaceutical conglomerates that have vertically integrated much of their respective sectors, and have realized that the sorcery of fiat functions considerably more efficiently when you "manage" all aspects of your hard-money competitor by making his gold business a "billboard loss leader" to the benefit of your worldwide promulgation of fiat.

I grew up on a family farm, and it taught me a lot about life. We produced both commercial poultry and fresh fruit for the local and export markets. Within the poultry sector we had a marketing board and within the raspberry sector we had a producers co-op. Both organizations helped us recover a free and fair price for our products. Whether we supported either of these organizations was not even worthy of debate; it was simply common sense. Yes, there were the odd personality conflicts and disagreements on methods or approaches from time to time, but that's just life. As individual agricultural entrepreneurs we needed the horsepower of an advocacy group to prosper.

Why is it so hard to convince my colleagues of this within our sector? Maybe we’re just too competitive to work together, or maybe regulations keep us so busy that we have little time to think and conspire.

Lastly, I believe juniors should support GATA because it’s the right thing to do for their shareholders. GATA has helped tremendously to investigate, educate, and talk openly about the inner workings of the mysterious gold world. The GATA "army" played an influential role in the unwinding of the oppressive hedging agendas that the banking industry was foisting on our sector.

To my knowledge only three companies and their respective shareholders suffered the agony of hedge-book blowups. I believe our sector was on track for several more before the tide was changed largely through GATA’s efforts. This contribution to investor well-being alone constitutes a huge public service worthy of recognition. One day, in my opinion, probably long from now, support for GATA, particularly within the United States, will be recalled as a very patriotic effort.

In summary, I believe that we must labor to expand and amplify the support behind GATA -- first, because the economics of our business demands it; second, because the synergy from our combined efforts will prosper from it; and third, because the stakeholders who pay our way deserve it.

Thanks so much for giving me this opportunity to address you with these thoughts.

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