And you thought he was kidding last year?
If Texas Governor Rick Perry (R-Nuts) has his way, his state would essentially create its own Fort Knox, in which the state would establish a Texas Bullion Depository as a place to store an estimated $1 billion worth of gold bars now owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO).
At the behest of Perry, accomplice would-be hoarder freshman state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione has filed a bill that would transfer the bullion back to Texas from a vault at the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York City.
Perry told fellow gold expert Glen Beck on his radio show last Tuesday that his lawmakers are in the process of:
“... bringing gold that belongs to the state of Texas back into the state.”
“If we own it, I will suggest to you that that’s not someone else’s determination whether we can take possession of it back or not,” Perry told Beck.
Apparently, former U.S. Rep. from Texas Ron Paul agrees, explaining to The Texas Tribune.
"If you think gold is a hedge, or a protection, you always want it as close to the individual and the entity as possible," Paul told the Tribune on Thursday. "Texas is better served if it knows exactly where the gold is rather than depending on the security of the Federal Reserve."
Even though Paul has been pushing for a federal return to the gold standard for years, and has pushed similar legislation in his home state in the past, Capriglione said he got the idea while attending a tea party rally earlier this year with the governor in his home county of Tarrant.
“Something on the scorecards of a lot of these businesses in deciding whether they want to come to Texas is stability and gold as being one of those items,” Capriglione insisted. “I think it’s been in his consciousness for a while in trying to get some sort of depository in the state of Texas.”
“We don’t want just the certificates. We want our gold. And if you’re the state of Texas, you should be able to get your gold.”
When commenting to
Yahoo Finance, Tangent Capital Partners senior managing director Jim Rickards speculated about the creation of a "Fort Knox of Texas."
“This bill contains a provision that says to the federal government that you, the federal government, purport to confiscate this Texas gold, we, the state of Texas, consider that to be null and void,” Rickards pointed out. “And under the 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution, they have that power.”
In other words, creating your own currency is essentially a move towards secession.
From Raw Story:
Earlier this year, more than 100,000 people signed a petition on the White House website calling on President Barack Obama’s administration to allow the state to secede.
White House Office of Public Engagement Director Jon Carson responded by noting that the Supreme Court in 1869 that states do not have a right to secede.
Carson noted that the Founding Fathers established a Constitution and “enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot — a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it.”
It was back in 2009 when Perry joked in an interview that Texas was "thinking about" becoming an independent republic. He subsequently dismissed the notion soon after.
Guess he wasn't kidding after all.
Here's more on the story at the Star-Telegram